Battle Squirrel 2014

Okay, last year's garden was an unmitigated disaster.

The squirrels ate everything, and everything the squirrels left, the cats dug up, and every thing the cats left the bad soil left stunted and bitter.

But hope springs eternal in the gardener's breast, so I'm trying again this year.

Parsley and broccoli and lettuce, with onions standing sentry around the outside.  The bare spot is where I've planted some peas.

Two boxes of broccoli, red cabbage, and lettuce, again with the protective barrier of onions.

Chard, cilantro, and lettuce, plus some overwintered pansies that may be starting to flower.  And our good friends, the onions.

I'm really, really hoping that the friend that told me onions repel squirrels is right.  But, just in case, all the white powdery stuff is an organic pest deterrent.  (Pepper oil and cinnamon oil and such.)

So.  There we go.  Spring planting.

(Six-year-old added for scale.)

Penalizing the Wrong Thing

It seems that the only people still struggling with institutional expressions of moral courage are the Catholics.

This tends to cause kerfuffles, because moral courage always involves sacrifice and risk. Pissing people off is not a certain sign of being right, but it is a not-uncommon result of the exercise of moral discipline (self-discipline or imposed discipline).

One recent kerfuffle was caused by a Montana Catholic school's decision to fire an unmarried teacher who became pregnant.  The evidence of her having violated their moral turpitude clause was plain for all to see, and so they acted on it.

The temptation, of course, is to say that the school was in the wrong because they were being mean, judgy McJudgersons.  This is a response that implicitly condemns any exercise of institutional moral discernment, that makes all moral decisions not immediately and forensically related to work performance private, individual ones.  This is the default practice of virtually every institution in the country, even those that are explicitly religiously affiliated.  (The UMC has a hard time firing pastors for moral turpitude, much less secretaries or daycare workers, and churches whose well-liked pastors have been terminated for having multiple affairs with many different congregants bear resentment against the mean, judgy denomination for decades.  Firing pastors for incompetence is a near impossibility, but that's another story.)

I honestly don't think that argument is a helpful one, even if I am sympathetic with the underlying concern--that firing this woman is the wrong response.

Cathleen Kaveny has written this lovely and careful piece responding to the issue and has offered a better line of thought.

In it, she highlights a crucial problem with the exercise of moral turpitude clauses: only women can be found guilty.

This isn't really true, and Kaveny doesn't make the mistake of putting it that way.

It is functionally true, however.   The Catholic church--themselves almost the last remaining institution with a moral backbone--have retreated from virtually every issue but that which makes them the most unpopular: sexuality.  And in that realm, since the beginning of time, there has only been one gender whose very body bears the incontrovertible evidence of sexual sin.

Only women can get pregnant.

And pregnancy is the only "proof" that cannot be hidden or ignored.  Men can be forced to take paternity tests, of course, though few institutions have gotten around to remembering that and fewer still manage to overcome their general reluctance to give a man a reason to file a lawsuit.  (Do women file fewer lawsuits?  Probably.  There is certainly less institutional fear of those who might.)

But a big, fat belly thrusts itself into our communal consciousness just as surely as it thrusts itself into a room before its duck-waddling bearer can catch up with it.  Institutions can no more forgo institutional responses to the inconvenient facts of women's reproduction than seventy-year-old men and women can forgo rubbing pregnant women's distended bellies.

So sweet Miss Susie walks into school one September with a big, big belly, and the school cannot ignore that problem, the way they can ignore the Lamborghini Mr. Michael very sensibly keeps at home or the bruises Mr. John's wife is careful to hide or the income Miss Janie doesn't report and tithe or whatever else violates their moral convictions.

And, of course, Miss Susie's paramour suffers nothing, unless they were caught, as Dr. Kaveny puts it, canoodling in the broom closet at school.

So the burden of these punishments are shared unfairly, and the community learns the wrong thing: it is pregnancy that is punished, not extra-marital sexuality as such.  Getting caught--and only women can get caught--is the problem.  Pregnancy is the problem.

This ought not be.  Pregnancy is not a problem.  It's not evidence of sin.  It's evidence of life.  It's evidence that God continues to give the gift of children to us, even in the midst of--even by means of!--our sinful condition.

This is exactly the mistake that Isaac's school's Health program makes, and it suffers from the same pedagogical idiocy: it teaches that pregnancy is the problem to be avoided.

One exercise in particular jerked my chain.

Isaac was required to calculate the financial burden a child imposes its first two years of life.

I thought we were having a great moment of communication, until I realized what was going on.

"Hey, Mom, how much do Amos's diapers cost?"
"Well, we use some cloth, so it's hard to say exactly, but it's about $35 a month for the disposables."
"When did he switch to regular milk?  And is formula more expensive than milk?"
"Oh, yes, formula is, like, twenty-five dollars a week, if you're formula-feeding full time, and that's if you're lucky enough not to need the special needs stuff.  You switch to milk at one year, but the amount they still need isn't exactly trivial."
"What are other things babies need?"
"Um . . . wait a minute . . . why are you asking?  Is there an urgent need here that I should be aware of?"
"Health class."
"Oh.  Oh.  Mmm."

The assignment was designed to discourage teen childbearing, but it did so by presenting a baby as a costly, burdensome thing.  It was one of the few assignments that spoke a language teens can understand, and it was all oriented toward making a baby seem like a bad thing.

Isaac didn't understand why I started throwing a temper tantrum at the end of his assignment.

"Okay, son, what's the total cost you've come up with?"
"$13, 850.  But the website says that I didn't include living quarters or travel expenses, which I would need because I'd be on my own."
"What?"
"I'd need to get my own place."
"ARE YOU FARGLING KIDDING ME?!?!"
"I mean, you know, some parents would . . ."
:hostile stare:
"So, uh, that's, uh, why I didn't even think to include the cost of the apartment, because, uh, I knew you and Dad would . . . uh . . . be . . . so, $13K.  Pretty pricey."
"Okay.  So.  You're in your car.  You're on a date.  Your girlfriend is with you.  It's dark out, and the windows in the back seat are tinted."
"Um, Mom, I don't like where this is going. . ."
"Do you really think to yourself, 'Gosh, I'd like to, but this could cost me $13K'?  Is that really going to stop you?"
"Well . . . it . . . maybe . . ."
"No.  It won't.  The only time you're going to think about $13K is when the little test strip comes back with two pink lines on it, and you think, 'Gosh, I could spend $300 now, or $13K later.'"
"I would never!"
"Well, you might now.  Now that they've frakking given you a reason to!!!!!"

It focused on disincentivizing child-bearing (or, really, child-rearing), not teen sexuality.  Having a baby is costly.  Having sex isn't.

And, as if to drive the point home, there was no corresponding financial activity related to STDs.  No calculating how much getting HPV or HIV or gonorrhea or chlamydia costs you.  Oh, they mention STDs.  The medical aspects.  But not the financial costs.

The part that is simply and entirely costly and painful and burdensome is noted, but the burden is not demonstrated in the terms teens understand.  (They understand money, because they all want iPhones and candy bars and cars with full gas tanks.  That's why the price-out-a-baby exercise works.  They do not understand sickness and death.  They think only old people get sick and die.  "You can get this disease, and it's really bad, so use a condom.")

But the child that might result is reduced to a single, uncomplicated, and entirely negative quality--its costliness.

And so they teach my son that getting pregnant is a bad thing and worth avoiding and preventing and "fixing" if you get unlucky.  They don't teach him that teen sexuality is a dubious pleasure at best and worth forgoing.

They also didn't bother to teach him that his parents are actually good people to consult when he is confronted with such issues, but I suppose that cannot be remedied.

Let this serve as your notice, though: Parents whose children must take school-based health classes, do not neglect to correct all the misapprehensions your children will pick up in those classes, but especially, most especially, the one that you are not going to be on their side if they "get caught."

Let them know that getting pregnant is not the bad thing, the thing to be avoided, the thing worth punishing.

Let them know that there's a difference between a serious thing--which having a child most assuredly is--and a bad thing--which having a child most assuredly is not.

Let them know you love them.  And that they will screw up.  And that you will still love them.

How to Change Someone Who Won't

I found this ad profoundly moving.



I should admit that I'd never really thought much about this issue, growing up, because I don't particularly care for football.  I was a baseball fan, and when someone talked about mascots that were insulting to Native Americans, I could only think of the Indians and the Braves, and those didn't seem all that insulting to me.  (The concept of cultural appropriation was far too sophisticated to find a sympathetic home in my teenaged brain.)

And when I watched the occasional football game, the nickname of the Washington team just didn't penetrate the fog of apathy (about football, not about justice), and it didn't occur to me that an actual racial slur, not a cultural appropriation but a racial insult, was being used.

