Method's killin'.

I'm at a time in life when my mopey indie rock isn't doing much for me. Fortunately, there's YouTube videos and Method Man. Language warning, which should go without saying for this genre.







So that's what I've been listening to.

Acorns, etc.

I wrote up something at the League on the ACORN tempest. I can't help thinking two things: first, the videos imply something's wrong, but the makers are content to just imply widespread corruption without attempting to pin down the extent. With some amount of taxpayer money at stake, a low-level congressional hearing and further investigation by professional reporters is appropriate. Second, ACORN's a big organization, and yet the conservative media is interested in the story because (only because?) of ties to Obama and other Democrats. What I'm curious about is whether and to what degree ACORN's internal problems hurt the people that they're trying to help, because it's not yet clear that they do.

The new media vs. old media angle on this story-of-the-week is the main reason I'm writing about it rather than just reading. I don't want James O'Keefe to be the standard for citizen journalism. That is, he got the scoop but I'm still waiting for real journalists to tell the story.

(Also, my friend Hope told me to check out the videos well before they got to the point in the news cycle where I would have seen them otherwise. Not being a watcher of cable news or a reader of Breitbart's blogs, I normally wouldn't have caught something like this until it crossed over. It was interesting to watch the whole process.)

A problem with rejecting natural theology.

Some time ago, I decided that natural theology was a dead end. I take natural theology to be something like the practice of looking at creation to deduce information about God. I'm not sure when I did this consciously, but I think I had two reasons. First, I became interested in theology that suggested to me a God who is way transcendent, except for the Incarnation, when He became way immanent. Second, I learned enough math and science to see that nothing in nature really jumps out as special creation — everything seems to run on laws, and we've described enough of those laws that we've got a general picture of how things work, though I have to acknowledge that picture gets really weird when you look at very big or very small things. (Weird in a good way, I think.)

At first, this made things simpler, as it avoided all the conundrums of creationism or ID theory. No conflict with science!

But recently I've been wondering if I made a mistake somewhere. I wrote a rather mopey post at the League on this theme. As I see it, dropping natural theology entirely leaves you with philosophical arguments, personal experience, and revelation handed down. Philosophical arguments can be nice, but there's also a counterclaim for almost every claim that's been made: I don't take leaning on philosophy to be easy. Personal experience… it's difficult for me to rely on my interpretations of my own interior life. And revelation — ah, revelation. More on that another time?

At any rate, as I think threw my view of nature, I'll take these ideas into consideration. Lee at A Thinking Reed:

“What we can and should do as Christians is offer a way of integrating the findings of the sciences with a richer picture of reality that takes account of all our experience (moral, aesthetic, religious, etc.). Reality is a many-layered thing.

“It also strikes me that Kenneth Miller’s statement that human beings are “an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out” is a salutary and properly humbling one. Christian theology has been entirely too anthropocentric, and a more theocentric and creation-centric perspective is urgently needed.”

And Matthew Milliner, a.k.a. Millinerd, quoting Jonathan Edwards:

“There is some impropriety in saying that a disposition in God to communicate himself to the creature, moved him to create the world. For though the diffusive disposition in the nature of God, that moved him to create the world, doubtless inclines him to communicate himself to the creature when the creature exists; yet this can't be all: because an inclination in God to communicate himself to an object, seems to presuppose the existence of the object, at least in idea. But the diffusive disposition that excited God to give creatures existence was rather a communicative disposition in general, or a disposition in the fullness of the divinity to flow out and diffuse itself.”

Final thought: it'd be so much easier to give up on this stuff if it weren't for beauty.

David Bazan news.

Via Mockingbird, I find that David Bazan, formerly of Pedro the Lion, has a new album coming out next week. A couple years ago I'd heard he no longer identified as a Christian; looks like the album's going to be the story of that. For more, there's an article in the Chicago Reader and an interview with Paste. I'm guessing it's going to be a return to form. I'll have more thoughts when I get a chance to listen to it.

Anathem and personal resolve.

I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem over the weekend, and I describe the experience over at the League. Not to get too personal, but it got me psyched up about writing and blogging again.

Yr humble correspondent isn't really cut out to be a political blogger — the news cycle stuff is more depressing than inspiring to me. Anathem sort of fueled my gut feeling that while it's great for some people to stare into the flux, maybe I'm the kind of guy that does better looking at old books nobody else is reading, even if they're not relevant to much of anything.

I mean, I'm sort of jealous of Stephenson's scholar-monks, only having to interact with the outside world for ten days at a time…

Cousin, bidness is a-boomin'.

