The Limerick Maneuver

A growing-old writer of limerick,
Being choked by a joke about Heimlich,
    Went into his mind,
    Reached round from behind,
And conjured this meter-and-rhyme trick.
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The joke (rather bawdier than this limerick) can be read on my friend Serena Joy's blog.

Would you identify yourself as an atheist?

Yesterday, Southern Writer commented on Wednesday's post:

He's [Sam Harris's] an atheist? It doesn't sound like it to me. I might just have to read the book [The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason].

And I replied:

I think that he would say, yes, he's an atheist. He presumably agreed to be featured, along with fellow "atheists" Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, in the cover article of this month's Wired Magazine: "The New Atheism." (And a couple or three weeks ago, Newsweek profiled him under the title, "Belief Watch: The Atheist.")

Well, I have since learned that The Sun Magazine published an interview with Sam Harris in its September issue:

Saltman: Would you identify yourself as an atheist?

Harris: Well, I'm not eager to do that. For one thing, atheists have a massive public-relations problem in the United States. Second, atheists as a group are generally not interested in the contemplative life and disavow anything profound that might be realized by meditation or some other deliberative act of introspection. Third, I just think it's an unnecessary term. We don't have names for someone who doesn't believe in astrology or alchemy. I don't think not believing in God should brand someone with a new identity. I think we need to speak only about reason and common sense and compassion.

And maybe neither should I be eager to decide whether to call myself an atheist or not an atheist. I've long felt that God (if God exists) doesn't care one way or the other, but might care whether I am reasonable and compassionate.

A mystery absolute

When I learned that Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, wanted to "study the neurological basis of faith," I imagined clinical experiments involving MRI machines, probes into subjects' brains, and the like. And I expected, after his book's devastating critique of religious faith (belief without evidence), that he would propose a scientific alternative for individuals' "religious" or "spiritual" lives—scientific in the sense of controlled experimentation, double-blind studies, etc.

How surprised, then, was I to learn, in his final chapter (before the epilogue), that he recommends individual observation of one's own consciousness, very much along the lines of Eastern practitioners of Buddhism and some forms of Hinduism. (Harris spent several years inquiring into these practices before he undertook his baccalaureate degree in philosophy at Stanford University.)

Though I may have more to say about the thought of Sam Harris (I haven't yet read his sequel: Letter to a Christian Nation), I'll leave you now with the concluding paragraph of the epilogue of The End of Faith^*:

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mytery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground of any experience we might with to call "spiritual." No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.

This concluding paragraph resonates happily with my own "mystical" temperament. Harris doesn't exactly sound like a man with horns, does he? He's not what people tend to imagine when they hear that someone "is an atheist."
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* My reading of the book began with the epilogue, which entirely captivated me the first time I read it and compelled me to read the book.

My role in this year's election comes to an end

I've done all of the calling I'm going to do to get out the vote for this year's election. I feel relieved. And, I'm gratified to be able to report, I feel better than I did at the start of the day. It helped to speak with a number of voters who also seemed eager for change—eager enough to have already voted or to be going to vote for sure before the polls close tonight.

The late news tonight and the news tomorrow will tell us how some of it came out. May my visions of Bushevik dirty trickery have been more paranoid than realistic. I'll vote for that.

Enjoy the game?

George Will ends his column that I see reprinted in Raleigh's News & Observer this morning with a baseball metaphor for Election Day. We've just been handed a program and we're told to "enjoy the game."

Today's voting feels like anything to me but a baseball game. When my wife and I voted at 9 o'clock, the polling place felt grim to me. I just didn't feel as though I was exercising a "proud rite of democracy" or something. I think there's just too heavy a pall of uncertainty hanging over everything. Whether the Busheviks' fear-mongering and smearing can actually (in this country of "educated people") bring out voters for Republican candidates. Whether the Diebold voting machine company has the fix in again this year in key races, so that it won't actually matter how people vote in certain precincts.

Nevertheless, we voted, and I'm back home now and am continuing to call likely Democratic voters in tightly contested districts to urge them to go vote.

I do this despite my misgivings. Am I one of the people of faith? I am still a person with some little hope, at any rate.

Lots of folks still undecided?

One of my readers asks, "Do you think there are lots of folks still undecided?"

My sense, from the people I've spoken with on the phone as a MoveOn.org "Call for Change" volunteer, is that there aren't many left undecided—at least among voters previously identifed as likely to vote Democratic (which is perhaps only roughly half of the total pool). I would think that there might be more undecideds from those "likely to vote Republican," since they have to deal with various disappointments in the way their "president" and their representatives have done things.

