Science in Its Rightful Place

President Obama has stated in his inaugural address, "We will restore science to its rightful place." I guess that I am less that sure about where that place is.

What is science's place? If it has been displaced, what has usurped it?

I am sure to those (such as myself) who still hold a Modernist viewpoint, science is pretty much authoritative. And for questions that it was created to answer, science does pretty well. I am a big advocate of Western allopathic medicine, physics, information theory, and most of the rest of the Dead European White Man package. Given the choice between antibiotics and accupuncture and herbal cures, I say, "Pass the pills, please."

But physical science was created to answer one category of questions, not every category. One of the big lessons of the 20th century is that while science is good at answering questions of "how," (as in, "How do I build a bridge that spans the Golden Gate?"), it pretty much fails when asked the questions of "why," (as in, "Why should I not take everything away from people who are ethnically different from me?")

If science has been displaced, I think that it has been displaced by clearer thinking about "why" we should (or should not) attempt some actions. We should ask questions about the value of human life before we use science to design weapons of mass destruction. We should ask those same questions before we use science to justify subordinating human lives to those of animals.

During the High Middle Ages, theology was "The Queen of the Sciences," and served as the capstone to the Trivium and Quadrivium that young men were expected to study. This meant that the other subjects (including Philosophy) existed primarily to help with theological thought.

Science had better watch out. Nothing stays the same.

Morally Unserious in the Extreme

Charles Krauthammer zeroes in to what is so troubling (to me) about the Obama Administration. Not that I disagree with Obama's conclusions (which I do), but that he pretends that his conclusions are neutral and without agenda. All the while condemning the Bush administration for its "lack of integrity."

He says that his decisions are grounded in "science." But "science" can only tell us what we can do, not what we ought to do. He is outsourcing his moral judgements to a method that by definition precludes moral judgements.

All this posturing was foreshadowed during the "Saddleback Debate" when Rick Warren asked the carefully worded question:

"...Forty million abortions, at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?"

Obama's reply:

"Well, you know, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade."

The question asked was not a theological question, nor a scientific question, but legal question, "When does a baby get human rights?" A question that a Harvard Law School Grad aspiring to the office of President should have seen fell right into his "pay grade." I was dismayed that Obama's answer was either a "canned" response to the word "abortion," or that he was finessing the question by pretending it was.

But what I see now is that he is outsourcing the responsibility for his moral judgements to others.

Bush had restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed (as of his speech of Aug. 9, 2001). While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned -- and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived -- human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science, and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research -- a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part -- the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on "restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" -- would have made me walk out. Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

What an outrage. George Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike President Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.

This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's pretense that he will "restore science to its rightful place" and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand -- this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically "scientific."

Dr. James Thomson, the discoverer of embryonic stem cells, said "if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough." Obama clearly has not.

Dr. Krauthammer, well spoken

And Surely the Age of Great Speeches Isn't Over

Tony Woodlief comments on Sunday's Inaugural concert:

Sunday's inauguration concert was designed to evoke strong emotion. It was certainly held in a dramatic setting, cast at the feet of Lincoln, in the place where Reverend King gave his nation-changing speech. The danger of standing where giants have tread, of course, is that doing so invites comparison. There was certainly little to be compared, this day, between the transformative words of these great men and the canned lines of the very small playactors selected to give speeches between the concert's musical acts...

...It was revealing that one of the speeches most worthy of note, from the incomparable Forest Whitaker, was essentially a selection from William Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech, an uplifting affirmation of art and truth that is at the same time a denunciation of the worst of post-modernism and relativism. What we have forgotten, as unwittingly attested by the voices at this concert (excepting Mr. Obama, of course, who is a first-rate speaker), is that actors are not, in a classical Aristotelian sense, artists. They are skilled, to be sure, but they are empty vessels, to be fitted to parts as suits the real artists, the writers and photographers, the costumers and make-up specialists. This is not to deny the accidental beauty of Marisa Tomei or Jamie Foxx, or the emotive skill of Denzel Washington. But something is strangely out of whack when speeches are to be delivered at the foot of Lincoln, on ground hallowed by King, and the deliverers we choose are none of them thinkers or writers...

The reality, of course, is that most actors today are nothing without smoldering looks and other people's words, and so each in turn took the stage to read the words of their intellectual betters. Perhaps this is the way of art in a highly specialized economy—if even Christian rock stars these days have to be sexually appealing, then surely we can't cast stones at average Americans who prefer their speeches to be given by beautiful people.

Yet there was a time when scientists and thinkers were among the household list that today is entitled: Celebrities. There was a time when speeches were given by people who could write them, and further, could deliver them with greater force than the pale, this-is-how-we-talk-on-the-Academy-Awards-stage style of Judd, Jackson, et al. And surely the age of great speeches isn't over, as witnessed by the performance of the most gifted speaker on Sunday's stage, Mr. Obama himself. Might there not have been room, then, amidst all the glamour, for an Irving, a Goia, and perhaps—God forbid, given sensitivities about speakers who affirm the validity of the entire Bible—the booming voice of a pastor?

In President Obama we clearly have star power, and one hopes thoughtfulness and moral courage as well. Perhaps the modern American bargain is that we can no longer have the latter two in our public officials without a healthy dose of the former. The danger, of course, is that too few of us seem able to discern the difference.

The Sunshine Patriot

From Ace, this link to an article in the Seattle PI documenting the sudden fashionability of American flags in Seattle:

With newfound patriotism, Seattleites want to wave the flag, hang it from their homes and stick it on their cars.

"The thing that's kind of astounding to me is I never ever would have cared to own a flag," said Rosemary Garner, 42. "This is the first day in my life I actually feel this funny sense of pride about my country. It's a very foreign feeling, but it's a good one."

"It's just a rare feeling to feel that type of, I don't know, national connection," said Noah Kriegsmann, a 33-year-old builder from West Seattle. He feels that Obama's win will help America's standing in the world, and he bought a flag to fly on his truck, though he admitted it felt strange to see the flag in his hand.

"I have just historically felt shame for what the symbol of this country is internationally. Being in someplace like Morocco, and Canadians have their flag on their backpacks -- I would never ever do that," he said.

Well.

I'm glad that these people are finally able to love their own country. That's a positive. (I wonder how they would react to a traditional Northwest flag-burning by ski-masked anarchists. Hmmm?)

But the essence of love is that the beloved is worth love regardless of whether or not your expectations are being met. You can love someone even while you are being embarrassed by them, as the parents of small children and the children of aging parents know.

Part of love is sticking with the one you love through rough times. That's what distinguishes love from lust.

So to my newly-proud Americans I say, welcome back to the country that bore you, protected you, and whom you tore down with your childish behaviour. I hope that this time you can stick around.

Do You Have Any Standards at All?

Orson Scott Card, Democrat and newspaper columnist, takes local newspapers to task for being in the tank for the Democrats:

...These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?
...
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.
...
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

Is that gonna leave a mark? Unfortunately, no. The only thing that will change the media in this country is the ongoing, slow-motion collapse of the newspaper industry.

I AM JOE

Dave Burge declares that whoever attacks Joe 'the Plumber' Wurzelbacher is attacking us all.

Belly Laugh

I saw the video of Senator McCain being besieged by the harpies of "The View," and it caused me to reflect.

What I wanted McCain to do, what I wanted Sarah Palin to do when confronted by Charlie Gibson, was to laugh. I wanted John McCain to toss back his head, hold his stomach and laugh at the silly improbability of it all until tears rolled down his cheeks.

When you think about it, "Do I have to be worried about the return of slavery," seems to require one of two responses. The first is outrage that your viewpoint could be so distorted by a sadly un-funny comedienne. I have no doubt that Senator McCain could rise to heights of outrage should he so desire. The second response is to look at these Lilliputian scold-hens and see how ludicrous their jabber really is. I don't want to hear a mean snarly laugh, nor yet a derisive snort, but a belly laugh that reflects his amusement that these people, these people, contend that they speak for the American people.

Have you noticed how Senator McCain smiles these days when he is standing in the vortex of all the cheers directed at him and Governor Palin? That's how I knew that she was the right choice. America wants a happy warrior, not glum eat-your-Brussels-sprouts policy wonks.

Anyway, the election season is here. At dinner parties I attend, the hostesses hush any talk of November when I am present. My brothers and sisters are, I am sure, discussing having me committed for the insanity of disagreement with them.

Recognizing Quality

From an MSN Money article on knowing when to spend more on an item to save in the long run:

Americans in their 20s and 30s are now at least one generation removed from the era of homemade clothing and hand-crafted wood furniture, Underhill says. "In the 1950s, 90% of homes had sewing machines, which means women knew something about how clothes were put together. They could look at something in the store and tell if was of good construction or crappy construction," he says. "In my office, I don't know anyone who has bought a custom suit. They don't know the difference between off-the-rack and custom."

