A Leap Year and a Leap of Faith

            Hi Everyone. I hope your February 29 is going splendidly. After all, it only comes around once every four years, right? If today’s your birthday, just think, you only have to worry about aging once every four years! If you happen to find the idea of February 29 inconvenient because you want it to be March 1, be glad you’re neither Chinese nor Jewish. Both the Hebrew and Chinese traditional calendars are lunisolar calendars, and so, every so often they add an extra month, not an extra day, to their calendar years. I can’t imagine having to reckon with a thirteenth month. Wouldn’t that be a pain? An extra day in February is ok with me. Here’s one more bit of leap year trivia. Because of the formulae that calculate leap years, there aren’t always leap years at the ends of centuries, even though that century mark falls at the four-year interval. So, 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 weren’t. Similarly, 2100 won’t be a leap year. There won’t be another end of century leap year until the year 2400. Incidentally, there’s debate right now among those who care as to whether the year 4000 should be considered a leap year or not. I hope they figure it out. They’ve got plenty of … time.

            So, why this title, “A Leap Year and a Leap of Faith?” I wanted to post something special on this leap day, a topic I’ve been resisting because when most people do it, it comes across as corny and insipid. I was just thinking, I make no secret about being a Christian. Yet, until recently I never considered the connection between my blindness and my faith. At any rate, now I have considered it. Correction, I’m still considering it. Here are a few observations based on my experiences as a blind person in today’s world and as a thinking, reasoning, believing being.

Trusting Your Senses

            Being a graduate student and a true academic at heart, I live and breathe the western university culture. There’s a great deal for someone like me to appreciate. Theorizing, discussing, analyzing, reading, teaching and most importantly, learning. Yet, it also tends to be a very skeptical culture. It’s a culture that demands proofs and takes very little as given. Some within that culture live by the motto ‘de omnibus dubitandum,’ doubt everything. On a college campus everything is questioned, every value scrutinized and, more often than not, rejected. Ok, that is the culture in which I operate. How did I end up being different? Because, you see, I am different. I don’t believe that skepticism is the best, or even a viable, philosophy for living. I hold to absolute truths and believe in a God who made the universe, who performs miracles and who has expectations for us born out of love for us. I have quite literally been laughed at because of the preceding sentence.

            “Oh come on, Brad,” one person said to me not too long ago, “how can you, an intelligent, thinking being, possibly believe in a great Santa Clause in the sky who will give you presents if you’re good and cast you into a fiery furnace if you’re not?”

            Well, there are all sorts of answers to that, but this posting relates to my blindness. So, I’ll limit myself to that set of answers. So many people believe only in what they can see and hear and taste and touch and smell or in what they can extrapolate based on the physical world. DNA, colors, aroma therapy, yoga, the speeches of JFK, the Andromeda Galaxy, and a slice of chocolate cake are all perceptible by the senses.

            The first thing to remember is that I have one less sense. Using my list above, if I operated with this brand of skepticism, I could choose to disbelieve in colors, DNA and the Andromeda Galaxy. After all, even if you took me to a biology lab and set a DNA molecule under a microscope for me or even if you let me look through the Hubble telescope, what good would it do me? I wouldn’t see them. Yes, I know you could argue for my belief or disbelief on purely logical grounds, but we’re talking about the physical senses here. So, the first thing to notice is that certain modes of proof, the sacred P-word on campus, are closed to me. You cannot prove that colors exist to me by demonstration or by appeal to physical objects. It’s not possible. Yet, I believe that colors exist. Why? As we do with many things, I believe in what I’m told exists. Who told me? Authorities I consider trustworthy and credible, of course. It’s just that you don’t need to be told that colors exist. You know they do. You don’t need or want proof of that. But consider this:  if everyone in the world were struck blind tomorrow, would colors no longer exist? Would the Andromeda Galaxy no longer be out there? Would Rembrandt’s imagery still exist? Of course those things would still exist. Your ability to see colors or to see the stars or to see a picture doesn’t make those things, the color, the stars, the painting, exist or not exist. They are what they are.

            That idea of belief has always been very fundamental to me in my day to day environment. I believe that the sidewalk is clear ahead of me. Not because I can see down the length of the sidewalk and know that there aren’t any trashcans, bicycles or people on it. Rather, I believe that the sidewalk is clear because I walked it yesterday and it was clear then. I infer that it will be clear today. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the sidewalk even disappears altogether! That happens to me in construction areas. What I believe about the sidewalk is a form of inductive reasoning. The sidewalk’s been clear for the last fifty days; so, it’ll be clear today. If so, great. If not, oh well. It happens.

            When I teach, I must operate on a certain amount of faith that my students are paying attention. If someone’s sneaky about it, I may not catch someone checking Facebook, reading a newspaper or sleeping in the back. I have, of course, developed my own strategies for managing my classroom and staying on top of things, but that’s not the point. Any sighted instructor would spot those things pretty quickly. I do not. Up to a point, I have to trust my students’ own willingness to learn and their sense of right conduct in class. Similarly, faith enters into my dissertation. When I’m with test subjects, I can’t actually see them at their computers. I don’t know for sure that they’re not opening an internet browser or goofing around while they’re supposed to be testing for me. Again, if I could see, this wouldn’t be an issue. But I cannot. So, I have to trust in an area where a sighted researcher would have no need for trust or belief or faith, as we’re calling it here.

            Given this inductive reasoning I’ve talked about, the question isn’t, why should I believe in God, but just the opposite. Why shouldn’t I believe in God? Despite Richard Dawkins assertions, God remains beyond the ken of science. He’s not a falsifiable hypothesis,. He can’t be seen by a telescope or contained in or dispelled by a logical proof. So, whenever people argue that God can’t be seen or investigated scientifically, I shrug. There’s a ton that I can’t see or investigate even in the way the rest of you can. So that line of argument against God holds little weight for me. It’s not at all compelling as it is for so many scientifically minded people.

Blindness and the Bible

            There are two points I want to make here. Since they’re related, I suppose it doesn’t matter which one I start with. I don’t know how many churches I’ve been to or individual Christians I’ve met who want to pray for my healing and the restoration of my sight. Firstly, restoration is a bit misleading; I never had sight and so it can’t be restored. More to the point, I want to start by saying I understand where this tendency comes from. People like this are thinking of Jesus healing multiple blind people in the New Testament. For example, see the stories in Matthew 9 and Matthew 12. Unfortunately for me, that’s all they’re thinking of. Yes, blindness in first-century Judea was a tough thing to bear. In twenty-first-century America, it still isn’t that easy. That being said, it makes perfect sense to me that those blind men sought healing from Jesus and got it. I can’t say that if Jesus weren’t here today that I wouldn’t ask him to give me sight. Maybe I would. Yet, I don’t pray for physical sight. Jesus performing a miracle is one thing. Miracles by their nature are exceptional divine interventions in the world. If God wants to perform one, far be it for me to stop him, but I’m not going to ask. There are other things I ask for each and every day.

            Still, there’s one thing about this whole blind healing bible discussion that those well-meaning people either forget or don’t realize. That is, God is in control. True, blindness is not the norm. Yet, if I were meant to see, I would. The fact that I am blind because of what happened to me at birth, because of incubators and optical nerve scarring, is not a negation of God’s power. God is, of course, bigger than incubators and optical nerve damage. I am, I repeat, as I was intended to be. That being said, I point these sorts of Christians to two passages. Consider God’s words to Moses in Exodus 4. Moses is pleading with God, pleading that he’s a poor speaker and won’t represent God well to the people and to the Egyptian ruler. God’s response is telling, “The LORD said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the LORD?” (Exodus 4:11). So, yes, God is greater than damaged retinas or scarred optical nerves or glaucoma or whatever the cause of the blindness. I am content with the condition because it is what I am meant to be. The follow-up question occurs, “ok, Brad, why were you intended to be blind?” Why does God do anything? He didn’t consult me about it. I am who I am.

            Yet it doesn’t disturb me. One other verse comes to mind. I don’t intend to quote a ton of them in this part of the discussion. Still, I said I was content. In the forty-second chapter of Isaiah, I find reason to be, “I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them” (Isaiah 42:16). Both of those passages are God’s own words as recorded in the biblical record. So, what am I to take from that? I am as I was meant to be, as I’ve said. And it’s going to be alright. That’s the second thing. That’s not to say that my life is, was or will be easy. Just the opposite, actually. Rather, it’s a promise that things are going to work out. God is there and will lead me where I need to go, just as a human being does when I take their elbow so that they can lead me someplace. If I would trust a human guide, why not a divine one? Again, it seems to make sense.

Concluding Thoughts, The Blind Atheist

            I wouldn’t have you take away the idea from reading what I’ve said that all or most blind people are believers in God let alone in the God of the Christian bible. Belief in God isn’t found in greater proportion amongst the blind than anyone else. I have met a number of blind people who are atheists or agnostics who lean toward the non-existence of God. Naturally, I disagree with them. Their disbelief isn’t grounded primarily in their blindness, not, at least, any more than my belief has its main roots in my blindness. Though, I have met those blind who contend that God, if he existed and was who and what he claimed to be, wouldn’t have made them blind either from birth or from some cause later in life. Yet I contend that it is precisely because God is who he is that they are blind. Exodus 4:11 again. They are fashioned as God meant them to be.

            The final thing I would have you avoid is thinking, either consciously or subconsciously, that faith is acceptable for me because I’m blind. “Well, that’s alright for him,” I’ve heard it said. “Let him have his faith, but as for me, I can see the world around me. I don’t need faith in God.” I’ve had people say this, and undoubtedly, many who don’t say it do think it. It’s not mean-spirited of people to think or say this, though it is mistaken. Just because you don’t see or smell radon gas leaking into your home doesn’t mean you don’t have a gas leak. Your detector unit may not be working properly, and that gas leak that you don’t see may still kill you. Alternatively, just because you don’t see the sun shining outdoors without a window, it doesn’t follow that the sun’s not shining. And so, we might fairly reason, just because God is a being you cannot see or touch or smell or taste or hear or prove by logic or disprove by science, by no means does it follow that no God exists. I submit to you that only people who are too sure of their own intellect and rely far too much on their limited senses will conclude, “that business about God is all bunk.”

            I realize that there are a great many arguments for and against the existence of God. I’ve made many of them and been on the receiving end of many more. I close by saying only that my purpose here has been to connect my blindness and my faith. If you have found what I said informative or even persuasive, then I am pleased. If you disagree with me, that too is alright. Alright in the sense that I won’t get upset. In truth, I hope that you will change your mind and heart and do so quickly while you still have time. In other words, I encourage you to make the leap of faith mentioned in my title, and what better day to do it on than, well, leap day! Meanwhile, have a good one.

The Language of Abortion, Part II

            Hello again. Looking back over my blog, I see I began it just about a year ago. A year ago this past Sunday, in fact. It’s done well, and my desire to continue with it is as strong as it was last February. I thought about coming up with some anniversary entry, but since I missed the anniversary, I’ll let it pass.

            Meanwhile, I want to continue thinking about the language of abortion. Some people ask me, “Brad, why do people like you always fixate on abortion when we’ve got issues like poverty, drugs and the sex trade to deal with?” A good question. It’s not that those issues aren’t important. Indeed, they are. But abortion, by its very nature, presents us with one of the most pressing ethical problems of our generation. So, after my last post on this subject, I surfed the net, looking up abortion clinics in my area. I also read articles, blogs, columns, and so on. I wanted to see how abortion was advertised, talked about, advocated, described and sold. Again, the language strikes me as interesting. I submit that God intended language to reveal. But where this subject is concerned, I contend that those in favor of abortion always use language to conceal. That’s quite a statement, I know. Last time, I talked about words like ‘right,’ ‘choice,’ and so on. Well, here are some more words and phrases that strike me as worthy of discussion, words that shape the abortion debate in such a way that to oppose them is dangerous and difficult. Here we go.

Equality:

            Bear with me. This word takes thinking about. ‘Equality’ has long been a buzzword in American society. It’s found in one form or another in the opening of our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence. You might say Americans have always valued it. It’s one of those things that you just take for granted as desirable. Everybody should be ‘equal,’ right? Who’s ever going to say we should have less equality? It is true that various women’s movement organizations such as NOW have made great strides in closing the gender gap. Education, jobs, salaries, politics, all of these arenas are ones in which women’s participation has been increasing. I saw a study recently that demonstrated that the salary gap is narrower than it’s ever been. Not to mention that I have, during my ten plus years of higher education, had far more female professors than male ones.

But what does this word ‘equality’ mean with reference to the abortion issue? Equal, I ask, in what sense? Who is equal to whom? In my attempts to figure out what the meaning of ‘equality’ is in relation to abortion, I came across this 2006 column by Brian Frederking, a political science professor at McKendree University, a small Methodist school in Lebanon Illinois. http://faculty.mckendree.edu/brian_frederking/columns/gender_equality.htm. I’ve edited it down a bit, but here he is:

… The problem is we have forgotten that abortion rights are intricately connected to the larger women’s movement. The goal of this movement is to break down patriarchal assumptions that men belong in the public sphere and women belong in the private sphere. The women’s movement is about creating both equal gender opportunity in the public sphere (school, jobs, voting, etc.) and equal gender responsibilities in the private sphere (parenting, doing the dishes, etc.). … If we really want to pursue the social goal of gender equality, then we must be willing to put up with a morally ambiguous medical procedure. Gender equality requires abortion rights. It is a package deal.

All we have to do is look around the world to confirm this. The World Economic Forum recently ranked gender equality in 58 countries around the world. It used five criteria to create the rankings: economic participation, economic opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment, and health/well-being. Abortion was not explicitly a part of the rankings.

            The top ten countries were Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia. (The United States was 17^th.) All of them have legally protected abortion rights. The bottom ten countries were Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, India, Venezuela, and Chile. All have either outlawed or heavily restricted access to abortion.

            Abortion rights are about the status of women in society. There are two kinds of countries in the world: those who accept modern gender roles and protect abortion rights, and those who prefer traditional gender roles and restrict abortion rights.

            I always stun my students when I say that they do not understand their positions on abortion. The pro-choice students think that it is about the individual bodies of women. But I tell them that they have forgotten the history of the women’s movement. I suggest to them that slogans of “my body, my choice” make them sound like spoiled children.

            The pro-life students are convinced that their position is about saving the lives of the unborn. But I tell them that their position is really a backlash against the women’s movement. It is about keeping women at home and men in power.

            I am not sure that I fully believe this. But my job is to challenge my students. I want them to think about these things. We all should.

            All due respect to the good Dr. Frederking, but I say with a smile that this is the sort of logic I was taught to avoid in my own papers and which I require students to revise in their essays for me. Frederking immediately connects abortion, a single issue, with universal issues of access, equality and suffrage, setting up a chain of reasoning that goes something like this:

Women’s rights = universal access to all spheres of influence, economic, educational, political;

“Abortion = a fundamental component of women’s rights;

Therefore, to oppose abortion is to oppose women’s rights. QED.

