Is our own camp ever engaged in playing politics, or is this proclivity exclusive to our opposition?

Do we ever accuse a person of just wanting to get attention or having too much time on his or her hands even if we concur with his or her point of view?

Do we ever bother to highlight that a person may not be a trained expert on a particular subject even if we like what he or she has to say about it, or do we simply tout them for their intelligence and common sense while saving our doubts about expertise and qualification for those whose views we find less palatable?

Do people we respect ever flip-flop, or do they invariably possess the laudable elasticity of mind to adjust to new realities?

Collectively speaking, are the media ever anywhere except in the pocket of our enemy?

Are the minority of ostensibly racist or violent nutjobs within our own ranks ever anything but a few isolated extremists that lurk within every organization, and are a similarly-sized minority of kooks in the opposing camp ever anything but symptomatic and representative of that entire movement?

Are members of our own tribe ever engaged in fear-mongering, or do they always raise legitimate concerns by definition?

Do we ever demand the same amount of evidence to support a claim that happens to jibe with our belief system versus one that does not?

Are we ever willing and able to draw a distinction between full and partial comparison if we consider the individual at the receiving end of such comparison to be our ally?

Will we ever learn to apply our own logic equally in all directions, if only to avoid coming across as capsized wingnuts afflicted with a bizarre predilection to shoot ourselves in the foot with it?

Barack Obama’s presidency is unconstitutional. His place of birth has nothing to do with it. The “birthers” were correct in their conclusion but wrapped themselves around the wrong issue to get there.

Mr. Obama’s presidency is unconstitutional because, at age 47, he was simply too young to have been inaugurated. All his acts as “president” are therefore null and void. For all practical purposes, the nation has been a rudderless dreadnought for going on 18 months now.

Setting forth eligibility criteria for the office of president, Article II of the U.S. Constitution clearly states the following:

[...] neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years [...]

There you have it. Attained to the age of thirty five Years.

The skeptical reader may now feel tempted to protest and point out that, in keeping with the universally accepted practice of counting linearly from zero towards infinity, 47 comes after 35, and hence the constitutionally mandated age requirement has been met by Mr. Obama.

Such reasoning, of course, merely shows that said skeptical reader’s mind is intractably mired in the past, reluctant to embrace the fact that the world has not been frozen in amber for two centuries and that society has moved on since the Constitution was drafted in 1787—welcome to the 21st century!

Forty is the new twenty. Not only do I subscribe to this modern adage for personal reasons, but the evidence supports it: life expectancy has increased in the past 200 years; people today spend more time on formal education prior to entering the work force; and they are in ever less of a rush to settle down and do the family thing; indeed, it has become quite common for a shoe addict (= a woman) to delay motherhood into her late thirties or early forties even.

While in the 18th century 35 would have been considered middle-aged, nowadays a person’s official youth extends well beyond that. Growing up happens in slow motion. Just look at Mick Jagger. By no measure does any particular calendar age of yore equal the numerically identical calendar age of today. In my estimation, age 35 in 1787 much more accurately translates to age 50 by modern standards. Surely I could conscript an expert panel of historians, sociologists, and statisticians to crunch the numbers and bear me out on this.

It follows that Mr. Change in the Oval Office has not yet attained to the constitutionally prescribed age of thirty five Years as properly adjusted for our times, which means we have no vice-president—will someone please call Joe Biden and inform him he’s been POTUS for more than a year?

IT'S ALIVE!!!!!

Preposterous as my little age bit may sound on its face, it is a perfectly valid demonstration of a so-called living constitution in action, i.e., a constitution whose liquid clauses undergo periodic permutations in meaning relative to what they meant when they were passed so as to properly reflect an evolving society.

If the U.S. Constitution is alive, as many folks insist it is and should be, then the argument that Mr. Obama is a bit too short in the tooth for the gig rings somewhat less guff-headed than it would if the darn thing were door as a deadnail (I prefer living clichés, so I can change them), which, I contend, it is supposed to be. Applying a the-world-keeps-turning-and-what-used-to-mean-this-now-means-that approach opens the floodgates for each of its clauses to potentially mean whatever happens to strike the fancy of a simple majority of the population, or, equally unfortunate or worse, a handful of judges on a court.

Yet the collective sentiments of fewer individuals than would comprise the super-majority required to pass an amendment is precisely what our constitution was designed to guard against; hence living is to a constitution what termites are to a wooden structure.

Enter Republican Arizona State Senator Russel Pearce, who the other day on The O’Reilly Factor, in a stunning display of breathing life into the 14th Amendment, emphatically argued that the practice of bestowing U.S. citizenship upon babies born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants (“anchor babies”) was an “unconstitutional declaration of citizenship”:

While to “bring a little common sense and integrity back” sounds commendable, the senator’s rationale puzzles the mind, as the 14th Amendment plainly reads thus:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Unless one is unsure as to the precise meaning of in the United States and whether it pertains to babies born in a hot air balloon that accidentally drifts over Samoa air space as the head emerges from the womb but has drifted out again by the time the second shoulder comes out, there doesn’t seem to be much wiggle room for interpretation with respect to all persons. Yet somehow the good senator manages to define it as some but not others, for, as he explains, illegal immigration didn’t exist when the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, and the drafters of the clause “never anticipated the deluge.” Hence it is perfectly OK to retroactively modify the term all—it’s alive!—so as to exclude anchor babies whom Senator Pearce doesn’t want in his state.

(The phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof applies to foreign diplomats—those folks who don’t have to pay their parking tickets—and children of illegal aliens clearly are not that when they are born. On second thought, under a living constitution, they might be. )

To back up his curious claim, he cites the Supreme Court case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898) and promptly confuses the ruling of the Court with the dissenting opinion. Despite his manifest confusion, Senator Pearce is correct in the sense that two members of the Court—Justice Fuller joined by Justice Harlan—had indeed argued in Wong that certain persons born in the United States were not entitled to U.S. citizenship, although Mr. Fuller’s wordy dissent reads pretty much like the Taney-esque Dred-Scott-type train wreck of an argument one would expect when a highly intelligent academic attempts to present a logical-sounding chain of reasoning to demonstrate that all doesn’t mean all, quite similar in style to the argument my aforementioned hypothetical expert panel would clobber together to show that 35 doesn’t mean 35 anymore.

In fairness, the majority opinion in Wong squandered no fewer words in making the case that all does, in fact, mean all, although the scribe could have saved most of his ink and simply quoted the first line of the 14th Amendment, followed by a pithy res ipsa loquitur.

Of course, the fact that the U.S. Constitution unequivocally declares that all persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are U.S. citizens is an entirely separate issue from whether or not that’s a good thing. Senator Pearce—and many others on both sides of the aisle—seem to have trouble distinguishing the actual meaning of the words from their desired meaning. Perhaps it would indeed be better if not all persons born in the United States were automatically granted citizenship status. Luckily, Article V of the Constitution spells out the process for making alterations to the document or add to it as warranted by changing times. I may have an faulty version, but Article V in my personal copy does not say, “This Constitution is alive—to modify, pass an amendment or simply reinterpret to suit your needs.”

Justice Bader-Ginsburg defended the living Constitution by reminding us that, for instance, We the People in 1787 failed to include blacks and women. That is correct, and these deliberate and unfortunate oversights were officially redressed via the 15th and 19th Amendments respectively. A living constitution, on the other hand, needs no such official amendments appended to the back of the charter. A living constitution is amended via majority consensus through their elected legislature or via court rulings, to wit by redefining certain terms and by projecting new information into the spaces between the lines, a procedure aptly referred to, even among many jurists, as “making stuff up.”

Amendments are a pain in the neck to get passed. The latest amendment (#27) was ratified in 1992 after it had been proposed in 1789. One could say that relying on the amendment process to effect change renders the document a bit hidebound. Exactly. Relative—but not complete—inflexibility is the whole point of a constitution. A constitution that’s easy to change is no constitution at all.

At 1,500 words shorter than Facebook’s privacy policy, the U.S. Constitution obviously doesn’t cover a lot of ground, thus leaving plenty of room for federal and state legislatures to make laws which reflect the mores and values of an evolving society. And if we stopped reading things into its “penumbras and emanations” instead of subjoining them via amendment, then there’d be even more room for the democratic process to accommodate majority druthers du jour.

It is obvious that there can be no security to the people in any constitution of government if they are not to judge of it by the fair meaning of the words of the text. (Justice Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution)

Determining what each clause meant when it was ratified in terms of the fair meaning of its words (“plain words approach”) is difficult enough, but looking for original meaning—which I shall boldly equate with actual meaning—towers over all other methods of interpretation in that at least we know exactly what we’re looking for, and we can narrow the results of our quest down to something infinitely more tangible than can be arrived at using any other method. Naturally, when the words themselves are ambiguous or overly expansive in scope, other narrowing techniques must be used, such as original intent, structuralism, precedent and the various “tests” judges habitually resort to in order to achieve better consistency in their rulings over time, such as the compelling state interest test and the infamous lemon test.

Add the concept of living to the interpretive mix, and you end up not with a constitution, but with a pile of meaningless goo. What could mean anything, means nothing.

Justice Antonin Scalia, generally considered one of the most conservative members of the Supreme Court and the mention of whose name therefore frequently triggers a reaction akin to that of a vampire being hit by a ray of sunshine, is known as an avid traditionalist and original meaning proponent:

I like my Constitution dead. (Antonin Scalia)

Whether you like the man or not—and if you don’t, I would guess you’re going by reputation without ever having actually read any of his opinions, which are among the most eloquent, brilliantly reasoned (irrespective of whether one agrees with his conclusions), entertaining, and at times intentionally hilarious legal screeds you’ll ever get your hands on—, he articulated the haymaker argument that blows the concept of a living constitution right out of the water, namely by pointing out that a living constitution implicitly assumes that societies always mature as opposed to rot.

Let’s say after another series of terrorist attacks on the United States, public animosity against Islam escalates to a point that several states enact laws mandating that Muslim shoplifters be punished by chopping off their right hand. While such punishment would be perfectly in accordance with the text of the Qur’an, it certainly wouldn’t fly under the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, at least not the way the phrase was understood when the Bill of Rights was passed in 1789—physical mutilation as a punishment for anything would have been considered cruel and unusual even then—nor under the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment, at least not the way the term any person was understood in 1868 (although many people at the time certainly didn’t agree that any person should be eligible for equal protection; but that has nothing to do with what the words themselves were understood to mean).

So under a dead constitution, there’s no cutting off anybody’s limbs for any infraction of the law. Under a living constitution, well, perhaps it ain’t so cruel and unusual when applied to members of a religion whose Holy Book actually prescribes this particular form of punishment—what’s so cruel and unusual about making a person feel at home by acting in accordance with their religion?

Regarding the 14th Amendment, we can always point to Justices Fuller and Harlan—and, of late, to the venerable AZ Senator Pearce—to back us up in our assertion that all persons doesn’t necessarily have to mean all persons; besides, who ever said that every human being is a “person” anyway? A novel set of circumstances may call for some definitional narrowing.

Basically, all one has to do is jump through a few creative hoops in order to justify why the plain meaning of the words in the Constitution has undergone a few desired mutations, and with a simple majority of the population in lemming-like concurrence—abracadabra!—cutting off somebody’s hand for swiping a pack of gum may not be so unconstitutional anymore.

For those inclined to believe I may be overstating the potential of a civilized society to deteriorate to such an extent, may I point to Germany in the 1930s.

Of course, no parchment barrier—not even a dead constitution—provides much protection against near-unanimous sentiments in a population. But it does guard against the implementation of whatever nonsense a simple majority may deem appropriate enough to condone and vote for at a given moment. Therefore, a dead constitution provides at least some measure of protection against the moral regression of a population to a time before it was passed.

A living constitution, by virtue of its very nature, effectively protects against nothing.

If the concept of a living constitution is so inherently counter-constitutional, why do so many people embrace it?

There exists one very compelling reason for individuals to defend their living constitution to the death and to foam at the mouth when confronted with the mere suggestion of a non-living one: because they want to see certain changes in society yet believe, perhaps rightfully so, that the masses of “unenlightened” folks out there severely curtail the chances of ever achieving the super-majority necessary to implement those changes via the official amendment process. A living constitution is the only way to bypass that process.

Trouble is, if it’s alive, then in light of the human mind’s virtually illimitable ingenuity when it comes to bending the meaning of the words on the page to reflect personal preferences and ideology, we might as well cut our vaunted Founding Document into little pieces and feed it to the pelicans or whatever winged and feathered vertebrates happen to be on hand.

Even better, we could collect all printed copies in circulation, shred them, and then toss the strips of paper into the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps it would help soak up some of the oil.

For if it ain’t toe-tagged, it ain’t much use as a constitution.

Last night I, once again, barged into my kitchen unannounced—calling ahead prior to changing locations within my own abode is a habit I have yet to adopt—and in so doing I rudely interrupted a cute little mouse during its preliminary inspection of a piece of pie which had been left unattended on the counter.

Although I cat scant resemblance to a bear … let’s try this again … although I bear scant resemblance to a cat and, to the best of my recollection, neither meowed, hissed, purred, nor licked myself on entrance, poor little Mickey or Minnie panicked as he or she noticed my presence, turned tail, performed an obvious miscalculation with respect to brake speed and counter friction, tumbled over the counter’s edge, landed on his or her spine on the tile floor beneath, instantly bounced back on his or her four little feet, and zipped into the sunset—under the fridge, to be precise—never to be seen again.

The trespassing quadruped, I would guesstimate, measured roughly three inches in length if it were to stand on its hind legs. My kitchen counter is exactly 36 inches high—a mensuration I performed for the purpose of composing this official report (using measuring tape, not Tampax, although the term may understandably precipitate split-second confusion in the precipitate reader)—which works out to approximately twelve times the height of the rodent (whom, alas, I’d had no opportunity to mensurate, so my uneducated non-veterinarian approximation will have to do).

As per my passports, I am six foot tall. (Regarding the plural, I suppose it should be feet, but since congenital Americans, for whatever reason, keep saying foot even when referring to more than one such unit of length, I have reluctantly resolved to bow to local convention lest I be chided for mulish refusal to assimilate.) Although I’ve never performed the experiment and have no plans to volunteer—at least not until Obamacare kicks in and turning one’s skeleton into sawdust has become an affordable venture—I would guess that if I plunged a distance of twelve times my height, i.e., a distance of 72 feet, which amounts to several stories (floors, not tales), and hit an unyielding surface back first, I would not spryly leap back on my feet and zip anywhere anytime soon.

Thus I conclude, with as scientific a reasoning as I can muster based on my observed datum, that mice are made of whatever gummi bears are made of.

This issue seems oddly confusing to many people, so let me clear it up:

If a Muslim individual robs a bank because he wants to buy himself a bigger flatscreen TV, he or she is a bank robber, not an “Islamist” bank robber. Unless a desire to fund violent jihad prompted the need for cash, the person’s muslimhood has nothing to do with the crime.

If, on the other hand, a Muslim individual blows himself and dozens of others to pieces while screaming Allahu Akbar, he or she is an “Islamist” terrorist, as the act was faith-based.

Jeffrey Dahmer and Adolf Hitler were Christians and homicidal—genocidal in the case of the latter—sociopaths, but not “Christian” sociopaths, as their deeds were hardly motivated by
religion.

I’m a Catholic and I once got a traffic ticket, but that didn’t make me a Christian offender. I may have listened to a Stones tape and erroneously thought I was in London, but it certainly wasn’t my denomination which caused me to drive on the wrong side of the road that night.

But any nutjob who waltzes into an abortion clinic with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other and opens fire while reciting the Lord’s Prayer is a “Christian” terrorist, as the deed was fueled by that individual’s religious views.

Crusades and Spanish Inquisition? Christian madness all day long.

Whether or not the powder munchkin who tried to blow up a van in Times Square last Saturday is an “Islamist” terrorist depends on whether (a) he is merely a failed actor who holds a grudge against the Theater District or (b) he believed himself to execute the will of Allah.

If a Buddhist plants himself in the middle of a highway in order to become one with a bus, he’s a Buddhist fanatic. If he’s just wants to kill himself because his girlfriend ran off with the mailman, different story.

So if an act was religiously motivated, appending a religious label makes sense. If it wasn’t, it doesn’t.

The simple isn’t always the best, but the best is always simple.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. (Martin Luther King Jr.)

In the end, we will judge a religion not by the violent acts committed in its name by of some of its adherents, but by the volume of condemnation bestowed upon such acts by its majority.

Free state was an ugly expression. Not because being free was bad, but because the term itself denoted the existence of slave states. After all, in the absence of the converse, there would have been no point of referring to certain states as “free.”

Luckily, there are no more free states. Just states. (Yes, I am fully aware that many African Americans vehemently object to the narrative that there has been much meaningful improvement for blacks despite the formal abolition of slavery and segregation, but we’ll leave this discussion for another day.)

Likewise, hobby and spare time are ugly expressions. Freizeit is painful.

Sure, there exists a particular type of creative person who can knuckle down for a limited amount of time, focus, and get stuff done. Novelist Anthony Trollope, for instance, wrote for exactly 2 1/2 hours each morning before going to work, and he left a stunningly comprehensive oeuvre. Good for him.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s James Joyce, who was once found all crestfallen at his desk because he had managed to put but seven words to paper all day and now he didn’t know “what order they go in.”

This second type is best summed up by the old adage that a rose has to grow at its own pace, and yanking at it will cause damage rather than accelerate growth. What would happen if you put a rose into the ground for 2 1/2 hours every day, then took it out again and stored it on a shelf until the next growing session? Most likely, it would wither rather then flourish.

Even if the Joyce anecdote is apocryphal, it hits a nerve because I can relate to it so well. I’ve never figured out how to speed up my roses and pack the process of growing them into my so-called spare time. Perhaps this is a genetic glitch, or maybe I’m just disorganized. Either way, it’s tragic.

Creativity is like baking a pie. Getting the mix right and the dough to rise takes as long as it takes. (Not sure, though, how long it takes to bake a rose.)

I rarely go near my music. Doing so is like spending a some time with the woman I love, knowing—believing at least—that ever really being with her is not in the cards. It hurts too much.

But yesterday, after several years of successful abstention, I took the masochistic leap and listened to a few old demo recordings of mine—just me, my guitar, my little drum machine, and a 4-track tape recorder. Here and there you can hear a truck roaring by on Ninth Avenue, because these were still recorded in my old Manhattan studio—studio as in one-room apartment, not as in recording studio.

Needless to say, the following demos were meant for my own ears only. The sole point of making them was for me to remember my own songs just in case I ever got to record presentable versions, like with the guitar actually in tune, having practiced my singing, and using some fancier recording equipment and software featuring some sort of instrumentation rather than my clumsy guitar strumming over my dinky little drum machine with the canned bass lines.

Alas, to grow this particular plot of roses, I’d need more creative time than I see coming down the pike anytime soon, i.e., in this lifetime. If you think snails and glaciers are slow, you’ve never seen yours truly engaged in any type creative activity. I can literally stare at a paragraph for nine hours, finally decide to replace a comma with an em-dash, then delete the whole paragraph because something about it doesn’t “feel” right. Imagine yours truly working on a song and trying to figure out where the guitar solo should go. Given my glacial self, there may never be any new and “presentable” versions, so I might as well post some of my existing ones here.

Now, I didn’t choose the following ten songs because they’re my favorites, but because all but one of them actually have words. Most of my other dozens of compositions are wordless as of yet and may remain so forever. Writing melodies comes a lot easier to me than writing lyrics. I’m not really the poetic type.

My singing, guitar playing, and the overall sound quality aside, the songs themselves are actually pretty good:

(1) The Sky Is Still Blue

This is a rather maudlin dirge about a funeral, even though no one in particular had died. In hindsight, I realize it is about burying my dream of ever being able to solve the subsistence conundrum and focus on playing around with my music full-time, which is all I really want to do, talent or no talent:

(2) Chains of Deception

Mystery lyrics. Sounds like someone got a rhyming dictionary for Christmas:

(3) Rainy Day

A little earlier, the sky was still blue, but now it’s raining. Perhaps I should write a musical about the Weather Channel:

(4) If Looks Could Kill

Something about a stupid guy smashing furniture. Or a smart guy refusing to smash it:

(5) Purple Skies

The sky was blue, then it rained, and now the skies are purple. Of course. That’s what always happens after rain, as every first-semester meteorology student knows. And yes, I’ve always had a partiality for 1950s rock’n'roll … three to get ready, now go cat go:

(6) Why Does It Hurt So Bad

“I’d rather sit and couldn’t move ’cause you were stuck to me with glue than to float around in orbit without you …” If this cheerful ditty doesn’t rate a Grammy for best lyrics, then nothing does:

(7) Why Do We Remember

Another why question. Might need a re-write to beat some sense into the tune. As an alternative, mumbling the words a little more could help:

(8) (No Title)

One of my many compositions without words. Properly recorded, this one may actually work just fine as a wordless wail:

(9) A Shot of Rock’n'Roll

In homage to my favorite genre, as a bonus track, here’s a song with a message:

(10) Black Bowl of Fruit

Encore, what the heck … One-two-three o’clock, four o’clock rock …

All songs:
Vocals & all instruments by Peter G.
Music & lyrics by Peter G.
Procuced by Peter G.
Copyright © All Rights Reserved

What a great read! Said I liked it but I lied—I LOVED IT! The perfect escape wrapped in mystery, adventure and danger! Lis is my new favorite author.
—Michael Bolton, Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter

As a television crime writer and producer, I expect novels to deliver pulse-pounding tales with major twists. Hand of Fate delivers big time.
—Pam Veasey, writer and executive producer of CSI: NY

In the 1999 British Comedy Notting Hill, the Julia Roberts character browses a small book store and pulls a travel guide off the shelf. “Signed by the author, I see,” she remarks, pleasantly surprised at her unexpected discovery of an apparent rarity. Store owner William, played by Hugh Grant, quickly douses her flicker of serendipity by explaining that the author simply couldn’t be stopped and that if the browsing lady were able to “find an unsigned copy, it would be worth an absolute fortune.”

No doubt, signing books adds a nice personal touch. I once bought a paperback whose author happened to be a real-life acquaintance of mine. Upon informing him of my purchase, he offered to sign it for me. At our next encounter I handed him his masterpiece, he scrawled a few personalized lines on the title page, added his signature, and thus I became the proud owner of a published book signed by its author. Should he ever attain celebrity status—either by writing something that sells more than twelve copies, appearing on a reality show, or committing high profile homicide—I’ll flip my little treasure on eBay for a nifty profit.

Most of the time, though, an author will just sit there in some office and sign books conveyor-belt-style by the palletload until carpal tunnel develops, a rote procedure which yields a somewhat watered-down kind of personal touch.

Upon so incautiously tearing open the potentially lethal package my postman had delivered, I learned of an even more diluted variety: The author signs a bunch of sticky labels, sends them to the publisher, who then slaps them into the books before mailing these now “signed” copies to the readers.

Max Planck

Far be it from me to make a mountain out of a little sticky label in the front matter of a mystery novel, but more than by its presence I was intrigued by its placement—its bottom left and right corners exactly equidistant from the bottom of the page, and its left and right edges exactly equidistant from the left and right page border respectively, perfectly parallel and centered with a margin of inexactitude of one Planck length (1.6×10^-35 meters) at the most. Could a human hand have affixed a label with such machine-like precision? Had the publisher used an atomic bookplate paster?

(Traditionally, a bookplate is a label pasted into a book for the purpose of denoting ownership, not authorship, but I suppose such label would be considered a bookplate even if it displayed the name of the editor’s daughter’s pet hamster. At the time of this writing, Wiktionary.org somewhat amusingly defines the term as a printed piece of paper pasted on one of the pages of a book, most often on the inside front cover showing ownership, and thus preventing theft, as if knowledge of the owner’s identity served as an effective deterrent against larceny. Next time, instead of locking your motor vehicle, try sticking a carplate on its hood.)

