One week ago today

"Jim Rix will be at the Tulare Historical Museum in Tulare [California] today to sign copies of his chilling book Jingle Jangle, the story of his cousin who was sentenced to death row in Arizona for a murder he didn't commit." That's the opening of Lewis Griswold's May 18 notice, "Writer signs book today about justice gone wrong," in The Fresno Bee. The notice goes on to say:

Rix grew up in Tulare. He has been friends since grade school with Tulare County Superior Court Judge William "Bill" Silveira.

The judge liked the book so much as a cautionary tale of justice gone wrong—"it caused me to examine my conscience as a judge," Silveira said—that he encouraged his old pal to come to their old hometown and talk about it.

The reading was also noticed by Luis Hernandez in the Tulare Advance-Register, "Union grad, author returns for book signing":

Retired Tulare County Superior Court Judge William Silveira says Jingle Jangle is a must read, even if the book doesn't paint a flattering picture of the judicial system.

And by Julie Fernandez in the Tulare Voice Weekly, "Former Tularean's Book a Reality Check":

"This is an important book," said retired Tulare County Superior Court Judge Bill Silveira, who was a classmate of Rix at Tulare Union High School. "This book is not just a story of someone who was on death row and gets freed because of actual proof of innocence. This goes far beyond that."

Ms. Hernandez's notice is the most thoughtful of the three, so it's unfortunate that it doesn't appear to be on the web.

Only Griswold's notice, however, includes the information that Rix "is now writing a movie proposal" (the premise of which is that, contrary to Griswold's statement that Rix's cousin was freed because "the real killer was caught," the real killers are still at large).

Idiotology

On March 18, 1958, the physicist Max Born wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell (then 85) in which he said:

I have read Khrushchev's long declaration in the New Statesman. I find it just as depressing as the letter from Dulles [Eisenhower's Secretary of State] published some weeks ago. The commentary by Kingsley Martin that these fellows are amazingly similar in their mental make-up is quite correct. One could just as well call them Khrushless and Dullchev, and, what they believe in, not an ideology, but an idiotology....

Russell replied on the 22nd:

Thank you very warmly for your letter of March 18 which expressed feelings exactly similar to my own as regards Khrushless and Dullchev and what you so aptly call their idiotology. I am sending my reflections on this matter to the New Statesman where they will be published shortly....[The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Volume III, p. 136]

I hadn't seen the obviously apt word "idiotology" employed relative to the Busheviks of our own era, but when I googled on it, the first hit was an article titled "Idiotology" (posted Sunday, 29 February 2004) in American Pundit. It begins:

There's a military term for President Bush's policy making process: incestuous amplification. It's defined as, "A condition in which one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation."

Bush has again shown his intolerance for dissenting viewpoints by firing the two members of his Council on Bioethics who advocated research on human embryo cells. He replaced them with three new members including, "a doctor who has called for more religion in public life, a political scientist who has spoken out against the research that the dismissed members supported, and another who has written that abortion is immoral and biotechnology is a threat."

Of course no one but Bush himself really knows what his policy making process is like, but there have been a couple glimpses into it by high-level administration officials. John DiIulio, Bush's former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives said, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio told Esquire. "What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Mutatis mutandis.

A photographer's eye to believe in

If seeing is believing, then only go to my friend Ken Marks's flickr website to believe you may never have seen a better set of nature photographs. Three examples (on which you may click to see larger):

A fall scene from Nova Scotia

Sometimes, if rarely, smoking saves your life

I found Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy such a good read, I decided to read his Autobiography as well. I'm enjoying it even more than his history of philosophy, and there have been many, many passages I'd have liked to share, and might have shared if I hadn't been so preoccupied lately with moving out of our house of twenty-five years. Last night, for the first time in several weeks, I felt relatively relaxed, and today I feel up to reporting the following amusing passage. Soon after World War II, when Russell was about 75 years old, and

