Lack of publishing make Homer something something...

Marty pointed me to this article, in which the man he insigntfully calls "Jerry 'I never learned to love' Falwell" blames the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks on gays, feminists, pagans, and liberals. Falwell.com assures us that the comment was taken out of context. So I began searching the web to find a transcript of the 700 Club, the show on which Jerry's comments were made, to see what this mysterious context was. I didn't find it, as the 700 Club archives seem to take several days to be put online. But in the process I did learn that Pat Robertson has an age-defying protein shake recipe that he'd like to share with us.

Wall sits: to the kiosk with you!

For reasons I can't explain, I'm getting a huge kick out of using the word "Soviet" in my paper on the Aral Sea. I even go through the trouble of typing out "Soviet Union" instead of settling for "USSR."

Soviet Soviet Soviet. It's almost as cool as "Pleistocene."

I have this psychological need to be constantly taking on new projects. I always need to be amassing more work, more responsibility. I used to be more cautious about it. Freshman year I agonized over whether to commit myself to taking on my first experiment in web design, wondering if I'd have the time to invest in learning HTML (I also have this control-freak kind of pride that doesn't let me do things the easy way, e.g., FrontPage). I declined a nomination for a Pep Band office (which turned out to be my only chance, as going abroad killed my ability to serve the next term and ability to be nominated for the final term) because I was worried that my Maroon-News commitments would be too much. But then I felt like a slacker when, early on in the semester, being Assistant Commentary Editor became less of a time commitment than being a production assistant had the previous semester. Of course, that all changed when Jon Egan realised he could dump all the work of the section on me -- a development I was perfectly happy with.

This year, I'm well beyond those kind of reservations. When Nan asked me, in a voice that suggested she wasn't optimistic about my response, to be a Deacon in University Church, I was ready to start work before she even got done explaining my potential duties. I realised afterward that I could have easily said no, claiming too much other work and commitments (on top of the fact that I don't feel like I'm exactly one of the pillars of Christian faith in UC). I had the same kind of experience when Lisa Benton asked me to be her research assistant sophomore spring. Or when Andrea told me Keith Brooks was looking for help in getting the Prism put together. My busiest week sophomore year was the week that I chose to begin working on Lore 2000.

The reason I'm writing this now is because I just got an email from the Geography secretary saying that Michael Peletz (my anthropology seminar advisor) is looking for someone to help him with a mapping project. I jumped up and had the phone in my hand before I paused to think. I'm behind enough in the work I already have, so taking on more wouldn't really help the situation. He'd probably get better work out of someone who is either not so busy, or who has learned time management skills. But when I see him in class on Monday I'll probably still ask if he's found an assistant yet.

My brother just showed me George W Bush's livejournal. I get really tired of Bush humour that boils down to "hur hur, he's stupid." There's a huge difference between incisive humour poking at the specific foibles of the current administration on the one hand, and sticking the name G W Bush in front of the whining of a six-year-old who is, shall we say, not in the highest reading group. Maybe I'm being elitist about this, but it seems like a George W Bush livejournal could have been done with so much more subtlety.

I have more keys now. I've got my room, the Maroon-News office, the Maroon-News editors' room, the geography lab, the geography lounge, the outside door to Alumni, the inside doors to Alumni, and the archaeology lab. And today I picked up keys to Neva's office and the copier room in the Chapel. Once they finish the renovations and the Stewards get their own office back, I'll get a key to that room too.

I get this feeling of power from having all these keys. Sophomore year, when I got my second key (room and M-N) I remember jumping up and down so I could hear them rattling together in my pocket. That may have contributed in some small way to my shift from wearing jeans to looser khakis.

Mr. Plechavy, the chorus and stage crew advisor at my high school, must have felt like God with all his keys.

Oops, it seems the Phi Beta Kappa induction is the same day as the family weekend football game. It's not a hard choice, though. Band wins.

I should stop writing about the World Trade Center incident. I can never say the right thing. Whatever I say is either dishonest or gets people angry. Rule #1: don't alienate your readership.

But I can't exactly write about anything else. When you've had a tragedy of this magnitude, no other problem can have any claim to attention, and no happiness can pretend not to be overshadowed.

