Abortion Yet Again: Stewart, Huckabee, & When Life Begins (14 Nov. 2012)

Okay, when Jon Stewart f*cks up on a basic point, it's time to review. In an interview portion on The Daily Show on gay marriage, Mike Huckabee shifted the discussion to the abortion debate and to the science of how life begins at conception, and Stewart allowed him to get away with it (The Daily Show 12 Nov. 2012).

No, gentlemen, life doesn't begin at conception. Life doesn't begin at all. It began. If the Bible is right, life began some 6000 years ago (it's year 5773 in the Jewish calendar). If recent estimates in the life sciences are correct, life on Earth began well over three billion years ago. And since then life has been passed on, each species reproducing after its kind, strictly according to the Bible, with variation and selection according to Darwin.  Plus other scientific complications but, as a practical matter, no "spontaneous generation."

Human sperm are alive; human eggs are alive. The product of the joining of egg and sperm — a fertilized egg, a zygote — is alive. Monozygotic siblings ("identical" twins and such) as a complicating case, each zygote is a potential unique human animal.

The abortion question is on the status of a zygote and its various stages through embryo, fetus, and finally a human baby.

'Cause, people, very few of us can say "All life is sacred" and not be a bleeding hypocrite.

For various reasons — including my killing a fair number of mammals in my work as a lab technician — I don't eat mammal meat. But I did kill those animals in labs; I cheerfully eat fish and fowl and crustaceans;  and I have killed bacteria by the billions. For that matter, I also eat carrots, and unless you are a really strict Vegan, you do too, do all such killing and/or eating.

And as healthy mammals we kill huge numbers of bacteria and viruses by our immune responses. And most of us squash cockroaches.

So, please, no bullsh*t about the sacredness of life.

If you like — and I insist that we do — we can make a huge leap of faith and say that human life is special and in some sense sacred and that we shouldn't kill people unless we really, really have to. That puts me with the Catholic Church against the death penalty and (sometimes contrary to the Church) against most wars. And that makes me, like most Americans, not too fond of abortion and nervous about late-term abortions.

This is something we can argue.

Still, I just can't see a single-cell organism like a zygote as a human being, even if it is a human zygote. Potential human, yeah, but only potential. Ditto for blastomeres and other early stages of embryonic development: until the organism has more complexity than, say, a mosquito, I'm not concerned about killing it. At all.

If you see humans as primarily souls and souls to be saved and see "ensoulment" taking place at conception and an aborted embryo a soul in an unbaptized body going to hell — then you should feel differently. And we can argue some more, vigorously argue. Second trimester? I'd keep the State out of it — and third trimester we can have some serious fights.

But we are not arguing about life or when life begins; we are arguing about personhood. Personhood and status under the law, including the status of — the rights of — fully-born women.

OK?

Abortion is a difficult enough issue without starting off stupid. (And if you tell me, "Gee, by 'life' I only include human life," I'll tell you that that's really arrogant and that arrogance on that kind of scale is really stupid.)

Condom Referendum: Los Angeles 2012 (17 NOV. 2012)

         Cheers for the voters of Los Angeles County! Two cheers for their approving 2012 County Measure B, the initiative requiring condoms in pornographic videos shot in LA County!

         Not three cheers: the law raises serious questions on free speech and the limits of government power, topics about which you will hear plenty because the condom requirement is opposed by the porn industry. (An industry I will not knock: the big-time spending that keeps America out of another Great Depression includes the great three p’s of Politics, Pot, and Porn.) Two cheers, though: since the law moves in positive directions on crucial issues of public health and toward reasonable resolution — not solution but messily political, tolerable resolution — of the profoundly dangerous issue of abortion.

         For me, the strongest objection to Measure B is that it requires artists, or at least communicators, to propagandize in support of policy endorsed by the State: in this case “the State” in its very minor incarnation of the County of Los Angeles. I’m a life-member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and even more than to censorship I object to requiring people to participate in propaganda. Still, the message to be propagated by Measure B is important enough that I support the idea for professional pornography shot in the LA area and would support similar laws throughout the porn-producing and porn-consuming world (which I guess is most places on Earth populated by humans).

         As the anti-Measure B forces will explain vigorously and at length, sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) aren’t a major issue with porn performers: porn actors know who their fellow cast members at least by name and have probably checked out their filmographies on the web — and porn professionals get tested regularly for STDs.

         Sexually-transmitted diseases are, however, major issues outside of pornography.

         AIDS the last couple of decades has gotten a lot of attention — along with such other sexually-charged, politicized diseases as breast and prostrate cancer — but there are other STDs.

         During the 1964 summer I worked for Illinois Public Health — and 1964 was in the late 1950s in terms of American sexuality — there was no big public announcement, but the word went around the lab I worked in that gonorrhea was pretty much endemic in the State of Illinois and that the State’s public health concentration — in what was called “venereal disease” at the time — would be on following up on cases of syphilis before syphilis became endemic.

         Gonorrhea is a bothersome disease, and one becoming antibiotic resistant. Syphilis can be deadly. And syphilis is on the rise again — especially in the Developing World — and the spread of syphilis, and STDs generally, can be reduced by widespread use of condoms.

         Widespread condom use also decreases unwanted pregnancies.

         My words here are “reduced” and “decreases,” and for the general point it’s irrelevant that condoms aren’t 100% effective. Few things are. In terms of public health, significant reduction is just fine. In terms of individuals — your kids for example — well, anything worth doing is worth taking some risks to do, and a whole lot of people, obviously, think sex is worth doing. So if you’re not out there campaigning against skydiving or high school football or collegiate boxing, don’t speak out too vociferously about the failure rate of condoms.

The contribution of unprotected sex to disturbingly high rates of abortion is profoundly important because a fair number of people, including powerful and influential people, judge abortion to be a variety of murder. Now add to that conclusion the observation that unwanted pregnancies are the major cause of abortion, and note further that sexually mature, uncastrated and unspayed humans will “to it” (copulate) whatever the laws may happen to be (Measure for Measure 2.1).

         The logic of seeing abortion as murder, or close to murder, leads to seeing widespread abortion as the moral equivalent of mass murder, a conclusion that justifies extreme measures “to stop the slaughter.”

         If it is to the shame of the Allies in World War II that they didn’t bomb the Nazi death camps — and it is — then what is to be said about those who would compromise on abortion in our time? Should we not, instead, praise those who bomb abortion clinics.

Get the point? And to that point add back that epidemic AIDS is a continuing threat in Africa and residual AIDS is still an incipient threat in the developed world. Less horrific STDs are a also significant issue of public health, and there is a long and justified tradition of allowing even extreme restrictions of individual freedom — e.g., quarantine for infectious diseases — when necessary to protect public health.

         So: (1) STDs threaten public health. And (2) The abortion rate is too high, period, and as a philosophically vexed and festering political issue — a morally charged issue with deep roots and radical implications — abortion is a constant threat to social peace.

         Both threats can be reduced, and as a practical matter harm reduction and risk reduction are the best we can do, and condoms are useful for reducing STDs and reducing unwanted pregnancies.

         Condoms also give sexually mature human males control over our reproduction and propagandizing for the use of condoms reminds the many occasionally forgetful dick-heads out there that contraception is (also) a male responsibility.

         So it is very important to encourage condom usage, and one way to encourage using condoms is to make it cool and, if possible, just “the way things are done” (in this case, many kinds of sex).

         Images of condoms on porn stars — and maybe some dialog — can get across that message. Real men, the message goes, can get it up and keep it up with a condom on. Real women can get their men up and keep them up and sometimes help get that condom on in interesting and really sexy ways. Real women put out for real men, i.e., real men wearing condoms.

And if there’s an “ageist” message as well — impotent old men avoid condoms, and old couples needn’t bother — well, this old man would be willing to put up with that. (Old farts still control the government and economy so we can be magnanimous about some teasing [and there’s money for rich old men investing in Viagra/Trojan cross-marketing …].)

         I’d also recommend condom pushing with amateur porn. If exhibitionists with decent bodies and delusions of talent want to upload to a porn site, they can demonstrate that whatever weird-ass sh*t they’re doing won’t spread a disease or get someone pregnant who doesn’t want to be pregnant.

Regulating amateur film-making is even more problematic than with the pros, but I would hope that Measure B would pressure porn sites to make clear that every medium has rules for “Standards and Practices” and that responsible pornos — classy, professional looking pornos — feature guys with condoms.

         “Because that’s the way it’s done.” That’s the message you want: condoms should become fashionable and then unremarkable, like not spitting on the floor, or even in a spittoon.

         Or at least that’s the way it should be done until STDs go the way of smallpox and polio and until we get effective contraception for males and females rather more elegant that rubbers.

         Until people are fertile only when they desire to reproduce, until the human population is a whole lot healthier than we are today — until then, guys, “Wrap that Willy!”

         So two cheers to the good voters of LA County for drafting porn stars as role models for condom use.

         Maybe just one cheer: the whole celebrity “role model” idea is bad. But make that one rousing cheer: slowing the spread of STDs, reducing the number of abortions, and teaching guys to act responsibly overbalances a lot of bad.

Practical English Usage: "Friend" (22 Nov. 2012)

           Call him "Bob."

            When Bob and I and a bunch of other people were in high school, my parents went away for a weekend, and I threw a party.

            You know the set-up here, but I'll note (1) that this clichéd high school party was thrown the end of the 1950s and that at that time girls in the State of Illinois were considered women at 18 and mature enough to buy liquor legally and (2) that cheap booze in Chicago tends to be really, really cheap.

            So my guests got very, very drunk, and Bob got very drunk and, as we called it, "sick." I gave Bob Pepto-Bismol but soon found myself holding his head as he figuratively puked his guts up, and quite literally puked out his new false tooth amid the pinkish mess in my parent's toilet, a revolting mess I flushed away.

            And Bob looked up at me, and smiled — and I realized I just flushed away his new, expensive, tooth and had no, repeat no intention of recovering it — Bob looked up at me and smiled and said, very carefully, as drunken guys will, "Thank you, Rich. You are a real fren'; and there's nuthin' more importan' than frenship."

            Okay, we can argue about things as important as friendship, but I'm sure there's little more important since Bob and I are still friends these many years later, and remained friends after Bob and I found ourselves on opposing sides of the nasty American political conflict over Vietnam. (Bob volunteered to fight in the War; I opposed it.)

            So, for a point of correct, practical English usage — as a first order approximation —the word "friend" can be defined (in part) as, "someone who'll hold your head while you puke."

            A friend is also someone who'll pick you up at the airport, or drive you to the emergency room — and wait around the ER to drive you home and/or call your family. A friend will check your apartment if you're away, water your plants, take care of your pets.

            Now you may be closely acquainted with someone from whom you wouldn't expect such gestures of friendship; you may be friendly with such a person — but that person is not your friend. If you know the person just on Facebook, if the person is on the phone trying to sell you something — such a person is not your friend.

            To talk about Facebook friends or "your friends at Cyberdyne Systems" devalues an important term and contributes to another loss: our loss of ways of talking about people we deal with and know fairly well but who aren't are friends, people we don't dislike or like, but are just sort of there.

            Say, "I don't like him" or "She's no friend of mine," and you've said something pretty negative. As the cultural anthropologist Michael Moffatt noted in Coming of Age in New Jersey about the Rutgers University students he studied, "Everyone ought to be friendly," at least friendly to people they know — and friendly in the American manner.

            The idea, though, isn't limited to college students in the USA in the late 1970s and 1980s (copyright for Coming of Age: 1989).

            In William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (ca. 1599), Brutus wants to know how his slave and emissary Lucilius was received by Brutus's ally Cassius and is told Cassius received Lucilius "With courtesy and respect enough, / But not with such familiar instances" — wait for it; Shakespeare will explain the rather high-flown "familiar instances" — "Nor with such free and friendly conference / As he hath used of old." Cassius didn't show what the Rutgers students would call "friendliness," which Brutus interprets as a decline in true friendship, friendship as a variety of love. As Brutus pedantically explains, "When love begins to sicken and decay / It useth an enforcèd ceremony" (4.2.14-21).

            Indeed, which is why the Rutgers student culture included "busting," what we in North-Side Chicago in the 1950s called "cutting," and which scholars of Anglo-Saxon warrior culture call flytings. (You want some high-power wonkish cred? Do the Dozens in Old English!)

            Still, as we should be learning from the degeneration of American political discourse generally, there's a whole lot to be said for cool correctness: treating people "with courtesy and respect," even if it's "enforcèd ceremony" and no more.

            One time I mediated a dispute between a professor and a student — that was my main service for the Miami University English Department: I handled student complaints — and it turned out to be a very simple case. "You two don't like each other," I said to them. What they needed was permission, so to speak, not to like one another. "You don't have to like each other; you just have to deal with one another for the next couple months."

            The student was much too good a good Catholic boy to dislike a teacher; and the teacher was far too professional is dislike a student — my tone here is snarky — and both were Americans feeling the pressure for friendliness. I gave them permission not to like each other, even to actively dislike each other — and could type out in a couple minutes a contract about how they would behave to one another: a couple months of unenthusiastic, cool correctness.

