“The Workhorse of Mammal Penis Research, the Armadillo”

In the oldest literary works, the first word or words of the body of the text served as the title as well. Thus Bereshit, “In the beginning,” is the Hebrew name for Genesis and the title of the Babylonian creation epic, Enumah Elish, is simply “When what is above was not yet called the sky…” Early Greek works were often called “About x”—according to Diogenes Laertes, the Pre-Socratic philosophers normally titled their main works About Nature (Peri Phusis); but most ancient works were given their names by anonymous editors long after they were compiled. More complicated and intriguing titles, presumably contrived by individual authors, came later. Plutarch’s titles are rather more fun than the essays they name: How a Young Man Should Listen to Poems, On the Malice of Herodotus, Whether and Elderly Man Should Engage in Politics. Rabelais recognized that titles didn’t even need a text. Chapter 7 of the First Book of First Book of Pantagruel is mostly a list of books from the Library of Saint Victor, including the useful Ars honeste petandi in sociatate (The Proper Method of Farting in Public) and the indispensable Advanced Ass Kissing for Graduate Students as well as the How to Eat Goats with Artichokes, Even When the Church Forbids It and the classic Quaestio subtilissima, utrum Chimera in vacuo bombinastans possit comedere secundus intentione, et fuit debatuta per decem hebdomadas in concilio Constantiensis (The Infinitely Suble Question of Whether the Chimera, Bombinasting in the Void, Can be Nourished on Second Intentions—Debated for ten weeks at the Council of Constance). I suppose the collection would now include several recent plays such as Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad, The Death and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Clarendon Under the Direction of the Marquise de Sade, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Constipated by Tom Stoppered. But titles don’t have to be jokes to be memorable. Consider the grave Victorian music of Darwin’s titles: The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects or The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms or, indeed, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.

I love titles almost as much as footnotes. It’s only the body of the books that puts me off; for I subscribe to the theory, universally held by bookworms like me, that the sole function of the text is to keep the table of contents from running into the bibliography. In this spirit, I make it a practice to use apparently arbitrary titles to conceal the secret and profound meaning of my own little essays by way of a make work project for graduate students in the alternative universe where my texts will be expanded upon as interminably as the works of Moses or Freud or Marx are in these parts.

Stunned Ox Pills

Since things conspire to make you more and more of a fool all the time, it makes sense to stupefy yourself even more than necessary just to regain helm control. Or, to put things more prosaically, which is, after all, kinda the point, it sometimes helps to squint at the world and attend only to the looming outlines of things instead of the details. Anyhow, displays of professional subtlety are irrelevant when you aren’t up for tenure. Instead of attempting to get it just right, how about replacing the exquisitely specific question with a coarser, more easily answered question? In political discussions, for example, it often helps to look not at legalistic particulars but at the envelope of the debate, the strategies served by the tactics. Outside of a courtroom, where atomic facts are rightly dispositive, it doesn’t matter very much what you decide about this, that, or the other nicety of international diplomacy. What you must understand, to understand anything at all, are irrefutable general facts such as the implacable hostility of American foreign policy to popular government in the Western hemisphere. We will work to overthrow any regime whatsoever that reflects the interests and desires of the mass of the population. A government doesn’t have to be a Marxist to be marked for destruction. As the current Haitian instance demonstrates, winning a legitimate election is enough. The record is quite clear: though the vicissitudes of Real Politik might oblige us to tolerate a Caribbean democracy now and then, the Monroe Doctrine is very much about propping up oligarchs. Let’s not be too clever about it.

The Particulars

I find it remarkable that really fundamental new facts about how living things work turn up all the time. The 5 March issue of SCIENCE, for example, features the discovery of a previously unknown way that an important class of white blood cells, the neutrophils, attack and disable bacteria. As any textbook will inform you, these cells engulf and destroy bacteria by phagocytosis; but it turns out they also know another trick. They can release DNA and various proteins that form a tangle of fibers, neutrophil extracellular traps or NETs, that immobilize and neutralize bacteria outside the cell. The cover of the 5 March issue is a scanning electron microscope image of Staphylococcus aureus caught in such a web. The bacteria look like oranges stuck in macramé. Apparently, the NET mechanism is a routine feature of innate immunity, activated in every pimple in Christendom. You have to wonder why it was so hard to identify the process and what else is going on all over the place that we haven’t discovered yet. And these things aren’t the details. They’re the particulars.

What Counts as Vanilla?