Aside from the bookplate precision conundrum, I was confused as to how many books signed by the author I now possessed all told, since this most recent addition to my personal library had never been in actual physical contact with its author nor her pen. The little sticky label inside had been signed, but not the book itself. This may be an important distinction, as I am about to file for Chapter Seven, for which purpose I must list the value of every item I own. Certainly, a book signed by its author is worth more than a book not signed by its author—under New York law, does this one count as signed or not signed?

Thus the mystery was in full swing, and I hadn’t begun reading yet.

Once upon a time, it would have been possible for a reasonably educated person to have read every book ever written. Nowadays, one can only conjecture how many hundreds of lifetimes it would take even for a speed-reading champ to plow through every book in stock at a modern multi-level bookstore, yet the average Barnes & Noble carries only a small percentage of all books ever published, and presumably most books ever written were never published.

The problem of selection arises: given the wealth of choices, why do we choose this book over that one? Why, for instance, given that I hadn’t even read Moby Dick yet, did I one day leave the Union Square Barnes & Noble with a copy of Halfway to the Grave (“A Night Huntress Novel”) by one Janiene Frost whom I had never heard of?

That day I had some time to kill, so I dropped into the nearest bookstore, headed straight for the shelf closest to the entrance, and found myself face-to-face with the latest chick-lit vampire releases. I could have sworn that the last time I had been to this particular store, this very shelf had held works of a genre closer to what I normally gravitate towards, or else I would have headed for a different shelf. (The staff there keep moving the merchandise around like in a supermarket.)

Since I only had a few minutes and didn’t feel like going on an expedition to locate my druthers, I randomly grabbed one of these crown jewels of world literature, no doubt, flipped it open, and landed on the Acknowledgments page, where the author extended her “deepest appreciation” to her “amazing agent,” whose name I instantly recognized, as this agent happened to be a lovely young lady I had once—peradventure twice or thrice— met under, let’s say, literature-unrelated circumstances.

The nature of our association notwithstanding, she had shared with me a little about her work as a literary agent, the stacks of pitifully composed manuscripts piling up on her desk at all times, the tiresome slog of separating the wheat from the chaff, then trying to select the winners from the wheat, and finally laboring to lick the chosen ones into presentable shape prior to submitting them to a publisher. Ergo, what I was holding in my hand must have been a grain of refined prime wheat, so I turned to Chapter One, and … it was just a delight. Perhaps I should say a delight for what it was—i.e., a chick-lit vampire tale—but then again, a sequence of witty and well-crafted sentences is precisely that, no matter what the genre or whose imagination such sequence had issued from. (And make no mistake about it—sometimes you do have to fight the undead with the half-dead!)

As I exited the store with my brand-new acquisition in hand, methought I heard the plaintive cry of a big white whale fading behind me, “What about me???”

At present, I own a few hundred books, the majority of which, quite frankly, I haven’t read yet. Most of them I purchased over the years because I thought they’d be interesting for various reasons (and many probably are), some of them were given to me, and a few the munchkins must have placed on my shelf at night, because my recollection of how I obtained them is a mite murky—a compilation of David Letterman Top Ten Lists published in 1990 (“Dan Qualye’s Top Ten Pickup Lines”) and the older of my two Scrabble dictionaries prime among those whose mode of procurement I could not explain even under the most stringent of CIA interrogations.

Expanding my book collection is not a top priority of mine at this juncture: (a) I have plenty of unread reading material gathering dust on my shelf, and (b) I have no money; but if I were to add yet another tome to my assortment, I’d probably get a Hemingway or Melville’s whale tale for a shoestring, as a little catching up on the classics surely couldn’t hurt my contemporary brain to which Captain Ahab sounds more like some Al-Qaeda big shot than a name in any way related to literature, and if you told me A Tale of Two Cities was about a water dispute between Knoxville and Memphis, I may not outright believe you, but I wouldn’t be in a position to present an educated rebuttal, either.

So in light of all that unread reading material I already own and my resolution to stop splurging on books until further notice—with the possible exception of firesale classics—why did I splurge on a brand-new hardcover?

Actually, I aced a little quiz that had popped up in my Facebook News Feed, and in consequence a free quasi-autographed advance copy of a whodunit with half a heavily lipsticked female puss on its glossy front cover wound up in my mailbox. After my Green Card in the Diversity Visa Lottery, this is only the second item I have ever won, so it warrants special attention.

Now, behold this toothsome specimen of femininity in the red top very carefully. If you think she might be some porn star, centerfold, or a cast member of Cougar Town (playing the little sister of one of the cougars, of course), you’re off the hook.

If, however, you’ve ID’d her correctly, you’re busted. Congratulations. You are a member of the most wretched segment of modern human society.

Are you a crack pusher? A wife beater? A rapist? A serial child molester? A Nazi? A terrorist? A Khmer Rouge sympathizer?

Worse. Much worse. You are a Fox News watcher. In exchange for a reasonably large sum, my silence is yours. (Yes, PayPal will be fine.)

In addition to her regular appearances as a legal analyst on the fair and balanced channel, Lis Wiehl, J.D., Harvard Law School graduate, and former federal prosecutor, co-hosted the Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly for seven years. Since to be scolded and lampooned for her “dopey” interjections and mocked for her unfamiliarity with some of Mr. O’Reilly’s favorite Motown artists—each instance of such grievous ignorance promptly accompanied by a derisive “Lis Wiehl, Harvard graduate, ladies and gentlemen!”—appeared to be Ms. Wiehl’s primary function on this program, those unconcerned with the ratings business and the attendant need to manipulate audience demographics may wonder why the motor-mandibled Irish man employed the services of a co-host at all. (Among many other things, Ms. Wiehl touches on the who and why of co-hosting in the book we are about to discuss.)

In one particularly memorable Radio Factor episode three years ago, an irate Bill O’Reilly ordered Lis Wiehl’s microphone cut and thundered that she was “not allowed to speak for three minutes” because she had allegedly “misled” his audience. In reality, Ms. Wiehl hadn’t misled anyone, but Mr. O’Reilly had misheard a word. Had she really said open instead of oath in the context at hand, the mike-cutting would have been justified. (Although he was dead wrong, Mr. O’Reilly was being exceptionally kind—for “open,” I would have sent her home for the day.)

During the commercial break following this incident, the wrongfully silenced Ms. Wiehl noticed a large padded envelope with a red string tab among the stack of her aggressor’s unopened snailmail on the U-shaped studio table, and she began to what-if-isize: what if there were a bomb in that package? … no, not a bomb … death would follow much too quickly … how about a little smoke-grenade that would spray a cloud of sarin gas into his face the moment he pulled the tab?

Lis Wiehl felt an eerie sense of contentment, indeed elation, at the thought of the loutish Talkmaster gasping and coughing awhile before crumpling the floor, his lifeless eyeballs staring up at the soft, fuzzy blue ceiling … what say you now, Bill O’Reilly? where be your gibes? your rants? your diatribes? your flashes of mockery that were wont to set the table on a roar? Quite chapfallen? (Ms. Wiehl, being of Danish extraction, shares a certain kinship with Prince Hamlet.)

My account of Ms. Wiehl’s train of thought in the immediate wake of the injustice she had suffered at the jaws of a tyrant is pure speculation, but may I present as circumstantial evidence her second thriller, Hand of Fate, which coincidentally kicks off with an attractive female co-host who, during a commercial break, hands her domineering boss a “padded envelope from a publisher” that “was in my box this morning, but it’s really yours” and quickly exits the studio to “get some tea.”

You guessed it—this would be the last piece of mail that talk radio firebrand Jim Fate would ever open.

In the novel, the murder victim is described by various characters—among other glowing encomia—as a “blowhard” and a “loudmouthed jerk” who

• always had an opinion
• liked to rile everybody up
• [was] all about getting in someone’s face
• just lapped up attention and did anything he could to get it
• wasn’t above shading the truth and even ignoring facts that didn’t fit his theories
• probably every day [...] made somebody mad enough to at least think about killing him

In the back of the book are printed endorsement letters from three different “key radio personalities,” each of whom deems himself the inspiration for Jim Fate. Although the character could conceivably be a composite of several individuals with a few imaginary attributes thrown into the mix—Jim Fate is portrayed as a 41-year-old bachelor who works for KNWS radio in Portland, OR, and doesn’t have a cable show—, given the longstanding Wiehl-O’Reilly connection in conjunction with the aforementioned 2007 mike-cutting incident being referenced in the narrative as one of the potential nails in the victim’s casket, his real-life identity is fairly open-and-shut, as the man himself duly acknowledges:

So there you go. Bill O’Reilly says it’s absolutely him, and anything Bill O’Reilly says is good enough for me. (I don’t use emoticons in my articles, but if I were to make an exception, I might add a winking smiley face right here.)

On page 2, Jim Fate addresses his co-host by her last name (“With all due respect, Hanawa, …”), a classic O’Reilly habit, just in case there ever was any doubt as to Jim O’Fate’s real-life identity.

Shortly thereafter, on the bottom of page 4, the doomed bloviator pulls the red string tab on the fatal package, and for the next five pages he slowly asphyxiates—a process the author chronicles with manifest relish in gruesome detail—until he finally flatlines on page 9.

The remaining 280-plus pages are devoted to the “Triple Threat Club”—an estrogen troika composed of Federal prosecutor Allison Pierce, FBI special agent Nicole Hedges, and TV crime reporter Cassidy Shaw—pounding the Portland pavement and beavering away, pardon the pun, at narrowing the sizeable pool of suspects while dealing with plot-unrelated personal issues.

Although at long last in a dramatic denouement the perpetrator blows his or her (or their?) cover, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter who shot J.R.—or who gassed Jim Fate—because for every person who loved him, there were probably ten others who loathed him, so almost everyone had a motive, plus the story lacks a hidden-in-plain-view trail of clues which, in hindsight, compels the outcome.

Little Bo Peep

Compared to other contemporary novels I’ve read of late, this one has a bit of a made-for-Network quality to it in that it contains (a) no sex beyond a few G-rated references to it (“He had already offered her a job and a place back in his bed”) and one account of a past rape where the victim had been conveniently drugged and hence couldn’t provide graphic details even if she wanted to; and (b) no profanity whatsoever save one mention of the word pee in the context of taking a pregnancy test, and two or three instances of whore—statistically speaking, one three-letter word plus one five-letter word makes two four-letter words on 293 pages, assuming we stretch the definition of profanity to include these terms. (Incidentally, Bill O’Reilly once or twice referred to Ms. Wiehl as Little Bo Peep on the air.)

So we’ve got blood and hair on the wall (“Half his head is gone”), but no venturing beyond first base and no bad language in a story set in the rough-and-tumble world of high-octane media, crime, and law enforcement, and which stars a Carrie-&-Co-style coterie of youngish professional females—albeit a trio and not a quartet—frequently engaged in girlie talk amongst themselves, always topped off with the “most decadent desert on the menu.” Not that these missing elements are essential for the composition of gripping fiction, nor would I necessarily notice their absence, but something here smacks of omission aforethought.

In scanning Amazon reviews for Ms. Wiehl’s previous novel, Face of Betrayal, the first in her Triple Threat series featuring the same three female protagonists, I came across statements like this one from Lisa R.:

Some Christian readers may find some of the scenes to be a bit edgier than they’re used to. There is no graphic detail, but there is an ‘after the fact’ bedroom scene between an unmarried couple and also some scenes with one or more of the protagonists drinking.

Edgier than they’re used to? What do Christian readers usually read? Toaster manuals? I happen to be a Christian and a reader, but “Christian reader” sounds like a separate species, i.e., the total being something other than the sum of its parts.

Marquis de Sade

So after apparently having taken a hiatus from her Little Bo persona and transformed into the Marquis de Sade for her a-bit-too-edgy-for-comfort fiction debut, Christian readers will be quite relieved to learn that Ms. Wiehl washed out her licentious mind with Ivory for the sequel—no more after-the-fact anything, neither unmarried nor otherwise, although, alas, some protagonistic wine-sipping is still going on.

(Should the de-edging trend continue, the third Wiehl, Heart of Ice, due in spring 2011, may well be about three pretty angels drinking tea while drifting on a floe—no snuggling up to each other to stay warm, of course; better to let the poor girls freeze to death than to risk edgy lesbian overtones.)

We're on a mission from God!

From humble beginnings in a village in Scotland 200 years ago to our modern-day publishing enterprise employing over 600 people, Thomas Nelson’s goal has been to Honor God and Serve People. At Thomas Nelson, we believe that we exist to inspire the world. We believe that the world desperately needs inspiration—the right kind of inspiration—and that we are a conduit for change [...] We want our products to be a means by which God breathes new life into His world.

These statements on the publisher’s website—Thomas Nelson Inc., the largest Christian publishing company in the world—hint at the solution to the mystery (other than the mystery of who offed Jim Fate). Nothing wrong, of course, with God breathing life into His world and Ours. Inspiration is good, and Hand of Fate certainly inspired me to peruse its publisher’s mission statement a bit more closely:

• First, we want our products—books, videos, and conferences—to affect people. We are not in the business of merely entertaining our audiences or “tickling their ears.” Instead, we want our products to have a positive impact on consumers. In addition, we live in a day when people are desperate for direction and advice. As a result, we want our products to provide practical guidance.
• Second, we want our products to have a positive emotional impact. Emotions are not something to disparage or disregard. They can be the very thing that provide the impetus for action. Inspired emotions can lead to noble actions. We want to intentionally stimulate (though not manipulate) those kinds of emotions through the products we produce.
• Third, we want our products to be a source of real change, both in individuals and in our larger culture. Looking back over our lives, most of us recognize that real change frequently came about as a result of the books we read, the conferences we attended, or both. These types of products provide an opportunity to affect deep and lasting change.

Aside from its rather thinly veiled objective—emphasis on thinly veiled, not the commendable objective itself—to rise above mere ear-tickling and to have a positive emotional impact upon its readership in accordance with Thomas Nelson Inc.’s specifications, Hand of Fate delivers a good deal of inside baseball to make it an entertainingly instructive read that never gets boring. As a legal expert and media insider, Lis Wiehl knows her streets, and it shows. The reader learns the meaning of expressions like womb to tomb and postmortem lividity and receives little crash courses in talk radio production, grand jury trials, and forensics.

And are you aware that most color laser printers do more than just print party invites and color-coded bar charts, but that they also secretly encode the printer’s serial number and manufacturing code on every document they produce? Something about tiny yellow dots that appear about every inch on the page, nestled within the printed words. I had no idea. Now I know, and should I ever commit a felony which necessitates the production of color prints, I’ll make sure to take extra precautions lest the evidence be traced to a Kinko’s two blocks from my house—although this may not be exactly the kind of practical guidance the publisher had envisioned.

While I would stop short of characterizing Hand of Fate as preachy, here and there it inclines in that direction—in my humble opinion, to filch a stock locution from someone we know. Speaking of whom, Ms. Wiehl’s long-term “sidekick” also wrote a novel in which an aggrieved party settles the score using unlawful methods, i.e., embarks on a veritable whacking spree. Although clearly the more conservative (“traditional”) of the two thrillerwrights, Bill O’Reilly’s 1998 revengefest Those Who Trespass—a fast-paced behind-the-scenes primer on the inner workings of the American news media laden with juicy details about the business in which the author cast himself as the killer and the cop—incorporates not only a more unbleeped kind of dialogue, but also passages like this infamous one, which I’m sure Mr. O’Reilly regrets having included, for it keeps getting quoted ad nauseam at the expense of everything else in the book:

He gently teased her by licking the areas around her most sensitive erogenous zone. Then he slipped her panties down her legs and, within seconds, his tongue was inside her, moving rapidly [...] Shannon lifted Ashley off of him and quickly knelt behind her [...] His hands firmly gripped her buttocks. Ashley could feel his rhythm. First quick, then slow, then quick again. He brought her right up to orgasm, then pulled back.

Strictly speaking, there’s no ‘after the fact’ bedroom scene between an unmarried couple in Those Who Trespass, either, as the frolic ends when after more than an hour of lovemaking the couple fell asleep. Hence no edgy after-the-fact stuff to upset the Christian readers. (The same goes for the living room scene and the shower sequence.)

Mr. O’Reilly’s current publisher, Broadway Books, part of Random House’s Crown Publishing Group, keeps its mission statement free of spiritual impact requirements:

Broadway Books publishes a variety of nonfiction books across several categories including memoir, health & fitness, inspiration & spirituality, history, current affairs & politics, marriage & relationships, animals, travel & adventure narrative, pop culture, humor, and personal finance.

That’s all—pithy enough to make it into the O’Reilly Factor e-mail segment. (Somehow its webmaster forgot to mention that Broadway Books publishes fiction books as well.)

The company who originally published Those Who Trespass, Bancroft Press, does include an enlightenment clause in their mission statement, but without specifying the nature of the enlightenment:

Bancroft Press operates under the slogan books that enlighten [sic]. It has published nearly two dozen books, from a TV thriller, a Hollywood novel, young adult fiction, and adult mysteries to non-fiction books ranging from humor, health, and cultural criticism, to history, business, art, and personal investment.

Bancroft Press apparently operates under the slogan books that enlighten and we use neither italics nor quotation marks. And on its Bill O’Reilly bio page, the company currently announces the following:

In May 2002, he is to begin hosting a nationally syndicated radio program …

O’Really? Can’t wait. Something tells me he will cut his pretty co-host’s mike and inspire her to kill him in a thriller.

In the back of Lis Wiehl’s Hand of Fate there is a “Reading Group Guide,” a list of thought-provoking questions on a variety of subjects broached in the book, such as whether our society has become too reliant on drugs to combat common problems like insomnia and anxiety, whether the country has become too politically polarized, and whether words can sound harsher when delivered electronically.

I would add this set of questions to the Guide:

How visible is the Hand of Nelson in Hand of Fate? Why did the author choose a publisher who insists on the inclusion of inspirational elements—and likely on the omission of others—in the final product, thus inevitably imposing constraints upon its writers? Had Ms. Wiehl published her novel with Bancroft Press or Broadway Books instead of Thomas Nelson, would it have a less Lifetime-TV feel to it and perhaps feature a dash of salacity in place of a Reading Group Guide?

Not that is should. Just curious if it would.

Prior to turning novelist, Lis Wiehl keyboarded two non-fiction works:

Winning Every Time: How to Use the Skills of a Lawyer in the Trials of Your Life—a title which raises the paradox of who would win if both parties to a dispute have read the book—, and The 51% Minority: How Women Still Are Not Equal and What You Can Do About It. (I don’t know…buy more shoes perhaps?)

Both were published by Ballantine Books—like Broadway Books an imprint of Random House:

Today, Ballantine is one of America’s largest publishers of hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback books — spanning a remarkably wide variety of subjects. Publishing talented writers from every category and genre, its hardcover program is particularly strong in commercial fiction…

No mention of its products aspiring to be a means by which God breathes new life into this world. And given that its hardcover program is particularly strong in commercial fiction and it had already published two of her books, what made Lis Wiehl switch to an overtly Christian publishing concern for her fiction series?

And why do these inspirational aspects “bother” me so much that I’ve launched into a whole Talking Points memo on them? Am I so flaming a liberal that any reference to the Deity spooks me as much as poor little Damien panics at the sound of church bells? Or am I just intimidated by strong female characters and debates on women’s issues like some men who wax hysterical at the sight of a bloody Tampax?

Well, my shrink will have to figure it out. On a conscious level, I simply wonder if the life lessons presented in Hand of Fate could have been presented in less conspicuous a fashion such that I, your humble reader, wouldn’t have become curious enough to actually research the publisher to figure out what’s going on here. Because somehow these lessons, valid as they doubtless are, don’t flow organically from the narrative but rather seem added to it like sails on a sauceboat—what would Chekov say?

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. (Anton Chekov)

The First Law of Narrative (“Chekov’s gun”) states that if there’s a gun on the mantelpiece in the first act, it must have gone off by the third. In other words, ideally, every element introduced into a story should either (a) bear on the course of events directly or (b) reveal something about a person’s character which shapes his or her behavior which, in turn, shapes the story line. Elements which do neither just sort of “hang there,” all dressed up with nowhere to go, as it were.

For instance, one of the protagonists, Cassidy, is hooked on sleeping pills. You could argue that this goes to her character, for certain personality types more than others are liable to substance abuse. Fair enough, but then again, as far as the story line is concerned, instead of as a Somulex® addict, Cassidy might as well be portrayed as a contortionist, a cat lover, or a bookplate collector, for her addiction neither helps nor hinders nor in any way bears on the search for Jim Fate’s killer. Sure, she falls asleep in her bathtub one night and almost drowns, upon awakening vows never again to do anything so stupid, then drives to work. It’s not like she suddenly conks out during a stakeout and as a result a suspect slips through the cracks, thus adding a new twist to the story. That Somulex® bottle is like a gun she keeps carrying in her purse but which never goes off. Sure, the murder victim had introduced her to the pills, so there’s a connection, but a connection that doesn’t impact on the story is like a cog that doesn’t turn anything.

Her addiction, it would appear, serves as a rather flimsily disguised justification to plug Narcotics Anonymous—certainly a worthy enterprise—which, as per its literature, urges its members to make a decision to turn their will and their lives over to the care of God and humbly ask Him to remove their shortcomings. Therefore, the addiction motif and its resolution align splendidly with the publisher’s mission statement while having nothing to do with the story itself.

The other two ladies also struggle with personal issues that do not turn anything in the novel’s center of gravity, namely the murder of Jim Fate. Thus Allison, the Federal prosecutor, is pregnant. While nothing speaks against being with child while hunting down a murderer, the former does not bear on the latter unless the pregnancy were somehow related to the motive for the crime, or perhaps during an ultrasound exam the rapid lub-dub of the fetus’s heartbeat reminded Allison of a galloping horse, a sound she had faintly perceived in the background on, say, a recording of one of the killer’s phone messages without having been able to place it at the time, but now this newly discovered equine connection leads to the perpetrator who owns a horse-racing track.

Since nothing like that happens in the book, Allison seems pregnant for no reason other than to showcase the vicissitudes of the condition, such as craving red meat one day and being repulsed by it the next, and to have life deal her a rough hand in the course of her gestation which provides an opportunity for personal growth and hence to serve as an inspiration for the reader in accordance with the publisher’s objective. As far as the story goes, however, in lieu of being pregnant, she might as well be playing the trumpet.

So Cassidy is addicted to pills, Allison is happily hitched and expecting, and Nicole is a single mom who has lost her faith in God. In a parallel universe, our three heroines collaborate on solving a murder. Does Moses ever show up to part the waters and forge a passage between the two? At one point, a character from the past suddenly stops by for a very dramatic sequence in the course of which bullets are fired and in whose wake Nicole begins to warm up to the Lord again—any relation to the murder of Jim Fate? A pinch of illegal immigration gets also tossed into the stew, with both sides of the issue being presented, fair and balanced, and Jesus having the final word on the subject—is there an undocumented alien component to the murder?

In the end, Hand of Fate reads like two separate books under a single cover, one being a murder mystery, the other a tract on Faith and muliebrity, all somewhat incompletely amalgamated like chocolate cake served with a side of broccoli.

Gary Null's Nutritious Chocolate

Somewhat counter-intuitively, chocolate and broccoli are perfectly compatible: Gary Null’s Nutritious Chocolate, for instance, contains Green Algae Powder, Wheat Grass Powder, Green Barley Powder, Alfalfa Leaf, Oat Grass, Broccoli, Parsley, Kale, Aloe Vera, Watermelons, Pink Grapefruits, and a slew of other ingredients not commonly found in dark chocolate, yet it tastes delicious and thoroughly amalgamated—so it can be done.

To be or not to be fair, Shakespeare sometimes paid no heed to Chekov’s gun either—perchance he knew not of’t—, and like Hand of Fate, the aforequoted-from Hamlet, too, has a bit of a ragbag quality to it. The play includes numerous elements and speeches which are only loosely, if at all, related to the fratricide at its core. For example, Polonius heaps a mountain of sage advice upon his son Laertes prior to the latter’s departure to France:

Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
[...]
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
[...]

And on and on. Yet it is unclear what, if anything, Polonius’s display of wisdom reveals about his character—other than standard issue complexity—such that it renders the old man particularly susceptible to eavesdropping behind a curtain and getting impaled in the process.

