THE GLORY OF THE KING JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE

I spent some time this morning comparing different English translations of the beautiful passage in Luke that recounts Satan's temptation of Jesus after the Son of God returns from wandering for forty days in the wilderness [I know, I know. Don't start with me. If you cannot feel a tingle of divinity when reading the Bible, you are dead to language]. Here is a portion of that passage, from Luke 4:5-8 [pardon the orthographic irregularities]:

⁵And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. ⁶And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. ⁷If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine. ⁸And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

Here is the same passage from something called The Contemporary English Version:

⁵Then the devil led Jesus up to a high place and quickly showed him all the nations on earth. ⁶The devil said, "I will give all this power and glory to you. It has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. ⁷Just worship me, and you can have it all."

⁸Jesus answered, "The Scriptures say: `Worship the Lord your God and serve only him!' "

The first passage is sublime, especially the phrase "get thee behind me, Satan." The second passage is pedestrian, tone deaf. "I can give it to anyone I want to" sounds like a kid in a playground handing out M&Ms.

I have long thought that of all the miracles associated with the Bible -- the multiplying of loaves and fishes, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the stopping of the sun in the heavens -- far and away the greatest is the writing of the King James version by a committee. I have seen the dead resuscitated on ER, and Adam Smith long ago explained how a cornucopia of commodities could issue from the dark recesses of a factory, but no one, to my satisfaction, has explained the sublime beauty of the King James Bible.

What I wouldn't give to have written one of those passages!

TWEET TWEET

Yesterday, I had a visit from Dr. Tanya Mears. Tanya is a former student in Afro-American Studies who wrote her doctoral dissertation on a body of literature written in Colonial Puritan New England on the occasion of the public execution of a condemned criminal. The sermons, "last words," and poetry are called, collectively, Execution Literature, and Tanya's dissertation [which I directed] deals with the subset of that literature written about persons of African descent. Now Tanya is turning her dissertation into a scholarly monograph, and her visit was for the purpose of our strategizing on how best to do that. I directed only two dissertations during my twelve years as Graduate Program Director in Afro-American Studies [it is, after all, not my field], and the first has already been published as a book, by Dr. Jennifer Jensen-Wallach, so once Tanya's book comes out I will be batting a thousand.

Tanya is a tall, vivacious, witty Black woman, seriously Catholic [she graciously forgives me my atheism], totally plugged in to the modern culture, and something of a fashionista. Some years ago. she prevailed upon me to coordinate the color of my socks, my pants, my shirts, my shoes, and my belts, and she has been after me for years to get Instant messaging, something I seem not to be able to accomplish on my computer. It was under her influence that I signed up for FaceBook, and though I now have a circle of friends [mostly former Afro-Am students], I never write on my wall [is that the correct phrase?], to Tanya's manifest irritation.

Anyway, after a long planning session, she joined Susie and me for dinner at Azure, a pretty good restaurant across the street, and over entrees, she arm-twisted me into joining Twitter. She assured me that I would acquire "followers" and that the traffic to this blog would increase exponentially.

So I am now on FaceBook and Twitter, Lord help me. I just checked, and I do not yet have a single follower. What ever happened to the leisurely reading [and writing] of books?

DEFENSIVE MANEUVERS

This blog post has two purposes, neither of them very elevated. The first is to pass the time until the Massachusetts by-election tomorrow. The second is to prepare myself for a defeat there, and to reassure myself that the sky is not falling. I have sent emails to everyone in the UMass Afro-Am Department urging them to get out the vote, and I have donated a hundred dollars to a campaign that is awash in money. But in truth, there is nothing I can do about my former friends and neighbors, except wait and hope.

So, here is what I am thinking. Two years ago and more, Howard Dean articulated a fifty state strategy for the Democratic Party that ran contrary to the conventional wisdom of the old timers. The Party went out and searched for conservative Democrats, Blue Dog Democrats, who could make a run for House and Senate seats that would ordinarily be conceded to the Republicans. The Party was particularly successful in locating military personnel with unimpeachable war records who were willing to stand for public office. The strategy was a brilliant success and produced not only a healthy House majority but also, barely, by the skin of our teeth, a sixty vote Senate majority, including the egregious Lieberman, the admirable Sanders, and, after the longest count in U. S. history, the newly serious Franken.

Anyone looking carefully at the line-up of Democratic senators could see that when it came time to legislate, getting all of them to agree on anything was going to require heroic efforts and major compromises. What is more, despite some statistical advantages in 2010 [having to do with which senators are up for re-election], it was obvious that this sixty vote edge was unlikely to survive another election cycle.

Obama, after all, received only 53% of the popular vote, in an election that followed eight years of the worst president in American history and featured a chaotic Republican campaign with a polarizing and alienating Vice-Presidential candidate. Optimists [like me] who saw Obama's victory as the start of a new progressive era should really have recognized how deeply and evenly split the country is.

So, if Martha Coakley manages to lose a safe seat to a nonentity, it will be a disaster, but not quite a calamity. I still believe that health care reform will pass, even without that magical sixtieth vote, but further major reforms were always going to be dicey. As I have often observed here, blaming Snow or Nelson or Landrieu or Lieberman for the impossibility of radical progressive reform misses the point. They are the product and reflection of the resistance to reform in this country, not the cause.

