Credit: Justin Terveen

Like most people who work in downtown Dallas, I’m on a continuous quest for The Ultimate Route Home — that undiscovered thoroughfare with few traffic lights and little traffic. A couple of years ago, for the first time ever, I drove northeast up Commerce Street, planning to continue onto Abrams, which goes right to my neighborhood. At the northern edge of downtown, a strange and wondrous sight awaited me.

I learned later that it was the Dallas Grand Hotel, or, as it was known in its high-living heyday, The Statler Hilton. The Statler opened in 1956 to great fanfare and once boasted the largest column-free ballroom west of Chicago. It is a model of mid-century architecture: stunningly impractical in scale and shape and loaded with fantastical curves and angles. They don’t make buildings like that anymore, and for good reason. They’re terribly inefficient and outrageously expensive. The Statler cost $16 million to build — in the early fifties.

I’d been working in downtown Dallas for 6 or 7 years already and had never seen or heard of this wonderful monstrosity before. I couldn’t believe I had missed it for so long.

I took that route home for several months, finding it slightly less annoying and a lot more interesting than 75 Central. Each time I passed the Statler, I would hope for slow traffic so I could peer in its windows at broken lamps, faded wall art, and overturned chairs. The place had apparently never even been cleared of its furniture and fixtures. It was a sad, hulking time capsule.

In 2007, there were rumblings that the Statler would be rehabbed and reopened. But that turned out to be a pipe dream. A hotel that takes 1,000 people to run just doesn’t make sense outside the go-go economic boom atmosphere of the postwar era.

Last year, the Statler Hilton was designated a Dallas landmark, which, considering the way these things normally go, pretty much ensures it will remain empty and deserted until it one day just falls over.

One indignant TripAdvisor reviewer claims to have stayed at the Dallas Grand this past February and been subjected to racial discrimination. I’m not sure how she managed to get a reservation, since the place has been closed for at least 8 years. And I’m thinking racism would be the least of one’s problems while sleeping here.

But things are looking up, sort of. In connection with the opening of Main Street Garden, the City of Dallas is holding a design contest aimed at sprucing up the facade of the dilapidated icon, which looms directly over the new park.

These days, I’m taking the Tollway home. For only 70 cents a day, I can get home about 20 minutes earlier than by any other route. I think it’s worth it. But I’ll still pass by the Statler occasionally, just to keep an eye on the facade redecoration project. I’m hoping the momentum builds from there.

One Iraqi has offered a heartfelt “Thank You America.” This is how I wish all Iraqis felt about us, and learning that at least one of them does feel this way brought a lump to my throat.

I was against the invasion of Iraq from the beginning and still wish we hadn’t invaded. But I was always in favor of finishing what we started, and, undeniably, we have done something truly great. This piece illustrates that accomplishment.

By way of Public Secrets, by way of Unreligious Right.

It’s apparently not enough for extremist ideologues to try to politicize our public school science curriculums and indoctrinate our children in long-disproven mythology. Now they’re trying to mess with social studies.

With science, we had those who want to teach hard science and leave religion to the churches versus those who want to teach creationism and undermine evolution by way of carefully-crafted logical fallacies.

This new debate is shaping up as a near-parallel. An ideologically polarized group of reviewers has been appointed by the politically-divided Texas Board of Education to review our social science standards.

One left-leaning, Latino historian has urged more emphasis on “the role of Hispanic and Native American participants in the state’s history.” This is predictable and perhaps even justified. I’ve never had a child in the Texas schools and haven’t seen any of our textbooks, although, if our culture as a whole is any indication, we’re probably already putting plenty of emphasis on these groups.

In any event, the liberal academic suggestion is relatively innocuous compared to what comes next.

The three social-conservative appointees, all far-right-wing activists rather than historians, have decried the failure of our K-12 curriculum to emphasize the role of the Bible and Christian faith, and the “civic virtue of religion” in American history.

Huh? Are our conservative Texas Board of Education members afraid some other state is going to steal from us the coveted Mantle of Bass-Ackward Education Policy? Just as we begin to edge mythological beings out of our science classrooms, we try to turn around and slip them back in via the back door of social studies.