Creative literary analysts, of course, will always come up with a cogent-sounding interpretation for anything. If a water-skiing squirrel—a mythical creature briefly mentioned in Hand of Fate—suddenly appeared during Hamlet’s gravediggers scene and for no discernible reason launched into a protracted soliloquy on where to find the best filberts in Copenhagen, scholars would be falling over each other in extolling the allegorical importance of its speech with respect to Hamlet’s insanity, and Shakespeare would now be credited, rightly or wrongly, with the semantic broadening of the word nuts to include the meaning of crazy.

Besides, the Stratford-upon-Avoner had a certain way with words, and the squirrel’s verses would be suffused with such riveting imagery that their ultimate purpose in the context of the story were of lesser significance.

Motivational psychology teaches that a strong enough why can take care of almost any how. Mark Twain once declared that the difference between the right word and the almost right word was akin to the difference between a lightning bolt and a lightening bug. (In the spirit of its substance, I slightly reworded Mr. Twain’s quote.) Thus in writing—as in music and chocolate-making—a strong enough how can take care of almost any what.

If all the elements in a story hang together like beads on a string and each one of Chekov’s guns dutifully goes off before curtain time, plain who-what-when-where language, interspersed with a few zingy one-liners here and there, works swimmingly. If, on the other hand, several stories that don’t quite gel on their own are to be bundled under one heading, stylish use of language goes a long way towards forging into a homogenous whole what may otherwise seem like a chimera of disparate elements. In one scene, Hamlet’s mother, the queen, asks for more matter with less art, but were she given a just-the-facts-Jack prose version of Hamlet, Her Highness may quickly change her royal tune and demand the art be restored as a crucial catalyst for the matter.

Hand of Fate, while certainly eloquent, focuses on content, not language, i.e., on the what more than the how; and regarding the how, it opts for clarity over style. Presumably, neither Ms. Wiehl nor her co-author/ghostwriter/distiller-in-chief (“She’ll say, ‘What’s a trap and trace in a legal context?’ and she’ll distill it down”), mystery writer April Henry (left), spent hours poring over each paragraph recasting it over and over until it scanned like a symphony before tackling the next. As a result, rather than being enthralled by the flow and the rhythm of the language, the reader cannot but focus on what happens next and wonder why it happens. Without unique and catchy phraseology as a common denominator to glue it all together, the inspirational aspects of the three protagonists’ personal journeys remain sorely untethered from the hunt for the killer, and never the twain shall meet.

In a previous post, I commented upon the inadvertent serpent motif in The Da Vinci Code. Every few dozen pages, someone or something advances by snaking. In addition, characters seem inordinately prone to wheeling around (wheel with a hee, not Wiehl).

Several instances of an uncommon word or expression—or a common term used in an uncommon way, such as snake as a verb—despite a plethora of alternate choices readily listed in the Thesaurus suggest an author’s relative unconcern with language beyond its primary function, which is to convey meaning with clarity.

Say what you will about The Da Vinci Code’s literary merits or the soundness of its historical infrastructure, every single element injected into the story pertains to the search for the Holy Grail and, by extension, to the murder of the curator in the Louvre. Teabing’s butler isn’t allergic to peanuts merely because food allergies are a problem in society and the afflicted individual ultimately improves his life by joining Allergics Anonymous, thus serving as an inspiration to similarly situated readers, while the search for the Grail merrily proceeds on a different channel. Butler Rémy gets killed in the context of the very quest which forms the meat of the novel by being given cognac laced with peanut powder. Chekov’s gun—the peanut allergy—doesn’t just hang there all dressed up with nowhere to go like the pill addiction in Hand of Fate. It actually goes off in the form of anaphylactic shock which bears on the story line by eliminating an accessory. If it didn’t go off, the laws of literary compensation require it be handled with such spellbinding verbal panache that its discharge—while still desirable—would become secondary.

Incidentally, Hand of Fate, too, features a goober component, and happily—unlike the Somulex® sideshow—it does bear on the murder of Jim Fate. The author(s) didn’t throw in a few peanut crackers just because Thomas Nelson finds them inspirational. They’re actually a crucial part of the story.

History will tell how many timeless quotations Hand of Fate holds:

I’m going to get some tea. (Hand of Fate)

sounds just as memorable as

Tomorrow is another day. (Gone With the Wind)

The observation that

It is usually more important how a man meets his fate than what it is. (Hand of Fate)

seems no less astute albeit no more universally acknowledged than

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (Pride and Prejudice)

Yet despite containing a number of potentially classic lines like these, style and language were given short shrift overall. Of course, Papa Bear (Papa Mouse?) O’Reilly always says that if you make a claim, you must give examples to back it up.

No problem.

So here’s an example:

Allison straightened up and bit the edge of her thumbnail. “I’ve been thinking about it too, Cassidy. All the evidence we have is circumstantial. [...] hated Jim Fate, and he had access to [...]. But if hating Jim Fate was a crime…”
     Cassidy finished the thought: “… then there are a lot of people out there who are guilty.”

This exchange between Allison and Cassidy occurs on page 268. By now, we’ve been informed about a batrillion times that Jim Fate is one of the most despised individuals that ever walked the solar system. Everybody knows. Even the water-skiing squirrel knows. Therefore, as soon as Allison says, “But if hating Jim Fate was a crime…,” the alert reader automatically finishes the thought, just to find it finished once again by Cassidy in the following line. So not only does Cassidy’s line completion (a) provide no new information and (b) mildly insult the reader’s intelligence by completing a thought as if he or she would have been unable to do so, worst of all it also (c) is phrased as blandly as an unsalted rice cake tastes. A triple threat indeed.

In my humble estimation, Allison’s thought should have been (a) left uncompleted and not responded to, (b) left uncompleted and concluded by Cassidy with a simple “I know”, or (c) completed in a snazzier manner, such as “… then half the country would be locked up.”

But “… then there are a lot of people out there who are guilty” almost looks like a screw-up at the printing plant where the original half-sentence was accidentally erased, and some lithography apprentice quickly whipped something up as the presses were already rolling.

Anytime an element is inserted into a narrative—be that element a whole theme, such as pregnancy or addiction, or just one line—which brings no news to the party or brings news but doesn’t bear on the main story line, what else but pure style could justify its inclusion? For if it also ain’t snazzy, witty, or poetic and euphonious by way of rhythm, sound, and flow—i.e., fun to read—it’ll just sit there on the page like a monkey on a rock (yes, the selfsame monkey David Letterman wouldn’t give your troubles to).

On the positive side of the language ledger, Hand of Fate is far less snake infested than The Da Vinci Code. A forensic pathologist and his assistant have air supply hoses snaking up their backs, but that’s it as far as ophiology. This makes perfect sense, as too much phallic symbolism would likely discomfit the Christian readership. If Ms. Wiehl and Ms. Henry (the distiller) had included additional snakes or snaking, Thomas Nelson Inc. surely would have removed them lest a few poison gas grenades from disgruntled worshippers might arrive in their mail (just as in response to this statement, I might receive a live diamondback in a padded package from Thomas Nelson in hopes that getting bitten may affect deep and lasting change in me).

While snaking does not loom large in Hand of Fate, a few uncommon-word repetitions caught my eye, although all of these are mere duplications rather than multiple instances of the same expression. Granted, I seem to be the only person on the planet sensitive to such repetitions, for even though The Da Vinci Code sold over 80 million copies and has been panned and trashed on virtually every account under the sun, a cursory Google search of snaking and wheeling as relates to the unusual frequency of these verbs in the book yields no results, save for my own brief lamentation on the subject.

Whatever word neurosis I may be afflicted with, these word duplications jumped out at me from the pages like jacks-in-the-book, and, I maintain, their presence bespeaks a touch of sloppiness in the language department which ultimately may be responsible for why the various ingredients in Hand of Fate fail to coalesce as well as they should.

Of course, repetition as a stylistic device or to avoid confusion must be distinguished from repetition as a result of having misplaced one’s Thesaurus. The following examples strike me as the latter. We’ll let the audience decide:

Reality was slogging forward with a child like a deadweight on her hip.

Reality slogs on for another seven pages and then…

She was plodding along with her head down, her mind someplace else, the sleeping [child] a deadweight on her hip, when she heard a shout.

The second time around, I would have made the kid a millstone around her waist.

They were in a typical office space, fuzzy, blue, head-high walls making a warren of cubes.

Later in a different building:

Most of the floor was a rabbit warren of cubicles separated from each other by shoulder-high partitions.

Perfect. Now we can take the rabbits from all the warrens in Hand of Fate and feed them to the snakes in The Da Vinci Code. (“Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The warrens’ tasty bunnies shall amply furnish forth the Vinci serpents.”) At least the cubes have turned into cubicles, and the walls have become partitions and shrunk to shoulder-height, but shouldn’t the second office be a maze instead of yet another warren?

She felt herself calm a fraction.

I had never heard or read the term a fraction used in the sense of a bit. Now I encountered it twice in one book.

Makayla lifted her head a fraction.

There are myriad ways to slightly lift one’s head. A tad. A trifle. An iota. A mite. A whit. A hair. Too many fractions, and I feel I’m in math class.

The observation suite was crowded with representatives from an alphabet soup of local, state, and national law enforcement as well as public health agencies.

Soup lovers will be delighted.

Personally and professionally, they wanted themselves and their particular branch of the alphabet soup associated with the winning outcome.

Frankly, I’m of two minds on the alphabet soup. The second serving may actually be a legitimate reiteration of the first, and switching expressions could lead to disorientation. On the other hand, besides remembering the term itself, the reader will likely have forgotten exactly who or what twenty pages earlier was thus referred to, get the impression the author had yet again mislaid her Book of Synonyms.

Still, alphabet soup may be such a common law enforcement term of art to summarize all the various acronymed agencies and departments that its repeated use is justified.

Once again, we’ll let the audience decide.

Yes, I am aware that I used the word thus nine times in this post.

I am also aware that 250 Words is the Soul of Wit.

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief.

Following the Danish nobleman’s lead, I shall be brief in my conclusion:

Lis Wiehl. Hand of Fate. In stores now.

Face of Wiehl

Sans context or commentary, someone on Facebook posted a YouTube clip of a cute teenager on a fake ship warbling a catchy tune. Per my cursory research, this song was a #1 hit record in 1968. Trouble is, unless one understands English and pays attention to the lyrics, judging from the girl’s performance alone one wouldn’t be able to tell whether this song is about (a) knitting, (b) baking cookies, (c) getting a manicure, or (d) being bored on a boat. Lines such as “when we were young and sure to have our way” don’t seem to carry much meaning for this 18-year-old.

Somehow I’d love to drive a fork into this girl’s leg; not as an act of violence or sadism per se, but to see if her expression would change or if her face would retain its mildly spaced-out grin no matter what happens. Most likely the latter. Bottom line, you watch 15 seconds of it, and you’ve seen the whole clip. Despite the pretty melody and the lovely voice, one just hopes for a hungry blonde-loving great white to jump out from the sea and put a merciful end to this:

By contrast, the following French lady knocks the lights out with as riveting a rendition of any song ever performed. No knitting or cookie-baking going on here, whether you understand French or not. In less than three minutes, Mireille Mathieu covers the gamut of human emotions at about every level of intensity under the sun. Very theatrical, yet beautifully subtle and natural at the same time—not an easy combination to achieve.

Warning: Watching this clip is addictive—like Lay’s Potato Chips, you can’t have just one! (At least I can never watch it just once … or twice … or three times …)

And no need to stick a fork into any of her limbs. All you’d have to do is touch her little toe with a feather, and no doubt a reaction would instantly show in those amazing eyes. The makeup and the lighting probably help, but whatever this woman is doing with her baby greens deserves an opthalmology Grammy for Most Mesmerizing Eyework during a musical performance.

No idea who or what God is, and I don’t mean to question Ms. Mathieu’s talent, but surely this is what happens when the Deity hijacks a performer and communicates through him or her:

Changing continents and styles, albeit no less divine and elecrifying: for his Hollywood screen test, a young singer from the South was handed a stringless toy guitar and asked to lipsynch to one of his own recordings on an empty stage. Like wearing ridiculously bejweled jumpsuits, there were certain things only this guy could pull off and still look incredibly cool:

An extremely versatile vocalist, Mr. Presley was equally adept at performing material even his Austrian fans can relate to:

Borrowing from the yodelmeister’s repertoire, John Lennon did a live version of Hound Dog in Madison Square Garden. Although Mr. Lennon gives a solid performance as always, it is his wife who steals the show. Notice the bass player looks like Jesus—other than the presence of the Lord on stage, what else could possibly account for the miracle that Ms. Ono’s otherworldly artistic contribution to this song fails set off a mass stampede for the exit doors? Verily, some things must be seen to be believed:

And now, an easygoing television professional will introduce our final song for today:

Sadly yet understandably, Sting has locked himself into his dressing room and is too frightened to emerge from under the couch and play us out as promised.

The good news is, a braver Britisher has agreed to fill in. Still don’t believe in God? Well, here’s God playing us out on the guitar. This is not to suggest that Eric Clapton is God, nor that God is a British subject; merely that God uses Mr. Clapton as a medium to speak to us via this dazzling blues solo which begins at 3:20:

God has left the building. Thank you, and good night.

Wall Street almost drove the whole country into the ground. On the flip side, even the most ayatolloid Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing leftist would have to admit to the physical prettiness of New York City’s Financial District, this grid-less labyrinth of narrow European-style streets wending their way between beautifully architectured mostly pre-war buildings whose sheer height nevertheless renders the scenery uniquely New York. Adding a charming hillside touch, the entire area slopes toward the East River, with nary a car to spoil the walking-around experience.

Since money and I naturally repel each other like the negative poles of two magnets, I seldom journey south of the Village, or SoHo at the most; hence it doesn’t happen every day that I can be spotted strolling down Wall Street. (For the Manhattan-challenged, the Financial District is located near the southern tip of this elongated island.) Strangely, whenever it does happen, passers-by seem blissfully oblivious to the rarity of the event they are witnessing. If they saw a giraffe lope past the Stock Exchange, would they ignore it, too?

Perchance my neck is too short to attract an appropriate amount of attention.

These days, my life bears an eerie resemblance to Wall Street. Wall Street in the early fall of 2008, that is, on the eve of the calamity. Except that I simply don’t owe enough, and hence my personal situation is far more precarious. If only I found a way to rack up an additional few hundred billion dollars in debt, then the U.S. treasury would rush to my aid. As matters stand, however, I’m screwed like a few hundred billion light bulbs instead.

So until I figure out how to acquire and then blow hundreds of billions of borrowed greenback for the purpose of scoring a bailout (I’m no financial expert, but as far as I can tell, that’s how the system works), I shall continue my bungling quest for employment, to which end I keep dispatching electronic résumés through cyberspace at an ever accelerating clip as if my life depended on it, which, in a way, it does. (At least my life as I know it, i.e., a life featuring food and electricity and like amenities.)

Yesterday, in response to one of these cyber mailings, some Wall Street area dining establishment called and invited me to come in for an interview later in the afternoon. I catatonically agreed, hung up, and instantly headed to the kitchen for a big knife to slash my wrists with. As always, I didn’t make it beyond the hesitation marks stage, whereupon my cowardly self resolved to repair to the dreaded appointment.

I stepped off the 2-Train at the Wall Street stop, exited the subway system, and was, once again, bowled over by the quaint beauty of this neighborhood, which I had not visited in quite some time. As is generally the case when I’m down there, I promptly got lost. Below Houston (the street, not the city), the famous Manhattan street grid goes haywire, and you can forget about simple coordinates such as 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues. My destination Hannover Square between Pearl and Stone didn’t exactly lend itself to the count-and-find method which is so eminently useful in other parts of the city, and as I do not travel thither that often, my mental map of the area was spotty at best.

After perambulating about in circles for awhile and enjoying the pretty architecture, I somehow wound up at my (un)desired destination just in time and introduced myself to the hostess, who checked my name off a list, handed me a pencil and an application form, and lead me to a table in the bar area where I was to complete the paperwork. The manager would be with me shortly.

A cocktail waitress materialized and inquired if I wanted a beverage. I declined and ordered a steak knife instead. No, I didn’t. There was no need for another weapon, as I had already been given a pencil with which to puncture my jugular in case the anguish of sitting there in yet another cocktail section of yet another restaurant completing yet another application form for yet another server position became unbearable and I were at long last able to muster the bravery to take arms against this sea of trouble.

Suddenly, the aforementioned cocktail toots plunked a fancy little wooden basket filled with popcorn in front of me. Her explanation was that she didn’t have any “real” customers right now, so I could have what her “real” customers usually got. That was nice, because I hadn’t eaten all day, as I hadn’t gotten around to stealing any food yet.

Over the years, I’ve seen various items put on tables for people to munch on while sipping their dopey cocktails—all kinds of bread, bread sticks, bruschetta, potato chips, corn chips, olives, cold cuts, you name it. Quite frankly, though, popcorn served in a restaurant was a first for me. Of course, I immediately asked if I could order a movie with that.

The moment these words had escaped my lips, I knew. I could tell by the expression on the waitress’s face and by her forced attempt to feign amusement: this was precisely what everybody said upon encountering the popcorn basket for the first time. People see popcorn, associate movies, and then goofily cast their eyes about for a screen and ask what’s playing, obviously laboring under the delusion of being exceptionally original. And day after day, the poor waitstaff must play along and pretend this is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard.

Here’s the classic incarnation of this scenario:

A customer has finished their meal, having devoured everything including the parsley sprig. The waiter comes over to clear the table, and the customer, referring to his or her perfectly empty plate, quips, “I didn’t like it.”

Now, the first dozen times I heard this line I may have found it mildly amusing. The following few hundred times I took it with stoic indifference, yet responded with a mechanical grin which probably failed to extend very far north of my upper lip.

But the last approximately tens of thousands of times some clown attempted to regale me with this mother of all shopworn dining room japes, I struggled to restrain myself from summarily landing a dynamic uppercut to the jester’s jaw and following up with the kindest of smiles and the words, “I hope you liked that.”

Should I ever write my waiter’s autobiography, it will be titled I Didn’t Like It—a felicitous double-meaning, for not only is it absolutely true, albeit in a grotesquely understated kind of way, but it also happens to be one of the top-three things most frequently said to me in a restaurant setting.

The other two, of course, being Check please and You’re fired.

Birds do it, bees do it, squirrels do it. All animate entities on this planet—and most likely extraterrestrials as well—are programmed by nature to multiply. Procreation happens automatically. It requires no special training, no talent, no skill, and no higher intellect. In all of nature, there’s no such thing as “too dumb to procreate.” Any living being too dumb to produce offspring would also be too dumb to respire or to convert sunlight into chlorophyll, i.e., be non-viable right out of the gate.

Even potatoes know how to multiply, hence the ingenuity of a potato is all it takes.

In addition to the necessary skill set being already built in, all living creatures are endowed with an inherent drive to procreate, and a pretty powerful one at that. So aside from no skill and no intellect, no more effort is required to effect conception than it takes to sit back, relax, and leave the driving to Mother Nature.

What does require a measure of skill, on the other hand, is to prevent procreation from occurring. One must possess at least a scintilla of intellectual prowess to be able to follow a pill regimen or to properly don a condom, and it certainly takes a lot more effort to exercise restraint—either by retreating in time or by abstaining from potential procreation-inducing activities altogether—than it takes to refrain from actively and consciously interfering with nature’s programming. Breathing is easier than holding one’s breath, and all contraceptive methods reside far beyond the intellectual reach of a squirrel.

This—to forestall yet another predictable knee-jerk objection besides the infertility issue—is not to suggest that there’s anything “wrong” with procreation per se, that babies aren’t cute, that having them isn’t a wonderful thing, blah-blah-blah, nor that women who become pregnant, or the men who contributed to the condition, or both, were simply too dumb to prevent it.

My point is merely that to achieve conception is a lot easier than to prevent it.

So then how come people, in general, are much more inclined to issue felicitations when a pregnancy has been brought on than when one has been prevented even though the latter was more difficult to achieve?

Certainly, raising a child into becoming a productive member of society can be considered an achievement, but no such raising has yet taken place at the time the felicitations are issued.

Anytime we encounter a non-pregnant woman of reproductive age, chances are some preventive skill and effort are in play, yet no one congratulates her or her mate on their accomplishment.

If, on the other hand, we encounter an expecting lady, no skill or effort were needed to bring about her condition, and if prevention was attempted, it obviously failed. Yet she and her guy will be treated as if they just won a bunch of medals in the Olympics.

Every baby bump picture on Facebook is followed by a list of congratulatory comments a mile long. No bump, no congratulations.

I don’t have kids (at least not to my knowledge), and I’ve never been complicit in any begetting (ditto), yet no one has ever congratulated me for the skill and effort I’ve put in over the years to accomplish this feat. Granted, not exactly an overwhelming amount of skill and effort in absolute terms, but certainly quite a fraction more than it would have taken me to share my chromosomes, in which case I would have been swamped with wows like I had passed the bar or completed a novel.

Methinks we’ve got it backwards.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have. (Gerald Ford, 1974)

Are there any Republicans left, pardon the pun, that haven’t suffered at least one televised stroke as of yet? Let us pray they all have medical insurance—under the current system, GOPers must have had a rough time obtaining coverage on account of their pre-existing condition. (In Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, a father, played by Alan Alda, breathes a sigh of relief upon being briefed by a neurologist about his son’s CAT scan results; of late, the young man had been espousing all manner of radical conservative ideas, perfectly consistent with the location of a small tumor exerting pressure on a particular area of his brain.)

To be fair, the current right-wing meltdown comes on the heels of eight years of collective liberal apoplexy. In their purest incarnations, members of either tribe come across as quite a few box nails short of a hardware store. Camp affiliation in general appears to exert an undue influence on an individual’s capacity to conclude that it’s raining upon seeing droplets of water falling out of a cloud, unless such conclusion happens to comport with the party line. This makes it incredibly difficult for the unaffiliated among us to cut through the pea soup and filter out potentially accurate and hence valuable intelligence from the ubiquitous partisan piffle and bickering.

As per Wikipedia and other corroborating googlidence (evidence procured by googling), I have schizoid personality disorder, defined as a heightened craving for seclusion and a fervent disinclination to join and associate. Now that heath care reform was passed, I expect to be eligible for treatment shortly. Once I am cured and governed by a wholesome desire to belong, I shall decide whether to join the right-wing kooks or the left-wing loons.

For the time being, however, my judgment on complicated matters remains hobbled by the idée fixe that I would have to put in an inordinate amount of study time before throwing in with either crew on a per-issue basis, and thus I am absolutely, positively, unequivocally, 100% percent clueless as to whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3490) and its little olive branch amendment, the Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 (H.R.4872), both signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday, (a) will sink the United States either altogether or at least “as we know it” via transforming the country into a quasi-socialist nation and adding batrillions of dollars to the already quite staggering budget deficit in the process, as Republicans contend in splendid unison (seconded, of course, by the ever weeping Glenn Beck) or (b) whether the new legislation is the best thing since sliced watermelon, as our fearless chief magistrate and his loyal apostelage allege, for not only will it not devour batrillions but actually save hundreds of billions of the green stuff while at long last affording painters and poets and whatnot an opportunity to pursue happiness untrammeled by the pesky distraction of having to worry about mundane matters such as health expenses—and what could be more fundamentally American than that? (Yes. Painters and poets. Just quoting Speaker Pelosi.)

Without having read the 2,400-plus-page legislative leviathan—”double-spaced,” as someone recently remarked in an attempt to assure that the proposed legislation really wasn’t quite as reader-unfriendly as the scare-mongering opposition falsely clamored—let alone researched each one of its clauses in detail for the purpose of appraising its potential to backfire in accordance with the infamous law of unintended consequences; and furthermore without possessing a thoroughgoing understanding of economics beyond the fairly intuitive dictum that spending more than is coming in may lead to trouble down the road, a principle which may or may not hold when it comes to an entity as cortex-witheringly abstruse as the budget of the (still) richest and most powerful nation in history, what with the constant international lending and borrowing such that no common mortal could possibly keep track of all the credits and debits and total them up so as to assess with reasonable certainty and condense into one single fathomable figure the actual condition of the nation’s coffers, not to mention their projected condition in the wake of an unprecedented entitlement experiment … speaking of keeping track, I can’t find the beginning of this sentence, which is precisely my point: it’s all very complicated, and lacking the aforementioned desire to belong—fear of clan alienation generally facilitates coming down on a particular side of a controversy—the schizoid non-expert is left with having to figure this thing out purely on the basis of reams of knotty data.

