Posts by Dr. Boli
ADVICE FOR SCREENWRITERS.
If your television show has been running for, say, twenty or thirty years, and you have finally, in a moment of weakness, allowed your romantic leads to marry, you can always create romantic tension all over again by separating the couple. The separation is most easily accomplished by having the female half of the pair declare that she “needs space.” This is inherently plausible, because everyone knows that a female television character periodically “needs space” even though she lives in a Manhattan apartment the size of a cathedral. With careful management, you can build a season-long story arc on the foundation of the woman’s need for “space.” Then, for next season, there’s always amnesia.
REMINISCENCES OF THE LATE PROF. RUTHERFORD WENZELL,
By a Friend.
—
CHAPTER 1: PROTO-PROFESSOR.
A story is told of Prof. Wenzell’s early days at Duck Hollow University;—and when I say that it is told, I mean that I seem to recall having heard it somewhere, perhaps years ago, but of course the details may have become clouded with the passage of time and sherry. But here is the story.
At that time, Prof. Wenzell had only just arrived, either the day or the year before (that is one of those clouded details, you see), and he had not yet achieved the reputation which his later work would one day thrust upon him. It would not be saying too much, or putting the case too strongly, to say that he was a relative unknown in the field he later came to dominate so dominantly. So much so, indeed, that one day he had forgotten the key to the office he shared with another faculty member (and although it seems impossible to imagine a time when Prof. Wenzell was considered so unimportant that he shared an office with another faculty member, yet we are assured that there was a time when he was even more unimportant than that): and for that reason he asked the custodian, who was known to possess a pass key to all the faculty offices, to open the door for him; whereupon the custodian looked him directly in the eye, and, without any sign of irony whatsoever, asked him, “Who are you?”
Astonishing and unlikely as this anecdote seems to us today, I have chosen to begin with it because it illustrates (whether it is strictly true or not) the obscurity from which our subject rose. The depths at the beginning of our story make the heights at the end all the more dizzying; for height, after all, is a relative measurement, as Prof. Wenzell himself so conclusively demonstrated when he utterly demolished the notion of “sea level.”
We begin, therefore, at the beginning of the story; or, rather, a little before the beginning, with the necessary preliminary information regarding Prof. Wenzell’s ancestry. His mother was a part-time state senator of good Anglo-Iberian stock, and his father was the only banjolele player in the Coral Sands Hotel Mandolin Orchestra. They rarely saw each other, and still more seldom their son; so that young Rutherford was reared mostly by a pack of half-domesticated wolves living in the back yard of the family home in Stanton Heights. The wolves taught him basic arithmetic and read him bedtime stories from the Critique of Pure Reason, and indeed I recall very clearly what a surprise, one might almost say a shock, it was to Prof. Rutherford to discover, during the course of a lecture to a freshman philosophy class, that hardly a one of his students had been acquainted with Kant before junior high school at the earliest.
As soon as young Rutherford learned to read, he devoured with eager relish the only books in the house, which were the instruction manuals for the various kitchen appliances. Their influence on his own style has been incalculable. They were kept in a drawer next to the refrigerator; and, for the rest of his life, whenever our subject saw a refrigerator, he immediately felt an overwhelming desire to read a book. Many of us among his acquaintances believed that this unusual mental association accounted for his almost emaciated appearance later in life. Often he would walk into the faculty lounge intending to retrieve his lunch, only to come running out again at a gallop in the direction of the library. There were whole weeks, nay months, when the same lunch bag sat in the refrigerator; and at the end of that time, of course, the food was hardly fit for consumption. It was generally at about that stage that Prof. Wenzell consumed it.
I have been told that Prof. Wenzell never set foot in a school until the day he arrived at Duck Hollow University to assume his professorship. But I have also been told that he was homecoming king and the star quarterback on his high-school football team. I have been told both these things at different times by Prof. Wenzell himself, so you see that I do not know which one to believe. I regard it as a matter for further research. But I have not done the research yet, and experience has taught me to expect that I shall probably never do the research.
