Anti-Etam

This is old news. It first showed up way back in October. But I've spotted it in a couple of end-of-year review stories, and it's got me tickled all over again. In a way it's another auto-antonym, but this auto-antonym comes from a musical mnemonic for a first aid procedure, so there are all kinds of quirky, fussy little symbol-referent wrinkles in play.

So there was a study done in Peoria, Illinois by researchers at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. They took ten doctors and five medical students, and trained them to give CPR chest compressions to music, and then followed up five weeks later to see if they could still remember the rate at which they were supposed to do the compressions. They did, so the researchers concluded it was a good training technique.

The study made news because of the cuteness of the song they chose: the BeeGees' "Stayin' Alive." But there was a twist that several of the news stories left out: another song that worked equally well was "Another One Bites The Dust," by Queen. One doctor commented, "Right rhythm, wrong message."

And this is trite, but I can't resist: it's also a good ending thought for 2008. I'm not sorry to see it bite the dust, but I've got reason to be thankful I'm still stayin' alive. And more importantly, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man; no time to talk.

Anti-Equality

The problem with what I'm about to write is that it gives me the creeps. But I suppose things are the way they are, and my dislike and discomfort are part of what I have to come to grips with.

Last week, I re-read "Don't Shoot The Dog," by Karen Pryor. Something I want to do someday is own a home with a yard, and then adopt and train a dog. I won't try to keep a dog in an apartment, even though I know a lot of people who do, because I don't think it's fair to the dog. But someday, when my roots are truly down and I'm a homeowner, I plan to take on that challenge. In thinking toward that, I've thought a good deal about dog training, and I've read up on the subject. And that reading and thinking took me in this direction.

This is what gives me the creeps: there are unmissable parallels between the Bible and dog-training.

Your dog has no idea what the word "sit" means. It doesn't understand that what you want it to do on that spot of carpet is in the same category with what you do in a chair, in a car, cross-legged on the grass, perched on a fence, straddling a tree-branch, or whatever. It does come to learn, by trial and error, that when that sound comes from your mouth, you want it to flex its hips and put its rump down. Stimulus, response. It can furthermore tell from your tone whether you're feeling patient, cheerful, tired, angry; but it completely misses the overwhelming majority of the content of what you said.

Now go read Isaiah 55:8-9. Go ahead; I'll wait.

In communication, we talk a lot about the content dimension and the relational dimension of a message. Dogs get about the tiniest crumb of content from anything you say, but they get a whole lot of relational message every time you pay any attention at all to them. They don't know what you mean, but they know very well who you are. They recognize you as different from anyone else on earth. They know you by smell. They know you by posture, and can respond to your different postures. They can read mood swings that your human associates might miss altogether. More and more people diagnosed with seizure-causing medical conditions are given aide dogs, because the dogs can spot incredibly subtle signs that a seizure is on the way.

Now go read Jeremiah 31:33-34.

Not for nothing are dogs recognized for their loyalty. Your dog is your dog, and you are his (her) person. The dog might not know what you mean, for your thoughts are not a dog's thoughts, and your thoughts are higher than the dog's thoughts. But the dog knows you.

And that's got me thinking today that God doesn't teach us; God trains us.

You could reasonably object that Christ called His disciples His friends, and that the author of Hebrews said we were Christ's siblings. (For that matter, so did Paul.) That doesn't faze me; plenty of people think of their dogs as family members. These days, more and more couples choose to adopt dogs instead of having children, and tell everyone that the dogs are their children, as far as family bonds and an outlet for love are concerned.

I warned you it was creepy.

Probably the essence of the creepiness is that it's demeaning. But anyone who's bothered to study the Bible knows that it teaches the wisdom of humility and the dangers of pride, so if I'm a little squeamish about being, by analogy, God's dog, then that might be a healthy squeamishness. I know that for plenty of folks who aren't believers, this explanation might be more than enough to drive them away. It certainly sums up my understanding of why some of my more passionately atheistic friends embrace that deliberate rejection of Christ: they rebel, they gag, at the thought of being anyone's dog. But something I've argued on endless occasions in my adult life is that the world as it is doesn't care about our discomfort. If we're jealous of birds, and make up our minds that gravity is so disappointing that we have the right to defy it, and we step off skyscrapers proclaiming at the top of our lungs that we reject gravity, gravity will put on a demonstration of its authority. Our dislike for it has zero effect on its mastery of us. Same is true of God and His dominion.

We don't, and can't, grasp His thoughts. When He speaks to us, we gather only the thinnest outer edge of His meaning. The most we can hope for is to know Him, to build in ourselves a loyalty to Him, to accept His gracious offer to be part of His family: not as equals, for He has no equal, but as beloved features of His household, brought under His shelter by our willingness to trust. In fact, the fit between that and a person-dog relationship is pretty complete.

Now, all of this does leave unresolved the question of whether we will always be His pets. Paul, in Corinthians, gives reason to think someday we will go from knowing in part to knowing perfectly. And, of course, He created us in His image: it wasn't until the fall that we were separated from Him. When that separation is ended, then perhaps we'll know Him from a perspective that is nearer child-father than pet-person. But none of that changes our present state, does it?

And if it gives me the creeps, then that just proves I still cling to some devotion to myself, some level of being impressed with myself, that needs to give way.

Anti-Quated

תּוֹרָה ≠ 方
משיח = 方

Anti-Podes

I've had some early Christmas presents this year, mostly in the form of words or phrases that wouldn't sit still and mean something plainly and straightforwardly. It must be my own particular flavor of dorkiness, but those just get me excited. I suppose it's a hazard of my trade.

One example of what I'm talking about is the auto-antonym, which refers to words that have meanings that are opposites. The first one that pops into my head is "cleave," which can mean "cut in two," but also can mean "seal together two halves." A couple of other examples are "custom" and "sanction." They remind me of kanji, which are wonderful because they have so many different readings. Our language is phonographic: the symbols tell us how to pronounce the word, which is why beginning readers learn how to sound out what they read. Other languages, such as Chinese, are ideographic, meaning that each unit of writing has an entire meaning. But the great thing about Japanese is that it uses both a phonological script (actually, two of them -- hiragana and katakana) and an ideographic script, kanji. And the ideographs each have a bunch of different readings: you have to fit them into context before you have any clue what they mean.

The idea isn't original with me, but I like how nicely that arrangement of writing tools fits with the split between verbal and nonverbal communication. There's been research in recent years that showed that speakers of ideographic languages processed the text in a different part of the brain from speakers of phonographic language. It's also the case that ideographic language coincides with cultures that are more indirect, more low-context, more inclined to let the receiver of the message fill in the details. And nonverbal messages have a lot in common with that: a facial expression surely means something, but the something is less clinical and precise than a carefully written and revised sentence; it needs the context before you can interpret it accurately.

All these thoughts were slurrying around in my head yesterday evening as I was rationalizing my failings. I'm a reasonably good teacher, and I was in an especially good mood, since my course evaluations for the fall had arrived, full of some incredibly kind and gracious words from students. But the place where I clearly fall short is in research; put bluntly, my publication record is pathetic. I've presented some conference papers, and I have one article and a book review, but that's just a piddly showing for twelve years' employment at three different universities. But the striking thing is, it's exactly because my publication record is so poor that I got absolutely zero stirring of interest from the majority of jobs I applied for, up until the day I applied for this job. And this job is so perfectly suited to my wants and my temperament that I can't imagine teaching anywhere else. And as I was reflecting on all of that, and turning my failing into a success, I thought, God knows what He's doing. And then I was very tickled to realize that my colleagues, former professors, etc. were probably thinking the exact same words about me, only with a slightly different emphasis: "God knows what he's doing!" And the meaning of the exact same words, arranged syntactically in the exact same formation, went sliding off in a completely different direction. To my delight.

Anti-Septic

I use a lot less soap than most people. I also think I'm pretty free from superstition. There's this whole psychological twist that goes into washing and cleanliness that equates power with quantity or volume, and crowds out consideration of precision.

Soap is not some magic dirt-erasing potion. I've seen people dip their hands, or their dishes, in soapy water and immediately rinse them off. A few even say they killed germs by doing so. Hogwash. Soap does one thing and one thing only: it lets the water wash off any oily dirt that's on the hand or the dish. Ordinarily, rinsing with water does nothing to greasy, oily dirt, because water and oil repel one another. But soap molecules have a hydrophilic "end" that attaches to water, and a hydrophobic "end" that attaches to oil, so soap is effectively a trailer hitch that lets the water haul the oil away. Mechanical scrubbing action is still necessary.

Imagine you wanted to paint a room: would you dip the brush in paint, just touch it to the wall, and expect the entire wall to magically turn that color, and be perfectly even and flawless? Not unless you're wobbly in the head. You'd have to go to the effort to apply the paint, smooth it over, give it a second coat, etc. The mechanical action matters. Really, when it comes to removing dirt, the mechanical action matters more than the soap does. You can take most dirt off with scrubbing, because the abrasion is violent enough to dislodge even greasy dirt. You may take your top layer of skin off with it, but you're always doing that anyway, little by little. A good, vigorous scrubbing just speeds it up a bit.

So all I've really argued to this point is that soap doesn't accomplish much all by itself. That doesn't explain why I use less of it. There have been a number of product tests done over the years to find out how clean laundry gets with a lot of detergent, a little detergent, and no detergent at all. The results show that it doesn't make that much of a difference: agitate clothes through water, especially warm or hot water, and that's the biggest part of getting them clean. Having read those reports several times, I cut way down on my detergent use a few years back. For whites or unmentionables, I wash in hot water and use a fair amount of detergent, but for clothes that don't get that dirty (pants, outer shirts) I use cold water and about a tablespoon or two of liquid detergent. And every once in a while, if I run out of laundry soap and haven't remembered to pick it up, I go ahead and run loads for a couple of weeks without adding anything to them.

None of this is the slightest bit interesting, even to me. But the widespread practice of piling on the soap, or imagining that it has "cleaning magic," is a symptom of a deeper rational kink. We do the same thing with over-the-counter medication, with nutritional supplements, and sometimes with particular relational practices: "Let's sit down and have a serious talk about this." It feels good to pour on the power, instead of carefully surveying the situation from all sides and choosing a response that's finely calibrated to it. It reminds me of people who pass me on the street at blazing speed, weaving in and out of traffic, and then when I reach a red light, they're right beside me. They sure had fun flooring that gas pedal, but it didn't get them any real advantage.

And sometimes I think we misunderstand God in that way. True, He's got all the power anyone can imagine, and scripture lays out a couple of circumstances where He put on a display that would reduce any human being to slack-jawed awe. But it's meaningless to talk about His power as a maximum, as a bludgeon, for two reasons: first, there's no maximum to it, and second, a corollary of the first, it goes way beyond the limits of our understanding. What I do more and more is think of God's power as precision; not as soap dumped on dirt, in hopes that the soap will operate like some cartoonish Clean Paint, but as meticulous and loving attention, wiping, scrubbing, polishing, applied to every nook and crevice of what needs cleaning. Not too much pressure, but not too little; no streaks, no scratches, no spills, no missed spots. I think of God's justice not as the kind of punishment that makes an atom bomb look like a love-pat, but rather as the most perfectly scaled, perfectly balanced, perfectly just consequence for the offense: breathtaking in its match, not in its immensity. God can go fingerprint-specific, atom-specific, quark-specific, and beyond, unlike we humans, who can only roughly match what we do to what we perceive.

That's a quality I'm quite convinced God has, and I find it far more awe-inspiring than thinking expansively about His power. I also think it's a useful starting point for thinking about problems. We have expressions like "swatting a mosquito with a bazooka" that allude to the error of excessively blunt response, but they're hardly everyday wisdom. I suspect it might be an artifact of our culture: we have so much power, from our military to our wealth (shaky at the moment) to our institutions to our ideas, that an impatient application of overwhelming force, a little Powell doctrine, seems appealing to us. People in other parts of the world learn more of a respect for subtlety and nuance. But anyway, I find myself more and more absorbed with wiggling the slightly warped key in the lock until I can get it to turn, rather than kicking the stubborn door out of its frame. And I save a good deal of money on soap.

Anti-Coherence

So this morning my ankles are sore, and I've got new thoughts about mindfulness.

Michael Stipe once said there were certain notes in some of his songs that he couldn't hit unless he was dancing, and I've decided there's a whole range of thinking that I can't tap into unless I'm walking. I walk to work every morning, which takes me half an hour, and this week, the walking conditions have changed with every new day. On Monday morning, I had to walk to work in several inches of snow, which, in many ways, resembles walking on the beach: soft footfalls, but drag between steps. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I had to pick my way over icy patches, lifting my feet and carefully planting them, testing each step for stability before putting down my weight. This morning, it was warm enough to rain, which meant I walked over some parts wet (but iceless) pavement, and some parts slush. People who do a lot of driving don't get as much chance to notice the different conditions as I do; by the end of my half-hour trek, the frame of mind I'm in has a lot to do with the terrain I've crossed.

And, as I wrote last February, the rules changed every day. On Monday, none of it was especially slippery. New snow is a change from dry pavement, but it's more or less problem-free. Tuesday and Wednesday, snow was safe, because it gives pretty good traction, but I had to take a careful look at any snowless patch and assess it for slipperiness. This morning, the last bits of snow were actually the dangerous part: the slush was very slippery, and I almost took a spill several times.

What this meant was, no autopilot, no routine. I had to invest more conscious effort in the walk than I do on most other days. But what caught my fancy was the signs of adjustment. Today my ankles were sore, because the walking I've done the past couple of days has exercised muscles that normally get left alone. Day after day, I step out my front door and swing into my stride, and it's a simple repetitive motion over and over; similarly, day after day I put my brain elsewhere and woolgather for half an hour until I find myself unlocking my office door.

But for the past couple of days, I've had to be very present through the entire trip. And that gets me to thinking about unexpected situations in teaching: students who are defiant, or who have particular needs, or scheduling circumstances that are new and different. Instead of swinging into my stride, I have to pick my way through those classes, and I do feel frustrated ("sore") at times, but it's just the building up of "muscles" that I've neglected.

Sometimes I get all ambitious about taking on more and more tasks, more and more commitments, more and more projects, but to free up capacity to attend to them, I have to compress the ones I've already got. I have to be more efficient and cut down the time and attention they require. I have to take my teaching and "swing into my stride," make it something automatic and unexamined, and I think sometimes what looks to me like maturity and growing professionalism is really a form of bureaucratized, mechanical, repetitive teaching that neglects some of the "muscles" I could be using.

Luckily, I can count on the school and the students to keep changing the rules. And they can count on me to keep getting sore about it. But it's a healthy thing.

Anti-Dote

As you read this, the odds are quite high that you're going to think I'm writing about something I'm in no position to understand. But the more years I live, the more I think that being in the position to experience it firsthand isn't nearly as helpful to a clear understanding as some might like to believe. Read on, and see what you think.

I think the biggest obstacle to healthy marriage is the mis-calibration of expectations. It’s a flashing danger sign if you fall into one or more of the following traps:

• Thinking, day after day, that because the stakes are so high, anything short of perfection is failure.

• Thinking that any sign of conflict is a crisis that demands the most heavy-handed overreaction possible.

• Thinking it’s worse to have attention called to a problem than to let the problem fester.

• Thinking that an issue is so minor and petty that it doesn’t need to be addressed.

• Thinking that your lives have to be so completely intertwined that nothing is separate from you or unknown to you.

• Thinking that anything you aren't interested in, don't understand, don't enjoy, don't appreciate, is good fodder for mockery.
  

• Thinking that in an emergency, if you really had to, you could just lay down an ultimatum and overcome any resistance to get your own way.

