The Data Port

Winning The Lottery

It’s a game we all play: What would you do if you won the lottery? Won big, won so big that you could frame your life any way you chose?

Except in the  way I am about to tell you I don’t believe my life would change too significantly…or say, rather, that I would not initiate great changes. I like my home and think I would keep living in it. I enjoy household chores, fixing things, and working on the bikes. Oh, I might hire the occasional handyman or housecleaner, but apart from that I can imagine my life grinding on pretty much as it does now.

I might buy another motorcycle, but we have two already and motorcycles can only be enjoyed one at a time.

Whenever the what-would-you-do-if-you-won-the-lottery question is asked I think of my father’s friend Harvey Hayes. When my father was a young actor Harvey was an old one. He lived in a bed-sitter in Chicago’s South Shore Country Club. My father took me to visit Mr. Hayes once (I sat quietly while they rehearsed a scene together) and I can remember being fascinated by the fact that he didn’t have a kitchen.

He had a sort of pantry with a small sink and a fridge, but he clearly never cooked. I asked him what he did for meals…his situation was now riveting…and he replied, “Well, young Arthur, I go to restaurants. I’m an actor, not a cook.”

That answer had a more profound effect on me than I suspected at the time.

If I won the lottery I would never cook again. I simply loathe cooking. I know it’s supposed to be creative and satisfying and all that, but I simply hate it. I dislike having to prepare a dinner for guests and getting all the courses to come out at the right time. I hate scrubbing up afterwards.

I would much rather treat my guests to a nice meal at an excellent restaurant. I could afford it if I had won the lottery.

Oh, I might have a small pantry kitchen like Mr. Hayes, where I could keep some bread and peanut butter or a box of orange juice… something I could eat at the sink when I got peckish… but for the most part I would eat all my meals out.

At my favorite places I would be well known. As a regular I could ask for special service…”I’m not very hungry tonight, do you suppose the chef could do a plate of sliced tomatoes and romaine, with some nicely buttered sourdough toast?” Well of course…because I was a regular who had won the lottery and always tipped well.

And I would never cook again.

Melvin Sees Atoms in Arizona's Future

While we’re waiting to learn the outcome of today’s voting, lets look ahead to 2010 to see what some of the campaign themes in LD 26 might be.

Incumbent Republican State Senator Al Melvin has just been appointed Co-Chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on Energy and Water. It’s not hard to imagine he’ll be mining that assignment for campaign issues in his re-election campaign.

Melvin believes Arizona’s future lies in becoming a major energy exporter. According to his most recent update we’ll generate thousands of jobs in Arizona. How?

“If Arizona can become the most atomic energy friendly state in the Union, Arizona can become one of the richest states in the USA.”

I assume this means something more than just sending little friendship notes to the one atomic energy plant we already have. I suppose we’ll have to build at least one more, just to prove how atomic friendly we are.

We can augment state income by building a spent fuel rod disposal facility under some of the open land up in Pinal County.

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Foothills voters storm polls?

The Data Port’s resident writers rolled out of bed this morning and hustled off to Orange Grove School to beat the crowds expected to turn up for the exciting bond vote.

Waiting To Vote

The Rush to Vote Was On

At the entrance to the polling place we noticed there were signs indicating a limit of 75 pies, which would have been more than we could eat that early in the morning. It didn’t matter, though, because we didn’t see anyone selling pies.

A Rite of Passage

There was a time…at least so it was in Chicago…that going to the fights was as much a rite of passage as getting laid, or being able to smoke without hiding your cigarettes.

A father would come home and tell mom that he and a couple of the boys were going to the fights that night and he thought he’d take the kid, if he wanted to go. Did the kid want to go? You bet. This was an invitation into man’s estate. Tonight he wouldn’t be a kid, he’d be one of the boys.

These were usually club fights, held in smoky social halls or neighborhood auditoriums, with fighters on their way up or their way down. There weren’t many women at these fights, at least not “nice” women. No one’s mother, no one’s sheltered sister, went to the fights.

