A People's History of Ada, Oklahoma

One of the perks of my day job (aside from giving girls flowers all day) is I'm generally on the road driving all around the county for four to six hours at a time.  And thanks to the magic of audio books, I've been catching up on all those huge tomes I've been meaning to read for years.  Last Thanksgiving, it was Don Quixote.  April was spent on Moby Dick, which was much more darkly humorous than I had expected.  Over the summer it was Ulysses (seriously, it took about two months).  October was War and Peace, which was actually much less painful than I thought it'd be.



Howard Zinn

 In October I found an MP3 of Howard Zinn's  A People's History of the United States:  The 20th Century.  Read by Matt Damon, The 20th Century focused on the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War.  Toward the end of the Gulf War section, Zinn highlighted some of the activist protests that began springing up across the country in late 1990.  I almost ran off the road when I heard Damon read this:

In Ada, Oklahoma, while East Central Oklahoma State University was "adopting" two National Guard units, two young women sat quietly on top of the concrete entrance gate with signs that read "Teach Peace ... Not War."  One of them, Patricia Biggs, said:  "I don't think we should be over there.  I don't think it's about justice and liberty, I think it's about economics.  The big oil corporations have a lot to do with what is going on over there....  We are risking people's lives for money."

How cool is this?  Ada, Oklahoma and East Central students were mentioned in arguably one of the the most influential history books of the 20th century.  How did I live ten years in this town (and spend five of those years attending classes at East Central) without ever knowing about this?  Hell, I was even a history minor for a while!

Theory v. Law v. Hypotheses

While verbally sparring with a friend online earlier, I stumbled upon a great little site that presents a very clear and concise definition of hypotheses, scientific law and scientific theory.  As anyone who's had these kinds of arguments on a regular basis knows, creationists, climate change deniers and the anti-science crowd in general all love to argue that a theory is really just an idea, not a concrete fact.  Evolutionary theory, quantum theory, chaos theory, string theory, climate change theory and all the rest are mere possibilities and should be treated as such, they claim.  Why?  Because they end in "theory."

Here's a great little explanation from the Wilstar site that helps to explain what a scientific theory actually is:

A scientific law is like a slingshot. A slingshot has but one moving part--the rubber band. If you put a rock in it and draw it back, the rock will fly out at a predictable speed, depending upon the distance the band is drawn back.


An automobile has many moving parts, all working in unison to perform the chore of transporting someone from one point to another point. An automobile is a complex piece of machinery. Sometimes, improvements are made to one or more component parts. A new set of spark plugs that are composed of a better alloy that can withstand heat better, for example, might replace the existing set. But the function of the automobile as a whole remains unchanged.


A theory is like the automobile. Components of it can be changed or improved upon, without changing the overall truth of the theory as a whole.

Keep this analogy in mind the next time you have to defend evolutionary theory in the public school system (or something along those lines).

'So if I own Mein Kampf I'm a supporter of Hitler?'

I got an interesting comment from a post made about a month ago called "People of the Book."  It was about an article written by Ted Widmer which explored the forgotten and/or ignored presence of Islam during the creation and infancy of our nation.  It's a fascinating article with a lot of interesting information that I didn't know beforehand, such as:

• Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both owned their own copies of the Quran.
• The earliest documented instance of a copy of the Quran showing up in North America was 1683, almost a century before the Declaration of Independence (and there may have been even earlier instances, but this is the first documented account).
• The Massachusetts Constitution, written at around the same time as another significant Constitution (the drafting of which was assisted by John Adams), has this great bit in it: “the most ample of liberty of conscience” for “Deists, Mahometans, Jews and Christians.”
• 
  Muslims and Catholics were often held in the same "extremely foreign" religion category.
• Thomas Jefferson tried to learn Arabic, and his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom was meant to protect "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination."
• Widmer:  "Jefferson and Adams led many of our early negotiations with the Islamic powers as the United States lurched into existence. A favorable treaty was signed with Morocco, simply because the Moroccans considered the Americans ahl-al-kitab, or 'people of the book,' similar to Muslims, who likewise eschewed the idolatry of Europe’s ornate state religions. When Adams was president, a treaty with Tripoli (Libya) insisted that the United States was 'not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion' and therefore has 'no character of enmity against the laws, religion and tranquility of Mussulmen.'
• Islam may have been a religious belief of up to 1 in every 5 African American slaves before emancipation.
• Washington in a letter to the people of Rhode Island:  "May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Any way you cut it, Widmer's article shines a light on a little-explored area of American history.

So I was kind of surprised to get a comment on the post this morning from my old friend Steve.  "So if I own Mein kampf I'm a supporter of Hitler?"  My first response was to just write a comment back on the post.  But as I started to type, I had a hard time narrowing my responses down to just one argument.

Ergo, this post.  Feel free to apply one, any or all answers back to your comment, Steve.

• So I guess you didn't read the article, which was about much more than the quote I originally referenced.
• In a Fox News 24-hour spin cycle, you might be.  Look at Van Jones, for instance.  Or Shirley Sherrod.  You owning Mein Kampf could be spun that way.  That's not the truth, I'd imagine.  There's probably a lot more to it, as there was with Jefferson and Adams each owning their own copies.  But if you want to boil it down to a right-wing talking point without exploring the issue at all, then sure.  Heil Steve.
• Interesting how you compare ownership of the Quran to ownership of Mein Kampf.  And by 'interesting,' I mean 'disturbingly telling.'  Why not use another religious tome to make a comparison, like the Bible, the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the I-Ching, the Book of Mormon, Hubbard's "Dianetics," or the Zohar?  What makes you think that comparing the holy scripture of an established and widespread religion to an autobiography written by a genocidal fuckhead was accurate in any way?  Imagine I'm cooking dinner for Kristen and I tell you "Kristen loves tomatoes.  I bet she'd really like marinara sauce on her pasta."  And you reply by saying "So if I own Mein Kampf I'm a supporter of Hitler?"  That wouldn't exactly be an appropriate comparison, would it?  Nor is comparing the Quran to Mein Kampf.
• Do you actually own a copy of Mein Kampf?
• No, you're not a supporter of Hitler (that I know of).  And by posting an article about the history of Muslims in Colonial America, I'm not a Jihadist.  Or a historian.
• Did you know before reading my post that Adams and Jefferson personally owned copies of the Quran?  Do you think the majority of the Evangelical Right (or the US population in general) does?
• Your comment almost comes off as threatened by the fact that two of our country's founders owned Qurans.  Does this threaten you?

Eagerly awaiting your reply, Steve.  You should visit my blog more than once a month anyway...

The 600 Years

I haven't had the best of luck embedding vimeo videos onto the blog, so here's hoping this works.

From Kottke, here's an awesome projection piece captured on video (he called it "video mapping," I have no idea what the correct term is) celebrating the 600th birthday of a clocktower in Prague.  It's kind of long, but well worth sitting through.  Also, you might have to slip your brower into fullscreen mode to get the entire video onto your screen.



The piece is called The 600 Years, created by the macula.  Pretty amazing.

Finding (and Losing) a Whole New Language

A National Geographic expedition to into northeastern India has made a pretty amazing discovery; linguists have unearthed a whole new and unique language.  Sadly, it appears this newly-discovered tongue (called 'koro') is already on it's way out:

Only around 800 people are believed to speak the Tibeto-Burman language, and few of them are under the age of 20, according to the researchers who discovered Koro during an expedition as part of National Geographic's "Enduring Voices" project.The language, they said, has never been written down.
"We found something that was making its exit, was on the way out," said National Geographic fellow Gregory Anderson, one of the leaders of the expedition that discovered Koro.
"If we had waited 10 years to make the trip, we might not have come across close to the number of speakers we found," he said.

The Enduring Voices is fighting a losing battle, attempting to record and preserve as many of the 6910 known human languages as possible before they're lost to the ages.  According to the article, around half of them are already endangered.  Talk about a bittersweet job description.

Landing a Newspaper Job the Hunter S. Thompson Way

I followed a link to the full story from Kottke, it's too good to not pass on.

Here's an excerpt from a letter written by Hunter S. Thompson, sent to the Vancouver Sun in hopes of landing a job writing for the paper:

By the time you get this letter, I'll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I'll let my offer stand. And don't think that my arrogance is unintentional: it's just that I'd rather offend you now than after I started working for you.

I didn't make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he'd tell you that I'm "not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person." (That's a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)

Nothing beats having good references.

Apparently the letter's one of many reprinted in The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967.  Kind of embarassed to say I haven't read this one yet.

People of the Book

Brown University's Ted Widmer had a piece published in the Boston Globe a few weeks ago focusing on the historic relationship between the Founding Fathers and non-Christian religions (and locally unpopular denominations at the time, like Catholicism).  As the media circus from last month illustrates, religious tolerance is as much a powder-keg issue as it has ever been. 

The religious right loves to take the position that the US is a Christian nation, and that Christianity should be the dominating religious influence within the country.  Even if that means denying other religious institutions their own rights.  And a lot of the vitriol stems from a more modern belief (especially by members of the Tea Party) that religious intolerance is somehow connected the founding principles of the country.

Not true, as Widmer has gone to some lengths to illustrate.  In fact, two of the Founding Fathers actually owned their own copies of the Koran:

No book states the case more plainly than a single volume, tucked away deep within the citadel of Copley Square — the Boston Public Library. The book known as Adams 281.1 is a copy of the Koran, from the personal collection of John Adams. There is nothing particularly ornate about this humble book, one of a collection of 2,400 that belonged to the second president. But it tells an important story, and reminds us how worldly the Founders were, and how impervious to the fanaticisms that spring up like dandelions whenever religion and politics are mixed. They, like we, lived in a complicated and often hostile global environment, dominated by religious strife, terror, and the bloodsport of competing empires. Yet better than we, they saw the world as it is, and refused the temptation to enlarge our enemies into Satanic monsters, or simply pretend they didn’t exist.

Funny how Fox News never brings this up, isn't it?  Read the entire article if you get a chance, it's a fascinating look at the tolerance and respect of all religions that went into founding our country.