Something ought to be said of the early romantic life of our subject, since such formative experiences often have a great effect on one’s thoughts and notions of the way the world is constituted. Something ought to be said, but it will not be said by me. Prof. Wenzell was a very private man when it came to the subject of his,—well, of his private life. When I knew him at the university, there were of course always rumors that one heard and dismissed. I do recall that once, arriving slightly early for a meeting in his office, I saw three attractive young women emerging from his door, each dressed as a chimney sweep and carrying a copy of Kalkbrenner’s Reflections on the Theaetetus of Plato. I assumed there was some perfectly ordinary explanation for their presence and appearance, and for the cricket bats and bits of broken pottery that were strewn about the floor of the professor’s office, and therefore did not bother him with trivial and superfluous questions. At any rate, a man may have his private peccadilloes without being called to account for them every moment of the day. I myself am immoderately fond of apricots.
The rest of the story of young Rutherford Wenzell cannot be told in a connected fashion, but only as a series of images or vignettes. Though he seldom spoke of his early life per se, Prof. Wenzell allowed little flashes of it to leak out in conversation once in a while. Thus we are able to say with some certainty that he knew want and deprivation: for I recall his telling a group of students on the grand staircase in Wheedle Hall (I cannot remember what brought the subject up), “When I was your age, we didn’t have fripperies like stairs. When we wanted to go upstairs, we had to wait for the elevator.” This indicates a youth of poverty, since it is well known that stairs were in use among the well-to-do more than a generation before Prof. Wenzell was born. Again, when the Acting Professor of Nineteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic Literature (who at the time was the youngest member of the faculty) complained that her feet were aching from a long walk across town, Prof. Wenzell replied, “I couldn’t afford feet when I was your age,” which speaks for itself.
Some critics have detected hints of a hidden sorrow in Prof. Wenzell’s work, and in their speculations have invented tales of early losses or romantic disappointments. They may well be correct, but I should like to ask them how they have detected this sorrow if it is hidden. I say that there are enough sorrows in the world to account for any taint of sadness in anyone’s writings: there is war, and disease, and asphalt, and artificial sweetener, and pitch correction, and television. What need have we, then, to turn over the dead sod of a man’s past life to find the root of a present melancholy? I have no recollection of the professor’s having mentioned anything about a secret sorrow himself, except once, when he told me, “I always weep when I see a dinette set, and nothing will console me for hours”; but what, after all, is there in that? Who has not felt the same?
On the whole, it seems useless to speculate any more on the unknown and unknowable youth of our subject. We may find fodder for infinite speculation in some of his quirks and eccentricities; but perhaps, after all, if a man runs screaming from the room whenever he sees a single sprig of celery, it may mean nothing more than that the man does not like celery. It is time, therefore, to leave the youth behind, and to face the man fully formed; it is time to meet the professor who astonished the world with his first work at the tender age of thirty-eight. It is time, in other words, to begin another chapter.
ARE YOU A CRANK?
How do you know when you have passed from being a mere eccentric into being a crank? If you have a Web site, it may be very easy to tell.
Does your Web site look like a site designed by a religious extremist in 1996? You are a crank.
Is your pet theory so complex that the table of contents runs over eighteen thousand words? You are a crank.
Are the eighteen thousand words presented all in one lump on the front page of your Web site? You are a crank.
Do you use underlines, bold text, italic text, red text, blue text, larger text, expanded text, all capitals, red and blue bold underlined italic text, shaded backgrounds, and ruled boxes for various shades of emphasis? You are a crank.
Do you believe in magic legalism—Dr. Boli’s term for the idea that a certain legalistic form of words or actions will break the spell of evil and bring about the reforms or salvation you desire, and that failure to adhere to the form brings automatic doom? You are a crank.
Do you believe that an entire institution of a billion members has seceded from you, leaving you the only remaining true member? You are a crank.
Do you maintain an annotated list of people who are definitely going to hell? You are a crank.
