Anyone with the merest scintilla of cultural or political awareness of the last 50 years should know who he was. My first memory of him was from the 1968 election when he called William F. Buckley a crypto-nazi and Buckley, losing his cool, threatened to “sock you in your goddam face” on national television. At the time (I was not yet 14 and only beginning to become aware of politics in any meaningful way), I thought Buckley was the cool one, but in retrospect Vidal never got ruffled, continued speaking clearly, and made his points.…
Category: Philosophy
Reflections On the 4th of July: A Personal Statement
I am not given to setting out pronouncements like this very often, but in light of the last several years I thought it might be worthwhile to do so on the occasion of the 236th anniversary of our declared independence.
I don’t think in terms of demonstrating my love of country. My affection for my home is simply a given, a background hum, a constant, foundational reality that is reflexively true. This is the house in which I grew up. I know its walls, its ceiling, its floors, the steps to the attic, the verge, and every shadow that moves with the sun through all the windows.…
Education
We seem to have lost sight of a simple truth of late. Not all things we do should or ought to be money-making enterprises. Yet we should do them anyway, because, to put it simply, without them we lose everything that makes making money worth the bother.
A string of university decisions in the last few years—most recently the forced resignation of the president of the University of Virginia and now the announced cutting of the University of Missouri Press— underscore how far we have drifted from this truth. None of these decisions have been about bad decision-making or scandal or anything that might impair the work of education. …
Preferred Position
I really like Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s my kinda scientist and he speaks well. Please watch the entire video before continuing with my little bit.
Okay, there’s a lot in that with which I agree. In fact, he gets to my preferred stance on the whole issue, that I would rather not have to deal with the categories and all the rhetorically inevitable garbage that comes with them. The problem is that most people actually won’t let you do that.
If I am asked honestly about my thoughts on whether or not there is a god, my answer is usually predetermined, not by me but by the person asking the question. …
All Or Nothing
I don’t do many posts about evolution here. It is a topic of interest to me and many years ago I went through a spate of reading everything I could find by Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and a few others to try to wrap my head around it. What I came away with—and this is very important for a point I intend to make later on—is that I am persuaded that evolution is real, that this is a pretty accurate description of how life operates, and that our future understanding of biology will be based solidly on these principles.
I do not have to be an expert on it to accept it.…
The Other Side
Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War. It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified. The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation. The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play. …
Bunk
One of the downsides to the information super highway is the amount of bunk that disseminates faster than ever before. It has always been with us, though, so we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it’s the fault of the internet. All the internet does is make this nonsense available faster, in more formats, and about more things than ever before, but the basic impulse has not changed since, well, forever.
Consider one of the earliest bits of nonsense that still gets some juice from time to time: Nero played while Rome burned.
Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, C.E.…
Meltdown
I considered writing something about the recent primaries in Michigan and Arizona, in advance of Super Tuesday, but things have become so mind-numbingly bizarre I’m not sure I’d have anything relevant to say, at least not about this particular election cycle. As a personal observation, I’d like to say that any of the Republican candidates still vying for the nomination disturb me. Romney is the least noxious, but that’s hardly a reason to vote for someone (and yet, we often do). I don’t find him as objectionable as the other three, and in another era he would probably be a half-way decent president. …
Narratives and the American Landscape
I watched the Bill Moyers interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt with great interest. Haidt tried to describe what has essentially become what might be called the Two Nations Problem—that is, that America, the United States, has become in many ways two very distinct countries.
At its simplest, what this means to me is that people, using the same documents, the same laws, and the same presumptions of national character, have created two very different narratives about what it means to be an American. Quite often these beliefs overlap, but at the extremes such instances are ignored or treated as anomalies or expressions of hypocrisy.…
New Look, Errata, and a Policy Statement
I’ve seen some blogs that change their look every month. Frankly, it’s too much bother, but once in a while…
So, here’s a new look. I’ve noted a few comments about the difficulty of reading white-on-black (or pale blue-on-dark blue, etc), so I found one that reverses that and reads pretty well. I’ve also found one that allows me to put my own images in the header, and that I may change more regularly, but for the foreseeable future, this is what the Muse is going to look like.
I suppose I should make a few other comments to go along with that.…