Be Still, and Know that I Am God

I know it’s an ad.

And if I were in England and had the opportunity, I might shop at Sainsbury’s thanks to this ad.
But the truthfulness of the story transcends the – perhaps – commercial reasons for putting this commercial out there.



Did the things that happen in this ad actually happen?

Perhaps not the football match. But there were scattered bits along the front during World War I, 1914, where there was a truce declared not by generals but by the common soldiers who maybe just wanted forty-eight hours of sanity in a world gone mad.



I like what is said here:

“Even at the toughest of times, in the heat of war, the most dreadful occasions, there can be great humanity.” This from Alan Cleaver, a WWI author and researcher, interviewed for the making of video, and perhaps as a consultant as the commercial was produced.

This is as important a message in this day as was the truce in 1914.

Because you may have noticed we kinda live in a sucky world.

So Sainsburys, thanks for giving me a little bit of hope in a screwy world, even if I had to watch a commercial to do it.

Because there’s also this:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

There for will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;

Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.

There is a river, the streams thereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the most High.

God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her and that right early.

The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.

The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.

Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations ha hath made in the earth.

He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.

Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.
The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.

And this is what I will remember. Back in 1914, for a brief moment, God made a war cease, He broke the bow, cut the spear, and burned the chariot in the fire.

Taffy Stretching

Explain something to me:

Business A should do business with Person X because even though Person X espouses a view that the owners of Business A don’t support, Person X has the right and obligation to be served by Business A and the owners of Business A are terrible, terrible people for refusing to do business with Person X.

Business B, however, should NOT do business with Group Y because Group Y espouses views that may not necessarily jibe with the culture of Business B, but Business B regards a larger part of its culture as obligating it to do business with Group Y which clearly has a right to be served no matter what they believe. But because Group Z opposes what Group Y espouses, Business B is a terrible, terrible business for refusing NOT to do business with Group Y.

It’s happening here, folks.

Business A and Person X.

Business B, Group Y, and Group Z.

This is the question I want answered: Should business be blind to the political and social proclivities of potential customers, or should businesses be allowed to pick and choose whom they serve based on those proclivities?

Also, I'm pretty sure Figure B has fallen asleep.

Before the Internet, Old Folks

You have to remember this: Before we had the Internet, we had old people.

And old people are a great resource for "content," and I'm not just talking about the nutrients that Homer Simpson mentioned. I'm talking about all the great stuff that's in their minds. Sure, maybe it's a lot easier to sort through stuff we can find on the Internet, but we lose a lot of the personal contact interacting, let's face it, with a box on the desktop. (Yeah, yeah, some of you are mobile. So a tinier box in your palm. Same thing.)

Take Barnaby, for instance. Barnaby is a creation of Crockett Johnson, who drew this comic strip way back in the 1940s, when dinosaurs may as well have roamed the earth, as far as most of the young farts today are concerned.

I have Mr. Loertscher to thank for introducing me to Barnaby. Mr. Loertscher taught sixth grade at Iona Elementary. Like many teachers of the time -- I'm not sure if teachers still do this, let alone sixth-grade teachers -- he'd read to us, nearly every day, as we worked on some assignment. He chose to read us the Barnaby comic strips, which he had in book form (this is way before Peanuts and Garfield, but not before publications and mass merchandising). I remember particularly Mr. Loertscher reading the words of Mr. O'Malley with his best imitation of W.C. Feilds -- though I didn't know he was imitating Fields at the time.

What a time that was. We loved eharing about Barnaby, about Mr. O'Malley, and about the Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men's Chowder & Marching Society. Mr. Loertscher, by reading that book to us, started me, at least, ont he road of becoming curious about the literature of the era. From Barnaby, I became interested in the works of Sinclair Lewis, became familiar with the likes of Archy and Mehitabel. WHo knew a sixth-grade teacher would help me on that wobbly path towards cultural literacy, or at least as culturally literate as one can be wandering down one of the many strange and varied paths that mankind has forged through the wilderness of imagination?

Thanks, Mr. Loertscher.

It was fun to recall the marching society when I learned Richard Nixon organized such a society among freshman Republicans when he was elected in 1949.

We miss a lot not talking to old people. In this age of instant information, we tend to forget that information used to be stored in peoples' heads, not on some cloud computing platform off in the ethers. Maybe this is why I like to read so much. There's a lot more information out there than we think.

I'm done now. Get off my lawn.

Homo Rhetoricus

I’m very confused.

Of course, some confusion is to be expected among those who live in the era of the Daily Me and the era of Truthiness, in which we choose increasingly to consume media and opinion that already match with what we think and believe. New opinions are brought in and subsumed by the Daily Me, but only if those opinions meet our expectations of truthiness – things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts, as defined by comedian Stephen Colbert.

I’m not convinced this is entirely a new era. The Daily Me and the concept of Truthiness may have new, shiny names in our age, but they reflect the same basic selfishness and wanton adherence to the current sophistry and rhetoric that is as human as armpit hair. Sinclair Lewis, in documenting and satirizing 1920s America, for example, paints in his character of Babbitt the conformist – the 1920s version of the Truthiness-seeker – who would not exactly feel out of place with “postmodern” relativism today.

We need more characters like Lewis’ Doremus Jessup, the journalist in It Can’t Happen Here, who gets fed up with the rise of totalitarianism in Lewis’ fictional America and does what he can to question authority and be civilly disobedient. And that doesn't mean ridiculing those who seek after truthiness rather than trugh, because in the definition of truthiness there's enough relativism to make realists squirm.

All this is coming up because I spent most of a sick day yesterday reading Lynne Cheney’s Telling the Truth, one of more than three dozen books we got in boxes that came to us in a roundabout way from a Teton valley lawyer looking to downsize his collection. Cheney does an admirable job attacking the objective relativism of the day – the supposition that truth can’t be discovered because truth is what appears to be true to whomever seeks to define truth. Reading her book, of course, is ironical, because she’s wife to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who seems to have applied concepts of objective relativism over, say, the past eight years, emulating quite a bit the previous eight years of the Clinton Administration and, perhaps, providing a prelude to the Obama Administration now unspooling before us (if you’ve got doubts, just check out the number of people who are scraping the “Question Authority” bumper stickers off their vehicles since the regime change brought in Nov. 4.

As erudite as Cheney’s book is, it concludes with a contradiction I can’t quite get over. She writes:

As I look back over this book, I am struck by the high level of arrogance that often exists among those who maintain that there is no truth except the one they would have us believe. They redefine our words and our lives for us, and expect us to go along. They rewrite the past and are shocked when we object. And this arrogance is often combined with an amazing lack of thought to the consequences of what they are preaching.

So, which is it she objects to? That people “maintain that there is no truth except the one they would have us believe,” or is it the arrogance behind some of those who believe their truths are self-evident? She spends just over 200 pages attacking relativism – the absence of truth – in academia, politics, journalism, and in the lives of many who consume what is produced – and yet in her conclusion seems to apply a relativist approach to deciding what is true. I hold truths that I believe are the only truth out there. But I am not arrogant about those truths. Am I a relativist, or a realist? After reading Cheney, I’m not sure.

Cheney, by way of explanation, however, seems to rely on “searching for truth,” rather than arriving at that final destination, in her reasoning against objective relativism. But searching without arriving, while opening the mind to many possibilities, does little to resolve the final question. Objective relativism may seek to make the whole world grey, but the realism Cheney subscribes to only narrows that band of grey slightly.

The only way this makes sense to me (and here comes my bit of truthiness) is that it’s the arrogance she objects to, not to the fact that some claim to have the only path to enlightenment. To think otherwise destroys her reasoning, unless I am grossly misreading things.

This might be why I found the philosophy course I took in college to be so boring. Round and round we go, without actually landing at the airport.

But that’s okay. At the foundation of all things, I find great strength in my ignorance on many matters. That doesn’t mean I wallow in ignorance, but that I am aware of my ignorance and am doing what I can (reading, studying, writing and thinking) to get rid of what little bits of ignorance I can. I’m far from the homo rhetoricus that Prof. Richard Lanham of UCLA describes, as quoted in Cheney’s book:

Rhetorical man is an actor; his reality is public, dramatic. His sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily histrionic reenactment . . . He thinks first of winning, of mastering the rules the current game enforces. He assumes a natural agility in changing orientation. He hits the street already street-wise. From birth, almost, he has dwelt not in a single value-structure, but in several. He is thus committed to no single construction of the world; much rather, to prevailing in the game at hand . . . Rhetorical man is trained not to discover reality but to manipulate it. Reality is what is accepted as reality, what is useful . . . Rhetorical man does not ask, “What is real?” He asks, “What is accepted as reality here and now?” He is thus typically present-centered. Past and future remain as possibility only, a paradigm he may some day have to learn.

I’m far. Yet sometimes so near.