            So I'm going to push respect, courtesy, and occasionally "enforcèd ceremony." If you want to be friendly with me, you'd better know that I go by "Rich" not "Richard" and that I assume anyone who addresses me as "Richard" doesn't know me well enough to call me by my first name and probably (hell, undoubtedly) wants something from me. If you want to be friendly, you should be open to actually becoming my friend: which means I'd expect to perform acts of friendship for you and would expect reciprocity: as in holding my head if I puked, picking me up at the airport — etc.

            Not as much as among Elizabethans or earlier, but to some extent, I expect friendship to be one of the varieties of love (usually asexual) and to exist not as a mere attitude but an evolving history of friendly deeds.

                    People who've moved away, or I've moved away from: these people can still be friends. The people I know just from Facebook or on line are potential friends for me, or for you, but aren't friends yet.


            There are a lot of people I'll treat with courtesy and respect and what we can legitimately call a friendly manner. But real friends? Expect only a few.

Happy Birthday, Jesus (Sometime Before Spring of 4 B.C.) [28 Nov. 2012]

  In Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (2012), Pope Benedict XVI notes, as a lead in the UK Daily Telegraph puts it, "Jesus born years earlier than thought." What I find most interesting about this story has been that it was news.

            In 1950, in a totally non-controversial passage in the history textbook The Ancient World, Joseph Ward Swain of the solidly Big Ten, classically Midwestern, University of Illinois, wrote that "Jesus was not born in the year 1," or, I guess, Zero. "Two of our four Gospels tell us that he was born under Herod the Great, who died in the spring of 4 B.C."

            Working through other information in the Gospels, the scholarly consensus by the late 1940s was "that Jesus probably was born about five years before the turn of the century" — in the Christian counting of centuries — and that it's "fairly certain that he was crucified on April 7, 30 A.D." Swain adds, "There is, of course, no evidence regarding the exact day of his birth, and not until several centuries had passed did Christians agree to observe Christmas on December 25" (II.476-77).

            Of course. And then Swain moves on to the significant historical stuff about "His" — Jesus's — "Preaching and Crucifixion," the next subsection title, and then a long discussion of the rise of the Church.

            So Jesus was "born years earlier than thought" by whom?

            Americans are a people of strong faith, but as surveys pretty consistently indicate, "large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions — including their own";  and, I'll throw in, that "large numbers of Americans" includes a lot of reporters.

            The United States is not "a Christian nation" mostly because we're not a nation at all; it's "the American Republic," and the Republic is a stew or chop suey or mish-mosh (not a melting pot) of races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions. Which is a damn good thing.

            We are, though, strongly … let's call it inflected by Christian culture, and Americans, for understanding our country, need some knowledge of Christianity. Also of the other world religions, but that's for another time.

            Christians especially should know Christianity, and it shouldn't be some sort of traumatic shock if someone tells them that it's a fair guess that Jesus was born in the spring — "when shepherds were watching their sheep in the field by night" (Luke 2.8) of 4-5 BC, and that it's no coincidence that Christmas in the northern hemisphere is a Festival of Lights like Diwali, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa: it's the winter solstice, people, and the time of the old Roman Saturnalia, so December was and remains an excellent time for a winter holiday balancing spring holidays like Passover and Easter. (The Islamic New Year, Muharram, is a quieter holiday.)

            It's Constitutional for secular public schools to teach about religion, and in principle the US Supreme court and NGOs like The American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way are all for such teaching. Still, serious religious education is politically risky for a school district and undoubtedly expensive: doing the job decently requires well-educated teachers.


            Someone, though, needs to do a better job, and the various Christian churches and Christian households are obvious places for serious study of the faith. One good way to start a discussion would be hitting kids with the neat paradox that Jesus Christ was born "B.C." and checking out what the Gospel narratives actually say on the subject. For that exercise, Pope Benedict has definitely supplied a "teachable moment."

Learning from the "War on Men" — and Stephen Colbert v. Fox News (30 November 2012)

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            In the "The Word" segment of The Colbert Report for Wednesday, 28 November 2012, many of us who do not watch much TV news beyond Colbert and The Daily Show could learn that Fox News is reporting a War on Men, part of which has resulted in American men not wanting to get married.

            I overstate and oversimplify here — and my scholarship is, let's say, casual — but all that’s pretty decorous given Fox reporting, and not just Fox.

            (I gave up on TV news after a drug warrior told Jim Lehrer that the major problem he encountered in the war on drugs was the large number of people who used cocaine without serious problems. Lehrer didn't ask a "WTF??!!" follow-up question. This occurred at the time PBS funding was under attack in Congress, though that may've been a coincidence. But as so often, I digress.)

