Category Archives: Commentary on the news

Asia, Commentary on the news, Family, Politics, Sport

Congratulations, Mary Ellis

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Lughnasa                                            Waning Grandchildren Moon

A big shout out to sister Mary.  She got her degree!  Dr. Mary Ellis.marygetsdegree670 How about that hat.  She owns all that regalia now.  This was in Singapore last week.

Heard an interesting theory today on Favre’s ankle angst.  Allison’s husband thinks Favre has plans to come back after the first game of the season.  Why?  It’s against New Orleans.  New Orleans is the home team for the Mississippi fan boy.  Who knows?  I do know this.  Favre’s played football for many, many years.  At this point he knows his body very well and he knows/has known the impact of the ankle surgery.  In addition this is a guy who makes split second decisions on the field, about football.  He’s not indecisive.  My guess at this point is that his wife is leaning on him to quit.  He has enough money, a pick-up truck, a dog and a farm.  What more does a country boy need?

Spoke with a docent who taught political science at U of Wisconsin in Eau Claire.  Neither one of us have a clue what’s going on in this election, either at the state or federal levels.  These are peculiar times in American politics, unlike any I have seen.  Right wing nutjobs in ascendancy within the Republican party.  An African-American President.  A recession that will not die and unemployment that will fall away.  Environmental catastrophes and congress can’t even consider a bill on climate change.  Health care legislation at the Federal level challenged at the state level.  Arizona comes out as a state of anti-immigrant bigots.  A California judge overturns prop 8 in California prohibiting gay marriage, a decision that will almost certainly send this lightning rod issue all the way to the Robert’s Supreme Court.  I know I missed a few things.  Who ever said politics were dull?

Kate spent the day with her sister Anne going to quilt shops in the southwestern burbs.  She got home about 7:00 and went almost straight to bed.  Exhausting.

Tomorrow more gardening and maybe bees.  Probably bees.  We’re getting set to order extracting equipment.  That means I gotta keep these lil buggers alive and producing for years to come.  Artemis Hives.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Cultural Relativism

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Summer                                 Waxing Strawberry Moon

“The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.” – Ruth Benedict

Long ago, back in the Paleozoic 1960’s I majored in anthropology.  Anthropology taught me a lot, shaped my view of the world.  In anthropology, long before it became fashionable enough to merit bashing on the then non-existent Fox News Network, multi-culturalism was an everyday conversation.  Ruth Benedict, herself an early anthropologist and student of Franz Boas, the father of anthropology reflects just that sensibility in this quote.

Anthropologist’s developed the idea of cultural relativism and it was and is crucial to anthropology as a discipline.  Anthropologists do field work using the participant observer method, which involves immersing oneself in the cultural of another, then writing about it.  Boas and the early anthropologists, among them Margaret Meade, had to undergo psychoanalysis as a preliminary to field work.  This was to enable the field worker to grasp, as best he or she could, the difference between something they brought to the interaction and the actual expression of a different worldview.

Cultural relativism meant that much as we might like to believe otherwise (manifest destiny, Hail Britannia) one culture’s solution to the way of surviving and flourishing is as valid as any others.  This is the core idea behind multi-culturalism, not merely a liberal tolerance of difference, but suspension of our own values and beliefs in order to accord respect to the other.

Does this have problems?  Yes, it does.   Critics like Alasdair MacIntyre in his book, After Virtue, say it represents an essential of Modernism, that is, ethical relativism.  MacIntyre suggests we consider Hitler’s Nazi party or, I suppose, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.  Using the notion of cultural relativism are we not bound to honor their horrific outcomes?

Academics often get caught in the absolutizing of their notions.  It’s either cultural relativism or a solid tradition, like the Thomistic Catholicism that MacIntyre puts forward.  In fact, I think these are more tendencies, ways we lean when assessing data.  Cultural relativism and the thinner soup of multi-culturalism are an inoculant, a vaccine against imperialism, against the unthinking imposition of a more powerful culture on a weaker one.

Tradition, on the other hand, seems an inescapable and therefore most likely necessary ingredient of the human lived experience.  Within in it we learn how to behave as an American, a Vietnamese, a Hmong, a Trobriand Islander.  We come to assume that the tradition and the culture in which we are raised is normative, and, in fact, it is normative in the vast majority of situations which we encounter.  It is when we cross cultures or traditions that questions arise that we may not have considered.

Who says democracy  is the only acceptable form of government?  Who says individual rights always come before the needs of the tribe or the state?  Who says marriage between homosexual couples is wrong, ipso facto?  Who says circumcision is critical?  Who says we cannot execute anybody we want to by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair?

It occurs to me that cultural relativism is a necessary defense against the arrogance of power, just as tradition is a defense against the moral relativism that a global perspective seems to require.  To position these two powerful aspects of human life, culture and tradition, against each other goes too far.  Instead, we need to learn the lesson each has to teach us and apply them both with humility and care.

NB:  Back to Hitler and Pol Pot.  We do not need to accept their violent prejudice as normative even under the notion of cultural relativism. What is necessary in those cases is to go within the culture of Germany and Cambodia, to mine their traditions and to critique them from within their worldviews.  It can be done and can easily be shown to be possible.  Then, we respect culture and yet have an avenue for expression of our deeply held values in a different cultural idiom.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Memories, Politics, US History

Poison Fruit

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Spring                                        Waxing Awakening Moon

Spring has sprung, then it sprang back.  23 today.  Not prime gardening weather yet.

