A Political Curriculum for Rational Mice

I've just added a link to Spinoza's Treatise on Theology and Politics and did this primarily so the teeming multitudes who visit here every day would have an opportunity to read -- not the whole thing -- but its chapter XX for sure. It's no more than a 15 minute read and is especially recommended for all you mice who have passed the age of unaccountability. The others -- youngsters and unaccountable adults -- will not have to read it, since the Mouse is hereby recommending to the potentates who rule this part of the earth that chapter XX of the TTP be made a mandatory part of the curriculum in all elementary and high schools. I am sure that our esteemable leaders will take this advice to heart and expeditiously act upon it so that none will be denied access to the essential wisdom conveyed by the long dead Jew, Mr. Benedict Spinoza.

I will pause here to permit you to click on the new link and then the little red box that will take you to chapters XVI thru XX. A short scroll down will take you to to the required reading.

[Pause.]

Now another pause while you copy and paste Spinoza's words into your memory bank, the one between your ears. You can also paste the words more firmly onto your hard drive, lest your warm-bodied apparatus functions no better than my own as a permanent recorder.

[Another pause.]

Okay. Now that we've got the Mouse's guide to the civic-minded firmly enscribed, you probably have a few questions or comments you'd like to share with the blogosphere. Just click below on the word "Comments." I'm sure the rest of the world is as anxious as I am to read your expansion on Mr. Spinoza's thoughts. And don't be shy. This is nice warm mouse-nest, as safe a place from abusive counterattacks as you are likely to find on the Internet . . . unless, of course, you initiate abuse yourself. (Even then if we're in control of our senses.)

But Back to Our Mendacious Leader

"See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over." [That's what the Mouse likes, straight talk from a straight thinking man. Forget it that it took 20 years to get Syria out of Lebanon and that our hero is inviting them back in.]

"I was not pleased that Hamas has refused to announce its desire to destroy Israel." [Yeah, that does sort of make you wonder what those guys are up to.]

"Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." [And ought to be persecuted to the full excrement of the law, too.]

"Americans should be prudent in their use of energy during the course of the next few weeks. Don't buy gas if you don't need it." [After this is over, buy gas whether you need it or not.]

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." [Say again...?]

"It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm's way." [Keep this in mind on election day.]

"I'm going to spend a lot of time on Social Security. I enjoy it. I enjoy taking on the issue. I guess, it's the Mother in me." ["Mother" being only half a word.]

[And this one for those who -- by deciphering the Mouse's sometimes involuted prose -- have become masters of the art.] "Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."

The Mouse Reads a Book

A friend of mine, Daniel Spiro, makes his living as an attorney by busting corporations and others who commit fraud, both at the Dept of Justice, where he has helped to recover over a billion dollars for the Medicare Trust Fund, and previously at the Federal Trade Commission, where he helped close down many telemarketing boilerrooms.

As magnificent as that may seem to us taxpayers, I argue that another of that young man's achievements is worth far more to us than mere dollars and cents. You see, just a few days ago Dan's first novel hit the streets, and the message delivered by that book will, I am sure, enrich its readers' understanding of themselves and their world far more than the finding of a few extra bucks in their pockets ever could. Dan named his book, The Creed Room, and that's exactly what the book is, a place where Dan and his readers can join an array of fictitious characters in a search for a new way to believe, to worship, and ultimately to live. The book is about God.

Dan attended a little talk I made earlier this month to a group of devoted Unitarians. We had lunch afterwards at a restaurant perched on one of the high banks of the Rappahannock in downtown Fredericksburg, he and his daughter Rebecca (a brilliant teenager), milady and I, and a half-dozen or so of the Unitarians. The book wasn't "out" yet, so I could only halfway appreciate the few things Dan said about it. Our conversation was mostly of Spinoza, but Dan did manage to make the point that the book is less a novel than "a novel of ideas." That's the subtitle, "a novel of ideas," and that is precisely what the book is. Oh, there's a plot, even a love angle and a bit of intrigue, but finally the book is not about anything other than the ideas passed back and forth by Dan's characters in "the creed room." The people in the room were brought there by a simple ad placed in The Washington Post by "the Benefactor," a wealthy mystery man who has brought the people together ostensibly to search for a new creed. The Benefactor's real reasons? Well, that's the intrigue part and I would do you no favors by revealing the "punch line."

I've known Dan for about three years. I met him at the Spinoza Group in DC, and while I was always moderately impressed by his insights into some of the sticky issues raised by the speakers, I was in no way prepared for the depth of knowledge and -- yes, I would say -- wisdom he presents in The Creed Room. I was made further unaware of what I was in for by the first 15 pages or so of the book. There were a few cliches he could have avoided and a couple of passive sentences that his editor ought to have had him rewrite, but now that I have finished the book, I think maybe those few pages were purposefully left unpolished just so we would take the main character -- Dan's spokesman -- to be one of us, and not just another academic spouting erudite and incomprehensible jargon. After those few pages, the book takes off in a whirlwind of ideas and beliefs that left me wondering how in the name of heaven Daniel Spiro ever found the time to finish Harvard Law School while amassing the wealth of religious lore and philosophical understanding he communicates in his book.

The people gathered in the Benefactor's mansion come from all the walks of religious life, from atheist, to redneck backslider, to new age mystic. Befitting Dan's own persuasion and the role of the Jews in shaping the major western religions, he shows us several shades of Judaism and brief sketches of several of the heroic rabbis who put together, with their wisdom and the example of their lives, the core beliefs of their religion. But the strength of the book lies in its (almost) even-handed exposure of the different belief systems. (The Christian fundamentalists are the only group to which Dan gives the back of his hand, though not his closed fist.) When the group of creed searchers finally reaches consensus and presents its new creed to the Benefactor, we are able to see at work the great lawyer that Dan must be. He presents the case for the new creed in a startlngly clear and convincing oration, as if he were speaking to a jury of our peers. We are given the "story," the evidence, and the conclusive recommendations in language that is as eloquent, and yet as simple, as an attorney's plea to a jury must be if his client is to be found -- in this case -- acceptable as a way of life for rational people.

The Creed Room is a must read for any man, woman, or child who is ready to listen to reason. [Available now, the Aegis Press, 352 pages, $18.95]

The Fritillary Mouse

The weight of the earth can be determined by undergraduates who have been taught to manipulate Newton's law of gravitational force. But even those who have not been taught know that the earth is heavy. So how explain the fritillary, the nymphiad butterfly who floats above the earth? Perhaps she is weightless. She has, at the very least, shucked off the earth's iron heart. She has managed to lift.

Three of them -- yellow ones -- play outside my window. These are not fritillaries, but "sulphur" -- the name the lepidopterists have given them -- lacks the playfulness of the word I prefer to call them by. They are "fritillaries."

Their flight resembles nothing less than a geometric pattern. Circles? Perhaps, but circles without fixed centers. No mathematically perfect moving point would dare taunt the Gods of planes and hypotheses with such erratically driven lines. They seem aware of each other. They fly towards then away from their playmates, as if teasing, laughing, as if wanting to be seen and appreciated as makers of great incorrigible figures. I wonder why they do that?

One just lit upon a white flower growing in the swinging pot I water every morning. I'd like to think they see me do it and that they dance for me, in appreciation. Foolishness? Perhaps, but no more so than that an imagist deep inside -- or somewhere -- has "seen" their games and made of them an invisible, spaceless force giving lift to a spirit that might otherwise remain tethered to "the news," or to aging images of himself. Fritillaries . . . sparkling elves, lightness become real, eternity shrunk into a moment.

Ah, well, they've left. I took my eye off them and they noticed. They've gone to seek other hearts to enliven, a toad's, or a tree's, some other something as needful as I . . . and as thankful for the fritillaries, real and unreal, that make life come to life.

Ah, well, no. They're all real, even those nostalgic dreams dredged from imagined worlds . . . even life as we may have lived it had we been butterflies with seven days to live, living each one as fritillaries live, above the earth, so light we do not know what heaviness means. Real . . . honestly real.

The Mouse in the Machine

There are two ways of experiencing beautiful things. We can think about them, or they can just be. Lounging in a deep-cushioned chair, on a moderate evening, perhaps on a well tended lawn that gently slopes to the edge of a narrow beach, a cold Chablis in our hand, occasionally sipping from it, not so much watching as letting the falling sun paint a pallet of color on the soon-to-be night sky -- just being there, with nature unfolding -- we lose our sense of Self. I suppose it's difficult to be of an absolutely clear mind -- with nothng in the picture but impressions of things like beautiful sunsets -- but in theory, it's possible. The self can disappear into emptinesses of that sort, hide away, as it were, overcome by a world that simply is.

Perhaps at such times even the things of beauty themselves vanish, their places taken by stillness, silence . . . nothing. We forget we are real. We experience the world (or something) unconsciously. We may react to unconscious experiences, react in a discernible way. At the simplest level we may experience joy or sorrow, but these are simply the measuring rods we consciously apply (without trying to) to the totality of experience. Even in cases where the measures are not taken, our bodies nevertheless know the physical counterparts of joy and sorrow. Those are moments that "can just be."