            Anyway, in the beginning of this males-and-marriage brouhaha, as it came through on the Report, was a survey on attitudes on the importance of marriage wherein was found that among young women — or probably, at most, young American women — 28% thought marriage important in 1997 and 37% thought it important in 2010/2011. My arithmetic has that coming out to an increase of 9 percentage points. Among young men, 35% thought marriage very important in 1997, vs. 29% in 2010/2011, for a decrease of 6 percentage points, and putting young men in 2010-11 finding marriage more or less as important as young women did a dozen or so years earlier. (But don't trust my arithmetic; I tend to screw up "percentage" vs. "percentage points"; the point, though, still holds.)

            On the Fox News website, on 26 November 2012, Suzanne Venker took these data seriously and concluded in Colbert's paraphrase that "Sisters Are Doing It to Themselves" in this declining male interest in marriage in that, in Venker's words, "Women aren't women anymore" but angry and defensive.

            And the cause of decline in femininity was the sexual revolution, which I think means feminism here since the sexual revolution in terms of sex was in the 1970s, and its effects would've been felt long before 1997.

            For a nice evisceration of this analysis, listen to Colbert: the "The Word" segment is about ten minutes into the broadcast. My problems with the Venkerian conclusion start with her taking way too seriously any survey about attitudes. If you want to find out what people really believe, yeah, just ask them — but then check out in detail what they do.

            Still, The Daoist teach that we should listen carefully even to people we know are lying, and they have a point. Sometimes it may seem like picking out the peanuts from the elephant dung, but we should listen to one another and profit from what we hear as best we can.

            So consider this.

            Writing from a thoroughly sexist and patriarchal point of view (though enlightened and progressive ca. 1516), Sir Thomas More has his non-Christian Utopians very strict about sex outside of marriage. Not just adultery — which can get you a sentence of penal servitude for a first offense and death caught twice — but "Any boy or girl convicted of premarital intercourse is severely punished, and permanently disqualified from marrying" unless pardoned on the no-marriage part, and the adult couple in charge of the offending household is "publicly disgraced for not doing their jobs properly. The Utopians are particularly strict about that kind of thing because they think very few people would want to get married — which means spending one's life with the same person, and putting up with all that inconveniences that this involves — if they weren't carefully prevented from having any sexual intercourse otherwise" (Book II, Paul Turner's translation, 1965: 103-04 [punctuation Americanized]).

            Now the stripping down of the family to its nucleus has been fairly recent, and big-family-man More would have been a little shocked by the isolation of contemporary Americans, and his Utopians were downright communal and communistic: More's Utopia is like one huge monastery. More presented a society where one could get companionship and intimacy in the general course of life; if you could also get sex, he asks provocatively, why marry?

            With the sexual revolution, it did become easier in the US to get sex outside of marriage, but alienation elsewhere increased, and perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if women in 2010 — if indeed this is the case — were more interested in marriage than in 1997. Women are increasingly in the workforce, and, as Colbert hints, more non-poor women now perform the alienating shit-work of a lot of jobs, and this may have more hungering for the companionship, intimacy, and relative stability of marriage: that shelter from the outside world for the Victorian father of the family.

            What about those young men, though, whose declining interest — and this may well be the case — needs some explanation?

            The major explanation may be economic, and indirectly educational. Guys haven't been doing all that well of late, and marriage would make most sense to us economically if we were to "marry up": as Colbert hints even more strongly, guys might want to marry a woman who could support them as househusbands.

            Gals, though, may be reluctant to marry down, and most of what's going on here may be that women place greater importance on marriage because it has become more of an issue for them because of a lack of marriageable men — but "No marriageable men around" may often mean no men it would be economically and socially advantageous to marry.

            So guys may find marriage less important because they feel less likely to marry. Aesop's fable on "sour grapes" points to the human tendency to assert, sometimes, we don't really want that which we are unlikely to get.

            More women want equality in marriage, and to a large extent are getting it, and that is all to the good.

            But, arguably, it's all to the good more for women than for men.

            Patriarchal marriage had a lot of advantages for men, especially for men who figured out that one of the most important things a human being has is time.

            Now a cousin of mine just sent me the latest viral video of a Rube-Goldberg device where, with much ado, a humongous chain reaction leads to some guys getting doused with paint. Etc. — check out Facebook and YouTube, to say nothing of XTube! So, obviously, a lot of people have a lot of free time on their hands. Still, one of the most important things we have is time, and traditional patriarchal marriage was very good to men in terms of time and labor: women did most of the work at home.

            An equal marriage nowadays is much less advantageous for men.

            Middle-class standards of housekeeping are very high in today's America, and few people can afford servants. Under strong traditional pressure, often from other women, women's standards for household neatness tend to be higher than men's — tend to be; clearly some men are neat and some women are slobs — and equitable division of labor in a married household probably means the husband spends significantly more time on housework then he did or would as a bachelor. When children come along the time constraints and other pressures on both parents nowadays are tremendous, and women want men to share that load.

            A "night club" when I was growing up meant a place my parents went. I had good, conscientious parents — who didn't think they had to come out to watch me swim or play football, much less coach a team. (By high school, we had "SACs," social-athletic clubs and fraternities, and we ran our own athletics.) And, of course, even middle-class and well-to-do kids until recently could be sent out to play on their own and were expected to walk most places or take public transportation.

            When kids come along, contemporary US parents are under tremendous strain — poor people probably more than the middle class and rich (though in different ways) — and significant numbers of women will work very hard to get men to share the burden.

            Much of that "burden" is self-imposed and a good deal enjoyable, but much is not.

            If a guy finds love and a "soul mate" — and that's an additional issue: the newish idea that every couple seeking marriage has to be Romeo and Juliet and powerfully in love, and working on the relationship — if a guy finds love and a soul mate and he can bring some wealth and skills to the marriage … well, yeah, he'll want to marry and probably will marry. But that may not happen.

            So, if young guys nowadays say marriage is less important to them than guys said in 1997, it could be sensible on their part: sensible if they're less likely to get married and if they are lucky enough to get companionship, some sex, and maybe even intimacy outside of marriage.

            There's no war on men, but there has been reduction in male privilege, and guys may be responding to that reduction in socially and economically rational ways.

            The nuclear family is a relatively new invention, and it's a bad idea. We're in an awkward period moving on to other possibilities. Get over it, conservatives, and start acting like real conservatives: working to increase community, and social supports.

What If You Did Everything Expected …? (7 Dec. 2012)

            If you're reading this, you're a modern person, free from the anxiety of primitive life and its taboos, probably free even from the complexities of following the 613 mitzvot ("commandments" — sort of) of the Mosaic law or the straight, strait, and narrow path for Christian salvation. Okay fellow free, modern folk, I have a question for you: What would happened if your tried to do everything expected of you — if you'd try even in our state of liberation to get everything right?

            Let me get into this question with a couple of stories. (I'm an old fart; I get to tell stories.)

            First one is from about the mid-1970s, when I found myself on Miami University's Student Affairs Council looking at proposed rules and came upon the locution, "Students are expected to …." I asked, "By whom, and so what?" Who expects them to do what this rule says, and why should they care: "what happens if they don't?"

            I was told, "Oh, then we can throw them out of school."

            I pulled what rank I had as an English teacher and former parliamentarian and — let's say liaison (and not "lobbyist") — and as someone who had dealt with student-targeted laws in the Illinois General Assembly.

            "'Shall'," I said; "You need to say, 'Students shall.'"

            Part of my sensitivity to this usage came from near the end of my first academic year at Miami when I received a very nice letter — fancy letterhead, really good paper — from the President of the University telling me that full-time, tenure-track faculty members "are expected to attend commencement."

            I asked myself, "By whom and so what" and concluded that I could skip those questions and read the sentence, «Untenured assistant professors had better get their asses to commencement», which turns out to have been much of what it meant.

            Behind that was my experience as a sophomore undergraduate moving out of a biochemistry program and into the Microbiology Department with a growing knowledge that what I really liked was English and history. I got a note telling me to report to the office of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and declare a major; "You must declare a major." That was back when one talked to humans about such things, and I asked the woman at the desk, "Uh, what if I don't? Don't declare a major." And I was told, "You must" and asked again "But what if I don't" — and was answered, "I don't know; no one hasn't before." After a moment of secretarial consultation, they told me to just be sure to declare a major before too long into the semester I graduated — "But don't come in during the first week or so; we've got too much work then."

            So my last semester I declared an English major, and a sweet little old Credentials Analyst told me I could have a split minor of Microbiology/History, which she recommended because, "We've never had one of those before." Which is what I did, and I graduated as an English major with a split minor in Microbiology and History; and the whole process was very good for me. And it was good for rule-writing by Student Affairs Council (for a while, and uniquely in the school's governance) because they adopted a policy of trying to be clear when we were making suggestions or requests and when we were bloody well giving an order backed up with, say, expulsion.

            The experience was good for me because I had grown up doing what I was told, asked, and/or (often just) expected to do.

            In my family, I was The Good One.

            It was fair. My sister was clearly my father's favorite child, and I was my mother's — talk about living a cliché! — and she was The Smart One, and I was The Good One.

            My father took this judgment with him to the grave in spite of occasional evidence to the contrary.

            After my father had a stroke and my mother came down with Alzheimer's disease, my sister was more loyal and helpful than I was; but I was still The Good One. With my father's encouragement, I ran a charity at age 18, and I pretty much ran a fraternity chapter at 21; I made Phi Beta Kappa and got Wilson and Danforth Fellowships for graduate school, took an MA at Cornell and a PhD at Illinois; helped manage the student strike at the U of I at Urbana during the Troubles in May of 1970, and managed to get work in my field and eventually get promotion and tenure at a pretty good university.

            My sister was still The Smart One, and I was not. (Indeed, when my sister called our father to tell him her son had made Phi Beta Kappa, our father congratulated her, paused, and then said, "But Phi Beta Kappa can't be that big a deal; Rich made Phi Beta Kappa.")

            Returning to topic — responsible students stay "on task" — returning to the topic, we can allow that I had some experience questioning authority and resisting social pressure. "And yet the old schooling sticks," and I still get anxious whenever I stray from the Good-One role and try to ignore (or reject) social demands.

            And this means a lot of low-grade anxiety for me, and probably for you. One of the easily-resolved paradoxes of the 1960s was that most of the radicals and counter-cultural people in The Movement were the good kids from high school, so even at a time of a lot of apparent rebellion most of us, most of the time, conformed and complied; and nowadays it's possible that more of us, more of the time, conform and comply.

            Or we try to.

            Think about your life if you did all you were supposed to do — just socially "supposed to do," ignoring serious stuff like moral dilemmas when social pressures conflict with internal ideals; ignoring big issues and major life-choices. What would life be like if we complied in all things in just the small stuff of daily life?

            What if you kept all your receipts, performed routine maintenance on your car and appliances, ran your virus scans, read the labels when you shopped, read the manuals with your cell phone and computer and the GPS on your car; if you spent all the time with your spouse and kids that you're supposed to nowadays; if you "gave 110%" on the job or to a sports team or volunteer work?

            If you got your holiday shopping done early — don't forget Halloween! — and studied up before you made big purchases; if you carefully reviewed the releases and contracts and terms of use that you sign; if you seriously skimmed a significant portion of your electronic and hard-copy mail and carefully considered all the requests for your support of worthy causes.

            If you followed the campaigns of all the candidates you're entitled to vote for, and read the full texts of the propositions and initiatives.

            If you replaced those batteries, checked the wiring, checked the furnace and the vents and the ducts and got the right amount of the correct exercises and kept up with the latest research on proper nutrition and got checkups and early treatment when you were supposed to (which can get tricky: check the health websites for current views on checkups, and learn the symptoms you should just keep an eye on for a few days before seeing a physician).

            What if you kept careful track of your spending and the packages you send and put in the necessary time to get the best deals on insurance and shopping: if you were a totally responsible investor, consumer and producer, worker and parent?

            Etc., etc., etc.

            What would life be like if, in all your roles, you gave that "110%" — or up to 20% in each role — to respond just to all of the legitimate demands on your time and effort?

            And remember that anyone who asks for "a 110% commitment" is demanding a blank check, and that someone who seriously wants more than, say, a quarter of you is making an illegitimate demand.

            As Curtis Armstrong's character Miles says to Tom Cruise's significantly named Joel Goodsen — "good son" Get it? — in RISKY BUSINESS: "[…] you wanna know something? Every now and then say, 'What the f*ck.' 'What the f*ck' gives you freedom."

            Maybe more exactly "What the f*ck" or its equivalent is necessary for survival.

            "Students are expected to …"; "Good citizens will always …" "Warrantee is voided if …" — Yeah, most of this stuff we should do, and in some cases it's a real risk if we don't. But part of the low-key horror of modern life is that we just can't do it all or even most of it. Fairly often we must say, "What the f*ck," which guarantees that now and then we will fuck up.

            Every bit as much as "primitives," surrounded by innumerable taboos, every bit as much as more recent folk with 613-and-counting divine demands or the infinite obedience a devout Christian owes a God who became human and died for your sins — as much as most people, most of the time, we will fail to live up.

            Freedom and responsibility means trying to do what is right as much and as often as we can, but now and then saying "What the f*ck" to things in general — and to some people making demands on us and placing their expectations, to everyone who wants more than their legitimate 25% or less —just saying (now and then, with an asterisk), "F*ck off."

Of Pranks and Pride and Malicious Mischief (11 Dec. 2012)

             I want to look at a line in the Associated Press's coverage of the December 2012 telephone prank by Australian DJs Mel Greig and Michael Christian, a prank that seems to be at least the occasion of the suicide of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who received and forwarded the call: "Whatever pride there had been over" the success of "the hoax was obliterated by worldwide public outrage […]."

            In that sentence, Kristen Gelineau, the author of the AP story, hints at something important.

            In the prank, Greig and Christian impersonated — probably badly — the United Kingdom's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip and successfully sought information about the condition of the royal granddaughter-in-law, the pregnant Kate Middleton Windsor (so to speak), Duchess of Cambridge, who was hospitalized for acute morning sickness.

            The prank has been called "sophomoric"; Gelineau is more instructive in her use of "pride."

            I'll object to "sophomoric" because college students as well as US high school students go through a sophomore year, and "College is for grownups," or should be, and some maturity should be expected of at least college sophomores.

            "Pride" is more like it because pranks are at the relatively harmless end of practical jokes, and practical jokes pushed far enough get to what's called, significantly, "malicious mischief."

            Shakespeare's tragedy Othello — SPOILER coming up … — ends in a bloodbath (although a restrained one as Jacobean tragedies go), and Greig and Christian, much to the contrary, intended no serious harm. Still, why prank someone at all? Why do people pull practical jokes or go further and do malicious mischief.

            The villain of Othello, the treacherous Iago, speaks about slander, his major method of operation for doing evil in this play. " Good name in man and woman, dear my lord," Iago says to Othello,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls.Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;But he that filches from me my good nameRobs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. (3.3.155-61)

Why would someone slander someone else? Why would any do that "which not enriches him" but "makes me poor indeed"?

            Revenge might be one intelligible reason, and Shakespeare's villainous Shylock is easier to understand than Iago: Shylock bears a grudge and tries to exact bloody, as we say, repayment.

            A revenge explanation doesn't work well for Iago: he's third in command under Othello, probably the greatest general in Europe, and he's reached this position at age twenty-eight. Iago may've hit a pewter ceiling, but for a guy who can't do the math required in the (Early) Modern military, he's doing very well, a hell of a lot better than, say, I was doing at age twenty-eight, and probably a whole lot better than you did or will do. However much Iago may feel slighted now and again, he owes Othello, big.

            Now Iago says he thinks Othello has cuckolded him, but that is really, really unlikely to have happened, and Iago doesn't dwell on that accusation. As the great Shakespearean critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it — he wrote some poems, also — as Coleridge put it, Iago's bringing up the idea seems like "the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity."

            Iago, I think, and have taught, is ticked off at subordination — which we good democrats should sympathize with — and has, let's say, issues with love and with ideals that don't fit into his anti-romantic views of the world (with which we should also sympathize). As dramatic characters go, Shakespeare's included, Iago is one twisted puppy and a complicated guy.

            Relevant here, though, is that he's a trickster, or Trickster-figure, with a capital "T": a prankster with a sense of humor who goes way, way, too far. He's an instructive case at the extreme end of a continuum that's starts near those two unlucky, dumb-ass Aussie DJs.

            Iago's mischief is truly malicious: it stems from malice, which in the old Christian psychology is precisely doing evil without any obvious gain.

            So if you want to seriously condemn the call from the merry Australian pranksters, don't call it sophomoric or immature but say that it begins to border on malice.

            And if you follow through on an analysis of malice, you can at least reach to something basic that we can understand, and that Kristen Gelineau points us at: pride.

            Pride may not be the worst of all sins or the source of all evils (Radix malorum Superbia est), but neither is it the virtue we've made it into today.

            We pull pranks to show how clever we are, to have that moment of trivial glory over other people.

            And sometimes the other people feel serious hurt.

            It may be that Jacintha Saldanha death can't, finally, be attributed to the prank phone call. OK, then we could go back to the suicide of Tyler Clementi and note that in addition to whatever hatred of gays was involved — and that could be minimal — there was much glorying in the embarrassing of another human being.

            Iago sings, ironically, "'Tis pride that pulls the country down" (2.3.90), and that, too, is an exaggeration. But pride is a problem when it moves us to mess over other people for kicks; it is a worse problem when we get into the habit of doing so. A habit of mischief is a serious problem when it overcomes empathy and moves us to find serious joy in embarrassing — thereby hurting — others.

            It's rare that practical jokes lead to tragedy; but far too often they lead to more pain than cheap laughs and tackier thrills can justify.