Up with Dennis...

Hello friends. I just watched Dennis Kucinich's speech "Up with America" from the DNC this past week. I still struggle to fathom that we can't see clear to think of this energetic, inspirational, and insightful man as "electable." The disgrace that he suffered at the hands of the media in collusion with the DNC is unconscionable...and yet he is the image of love stumping for the Dems.

This literally brought tears to my eyes. God bless you Dennis. I hope someday we can get this man and his vision into a position to move our country in the right direction, and I hope we do it before its too late.

More on Beijing 2008

Last month I commented on a Slate.com story about boycotting the Beijing 08 Olympic Games. This week I was directed to an editorial in April's Economist highlighting the spectacular failure of the IOC's "quiet diplomacy":

A DEVELOPING country gets the Olympic games as an acknowledgment of its new, exalted status. An authoritarian government, awash with money, exploits the chance to project a peaceful, progressive image. Critics of the regime use the games as a chance to demand more democracy and human rights. There are demonstrations, forcefully broken up.

This is the story, more or less, of the Beijing Olympics 2008—so far. But it also describes the run-up to the Mexico City Olympic games of 40 years ago. Then, the protests ended in a massacre, an awful sign of how far governments can go to protect a cherished sporting show.

In "honor" of the start of the 08 games I'm wearing this shirt by Thread Pit on Friday:

Be ye therefore perfect...

Does cross-posting something on my blog that I wrote for a TexAgs count as cheating? I hope not.

Anyhow, this grew out of the "Christians, why don't you believe in... thread, this will be a reference point for Orthodox Christian soteriology. This is an important topic for discussion, even among Apostolic traditions, since the definition of salvation and why we need it differs even between the East and West. Orthodox soteriology will also sound foreign to protestants who hold to sola fide. I encourage readers to engage all linked articles and post thoughtful questions and dialogue. If you want to start a thread about your faith tradition's theory of salvation, please be my guest. =)

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect

(Matt. 5:48)

...till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ

(Eph. 4:13)

...as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

(2 Pet. 1:3-4)

The Orthodox understanding of salvation is often called deification or theosis. St. Athanasius notes in his treatise On the Incarnation that “God became man that man might become god.” St. Gregory Palamas tells us that we are able to become by grace what God is by nature The Orthodox notion of salvation is not juridical; that is, it is not simply justification for guilt. Valeria A. Karras, points this out in her paper Beyond Justification: An Orthodox Perspective:

Robert Eno has pointed out the second generation of Christians, the Apostolic Fathers, “have been seen as presenting an almost total disappearance of the Pauline point of view.” A search of Greek patristic literature on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae shows that, over a period of a couple of centuries that includes the theologically-rich fourth century, most Greek Fathers don’t talk much about dikaiosuvnh (“justification” or “righteousness”) except when exegeting a passage using that term. The striking exception is Gregory of Nyssa, the late fourth-century bishop who was younger brother to Basil of Caesarea, but, interestingly, when Gregory uses the term, it is almost always in the context of the true, Christian way of life, in other words, works of righteousness; neither Nyssa nor any other Eastern Father ever writes in terms of what Lutheranism calls “forensic justification” (some would claim that the mid-fourth century Alexandrian bishop Athanasius did, but we will return to this issue later).

The absence in Eastern Christianity of a soteriology in terms of forensic justification is serious because Orthodoxy believes not only in ecumenism across geographical space, but especially “ecumenism in time”, i.e., the need to be consistent with the theological tradition of the Church from the earliest centuries. Thus, the traditional Orthodox mind is immediately suspicious of biblical interpretations that have little or no root in the early life and theology of the Church; this is true in spades of particularly the forensic notion of justification, and of its consequent bifurcation of faith and works. Sola scriptura means little to the Orthodox, who as opposed to placing Scripture over the Church, have a full sense of Scripture’s crucial but interrelated place within the Church’s continuing life: the apostolic church communities which produced many of the books of the New Testament, the communities of the catholic Church which over a period of centuries determined which books circulating through various communities truly encapsulated the elements of the apostolic faith; the dogmas and Creed declared by the whole Church in response to the frequent controversies over the nature of the Trinity and of the theanthropos Jesus Christ, controversies which frequently arose precisely from dueling perspectives of which biblical texts were normative and of how those texts should be interpreted.

This of course does not mean that the Orthodox do not believe that each generation of Christians may receive new insights into Scripture, especially insights relevant in a given cultural context. However, it does mean that the new insights must remain consistent with earlier ones, and that one or two Pauline passages (and one specific interpretation of those passages) are not considered theologically normative – particularly as a foundation for a soteriological dogma – unless the early and continuing tradition of the Church show them consistently to have been viewed as such.

History is important in a second way. Because of its less juridical exegesis of Pauline soteriological statements, Eastern Christianity has never had anything approaching the kind of faith v. works controversies that have enveloped and (for both good and ill) theologically shaped the Christian West, whether one considers the late fourth-/early fifth-century Pelagian controversy or the 16th-century Protestant Reformation begun by Martin Luther. Rather, the East has maintained a somewhat distant and even puzzled attitude toward the theological polemics which have raged over justification in terms of faith or works.

The Orthodox notion of theosis is relational in that we become like God by communing with God, as was man’s created purpose. Mankind’s fall from grace was that Adam & Eve broke communion with God by eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and, rather than repenting and returning to --God, they persisted in sin—Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. God removed them from Paradise as a mercy since if they were to further disobey and eat of the Tree of Life they would become eternally sinful. It is instructive that the original sin was a distortion or perversion of created intent: mankind was created for communion with God, but rather than following God’s plan for theosis they partook of the tree to become “like God.”

The consequence of the broken communion and persistence in sin is that man became subject to Death. Christ effects our salvation by restoring communion in His person—fully man and fully God, and by destroying Death. He calls us to “be perfect” because He has made that perfection possible…not easy…but possible, through imitation of Him.

When the Son of God assumed our humanity in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, the process of our being renewed in God’s image and likeness was begun. Thus, those who are joined to Christ, through faith, in Holy Baptism begin a process of re-creation, being renewed in God’s image and likeness. We become, as St. Peter writes, “partakers of the divine nature” (1:4)

Because of the Incarnation of the Son of God, because the fullness of God has inhabited human flesh, being joined to Christ means that it is again possible to experience deification, the fulfillment of our human destiny. That is, through union with Christ, we become by grace what God is by nature—we “become children of God” (Jn 1:12).

“Deification” p. 1692, The Orthodox Study Bible, 2008, Thomas Nelson Publishers

With the Incarnation, God has assumed and glorified our flesh and has consecrated and sanctified our humanity. He has also given us the Holy Spirit. As we acquire more of the Holy Spirit in our daily lives, we become more like Christ, and we have the opportunity of being granted, in this life, illumination or glorification. When we speak of acquiring more of the Holy Spirit, it is in the sense of appropriating to a greater degree what has actually been given to us already by God. We acquire more of what we are more able to receive. God the Holy Spirit remains ever constant.

Theosis: Partaking of the Divine Nature by Mark Shuttleworth.

All of this is intended to be worked out in “fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12), and while we are corporately saved (2 Pet. 3:9), I’m called to worry about my own shortcomings and simply love everyone else. Fr. Matthew puts a nice twist on the mote:log injunction (Matt 7:5) by telling me to keep my eyes on my own plate. And while he is speaking specifically about fasting, the concept maps nicely onto thinking of myself as “chief among sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15).

Comparative Religion

I wrote this in response to a thread at TexAgs.com asking whether or not the resident Christians had studied other faith traditions. Please forgive any inaccuracies I may have written below, as my study has been self-initiated and is, in all likelihood, incomplete.

In-between my formative years when my family attended first an Independent Fundamental Baptist Church (Worth Baptist, Ft. Worth), then Southern Baptist churches (Matthew Road, Grand Prairie; First Baptist, Euless) and my conversion to Orthodox Christianity, I did study Buddhism and Taoism. Growing up, I went to my best friend's synagogue (Congregation Beth Shalom, Arlington). In college I had gone from my Baptist roots (First Baptist, Bryan) to non-denominational (Grace Baptist, College Station). When my then fiance and I started talking about churches we visited churches based on her background as well (St. Thomas Episcopal, College Station). We ended up halfway between our faith backgrounds (A&M United Methodist, College Station).

Our pastor there, Buddy Walker, a Baptist convert himself, helped me start to understand issues such as infant baptism. When I brought my thoughts about Buddhism to him, he also made the point that the same Christ that said to love our enemies probably wouldn't have much problem with most of what Buddha said.

I have in the last two years done fairly extensive reading on Baha'i and Islam. What I have found in all of my reading and participation is that there seems to be something innate in most people that draws them to be part of something bigger than themselves. I concur with prof. gradoo that I'm likely to have approached all of my study through the lens of some basic "Christian" assumptions, but I've also shattered some of those assumptions along the way (e.g. OSAS, Sola Scriptura).

