The Newsstand Sophisticate

The Onion has one man’s story of how he came to play the music favored by dentists and hotel bar managers everywhere.

“Eventually, you grow up a little and give up your dream of an experimental hardcore rock-jazz trio called ‘Orbit.’”

“The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper,” The Weekly World News, is ceasing print publication. The online version will still be updated, but you’ll no longer be able to read about Bat Boy, Hillary Clinton adopting an alien baby, or the discovery of an eleventh commandment while you wait for your groceries to be scanned. From now on it’ll be nothing but celebrities and recipes and the occasional booklet on healing foods of the Bible or horoscopes for cats.

(Via DSTPFW).

If you’ve ever wondered what your cat, or other people’s cats, do while you’re not around, wonder no more. A German engineer, Juergen Perthold, modified a small digital camera to take pictures at timed intervals and then attached it to his cat’s collar. The result, a pictorial diary of Mr. Lee’s adventures—sitting under cars, staring down other cats, and provoking a snake—can be seen here.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about a possible uptick in religious observance in Europe as governments reduce their support of established churches. The idea is that “deregulating” churches, like deregulating any other industry, will boost competition, in this case for souls:

“The enemy of faith, say the supply-siders, is not modernity but state-regulated markets that shield big, established churches from competition. In America, where church and state stand apart, more than 50% of the population worships at least once a month. In Europe, where the state has often supported—but also controlled—the church with money and favors, the rate in many countries is 20% or less.”

I wish the activists hell-bent on making the U.S. government more “Christian” would read and absorb the lesson of this article. Trying to make the government more like Old Time Gospel Hour might be more likely to bring a little bit of the spirit of the Department of Motor Vehicles to the house of God. Conversely, really militant atheists might start supporting faith-based initiatives and vouchers for religious schools as a reliable way to reduce religiosity in the country.

The L.A. Times has an interesting article on population projections for my native state, California. (Any shocked Texans reading this will be relieved to know that though I was born in San Francisco, shortly before my birth my grandmother sent my parents a jar of dirt from her backyard in Dallas to place under the delivery bed so I could be born over Texas soil.)

In the article, Jack Kyser, the chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, refers to California as “a country masquerading as a state.” By 2050 the state is expected to have 60 million people, the majority of whom will be Latinos. I’m sure the xenophobes are already panicking about the incomprehensible idea of people of Hispanic descent forming a majority in cities like San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles.

When I was in high school in Northern California in the late 1980s, it was obvious that the infrastructure of highways and the education system in the state were crumbling. I haven’t lived there since then, though I visit fairly often, and I’ve seen some improvement, but the challenges the state will face in coping with that kind of growth are formidable. The Los Angeles area in particular will have to figure out a way to encourage greater density and redo the strip mall and parking lot model that prevails in most of the area. Perhaps they can learn something from San Francisco, which after New York is the most densely populated city in the country.

California has, at least since the mid-twentieth century, been the state to look to for the earliest manifestations of trends that eventually hit the rest of the country, and I bet the way the state addresses this population boom will not prove an exception. I hope I am still alive in 2050 to see what happens.

In an earlier post on a New York Times article on state oppression in Iran, I pointed out the oddity of the reporter Neil McFarquhar’s claim that a judicial decision not to carry out a public stoning of an adulterous couple makes Iran “a difficult country to separate into black and white.” As is often the case when the supposedly liberal-minded try not to sound too judgmental, the meaning of the assertion is not clear.

If the reporter (or copyeditor) meant that you can’t judge the Iranian people by the actions of its government, he is right, but the point is obvious. If he meant, though, that we shouldn’t be too emphatic in our condemnation of the Islamic Republic of Iran because it’s capricious and unpredictable in its use of state violence, well, I disagree, to say the least. That Iranians are sometimes able to prevent their government from carrying out unjust and barbaric practices does not change the fact that any state that punishes adultery as a crime with stoning deserves condemnation, not suspension of judgment.

The hedging and moral muddle of that paragraph have been rendered superfluous, anyway. According to Iranian feminist site Women’s Field, Jafar Kiani, the male half of the couple, was stoned to death July 5, while his fellow accused, Mokarrameh Ebrahimi, waits in prison with her children.

Norm rounds up some of the condemnations, from the United Nations High Commissioner and Amnesty International and elsewhere, of this barbaric criminal act, carried out by an institution, the state, whose primary role in a just world would be to protect the rights of its citizens.

Just in case you were concerned, the Newsstand Sophisticate is suitable for the whole family:

(via DSTPFW)

I’ve been reading Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. It’s a gratifying book to read when you live, as I do, in a state where politicians routinely try to outdo each other with public displays of piety, for it shows that the idea entertained by religious conservatives that the U.S. was a nation of God-fearing Christians until the 1960s came along is pure, uncut buncombe. It’s also a bit depressing to read, as it seems clear that current politicians with the religious views of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln (who never joined a church) might not be able to be elected.

In addition to writing about Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll, and Susan B. Anthony, Jacoby mentions a Missouri-based freethinking cartoonist named Watson Heston, whose “Bible Comically Illustrated” sold 10,000 copies in 1900 and probably sent the Baptists of his day into paroxysms of wounded outrage (though Jacoby doesn’t mention any Baptists carrying “Behead Those Who Insult Christianity” placards). The drawings are somewhat crude, but there’s an appealing absurdist sense of humor behind them.

You can see a few of his illustrations here, and can order a CD-ROM of his work, along with other freethinker writings on the Bible here.

David Thompson recently linked to a video site where you can view Vanessa Engle’s BBC documentary series, “Lefties.” The series profiles three radical projects in Margaret Thatcher-era Britain: the attempt to start a socialist newspaper, revolutionary feminists who declared that political commitment required women to become lesbians, and middle-class university graduates heralding “the revolution” by living as squatters in South London. It’s a fascinating documentary, and it’s hard not to feel a mirthful derision and contempt for many of the ideologues profiled—all the most unpleasant aspects of the self-righteously indignant and sanctimonious lefty are presented in vivid fashion.

Nevertheless, I found myself feeling something close to sympathy for a few of the folks in the series. Most of us want to change the world in certain ways and to be part of a community that shares that desire. We all face moments when our vision of the way the world is—often built up over long periods of time and through considerable effort of thought and debate—is eroded by the indifferent reality of the world as it actually is. When this happens, it can be very painful to do the right thing: to alter our even abandon our theory in the light of the facts.

In the battle between belief and reality, the lefties in “Lefties” almost all choose to preserve the purity of their vision no matter the complications, and even to goose themselves into ever greater heights of absurdity and dissonance with the world they live in. It’s an act of defiance, and somewhat admirable in the way bizarre feats of will power, like eating sixty-six hot dogs in twelve minutes, can sometimes be, but it’s also indistinguishable from the homesteaders in the loonier precincts of religious millennarianism. The squatters who insist on the imminent arrival of the revolution are not much different from the Seventh-Day Adventists that confidently predicted the exact date of the second coming only to push the day ahead just as confidently every time the Nazarene failed to return.

I wonder if there’s some retrospectively obvious turning point where each of these people could have chosen to alter their theory rather than wall themselves off from criticism or common sense. The difficulty lies in the fact that they may have started out trying to realize worthwhile things—sexual equality, poverty relief, a new newspaper. But they’ve convinced themselves that altering their mental edifice of political “certainties” would be to abandon those earlier idealistic commitments, which of course is not true.

Listening to them makes you realize how easily we deceive ourselves. Self-deception is the well-spring of both great tragedy and comedy, which is why this film is so funny and so mortifying at the same time.

It also has a great soundtrack, culled from the era: Joy Division, the Smiths, Magazine, and more.

The American colonies declared their independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain two-hundred-and-thirty-one years ago today. Thomas Jefferson’s stirring document is still well worth reading.

The Fourth of July is not a solemn holiday. Most Americans celebrate by drinking beer at cook-outs and exploding fireworks. So for all those, American or otherwise, who celebrate their independence today, here’s an excerpt from H. L. Mencken’s “The Declaration of Independence in American”:

“When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

“All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else. That any government that don’t give a man them rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any government don’t do this, then the people have got a right to give it the bum’s rush and put in one that will take care of their interests.”