Apple is up before a Congressional committee for exploiting certain provisions in the U.S. tax code to avoid paying certain taxes. This is, in months without an "r," a bad thing and should be punished.
Meanwhile, some IRS employees are up before a Congressional committee for questioning the validity of efforts by certain organizations to avoid paying certain taxes on the grounds that they were not political in nature, despite the fact that their names included such phrases as “Tea Party” and “patriot.”
Pop quiz: Can you spot the one phrase common to each case?
Who, exactly, is supposed to be surprised by any of this? Discuss, using what you have learned in this course.
Bonus question: Speaking of Congressional committees, how is it that these various provisions, exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions of tax law come into being?
Many, many years ago -- I can’t recall the exact year, but it was in the late ‘60s, know what I mean, wink wink nudge nudge -- I happened upon an odd little book at a friend’s house. It was called The World’s Largest Cheese and it consisted of -- I’m guessing here -- whatever came up in one or more late evening, um, conferences between the authors (wink wink nudge nudge again). In other words, it had no overall theme or structure; it was a compilation of odd ideas taken to absurd extremes.
Some of the best bits were in the groups of photographs, such as a collection ostensibly representing the Hall of Fame of Athletes with no Vowels in their Names (to which ought to have been added parenthetically “if you don’t count “y” as a vowel”).
One of those photos hit home with me the instant I saw it. It was a picture of Stan Kann. If you didn’t spend part of your life in the general vicinity of St. Louis, you may never have heard of him. When I was a boy he had a ten or fifteen minute show every afternoon on KSD-TV, playing the organ in a small combo. They wore derby hats and sleeve garters, and I remember a little ditty called “Who Put the Devil in Evelyn’s Eyes?” Stan also helped out musically on the favorite local morning show with Charlotte Peters.
But Stan was best known for two things. Locally, and for decades, he became an institution playing the mighty Wurlitzer organ at the Fox Theatre. (For many years he also played at a restaurant owned by St. Louis’s other Stan, Musial.)
Nationally, however, he was one of Johnny Carson’s favorite and most frequent guests (77 appearances, reportedly) on “The Tonight Show.” But he didn’t play the organ for Johnny. Oh, no. He brought samples from his hobby, which was collecting vacuum cleaners.
That photo in The World’s Largest Cheese was accompanied by what I have ever and always since then asserted was an ultimate, a perfect caption. With thanks to Robin and Dick, here’s the pic:
And if you can’t read it, I’ll transcribe the caption:
Stan Kann relaxes with his collection of vacuum cleaners, the world’s largest.
Two things fly this little sentence to the very peak of Parnassus. Second is the comma. Yes, it’s required by the grammar of the sentence. But the sentence might have gone otherwise, as “Stan Kann relaxes with the world’s largest collection of vacuum cleaners.” Compare the two. The second one is flat to the point of tedium. Ho-hum, turn the page. By deferring the contextual information to a dependent adjectival phrase, set off by a comma, the writer has forced a brief pause, one just long enough for the reader of “collection of vacuum cleaners” to go “wait, what?” The pause, that is, that gives you pause.
But the real brilliance is in the verb. Stan “relaxes” with his collection. It might have read simply “Stan Kann with his collection...”, the omission of a verb being entirely acceptable in a caption. Or it might have been “Stan Kann shows off his collection...”, which would have risked irritating us because no one likes a showoff. But no; in a tiny stroke of genius, Stan “relaxes.”
Now note that no human being can possibly relax in that posture. So Stan is not truly relaxing. Yet we accept that, in this fugitive and only fortuitously caught moment, Stan is relaxing. And so we know, somehow, that Stan is a person like ourselves. He works and then he relaxes. But even in relaxation, his is an active mind. He is open to what the world around him offers. He marches to the beat of his own drummer. He is confident and kindly. He is happy to share his joy with us. And we are happy that he did.
Yesterday I happened upon an old sci-fi movie I'd never seen: "Devil Girl from Mars," a British film from 1954 that is, I read, something of a cult item in certain circles. I can see that. It's also a bit of a ripoff from "The Day the Earth Stood Still," a classic of the genre. A lone spacefarer and his/her robot arrive on Earth; the traveler speaks in deadly serious tones; and the robot demonstrates vast destructive power. The noir-ish lighting of the interiors of the two spacecraft is similar as well. What distinguishes the two films is a great gap in production values. The Brit one was done on the cheap, and it shows in every scene. The gap is widest in the contrast of the two robots. Gort is immense, impassive, and rivetting; the Devil Girl's pal is badly designed, badly made, and so absurdly top-heavy and clumsy that it threatens to topple over with each step it takes.
But apart from the movie's, er, qualities, what struck me was...well, look for yourself. Here is Nyah, the Devil Girl (played by Patricia Laffan):
Here is Flash Gordon's eternal foe Ming the Merciless (played by Charles Middleton):
And here is Count Dracula (played by Bela Lugosi):
There's probably a Ph.D. dissertation hiding here, something along the lines of "Transgressive Trope: Biliminal Hairlines in Late Capitalistic Imagination."
Oh, I almost forgot: Eddie Munster (played by Butch Patrick):
I was once shown a beautifully bound book that was, I was told, an anthology of notable scholarly writings from various Arabic-speaking countries. I could read nothing of it, but flipping through the pages, I stopped at one article that included a great many elegant geometric diagrams based on representations of the Earth’s geography. It was explained to me that this article was a doctoral dissertation that demonstrated that the city of Mecca occupies the “center of the surface of the Earth.”
Euclidean geometry has for thousands of years been the model of deductive logic: Beginning from a set of axioms, prove a proposed theorem to be true. Prove, for example, that the three angles of a triangle sum to a straight angle. The method is powerful within its limited domain, but it is not foolproof. I recall when my high school geometry teacher filled two or three blackboards with the proof that all triangles are isosceles triangles. You may be familiar with the algebraic proof that 1 = 0. Such stunts tend to be long and complex. This lends a kind of credibility to them while distracting the student from the necessary violation of an axiom or a rule of inference somewhere in the chain.
Partly because of the rigor of Euclideanism, and partly because of the general fame of Greek philosophy, the deductive method has always enjoyed a stellar reputation. Indeed, in many places and ages it has been thought of as the single path to Truth, and its tool, Reason, as a unique endowment from God himself. “Reason is God’s crowning gift to man,” wrote Sophocles. (But then he was one of those Greeks.) “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!” wrote Shakespeare. (But then wasn’t Hamlet a bit of a piece of work himself?)
The habit of holding up Reason as man’s distinguishing and almost divine characteristic makes it so much easier for ideologists, not to mention the inevitable rascals, to hide behind displays of reasonable-seeming but faulty argument. Hence the conspicuous complexity; hence the misleading diagrams.
The dissertation whose artwork so struck me needed all those elaborate and carefully executed diagrams because its job was to prove an absurdity. The dissertation was not a report of a discovery. It was a justification of a premise. In a way the author quite deserved his Ph.D., though it ought to have been for ingenuity rather than research.
With enough pomp and handwaving, the really clever chap can prove almost anything he likes, and when it suits him he can pretend to be doing science all the while. He does this because he has learned that the rubes will buy it.
This sort of thing is called non-science because so often it makes use of the tropes and trappings of genuine science but goes about its task exactly backwards from what science does. Notice that the Islamic scholar’s proposed task was not to find where, if anywhere, the “center of the surface of the Earth” might be, but to show that it is in a predetermined location. Similarly the Intelligent Design proponent sets out to construct a plausible argument supporting a particular thesis. The fact that the thesis is cloaked as a conclusion does not change the nature of the exercise.
If I reach out to flick off a light switch and get a tingle in my finger, my first reaction is purely reflex -- I recoil. Then I pause and, if I am like most men, I try it again. Just to make sure, you understand. If I am tingled again I am confident in concluding that there is something wrong with the switch. (Though if I am like most men, I decline to call the electrician.)
When first I reached out to the switch, I did so on the tacit assumption that all was well with my wiring.There was no need for me to express that assumption to myself before acting. But if I were a different sort of fellow I might have gone about the thing in a different way. I might have taken the trouble to develop a theory about my wiring. I might have said something to the effect that “The wiring in my house is excellent and without fault. No harm can come to anyone from it.” I might somehow have come to feel that this was neither a mere hypothesis nor even a simple statement of fact but a doctrine, a dogma, acceptance of which it was important that I and others both embody and enforce.
Given that commitment, I could not have viewed the first or second touch as a test. For there can be no test of a thesis that is not open to revision. Rather, I might well have kept touching the switch, denying that I felt anything. Or I might simply have walked away in order to give the world a little time to right itself. In the first case I might have killed myself; in the second, someone else. What I would not have done is learn from experience. Had our species acted like this back on the African veldt, there would be no such species. Survival required just the opposite response: taking experience seriously and seeking workable ideas to explain and predict it.
There have always been charlatans, of course, and since the rise of science as a powerful institution there have been charlatans who pretended to be doing science -- rainmakers, astrologers, sellers of tonics and magnetic bracelets and orgone boxes, Lysenkoists, Freudians, and so on. In our overly politicized world they now tend to be enlisted in ideological wars and to make their money less from direct sales to the rubery and more from constructing apologies for such causes as creationism, anti-vaccination, the precautionary principle, or climate-change denial.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 05:34PM 
