This morning isn't off to a very good start, so I'm going to skip today's installment.  Here, however, are a couple of belated father's day poems:

My Papa’s Waltz

By Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath   

Could make a small boy dizzy;   

But I hung on like death:   

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans   

Slid from the kitchen shelf;   

My mother’s countenance   

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist   

Was battered on one knuckle;   

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head   

With a palm caked hard by dirt,   

Then waltzed me off to bed   

Still clinging to your shirt.

 

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

                                           --Robert Hayden

My experiment with a new chemo schedule was short-lived.  Having taken the three pills every morning for two years, I decided to shift to taking them before bed, hoping that I could lessen the number or depth of crashes during the day.  But once I made the shift, I slept as much as, if not more than, I had before.  There were no changes in my stomach problems.  We usually eat dinner between 8 and 9 p.m., and I have to wait two to three hours after eating before taking the chemo.  That timing wasn't in itself a problem: I usually go to bed at 11:11 p.m.  No, that's not some weird superstition.  If I watch the monologue and the first half of the first interview on Letterman or Leno, I find myself being tucked in at 11:11 (and falling asleep by 11:12).  But perhaps because I couldn't eat after 9, almost every evening, I found myself with a hankering for a later snack--some fresh watermelon, a Dove bar, something.  So with no real benefits evident from the change, I'm back on my old schedule. 

My theory is that if I accomplish one thing a day (beyond sitting on my tuches watching TV or reading), the day has been a success.  Yesterday, both Mohamed and I got much needed haircuts.  Success on Saturday!  Earlier in the week, I spent 90 minutes at the DMV waiting to get my driver's license renewed.  I was uncharacteristically a little paranoid about this.  Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State, is busy around the country working to reduce voter turnout.  He was instrumental in writing the very restrictive immigration laws in Alabama and Arizona, and his current project is disenfranchising indigenous peoples in Alaska.  Kansas passed a voter ID law that went into effect with the last election.  Since I let my passport expire, the driver's license would be my sole government-issued photo ID.  Now, according to the renewal card I received in the mail, I needed to bring proof of residence to renew the license.  The card suggested a utility bill, but I don't get utility bills anymore; I went paperless a long time ago.  I had just gotten a property tax bill, so I brought that, though I realized that the fact that I paid taxes on a certain property doesn't necessarily mean that I live there.  My unease was groundless.  After the hour and a half wait, the renewal took about five minutes, and the examiner didn't ask for any documents other than my old license.  My photo even turned out decently, so another day, another success.

Visitors came this week bearing gifts: a homemade pumpkin pie, a selection of muffins, and a boughten coconut cream pie.  I don't understand why spell check doesn't recognize the perfectly good word 'boughten.'  I have support on my side in the last lines of Robert Frost's extremely dark poem "Provide, Provide": 

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew,
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!    

The bleakness of the last tercet is only reinforced by Frost's use of the regionalism, probably unfamiliar to most of his readers, the colloquial and discordant 'boughten.'   

My two new words of the week: meta-data (metadata?) and yottabyte.  Since the news this week has been dominated by the NSA's accumulation of data, these words are suddenly everywhere.  Meta-data in this case seems to mean phone numbers called and duration of calls (sounds like data to me) rather than the actual content of the calls.  The NSA has assured us that the 97 trillion records from March, for example, are only meta-data; there's no listening in on the actual calls.  The haystack in which they're trying to find a needle of significance (to use this week's metaphor) is now so huge and requires such enormous new buildings in Utah that the data to be sifted are now described in yottabytes (each one a million billion gigabytes).

Although the story is everywhere on the news, most Americans seem rather indifferent to the obvious intrusion on our privacy.  One response is often, "If it helps prevent a terrorist attack, the program is fine with me."  Another is that few of us have any expectation of privacy on phones or the Net.  Most of us assume that once we're on a network, there's no way to control who has access to what we say or send.  And then this "revelation" isn't exactly new.  As early as 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that the history of our telephone calls belongs not to us, but to the telephone companies.  We had the same revelation and discussion about Internet snooping in 2006.  Libertarian Republicans are outraged, but the mainstream of the GOP supports the program.  Many Democrats who were upset when Bush was in charge of this are less so now that it's Obama.  It seems unlikely that there will be enough serious and sustained objections to significantly modify--to say nothing of ending--the program. 