Cautious praise for Inglourious Basterds. It worked for me structurally and stylistically. I'm still trying to decide where I land on Tarantino's distance from history — am I with the New Yorker's David Denby, who called the movie “a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously”? Or do I put this aside in favor of sharp and interesting critical readings?

Clearly, there's a few high-order issues to clear up before I can settle on a valuation for Basterds. History, evil, violence, entertainment, irony, escape: it all swirls around in Tarantino's latest opus, and there's a lot I could try to sort out. Of course, a southerner's got to work these things out anyway, and it's a process. So the best verdict I can give right now is a kind of deferral that affirms Basterds as a movie worth coming back to once I've made some progress.

The story of my job search?

"He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others." - William Hazlitt

(Quoted in Alan Jacob's review of a Hazlitt biography.)

Home Alone / Saw.

Today my brother messed up some childhood memories by observing that the first two Home Alone movies should be thought of as prequels to the Saw films.

Honestly, in the second one, Kevin McAllister is pretty much a Jigsaw in training.

Caring about health care.

Everybody's talking about health care at the League, but I'm so ignorant in this area I don't want to post my insubstantial, probably obvious opinions over there. On the other hand, I'd like to put them somewhere for the record, so here they are:

1. There's something wrong. You need insurance if you don't want long-term treatment for sickness to be impossibly expensive, but insurance itself is complicated and expensive, and (according to what I've picked up from the news) tens of millions of people either don't have it or don't have enough. This is a very bad situation.
   
2. The system in place now is an enormously complicated regulated market. The government's already involved to the point where it makes no sense to call the medical treatment system a free market system.
3. If something has to change, it could happen in three ways, broadly speaking. First, the government could make definite steps reducing regulation and letting health care be more of a market system. Second, the government could remain committed to something like our current level of regulation while trying new regulatory schemes. Third, the government could become more active, whether that means a public option or something more ambitious.
4. There's no way we're going the free-market route. It's cynical to say so, but I'd anticipate that the only “free-market” reforms that could get through our sluggish system would be the ones that insurance or pharmaceutical companies find to be to their advantage. Furthermore, free-market health care exists only in theory as far as I can tell. And under this administration, it's immaterial anyway, unless some super-Reagan appears before the next election. So from this citizen's perspective, a free-market health care system isn't politically possible, nobody in power really wants to do it, and we don't know for sure that it would even work in reality. In short, you can't get there from here.
   
5. If the Republicans have their way, we'll probably stay with some version of the status quo: some comparable kind of regulation that doesn't address the very real problem of people being un- or under-insured. Gingrich and company will, as usual, come up with some interesting ideas that could do something about the people that our system leaves out, but since the base is apparently frightened of changes in their health care policies, will the Republicans ever make health care reform a major priority?
6. And so I'd actually like to see the third option: the government gets more involved. It seems like this is the kind of thing that should be happening when it's a major goal of the party that controls both houses and the Presidency. I guess it's the parliamentarian in me that thinks that when the people vote for a party, that should be expected to get its way in policy until the next election. Alas, we've got these mechanisms for obstruction.
7. If the government's obliged to ensure that citizens have a basic level of education, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think the government's obliged to ensure that citizens can get medicine and treatment for injuries and sickness. Now, I reserve some suspicions about the education-obligation on a theoretical level, but it seems like we basically buy that a democracy is better off if the citizens are educated, and that the government has some role in providing that education. It seems like a pretty simple extension to say that a democracy is better off if the citizens are healthy, and that the government has some role in ensuring the availability of treatment and medicine. (One could question the validity of this extension in that education is provided for children — i.e., proto-citizens — whereas adults should be expected to manage their own health insurance.)
8. During the election, I noticed that President Obama sells his style of government action as structures of regulation within which market forces are harnessed so that the government has direction over the range of outcomes while avoiding as many Soviet-style inefficiencies as possible. As I said, I'm way ignorant here and I haven't even tried to assess whether the plans really do this. If any of them really take this approach, I'd love to see it work out, as it would confirm some of Etzioni's arguments in The Moral Dimension.
9. It's not an article of faith for me that government is necessarily worse than private enterprise in every arena of activity. But even if I did believe that, it wouldn't follow that a stronger government/market hybrid is necessarily worse than a weaker government/market hybrid. In this case, I'm inclined to believe that the stronger government/market hybrid is better than the weak one.