            If I may slip into logic speak for a moment, it does not necessarily follow that if I oppose abortion, that I want women barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. It is also false for people like the professor to suggest that being an advocate of abortion is a necessary condition, let alone what we call a necessary and sufficient condition, of supporting women’s rights generally. This sort of slipshod reasoning irritates me because it claims to be logical and is riddled with fallacies, errors in reasoning, if you will.

His logic, as a favorite character of mine would no doubt point out, is flawed. As a footnote, I don’t know what to make of his statement at the end of his column about not knowing whether he believed what he was saying, but that it was his duty to challenge his students. O …k. I thought it was his duty to teach and instruct? But what do I know. I only have five years of college teaching experience. Maybe when I equal his ten, I’ll know what he meant.

            More important than his logic, however, is this writer’s grasp of history as demonstrated in this column, “The pro-choice students think that it is about the individual bodies of women. But I tell them that they have forgotten the history of the women’s movement.” Actually, some of us may know a bit more about that history than he does. The juncture that ties abortion to the broader platform of women’s rights is frequently suggested to be history. Women, people like this professor claim, have historically sought their rights, and this issue has been a historical part of the struggle. Not true. I wonder how people like Frederking would react if they knew (or were reminded) that the early pioneers of women’s rights vehemently opposed abortion.

            Go back to the writings of the nineteenth century and read Susan B Anthony. Anthony was a women’s rights crusader at a time when they had next to none. No voting, no political status, and salary equality? Non-existent. Remember, women didn’t even get the right to vote in this country until 1920. Anthony lived and worked in the mid to late 1800’s, dying in 1906. While abortion was not one of her main causes, she did write this in 1869, "When a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is a sign that, by education or circumstances, she has been greatly wronged." For all the differences between abortions then and now and for all the differences in thought between then and now, I find it hard to believe that, were she resurrected today, Susan B. Anthony would be on the front lines of NOW at a state assembly battling for pro-abortion legislation. I just don’t think so. Finally, some pro-choice scholars and political activists I’ve read point out that she never talked explicitly about fetal rights, state mandates about abortion, and so on. One writer for Women’s ENews, Allison Stevens, even went so far as to say that those who cite Susan B. Anthony in support of pro-life arguments are exactly the sorts of people the nineteenth-century activist would’ve opposed. Quite a statement. So then, I reasonably ask myself, just what did Anthony and her contemporaries say about this topic? Here are a few things they said:

"Guilty? Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!" Susan B Anthony, 1868.

"Child murderers practice their profession without let or hindrance, and open infant butcheries unquestioned...Is there no remedy for all this ante-natal child murder?...Perhaps there will come a time when...an unmarried mother will not be despised because of her motherhood...and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with." Victoria Woodhull, 1870.

"The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief...So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies." Emma Goldman, 1911.

            Clearly, these were women who saw abortion as being a deep societal ill, one caused by the plight of women during their time. They hoped, if these quotations are representative of their writings, that in time, women’s education, empowerment and inclusion in the mainstream of American life would lead to a lessening, not an increase, in abortion. They seem to have anticipated a day when abortion would be a thing of the past, not a day when it is legalized and sold like any other elective procedure. Today, women in America enjoy freedoms and rights of enfranchisement beyond these pioneers’ wildest hopes; yet, more babies are aborted in this country every day than ever before. I submit to you that they’d weep bitter tears if they knew it.

Still, let’s leave Anthony for the more recent past, shall we? “So what,” some writers might argue, “abortion became an issue of equality in the middle of the last century and is now unquestionably linked to equality, access and suffrage.” That professor’s column above certainly supports that idea. Incorrect … again. Anyone ever heard of Feminists for Life of America (FFL)? My guess is that most haven’t. They’re a women’s rights organization, as you might have guessed. They were founded in Ohio in 1972 by two women from OSU. Interestingly, one of them, Cathy Callaghan, was a tenured linguistics professor at the time. The other founder, Pat Goltz, was expelled from the Columbus chapter of NOW in 1974 for arguing that abortion violates feminist principles. They fight against domestic violence, against sex trafficking, against pregnancy discrimination, against discrimination in the workplace, and against abortion. That last one is where they differ from the big names. They are avid supporters and promoters of women, but these women argue passionately that abortion is wrong and that it’s unnecessary. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s their page:

http://www.feministsforlife.org/

            So, many people would like to muddy the waters surrounding abortion by tying it to the broader women’s rights movement. They get away with it, because nobody really opposes most things the women’s rights movements of today stand for. The rhetorical trick, therefore, is to convince people that abortion equals the rights of women and to oppose it is to oppose the progress, the equality, of women in today’s America. However, this sleight of hand is both misleading and historically inaccurate. It succeeds because most people lack the historical background and the knowledge of women’s advocacy needed to see through it. The earliest women’s rights advocates regarded abortion as nothing less than child murder and longed for a day when the society as a whole would have advanced beyond the point where women felt they had to abort their children. Logically, it is an error in reasoning to argue that a person who is against abortion is also against the rights of women generally or in our society as a whole. So let’s leave ‘equality’ behind and look at some more language. Like Callaghan, I do linguistics, after all.

Pregnancy as Euphemism

            Women’s Health Practice, just up the street from me, has a very comprehensive web site and offers abortions by various methods up through twenty-four weeks or six months of pregnancy. What’s interesting here is just how they use the word ‘pregnancy.’ This may seem obvious. We all know what pregnancy is, right? Well, yes. But they use the word ‘pregnancy’ to mean something more than just the state of being with child. Consider this quote, which is found in their section on medication-based abortion. They describe the effects of methotrexate this way,  “It stops embryonic or fetal cells from dividing. Once these cells can no longer divide, the pregnancy stops growing.”

            A pregnancy does not grow. It is not animate and it doesn’t describe an object, animate or otherwise. It is a biological condition, a process. So, what is it that “stops growing,” exactly? The pregnancy process ends because the baby, not the pregnancy, stops growing. But imagine this same description if they actually said what they meant. Here it is, “It stops embryonic or fetal cells from dividing. Once these cells can no longer divide, the baby stops growing.”

            One other thing about this clinic’s abortion page. I couldn’t find the words ‘baby’ or ‘child’ anywhere. Look for yourself:  http://www.womenshealthpractice.com/abortion.htm. If you find it, let me know. I’ll tell you what I did see, however.

Code Words for ‘Baby’ and ‘Child’

            Regardless of your stance on abortion, it’s interesting to note how strenuously the industry avoids words that would connect the baby to the rest of the human race. You won’t find them talking about a ‘baby’ even for a late-term abortion. Never do it. And nobody uses the word ‘child.’ Wonder why? Is it perhaps because they know collectively what they do and cannot call babies what they are for fear of admitting it? Maybe. It’s also bad business. Telling a scared girl or woman that, “terminating your pregnancy at this point in the fetus’s development is a safe and low-risk solution to your needs,” sounds comforting and brings in money. Telling that same scared girl or woman, “Ending your baby’s life at this point in your pregnancy is a safe and low-risk solution to your needs,” however, is likely to trigger a fall in revenue. We’re not done.

            To end with this web page, I found two instances where biological terms are substituted for baby. A bit more dangerous, since the word ‘tissue’ bespeaks a living (or once living) organism. Try these excerpts from the clinic’s surgical abortion page,  “Your tissue will be sent for analysis to a pathologist. … As a woman progresses farther into pregnancy, there is more tissue to evacuate. … patients can arrange for tissue burial, although they need to be aware that these services must be arranged well in advance and may be costly.”