Having grown up in one of these quasi-socialistic Western European bogeyman nations and recalling that supermarket shelves were always stacked, no faucet ever seemed to run out of clean water (hot or cold), and shortages of any kind were virtually unheard of, I confess that I am not exactly quaking in my slippers at the specter of my adopted country “turning into Denmark,” as long as it doesn’t turn into Cuba or Somalia once the entire system collapses under its own entitlement weight.

My relative nonchalance in this matter may derive from the fact that on neither side of the big pond have I ever managed to advance into a tax bracket where Uncle Edelweiss or Uncle Sam would pocket a painfully large cut of my take-home in order to finance my fellow citizens’ artistic ambitions and foot their medical bills in case they inadvertently swallowed an inkwell during a poetry session or got mauled by their subject while attempting to paint a grizzly in the wilderness. Barring some sort of miracle, I’ll always be on the receiving rather than the subsidizing end of the entitlement ledger.

Still, it seems plainly obvious that exorbitant taxation of the affluent affects lower income echelons in ways perhaps not anticipated by those who are genuinely concerned about helping the poor. After all, the more the fat cats are being taxed, the less money they have left over to blow on themselves, and the fewer yachts and $1,000-bottles of wine they will purchase. In consequence, workers in the boat factory get laid off and busboys make less money.

No doubt, a growing entitlement system inevitably causes a proportionally larger segment of the population to slack off and overall ambition levels diminish. Once the basics, such as food, shelter, medical coverage, and perhaps even a certain standard of living beyond those basics, are guaranteed by whatever Uncle is in charge, more people tend to fall ill with all manner of conveniently unfalsifiable maladies, such as excruciating migraines and back pains that render labor impossible. On balance, processes like recovery from whatever may ail the patient and finding a job mysteriously take much longer in nations where molassitude in these areas is rewarded with a weekly direct deposit into one’s checking account. Even the most math-challenged quickly realize that busting one’s buns to make, say, $32,000 a year if on can collect, say, $30,000 in entitlements means that working full-time only nets an extra 2,000 bucks a year as compared to full-time lemonade-sipping in a hammock. The nifty deposits may not continue forever, but if we’ll have to find a job anyway, why go looking for one any sooner than when we, well, have to?

Liberals, by and large, tend to downplay welfare fraud as rare and negligible in scope. Precisely what understanding of human nature this assumption is based upon I do not know. In general, the more progressively-minded the speaker, the less clear it becomes what species they are actually describing when they they profess to describe the human race. Apparently, altruism reigned supreme until money and monotheism were invented, and the ensuing corruption of homo sapiens culminated in the creation of the United States and capitalism. Of course, an extreme version of this bizarre notion of what makes people tick is sketched in the infamous Communist Manifesto, which essentially puts forth the incentive structure of an ant colony as a workable model for human society. (This is not to say that most liberals have much use for the Communist Manifesto; only that they may find its basic tenets an itty bit less absurd than non-liberals.)

Conservatives seem slightly more in touch with human nature, albeit curiously disposed in other areas. It took about thirty seconds to convince these people that Iraq had stockpiles of WMDs, but somehow there’s never enough evidence that man’s actions may have a hand in climate change. Instead of worrying about the environment, they’d rather teach intelligent design in biology class. And of course, during the entire Bush administration, no right-winger in front of a microphone ever failed to break into paeans about the economy rockin’ and rollin’ and clicking on all cylinders when, in fact, it was careening straight toward the abyss. So forgive me for not putting too much stock into impassioned GOP rhetoric no matter what the issue may be, including the incessant doomsday prattle about this health care bill. (The doomsday prattle may be right on the money, but if so, then in spite of the messenger’s identity, not because of it.)

Bottom line, in the real world, one should never underestimate people’s ingenuity when it comes to wangling free stuff. And they don’t call ‘em entitlements for nothing. The moment a new gift basket has been introduced into the fabric of a society, any subsequent retrenchment thereof will be regarded as outright theft, and giving less becomes synonymous with taking away. If I give you ten bucks today, ten bucks tomorrow, and ten bucks on Sunday, then if I give you only nine bucks on Monday, you’ll accuse me of having stolen a dollar from you. In railing against Obamacare, even our untiringly exasperated Republican anti-Obama warriors are standing there, arteries popping out of their necks, accusing the new health bill of “stealing” from Medicare. Last time I checked, Medicare was a government entitlement program, too. How can the government “steal” from an entitlement the government itself dispenses?

That said, the U.S. certainly has the “best health care system in the world,” as chest discomfort survivor Rush Limbaugh is eager to point out every five seconds, which is precisely why it simply feels wrong, for lack of a better term, if millions of people, for whatever reason, don’t have access to most of it, even if they’re just a bunch of lazy bums who can’t make a proper living; just as it simply feels wrong if 5% of the population control 90% of a nation’s wealth (or whatever the precise percentage may be), no matter how aboveboard those 5% may have acquired their riches, be it via hard work, inheritance, or wise investing. In the end, the larger the disparity between the super-rich and the poor, and the more shrinking the middle class, the more mismanaged a nation looks as a whole. Perception is a bitch.

Besides, even the most ardent Christian conservative will cede that Jesus wouldn’t deny emergency care the sick, so from a purely economic standpoint in makes no sense when people—at taxpayer’s expense—present at the ER with wildly advanced conditions that could have been fixed a lot more cheaply in their early stages if only these patients would have been able to see a doctor then.

The other day, former GOP Congressman and Dancing With The Stars sensation Tom DeLay appeared on Fox News brandishing his personal copy of the U.S. Constitution and insisting he couldn’t find the clause which gave license to the kind of government health-care takeover as had just been signed into law.

Others contend the licence to do so is plainly implicit in the Commerce Clause. Of course, everything as well as its polar opposite can be read into either the Commerce Clause or its magical catchall brother, the Necessary and Proper Clause. Based on the fact that bookstores in more than one state carry the Holy Qur’an, a moderately creative legislature could probably enact Sharia law under the Commerce Clause.

A matter of interpretation, as they say. When you get to a fork in the road, take it.

Although I was personally present neither at the Philadelphia Convention nor at any of the subsequent ratification procedures in any of the 13 colonies, the current battle over passing health care strikes me as eerily reminiscent of what the battle over passing the Constitution must have been like, with Federalists and Anti-Federalists at each other’s throats, each accusing the other of recklessly attempting to destroy the incipient nation. Deals were made, arms were twisted, representatives were pumped full of rum so as to secure their votes, and what ultimately came out of a wash was a document so laced with compromise that now, more than 200 years later, we still can’t figure out what the darn thing actually says in places.

They say that nobody really “likes” our new health care bill. Probably true. No one really liked the Constitution, either, when it was passed—too many limp-wristed concessions to the opposition.

Ancient Egypt had existed for 3,000 years by the time Cleopatra put the asp to her breast. The U.S. is still an incipient nation. At each stage in its evolution, it has stood alone with no precedent in history to guide it. It weathered the great Civil War without falling apart. It may weather government-subsidized health care as well.

Or maybe not.

There has never been a 21st century, and there has never been a constitutional democracy of 300 million people. So nobody really knows what to do. Your guess may be better than mine, but it’s guess nonetheless.

Terra incognita, once again.

Stadttheater Klagenfurt, 1992

Nobody wants to hire me. Not even stupid restaurants want to hire me anymore. (Smart ones never did.) Whatever. No doubt, this is all due to the recession, climate change, and the recent late night imbroglio at NBC. My attitude has nothing to do with it, and whoever suggests otherwise is in for a mighty knuckle sandwich.

Speaking of chow, since starved actor will look a trillion times more flattering on my tombstone than starved waiter, I’ve scoured my nostalgia folder for some spiffy audition clips. By virtue of posting them here and designating them as such, yours truly has officially become a starving actor again. Yippee. Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced the footage of my storied Hamlet on Broadway, and copyright strictures preclude me from sharing clips of my acclaimed Stanley in Warner Bros.’ unreleased Streetcar remake. Oh well. My remaining thespian oeuvre still looks plenty impressive…

In this 2001 straight-to-DVD indie masterpiece, I am peacefully enjoying a goblet of fresh blood when the anti-vampire squad in riot gear suddenly busts in without knocking. I hate it when that happens. An arrow in one’s brisket can ruin the whole day. The good news is, if you’re mad at me for any reason, here you can watch me croak on loop until you feel better:

In 1996, George Clooney and Nicole Kidman were my co-stars in The Peacemaker. Most of the clip is in slo-mo so as to afford an opportunity to savor the nuanced performance by the backpack-carrying passer-by entering from the left. There is no sound, but no one says anything anyway. Somewhat miffed that I was snubbed for a Best Background Oscar, I’ve turned down most subsequent Hollywood offers:

Life doesn’t imitate art. It imitates bad television. It does ineed. In 1992, I played a waiter on a silly German TV show, and thus my serving debut was captured on camera. Visible in the background is the Wörthersee, a big Austrian lake. Had I known how many years of real-life restaurant drudgery would follow, I’d have jumped in and drowned myself right then and there. Once again, there is no sound, as this was recorded right off the TV screen with a cheap little digi-cam:

Oh, you need current clips, Mr. Casting Director?

Oops…

Presumably, someone will ring my bell shortly to inquire whether I had liked its font and the design with its light-blue background, and whether I found the Start here at the top enlightening or perplexing given the omission of a matching Stop here at the bottom of the final page. After all, without having been told when to stop, I might have plowed through the end of the form like a Toyota on steroids and kept checking imaginary boxes until my pen ran out of black or blue ink.

So most likely, the door-knocking wetware will be deployed to collect feedback on the forms; to make sure people received, understood, completed, and returned them; and perhaps to elicit one or the other confession about failure to report illegal live-ins.

At first blush, counting the dwellers at one’s residence sounds like a straightforward enterprise. Not so fast: the form instructs me to count the people living in this house, apartment, or mobile home using our guidelines, so I’m not supposed to run off half-cocked and blithely start counting calvaria without having familiarized myself with a few procedural pitfalls. I am furthermore enjoined to perform the count before I answer Question 1 (“Number of people”). I appreciate the heads-up, for I get easily confused about sequence of operation in matters like these.

The guidelines inform me that babies are people and must be included in the count, a rather thinly veiled pro-life message snuck into a government-issued form. Very clever, but probably unconstitutional. I thought the Bush years were over. I guess not.

Regarding each resident’s race, the first two options are:

• White
• Black, African Am., or Negro

Obviously, the use of the term Negro on the Census form has stirred up some controversy. A Census Bureau spokesperson pointed out that many older African-Americans identified themselves that way and that those who did needed to be included. That’s very thoughtful, and I happen to identify myself as European American, not as a piece of chalk. I’m feeling left out, and I demand an explanation from the Census Bureau.

Forms are fascinating. Prior to scoring my Green Card, I lived in the United States on various visas. On every visa application form I had to check a series of yes-or-no questions, such as whether I was a Fascist, a Communist, or a terrorist planning to carry out assassinations upon my arrival in the U.S. Of course, under no circumstance would any visa applicant ever answer any of these silly questions in the affirmative, least of all terrorists planning to carry out assassinations. So why bother asking these questions in the first place? For legal reasons, so that an additional six months for lying on a visa application could be slapped onto the defendant’s life sentence?

(When I finally became eligible for Permanent Residence status, I was required to fly to Austria for my so-called “Green Card Interview” at the U.S. Consulate in Vienna. The only question I was asked at this exhaustive “interview,” which I had to travel thousands of miles to subject myself to, was whether I belonged to any of a particular selection of terrorist organizations. I said no and received my Green Card.)

For a few years I was actually rich enough to afford health insurance under Healthy New York, a state-sponsored program that makes available health plans at a discount for low income earners, so I was eligible to receive Blue Cross Blue Shield coverage for about 200 bucks a month. Every year I had to submit a re-certification form to show that I was still low-income enough to qualify.

On the first page of my annual two-page Blue Cross re-certification form I was asked to provide some personal information, such as name, address, policy number, and the like. What puzzled me was that in parentheses next to the word address it said where you live. I could never figure out who might have been the target audience for this parenthetical definition. After all, those who may have had trouble understanding the term address probably wouldn’t have understood where and live, either, let alone any of the other words on the form, like name, for instance, the precise meaning of which was entirely left to the form-completing party to figure out—no what it says in your passport next to “Name” in parentheses. Those who may have thought address meant e-mail address most likely also thought name referred to their Match.com handles, so clarification would have been in order on both counts.

On page 2 I had to provide my current monthly gross income. It seems that whoever drafted the form considered it necessary to clarify the term address so even a capuchin monkey would understand it, but at the same time figured that the meaning of current monthly gross income—which can be defined and calculated about 9,000 different ways—was as limpid as the surface of a mountain mere on a windless summer morning.

The word monthly, in particular the ending -ly, implies that more than one month is involved. Otherwise the form would simply ask to provide the current month’s gross income. Now if, as is quite common, one works a job—or even several jobs—where one’s monthly income varies wildly, monthly necessarily implies the average income of (1+x) number of months. So at the very least, current monthly can be defined as this month’s and last month’s gross income added together and divided by two. But what’s the current month as regards income?

On March 17th, for instance, is the current month simply March, even though we’re only halfway through and my crystal ball is in hock so I can’t predict how much I’ll make during the remaining half, or is it the past 30 days as counted backwards from today, in which latter case the current month would be defined as the period from February 18th to March 17th? Or does February count as the current month as it happens to be the last completed calendar month on record?

Moreover, the average of how many past months can reasonably be regarded as one’s current monthly income? What if I totaled up my gross income for the past six months and divided it by six? Eight months divided by eight? Twelve months divided by twelve? What if I simply took last year’s adjusted gross income from my tax return and divided it by twelve? Would that be current enough even though the figure thus arrived would not include my earnings since December 31st? If not, could I simply add my January and February earnings to last year’s adjusted gross income and divided the result by 14?

Unless someone has some sort of conventional and permanent job with a fixed salary except for perhaps getting a raise every few years, each of these calculations may yield a vastly different figure for current monthly gross income. In fact, what if I added up all the money I ever made and divided it by my age multiplied by twelve? In a macro sense, that too could be regarded as my current monthly income of sorts, as none of my past lifetimes would be included.

In late 2007, in one of several endearingly clumsy attempts of mine to quit restaurants for good, I decided to become a real estate agent in New York City. There was method to my desperation: I figured either (a) I’d get lucky and make a killing in real estate, or (b) I’d crash and burn so badly and get myself so deeply into personal debt in the process that I wouldn’t possibly be able dig myself out of the hole by waiting tables again, in which case I’d be forced to come up with something far more ingenious and, hopefully, more spiritually satisfying. Needless to say, I quickly accomplished option (b). (At present, I am still waiting for that wave of unprecedented ingenuity emerging from within myself which, according to my plan, is supposed to save me.)

The point being, I worked as a real estate agent for the first eight months of 2008. In January, I made zero. February, zero. March, zero. April, $4,000. May, zero. June, zero. July, zero. August, zero. Ergo, from January to August 2008 I raked in exactly $4,000, and all of it in April. What was my current monthly income if, say, in early May I sat down to complete my Blue Cross re-certification form? Would it have been 4,000 divided by 5, given that it was May? Or 4,000 divided by 4 1/2, given that May wasn’t over yet? Or was it $4,000 divided by 2, given that two months are the minimum number of months required to satisfy the definition of monthly?

Bottom line, defining current monthly gross income would have made a lot more sense that defining address. As a client, of course, I appreciated the opportunity to supply my own definition of current monthly gross income each year such that my income so derived always fell below the threshold the exceeding of which would have quadrupled my monthly premium.

But perhaps Blue Cross deliberately refrains from defining current monthly gross income precisely in order to encourage their clients to use creative accounting methods so as to come in below the threshold. After all, unambiguous non-eligibility would cause most folks to cancel their insurance altogether rather than pay three or four times as much as they paid before. At least if they’re given some wiggle-room in the monthly income department, they’ll stay on the rolls. Better to cash in a small premium from a client than to lose him altogether.

Health insurance. The good old times. For now, I just hope I won’t hurt myself while blogging until Obamacare kicks in.

So I’ll go ahead and fill out my pretty light-blue two-page Census form as a warm-up, and then I’ll tackle the two-inch stack of Chapter 7 paperwork. Not having embarked on either project yet, I don’t mean to jump to hasty conclusions, but simply counting the number of people living in my apartment—even if I have to include all the babies—sounds somewhat less of a hassle than making a list of my possessions and then calculating the value of every book, T-shirt, and spare set of guitar strings I (still) own.

So many important-looking forms are piling up on my desk right now, a casual visitor may get the mistaken impression that I actually I have a job or something.

• Address (where you live)
• Park (where you are about to live)
• Bridge (a type of ceiling)

This is the opening line from an Associated Press article in the Business section of today’s New York Times:

If you don’t mind going door to door and asking strangers some personal questions, you may have a future as a Census worker.

Huh?

I used to mind very much going table to table, ragged out in a dopey apron and tie, asking strangers some personal questions about their dinner preferences, yet minding it didn’t prevent me from having a rather extensive past doing precisely that. So why should the fact that I would certainly mind shuffling door to door and interviewing strangers about the number of cohabitants they keep stashed in their closets prevent me from having a future as a census worker?

AP’s reality-impaired syllogism rests on the grotesquely flawed premise that if a person minds doing something, he or she won’t consider doing it for a living. If this were the case, most people would never apply for the very jobs they’re applying for. I certainly wouldn’t still (or again, depending on whether one divides time into units of months or decades) be e-mailing my restaurant résumé through cyberspace or dropping into any of these horrible places like an idiot in order to fill out an application form for a stupid server positon. Yet according to the AP scribe, my doing so indicates that I wouldn’t mind waiting tables again. By this peculiar definition of “not minding” I wouldn’t mind nailing myself to a utility pole or pouring molten lead into my eye sockets, either.

Last week I saw my dentist for a checkup and cleaning. As I settled into the chair and he was lining up his utensils, he asked me if I still worked at whatever restaurant I’d worked at the time of my previous visit. I told him no, I hadn’t been working in a restaurant since my most recent firing, because (a) I hated it, and (b) nobody was willing to hire me anymore, for which there were several reasons: the economy is on the ropes; my youthful good looks may have declined relative to 15 years ago when I first picked up a tray, thus lowering my odds of getting hired because I’m “cute”; plus I’m having more and more trouble feigning enthusiasm for this dreary profession as my main objective during interviews these days is simply to keep myself from throwing up. (In fact, I may file a law suit for job discrimination based on skin color. Managers seem reluctant to hire candidates who look green in the face.)

My dentist seemed puzzled and told me he always thought it would be “fun” to work in a restaurant. Well, a chacun son goût, as they say in Austria. Personally, I’m having a lot more fun in a dentist’s chair. I prefer a drill in my mouth over a wine opener in my hand any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

My attitude towards restaurant work has waxed more bizarre over the years. In late 2008, for instance, I completed a training shift at a place in Midtown, at the end of which I was asked to come back for my second and final trailing the following day, whereupon I was to be put on the schedule full-time. The uniform was a black button-down shirt, of which kind at the time I possessed exactly one presentable unit. This I wore for my training shift. Upon leaving the restaurant that night I convinced myself that my financial straits were so dire that I couldn’t possibly afford to buy another black shirt, so I did the only logical thing: on my way to the subway I tore the shirt I had on into shreds, because then I’d be off the hook as far as returning for my second training on account of not owing the requisite attire. Indeed, I stepped into the N-train with tatters hanging off my shoulders, hoping my fellow straphangers would think some estrous female had tried to rip my clothes off; a much more flattering story than that of having performed the sartorial massacre myself so as to guard against yet another wearisome waitering gig.

Back in my apartment I noticed, alas, that a spare black shirt was hanging in my closet, albeit a less pretty one that had turned dark gray over the years due to having been subjected to hundreds of cycles in various washing machines. Gripped by terror upon considering my bank balance, I resolved that accepting the job would be the “smart” thing to do after all, so I briefly managed to vanquish my demons, donned the grayish upper garment, and dutifully reported for my second training shift at the appointed hour. Yet within less than 30 seconds of entering the place I found myself back on the sidewalk again. Guided by an invisible hand and without input from the left (rational) side of my brain, I had walked up to the manager, without giving reasons informed him that I wouldn’t or couldn’t (don’t remember which) take the job, and turned tail like the proverbial bat out of hell (a mixed metaphor, I know, as bats do not have tails).

Standing on 44th Street with no concrete restaurant proscpects lined up and hence without immediate motive for shredding yet another piece of apparel, I once again chose the most logical course of action:

I ambled up to Broadway at 43rd and waltzed into the Times Square recruiting station. After all, the prospect of crawling through the mud in Afghanistan with a rocket launcher strapped to my back seemed delightful compared to waiting on any more tables. So over the next few weeks I underwent all the tests at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyln, was adjudged mentally and physically fit, and was cordially invited to enlist any time.

Ultimately, I hesitated, because (a) I’m more of a girly-boy, and hence wouldn’t be too happy a camper in a testosterone-laden environment (admittedly, not the happiest camper in restaurants, either, so that’s a wash), (b) I’m scared of guns, but more importantly (c) in order to qualify for any of the army positions that struck me as potentially interesting I would have been required to apply for Top Security Clearance (or whatever exactly this thing is called) which, in turn, would have required me to renounce my Austrian citizenship (which made me wonder why the current governor of California was allowed to keep it; apparently, being commander-in-chief of the California National Guard isn’t a top-security-clearance kind of gig).

In the end, I hesitated for so long that I crossed the upper age limit for enlisting, so now the army issue is moot, and I’m back looking for a stupid waitering job and tearing up my wardrobe in self-defense.

Seeing no other way out, the headline of this blog entry may soon grace the front-page of the New York Post.

On second thought, chances are I’ll chicken out of cutting off my head just as I chickened out of joining the army. More realistically, a few years hence the headline will read thus:

Dead at 98: World’s Oldest Active Waiter Collapses During Busy Brunch Shift in Midtown

Of course, I may have OD’ed on anti-depressants long before that.

“It was either a massive 30-city tour or start helping out around the house,” said Conan O’Brien, announcing his upcoming Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour.

As soon as the tour wraps up and his contractual television ban expires, Mr. O’Brien is expected to return to the small screen and essentially do the same show he’s been doing for 17 years, only on a different network. Probably Fox. [Actually: TBS!]

Whatever station he’ll be on, the title for his new show is obvious, and you read it here first:

Not Tonight with Conan O’Brien

The simple isn’t always the best, but the best is always simple. For no apparent reason, this title suddenly appeared before yours truly out of the blue. Although it is now my intellectual property, I am willing to work something out with Mr. O’Brien if he wants to use it. A five-digit figure would be fine. It’s a bargain. I’m working for peanuts here.

For now, I am posting it on my blog in order to establish my copyright claim. Thus, if his show ends up being called Not Tonight with Conan O’Brien—which, after all, is the perfect title hands down—without having consulted and compensated me, I’ll be in a position to initiate a law suit over purloined titlage. (If I had a lawyer, he or she surely would have advised me to do precisely what I am doing.)

In case this strikes the honorable reader as delusions of grandeur on my part, that may correct, but it may also betoken a failure on the part of the honorable reader to tell a crack title from a leaky faucet. Admittedly, I am somewhat biased in favor of one of these options.

In any event, I find my title hilarious, and as long as I can keep myself entertained, no one gets hurt. I’m only dangerous when I’m bored.

Incidentally, for all who wonder why Mr. O’Brien’s Tonight Show took a bath, it did so because his set’s feng shui was off the rails. And I mean completely off the rails. The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien was a feng shui Pearl Harbor if ever there was one. No wonder the ratings tanked.

