Authority

The immensely influential humanist Edward Said wrote:

There is nothing mysterious or neutral about authority.  It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.  Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed (Orientalism, p. 19-20, 1978).

Something to consider.  I’m currently teaching Sunday School class on the religions of the world; we have begun our study with Hinduism, a “religion” completely constructed by authority.  It is hard and not natural for us, but we are trying to analyze this.  Maybe by the end of the year we *might* be ready to do the same for our own dear Christianity.

Smallpox vaccinations

A couple of days ago, I had to go to the doctor for a routine check-up. The nurse and I determined that I had not had a tetanus shot since 1991, so she rolled up her sleeves, I lowered my pants, and I got it right in the behind. It’s good for ten years, which is to say, I am basically immune from lockjaw for a decade. The little things she injected me with are starting off their ten-year plan of defense against rusty nails and other mishaps.

While I was in the waiting room before the vaccination, I had been studying for my comps. I’m reading a book of essays by various anthropologists and ethnographers about the Huichol people of northwestern Mexico. Unlike many of their indigenous neighbors, the Huichol are famous for maintaining their cultural lifeways in the face of colonialism and the steamrolling external forces of assimilation. They are also famous for the peyote they eat as part of their ritual life. The so-called “Huichol trinity” is peyote, corn, and the deer.

Smallpox, known as etsá in Huichol, was a terrible assassin throughout the Americas in the years after the arrival of the Spaniard colonizers. One of the reasons for the Huichols’ amazing cultural resilience is that they were less affected than some by smallpox because their native medicine discovered vaccination. Allow me to quote at length an essay by Armando Casillas Romo, MD, who did a study of the various diseases and remedies known to the Huichol:

…the dreaded smallpox. The people of San Andrés Cohamiata say that no one in this area has had this disease for a long time, as long as fifty years.

The extraordinary thing is that to ward off this scourge in the absence of medical help from the outside, Huichol shamans developed their own technique of immunization. We were told that the mara’akáte (pl. of mara’akáme) would use the thorns of the plant known as huizache, a thorny shrub found over much of Mexico, to pierce the skin eruptions of people already suffering from smallpox and extract the liquid from them. With the permission of the parents, they would then inoculate the arms of healthy children with this liquid. The cure also involved the same “confessions” rite as that prescribed for rubella.

Several Huichols told us that etsá disappeared from their community thanks to a famous mara’akáme named Carrillo, who died several decades ago. It is said that to “cover up”–that is, calm–the disease he made a pilgrimage to Haixáripá, a sacred place on the slopes of Popocatépetl, the great snow-covered dormant volcano near Mexico City, where Huichol mythology says smallpox made its first appearance. His efforts were successful and small pox never again bothered the people of San Andrés.

All this has left me a little interested in the history of tetanus in our own world. I got a shot without clear understanding of what tetanus even is, why the shot lasts only ten years, and who discovered the inoculation. I also am clear that I have confidence in the shot without any confession or pilgrimage narrative as supplemental community participation in my wellness. So, my vaccination was effective but also socially impoverished.

Local and delicious foodstuffs

Since moving to the greater St. Louis area, we have been doing our best to feel at home, starting with the unique foods and drink that the region has to offer.

Number one on my list of good St. Louis food is an appetizer called “toasted ravioli.” You take a beef ravioli, bread it, fry it, sprinkle parmesan cheese on it, dip it in marinara sauce, and eat. I like ravioli anyway, but this is really good.

Next on my list is a cheap cut of meat called the “pork steak.” It’s like a big, yummy pork chop, but always prepared on the barbecue with lots of sweet, tomato-based, barbecue sauce. There’s a place about a mile from our house called “Big Mama’s BBQ” where the pork steak is so big, you absolutely must take at least half of it home for lunch the next day. I’ve made it very successfully at home on a low fire grill with lots of basting. I normally grill very hot on a fast grill and only baste at the end, if at all. But low heat and lots of sauce is the way to go with pork steak.

Finally, a Belleville, Illinois, original. We live in Belleville, the birthplace of a special beverage called “Stag” beer. It’s an American lager, light and full of rice, but also a little sweeter and fuller than those other American brews. With virtually no finish, it is a great beer for drinking when you are hot and thirsty. No longer brewed in its hometown, Stag is now owned by Pabst up in Wisconsin.

Not a bad way to get acquainted with a new place!

One or Many

In the Intro. to Philosophy class I’m teaching, we’ve been covering the pre-Socratics.  Starting with Thales and moving on up to Democritus, these ancient people were fascinated by the fabric of being.  Many of them were quite clear that all things were made of some specific substance or other:  for Thales all things could be reduced to water, for Anaximenes it was air, Pythagoras saw numbers in everything, and for Heraclitus, perhaps fire was the base of all.

Others doubted this oneness.  Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus thought the universe to be far more fractured in essence, and more process-oriented.

Last Thursday I polled the class to find out how many of them were modern-day monists and how many accepted the other side of the debate, that being is in no sense unified in one reductive substance.  30% monists, 70% pluralists.  The pluralists cited mythic “science” as the reason for their notion that our being is made of discrete and differentiated motes.  The few monists foresaw Aristotle (he’s next week) and named the necessity of some sort of unifying first cause that was also the stuff of existence.

How about you?  Do you think the universe is made up of one thing or many?  Why?

IRFD: Saints edition

Today is International Rock-Flipping Day! I’m looking forward to seeing all the great photos people take of things and creatures found under rocks. I also know that there are a lot of smart folks out there who know considerable and wonderful things about bugs and other under-rock denizens. I thought I’d try to tailor my participation in IRFD to my own particular area of interest: Catholic saints and the protections they offer.