Fortunately, it is Texas social studies teachers who ultimately will write the new standards, and they can do pretty much what they want with the panelists’ recommendations. (I have suggestions.) We can all hope that they remember Texas, as the largest textbook market in the United States, is an educational standard-setter for the country as a whole and act accordingly.

Image: U.K. National Archives, by way of Associated Press

The Associated Press reports British researchers recently found a rare original copy of the Declaration of Independence. The copy, one of the “Dunlap Broadsides” so named after its printer, might have ended up in Great Britain due to British interception of an American naval vessel.

George Washington had a brand new Dunlap Broadside read to his troops in New York on July 9, 1776.

The Dunlap Broadside reflects a non-unanimous declaration because New York had originally abstained from the vote on its approval. New York finally assented to the document on July 15, 1776.

The Irish-born John Dunlap published a weekly newspaper, The Pennsylvania Packet. An ardent supporter of — and soldier for — the American cause, he became the official printer to the Continental Congress in 1778. In 1787, his newspaper published the brand new U.S. Constitution.

Only 200 Dunlap Broadsides were printed, and the recent find is one of approximately 26 known to be extant. The last one to surface sold for $8.14 million in 2000.

Psychology Today bloggers Kayla Causey and Aaron Goetz have taken an admirable stab at answering a question I’ve often puzzled over: Why we won’t speak ill of the dead, and why we’re so assiduous in this refusal that, when someone like Michael Jackson dies, we suddenly forget the creepy final 15 years of his life and re-crown him with his “King of Pop” title from the 1980s.

Their theory is food for thought. Early man might have evolved a predisposition to assume something that’s motionless is merely sleeping, the rationale being that an inert bear or sabertooth tiger might wake up and bite one’s arm off. This instinct might explain our abhorrence of speaking ill of the dead — a deep-seated, if not entirely rational, fear that they might haunt us if we disturb them. It’s the reason we often add “rest in peace” to any utterance about a dead person, especially if we’re saying something less than complimentary. The tendency persists in part because we don’t know what it’s like to be dead, and so we err on the side of caution and assume that the dead might be omniscient.

I’ve always chalked up our reluctance to say bad things about dead people to pity of the deceased. They’ve had the ultimate misfortune, so why make things worse for them? But Causey and Goetz’s proposition makes a lot of sense, too. To pity the dead is to assume there’s something remaining to be pitied.

Goetz and Causey also have a fascinating theory explaining how homosexuality manages to endure through natural selection.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The British Museum is a wondrous place filled with a staggering array of priceless antiquities, many of which didn’t originally come from Great Britain. It’s easy — and oh-so-politically-correct — to condemn the British government as a bunch of thieving imperialist rascals for all this hoarding of other nations’ cultural heritages. Although I’m not usually one to either condemn people on account of events I don’t fully understand or buy into every nationalist myth that comes along, I used to pretty much accept it as a given that the British spent most of the 19th century looting less-well-organized parts of the world.

After reading culture critic Richard Dorment’s article in yesterday’s Telegraph, I think I owe the British an apology, as might a lot of other people. Mr. Dorment sets the record straight thusly:

Lord Elgin paid the enormous sum of £39,000 to acquire the marbles, and was careful to obtain documents from the Turkish Government approving their removal from Greece, which had then been part of the Ottoman Empire for 350 years. Since Parliament legally purchased the marbles from Lord Elgin in 1816, the British Museum’s title to them is unassailable. The Greeks know this perfectly well – otherwise, instead of pulling this PR stunt, they would be suing Britain in the European courts.

Dorment continues to point out facts I didn’t know, such as exactly how the Marbles came to be in such a pitiful state at the time Elgin acquired them: The Ottoman Turks used the Parthenon “first as a mosque and then as a powder magazine”; and, by the end of the 18th century, Turkish soldiers were using the priceless Marbles for target practice. And lest we think it was just the Turks abusing the Elgin Marbles, Mr. Dorment also notes that the locals were burning them to make lime for use in home construction.

At the Parthenon, June 2006

Dorment suggests that, rather than huffing and puffing with righteous indignation over the Elgin Marbles, the Greeks should erect a statue honoring Lord Elgin for saving the Marbles, which are now viewed free of charge by some 4.6 million visitors per year. And, while there is easily accessible information on the existence of an actual legal controversy over the legitimacy of Lord Elgin’s actions in removing the statues, it is certainly worth pointing out that the Greek government has never thought enough of their case to sue. Rather, they seem content trying to shame the United Kingdom into handing over their treasure.

It’s also far from clear that, if Elgin hadn’t interfered, there would at this point still be anything left of the Elgin Marbles to squabble over.

Thomas Sowell is a great American who often expresses that which the rest of us either can’t quite articulate or shrink from articulating for fear of being accused of racism. In his recent column on the identity politics of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, he points out the fundamental error of reverse discrimination:

One of the many problems of the payback approach is that many of the people who most deserve retribution are no longer alive. You can take symbolic revenge on people who look like them, but this removes the whole moral element. If it is all right to discriminate today against individuals who have done you no harm, then why was it wrong to discriminate against you in the past?

Mr. Sowell has been on the receiving end of old-fashioned racism, and he deserves our attention now. “Equality or Payback?” should be required reading for all Americans — especially those in the Senate.

KING JOHN

by W.L. Warren

King John, by W.L. Warren

W.L. Warren begins King John with an explanation of how and why John ended up with the dastardly reputation we all know from Robin Hood stories and other popular fiction. John, Warren says, suffered from a confluence of factors that have rendered a slanted and warped portrait of him. Historiographical methods of the past concentrated almost entirely on contemporary chronicles, practically ignoring administrative records and other, more objective sources. John especially suffers under this kind of examination, since the chroniclers who wrote about his reign were all either poorly informed, outrageously prejudiced, or both.

John is mocked with the name “Softsword” for having lost his hold on the French domains his father, Henry II, and his brother, Richard I, worked so hard to keep. Warren points out, however, that such far-flung territories could never have been maintained, and, even had Richard lived, the French outcome would probably have been the same. Far from being a military do-nothing, John is the founder of the Royal Navy. Warren marvels that a nation that came to treasure its naval superiority as England did could so completely vilify the founder of its navy.

But this book is no whitewash, either. John was duplicitous and grasping and didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t beholden to him. He surrounded himself with baseborn hangers-on, excluding and alienating the barons of his realm. He took money for dispensing justice and then still ruled against the side that paid him. He was cunning and conniving, and was known to issue decrees that said one thing while secretly issuing instructions that ran exactly counter to what he wrote.

Yet this same king instituted something that, to historians, is even more important than the Royal Navy: the systematic keeping of government and court records. Before John ascended the throne in 1199, English government recordkeeping is spotty and haphazard – a frustratingly obscure and incomplete source for the study of history. But from 1199 on, these same records emerge as a rich and authoritative resource. Hmm, almost as if John knew the chroniclers weren’t going to treat him fairly…

Another myth that gets busted in this book is the one about King John’s being forced to sign the Magna Carta. While Warren concedes that John had backed himself into a corner by running roughshod over his barons, he explains that the Magna Carta was simply a compromise brokered between him and his opponents. Nobody was holding a gun to his head – and wouldn’t have been even had guns been invented. And John had the last laugh when, days later, he made England a fief of the Pope, who reciprocated by declaring the Magna Carta null and void.

When I started reading this book, I had a fairly negative attitude about King John. By the time I finished, I still didn’t like him much, but I had a new appreciation for him as a brilliant, complex, and probably tortured soul who tried to do great things and occasionally succeeded.

David Hyde Pierce as Niles Crane

Leave it to me to follow up a profound (I hope) piece on my path to atheism with a silly bit of lowbrow humor about a character from an old sitcom.

This article in today’s Wall Street Journal, about the crass behavior of audience members at Broadway shows is — shall we say — interesting. But the funniest part was this anecdote shared by actor David Hyde Pierce, who played Frasier Crane’s class-conscious brother, Niles in the long-running series Frasier.

David Hyde Pierce, now starring in “Accent on Youth” on Broadway, has seen the gamut of faux pas. During “Curtains,” for which he won the Tony for best actor in a musical in 2007, he witnessed a family passing a bucket of chicken down the front row.

“You want to take the bucket and stick it on their head,” he says. “On the other hand, it also suggests these are people who don’t usually go to the theater, and that’s not a bad thing.”

Niles, I totally agree with you.

I wish I had some profundity to offer today, but alas, I just tucked my First Big Historiography Paper into the online assignment dropbox, and my brain isn’t good for much more than laughing about greasy fried batter and 10-year-old sitcoms.

Notre Dame Basilica, Montreal, 2008

Like many (if not most) atheists, I was raised Christian and lost my faith gradually over many years. From the time I was a preschooler, my faith was threatened by my curiosity. Many factors influenced my ultimate transformation: the numerous inconsistencies in doctrine, knowledge of the history of Christianity, a decent understanding of science. Add to that the obscene prosperity of evil versus the grinding misfortunes of the innocent and the absence of modern-day miracles (the loaves-and-fishes variety, not just someone’s cancer mysteriously going into remission).

Blaise Pascal

I’m almost ashamed to admit that, for at least a decade, I continued to “believe” only out of fear of what might happen if I didn’t. Silly as that was, I learned that, in so hedging my bets, I was in august company.

Finally, though, I faced facts. Pretend as I might, I couldn’t hide my lack of faith from an omniscient god. If he existed, he already knew I didn’t believe in him. No matter how I protested, he would consign me to hellfire anyway. So I embraced my doubts, stopped mentally torturing myself, and began exploring other philosophies. Long story short, I quietly acknowledged my atheism about 10 years ago, in my early thirties.

It was after this ultimate break with religion that my eyes opened to the most compelling reasons not to believe. While my mind was shackled by faith — even the mere attempt to hold onto faith — I couldn’t see the things that make a god not only unnecessary for, but a barrier to, a life well-led.

What really makes a god at best superfluous are the wonders that surround us — both the things we create and the things that this wondrous, perfect mix of atoms we call earth presents to us unbidden.

Muir Woods, 2008

Which inspires more awe: That a magnificent stallion, a majestic, old-growth forest, or a crystal-clear, blue-white diamond was simply plopped down before us by some far-off, inscrutable being whose prejudices and temperament are suspiciously similar to our own, or that those things emerged over millions of years through natural, knowable processes that required no divine intervention?

What makes a god potentially harmful is the irrational demands he places on one’s conscience and morality.

Which is more comforting: Believing you must carefully choose whom to befriend based on whether they value — and abhor — all the same things you do, or being free to associate with anyone who is kind or funny or helpful, without having to judge them or feeling obligated to convert them to your personal code of behavior?

Which wastes more energy: Continual mental grappling with latest evidence debunking religion, or accepting the world as it is?

Which offers more validation: Thinking you must rely on the aforementioned inscrutable being for your complete set of moral values and ethics, even when it tells you to shun people who aren’t hurting anyone, or knowing that the elegant logic of the Golden Rule — which is demonstrable in evolutionary psychology — is all anyone really needs?

Which is more emotionally satisfying: Believing that, when family and friends love you and look after you, it’s really just a god working through them as if they were marionettes, or that they do these things because hundreds of millennia of evolution have endowed the human brain with an innate sense of empathy toward others?

Living in the Deep South, on the buckle of the Bible Belt, I frequently suffer the sting of isolation. I understand a little of what a closeted homosexual must feel: Most of the people who populate my day-t0-day life would be horrified to know I’m not guided by the same values they believe to be immutable and essential — that my absence of belief is just as strong as their belief.

But I find solace in the knowledge that I see the world with greater clarity. I suffer from fewer irrational fears. I didn’t just accept a certain philosophy of life because my parents told me to, but rather put much thought and effort into a rational examination of the world and my own mind. And I know that letting go of an enormous source of emotional stress hasn’t made me one iota less moral.