Generally ignored in the discussion of privacy over the last two weeks was the important Supreme Court decision in Maryland v. King.  By a 5-4 majority, the Court decided that police could do "suspicionless" DNA swabs on anyone stopped for a potential offense.  The majority decision argued that DNA swabs were basically like and no more intrusive than fingerprinting.  That decision was written by Justice Kennedy, joined by three of the other conservatives (minus Scalia) and one of the liberals, Justice Breyer.  The scathing dissent was written by Justice Scalia for himself and three of the four liberals (Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan).  These are indeed strange bedfellows on both sides.  Although Kennedy and Scalia often vote on the same side, their relationship seems to be the least cordial on the Court.  Kennedy is known for writing flowery, sweeping opinions; Scalia is known for mocking them.  Although dissenting opinions are rarely read aloud when the decision is rendered, Scalia read his in this case, enjoying, it would seem, the chance to enhance his sarcasm, as in his opening remark that the state of Maryland's argument justifying the swabs "taxes the credulity of the credulous."  In the same paragraph he argues that the comparison to fingerprinting seems "apt" only to those who know no more about the procedures that the majority opinion has chosen to tell them.

Relying on his Originalist theory, Scalia compares the taking of DNA swabs for no probable cause or reasonable suspicion to the despised General Warrants used by the British before the Revolution.  The Fourth Amendment specifically prohibited, except in very narrowly defined circumstances, suspicionless searches.  In the case of King, as Scalia points out, he was stopped for one reason, a swab was taken, nearly four months elapsed before the results were matched with a completely unrelated crime from years earlier.  Scalia spends a large part of his dissent enumerating the differences (complete with a chart) between suspicionless DNA swabs and other types of information.

Scalia is also particularly irritated by Kennedy's assertion that swabs will be taken only from those originally stopped for "serious offenses," a term he finds hopelessly vague--"a senseless distinction."  "Make no mistake about it," Scalia writes, "as an entirely predictable consequences of today's decision," your DNA will be taken and entered into a national data base, no matter the nature of the crime or whether the arrest resulted in conviction or not.  True, he writes, we might solve more crimes this way, but "I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection."

A question and a reminder:  As the Court's term comes to its end and a number of important decisions (including marriage equality) are about to be announced, do some recent votes (Roberts for the Affordable Cart Act, Breyer to the right and Scalia to the left in this case) indicate potential fissures in the prior predictability of the Court?  Probably not, but it's interesting to think about.

Despite the power of the dissenting opinion in Maryland v. King, it's important to remember that it was the dissenting opinion.  According to the majority, whenever one is stopped by the police, a DNA swab is permissible without any charges, any probable cause, any reasonable suspicion.  That may have been the most important and serious violation of our privacy rights while our attention was focused elsewhere.

One good day, one miserable one this weekend.  Saturday was good, culminating in a superb dinner at Topeka's best restaurant.  My old colleague and friend Virginia took the recently retired Mo (as in Maureen), our British Shakespeare teacher for the last dozen years, her husband Dick, my Mo, and me out for a very early birthday dinner.  Mo and I have birthdays in mid-July, but she and Dick are leaving tomorrow for a summer in Seattle, so the celebration was five weeks early.  It's been a long time since Topeka had a first-rate restaurant.  During the 1980s, we had an authentic French restaurant, La Picardie, but it closed nearly thirty years ago.  The Rowhouse is a very special restaurant: it's open only four nights a week; its menu changes every week; many of the herbs and greens are grown in its own garden; and they have a tasting menu of small portions of all dishes on the small menu.  The dinner was as good as always, and the company lively (my favorite adjective).

After driving home in a pouring rain (in our newly washed car), I discovered that Vittoria de Sica's classic neo-realist movie "Two Women," starring Sophia Loren, was on TMC.  Loren gives a brilliant performance as a tough store owner, fleeing Rome in the confused last days of WWII and trying to protect her teenage daughter.  It's a gritty portrayal of wartime conditions and of the day-to-day struggle of village people, who have no particular stake in the war except finding food and staying alive.  Loren succeeds in survival and protection for ninety of the hundred minutes of the film.  But in the last few minutes, having taken refuge in a nearly destroyed church, mother and daughter are raped by retreating Moroccan (fighting on the side of the Italians) soldiers. 

Starting at about 3 a.m. Sunday, however, the happy evening went south and stayed there for the next 36 hours.  After an often interrupted sleep, I could hardly wake up yesterday morning, sleeping till after 9 a.m., the latest I can remember in many years.  Many Imodiums later, we went out for a late lunch with a friend.  But halfway through the lunch, the black curtain descended: I couldn't eat and could barely stay awake.  All I wanted was to be in bed, and once there I slept the afternoon away--three hours of oblivion.  I managed to stay awake for the rest of the evening, but between cramps and bathroom runs (so to speak), I couldn't eat and sat in my corner of the couch, quiet except for frequent groaning noises.  After two years of these, Mohamed remains patient.  I'm not sure I'd be so gracious.

For the past two years, I've been on the same chemo schedule.  Every day with my morning batch of pills, I take the chemo.  Then I wait for an hour before I can eat anything.  And then I know that three to four hours later, I'm going to crash, a preliminary to the longer afternoon sleep.  After thinking about it many times, but letting inertia keep me on the same schedule, I've decided to shift and take the chemo before bed.  I have to wait at least two hours after eating before taking it, but perhaps the sudden needs for sleep will actually occur during the night.  If so, I'm going to feel pretty silly that I've spent two years following the same routine.

It's a beautiful late spring day here, and I have absolutely nothing to say.  After weeks of rain--but no severe weather--Topeka is looking greener than it has for a long time.  Our new patio furniture has arrived, and four out of five pieces have been assembled.  As the delivery men schlepped the table and chairs (minimal--haha--assembly required), everyone noticed that the box had a hole in it, that the smaller box inside with the connecting pieces also had a hole in it, and that parts were falling out across the lawn.  The Sears people picked up a couple of them, but once they'd left and assembly had begun, it turned out that three necessary pieces were missing--hence, three chairs and the table put together, one chair in pieces in the garage.  Still, for the two of us, three chairs are sufficient, and it feels wonderful to sit outside in the sun.  Even inside, I love this period post-furnace, pre-a/c with the windows open and fresh air circulating.

Putting the chairs and table together wasn't that difficult once we had the right tools, since the cheap and flimsy wrenches that came with the set were worthless.  Unfortunately, by 'we' I mean Mohamed, since because of my damaged left scapula (and I'm a leftie), I can't fully extend my arm or use much force; although my right, titanium-filled leg works pretty well, I can't get down on my hands and knees; and my energy level for physical work flags awfully quickly.  It was frustrating to have to just stand there and watch Mohamed do all the work.

In general, though, there haven't been any significant changes to my health--the same ups and downs in the same unpredictable "pattern."  I still need a one-hour nap in the morning (almost exactly 3½ hours after I take my chemo) and a longer, two-hour nap in the afternoon.  Again, it's frustrating to have so much of the day broken up by sleep.  It's hard to gain any momentum.  The goal now is to accomplish one thing a day.  I consider that a success.  Next week we need haircuts, so one day will be devoted to that one-hour task.  I need to renew my driver's license.  Another day, another task. 

I start every day by watching "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," which I've DVRed the night before.  Last night's "Daily Show" was the last for Jon Stewart for three months, as he goes off to the Middle East to make a movie about Iran and its people.  His sympathetic interest began with a story he did from Iran just before the last election there.  I'm going to miss him for three months, but, as someone who's known a lot of Iranians, I can look forward to the movie he produces.

And that's all the news that's fit to print--and some that isn't--on this beautiful morning.

After my last post, one of my gentle readers correctly pointed out that the version of Protestantism and guilt that I described was only one strand of Protestant theology--and historically hardly the most important.  John Calvin described man as "a five-foot worm," and Martin Luther wrote, "I am dust and ashes and full of sin."  The third of Luther's 95 Theses says "Penitence is null unless it produces outward signs in various mortifications of the flesh."  As an American literature professor, I often taught sermons and essays by Jonathan Edwards and other Puritan divines.  Edwards would hardly recognize the view of guilt that seems to dominate current Protestantism.  But that was part of the point: although the process Bethany sketches doesn't represent all of the Protestant tradition, it's been there since the beginning, and for the last hundred years or so, it seems to be most common Protestant view.  I've rehearsed the argument in my head since the last blog, and it seems to go something like this:  I've sinned.  I feel guilty.  But I believe in Jesus Christ.  He took all the world's sins on his shoulders.  Therefore, since I'm a believer, I'm still among the saved and on my way to Heaven.  Is this really the logic?  Is the sinner off scot free?  Am I missing something in this supposedly most logical explanation?

The whole notion that one knows that s/he is saved also seems repugnant.  Whenever I hear someone say, "Well, I'm a Christian so I know that I am going to heaven," I'm taken aback.  And, of course, there's always the implication that the speaker knows who is not saved.  I'm not sure it's a position that Calvin, Luther, or Edwards would endorse.  But I hear it frequently, always with what seems to me a smug assurance.  If I were an omniscient and inscrutable god, I think I would be angered by the arrogant assumption that a flawed human was onto my ways.

And of course this is generalized to the larger proposition that only Protestants or Catholics or Muslims or whoever can go to heaven, while the rest of the world is perpetually damned.  Catholics used to have the concept of Limbo--those born before Christ or ignorant of him who had lived a good life couldn't go to heaven, but neither were they condemned to hell.  But now the concept of Limbo is itself in limbo--it's no longer an official tenet of the Catholic Church, but members are free to believe in it if they wish.  Pope Francis almost gave the game away a couple of weeks ago when he said that one didn't have to be Catholic to be redeemed; "even atheists," he said, could be saved.  It took about 24 hours for the Church to "clarify" what he meant.  (Since he wasn't speaking ex cathedra, his statement wasn't infallible.)  His inclusive message, his spokesman said, applied only to those who had never heard of or had any contact with Catholicism.  Those who had and rejected, either explicitly or tacitly, the Church could not be saved.  Still, he could backtrack only part way.  For the first time, that leaves a lot of non-Catholics still eligible for salvation.   Too bad for me, though.

Je saute du coq à l'âne:  SCOTUS began handing down its June decisions yesterday with a case that split the traditional division of the Court: Scalia voted with the liberal wing, while Breyer voted with the conservatives.  Sometime soon this month, the Court should announce its decisions in the two landmark marriage equality cases.

One of the pleasures of teaching is when old students contact you and catch you up on their lives.  A few years ago, we had a wonderful English major--I'll call her Bethany (this is the first time I've ever changed someone's name, but for some reason I don't feel comfortable using her real name)--who was one of those students who make teaching especially rewarding, the kind whose papers you put at the bottom of the stack so that when you think you can't face grading another paper, you know there's a good essay waiting for you.  She was not just smart, but unpretentious and good-humored.  Bethany was also extremely religious, a very devout Protestant, and obviously troubled by my atheism.  I would have expected her to go to graduate school, but after graduation she married and has had two children.  I may be misinterpreting her motives, but I think that her choice was determined in part by her belief that it is the man's place to be the breadwinner and the woman's to be submissive.  In the last couple of years, I've gotten several nice, flattering e-mails from her.  The first I found rather off-putting, since she said that the only hope for me was to put myself in the hands of the Great Healer, the only true physician.  But since then she has generally avoided religion--until this week.  Pondering my coming out stories, she wondered how an atheist . . .

Normally, what follows is how an atheist can be good, can make moral decisions.  I think most atheists are tired of this question, which implies that we can't figure out simple moral principles (and those those of Christianity are unique) or can't follow them if we somehow manage to arrive at a sense of morality.  We arrive at moral decisions in the same way that most people do--and we do so sometimes successfully, sometimes not so.  I really doubt that most Christians, faced with a moral dilemma, actually make their decision by contemplating WWJD.  And given the history of religious wars, I'm equally doubtful that Christians (or members of other religions) arrive at solutions any more successfully than atheists do.  It always seems especially ironic that what Christians really imply is that without the promise of heaven or the threat of hell, they would be incapable of acting morally.  At least atheists don't need bribes and threats.

But Bethany's question was somewhat different: how do atheists deal with guilt?  For her, she said, the only satisfactory answer was the Protestant one: "Christ Jesus took upon himself all sin, for once and all."  And that's that.  I've always found that answer, even metaphorically, one of the most repellent aspects of Protestantism.  It's just way too easy and rather than answering anything seems a gross evasion.  At least in Catholicism, you have to work to get rid of guilt.  But for Protestants, all you have to do is profess your faith, and guilt magically vanishes.  Christ took care of all that for us.  (Martin Luther was particularly irritated by the book of James, which he wanted expunged from the Bible, calling it "an epistle of straw" because James says that "faith without works is dead.)  The parable of the Prodigal Son has always seemed to me one of the most pernicious in the Bible.  But it's a favorite of American Protestants.  Is there any story they like better than the sinner come home?  (Of course, as Jimmy Swaggart found out, you can only work it so many times.)  Mark Twain parodies it in the con men's scam at the revival meeting in Huck Finn.  And the lesser known George Washington Harris has an even funnier version in his Sut Lovingood tales.  One can sin and sin and sin, but a few tears and a profession of repentance, and the faithful rejoice. 

Atheists deal with guilt the same as most non-Protestants do: we can deny it or ignore it; more successfully, we can make amends and resolve to do better.  But however we deal with it, the responsibility and accountability are ours.  Like all human decisions, our reactions are tentative and ad hoc.  That may not be as comforting as letting Christ take all the burden, but it's what we have to work with and the best we can do.  And it seems much more honest than just wiping it all away with a profession of faith.

What also seems too easy about Bethany's answer is that it does away with shame.  Guilt becomes purely private, as does forgiveness.  Protestant Christianity used to have a firm sense of shame.  Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is a classic exploration of the differing roles of guilt and shame.  But somewhere over the last two or three centuries, Protestantism has banished shame.  (A few hours in front of a television set should be more than enough evidence that many Americans no longer have any sense of shame.)  But actions that entail guilt are usually not only private in their consequences.  Why should they be only private in their expiation? 

A student in one of my classes once wrote that Hester Prynne "suffered from low self-esteem."  My marginal comment was LMAO.