Brilliant Analysis

According to the Madera Tribune, sago palms have been disappearing from local yards.

After establishing that “A small tree can cost as much as $200,” the article goes on to quote Pam Geisel, who says, “I can’t explain why it’s happening. It’s been an on-going problem for quite some time.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that if a plant worth $200 or more can be swiped from somebody’s front yard without much difficulty, there’s a bit of an economic incentive there. Good thing Geisel is a “master gardener” and not a police detective or a sociologist or an economist.

Law School Mailers

Boy, I tell you what. (Pronounced: “Bo’ ah tell yoo hwut.”)

The folks down at the University of La Verne College of Law have an interesting recruitment-by-mail strategy. Only days after I registered with the Law School Data Assembly Service (LSDAS) I received my first postcard from the folks at ULV.

The First Postcard

On the front it says “We’re up close and personal” in all capital letters. Below that sentence is one of those slick PR photos that universities are always slapping on their literature. This one has two people on the landing of an L-shaped stairway, one of them a student ascending, the other a professor descending, as though they just happened to run into each other. Coincidentally, (1) they are both dressed quite fashionably, (2) they need to have a quick conversation on the stairs, and, most exciting of all, (3) a photographer happened to be present. Of course, it is this third coincidental factor that betrays the staged nature of the situation, in case you hadn’t already figured out that students and professors tend to have significant interaction in classrooms, offices, and sometimes over lunch tables, but almost never while standing on the stairs. If this lovely photograph were accurate, there would be a colorful blur in the middle where a third person was quickly stepping through and muttering, “Excuse me.” As it is, we have a thin and relatively attractive (I’m guessing that without her makeup, her stylish apparel, and the 45 minutes she spent doing her hair this morning, she would just be average looking) blonde student talking to a thick and relatively attractive professor who looks like a cross between William Shatner and Sydney Pollack. Also, the blonde student is performing your standard “University PR Photo Hand Articulation of a Nonexistent Point” maneuver.

(Instructions for recreating the UPRPHANP at home: (1) turn one hand so that your fingers are pointing away from you and your palm is pointing sideways; (2) separate your fingers a little, pulling your smaller fingers toward the center axis of your body and the larger ones away form it; (3) open your mouth like you’re saying something very important, like “The survival of civilization depends on me!”; (4) hold for the photographer and feel a pang of guilt as you suddenly realize that no rational person ever looks like this in the midst of real conversation, but feel happy because you will now have your vain face pasted into mounds of PR materials for the University.)

On the back of the postcard, there’s another, longer all-caps slogan:

Choose the law school that’s close to everything Southern California has to offer, with small classes and a personal approach.

Then there’s a bunch of boilerplate b.s. like “Here at La Verne, students find staff members committed to helping each student individually and professors who know them by name and take a personal interest in their goals and dreams.” Sure. Like you’ll ever find a university that writes on its PR material things like, “Here at Lame-O University, students find staff members committed to avoiding them as much as possible, helping no one—individually or otherwise, and professors who refer to them by their 9-digit Social Security Numbers or not at all and who take a personal interest in getting out of class early to sneak away and smoke.”

The Second Postcard

As if the first one wasn’t enough, a few days later, here comes another: “We’re up close and virtual.” (Do you see a pattern emerging yet?) Again, there’s another slick PR photo. This one involves two students, one male (grinning happily) and one female (blank and faux pensive), looking at a computer display (out of frame) and nestled up against each other so closely that in real life, either (1) she would feel creeped out and accuse him of sexual harassment, or (2) they would very shortly stop looking at the computer and find an empty broom closet in which to continue their research on the mating rituals of pale-faced law students. Of course, in reality, they are nestled up against each other so closely so that the photographer can get a nice tight shot that doesn’t reveal anything about their surroundings, which are probably nowhere near as cool as one might imagine. I’m guessing they’re in a crowded computer lab.