But, since one way to deal with disappointment is to just believe all the harder (like those folks in the 50's whose leader's prediction of the end of the world didn't come to pass¹), there may not be so many undecideds among the Republicans as we might think, especially since Republicans tend, more than Democrats, to be "faith-based" folks².
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1. The case was written up by the cognitive dissonance theorist, Leon Festinger, and I wrote about it on September 27.
2. Being no admirer of Bush Republicans, I like to think that Sam Harris's book, The End of Faith, is warning us against certain Muslims and Republicans more than it is against Democrats. That is, "faith based" folks believe things that have no evidence to support them, regardless of contrary evidence. Like "president" Bush himself. See the excerpt from Krugman, in my post of a few minutes ago (below).

Mr. Bush's character

Ooh, don't you just love it when a smart, articulate, good man comes out and says in print what you yourself believe with most of the fibers of your being? Paul Krugman in today's New York Times ("Limiting the Damage"):

At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself “pleased with the progress we’re making” in Iraq.

In other words, he’s the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.

...That said, it’s still possible that the Republicans will hold on to both houses of Congress. The feeding frenzy over John Kerry’s botched joke showed that many people in the news media are still willing to be played like a fiddle. And if you think the timing of the Saddam verdict was coincidental, I’ve got a terrorist plot against the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you.

Moreover, the potential for vote suppression and/or outright electoral fraud remains substantial. And it will be very hard for the Democrats to take the Senate for the very simple reason that only one-third of Senate seats are on this ballot.

...[A] White House strategist has already told Time magazine that the administration plans a “cataclysmic fight to the death” if Democrats in Congress try to exercise their right to issue subpoenas — which is one heck of a metaphor, given Mr. Bush’s history of getting American service members trapped in cataclysmic fights where the deaths are anything but metaphors.

But here’s the thing: no matter how hard the Bush administration may try to ignore the constitutional division of power, Mr. Bush’s ability to make deadly mistakes has rested in part on G.O.P. control of Congress. That’s why many Americans, myself included, will breathe a lot easier if one-party rule ends tomorrow.

And if it doesn't? Will you be ready to take to the street?

A step behind...

You know how we're maybe always a step behind the terrorists? They hijack airplanes with box cutters, so we outlaw boxcutters and knives on airplanes. They try to ignite their shoe, so we now have to remove our shoes to board. They bring liquid components for a bomb on board, so we're restricted on the amount of shampoo we can take with us on vacation.

Well, it may be like that for the Democrats in this election. Karl Rove and the Republicans had effectively gotten out the vote in recent elections by muscular telephoning strategies, so now the Democrats are doing it too.

But sort of like the terrorists, the Republicans are using something new this time, something called "push polls," where they have computers call people pretending to be conducting a poll, but the questions are really carefully designed to influence the way the listener votes.

It's reported by Christopher Drew in today's New York Times ("New Telemarketing Ploy Steers Voters on Republican Path").

In the woods

My wife and our poodle and I took a long walk in the nearby woods yesterday. We walked through glorious fall foliage, up and down some fairly rugged, rocky hills, along a wild-enough creek to provide many sounds of falling water and continual picturesque vistas. Though at no moment did I experience one of those "surpassing feelings,"¹ the walk restored in me a sense of calm and balance. And I needed that.

Ironically, the way this country is "in the woods" politically now is anything but calm and balanced.

In his New York Times op-ed piece Friday ("Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence"),Thomas L. Friedman wrote:

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip² about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry – a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service – and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

...if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq – and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate – it means our country has become a banana republic.

And in today's New York Times ("Throw the Truthiness Bums Out"), Frank Rich writes:

While lying politicians and hyperbolic negative TV campaign ads are American staples, the artificial realities created this year are on a scale worthy of Disney, if not Stalin. In the campaign’s final stretch, Congress and President Bush passed with great fanfare a new law to erect a 700-mile border fence to keep out rampaging Mexican immigrants, but guaranteed no money to actually build it. Rush Limbaugh tried to persuade his devoted audience that Michael J. Fox had exaggerated his Parkinson’s symptoms in an ad for candidates who support stem-cell research purely as an act.

In a class by itself is the president’s down-to-the-wire effort to brand his party as the defender of “traditional” marriage even as the same-sex scandals of conservative leaders on and off Capitol Hill make “La Cage aux Folles” look like “The Sound of Music.” Just in recent days, the Rev. Ted Haggard, a favored Bush spiritual adviser and visitor to the Oval Office (if not the Lincoln Bedroom), resigned as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after accusations that he patronized a male prostitute, and the Talking Points Memo blog broke the story of the Republican Party taking money from a gay-porn distributor whose stars include active-duty soldiers. (A film version of Mrs. Cheney’s "Sisters," alas, still awaits. [Sisters is an out-of-print lesbian sex novel by the wife of "vice president" Dick Cheenie.])

As I said, American politics is the cheapest entertainment going, but it's not pretty or funny or fun³.
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1. My post about a "God experience" in my back yard.
2. But why would the hapless Kerry joke [a verb] about this in the first place? Pathetic. When he read my post about Bush jokes not being funny, he obviously didn't get it.
3. My first post about Kerry's "joke."

Going to Canada

My spirit felt so heavy last night, minus day four of the election, that I found myself thinking this morning of a line from Robert Frost's poem "Birches":

I'd like to get away from earth awhile.

I'd like to get away, but I made a commitment to contact at least ninety likely Democratic voters before the polls close on Tuesday and encourage them to go vote (and help them find or verify their polling place).

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

There are lots of birch trees in Canada. Maybe I could recruit those ninety voters to join me there. We could all come back after "the end of faith" and the end of partisan politics. After the time it was possible for men like Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff and Karl Rove to flourish. After the time it was possible for a man we despise to be "elected" president.

Please help me verify this

In an email just received from Howard Dean, he alleges the following:

Here's how the Republicans are trying to win this election:

• President Bush himself is trying to scare voters with ridiculous claims, saying that "terrorists win and America loses" if Democrats were to take control of Congress.
• In Missouri, Michael J. Fox recently appeared in a heartfelt ad for Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill, criticizing the Republican incumbent's opposition to stem cell research. The GOP smear machine immediately attacked Fox and McCaskill, with Rush Limbaugh even suggesting Fox was faking his symptoms of Parkinson's disease in the ad.
• In Tennessee, the Republican Party ran racist ads aimed at dredging up some of the worst racial prejudices imaginable. The ads attacking Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford, who is African-American, show a scantily clad white woman beckoning to him. The ad is so bad that some TV stations are refusing to run it, and non-political companies have fired the Republican consultants who made it. The RNC refused to denounce the disgusting ad, despite a public outcry.
• In California, one Republican campaign took a page from the national GOP playbook, which calls for suppressing minority voters at every opportunity. The campaign sent a false and deliberately misleading mailing to Hispanics in the district that threatened jail time for any immigrant – legal or not – who tried to vote.

In the spirit of rational, evidence-based inquiry, I ask your help. Do you know of any evidence tending to disprove Governor Dean's allegations? Or are the Republicans really this bad?

If you are not a blogger and must comment as "Anonymous," please be so kind as to identify yourself. I will delete comments not so identified.

Further along the road toward a syllogism of self-blinding

In my post of October 30 post ("The Lost Candy"), I gave a two-statement version of a deductive schema to try to represent the faulty logic by which people "blind themselves" into believing things that aren't so. Thanks to Steve G for so far being the only taker on my challenge to convert my schema into a legitimate syllogism (which, by definition, consists of three statements; the classic example is:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.)

Steve G's suggestion was:

Americans are being sent to die for a made-up war.
A real president wouldn’t do this.
George W. Bush is a lost cause.

As I commented back to Steve G (it's the third comment on the October 30 post), "Very nice, Steve G! A clever and apt syllogism. And I particularly like how you include my long contention that Bush isn't legit. My two-statement version overlooks that point in order to concentrate on the blinding mechanism...Since, by definition, a syllogism represents a valid deduction, the challenge of the syllogism is to convey the logical contradiction that constitutes the act of self-blinding. In my two-statement version, this is handled by the phrase, 'It is inconceivable that...'."

I still haven't solved my own challenge as posed, but here is a syllogism of sorts that makes explicit the dilemma that statements beginning "it's inconceivable that" impose on a person:

It's inconceivable that the president of a country like the U.S. could send Americans to die for a made-up or lost cause.
George W. Bush is the "president" and he seems to have done so.
Either a U.S. President can send Americans to die for a made-up or lost cause, or the impression that George W. Bush has done so is a false one.

The third statement expresses the dilemma. It forces the thinker to choose between two alternatives (or others that might be mentioned, but I choose to keep this simple).

For certain people, the power of the first statement (the "it's inconceivable" one) is so huge that they reject it so quickly and so completely that they aren't even aware of doing so. And what does that leave them with?

It leaves them with: "The impression that George W. Bush has [sent Americans to die for a made-up or lost cause] is a false one," or "George W. Bush has not done so."

What "unblinding" yourself calls on you to do is to give up some cherished beliefs, such as the one that no president of the United States of America could do certain things (it's just inconceivable).

Or ones like "God just wouldn't encourage his people to stone women to death for being raped." (A large portion of the Muslim world believes that God does. Killing women who have committed adultery or been raped is considered "honor killing." Sam Harris writes about this in his chapter, "A Science of Good and Evil.")

I'll continue to think about this. Fascinating subject. Remember, Harris's thesis is that the world has become too dangerous to allow unfounded beliefs to continue to go unchallenged.

Will the new people be up to the task?

Bob Herbert, in his op-ed column Monday in the New York Times, "The System's Broken," wrote:

The system is broken. Most politicians would rather sacrifice their first born than tell voters the honest truth about tough issues. Big money and gerrymandering have placed government out of the reach of most Americans...

...American-style democracy needs to be energized, revitalized. The people currently in charge are not up to the task. [emphasis mine] It’s time to bring the intelligence, creativity and energy of the broader population into the quest for constructive change.

I'm making telephone calls for MoveOn.org and hoping that a Democratic takeover of the House and possibly of the Senate will put some new people in charge (of at least part of the legislative branch of our federal government) who are up to the task.

I'm finding that working to get out the vote is like spanning Kierkegaard's chasm of doubt. On one side is the hope that the election will be fair (and the widespread opposition to Bush and his policies can be registered), on the other the fear that it won't be fair (and once again the popular will will be undercut by the ruthless, undemocratic people who have been bullying and stealing their way into political office under Bush, Cheenie, and Rove). Like the position of Kierkegaard's doubting believer—hanging by his fingernails between two cliffs, left hand on one side, right on the other—ours is an uncomfortable position to be in.

How Kerry's "joke" was supposed to go

Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.

Unfortunately, as I wrote last night, he delivered it as

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

Kerry hasn't had as much practice as Bush has. If he'd taken office in January 2005, according to the true outcome in Ohio, he might have delivered such a "joke" as written.

And Bush does seem to have used his advantage well. He even speaks with considerably more fire than Kerry. The words of Kerry's press conference after the predictable Bushevik attack on his gaffe seemed emotional enough, but I saw and heard a snippet of his delivery on TV last night, and he was more like Al Gore, vintage 2000.

And I haven't seen so many reports lately of Bush saying stuff like, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." That was supposed to go, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you."

Now that the Busheviks have a Kerry lapse (like "I voted for it before I voted against it") to pound to death until Election Day to distract as many voters as possible from the Bush record of incompetence and mendacity, they probably won't have to steal as many votes on November 7.

Wow, Kerry shows some fire!

DO read the article "Kerry and G.O.P. Spar Over Iraq Remarks," by David Strout, in today's New York Times. Excerpt:

[Senator Kerry], who was campaigning for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Phil Angelides [in California], opened with several one-liners, joking at one point that President Bush had lived in Texas but now “lives in a state of denial.”

Then, Mr. Kerry said: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Predictably, Busheviks conveniently chose to interpret this as Kerry's having demeaned servicemen and women. For example, White House Spokesman Snowjob

asserted that Mr. Kerry’s speech “sort of fits a pattern” of criticizing American troops in Iraq. “This is an absolute insult, and I’m a little astonished that he didn’t figure it out already,” Mr. Snow said. “If I say something stupid, I apologize as quickly as possible.”

Kerry had now had enough.

But if anyone should apologize, Mr. Kerry said, it is President Bush and his administration officials who started the ill-conceived war. He said his remarks, which he conceded were part of a “botched joke,” had been distorted and called the criticism directed at him the work of “assorted right-wing nut jobs and right-wing talk show hosts.”

“If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy,” Mr. Kerry said in a statement. “I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.”

“I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed-suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq,” Mr. Kerry went on. “It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.”

...“Had George Bush and Dick Cheney been in combat one minute of their comfortable lives, they would never have sent American troops to war without body armor or without a plan to win the peace, and they wouldn’t be exploiting our troops today,” the senator said.

...“No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut-and-run policy in Afghanistan and a stand-still-and-lose strategy in Iraq,” he said in his statement. At his news conference, he accused Republicans of creating “straw men” because “they’re afraid to debate real men.”

American politics, the cheapest entertainment going.

Only it isn't pretty or funny. Or fun.