Author Archives: Frank Moraes

About Frank Moraes

Frank Moraes is a freelance writer and editor online and in print. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, throughout the computer industry, and as a college physics instructor. Find out more at About Frank Moraes.

Anniversary Post: Donner Party Begins

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Donner Party - Page 28 of Patrick Breen's Diary: 'On this day in 1846, the Donner Party set out from Springfield, Illinois. They went on to famously eat each other. As a result, I’ve never been that much interested in it because when I’m hungry I’ll eat anything. So it doesn’t much matter to me. But I bring it up today for a totally different reason.

I had been out of touch with my friend Will for a number of years. I think we managed to independently marry different women on the same day. But when I got back in touch with him, I found that he had become obsessed with the Donner Party. I remember one evening coming over to his place and his idea of the proper way to spend the night was to listen to a lecture on the Donner Party.

Now, on the one hand, I greatly admire that. And I can always use it when Will tells me that whatever I’m currently obsessing about is boring. But it is a little creepy. You haven’t seen a guy for years and all he wants to talk about is cannibalism. I’m not saying Will is a cannibal, but he is very picky about exactly what taco trucks we eat at. Just saying.

The one thing I learned about the Donner Party is this wasn’t the case of people getting stuck and then starving. The whole thing went on for a year. People went off looking for help, leaving others behind. The whole thing seemed very much preventable. If only other people had cared more. But hopefully, Will will notice this post and fill us all in with a comment.

But as I indicated: it just doesn’t seem strange to me that starving people would eat the flesh of dead people. I don’t see the big deal. In fact, I don’t see any issue at all. It is a totally rational decision. Any other decision is just standing on ceremony.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens as Our Empire Dies

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Star Wars: The Force AwakensI went over to visit my brother, who turned out to be doing somewhat better than I had expected (but still not good). He had purchased Star Wars: The Force Awakens through his cable provider, and so I ended up watching the first half of it. My brother was in a surprisingly good mood and was generally amused at my MST3King of it. The whole thing really is just a remake of the original film. But I have to admit: it’s better.

What most struck me was that Finn in the part of Han Solo was far better. Even in 1977, the Han Solo character was nothing but a stereotype. He had all the depth of character that an actor of the depth of Harrison Ford is capable of delivering. But the Finn character has actual nuance. His is a character that I can actually believe.

The film starts with basically the Star Wars equivalent of the My Lai Massacre. And despite supposedly being trained from birth to be nothing but a robotic killing machine, he turns against the First Order. I left right after he told Rey (a much less annoying Luke Skywalker) that he was just running away. I know that he will come back, just like Han Solo, because this is not meant to be a film that surprises you.

Still, as much as I liked Finn and Rey, most of the rest of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was crap.

My brother is incredibly conservative, which is interesting given that he’s been on the government dole most of his life. That’s not a slight on him. I love him. He’s my (half) brother and his biological father badly abused him, and my father was not exactly the understanding kind. But I’ve noticed a lot of people who are dependent upon the government going in exactly the opposite ideological direction than you would think. I assume it is because they are compensating. And when asked, they always say more or less the same thing: they deserve their benefits they are just against other people who “abuse” the system.

But I find it curious that my brother (and let’s face it: the vast majority of people everywhere) find a character like Finn a hero. But he is only a hero because the film defines the First Order as evil itself. If the film had even the tiniest amount of nuance, Finn would be a morally ambiguous character. Consider Bowe Bergdahl: the narrative is that he went AWOL and this is considered a bad thing because it is taken as a given that anything the US does is right. I personally think that running away is the most natural thing in the world.

Still, as much as I liked Finn and Rey, most of the rest of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was crap. The opening scene was clearly shot on a sound stage. It had the look of those Roger Corman television science fiction shows where everything happened in more or less a single room. And then there was all the humor regarding Han Solo being shocked about a modern woman. That sort of thing creates dissonance because it makes explicit the change in the sexual mores of the 1970s and those of today — something that makes no sense in the universe of the film. And if I, having seen only the original film once in 1977, can make out all the references, it’s a pretty ham-handed effort.

For what it is supposed to be, however, it seemed to work just fine. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is, of course, the kind of entertainment that a dying empire creates for itself, so it can pretend that it is still on the side of the rebels. But, of course, we aren’t. We are just an old power doing everything we can to hang onto it. And that means that we will lose that power, just as surely as the First Order will by the end of the third film.

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” poster licensed under Fair use, via Wikipedia.

Morning Music: Die Bosniaken Kommen

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Die Bosniaken Kommen - Eduard WagnesOne of the writers I work with is from Bosnia. And I wanted to complement him on something he had written by quoting Patton, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” This particular writer is actually quite well known and only works for us as a kind of favor. Since I know his other work, I know what kind of things he would do a very good job on, and I was very impressed with something he had written and I wanted to use the line. If I knew him really well, I could have just written, “You magnificent bastard, I read your book!”

The whole thing ended up in an exchange about Rommel. He seems to know a great deal about the wars of the last century, which isn’t exactly surprising, given that he lived through the Bosnian War himself. Anyway, he mentioned that Rommel became famous on the Isonzo front — I believe in the Battle of Caporetto in particular. He wrote, “Due to the extremely harsh terrain, the Central Powers had to deploy elite mountain infantry… As a tribute to their gallantry, Die Bosniaken Kommen march is still played at Austrian military events.”

I don’t like to pass up any opportunity to do something different for a morning music. So I grabbed onto it. We’ll get back to Merle Haggard tomorrow. But today, we’ll listen to this march. I find it curious that marches aren’t used more in the teaching of music theory. You can see in them so clearly two-part counterpoint. And from there you can add the harmonic structure. But I suppose the use of Baroque music is more pure.

Die Bosniaken Kommen was written by Eduard Wagnes in 1895. According to Wikipedia, it is “played on all military events in Austria.”

Image of Wagnes by Josef Moserderivative work: Herzi Pinki – This file was derived from Bad Gams Denkmal Eduard Wagnes.jpg: , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: Colfax Massacre

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Colfax Massacre 'Riot' SignOn this day in 1873, the Colfax massacre occurred. As you can see in the image on the left, it is referred to as the “Colfax riot” by bigots. The end of “carpetbag misrule” was really the the new beginning of white rule by terrorism. That sign was put up in 1950.

This is what Ian Millhiser wrote of it in his book, Injustices:

Led by Christopher Columbus Nash, an ex-Confederate army lieutenant who was also the Democratic candidate for Grant Parish sheriff, Democratic forces marched on Colfax on April 13. Though the approximately 150 black men defending the courthouse slightly outnumbered Nash’s men, the Republican forces were massively outgunned. About half of Nash’s men were Confederate veterans, including four officers. Each of them was well armed, many of them with multiple guns, and they had even brought a small cannon to Colfax on a two-horse wagon.

Think about the Colfax Massacre in a modern context. This is what you get when you take a “forgive and forget” (one president might say “look forward as opposed to looking backwards”) attitude toward misbehavior. I’ve discussed this issue many times. I recommend that you check out, Let’s Destroy Laudatory Confederate Monuments. It includes the amazing statistic that although the people of Kentucky stayed with the Union and overwhelmingly supported it, the state has 72 Confederate monuments compared to only two for the Union.

Rewriting the Colfax Massacre

When you allow people to pretend that they did nothing wrong, you allow them to rewrite history. Looking at monuments around the United States, you would think that the Confederates had had some great injustice done to them. They were traitors. They committed treason. General Lee should have been put to death by the mores of the time, not allowed to ride away on his horse with his sword.

I think the same thing about torture. Now we have Dick Cheney going all around talking about how great torture was and how it kept us all safe. Now there’s a man who should have died in prison long ago. But instead, he’ll continue to live to the point where he is all machine and no flesh. There is absolutely no great new life extending technology that won’t be put to use for this most vile of men.

