MORAL PRINCIPLES VS. MATERIAL INTERESTS
Upon opening a collection of that old misanthropist Ambrose Bierce's fables, the very first one caught my eye:
A Moral Principle met a Material Interest on a bridge wide enough for but one.
"Down, you base thing!" thundered the Moral Principle, "and let me pass over you!"
The Material Interest merely looked in the other's eyes without saying anything.
"Ah," said the Moral Principle, hesitatingly, "let us draw lots to see which shall retire till the other has crossed."
The Material Interest maintained an unbroken silence and an unwavering stare.
"In order to avoid a conflict," the Moral Principle resumed, somewhat uneasily, "I shall myself lie down and let you walk over me."
Then the Material Interest found a tongue, and by a strange coincidence it was its own tongue. "I don't think you are very good walking," it said. "I am a little particular about what I have underfoot. Suppose you get off into the water."
It occurred that way.
Sound familiar? To me, it connects with what seems to have become the way so many things are going on in our fair American democracy.
But wouldn't it be great if this led people to think about their moral principles? How well are they understood? What reasons do we have for embracing them? Most especially, how can we satisfactorily resolve those conflicts without sacrificing our principles? When is compromise a good thing, and when isn't it so good?
Critical thinking like that actually strengthen your principles. But fair warning: it can also lead you to change them. Maybe even adopt new ones.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Are You Sitting Too Much?
Here's one for you to ponder. And the sooner the better!
The Associated Press recently reported that "Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods — even if you also exercise regularly — could be bad for your health. And it doesn't matter where the sitting takes place — at the office, at school, in the car or before a computer or TV — just the overall number of hours it occurs.
"Research is preliminary, but several studies suggest people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die. . . .
". . . in a study published last year that tracked more than 17,000 Canadians for about a dozen years, researchers found people who sat more had a higher death risk, independently of whether or not they exercised.
"We don't have enough evidence yet to say how much sitting is bad," said Peter Katzmarzyk of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, who led the Canadian study. "But it seems the more you can get up and interrupt this sedentary behavior, the better."
"Figures from a U.S. survey in 2003-2004 found Americans spend more than half their time sitting, from working at their desks to sitting in cars.
"Experts said more research is needed to figure out just how much sitting is dangerous, and what might be possible to offset those effects."
Lara Lohan, senior editor at AlterNet, has some tips for dealing with this dreadful news:
Answer your morning emails via your handy smart phone while walking to work, be sure to glance up when crossing streets
Interrupt colleagues often and in person
Try to find crowded places to eat where there is standing room only
Ask your local pub to replace the tables and chairs with treadmills
And if you can't possibly trade in your desk job for a mail delivery route, try not to get too discouraged about the heaps of bad health news these days. Yes, something will surely kill you, but you don't have to take it sitting down.
The Associated Press recently reported that "Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods — even if you also exercise regularly — could be bad for your health. And it doesn't matter where the sitting takes place — at the office, at school, in the car or before a computer or TV — just the overall number of hours it occurs.
"Research is preliminary, but several studies suggest people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die. . . .
". . . in a study published last year that tracked more than 17,000 Canadians for about a dozen years, researchers found people who sat more had a higher death risk, independently of whether or not they exercised.
"We don't have enough evidence yet to say how much sitting is bad," said Peter Katzmarzyk of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, who led the Canadian study. "But it seems the more you can get up and interrupt this sedentary behavior, the better."
"Figures from a U.S. survey in 2003-2004 found Americans spend more than half their time sitting, from working at their desks to sitting in cars.
"Experts said more research is needed to figure out just how much sitting is dangerous, and what might be possible to offset those effects."
Lara Lohan, senior editor at AlterNet, has some tips for dealing with this dreadful news:
Answer your morning emails via your handy smart phone while walking to work, be sure to glance up when crossing streets
Interrupt colleagues often and in person
Try to find crowded places to eat where there is standing room only
Ask your local pub to replace the tables and chairs with treadmills
And if you can't possibly trade in your desk job for a mail delivery route, try not to get too discouraged about the heaps of bad health news these days. Yes, something will surely kill you, but you don't have to take it sitting down.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE F-WORD
Advice to parents: Don't let your children read
this--unless you are prepared to answer their
questions why adults treat sex as dirty.