(By the way, parents: remembering what an idiot you were when you were a teenager is a great way to remind yourself to be patient with your teenagers.  Just sayin'.)

Anyway, once the injustice was pointed out to me, I had a hard time unseeing it, and I have lost my sympathy for any arguments (are there any, actually, that don't boil down to "we don't wanna"?) for the worth of keeping that name in play.

Obviously, these proud Native Peoples have not found a sympathetic hearing among NFL execs, team owners, managers, players, and the like.

But there is a group of people who could change things.  Radically.  Without them changing at all.

Sportscasters.

Sports journalists, networks, papers, commentators--anyone whose job it is to talk about sports could simply refer to the team as "Washington."

It can be an adjective and a noun.  There is no grammatical or practical need to use the offensive nickname.

It can be dropped.  Entirely.  Without fanfare, or with a simple public statement, or even with a big to-do.  But it can be dropped.

Sportscasters can't control what coaches and players say, they can't control what team uniforms and logos look like, they can't control the fans or even preach very successfully at anybody.

But they can stop using hurtful words.

Individual commentators and writers and interviewers can quietly drop the word out of their vocabulary, even if the organizations of which they are a part will not go along.

Larger organizations can make public announcements or send confidential corporate memos.

They can do it.  And they could make a difference.

I'm going to try to stop using the Washington team's nickname.  You can, too, if you like.  It probably won't much matter.

But maybe it will.

Imagination

I've been Netflixing some over the break.

That's a verb now.  (I've declared it to be so.)

Netflixing describes that sort of watching that has been enabled--or, rather, encouraged--by the patterns of availability of online streaming of television shows.  (I've been doing it over Amazon Prime, just as much as over Netflix, but we'll give the tip o' the hat to Netflix.)

One can't watch the current season of one's favorite shows on Netflix, so one dredges the catalog of available shows and wonders what calculus of licensing fees, popular demand, and bandwidth capacity led to, for example, the choice of only seasons four and five of Inspector Lewis being available, while the entire run of Midsomer Murders is on tap; Psych but not The Mentalist; or only two or three Jane Austen adaptations at a time (and never the best ones).

Still, one finds a series and watches it from beginning to end--in binges, if it catches one's eye or if one has some obligation to avoid, over a more prudent time span if it is merely enjoyable.

One could do this in the olden days, too, back when DVDs still existed.  But everything old is made new, and we'll let the young'uns believe that they invented glut-viewing.

I've been watching British mysteries, because I've already watched the entire run of West Wing (twice) and Firefly (seven times), and because when a nation decides it would rather have four well-written episodes per year than twenty-two episodes of, well, Castle, they do tend to crank out some decent stuff.

Also, the cliches of a different culture are always new to you, for at least the first several seasons, and even cliched and hackneyed dialogue sounds very fine in at least three-fourths of the different British accents I can more or less identify now.

In any case, once I started to get a feel for British cliches, I noticed one standout among some of the older shows.  They almost never end in armed confrontations, and even when they do, the arms rarely get used.

It's a very interesting contrast to American cop shows, which may, for the first season or two, play with different ways of creating tension and resolving the final show-down.  But if a show survives into the third season, you'll find the number and intensity of shoot-outs increasing dramatically as the series wears on.  (They run out of more interesting things to do, I guess.)

But Inspector Lewis, Inspector Barnaby, Inspector Lynley--they don't carry guns.  So they can't wrap up a case with a nice, satisfying shoot-out.  Oh, there's the odd villain threateningly waving around a weapon, the occasional deranged mass murderer whom the plucky detectives must confront without recourse to anything but their wits and their words.

Interestingly enough, British TV writers can come up with words for that sort of moment.  (The few times the writers of Castle have tried have been painfully cliched and strained the limits of suspended disbelief.)  Perhaps constraint--not being able to write in a shoot-out--is a goad to creativity rather than a limit to it.

Perhaps if writers of American crime shows set themselves a constraining goal--"Hey, let's write five episodes this season where the cops don't draw their weapons!"--they might come up with something better than "She wouldn't have wanted you to do this, would she?" at the pivotal moment.

Whether artistic creativity might be a goad to other sorts of creativity--the moral and intellectual resources to do something other than kill threatening individuals when they come our way--is another question entirely.

Or perhaps not.

Reading List

I've started my reading for the year, and have finished two books so far!  Wahoo!

I decided that coming up with a reading list would be more helpful than not, so I took a stab at it.

A few years ago, I tried making up a year's reading list by picking ten books in ten different categories.  I think I'm going to go with a similar approach, but I found it helpful to think about taking a course in something.  When you're taking a course, you read some primary materials and some secondary studies.  So, I've tried to come up with courses I want to take this year and to come up with a reading list for those courses.

I also have a reading list for the courses I'm teaching this year, as well as a Just For Fun list, because everyone needs one of those.

I don't have all of them filled in yet, but there's enough there to start with.

Let me know if you're planning to read any of these this year, too!  And if you have any suggestions for me to bulk up any of these "courses," I'd love it!

Great Books: Ancient History

1.     * SWB Story of the Ancient World

2.     Copleston History of Philosophy

3.     * Aristotle, Politics

4.     * Plato, Apology

5.     * Plato, Laws

6.     * Epictetus, The Discourses

Theology: Patristics

7.   Brown, Body and Society

8.     Augustine, City of God

9.     * Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian

10.  * Chrysostom, On Marriage and Family Life

11.  * Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty

12.  * Chrysostom, Homilies on St. John

13.  * Basil, On the Human Condition

14.  * Basil, On Social Justice

15.  * Lactantius, Divine Institutes

16.  * Ambrose, On the Duties of the Clergy

17.  * Griffiths, On Lying

Courtesy and Social Morality

18.  * Carter, Civility

19.  * Bourdieu, Distinction

Bioethics: Autonomy

20.  * Elshtain, Sovereignty

21.  * Elliott, Rules of Insanity

22.  * Weisstub, Autonomy and Human Rights in Health Care

23.  * Engelhardt, Philosophy of Medicine

24.  * Engelhardt, Bioethics Critically Reconsidered

25.  * Mazur, Informed Consent, Proxy Consent, and Catholic Bioethics

26.  * Pellegrino, For the Patient’s Good

27.  * Hester, Community as Healing

28.  * Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity

University Concerns

29.  Bain, What the Best College Professors Do

30.  Barzun, Begin Here

31.  * Twale, Faculty Incivility

32.  * Mason, Do Babies Matter?

33.  * Ward, Academic Motherhood

34.  * Nussbaum, Not for Profit

Jane Austen

35.  * Leithart, Miniatures and Morals

36.  * Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist

Classes I'm Teaching

37.  The Portable Atheist

38.  Confucius, Analects

39.  Bhagavad Gita

40.  Santideva, Bodhicaryavatara

41.  Prothero, God is Not One

42.  Long, Christian Ethics

43.  Wells, Christian Ethics reader

Just For Fun

44.  * Howatch, Glittering Images

45.  * Matchar, Homeward Bound

46.  Gaskell, Cranford

47.  * Atwood, The Year of the Flood

48.  * Russell, The Sparrow

49.  Tolkien, Hobbit

50.  * Fforde, Woman Who Died a Lot

(Strikethrough means that I've finished reading them.  Asterisk means that I don't yet have a copy.)

Christmas Eve Recap

I did a lot of baking in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  But none of it was for us.

It was for teachers . . .

. . . nursery workers . . .

. . . neighbors . . .

. . . and other assorted folk.

But we did have a lovely Christmas Eve dinner, just for us.

Hope you all had a lovely holiday.  A very happy New Year to you.

Ordinary Reading

I calculated last year that if I lived a slightly-above-average lifespan and read a book a week for the rest of my life, I could read about 2500 more books in my lifetime.

This does not seem like nearly enough.

But I won't even read that many if I keep up my current pace, so we'll need to step up our game in 2014.

Now, if I read two books a week for the rest of my life (presuming a slightly-above-average lifespan), I could get a good 5000 more books read.  And that seems more reasonable than 2500.

So I decided to set 100 books a year as a goal.

I can't decide whether to get a list going and be organized about it or to grab the nearest book and read.

If I had a list of 100 books, I'd always have an idea of what to read next.  And I could put together some mutually illuminating selections.

If I just grabbed books that looked good, maybe I'd finish more books.

It's tough to say which is better.

It's hard to self-educate.  Much easier when someone else is assigning your reading list.  My best grad school classes had a one-page syllabus.  15 weeks, 15 books, one paper.  Boom.

Maybe I should just make up seven courses with 15 books apiece.  There's an idea.

In any case, I've already finished my first book of the year.  The fact that I only had twenty pages left to read is irrelevant.  I'm declaring myself off to a good start.