Colfax Massacre “Riot” Sign by Billy Hathorn, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia.

What Is Contagious Is Random

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Contagious: Why Things Catch OnMy boss has tasked me with the job of revitalizing the blog for our flagship website. This is a job I worked very hard to avoid. Because a professional blog is different from a personal blog like Frankly Curious. In general, people come here because they think I’m vaguely interesting and they want to know what I’ll rant about. But a professional blog is all about trying to find market niches and determine what articles will take off — go viral. And so he recommended that I read Jonah Berger’s book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On.

Given that he’s a nice guy, he sent me the book along with two others that I might actually like. I was highly suspicious of the Berger book as I am all such books. Why do things catch on? Well, I can tell you why once they catch on. Or at least I can provide you with a plausible sounding reason. But can you really predict what is going to take off? To quote William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.” In Adventures in the Screen Trade, he wrote about a collection of films and why producers thought they would be great successes. All the films were, in fact, flops. So he went through the earlier happy talk to explain why it was wrong.

Of course, I don’t think that Gibson’s reasons for films flopping were right either. For example, he said that Pennies From Heaven flopped because Steve Martin wasn’t a singer and a dancer. Personally, I think it flopped because it’s an incredibly depressing film. Coming off The Jerk did people really want to see that? Did people really want to see that film under any circumstances? I wrote a largely positive review of the film, but that is looking at it as art — not as popular entertainment. Regardless, my ideas are no better than Goldman’s; they are just guesses.

Nobody knows anything.

Can We Predict What Will Be Contagious?

The issue is not confined to Hollywood. We’re really good at finding patterns in things. But that doesn’t mean we’ve figured out reality and it certainly doesn’t mean that knowing some patterns lead to actionable intelligence. In Contagious, Berger lists “Six Principles of Contagiousness.” Here they are with my brief descriptions:

Social currency
This is the kind of thing that makes people want to share it with others. For example, when I hear a particularly clever line in Bob’s Burgers, I want to share it with people. When I learn about a bizarre bit of computer trivia, I want to share it with any person I think will understand it.
Triggers
Some things trigger other things. For example, if people mention chatbots or AI, it will trigger me to tell the story of Robert Epstein.
Emotion
When people connect emotionally with something, they are more likely to share it.
Public
If others see people doing something, they are more likely to follow along. I’ve thought that a lot of fashion (eg, baggy pants) were due to someone having no option but to dress a certain way, and so doing it proudly rather than apologizing for it.
Practical value
People are more likely to share things that are useful. This appears to be why people are always forwarding nutrition information to me. Note to everyone who knows me: I don’t care.
Stories
Is there a broader narrative that the story falls into? Note: this is how racism works.

This is all fine, but I think it is useless. For example, what is it that makes something have social currency? What is “cool”? These six principles are really just a way of explaining why things have taken off — not why things will take off. As Berger himself notes: plenty of cute animal videos go viral, but far more do nothing at all. And it is usually the case that there isn’t anything particularly different between them.

Theories Don’t Help

What’s more, all of these principles are common sense. You can boil them down into one really useless sentence, “People share things that they find interesting.” The big question remains: why do they find them interesting? And I don’t think a theory helps you there. You still have to go on a case by case basis. And you have to accept that a lot of great and interesting work still won’t catch on because that’s just the way the world is.

“Nobody knows anything.” —William Goldman

I think that books like Contagious act as pacifiers. They give people something to hang onto in a world that is pretty much random. And now, the internet is not really about making content that people will push; it is about making content that computers will push. Think about Upworthy — the viral content machine. Inside of six months, it saw its traffic fall by over 50%. This did not happen because the content changed; it happened because Facebook changed a computer algorithm.

This is all very disturbing from the standpoint of all content creators. It’s as though companies like Google and Facebook have become gods and we do our best to please them. But they are no less fickle than the Abrahamic god. But the larger issue is that people end up with worse content, because everyone is writing for these gods now.

