The Virtual Stoa

There’s a story in today’s Observer about the children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, based on the true story of the love of Roy and Silo, two male penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo. We bought a copy in San Francisco’s A Different Light last year for one of our nephews, and it’s a pretty good book, with lots of pictures of penguins in it.

The Observer article, however, does rather overdraw the contrast between “liberal Manhattanites” and “small towns in the American heartland”. Tango is basically a conservative text, which strongly implies that the gay penguins’ relationship is legitimated through the baby-penguin-rearing activity that transforms them into a family unit deserving of respect. So it’s basically an Andrew-Sullivan-inflected gay penguin children’s book.

What America needs is a book to celebrate the lives of queer and sluttish non-baby-penguin-rearing male penguins. This is a group that is strikingly underrepresented in America’s lucrative and high-profile children’s book market.

In addition to its pair-bonded lesbian geese (Alice and Gertrude, I think), San Francisco Zoo used to have a nymphomaniac lady penguin. I wonder what happened to her.

My basic assumption is that the House of Representatives seems to be so thoroughly gerrymandered these days that even a big swing to the Democrats is unlikely to dislodge the Republican majority. But I’ll be very pleased if Tuesday proves me wrong.

I’m wondering whether this would be a permissible entry for Norm’s Musicals Poll?

1. Oklahoma! [5pts] (where the wind comes sweeping down the plain…)

2. Oklahoma! [4pts] (and the waving wheat can sure smell sweet / When the wind comes right behind the rain…)

3. Oklahoma! [3pts] (every night my honey lamb and I / Every night we sit alone and talk and watch a hawk making lazy circles in the sky / We know we belong to the land [yo ho!] / And the land we belong to is grand / And when we say, Yeeow! A-yip-i-o-ee-ay! / We’re only saying, You’re doing fine…)

4. Oklahoma! [2pts]

5. Oklahoma! [1pt]

OK?

(Entries to Norm by 5 November.)

A bit more over here.

Over here.

I thought the post below was my signing off for the festive season, but I’ve just returned from the Indian restaurant round the corner, having gone in there a couple of hours ago armed with a bottle of decent Rioja and a copy of the judgment in Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, and I want strongly to endorse Mrs Tilton’s opinion, in comments below, that this is very good stuff indeed. Lengthy legal judgments aren’t often minor masterpieces of comic prose, but this one is — laugh-out-loud funny in a few places — in addition to being thoroughly well-reasoned and very interesting throughout; and there’s something tremendously satisfying about the extent to which the partisans of “Intelligent Design” are shown to be as mendacious as they are moronic. Treat yourself this Christmas; it may be 139 pages long, but there aren’t many words on each page, and Judge Jones writes well. More on the case here. Now I just want to get hold of a copy of the ID textbook, Of Pandas and People, as I strongly suspect that every home should have one.

I’m reading Robert Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism:

The term national socialism seems to have been invented by the French nationalist author Maurice Barrès, who described the aristocratic adventurer the Marquis de Mor�s in 1896 as the “first national socialist”. Mor�s, after failing as a cattle rancher in North Dakota, returned to Paris in the early 1890s and organized a band of anti-Semitic toughs who attacked Jewish shops and offices. As a cattleman, Mor�s found his recruits among slaughterhouse workers in Paris, to whom he appealed with a mixture of anticapitalism and anti-Semitic nationalism. His squads wore the cowboy garb and ten-gallon hats that the marquis had discovered in the American West, which thus predate black and brown shirts (by a modest stretch of the imagination) as the first fascist uniform…”

Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p.48.

From the US Department of Justice:

ALMOST 7 MILLION ADULTS UNDER CORRECTIONAL SUPERVISION BEHIND BARS OR ON PROBATION OR PAROLE IN THE COMMUNITYWASHINGTON, D.C. — The number of adults in prison, jail, or on probation or parole reached almost 7 million during 2004, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. The number has grown by more than 1.6 million adults under correctional authority control since 1995.

The nation’s total correctional population was 6,996,500 in 2004, of which 4,151,125 were living in the community on probation; 1,421,911 were in a state or federal prison; 765,355 were living in the community on parole; and 713,990 were in jail, according to the BJS report on probation and parole. At year-end one in every 31 adults were under correctional supervision, which was 3.2 percent of the U.S. adult population…

Wow. [via]

The post below reminds me on an encounter I had almost exactly ten years ago, shortly after moving to the US. I was sitting on the T in Boston reading a copy of the Federalist, and a man in a hat turned and said to me, “Federalist Ten, Madison on faction — that’s my favourite,” and I thought what a great republic this is, where people exchange the numbers of their favourite Federalist Papers on the subway.

Over here:

“His bio, the White House press release, and a number of sources list him as assistant city manager in Edmund, Okla.,” Miranda says. ” When we called the folks in Edmund, they told us that, no, his position in fact had been assistant to the city manager…

No, I wouldn’t put Gareth in charge of mopping up after hurricanes, either.

I haven’t written anything on this blog so far about New Orleans, as I don’t think I have anything particular to say, beyond the usual reactions of appalled horror and despair in the face of the immense loss of human life and the destruction of one of the world’s great cities. But (in keeping with my recent interest in animal life) I am pleased to read that the Audubon Zoo, which I visited in November 1998 on my only visit to New Orleans, has escaped serious damage.

It’s good zoo, with a speciality in unusually white animals, entertainingly enough for a zoo in the Deep South. (The white tigers are exceptionally stylish beasts.) And the zoo was in the international news shortly before the hurricane hit as the home of the kittens of the cloned wildcats. (You might remember seeing the cute pictures in the UK papers, even if you didn’t remember that they were born in New Orleans.)

When Katrina hit, a few flamingos copped it, a raccoon went missing, a couple of otters have died (the excellent Monterey Bay aquarium is giving temporary accommodation to surviving New Orleans otters and penguins), and - rather alarmingly, to my mind - an alligator has escaped, but in general reports of damage are slight. (There’s a handy article here, which reports that the Komodo dragon is just fine.)

Is it appalling that the animals are being better looked after than a lot of the people? Yes it is. (See every other blog in the world for extensive discussion of government failure in NO, LA and the USA.) But that’s not going to stop me celebrating both the good fortune of the zoo and the efforts of those who have devoted themselves to keeping a remarkable collection of animals going in what must be very difficult circumstances indeed, and looking forward to my next visit.

Via Brian Leiter, I read that the Olin Foundation is shutting itself down, meaning that the American Right will have to find another $20 million each year if it wants to carry on doing what it’s been doing with Olin money for the last few years.

I was a happy recipient of Olin money on two occasions, funneled through Harvard’s Program [sic] on Constitutional Government, once to take some time out to read Saint Augustine’s Confessions in Latin in the Summer of 1996, and then to go on UC Berkeley’s intensive Greek summer-school course in the Summer of 1999.

A relatively benign use of right-wing foundation money, it seems to me.

(Although the Liberty Fund’s Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics series is probably even more benign than that, making cheap editions of Hugo Grotius, Nathaniel Culverwell, Gershom Carmichael and others available to a mass audience at the turn of the twenty-first century…)

Remember that today is Loyalty Day. I haven’t found this year’s executive proclamation on-line yet, but it can’t be too long in the pipeline. So go on, all of you: pledge yourself to that flag and (more importantly, since this isn’t Flag Day) to the Republic For Which It Stands.

The comments thread will do just fine as a place to deposit your protestations of allegiance. Go for it.

Four years ago, PM told me about this custom and practice over at the University of Chicago:

In front of our building [Pick Hall: which used to house the Economics Department] is a lovely abstract sculpture which, at precisely noon on May 1st each year, casts the shadow of a hammer and sickle on the ground in front of the building. As if that weren’t enough, large crowds of students — including anti-communist demonstrators carrying full-sized American flags — gather at noon at the sculpture, to protest its shadow, I suppose.

Re-enactment should take place in a few hours’ time…

I see that it’s Ayn Rand’s 100th birthday today. (Here, here, here.) Do we have Randians in the UK at all, or are they, like Straussians, just a funny American phenomenon that was never successfully exported over here?

Thanks to Nick for passing this along from somewhere or other:

The election is over, the results are now known.
The will of the people has clearly been shown.
We should show by our thoughts, our words and our deeds
That unity is just what our country needs.
Let’s all get together. Let bitterness pass.
I’ll hug your elephant.
You kiss my ass.

Oh yes, and there was an election in the United States during my Blog Silence, which annoyed me, not only because the Republicans won, but also because I’d spent the previous twelve months reassuring various nervous Americans I know here in Oxford that they wouldn’t.

Bugger.

Hearing about this story on the radio this morning and thinking about next Tuesday’s election combined to remind me of this joke.

At the APSA I picked up a copy of a CD of “Presidential Campaign Songs, 1789-1996” released by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. It’s a very interesting record, for all kinds of reasons, but rather than talking about those reasons I thought I’d just post the words to “Why Not The Best?”, by John L. Turner.

I heard a young man speaking out just the other day;
I stopped just to listen to what he had to say;
He spoke straight and simple — by that I was impressed.
He said, “Once and for all, why not the best?”He said his name was Jimmy Carter and he was running for President,
And he laid out a plan of action — made a lot of sense!
He talked about the government and how it used to be, for you and me;
That’s the way it ought to be, right now:
Once and for all, why not the best?

He spoke plain and simple and I began to understand
I was listening to quite a man, talking to me.
I began to see…
We need Jimmy Carter!
Why settle for less?
America –
Once and for all, why not the best?

We need Jimmy Carter!
We can’t afford to settle for less,
America –
Once and for all, why not the best?
Why not the best?
Why not the best?

Other highlights include “Huzzah for Madison, Huzzah!”, “Get on a Raft with Taft” and “Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge”. Sadly, the disc’s producers couldn’t find a song commemorating Chester Arthur.

I’ve just finished, and just enjoyed Thomas Frank’s new book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, curiously though rather pointlessly retitled What’s the Matter with America? for its UK edition. (I read the US edition, bought cheap at the APSA.) Anyway, as I say, it’s a fine, fine book, but what I was most struck by was footnote 14 on p.283:

Beer contianing less than 3.2 percent alcohol is one of the constant reminders of the Prohibition years in Kansas. Prohibition began in Kansas by constitutional amendment in 1881, but in 1937 the state legislature declared beer with less than 3.2 percent alcohol to be a “cereal malt beverage”, not an “intoxicating liquor”, and hence legal. Proper liquor was not permitted in Kansas until 1948, and even then it could only be dispensed from liquor stores and, later, private clubs. What few taverns you found in Kansas when I was in college sold only the three-two stuff.In the seventies, Attorney General Vern Miller went to outrageous lengths to reming the world that prohibition was still largely in effect in Kansas, once even raiding an Amtrak train for serving liquor as it traveled through the state. Airlines, too, were required to stop serving drinks when in Kansas airspace…

The note ends by inviting you to “read up on the fascinating, perplexing history of Kansas liquor law” here [pdf] (though I’ve posted the correct URL here, rather than the incorrect one listed in the book).* Yes, yes, I know Kansas City’s in Missouri. Don’t panic.

One of the gloomy things about visits to America is hearing my far-better-informed-than-myself friends explain to me why they think W is going to win the forthcoming election, when I’ve tended to take the view all year that he can’t possibly pull this one off (for various reasons, but especially for some of those listed by Nathan Newman back in January).

The immediate feelings of gloom, however, are partially offset by this priceless new Bushism: speaking in Missouri, W. claimed that owing to the threat of legal action,

“Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.”

Video clip here (via, via).

While staying at the Sheraton hotel in Chicago at the APSA, I had the television on from time to time in the morning before I went out and in the evening after I came in, tuned to CNN (when I wasn’t trying to catch up with baseball news), with the result that I flew back to England knowing an awful lot about the moment-by-moment progress of hurricane Frances across the state of Florida, and (in comparison) a quite trivial amount about the atrocities in Beslan.

I’m catching up now.

Over here, if you haven’t seen it already.

Bastille Day brings comfort to objectively pro-French Presidential candidate John Kerry with today’s instalment of the Electoral Vote Predictor after eighteen new statewide polls have been published. Splendid!