MLK

On wealth and poverty:

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, “Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives.”

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world — and nothing’s wrong with that — this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., March 31, 1968.

Domestic comedy

[The television was on in the background.]

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Yehhpp.”

[Sometimes you just can’t get enough of the self-storage auction industry.]

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (via Pinboard)

Logic and marriage

Rick Santorum’s recent performance in a sparring match with college students is one small moment in the evolving story of equal marriage rights. But it’s a moment that makes me mighty angry, for three reasons:

1. Santorum treats an urgent question about the dignity of human relationships as an occasion to score cheap debater’s points: “Well, what about three men?” He begins by moving right past the possibility of partnership to raise the specter of conjugal trios and quintets. Notice too his ham-fisted sarcasm: “I’m surprised I got a gay-marriage question in a college crowd. I’m really — that’s a shocker for me.” He is a clueless, tasteless smarty-pants who seems to have no understanding of why same-sex partners in a loving relationship might want to marry.

2. Santorum casts marriage as “the union that causes children to be created.” But men and women marry for many reasons. And they “come together to have a union” for many reasons, not necessarily “to produce children.” (Produce?)

3. Santorum’s slippery-slope logic is specious. Santorum says that “Reason says that if you think it’s okay for two, then you have to differentiate with me as to why it’s not okay for three.” Slippery slopes though have a way of tripping up those who argue from them. If we follow Santorum’s logic, it’s the institution of heterosexual marriage that is itself the cause of problems. For when we allow a man and a woman to marry, look what happens: same-sex partners want to marry too.

That Santorum is on the wrong side of history seems pretty clear to me. It’s telling though that even he pays some sort of lip-service to the dignity of same-sex partnerships by granting that “all relationships provide some good to society.” That must mean that same-sex relationships provide some good to society. So why can’t same-sex partners marry?

Related reading
The Flag of Equal Marriage (“An evolving protest flag for equal marriage rights in the United States”)

Webster's New Collegiate ad

[Life, November 17, 1961. Click for a larger, more readable view.]

I’m reading Herbert C. Morton’s The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics and teaching David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I have dictionaries on my brain. Thus this post.

It’s impossible to tell from the ad that Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (published in September 1961, lower left in the ad) was already the subject of heated (and often badly informed) criticism. This issue of Life has a letter from Gove defending the Third against a recent editorial:

The controversy over Webster’s Third is a remarkable moment in the so-called culture wars (resulting largely from an ill-conceived publicity campaign). I laugh to think that I used this dictionary for many years before learning that anyone found fault with it: to me, the Third seemed, and still seems, just fine. And I for one like the idea of Ethel Merman being quoted in a dictionary (or “the dictionary”): “Three shows a day drain a girl.”

A related post
-wise-wise (The Life editorial and -wise)

[Is that Rick Perry, time-traveler, smiling in 1961?]

Waterstones’s missing apostrophe

David Marsh, who created International Apostrophe Day, isn’t troubled by the disappearance of the apostrophe from the name of the British book chain Waterstones (was Waterstone’s). Nor am I. It’s tedious turning names ending in ’s into possessives. Consider Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Other apostrophe posts
Apostrophes and corn
Apostrophes and vandalism
LETS PLAY TWO

Radio buttons

Jesse James Garrett, The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: New Riders, 2011).

I like this touch of comedy.

A vaguely related post
Ta-da List

[If your reaction is “Huh?” see here. Also here.]

Hazel Frederick

That’s her name.

Internets addiction

Apropos of the Chinese study of “Internet addiction” and brain structure, a measured response: Can you really be addicted to the internet? (Guardian).

[The “internet” is much scarier with a initial cap. And scarier still in plural form.]

Art imitates life imitates art (M*A*S*H)

M. Hugh Steeply’s father’s M*A*S*H addiction began when the show went into syndication:

“The show was incredibly popular, and after a few years of Thursday nights it started also to run daily, during the day, or late at night, sometimes, in what I remember all too well was called syndication, where local stations bought old episodes and chopped them up and loaded them with ads, and ran them. And this, note, was while all-new episodes of the show were still appearing on Thursdays at 2100. I think this was the start… .

“The fucking show ran on two different local stations in the Capital District. Albany and environs. For a while, this one station even had a M*A*S*H hour, two of them, back to back, every night, from 2300. Plus another half an hour in the early P.M., for the unemployed or something.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

Art imitates life: “this one station” sounds an awful lot like east-central Illinois’s WCIA, which for years offered ample servings of M*A*S*H after the early and late news (one episode early, two late). How many times did I hear it: “M*A*S*H is next.” Wallace, as you may know, grew up in east-central Illinois, in Urbana.

Life imitates art: two cable channels now offer three hours of M*A*S*H on weekdays: 5:00–7:00 p.m. Central (TV Land) and 6:00–7:00 p.m. Central (Me-TV), six different episodes. On Sundays, TV Land runs M*A*S*H from 4:00 to 7:30 p.m. Central. Check your local listings. Or don’t.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

[It’s a good thing I never got started watching M*A*S*H.]

Telephone exchange names on screen: KLondike

Sean at Blackwing Pages sent this screenshot, from an episode of Modern Marvels — Engineering Disasters. He writes that this telephone appeared in a depiction “of the office of a U.S. Navy radar installation in the ocean (much like an oil platform) that went down in rough seas.”

KLondike (55-) is of course the imaginary exchange name of movies and television. But the Telephone EXchange Name Project notes that in 1955, 55- “was reserved for radio telephone numbers.” That might make this KL a recreation of the real thing.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Murder, My Sweet : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

Thanks, Sean.