Rising up (n)ever

Back when I was working as a student minister, one of my least favorite tasks was the selecting of readings to accompany a ceremonial event. Going in, I had thought I would delight in such a chore, having falsely assumed that an appreciation for English poetry and a mania for quotation would equip me with any number of apt apothegms for any given occasion. Not so. The chief problem lies with poetry itself.

It is a great and prevalent misconception in our society that literary poetry is a delicate and soothing art, one of whose chief virtues lies in its ability to provide solace. In truth poetry—if it is in any way good or memorable—is violent, provoking, conscience-pricking, paradoxical, or otherwise upsetting. This makes it a particularly poor vehicle for performing the sometime ministerial office of comforting the afflicted (the alternative role of "afflicting the comfortable" is definitely not—however worth doing sometimes—suitable for all occasions).

A Low Dishonest Decade

I have an early January birth date in a year ending with a zero. As a result, my age has always corresponded roughly to the year in which we find ourselves; and the decades in my life have also tracked alongside the decades of our calendar - plus ten years' difference. Since we have just come to the end of another decade in our country's life and in my own, therefore, it seems there might be some reflections in order.

While we're on the topic of birthdays, by the way, I should note that I am deviously humble on the subject. At work, I never announce my birthday to anyone when it is coming. Indeed, I go out of my way to suppress and bury the fact. I also, however, leave just enough breadcrumbs leading in its direction that the diligent might be able to discover it and share with me their birthday wishes on the day of.

Donut Understand

Yesterday I was in a Dunkin' Donuts (I guess now officially just "Dunkin'") getting my morning coffee, when the two unbearable yet familiar yammering voices of the "Dunkin' Radio" hosts came over the audio system. It would seem that rather than pay royalties for a service like Muzak or simply turn on the radio, the company has devised a far more ingenious solution - that of creating their own broadcast. Largely, it consists of sugary beat-heavy pop songs interspersed with ads for nothing but Dunkin' products. There is also, however - worse than all the rest - a periodic "trivia" segment.

As someone who founded one plank of his teenage selfhood on the idea of being a "trivia buff," my heart sinks whenever this segment comes on. The so-called trivia questions are in fact designed to exclude anything that could remotely be described as specialized knowledge. They relate to matters of such universal familiarity that no one could ever possibly feel their intellect was being called into question. Yesterday's was particularly odious. In between the advertisements for new sugar-laden latte concoctions, our male and female co-hosts asked: "how many months have 28 days in them?"

Wisdom Turned to Folly

In his article posted yesterday in response to the Australian wildfires, Paul Krugman notes in passing an intriguing statistical fact about conservative climate change deniers. They are not, he observes (contrary to popular liberal belief) especially likely to be people lacking in scientific awareness and training. To the contrary, he cites a study in Nature showing that conservatives with high levels of scientific literacy and numeracy are more likely to deny the reality of climate change than those with little background in the subject.

This makes a perverse but comprehensible kind of sense. The fact that climate change is real is attested by the evidence of the senses, by ecological disasters that are already unfolding around us (such as Australia's wildfires), and by the headlines of any reputable newspaper. To deny it, therefore, requires a certain brilliance - the ability to mine for strange and exotic sources of quasi-information, say, or to interpret obvious data in surprising and contrarian ways.

Anytime, Anywhere

From the start of the "War on Terror" two decades ago, many policies implemented under its heading have been blatantly unlawful. In order to justify them, therefore, the two prior administrations - Bush's and Obama's - found it necessary to rely on certain legal fictions. Torture wasn't really torture, Bush's legal team said; it was "enhanced interrogation." We weren't really conducting assassinations in any country anywhere in the world, regardless of whether or not we were officially at war there, said Obama administration officials; we were simply engaged in a conventional armed conflict with an unconventional foe: one whose unique characteristic was that they operated across and beyond state boundaries.

A Cruel God

I have before on this blog called attention to the speech delivered by Judge George O'Toole at the sentencing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It is, without doubt, a stirring piece of rhetoric. The judge seemed to have sensed he had been handed a historic moment, and he rose to it -- aesthetically if not morally -- by delivering remarks worthy of any collection of courtroom oratory.

One of the risky devices the judge employed -- risky because it could bring charges of irrelevance and grandstanding -- but which O'Toole used in this case to great effect -- was to rely on pithy and oracular quotations from works of literature and musical drama. At one point, for instance, he quotes a line from the libretto of Verdi's opera Otello, based on the Shakespeare play. "I believe in a cruel god," sings Iago. The judge's purpose in mentioning this is not to endorse the Iago worldview, of course, but to attribute it to the man he is sentencing.