Tag: politics

Everybody else who has a blog and is over 40 is reminiscing
about where they were when Apollo 11 landed 2 men on the moon, so
I guess I will too. (See all the science fiction writers at tor.com.)

It was between my Freshman and Sophomore years in college. I
was a physics major at Brown University in Providence, RI, but I
was at home with my mother and sister in Fall River, MA.

My summer job that year was in a tutoring program at Bristol
Community College for students who were judged to need some
remedial work to handle college level courses. I was teaching
three classes a day in remedial math, and getting home utterly
exhausted. So I usually took a nap after supper while my mother
was watching the news, so staying up late didn’t bother me as much
as it did some people.

I had vivid memories of hearing about Sputnik over the radio
at breakfast in 1957, and I knew that was directly tied to my
parents having better and more stable jobs teaching science in
college. So I probably thought the moon landing would lead to
there being good jobs for physics majors in a few years.

I was also a pretty avid science fiction reader, so I probably
thought it was a first step towards having humans living elsewhere
than on one planet. I remember having nightmares in 1962 or so
after seeing a film of George Gamow explaining about the life
cycle of the sun. He said it would become a red giant in
only a couple of billion years. I think the pictures in the
nightmare were actually from the chapter in a Bible stories book about the flight
of the Israelites from Egypt.

I was probably as wrong as lots of other people about the
directness and speed with which we were going to accomplish any of
those things, but if we ever do have extraterrestrial colonization
and reliable jobs for physics majors, it will be partly
because of NASA and Apollo 11.

Happy Fourth of July, if you’re someone who celebrates it.
Even if not, you might want to read the Declaration
of Independence and think about it.

In the first place, it’s a really good piece of writing. And
there are a lot of phrases and sentences that have entered the
English Language. It isn’t quite as full of quotations as the
best of Shakespeare, but it’s close:

• the course of human Events
• the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God
• a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind

That’s just the first paragraph (preamble). The second
paragraph is almost more jam-packed:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers
from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of
the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new
Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and
organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed,
will dictate that Governments long established should not be
changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all
Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer,
while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing
the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of
Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object,
evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is
their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and
to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the
patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the
Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of
Government. The History of the Present King of Great-Britain is a
History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct
Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these
States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid
World.

And the last paragraph is the one that makes it such fun to
read aloud:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of the divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

One of the features that makes it such a tight piece of writing
is that it’s a syllogism:

A: When these things happen, the government should change.

B: These things have been happening.

C: The colonies are of right and ought to be free and
independent states.

Another point to consider is that, compared with many other
pieces of political propaganda, it seems to have been mostly
true. Not that some of the stories might not have been told
differently by the opponents of independence, but historians who
have looked at the question find some basis for all the “Facts” in
the document.

So you can complain, and I certainly do, about the abuses of
power in the system of government set up after this Declaration.
But it’s worth thinking about all the important revolutions
inspired by this language, probably including some minor ones in
our own biographies.

And have a good cookout or fireworks or whatever you do.

I’ve been reading the discussion of Sonia Sotomayor’s
nomination to be a justice of the Supreme court with more interest
than I sometimes read such things. She’s roughly my age, and it
still surprises me when people who seem that much like me get be
judges and presidents.

I thought I’d point you at two of the more interesting articles
I’ve run into.

Slate Magazine has an article called The Invitation You Can’t Refuse —
Why Sonia Sotomayor was talking about race in the first place.
It’s written by a latina lawyer, who makes the point:

Imagine Chief Justice John Roberts being invited by members of his own cultural network to deliver remarks for the Honorable William H. Rehnquist Law & Cultural Diversity Memorial Lecture on what special qualities white men bring to the bench: “What makes your approach, as a white male, different from that of your black judicial colleagues?” “Does being a white man give you special insight into the perspective of white male defendants in discrimination cases?” “Has the presence of white men on the bench made any difference in American law?” Odds are he wouldn’t last two minutes before treading on someone’s sensibilities. But this political high-wire act is expected from minority figures as a matter of course.

This morning’s New York Times has an article comparing the
biographies of Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas called For
Sotomayor and Thomas, Paths Diverge at Race.

Among the striking paralels drawn between these lives are that
when they arrived in college, both felt that they didn’t speak
English as well as they wanted to:

Ms. Sotomayor had grown up in the Bronx speaking Spanish; Mr. Thomas’s relatives in Pin Point, Ga., mixed English with Gullah, a language of the coastal South. Both attended Catholic school, where they were drilled by nuns in grammar and other subjects. But at college, they realized they still sounded unpolished.

Ms. Sotomayor shut herself in her dorm room and eventually resorted to grade-school grammar textbooks to relearn her syntax. Mr. Thomas barely spoke, he said later, and majored in English literature to conquer the language.

“I just worked at it,” he said in an interview years later, “on my
pronunciations, sounding out words.”

Another similarity was what happened when they were interviewed
for jobs after graduation from law school:

Mr. Thomas and Ms. Sotomayor did have one experience in common: law firm interviewers asked them if they really deserved their slots at Yale, implying that they might not have been accepted if they were white.

Ms. Sotomayor fought back so intensely — against a Washington firm, now merged with another — that she surprised even some of the school’s Hispanics. She filed a complaint with a faculty-student panel, which rejected the firm’s initial letter of apology and asked for a stronger one. Minority and women’s groups covered campus with fliers supporting her. Ms. Sotomayor eventually dropped her complaint, but the firm had already suffered a blow to its reputation.

Mr. Thomas was more private about the experience — even some friends do not recall it — but he took it hard. With rejection letters piling up, he feared he would not be able to support his wife and young son.

The problem, Mr. Thomas concluded, was affirmative action. Whites would not hire him, he concluded, because no one believed he had attended Yale on his own merits. He felt acute betrayal: his education was supposed to put him on equal footing, but he was not offered the jobs that his white classmates were getting. He saved the pile of rejection letters, he said in a speech years later.

“It was futile for me to suppose that I could escape the stigmatizing
effects of racial preference,” he wrote in his autobiography.

I certainly hope they get the confirmation process over in time
so that it doesn’t interfere with fixing health care and the
economy, but meanwhile, it’s producing some interesting writing.