Alice in Wonderland

Since I started work her at the RWMC three years ago, the back door to our building -- which leads to a building used by another contractor -- has been closed. Nary the two shall meet seemed to be the way things worked around here. Until last week. Since last week the door has stood open, like a portal into another dimension, beckoning us with the unknown.

Every time I go back to the water cooler or copy machine, I feel like Alice on the portal of Wonderland. Who knows what adventures and strange characters lie just beyond that tempting, open door? But like trained monkeys, none of us -- at least to my knowledge -- have wandered through that door into the netherworld beyond where, it is rumored, there are bathrooms for our use that lie much closer to our little cubicle farm than the bathrooms next door. But no one dares break the sarcosanct barrier that for so long lay there, but now lies broken.

I may be the first. I may do it today. But it won't be a long excursion. A brief one or two steps into the unknown beyond, hoping against hope that I don't trigger some unheard alarm and thus incite the wrath of hired goons in big black boots. If this is the last you hear from me, you'll know what happened.

Must. . .save. . .the brain!

First, there's the old Internet circular (B-65):

I cdnuold blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg!

The phaonmeal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabridge Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanig, huh? Yaeh I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!

The contrarian in me disputes the author's assertation that spelling doesn't matter, because it certainly does to anal retentives such as I. But because this circular is readable by fluent readers confirms much of what Frank Smith writes in his book, "Understanding Reading," which I'm reading (and understanding) for my class in reading theory and document design. He writes on page 51: "Reading involves looking for meaning, not specific words." This assertion meshes wonderfully with Smith's idea of the "theory of the world in our heads." As he writes on page 55: "Our theory of the world seems ready even to make sense of almost everything we are likely to experience in spoken and written language -- a powerful theory indeed." Our theory, as Smith writes, is our "shield against bewilderment." As readers (and as human beings) we take risks, we predict. We experience bewilderment only when our efficient theory of the world fails us -- then we're surprised, we ask, "Why did that happen to me?"

Recalling the last time I felt acute bewilderment helps me understand more of what Smith is writing about (although, as he asserts, my recollections are likely to be tainted by the recent reading I've done in his book). Two years ago, I became a technical writer, leaving behind the more general writing found in journalism for the specific, attenuated world of radioactive waste disposal. My first few weeks on the job were bewildering and confusing. I understood the process of writing and editing, of attending meetings, reading e-mail and making phone calls, but up until that time, my theory of the world had not included a flood of acronyms, convoluted environmental requirements and the tribal knowledge that makes up the 50-year history of radioactivity in Idaho. My theory, though not wrong, obviously needed some augmentation. So two things came into play as I began "getting into" this job:

• Time passed. "Time and change are an essential part of the way we perceive the world," Smith writes. After a few weeks of swimming (and copious note-taking, reading and talking with peers to figure out what the hell was going on) that theory of the world in my head started collecting more information.
• I adapted my skills. "Our skills are the part of our theory of the world that enables us to interact with the world, to take the initiative in our transactions with our environment," Smith writes. No way was I going back to the worlds of journalism or telemarketing. That good ol' theory, adaptable to the end, started helping me make sense of this new world.

Am I a genius now? Not at all. But reading Smith's book helped me understand the inner workings of that adaptability. My theory of the world is now tainted by the world of radioactivity.

Reading Smtih also brought out a few random thoughts:

• Theelepeltje. I did not know what the word meant. But i recognized it as a word. I'm half Dutch, through my father's family. My eyes immediately latched onto the "tje," a common Ducth word ending. I also knew the Dutch word for tea is "thee." Teaspoon, right. What fun.
• Memory. As Smith writes about our long-term memory -- especially recall -- working on interconnections, it came to me how many childhood memories, many times the most vivid memories I have, involve eyeglasses. I started wearing eyeglasses in the 2nd grade, and recall instances of lost glasses, broken classes, stolen glasses, dirty glasses. There are also strings of memory that involve dogs, toys, avoiding Tuesday after-school Primary classes, fire (not that I burned things down as a kid; I just have a lot of fire-related memories). It's weird.
• Cultural sharing of theories of the world. Sometimes we ask ourselves, how can people act/think that way? I've read a lot about the Holocaust (my father was a civilian during World War II, and brought those war memories with him to our family), and the big questions are How could the Germans behave so badly and how could the Jews allow themselves to be slaughtered. The answers that always come back in the books I've read is that it has to do with inborn culture. Maybe this theory of the world in our heads helps me understand what that means just a little bit better.

I've babbled long enough. Suffice it to say this book really set me to thinking about what we think, what we do and what we think we do.