Always fear the reader who accuses smugness or arrogance simply upon coming across a quiver of big words or inaccessible references.

Is being cerebral a bad thing in writing?  Presumably this is a Master’s course and we should be aspiring to the intelligent.  If your primary criticism is that the author of whatever you’re reading is smarter than you, go pick up a fucking book, or a dictionary, and get cracking.

Are the points these people want our writers to make simply arguments to reinforce the points as we already imagine them to be?  The very act of an author’s teasing a hidden meaning—or even an observation that is not immediately apparent—out of a scene is scoffed at by this ilk.  That Joan Didion might have an objection to a culture immediately calls upon her the charge of elitism.  It is as if people are offended by the simple act of being challenged; even where criticisms of Didion might exist, those that are substantive are never mentioned, but stem rather from this lack of confidence, or perhaps a simple ruefulness at the mere suggestion that things may not be as they seem.

I remember the precipitating incident only vaguely, though the experience as such is not uncommon in writing and literature courses.  A student will, after having read a piece of writing, judge it based on their own personal, ideological, and emotional reactions.  Now, of course our biases inform our interpretations and opinions of literature constantly as we read; that’s the way literature works:  we react (or don’t) according to the impressions we’ve come to accept through the culmination of our experience and, using only this hard-won but uneven palette of information, like or dislike a work based on whether we think it feels true.  By true, I mean that we laugh at a joke because it feels genuinely funny, grimace at a dramatic turn because it genuinely hurts, or shrink in horror at a science fiction story because the paths to dystopia and slavery become frighteningly hard to ignore (Logan’s Run, anyone?).

But the situation becomes a bit discouraging, especially during a group discussion, when a student decides a work is either good or bad because what they as a reader wanted to happen either did or didn’t.  Sometimes readers want revenge and get angry when the villain escapes; sometimes they get red in the face when an author fails to subject a character to some sort of poetic or ironic comeuppance that either reinforces or disintegrates that character’s primary flaw.  We want carnivores to be devoured by plants, rapists to lose their sexual organs, bigots to renounce their petty hatred.  We seem to be programmed to want these sorts of neat, little endings; we seem to want things to be easy, to watch whomever we’re rooting for win out.

But, of course, life isn’t easy.  The good folks don’t always win.  Sometimes the bad guys win because there is a point to be made—which doesn’t mean, of course, that we have to side with the rapist or the bigot (I hope none of us do), just that we shouldn’t shut off our brains at the first sign of discord.

Granted, we have many lenses through which we can examine a piece of literature, and many different reasons to read as well (enjoyment, “enlightenment,” perspective, etc.).  If your critique, however, can be restated to approximate in form a statement like “I didn’t like it because I wanted him to die,” it may be best to consider reassessing your critical methods or else finding another line of work.

To address my little found ramble again, Didion upsets some readers because she is almost unfailingly indecisive.  It’s sort of her thing.  Furthermore, back in the 1970s she rubbed elbows with some pretty famous people, and, every now and then, her accounts of ritzy parties and political functions read as if written partially for the purpose of name-dropping.  Personally, I think Didion is a fantastic writer, and yes, part of my estimation stems from the fact that I can appreciate her radical uncertainty in all things—a bias-informed position on my part, to be sure.  At times she writes presuming a level of education from her readership; if I remember correctly, it was this sort of writing, in a 1970-something piece criticizing zeitgeisty anti-womanhood feminists, that rankled a few of my classmates.  Surely some of the more specific cultural and political references, namely those local to California, are lost upon my generation, and the reading required some extratextual engagement, which is to say you had to look a few things up if you wanted to understand the article.  Plus, Didion (uncharacteristically, for her) used some big, scary words.

It is well known in some circles (maybe) that, when presented with big, scary words, writing and literature students who don’t already know those big, scary words tend to feel, well, inadequate.  Often this gnawing sense of inferiority leads to a lashing out, a heated, uncontrollable hatred for the writer, and comments like “I just think the writing is unclear, you know, like, she could have, like, used shorter words to get her point across,” have been known to pass the lips of some otherwise reasonable people. On these occasions, most of the other students nod knowingly, and those who would love to publicly pillory the statement either buck up and look like assholes or swallow the temptation and sit there seething, perhaps scribbling down a few choice words in silent protest.

I really don’t mean to be caustic.  I’m just a bit shocked at the resistance to being challenged.  Morally or politically, ideologically or intellectually, the instinct, when a person is presented with a potentially problematic viewpoint, seems to be to circle the wagons at all costs.

Do we really want everyone to write in short, pithy sentences?  Do we want the reductive “truth” or the complex amorphism?  Should we spurn literature that doesn’t agree with the simplistic mottoes we’ve all no doubt pinned inside our jackets?  Obviously all such considerations can and should be made case-by-case, work-by-work.  And, yes, sometimes we will decide we are not willing to make certain concessions.

But consider, next time, that maybe, just maybe, if you don’t like something, you weren’t meant to like it.  Perhaps we’d be a bit better off if we didn’t feel so comfortable all the time, if we sought what upset us rather than avoiding anything that threatens to break our little bubbles.  Furthermore, and regardless of the previous points, don’t dismiss the notion that personal and intellectual growth are probably watered more by chaos than harmony.

Hitchens at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas, NV (January 2007)*

This will be as useless and banal as any obituary or tribute, not only because memorializing a person’s life is, in its own way, an act of barbarism, but because I am limited in what I’ve read of Hitchens’s work to his last eight or so years’ worth of essays.  I’ve not read God is Not Great, nor have I read Arguably.  I will, but that’s not the point.  Reading one Christopher Hitchens essay should be enough for any reader to realize, without doubt, that they are drinking deep the work of a virtuoso, a true master of written English, and a wit unparalleled by any of his contemporaries.  When he died last night, the world lost perhaps its finest living prose writer.

I have always marveled at Hitchens’s fearlessness.  A person can be born with intelligence, can then cultivate that intelligence with the requisite hours of reading, writing, and deep thinking; Hitchens certainly exhibited both this staggering raw intellect as well as the drive to put it to good use.  But it was his bellowing confidence in the soundness of his position that, I think, proved his most important trait.  Atheists like me will never forget his unapologetic challenges to the very concept of religion, the ferocity of his defense of reason and reality in the face of a world that mostly didn’t want to hear it.  It is important to note that on the night Christopher Hitchens died, for good, without promise of Heaven or Hell, well over 6 billion people on the planet earth went to sleep that very same night believing in a god.  Such was, and is, the sheer force against the realities of our existence.

From a political standpoint, Hitchens was always challenging, and often frustrating.  As an unapologetic liberal during my college years, having bought wholesale many myths peddled by the Left that held any supporter of the Iraq War as a blithering dolt, reading Hitchens’s cogent and informed (and yes, sometimes troubling)  affirmations of U.S.-led armed conflict in the Middle East spurred the first tremors of my own crisis of opinion, a radical uncertainty in all the moral shibboleths I had, up until that time, taken for granted.  I still don’t agree with Hitchens on Iraq.  I never will.  But dissent is the whetstone upon which logic is honed… and hell, let’s just up and throw progress in there as well.  For, to calcify ideologically to the point of surrendering to the nearest and most convenient pair of blinders is to render oneself irrelevant.  It is to die before dying.

There is little else for me to say about the man that won’t be said in much more worthy fashion by those who knew him well.  His death has been picking at me since last night, though, and I’ve been walking around fending off small panicked waves of sadness.  The world seems a slightly emptier place without Christopher Hitchens.  To think that he will never write another word, a loathsome realization in a land that badly needs the sort of perspective Hitch dealt regularly, with seeming ease.

Yes, Hitchens is gone now, and with him goes an irreplaceable force.  It’s almost surreal, really:  I always half-expected him to beat the odds, to emerge from the harrowing shroud of cancer a physical exception as well as an intellectual one, a corpus of raw and honest essays about his own flirtation with death nestled underneath his arm as a reminder of his trial instead of a self-composed requiem.  I thought he would make it.  But he didn’t.  He was just a human being, after all, and our chaotic universe, unlike gods, does not bestow its favor upon any person.

Still, who can believe it when a titan falls?

UPDATE (12/17/2011): Having now reread this thing with the benefit of a little distance, I realize my third paragraph comes off as a bit fawning, and perhaps dismissive of the subject it deals with.  I thought some of Hitchens’s writing on Iraq and Islam bordered on jingoism, even if I sympathized with those strains of his criticism that had more to do with atheism than with a hawkish war machine.  I feel just about as badly about Iraq now as I did six years ago, and, while I meant what I said about his opinions forcing me to reevaluate my own, I do regard his views on the war as a major chink in his armor.  He was a flawed human being—too sure of his own opinions, arrogant and dismissive, at times even unduly caustic.  Regardless, my other comments stand.  I will miss the hell out of him.

* Photo by ensceptico (CC-BY-2.0)

Carry on...*

A friend of mine posted a link to Adbusters.org, a site promoting a holiday season in which people buy nothing.  This season, of course, begins with Buy Nothing Day, today, Black Friday.  If you scroll down the page to which I linked, you’ll notice a number of, frankly, hilarious pictures of protesters criticizing the consumerist rampages of the day.  While I empathize with the anti-consumerist sentiment, while I think it utterly sick and disgusting that people are trampled and pepper sprayed in the mad rush for Deals, I have trouble with the idea of a Buy Nothing season.  (But I may drop “Everything is fine, keep shopping” a few times.  Some of these people do deserve it, after all.)

The ostensible aim would be to make our voices echo down the avaricious halls of corporate offices everywhere, to wrench the suits out of their greed comas just long enough to realize that what they’re doing is Wrong.  I have my personal corporate boycotts:  Nike, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart,  etc.  I don’t pretend my actions make a difference, but for whatever it’s worth, I try to avoid buying anything from these and other corporations if I can.  I may have snagged a Nike headband over the summer because that’s all the store carried; I ate a chicken sandwich from a train-station McDonald’s because the other restaurants were closed.  These things happen.

What would  happen, though, if we dogmatically heeded the Buy Nothing campaign?  By asking this question I’m not suggesting that Buy Nothing demands we stop purchasing groceries or other essentials; that’s not what they’re on about.  Rather,  I’m assuming they want a gift-free holiday.   They want people to stop gobbling up electronics and toys and all those other giftables stores mark down during the holidays in order to clear their inventory for the next year.  And more power to them.  After all, the holidays do seem to ignite some atavistic resource-competitive instinct in the shopper, an insatiable urge to drive an ice pick through the eye socket of whoever just snagged the last 42-inch HDTV at a 60% discount and walked out of the store clutching  their claim check like a mother gorilla holds her nursing baby, eyes darting around suspiciously, looking for any sign of trouble.

Materialism can be destructive.  It can lead someone to grow addicted to acquisition and to prioritize this acquisition over what most people would consider more important resources—namely, personal relationships and forms of self actualization (intellectual, political, etc.).  Materialism can blind us to poverty, slavery, and corruption; it can mute our willingness to upset the status quo.  We all know it, and we’ve all allowed ourselves, at one point or another, to be blinded in this way.  I sincerely commiserate with the Buy Nothing crowd on this count.