This post is just to try to make the last post publish.

I'm not feeling anything. Not numbness, or even shock. Just honestly nothing.

Well, that's not even precisely true anymore. I'm feeling bad because I didn't feel anything. I'm frustrated because life got disrupted and the mountain of work next to my computer hasn't been getting any shorter, and angry at myself for worrying about a petty thing like that. "You moron, tens of thousands of people died and you don't care."

I feel like I should cry, and be so distressed I can't concentrate on anything, and go to the meetings on campus looking for solace but unable to find it because no amount of discussion can bring people back to life. I don't mean in the sense that I have grief and rage inside that I need to let out. I feel like I should manufacture grief, find some way to force myself to be sad, just to prove I'm human.

I don't want revenge. I want to prevent things like this from happening again, but that's only in an intellectual sense. I don't want to get back at the people who did this. If we could prevent terrorism but leave the perpetrators of this act unscathed, I'd be all for it. Justice for justice's sake is meaningless to me.

And I feel bad because I'm not bothered by the loss of the New York skyline. I can understand how the lives of the people involved and the functioning of the world economy are important, but the fact that there's sky where there used to be skyscrapers isn't important to me. Granted, I've only been to New York city twice in my life, and I never did the usual tourity things there, but I'm still an American.

Before this, I would have considered this kind of emotional distance a virtue. I would have said that it's good to be able to keep your emotions, particularly bad ones, from getting the best of you. I would have said it's good to be able to look at a situation rationally. But I'm not so sure anymore. To everyone but me, "I feel your pain" isn't a cliche anymore.

Everyone else is writing about sadness and rage and horror. They're swearing more than usual. They're saying they can't understand. They want to kill Osama bin Laden, then bring him back to life and kill him again. They feel vulnerable, and fearful. And I sit here and point out stupid things that news anchors did.

Maybe there's some complex psychological reason for this. But I'm probably just a cold, selfish bastard.

It's pretty clear at this point that we're going to war with Afghanistan.

A few more anecdotes from the morning's news coverage:

An anchor on NBC (I forget who) said "this is the worst attack on American soil since the War of 1812. Or what we did to ourselves in the Civil War. ... Oh, and Pearl Harbor."

A reporter in the field for CNN at about a quarter to 12 said "...the attack which happened just four hours ago," at which point the cameraman's hand appeared on screen with three fingers up. "I mean, three hours ago."

An NBC field reporter spent five minutes conveying the fact that there was a bomb suspected to be in the school he was standing next to, and therefore he ought to leave right away.

I won't explain what just happened, because if you haven't been watching the news you're a bad person, and I won't have any respect for you until you at the very least click over to the Post for a while.

Marty woke up as I was playing a clip of Bush's speech in Florida. He thought it was some doctored clip someone made as a joke.

One of NBC's less over-repeated clips was a ground-level shot of the first tower falling. The camera was close enough that there was nobody in the street anymore. But in the foreground, there was a traffic light, going about its business. I'm sure you can come up with your own symbolism for that.

NBC really wanted to pin it on Osama bin Laden. They even put his picture up on the screen, without any kind of blurb saying "his involvement is pure conjecture." Granted, he is the most likely suspect, and none of the news organizations have come out and claimed he must be behind it, but in dwelling on him as a possible suspect they're pronouncing him guilty in the minds of a lot of people.

It seems like the obvious thing to write my commentary on this week. But what could I say? That it's horrible? That's obvious. If my political beliefs were completely opposite I would call for a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan (or at the very least hitting it with our entire nuclear arsenal). But I'm not Jeff Martin.

Much unplanned weirdness tonight.

I returned home from the University Church Deacons and Stewards meeting around 9 and began to do the dishes. Dave came into the kitchen and told me to wash the frying pan with feeling. He selected "remorse" as the feeling I should use. Then he told me that the fact that I had a paper that said "ABRAHAM" taped to my chest was one of the weirdest things he'd ever seen. I explained that we had done this icebreaker where everyone has the name of a famous Bible person on their back, and you have to find out who your person is by asking yes/no questions. You could move it around to the front once you guessed. I confused Elisha because I had narrowed mine down to a man in Genesis, so I asked "Did he live before Abraham?" She answered, "well ... during." Dave said that was even weirder.

My facial expression during this conversation deeply frightened Dave, because he said it was exactly the kind of expression Amanda would make. He started backing away from me, holding his fingers like a cross and saying "avert your eyes! He may change forms!"

I discussed the issue with Mikey and April-Lyn, and we came to the conclusion that, while April-Lyn was Amanda's twin and Kate-o was Amanda's clone, I must be Amanda's doppleganger.

I then discussed the issue with Marty. He expressed concern that there was a turning-into-Amanda epidemic on the loose. We decided we may have to quarrantine all infected persons. We would need to be especially careful because one of Amandaa's roommates is little Moon-Pie. The consequences of combining the Amanda Virus with the Wolyniak budding capability could be disastrous. Then we would have to create an Amanda serum (extract of Amanda, if you will) to use as a vaccine.

So I went up to the fifth floor of East to deliver the Whitlams CD I had earlier promised to loan to Amanda and Maggie, who I have corrupted into Whitlams fans (which only reinforces Maggie's reported obsession with going to Australia). Shortly after I arrived, half a dozen people arrived to watch The Emperor's New Groove. I had no choice but to stay and endure its Disney-ness. In its defense, I can say that it made no attempt to inject a romantic subplot -- quite a feat in a movie of the non-messed-up persuasion. It was very frightening being in a dark room with six people who were not only reciting lines from the movie, but also imitating the characters' hand motions. And I learned that Amanda had been feeding me ENG lines all day, as every other word out of their mouths made me think "hey, Amanda said that today!"

Amanda and Maggie continued to hold me hostage after the movie ended and the others departed. They offered to let Marty ransom me for $20, but he decided he'd rather have a single. Then they decided to let me buy my freedom by helping to re-hang the tapestry in their stairwell. Amanda wound up doing most of the work, as getting up to the tapestry involved standing on the plaque that has their room number beside the door. I just fetched adhesive.

Grape-a-don says ... SORORITIES CAN SUCK THE D.

(By which I mean they're now in the Kiosk, for the offense of cruising up and down Broad Street yelling and blaring their horns.)

Today Nan's sermon dealt with the idea of religion's superiority over secular ethics. She's talked about this theme before, and while I generally like Nan's preaching, her treatment of this issue really bothers me. Her point is basically that secular humanism has never come up with any morality on its own -- it just stole the ethics of the Judeo-Christian tradition and removed any references to God. She basically said that humanism has no basis on which to create morality because it doesn't have God to hand out the rules.

But I see the issue from the opposite side. I think a morality derived from humanist principles and based on human reason is a very real possibility. In fact, it seems that the modern liberal tradition has been driven by secular philosophy, with religion following after in finding its justification for similar principles. This is not a bad thing from a religious perspective -- looking at things from a different perspective can discover new ideas that can either be reconciled with the original perspective better than older ideas, or just stimulate further thought from the original perspective. To me, for example, a liberal political stance seems to fit the principles of Christianity better than the conservatism usually associated with the religion.

And there's no need to reinvent the wheel in ethics. I think the fact that humanist perspectives have retained much of the Judeo-Christian moral system as evidence not of humanism's failure to come up with any new ideas, but rather of the strength of those morals that both systems agree on. A good ethical system is not arbitrary, so it must be able to be derived from a source other than simply divine revelation. An arbitrary ethical system is limiting and disempowering, because it leaves you stranded when new situations emerge. I think a central theme of the New Testament is that we're not passively accepting God's decrees without knowing why, but rather that we are to be actively working with God to discover how we should act. And this process isn't carried out through some special capacity for ethical reasoning that only Christians have access to.

I think the best moral code is one that would leave you with no regrets if God turns out to exist, and none if He doesn't.

I'm disappointed in the Washington Post's cartoonists. At the moment there are three cartoons (Bok - Luckovich - Sargent) linked on the editorial page that compare Janet Reno's candidacy for Florida Governor to the recent shark attack scare. Try to be a bit more creative, guys.