Dean's World

I overheard the following short conversation between my Aunt Raine and her friend Claire a few minutes ago:

Claire: "I hear that President Bush is taking full responsibility again for dropping the ball on Katrina."

Aunt Raine: "Our president girl! And yes he did."

Claire: "He ain't my President. And it's way too late to be all responsible. Look at how you've been treated by the Feds and insurance companies after you loss your home down there."

Aunt Raine: "Yes he's your President and yes the treatment has been 5th class but at least he's man enough to take responsibility."

Claire: "HA! He isn't a man and he messed up terribly!"

Aunt Raine: "Well he ain't God, you dummy! And I'm tired of this Bush bashing crap. Katrina screwed up everyone from the direct victims on up to the President. God can't get screwed. Men can."

Claire: Whatever Raine. You didn't vote for him anyways. Why you defending him?"

Aunt Raine: I'm not defending him. I'm acknowledging his manhood by him taking responsibility. Why do I have to devalue him as a man all because I didn't vote for him?"

I love my Aunt Raine. She's just full of good ol' common sense. Louisiana style.

Martin Shoemaker commissioned the following essay. He said,

I can’t really think of a better topic than this one: Draco, Jake, and Rosemary. Tough one for ya, I know — not. When I wrote my Dad’s eulogy, I realized that the cliché is all too true: we never seem to tell people why they’re important to us until it’s too late. As Arsenio Hall’s grandmother once told him, “You bring me my flowers while I’m alive, damn it!” It’s important to tell the people who matter to us why they matter.

It's a tougher challenge than you might think. I've written many times about my wife and our relationship--we're fairly well an open book online. For a good example there, see 100 Things About Another Blogger. We've been through a lot together, she and I; I've watched her almost die a couple of times. We've gone through pretty tough times as a couple and stayed together through things that might have blown other couples apart.

There's my son Jake, soon to be turning 8, and quite the little man already. He's smart and sassy like his mother. Sadly, although I was the first to hold him and feed him in his early days, and spent lots of time with him in the early days, since our financial collapse a few years ago it's been different. I've been forced to work horrible hours at a job I hate for over four years, and forced by circumstances to accept going to school full time--which I also hate with a seething passion--just to hope to get a level of financial security and stability that Rosemary and I concluded we needed. This has forced me to spend far less time with him than I'd like, and to have far less energy when I do spend time with him. I don't think he fully understands that now, nor am I sure he ever will. But he's surely a wonderful child: bright, happy, lovable, smart as a whip, and able to beat his old man at most--not all quite yet, but most--video games. All that and an honor student. What a kid.

Little Draco--what can you say about a boy not even a year old yet except that he's a delight? He looks so much like his brother, but is very different--more giggly, more silly, a bit less imperious, a bit more subtle. It's amazing how you can see such differences in kids' personalities when they're just infants. I get far less time with Draco than I did with Jake when Jake was his age, but I hope that once the madness of this horrible schedule and this utterly infuriating time wasting I'm doing persuing a college degree will leave me, in a few more years, able to spend more time with both of them.

What can I tell you about these wonderful people who are part of my life? They're the reason I get up every day. They're the reason I haven't collapsed into an alcoholic stupor. They're my reason for working a job I hate--to keep them fed and safe. They're the reason I go to school which I hate every second of--to secure a better future for them.

If it were all to end tomorrow, the only regret I'd have is not getting this idiocy of a "college education" behind me before I got married, so I wouldn't have to putz around doing so many things I hate now and could devote more of it to them.

But they're worth it. Every bit of it.

And speaking of being worth something, what these folks are doing is important too:

Industrial Bill (a.k.a. "IB Bill") has asked the following:

I'd like you to write a short essay, no sources, and you can be as flexible as you like, revealing as little or as much as you see fit: What/who matters most to you — and why? That's probably what we're all thinking about right now.

What matters most to me? On the surface, this would seem an easy question. Were I inclined to take the question unseriously, I would throw off a half-dozen simple answers. And the truth is, those simple answers would not be simple things: Security. Stability. The esteem of my peers. Self-esteem. Challenges enough to make my life interesting but not so challenging that I cannot overcome them.

Would we not all assent to such answers? Maslow's hierarchy of needs would seem to describe most of us, would it not?

Within that, there are also the little things that seem to matter to most of us: whether our favorite sports team does well. Whether our children do well in school and make us proud--and are happy. Whether we're good lovers in bed. Whether we smell bad. Whether our favorite movie does well at the box office. If we are religious, whether God is pleased with us. If we are not religious, whether we have left our mark, however small or subtle, upon the human race.

To an extent, Bill's question is the easiest possible to answer. I'd say that if I'm making a good and secure living, if I'm doing good in school, if my wife and children love me, and if people enjoy reading my scribblings here on this weblog, then I'm measuring up to everything that's important to me.

But if we were not inclined to take it unseriously, Bill has asked me the most difficult question that can be asked of a human being.

We go through this life doing our best to survive and, if we're lucky, to thrive. None of us are perfect, and none of us measures up to everything we would like to be. I am not a baseball fan--in fact, unlike most male humans, I am not much interested in competitive sports--but I often think that American baseball is a wonderful microcosm of life as an ordinary human. For let us just look at baseball: in this sport, failure is far more common than success.

No? You doubt me?

Baseball is a study in failure. If you are one of the greatest who ever played the game, you might have a batting average of .333--which would mean that out of a thousand times at bat, then 666 times out of a thousand you failed. Perhaps you didn't swing, or if you did swing you whiffed it: you missed, you batted a foul, or you hit the ball but were called out. Ultimately, you failed. Yet if you failed only 666 times out of a thousand, you would be counted among the greatest athletes who ever played the game.

Robert Browning said, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" I think of that often as I go through life.

So what's important to you? Mostly, you can only answer that for yourself. If you're a believing man, it'll be between you and God--but it's still a question only you can answer. Ultimately, it's still up do you.

Yet to bring this to a very personal level, I will say this: Before September 11, 2001, I had a lot of answers to this question of what is important, most of them self-indulgent. After it, with much contemplation, I was forced to bring such a nebulous question into sharp relief:

What is important to me?

What is most important to me is my wife and my children. They are my reason for living, my reason for existing. If I have done my duty to them as best I could, then I have truly been a man. I need no further justification for anything I do.

But beyond that, I often think of something that James Joyce said: "'This race and this country and this life produced me,' he said. 'I shall express myself as I am." One of the best writers in the blogosphere has taken that as her byline, and I wish I had been so wise as to make it mine. "Defending the liberal tradition..." does not say it half so well.

Beyond myself and my many failures and my few successes, there comes my chosen family: my beloved wife and my unbelievably amazing sons Draco and Jacob. If there is a God, he let me know he exists by giving them to me.

But at a higher level comes this:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

That is a statement of what it is to be an American. But it is also a statement of the best aspirations of the human race.

And right now your fellow Americans--and your fellow human beings--need your help. Right now.

---

This essay was written due to the generosity of Industrial Bill. For a donation of $50 or more to the Red Cross, I'll write an essay on any subject--any subject you wish. So what are you waiting for, punk?

Our friend Moze, the Defiance, Colorado Democrat has asked me to answer the following question:

Does the Theory of Evolution refute the account of creation in Genesis 1&2?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that it depends on how you look at it, but no not really.

The Bible, most particularly the first five books of the Tanakh or the Old Testament, is mostly a collection of mythology strung together over a period of thousands of years. The creation myth it tells is no more accurate than the Greek mythological tale of how the Earth was created from the body of the goddess Gaia (SOURCE) or the Egyption creation stories (SOURCE) or the countless other tales spun together by folklore and tradition that ancients strung together (SOURCE). When the biblical book of Genesis was put together, an unknown scholar or group of scholars--almost certainly not Moses--took the various tales of creation that had been passed down by oral tradition by his people and wrote them down.

When looking at the Bible, the tale of the Genesis creation is not one but two completely different creation stories, cleverly woven together. The first tale is told in Genesis Chapter 1, and begins "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (SOURCE). That tale ends, oddly enough, not at the end of chapter 1 but at chapter 2, verse 3, which concludes "By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done."

The second tale, which probably ought to begin the second chapter, begins at is a completely different tale from that told in the first. The second story begins, "This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created," and ends more or less in Genesis 3 (SOURCE), with Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden.

The two tales are not quite perfectly separated. On that point, Biblical scholar Richard E. Friedman, in his excellent book Who Wrote the Bible? (SOURCE) lays out, in fairly convincing fashion, that some sentences were cribbed from the first tale and inserted into the second, and vice versa, in order to make them blend better and seem less in conflict with each other. Regardless, these are two mythological tales, and an interesting and fascinating allegory for the human experience--most especially the human experience as understood by mostly-illiterate people who were incredibly poor and very short-lived by modern standards.

Those tales were later compiled many generations later by literate and somewhat more wealthy people based on what had come down from their parents and grandparents. The fact that we still have that thousands of years later is remarkable.

None of this has anything to do with science. It's mythology. That's not a dismissive thing to say either: mythology is extraordinarily important to the human spirt. We need mythology: it tells us things about ourselves, about each other, about our past, and about our future. It's not insulting to call something mythology. It should just be remembered that it is not science.

There have been efforts by a few to suggest that evolution followed the broad path laid out in Genesis, but this effort fails to pass close scrutiny. Simply read Genesis 1 and follow the literal sequence, and you can see where it doesn't mesh with what we know today; just for starters, the Earth was not dark and completely covered with water before the sun came up and the land masses were created. In Genesis, the first living things described as being created are plants, when we know for a fact there were many other organisms before there were plants; then Genesis describes birds and sea creatures being created around the same time, when in fact those were millions of years apart; it describes livestock animals and all other land animals being created at the same time, when in fact the various forms of livestock and other land animals appeared at many different times and through many different processes--and livestock didn't exist until humans created them by breeding. Genesis then describes man being created last of all, which is wrong because many important species came into being after the earliest humans.

I keep looking for a better online source and not finding one, but at least one basic chart I've found (SOURCE) looks to mostly be accurate and shows how the sequence of events in the evolutionary record just didn't happen in the sequence Genesis mentions. So even if you try the old allegorical trick that we all heard in that terribly overblown--and by the way, historically very inaccurate--film Inherit the Wind (SOURCE), it doesn't work. No, you really can't just say, "days were longer than 24 hours during the period of creation, to God, millions of years could be a day." I'm sorry, that doesn't much hold up. The sequence of creation that Genesis lays out simply does not map to what we've seen in the evolutionary record. Not in any way I can tease out, anyway.

More to the point, if the Genesis account is to be taken as literal truth, wouldn't we expect it to say somewhere that God later established the length of time of a day as a short time period? Come on. This is all gilding the lilly: here we have a wonderful and important mythology passed down by word of mouth by ancient humans, and we're trying to twist and contort it to fit a scientific theory--and contorting the science to fit it as well? What's the point?

If I were a man who believed that Christianity (or Judaism) was the true religion and these books the genuine Word of God, I'd still say that religious folks should stop pretending that God personally came down, took out a pen, and wrote these tales down. I'd say that the proper way to look at them is that God's chosen people passed down the tales by word of mouth for dozens or hundreds of generations, and when they were written down God let them be written that way because God was far more concerned with the spiritual truths and the lessons those tales had for people, not the exact intricacies of how He went about piecing together his creation. No more than He wanted to make it a math text or a cookbook. God is not incapable of approving of myths. Myths are not "lies."

As a non-believing man, I say that these myths are still wonderful and powerful, no different from any other mythology--and that mythology is truthful, powerful, important stuff. There's no reason to gild the lilly that mythology represents by trying to twist it to fit a biology textbook.

So: can the Biblical tale of creation be jibed with the theory of evolution? No, not literally, not at all, and attempting to do so is kind of silly. But as an allegory to the evolution of the human spirit? Sure. No problem.

--

This is the second in a series of what I've dubbed "Essays for Katrina," essays written to support relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina. For a $50 donation to the American Red Cross, I'll write an essay of at least 600 words with at least 2 references on any subject you request. Any subject at all. I can't guarantee you'll like the essay, but I'll do my best to make it informative--or at least entertaining. :-)

This essay was written due to the generosity of Moze, the Defiance, Colorado Democrat.

Everyone has heard urban legends. Including you.

Mind you, you may not have heard the term "urban legend," and you may not be familiar with what they are. But everyone has heard at least a few of them, and just about everyone has believed at least one. Almost everyone has repeated one, too. While many of them are things that you have to be kind of gullible to believe, most are far from impossible--they just usually aren't true. But the stories usually have some ring of truth, and resonate with people, and make them want to repeat them.

For some reason, probably because Americans are obsessed with race, a lot of the tales have racial overtones. One of the tales I've heard many times is of the white woman who went to Las Vegas. One night after spending some time in the casino, she started to go back to her room. On her way, she noticed a group of black men following her. She got especially nervous when they got on the elevator with her, and she found herself alone with them. They kept eying her strangely, and then the leader said, "hit the floor!" In a panic she took it as an order and dropped to the ground. The man then realized he'd scared her, apologized, and began laughing. "Lady, thanks, that's the funniest thing that's happene to me in ages." All he'd meant was for one of his companions to hit the button for their floor. Later on, the woman got a bouquet and some candy and a nice note from the man--and it turned out he was Lionel Ritchie, the other men his bodyguards.

Actually that's just how I tell the tale because the first two times I heard it, it was about Lionel Ritchie. In truth this tale has been told about Eddie Murphy, Michael Jackson, Magic Johnson, OJ Simpson, Jesse Jackson, Jackie Robinson, and many other black male celebrities. Problem being, so far as anyone can tell, it never happened. No black celebrity who's been asked has ever said he remembered such an incident, and no researcher who's tried to track down this woman has ever found her. Also, the location in the story sometimes changes to Atlantic City, or New York City, or some similar place. (SOURCE)

Interesting question: is this a racist tale against black people--about how scary black men can be? Or is it a racist story against white people, about how paranoid and gullible they can be? I don't know. I do know that any time you ask someone where they heard the story, they'll usually claim it happened to someone they know--a friend's cousin's mother, a cousin's best friend's aunt, or so on. A lot of urban legends are like that.

While most legends are basically harmless, some are corrosive. For example, there's the one about how fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger hates black people. The story goes that that he went on Oprah Winfrey's show "recently" and she asked if it was true that he was embarassed to have black people wearing his clothes. He said yes it was true, his clothes were meant for upper class whites. Oprah ordered him to leave the show, the first time she ever did that to a guest, and got a standing ovation.

Great story? Yeah, well, it's total bunk. Complete malarkey. Nothing remotely like it ever happened. (SOURCE 1, SOURCE 2, SOURCE 3)

In a similar vein, there's a horrible rumor out there that Church's Chicken, a regional food chain that serves fried chicken, is owned by the KKK. This is outright terrible: Church's has many black franchise owners and stockholders, and provides employment opportunities and charity work in countless black communities. Indeed, Church's is very open about the fact that black people make up the majority of their customers, and they're pleased as punch to have their business. Church's has also been said to put a secret ingredient in its chicken to render black men sterile, a rumor has been said of Popeye's Chicken and several other foods and beverages. It's all a bunch of crap. (SOURCE)

Some legends are almost entirely fun, and go into the supernatural. In my boyhood Chicago I often heard the tale of "Resurrection Mary," a girl buried in Resurrection Cemetary at 7600 Archer Avenue. She was supposedly killed on the night of her teen prom back in the 1930s, and every year or so since then she reappears on the anniversary her death. She appears as a very pale girl wearing an old-fashioned party dress who's hitchhiking. Those who pick her up report dropping her off at a certain address, where she promptly disappears. Usually, she leaves behind a trace of dampness or cold. A great part of the legend--and this much is true--is that at one time some of the bars on the fence near her grave were bent outwards, as if someone had bent them to escape. You'll still sometimes find people who say they know someone who knows someone who drove this girl home one dark night, usually either during Teen Prom season or around Halloweeen. (SOURCE.)

Some urban legends aren't even stories so much as they are bits of folk wisdom. Sometimes you can even guess where they came from. For example, I've found that most people seem to believe that humans breathe through their skin--that your lungs do most of your breathing, but your skin is a sort of secondary system, so if you completely cover your skin in a way that won't let oxygen through, you'll suffocate. It's surprisingly common. Indeed, I even once had a skydiving jumpmaster tell me that when you jump out of an airplane and go into free fall, the enormous wind velocity (you fall at around 120 mph, which is the equivalent of standing in a hurricane wind) pushes enough oxygen into your bloodstream that you don't need to breathe.

I'm afraid it's just not true. This seems to have its source in the James Bond story Goldfinger. In it, a beautiful woman is murdered by a nefarious villain who paints her entire body in gold paint, causing her to suffocate because her skin can't breathe. Where author Ian Fleming originally got that I'm not sure, but in any case it's nonsense. Nobody breathes through their skin. At all. (SOURCE)

Oh, by the way, have you heard the one about how Chevrolet pulled a major marketing screwup by selling a car called the "Nova" in Spanish speaking countries? Because supposedly "no va" means "doesn't go?" Nope. Sorry. Not true. (SOURCE.) It's about like saying English-speaking people think a Nobel prize means you win a prize where you don't get a bell.

It's tempting to feel superior to people who pass these legends on--until you finally find out that you yourself have believed one. Furthermore, someone who tells you a tale like this might not be as dumb as you think.

For example, have you ever heard the one about how the Bayer company used to end its product names in "in" and that they gave us both aspirin and heroin? And that heroin used to be legal and sold over the counter by Bayer just like aspirin? That one happens to be completely true. Yes, true. All of it. (SOURCE) Also, yes, Denzel Washington did indeed visit a group called Fisher House that helps wounded veterans, and he made a big donation to them--although he didn't whip out a checkbook and buy them a whole new building (SOURCE).

The proper way to look at an urban legend is with enjoyment. If you've passed one on, the best thing to do is laugh and say, "whoops, ya got me." They are fun, and occasionally give us insight into how people, or certain communities of people, think.

I also find them a fascinating look at the human animal. Human beings love telling stories and passing on folk wisdom. We like to think we're better and smarter than our ancestors, but the truth is we're not so different after all.

One of the great marvels of the internet is how it's allowed people to not only share urban legends, but to collect, compile, research, and analyze them, and find out whatever truth might or might not be behind them.

For my money the best site on urban legends is Snopes. Sometimes they're a little on the P.C. side, and I once got into a pretty stupid argument with Barbara Mikkelson, one of the site's proprietors. But I've never seen a more comprehensive or detailed source on the subject. The best thing about the site in my view is that they not only tell you what stories you've heard are false, they're also good about noting stories that might be partially true, and the occasional tale that turns out to be quite true. I can spend hours just reading that site, and if you're like me I'll bet you can too.

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This is the first in a series I've dubbed "Essays for Katrina," essays written to support relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina. For a $50 donation to the American Red Cross, I'll write an essay of at least 600 words with at least 2 references on any subject you request. Any subject at all. I can't guarantee you'll like the essay, but I'll do my best to make it informative--or at least entertaining. :-)

This essay was written at the behest of Josh Reynolds.