I know this very well from my work here. I know the kind of articles that get a lot of hits. If I wanted to push my numbers up, I’d be writing a lot more about the presidential election. Instead, yesterday, I wrote about something that I know people don’t like reading about: central banks. But I think the issue is important. It’s the sort of thing that people should be exposed to even if they don’t care about it. But I’m not here to make money, so I can do that. I could never do that in my day job.

But I still think it is a fool’s errand to try to find contagious content. I think Henri, the existential cat is one of the most brilliant ideas ever. But the original video has only three million views. (Note: the second Henri was far more popular, but far less successful.) Meanwhile, Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift are superstars without a lick of talent between them. Emotion? Practical value? What’s contagious is what we learned in Caps for Sale: monkey see as monkey do. Except now it is: human see as computer do.

The rest is chaos, regardless of what theory you want to present to explain it. Again: nobody knows anything.

Book cover taken from writer’s website, licensed under Fair Use.

Morning Music: Swinging Doors

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Merle Haggard - Swinging DoorsMerle Haggard’s second album, Swinging Doors, is a perfect country music album. My biggest complaint about popular music generally and country music specifically is how fake it is. And I suppose that’s true of Haggard too. I mean, the man was born in Bakersfield, California. Yet listen to that accent he affects in his songs. And yet, it seems entirely authentic coming from him.

(To be fair, Elvis Costello sang with a distinctly American accent on his first few albums. I don’t think it was affected. I think it was just the result of listening to American singers. I assume the same thing was going on with Haggard.)

My favorite song on Swinging Doors has always been “The Bottle Let Me Down,” because its funny and I love country drinking songs more than anything. But arguably, the strongest song is the title song, which is about the exact same thing. And it includes a very clever refrain, “I’m always here at home till closing time.”

It’s kind of funny that I love these kinds of songs, because I’m not like that at all. Unless a drug puts me to sleep, it only makes me more introspective. This is why I hate cannabis. I don’t need a drug that encourages me to consider everything I’ve ever done in the most negative way possible. If I had to live in the state of mind that cannabis brings out in me, I would have killed myself decades ago.

Admittedly, alcohol does not make me self-critical. Instead, it makes me more accepting. But that wouldn’t be a good thing in dealing with a break-up. Just the same, the way that Merle Haggard tells the story in “Swinging Doors” strikes me as exactly what I would be like. And that does make it hilarious. But only in a fictional setting. In real life, it’s just pathetic.

Album cover licensed under Fair use, via Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: the Real Shakespeare

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Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of OxfordI am, as usual, far behind on work. But that’s not why I’m rerunning this article about Edward de Vere. It is just that this is the kind of information that you need. I get so tired of these conspiracy theories about Shakespeare. They are all, at base, trying to justify how one man could write such amazing plays. The problem is, the plays aren’t that amazing. Just because we’ve had them forced on us our entire lives doesn’t mean they are great.

On this day in 1550, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was born. He was an awful person. He wouldn’t accept that the first child of his marriage was his. He was pretty much the definition of a libertine. But he was a poet and playwright of some repute. You know, at that time, the rich didn’t have much to do with their time. Of course Edward spent through all of his fortune by the end of his life. And that is with the Queen giving me a thousand pounds per year in addition (an enormous amount of money). I could not possibly care less about this idiot, except for one thing.

A lot of people think he wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. In one way, who cares? I mean, we know almost nothing about Shakespeare anyway. So what does it matter? But it really bugs me that one of the main reasons that people think Edward wrote the plays is because Shakespeare’s plays supposedly show so much knowledge of the way that the aristocracy lived. But this is so ridiculous. I’m poor, but I have a damned good idea of how the rich live. And it isn’t just because of television. In Shakespeare’s time, the poor knew how the rich lived because they saw it — and their servants saw it up close and personal.