In the same year that I went to Germany, the Government sent me to Norway in the hope of inducing Norwegians to join an alliance against Russia. The place they sent me to was Trondheim. The weather was stormy and cold. We had to go by sea-plane from Oslo to Trondheim. When our plane touched down on the water it became obvious that something was amiss, but none of us in the plane knew what it was. We sat in the plane while it slowly sank. Small boats assembled round it and presently we were told to jump into the sea and swim to a boat—which all the people in my part of the plane did. We later learned that all the nineteen passengers in the non-smoking compartment had been killed. When the plane had hit the water a hole had been made in the plane and the water had rushed in. I had told a friend in Oslo who was finding me a place that he must find me a place where I could smoke, remarking jocularly, "If I cannot smoke, I shall die." Unexpectedly, this turned out to be true. All those in the smoking compartment got out by the emergency exit window beside which I was sitting. We all swam to the boats which dared not approach too near for fear of being sucked under as the plane sank. We were rowed to shore to a place some miles from Trondheim and thence I was taken in a car to my hotel.
    Everybody showed me the utmost kindness and put me to be while my clothes dried. A group of students even dried my matches one by one. They asked me if I wanted anything and I replied, "Yes, a strong dose of brandy and a large cup of coffee." The doctor, who arrived soon after, said that this was quite the right reply. The day was Sunday, on which day hotels in Norway were not allowed to supply liquor—but, as the need was medical, no objection was raised. Some amusement was caused when a clergyman supplied me with clerical clothing to wear till my clothes had dried. Everybody plied me with questions. A question even came by telephone from Copenhagen: a voice said, "When you were in the water, did you not think of mysticism and logic [which was the title of a book Russell published in 1917]?" "No," I said. "What did you think of?" the voice persisted. "I thought the water was cold," I said and put down the receiver. [Volume III, 1944-1967, p. 21]

Clematis

Last photo of it I'll ever take

Today is the first day that my wife and I are no longer the legal owners (since 1983) of the home where glories this clematis (and several other clematises and many other flowering or merely leafing plants).

Arbor in early evening

Touched by Photoshop's colored pencil

Arbor rose

Arbor in early evening

Feathers and flowers

By the way, William Shakespeare is generally thought to have been born on this day in 1564—444 years ago.

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown....
            – The Merchant of Venice

Spring and All (title of a poem by William Carlos Williams)

Before we leave our home of 25 years in a few short weeks, I'm looking around at our glorious, last springtime here...[click on a photo to enlarge it]

103 years ago today

My father was born on this day in 1905. Over the years of my own adulthood and middle age I've seen so much of my father in my own mannerisms of body and speech, and yet he remains largely an unknown man to me. That is, though I perhaps knew him as well as most men know their fathers, I feel that there's more about him that I don't know and never even suspected than that I did come to know.

Somehow, beginning as a bookish teenager, I felt there was a kind of divide between him and me, a division that afforded me much grief of longing, particularly during my late twenties and my thirties, when my own children were young. I felt a mysterious need to connect with my dad, to somehow get on the same wavelength of understanding and feeling. It's hard to define what the "connection" would have been, or exactly what was missing that I thought needed to be there. I never felt that the connection got made or the missing parts got filled in. At some point in the final years of his life (1976-1980) I accepted that they never would. I even convinced myself that that was okay, even though I don't really think it was.

Could it have been a simple failure to really know that he loved me, or a failure on my part to really appreciate him, to understand to what extent his life had consisted of pleasure, to what extent of pain? He grew up the oldest child of a large family. At an age when I was reading books, attending school everyday, preparing for college, he was working a mule in the fields (in Arkansas) to help feed his brothers and sisters. That is, he didn't have my "advantages," and ironically it was probably those very advantages that constituted the gulf that I felt divided us. My so-called advantages pushed me into a world more of the mind and the imagination than of everyday, present reality.

Anyway, Dad, I just wanted to tell you again, as I did my best to tell you almost thirty years ago, that I love you. I still love and always will love you, even if my understanding of you was imperfect and my memory of you is at best an approximation of who you really were. And thanks again for everything.

