Penniless

Back in September 2008, I posted a short essay calling for abandonment of the United States one cent coin -- or the "penny," as we colloquially call it, in imitation of our British forebears. I felt my logic was impeccable, and that my irritation at having to deal with those little red buggers had to have been well nigh universal.

And yet, our own government continues to mint pennies at a loss of 0.6 cents per coin. But our neighbors to the north have seen the light. Canada announced yesterday that it will stop minting the Canadian penny this year because, as everyone knows, they're a damned nuisance -- as well as an unnecessary cost to the government.

When I was a kid, the British were still minting both a penny and a half penny, and had only recently stopped minting the farthing (one-fourth of a penny). And this was back before decimal currency, when there were 240 pence to a pound sterling.

The British, since decimalization, have abandoned the old half penny, the old "tuppence" and "thruppence" (2d and 3d) pieces and the sixpence (6d). The shilling coin (12d) became the 5 pence in the new decimal currency. The new half penny (200 to a pound sterling) hasn't been minted since 1984, leaving the "new" one penny and two pence coins as the smallest circulating coins. But the British penny is worth 1.6 American or Canadian cents, which makes it difficult to argue that the Brits stand together with us in support of a coin as worthless as our own penny.

Some worry that abandonment of the penny would cause the price of everything to be rounded up to the nearest nickel. Not really. Prices per item could still be expressed in cents. Or less, in fact: Gasoline, for example, is routinely priced to the nearest tenth of a cent per gallon. Only payment in cash for a total purchase -- your week's grocery shopping, for example -- would be rounded up. If you were writing a check or using a credit card, you could still be billed $29.97 rather than thirty bucks for your bag of groceries.

As the AP story reports, Canadians are joining New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Sweden and other countries in dropping coins of equivalent value to the American cent. Although the Euro one cent coin is still being minted, it's being increasingly shunned by businesses in a number of northern European countries. And the Euro cent is worth about 1.3 American cents. Even in China, the smallest coin in general circulation is the Jiao, worth about 1.6 American cents, although the Fen (0.16 American cents) is still accepted as legal tender.

But as Americans, we are exceptional. We will scorn the metric system, execute criminals, cling to dollar bills now worth a dime in 1950s' value -- and cheerfully churn out tons of worthless, irritating, and costly pennies. Why? What d'you mean "why"? Just because! You some kind of Commie or something?

The Dark is Rising

Having amazed myself last month by reading the Hunger Games trilogy -- and I'm holding off seeing the movie that opened Friday night until the teenagers have drifted out of the theaters and on to some new excitement -- I then moved on to another level of young people's fantasy -- Susan Cooper's series of books, The Dark is Rising. I finished the fifth and final book, Silver on the Tree, yesterday.

Like all such fantasy/adventure stories, I'm left feeling dizzy, neither in the "real world," nor in the fantasy world from which I've just departed. It's an enchanted state, leaving me excited, regretful, and with a certain tearful blurriness in my eyes. Just as I felt many years ago when I completed the last page of The Lord of the Rings.

You yourselves -- my readers -- probably either read the The Dark is Rising when young, or have long since found that kind of reading to be not quite your cup of tea: I don't intend to describe the intricate plot of the series in any detail here. I'll just remind you that it is a very English story about contemporary English (and Welsh) children; about one boy (Will Stanton) who discovers on his eleventh birthday that he is not quite like the rest of his family, but is rather one of "the Old Ones"; about Arthurian legends; about the illusory nature of Time; about an age-old Manichean conflict between forces known as "the Light" and "the Dark," forces that contend -- unlike forces in those religions that tend toward Manicheism -- subject to rules set by a greater force, neutral and implacable, called "the Ancient Magic."

The second book, itself called The Dark is Rising, written in 1973,¹ stands out from the other four as the best and purest presentation of the magic world that hides behind our own perceptions. The first book, Over Sea, Under Stone, written earlier in 1965, is a much milder story, more a traditional English children's adventure story, gently flavored with hints of magic. The later books -- Greenwitch (1974), The Grey King (1975), and Silver on the Tree (1977) -- chronicle the growing power of the Light, as the various protagonists (Will himself, the mysterious and avuncular Merryman (who turns out to be Merlin), Will's slightly older friend Bran (son of King Arthur, but brought to our time as an baby and reared in Wales), and Will's three young friends from Buckinghamshire) successfully complete their assigned quests, leading to the final triumph over the Dark in the final volume.

During the course of the five books, we -- and more importantly, young readers -- learn about the great disasters in British history, disasters that are described not as random evemts, but horrors that have occurred during periods when the Dark was ascendent. The Saxons and the Danes might well have invaded England in the normal course of events, even apart from the Dark. But without the Dark, the invaders would not have killed and destroyed on such a devastating scale, killing and destroying for the sheer enjoyment of death and destruction. (Will sees the Dark working in a small way even in his own neighborhood, when he comes upon local bullies aimlessly tormenting a small, dark "Paki" child.) Each wave of invaders eventually settled down and became "British," but only after the Light had once more for a time gained the upper hand, thrusting the Dark back into the hills, back into temporary withdrawal -- licking its wounds and preparing for the next assault.

Cooper is a beautiful and compelling writer. Peculiar to these books -- compared with, say, the less profound Harry Potter books -- is the author's loving and detailed descriptions of natural and human environments in the parts of Britain -- Buckinghamshire, Cornwall and Wales -- in which the action occurs. Cooper has the knowledge and sensitivities of a gardener, a botonist, a zoologist, an architect, an oceanographer, an historian. No butterfly passes unnamed and undescribed; no architectural style goes unremarked. Her research seems meticulous, as she describes in loving detail the actual towns, mountains and coastlines in Cornwall and Wales where the story takes place. Her characters make free use of the Welsh language where appropriate.