Truth be told, I don’t really know much about feng shui. Somebody explained it to me once. I was listening with half an ear punctuated by the occasional shoulder shrug. An aquarium, for instance, must be placed either on the left or the right side of the entrance—I forget which one. Placed on the wrong side, it will occasion financial hardship. Placed on the correct side, riches. I also recall something about the direction of one’s bed. The head must face either east or west, or else misfortune and ill health will befall the feng shui challenged sleeper. Something like that. And so on and so forth.

Basically, feng shui deals with how physical objects—such as buildings, furniture, and the like—are positioned in relation to other items and which direction they face. Positioning them correctly produces positive energy. Position them wrongly, and the gods will be angry. The shape of an object is also very important. Triangular items protruding into an open space, for example, are bad. The famous Flatiron Building (left) on Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street in Manhattan, for example, allegedly constitutes a particularly heinous feng shui infraction to the point where one may wish avoid this particular intersection altogether, let alone visit or—God forbid—work in this building. I don’t know. I sort of like it, although I figure that the rooms located in the frontal apical edge may be a nightmare to heat in winter.

Given my relative unfamiliarity with the science’s minutia—assuming one wishes to call it a science—I simply use the phrase bad feng shui whenever something strikes me as awkwardly put together, such as Conan O’Brian’s Tonight Show set. I forget how much it cost to custom-build this monstrosity at Universal Studios, but aside from running into the millions, it looked big, cold, and logistically incomprehensible. Before people doze off at night, they want to see something warm and comfy, not a guy entering the stage out of a supersized tin box with a curtain. And could the Tonight folks have picked a worse place for the sidekick’s podium than front left by the first row and next to the entrance?

By comparison, check out Jay Leno’s new Tonight Show set. It is perfect. Small, cozy, warm colors, and the entire composition makes sense. Ironically, it is the same set that was used for his ill-fated 10 P.M. show, only given a major facelift. The glass doors at 10 P.M. were awful. They looked like the entrance to a supermarket. Now they chucked them, repainted the whole set, and it’s beautiful. Excellent feng shui, and I predict the show will have a successful run.

Ditto no complaints about Letterman’s, Fallon’s, the Scottish guy’s (whatever his name), and Conan’s old New York set. Sure, the host matters, but all these guys are very good at reading jokes off cue cards and providing quick-witted repartee with their guests. But if the set sucks, forget it.

In a related story, Jay Leno was accused of stealing the Tonight Show back from O’Brien. A lot of ink has been spilled, and lots of questions have been asked. One question, however, has not been asked, and that’s the most interesting one:

If Leno had quit NBC, who would be hosting the Tonight Show now? Would they have kept Conan or held auditions? Does anybody know?

It seems to me that the only way Leno could be accused of taking anything away from Conan would be if they’d kept Conan around at 11:35 after Leno’s hypothetical departure.

Whatever. All I know is that (a) there was something seriously was seriously wrong with the feng shui and (b)NBC lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Correlation or causation?

We report, you decide.

If you’re just goofing around, applying won’t suffice. In addition, you’ll have to come in for an interview, undergo job training, and perhaps even show up for work every day.

If you’re serious, all you have to do is apply, and you’re done.

Or could it be the dangling only refers to the serious and not to the act of applying?

As I keep scouring Craigslist’s Help Wanted section in my endearingly fruitless quest for employment, I keep stumbling across the endearingly insipid Serious Only Need Apply. I can’t help but wonder about the mindset of an employer who would bother to include such a silly line in a job ad, assuming the employer him- or herself either wrote or personally signed off on it prior to its publication. (Even if some factotum was wholly responsible for the content of the ad, the impression it engenders attaches to the employer and the company, not to the witless minion in charge of its composition.)

Obviously, Serious Only Need Apply won’t deter non-serious applicants, precisely because they’re non-serious and therefore won’t take the text of the ad seriously in the first place. Moreover, given that non-compliance carries no penalty whatsoever and nothing is lost by applying, the dopey line won’t even deter those unable to quantify the extent of their own seriosity for the purpose of determining whether or not it falls within the employer’s definition of the term.

The only class of applicants this line may conceivably deter are those concerned about a potential employer’s ostensibly limited understanding of human nature such that he or she appears to believe its inclusion would keep pranksters at bay. A person with such a paltry grasp of how the human psyche operates is most likely clueless about what motivates people in general, and employers who are clueless about what motivates their employees tend to lead by the crack of the whip. Sounds enticing. Can’t wait to apply.

For better or worse, first impressions are crucial on both sides of the hiring process, and Serious Only Need Apply deserves its place on the Mount Rushmore of instant turn-offs, along with a truckload of typos and the infamous No Pay.

Since it takes four to make a Rushmore, here’s another popular doozy:

Must Be Qualified.

At least one doesn’t have to be alive, awake and willing to work, or it would surely say so in the ad.

She ends up raped, strangled, and robbed.

Now, if—upon condemning this act of violence—you ever so gently offered for consideration the thesis that the young lady’s choices in the run-up to her demise may not have been among the most conducive to her personal welfare, chances are you’d be taken to the woodshed by every women’s and victim’s rights group under the sun for “blaming the victim” in a disgraceful bid to make excuses for her attacker(s), as if you were implying that on account of the victim’s conduct the crime committed was less severe than had she been stone sober, wrapped in a burlap blanket with a potato sack over her head, and assaulted en route to the grocery store in broad daylight with fifteen body guards and a pack of growling pit bulls at her side.

Some time ago, on The O’Reilly Factor, former child abuse and sex crimes prosecutor Wendy Murphy (left) emphatically put forth that “there’s only 100% of blame to go around”; hence, any allegation of wrongdoing (or dumbdoing) on the part of the victim “by definition” reduced the culpability of the perpetrator.

Not sure whence Ms. Murphy obtains her definitions, but this one smacks of Monty Python’s Flying Circus rather than the Academy of Common Sense.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked that the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time. Another excellent mind test is the ability to tell truly contradictory ideas from those that merely seem contradictory to lazy thinkers or crazed activists like Ms. Murphy—although I’m sure the good counselor does lots of valuable work in her spare time, i.e., when she isn’t busy spouting half-witted arithmetics into a television camera.

Even lower-rated minds should easily be able to erect a solid wall of separation between the culpability of a perpetrator and his or her victim’s hare-brained behavior, as there is absolutely no contradiction between a criminal being 100% guilty and the victim having acted like a dunce. Given that the units don’t even match up, subtracting one person’s imprudence from another’s culpability makes about as much sense as subtracting your dentist’s hat size from the number of your fillings, or the height of the Empire State Building from the temperature in Midtown.

As per the American Heritage Dictionary—seconded by Webster’s—anytime something bad happens to us, we are victims. We may be victims of our genes, of our own behavior (perchance occasioned by our genetic proclivities), of the actions of others, or of the latter in concert with the previous. Yet although legitimate questions about a victim’s judgment may be raised for having conveniently painted a bright red target on her forehead and worn a “Shoot Me” T-shirt, such questions hardly qualify as mitigating factors regarding the guilt of her assassin. Apples and oranges.

Of course, especially in cases of rape and sexual molestation where the occurrence of the act and its non-consensuality have been established, the defendant and his dream team will play the provocation card in an attempt to wangle a reduced sentence. After all, doesn’t the victim share some blame because she “asked for it” by walking around drunk and half naked?

Such a defense certainly ought to be taken into account, to wit by ordering the perpetrator to serving his time in a zoo instead of a conventional correctional facility. Clearly, his reasoning combined with such paltry impulse control capabilities put him more on par with a mountain lion than an evolved human being.

A few years back, on NBC’s Judge Joe Brown, a guy stood accused of having totaled another guy’s motorized go-cart. The defendant admitted to being responsible for half the damage. Judge Brown inquired what made him think—given that he had wrecked the entire vehicle all by himself—he should pay for only half. The defendant opined that because the go-cart-owning plaintiff had provided the booze, and because being loaded was deemed a factor in the crash, the responsibility ought to be shared. In the end, not only was the defendant held liable for the entire damage, but the judge slapped on an extra fine for the sheer nerve to present such a dimwitted defense. In fact, he jacked up that extra fine after the defendant repeated his excuse, and then hiked it some more in reaction to yet another repetition thereof.

I’d have ruled the same way, except that the plaintiff—because he had furnished the liquor—would have received only part of the money, and the rest would have been donated to charity, thereby holding the perpetrator 100% liable while simultaneously acknowledging the injured party’s complicity in upping the odds for disaster and thus divesting the victim of some of the sympathy he would otherwise have been entitled to.

Similarly, any molester/rapist who cites his victim’s “provocative attire” or “lascivious demeanor” or whatnot as an extenuating circumstance for his transgression ought to receive an extra year in the zoo, plus an additional six months for every time he or his lawyer have the gall to ditto their risible rationale.

That said, if the victim acted injudiciously, such as walking around drunk and half-naked, her behavior increased the likelihood of the outcome she suffered. Am I “blaming the victim”? Absolutely. However, I am blaming her separately from blaming the perpetrator, as one has zilch to do with the other. A person who smashed a shop window doesn’t get a reduced sentence because the golden watch on display looked particularly appealing and easy to snatch, even though the store owner should have installed thicker glass and had a better security system in place. Why should a crook get time off for having had an accomplice, even if the accomplice was, in fact, the victim by way of facilitating the felony?

There are no guarantees in life. We weave our way through the Red Dust shrouded a probability cloud in which our individual choices either increase or decrease the odds for particular outcomes. The question arises to what extent a victim should be “blamed” by recognizing or—Heaven forbid!—even pointing out that by acting differently he or she may reasonably have averted a particularly infelicitous occurrence. Emphasis on reasonably; after all—to remain with our flagship example of rape—by leaving her house a woman increases her chances of getting raped by a stranger, and by staying home she boosts her chances of getting raped by her spouse, her boyfriend, or the milkman. Strictly speaking, a woman increases her chances of getting raped simply by refusing to commit suicide, yet she can hardly be blamed for electing life over death, nor for either staying home or going out.

Wardrobe choices may offer some opportunity for protection, although this is a murky area. Although many predators will become overly excited at the sight of a girl in a mini and tank top, others may snap at the sight of a fully burqa-ed female, irresistibly intrigued by the mystery of what may lie beneath. As a general rule, though, the tighter the wrapping, the more skin lies exposed, and/or the more closely a woman’s get-up resembles that of an odalisque, the more she’ll attract the attention of everyman, including those she may not wish to attract. Of course, I confess to being rather partial to scantily clad females, and far be it from my European mores and sensibilities to demur to exposure of any degree. Provocative attire and flirtatious demeanor alone certainly do not warrant excessive harrumphing in case a person with a shoe addiction (= a woman) runs into trouble with some troglodyte who can’t keep his appendages properly stowed (such as his hands in his pockets).

I am, however, open to “blaming the victim” for precarious situations which occur in the context of getting lushed up in public while dressed like Pretty Woman on the clock, pole-dancing in a room full of drunk guys, or entering into romantic relationships with men who wear their abusive tendencies on their sleeves. Once again, this line of judgment is entirely separate from locking up the perps in a zoo and tossing the keys into the crater of Mount Vesuvius.

For the sake of political correctness, it shall be stated that men, too, are liable to getting raped, molested, or physically abused by women. And sometimes dogs gets bitten by the mailman. (I don’t mean to suggest that, on balance, women are less powerful, or even less cruel and ruthless, than men; only that, by necessity, footwear addicts are more disposed to causing pain and destruction by resorting to methods other than brute physical force.)

Given that there appears to exist some sort of non-random action-consequence dynamic in this probability cloud called life—the more often we play Russian Roulette the more likely we will end up with a bullet in our head, even though it could happen anyway—is it possible that some people will take actions specifically so as to increase their chances of bad things happening to them? Is it conceivable that, say, a rape victim was indeed “asking for it”?

Sure it is. Two reasons: (1) Some individuals have a guilt complex and feel they deserve to be punished, so they are drawn to situations where pain is likely to occur, or (2) because they feel that the best way to come by genuine affection is to be a genuine victim.

We’ve all experienced that people are generally nicer to us when we’re sick or hurt. And how many hearts had gone out to Haiti prior to the earthquake versus afterwards? Having been on the receiving end of a disaster, a crime, or any type of malice (such as having been lied to) is a surefire way to attract increased amounts of loving attention. (Some people will become very angry reading this, primarily those prone to applying this particular strategy to harvest affection.)

Of course, it would be beyond preposterous to suggest that the victims in Haiti were using any sort of conscious or subconscious ploy to draw the world’s attention by allowing themselves to be buried alive by the millions. And clearly, bestowing loving attention on people who are hurting is a good thing, even though in some cases we may not appreciate the psychological complexity of the situation, i.e., we may not be aware that we’re being played. Moreover, the overall number of those deliberately putting themselves in harm’s way with the express objective of receiving hugs in the wake of their victimhood is probably fairly small. Besides, these individuals are victims nonetheless, albeit victims of something else, something much deeper and more painful than the immediate source of their injury.

Some will argue that perpetrators themselves are victims, as they suffer from an uncontrollable urge to do bad things, hence it isn’t really their fault. On some level it makes sense that all so-called “evil” ultimately reduces to limited functionality in certain areas of the brain, e.g., the inability to feel empathy. So then how can we “blame” a rapist if he simply couldn’t help himself due to a medical condition?

This line of reasoning entails the inevitable conclusion that there are no perpetrators, no criminals, and no bad people (except Republicans), because everybody is a victim of sorts. We’re all sinners, because we’re all victims. Enlightened and compassionate—perhaps even imbued with a hue of ultimate truth—as this conclusion may be in theory, in practice it is rather worthless. If free will doesn’t exist, then those arguing in favor of holding people accountable for their own actions aren’t accountable for their personal-responsibility fetish, either, as they simply can’t help espousing the concept of a free will. In a world filled with Manchurian Candidates, the whole concept of blaming anybody for anything would be moot.

In the comment section of my previous post, one of my honorable interlocutors alleged that I was a victim of “the blame the victim mentality that is so rampant in protestant, capitalist society” which is allegedly loath to give “a person willing to work a chance to earn a full-time salary.” In the course of attempting to convince me that I ought to count myself among the plaintiffs in the class-action case of Penniless v. Society, the claimant kindly provided a link to a Wikipedia article titled Victim Blaming.

By Wikipedia’s very nature, the content of their entries is subject to change. At the time of this writing, however, the first paragraph of the entry in question contains the following sentence:

Victim blaming is a typical fascist trait, infamously expressed in arguments like “a raped woman in a short skirt was asking for it.”

It was this statement which prompted me to go off on a lenghty prelude expanding upon victimhood and rape, although my actual point today is to explain why our “protestant, capitalist society” is exactly as responsible for my personal failure to make a living in this world as it is responsible for my cavities and the climate on Venus.

Strikingly, the aforementioned interlocutor dragged society into a debate about the perennial void in my wallet as if society by default were to blame for the existential face plants of its members, without possessing any real knowledge of my personal history and the series of quietly disastrous choices I may have made over the course of my life that would have sufficed to do me in irrespective of society’s attitude at large.

For instance, I grew up in a part of the world where university education is free of charge. Getting a PhD or a Master’s, even several of these, wouldn’t have cost me or my parents a dime. Did I avail myself of this opportunity? No. I politely declined all higher education, confident that I would manage to slide by and succeed in life on my natural smarts and talents.

Oops.

And now, having worn myself out hopscotching from one menial job to the next on both sides of the Atlantic for close to two decades, I’m feeling too drained, too tired, too listless, and too broke to once again pack my bags and “start over,” whatever that may mean. Next stop Brooklyn Bridge. That’s too bad, but what’s “society” got to do with it? By way of unemployment compensation, the state of New York has been keeping me afloat for almost a year now. Indeed, society is paying my bills. What else does society owe me? Free manicures?

Am I, the victim, to “blame” for all this? Sure, just like I am to blame for my cavities. As I recall, no one has ever put a Glock to my temple and forced me to dig my teeth into a Hershey’s bar. On the flip side, this protestant, capitalist society has never applied force to prevent me from doing damage to my enamel, either.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Well, freedom has rung. Freedom, alas, includes the freedom to take a bath.

Of course, one may adopt the notion that individuals like myself aren’t really “free” but are genetically wired to make cataclysmal choices in life, just as the lady at the top of this post may have been genetically wired to dress up like a hooker, get fried, and take a solo walk on the South Side of Chicago in the middle of the night.

Who knows. But society? Nah.

Perhaps it’s all just a matter of luck. In the immortal words of Jake Blues:

I ran out of gas. I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN’T MY FAULT! I SWEAR TO GOD!!!

Apparently, GID has been officially classified as a medical condition such that, in some cases, sex change operations may even be tax-deductible as medical rather than cosmetic procedures. Translation: you and I foot the bill. At least part of it. And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with helping the sick.

My aim is not to dispute or even to debate the merits of such classification. I do, however, contend that if GID indeed amounts to a genuine medical condition, then my DDD is a genuine medical condition as well.

I honestly don’t know if I’m joking or not, as I find it increasingly difficult to tell what is and what isn’t a joke when it comes to the ever growing lexicon of newly discovered mental health disorders: Attention Deficit Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, Defiance Disorder, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Pregnancy Disorder, Fear-of-Tap-Dancing-Unicorns Disorder, and so on and so forth. Chances are that by now, listing the symptoms and behaviors that do not indicate a mental disorder as defined by the DSM (“Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”) would take up far fewer pages than listing those that do. In order to save paper, the American Psychiatric Association might as well switch over to publishing a slim and streamlined Diagnostic and Statistical Brochure of Mental Health in lieu of the current 943-page tome of disorders (which famously ends with a catch-all disorder nebulously styled personality disorder not otherwise specified).

Am I exaggerating? I hope so.

So what exactly is the fundamental difference between, say, Gender Identity Disorder and my DDD which justifies the exclusion of the latter from the pantheon of accepted medical conditions?

DDD, of course, stands for Dollar Deficit Disorder. The disease manifests as feeling irrevocably trapped in excruciatingly agonizing circumstances on account of being perpetually broke. (That’s three adverbs in one sentence. I know. Sue me.) My illness interferes with my daily functioning in several ways—for starters, an almost complete inability to fall asleep at a godly hour. And sometimes I’m literally shaking, especially upon accidentally glancing at my bank statement. (The balance itself is quite large. What worries me is the little minus-sign in front of it.)

Being afflicted with a medical condition is the only viable explanation for my being so galactically incapable of getting my finances in order:

After all, I’m punctual and reliable to a fault, I have no intoxication-related issues whatsoever, I’m not much of a shopper, I’m fairly well-endowed (IQ-wise, that is), I harbor a pronounced creative streak, plus I’m an extremely hard worker, as evidenced by having waited tables full-time for 14 long years, up to 60 hours per week, with nary a day of calling in sick—the only activity, unbearably dull and mind-numbing as it was, that ever enabled me to pay my bills at all.

I even have a high-school diploma and some dopey little business degree.

So why would a basically intelligent individual waste 14 years of his prime toiling away at a job he hates as much as I hate working in restaurants, just to end up more penniless than he started out, unless he has some type of mental disorder? Because said individual is obviously very sick, and it is not his fault.

Therefore, my suffering equals that of the person with Gender Identity Disorder. Both of us feel hopelessly strait-jacketed and hence severely hobbled in our ability to pursue happiness in life, one as a result of being the wrong sex, the other due to an inability to generate even a modest income in a manner that seems preferable to serving life on Riker’s Island. Actually, a GID victim is in a slightly better position, for at least there’s a surgical procedure to take care of hir (hes) problem. What’s the treatment for my DDD other than being administered threadbare advice of the you-can’t-always-do-what-you-love-and-sometimes-you-have-to-bite-the-bullet-and-maybe-you-could-get-another-restaurant-job-just-for-now-until-you-get-back-on-your-feet-and-then-you’ll-figure-out-bla-bla-bla variety? There is none.

To add insult to injury, no one takes my illness seriously. Instead, I’m being referred to as “lazy.”

Bottom line, if the guy who wants to be a gal has a disease, then so have I. And if his/her treatment is tax-deductible, then I, likewise, should be allowed to deduct my yearly expenses for Hershey’s bars and M&Ms that help me cope with my distemper.

And yes, I do accept donations.

Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is a the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish moustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy’s high heels. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.

The above 80-word paragraph features five adverbs, i.e., 6.25% of it is pure adverbiage—quite remarkable for a paragraph explicitly composed to discourage rather than to promote their employment—including a whopping three instances of the word usually. (On the previous page, Mr. King had stated that he was “not in love” with the sentence My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss because it contained the word with twice in four words.)

Mr. King continues:

Consider the sentence He closed the door firmly. It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there.

Good point. While I’m at it, I shall also ask myself if really really has to be there.

A Tenth Anniversary Edition of On Writing is scheduled for July 2010. Whether the author or his editor will excise a few adverbs from the anti-adverb section remains to be seen.

What also caught my attention—other than the substantive content itself—was that in its 290 pages, On Writing contained at least twenty instances of the word apt in the sense of likely, as in you’re not apt to get a very unbiased opinion from folks who’ve eaten dinner at your house on page 217. (Incidentally, does very really have to be there?)

The last time I found the frequency of a particular not-so-common word similarly conspicuous was when I read The Da Vinci Code. In one of its early chapters, someone snaked himself through a partition at the Louvre. A few dozen pages later, a van snaked its way up a hill. For the rest of the novel, at clockwork intervals, someone or something advanced by snaking. About halfway through the tale I began to suspect that the repeated use of the word snake was yet another clue to the solution of the mystery. Thus I resolved that an serpent of some sort must have swallowed the Holy Grail; or perhaps that the Holy Grail was indeed Mary Magdalene’s offspring, and snake was used as a phallic motif that, yes, snaked itself through the whole novel. (Given the wealth of verbs that signify locomotion, it is hard to imagine that all this snaking could have been a mere editorial oversight.)

In addition, there was a lot of wheeling going on in the Da Vinci Code. No one ever seemed to turn around. Everybody wheeled.

As Stephen King would put it, characters and objects in Mr. Brown’s novel were usually more apt to snake and wheel than they were usually apt to move and turn.

Usually, that is.

My previous post contained the following sentence:

Weapons of mass destruction or no weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, being located smack in between Iran and the Saudi Arabian oil fields, with Saddam and his murderous Oprichniki removed as a regional stabilizer of sorts, I guess there’s little chance of pulling out of there until such time as we’re all driving solar vehicles.

A former-sort-of-coworker-turned-Facebook-acquaintance of mine (not the gentleman pictured above) kindly yet forcefully lamented that something was “very wrong” with this sentence and that it made “no sense,” grammatically speaking.

Yet I contend that my sentence works just fine, as it is structurally modeled upon the Second Amendment:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This antiquated construction is called an “ablative absolute.” Recast into modern parlance, the amendment would read thus:

Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Perchance due to its somewhat antediluvian grammatical structure, the Second Amendment continues to engender confusion and controversy as to its precise meaning; but that’s a discussion for another day.

Here’s my sentence stripped down to its structural skeleton:

Iraq, being located between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with Saddam removed as a stabilizer, there’s little chance of pulling out.

Recast into more modern English:

Because Iraq is located between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and because Saddam has been removed as a stabilizer, there’s little chance of pulling out.

I believe my sentence is structurally identical to the Second Amendment, hence perfectly sound. A mite arcane and cobwebby, perhaps. Wrong, no.

My former-sort-of-coworker-turned-Facebook-acquaintance apparently disagrees and has officially vowed to give up trying to “edumacate” me on proper grammar.

But I no I dun nuttin’ wrong.

Our Right to Arm Bears Shall Not Be Infringed!!!

Agreed. We do have the coolest president imaginable, the classiest First Lady, two adorable First Daughters, and the most hypo-allergenic First Dog in history. More importantly, with the exception of Bo (left), less than one average human lifetime ago this entire beautiful family would have been relegated to the proverbial–as well as the literal–back of the bus in certain parts of the very country whose executive mansion they now rightfully inhabit. In spite of its flaws–which may be due to imperfections in human nature itself rather than the American system of governance–we live in a great nation with a moral arc bending towards justice in many respects.

