AmbivaBlog

Mail Mad

I live in New York City. In the past month, two "financial instruments," as it were, that were sent to me by regular mail -- a stock certificate, and a birthday check from my parents -- never arrived. Neither was particularly identifiable as a financial instrument, and I've gotten other checks, some of them more identifiable as such, so I can't conclude that it's mail theft -- that someone is cherry-picking my mail for the good stuff -- or that the two disappearances in one month have anything to do with each other. The only thing these two pieces of mail have in common is that I was expecting them -- and therefore know I never got them. If two could vanish within a month, it makes me wonder: what else of value have I never gotten that I wasn't expecting?

The postal service is said to deliver an average of 5 pieces of mail per address, per day, nationwide. Just guessing, but in New York City that probably means at least 50 million pieces of mail are processed every day. More likely twice that or more. After passing through machines, which can hardly be error-proof (do they mangle and mismatch letters? stick them together? shoot them onto the floor under the machine?), mail is hand-sorted and bundled by route carriers, who, in our neighborhood, frequently drop mail pieces in the wrong mailbox or deliver them to the right number on the wrong street, or the wrong number on the right street.

Much has been said about the "civil service mentality," the lack of motivation of postal (or public-school) employees who have an entrenched union (the APWU or American Postal Workers Union, part of the AFL-CIO), guaranteed pay grades, seniority, and pension. And certainly one could scream standing in line in the post office watching clerks work in the dreamy slo-mo of a competition-free zone. But postal workers are no worse than the new bottom layer of poorly-educated, minimum-wage corporate employees, who have none of the civil servant's comfy security or benefits, but have a surprisingly similar lethargy and indifference, bred of hopelessness. They are the people in Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, who know they'll never get out of poverty no matter how hard they work, so, often, they don't. There's some strange defiance in the fashion for extended, elaborately lacquered fingernails, like those of ancient Chinese aristocrats, that comport so poorly with cash-register keys.

All but gone, in our time and country, is the old ethic of working hard and well at even the humblest jobs, either in the faith that hard work will be rewarded or (rarer still) in the expectation of no reward beyond the private satisfaction of doing so. Only immigrants, for whom the minimum wage, translated into pesos or dong, is a bonanza, still hold to those two antique faiths. For the native-born, it's "American Idol" or nothing. Jacques' friend Peter Kass, the great drama teacher who was a protegé of Clifford Odets and a friend of "Julie" (John) Garfield, tells us that in back the '40s and '50s show-biz people used to say, "Success and fame . . . or just a lousy living." We're all in show biz now. And the living is lousier than ever.

- amba

(There's actually a watchdog group, Postal Watch, that exists "to protect the Rights of the People" from "intrusive and burdensome United States Postal Service actions and regulations." It doesn't say anything about indifferent, careless and sloppy.)

A Great Analogy? (UPDATED)

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change.NET, on the election of Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI:

[T]he two words that went through my head were: Konstantin Chernenko.

Also known as . . . the stagnation before the storm?

UPDATE: Au contraire: Richard Lawrence Cohen's comment seems important enough that I want to copy it here (for you non-comment readers) and put in the links:

Conservatives are blogging about him as if he's going to be Churchill. (See Sisu, The Anchoress, and G as in Good and H as in Happy, for instance, and their links to sites like Asia Times and Chiesa.) And I have the uncomfortable feeling they might be right. While liberals are focusing on whether the Church is going to change regarding abortion, celibacy, contraception, etc., it is quite possible that the Church's historic role in the coming generation will be to help prevent the Islamicization of Europe.

Intelligent Design leaders like William Dembski are also elated about the election of Benedict XVI, who as Cardinal Ratzinger thanked science for revealing the miracles of Creation: "[W]e must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error… (They) point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before."

Benedict XVI's arresting statement at his first mass as Pope that "I have a sense of inadequacy and human turmoil at the responsibility entrusted to me" reveals that he is a humble man -- and not a simple one.

Also very much in the new Pope's favor, he loves cats, talks to them, and they follow him (from Sisu, catblogger extraordinaire). I'll never say another bad word about him.

Sissy concludes: "He loves cats, he plays Mozart on the piano before he goes to bed at night and the dictatorial relativist Left is apoplectic. Halleluijah!"

