The Beginning

The Beginnning

The San Fransisco Earthquate started at precisely 5:12 a.m.

The Titantic stuck the iceberg at precisely one time.

Hitler wrote that his anti-semitism began with one encounter on one day with one Jew in Vienna.*

The AIDS virus has been connected to one man who gave a blood sample in the Congo in 1959.

A person is killed by a cancer that begins at a specific moment with the first mutating cell at.

There is a compulsion to know The Beginnning because of human-kind's need for meaning. It is the rational's need for an explanation of the unexplainable.

Knowing The Beginning is the ultimate starting point in that process. But knowing The Beginnning does not provide meaning. It is the morbid result of the rational process's reductio gone absurdum. The rational is beguiling, it does not provide meaning.

The Big One would have struck San Francisco sometime. AIDS would have made the primate leap in 1960 or 1961. Hitler's anti-semitism would have started sometime.

But they didn't. They struck when they did and we obsess on those moments because we confuse but/for-often random-occurrences with cause and that is a fault of the age of rationality.

-Benjamin Harris

Eastern Thought/Western Thought

Eastern Thought/Western Thought

"It is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great."
-Confucius

"Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events."
-William James

Ideas That Make You Want to Slap Yourself on the Forehead and Go "WOW!": LifeStraw

*Ideas That Make You Want to Slap Yourself on the Forehead and Go "Wow!": LifeStraw

LifeStraw is a product made by a company of the same name that filters drinking water of waterborne diseases, thus potentially saving millions of lives a year. As pictured on ABCNEWS website the product is a tube that appears to be about the size of a recorder.

Users can drink contaminated water through it because it is lined with disease-killing filters. The filters remain active through about 700 liters of water or a year or more of normal human water intake.

A single LifeStraw sells for about $3.50, "the mere price of a frappuccino at Starbucks," in the words of ABC. That sounds too much for impoverished nations to pay in the quantities needed. Maybe the price could be cut with mass purchases or maybe the United Nations could chip in to buy them.

ABC also reports that LifeStraw was one of Time's Best Inventions of 2005.

-Benjamin Harris


*See also "Cisterns," 3-15-05.

Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang

"I have always assumed that the end of living is the true enjoyment of it."
"What can be the end of human life except the enjoyment of it?"

Under the chapter subtitle MAN THE ONLY WORKING ANIMAL:

"...if a jungle beast were let loose in a city and gained some apprehension of what busy human life was all about,he would feel a good deal of skepticism and bewilderment about this human society."*

..."Even domestic pets don't have to work...a house dog...takes a nap in the morning...the aristocratic cat...just goes wherever it likes to go. So, then, we have this toiling humanity alone, caged and domesticated...forced by this civilization and society to work..."

"...I cannot believe that, with the coming of better material conditions of life [The Importance of Living was written in 1937], when diseases are eliminated, poverty is decreased and man's expectation of life is prolonged and food is plentiful, man will care to be as busy as he is today."

------

Such fun writing, and so insightful, but the life of leisure that Lin predicted did not come to pass and it's absence is widely regretted. Not here.

A full life is a life full of work. Lin is right that a purposeful life is purposeless, that wealth, status, fame, and power are not what life is about.

Life is about effort.** That is perfectly consistent with Taoism, that there is no destination only journey, that the journey is the destination. But it also goes beyond Taoism's endorsement of a life of leisure, of a species of "loafers," in Lin's word.

We must try because we can.

The brain is not all that there is to mankind, as Lin says, but it is a part of us. Most obviously, our brain allows--forces--us to realize one, that there are many aspects of the world as we find it that are...harsh, and two, that we can change the world as no other species can and sometimes make it better.

Our realization that we can effect change also makes us as normative beings. When we choose one course of conduct we are also not choosing others. We are making value judgments. Later, we can reflect on those choices and the values that informed them, and make the same or different choices next time around.

Most to the point of this disagreement with Lin is the elevation of man's spirit that comes from effort alone. Why climb Everest? "Because it is there," famously answered George Mallory. That answer stuck with people because it went to Anglo-American man's Tao of work: Effort.

* "Body and Soul," Public Occurrences, 10-18-02.
** "The Importance of Being Earnest," Publocc, 10-6-02.

-Benjamin Harris

Homeward Bound

Homeward Bound

Ah, homeward bound I go! Let me now on learn to live alone! The world and I are not made for one another, and why drive round like one looking for what he has not found?

-T'ao Yuanming

True Crime Stories: Winning-Losing, Life-Death

True Crime Stories: Winning-Losing, Life-Death

The interview was over and I shook hands with the prisoner/witness and started to leave the long interview room.

"Hey," he called to me as I got to the door. I turned around.

"I know you're a professional but, if you lose this trial, you know I'm a dead man."

"I know," I said, knowing.

-Benjamin Harris


PUBLIC OCCURRENCES

Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang

"The Chinese as a nation are more philosophic [meaning here, easy-going] than efficient, and that if it were otherwise, no nation could have survived the high blood pressure of an efficient life for four thousand years."
The Importance of Living.

In previous posts* I have begun an attempt at comparison between art and science in the West and in China. I noted that China is the world's most continuously great civilization, that is it has never fallen into relative insignificance as have the Egyptian, Greek and Roman. Lin writes humorously as the above quote indicates, but also seriously, as the above quote indicates.

Maybe that is why the Chinese have remained continuously great.


*10-4-05, 9-27-05, 9-15-05, 9-5-05.
-Benjamin Harris

John Kenneth Galbraith Died Today

John Kenneth Galbraith Died Today

Such a wonderful, generous-spirited man. His economics will be debated but never his heart. A Canadian who immigrated to America and enriched our country as many others have but none more. God bless him. This is Public Occurrences.

On Lin Yutang

Modesty is a great virtue when dealing with immodest challenges, like War, and Philosophy. Americans are modest; Pragmatism, the homegrown American philosophy is modest; Metaphysics, European, is not.

However, modesty must not be failure to act. The Swiss fail to act. Americans do not fail to act.

Lin Yutang

"I should have liked also to write the entire book in the form of a dialogue like Plato's."
...
"I do not mean answers and questions like newspaper interviews...I mean really good, long, leisurely discourses..."
"...with many detours, coming back to the original point of discusion by a short cut at the most unexpected spot,..."
"...like a man returning home by climbing over a hedge...Oh, how I love to reach home by climbing over the back fence, and to travel bypaths!"
...
"The [Eastern] ideas expressed here...are hackneyed truths there...nevertheless...they have become a part of my being."..."when I first encountered them, my heart gave an instinctive assent."
...
"If one is too well-read, then one does not know right is right and wrong is wrong."

I believe that that is often true. In the work of some great thinkers there is a remove from right and wrong: in Marx for example killing comes too easily. It is almost as if they are so intellectually above the surface, where everyone else is, that they are beyond good and evil. Nietzsche too? Or like Richard Rorty: such a sensible, modest, American, philosophy. But he got excoriated for seeming to deny that slavery is, always was, and always will be morally wrong. In a footnote, he simply asserted the eternal evil of slavery, not connecting it to his philosophy.
...
"I have not read Locke or Hume or Berkeley, and have not taken a college course in philosophy." ..."Some of my sources are:...a Shanghai street car conductor...a squirrel in Central Park..."

Is Lin going to turn out to be twee? One can, or at least Chinese One's can, gain insight from non-human...things, like squirrels or sunsets. The intellectual tradition of the West is so, so limited by concentration on the mind's abilities. It is fetishitic.

...
"Thus deprived of academic training in philosophy, I am less scared to write a book about it [i.e. philosophy]."

That seems very wise. Philosophy must be a daunting subject to write about.
...
"Courage seems to be the rarest of all virtues in a modern philosopher."
That is a very insightful, very true observation.
...
"But I have always wandered outside the precincts of philosophy and that gives me courage."
At first read that is a thrilling sentence but is it that those inside philosophy cannot have courage? One sometimes gets "courage" from doing something well which one has had no grounding in? In sports, "He's not afraid, he's never been here before; he doesn't know that there is so much to fear?"