But to support crippling the holiday shopping season would mean implicitly supporting a form of collateral damage that should give Buy Nothingers and Occupiers pause.  Seasonal workers will suffer first; they will lose their jobs very quickly if stores have no reason to hire them—a somewhat troublesome issue, then, as those most likely to suffer at the hands of a widespread anti-corporatist holiday movement are likely to belong to the demographic the Occupy movement is purportedly attempting to defend.  Executives are tougher to root out; they weather boycotts and economic hardship much better than do the working class.

Perhaps this collateral damage is acceptable to some people.  Maybe the net gain in “consciousness” will be worth it, but I’m not sure there will be such a paradigmatic shift if the Buy Nothing camp succeeds (unlikely, but still).  It seems to me that the holidays will simply grow leaner for many people, perhaps even catastrophically for some of the less fortunate folks, and an economic system already destabilized by corporate malfeasance and political bickering will teeter more precariously on the edge of… well, we don’t really know.

These are just my impressions, and I make them as someone who is conflicted over the issue, partly because I agree with the core anti-consumerist message, partly because I don’t see material want as an entirely bad thing, as long as a person can keep it under control.  Because here is the other issue during the holidays:  I love my family and friends, and I enjoy surprising them with a gift they will truly enjoy (but I’m a notoriously unimaginative gift-giver, so take that as you will).  Are there other ways to make people happy?  Of course.  But giving a good gift means that you’ve taken the time to try to consider someone as a person, to weigh their quirks and personal obsessions and give them something they will cherish.  It need not be expensive at all.  Remember that gift-giving also calls into play a purely social element, a drive that doesn’t necessarily draw its power from consumerist greed.  To paint all shoppers as driven by such impulses is disingenuous, I think,  and doesn’t adequately address the issue.

So should we buy less?  Yeah.  I’m for that.  Should we expect less?  Absolutely.  We may even want to ask our family to give charitable donations instead of gifts; I love that idea, too.  But I’ll be buying gifts for people, hopefully gifts they actually need, and if I’m a consumer whore in Buy Nothing’s eyes, so be it.  The goal, for me, is not to unplug entirely but to be reasonable about consumption and to be as conscientious as possible.

For the record, I refused to have anything to do with this Black Friday nonsense today, but Cyber Monday may be a different story.  It’s time to put my current machine (an overpriced Black Friday burn from two years ago) to sleep.  Seriously.

* Image Credit:  Adbusters.org

(This post is very closely related to this post, but it takes a bit of a different tack.  I may get some shit if any of my classmates happen across this thing, but it’s meant to open an honest, reflective dialogue about what the fuck we’re doing here.  Most of this advice, while addressed to “you,” is also addressed to me, and to be sure, there are classmates of mine who would not be included, like I would be, as “part of the problem.”)

I have spent most of my scholastic life studying English—writing, literature, pretense, ego—and, mostly, it’s all garbage.  The English degree should not impress (not that most people consider us English majors with any special reverence), despite the fervent protestations from budding writers everywhere.  But to my fellow English punks, you Bachelors and Masters alike, know this:  we’re not worth a goddamned thing.  For all the erudite brilliance of Saul Bellow, the visceral sickness of Vladimir Nabokov, the absolute mastery of Dorothy Parker, their work and that like it amounts to very little—or, if my suspicions are correct, nothing.  Something about wishing in one hand and crapping in the other…

The hours we have spent analyzing such works are wasted hours, hours we could have spent doing something useful like smoking cigarettes, or fucking. We have emulated the wrong people, idolized them without justification.  Our attempts to forge our own ways into that echelon of writers good enough, or lucky enough, to serially hoodwink publishers into forking over hefty advances—and readers into sopping up whatever literary poisons we serve—have been exercises not only in futility but in insincerity.

It is the writer’s charge these days to write cynical, sociopathic ad copy for Budweiser by day and by night to affect a sniveling egoism toward anyone who hasn’t considered the synchystic merits of Finnegan’s Wake.  (I learned the word synchisis in class a couple of quarters ago.  How impressive that I’ve used it in my own personal ramblings, eh?  Extra credit!  Furthermore, I haven’t read more than a chapter of Finnegan’s Wake; but since I am an English person, that is to say, a person engaged in the study of English, I am allowed to speculate regarding Joyce’s novel without qualification, having considered at least the vague impressions of the English hive mind, which itself is made up of other consciousnesses that have also not bothered to read the entire book.)

We writers don’t write for you; we write for us.

A potentially harmful machine.*

But that’s an old rant, a holdover from my undergrad years.  A graduate student, especially one at the tail end of his Masters degree, should know better than to throw around frivolous accusations and gross generalities, yes?  Besides, the anti-writer writer is a bit of a cliché in and of itself; and, these days, I’m loath to call myself a writer at all.  Writers write, after all.  (Or, as I said more than a few years ago, “Writers write and shut the fuck up about it.”)

But here’s the nut of this thing:  writing, in itself, is not the point.  The point, of course, has more to do with what we write and, these days, whether we are qualified to write it.  I’ve veered away from fiction recently precisely because it says less and less to me as time goes on (though it is a form I will probably always love).  The echelon of great fiction writers, past and present, certainly have It, whatever It is—that mix of wit, perception, foresight, whatever.  Most of us, however, don’t have a thing to say because we haven’t ever studied anything besides literature and writing:  we haven’t, you know, attempted to look at the world as it is and come to our own conclusions; we’ve filtered everything we know through our hero authors, who’ve parsed love, loss, pain, elation, reconciliation, and disgusting sex into neat little packets, which we consume greedily, believing we’ve gained something from the endeavor.  And many times we have, but I suspect we overestimate the value of art in a vacuum.

