Speechless (because immigrants took my speech).

So, I saw this ad today on CNN. I don't even have any further commentary. I saw this fucking ad on CNN in the afternoon and that's crazy to me.

Decline and/or Fall.

From The New York Times, an exercise in agonizingly strained optimism: Opportunities and Perils for Obama in Military Action in Libya. How many ways can one find to say "If it works..."?

The Course of Empire: Destruction. Thomas Cole, 1836.

Yes, but did the press corps LOL?

From an article in the New York Times about new plans for oil drilling oversight:

"The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, announced the changes Tuesday morning over Twitter."

This morning on Prairie Home Companion.

I didn't catch the whole show, but I think they said it was Bad Joke Day. Some of the bad jokes were hilarious, and one of their songs included the line: "You say the Democrats don't stand for anything, but that's not true, we do stand for anything."

Why I ♥ the internet.

The internet is useful. This is, I think, pretty generally accepted. Yet, despite my own dependence on the utility of this wondrous series of tubes for pretty much everything, I think I only really love the internet at its most useless. The frivolous internet has the capacity to delight me in three ways: by providing hilariously wrong information, by answering questions I would never care to ask, and by informing me of my membership in communities I would never seek on my own. Does any of this improve my work or my quality of life? No. But sometimes it improves my day.

Here's what I mean...

I found this gem of wikipedia vandalism a few days ago and captured it before the fact police got to it:

Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 – March 22, 1758) was a preacher, theologian, and missionary to Native Americans. His sermons such as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" inspired his parishioners to coin what has now become an American colloquialism: "Ain't no sermon like a J. Edwards sermon, 'cause dem J. Edwards sermons don' stop."

I also found this blog, which is dedicated to a largely unpopular food which I've always quietly enjoyed: http://www.sardinesociety.com/

And finally, did you know that Andy Griffith once played Sir Walter Raleigh in a film titled The Lost Colony? Neither did I, but I do now.

You're welcome, Part II

"Among the islands of Polynesia, no sooner are the images overturned, the temples demolished, and the idolators converted into nominal Christians, than disease, vice, and premature death make their appearance. The depopulated land is then recruited from the rapacious hordes of enlightened individuals who settle themselves within its borders, and clamorously announce the progress of the Truth."  (Herman Melville, Typee)

"We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world." (Herman Melville, White Jacket)

 * * * * * * * * *

A group of American missionaries goes to Haiti in search of orphans to save (with every connotation that little verb can muster). They pick up thirty-three children and head to the Dominican Republic, but are arrested at the border for having taken the children without documentation or without verifying that the children were even orphans. Are these folks kidnappers? (see story here)

Well, to put it plainly, to evaluate the situation based on the act itself rather than on the internal world of these missionaries' thoughts, yes. Yes, they are kidnappers. But what of the world in which they fancy themselves God's elves? What of their belief that they were on a mission ordained by Christ, that they never had any intentions of trafficking children, that they were actually doing good? Must this be taken into account? Again, I say yes; but maybe not in the way Idaho's Central Valley Baptist Church would like.

For the record, I fully buy the story of the missionaries. I do believe that they acted with the best of intentions, and that their enthusiasm and naivete blinded them rather than that their Christian mission is a cover-up for some nefarious plot. And maybe the children had a darker future awaiting them in Haiti than they did in a Baptist-run orphanage in the Dominican Republic or in the custody of adoptive parents in the U.S. This viewpoint was partially validated when it emerged that some of the kids actually were not orphans, but were handed over to the missionaries by their own parents, who were promised that their children would be educated in America and placed in loving homes with swimming pools. So this will not be a commentary on if or how these people should be punished, because frankly I don't have an opinion. What they did was illegal, but was done with the best of intentions. You can't take children out of a country without proper documentation, but some of them were handed over by their own parents. So it's all criminal and beneficent and bad and good and on and on and on...we have courts to address those questions.

What bothers me is not the difficulty of finding an answer to these legal and ethical questions, but the mindset that would justify such actions in the first place. What bothers me is that the real problem resides in the very term thrown around in an attempt to exonerate these do-gooders for their do-gooding: Faith.

Understand, when I criticize faith I don't mean to criticize people of faith (though I think that label is unfortunate for reasons I'll soon disclose) or religion per se, but rather a particular brand of faith that subordinates ethical coexistence to unethical but well-intentioned behavior, and opens the door to a form of imperialism that can always revert back to an ethical standard derived from a plane unavailable for assessment by non-believers.

It's a deficient version of the paradoxical faith of Abraham as conceived by Kierkegaard. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard describes the faith paradox as being predicated on the "strength of the absurd." After decades of barrenness, God has not only granted Abraham a son, but promised that this seed shall give rise to a great nation. Since Abraham has absolute faith in the word of God, he doesn't question the order to kill his son, but, on the strength of the absurd, believes that he can both obey the order and get his son back in some undisclosed way. Furthermore, in obeying the word of God, Abraham here must disregard the ethical--he must reject the social world and exist only to obey God. He can't explain his actions, since they are justifiable only on the strength of the absurd and are simply unjustifiable to the world at large. To the earthly world beyond himself, Abraham is, at the moment he reaches the top of Mount Moriah, no more than a premeditated murderer. That God stops him at the last second does not justify the silent preparation and intended execution (for it had to be intended, otherwise it wouldn't constitute an act of faith and then Abraham would just be some guy).

Kierkegaard calls this rejection of ethics in the service of the absolute the "teleological suspension of the ethical," and if you don't have God whispering in your ear or thundering down at you from the mountaintops you can still teleologically suspend the ethical if you really think you're working toward a godly end. And therein lies the problem with those religious factions who value blind faith over less nihilistic versions of religious observance, like piety, for example. Any post-biblical version of blind faith must be deficient for two reasons: first, Abraham is an example that can't be emulated--otherwise, again, he wouldn't matter. Second, the "knight of faith" (as Kierkegaard refers to Abraham) is not viewed as such by his contemporaries, because of his suspension of the ethical--the very thing that makes him an exemplar of godly action would render him a criminal in his own age. To commend or excuse unethical behavior based on the faith of the transgressor makes no sense, since we don't have access to his revelation, and if we did, his actions wouldn't be exceptional.

So what does this have to do with these missionaries in Haiti? The problem is not that these individuals conceived of themselves as having received orders directly from God (although some have made statements eerily close to such a claim), but that the U.S. as a whole operates with this City on a Hill mentality that always justifies itself based on some hazy endpoint by which we consider ourselves essentially better than others. How is it even debatable that taking thirty-three children from their home country without documentation, without verifying whether they're all actually orphans, without getting permission from any of the three nations involved, would be a case of child trafficking? It's really only debatable if there's some essential difference between these kidnappers and real kidnappers. So when they say "we are not kidnappers," they can't possibly mean that they didn't take children without permission; what they can mean is that they aren't Ukrainian pornographers, Thai pimps, Mauritanian slave drivers, etc. What they mean is "we are Americans," and that's supposed to be a valid defense. Still, no one in their right mind would deny that such actions--even if committed with the best of intentions--have massive potential for now giving the green light to "real" traffickers. And yet every day on every channel defenders of these people's actions are taken seriously when they defend them not on the grounds that their violation of the law was a mistake, an idiotic and arrogant move that they regret, but that they didn't violate the law because they acted in good faith.

By this absurd logic a surgeon could retroactively excuse operating with blunt instruments if he just claimed belief that those instruments were somehow better than whatever else was available. And that's exactly the mentality with which we so often excuse our actions*. Take the horrors of Blackwater (whose CEO, by the way, saw himself as a Christian crusader) in Iraq and how they're so often handled by defenders of the Bush administration. They're not murderers, they just made some mistakes. That those mistakes actually include murder doesn't make them murderers. Why? Because they had the right idea, and so did we when we hired them. So although I'll reiterate that I believe the Central Valley Baptists acted with the best of intentions, I'd also add that those intentions are only any good within an all-too-prevalent ideology which dictates that the job of charitable Americans is not just to help the less fortunate survive and get back on their feet, but to save them from themselves and to do so by converting them to our clearly superior ways.


