I recently saw the movie “The Help,” which chronicled the insults and indignities suffered by black people in the early 1960s.

Its basic theme, of black people humiliated and oppressed by whites who were either racist or oblivious, rang true. It was consistent with my experience in life, though it took me many years to understand that experience.

As a child, I knew almost nothing about racism. It never occurred to me that racial differences were significant.

I don’t say that to establish how virtuous and enlightened I was, because I wasn’t. Virtue requires conscious choice. And children, no matter how clever, are almost never enlightened. I didn’t choose not to be a racist. I simply wasn’t one.

Even as a child, I was a nerd. I lived in a world of books and ideas, not of people. I still do. I might not remember your face (or your race), but I’ll remember numbers and facts about you. We nerds don’t dislike people, but people don’t register with us as vividly as do ideas, facts, and principles. As a character on the delightful and quickly-cancelled TV sitcom “Wonderfalls” said of himself, “It’s a borderline autistic thing.”

By the way, that’s not just a funny line from a TV show. Some neuroscience researchers think that autism is an extreme form of male cognitive organization. But I digress.

In my primary school class, Greg was the only African-American kid. There were no Hispanics or Asians, so except for Greg, we were all white. As far as I could tell, no one treated Greg any differently from the rest of us. I never noticed anyone make hostile remarks about him or pick fights with him. Of course, as a nerd, I wasn’t attuned to that kind of thing. However, I would have noticed it if it had been intense or repeated.

Much of the time when I was a child, one or the other of two black ladies took care of me.

Margie, my parents’ housekeeper, was from Alabama. She’d previously worked in an ice cream shop, which to a seven-year-old boy seemed like a glamorous and exciting job. She taught me how to scoop ice cream “the professional way” and how to make chocolate sodas. She praised the childish comic strips that I drew and she encouraged my artwork. She nagged me to practice for my piano lessons.

Bea, my grandparents’ housekeeper, was a plump, good-natured lady a little over four feet tall. Whenever my father saw her, he jokingly asked Bea if she was standing up or sitting down. She was devoted to my grandparents and to me. She taught me a lot, including personal hygiene.

And yet, there was something odd about Bea’s relationship to my grandparents. I didn’t understand it at the time. My maternal grandfather loved Bea but hated black people. That wasn’t what he called them, but you can guess the word he used.

After a while, I realized the inconsistency of my grandfather’s attitude: he hated black people in general, but every black person who he  knew personally was “different.” The ones he knew were all right. It was only the ones he didn’t know who were — well, whatever he thought they were. He never elaborated on the subject, at least not to me.

In high school, one of my best friends was John, an African-American who again was one of a very small number of black students at the school. Everyone, including John, made jokes about race, but as far as I could tell it was all good-natured. Just as with Greg in primary school, I was never aware of anyone being unfriendly to John or saying hateful things on account of his race. He was a very likeable guy, and as far as I could tell, everyone liked him.

In college, one of my friends was Charlie, a pre-med student. That was when I first became aware of race as an issue, though I was still fairly obtuse and insensitive about it. Charlie was one of a fairly small number of black students at our college.

My perception might have been unfair, but it seemed to me that most of our black students confirmed the worst racist stereotypes. I thought that they weren’t serious about their studies, and that they complained constantly about real and imagined insults. Looking back, I’d guess that my perception was biased by those very same racist stereotypes, but that’s what I thought I saw.

Charlie was different. (That sounds just like something my grandfather would have said.) Unlike the other black students, he wasn’t on scholarship. Whenever you saw Charlie, he was doing one of three things: studying, participating in class, or working at one of the part-time jobs he held to pay his way through college. The other black students thought he was “acting white” and viewed him with disdain. He graduated with straight ‘A’s. I’m sure that he’s now an eminent doctor somewhere.

How much hurt and anger lurked beneath the smiles and easy-going demeanor of all those black people? Were they really as happy as they seemed?

I hope so. But I suspect it was partly because they knew what happened to black people who expressed dissatisfaction or stepped out of line.