Just today, Paul Krugman once again criticized the Obama administration for not having made the stimulus bill much bigger. I remember, and surely he must also, how near a thing was the passage of the inadequate bill we got. What on earth makes him think a much larger bill was ever a possibility? He has it in for Summers and crew, and he is, I think, totally correct to view them as incompetent clowns. But if Krugman had been sitting where Summers does, and had argued for a one and a half trillion dollar stimulus bill, he would have been totally unsuccessful in getting the Congress even to consider it, let alone pass it.

The sad fact is that we progressives are trapped in a fundamentally non-progressive era, when we must make do with what we have, and try to accomplish as much as the Congress will allow. So, if tomorrow turns out badly, we will simply have to suck it up and soldier on. The one bright spot in all of this is the self-destructive behavior of the Republicans, who are clearly quite unwilling to put forward candidates at the national level who can win. I prayed that I would live long enough to see a progressive president elected. It happened. Now, I pray that I will live long enough to see Sarah Palin nominated by the Republicans. You take your pleasures where you find them when you reach my age.

PUZZLES

This being Sunday, my first thought is the NY TIMES crossword puzzle. A good deal of my waking life -- more than one might wish to admit -- is spent solving puzzles. Crossword puzzles, Doublecrostics, Sudoku puzzles, Ken Ken puzzles, Puns and Anagrams puzzles, London TIMES type puzzles -- all are grist for my mill. The first thing I do upon taking my seat on an airplane is to check the seat pocket for the airline's magazine, in hopes of finding several puzzles in the back pages.

Puzzles of this sort exercise on me what aesthetic theorists in mid-twentieth century philosophy used to call an objective demand. Faced with an empty puzzle, I feel a compulsion to attack it. Working on a puzzle is for me a peaceful activity, and when I finally finish the puzzle, no matter how easy it has been, I experience a satisfying sense of completion and fulfilment. The world is now ordered rightly.

The NY TIMES puzzles were my first addiction. Will Short arranges things so that they start very easy on Monday, and grow progressively harder as the week passes. The Thursday puzzle always has something quirky about it that one must guess to solve the puzzle. The Friday and Saturday puzzles are genuinely hard. Sometimes, I cannot at the start solve a single clue, but almost without exception, I manage to finish them all. The Sunday puzzle is actually rather easy, but it is enormous, and hence takes a long time to finish [half an hour or more, I find.] Naturally, I do them in ink, and, as even the most naive reader can surely tell, I am immensely vain about my ability to solve them.

Sudoku puzzles, a relatively recent import from Japan, are quite different. Although they are written using numbers, they are logic puzzles, not mathematical puzzles. One could without any essential alteration replace the numbers 1 through 9 with letters or symbols of some sort. At first they were very challenging, but I have now devised ways of solving them that make it merely a matter of time. Still and all, as I enter the last number in the last box, I feel a sense of accomplishment and fulfilment. Ken Ken puzzles, an even newer import, are genuine arithmetic puzzles, and require a totally different set of reasoning tools.

DoubleCrostics are complex word puzzles, the one drawback of which is that one must fill in the letters from the clues in the body of the text. I am terrible at doing that, and routinely put letters in the wrong places, which screws things up in a big way. At one point, frustrated by my incompetence at filling in the letters, I decided to try solving them in my head, without filling in the letters, but just solving the clues. I can do it, but it requires enormous concentration, and is not really worth the effort just to avoid the secretarial work of entering the letters in the text.

I think there must be a connection between this addiction to puzzles and the way I do philosophy, by telling myself stories about ideas until the stories are perfectly clear in my mind, but I do not quite see what that is.

Well, tomorrow, we start all over with the easy Monday puzzle. Hardly worth the effort, it only takes me about five or six minutes. But so long as it is there, it has to be solved!

VAMPING 'TIL READY

Regular visitors to this blog will have noticed that I have not put up any new posts in the past several days. In part, this is because I have been busy preparing for, and delivering, a ninety minute lecture on Freud and a two hour lecture on Marx. [Yes, even I actually spend time preparing, for all that it may not seem that way as I ramble on in class.] But the principal reason is that the news, these past days, has all been about the horrible catastrophe in Haiti. Blogs are, by the nature, chatty, snarky, personal, opinionated. But in the face of a tragedy of this magnitude [not enormity -- that means something else], I simply have not had the heart to snark or chat. I could, I suppose, go off on the despicable things that Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh had to say, but that is so disproportionate to the human suffering we are witnessing that it seems inappropriate, somehow. Each of us can donate some money to the relief effort, and that is a good thing to do, even though at this time the problem is not lack of resources but the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of actually getting them to the people who need them the most. So I have been silent.

