Positive Liberty

Our house has been in a ferment these past few days.

No, it’s not about Objectivism, nor even Hegel. We’re making homebrew beer.

Whenever I talk about homebrew, I always get two comments.

–It can’t be legal.

and

–It can’t taste very good.

Both of these impressions are mistaken.

It is legal, with no paperwork or government oversight necessary. There are no taxes, no forms to fill out, and no need to worry about revenuers. In the United States, homebrew became legal in 1978. So long as you brew in reasonable quantities and do not sell or distill what you make, you need no government permits. Distillation is still illegal in the United States without a permit, though it is legal, ahem, in New Zealand.

We’ve come a long way since Prohibition. Back then my grandmother was a young child, and–true story–she used to make illegal whiskey deliveries in her Little Red Wagon. “No one ever suspected a kid,” she says. She remains a woman after my own heart. Nothing against her or her efforts, but today’s homebrews are safer, easier to make, and of consistently better quality than anything from the Prohibition era.

One word of caution, however: Some states, including Alabama and Utah, still maintain homebrew prohibitions. These laws are entirely unenforceable given recent technological advances both in communications and in brewing itself. They remain on the books, though, and thus it is best for you to check your local laws before rushing to brew at home.

As to the taste, I have to say that the average homebrew tastes much better than most commercial beers. I’ve sampled beer from probably a dozen different local homebrewers, and they’ve all been excellent. Some of them have been wildly creative, while others were perfect renditions of a classic style. I’ve had beers that were an exact copy of a Guinness Stout–and beers that resembled nothing else in the known universe.

The sky really is the limit. During the past week, I removed a 5-gallon jug of pilsener-style lager from an unheated room in the basement. It had been fermenting there during the cold months of late winter, slowly and delicately, giving it the unmistakably dry, crisp quality of the true lager style. It should be ready in just another week. Meanwhile, I’m brewing a peach wheat ale, something you might never find in the stores no matter how hard you look. One good thing about ales is that they take much less time than lagers, as they’re typically ready to drink in under a month. My partner Scott–ever the brave one–is attempting to brew a sake, which is also legal in the United States–though ironically it’s illegal in Japan.

Besides good taste, a moderate consumption of homebrew is actually good for you. The dangers are essentially nil: So long as you don’t add poisonous herbs or use any lead-lined equipment, it is virtually impossible to make a toxic beer. (Hmm… Homebrew is illegal in Alabama–and the lead poisoning cases came from? …Alabama! Surely it’s just a coincidence…)

Now, not everyone believes us when we say how good a homebrew can be. I brought a keg of my homebrew to a recent JHU History Department party. People were afraid to drink it. Heck, they were even afraid to touch it, because admittedly the kegging system I use looks a bit like something out of a munitions catalogue. But contrary to your expectations, the device does not explode when you press the red button. Instead, it produces a steady stream of delicious, nutritious beer.

One by one, the invitees tried the brew. By the end of the night, they’d nearly emptied the full 2.5-gallon keg. My advisor–who had repeatedly called the brew “rotgut” to my face–finally broke down and tried it. Then he poured himself a rather larger glass. And then he poured another. I’d made a convert.

You may now be asking–how do I get in on homebrewing? This is a common question. Dave Jansing asked it once, and I taught him how it’s done. Now he brews his own, and you can too. Many areas boast walk-in homebrew stores, which are the best places to get started. Here you can see demonstrations, ask questions, and get expert advice. In Maryland, I recommend Maryland Homebrew and Annapolis Homebrew as two very good suppliers. I try to divide my purchases between them, since I have had nothing but good dealings with both stores. The canonical reference text on homebrew is Charles Papazian’s Complete Joy of Homebrewing, now in its third edition. This book should also be available at any homebrew store you visit.

The bottom line is simple. Do you love cooking? Love chemistry? Love good old-fashioned American freedom? Or do you just love a good beer buzz now and then? Well then I say: Go forth and brew!

Here is a quote from the respected Hegel scholar J. N. Findlay, in a Foreword to the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford UP, 1977:

Once [Hegel] departed from the dispiriting atmosphere of Berne and Frankfurt, and ceased writing such relatively dull, much over-studied writing as he produced there, an afflatus seized him in the Jena lecture-rooms, an afflatus perhaps unique in philosophical history, which affected not only his ideas but his style, and which makes one at times only sure that he is saying something immesurably profound and important, but not exactly what it is.”

In other words, and as a fellow graduate student asked me this afternoon, “Why on Earth are you reading Hegel?”

I’m not sure. But it let me use the word “afflatus” in a blog entry, which is always nice.

…over at the comments section of NoodleFood, Diana Mertz Hsieh’s blog about Objectivist philosophy.

I’ve had only a few minor interventions in the debate, which may be largely incomprehensible to those not familiar with Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism or its history. Sadly, the current debate will be quite familiar to many of us who have already heard way too much about certain nasty recriminations among the early Objectivists.

Still, I’ve been finding it immesurably interesting to return to the world of Objectivism after a hiatus of nearly seven years. A lot has happened; the movement has fragmented further than ever before, and I have to say I welcome the development. After all, what mature intellectual movement isn’t fragmented? I was also pleasantly surprised to see that several of my own ideas on this thread, regarding the moral status of homosexuality within Objectivism, were arrived at independently by Dr. Chris Sciabarra, for whom I have always had great respect.

I now eagerly await the arrival of his monograph entitled Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation.

Yesterday may have been a pivotal day in my life. After finishing a class with my discussion section in Modern Jewish History, a student asked me what I would be teaching next.

“I don’t know,” I replied. It may sound surprising, but up until that time I had given the question no thought whatsoever. The next words came out of my mouth before I really understood what they meant:

“Come to think of it, this might be the last time I ever teach.”

It’s true. I’m in my last year a teaching fellow, and yesterday was the last class of the term. While I’ll still be a student next academic year, I am not scheduled to teach any classes–and the job market for historians is essentially nonexistent.

The overall market for academics in the humanities has become something of a lottery in recent years, and the number of winning tickets has grown very, very limited. My undergraduate adviser warned me that graduate school was a risky proposition, but he also assured me that by the time I finished, the market would probably have improved. Only the first half of his advice has turned out to be correct. The second half has fallen through, opening up an abysmal hole in my career plans. I’m now wondering what I can do with my life if I don’t land the job for which I’ve been preparing over the last six years.

I love teaching. It’s one of the times I feel most alive, most in touch with the world, with people, with life and especially with ideas. Like a fiend, like an addict, I’m wondering if I can somehow manage to teach one more class, even if all my other plans fail me. I may get that last hurrah next spring, but only if I win an additional fellowship for which I’m applying.

I’ve proposed to the Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality that I teach a class on gender in the French Enlightenment and Revolution. Winning their competition means I’d get a chance to teach some very intelligent undergrads the works of writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Olympe de Gouges, and Mary Wollstonecraft. I’d also be ending my teaching career with open eyes, something that I may (or may not) have failed to do yesterday. Such are my dreams.

The usual route for history graduate students these days is not to enter a tenure-track position immediately after getting one’s degree. Typically, a graduate student must take a series of postdoctoral fellowships, adjunct positions, and temporary appointments before either ascending to the rarefied air of the tenure track–or before getting spat out of academia, ten years later, with only three additional letters after his name.

There are several reasons for this. All of them derive from the perverse economics of the academy as it is currently structured.

First, more and more graduate students are being admitted, in part because a graduate program enhances the prestige of a college or university. Once a school has a program, having ever more numerous graduate students is thought to enhance the prestige of that program. Many of these graduate students are of course teaching undergraduate courses, which means that fewer tenure-track positions are necessary in the first place. The universities are happy about this state of affairs, because graduate students are cheap, while tenure-track professors are expensive.

The trouble is, this larger and larger cohort of graduate students goes on in a few years to seek the smaller and smaller pool of tenure-track jobs. The belief that graduate students make a program better is strangling the academic economy. In technical terms, demand for tenure-track positions is inversely proportional to quantity supplied, and the two are now set in a positive feedback relationship.

As a way of prolonging graduate student agony and further decreasing university expenses, schools are also hiring an increasing number adjunct faculty members. Adjunct jobs pay very poorly and offer no benefits at all; they have also become the undeclared entry-level position in the academy–a place formerly held by the postdoc and before that by the now-lowly graduate student. Universities like adjuncts better than either graduates or postdocs, because adjuncts are cheap, expendable, and available at will. With so many graduate students desperate to get the few tenure-track positions, adjunct jobs always have plenty of applicants, hopeful souls who want to hold on to their academic dreams for at least a few more months. Then the months begin to turn into years…

Unlike some people, though, I have absolutely no plans to spend five years as an adjunct faculty member. I’ve read the Invisible Adjunct’s monumentally depressing blog, and I am forewarned. This will not happen to me.

I will indeed enter the academic job market next year, but if I do not get anything worthwhile in the academy, then I plan to leave forthwith and find something better. I might go to law school, work for the federal government, or offer my skills to any of the many lobbying and advocacy groups to be found in Washington. This city is probably the only place in the country where having strong opinions is in itself a valuable job skill. Combined with some modest ability at writing–and those three magic letters–I plan to do better than being an adjunct faculty member. Wish me luck.

Here’s a lengthy discussion of why the current war in Iraq has been terribly misguided. Interestingly enough, it’s from the capitalist, individualist, realpolitik, Ayn-Rand-inspired blog The Light of Reason. Here’s a teaser:

if a country is a genuine, serious threat to us — a threat that we consider must be eliminated for our own safety — then that country is our enemy. But by casting the net of threats to our security so broadly, and by endorsing the idea of “regime change,” we have placed ourselves in the middle of an impossible contradiction: we are making war on a country, yet we simultaneously proclaim that the country itself is not our enemy. Only the current regime is our enemy.

