Eric The Blue

Scalia: there he goes again

The recent Supreme Court decisions on the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage have made me realize how wearisome Antonin Scalia has become.  I used to sort of enjoy him, in the way you might look forward to hearing the outrageous soliloquys of a parent's cranky uncle at Thanksgiving dinner.  Maybe the problem is that the big decisions have been arriving at the rate of two or three a week, with Scalia on the short end of the vote, which he unfailingly regards as an invitation to scold, while Thanksgiving occurs just once a year.  These nuts are enjoyable only in small servings.  In the words of a recent headline in the Borowitz Report, "Many in nation tired of explaining things to idiots."

Scalia, however, never tires of explaining stuff to people he regards as idiots.  In his case, in his opinion, most of the population qualifies, including the majority of his Supreme Court colleagues. But how coherent are his lectures?  It often seems that he makes use of the unwritten rule against interrupting a sermonizer.  The Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, he intones in the manner of the Delphic oracle on Adderall, cannot possibly bar prohibitions of same-sex marriage, since when it was ratified right after the Civil War all states limited marriage to opposite-sex couples.  The list of injustices that the equal protection clause allows is in this view long.  It has nothing to say about, for example, interracial marriage or women's suffrage.  One of Scalia's favorite gambits is to inform his foes that "words have meaning," but it isn't clear what he thinks the words of the Fourteenth Amendment  mean.

It's only clear that he thinks he has a monopoly on human intelligence.  It used to be amusing to wind  the crank and watch him go.  Lately, though, listening to his old act is just the price we pay for getting the right result.

Fact checking John Hinderaker

John Hinderaker, of the Power Line blog, is in a state of high dudgeon over President Obama's remarks regarding mass murder at the church in Charleston, South Carolina, last week.  The post is called "Barack Obama Disgraces Himself Again."  You will recall that the President said that other countries don't have these sickening catastrophes with anything like the frequency with which Americans endure them.  Here is Hinderaker, from midflight to soft landing:

Murder is a terrible thing, but thankfully, the homicide rate in the United States is dropping. It was lower in 2014 than in 2013, and lower in 2013 than in 2012. Today, it is only about half what it was during the Clinton administration. In the intervening years, private handgun ownership has exploded. Many argue, and statistics support the claim, that broader gun ownership has contributed to this stunning reduction in the homicide rate.

[Snip]

“Mass violence” happens in lots of countries; more important, the homicide rate in the U.S. is about average, ranking higher than some western countries that have less demographic diversity, but much lower than Russia, most of Africa, the Caribbean, and most of Latin America. The assertion that we have a unique problem with “gun violence” is simply false.

Obama does not specify, naturally, how we should “shift how we think about gun violence collectively.” He is just trying to fire up his base, not to achieve anything constructive. But here is an idea: news reports indicate that South Carolina law prohibits carrying concealed firearms in churches. The one thing that undoubtedly could have stopped the deranged and reportedly drug-addled Dylann Roof is a couple of parishioners with guns. Somehow, though, I don’t suppose that is the “shift” that Obama had in mind.

Operating on the theory that if the facts and figures were on his side Hinderaker would set them down, I did a few simple Internet searches.  First, let's consider the claims relating to the "stunning reduction in the homicide rate."  If you google "homicide rates in the U.S. by year," the first return, from disastercenter.com, a compilation of data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, provides comprehensive U.S. crime statistics for the years 1960-2013.  For the first first four years of the current decade, the number of homicides in the U.S. were, coming forward from 2010: 14,772; 14,661; 14,866; and 14,196.  To discern an optimistic trend in these numbers, you have to be determined.

But of course Hinderaker's real argument is longer term:  "Today, [the homicide rate] is only about half of what it was during the Clinton administration."  This turns out to be rather artfully phrased, unless you want to go so far as to say that Hinderaker is lying.  What the data show is that there has been over the past generation a significant decline in the homicide rate, and that this decline is confined almost entirely to the years that Clinton was president.  Here are the details:

Clinton was elected in November of 1992.  That year, the U.S. homicide rate was 9.3 per 100,000 population.  For the years of his Presidency, the figures were as follows:

1993 (9.5)
1994 (9.0)
1995 (8.2)
1996 (7.4)
1997 (6.8)
1998 (6.3)
1999 (5.7)
2000 (5.5)

Now there's a trend.  Then George W became president and the dramatic gains ceased.  In the eight years of his Presidency, the rate went from 5.6 to 5.4.  For the last several years, it's been pretty steadily just below 5.0.