The question comes of up because of a comment left on our recent article about historical fallacies having to do with slavery:
If you’re at all interested in knowing . . . the Catholic Dogma . . . that we *must believe* to get to Heaven . . . I list it on my website > > > www.Gods-Catholic-Dogma.com
C A U T I O N : The Catholic Church has had no physical properties for 50 years (8 Dec 1965) . . . because of the Sources of Dogma on automatic excommunication for heresy.
The Catholic God knows . . . what we think and believe . . .
Catholic Faith (pre-fulfillment) writing of Deuteronomy 31 : 21 >
“For I know their thoughts, and what they are about to do this day.”Catholic Faith (pre-fulfillment) writing of Job 21 : 27 >
“Surely I know your thoughts, and your unjust judgments against Me.”Catholic writing of Romans 1 : 21 >
“They … became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened.”If you only scan the Index … you won’t see the infallible Dogma from the Pope in union with the Bishops of the world … which * alone * keeps people from eternal damnation.
Dr. Boli was about to say that he does not like to make fun of sincere people’s sincerely held religious beliefs, but that would be a lie. He does like to make fun of some sincerely held religious beliefs. In general there is an inverse ratio between the number of people the crank proposes to damn in hell and the guilt Dr. Boli feels about making fun of said crank. Someone who has said to Dr. Boli, “You, personally, are damned to hell,” can hardly complain about the mild term “crank.”
He will point out, however, that much of the crankiness could be mitigated by good Web design. Make the site look more modern. Give it a menu structure that masks the unfathomable depths of crankiness within. Perhaps you could add a slider.
One of those “laws” that people on the Internet like to cite is called “Poe’s Law,” which says something like this: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a religious extremist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.” Dr. Boli brings up Poe’s Law because it is not possible to prove beyond a doubt that www.Gods-Catholic-Dogma.com is not a parody of crank Web sites. On the one hand, if a Web site where the mere table of contents runs to more than eighteen thousand words were a parody, then it would be perhaps the most heroic parody in history, and that seems rather unlikely. But, on the other hand, the commenter signs his name “Mike Bizzaro.”
WHY THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY CAN’T BE SATIRIZED:
Because you can’t beat them at their own game.
Someone who changes his name to “Sol Invictus” in honor of the favorite deity of the Roman legions has a bit of an ego problem. Someone who does so and then, when he speaks to reporters, translates “Sol Invictus” as “majestic unconquered sun” has an ego too big for this continent.
MARK TWAIN REMEMBERS SLAVERY.
Since we were talking about the evils of slavery, it seems to Dr. Boli that no amount of argument can demonstrate the pervasiveness of the evil as well as this simple illustration from Mark Twain, which comes from Following the Equator. He has stopped at a hotel in Bombay, and a long troop of Indian hotel employees has followed him to his room, led by a German supervisor.
There was a vast glazed door which opened upon the balcony. It needed closing, or cleaning, or something, and a native got down on his knees and went to work at it. He seemed to be doing it well enough, but perhaps he wasn’t, for the burly German put on a look that betrayed dissatisfaction, then without explaining what was wrong, gave the native a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him where the defect was. It seemed such a shame to do that before us all. The native took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any resentment. I had not seen the like of this for fifty years. It carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one’s desires to a slave. I was able to remember that the method seemed right and natural to me in those days, I being born to it and unaware that elsewhere there were other methods; but I was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher. My father was a refined and kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation. He laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not heavily; once for telling him a lie—which surprised me, and showed me how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort. He punished me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses. My father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature. When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly—as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man’s skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it. Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it.
It is curious—the space-annihilating power of thought. For just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native’s smitten cheek was not done tingling yet! Back to boyhood—fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe—all in two seconds by the watch!
“My father was a refined and kindly gentleman”—and yet his usual method of addressing a slave was to get his attention with a smack. This is what owning slaves does to the moral sense of refined and kindly gentlemen. There are still—incredible as it is to say—Confederate apologists who argue that slavery was a largely benevolent institution, because it was in the economic interest of the slaveowner to treat his property well. When you hear their arguments, you will remember Mark Twain’s story of his refined and kindly father.
HISTORICAL FALLACIES: SLAVERY.
The first in an occasional series on failures of imagination in historical writing.
