Meet the New Specs, Same as the Old Specs

My new glasses are in.

You may not be able to tell, since I chose them myself.  Unless Kim comes with me when I choose things, I tend to end up with whatever looks closest to whatever I walked in with.  I find this simpler in the long run, and it certainly explains any number of things about my appearance – shoes, clothing, haircut, and now glasses. 

Mr. Adventure, I am not.

These are not the usual glasses, though, not “under the hood,” as those who have some understanding of automobiles are fond of saying.  I don’t understand automobiles beyond “push the slanty pedal down and it goes forward,” but I do love a good phrase.

No, these are bifocals.  Transition bifocals, which means that there’s no clear line between what you can see and what you can’t – it all blurs together.  So far, literally.

I’ve been wearing these things since I got up this morning and the world has finally stopped looking like it’s covered in jello now, which is good.  I’m still not entirely used to the idea that I have to move my head rather than my eyes to see things, and where the boundaries are for the various focal lengths are still somewhat of a mystery.  But I did manage to drive to the other side of town and back this morning without changing the shape of any of the big iron things on the road, and that has to count for something.

There were donuts at the other end of that trip.  Motivation is important.

The United States Not A "Christian Nation"

It’s election season again, and this means that more than usual you will be bombarded with utter nonsense about What This Great Nation Of Ours Was Founded Upon.

It has been my sad experience that whenever someone utters any variation of that sentence in any context outside of a university classroom – and, frankly, most contexts within one – I am about to be sold a bill of goods.  That phrase is almost invariably the prelude to a version of American history that at best can be described as “misleading” and at worst (i.e. usually) can be described by such terms as “mendacious,” “distorted,” “hallucinatory,” and “possibly drug-induced” in some combination up to and including “all of the above.”

It is surprising to me how often this revolves around the idea that the United States is somehow a “Christian nation,” given the clear prohibitions that Christianity makes against bearing false witness and rendering unto the Lord that which is Caesar’s.  I will leave the implications of that regarding the  faith of those making such a claim as an exercise for the reader.

For the record, the United States is not a “Christian nation.”

The Founding Fathers were very clear about this, and anyone who takes the time to study the reality of this nation’s founding is also very clear about this.  Whenever you hear someone rattling on in favor of the whole “Christian nation” idea, you can be sure you are dealing with someone who is at best reality-deprived, and at worst lying to you in order to sell you something.

There are a lot of such people out there today, unfortunately, many of whom seem to be running for office.  And to judge from the rest of the platforms these people unashamedly present to us for our approval, most of which seem to be drawn from more contemporary sources such as that noted Christian devotee Ayn Rand, all of the descriptions above apply – they are phenomenally ignorant, completely cut off from reality, and desperately trying to sell you something that you don’t (or at least shouldn’t, if you have an ounce of patriotism or self-preservation) want.

Don’t listen to them.

Now, this is not to say that religion in general and Christianity in particular can be ignored when studying American history.  While the United States is not a “Christian nation” in the sense that is generally implied by that phrase, it is most certainly a nation made up overwhelmingly of Christians, and some of the most zealous, committed, and partisan Christians on earth no less.  It has been from the early stages of European colonization, and nothing since has lessened that. 

You cannot hope to understand American history unless you also understand the history of American religion. 

If you want to understand history, you need to understand why people did what they did.  It’s not enough to know what happened – you need to gain some insight into why they thought that was a good idea at the time.  When the majority of Americans are and always have been religious – often deeply so – any movement that affects that aspect of their behavior is going to have a profound effect on pretty much everything else they do.  A lot of the reasons that Americans thought this or that was a good idea at the time, in other words, get back to their interpretations of Christianity – mainly Protestant Christianity for much of our history, but many different shades of it and other flavors (Catholic, Orthodox, Mormon, etc.) as well.

Much of the impetus for colonization and immigration here was religious, for example.  Not all of colonization was religious, of course.  Commerce and trade played a big role from the beginning.  And particularly as you move into the 1800s the sheer desire of people to get out from under the thumb of heavy-handed governments or out of the way of warfare comes into play.  Furthermore, not all of the religious motivations were even remotely compatible, even if you ignore the fact that there were Muslims, Jews and Catholics here from the very beginning and just focus on the many and varied Protestants.  But that doesn’t remove the importance of religion to the colonization of what eventually became the United States, and it doesn’t reduce the importance of that factor in bringing people here even after the country was set up officially.

Even if you limit your focus to the actual founding of the United States – the period between 1763, when the colonies began their slide into revolution, and 1815, when the American Revolution was finally secured after the Second War of Independence (usually referred to as the War of 1812, for creatively challenged reasons), religious motivations were there in force.  The “Christian nation” people are right about that.  Where they are wrong is in their assumption that those religious motivations were the defining characteristic and guiding impulse of the new nation.

What these “Christian nation” types either don’t know or refuse to accept is that the main reason the Founding Fathers were so adamant that the new republic not be considered a Christian nation was precisely because of the strong religious motivations and feelings of the American people.  The religious motivations of the Revolutionary Era were so many and so varied that the Founders understood – in a way that modern Americans forget, even if they can grasp it at all – that these motivations had to be kept out of the final product or the end result would be the kind of religious civil war that had plagued European nations since the Reformation. 

The Founders were better historians than most modern Americans that way.

They remembered the Thirty Years War, which killed more people than any European conflict prior to World War I and whose barbarity retains the power to shock even in this jaded era.  They remembered the English Civil War of the mid1600s, which set England back a generation and cost it more in blood and treasure than any conflict between the Wars of the Roses and the Napoleonic Wars.  They remembered the civil wars in France at the end of the 1500s, when the streets literally ran red with the blood of the massacred on Saint Bartholomew’s Day.  All that bloodshed, chaos and destruction in the name of the Prince of Peace, all that warfare waged by supporters of competing visions of salvation, and nothing accomplished other than the perversion of both faith and politics.

The Founders did not want that, and they made sure that their new nation – a nation founded upon the ideals of the Enlightenment in so many ways – would be insulated from this as much as possible.

They quite deliberately took Christianity out of the Declaration of Independence.  There is only a passing reference to a "Creator" and “Nature and Nature’s God” in that document, blandly non-denominational statements that could have been written with equal justice by a Wiccan. 

They quite deliberately took Christianity out of the Constitution.  There is only one reference to religion in the original text of that document as passed by the Constitutional Convention and ratified by the states that founded the Union, and it is negative – a prohibition on religious tests for public office that modern politicians would do well to remember.  The Preamble, which sets out the basic definition of the Union, starts out “We the People of the United States.”  It doesn’t mention the states at all, not that this bothered Southern traitors three quarters of a century later.  Nor does it mention Christ or any version of God. 

Believe me, people noticed that last one at the time. 

A fair amount of the opposition to the Constitution during the ratification debates of 1787 and 1788 came from precisely the people who felt that this omission was sinful and mistaken – ministers, mostly, from established churches who hoped to continue living off of the taxpayers of the new nation as they had done before independence.  Many of them did, in fact – until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 the First Amendment prohibition against the establishment of religion applied only to the federal government, not the states, and several states forced their taxpayers to pay for churches into the 1820s or 1830s – but that wasn’t enough.  They wanted a theocracy.  They wanted a “Christian nation.”

And they didn’t get one.

The Founders wouldn’t give it to them.  They knew the problems it could cause if they did.  They created a secular republic instead, one which would rule over its deeply religious population as a sort of neutral referee, leaving matters of faith in the hands of individuals, where they belonged.  They did not feel it was the province of the new nation to tell its citizens what to believe, and in this they have been proven correct.  We are one of the few Western nations that has never experienced a religious civil war and one of the few where church and state are separate, and this is not a coincidence.

In creating this secular republic they were supported not only by the sort of Enlightenment-minded gentlemen who made up the political elite of the new nation and thus largely mirrored the Founders themselves, but also by the leaders of the emerging evangelical sects that would dominate the United States in the nineteenth century but who, when the Constitution was written in 1787, were on the outside of political power looking in.  Those leaders understood that if the United States were to be founded on Christianity it wasn’t going to be founded on their version of Christianity and they would be crushed in much the same way they had been suppressed in Europe.  They supported the separation of church and state in eloquent and – in light of present positions – ironic prose.  Read Isaac Backus sometime if you don’t believe me.

Backus was a Baptist minister, one of the many converts made during the First Great Awakening in the mid-1700s.  In 1773, as the colonies spiraled toward revolution and independence, he made his case for the separation of church and state in a pamphlet entitled, An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Against the Oppressions of the Present Day. “[I]t is needful to observe,” he wrote, “that God has appointed two kinds of government in the world, which are distinct in their nature, and ought never to be confounded together; one of which is called civil, the other ecclesiastical government. … Now who can hear Christ declare, that his kingdom is, not of this world, and yet believe that this blending of church and state together can be pleasing to him?”*  Backus and his followers continued making this argument throughout the ratification period for the Federal Constitution of 1787 – Backus himself was a delegate to the Massachusetts convention that ratified the Constitution and voted in its favor, noting with particular approval the rejection of religious tests for public office – and it is their views, not the “Christian nation” views, that won.

You can see this victory codified into federal law with the Treaty of Tripoli, which was negotiated under George Washington’s administration, approved by the Senate in 1797 and signed into law by John Adams.  The treaty flatly states that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.“ 

On the one hand, it is entirely possible to make too much of this.  It was one throwaway line in a treaty that lapsed eight years later.

On the other hand, when the treaty was sent to the Senate, that line sparked no debate whatsoever.  In other words, the men who were there when the United States was created and who were in a position to know firsthand what the nation was really founded upon – and, since it was only a decade prior, presumably to remember those facts – saw nothing controversial about that statement.  It was seen as a simple restatement of obvious fact, not an assertion that needed proof. 

Trust me - I’ve studied this period intensely.  This was an era of vitriolic politics, where each side saw themselves as the only true and proper defenders of the republic and where everyone involved feared that a single misstep could doom the new republic.  Anything that would have been seen as even remotely debatable would have launched barrages of rhetorical artillery that would leave marks visible even today.  The line itself is not as important as the fact that nobody at the time saw it as controversial.

It wasn’t.

The United States is not a “Christian nation.”  It is a nation made up overwhelmingly of Christians.  But these are not and never have been the same thing.

Keep that in mind, this election season.


----

*Italics in the original.

That Kind of Day

That’s it. I have officially Burned Out.

There is a list of things I need to accomplish today that is longer than I really care to think about. It is preceded by the list of things I should have accomplished yesterday and followed by the list of things for tomorrow. These lists cover long term goals, short term tasks, intermediate range wishful thinking, global needs and specific crises.

And none of them are getting done today.

 I suppose some of this is because it has been a hectic month. But they’re all hectic. Nobody I know has free time anymore.

 It’s been the sort of day where I stare at one task, put it aside, stare at the next task, put that aside, and cycle through the lot of them until I find myself back at the first task with nothing accomplished other than becoming marginally older. I can become older without that kind of effort.

Perhaps I will just call it a day.

Optimized

Good heavens. I have been optimized.

 For the last month or so Blogger has been threatening me with a new format. Well, they probably didn’t see it as a threat. They saw it as an Opportunity! See all the new features! Look at all the improved layout! Notice how much more you can do now! You can make your blog do tricks! It can look like different blogs to different people, if you only click this toggle button! Or unclick it. Whichever.

And once again, we are back to the Engineer’s Problem.

Engineers look at gizmos and ask, “How many things can I get this to do?” They want flexibility, capacity, energy. They want a box that can solve all of the world’s problems, fix a tasty meal and tuck your children in bed at night, and they want it with four buttons that need to be pressed in varying combinations and patterns because more than four buttons is aesthetically displeasing.

I look at gizmos and ask, “How can I get this to do what I want?” This is a very different question, with a much more straight-line sort of answer. This is one of the many reasons I did not become an engineer of any kind. Not understanding circuit diagrams despite hours of explanation also figured into that decision.

I had been given the opportunity to “upgrade to the new Blogger interface” a couple of years ago, back when they introduced the last new Blogger interface. I tried it, and decided that it was indeed more flexible, capable and energetic but that those very qualities were a hindrance to me actually getting it to do what I wanted, which was to make blog posts.  Fortunately they had a Back button on the whole thing, so I went back to my old unimproved interface and was happy.

There doesn’t seem to be a Back button this time around.

And getting this post into the proper format has been a neat trick, since my old work-around of pasting Word documents into the HTML editor and then switching over to the Compose mode (to avoid all the formatting tags that Word began to introduce several Blogger upgrades ago) seems to be working extra well these days, to the point of removing all formatting entirely - even paragraph breaks.

Joy.

Eventually, I suppose, I will figure out a way to make this new system do what I want, and perhaps later I will even figure out a way to get it to stop doing what I don’t want. But this hardly seems like the upgrade or Opportunity that Blogger insists that it is.

And fairly soon I am sure the Facebook Borg will assimilate me into Timeline.

Keep those good times rolling, yes indeed.

It's Not The Questions, It's The Answers

One of the most valuable lessons I learned growing up was that you should never ask a question if you don’t really want to know the answer.

There are two ways you can take that lesson, and both of them are important things to consider before asking anyone anything.

On the one hand, there are times when you already know the answer and having it confirmed will do you no good. Sometimes a little ambiguity is all you need to preserve the peace and allow everyone involved to look the other way while important, necessary, enjoyable or irrelevant but somehow forbidden things go on. You don’t need to know. Don’t ask. No good will come of asking.

On the other hand, there are times when you really don’t know the answer but a little forethought will tell you that none of the possibilities are going to make your world easier, more profitable, more enjoyable or more peaceful. If you can’t imagine an answer that will be at all comforting or provide you with information that is in any way useful, you may want to rethink your strategy, question-asking-wise.

But it’s often hard to know those questions in advance. They sneak up on you, and they’re out of your mouth and into the air before you realize. You’ll know them when they pop out – they’re generally followed by a brief “what do we do now?” kind of pause in the short run, interludes of crisis in the medium run, and lingering regret in the long run – but by then it’s too late.

So here are a few questions you should probably plan on not asking, so you can recognize them in advance and in fact avoid asking them.

1. That theory you have about your favorite sports team being cursed, how does that go again?

2. Why do you use so many multiple exclamation points and capital letters when you write?

3. So, how did you come to be a Ron Paul supporter?

4. I tried calling you late last night – where were you?

5. I’m going to hell? Now what makes you say that?

6. You wrote that down?

7. How many volunteers do you need?

8. That new dish was really tasty. What’s in it?

9. What’s this camera doing in your bedroom?

10. How much did that cost?

11. What do you think you’re doing?

12. Why isn’t all that scientifically proven evidence good enough for you?

There are a whole lot more of these questions, but even thinking about them is enough to drive a body to drink and it is just too early in the day for that. It may be five o’clock somewhere, but not here.

Big Yellow Machines

The big yellow machines were back outside my house today.

My street is apparently slated for demolition this spring. Not the houses, mind you. Just the street. And about time, I say, for getting from Point A (at the south corner of my block) to Point B (my driveway) without first being rerouted through Point C (which feels very much like the exciting part of a motocross track) has become something of a trick. This does not include actually getting past the sinkholes guarding my driveway, some of which have glass elevators and charge admission fees.

Coming home can be an expensive, if scenic, proposition.

So when the letter came in February that the city would begin to replace this carnival of multiple altitudes with something resembling a macadamized road, I was on board with it.

Last week they began what appears to be Phase 1 of this project. Phase 1, from what I could tell, involved making great holes in the road wherever a water pipe came to the surface (approximately every thirty-five feet), and then filling those holes in with gravel. I am sure that something of note happened between the making of those holes and their filling in with gravel, but beyond a general sort of “and then they fixed the water main” I couldn’t tell you what that something might be.

And they didn’t fix it anyway. At least not at first.

They tried though. Last Friday there suddenly appeared in front of my house a hole ten feet square and eight feet deep encompassing the south half of my driveway apron as well as pieces of the surrounding street and terrace (Our Little Town has awfully wide terraces), and as I was negotiating with the crew chief for an approved escape route so I could get to work that day he asked me “How’s your water pressure upstairs?” “What water pressure?” I asked him. “Figured,” he said. It turns out that there were multiple leaks out there in the road, and that he would be directing his crew to fix them.

On the one hand, those leaks were before my water meter, so I wasn’t paying for them. On the other hand, wasting water is a bummer, bad water pressure is more of a bummer, and the idea that this fixing of leaks might resolve the recurring sinkholes guarding my driveway and save me admission fees seemed, well, an anti-bummer. “Have at it,” I said, as if he needed my permission.

When I came back later that day, it appeared that he had not fixed those leaks so much as moved them to new locations. My newly graveled hole was a swamp, which had not been the case with the original sinkholes. But by then it was the weekend, and I had to wait until Monday to complain.

They said they’d send someone out.

It turns out that my leaks probably were fixed, but they had created new leaks with the hole in front of my neighbor’s house and that water was running south to me and making my swamp. I found this explanation satisfyingly explanatory, but rather short in the “solving my actual problem” department.

Yesterday they came by and cut a groove into my new gravel, which had the salutary effect of draining my new swamp but was still lacking in the “solving my actual problem” department.

This morning they came to solve the problem.

Vast yellow machines crawled hither and yon back and forth in front of my house, making my computer bounce up and down and causing the work crew to shut off my water, though they were kind enough to give me sufficient lead time to get a shower and fill my teapot.

There is something about big yellow machines that dig up stuff that is just forever fascinating, especially if you – like me – were once a 9-year-old boy.

But now they’re gone again. It seems like they actually did solve my problem. The swamp appears to be gone. I haven’t noticed any great change in water pressure, but at least I’ve got the old pressure back.

And sometime soon they will redo the street, which will mean more big yellow machines.

Yay.

It's a Hockey Night in America

This is my favorite time of the year, sports-wise.

It’s the first round of the hockey playoffs, which as far as I am concerned are better than the Super Bowl, the World Series, the World Cup and the season finale of Mythbusters combined. There’s always a game on, since there are three or four games every night across four different time zones, and the games are fast, hard-hitting and generally fun to watch.

I’m not sure why it is that the things I like most are invariably the things that make most other people either yawn or scratch their heads trying to figure out what exactly I’m talking about. Hockey used to be the fourth sport in this country, behind football, baseball and basketball, but now it falls somewhere below NASCAR, UFC fights and competitive eating as well.

And still nobody cares about the World Cup but us contrarians.

I like football, really I do. I like baseball if I can watch it in person, or on television if I’m in a languorous mood.

But basketball is just silly. UFC is nothing more than boxing with the rules taken out. Competitive eating is the single best example of the pitfalls of unlimited cable channels with airtime to fill. And NASCAR? Seriously? Why would anyone want to watch people drive in circles all day? I understand that takes skill and physical conditioning – it’s not like driving in circles in the grocery store parking lot, however much it looks like it from the outside – but there are a lot of things that take skill and physical conditioning to do that really are not meant to be spectator sports.

Welding, for example.

What makes this year’s playoffs even better is that my two favorite teams are meeting head to head.

I grew up as a fan of the Philadelphia Flyers, a team I still regard as my favorite organization in all of sports. I was about Lauren’s age during the years of the Broad Street Bullies, when they won their two Stanley Cups. I remember hanging out with my brother late one night in the bedroom that we shared when all of the sudden it seemed like the world had erupted in horns and shouting, and not knowing until the next day what that had been all about.

I lived in Pittsburgh during their first two Stanley Cups, in the early 1990s. I didn’t own a television for part of that and didn’t get cable even when I bought one, so most of the games I had to see at a local bar, about half a mile from my apartment. It was a long, narrow bar, maybe 12 feet wide and forever long, so sound tended to bunch up and reverberate, and the night they won their first championship I left that bar with my ears ringing and couldn’t hear right for nearly a week.

I’m probably the only person in America who can genuinely call himself a fan of both teams, such has the rivalry between them grown heated.

As a Flyers fan, I’m liking this series. They’re up three games to none in this best-of-seven, and have come from behind in all three to win convincingly – twice on the road. They’ve played with discipline and intelligence, they’ve shown strong defense and scored almost at will (20 goals in three games? That would be a lot of scoring for baseball, let alone hockey). Barring a historic collapse, they will move on.

As a Penguins fan, however, I’m thoroughly annoyed. Not just because they’ve lost three straight games that they led by as many as three goals, but because they’ve turned into thugs and charlatans. Their captain is a petulant little coward who has hung his teammates out to dry, they’ve deliberately tried to hurt opposing players, and even the Pittsburgh media have called them out on it.

It’s kind of conflicted, really.

But soon enough it will all be over. This round ends next week sometime. The next round comes and goes, and eventually some toothless, scruffy guys will be skating around with a big silver bowl over their heads and goofy smiles on their faces, and it will all be put away for next year.

Go Flyers.