The Ontology of Sociology

The present post is simply a sort of by-trifle to The Ontology of Psychology.   It might alternatively be dubbed “The characterology of individual action in a multiperson structured setting”.

The unit of analysis  in Goffman’s accounts  is always the individual role-player  striving to effect his will  within a role-structuring situation.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  115

This put me curiosly in mind of the ‘sociology’ of chessmen.  (Here we speak, not of the vision of grandmasters, which is doubtless far more holistic, but of patzers, which is the only one I know.) 

Originally, the game was a metaphor or rather ‘video-game representation’ for medieval warfare.  Thrilling stuff.   And to a beginner, at least, it really does feel as though individual pieces are venturing out, or ignominiously retreating,  issuing powerful threats or just pushing pawnily along.   Sometimes, a noble warrior even ventures to be ‘sacrificed’ for the greater good.  I can testify that, as a scrappy lad first learning the rudiments, the queen, rather than just a factor among many, in a sort of multivariate algebraic equation,  was dizzying in her potential power -- “Wait’ll I sic my queen on ‘im!”  It was reminiscent of the culture of trading baseball cards -- Trajea a Mickle Mantle for a Yogi Berra plus a Roger Marris.    An archive of children’s chess-matches  would probably back this up, showing far more early-game forays by that dominating dame, than in expert play.

Compare, from Nabokov’s chess-novel:

…palpable pieces whose quaint shape and wooden materiality  always disturbed him, and always seemed to him but the crude, mortal shell  of exquisite, invisible chess forces.

…

Luzhin removed and placed on the table beside him  what was no longer an incoporeal force, but a heavy, yellow Pawn.

… The weightiest elements on the board  called to one another with trumpet voices, and again there was an exchange, and again two chess forces  were transformed into carved, brightly lacquered dummies.

-- Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense (1964)

~

In Go, by contrast, the counters are all blandly interchangeable in themselves.   They pop out of nowhere, one by one (indefinitely); and once placed, have no power to move from the spot.  A holistic view is imposed even on the beginner.

Mysteries of Cricket

Cricket matches occasionally end in a tie, and often in a draw;  but that does not make it a futile game;  if no side ever won, the game would lose its point.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 279

Assignment:  Distinguish tie from draw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6FdBZQw2zQ

I am at last resigned to the fact that I shall never understand String Theory;  and a grasp of cricket  must likewise remain  forever beyond my means.

Given that, Kipling’s dig about “the flannelled fools at the wicket” was quite unfair;  you practically have to be a barrister to make sense of the game.

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More re the point of a given genre of game:

Within the vocabulary of chess, it makes no sense to say ‘That was the one and only move which would achieve checkmate, but was it the right move to make?’  … as someone might ask, whose purpose in playing chess  was to amuse a small child  rather than to win.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  125

(And what is the point, of this game of life? --  Perhaps, to amuse the gods.)

It would be interesting to imagine extragalactic sociologists or philosophers, provided with a complete, objective and uncommented, play-by-play record of every cricket game ever played, and every chess game ever played; we wonder whether, from these, they could deduce what the point was.  Cf. & contrast the card‘game’ that we children called ‘War’, in which again, the ‘point’ is to ‘win’,  only, each player’s moves being completely determined, the resemblance to any normal game is but feeble;  it’s really just a long-drawn-out, inefficient way  of staging a single coin-flip.

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Back to cricket, with its arcane distinctions and welter of rules -- surely exceding those of tennis (let along ping-pong), basketball, soccer  and much else.    These come at a cost (we want to shout, Just play the game!), but indeed to such an extent, that what would, from a practical point of view, be counter-productive, must surely serve some sociopsychological purpose, delineating the cultural boundaries of the Tight Little Island.   Rather like the Japanese language, with its complex system of grammatical honorifics, which no-one can master who hasn’t grown up in the culture from birth.  Or Anglo-Catholic worship ritual: unlike in an evangelical church, where anyone can wander in off the street and fit right in, for an outsider to attempt to participate  is continually to find yourself sitting when (suddenly, inexplicably) everyone else is standing up,  or standing up when they are sitting down, or kneeling, or crossing themselves.

For an American analogue, we would suggest, not so much our National Pastime of baseball, which physically most resembles cricket, but American football, with its ever-expanding rulebook, its minute schedules of differing penalties for everything from twitching (on the offensive line -- “false motion” -- or the defensive -- “offsides”) to spiking the ball; and its many game-interrupting circumstances. -- What physically most resembles football is rugby;  but here the playing of the game -- the continuous unscripted motion, as in soccer or basketball -- quite trumps the courtly ceremony characteristic of football.

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There is generally a core of rules that characterize the essence of a given kind of game.  As for the rest, they contribute to its aura of spectacle,  but are not constitutive of the game.

The essense of football is simply that one guy runs with the ball toward a goal, and the other guys try to stop him.   Early football (and kids’ football even today) was largely just that.   Then they added the possibility of a forward pass:  that was a significant addition to the core, constitutive of an extension of the game (Football  v. 2.0), but one in which the earlier nucleus remained aufgehoben:  after all, there are plenty of running plays even in the NFL, and if you laid them all end-to-end, you’d have a simulacrum of original football (though to be sure, they are subtly different, since each play is instinct with the possibility that someone might throw the ball).

The constitutive rules of chess are the powers of the pieces.   That much is sine qua non -- you couldn’t very well specify the moves of all the pieces except the knight, letting that fellow to joust around as the mood might move him.   But now you’ve got a game, which could just as well exist without niggling side-rules like that of castling, or capture en passant (let alone purely ceremonial, non-structural rules like “j’adoube”).

Spheres of Influence

It is not the aspirations of nations  which create nationalism:  it is nationalism which creates nations.  … But the world is richer in cultural differentiations, and in systematic injustices, than it has room for ‘nations’.

-- Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (1964), p. 1974

In The Lonely Crowd, we sought to indicate that political bossism in America was not entirely evil, and certainly not as evil as are attempts to extirpate it totally.

-- David Riesman, 1969 preface to The Lonely Crowd, p. lxv.

And what -- the Ukrainian people -- Do they wish to live a life separate from Soviet Russia? -- No!

-- Leon Trotsky, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cFGOLS-BU

Headline from a moment ago:

Kerry to Visit Kiev to Show Support for Ukraine Government

A detailed local argument, which I shall not present, would point out the parallels between Yanukovych and Morsi -- both duly elected, both evicted by a kind of coup.  Not a palace coup, a popular coup;  but still.  Quite possibly both are scoundrels; but there is the larger point.

Overarching this, and of far more general significance, is a global argument, of quite wide applicability  since it applies as well (both empirically and provably) to the Internet.   Namely:  No-one can micromanage anarchy and chaos, which is the essence of World History, as of the World Wide Web;  but the existence of spheres of influence is  in both cases  a stabilizing factor.  I am speaking now, not politically nor morally, but virtually mathematically.  However unpleasant Mr Putin, however enchantingly coiffed Ms Timoshenko -- Stay the aitch out.  “Entre l’arbre et l’écorce, il ne faut pas mettre le doigt.”

Such is the reality of Realpolitik.  Not saying it’s pretty;  that doesn’t make it less real.

Bringing it back down a notch:   Russia has ever let us play in our hemisphere (remember, we have invaded several nations -- can you even name them?  do you care? -- in our Monroe-doctrine/Platt-amendment private sandbox, with no protest from the Russians);  let them play in theirs.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(I am James Monroe, by jingo, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

In antiquity,

by and large it is the empires which require explanation, whilst their break-up, or the persistence of fragmentation, do not.

[But] the situation is now changed.  It is the large and effective units which seem natural, and it is their breakdown and fragmentation which is eccentric and requires special explanation.  Small units do indeed survive, but one may well suspect that they are parasitic on the larger ones.

-- Ernest Gellner, “Scale and Nation” (1973), repr. in Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 140

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[Footnote]  A less-general observation, of more limited validity, since not a truth of graph-theory, but merely a rule-of-thumb of history:  using, this time, an economic metaphor.  Namely:   We have only so much diplomatic capital to spend.  And, as a philosopher once said (Pliny the Elder, perhaps):  Don’t let your mouth write a check  that your ass can’t cash. (Don't challenge Russia  unless you're willing to throw a punch.)

This brings up a further meta-consideration, owing nothing to the specificities of this crisis, and applicable to any political/military initiative whatsoever.  Namely, however carefully crafted your immediate response might be, it is not enough simply to advance your rook and then take the rest of the day off:  like a grandmaster, you have to look ahead several ply.  What if the bastard deploys his queen?  Dang -- Hadn’t thought of that!

 

Here we outlined such an exercise:

CONOPS :  Syria

[quotable-quote: “You can’t vote just for the nose of the camel;  you’ll be embracing the whole beast.”]

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 [Update 3 III 2014]  From an excellent op-ed in this morning’s New York Times:

This interpretive frame may be hard to understand, but some things are not wrong just because Russians happen to believe them. Russian news crews were covering a real story in Ukraine: the chaotic dismantling of a legally sanctioned government, the quick breakdown of an agreed framework for new elections, and the creeping transformation of political disputes into ethnic ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/opinion/crimea-the-tinderbox.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

There are, thus, parallels worth pondering  with the cascade of recent political events in Egypt.   In such embroiled situations, it does little good to invoke violations of  “International Law” (an ill-defined and rumored entity, always invoked selectively), Roberts Rules of Order, or Principle P of the Binding Theory.   Pieces are in motion on the giant chess-board, reminding us that chess was originally conceived as a game of war.

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Added factors skewing perceptions  specifically by Americans are these national traits:

(1)  A tropism for dividing any broiling situation  into two camps, Good Guys versus Bad Guys (often with absurd results);

(2)  Sentimentalism for ‘grass roots movements’.

Bear in mind that the Tea Party is ‘grass roots’;  the NSDAP began as ‘grass roots’;  virtually every cockamamie and eventually violent movement began as ‘grass roots’, including even some now-narcoterrorist organizations like the FARC.  "Grass roots" my boots.  A lot of it is crabgrass.

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~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update 26 March 2014]   Well-put in an op-ed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/opinion/a-tortured-policy-toward-russia.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

By IAN BREMMER      MARCH 26, 2014

THE United States has once again twisted itself into a rhetorical pretzel. As when it threatened military action against Syria if a “red line” was crossed, the Obama administration’s rhetoric about Russia and Ukraine goes far beyond what it will be willing and able to enforce.

Earlier this month, President Obama warned that America would “isolate Russia” if it grabbed more land, and yesterday, he suggested that more sanctions were possible. Likewise, Secretary of State John Kerry said the Group of 7 nations were “prepared to go to the hilt” in order to isolate Russia.

But Washington’s rhetoric is dangerously excessive, for three main reasons: Ukraine is far more important to Vladimir V. Putin than it is to America; it will be hard for the United States and Europe to make good on their threats of crippling sanctions; and other countries could ultimately defang them.

First, the United States needs to see the Ukraine crisis from Russia’s viewpoint. Threats from America and Europe will never be the determining factor in Mr. Putin’s decision making. Ukraine is Russia’s single biggest national security issue beyond its borders, and Mr. Putin’s policy, including whether to seize more of Ukraine, will be informed overwhelmingly by national security interests, not near-term economics.

Furthermore, Russia has provided Ukraine with some $200-$300 billion in natural gas subsidies since 1991. With an anti-Russian government in Ukraine, Moscow is likely to stop these subsidies, lifting a major economic burden just as the West tries to squeeze it financially.   ... The Obama administration needs to preach what it will ultimately practice. Otherwise Washington’s credibility will erode further as it walks back its words.

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A reflection on the break-up of the Soviet bloc, in longer historical perspective, by a European with no reason to be an apologist for Russia:

The strange, self-initiated dismantling of that system after 1985, culminating in the total un-shackling of Eastern Europe in 1989, has led to a situation similar to that which followed the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire. … It would seem that some solution along the lines proposed by Malinowski  is the only humane one, the only one with some prospect of implementation without major loss of life.  Colonise simply everybody -- i.e. deprive their political units of sovereignty -- whilst allowing them absolute cultural freedom of expression.

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), p. 143

[Update 14 September 2014]  In the Book Review of this morning’s New York Times,  John Micklethwaite has a punchy, perceptive review of Henry Kissenger’s new book, World Order.    Both reviewer and author  champion Realpolitik:

Might a little realism have been useful in Iraq, rather than the “stuff happens” amateurism of the Bush years? Would a statesman who read Winston Churchill on Afghanistan (“except at harvest time . . . the Pathan [Pashtun] tribes are always engaged in private or public war”) have committed America to establishing a “gender sensitive . . . and fully representative” government in Kabul?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/books/review/henry-kissingers-world-order.html?ref=books&_r=0

Sky Wars

Tea-bagger types regularly deride the Obama administration’s (recently striking) foreign-policy achievements (Syria, Iran) by hooting that it’s all just to distract attention from “O-care”.   The danger, rather, is that press obsession with the latter will deflect attention from some potentially quite fraught developments around the world:  at present,  the quasi-confrontations in “Sino-Japanese” airspace, into which the U.S. Air Force has just now dared to tread.   For perspective -- imagine if China were to fly bombers (unannounced) over the water between New York and Martha’s Vinyard, blandly dismissing the provocation as a “routine exercise”.

If some drama of danger involves a passenger plane, Americans pay riveted attention;  but otherwise, if the aircraft are merely military, it perhaps strikes them as more like an airshow, with the romance of “Top Gun”:  War Games in the Sky.

This addlepated attitude is fine for moviegoers, but not for free men.    What do we do when China shoots down one of our planes?   As we inquired in the case of our proposed attack upon Syria (advocated by John McCain and his ilk, and successfully deflected by the President):  after the bugle-blaring curtain-opening, flags waving, what is the plan for the middle distance? [See Intervention in Syria: Cui Prodest?]  As we saw in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the Bush administration didn’t really have one.    But make no mistake about it:  the military and economic heft of China are in a whole different league from those of Afghanistan or Iraq.   Yet more, we never did go to war against those nations as a whole -- initially it was just supposed to be against the Taleban and the Sadaam Baathists;  later we got sucked in (surprised?),  but even after the quick victory over the announced targets of the invasion  and the rising of a much broader enemy caused by the invasions themselves,  we still were backed by significant segments of the local populations.   In a war against China, that would by no means be the case.

You might think it alarmist, even to use the phrase “War with China” in a sentence.  But we are now rattling sabres.   If you’re not prepared to use your sabre, why rattle it?

[Note:  I won’t comment about the merits of the Chinese move, having nothing of value to add.   But here is a seemingly even-handed summary: ]

This face-off marks the most worrying strategic escalation between the two countries since 1996, when China’s then president, Jiang Zemin, ordered a number of exclusion zones for missile tests in the Taiwan Strait, leading America to send two aircraft-carriers there.

Plenty of countries establish zones in which they require aircraft to identify themselves, but they tend not to be over other countries’ territory.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21590930-chinas-new-air-defence-zone-suggests-worrying-new-approach-region-face

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*

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There is another dimension to all this, quite apart from the game-theoretic calculations of diplomacy (a game of General Tso’s “Chicken”, you might say).  Consider this article from the morning’s press:

Japanese protesters have demanded that ethnic Koreans “go home or die,” disrupting the once-bustling neighborhood.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/new-enmity-between-japan-and-korea-plays-out-in-tokyos-koreatown/2013/11/28/974c91cc-528b-11e3-9ee6-2580086d8254_story.html?hpid=z1

This reminds us that the East Asian cauldron contains more antipathies than just a bilateral face-off between China and Japan.  Do we really want to stir that particular pot?

And not only Koreans are in the rifle-sights of an increasingly noisy fringe in our … ally … Japan.   Here, an animated crowd of Japanese welcome some Western visitors outside their hotel:

“White Pigs Go Home”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Veih24Dsg&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dr4Veih24Dsg&app=desktop

Imagine what things will be like if we get more deeply involved in their mess.

 

Add to these, Taiwanese sensibilities, and you have sixteen reasons (two-to-thefourth bilateral antagonisms) for us to stay out.

~

The whole region is a prickly thicket of mutual antipathies.   And he who toucheth pitch …   Indeed, already we have, in letting-in their populations, let in some of their meshugaas.  A reader of the WaPo article commented:

In the US in many school systems with Korean populations the Koreans have agitated for and gotten the school to change their geography maps. The Sea of Japan is now the Eastern Sea.

2 lessons to be learned here:
1) Americans of Korean decent have learned their community organizing liberal fascism well.
2) Our schools are more interested in politics, grievances and sensitivities than education.

[Update Sunday, 1 December 2013]  After months of taking the public pulse by wading through American readers’ comments, which, whatever the initial subject, generally devolve into Obamaphobic rants, it is almost refreshing to get a glimpse of the wedge-brained craziness that prevails in other arenas.  In a comment on this week’s Time blog on the subject of the Japan-China island dispute, one reader vents:

    The Diaoyu Islands are belong to China

You go, guy!   “R U basis is bewrong 2 Us !!!”

Actually, that post interestingly reveals, two of the wretched outcroppings actually bewrong, de facto, to US:

The eight barren isles — two of which are under control of the U.S. military — are called the Senkaku Islands (in Japan) and the Diaoyu Islands (in China). … Japanese citizens cannot land on either of the islands without first getting permission from the U.S. military

--  http://swampland.time.com/2013/11/25/meanwhile-3500-miles-from-iran/#ixzz2mEigS6Ds

Incidentally, that blogger as well is worried that this shadow-play of feints and parries, might spin out of control, for he headlines his post

China’s Restriction on Airspace Over Disputed Islets Could Lead to War

Weekend declaration by China ratchets up chances of conflict with Japan and the U.S.

If that were to happen, it could make the Korean War and the Vietnam War seem like a stroll by the carp-pond, a walk in the park.

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The  U.S. intervention in this dispute, while morally and geopolitically understandable, smacks of brinksmanship:  Are we in fact willing to go over the brink?

The Sea of Japan is no stranger to provocative airborne incidents, fraught with peril for all concerned: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007

At the time, there was considerable speculation in some quarters that the passenger plane that was shot down  may actually have been a ferret flight. (W-Allahu a`lamu…)

China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea, all facing off and snarling at each other.

And then, as though advancing a pawn, we place some of our own assets in harm’s way.   The analogies with Sarajevo are obvious.

Destiny -- your move.


(By the by, there is also North Korea, lurking in the wings.  So far they haven’t figured in this scenario, but their usual role is to act unexpectedly and Make Things Worse.)

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It is actually reassuring that the Administration announced a  geostrategic “pivot to Asia”.  This means that the situation there has their full attention, and they are not just winging it, despite that gadfly distractions that daily buzz up from the Republicans, and the media’s obsession with mayflies.

And indeed, Obama recently pulled off a neat bit of brinksmanship in the Middle East, threatening the Syrian regime if it did not give up its chemical weapons.   Calling the bluff, al-Assad didn’t blink; but then the President turned around and called Congress’s bluff concerning the Right To Declare war, whereupon those playpen blowhards slunk off with their tails between their legs, and the adults got down to business, so far with stunning results.

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This morning, as my wife set off for the gym, to abye her sins by trudging  for an hour on a treadmill in front of a TV screen (this would be reckoned cruel and unusual, had a court  ordered it), I requested that she check out Fox and CNN, to see how they were handling this story.

She reported back:   Neither had touched on it  during the hour she watched.  They spent the whole time covering a local train derailment.

So we turned to the foreign press.

France having had no colonial history with any of the four principle countries in this standoff,  we may look to commentary from that source  for a comparatively dispassionate summary of the basics of the case;  France knows that it is here just an onlooker.   Here is some that is well-phrased:

Chine-Japon : jeux dangereux en mer de Chine

Depuis plus de 40 ans, Japon et Chine se disputent un petit archipel inhabité en mer de Chine. Mais jamais la crise n'avait connu une telle escalade.

"Nouvelle incursion de bateaux chinois dans les eaux territoriales des Senkaku" : il ne se passe pas une semaine sans que ce titre ne barre la une des journaux nippons. Priés par les garde-côtes du Japon de quitter les parages de ces îles de mer de Chine orientale, les navires gouvernementaux chinois n'obtempèrent pas. "On n'a pas de raison de partir, on est chez nous", répondent-ils en substance.

La querelle ne date en effet pas d'hier, mais elle s'est intensifiée depuis le rachat en septembre 2012 par l'État nippon de trois des cinq principaux îlots Senkaku à leur propriétaire privé japonais. Cette nationalisation de fait a mis en rogne Pékin qui depuis multiplie comme jamais les actions provocatrices à l'égard de Tokyo.

La bataille autour des Senkaku est actuellement le point noir des relations sino-nippones, mais c'est surtout le symbole d'un conflit historique entre les deux nations qui se disputent la suprématie en Asie.

-- http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/chine-japon-jeux-dangereux-en-mer-de-chine-29-11-2013-1763289_24.php

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Happy, umm, Th*nksg*v*ng

[Update November 2014]  Since people are still viewing this old post, it’s best to update.  BLUF:  Stand down.  There seem to be few or no mainstream attacks against Thanksgiving  this year.  Go figure.  In fact, the principle MSM article that came to our notice, was the spread of Thanksgiving paraphernalia to the land of our former colonial masters, England.

For this, as for so much else,  

we give thanks.

~ Original Post, 2013 ~

First Columbus Day.    And now -- what -- is Thanksgiving too  now Politically-Incorrect?

How to talk to your children about Thanksgiving's ugly history

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-thanksgiving-history-children-20131126,0,1226806.story

(One strains to imagine the nationwide epidemic of family dramas that presumably led to that post. Little Susie, a teardrop suspended from her button-nose:  “M-m-mommy … This turkey t-tastes like genocide …”)

A reader retorts:

Thanksgiving Day is about neither history nor patriotism -- nor is it about Indians -- it's a day we set aside to give thanks -- to God or our families or fortune -- for what we have, as much or as little as it may be.  Period.

It's rather pitiful that a petty little prig chooses to dwell not on thanks but on resentment, though it's no surprise that a pompous mediocrity like The Times chooses to publish her.

[Update] No worries -- The politically correct term this year is “Thanksgivukkah”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/where-is-it-thanksgivukkah-year-round-at-home-with-the-nava-jews/2013/11/27/a4d65e02-554e-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html?hpid=z1

That chimeric coinage “Thanksgivukkah”  rivals that of Gröfaz for sheer phonetic grotesquerie.  It looks as though it should rhyme with “F*ck ya” (which is indeed the message to those whose ancestors founded this nation), but presumably some other pronunciation is intended.

Note:  This newly-minted wordoid “Thanksgivukkah” is something of a lexicological mayfly, not expected to see long wear:  Hanukkah and Thanksgiving are not expected to coincide again  for over seventy thousand years …

~

Oof, and now this:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/pj-gladnick/2012/11/26/slate-writer-racism-could-explain-white-turkey-meat-preference

[Flash update!]  Our crack research team here at WDJ Worldwide Enterprises ® (Headquarters:  Geneva) has dug into the matter and uncovered the real reason for the previously unexplained preference for white meat.  The answer might surprise you!  It has to do with the game of chess.  Here, the White pieces get the first move, which gives them a slight advantage over Black.   This explains the otherwise puzzling preference for tender turkey breast over the dried-out, tough and sinewy drumsticks.

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Our Thanksgiving-related woes have been noted abroad.  Here, in Switzerland:

Fest unter Druck

http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/international/auslandnachrichten/black-thursday-an-thanksgivukkah-1.18193626

 

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[After-thought]  If the apostles of goodthink (what the French these days call bisounours) imagine that, by posting such an edgy op-ed as their corporate contribution to the holiday spirit, they are bringing us all together for a thoughtful dialogue, followed by singing kumbaya around the fireside and sewing-circle, they are -- simply as an empirical matter -- sadly deluded.   The dissenting reader’s-comment with which we opened this post, is actually relatively measured;  more typical are such testy replies as the following:

THERE’S A REMOTE CHANCE THAT INDIANS WERE NOT LIVING IN A HIPPIE COMMUNE WHEN WE GOT HERE
The accepted narrative for Native Americans is they were all playing Ring Around the Rosie until we blew germs on them and they all fell down. Though he had a helluva time getting it published, Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization debunks that myth. The book describes common traditions such as mutilating a body AFTER it was killed to ensure the victim was doomed in the afterlife. We learn of mass graves with hundreds of scalped cadavers a good half-century before Columbus got there. Indian traditions have many wonderful traits, but let’s grow up a little and allow for the possibility they were simply incompatible with the modern world. For Christ’s sake, when we got here they hadn’t even invented the wheel.

Happy Thanksgivukkah

countered (from the opposing wing, the Atavist camp) by such blasts as

The so-called Thanksgiving story imparted to most American schoolchildren is a triumphalist, sectionalist Yankee national origin myth.

Although the on-the-air-heads in the Fluff Room (which has replaced the Newsroom at many media) cannot perceive it, posting a piece like that at a sensitive time like a solemn national holiday, makes as much sense as putting up Dylan’s “Masters of War” to mark Veteran’s Day, or a historical account of the doctrine of Jewish blood-guilt for Yom Kippur.

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Other holiday-related posts:

   * Fourth of July

   * Veterans Day

   * Hallowe’en

   * Christmas Eve

   * Christmas

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For a selection of individual detective stories,

available for your Nook or Kindle,

visit this site:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

~

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