Who can forget the expression of joy mingled with a sprinkling of disbelief in the teared-up eyes of older African-Americans, who had witnessed segregation firsthand, as they watched a black man delivering his acceptance speech and subsequently being sworn in as, yes, president of the United States of America? And irrespective of whether or not one agrees with Mr. Obama’s policies, who could possibly fail to delight in the notion of a bunch of knuckleheaded drips banging the deranged contents of their goofy-looking white hoods against the walls of their little klonvocation chambers in sheer frustration?

President Obama has been at the national tiller exactly one year plus change, no pun intended, and as yet there is no telling whether the slightly bungled oath was a premonition or a meaningless aberration as regards the overall success of his tenure. The motto of underpromise and overdeliver may be sound business advice; getting elected, on the other hand, calls for massive doses of overpromise, a strategy which inevitably entails a proportional degree of under-performance. During his campaign, Mr. Obama played the change card with such unprecedented ferocity that the current post-honeymoon doldrums were as predictable as a capital hangover following a night of unbridled carousal.

His barrage of euphonious campaign orations caused that single word “change” to reverberate in our cochlea nonstop for two years, thus effectively drowning out any specifics he may have appended to his pledge of momentous change on all fronts–with the possible exception of a reversal of gravity, thus making staplers fall skyward when dropped once he settled into the Oval Office. By the end of the seemingly never-ending ‘08 campaign, I had developed a veritable allergy to that word such that the mere thought of changing lanes on a highway or changing a light bulb in my kitchen caused me to experience mild to moderate nausea, like the thought of a ginger snap after having just packed down several bagfuls for lunch. To this day, I don’t change channels anymore. I switch them. And I carry no more change in my pockets. Only coins. It may take me a few years to recover from the prolonged onslaught of that word over a 24-month period, but perhaps some day I’ll gradually reintroduce it into my life. For the time being, I’m thoroughly changed and hoped out.

Change, of course, comes in two flavors: change for the better, and change for the worse. No matter which way the pendulum may swing, the president will deliver what he promised. Even if the country takes a hefty turn to the right, that will be change. Even if nothing changes except for global temperatures to rise by yet another fraction of a degree during his time in office, the pledged change will have occurred, whether caused by or merely correlational with his actions in the White House. Even chump change is change.

A Harvard-trained lawyer with a natural gift of gab, Mr. Obama certainly excels at saying one thing and making it sound like another. We all know he meant change for the better, but we won’t be able to hold him accountable for wholesale breach of promise should things go south, for change is what he promised, and change, for better or worse, we shall receive.

In the specifics department, he promised, among other things, wall-to-wall C-SPAN coverage of the health care debates and the closing of Guantanamo. While the latter may still happen, he seems to have gone back on the former. To be fair, this may not be his call entirely. After all, not being an Egyptian-style pharaoh, the president commands only one paltry branch of government, and arguably not even the most powerful one at that. (Including the press and Oprah, I’m counting five branches.) And while the sky’s the limit as far as promising stuff, in a system built upon separation of powers, there’s only so much one person can effect without quite a few others playing along. The very system designed to prevent vesting another George III with unfettered tyrannical reign also severely curtails any potential messiah’s circle of influence.

I never heard candidate Obama promise to end the Iraq adventure; merely to consult with his generals and discuss an appropriate exit strategy, which really was just a different way of saying we’ll be there for another 100 years, although he phrased it in less blunt and hence more palatable a fashion than when John McCain said the same thing directly and got clobbered for it. Reducing U.S. forces in the region by one troop a year could legitimately be called an exit strategy. Weapons of mass destruction or no weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, being located smack in between Iran and the Saudi Arabian oil fields, with Saddam and his murderous Oprichniki removed as a regional stabilizer of sorts, I guess there’s little chance of pulling out of there until such time as we’re all driving solar vehicles.

The continued U.S. presence in Iraq as well as a troop surge in Afghanistan coupled with a stepped up bombing campaign against targets in Pakistan notwithstanding, President Obama has already proved his Reaganesque Teflon quality by scoring the Not-Bush-Award a.k.a. the Nobel Peace Prize.

The former senator from Chicago seems to be given a pass in many respects by people who would skewer others for very similar actions. The following statement, which I recently came across while listening to my backlog of semi-ancient podcasts on my iPod, exemplifies this phenomenon:

People who have trouble with authority lose their sense of compassion. Because I believe every one of you, everybody at WBAI, should have, if possible, it would be ideal, if you could have compassion for every Republican out there. Yes, I want you to understand, why did people vote, and why do people continue to vote to favor the war? [emphasis added] Why do they? Why is there a group of people somewhere down south wearing white sheets over their head, you know, and feeling the way they feel? Why is it? Can you feel compassion for that? Well, unfortunately I do, because when I see it, I see the illness, I see the sickness. I see how, um, damaged these people are, and I see the damage they do. (Armand DiMele, The Positive Mind, WBAI, 8/12/08)

What’s remarkable about the above assessment by an otherwise brilliant psychologist who hosts a show on WBAI, a self-described pacifist and ardently pro-Obama radio station with a proportionally large minority demographic, is that in the thick of the ‘08 campaign Mr. DiMele clearly yet–I presume–inadvertently diagnosed prospective Obama voters, i.e., most of his audience, as “damaged” and seamlessly lumped them in with Republicans and KKK members. Throughout his campaign, candidate Obama unambiguously referred to Afghanistan as a “war of necessity,” advocated military action in Pakistan, and never explicitly vowed to withdraw from Iraq. Therefore, anyone who voted for Obama clearly voted, among other things, in favor of war, specifically a continuation of war in one theater, and an escalation in two others. Wars of necessity, perhaps, but wars nonetheless. Obviously, as Commander in Chief, President Obama could recall all U.S. troops at once. He never said he would, and he hasn’t done so after one year in office. If anything, he upped the ante, perfectly consistent with his prior rhetoric.

An Obama-supporting friend of mine recently opined that individuals opposed to gay marriage, by virtue of their mere opposition to it, were bigoted morons, whereupon I could not resist confronting her with a clip of Mr. Obama plainly stating that, in his mind, marriage was a union “between a man and a woman,” and adding, for good measure, that such union was “sacred” and that “God’s in the mix.” Even though her original tongue-lashing against gay-marriage opponents had contained no exemption for tone, my friend’s reaction to the clip was something to the effect that since Obama didn’t espouse these views in a preachy and self-righteous manner, there was no problem with his stance.

Following this particular train of logic, I suppose that when President Obama orders an unprecedented number of Predator drone strikes against Pakistani villages, strangely under-reported in the media, yet killing and maiming God-knows-how-many innocent bystanders in the process of taking out a bunch of suspected Al-Qaeda big shots, he does so in a more kind and loving manner than had a hawkish Republican ordered those very same strikes, who would, most likely, be slapped with the moniker of war criminal rather than given a peace prize.

Referring to Mr. Obama’s predecessor, the aforequoted Mr. DiMele said the following:

Bush has daughters, Clinton has daughters, except for George Bush, Sr. He had two sons, if you want to call ‘em that. (Armand DiMele, The Positive Mind, WBAI, 8/28/08)

If you want to call them that? The expressions “son” and “daughter” being reserved for homo sapiens, Mr. DiMele essentially conferred sub-human status on the previous president. Given that Mr. Obama, like his predecessor, seems to favor war, I am waiting for Mr. DiMele to step in front of his WBAI microphone and refer to Barack Obama as “Ann Dunham’s son, if you want to call him that.” Such dehumanization of the current president, of course, wouldn’t go over too well in that particular forum, but I’m not sure I completely understand the difference between the two men in the war department. If there is a difference, the difference must be in degree, not in kind. While members of the previous administration were, and still are, frequently denounced as “war criminals” by the pacifist/liberal segment, Obama seems to get away with the lesser charge of being, oh well, a “politician.” The fundamental distinction, though, escapes me.

Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, likes to finish his show by counting the days since President Bush’s grotesquely premature mission-accomplished proclamation on the USS Abraham Lincoln. (“That is Countdown for this, the 2,037th day since the declaration of ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq.”)

On Sunday, January 22, 2006, then Senator Obama appeared on Meet the Press:

MR. TIM RUSSERT: So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I will not.

Thus, today is the 1,463rd day since Mr. Obama’s declaration of “I will not.” For some reason, Mr. Olbermann has never incorporated this count into his show.

In early 2006, I had never heard of Barack Obama, but I recall being impressed by the unequivocal nature of the senator’s answer. Usually, when asked whether they are considering running for higher office at some point in the future, politicians weave and dodge like someone is hurling plague-infested cushions at them, and once they’ve re-emerged from under the table and their initial blushing and stuttering spell has subsided, they enter Manchurian-candidate-mode and repeat over and over, until the interviewer snaps them out of it by mercifully switching the subject, that “right now” they’re “focused on” whatever office they’re holding at the moment, as if being focused on shooting hoops in springtime precluded a person from planning to go skiing in December. Aside from such obvious non-sequitur, which can’t but engender doubt as to whether the stammering official is bright enough to comprehend a simple question, what am I, a potential voter, to think of a person who is this hell-bent on convincing me that he or she doesn’t think about the future? Lack of foresight on the part of our helmsmen and -women is precisely what causes many of the messes we’re in, so I fail to grasp the tactical brilliance of coaching politicians to emphasize their disinclination to look ahead when asked about their personal career plans. A simple “maybe” or “not sure,” in my humble opinion, would come across as much more stately and confidence-inspiring than the annoyingly hackneyed and blinkered-sounding right-now-I’m-focused-on routine all the time.

Therefore, I appreciated the concise clarity and aplomb with which Mr. Obama delivered his I will not [run for president in '08] to the nation. Trouble is, well, and ever since he announced his candidacy shortly thereafter, anytime the man issues a declarative statement of any kind, my mind inevitably goes, “Yeah, like he wasn’t gonna run in ‘08.” (Had I run against Obama, I’d have taken the clip of his ingenious I will not, added the slogan Why believe anything else he says? and sent him a heartfelt thank-you note for handing me my haymaker campaign ad on a silver platter.)

Of course, we want to see a capacity to “adjust to new realities” in our leaders rather than expect them to unbendingly cling to previous statements like limpets on the hulls of sinking galleys. Obama, however, must have known in early ‘06 that he might run in ‘08, so I’ve never quite fathomed his categorical denial. Not the biggest deal of all deals, perhaps, but first impressions generally loom larger, linger longer, and are more difficult to alter than subsequent ones, and the nonchalance of his squarely proclaiming one thing into a television camera, then turning around and doing the polar opposite without missing a beat, set off my spidey senses right from the jump.

He’s still the coolest president, though. Do I trust his words? Sure, about as far as I could throw the First Desk (right) using my left arm only.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did not vote for Obama. In fact, I didn’t vote, period. I became a U.S. citizen a few months after the ‘08 election, so up until now I’ve been happily off the hook as far as having to make up my mind in these matters. I always considered myself lucky being exempt from voting, since other than on the basis of charisma and on-camera demeanor, which, although important to some extent, shouldn’t be the dispositive factors in choosing a competent leader, I’ve always had trouble getting myself to prefer any candidate over any other. Indeed, I couldn’t decide between Clinton and Dole, Bush and Gore, Bush and Kerry, nor between McCain and Obama. Whether this is a sign of exceptional intelligence, unparalleled stupidity, profuse confusion, general space-cadetry, or some other unspecified mental ailment, I do not know.

I sometimes picture myself at the aforementioned desk in the Oval Office, tasked with leading the nation. (Not being a natural-born citizen, the chances of this ever happening are slim to nil, so the panic-stricken reader may safely breathe a sigh of relief. Unless, of course, I can find a way to coax the nation into believing I was born on Oahu. Some crazed conspiratorialists will argue that such a caper was pulled before.)

Frankly, I doubt I could run a coffee shop, let alone a behemoth like the United States. In theory, perhaps, but in the real world the devil always hides in the small print. For instance, every president is sitting on a mountain of classified information which, by virtue of it being classified, only the president and his immediate circle have access to. So there seems to be no real way to assess what any given president actually has to contend with on a daily basis. This may, in part, explain why new presidents can’t govern the way they campaigned; because once a president-elect has been briefed by the lame duck, he’s suddenly privy to truckloads of potentially game-changing minutiae he wasn’t aware of when he ran, and all this novel information most likely requires a subtle (or not so subtle) change of tune in several areas as compared to his lofty campaign theoretics.

Without knowing what the president knows, I find it rather difficult to determine what I’d be doing differently were I in his (or her) shoes, even if his (or her) actions seem incomprehensible to me. Would I have given orders to invade Iraq? I hope not, but I may have. The world is a complicated place, and not possessing too firm a grasp on history, other countries and cultures, and economics myself, I’m having a bit of a rough time evaluating other people’s grasp on these very issues; hence my perpetual reluctance to either gush over or reject out of hand particular presidential candidates. Not having spent years studying a raft of complex issues, how am I supposed to know if the silver-tongued person on the podium knows what he (or she) is talking about?

I’m not exactly sure how a de-facto popular vote for president is constitutional anyway. If the relatively uninitiated masses were meant to vote for a president, then why did the guys in Philadelphia devise an electoral college, i.e., a group of individuals provided by each state (whether by appointment or elected by the people), equal to the number of congressional representatives of that state, whose charge it is to elect the head of the executive branch? It seems that this intolerable circus of an election campaign which literally consumes half of an entire presidential term, at the conclusion of which the whole nation lines up at the poles to check a box or dimple a chad next to the name of whatever candidate did the better job of looking smooth and tan on TV and wheedling themselves into their confidence is precisely what our forethoughtful Founders were trying to avoid by setting up the electoral college.

Prior to the 17th Amendment, there was no popular vote for U.S. senators, either. Perhaps I have an outdated version, but my personal copy of the Constitution does not yet contain an amendment that sets forth a popular vote for president. Keeping on hand a contingent of perfunctory electors in each state who mindlessly execute the will of the majority in that state seems at striking variance with the spirit of the Constitution. Either comply with the darn thing, amend it, or toss it. Had the Founders wanted the people to vote for president, they would have put it in there. No doubt this would have been a lot easier than the convoluted procedure they did put in, which plainly indicates how important it was for our vaunted Framers to keep the people as far as possible away from the presidential polls.

The time for a popular presidential election may have come, and so may have the time for a naturalized citizen to be elected Commander in Chief, yet I doubt that my candidacy would fly prior to the passage of a specific constitutional amendment allowing it. Of course, we could simply re-define natural-born as no Cesarian, which would be somewhat on par with the eyeball-numbing constitutional elasticity on display every four years on November 4th.

(If President Obama, a constitutional law professor, reads this post, perhaps he will take a moment and explain the constitutionality of it all in the comment section below. I’d also like to hear from James Madison. I’m curious who’ll respond first.)

Policy-wise, depending on whether a right-winger or a liberal has the microphone, Mr. Obama either ran from the center but, alas, governs from the left, or he ran from the left but, alas, governs from the center. Either way, no one seems perfectly happy with wherever our cool president may, in fact, be governing from. By the very nature of the gig, a president of all Americans must necessarily display a certain degree of all-over-the-placeness in his positions.

In the end, though, no matter what a president does, he (or she) will take it on the chin for being either too right, too left, or for spinelessly trying to have it both ways.

Why would anybody want this job in the first place?

I suppose a legitimate argument can be made that a new decade begins at every moment. Hence, the decade that commenced on November 4, 1984, at 7:45:32 a.m. cashed in its chips on November 4, 1994, at precisely 7:45:31 a.m. And this very moment (right now) is the final one of the decade that started exactly ten years minus one moment ago.

Therefore, the decade that began January 1, 2000, at 00:01 a.m. has no choice but to expire December 31, 2009, at 11:59 p.m. The quantum effects of special relativity aside, ten years are ten years–a decade is a decade no matter what point in time the clock was started. A decade always ends ten years to the zeptosecond from the zeptosecond we started counting. And there exists no law against celebrating the end of a previous decade and the beginning of a new one whenever the mood is upon us.

Of course, if everyone launched and feted their own official decades willy-nilly, the attendant lack of consensus would render a title like America–The Next Decade meaningless to those whose personal decades happen to be out of sync with NBC’s decad-ent bookending habits. Luckily, rampant individualism in this area does not obtain. Given that an overwhelming supermajority appears to subscribe to a unified–albeit rather bizarre–method of counting years, the idea that the new decade is only a few days off stirs little controversy, if any.

Call me old-fashioned, but when I count to ten, I go like this:

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

If I wanted to divide, say, a large pile of marbles into groups of ten, I would certainly not go:

Ten, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

Oh no. Buttoned-down dork that I am, I’d properly start with one and wrap up with ten, then move on to the next group of ten, and once again start with one and work my way up to ten. For lack of a better excuse, that’s how my parents taught me to count, and I’ve stuck with the strait-laced sequential method to this day. I always count one to ten. Never ten to nine with one through eight sandwiched in between.

Come to think of it, I’ve never really heard anybody perform a count by starting with the last number in a given series, then jumping to the first, proceeding sequentially from there, and concluding with the penultimate number in that series.

Yet when it comes to defining a set of ten not marbles but years, there seems to be universal agreement on precisely such topsy-turvy enumeration. Every decade officially ends with year nine (e.g., 2009), and the following decade kicks off with year ten (e.g., 2010).

A decade is defined as a period of exactly ten years. The year 1 B.C. was immediately followed by the year 1 A.D. without a year zero in between. Hence, the first decade A.D. necessarily ran from 1 A.D. until and including 10 A.D. It follows that the second decade A.D. commenced with 11 A.D. and ran until and including 20 A.D.

If one keeps counting in units of ten, it is arithmetically impossible to arrive at a decade that begins with a year whose number ends in zero unless one decade in the past 2000 years was only nine years long, in which case it would have fallen short of the accepted definition of decade. Therefore, any claim that the current decade ends December 31, 2009, must be attended by a compelling explanation regarding this mysterious 9-year-long decade.

Bottom line, we habitually celebrate the end of our decades one year earlier than we would if we counted years from one to ten like we count everything else. Strangely, in demarcating our decades, we suddenly become ambassadors to the Ministry of Silly Counts.

The project of backing up my data proved a shade more technically challenging than I had anticipated, so in flagrant defiance of the doctrine which holds that men neither ask for directions nor read manuals, I grudgingly resolved to consult the accompanying literature.

On page 17 (out of 50), the following statement perplexed me:

It is worth mentioning that Live protect requires adequate System resources.

It seems that protect should be capitalized and System should be lower-case, but let’s not sweat the small potatoes. What I found several orders of magnitude more troubling was that none of the statements in the preceding 16 1/2 pages had been prepended by a clause to the effect that they were worth mentioning. Strictly speaking, as per the text of the manual, I had consumed 16 1/2 pages of alphabet soup until finally hitting upon a valuable piece of information. A quick scrolling through the remaining 32 pages revealed that no additional statement had been flagged as meriting mention.

Apparently, the fact that Live Protect required adequate system resources was the sole snippet of intelligence deemed worthy of sharing by the manual’s author. Then why, one might rightfully wonder, did he bother to pad this lonesome morsel of import with 50 pages of inconsequential blather?

Death Cap (Poisonous)

Imagine a mycologist compiling a list of, say, ten types of mushrooms and putting the word poisonous next to three of them. Now, if I pointed to any of the other seven varieties on the list and inquired whether they were poisonous, our list-making mushroom maven would naturally assume that either (a) I wasn’t the brightest candle on the cake, or (b) I was trying to mock him. For obviously, having labeled only a few of the given mushroom types as poisonous suffices to convey the notion that the others are safe. To ask whether any or each of the types not designated as poisonous was poisonous as well would accomplish little save to cause the list maker to bang his head against the wall in frustration.

Here’s the underlying principle:

Expressio unius est exclusio alterius.

This fairly intuitive rule of textual interpretation–one of several so-called canons of construction–states that the expression of one signifies the exclusion of the other. If I go to the movies and there’s a sign above the box office which reads Women Pay Half, it makes no sense to ask whether the 50% discount applies to me, being male, as well. It clearly does not. Except for the uncommonly benighted among us, putting up a second sign that says Men Must Pay Full Price would add nothing in the way of clarity.

Pursuant to this canon of construction, the prefacing of exactly one statement in a text as worth mentioning plainly signifies that all other statements contained therein are not worth mentioning. If only one in a line of skin-care products is labeled unscented, it must be assumed that all others are not. And I just don’t see the point of plowing through 50 pages of predominantly useless information.

Now you may argue that this appears to be no more than an instance of clumsy writing rather than a conscious or sub-conscious attempt at negating the significance of 99.9% of the total amount of information provided. I concur. Even though, strictly speaking, this single ham-fisted slip of the pen consigned the rest of the manual to conspicuous irrelevance, chances are its author considered all of his statements to be prodigiously informative. Yet something possessed him to highlight, seemingly at random, one of precisely those pieces of information as worthy of mention which contributed the least to my understanding of the product.

Ideally, either all of the statements in a given composition should be prefaced as worth mentioning, or–even more ideally (yes, more ideally is possible in a more perfect Union)–none of them; for to haphazardly select isolated text fragments and tout them as worthy of disclosure not only looks frightfully butterfingered on the page, but ambiguous phrasing of any kind is liable to occasion unanticipated and potentially precarious reactions in compulsive literalists like Rain Man (recall autistic Raymond stopping cold in the middle of the street the moment the light changed to Don’t Walk) or in dyed-in-the-wool logicians like Commander Spock.

(Indeed, such seemingly innocuous lapse of logic could easily bring down the Enterprise: Picture Mr. Spock–all onboard technicians have been hijacked by the Klingons–consulting the manual of a vital yet malfunctioning navigation system aboard the starship. The instructions contain exactly one statement flagged as worth mentioning. The Vulcan will immediately zoom in on this one single statement to the exclusion of all other potentially crucial information surrounding it. Consequently, the faulty system won’t get fixed, and the Enterprise will crash into a mountain on Planet Minnobia. Could happen.)

Inserting prefatory gibberish into spoken language is more defensible, as doing so aids in maintaining our verbal flow while giving our brains a few extra nanoseconds to construct the meaningful portion of our statements. Naturally, once a sentence has been spoken, one cannot go back and delete the superfluous claptrap. In writing, on the other hand, there’s plenty of opportunity to revise and expunge all addlepated surplusage.

Roughly 100 pages into a book I recently read I happened upon this stunningly redundant whopper of non-information:

In this context, it is furthermore interesting to point out that…

In this context? What other context is there? Unless otherwise specified, it seems reasonably clear that all points are being made in the context in which they occur. If someone gives a lecture on cytogenetics and talks about homologous chromosomes and free-floating nucleotides, prior to being issued a change-of-subject alert it is unlikely that anyone in the audience will mistake the term messenger RNA for a baseball maneuver or wonder if Gregor Mendel may have been a composer.

And it is interesting to point out? One seldom encounters statements expressly introduced as not interesting to point out. The mere inclusion of a particular point in a given text implies that the writer thought it was an interesting one. Unless, of course, an exceptionally ingenious wordsmith decides to refer to only a selected few of his points as interesting, in which case he effectively declares all others to be dull. Expressio unius est exclusio alterius.

A little later in the same book, another classic eye-roller had escaped the editor’s attention:

Before we conclude this chapter, let us discuss…

As long as we subscribe to conventional notions of time and space, every topic discussed in a given chapter is being discussed before the chapter ends, just as every topic discussed in a given book is being discussed before the book ends. On a deeper and more existential level, everything occurs prior to the termination of that which it is a part of. The statement Let’s go to the beach! automatically means Before we die, let’s go to the beach! By explicitly adding before we die, we are–strictly speaking–implying that a post-mortem stroll a la playa would be feasible.

In keeping with our by now familiar exclusion rule, preluding only one of several sub-topics included in a chapter with before we conclude this chapter squarely states that all other sub-topics in this chapter are being discussed after it ends, and this seems oddly irreconcilable with the geographic location of the writing on the page, namely before the following chapter’s headline.

Let’s examine a fairly typical opening sentence of a letter:

I am writing you this letter to inform you that I have received yours, and I would like to respond.

In the Sheer Meaninglessness category, this line deserves a Pulitzer. First of all, letters are always written, which obviates the need to explain, within a given letter, how it was produced. (Anything sculpted or baked is generally not a letter.) Second, there is no need to point out that this letter is the one being referenced, as it is this very letter the reader is looking at while reading those words. Third, letters typically aren’t used as snow shovels or to cut vegetables, so the sole purpose of a letter is to inform.

Finally, since one cannot respond to that which one has not received, the fact that the letter was, in fact, received will become fantastically obvious to the recipient of the response to it simply on account of, well, having received a response to it. (Of course, getting to the actual substance of the response itself is delayed by having to maneuver his eyeballs past a bunch of preliminary hooey.) And in lieu of affirming one’s desire to respond, why not simply begin?

In fact, the verbiage here is so conspicously barren of meaning, the letter’s recipient may conceivably be tempted to consult Robert Langdon. Given that the sentence itself neither sparkles with beauty of expression such that it could rightfully be considered poetry, nor appears to communicate anything beyond Look at me–I’m a sentence! it stands to reason that its particular arrangement of letters and spaces constitutes some sort of secret code–the key to the Holy Grail perchance? Why else would someone have bothered to compose such vacuous monstrosity?

A while ago, Chase dispatched the following bulk e-mail which opened thus:

We’re writing to let you know about updates we’ve recently made to some of our online disclosures and agreements.

Obviously, a streamlined We’ve recently made updates to some of our online disclosures and agreements would have worked just fine–so what’s up with this mysterious we’re-writing-to-let-you-know part? Whoever composed that e-mail must have been aware that every recipient smart enough to be able to open and read it would also be smart enough to know that electronic messages don’t come into being via sexual reproduction and that their exclusive purpose is to deliver information, i.e., to let know. Ergo, there must be more to the ding-dongy intro than meets the eye.

Chase is by no means the only financial institution to leaven its formal correspondence with suspicious chunks of potential code. The other day I received this dilly from Capital One:

We would like to notify you that changes have been made to the Online Banking Terms and Conditions…

To learn of someone’s desire to notify me of something which I am being notified of immediately following the profession of such desire in the very same sentence seems obtusely pleonastic. We’ve made changes to the Online Banking Terms and Conditions would have done the job equally well with less scriptural clunkage.

In Capital One’s defense, their desire to notify was expressed as well as fulfilled. This is not always the case. For instance, how many actual thanks have you ever received?

Sure, people constantly want to or would like to thank us, but how often do they follow through? Anytime someone professes how much they would like to thank me or want to wish me a happy birthday, I am curious what mysterious force stays their tongue and precludes them from taking that extra leap and doing so. Stating that I’d like to move to Fiji means neither that I’m already packing my bags nor that I’ll ever actually move there. It merely constitutes an aspirational declaration. I may move there. I may not. Why should a different logic apply to your stating that you’d like to thank me?

On 17 December 2009, in a Letter to the Washington Post , Sarah Palin wrote:

I’d like to thank Eugene Robinson for highlighting Alaska’s achievements on climate change.

One can almost hear the unwritten portion of that sentence (“…but because Mr. Robinson is a flaming liberal, I can’t quite get myself to do it”). Accordingly, no thanks were forthcoming in any of the subsequent paragraphs.

A few days earlier, the best-selling Alaskan governatrix of all time had posted the following on her Facebook page:

Todd and I would like to offer our best wishes to the Jewish community as they celebrate Hanukkah. …

Todd and Sarah may have been too busy picking off reindeer from a chopper to extend their best wishes to the Jewish community, but it was nice of them to at least take a moment to announce that that’s what they would have liked to do. Oh well. Perhaps they’ll get around to it next year. Meanwhile, her latest post starts Todd and I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas! (As we speak, I’m waiting with bated breath for those wishes…)

The good governor seems to suffer from a dubious-opening-line fetish in general. This is how her penultimate Facebook post, flaring out at Obamacare, kicks off:

Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reid’s Senate was making shady backroom deals…

Since I hadn’t spent the weekend preparing for the holidays with my family, I stopped reading right there; obviously I wasn’t included in the target group for this article. She might as well have opened with Dear moose-stew-loving Martian SUV-owners: Last weekend while you were bungee-jumping off a blimp over Wasilla… Well, I ain’t and I wasn’t. Good-bye.

Now, at first blush, all this linguistic parsing may sound like a pipeload of nitpicky mumbo-jumbo only a control freak could love. Not so fast. Being mindful of what people are actually saying versus what they appear to be saying can yield important clues. Although often the proverbial cigar is just a cigar (i.e., an awkward turn of phrase is precisely that), equally often the apparent cigar turns out to be a trumpet, a lawn mower, or a battle ship.

Statement analysis is premised on the thesis that we generally say what we mean and mean what we say. Lying through our teeth makes us nervous and uncomfortable, and so we tend to avoid it whenever possible. Our natural inclination is to play verbal dodge ball instead, to say things that are, strictly speaking, correct while ever so subtly manipulating the listener into drawing the wrong conclusions, i.e., to get them to hear what we want them to hear, not what we’ve actually said. And even when we make a premeditated effort to lie, given that the truth–at least the truth in the sense of what we believe to be true–is foremost on our minds, it frequently leaks out in the way we phrase things.

In 1994, O.J. Simpson famously declared that he was absolutely 100% not guilty of committing the double murder. Trouble is, in his oddly titled 1995 book I Want To Tell You (the title would be correct even if the book contained nothing of what he wanted to tell us, because he never said he would tell us) he remarked that he had one thousand percent faith and trust in Nicole’s decisions regarding the kids. So according to Mr. Simpson’s unconventional way of applying percentages, he de facto swore to being ten times less “not guilty” than he’d had faith in his wife, and God knows how much faith that may have been in absolute terms. Oops.

Statement analysis is being used, among other areas of application, in the interrogation of criminal suspects. Imagine a defendant, upon being asked whether he killed his aunt, responding like this:

I’m innocent. I would never do nothing like that. I’m not a cold-blooded murderer.

To the casual listener, this may sound like a forceful denial of the deed. Yet strictly speaking, there’s not a shred of denial within a 50-mile radius of this statement:

In our legal system, everyone is officially innocent until a verdict of guilty has been handed down by a court of law. So yes, at this point the suspect is innocent, whether he killed his aunt or not. And would never do is the opposite direction from have never done. The former refers to the future, the latter to the past. Our suspect also tossed in a little double negative there. So not only is he silent on the past, he’s flat-out saying that whatever he’s accused of, he would do it again. And not being a cold-blooded murderer simply means his present body temperature clocks in at a hale and balmy 98.6°F. He makes no reference to his blood temperature at the time of his alleged crime. For all we can tell from his testimony, his blood could have been anywhere between frozen solid and boiling then. Furthermore, since the term murder connotes premeditation, if the killing was spontaneous, he would neither be nor have been a murderer, cold-blooded or otherwise.

In fine, our suspect may have chopped his hapless aunt to pieces with a bolt cutter and relished every moment of it, yet his statement would be completely truthful on all counts. He did a little verbal tap dance that covered everything plus the kitchen sink, except that he artfully steered clear of denying the killing.

Although I didn’t follow the recent Amanda Knox trial all too closely (the American convicted of murdering her British roommate in Italy), I was struck by this excerpt from her final statement to the jurors:

The first thing to say is that I am not calm. I am afraid of losing myself. I am afraid of being defined as something I am not and by actions that are not mine. I’m afraid of having the mask of a murderer forced on to my skin.

I have no idea what else she said. She may well have denied killing her roommate at a different time or in a different part of this particular address to the jurors. Clearly, though, the above excerpt contains about as much of a denial as it contains a recipe for buttermilk pancakes, yet it was this particular passage which was widely disseminated with no actual denial published in conjuction with it.

When standing trial, lack of calmness and fear of losing oneself most likely attend guilt and innocence alike. Having the mask of a murderer forced onto one’s skin simply means that one was caught–presumably, most murderers are afraid of being caught. And afraid of being defined as something she is not and by actions that are not hers? Alright, so she’s worried she might get charged with witchcraft and the Kennedy assassination in addition to whatever crime or crimes she may really have committed.

What we have here is a beautifully crafted and momentous-sounding statment which, strictly speaking, amounts to a hill of beans, and which, in doing so, incriminates more than it exonerates. This is not to suggest that the poor girl is guilty; only that, unless she’s guilty, her lawyer or whoever else may have been responsible for feeding this particular excerpt to the press should, strictly speaking, be whacked over the head with a bunch of soggy fettuccine.

Before we conclude (when else?) I’d like to–nay, I shall!–quote the great Sherlock Holmes:

It is, of course, a trifle, but there’s nothing so important as trifles.

* My Dad (1930-1999) *

Laura Ingraham

The other day, I watched a fascinating exchange between Laura Ingraham and Diane Francis, a Canadian journalist who advocated population control by referring to China as having had some success with their one-child policy. Although Ms. Francis, a self-professed feminist, conceded that she wasn’t particularly crazy about Communist dictatorships and their methods, some serious action needed to be taken in order to stem population growth, or else at some point in the not so far future global competition over basic resources like food, water, and energy would become so fierce that World War II will look like a dorm room pillow fight by comparison. (My analogy, but it captures the gist of her analysis.)

Needless to say, Laura Ingraham, being a card-carrying Christian conservative, blew her top at the notion of any kind of policy aimed at reducing birth rates, citing that any such policies would be impossible to enforce without draconian methods akin to those employed in China. For instance, we’d have to tell women how many children they could have, and this would never fly in this country. 

Probably true. Hard to imagine to impose a one-child policy in the United States without kicking off a civil war that would make the Civil War (capitalized) look, well, like a dorm room pillow fight by comparison. After all, this is a Christian country, and one of the tenets of Christianity is that God creates every human life for a reason, and it is a mortal sin to interfere with the process. Hence no abortion, and, ideally, no birth control either. Certainly no one-child policy. Be fruitful and multiply.

(Besides, the U.S. population only went from roughly 25 million 100 years ago to 300 million today. Why worry about overpopulation here?)

When my grandfather was born, world population stood at two billion. Now we’re at over six billion, which means that the total number of people tripled within one decade. This circumstance alone, of course, is more frightening than terrorism and global warming combined to the power of googol. What are we going to do? Build a second floor onto our planet so half of the people can live upstairs? And then, as needed, simply add floors? Or pump air into the center of the earth in hopes it’ll inflate like a balloon? Order planet enlargement pills from some Canadian online pharmacy?

As the old saying goes, if you don’t change course, you’ll end up exactly where you’re headed. No way mankind will survive yet another tripling or even a doubling of its population, but that’s exactly where we’re headed. And the funny thing is, everybody knows it. It’s like staring at a category 5000 hurricane that’s coming right at you and hoping it’ll miraculously swerve left or right before blasting you and your town up into the stratosphere.

A high-school teacher of mine once presented the following image:

Imagine a glass jar with bacteria. These bacteria will continue to multiply, and once there are too many, they’ll all die off.

Simple as that. Dial M for multiplying ourselves into distinction.

So here’s the dilemma: on the one hand, we can’t just sit there and proliferate until we become too many and die off, all the while knowing perfectly well where we’re headed; yet on the other hand, it seems to be impossible to even mention a reduction in birth rates as a desirable goal without (a) the right becoming apoplectic with rage over such fascist and sacrilegious ”anti-life” attitude, and (b) economists gently reminding us that we need an ever increasing supply of young people in order to support an aging population in terms of social security payments and the like.

Looks like we’re screwed. Clearly, overpopulation will do us all in. But if you dare say so, Laura Ingraham and her crew will bite your head off.  

So what’s your solution to population growth, Ms. Ingraham, other than clutching that golden cross around your neck and ridiculing those who are at least trying to find one? Do you have one and you just didn’t get to share it with us because you were too busy talking over Ms. Francis?

Quite frankly, I don’t have a workable solution, either. Emphasis on workable. However, acknowledging that the problem exists may be a first step towards solving it. But one can’t get some folks to even do that lest they may incur God’s wrath for being anti-life, apparently not realizing–or refusing to realize–that by far the biggest threat to human life is creating too much of it.

On page 98, in a chapter on understanding people and how to tap into our quintessential oneness with our fellow citizens so as to be able to convert them into real and recognizable characters on the page, Ms. Lamott writes the following:

But it’s even possible to have this feeling when you see–really see—a police officer, when you look right at him and you see that he’s a living breathing person who like everyone else is suffering like a son of a bitch, and you don’t see him with a transparency over him of all the images of violence and chaos and danger that cops represent. You accept him as an equal.

Violence, chaos, and danger? That’s quite a flattering lineup of cop associations. Verily, one would think Ms. Lamott is referring not to police officers but to members of MS-13.

May I have two tickets, please?

I seem to be wired backwards, because when I see a cop, he represents order and security, not “chaos and danger,” and to the extent to which I see him shrouded in a transparency of violent imagery, then only insofar as–at least in that world which I generally inhabit–cops are the ones called upon to quell it upon occurrence. To her credit, Ms. Lamott is willing to admit, albeit after some conscious effort, law enforcement personnel into the exalted ranks of those men that are created equal–after all, who would want to be arrested by one of Lord Voldemort’s Inferi? (A Harry Potter reference, in case you aren’t up on your Rowling.)

We all know there are bad apples in every lot, so there’s no need to expand upon this threadbare aspect of pomology. A certain percentage of spoiled fruitage notwithstanding, many folks seem to loathe badged apples altogether. They just despise the police as an institution. One gets the impression that if it were for them, law enforcement ought to be abolished wholesale, and, thus emancipated of the oppressor’s yoke, in short order all of humanity would peaceably assemble around a giant campfire and spend the remainder of eternity roasting marshmallows and chanting James Taylor tunes on loop.

Cuff Me, Constable!

In an illuminating discussion on crowd psychology, a psychologist on WBAI (a small NY radio station once reportedly referred to by New York Times Magazine as an “anarchist’s circus”) recently explained that crowds were inherently pacific unless subjected to physical confinement; to wit, unless corralled into a confined area by the police, in which case violence was liable to erupt. In other words, the police are causing aggression by exerting an oppressive force upon a population. This characterization, while undoubtedly valid under specific conditions, most likely lies at the heart of the general anti-cop-itude of many: if there were no police and no military, the global bloody nose count would decline dramatically, as violence would slowly give way to the natural flow of illimitable love and compassion among all living creatures. By golly, even a snake would rather hug the mouse than kill it.

A while ago, Rosie O’Donnell, upon being asked whether she wanted the United States to win in Iraq, cryptically responded by pointing out that she wanted America to be what the Founders had wanted it to be. Unfortunately, she stopped short of disclosing what exactly that may have been and whether the Founders would have rooted for victory or defeat in Iraq. Now, I have no idea how Ms. O’Donnell feels about cops, and from her public commentary on current issues it is difficult to tell whether the lady knows James Madison from Archie Bunker. (Maybe she does. Maybe she can recite the Federalist Papers from memory like a blindfolded hafiz can recite the Holy Qur’an.)

The point being, it seems that virtually everybody–from flaming liberal to raging neocon–wants America to be what the Founders wanted it to be, and according to whoever happens to be in possession of the microphone at a given moment, the degree to which the country is going to hell in a haversack is exactly proportional to the extent to which the pernicious opposition has caused it to diverge from the Framers’ vision. 

While no one can accuse the Framers of having skimped on ambiguity, their take on law enforcement is rather clearly expressed in the following power which they bestowed upon the government (U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8):

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

Although I cannot say with certainty what they meant by “calling forth,” I would venture to guess that they didn’t picture the militia walking around unarmed and politely asking the people to follow the laws in exchange for cookies and flowers. The Framers envisioned a nation of laws, and–knowing full-well that merely enacting laws without enforcing them was an exercise in futility–they fitted the government with the power to enforce them by, alas, force if necessary. (The word is law en-force-ment, not en-ask-ment.) In fact, they created an entire branch for that very purpose. The president heads the executive branch. To execute what? The laws of the land.

So now there’s a segment of our citizenry who, on the one hand, extol the Founders and their vision, yet, on the other hand, holler bloody oppression every time they see a cop who looks like he may not merely stand there like a bearskin-hatted redcoat in front of Buckingham Palace but who comes off as so utterly violent, chaotic, and dangerous that he may conceivably go so far as to engage in active attempts at enforcing the law. What to make of such dichotomy?

Henry David Thoreau, author of "Civil Disobedience"

In truth, we all want the laws enforced, but only the ones we like, not the ones we disagree with. Obviously, no one agrees with every law, and people amongst each other will always clash over which are the smart laws that should be enforced and which are the dumb ones that should be ignored. Our natural tendency is to proudly proclaim we’re “a nation of laws” every time a law we like is being enforced and to scream ”police state” every time a law we dislike is being enforced. In the end, every law constitutes a limitation upon our liberty to act as we please and hence is a potential obstacle to our pursuit of happiness. If nude shopping makes you happy and you show up at the supermarket in your birthday suit, you’ll be arrested. So there’s your police state, Mr. Thoreau.

Even though members of all political persuasions are constantly confronted with laws that are antithetical to their respective world view, it seems that only the left has elevated hostility against law enforcement to an Olympic discipline.  This is somewhat understandable, as the liberal mindset, by its very nature, is highly averse to rules and “force” of any kind. What’s unclear, though, is by what mechanism exactly liberals expect the non-liberal percentage of society to comply with liberal policies unless such policies are backed up by the specter of uncomfortable compulsion in case of insubordination, be it forcible detention or the forcible confiscation of property.

If Obamacare passes, for instance, Rush Limbaugh and his dittohead acolytes are unlikely to contribute their share unless they sincerely believe bad things will happen to them if they don’t. To my knowledge, as of yet no one has figured out how, using nothing but the twin powers of love and persuasion, to cajole large numbers of people into voluntary compliance with laws they don’t like. People don’t follow laws because they get a kick out of following laws. They follow laws to avert cuffs and the slammer. And that includes laws enacted by liberal legislatures.

Think of it this way: who is an anarchist going to call for help if Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin–hunting rifles in hand–are staging an illegal pep rally on his front lawn? The cops. You betcha. And if anarchy were the law of the land, who would enforce it and prevent non-anarchists from forming illicit police units?

No one who sincerely believes that police officers represent violence, chaos, and danger, should have to fund such a despicable enterprise. These people should get a tax reduction, and in return the cops won’t show up when they call them.

No doubt Ms. Lamott would be very much in favor of such exemption for herself and her family. After all, upon being burglarized and attacked by a masked intruder, why escalate the situation and invite even more chaos, violence, and danger into your house by calling the cops?

Well, for starters, if only one person is involved, it ain’t marriage. Simple as that. Says who? Why, tradition, of course. Historically speaking, the concept of marriage has never been known to extend to unions with oneself.

So there I go, and there I have it. Bummer.

Gay marriage proponents argue that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees the right to same-sex marriage, and that resorting to the ballot box in this matter amounts to an exercise in futility, since–short of the passing of an constitutional amendment–our fundamental rights are not accountable to the democratic process. The Equal Protection Clause, by definition, trumps the outcome of any popular vote.

Makes sense. After all, the whole raison d’être of the Bill of Rights and its subsequent additions is to protect minorities from what James Madison aptly termed the “tyranny of the majority,” precisely so that no one can be stripped of a basic right by popular consensus or legislative fiat. (In a pure and unfettered democracy, no Bill of Rights–indeed no Constitution–would be necessary, save to ordain the majority’s right to disenfranchise minorities in all areas.)

Furthermore, the phrase “nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” clearly states that all laws must be equally applied to everybody. So if one segment of society is allowed to marry whomever they please, the same right must be accorded all others.

Having established that persons of legal age cannot be denied the right to marry their consenting and likewise-of-legal-age partners of choice, the whole issue of who has a right to marry whom under Equal Protection boils down to what the word “marry” means.

Several possible definitions are in play:

One camp argues that to “marry” denotes the union of exactly one man and one woman (in which case gays and lesbians have no equal protection claim); another camp defines it as the union of exactly two consenting adults (in which case gays and lesbians do have an equal protection claim); and a third camp puts forth the definition of marriage as a union between two or more consenting adults (in which case virtually every form of non-traditional union has an equal protection claim).

So how to go about choosing the correct definition?

The intuitive method for solving the mystery is simply to ask what the term “marriage” has meant through the ages, i.e., to search for the so-called traditional definition of marriage. For better or worse, this method will yield as our answer the union of exactly one man and at least one woman, whereby the permissible number of wives sometimes varied by culture and religion. Perhaps in certain societies some women were allowed to command several husbands. In any event, it is safe to surmise that, for the better part of recorded history, to “marry” involved a mixing of the sexes, or else the term didn’t apply; just as pointing at a mailbox and calling it a birdhouse doesn’t make it a birdhouse.

If we boarded our trusty time machine (yes, hybrid models will be available soon) and paid a visit to every society that ever existed all the way back to the Sumerians for the purpose of conducting a pan-historic poll on whether a man could “marry” another man, whether a woman could “marry” another woman, whether individuals could “marry” themselves, or, for that matter, whether monkeys were fish, the uniform response to all these questions would be a resounding “huh?”

Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, 1787

Of course, Philadelphia in the sweltering summer of 1787 would be among the stops on our journey, and we’d present our questionnaire to the eminent assembly gathered at Independence Hall. While we’re at it, we might as well toss in the query of whether women should have the right to vote. Once again, we’d receive a collective “huh?” on all counts. (By contrast, if we inquired whether slavery should be phased out or continued, the response would be far from uniform. Not much collective concurrence on that one.)

Or let’s do the screwdriver test (think booze, not home improvement):

Screwdriver

Drop into your neighborhood bar and order a screwdriver but with extra OJ in lieu of the vodka. Now the bartender will understandably shoot us a puzzled look, since we effectively ordered a glass of orange juice, not something that answers to the traditional definition of “screwdriver.” Obviously, it is the combining of the two primary ingredients which makes it that. Since there exists no constitutional proscription against broadening the traditional definition of a highball, we might as well decree that henceforth the term “screwdriver,” in addition to its original meaning, shall also mean (a) plain vodka, and (b) plain OJ. Should such definitional expansion confound or offend the orthodox majority of mixologists, tough. Screwdrive them.

By the same token, we could expand the traditional definition of marriage to include autosexual marriage, homosexual marriage between two people, bisexual marriage (i.e., George getting married to Jeffrey and Jennifer), and all manner of multiple marriages, co-ed as well as unisex. After all, traditional and desirable are two entirely different pairs of wingtips. Just because something lines up with long-standing historic precedent doesn’t mean it’s right. Even though women were traditionally kept out of the voting booth, every sane contemporary of ours will concur that we’ve traded a flawed tradition for something much better, fairer, and morally superior; indeed, that we’ve corrected a historical wrong.

The difficulty, it seems to me, arises when–citing the Equal Protection Clause–we campaign for expanding and improving the traditional definition of marriage so as to include same-sex couples but omit to promote all other conceivable semantic enrichments of the term. The oft-deployed argument in favor of gay marriage that “it would still be between two people” goes sprawling right out of the box in the sense that the word “still,” by its very definition, connotes traditional practice (i.e., “how it has always been”) when it is, in fact, tradition that one is attempting to throw under the bus by advocating gay marriage in the first place.

As stated above, kicking tradition to the curb isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it may indeed be eminently desirable regarding the matter at hand, namely the redefinition of marriage as a union between two consenting adults instead of clinging to the hidebound and cobwebby one-man-and-one-woman requirement. 

However, the selective defenestration of the traditional gender requirement (male and female) in tandem with the preservation of the no less traditional number “two” (as in two people) seems quite arbitrary and at serious loggerheads with the notion of equal protection, as neither I (who would like to exchange rings with myself) nor my buddy George (who wants to wed Jeffrey and Jennifer) were accorded equality as a result of the marriage-redefinition process. George and I were squarely left out. What’s equal about that?  

If, on the other hand, the word “marriage” had not been subjected to any kind of semantic broadening at all, then the types of unions George and I, respectively, desire wouldn’t fall under the traditionally narrow definition of the term. Hence we’d have no Equal Protection claim regarding “marriage,” since the romantic alliances we have in mind are not that.