Your father’s friends might offer you a cigarette, or a seegar and a beer, and your father would look the other way and you’d try to smoke the one and drink the other without disgracing yourself.

That sort of thing made you a boxing fan for life.

Climate Change and Pascal's Wager

The 17th Century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is famous for a bet he made about the existence of God. Given the fact that reason alone cannot settle the question of God’s existence, how should we settle the question? Bet on God and live accordingly? Or bet that God does not exist ?

Suppose we act as if God exists and He does, then we win the God bet.  Now suppose we bet on God and He doesn’t exist. We are at least no worse off than if we bet on there being no God. No harm no foul.

But if God does exist and we bet against him then we risk salvation.

Pascal takes his argument one step further, suggesting that even if God doesn’t exist we should act as if he did. We would have much to gain and nothing to lose.

Note that none of this settles the question of which side is right, the “no Godders” or the “Godders.”

What’s buried in this “bet” is a normative prescription. That is, a rule for deciding how we ought to act in the face of conflicting (and for us) unresolvable differences: Consider the consequences of either side being true and decide how to act in consideration of the possible consequences.

Let’s apply this to the climate change dispute.

I take it that a very large body of scientific evidence supports the claim that the results of human activity radically affect the world’s climate to an unprecedented and dangerous degree.

But not everyone holds this view, some arguing that the scientific evidence is flawed and that the observed climatic variations are within normal limits.

I happen to believe, as apparently a majority of climatologists do, in the reality of a radical climate change, but whether I do or not is immaterial because the issue is not about which view is true but about how we should act assuming that one or the other is true.

So.. I will make my Pascal’s Wager on the side of radical climate change. If it’s really occurring then we had best be trying to do something about it. If it’s not true that we face radical climate change we will still benefit from the strategies for reducing pollution (wind power, solar power, reduced dependence on coal and foreign oil and so forth.)

If we bet against climate change and it’s really taking place we risk the consequences of increased pollution and lose the benefits we might derive from working against it.

Twilight of The American Empire

If anything can be said to characterize this period in the history of the American Empire it is the faint sweet smell of decay, the aroma of something barely nosed out behind the curtains of our public and private lives. It is the way an Empire in decline begins to smell.

As a people we have become spiritually feverish and anxious, only dimly aware (if at all) that we are sick yet, somehow, responding to that half-sensed odor by questing after distraction and emotional excitation. Thus we hide ourselves from the truth.

Americans have never been a particularly introspective people; our thought has always been directed outward, toward the world. We have been engineers, pragmatists. According to the the myths we employ to understand others it is the French to whom we attribute the inward turning of thought: Think Descartes.

When I look about today I can’t help but think of Rome: Bread…circuses… and Caesar’s royal circlet sold to the highest bidder; political destinies sold to the corn merchants.

Some weeks a go a friend looked up from his coffee and after a pause in our conversation said, “There is no honor any more.” Then just a few nights ago someone looked up and asked, “Don’t we care about facts anymore?”

If there is a public life without honor, then action in public life is without limits; and in a public discussion in which facts are less important than emotions, anything you say with conviction becomes true—and chaos ensues.

Emma

Emma Goldman Lives

The Sons of Anarchy started slowly and built a reputation on word-of-mouth until it became a Tuesday night TV powerhouse that rode over even Jay Leno’s ratings.

I’ve been watching the first season on DVD and found it as seductive as any daytime soap opera, with its large cast of characters and complicated relationships all playing out in a basic plot structure that led some wit…possibly French?…to call the show “Hamlet on a Harley.”

SOA belongs to the “bad guys with hearts of gold” school of pop entertainment, and these guys, all members of The Sons of Anarchy motorcycle club, can be pretty bad. Immediate and violent reprisal by fist and gun is their preferred method of conflict resolution.

The ‘hearts of gold’ part is that the brothers are a vigilante group, protecting their town of Charming, California, from being overrun by drug gangs, neo nazis, and rapacious developers.

The club runs a legitimate car and bike repair business and an extensive illegal gun running operation.

And why are the brothers called the Sons of Anarchy? Perhaps the answer lies in a quotation that our hero, Jax Teller, finds in the club founder’s (his father’s) note book. It is from Emma Goldman:

“Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property and liberation from the shackles of restraint of government. It stands for social order based on the free grouping of individuals.”

An interesting appearance by an old anarchist in a Fox network show.

For plot summaries and info about the show click here.

Never heard of Emma Goldman? Click here and here.

Still Needed?

Something like twice a year (or is it only once a year?) six pounds of scrap paper are delivered to my front gate in the form of telephone directories. I take the old ones out to the recycle bin and slip the new ones onto the shelf under my desktop.

Six months later I take them out to the recycle bin. I have needed them as much as a moose needs a hat rack. Instead, I use my computer or my cell phone and Google up the info I need. Of course there’s always checking  the on-line version of the telephone book, which I find easier to use  and better organized than the dead tree version.

Time to do away with the dead tree version.

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Thinking about telephone books has reminded me that they were always present (often with the page you needed torn out) in every public telephone booth. Anyone remember public phones? There used to be a public phone booth in every drug store in America, in the back corners of some bars, and in all airports, railroad stations and bus terminals.

They are gone now, of course, as a result of the spread of the cell phone. The disappearance of public phones is what drove me to join the cell phone gang in the first place. Now I am a confirmed addict and devoted texter.

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It occurs to me that back in the day there was an equivalent to the text message—a challenge to say all that you wanted or needed to say in ten words. It was the telegram, and the Western Union messenger was a common figure in office buildings.

Of course the arrival of a Western Union messenger on your front porch was always fraught with either anxiety or eager expectation. Telegrams announced both the great good things and the sorry passings…always more serious (and more expensive) than today’s text messages.

Homer

There is more to getting an education than job training, although nowadays the two seem to be considered pretty much the same thing. An education  continues to be a source of pleasure and delight long after your collegiate job training is hopelessly out of date. In support of this claim I offer the following.

Fifty years ago or more I studied ancient Greek in college. I was a dreadful student. Our teacher, Dr. Ryan, was an easy going Irishman with an Irishman’s love of language, talking and song; a teacher who managed to inspire even the least of us with some understanding of, and passion for, the  glories of the language and the literature it framed.

Normally in beginning classes like ours if you translated anything it was pokey elegiac couplets by Theognis or passages from  Xenophon’s  “Anabasis,”  a direct and soldierly account of the march of  ten thousand Greek mercenaries, escaping from a lost cause in Persia, as they fought their way toward the Black Sea and home.

But on special occasions  Ryan would present us with short passages from the Iliad to translate. We would sit around a great seminar table and hammer with our dictionaries at the little slips of paper  on which the day’s challenge was written, trying to coax some sort of meaning from a Greek that was well beyond  our ability to translate.

Ryan circled the table, leaning over our shoulders and looking over our confusions, hand-holding us through our translations. Finally he’d take mercy on us and let us close our dictionaries. He would tell us his own translation and then in a chocolate-rich baritone he would “sing” the passage in Greek.

The meter of the Iliad isn’t jingley, it doesn’t go bumpety, bumpety, bump. The rhythm of its verse, the way it rushes and plunges, shouts,  or speaks with stately deliberation, is due to the length of its syllables and where the speaker’s breaths fall; not to a drumming emphasis on every second or third sound.

The verse is a kind of music. The Greek words echo, sound like, the clangor of Apollo’s silver bow, and the vibrating twang of the bow string; the hiss of waves as they retreat from the shore, or the terrible metallic ringing of a pitched battle between men heavily armed in bronze.

If nothing else, the Iliad is a whacking good war story, a  piece of military history dreadful in its detailed accounts  of  battle wounds that dropped a man to his knees , “screaming shrill as the world went black before him—clutched his bowels to his body, hunched and sank.”

