Kenneth Sutton's aide-mémoire
My friend and coworker Philocrites has written a smashing reflection: Bush and Colbert, Lear and the Fool.
Remember King Lear’s Fool? The jester in the play doesn’t crack Bob Hope one-liners or play the lute; he introduces a very dark kind of comic relief. He satirizes Lear’s misjudgments. He’s the only person who tells Lear the truth, even though Lear can’t bear to acknowledge the full significance of his mistakes until the end.
Go read the rest of it.
Great article today in the New York Times: U.S. Says It Fears Detainee Abuse in Repatriation.
A long-running effort by the Bush administration to send home many of the terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has been stymied in part because of concern among United States officials that the prisoners may not be treated humanely by their own governments, officials said.
How much bullshit, two-faced lying, and general evilness is this administration going to keep shoveling out? Creating the prison in Guantánamo Bay was unethical from the get-go, not to mention the treatment of prisoners since. No wonder it’s creating more problems now.
And by the way, when was the last time the U.S. gave asylum to a gay person because of fears that they might not be humanely treated by their own governments?
Hiding and Seeking is a deeply moving independent documentary about one man’s attempt to help his adult sons gain respect for the “other”. Menachem Daum travels to Jerusalem to visit his sons and their families, and to talk about xenophobia, racism, and religious intolerance. It’s eye-opening. Eventually he, his wife, and the sons travel to Poland to see where the Holocaust-survivor parents/grandparents lived. Be sure to watch the interview with the filmmakers in the DVD extras.
There’s a skirmish in the culture wars under way in Lexington, Massachusetts. Elementary school principal Joni Jay is holding her ground about a teacher’s decision to read King and King to a second-grade class. The newspaper account describes her as a real pro, as well as having a balanced and sensible attitude. She’s met with parents who were upset about the reality of sexual orientation being raised at school and who are bringing suit against the school.
”She wanted to make us feel that our concerns were heard,” Rob Wirthlin said, ”and that’s what she left us with — that our concerns were heard.” That was insufficient, he said.
Exactly. She heard you, but you’re wrong.
Shame on them:
And hooray for:
The concluding sequel to Karen Traviss’s Crossing the Line, The World Before comes to an unsatisfying end. Traviss’s shallow character development finally becomes a fatal flaw, especially when coupled with her transparent plotting of relationships. The final fifty pages or so are painfully clunky, with the final denoument being drawn out until the final paragraphs. The only question is whether the author is going to screw the reader, not how the relationships will resolve. And really big plot elements that are used for dramatic tension through the book are left hanging totally unresolved.
Readers may be happiest confining themselves to the first Wess’har book, City of Pearl.
Richard Reeves has written a profile of John Stuart Mill in the May 2006 Prospect Magazine.
I haven’t read much political philosophy, so it was interesting to learn about Mill. Some nuggets (each paragraph lifted separately):
Mill was a man who saw little value in ideas unless they were tethered to human improvement, and was brilliantly successful at using his intellectual stature to influence the politics and culture of his age. He is the greatest public intellectual in British history
“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.”
Mill saw an important role for government, believing that people needed educational and economic resources to lead their lives along paths of their own construction.
Mill’s success rested on three factors. First, he wrote clearly and attractively. Second, he managed to attract liberal opinion without provoking too much opposition from the church, by simply putting to one side questions of supernatural power. Third, he appealed to the Romantics by giving poetry and art a vital role in establishing many of the goals for human improvement while remaining firmly on the side of reason and science against “intuitionism“—the idea that certain truths are known a priori without any need for experimental proof.
Public intellectuals can help to shape the general climate of ideas, but are rarely able to effect specific changes in law: one of the reasons why Mill later became an MP.
Unlike many Victorian intellectuals, he was not opposed to factories and trains and real income growth. But he was concerned, like Keynes 80 years later, that the habits of competition might become entrenched: “I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels… are the most desirable lot of human kind.”
But for Mill, liberty consists of much more than being left alone. It requires choice-making by the individual. “He who lets the world . . choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation,” he writes. “He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties.” For Mill, a good life must be a chosen life.
by Karen Traviss
So I ran out and bought the second one. Crossing the Lineis just as much of a page turner as City of Pearl. I love the ambiguity and complexities of the title pun. And I’m eager to see how it turns out in the third volume. (This one is not satisfying in itself.)
All is not what it seems. I’m just sayin’.
The New York Times has an article on A Religious Push Against Gay Unions:
Organizers said the petition had brought together cardinals from both the left and right sides of the United States bishops’ conference, including the liberal Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles and the conservative Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, as well as Cardinals Edward M. Egan of New York, Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, William H. Keeler of Baltimore and Sean Patrick O’Malley of Boston.
The gist of the news is that this year support is higher from the Roman Catholic hierarchy for the current attempt to bring out Republican voters by proposing a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. What I think we need is a constitutional amendment banning Roman Catholic priests from being near children.
by Karen Traviss.
I bought City of Pearl a while ago, but yesterday I needed a commuting book and finally picked it up. This morning at 2:00 I put it down. (Well, I did put it down while I was a work.) Yes, I wanted to see how it ended that badly. Some of the plot resolutions towards the end were predictable, but it was satisfying nonetheless. It reminded me of Julie Czerneda’s Species Imperative series. I’d certainly welcome a sequel (though this book is complete in itself).
(Lo and behold, I discovered Traviss has a website, and that there are two sequels, already in print. Yippee.)
Not a common experience. But last Monday I went to Norumbega Harmony’s monthly Sacred Harp sing, and we sang William Billings’s Easter Anthem, and pieces of it just keep going around in my head. I’ve found two versions online. (These links will take you directly to mp3 files hosted by Voices across America.)
And then my friend (and co-worker) Philocrites wrote about The gospel of forgiveness:
But there it is, the astonishing fact, right there in the news: These women and this little girl had the strength of character to forgive rather than seek vengeance. They even reached out to the man in an act of fellowship. Could I? Not yet. But when I made the decision eight years ago to renew my baptismal vows in an Easter vigil at King’s Chapel, I did it because I wanted to learn the discipline of living the resurrection. Jesus did not teach an easy path: His is a gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation, a witness to the grace that can take a vengeful world and a bitter heart and make it new.