It's pretty well known that the economy was humming during the Clinton years and that W. then steered into the ground, so perhaps there is a connection between economic health and lower homicide rates?  Not according to Hinderaker.  He attributes the decline to an "explosion" in gun ownership.  What about that?  According to Gallup, he's full of it: since 1992, the percentage of Americans answering Yes to the question "Do you have a gun in your home" has gone from the high 40s to the low 40s.  If there has been an "explosion" in gun ownership, then, it's because those people who have one are now assembling arsenals.  But, since Hinderaker does not advise worshipers to bring lots of guns to church, it doesn't seem that this trend helps his case.

Finally, regarding the claim that the U.S. homicide rate is "about average": this is defensible if you include the third world.  If you compare our homicide rate to that of, say, Canada or Japan or any of the countries of the European Union to which we have the closest historical and cultural ties, you'll see that our rate is off the chart.  Try googling "Deaths by gun violence per capita by country."  Possibly the President has done that.  If Hinderaker has, he's trying to conceal what you discover.

 

 

John Nienstedt's legacy

John Nienstedt having resigned, there are a spate of "legacy" articles in the local press, all quite somber, perhaps appropriately so since there is nothing terribly funny about pedophilia and obstruction of justice.  But on the principle that it's always good to laugh, I'd like to memorialize two of the former archbishop's unintentionally funny misadventures.  After all, one candidate for his "legacy" would be that he helped to make his church and the Catholic clergy the butt of a million jokes.

"Do you trust me?" asks my octogenarian dad, when I call to ask whether he can babysit.  "Of course," I  say.  "It's not like you're a priest or something--and, anyway, we only have girls."  He laughs. Catholic Church, big  joke:  everyone's in on it.

I loved almost as much as anything the 400,000 DVDs that Nienstedt arranged to have mailed to Catholic households urging a Yes vote on Minnesota's marriage amendment a couple years ago.  Four hundred thousand!  Fewer than 3 million voted on the amendment, and the archdiocese sent out 400,000 DVDs.  It's the layers of ineptitude and miscalculation that are humorous to contemplate.  Big bucks, no bang.  Maybe the recipients should also have received, Oprah-style, a DVD player!  No, no, they might use it to watch Brokeback Mountain!

That is what composition teachers call a smooth transition into Nienstedt's work as an archdiocesan movie reviewer, which I consider to be his finest hour.  This was back  when he was archbishop of New Ulm.  Ang Lee's epic was up for a zillion Golden Globes and Oscars, but the vigilant Nienstedt took to the pages of the archdiocesan newsletter to express a contrary opinion.  His review is notable for the concision with which he summarizes the plot:

The story is about two lonely cowboys herding sheep on a mountain range.  One night after a drinking binge, one man makes a pass at the other and within seconds the latter mounts the former in an act of wanton anal sex.

If memory serves, the newsletters of the Lutherans are less colorful.  The affidavits collected by the Greene Espel law firm shed retrospective light on the evident gusto with which the reviewer sets the scene.

 

Bloomsday, 2015

The action of James Joyce's Ulysses occurs on June 16, 1904, which is marked by Joyceans as "Bloomsday" in honor of the main character, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish ad canvasser who spends the day walking around Dublin, plying his trade and attending a funeral and eventually just avoiding going home, where he knows his wife, Molly, has a late-afternoon assignation with her newest lover, Blazes Boylan.  Though according to many arbiters (such as the Modern Library's Top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century, which it sits atop) Ulysses is one of the last century's greatest artistic achievements, it could at first not find a reputable publisher.  The alleged problem was obscenity.  It's amusing to speculate on the disappointment that must have been suffered by those who, taking notice of an intriguing indictment, got hold of a copy and discovered--it's hard to say exactly what, but surely not anything that tends to arouse prurient interest. 

And relying on that definition of obscenity--that it arouses prurient interest--Judge John Woolsey ruled, in December of 1933, eleven years after its first publication in Europe (in an edition of 1000, by the bookstore owner Sylvia Beach), that Ulysses was not obscene and therefore could be published in the United States of America.  In a way, it seems an odd definition.  Supposing you set out to arouse a reader's prurient interest.  In that case, whether your work product would be deemed obscene or not would depend upon your skill: if you were any good, you'd be a pornographer, while  less able toilers in the vineyard would at least not be guilty of any crime.  The former would not be able to find a publisher.  The latter would not be able to find readers.