What makes the Iliad more than a battle tale is its  rich  individual  characterizations and psychological subtlety. What fed the Trojan War was not simply a runaway wife but the jealousies, vanities, rage and over weaning pride of its players, both Gods and men.

And on re-reading it this is what surprises and delights about the Iliad. Hector and  Achilles, Paris and Helen, Agamemnon and Menelaus, Zeus and Hera are not the cardboard cutout figures we are likely to remember from some distant humanities course. They are human, all too human.

For all that I forgot, or never learned, I always remembered that the Iliad was, or was supposed to be, wonderful. I just never read it all. Okay, I had hardly read  any of it. The trouble was that I never did learn to read Greek and  no translation  sent the shivers up and down my back the way Dr. Ryan’s readings and translations did, or captured what I knew the Iliad was.

Fifty years later I rediscovered all that when a friend sent me a talking book version  of the Iliad recorded  by the English actor Derek Jacobi. I was bowled over by the reading and hunted up the translation

The translator is  Robert Fagles, who won The Academy of American Poets 1991 London Translation Award for his work. There is a very nice paperback version published by Penguin in 1991, and again in 1998. A long introduction gives an account of the history of the text and an excellent set of notes and pronunciation guides.

This translation is the Iliad I remembered  taking so much pleasure in. I have no idea how technically accurate it  is and I don’t much care…it’s enough that it justifies the memory.

So there, in the end, you have it. A fifty year old education and a completely “impractical” course continue to pay benefits long after the  job training manuals have been recycled.

New Gun in Town

Still catching up from vacation. I see that we have a new (conservative) political gun in TucsonCitizen town. His first post attracted lots of comments so, for better or worse, he must have struck a number of nerves. That’s what blogging is supposed to do.

The theme of A Sonoran View’s first post was the popular conservative meme that if the Census counts everyone the constitutional basis of the Republic will be shaken to its foundation.

The argument is that the reason we count heads is to properly apportion the number of congressmen to which a state is entitled. True enough as far as it goes. But,Oh-Oh, If we include non citizens we will skew the count and a state might get more congressmen than the number to which it would otherwise be entitled.

And wouldn’t that be an embarrassment of riches.

I’m not sure that really is the case, and I don’t really care, but how would we know if we didn’t count everyone in the first place? I hardly think that inserting the question, “Are you here illegally?” is going to result in full disclosure.

My real criticism of this post is that it assumes that the only purpose of head-counting is to apportion delegates.

As a matter of fact the census acquires a mind-boggling amount of demographic material over and above just the number of folks who are here. That data is important for business planning, as well understanding the size and ages of groups for whom even a government reduced in size must plan. The census tells us who we are and where we are going as a people.

Let’s not make the job harder than it needs to be.

Terri Proud

A new hat has been thrown into the LD26 ring. Republican Terri Proud has announced she is a candidate for the House seat now held by Democrat Nancy Young Wright.

Proud has been living in Northwest Tucson since 1997. According to her LinkedIn.com listing she is currently employed as Office Manager/Senior Paralegal at Lippman Griffith and Associates. She has attended Pima Community College.

Her current political action position is as Arizona State Coordinator of the Second Amendment March, a project of the NRA, and she belongs to the Pima County Republican Liberty Caucus:

“The Pima County Republican Liberty Caucus (PCRLC) is a political action oriented group of liberty minded individuals within the GOP. Our goal is to return the Republican Party back to its roots of liberty, limited government and free markets. The government which governs the least governs the best.”

(Personal Note: As a one time Philosophical Anarchist I too believed that government was the source of human misery. First as the source of international conflict and, second, as the supporter of capitalism and the active enemy of the socialist movement. Perhaps Ms Proud and I are closer than either of us suspects, where I was once an Anarcho-Syndicalist, she is an Anarcho-Capitalist. It makes to laugh.)

Proud’s political goal as an LD26 candidate is to join hands with Cap’n Al. Her political platform seems to boil down to “cutting taxes” and defeating Ms Wright, who is an agent of Nancy Pelosi.

Proud’s website is here.