Building a scholarly toolkit (or not)

A fellow could become quite the scholarly interlocuter if he or she paid close enough attention to what is posted on the internet. (Or, as a friend of mine used to say about seminary: you could teach people the buzzwords and mental processes in a weekend long workshop, and have much the same effect.)*

For example, in case you're feeling threatened and need to make sure your conversation partner feels stupid, here are some helpful tips from the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams. The comments to this post fill out Scott's ideas nicely.

And, if you want to take it to the next level, you could peruse Gaunilo's Humble Suggestion II, although I must admit I am puzzled as to why he thinks these are bad ideas. I suppose it is just because he hasn't read Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (2d ed.). Or at least he hasn't read it closely enough.**

So there you have it, some helpful suggestions on how to interact with others when having scholarly debates or even casual conversations.

Or you could, you know, read deeply, listen carefully, and interact with others in love, humility, and a desire to come more fully in touch with the truth. But that would take more work.


*Just in case my irony isn't showing through, I think that this sort of buzzword and cliche driven 'education', found in the some bits of business and the church, is worth grieving, if not outright despairing. And my friend was making a general observation, not endorsing it: he followed up his line by saying 'I'm afraid of that, and I want to take advantage of my time here [i.e. in seminary] to make sure that doesn't happen.'

** Yes, of course this is a joke. I consider G a friend, and I am deliberately conflating and transgressing two of his excellent suggestions.

Tell your friends!

Advent is upon us

Why not check out the postings at Hopeful Imagination over the course of the season for some devotional thoughts and insights? Postings start today, November 28th.

That wacky internet

As a public service to you, dear reader(s), I would like to call your attention to the Strange New Products blog. If you find that your everyday internet experience is hohum, dull, and drab, I recommend you take a few minutes to peruse these pages: see the startling sea monkey necklace! Behold the mysterious pill Magneuro 6-S, said to make you psychic! Take a peek at the future in the wovel, destined to change life as we know it in the snowbelt!

You see, I take the time to find these wonders of the internet so that you don't have to spend precious time and resources doing so. You're welcome.

(How, you might ask, can a (seemingly) successful doctoral candidate at a prestigious university find time to surf the internet pointlessly, finding an occasional link to place on his own blog? My answer -- volume! Well, no, more precisely, I'm not sleeping much these days. I assume I'll sleep more when my house finally sells -- anyone looking to buy a home in the St. Joseph, MI area?)

The First Ten Weeks: part three

A few more items to add to the list of observations about life in Cambridge:

● The weather here is unusually mercurial, more than anywhere I have ever lived. In Chicago we are fond of joking 'If you don't like the weather, wait a minute'. Here it isn't a joke: it's true. Take yesterday (November 26th) as an example: it rained seven times. Mind you, that doesn't mean that it was gloomy and overcast all day and somehow managed to summon up the energy to spit seven times. No -- seven separate times entire rain fronts plowed into Cambridge, and seven separate times they blew through within a half hour and left a very pleasant sunny day in their wake (only to be ruined by the next front to blow through.)

Or take last Thursday: I rode to a lecture in the morning in a foreboding gloom; came out around lunchtime in full, warm sun; and rode into town for a few errands, only to ride home (after about an hour) in soaking rain and gale-force winds, which subsided only when I arrived back at the flat. As one denizen of Cambridge once put it, the weather here is predictably unpredictable. I'll second that.

● Another weather-related observation has to do with clothing. I tend to run a bit warmer than many, and so living in America, I tended not to wear sweaters. It's not that I didn't like them; I had a number, and I seemed to enjoy buying them. But, frankly, even in winter, I was still warm. We kept the house reasonably warm, I rode around in a warm car (or only made brief trips in a cold one), and I worked in a warm office. What did I need a sweater for? Not so, here. Now I routinely wear four to five layers when I am going outside, one of them usually a sweater of some kind. The major reason for this, of course, is that I am riding a bicycle or walking rather than driving (the temperatures are down in the 30s to 40s these days). But I think that many English buildings are just kept cooler. This might be partly the natural thermostats of British people (they may be better adjusted to cooler temperatures); it may be partly due to large, drafty, and poorly heated buildings; it may be partly due to English cultural notions about the value of fresh air (they love it, even during winter -- I can't say they're wrong). I can only speculate on the causes, but the upshot is that I get to wear all of those great sweaters I've had for so long and only worn on rare occasions: nothing wrong with that.

● My final observation for now has to do with the windows. You may have heard that they don't have double-glazed windows. That is true on some older buildings, but most everything new or recently remodelled has double-glazing. What you might not have heard is that the English don't have screens on their windows: this is absolutely true, no matter what age the building is (which also means that double-sashes are unheard of). They don't need screens because there are no insects here -- or more precisely, there are no insects that bite or that you need to fear. (There are a few bugs that are attracted to the light and may come in at night, but they are big and comical-looking; Alex call them her 'friends'. You can easily shoo them back outside.) Even the bees are very docile here. What a wonderful place, that even the bugs are gentle enough that you need not fear them, and can just leave your window propped open all night without a worry.

More anon.

...And Back Again

AAR was great this year. I am back, and (as before) quite exhausted, bordering on ill. But I had a great time there, including hearing several great papers, catching up with a bunch of friends old and new (including meeting Gaunilo face to face), and buying more books than I ought, at 50% off retail. I'm already looking forward to next year.

Two additions to the links: first, I joined a team blog, my first such venture. Hopeful Imagination will feature a reflection each day of Advent, and should prove to be quite interesting. The calendar of contributions is posted now, so take a look. (I will be blogging on the 5th and the15th, which I post not so much to let you know as to remind myself!)

Also, Thom left a challenging comment on a previous post which, I believe, was meant to deepen thought; I wish he had said more to help me in that direction. Nevertheless, his blog seems interesting and worth following, and he seems to be headed in a way that many of us have either walked before or are walking in now.

Gone...

Well, I'm off to a conference in Philadelphia for the next five days, because (as Thunder put it once) 'I don't have a real job.' Keep the Street clean while I'm gone.

Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon

Today, Gaunilo was writing on the topic of Evangelicalism, and raised an issue for me that has been rolling around in the back of my mind for a while. Looking back on his post I realised that what I had to say did not flow directly from what he said, but was related only tangentially. So rather than comment there, I decided to post here.

This issue is this: evangelical Christianity (in fact, American religion generally) is deeply suspicious of structure and authority. Deep dualisms abound, like spirituality versus religion, faith versus dogma, conscience versus creed, scripture versus tradition, internal versus external, and substance versus form, all in service to the anti-authoritarian axiom. (The latter term in each of these dualities flows out of a community, whereas the former is proper to the individual.)

And yet every movement, even one which is anti-authority and anti-structure, needs some cohesion, some authority, to continue existing. American evangelicalism is a fascinating mix of Reformed Orthodoxy and warm-hearted pietism, mixed with American pragmatism and (often) business and marketing sensibilities. But the thing that holds it all together is the Bible; it's the only authority they will acknowledge.

So what does it mean when a movement is suspicious of external authority and against visible structure and yet are united on ascribing authority to a sacred book?

It would seem a quandary, especially to the degree that one emphasizes individual conscience in interpreting Scripture. What sort of governor can be placed on the vagaries and idiosyncracies of 'individual interpretation'? And how can that governor, that structure (stricture?) of interpretation itself be acknowledged, without bringing in an external (non-textual) authority?

I'm not convinced it has been done successfully. But it has been tried in three steps, in an attempt to make authority proceed straightforwardly from the text. First, there is an insistence that the Scripture is perspicuous, that it is clear in all that it intends to say. Second, it is maintained that Scripture is not only clear, but univocal: it means one thing, and only one thing. Third, it locates that univocity in the mind and intention of the original writer. So therefore, to grasp and live under the authority of Scripture, one must hear the clear and univocal meaning of the text, which flows from the mind and intention of the author. Anything less is attempting to resist obeying God.

The problem is that these are theological claims masquerading as textual claims.

Texts -- at least the ones worth wrestling with -- are not perspicuous; they are multivocal, often embarrassingly so; and the author's intention, while important, never exhausts the meaning of the text, at least a Scriptural text. And it is notoriously, almost self-defeatingly* difficult to determine the intention of an author who is dead and gone and separated from us by centuries. Trying to approach the intention of such an author is like trying to walk to the horizon: you can make headway, but it remains far off.

(Excursus: This separation might not be so great with a more robust ecclesiology -- one which includes the communion of saints, for example. I heard for the first time this week a delightful anecdote about St. Thomas Aquinas, who when writing his Biblical commentaries, reached a section that tied him up in knots so that he couldn't make headway. A monk passed by Thomas' solitary cell one night to hear him conversing with three other voices! When the monk asked Thomas about it the next morning, he replied that he had reached the end of his rope trying to understand the text, and prayed for understanding. Whereupon who should appear to him but Saints Peter and Paul, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, who laid it all out for him!)

So these are not textual claims but theological claims, along the lines of "God speaks, God speaks clearly, God speaks univocally, God speaks through these people," and so forth. This is not necessarily a problem, except that the claims themselves do not flow perspicuously and univocally from the intention of the authors of Scripture. Or as my favourite Regius Professor of Divinity puts it, "these doctrines of Scripture are not themselves Scriptural."

In other words, you can hold these doctrines, but not purely on the basis of Scripture -- it has to come from somewhere else. When you admit that much, the jig is up, because it involves you in theories of the church's teaching authority, or the status of tradition, or the conclusions of reason, and so forth. Not a bad place to be, in my estimation, but one that many evangelicals would be chagrined to find themselves in. (Not, of course, that I would claim that any of these -- authority, tradition, reason -- are simple, clear or univocal either.)

If one doubts that the Scriptures are less than perspicuous and univocal, then witness the amazing profusion of Biblical commentary, (even the need for Biblical commentary in itself adverts to the need for explanation and elaboration) which only proliferates more today than ever, evangelicals being among the forefront. If the Scripture were univocal and perspicacious, then it would seem that the need would be for one person, once, to express the Bible's timeless meaning and then for it to be dusted and done. Rather like Peter Lombard's Sentences, we would just have one book that did it all.

Part of the problem is that American evangelicals -- like almost all of us, myelf included embarrassingly often -- have drunk deeply at the wells of Enlightenment epistemology. (Even if the phrase is unfamiliar to you, the habits of thought will not be.) And so thoughts about authorial intention and hermeneutics (interpretation of texts) are foremost in the minds of these Bible scholars; they exegete the text to find the grammatical and historical-contextual meaning of what the author meant, and nail down a meaning of the text.

But I wonder if this is truly the best method. If indeed we believe the Scripture to be the 'trysting place' (to use David Fagerberg's suggestive phrase about the liturgy) between God and humanity, then doesn't it seem that rather than using a tool to pull apart the text, we might be better to approach it with prayer, love, humility, openness -- in short, with an attitude of worship? I do not mean to create my own dualism here, repeating the anti-intellectualism that I was just critiquing; there is no disjunction between rigourous exegesis and prayerful, worshipful engagement with the Scripture: but why does exegesis come first? Why might not God come first? Again, if the Bible is the trysting place between God and humans, then why should we be surprised to find many, many meanings, perhaps infinite meanings there -- one of which is the historical?

Perhaps there is a different way of thinking of the word exegesis. It is a verb from Greek, made up of two parts, ex, and ago, meaning more or less "to lead out". {I have been told by someone who knows that this parsing is incorrect (see comments) -- but I stand by my portrayal of the usual practice of exegesis, and the alternative I suggest; the image of 'leading out' is still useful, if not philologically faithful. -ed.} So when one does exegesis, one leads out the meaning from the text, as if one were leading a flock of sheep or a herd of cows. Usually, when this is done, it is a matter of putting all of the animals in the right pens and making sure that they are closed in and controlled, and that none escape. It could be considered a form of domination, but it might also just be a fearful caring that the text doesn't get out and hurt itself. But maybe that's not the best way to think of 'leading out' a text. Perhaps we are meant instead to open the pens, and lead them out into the open. In doing so, we may let the text lead us out, down into paths that we have never taken, willing to follow it wherever it might go, as far as it might go, all the while waiting to be met by God.