Judge Woolsey's opinion, which serves as a preface to my Modern Library edition of the novel, is in a couple of places simultaneously astute and humorous.  He says he read the book through without detecting obscenity.  Nevertheless, doubting his qualifications, he asked a couple "friends," men whose opinions he respected, what they thought, and:

I was interested to find that they both agreed with my opinion: that reading Ulysses in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts but that its net effect on them was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.

So, on the lookout for obscenity, these men found only a "very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women."  How disappointing!  Happy Bloomsday!

In the 'hood

The convenience store down the block and around the corner is owned by some recent immigrants who will deliver their tacos to you.  Those little two-letter prepositions that share a consonant but define very different arrangements must be the despair of adult English language-learners!  But you have to like some Middle Eastern guys who upon arriving in America start crowing about their tacos.  Here's some of the competition.  I am myself partial to the beef tongue taco at Taco Taxi, Bloomington Avenue and East Lake Street. 

The Hastert case: Hinderaker speaks

As more details about Dennis Hastert's troubles are reported, I find myself wondering about the meetings in which, according to the indictment, the former Speaker of the House agreed to pay "Individual A" $3.5 million in compensation for "prior misconduct."  Did Individual A say something, to which Hastert made reply, and then, after some back-and-forth, offers and counteroffers, Hastert said, "OK, $3.5 million cash.  Seventy payments of $50,000, one payment every six weeks." 

It seems crazy that Hastert would sign up for that.  As an ordinarily sophisticated person would know, just the logistics of delivering that much dough beneath the radar are quite challenging.  The only logic to the figure is that it represented something close to the most that Hastert could pay.  And now, having paid out well over a million dollars, the whole world knows anyway.  It's a ton of hush money for not  much hush. It seems that someone who was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives for eight years might be a more effective negotiator.

John Hinderaker's take on these things is always interesting:

Hastert is the victim in this scenario, yet he, not the blackmailer, is under indictment. The indictment stems from Hastert’s withdrawal of cash to pay the blackmailer. The indictment, in my view, represents overreaching by the U.S. Attorney and likely is politically motivated.

Some Democrats tried to make political hay out of Hastert’s indictment. This is the height of hypocrisy. If any of your Democrat friends try to make something out of Hastert’s relationship with a high school student 40 years ago, all you need to do is say: Gerry Studds.

Studds was a Congressman from Massachusetts. He admittedly did exactly what Hastert allegedly did: Studds had a homosexual relationship with a page, a 17-year-old boy, who worked for the House of Representatives. Studds described his liaison as a “consensual relationship with a young adult.” Hastert could say the same. Was the Democratic Party horrified by Studds’ conduct? Not a bit. He was censured by the House, but greeted with standing ovations when he returned to Massachusetts. Studds’ heavily Democratic constituents returned him to the House for six more terms after his affair with the page was exposed. And, of course, Studds’ misconduct occurred while he was a member of the House, not decades earlier, and was directly related to his work as a Congressman. So Republicans should take no grief with respect to Mr. Hastert.

Shorter version:  When a Democrat runs afoul of the law, it proves that they are all moral reprobates.  And when a Republican runs afoul of the law, it proves that all the U.S. attorneys are Democrats and, therefore, moral reprobates.  Poor Dennis Hastert!

Books of the Bible: II Samuel

By taking a long stride across the latter portions of I Samuel, I skipped one of the most famous--well worn and assimilated--Old Testament stories: David versus Goliath.  Read in the context of what surrounds it, this incident is just one of many in a rather shapeless glob of material concerning the rivalry between Saul, Israel's first king, and David, its second.  Much of this matter, including David and Goliath, seems as if it might have been written by, say, David's mother, for the evident intention is to make of David a species of fair-haired boy--he's always standing on a higher riser than the neurotic Saul, who ends a suicide.  If you wanted to try and summarize I Samuel chapters 13 to 31, you could perhaps do no better than to quote the celebratory song sung by some Hebrew women after a military victory (I Samuel 18:7):

"Saul has slain his thousands,
And David his ten thousands."