Public health professionals have long complained that they lack reliable information about human sexual behavior. No entomologist would publish a paper on the maculated okra beetle without knowing more about its natural history than anybody knows about the doings of our own kind. Who does what to whom and how often is highly relevant to policy issues ranging from population control to the spread of HIV, but any attempt to find out automatically raises a hell of a fight and not out of concern about privacy or personal rights. The presumption is that the professors are obsessed with sex and already know too much when, in fact, our ignorance is quite comprehensive. But sex isn’t the area in which endless discussion goes along with a lack of baseline information. For example:

We supposedly live in an era of rampant scientism. This presumption allows devotees of various alternative points of view to represent themselves as daring rebels. I have to wonder whether they are really entitled to romanticize themselves in this fashion, however, since nearly everybody I meet is into astrology or Chinese herbal medicine or homeopathy or intelligent design or morphic resonance or spiritualized quantum mechanics or telekinesis or tarot or ESP or, in one memorable recent instance, traditional alchemy. Amid these dense flocks, it’s the stray positivist who appears as the lone eagle; and that’s in the context of the kind of people I meet, hardly a random sample. To judge by the membership and financial clout of various literalist religious groups, the population as a whole is even more haunted—literally. Many even claim that the dead rise. Survey sampling provides some information on what people actually believe, but the method is a very blunt instrument. Granted that people only seldom think the way they are supposed to as members of a high-tech, postmodern civilization, it would be useful to understand the real worldview of the tribe.

I once read a case study of a supposedly schizophrenic girl who reported that she could read minds and was hospitalized, in part because of this delusion. The shrink who studied her case took the trouble to interview her family and discovered that they one and all believed she could indeed read their minds. Like an unlucky medieval peasant, the girl made the mistake of maintaining a folk belief too obstinately before the wrong tribunal.

An Enthymeme

In the heyday of the old Soviet regime, Gosplan was the agency that managed the entire economy. Since Gosplan couldn’t evaluate the performance of a firm by looking at its balance sheet—Communism wasn’t about profits—it measured physical output instead. The results were predictable. The manager of the glassworks made very, very thin glass indeed because he was rewarded for putting out the most square meters of windowpane. The same mechanism guaranteed that steel beams would be immensely heavy in order to increase the total number of tons produced by a plant. Unfortunately, similar idiocies can and do occur in capitalist economies. An example:

American drug companies spend an enormous amount of money developing new drugs in order to increase their profits. Because their priorities are set by the market and the market reflects the buying power of people with money, this way of organizing things ensures that baldness will be a more attractive target for research dollars than, say, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. Even ignoring this obvious fact, however, and focusing on the response to any given disease, the current system automatically misallocates research money because a huge proportion of research is conducted to match existing and effective drugs with related equivalents that aren’t covered by the same patent. Of course, the variants may be somewhat better than the originals or at least have more amusing side effects; but most of the time they are only sought as a way of making money to make money. The President of Pfizer is gaming the system no less than the commissars who ran the steel mills of Magnitogorsk. Because we’re a much wealthier nation than the USSR ever was, we’ve been able to tolerate this and many other built in inefficiencies with less obvious strain. That may be changing. After all, the Soviets were also able to compete globally for many decades with an economy distorted by ideology; eventually they paid the price.

Ex Parte

When criminal sentences are rigidly mandated by law, the branch that gains in power is not the legislature that makes the law but the executive that enforces it, especially when, as is so often the case, universal application of the law is impossible. Authoritarians love drug, obscenity, and vice laws, even though they are as likely as anybody else to violate them personally. The always highly arbitrary enforcement of such statutes gives them a useful weapon to destroy or silence their political rivals and keep the niggers down, and mandatory penalties ensure that no judge can temper injustice with equity. Since anybody conversant with political history knows how this game is played, it isn't decent to legislate as if such abuses were an accidental consequence of otherwise harmless demagogy. I don't know if we ought to legislate morality at all, but I'm sure we ought to legislate morally.

A Genuine Question

It has become something of a commonplace to claim that a leftist variety of anti-Semitism is on the rise, especially in Europe; but what I mostly encounter is hostility to Likud-style Zionism. Now some versions of this critical attitude may or may not be warranted or even licit, but I don’t think I’ve heard any leftist attacks on Jews per se, though I’d hardly be surprised if there were some. What seems more likely is that the neocons are engaging in an extension of an old rhetorical move. Just as McCarthy and his cohorts lumped New Deal democrats in with authentic communists and the contemporary right has more recently floated the merely stupid notion of a Marxist Hilary Clinton, people like Victor Davis Hanson speak as if an attack on a particular nationalistic ideology amounted to an assault on a whole race or religion, despite the fact that many of the loudest critics of Israel’s policies are not only Jews but Israelis (Ze’ev Sternhell) or even Zionists (Noam Chomsky). If there is a groundswell of genuine anti-Semitism—and maybe there is—I wish somebody would identify the perpetrators and lay off with the facile name-calling.