My mother had a Singer sewing machine, and, being a daughter of the depression, made lots of clothes for the family. Those she didn't make, she likely altered to fit the next-smallest child.

For one brief, shining moment I owned a wardrobe of hand-tailored clothing, including hand-made shoes. I was in Asia for a year and was buying clothes that weren't hand-me-downs. Alas, all my baggage was lost on the trip back to the United States!

Tony Snow

I was a Tony Snow fan since the beginning of "Fox News Sunday." His closing comments were gems. His comments following September 11, 2001, when he lost his composure still define the times.

I hope that this doesn't sound too self-centered, but you get to an age and notice that the people that obituaries are starting to be about people who are younger than you. Tony Snow faced the monster that was eating him a piece at a time, and he laughed with the joy of the life that remained:

Tony Snow in The Jewish World Review, 2005:

The art of being sick is not the same as the art of getting well. Some cancer patients recover; some don't. But the ordeal of facing your mortality and feeling your frailty sharpens your perspective about life. You appreciate little things more ferociously. You grasp the mystical power of love. You feel the gravitational pull of faith. And you realize you have received a unique gift – a field of vision others don't have about the power of hope and the limits of fear; a firm set of convictions about what really matters and what does not. You also feel obliged to share these insights – the most important of which is this: There are things far worse than illness – for instance, soullessness.

No Greater Honor

In The Atlantic Robert D. Kaplan describes the process of awarding the U.S. military's highest honor, and reflects on the disconnection between those who serve and those who are served.

Over the decades, the Medal of Honor—the highest award for valor—has evolved into the U.S. military equivalent of sainthood. Only eight Medals of Honor have been awarded since the Vietnam War, all posthumously....

Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith was the ultimate iron grunt, the kind of relentless, professional, noncommissioned officer that the all-volunteer, expeditionary American military has been quietly producing for four decades. “The American people provide broad, brand-management approval of the U.S. military,” notes Colonel Smith, “about how great it is, and how much they support it, but the public truly has no idea how skilled and experienced many of these troops are.”

Sergeant Smith had fought and served in Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Kosovo prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. To his men, he was an intense, “infuriating, by-the-book taskmaster,” in the words of Alex Leary of The St. Petersburg Times, Sergeant Smith’s hometown newspaper. Long after other platoons were let off duty, Sergeant Smith would be drilling his men late into the night, checking the cleanliness of their rifle barrels with the Q-tips he carried in his pocket. During one inspection, he found a small screw missing from a soldier’s helmet. He called the platoon back to drill until 10 p.m. “He wasn’t an in-your-face type,” Colonel Smith told me, “just a methodical, hard-ass professional who had been in combat in Desert Storm, and took it as his personal responsibility to prepare his men for it.”

Sergeant Smith’s mind-set epitomized the Western philosophy on war: War is not a way of life, an interminable series of hit-and-run raids for the sake of vendetta and tribal honor, in societies built on blood and discord. War is awful, to be waged only as a last resort, and with terrific intensity, to elicit a desired outcome in the shortest possible time. Because Sergeant Smith took war seriously, he never let up on his men, and never forgot about them...

The ceremony in the East Room of the White House two years to the day after Sergeant Smith was killed, where President George W. Bush awarded the Medal of Honor to Sergeant Smith’s 11-year-old son, David, was fitfully covered by the media. The Paul Ray Smith story elicited 96 media mentions for the eight week period after the medal was awarded, compared with 4,677 for the supposed abuse of the Koran at Guantánamo Bay and 5,159 for the disgraced Abu Ghraib prison guard Lynndie England, over a much longer time frame that went on for many months. In a society that obsesses over reality-TV shows, gangster and war movies, and NFL quarterbacks, an authentic hero like Sergeant Smith flickers momentarily before the public consciousness.

It may be that the public, which still can’t get enough of World War II heroics, even as it feels guilty about its treatment of Vietnam veterans, simply can’t deliver up the requisite passion for honoring heroes from unpopular wars like Korea and Iraq. It may also be that, encouraged by the media, the public is more comfortable seeing our troops in Iraq as victims of a failed administration rather than as heroes in their own right. Such indifference to valor is another factor that separates an all-volunteer military from the public it defends.

