"It’s as much a war movie as anything else, with a woman as the general, and her gender isn’t the chink in her armor."

Wrote Frank Bruni, in the NYT last October, in "Sigourney Weaver Goes Her Own Way/Delivering performances both profound and eccentric, the actress has refused to be pinned down or defined throughout her nearly half-century career. At 71, she’s still going her own (mischievous) way." 

There were 9 other articles with the word "chink" in The New York Times in 2020. Today, the NYT's delightful word puzzle "Spelling Bee" challenges us to make words out of these letters....

... and it rejects the word "chink." If you try to enter it, you'll be told "Not in word list." 

I wasn't surprised to see this. I'd long observed the Spelling Bee's rejection of the word "coon," which can be a racial slur but, obviously, is also what people who call an opossum a "possum" call a raccoon. Last November, I blogged (at great length) about the Spelling Bee's rejection of the word "nappy."

The reason I'm blogging about this issue again, with "chink," is that the NYT printed the word "chink" 20 times in its own articles in 2020! When is a bad word so bad it's censored when it appears in a non-bad context? Take a position.

You know what? I took a position back in 2012. ESPN had fired a reporter for using the phrase "chink in the armor" in a headline that was about a Chinese basketball player. I felt sorry for the reporter, who'd used "chink in the armor" many times before and didn't mean to crack a joke about the player's race, but I wrote:

"For Marianne Williamson and Donald Trump, religion is all about themselves/The conviction that you can shape the world with your mind is an American tradition."

By Tara Isabella Burton (in WaPo). This is a fantastic article, full of detail and useful connections spanning American history. Excerpt:

But Williamson has more in common with President Trump than she — and indeed many voters — might admit, and it’s not just that both have used personal celebrity as a springboard into politics. At their core, both are also prime representatives of one of the most important and formative spiritual trends in American life: the notion that we can transform our material circumstances through faith in our personal willpower. Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality and Williamson’s woo-inflected belief in the power of “self-actualization” both come from the quintessentially American conviction that the quickest and surest route to Ultimate Reality can be found within ourselves....

Trump... has spoken openly about his family’s long and close relationship with Norman Vincent Peale, a 20th-century writer well-known for his best-selling 1952 book, “The Power of Positive Thinking.” While Peale was formally a Christian — he was the pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in New York for more than 50 years — his writings were suffused with the idea that you can transmute and augment yourself through sheer mental exertion. “Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” he wrote. “Never permit it to fade.” By thinking it, his readers would make it true....

Waves of what you might call “intuitional religion” have been washing across the American religious landscape since the First Great Awakening of the 18th century... New Thought, which flourished in the mid-1800s, was heavily shaped by the Transcendentalist philosophers of the previous generation, writers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed that the human self was the closest thing we have to a reflection of the divine. For these thinkers, organized religion — indeed, every mainstream institution — inhibited people from trusting their divinely sanctioned intuition, which they saw as the most direct path to truth....

"A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape."

Wrote Wendell Berry, quoted by Etienne in last night's "Winter Road Café," after Bunk said "Hey, this photo..."



"... appears to be a bike path, not a road."

I love the Berry quote, and thanks to Etienne for bringing it to us. It perfectly explains why I, using that photograph and needing a title for the "café," could not bring myself to use the word "path," even though I knew for sure — what you were left guessing* — that it is the thing most people call a "bike path."**

___________________

* Danno observed that if it's not a bike path, it's got "a very wide stripe!"

** Actually, around here, the official term for a thing like that is "bike trail." So you may want to discuss the path/trail distinction or bring out evocative poetic quotes with "trail." There must be many, "trail" being an even more powerful word in the legend of America. The Chisholm Trail, the Appalachian Trail, etc. And yet "trail" refers to dragging something along behind you. The oldest meaning is the trail of a long robe. On the landscape, then, the "trail" is what those who've gone before have left behind. And "trail" has only meant "path" since the early 1800s. "Path" has referred to "A way or track formed by the continued treading of pedestrians or animals" for as long as we can find a language called English — the period the OED calls "early OE" (600-950). That's profound. And — here's where I change my mind and decide that "path" is more powerful than "trail" — the word "pathfinder" has special resonance (from the OED):

1840 J. F. Cooper (title) The pathfinder.
1860 W. Whitman Leaves of Grass (new ed.) 425 The path-finder, penetrating inland, weary and long....
1847 R. W. Emerson Poems 169 Sharpest-sighted god.., Path-finder, road-builder, Mediator, royal giver.
1898 W. James Coll. Ess. & Rev. (1920) 408 Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path-finders. What every one can feel, what every one can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes can find words for and express.

4 great American names, clustered in the great English Dictionary.

There is no word "trailfinder," though there is — we must give "trail" its due — "trail-blazer." But "trail-blazer" only arrives on the scene in the 20th century, and its earilest recorded usage cannot compare to the quadrumvirate of James Fennimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James:

1908 Daily Chron. 19 May 3/2 Mrs. Hubbard's journey..with a small party of ‘trail blazers’ native to the ways of Labrador....
1957 V. Packard Hidden Persuaders xxi. 233 Tide, the merchandisers' journal, admonished America's merchandisers to pay attention to this trail-blazing development as it might be ‘tomorrow's marketing target.’

The "trail-blazing development" was a planned suburban community in Miramar, Florida:

What does it mean to buy a "packaged" home in a "packaged" community? For many (but apparently not all) of the Miramar families it means they simply had to bring their suitcases, nothing more. No fuss with moving vans, or shopping for food, or waiting for your new neighbors to make friendly overtures. The homes are completely furnished, even down to linens, china, silver, and a refrigerator full of food. And you pay for it all, even the refrigerator full of food, on the installment plan.

"I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing."

Said Maryanne Wolf, author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain."

Humans... seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia....

Haven't we always had to shift between different styles of paying attention? Imagine us in evolutionary times, before the printed word, when we were out and about looking for food, trying to survive. The ancestors who contributed to our brain structure had to skim and scan and then lock onto details. Isn't this agility functional?

But Wolf bemoans students' inability to read "Middlemarch" and William James and Henry James: "The students no longer will or are perhaps incapable of dealing with the convoluted syntax and construction of George Eliot and Henry James."

Maybe they are rejecting this kind of writing for good reason. Their elders impose this reading on them, but the key question is whether they can shift to accurate and closely detailed reading when they've found something they think is worth their attention.

When does someone who's selling services as a "psychic" deserve to be prosecuted for committing a crime?

In NYC, the government prosecuted a fortune teller — Sylvia Mitchell, 39 — who worked in some storefront in Greenwich Village. The jury convicted her and she could be sentenced to as much as 15 years in prison. The charges were larceny and a scheme to defraud.

During a weeklong trial, prosecutors portrayed Ms. Mitchell as a clever swindler who preyed on distraught people, promising them that she could alleviate their troubles through prayer and meditation to remove what she called “negative energy” and rectify problems that arose from their “past lives.”

In my book, this is entertainment and unconventional psychological therapy. Let the buyer beware. Who's dumb enough to actually believe this? Should the government endeavor to protect everyone who succumbs to the temptation to blow a few bucks on a fortune teller? But this was a case where there were a couple victims who somehow had enough money to make their losses nontrivial. One woman gave Mitchell $27,000 in what was portrayed as an "exercise in letting go of money." Another put $18,000 in a jar as a way to relieve herself of "negative energy."

Both women admitted on the stand under cross-examination that they were deeply skeptical of Ms. Mitchell’s techniques, but paid her anyway, suggesting that they were never tricked into thinking the psychic had the power to better their lives, [Mitchell's lawyer] said.

But an assistant district attorney, James Bergamo, described Ms. Mitchell as an expert at discovering people’s vulnerabilities and scaring them into handing over their cash. It mattered little, he argued in his summation, if Ms. Mitchell’s clients believed what she said about their past lives or negative spirits: the important fact was that they believed she would return their money. “The facts scream scam,” he said.

In Stupid World, no one can hear facts screaming. 

"We live in an age of what William James called 'medical materialism,' so instead of fretting about a fallen world..."

"...we speak of a poisoned one."

In a modern version of original sin, the corruption of our environment is so thorough that it defies individual efforts to transcend it: “Even those making good lifestyle choices still shower with city water, eat meals at restaurants, and live, work, and shop in buildings that have been cleaned and fumigated with toxic chemicals,” writes [Alejandro Junger in "Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself"]. We might add to his list other features of daily life that we suspect may be dangerous but haven’t been banned by the authorities: cell-phone signals that may lead to brain cancer, endocrine disruptors that drive our hormones crazy, probably leading, again, to cancer. Distrustful of our surroundings, we try to close ourselves off to malign influences and to purge them. It is no accident that Clean dwells obsessively on defecation and elimination. Junger wants us to flush out shit, “toxic waste,” even mucus, which he says has “a dense and sticky quality; it resonates with and attracts dense, toxic thoughts and emotions.”

(Here's the relevant William James book, one of the great classics, including a free Kindle edition.)

ADDED: Having downloaded the free Kindle version of "Varieties of Religious Experience," I can give you the relevant text right here:

Intelligent adults, contemplating why they play a mindless video game.

Lori Culwell sees the game "Angry Birds" as her "meditation tool" and thinks she's "picked up some sage wisdom from those self-sacrificing birds and their mortal pig enemies. Call it an Angry Birds satori, perhaps."

[T]he birds put my mind into a deeply Zen-like and hypnotic state, not unlike "flow" as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Maybe the people at Rovio have given us a game that is part meditation, part allegory for life. Maybe Freud would point out that my finding Zen in a game based on pig destruction signals latent anger issues.

("Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is one of my very favorite books, as I've noted before.)

And here's William Ian Miller in "Losing It"  — a book I first talked about here — talking about solitaire:

Everything distracts me... I interrupted the writing of this paragraph to play a game of solitaire, and then when I lost I allowed myself to play until I won, and then one more in case I won two in a row, and then I kept on until I won two in a row. Says the ancient rabbinical Pirkei Avot: The Ethics of the Fathers, written some eighteen hundred years ago: “If a man is walking by the way and is studying and then interrupts his study and exclaims: ‘How beautiful is this tree? How beautiful is this plowed furrow?’ Scripture considers that it is to be regarded as if he has forfeited his life (or as if he bears guilt for his soul).” If the beauties of nature cannot justify distraction, what of solitaire? My offense is (as if) capital; if only I could remember which circle of hell awaits me. My will—an element of my name, no less—never strong to begin with, has become weaker. The “I am” that remains in Will -iam is thus a ghost of its former self. If William James is right, and I find that he usually is, then I am in trouble: “The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind" (italics in original).

Do you use video games in a way that makes you want to explain it — like Culwell — in terms of meditation and wisdom or — like Miller — to read it as a signpost that you are walking downhill toward the grave?

"Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes."

So wrote William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902), quoted in "The Harvard Psychedelic Club" (2010).