Do you think this country went through a sexual revolution back in the 60s and early 70s? Apparently there are people--I don't know how many--who think we did. But I wonder. . .
I have trouble thinking something fundamental in our attitudes toward sex hasn't changed. Something lurking in the way people talk about sex. It's the age-old association of sex with dirt and violence.
"Love hath built its temples in places of excrement," Montaigne once observed. Can you think of a better way to degrade sex? It's like building a playground over a leaky sewage treatment plant.
I had a sister I used to think of as the crypto-fascist in the family. One day in her house I used the word “fuck,” and she blasted me. “If you want to use language like that, Mister, do it in the bathroom!” So I went in the bathroom and shouted, “FUCK.”
But why the bathroom? Because that’s where we get rid of dirt we don’t want to have around, according to Murray Davis ("Smut"). Not all dirt, you see, is dirty. Dirty dirt can embarrass you: it’s not supposed to be seen or heard in polite company.
Dirty talk requires washing out your mouth--or having someone do it for you, as parents supposedly used to do with their children. “Gutter talk” is another label for it; “filth,” is a favorite, as is “garbage.” The English language has over 1,000 words for copulating and some 1,500 synonyms for our genitals.
Jesse Sheidlower--an editor at Random House at the time--put together a dictionary of "every sense of fuck, and every compound word or phrase of which fuck is a part," which he found in use in the U.S. From "absofuckinglutely" to "tit-fuck," it runs over 200 pages. He titled his book, "The F Word."
As one writer observed, sexual functions and body parts must be extremely important to us. Yet, the most direct and unambiguous words for them are called dirty and banned from public, "polite," company.
And so we resort to those god-awful euphemisms: “doing it,” “having sex,” “getting it on,” “being intimate,” "hooking up," on and on. What are people referring to when they talk about “having sex”? What, indeed, do people mean by “sex”? Bill Clinton isn't the only one who thinks oral sex is not sex. A lot of young people don’t either. Some people don’t think masturbation is sex either, and when they say there’s no such thing as safe sex, they never mention it.
Am I the only one who thinks that this doesn’t sound like people who are comfortable with sex?
Back in the early ‘60s, Edward Sagarin brought out “The Anatomy of Dirty Words.” It was a serious scholarly work, but like "The F Word," you can have a lot of fun reading it.
For example, how we carefully use the word “balls.” Many people are named “Ball,” but no one is named “Balls.” Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Ball are not known as “the Balls.” Expressions like “she is on the ball” or “he carries the ball” are positive, but not “he carries the balls.” Yet when you say “he’s got balls” and “she’s got balls” you are being complimentary (in a sexist sort of way). California's governor recently assured us his chief aide--"governess," people call her--"has balls."
But of all the proscribed sexual words, “fuck” still remains supreme. In one version or another, the word is known in all cultures; it’s hated, feared, revered and loved, but not free of its taboo. It is the four-letter word. Even when we see it written as “f- - - ,” or referred to as the "f-word," we know right away what is meant. (The New York Times at one time used to print “sex” as “s-x.,” and we all knew what it referred to.)
So why can’t the full word be used? No other word in the English language, Sagarin thought, is so readily understood without being explained . . and it’s still not decent.
Here's a dude telling his buddies what he did the night before:
“So I finish my fuckin’ work for the day, get home and like shit, shave, shower, shampoo and shinola, get in my fuckin’ car and you know pick up my fuckin’ girlfriend. We eat at like one of those fuckin’ roadside places, you know, a fuckin’ beer and fast food joint, then we pick up a fuckin’ six-pack and like go to the fuckin’ motel and we have you know like sexual intercourse.”
Ånd what about the first-grader, looking at how his classroom had been trashed over the weekend, pointing at his desk and blurting out, "Look! Someone wrote 'fuck' on my desk"?
"You can read!" his teacher says in wonderment.