Unable to defend the obvious lopsidedness of ditching the traditional male-female component of marriage while retaining the traditional spouse count, some gay marriage advocates may be willing to sign on to the redefinition of marriage as the consensual union of two or more partners. Of course, such unidirectional flexibility of the PTNSPM (permissible total number of spouses per marriage) towards infinity but not in the opposite direction towards zero (which would entail the legitimacy of autosexual marriage) must likewise be justified on Equal Protection grounds, and this presents somewhat of a dilemma:

Merely insisting that a union with oneself is not covered by the term “marriage” effectively returns us to square one of this discussion. On the other hand, the matrimonial carte blanche following the admission of both autosexual as well as of all manner of multiple unions into the marriage tent–this, after all, would be the logical conclusion under Equal Protection, once tinkering with the traditional definition has begun–would turn the sacred bonds of marriage into a farce. One might as well abolish marriage altogether and give everybody a tax break.

In his concurring opinion in the case of Texas v. Johnson, decided in 1989, Justice Kennedy wrote the following:

The hard fact is that sometimes we must make decisions we do not like. We make them because they are right, right in the sense that the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the result. And so great is our commitment to the process that, except in the rare case, we do not pause to express distaste for the result, perhaps for fear of undermining a valued principle that dictates the decision. This is one of those rare cases. 

It is indeed. Just in case it didn’t come through in the penumbras and emanations of this essay, its author is all in favor of gay marriage, and, in the spirit of Justice Kennedy’s eloquent words, I (the author) hereby pause to express distaste for the result which my personal reading of the Constitution compels. 

Rosa Parks

Based on the reasoning presented above, however, I am unable to regard the gay marriage controversy as a Fourteenth Amendment and hence as a Civil Rights issue. The comparison of upholding the traditional definition of marriage to racial segregation fails to compute on several fronts. For instance, although reasonable people may differ on what exactly the word “marry” connotes in terms of number and sex(es) of the candidates, no reasonable person could possibly define riding in various areas of the bus as meaning different things depending on who’s doing the riding (as in “riding in the front of the bus is allowed, but when a ”colored” person does it, it’s called trespassing, not riding, and therefore it’s not allowed; in the back of the bus, the reverse logic applies”).

Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court via its case history regarding discrimination has effectively declared classification based on race to be an entirely different kettle of fish than classifications based on anything else, including sexual orientation. So assuming that banning gay marriage indeed constitutes a form of discrimination–whether it does or does not, as we have seen, hinges on one’s definition of “marriage”–, any state enacting such ban merely has to demonstrate that their motive for discriminating was “rational.” For instance, to protect the community’s “sense of morality” (perfectly legitimate under any state’s police powers) would satisfy such rationality test, and the law permitting the discrimination will most likely be upheld by the Court.

State laws discriminating on the basis of race, however, are held to a much higher standard. It will not suffice for such laws to be “rational”; they must serve a so-called “compelling” state interest. And an interest in protecting a community’s sense of morality, while rational, is not deemed “compelling” by a long shot. In practice, this means that laws discriminating on the basis of race will almost always be overturned (with the possible exception of affirmative action cases).

A suspect class is one saddled with such disabilities or subjected to a history of purposeful, unequal treatment, or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process.

According to the Supreme Court, only race falls into this “suspect class” definition.  Hence, in the case of Loving v. Virginia, decided in 1967, Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law (prohibiting interracial marriage) was struck down. The discrimination was race-based, served no “compelling” state interest, and was therefore toast.

While one may agree or disagree with such class system–”suspect” for race, “semi-suspect” for gender, and “non-suspect” for everything else, including age, wealth, sexual orientation, or dietary preferences–, the fact is that likening a ban on gay marriage to gays and lesbians being relegated to the “back of the bus” flies in the face of longstanding Supreme Court jurisprudence; indeed, one would have to conclude that the U.S. Supreme Court has been stacked with a majority of irrational homophobes for decades.

Although I concur with conservatives (as well as with the Supreme Court and, presumably, with most African-Americans, conservative or otherwise) in that I do not believe the widespread reluctance to revise the traditional definition of marriage resembles racial discrimination on any level, I’d like to conclude my remarks by putting to the torch two of the most popular arguments regarding homosexuality in general, and gay marriage in particular, espoused (pardon the pun) by our friends from the conservative side of the tracks:

First, they tend to claim that our sexual orientation is what we do, not who we are; hence it didn’t compare to ethnicity. As a devout heterosexual, I respectfully disagree: I certainly am straight, even on my celibate days when I’m not doing anything that couldn’t be shown on network TV. I am straight even when brushing my teeth. And no, I did not choose to be straight like picking out a tie in a store. Many conservative so-called thinkers seem to forget that they would have to apply their own rationale on themselves and admit that, following their own logic, at some point in their early years they made a choice to have the hots for Marilyn instead of the Marlboro Man and that they could, therefore, choose to turn gay anytime (after all, it’s just a “behavior”). I have yet to hear such admission. What ever happened to “fair and balanced”?

Second, right-wingers (I exclude Mr. O’Reilly from this category) tend to defend traditional marriage by highlighting procreation and the raising of children as its paramount purpose. Strangely, though, I never hear them proposing the annulment of childless heterosexual marriages after a reasonable grace period. After all, if a couple either can’t or doesn’t want to have kids, then what’s the point of staying married? So the child-rearing defense of traditional marriage doesn’t quite wash. In fact, if Jenny and Rachel are willing to adopt while John and Mary opt to remain bratless, then this particular argument against gay marriage not only doesn’t wash but royally shoots itself in the foot.

In sum, given that the Constitution is silent on marriage, the issue of its definition, in my opinion, must be resolved through the ballot box in the various states and, ultimately, by way of a constitutional amendment redefining marriage as a union between two consenting adults. For if the right to gay marriage were already enshrined in the Constitution, then so would be my right to marry myself.

The hit musicals, which often charge more during holidays, exploited demand even further last week by requiring more people to buy tickets at premium prices of $300 or higher. (Patrick Healy, New York Times, 12/1/09)

Broadway Musicals requiring (!) people to buy $300.00-plus tickets? Who would have thunk it? How is it constitutional to force the folks to fork over their hard-earned rent and grocery money at the box office? Whatever happened to property rights?

Effective immediately, I shall steer clear of the Theater District, lest I may suddenly find myself surrounded by a gang of brass-knuckled goons jumping out from behind a billboard or rappelling from a marquee and blackjacking me into blowing hundreds of dollars on show tickets.

Now, I’m no economist, but I sometimes do wonder what kind of theory of economics a person subscribes to that impels them to use a certain terminology in their reportage. Last time I checked, the United States was a free market economy. Is such a system God’s gift to mankind? Probably not quite, as evidenced by the current casino-capitalism-induced fiscal Armageddon. Obviously, the system needs a few adjustments, or else a bunch of Wall Street greedheads will drive us all into the ground. But wagging one’s finger at raising the price of non-essential luxury commodities like Broadway tickets in a situation where demand outstrips supply and calling it “exploiting” demand? Give me a $300.00 break, will ya, Patrick?

First of all, theaters boast a limited number of seats, and there are only so many performances per week that can reasonably be scheduled without unduly taxing the cast. This puts a natural ceiling on the number of showtimes and tickets available, and if a particular production is real popular such that the number of potential ticket buyers exceeds the static number of seats,  prices go up. Even if theaters kept prices unnaturally level in spite of higher demand or even stopped charging altogether, no greater number of people would get to see the show than if they hike ’em to the max. In fact,  higher prices will most likely deter some folks from watching a particular show more than once, so the higher the prices, the more people will actually get to see it. Of course, this applies only to those with pockets deep enough to do so. But so what? Free health care for everybody and universally affordable Broadway tickets to boot?

Second, it seems to me that the overwhelming majority of Broadway shows aren’t doing so well. So if there are a handful of flagship productions that continually sell out even at exorbitant ticket prices, the revenue thus generated may help get a few underdog productions off the ground and  keep them on life support for a while. Keeping the cash cows on a leash by holding prices at artificially low levels seems utterly counterproductive in the larger scheme of things. Sure, little Johnny and his four sisters may not get to see the Lion King because their daddy ain’t Bill Gates, but other people will get to see equally worthy albeit less flagshippy productions that never would have come to be  were it not for the hefty chunk of change the blockbuster shows pull in by way of squeezing a more affluent audience. Imagine what would happen if all theaters suddenly stopped “exploiting demand.” Millions of dollars would be lost. And then what? A government bailout for Broadway?

Of course, there’s a flip side to the exploitation coin: if demand for a particular show is poor, prices go down. So applying the reasoning of “exploiting demand,” many theatergoers are exploiting the lesser demand for less popular productions by obtaining those tickets a lot more cheaply than they would otherwise. One can call such price fluctuations supply and demand, or one can call them exploitation. But whatever nomenclature one chooses, it ought to be applied consistently in both directions.   

" … exploiting demand … requiring more people to buy tickets at premium prices … "

This is a very New York Timesy way putting things. I betcha a Wall Street Journal writer wouldn’t have put it like that. So what kind of world view underlies Mr. Healy’s choice of words? Because obviously (with the possible future exception of health insurance if Obamacare makes it through Congress) there is no such thing as “requiring” anybody to purchase anything, let alone theater tickets. The word “requiring,” in this context, seems utterly nonsensical, but it does rather effectively carry the connotation of the powerful gouging the indigent, and I suspect this was Mr. Healy’s intent. Such accusation is certainly appropriate in many contexts, but to flash the exploitation card every time some people are effectively excluded from enjoying specific goods and services on account of high prices inevitably raises the question of what kind of ideal alternative solution the exploitation-card flashing individual has in mind.

So how to fix the age-old problem of uneven distribution of property, i.e., money? Perhaps they should pass a law that henceforth all employers shall pay all salaries to the government instead of to their employees, and then the government would distribute equal allowances to everybody. And how to modify the system so that every person is guaranteed equal opportunity access to see the Lion King?  Hmm. Perhaps, via legislative fiat, cap Broadway tickets at, say, ten bucks, and then, if more people want to see the Lion King than there are seats in the theater, have a ticket lottery. Fair enough?

Sounds plenty compassionate so far, but what about those of us who can’t even afford ten bucks for a ticket? People like myself, for instance: I literally have less than no money, no job, I’m essentially living on canned chick peas and crunchy peanut butter, and I’m struggling to keep my Internet connection turned on. So from my present vantage point, every seller who charges any amount for anything is “exploiting demand,” because no matter what they charge, chances are I can’t afford it.

And I really resent the fact that I’m “required” to plunk down three bucks for a jar of peanut butter. Why don’t they just give it to me? I’ll crack you a smile, and you pass me the goober spread. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Yeah, I’m sure I must have read that somewhere once …

Do small talk. It’s meaningless. It’s good for you.

Although I do not recall the context which prompted the chitchat prescription, its likely aim was to promote the use of conversation as a bonding tool as opposed to a mere conduit for the exchange of utilitarian intelligence or lofty intellectual constructs. Notwithstanding the fact that the determination of meaning-lessness versus its fullness resides notoriously in the eye of the beholder, on its face the notion of enjoying the company of others by way of shuttlecocking meaningless sound waves back and forth without allowing cumbersome tidings to distract from the congenial vibe seems reasonably therapeutic, especially for patients with full-blown STDD (small talk deficiency disorder).

It just so happens that yours truly’s dexterity in the small talk arena rivals that of the average milkman attempting to perform mitral valve surgery on an Dalmatian. Indeed, your’s truly couldn’t small-talk his way out of the proverbial paper bag at a wedding reception if a crazed Afghan party crasher held an AK-47 to his temple and demanded such talk; although, on account of the strength of such incentive, he might, in fact, be able to crank out an unusually eloquent succession of perhaps two or three peppy zingers along the lines of “That’s a beautiful rifle” and “How’s your goat?” prior to falling silent due to STE (small talk exhaustion), which, in this case, would most likely be followed by his falling even silenter [sic] due to CLE (cerebral lead envenomation).

So what exactly is this “small talk” aside from that which the author of these lines can’t seem to get a hang of? By what metric are we to gauge the size of our confabulations? And are we to define “small” as (1) referring to a predefined repertoire of topics compiled over time by popular consensus, or as (2) a function not of content but of the manner in which and the depth from which we retrieve information from our neocortical data bank for subsequent articulation?

Moreover, can otherwise identical information double as either small talk or big talk depending on how it is being received by different people? For instance, does a standard-issue cocktail party proclamation like “They forcast a blizzard for tomorrow” get bigger simply by virtue of being directed–perhaps inadvertently–at a twin-engine pilot versus, say, an interior decorator? Or, for that matter, at a live-in interior decorator versus one who depends on his bicycle as a means of getting to work?

What if some well-intentioned socialite blithely remarks “I love peanut butter coated shrimp topped with heavy cream and chocolate-covered strawberries,” whereupon, at the mere sound of such ingredients, one exceptionally allergic listener breaks out in hives and collapses from psychosomatically induced respiratory arrest? And what if, in addition, an undercover gourmet chef within earshot proceeds to sucker-punch the unsuspecting shellfish afficionado for public dissemination of such blasphemous culinary combination? Having thus occasioned bedlam, does the remark itself still count as mere small talk or must it be upgraded retroactively? In other words, is talk size a function of intent or of effect?

Let us assume we’re ready and willing to heed our sagacious psychologist’s advice (“Do small talk”), and let us–for simpicity’s sake–ignore the problem of whether the observed impact of individual utterances on listeners who may have processed identical pieces of ostensibly innocuous information in wildly divergent and unpredictable ways ought to be factored in ex post facto for the purpose of talk size determination.

The issue, having been reduced to defining talk size strictly as a function of intent rather than effect, now boils down to this:

If a particular thought effortlessly floats to the surface of our consciousness, ready to be converted into sound and dispatched into our surroundings, how can we tell whether or not it qualifies as small talk?

The answer hinges on whether we subscribe to the concept of (1) substantive small talk (SST) or (2) procedural small talk (PST).

To conscript a potentially familiar analogy into our discourse, the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution harbors the infamous “due process” clause, which has been interpreted by some as meaning “substantive” due process (in which case abortion, for example, may be considered a constitutionally protected fundamental right), by others as strictly “procedural” due process (in which case abortion is not a constitutionally protected fundamental right, at least not on Fourteenth Amendment grounds). The jurisprudential implications need not concern us here, except to introduce the terms “substance” and “procedure” as two vastly disparate entities. The first is concerned with “what,” i.e., content, the other with “how”, i.e., manner.

Substantive small talk (SST) is solely defined in terms of subject matter. On this reading, certain topics fall under small talk, others do not. Where to get the best Mojitos in town? Small talk. Alcoholism? Big talk. Oprah leaving ABC in 2011? Small talk. Should coffins of fallen soldiers be shown on TV? Big talk. The weather? Small talk. Climate change? Big talk. And so on and so forth. Hypothetically, if we were uncertain whether a particular topic belonged to the small talk family, we could simply consult a small talk dictionary and look it up. If the topic is listed, we can safely broach it. If not, we must choose another, lest we’d be flouting our sagacious psychologist’s advice by waxing unduly meaningful.

Regarding the division of topics into small talk and non-small talk such that they could be listed in an almanac of some sort, one obvious pragmatic difficulty arises: topic creep. Aside from geographic, cultural, contextual, and job-related variations with respect to which subjects are to be deemed trivial as opposed to momentous, one and the same overall subject may seesaw between small talk and big talk depending on (a) which aspects of it are being discussed, (b) the depth of subject penetration, and (c) the potential of synergistic consolidation of several small talk topics into an entirely new one which may exceed the bounds of substantive small talk. In short, the exponential growth of topic subdivisions would quickly make the U.S. Tax Code look like your average toaster manual by comparison.

Without further subdivision it would be impossible to determine, for instance, whether the topic “cats” is small talk or not. One would have to provide separate listings for “playing with cat”, “bathing cat”, “skinning cat”, “death by cat bite”, “taking cat to the vet”, etc. Obviously, the fifth entry in our list (“taking cat to the vet”) would require clarification by even further subdivision into all possible reasons for taking a kitty to the doctor. (Simply getting its shots or having a hairball removed may be considered substantive small talk. If, on the other hand, the poor feline had a terminal condition, discussing it may be regarded as crossing the line into big talk.)

As we can see, owing to the sheer volume of entries it would have to contain, our small talk encyclopedia is but a theoretical contrivance. The basic principle of substantive small talk, however, holds: If we talk about this, we are doing small talk, if we talk about that, we are not, even though many topics may resist dispassionate classification for a laundry list of reasons.

Bottom line, substantive small talk is strictly defined in terms of what is being said and has nothing to do with how the information is being retrieved from within us. Therefore, a casual statement like “What do you say about all this rain?” counts as small talk, whether it emerges from the speaker’s mind with the facility of a locust bouncing off a flower petal, or whether its production requires a series of strenuous internal computations in consequence of the circumstance that weather awareness and hence weather-related issues figure poorly in the speaker’s personal scheme of things, except, perhaps, in the context of planning a concrete weather-dependent activity, e.g., tracking quasars with a telescope. As far as SST, content is king.

Procedural small talk (PST), on the other hand, is entirely unrelated to subject matter. It is not defined in terms of what is being said but only in terms of the manner of statement composition, which, in turn, hinges on where in the speaker’s brain the about-to-be-shared information resides, more specifically the brain-tongue-path (BTP), i.e., the journey such information must undertake in order to travel from its neocortical storage folder to our organs of enunciation. In other words, PST is a function of the mental effort required to come up with conversation material.

I readily confess to know nothing about the brain, except that it includes that particular cluster of cells north of the thorax which the aforementioned Afghan party crasher would blow out of me were he to pull the trigger on his rifle. Therefore, my understanding of how information journeys hither and yon within said cluster of cells is a bit fuzzy (to say the least), although over the years I’ve heard numerous tales about axons, glia, synapses, neurotransmitters, and oodles of other whatchamacallits and thingamajigs reportedly involved in all manner of tangled sub-cranial processes, including speech production.

Given that it all seems rather complicated, the accuracy of the neurological minutia is hereby declared immaterial to this discussion. I am certain, though, that something analagous to the brain-tongue-path (BTP) exists, although I’d be willing to wager my nonexisting Fijian beachfront that whoever discovered it called it something else.

Let’s just say that all our mental files–factual and counterfactual knowledge, memories (real and false), opinions, etc.–are stored in folders, much like the folders on our computer, and that these folders are located in different locations and hence at varying distances relative to our brain’s speech factory, where information retrieved from any such folder is then converted into words to be presented via our organs of enunciation (tongue, larynx, etc.) to our interlocutors for their consideration. It follows that some units of information are rather easily collected and converted into language, whereas others must be dredged up (or, if dredging comes up empty, fabricated) via the energy-guzzling process called “thinking.”

Mental effort is anathema to procedural small talk. PST is defined as the spontaneous sharing of thoughts which naturally reside at the surface of our consciousness irrespective of subject matter. Recall that SST (substantive small talk), by contrast, refers to the sharing of thoughts that pertain to a particular range of topics only, irrespective of the actual effort required to produce such thoughts.

The small talk-gifted among us just happen to be naturally plugged into the very topics that have been inducted–via some sort of evolutionary subject matter selection process–into the Substantive Small Talk Hall of Fame. This happy confluence eliminates the need to draw a distinction between SST and PST, as individuals of such disposition easily manage to do both simultaneously. They can jabber away about the sunshine and the flowers, who got engaged to who, Melanie’s baby shower, Brandon’s bachelor party, who wore what at the Oscars, the latest televised wardrobe malfunction, Jennifer Aniston’s most recent breakup, the World Series, Superbowl, shoe shopping, purse shopping, curtain shopping, cocktail recipes, where to get the best pancakes for brunch, and on and on and on, virtually ad infinitum, and the deliberately casual and strikingly inconsequential treatment of such topics seems to cause them no effort at all. (Dexterity in one area, of course, does not necessarily negate proficiency in others. Substantive small talk virtuosos may display equal facility with big talk.)

This SST-PST overlap, alas, is missing among the officially small talk-challenged segment of the population. Although these patients–yours truly among them–are perfectly capable of beating their gums in equally effortless a fashion, what comes out of the wash generally fails to meet the classification criteria for small talk in substantive terms and is therefore liable to draw reactions from mild indignation to outright hostility–generally hovering somewhere around moderate alienation–from those on the prowl for run-of-the-mill chitchat.

Procedurally speaking, however, these tangle-tongued galoots are small-talking just like everyone else, as they are likewise merely articulating thoughts that happen to float close to the surface of their consciousness. Given, though, that these thoughts are of a more unconventional type, the speaker may inadvertently come across as shooting the breeze with a rocket launcher instead of a squirt gun, whereupon, in a doomed attempt to blend in with the crowd, he may decide to take a stab at substantive small talk and, as a result, appear as relaxed and comfortable as an actor on stage who blew his lines and is now desperately trying to adlib himself through the rest of the scene.

Do small talk. It’s meaningless. It’s good for you. I can’t say for sure, but I suppose our psychologist is advocating the practice of substantive rather than procedural small talk. Oh dear. So if somebody says “What a beautiful day,” I guess I could retort with a slightly modified version of that line (“Indeed, what a beautiful day”), followed by the forecast for tomorrow, followed by a recountal of yesterday’s meteorological conditions, and once I run out of local weather reports, I can always launch into an a capella version of “The Rain In Spain.”

Alternatively, I might as well just skip the making-a-fool-of-myself part, switch over to PST, and say what naturally comes to mind, which, in this case, would probably be something to the effect that “beautiful” means different things to different people, that certain skin types may object to the characterization of a bright blue sky as “beautiful” and much prefer cloudy days to guard against melanoma, and then I would proceed to expand upon the amorphous concept of beauty in various contexts, by which time the other person’s desire to converse with me will most likely have died on the vine, and I’ll have scored yet another all too familiar complaint about how I “can’t simply accept that it’s a beautiful day.”

Do small talk.

Easier said than done.

In fact, easier written an endless dissertation about than done.

Facebook’s “Like” feature, in its current form, is akin to an election featuring ballots which display the pre-printed name of exactly one candidate with a check-box next to it and some empty space below where one may write in the name of a challenger. Needless to say, any election this blatantly skewed towards one particular outcome would be more reminiscent of countries like Cuba and North Korea than of a Western-style democracy.

By reducing the expression of approval to one click while keeping in place the burdensome process of having to string together an entire sequence of letters to form at least one internally coherent word in order to communicate anything other than “liking” something, Facebook’s “Like” feature, in its current form, clearly discriminates against the following groups:

1. Facebook members who are strapped for time

2. Facebook members who are semi-literate, i.e., those who, on account of incomplete education, can read and click but not write

3. Facebook members who, due to illness or injury, are physically able to read and click but not type

4. Facebook members who, upon keyboard failure, are forced to communicate via mouse clicks only

5. Facebook members who are generally lazy and thus tend to gravitate towards the simplest option available, irrespective of whether or not it reflects their true position

In light of the above, we petition Facebook to honor the American way and either

(a) eliminate the “Like” feature

OR

(b) add an equally convenient “Dislike” option.

We are looking forward to a swift resolution of this matter and for Facebook to move closer towards its presumptive goal of becoming a truly shining city on the cyberhill.

Thank you.  

(Facebook members CLICK HERE to join this petition!)

Somebody needs more iron for his brain. A lot more.

This blog is in the process of being set up. Kindly disregard its present appearance, its potentially limited functionality in isolated areas, as well as the impressively low number of informative entries. We are working on it; to what end exactly, we shall see. Our webmaster (right … no, left) is a bit of a technological genius, so it may take his nibs ten to the power of twelve times the age of the universe years to figure it all out, like the proverbial lizard crawling through molasses. (If this expression has not yet attained proverb status, it most certainly should have–if not full-fledged proverb, then idiom at least … that would be idiom with a final ”m,” not with a “t” like our crack webmaster.)

Sleepy or simply not riveted by this post?

This is a new paragraph with a picture of a yawning jaguar to the right. Even the poor kitty seems bored to tears by now. Speaking of pussycats, here comes a random link test. Oops. Wrong link. Here we go: the correct link … no … for heaven’s sake … never mind, this is the one. Meow. This mercifully concludes the link test segment of this meaningless trial entry.

This sentence opens the final paragraph of this meaningless trial entry. Happily, this sentence concludes the final paragraph of this meaningless trial entry.