True, having been in one of those moments of pure Being, we may, moments later, reflect and find ourselves joyful or sorrowful for having been there, but by that time, the moments of pure Being have come and gone. We have become "objects" again, "objectively" assessing the world of things.

Our culture is made of objects we have consciously thought about, things we have applied words to, oils to, music to. These are views of the world we can consciously express. But our lives as we live them are determined by all our experiences, not just those of which we are conscious. We experience beauty as it is beyond the possibility of expression, beyond the poetry and the music. In that world, we exist seamlessly. We cannot be separated from it. Only in the world of things, the world of culture, can we conceive of ourselves as separate things. Only in that objectified world do those inventions we call art have meaning and beauty of the reflective sort. That's the world we see, not the world we experience.

In the world of culture we have made an object even of God. He is something "out there," a real something that "thinks" and "feels" and "has a son." He's something that fits neatly into the world we have made with our words and pictures. He's a "he."

In the world of culture, we blog. We make up stuff to say to others like ourselves, and when we do it well, and the others reply saying nice things about us and our "philosophical ramblings," we experience joy. (Or sorrow when the others refer to our stuff as the "philosophical ramblings" they actually are.)

In the world of culture we have manufactured, seams always appear, gaps between our "truths." But that was bound to happen. Words are clever codes we've invented, and as good as they can be made to unfold when expressed by master wordsmiths, they fall short of describing the smooth, seamless infinitude of the world as it is. It is not because there is no truth that we never quite speak it truthfully. We fail because our codes are inadequate.

Perhaps our musical experiences come closer, since we seem to be able more easily to forget where and who we are when in their thrall. The world created by music seems on occasion not of this world but of some other where time and distance cannot intrude. God seems to be there in that world, not as a thing, but as the final and perfect expression of what ultimately is. Music creates for us a kind of reproducible satori, an awareness of the whole of Being and of a truth that cannot be made into words. We can, of course, trace the notes, the rhythms, and the rise and fall of musical sound to human artificers, but we may yet within the musical experience find the soul of God.

Perhaps we can intellectually relate all aesthetic experiences to similar views of eternity. We may completely explain color and meter and the semiotics of language. We may learn the physics of our neurological machines, know them so well that we may even convince ourselves that God is "in the numbers." But the experiences of joy and sorrow, the frightening mixture of them we find in our most poignant flights into the beyond, cannot be explained by a knowledge of words or notes or "things" of any sort. They seem to lie simultaneously outside and within the dimensions of space and time. They are wholly unlike ideas and objects, different in a way that itself is different. There, in our suspicion of a difference between body and soul, resides the reality of what we mean when we speak of what it means to be truly human.

If we could not doubt that this were so, it would not be real.

Beauty in a Mouse's Eye

Hedy Lamarr was beautiful. All the rest of the "stars" -- including many with more talent -- were (and are) almost beautiful. To the Mouse, some of the modern "beauties" don't even come that close. You take Uma Thurman and that gal whose name I always suppress -- the one who played Erin Brockavich and the "Pretty Woman" -- for my money, they're just actresses, not beauties. Something about the Thurman gal looks weird to me. And I don't mean her anorexic frame. And that other woman's mouth is so big it distorts her face into something resembling a harlequin's mask. [What's her name? If I keep writing sentences that ought to contain her name, maybe it'll come to me.]

I recall the first time I saw Hedy Lamarr's face on the big screen. T'was in a movie about a bunch of stage struck young ladies, the one in which Katherine Hepburn delivered the famous line about the jonquils. The director must have known that Hedy's beauty was the sort that would bore itself into every adolescent's eternal soul. He had the camera pause just for a moment, giving us a view of the back of Miss Lamarr's head. But then, suddenly, she turned full face -- not it seemed to the camera -- but to me and every male child in the universe.

Well, no ... it wasn't that movie at all. That was "Stage Door," a great flick, at least for the 30's. I don't remember the name of the movie in which Hedy Lamarr first turned her face into mine. Maybe it wasn't a movie at all, but a montage of a dream in which I selected the face that launched my ships and directed it to turn, just at the proper moment, to create an explosion of passion that would endure forever.

[Merciful heavens, Mouse! Have you no decency?]

It has been a different sort of week. Milady has been away at a get-together of Unitarians, down at VPI in Blacksburg. She attends every year, leaving me to tend the garden and feed the cat. [Hmmm, cat just heard her name, stuck a hand up and pawed my arm to remind me that it's about that time. She has yellowish eyes that can plead with the best of them.] I've been emailing old friends I haven't heard from in centuries, taking the edge off emptiness. Been trying to come to grips with growing old.

One of my friends -- of the younger type -- told me that the reason young people "don't like old people is because old people have forgotten how to have fun." Boy, that cut deeply. I'm sure she didn't mean that she doesn't like me -- everybody loves the Mouse! -- but that when young people and old people start talking about fun things to do, they find themselves talking about different things. [Hedy Lamarr died in 2000.] The beach, for instance. When I was young sand was a good thing, and sun, too. My friend Charlie and I used to hitchhike 60 miles (each way) to go to the Gulf beach. We'd come home tired and perhaps sunburned, but the beach was still fun.

But the beach must not have been a "thing of beauty," 'cause a trip to the beach now seems like anything but a joy. [My gosh ... it says here Hedy was born in 1913; was she that much older than me? Nineteen years?] He and I also used to go blackberry picking, out by Hartwell Field, where for some reason the city had dumped big slabs of concrete; the vines took over the place, and in no time we would fill our pails with the luscious berries. I cannot believe today that we actually did that for fun. Last week, while mowing the "back forty," I discovered a profuse growth of wineberries on our "estate." (They look like blackberries, but are red and smaller.) Milady and I picked several bowlsful of the things. They went well with our morning cereal, but picking them was a chore, not something I would do for fun.

Still, it does seem there ought to be something young and old people could talk about, or do together, that both would regard as fun. I'm tempted to think there might be the old standby, sex, but that's kind of forbidden territory, especially for old folks only a few years younger than Hedy Lamarr. Back in the 70's, when the practice of rich old men taking on "trophy wives" was just catching on, we less-than-rich types used a phrase to describe them. We called them "dirty old men." I guess, then, that even if we might admit that the pleasure of sex would hardly die in healthy old people -- I speak with more authority for the male of the species -- the whole glamorous experience that sex once was when we were young has lost at least a tad of its beauty. Hard to think we might still link the joy of sex with the romantic graces that only (it seems) the blush of youth can lend to the occasion. Still, I suppose the young and the old can speak of sex as if they were talking about the same thing. Some memories die only when we cease to be.

Hedy was supposedly married to the lecherous band leader, Artie Shaw. I refuse to believe it. (And it's actually not true. I had her confused with Lana Turner, an "almost.") Her beauty belonged to no one, and to everyone. It had "staying quality." I hope they never print a picture of her as she must have looked just before she died. She would have been 87. Beauty like her's should never be permitted to die.

Facing Mendacity

Every day I get at least two emails from an outfit calling itself "The Ayn Rand Institute." One of the most recent was a missive informing me that "America is not 'addicted to oil'." The writer hinged his claim on the belief that oil, rather than being an "addiction," is actually a necessity. But he was not serious in that claim. He was simply making a tendentious statement, setting up what has come to be called "a strawman theory" so that, in shooting it down, a different and more meaningful point can be made. It's clear, for instance, that oil is not a necessity. Alternative fuels exist. Oil has been made to seem a necessity by government policies that favor its continued use in lieu of alternatives. But as I say, that wasn't the author's objective. He quickly got to his real point. "The problem we face today is not oil, but oil-rich enemy dictatorships like Iran and Saudi Arabia." The upshot of this marvelous revelation was that we must "punish our enemies until they renounce their aggression."

Mr. Epstein, the putative author of this recommendation, does not say what he has in mind as a form of punishment. Perhaps he means that we should bomb their asses into yellow-sand-colored powder, or have the UN apply "economic sanctions," or even -- heaven help us -- stop buying their oil. I cannot imagine, even in my most confrontational frame of mind, that he would have us deal forcefully with the British, Dutch, and American oil companies who profit more from the actions of the dictators than the dictators themselves do. I cannot imagine that he would have us even admit that the source of our "addiction" lies in the fact that the benefactors of this illicit "drug trade" find the status quo acceptable. I cannot believe that Mr. Epstein, in his private wisdom, would have us dismantle the cozy cartel that has so gracefully enriched the already rich.

If I were of the totally depraved conspiratorial sort, I might entertain the notion that maybe, just maybe, the oil maggots are becoming even greedier, and that they have urged Mr. Epstein to plant a string of worry beads in the minds of their OPEC partners. "Why," Exxon-Mobile-Shell-BP may be thinking, "why should we share our hard-earned wealth with a bunch of rag-headed shieks whose only virtue is that they happened to be born on top of an oil dome?" Partners in crime are just that way; they are, by definition, criminals, so why should we be surprised that they seek opportunities to extend their criminality? (That there is "honor among thieves" is a false rumor spread by thieves.) The American people have never appreciated the beneficent effects on oil profits created by "trouble in the middle east." The difference between 5% of $3.09 9/10 and 5% of $1.82 9/10 is measured, not in billions, but in tens of billions.