-Benjamin Harris

Amr Khaled: Reforming Provocateur

Amr Khaled: Reforming Provocateur

Imagine a prominent Arab Muslim cleric calling for "a new approach by Muslims, one of reform and dialogue with the rest of the world." An Islamic Martin Luther.

Imagine that the Muslim Reformation has already begun. "For the past three years,with youth across the Islamic world we've been working for a faith-based renaissance in this region, which will not take place by clashes but by coexistence."

It is brave, rational, visionary leaders that Islam must have right now because it is doomed in a clash of civilizations with the West. It is also brave, rational, visionary Muslim leaders that Americans, of all, want now. Because it is we who will be the West's vanguard in the clash, and we to whom war is so execrable and every individual human life so dear.

The utterer of the words above is Amr Khaled, an Egyptian, Islamic televangelist, "young,[38] smiling, teach[ing] love and mercy and ...so popular he's credited with inspiring thousands of women--turned off by dour, traditional clerics--to take on the veil."

The report from which the above quotes was taken was on CNN.com tonight.

CNN writes that Mr. Khaled is using his star power "by trying a new role, as a bridge between Islam and the West at a time when many (Here!) are talking about a clash of civilizations.

Mr. Khaled has taken the Danish cartoon causis belli and turned it into an opportunity for Islamic introspection. This is what can happen if a policy of continual, constructive provocation as advocated here on March 6 is pursued.

"In his sermons, he has avoided politics [separation of mosque and state] and stressed God's mercy, seeking how one can be a good Muslim while still enjoying the activities of modern life," the report states.

"He is so tolerant and friendly,he makes you feel good about your religion and yourself," a young Egyptian woman is quoted as saying.

Khaled as Martin Luther, the beginning of the Islamic Reformation: Mountains out of molehills at this point. And Martin Luther King was murdered before he could over the mountain. But he saw the racial tolerance that lay in the valley beyond.

The Egyptian government banned Mr. Khaled from preaching in 2002. He decamped to England, getting a PhD with a thesis titled "Islam and coexisting with the other." Now he is back in Egypt. "For good," CNN reports hopefully.

We'll see, but eventually Mohammad must go to the mountain. The mountain cannot be brought to Mohammad.

Amr Khaled at least has started the trek. Godspeed to him. This is Public Occurrences.

Hope and Fear, Tragedy and Reality. Dr. Wafa Sultan on Islam

Hope and Fear, Tragedy and Reality. Dr. Wafa Sultan on Islam.


The truth was made more compelling by the elegant prose:

"The Jews have come from [the Holocaust]
and forced the world to respect them with
their knowledge, not with their terror, with
their work, not with their crying and yelling."

"We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up
in a German restaurant. We have not seen a
single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a
single Jew protest by killing people."

"Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning
down churches, killing people and destroying embassies."

That is from the front page of today's New York Times under the headline "Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats and Some Hope." An important message prominently displayed in America's newspaper of record. And by a Muslim. Compelling indeed.

But the tragedy of the story is that the headline is wrong. Wrong because Dr. Wafa Sultan, whose words those are, is not a practicing Muslim, has not been for 27 years. Wrong because the headline genuflects toward a Muslim Reformation, toward a solution from within, the West's magic bullet hope; no, dream; no, fantasy.

Dr. Sultan was raised a Muslim in Syria but in 1979 witnessed the reality of Islam when members of the Muslim Brotherhood broke into her college classroom and killed the professor before her eyes. "They shot hundreds of bullets into him shouting 'God is great!' At that point I lost my trust in their god..."

The tragic quiddity of the story is captured in the article's account of the "debate" she had with a practicing Muslim, an Egyptian religion professor, on Al Jazeera on February 21.

After saying, "I am a secular human being," Dr. Sultan's opposite ended further discussion by asking rhetorically, "Are you a heretic?" The Times wrote that Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli "then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam..."

"Are you a heretic" was all that mattered. A heretic is the worst thing there is in Islam, worse than being an infidel, a believer in another religion. But if one is either, one is also (1) therefore not fully human, and consequently (2) one whose life can--should, to some--be ended mercilessly.

The Times headline is wrong because unless practicing Muslims like Dr. al-Khouli say the things that Dr. Sultan is saying there can be no Islamic Reformation. There will only be those, like Dr. Sultan, who left the faith.

It is because of this reality of Islam, as practiced, that brave, brave, wise Dr. Sultan is sorrowfully wrong when she eloquently says:

"The clash we are witnessing around the world
is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations.
It is a clash between two opposites, between two
eras...It is a clash between civilization and backwardness..."

This is also the consensus of the American foreign policy intelligentsia. It was Sen. Kerry's argument that it is not a war with Islam that we're in but a battle between Chaos and Civilization.

It is also the nonsense that produced one of President Bush's most notorious blunders, his ridiculous "Axis of Evil" speech that lumped paranoid, hapless North Korea together with Muslim Iran and Iraq. It is the nonsense that there is some kind of terrorism gene that links the Muslim Brotherhood and...the Irish Republican Army...Basque separatists...Chechyn rebels.

It is the moral bankruptcy that also lumps together backward Saudi Arabia and America in one "Civilization."

No, Dr. Sultan, heartbreakingly no, it is not a "clash between two eras." The clash is occurring between two peoples existing in the same era, now. It is a clash of civilizations, of two contemporaneously existing civilizations not a clash between Civilization and Chaos. "I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teaching," as brave Dr. Sultan said herself.

The terrible, terrifying truth is that the war is with Islam, that if Islam does not Reform from within and attacks America again, it will be Reformed from without in a literal Apocalypse, come from the sky, by American nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds," said an awestruck J. Robert Oppenheimer at Trinity, quoting Hindu, another of Islam's countless enemies. It is a Death that America does not want to inflict, that Americans can not yet even think, but which America will deliver if it has to. This is Public Occurrences.

Investment Advice

Investment Advice take the $2 you normally spend on Powerball or the like, take the odds and put it on the University of Pittsburgh to reach the Final Four. Put another two-bill with the odds for the Deserted Steel Mills to win the national championship. -Benjamin Harris

Signs of Water on Saturn's Moon Enceladus

Signs of Water on Saturn's Moon Enceladus

Headline on CNN.com today; what looks to the scientists like an Old Faithful-type geiser spewing liquid water into the "atmosphere" of Enceladus, which immediately freezes on the incomprehensibly cold -300 degree surface.

Everywhere there is water on earth we have found life. We have found strong evidence of it in likely places like Mars and Europa; now in the unlikely place of Enceladus.

Water is all around us in our own middle class solar system in the suburbs of one of a billion other typical galaxies. Life is also all around us in the cosmos and we will find it in our human lifetimes.

-Benjamin Harris

Danish Cartoons, Islamic Rage, The West Squirms

Danish Cartoons, Islamic Rage, The West Squirms

Islam is rioting over a series of offensive cartoons and the West is squirming.

Islam does not recognize freedom of speech. That is because it is a totalitarian philosophy with a religion's patina. For the same reason Islam dictates everything from subordinate status for women to which way toilets may face (never towards Mecca).

It is official policy (though the dissenters have been getting louder) that there is no "clash of civilizations" with Islam, that the word as a unitary is a hateful caricature, that there are "good" Muslims and leaders and states.

To use Islam as a unitary is no more hateful than using Germany as a unitary during World war II was hateful. There were peaceful Germans then, there are peaceful Muslims now. We should not have slaughtered "innocent" German men, women and children then; we should not attack the Pakistani grocery store owner down the street now. We must not hate.

In both cases however, the masses adhere to a totalitarian philosophy and nowhere does Islam live in peace with its neighbors: Islam has bloody borders. We must not be blind.