25 years later: ready to let go

We'll be downsizing soon (moving to a smaller house on a smaller lot), and I've spent much of this weekend removing from our attic the rest of the boxes (mostly) that I didn't bring down last weekend. Much of the stuff I found up there had been...well, "stuffed" is the appropriate term...stuffed up there soon after we moved in in 1983. And not thought of since. Until today. And today we're mostly doing what we might have done twenty-five years ago: throwing it away.

I'm naturally wondering what we thought we were keeping it for. Probably not for any practical reasons, but just in order to buy some time to distance ourselves from the past it represented so that we'd become ready, someday, to let it go. And today, indeed, we're not feeling much attachment to any of the stuff at all. We're long since ready to let it go and be done with it. Dusty boxes, moldy paper...faded or forgotten memories.

My wife did set aside her tassel from the mortarboard she wore for high school graduation (45 years ago), however. And I set aside my "Youie Journal" from 1989, intending before I recycle the paper to try to read and understand what I was experiencing that manic summer when I imagined that The She-God fancied me.

What happened since then?

Today a friend wrote and said unto me:

While reading this (from your "A history not of God, but of the idea of God" post)...

..."create a sense of him for myself." For several months now I have much enjoyed the freedom from any such sense whatsoever. If it's "obvious" to some that God exists, it's just as obvious to me that there's no such X.

...I remembered you used to believe in "the goddess," a concept you had arrived at yourself. So at least up until or at that time, I can only imagine you must've had some sense that there was some kind of "higher being." What happened since then?

And what I wrote back and said unto her I would like to share with all readers of this blog:

I realized that I was wrong. Before that, I was still laboring under the apprehension that there might be "God," and I preferred to think of her rather than of him (or it). The goddess was also my way of thumbing my nose at the he-god people. But over the course of time I realized that there seemed to be no little justification for going the full monty and thumbing my nose at the whole god concept. Not that thumbing my nose was the object, but I do admit seeming to need to go through such a phase. I think I resented how most of world civilization seems to have conspired to foist god-belief onto everyone, from the cradle.

The real advantage of throwing over the god concept is that I no longer have to bear the burden of its baggage. Everything is much simpler, sort of à la Occam's (or Ockham's) razor. It seems more and more obvious to me that most theological constructions (which can become church dogmas) are attempts to apologize for (in this context, that means create rationalizations for believing) things that seem pretty far-fetched (if not downright stupid or even immoral, such as animal sacrifice, not to even mention various shameful practices regarding slaves and women, the latter being considered a sort of slave themselves, or at least a class of property belonging to men).

Mementos

In order to remember what the heck I was going to do before I got distracted, I've finally had to resort to the technique of the character Leonard in the movie "Memento" (2000: Christopher Nolan). You may recall that Leonard had a short-term memory deficit particularly severe for someone trying to find the man he thinks killed his wife. He was continually writing down clues and appointments as he tried to piece¹ things together. (Leonard, by the way, was played, appropriately, by Guy Pearce>.)

Not only is my short-term memory not what it used to be, but also, in this e-mail and telephone and open-office-door age, I am continually being interrupted, even on a good day. And besides, I've always liked the high-energy way of trying to do several things at once. I still can, except that, more and more, some of the things I'm juggling fall to the ground and roll under a table, where they may or may not be discovered.

So...make a note! Put it where I can see it! Check the pile! Don't let the mementos accumulate! Keep on top of things! Don't lose my ass!

And good luck!
_______________

1. Ha! Minutes after posting this, something didn't feel right in my addled brain, and I finally realized that I'd originally written this as "pierce"; of course, now that I've corrected it, my parenthetical about Guy Pearce isn't nearly so effective.)

Happy new year, those April Fools among you!

According to my old friend Pennell Rock (who was in the class ahead of me at Yale):

Did you know that before Pope Gregory in the sixteenth century, the new year used to begin on April 1? Those who did not get the message that the year now started on January 1 and continued to celebrate it with the arrival of spring came to be known as "April Fools."

And, as Pennell also says:

So all blessings and best wishes for the new year!

Learn more about Pennell and his life of sensitive reflection.