Note the consequences of this position. We want to preserve the infrastructure of the country, while at the same time bombing the country into submission. We do not want to harm innocent Iraqi civilians, but it turns out that enemy soldiers are posing as innocent Iraqi civilians — so how are we to know whether anyone is a “real” enemy or not? And at the same time we are fighting a war which it now turns out may be much more costly than we were originally led to believe, we are also spending massive amounts of money (and using numerous personnel) to prepare humanitarian aid. In short, we are trying to kill the enemy and preserve, and even improve, its life at the same time.

It cannot be done. Contradictions do not exist, and if you try to make one manifest in the world, you will fail.

I’ve yet to give my blog’s manifesto on Ayn Rand and Objectivism, though I suspect it’s coming soon (On one foot: I still love Ayn Rand. I think she made some serious mistakes, though, and largely because of these errors, her followers have often made fools both of her and of themselves. Details will follow, I promise.)

I’ve already blogged on the war, but just once. It was so depressing that I don’t plan to do it again.

Comic books never played much part in my childhood. I can only recall ever having one comic book, and I believe it was a collection of Bible stories, which hardly counts. It was also before I could read, and my parents never let me have another–just to be sure that it hadn’t done any permanent damage. Much like television, comic books were bad, something to be avoided if I was to grow up as an intelligent person in a world full of idiots. Instead my parents encouraged me to move as quickly as possible from children’s literature to “real” books. Thus I went from Dr. Seuss to Tolkein in under a year–with only a short detour to pick up Madeline L’Engle and Roald Dahl.

It made all the difference in more ways than one, because I still can’t stand comic books. I hereby confess to being a complete philistine when it comes the graphic novel–in any of its forms.

To my ears, even the name “graphic novel” sounds absurdly pretentious, and when you combine it with the contents, the overall effect on me is one of profound annoyance. How could anyone could take something like this so seriously? The plots are like science fiction without the edge, like fantasy without the wonder, like all the hack-and-slash with none of the enduring impact.

Scott has taken, erm, heroic steps to get me to like comic books, and I still don’t like them.

I’ve been assured that Neil Gaiman is an excellent graphic novelist, and I’ve read five books of The Sandman in an attempt to find out why. But then I look at the impact that The Sandman has had upon my sense of life and my interior emotional background. It pales before most any piece of short science fiction I’ve read lately. When I look at, say, James Tiptree’s And Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, or Ursula Le Guinn’s The Barrow, I can honestly say I’ve spent more time thinking about these two stories than I have spent thinking of everything that I’ve read of Neil Gaiman.

What’s worse, I’m starting to think that it’s not at all Mr. Gaiman’s fault. I really am a philistine, and it might even be genetic. Scott and I argue about it all the time, and usually it sounds like this:

“Did you read the next book of The Sandman yet?”

“No, I forgot.”

“You forgot?“

“Yeah, I guess I just didn’t think about it.”

“I’ll leave it out for you.”

“Leave it on the shelf, I’ll remember.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well.. no, not really.”

“These are SO good. You really need to read them.”

“Okay… I will.”

“Oh, and you should read this too.”

“What’s that?”

“Hellboy.“

“Hell… boy?”

“It will give you an idea of what comics were like before Neil Gaiman. Then you’ll really be able to see how much he’s contributed to the genre.”

“So let me see if I understand this. I’m reading a comic book I don’t enjoy, and to make it better, you want me to read one that I’ll like even less?”

“It’s really not bad. I know the name’s hokey, but there are some interesting ideas.”

I read one story of Hellboy. I hate to say it, but I was right. No, that’s not true… I really like saying that I’m right, and Scott knows it–so just to make sure that it’s not out of some cussedness of mine, he keeps foisting more and more graphic novels upon me. Come to think of it, he really likes saying that he’s right too, so there’s no end to the problem in sight.

For a long time, Scott tried to diagnose what might be wrong with my aesthetic sense. He proposed that I’m just not used to thinking in pictures, and that it’s a skill I could develop in time. But I think the trouble is more serious than that.

I’ve never once thought in pictures. I can’t do it. When I’m thinking to myself, when I’m thinking just for the sake of thinking, it invariably comes out in a string of words. I compose lectures, monologues, dialogues, poetry. Almost always, my inner textstreams are focused, linear, and even more or less grammatically correct.

In other words, I even punctuate my thoughts. Except for dreams and altered states of consciousness, I have never once composed a picture in my mind. If you were to open up my mind and spill it out on a table, you would get nothing more than a pile of words. My imagination is like those times on Sesame Street when the gang is learning a new letter They play around with a big, spongy letter “M,” then combine it with other letters, and suddenly a glass of milk appears, or a mailbox–or a monster.

Thus, when I read a comic book I’m completely out of my element. They throw off my interior monologue more than anything else I know, and the result looks something like this:

“Here’s a picture and some words. Wait, the words are divided up into bubbles. Do I look at the picture first, or do I look at the words? Hmm… The bubbles are diagonally across from one another, this one is higher, but it’s on the right. Do I read the top right words first, or the bottom left? Or is it the reverse? Do I look at the picture last, first, or in the middle? Maybe I should skip to the next panel to get a clue. No, that will ruin the surprise–if there is one. I should probably read the previous panel again, then come back. Damn… now that I look at it, the “previous” panel is below this one, too. It’s also in the background, kind of. Was I supposed to read it first? Or is it supposed to be last, since it’s in the background–like a transparency through to the next page, perhaps?”

While all this is going on, I have here and there managed to read all of the words of the panel in question. I’ve also re-read the two previous panels, I’ve looked ahead to the next two panels, and I’ve skimmed the stuff in Neil Gaiman’s infuriating background panels. I may even have looked at a picture or two. In the process, I’ve entirely forgotten to think about what I’ve read, and even my emotional sense has been so distracted that I’m not really sure what to feel.

So… I’m sorry, Mr. Gaiman. And I’m sorry, Scott. Much like opera, I suppose there are some people who just don’t like this particular art form. I can’t say I haven’t tried.

It’s an old trick, but a good one, to blog occasionally on the search results that have brought people to your site. I’ve got some recent favorites to share.

The first reads American values life liberty and try pursuing a bit of tolerance too. He’s clearly on a rant, but at least his heart is in the right place.

Second, I’ve gotten a remarkable number of hits because of my tiny little article on Strippercize several weeks ago. It’s an article that I’m ashamed to say has gotten far more attention than most of the more serious things I’ve written. A typical search hit from this post reads “Carmen Electra aerobic striptease complaints.” I’m still not sure what’s to complain about.

The last notable search hit came from someone seeking “Kant’s perspective on gay marriage.”

To be perfectly clear, Kant probably never even once considered the possibility of two men getting hitched. Granted, I’m not an expert on Kant, and I have to admit that I’m not even much of a fan. But what possessed anyone to search for something so completely anachronistic? They might as well have asked for Kant’s opinions on nuclear warfare while they were at it.

Oh wait, I get it… This must have been a school assignment, and the searcher was looking for someone who had already done all his work for him. I imagine the assignment prompt went something like this:

Imagine that you are Immanuel Kant. What do you have to say about today’s gay marriage debate?

Perhaps there was an addenda, stating that the response isn’t allowed to consider the obvious, namely that gay marriage has only recently become an issue, and that to form an opinion, one must be aware that an issue exists in the first place. So we must imagine, then, that Kant lived for two hundred additional years, that he managed to stay abreast of current events, and that his political beliefs changed consistently with the times. Where on our present political spectum would he be right now, on this particular issue? That would depend entirely on the (essentially arbitrary) trajectory we used to haul the now undead 18th-century philosopher out of his grave and into the present.

Ok, so you want something you can plagiarize and take back to your philosophy prof? Here goes:

Kant had no opinion on gay marriage. Nor, for that matter, did Jesus, Socrates, Buddha, or any other philosopher–until the late twentieth century. Plenty of thinkers have had ideas about gay sex. Some of them, particularly the ancient Greeks, had quite favorable ideas about gay love. But until just recently, virtually no one has committed the act of intellectual audacity that would see modern, companionate romantic love as fundamentally equal–whether it involves two persons of different genders or of the same.

The idea that two men or two women can live in a permanent, stable, healthy, mutually supportive relationship, one precisely equal in worth and dignity to a heterosexual union, is fundamentally a new idea. There have arguably been gay marriages of a kind in the past, and John Boswell has made the case for their existence as well as anyone can. Whether his scholarship convinces you–and many people are not convinced–still, modern gay marriage is an innovation, much like votes for women were once an innovation, too.

For the record, Kant opposed votes for women, on the grounds that men and women had naturally separate spheres in society, and allowing women to vote would lead to the breakdown of the natural difference between men and women. If Kant was supposed to be a paragon of Enlightenment–and many people aren’t convinced of this either–still, he came up very short of our modern standards. Measuring him by the political issues of the present day therefore isn’t just silly, it’s also false and ultimately harmful to our thinking, both about gay marriage and about Kant.

It’s harmful to our thinking about gay marriage because it obscures the fact that we gay marriage advocates really are claiming something quite remarkable: We are claiming that our relationships, whether blessed by the state or not, are every bit as fulfilling as straight ones. We are also claiming that very, very few people in all of history have grasped this fact, just as very few had previously understood that women should also be allowed the vote. Such a remarkable claim can’t be easily evaluated by recourse to the past, but only by examining the present state of affairs–and thus Kant does not apply.

This sort of assignment is harmful to our thinking about Kant as well, because it invites us to imagine a Kant that we would like, one that is altogether more modern and enlightened than the real one. In all probability this pseudo-Kant just happens to agree with us, too–whatever our views might happen to be. Such a philosophy assignment may be great for encouraging fanciful thinking, but it doesn’t do very much at all to encourage critical thought about Kant or his ideas.

Gosh, I hope that guy searches again…

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) promises to “bridge the language gap” between the newspapers of the Middle East and the English-language world. The results are often disturbing, and conservatives like to point to MEMRI as proof of the benightedness of the Muslim world.

I would like to make a different argument. I find that while MEMRI often provides a valuable service, it just as often imposes a new language gap, with a new set of questions that cannot be solved through reference to its articles alone.

Consider the following two stories.

This article from Iran claims that the United States Armed forces set up the web site www.rape.com, which allegedly contains pictures of American soldiers raping Iraqi women. Apparently the army has posted these pictures to “celebrate.”

Now this is a blatant lie, as anyone with an Internet connection can immediately verify. Rape.com is a website offering information, counseling, and support for rape victims in the United States. The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network runs the site, and searching rape.com for “Iraq” yields no hits at all.

Now let’s look at another story. From Egypt, this article claims that the Jews are behind every single act of international terrorism. And the evidence?

“…after every terror operation they perpetrate, they leave a sign, clue, or traces meant to show that the perpetrators are Arab Muslims.”

QED: Because Muslims appear to be guilty, Jews must be the real perpetrators, an argument I can’t really see as convincing to anyone. The same article also recycles the absurd claim that 4,000 Jews were warned in advance about September 11. The Anti-Defamation League has documented many similar stories, most of which strike a similarly paranoid tone. Are we really to believe that not a single one of the 4000 Jews working in the World Trade Center bothered to tip off the U.S. government? Even a second’s thought reveals how feeble this argument is.

Both of the above stories are entirely bigoted, entirely false, and altogether pernicious. Yet presenting them as MEMRI has done, without commentary or analysis, does more to obscure than to enlighten.

First, we should note that both articles came from official, state-run presses, and that critical, independent journalism is forbidden in both countries. This is the typical state of affairs in the Middle East, and MEMRI’s typical news article is thus the product of a propaganda machine. Given these facts, we must ask ourselves: Do these stories reflect genuine public opinion? Or are they just the opinions that the Egyptian and Iranian governments want people to have? During the bad old days of the Soviet Union, did anyone think that the typical Russian got all of his opinions from Pravda? No–Somehow, most Westerners were sure that the Russians didn’t believe the Soviet news system either.

Nor should we trust opinion polls that show such stories to be popular in the Muslim world. That Middle Eastern newspapers print this drivel, and that people there claim to believe it, tells us virtually nothing about what people really believe: Much like journalism, opinion polls are notoriously inaccurate in an authoritarian country. In a police state, individuals will say only what is expected of them, holding close to the government line for fear of discovery and punishment. I understand that both Egypt and Iran regularly torture dissidents.

To make matters worse, these stories tell us even less about what people in the Middle East would prefer to think, were they given the chance to develop their own opinions in an environment of freedom of expression and conscience. Even if many Egyptians sincerely believed the nonsense printed in their newspapers–and this is the worst-case scenario–might these same people not change their minds, if they had other opinions and ideas to choose from?

Here is where MEMRI, useful as it is, seems at its weakest. While MEMRI may bridge the language gap, it does so in only one direction, funneling to the West all those state-manufactured opinions that are most certain to infuriate us. It’s true that more liberal voices do exist, and that MEMRI provides these as well, but the state-run media clearly dominates MEMRI’s work, just as it dominates in the Middle East itself. Because MEMRI works in only one direction, and because it offers no possibility for exchange among individuals of different perspectives, the site serves largely to reify the state-manufactured opinions that it translates, while doing little to work for greater freedom.

The result is polarization: Simpler folk over here often take these Pravdaesque stories to be expressions of an authentic public opinion. Comparatively few people, I think, seem to recognize that as with Soviet Union, a public opinion that is authentic in both form and expression has little chance to develop in the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East. That liberal voices manage to get through at all speaks volumes in itself about what’s really going on.

How much more could MEMRI’s staff accomplish if, say, they devoted some of their time to translating English-language commentary into Arabic? What if they translated both sides of our public debates? Suppose they also transmitted the ideas of Western anti-war writers, to give the Muslim world intellecutal ammunition for opposing the U.S. war in Iraq without the idiotic conspiracy theories that now dominate their media? Why, that could be the start of real intellectual freedom, with multiple points of view, from multiple cultures and ideological perspectives, all competing for attention. Take that, state-run media.

