Eric The Blue

Letter to the editor

I sent the following letter to the editor of the Star Tribune today.  The body of the letter includes a link to the home page of the reporter who wrote the story I'm complaining about.  It purports to include a link to the story itself, but, as of 3:00 p.m. Central Time on Sunday, June 27, the link doesn't work.  He ought to be relieved.

June 27, 2010

 

To the editor:

 

While reading Jeff Strickler’s credulous paean, “Faith healing: From fringe to the masses”(June 27, page 1A), I kept expecting to get to the part where some skeptic is quoted for “balance.” That is the rule, after all, for journalistic treatment of the creationism versus evolution dispute.  But for some reason evolution by natural selection must be subjected to the scrutiny of crackpots whereas “faith healing” gets a pass.

 

All I want is some evidence that there’s anything to it.  Sure, Strickler quotes one man with a back ache who says he got better after submitting himself to “the circle of 10 healers at a recent service at Spirit United Church in southeast Minneapolis.”  A balanced piece might have here made mention of the placebo effect, but Strickler concludes instead that “[i]t’s time to update the clichéd image of faith healing.”

 

Update it to what?  The story includes a picture of a healer suspending her hand over a man’s head “in an effort to bring some good energy.”  Another healer elaborates: “It’s about dynamic energy.  Every cell in the human body is dynamic, it’s constantly moving, and energy can pass from one cell to another.” 

 

What a load of rubbish!

--Eric Jorgenson

 

Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen was born in 1828, the same year as Tolstoy, at Skien, a small town a little over 100 kilometers southwest of Oslo.  His mother had artistic interests and his father was a prosperous merchant whose fortunes reversed dramatically before Ibsen was ten.  His youth and young manhood is a tale of poverty, hardship, and loneliness.  At fifteen, he was apprenticed to a pharmacist at Grimstad.  He worked long hours and stole from his sleep to study for the entrance exams at the University of Christiania (now Oslo), which, performing poorly in Greek and mathematics, he nevertheless failed.  He had an illegitimate son with a servant girl in 1846.  There is no evidence indicating Ibsen ever met the boy, though he helped to support him for fourteen years.

By 1850, when Ibsen moved to Christiania, he was writing satirical sketches, poems, and plays.  They are of interest now only because he wrote them.  He came to the attention of Ole Bull, who hired him to work at Den Nationale Scene, a small theatre in Bergen where, like Shakespeare before him, he acquired a practical education in the theatrical arts.  He remained in Bergen till 1856, when he returned to Christiania to become the artistic director of the new Norwegian Theatre, and when after a couple years that theatre went bankrupt he caught on at the Christiania Theatre.  The many plays he completed during these years found no audience and history has not reversed the judgment of his contemporaries.  A series of four dramas, for instance, treated Norwegian history and folklore.  Probably there was rough weather and trolls but you would have to read them to know for sure.

Meanwhile Ibsen had in 1858 married Suzannah Thoresen.  Their only child, Sigurd, was born the next year.  There is at the center of most of Ibsen's great plays a problematic or sham marriage, so it is natural to speculate about his own, the more so because after he was famous he formed apparently intimate associations with a series of much younger women.  But Suzannah, the stepchild of a novelist, appears to have been through the years a reliable support and source of stability.  She died in 1914, eight years after her husband.

Ibsen left Norway in 1864 and, excepting a couple brief visits, did not return until 1891.  His attitude toward Norway appears to have resembled Joyce's toward Ireland: he couldn't stand it, found it intolerably stuffy, and took his inspiration from it.  (Joyce, by the way, revered Ibsen, taught himself Norwegian in order to be able to correspond, and, in his first published work, glowingly reviewed When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen's last dramatic work, in the Fortnightly Review of April 1, 1900.)  In nomadic exile, mostly in Italy and Germany, and almost forty years old, Ibsen soon began producing the plays on which his reputation as the world's second greatest dramatist rest.  Here is the roster: Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), then, turning in a new direction, Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).