According to CNN it wasn't just "bad" Muslims in "bad" countries that rioted either. "Rage...poured out across the Muslim world...with aggrieved believers calling for the execution of those involved."

It is dangerous hokum to insist on a fractured Islam with "good" and "bad" variants and nations when there were cheering street demonstrations on the West Bank and Gaza on September 11; when our "friend" Pakistan has its madrasahs inculcate her children in hatred of "infidels"; when our "friend" Saudi Arabia gives state support to one of the most intractable and violent strains of an already intractable, violent religion; when an influential cleric in that same Saudia Arabia recently gave Koranic blessing to the use of nuclear weapons against the U.S. by al Qaeda, founded and led by one of her sons; when that same Saudi Arabia sent a delegation to a meeting with President Bush that included another cleric who proximately had called for the enslavement of Jewish women for the pleasure of Muslim men.

And those are our friends.

There is also Iran and Syria and Hamas, with its new democratic imprimatur. And so, today, Syrians overran the Danish embassy, by international law Danish soil. A high-ranking leader of Hamas--the chosen of the Palestinian people--opined that "we should have killed all those who offend the Prophet and instead here we are, protesting peacefully."

Other, nongovernmental, buildings were also stormed. Islam does not separate church and state. Islam is all, it is total. Islam does not distinguish between state and private acts; in fact that conjunction was one of the justifications for the attack on the innocents of 9/11.

And the West squirms. Governments, including the United States, have issued statements condemning the offensive cartoons, rather than acknowledge that the problem is with Islam, rather than tell Islam to grow up.

And the West appeases. The Vatican, its own totalitarianism gone half a millenium but still mourned, issued a statement calling the cartoons "unacceptable provocation," the consequence of a freedom that "cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers."

The Vatican, and Old Europe. Morally exhausted worn-out collaborators and appeasers, then and now.

And the United States. President Bush, faineant, having exerted himself and gotten good grades in his first term, willing to coast now in his second, trying only to avoid flunking, keeping his head low and his mouth shut so that the professor doesn't call on him, refusing to grasp reality, refusing a grasp at greatness. The legacy's life.

A Danish newspaper published some offensive cartoons and Islam is in a rage. Meanwhile Muslim Iran continues to pursue a nuclear capability.

And the West squirms. This is Public Occurrences.

The New Yorker Reader Finis: More Ads: Oil Paintings of Dogs; Custom-made SUV Floor Mats.

We noticed a lot of lifestyle-type ads:

"The Retreat at Sheppard Pratt. A first class setting for world class care. Psychotherapeutic milieu."

We take Thorazine, they take Thorazine, but WE go to the Free Clinic to get it; THEY go to The Retreat at Sheppard Pratt.

We determined to change our milieu.

"The Vein Treatment Center."

We shoot heroin; they shoot heroin!

"Structure House, a renowned facility and community for weight loss, diabetes management, and lifestyle change."

Dr. Hersh, our Urologist at the Free Clinic and a New Yorker writer "on the side," had often talked to us about a lifestyle change and our need for more structure.

"Are you a Sybarite?"

Not since Dr. Hersh gave us shots of the penicillin.

We then began to see a pattern in the ads:

"World's BEST Beds."
"Upton Tea Imports, purveyor of the world's FINEST teas." Purveyor means seller, we looked it up.
"Terroir: only the freshest and FINEST coffees."
"Classic Legacy Perfumes. FINEST Quality Formulations."

"Best," "Finest:" Whatever the expense only the best will do. That is the quintessence of The New Yorker reader.

"Custom-Made Floor Mats. Perfectly tailored to fit your car, van, truck or SUV."

Even with FLOOR MATS only the best will do. We had a pickup truck that we could accessorize with one of these.

"Fine Dog Portraits in Oil."

We have a dog, Tilley. We have some Polaroid pictures of her but the difference between us and Them is that They paid for fine oil portraits of their dogs. This threw some needed light on the "Love your pet in style" ad that had flummoxed us earlier. We loved Tilley but to REALLY love Tilley we had to show it by spending whatever was required to love her "in style."

We then saw the Cold Fusion Yo-Yo ad for the first time since The Undersigned showed it to us at the Free Clinic. It cost $90. It was by Duncan, which is to yo-yos what The New Yorker is to magazines.
$90 for a yo-yo. We used to get a Duncan yo-yo for 99 cents when we were young.

Who would pay $90 for a yo-yo? New Yorker readers obviously, but why...why?

Because it was the BEST, that's why! And whether it's floor mats, boat shoes or yo-yos only the best is good enough for the best and the brightest (i.e. New Yorker readers).

It was all beginning to make sense.

Then...we saw the Rosanna Stone of our inquiry:

www.joannerossman.com.

"Purveyor of the Unnecessary & the Irresistible."

New Yorker readers bought a lot of things from "purveyors." They seemed to be an integral part of The New Yorker reader "milieu."

We had another head click. Unnecessary and irresistible, unnecessary and irresistible...peut-etre as in cocaine and heroin, which we were familiar with? We see said the blind man!

We thought to ourselves that this Joanne Rossman must be to New Yorker readers what Playboy centerfolds are to women: the standard in style by which all others are measured.

It was all in the style. If you had business savvy and style you could purvey all manner of
unnecessary and irresistible things.

We resolved to suggest a business card to Tyrone the next time we saw him at the Free Clinic:

"Tyrone, Purveyor of the Unnecessary and Irresistible
The Finest Essence of Coca and the Best French Opiates
Located under the tree by the 7/11, corner of Washington and State
Open 2-6 a.m. nightly."

And after a while of purchasing Tyrone's purveyances one could check into The Vein Treatment Center or The Retreat at Shepphard Pratt.

It was closing time at the library and we felt that we had accomplished our objective.

We had tested ourselves, we had read The New Yorker, but we had not read The New Yorker as a magazine, we had read it as an anthropologist had read the Rosanna Stone, we had analyzed it as a cultural hermeneutic; we had "read" it maybe as New Yorker readers didn't even do.

It wasn't the articles that separated New Yorker readers from the riff-raff. They didn't read the articles. It wasn't even the cartoons. Lots of magazines have witty, erudite cartoons. It was Style, as exemplified in boat shoes with 18 karat gold eyelets, in oil paintings of dogs, in the unnecessary and irresistible. It was a certain, how to say, je ne sais quoi.

We thought of submitting our anthropological analysis to The New Yorker for publication, but then we thought that was stupid, no one would ever read it.

Democrats Should Oppose Alito

Democrats Should Oppose Alito

Judge Samuel Alito's elevation to the Supreme Court is all but inevitable. He is unquestionably qualified, the Senate Republican majority is so right-wing and the Democrats so impotent and rudderless that there is no serious threat to his confirmation, but this is (tired metaphor alert) one of those political watersheds, like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

Alito, nicknamed "Scalito" for his commonality with Justice Antonin Scalia, will almost surely replace Sandra Day O'Connor's vote upholding Roe v Wade with a vote to overrule it.

Political correctness dictates that a politician never say that (same metaphor alert) he/she has a "litmus test" for judicial nominees.

Abortion rights should be a litmus test. Any Democrat who votes to confirm Alito or even silently casts a no vote is betraying the principles of his/her party on the one domestic issue that has most clearly distinguished the parties for over a generation.

Sen. John Kerry called for a filibuster earlier this week to stop Alito's confirmation but he doesn't have the votes. The Democratic half of "The Gang of 14" has agreed not to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees, the Republican half has agreed to oppose attempts to abolish the filibuster procedure altogether. Two of the seven Democrats have also announced that they will vote to confirm Alito.

This group of appeasors will regret their actions. As an earlier group of Democrats had to answer the question of how they voted on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, this group will have to answer to their daughters and granddaughters on what they did when the right to abortion was to be upheld or wiped out.

