Quote of the Day

From Tim:

"I want my Oompa-Loompa and I want him now!"

Friday Catblogging

Cheap thrills, perhaps, but it does get me to post when my head is too tired for anything else.

Here's Cassie, relaxing in bed with a good book. Which is probably what I should be doing.

Debut of the Wuss Cat

OK, I've been severely remiss in my blogging. I never promised anything else. But there have been good reasons. Trust me.

Only a small part of my severe remissness has been the loss of the intervening chapters "Revenge of the Wuss Cat" and "Wuss Cat Rides Again." Wuss Cat is all better now, and he's ready for his close-up.



Meet Mr. Stormy Pants, wuss cat extrodinaire.

More to follow when I get a round tuit, but today is Friday and it's cat-blogging day. This post has been deemed necessary for national defense.

Return of the Wuss Cat

As in literally, he returned from the vet today. Again.

We got a call from the vet yesterday. When we had Wuss Cat in to examine the raw spot he'd scratched on his shoulder, they took a sample for a fungus culture. It finally came back positive; Wuss Cat has ringworm. Wuss Cat is now Grunge Boy.

Unfortunately, it's spreading to the other cats. This isn't going to be fun: Grunge Boy needs an antifungal bath every week for the next three weeks. We really should do that to all four cats, including lathering them up with antifungal soap, and letting it sit on them for 10 minutes before washing it off. One cat at a time. I really can't see us pulling off that kind of circus in our house. I've bathed cats before; that's not the problem. It's catching them, confining them, then telling them to take a number while the cats ahead of them get their baths. Bathing them is easy; it's the panic of kitty anticipation that I don't look forward to. Grunge Boy isn't the only wussy cat who knows how to run and hide, and how to outsmart two people trying to catch him.

On the other hand, hauling them all to the vet and having them do the baths is expensive. We're not exactly rolling in money these days. So we have topical meds for the other cats, while we wait and hope that the ringworm doesn't contaminate everything in the house and spread back to Grunge Boy. So every week when Grunge Boy gets his bath (he doesn't get a choice), we need to wash all our laundry and bedding, bleach the sofa, boil the carpets, vacuum the walls, and do everything else possible to rid the house of contaminated cat hair. Ever try to get rid of cat hair in a multi-cat household?

Your circus for my circus. I'll trade you. Sight unseen.

Defending Our Freedom

I've seen a fair amount of nonsense on the issue of freedom of speech lately. A few things are worth setting straight.

Nowhere in the first amendment is there anything about good speech. There's nothing about good taste, for instance. Or good judgment. Or respect, or values, or ideology. Or anything else, actually. The limits on free speech are elsewhere: You can lie as much as you want, but if it causes material damage to another person or obstructs justice, you are liable for the consequences. If you make a verbal threat of violence, that's assault, just as much as if the threat had been non-verbal. That's about it.

The first amendment doesn't obligate you to speak or publish. You're free to make a choice. All this hornswoggle about newspapers being too cowardly to publish inflammatory cartoons is just so much free speech. In this Internet age, if one publication withholds something that is generally available, it's not a loss of information, it's just a judgment call. Anyone who hasn't seen those cartoons yet probably doesn't want to see them.

That brings up a couple of other things about free speech. Nothing obligates you to listen, or to read. Free speech doesn't guarantee an audience. Nor does it guarantee comprehension or agreement. It doesn't protect you from someone who doesn't like what you say. You say what you want; I say what I want. That's the deal.

It used to be that publication was a scarce resource. "Freedom of speech belongs to those who own the press." Then the price got lowered to the price of a megaphone. Then the Internet came along. Anybody can say anything; anybody can get published. Anybody can get offended at anything. Isn't technology wonderful?

It's not all free, though; there's still no such thing as a free lunch. Our freedom of speech is only as protected as the law that guarantees it. Constitutions can be changed; remember, the first amendment is an amendment. Governments can be overthrown. Congress can pass bad laws, and while they may be unconstitutional, it may take years of court battles to get them overruled. Your rights do require defending.

There are also issues of intimidation. Some people and some groups — both domestic and foreign — would like to be able to limit what you say. Such threats can take many forms, from social pressure, to laws, to burning embassies. If you truly value your right to say anything, then it's up to you (and to us, collectively) to defend that right, with whatever means are appropriate.