Also, again, the female is blonde and thin and relatively attractive (and, again, I suspect it’s more makeup and preparation than natural beauty) and the male is thick and, well, I don’t know if he’s relatively attractive, but he certainly has the stylish goatee, short haircut, and single earring that, when coupled with a good-boy plaid shirt, indicate someone who probably has more to offer downstairs than up, but wants you to think he’s a modern renaissance man.

The back of this one has another all-caps slogan:

Choose the law school that’s close to everything Southern California has to offer, with a campus wired with state-of-the-art technology.

Already I can imagine the template for these things: “Choose the law school that’s close to everything Southern California has to offer, with [insert whatever slick, flashy, and insubstantial fluff you think will entice people to write the name of your university on their tuition check].” Speaking of “insubstantial fluff,” here’s an excerpt from the boilerplate b.s. on the second postcard: “Here at La Verne, students enjoy our 7-acre campus with wireless Internet access, a computer lab with an array of up-to-date student workstations and classrooms with the latest in audiovisual technologies.”

The message of this postcard being: “If you are a cute blond chick or a metrosexual male and you think getting a good education means having lots of ‘up-to-date’ technology, come on down!”

The Third Postcard

Yes, a third postcard. It came today.

“We’re up close and (wait for it…) practical.”

This picture actually looks like something that might really happen in law school. In the foreground are two students (again, one male—thick, bald, goatee, and one female— thin and relatively attractive) who appear to be arguing a case in moot court, or something like that. Their backs are to the camera. One of them, the male, is standing at a lectern and was actually moving at the time the picture was taken, because his hand is a blur. The female is seated at the table next to him, consulting research notes both on paper and on a laptop computer. And get this: she’s not blonde. (However, she does have blondish highlights in her hair.) In fact, there’s not a single blonde head in the whole picture, which also includes a panel of five “judges” in the background, all of whom are focused on the male student at the lectern. Here’s the gender, ethnic, and pose breakdown for the panel:

• 3 females; 2 males
• 1 “African American” female; pensive expression
• 1 “Asian American” male; pensive expression (extra points for cocking his head to one side)
• 1 “Hispanic American” female; expression that looks like a cross between pensive and “Wow, he’s cute!” although this could be more a matter of interpretation
• 2 “white people,” one from each gender; their expressions look like “I’m bored out of my mind; can we leave yet?”

Fascinating. When I see pictures like that, I have to wonder what’s going on inside the mind of the person who chooses the folks to pose: “Let’s see…I’ll need to have a good mix of gender and ethnicity, so I’ll choose so-and-so and so-and-so…” etc. Because in my experience, finding a naturally diverse group of people who came together voluntarily is almost impossible. Rather, people tend to cluster with others who are like themselves.

At any rate, on to the back of the card:

Choose the law school that’s close to everything Southern California has to offer, with an emphasis on practical skills along with a traditional curriculum.”

Because, you know, traditionally, no one learned anything practical in school. Plus, everything “traditional” is bad now, unless you’re talking about the traditions of a minority or “subaltern” group. (You have to throw in words like “subaltern” now and then or academic folk won’t pay attention to you.) And, “Here at La Verne, students gain a solid foundation in legal principles and theory along with a practicum that teaches and strengthens professional skills so that legal theories learned in class become real tools used to solve real problems.” Because, you know, students aren’t smart enough to put their learning to use unless someone is there to hold their hand in a “practicum” setting. In olden days, also known as “yore,” when things were still done the “traditional” way, one could frequently find a lawyer at the end of his wits in court who would suddenly stand up and blurt, “I, I know the, the theory here, but, but, I just don’t know how to apply it to real problems!” At which point he tore out his hair and ran screaming from the courtroom. You don’t hear about this because it was so common that no one was shocked by it so no one remembers it. But trust me, in the olden days, this happened all the time because students did not have a “practicum” as part of their “traditional” law school curriculum.