• Thinking that your children are entirely dependent on you to set a good example in this area, and overlooking the possibility that if you bother to listen, they may actually have some lessons to teach you.

The kind of thinking that’s a good sign consists of understanding that it’s a delicate balance, a tricky negotiation that needs non-stop attention and work. The biggest part of that work is being willing to listen, to frame your perceptions and feelings in words, to work, gently and patiently, through difficulties. Easy to say, but baffling and exhausting to put into practice.

You might have gotten this far thinking, “Actually, you’re just stating the obvious. Everyone already knows this by now.” And where marriage is concerned, I think that’s probably true. But here’s the twist: I wasn’t really writing about marriage. Go back up to where I bolded it, and replace it with race relations. Then re-read it and see what you think.

Anti-Pathy

"Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge? - is not that the inference?"
-- Socrates, Gorgias

Placebos are disturbing things. Last night I was reading about them over pizza and beer. They work incredibly well. A huge stack of surveys documents the fact that physicians regularly prescribe placebos for their patients, and that they work just fine. Pharmacists get sucked into the game too, since a prescription that plainly calls for something inert traps them in the middle: they probably can't substitute their pharmaceutical expertise for the doctor's broader medical expertise -- they can't diagnose, in other words -- but they're the ones on the cutting edge of the deceit: they hand the customer a bottle of things that are represented as medicine but in fact have no bioactive ingredient.

The crazy thing is, study after study shows that placebos work. If patients expect that what's in the bottle will ease their pain or other symptoms, then very often those symptoms vanish. And the converse is also true: chemicals that should interact with bodily processes in a defined way are completely ineffective if accompanied by a suggestion or distraction that convinces the patient that the drug won't work properly.

The rub is, even if it works, it's entirely deceitful. Even if the results are better than than what the actual drug would produce, does that justify lying to the patient? Even if you can demonstrate that an actual drug is only effective so long as you enlist the mind, the imagination, the expectations of the patient, you can't escape from the fact that the doctor is fully aware of the fraudulent nature of the transaction. It may work, but effectiveness is not honesty. Isn't that, at the very least, troubling?

I got to thinking about that this morning, because I'm teaching rhetoric in the spring, and throughout the history of human civilization, we've had a love-hate relationship with rhetoric. Socrates couldn't stand the study of it; said it was an inferior art, concerned only with appearances and flattery, and that instead we should concern ourselves with truth, as discovered through dialectic. And he reminds me of a patient saying "Never mind the placebos. I want a real, entirely bioactive drug." It's certainly to be expected that Socrates prefers truth to rhetoric, but it's also far from clear that this insistence gets him where he wants to go.

My take on absolute truth: yes, it exists, but it exists as the sole and exclusive property of God. Its essence is congruence with His thoughts, His pronouncements, His judgments. The quality "true" can be defined as "what God thinks." And I think He speaks to us in true statements. But those concessions land a long way from stipulating that we can understand those truths, act on them, or transmit them to anyone else without distorting them. (Look here and here and here.) Furthermore, plenty of folks have had the truth revealed to them, and have fled from it. As with medicine, sometimes the ways people reshape themselves, the damage they inflict on themselves, puts them beyond the help of the medicine, but a placebo can be the lever to the fulcrum of their expectations, and can dislodge what ails them.

From research, we know that placebos work because people are swayed by the trappings of a medical setting: lab coats, medical equipment, gleaming institutional hallways, etc. They're also emotionally invested: they're in pain, frightened for their lives. And finally, it's well-documented in medical literature that experimental treatments can produce a placebo effect because patients feel a bond with their doctor and want to please her or him. And I'm sure you see this coming: Aristotle categorized rhetorical appeals as logos (the objective, institutional proof that anyone should accept as authoritative), pathos (proof based on emotion), and ethos (proof based on the character or identity of the person doing the persuading). I don't think that's a coincidence.

And then there are the dynamics of resistance and addiction. Antibiotics become less effective as people keep taking them, because the pathogens they target evolve countermeasures that enable them to survive the chemical attack. Pain killers become less effective because the body's chemistry changes, and people develop a physical addiction, a tolerance, to the drug's effects. In the same way, critical, life-changing truths can hit us incredibly hard on the first hearing, but lose their potency and become mundane upon repeated hearings. And far too often, truth is outflanked and contained by clever counter-maneuvering; sometimes by an outside party who is both clever and dishonest, but just as often through our own rationalizing.

In short, I think we romanticize medicine, and I think we romanticize truth. In both cases, I think we mistake our cloud of perceptions for objective features of reality, and we think the milieu in which we move is far more clear-cut and stable than it really is. Healing is in God's hands, just like truth, and I think we concoct ersatz stand-ins for His power because we cannot stand to wait for His time, to face fully our dependence on Him. We swallow medicine so we can pretend that we've taken control of our illness. We pronounce statements true or false so we can feel the Godly authority of policing the quality of knowledge, of sorting fact and error into their categories, even though those pursuits fly in the face of everything we know about our human limitations.

So it's not a question of whether placebos are better or worse than medicine. I think there's not a difference. God heals, and every healing happens by His permission. The same is true of rhetoric and the truth. Rhetoricians have worked through the years to establish the claim that all communication, all human pronouncements are rhetorical, and I've always shook my head impatiently because I thought that diluted the concept out of existence. But now I think they're probably right. It is all rhetorical, simply because truth is a quality that does not, and cannot, come from us. It's all just placebos.

Anti-Atrophy

My Christmas break reading list:

• Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, by Alex Pentland
  
• Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, by Len Fisher
• 13 Things That Don't Make Sense, by Michael Brooks
• Outliers: The Story Of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

That's all the fun reading I'll have time for. I also need to re-read, cover-to-cover, the textbooks for all four classes I'm teaching in the Spring. But since we're expecting a pretty big winter storm tomorrow, with a second salvo about Wednesday, I may get a lot of good days to stay inside and just read the day away.

It's times like this I wish I'd spent the extra dollars to live somewhere that had a fireplace.

Anti-Occident

There are few things we do a shabbier job of than understanding terrorism.

To begin with, there are too many people who pull back altogether from the challenge of understanding it. "Understanding" is a synonym for "condoning," and both are weakness. Terrorism is like fire: you don't analyze the fire, you extinguish the fire. The only thing to be done with terrorists is extinguish them, liquidate them, eradicate them, find them and kill them by any means necessary.

Rarrr, we're tough. Hope nobody notices how terrified we are.

In fact, terrorism is the result of a whole array of breakdowns and failures, and we could do a far better job of reducing its incidence by pouring some serious resources into any one of them. In most parts of the world that yield terrorism, public opinion of the west in general, and the United States in particular, is both very negative and very dysfunctional. The misunderstandings are epic. The potential for smart, relentless work to reach out to other parts of the world, to put our own messages into their media and other cultural channels, is enormous, and largely unrealized. Trying to teach our way out of the root causes of terrorism doesn't feel enough like muscle-flexing. But that muscle-flexing has the same failing as corporal punishment: it may work, temporarily, in limited measure, on very young children, but it's far less likely to work as the children grow older, stronger, more sophisticated, and more willful. Instead, all it accomplishes is to slather on another layer of resentment and determination.

Next semester I'm teaching intercultural communication, and I'm tempted to make terrorism one of my running examples. It really seems to me that if students understood that there are bodies of reasoning, chains of argument, whose output is a considered decision to turn to terrorism, and that those chains draw from cultural premises that aren't familiar to us, but are also not beyond our ability to decipher, then that understanding might dislodge the stubborn determination to view terrorism as the same thing as a stuck jar lid, something that will only respond to muscle.

Confirmation

A License To Print Money!
Since before you were born, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has asked hiring managers what they look for in the people they hire, and the #1 answer year after year is communication skills. In COMM 212: Storytelling and Public Speaking, you’ll get on your feet and get your feet wet, talking about yourself, giving your testimony, telling stories about your family, mastering Powerpoint, and even learning a thing or two about research and persuasion.

