ARCHIE. ... What makes a cow give milk?
RICHARD. [Takes his hand.] Who knows? Do you understand what it is to give a thing?
ARCHIE. To give? Yes.
RICHARD. While you have a thing it can be taken from you.
ARCHIE. By robbers? No?
RICHARD. But when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. [He bends his head and presses his son's hand against his cheek.] It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.
...
ARCHIE. Are there robbers here like in Rome?
RICHARD. There are poor people everywhere.
-- James Joyce, Exiles
January 19, 2005
January 18, 2005
Goodbye, Riverend
Clarence (The Riverend) Sterling died on January 7. A nice obituary appeared in the January 16 Ventura Country Star (registration required). He was much loved by the people around Ojai, California. The Ventura Red Cross disaster operations center was named for him in December. He died of esophageal cancer at the age of 59.
His humanity set him apart from most scholars of Finnegans Wake, which he elucidated along with Joyce's other works with fresh and penetrating insight, supported by a wide range of interests. He was extremely generous with his knowledge and enthusiastic about the work of others. I corresponded with him while working on my book about Finnegans Wake. Not just about that book but also about our respective lives on our respective mountains. He had wonderful tales from his family's past, particularly one about a great-aunt's dance date spontaneously combusting (if I remember correctly). He also wrote about the people of the region, including the native Chumash.
He showed James Joyce to be a humane writer who gave voice to the victims of history's brutality. Notably, he realized that the central number in Finnegans Wake, 1132, referred to the sacking of Kildare, the house of St. Bridget, on the eve of her saint's day of that year. The abbess was raped. The event contains all the violence -- political, sexual, technological -- inflicted by humans on each other and the earth. The famously beautiful Book of Kells, a model for Finnegans Wake, may have been produced at Kildare. Sterling wrote that all of Joyce's work invoked the ancient mother Brigid (who became St. Bridget).
Joyce gave voice to that which is lost. Clarence Sterling helped us to hear it.
... there fell a tear, a singult tear ...
His humanity set him apart from most scholars of Finnegans Wake, which he elucidated along with Joyce's other works with fresh and penetrating insight, supported by a wide range of interests. He was extremely generous with his knowledge and enthusiastic about the work of others. I corresponded with him while working on my book about Finnegans Wake. Not just about that book but also about our respective lives on our respective mountains. He had wonderful tales from his family's past, particularly one about a great-aunt's dance date spontaneously combusting (if I remember correctly). He also wrote about the people of the region, including the native Chumash.
He showed James Joyce to be a humane writer who gave voice to the victims of history's brutality. Notably, he realized that the central number in Finnegans Wake, 1132, referred to the sacking of Kildare, the house of St. Bridget, on the eve of her saint's day of that year. The abbess was raped. The event contains all the violence -- political, sexual, technological -- inflicted by humans on each other and the earth. The famously beautiful Book of Kells, a model for Finnegans Wake, may have been produced at Kildare. Sterling wrote that all of Joyce's work invoked the ancient mother Brigid (who became St. Bridget).
Joyce gave voice to that which is lost. Clarence Sterling helped us to hear it.
... there fell a tear, a singult tear ...
Website will 'blow away myths' about windfarms
The Scottish government has announced plans for a web site to give people "'the hard facts' on renewables and wind energy and allow for informed debate -- something pro- and anti-windfarm campaigners have long called for." They say it will "blow away the myths."
But it will attack only charges by opponents. It will leave untouched all claims made by supporters. It will also feature long-refuted polls showing public support, even as they receive thousands of letters opposing the proposed wind farm in Lewis.
Deputy First Minister Jim Wallace, in announcing the site, urged those opposed to wind energy to "engage in a debate based on the facts." Ah, Mr. Wallace, that is in fact what we ask of you. Republishing on a government site the trade group British Wind Energy Association's spiel does not make it true.
On Greenpeace U.K.'s Yes2Wind forum, a simple question was recently posted: "I gather that the question is whether whatever benefit they provide is worth the expense and impact of their construction. Can someone cite some data showing how much fossil and nuclear fuel use has been reduced where wind farms are operating?" There has yet to be an answer.
Nobody arguing for utility-scale wind power has been able to cite such basic data to support their claims. It seems, Mr. Wallace, that it is you and your friends in the wind biz who are averse to facts.
But it will attack only charges by opponents. It will leave untouched all claims made by supporters. It will also feature long-refuted polls showing public support, even as they receive thousands of letters opposing the proposed wind farm in Lewis.
Deputy First Minister Jim Wallace, in announcing the site, urged those opposed to wind energy to "engage in a debate based on the facts." Ah, Mr. Wallace, that is in fact what we ask of you. Republishing on a government site the trade group British Wind Energy Association's spiel does not make it true.
On Greenpeace U.K.'s Yes2Wind forum, a simple question was recently posted: "I gather that the question is whether whatever benefit they provide is worth the expense and impact of their construction. Can someone cite some data showing how much fossil and nuclear fuel use has been reduced where wind farms are operating?" There has yet to be an answer.
Nobody arguing for utility-scale wind power has been able to cite such basic data to support their claims. It seems, Mr. Wallace, that it is you and your friends in the wind biz who are averse to facts.
January 17, 2005
"Beyond Vietnam"
From address to Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, by Martin Luther King, Jr.
A few years ago there was a shining moment in [the struggle I and others have been waging in America]. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
... Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
... Five years ago [John F. Kennedy] said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
A few years ago there was a shining moment in [the struggle I and others have been waging in America]. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
... Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
... Five years ago [John F. Kennedy] said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Correction
From Ironic Times:
A recent article misstated President Bush's solution for asbestos injury lawsuits as calling for a ban on asbestos. In fact the president called for a ban on lawsuits. We apologize for any confusion caused by our mistake.
A recent article misstated President Bush's solution for asbestos injury lawsuits as calling for a ban on asbestos. In fact the president called for a ban on lawsuits. We apologize for any confusion caused by our mistake.
January 16, 2005
Airline CEO's free pass
To the Editor, Caledonian-Record:
According to an April 4 story in USA Today, US Airways CEO David Siegel was given a new compensation package last year potentially worth almost $11 million. When the airline fails, he'll be all right. Yet it's the baggage handlers of his airline whose absence is noticed (Caledonian-Record editorial, Jan. 7).
Siegel could call in sick for a couple of months from a villa in southern France and nobody would notice. Baggage handlers made it clear what keeps an airline flying, and this paper reviles their audacity to expect fair compensation and security for it.
If US Airways can't afford to pay their workers, the CEO ought to come under some scrutiny. Instead, this paper condemns the workers' desperate worries and gives the CEO a free pass to enjoy his millions.
The people separated from their luggage over Christmas should vent their wrath at David Siegel, not the people whose work he lives on.
According to an April 4 story in USA Today, US Airways CEO David Siegel was given a new compensation package last year potentially worth almost $11 million. When the airline fails, he'll be all right. Yet it's the baggage handlers of his airline whose absence is noticed (Caledonian-Record editorial, Jan. 7).
Siegel could call in sick for a couple of months from a villa in southern France and nobody would notice. Baggage handlers made it clear what keeps an airline flying, and this paper reviles their audacity to expect fair compensation and security for it.
If US Airways can't afford to pay their workers, the CEO ought to come under some scrutiny. Instead, this paper condemns the workers' desperate worries and gives the CEO a free pass to enjoy his millions.
The people separated from their luggage over Christmas should vent their wrath at David Siegel, not the people whose work he lives on.
January 14, 2005
It doesn't work
Marcus Rand, chief executive of the British Wind Energy Association, asks, "If this stuff doesn't work, why would major companies be investing millions of pounds in developing it?"
Meanwhile in Ireland, "Sustainable energy firm Airtricity said it will not go ahead with any further wind energy projects due to the uncertainty over continued Government support. ... [Chief executive Eddie O'Connor] said the industry was struggling because banks were not prepared to provide finance with the amount of uncertainty surrounding the sector."
Seminars in the U.S. explain that tax breaks can cover 75% of the cost of a wind facility.
That is to say, this isn't investment. It's piracy. Without the government's support, forget it. Why, Marcus Rand? Because putting this technology on the grid doesn't work.
P.S. Even if those "major companies" (such as military contractors GE and Halliburton) were honestly putting their own money into them, that doesn't mean anything. The U.S. has spent billions for a "star wars" defense system that still isn't anywhere near working (not to mention that it would be totally unnecessary even if it did work). Money is a marker of folly more often than wisdom.
Meanwhile in Ireland, "Sustainable energy firm Airtricity said it will not go ahead with any further wind energy projects due to the uncertainty over continued Government support. ... [Chief executive Eddie O'Connor] said the industry was struggling because banks were not prepared to provide finance with the amount of uncertainty surrounding the sector."
Seminars in the U.S. explain that tax breaks can cover 75% of the cost of a wind facility.
That is to say, this isn't investment. It's piracy. Without the government's support, forget it. Why, Marcus Rand? Because putting this technology on the grid doesn't work.
P.S. Even if those "major companies" (such as military contractors GE and Halliburton) were honestly putting their own money into them, that doesn't mean anything. The U.S. has spent billions for a "star wars" defense system that still isn't anywhere near working (not to mention that it would be totally unnecessary even if it did work). Money is a marker of folly more often than wisdom.
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