The Bottom Line: Expressions of Opinion

It was interesting to note in the Times (June 29) that the House of Representatives, apparently unaware of the results of the Times' recent letter-to-the-editor survey, finally voted out a constitutional amendment that would permit Congress and the states "to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States".

Such a law would be nice to have on the books, especially since it would be particularly easy to enforce. In fact, by definition such a law could not be broken, even by those who would burn the flag or otherwise show disrespect for it. According to my dictionary, "desecration" is a specifically religious word, used to refer to the defiling of holy or sacred objects -- it is, in fact, the opposite of "consecration". While it has been traditional for many years to use religious terminology in political hyperbole for the purpose of arousing emotions -- see Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for several early examples -- it is not clear what force such terminology would have in law. Certainly the U.S. flag, however much we may respect it, is very far from a holy or sacred object, particularly in a nation that recognizes no state religion.

Personally, I believe it only just that the New York Times, Washington Post, and/or other papers print the personal manifesto of anybody who wants to provide one. I myself can come up with two or three of my own, and -- having followed the letter column in the West County Times for some years now -- I can identify half a dozen others from among your readers who could, and probably would, write such manifestos. Regrettably, with a quarter of a billion Americans holding diverse opinions about this, that and the other thing, the Times and the Post have to exercise a certain amount of discretion about which manifestos they publish. And I'm not sure that killing a few people is quite the best way to convince them of the exceptional justice of your particular cause.

My suggestion to the Unabomber is that, despite his known dislike for computers, he acquire an internet World Wide Web site, or find somebody who is willing to provide space in his or hers, and post his manifesto there. From that point on, the manifesto will live or die on its merits. If it's interesting, he can expect that thousands of people will see it within a couple of months -- maybe (if it's really, really interesting) millions. If it's turgid and impenetrable, of course, nobody will bother to read it; but even the Times or the Post couldn't overcome that problem.

I have been enjoying the current exchange about creation vs. evolution in the letter column. I particularly liked Frederick Lang's invocation of the second law of thermodynamics to show the fallacy of evolution (July 30), especially his unilateral extension of the law to open as well as closed systems. This version of the second law would also make it impossible for an embryo to develop in a mother's womb, thus demonstrating the truth of the old idea that every newborn child is, quite literally, a miracle.

Nevertheless, I remain unconvinced of the "truth" of either viewpoint. Scientists of the past century and a half, sifting through mountains of evidence, have developed a remarkably consistent picture of the universe, across a multitude of disciplines; but consistency isn't necessarily identical with "truth". On the other hand, the creationist view, although its only supporting evidence is a collection of thirty-century-old midrash, depends on miraculous intervention; this makes it non-falsifiable, and thus puts it outside the purview of science and immune to scientific examination -- the term "scientific creationism," popular among creationists, is an oxymoron.

Of course, "truth" isn't the only touchstone by which to judge theories -- "usefulness" might be another. All the scientific and technological developments of the past century have derived from or contributed to -- sometimes both -- the scientific view of the universe, including evolution. On the other hand, it is not clear that creationism has had anything to teach us, except -- if we accept its validity -- that the universe can be infinitely capricious. Ultimately, if some genius were to find a way to prove the scientific view "false" and the creationist view "true," my recommendation would to be ignore him and go on about our business -- we would be far better off for it.

Bruce Young (Aug. 18) has finally fallen back on the ultimate, irrefutable, and unprovable explanation for the huge mass of evidence that has for so many years misled and confused evolutionists and other scientists: it was created by God right along with the universe -- apparently to confuse us.

Ignoring the tremendous leap of logic required to pass from this "it could have happened that way" to "it DID happen that way," and ignoring the fact that the creationists' cosmogony is only one among a hundred or more similar ones still extant -- the 129,600-year creation of the universe by P'an-ku the Nebula described in "The Pilgrimage to the West" is particularly elegant -- I can only say: So what? It makes absolutely no difference whether the scientific view of the universe is correct, or whether truth lies in the idea that the universe was created in seven days 6,000 years ago next autumn, a la Archbishop Usher, complete with incoming light from other galaxies, partially decayed radioactive elements in granite, and a revealing fossil record -- or, as is in fact equally likely, that it was created three seconds ago as you read this, complete with all the above, the finished newspaper in your hands, and divinely inspired memories of how you picked it up off your lawn fifteen minutes ago.

Imagine that you arrive late to a movie, five minutes into the third reel. You want to figure out what is going on in the story. What happened in the first two reels is extremely important for understanding what will happen in the next three. The fact that the projectionist, too, arrived late, skipped the first two reels, and started showing the film at the beginning of the third is totally irrelevant to the story as it develops, and can safely be ignored.