All this is to say that this citizen hopes the Democrats can find a way to get a functioning health-care reform bill in line with their general goals through the mire of our political system. The problems they're trying to solve are so serious that sometimes I think there's some saner parallel universe where the policies the Democrats are pursuing are considered cautious and incrementalist in comparison to the radical overhaul that some sizeable minority of citizens are demanding…

As I said, though, I'm not up-to-date or well-informed on anything that's going on right now. The real world keeping me busy and all that. You know.

Goats go to heaven?

There's now a tracklist for the new Mountain Goats album, the title of which will be The Life of the World to Come. The song titles are scripture references. According the website, it's songs about “twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of.” As a public service, here's the verses (KJV) to go along with the references:

1. 1 Samuel 15:23 — “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king.”
2. Psalms 40:2 — “He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”
3. Genesis 3:23 — “Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”
4. Philippians 3:20-21 — “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”
5. Hebrews 11:40 — “God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.”
6. Genesis 30:3 — “And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.”
7. Romans 10:9 — “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”
8. 1 John 4:16 — “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”
9. Matthew 25:21 — “His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”
10. Deuteronomy 2:10 — “The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims…”
11. Isaiah 45:23 — “I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.”
12. Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace — I'm not going to copy the whole chapter here, but Ezekiel 7 is a judgment scene.

I could hardly be more eager to hear this album. John Darnielle wields scriptural allusions with more dexterity than just about any other songwriter I can think of, and especially more than Christian songwriters. His chorus for “Against Pollution” (“When the last days come, we will see visions more vivid than sunsets and brighter than stars. We will recognize each other, and see ourselves for the first time the way we really are.”) is basically my own heart's eschatological hope. His characters can be desperate believers or proud heretics.

And will he do something with the Anakim on track 10? I've wanted to hear a song about the Anakim ever since I read Frank Peretti's The Tombs of Anak in elementary school…

Maybe, come October, I'll do a post for each song on the album.

Bill Kauffman is on to Charlotte's trickery.

Bill Kauffman recently traveled through my hometown's airport and saw some kind of ad campaign for “Charlotte, USA.” In The American Conservative, he muses on why they left out the “NC”:

“So N.C. is gone, ostensibly because Charlotte is no mere city but is instead a 16-county two-state blob that absorbs all the little communities within devouring distance, chewing them up into one masticated bolus flavorless enough to be swallowed by savvy global investors put off by states with directional adjectives in their names.”

He calls for impromptu citizen repair of these posters; if I were in Charlotte now, I'd be tempted to take him up on it.

But, yes, this is an ongoing problem with Charlotte, whose lurching efforts to become a World Class City provided the backdrop to my childhood. He's kind of got it pegged: Charlotte's explosive growth during my lifetime — at least 275,000 people since 1990, if the census is to be believed, which is approaching a 70 percent increase over a period of 17 years — has a lot to do with people who came for Charlotte, USA, rather than Charlotte, NC. It's Charlotte, USA gets the yuppies and the corporations. It's banks, not basketball or barbecue, though I should admit now that Charlotte wasn't particularly known for its barbecue, and, in my opinion, the Davidson / UNCC rivalry isn't much compared to what we've got going on in the Triangle. Anyway, banks: could it be a coincidence that Charlotte's business leader, Hugh McColl, changed his bank's name from North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) to NationsBank, and later Bank of America?

Much of the city feels soulless to me, although there's a strange comfort in that our efforts to become World Class are paying off in the form of a NASCAR hall of fame right next to the convention center. I suppose that this keeps Charlotte somehow tied to the North Carolina tradition of running moonshine — Wilkes County, Junior Johnson, and all that. (The apparently complicated issues of localism and corporatism in the world of NASCAR I will leave to the side, not being a racing fan myself.) Another bit of history that we try to keep in mind is that James K. Polk was born in Mecklenburg County — but do we really want to celebrate that? I'm going to have to think on how to find history in Charlotte, NC.

Chapel Hill, on the other hand, drips history, as old university towns tend to do. Might I again remind you that UNC was the first public university in the nation to open its doors?

My mind is filled with radio cures.

“There is something wrong with me…”

The way Jeff Tweedy sings that line. How does he do it.

(I have been listening to a whole bunch of Wilco because their new album just came out, and suffice to say it brings back many memories and feelings and little nostalgias and such. It is interesting which songs keep their force, which ones seem to lose it for a time, and which ones gain force, perhaps when a line or harmony or something hits you in a different way, perhaps because you're listening on a different set of headphones or speakers. You know one argument for record players is that the needle physically wears down the vinyl very slowly so that what you hear is something different every time you play it, whereas with CDs if the equipment stays the same then the sound should stay the same too. So maybe switching out headphones or buying a new stereo or putting the CD away for a while until you live in a room with totally different acoustic properties is the best way to carry that through to the digital age, though I bet everybody else figured this out in the 80s or 90s when people listened to a lot of CDs. With mp3s — I doubt it matters because you've compressed so much of the interesting stuff out of the recording already.)

