waagnfnp

by spyder 
My own take on May the first in 2007.

The following represents the strands of ribbons to become entwined as we dance around the axis mundi in the commons of a forest meadow. Each a line of thinking of the royal screwing that this day represents, so fertile and fecund, so phallic and virile, dancing about the shaft that has been deeply inserted into the mother, into the consecrated Earth. Plunge that puppy right in there, and dance the night away.

The Rites of Spring
Beltaine was a time of fertility and unbridled merrymaking, when young and old would spend the night making love in the Greenwood. In the morning, they would return to the village bearing huge budding boughs of hawthorn (the may-tree) and other spring flowers with which to bedeck themselves, their families, and their houses. They would parade back to their homes, stopping at each house to leave flowers, and enjoy the best of food and drink that the home had to offer. In every village, the maypole—usually a birch or ash pole—was raised, and dancing and feasting began. Festivities were led by the May Queen and her consort, the King who was sometimes Jack-in-the-Green, or the Green Man, the old god of thewildwood . They were carried through the village in a cart naked save the covering of flowers and enthroned in a leafy arbor as the divine couple whose unity symbolized the sacred marriage of earth and sun.

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A specter is haunting America — the specter of financial apocalypse. Record-breaking current-account deficits, plummeting regional housing markets, a weakening dollar, and news that major central banks around the world are beginning to diversify their currency reserves have made the possibility that the U.S. could soon experience what happened to Mexico and Southeast Asia in the 1990s newsworthy even to the reliably rah-rah American corporate media. With Time and the Atlantic Monthly examining the cases for alarm and calm, respectively, in recent weeks, the time has come for the WAAGNFNP to consider its stance on global capitalism.

Flashback: It’s Fall 1997 and I’m teaching a course called Globalization and Its Discontents in the Princeton Writing Program. The course, which examines the processes and discourses of globalization, is a challenge for my students, who come from all over the western hemisphere, but they really get into it and work incredibly hard. After surveying attempts to define globalization in the context of major post-Cold War-paradigm-shift candidates, from Fukuyama’s “end of history” to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” from Barber’s “jihad vs. McWorld” to Kaplan’s “coming anarchy,” we turn to debates over globalization of manufacturing, agriculture, trade, finance, labor, racism, civil society, and culture: is it really happening? is it new? is it a good thing? for whom? can and should it be stopped? why or why not?

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Sixty-two years ago today, American army units, supported by naval artillery, were preparing for yet another assault on Kakazu Ridge, a part of the outer line of the “Shuri” defenses on the southern part of Okinawa Island. April 1st, Easter Sunday, had been L Day (the landings on Okinawa itself) for Operation ICEBERG. There had been little opposition to the American landings, nor any significant fighting during the first few days of the operation. However, within the first week, American Army units, including my father’s, had begun to run up against the well-established Japanese defenses concentrated in the southern third of the island and which took full advantage of the abundant rocky hills, caves and burial tombs. These engagements marked the start of more than two months of  bitter fighting as American Army and Marine units slowly forged advances through the well-prepared Japanese defenses. When they reached the southern tip of the island in June, the last land battle of World War II came to a close. The Americans had suffered 12,000 dead and 50,000 wounded, the Japanese Army almost 100,000 dead and 7,000 captured (up to a quarter of the army was Okinawan conscripts), and estimates of the death toll among Okinawan civilians ranged from 40,000 to 150,000 (modern consensus favors the higher estimates.)

Hill that was part of the defenses, normally covered with verdant foliage.

US Tanks and infantry on Okinawa.

The campaign for Okinawa had many noteworthy features, including the most intense Kamikaze attacks of the war against the supporting US fleet, extensive use of flamethrowers against entrenched Japanese defenses, mass civilian suicides, the deaths of the commanding officers on both sides - and of the famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle, the sinking of the “super” battleship Yamato, intense disagreements on strategy and tactics within both the American and Japanese commands, and of course the question of what impact, if any, it had on the subsequent decision by the United States to use atomic weapons against mainland Japan. For further reading, I recommend the official Army history available online here, and the books: Operation Iceberg (primarily an oral history) and Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb. For me, Okinawa has served as a nexus of the personal and the historical, linking my quest to connect to my father’s specific experiences, with the larger narratives of World War II, war in general and the decision to use atomic weapons . (I want to thank The Constructivist for this post at Mostly Harmless and a subsequent one here at waagnfnp which prompted my latest reexamination of my views on the entire episode, and which led directly to this post.)

As far back as I can remember, I was aware that my father had served in World War II, but it was only after he had rebuked me in uncharacteristically angry tones for suggesting that a particularly intense fireworks display might be akin to an actual bombardment, that I began to view his time in the war in anything other than the most simple-minded comic book terms.
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By James Killus

I cried because I had no shoes,
’till I met a man who had no feet.
So I said, ‘You got any shoes you’re not using’?

– Steven Wright.

My last summer at RPI (Rensselear Polytechnic Institute), when I was putting some finishing touches on my Master’s Project, I had a roommate named Ed Kulis. This isn’t going to be a “funny name” essay, though I acknowledge the potential..