The assumptions that I have left are that we are intentionally created (though I don't take a dogmatic position on how or when); that Christ is God; and that our calling is to love one another. Besides Christianity, Buddhism & Taosim come the closest to providing a framework for understanding my experience. The difference for me between these two and Christ is that instead of the person being subsumed in an everythingness of Being, in Christianity, the person becomes an integral part of unity in God, but retains his personhood. For a great meditation on Lao Tzu as a pre-Christian prophet (ala Aristotle) see Christ the Eternal Tao by Fr. Damascene Christensen.

Coming to Orthodox Christianity, I struggled with some concepts (e.g. veneration of icons, the role of the Theotokos, confession) more than others that were more familiar in my upbringing (e.g. the Trinity). What I discovered is that while there is a wealth of texts and traditions in Christianity, so too there are a wealth in other faith traditions as well. This is, finally, what I think faith is. I decided that I would trust Christ's word that he had established a temporal church and that it would persist (Matt. 16:18) and be led by God into all Truth (John 16:13). Along with trusting that Christ’s church existed and persisted to our times and had preserved Christ’s teachings intact and unaltered, I had to trust that those things which I didn’t cognitively understand would be made clear.

With respect to the comparative religion, I don’t disbelieve Judaism but think that Orthodox Christianity is a fulfillment of the Law and Prophets in Christ (and Judaism post-Javneh has a flavor of damage control for the “Christian problem”). Islam is a radical monotheistic reaction to Christianity. Baha’i is a universalist reformation of Islam. Buddhism/Taoism, like many pre-Christian religions (including Native American religion and Zoroastrianism) reveal mystical truths which are fully revealed in Christ. I’ve not studied Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, or Sikhism in any depth past casual reading. Confucianism is more of an system of ethics than a faith, and as such isn’t necessarily at odds with Christianity. In the case of Hinduism and Jainism, I think that multiple gods and/or ancestor worship can be influenced by evil spirits and/or point to later, more fully revealed truths in Christianity. Sikhism also points to a “Universal God,” which is beyond human ken…also has the ability to be interpreted as fulfilled through the Trinitarian understanding we have of God as uncreated and outside of time.

The bottom line to comparative religion for me is a truth that I discovered in Orthodoxy (it certainly wasn’t an aspect of the Evangelism Explosion training I received in the Baptist Church) is that I am called to focus on my own salvation, to work that out in “fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12) and not worry about what someone else is or isn’t doing, but to love them as icons of Christ.

Field of Drama

I suppose I could have just as easily titled this as the third part of the decline of American power.

Ever wonder why we have evolved into a nation of overweight, uptight, litigious video gamers? Here's a good example of why:

After three weeks of clearing brush and poison ivy, scrounging up plywood and green paint, digging holes and pouring concrete, Vincent, Justin and about a dozen friends did manage to build it — a tree-shaded Wiffle ball version of Fenway Park complete with a 12-foot-tall green monster in center field, American flag by the left-field foul pole and colorful signs for Taco Bell Frutista Freezes.

But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present.

On the one hand we have examples of creativity, industriousness, and exercise. On the other worry about property value, noise, and liability. Which nation do you want to be?

Orthodox Perspective on Ordaining Women Priests

With a nod to the folks over at Vox Nova, who made me think hard enough to write something down.

The Anglican Church has voted to approve the ordination of female bishops, further intensifying rifts caused by the ordination of women to the priesthood.

The teaching I’ve received from my spiritual father, Fr. Matthew, on the matter of a female priesthood goes like this:

On either side of the beautiful gates there is an icon of Christ (right) and the Theotokos (left).

As icons, they represent the spiritual and physical reality of actual persons, and as such reflect the glory of God. They are also icons of perfect manhood and womanhood; that is, the highest calling that any man can aspire to is that of priest, and the highest calling any woman can aspire to is that of mother. Not all men will be priests and not all women will be mothers, but certainly no man will ever be a woman (plastic surgery and hormone supplements notwithstanding) and no woman will ever be a priest because these we are specifically created for different functions.

Fr. Alister Anderson has written a response to the Anglican decision to ordain women in the priesthood and his comments echo the teaching I related above:

We Christians who advocate only a male priesthood as being the only valid apostolic ministry of the Church do not in any way deny that women have equal rights and opportunities to work. We believe that women should be paid commensurately with men for their labor and skill. But certain leaders deprecate the male priesthood as being a bastion of male chauvinism and a violation of civil and equal rights for women. Nonsense! The Church is not a secular institution governed by democratic processes. The Church is a spiritual organism and not just a secular organization. She is a spiritual and supernatural monarchy with God as Her king and supreme judge. We Orthodox Christians declare that while men and women are equal in the eyes of God and under the secular law, they are very different in their human nature because God has created them for different functions. A bishop, priest and deacon have a specific function within the family of the Church. To ordain women to the sacred ministry would only confuse and destroy that function. In terms of human function a woman can no more be a priest than a man can be a mother.

The full article

At long last...an update

It seems people (my dad) check this site and notice when I don't post. Since last I posted, the world has continued to move. Marking such progress, its of special note that the Northwest Passage, long sought at great cost, is open for the first time in recorded history.

I've discovered that there are more Kotineks out there! Hi Lauren, if you're reading.

While I voted for Ron Paul in the primary, it doesn't mean that I've permanently crossed the aisle. I held out hope that if there were a Republican candidate with good plans for foreign policy, trade, and health care it would force the remaining Democratic candidate field into more substantial positions.

Anyhow, hope you enjoy reading the updates and I hope I get a chance to write again soon!

Night Falls on Lake Somerville, July 4, 2008

A Medidation on the Decline of American Power, Part II

All of this doomsday scenario making leads us back to the 08 elections. Is there the possibility of change?

From my perspective, there are three very basic areas in which we need radical shift if we are to stave off the worst of the possibilities I've described:

1) Develop a coherent, workable foreign policy. Isolationism can't work. Jingoism paints targets on our collective chest. Removing ourselves as the coordinators/occupying force in Iraq and Afghanistan would be a good start (replacing with U.N. command is a possibility).

2) Develop a fair trade policy. Bring production back to the states, encourage heirloom craftsmanship and buying locally. Use (what little) economic power we have to mandate fair wages and humane working and living conditions for workers abroad (this ought to have an beneficent effect on immigration as well). Don't trade with countries that won't play ball. Don't give personal rights to corporations.

3) Establish universal, centralized health care for all people in the USA.

I recognize that all three of these represent radical shift from the current state of affairs. I also think that we're at a tipping point economically, politically, and militarily. We don't have the luxury of making a slow U-turn. Unfortunately, neither of the presumptive major party candidates has the political will to pull off this kind of sea-change. A McCain presidency is a vote for status quo. Obama will make a good president someday, but not yet (and he agrees with me...waiting on the video from LaueOfficer). I don't think you get to where Sen. Obama is, as fast as he did without being in somebody's pocket, and that scares me (incidentally, I read an article in a magazine aboard a flight to Denver last year that cited specifically whose pocket he's in...but I can find no reference to this now). What scares me most is that someone with pockets that big isn't likely to be interested in much of a shift from business as usual either.

A Medidation on the Decline of American Power, Part I

For quite some time now (perhaps since the Democratic National Convention in July 2004) I've believed that the future of our country will, quite literally, ride on the outcome of the 2008 elections. In 2003, former president Bill Clinton noted, "We need to be creating a world that we would like to live in when we're not the biggest power on the block." We have not, in the interim, been exhibiting the sort of humility that President Clinton suggested. To the contrary, we've eroded the trust of our allies and sometime collaborators worldwide, our credit practices have caused the dollar to plummet, and our military--though still the most advanced in the world--is stretched dreadfully thin and cannot sustain the current deployments indefinitely. Domestically, we have sat idly by while watching as our elected representatives have traded in on our fears and expanded their powers; as Ben Franklin observes, perhaps we deserve neither liberty nor safety. Short-sighted attempts to solve the energy crisis with ethanol will make food and fuel prices continue to rise. We're scared of our food, and rightly so, because we don't know its provenance.

Most Americans are literate on some level. More than fifty percent of our economy is based in the service industries. Ubiquitous technologies such as internet and cell phones have made easier migration from family homesteads. Many Americans work to have enough money to have a place to stay and a way to get to work, and we don't seem worried about not saving. We are, in summary, creating a highly-educated, highly-mobile, poorly-compensated underclass. Marx only said that religion was the opiate of the masses because he had never seen TV.

The curious thing about critics of Marxism is that they focus on the failures of Communist states. Though I am decidedly not a Marxist scholar, my brief reading of his and Engels principles suggests that the theory hinges on the dialectical historical process resulting in a shift in the balance of power. Put simply, Marx and Engels weren't creating a business plan so much as making predictions of the future. The ironic part of all of this is that the only place in the world (so far) that has the necessary conditions to play out the Marxist experiment is right here in the good ol' USA. One need not imagine too hard to come up with a scenario that could mobilize a restless underclass: a severe disruption in the activities that take our minds off of our lives, or a steep spike in the cost of food and fuel, which leads to less travel, less eating out, less flying...what made up over half of our economy again? And those nations we bullied, think they'll watch from the sidelines as our country falls apart?

Boycott Beijing 2008?

Anne Applebaum at Slate.com has the right idea, why not boycott the 2008 Olympics?

Unfortunately, the American people have, as a whole, lost the stomach for prosecuting righteousness if it means getting our own hands dirty. Or, more to the point, not getting that Coke at McDonalds for lunch, paying for it with your Visa, driving there in your V-Dub, taking pictures of the kids' soccer game with your Kodak, letting them wear Addidas, or making dinner with your GE appliances. Or doing without a whole host of integral products and services. We wouldn't want of offend anyone now, would we? Yes, we really are that lazy.

Kucinich out of Race, I'm Changing Boats

Effective on Rep. Kucinich's official withdrawal from the 2008 presidential race tomorrow, I will be shifting my monetary, volunteer, and grassroots organizational support to Republican candidate Ron Paul.

The media blackout of Rep. Kucinich in the 2008 contest and the DNC complicity in a system that seeks to anoint an early frontrunner and channel all donations through the DNC is an abhorrent corruption of the democratic process. We Americans should all be ashamed of our system.

The big three issues in this race are our rampant militarism, health care, and the economy, and all three are inextricably linked. As was the case in 2004, Rep. Kucinich was the only Democratic candidate who could stand on a record of not funding the war, providing for an immediate withdrawal of troops, a universal not-for-profit health care system, and an economic policy that privileges working people, not corporations.

I have thought for some time now that the viability of the United States in the next decade would be determined by whether or not the 2008 election would be a real turning point, and none of the democratic "frontrunners" provide hope for substantive change. I'm not interested in changing the name of who is in power in Washington; I'm interested in changing who is in power in Washington, and that needs to be the American people. Since Rep. Kucinich can no longer carry that flag in the presidential race, I'm willing to be blind to party labels and support a man who has that vision.

More Jena 6

After a particularly heated office discussion about whether or not the Jena 6 demonstrations were useful and necessary, a co-worker gave me a copy of this article which suggests that the story is far more convoluted than what was generally represented in the news media (go figure).

Among the conclusions that our discussion came to, the following ideas are underscored in this article: there is more to the story than what we heard on the news and in the paper, and none of the young men involved can be characterized as innocent.

But, the legal response to the Jena 6 story, the outpouring of emotion, the creative response, and the thousands that converged on Jena, LA and demonstrated in their own towns and schools suggest a reason why we did take to this story with the fervor we did.

Strange Fruit

"Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root"
- Lewis Allan (Abel Meeropol)

-tshirt image courtesy of Glenn Bracey

September 20, 2007

Nationwide protests today bring a new generation of activists into the ongoing fight against entrenched racist power structures in the U.S. The "Jena 6" are accused of conspiring to murder a white high school classmate (who spent a total of 3 hours in an emergency room as a result of his injuries). These six young men--Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Mychal Bell, and Jesse Beard--were in fact responding to a racially-charged tensions in the small Louisiana town of Jena (pronounced gee-na)that heightened after two black students had the audacity to sit under "the white tree" on school grounds for lunch.

The following day, several nooses were found hanging from the tree, an all-too-clear message from white students intent on preserving the Jim Crow privilege of their favorite eating spot. When black students protested the hateful display, District Attorney Reed Walters threatened, "I could end your lives with the stroke of a pen."

When a white student continued to taunt black students, a fight ensued and D.A. Walters got a chance to make good on his threat. Perhaps saddest of all is that even if "justice is served" and the young men are exonerated, the damage is incalculable. Mychal Bell, the young man whose conviction is currently under review stands to lose out on his pick of college scholarships. Worse still is the hard lesson these young men have had to learn at such an early age that the system is stacked against them. The thousands of people who are traveling to be a part of the protest illustrate that the problems these young men face aren't unique, but in fact systematic oppression still occurs and has mobilized the next Hero Generation.

Visit the following sites for more information and to support the defense efforts of these young men:
http://www.freethejena6.org/
http://www.colorofchange.org/jena/

To Be, or Not To Be

I'm having an epistemological, ontological, existential crisis with regard to my doctoral program. In a recent course geared toward helping students prepare our dissertation proposals, I discovered a huge gap in my education.

The opening essay to Conceptions of Giftedness, by James Borland, makes a compelling case for dismissing with the notion of defining giftedness. My very first reaction was a feeling of validation since I found correspondence between Borland's points and some ideas I had been developing independently since my introduction to the field. One such issue is the need for an umbrella term to describe giftedness and retardation (my suggestion is lamentably uninspired: "differently abled"). I suggested the need for such a term since there seems to be some emotional baggage attached to the term "gifted" that leads some administrators and teachers to believe that gifted students will fend for themselves in an average educational setting. The other point of correspondence that I found was with my idea that early entrance programs are an imperfect solution to the need for accelerated learning opportunities for gifted students. I suggested that instead we should have an educational system that provides access to suitable learning opportunities for students from birth through college, regardless of age.

Borland's solution is simple and elegant. If the end goal of programs to serve gifted students is ability-appropriate educational opportunities, the amount of time and energy we are spending on identification is a ridiculous waste of time, not to mention a process fraught with uncertainty and inequity. Instead, we should spend our resources ensuring that all students have an ability-appropriate education. In so doing, the gifted constituency, however one wants to define it, has their needs met, as do all other students, including those that might have been otherwise marginalized.

Which leads me to my crisis/es. Most of my chosen field has taken up the banner of one or another definitions of giftedness, and usually, some method of concluding that a person meets those criteria. I don't think that we can accurately say what giftedness is, figure out how to determine who is actually gifted, or continue to have a viable field while recognizing the ethical, political, and professional implications of being so unsure.

Ive come to the conclusion that I'm not satisfied with the rigor of my doctoral program so far. I don't have a good command of the literature (as evidenced by my startling discovery), I'm not confident in the soundness of some of the major theories in my field, and I'm not convinced of the viability of my degree. I need to immerse myself in the literature and find my way back out.

Radicalism as a Democratic Social Indicator pt. II

A few more thoughts on the subject. Unpolished. Let me know what you think..

******************************************************************************

The more firmly entrenched persons in positions of power tend to be, the less likely they are to be willing to share power and access to power. In shoring up their positions, such persons tend to choose as their successors persons of like mind and intent. Maintenance of the status quo (i.e. classical conservativism) is a tool of those who would consolidate power. Such a process is inherently un-democratic and leads to ideological inbreeding.

Radicalism, understood in the socio-political sphere as agitation (e.g. demonstrations, proselytization) and pursuit of change that is inimical to centrist positions because its end is widespread social change (hopefully for the better). Understood in this light, the claim to be apolitical and/or not vote is, in fact, a vote in support of the status quo.

Political parties, no matter their stripe, that have massive infrastructure and resource needs that extend past an immediate election, campaign, or mission can fall prey to this underlying principle.

Full Circle

NOWisNOW is a band whose sound you're not likely to have heard unless you frequent small, hip venues on the eastern seaboard or are a SKEMER. If lead singer Mitch Alden has his way, though, that might change. Mitch is petitioning the director for a (hopefully) upcoming big-screen production of The Dark Tower to include his original music in the soundtrack of the movie. In his blog, Mitch writes:

King's office told me that once the deal is set, more often that not, the Director, not the author, chooses the music for their movies...and here is where I could really use your help - getting JJ Abram's attention. I'll be sending his office a CD with a letter and all that stuff, but having the outside hype concerning these tunes would be an added bonus. If any of you guys know of message boards or other areas where folks talk shop about JJ Abrams &/or "Lost," or "The Dark Tower," would you be into starting some threads about getting these tunes in the production? I'm thinking during the outro credits, the tunes would be used best, but I'll leave that opinion to your tasteful ears. And if you're not into message boards, Of course, you could always write JJ Abrams or Stephen King directly :)The 3 tunes are "other worlds", "daydream", and "wheel."

The Dark Tower inspired tunes can be found here.

Listen to the songs, and if you feel so inclined, help spread the word on Mitch and NOWisNOW and help the inspiration for these songs come full circle.

Classics of the Form

My sumbission to the VH1 Classic Rock Playlist contest

Playlist generated with Project Playlist

A Movement to Transform?

I sent the following letter to Sojourners in response to their exclusion of over half of the Democratic presidential candidate field from their recent Candidates' Forum:

Dear Sojourners,

I was appalled, dismayed, and disappointed to learn that your organization declined to find a way to include all of the Democratic Party candidate field in your recent forum. At the very least, Sojourners should be quite sensitive to how media access and portrayal of candidates influences voter perspectives. More to the point, you excluded the candidate that best exemplifies the values expressed in your Mission.

Not one to let such an injustice go unchecked, Rep. Dennis Kucinich corrected your error by securing time for the rest of the field to also share their perspectives on and commitment to Faith, Values, and (ending) Poverty. In this action Rep. Kucinich clearly demonstrated his commitment to social justice, helped to inspire CNN and the rest of the viewing public to see beyond the choices made for them by self-serving interest groups, and gave some hope that a true message of peace and love can prevail even when it might not seem marketable.

I invite Sojourners to admit their error and publicly acknowledge the leadership that Rep. Kucinich has shown in this situation. Until such time, I don’t intend to monetarily support Sojourners and will be canceling my subscription to your journal.

Peace!

In response, I got what seems to be a semi-personalized form letter directing me to Sojourners website:

Mr. Kotinek,

Thank you for expressing your concerns about the recent Democratic presidential forum. We appreciate your willingness to share your views with us, as your thoughts have not gone unnoticed. Rep. Kucinich's absence, and the rest of the second-tier candidates, came in order to fulfill our need to engage in a broader dialogue on the issues. Filling in eight different candidates within one hour of time would make for a very limited discussion, which is something we very much wanted to avoid. I would invite you to take a look at our website which looks into this matter in further detail.

Blessings,

And my response:

Thank you for your response and dialogue on this issue.

Respectfully, if the intent of the candidate’s forum was broad dialogue, was choosing the three candidates receiving the most press the most effective way to achieve your goal?

My frustration and disappointment stems not as much from the fact that Rep. Kucinich was not included, or that any particular candidate was included or not; rather, I hold Sojourners to a higher standard than most mass media outlets and had hoped for an honest and real exploration of this subject. Sen. Clinton pointed out that she does her best (and it showed in the forum) to distance herself from the topic of faith. I feel that she was included only because the DNC and major media have anointed her as the “frontrunner.” Any such attempt this early in the game is ridiculous if the intent of an election is free-ranging debate and an opportunity to democratically select (on the part of the American people) the best candidate from the field. All of which begs the question, if that isn’t the intent we’re operating under, what is?

Peace!

Today Jim Wallis published four questions he didn't get to ask at the Candidates' Forum. These questions cover the topics of extreme poverty, the practical application of the Commandments of Blessedness, the cultivation of fear as a political tool, and government funding of faith-based charitable organizations. I'm hoping to see Dennis Kucinich exhibit leadership in stepping up and being the first candidate to answer these questions, and in so doing, perhaps, kindle an acceptance of his legitimacy in the minds of the folks at Sojourners (Romans 12:20-21).

More Media Bias

I wanted to insert a quick note to point out a small milestone. Depending on which of my visitor counters you prefer this blog either has just, or will soon, roll over 500 visits. I appreciate your support and comments.

And now, on to the story...

This past Sunday night, June 3, Sojourners hosted a forum for the Democratic Party candidates to talk about "Faith, Values, and Poverty". As Rep. Dennis Kucinich's site reports, Sojourners had no intention of including any "second-tier" candidates. It was only Kucinich discussed the problem of leaving out half of the Democratic field with CNN executives that the remaining five candidates were invited to participate, albeit only in the second half of the program and with half as much time for comments.

Steven Thomma notes that the mass media outlets seem to think that the American people can only understand and participate in a dualistic decision-making process. As I've pointed out before (here, and here), its undemocratic to narrow the field so early in the race, and will likely result in a ticket that is so bland as to not provide a real alternative to the status quo.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by the DNC looking for a donation. I clearly and emphatically noted that so long as the DNC did nothing to agitate for more fair media treatment of all candidates, I would continue funding my candidate of choice directly.

I encourage you to act similarly. Don't accept the inevitability of a choice made for you by those who purport to represent you. Use the power of your support to ensure that our election process remains (or becomes, if you prefer) open, democratic, and representative.

Do Redheads Have More Brains?

The following is an article that I read for the first time as an adolescent. I had just started high school and this article helped me find a sense of pride in an appearance otherwise ripe for ridicule. At a time when home computers were still very new and the internet as a public sphere was unheard of, I remember carefully typing the article word for word; I even tried very hard to match the fonts used in the magazine. I still have the original article, pages ripped from the magazine, stuffed in a case with other mementos of childhood.

I contacted the author, Dan Rottenberg, to see if the article is available online since I am fond of referring others to this article in hopes that it would provide a similar sense of pride in their red hair. Mr. Rottenberg responded that it is not available digitally elsewhere, and granted me permission to reproduce it here. I am honored and proud to do so.

Do Redheads Have More Brains?
By Dan Rottenberg
Town & Country, August 1991

On a recent trip to London, I engaged in a little mental game. Everywhere I went, I asked my English friends and acquaintances to pick out the five most important people in the past thousand years of British history. Without any prompting from me, they invariably produced a list that was comprised of William the Conqueror, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill. Occasionally, in the hope of tripping me up, someone would toss in a more obscure fellow like James I (who united England and Scotland) or a nonpolitical figure like Shakespeare. No matter: when they were finished, I would ask, “Now, what do all these people have in common?” After allowing a minute or so for sufficient head-scratching and brow-furrowing, I would point dramatically to the answer: my own bright red hair.