In a few days, September 7, will be the feast day of Saint Gratus of Aosta. Gratus is said to have been born in Greece but later relocated to Aosta in the Italian Alps. Around the middle of the 5th century he became the bishop of that region and died of natural causes later that century, not necessarily the best way to go if you’re planning on sainthood. As with many saints, a popular devotion to him developed much after his death; in Gratus’s case, his cult really got rolling in the 12th and 13th centuries. This included using his relics as powerful talismans against certain natural events including storms, floods, droughts–and of particular interest for IRFD–a plague of insects.

Not all of us are as intrepid about the monsters-in-miniature that we might find under our rocks. But take heart! Saint Gratus of Aosta is the patron saint against the fear of insects!

The rocks we flipped are arranged in circular pattern in the garden behind our house. The rocks themselves are angular and thick with fossils and crystals and are certainly not naturally-occurring in this precise spot. They were put here by the devout previous owners of our home, Catholics given to statuary. In fact, in the center of this center of stones was a large cement pedestal upon which stood the BVM, her hand raised in benediction on the hostas, roses, and other ground-cover that grew here. When they moved out, they took Mary with them and pushed the pedestal off to one side thus leaving a circle of stones with a palpable absence of holiness and presence in the center.

Protestants, we planted a hill of jack-o-lantern pumpkins in the circle, and now in September, large vines and leaves are beginning to brown around the big, orange pumpkins. I imagine that the etched face of St. Gratus is one of all the souls hovering right below the surface skin of the pumpkins, waiting to be revealed on Halloween. Gratus, according to legend, went to the Holy Land after receiving a vision that he should do so. When there, he discovered the head of John the Baptist in Herod’s decaying palace. He carried the head to Rome to present it to the Holy Father, but the head had apparently not improved with age. It fell to pieces, and Gratus was left holding the jawbone. My desire is that Gratus wield the prophet’s jaw, the jaw which ground many locusts in sweet honey, and bless our encounter. May the fear of insects be made holy among us and under our rocks, may the Gratus-o-lanterns of our garden look upon us with benevolence and subtle warning, and may all of you be blessed again and again.

Gratus was with us as we flipped our rocks. We found only veiny roots, dirt and a couple of roly-poly relics, rolled tightly in their own chitin reliquaries.

Happy International Rock-Flipping Day to all!
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Update: Dave Bonta, convener of this event, has compiled a list of participants with their blogposts. Check ‘em out!

I realize you don’t want to see more pictures of my new dog,

but I’ve never felt this way about a dog. I’m not expecting comments or anything; I just feeling very evangelical about this particular dog, like I need to share.

And for someone who knows next to nothing about taking pictures, this one came out real nice:

I’ll try to restrain myself from posting more, but you have to admit, this is an unusually terrific dog.

Calm little doggy

I’ve never been a dog person, but that doesn’t seem to matter. I love our new dog, Becky the basset hound. She’s 8-weeks-old, cute as can be, funny, and sleepy.

Little for now, but she’ll probably make it up to 50 pounds or so, and fill up her new bed.

For more cutey-pie pictures, check out my wife’s blog.

Slugs

Our outside cat has not been eating her food lately. She may have worms, or she may be totally grossed out by the colossal slugs that have been dragging themselves in and around her food dish.

In the few months we have lived in southern Illinois, I have had more–and more varied–slug experiences than ever before. First of all, they are slug giants. These are antediluvian monster slugs who also have pituitary problems. Second, they are fiends for dry catfood. In searching for ways to keep them out of my cat’s food dish, we discovered that some people use catfood to lure slugs out of their vegetables. What is to be done?

One morning last week before the sunrise, I went outside to feed the cat. Hanging from a ropy cord of slime directly above the catfood dish were two slugs in the throes of slug passion. It was acrobatic, and they were oblivious of me. They twined around each other like DNA covered in ectoplasm. Slugs are hermaphroditic and are perfectly capability of mating with themselves (there once was a slug from Nantucket…) but prefer to seek out partners supposedly for greater genetic variety, but these two seemed to be going at it out of simple lust. I left them alone; I guess they dropped into the catfood after their carnal relations and just rolled in food. Pituitary problems and no self-control. When I cleaned up after them, I found that the cord they hung from was eerily similar to the gummy strips of booger-like material that advertisers use to hold their ads into magazines.

I suppose it is cruel, but I have a taken to hunting slugs in the evening hours and pouring salt on their broad backs. I’m worried about the effect they are having on my cat’s appetite, and it is also not unknown that my 2-year-old daughter scoop up a handful of catfood to keep her energy levels up while playing. I’d prefer she not eat slug slime. While we wait for the first cold snap (or whatever it is that sends the slugs packing), our cat will most likely be meeting the Illinois vet. I don’t know what they’ll prescribe for feline slug disgust.

Int’l Rock-Flipping Day is proclaimed

One of my favorite bloggers, Dave Bonta over at Via Negativa, has proclaimed September 2 to be International Rock-Flipping Day. Want more information? Want to participate? Check out the details here.

In vain

I heard a story on NPR this morning about the ongoing VFW convention.  A reporter asked some of the participants what they thought of the various presidential hopefuls that have spoken to the gathered veterans.  A vet from the Iraq War said that she agreed with the candidates who wanted the U.S. to remain engaged in Iraq until “victory” because–as she put it–otherwise all the fighting and dying they have already done “will have been in vain.”

Of course, I’ve heard this line of reasoning before, but it never struck me like it did this morning.  Not only will it have been in vain, it already is.  All the fighting and dying has been in vain.  I found myself talking to the vet through the radio.  Yes, what you did was useless.  You were grossly manipulated by liars.  Our culture of patriotism misled you into this vain and disastrous affair.   Worse than “in vain,” you have most likely made things much, much worse than they possibly would have been without our military’s presence in Iraq.