Tony Hillerman dies

Mystery author Tony Hillerman died yesterday. New York Times obit is pretty good. Hillerman set many of his mystery books on the Navajo reservation, and his main characters were Navajos; there are a number of scenes dealing with navajo religious events.

From a religious point of view, Hillerman’s books are of particular interest because his characters deal with the tension between traditional religion and contemporary life. One of his characters, Jim Chee, adheres to the traditional Navajo religion, but as (what I would term) a religious liberal; that is, Chee figures out ways to adapt and accommodate religious traditions to contemporary realities. There are other Navajo characters in Hillerman’s books who either reject religion completely, or cling to traditional religion in a fundamentalist way, or reject their traditional religion in favor of more attractive religions that come from the dominant superculture around the Navajo microculture. Each of these religious options — religious liberalism, rejecting religion completely, fundamentalism, conversion to another religious tradition — face each one of us today. Few of us have to confront with the problem that also confronts Navajo people:– to what extent is traditional religion an essential part of their ethnic and cultural identity, and how far can they change that religion before the change leads to cultural extinction and complete assimilation into the dominant Anglo culture?

While Hillerman’s books are “just mysteries,” and therefore suspect from the point of view of “high art,” I have found them to be some of the most thoughtful meditations on the role of religion in contemporary life. For that reason, and for his memorable characters and good storytelling, I’m going to miss Tony Hillerman.

At night

In the middle of the night, a crash of rain on the skylight awakened me. It sounded so loud and harsh that, dazed by sleep, I was sure the glass in the skylight would break and the water would come pouring in; half-dreaming, I thought about where I’d get plywood to cover the open skylight, and would the landlord repair the glass quickly? Somehow it never occurred to me that if the skylight broke there would be little bits of tempered glass all over the floor: all I could think about was how we would clean up the water that was sure to pour in. The rain squall was soon over, and slowly I calmed down and drifted back to sleep.

Monty Python and cultural commentary on American politics

Seesmic, the video microblogging site, has decided to move into political commentary — sort of. Well, really we should call it cultural commentary.

Seesmic did an interview with John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, during which they asked him his opinion of Sarah Palin. You don’t have to be a member of Seesmic to watch — they’ve posted it on Youtube. Cleese is not an acute political observer, and it’s clear that because he doesn’t agree with her politics he gives her no credit whatsoever. But this interview isn’t political commentary, it’s cultural commentary. By listening to Cleese in this interview you get a sense of what a skilled professional actor sees when he looks at an American politician. Here’s a transcript of the relevant portion of the interview:

“People watching her [Sarah Palin] on television, can they not see that she’s basically learned certain speeches? And she does them very well, she’s got a very good memory. But it’s like a nice-looking parrot. The parrot speaks beautifully, and kinda says ‘Aw, shucks,’ every now and again, but doesn’t really have any understanding of the meaning of the words it is producing, even though it’s producing them very accurately. And she’s been in these training sessions with Cheney’s pals, and she’s learned these speeches, and the extraordinary thing is that so many people are taken in by it.”

Once you remove the ad hominem bits and his obvious political bias, Cleese’s cultural critique of Palin is quite interesting. He’s basically saying that she’s very good at making her hearers feel that she knows what she’s talking about. But Cleese forgets that this is exactly what every politician does, and has been doing for thousands of years; this is simply the nature of political rhetoric, and has been at least since the time of Aristotle. Here’s some of what Aristotle has to say about political rhetoric:

“Since rhetoric exists to affect the giving of decisions — the hearers decide between one political speaker and another… — the orator must not only try to make the argument of his speech demonstrative and worthy of belief; he must also make his own character look right and put his hearers, who are to decide, into the right frame of mind. Particularly in political oratory, but also in lawsuits, it adds much to an orator’s influence that his own character should look right and that he should be thought to entertain the right feelings toward his hearers; and also that his hearers should be in the right frame of mind. That the orator’s own character should look right is particularly important in political speaking…. When people are feeling friendly and placable, they think one sort of thing; when they are feeling angry or hostile, they think either something totally different or the same thing with a different intensity….” [The Rhetoric, Bk. 2, ch. 1, 1377b21-1378a1, trans. Richard McKeon]

So a deepeer cultural commentary on contemporary American political discourse has to take into account that all the tricks used by today’s politicians are really thousands of years old. Political rhetoric is used to sway the emotions, in order to cause people to make decisions. Today politicians use mass meida to reach more people, but the basic principles remain the same. Reading through Aristotle’s Rhetoric has been making me calmer in this very stressful presidential election season — I can see that politics is not much different now than it was in ancient Greece.

Human nature is weak

My friend Elizabeth, whom I met in college and who now works for the Department of labor in Washington, visited us today. “Well,” said Elizabeth, “we could either go to the beach, or go to bookstores in Cambridge.” We looked at each other. It was a beautiful fall day, a perfect day for a walk on the beach. We drove to Cambridge.

We started in Central Square. Pandemonium Books had Doris Lessing’s new novel Cleft in paperback. “I always liked her science fiction better than her mainstream novels,” said Elizabeth. So I bought it, along with a magazine and a game and a Terry Pratchet book.

We walked up to Harvard Square and stopped at Revolution Books. I was hoping to find a used paperback copy of Marx’s Kapital because my old copy has started to smell moldy, but they only had the first volume. I got the latest copy of a communist newspaper instead; I figured they’d offer a perspective on the global financial crisis utterly different from the Republicrats (or is it the Demolicans? anyway, the party that has the purple elephant and donkey as their symbols).

Next stop was Harvard Book Store. I found a 1962 paperback edition of a Perry Mason mystery novel, The Case of the Duplicate Daughter, with an outrageous pink cover showing two young blonde women — the cover alone was worth the two bucks I paid for the book. I also got some books for work: Rethinking the Gospels: From Proto-Mark to Mark, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism, and a couple of others.

From there we walked to McIntyre and Moore Booksellers in Porter Square, which I still think is the absolute best bookstore for used scholarly books in the country. I didn’t get much — just The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780-1833 (another book for work), and a book on subcultural music. Elizabeth, however, bought a lot of books, including an early Beat novel, two books on Quakerism, and a book that traced the intellectual effect of yoga on English-language literature.

“That’s how I first learned about yoga, through literature,” she said to the nice man who rang up her purchases and arranged to ship the books to Washington for her. “I would never find a book like this in Washington, the anti-intellectual capital of the world. What other city could I find a book like this?”

“Maybe Berkeley,” I said. “Cambridge, or Berkeley.”

Having struck our blow against anti-intellectualism in America, we left McIntyre and Moore Booksellers and walked to the subway station. I staggered a bit under the weight of all the books I was now carrying in my canvas bag — human nature may be weak in bookstores, but your arms have to be strong.

Fat cat

And no, the fat cat to whom I’m referring is not Richard Fuld, the former president of Lehman Brothers who received obscene amounts of money for driving that bank into bankruptcy. I mean a literal fat cat, who goes by the name of Mosby. Mosby is trying to lose weight, and he is keeping a blog of his progress.

Well, actually, he’s keeping a blog of his lack of progress because he can no more resist eating kitty treats than Richard Fuld could resist taking home tens of millions of dollars in spite of incompetent performance. The URI of Mosby’s blog is walkingottoman.blogspot.com/ — and yes,Mosby does indeed look like a walking ottoman.

Autumn watch

On Monday, I noticed that there were no fishing boats moored at the wharf next to the Maritime Terminal building. When the big reefers come in, this is where they tie up to offload whatever perishable cargo they’re carrying. I kept on walking down the waterfront, and as I was standing on State Pier, I could see a good-sized ship slowly coming through the hurricane barrier. Since it was a nice sunny fall day, I decided to stand there and watch it come into New Bedford harbor. A police boat raced down the harbor to escort the ship to its berth. When the ship got close enough, I could make out the name on her bows: Nova Zeelandia. The tug Miss Yvette was attached to her stern, and the tug Jaguar circled around her bows, occasionally tooting its whistle at the big ship. One of the water taxis sped out towards her, presumably ready to take one of the officers to the Customs House. The swing-span bridge swung open, and I watched long enough to see the tugs and the police boat escort her through, while the little water taxi sped after them all, trying to catch up.

Yesterday evening at about ten o’clock, Carol and I were driving back into New Bedford across the harbor on Route 6. We passed the Nova Zeelandia, all her lights on, still unloading her cargo at that late hour. It looked like they were unloading boxes of fruit — perhaps oranges or clementines from Africa (you can track her position on this Web site, which shows her leaving Morocco sometime before 11 October, and passing by the Azores). Forklifts were running back and forth, and several tractor-trailer rigs were backed up to the wharf, ready to take on pallets of the fruit.

We don’t seem to have many of the big ships coming in during the summer, but one of the signs of autumn is the return of the reefers, offloading fresh fruit for New England markets.

Pictures of Nova Zeelandia here and here.

*gloom*

So here’s my gloomy scenario for the presidential election: Barack Obama loses by a slim margin. Immediately, the whispers begin: “The only reason Obama lost was because he was black.” “The only reason Obama lost was because McCain used racial innuendo, called Obama a Muslim.” The country becomes more divided; the racial divide widens more than anything else. Everything gets really ugly.

Since I am (ethnically speaking) half New England Yankee, and half Pennsylvania Dutch, I am by nature a very gloomy person (this is why I’m a Universalist, I need to know that things will get better after I die). I had convinced myself that a slim loss by Obama would be what would happen. A win by Obama would be just as bad, due to the assassination attempts (being gloomy, I know there would be assassination attempts). Now I am trying to convince myself that McCain will win by a wide margin, since it is the least gloomy scenario for me.

Man, I hate presidential election season. It’s almost as bad as watching the Red Sox lose postseason games. The only thing keeping me from total gloom is that the Yankees aren’t in the World Series.

*gloom*

Tin-foil hat time

Let’s just say that I was talking with someone today; it doesn’t really matter who they were. We were talking about how lousy the economy is, and how the cost of everything is rising.

“Except gas. Gas is cheap right now,” said this other person.

“That’s true,” I said.

“For now. For the next three weeks. It’ll go up again after the election.”

“After the election?” I said.

“Yeah, it’s the oil companies trying to influence the election.”

Mm-hm. Of course I don’t believe this. No need to wear our tin-foil hats, folks; we do not live in a world of puppetmasters and vast conspiracies.

And if the price of gas rises sharply in mid-November, it will just be coincidence.

Autumn watch

The alarm went off this morning, and I staggered out of bed to shut it off. It seemed so dark that I was sure the alarm had gone off early. When I checked it, the alarm was set at exactly the same time it is always set for; but now the sun is rising late enough that I’m finally aware of it.

The wind blew ferociously all day, whipping leaves off trees, and coming around the side of tall buildings to slap you in the face. Carol and I went for a walk today, and we decided that wind was just too bitter to walk along the waterfront; so we walked up around the railroad yard instead, where it’s a little more sheltered. Even then, the cold north wind made us put our heads down, and tuck our hands in our pockets.

Tonight, we’re supposed to get a hard freeze, our first hard freeze of the year. Being close to the ocean moderates the temperature, but eventually the cold weather settles in here, too.