-Benjamin Harris

"Boswell felt that the act of writing regularly was beneficial in itself, both as a discipline which would encourage the habit of application and as a means of staving off the depression which often resulted from inactivity. Morever, he hoped that 'knowing that I am to record my transactions will make me more careful to do well.' "

Adam Sisman, Boswell's Presumpuous Task; The Making of the life of Dr. Johnson.

Could We Be a New Yorker Reader: Parte Tres

The New Yorker Horror
Parte Tres. "The Ads.
You're Looking at the
Ads."

How could we recognize a New Yorker reader? More importantly how could we look like one our ownselves and subtly signal our status to our brethren and sistren?

Cleverly, we thought to ourselves, "Look at the Ads." Isn't that how this all started, with The Undersigned's mention of the cold fusion yo-yo ad at the Free Clinic?

Yes it was.

Suddenly we realized that right here, in this library, lurking in that aisle over there or seated at that desk here, might be a New Yorker reader, invisible to our untrained eye because she was not playing with her cold fusion yo-yo at the moment. But if we knew other things they bought, the kinds of clothes they wore, we might be able to spot them.

We saw an ad in the October 17, 2005 issue,

"Love your pet in style! Poochstyle."

Uhh...

In the November 7 issue there was,

"Self-Indulgence-You Deserve it. Treat yourself to the luxury of a silk smoking jacket for the holidays!"

Now we were cookin' with gas! A silk smoking jacket!

In the same issue,

"For the Sportsman who has everything. Except boat shoes with [18 karat] gold eyelets and deerskin linings."

We had never thought of something like this before BECAUSE WE WERE NOT NEW YORKER READERS BEFORE!

An ad for a "European Beret" was in the October 17 issue and one for a "Greek Fisherman's Cap" in the November 14 issue.

We began to See: Going back to Eustace, Hats--but only certain kinds--distinguished New Yorker readers from the unsophisticated and unintelligent.

Our instinct was confirmed by two other ads from 21 November, "The Cashmere Watch Cap," and "The Traditional Night Cap." There was even an article in the October 17 issue titled "Old Hat." (And they didn't think we'd get that hint :)

We saw "Beau Ties Ltd of Vermont. Handcrafted silk bow ties..."

Beau/bow: tres clever, neau?

Then, "Mr Happy Crack says...'A dry crack is a happy crack' T-shirts, boxers ballcaps, thongs, onesies"

We felt more like a typical New Yorker reader when we saw this ad from The Happy Crack Company, which we were familiar with.

We now had a plethora of headwear ideas, we knew what kind of shoes to look for, we had our silk smoking jacket, our beau ties, even our Happy Crack "onesies." We looked to complete our ensemble and on page 95 of the November 1 issue we saw,

"Finally, horizontal corduroy pants."

We thought for a moment that maybe New Yorker readers had been so difficult to spot before because they had been staying indoors until this invention but then we thought that was stupid.

We had to admit that a gent or gent-ette dressed in a Watch cap, smoking jacket, boat shoes with gold eyelets and deerskin linings and playing with a cold fusion yo-yo would stand out even more than Tyrone in his gangster suit, spats and black shirt.

We now felt adequately prepared to spot a New Yorker reader and thought a library as good a place as any to find one, probably several, so we got up from the periodicals circulation desk and walked around.

Not a pair of horizontal corduroys in sight. Or any Watch caps or Nightcaps.

Finally on the third floor we saw One. It was a she One, a beautiful she One, and she was wearing a European beret!

She was seated in one of those double carrels that enabled us to sit directly opposite her. Giddily we approached the carrel. We noticed that she was wearing a fashionably short skirt, which we thought the very image of New Yorker sophistication. We sat down opposite her.

After a few heady moments we realized that we couldn't see if she was wearing boat shoes with gold eyelets and deerskin linings so we bent way down and looked under our desk because she had uncrossed her legs and was resting her knees on her desk.

We promised the security guard that we would not do that again and were permitted to stay in the library. We went back to our magazines at the periodical desk.

-Benjamin Harris

Could We Be a New Yorker Reader? Parte Deux

Could We Be A New Yorker Reader?
Parte Deux: Dr. Seymour M. Hersh
and the Inspiration of Tyrone.

Did we have the "right stuff" to be a New Yorker reader?

As we took our hands off our eyes and began reading the first article we were pleasantly surprised. One article was called "Letter from Pennsylvania, Darwin in the Dock, Intelligent design goes to school."

We already knew where Pennsylvania was and so we didn't feel the need to read that one.

"Corduroy rules," was the title of a USA Today-length article in a section called "The Talk of the Town" on December 5. As a guy living in Peoria, we have owned corduroy pants our whole lives.

In another issue we saw, "How the White Sox won." Besides the cartoons, The New Yorker had sports too. There was just more and more common ground between us and readers of The New Yorker.

Since we already got Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, ESPN The Magazine, and USA Today we already knew that the (Chicago) White Sox won the (baseball) World Series so we didn't need to read that article either.

In reading another article we saw that the writer was Seymour M. Hersh, who is also our urologist at the County Free Health Clinic! We actually knew a writer for The New Yorker!

So having read a "critical mass" of the "allegedly" "daunting" "articles" in The New Yorker we now just leafed through some other issues, to soak up the "milieu" as a New Yorker reader would say.

As we went through more and more we noticed that apparently they had a mascot, "Eustace," we forget his last name, who was pictured on the index of every issue.

"Eustace" wore a top hat and looked down his nose at a butterfly through a pair of those old-fashioned glasses that you have to hold up to your eyes because they don't go behind your ears.

Then something clicked in our head again like it did when we saw the sign "This is not a library!" in Abdul's newsstand: How could we spot a New Yorker reader when we saw one?

We thought for a second that maybe they all dress like Eustace but then we thought that was stupid. Do the Philadelphia Phillies dress like the Phillie Phanatic?

Don't make us laugh.

What it was was that The New Yorker was a very old magazine. It went back to the Truman administration in the 1920s and more people back then must have dressed like Eustace. They just didn't update the mascot's look.

What clicked in our heads when we were thinking about all of this was that to be a New Yorker reader you had to LOOK like a New Yorker reader. We recalled something our friend Tyrone said one time at the Free Clinic when we asked him why he was dressed in a gangster-striped suit, spats, and a black shirt. Tyrone said, "If I'm going to be impo'tent, I'm going to look impo'tent."

We had always remembered that.

We needed to find out what modern New Yorker readers wore and what stuff they bought if we were to be able to recognize them, go to the places they went, hopefully meet some of them, do the things they do, and ultimately, BECOME one of them.

-Benjamin Harris

Could We Be A New Yorker Reader? Parte Une

Could We Be A New Yorker Reader?
Do We Have The "Right Stuff?"
Parte Une: "The Cold Fusion Yo-Yo."

We were chatting with a friend the other day when he said something about a "Cold Fusion Yo-Yo" in "The New Yorker."

We had no idea what our friend, at whose request we will identify only as "The Undersigned," was talking about but not wanting to look stupid we copied his facial expressions and shook our heads in amazement whenever he did.

Cleverly, we asked The Undersigned to show us and in this way found out without having to ask and look stupid that it was an ad in a magazine. We read the ad but still didn't understand it. However we did not feel stupid because neither did The Undersigned.

We wondered to ourselves why someone who lives in Peoria, Illinois would read a magazine for people who live in New York City but cleverly decided to ask a slightly but significantly different question, "Why do you read that?"

In this way we could appear to be not unfamiliar with The New Yorker and at the same time find out what kind of magazine it was. The Undersigned said that he got The New Yorker because "intelligent, powerful and sophisticated people" read it and because it had been called "perhaps the best magazine that ever was."

That appealed to us because we like things that are the best, which is why we get The Sharper Image catalog.

So being intellectually curious and a "social climber" who associates only with "the best and the brightest" like The Undersigned, we were now intrigued by this The New Yorker and wanted to look at it for ourselves but The Undersigned threw it in the bio-hazardous wastebasket before we could.