Oh my . . . these conspiracy theories are great fun. Why not go whole hawg? Why not recast Mr. Epstein as a Johnny-come-lately to the squabble between OPEC and its "legal" partners? Would we be surprised to learn that, from the beginning, the partners have been at each other's throats over divvying of the shares? Seen from just that vantage, the details of the current "trouble in the middle east" make more than a little sense. I refuse to believe that the dictators of Iran and Saudi Arabia are ignorant of the threats to their "rightful share" posed by the militarily powerful oil companies. And I have only a minimal reluctance to believe that the so-called insurgents in Iraq, the Hamas in Gaza, and the Hezbollah in Lebanon are financed by those very same dictators, not because those worthies care a rat's ass for the Palestinians, but because the terrorists are the cutting edge of OPEC's defense against their greedy partners. So long as America's forces are busy fighting brush fires, they cannot give their full attention to the "necessities" of the oil companies.

Besides, from the viewpoint of the "sisters" (the oil companies) the current state of affairs in the middle east is nearly perfect. Without doing significant harm to the flow of oil, the price of the flow has been raised to record levels. "By gosh, look at those dictators squirm, as they see the threat to their gravy train taking on visible proportions in the American mind! If this doesn't lead to a re-privatization of OPEC, it has at least had glorious short term effects!"

"Hmmm. But what do we do now for a new president who is willing to do our bidding? Maybe we should go for a democrat -- you know, one of those tax-and-spend liberals. If somehow we can arrange, say, a 50 cent per gallon tax on oil imported from OPEC nations -- like Venezuela -- and have the revenue funneled to us as tax incentives to encourage reasearch into alternative fuels . . . wow! wouldn't that be something!! Then, our locally mined oil would jump 50 cents a gallon, and we would no longer need those rag-heads! But first, we've got to privatize Mexican oil. Aren't we lucky that they're not in OPEC."

Sounds far-fetched, doesn't it? But, hey, if I, who have nothing to gain, could think of it, why not those who have the world to win?

Another email just arrived from the Ayn Rand Institute. Yeah, well, I see. Ah, yes, I see. The Hamas-Hezbollah axis would never have been able to gain power if the US had long ago permitted Israel to kill every Palestinian on the face of the earth. Hmmm. This guy -- one Elan Journo -- is more talkative than Mr. Epstein. But I do wish they would use larger print in their emails.

"Kill them all." "Kill them all."

Mr. Kurtz . . . he not dead.

Mr. Smith Goes to Mouseland

Max Weber -- a culture analyst -- found it difficult to form a commitment to rational politics. He thought capital "R" Reason itself was a matter of choice, a value placed on the world by human action, and not an inherent quality of being itself. Allan Bloom, on page 150 of his book The Closing of the American Mind, wrote that "Weber was witnessing a struggle of the Gods for the possession of man and society, the results of which were unpredictable...there was no theodicy to sustain him in his travails." These ideas, Bloom observes, were natural effects that were bound to follow on the heels of Nietzsche's obituary for the death of God.

A deeper reading of Weber would be needed to identify those substitute "Gods" he claimed were struggling for the soul of man, but one of them was almost certainly the supernatural embodiment of the gospel according to Adam Smith. Some of Weber's best work involved an analysis of the relationship of the Christian and work ethics. As summarized by Ernst Troelsch's critique of Weber's ideas (in The Economic Ethic of Calvinism), the Protestant disposition consisted of capitalistic qualities:

1. Systematic division of labor;

2. A feeling for profit and advantage;

3. The abstract duty of work; and

4. The attitude toward property as towards something great which ought to be maintained and increased for its own sake.

Said just that way, the virtues of Smith's economics might be said to reach further into the human psyche than merely into the minds of industrialists. Feelings for "advantage" and "the duty of work" are human qualities that -- if they are real -- dignify humankind whether capitalist, socialist, or hunter-gatherer. But humankindus Americanus is essentially only one of these. He is capitalist (but only to the core). He worships, among others, the Smithian God.

It is perhaps not coincidental that the hands of Yahweh and Smith's God are both less visible, and thus more shrouded in mystery, than the hands of the animistic and iconic Gods that inhabited the realm of pre-historic man. So any apparent contradiction between the works of Christian and Capitalist man can be rationalized -- at least in primitive minds -- by the standby shibboleth, "The Lord works in mysterious ways." We may not understand why it is necesasary to wage war in order to export Christianity to the infidels, but we may be assured, by the material benefits of capitalism, that murder and destruction must number among the inscrutable means employed by the Lord to bring about his Kingdom on earth.

If it were not so obviously the case, that the Christian west has been more greatly blessed than the pagan east, we might be less prone to ascribe righteousness to those bearing the sword and the cross as the dual instruments of "progress." We might even in our wildest flights of fancy begin to understand something from the Sermon on the Mount that we have been blind to see by the confusion of Smith's and Yahweh's hands on the levers of history. We might -- God forbid -- begin to see murder, not as mere "collateral damage," but as a sin.

But then, if we ever do make the mistake of seeing ourselves as the creators of the mythological Gods, and ourselves as the creatures who have defined the values that act as determinants in our decision-making apparatus, we shall be forced to question both Max Weber and Allan Bloom. If as individuals we are compelled by our values to act as we act in every moment of our lives, if all our actions can be understood as rational -- in the sense that "It seemed like a good idea at the time" -- then what Weber understood as irrational activity is and always has been rational in the purest sense of the word: we had reasons for doing what we did. Bloom -- by these same assumptions -- was perhaps not quite so mistaken, but seemed nevertheless to believe that the real values that ought to be adopted by thinking people exist somehow (and somewhere) as virtues to be discovered. His error -- if in fact he has made one -- consists in his failure to give proper weight to the human role in defining those virtues. He seems to believe that the human mind has been "closed" by a failure to pay attention to clues or hints or whatevers that exist as detectable entities.

But as I say, Bloom was closer than Weber to what I regard as the truth. If our choices are determined by our understanding of what is good for us, and if our knowledge is determined by nothing but real things and real ideas, then in a manner of speaking, the clues and hints of true goodness are indeed out there (or in here, to say it more properly). From the human viewpoint, the world works rationally, in that nothing happens that cannot in theory be explained as an effect of a knowable cause. If an ideal set of values exists, it must somehow exist as a potential outcome of human action, probably, of reasoned thought.

The problem is the same one that crops up in Smith's invisible hand economics. It is certainly the case that if all industrialists act to produce the greatest profit for themselves, and if it is true that all market transactions involve a fair trade of products, it still does not follow that the result will produce anything like an ideal world. Some of the products, and thus some of the fair trades, may be absolutely harmful to the buyer. Only if human freedom is elevated to the highest rank as an absolute and unquestionable value can the world of fair trades be justified as always ideal, an obvious absurdity. By that standard, all human action freely taken would be good, and any discussion of ethics would be a waste.

More later.

The Mendacious Mr. Smith

Adam Smith is generally credited as the greatest of the founding economists. His classic book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, has rightfully been acknowledged as the most fundamental of the intellectual building blocks that undergird the capitalist system. The most famous quotation from that book has become to the capitalist what the first commandment of the Decalogue was to the Jewish people. In a single sentence, Smith defined the guiding principle that has ever since guided capitalist theory.

"By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he [the industrialist] intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." [Book IV, chapter 2]

Because the manufacturer cannot succeed unless he produces something valued by society, the sum of all such values, when actually produced, must necessarily result in a broad social good that could never have been produced by actual design. Clearly, no industrialist could hope, by his singular devices, to produce the proper level of goods and services that would optimally satisfy all the needs and wants of his countrymen. But by fulfilling their own selfish goals -- profitably to produce products of value to society -- the collection of all individually selfish manufacturers do in fact, Smith says, create the greatest possible good for the greatest number of people. This goal is achieved even though none of the producers sought anything other than their own selfish ends.

Smith goes on to say, in the same section of his book, that "...no statesman or lawgiver" could possibly determine what will sell better than the man actually engaged in producing marketable goods. Moreover, the power to attempt such prescience "would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it." Thus was born the first law of capitalism: No state shall interfere with the actions of the free market.

Organizations representing the working classes, or failed and failing businessmen, continually argue against Smith's logical conclusions, but to no avail. To the extent they are successful -- say, by establishng minimum wages -- the cost of the goods necessary for survival at the minimum wage increase so that the higher wage is shortly of little or no real value. The forces of the free market determine the price of all goods, including labor, and any attempt by "statesmen and lawgivers" to set the prices of goods is bound to produce inefficiencies that would otherwise not have occurred.

From a political point of view, the best attack against Smith's logic consists, not in opposing it on logical grounds, but in accepting it as the truth and tracing it to its eventual consequences. The secret to that attack lies in plain view, right in the title of Smith's masterpiece. He wrote of the wealth of nations, as if the wealth of nations were somehow coincident with the wealth of corporations. But as we know -- or at least, as we may be able to demonstrate -- the conglomerate of modern multi-national corporations produces wealth, not in nations, but in the world as a more or less single entity. The invisible hand, working as it assuredly does, produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the world as a whole, and not necessarily for the nation that spawned the corporations that give the hand its life's blood.