Suppose, for a moment, that you are a conscientious historian who has decided that Americans must be made to understand exactly how the individual slaveowner of the antebellum South was personally responsible for the evils of slavery. You will do so with a searing appeal to America’s conscience; or, in other words, with an article in Slate. So you sit down to your Macintosh to type, and…
And in the back of your mind you feel a little pricking. For some reason your memory has chosen that moment to replay an article you read somewhere about appalling conditions in Apple factories in Asia—conditions that have more than once been described as “slavery.”
You shake your head to clear your mind. Of course even the worst factory conditions are not the same as African slavery as it was practiced in the southern United States. That is incontrovertibly true.
Still, you remember thinking when you read that article that there was something monstrously evil in those factories. How can you condemn one monstrous evil by participating in another?
“That’s it,” you declare with sudden resolution. “From now on, no more Apple for me. Instead, I’ll…”
You’ll what?
There is not a single other computer brand that does not depend on the same sort of exploited labor.
You’ll build your own computer? What a splendid idea! Where will the components come from?
“Fine,” you say with a desperate resolution. “I’ll turn Luddite. I’ll write everything in ink on paper.”
The first notebook you pick up says “Made in Indonesia.”
You can’t escape the web of evil.
In our complex modern world, we deal with all kinds of evil, but we have just run up against what we might call systemic evil, to borrow a term from the medical profession. (We shall fill the tank and take a spin through the car wash before we bring the term back, so everything’s all right.) Systemic evil is evil in which we participate merely by living in our complex modern world. There is no little check box to opt out. You broke the shrink wrap; you used the life that was given to you; therefore you agreed to the evil.
And exploited workers in Asian factories are just one tentacle of the evil that pervades modern life. How about automobile companies that deliberately evade pollution controls? You will boycott them and buy only from non-evil automobile manufacturers? Dr. Boli believes that you are in for a rude surprise when you start trying to find one of those. How about wars and terrorist attacks started by greedy and ambitious politicians who kill thousands as a way of augmenting their own power? You’ll move to Switzerland, which never gets into wars? Dr. Boli suggests you might do a little research on how such wars are financed.
No, the modern world is sufficiently complex that you simply cannot pull evil out by the roots without killing the rest of your crops. This is the meaning of the parable of the wheat and tares:—for the historical fallacy that Dr. Boli has chosen to address today is the idea that things were simpler in days gone by.
The subject came up because of an article in Slate that an alert reader pointed out to us: “Slavery Myths Debunked,” which begins with an introduction that shows a serious lack, but not a surprising lack, of historical imagination.
Dr. Boli was relieved to find that most of the article is just good sound history. No, Irish indentured servants were not slaves in the way African slaves were slaves; that is true, and it needs to be said. However badly the Irish were treated, they were white citizens with rights. No, factory workers in the North were not worse off than slaves in the South, for the good and sufficient reason that it was at least theoretically possible for a Northern factory worker to stop being a factory worker, or for his children to become embezzlers or prostitutes or something else better than either factory workers or slaves.
It is only in the introduction that we find the parade of fallacies, which of course is a little ironic in an article purporting to debunk historical myths. We shall look at only one of those fallacies, because it will stand in very well for all of them.
In a June column on the legacy of Robert E. Lee that was otherwise largely critical of the Confederate general, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks wrote that, though Lee owned slaves, he didn’t like owning slaves—a biographical detail whose inclusion seemed to imply that Lee’s ambivalence somehow made his slaveholding less objectionable.
The implication seems to be that, because he held slaves, Robert E. Lee was simply evil; there is no mitigation for his disapproval of the institution of slavery.
Now, Robert E. Lee is not one of Dr. Boli’s favorite people. Dr. Boli was not impressed by Lee when Lee was alive, and he is not any more impressed by him now that he is dead. But to suggest that no good person could have owned slaves is to misunderstand the complexity of the antebellum era. It minimizes the evil of slavery by suggesting that it presented a simple choice: one could decide not to have slaves the way one decides not to kick a puppy, and then one’s conscience would be clear.