You can have the whole world in your hands!
You’ve flashcarded all the vocabulary and sweated out the grammar, so now you know a foreign language and are ready to study or work abroad. But what if you make a mistake? What if you offend somebody? What if you think you’re waving hello, but actually you’re calling someone’s mother an aardvark snuggler? After COMM 220: Intercultural Communication, you’ll be equipped with the tools to analyze different cultures, avoid pitfalls, make friends, win respect, and navigate the globe with nothing to fear.

Road trip!
Have you always wanted to be better at reading expressively, thinking on your feet, or talking in front of people? Want to improve in all those areas without having to stress over the grade? How does taking out of town trips on the university’s dime, making smart friends from other colleges, and enjoy bonding time with your fellow Beacons sound? COMM 322: Forensics earns you upper division credit for being a Speakin’ Beacon, a member of the NCU speech and debate team. You commit to a half-hour team meeting each week, plus a half-hour one-on-one practice session with Doyle, and then you compete in the novice division at no more than two tournaments. Have fun, get smarter, get out of town!

Never be manipulated again!
From politicians to businesses to your own family members, everyone you communicate with has an agenda, and they all try in their own ways to manipulate you. In COMM 340: Rhetorical Criticism and Argumentation, we study the art of persuasion and the framing of good reasons. Learn to spot both the blatant and the subtle attempts to wear down your resistance and sway you into doing someone else’s bidding. You’ll swell up with pride the first time you say, “No sir, these are the droids I’m looking for!”

Decode the secret messages all around you!
You, and everyone else on earth, transmit a raging flood of information at every moment, even when you think you’re being silent and unremarkable. Plenty of people promise you that they can teach you how to read “body language,” but most of their claims are ridiculous hogwash. In COMM 430: Nonverbal Communication, we focus on reliable, sound research into messages of appearance, posture, voice, facial expression, gesture, and much, much more, and we separate the truth from the nonsense that people slap together just to make a buck.

(This is the other thing I did for the latest issue of the Mishpat. They asked for classified ads for all the Spring classes, to give students an idea what they were about.)

Conjuring

I remember being six years old, standing on a riser in an outlandish getup, and singing “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.” But that was a vicious lie. For one thing, I didn’t lose my first baby tooth until almost two years later. For another, all I really wanted for Christmas was a Batmobile. A big one.

Early on, I showed promise as a communicator. I could drop hints like the Enola Gay could drop kilotons, and on this occasion I held nothing back. Each afternoon, when “Batman” came on TV, I sat bolt upright and watched for a shot of the Batmobile. Then I’d bounce up and down, stab my finger at the TV, and make a noise like a litter of guinea pigs startled by a gunshot. My mom told me a dozen or more times, “All right, we get it.” Finally, she threatened to change the channel, which shut me up like magic. The appropriate-sized box appeared up under the Christmas tree, and I figured the fix was in.

On Christmas morning, I snatched up my box of joy, but the second I did, my heart sank. Remember how you could tell from the weight that a present wasn’t a toy, but a sweater? I clutched it, unopened, turned my little kid sad eyes on my parents, and clicked on the high-beams. “Honey, that’s your present from Aunt Della,” said my mom. “You’ve got other presents.” She picked one up and handed it to me. It was tiny, but it had heft, so I shucked it in a few quick motions.

They’d gotten me the Hot Wheels Batmobile.

It had about one molecule of cool to it, but it paled next to my dream, the same way a single pizza flavored goldfish cracker just can’t hold its own against a family-sized pizza with everything. How were my Batman and Robin action figures supposed to fit inside it? Didn’t my folks understand that Batman and Robin had places to go?

I almost missed out on the rest of Christmas that year, because I fell so deeply into a sulk that no one could stand to be around me. And that would’ve been a shame, because it was clear to me that Christmas wasn’t about presents. It was just as much about cookies and pie. It was also about Christmas TV specials that came on only once a year, back before TiVo, DVDs, or even VHS. And it was about snuggling up on the couch with my entire family while my mom read the Christmas story out loud from the Bible.

The longer I live, the more TV-related inventions I can rack up that didn’t exist when I was a kid. Not only that, but I also appreciate more every year how bankrupt is the whole “Get get get” mindset into which so many of us fall every Christmastime. Especially I find that the whole present-buying mission is tangled up with a sizable dose of mind-reading, which is a disaster waiting to happen. One December I took my seven-year-old nephew Christmas shopping for his little sister, and I watched carefully to see what he picked up. Later that night, after he went to bed, I returned to the same toy store and chose the three or four things he’d admired the most. On Christmas morning, I scored several big hits in a row, but as he picked up his last present, I said “I think you’re especially going to like this one!” With one of those high notes of little kid ecstasy in his voice, he said, “It’s a camera?” And my smile froze, and with my voice trailing off, I said, “Ah. I, uh … didn’t know you wanted a camera.” And his whole bubble of inflated expectations suddenly popped, as it does, at the first sign of disappointment. It was the Batmobile letdown all over again, only this time I was the giver who fell short.

But it turned out okay, because we’d done so much more than rip open presents on Christmas morning. We went out and looked at decorations around the neighborhood. At one point, he saw an airplane’s blinking lights, and shouted “Maybe that’s Santa Claus!” We teamed up to bake a mess of Christmas cookies – only chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever made that were slice and bake – most of which went into his parents’ and sister’s stomachs, and only two of which we saved for Santa and the reindeer. (But he spent a lot of time deciding which cookies were ones he wanted to put aside for them!)

And just a few minutes after everyone had opened their last present, I opened the Bible and read the Christmas story aloud, with a nephew snuggled up on one side and a niece on the other, both staring into the distance, lost in the world of the story. They asked questions about Mary and Joseph, the stable, the star, the angels, and I remember easily a dozen questions about Mary’s donkey. For the record, I have no idea what its name was, or whether she petted it when it felt sad. If Dr. Crow or Dr. Heine knows, I hope they’ll do the right thing and speak up.

And I think we do that to our Father far too often. James 4:3 says “You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.” We do it year-round, but we cheat ourselves even more when we do it at Christmas. Our Father, who chose the weak and humble to throw down the proud and mighty, who delights to do mighty things that we could never see coming, gave His people exactly what He’d promised, and because they expected something different, something in line with their own wrong motives, they rejected the Father’s gift and were disappointed. I pray we’ll make this the year that we don’t fall victim to that mistake.

(The editor of the Northwest Christian University school paper, the Mishpat, asked me a few weeks back to write something about Christmas. This is what I submitted. It ran in the current edition. I'm putting it up here so folks from other locales can see it as well.)

Concussion

So one of my favorite cheap shots is to say that someone has all the critical acuity of dental floss. But then, this morning, on my walk to work, I got to thinking.

(Most years, the quality of my thinking by this point in the term has oozed away in unexpected directions, knocked off center by fatigue. It's not necessarily bad, wrong, or irrational, but it's certainly unpredictable.)

So anyway, I said to myself, That's actually a pretty bad metaphor, because dental floss gets into those tight, dark, crevices and works out the debris that rots and corrodes. It's actually sort of a compliment to say that someone's critical thinking skills are like dental floss.

I need a vacation.

Consumption

We have this really pernicious idea, my generation and the ones following it, that I think it's high time we stamped out. That idea is the concept of "free time." I am more and more convinced that there is no such thing as free time.

When my mother was a child, she worked in the fields to earn money for her school clothes and other necessities. She began doing this when she was still very young. On a number of occasions, she talked about how hard she worked and the aches and pains she felt at the end of the day, and she always ended by saying that she wanted an easier life for her own children. I think that's a very widespread, and in fact almost universal wish: nearly all parents who have hard work in their backgrounds aspire to provide their children with an easier life. Furthermore, I think a lot of folks identify with that wish, think it's a noble one, and are grateful to parents who worked toward that goal. And I'm not even prepared to say it's a bad goal. But it does tuck one stubborn distortion into its beneficiaries' worldview: the notion of free time.