This of course refers to the new Pope's now-famous dictum that "We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism...that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one's own ego and one's own desires as the final measure."

Here are two must-reads on that subject that I think any honest person would find difficult -- almost impossible -- to dismiss:

Michael Novak's National Review Essay, and

Belmont Club's brilliant "Nightfall" (hat tip: Winds of Change.NET), a meditation on how easily people (without exception! thee and me!) give in to evil, and how the therapeutic welfare state encourages them to do so, and shelters them from the consequences which are Reality's means of teaching us.

As a moderate, I rouse to this ringing call against moral relativism. However, I don't understand why not being a moral relativist would require me to condemn those whose love is to their own sex to a choice between joyless marriage, celibacy, or excommunication and hell. Why not, instead, hold all human love to the same high standard? I also don't understand why the promotion of birth control -- to prevent conception and to prevent the transmission of disease -- is blamed for human licentiousness by the same people who wisely locate the impulse to sin in the soul. If it's in the soul, it's not in the condom box.

These people are saying that our free will to choose the good is so weak that the mere possession of a condom can tip the balance between virtue and temptation. They are also basically saying that sex is nasty unless it is being used (at least potentially) to create new life, and that people who use it exclusively for any other purpose -- even the deepening of intimacy -- should not be shielded from paying a steep price. To them, pregnancy with its responsibilities, or disease with its mortal penalties, are "the consequences which are Reality's means of teaching us."

Elizabeth Anscombe, for whom Princeton University's abstinence group named itself, has some stern and striking things to say on this subject in a famous 1977 essay defending the Church's prohibition of birth control:

In one word: Christianity taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be. . . .

[About preventing conception:] People just won't be so careful. And so the widespread use of contraceptives has in fact led to more and more rather than less and less abortion. . . . [L]ike the fear of venereal disease, [the fear of unwanted pregnancy is] an objection that's little capable of moving people or inspiring them as a positive ideal of chastity may.

The Christian Church has taught such an ideal of chastity: in a narrower sense [i.e. celibacy, devotion to God alone], and in a broader sense in which chastity is simply the virtue whose topic is sex, just as courage is the virtue whose topic is danger and difficulty.

It's a very strange experience to read this, to resonate with much of what she says:

Sexual acts are not sacred actions. But the perception of the dishonour done to the body in treating them as the casual satisfaction of desire is certainly a mystical perception. I don't mean, in calling it a mystical perception, that it's out of the ordinary. It's as ordinary as the feeling for the respect due to a man's dead body: the knowledge that a dead body isn't something to be put out for the collectors of refuse to pick up. This, too, is mystical; though it's as common as humanity

-- and then to discover that it is only the transmission of life (and not of love) that makes it so: "rewardless trouble of spirit [is] associated with the sort of sexual activity which from its type is guaranteed sterile: the solitary or again the homosexual sort." (How does someone who has likely never experienced "the homosexual sort" state authoritatively that its only possible fruit is "rewardless trouble of spirit"? In fact, that is probably a good description of what a gay friend of mine experienced in his effort at heterosexual marriage.)

UPDATE AGAIN: For a most refreshing gloss on this, a must-read is Karen Armstrong on the history of the Christian church's view of marriage (hat tip: Jesus Politics):

Issues of sexuality and gender have long been the Achilles' heel of western Christianity. Indeed, in the earliest days of the church, Christians had a jaundiced view of heterosexual marriage . . . The fathers of the church often used [certain] New Testament remarks to revile marriage, with the same intensity as those Christians who condemn homosexual partnerships today. . . . Even Luther, who left his monastery to marry, inherited Augustine's bleak view of sex. . . . Matrimony was a "hospital for sick people". It merely covered the shameful act with a veneer of respectability, so that "God winks at it". . . . Calvin was the first western theologian to praise marriage unreservedly, and thereafter Christians began to speak of "holy matrimony". The present enthusiasm for "family values" is, therefore, relatively recent. . . . The current attempt to recognise homosexual partnerships is thus the latest development in a long struggle to bring sexuality into the ambit of the sacred.