I often don’t write anything new on the weekend. Instead, I prefer to link to someone else who makes a point much better than I could have done.

See, wasn’t that easy?

My blogfather Dave Jansing delivers a much-deserved rant on new anti-gay laws in Virginia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Virginia is coming up with even more ways to make certain that no two persons of the same gender can have anything even vaguely resembling a marriage–just in case–by prohibiting a broad array of same-sex contractual agreements.

The latter two states are doing even worse: They are currently contemplating laws that apparently allow doctors to refuse treatment to people solely on the basis of sexual orientation. It’s all in the name of “moral conscience,” of course.

I’m particularly worried about the Michigan law:

The Conscientious Objector Policy Act would allow health care providers to assert their objection within 24 hours of when they receive notice of a patient or procedure with which they don’t agree.

….

UPDATE: The text of the Michigan law has apparently been changed, perhaps as recently as within last few hours, as Dave Jansing just reported to me–how quaint–by phone: The text of the current law appears here, and does not appear to permit doctors to object the “person” qua person, contrary to what some news services had reported. Because I substantially agree with the measure as it is now written, I have removed my complaints about it.

My friend Chuck Walker plans to marry his partner in Massachusetts next month. He is a resident of Washington, DC, a member of the DC Gay Men’s Chorus, a very talented actor, and an all-around great guy. His marriage checklist has just started, and I’d like to publicly wish him well on his journey.

“Tell me the Creation Story!”

“Are you sure you’re ready? It’s pretty hard.”

“I’m eight years old, daddy. I want to hear it.”

Isabel was in no mood to compromise. From her birth, Isabel’s father had been waiting for this moment; in the Velmark, the Creation Story is a rite of passage. It’s the first day of school, the first communion, and the birds and the bees–all rolled into one.

It’s a ritual, yes, and while they may appreciate a ritual now and then, the humans of the Velmark hold dogma to be the root of all evil. They scoff at it in themselves and punish it mercilessly in others. To them, the Creation Story is a tradition. It’s also the future. Above all, the Creation Story is a test, for the hearer, the teller, and the believer. This is my one chance, thought Isabel’s father. I had better do it right.

He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and began.

“Once upon a time, there was the Creation of Things. We aren’t exactly sure how long ago it was, because there weren’t any people back then. The sages argue about it all the time, even the very smart ones at the Gnomish Academy. They dig up evidence and do tests in their labs, and all the time they’re learning more about it.

“Some people think that that one god did everything. Some think that a bunch of gods did it. And some people think that the Creation of Things happened all by itself. But whatever happened, there are probably some questions where we’ll never have the answers. I’m not a sage, either, so I can’t really tell you much more.”

“Oh come on, daddy, I want the real story.”

“You’re very wise for your age. The Creation of Things is not the real story, because it’s not the one that matters most. Some people never do figure it out, but there is indeed another story. It’s called the Creation of Us.”

“Tell me that one!”

“I won’t be able to tell you the whole thing in a night. Are you sure you’re ready for a story that big?”

“Yeah! Tell me about the Creation of Us!”

Isabel’s father took another deep breath and began the real Creation Story.

“The Creation of Things made all the ordinary, natural things you see around you, even life itself. The only thing that the Creation of Things didn’t make was meaning. It might have made people, but those people had no values, no cultures, no religions, no great ideas, no hopes, and no dreams. All of those came from the Creation of Us.

“People more or less agree about the Creation of Things, but the Creation of Us is a whole lot harder. Almost every group of people has their own story, and people make up new stories every day. Every one of them is different. When you take them all together, that’s the Creation of Us. It’s hard to explain, but I can tell you some of the stories if you like.”

“Okay.”

“A long time ago, there was only a single dwarf in the whole wide world, and he was very lonely indeed. He took a hammer and a chisel, and he carved another dwarf out of a magic mountain. That was the Second Dwarf. The only problem was, the Second Dwarf wasn’t totally finished. He was still all rough around the edges.”

“Like the dolls I made out of grass last summer.”

“Just so! But the First Dwarf didn’t notice, or maybe he didn’t care. He put down the hammer and chisel and danced for joy. The Second Dwarf picked up the hammer and the chisel, and he carved the rest of himself out of the stone, until he was smooth and clean and whole. Then the Second Dwarf was very happy, because he had fashioned a part of himself.

“The two dwarves worked together after that. They carved so many dwarves out of that magic mountain that pretty soon there wasn’t a mountain left at all–They’d turned the whole thing into dwarves! Every one of them was hard and solid like the magic mountain itself.

“Still, they left every dwarf just a little bit unfinished, in memory of the Second Dwarf, who had carved a part of himself. The Dwarf Fathers never once made a whole, complete dwarf at all. To this day, every dwarf believes that the most important thing in his whole life is to find the part of him that isn’t done yet–and carve it into something better.”

“You mean like getting my ears pierced?”

“Maybe. But sometimes the part that needs work is on the inside, and then it’s harder to fix. If you’re a dwarf, you’ve got to look very deep down inside yourself, just in case the Dwarf Fathers left a rough edge on your heart or your soul or something.”

“What are some other stories?”

“There’s the creation of the elves, which many people say is not a creation at all. Want to hear that?”

“Sure.”

“The elves claim they aren’t created by anyone, and that there never was a First Elf. They might be right, because it seems like elves crop up randomly, here and there, and no one knows quite how.

“Whenever a new elf appears, he’s lonely and afraid. He right away goes on a quest to find other elves to be friends with. Then they all throw a big party, with lots of dancing and singing. From that point on, the new elf is a part of the group, just like the old ones. Every new elf is a reason to celebrate, because that new elf has just relived their creation story.

“The elves look out for each other, too, because so many people mistrust them. Even a lot of the gods don’t like the elves. So they protect one another, and their creation story is all about the one lonely elf making his way through lots of dangers, then finding the big group to be happy with at the end.

“Oh sure, there are some elves who live their whole lives all by themselves, but they’re very sad indeed. Being an elf is like being invited to a party, becoming part of the group, and their creation story tells them how to be good elves, just like the dwarves’ story says how to be a good dwarf.”

“Do you think I could be an elf?” Isabel asked.

“I don’t know. Your ears don’t look very pointy to me, but if you do become an elf, I sure hope you’ll come back and visit us still.”

“Oh daddy… I don’t know if I’ll really be an elf. But please, tell me more stories!”

“The gods all have their own creation stories, and they fight about them all the time. See, every god is terribly sure that he, personally, is the only god who is right. I almost don’t want to tell you any of the stories with gods in them. I don’t want to confuse or hurt you.”

“Just tell me one. If I get confused, I’ll make you stop.”

He thought for a moment, then began.

“This story is very old, and very important. It’s also very hard. This one story has enslaved men and set them free. People have told it as a way of hurting women and as a way of raising them up. Some say that it’s violent and bloody and primitive. Others say that it’s loving and hopeful.

“People have said that this story means we’re all basically good. They’ve also said that this story–this same story–means that we’re all basically evil. People have fought and died over this story for thousands of years. Many different groups say that their god invented it, and that no other god is allowed to use it.

“Some people even tell this story because they don’t like the Creation of Things. And so they go around saying that this story is the only story anyone needs to know. They try to blot out all other creation stories so that this one won’t have any competition. But me, I’m not going to say what I think about it, because I want you to think for yourself.”

He opened his mouth, and Isabel heard the strangest story of her entire life.

She hoped it wasn’t true, because it didn’t make people sound very nice at all. It made God sound even worse. But what if it were true? How life took on new colors, new meanings! Yet how it was violent and bloody! It made her feel every different emotion at once. It filled up her being, and the very magic of this story must have been what made the gods so jealous.

“So what do you think?”

“I don’t know. Why did it have to happen that way?”

“I can’t say either. Even the people who love this story the most will tell you it’s a mystery.”

“So which story is the right one? Is it this story, or is it some other one?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Well one of them has to be right.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“One of them has to be right. It just has to be.” Isabel pouted.

“I told you the Creation of Us was hard. Now do you want me to explain, or have you had enough for one night?”

“Ok, tell me.” She kept pouting.

“The Creation of Us isn’t ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ It’s not right, because every single one of the stories can’t be literally true at the same time.”

“I told you so.”

“Isabel.”

She glared.

“But these stories aren’t all wrong either. Even if they didn’t happen the way that we tell them, still the creation stories–create us! These stories, and what we do with them, make up probably most of who we really are on the inside. Even if the stories are total lies, still they’re special, because whenever someone says ‘This is the creation story,’ you know that he’s saying the most important thing in his life.

“And when you look at all the stories together, they give you a picture of the whole world, with all its messiness and confusion. And yet every one of the stories has at least a tiny kernel of meaning inside it, whether for good or for bad.

“Which one is the best story? Look around you. Look at the people that these stories make; look at the uses that people put them to. The stories that are true will have the best people following them. The false stories create a lot of mean, cruel, false people. And sometimes whether the story is true or false depends more on the telling than on the story itself.

“As you grow up, you’ll learn more and more about the Creation of Us, and maybe one day you’ll pick out a story to explain your own creation. Maybe you will find two or three that you like, and you’ll weave them together. Or maybe you’ll make up a totally new one. Pick your story carefully, though, because that story is going to remake you in its own image. You see, the longer you hold onto a creation story, the more it creates you.

“Now, lots of people are going to come to you with their own creation stories, and they will try to tell you that their story is the only right one. But you should never let them decide for you. Isabel, you are always the one who decides–you, and no one else.

“And now you know the Creation of Us.”

Isabel looked confused.

“That’s a very silly way to end a story.”

“It’s terribly silly. But it’s also terribly serious.”

“Do you really believe in the Creation of Us?”

“Believe in it? I don’t really believe in anything else.”

At last I have something happy to write about. Prospects look very good for a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in California. Its sponsor is even predicting that it will pass, following an 8-3 favorable report out of committee.

There is no word yet on whether Gov. Schwarzenegger would sign it, but just the fact of a legislative action is tremendously encouraging: For a long time, gay marriage opponents have protested that activist judges were trying to force gay marriage on the United States against the wishes of the legislatures and people. Now they cannot say so for much longer. Even if Schwarzenegger vetoes, still the argument will be much less convincing than before.

Additionally, if the bill becomes law, and if conservatives want to be true to the principles of federalism, then they will have no choice but to wish California well and move on to other battles. Unfortunately, I don’t expect as much from them: One need only consider how California’s medical marijuana laws have been subverted to see how the protections of federalism only apply those particularisms we happen to like. Neither liberals nor conservatives ever seem to come to the doctrine of federalism sincerely, and for conservatives in particular, federalism seems to include a clause reading “except for California.”

But this is no time to be cynical. If California legalized gay marriage through legislation, then there would be no going back: California isn’t Hawaii or Vermont; it’s not even Massachusetts. Given its cultural and political impact, California can’t be written off as an odd data point. Much more often, it’s a trendsetter. John Mayer, the Unitarian chaplain who conducted our marriage in Ontario, was quoted at the time as saying “I think this is just the beginning of a landslide.” He was right. For gay people, this is an amazing time to be alive.

Yesterday was Yom Ha’Shoah, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day. Memorials were held on college campuses and other public places across the United States. In a more innocent time, we might have said “Never Again,” and yet subsequent events–in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and now Sudan–remind us that genocide can happen anywhere.

Our Modern Jewish History class is studying the Holocaust this week. Yad Vashem has extensive resources on the genocide and its implications for the present world. It offers historical information, advice on how to teach about the Holocaust, and an excellent collection of links.

Another valuable site is Nizkor, dedicated to refuting those who claim that the Holocaust never happened. A good place to get started is their page of 66 Questions and Answers About the Holocaust. Some may take the strategy that it is better to ignore these so-called “Revisionists,” for fear of making them seem legitimate, but Nizkor believes the opposite. They hold that is best to refute these claims openly, point-by-point, because the truth has nothing to hide.

I tend to agree with Nizkor’s approach; a student stumbling onto a Holocaust-denial website unaided might actually be fooled by some of its misinformation, and it would only help the Revisionists if we maintained, conspiracy-like, a total silence on these matters. “Look,” say the Holocaust deniers, “your instructors don’t want you to know this, but we value your academic freedom. What is that Jewish conspiracy trying to hide from you?”

It’s appalling, yes, but in the historical profession, the appeal to academic freedom is the last refuge of the scoundrel. I support freedom of thought as much as the next person, but I also care about the truth. You may be free to think that 2 + 2 = 5, but that does not mean that I must advocate it in my classroom. More to the point, my own academic freedom as an instructor means that I need not agree.

The same principle applies here, though on a far grander and more important scale. Most crackpot theories in history–JFK assassination scenarios, UFOs, Freemason conspiracies–are harmless and thus don’t merit much attention from professional historians. Denying the Holocaust is different, because, as Nizkor explains so well, those who deny the Holocaust are often doing so because they would like nothing better than to bring back state-sponsored racism in all its forms. Once the Holocaust becomes just a “theory” in history, once it is just an “opinion,” such brutality will be that much closer to making yet another comeback.

For two reasons, I’ve tried to be a “thinker,” not a “linker.” First, because the really big-name linkers will always do it better and faster than I ever could: They do it full-time, and lots more people send them potential link material. Second, I started blogging to practice my non-academic writing, and linking rarely helps one to write better. In general I want to develop sustained arguments, not point at those of others.

Still, this piece on the doctrine of state secrets is definitely worth a read. It’s long, but very interesting. I have to admit I don’t know enough about this doctrine to have anything even approaching a qualified opinion, but this story is easily enough to make me nervous. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the story:

The scope of what constitutes a state secret has also expanded, from military technology to all sorts of domestic intelligence operations. Even unclassified information has become subject to national security claims. Government lawyers argue that judges can’t see the whole picture, can’t tell when separate pieces of seemingly innocuous information might be gathered into a revealing “mosaic.”

Over the years, the types of information protected by the state secrets privilege have included: alleged collusion between defense contractors; alleged malfeasance and incompetence by contractors; alleged civil rights violations by the FBI (news - web sites) and CIA; the purchase, insurance and inspection records of a government mail truck involved in an accident; and an FBI file on a sixth-grade boy who received a large amount of mail from foreign countries because he was writing an encyclopedia of the world as a school project.