There is simply no such thing as free time. All leisure time is earned. All discretionary time is the result of work. We have time to relax, to reflect, to take care of our needs, after we have addressed our responsibilities. We do not possess such time as our entitlement.

Misunderstandings about that are one of the big anchors of the time sickness that too many college students have. Yes, you have to have down time and leisure time to stay healthy; I freely admit that. But another requirement of good health is healthy food, made from healthy ingredients, and no one's giving that away either. Try shopping in the produce section, especially the organic half of it, and then just walking out the door, telling the store manager "I need this to be healthy, so I'm entitled to take it for the asking." I doubt that'll go over well.

Many folks my age and younger grew up with a measure of unstructured time that would've dazzled our parents and grandparents when they were young. And because we grew up immersed in that reality, we simply accepted it as a feature, an element of the scene, a constant, just like sunrise and sunset and oxygen. Time to relax was simply part of the world picture. But it wasn't! Through much of this nation's history, and throughout much of the rest of the world, children are expected to pitch in and work to contribute to the household pool of resources. In our culture, today, we've made a collective decision that children are largely exempt from that shared responsibility. But that doesn't mean the leisure time bubbles up from some magic, inexhaustible spring. It just means the parents have to work that much harder. The kids' playtime isn't free time; it's a gift, a provision, from the parents' hard work. And when the children leave the parents' protection, the free time goes with it. But because we're so accustomed to it, that's not immediately evident. And for many kids, college is the first shock, the first wave of struggle with that changed reality.

Responsibilities have to be tackled, carried out, and completed, and then there is earned time, which is not at all the same as free time. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and there ain't no such thing as free time, and the "I feel overloaded, I feel stretched, I desperately want time to relax, so I'll simply demand it and claim that I'm owed it" argument is flawed, false-to-fact and childish. It's also, I regret to say, a stubbornly rooted collective belief, not only among college students, but among a whole lot of the young adults of my acquaintance. What would be required to dislodge the belief is unclear to me, but I sure wish I knew.

Construction

The Northwest Christian University Forensics Team enjoyed its first taste of success in mid-November, and was left hungry for more. According to sophomore Sam Robison, “It was a great learning experience and overall a great trip.”

The team, nicknamed the “Speakin’ Beacons,” traveled to McMinnville on November 14 to compete at the R. D. Mahaffey Memorial Forensics Tournament, hosted annually by Linfield College since 1930. Sophomore Jed Noles described it as “A lot like a wrestling tournament, only with less athletes and no spandex.” Robison and Noles were joined by senior Jeramy Anderson, junior Jason Bell, and first-years Ryan Vermilyea and Areyell Williams, to make up NCU’s traveling squad.

The competitors entered events in three categories: oral interpretation of literature, including poetry, prose, drama, and a special “mad libs” event invented by the tournament host; platform speaking, both informative and persuasive; and impromptu speaking, in which speakers were given a quote and allowed up to two minutes to prepare a five minute speech to be given immediately. In each event, the students spoke three times, grouped with four or five competitors from other schools, and a judged ranked the presentations from best to worst.

Robison received one first place ranking for his informative speech on infinity, Anderson a first place ranking for his poetry about nightmares, and Noles received a first place ranking for his dramatic monologue about domestic violence. Robison said, “My performance was the best I could do at that time. However, I feel that there is room for improvement and look forward to the next one.” After the three preliminary rounds were complete, the top speakers in the tournament, by lowest total of ranks, advanced to an elimination round to determine final placement. Noles’ rankings in impromptu speaking earned him a spot in the semifinals, where he placed #10 overall in his first attempt at the event. “That’s my favorite event,” said Noles. “I've still got a long ways to go before I get to my potential, though.”

On Thursday night, before departing for the tournament, the Speakin’ Beacons staged a showcase for the NCU campus, attended by twenty NCU students, faculty and staff. Williams and Noles presented impromptu speeches, Robison his informative speech, Vermilyea his poetry, and Noles and Bell their dramatic monologues. Robison commented, “Jason gave an excellent dramatic interpretation. His performance sucked me into his piece and made me laugh and tear up, which is the kind of piece it is supposed to be. When he gave his piece, I saw the nine-year old boy he was in the piece, not Jason Bell.” Noles agreed: “I enjoyed Jason's monologue very much. It just proves that he's a kid at heart, I guess.”

The Speakin’ Beacons travel to two tournaments each semester, and the tournaments are no more than a two hour drive from Eugene. Students can receive academic credit for participating on the team by registering for COMM 322. The class obligates its enrollees to attend a half-hour team meeting each week, whose time is negotiated to fit everyone’s schedule, and also to schedule a half-hour one-on-one coaching session each week with Doyle Srader, the director of forensics at NCU. Students are also free to compete without registering for the class if they choose.

Says Noles, “Our school is training pastors, teachers, people in many other professions in which they will be representing Christ in a world that needs to experience His love. Having this kind of experience in public and impromptu speaking makes us ready for the situations that will arise in life where we will need to proclaim the message of the cross.”

Confession

Check out the following verses. Read enough around them to get the context. You'll see what's been on my mind for the past couple of weeks.

• Genesis 4:26.
• Genesis 11:4.
• Genesis 12:2.
• Matthew 6:9.
• Romans 10:13.
• Philippians 2:9-11.
  
• Revelation 2:17.
• Revelation 3:12.

Conditions

My child, you too can grow up to be president!

So long as you graduate from Harvard, and not from Howard.

So long as your birthplace was somewhere comforting, all-American, and instantly recognizable.

So long as when you speak, you sound more like John Edwards and less like Martin Luther King, Jr.

So long as you refrain from ever showing anger, unless you’re white.

So long as you are definitely, definitely not a Muslim, Article VI of the Constitution be damned.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s progress, but it’s not the finish line. Don’t be fooled.

Conservatives

In 2010, I genuinely want to see Republicans turn the tide and start winning again. But there's a catch: they have to do it the right way.

The "right way" doesn't mean they have to abandon what they believe in and move to the left. It doesn't mean they have to repeat that terrible experiment of the Clinton years, "triangulation." Wrong-footing your opponents by adopting a watered-down version of what they're pitching, just enough to temporarily placate voters in the middle, is no way to run a government. There's a reason so many of Clinton's voters had to hold their noses and vote for him, and the biggest part of it has nothing to do with the percentage of time he kept his fly closed. The impression he gave folks, that he operated on zero principle and a hundred percent expediency, came directly from the way he governed, and we're well rid of it.

So what do I mean?

I swung, politically, from the far right to the far left almost twenty years ago, which is another story for another time. But even after I did, one of my favorite members of the Senate was Nancy Kassebaum. (I was a debater back then, and we had no choice but to keep up with current events if we wanted to win, which is why I had a "favorite member of the Senate.") She was smart, she was principled, she solved problems, and she was a Kansas Republican. Another Kansas Republican was Robert Dole, and even though I had identified politically with the far left for a number of years by then, I nevertheless voted for him for president in 1996, because Clinton's behavior had so disgusted me, and I thought Dole was far better endowed with integrity and judgment.

Bear with me. I'm getting there.

I've also lived in Texas an awful lot, including my entire childhood and almost a decade of my adult life. If I had a hard time getting along with Republicans, I would've had fewer friends than George W. Bush currently has. Instead, I was blessed to know a whole lot of very lovable, very far-right people who were accepting, patient, and open-minded with me. And I've known a few who were so devastatingly intelligent that they could stick a stiletto in my political positions and force me to rack my brains as hard as I could to defend them.

People with those gifts and that temperament are not currently leading the Republican party. I have no idea why.