Today is Susie's birthday. She and I were both born in 1933 -- she on January 16th and I on December 27th. Each year, there are twenty days when we are the same age. Here is an odd fact that I do not know quite how to explain. My father's father, the socialist leader Barnet Wolff, was a year younger than his wife, Ella Nislow Wolff, although when Ella was in her nineties, a quarter of a century after Barney died, she tried to shave a year off her age. My father and mother courted at Circle One of the Young People's Socialist League [YPSL -- hence they were known as Yipsels]. She was born in 1900, and he in 1901, so she too was a year older than he. When I fell in love with Susie in 1948, I was fourteen and she was fifteen. At that point, I did not even know about the ages of my grandparents. Go figure.

Anyway, I bought Susie a really nice present for her seventy-seventh. It is a necklace of what are called "African trade beads." These are brightly colored beads, made in Venice and elsewhere of glass and other materials and brought by European traders to the West coast of Africa, starting in the fifteenth century. They were traded for slaves, ivory, gold, and other "goods," and then were re-traded into the interior, where in some cases they came to be used as currency. Susie saw the necklace in a Carrboro bead store a few weeks ago and admired, it, but the price was outrageous, so she moved on. Generally speaking, it is considered rather gauche to tell your wife what you paid for her birthday present, but since Susie likes a real bargain almost more than she likes the present itself, I told her I had bargained the store down to about 40% of the asking price, and that considerably added to her pleasure.

Well, while we wait for the outcome of the Massachusetts by-election, I shall go back to preparing next week's lectures.

NAVEL-GAZING

A lifetime as a professional philosopher is not a good preparation for blogging. As I have remarked before, philosophy considers things sub specie aeternitatis, whereas blogging is essentially a form of gossip. Some of you may be old enough to remember the great old musical comedy film, Bye, Bye, Birdie, a send-up of the Elvis mania. Early in the movie is a marvelous song "Have you heard about Hugo and Kim?" [sung by a group of high school students calling one another on the phone to gossip about the fact that Hugo has "pinned" Kim --you have to be of a certain age to know what "pinned" means. It does not refer to wrestling.] Anyway, most of what passes for political commentary in blogs, and on television, for that matter, is really just a variant of "Have you heard about Hugo and Kim?"

All of which creates major problems for me as a blogger. I ought to be blogging madly just now about Harry Reid's injudicious remarks about Obama, about Steve Schmidt's revelation that Palin did not understand why there are two Koreas, about Harold Ford's flirtation with a run for the Democratic Party nomination for Gillibrand's Senate seat, about Tiger Woods' meltdown, about the Jay Leno/Conan O'Brian kerfuffle. But the sad fact is that I really do not care about any of these things. They are completely absorbing the attention of the blogosphere right now, and in six or seven minutes they will be replaced by half a dozen equally uninteresting non-events, which will give way to another group, and so on ad nauseum.

I am quite capable of blogging about less than world-shaking matters -- witness my repeated references to the health of my cat, Murray. But I do feel an underlying obligation to devote my blog posts to matters either of real intellectual interest [such as the origins of the notion of Natural Law] or to issues of political and public policy about which I think I have something worthwhile to contribute to the public discourse. And, opinionated though I am, such things do not arise reliably on a daily basis.

Several things are happening just now that are worthy of comment, but about which I have little or nothing to say. Most important, I would say, is the terrible earthquake that has just devastated the capital city of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. I hope against hope that the loss of life is not too great, but all I, or any of us, can do, is sit and wait.

On the legal front, the most fascinating event now unfolding is the trial in California challenging the Proposition 8 overturning of the California Supreme Court's legitimation of same-sex marriage. This challenge, led quite surprisingly by conservative lawyer and Bush v. Gore victor Ted Olsen, has been widely viewed in the LGBT legal rights community as an unwise and precipitous suit, carrying with it the grave danger that at the Supreme Court level same-sex marriage could be declared by this Court as definitively not a right guaranteed by the Constitution, thereby setting back decades of efforts. Yesterday, an extraordinary exchange took place in the court. The upholders of Proposition 8 have chosen to take their stand on the claim that same-sex marriage threatens the stability of heterosexual marriage. This has always struck defenders of same-sex marriage as a bizarre claim, and in court, the judge forced the lawyer defending Prop 8 to answer the question, "How does same-sex marriage threaten heterosexual marriage?" After a pause described by spectators as long, the lawyer replied, "I don't know, I don't know." It was, however this all turns out, a memorable moment.

On the political front, the gossip lately has all been about the supposed meltdown of the Democratic Party, signaled by the decision of Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan not to seek reelection this year. I do actually have something to say about that matter -- not about the decisions of Dodd and Dorgan, but rather about the context in which those and other similar decisions should be viewed. I will try to sort that out tomorrow.

But this is the day on which I begin teaching a research study group [i.e., non-credit course] in the UNC Philosophy Department on Karl Marx's economic theories. Tomorrow, I give my first Freud lecture at Duke. Strange as it may seem for someone with half a century and more of teaching experience, I am actually a trifle nervous. This morning, I started re-reading Chapter Two of my book, Understanding Marx, and I was both impressed by how much I once knew about the subject and appalled by how much I have forgotten. I see that I shall have to do some serious preparation to keep up with the interesting assortment of graduate students and faculty who have signed up for the study group.

Oh, by the way, Murray seems to be doing just fine.

TIME SETTING

OK. Eoin sent me an email and told me how to correct the weird time problem. Let us see whether it works. Here goes.