We would almost certainly be better writers had we been forced—prior to ever enrolling in a writing course—to major in physics or history or geology, or dropped into the middle of a shark-infested reef with a nasty gash in one leg and a rusted Bowie knife strapped to the other.  Those are the sorts of experiences that give you, well, experience, and furthermore, they provide what is perhaps the most lacking feature in my demographic of mediocre wordsmiths:  frame of reference.

Do you really have anything to say about reality if you’ve spent your own steeped in abstractions and simplifications, both of which are inherently necessary to make any work of literature operate as a unit?  What if you’re like me?  What if you’ve had it pretty easy relative to many of your peers, the well-cared-for life, so to speak, and had little more responsibility than to whip up eloquent-sounding papers on the Wife of Bath or on metaphor in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, which you never even finished?  Do you, then, have any perspective that will help your fellow human?  Maybe, in a very limited sense.  But I’m not so sure.

Writing and literature students should be plucked from their cheap plastic seats, their pens violently wrenched from their hopeful fingers, their self-important smirks wiped off with the business end of a broad, hairy-knuckled hand.  They should be put on a farm for braindead rejects, where, with a bit of luck and some elbow grease, they can work their way back into society—but not before being trapped in a pen with a rutting elk.  Fight your way out of that, kid, and we’ll set you up with a cushier gig in the kitchen, where you’ll spend the next four years licking the plates clean and massaging antibiotic ointment into the fry cook’s grease burns.  Don’t worry, though.  You’ll be able to put all of this on your resumé.

Because the sad thing is, most of us will not make a living doing this.  Most of us won’t even run a successful blog doing this (case in point).  But you wouldn’t know that with all the hopeful eyes about.  If we’re studying writing for our own personal edification or because we simply love it, that’s fine; if we are taking a cue from my proposed Torture Farm Scenario, just in reverse—using writing to gain a skill set that complements our life in business or taxidermy—okay.  My suspicion, however, is that we all think we’ve got something special to say, and probably a few of us (you) do.  But I’d be willing to bet that number is much smaller than enrollment.

This is not a plea for anyone to stop writing—I’d feel rotten if it was—but it most certainly is a request to consider why we’re in this racket at all and, if we’re truly serious, what we’re going to do about it.  My advice:  get interested in something else.  We’ll be better writers.

* Photo by seychelles88 (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0):  Underwood Portable Typewriter (1926)

Cookie.  John Lennon

My smoking has kicked up again; and my mental health is easily at a five-year low.  Over the past month or two I have lost close to twenty-five pounds and averaged about one meal, three hours of sleep, five hours of stomach pain, fourteen hours of lumbago, and 0.7 grim and disappointing ejaculations per day.  Add to this hideous menagerie my various other physical maladies: an aching leg on account of a self-suspected deep vein thrombosis, constant tinnitus in my right ear, strange pseudoseizures on the left side of my body, an impinged peripheral nerve (or brachial plexus), and general physical atrophy.

The picture gets pretty bleak.  But things are about as well as can be expected.

It’s important that anything I say prior to and after this sentence be taken with a grain of salt—not a very big one, but a grain nonetheless.  My glucose levels are likely perilously low.  If I hadn’t have choked down a veggie patty sandwich in the car, I might very well be unconscious on the floor at my office right now—eyes lolling about, tongue wagging uncontrollably in the small puddle of oil that has leaked out of this antique space heater next to me.  The paramedics wouldn’t come until tomorrow morning when my boss would stroll in to find me comatose, a bull’s-eye carved into my forehead and a note stapled to my chest.  Please Throw Out.

I look like a strung-out hooker with these dark bags under my eyes.  I am perilously dehydrated.

This week in particular has been marked by tremendous scholastic and personal failures.  It used to be that I could pull any old wad of written garbage out of my ass and have it fawned over by a classroom full of students, most of whom were better suited for jobs as spitshiners or doorstops at a roadside motel.  Not anymore.  Not these days.  Mostly because the professors have gotten better, even if most of the students have not. No, it appears I will need to work (a little) to make the grade this time around, which is an idea that is at once exciting and anathema to me.

It’s the human interest story, though, that gets to me.  A sub-par grade I can cope with, here or there, and professional woes generally prove to be transient.  But there is some encoded malfunction in my brain that seems entirely unable to navigate the strange and tortuous passageways that make up human interaction.  My signalling functions are working properly, I’m sure.  I don’t doubt that I am sufficiently able to convey my messages, both spoken and unspoken, to any given person.  My signal recognition, however, is on the fritz.

I will not go into the details, because they are boring and would unfairly implicate a vast number of parties who don’t deserve to be half-assedly and ineffectually veiled in my depressed rantings.  I’ve changed my Standard Operating Procedure in this regard.  Besides, if I were to be bluntly honest about the strained emotional logic that has possessed my brain for weeks now, it would be embarrassing for all of us—for me, in the way one must be embarrassed when caught singing along to Dolly Parton songs in the bathroom—for you, in the way one is embarrassed when watching reality TV.  It will suffice to say that I am grossly mistaken about many things. Not only that, but there was never any indication otherwise save for those abstractions of truth produced by my hunger- and fatigue-addled brain.

Could I have been so deluded?  So hopelessly lacking any kind of practical filter that would have prevented this not-so-wholly private meltdown?  I try my damndest to be logical, to recognize and counteract my own confirmation biases, but the possibility that I ignored every bit of evidence contradicting my desired conclusion is not only very real, it is undeniable.

To a point, I am comfortable with that assertion. I am not comfortable with that assertion, not in the least.  It means that every fouled up algorithm and faulty rule set in my head must be razed and constructed again from scratch.  The entire machine needs to be rebooted or, better yet, scrapped for new hardware.