* What I mean here is that the practice of trying to determine the author's intention of this sort of text is so incredibly contested -- sometimes the same arguments can be mustered in diametrically opposed cases ('this letter is a clear example of the apostle Paul's writing style, seen through comparison with his other writings,' versus 'the author of this letter followed Paul's writing conventions a little too closely in trying to make this letter sound authentically Pauline, and it doesn't convince.').

A Quick One

I have been aching to post something serious and thoughtful on the whole evolution/ creation/ intelligent design debates, as I have heard some interesting papers and presentations recently. But that will have to wait, alas.

On the other hand, when you have Pat Robertson loose on the streets, you just don't know what to expect next. He recently said of a town in Pennsylvania that decided to go back to teaching only evolution:

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city... God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever... If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them."

(Quote cribbed from Thunder, but available all over.) There is so much that is worth calling into serious question here, and maybe I'll do it another time. But the question that this quotation raised for me is this:

If God won't help Dover in the midst of a disaster, then what of (creation-science leaning) Kansas? If they have a natural disaster -- say, a tornado -- should we conclude that 1) God has no say in Kansas meteorology, 2) everyone will be protected, and any death toll will be the creation of the godless liberal media, or 3) the old saying is true, that you only hurt the ones you love?

God, please forgive me for such vain speech. And forgive Pat Robertson for his idolatry.

The First Ten Weeks: part two

Looking back, last time I wrote an awful lot about food.

I hope you're not disappointed to find I'm going to do much of the same here.

● Well, I'm not only going to write about food. It has been interesting for us to live without a television here. We've been great fans of some British television in the past (Foyle's War, Vicar of Dibley, The Office, Keeping Up Appearances, the list goes on...), so I'm sort of sad to be missing it. Naturally, some of it is dreck, but I understand that it has some rather bright spots, too. And speaking of spots, the adverts are supposed to be top-notch, too. But we generally have more important things to be spending our time and money on (Money? Yes, money. A telly license costs about 120 pounds per year.). And we watch dvds on our computers, so we're not exactly deprived.

● Back to food: the British seem to have perfected the cafeteria lunchtime sandwich. Everywhere you go, from the local buttery, to college refectories, to the local Lunch Aid outlet, to Boots the Chemist, to Marks & Sparks, to the economically-named Eat restaurant, you will find pre-packaged, made-earlier-that-day sandwiches. They come in a distinctive triangular shape, as they are cut from corner to corner and doubled over. The sandwiches are generally quite tasty, often on good quality bread. And you can get some interesting fillings, too: prawn salad, egg salad and watercress, chicken tikka (an Indian dish), coronation chicken salad, cheese and onion, cheese and pickle, Wensleydale and tomato, green Thai chicken. Two of my favourites are all-day breakfast (hard-boiled egg, English bacon, bangers (English sausage), and brown sauce), and bacon & bleu cheese (the cheese, not the dressing). We haven't been able to find the latter one at all in Cambridge, the last one we had was in Salisbury two years ago. It was so good, but it might be that the NHS made them take it off the market because it would be easy to overdose! I once heard a radio personality -- I want to say it was Howard Stern, but I never listen to him, but some hipster doofus like that -- say to a Brit that he loved their sandwiches, and whenever he was here, he would buy three of them, go back to his hotel room, lower the shades, turn on some smooth jazz, and sit in the dark and eat. It sounds ludicrous -- it is ludicrous -- but for some reason, it makes sense, too.

● People here seem to eat out a lot less than in the 'States. One reason is that dining out -- even casually -- is much more expensive here. There just isn't the tradition of swinging by the (fill in the blank) restaurant before coming home from work to pick up a takeaway dinner. That's not to say that the English are not big on convenience food -- the takeaway sections of places like Sainsbury's and ASDA (supermarkets) are huge. It's just that they do it a bit differently. Interestingly, while dining out is more expensive, groceries are cheaper. So there are strong circumstantial motivations to dine in more often.

● Another reason people might dine out less here is that the service in restaurants is not all that it might be. I went into a local pub once and was just about to order a late lunch, when I was told the kitchen was closed for an hour because they were too busy, and had gotten backed up. (We left and went back later -- we just chalked it up to a different set of cultural practices and expectations; we had a fine meal and several nice beers when we returned. It almost always pays to be maximally easygoing in situations like this.) But sometimes service can be dreadfully slow and inattentive. One friend from Australia, after a particularly bad experience, spotted the line near the bottom of the menu: "Service not included." He took out a pen and wrote in next to it: "I noticed."

● I love fish and chips, and so I have been sited to indulge this constant craving. We have had much that is adequate and satisfying, and a few winners. Pride of place in this last category (so far) must go to Jack's Fish and Chips, in Cherry Hinton. I had it for the first time last Saturday, and it was delicious, especially the fish (cod, I think). I ate an entire order, and half of another, and was filled to bursting, but I had an appetite for another order and a half.

Well, time has run out again, so I will have to bring you more in part three, coming soon.

On Transport, Ideology, and Progress: Some Thoughts Prompted by Gaunilo

I began responding to Gaunilo's fine thoughts in the comments for my last post, when I realised I had begun a new post altogether. Here is the post, retaining some of the elements of response, because I am too tired to redo it all.

Gaunilo:
Yeah, your friends -- and mine, when I articulate the idea -- have a point. But it's not the point they think they have. It's not that America is so big that it couldn't work, it is that we have consistently, since just after World War 2, worked to construct our built environment so that it couldn't be navigated by anything but automobile. In 1929, 1939, it would have been almost unthinkable that you would need at least one car for every adult in your family: there was routinely more public transit as a percentage of overall traffic, and population centers were focused on public transit hubs (the suburb with the train station near the center of town, the neighborhood with an el or subway station near shopping, etc.) It's not that America couldn't be like that, we've just decided -- for whatever godless, selfish, vain reason -- that we don't want to be like that.

And I think you are right, Gaunilo, to describe it in terms of a deep, almost primal attachment (again, post World War 2) to our cars, maybe in the same way we are attached to our guns. Fetish might be too weak a word, but it indicates some of the unhealthy and irrational attachment. Car ownership has been plunged deep into our psyche, such that to be an American and not have a car (or be able to have a gun) is almost unthinkable, a violation of our fundamental identity, except for small outposts such as New York City, Boston, much of Chicago, the Bay Area -- but then, there are quite a few who wouldn't consider those archetypally American cities, either.

The thing that really burns me up -- not that you asked! -- is the refrain I hear from some Americans that it is only a matter of time before Europe gets it straight and becomes like us, bags the services, labour unions, public transit, etc. This is wrong for so many reasons: cultural ignorance, for one. One person once said to me in an offhand way, but entirely seriously, that were it not for Quebec, Canada would just simply join the US. Another person once said to me in all seriousness "Why doesn't England just dump their Queen and come into the twentieth century?" Failure to grasp the integrities of other cultures is not unknown for Americans. These sorts of things that I have mentioned above, including transportation options, are crucial to the European self-image (like England with the Queen), and to give them up would be almost unthinkable.

(To make my presuppositions clear, I don't believe that any given cultural icon is self-justified.
I am assuming that the Queen, as an icon of British life, and the car, as an icon of American life, are not morally equivalent. I am not a knee-jerk defender of the Queen, but I would say that the effects of uncritical automobile usage have had a much more profoundly negative effect on the world and future usage should be re-thought.)

But it is also offensive because it paints America as self-evidently the pacesetter for the world, as if to say a country can gauge its success by the degree to which they look like us, because we have progressed further than anyone else. Everyone else, to be in the game, has to play 'catch-up'. But this is wrong. It seems to me that "progress", if that describes anything, is much more patchy than simply one nation or people self-evidently embodying it, and the rest of the world following suit. This, frankly, is a dangerous ideology and a substitute for thought, because it justifies not only blindly following whatever policy is in place, but also viewing any alternative with suspicion. This kind of ideology is found in the US, but also lurks in the UK, France, China, Argentina, Iraq, you name it. Just when the globe has shrunk enough through communications, we have decided to turn inward. True progress, when there is any, requires discernment, risk, and thought, not marching along a safe and self-evident pathway.