And what are we to make of “mother-fucker”? A comedian once said he had once thought “mother” was only half a word. “Mother-fucker” is found in most West African languages, and was brought to this country by slaves. But when I first heard it in the Navy, it was used by whites. I was appalled--probably because of its connection with the incest taboo. And when my fellow Swabbies used the word, they meant nothing good by it. But no one thinks someone is being accused of fucking their mother when it’s used these days. Do they?
Then there’s the use of “fuck” as a violent expletive--as in “fuck you,” “fuck off,” “don’t fuck with me,” or “he fucked her over.” Here is the word most clearly and closely associated with sex used to express something bad, violent, wrong, undesirable. It's a popular way of attacking someone. When someone tells you, “Fuck you” there’s no mistaking that.
Is it only coincidental that the word is one of the more violent epithets that we have? Why isn’t “don’t mess with me” as good as “don’t fuck with me”? Or “get lost” not as good as “fuck off”? I have to admit when I am really angry there seems to be no other word that says what I want to say. Why is that? Is there some sort of hidden connection with sex that makes fuck-epithets more powerful, more violent?
Sexual language is widely associated with male power. When men suffer the horrors of what clinically is called erectile dysfunction, it is commonly referred to as impotence. No potency, no power. Right? Fucking-- usually meaning penile-vaginal intercourse--can be an exercise of power over a woman by a man “Ken fucked Barbie” is okay, but “Barbie fucked Ken” can have a jarring effect, though people may not be quite sure why that is.
Why is calling someone a prick a common way for dumping on them? (And note it is “prick” and not “penis.”) Sex in our society, some still claim, is penis-oriented. So Sagarin invited his readers to imagine a society in which calling someone a prick is considered complimentary.
He would be a well-rounded personality, firm, have a great sense of rhythm, with an excellent sense of direction. He is firmly determined, unbending and inflexible once he has set out to accomplish something. But he could still--if he is perfect--withdraw at will into himself without losing confidence that he can regain his full stature.
He must be a man of stature, gregarious, well liked but never imposing himself on others. He rises to every occasion, a true pillar of society, but power is only a means to an end. For he aims to please, and because of his remarkable self-control he terminates his encounters with others only when mutually agreeable.
If women are still having trouble with the male orientation in the way we treat sex--not just in the way we talk about it, but the way we do it--why is it that depictions of an erection are so forbidden, but soft ones are not?
To call someone a cunt or a prick is to say something very malevolent indeed. Or can it be argued that the genital- and fuck-epithets are purged of all sexual meaning--like “bloody” as an epithet is purged of all association with blood?
Why are our favorite expletives sexual? While the alleged sexual revolution was supposedly underway, there was another movement calling into question our reliance on schools for educating people. “Skools,” their critics called them; dangerous unhealthy places--especially for the young (sound familiar?). In some quarters “skool” was a dirty word. It could replace “fuck”--as in “skool you,” or “don’t skool with me,” and “skool off, will ya?”
Nope. We don't appear to be ready to give up sex as dirty dirt, and with it all those fucking--er, dirty expletives.
Advice to parents: Don't let your children read
this--unless you are prepared to answer their
questions why adults treat sex as dirty.
Do you think this country went through a sexual revolution back in the 60s and early 70s? Apparently there are people--I don't know how many--who think we did. But I wonder. . .
I have trouble thinking something fundamental in our attitudes toward sex hasn't changed. Something lurking in the way people talk about sex. It's the age-old association of sex with dirt and violence.
"Love hath built its temples in places of excrement," Montaigne once observed. Can you think of a better way to degrade sex? It's like building a playground over a leaky sewage treatment plant.
I had a sister I used to think of as the crypto-fascist in the family. One day in her house I used the word “fuck,” and she blasted me. “If you want to use language like that, Mister, do it in the bathroom!” So I went in the bathroom and shouted, “FUCK.”
But why the bathroom? Because that’s where we get rid of dirt we don’t want to have around, according to Murray Davis ("Smut"). Not all dirt, you see, is dirty. Dirty dirt can embarrass you: it’s not supposed to be seen or heard in polite company.
Dirty talk requires washing out your mouth--or having someone do it for you, as parents supposedly used to do with their children. “Gutter talk” is another label for it; “filth,” is a favorite, as is “garbage.” The English language has over 1,000 words for copulating and some 1,500 synonyms for our genitals.
Jesse Sheidlower--an editor at Random House at the time--put together a dictionary of "every sense of fuck, and every compound word or phrase of which fuck is a part," which he found in use in the U.S. From "absofuckinglutely" to "tit-fuck," it runs over 200 pages. He titled his book, "The F Word."
As one writer observed, sexual functions and body parts must be extremely important to us. Yet, the most direct and unambiguous words for them are called dirty and banned from public, "polite," company.
And so we resort to those god-awful euphemisms: “doing it,” “having sex,” “getting it on,” “being intimate,” "hooking up," on and on. What are people referring to when they talk about “having sex”? What, indeed, do people mean by “sex”? Bill Clinton isn't the only one who thinks oral sex is not sex. A lot of young people don’t either. Some people don’t think masturbation is sex either, and when they say there’s no such thing as safe sex, they never mention it.
Am I the only one who thinks that this doesn’t sound like people who are comfortable with sex?
Back in the early ‘60s, Edward Sagarin brought out “The Anatomy of Dirty Words.” It was a serious scholarly work, but like "The F Word," you can have a lot of fun reading it.
For example, how we carefully use the word “balls.” Many people are named “Ball,” but no one is named “Balls.” Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Ball are not known as “the Balls.” Expressions like “she is on the ball” or “he carries the ball” are positive, but not “he carries the balls.” Yet when you say “he’s got balls” and “she’s got balls” you are being complimentary (in a sexist sort of way). California's governor recently assured us his chief aide--"governess," people call her--"has balls."
But of all the proscribed sexual words, “fuck” still remains supreme. In one version or another, the word is known in all cultures; it’s hated, feared, revered and loved, but not free of its taboo. It is the four-letter word. Even when we see it written as “f- - - ,” or referred to as the "f-word," we know right away what is meant. (The New York Times at one time used to print “sex” as “s-x.,” and we all knew what it referred to.)
So why can’t the full word be used? No other word in the English language, Sagarin thought, is so readily understood without being explained . . and it’s still not decent.
Here's a dude telling his buddies what he did the night before:
“So I finish my fuckin’ work for the day, get home and like shit, shave, shower, shampoo and shinola, get in my fuckin’ car and you know pick up my fuckin’ girlfriend. We eat at like one of those fuckin’ roadside places, you know, a fuckin’ beer and fast food joint, then we pick up a fuckin’ six-pack and like go to the fuckin’ motel and we have you know like sexual intercourse.”
Ånd what about the first-grader, looking at how his classroom had been trashed over the weekend, pointing at his desk and blurting out, "Look! Someone wrote 'fuck' on my desk"?
"You can read!" his teacher says in wonderment.
And what are we to make of “mother-fucker”? A comedian once said he had once thought “mother” was only half a word. “Mother-fucker” is found in most West African languages, and was brought to this country by slaves. But when I first heard it in the Navy, it was used by whites. I was appalled--probably because of its connection with the incest taboo. And when my fellow Swabbies used the word, they meant nothing good by it. But no one thinks someone is being accused of fucking their mother when it’s used these days. Do they?
Then there’s the use of “fuck” as a violent expletive--as in “fuck you,” “fuck off,” “don’t fuck with me,” or “he fucked her over.” Here is the word most clearly and closely associated with sex used to express something bad, violent, wrong, undesirable. It's a popular way of attacking someone. When someone tells you, “Fuck you” there’s no mistaking that.
Is it only coincidental that the word is one of the more violent epithets that we have? Why isn’t “don’t mess with me” as good as “don’t fuck with me”? Or “get lost” not as good as “fuck off”? I have to admit when I am really angry there seems to be no other word that says what I want to say. Why is that? Is there some sort of hidden connection with sex that makes fuck-epithets more powerful, more violent?