I had a pretty good apartment down on 10th St., close enough to campus to walk if I wanted, far enough that it wasn’t embarrassing to drive. I’d had a couple of other roommates while there, but there were also several stretches where I lived alone. One of the nice things about the place was that it was cheap enough that I could do that.

Anyway, Ed always drove. The first thing I ever noticed about him was that he walked funny. A short while into our acquaintance, when we were walking across a parking lot, having just climbed some stairs, I asked “What’s wrong with your legs?”

“What legs?” he replied, and grinned a little.

Several years earlier, Ed’s car had broken down on the Sawmill Parkway, just north of New York City. It was a VW, engine in back, and while he was checking the engine, a truck hit him. He woke up several days later in the hospital, minus much of his legs. One ended mid thigh, the other had a bit left below the knee. His “funny walk” was nigh onto a miracle of rehabilitation therapy and athletic level control of his prostheses.

The whorehouse Madame answers the door and at first doesn’t see anybody. Then she looks down a bit and sees a guy in a motorized wheelchair. He’s a quadruple amputee, no arms, no legs.

“Don’t just stand there,” he says. “Let me in.”

“But you’re a quadruple amputee,” she blurts out.

“I rang the damn bell, didn’t I?” he replies.
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By Amanda French

From my enormous second-story concrete porch or deck or balcony or
whatever it is (and by enormous I mean twice as big as my apartment’s
living room), I have a great view of squirrels. Lots of squirrels.
Thereare lots of trees near the house, so when I sit out on my second-story
porch (I’m going with “porch”), I’m kind of up in the boughs right
among’em, the squirrels. There’s one methodically tightrope-walking the
telephone line about twenty feet straight in front of my nose and
exactly level with my eyes. There’s two chasing each other in a
skittering helix up and around and down the tree trunk like red stripes
up and around and down an electric barber pole. There’s one eyeing me
worriedly, completely still except for the whipcracking bushy tail.
There’s one triumphantly making the notoriously tough leap from the
thick fallen branch stuck in the tree crotch to the thin branch of the
next tree over. The branch dips and sways as the leaper grabs it and
scurries upward.

I like watching the squirrels, and I feel fairly expert at it by now.
One of the reasons that I like watching them is that I know what
they’re called. Squirrels. They’re called squirrels. They don’t have any other
name that I should be calling them, as far as I know, though I’m sure
there is some Latin term. Maybe biologists call them “American
squirrels” or “gray squirrels” or “brown squirrels” or “common
squirrels” when they’re not using the Latin, but only the pedantic
would call them something like that. They’re called squirrels, and everyone
knows it, and everyone knows exactly what I mean when I say squirrels.
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This is a shot I took last month of my older and younger daughters outside the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. I blog about them here and there every so often. This is one of those times.

Imoto’s stroller is almost exactly at the hypocenter — what Americans are more accustomed to calling Ground Zero. With my caption, I’m trying to capture something of the effect that the museum’s opening exhibit had on me. It was a small, dimly-lighted room filled with photos of everyday life in Nagasaki the morning before the blast and items large and small that testify to its force, including beams from a school water tower, remains from a church, and a clock stopped at 11:02 am, all staying still to the beat of an ominously ticking clock.

It wasn’t only that this simple exhibit made me replay the all-too-typical “imagine you and everyone you love disappearing in an instant” nuclear disaster fantasy scenario anyone who, like me, grew up near a U.S. military base during the Cold War has probably run through their heads a million times by now: it wasn’t quite the imaginative empathy of identifying with the victims or putting myself and my family in their place. It wasn’t only that standing at the second place in human history where this fantasy became reality confronted me with its limits: it wasn’t quite the ethical recognition of the impassable gulf between witnesses-thrice-removed and victims. And it wasn’t only that I was nevertheless forced to reflect on my tangled ties to Nagasaki, as an American citizen married to a Japanese citizen whose two daughters are dual citizens (until they turn 21, under current laws, at least).
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By Dr. Free Ride

[Update to the Update: 4/11/07 - On the off chance that anyone comes back by here. Dr. Free Ride’s response to the comments can be found here.

Update 3/25/07 - Good news! Dr. Free Ride will be making a follow-up post to address “a bunch of the points raised here”. Look for it sometime during the week of April 9th. Would be sooner, but a dealine on a paper has to be met by next week. Thanks for your patience. - Oaktown Girl, MOJ.]

There’s a rumor afoot that serious scientists must abandon what, in the common parlance, is referred to as “faith”, that “rational” habits of mind and “magical thinking” cannot coexist in the same skull without leading to a violent collision.

We are not talking about worries that one cannot sensibly reconcile one’s activities in a science which relies on isotopic dating of fossils with one’s belief, based on a literal reading of one’s sacred texts, that the world and everything on it is orders of magnitude younger than isotopic dating would lead us to conclude. We are talking about the view that any intellectually honest scientist who is not an atheist is living a lie.

I have no interest in convincing anyone to abandon his or her atheism. However, I would like to make the case that there is not a forced choice between being an intellectually honest scientist and being a person of faith.
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