Read the short article. It is well worth your time.

WFB RIP

Ouch.

A personal note, a couple of quotes, and a few links.

I became a Republican at 16 years old, when I received my first minimum-wage paycheck out of which was drawn Federal Taxes, State Taxes, union dues and a union initiation fee, all of which were mandatory. I became a real conservative in the late 1970s when I encountered Mr. Buckley's television show, Firing Line.

On Firing Line I saw manifest the "marketplace of ideas." And the delight, the joy, the brio with which Mr. Buckley engaged his liberal guests gave me a model to follow. Quite frankly, after watching Firing Line every other conservative talk fest has more than a whiff of pro wrestling about it.

I saw Mr. Buckley speechless only twice.

Once was when his guest was Mother Theresa. He asked, as television hosts will, to what address could his viewers send money to support her mission. She said that she didn't appear on his show to raise money, but to communicate what God would have her share. Mr. Buckley tried again, personalizing it to try to elicit a response, "Where would I send money for your work?"

Mother Theresa said, in that quavery voice, "I don't want you to give money. I want you to go out and look into the face of the poor."

To which Mr. Buckley had no reply.

A couple of quotes:

...if there were nothing to complain about, there would be no post-Adamite mankind. But complaint is profanation in the absence of gratitude. There is much to complain about in America, but that awful keening noise one unhappily gets so used to makes no way for the bells, and these have rung for America, are still ringing for America, and for this we are obliged to be grateful. To be otherwise is wrong reason, and a poetical invitation to true national tribulation. I must remember to pray more often, because providence has given us the means to make the struggle, and in this respect we are singularly blessed in this country, and in this room.

I was in a radio exchange with the senior U.S. liberal, Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who in a casual survey of technology stunned me by saying that, in his judgment, "Word processing is the greatest invention in modern history." Suddenly I was face to face with the flip side of Paradise. That means, doesn't it, that Professor Schlesinger will write more than he would do otherwise?

And a quote by Jonah Goldberg about Mr. Buckley's place in history:

In the next few days, there will be a wave of liberals — Frank Rich comes particularly to mind — who will use WFB's memory to beat up on today's conservatives....Liberals today bemoan how wonderful the conservatives of yesteryear were, solely to lament how terrible they are today. [My link -ed.] The recent bout of Goldwater nostalgia on the left was a perfect example. The strange new respect liberals have for Ronald Reagan would be another. And you can be sure they will use Buckley to that effect too.

That said, I'm delighted to have conservative heroes become simply American heroes. But it's at least worth pointing out that Goldwater, Reagan and, of course William F. Buckley were subjected to vicious criticism from the left in their day. That they belong to all Americans now is no small testament to their success in the face of often unrelenting opposition.

And for links, the best come from the online presence of Mr. Buckley's magazine:

From the Editors "It has been said that great men are rarely good men. Even more rarely are they sweet and merry, as Buckley was.

A Symposium of Conservatives "The scene was slightly surreal, but it was an adventure and we were having fun. The gift of turning life into adventure was one of his charms, which helped attract young and old alike, but particularly the young, to his side. By merrily refuting liberalism, he gave birth to a conservatism, shaped in his own image, that avoided the drearily doctrinaire."

UPDATE: Nodding to Jonah Goldberg's point above (or, since this is in re: WFB, supra), Ross Dothat in The Atlantic writes:

Liberals tend to find kind things to say about men of the Right only once they're old and out of the arena, the better to contrast the decent conservatives of yore with the supposed right-wing pygmies of the present. But in Buckley's case the contrast is accurate, so long as we make it bipartisan: He was a giant, and no contemporary commentators, be they left or right or something else entirely, can hope to live up to the example he set, or the enjoy the impact he had. He didn't quite stop history, as he vowed half-jestingly to do, but he did manage to change it, and he will cast a long shadow over political journalism, and our politics in general, for as long as American history runs onward.

Remembering Jeff Meisch

This was a tribute to one of my very best friends. I posted it to forum for old alumni, GaneshaHighSchool.com.

Jeff Meisch was my best friend through High School and into my first years of college. We were opposites in many ways but shared the alienation of being outsiders to the popular crowds at school. We were Marching Band geeks. We both had crushes on Joyce Wright (Dery).

We were a Mutt and Jeff team (and Jeff often pointed out that he was, after all, Jeff.) I was tall and thin, Jeff was short and round. While I looked at the world like a wounded puppy dog, Jeff affected and air of sophisticated cynicism. I was Art Carney, Jeff was Jackie Gleason.

Gleason is tremendous; if you’re my age you grew up with Gleason as the TV variety show fellow with the away-we-go schtick. You learned about the Honeymooners later, at which point your appreciation expanded greatly. Gleason had that same skill Roscoe Arbuckle possessed in such amazing quantities: lightness and grace. But Gleason had gravity, too. Modern fat comics haven’t had that skill; Belushi was just amped and revved, which is different from having, uh, inner buoyancy.... John Candy was heavy, period. Chris Farley was an overinflated kickball still bouncing off the walls an hour after it was thrown. Gleason was different. He had – what’s the word? Buoyant innards.

That was Jeff.

I remember summer days when we would hop in his old Ford Econoline van, fill up on $0.35 gas and drive aimlessly all over Southern California -- from Grapevine Hill to the Mexican border, from watching girls in bikinis on Huntington Beach to shooting cans on the high desert with a .357 magnum. We would have wide-ranging conversations that multiplexed from music to metaphysics to what we saw ahead for our lives.

Jeff, a Jack Mormon, introduced me Beefeater's gin and Black Watch cigars. I never did take a shine to gin.

Jeff came up with a brilliant plan to sneak hooch into our Senior Party. The party was a multi-school event to be held in Disneyland. Jeff knew that there would be a shake-down at the gate for contraband that night, so we paid to enter the park the day before, packing several flasks of Beefeater's. We rode the Storybook Land Canal Boats ride and, as it passed near the bank in a secluded spot, stuck the bottles in the shrubbery. The night of the party, we rode the ride and grabbed the flasks. Good times.

When we worked in the pit orchestra for the High School musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Jeff bought a dozen roses to give to Joyce Wright. Knowing how painfully shy I was he decided to torment me by announcing he was going to sign my name to the card. I was stunned, but I knew what to say. "You wouldn't dare." He took it as a challenge and wrote my name. Joyce gave me a kiss.

Jeff was one of the few people I knew at my own wedding. That was the last time I saw him.

It's often said that guys never form friendships as close as ones formed in school years or in the military service. I can attest that this is the case with me. For respiratory health reasons Mrs. Gray and I moved away from Southern California in the early 1970s. With the demands of a new career and family and the tyranny of the immediate, it was very easy to let contacts slip away. Pre-internet it was difficult to re-establish contacts.

But for a couple of years I have been trying to re-establish those ties with family members and friends. So I googled Jeff's name now and again. Last Thursday I came across this site. Once again I scanned the registered members looking for Jeff's name. Then I saw a scan of a program for a 30-year reunion dinner. I browsed the photos, trying to pick out familiar faces. On one of the last pages was a "Memoriam." There on the list of departed classmates was Jeff's name.

I was shocked at how much I was shocked. My cohort is now well into the half-century mark and news of another passing is a more and more frequent occurence. But I was really saddened that I won't be able to catch up with Jeff.

Encountering Limits

As you age, you realize that many of your childhood dreams will never come true. You'll never be as strong as Superman, you'll never be as rich as Bill Gates, and you'll never be as clever as Dick Cavett:

Years later, as a guest on the Tonight Show, [Johnny] Carson told Cavett that his favorite joke Cavett wrote for him during his days as a writer was the humorous caption to a newspaper photo of Aristotle Onassis looking at the home of Buster Keaton which he was considering purchasing.

Cavett wrote: "Aristotle Contemplating the Home of Buster."

Good Dog

Noted with only this comment: Jake lived only because of the love and dedication of Mary Flood.

Good, human, Mary. Good Human.

Click on the image to see a slideshow.

Sept. 11 rescue dog with cancer dies

NEW YORK - A black Labrador that burrowed through smoking debris after Sept. 11 and flooded rubble after Hurricane Katrina in search of survivors has died after developing cancer.

Owner Mary Flood had 12-year-old Jake put to sleep Wednesday after a last stroll through the fields and a dip in the creek near their home in Oakley, Utah. Flood said Jake had been in pain, shaking with a 105-degree fever as he lay on the lawn...

...Flood adopted Jake as a 10-month-old puppy. He had been abandoned on a street with a broken leg and a dislocated hip.

"But against all odds he became a world-class rescue dog," said Flood, a member of Utah Task Force 1, a federal search-and-rescue team that looked for human remains at ground zero.

On the evening of the team's arrival in New York, Jake walked into a fancy Manhattan restaurant wearing his search-and-rescue vest and was treated to a free steak dinner under a table.

Flood eventually trained Jake to become one of fewer than 200 U.S. government-certified rescue dogs — an animal on 24-hour call to tackle disasters such as building collapses, earthquakes, hurricanes and avalanches.

After Katrina, Flood and Jake drove from Utah to Mississippi, where they searched for survivors in flooded homes.

In recent years, Jake helped train younger dogs across the country. He showed them how to track scents, even in the snow, and how to look up if the scent was in a tree.

He also did therapy work with children at a Utah camp for burn victims and at senior homes and hospitals.

"He was a great morale booster wherever he went," Flood said. "He was always ready to work, eager to play — and a master at helping himself to any unattended food items."

She said Jake's ashes would be scattered "in places that were important to him," such as his Utah training grounds and the rivers and hills near his home where he swam and roamed.

The Heav’n-Rescued Land

I wonder these days how many people know the first verse of the national anthem? I wonder how many people know that The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses?

I know, friends and neighbors, because I once sang all four verses to get out of a tight spot.

I was a young fellow, and a trainee at the U.S. Army Signal School's Ceremonial Unit. The unit was run like a kind of fraternity with several weeks of initiation where the pledge's lives were made miserable by the older team members. A common punishment was to order the trainees to drop for endless pushups. (I left the unit a year later with arms like Popeye.)

One particular fellow, PFC Peake, had made it his mission to make me spend as much time as possible doing pushups. After three weeks I knew that the situation couldn't go on. I knew that we were headed for a showdown. And so I began to memorize the entire national anthem.

Sure enough, a few days later I walked into the unit's dayroom and into a circle of older team members. On seeing me, PFC Peake yelled "Drop trainee!" So I assumed the pushup position. But, before he could assign me a specific number of pushups to do, I began singing The Star Spangled Banner. Of course everyone in the room saw the joke and played along, coming to attention (including me).

As I reached the first refrain, "O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave," Peake's eyes lit up. I had played my joke on him, but now whatever number of pushups had been ready to assign, it had now doubled.

As I sang, "O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave," I coud see the group start to relax. Before they could drop from attention, I began the second verse:

"On the shore, dimly seen thro’ the mist of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes"

Again, as I reached the refrain, the group prepared to see Peake's aweful vengance. But then came the third verse and refrain--then the fourth.

By the time I sang (with a cracking voice) the final refrain, "And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave," the atmosphere in the room had changed. They knew that they had been topped. As I finished PFC Peake gave me the command, "Carry on," and I went about my business. Two week later I passed my tests and inspections and became a unit team member.

I think that it's good for us to see the full text of Key's poem that so swept a nation that it became it's national anthem. And if we find some of the words hard reading, we need to measure ourselves against the text, not measure the text against what we think it should be.

So here it is, in it's non-politically correct form, The Star Spangled Banner:

O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen thro’ the mist of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream

’Tis the star-spangled banner. Oh! long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation,
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our Trust"

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Imagine All the People...

...Living for today.

You don't have to be a dreamer, because these people seem to exist. They are called the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN). They are described in this New Yorker article:

...They playfully tossed my name back and forth among themselves, altering it slightly with each reiteration, until it became an unrecognizable syllable. They never uttered it again, but instead gave me a lilting Pirahã name: Kaaxáoi, that of a Pirahã man, from a village downriver, whom they thought I resembled. “That’s completely consistent with my main thesis about the tribe,” Everett told me later. “They reject everything from outside their world. They just don’t want it, and it’s been that way since the day the Brazilians first found them in this jungle in the seventeen-hundreds.”

But his [Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor's] work remained relatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” which was published that fall in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article described the extreme simplicity of the tribe’s living conditions and culture. The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition...

Unlike other hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon, the Pirahã have resisted efforts by missionaries and government agencies to teach them farming. They maintain tiny, weed-infested patches of ground a few steps into the forest, where they cultivate scraggly manioc plants. “The stuff that’s growing in this village was either planted by somebody else or it’s what grows when you spit the seed out,” Everett said to me one morning as we walked through the village. Subsisting almost entirely on fish and game, which they catch and hunt daily, the Pirahã have ignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking, and they produce only enough manioc flour to last a few days...

...Everett hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ”

To Everett, the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality—he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle”—explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?” Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys’ model airplanes to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahã’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents.

No cultural memory...no art...I don't want to come off as a kind of cultural imperialist here, but this really tests the boundaries of my understanding.

Jeff's Dead

Few reading this blog (with the exception of Mrs. Panjandrum) remembers Jeff. Jeff was my best friend in High School and my first years of college. We were opposites in many ways but shared the alienation of being outsiders to the popular crowds at school. We were Marching Band geeks. We both had crushes on Joyce Wright.

Jeff was one of the few people I knew at my own wedding. That was the last time I saw him.

We were a Mutt and Jeff team (and Jeff often pointed out that he was, after all, Jeff.) I was tall and thin, Jeff was short and round. While I looked at the world like a wounded puppy dog, Jeff affected and air of sophisticated cynicism. I was Art Carney, Jeff was Jackie Gleason.

Gleason is tremendous; if you’re my age you grew up with Gleason as the TV variety show fellow with the away-we-go schtick. You learned about the Honeymooners later, at which point your appreciation expanded greatly. Gleason had that same skill Roscoe Arbuckle possessed in such amazing quantities: lightness and grace. But Gleason had gravity, too. Modern fat comics haven’t had that skill; Belushi was just amped and revved, which is different from having, uh, inner buoyancy.... John Candy was heavy, period. Chris Farley was an overinflated kickball still bouncing off the walls an hour after it was thrown. Gleason was different. He had – what’s the word? Buoyant innards.

That was Jeff.

I remember summer days when we would hop in his old Ford Econoline van, fill up on $0.35 gas and drive aimlessly all over Southern California -- from Grapevine Hill to the Mexican border, from watching girls in bikinis on Huntington Beach to shooting cans on the high desert with a .357 magnum. We would have wide-ranging conversations that multiplexed from music to metaphysics to what we saw ahead for our lives.

Jeff, a Jack Mormon, introduced me Beefeater's gin and Black Watch cigars. I never did take a shine to gin.

Jeff came up with a brilliant plan to sneak hooch into our Senior Party. The party was a multi-school event to be held in Disneyland. Jeff knew that there would be a shake-down at the gate for contraband that night, so we paid to enter the park the day before, packing several flasks of Beefeater's. We rode the Storybook Land Canal Boats ride and, as it passed near the bank in a secluded spot, stuck the bottles in the shrubbery. The night of the party, we rode the ride and grabbed the flasks. Good times.

It's often said that guys never form friendships as close as ones formed in school years or in the military service. I can attest that this is the case with me. For respiratory health reasons Mrs. Panjandrum and I moved away from Southern California in the early 1970s. With the demands of a new career and family and the tyranny of the immediate, it was very easy to let contacts slip away. Pre-internet it was difficult to re-establish contacts.

But for a couple of years I have been trying to re-establish those ties with family members and friends. So I googled Jeff's name now and again. Last Thursday I came across a site that was an on-line forum for alumni of my old high school. Once again I scanned the registered members looking for Jeff's name. Then I saw a scan of a program for a 30-year reunion dinner. I browsed the photos, trying to pick out familiar faces. On one of the last pages was a "Memoriam." There on the list of departed classmates was Jeff's name.

I was shocked at how much I was shocked. My cohort is now well into the half-century mark and news of another passing is a more and more frequent occurence. But I was really saddened that I won't be able to catch up with Jeff.

An Ever-Constricting Circle

Dean Barnett reflects on living with a progressive illness in wake of the news about John and Elizabeth Edwards:

THROUGH THE YEARS, I’VE COME TO VIEW SERIOUS and progressive illness as an ever constricting circle with oneself at the center. The interior of the circle represents the contents of one’s life. As the circle gets smaller, things that were inside get forced out. Some of these things are dearly missed; other items that were once thought precious get forced to the exterior and turn out to go surprisingly unlamented.

At the innermost point of the circle are the things that really matter: Family, faith, love. These things stay with you until the day that you die. At the very end, because the circle has shrunk down to its center, they’re all you have left.

But as we approach that end, we finally realize that all along they were what mattered most. As a consequence, life often remains beautiful and worthwhile right up until the end.

I have dealt with the passing of siblings, cousins and one parent, but I've never had the experience of the long twilight of a progressive illness. I do pray for the Edwards.