The question of "appropriate" defense is not a small one. It usually pays not to over-react, but under-reacting (or not reacting) can lead to repeated and increasingly aggressive threats. It's also usually better to respond earlier rather than later, and to make sure that our response and intent are clear. Somewhere along the line, we have to decide what our rights are worth to us, up to and possibly including our lives.

It is also crucial to understand the scope of a real or potential threat. Some people seem remarkably incapable of doing that.

Once or twice in my lifetime, the world has changed. It's not so much a matter of when I was born; it's a question of when I last updated my worldview. I try to keep my worldview up-to-date, although I haven't yet figured out why I might want an iPod. Some people are stuck with the same worldview they had when they grew up; if their glory years were the 1960's, that's kind of a crippling worldview to carry around these days. Some people's worldviews are stuck in an age when the Islamic Caliphate ruled the known world.

The thing is that the world has not become a more benign and nurturing place. It's not only that there are more people and more threats to our safety and freedom. Perhaps the biggest change is that the boundaries and safety barriers have broken down. George Washington once warned us of the dangers of foreign entanglements. That was fine for his lifetime; America was a small, weak, and isolated nation that needed to focus on getting its own act together. He'd seen the worst of late 18th century Europe, and no doubt that was a scary perspective for an American of that age.

America is no longer small, weak, or isolated. Every aspect of our economy is enmeshed with the rest of the world. Every country measures its power and policies in relation to America. We're entangled. It's a done deal.

It used to take weeks for a letter to cross the Atlantic, and months to get a response. Electrons travel considerably faster. Oceans used to provide a barrier against invasion, but al Qaeda found the resources to destroy the World Trade Center without crossing any oceans at all.

It isn't simply the physical barriers, which are also shrinking as we speak. Politics has always been a realm of ideas and information, but now the rest of our economy is, too. World crises come and go in a matter of minutes, as well as decades. Power slips across oceans with no visible means of transport. Information overload stopped being a bad joke decades ago. Now that six billion people can speak freely (well, many of them can) and inexpensively (all who can speak freely, plus a good many more), the whole process of collecting, filtering, organizing, and evaluating the daily flood of truth, statistics, threats, and lies can be overwhelming.

All this is to say that the threats to our freedom are real and immediate, and that those threats are no longer limited to physical attacks on our land or our citizens. If the mullahs in Iran want to limit our freedom (and I believe they do), they can and they are finding ways to do it. Limiting our freedom of expression is one of several ways they are attacking us. Non-Islamic people all over the world, whose worldviews haven't changed enough to enable them to understand the nature of that threat, are helping them.

That seemingly innocuous "help" takes many forms: Telling us that "we're at fault" for Islamic anger, and that while we are responsible for the consequences of our acts, those who burn embassies and issue death threats against us are not responsible for their acts. Telling us that we should voluntarily give up our freedom to avoid further confrontation. Telling us that we should respect the values of people who want to destroy our values. Telling us that we should exercise our right to free speech within the limits of good taste and good judgment (their good taste and good judgment, not ours).

They're free to say that; that's how freedom works. But they're dead wrong, and I'm free to say that, too.

More than that. While I'm willing to defend their right to say something stupid, I'm not so willing to pay the price for their stupidity and short-sightedness.

The thing is, even though free speech and instantaneous communications have gotten us into a lot of this, free speech and freedom of expression are also critical to surviving all these same issues. We cannot let anyone tell us what to say or what to publish.

Robert Heinlein said it so well: Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite. If Mrs. Grundy wears a burka these days, the basic issue hasn't changed.

Today's Bakhtin Quote: Laughter at the Grotesque

From Rabelais and His World:

The image of death in medieval and Renaissance grotesque is a more or less funny monstrosity. In the ages that followed, especially in the nineteenth century, the public at large almost completely forgot the principle of laughter presented in macabre images. They were interpreted in an unrelieved, serious aspect and became flat and distorted. The bourgeois nineteenth century respected only satirical laughter, which was actually not laughter but rhetoric. (No wonder it was compared to a whip or a scourge!) Merely amusing, meaningless, and harmless laughter was also tolerated, but the serious had to remain serious, that is, dull and monotonous.

So many things come to mind on re-reading this quote.

Bakhtin wrote this around 1930 in Stalinist Russia. Like so much political expression of that era, it is couched in Aesopian language: It all happened somewhere else, a long time ago. It's only an academic treatise about an obscure and difficult novelist from the Middle Ages, after all.

