This is going to be a political post. I’ll say that up front, so that those of you not interested in my politics can surf on. And why should you be interested in my politics? I have a little bit of credibility when I post on writing and books. I have none at all when I talk about politics. (“Why then,” asks the perceptive reader, “do you write occasional columns for a political organ like The American Spectator Online?” The answer is that I write for them because they pay me. I’m a capitalist. At least I am now.)

20 years ago tomorrow, President Reagan made his famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech. That was 1987 (in case you were having trouble with the math), and it was just about then that I was going through my great political transformation.

I grew up a Democrat. Dad was a Democrat, heir to an old strain of Upper Midwest Scandinavian populism, embodied even today in the name of the Minnesota liberal party—the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. Those pietistic Scandinavian pioneers I like to write about had been political radicals back in the old country, and they continued pro-worker and anti-corporation in their American politics. Back in those days, nobody saw any disconnect in William Jennings Bryan being a fiery, Bible-thumping evangelical even as he railed against the oppression of the bankers. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, chief force behind Prohibition, was the mother of every liberal world-fixing organization that’s come since, from the ACLU to PETA to NARAL.

But during the Reagan administration I began to re-think all this. All my fellow Democrats despised Reagan. They called him “Ronald Ray-gun,” and described him as a superannuated, has-been actor with polyurethaned hair. But he was growing on me. I don’t think I ever voted for him, but I couldn’t help noticing that he kept saying and doing things I just liked.

And I was more and more uncomfortable in my own party.

The first thing that began to distance me from the Democrats was a thought—a thought that started as a tiny little shoot in my mind (planted, I think, by an article on the new phenomenon of the neo-cons in Time Magazine) and grew tenaciously once it put out roots. This thought went like this—“When you look at another human being and say, ‘That poor fellow is not capable of looking after himself. He must be cared for all his life, or he will die,’ you are not investing that person with dignity. You are treating him as subhuman (indeed the defenders of slavery had made a very similar argument). Some people may indeed be incapable of caring for themselves, but that judgment does not give them dignity. To expect a man to work is to treat him as a man.”

On top of that, my party was changing. I remembered when there were lots of pro-life Democrats, and when support for traditional marriage was not only the majority position, it was the only position. But it was growing more and more clear that there was no place for those opinions in the party anymore.

So one day I looked around me, and I said, “I guess I’m a Republican.”

Bill Reichart has filed his review of Evan Almighty. He likes it better than Bruce Almighty.

Warning: All I’ve got to post t about is what I did today. Which, as faithful readers know, is a subject both dull and irritating.

I actually accomplished a small achievement. One of the burdens of my job, a job which I generally like very much, is the business of book returns. No matter how canny you try to be when ordering textbooks in fall and winter, you always end up with rows and rows of unsold books, staring back at you with a “You brought us out here for this?” expression on their spines. (Yes, books look at you with their spines. They’re books, for pete’s sake. If they have eyes at all, they have them all over, like the living beasts in Ezekiel.)

I hate doing book returns. It’s one of many activities which normal people accomplish without a second thought, but are like East German tax audits to me. I hate to call strangers on the phone, for one thing. And of all the things I could call them about, asking their permission give back something I asked them for in the first place is one of the worst. One of the numerous absolute rules in my shabby little interior world is that I should never ask for anything that might possibly be refused. Refusal—rejection—is intolerable. Refusal is judgment on my personal worth. There’s no possible reason anyone would ever turn me down on anything, except that they hold me in utter contempt.

Sometime last term, one of our instructors ordered five copies of a particular book, then changed his mind after it had been delivered. So (at great expense in emotional effort) I called the distribution company and faxed them the information the lady said she needed to provide a return document.

But when I’d done that, I got a fax back from her saying she had no record of that book in their stock lists.

This was in April. Since that time I’ve had the books sitting in a box in my office, and I’ve told myself every day, “I’ve got to call her back and find out what the hang-up is.”

Today, I called at last. The lady I’d dealt with was on vacation, but the lady I talked to said I needed to talk to another number (some sort of publisher/distributor division of labor). The lady I talked to at the new place took my information, then e-mailed me a .pdf of the return document I needed. I put the box of books in the mail this afternoon.

Success!

My reward? I get to do the same thing with a bunch of other books and publishers.

Headed home, I noticed that all the traffic lights were out in my neighborhood. I wondered if we were having a power outage.

We were. The problem, apparently, was some kind of fire or accident just down the street from me. The street where I’d planned to walk after work, taking advantage of the rare sunny afternoon in a rainy week.

And, of course, when the fire department barricades a street, I don’t go up it even on foot. Somebody might tell me I wasn’t allowed to come that way, and that would be a judgment on my personal worth (see above).

So I mowed my lawn. Which is just as good, and accomplishes something besides.

The moral? The moral? After a day like this you want morals from me? As my enemies have always maintained (when they’re not refusing me things), I’ve got no morals.

A mushroom and a couple parasites have been discovered in a seriously old chunk of amber. Which brings a question to mind. (It does not beg a question, because begging the question means circular reasoning.) How do you read Genesis?