Even now, a few shadowy echoes are trickling back into my accessible memory.  Clues I should have registered and evaluated.  Bits of pertinent data foolishly omitted during analysis.  It has become clear to me that this whole series of malfunctions was preventable, and utterly so.  I am mortified, and the more I run and re-run the numbers, the clearer the picture becomes.  Not only was I delusional, I was absolutely clueless.

Too many questions.  Too many hard answers to stomach.  Just over a quarter century on this blighted rock has not prepared me for anything: some damn thing about jumping into the ocean, and sharks…

Failure is not a rare commodity in my life.  I export it the way Saudi Arabia exports oil or America exports mercenaries.  Still, such massive miscalculations are rare, such catastrophic shutdowns merely theoretical.  If only there was some maligned geek to pin this on and shove out the door in front of the entire office: I could rest easily knowing that I’d made a scapegoat out of the poor, guiltless schmuck and ruined him and his family.  But I’ve got no one to blame but myself on this one. I simply should have known better.

The cookie jar is empty, John.  The dream is over.

Lethal Injection Chamber*

The following list of articles skews toward the anti-death-penalty persuasion, and does not hit every cogent point, pro or con, regarding capital punishment.  How could it?  But the furor over Troy Davis’ execution the other day—as well as some back-and-forth with fellow Sloth Jockey blogger Vinnie Bergl—has the topic fresh in my head.  I don’t know whether Troy Davis was innocent or guilty; I don’t know whether doubt over his innocence or guilt was a false impression given by the media.  For purposes of the following post, and the questions it asks, Troy Davis’ specific case doesn’t really inform the greater question:  is the death penalty ever justified in a civilized society?

I’m against capital punishment for what some might consider a simplistic reason: that, when doling out an absolute punishment, one innocent killed at the hands of the state is one too many.  I’m also sympathetic to skepticism over revenge, and my loose understanding of the greater effectiveness of capital punishment as a deterrent is that it doesn’t work.  To me, the death penalty is a difficult institution to defend, even if I probably wouldn’t lose too much sleep over the execution of a mass murderer or serial killer.

Consider the following:

Why Does the United States Love the Death Penalty?

In this piece for Lapham’s Quarterly Christopher Hitchens considers why the United States is the last country within its so-called peer group to maintain the death penalty:

To be in the company of Iran and China and Sudan as a leader among states conducting execution—and to have pioneered the medicalized or euthanized form of it that is now added to the panoply of gassing, hanging, shooting, and electrocution and known as “lethal injection”—is to have invited the question why. Why is the United States so wedded to the infliction of the death penalty? I have heard a number of suggested answers: two in particular have some superficial plausibility. The first is an old connection between executions and racism, and the second is the relatively short distance in time that separates the modern U.S. from the days of frontier justice.

…

The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

There are a couple of good paragraphs omitted from this excerpt in order to tie the thought together.  Later in the article, Hitchens also considers the Nuremberg trials and the hanging of Saddam Hussein—executions that bookended larger cultural/political movements and could not be considered standard application of capital punishment—bringing, as he almost always does, an interesting perspective to the issue, wondering where we might draw the line were we the surviving victims.

Will Wilkinson on Morality and State-Sanctioned Killing

Wilkinson has three posts on this list because capital punishment seems to be an issue about which he feels exceptionally strongly.  Apart from questions about its effectiveness, both in the court system as well as in its place as a deterrent, Wilkinson questions the very root of the revenge impulse that leads to capital punishment, arguing that it has no place in modern society.

“Plush and Unusual Punishment”
This post was written after Anders Breivik went on his sick rampage in Norway.  Many people in America were screaming for his blood, while Norwegians seemed to be coming to grips with the sheer gravity of the event, their Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, civil and calm and reflective in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Some news outlets got wind that Norway’s maximum sentence was only 21 years (though it carries the potential for extension) and were understandably miffed.  Furthermore, we also discovered that Norway’s prisons are not the dungeons that American prisons are, a fact that did not sit well with retributionists.

Wilkinson considers these points, and while I’m not sure I am in total agreement with him on all points, including the following excerpt, I think he is genuinely concerned about humaneness and civility, two traits that are, I think, more important that the capacity for retribution:

Nothing can be done to bring Mr Breivik’s victims back to life. The most compelling, non-mystical case for vengeance is that it offers some consolation to those wracked by desolation and fury at the murder of their loved one. But the point of a criminal justice system in a civilised society is not the mental peace of those collaterally wounded by crime. All evidence supports the proposition that Norway’s criminal justice system is both practically and morally superior to America’s. If America’s abominably cruel and unjust system delivered results even remotely comparable to Norway’s enviable level of civil peace and order, then there might be some reason to take seriously American animadversions against Norway’s short sentences and humane prison. But we don’t. We’re not even close. So Americans should just shut up and watch. It could do us some good to see how a civilised society handles such a horrifying crime.

(Vinnie originally cited this quote, and I remember arguing that I didn’t know why our court system should necessarily ignore the mental peace of the bereaved.  I think my argument ran along that lines that we should consider whose rights we prioritize:  victims’ or perpetrators’.  That supposes we cannot consider both, and I’m not sure I’d defend my original comments all that fervently at this point.)

“The Killing of Troy Davis”
Wilkinson on the difference between justice and revenge:

Now, I don’t know how to convince you that even especially heinous murderers don’t deserve to suffer the same fate they meted out. I suppose I would start by distinguishing justice from vengeance. I would observe that there is no pervasive ethereal moral substance that must be kept in some sort of cosmic balance lest society devolve into chaos. We may feel deeply, in our marrow, in our prickling indignant skin, that the yin of crime calls out for the yang of punishment. But I would warn against putting much trust our retributive instincts. I would suggest that civilization demands setting these feelings aside, that it requires that we ask ourselves in a cool hour the point of criminal justice.