In a sense, the story is profoundly conservative -- not only because of the conflict between absolute good and absolute evil that it portrays, but in its implicit lament over the steady despoiling of the British countryside -- throughout the centuries ever since the days of King Arthur, as well as, in an accelerated fashion, the changes in our own day. Every casual tourist encountered elicits scorn and distaste from her child protagonists; every new dwelling for big city vacationers incurs their contempt.

"Cars, cars," said Will. "D'you know there's even something on the Machynlleth road called a chatel? A chatel! Presumably a cross between a motel and -- " He broke off, staring at the road ahead.

And the books' tale seems conservative also through the underlying, deeply-felt lesson that it teaches, a lesson that Edmund Burke would have well understood, that the history of a people must be viewed as an organic whole, that a nation consists not just of today's citizens, but of those in its past and its future as well. The travel by Cooper's heroes back and forth in time -- from the time of Arthur, the Saxon invasions, the pillaging by the Danes, the nineteenth century, and back to the present -- isn't time travel merely for the sake of excitement, as in some science fiction novels. It is the author's device to show how Britain's past lives on through its present, and how its present population has debts, and consequent obligations, to those who guided Britain through its past.

(Whenever one of Will's young friends asks about some paradox that seems to result from travel through time, an Old One replies that his question is just the sort of thing that a human would ask! The passage of time, we are reminded, is a human illusion; all events throughout time are occurring (in a sense) simultaneously. Got it?)

And in these ways, the story line stakes out a philosophically conservative position in the same way that many of us -- despite perhaps our liberal political views -- often feel conservative. Cooper's story teaches and encourages values -- historical, architectural, environmental, moral -- that should be of use to young Britons today. Or to young Americans, for that matter, insofar as we still derive our values -- even if not, for most of us, our blood -- from our country's British heritage.

In the end, on a day in the late 20th century, when the final book was written, the Light wins its battle. With the help of Will, Bran, and the English youngsters, the Light totally and with finality vanquishes the Dark. Cooper seems to treat this final battle -- a pagan Armageddon -- as the breaking of mankind's bonds to supernatural forces, an ending of mankind's susceptibility to unseen forces of evil ... or of good. But it does not free mankind from the darkness found in the hearts of each of us. From now on, the children are told, it is up to each human being, and to humanity collectively, to fight for what is good. They will have no supernatural Dark to blame for the evils they encounter, and no powers of Light to save them from their own mistakes.

"For remember," he said, "that it is altogether your world now. ... We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. ... For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. ... Now especially since man has the strength to destroy the world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvellous joy."

"We'll try," Simon said. "We'll try our best."

Merriman [Merlin] gave him a quick startling grin. "Nobody can promise more than that," he said.

And with that final admonition, in a farewell reminiscent of the final scenes in Tolkien's The Return of the King, the Old Ones -- the great powers of the Light -- sail off, away from Earth and out of Time. Only one Old One remains, the now 12-year-old boy, Will Stanton -- the last and youngest of "the Old Ones" -- who will remain with his family and with the young friends he has made during his quests and battles. A young boy, but also an Old One and immortal, his life on Earth will continue as a "watchman" for the Light until the proper time arrives for him, too, to depart and join his fellows of the Light.

When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back;
Three from the circle, three from the track;
Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;
Five will return, and one go alone.

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¹Filmed as a highly unsuccessful movie with poor reviews in 2007, and released in the United States under the title The Seeker.

Quinquennial

Five years ago today, I nervously entered my first post on my newly adopted template for "Confused Ideas from the Northwest Corner." In that post, I noted that I'd spent a lot of time planning out and arranging the format, but that, having completed those details, wasn't really sure what I was now supposed to talk about.

Five years and 497 posts later, I have to admit that I'm amazed to have persisted so uncharacteristically, surprised that I'm still coming back here regularly and sharing my writings.

As I've noted on earlier anniversaries, my mix of subject matter has varied slightly over the years. During the first two years, many of my posts were aimed at politics, especially the Obama-Clinton battle for the Democratic nomination, the vehemence of my thundering pronouncements aided and abetted by comments and criticisms from another novice blogster, a very bright high school writer named Zachary (now a politically disaffected -- but academically very successful -- senior engineering student at the University of Colorado). With time, I gradually increased the percentage of posts devoted to book and movie reviews, comments on scientific items I came across in the press, and discussions of my personal enthusiasms for long hikes in foreign places and for making fumbling attempts at playing the piano.

What most my posts have in common is more a desire to organize and understand my own thoughts than to communicate those same thoughts to you, my hapless readers -- but, of course, both desires at all times co-exist.

So the guy on the haystack still sits there, five years later, and still ponders the fascinating and bewildering world in which he lives. I fully expect to find myself still pondering and still writing away when Year Six comes around. Thanks for sticking with me.

Floating high o'er vales and hills

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
--Wordsworth

Oh, William! How very true. One does grow weary of books and documents. Or, should I say, of internet and Kindle? But to wander in green fields -- during March around Seattle -- is to risk drowning in rain or, as grandma would have put it, catching your blessed death of cold.

But if I can't gambol over the hills and fields right now, I can at least plan for the future, looking forward to different climes and different months. After two consecutive years of hiking in Britain, I'll be returning in July for a third.

This time around, my 14-year-old niece Maya and I are planning a weeklong hike in Wordsworth's own Lake District in northwest England. We will be hiking seventy miles from the town of Ulverston in the south, near the Irish Sea, to Carlisle on the Scottish border, walking through the very heart of the Lake District. Although the total distance hiked will be shorter than on either my Hadrian's Wall or West Highland Way walks, the elevation gain will be significantly higher, ascending about 2,300 feet in one day alone.

The path leads through several small towns, tucked into valleys and lying beside lakes, and climbs at times over what are called the "high fells" -- which essentially means the higher mountainous areas.