I got into a discussion about the age of the universe on Thinklings, and I thought I’d bring up the topic here though not for debate because we don’t want to reach our target heart-rate on this blog. So, how do you read Genesis? Does it appear to be straight-forward history, despite the miraculous content? Are there literary cues you can point to showing it to be symbolic?

I’ve heard some people extract odd meanings from the first few chapters, because they don’t appear to be familiar with reading ancient literature. Genesis isn’t written a like modern book, so it can’t be read like one.

Phil sent me this link to a story about evidence (through chicken bone analysis, no less) that the Polynesians sailed to South America about a century before Columbus.

This, as Phil mentions in his note, still leaves them about 400 years behind Leif Eriksson.

But it doesn’t surprise me in the least. The Polynesians were truly phenomenal blue water sailors.

What particularly intrigued me was the idea that Thor Heyerdahl might have been right, but backwards. Although he proved with his Kon Tiki voyage that it was possible for South Americans to have populated the South Pacific islands, recent DNA studies have proved that Polynesians are not the descendents of Native Americans.

Apparently the voyage was made at least once, though. Only it was in the opposite direction than Heyerdahl theorized.

{INSERT NORWEGIAN JOKE HERE]

Speaking of Norwegians, I’ve been asked to give a short talk at a heritage-themed service at my home church later this month. In looking for information on one of the early pastors, I came on an old book called Fifty Years in America, by N. N. Rønning (long out of print. Don’t even bother looking for it on Amazon).

Rønning came to America from Norway in the 1880s, about the same time my own people arrived. He had a more intellectual bent than most immigrants, though, and eventually attended the University of Minnesota, ending up as a professional writer.

He gives character sketches in the book of some of his teachers at the U. of M., including Cyrus Northrop, the university president:

In an address delivered November 18, 1908, at Whitman College, Washington, [Northrop] said:

“I would not stay one day at a state university if I were hampered in the maintenance of Christianity, and were compelled to recognize agnosticism as being as good as Christianity. I said to the Regents of the University of Minnesota in my inaugural address that I must be free as a believer in Christianity, and daily service in chapel, with singing of hymns, reading of scriptures and prayer to God has gone on all these years, and hundreds of students daily attend these services, their attendance being entirely voluntary….”

In another address delivered at the commencement of the University of Wisconsin, June 21, 1893, he said: “I have a very genuine contempt for a class of men who are forever proclaiming the failure of Christianity, or the failure of education, or the failure of the human mind, or the failure of God, because everything is not yet perfect.”

Minnesotans today know Northrop’s name primarily from Northrop Memorial Auditorium, a stadium at the university that’s named in his honor. Here’s its web site. You’ll note that one of the first events listed on the schedule (if you’re reading this in the archive, sometime in the future, never mind—it will have changed by now) is an event called “Glitter and Be Gay.”

You know, some days I feel like the guy in Ecclesiastes 2:18-19 (NIV): “I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the work into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless.”

But I suppose that would make me like one of the men Northrop expressed contempt for in 1893.

Update: Phil tells me the original message came from reader Greg Smith, and he forwarded it to me. For the record.

Perhaps this won’t go anywhere since I don’t know if studios like Disney habitually spend over $100,000 on scripts they don’t use, but the news from Variety.com is that The Big Ears has purchased a spec script for a cartoon about Adam and Eve. Satan tries to break them up, and Adam chases Eve through a modern city in a romantic comedy with biblical references.

This reminds me of a NY Times article on the film Evan Almighty, which says the producers are reaching out to churches to promote their film. Sara Ivry reports, “]The Passion of the Christ] demonstrated just how many evangelical moviegoers there are and how much money can be made from them.” Monkeying around with sacred stories won’t do it, not for me. For comedies, Universal should take stab at adapting Joe LaFlam. It could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Louis, if you know what I mean.

A still life by Matthew Bates

Warner Brothers and Universal are building a Harry Potter theme park. I confess I’d like to visit Hogwarts too, but I’d be concerned that it would have lots of little witchcraft and faux occultic elements lying around.

The Defense Department is developing cybernetic moths for video surveillance.

“Moths are creatures that need little food and can fly all kinds of places,” he continued. “A bunch of experiments have been done over the past couple of years where simple animals, such as rats and cockroaches, have been operated on and driven by joysticks, but this is the first time where the chip has been injected in the pupa stage and ‘grown’ inside it.”

“Once the moth hatches,” Brooks said, “machine learning is used to control it.”

I’m still beat tonight. Had another good night’s sleep, and my eye-bags have receded somewhat, like one of Sen. Gore’s icebergs, but I’m still shot from the weekend. I mowed the lawn after work, and now I’m about ready to collapse in a wrinkled, damp pile in a corner, like a college guy’s tee-shirt.

So I’ll redirect you to this post, composed by someone who calls himself “The Big Stink” (I assume it’s a he; rare is the woman who’d voluntarily assume a name like that) at an excellent Twin Cities blog called Freedom Dogs. I wish someone had told me these things at graduation. I wish I had the courage to put some of them into practice even today.