Right now, the Republican leadership is oriented toward seeking out fights, picking them, and landing enough punches to put on a good show. It captures the attention of their base, because it's human nature to pay attention to conflict. It harnesses their outrage that people dare to disagree with them, and that outrage becomes energy and motivation that drives them to write checks and cast their votes. But it's a corrosive, poisonous, self-extinguishing strategy. A rule of politics that is ageless wisdom, that you can carve into granite and count on, is that people who disagree with you do not stop being your neighbors. When Republicans work up the outrage over and over again that other people dare to disagree with them, eventually they alienate so many of their neighbors that government loses the critical mass of pooled effort that it requires. That outrage and hostility is, at that point, easily identifiable as the source of the breakdown, and as a target for those neighbors to smother with an electoral defeat.

Campaigning on enmity and hatred is a shortcut, and a terribly sloppy one. It amazes me now that Karl Rove actually spoke, in 2004, of the Republican majority being "permanent." He may as well have fogged the nearest window with his breath and written majority with his finger.

So what would a Republican win in the next election look like?

First thing Republicans have to do is grab the nettle and tell themselves, "Yes, it takes unusual intelligence and competence to govern." There is no shame in saying to someone else, "You're better at this than I am," or "You understand this better than I do," and agreeing to comply with their instructions for that very reason. And there is no virtue in saying "I like you, so you're in charge." Not a scrap. None. Zero. In fact, it's a boneheaded way to pick a leader. Time to dump it on the trashheap of history.

Having done that, they need to search out their brilliant members and listen to them. They need to learn to approach politics not as distributive bargaining, where there's a finite pot of goods to be split, and the object of the game is to beat back your opponent and grab as much as you can, but rather as integrative bargaining, where if both sides will agree to contribute all their talents to making the enterprise run at maximum efficiency, then everyone will get more from the pot, because the pot itself will grow larger.

How will we know this is happening? One big sign: the word "liberal" will never come out of their mouths. If the best a candidate can do is fling "liberal" as a perjorative term, then they've got nothing. They aren't bringing ideas, they're bringing leftovers.

This is not my wish or my request: this is my diagnosis and my prediction. Republicans can either make a clean, radical break with the tactics of the past, or they can muddle through, half-and-half, still contaminating their platform and their argument for people's votes with the old, polarizing tactics that make the negotiation distributive instead of integrative. If the Democrats had nominated Hillary, the primary candidate who had all the institutional advantages and knew how to play the game, I have no idea who would be president this morning. Instead, the Democrats nominated the unsafe choice, the departure, the one who didn't play the game the old way, who broke old rules and pulled new ones out of thin air, and the results speak for themselves: an electoral outcome that wasn't inches from stalemate, but was the most dramatic in a generation. Sure, economic conditions and Bush's mistakes gave Obama a cushion of voter discontent, but I'm convinced that the layer of votes traceable to those two forces is thinner than most folks seem to think, although historians may not be able to make that case this side of the next century.

For the Republicans, a clean break will harness the incredible minds that wait in their ranks, and will pipe new fuel, new ideas, new proposals into this country's engines of creativity. A cautious, muddled, indecisive housecleaning will not do. And if Republicans turn out for the 2010 elections still framing politics as a war against enemy liberals who must be defeated, then they're in for another thrashing, another piledriving, another wipe-out, to rival the one we just witnessed. And the painful lesson can be administered as often as necessary until it is learned.

I am prepared to wake up the day after the 2010 elections to find that Republicans pulled off a smashing wave of victories, and to smile and be glad about it, if they do it the right way. This country works best when everyone, from all political perspectives, chips in their very best efforts. This is a moment where a big national stumbling block has acquired an enormous crack. The Republicans can fill it in with cement and keep it in place, so we all can keep tripping over it, or they can stick in their chisel and finish the job. I pray they will, and I pray the 2010 fight will be an even match that brings out the best in everyone.

Naming

"I'd really, really love to name a kid Π. The problem is, he'd get away with murder, because when he got in trouble, you couldn't call him by his full name."

Me, yesterday, in a post-Sunday school conversation. One of the kids found this hilarious, and insisted that I share it with the world.

Cretins

I do not identify with the Democratic Party. I am not a registered Democrat, and have no plans to become one. I am not, today, committed to voting for Barack Obama. I desperately want John McCain to lose, and I am aware that would result in an Obama victory, but because I live where I live, my vote won't make that any more or less likely. Oregon's going for Obama by a wide margin, no matter what I do about it.

What infuriates me to the point of despair about the Democrats is how cowardly they are. Now, yesterday I wrote about Republicans' moral cowardice, which I think explains their argumentative tactics more than any genuine viciousness or belligerence: I think they've found something that works, and even though they probably find it troubling, they can't take the risk of pursuing a less certain strategy, even if the less certain strategy is the defensible one that would let them sleep easily at night. That's what I mean by moral cowardice.

The Democratic leadership's cowardice is of a different sort. They are completely bewildered by the concept of making opinion, and are petrified at the risks of so much as trying it. Instead, they have no choice but to follow it. There is not an ounce of granite anywhere in their spines, not an ounce of stubborn confidence that if they repeat the truth enough times and defy anyone to prove them wrong, that public opinion may come around.

The latest example of this is offshore drilling.

I've written about this before. The arguments for changing the law to let oil companies drill offshore are moronic. The additional oil absolutely cannot make a difference in the situation we currently face, because it can't get to the marketplace in any reasonable timespan. Nothing uncertain about that: it can't.

If being anti-drilling were a Republican position, they would put that simple fact into the echo chamber and flog it, publicly, with all their might. They would know that sooner or later, people's opinions would change. They would have the courage, the determination, the fortitude, to plough right into even a strong and fierce front of public opposition, and bend it back into opinion that supported them.

If I live to be two hundred years old, I doubt I'll ever see the Democrats pull off that kind of shaping.

They've already caved on offshore drilling, and are now trying to find the least bad, least damaging framework to open it up. Why? Because they read the poll numbers, and their cowardly little knees went to knocking. "Oh no! Those mysterious people out there who sometimes vote for us, but not very often, don't like our position on this issue! Persuade? What's that? Educate? What's that? Lead? I've never heard that word before. Our only choice is to make sure that whatever we tell them we're going to do is exactly what they want done at that specific moment!"

That, while we're on the subject, is precisely why every Democratic candidate for major office is in favor of the continued employment of capital punishment in this country. They see the numbers, and their backbones turn to water. And that is the chief deal-breaker that keeps me from voting Democrat anytime there's a Green Party candidate available. Cynthia McKinney is an exception, and one that's really complicating my decision of what to do with my vote for president -- I'm all but decided to write in Helen Prejean -- but further down the ticket, it's Green where available, case-by-case in all other circumstances.

I will say that this flaw is far more forgivable than the flaw I was chewing the scenery about yesterday evening. In some ways, it's almost encouraging. If the idea of a powerful and effective government is scary, and the idea of a rickety government that can't get its act together is somehow comforting, then everyone ought to vote Democrat every time. Not only are Democrats the party that eat their young, that run campaigns like circular firing squads, but they certainly can't take an agenda and marshal enough public support behind it to make any fundamental change.

Obama may defy that historical pattern on a few points. He may be able to talk people into seeing things differently. But I'm not encouraged by his performance on the two issues I've cited here: offshore drilling and capital punishment. He isn't putting much kick into swimming against the current. I'm afraid he's tainted by the all-pervading Democratic culture of followership. I'll need much more powerful evidence before I can muster up too much enthusiasm for the idea that he can make things different.

And to this day, I still don't think the guy's that good of a speaker. And I base my opinion on a deeper and more studied background of judging speaker effectiveness than about 99.999% of the population. Mostly, it's about the baseline expectations, and how far someone moves beyond that baseline. My baseline is, I think, different from others'.

I will be less disappointed if Obama wins than if McCain does, because I'm less opposed to an empty and repetitive charade than I am to rewarding vicious slander, thereby reinforcing it and guaranteeing its reuse in the next electoral cycle. But I still haven't caught the enthusiasm of either party, and I don't expect to.

Crevasse

I can argue like a Republican. Check this out: here's how a Republican would argue against the McCain-Palin candidacy.

Premise #1: Watch this.

Premise #2: Read for yourself what Obama wanted taught to kindergarteners. Search in the page for this phrase: "All family life courses of instruction," and then jump down to paragraph nine. Read it in its entirely, especially the parts about "touch an intimate part of another person."

Let it dawn on you that Obama wanted Kindergarteners to learn about bad touches, so they could protect themselves.

Now, if I'm a Democrat, I stop here. I've refuted another Republican lie. But I'm a Republican, remember? Of course I won't stop here.

JOHN MCCAIN BELONGS TO THE PARTY THAT GAVE US MARK FOLEY.

HE SPENT CAMPAIGN FUNDS ON A TELEVISION ADVERTISEMENT ATTACKING BARACK OBAMA FOR TEACHING KINDERGARTENERS ABOUT BAD TOUCH.

THE CONCLUSION IS CLEAR.

JOHN MCCAIN IS PRO-CHILD MOLESTATION.

NOT JUST THAT, BUT JOHN MCCAIN PERSONALLY RAPES CHILDREN. SEEN YOUR CHILD LATELY? JOHN MCCAIN IS PROBABLY RAPING YOUR CHILD RIGHT NOW.

Here's the point of what, I admit, is an incredibly tasteless post. Do you find it over the top? Do you find it excessive? Hyperbole?

Have you forgotten Susan Smith?

Have you forgotten Newt Gingrich's words to the AP, explaining what happened to her? "I think the mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick society is getting and how much we have to have change. I think people want to change, and the only way you can get change is to vote Republican."

And you did know, didn't you, that Susan Smith's stepfather was a local Republican leader, right? And that he molested her? YET ANOTHER REPUBLICAN CHILD MOLESTER. THE REPUBLICAN PLATFORM REQUIRES EVERYONE TO MOLEST THEIR CHILD EVERY HOUR ON THE HOUR OR BE PUT TO DEATH.

See? I can argue just like a Republican. Keep this in mind the next time you get tempted to say that there's no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, that all politicians lie. Ask yourself if you can even imagine Obama saying any of the kinds of things I've laid out above.

And then be honest with yourself, and ask if Republicans would hesitate for one heartbeat before they leveled charges that were that inflammatory, or even worse, based solely on the two minor, easily-explained gaffes that I pointed out above in John McCain's clumsy attack.

These are all things Republicans would say in the blink of an eye, with no twinge of conscience.

A few weeks ago, we heard about how Barack Obama was playing the race card when he referred to an image from a Republican ad. In the ad, Ben Franklin's face on the hundred dollar bill turned into Obama's. Obama mentioned, in passing, that Republicans would point out that he didn't look like the guys on the currency, which was factually 100% correct. For the next several days, all we heard was how Obama was playing the race card.

Now, all we hear is about how sexist Obama and Biden are. Not about the sexism card. Not about the McCain campaign's ineptitude in failing to vet Sarah Palin, in failing to find out about the ethics investigation, in failing to find out about her comical reversal on the Bridge to Nowhere, on failing to find out all sorts of embarrassing details. No, Obama's a sexist. Previously, when he made an objectively, factually verifiable comment, he was playing a race card. Now that he's pointing out facts, he's a sexist.

And they aren't embarrassed. They aren't capable of being embarrassed.

I have my problems with the Democratic Party. Part of me will not be pleased if they win the White House this November. But part of me is ready to say that I will no longer live in a country ruled by a party that embraces wrong, that is unashamedly vicious and dishonest. I am not idealistic about politics, but there are lines that may not be crossed, and there is wickedness that is not tolerable in a leader.

I think John McCain and Sarah Palin want, by their own understanding of the country's problems and their own proposals, to make things better. But I think they've weakened, and realized that doing wrong brings short-term advantage, and their moral cowardice has moved them to embrace that short-term advantage. And they've taken their block of voters with them. Plenty of people I would otherwise respect and think of fondly, I get closer and closer to hating. This resentment can't fester forever. The Democrats can't be the adults, the party that chooses decency, the party that stops at the line, forever.

For most of the twentieth century, the white supremacists took every vicious, violent, dishonest, and wrong advantage they could to keep nonwhite folks out of any position of power. When the dam broke, it broke violently. And I just can't believe Republicans can't see what they're storing up for themselves. They are brewing up a broth of hatred, and immersing themselves in it, thinking they'll always be safe. I keep telling myself, they can't be that foolish. They can't. There are limits. They just can't.

But maybe they can. They did, after all, elect George W. Bush, and then return him to office for a second term.

He was incompetent. Utterly unequal to the office. In hindsight, that's open-and-shut, and no longer a matter of opinion. It wasn't that he was stupid, because he wasn't; but it was flat true that he was stubborn, self-satisfied, and incurious. A competent president must question himself. That simply isn't a hard idea to understand. Bush refused to do so, so Bush was unfit to be president. I said this, over and over and over and over and over again, in 2000. I have never been so right in my life. And it has never felt worse. I said it again in 2004. Right again, overruled again, should've listened to me again. Being Cassandra sucks.

Three times in a row is not tolerable.

Robert Lifton has written several books explaining how doctors who practiced in Germany during the Nazi years could break down every principle they ought to have embraced, to silence their consciences so much that they could be concentration camp operatives. He's talked about the kind of disconnect, the kind of dual consciousness, that made such choices tolerable. And I am convinced that perfectly intelligent, perfectly principled Republican friends and associates of mine have given in to exactly that kind of mental disconnect. If they ever stopped to really associate the words, the attacks, the decisions, with themselves, they'd be too appalled to continue one more second. But as long as they can convince themselves that it's all some sort of semi-real game, some sort of fake Monopoly money and Monopoly speech and Monopoly debate and Monopoly ideas and Monopoly smears and Monopoly slanders, it's all okay, all the game pieces go back in the box, and the next morning everyone is friendly again.

That will not work forever.

That won't even work one more time. The time for that has passed.

I am already at the end of my rope, and I am a born-and-raised Texan. I have all the reason in the world to feel fondness and patience toward the Republicans in my circle. But this is no longer something I can wink at. This has crossed the line.

It's too late for John McCain to clean up his act and run the kind of campaign he promised. He simply has to lose. If he wins the presidency, then this nation has lost its soul, has violently flung aside everything that made it special.

McCain once opposed torture, saying that torture strikes not only to the very heart of right and wrong, but to the very heart of who we are. When he said it, his words delighted me, because in my academic work I've been building for years on a core idea that ethics aren't a set of rules, but are a set of identity elements that tell us who we are. But as part of the image overhaul he carried out on himself to quiet the fears of the Republican base, McCain has even backed off from his anti-waterboarding position, and now apparently no longer cares who we are, or whether we're throwing away who we once were.

And that is not tolerable.

He has to lose.

In a landslide.

Creativity

Two good political one-liners I've heard lately:

"Sarah Palin's not the pig -- she's the lipstick."

"Jesus was a community organizer. Pontius Pilate was a governor."

Credentials

As a professor of Communication, I am prepared to say, for the record, that anyone who takes six years and five colleges to earn a bachelor's degree in Communication is not president material. Or even vice president material.

That is all.

Remission

So today, I got to thinking about the contour of ignorance.

And this is not an excuse to bash other folks. I'm talking only about my own ignorance.

Lots of folks wonder about the future. I can't say I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I believe I've reached my very own "End of History," as Francis Fukuyama might say. He was naïve to say it when he did, and maybe I'm equally naïve, but all I'm really saying is that the future isn't that interesting to me. Instead, I wonder about what I don't get.

A lot of folks wonder what tomorrow will bring. If they just hold their horses long enough, they find out. Even quadriplegics in a persistent vegetative state make it to tomorrow in no more than twenty-four hours. It's a singular stream with a single current and fewer surprises than we like to pretend there are.

What interests me more is what I don't get.