What have I learned from all that? I suppose it amounts to this:

• A just society doesn’t treat any group of people as second-class citizens.
• Even if people smile when they’re mistreated, it doesn’t mean they’re happy about it or that they think it’s okay.
• An injustice done to any person is an injustice done to all of us, and we should treat it as such.

As well as what I always knew:

• All people have infinite worth and importance. To the extent that we can, we should treat them that way.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

By N.S. Palmer

In today’s New York Times, its column “The Stone” asks what The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy called “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything:”

What is the meaning of life?

The British comedy troupe Monty Python devoted an entire movie to that topic. At the end of the movie, John Cleese summarized the meaning of life as follows:

• Be nice to people.
• Don’t eat too much fat.
• Try to get some walking in.
• Read a good book every now and then.
• Live in peace and harmony with people of all races, creeds, and nationalities.

That’s a good answer, considering that the question itself is badly stated. As the supercomputer Deep Thought observed in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you can’t understand the answer unless you understand the question.

So you can’t answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” unless you can answer “What is the meaning of the question?”

The New York Times column has some good ideas in it, but largely misses the point. It approvingly quotes Jean-Paul Sartre‘s remark that without God, life has no meaning. But then it disputes the idea that life has meaning with God, either.

The Meaning of Meaning

In logic and linguistics, meaning typically refers to intentionality, the property by which an object refers to something other than itself.

If I say “there is an elephant in the living room,” my statement is not self-contained. It refers to something beyond itself, that is, to the presence of an elephant in the living room.

In fact, intentionality is one of the defining characteristics of consciousness, and therefore of us. To be conscious is to be conscious of something.

That isn’t too far removed from people’s vague sense of what it means for their lives to have meaning. We want our lives to be about more than just themselves. We want them to be in relation to something else.

Most people want to live for something beyond themselves: for God, for their spouse, for their children, for their political ideals, for music, and so forth. They want their lives to be in accordance with their objects (God’s wishes), pleasing to those objects (God’s approval), or beneficial to those objects (the welfare of their children, the success of their political ideals, and so forth).

In that sense, God does give meaning to people’s lives, both:

• In an absolute, metaphysical sense (whether people believe in God or not), and
• In a psychological, moral sense (if people choose to devote their lives to following God’s directions as they understand them).

But you can’t make sense of the answer unless you can make sense of the question. That’s how I make sense of it.

Your answer might differ: but if it makes sense to you, that’s what counts.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

“Hypocrisy is the tax that vice pays to virtue.”

That quote has been attributed to various people: to the Irish satirist Oscar Wilde, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse, and the French social reformer Francois La Rochefoucauld, among others. Perhaps they all said it.

But it spotlights a truth: However much we dislike hypocrisy, it serves an important social function.

President Obama, like President Bush before him, now claims the right to order anyone killed, anywhere in the world, without a trial or conviction for any crime.

Here’s a non-surprise: The U.S. government has been doing that for a long time.

Someone gets in the way, whether of the U.S. government, the oil companies, or the multi-national corporations, and he gets killed. Saddam Hussein, who was the first President Bush’s favorite Middle Eastern dictator until he got too independent. Ngo Dinh Diem. Patrice Lumumba. News reporter Danny Casolaro. Now, it’s Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi‘s turn. He has a target on his back because he annoyed the oil companies.

But in the past, there was a difference. Even if the president knew what was going on, he avoided any personal involvement. He had “deniability.” The president pretended that he knew nothing about it. And the rest of us went along with the charade.

Yes, it was hypocritical. But that’s the point. The hypocrisy was a good thing. When a hypocrite sins covertly, he breaks moral and statutory law but he acknowledges their validity.

President Obama and President G.W. Bush are not hypocrites, at least not on the issue of government-sponsored murder. They embrace their evil acts. They even boast about them. By so doing, they deny the validity of the moral and statutory laws that forbid such evil acts.

Not only do they do evil, but they compound their sin by weakening the moral foundations of civilization. They avow that we are nothing more than lawless, bloodthirsty barbarians. And they have the power to prove it with their actions.

So let’s hear it for hypocrisy. If people are going to sin, they should at least have the decency to lie about it.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

By N.S. Palmer

I’ve been reading Christopher Moore’s excellent book Lamb. It offers a light-hearted but surprisingly respectful “alternative Gospel” about the early life of Jesus.

The story is told by Biff, Jesus’ boyhood best friend. On the orders of the Most High, the archangel Raziel resurrects Biff in the present day (2010) to write the new Gospel. The two of them live in a hotel room in New York while Biff writes about his experiences with Jesus. The Gospel narrative is interspersed with scenes in the present day, as when (a) Biff finds a Bible in the hotel room and tries to read parts of it without letting Raziel find out, and (b) Raziel becomes obsessed with TV soap operas but doesn’t realize they are fictional.

The idea of telling about Jesus’ boyhood is not a new one. One of the Gospels that did not make it into the Christian canon was the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which recounts stories about the childhood years of Jesus. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas has Jesus striking his playmates dead on at least one occasion, but Biff’s Gospel in Lamb paints a kinder, gentler picture of Jesus that is more in keeping with our traditional view of him.

Apart from recommending the book to anyone except those who would find any non-canonical Gospel offensive, I’d like to make two points of interest.

First, you might have noticed that I wrote “Jesus’ boyhood.” According to the authoritative writing manual The Elements of Style by Willard Strunk & E.B. White — a book that writers regard as a “Gospel” of correct English — the normal rule is to form singular possessives by adding apostrophe-s. That applies even to words ending in the letter ‘s’.

Thus, for example, you’d normally write “James’s brother” instead of “James’ brother,” the latter of which is incorrect. But there’s one exception, and only one: when you form the possessive of “Jesus,” referring to the Biblical Jesus, you only add an apostrophe. No ‘s’.

All right, it’s not earth-shaking, but it is interesting. It’s a linguistic remnant of the culture in which we used to live, which in the last 70 years has been bulldozed and plowed under by Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart and Britney Spears and Halliburton. Even in punctuation, the name of Jesus got special treatment.

Second, in the book Lamb, the angel Raziel refers to another angel as “a Seraphim.” Unless you know Hebrew or have studied theology, you might not recognize that as incorrect. But the “-im” is a masculine plural ending in Hebrew. You can have one Seraph or multiple Seraphim, but you can’t have “a Seraphim.”

Besides singular and plural, Hebrew also has a “dual” ending that refers only to pairs of things, such as hands or eyes. I don’t recall if there’s a dual ending that applies to two angels, but there might be.

Angels are an interesting topic in themselves. If you believe in them, then their interest is theological; if you think they’re mythical, then their interest is cultural and psychological. The Thomist philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who was editor of The Encyclopedia Britannica for many years, wrote a good book about The Angels and Us.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Earlier this evening, I was reading Men of Mathematics by E.T. Bell.

It’s one of my favorite popular books about the history of mathematics. It discusses both the lives of great mathematicians* and their major discoveries. Some of the discoveries are pretty abstract, but the book does a good job of explaining them in simple terms. And Bell isn’t shy about saying when he thinks that someone acted like an ass or an idiot. With a little effort, almost anyone can understand and enjoy the book.

However, in his chapter about Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), Bell wrote:

Instead of the easy Latin which sufficed for Euler and Gauss, and which any student can master in a few weeks, scientific workers must now acquire a reading knowledge of two or three languages in addition to their own.

As a boy, I had two years of Latin study. I enjoyed them immensely, both because Latin is fun and because I had a wonderful teacher. The teacher was Mr. Shaugnessy. He tricked us into thinking that we were goofing around when we were actually learning Latin. Sneaky devil. Because it was a boys’ school, he could (and did) spice up exams with dirty jokes in Latin that we were supposed to translate. Sadly, he was also a chain smoker. Lung cancer. All his students remember him and benefited from having him as a teacher.

I never really understood English until I took Latin. It showed me how all European languages work, since all European languages are either derived from or influenced by Latin. It even gave me a conceptual framework to understand non-European languages such as Russian, Hebrew, and Hindi.

Hindi, by the way, is one of the official languages of India and has surprising similarities to English. Both English and Hindi are Indo-European languages derived from the same ancient language group. In spite of the geographic distance between New York and Mumbai, their official languages are related.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of Latin. But Latin that “any student can master in a few weeks?” That strikes me as one of the most optimistic characterizations of Latin that I’ve ever heard.

Yes, Latin is logical. Yes, almost any student can learn the noun declensions, verb conjugations, and a working vocabulary in a few weeks. But that’s just to read a little Latin, not to write in it. And it’s hardly “mastering” Latin. Euler, Gauss, Newton, and their contemporaries wrote in Latin, which is much more difficult than simply reading it.

Either Bell has a very liberal concept of what constitutes mastery, or he’s referring to a subset of Latin that people of Gauss’s time used for their scientific writing. I suspect that it’s the latter.

I also suspect that Bell was a trifle optimistic about how many languages the average scientific worker can read. Most U.S. doctoral programs require their students to pass a reading proficiency exam in one foreign language relevant to their field. A few years later, very few American graduates can still read the foreign language in which they took the exam, let alone any other foreign language. The percentages are higher in Europe, of course, where many people at all educational levels are multi-lingual. And around the world, English has replaced Latin and French as the lingua franca of science and commerce: lots of people know English as their second language.

Nevertheless, Latin remains a wonderful foundation for understanding all other languages. It’s also a gateway to reading a lot of classical literature. One of the best texts, for study on your own or in a class, is Wheelock’s Latin, now in its sixth edition. Other resources for learning about Latin are:

• Why Study Latin? An About.com page with links about the benefits of Latin study.
• Getting Started on Classical Latin: The Open University’s online course in basic Latin, with 10 hours of instruction.

Have fun, and don’t expect to master Latin in a few weeks. You can get a good working knowledge of Latin in that short a time, however.

_________________________
* Women mathematicians, too, in spite of the book’s title. I received an indignant email about the sexist title from my niece, who graduates from college next month and is quite good at mathematics.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

I’ll miss newspapers when they disappear. There will still be a few of them online, but it just won’t be the same.

This morning, I’m sitting at McDonalds and perusing The New York Times while I quaff my coffee.

I should put this in context, both politically and metaphysically.

Politically, I’ve concluded that the U.S. government and political system are irredeemably corrupt. A sufficient number of politicians and government officials are “on the take” from giant corporations and the super-rich that almost nothing positive can be accomplished.

Wall Streeters, banksters, and giant corporations will continue to loot the United States until there’s nothing left to loot. Then they will pick the carcass clean, leaving honest Americans to fend for themselves in a wrecked country. There’s nothing non-violent that we can do about it, and since violence is a very unpredictable instrument of social change, I don’t advocate it. All I can do is get a big tub of popcorn, watch the show, and laugh.

There’s a reason why mature people don’t start revolutions, which are almost always started by the young. When you reach a certain age, you’ve learned not to act without thinking about the results of your actions. You tend to act only if you are reasonably sure that your actions will improve the situation.

Violent action lacks that kind of predictability. Revolutions are launched by young people who are so outraged by injustice that they don’t care about the result. That might happen in the U.S., though corporate control of the army, the secret police, and almost all of the communications and news media would make it difficult. My guess is that our decline will continue until the corporations and super-rich start fighting each other for control of the country, with each side enlisting working-class cannon fodder to “fight for their freedom.” Then the country will break apart, with unforeseeable results.

In any event, that’s my political assessment: We’re done. Stick a fork in us. And the reason for the political situation — indeed, the reason why justice and freedom are such rare commodities in human history — lies in our metaphysical situation.

