News from the East

Mom visited a museum exhibit about Princess Diana, in Philadelphia recently. Among the artifacts was a room full of condolence books from around the world. She was excited to report that one of them lay open to a condolence signed, "Love, Damon and Debbie". I had a hunch that, although there may well be plenty of "Damon and Debbie" couples in the world, it might possibly be related to the British soap opera characters of the same names.
I think it was pulling up the Wikipedia page for Damon and Debbie, that inspired me to google my name. I came up with this Chinese language article about the sign shop. I could recognize other names mentioned in the story, which indicated that this was either written by or copied from someone who had actually spoken to me about sign making. I used Google's convenient translation tool (which popped up alongside the search results), to generate this, entitled The Charm of the Traditional Identification:

Why?

This morning, I got an email from Mom, something with multiple 'FW: Fwd:'s in the subject line, about a song "written by a 13 years old boy". It had a couple of links, to a ".wmv" file and to a ".txt" file, both of which required downloading. Against my better judgement, and because I'm in a band with a 14 year old boy (and have been since he was 8), I downloaded and watched the ".wmv" file. It was a maudlin video of some British lad, Declan, presumably a creation of Pop Idol, or some such program, asking repeatedly, why certain bad stuff exists in the world.

I replied as follows...

Health care debate!

Moved, I guess, by how the lack of ideas being reported as coming from the conservative side of government, during the current attempt at health care overhaul, resembles the lack of conservative ideas reported way back in the financial bail out days, I got back on my high horse, and decided to prod Dad, again, with assorted liberal rhetoric on the topic, in lieu of any evident "debate". I sent him a link to a Krugman column, asserting that the "public option" was a necessary gambit for reducing costs, and a recent Matt Taibbi piece, from Rolling Stone, wherein he explains why the entire process has been completely bungled by corporate interests, and is doomed, as a result, not to save anyone any money.

Dad responded in kind, sending me a list of 14 conservative talking points, that I don't suppose he wrote himself, since they display a wit that's a bit snarkier than I'd characterize his as being; but he didn't say who wrote them. I imagine these are the points that are just hit on, repeatedly, on conservative talk radio--some of the points themselves are repeated--and, as a result, don't do much to explain anything, only to incite indignation in their target audience.

So I responded, perhaps a little too graciously, "This is the first time any republican thinker has managed to squeeze a cogent argument for some completely different idea to the way health care works in the entire rest of the developed world outside the U.S., into the San Franciscan airspace!", before getting down into the dirty work of actually trying to read the stuff, and then debunk all the poppycock therein. I don't think it's likely I got any sound counterpoints across, but at least I was able to highlight some paradoxes in the conservative grab-bag of horror stories. At the same time, I have to admit that, on both ends of the political spectrum, we share a lot of pessimism over what's likely to come out of the process.

Breaching Separation of Church & State

(or, Traipsing Trepidatiously 'Cross the Personal/Political Divide)

At our church, we have a tradition (I may have mentioned elsewhere), of "concluding the sermon", which entails, after a couple minutes' meditation, parishioners who are so moved, standing up and sharing how the day's homily or scripture passage resonates with something in their lived experience (i.e, not something they read in a paper or saw on TV). An extension of that tradition, more suited for people like me, who shy away from off-the-cuff public parabolizing, is the "SGN Sharing" email group. Of course, some such people like me, prone to embedding hyperlinks in their emails, tend occasionally to conflate "lived experience" with "having visited a website", or "the way I felt after visiting said website".

Case in point: one co-congregant, S, sent around a link to www.bornagainamerican.org (careful: it'll want to start playing a music video when you click on it). S asks, "What does it mean to be a 'born again American'? I'm not sure, but the combination of left-leaning political and social values with overt and specific references to the Bible, its traditions of social and economic justice, and the Biblical term for religious and spiritual rebirth is fascinating."

Another co-congregant, J, who represents the rare conservative reef in SGN's socially progressive sea, linked us to Jonathan Haidt's excellent TED talk, on the "moral roots of liberals and conservatives" (video after jump):

God IS science (is God)

I got an email from Mom, this morning, that included the full text of a story titled "GOD vs. Science", which she prefaced, "this is kinda long, but it's really good!" You can read the whole story here, online. That links not to the original instance--just the highest ranking response to a Google search, sparing me the need of pasting it all below, where enough of it turns up, anyway. Turns out, according to Snopes (one of my favorite resources for, among other things, debunking the occasional panic spam about an internet based apocalypse), this has been going around for quite some time by email; and in some variations, the student in the story turns out--surprise, surprise!--to be Albert Einstein. But before I'd read any of that, I responded to bits of the story, as copied below: