Dr. Metablog

Vivian de St. Vrain is now Vivian Hussein de St. Vrain

Hatemongering right-wingers have been using Obama's name to attack him.  It's only-slightly-disguised bigotry.  Obama sounds like Osama, Hussein is the late, unlamented  dictator, while Barack is strangely foreign and rhymes with Iraq.  It's primitive tribalism --a way of calling Barack "foreign" or "un-American" without actually using the words.  Although Obama generally calls himself "Barack Obama," foxnewsistas and McCain surrogates like to chant, "Barack Hussein Obama."  You can hear them waiting for the audience to hiss.

In response, supporters of Obama have adopted Hussein as their own middle name. There's a good article in The New York Times:  (June 29, 2008: "Obama Supporters Take his Name as their Own").  "I am sick. of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama’s name like it was some sort of cuss word,” one commentator  wrote in a manifesto titled “We Are All Hussein.”

So today, Vivian de St. Vrain joins the movement and proudly announces that henceforth the proper designation is "Vivian Hussein de St. Vrain."  It has a nice lilt, doesn't it?   

Go Blue!  Go Dems!  Go Barack!  Yes we can! Yes we can!

Wheel-man, I Salute You!

My brother Jonathan says, "The wheel.  I could have invented the wheel."  Meaning, I think, that he understands the advanced scientific principle -- a wheel turns round and round.  Unlike, say, the refrigerator or the radio, which he doesn't understand and will concede that he couldn't possibly have invented.  As for myself, I don't think that  I could possibly have conceived of something so elegant as the wheel.  The chair.  I could have invented the chair.  No moving parts.

And yet the wheel, history tells us, was anything but obvious.  Homo sapiens sapiens had been on the planet for half a million years before some Mesopotamian genius, or series of geniuses, figured out the fine art of rolling (in fact, the wheel was apparently used for pottery for centuries before it was adapted for transport).  In the Americas, both the Mayans and the Incas domesticated plants and animals, perfected smelting and weaving, carved out roads and aqueducts, but never hit upon the wheel. 

If my brother had been born near the Olduvai rift in East Africa in the minus four hundred thousands, would he have been smart enough to come up with the wheel?  Would he even have had the opportunity?  Wouldn't he, like the rest of us, have spent his time cowering in the cave, occasionally rushing out to grab a hunk of dead gazelle whenever the lions turned their backs?  And employing every bit of his brain power learning how better to knap the flint.   

And besides, even if you figure out that a tree trunk can be made to rotate, you still have to invent the axle.  And the spoke.

The lever?  Yes, I think so.  Put a hunk of wood or a piece of bone under a rock and pry it up.  I could have done that.  But how about the pliers -- a double lever, now in use for about 4000 years.  I think I could have stared at a three pieces of metal for a zillion years and not invented the pliers.   

I'll make a prediction.  One day, when the aliens come to visit us from their infinitely more advanced civilization, they will marvel at us the way we marvel at the Incas.  How astonishing, they're going to say, they got as far as they did but they never figured out the glugg.  The glugg will be something as elementary and as obvious and as useful as the wheel or the lever or the inclined plane.  Some simple machine that we've completely overlooked.

So wheel-man, whoever you are, I celebrate you.

Hey Jon, why don't you go invent the glugg?

Could I in actual fact have invented the chair?  Well, perhaps I would have been smart enough to think of sitting on a rock or on a tree stump. But a chair with legs?  Or with legs strengthened with stretchers?  Not very likely that I would have been smart enough to invent a chair.  If it had been left to me, we'd still be squatting on tree stumps. 

My Facebook Friends

My Internet consultant, who is forty-something years old, signed me up on Facebook.  He said that I needed to understand how communication takes place between young folk in the modern era.  He also thought that I should assemble some Facebook friends. 

He himself concedes that in Facebook years he is an oldster.  "You're on Facebook?" say his astonished junior colleagues and employees, not shy to hint that he's a bit long in the tooth for an activity so totally 'with it' as social networking.  Hey, what about ancient me?  A generation and an electronic revolution older, I allow my pre-Cambrian self to be Facebookized.   

It's a new world.  A "Facebook Friend" is not to be confused with a real friend.  In the traditional universe (mine), relationships were either intense or diffuse.  You can enjoy a few important relationships or spread yourself over many -- say, twenty or thirty -- that are superficial.  It's taken me a lifetime to acquire and sustain a very small number of genuine, intense friendships.  But young people seem to diffuse their emotional attachments, as I discovered by browsing the Facebook site.  They form networks of three or four hundred or eight hundred fellow Facebookers.  No doubt but that these young folks possess memories far more retentive and perspicuous than mine -- but what can it mean to have relationships that number in the hundreds?  "Facebook Friend" can signify nothing more than someone whose path has crossed your own sometime, somewhere. 

Nevertheless, it's intriguing to be in instant communication with a more-or-less compatible cohort.  I must say, however, that there are practical limits to the grandparental Facebookish experience.  Real friends of my own years not only suffer from limited computer literacy but are natively grumpy and therefore indifferent to social networking.  They're basically Internet hermits.  When I stumble upon the page of coevals who are Facebookers (perhaps, like me, because a young friend or grand-daughter took pity on their Facebooklessness), what generally appears -- along with a generic subsitution for an actual photograph, which they don't have the skills to post -- is a dispiriting message such as "Frank has no friends."  As a result, almost all of my "Friends" are a generation or two younger than I -- which makes me feel pseudo-youthful but also as though I've crashed the party but I'm not dancing.

I tried an experiment.  I solicited (is that the word?) Friendship with Zoe, just entering our local university and whose father I've known since 1969.  She has not "confirmed me."  I also approached, timidly, Sam K., who's in high school abroad.  I've been good friends with his grandparents for most of a lifetime.  Sam also declined to confirm me.  ("Confirm" -- the proper Facebook locution -- seems both too religious and too 'rite of passage' for me.)  I also tried Rebecca M., a junior in college -- no confirmation.  Is it possible that these young people don't want one of Gramp's friends to know who's writing what on whose Wall?

There seems to be some sort of competition among Facebookers to acquire the most Friends.  I'm as competitive as the next guy, but, handicapped by my years, I'm stuck at thirty-five Friends, which is absolutely zip zilch in the galaxy of Facebook amical achievement.  Moreover, I must confess that one of those thirty-five Friends is a 6" foam donkey named Lefty who is the miniature mascot of a Democratic consulting firm.  Zooming ahead, Lefty has left me to choke on his donkey-dust.  The  donkey has one hundred and twenty-four Friends, all of them, no doubt, intimate.

Bone in the Ear

The new clerk at the local Aubuchon has a green Mohawk.  The non-Mohawk part of his head is clean-shaven.  The clerk looks to be about twenty years old.   He couldn't tell me in which aisle to find a S-hook.

I'm surprised but not offended by the Mohawk.  I wonder, though, how the would-be clerk dressed for his interview?  Did he come in full war paint, or did he secure the job looking like Joe HighSchool and then later switch to the foppish hairstyle?  Or was the regional manager, or whoever pulled the trigger on the hiring, more tolerant than your run-of-the-mill mid-level corporate executive.  Hey, maybe green Mohawks don't cut into profits?  I'd guess so, but perhaps I'm wrong.  Vermont's a tolerant state.

Unlike tattoos, Mohawks can be ephemeral.  In six week, green Mohawk guy could revert to being plain old Thurston Sleeper.  But a green Mohawk is a curious, labor-intensive affectation.  it takes work to keep it erect and keep it green.  To me it says that the clerk is far more interested in making a fashion statement than in doing his job.  He's in the epater le bourgeois business -- but it's M. Bourgeois who's going to come to the hardware store searching for just the right kind of wood chisel.   

When we first came to this town, back in 1968, Aubuchon was the second-line hardware store.  Everyone who wasn't just passing through shopped at locally-owned Gove and Morrill, which carried three or four times the number of items as Aubuchon, including all the hard-to-find stuff that nowadays you can only locate on the Internet.  Moreover, Bart Morrill and Lester Wakefield knew how to fix everything.  Not only would they gladly learn and gladly teach, but they had a bit of a machine shop in the basement and would whip up the odd part when necessary.  Now they're both long gone and so is their store and the new guys at the Aubuchon don't know nothing  -- although they're gussied up in ways that Bart and Lester could never have dreamed.   