            Tissue? Makes it sound highbrow and medical, like something I’d read in a biology textbook. It’s also semantically inaccurate. ‘Fetal tissue’ is only an accurate term up to a certain point. By twenty-four weeks, though, what you’ve got is a very recognizable baby, arms, legs, head, internal organs. Many types of tissue there. I should know. I was born at twenty-six weeks. And “tissue burial?” Who are we kidding here? They almost, almost admit what they’re doing. Replace ‘tissue’ with ‘baby’ or ’child’ in the last excerpt and reread it.

This will probably be my last posting on abortion for a while. I’m not an activist per se, I’m not a specialist in medicine and I don’t work for a pro-life organization. I’ve never claimed any particular expertise, and this blog isn’t just about this issue. Still, if I leave the topic here, let it not be because I don’t have strong feelings based on well-informed opinions. There are other issues out there, but this one deserves every word of attention I’ve given it and more. I look forward to any reasoned comments anyone wants to leave.

The Language of Abortion

            I have been reluctant to touch the issue of abortion in my blog, not because I lack for a  stance about it, but mostly because I don’t want my thoughts dismissed as “radical right-wing garbage.” In our current climate, it is very dangerous to oppose abortion. The moment you do, you become fair game for those who are ready to label you a misogynist (or woman hater) or for those who are ready to paint you as dictatorial, narrow-minded, intolerant, in short, to describe you with the language many use to describe Christians. Now, I should point out that not all people who are “pro-life” are Christian, and it is also true, sadly, that not all Christians are “pro-life.” Still, the last reason I haven’t touched the issue is lack of a specific current event. My blog entries that touch on issues like unions, outsourcing and the like stem from particular items in the news, and now, abortion has come up for discussion thanks to the recent controversy surrounding the Susan G. Komen Foundation. But since the subject’s come up, I want to engage in calm, reasonable, rational, caring and truthful discussions here, emphasis on ‘caring’ and ‘truthful.’ So, to quote God from Isaiah 1:18, “Come, let us reason together.”

            I was fifteen when I learned just how abortions are performed. Two of my friends were going back and forth on the subject, and I was listening with only half an ear. I’d heard it all before, it seemed, and the debate simply didn’t interest me. Finally I chimed in with, “you know, how are abortions even done anyway?” My two friends fell silent, and one turned to me and offered to let the others sitting around us leave the room. No one did. She then explained in graphic and accurate detail how the most common procedures were done. She told me about suction abortions, saline abortions and partial birth abortions. I sat there in horror. I had a vivid imagination, you see, and once I had the how-to information in hand, imagining the actual process didn’t take much. A question came out of my mouth without my planning it.

“Amy,” I asked, “Why would anyone even think about doing that?”

Well, almost as many years have passed since that conversation. I’m twenty-nine now. Since that conversation, I’ve sat in philosophy classes beyond count, contemporary issues classes, biomedical ethics classes; I’ve been to three universities as a student and I’ve read feminist writers, post-modern writers, women’s rights advocates, sociology texts, and on and on and on. I’ve met a number of women who’ve had abortions. And still, I want to ask that question. Today, I am a linguist. I live by words and I thrive on knowing what people mean when they use words. So, my own contribution to the abortion debate (probably one of today’s most controversial issues) is to look at the words people use and figure out what’s going on. Let’s look at some language.

Rights and Choice

My first question:  which rights and what choice are we talking about? Reading the literature of NOW and Planned Parenthood and the like, certain answers keep coming up. These organizations talk about a woman’s choices in terms of her “reproductive rights.” The basic idea boils down to something like, “my body, my rights.” But again, rights to do what? A choice to do what?

The first problem with the, “it’s my body and I’ll decide what to do with it,” line of reasoning is that its inherently false. My arm is part of my body because it shares my DNA. The cells of my arm, my liver and my femur share my own unique genetic pattern. Yet, a baby, whether he or she is a zygote (the first cell formed after fertilization) or a fetus or a newborn on the verge of delivery, doesn’t fit this basic criterion for being called part of, “my body.” Their DNA is not identical to the woman’s, because that DNA includes the father’s contributions too. To take a more extreme example, even a cancer cell has more in common with the woman’s DNA than this baby does, because a cancer cell is a mutated cell of her own genetic code. A baby, by definition, has a genetic code that is unique to him or herself, and not entirely part of either her mother’s or her father’s genes. So, “my body?” That is incorrect. It’s not part of her body. It is a resident of her body, true. The baby is fully dependent on her mother’s body for life, true. But that doesn’t make the baby part and parcel of her body the way the mother’s arm or leg is. So, to this line of reasoning I would reply, “if most people wouldn’t kill a baby while it’s suckling at the breast, by what logic do we justify doing so a few months before it gets to come out and do that?” Let’s move on.

Let’s talk about the words ‘right’ and ‘privacy.’ They seem to be very important in this discussion. Many women’s rights advocates see abortion as being a matter of a woman’s right to privacy and personal choice. Many will argue vehemently that that right to privacy and that right to choice are sacrosanct, and that anti-abortion people are impinging upon those rights. This is a powerful argument to some, but I find its reasoning flawed.

First, our rights are already limited. I do not have the right to walk across the hall and shoot my neighbor. According to my lease, I do not have the right to play my music as loud as I want to even in the ‘privacy’ of my own home. If I’m arrested, I lose my right to privacy. I cannot abuse my children even in the ‘privacy’ of my own home, because I don’t have the right. In every one of the examples I just used, the notion of ‘privacy,’ held sacred by pro-abortion advocates, is superseded by other rights or circumstances or laws. So, apparently, we as a society do indeed hold some things as being able to transcend my right to privacy. Why, I ask in puzzlement, is killing a baby before it is born considered a matter of ‘privacy,’ but killing one the day after he or she is born isn’t a matter of ‘privacy?’

Now, let’s talk about the other word, ‘choice.’ In all the examples above, two things came into play, right and choice. I don’t necessarily have the right to do any of the things listed in that paragraph. That doesn’t mean, however, that I can’t choose to do them. I could walk over and shoot my neighbor. It’s a matter of choice, right? I could smack my kids around to my heart’s content. It’s a matter of choice, right? Well, ok, yes, I can choose to do those things. I have free will and a body that mostly obeys my commands. But you might reasonably point out that choices have consequences including legal ones, and because of these consequences,  I might refrain from shooting my neighbor or beating up my kids. Fair enough.

So, does abortion have consequences? Whose consequences? Well, since every biology textbook I’ve ever picked up defines the beginning of life as being at conception, the first answer is the baby’s consequences. A good number of abortions happen somewhere in the first trimester. By the end of that time, the baby displays facial expressions, has a heartbeat, generates a brain wave pattern unique to himself, kicks and makes fists, and the nerves are developing. Consider this from Dr. Robert Shearan, a surgeon who, we presume, knows his stuff:

As early as eight to ten weeks after conception, and definitely by thirteen-and-a-half weeks, the unborn experiences organic pain.... First, the unborn child's mouth, at eight weeks, then her hands at ten weeks, then her face, arms, and legs at eleven weeks become sensitive to touch. By thirteen-and-a-half weeks, she responds to pain at all levels of her nervous system in an integrated response which cannot be termed a mere reflex. She can now experience pain.

That last point is important, because abortion hurts like hell for the babies themselves. Yes, they feel pain, lots of it.

Other consequences to this ‘choice?’ I’ve met women who’ve had abortions, and I’ve read of countless more, and almost to a woman, they’ve talked about the emotional scarring, the regret and pain, that followed their abortion. Maybe not immediately, but at some point it came. Try this one:

Doctors shouldn't say it is easy for people to have an abortion. Because it's not an easy thing. People like my friends get pregnant, get an abortion, get pregnant, get an abortion, get pregnant, get an abortion. You know what I mean? All my friends that I've called say, Oh, it's a piece of cake.' For me, it wasn't a piece of cake.

The woman who said that was quoted in the Journal of the American Medical Association, folks. So, apparently, there are consequences to the women involved.

Are there any consequences to the fathers? Well, consider this:

She did it for me. I feel like I murdered somebody. I wish I could do it over again, if I could just go back in time and relive those years. If she'd had the child, even if we'd got married and everything, it wouldn't have been that bad. I've seen other people do it. Reality's such a bitch sometimes, you know?

That was spoken by a father who didn’t become a father, not that time anyway. One more, and this may surprise you. Abortion, that ‘choice,’ often has lasting consequences for many of the clinic workers who do them. Imagine being a nurse or tech whose job, eight hours a day, is to take babies in the womb and end their existences. Think I’m exaggerating? Let me spend a little time on this point, because it’s often overlooked. I have two longer quotations here which should shed some light on the issue. Consider this first,  most of the time, possibly all the time, the patient i.e. the mother, does not get to view the fetal remains. Who would want to, you ask? She is protected from seeing the end results. Not so for the technicians performing the abortion. They see the consequences up close and personally, and they see them right away in full color and HD. This first quote comes from a report presented to the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians by a veteran abortionist of twenty-three years’ experience and his assistant some years ago. They interviewed twenty-three current and former staffers at their clinic about their responses to viewing some of the procedures, and this, from the report, is a summary of what they found:

Many subjects reported serious emotional reactions which produced physiological symptoms, sleep disturbances, effects on personal relationships, and moral anguish.... Reactions to viewing the fetus ranged from "I haven't looked" to shock, dismay, amazement, disgust, fear and sadness.... Two felt that it must eventually damage [the doctor] psychologically… Two respondents described dreams which they had had related to the procedure. Both described dreams of vomiting fetuses along with a sense of horror. Other dreams revolved around a need to protect others from viewing fetal parts, dreaming that she herself was pregnant and needed an abortion or was having a baby.... The more direct the physical and visual involvement [i.e. nurses, doctors], the more stress experienced.

That’s pretty straight forward, isn’t it? Have you ever seen a suction machine? I haven’t. Well, ok, that’s not a blindness pun. I really never have been to an abortion clinic or handled the machinery responsible. I can’t say I want to, though I’d probably go if I had the chance and a reason. Here’s a description written by a woman researcher who was pro-choice at the time. This is graphic, I warn you:

I am drawn to the unit, irresistibly, by my reactions of disbelief, sorrow, horror, compassion, guilt. The place depresses me, yet I hang around after working hours. When I leave, I behave outside with the expansiveness of one who has just escaped a disaster. I have bad dreams. My sense of complicity in something nameless grows and festers. I consider giving up the research....

I remove with one hand the lid of a bucket.... I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person there floating in a bloody liquid--plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But then perhaps this was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises and the face has the agonized tautness of one forced to die too soon. Death overtakes me in a rush of madness. [the same woman goes on to talk about her experiences from the surgeon's end of the table.] During an abortion] The doctor pulls out something, which he slaps on the instrument table. "There," he says. "A leg."... I turn to Mr. Smith. "What did he say?" "He pulled a leg off," Mr. Smith says. "Right here." He points to the instrument table, where there is a perfectly formed, slightly bent leg, about three inches long. It consists of a ripped thigh, a knee, a lower leg, a foot, and five toes. I start to shake very badly, but otherwise, I feel nothing. Total shock is passionless....

"There, I've got the head out now"... There lies a head. It is the smallest human head I have ever seen, but it is unmistakably part of a person. My vision and my hearing though disengaged, continue, I note, to function with exceptional clarity. The rest of me is mercifully gone.

            Ok, under our laws it is a choice. Even when it was illegal, it was still a choice. No one disputes a woman’s ability to choose and that this is one possible choice. But is it a choice she should make? The consequences are far-reaching. They go beyond one woman and one baby. They impact lives in a widening circle that draws in fathers, family members, even the people paid to perform the abortion. I didn’t make these quotes up and they’re not the only ones I’ve found. The tone and content are remarkably similar. So again I ask, even if it is a choice, is it a right one?

Abortion vs. Murder

            I’m not trying to be flip here. When Christians call abortion ‘murder,’ they’re dismissed. When the laws of the land call it the same, most nod approvingly. What am I talking about? In an increasing number of U.S. states, a man who murders a pregnant woman is charged with two counts of murder, two. The woman’s and the unborn baby’s. The murder charge involving the unborn baby is pursued with all the seriousness as the charge concerning the woman. What does this tell me? It tells me (and remember I’m not even speaking morally) that there is a disconnect in the language and intent of our laws. Answer me this:  how is it murder if someone kills the woman and baby, yet if the woman pays to have the baby killed, it’s a medical procedure? Some might answer me, pointing out that in the first example, the woman dies too. Point taken, but the murder charge brought against the killer for the baby is the same murder charge that he would face if he’d killed, say, a mother and her newborn. No difference under the law that I’m aware of. So, my question remains a good one. And there is no answer. Well, there is one. Our laws concerning the unborn are inconsistent.

            In medicine, we call it ‘termination of a pregnancy.’ Yet if a doctor performed the same saline procedure or something similar once the baby was outside the womb, we would call it ‘murder’ and hang the doctor from the highest tree. The arguable exception to this was the partial-birth abortion. For those not in the know, the partial-birth abortion, put briefly, involves delivering the baby alive, just as you would normally, and then making an incision at the base of the baby’s skull and sucking her brains out with a vacuum pump. After that, the baby’s body is delivered the rest of the way. Fortunately, and isn’t it about time we had some good news, this type of abortion, which was made legal by President Clinton in 1997, was made illegal by legislation signed into law by George W. Bush in 2003. A 2007 Supreme Court decision, Gonzales v. Carhart, upheld the Partial-birth Abortion Ban Act. I add that many clinics have found ways to circumvent the wording of the law. Not surprising.

            I have not been trying to sensationalize the issue. I’ve just been talking about words we all use, ‘rights,’ ‘choice,’ ‘abortion’ and so on, trying to figure out just what we mean, regardless of what we think is meant, when we use this language in the abortion debate. This is not a comprehensive discussion of the issue. I have not, for example, mentioned the fact that the earliest women’s rights advocates, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were ardent supporters of women’s rights at a time when they had next to none, both vehemently opposed abortion, calling it a crime and labeling it murder. Hmmm, interesting. On that same subject, I have also not discussed the fact that many feminist groups oppose abortion, though you never hear about them. One is the Feminists For Life (FFL) which is passionately pro-women’s rights and is ardently anti-abortion. One member called the attempt to make abortion a women’s rights issue “terrorist feminism,” because women are deceived into believing they have to be willing to kill (babies, of course) to support the platform of women’s rights. I could go on and on. But this is a blog, not a book. I suppose, in closing, I’d have to say that what amazes me is not that some people oppose abortion, but that so many approve of it unreservedly. Feel free to respond reasonably.

Anybody Want a Job?

            This morning I had a technical question about my voice recognition software. After reading the “help” files and not having resolved my trouble, I placed a call to the company’s tech support line. Now, the company we’re talking about, Nuance Communications Inc. is headquartered right here in the good old U.S.A. They’re in Burlington Massachusetts to be exact. This is an important detail. Believe me. Well, tech support meant that I had to call Florida, the 407 area code. So, I did. And when I did I got this:  “Good Morning, thank you for calling Nuance Technical Support. My name is Louise. Have you called about this issue before?”