Metaphysically, in this world at least, the evil have a systematic advantage over the good. And the very evil, such as the Bushes and Hitlers and Stalins, have an advantage over the moderately evil. The pickpocket beats the liar. The robber beats the pickpocket. The murderer beats the robber. The psychopathic mass murderer beats the ordinary “amateur” murderer.

Consider what it means to be a good person. Among other things, it means that:

• You will not do certain things even if they are in your material self-interest.
• You will do certain things even if they are against your material self-interest.

The evil, on the other hand, have fewer such limitations. And the more evil they are, the fewer limitations they have.

Imagine a tennis match between two players of equal ability. One of them not only obeys the rules of tennis, but in the middle of volleys, he runs over to the side of the court to help children and little old ladies. The other player pays no attention to the rules and cheats constantly. He “wastes” no time on anything except winning the game.

Which player wins, the good one or the evil one? The answer is obvious. Unless the good player gets very lucky — which does happen on occasion — the evil player wins.

The same applies to life on earth. Good people have a long list of things they won’t do. Evil people say, “Sod all that, I’m going to win.” And they do.

All that provides a context in which the morning newspaper becomes an exercise in dark humour.

On the front page, we learn that the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi has been using cluster bombs against the rebels who want to overthrow him. The lead paragraph observes that such bombs “have been banned in much of the world.” Only later does the article mention that the U.S. uses cluster bombs. It never mentions that the U.S. and Israel both use cluster bombs against civilians, or that those two countries have not agreed to the treaty banning cluster bombs.

The New York Times is a real newspaper and often does a good job, but when it’s under pressure (or under orders) to publish war propaganda, it does so. The first paragraph demonizes Qaddafi, who is undeniably as bad as Bush or Cheney, but “buries” the inconvenient facts further down in the article. What distinguishes the Times is that to retain a little credibility, it did at least mention some of the inconvenient facts. Dedicated propaganda outlets such as Fox News and The Weekly Standard probably wouldn’t have bothered.

Elsewhere on the front page, we learn that Republican governors and state legislatures want to gut environmental protection laws so that corporations can pollute ad libitum and impose the costs on others.

On the editorial page, we learn that House Republicans want to throw open the Gulf of Mexico once again to the tender mercies of the oil companies, given that they did such a good job almost destroying it last year.

On the op-ed page, Columnist Gail Collins catches Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney falsifying the history of the 1990s, much the same as almost all Republicans routinely falsify the history of tax cuts for their wealthy sponsors.* Romney would probably take refuge in Republican Sen. John Kyl’s excuse that his lie about Planned Parenthood spending 90 percent of its funds on abortion “was not intended to be a factual statement.”

In fairness to Mitt, Collins found the lie (births to teenaged mothers peaked during the Clinton years) in a book of which Romney was the listed author. As a former Capitol Hill ghost writer, I can tell you that Romney almost certainly didn’t write the book.

Elsewhere on the op-ed page, columnist Charles Blow reiterates what’s widely known to everyone but Fox News viewers and Tea Partiers: corporations and the super-rich get a steadily increasing share of the national income but pay steadily decreasing tax rates. The top income tax rate was 91 percent under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would now be considered a radical socialist. Since then, it’s been repeatedly reduced to reach its current level of 35 percent. House Republicans want to cut it even more to 25 percent.

U.S. economic growth was higher when the top tax rate was higher, but that’s one of those inconvenient facts that politicians can forget in the interest of getting money from Wall Street. Republicans are determined to give more tax breaks to “job creators:” but they fail to mention that the jobs are created in China and Indonesia, not in America.

I made my mind up, back in Chelsea,
When I go, I’m goin’ like Elsie.
Start by admitting, from cradle to tomb
Isn’t that long a day.
Life is a cabaret, old chum,
Only a cabaret, old chum.
And I love a cabaret.

– Cabaret

_________________________
* I don’t mean to beat up exclusively on Republicans. It seems to me that Wall Street pays Republicans to commit the crimes, and pays Democrats to stand around whining that they can’t do anything about it.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are include

Two basic forces shape the universe: Law and Love, or if you prefer, Rules and Results.

Those forces also generate the two basic viewpoints about human and Constitutional rights. Both are currently on display in a dispute over gun control laws.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of the “Bill of Rights,” states:

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Opponents of gun control laws latch onto the part that says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Supporters of gun control laws argue that “the people” refers to Americans collectively rather than as individuals, so the right to keep and bear arms applies only to people in government-organized military organizations.

Frankly, I think that opponents of gun control laws have the better Constitutional argument. The text says what it says. And via the Fourteenth Amendment and later court decisions, the Constitution applies to states as well as to the federal government. Therefore, one can make a good case for an individual right to own guns.

But that’s not the only question involved. The larger question is whether rights are an end in themselves, or are justified because they produce good results.

Consider Timothy Egan’s recent column about the January 2011 shootings in Tucson. After avowing that he grew up around gun owners and supports private gun ownership, he starts talking about results. He cites statistics showing that more gun ownership leads to more gun deaths, more often of the innocent than the guilty.

Conservatives and libertarians argue that gun ownership makes everyone safer, but they really see that point as irrelevant. Their main response to Egan’s argument is to say that results don’t matter. Only rules matter. And according to what they say are the rules of the U.S. Constitution and “Natural Law,” the government has no business restricting or discouraging gun ownership of any kind. You can probably even find a conservative or two who thinks it’s in the Ten Commandments.

As usual, the dispute between rules and results leads to further questions:

• If rights are an end in themselves, how do we know that? How do we know what rights we have? And if respecting rights in a particular case would lead to terrible consequences, should we still respect them in that case?

• If rights are justified because they produce good results, then results for whom? “The greatest good for the greatest number?” Or just for the Wall Street sharks and corporate billionaires who bankroll libertarian think tanks and publications? How much good does a right have to produce, and with what degree of reliability, in order to qualify as a right?

Because the choice between emphasizing rules and results is so fundamental, there’s no way to prove that one choice is right and the other is wrong. Different people make the choice based on their personal history, psychology, and the dominant viewpoint of their society. And the choice itself is a false dilemma: you need both law and love, rules and results. Having only one of them would be like trying to do mathematics with only odd numbers.

It’s peculiar that many evangelical Christians, as conservatives, think that rules are more important than results, because Jesus taught that rules should be guided by love.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

A Muslim family in America. Source: The New York Times.

Today’s New York Times has a front-page article titled “U.S. Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?“

The family described in the article seems perfectly nice, so I’d like to answer that question with an unqualified “yes.”

But sadly, the truthful answer is, “yes and no.”

To the extent that Muslims adopt Western culture, customs, values, and behaviors, yes, they do indeed belong. A society is a group of people who share those things.

And there’s the rub. Whatever its merits or demerits as a religion, Islam is not a significant part of Western history and culture except as an antagonist. Muslims stand outside the Western tradition.

It’s important to understand what that means and what it does not mean.

It does not mean that Muslims are bad people or that they are necessarily our enemies. It does not mean that they can’t contribute to our society and be accepted in most contexts. It doesn’t even mean that Islam itself has nothing to offer us in religious insights or examples of faith and courage.

What it does mean is that by their answer to one of the most important questions of life, “What’s it all about,” Muslims stand apart. They do not belong. And depending on how they interpret their faith, it means that they disagree with some of Western civilization’s fundamental conclusions about justice, individual rights, freedom of religion, the role of government, and the relationship between humanity and God.

It also means that most Western people will regard them with just a little bit of doubt. The more values and beliefs that people share, the more they feel confident that they understand each other and can trust each other. Don’t blame me for it: that’s just the fact. There are both valid and invalid reasons for it.

And it has nothing specific to do with Islam. It applies to all differences between people. The more extensive and important the differences, the greater is the potential for distrust, misunderstanding, and hostility.

Difference is not a license to treat anyone with less than the respect and love that all people deserve. But it’s foolish to pretend that the difference doesn’t exist.

I’m reading the Sunday New York Times and drinking coffee at McDonalds while I procrastinate about doing the real work of the day.

The Sunday print edition of The Times is about half the size that it used to be. The pages are smaller, there are fewer of them, and whole sections have been eliminated. Partly, it’s because of the recession. Mostly, it’s because there are fewer readers and thus lower advertising revenue. But it’s still a substantial newspaper, one of the few remaining examples of the species.

It’s also, as Churchill said of Russia, a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

During the Bush-Cheney nightmare, The Times slavishly suppressed any stories that the administration wanted to keep secret, such as torture, illegal wiretapping, and anomalies in the official story of the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, it enthusiastically front-paged administration propaganda that it knew, or should have known, was false, such as the myth of Iraqi WMDs and various provocateur-fabricated “terror plots.”

Now, however, The Times is printing secrets all over the place. Partly, it might be because Executive Editor Bill Keller is ashamed of his actions during the Bush-Cheney years. Partly, it’s probably because he isn’t as afraid of the Obama administration as he was of Bush and Cheney.

Machiavelli, Nixon, and Obama

The Bush-Cheney regime asked a simple question to get people’s cooperation: “If you cross us, would you prefer to have your back broken or your neck broken?”

The Obama administration, however, wants to sit down and reason with you. If progressives say that white is white and Wall Street Republicans say that white is black, Obama’s instinct is to split the difference and say that white is gray. But as soon as he makes that concession, Wall Street Republicans insist that gray is black, and the negotiations begin again. Inch by inch, compromise by compromise, working Americans get scr*wed.

It’s not for nothing that Machiavelli said it’s better for a prince to be feared than to be loved.

We can see the difference not only in news media but in Congress, where obstructionist Republicans and spineless Democrats blocked or weakened legislation vitally needed by working and unemployed Americans. They’re not afraid of crossing the Obama administration as they were of Bush-Cheney. They’re more afraid of Wall Street, Fox News, and Glenn Beck.

Another brilliant political thinker, less admired than Machiavelli, was — believe it or not — disgraced U.S. President Richard Nixon. As president, he tried to make people think he was slightly crazy, so that they believed his actions were not rationally predictable: “If you set him off, Heaven knows what he’d do: he might start a nuclear war!” Nixon called it his “madman theory.” Of course, it was a variation on Machiavelli, whose work Nixon had read.

Obama suffers from the opposite fault. He seems very calm and rational, so his actions and reactions are quite predictable. It enables his adversaries to play him like a violin.

Reporters Sneak Facts Past Censorship

The Times still carries water for the government, if less consistently than it did during the Bush-Cheney era. Having worked as a newspaper reporter in Washington DC, I can see that Times reporters often try to “sneak” forbidden facts past management censorship.

One news story about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers after the 9/11 attacks noted, far down toward the end of the article, that (a) in addition to the two towers, WTC Building 7 collapsed but hadn’t been hit by anything; and (b) no comparable buildings before or since 9/11 have ever collapsed due to fire or airplane impacts. The reporter knew.

Another news story about the recent Wikileaks release of Afghan war documents dutifully parroted the government’s line that Wikileaks had not sought the Pentagon’s help in redacting potentially harmful information. But further down in the article, near the bottom, it recounted how Wikileaks  contacted the Pentagon and sought its help to do exactly what the same article earlier said Wikileaks had not done. The reporter knew.

It’s how things work sometimes. When I was a reporter, I once wrote an important article about government security measures that was accurate and had no classified information. The newspaper’s editor re-wrote the first two paragraphs to say exactly the opposite of what the rest of the article documented. The theory was that most people wouldn’t read the entire article, which still had my byline. Anyone who read the whole article must have thought I was nuts.

Bringing Democracy to Iraq

On the other side, there’s still plenty of propaganda in The Times.  A “Week in Review” article about “Winning, Losing, and War” states:

As the last officially designated American combat forces left Iraq, television cameras caught the exultation of a soldier finally heading home.

“We won!” he yelled. “It’s over! America, we brought democracy to Iraq!”

When I first read that, I thought of the incident years earlier when news media reported that Iraqis had spontaneously pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Of course, the whole thing was staged by the Bush-Cheney administration for propaganda purposes, and many of the people pulling down the statue weren’t even Iraqis, having been flown in as actors for the “unreality TV” show.

Did a soldier really yell that nonsense about bringing democracy to Iraq? Possibly. Was the soldier instructed to say it, and was the incident staged for propaganda purposes? Almost certainly, and the reporter had to know it.

Fearless Leader Bush

But of course, we all remember how Fearless Leader Bush called Americans to arms in 2001-2002, saying that “it’s time we brought democracy to Iraq.”

Oops. He didn’t say that. He said that dat debbil Saddam Hussein, whose only difference from Bush and Cheney was that they dress better, had nookular bombs and anthrax-spraying aerial drones that he was going to unleash on American cities. Darth Cheney went on TV to say that “we know where the weapons labs are.”

General Colin “Uncle Tom” Powell went before the United Nations with a faked slide show purporting to prove that Iraq was bristling with illegal WMDs. Administration officials and surrogates also peddled the false story that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, thereby to provide a fig leaf of legality to an otherwise naked act of aggression.

The Bush-Cheney regime didn’t invade Iraq to make it into a democracy. Bush and Cheney lied and frightened Americans into supporting the war:

• Because they wanted to conquer and loot the country.
• Because Dubya wanted the glory of being a “war prezadent.”
• Because they wanted to enrich their friends and military contractors.
• Because they wanted to regain control of Iraqi oil resources for themselves and their friends in the oil industry.
• Because they wanted to satisfy their perverse lust for murder and destruction.
• Because they wanted to increase the threat of terrorist attacks, real and imaginary, so that they could destroy the tattered remains of Constitutional protections for ordinary Americans.

Saddam Hussein is dead. Bush and Cheney are still walking around free, and they will be supported in luxury by taxpayers for the rest of their evil lives. You couldn’t write this stuff as fiction. Nobody would believe it.

Brand Blanshard (1892 - 1987)

Today, August 27th, is Brand Blanshard‘s birthday. If he were still with us, he would be 118 years old.

In college and graduate school, he was my mentor and inspiration.

Though little known outside of academic circles, he was one of the giants of 20th-century philosophy. His ideas, writing, and teaching set an example of clarity, insight, and scrupulous dedication to the truth that few other philosophers of that or any century can equal.

Born in 1892, he entered the University of Michigan in 1910 and, after his junior year, won a Rhodes scholarship to complete his studies at Merton College of Oxford University in England. Many years later, in his autobiography, he wrote:

I despair of putting in words what Oxford meant to me. It surely meant far more than to some who were better prepared to take it in stride … To a youth straight from the Middle West it was overwhelming.

At Oxford, his tutor was H.H. Joachim, an eminent philosopher of the Absolute Idealist viewpoint. His own mentor and inspiration was F.H. Bradley, a philosopher who towered over late 19th and early 20th-century philosophy in much the same way as Professor Blanshard towered over the middle part of the 20th century.

For much of his life, he was Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He wrote his last book (Four Reasonable Men) at the age of 92, and died in 1987, at the age of 95.

Professor Blanshard’s magnum opus was The Nature of Thought (1939), a far-ranging two-volume work that he wrote from 1923-1938, much of his time spent at a carrel in the reading room of the British Museum. I have a photograph of the place in the British Museum where he worked. Mrs. Blanshard sent to me after he passed away.

He is probably best-known for his devastating critiques of logical positivism in epistemology and emotivism in ethics: critiques which, by exposing the central errors of those theories, were almost single-handedly responsible for their abandonment.

I remember all that about Professor Blanshard, and yet, there are other things about him which to me are just as precious. He was a kind and inspiring teacher; a loving husband to his wife, Roberta Yerkes Blanshard; and a noble gentleman of the kind no longer known by this world.

He was also my friend, and I miss him. I comfort myself with the thought that I will one day see him again. I’m sure that we will have a lot to talk about.