The best critical study is probably still George Bernard Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism.  The standard, accepted summary of Ibsen's life's work is that he invented the tightly plotted drama of social realism.  True, but it sounds like something in a half-forged college essay, and does not explain, for example, Joyce's adulation.  Ibsen's great overlooked theme, in my estimation, concerns self-delusion: the power of many of the plays derives largely from the way pretensions and "life's lie"--the story people tell themselves about themselves in order to live contentedly--is stripped away so that both audience and character finally contemplate their naked selves.  The American dramatist O'Neill said something that summarizes the desolating effect of the great Ibsen plays--"a life of illusion is unpardonable, but a life without illusion is unbearable."

Ibsen developed mental illness in his final years and died, in Christiania, in 1906.

Netflix: "Crazy Heart"

Exploits some tried-and-true crowd-pleasers: the suffering artist, the recovery movement, the plucky single mom with a very cute 4-year-old, the potential couple you want together but it might not happen--a pail full of schlock with a country-western sound track.  In one particularly absurd sequence, we are asked to put out of our minds the fact that you need not be a sodden country singer at the bottom of the well to lose track of a kid at the mall.

Jeff Bridges stumbles and mumbles his way to the Academy Award.  People of a certain age might say, Whatever.  I'm just saying it's not any good.

Bloomsday, 2010

The hordes of avid followers of this blog know that on each June 16, in honor of Bloomsday, I devote a post to James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904.  That's the day Joyce went on his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.  She seems to have permitted him considerable liberties and it meant enough to him to be commemorated in what some consider the finest novel written in the English language. 

Maybe it is, but of the works of Joyce known to me the most enjoyable is "The Dead," the long story that brings his collection Dubliners to a close.  There is a party on a winter evening to honor two elderly ladies, the maiden aunts of one Gabriel Conroy.  The guests and the food and talk are described with Dickensian thoroughness, page after page, and finally the guests, including Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, head home in the dark.  We've gotten to know something about Gabriel.  He's educated, conservative, nearly middle-aged, a decent man but timid and conventional.  Gretta, whose beauty has begun to fade, was once courted by a sickly man who caught his death serenading her on an inclement night.  That is one thing we learn.  Another thing we learn is that Gabriel thinks it very important to wear galoshes in wet weather.  Alone with his wife after the party, he watches out the window as the snow falls and has a kind of muted vision of mediocrity and insignificance--within and without.  The end.

I've done the story the same justice as the teaser, "Danish prince returns home on school vacation and finds his father murdered and his mother already remarried to his uncle."  If you are at all inclined, read "The Dead."  If you like it, read all of Dubliners straight through: it's a great book, and your prize will be that at the end you'll get to read "The Dead" again.

Darwin all around you

Something interesting in the newspaper over the weekend: an interview with Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like.  Here's the last part:

Q: Our "Stone Age psychologies" haven't kept pace with the way we live.  Explain.

Bloom: A study asking kids in urban Chicago what they were the most afraid of did not yield a most popular answer of "guns." It was spiders and snakes, which have terrified people through the ages.  Another example: Jealousy, anger and tribalism are all qualities that evolved to help humans deal with life in small groups.  Now in a huge, anonymous world we still have the same feelings and that can mess us up.  Some complete stranger writes a nasty comment on his blog about me and I get really mad.  A rational person is amazed at road rage.  Our minds were not built to deal with strangers, but with people you would meet over and over again.

Q: How is the current obesity epidemic linked to this theory?

Bloom: Our desire for fatty foods is still the same as it was when they weren't plentiful.  People were wired to gobble it up wherever and whenever they found it.  It was once useful to store that fat in our bodies.  Now there's too much of it around.  But we'll only stop eating too much if natural selection rewires us, and it will only happen through who has the most children.

Q: Ah, the Darwinian approach to dieting.  What would Darwin have thought of your book?

Bloom: I think he would have written me a blurb.

I've sometimes thought that, in addition to being "wired" to consume fatty foods, we are sentenced to misery by the facts of life uncovered by Darwin.  The restless and disturbed ones had more sex with more partners, thereby filling the gene pool with their unhappy propensities.  We are not, biologically speaking, the descendants of some ancient Socrates. 