The new waitress at The Perfect Pear sports the usual nose ring but she also displays a hefty piece of bone in her left ear lobe.  It looks, to the unsophisticated eye, like the tooth of a small shark.

Something of a Fairy Tale

My granddaughter Ella, who is pushing six, is here for a brief visit.  Yesterday, after catching four salamanders, kicking the soccer ball, planting the yellow snap beans, and running in exuberant circles, she asked me to tell her a story.  I'll report only the gist of my long, detailed, but uninspired narrative. 

A young princess is born with a birthmark on her back in the shape of a red heart.  Her parents consult a wizard, who tells them that their daughter is destined to marry a powerful, handsome prince.  The parents are elated and the princess grows up with the guarantee of a blissful marriage.  However, one day, when the princess is in high school and trying out for the swimming team, one of her friends notices the birthmark and asks her why she has a birthmark on her back in the shape of a diamond.  "A diamond?" says the princess.  She consults the wizard who tells her that she's not going to marry a prince after all;  instead, she's going to have to carve out her own career.  She'll have to study her French, take her piano lessons seriously, learn arithmetic and work very hard in school.  So the princess takes the advice and becomes a very diligent and hard-working young girl and has many successes.

I was now putting myself to sleep with this highly moral and improbable tale, so I asked Ella whether she would finish the story.  "Sure," she said, " one day the diamond turned back into a heart and she married the prince and lived happily ever after."

So much for contemporary, enlightened fairy tales. 

Stepping Eastward

It's just about 2000 miles from our residence in Colorado to our summer quarters in Vermont.  Early this week I made my 33rd drive from the one to the other.  We were lucky -- we sidestepped both floods and tornadoes, though fields were flooded throughout Iowa and there was impressive and nasty twister damage in Aurora, Nebraska.  There were the remnants of dwellings and big hunks of metal roofing lying on the side of the road.  Nevertheless, it was one of our easier trips:  four solid ten- to twelve-hour days of driving.  As usual, I was impatient for the first hour  -- It takes a while to get into the swing.  But after a while I went into a "zone"  -- otherworldly, attentive, resigned, content.  It's another state of being.

It was only at the end of the trip, along narrow and undulating Route 4 from Rutland to Woodstock, when for twenty miles I trailed the Executive Director of the Slow Drivers of America, that I lost my equanimity.  I was just about to metamorphose into the Incredible Hulk, vault from my vehicle and toss the guy and his Plymouth into the Ottaquechee River, when I found an opening to drop into third, floor it, and zoom by him.  Ah, what satisfaction!

It's an amazing trip -- an ever-changing and fascinating landscape.  Some people claim that the mid West, with its astonishingly large cornfields, is boring, but those who think so are just not paying attention.  It's a long book, to be sure, but every page is different.  Despite the pleasure of it all, I'm relieved to get out of the vehicle, stretch the old legs, and get going on the gardens.   With nothing on the driving horizon except an occasional trip to town for supplies. 

My New Career - II

Regular readers of this blague will remember that last year I made myself available for the NBA draft.  I'm sorry to report that not a single one of the general managers was daring enough to gamble on me.  It was disappointing and inexplicable.  I would have suspected that at least one or two of the teams would have read my official statement.   And jumped at the chance of adding me to their roster.  I was depressed for a couple of weeks, but now, every day for eleven months, I've been working on my inside moves.  Baby hook with both the right and left hands.  My basketball is worn smooth from the concrete driveway.

I now believe that I have discovered the reason that I was not snatched by the Lakers or the Celtics or another one of the elite teams (frankly, I'm not all that enthusiastic of starting my pro career in an off-brand situation like Memphis or Denver). 

Last year, I was scrupulously honest about listing my height.  It was exactly "five feet ten and one-quarter (formerly five feet ten and three-quarter) inches." How naive I was!  Apparently, guys are exaggerating their credentials, and I now discover that chicanery and bloviation are rife in the hallowed halls of the basketball-draft world.  For example, Michael Beasley of Kansas State, supposedly 6' 10", measured only 6' 7" even wearing sneakers.  Derrick Rose of Memphis dropped from 6' 4" to 6' 1".  You see what's happening -- I'm playing the draft game fair and square and so I don't get the same kind of publicity that the guys do who tweak their credentials. 

So there will be some changes on my application this year.  a) I'm taking out all references to my atrial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy -- it hasn't bothered me for months and certainly doesn't stop me from playing at my peak for periods of 3 or 4 minutes at a stretch.  So that's gone.  b) I'm also going to list my height at 6' 2 1/2".  A slight exaggeration but I doubt anyone will notice because I play big.  Also, I'm wearing thick soles. c) In the interest of absolute truth, I'm going to admit that I've put on a couple of pounds during the last year.  Not a deficit -- an asset.  I'm getting to the point that I could be described as a "widebody"  -- very rare in the NBA --and much coveted.  Also, my cataracts are stable and, though I take the prostate medicine every other day, there's no sign yet that it will compromise my ferocious aggressiveness.  And let me be perfectly clear -- there's not the slightest bit of truth to the rumor that I will have to frequently leave the field of play to make use of the restroom facilities. 

News from Nebraska

Today we covered 200 miles or so of Route 34 of western Nebraska, the reddest part of one of our reddest states.  We started in the high steppes and finished in fertile (when irrigated) farmland.  Here are some of the roadside highlights.  Nine reassuringly green John Deere dealerships, evenly spaced along the route.  A number of llama farms, producing either wool or llamchops, I don't know which.  Outside Benkelman, a large roadside sign:  "Birthplace of Ward Bond."  Entering Funk, Nebraska (pop. 204), a sign, "Welcome to Funk."  The curious slogan of the small community of Minden:  "The Christmas City"  (for which act of arrogance Minden should be rechristened "The Chutzpah City").  Just west of McCook, a giant billboard:  "In God we trust, not Hillary."  A challenge to logic, I think.  Or perhaps, a challenge to divine exactly what the billboardist was thinking.  Are we supposed to imagine that Hillary Clinton is conceived of in McCook as the anti-Christ?  And finally, just east of Hastings, for some years the residence of Willa Cather, the largest of billboards, viewable for miles:  "Don't Beat Your Kids -- God."   An admirable sentiment to be sure, and one to which we can all subscribe.  Alas, the words that God put on the record are these:  "He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes (Proverbs 13:24) and also "Withhold not correction from a child:  for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die.  Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell" (Proverbs 23: 13-14).  The amateur theologican who composed the words on the billboard offers a paraphrase of God's words which is, how shall I say this kindly, somewhat loose.  Revisionist even.   

An American "Victorian" Novel

It's not just sexual prudery that makes a novel "Victorian."  The more of these novels I read (and trust me, I've read my share), the more clear it is that the heart of the matter is that hero and heroine are kept apart not by Mrs. Grundy but by paralyzing social constraints.

To demonstrate my point, I will now invent the plot of a generic "Victorian" novel.

Lydia Armstrong, who is charming and rich and has been greatly improved by her singing and drawing lessons, loves handsome, intelligent Reginald Cockerell, but she can't hint that she does so for fear of appearing forward. Besides, her parson father looks down on the upstart Cockerells, who made their small fortune in trade.  Meanwhile, young Cockerell feels that his first enthusiastic courting of Lydia was awkward and unwelcome;  moreover, he's been informed that she loves Bentley Rayburn, an empty-headed aristocrat who drives a mean barouche.  As a result, Cockerell emigrates to Australia, and although presumed to have been shipwrecked, returns after nine years and 650 pages to discover, quite inadvertently, that Lydia has been pining for him all the while she has sat patiently sewing and providing French lessons for her numerous adoring nieces and nephews.  After a few more chapters and much agonizing, he at last, awkwardly, affirms his longstanding affection.  Much glee; as W. S. says, "the more delayed, delighted."

Why the heck didn't Lyddie and Reg sit down and talk things out before he left for the Antipodes?