I notice that a lot of folks oversimplify matters that I know to be complicated. Here, in Oregon, when people find out I'm from Texas, they oversimplify what Texans think, believe, experience. People of just about any political stripe oversimplify their opponents. People who are scared of any discrete group oversimplify their motives, ideas, behavior. People who aren't sure how to tackle a problem are often the first to oversimplify its essence and the proper solution. And, of course, me being an academic and all, I have this terrible bent toward spotting the complexity in things, sometimes needlessly, so all those oversimplifications stand out to me like signal flares at midnight. Hazard of the trade.

But what I've noticed is, for any human experience, there are those who level it down to something manageable and comforting, and there are those who grapple with it in its endless complexity, usually because they have no other choice. And as I see people around me respond cluelessly to others, to situations, to phenomena, I wonder what it is that I'm clueless about. I have absolutely zero doubt that I have many, many clueless spots; I'm just unsure what they are.

I've taught my students for years that whatever opinions they have about culture, and the typical habits and behaviors of other national/ethnic/racial groups, I can identify another group who has the same reaction to them. A lot of my students are Caucasian and sheltered, so they sometimes report that they think African-Americans are belligerent, hostile, abrasive, and otherwise discomforting. And it startles them when I tell them that some Japanese folks would regard them with identical discomfort, finding them too aggressive, too belligerent, too likely to invade their space, be uncomfortably direct, show overt hostility when it wasn't called for, etc. Instead of thinking of themselves as an endpoint against which others' behavior ought to be measured, what I want them to understand is that they occupy a spot on a continuum, and there are people groups in spots on either side of them.

That truth strikes me as powerful enough that I'm pretty certain that others have much greater insight than I do into the very moments of other people's cluelessness that attract my attention. My gut tells me that the simple distinction between cluelessness and savvy actually conceals an identical geometry of situatedness: I'm not the enlightened one; I'm just further along the spectrum than some, while not as far as others. And I'm sure I display my cluelessness to those others.

My instincts tell me that those who have direct experience can claim a certain gold standard of authentic understanding, but in my less sure moments, I doubt even that is true. People who are outside observers can chip in yet another kind of wisdom, yet another stream of clues, which put experience into its proper perspective, while those who actually live through the experience, who distill it out of their sense data and interpretive filters, are actually at a disadvantage in understanding what their memories have recorded. If I were to sketch a Johari window, I'd now be talking about the blind self.

And the interesting thing about cluelessness is that it's much more multivariate and multidimensional than the future. As I said earlier, the future emerges from the present, even if sometimes we completely overlook the elements of the present that converge to create that future. But overcoming ignorance isn't a simple forward motion. Instead, I think of it as a point in endless space, from which there is the opportunity to push outward, as light from a candle, propagating in all directions. I can be clueless, I can have potential to overcome my limits, in empathy, in aesthetics, in reasoning, in prediction, in ethics, in grasp of natural forces, in any of a literally unbounded set of types of knowledge. The possibilities sprint out in front of my imagination, even in its most febrile explosions.

It's a lot more interesting than the future. And besides, there's no need to worry about tomorrow. Today has evil enough of its own.

Burn Down The Mission

So tonight I watched Rick Warren's Civil Forum on webcast.

John McCain makes it all sound so simple, doesn't he?

Barack Obama's answers to the questions weren't nearly as fluent as McCain's. Obama was very careful with the words he chose. And that was true for every question, not just the questions for which anyone could've predicted that McCain's answer would please the crowd more than his. He weighed his words for the entire hour, and he often cautioned that there weren't simple formulas under which the decisions would make themselves.

McCain, to almost every question, had an answer that would fit on a bumper sticker.

This is nothing new.

Understand, I was once a hard-core, far-right conservative. In 1979, when I was in fifth grade, I made up my own pro-Reagan flyers and handed them out. I chose Baylor for college, thinking, among other things, that I'd fit right in politically. And six years later, when I left, I'd done a complete pendulum swing, and it was because of exactly what I saw tonight in the contrast between McCain and Obama. I'd realized that the scale of the problems that the president and Congress address gives them a density of complication that absolutely rules out reduction to slogans. I might forgive a parent for explaining these things to very young children in short words and sentences, but the president of the United States is not my parent and I am not a child.

Now, I will admit, some of the difference I saw tonight had to do with the questions, the questioner, and the venue. Rick Warren's questions were always going to be a downhill fight for McCain and an uphill fight for Obama. Everyone knew that. Points to Obama for braving it, and points to McCain for visiting the NAACP convention this year, after Bush boycotted it for the first umpteen years of his political career. Very rarely is a speaking situation, or an audience, a level playing field. Part of McCain's fluency and part of Obama's caution had to do with the tilt of the subject matter. But that was far from all of it.

The Republican Party is running on a long historical cycle of providing easy answers. The Democrats have, for this century and much of the last, been the party that described problems as multivariate and complex, and offered cautious, complex responses that were often not very comforting. That, I think, is what we saw tonight out of McCain and Obama. Nothing has changed. The parties are playing to type.

And after the last eight years, it just dumbfounds me that anyone on earth can still find simple solutions attractive. What is it going to take? How many ham-handed, clumsy moves are going to have to blow up in our face before we accept that perhaps governing this country is harder than it looks? That a governing strategy can't fit into five words, and if someone manages to do it, then what they've just produced isn't substance, but spin? Is the past five years of the Bush administration not enough to show people that incompetent government by the incurious and the unprepared, by people who are caught off guard by what they didn't stir themselves to think about, has real consequences? Consequences that don't go away overnight?

In my darker moments, I sometimes think very hateful thoughts. I think thoughts that prominently include the word "stupid," repeated over and over again. I compare people who would swallow this kind of appeal to dog food. To furniture. To breakfast cereal. To a bag of hammers. To dirt. Brain damaged dirt. But once my frustration cools off, I remember once again how wrong I am to think such things.

It's not stupidity, it's fear.

The electorate puts me in mind of a cancer patient. Barack Obama fits the role of a skillful, educated and supremely ethical doctor. The very best doctors, when talking to cancer patients, have to dance their way through a minefield. They have to accentuate the positive, but it's horribly wrong, even wicked, to eliminate the negative. They have to hedge, they have to point out risks, they have to admit what isn't understood. Their ethics require that they seek out informed consent. That, I assert, is what Obama had to offer tonight: a diagnosis. Diagnoses aren't clear-cut, because human bodies are unpredictable and idiosyncratic, and treatment is often painful, carries risks, and bears no guarantee of success.

John McCain is a pharmaceutical sales rep. He's got some pills to sell. His claims about the pills are power-worded. Whether he's right or not, and even if in the back of our minds we know that the doctor is probably closer to the truth, it's very appealing for us to think about swallowing a pill and watching all that bad, scary cancer just vanish as the magic medicine spreads through us and wipes it out like an eraser. We want to believe it. And so many Americans have talked themselves into a defeatist funk when it comes to understanding any of these issues, or either party's position on them, that investing the discipline to make a truly rational decision seems to them to demand a much higher cost than they think they can afford.

I used cancer patient as my example, rather than any other ailment, because I've known too many cancer patients who let fear, frustration and the temptation of despair turn them to irrational silliness: "alternative" medicine that amounted to voodoo. People whose fear is that powerful may as well be drowning. They'll grab at the explanation that ends in more hope, no matter how transparently foolish it may be.

I still have nagging, stubborn, possibly even indelible objections to Barack Obama's bid for my vote. But I am not on the fence when it comes to who is making the stronger case. I still expect I'm going to write someone in. But I have no illusions about what John McCain is doing. As much as his negative ads aggravate me, after he made lofty promises to stay entirely away from such campaigning (and while he makes the jaw-dropping claim that his campaign hasn't been negative), that's not my biggest grievance with his argument set. My biggest gripe is with its dishonest, violent, condescending simplicity.

Intermission

To teach by Socratic
Is enthymematic.