The conservative embrace of right wing populists has begun to bear poisoned fruit again.  They referred to Obama and African-American congressmen as niggers, Barney Frank as a faggot and phoned in death threat to several members of the House who switched their votes on health care reform.  The great irony of the moral majority, Christian right, tea-party tea bags is that by all normal political calculation they should vote Democrat.  They are, in the large part, blue collar folks, some living on minimum wage, many no doubt eligible for the health insurance provisions just passed by Congress, but conservative strategists have intentionally chosen to underwrite their social prejudices against people of color, homosexuals and folks with a college education in order to collect them into the party’s ranks.

This is not a deal with the devil; it is the devil making a deal.

I know these folks because I grew up with them in Indiana.  They first came to national notice in Indiana when 30% of the Hoosier electorate voted for George Wallace for President.  They were first and second generation folks from Appalachia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee and worked in the automobile and other heavy manufacturing centers in the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio area, the area long since identified as the rust belt.  Union workers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, these constituencies voted a straight Democratic party ticket in line with their economic self-interest.

After LBJ and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, George Wallace made an independent run for the Presidency aiming himself squarely at southern Democrats, the diaspora of southerners working in the north and those other bigots nationally willing to sign up.  This came to the attention of Kevin Phillips, then a strategist for Richard Nixon.  He conceived of the moral majority, corralling the Wallace voters and conservative Christians, sometimes the same group into a winning base for conservative Republican politics.  This was the time of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.

Right wing populism has a long and unsavory history in the US.  The KKK, anti-semite, homophobes, anti-Darwinists and love it or leave it patriots are just a few examples.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has made a career for Morris Dees and his compatriots filing suit against various organizational expressions of these folks.  When economic insecurity marries the all-too human propensity for discrimination, a violent firestorm will result.  It is no different now than it was in the post-Reconstruction days, the days during the Great Depression or the years after passage of the Civil Rights act.

True conservatives should be ashamed.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on the news, Health, Politics, US History

President Shoots the Moon

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Spring                                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

Moon viewing.  We don’t do it much here, except as a casual thing, a walk outside, look up, oh a nice moon tonight or shine on harvest moon for me and my gal then on to the drive in or what’s on your play list dude? In Japan they take the moon viewing a step further, ok, a whole nighttime stroll longer.  They build moon viewing platforms, have parties, and produce some wonderful art that features the moon.  Tonight the waxing awakening moon hung just above the trees in the west, behind a scrim of clouds, a faint glow surrounding the upturned crescent.  It is a moon to remember.

This crescent awakening moon will now memorialize for me the day the Democratic party got some balls.  Obama wanted to pass health care reform.  I saw a representative, I don’t know his name, with silver hair, looked about my age, get up and say, “Before we were born, reform of the health care system was begun, just waiting for this day.”

This is not a victory for Democrats, however, it is a victory for the American people, a victory for those who have lived their lives in fear of a cough, a broken leg, a child’s fever.  In this country, which can bail out billionaires and support subsidies to bank robbers, that is, banks that rob, to have 32 million people with no health insurance has been a crime of long standing, a crime that has produced serial deaths over and over with no fear of prosecution.

It is my hope that Republicans will understand that many of the folks who swallow the tea party line are the very people who will wake up some time soon with health insurance, health insurance they have never had. If you don’t believe me, just look at the Gallup map below and consider it with an overlay of the Bush and McCain presidential votes.

Obama has won a victory here, a hard fought victory and he should get his props.  He should also get more credit for calming the Great Recession and ushering in a period of up ticking economic news.  I imagine we will see more such substantive wins for him as his presidency continues.

Hurray for the red, white and blue!

Now a moment on partisan politics and post-partisan politics, the so-called third way.  Yes, our politics have become so polarized that it is difficult to recall the times when it wasn’t.  Yes, there is acrimony and ill will and yes, it does make governance more difficult than it needs to be.  Here’s the thing, though.  In the end it is politics.  This clumsy, broken, dysfunctional process is the way we have chosen, and keep choosing, to mediate our substantive differences.  I read a very compelling argument for changing the system of representation in the Senate where 10% of the states have 90% of the population, but have only a tenth of the votes.  The author of the argument went on to say that fixing this dysfunction was not possible and that we needed to work with the system we have.

It’s not ideal, but there is no system for managing the affairs of human societies that is and ours is better than most.  This vote proves it.

Commentary on the news, Politics

Shopping

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Imbolc                                            Waning Wild Moon

Watched The Hurt Locker.  It comes to mind this morning because Saturday is grocery shopping here at chez Ellis/Olson.  After spending a full rotation in Iraq as a fearless and emotionally committed bomb tech, the lead character rotates back to the mainland. The scene that takes us back to the states with him opens with him pushing a grocery cart down a frozen foods aisle.

The shift from the sandy, hot precincts of Iraq to a modern US grocery store jars on several levels.   The first is visual.  The glass is clean, the chrome gleaming, the banks of freezers stretching out quite a distance.  The second is aural, no bombs going off, no screaming civilians, no rumbling trucks, no blare of heavy metal music.  The third is the juxtaposition of this  bomb-suit wearing, in danger of dying, hard-drinking, rock and roll blasting, Staff Sergeant William James with the ordered gleam of American food retailing.

His wife comes by with his son, “Get some cereal and I’ll meet you at the checkout.”

He leaves frozen foods and goes into the cereal aisle.  Told to get some cereal he confronts another well-ordered aisle, this one with boxes upon boxes of varied types of grains made into breakfast food.  His confusion and inability to make a decision contrast sharply with his demeanor in the war zone where life becomes stripped down and, though often life or death, the decisions are more straight forward and apparently easier to make.

I have a very mild sense of this every time I go to a grocery store.  It comes from traveling in 3rd world countries and seeing the chaotic, but often much more interesting mercados and street merchandising there mixed in with the desperate poverty that makes the range of choice available to us enough to cause the kind of confusion and lack of decisiveness expressed by Staff Sergeant William James in the Hurt Locker.