Thus, if the American people truly subscribe to the first law of capitalism, if they truly endorse the notion that no system other than free market capitalism can produce great wealth, then they must be prepared for the leveling of American working class wages that will certainly be brought about by the actions of the invisible hand as it works to increase the wealth of the world.

This is not to say that the American people would be doing the "right thing" in opposing free market capitalism, but that they should be made aware of the reasons why their wages are falling while corporate wealth is increasing. It is entirely possible that, when the American people finally see the lowering of their actual standard of living as an economic consequence of free market capitalism, they may more easily adjust to their hardships. Feeding the poor of the world is certainly compatible with the tacit -- if not always exercised -- moral principles of the Judeo/Christian ethic, and no better way exists than free market capitalism to put that ethic into practice.

But as I say, making clear the ultimate effects of capitalist policies constitutes a politically effective way to attack Smithian capitalism. Whether it should be attacked is a different matter entirely. Poverty is probably one of the great causes of international conflict. If free market capitalism can actually reduce world poverty, by expanding capitalist economics to greater and greater portions of the world, we might experience less frequent adventures of the militaristic sort. We will, in any case. have done more than any philanthropy ever could to feed, clothe, and shelter the poor of the world.

More tomorrow.

Misled Mouse

First, a bit about that word "misled." As a teenager, I had a girl friend who pronounced it, "myzled," as in, "Franklin, I think you're myzling me." True, I probably was, but that's what teenage boys do who have had good upbringing: they disguise their intentions toward teenage girls. We myzle them, and occasionally our myzling works (but you couldn't prove it by me).

Ok, with that upgrade now made to the way English shall be spoken, let me tell you about a great myzling (noun form) that has been perpetrated on the world by certain forces in America. Global warming is real, and yet most people -- including the Mouse until yesterday -- believe doubt exists among the scientific community regarding its reality. Last night, milady and I went down to Charlottesville to a little art theater to see Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth. Now I will admit that Gore may be myzling us too, but if so, he managed it well. He's had his way with me. Here's the line of reasoning that converted me to his way of thinking -- and which, incidentally, illustrates the news media biases I was yawping about yesterday.

A study was made to determine the extent to which the scientific community agreed or disagreed with the consensus opinion that global warming is real. A random sample of scientific peer-reviewed papers was taken, and of the 960+ papers reviewed, zero percent disagreed. That is, all of the scientific community agreed that global warming is real. A separate sample of 650+ media articles was then pulled to test the extent to which the media agreed that global warming was real. More than half (53%) thought there was "some doubt." What was a certainty among those who know, was "in doubt" among those who tell us what to believe.

Gore went on briefly to show how this doubt was created. Public relations firms were hired and were given the job of creating doubt. One of the firms boasted, in a private communication, that "doubt is our product." A senator, who was either bought and paid for or "convinced" (i.e., myzled) by the PR firm, went so far as to say, "Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." [I won't say the senator's name, but part of it was "Imhofe."]

The results of these studies immediately caused me to reflect on yesterday's blog. Those PR firms did not aim their "doubt" at householders like you and me; they went after the news media. I have personally seen at least seven panel discussions on global warming in which both sides (as if there were two sides) were presented. The PR firm's idea, of course, was that they could get more bang for the buck by having the media carry their message than they would get by a junk mail broadside. Their aim was not to convince, but only to create doubt. I can attest to the fact that until I saw the results of the surveys Mr. Gore reported, the strategy had been effective, at least on a humble Mouse.

But then, one might ask: "Even if global warming is a fact (and not a hoax) perhaps it is merely cyclic in nature, just the weather making its normal sine wave of ups and downs; maybe humankind has had nothing to do with it."

That was the main source of Mouse's myzlement (before yesterday). It seemed entirely possible that all the data about warming could be explained as only nature taking her course. But then came Gore with another pot-load of hard fact.

For at least two decades scientists have taken ice core samples from the ice sheets of Anarctica, and by analyzing the contents of air bubbles found in those cores have been able to draw an accurate picture of CO2 and temperature variations over the past 650,000 years. Gore used a huge graphic screen to display those pictures. Looking at the graph lines we could see the past seven ice ages clearly depicted, and see just as clearly that the CO2 measure tracked almost perfectly with the temperature gradient. The dramatic changes in temperature that led to, and brought the earth out of, the ice ages could have been predicted by anyone knowledgeable of the CO2 content of the atmosphere.

But then came the hard part, the truly frightening part. At the highest points reached by the temperature of the earth over the past 650,000 years, the ratio of CO2 to other constituents of the atmosphere never exceeded 300 parts per million. But today that ratio has already gone way beyond that upper threshhold and if the rate of increase continues will be off the chart.

Thus, when nature had the world to herself, when human actions contributed little or nothing to the CO2 mix in the atmosphere, the cycle of extreme cold and extreme warming produced the world as we know it, at least, as we knew it 75 years ago. The polar ice caps and the glacial formations in the high parts of the earth's land masses were such that humankind could live in relative comfort. But if the warming level exceeds the peak levels reached in the past, the ice caps and glaciers will melt and the balance of temperature and temperature related effects will be upset, and life as we know it will dramatically change. It may in fact become impossible.

The facts demonstrated by the evidence in the ice core samples proves that the current levels of CO2 accumulation and the attendant rises in temperature have been brought about by human action. So the certainty of global warming has been joined by the additional certainty that humankind is a contributor to the problem.

But that's actually the good part. If human action is causative in nature -- and who's to doubt it -- then human action can effect changes in the opposite direction. That was Mr. Gore's positive message, that we have it in our power to change the CO2 levels in the atmosphere and thus bring about a normalization of the earth's temperature. Many nation's have already taken action. Only the USA and Australia failed to sign the Kyoto protocol, an international treaty designed to lower CO2 emissions. But the USA emits more than 30% of the CO2 currently entering the atmosphere, so without our participation, the efforts of the rest of the world may be ineffective.

On the other hand, it could be that our current administration knows all that and sees that if the rest of the world actually takes action to solve the problem, while we do nothing, the ecocomic differential between us and them may be broadened to such an extent that they will be unable to compete. But this so-called "advantage" is countered by the fact that sound environmental policies, integrated into the economic base, produce economic advantages that leverage the implementing nations to the disadvantage of those that fail to obey nature's demands. The Japanese auto industry long ago decided to manufacture high-mileage automobiles (thereby decreasing emissions of CO2), and today Toyota and Honda are prospering while Ford and GM flounder. It may be that the Japanese acted for reasons only peripherally related to global warming, but now that we can see the benefits of their strategy in terms of CO2 emissions, we can -- and should -- ground our actions in the light of the lessons learned by the Japanese "experiment."

Tomorrow, I will write about how the illusion of the modern "philosopher's stone," called "Adam Smith's invisible hand," has made it possible for the PR firms to create so much doubt in the face of so much fact.

Mendacity on Channel nn

A month or so ago (May 24) I blogged the fact that corporations have no conscience other than the one focused on the bottom line of their balance sheet. I did not make the point quite so clearly as I could have that, for a corporation to succeed in business, it must never let moral consciousness intrude into its affairs. This is not to say that corporations should act illegally, but that they should not let so-called moral sensitivity encroach into their decision-making processes. If, for example, Glaxo Smith Kline can make a new drug that absolutely controls the effects of asthma (Advair) they should – and do – charge for that drug the price that will assure their highest bottom line profit. If they set the price too high or too low, optimum profit will not be earned. In determining that price, to the extent Glaxo concerns itself with “the greatest good for the greatest number” or with bleeding heart sympathies for those asthmatics who will suffer because they cannot afford the drug unless it is sold for a pittance, the company will find itself indecisive and, soon, bankrupt.

But there are some corporations – those in the news business – for whom concerns for the bottom line and moral sensitivity become, at best, confusing. A representative democracy cannot function well without an informed electorate, and news broadcasters – news corporations – would serve us well as a way of keeping informed if they functioned as a public servant rather than as a conscienceless corporation. Unfortunately, the news media focuses on its bottom line just as assiduously as any other economic entity. Their profits are a function of the size of the audience they can attract to their spiel. Consequently, the word “demographics” plays a major role in their program decisions, and they each have carved out for themselves a market niche. CNN plays to a “liberal” audience, Fox News to people of a far right persuasion, the PBS News Hour to a middle of the road, so-called open-minded audience, and CNBC – the stock market channel – to what has been termed “the investor class.” CNN, thus, while just this morning discussing the terrible events in the near east, decided to play their report against a backdrop of President Bush in St. Petersburg, leaning toward an attractive blonde, both laughing as if nothing in the world could be more humorous than the news. Fox, on the other hand, apparently unable at the moment to find a way to spin the news to appeal to their clientele, interviewed, in the same general time frame, a retired fashion model/movie star who had apparently given birth nine years ago to twins. The previous evening, a commentator by the name of Kudlow on CNBC, was seriously asking a panel of “experts” if indeed the war breaking out in Lebanon – and the attendant collapse of stock market prices – presented “a buying opportunity.” I had the impression that even if the death toll were to mount to “newsworthy” proportions, Kudlow would still wonder if this were not a good thing, seeing as how stock prices had been “irrationally” depressed by this minor conflict.

The casual observer of the “news scene” might come away believing that the news corporations are politically biased, but nothing could be further from the truth. They are merely shaping their “biases” around a well-informed view of their market. They are well aware that the listening public is biased, and that any news story that flies counter to what their audience expects to hear will arouse animosity. Worse, it will lead the viewer to “click off” to another channel. My wife, for example, as biased liberally as Attila the Hun was conservatively, will leave the room rather than watch our beady-eyed president smirking up the news. I feel a similar distaste for the Kudlow fellow, even though I feel certain he would put me in “the investor class.” His voice grates on my ear, and his cheer-leading enthusiasm for all things free-market causes me literal pain. I have even been known to develop a rash from the PBS News Hour with its super-sensitivity to telling both sides of every story. I imagine they would have discussed Robespierre's guillotine in econmic terms. “And here are Somebody and Nameless One to discuss the cost impact of guillotining as opposed to firing squads.”

It doesn’t help matters much that we may actually learn of the media’s programming priorities. They would still be playing to our prejudices, catering to our passive side rather than stimulating us to think actively about the stuff they’re talking about. It’s virtually impossible to listen to all the different slants they warp the news into, only slightly less than impossible for the normal hard-working father and mother of 2.4 children to synthesize the truth out of the hodgepodge the media have forced us to hear and see.

Small wonder that our representative democracy doesn’t function quite so well as it might if we were exposed to “just the facts, ma’am” instead of the coined and canned message massage we’re rubbed up with. At least, we could hold ourselves – me you, and you me – responsible for the mess we make of the ballot box. As it is, we’re no more able to vote wisely than Pavlov’s dog was to refuse to salivate at the ringing of the dinner bell. We’re not recipients of the news; we’re customers of news-makers.

Mouse to the Ramparts

A local acquaintance -- and a highly educated one at that -- conservative to the core and at the mouth-end too, just recently informed the Mouse of several "facts" that had somehow slipped through the Mouse's intelligence gathering network without becoming entrapped. Foremost among the elusive knowledge imparted by this worthy is the "fact" that "there is no such thing as a Palestinian." My informant -- perhaps without realizing it -- was in effect saying that there never was a place called Palestine. Which is of course cat shit.

Hmmm. As it turns out the term "cat shit" fits nicely here, since cats -- but not bulls -- try to cover up their excrement. And that appears to have been the case with this particular "fact." Someone has made a conscious effort to cover up the fact that the area currently occupied by Israel was at one time known as Palestine. Without that cover-up, my highly educated friend would perhaps never have made such an egregious error. He is after all a conservative, and we all know that no genuine conservative would ever speak anything but the dead level truth. [Pity me, please, for the lame irony of that last sentence.]

You might imagine that the erasure of Palestine from the historical map of the world was brought about by the efforts of Limbaugh, Rove, and other recent revisionists, but to believe that would be a mistake. They have merely continued an effort that traces at least to 1974. I have in my (secret) possession several stamp albums that I acquired during a previous incarnation when I operated as a small business stamp dealer. Several of those albums were printed in the 1940s, and all of those contain spaces for the stamps of a place called Palestine. But I have one other album, copyrighted last in 1974, that contains no places for any country going by that name. Moreover, a page by page search of that album finds none of the stamps of Palestine by any other country name. Palestine was deleted as a country at least as early as 1974.

Strange, you might say, until you notice the publisher of the album: Minkus Publications, Inc. To those of us in the stamp business it was well known that the Minkus company, in addition to offering the conventional philatelic services, also was the paid representative of the Israel Post Office. Under the terms of its agreement with the IPO Minkus was to see to it that the stamps of Israel were widely collected. The economic value of that service will be appreciated once you catch on that a stamp can be printed for less than a penny. When sold at face value to collectors who will probably never use the stamps for their intended purpose -- to mail a letter -- the profit margins approach astronomical proportions. The U.S. Post Office does the same sort of thing, but they do not fool around with middlemen like Minkus; they run their own retail outlets to collectors and dealers. (I got my start in the business by purchasing "nice copies" from the L'Enfant Plaza outlet in Washington and reselling to the mail order trade.)

Okay. Minkus was well within its rights to make sure that in their album provided spaces for every stamp ever issued by Israel -- more than twice as many pages for Israel's stamps as for Russia's, even though Russia had issued roughly ten times more stamps than Israel -- but by no stretch of the reasoning mind can a justification be found for the deletion of any mention of the country called Palestine.

Well, that depends on your point-of-view. Clearly, if you are a member of the Israeli government, faced with trying to win an endless war with a bunch calling thmselves "Palestinians," it may very well make all the sense in the world to create the illusion that nothing like a "Palestinian" every existed. The war is, after all, a land war, with both sides claiming ownership to the same piece of real estate. If the claimants on one side do not even exist -- and never did -- it's easy to see how the issue ought to be settled in the minds of the world's people.

Just to make the matter sure, I looked up the word "Palestine" in a Biblical Atlas. Sure enough, the word is there, "Palestine," defined as the equivalent of "Israel" and "Canaan." The atlas goes on to say, however, that the word "Palestine" has in recent times taken on "political overtones," so anyone using the word should understand that it refers to an area of land in the near east. "Palestine," it says, is a derivative of the word "Philistine," the name once given to the people who lived there in Bible times. Now, I would not go so far as to say that the publishers of the Biblical Atlas were in on the coverup, but it has not gone unnoticed that by mentioning the derivative of the name, they have effectively identified the current Palestinians with the Philistines of Goliath fame, and we all know what shit asses those guys were. But like I say, that's probably just an unintended consequence of the truth: the derivative of the name appears to be a simple fact.

Now, the Mouse is well aware that in bringing this up he is apt to be branded an anti-semite or even a Nazi. T'ain't true, but I do not see how the Iraelis have done themselves a favor by permitting the name "Palestine" to be purged from the vocabulary. If the Palestinian people truly do exist -- and they do -- and if they think they have a claim to certain of the lands in Canaan, then there ought to be a court somewhere that would grant them standing. God knows how many lives and fortunes would have been saved if the changes that took place in Palestine in 1948 had been settled by lawful means.

But then, the same could be said for most of the lands of the world. We are, finally, all Africans who have migrated into territories that were presumably unoccupied before we got to where we are. I suppose the law, "finders keepers, losers weepers," could be applied, but more effective "laws" have usually prevailed: the laws of force. To settle disputes of the "land" sort . . . well, that's what bombs are for, and everyone knows how effective and just are the finer points of argument when munitions are properly and loudly proclained.

The Mouse in Pamplona

The more I think of the problems of our lives, the more I am persuaded that we ought to choose Irony and Pity for our assessors and judges as the ancient Egyptians called upon the Goddess Isis and the Goddess Nephtys on behalf of their dead. Irony and Pity are both of good counsel; the first with her smiles makes life agreeable; the other sanctifies it with her tears. The Irony which I invoke is no cruel Deity. She mocks neither love nor beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed. Her mirth disarms and it is she who teaches us to laugh at rogues and fools, whom but for her we might be so weak as to despise and hate. Anatole France, Thais

I have amused myself in the past few hours by playing a game invented by Hemingwaty in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway called his game "Irony and Pity" and used it as a mechanism to deflate the dramatic view of life suggested by the great French writer quoted above. The hero of Hemingway's novel, roguishly named "Jake," suffers from what most of us would call impotence, but which Jake ironically explains as "an accident" thereby earning more pity than would be the case if his inability to "get up" -- as Hemingway puns in the same chapter of the book -- were an effect of a neurotic persuasion. Contrary to France's "good counsel," Jake finds nothing in his "accident" to smile about. His condition is real, as are all the afflictions life and history have thrust upon us. And yet, we do not in the novel find Jake a disagreeable, but rather an affable person who we are led to identify as the author's surrogate.

Given that Hemingway puts the words "irony and pity" into the mouth of a character not particularly likeable -- and certainly not identifiable as the author in disguise -- the scene is all the more ironic. Hemingway draws Bill Gorton, the "unlikeable" character, as the polar opposite of the down-to-earth and bucolic Jake (a fisherman, like Hemingway). The phallic symbols repeatedly written into the chapter -- and the entire book -- enforce what could be called a Hemingway fixation, that life is all about "getting up." The wriggly worms that Jake is good at corralling into tobacco tins, stand in contrast to the sturdy trout that Bill catches more of than Jake does. If life were as simple as Hemingway makes it out, if we are as impotent in bringing our "fish" to ground as Hemingway makes us out to be (in The Old Man and the Sea) then all is "ado" and life itself is an ironic game played by pitiable fools. The sun "rises," but we do not.

In rambling the internet in search of a copy of the Hemingway novel -- I do not own one -- another googled "score" took me to an excerpt from Hendrik van Loon's The Story of Mankind, a pseudo history published in 1922, 4 years before Hemingways first novel. The following long quote struck me as an example of history's pitiful irony.

Often before have I warned you against the false impression which is created by the use of our so-called historical epochs which divide the story of man into four parts, the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation, and Modern Time. The last of these terms is the most dangerous. The word "modern" implies that we, the people of the twentieth century, are at the top of human achievement. Fifty years ago the liberals of England who followed the leadership of Gladstone felt that the problem of a truly representative and democratic form of government had been solved forever by the second great Reform Bill, which gave workmen an equal share in the government with their employers. When Disraeli and his conservative friends talked of a dangerous "leap in the dark" they [the liberals] answered "No." They felt certain of their cause and trusted that henceforth all classes of society would co-operate to make the government of their common country a success. Since then many things have happened, and the few liberals who are still alive begin to understand that they were mistaken.

Continuing my morning's playing of Hemingway's game, the idea has once more been made clear to me that my favorite philosopher was as pessimistic as Hemingway and van Loon were that humanity, as a group, would be able to bootstrap itself out ot its ironical state. After all, the last line of the opening paragraph of Spinoza's first work expresses his desire to find "something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity." [Italics added.] The final sentences of his last work make the same point, that "salvation" is not to be found by the masses, but only those who -- perhaps with Anatole France -- can smile at history's unfolding and thus lift themselves from the mass of those who are to be pitied. "If salvation were ready to hand and could be discovered without great toil, how could it be that it is almost universally neglected. All great things are as difficult as they are noble."

Perhaps, this new device, this blog-world, has been brought into being as a place where irony and pity can be discussed as things out there, objects we can choose to understand as creatures of the human "accident." We are perhaps impotent to extricate ourselves from the skins we were born in, but -- I must phrase this as a question -- is it possible to live as something other than pitiful creatures doomed to gather wriggly worms? ... can we never expect actually to fish with the expectation of catching something worth having?

Are we crazy for wishng it might be so?

Mouse as War Protester

Actually, it's an old story, dates back to late November 2002 when I was still a 70 year old youngster. Seems about 20 or so of us Madisonians had decided to take to the streets to march against what was threatening to be a war in Iraq. I'm not sure what possessed so many people in this small county to decide that the war was something we ought to take umbrage with. For the longest kind of time I was not altogether sure what led me to protest, but I've spent the afternoon going through the notes I made in preparation for writing what turned out to be about 25 newspaper articles against Mr. Bush's decision and have finally traced my mindset to what must be its origin.

The earliest hints of outrage began in September of that year, and unless I've got it all wrong, grew out of what was essentially a grave mistake on my part. Milady and I were only mildly political before that time, so when we heard rumors of war falling from the lips of our great leader, I 'lowed as how it was all just saber rattling, an attempt to stir up the masses prior to the midterm elections which were to be held two months later. Because a war with Iraq made no sense to either of us, we were quite content to believe that after the elections, the war talk would gradually fade away.

We heard Bush's now famous speech in Cincinnati where he made an attempt to summarize all the reasons we should go to war, but were unimpressed, probably because we had already pidgeon-holed the "evidence" as mere politicking. At about this same time, the United Nations -- apparently at the USA's insistence -- had begun debating a stronger resolution which, if enacted, would send inspectors back into Iraq, armed with the authority go and do as they pleased to locate any weapons of mass distruction that the Iraqi government might be hiding. At about that same time, Mr. Bush's administration had asked the Congress for authority to go to war with Iraq. Connecting this request to the activities then ongoing in the UN, I interpreted this request for authority as an attempt to demonstrate to any recalcitrant UN members that the USA was serious. It was a strategem designed to get the UN to take action and pass the strong resolution.

That was my second major mistake.

As we know, the authority was granted with bipartisan support, and a week or so later -- after the elections had gone Mr. Bush's way -- the UN passed its resolution, and two strong groups of inspectors were sent to Iraq.

So, it seemed to me that Bush had scored at least two major victories, one on the home front -- winning inceased majorities in both houses of Congress -- and another internationally. If Saddam Hussein was actually a threat to us and his neighbors, the UN had taken steps to assure that the threat would at least be held at bay until we could finish the mop up of Osama bin Laden. With the inspectors looking over Saddam's shoulder, no way could Iraq deploy or continue development of their weapons, even if they had them. And if Saddam Hussein did not cooperate, if he did anythng that even smacked of a material breech of the resolution, he would be in violation and Iraq would be subject to "strong measures."

I could see it clearly. We had the best of all possible worlds.

Believing that was my third mistake.

I came to my senses in what was an instant of immediate insight, an epiphany if you will to call it that. Less than a week after the newer, stronger UN resolution had been passed, a State Department spokesman (name of Jones) and an "unnamed official" in the Pentagon both, on the same day, uttered a grievous lie. For eight years the U.S. and Great Britain had been patrolling two so-called no-fly zones in Iraq. These zones were set up after the first Gulf War to offer protection to the Kurdish and Shiite populations of Iraq, after we had abandoned them to Saddam's "tender mercies." It was not even newsworthy that the patrols were regularly painted by Iraq's radars, and only slightly moreso when they were fired upon.

So, imagine my surprise when the two administration spokes-persons declared that the most recent "painting" of our patrol planes constituted a "material breech" of the newest UN resolution. I immediately went to the internet, convinced, but wanting confirmation, that nothing in any UN resolution had ever referred to the no-fly zones, and that, consequently, nothing that happened in relation to our overflights and Iraq's protective measures could possibly have been considered a material breech of any UN resolution, much less the newest.

Of course, the confirmation was there. I knew in that moment that I had been looking at the administration through glasses fogged over by wishes and dreams. Those damn fools were hell-bent on going to war.

Don't ask me how I was so certain. I just know that I was. I immediately started working to do what I could to inform the local papers and people of what I knew to be a foolish adventure. Not only was Bush apparently demoting the search for Osama bin Laden to a lower priority, he was doing it in the face of international opposition that was almost certain to weaken any attempt to bring the perpetrators of the 9/11 attrocity to justice. The so-called war on terror could never be won without the unequivocal support of all -- or nearly all -- of the nations of the earth, and here was our great leader, sacrificing the goodwill and cooperation of many of the major players.

I took to the streets, me and milady and a dozen-and-a-half others, marching back and forth in front of the Madison County Court House, bearing our little insignificant signs, knowing we were right, but suspecting that our efforts would be of no effect.

Three years and four months later, thousands and thousands of lives later, Osama still on the loose, I take no pride in having been belatedly right. I only wish our legislators had been as enlightened as I was when I read those seemingly negligble words spoken by two insignificant operatives in an administration that, all along, had intended to do exactly what it appeared to be saying it would do. Perhaps the boys in Congress were as incredulous as I was in believing that no sane government would go to war in Iraq before putting the criminals of 9/11 in the ground.

Entrepreneurial Mice: Outwardly & Visibly

In an earlier blog I took a nip at the four factors of economic production. Here I add a fifth factor, the one suggested by Alan Greenspan during his pissed-off libertarian period. The good doctor proposed that to land, labor, capital, and entrepreneur we ought to add government, and observed further that of the five, only government is authorized to carry a gun. Greenspan’s lamentation was downright orgasmic to his fellow libertarians, to whom government, armed or unarmed, was the devil in disguise. Later, urged by the realities of his increased responsibilities, Greenspan abandoned his suspicions of government, and thus fell from grace with the Smithian “conservatives.” Nevertheless, laying aside the Chairman’s perfidious flip-flop, I will, in the remarks that follow, leave government where he placed it: in the guard tower overlooking the “circus ring” (or “prison yard” if you prefer) where lands, labors, capitals, and entrepreneurs struggle for balance (or dominance).

What we have here is a new way people might be able to think about economic things after they get clear about why they believe what they believe. I call this oration “outward and visible” because the views expressed here have a sort of objectivity about them. People can understand and discuss them without having to define terms and adjust to other people’s biases. Differences of opinion may still arise, but if I have written well, the differences will eventually give way to Reason.

When economists speak of land they typically refer to land (and/or rent) in the context of business ventures. They seldom refer to the land occupied by the houses and garages of home owners as business property. To the economist, private homes are commodities, things bought and sold, just like automobiles, washing machines, and chocolate bars. But look sideways – or as Mark Twain said, “through a glass eye darkly” – at the private home and you will see an enterprise just as much a business as the largest international corporation. The home owner has borrowed capital to invest in his home, he labors to maintain or increase its value, and he certainly has leased land as a part of the contract he signed when he purchased his home. Finally, the home owner took a significant risk when he contracted to buy his home, a gamble that clearly identifies him as an entrepreneur of the most fundamental sort. He is a risk taker.

The magic of free market capitalism joins all economic enterprises – including home ownership – into an inter-dependent network. The enterprises support each other with their products and services, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, and in doing so, develop a productive capacity much greater than would be possible if they each tried to do everything for themselves. The auto manufacturer, for example, depends on steel makers, plastics manufacturers, tire companies, insurance companies, the oil industry, and if the truth were known, practically every other industry. If General Motors attempted to provide all these supporting commodities and services for itself, chances are high that the cost of producing cars would be much higher. Even at the level of the great corporations, the division of labor leverages production.

All industries depend on labor, and in an ideal economy, all labor would be supplied by the enterprises collectively referred to as “home ownership.” Sociologists believe home ownership greatly enhances social stability, and common sense suggests they’re right. Consequently, land devoted to home-owning labor is much more productive than land beneath the feet of “vagabond” labor. It thus follows, also from common sense, that government, as an economic factor, should be going out of its way to encourage home ownership.

Many governmental actions toward this end appear to be aimed in the right direction, but sometimes those actions do not favorably compare with what government does for conventional enterprises. I have in mind the income tax deduction afforded home owners for the mortgage interest they pay to lenders. This deduction benefits the home owner, but only if the sum of all his deductions exceeds the amount of a fixed standard deduction. But the same tax code that limits the home owner’s interest deduction permits General Motors to deduct its interest payments without limitation. The code also permits GM to deduct all of its other operating expenses, without regard to a fixed limit. GM may, for example, deduct money spent to maintain its lands and land-like property. The home owner cannot make similar deductions. A thorough analysis of the federal tax code would reveal many more instances in which it treats corporations and home owning entrepreneurs differently, with the differences almost always favoring the corporations.

At first look, the differences in the way the tax code treats home owners and corporations would appear to be justified; corporate taxable income cannot be computed without deducting the corporation’s expenses. But this fact only accentuates the unfairness. The notion of a “gross income” from which operating expenses are to be deducted, applies to both corporations and home owners. But corporations -- and not home owners -- are permitted to deduct all their operating expenses. If the tax law treated corporations and home owners the same, home owners could deduct all their subsistence expenses, paying income tax only on monies spent for luxury items and savings. That is, the home owner would pay taxes only on his net income, same as the corporation.

Local governments also seem aware of the vital role of home ownership in the economy. Zoning laws strike me as the most common and beneficial manner in which local administrations become involved with home-owning entrepreneurs. But even here, the benefits of home ownership are not always kept in focus. The planning boards do their planning under pressure from elected boards of supervisors (or other ruling parties) to achieve objectives that sometimes lie in the wrong direction. The rulers here in Madison County, Virginia (where we have swinging bridges) just passed a binding regulation restricting land owners to “four-in-ten,” meaning that the owners of a plot of land have the right to divide their land into only four (or less) smaller plots in any ten year period. I’m reasonably convinced that by this act they seek to maintain the rural character of this beautiful part of the world, but who knows for sure? They may have been aiming to further what appears from others of their actions to be their primary purpose in governing – to minimize the number of kids moving into the county.

If you wonder why they would want to do that, well, think about it. The largest single slice of the county’s budget goes to the school system, and the cost of running the schools is proportional to the number of children to be educated. So these decentralized central planners, while they would challenge to a duel anyone who publicly branded them as socialists, see no problem in restricting an owner’s use of his land, employing pretty much the same sorts of controls (minus the firing squads) Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and other notables of the socialist persuasion used to enforce their rules. I’m reasonably certain that similar purposes figure into the schemes of local planners everywhere. As one of the local bucolic characters might say, “Them damn commies is ever’where!”

But zoning laws have their uses. Nobody would want a slaughter house next door to their home, and most people would see the desirability of maintaining beautiful mountain vistas, or restoring the antique loveliness of an historic town. Those are values that supersede economic concerns. They constitute the essence of the nation's most fundamental purpose. The nation is not in business to make stuff, which is another way of saying, the nation is not about seeking economic balance. The nation is about creating circumstances that make it possible for people to be happy. If the rights of a person who wants to build a slaughter house have to be restricted in the public interest, the average citizen might well ask, “What’s the problem?”

Well, that is the problem! Every act of government involves an abridgement of freedom. Every tax constitutes an appropriation of property, every law, a restriction of individual desire. And every pistol-packing governmental tradeoff of protected rights for individual privilege virtually assures that some part of the citizenry will get nothing in return for the trade. Some people -- like those miscreants who want to build a slaughter house over your back fence -- will even be denied the free use of their money to develop a legal business. Perhaps it was not idealism that led Jefferson (or whoever) to utter that classic statement about the best government being the one that governs least. That line may have been spoken in recognition of the difficulty governments face when they are forced to make decisions that affect people’s protected rights. The government that governs least governs easiest.

Governing a people who are existentially free is a difficult task, especially when honestly undertaken.

Mouse as Party Animal/Host

I have discovered that the duties of a host at a party can be tiring, if not downright debilitating. The night of the Fourth, Mrs. Mouse & I threw a party for what turned out to be 55 people, 15 more than we anticipated. All were, of course, invited guests, but some forgot to RSVP, leading me to believe we were not as clear in that regard as we might have been. Not a problem, except that the increased numbers caused the party to distribute itself across a wider terrain than would have been the case if all the guests had been able to fit into the two or three "sitting areas" we had prepared for conversational gatherings. As it was, one group wandered off to "the back forty" where we have our vegetable garden, another to the front lawn area where a game of "no-rules croquet" was set up. Two other groups formed in the pre-arranged areas, which were strategically situated around the food table and the make-shift bar (where a connoisseur's arrangement of Diet Dr Pepper and ginger ale were in command). This diaspora of guests noticeably affected the Mouse's ability to float host-wise among them. Legs may indeed have been "made for walking," but old legs can take only so much of it before offering complaint.

The idea for the party came into being about five years ago. Our place is situated about 2 1/2 miles down the road from the locale where the local mad bombers hold the county's Fourth of July fireworks celebration. We can thus enjoy the display without having to join the crowds. But fireworks aren't the same without the oooing and aaahing that accompany each colorful explosion, so they need a crowd. Hence, our party.

It's amazing what a person can learn at a gathering of this sort. Jim Long, an avid kayaker, just in talking about some of his recent "paddles," identified local streams and rapids I never knew existed. It's not that I plan to kayak, but that places like Kelly's Ford, Rapidan Rapids, and even our own Robinson River (rushing almost by our front door) take on a romantic appeal when you hear them described as challenges and not just as scenery. Bob Miller, one of the County Supervisors, who wherever he goes seems to attract politically minded persons, drew the usual crowd, even though he was wearing three baseball hats, one each of red, white, and blue jesterly arranged. Leland Nettles, an internet antiques dealer, swapped Ebay stories with the Mouse and a few of the others who had made their "fortune" selling nondescripts to anonymous buyers in hyperspace.

I would describe the croquet game, but for the life of me I could not decipher the rules they were playing by. The wickets were setup in the standard pattern, but for the five minutes I watched the proceedings, I saw no one even attempt to send a ball through any of them. If I were forced under torture to define the object of the game I would say it was to see how much laughter you could arouse from your competitors without resorting to pratfalls and cream pies. And I assure you, none of the contestants were imbibing anything stronger than the fare offered at the drinks table; I guess they were just naturally happy people, happiness being a plague here in the Blue Ridge.

Several of the guests had also attended the Mouse's talk in Fredericksburg two days before, and one of them insisted that I share the illustration I made during the Q & A session of how the "law of association" works. My dad had tested my "associational" ability when I was about 12 years old, and did it with this question: "Why is a firetruck red?" The answer went like this.

You notice that a firetruck has a footboard on the back where some firemen ride. "Yes, daddy." And that a foot is a ruler, that a ruler is also Queen Mary, and Queen Mary is a ship, ships sail in the sea, the seas have fish in them, fish have fins, the Finns fight the Russians, Russians are red, firetrucks are always rushin' so they're red. . . .

And, of course, because my daddy said it, that made it so.

When the fireworks started we all noticed that they didn't seem to be going as high this year as in past years. Bob Miller suggested that they were going just as high but that the trees in the foreground had grown a bit taller, creating the illusion of "weaker fireworks." That idea was put to rest by the much more "likely" theory that George Bush had shipped so much black powder to Iraq for the murder of women and children that the fireworks makers were short-changed. The Mouse, for one, did not agree with that notion. It implies that Bush had purposefully set out to commit murder. I don't think he did. He's just stupid. It didn't occur to him that munitions randomly distributed across a populated area would be bound to kill at least one or two innocents.

After the fireworks, Jim the kayaker, Mack Rowe (a cartoonist), and I stood around looking at the stars. There was a bit of a haze so the Polar Star moved in and out of view. Jim pointed out that dim objects in the night sky can be seen more clearly if you do not look directly at them, but a few degrees away from their true location. It has something to do with the way the cones of the eye are arranged, he said. I didn't understand, but Jim was right in any case. I tried it, and sure enough, if you look with your peripheral vision at dim stars, they appear more vivid to the eye.

I don't know how that fact relates to a Fourth of July party. I guess it has something to do with why firetrucks are red.

The Mouse and James Joyce on "Art" as an Art Form

[The following is an excerpt from chapter five of a book I wrote last year. I was led to blog this by an article the Fairhope Lady wrote yesterday, while I was out transforming mankind.]

Toward the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce – posing as his hero, Stephen Dedalus – asks himself a question: “If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood, make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art?” The guy he was asking – a Mick by the name of Lynch – laughed and replied, “That has the true scholastic stink.” Specialists studying Joyce’s work have identified most of the real people Joyce gives fictitious names to, but even if there were somewhere in the world a flesh-and-blood counterpart of Joyce’s “fictitious cousin” Lynch, we would still have no reason to believe the exchange between Joyce and Lynch ever took place. We can assume that Joyce – as “Lynch” – reacted to his own question.

Joyce intended us to understand it that way. Reciting more “scholastic stink,” he has Dedalus explain how depersonalized emotions grow into artistic statements. If the artist does his work well, Joyce says, the person experiencing the art will feel as if he has been caught up in the tides of “a vital sea,” and the artist will no longer seem to exist. That is, Lynch and Dedalus will be real, and Joyce himself will not.

To this magical claim, Joyce causes Lynch to reply as follows: “What do you mean by prating about beauty and the imagination in this Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country.”

When we reach the end of Joyce’s self-analysis – thirty or so pages later in small print editions – Dedalus removes all doubt about the nature and identity of the block of wood blindly made into a cow. Joyce challenges himself – as Dedalus – with these purple words: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race....Old father, old artificer, bear me now and ever in good stead.” He’s telling himself that experience is encountered... (it is something we run into, or that runs into us, something forced upon us)...and that out of the collision we forge conscience...(we get to feel how we think about things). The soul is the artist’s work place...(and his product). We learn that Dedalus, Lynch (and Lynch’s hatred of Ireland), the wooden cow, and Joyce himself are one and the same.

But is it art? The cow, I mean. Of course it is, but Joyce left the obvious question unasked: who was the artisan swinging the axe? If we are made by the things that happen to us, by no effort of our own, if we are mere blocks of wood being chopped by blind fate, well, in that case, the axe man’s identity’s clear. We are made by an “old artificer” out there somewhere who eternally does his work so well the question of his actuality seldom arises. He has invisible hands. He has no intent to do good or evil. He has no conscience.

The artificer?...by His works ye shall know Him.

Joyce was not, however, wasting his breath on that prayer to his “old father, old artificer.” He was appealing (once more) only to himself. It was after all, the mythological Daedalus that Thomas Bullfinch describes as “a most skillful artificer.” Joyce implores of his burgeoning talent, that it produce, as a reality, the desire he expressed in his wish of “6 April, later” (in Portrait of the Artist), “...to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.” He knew that the embrace of ultimate beauty needs effort, and that unseen loveliness cannot come into the world but by imagination itself.

But is it art? Anything manufactured by human hands can pass for art – and be art – if imagination makes it so. I once took a plywood board, 3’ x 3’ square, spray-painted it light yellow in many, many layers, framed it with glossy black 1” x 1” rough oak stripping (did not even bevel the joints), stretched threads diagonally from the four corners to mark the center, cut a small template, meaning to stencil a glossy black 7/8” x 5/8” diamond directly there where the threads crossed, but the paint ran haphazardly (but not too far) beneath the cut-away, appending small “legs” upon the diamond, the effect reminding me of the Lunar Excursion Module – it was that time of history – so I named the thing Apollo and sold it at first sight. It was a yellow board with a smear of paint in the center. The black frame may have caused the LEM to seem to stand out 3-D-wise in front of its yellow vacuum, to be swallowed as it were in the immensity of space, but even in that magnificent accident, it was imagination that made it art – not mine alone, but the woman buyer’s too. I never asked her what she saw there. Her check cleared at first asking.

But was it art? The check, I mean.... No, no, no! I do not mean the check! At least, it was not my intention to mean the check. But in the time-space following the bold-faced question (and its mark), an image materialized of my friend Catherine’s blue pencil, slashing a circle ‘round the question and the sentence I would have composed as an answer (which for the moment I have forgotten) and scrawling a question of her own in the margin: “What ‘it’ do you mean? The check?” So it was written, The check, I mean – humor, teaspooned into a remembrance of Joyce’s near-sighted confession, as if enough were not already there.

“Do you, Franklin.,” (she always calls me by that freehold farmer’s name) “mean to suggest that a surrogate for money can be a work of art? And if not, why not, if art is always only in the beholder’s eye? If all is art, then why the word art?”

Well, we have words aplenty made for mere convenience. If we had not “art,” how could we tell the difference between the artist’s and the carpenter’s work? How justify the great cost of Sunflowers? I watched a man on the television the other night make cleverly arranged structures of ice, driftwood, basalt, and other perishable or movable objects, situating his arrangements in tidal waters just so the tides would shortly destroy them. Someone – not the man himself – called the doomed manufactures art. A blue-nosed critic might argue that, as a minimum, art must endure. But all things perish – sunflowers, Sunflowers, great castles, cloud castles, even the earth, the universe...well, maybe the universe. So it’s not their permanence that gives art objects their difference. All things that are, won’t be (even that sentence I intended to write instead of “The check, I mean” that so far I have not remembered). Art is what people call “art.” Perhaps no one would refer to a pile of shit as art, but one imagines that a perfectly rendered water color of it might be. I knew a man who painted animal anuses – I mean he painted paintings of animal ass holes, not that he actually painted the animals’ asses themselves (but why not?). I do not recall that he ever sold one or even got one hung on a wall, but is that what makes art art? That it also is a surrogate for money?

[After that, the chapter drivelled off deeper and deeper into incomprehensible inanity, concluding with a framed protrait of George Bush, pleasantly posed over an expensive desk, smilingly, and importantly, signing the paper that launched a thousand misguided missiles upon the flesh and blood of real mothers and their babies in a faraway land . . . and finally asking, "But was it art?" and answering as Joyce most certainly would have, "George's smile, you mean? Sure it was art. See, see, the caption in the catalog says it was."]

The Mind and Body of a Mouse

[I have for the most part this week neglected my blogging duties. The reason does not trace entirely to jet lag. Tomorrow I am to perform as a Unitarian-Universalist minister, "preaching" to the congregation of the UU Fellowship in Fredericksburg, VA. I have spent the most productive hours of the past few days honing the words of my "sermon." [I also had a lot of neglected grass to mow.] The following few paragraphs appear somewhere around the middle of my talk. They follow the section where I make it "as clear as the light of day" that the truth of science constitutes a critically inseparable part of the religious man’s truth (and presumably, religious woman's too). The subject addressed here is by no means "settled science," as I indicate, and I welcome any contributions any of you may wish to make to a deeper understanding of the unity of mind and body -- or their separation, as the case may be.]

We can assume that the human brain – a physical thing – operates in accord with physical laws. We may not yet know those laws, but if Spinoza was right such laws do exist.

Now consider that the ideas we have about the physical world operate by mental laws. One such law might be the law of association. We’re able to associate similar ideas. We may for instance see a blue sky, and be led to connect the blueness of the sky to Paul Bunyon's big blue ox, Babe. We may then associate the ox to a man plowing a field with an ox-driven plow, and from that image be reminded of Edwin Markham’s poem, The Man With the Hoe, which images the man as “brother to the ox,” and from that recollection of the leftist poet’s work be led to think of the color “red.” So blue and red are related in the mind by the law of association, that is, by a series of mental causes and mental effects.

But nowhere in the physical brain – looked at and analyzed only as a physical thing – nowhere can we find anything that resembles the series of associations by which blue and red were “logically” connected. We may see and completely understand the interactions of neurons and glial cells, we may analyze, name, and describe the functions of every physical part of every one of the billions of neurons and their axons, we may map the connections of every one of the trillion or so dendrites, we may know and be able to assign functional roles to every chemical flowing in every synapse . . . but we cannot conceive that any of what we have thus come to know of the physical brain will contain anything like the experience of joy or sorrow, nothing like a picture or a feeling or a color or a sound or an aroma. We will know nothing of the world of human experience. To quote a famous linguist, “The map is not the territory.”

Earlier I spoke with a measure of disdain of a mindset we associate with Lynchburg, Virginia. I could just as scornfully speak of the level of disdain held in certain scientific circles of the Spinozistic conclusions I just expressed. Modern scientific dogma holds that all effects can be reduced to physical causes. That is, that what we refer to as consciousness is “nothing but” an effect of a physical brain. Once we take seriously the fact that a disagreement exists between physicalism and Spinozism, an esoteric debate ensues, one far too complex for me at any time, and certainly too technical for an assembly in a religious fellowship. If you’d like to follow-up on that subject, just google “hard problem” and “Chalmers” and follow the thousands of links. Finally, you’ll see that the physicalists conclude that the problem associated with the mind and consciousness is just another one of the unknowns that science will eventually make known, while the opposition, primarily David Chalmers, says the physicalists just don’t see the difference between “the hard problem” and the other problems science has dealt with. I hope my grandchildren’s grandchildren live long enough to see the end of that discussion.

In any case, Spinoza, in claiming that the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things, has said that, even though our ideas cannot be explained by reference to physical causes, there still is, for every idea, a physical counterpart. We may explain the physical operation of the brain by referring to physical laws, but to understand the order and connection of ideas, we need to refer to mental laws. Psychological causes and effects can be studied separately from their physical counterparts. Most scientists agree. It also follows that any change in the physical brain will be accompanied by a change in mental activity. Scientists would certainly agree with that. But when we finally come to grasp Spinoza’s dual aspect theory – that changes in minds and bodies occur simultaneously – it necessarily follows that any change in either the mind or the body will be accompanied by a change in the other. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. . . .