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Near Sunizona.
29-Apr-12I was surprised to see Obama come out for gay marriage – it’s a long-term winning issue, but in the short term it’s risky, and I don’t associate Obama with risk. But then a day later as if on cue out comes the dirt on Romney – that he teased gay students in his high school (“Atta girl”) and led a “posse” of boys to ambush a long-haired boy and forcibly cut off his hair. The terrible thing about the story is how much it feels right - that Romney’s nervous and unsettling need for absolute conformity to external sources of meaning and normalcy was present even in high school, and that he has apparently never had any effective source of inner integrity. And his lame apology seems perfectly scripted to showcase his human vacuity. And the story is much more effective for the contrast with Obama’s now-public support of gay marriage.
Obama never has to talk about the Romney story and I bet he never will. Romney is just going to be Facebooked to death by stories like this. Obama has apparently decided to make gay rights one of his chief motivating factors to get his electorate out. It’s a fascinating move. It’s also Rovian. Obama’s base – college-educated first-half-of-lifers like myself who volunteered for his campaign last time around – may not be too impressed by his records on civil rights, U.S. imperialism, the unabated concentration of wealth, or the protection of the middle class. So he’ll motivate us with Osama bin Laden’s head on a platter and “social issues.”
Fracking.
07-May-12
Catskill photographer Les Stone has started turning his camera on fracking in Pennsylvania so we know exactly what we’re talking about. I’m sympathetic to the argument that if we consume energy we had better share the burden of producing it. But destroying groundwater – forever – is always going to be just about the least appealing energy solution there is. Consume less, people.
Christopher Page.
07-May-12It is very easy to be impressed by Christopher Page. For those with some sense of what they’re looking at, his “Reasons Not to Read the Old Testament” are astonishing. And he’s thoughtful and Christian everywhere.
Grafton and the Colleges.
06-May-12A good read. The next thing we need is someone to analyze the budgets of these colleges to figure out just what is meant by the political phrase “the rising cost of college.” It’s not getting more expensive to hire teachers.
The Missions.
06-May-12
The abandoned mission church of Tumacacori.
Last weekend I visited the abandoned mission of Tumacacori after attending mass at the flourishing one of San Xavier del Bac. I also watched the excellent Robert Bolt-written movie The Mission, which takes as its theme the political difficulties of the Jesuits which led to their dissolution by the pope in 1773. The entire theme could use a full essay treatment – the connection between worship and farming present in these missions is such a tempting template – but I am not certain I will have the time to write about it while I am here in Arizona.
San Xavier del Bac, which is one of the most extraordinary buildings in America, is a miracle of craftsmanship which photos hardly do justice to. The only things in the entire church which appear to have seen the touch of a machine are the floor tiles and the pews. Everything else is irregular, human, hand-hewn, and beautiful. I had the honor of spending the Easter triduum at this church, which is woefully underappreciated by the faithful here (I had imagined it might be difficult to see services in so small a church here, but it was not even full). But even San Xavier, which is in superb condition, went through a period of thirty years of complete abandonment. Phocion Way, who wrote a minor travel classic about the area entitled Overland by Jackass Mail, wrote about the abandoned mission thus:
The birds are its only occupants and they sing praises from morning until night. They build their nests on the heads of the saints, and warble their notes of joy while perched on their fingers. They do not respect the sacred image of Christ for a noisy swallow has built her nest in the crown of thorns that encircles his brow, and at this moment is perched on his bleeding hand scolding loudly at my near approach. The door is always left open, but the property of the church is not disturbed. The natives look upon the structure with a feeling of awe and could not be persuaded to deface or injure it. If this country should ever again become thickly populated, it will be renovated and repaired and again used as a place of worship.
Tucson.
06-May-12“In 1858 the reputation of southern Arizona for wickedness was just beginning. By the Gadsden Purchase this border territory had recently been acquired from Mexico. The tradition of mines of fabulous richness, abandoned by the Spaniards, made this remote country a new El Dorado. The sudden influx of Americans, eager to exploit its mineral treasures, produced a society that was without parallel in the world. An experienced traveller who had visited the rough mining towns of the West described Tucson as ‘a city realizing, to some extent, my impression of what Sodom and Gomorrah must have been before they were destroyed by the vengeance of the Lord.’ Later communities were to arise and flourish in iniquity, as the great cow-towns, Abilene and Ogallala, but in the period before the Civil War only Natchez-under-the-hill could rival Tucson in crime. For in the Gadsden Purchase were gathered the worst elements of two civilizations.” - W. Clement Eaton, “Frontier Life in Southern Arizona 1858-61″
Picacho Peak, Arizona.
06-May-12
Taken near the top. The peak rises very impressively from the desert. It appears to be a volcanic plug, like Shiprock or Devil’s Tower. Even the trail to the top climbs at an 80-degree incline at times, and you hoist yourself up with metal cables. This is from the not-so-steep side, where the trail is; when you get to the steep side and look down, it’s really amazing just how steep a mountainside can be. Photos do not do justice to the vertigo effect. Amazingly enough a Civil War battle was fought here, just to ensure that American self-destructiveness and hatred be not absent from the place.
Merrie Olde England.
06-May-12A nice interview about the ever-interesting 18th century. The most remarkable thing to my eyes:
We have very good data on births outside marriage and births within seven months of marriage, which is a pretty good indicator of people having had sex before marriage. These are aggregate statistics covering the whole [of England], and show that in the 16th and 17th century the effect of this sexual discipline resulted in a very low number of births outside marriage. In 1650, 1 percent of all births were illegitimate. But by 1800, almost 25 percent of all first-born children were born outside marriage and 40 percent of women came to the altar pregnant. That explosion is unprecedented, and that kind of level was the new norm. So I think we can measure a real change in behaviour that went along with these changes in attitudes to sex in the 18th century.
I have written before about how I don’t believe in any “sexual revolution,” and I’d be more inclined to doubt the pre-18th century data suggesting that human sexual mores have changed. But it may be the case that the Puritan era was different, but just a blip in the history of “merrie olde England,” which resumed its true nature soon enough.
Peter Annet appears to be a character worthy of further exploration:
He applies to the question of sexual morality the same kind of reasoned, rational outlook that he applies to all other subjects in life. He becomes mildly infamous for doing this with respect to religion in the early 18th century, in trying to strip away what he sees as the superstitions of priests and so on and return to what he understands as the essence of Christianity. He has an archetypal 18th century faith in reason as the only true guide. The second thing he does is think: “What does this mean for sexual ethics? Is it true and right that we should, as the Bible and church teaches us, only restrict ourselves to sex within marriage?” His answer is a resounding “no”.
He tries to reason – from natural law, from conscience and from all the other bases that 18th century people like to use – for a new kind of sexual morality. In doing that he puts forward in this book a remarkably modern set of proposals. He says men and women should be free to have sex with whomever they like for as long as they like, and to co-habit freely and divorce freely. The only thing that mattered, in his eyes, was the care of children.
New York City.
06-May-12A whole bunch of gobsmacking old photos of New York City.
The Richness of Human Life.
15-May-12Two fifth grade students finished their tests later than the rest of the class and as a result their tests ended up in a different pile from everyone else’s, and when I got to grading them I figured I would skip the scantron – it was only two tests – and grade them by hand. On the thirteenth question of the test – “what is the Latin for ‘friendship’” – one of the students circled the correct answer (“d. amicitia”) and then drew the torso, head, and tail of a cat looking at the correct answer. It was gratuitous – she knew that we teachers did not normally look at the test booklet for scantron tests – and it took away from her time on the exam. But it was wonderfully dear. If we had found something like this in an inscription two thousand years old, it would be almost unbearably precious and human. But it is precisely the kind of thing that tends to perish – the silly work of a childish hand, which adults pass over to get to graver concerns.
Since some students were done with their test early, I told them that I wanted to write a book about a javelina who visits ancient Rome. I needed an illustrator, so if they wanted to try out for the post they could do so. Having them illustrate a story about a javelina in Rome is a pretty good way to get a partial inventory of the some of the stranger areas of their minds. I got pictures of gladiators and fishmongers and the Colosseum and reclining emperors and “poisoness water” and men chanting “Hail Neptune! Hail Mars” in the recesses of temples.
We put so much effort into showing none but the rational parts of our mind: always giving the answer to the question asked and nothing more, being relevant and coherent and organized. I wanted the kids to put answers on their tests, not drawings. But I felt that the richer and more important side was left neglected and unexplored, a casualty of efficient and well-run society, which has other things to do than look at children’s projections about time-traveling javelinas.
So it is with my time in Arizona, which is coming to a close. I was loyal to the system: I taught, I did my work, I paid my bills and I paid attention to all the things which could be construed as my professional responsibilities. I had little time for anything else. But I feel a richness in the human and animal lives around me which I do not routinely come into meaningful contact with by being professional or dutiful. I know this is what I want – life and reality as opposed to all our politeness, which is always a form of partiality and incompleteness – and yet I don’t really know how to get it. And when I get in that car and leave Tucson I will be leaving behind a white-collar job and returning to poverty and uncertainty.