Although, at Wordsworth's advice, I'll be escaping books, somehow my enjoyment of these hikes is enhanced by the magic of words. Fells, for example, and crags, moors, bracken, tarns, pikes and lanes -- words that were all used in a guide's brief description of the route. And proper names: Coniston Water, Village of Elterwater, Langdale Pikes, Cat Bells, Derwentwater, and Skiddaw Forest. We speak the same language and can encounter the same words in America, of course. But not in such concentrated effusion, a tangle of Saxon and Celtic that casts a glow of mystic antiquity over the entire region.

The hike ends in the border city of Carlisle, a pleasant town through which I passed near the end of my Hadrian's Wall hike, so I'll be ending up on familiar terrain. We'll also spend a couple of days sightseeing in London before the hike begins, letting our bodies catch up with the eight hour time difference.

Our hike is still four months away, but the anticipation allows me to brush aside thought of the Seattle drizzle, and to inhabit, mentally, for at least a few minutes at a time, a more exciting and fascinating world.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Keep your pinches to yourself

It's St. Patrick's Day. What's the Celtic equivalent for "Bah, humbug!"?

I'm not Irish. Well, there may be some Irish DNA traces in my cells. But, if so, those traces are miniscule, and probably of the scorned Scots-Irish variety. Certainly the only brogue I've ever affected was a clunky type of shoe I sometimes wore as a kid. I've never seen a four leafed clover. The only clovers I'm familiar with had three leaves and purple flowers that were attractive enough, but unfortunately all a-buzz with bumble bees.

Irish or not, St. Patrick's Day was a big deal as a kid. Not because anyone knew who St. Patrick was, but because if you didn't sport some wearing apparel colored green, everyone had implicit permission to pinch you. Of course, my fellow school inmates pinched me on other days as well; they just didn't shout "St. Patrick's Day!" while doing so.

St. Patrick, contrary to the belief of some non-Irish Americans, wasn't a leprechaun. Nor did he sport a green cap, or smoke from a long-stemmed pipe. He was a missionary, and not really very jolly. He wasn't what we today think of as Irish. He may have been born in what is now -- oh, the shame! -- the English county of Cumbria. He may even have been an amalgam of two totally different people, a guy named Palladius and Patrick proper, but that's still something for historians to sort out.

He probably lived between about 340 and 440, with his active work taking place in the latter fourth century. Those weren't carefree and frolicsome times in Ireland, or anywhere else. Patrick, so far as we know, wasn't given to pinching his peers for failing to wear green. The Irish have their little ways, however, and they weren't all that keen on being converted and baptized by this weird guy from England (although England wasn't yet England). He was seen as the fulfillment of an obscure Druid prophesy:

Across the sea will come Adze-head, crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house;
all his people will answer: "so be it, so be it."

Nevertheless, he did baptize "thousands," according to his own written account. And he did become the patron saint of Ireland, an honor given perhaps in shamefaced recompense for his somewhat frigid reception by the early Irish.

St. Patrick wasn't particularly meek and mild. When a local Irish "king" (leader of a small band of Celtic ruffians) sold some of St. Patrick's converts into slavery, St. Patrick hurled an excommunication at him and denounced the king's followers as "fellow citizens of the devils" and "associates of the Scots." The Irish could accept with some equanimity a relationship with the devil, but equating them with the heathen Scots ... well, faith and begorrah, that hurts!

Apart from St. Patrick's religious accomplishments, he is best known to a secular posterity as the saint who drove the snakes out of Ireland. And, true enough, there are no snakes in Ireland. (Except maybe in a zoo, or in such hypothetical roadside attractions as "Only 37 More Miles, See Amazing Snake Pit, Children Free When With Adults."

But sorry, Mike, Sean and Paddy. Neutral scientists claim that all the snakes were banished from Ireland not by St. Patrick, but by the ice packs of the last glacial period, some ten thousand years ago. Ireland has since kept elite, insular, non-serpentine company with such lands as New Zealand, Iceland, Greenland and Antarctica -- none of which was ever proselytized or even dreamed of by good St. Pat. Another pious legend exploded.

So if some of you want to run around today, pinching people in honor of a dour fourth century missionary who was ridiculed by the same Irish who now claim him as their patron saint, a man who is remembered today primarily as the guy who drove non-existent snakes off the Emerald Isle -- fine, be my guest. But those schoolyard pinches can damn well hurt, and don't any of you pinchers think I've forgotten who you are.

Intriguing Iran

Iran is surprising, as this blog has repeatedly suggested. Those who think of the country as a vast desert, inhabited by backward "Arabs," inhabit a dream world. And it's a bad dream. Yes, Iranian society is ruled by a repressive government, but the Iranian people -- many, many of them -- are too well educated and creative to simply submit to authority like a nation of toads.

To recapitulate two events of just the past few weeks: (1) The Iranian film A Separation took the Oscar for best foreign film -- an award that both delighted and worried the reigning mullahs. And (2) even more surprisingly, last month the Iranian Book News Agency (IBNA) issued a routine press release announcing that a Persian language edition of David Sedaris's best seller, Me Talk Pretty One Day, was about to be published in Iran. The release notes that the second half of the book tells of Sedaris's move to Normandy, together with his partner Hugh. The release continues:

Much of Sedaris's humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and often concerns his family life, his middle class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, Greek heritage, various jobs, education, drug use, and his life in France, and most recently in London and the South Downs.

Maybe not exactly the sort of entertainment you'd expect a fundamentalist Islamic regime to offer its people? But in Iran you just never know.

It's been nearly a year now since my own much scribbled-about trip to Iran. My own first surprise, after a late night arrival in Tehran, occurred the next morning as I stepped outside. There, looming before me, was a rugged range of snowy mountains. Intellectually, I was fully aware that the Elburz Mountains separated Tehran from the Caspian Sea, and that northern Tehran itself was built up into the foothills of that mountain range. Still, seeing all that dazzling snow as I stepped out of the hotel was something of a jolt, a sight that seemed incongruous, in my own mind, with my preconceptions of the Middle East.