*Of course, this situation in Haiti is an isolated and highly unique incident; this kidnapping isn't part of American policy in that region, nor is it the modus operandi of the vast majority of Christian missionaries. However, it is indicative of an underlying sense of entitlement drawn from the popular (and almost exclusively Christian) notion of American exceptionalism. Would the conversation about this issue be so polite and receptive to their defenders if the missionaries had been Venezuelan? What if they represented a mosque instead of a church? I don't think it would.

Shake your moneymaker.

Today's earthquake was one of the biggest I've felt in a long time, but definitely not panic-worthy. It actually provided an inexplicable thrill, maybe due to the fact that I haven't felt one that big in so long, yet without the sheer terror that accompanied the 1994 Northridge Quake. The automatic instinct after an earthquake is to go outside and see if--well, I'm not sure what people go outside to see, but they end up finding each other out there, briefly discussing objects that teetered ominously on the shelf, and then going back in the house to call family and turn on the local news. Upon stepping outside, I was disappointed to see that nobody in my building felt like observing the time-honored post-earthquake block party tradition. The television did not let me down, though, faithfully displaying the needle that still hopped around reminding us that tectonic plates never stop moving, as if to say, "This isn't over yet." Then for the rest of the day there were the standard shots of schools, brick walls, and shiny supermarket aisles littered with fallen merchandise. Still, aftershocks and speculations of "the Big One" notwithstanding, this one appears to be over.

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer actually seemed disappointed by this. I guess now that Obama's back in America and McCain has yet to choose a running-mate the election just doesn't have the same punch it did a week ago, so as they covered major news stories around the world CNN for some time maintained a split screen displaying a live shot of an empty podium. Eventually Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped up and Blitzer interrupted another report to hear the Governator spend a few minutes assuring Californians that everything is fine before moving on to address questions about the state's budget problems.

Serves CNN right for expecting so much with so little sensationalism. The local stations--now those guys can squeeze water from a stone. You don't see Anderson Cooper in a Honda dealership pointing out weather sealing strips falling from the windows and staff moving the merchandise to safety "in record time." I bet nobody at CNN even knows what the previous world record was for moving Hondas out of a showroom.

photo: Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times

Life in Irvine.

Today I started a capoeira class. Including myself, there were only two newbies in the class, and everyone else had been around for at least a year. That, apparently, means it was simply up to us to catch up. Watch the moves, attempt the moves, get up and try again. One of said moves was a handstand nearly identical to the ones that breakdancers do. Wooden floor. I now have a knot on my head from that one.

So following this little adventure, I decided I'd treat myself to a burger from In 'n' Out. As I waited for my food, a father and his no-older-than-eighteen year old son entered, practically yelling at one another. It didn't take much eavesdropping to figure out what was going on: Irvine dad sends his kid to college, kid develops some liberal opinions, dad gets pissed; family goes to In 'n' Out to talk it over (mom looks around in humiliation).

Kid: It's illegal to tax people? That doesn't make any sense!
Dad: It's illegal raise taxes the way Obama wants to. It's not in the Constitution. Look it up.
Kid: That doesn't make any sense! And, I mean, is the Iraq War in the Constitution?

Oddly enough, I sort of felt sorry for the dad. He wasn't some silver spoon Republican, if appearances are worth anything. Calloused hands, thick neck, dirty jacket, hunched over and tired-looking. He looked like an electrician or a washing machine repairman. Probably worked his ass off for years and just didn't like paying taxes; gets all his talking points from AM radio and Bill O'Reilly. Misguided politics notwithstanding, he reminded me of my own father (I've always been very proud of my laboring dad's informed progressivism). Eventually Mom noticed I was listening, so I averted my gaze and stared at the wall in front of me until the kid at the counter called my number so I could grab my dinner (sans tomato, because of the salmonella scare) and leave.

While eating I turned on CNN. Floods, fires, some teenagers made a pact to get pregnant, Obama's courting evangelicals and James Dobson is telling evangelicals that Obama's a phony. This prompted a panel to debate whether Dobson is right or wrong. Dobson is the one that said teaching kids about racial diversity and tolerance is a coded way of converting them to homosexuality. According to Dr. Dobson, Spongebob Squarepants is an important part of this nefarious plot. People still listen to this guy.

I have a paper to write. TV off. Back to work. Ho hum.