After leaving the County Free Health Clinic we then got on the bus to go home but we had so many thoughts going through our head that we got off at the newsstand to buy a copy of The New Yorker.

We were familiar with the location of Maxim magazine on the magazine rack and cleverly figured that since Maxim starts with an "M" that The New Yorker should be right nearby. We did not see it however.

We looked behind some issues of Maxim to see if a copy of The New Yorker got misfiled there. We opened an issue of Maxim to see if one got stuffed between the pages.

We spent an hour doing this.

We asked Abdul, who owns the newsstand, if he carried The New Yorker. We were told no. We went to leave but Abdul motioned to a sign in the store that said, "This is not a library!" We paid for a copy of Maxim but the sign clicked something in our head and we asked Abdul if he knew where a library was.

He did not.

After inquiring of several other people we were told that the library was located in the Government Center near the County Free Health Clinic, which we were familiar with.

We took a bus back downtown and in short order found the library. We went up to the periodicals circulation desk and asked for The New Yorker. We were given a month's worth at a time.

We noted that every cover had a drawing on it, like a cartoon. We were impressed. We leafed through the issue and saw more cartoons. There were lots and lots of cartoons. We thought maybe this was their annual cartoon issue, like Nickelodeon used to have its JuneBuggs Buggs-Bunny marathon every year, which we greatly missed.

However we discovered that every issue of The New Yorker had tons of cartoons. We were thrilled that maybe the best magazine that ever was had cartoons in it, just like Playboy, which we were familiar with. And that just like the only reason we bought Playboy was for the cartoons, we learned that a lot of people only got The New Yorker for the cartoons.

We were beginning to see that we had a lot in common with the movers and shakers who read The New Yorker.

Even with our confidence soaring, we got butterflies in our stomach when we prepared to read the articles. We read USA Today when we have the time to devote to it but we inferred from the things that The Undersigned said that The New Yorker was even tougher.

Did we have "the right stuff" to be a New Yorker reader?

-Benjamin Harris

"The Cold Fusion Yo-Yo"

"The Cold Fusion Yo-Yo"

"by Duncan, a high-tech precision 62g aircraft aluminum yo-yo with steel ballbearigs. World record 7 minute spins. Red and black special edition limited to 1600 pieces. $90 plus $6.00 S&H."
www.yoyoguy.com
"Infinite Illusions"

This page did not go looking for the above. As with "Dead Sparrow Overshadows Domino World" it simply appeared in perusal of mainstream pubs.

(ASIDE: perusal has to be the only word in the English language with two opposite meanings. The first, preferred, usage is to read thoroughly. The second, discouraged, but much more common, is to skim.)

"Cold Fusion Yo-Yo" was encountered in a quick thumbing of a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine.

Even moreso than with "Dead Sparrow" the mind cracked when stumbling across "Cold Fusion Yo-Yo."

"Cold Fusion" is as synonymous with scientific quackery as perpetual motion machines. When conjoined with "Yo-Yo," itself a substitute for daft-ness, the implication is of something with the gravitas of the pet rock, or a spoof in the spirit of Orson Welles.

Perhaps it is, since the undersigned will not be paying $90 + S&H to find out.

Perhaps it is a goof on the middle-brow readership of The New Yorker, or a hermeneutic for that ethnological subgroup.

It says here though that it is not a goof. However, there is cultural meaning.

The undersigned believes that if you send the money to "Yo-Yo guy" at "Infinite Illusions" you will get the objet d'art pictured in the ad. I believe that the object is truly manufactured by Duncan, which is to the manufacture of Yo-Yo's what Apple is to the manufacture of personal computers.

In the undersigned's (childhood) experience, a Yo-Yo by other than Duncan was the equivalent of wearing "sneakers" by other than Converse, that is, an irrebuttable presumption that you ate paste made of nose dirt and still slept with your mommy.

It is inconceivable to the undersigned that Duncan would lend itself to a goof like this here.

Too, the specs of this object, "62 g aircraft aluminum," and "steel ball-bearings" has the ring of validity, as appealing to those of normal I.Q. but super-normal bank balances and super-super-normal social ambition,; to those who want "the best," who get their gifts and their gift-giving ideas from The Sharper Image, who pay super-normal prices to buy their normal I.Q.'d children admission to The Dalton School and like that.

In short, this object seems to have been marketed to it's perfect target audience.

All of this still seems to leave unexplained the object's description. A "cold fusion yo-yo" would seem to raise red flags with even non-Mensa members but even the undersigned (who is NOT eligible for Mensa membership) knows of the snake-oil reputation of cold fusion.

The description is alerting enough that the undersigned can imagine questions of the type, "Geoff dear, what is cold fusion?," but the undersigned cannot imagine even know-it-all men like Geoff replying with, "Why, it's the newest advance in Yo-Yo's Heather, you dumb-ass. I read about it last month in Men's Health."

But it must be so because Duncan is the manufacturer and a journal with the social standing and ambition of The New Yorker would not allow itself to be so hood-winked.

The undersigned has to believe that there is such a critical mass of dumb-asses out there, and that they read The New Yorker in such numbers, as to make the cold-fusion yo-yo the perfect holiday gift for the likes of Geoff and Heather.

Which is why the undersigned is reconsidering his opposition to the death penalty, nay to mass murder.

-The Undersigned

Books and Covers

Books and Covers

During the transition from the Carter to the Reagan administration William F. Buckley, Jr. said that he anticipated that there would be less hugging and cheek-kissing between the new American president and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union than there had been previously.

Buckley went on to wonder aloud about the psychology behind this literal embrace of the dictator of a hostile superpower by the leader of the Free World.

Jimmy Carter's insouciance was part of the reason for his desire for a personal bonding with Leonid Brezhnev but there has always been the belief in diplomacy that a personal connection can lead to greater understanding and hence to conflict resolution.

The opposite is also felt to be true, personal animus makes dealing with the issues that are really at stake more difficult.

The perils of following these truisms need no itemization. As a conscious act of diplomacy personal friendliness as a means to the strategic end of conflict resolution is a proven failure.

It is not a rational act, or at least not just a rational act. It is purely an emotional human thing.

People want to like other people and to be liked by them. When we meet political figures whose views we share we want to have that political commonality conjoined with personal warmth. When we meet those with whom we disagree politically we often experience dissonant feelings if they have pleasant personalities.

I met William Kristol and Maureen Dowd at a bookfair recently.

One's political leanings--as opposed sometimes to one's views on a particular issue--are more instinctive than studied. Genes, upbringing, family, friends, teachers--and some facts--produce an inclination that is perhaps dignified by the term "world-view" but is something like that.

In me those factors have formed an opinionated, confrontational, angry, yelling, right-leaning, curious, reasonably bright, pretty well-read, pretty standard-issue, know-it-all American male.

My world-view is approximate to that of William Kristol. Kristol's avuncular TV persona is reinforcing to this political commonality.

I cannot ever remember a political issue on which I have identified with Maureen Dowd and her op-ed persona grates on me, as it does on many, especially on men. She was at the bookfair promoting her book "Are Men Necessary?"

My girlfriend holds dual French and American citizenship. She moved to the U.S. at 13, and is strong, intelligent, highly analytical, empathetic and modest in stating her political opinions on specific issues.

Her world view is that of a left-leaning Democrat.

When my girlfriend and I went over the book fair agenda I had enthusiastically circled Kristol's talk, to which she assented (by silence). She is still personally fond enough of me to sit peaceably with me through a talk by William Kristol.

Dowd and Kristol spoke on the same day in the same lecture room. Dowd's talk was before Kristol's.

Dowd was bright, witty, personable, generous with her questioners, modest. In an admittedly gender-engendered reaction she was also attractive. She has a beautiful face and gorgeous Irish red hair but I had seen pictures of her before. It was her personality that added so much to her attractiveness.