Conclusion

Will there be a fourth postcard? One can only hope. Perhaps it will be something like, “We’re up close and prolific,” and will discuss the talents of their advertising copywriters.

The University of La Verne College of Law clearly thinks that attracting people who fall for slick, insubstantial advertisements arriving in their mailbox will help them grow a strong student body of clear, critical thinkers to be tomorrow’s lawyers. My verdict? Um, let’s not get up close and anything with La Verne.

Too Many Links

I have been tweaking and twiddling with my templates and stylesheet all day, trying to come up with something that’s aesthetically pleasing and functional. Most blogs drive me nuts with their busy, cluttered layout, and that hampers their functionality. (What is the function of a blog? To convey written communication? Ah, you are wrong, my friend. The function of a blog is to serve the vanity of its author.)

These days, The Thing To Do™ with a blog, it seems, is to have three columns: a big middle one for “content” and a smaller one on each side. Then, in one (or both) of the side columns, you’re supposed to have about three hundred links to other blogs that you enjoy, appreciate, read, recommend, link reciprocally, or whatever. This strikes me as ugly, nonfunctional, and disingenuous. (If you can regularly read as many blogs as some bloggers link, you might try looking for a job.) Simple blogs catch my eye, because the “content” isn’t nestled in between hundreds of words of distracting links that I couldn’t care less about anyway. A few links are good because they let you recognize friends, really good stuff, or the blogs you actually read every day. But more than just a handful starts to get, well, out of hand.

So I am trying for a simple, peaceful layout here. I haven’t changed much about the default Movable Type template. The colors are different. I changed the typeface in the title banner and added the slick picture of aspens in the background. I’m still contemplating whether I want to change the order of the items in the smaller column to your right, because having the archives higher than the recent entries seems a little “out of whack” to me. Beyond that, however, I’m not inclined to make many changes.

What do you think? (Doesn’t matter. This thing is here to serve the vanity of its author, remember?)

Nerd Power

During the last couple days, I finally did something I have been wanting to do for years. I set up my old computer as a web server. This tough little machine (a laptop I once dropped from chest-height onto an asphalt parking lot, with nary a hiccup in functionality) is currently sitting on a TV tray in my bedroom, serving up a Movable Type blog. (This blog, by the way, has my real name on it. Hence the lack of links between here and there.) So I have had a fine time getting back in touch with the computer geek I used to be in high school—diddling with obscure snippets of computational incantations, searching through websites for help (in the old days, I had to use big, fat books for that part), staying up until the wee hours of the morning, and so on. Ah, the joys of being a nerd. I forgot how empowering it feels.

So now I have a computer on the web. This is the way it ought to be. Not like television, where you just get the idiot box and wait for other people to fill it up with garbage. With a computer, you can broadcast your own garbage. Sweet.

Quick Thoughts

Running my own web server with my own blog, instead of having my stuff hosted on some stranger’s computer, has been surprisingly exciting. If something goes wrong, it’s my problem; there’s no waiting around for some tech support person to respond to my query. Of course, the flip side is that if something goes wrong, it’s my problem.

Another nice thing is that I’m not staring at advertisements anywhere. They aren’t on my page, they aren’t on the blog administration pages, they aren’t anywhere. This, in my opinion, is absolutely fantastic.

The next step, I suppose, will be to get myself a real domain name, maybe even a static IP address.

A Spin Around the Block

This is my first Movable Type blog, hosted on my own hardware—a five-year-old Tangerine iBook. Setting up has been frustrating, since I am not familiar with the Unix-like undercarriage of Mac OS X, but it appears to be working now. More soon.

Poor Wittle Opwah

Well how do you like that? What, you mean big, rich celebrities, who have more power and influence than any one person should have, can’t always get what they want? Fantastic! More people should step on Oprah’s toes; then she would remember she still has toes just like the rest of us.

“Quirky Situations”!?

Would anyone mind telling me why “quirky situations” merit the rating of “Parental Guidance Suggested”?

“Quick! Cover your eyes, children! This is a quirky situation!”

“No, I’m sorry kids, you won’t be seeing this movie; it has quirky situations! We’ll wait until you’re older.”

Yes, I realize the reasons given for the PG rating on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also include “action” and “mild language,” but why aren’t those sufficient on their own? Come to think of it, what is “action” doing in there?

“Oh, dear. We can’t let the children see that movie. It has action. Better to set them down in front of the wall for ninety minutes with a bucket of buttery popcorn.”

But apparently our dear friends, the twisted, puritanical goons at the MPAA, believe that “quirky situations” and “action” merit a PG rating. (Let’s see, I can’t think of any G-rated movies that have “quirky situations” or “action” in them. For example, that new Herbie movie, the one about the sentient Hitler-mobile—I mean, Volkswagon—looks like a decidedly staid and unquirky affair, like Howard’s End.)

Now “mild language,” yes, I can see that winning a PG rating. Kids will imitate anything, because they’re really just little mimeograph monkeys with mouths, so giving them bad ideas about language can be, well, a bad idea. (Not that they won’t pick these things up at school from all the first graders who watch Chucky movies at home with their dimwitted breeders—er, I mean, uh, “parents.”)

Incidentally, Batman Begins was much better than I expected (and certainly earns its PG-13 rating).

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Read Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford. Then go find what you love.

The Trouble with Private Reinterpretation

First, read this article on recent alterations to the Scout’s oath in the U.K., especially this bit:

The updated guidelines allow the word ‘God’ to be replaced by ‘Allah’, ‘my Dharma’ or others according to the individual Scout’s faith or religion. Only atheists are not allowed to join the movement.

Then see Tom Morris’ response, particularly:

I don’t see why, with a bit of interpretation, an atheist cannot agree with [the oath]. . . . As an atheist, I do not believe that there is any God. So, what duty does an atheist have to God? I won’t say contempt, but at least total apathy. I promise to do my duty (of apathy) to a (non-existent) God.

While I can’t tell if Tom’s tongue is in his cheek or not, I know several atheists who would, in all seriousness, take a similar tack here in the United States. “Let’s just interpret the theistic language according to our own perspective,” they say. “That way we don’t have to change any venerable oaths or pledges, nobody gets upset, and life goes on without any of these annoying culture wars.” But I think that conciliatory method is profoundly misguided, for two reasons.

[Update: Apparently atheists are not really excluded in the U.K. Still, what's the point of an oath if everybody says it differently? At any rate, atheists are still excluded in the U.S.A.]

First, if you’re going to start reinterpreting the meanings of texts just so you can participate in group activities where the recitation or affirmation of those texts is required, why aren’t British and American atheists sitting in Christian churches and reinterpreting all those texts? (Actually, I think there are plenty of atheists sitting in churches and reinterpreting texts to suit their differing perspective. They’re called Liberal Christians.) After all, most atheists are acutely aware of the social structure offered by churches and lacking for atheists. For many of us, especially ones like me who live in areas with a particularly high concentration of pious Christian folk, finding alternative groups for social participation can be a challenge. But, hey, if we can, in good conscience, start reinterpreting the Christian texts and make up our own parallel meanings for them, why aren’t we participating in the church?

(One might argue that the Christian texts are just a poetic locus for human participation in a social organization that uses those unchanging central texts to bring together a long historical chain of participants and perpetuate the illusion of consistency while the interpretations of those texts nevertheless change with changing human society. Why, then, could they not accommodate the atheistic person? Many people are probably uncomfortable with this because reinterpreting the Christian texts into an atheistic perspective turns those texts completely on their heads. This kind of infinite malleability breaks the integrity of the text and leaves it as limp and empty as a series of nonsensical phonemes. As well, this prospect raises the question of why people need to maintain a textual locus for connecting with a traditional social and belief system. If any perspective can be stuffed into any text, if the word “God” can be made to mean anything, then the unity offered by these texts is so thin as to be mostly illusory. That unity is already mostly illusory when one compares the entire range of Christian traditions attached to common texts. Why bother? Hence the modern response to avoid unifying texts and achieve social harmony through other means that don’t require private reinterpretation, persistent dishonesty, or a commitment to admittedly vague and infinitely malleable texts for the sake of a nominal collectivism. The closest we come to this in the United States is through our Constitution, which is only moderately malleable, unless you ask people like Anton Scalia.)

Second, why are atheists the ones who have to go reinterpreting theistic texts? Why aren’t our public, civic, and social oaths and pledges couched in stridently non-theistic language, so that religious people have to internally reinterpret them? For instance, why couldn’t the Scout’s oath go something like this:

On My Honour, I promise that I will do my best
To do my duty to Whatever Powers or Forces to which the Human Experience is Subjected and to Whoever is in Charge,
To help other people
And to keep the Scout Law

Then Christians would have to interpret “Whatever Powers or Forces to which the Human Experience is Subjected” as the Christian God. Already, though, I foresee a host of objections, from objections to a lack of poetic rhythm to accusations of “New Age” jargon, to allegations of an outright denial of Christian heritage by the removal of preferred Christian terminology, and so on. In other words, I suspect that asking Christians to privately reinterpret the text of an oath in their own favor would bring down a rain of strenuous denouncements.

Ultimately, the only fair and just course would be to remove all religious qualifications from these kinds of things. The Scout’s oath in the U.K. ought to read:

On My Honour, I promise that I will do my best
To help other people
And to keep the Scout Law

And the American one ought to read:

On my honor I will do my best to obey the Scout Law;
to help other people at all times;
to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally true.

(Yes, I also changed “morally straight” to “morally true.” But that’s a whole different issue—one I don’t feel like addressing right now.)

So I think we have three options:

(1) We could maintain theistic texts at the centers of our social and civic organizations, and insist that there is only one correct understanding of these texts, and that everyone must agree with it or leave the group. This is basically what Catholics and conservative Protestants do, and it is fine for them because Catholics and conservative Protestants are organized as essentially and fundamentally theistic groups.

(2) We could do away with all group texts, and refuse to make strict definitions of what social and civic organizations are about. This is clearly a silly extreme that no rational society will ever adopt.

(3) We could make sure all defining texts and oaths are pared down to reflect only the specifics of their group’s function (as I did with the Scout oaths above), and keep controversial but nonessential peripheral issues like metaphysical opinions out of them. Unless Scout activities are all thoroughly incomprehensible without a particular theological perspective, there is no point in requiring that theological perspective for participation in their activities. But Scouting is not primarily a religious activity. Furthermore, religion is a controversial issue, and the rest of the Scout’s oath directly contradicts the notion that religious controversy should be actively maintained. Doing your best, helping others, keeping physically strong, mentally awake, and avoiding immorality are all conducive to the maintenance of social harmony regardless of individual beliefs.

Interestingly, despite the current state of the “culture wars” in the United States, I think the third option was the one taken by the framers of our Constitution. Religion is nearly absent from that document, except to say that there should be no religious qualifications for civic participation (Article VI, Clause 3) and that no religion should be supported by the government (First Amendment). Of course, that does not bear on the ability of private organizations like the Scouts to define their own terms of participation, but, as I pointed out above, maintaining the theism in the Scout’s oath is not required by the rest of its terms, and perhaps even contradicts them.

At any rate, I for one have little patience with the practice of upholding infinitely malleable texts, be they religious or otherwise. The simple fact that Tom Morris was able to participate in the Scouts as an atheist despite their explicitly theistic oath demonstrates the needlessness of the clause and indicates that its supporters are not so much interested in maintaining a particular kind of unity as they are in maintaining the appearance of a particular kind of unity, a peculiarity which demands reflection.