Armstrong explains what the Biblical proscriptions on "sodomy" really meant in their time (they were about temple ritual, not everyday life), and decries the practice of applying a two-thousand-year-old human document literally -- but of necessity, selectively -- to the present:

The Bible is not a holy encyclopedia, giving clear and unequivocal information; nor is it a legal code that can be applied indiscriminately to our very different society. Lifting isolated texts out of their literary and cultural context can only distort its message. Instead, we should look at the underlying principles of biblical religion, and apply these creatively to our own situation.

Meanwhile, Chiesa tentatively predicts that the Church's stringent opposition to birth control is one thing that may change:

HUMANAE VITAE. The encyclical of Paul VI forbidding artificial contraception produced one of the most serious ruptures between the papal magisterium and the practice of the faithful in recent decades. But today the focal point of the Church’s preaching has shifted: more than the pill and the condom, the Church’s attention is concentrated on the defense of every life from the moment of conception. The result is that even at the summit of the Church’s leadership calm discussions have begun again about the prohibition of “Humanae Vitae” as not definitive or rigid, but open to future corrections. Cardinal Georges Cottier, official theologian of the papal household, gave an authoritative first sign of a shift one month before John Paul II died: he admitted the use of the condom as a defense against AIDS, under accurately described special conditions. It is possible that the new pope will take further steps in the same direction.

Finally, to end this chaotic post-post (troubled by the guilt that I need to be working, not blogging), here and here is the new Pope in his own words.

- amba

The Skirt Strategy

It's really a very clever move, when you think about it. And loaded with ironies.

The two nominees to federal appellate court, blocked by Democrats during Bush's first term, who have now been renominated and endorsed by a party-line Judiciary Committee vote, setting the stage for a showdown over Democrats' determination to filibuster, are both women. One of them, Associate Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court, the nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for DC -- which the L.A. Times has called "the triple-A farm team for the Supreme Court" -- is African-American, the daughter of Alabama sharecroppers.

Both are extremely conservative. Priscilla Richman Owen is a "protege of Bush confident Karl Rove, who engineered her 1994 election to the Texas Supreme Court." She has opposed the "judicial bypass" written into Texas law that allows a minor, in special circumstances, to get a judge's permission to obtain an abortion without parental notification. And she has handed down rulings that directly benefit her big-business campaign contributors. Brown holds rather Clarence Thomas-like views, bending over backwards to avoid any whiff of political correctness, obsequious towards the business establishment and harshly Darwinian towards its footsoldiers and aspirants. As the New York Times wrote in 1993:

[S]he has praised the infamous Lochner line of cases, in which the Supreme Court, from 1905 to 1937, struck down worker health and safety laws as infringing on the rights of business. . . .

In one case, her court ordered a rental car company to stop its supervisor from calling Hispanic employees by racial epithets. Justice Brown dissented, arguing that doing so violated the company's free speech rights.

Last year, her court upheld a $10,000 award for emotional distress to a black woman who had been refused an apartment because of her race. Justice Brown, the sole dissenter, argued that the agency involved had no power to award the damages.

But she's black, and a woman. Not only are these constituencies traditionally claimed by the Democratic Party, but opposition to Brown's nomination will be portrayed by Republicans as racist and sexist -- or, more convincingly, as ripping the equal-opportunity mask off of naked left-wing ideology. As Outside the Beltway observes drily, "That the GOP has decided to implement the rule change with Brown, a black woman, is likely not a coincidence."

The irony is that this opportunistic ideological war is shattering so many glass ceilings. We now have a black woman Secretary of State (whose qualifications even her enemies can't impugn), trumping Bill Clinton's appointment of a mere woman. Republicans have taken political correctness and thrown it back in Democrats' faces, with nominees who are politically-correct in their demographic characteristics but proudly politically-incorrect in their views. With this tactic, the Republicans can use race and gender to pretend they alone are so enlightened as to be blind to race and gender. In doing so, they win minority and female recruits simply by portraying political conservatism as the road to unparalleled reward and individual success. In its own way, it's a sneaky affirmative-action program.

- amba

Elders, Like, Totally Rule!

Ronni at Time Goes By wants to rehabilitate the ancient and valuable word ELDER:

Adulthood is all about action - doing, reaching, grasping, achieving, getting, succeeding – as it should be. The idea that elderhood holds different imperatives does not exist in our collective consciousness anymore. Instead, elders are pressured to keep up the pace, to continue to achieve and society’s highest praise for old people is reserved for those who most resemble adults in their appearance and behavior. And when they no longer are capable of holding up that pretense, they are made invisible to the culture, consigned to institutions where all rights to decisions about their lives are claimed by adults.