Direct criticism of Stalinist Russia could get you killed. Mere allegory would only get you banned. Rabelais and His World didn't get accepted as a dissertation, let alone published, until 1964.

In Rabelais's time, early 17th century France, there was no boundary between the sacred and the profane. Yes, state and church ceremonies and festivals were solemn, but they were accompanied by bawdy and sacrilegious carnivals. The boundary between the two worlds was vanishingly thin: Carnivals included parodies of religious ceremonies, up to and including parodies of high mass. Church members conducted religious services, then stepped out of the church to participate in the carnivals; some even wrote the parodic texts. Rabelais himself, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel is pure carnival in all its lusty, obscene, drunken glory, was a Franciscan friar and a priest.

This (mostly) easy co-existence between the sacred and the profane did not last, and much of Rabelais and His World traces the history of that loss. The loss proceeded in ways that are familiar and scary. Popular culture became "low" culture, treated with contempt by the church, by the state, and by intellectuals. Laughter, as Bakhtin notes, became sarcasm, and sarcasm in turn became rhetoric. He quotes A. I. Herzen, who wrote, "Voltaire's laughter was more destructive than Rousseau's weeping."

At first it seems bizarre that an academic dissertation on a 300-year-old French novel could be so threatening to the Soviet power structure that it would be rejected and banned. You don't have to read much of it, though, to understand. How much laughter and parody could the Soviet Union withstand? In Bakhtin's own time, the poet Osip Mandelstam referred to Stalin's moustache as "roach whiskers" and was exiled. How dare Bakhtin glorify a culture of laughing at the state?

Today, for the second day in a row, embassies are burning because someone dared to laugh at a sacred figure. Could it be that Stalin was more tolerant than the imams and mullahs who threaten Europe with war over a few cartoons?

Update on the Wuss Cat

OK, the Now Here girl has been nowhere girl, or some such. Sorry. [You have readers? -ed. Go ahead. Rub it in.]

Wuss Cat (whose formal name is Mr. Stormy Pants) has been scratching himself raw. Ear drops cleared the infection, but didn't stop the itching. The next step was a steroid injection, which slowly seems to be doing the job. We don't know yet how much hair will grow back in. No photos of Mr. Pants until he's photogenic again.

About my absence: I've been finishing up an part-time contract job, which is now finished, allowing me to migrate from "underemployed" back to "unemployed" and to go back to job-hunting again. The job market may be booming for some, but there are still some areas that definitely suck.

Anyway, not having my head embedded in a database means that I can think more about writing. Writing probably means posting more. Writing also means I need to get my butt in gear and work on the paper that I'm supposed to present at a conference in May. More on the paper soon, I hope.

We've Raised a Wuss Cat

Sad but true.

This cat is amazing in so many ways. So sensitive. So affectionate. So beautiful. So graceful. So completely psychic when we start thinking about giving him his medication. And such a squirming mama's boy.

A couple of days ago an ear infection flaired up, and overnight he scratched a big raw spot on his shoulder. So Saturday, it was the trauma of a vet visit. He came back in total mistrust mode; he'd run to another room if he saw either of us walking around. (Forget coming when we call him.) We had to trap him and drag him out from under the furniture just to put the Tressoderm in his ears. This morning we couldn't even get him out from under a cabinet. We finally wrestled his head out just far enough (with my arm pinning him from behind) that C. could put drops in his ears. Just for drops! Heaven help us if we ever have to pill him.

I didn't ask to get a metrosexual cat. I hope he doesn't start shaving his chest, and wearing cosmetics and earrings.

Today's Bakhtin Quote

Actually, today's quote is Bakhtin quoting Konrad Burdach:

Humanism and Renaissance are not the product of knowledge. They do not arise because scholars discover the lost monuments of antique literature and art, and strive to bring them back to life. Humanism and the Renaissance were born from the passionate and boundless expecation and striving of an aging epoch; its soul, shattered to its very depths was thirsting for a new youth.

First post

I don't know that I'll be much of an active blogger, but so many things are converging at this point that I need to write some of these things down. Neo-neocon is certainly one of my inspirations; her journey reflects mine in a number of ways. What I see in the Middle East is also driving a lot of my need to think and write.

So.... I'll be back. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere.