AZ Thunderstorm!

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Looking out the window, I’d thought of taking a dip in the pool. Pretty windy! I went outside to look around. Light rain, then, ka-BOOM! Okay, no swim this evening. Light rain, just enough to tease the the landscape plants a little bit, but the patio’s still too hot to stay damp. Heat lighting: a parade of kettledrums dances invisibly across the sky. I step out to the pool to inspect what looks like a bird’s nest, blown into the pool. There’ll be lots of skimming tomorrow morning! Then, a blinding flash-CRASH, very close! I wait for the sound of the fire engines, but it never happens. Now, light rainwater trickles lightly down the downspouts. Open the windows and sliders: free air conditioning. This Arizona springtime T-storm may not be much; we’ve seen a lot worse here. But it’s enough to keep me indoors!

Rhetoric: Fallacy of Disenfranchisement

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I’ve long been fascinated by rhetorical fallacies, because we encounter so many of them that they begin to fall into recognizable patterns. I even wrote a 2004 article “Rhetoric 101,” primarily to aid in sorting out cascading political arguments about gay marriage equality.

Most likely the same as you, I can’t keep track of all these categories of rhetorical error. Fortunately, there’s an excellent reference site at Nizkor.org that lays these all out for us.

Common fallacies and logical falsehoods we’ve probably already heard of include:

  • Argument ad hominem (“against the person”): trying to invalidate an argument with a personal attack on the speaker.
  • Straw man: substituting a falsified version of the opponent’s premise and attacking the falsification.
  • Smear: usually, the intentional distribution of a falsehood about a person, group or idea
  • Slander: a smear against a person
  • Defamation: smear or slander applied to an entire group, race, nation or culture.
  • Appeal to Authority: An authority on this subject has already said that X is true.

I’ve noticed a popular fallacy that seems to be of a distinct category. I call it “Fallacy of Disenfranchisement” because it attempts to disqualify a speaker from even expressing an opinion. It circumvents arguments ad hominem by entirely eliminating the ‘hominem.’ This fallacy might also be called a “reverse appeal to authority.”

I encounter it fairly frequently in forums where military veterans join in the dialog:

“If you have not served, you do not know what you are talking about, so you can’t criticize/so shut your piehole.” [concerning recent war atrocities]

As a Vietnam veteran, I bristle when I see vets, claiming some sort of moral high ground solely on account of military service, attempting to silence others (who of course may even be veterans themselves).

But it’s not just veterans who pull this cheap trick:

  • “Ann Romney never worked a day in her life” [Obama campaign spokesperson, later repudiated] — therefore women who run a household are disqualified from speaking out on jobs and the economy.
  • “Obama never ran a business in his life” [candidate Mitt Romney] — therefore only ex-CEO’s are qualified to run the world’s most powerful nation.
  • “You don’t know what it’s like to be gay …”

… or African American, or a female subjected to male executive chauvinism, or Native American, or Hispanic … This area can be a rhetorical slippery slope.

As a simple statement of fact, yes, this form of declarative can make a very powerful statement. Heterosexuals have never walked in a gay person’s shoes. Caucasians have never been subjected to the racial abuse so often heaped on minorities by other Caucasians. Until recently, most men were notoriously clueless about unwanted familiarities and even predatory behavior with the opposite sex, and they laughed about it. And so on.

Perhaps it would be a better world if we could all walk in another’s shoes for that proverbial mile! But this should never be allowed to stop anyone from getting the facts, trying to judge them fairly, and acting appropriately.

Having said all that, if you’ve never come home from a war zone where you’ve risked your life for your country, you’re never going to fully comprehend what it’s like to return to Stateside to find yourself despised and reviled by your civilian peers (as happened to me in 1964).

If that’s the point we want to make, so be it. Stop there. But if we wish to engage others on the tactical points of national policy, or on minority rights or any other debate topic, our special status never excuses us from reasoned discussion of the facts, just like anybody else.

May There Always Be a Dialog

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Excerpts from a letter to a friend:

Our best minds have pondered the question of individual responsibility and group accountability for millennia.

The Buddhist approach is partly to remove one’s self, metaphorically or physically, from the artifice of the daily stress cycle to contemplate what is really important and what can be done to achieve it. Happiness or contentedness is part of that equation …

The socio-political approach is to categorize and classify everything and all the players into neat little artificial groups, and assign goals to each. This has the advantage of presupposing the experiment-designers have some knowledge of which values can properly give rise to those goals, and the safety of insulating us from having to account for the pesky, unpredictable individual. As I once wrote in an essay I called “Black Elk Speaks” (yes, concerning Niehardt’s book):

“The thought occurs that it would be a bad thing to try to needlessly integrate the vision of Black Elk with my own, or into our present circumstances in the United States. There is a certain value and dignity in keeping these things separate from each other in understanding, for they are different experiences and have their meaning in different worlds. The Western rush to explain everything in terms of other things which are also not truly grasped leaves a vacuum, the filling of which is only approximated by art.”

Tribalism and elitism seem to go hand in hand with each other, and with the racial, ethnic, economic and other minority divides you observe. We have done a better job of breaking down elitism, in an average decade, than most other countries did over their centuries. We all just have a long way to go.

The answer will never come from one individual like you or me, nor even from some great future prophet. Humanity needs to evolve, and our particular “in” with evolution is education, as it has been for 100,000 years, and I don’t just mean science and math, either. :-) That will make us or break us, particularly the :-) part. It is not the sound of just the one right butterfly, it is the sound of them all taking off by the hundreds of thousands into the wind.

If you remember the TV commercial about cowboys driving huge herds of cats, ponder for a moment how one herds a cloud of butterflies, and you’ll have our answer.

Ethnic Intolerance

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Today I was obliged to respond to a disturbing Facebook thread. I put it in my Facebook status, in preference to escalating heated emotional posts, to bring the topic to a wider audience. I share my remarks below.

I recently read a Facebook post embedding a YouTube video of inflammatory pro-sharia-law comments. The video was shot in a London district protest demonstration. The Facebook comment thread that followed contained pointed ethnic slurs. One of those slurs was against our own President. That kind of talk can’t be dismissed idly.

1) An ethnic slur against the President of the United States is an attack on ALL Americans and what this country stands for.
2) The YouTube video was uploaded anonymously by someone who wanted to be called “BurnIslamBurnAllah.” This should have been a clue. It focused on irritatingly offensive pro-sharia extremist statements apparently made around the time of the 2011 UK riots.
3) That’s no more representative of one billion Muslims than “End of the World 2011″ Harold Camping typifies 300 million Americans.
4) We need to “get a grip …” Drop Mars-Invades-Earth hysteria.
5) Since last year’s London riots, the UK has faced up to the fact it still needed to address ethnic situations similar to what we in the US (for the most part) got through decades ago.
6) Even friends and very nice people are getting too much news from YouTube videos instead of real journalism.
7) Don’t expect to counter sharia law extremism with homegrown extremism and intolerance. Islamic or Christian hate talk, it’s still extremism.

Collective Guilt and the Third Reich

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Someone recently sent me a short essay on the rise of the Third Reich, the History of World War II, and the Nazi mind-set that started it. Below I’ve excerpted from my rejection letter.

I’ll have to pass on this. It is one of the most written-about topics in the history of the Western World.

I don’t think we can reduce Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” or Hannah Arendt’s signature work “Totalitarianism” down to half a page.

The rise of Nazism was the result of several phenomena in deadly combination: group-think as you write, and also militarism, racial and ethnic hatred, a dysfunctional German economy thanks in no small part to the vengefully and poorly engineered Treaty of Versailles, the German turn to mysticism and determinism as the source of authority of the state, and a poisonous political apparatus gone viral … a certifiable national psychosis.

Any idea of a disease of shared history, a kind of collective racial guilt, will never fly at summitlake.com. If there is any validity to some aspect of that notion at all, it is to be found in the trend to simplified effortless no-work answers, but the guilt of acceptance lies with individuals, not a race, nation or its leaders. Only individuals can empower tyrants and monsters. You and I are not responsible for Dachau, the Civil War, or Rick Santorum.

Improving Toaster Waffles

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I’ve been buying toaster waffles for years. They’re quick and convenient. But by the time we butter and pour syrup on them, they aren’t very hot, and they don’t have a lot of flavor beyond the syrup.

I’d never make waffles from scratch just for myself, even if I did have a waffle iron. So try this:

Toast your frozen waffles on a hot griddle or large frying pan. No need to defrost. Use plenty of butter, re-buttering when you flip them over. A minute or so on each side is plenty. They brown nicely and quickly. As they’re now already buttered, just serve with syrup as you fancy. Enjoy. You’ll notice a tremendous improvement!

Glock Automatic Pistols

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A non-shooter friend posted a link on the Glock handgun, which was interesting comment on the industrial design of a modern handgun, and its popularity with law enforcement and civilian enthusiasts.

For those who don’t follow such stuff, the Glock is a cleverly logical step up from the “G-man .45″ (Eliot Ness, Fearless Fosdick, GI Joe) – the service sidearm of two world wars. The government M1911 .45 Auto is now over a century old.

For me, reading a posted article about the Glock was also a reminder why I, a paper target shooter (high power rifle and large-bore revolver) never liked automatic handguns.

Most city people distrust guns and people who use them, often rightfully so. Not a lot of them want to hear why someone who maybe fired a Glock once, dislikes auto handguns. But here you go.

In the military I qualified on the M1911. Unpleasant to shoot.

Now, a heavy-caliber revolver also produces a lot of recoil, which is why you often see on the screen that a shooter’s forearm is raised up, to one degree or another, after each shot. A .44 Magnum can propel a two-arm hold vertically from 45 to almost 90 degrees vertical. I’ve seen men twice my size put down a .44 after one shot. It all depends how you hold it.

But all of the revolver’s recoil is along the single vertical axis, so you can brace against it along that single axis.

Not so with automatic handguns. The heavy blow-back or piston slide mechanisms are cammed to unlock the bolt and eject the spent casing. This produces a pronounced twisting motion. This is a two-axis recoil. Most annoying, it throws you off for the next shot. Target shooters would mind. Combat shooters would suck it up and get really, really proficient with this design. Plinkers and yahoos probably wouldn’t know any better.

Recently I met with someone in South Carolina who owned a Glock. We didn’t fire it, but he taught me a modified way to hold an auto handgun which could also improve the two-hand-hold for a large bore revolver. Even so, I’ll stick to six-shooters.

So there you go.

Righteousness

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“Art can soothe, it can inspire, but it also stirs heated passions and outright protest. Why does that happen, and why in some cases but not others? That’s the subject of the new book, ‘Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protest Over Art and Culture in America.’”

For a PBS transcript of that topic, or even a video clip, you can read Conversation: Why Do Americans Protest Art?

I was immediately struck by a parallel question of my own. In Pakistan, why do they stone the rape victim?

It seemed obvious to me that overzealous righteousness has everything to do with it: the god-given notion that we have the right to define what offends us personally as an offense to the very universe, and that we somehow then acquire the divine right to mete out retribution of our own choosing without benefit of judge, jury, trial or verdict.

They are in this country illegally; they deserve whatever we can do to them. If an official suspects a person of wrongdoing, it should be OK to detain them indefinitely without charges or a hearing. My neighbor is voting Republican; he must be a very bad person. The Jones are voting Democratic; see how they have renounced the American Way.

When we think about The Crusades, the Holocaust, Little Rock, Matthew Shepard, the Jihads or the Salem witch trials, there looms a very real sense in which the greatest evils of mankind come not from unguarded sin, but from unbridled righteousness.

Classical Music and The Human Voice

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a musical travelogue

All musical compositions mentioned in my article are linked to corresponding YouTube video clips. Clicking a musical link should open new browser tabs or windows for you. Musical quality is very good. You can alternately search for and audit most or all of these selections on Amazon, iTunes or similar sources.

Here is a mercifully brief history of my evolving discovery of the human voice in classical music. If you have an audio pipe to “hi-fi PC speakers” or a home entertainment system, now is the time to switch to it.

I’ve been a classical music buff all my life. I still could just never bring myself to understand opera! 99% of it always sounded like glorified yodeling to me. You see, I understood completely that exposure to the genre is the key to understanding it. It was just the exposure to opera that I studiously avoided.

These days, even old dogs learn new tricks. With the help of the amazingly complete YouTube libraries, here are some musical “stops” on my discovery of the human voice in classical music.

non-operatic classical vocals

I somehow did learn that the human voice is potentially the grandest musical instrument of them all. As early as high school I fell in love with two non-operatic classical vocals:

Much, much later I was introduced to the Renaissance church music of Lassus and Thomas Tallis. As you’re no doubt already aware on some level, those abbey monks contributed a lot more to the future of our culture than the fundamentals of wine-making. I’m not even religious in any accepted conventional sense, but I don’t know how one can listen to Lassus and NOT feel a profound reverence for the human spirit. I give you:

Thomas Tallis: A more muted composer who wrote in English for the courts of Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth. Tallis speaks of devotion, solace, and perhaps of loss and regret, but all with incredible clarity and precision of expression.

This led to my introduction to the astounding modern twentieth century Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Listeners who know nothing else of Arvo Pärt’s music would generally recognize this piece. It is longish (9:50), but listen how hauntingly Pärt blends human voice and human instrumentation into a single unquenchable voice in these pieces from Berliner Messe.

Igor Stravinsky: Best known perhaps for his “Firebird” symphony and “Rite of Spring” ballet, many listeners find the music too dissonant and cacophonous. I happen to like Le Sacre du Printemps, “Rite of Spring.” Incredibly, he also wrote some of the most soothing music in the western world, and I give you two quite different short clips of his work Pastorale:

    • Pastorale: piano by Stravinsky himself (2004)
    • Pastorale: with Dame Joan Sutherland, soprano

Compare Stravinsky’s Pastorale with Arvo Pärt’s instrumental piece Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror).

Classical opera arias I like:

This first one (by Verdi) is something I gloried in as early as junior high school. I heard it on our local FM station – but never found out what it was. I forgot all about it until I heard it again a few years ago. “Aida” is an opera, all right, but this is an orchestral part. It is one of those pieces most people “know” but (sadly) can’t identify:

The second piece is known to tens of millions of TV viewers. British Airways used a muted orchestral version of Delibes’ “Lakmé” (Flower Duet) in a 1980′s TV commercial.  It doesn’t do justice to the original. Fast-forward to around 2009-2010, for a TV ad for Kohler, a high-end manufacturer of faucets and shower-heads [clip here]. A plumber finishes installing a “smart” shower-head and tests it by getting into the running shower, turning its awesome music system to “Lakmé,” and singing along with the operatic passage. He then dries himself off and leaves the bewildered homeowners.

You will recognize it instantly:

The thing is, Lakmé is bona fide opera, and I like it. At least, I like that part of it.

Finally, we return to today with a clip in that great body of classical music that is non-operatic but uses the human voice integrally as part of the story. Of “Powaqqatsi” by modern composer Philip Glass as part of a film score, Wikipedia writes: “Here, human voices (especially children’s and mainly from South America and Africa) appear more than in Koyaanisqatsi, in harmony with the film’s message and images.”

The film and the music may have different meanings for different listeners. For myself, the songs in the score draws me back to my backpacking days in the high Sierras. The mighty mountains surround me with their booming presence. The delicate verdant meadows and wildflowers sing to me. I am transported through time. It is my own time, but for the moment, it is eternal …

The following short clip appears to be the actual trailer for the 1988 movie. Segments of many different tracks in the score are spliced together but they are effective in conveying the power of the idea. The video is spectacular too. Turn up the sound!

One small step for man …

Other References

The Little Old Lady and the Dog – a Modern Parable

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I have one or two friends who are fond of forwarding “loaded” jokes of the variety that, on one level, seem to be straightforward humor or truism, but with a second layer of gratuitous and purely political invective grafted on. Somehow, these unfailingly parrot the far end of the “right-wing” political party line, with which I find myself currently and profoundly disaffected. After receiving one more of those from a friend with just such a penchant for politically-hijacked “jokes,” I wrote this up and almost did a “reply-all” to chain letter and all its recipients with my own composition below attached. But, proving a point, by embarrassing my friend in front of all his other friends, is just not worth ending a 55-year friendship — even though it’s true enough that I am always in the right, whereas he is always 100% in the wrong and never has a leg to stand on. So I will just share this with you as food for thought, Dear Readers, and let it go at that.

The Little Old Lady and the Dog

There was this little old lady Gladys who went for a walk with her Yorkshire terrier. Along the way, she met her old friend Mrs. Gunderson, who said, “Why hello Gladys, how good to see you again, how are you?”

Gladys said, “I am fine, I am very glad to see you, and I do so want to tell you about my new little dog Herriot! But I must say how very upset I am about how all these Liberals are trying to wreck the country with equal this and equal that and tax the rich and spend spend spend. Land sakes, there they go again, trying force all these illegals down our throats and expecting us to like it, can you imagine? Next thing you know they’ll be wanting to marry. They’re just awful! Now just look at how they’ve ruined our school system: why, kids can’t even count change properly like we could when we were their age, not of course that I would stoop to count change out to some … some commoner! Everything we did in the day was superior to anything they’re doing today. You didn’t catch US spending all day texting and surfing the internet! And, when we wanted to make money, we’d go out out and earn it the tried-and-proven hard way, honest money every penny of it, devoting lifetimes of sheer hard work and loyal drudgery to a single at-will employer … if, of course, we didn’t marry into the right circles soon enough – my dear, how is that husband of yours doing in what, that clerical position of his? You do look a little harried today! No no, you didn’t catch any of us growing so-called “startups,” they call them now, peddling IPO’s while still in their teen years, and retiring as billionaires in their mid-twenties! And they’re all these damn Nancy Pelosi Liberals, you know, every single last one of them, who will try to twist the conversation around into the Environment when all we’re discussing is how to make a $20 profit on a truckload of old-growth redwood. They’ll take a simple innocent declarative sentence like this one and embroider and embellish it until it sounds like Al Gore’s Sermon on the Mount! Who the blazes do they think they are? They act like they’re so high-falutin’ SUPERIOR when in fact you or I have more superiority in our little fingers than they have in their amply fat Burger King rear ends, my dear! And, let me tell you another thing, they complain like crazy when we try to tell our side, the real truth of the story, and they LAUGH at us like we’re demented old coots when we try to warn them of the many evils of their godless ways. If there’s one thing I just don’t like, it’s their little smug, defamatory, self-righteously hostile attitudes. If the misbegotten little shits can’t be forced to listen to reason, why don’t they all go back where they came from?”

Mrs. Gunderson said, “Why my dear Gladys, this is all well and fine, I’m sure! But what about your darling little Yorkie?”

Gladys said, “Oh, Mrs. Gunderson, my goodness, he’s not important; he’s just along for the walk — don’t you see, dear? The important thing is for us to be ready to take any conversation, situation or scenario and turn it into a venue for righteous political agenda.“

©Alexander Forbes and www.summitlake.com December 7, 2011
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