Since one of my themes has been the implausibility of the fundamentalist view of the Bible, I should observe that many details in the history found in I Samuel are contradicted by the history found in II Samuel.  And they aren't necessarily trivial ones. For example, I said Saul committed suicide.  That's true, according to the last chapter of I Samuel, in which the king is wounded in battle by Philistine archers.  Unwilling to allow the enemy the pleasure of finishing him off (and then perhaps having some fun with his corpse}, Saul instructs his "armor-bearer" to run him through with a sword; when the armor-bearer declines to raise his hand against the king, Saul falls on his own sword.  In the very next  chapter, the  first in the book of II Samuel, Saul dies again, and, according to this account, it was not by his own hand but by that of an Amalekite man who obeys an order similar to the one Saul gave the armor-bearer in the previous chapter. The famous story of David and Goliath is subject to the same kind of contradictory double-telling.  The familiar version is found in I Samuel 17.  But in II Samuel 21 Israel is beset by Philistine giants, including one "who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot."  (Sure he did!)  The telling of this tale includes the detail that "Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim, the Bethlehemite, slew Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver's beam."  The editor of the The Oxford Annotated Bible explains, "It may be supposed that this name [i.e., Goliath] became erroneously attached to David's victim, whose name was unknown." 

So, to be strictly accurate, "David versus the Giant erroneously referred to as Goliath"?  I am sure that the fighting fundamentalists would say that once you are talking about "what may be supposed" to be errors in the biblical text, the next step is to deny that any of these tales concerning preternaturally imposing foes who are miraculously vanquished in battle belong to history.

Although I think you'd make fewer mistakes if you did just that, it's also true that the heart of the book of II Samuel is a sustained, wrought narrative on the history of King David's reign.  Considering the royal hagiography that precedes and follows, the author's objectivity about the king's  personal failings make for something like what lawyers call a "statement against interest," the probative value of which is high.  Few have doubted that the broad outline of the narrative is historically accurate, that the narrative is the work of a single author, and that this author was a writer of considerable skill who also may have been a member of the king's court (such is his evident access to, and sure handling of, intimate details).  Some have gone so far as to call him "the father of historical writing," and his "court history," as it's called, which comprises chapters 9 through 20, is regarded as "the prose masterpiece of the Old Testament."  (I'm putting quotation marks around phrases that tend to recur in the commentaries.)

The story moves very swiftly, especially at the outset.  David happens to see a beautiful woman--Bathsheeba, the wife of Uriah, a soldier.  He arranges for her to be delivered to him, they have sex, and she conceives.  The pregnancy is a problem that David attempts to resolve, first, by calling Uriah home from the war.  But he's a good soldier and honors the code of abstaining from sex while his fellows remain at war--to such a degree that he doesn't even go into his home.  David then wines and dines him, in the expectation that a  little buzz will help him forget his scruples.  Uriah eats and drinks but, when the fun is done, he sleeps on the step outside the door of his house.  David sends him back to war carrying a written order that he be placed in the front of the fighting, and that his fellows then suddenly retreat, so that Uriah will certainly be killed.  This scheme works.  Upon receiving word of Uriah's death, David takes Bathsheeba as his wife.

If challenged to state what is so remarkable about this, I think I'd say that it's the effect made by the sensational subject matter together with the author's restraint. You'll notice that he is silent about such details as David's state of mind as his successive plans are foiled by his dutiful victim.  Is it  with exasperation or a shrug that the king gives up on Plan A and Plan B and simply orders the man to be killed?  There is no access to David's mind, only to his deeds, and one feels that if it were otherwise some of the chill would be lost. 

God has a low profile in the court history--that's another area in which the author exhibits artful restraint.  At the beginning of Genesis, God is depicted as walking to and fro in His garden, and His interrogation of the first humans commences about three seconds after Their First Big Mistake.  And that is pretty much the way it goes until we arrive at the court history, the economy of which is abetted by God's absence from the narrative.  Only that isn't quite right.  When Uriah is dead and David married to his widow, so that he would appear to be in the clear, God finally gets a mention:

But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.

This is a hinge.  The door swings open on the second part of the narrative, about rebellion and death within David's own family, including preeminently the story of his son Absalom, all of which is accomplished in the same swift, vigorous, secular-seeming fashion.  The Deuteronomist's wooden theology of rewards and punishments isn't rejected but the wooden story-telling is replaced by . . . the prose masterpiece of the Old Testament.