As an atheist I find the moral claim of this statement—essentially that no cosmic balance exists to be righted—persuasive, and I think we do need to be careful when our instincts to exact revenge hew to such lines of thinking.  However, overcoming the sense of violation and, for lack of a better term, evil  that most decent humans feel at the thought of murder is a tall order, especially if we consider that animals, humans included, are likely programmed to retaliate.

Our baser instincts should not govern our policy, and while I’m a bit torn on the absolute question of the death penalty, I think its continued existence mandates that we use it sparingly—that is to say, almost never.  Rationality and civility are bested served when we can prevent certain atavistic impulses, like those Wilkinson deems objectionable in his post, from finding purchase.

“Moral Progress and Arguments Against the Death Penalty” 
I’m including this one for a few interesting graphs that Wilkinson includes which show the decline, over time, of capital punishment in Europe, of execution rates in the United States, and of executions in the United States for crimes other than homicide.

Wilkinson equates these declines, speculatively, as effects of a society that is growing more “moral”. Now, to make this assumption, or to agree with Wilkinson’s suggestion, we have to assume a moral position that supports the notion of killing as wrong, whether it comes at the hands of an individual or the state.  If you don’t subscribe to to this philosophy, you will see a number of problems with the assumptions contained in the article.

I’m not certain that a decline in death penalty rates is necessarily indicative of a society that is making moral progress; I could imagine other reasons for such declines.  Our society, however, does appear to be growing more inclusive, more accepting of moral ambiguity in general (i.e. non-dualistic thinking), and more capable of considering alternatives to current paradigms (I’m not implicitly nodding to any ideological movements here, by the way).

Are these shifts in perspective and others like them indicators of enhanced intelligence and morality?

Our Angels Aren’t Smart Enough

Jason Brennan on Bleeding Heart Libertarians:

Even if we grant for the sake of argument that some people deserve to die, it does not follow that the state may be authorized to kill them. For a state to have the right to kill criminals, it must make decisions about guilt and hear appeals in a fair, competent, and reliable manner. It must have rules that reliably let the innocent–or those whose guilt is reasonably in doubt–go free. The American criminal justice system fails to meet these standards. Perhaps a government of smart angels should be granted the right to kill. We could debate that. But no state in America deserves any such right.

Wilkinson reproduces Brennan’s post in its entirety in “Moral Progress and Arguments Againts the Death Penalty”, and I’ve just done the same thing here because Brennan’s bottom line essentially states my own.

The discussion that follows in the comments is an interesting one that I haven’t been able to read in full just yet.  However, I highly recommend taking a look at the discourse between the commenters and a couple of the BHL writers, a back-and-forth that prods at the notion of irreversibility and compensation for false imprisonment: For instance, is a person’s spending twenty wrongful years in jail any more reversible than killing them?  That twenty years is lost, and they can never be compensated for the time.  (For the record, I don’t think this notion disqualifies the anti-death-penalty position, nor do I think the distinction means we must do away with all punishment, as one commenter seems to; the comparison, however, is something we might want to think about in order to check our presumptions.  But if we can compensate falsely imprisoned people at all, it stands to reason that we have a better chance to do so if they are alive than if they are dead, in which case we could not compensate them at all.)

Much of the grunt work on good blogs is now done in the comments section, by the way, and leafing through differing immediate perspectives can be useful.

The Death Penalty Digest

I just happened across the blog Just Above Sunset while looking for trackbacks to the Brennan piece.

Editor Alan takes the following Gandalf quote as a sort of thesis, or frame, for his article:

Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.

He provides a digest of some recent writings on the death penalty that cover a wider array of opinions than I’ve linked to in this post, and it’s well worth the read, as he touches upon the contemporaneous (to Troy Davis’) execution of a white supremacist whose crimes are sure to spark disgust and an impulse for revenge—all in all, a much different kind of execution than one tinged by the specter of doubt, the perception of the specter of doubt, or any case in which a confirmed innocent was killed.

___

Obviously, we have a lot to think about relating to the death penalty.  To read meaningful discussion and consider differing opinions is, I think, invaluable and utterly necessary, especially when considering challenges to our own humanity.  In my introduction I stated that I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over the execution of a mass murderer or serial killer, and while I still admit to feeling this way, I think the Gandalf quote is a fitting statement of caution in favor of humility and against self-righteousness, and a wise starting point from which to deal with the question of administering death.

I’m interested to hear any thoughts.

* Image courtesy of publik15 (image link) under a CC BY 2.0 license.

Here’s an interesting one:

The present study experimentally manipulated status by seating the same target model (male and female matched for attractiveness) expressing identical facial expressions and posture in either a ‘high status’ (Silver Bentley Continental GT) or a ‘neutral status’ (Red Ford Fiesta ST) motor-car… …Results showed that the male target model was rated as significantly more attractive on a rating scale of 1-10 when presented to female participants in the high compared to the neutral status context. Males were not influenced by status manipulation, as there was no significant difference between attractiveness ratings for the female seated in the high compared to the neutral condition.

On first glance, this doesn’t seem all that surprising.  The evolutionary conjecture probably goes something like this:  Traditionally, males of the species are responsible for wooing their female counterparts by way of impressive feats, activities that showcase the male’s ability to build a home, hunt prey, or exhibit brute strength; females therefore instinctively pick up on these sorts of success queues from men.  Males, on the other hand, choose their female targets based on the perception of fertility, normally showcased by the female via purely physical traits; males are therefore queued into females’ physical characteristics rather than their possessions of status.  So a nice car wouldn’t affect a male’s perception of attractiveness, whereas it would a female’s.

I can’t promise my parsing is correct, mind you.  I’m sure an evolutionary biologist would have a thing or two  to say about it, my assessment of which is based on a non-trivial number of hours spent watching nature documentaries and some fairly light reading on the subject.

Putting 9/11 on the Backburner

Robin Hanson is pulling me in two directions again.

Here’s the part of his recent post entitled “Forget 9/11″ that I agree with:

Yet, to show solidarity with these three thousand victims, we have pissed away three trillion dollars ($1 billion per victim), and trashed long-standing legal principles…

Here’s the part I don’t:

…And now we’ll waste a day remembering them, instead of thinking seriously about how to save billions of others. I would rather we just forgot 9/11.

Do I sound insensitive? If so, good — 9/11 deaths were less than one part in a hundred thousand of deaths since then, and don’t deserve to be sensed much more than that fraction. If your feelings say otherwise, that just shows how full fricking far your mind has gone.

(Click the link in that excerpt, as you might not get the gist of that sentence unless you read Hanson’s previous post on near vs. far thought modes.)

Hanson’s anger regarding the disproportionate weight we put on native deaths is well taken.  That the World Trade Center bombing provided such potent imagery, seared into our brains by nearly constant coverage, does not help us look past all of the impotent memorializing ten years later.  I am still haunted by the image of people throwing themselves from the towers as flames devoured the upper floors, not because these people were Americans but because they were human beings.  Human loss is difficult to swallow, and it’s worse to swallow when we see it close to home.  But we do disproportionately realize these sufferings:  Consider the 12 million people threatened by famine and sickness in Africa right now (4 million in Somalia alone), or the ongoing cholera outbreak in Haiti, or any of the other billions of people who live in  relative poverty, faced with the prospect of dying every single day.

What Hanson doesn’t seem to appreciate in the context of his post, though I doubt the distinction is entirely lost on him, is the potential for 9/11 to remind us of our responsibilities to remember this greater scope of human suffering.  September 11 ended the naive dream many of us were living (my high-school self included) that saw us safe and secure and indefinitely prosperous, that acknowledged specters of violence like those we saw on the news in places like Lebanon and Israel as mere theoretical risks.  To forget the slide the WTC attacks precipitated, however, would be foolish.  Hanson himself mentions the wasted treasure and degradation of legal principles we witnessed; what makes him think forgetting all of this would somehow benefit us, I don’t know.

Why forget and pretend that 9/11 was a blip on the radar?  Why not simply remember it as the complex story of pain, strength, political malfeasance, paranoia, and cultural shift that it is?  I can’t imagine that Hanson fathoms death as the only salient metric by which to judge history.

The caveat, of course, is that 9/11 should not be used as an excuse to stagnate; unfortunately, these events, and the dead, have been used as political capital by pretty much everyone in Washington.  So, in that sense, we are not remembering 9/11 correctly or constructively; I’ll give Hanson that, wholeheartedly.

Screening for Breast Cancer

The NEJM has an interesting piece on clinical guidelines for breast-cancer screening.  You may remember that the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force recently changed the mammography recommendations for women in their forties, supporting a reduction in the number of scans, even while finding that regular scans reduced mortality in this demographic by 15%.

The author of the NEJM piece, Dr. Ellen Warner, has this to say:

How should one approach the question of screening mammography in a patient in her 40s, such as the woman described in the vignette? The decision should be individualized, with the recognition that the probability of a benefit is greater for women at higher risk. This patient has no major risk factors, such as a family history of breast cancer or a history of a premalignant lesion on biopsy, that would put her at even moderately increased risk. Her chance of having invasive breast cancer over the next 8 years is about 1 in 80, and her chance of dying from it is about 1 in 400. Mammographic screening every 2 years will detect two out of three cancers in women her age and will reduce her risk of death from breast cancer by 15%. However, there is about a 40% chance that she will be called back for further imaging tests and a 3% chance that she will undergo biopsy, with a benign finding. Lifestyle modifications (e.g., weight control and avoidance of excessive alcohol consumption) that might lower her risk should also be discussed.

Read the whole article for a discussion on the evidence regarding breast-cancer screening; it’s a complex issue, and considering the backlash in response to the new recommendations, it’s worth reading about the sorts of observations and evidence that go into producing clinical guidelines.

Oxford Comma Blues

I’m going to tell you this once:  use the Oxford comma.

Why?  Well, imagine we have a list of things which includes:

• Merle Haggard’s ex-wives
• Kris Kristofferson
• Robert Duvall

That list is taken from a newspaper article the linked-to Language Log blog cites as having incorrectly, or ambiguously, punctuated the listed items in a picture caption showing Merle Haggard.  In the context of that caption, the sentence can be written one of two ways, depending on which theory of serial commas you prefer:

• Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.
• Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson, and Robert Duvall.

Which do you think is correct?  If you guessed the second sentence, congratulations!  The first sentence clearly reads as if “Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall” is an appositive renaming “ex-wives”, when clearly those two are separate items in the list.  The only way to punctuate this sentence without ambiguity is to include this final serial comma, the Oxford comma.

Some publications traditionally omit the final serial comma, and while most lists don’t lend themselves to the sort of ambiguity seen above, there will be instances in which an Oxford comma is necessary to preserve the writer’s intended meaning.  But because publishers like to be consistent, and because consistency, to a publisher with low regard for this type of punctuation, will mean including a list with the serial comma omitted, editors will likely ask for a rewrite and end up wasting a bit of time. The simple answer:  just use Oxford commas all the time.  You will never be wrong, and if you ever need to equate the final two items in a series for any reason—omitting the comma also insinuates that the final two items are more closely related  to one another than they are to the other items—you can always leave it out.  Stylistically, you’ll have more leeway.

Click through to the Language Log post for another funny and improperly punctuated list.  I’ll give you two of three items from that one:  ”Nelson Mandela” and “dildo collector”.

From the top of the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima looking northwest. Frame buildings recently erected. 1945*

I’m taking a class on New Journalism, and our reading assignment this week was John Hersey’s famous article, published in The New Yorker on August 31, 1946, simply titled “Hiroshima”.  (You can access the article here, but it’s behind a paywall.)  Hersey’s piece  is a truly harrowing tale told from the perspective of a handful of citizens who lived through the bombing—their actions in the direct aftermath, and their struggles a year after.  Hersey’s prose is matter-of-fact:  he does not proselytize; he does not interpret; he simply tells the story and stays out of the way.

One passage in particular struck me:  Mr. Tanimoto, a Methodist pastor who has been ferrying the wounded and dying across a river for hours in a small punt, using a bamboo pole in place of an oar, sees a group of people huddled on a sandbar, about to be drowned by the rising tide:

Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit.  He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard.  They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves.  He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment.  Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat.  Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like:  yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly.  With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across with it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide.  He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, “These are human beings.”  It took him three trips to get them all across the river.  When he had finished, he decided he had to have a rest,and he went back to the park.

The appeal to humanity in this passage strikes me as especially haunting, the fact that one must remind himself that these mangled bodies he carries are, in fact, people, and that he must not recoil, that he must treat them with due dignity.  If there is a larger message about the dehumanizing effect of war, you can mull that one over yourself; that’s not what makes this passage so interesting or appalling to me.  For me, the scene stands alone as a stark and visceral moment in which the pure fact of humanity must be affirmed, against all revulsion and shock, and while we may consider broader issues, we should never forget the bare existence of our personal breaking points.  Mr. Tanimoto girds himself against his own in this case.  Would that we could all be so certain we would react as admirably.

* Picture is a public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. I took the caption from the Wikimedia summary as well.

Google+, after a little initial hiccup, rolled out a highly functional mobile app (Android’s was more functional than the iPhone’s, from what I hear) with resharing, user tagging, and a nice interface. Facebook now responds with v1.7 for Android  after a number of incremental updates, albeit slowly, with tagging, a photo swipe interface, and a slightly more functional design, the former of which features should have been available a long time ago. Maybe Facebook would have done this eventually anyway, but their app has been notoriously mediocre for quite awhile now, until  today.

The more users Google or any other social network can siphon from Facebook the better.  If Facebook continues to feel meaningful pressure from its competitors, Zuckerberg’s crew will continue to add features and improve their own service.

Now if Google would only integrate Reader with Google+ I’d be ecstatic.

I can’t remember if the quote above appears in this exact form in Michael Chabon’s novel, but Rip Torn delivers it perfectly in the film adaptation.  Q, of course, is the pretentious, vocally flatulent writer “friend” of Grady’s who gives a speech to an auditorium of rapt students eager to lap up his every word.

No writer has cause for this sort of hubris or even confidence, really.  Writing is of very little worth to a practical person—at least fiction, certainly poetry, and most journalism.  Sure, writing was the primary driver behind just about every information revolution dating back to the Neanderthal, but when I consider my own forays into the art form, as well as my continuing formal education which revolves around it, I’m struck with a tremendous sense of failure.  Not because I’m a bad writer;  I am, but that’s not the point.  Quite simply, I feel that the contributions to be made through fiction are no longer relevant.  If they ever were, they assisted social movements at times in which the public opinion could be sufficiently galvanized through such means.  The most socially important fiction book of our generation is The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.  Don’t think too hard about this one; you’ll depress yourself; but it’s probably fair to say that no novel of the past fifteen years has spurred the sort of widespread social introspection that The Da Vinci Code did.  Was it a good book?  No.  Were Dan Brown’s arguments accurate?  Who cares.  Regardless of the latter answer, the post-publication wave of self-proclaimed Gnostic experts who attempted to dismantle the Vatican’s very foundation speaks to a perhaps higher-than-normal level of religious reconsideration among the general public at that time.

But that’s it.  That’s all we’ve got.  The most important (mass-appealing) novel of a generation led to little more than an impotent quasi-intellectual orgy and two Hollywood “blockbusters” that were even worse than the books upon which they were based.

Art is fruitless.  Its intrinsic value, or worth, is measured only by the effectiveness of its illusion, and on that count, I suppose I’m still trapped by it.  I love stories—reading them, watching them, listening to them.  Stories help to parse some of the big questions into manageable bite-sized pieces.  Of course, this impression is little more than a mirage of understanding, just as perhaps all of our pretenses toward knowledge are.

I don’t mean to say art is meaningless, but its benefits are intangible and woefully subjective.  A breakthrough drug will save lives; a plasma engine may one day take us to deep space; carbon nanotubes could give us clean, long-term battery power.  These contributions are more easily weighed and more important to the well-being of the human race than something as trivial as Moby Dick or War and Peace—the intellectual rigor required to see their success, greater and more demanding.  The artistic mind is a disorganized one, a mind that succumbs to its every flight of fancy and one that is often beholden, almost specifically, to its biases, preferring instead to substitute fantasy for reality, folk philosophy for physical reality.  Right?

Maybe.

But then I think of Nabokov and Orwell, even Vonnegut, who always struck me as a profoundly humane person, and decide otherwise.  I think of Dali and Van Gogh, two artists with almost purely artistic intelligence, and Jimi Hendrix, who likely could do nothing else but play the guitar like a motherfucker.  They all did tremendous work that I love.

I suppose that’s all worth something, but who’s to say what?  Love, sadly, is not a good marker of utility.