Curiously I didn't take any note of her figure until Lorna and I got to the front of the book-signing line. I leaned over the table behind which she was seated to ask her if she had heard about the domino-toppling Dutch sparrow and noted that she was wearing a pretty low-cut top that highlighted a full bosom.

During her thirty minute talk Dowd mentioned her mother, who died over the summer, three times. The references were appropriately placed in her talk but after two it was clear that she was still deeply affected by it. At the third mention her voice almost cracked.

The reserved, almost shy, way in which she looked at my girlfriend and me was so natural and unaffected. She responded to my sparrow news alert with nothing in particular, something like "No I hadn't heard of that. I'll have to check that out when I get done here," but it was not dismissive. It was not delighted but it was responsive.

The tone of her reply, the way she looked at us and the tone and content of her talk all suggested to me, correctly or incorrectly, that she was feeling vulnerable, maybe even clinically depressed. She was just so human.

I ran into Kristol as he was entering the lecture hall. He is short of stature which I hadn't expected.

"Mr. Kristol it's a pleasure to meet you," I said.

"Bill Kristol," he replied distractedly as if he was introducing himself to me and hadn't heard that I had just used his name so as to make it unnecessary for him to repeat it. He made only the briefest, most flitting eye contact.

Before Kristol spoke I gave Lorna a brief bio of him which was self-satisfyingly echoed by the man who introduced Kristol. "Bill Kristol is the editor of the most influential, most read magazine in Washington..."

The editor of the most influential magazine in Washington then gave a thirty minute talk exclusively promoting a book which was a compendium of essays from his magazine's first ten years; a Greatest Hits of The Weekly Standard. It was a bit crass.

There was nothing about "the state of the world" or even of current Washington, D.C. in his talk. No insight from one so influential with the Bushies. The smiles that he sprinkles about frequently when he speaks, which are so effective a part of his TV package, appeared more like facial tics in person. They were displayed randomly, often non sequiters to the subject.

I grew restless, impatient and then embarrassed. My girlfriend, with her world view, not wanting to rub it in, sat beside me respectfully in silence but this time it was not a silence of assent. Finally I voiced the frustration that we both felt at this disappointing presentation.

After his talk was over I attempted to speak to him.

"Mr. Kristol, do you have time for a question or do you have to go?"

"Well, I think I have to go to the book-signing," he said with the same distraction and disinterest.

My political leanings didn't change from approximate to Kristol to approximate to Dowd as a result of meeting these two cognoscenti but I'd sure rather my girlfriend and I have Maureen Dowd over for dinner than William Kristol.


-Benjamin Harris

On "Dead Sparrow Overshadows Domino World"

On "Dead Sparrow Overshadows Domino World"

I did not know that there was a "Domino World."

I have heard of a "Raider Nation," I was aware that there were groups of people dedicated to coin collecting, bird watching, surviving cancer and drunk drivers, sexual bondage (dedicated to, not surviving, I think), but I did not know of a "domino world."

I know where Holland is, I know that it's people are called Dutch, I don't know why the people of Holland are called Dutch though, I know of their windmills and wooden shoes, I know Amsterdam is their capital, that it has a famous red light district and a museum dedicated to Van Gogh. But I did not know that Holland was the, or a, center of this domino world.

I don't know why Holland would be a center of a domino world, if it is a national pastime, or if there's some hermeneutic wood thing between the shoes and the domino.

I had never considered the Dutch to be obsessive or prone to overreaction. My image of them had been as a placid, content, moderate people. I had no referent for a Dutch psyche that would attempt to break the world record for domino falling, or for it being televised, or for it being taken so seriously that a wayward bird would be extinguished for interfering, or for the shooter to receive death threats, for the creation of an impromptu web site on the incident, for 5,000 Dutch to sign a condolence card for the bird, for the head of a Dutch bird group to appeal to the people of Holland for calm.

I did not know.

The bird was the common sparrow, officially on some endangered list in Holland, but one whose even current diminished numbers were still 1,000,000 mating COUPLES.

I don't know what the Dutch reaction to the killing of a domino-interfering Bald Eagle or Ivory-billed Woodpecker would have been.

I don't know why this story appeared on ESPN.com.

There are so many aspects to this: the true nature of the inscrutable Dutch; the limits of one person's, or one people's, ability truly to understand another; the limits of knowledge generally; trans-species empathy; the allure of falling dominos; air-pistol control; what passes for culture; what passes for entertainment; the qualifications of the person who edits ESPN.com.; the concept of responsible journalism; the impact of televised violence.

I do not know.

-Benjamin Harris

"Dead Sparrow Overshadows Domino World"

"Dead Sparrow Oveshadows Domino World"

Linguists like Noam Chomsky have given examples of meaningless sentences that can be constructed by using the rules of the language.

The dead sparrow sentence above is not one of these however.

It was the title of an article on ESPN.com a couple of days ago.

Clicking on the article I learned that some Dutch TV station had been trying to break its own record for falling dominos when the doomed sparrow accidentally knocked one over causing 23,000 others to fall before the China Syndrome was stopped.

A security guard then shot the bird dead with an air pistol and the TV station went on to break the record with over 4,000,000 dominos falling.

The assasination of the bird had been witnessed by a crowd however and they were distraught by the incident, hence the "overshadowing."

A web site was instantly created and over 5,000 people signed a petition in memory of the bird.

The marksman received death threats.

The head of a Dutch bird group called for channeling the passion into constructive efforts to save birds and urged calm in the nation.

-Benjamin Harris

Art and Science Piece; Abstract, Draft One

Art and Science Piece; Abstract, Draft One

Economically, militarily, technologically, scientifically and culturally America is to varying degrees the world's only superpower today. In all of these areas America inherited the tradition of the West and built upon it.

This Western Way separated Man and Nature as a unity by making Man an observer and Nature the observed.

It separated Man himself as an intellectual, physical, and spiritual unity by elevating the intellectual over the spiritual.

It separated man's unity as a physical being with five senses by elevating the sense of sight over the others.

From the Renaissance onward the West's goal has been to pursue a complete "accounting for," which became for it the Truth.

While breaking the unity of Man and Nature, and of Man himself, the West united two separate things, method and outcome.

The Western Way was method-driven and outcome-neutral. The method, scientific inquiry, was to be followed and by definition truth would result. The method could not be questioned and so the outcome could not be questioned. Thus method became outcome, description became meaning, [and meaning--truth--became description.]

Until after the beginning of the Renaissance, the Western Way also united the separate disciplines of art, philosophy, and science. All pursued the same goal and used the same, scientific, method. The spiritual and emotional components of art and philosophy, like those of man, were subsumed to their scientific components and to scientific purpose.

In the Arts, poetry and music were comparatively devalued to painting. Painting was intellectual and could pursue the West's goal of description while music and poetry were spiritual, and could not.

The West strove for this truth, this perfect description, and in its pursuit of the perfect description only perfect subjects were painted. Human beings only in perfect, youthful, physical appearance--that is no "real" human beings at all, but rather idealized forms of human beings--were painted.

The Western Way thus further abstracted--removed--Man from its method, which was its meaning, which was its Truth. This idealized human form, this meaning, this truth, was Beauty and it became the measure of a painting's greatness.

Working in tandem with science, painting, the West's premier art form, the most advanced of the West's disciplines, achieved its goal of verisimilitude during the Renaissance. A completed paradigm had been accomplished and western painting and science thereafter diverged.

They diverged because western painting's brief had been so modest, which is not to devalue its achievement. Western painting's goal had been to describe, mirror, or copy, to account for:

(1) the physical world removed from the spiritual, that is as man and nature separated.
(2) to so account for the physical world as comprehended only by man's sight, not by any of his other senses in combination, not by the sight of people in other cultures and not by any other species--e.g. eagles, bats, dolphins--and any of their senses.

After the Renaissance western science pushed its goal beyond the human ocular to the sub and super ocular.