            My first impulse was to respond in Spanish. Louise is a name that occurs commonly in a variety of Hispanic communities, and as we all know, Florida has a massive Hispanic population. He had an accent, but it wasn’t distinctive enough to place it. So, I talked to good old Louise. Alarm bells began going off when we got to my first question, whether, given the advances made in the software in question, I, a totally blind user, still needed to employ a certain intermediary program to maximize my access to the voice recognition technology. A simple question, actually. When I talked to Nuance about six years ago, this interface I’m talking about was still widely used by blind users of Dragon Naturally Speaking, and Nuance was still recommending it. So, I know that the company knows what it is. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when the rep’s first questions revealed to me that he had no idea what in Heaven’s name I was talking about. Well, ok, I thought, not every tech rep is knowledgeable about everything. Let’s move on.

            Finally, the representative is helping me register my product so that I can get faster tech support next time I need it, and during our chat he asks me about the weather here. I tell him the weather’s fine, which for Illinois in late January, it really is, and I ask him in turn how Florida’s weather is. And he says, “Oh, this is the Philippines.”” He told me that my call to Florida had been routed to him at his desk there in Manila, as were most tech support calls about my product, it seems.

            Now, isn’t this a familiar story? How often do we have troubles with something from credit cards to computers and make a phone call, and get this (in extremely heavily-accented, barely comprehensible English), “Thank you for calling [company name]. My name is Robert. May I have your name please?” This happens to just about everyone these days. Comedians make fun of it. YouTube has who knows how many skits that poke fun at it. I’ve encountered it times without number with credit card accounts, technical support issues, even telemarketing. Today, people, I’m not laughing. If you haven’t figured it out, I’m talking about offshore outsourcing. It’s also known as ‘offshoring.’ Just so we’re straight on our terms here, I’m talking about situations where a company outsources overseas, not to another domestic company in country.

            My first encounter with outsourcing came at the age of fifteen in the late 90’s. I was walking through the commercial district of my home town (in so far as an army brat has a home town), which is Clarksville Tennessee. We passed the Acme Boots plant. Now, let me say a word about this company. It was founded in Chicago by two shoe makers, Jessel and Sidney Kohn. They moved their children’s and infants’ shoe factory to Clarksville Tennessee and set up shop on Crossland Avenue. Around 1940, they became known as Acme Boots, a name that many Clarksvillians would still remember today. The company history goes on from there, but the thing you ought to know is that this was an American company, founded by Americans, built by Americans and selling to Americans. In 1989, its Clarksville plant closed up shop. I’m told that the jobs out of that plant that weren’t liquidated were relocated to various manufacturing spots around Mexico.

            Back then, I didn’t have any understanding of business at all. I still have a limited understanding of large scale company finance. Then again, so do a lot of people. But I felt, standing there outside that closed up plant, that there was something wrong with closing up a local manufacturing facility, a place where men and women reported for work every day, did their work and took their duly earned pay, only to move that plant down to a country where those same jobs will be done by people who will be paid a pittance by our standards. Well, over a decade later, with two degrees under my belt and a third one on the way, now that I’m approaching 30 (only one more year until that happens), guess what, I still find something wrong with it.

            The usual reason you see companies sending their work overseas has to do with cost-cutting. Oh, they’ll tell you things like, “we do it so we can offer our products to you at a lower price.” Whether or not that’s true, it saves the company overhead when they can pay a call center full of people a buck or two an hour to do work that they’d have to pay us seven bucks an hour to do an upwards. Does that make Americans greedy? I’ve actually heard diehard business people of one party or another call the American worker ‘greedy’ because he won’t take wages like what Chinese or Mexican workers will take. Well, I don’t want to make this a Democrats versus Republicans issue. I am so disinterested in both parties that I can’t even tell you which party is on which side of this issue. It’s an American issue, people. Whether you voted for Obama or McCain, or Bush or Carry, it affects you and me. I say all that so we can talk about it without politicizing it more than we have to.

            So, why did I get some guy in the Philippines, way the hell and gone on the other side of the planet, when I, an American living in America, called an American company, using an American phone number, to get help? It happens all the time. But I submit to you this:  just because our larger and medium-sized businesses see a profit margin in it for them, that doesn’t make it right. I know I’m not alone in this point-of-view either. In August 2004, Zogby International conducted a poll  and found that 71% of American voters who participated said that they felt that this type of outsourcing hurt our economy, and another 62% felt that the government should impose some form of tax-based penalty on companies who outsourced. Well, that solution may or may not be workable or the best one. It sounds good, but I don’t know. Here’s something I do know, however.

            As for us on this level, we average consumers, I have news for us too. Cheaper isn’t always better. Remember that thing in the news a few months ago about the Chinese drywall manufacturer having to settle a lawsuit with all those people on the Gulf Coast because their houses were falling apart? Here’s a link to an ABC news story about that:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/chinese-drywall-settlement-reach-billion/story?id=15163447

The first question that popped into my head was, what the hell are homebuilders along the Gulf Coast doing getting their building materials from the Chinese? Sears used to build houses. Now the home builder of America is … let me get the right Anglicized spelling … Tianjin Co. I don’t care how much money we owe them. Do we have to let them build our houses? I’ve always thought Chinese-made stuff was junk to begin with, and so far, I haven’t been proven wrong. In fact, I’d say I’m right regardless of what the pro-Asian lobby thinks. A non-profit home building organization, Operation Helping Hands, actually went broke helping so many home owners across so many states to replace this stuff, which was corroding people’s pipes, their silverware and their jewelry and causing health problems.

Come on, folks! These are the same people who make most of the kids’ toys these days. You know, the ones you buy from Wal-Mart that fall apart as soon as you take them out of the box? Yeah, those guys. Drywall? Are you serious!

It’s time we stopped letting corporations opportunistically send jobs overseas. G.E., for instance, wants to send its x-ray division from Wisconsin to China. And the CEO claims that he expects that the move won’t cause any job losses. I doubt it. But even if he’s right about that based solely on the numbers, shouldn’t we be creating jobs here, not there? China keeps coming up, because it’s one of the most popular venues for our outsourcing. I guess the Chinese need our jobs more than we do, eh? India’s another one. Though most of the jobs that wind up in India have to do with customer support services, call centers and the like. If you have a question about your Master Card charge or your computer’s warrantee, it’s probably an Indian who will take the call. Again, I suppose New Deli residents need our entry level jobs much more than we Americans.

I know big business would reply and tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I do, actually. Just because something is legal, does that mean you ought to do it? As for us, the buyers, who sold us on the idea that cheaper is always better? I would be glad to pay a few dollars more for an American product that was actually made here in the USA. Assuming you have the money, shouldn’t you? I know. American stuff is more expensive. It also lasts, people. You get what you pay for. I’ll just have to be on the lookout next time I want a laptop and not by Li-Chou LTD’s computers. No, that’s a made up company name, but give it time, people. The way this country’s going. Just give it time. It’s hard to know where to end a post like this. So, I’ll stop here. Think about what I’ve said, would you? Till next time.

Internet Censorship, Rethinking the Issue

I keep seeing these “Stop Piracy” links on my Facebook page here, and I note a couple of interesting things. It's interesting how easy it is, when protesting, to fail to give an accurate and balanced view of the situation. I've had a hard time discovering for myself what's in these bills. All I've seen are a bunch of internet sites like Wikipedia ranting about it. Maybe their rants are perfectly justified. But maybe, just maybe, I'd like to see the legislation for myself and make a decision that is more informed than the average American's decision is going to be. This, for example, comes from the widely-circulating link from Google, "End Piracy, not liberty:"  Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Now, that single sentence is highly provocative and is apt to cause readers to swell with indignation. It's a carefully calculated piece of jingoistic propaganda which is designed to motivate you to fight to the death for your rights. It smacks of “give me liberty [read internet] or give me death.” Hang on, though. Hold it a sec. Think with me about that one sentence for a moment before moving on, "would censor the web?" Every time a cite is banned for bootlegging uncopyrighted movies, that's a form of censorship. Yet, we don't seem to complain. When parents impose controls that filter what their kids can and can’t view on the net, that's censorship of a sort. Do we complain? Companies, colleges and universities (especially private ones) have regulations and guidelines out the old ying-yang telling their customers, employees, students and other staff what they may, may not, or must view. Is that censorship? Yet, we don't complain. “Impose harmful regulations on American business.” Ok, what regulations? Who would be affected? Wikipedia certainly wouldn’t be in my opinion. It’s free. The advertisers who support Wikipedia and Google? Well, before you say anything, remember, Google already limits what you can advertise on there. The limits aren’t anything most of us would protest against and consist of things we would find sensible. Go read their policy on this subject, but it is a form of, dare I say it, “censorship.” And I’m not even saying they’re wrong. I’m saying that no one, not even the BBC article I read courtesy of someone on my Facebook page this afternoon, is bothering to find out what, exactly what, is contained in these bills. So, I tried to. Where are the bills? By the way, if anyone does discover the full text of the bills, send me a link. Maybe I’ll revise my opinions in light of what I read, maybe not. In any case, googling the bill titles or legislation numbers does little good. You can find ten thousand articles about the protests or articles that claim to explain what the bills are about, to be sure. There’s even a Wikipedia article on each one. But how much can I trust Wikipedia to provide me with a fair and balanced view of what the bills contain? I don’t have anything against Wikipedia, mind you, but this cite is adamantly opposed to the legislation, and so its point-of-view is already suspect. Similarly, most media has a left-leaning bias and will always present the anti-censorship position. I don’t want pro or anti-bill arguments. I want to read the actual text and nothing but the text of the very legislation itself. That’s what all of us need to be doing. Yes, it may require using a dictionary and it won’t be as easy to read as a fluff novel, but reading the legislation itself, for yourself, is the only way you have of insuring that you make a decision that is truly your own. Otherwise, good luck..

            Now then, based on what I was able to find, even using Wikipedia’s own information against it, as it were, here’s some food for thought. This reminds me of the Nabster crisis. The music industry is still struggling with lost revenues from artists whose works are transferred through file sharing again and again. Nowadays, there are plenty of ways to buy music digitally and legally. I have no problem paying $0.99 for a song. I have no problem paying Netflicks for movies or TV viewing if I want to. I believe that an artist or author should be compensated for their work. I’ve written stories. None of them are published, but I’ve done it. If I ever did publish something I’ve written, I’d want to choose whether or not to make money from it. If I publish it on Hubpages, for example, then it’s free and open to everyone. That’s probably what I’d do But suppose, just suppose, that you, the reader here, publish something like a novella in an anthology or in some other royalty-generating way. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. If you want to make your livelihood with the written word, I wish you well. Then, supposing someone took your novella or poetry collection that you’d legally copyrighted and put into bookstores, hand scanned it with a doc scanner and posted it to the web, how would you feel about it. They could even do so without mentioning your name. What would you think of that? If you find yourself not liking that idea very much, well, now you’re starting to get it. Foreign web sites, those beyond the reach of our laws, can do just that and have done it.

            Let’s consider something else beyond the issue of censorship. Opponents of these two bills moan about first amendment rights. Big surprise there. Now, I’m a fan of the first amendment, no matter what the radical left thinks. Consider this:  it is illegal to threaten to bomb a plane or a building. It is generally illegal to crash a commercial site with spam messages. It is illegal to talk to the Taliban about plans to poison America’s water supply. You can’t even shout, “fire,” in a movie theater. These are all exercises of speech, and there are those who’d claim that every one of them should be allowed in theory because of freedom of speech. What I am saying is just this:  there have been times and places where we have seen fit to restrict or censor the freedom of speech or press. Now, given that, the question is not or should not be, “are these bills violating our first amendment rights.” The question we should be asking is, “what do first amendment advocates want to be able to do that these bills would limit them from doing?” Online publishing of their own work? I don’t think so. Sharing free content? I don’t think so either. Does it ban people from doing business with or supporting certain web sites? What kinds of sites? Well, if it bans them from opportunistically supporting sites that specialize in distributing copyrighted materials to people who haven’t paid for them, well, shouldn’t they be banned from doing so?

            There’s another provision, so it seems, that would penalize users, possibly criminally, for continued streaming or downloading of copyrighted internet content that they haven't paid for or gotten permission to use. Now, I’m sure we’ve all done this at some point at one time or another. I’m sure I have, possibly without even knowing it. Sometimes, though, I did know it. These issues of streaming and file sharing are new ones relatively speaking. Our copyright laws have only begun to address this issue, because up to about a decade ago, this form of digital media simply wasn’t available and it wasn’t the way people chose to publish. But now with ITunes, Amazon’s Kindle reader, Audible and Google Books, electronic media is becoming the means of publication for everything from songs to poetry to doctoral dissertations to the latest novels. Now, I remember when file sharing was only just starting to be cracked down on by the R.I.A.A. I knew, and still know, people with not hundreds, or thousands, but tens of thousands of songs sitting on their hard drives, all illegally file shared. Now, my friend Nick can give you a better idea of when a song that you get is legally gotten and when it’s not. Suffice it to say that not all songs you get for free are illegally had, but that the big file sharing sites like LimeWire, Kazaa or whatever people are using today are not legal means of exchanging tunes. So, take an acquaintance of mine who has something like twenty thousand songs on his hard drive. If fifteen thousand of them are illegal downloads or file shares, then, at a cost of, let us say, one dime per song, that represents $1500 worth of music that he didn’t pay for. If we were talking about jewelry or food or any tangible goods, the phrase we’d use is “stolen property.” In fact, at that value’s worth of goods, we’d be talking about felony prosecution for grand larceny.

            So, should it make a difference whether the goods stolen are shoes or songs? Some think it should make a difference indeed. Many people feel like you shouldn’t prosecute someone for piracy like the type I’ve been describing. Yet, I ask, what is the real difference between steeling $100 worth of shirts from Coal’s or steeling $100 worth of movies or songs from their makers. The difference is only in technique. When I steel a shirt, I walk into a store, take a shirt off the rack and walk out with it. Alternatively, I do the same from my friend’s dresser. I’ve still absconded with property that I do not own. I didn’t pay the store for it, nor did I pay sales tax on it. I have stolen it. If I steel it from my buddy’s dresser, I’ve freely taken something to which his money entitled him, not me. But there’s a perception out there that if I download your movie from a web site that offers it, what have I really done? It’s harmless, right? Well, no. Because actors, directors, camera people, makeup artists, sound effects people, and musicians and writers made that movie to sell to you in the hopes that you’d enjoy it and that they’d make a little money from it. What’s wrong with that? In my view, nothing.

            Finally, some critics warn that if the American government is prepared to ban foreign web sites for whatever reasons, then foreign countries may ban American web sites for their own social and political reasons, thereby harming us. Well, that’s their right. That’s why it’s called a “foreign” country. I don’t really care whether China bans Facebook or whether or not the Saudis ban Amazon. Of course, Facebook and Amazon may care a great deal; I don’t know. But foreign governments can do whatever they want with the internet in their country. I think we’re big enough to take it if France bans a web site or two or if the Brits don’t like one of our news outlets because it infringes on their personal privacy acts by reporting confidential news. Guess what. We don’t own the net and it’s not up to us to tell other countries what to do with it. It is our job to protect ourselves. That may mean that we ban some foreign sites from doing business with us in order to protect our own copyrights. And it may have the consequence that foreign governments do it to us. Tough. If we can do it, why can’t they? In fact, some do. Check out China.

            Fundamentally, I disagree with Professor Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law prof who specializes in the Constitution. He claims that SOPA and PIPA would undermine freedom of speech and the free exchange of information on the internet. I don’t see any inconsistencies in trying to balance an open forum like the net with safeguarding the property rights of people who have something worth protecting. And it is property, people. Even if it’s not a house or a car or a shirt, it’s still theirs, and if you didn’t pay for it and they didn’t give it away, you have no damned right to it. End of discussion. Replies should be … interesting.

Old-Time Radio

            This all started, depending on your perspective, when I was eight years old in Barns and Noble or just a few weeks ago courtesy of a conversation with Nicole about advertising techniques. What am I talking about? A rediscovered hobby of mine which we’ll get to. Oh yeah, where have I been, you ask? Let’s see. It’s been a while since my last blog post, I know. That isn’t due to a lack of things to talk about, but rather to a plethora of things to do and the accompanying exhaustion that follows doing them. For starters, I’m going to be here an extra year. Despite intensive recruiting efforts and $30 per head paid out of my own pocket, I still don’t have enough subjects for my study. This, I suppose, is the big downside to human subjects-based studies. So, that prolongs my studies an extra year. Meanwhile, I continue writing those parts of the dissertation that can be written in the absence of data. Did I mention that I hate lit reviews? My one solace is that my advisor hates them too. Misery loves company.

            Christmas was wonderful if you were wondering. Nicole popped up here at the end of November, spent Thanksgiving with me and then we traveled back to North Carolina for Christmas. After a New Year’s spent in Tennessee, where I reaffirmed my pension for singing Lynnard Skynnard tunes under the influence, we’re back. Having taken on a winter pre-semester German course and finished it, both because I wanted to and because of the extra few hundred it’d bring in, I now sit here contemplating the start of a new semester. That’s it for catching up. You know me. I’m not one for writing blog posts solely for that purpose. So, let’s get on with it.

            I’ve recently rediscovered my latent interest in the Golden Age of radio, a hobby which seems to interest more people than I’d have thought. This all got started when Nicole and I were sitting around talking about commercials and I began looking up old 50’s ads. This led to my remembering my youth. One day about twenty years ago, my mother and I were in a bookstore in the mall. She was and is an avid bookworm. There are worse vices that a person can have, so I don’t blame anyone for having too many books. Anyway, it was her custom that on such book runs, I could have one or two audio books. Audio books back in the early 90’s were both a bit scarce and rather expensive. There just weren’t that many, and most people hadn’t caught on to listening to books. Now, thankfully, blind people in this country have benefited enormously from the public’s interest in audio-recorded books. Thanks everybody. Well, on this one particular day I couldn’t decide what I wanted, so, she picked.

            What she got was a set of four cassettes and on each cassette were two recordings from either the old Suspense Theater or one of the old detective episodic serials. Well, time has passed and now much of this material is available online either for streaming or for download courtesy of the Old-Time Radio Research Group.

            The Suspense Theater is particularly interesting, because it featured a new half-hour-long story each week, never with the same characters and rarely the same actors. The show’s trademark was the announcer’s intro. Every title was followed by the tag, “a tale well calculated to keep you in … suspense!” That’s how I came to know some of those old names you just never see on screen anymore:  Danny Kaye, Douglas Fairbanks, Joseph Cotton, Bob Hope, Olivia de Havilland, Bette Davis and Lucille Ball. A lot of those names are still known today. What’s interesting is that their appearance on radio was usually secondary to their screen work and in many cases was simply the side work they did to make money while struggling to promote themselves on screen. Lucille Ball’s best radio work, in my humble opinion, took place ten years before “I love Lucie,” and it’s not something she’s particularly well known for anymore. Danny Kaye is probably totally unknown today, but he sounded good on the radio to be sure.

            The first suspense program I ever listened to was one of Lucille Ball’s roles. It was a 1948 production called, “A Little Piece of Rope.” She played Isabel Towns, a professional blackmailer who winds up snagging The Strangler, a local serial killer, as one of her victims. On the reverse side of that cassette was Danny Kaye in the 1949 show, “The Too Perfect Alibi,” about a man who tries to ease his romantic rival out of the way so that he can get the girl and winds up watching her go to the chair for the crime, kind of an unintended twist. My first exposure to Bob Hope was his 1949 role in the show, “Death Has a Shadow,” where he plays a shady lawyer (is there any other kind) who’s knocked off his wife and now has to face being knocked off by the killer he hired to do the deed. I first came across Olivia de Havilland in her 1944 role as Judith Webster in “Voyage Through Darkness.” It goes on and on.

            As good as Suspense Theater was, to me, the detectives were even better. I have to say I don’t care much for Sam Spade. My all-time favorite was and is still Richard Diamond, most famously played by Dick Powel on radio from 1949-53. I saw an episode of the TV show they made out of it in the mid-50’s, and it just wasn’t such of a much. Diamond is a former New York City cop turned private I who’s always near broke and starving for clients while dating, of course, a multi-millionaire who he just can’t seem to settle down with. I’d have to say Diamond and I get along because of his sense of humor. Nicole seems to think it resembles mine to a certain degree. Maybe it does. And then there’s the whistling jingle that always starts the show that gets stuck in your head, not to mention the incessant cigarette ad and accompanying jingle that ran for better than a year around 1950 that gets featured in each program. I have over a hundred of the episodes, and despite its repeating themes, Diamond’s corny slogans when he answers his office phone, the ever-present girl who comes on to Diamond and winds up pulling a gun, the beating Diamond usually takes at some point in the show, and the cops who frequently save Diamond’s bacon, the stories are still funny and interesting. Nicole’s favorite part is the song he sings to his girlfriend at the end. This is a nod to Dick Powel’s Hollywood singing days. And so, a piano solo is featured at the conclusion of each case.

            The other detective I got into in a big way is one who is still extremely well-known today, Phillip Marlowe. I admit I can take or leave Raymond Chandler’s writing. Still, there’s no better actor for Marlow than Gerald Mohr, who acted in several thousand radio plays and played Marlowe from 1948-51. A frequently used intro tag line, “Now get this and get it straight. Crime is a sucker’s road and those who travel it end up in the gutter, the prison or the grave.” These were simpler times, cynics could argue, before people realized how easy it was to get away with crime, some kinds of it anyway, thus giving the lie to Marlowe’s tag line. I, however, am not a cynic. The overall message of the early hardboiled detectives was that crime doesn’t pay. One wonders what Marlowe or Diamond or even Sam Spade would think of America today. They’d probably say it hasn’t changed much.

            So there you have it. It’s a harmless hobby. It’s completely free. But it does make me wish that television and radio were as good today. Nicole tells me there’s still some good suspense theater (not the specific Suspense Theater I’ve been talking about) on today. I’ll have to see it for myself. It does seem, however, that the age of the hardboiled detective on the radio has passed. In fact, radio itself isn’t such of a much. Aside from music, you usually are just left with ranting ultraconservative talk radio, more of an entertainment venue than a source of real information, and I don’t find it entertaining. One of the chief exceptions to this is the Left Behind series of radio plays and the Chronicles of Narnia, two separate versions. So, if anyone has their own favorites from the Golden Age of radio, let me know.