Sheridan: Con-Law

OVER-SHARING

Sharing.

What a concept.

What a word.

I came across it in grade school.  Sharing is what you were told to do when two kids were fighting over the same crayon in kindergarten.  Take turns!  Share!  Okay, goddit.

Fast forward to second grade.  Teacher says everyone has to bring in a pair of scissors because tomorrow we're going to do cut-outs using construction paper.

"Mom, you got a pair of scissors I can bring to school tomorrow?  We're doing a project where you have to cut paper."

She finds the scissors.

In the morning, I remember to bring them to school.

Cut-out time arrives and I'm cutting out forms from paper.  I put them down and the kid seated next to me grabs them.  "Hey, give me those."

"I forgot mine."

The teacher sees.

"Share," she commands.

That's where I learned about sharing.

Sharing is where you remember and prepare and someone else doesn't but gets the benefit of your effort.

Sharing is bad, right?

My grand-daughter, barely 4 and in pre-school, is with me at the new Academy of Science in Golden Gate park.  Several kids are at an exhibit where you press a button and a projector overhead casts an image on the table.  The trick is to get to the button to press it and Liana has been blocked. 

She says to the bigger girl, who ignores her, "Can we share?" 

Meaning, "How 'bout you give up what you've got so I can play too?"

Sharing isn't working well, today.

On subsequent occasions I see Liana taking toys away from her little, and resented, sister, on the claim we suddenly need to share.

The theory, as best I can figure is, "What's mine is mine, what's yours is mine, too."

My Republican friends are likely to call sharing Communism.

My Democratic friends are likely to call sharing, "We're all living in the same boat, so let's tax what you have and spread the benefits to the have-nots."

Both ways are good and right. 

Both ways are evil.

The other day I came across a variant of the term, called "over-sharing."

Someone was complaining that another was providing way too much personal information on a chat site, for comfort.

Today, in an article concerning a breach of security at a White House function, a state dinner no less, for India, a dressed-up couple, uninvited, apparently crashed the party, making one wonder that if they can do this, what could terrorists do, I see "over-sharing" used for the second time. 

This is a new word for me, obviously.

“There’s a whole culture of over-sharing — everybody is broadcasting now and everyone is putting themselves out on the Internet and TV,” he said. “Some people just take it further than others.”  N.Y. Times.

Forgive me for oversharing.

Talking too much, I suppose.

Novelists and playwrights do this, don't they?

I guess if you do it artfully enough, you're okay.

Do it in a more pedestrian fashion and you're not.

Sharing..., oversharing..., undersharing..., like Uncle Scrooge...

There must be a happy medium.

Let me know when you find it.

We'll call you an Independent or a Moderate, I suppose.

CHINA QUIZ: NAME THE CONSTITUTIONAL VIOLATIONS

Article:China house church leaders sentenced:/n/a/2009/11/25/international/i225453S32.DTL

Article:China house church leaders sentenced:/n/a/2009/11/25/international/i225453S32.DTL

Constitutional rights are a lot easier to understand in the breach.

In this article, published in the San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com), try to pick out the constitutional violations had the government activity occurred here.

People are carted off to jail, given harsh prison terms, in last minute trials where no lawyers are allowed, for getting together in a home to pray, and the minister's wire is arrested for protesting to the government.

If you gave this as a fact situation and asked the students to describe the violations, they'd have a lot to write about.

Pres. Barack Obama made a state visit to Beijing last week where he met with our chief lender, Hu Jintao, premier of China. 

Not much you can say, I suppose, about human rights, to your banker. 

Bankers, as we've learned, do what they want with impunity, even when it means destroying the economy and advancing socialized banking, as in accepting taxpayer bailout of the financial industry after investing heavily in vaporware known as derivatives which they sell to each other, preferably offshore.

Query:  If a student or visitor to the United States from China refuses to return home and requests political asylum here on the ground that s/he's a Christian and will be persecuted for exercising his religion in unauthorized home meetings, do we grant the petition?

China house church leaders sentenced

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer

Thursday, November 26, 2009

(11-26) 00:53 PST BEIJING, China (AP) --

A court in northern China has sentenced five leaders of an unauthorized Protestant church to prison terms of up to seven years on charges including illegal assembly, rights groups reported Thursday.

The sentences are among the harshest in recent years for members of so-called "house churches" — congregations that refuse to register and accept the authority of the government's Religious Affairs Bureau.

Arrests stemmed from a Sept. 13 raid by police and hired security guards on sunrise services held in a dormitory building by the 50,000-member Linfen Fushan Church in Linfen, northern Shanxi province, rights groups and the advocacy Web site Boxun.com reported.

Those sentenced late Wednesday by the Linfen Intermediate Court included the church's pastor Wang Xiaoguang and his wife Yang Rongli, who both received the maximum sentence. Yang was apparently targeted for her efforts to petition local authorities on Wang's behalf, Boxun said. Others were given sentences of between three and four-and-a-half-years, it said.

The trial was called at the last minute and the court permitted only one family member of each defendant to attend, the reports said. Local authorities had previously refused to allow lawyers to meet with the accused.

The reports said the five were convicted on two charges: "illegal land occupation" and "assembling a crowd to disrupt public order." No other details were given. Monitoring groups frequently cite such charges as evidence of government harassment of nonofficial churches.

Yang had been detained the day after the raid while carrying a protest to the Shanxi provincial government offices in the capital of Taiyuan, reports said. Another 10 people were detained over the following days, although it was not immediately clear whether they had been released or would also face trial.

Calls to several departments of the Linfen Intermediate Court rang unanswered on Thursday. A man who answered at Fushan police headquarters hung up after a reporter identified himself and calls to other local government departments went unanswered.

According to the U.S.-based China Aid Association, local authorities had earlier chosen not to prosecute church leaders under harsh anti-cult legislation that could have brought more severe sentences. That seemed to indicate they would continue to allow the church to exist, although reports said police continued to be posted outside church offices.

The association said the sentences were the toughest against unofficial church leaders since Zhang Rongliang received 7.5 years in 2006. It said lawyers for the five had been shown only a fraction of the documents submitted in the case and claimed the verdicts had been predetermined — a common accusation in politically sensitive cases.

"We strongly condemn this unjust sentence based on trumped-up charges. This case clearly shows the seriously deteriorating situation of religious persecution in China," association President Bob Fu said in a statement.

Officially, China's communist government requires all Protestants to worship in the non-denominational Three-Self Patriotic Movement, while Catholics must meet in the Patriotic Association. Both are beholden to the Religious Affairs bureau, while the degree of tolerance for unregistered churches varies from location to location.

The number of Christians in China is estimated to be about 50 million to 130 million.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/11/25/international/i225453S32.DTL

CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

Whew!

I knew it!

Understanding life is really a lot simpler than it seems.

The trick is to make up a story that explains everything.

This past week we suffered an extreme tragedy.  Fort Hood, Texas, is our largest military base.  From here the First Cavalry, the "A" Team, the troops we send in first after the Marines and the Navy and Air Force take their shots, the Boots on the Ground, the "Go team," is headquartered here.  

These are the troops, the men and women, of all races, creeds and colors who protect you and me.

We'll do anything to protect them.

Well, the Army did do everything it could.  It took an enlistee out of high school, sent him to college, taught him to be a doctor and then a psychiatrist.  His job was to look after troops experiencing extreme psychological malaise after returning from war.

Unfortunately, he became confused, crazed in fact, and went berserk, killing thirteen on the base and shooting many more, forty-one, all told, before being himself shot down by a civilian (female) police officer responding to the shooting.

Bizarre?  Of course.

Mind boggling?  Even moreso.

Here's the Army doing all it seemingly could to protect the troops and the watchdog goes berserk.

If I were the Army, I'd be tearing my hear and gnashing my teeth in frustration.

"But we did everything..." I can hear it saying.

"We'll have to learn the lesson and do more, for that's the Army way," I hear that too.

The Army is one of the few American institutions that actually pays attention to what it did today, and yesterday, to learn what it can for tomorrow.  This is not a bloodless process, intramurally.

See the new Neil Sheehan book about the Cold War, based on the life of Bernard Schriever, the man behind the ICBM in the nuclear arms race with the thankfully former Soviet Union, "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War"  (Random House, 2009).

It is difficult for us to stop fighting the last war and to imagine the next.  That's what Schriever, who did fight the last war, did.  Lot's of bureaucratic infighting, with Congressional approval.  Ultimately a decision has to be made.  This decision is a matter of life or death.

How do we make these decisions?

We tell stories.  We tell THE story, the one that seems most true as compared with the others.  We look forward, not back, we hope.

***

These stories we tell about ourselves, to explain ourselves to ourselves.  What kind of stories are they?

Some call them myths.  Others call it our 'cosmology,' our story of ourself.

Is there only one story?

No, there are many, one for each of our human cultures, from Paris to New Guinea.

Here's what Levi-Strauss had to say about that:

In any society, he maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.” As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and to try to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking.

I like that.

Who are our creative mythmakers?

The Supreme Court?

Our poets?

Playwrights?

Authors?

Cartoonists?

Law professors? (Doubtful)

Seers?  Witch-doctors?

When we speak of climbing to the next higher level of generality, aren't we talking in some sense of reaching for a new myth?  I'm not so sure, but I'm not ready to rule it out.

The massacre at Ft. Hood brought the story of Oedipus Rex to mind.  The tale, by Sophocles, is based on the myth that the king and queen of Thebes had been foretold that their son would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother.  Whoa!  Where did Sophocles come up with a tale like that?  Where does his mind dwell?