In western art Rembrandt began to push painting into a more spiritual direction. His portraits aimed at revealing more of the spirit or character of the person rather than a purely physical, or physically idealized, form. Rembrandt painted his human subjects with less beauty.

Philosophy broke with science in the late 18th c when Kant succeeded in his argument that it was a "foundational" discipline.

In contrast to this Western Way is the Chinese civilization which existed as an island in relation to the West.

China's Zen religion is method-neutral and outcome-driven, the opposite of the Western Way.

Chinese art forms were valued more for their spiritual component than in the West. Music was valued more highly. "The Three Perfections" in Chinese art were painting, poetry and calligraphy. Painting and poetry had the same status, the opposite as in the West and precisely because of their spiritual component.

In Chinese painting the spiritual was elevated over the intellectual, again the opposite as in the West. A Chinese painting's quality was evaluated by reference to six factors. First was "spirit consonance," sixth was verisimilitude.

The apex of verisimilitude, as devalued in Chinese painting, was reached during the Sung dynasty between the late tenth and thirteenth centuries. The apex of verisimilitude, more valued, in the West occurred in the fifteenth century.

China and the West existed as islands in relation to each other. The social, political and economic influences were different yet after reaching its apex of verisimilitude Chinese painters began painting in a style that has been explicitly analogized to that of the Impressionists and to the post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne.

Despite being an island, China had its "Renaissance" in verisimilitude, but two-five centuries before the West's Renaissance. Despite being an island, China had "Impressionism" and "post-Impressionism" after its renaissance but two-three centuries before the West had its Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

-Benjamin Harris

Art Piece, Draft Two, Part Two

Art Piece, Draft Two, Part Two

A passenger on one of the first trains in England breathlessly wrote to her mother about what it was like for a human being to move at 35 mph. The English countryside became a blur, moving by too fast for the human eye to focus. Humans had not just conquered nature, they were in a real sense outside of it. They were observers but speed had negated their ability to even see, the one sense that the Western Way was based on.

Near the end of the post-Renaissance/pre-Impressionist art period, and two-thirds the way through the Industrial Revolution itself, technological science gave Western man the camera. Among other things the camera allowed human beings to stop time.

Not since the days when scientists like Leonardo were working on their discoveries in human optics, perspective, and anatomy had a scientific advance had such an effect on Western art. However, the effect was not the result of science and art working synergistically as in the past; like all other areas of human activity, art was changed by science as an external force and that force itself was driven by a methodology that had never been challenged. After the invention of the camera, what was art's brief? It must have seemed to an aspiring artist as if there was nothing left to be done.

Around the time of the invention of the camera, western writers like Dickens ("David Copperfield," 1849-50) and Thoreau ("Walden," 1854) began to challenge the results of the Industrial Revolution. More implicitly than explicitly, science, which created the Industrial Revolution, was questioned also. Description and meaning, previously united and considered inviolate were coming to be seen as distinct.

In 1844 Friedrich Nietzsche was born. He grew up in the industrializing west, the results of which Dickens and Thoreau were challenging, in a time when constants like motion, space, time and mass were being perceived and experienced as less constant by the day.

Nietzsche was fifteen years old in 1859 when Darwin published his "Origin of Species." Like Copernicus and Galileo before him, Darwin was a further challenge to the spiritual heritage of the West. Natural selection not supernatural intention was the explanation. Once again western science had provided an emotionally and spiritually shattering outcome-neutral accounting for.

In the early 1870's art began to reflect the changes that had been occurring in society as a result of science. The Impressionists painted in a "blurry" style, just as the railroads first passengers saw the landscape as it went by. The results of their work and their methodology was a break with the Western Way.

The Impressionists were also experiencing the fall of standards in motion, space, time and mass and were searching for new essences to replace them. They painted light, they turned away from traditional subject matter and painted peasants. They turned from the West entirely and painted peoples and places and in styles of "primitive" societies such as Tahiti.

With standards--truths--falling all around them, the Impressionists looked for and found many truths. They painted themselves, but not as portrait objects. They painted themselves into their art as personal, expressive, emotional beings into and onto the canvass. Brush strokes were no longer to be hidden. They were to be seen and experienced as part of the finished art work.

The Impressionists broke with the Western Way but they did not break with all of humankind's way of painting. Rather, however unconsciously, they were painting with the mindset that Chinese artists had been painting with at least seven centuries before.

Su Shi, an eleventh century poet/painter/statesman, wrote "One can enter a state absolute concentration in which an object is grasped through total identification and then arrive at a fusion of the subject and object--the artist, or viewer and the work of art."

This was a new Western essence however, a new truth and it was personal and emotional, methodologically neutral and outcome-driven. Method and object, description and meaning were being separated in painting too.

The Impressionist painter was not a scientist whose instrument was a brush; he was an autonomous, atomized human being who was fusing his personal spiritual consonance and his art. The scientific dichotomy of observer and observed was broken. The scientific method was broken as an artistic method.

In 1873, as the Impressionists were abandoning the scientific method, challenging its truth and revealing other truths which were emotional, Nietzsche wrote philosophically of the non-objectivity of truth.

Nietzsche challenged the results of science as Dickens and Thoreau had done, he broke with the scientific method as the Impressionists had done but he also challenged--attacked--the ethical and moral foundations of the West. In doing so Nietzsche proposed a reformulation, a reconceptualization of what a human being was.

He argued that the whole of Western civilization had taken a wrong turn at Socrates when it should have taken Homer's road. He wrote as passionately as Van Gogh painted and argued that human essence was in a drunken, half-mad, emotional "Dionysian" state, not the rational, logical "Apollonian" way that the West had adopted instead.

Nietzsche wrote that "[The Dionysian artist] is now at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator, that '[The Dionysian artist] is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art."

Nietzsche was not only arguing for recasting Western man in Homer's mode rather than the Apollonian way. He was, consciously or not, casting the Western artist precisely in terms of the Chinese and precisely in the terms of the post-Impressionists.

If the essence of humanity was its spirituality, not its intellect, if man could not be reduced to Rene Descartes "brain in a vat," then the rational, scientific outcome-neutral method of science, philosophy and art was "untrue" because that conceptualization of man was untrue.

At a time when nothing looked certain, when everything looked relative not even good and evil could go unquestioned. In 1886 Nietzsche wrote "Beyond Good and Evil." At this same time Paul Cezanne was searching for new truths in mere shapes.

Nietzsche died in 1900, at precisely the historical endpoint of the Industrial Revolution. He, the Impressionists and the post-Impressionists worked and lived in a world that was described by high science according to the model of Isaac Newton. The Newtonian model was both description of the physical world and methodology. Even the truths of Newtonian physics and high science's model were to be challenged, and shortly.

In 1905 Albert Einstein published his paper on special relativity, in 1912 his paper on general relativity.

-Benjamin Harris

The Aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita

The Aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita

799-0. That is the number of dead as a result of the two hurricanes as reported in CNN this weekend (apparently the 25 dead in the bus fire didn't count somehow).

Katrina was a bit stronger than Rita and New Orleans was infinitely more vulnerable than Houston, and Galveston, although almost as vulnerable as New Orleans, had only 57,000 people to evacuate.

And Texas had the lesson of Rita to learn from. And former International Arabian Horse Chief of Stewards Mike Brown had resigned post-Katrina and pre-Rita and the Bush administration reacted better.

No two things are the same but even with those differences there's one that in my view explains more about that 799-0 difference.

"Texas is ready," said it's governor, and it was. Louisiana wasn't.

Louisiana's governor said there were thousands of dead. New Orleans' mayor claimed 10,000 and embarrassingly cried in a profane radio interview. Criminals shot at rescue helicopters and ambulances and raped women in New Orleans shelters. That didn't happen in Texas.

Even with it's greater vulnerability, New Orleans with 300,000-400,000 people, had about 1/10th of the population that Houston had to evacuate and aside from the mother-of-all-traffic jams it did it.

Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco showed an astonishing lack of competence. Bill White and Rick Perry acted as competent political leaders should.

Bush has taken political heat for his government's handling of Katrina. We'll see if Nagin and Blanco do but I have not heard a hue and cry.

799-0 sounds like it could be the electoral outcome in a typical Republican-Democratic presidential election but it's not. It's the number of people who died in a catastrophe that was anticipated in one state, governed by Democrats, and the number of people who died in a catastrophe that was anticipated in another state, governed by Republicans.

Instead of paying a political price, my guess is that Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco will be speakers at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

-Benjamin Harris

Art Piece, Draft Two, Part One

Art Piece, Draft Two, Part One

Until about the mid-fifteenth century in the West the presently distinct disciplines of philosophy, art and science were united.(1) They had the same goal, a complete "accounting for" of the physical world as perceived by humans with their eyes(2)and philosophers too, from Socrates to Descartes to the early Wittgenstein had the same goal and used the same methodology as did scientists and artists. That methodology was viewed as rational, empirical, incremental and cumulative.

This Western Way was driven by just one of the human senses, sight, not sound or taste, etc. It was also the physical world as physically--not emotionally or spiritually--experienced by just this one of the five physical senses that was the goal, that was to be accounted for completely and precisely by the three disciplines. In art this "accounting for" was often termed "describing;" in science "explaining;" in philosophy "proving."

The methodology of the West was not just rational and intellectual, or non-emotional and spiritual but in fact explicitly anti-emotional/spiritual. Even thus circumscribed the West considered achievement of this accounting for to be the "Truth." There was no other.

Thus conceived and pursued, Truth could be approached closer and closer in a linear manner. "Progress" could be made. Derivatively, and with more far-reaching consequences , the Western Way was method driven and outcome neutral. Whatever outcome resulted from the method was the Truth, or a closer and closer approximation of it. Thus the methodological became the metaphysical. Descriptive "truth" was the same as meaning.

Because of the above, the West's dominant art form was painting. In Thomas Kuhn's view painting was the cumulative discipline of the Renaissance and before.(3) Western painting's goal was to describe or "mirror" the (sight limited) physical world. Music, experienced with a different sense, and emotional, was comparatively devalued.

By contrast, in China, the most continuously great of the world's civilizations, a painting's greatness was evaluated according to its achievement of six goals in descending order of importance. Ch'I-yun or "spirit consonance," was first. Verisimilitude was last. Music was a more important art form in China than in the West because of its emotional content.

Plato put poetry at the bottom of his list of worthwhile endeavors. The Shih Ching, "The Book of Documents," an early Chinese text on art, lauded poetry precisely for its mimicking of music's ability to put sentiments to song.

As the West's way proceeded it changed humankind's physical, intellectual and spiritual relationship with what it was seeking to completely account for. In cyclical manner the observer was affecting the observed which was affecting the observer.

Nature in the West was demystified, described, understood and conquered. The Way removed humans from nature. This was viewed as "liberating" humankind.

By force of logic and empirical proof western methodology forced western spiritual institutions to accommodate, or acquiesce, to it.

By force of understanding, nature was made to give up more of its bounty.

By conquest large parts of nature were destroyed and replaced by human creations for habitation and other desiderata.

At least in historical perspective to some, perhaps most, contemporary art historians, a complete accounting for, the truth, was obtained in painting by the mid-fifteenth century. Portraits were painted with uncanny verisimilitude, physical objects were captured in exacting detail, more detail in fact than the human eye could see.

Ernst Gombrich for example wrote that for an aspiring art student in the Renaissance it must have felt as if there was nothing left to do. Other scholars in different fields arrived at similar conclusions. Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that after van der Weyden art became nothing more than a game of technical refinement.

According to Richard Rorty philosophy broke with science in the late 18th century when Kant succeeded in transforming philosophy from a hand maiden of science to a discipline that was held out to be the "foundation" of all others. In language similar to that of Gombrich, Rorty describes philosophy student's dilemma in the shadow of the collossus science, "...it is hard to imagine what philosophy could have been in the age of modern science. Metaphysics--considered as the description of how the heavens and the earth are put together--had been displaced by physics."(4)

In the view of Thomas Kuhn, art "diverged" from science in the mid-fifteenth century when it "completely renounced" verisimilitude and turned to learn from "primitive" cultures instead. The days when a Leonardo could move seamlessly between art and science and philosophy were, in the West, in Kuhn's view, over.

It was not the same in China where the aim of art was "spirit consonance." The sciences in China, though advanced, did not explode in descriptive power and practical effect on Chinese life in the way that they did in the West and the spiritual Way was different also. By even commonplace understanding a Zen approach to the world is a non-linear, no-incremental Way.

Importantly, in the West method drove outcome. Even today the scientific community prides itself on its detachment, this outcome neutrality. Do the experiment rigorously, follow the evidence and the result will be the truth. The method was considered validated, thus so were its results. The Zen way by contrast was explicitly to take a non-methodological Way.

The West the Standard Model is that the great flowering in art and culture occurred in the Renaissance, the literal rebirth, when the West turned back to its Greek and Socratic methodology. But if this Standard Model is correct then the apex of--the final truth in--painting was achieved in he early Renaissance and the rest of even that great time was only an extension or "refinement."

If this Standard Model of Western art history is true then there is a dissonant ring of inertia and comparative non-creativity to the rest of the Renaissance and to the next 300 years until at least the Impressionists.

During that same time however it would not have appeared to a Western prospective scientist that there was nothing left to do. During those years western science physically changed the western landmass, western man's relationship to nature and his spiritual relationship with whatever was left.

The Western artist had achieved complete descriptive power at and slightly beyond the human ocular level by the early Renaissance. The Western scientist now pursued the truth to the sub and super ocular levels. There was indeed more there than met the eye. During this period western philosophy worked in tandem with science and according to the scientific method and its most influential figure was Rene Descartes.

In the Standard Model's view, post-Renaissance/pre-Impressionist art is creatively stale, aesthetically mediocre, almost embarrassingly so, and, as in the views of even those outside the field like Levi-Strauss and Kuhn, disconnected. Disconnected from science certainly, but also from society, for it was during this interregnum that the Industrial Revolution took place.

Art, and the scientific methodology that so effected it, had supposedly achieved a perfect description, the truth, by the early 1500s but that art did not describe the truth, the reality, what the human eye saw and the rest of the human being experienced, beginning in 1700.

As "high" science first challenged and then forced Western spiritual institutions to adapt to it, technological science, going beyond high science's descriptive truth, now changed the truth. It changed the physical world and Western man's relationship to it. The observer had changed the observed.

For the first time in all of humankind's existence, man's relationship to time itself changed. That relationship was no longer cyclical and measured by the changes of the earth's rotation and available sunlight or by the seasons of the year. Western man in the Industrial Revolution began to--was forced to--experience time in much smaller increments and now as measured by clocks.

The Industrial Revolution also changed Western humankind's relationship with motion. Previously, the human speed limit was set by the pace of his walk, his run, then the pace of nature's animals that he learned to domesticate. With the invention of locomotive power, initially exclusively rail power, man was able to shatter the old speed limit.

Rebecca Solnit has marvelously described man's difficulty in adjusting to the new speed. An English M.P. standing on railroad tracks had his leg cut off by a train whose speed he miscalculated because he had no referent for it.




(1) See e.g. Gombrich, The Story of Art, p. 361. Danto, The End of Art, and Belting, Vision and Presence argue that art as currently understood did not begin in the West until around 1400.
(2)The world as perceived by, e.g. eagles, or dolphins or even other human societies like the Chinese was not considered.
(3) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p.161"
(4) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.132.
(4) River of Shadows.

-Benjamin Harris

Today is Sept. 11

Today is Sept. 11

I'm not near over this yet.

-Benjamin Harris