Words of the Day: "Love" and "Life"

The company making and/or distributing old-fashioned Dominica bay rum aftershave has apparently gone out of business, but I was able to buy a couple bottles on e-Bay at an almost-reasonable price. I made the purchase as a "guest," and the confirmation e-mail I just got was (a) misleading — suggesting they were holding my purchase hostage until I signed up — and (b) a temptation to join e-Bay and use their services to buy items I "love." 

Okay, at least they didn't insist on an e-Bay "community" or "family," but items I love, like aftershave?! I know we have those hearts on Facebook and that at least one NPR station asks if we love their shows, but I think we've gotten to some serious word-inflation with loving anything short of puppies or kittens that I'm likely to see on e-Bay (and I assume they do not sell live mammals). Now living in California, far from the pollen-attack-plants of south-west Ohio, I still have some minor allergy issues, and I really like lime bay rum as an aftershave that doesn't aggravate those remaining allergies. I'm grateful for bay rum; I like the smell, especially with a touch of lime — but it's just a casual relationship, not love.

* * *

"All Lives Matter," a meme I received said, and people have pronounced in my hearing "All Life Is Sacred" — and in that second case I've told them not to assert the sanctity of all life while chomping on a hamburger or even a carrot. Or using your leather shoe to squash a cockroach — and then clean your hands off with a bacteria-killing hand sanitizer. Most life on Earth over Earth's history and at any time by weight and number of individuals is Archaea, Bacteria, or, among us "higher" organisms, plants and insects. The Jains come close to literally respecting the sanctity of all life, but if they're to live healthily even their bodies must kill intruding bacteria and viruses, and kill aging or over-active cells of the body itself.

If people mean "All human life is sacred" (or whatever), they should say that, or argue for a definition of "life" that excludes most creatures your high school life-sciences teachers made you study.
This last point is important.
There's a dangerous arrogance in restricting real life to human beings on religious grounds or some secular theory of human exceptionalism. And even if we arrogantly assume we humans are extra-special special, it's just silly to say that cats and dogs and even ants and worms somehow aren't alive. And it's irresponsible to kill living things and not be conscious of doing so. Personally, I've killed bacteria by the billions, and I won't apologize for that killing — but I will take responsibility, and a heavier responsibility for the laboratory work I did that involved killing dogs, one cat, a rabbit or two, and a lot of rats. I've killed my quota of mammals, I think, which is one of the several reasons I now decline to eat them.
Mammals are kin, and I draw the line there for food. I also draw a line at octopuses, which is a lot easier since I'm not even all that fond of squid. 
Octopuses are invertebrates and not in the web of life close to humans and chimps and dogs and birds. But my sister and I were once invited backstage, so to speak, at a major aquarium and got to see an injured octopus in their veterinary section, in an aquarium cage inside a larger aquarium. Anything simpler, and this octopus escaped, picking locks and going around opening other others. As far as the (human) staff could figure out, the octopus got bored, and the locks and cages were a challenge. And I figured any creature smart enough to get bored and pick locks was too smart to kill casually (or have killed and eat if there's a variation of [squid] calamari made with octopus). 
Not too far into the 20th century, there was a fair degree of agreement that humans shouldn't cause unnecessary suffering to sentient creatures, with "sentient" not in the sense of "smart and conscious" and "capable of thought" but just, well, sentient to external stimuli, able to perceive enough to suffer. Whether eating hamburgers and spare ribs is necessary is something we can argue about; cruelty to animals for sport isn't something most of us argue: it's just evil, period.
Our treatment of non-human animals will become a more pressing issue as, as the over-stated title to an article in The Atlantic has it, "Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition." The debate on human life will become more pressing as we in the US enter another round of debate on abortion, with a new US Supreme Court. As others and I have stated repeatedly, that conflict over abortion isn't about "When does life begin?" Life doesn't begin; it began. How do I know? The Bible and my biology courses tell me so. Life began and gets passed down. So, yes, indeed, "There's always a death in an abortion." The question is what's being killed and what status should he/she/it/they have ethically considered and under the law? A human fertilized egg — a human zygote — is a potential unique human individual or, on occasion, a set of genetically pretty much identical but still unique individuals. ("Monozygotic siblings" aren't really identical twins or triplets or whatever: They've had slightly different environments in the womb, and individuality is their birthright.) But a zygote is a one-celled creature, and you shouldn't mind killing it if you eat that hamburger or carrot without qualms or stomp that cockroach and thereby kill more "highly" developed life.
 To get a human zygote more valuable than a steer and important enough to compete with the rights of its human mother, it's most efficient to have a theory of a human soul and to argue that "ensoulment" occurs at the moment of conception. In an important traditional Roman Catholic view, you can have the zygote and succeeded embryos and fetuses as unborn babies and, perhaps more significant, unbaptized babies, who, if killed would wind up in Limbo (at one time) or Hell. As the thoroughly Puritan Reverend Mr. Michael Wigglesworth had God say to unbaptized dead babies it in "The Day of Doom" (1662 —a truly awful poem):

"You sinners are, and such a share	345
As sinners may expect,
Such you shall have; for I do save
None but my own elect.
Yet to compare your sin with their
Who liv’d a longer time,	350
I do confess yours is much less,
Though every sin’s a crime.
"A crime it is, therefore in bliss
You may not hope to dwell
But unto you I shall allow	355
The easiest room in hell.”

And here we get to serious arguments on secular vs. religious ideas on what "life" means in "Choose life" and what we mean by "love" with either a God of Love who'd damn babies on a technicality or in a love one might have for one's fellow human beings viewed realistically and materialistically — and when one becomes human on the way from zygote to embryo to fetus to baby to, well, a conscious, talking, definitely-a-person person. 
WORDS MEAN; and if they "mean" in complex ways, that's all the more reason to use them carefully.

Donald J. Trump and King Richard II: The Politician as Actor

CAUTION: Long, academic (hence, arguably elitist, starting with my using the word "hence") post.

I'm a bit less apprehensive than many about the almost inevitable upcoming election of Donald Trump (19 Dec. 2016, 6 Jan. 2017) in part because I see in him not only the standard historical precedents — Italy supplies two useful ones — but with England's King Richard II. As a youngster, the historical Richard rather heroically met with leaders of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt and lied his royal ass off promising freedom and redress of grievances. He soon suppressed the revolt and sent the serf contingent back to serfdom, promising them they'd be oppressed even more than before. 

Shakespeare deals with Richard later in Richard's life, as Richard moves to his fall. Not with disinterest (I'll note with a double negative), Shakespeare acknowledges and even stresses that kings must be actors. Richard, however, comes to live the part and starts to believe what had become by Shakespeare's time the standard royalist propaganda on the Divine Right of Kings. King Richard is into his own beautiful words — and he's good at language, unlike Mr. Trump — and gets lost in them. He loses out to a man of few words and a relatively early member of "the reality-based community": that man of facts and opportunist action, Henry Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV.

As king, Henry IV gives good but pretty standard Machiavellian advice to his son, who goes on to become Henry V and outdo his dad in more sophisticated Machiavellian kingship. Henry IV isn't into straightforward speech, but here's his analysis of Richard for his son's benefit, and I think ours.

My expectation is that Trump will undermine himself as a, ahem, bad actor with delusions of total power, and will be displaced by hard-facts people who can use Machiavelli et al. to ethical ends. 

Enjoy! (Or just delete; I did give that trigger caution above.)

=============================================================

HENRY IV TO PRINCE HAL
The hope and expectation of thy time
Is ruin'd, and the soul of every man
Prophetically doth forethink thy fall.
Had I so lavish of my presence been,
So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company,
Opinion, that did help me to the crown,
Had still kept loyal to possession
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark nor likelihood.
By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wonder'd at;
That men would tell their children 'This is he;'
Others would say 'Where, which is Bolingbroke?'
And then I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dress'd myself in such humility
That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts,
Loud shouts and salutations from their mouths,
Even in the presence of the crowned king.
Thus did I keep my person fresh and new;
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne'er seen but wonder'd at: and so my state,
Seldom but sumptuous, showed like a feast
And won by rareness such solemnity.
The skipping king, he ambled up and down
With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt; carded his state,
Mingled his royalty with capering fools,
Had his great name profaned with their scorns
And gave his countenance, against his name,
To laugh at gibing boys and stand the push
Of every beardless vain comparative,
Grew a companion to the common streets,
Enfeoff'd himself to popularity;
That, being daily swallow'd by men's eyes,
They surfeited with honey and began
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.
So when he had occasion to be seen,
He was but as the cuckoo is in June,
Heard, not regarded; seen, but with such eyes
As, sick and blunted with community,
Afford no extraordinary gaze,
Such as is bent on sun-like majesty
When it shines seldom in admiring eyes;
But rather drowzed and hung their eyelids down,
Slept in his face and render'd such aspect
As cloudy men use to their adversaries,
Being with his presence glutted, gorged and full.
(_1 Henry IV_, from MIT Shakspeare on line)

The "No-Visible-Scars" Approach: Disciplining/Harming Kids and Others (29 June 2013)

Most of us learned as kids, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me," which we modify as adults to add, "Words just leave those invisible wounds that fester for years and years, poisoning relationships and our lives …."

I was going to write on this topic again anyway — indeed, I'd already written that opening paragraph — when I listened to David Sedaris's Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013), which includes a story in which a young Sedaris gets paddled by his father. In earlier books, Sedaris had talked about his father's dinner-table custom of hitting his wise-ass kids on the heads with a heavy spoon, and I thought that a bad thing for the father to do: scalp wounds can bleed a lot, nerves in the scalp damage easily and take a long time to heal, frequent head trauma of even a minor sort can harm the brain, and I agreed with the instructor of the one psych course I took that it's unethical for big people to beat up on little people.

Still, the instructor noted that kids are pretty resilient and that the research as of that date (mid-1960s) indicated that all sorts of systems of discipline could work with children so long as the general environment was loving and the system applied fairly and consistently. As the instructor threw in, "It won't warp their little psyches if you hit 'em now and then; and there's your psyche to consider" — and then repeated the ethical point that adults shouldn't beat up on kids, ever.

In the story with the paddle, however, the young — but not all that young — David Sedaris wasn't beaten up by his father and had behaved really, really like a brat. What bothered me in the Let's Explore Diabetes stories about the elder Sedaris (and remember that these are stories, and we haven't heard Dad's side) — what bothered me with this to-some-degree-fictionalized Dad wasn't that he'd once paddled his son but that he consistently undercut him verbally.

There may be something in my personal background working here. I can recall only one occasion when my father hit me — on the arm, with an arrow I had loosed in the apartment — but our parents didn't work very hard to disguise that (CLICHÉ ALERT!) I was our mother's favorite and my sister my father's favorite. Also, I was "the good one," the occasional arrow-equivalent notwithstanding, and my sister "the smart one": all the way through to at least my PhD and getting tenure at a respectable university.

Quick story. My sister called me one time laughing and saying that she'd called our father to tell her that her son had made Phi Beta Kappa. My father sent on his congratulations, paused, and said, "Well, that can't be such a big thing; Rich made Phi Beta Kappa."

Anyway, and for sure, I was kind of sensitive to — let's call it "verbal negativity" and leave "abuse" for more serious issues — to verbal negativity by the time I was a junior or senior in college.

I recall helping to run my fraternity chapter's Hell Week then and having some inspectors from the Interfraternity Council show up for yet another surprise inspection and getting into a moderately friendly discussion with one on pledge training. He politely declined my invitation to camp out in our foyer (or some similar snarky remark) and noted that he and his colleagues had returned because there were rumors that my fraternity chapter included sweat sessions of the boot-camp persuasion in our pledge training. Neither confirming nor denying the rumors, I noted that IFC held us responsible for the behavior and, as we said back then, discipline of our pledges and wondered aloud what sanctions for pledge-ly mischief he would recommend.

He told me that his house used line-ups where a pledge would be verbally dressed down (and verbally torn down) in front of his pledge brothers.

"The 'No-Visible-Scars' approach …?" I said, innocently, and thought "Now that is barbaric" and said that we didn't do that, and wouldn't. We'd line pledges up and yell at them as a group, but if we were going to say hard things about a pledge we said them to the pledge in private; and however much we were willing to use Parris-Island techniques for motivational aerobic exercise, we avoided the Marine tradition of tearing a guy down (destroying a boy to build a man, breaking the man to build the Marine [see Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket or just about any Marine movie prior to the 1990s).

            I am a life member of the American Civil Liberties Union and close to an absolutist on free speech; and contrary to some of my allies in feminism and on the Left, I strongly differentiate between speech and actions and limit a phrase like "speech acts" to something like, "I now pronounce you husband and wife" (or whatever), or "You're fired!" And I note again that David Sedaris tells stories, and even if they are 100% true to his perceptions and memories, we don't hear from his parents and siblings. Still, to my ears, the elder Sedaris comes through as something of a villain.


            I can forgive him his heavy spoon and (far more easily), his occasionally swatting a bratty son. Cutting the kid down, though, figuratively, hitting him with "verbal negativity" at just about every exchange — now that is kind of barbaric and cruel.