All these various strands of surprise by, and pleasure with, Iran and its people came together for me this afternoon as I received the April issue of The Atlantic. In a short article,¹ climber Gregory Crouch describes his experiences while on a serious climbing expedition last spring in the Elburz (he transliterates the range's name as "Alborz").

No, he didn't "accidentally" hike across the border from Iraq. In another of those Iranian surprises, the expedition was a joint venture between the American Alpine Club and the Alpine Club of Iran, with men and women from both nations participating. Making an ascent of Alam Kuh, the second highest peak in Iran, Crouch and two American partners, one male and female, climbed together with an Iranian married couple, the woman being one of Iran's best female rock climbers. Other members of the party, both American and Iranian, made the climb by a different route.

The expedition ran into some minor bureaucratic hassles before it got started, but the ultimate message of the article was that climbing is alive and well in Iran, where it is unusually popular among the better educated segments of the population, and that climbers from all nations form a like-minded community regardless of political differences among their respective governments. For me, the article also reaffirmed my conviction that Iran is a complex nation, and that even its Islamic rulers permit -- surprisingly; sporadically, perhaps; and unpredictably -- many more freedoms than we here in the West may suspect.

Excellent Iranian movies, a strong Iranian climbing community, American-Iranian exchanges -- and a healthy appreciation by Iranians of the bittersweet humor of David Sedaris. Yes. I do realize that Germans and Americans were toasting their mutual friendship and cultural kinship right up until 1939. It didn't prevent World War II.

Still, as I noted on Facebook, Iran isn't the sort of country I'd care to carpet bomb, thank you.

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Photo from The Atlantic. Caption: "Two climbers, one Iranian and one American, prepare to strike out from base camp on an ascent in the Alborz Mountains."

¹Gregory Crouch, "The Peaks of Persia," The Atlantic (Apr. 2012).

Ides of March

"Beware the Ides of March"
--Julius Caesar, Act I, scene 2

Julius had other plans, of course, and ignored the warning -- leading to his assassination on the floor of the Senate. Death under the knives of 23 Senators -- a fate not unfamiliar to national leaders in our own time, even if nowadays the knifing is more metaphorical.

But, as every schoolboy knows, Caesar's demise occurred on the "Ides of March." What is this "Ides" business, you might (but didn't) ask? Every schoolboy knows the answer to that as well, but -- as a perusal of my recent essays suggests -- I've really been hard up for blog topics recently, and today the Ides of March seems to present an appropriately topical topic.

Now you -- and our hypothetical schoolboy (why never a schoolgirl?) -- may simply assume that the 15th of any month, for some mystic reason cherished by the ancients, was arbitrarily called the Ides. Just as we, in our day, have picked a mid-winter date for retail sales promotions and have called it, pulling a name out of a hat, "President's Day." But you -- and our schoolboy (school child?) -- wouldn't be quite correct.

Ides is our English corruption of the Latin word idus, a small but interesting word that may or may not be, ultimately, of Etruscan origin. ("Etruscans" = a clever, artistic and commercially proficient people who were flattened early on by their dour, brutish, but determined Roman neighbors, who (adding insult to injury) insisted on calling the Etruscans "Tyrrheni." A warning we should ponder, a warning against taking dour and brutish neighbors (I'm thinking of Canadians) for granted.) But I digress. (Or I excessively parenthesize.) The word Ides is probably derived from, or otherwise related etymologically to, the Latin word iduare, meaning "to divide."

The Ides thus was approximately the date that divided the month in half. For months with 31 days, like March, it occurred on the 15th. For other months, it occurred on the 13th. The original idea seemed to be that the Ides would mark the full moon of each month, but since Roman months were uniformly lengthier than the lunar month, I can't quite see how this would have worked.

The Romans had similar appellational inspirations for the 1st and 9th days of their months, calling them, respectively, the Kalends and the Nones. The Kalends, according to those who spend their lives thinking about such matters, probably was originally intended to mark the new moon of each month, and the Nones, the (waxing) half moon.

Once the Romans had thought up names for special moon days in the first half of the month, they seem to have lost interest. After the Ides of each month, a gray sea of dates known only by numbers stretched on placidly to the 31st (or 30th).

For those dates not lucky enough to have classy names like the Kalends or Nones or Ides, the Romans simply counted the days until the next named benchmark. Perhaps because the Arabs hadn't yet invented the zero, they called the benchmark itself the first day; therefore, for example, two days before the Ides (as we would call it) would be (to the Roman way of thinking) the third day before the Ides. Once past the Ides of each month, the Romans were stranded in a confusing realm where the month to which the formal date referred didn't correspond to the actual month as lived on the ground. E.g. ("exempli gratia", another curious Roman invention), March 20 would be the thirteenth day before the Kalends of April, or XIII Kal. Apr., even though the Romans were fully aware that they still had many days to suffer through yet another dreary March.

Today, March 14, would be the second day (yes, second, remember? Keep up!) before the Ides of March. II Id. Mart., one would think. But the day immediately prior to a benchmark date was instead called the Pridie (think about it, ok? -- pre + die, day before).

Therefore -- today is Prid. Id. Mart. (Mart., since they called March, Martius).

So, all I've been trying to get to, folks, is a simple greeting:

Happy Prid. Id. Mart.!!

And please, tomorrow, do beware the Ides of March.

(Which a generation or so ago was the deadline for filing federal income tax returns, which, while less painful than an assassination, still lent the expression a certain poignancy.)