Sexual language is widely associated with male power. When men suffer the horrors of what clinically is called erectile dysfunction, it is commonly referred to as impotence. No potency, no power. Right? Fucking-- usually meaning penile-vaginal intercourse--can be an exercise of power over a woman by a man “Ken fucked Barbie” is okay, but “Barbie fucked Ken” can have a jarring effect, though people may not be quite sure why that is.
Why is calling someone a prick a common way for dumping on them? (And note it is “prick” and not “penis.”) Sex in our society, some still claim, is penis-oriented. So Sagarin invited his readers to imagine a society in which calling someone a prick is considered complimentary.
He would be a well-rounded personality, firm, have a great sense of rhythm, with an excellent sense of direction. He is firmly determined, unbending and inflexible once he has set out to accomplish something. But he could still--if he is perfect--withdraw at will into himself without losing confidence that he can regain his full stature.
He must be a man of stature, gregarious, well liked but never imposing himself on others. He rises to every occasion, a true pillar of society, but power is only a means to an end. For he aims to please, and because of his remarkable self-control he terminates his encounters with others only when mutually agreeable.
If women are still having trouble with the male orientation in the way we treat sex--not just in the way we talk about it, but the way we do it--why is it that depictions of an erection are so forbidden, but soft ones are not?
To call someone a cunt or a prick is to say something very malevolent indeed. Or can it be argued that the genital- and fuck-epithets are purged of all sexual meaning--like “bloody” as an epithet is purged of all association with blood?
Why are our favorite expletives sexual? While the alleged sexual revolution was supposedly underway, there was another movement calling into question our reliance on schools for educating people. “Skools,” their critics called them; dangerous unhealthy places--especially for the young (sound familiar?). In some quarters “skool” was a dirty word. It could replace “fuck”--as in “skool you,” or “don’t skool with me,” and “skool off, will ya?”
Nope. We don't appear to be ready to give up sex as dirty dirt, and with it all those fucking--er, dirty expletives.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Putting My Life Into My Writing
About 20 years or so ago I decided the time had come to pursue writing seriously. I would become a writer. A free-lance writer as it turned out--reporting mostly on medicine for those throw-aways you may have seen in your doctor's office.
The docs, harried as they are, pay little attention to them beyond items that bear directly on their practice.
Assignments were not easy to come by; pay was wretched--sometimes I wasn't sure I'd be able to pay the rent. And my writing was confined mostly to what editors wanted.
But I wanted to write on what interested me, not as a hack or journeyman--which is not to demean them in any way: most reporters are hack writers, though that doesn't keep them from being excellent journalists with their own style. But when you work for another, you're limited in how much of you goes into your writing. Your writing is in your life, but I wanted to put my life into my writing.
Ah! There's that old ego that Zinsser mentions. Philosopher David Hume warned, however, that it wasn't easy to talk long about yourself without indulging in vanity. Still, Montaigne noted that it was customary to allow oldsters "more freedom to prate and more indiscretion in talking about oneself."
Well, I decided to write my memoirs
But that, too, proved not to be what I saw myself doing as a writer. It suffered too often from the academic/scholarly kind of writing and thinking (and feeling) that I'd been indulging in as a professor. And I was still confined to a pre-set format--chronology--and solely about me.
So now I'm pulling out all the stops; you can expect to see a wide--or wild--range of topics, nonfiction and fiction. I will not be pushing a cause, grinding an axe, getting on a hobby horse and writing it to death. Though sometimes you may think I get on my horse and write off in all directions. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) In some ways, my blog is my declaration of independence from topics, formats and styles that I have adhered to in the past. If things tend to get giddy at times, I hope you will bear with me.
More than just put up with me, however, I hope the writer in you will be galvanized into writing back. You will note that you are able to comment after each posting. I do want to hear from you; maybe have ongoing exchanges; maybe even dialogue. Tell me--and others--what you think. I look forward to seeing what you have to say.
And so we begin. . . And what can be better than beginning with sex? I mean talking about sex. Well, I really mean talking about talking about sex. (The distancing should help keep this a family blog. (Uh huh. . . .)
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