Because frankness is impermissible;  it's insufficiently "Victorian."  The rules don't allow it.

Although there must be a quarter of a zillion variations on the theme, the essence remains constant.  All those Lydias and all those Reginalds are kept apart by the social artifices that exalt and fetichize propriety and inhibit self-realization and pleasure.

I've been indulging these sour thoughts because I've just finished reading William Dean Howells' high-Victorian (1882) domestic novel, A Modern Instance. Howells is often described as a "realist" novelist.  I suppose he is, if by realist is meant that in A Modern Instance the central figure, Bartley Hubbard, is a rotter, a gambler, and an opportunist, the hero Ben Halleck limps, and the heroine, Marcia Gaylord has a foul, jealous temper.  But take away these flaws and the so-called realist novel looks typically Victorian.  The crux (here come spoilers) is that the scamp Bartley marries Marcia and then deserts her.  A divorce follows.  Our upstanding friend Ben Halleck has loved Marcia unselfishly for many years, but he can't propose to her because he has violated the rules by loving her even in the years when she was married.  Will the sanctity of wedding vows and all of western civilization come crashing down if he marries a previously-loved divorcee?  Howells even goes so far as to kill off Bartley, but he still can't see his way clear to allowing any happiness to Ben and Marcia.  How does the novel end?  Well, it doesn't end;  it just stops, with Marcia rusting in Equity, Maine, and Ben puzzling and paralyzed down in Boston. 

Howells, though an American, a "realist" and an excellent craftsman, cannot resolve the dilemma he has created.  He is incapable of bringing his novel to satisfying close because he is as deeply Victorian as the characters to whom he has given life.   

Victorians are often called Puritans, but it was the most radical of the Puritans, John Milton, who, in the 1640s, two hundred and fifty years before Howells, first advanced the thesis that divorce should be legal and that marriages should be based not on sacrament or law but on mutual love.  And although he doesn't say so, I'm sure that Milton would have been perfectly at ease if Ben Halleck and Marcia Gaylord had talked about the divorce, found their way to bed, and lit out for the territories.  

Flagrant Greenwashing

A new and useful word is "greenwash," which is what happens when a can of ozone-destroying chemicals comes to be decorated with cute bunnies. Corporations have perfected this kind of propaganda: it's cheaper to portray the company as green than to cap that smokestack.

The Bushies have brought greenwashing to politics and given us Clear Skies (which clears the skies of birds) and Healthy Forests (which would more accurately be called Healthy Seedlings, because that's all that remains after the forest has been clearcut).

Anti-environmental candidates frequently cover themselves in greenwash. Here's a particularly flagrant example. Former U. S. representative Republican Bob Shaffer, who scored just 5% on the League of Conservation Voters' scale and has been targeted as one of 2008's "dirty dozen," is running for an open Senate seat in Colorado. In addition to being in Jack Abramoff's pocket, Shaffer supported the Cheney-led initiative that gave $33 billion in tax breaks to big oil. He opposed incentives for developing alternative fuels and dug in his heels against fuel efficiency standards for automobiles.

Schaffer was Vice President of an oil company, Aspect Energy.  Here's his brief biography on Aspect's website.

"Bob Shaffer is Vice President for business development at CHx Capital, LLC, where he is involved with a variety of energy, mining and education projects. Additionally, Bob is actively involved in international business development activities for Aspect Energy, including sourcing and development of international oil and gas exploration opportunities for the Company."

Hold on.  That WAS his biography until a couple of days ago. Now that he's been nominated for the Senate, his history has been greened up. Here's the substitute paragraph: 

"Bob was involved in a variety of wind power investments, international energy opportunities, and education projects. Bob worked to improve the US Wind Industry. Specifically, he worked to increase entrepreneurial opportunities for small business owners by ensuring that wind-specific tax credits could be utilized indirectly by wind developers classified as small business owners. Bob helped educate Congress about the benefits of wind power including its positive impact on the environment, job creation, and its importance in making the United States less dependent on foreign sources of oil."

Truly amazing. One day he's prospecting for foreign oil;  the next day he's a fanatical supporter of windpower.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, what a little greenwash can do.