But what if old people, as I believe, have a different reason to be? . . .

Yep, I want to entice you to go there and find out what wise elder Ronni thinks that reason may be. Hint: I've often thought, hearing them debrief at great length (especially in the South), that old people have a "story-letdown reflex" (analogous to nursing mothers' milk-letdown reflex, and for a comparably nourishing purpose).

- amba

Helpless

That's how it feels when someone you love is depressed. They are still there, but not there, like Emily in "Our Town" who's sitting at the breakfast table but is really already dead. Maybe it's even worse when they are able to report articulately from that hollow void, but can't hear your answer. They are, however temporarily, as unreachable as the dead, and the terrible fear, of course, is that you're really going to lose them, because to be depressed is to be "half in love with easeful death": you feel dead already, and deservedly so -- unfit for anything but the Darwinian death penalty -- all that hurts is the part that's still alive, so what's to lose?

I find myself sounding all preachy and teachy (you'll hear me in his Comments, finger-shaking), trying to scold my brother out of his depression, when I know from experience that will is not the way. Pain or anger is the way out. Depression is "free-floating" and futile, like "learned helplessness."* It's the overall-aching, phantom-limb pain of feeling nothing. Anger or pain is pointed self-defense; it can identify and apply itself to one point, like a chick's egg-tooth, and break out.

All I can do is wear his shirt, which looks better on him but feels better (if far baggier) on me (oh for a digital camera!), because it gives me the sense of warmth and protection that I feel so helpless, right now, to extend to him.

- amba

*Re: Learned Helplessness, if the Martin Seligman who conducted these horrific experiments on dogs in the 1970s -- subjecting them to electric shocks they could not avoid or escape, at which the dogs became depressed -- is the same one who now expounds on "Authentic Happiness," I find that an appalling irony, though perhaps it's just a logical progression . . .

James Hillman Sampler II

From The Myth of Analysis

On the Essential Ambivalence of Creativity and Love:

Those twins, compulsion and inhibition, are familiar enough in all creative efforts where one is both driven and blocked, enthusiastic and critical, on fire and fearful. . . . The creative may be a single urge, yet we are always "of two minds." Eros is both direct, like fire and arrow, and indirect, like the wreathed garland, also its symbol.

The compulsion-inhibition ambivalence shows in ritual, in play, and in mating, eating, and fighting patterns, where for each step forward under the urge of compulsion there is a lateral elaboration of dance, of play, of ornamentation -- a "breather," which delays, heightens tension, and expands imaginative possibility and aesthetic form, making patterns, delightful and devious, cooling the compulsion of inborn release mechanisms for direct fulfillment . . . whether [the object] is to be copulated with, eaten, or killed. . . . The indirect movement is not a pattern of flight . . . It is not, essentially, a bending-back or a turning-away from the object; it is rather a continued advance upon it, but indirectly and with a different timing, and it overcomes compulsion, yet fulfills its need in another way. . . .

[F]ear is as much the spontaneous gift of eros as is the erotic impulse itself. Trusting and doubting, yielding and denying, opening and closing, back and forth, are part of the interplay of eros and psyche, each bringing the other into being. . . .

Fear seems an inherent necessity to the eros experience; where it is absent, one might well doubt the full validity of the loving.

A consequence of this fear is that we can trust eros. Instinct contains its own self-regulator . . . .The compulsion is checked by the counsel of wise fear -- elaborating, ritualizing . . .

(pp. 74-76, 81)
_______________

On Impossible Love and Love Triangles:

Of all forms of impossibility, the arrow strikes us into triangles to such an extraordinary extent that this phenomenon must be examined for its creative role in soul-making. The sudden dynamic effect on the psyche of jealousy and other triangular fears and fantasies hint that this constellation of "impossibility" bears as much significance as does the conjunction [of two]. To explain it Oedipally or . . . to see it morally and negatively, does not allow it objective necessity. So necessary is the triangular pattern that, even where two exist only for each other, a third will be imagined. . . . We witness the same Eros which joins two now breaking the reciprocity of the couple by striking his arrow into a third. The stage is set for tragedy and for every extreme sort of psychic and erotic aberration. Perhaps this is its necessity: the triangles of eros educate the psyche out of its girlish goodness, showing it the extent of its fantasies and testing its capacity. The triangle . . . like all impossible love, cannot be lived fully in actuality, so that the third comes as imaginal reality. But it comes not as imagery in meditation but through violence and pain and in the shape of actual persons, teaching the psyche by means of the triangle that the imaginal is most actual and the actual symbolic. We say, at one and the same time: "It's nonsense, a projection, all in my imagination" and "I can't go on without the actual you."