So the king and queen, to avoid this fate, hand the baby off to a courtier to expose and die on a mountain top.  The courtier, taking pity on the baby, hands him to a shepherd who raise him.  On the road to Thebes, twenty years later, there's an armed encounter following a quarrel in which the young man, Oedipus, kills the old man, who, it turns out, was the king, unbeknownst to the younger man, his son, who proceeds to the city, enters the palace, and eventually marries the widowed queen, his mother.

Fate was not fooled for one instant.  Every move played into the hands of Fate.  The more the parents tried to avoid their alleged fate, the more they ensured its enactment into reality.  Really.  This is too much.

Yet, with the Army, it seems to have happened.

Back to square one.

Below is an article on Levi-Strauss, the analyzer of myth, who passed away last week.

 

---

November 8, 2009

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part Harmonies

By LARRY ROHTER

Millions of words have been written trying to explain or apply the theories of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss since the publication of his work “Structural Anthropology” in 1958. More than a few of the resulting texts in disciplines as varied as sociology and philosophy are dense, turgid and jargon ridden, or so the complaint goes. But Mr. Lévi-Strauss himself could be simple, direct and elegant when he wanted to be. Structuralism, he once said, is simply “the search for unsuspected harmonies” across cultures.

In fact, his life’s work was dedicated to detecting and codifying what he believed to be the underlying structures common to all societies. Working among Amerindian tribes in the Amazon and elsewhere from the 1930s onward, he found those harmonies to be especially manifest in mythology. In any society, he maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”

As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and to try to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking. Here are four pairs that, explicitly or implicitly, are important in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died a little over a week ago just shy of 101.

THE RAW AND THE COOKED “Raw” and “cooked” are shorthand terms meant to differentiate what is found in nature from what is a product of human culture. That dichotomy, Mr. Lévi-Strauss believed, exists in all human societies. Part of what makes us human, however, is our need to reconcile those opposites, to find a balance between raw and cooked. But where is the dividing line between nature, which is emotional and instinctive, and culture, which is based on rules and conventions? In a metaphoric sense, a cook is a kind of mediator between those realms, transforming an object originally from the natural world into an item fit for human consumption. So by “cooked,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss means anything that is socialized from its natural state. Yes, the definition of what is considered edible varies from one society or religious group to another. But all have binary structures that separate the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the rotten, the moist and the dry or burned.

THE TINKERER AND THE ENGINEER In “The Savage Mind” (1962), Mr. Lévi-Strauss proposes a distinction between modes of conception, design and manufacture. The “tinkerer” or “artisan,” two possible renderings of the somewhat ambiguous French word that he used, “bricoleur,” works mainly with his hands, using materials that already exist, which he tries to put together in different ways. The “engineer,” in contrast, is a proto-scientist. He has a more abstract mental universe, which allows him to invent tools, devices or materials and transcend the boundaries that society imposes. Though both the tinkerer and the engineer face comparable obstacles, they navigate them in dissimilar fashion, with the tinkerer being more typical of the approach of “the savage mind.” One way is spontaneous, the other methodical. “A truly scientific analysis must be real, simplifying and explanatory,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote, while the tinkerer is confined to a more narrow and immediate focus.

THE I AND THE WE Mr. Lévi-Strauss was loath to accept the notion of “us versus them,” because it didn’t conform to his belief in societies’ shared structures. Instead, he often focused on the distinction between “I” and “we.” In looking at kinship patterns, for example, especially among the Amerindian peoples who provided much of his research material, he was more attentive to the rules governing relationships between different family groups than the roles of the individuals making up those families. Examining both Oedipus and Amerindian myths, Mr. Lévi-Strauss suggests that the universal incest taboo is the way human societies resolve the opposing dangers of excessive love and hatred for close blood relations. He also rejected one of the fundamental features of Western thought: seeing individual self-expression as the height of creativity. Because he was so interested in mythmaking, a collective process that occurs incrementally over time, he favored the notion of a communal approach to making culture, writing in “Tristes Tropiques,” “The I is hateful.”

THE LANGUAGE AND THE WORD From the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Mr. Lévi-Strauss borrowed the distinction between “langue” (tongue, or language) and “parole” (word), and then gave it a twist. The tongue, the underlying system of language, is something “belonging to a reversible time,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote, outside a particular moment. A word, in contrast, is a specific utterance that, once expressed, cannot be reversed. Think of a piece of sheet music: it can be read or played from left to right, from one page to another, in a horizontal, linear fashion leading to a coda, a definite conclusion. That is “parole.” Or it can be studied vertically, in hopes of discerning harmony and other structural relationships between the notes in the treble and bass clefs. That is what Mr. Lévi-Strauss considered “langue.”

Illustrations by Leif Parsons.