Lagerkvist

John Mihoff and I read Par Lagerkvist back in the late fifties. Recently Jack retold one of the stories that Lagerkvist had written. 

Lagerkvist won the Nobel Prize in 1951. He was a novelist, a moralist and a great stylist. When he was young and most pessimistic, he wrote, "Anguish is everything." 

What follows is my faulty memory of Jack's faulty summary of the story. 

Bill (not the name used in the story) was a religious man who did his best to live a good life. When he died, he went to heaven, where he found the terrain mostly flat and featureless except for a road. He walked down the road until he came upon a small group of people sitting in folding chairs, chatting and drinking cool water. 

One of the chairs was empty, so Bill took a seat and joined in the conversation, but after a while he grew restless. "Heaven is not what I expected," he said. "For one thing, where's God?"  Oh, just down the road, he was told.

Bill walked another mile or two until he came to an old bearded fellow sawing logs, making firewood. "Are you God?" Bill asked.

"Yes."

"Well, Heaven is not what I expected. It's dull."

"I did the best I knew at the time," God said and retuned to sawing wood.

______

Jack observed that many of us come to view our parents as people who did the best they knew at the time. We hope our children will feel that way about it.

The Walking

Scientists tell us that, generally speaking, walking upright has had no lasting advantage among mammals (other than humans). It's too slow. Imagine strolling along and suddenly you had to outrun a lion.

Having two free hands has advantages in gathering food and holding a spear, but what made it work in the beginning was a social network. To survive in the wilderness, you needed a family, a tribe. With 20 spears you could hunt lions. To survive and prosper, you needed to be--like wolves--part of a cooperating family. Without cooperation, walking on two feet would have made you easy prey. We survived by cooperating. 

The Corporate Democrat

My daily newspaper, a centrist corporation, today printed a letter against the welfare state that included the following. "No doubt word will be spread throughout Guatemala, El Salvador, and other decrepit Latin American countries and nearby states about the new California Dream: come to California for free lodging, free food and free medical care."

Letters printed by newspapers should, in my opinion, be factually accurate and not moronic. Does the editor think racists deserve a fair share of the ink? Or does the editor publish occasional bits of racist sarcasm because it is an effective way to attract attention and sell papers? What motivates the editor? 

Stillbirth

The Fresno Bee reported that Chelsea Becker is now out of jail--after 16 months. Becker had used meth while pregnant. When the child was stillborn, Becker was arrested for murder, and her bail was set at $5 million.

This happened inn Kings County, just to the north of Kern County, in the number-two-hole part of California.

It may be important to note that there is no scientific evidence that meth usage can cause a stillbirth. Also that the politics of this section of California's big valley has been blighted for some time. The county did vote for Hubert Humphrey 63 years ago, so who knows what might happen there next. 

Death Penalty

Oregon has more or less decriminalized the possession of otherwise illegal drugs like heroin and oxycontin. People in possession can still be fined $100, a citation that will be dropped if they agree to a health assessment. That looks like common sense. It takes some profit out of organized crime, and Oregon can hire fewer deputies and fewer prison guards. 

A law like that might have saved Andrew Brown's life last week in North Carolina. A posse of officers showed up to arrest him. Someone had fingered Brown, an unarmed black man, as a drug dealer. Frightened he tried to flee in his car, forcing a white officer to jump out of the way, which is a death penalty offense in North Carolina. After Brown got clear of the police and was motoring into the distance, they shot him in the back of the head. And that was justified, the local white prosecutor said. 

The Significance of Kushner

Just think how bad things would be now in the Middle East if it weren't for Jared Kushner's peace plan.

What War Is Good For

When I was about ten, the Israelis and Palestinians went to war against one another.  I am now an old man, and the war continues. 

From what I can tell, killing human beings on the other side keeps all the current leaders in power. That's one thing war is good for. 

Wayne Lapierre

 It somehow became a practice around the NRA to gift the executive vice president and boss, bloody Wayne Lapierre, with silk suits and rides in yachts. Wayne is apparently a modest fellow--he could have made himself NRA president, after all, or maybe sergeant at arms. Instead he seemed contented with perks. 

He now finds himself in court accused of weekends in a cramped little 100 foot yacht, when important people have yachts three times that long. On television Wayne looks embarrassed at having his cheapness made so public.

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Is Race A Social Construct?

Like others of my sort, I have been going around for decades telling people that race is a social construct. Recently Jack told me that what I claimed was true but trivial. 

Jack went on to remind me that all words are social constructs (see the private language argument). So when you say that race is a social construct, you can't be wrong.  "Walnut" is also a social construct, originally meaning "foreign nut."

"Race" is a term from biology, where it was used in my youth as a taxonomic category related to "subspecies." But biologists no longer divide people into races. The human species doesn't have enough genetic variation to merit that kind of division. And that settles the matter. We are all one thing, so to speak. There are no clear-cut, genetic boundaries in a species with a thousand shades of skin color.  

I  would guess that DNA studies played a role in all this. Penguins have more genetic variation than we do.

Free Beer

 Some locales are now offering slackers a free beer if they get vaccinated. That may help with tRump supporters. And it reminded me of my grandfather, who joined the KKK in Taft because the recruiter told him they served free beer. 

A hundred years ago the California KKK was mostly a pyramid scheme. It cost ten bucks to join. If you talked someone else into joining, you got to keep half of his ten dollars. That was good money. 

There was, of course, no free beer. After having his photo taken wearing a white sheet, my grandfather quit, bitter and unforgiving.

The Kill Rate

If you look at the rates of deadly police shootings per 100,000 people, you will find that the rate in California is four times that of New York. California's kill rate is higher than that of Georgia or Texas or Florida or New Jersey. But before you start to brag, there are some small states with even higher rates. 

Pear Salad

 My wife took us to lunch today at a brand new Mediterranean restaurant, where I ordered a pear salad, which came with pita bread, and a root beer. When the food arrived the salad had no pear in it. Also no pita and no root beer. Otherwise the meal went well if you like Greek food. I do not. 

Is Racism Innate?

I would like to believe that racism has to be learned. There's a song that says so.  But what if a tendency toward racism is innate?  

Darwin realized that species change through natural selection in a challenging world. Back when humans had real races, Homo sapiens encountered the Neanderthals in Western Asia and Europe. Neanderthals were human but different. It may be that when a Homo sapiens had to chose between one race or another, she favored the one who looked like her. This bias would have had survival value for her kind. Over time the relatively few Neanderthals disappeared, although many people today carry a few of their genes.

Some cognitive scientists believe that we are genetically programmed to prefer people who look like us or who share our ways--the blonde graduates of Duke may favor their own kind. In general people do not like difference. Small children may suddenly fear--for no apparent reason--adults who look different from their parents. 

But cognitive scientists argue that we aren't doomed to be racist. We can learn anti-racism in the same way that we learn to control our tempers.