(pp. 97-98)

©1972, 1998 Northwestern University Press

"Educate the psyche out of its girlish goodness"! How I love that. It was happening to me as I first read it.

- amba

Addiction is Addiction.

I make coffee in the morning with the same reverent impatience with which a junkie cooks her fix.

- amba

[My cable modem keeps cutting out, and I can't be here for a service visit till Saturday (the problem is either a connection on the roof or disruption by construction in the neighborhood), so it may be kinda quiet -- or at least, refreshingly short-winded -- around here for a few days.]

UPDATE: Silly me, I forgot that this new computer has AirPort! Living in the middle of so many overlapping hot spots, I'll never be lonely.

HABEMUS PAPAM

"Habemus Papam!" We have a daddy. (Of course, "we," strictly speaking, are Catholics only, but the whole world knows it has a stake in this and the whole world is kibitzing.) Oh the security of ritual, the security of authority, the security of certainty. What children we still are.

Andrew Sullivan, a gay and in some ways conservative Catholic, on the views of the new Pope:

A woman should follow the "roles inscribed in her biology"; gays are inherently disposed to "intrinsic moral evil"; conscience as the modern world understands it is illusory. Yes, we have a new Pope. Just like the old one, but without any of his redeeming features.

SEPARATED AT BIRTH? Go here, and then . . . just imagine the guy in the right-hand image in a Pope's miter.

Don't misunderstand me. In many ways I agree with this by Dinesh D'Souza:

Augustine contends that God is the lamp that illuminates the inner soul. Rousseau broke with Augustine by severing this connection between the inner voice and any external authority. For Rousseau the inner voice is the sovereign and final authority.

This is the moral code that we have inherited today . . .

It is a massive shift in the source of morality — away from the external order, toward the inner self. . . .

I do not believe that this new ethic of the Imperial Self can be completely uprooted, as some people who bemoan the decline of the old moral consensus would like to do. But I am also concerned with the moral danger of conceding final moral authority to the Imperial Self. Human nature is flawed and the "voice within" is sometimes unreliable and sometimes wrong. As Immanuel Kant warned, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

Perhaps a more practical goal is to contain, and perhaps to roll back, some of the excesses of the new ethic of authenticity. This involves a recovered sense of the moral sources that continue to inform our moral self-understanding, sources that can be found in our religious and ethical traditions but which have disappeared from our public debate. The urgent task at hand is to recognize the power of the new ethic of authenticity while steering it toward something higher, to ennoble the self by directing it toward the good.

But I don't believe the "external authority" is a bunch of men in robes, or even a book. The external authority is reality. There are objective moral and spiritual laws (e.g. "what goes around, comes around") just as there are objective physical laws. Those laws are enshrined in every great tradition, but encrusted with a lot of superstitious and political nonsense that is given the same sacred status as the living truth it partially obscures. Right now, we're offered a stark choice between buying it all or rejecting it all. This is immensely frustrating to many, many people who want to investigate, discover, and submit to the truth, but for whom merely to submit to authority is an abdication of responsibility.

- amba

Sample Living Will

Paul Rudnick posts his online in the current New Yorker. A few points:

5. Do not resuscitate me before noon.

10. If there is any family dispute over my medical condition, it must be settled with a dreidel.

17. In lieu of flowers or donations, I would prefer rioting.

Shoulder to the Pen

Alicia Bourassa of Behind Glass collects rueful, consoling quotes from famous writers under the rubric "Writing is Hard."

She missed this one:

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
- Thomas Mann

This is another great source. Here I found:

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
- Robert A. Heinlein

Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.
- Rosemary Mahoney

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it to be God.
- Sidney Sheldon