Passing through Lodi.

I drive straight north to Lodi, Wisconsin, which I don't think is the Lodi that Creedence Clearwater Revival was stuck in. There's a Lodi in New Jersey, too, and I've always assumed that's the one that Creedence meant to just pass through. [ADDED: Read through to the update before emailing me!] I didn't ride in on the Greyhound, I drove my new Audi TT Coupe. Here's Main Street with Silvio....

I admired the roof lines of the buildings that were built in the late 1800s....

I stopped to photograph the Palmer Tree, which the plaque on the rock said was a Burr Oak, that dated back to 1848, when the town was settled....

There were some more recent signs, but these seemed not to be from the present but from the 1970s...

In the middle of Main Street there is a break in the storefronts where the sidewalk crosses over a brook...

An archway proclaims it "Home of Susie," and a sign explains that in 1948 Susie the duck endeared herself to the Lodi townsfolk when she laid her eggs in a masonry flower basket, to which she returned each year. The duck received "national media attention," perhaps the most attention ever paid to Lodi....

Back to the car, parked in front of Galaxy Pizza...

Driving home I stop at Lodi Marsh, at a segment of Wisconsin's "Ice Age Trail." Some views of the marsh...

UPDATE: An amazing number of people have emailed to say that Creedence was talking about Lodi, California. Is "Lodi" like "Springfield" -- a name that comes up as a town name in every state? I happened to drive home through Springfield, Wisconsin today. Googling "Lodi," California comes up first, followed by New Jersey. Third is Italy, which must be the source for the name. Here's a Lodi, Wisconsin website.

UPDATE 2: Sorry, the photos that were once here are lost forever. My mac.com homepage was destroyed by Apple, and my workaround of using archive.org isn't working. Oh, it's just as well! There were so many photos here. It would have been a lot of trouble restoring them all. And who would see this old post? I'm writing this in May 2019, the day I decided I needed a "Creedence" tag and found all the old posts that mentioned Creedence. I tend to the archive like that, adding new tags retrospectively. Maybe I only do it for myself, but if you are reading this, hi.

Silvio is getting impatient.

I'll be back later.

Don't miss Nina's Gates-blogging!

(If a scandal arises as a result of the big Gates project, we can call it Gatesgate.)

What's worth "bothering" about in the Ward Churchill controversy.

Sean Hackbarth tries to answer a question I asked him in email. He had written to me to call attention to a post of his that complained about Ward Churchill coming to UW-Whitewater "to grab as much attention as he can." My question, meant to imply why I wasn't going to link, was: Aren't you helping him get attention?

He titles the new post "Should we even bother?" which suggests he's not really getting or not admitting what my point was. I recommend doing what is best, not doing what takes less effort. Denying someone the springboard of your outrage might be better. That it's less bother is just a bonus.

But if your outrage at things Churchill has written is creating a fund of energy that you want to expend on something useful, what I have recommended and continue to recommend is to focus on the institutions that hire and promote undercredentialed political ideologues like him. By focusing on Churchill, you make it easier for those institutions to avoid responsibility for what is a much broader problem. You make it all too easy for these institutions to retaliate against the one individual that critics have locked onto. You help them make it seem as though they've done enough. That the retaliation also offends free speech values further demonstrates how dysfunctional the focus on the individual speaker is.

"Now that the 'frames' have the added fabric, they have become curvy and flirtatious."

Nina has the first of what I'm sure will be a lot of pictures of The Gates in NYC.

UPDATE: Using pure nerve, Nina finds her way to the press box and gets some great shots, including this closeup of Jeanne-Claude (her hair newly oranged), Christo (not orange, grizzled), and Mayor Bloomberg. She attributes her success to her black coat and her multi-cultural personality ("New York chutzpah, Midwestern temerity, Polish spunk").

Too much moral clarity?

In today's NYT, Roger Cohen writes about the Bush Administration's embrace of Natan Sharansky's book "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.":

Here is Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of state, explaining last month what will guide her policy: "The world should apply what Natan Sharansky calls 'the town square test': if a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a fear society has finally won their freedom."

The idea of the town-square test appears on Page 40 of Mr. Sharansky's book. By this point, he has developed the arguments that are repeated in various guises through the remaining 263 pages. These may be summarized as follows: Freedom is attainable for every person on earth. It is the best guarantee of global security, because democratic societies are nonbelligerent. Totalitarian or, as he puts it, fear societies are dangerous because they always seek external enemies as a means of self-preservation.

To act on the above requires "moral clarity." This phrase is repeated with bludgeoning insistence. By moral clarity, Mr. Sharansky means the courage to bring down autocracy wherever it may exist, including the Middle East. "We must recapture moral clarity," he writes, "by recognizing that the great divide between the world of fear and the world of freedom is far more important than the divisions within the free world."

Cohen calls the book too "simplistic," too "pat."

The danger now is that the beauty of his argument may become a form of blindness. He uses America's abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison mainly to laud the response of a free society to such an outrage: investigation, public debate, judgment and punishment.

But Mr. Sharansky might also have taken Abu Ghraib as an illustration of what can happen when a society becomes too certain of its mission, too giddy with its might, too negligent of constitutional safeguards of liberty and too blind to the humanity of people from another culture. Moral clarity in the name of freedom is one thing. But the slogan of freedom masquerading as moral clarity is quite another.

Cohen is right to raise these concerns. It's important to have values, but you also must constantly pay attention to what you are actually doing. Ideologues are dangerous, even if some ideology is important in the practical work of making the world a better place. Real moral clarity involves clearly seeing the effects you are having and not falling blindly in love with your own ideas.

She "worships the female sexual organ, seeing it as her god."

Uganda denounces Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues."

The Ugandan government has condemned "The Vagina Monologues," which is to be staged in the country later this month, saying it is part of an international effort to corrupt the moral fabric of Ugandans. The state minister of information, James Nsaba Buturo, said the government had no plans to ban the play, but said the title "is undoubtedly indecent and tasteless" and the content "promotes values that are a threat to our country."

Well, good for them for not banning it! Myself, I think the play is awfully bad, though I couldn't care less if Ensler "worships the female sexual organ."

(Political theology might be this blog's theme of the day. See previous post.)

UPDATE: In the end, Uganda did ban the play.

"When you think of the New Testament, they get about 2 of the values and we get about 27."

That's Howard Dean, speaking to members of the Democratic Party's African-American caucus. Ah, political theology!

The tsunami's archaeology.

The BBC reports on the effects of the tsunami in India:

Archaeologists say they have discovered some stone remains from the coast close to India's famous beachfront Mahabalipuram temple in Tamil Nadu state following the 26 December tsunami.

They believe that the "structures" could be the remains of an ancient and once-flourishing port city in the area housing the famous 1200-year-old rock-hewn temple.

Three pieces of remains, which include a granite lion, were found buried in the sand after the coastline receded in the area after the tsunami struck.

Saturday!

How nice to have a Saturday -- a Saturday without a stack of admission files on the table. The files claim your attention whether you are reading them or not. To be fair and properly attentive, you can't read too many in a row, so much of the time you are simply feeling that you ought to be reading them. Today, the table is clear. I have no plans to make any progress through any tasks more challenging than reading the newspaper. (The blinds are even up!) It's a perfect day to back Silvio down the driveway and head out onto the Wisconsin backroads. What's out there? Snowy hills and rolling farmland and maybe a charming little town or two. I think I'll drive north today. I hope to have a few photographs. Today, as I look forward to seeing the very orange photographs from The Gates in NYC, I'm going to go collect some images that will be very white and gray. And blue!

Recycling in Madison.

Regular readers know of my tribulations trying to throw out the trash properly in Madison. A reader sends this link to an article about the new recycling program in Seattle, because it's got this about Madison:

In Madison, Wis., a liberal college town that embraced recycling enthusiastically when it began in 1991, a fine has never been imposed.

"Seventy percent of the population is going to walk across a bed of hot coals to recycle a bottle. They just do that. They believe in it," said George Dreckmann, Madison's recycling coordinator. More than 90 percent follow the law, and Dreckmann said it doesn't make sense economically or practically to go after the few violators.

Useful information!

You know, we're required to use special clear plastic bags that are emblazoned with the words "Madison Pride." It's not bad enough that you have to put your bottles on display to your neighbors. Good thing we drank a lot of milk this week so there are plenty of bulky milk containers to cover up all the wine and beer bottles that conveniently sink to the bottom -- otherwise the locals might think ill of us -- but then they'd probably think ill of us if we had a lot of diet soda cans -- or even soda cans, period. But we've got to buy special bags that compel us to manifest a prideful attitude about the low-level virtue of recycling. Arrgh.... Time to uncork a bottle of wine and drink a toast to the cloying self-love that swirls through my lovely little city.

But regular readers want to know: How did the test chair work? Well, the chair was gone, but I've got to allow for the possibility that some ordinary citizen came by and decided to pick up the chairs, a la Holly Woodlawn in "Trash." (Note: any esoteric allusion to beer bottles is quite unintended.)

The history of humor.

"The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker" arrived in the mail today. It contains over 68,000 cartoons, most of which are on two CDs but 2004 of which are in the 600+ page large format book. A nice thing about the book is that it's organized by year, beginning with 1925. (Doesn't the magazine seem older than that?) So you can see the sort of thing that was thought funny in any given year -- that is, what the editors of The New Yorker thought was funny in a way that expressed the whole New Yorker ethos. Like here, in 1925, a man is reading the newspaper and on the floor is a very sketchy line drawing of, presumably, his son. The son is on all fours and might have a tail, so maybe he's a bit of a monkey boy -- I'm not sure. The caption is:

"Pa, what is all this talk about Evolution?"

"Son, I'll have to consult my attorney before I can answer that question. I might be sent to jail for it."

Okay. It's a reference to the Scopes trial, which was in 1925. (A case in which a schoolteacher was tried for teaching about evolution.) So is it just a simple matter of the father referring to the Scopes prosecution, or is it some strange devolution of the boy into a monkey that the father is invoking Scopes to avoid dealing with? I'm going to guess the former. Finding this cartoon inscrutable doesn't necessarily prove that humor changes a lot over the decades, because there are always some current New Yorker cartoons that you can't quite figure out. (There was a "Seinfeld" episode about that.)

Anyway, looking for some info on the Scopes trial, I came up with some contemporaneous and non-New Yorker cartoons: here and here.

A tribute.

To one Marine who was killed in Iraq, a friend of one of our students here at the law school, who wrote, the day after the Iraqi election:

These tributes and beautiful stories are never portrayed in the mainstream media--only the violence or death, and then the success--never a tie between the tragic sacrifice and the success!

The site has been sent to numerous military families, however, without having a military family member or friend I think it is hard for people, especially my generation, to understand the sacrifices people just like ourselves are making over there. For example, I don't know another person in my law school class (except two others who knew Bobby) who have either friends over there, family over there, or have known someone who has been killed, some law students, obviously opposed to the war--which as you know is not rare in Madison (and I opposed the war after we found out they did not have WMD), even had the audacity to tell me that day when I was notified that Bobby had been killed that "it is too bad your friend died for nothing."

Perhaps you could take a look, as I think both the left and the right should recognize the true heroes that led to the success of the election in Iraq--as it wasn't really Bush, but rather, it was people like Bobby. Also, the right needs to remember to ensure that they realize that "spreading democracy" has an extremely high cost--and the left needs to remember in order to remind them that whether you were against the war or not, this is a victory for human kind and being antiwar should never mean being antisoldier.

"Modernist obscurantism and feel-good communalism."

New Republic art critic Jed Perl slams The Gates -- even though it will create "one of the world's most beautiful urban spaces." Apparently, it's all too easy, too beautiful. It has "no core, no essence" -- "There isn't much of anything left once you've stripped these fun-with-fabric extravaganzas of all their logistical complexities."

Maybe it is purely lush and hedonistic, but why not give in to the sheer pleasure of beauty?

The California Supreme Court on IQ and the death penalty.

I've written before about the question whether the Supreme Court's Atkins case, barring the death penalty for the mentally retarded, meant for IQ tests to be determinative. Yesterday, the California Supreme Court rejected the IQ line-drawing sought by the prosecution (who suggested 70 as the cut-off point). The case involved a man who has scored from 71 to 86 on various tests. How bizarre it would be to execute him because he scored 71, when it would violate his constitutional rights if he'd only scored 70! The court decided he was entitled to a hearing, based on the fact that a qualified expert found him to be mentally retarded. At the hearing, the IQ scores are simply part of the whole mass of evidence that can be considered in reaching a factual conclusion.

How fascinating the human body is when it doesn't look like itself!

What a cool sports photo! It reminded me of a Tim Hawkinson artwork, which I'd just been admiring in the newspaper: see it here by clicking on slideshow and going to the sixth item.

The sports photograph comes from these World Press award winners, which I found via Metafilter.

All the items in the art slideshow and the photography awards series are worth taking a look at.

For February: orangeness.

Well, I didn't go to New York, at least not this weekend, to see The Gates in Central Park. Teaching on Friday and Monday mornings, it would be two days of traveling and -- realistically, for me -- $1500 just for one full day in the city. (Yeah, another night and morning too, but still!) So, I'm checking out the photographs over on Flickr. This one is nice. Tomorrow the fabric will be unfurled, so there should be tons of photography soon. Nina's in NY, with no photographs yet, but she's saying, "This morning, I'm off to explore the emergent path of saffron. It is up and waiting. The sun is brilliant. The stage is set." So she should have some good pictures, with her unique commentary, soon enough.

How exciting for the people in New York! I hope you like orange. Personally, I think orange is just what February needs. Officially, they're calling it "saffron," but people, you know it's orange! No need to deny it, like a J. Crew catalogue. It's orange!

UPDATE: Nina's got pictures now. She notes, here, that the gates -- with the fabric still tightly wound -- work as frames when you photograph the buildings that ring the park.