It's not just the overfed among us who argue for Darwin's dangerous idea.  It's the psychiatry patients.

Addendum

When did conservative politicians and their friends stop thinking in order to devote themselves full-time to shouting and waving their arms?  I date it to 9/11, though it is possible that's only when their gesturing started knocking things over so that it got hard to ignore. 

Really, though, does not the reaction to the despicable acts performed that day seem now rather out-sized?  The attack could have been regarded as a horrendous crime demanding investigation, prosecution, and punishment.  But, no, we were told it was an act of war--19 guys with box cutters achieving what formerly required an army.  If it's war, the civilian body count of around 3000 probably does not strike, say, the Japanese as a sufficient reason to invent a new epoch, the "post-9/11 era."

When war is declared, the shouting and sloganeering follow.  The clash of civilizations!  The Islamofascists! Anything is permitted, for we were attacked by the evil enemy.  I can't even remember which Democrat (Biden?) said of Rudy Giuliani that all his sentences include a noun, a verb, and a reference to 9/11, but he had it about right--though there was no particular reason to single out Giuliani.  The way I'd put it is, after 9/11, we were told, "Because we were attacked, we must do x"--and x could be anything.  You couldn't be a patriot if you noticed what freshman composition teachers sometimes write in the margins of student themes: "logical connection weak." 

A nation at war doesn't listen to reason.  John Kerry made the mistake of suggesting that a "war on terror" could not succeed, that we need instead constant vigilance, over a long period, exercised in defense against a dangerous but weak enemy.  What we don't need is to lash out, go crazy, invade countries, waterboard prisoners, fly them off to "black sites" in distant lands or keep them indefinitely in Cuba.  Once, it was possible to imagine that the "conservative" party might make that case.

The Republicans shout, wave arms

I think I became--horrors!--a liberal on account of what was in the news when I first started reading newspapers.  At home, there was the civil rights movement, and, in the columns given over to foreign affairs, the war in Vietnam.  I formed the idea that the liberals were right to support the former and oppose the latter.  By "right," I mean "morally right," so I regarded those on the other side as something worse than just "a guy I disagree with."  In the last 40 years they haven't done much to change my view of them.

Of course I haven't entirely approved of the people I vote for, either.  It often has had to do with their manner.  Ideals rode with high hopes in the front while reason seemed more like a back-seat driver.  Humphrey, Wellstone--both arm-waving loud talkers.  Something in the middle of my Norwegian soul was made uneasy.  But I voted for them, donated money, volunteered, did body English while watching election returns.  Couldn't stand their opponents.

And now the other side has adopted my side's discomfiting habits.  They have all the wild, effusive, gesticulating shouters.  The phrase "conservative temperament" formerly seemed to me a meaningful one with favorable associations--calm, steady, realistic, level-headed, all of that.  But who is thus described?  Rush Limbaugh?  The tea party patriots?  The fellows who love their guns?  Ann Coulter or the Power Line bloggers?  Newt Gingrich? 

Or President Obama?

Republicans sometimes refer to themselves as "the grown-ups." It didn't always seem ridiculous but those days are gone.

Martin Gardner: 1914-2010

I learned today, while listening to Car Talk on NPR, that Martin Gardner has died.  He's responsible for the update of Thompson's Calculus Made Easy that I've been working through as my wife, Amanda, has been enrolled first in Calculus I and now Calculus II at a local college.  The Wikipedia article on Gardner lists sixty other books he wrote.  I've read only Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?--one in a series debunking pseudoscience--and the essay collection called The Night is Large.  I recommend both, but there are at least 59 others, and, like me, you've probably never read Little Dorrit or Middlemarch, either.  For 25 years, Gardner wrote a column on recreational mathematics for Scientific American.  I think the Car Talk guys were subscribers because their weekly "puzzler," they acknowledged on air, is borrowed from his "Mathematical Games" column.  Gardner was 96.