Consider the actual situation, however. Lee inherits a plantation full of slaves. Let us suppose that he hates the institution of slavery with a white-hot passion (which he did not, by the way, but let us suppose it). What should he do?
Well he should let the slaves go, of course.
Fine. And then what?
What place was there for a free black person in Virginia? With trivial exceptions, none whatsoever. By law, anyone who had visible African traits was presumed to be a slave; there were large rewards for returning a supposed runaway, and the supposed slave’s testimony would not be admitted in court. So a freed slave lived in constant danger of being enslaved again by some unscrupulous or simply mistaken white person. Aside from that, there was almost no reasonable way for a former slave to earn a living, since whatever jobs would be entrusted to a former slave were already filled by current slaves.
But they could go north.
And would they fare better there? At the minimum, Lee’s responsibility to his slaves would require him to find a way for them to live as well as they lived as slaves—that is, to have their minimal bodily needs taken care of. Simply saying “Go north, be free,” would be condemning them to starvation. How easily could a Southern slaveowner find homes and jobs for his freed slaves in the North? And, of course, the Fugitive Slave Laws could make it almost as hard to remain free in the North as it was in the South.
Then he could send them back to Africa. But by Lee’s time, almost all the slaves in the South were born in America. They had no more practical knowledge of Africa than Lee had. Africa was not “back,” and would they want to go there if they were free? Some free black Americans did, but many did not.
Well, then, he could pay them and make them employees instead of slaves. But there were no other positions for free black “employees,” so all the employees would have had to stay in Lee’s employ or starve to death. It seems obvious that the difference between a slave and an employee who can never leave his position to go anywhere else is a difference in name only.
He could sell his slaves to another master and wash his hands of the whole thing. It might allow Lee to feel very smug for a while, but plainly it would be a bad thing for the slaves, probably breaking up families and friendships of long duration among them.
Supposing Lee to be the most tender-hearted humanitarian imaginable, then, he will keep his slaves even if he detests the institution of slavery. He will do so because any alternative he can think of is much worse. If he loves the slaves as human beings, they will have to remain slaves.
That, in a few words, is how thoroughly evil the institution of slavery was. A white southerner born into a family with slaves was stuck with them unless he was willing to treat them with callous cruelty. This is how evil works. It enlists our most selfless motives in its service. You can almost hear the satisfied chuckle of the demons right now. It’s a fine piece of work, they say.
But if it was nearly impossible for an individual slaveowner to get around the problem of slavery, then we are faced with a choice. We can condemn all slaveowners as evil, on the unimpeachable grounds that slavery is objectively evil. But then we create a Calvinistic world in which millions are born damned, with no hope of redemption. A third of all white Southerners owned slaves before the Civil War, as the Slate article mentions; that’s quite a lot of objectively evil people. Our only alternative is charity: the understanding that There is none righteous, no, not one, and that slaveowners, Hitler Youth members, Volkswagen drivers, Apple users, and all the rest of us living in this complex modern world are caught in a vast web of evil not of our own making. When we insist that slaveowners chose to be evil and could have done otherwise, we are missing the magnitude of the evil. And when we trivialize the evil to a matter of individual choice, then we smugly absolve ourselves of responsibility. For if the evil is really that huge and all-encompassing, then it is not a few individuals who need to be changed, but everything; and that would mean we must accept the horrible possibility that we are called to change the world.
DR. BOLI’S MUSEUM OF STUPID WEB DESIGN.
Go to the Public Art Portfolio page of the Willet Hauser Architectural Glass company. Hover over one of the thumbnails and a plus sign appears, indicating that you could click on the picture to enlarge it. Now click on the picture to enlarge it.
From DR. BOLI’S UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY.
Arrogant (adjective). Refusing to accept my preconceived notions without investigation or debate.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
NEW TOBACCO WARNINGS.
Tobacco products are festooned with dire warnings about their effects on the user’s health, and yet people continue to use tobacco products. That is because health is not very high on the list of things tobacco users really care about. Thus new government-mandated warnings will be introduced next year that will, it is hoped, strike deeper into the minds of the purchasers of tobacco:
