Keith Burgess-Jackson

I leave you this fine evening with a column by Gen LaGreca. While I like the substance of the column, the writing is atrocious. Count the metaphors in the final two paragraphs:

Today’s nanny concocts a bitter brew of hundreds of alphabet-soup agencies to regulate our lives. How many modern pioneers are choking at this campfire?

To grab the reins of our lives, to ride free and unafraid like Daniel Boone, we must get the nanny off our backs.

Ah yes, get the nanny off our backs. Maybe we should get our mouths off the nanny’s teats.

10-22-87 . . . For many months now there has been a recall movement afoot in the state [of Arizona]. The target is Evan Mecham, our Mormon, car-dealer governor. It was recently announced by recall organizers that a sufficient number of signatures has been collected to put the matter to a vote. Meanwhile, Mecham has belittled the movement and refuses to talk about it. One gets the impression that he’s going down with the ship, like any good captain. But today there was startling news out of the capitol [sic; should be “capital”]. It appears that the governor failed to report a $350,000 loan from a Tempe attorney-developer. That’s illegal. Now there’s talk of an impeachment proceeding rather than a recall. According to our state constitution, any public officer can be impeached for committing a felon, misdemeanor, or malfeasance in office (whatever that means). The House [of Representatives] considers the charges and, if a majority of members votes to impeach, the matter will be heard by the Senate. It takes a two-thirds vote of the senators to convict, after which the governor is precluded from holding any other state office. So things are getting interesting. As far as I’m concerned, impeachment is better than a recall, since it rests on a criminal conviction and prevents future officeholding. I despise Evan Mecham and all that he stands for.

Vegetarianism is overdetermined. If all you care about is animals, you should be a vegetarian. If all you care about is the natural environment, you should be a vegetarian. If all you care about is yourself, you should be a vegetarian. If all you care about is human beings, you should be a vegetarian. If all you care about is your children, you should be a vegetarian.

Power is access. To be powerful is to have access to others. To be accessible to others is to be powerless. One of these days, people are going to realize that cellphones are a form of servitude. I’m nobody’s servant.

The editorial board of the New York Times wants to reward, rather than punish, those who are in this country illegally. Could there be a better way to get even more illegal aliens? Here is the policy the board advocates:

Find out who they are. Distinguish between criminals and people who just want to work. Get them on the books. Make them pay what they owe—not just the income, Social Security, sales and property taxes they already pay, but all their taxes, and a fine. Get a smooth legal flow of immigrants going, and then concentrate on catching and deporting bad people.

Suppose 10 people broke into a board member’s house. The member would presumably advocate the following:

Find out who they are. Distinguish between criminals and people who just want to work. Get them on the books. Make them pay what they owe—for room and board. Get a smooth legal flow of house guests going, and then concentrate on catching and evicting bad people.

Not likely, is it? But what’s the difference?

What is needed is a philosophy that does not just comment from the outside, but participates in the process of science itself. There must not be any boundary line between science and philosophy. Nor should one be content with an increase in efficiency, truth content, empirical content, or what have you. All these things count little when compared with a happy and well-rounded life. We need a philosophy that gives man the power and the motivation to make science more civilized rather than permitting a superefficient, supertrue, but otherwise barbaric science to debase man. Such a philosophy must show and examine all the consequences of a particular form of life including those which cannot be presented in words. Thus there must not be any boundary between philosophy and the rest of human life either.

(Paul Feyerabend, “Let’s Make More Movies,” chap. 13 in The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, ed. Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell [New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975], 201-10, at 208-9)

Note from KBJ: I’ve been mining this book for quotations for almost half a year. I hope you enjoyed them. Several of the essays in the book are asinine. Sometimes I think there is nothing that all “philosophers” have in common, except the name. In some cases, I don’t have the foggiest idea what some “philosopher” is saying. What a discipline!

Congratulations to the Boston Red Sox (and their fans) for winning the American League Championship Series. The Cleveland Indians started off well, then faltered. As so often happens in the postseason, it came down to pitching. Cleveland’s top two starters, C. C. Sabathia and Fausto Carmona, didn’t perform; Boston’s top two starters, Josh Beckett and Curt Schilling, did. As for what’s to come, I think Boston will win the World Series, perhaps by way of a sweep. Experience is important in the postseason, and Boston has more of it than Colorado. That said,  I hope the Rockies prevail. It’ll be interesting to see whether the weather cooperates in Denver this weekend.

Here.

To the Editor:

It isn’t enough that Americans are now routinely working 14-hour days, that no one cooks a real dinner anymore, that kids and parents stand around eating takeout in the kitchen at 10 p.m., that dinnertime conversation is dead, that the two-week family vacation is a thing of the past? Now we have to do this to the French?

If they have spent any time thinking at all, they’ll conclude that a life of ever more fancy gadgets and bigger houses to clean but no leisure time is a poor exchange. We could learn a few things from them. Vive le 35-hour workweek!

Carolyn Ziegler
Pine Mountain Club, Calif.
Oct. 18, 2007

Note from KBJ: Anyone who wishes to have a 35-hour workweek is welcome to it. Is there a law that requires people to work 40 or more hours? Take me, for example. I could have practiced law for a living and earned a hell of a lot more money than I earn as a professor. I chose the relaxed life. That’s how things are done in a free society. Has the letter writer lost sight of the distinction—it’s pretty basic—between allowing people to do X and coercing them into doing X? Is she suggesting that nobody be allowed to work more than 35 hours per week? Can you say “totalitarianism”? By the way, how likely is it that people who work 14-hour days to buy “fancy gadgets and bigger houses” are going to cook real dinners, talk to one another, take family vacations, and enjoy leisure time if their workweek is reduced to 35 hours? Will these things be mandated by law? Isn’t it just as likely that they’ll spend their evenings in the nearest pub, drinking themselves into oblivion, wondering where their freedom went?

The editorial board of the New York Times thinks you are undertaxed. I’m serious! It wants agents of the state to take even more of your hard-earned money and give it to others. I have a better idea. Let people keep the fruits of their labor. Those who can’t make it on their own should look to charity. Those who want to help others should, by all means, do so—instead of trying to coerce everyone else into giving. Is everything now a public responsibility? Whatever happened to intermediate institutions such as church, union, party, school, extended family, community center, and neighbor? Progressives don’t like intermediate institutions, for they generate loyalties to something other than the state. Also, they can’t be controlled. Progressives want uniformity, regulation, bureaucracy, and centralized control. All else, in their view, is chaos. What progressives view as chaos, conservatives view as spontaneous order. Progressives want to impose order from above; conservatives want it to evolve from below, through the voluntary decisions of individuals. Progressives detest federalism; conservatives relish it. Progressives hate markets, which they view as disorderly; conservatives believe that markets are efficient allocation mechanisms.

Stephen Krueger responded to my plea for a flowchart. See Addendum 2 of this post.

Here.

As Yankee fans, libertarians, and soccer aficionados well know, I like to tease, taunt, and torment people—in a jocular way. Don’t ask why. I just do. Twenty years ago today, my letter to the editor of the Arizona Daily Wildcat (the student newspaper of the University of Arizona) was published. Here it is:

To the Editor

Thank you for the feature article on the rock group Kiss (Encore, Oct. 8)[.] As writer Mike Gillette implies, it is high time that Kiss is recognized as the musical and social force that it is. Thousands of us who came of age in the early ’70s fell in love with such classics as “Deuce,” “Hotter than Hell” and “Ladies in Waiting.” I’m proud to say that I attended seven Kiss concerts and purchased all of their albums. No musical group has had more of an influence on my life, and I doubt that any ever will.

And yet, despite the obvious quality of their music, Kiss is shunned—even ridiculed—by so-called music critics. This never ceases to amaze me. You see, when the history of rock ’n’ roll is written, Kiss will have a chapter to itself. Other groups, such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, will warrant at most a footnote. In the end, quality always prevails. Long live Kiss! It’s time for the Kiss army to come out of the closet. We may be attorneys, doctors and military officers by now, but we still groove to the strains of “Detroit Rock City.”

Keith Burgess-Jackson
Graduate Assistant
Department of Philosophy

One of my fellow graduate students, Jonathan Kandell, was the newspaper’s art critic. He called me one evening before the letter appeared to inform me that the editorial staff had debated it. He wasn’t sure whether the letter would be published, but guessed that it would be. My aim, as you can imagine, was to provoke. It was by then fashionable for twentysomethings to dismiss Kiss as nothing more than a “hair band.” I still chuckle when I read my letter.

My liberal (socialist) buddy hates the Yankees as much as you. Why? It isn’t FAIR that they win so much.

A lifetime of trying to get him to appreciate what it TAKES to keep on winning has failed utterly. (Me thinks that represents my life in business versus his as tenured professor.)

If asked which country is the “best” in the world he pegs the U.S. at about 7th or 8th. I am convinced he believes it isn’t FAIR that we have been so successful. I can’t say he hates the U.S., but it wouldn’t surprise me if he thought we were too big for our britches and maybe time we lost a war or two. “The U.S. clearly struts around the world thinking too much of itself . . .” There is no underdog he doesn’t favor. (E.g., the Rockies . . .)

Perhaps your Yankee hatred betrays some of your liberal roots still growing unbeknownst to you that allows fairness to cloud your judgment. To be highly successful year after year is more meritorious than once in twenty.

Will Nehs

Note from KBJ: Why does your buddy hate me, Will? Does he even know me? As for why I hate the Yankees, it’s simple. They try to buy titles. What good is a title if you bought it? It’s like buying a Purple Heart.