Jon Cogburn's Blog

Circle Jerks - Wild in the Streets

Emily's award winning story

My wife's short story "Million Dollar Pie," was one of the three winners of a local fiction contest. It was blind-review judged by MFA students from LSU and beat out stories by people with MFAs.

In the on-line spiel after the story, Emily writes:

I started writing the first draft of ‘Million Dollar Pie’ many years ago after a friend (no connection to the characters in the story) flipped his canoe into the notoriously filthy Olentangy River near the Ohio State University (during rewriting the story migrated to New Orleans and the river became Lake Pontchartrain). I think I initially wanted to use the image to craft a story using the tired cliché of water baptism as the beginning of new life. But as I wrote (and rewrote), it became clear that even after Frank realizes that he needs to start anew, he is not any better off. He still won’t be a successful academic, his wife will not come back, and his new temp job is just as horrible as the old one.

Like Frank, I have a lot of education that doesn’t help me earn very much money. My most recent attempt to do so was as an adjunct teaching philosophy at LSU and Baton Rouge Community College. Unlike Frank, I also play bass guitar in a local swamp punk band, write fiction, and take care of my eight-month old son, husband, two cats, and dog.

Anyhow, Joe Bob says check it out.

Joseph Schumpeter

The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. His thinking becomes associative and affective.

Mr. D (part 1)

In many ways Mr. D was the ideal retail management guy. He worked something like 80 hours a week and always had his nose in everything. Some aspects of the ideal retail management guy are morally problematic though. Mr. D's true genius was at enlarging his organizational turf and then tenaciously holding on to it. For example, even though I was technically a K-Mart Apparel employee and not a K-Mart employee (they are separate companies both owned by Kresge, and the apparel manager runs his or her third of the store with nominal independence from the store manager), on my first week in the receiving bay Mr. D grabbed me by the arm and said, "You apparel people need to pull your weight. Here's a broom. There's the floor. Every day at 4:30 I want you sweeping that floor until this whole bay is spotless." Now there were janitorial staff at night to do that, but by getting away with dictating 1/16th of an Apparel employee's work hours, he gained more power over the Apparel manager.

And Mr. D constantly did stuff like this. Several times a week he would preemptively order some employee to clean the bathrooms, and he periodically put you on a register for a day as your normal work piled up.

After impromptu janitorial detail (which often involved cleaning up after astoundingly vile, unsanitary customers), the worst thing you could get drafted to do involved the upstairs storage space in the receiving bay. Every single time one or two days before the fire marshal's visit Mr. D ordered a few hapless employees to spend a few days rearanging tens of thousands of  pieces of excess merchandise in the attic. Then, on the morning of the inspection the storage space would be up to code (I guess Mr. D had a contact at the fire marshal's office; the visits were supposed to be surprises but if my memory is correct we always knew). In Summer it was well over one hundred degrees up there and the task was Herculean. Then, often as not, the afternoon after the marshal's visit, you'd have to move all sorts of stuff back to its original non-code place. I once spent an incredibly hot July day moving a floor-to-ceiling stack of window blinds (which we never sold the whole time I worked there) two and a half feet to the left. It was so physically taxing that I cried at the end of the day. How do assembly line workers do it? Then, at the end of the inspection I had to spend a day moving stuff back. I felt like an un-cool version of Cool Hand Luke. I still do sometimes.

Raymond Bonner

. . . .Unfortunately, the truth, which emerges with painful clarity from Standard Operating Procedure, is that what happened at Abu Ghraib was not only tolerated but condoned and encouraged. Harsh treatment wasn’t punished; it was rewarded. When First Lt. Carolyn Wood of the Army was in charge of the interrogation center at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan in 2003, she established a policy that allowed prisoners to be held in solitary confinement for a month, to be stripped, shackled in painful positions, kept without sleep, bombarded with sound and light. Three prisoners were beaten to death on her watch. She was awarded a Bronze Star, one of the armed forces’ highest combat medals, promoted to captain and sent to Iraq.

At Abu Ghraib, a Marine Corps lawyer and an Army lawyer witnessed prisoners being suspended from their cell doors. Occasionally they expressed mild concern, but over all they said nothing, which was taken as “implied consent.” When a prisoner interrogated by the C.I.A. died from the beatings, a “parade of senior officers” viewed the corpse. Army medics cleaned up the body, and the official reason given for the death was a heart attack.

. . . .
The Justice Department sent only four men to set up a corrections system in Iraq, in May 2003, and two left quickly in frustration, leaving Lane McCotter, who had made a career running military and civilian prisons, and Gary Deland, who had worked with McCotter in Utah. “We were going to make it into a model prison,” McCotter said. Deland established a police academy, where he fired any recruit found to be taking bribes. But the men had neither the time nor the resources to carry out their mission. A four-month assessment period was shortened to 30 days. They concluded that Iraq needed 75,000 prison beds. Fewer than 3,000 were provided, and civilian and military prisoners were held together, in violation of Army doctrine and the Geneva Conventions. Many were innocent, picked up in sweeps, guilty of nothing other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Deland said.

Later in 2003, the American military took over running the prisons. The job was given to combat units of the military police. “We had no training, we were vastly outnumbered and we were given lots of responsibilities that we didn’t have any knowledge about how to carry out,” said Specialist Ambuhl, who was one of only seven M.P.’s assigned to cell blocks housing more than 1,000 prisoners. “They couldn’t say that we broke the rules because there were no rules,” she said.

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller had commanded the prison at Guantánamo before coming to Iraq. Breaking with Army doctrine, but following the procedure he had established at Guantánamo, he put the military police, who normally run military prisons, at the service of the interrogators, military, C.I.A. and civilian contractors. The guards must “be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees,” Miller wrote. “You’re treating the prisoners too well,” he told the guards. “You have to treat the prisoners like dogs.”

But the military’s dogs were treated better and, as is now well known, were used to frighten the prisoners — exploit their phobias, in the Pentagon’s euphemistic jargon. Two dog handlers “had an ongoing contest to see which of them could make the most prisoners piss in fear.”

Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian interrogator known as Big Steve, ordered the dogs to be used on a prisoner nicknamed A. Q., because he was thought to be an Al Qaeda operative. One picture shows the man, his arms tied behind him, cowering against the wall, the snarling dog’s teeth inches away. “He would tell us to put A. Q. in this position or that position, then put the dogs on him,” Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick said. “Then he would tell them to pull the dogs off, then he would go in the cell, shut the door and I guess interrogate him.”

After several months of torturing A. Q. with “dogs and bondage and hooding and noise and sleeplessness and heat and cold,” the authorities realized that he had no connection to Al Qaeda or any criminal activity, and he was released.

Marjorie Valbrun

Catherine Price's Broadsheet post about a recent article on honor killings has been haunting me all week, not because the subject is new but because, like her, I can't get past the idea of a father stomping, stabbing and suffocating his 17 year-old daughter to death, with the help of his sons, and of her uncles then spitting on her grave in disgust. Why? Because the girl had a crush on and spoke to a British soldier in Basra.

I know many of us have heard these horrific stories before. Still, i never cease to be amazed, and repulsed, at the level of violence toward women and girls that is tolerated in countries across Africa and the Arab world, in East Asia and Eastern Europe, in China and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Yes, we have plenty of violence against women at home, but I think it's safe to say that the level of violence against women and girls here, doesn't even compare to what takes place overseas. In many cases it is not only tolerated, or ignored, it is officially sanctioned by governments that claim they can do nothing to stop violent practices that occur mostly in tradition-bound enclaves ruled by male elders, or taking place in war-torn countries in states of perpetual anarchy.

Gang rapes, revenge rape, war rapes, punishment rapes, beatings, honor killings, genital mutilation, forced prostitution, the sale and marriage of little girls to grizzled old perverts. It's enough to turn the stomach. As American women we can march and speak  out, we can give money to organizations working hard to prevent and hopefully end these ugly practices, and it will still continue unless the international community comes together to address it head on. We need formal, international treaties that attach sanctions and penalties against countries that tolerate this form of gender terrorism. 

Too bad the United Nations can't take the lead. Its credibility on this issue is very comprised given that hundreds of UN peacekeepers working in troubled countries have been implicated in shameful sexual abuse scandals involving coerced sex with girls as young as eight in exchange for food and empty promises of jobs, or payments of a single dollar. Some of the UN workers are from the very countries where violence against women is an ingrained part of the culture. How sad that they are importing the worst of their values rather than their best, spreading disease and despair instead of the goodwill the UN is supposed to foster.

I know these traditions date back to past generations and are culturally institutionalized. I know too that the perpetrators are not usually enlightened or educated men, but barbaric and backwards -- yes backwards -- men. Still, this doesn't mean the larger society has to accept it. Nor do official government leaders who are usually educated men who know better.

How ironic that the term "honor killing" even exists. There is certainly no honor when men attack the most defenseless, least respected, less protected members of their society. And there's definitely no honor when world leaders, like the U.S., that are not shy about imposing their values on other countries in other ways, do so little about it.

The first sign of societal breakdown is when the male members of a society turn on their women and children. Seems to me that the affected countries were broken long ago.

Kevin Drum

No political ideology lives in isolation. We judge communism by how Mao and Stalin implemented it, we judge 60s-era liberalism by how LBJ and the Democratic Party implemented it, and we judge social democracy by how Western Europe has implemented it. That's how you judge movements: by how their real-life adherents put them into practice, not by reference to a utopian vision of how they should be implemented if only we lived in the best of all possible worlds.

Nonetheless, now that the Republican Party has been brought low, an awful lot of conservatives are jumping ship, claiming that it really doesn't represent them at all. But look: when the GOP made common cause with evangelical extremists, conservatives cheered. When the GOP accepted Grover Norquist's tax jihad as sacred writ, conservatives cheered. When Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay all but declared the GOP the party of corporate welfare, conservatives cheered. When George Bush declared war on the Middle East, conservatives cheered. Somehow Burke never really entered the discussion. But now that it turns out these positions have been pretty much played out, Burke is back in and Karl Rove is out. That's just a little too convenient.

Hilaire Belloc

Lord Lundy from his earliest years
Was far too freely moved to Tears.
For instance if his Mother said,
"Lundy! It's time to go to Bed!"
He bellowed like a Little Turk.
Or if his father Lord Dunquerque
Said "Hi!" in a Commanding Tone,
"Hi, Lundy! Leave the Cat alone!"
Lord Lundy, letting go its tail,
Would raise so terrible a wail
As moved His Grandpapa the Duke
To utter the severe rebuke:
"When I, Sir! was a little Boy,
An Animal was not a Toy!"

His father's Elder Sister, who
Was married to a Parvenoo,
Confided to Her Husband, Drat!
The Miserable, Peevish Brat!
Why don't they drown the Little Beast?"
Suggestions which, to say the least,
Are not what we expect to hear
From Daughters of an English Peer.
His Grandmamma, His Mother's Mother,
Who had some dignity or other,
The Garter, or no matter what,
I can't remember all the Lot!
Said "Oh! That I were Brisk and Spry
To give him that for which to cry!"
(An empty wish, alas! For she
Was Blind and nearly ninety-three).

The Dear Old Butler thought-but there!
I really neither know nor care
For what the Dear Old Butler thought!
In my opinion, Butlers ought
To know their place, and not to play
The Old Retainer night and day.
I'm getting tired and so are you,
Let's cut the poem into two!

Second Part

It happened to Lord Lundy then,
As happens to so many men:
Towards the age of twenty-six,
They shoved him into politics;
In which profession he commanded
The Income that his rank demanded
In turn as Secretary for
India, the Colonies, and War.
But very soon his friends began
To doubt is he were quite the man:
Thus if a member rose to say
(As members do from day to day),
"Arising out of that reply . . .!"
Lord Lundy would begin to cry.
A Hint at harmless little jobs
Would shake him with convulsive sobs.
While as for Revelations, these
Would simply bring him to his knees,
And leave him whimpering like a child.
It drove his colleagues raving wild!
They let him sink from Post to Post,
From fifteen hundred at the most
To eight, and barely six--and then
To be Curator of Big Ben!. . .
And finally there came a Threat
To oust him from the Cabinet!

The Duke -- his aged grand-sire -- bore
The shame till he could bear no more.
He rallied his declining powers,
Summoned the youth to Brackley Towers,
And bitterly addressed him thus--
"Sir! you have disappointed us!
We had intended you to be
The next Prime Minister but three:
The stocks were sold; the Press was squared:
The Middle Class was quite prepared.
But as it is! . . . My language fails!
Go out and govern New South Wales!"

The Aged Patriot groaned and died:
And gracious! how Lord Lundy cried!

1.33

1.33 maitrī-karuņā-muditā-upekșāņām sukha-duhkĦa-puņya-apuņya-vișyāņām bhāvanātaś-citta-prasādanam

Translation and Interpretation:

Feuerstein translates this as, "The projection of friendliness, compassion, gladness and equanimity, towards objects--[be they] joyful, sorrowful, meritorious or demeritorious--[bring about] the pacification of the conciousness."

Given its obscene ill use by masters of war from Vietnam to present, the English word "pacification" might have bad connotations here. The sanskrit "prasādana" is made by "pra" plus the verb for "to sit" ("<sād"). So "citta-prasādanam" literally means something like sitting down of consciousness. This leads Sudarsha to translate the sutra as, "prasādana, calming, settling citta [is as follows]: (you can) radiate friendliness, compassion, delight [or] equanimity toward good/bad, distress/pleasure."

The folks at Himalaya Esoteric Spiritual University defend the claim that this sutra is the fundamental one concerning the ethics of yoga. They explicate the relevant Sanskrit terms in the following manner:

maitrī - benevolence, friendship, loving kindness, liking, love;
karuņā - sympathy, compassion, pity, empathy;
muditā - satisfaction, enjoyment, joy, integrity;
upekșā - impartiality, tolerance, indifference, neutrality, tranquillity
citta-prasādanam -  a state of purified or silenced consciousness (citta, the Consciousness (of the body, mind, and heart) remains in the state of eternal (PRA) being (SD), which is immeasurable purity, eternal tranquillity (prasādana), or the vibration/energy of the name (NAM) of eternal silence or being (prasād).

Ties to Christianity:

The connections are clear. Not only is the yogin to (1) be friendly (everyone brothers and sisters), compassionate (as the Samaritan), joyful (water into wine, fellowship, the kingdom at hand), and tolerant (judge not lest ye be judged, forgive trespassors, dine and celebrate with those different (and this includes class, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and religion) than you), but she is also to (2) manifest these traits towards all things, including sorrowful and demeritorious, objects (love your enemy). (3) Likewise, the peace that is promised is indistinguishable from the what Christians in the contemplative tradition hold to be the case when people are receptive to God and heaven and earth overlap.

Implications for practice:

Interestingly, in Jois' ashtanga (from așţa = eight, ańga = members or limbs) vinyasa (linking asanas (poses) together in a graceful flow) yoga (I highly recommend David Swenson's fantastic book and DVD, albeit they must not substitution for taking classes with actual teachers), all positions involve holds that last for multiples of five inhalation-exhalation pairs. And you start your morning practice with five A sunrise salutations and five B sunrise salutatations. At this point in my practice, I find that a really good way to take enough time with each breath (and to get the most out of greeting the sun) is to meditate on the five terms above: (1) maitrī, (2) karuņā, (3) muditā, (4) upekșā, (5) citta-prasādanam. I don't just meditate on the terms but try to feel the meaning of each one. By doing this I not only control my breath better and take the time I need, but I come closer to embodying the liberatory promise of yoga. When you get to the fifth inhalation-exhalation or fifth sunrise salutation you can feel some of the peace that comes through embodying the first four virtues.

Further thoughts:

Sutra 3.23 will talk about the point where a yogin must constrain the first three sentiments above (Vyāsa argues that it does not apply to the fourth sentiment). This could be read as just the Aristotelian injunction not to overdo anything, but in the context of the surrounding sutras I think maybe the point is that very, very advanced yogins will transcend their attachments to everything, even ultimately their desire to transcend attachments. And this is another way in which yoga and Christianity overlap, while there are all sorts of things one should do to pursue liberation, in the end grace is still required. That yoga holds that grace is actual shows that it is not clearly "pessimistic" in a way that contradicts Christianity (unlike many Hindu philosophies, it also does not hold that the perceived world is illusory and false, and it is also mono-theistic; I like to think that natural science and the process theology tradition in Christianity explain the world from a point of view within time and yoga (and Kant and Schopenhauer) supplements this by showing what follows from the fact that "part" of us and the universe are outside of time). In any case, the paradoxical transcendence of all attachment is far down the road and something most of us will only have brief moments of in this lifetime.

worries about teaching upper level intro to metaphysics

I'm teaching a metaphysics seminar this coming semester. I research a lot of metaphysics, but I find some of the methodology in core analytic metaphysics to be sophistical. Many metaphysicians kind of do pretend linguistics. The game is to try to get as many inferences covered in a logic whose quantifiers don't range over the stuff to which you don't want to be committed. Through the early 70's this actually produced some workable linguistic data and suggestions, but since then I'm not so sure. (1) The central Quinean conceit is really stupid, as if modal logics that use necessity operators are metaphysically fine (assuming one can adequately translate natural language modal claims into such logic) because they don't explicitly quantify over modals. So why base the major debate in the philosophy of time (or that part that doesn't get it's hands dirty paying attention to the relevant physics) about this issue. For that matter, how many analytic metaphysicians working on modality (or philosophers of language working on implication for that matter) have actually read Kratzer's analysis in terms of generalized quantification, or who would understand it in the context of the history of generalized quantificational accounts starting with Montague? (Kratzer co-authored a book with the chair of the MIT Linguistics department for God's sake; she's not some crank I just discovered.) (2) O.K. lets pretend that natural language semantics done correctly will end up suggesting a metaphysics. Why think that such a metaphysics is likely to be true? Our natural inferences concerning momentum presuppose that it works in ways that are demonstrably false (for example if you are spinning a heavy object on a string and cut the string mid-spin, the object does not go out in widening circles).

In addition (with perhaps the exception of the issue of modality) the issues that excite me the most are more towards the periphery of contemporary analytic metaphysics. I'm really interested in the philosophy of time, but because I'm interested in the contrast between becoming and being in Platonism and Indian Philosophy and how this contrasts with process theological approaches to Christianity. All the hot debates about "presentism" aren't going to help me much here. Likewise, I'm interested in appearance versus reality but again because mostly I'm torn between a Schopenhaurian/Vedantic/Yogic view of liberation compared to a process theological view. As with the being/becoming issue, I hope the two views can be reconciled in some way, but (with the exception of debates about Heideggerian direct perception versus representationalism in the philosophy of perception) not much in contemporary analytic metaphysics seems that helpful. To the extent that I'm interested in modality I am interested in the plausibility of a broadly Kantian account of it. I hope there is some good contemporary stuff (in addition to Thomas Friedman's work on the a priori) that relates to this. I really liked John Divers book on possible worlds, and intend to teach it again, but the fact that the only form of anti-realism he considered was non-cognitivism made it pretty unhelpful in this regard.

I don't know if it is a mark against contemporary metaphysics that it has so little to say about the metaphysical issues that got most of us into philosophy in the first place. . . . Part of the problem is that there is no royal road to metaphysics, no clear method that is guaranteed to produce understanding. When you begin to learn from the very few great metaphysicians that currently exist this conclusion is inescapable. Part of the problem is that metaphysics needs friction; to do anything other than say the trivial in non-trivial sounding ways it has to deeply involve other discourses. Mark Wilson's discussion of just about anything and the tradition of classical physics and applied mathematics, Ian Hacking's discussion of mental illness, and Stephen Stich's cognitively informed work on reference are the three great exemplars of this. But they are giants, and it's not so easy to teach Wilson's work.

I'm going to teach M Loux's anthology and intro text. From my current perspective (in the week and a half since surgery I get very mopey and depressed from the afternoon on; I hear this gets better) the articles look pretty frictionless, involving pretend linguistics and self contained thought experiments. I hope teaching it helps my research. I hope I can sell it as worthwhile to the students. . . .