The Monkeys Tell No Tales in Zamboanga

A few hours after writing a note about our dubious activities in Guantanamo, I ran across this report on the BBC about American human rights violations at concentration camps in Afghanistan. Obviously I have no independent way of assessing whether the report over or understates the seriousness of the situation. But that’s a big part of the problem. Our toothless and corrupt media certainly can’t be counted on to inform the public. In this, as in every other real issue the Press maintains its normal position: finger in the wind, thumb up the ass. Meanwhile, even decently conducted wars are vile affairs; and a war conducted in secret by a violent and duplicitous administration is likely to be far worse than that.

Osama Has Already Won

While people argue endlessly as to how much damage Ashcroft’s antiterrorism campaign has inflicted on American civil liberties, a potentially more important consequence of our overreaction is largely undiscussed, at least outside of the science journals. Since 9/11 and in large part because of new immigration and visa policies, the United States has become a less attractive place for foreigners to go to school. The bright young engineers and scientists who used to travel here to grad school are more like to stay home or train in other countries rather than run the gauntlet of paranoid bureaucrats. [Reference] Since our economy has been dependent on draining talent from the rest of the world for a very long time, this change does not augur well for our continued prosperity, especially since it reinforces other developments that are gradually making the United States a less attractive destination.

Very few people pointed out at the time that Spain was hurting itself by expelling the Jews or dared to inform Louis XIV that the Huguenots made France rich. It’s about time somebody told somebody who matter in these parts that discouraging productive people from moving to the country is a very similar stupidity. At least the Catholic Kings were motivated by religious scruple and righteous bigotry. The explanation of our behavior—you can hardly call it a reason—is even less attractive. We just plain got scared all out of proportion to the realistic threat.

Martha and the Separation of Powers

I have no opinion as to the guilt or innocence of Martha Stewart, although I expect my Republican nephew is right that her support of Democratic candidates had something to do with the way in which the whole affair was conducted. Whatever the motives of the prosecutors, however, the case underlines how much power we’ve given these creatures of the executive at the same time that mandatory sentencing guidelines have turned trial judges into powerless clerks. Ever since Congress discovered that legislating draconic and automatic punishments could win them easy points with a vindictive or fearful public, judges have not have the ability to moderate excessive prosecutions with lenient sentences. All of the discretion vests with the prosecutors, who are responsible to no one. Ironically, this gradual change in our judicial system brings us in line with the traditional practices of Imperial China where it was felt that an independent judiciary would thwart the sacred will of the son of heaven and mandatory minimums were the universal rule.

Haiti and Iraq

Reality, as I like to say, may not be coherent; but it is stringy. The current Bush administration claims that it can do whatever it likes to the prisoners in Guantanamo because technically the base is located on Cuban rather than American soil and neither our constitution nor international law apply to those imprisoned there. This casuistry is not new. It was invented by the first Bush administration to cover the detention and brutalization of Haitian refugees back in 1992. The only difference, if it is indeed a difference, is that the mistreatment of the Haitians has long since been documented in detail whereas we don’t know what’s going on these days in Guantanamo, anymore than we know what horrors are being committed in our name in Iraq.

One-A-Day Brand

After obsessing over picky details and exquisite subtleties for years, newly minted PhDs can be counted on to terrorize their students for a year or two with pointless displays of erudition and the dreaded oral footnote. It usually takes a while to recognize that you’re doing very well if you communicate a single important idea in every class meeting and that 30 significant concepts a semester is a highly worthwhile goal. Learning is a physiological process that takes time and sleep. To speak like a chemist, the volume of input is not the rate-limiting step.

In the spirit of this observation, I offer a single thought:

Many historians and analysts have noted that periods of increased immigration have typically coincided with eras of reaction in the United States. Conversely, when immigration abates and formerly despised newcomers become familiar neighbors, Americans become more progressive because they are eager to help those perceived as their own kind. The complacent assumption behind many versions of this cyclical theory is that new groups will indeed eventually be assimilated. However—and this is the thought of the day—the process of assimilation always depended upon the dynamism of the American economy. It required exponential growth to absorb the millions who came. Failing some new economic revolution of the scale of the settlement of the empty lands of the west or the industrial revolution, why should we expect the new immigrants to be integrated into the American system except as the domestic representatives of the wretched lower caste of the neoliberal world economic order? And what kind of politics goes along with a huge, permanent underclass?

