Where Politics and Language Meet: Lakoff v. Pinker

Here's an interesting kerfluffle: Stephen Pinker wrote a pretty excoriating review of George Lakoff's latest book Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea. Lakoff's rebuttal is here. I haven't read the book, although I read and enjoyed Lakoff's previous work Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, and I have only skimmed Pinker's attack here and Lakoff's rebuttal, but they certainly look interesting. (Comments? minnehaha B? sleigh? cakmpls? Bueller?)

Santorum and The Lord of the Rings

I winced when I read this story:

Embattled U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said America has avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the "Eye of Mordor" has been drawn to Iraq instead.

Santorum used the analogy from one of his favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien's 1950s fantasy classic Lord of the Rings, to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand.

"As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else," Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

"It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S.," Santorum continued. "You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States."

In an interview with the editorial board of the Bucks County Courier Times, sister paper of The Intelligencer, the 12-year Republican senator from Pennsylvania said he's "a big Lord of the Rings fan." He's read the first of the series, The Hobbit to his six children.

A spokesman for Democratic opponent Bob Casey Jr. questioned the appropriateness of the analogy.

"You have to really question the judgment of a U.S. senator who compares the war in Iraq to a fantasy book," said Casey spokesman Larry Smar. "This is just like when he said Kim Jong II isn't a threat because he just wants to "watch NBA basketball.'"

A blogger at the National Review opined:

That comment ought to anger Tolkien fans—I think this voter bloc will now swing toward Santorum.

Well, no, my sympathies will never sway toward Santorum, no matter what his opponents might say or imply about LOTR.

Tolkien hated allegory and fiercely resisted, for example, comparing the story of the Ring's destruction to, say, World War II or the atom bomb. I think Santorum's comments illustrate why Tolkien intuitively distrusted the pernicious uses that an allegorical interpretation might make of his work. As I said in an earlier post, it is tempting to think of us arrayed against the foe as being like Theoden riding out from Helm's deep--but we must never fail to remember that to the other side, we're the orcs.

George W. Bush delights in speaking of the war in apocalyptic terms, good vs. evil. That is what Santorum is doing, too. So I can see why the LOTR analogy to them is appealing. The danger is that it is very easy to fail to see the darkness in one's own heart but to simply project it onto the enemy, if one insists on seeing the enemy as nothing but orcs. Viggo Mortenson, I know, has spoken fiercely on this topic, refusing to allow the analogy that the right wing wishes to draw, and instead pointing out our similarity to Saruman's position. (I was not able to find the specific clip, although in this clip he does explain some of his criticisms of the Bush administration).

The most instructive example Tolkien gives us as an artist, I suppose, is the battle for good and evil waged within the human heart. He gave us plentiful examples of this too, within the story arcs of Galadriel, Aragorn, Boromir, Gandalf, Faramir, Sam, Frodo and Gollum. It is difficult to easily dismiss with smug superiority the other as "evil" when one sees and recognizes the darkness in oneself. It is certainly very difficult to accomplish this in today's political climate--and, even harder to, as Frodo did, see and recognize and give credit to the goodness that still resides in Gollum.

Another feed that definitely needs wider promotion: sandbox_blog

You may have seen the recent Doonesbury strip, where Gary Trudeau announced he was going to start a blog written by soldiers on the front line in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Welcome to The Sandbox, our command-wide milblog, featuring comments, anecdotes, and observations from service members currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. This is GWOT-lit's forward position, offering those in-country a chance to share their experiences and reflections with the rest of us. The Sandbox's focus is not on policy and partisanship (go to our Blowback page for that), but on the unclassified details of deployment -- the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd. The Sandbox is a clean, lightly-edited debriefing environment where all correspondence is read, and as much as possible is posted. And contributors may rest assured that all content, no matter how robust, is currently secured by the First Amendment. To submit a post, click here.

This has been syndicated on LiveJournal as sandbox_blog. Only seven people are signed up so far--we can do better than that! I think it is important to get the perspective of people on the front line.

Molasses Gingerbread

I posted this as a comment in response to a request for recipes including molasses and thought I'd post it here, too, since it is one of my all-time favorite recipes and perfect for this cozy time of year. [Note: I often double this recipe, using a 13x9 pan]

This is an incredibly good recipe I got from pameladean

Molasses Gingerbread

1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup dark molasses
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 TB ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda, dissolved in 2 TB hot water
3/4 cup cold water
1/4 cup granulated sugar to sprinkle on top of batter

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Grease and lightly flour an 8x8 inch baking pan.

Combine the butter and molasses in a large mixing bowl and beat until well mixed. In a small bowl, mix together the flour, ginger, cinnamon, coriander, and salt, stirring with a fork to blend. Stire into the butter mixture. Beat well. Add the baking soda dissolved in water, stir and blend. Beat in the cold water and mix well. Spoon into the pan and sprinkle the sugar on top. Bake for about 20 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Makes one 8x8 inch pan.

Curses for those who would mistreat books

Here is a great post by Midori Snyder at the endicottstudio feed:

Perhaps because it is almost Halloween, perhaps it's because I am teaching E.A. Poe at the moment, but I was ghastly, gaunt, and ghoulishly delighted that in addition to identifying the owner of a book (see the post below), bookplates also carried curses along with the art to warn messy readers of the fate that awaits them should they mark up or dog-ear the owner's book. (Oh I am so going to hell for those two!). Here's a good example of what you might expect should you damage a book of C. J. Peacock:

Who folds a leafe downe
ye divel toaste browne
who makes marke or blotte
ye divel roaste hotte
who stealeth thisse booke
ye divel shall cooke.
The Virginia Commonwealth Universities Library preservation department has a nice collection of more curses (the especially harsh ones reserved for those who would steal a book!). My favorite comes from the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona:

For him that stealeth a book from this library,
let it change into a serpent in his hand & rend him.
Let him be struck with palsy, & all his members blasted.
Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, &
let there be no surcease to his agony till he sink to dissolution.
Let bookworms gnaw his entrails
in token of the Worm that dieth not,
& when at last he goeth to his final punishment,
let the flames of hell consume him forever & aye.