What’s more, this desire to find someone — Anyone! — but Shakespeare to have written the plays is based on the idea that the plays are so amazingly great that they couldn’t have just been written an ex-school teacher from the country. Well, I have news for you all. Although Shakespeare’s plays were well regarded during his life, they weren’t seen as any better than the plays of Marlowe or Jonson. And they were seen as inferior to the plays of people who came after. I’m a fan of Shakespeare, but he just wasn’t that great.

So people: get over it. If you want to think that someone else wrote Shakespeare’s plays, at least go with Marlowe. At least in that case you have royal spying and murder and faked deaths. It’s a lot more fun. The Edward de Vere narrative is just boring. But really, I think people get into the whole “who wrote Shakespeare” question because it relieves them of having to read the plays, which are by and large not all that great. So sure, I’d rather read “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward De Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford than The Two Noble Kinsmen. But that doesn’t prove anything.

So happy birthday you great pretender, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford!

Afterword: Who Thinks Edward de Vere Was Shakespeare?

Who believes such nonsense? This guy:

The End of Independent Central Banks?!

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Simon Wren-LewisSimon Wren-Lewis asked a good question yesterday, Can Central Banks Make 3 Major Mistakes in a Row and Stay Independent? He pointed out that the central banks (the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, and so on) are primarily responsible for the housing bubble and resulting market crash. Then, when the governments stupidly turned to austerity, the central banks did nothing — in particular, they didn’t make it clear to policy makers that they really had no tools at their disposal. And the third mistake, Wren-Lewis thinks, is this big push now for the central banks to “normalize” the situation. By that, they mean raise interest rates back to where they would normally be and not right at zero.

Wren-Lewis’ concern is that the central banks acting so badly will cause them to become controlled by elected officials. He thinks this is a bad thing because he looks back to The Great Moderation after Paul Volcker and others tamed the business cycle. I appreciate that way of thinking. At the same time, the central banks are unaccountable plutocratic institutions. Today in the United States, the Fed doesn’t seem to care about workers. It seems only interested in doing the bidding of the banking industry.

It’s kind of hard for me to think that making central banks dependent upon the whims of democratically elected officials is all that bad.

I think it is very interesting that when the European Central Bank was formed, it was not given a dual mandate to stabilize prices and maximize employment; it was only given the mandate to stabalize prices. This fact almost caused the EU to break apart in 2010 when the bank didn’t seem to see its purpose as being the lender of last resort. But the point is that things have changed so much since the 1960s when it was generally agreed that people needed jobs. Now the plutocrats are in charge and all they care about is making their own lives better.

So it’s kind of hard for me to think that making central banks dependent upon the whims of democratically elected officials is all that bad. As Simon Wren-Lewis noted, “What central banks should be doing in these circumstances is allowing their economies to run hot for a time, even though this might produce some increase in inflation above target.” But instead, we are getting the opposite. After years of stagnant wage growth, the first sign of increasing wages makes them freak out and want to slow the economy. As Dean Baker always says, this is a decision to put millions of people out of work.

As long as we have a central bank that cares only about the interests of the financial industry, I think it is a mistake to have it independent. In that case, no matter how good the government’s fiscal management, regular workers will continue to see their wages stagnate. And they will be the lucky ones in that they at least have jobs. The Federal Reserve has been unable to help the American worker for almost a decade, but can (and apparently will) hurt the American worker as the economy improves. This makes me wonder about independent central banks. We the people have to take control — either directly or by putting better people in them.

Image of Simon Wren-Lewis taken from his site and licensed under Fair Use.

Morning Music: Two Special Moment in Paris

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Luxembourg Garden GazeboI want to take a quick break from Merle Haggard, just because I feel like it. I remember two major things about being in Paris. We performed at many places but two really stood out. The first was Notre Dame de Paris. The thing about that was that we were only allowed to perform sacred music there. That cut out most everything we did. The only thing I can remember that we did was Bach’s cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, which means something like “Heart and Mouth and Deed and Life.” You probably know it best from last of its ten movements, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” For whatever reason, I just want to listen to it today.

It was very special to perform there. I’m not religious and I never have been. But I love religious art, architecture, music, and even ceremony. It’s all meant to heighten the religious experience. But to me, all that peripheral stuff is the religious experience. And they are probably more important than ideas in the religion anyway — especially for the illiterate masses that followed the religion all those years in a language they didn’t understand.

The other great Paris experience was performing under a gazebo in the Luxembourg Garden. It was probably a weekend afternoon and there were many hundreds of people sitting around listening to us. They hadn’t come to listen to us. They were just there. People played there all the time. It was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. But we were perhaps 15 minutes into our performance and it started to rain — hard. I figured everyone would run away. But they didn’t. They just opened up umbrellas and continued to listen. It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.

Image cropped from one taken from Best Parks in Paris. Licensed under Fair Use.

Anniversary Post: The Apple I at 40 Years Old

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I am out of time, and I must get up early and visit my brother this morning. So I’m replaying last year’s anniversary post. But it’s quite interesting. It’s worth another go. -FM

Apple IToday, the Apple I is 40 years old. The company itself was started just ten days earlier. It’s interesting that in the public consciousness, Apple is Steve Jobs. Yet the first Apple computer was not built by Steve Jobs. In fact, I don’t think that Steve Jobs ever built a computer. He was the sales guy — the PR man. The Apple I was built by Steve Wozniak. So was the Apple II. Wozniak was the tech guy of the company for as long as the company couldn’t afford to hire tech people from outside.

Apparently, a year earlier, Wozniak had attended a computer club meeting. He was so inspired that he decided to build his own computer. And a year later, he had. Forgive me for not thinking much about the non-technical aspects of business, but I just don’t think that Jobs’ “idea” of selling the computer was all that brilliant. But he’s the man who everyone remembers. And he’s the man who every know-nothing uses (along with Bill Gates) as examples of entrepreneurship and why we need to keep Mitt Romney’s taxes low.

The Apple I was a pretty basic unit. It came with 4 KB of memory — which could be expanded to 8 KB on board or 48 KB with expansion cards. I know, this sounds like nothing. But the truth is that with 48 KB, there are some pretty decent user applications that can be created. In particular, I’ve run totally acceptable word processors and spreadsheets on computers of that quality. But the biggest thing that limited all computers of that age was the video. The Apple I had a 40×24 character display. It looked something like this:

On March 5, 1975 Steve Wozniak attended
the first meeting of the Homebrew
Computer Club in Gordon French’s garage.
He was so inspired that he immediately
set to work on what would become the
Apple I computer. Wozniak calculated
that laying out his design would cost
$1,000 and parts would cost another $20
per computer; he hoped to recoup his
costs if 50 people bought his design
for $40 each. His friend Steve Jobs
obtained an order from a local computer
store the Byte Shop the affordable
computer store in Mt View California
for 50 computers at $500 each. To
fulfill the $25,000 order, they obtained
$20,000 in parts at 30 days net and
delivered the finished product in 10
days. Apple went on to be one of the
biggest computer companies in the world
by stealing innovations of other
companies and suing any competitors. Now
people buy Apple products because of its
brand, even though better products at
cheaper prices are widely available.

Happy anniversary Apple I!

Image taken from Engadget, licensed under Fair Use.

Cultural Christians and Bigotry in Tennessee

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Cultural Christians Lie in TennesseeLast Wednesday, the Tennessee House voted 68-22 for a bill that would allow mental health professionals to refuse to treat patients on the grounds of the counselors’ religious beliefs. It’s just another “hate the fags” law and a big sign that on this issue at least, the cultural Christians are not only losing, they are terrified. This vote reminds me of the comment from yesterday’s anniversary post where an explicitly racist judge ranted from the bench.

Let’s think about this for a moment. This law is designed to make it harder for LGBT people to get counseling services. In what way is this Christian? In the Gospels, Jesus doesn’t have a problem going around and ministering to anyone at all. But apparently, these Christian counselors have to be protected from the rules of their profession, the American Counseling Association, that they can’t tell LGBT people that they are wrong or sinful. You have to ask: why didn’t such counselors go into the church instead?

Two days before the House voted on its ridiculous bill, the Tennessee Senate voted on an even more ridiculous bill, SB1108, which “designates the Holy Bible as the official state book.”

Think of a lawyer who is defending a murderer. I would assume that the lawyer would be against murder; pretty much everyone is; the truth is that the vast majority of murderers are against murder. But the purpose of the lawyer is not to judge the murderer but to provide them legal services as dictated by the ABA. Yet where are the laws being passed to protect Christian defense attorneys from having to defend people who have sinned in God’s eyes? I’ve never heard of any such thing, and I have no doubt that such a law would go down in flames in the Tennessee House.

Cultural Christians and Bigotry

So this really isn’t about Christianity. This is just about attacking one minority group that a certain section of cultural Christians have decided is more important than everything else. And shame on them for using the cover of their religious freedom to justify it. These are not just bad Christians and bad Americans, these are anti-Christians and anti-Americans. These are people for whom their bigotry is more important than both their religion and their country.

Meanwhile, we had the Catholic Church release, The Joy of Love. And yes, it isn’t radical. I actually get rather cross at people who think that the Catholic Church is suddenly going to accept same sex marriage or allow priests to marry. But the document is about acceptance. And based upon where the document started two years ago, we know that Francis himself would like to go a good deal further on these matters. But my point is that even the sclerotic Catholic Church is trying to reach out, but these American cultural Christians just want to segregate.

Two days before the House voted on its ridiculous bill, the Tennessee Senate voted on an even more ridiculous bill, SB1108, which “designates the Holy Bible as the official state book.” The House approved the same thing last year by a vote of 55-38. The Senate passed SB1108 by a vote of 16-8.

I’d like to say that it is obviously unconstitutional, but it is hard to say anything is obvious in the federal courts anymore. But most opponents are making that argument. Happily, some Christians are making the argument that making the Bible the state book “trivializes something they hold sacred.” Yes! If you actually care about your religion, you treat your holy texts as something more than a cultural symbol of how “everyone ’round here believes it!”

The world of religion is wild and wacky. And I’m always interested to hear what serious people think about religion. But what I come upon in this country is mostly a bunch of people who believe it because it is in that book that their parents told them was the truth. Cultural Christians have absolutely nothing to add to any theological discussion. They use their religion as a cultural signifier to tell the world that they are the right kind of people and the rest of us aren’t.

Image altered by one by Airtuna08 at en.wikipedia, licensed under CC BY 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Morning Music: Merle Haggard

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Strangers - Merle HaggardSince Merle Haggard died last week, I figured we’d spend some time listening to his music. He’s always been a struggle for me because on the one hand, he was one of the most talented songwriters ever. On the other hand, he wrote “Okie from Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me” — two of the most vile and reactionary songs ever. And they weren’t the only ones.

The thing is, I think Haggard was a smart and thoughtful guy. But that kind of working class bigotry toward anyone considered an outsider came all too easy for him. It’s weird and it also explains why he was all over the board when he discussed these songs. Mostly, I don’t think he much knew what he was doing. He just wrote the songs and how ever they turned out was okay. Analysis was not really what he did. But he should have. Anyone with his background and good fortune should have embraced the outsider to the core of his being.

Five years after his release from San Quentin Prison, Merle Haggard released his first album, Strangers. It’s not a great album. Over half of it is other people’s material, and I’ve never been so much taken with him as a performer. And it doesn’t include his best material. But much of it is quite fine indeed. It isn’t very distinctive, however. In particular, today’s song, “If I Had Left It Up To You” sounds like George Jones wrote it. And that’s true of most of the tunes on the album, they sound like someone else wrote them. But that doesn’t make them any less good. And for a first album, well, wow.

Album cover licensed under Fair Use, via Wikipedia.