Etymology Break: “Bunkum”

I did not know until today that “bunk,” “bunkum,” and “debunk” were among North Carolina's many contributions to Western Civilization. Imagine Brave New World without Ford's “History is bunk”—it wouldn't work. And where would anti-spiritualist literature be without “debunk”?

It turns out that “bunkum” actually comes from Buncombe County, location of Asheville and birthplace of Thomas Wolfe. You may have known this already. But I learned it today.

“[The Jeffersonian Republicans] were determined to get Missouri admitted without restrictions on slavery. After the Sixteenth Congress convened in December 1819, the debate over Missouri resumed. The speeches seemed interminable as well as intemperate. When Felix Walker of North Carolina was urged to sit down, he replied that he had to give his speech for the folks back home, ‘for Buncombe County.’ Ever since, Americans have called a certain kind of inflated political oratory ‘buncombe’ — or ‘bunk’ for short.”

-Daniel Walker Howe. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. (151)

I've spent non-negligible amounts of time in Buncombe County on many occasions… but I never knew.

Explanation.

Dear The Internet,

I haven't been around much these last few weeks. I wish I could say that I'm sorry, but really, I'm not. I definitely don't feel like I owe you an explanation, but I suppose I can give you an explanation, as a gift or something. Basically, these last few weeks have been a sort of perfect storm of (1) interesting things happening in the physical world (e.g. a spate of weddings), (2) concentrating on things that I find too complicated for posting, (3) and disinterest in the various “brouhahas” and “kerfuffles” that are going on right now.

I anticipate that once I've sorted through some of the complicated things referenced in (2), I'll start posting more on the various sites with which I'm affiliated.

-wrb

Selfishly convenient.

David Foster Wallace’s penchant for footnoting makes him a little bit hard to excerpt, but I’m going to use an asterisk to represent what is a numbered footnote in the text:

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme — and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings;* and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven’t succeeded in working out any kind of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

* Meaning a lot less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human’s life vs. the value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one human’s taste for a particular kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it’s possible to live and eat well without consuming animals.

-David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster.” Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2006. (253)

Yeah… pretty much. I am so far from a moral example on this one.

UPDATE: Bought myself some couscous. Felt no guilt when I ate it. (Couscous isn't made from animals, right?)

DFW's cultural pessimism.

Infinite Jest was the first thing I read by David Foster Wallace. I think it was back in the summer of 2004. It was only years later that I got around to any of his other work. Flipping through Consider the Lobster today made me realize that DFW really earned his take on American culture. He went on the cruise, he interviewed the right-wing radio jock, he sat through the porn awards, he got out there and mixed it up. (Although perhaps he only got this kind of access after he'd written his big book…) At any rate, I think a second trip through Infinite Jest will be pretty rewarding once I've read a bit more of the non-fiction.

I'm usually inclined to speculate from the comfort of a comfy chair whenever I can. But there's a good case to be made that comfy-chair critics should be ignored whenever possible.

Kant on blogging.

Well, not really. But that's what this makes me think of:

“But it is quite absurd to try for popularity in the first inquiry, upon which depends the total correctness of the principles. Not only can such a procedure never lay claim to the very rare merit of a true philosophical popularity, inasmuch as there is really no art involved at all in being generally intelligible if one thereby renounces all basic insight, but such a procedure turns out a disgusting mishmash of patchwork observations and half-reasoned principles in which shallowpates revel because all this is something quite useful for the chitchat of everyday life.”

-Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington

It's lines like this that make me wish I could read it in the German. How on earth did the translator pick “shallowpates”?

Maybe I should change my blog's subheading from “the world around William includes…” to “a disgusting mishmash of patchwork observations and half-reasoned principles.”

“Su-per-chunk.”

Mac says:

“it's just strange hearing the news-y voice of Charles Gibson saying the word ‘Superchunk.’”

He's right. It is pretty weird. Anyways, there's a new Superchunk EP out. It's got “Misfits and Mistakes,” which is, in my opinion, a fantastic song.

Commitment.

Sort of really loving this song, by my friend Casey. Think Roy Orbison crossed with Bon Iver.

Stress solution.

Few things can alleviate the stress of the end of a busy semester like singing your throat out to Vee Vee on the back roads of the Piedmont.