Believing is to Hearing what Lying is to Speaking

If God really is dead, then nothing is permitted since there’s nobody around to do any permitting. And that’s not just a logical deduction. Historical experience suggests the same thing. It isn’t the skeptics and liberals who demonstrate bloody resolve or commit the great historical crimes but those who operate in the service of History, Race, Allah, Yahweh, or some other absolute authority. There aren’t that many Raskolnikovs but there are lots and lots of Rasputins. Indeed, the most cogent objection to rationalism has always been that it makes people timid.

Most believers are neither ax murderers nor crazed monks, of course; but they do demonstrate a notable proclivity for lesser offenses. In particular, they lie efficiently and often because they lie with a good conscience. Those of us who do not possess the teacher’s edition of the book of life, the one with the answers in the back, tend to be careful about what we say because nothing supports our word except our own uncertain lights and whatever integrity we can muster. Meanwhile, the faithful have a highly convenient “for the sake of which” that covers all infractions and a host of motivational speakers to bolster their self esteem. So they talk to each other and themselves as one talks to children, promoting all sorts of things they know to be false because they assume that it’s for a higher good if not a higher truth. And even when they don’t open their mouths, they dissemble with their ears by listening approvingly to falsehoods.

Accessories After the Fact

Did American military personnel kidnap Aristide? As usual, the press is asking the wrong question because the answer to the right question is not so easy to pettifog. Showing up with heavily armed men and making threats can perhaps be represented as a rescue, at least by PR professionals with experience in the tobacco industry; but there’s no way to spin the fact that our government has worked for three years to oust another elected leader in favor of unelected and violent oligarchs. The coup has our fingerprints all over it as, of course, everybody knows but very few care so long as the miserable and despised Haitians don’t try to come here. Aristides’ removal itself may be of minor direct benefit to the Bush regime, but it has the considerable merit of making the American public complicit in a violation of international law.

Drip, Drip, Drip

The Bush administration continues to stack the deck by appointing its ideological allies to important scientific commissions, in this case the group that advises on stem-cell research. (reference)

If you only hear about one or two of these moves, you may believe that critics of the regime are just paranoid. Allow me to make the Baysian point that this kind of sweet reasonableness makes perfectly good sense when dealing with sweetly reasonable people but not when you aren't.

The Suppressed Fifth Chapter of Ecce Homo: Why I am so fat

Recently published research shows that television leads to obesity in small children not so much because of the hours they spend in a motionless trance before the screen, but because of the irresistible advertisements for junk food they are exposed to. As one of the researchers commented in a radio interview, kids under seven believe everything they hear and see. Presumably adults do better; but tendency of people to believe what they hear is very strong. Under laboratory conditions, grownups may be capable of distinguishing between image and reality; but they seldom do so in the wild. You frequently read that the great thing to learn is how to learn, but it is just as important to learn how not to learn. My field research indicates that the second lesson is seldom successful.

I recall a freshman who was unhappy because he had to read the Republic. “What’s with this old stuff? Plato didn’t know about relativity and quantum mechanics like we do.” World-class naïf that I am, I responded, “Gee, I didn’t even know you were a physics major.” But if it is common for particular people to act as if they somehow possess the knowledge and capabilities that actually pertain to a few specialists, it is even more common to define humanity generically in terms of characteristics that are seldom in evidence in the day-to-day behavior of individuals. Is man a rational animal? Not very damned often. As Piaget showed, at a certain age people become capable of what he terms abstract operations and can, therefore understand why a tall beaker doesn’t necessarily contain more fluid than a short one. In the real world, however, individuals do not routinely function at this level, which is perhaps why wine makers go on putting a dimple in the bottom of the wine bottles.

Being rational means, if nothing else, having fully human language; and people certainly do talk. But while adult speech certainly can not be boiled down to a congeries of stimuli and responses as B.F.Skinner used to claim, from a natural history perspective a large proportion of our discourse does consist of bouncing ready-made phrases off one another. The creative aspect of language production, the human ability to produce an indefinite number of grammatical sentences at will, is seldom strenuously exercised; and as with music, most of the creativity on display is a matter of performance, not composition. The real problem, however, is not that new and relevant statements are not uttered often enough but that they aren’t heard often enough. Fully human speech reception requires the activation of the same capabilities as speech production. It is easier to react like a pigeon in a Skinner box and assimilate verbal input to a short list of expected signals, thus becoming a perfect victim for the reinforcement schedules of the political and corporate manipulators.

CSI Jerusalem

I haven’t seen Mel Gibson’s Jesus movie yet, and I won’t review anything before I see it. Whether a review is the right format for commentary on a work like this is not obvious, however, since the debate about the movie is not about how well a director handled a theme or an actor realized a character but about the ethical validity, political effects, and public health implications of putting out a modern Obergammau Passion play. Anything can be done well or badly. Some bodice rippers handle the conventions of the genre with panache, others just don’t stir the juices of middle-aged ladies. There are well conducted bull fights and bad ones, well filmed fisting scenes in pornos and others that just don’t come off, more or less believable snuff movies. Apparently, to take the word of many people who have seen the movie, Gibson produced something that works on its own terms. The issue is precisely the terms.

One thing is clear. Gibson is hardly breaking new ground. Christians have been working themselves into a state of morbid excitement over the wounds of Christ for a couple of thousand years now. The pleasure the faithful draw from this spiritual self-abuse is one of the engines of the religion, just as the Shiites gain energy by flagellating themselves every year in memory of the martyred Ali. It would be an error, therefore, to accuse Gibson of perverting the meaning of the Gospels since he isn’t introducing any novelties. What’s wrong with the movie is also wrong with Christianity, though obviously there is a lot more to Christianity than a sadomasochistic obsession with the Cross.

The Others

Five hundred years after Copernicus, many people are aware that the Earth isn’t in the middle; but we still think geocentrically as the view out the window had a special privilege. Now it may be true, to paraphrase Tip O’Neil, that all astronomy is local; yet I find it curious that we don’t seldom even bother to map our situation relative to nearby stars. Where is Sirius relative to Alpha Centauri or Arcturus?—just to mention a few neighborhood hot spots barely beyond Local Fluff and well within the Local Bubble. And where is superman or Captain Kirk supposed to find a road map? The only book I’m aware of that offers a cartographic look at our corner of the universe is Nigel Henbest and Heather Cooper’s Guide to the Galaxy. A sample.

Parochialism also rules our view of living things. Although we a perfectly aware, or should be, that the dominant life forms on earth are bacterial, not only in respect of their ubiquity, mass, and sheer numbers, but because the prokaryotes are a vastly more varied group than the relatively monotonous eukaryotes—biochemically speaking, it’s hard to distinguish a shitake mushroom from the governor of California and that’s not just this year. Even when people do deign to notice the microbes, it’s almost always in a medical context as if the bacteria never had anything better to do than give us the runs. That’s why I got a kick out of finding A Field Guide to the Bacteria by Betsy Dexter Dyer at Borders the other day. Checking out delta proteobacteria in sulfur-rich environments is unlikely to replace birdwatching as a popular hobby, but a natural history appreciation of bacteria corrects the same kind of error of perception that comes from thinking of the stars as bright lights on the inside of a sphere. (A more synoptic but equally genial tour of the whole world of living things may be found in the third edition of Five Kingdoms by Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz.)

Two or More of You

Back in 1990, I met a charming grad student at a Thanksgiving party in Berkeley. I recognized her last name, and asked her about it. Sure enough, she really was a descendent of a certain Austrian military man. The general in question was notable for almost defeating Napoleon in Italy in1800. Indeed, by the afternoon of the critical battle, Melas had his army in full pursuit of the routed French. Unfortunately, as the wounded but apparently triumphant general was getting his head bandaged, an exploding caisson and a spontaneous cavalry charge reversed the results of the day, thus ensuring the young Napoleon would go on to become Emperor of the French, terrorize Europe for another decade and a half, and get his cook to invent chicken Marengo. My encounter with the general’s descendent was also fated thereby, along with the advice she gave me about a scholarly question. She was (and is) a comparative literature maven and an expert, among other things, on Greek literature. I asked her about recent work on Homer, and she recommended Gregory Nagy’s Best of the Achaeans. As much as I would have desired it, personal circumstances prevented me from encountering the lady again; but I’ve been reading Nagy ever since.

Homer has been important to me since childhood. I didn’t pull a Schliemann and dedicate my life to a search for the historical Troy because I had happened to hear a drunk German reciting the Iliad in Greek from a tabletop in a Latvian saloon; but sometime after I found my sister’s paperback copy of the Rouse prose translation, I determined to learn enough Greek to read the poem myself and eventually I did, sort of—my linguistic abilities were almost as feeble then as they are now. I may have inherited my taste for the epics from my father, who loved the Odyssey and whose memory was so remarkable that he could forget the poem entirely in two years and thus give himself the pleasure of reading it for the first time over and over again. (On the odd years he read Don Quixote.)

Granted my reverential attitude towards Homer, it was a shock to learn that many scholars believe that the epics were not written by a single author. The Homeric Question has been a live issue since Frederick William Wolf published his Prolegomena to Homer in 1795, but it was news to me in 1962. I thought it was an infamous heresy, an outrage to my youthful romanticism—I didn’t know anything yet about the Volkish variety of romanticism that actually celebrates collective authorship of the epics. But over and beyond wanting to keep my faith in genius and the productive imagination, I had a more substantial reason to reject the thesis of many Homers. The traditional argument for multiple authors has always depended on contradictions in the poem, but what struck me at 16 was just the reverse—the impressive consistency of the works, the perfection of the design, the unwavering objectivity of vision. Like Jesus in the Gospels, the heroes in the Iliad always seemed to say things in the best possible way on every occasion. I was much less impressed by gaffes like the three ambassadors to Achilles who turn into two in Book Nine. It didn’t strike me as particularly surprising if a single author made mistakes like that. If Cervantes, who presumably was an individual man and not a folk tradition, could get Don Quixote’s ass stolen and then mysteriously restored, a single, real Homer was likewise entitled to nod.

When I actually read the Greek text, my ideas gradually changed but not because of the often discussed contradictions. I came to believe in the collective authorship of the epics for the same reason I used to deny it. If the poems had a very specific kind of perfection, I decided, it was precisely because many years or centuries of singers and listeners had worked over the material. That’s where Nagy comes in. Working in the tradition of Albert Lord and Milman Parry and partly on the basis of their field observations of living traditions of oral poetry in the Balkans, Nagy fleshed out a performative theory of the origin of the epics and explored its implications. Nagy understands the current text of the Iliad as the outcome of a long series of creations and recreations of material from deep in the Indo-European past—he’s famous, or infamous, for finding a semantic and metrical cognate for the epithet kleos aphithiton (unperishable glory) in the Vedic Sanskrit sravas aksitam, which means the same thing. As speculative as these Dumezilian details of may be, Nagy’s general view of the origins of the epics is a revelation. In any case, having changed the terms of the debate without writing the last word, much as Noam Chomsky seems to have permanently changed linguistics without coming up with an adequate grammar of any language, the further ifs, and, and buts don’t seem so important.

In ancient literature at least, perfection seems to belong to those works that were essentially communal and oral. The works of the scribes are much less consistent. The authors of the various segments of the Jewish Bible are supposed to have been divinely inspired. It is a more stringent test of one’s faith to find the hand of God in the hacks who edited the final product, however, though their efforts were vastly better than whoever is guilty of the received version of the Koran. Meanwhile, the parts of scripture that do reflect a long oral tradition—some of the Psalms rework older non-Jewish poems we know from archeological digs at Ugarit and elsewhere—have the same inevitability as Homer’s language. I also believe that the great literary merit of the King James translation derives from its long incubation in a tradition of speaking. Generations of preachers worked on earlier versions of an English Bible so that the final product reflects an immense body of pulpit experience. The great old literary works were cooked up slowly in a broth of performative tradition.

The old joke has it that a camel is a horse built by a committee. The joke, like many others, is at best misleading. Most things produced by committees are outlandish or mediocre, but so are most things produced by individuals.

The Company He Chooses

I’ve heard quite a few television pundits suggests that it will be hard to convict or even indict Ken Lay for his activities at Enron. They educe every conceivable difficulty except the most obvious. Or has anyone heard anybody pointing out that Feds may be reluctant to go after Ken Lay because of his intimate connection to George Bush? Over the years, Ken Lay has been Bush’s number one backer. Their publicly available correspondence, more voluminous than many a packet of love letters, testifies to a very long affair indeed. Now this association doesn’t prove anything sinister, any more than the well-known business connection between the Bush family and the Ben Ladens, but it is surely relevant, especially since the then governor helped Lay with various deals in Texas.

Of course, the Feds may get Lay after all, perhaps striking a deal that offers him a reduced sentence in exchange for not helping them prosecute his accomplices.