Let the Omnipotent Divine Projectionist rest on Her laurels. If you're interested in the story you're living, it's the scientists, not the creationists, who are figuring it out for you.

Reading Bob Greene's column on U.S. English (Sep. 6), I was again struck by a personal contradiction that has bothered me for a long time: given that I am a speaker and proponent of Esperanto, and have used much the same arguments that Greene puts forward for English -- and such arguments are certainly at least as valid on a national scale as on a global scale, aren't they? -- why do I always feel such an urgent desire to give these people a boot on the collective seat of their pants? And then, after finishing Greene's column, I finally understood. It's not the goal, but the path to it, that is so troublesome.

Supporters of such organizations as U.S. English, most of whom come from that part of the political spectrum that loudly and often trumpets its respect for the individual's God-given rights, have skipped past the basic tenet of socialism -- that the individual should be willing to subordinate his identity to the needs of society -- directly to the heart of its totalitarian equivalent: that the individual MUST be FORCED to SACRIFICE his identity for the CONVENIENCE of society. This is what a judge publicly informing a mother that by speaking Spanish to her five-year-old daughter she is engaging in abusive behavior -- a term with significant legal connotations -- is all about. It's what firing Filipino nurses for addressing each other with Tagalog honorifics is all about. It has nothing to do with maintaining Greene's "basic connective value of a common language," which is certainly a convenience but hardly a necessity -- Switzerland seems to do all right without it -- and in any case is in no danger here; it has to do with punishing those who maintain a personal identity outside this basic connective value, or even those who are simply incapable of learning a second language such as English.

Those who doubt should look at the Russification program that Stalin introduced in the USSR in the early thirties; it was nothing more nor less than the agenda of U.S. English, declared in a Slavic accent. In the long run, its only saving grace might have been its success in creating a homogeneous, easily governed nation -- though even this would be doubtful in a society which proclaims, as ours often does, its dedication to pluralism. How successful was Russification after two generations as state policy? The sundering of the Soviet Union and the Abkhaz and Chechen wars should serve as satisfactory answers to that question. Those who would use the same tools to (redundantly) guarantee the position of English here might do well to remember Santayana's most famous aphorism: Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

I am impressed by the current enthusiasm for establishing a "third party" as an alternative to the two traditional political parties, as evinced by numerous recent articles in the Times, but I think it should be pointed out that H. Ross Perot's new party, if it gets off the ground, will be far from the third party in American politics. More like the ninety-third.

Perot would not be the first would-be president to generate his own political party; Theodore Roosevelt, rejected by the Republicans, created the Bull Moose Party (can Perot come up with a name as interesting?), and erstwhile Democrat Henry Wallace was the father of the leftist Progressive Party, in the same year that sometime Democrat Strom Thurmond ran for president as a rightist "Dixiecrat." In recent years such alternative presidential candidates as Eugene McCarthy and John Anderson have not gone so far, but the last time I looked George Wallace's American Independent Party was still on the ballot. We also have such issue-oriented parties as that left-over of the Vietnam War era, the Peace and Freedom Party, the new environmentalist Green Party, at least three different parties with the word "socialist" in their names with views ranging from social-democratic to unabashedly Stalinist, the American Nazi Party and its clone the National Renaissance Party (and a few other beasties of the same ilk as well), and even a rump Communist Party. Out in right field somewhere, the Libertarian Party, which shares its basic ideological premises with the Communists but differs drastically from them on policy, usually puts up what passes with third parties for a good showing at the polls. The moderate-left Transnational Radical Party has at least a few members in this country, and will probably be proposing candidates for office in a decade or so, when popular revulsion against current right-wing legislative excesses replaces popular revulsion against earlier left-wing excesses. Nor would it surprise me to see a social-libertarian anarcho-syndicalist party, inspired by the philosophy of Noam Chomsky, founded in the not too distant future.

Of course, Perot's party might well do better than any of these and become a major player, replacing one of the current major parties. The last time this happened was 140 years ago when a group of disaffected anti-slavery Western members of the conservative Whig Party split off and founded ... the Republican Party.

The papers today (Oct. 4) are full of editorials, including the Times', and op-eds deploring the fact that, despite a massive and compelling case by the prosecution, a jury influenced by Johnny Cochrane's "race card" and without a full understanding of the meaning of "reasonable doubt" acquitted O.J. Simpson of the double murder of his ex-wife and a chance companion. Pity that it ain't so ...

Cochrane did indeed lean heavily on the race problem in his arguments. The result of this attempt to inflame racial prejudices should have been to produce, after some fruitless weeks of deliberation, a hung jury containing nine black jurors stubbornly insisting on acquittal while three non-black jurors just as obstinately voted to convict. Instead, we received a quite homogeneous verdict from this ethnically heterogeneous jury. Cochrane's "race card" fell face down -- luckily for Simpson.

As to "reasonable doubt" -- well, there may have been variations in understanding of that term among the jurors; but the speed of their reaction suggests that they did not acquit on "reasonable doubt", but simply on the fact that they did not find the prosecution's case against Simpson particularly compelling.

Which is not too surprising. In the mountains of praise heaped on the prosecution, not many people seem to have noticed that, unable to develop a genuinely strong case against Simpson, they were forced to fall back on quantity ("40,000 pages of evidence and testimony" according to the Times editorial) rather than quality, apparently hoping to snow the jurors.

If we look at the three old pillars of a successful prosecution -- motive, means and opportunity -- we find that means were missing -- no one ever succeeded in connecting Simpson with a murder weapon, or even with the bloody trace of a murder weapon; in fact, no such weapon or trace was ever found -- and that, while motive and opportunity were both shown, they were not terribly consistent with each other; the Simpson who hacked two people into hamburger in a spontaneous jealous rage could hardly have been the same Simpson who coolly and methodically planned every step of an operation that had to be fitted very carefully, and without possibility of anything going wrong (such as Nicole's having unexpected company), into an extremely limited window of opportunity. Furthermore, what evidence there was turned out to be more soporific than compelling, even before Mark Fuhrman's monkeyshines became public knowledge. Frankly, there are probably about five hundred thousand people in the L.A. basin against whom the prosecution could have made a better case than they did against Simpson.

Your editor does make one point worth noting, however. He states that "many people have been convicted on far less hard evidence." This is undeniably true. Scary, isn't it.

For some years I've wondered where the ignorance so epidemic in California's school systems has come from. After reading the comments by Los Altos school board president Phil Faillace quoted in Richard Cole's article on the school system's cancellation of all Halloween festivities (Oct. 13), I think I finally understand; the kids get it from their elders.

Faillace states: "The board has to acknowledge Halloween's roots in Druid ceremonies and in a Celtic festival for Samhain, the Celts' god of the dead." Any Celt would have been hard-pressed to identify a god whose particular jurisdiction was the dead, much less Samhain, who appears to have been invented in the early 1980's by a fundamentalist Christian who did not realize that the letter combination 'mh' is simply the Gaelic way of spelling our 'w' and thought that the first syllable of the word was our "Sam", a person's name.

Halloween, known to speakers of Gaelic as Samhain (pr. SOW-en), was, among the Celts as among their contemporaries the Romans and others, simply a celebration of the change from autumn to winter; in effect, it was a harvest festival. Many peoples also believed that it marked a time when the world of the dead was particularly close to our own, and so was the best time to honor those who have passed on in a way that they could recognize and share -- by providing them with a place at the family table, a custom which, although it has changed in this country to the symbolic providing of edibles to neighbor children, has stayed somewhat closer to its origins in México's The Day of the Dead, which is celebrated at the same time as Halloween. Among no people that I know of has a god named Samhain ever played any role in this celebration.

With respect to Faillace -- as much as he deserves -- banishing Halloween, Christmas, Hanukkah and other popular festivals with religious associations from public schools is no way to teach children about religion. Ultimately, it only teaches the children that their elders are fools.

Thomas Sowell (Nov. 5) in his syndicated column raises the interesting point that most material on the internet is in English, and explains this as being due to the twin facts that English-speakers created the internet and that English is the most widely spoken language in the world.

It would be nice if Sowell would actually investigate the internet rather than simply writing about it. Speaking only of Usenet newsgroups, to which Sowell is apparently referring, many exist in languages other than English, representing venues ranging from Finland to Japan. Some receive no attention in this country because few American machines are configured to display their foreign-script postings properly -- Russian, Japanese and even Chinese groups (some of the latter initiated right here in the United States!) are examples. Others are simply overlooked because most people subscribe to on-line services that provide no access to them. But foreign languages are widely used on the internet, and when this is noticed by English-speakers, some of them actually go into hissy-fits over it, as witness last year's flame war over the use of French in discussing the establishment of soc.culture.quebec. An acquaintance of mine in Finland complained (publicly) that subscribers from one American on-line service, finding a Finnish newsgroup in which he participated, "invaded" it with complaints about the fact that the posters were using some strange "medieval" language rather than English. ("This changed no one's opinion of Americans," he added, rather ambiguously.)

Interestingly, a study of English-language general-interest groups -- and this includes mailing lists as well as newsgroups -- will generally show a non-representative distribution of participants. Eighty to ninety percent come from the United States. Most of the rest are from Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. There is a tiny contingent from northwestern Europe. An occasional posting will be made by somebody in southwestern Europe or Latin America. People from other parts of the world virtually never appear, despite the fact that there are many people with internet access in Asia, central and eastern Europe, and elsewhere -- see, for instance, the globally much more uniform distribution of posters in soc.culture.esperanto, the huge number of Latin American Spanish-language postings in soc.culture.mexican and soc.culture.latin-american, or the many newsgroups in the jp (Japanese) hierarchy.

Several years ago English was the only language of the internet. Today it is the major language of the internet. What it will be a few years from now, only history will tell.

Jefferson Kinney (Nov. 16) questions why newcomers bother to come to the United States only to "demand that we adopt their cultures and languages." Kinney's experiences must be quite different from mine. I've lived in a multiethnic, multicultural West County neighborhood for almost twenty years, and despite the fact that many of my neighbors are Mexican and Laotian, not once has any of them demanded that I adopt their cultures and languages. They haven't even demanded that I merely respect them, though I try to do so voluntarily.

Kinney also brings up the old shibboleth of Québec and Canada. While this is not a totally atypical sistuation in the world, most multilingual nations survive in relative harmony -- Switzerland with four official languages is a good example, as is Finland with its ten percent Swedish-speaking minority, and India with some fifteen official languages, or even China, which despite its overwhelmingly Chinese-speaking majority finds it conventient to use six different languages (written in six different scripts) on its paper money. In the case of Québec we are looking at a conquered nation which, for almost a quarter of a millenium now, has been treated as a conquered nation, whether through deliberate policy or simple arrogance. That many Québecois object to this and would rather go their own way is not surprising, any more than the fact that the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians objected to having their languages replaced by Russian, a much more widespread and useful language, should be surprising. Had French-speakers in Canada been treated with respect by the English-speaking majority, it is very unlikely that Canada would now be having the problems it faces.

National language problems generally arise when a dominant group attempts to use language as a tool for monopolizing power and privilege and denying them to other groups. This has been the policy in Canada, whether deliberate or inadvertent, for more than two hundred years. It is the policy Kinney advocates for the United States.

Ed Rounds (Nov. 20) proves that truth is no match for a good story when he attributes our current budget deficit not to Reagan and Bush but to the forty-year spend, spend, spend policies of a Democrat Congress.

During the 35-year period between World War II and 1980 a primarily liberal Democrat Congress, working with alternating Democrat and Republican presidents, gave us a series of annual deficits that by today's standards seem laughably miniscule -- generally between five and twenty billion dollars per year. It was a liberal Democrat Congress and a liberal Democrat president (Lyndon Johnson), in fact, who together gave us the last annual budget surplus we were ever to enjoy -- and this during the heyday of the much-maligned Great Society. By 1980 our postwar national debt had risen to about a trillion dollars -- in real dollar terms, not much different from that in 1945. It was Reagan and Bush who -- with the help of such allies as Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich in Congress and with the acquiescence of a body of senators and congressmen growing ever less liberal on both sides of the aisle -- pushed through a series of absolutely insane budgets, largely based on the mathematically unusual theory that you can add two negative numbers together and come out ahead, and kicked the national debt up to four trillion dollars in the space of a mere twelve years.

In fact, if you do the arithmetic, you will find that the lion's share of our current huge budget deficits -- almost two hundred billion dollars a year and increasing -- wouldn't even exist without the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations. This interest on the Reagan-Bush debt is and will continue to be a financial hemorrhage in our body politic. In fact, if present plans to rebalance the budget go through, the long-term net result of these policies -- and, who knows, this might even have been intentional! -- will be to have moved more than a quarter of a trillion dollars per year out of government-funded programs that benefit the American people as a whole and into the pockets of the financiers, at home and abroad, who encouraged and funded the Reagan-Bush borrow-and-spend frenzy -- a situation guaranteed to endure in perpetuity. I do not wish to cast aspersions on the good names of the great American statesmen who landed us in this mess, but the terms "rip-off" and "swindle" might not be too strong.

Like reader Ronald Johnson (Nov. 26), I too was dismayed by your editorial comment that "[Social Security] beneficiaries will receive much more than they contributed," but for different reasons.

When I retire at age 65, I will have been on the job for some 43 years and will have contributed, out of my salary, some $80,000 dollars to Social Security over the years -- at a conservative estimate. Assuming Social Security pays me $1000 per month -- somewhat more than the current average outlay, I believe -- it will take almost seven years for me to make up for the amount that I contributed. Does the average American worker live seven years after retirement? I don't think so.

This does not take into account matching funds paid into Social Security by my employers over the years. Nor does it take into account the accrued interest that I would have collected on that money had I been free to invest it at prevailing interest rates. Ultimately, by my calculations if I had access to all the money that has been paid into Social Security by and for me over the years and to all the interest that would have accumulated had I been investing the money myself, I could draw at least $1000 a month after retirement from interest alone -- never touching a penny of the invested capital.

There may well be problems with the Social Security system caused by changing demographics in the United States and by its hand-to-mouth system of acquiring and disbursing funds, and those problems may well need to be fixed. But claims that the beneficiaries of the system are, on average, coming out ahead on the deal are -- to put it charitably -- exaggerated.

John Wolfe, in his defense of the overuse of California's water resources for development (Dec. 29), explains that water "renews itself". Water does not, in fact, "renew" itself in the accepted sense -- it is unlikely that any significant amount has been created on this planet in the last few billion years, though very little has been destroyed, either -- but it does "recycle" itself, and with far less effort than required for the recycling of aluminum cans or old newspapers. Hopefully this is what Wolfe meant in his explanation.

The problem is that the recycling rate is determined by matters over which we have little or no control, such as the rate of solar insolation and the surface areas of the oceans. Short of the sun going nova or the polar icecaps melting -- neither of which any of us are particularly anxious to see occur, much less initiate -- the amount of water passing through the state of California will remain on average constant from year to year. (I use the term "on average" for reasons that anyone who lived through the recent decade-long drought will be well aware of.) Unfortunately, the number of mouths and lawns that demand their fair share -- and sometimes more -- of that water does not hold steady; the population of this state has approximately doubled since my parents moved here about a third of a century ago. It will do me little good to know that the glass of water I drank this July morning will be back as snow next January when the reservoirs don't hold enough water to provide me with a drink in August; it does not take five months to die of thirst. This is without considering the equally important issue of underground aquifers, which are being drawn down at an alarming rate and whose cycle is considerably longer than a year, or even a century. Given these factors, my sympathies do not lie with those who demand an excessively large portion of our water resources to maintain permanent intensive care upon half an acre of imported European grass.

Wolfe comments that, although "we have not always managed our natural resources in the past," this "does not mean that we are incapable of doing so in the future." This is probably true, but being "capable" and being "willing" are two quite different things, and given the human race's history of avoiding rational solutions in favor of quick profits I think that I would prefer to err on the side of caution in ensuring that my children and grandchildren will have enough water to drink. If this makes me part of Wolfe's "radical environmental minority" then so be it. There are worse things one can be.

James F. Jungles (Dec. 31) raises the interesting question about Bosnia: for whom are we fighting? So far we are not fighting for anybody, or at all, for that matter -- except against winter mud. But if we were fighting, the obvious answer is, of course, that like the cop on the beat in Oakland or Pinole we wouldn't be fighting for any particular group but to enforce compliance with a law that has been accepted, at least in principle, by all parties to the -- hopefully late -- civil war.

Jungles also mentions the danger to American troops from some eight million land mines in Bosnia. That danger is real and regrettable, as thousands of dead and maimed Bosnian children will be testifying over the next few decades, though I confess that I would feel even more regret if I could be absolutely sure that none of those land mines -- or at most a tiny fraction of them -- were marked "Made in U.S.A." on their casings. I suspect, though, that this hope is a vain one.

Somehow Jungles then confuses the U.S.-led NATO force in Bosnia with the tiny U.S. contingent in the U.N. "peacekeeping force" in nearby Makedonia -- a group whose most violent encounter to date has most likely been with a bottle of "slivovica" when no one present had a church key. That one American refused to carry out an order issued by the President of the United States -- to sew a U.N. patch on his uniform -- seems to Jungles to be an act of heroism, not a violation of Article 2 Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States and of Michael New's induction oath, which it in fact was. Jungles then asks whether it is "lawful to be ordered to put on the uniform of a foreign government". Skipping over the facts that a patch and beret hardly constitute a uniform -- except perhaps at a nudist colony -- and that the United Nations is by no stretch of the imagination a government, foreign or otherwise, one might wonder why Jungles and others have failed to raise the same question on those occasions when U.S. "military advisors" have been ordered to put on the uniforms of host governments to free the U.S. from "accountability" in local, but often U.S.-led, military operations.