It might be easy to shrug it all off, but I think that the history of 'progress' ought to make us think long and hard. It is Remembrance Sunday here in Britain today, and it has been a common refrain that in the last sixty years, our supposedly modern and enlightened times have been able to produce only 26 days -- 26!! -- on our planet without war somewhere. Apparently, we aren't even able to take off Christmas Day on a consistent basis. And a disproportionate number of the victims of war, especially in this timeframe, are children and other noncombatants. You don't need to be a pacifist to ache for more days of peace, and for children to be able to grow up untraumatised.

The point that I am trying to make is that so many major, life-changing decisions are made unthinkingly (and often for us rather than by us), from building sprawling car-dependent suburbs, to assuming that other nations are wrong if they are different, to going to war against the threatening 'other', and that these decisions end up being profoundly harmful to others and ourselves. It seems to me that it is a vocation of being human to actually think about these things, and keep the other in view in doing so. (Maybe you can call it a plea for a humane education.)

The First Ten Weeks: part one

Well, we've been here in England for ten weeks already, and so it seemed like time for some reflections on living in a different culture.

● As I've mentioned before, we're living without a car; as I've also mentioned, we love it. Many people live here without benefit of an automobile, and many more who have one nevertheless walk or bicycle places. This makes for a very healthy life, and one lived on a more human scale. No time spent in traffic queues, no money spent on petrol, no having to find parking. If we can work this sort of thing out for the rest of our lives -- wherever we live -- I will be quite happy indeed. In fact, this is the longest that I have lived without being in a car, as I've only ridden in one once since we arrived. For that matter, I have lived my entire life these last ten weeks within a no-more-than-five-mile radius, also a first for me.

● The British take their cheese seriously, much moreso than we Americans would ever dream of doing. A typical supermarket will have an entire two-sided aisle filled with cheeses. It will also have its own store brand, not just of cheddar -- which everyone knows is white, not orange -- but also of stilton, caerphilly, red leicester, gorgonzola, and many others besides. I love cheeses, and so I take this as a weather sign of British cultural superiority.

● Related to the last point, the British rather sensibly do not pasteurise everything they can get their hands on. When I was in Honduras several years ago, I fell in love with unpasteurised, not-from-concentrate orange juice: it is divine. Of course, I couldn't get it back in the 'States. The same is true of cheese: America has decreed that all cheese, in fact any milk consumed, must be pasteurised, unless you own the cow. This might seem a trivial matter for many of my American readers, but I have seen the light: lait cru brie. I had eaten brie numerous times before moving to England, but I always did it more out of joyless duty than pleasure -- 'they say this is good, so I'll eat it'. I never really 'got' brie, never appreciated it. That is, until a few weeks ago at the cheese stand in the market square, I picked up some brie, which was lait cru (unpasteurised). I took it home, tasted it, and could barely get enough of it. I have bought some every Saturday since then. It is amazingly, sublimely delicious, and I cannot get enough of it. Which leads me to think that Pasteur -- a Frenchman -- was actually just trying to pull one over on the U.S., so that we wouldn't learn just how delicious this stuff is, and they could keep it for themselves.

● The British also have an affection for sweets which outstrips America's, with long aisles of markets devoted to cakes, biscuits and other sweets. They do not, however, have the same taste for savoury snacks that we do; our displays of crisps (potato chips and the like) tend to be much larger and more diverse than theirs. That is not to say that they do not have interesting offerings in this area, though. If anything, their choice of crisp flavours puts ours to shame. You can choose from ready salted, barbecue, beef and onion, cheese and onion, roast chicken, roast lamb, smoky bacon, worcester sauce, prawn cocktail, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, pickled onion, Marmite Yeast Extract, and -- I might not be making this up -- Lincolnshire Marmoset. They have a great wealth of flavours to choose from (most packed in single-serving containers, so it is hard to sit and watch reruns of Peak Practice whilst consuming a huge bag), but they do not seem to play as prominent a role in snacking here as in America.

Gotta go for now but look for more installments soon, including information on Guy Fawkes' Night, the dangers of riding a bicycle in the dark (i.e. 5pm), and the possibility of having a pleasant walk in steady rain, even when it includes occasional gale force winds.

I Was a Teenage Socialist...

And apparently I have been more recently, too, if this test is to be believed. (Hat tip to Thunder for the link.) Normally I would use this instead of content, but this actually suggests something that might be worth saying... see below.

You are a Social Moderate (55% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (3% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness. loc: (18, -175) modscore: (2, 33) raw: (331) Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

In other words, I am from the Upper Midwest region of the United States of America. I'm not sure that 'socialist' best captures it -- at least not anymore -- but there is a definite tendency in the Upper Midwest towards social moderation and economic liberalism (in the test's terms). This is very different than the sorts of liberalism that you find in the Northeast and the West (at least in California). In the northeast, speaking generally, liberalism tends to be more patrician, more a function of noblesse oblige, than in the Midwest. California tends to be quite liberal (and quite conservative at the same time), driven by a long tradition of iconoclasm. The Midwest is neither of these: it is blue-collar, working class, union, labor, and populist; as a result it tends to be hard-working, egalitarian, communitarian, common-sense. It is, as my results suggest, economically liberal and socially conservative to moderate.

Indeed, when one considers prominent senators from the upper midwest, past and present, it becomes clear: Paul Simon (D-IL), Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Barack Obama (D-IL), Carl Levin (D-MI), Deborah Stabenow (D-MI). These all tend to be quite unapologetically liberal, but also intensely decent folks, popular in their home states, and unafraid to mix with the 'person on the street'. And if Russ Feingold represents this group (and I honestly don't know that he does), then they are not afraid to 'cross the aisle' and work for the good of the nation -- I have in mind the work Feingold did with John McCain (an intensely decent person also, and a conservative Republican) on campaign finance reform. (I don't think the work is done in that area, and I realize that there are compromises in this measure -- but the bipartisan work on behalf of the nation is laudable.)

Moreover, Milwaukee was the first major city to elect a socialist mayor, Emil Seidel, known for closing brothels and casinos, regulating taverns, founding the first public works, creating a public park system, and a police and fire commission. Wisconsin also twice elected a Socialist to the House of Representatives.

And the Upper Midwest is where I'm from. And in fact just this year I discovered that I had a distant connection with this populist liberalism. My great-great grandfather, along with serving in the Union army in the Civil War, was also active in organizing railroad labor unions. He was also politically active, and an associate of Eugene V. Debs, helping Debs in his five campaigns for the presidency. Yes -- that Eugene V. Debs. Intriguingly, my great-great grandfather and Debs grew up in the same town in Indiana; yet more suggestively, their families both emigrated from the same area of France (Alsace). So now you know.

But apart from the biographical revelation, my point is this: the Upper Midwest has its own political profile which is unique to itself, and flows out of its own history and ethnic profile. It cannot be reduced to either the liberalism on offer by the Democrats, or the conservatism of the Republicans, both of which are particular syntheses of issues, which typically issue from other parts of the nation.

Baconsteak (TM): a dream come true!

My brother has long dreamed of marrying the flavours, textures, etc., of bacon to steak, so that he could have the best of both worlds in one food. The recent advances in cloning tissue have only encouraged him, as now the process of creating what he calls Baconsteak -- I guess 'Steakon' didn't test well with the focus groups or something -- could be done entirely in a laboratory, and would not involve the slaughter of animals. Well, my brother and those close to him being creative people, it didn't take a lot of encouragement for one thing to lead to another, and now we have the first wave of marketing for Baconsteak (TM). The nationwide rollout date is unknown, but look for Baconsteak on the menu of your local Howard Johnson's restaurant real soon.

Here's the first spot.

I recommend that you also see the second spot.

(As time goes by, the links to these videos change, so the thing to do is go to OptiTV and search under November 2005 for 'Bacon Steak' and 'Bacon Steak Accomplished'.)

The next thing on the horizon must be a 'helper' for Baconsteak: Shake 'n' Bake Bacon Steak!

Now back to the usual stentorian platitudes...