Over the weekend, I was at the graduation party for my niece. Actually, she is the daughter of the sister of my sister’s husband. And I have to say, they put on a good party. The father is a constant builder and one thing he has built on their vast property is a bar. Admittedly, the beer on tap was marginal and most of the beer in bottles sucked. But since the demand for good beer was low, I managed to spend the day drinking little else but Lagunitas.

At one point, I got into a conversation with the mother about Johnny Horton who was born on this day in 1925. It turned out that she is a big fan of his music and I had to maneuver to avoid borrowing a CD of his music. It wasn’t that I don’t like his music, it is just that it would have been a hassle to get it back to her. I was raised on the music because my own mother was a fan.

Horton was best known for “saga songs,” which I always associate with folk music, but apparently he was considered rockabilly. His best known song is Jimmy Driftwood’s The Battle of New Orleans. I like the song, but I’ve always thought the production was silly with the drums and the “Hup, two, three, four!” part. In fact, Driftwood’s version is far superior.

But I do love Horton’s voice. He has just enough of that bluegrass hollering thing going on to make what is essentially a pop voice interesting. He also has great variety in the timbre of his voice. And for all the silliness of the production of his songs, they have a gusty appeal. Here is “North to Alaska”:

While on tour in Texas, Horton’s was killed at the age of 35 in a car accident when a drunk college student hit the band’s car while crossing a bridge. The other two survived, although guitarist Tommy Tomlinson lost one of his legs. The drunk kid, of course, suffered only minor injuries.

Happy birthday John Horton!

The following video is well worth spending some time watching. It is a lecture by Alfie Kohn about the pernicious effects of “tougher standards” in the education “reform” movement. Before I get to the substance, though, I want to say something about the style. A common thing in media is to have a passionate conservative paired up with a mild-mannered moderate. This is thought to be balance. What’s more, it is often claimed that “liberals” are all mild-mannered. It isn’t that. It is that they refuse to put actual liberals on. Kohn is extremely passionate. But he’s exactly the kind of person who isn’t much allowed on mainstream television because his ideas are supposedly outside the mainstream. Of course, the same media outlets are only too happy to bring Cliven Bundy and Ted Nugent on their shows.

There are a lot of interesting things in the talk, but I just want to mention three. He provided a thought experiment. Imagine that all the students in a state passed a standardized test. Would this cause the governor to applaud the teachers and students and claim that the system was working? No. It would freak out everyone. They would just say that the test was too easy and they would make a harder test. The point is that tests may be quantitative, but they are not accurate. They are created so that a certain number of students fail. Thus: the students are graded on a curve, which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Another interesting thing is a fundamental problem with western thought: we measure what we can measure. So we’ve set up tests to measure what is easiest to test, not what is most important. For example, he noted that the tests will look at how many times a student used a comma correctly rather than looking at how many interesting ideas that student wrote about. In his essay I talked about earlier, he wrote, “Low-quality instruction can be assessed with low-quality tests, including homegrown quizzes and standardized exams designed to measure (with faux objectivity) the number of facts and skills crammed into short-term memory.” Again we come back to this issue of utility. To the modern business, workers are cogs; they want workers to be interchangeable. So it is important that all students know some list of facts rather than have the ability to think.

I’ve seen this for decades in the the high tech industry. At this point most programming languages are built on c++. But this doesn’t stop developers from creating yet another c++ language that has special features for doing this or that. Yet companies always want to hire people with skills in that particular new language rather than experienced programmers who can probably become experts in the language in the week it takes for an application to be processed. In short: American business is stupid, so it isn’t surprising that it wants our kids to be stupid too.

Finally, he ends the lecture by talking about what tests are really all about: inequality. Students from rich families do better on tests than students from poor families. He says that simply by knowing the percentage of students who get free lunches, he can predict their test scores with “chilling” accuracy. So in the end, tests are not about helping students—much less those struggling. They are about ossifying the status quo—allowing income inequality to freeze into place.

Check out the video. It’s about 45 minutes long and it provides a good introduction to what is wrong with our test-based education system.

The United Church of Christ (UCC) has been performing same-sex marriages since 2005. So they decided to pursue a legal challenge to North Carolina’s ban on same-sex marriages. They are arguing that the state is violating their freedom of religion. That is too delicious not to talk about.

But I think the case is very clear. People’s rights to free expression do not trump laws. The Rastafarians believe very much that they should be allowed to ingest cannabis, but that has never stopped one of them from being imprisoned for that “crime.” So I don’t think that the UCC has a religious right that trumps North Carolina law. Of course, there may be details in the law that would push me in the UCC’s direction. But as it stands, it seems pretty simple.

I am just being consistent here. I also think all of these religious based attacks on Obamacare should have been thrown scornfully out of court at the very beginning. And there are lots of similar cases, like where a Christian pharmacist claims he has the right not to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. The Rastafarians have a far better claim to their drug rights than do hobby stores who want to micromanage their employees’ healthcare coverage.

But given all the time and efforts that conservative Christians have put into destroying Obamacare using such arguments, you would think that they would be in support of the UCC. After all, it is a matter of religious liberty. It shouldn’t matter that it is in the name of a specific policy that they don’t accept. But, of course, it does matter. North Carolina Values Coalition (NCVC) executive director Tami Fitzgerald said in a press release that because a majority of the voters in the state voted for the law, the UCC should have no rights. She then went on to talk about how she was the ultimate arbiter of what Christianity is and that the UCC is just wrong.

Of course, when Hobby Lobby was before the Supreme Court, Fitzgerald was firmly behind it, urging people to Pray for Hobby Lobby. But I’m sure that is not the only bit of hypocrisy that Fitzgerald and the NCVC have in store. Right now it is all about the fact that 61% of the electorate of North Carolina voted to ban same-sex marriage. As soon as the people become in favor of same-sex marriage, she will be using a different argument. And it won’t be long. Last year, the people of North Carolina were against same-sex marriage by a tiny 45%-44% margin.

We’ll see what happens to this case. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if conservative judges find that a same-sex marriage ban did not violate the UCC’s religious rights even while they find hitherto unknown religious rights of hobby stores. Luckily, the same-sex marriage issue will be resolved by the people very soon.

Normally, if someone rings the doorbell on a Saturday afternoon, it is my friendly neighborhood Jehovah’s Witnesses. Like many Christians, they mistake the Bible for a book that ought to be read by the laity. And so they are out all the time fishin’ for souls. It is almost sweet. And annoying as hell! You see, these people are frauds. They pretend to be my friend but they aren’t interested in me anymore than the salesman at Best Buy is. I’m not an individual; I’m just another soul like all the rest. And it takes all my force of will to not talk to them about religion because I am far more serious about the subject than they are. So I just smile, take their Awake! magazines, and close the door. It makes them happy because they are under the delusion that this is what Jesus wanted them to do.

But here in little Sonoma County, the election has begun. So now, when the doorbell rings, it is likely to be someone selling a political candidate. I like this! And it isn’t because I like politics more than religion, because that isn’t even true. If actual religious seekers came to my door, I would be happy to engage with them. But instead, religious dogmatists come to my door to sell me their religion. But that’s not what they say. According to them, they’re doing me a favor!

The campaigners are selling stuff too, of course, but they don’t claim otherwise. They are partisans looking to help out their side. That kind of honesty is refreshing in modern America where even our television commercials are often of dubious relevance to the products that they are pushing. But you know what’s really great about them. They never try to read to me. “If I may, there is a passage from Barack Obama’s 2012 inaugural address that is of particular relevance to this, ‘For George Washington so loved the nation…'”

Fundamentally, there is nothing different about the Christians who come to my door and the political activists. They are all true believers for their causes. I suspect that the nice young man who came to my door a couple of days ago is just as certain Mike McGuire is the right man for the California State Senate as the Jehovah’s Witnesses are that God will create a heaven on earth for them in a now unspecified future time. But there is still a huge difference between them.

In our society, we are told that having irrational certainty about religion is a good thing. This allows Christians to go their whole lives without ever hearing Jesus referred to as a Cosmic Jewish Zombie. It is thought that doing this is rude, which is probably true. But it also means that religious thought doesn’t advanced and they are stuck with a common philosophy today that would have appalled early Christians, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Thanks to right wing hate radio and especially Fox News, we are getting a lot more of this in politics. Still, it is true that if you start spouting off about politics at a local pub, someone will counter you.

As a result of this, political activists come to my door with humility. They know they are intruding. They know that the person behind the door may have strongly held opinions that counter their own. The Christians know that they may get some push back too, of course. But it isn’t the same. The vast majority of people do not agree with them. Only 2.5% of the nation is Jehovah’s Witnesses. (The Mormons don’t come around here, but they are much the same with 5% of the population.) And even most other Christians don’t want what they are selling. While doing some work at a Baptist Church recently, I found a pamphlet on how to deal with Jehovah’s Witnesses. But whatever abuse they get only goes to prove to them the righteousness of their work and purity of their souls.

Political activists have no such solace. The essence of political organizing is not about convincing people who disagree with them. It is to find and organize those who do agree with them. So they aren’t trying to find people who scream at them so they can feel good that they’ve located followers of The Evil One.

But above all, political activists are to be admired because they are involved in facilitating the basis of our society: democracy. I’ve always felt dragging the Bible from door to door is very much like my bringing Don Quixote door to door. It too is an old book with much spiritual insight. Why don’t I do that? Because my interest in Don Quixote is not widely shared. I may think that people would be better off if they read the book, but it is presumptuous of me to force it on them. But all citizens of this country should care about who our elected representatives are. So political activists are a very good thing indeed.

Afterword

Thus far, the only people to come to my door are Democrats. And the only political mailings I’ve received are from Republicans. I find that humorous: Democrats have people, Republicans have money.

On this day in 1848, the great Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma was born. I’ve never been very clear on the Indian caste system, but Varma was kind of born to painting—or at least that bourgeois creative class. Actually, I suppose he was part of Vaisyas caste. His father was a scholar and his mother, a poet. And at least two of his brothers went on to be painters. Varma is the most famous of them.

What I appreciate about him is how he brings western and eastern painting traditions together. You might say he was the William Bouguereau of India. But as much as I love Bouguereau, Varma is much more than that. His color palette is far more intense. And his religious painting is far more interesting, but that is probably just because the Hindu religion has far more interesting iconography than Christianity does.

Here is painting I especially admire of Murugan, the god of war, victory, wisdom and love:

Happy birthday Raja Ravi Varma!

Please forgive me for not writing much today. I’ve been here the whole time, but I seem to have the flu or something. I just don’t feel up to reading or writing. In fact, I spent the last two and a half hours watching Harakiri, which is an incredibly powerful film. Even still, I don’t feel up to writing about it.

Last week, Infidel753 wrote, Catacombs of the Blogosphere. It is sort of a celebration and remembrance of blogs that have stopped running (or slowed to a trickle). Blogs are, by their nature, ephemeral. And in a fundamental way, I think that political blogs are unhealthy. They force us to consume a lot of politics and then they attract (in my case) conservatives who, nine out of ten times, add nothing to the conversation. They spout talking points that I have usually addressed many times before. It’s exhausting. (Of course, they also attract more interesting and informed people, which is a big part of why I continue to do it. So I’m not surprised that people cut back and even stop.

There’s another issue, I think. Blogging forces you to see just how many great and thoughtful writers there are out there. It’s great for developing your skills. But it isn’t going anywhere. It is hobby writing. I figure I could do this for another decade and I would still be getting the same few hundred actual (not spam) visitors per day. To a large extent, this is simply a result of the structure of the internet. I have another website that I started in early 2000. I haven’t done anything on it in years. Yet it still gets ten times the traffic that Frankly Curious gets.

A better question than “Why have they stopped?” is “Why did they take it seriously for so long?” And I think the answer to this is extremely positive. It shows self-actualization; it shows commitment; it shows passion. Bloggers really are the best of what we are. (Well, they are; I’m just a narcissist.) And they are extremely idiosyncratic. Infidel753 mentioned this, “If a blogger is dedicated to liberal politics but also has a passionate interest in, say, gardening and jazz music, then there will be some posts about liberal politics and others about gardening or jazz music.” Exactly.

Still, why do I post five or so articles every day? Part of it is fear. I see it as a kind of work of anti-art. It will go on as long as I do it and then it will be no more—very much like life itself. We spin our webs as a reflection of who we are. William Buckley famously wrote, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop…” We liberals run ahead of history yelling, “Full steam ahead!” It’s a noble, if futile endeavor. But what else am I going to do?

It is very possible I will repudiate this all tomorrow. I feel like my head is swimming. But I had to get this out. It’s been over a year since I only published one article in a day…

Update (29 April 2014 8:52 am)

Infidel753 wrote a followup:

Today is the 88th birthday of Harper Lee. She wrote one of the greatest English language novels ever, To Kill a Mockingbird. Of all the Southern Gothic authors, she is the only one that doesn’t seem to hate the entire world. But had she ever published so much as another story, we might have found out that there were stores of misanthropy just waiting to explode on the page. Of course, she never did publish anything more.

Because she never published anything else, many people have speculated that Mockingbird was some kind of collaboration with Truman Capote—or at least that he “edited” the book. I’m deeply offended by this. First, given Capote’s personality, does anyone really think he would not have skimmed off more than his fair share of the credit for what is sadly better than anything he ever wrote? Second, Harper Lee has a rather different style. At the time she was writing it, Capote was writing Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Third, it isn’t as though the two were kids anymore; they were both in their thirties. The whole thing strikes me as pure sexism.

I think the reason that Harper Lee has published no fiction is that she’s paralyzed by the success of her novel. It isn’t as though she hasn’t tried to write other novels; she’s just been unhappy with them. Regardless of what she released, it would have been savaged. We’ve seen this again and again. Joseph Heller wrote his whole life under the shadow of Catch-22. Ken Kesey wrote under the shadow of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And if I didn’t hate him so much, I would admit that the same fate awaited J D Salinger.

It reminds me of what Orson Welles said of his endless production of one of his great unfinished projects, “Don Quixote was a private exercise of mine, and it will be finished as an author would finish it—in my own good time, when I feel like it.” It would be far better if successful writers wrote less. I’ve long been a defender of Stephen King, who really is a talented writer. But for decades he’s been publishing books just because he can. A little quality control would go a long way. And it would allow more oxygen for other authors.

So Harper Lee shows a hero for her creative humility. And that is something writers are greatly in need of.

Happy birthday Harper Lee!

Yesterday, I wrote about Lynn Vavreck’s excellent book The Message Matters. In my discussion, I focused on how, Campaign Messages Don’t Matter to Media. But there were other issues that I took note of. Toward the beginning of the book, she noted that campaigns don’t matter to either the high or low information voter. The high information voter already has a narrative for the candidates and the low information voter isn’t paying attention at all and will just go with retroactive voting based upon the economy. It is the group in the middle who can be affected by campaign messages.

This last week, Vavreck wrote an article along these lines at the excellent The Upshot blog at The New York Times, The Myth of Swing Voters in Midterm Elections. She noted something that people around here should know: the vast majority of people side with one or the other big parties and when it comes time for voting, they vote the way they always do. From a practical standpoint, it means that the question is not how people vote but who votes.

In the article, she highlights what happened in 2010. This too should come as no surprise. I’ve long ranted about the ridiculous idea that the 2010 election indicated that the voters were unhappy about Obama; I’ve always said it was simply that a large chunk of Obama’s voting base didn’t show up. But I was still shocked by this chart:

What this shows is that only 6% of the electorate switched sides and they did it about evenly. Slightly more people switched their votes from Democrat to Republican because there were more Obama voters in 2008. But the difference is very small. The midterm problem was not liberals seeing Obama in action and running to vote for Allen West. It’s that 11% of the people who showed up to vote for Obama didn’t show up to vote against Allen West.

Vavreck sums it up well:

To see why this is bad, all you have to do is look at the House of Representatives. But there is good news in this fact: Democrats win elections by default if voter turnout is high. So Democrats don’t need to do their constant dance to the right to impress swing voters, because there really aren’t any there to get. And the party seems to have finally woken up to this fact and is putting more focus on “get out the vote” efforts.

Probably the best thing that any person can do politically is to encourage others to vote and to help others vote. And of course the most basic thing you can do—the thing that really ought to be a requirement for citizenship—is vote yourself. Sadly, that is something many of my liberal friends can’t even be bothered to do. We get bad government here in the United States not so much because of conservative voters but because of liberals who do not vote.

The General Election is on 4 November 2014. That’s six months and one week away. I’ll be reminding you as we get closer.

Afterword

In a broader sense, I wish people would stop referring to America as a “center right” nation. That’s a pretty odd claim. If you talk to Americans about issues, they come down as decidedly liberal—especially on economic issues. If you ask them all what their opinions are on parties, they come down decidedly as Democratic. The only way that America is a center right nation is in the sense that we make it hard for people to vote; so when few people show up at the polls, they tend to be center right. But that isn’t the people in a general sense. That’s just decades in which the oligarchs have manipulated our democracy.