His Honor

I slipped into a ridiculous black robe, opened the door, and strolled into a hushed courtroom whose inhabitants -- somewhat alarmingly -- jumped to their feet as soon as I entered. Avoiding tripping over my robe and falling flat on my face, I made my way to the front, climbed up to the judge's bench, and intoned, in a voice that I hoped sounded authoritative, "Please be seated."

In front of me, at the counsel benches, I observed four youthful "attorneys," with faces incongruously unlined and not yet disfigured with cynicism, smiling up at me with hopeful eagerness.

Yes, here I was in the King County Courthouse, berobed and befuddled on a sunny Saturday afternoon, presiding over one of several trials concurrently under way in various courtrooms -- part of a regional mock trial competition.

I enjoy contact with enthusiastic law school students. I have frequently presided over appellate moot court competitions, where the students argue the legal issues of an appeal and my job is to interrupt their prepared arguments and ask them questions they hadn't anticipated. But this was, so far as I can recall, the first time I had judged a mock trial. The rhythm is different.

I've spent my career posing objections to my opponent's questions. I found it enlightening, and interesting, to find myself on the judicial side of the objections. Each witness has been called to, in a sense, tell a story. Like the jury, the judge gets absorbed in the story. Or he becomes bored and lets his mind wander. In either case, counsel's objection brings him swiftly back to the matter at hand.

Nothing would be more embarrassing, I would think, than hearing an objection and realizing that you don't recall the question to which the objection is being posed. But there counsel are, standing in front of you, staring at you and waiting for your ruling. All you can do is buy time by asking the attorney to explain his objection, and perhaps give his opponent a chance to respond. By that time, with a little luck you've been able to piece together the problem and arrive at a decision.

Actually, the novelty and fascination of presiding over a short (a bit over two hours) trial was sufficient that I was never caught unaware, never let my mind drift off. (But I can see the dangers of narcolepsy that might lurk if I had been hearing boring testimony, day after day, in a tedious trial.) Whether the students' objections were well-founded or not, it was fun to observe their thought processes -- and these law school student "attorneys" were quite bright. Fortunately, the evidentiary rules -- at least the ones apt to apply at this level of practice -- are sufficiently well-engrained in my mind that my rulings came quickly and without much hesitation.

The mock trial left me with a couple of impressions: (1) These law school students presented their cases better than many "experienced attorneys" I've faced in real trials; and (2) the power of being a judge is absolutely intoxicating.

As I posted on my Facebook page (with privacy controls fully in place), it's really quite irritating that in all these years, the Governor has never possessed the wisdom and basic good sense to call and suggest that she appoint me to the bench.

I would have accepted before the words were out of her mouth.
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Photo: Stock photo of high school mock trial.

Just you wait, 'Enry 'Iggins!

He was a sculptor, living on the island of Cyprus. She was a statue. He must have been one hell of a good sculptor, because -- although claiming to be a "confirmed bachelor" -- he fell in love with his marble creation. He beseeched and prayed to Aphrodite, his prayers were answered, and his statue warmed to his kiss.

They married, and lived happily ever after.

The sculptor's name was Pygmalion; his bride was Galatea. The story was most famously told by Ovid, but was based on much earlier Greek legends.

Last night I saw a local production of George Bernard Shaw's adaptation of the legend. Pygmalion was recast, of course, as famous phoneticist Henry Higgins; his statue became Eliza Doolittle. Eliza didn't start out made literally of stone, but -- as a girl selling flowers on the street -- she was nothing more than a statue in the background so far as Edwardian society was concerned. Higgins sought to bring her to "life," not with a prayer and a kiss, but by teaching her to speak and act like a "lady." He did it on a bet, and he did it in six months, presenting her as a duchess at an Ambassador's garden party -- and getting away with it.

The story is most familiar to us as Lerner and Loewe's 1956 Broadway musical, My Fair Lady. The musical adopted much of Shaw's dialogue verbatim, interspersed with musical numbers that remain well known to the present day. Broadway being Broadway, the musical had a romantic ending -- we watch Higgins suddenly realizing he is smitten with Eliza ("I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face"), Eliza returning to him after leaving earlier in a huff, and Higgins uttering his final words -- spoken stubbornly but with obvious affection -- "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers."

Shaw was not such a romaticist. His Henry Higgins remains stubborn to the end. Only when Eliza stands up to him, before storming out to attend her father's wedding, does a flicker of appreciation cross his face, as he exclaims some Edwardian equivalent of "she's a feisty little filly, ain't she!" His appreciation, it turns out, is most likely for his own finesse in crafting such a delicious work of art. "Galatea!" he exults as the lights dim to black. (Shaw actually wrote several endings for the play, none of which seemed to completely satisfy him, but I'm describing the production I watched last night.)

I've always enjoyed the musical -- as viewed in the 1964 Rex Harrison/Audrey Hepburn, Oscar-winning film -- despite some sniffing by critics at whatever liberties the musical took with the play -- but it was fun to finally hear Shaw's lines in their original context. Shaw was a complex man with many interests -- the play has much to say about the relationship between how one one speaks and one's position in the British class system. But essentially the play -- more so than the musical -- strikes a blow for feminism. To Shaw, the statue comes to life not when her "sculptor" kisses her, but when she learns to stand on her own two feet, unconcerned about her sculptor's approval, and walks out the door, head held high.

Whether "Pygmalion" realizes that his "Galatea" has only then truly become a living human being is left hanging in the air. Whatever his enlightenment, or lack thereof, his "Galatea," at least, will now live happily ever after -- with or without the future companionship of "'Enry 'Iggins."

Harboring a masked bandit

In 2007, I wrote a few paragraphs about the guy in Oregon who rescued an injured fawn, nursed it back to health, and kept both it and its subsequent offspring on his property -- only to have them seized by the state wildlife department, probably to be put to "sleep." I suggested a certain over-zealousness by game officials, and a certain lack of rationality.

Arizona has gone a step further. A man named Stan saw a raccoon drowning in the Colorado river. Being a kind-hearted sort, he jumped in and rescued it. The raccoon, now named Sonny, was quickly domesticated. Locals got used to seeing Stan walking around town with Sonny perched happily on his shoulder.

Uh uh uh uh, boys and girls! Don't you ever go trying to rescue a raccoon in Arizona! Under state law, the raccoon "is the only animal in Arizona that can be legally taken with a firearm at night." It can't be kept as a pet without first obtaining an "exotic animal license." The Arizona Game and Fish Department somehow heard about this peculiar miscreant walking about with an exotic masked bandit on his shoulder. And they pounced!

Stan was arrested. No, not given a ticket. Arrested. Sonny was seized and taken into custody where he will learn -- in his final moments -- never to trust the animal called "man." (This being Arizona, he'll probably be strapped into a tiny electric chair.)

I've entertained you on occasion with my on-going wars against neighborhood raccoons who attempt to enter my house and eat my cats' food. The varmints have been quite a pain in the neck, although I seem to have them stymied at present.

But despite my adversarial relationship with raccoons, I now declare: Arizona, this is just one more of your totally imbecilic outrages! I suggest we put the Oregon and Arizona game department officials on a sinking raft headed down the Colorado, facing the prospect of drowning.

I won't bother throwing them a rope.
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Photo: Sonny

UPDATE (2-25-12): State officials state that Stan was arrested on an outstanding misdemeanor warrant, not for harboring the raccoon. They also state that Sonny will be put to "sleep" only if tests show an infectious disease. Otherwise, he probably will be adopted by some appropriate institution. Better an orphanage than "inappropriate" parents, as we've discussed in a different context.

Out of many ...

E pluribus unum: "Out of many, one."

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us -- the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of "anything goes." Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an "awesome God" in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

--Barack Obama, 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Speech

As I puzzle my way through the world of American politics, I try to understand how the right wing thinks, as well as the left wing and the center. And, in doing so, I run into a constant thread of visceral dislike of and disdain for President Obama -- not just for his political and economic positions, but for him as a person. And I've wondered, why?

I've wondered, because most of his political agenda -- achieved or proposed -- is fairly typical fare for a Democratic politician, certainly not much different from that of a centrist such as Bill Clinton. And yet, Obama is denounced, both by politicians and by average Joes commenting on web pages, as the most dangerous president this nation has ever confronted -- a socialist, a foreigner, a denier of American "exceptionalism," a man "who is not one of us." I could only assume that this vitriol represented a racist reaction to the first black man to serve as president, as well as distrust of his unusually cosmopolitan upbringing. And, in part, this may well be the case.

But I've been attending a bi-weekly series of lectures about the 2012 campaign at the University of Washington, offered by David Domke, the Chairman of the UW Communications Department (an excellent and highly entertaining speaker). Last night, during the fourth lecture of the series, Domke contended that President Obama -- consistently since his 2004 keynote address -- has pushed an agenda of "inclusiveness." Obama has insisted that America is a family, and that our family's membership is broad enough to include all races, religions (including atheists and agnostics), marital statuses and family types, sexual orientations, and varying national origins and customs.

Domke noted that right wing politicians who hint that Obama "is not one of us" are correct in believing that Obama is different from every prior president in his embrace of all faiths, in his insistence on the common ideals of the three "Abrahamic" faiths, in his color blind approach to race, in his ease with and around gays. But, Domke added, Obama actually does not differ greatly in his "inclusiveness" from the American people of today -- probably not differing from a majority of the voters, and certainly not from a great majority of the younger cohorts of voters.

It is this sense by the right wingers -- that Obama represents the future -- that has fueled their desperate opposition. Their opposition may be expressed by the more adroit as opposition to specific policies -- and of course conservatives do oppose those policies -- but it is their sense that the America they know, love, and understand is slipping away through their fingers that infuses their opposition with so much emotion. It is their sense that America as a Christian nation -- for many, a white Christian nation, a nation that sits down to dinner and says grace as a nuclear family, as portrayed by Norman Rockwell in his paintings -- is being submerged by wave after wave of new customs, new colors, new languages, new family groupings, and new religious practices. It's their conviction that America's greatness rests on the bedrock of the happy families shown in the old Dick and Jane readers, in the Rockwell paintings, that leads to their deeply felt fear that America is "doomed."

Understanding these fears makes it easier -- for me, at least -- to understand contemporary American politics. As of this date, it's uncertain which party will win the 2012 elections. But the trend for the future is undeniable, and it is not a trend that favors the right wing. Professor Domke displayed a complex graph that showed support for gay marriage to be higher among voters aged 18-30 in Mississippi (in Mississippi!) than it is among voters over 65 in Massachusetts -- the two states that overall represent opposite poles with respect to support for that issue.

The nation is moving rapidly away from the comfortable images portrayed in the old Norman Rockwell paintings, moving toward a far more cosmopolitan society. Obama is not the cause of this movement, although he understands and supports it. He is merely a reflection of where our society is today, and certainly where -- necessarily, as a result of simple demographics -- it is heading.

Every political issue is worthy of dispute on its merits. Conservatives are not always wrong, and liberals are not always right. But to oppose the president because "he is not one of us" is to stand opposed to where we're irreversibly heading, to stand opposed to America's future.

And that's not a winning strategy.

Deportation

When John Smith, Sr., was 18, he spent a year in China on a church mission. While there, he met a local girl; one thing led to another, and his son was born in Hong Kong. The couple never married, but John returned to the United States with his baby, John Jr. Immigration officials assumed that the baby was a citizen and did not ask for documentation.

John Jr. grew up in the U.S. and never returned to China or Hong Kong. When he was 29, John Jr. was convicted of "trademark counterfeiting" and served a short term in prison. On his release, he was ordered deported to China as an alien. Just seven days later, he was put on a plane to Hong Kong.

Children of American parents born overseas usually become American citizens by birth. However, for a citizen father to pass on American citizenship to his child born overseas, he must have lived in the U.S. for at least five years after the age of 14. Since John Jr.'s father was only 18 when his son was born, it was impossible for him to meet that requirement, and John Jr. did not qualify for citizenship.

Following his deportation, John Jr. hired a lawyer and filed a motion to re-open the matter, based on constitutional objections to the statute under which he had been deported. But another surprise awaited him: a statute provides that once the claimant leaves the U.S., by deportation or otherwise, he is barred from re-opening the question of his citizenship and deportation.

John Jr., thankfully, is not a real person. But he could have been, and his story may in fact be based on a real set of facts.

I served on a three-attorney panel last night at the University of Washington law school, judging the semi-finals of an appellate advocacy competition. As usual, the student "lawyers" were excellent. Since the participants were students who had survived earlier rounds and had reached the semi-finals, I was seeing some of the best of the best. Their legal arguments involved minute dissection of a web of statutory and regulatory law, as well as issues of constitutional law.

But I tell John Jr.'s story because it points out how absurd America's immigration laws can be in practice, and the gross injustices that can result in individual cases. As one of my fellow judges asked the "U.S. Attorney," what's to stop California police from sweeping up large numbers of persons with Hispanic names or appearances on routine drug charges, for an immigration judge to determine that those unable to produce appropriate documentation are illegal aliens, and for them to be deported virtually overnight to Mexico? American citizens caught up in this drug sweep, unable for some reason to produce proof of citizenship before the immigration hearing would -- once deported -- be unable to re-open the queston of their citizenship once they ended up in Mexico.

Our fictitious John Jr. came to the U.S. as a baby in his father's arms. He grew up an American, with no subsequent contact with China. Both he and his father believed he was an American. Twenty-nine is a late age for such a person to learn for the first time that he's actually Chinese. Seven days after that determination is an early time to find oneself on a one-way flight to China. But, as the student attorney for the government pointed out, under present law, not even excusable ignorance of your non-citizenship is a bar to deportation.

This moot court appeal points out one of the many ways in which American immigration law -- rigidly applied as it is, with no real sense of equity in individual cases -- is unfair both to American citizens somehow caught up in it, and to those who would be American citizens but for a technicality of which they were understandably unaware.

A rustle in the dark

... as you may well imagine, the Professor's views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.

--M. R. James, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"

Thus ends one of M. R. James's most famous horror stories, a story about something that comes when one whistles, something that embodies itself in crumpled bed linen. Linen that moves about the room at night.

I re-read James's masterpiece after reading an article about the author's life and work in last week's New Yorker. James was the quiet, studious provost at King's College, Cambridge. He spent his life locating and poring over old manuscripts. But he's best known for writing several volumes of chilling short stories.

James was an interesting character, and his stories may or may not be self-revelatory psychologically. But the stories are the sort that make the hair rise on the back of your neck, despite a total absence of blood, gore, and decapitations. Merely a sheet on a bed that moves about -- once the candle is snuffed out.

The New Yorker article, and my subsequent glancing back through a volume of James's stories, instantly took me back to a summer day when I was 14. It was a hot day, and I had walked over to the house of a vacationing aunt and uncle, where I performed my daily job of moving the sprinklers from place to place about the yard. I had brought a recently-purchased book with me -- Tales of Terror, edited by Boris Karloff. I set up the sprinklers in their initial positions, got them running, and went inside the cool house to relax and amuse myself for a half hour until I'd have to move them again.

The story I began reading was -- as I now discover -- a classic: "The Willows," by Algernon Blackwood. A camping story, about a couple of men who are canoeing down the Danube near the Austrian/Hungarian frontier. They pull up to a small sandy island to spend the night, an island forested with willow trees. During a night somewhat reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project, they sense that the willows are malevolent or are at least the expressions of something that's malevolent. At the climax of the story, the body of a peasant floats past their campsite with bizarre funnel shaped gouges in his face, the mark of whatever forces surround them in the willows.

Blackwood's story ends. But before I finished reading, I became conscious that I was sitting and reading all alone in a cool, dark, quiet house -- a small, simple rambler with which I was totally familiar -- and that my heart was pounding. The house was dead silent, except for the slow "tick tock" of a pendulum clock on the mantle. Not only the house was silent, but the entire world, indoors and outdoors, seemed hushed.

I quickly exited the cool house and sat on the back porch in the hot sun. I continued reading. I still had a couple of hours of sprinkling to oversee. But I read outdoors, free of whatever menace my aunt's normally friendly home, now at my back, seemed to offer.

A truly well written ghost story, or "tale of terror," doesn't jump at you or spatter you with gore. It merely suggests that all is not as you think it is, that worlds exist far beyond our powers of perception, and that those worlds may well be hostile and menacing. A world, as "The Willows" suggests, which is

a new order of experience, and in the true sense of the word unearthly, [a world where] great things go on unceasingly...vast purposes...that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul, ... an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows.

For some reason, I felt safe sitting outside, where the sun beat down on me, the breeze blew in the trees, and the sprinklers spurted rhythmically. I hadn't yet read anything by M. R. James. His stories would have warned me that the greatest horrors can present themselves in the most pleasant, mundane and unassuming of locations.

The ability to be scared out of your wits by a good yarn is part of the charm of being 14. It's surprising (and a bit alarming) how a good enough story can make your hair stand on end, even as an adult.

I can't find my old childhood copy of Tales of Terror. I've just now ordered a used copy through Amazon. Parts of us never grow up.

Why I'm not voting "libertarian"

As you approach the Grand Canyon, driving north from Phoenix and Flagstaff, you pass through the town of Tusayan, just five miles south of the national park boundary. Tusayan's 558 residents live in 313 households, clustered in an area of a quarter square mile. Its voters first voted to incorporate as a town in 2010.

The vote to incorporate followed strong lobbying from developers, businessmen who hoped to construct their proposed development with minimal governmental interference. The newly elected town council -- whose members now face a recall election next month -- obediently approved the requested development.

What kind of development did the council of this small town approve? How about 3 million square feet of hotels, spas and retail outlets -- in a town with a population of 558? According to a story in today's New York Times, the council's approval of the development faces a referendum vote in May, a referendum that the developers are fighting in court to prevent.

The town itself has only two wells, a water source that barely provides for the existing population. The impact of such a massive development on the national park itself is even more worrisome.

... it pushes up against the limits of what we can provide,” said David Uberuaga, the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. “Everything is getting maxed out. They’re just doing it for the almighty dollar. It’s a gold mine they’re trying to exploit.”

It's schemes like this that turn me against the wave of support for "libertarianism," at least libertarianism in its purist form and taken to its logical conclusion.

Ron Paul, as Wikipedia notes, is "a free-market environmentalist, he asserts private property rights in relation to environmental protection and pollution prevention." According to the SourceWatch wikipedia:

Paul's stand on the environment is well-known. He is for the dissolution of the EPA, FDA, Department of the Interior and other government agencies whose overt mission is to protect citizens and the environment. Paul has also called for the privatizing of the National Park system .... Republicans for Environmental Protection gave him a score of 17 out of 100.

Libertarians, at least in their purist form, believe that property rights are absolute, and that every landowner has the absolute right to use his land as he pleases. They ignore what economists call externalities -- the fact that using your land as you please may impose costs on neighboring landowners and on the public in general.

Just as a steel mill built in downtown Beverly Hills would cause an enormous decrease in property values for miles around, so a 3 million square foot mega-mall on the border of Grand Canyon National Park may well destroy or damage the values for which the park was created, values that visitors travel from all over the world to experience.

This doesn't mean that nothing should ever be built within five miles of a national park. It does mean that values are at stake in addition to the developer's right to develop the property that he has acquired for development. Those values include the integrity of the neighboring national park, as well as the effects on residents of the small town itself in which the project is to be constructed.

Various land use regulatory agencies -- at the city or town, county, state and federal level -- protect these interests. The process for gaining regulatory approvals may seem cumbersome, and at times could well be improved. But libertarianism would strike down all regulatory protection for the public, and leave national parks and other environmental treasures to the mercy of developers and the free market.

We're not that kind of country. Nor should we be.

My cats drive me nuts!

The text used in my college survey course in psychology included a series of amazing paintings by Louis Wain, an early twentieth century painter afflicted with schizophrenia. Wain's paintings of cats became increasingly abstract and even frightening over time, as his symptoms worsened. My psych text offered the paintings, presumably, as an illustration of how the mental illness may affect the perceptions of its victim.

I found the paintings interesting for that reason, as well as aesthetically pleasing, and I've had them posted on this blog's sidebar almost since its inception. (I've always expected someone to ask some pointed questions about why I seemed so interested in madness, but, of course, no one ever did.)

It never occurred to me that the subject matter of the paintings -- cats -- had any relation to Wain's mental illness. Not until today, when I read an article in this month's Atlantic.¹

If you spend much time around your cat's litter box, you've probably been exposed to a parasite found in cat feces called Toxoplasma gondii. T. gondii can be found in about 20 percent of Americans, and is known to be a health hazard to people with weakened immune systems. In healthy individuals, however, it causes at most mild flu symptoms before the parasite is overcome by the body's defenses and ends up dormant in the brain. This has been scientists' common understanding for many years.

But a Czech scientist named Jaroslav Flegr has discovered evidence that the parasite, rather than being dormant, works silently in the brain, rewiring connections in a way that affects the host's behavior. The purpose of this rewiring is to make the usual post-feline hosts, rats and mice, act in a way that will result in their being easily killed and eaten by another cat. For example, the "rewired" rodent becomes sexually attracted to the odor of cat urine, a response called "fatal feline attraction." When the cat eats the rodent, it also ingests the T. gondii that infects the rodent. The parasite finds itself cozily back in a feline environment, which happens to be the only environment in which it can reproduce. T. gondii has no interest in humans as such, and any effect by the parasite on human behavior would be inadvertent from an evolutionary standpoint.

But such behavioral effects do exist, Flegr has shown. For most of us, the effects are minor. Infected males, for example, tend statistically to become a bit more introverted, suspicious, uncaring about others' feelings, and inclined to ignore rules. (No, I'm not going to try drawing political conclusions!). But for persons who are genetically so inclined, Flegr believes, the parasite may also trigger the onset of schizophrenia.

Interestingly enough, so far as we know schizophrenia did not seem to exist until the late 1700's -- which is also the time when large numbers of urban Europeans began keeping cats as pets. And recent studies have shown that schizophrenia is two to three times as prevalent in persons infected with T. gondii parasites as in those who are not.

My cats and I watch each other, as we always have, with mutual curiosity. My own curiosity, however, is now tinged with surges of suspicion. Are my furry friends responsible for those psychedelic nightmares I seem to have at times? Do they explain the voices outside my window -- the ones just barely intelligible, but who seem to utter my name with contempt? I shudder. I feel increasingly introverted, as I regard Loki and Muldoon with a newly critical eye -- and with less concern for their own feline feelings than in the past.

The article does have reassuring things to say, I have to add, and I recommend its perusal to my own readership. I certainly suggest you read it before you drown your own cats, or before signing yourself into a mental hospital.

Still, one might as well be prudent ....
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¹ Kathleen McAuliffe, "How Your Cat is Making You Crazy" (The Atlantic, March 2012)