Here is his introduction to his essay "The Laffer Curve," reprinted in The Night is Large:

I would have expected supply-side theory to die a slow death after Ronald Reagan's failed promise to balance the budget by cutting taxes, emasculating the federal government (but without touching social security), and increasing military spending.  Alas, it is still alive and well.  As I write (1995), many Republican leaders are promising to balance the budget by cutting taxes (especially on the rich), emasculating the federal government (but without touching social security), and increasing military spending.

My spoof on the Laffer curve ran in Scientific American (December 1981).

The 61 books show what can be done by someone who combines intelligence, curiosity, and a devotion to learning and work.  You feel you could be like him if only you were a little smarter, a little better. 

Pressure and perfection

Not a slow news day on the diamond yesterday.  Everyone knows about the blown call in Detroit that cost Tiger pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game.  Meanwhile, in Seattle, it sure looked to me as if my Twins were robbed when, in the bottom of the tenth, an umpire ruled a Seattle baserunner safe on an attempted force out at second base.  It would have been the third out of the inning.  Instead, the winning run scored from second as the Twins' shortstop, J.J. Hardy, stretched toward the outfield to receive the flip from Matt Tolbert and was left in no position to throw home as the umpire made the safe sign. 

The call in Detroit had no effect on which team won the game, but it's getting much more attention.  There has been a lot of talk about people not being perfect, pitchers and umpires both included, and the good behavior exhibited by the principals has been praised by everyone. Jim Joyce, the umpire, owned up to the mistake, and Galarraga graciously accepted his plainly heartfelt apology.  Check, check, check.  But did you see the play?  It wasn't very close, and the question therefore arises: How is it that Joyce, by all accounts a good umpire, got it  wrong?  He wouldn't have a reputation for competence if he blew many calls on plays no closer than that one. 

There have been enough perfect games, spread more or less evenly over baseball's long history, so that most of them are no longer very well remembered.  I know that Catfish Hunter pitched one, because it was against my Twins, but I bet that you didn't know that, even if you are a fan.  It seems to be a half-freakish event, the result of a god's passing smile as much as a pitching achievement.  Dallas Braden is not by a long shot the only pitcher with a perfect game who is not a candidate for the Hall of Fame.  The most famous perfect game in baseball history is in this respect representative.  It belongs to Don Larsen, of the Yankees, an otherwise unknown toiler who was perfect in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series.  The final out was recorded when home plate umpire Babe Pinelli rang up Brooklyn pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell on a pitch that most eyewitnesses agree was both high and outside.

Is it possible that Pinelli, caught up in the moment, expanded the strike zone?  I'm not casting aspersions.  It's just a fact that a perfect game, though it belongs to a pitcher once completed, puts a lot of pressure on other participants, especially in the late innings, the fielders of course but perhaps no one more than the man calling balls and strikes.  And stress can affect perception and judgment.  Pinelli's ordeal ended with a dubious "strike three" that hardly anyone remembers.  I think it's possible that Joyce, setting his mind against the tendency to bring the thing to a successful conclusion, made the opposite mistake.  He wanted the guy to be out, the game over, the perfect game achieved, and so couldn't see that what he wished for happened.  The guy was out.

Commencement address

Rebecca Mead, writing in The New Yorker, asks aloud during this graduation season whether a college education is worth the expense.  According to the economists, it isn't, unless you major in something like accounting or business.  For those in the truth-and-beauty fields, forget it: take the job today you would otherwise take in four years, only with tuition debt the size of a mortgage.

The unexamined assumption is that it's better to have money than an education.  Mead demurs, gently.  My own view is that the economic utilitarians have carried the day so that what now usually passes as a college education really isn't worth the expense.  Accounting!  My distinct impression is that the top colleges are just white-collar trade schools.  All education now is vocational.  What are you going to school for?  It's assumed that the answer is to prepare for a profession or a particular line of work.  Great.  Go to college, get a job, spend the rest of your life buying the stuff advertised on TV during golf tournaments.  You'd be a sucker to go to college to catch the beat of a different drum, because, nowadays, there's only one drum beating.

Mead's colleague George Packer has more.