It may not mean anything, but it is a mystery worth pondering. Redheads make up only about 2 percent of the world’s population, and some 4 percent of Americans. Yet, they’ve produced 15 percent of U.S. Presidents, not to mention some of the world’s greatest overachievers [see list below], attaining a significance far out of proportion to their numbers. Can anyone imagine American history without Christopher Columbus, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Literature without Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, George Bernard Shaw or Sinclair Lewis? Music without Vivaldi, Paderewski or Beverly Sills? Sports without Red Grange, Don Budge or Red Shoedinst? Crime without Jesse James or Lizzie Borden? In his 1943 book The Hero in History, Sidney Hook suggested that only a handful of people can be said to have altered the course of world history, and of the half-dozen examples he cited, three---Cromwell, Napoleon, and Lenin---were redheads.

We carrot-tops take great comfort in such recitations because, frankly, the world has given us pretty rough time. Throughout the Middle Ages, male redheads were considered “sons of the devil” and, as a result, experiences great difficulty finding wives. And at the height of Europe’s witch hunts, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many women were stripped, shaved, pricked and otherwise tortured, then put to death simply because they were redheads. Painters since the Renaissance have generally depicted prostitutes with red hair. In nineteenth century Germany, barbers did a thriving business in concoctions aimed at altering their red-headed customers’ hair color. An American newspaper once explained to its readers that twenty-one Cincinnati men who had married red-headed women were color-blind and had mistaken their sweethearts’ tresses for black. And who could be more revolting than Dickens’ Fagin, in Oliver Twist, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured my a quantity of matted red hair?

“Everyone stands in horror” of red hair, said the seventeenth-century French scholar Jean-Baptist Thiers, “because Judas, it is said, was red-haired.” But Christians hold no monopoly on such superstitions. At one time, the Brahmins of India were forbidden to marry red-haired women. And in ancient Egypt, redheads were worshipped---and occasionally sacrificed ---as fertility symbols.

Even in our own, more secular age, redheads are still widely regarded as passionate, hot-tempered and adventurous. Alice Crimmins, the Queens barmaid convicted in the mid Seventies of murdering her two children, suffered in the jury’s estimation at least partly because she had flaming red hair, opines Kenneth Gross, author of The Alice Crimmins Case. Conversely, red-headed men are perceive as goofy characters: take, for instance, Bozo, Howdy Doody and Ronald McDonald.

“In the movies, there are no red-headed leading men,” says Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, himself a redhead. Adds California beauty-pageant promoter Steve Douglas, the 36-year-old founder of Redheads International, “You can watch TV all night and never see and attractive male redhead. There are no top TV stars or other people to help a little red-headed kid who’s growing up form an attractive image of himself.” That isn’t entirely true: who on television is more influential than Ted Koppel? But perhaps he’s the exception that proves the rule.

My own entry into the world in 1942, is also instructive. Upon seeing my bright red hair, my relatives quickly split into two philosophical camps. The pessimists said, “What a shame!” The optimists said, “It’ll probably change.” My parents were actually pleased with my hair color, but mystified at to whence it had come, since both of them were brunettes. But a few months later, while showing me off to her grandmother, my mother noticed that the aging woman’s gray hair had a pinkish tinge. When my mother asked about it, my 78-year-old great-grandmother reluctantly admitted that, as a girl in czarist Russia, she had indeed been a redhead. But in that time and place, red hair had been the mark of a “fallen woman”—so once her red tresses had faded, she had never mentioned it again.

To be sure, we redheads have had our moments of glory. Red hair was fashionable in Elizabethan England, for the simple reason that Elizabeth I herself was a redhead and proud of it. The reddish-gold-haired Venetian women portrayed in paintings of Titian—himself a redhead inspired women in sixteenth-century Italy and Greece to tint their hair in imitation. Hair dye, in fact, is said to have originated with the Gauls—the men , not the women—who colored their hair red. And many red-heads like to be conspicuous: the late comedienne Lucille Ball imported fifty pounds of henna from Egypt early in her career and later imported and additional 100 pounds—enough to maintain her distinctive brilliant red tint for a lifetime.

The real trouble with being a redhead, you see, lies not so much with whether red hair is in favor or out, but in the fact that redheads are the objects of extreme reactions: if we’re not being put on a pedestal, we’re being sacrificed on an altar. Either way, to be a redhead is to stand out in a crowd. As movie actress Myrna Loy once observed, “Red hair isolates you.”

To grapple with those feelings of isolation, redheads periodically band together in support groups. In 1977 a group of Brown University students launched an organization called Redheads Are Special People—at a party whose menu featured red punch, strawberry ice cream and red candy—and the organization subsequently expanded to thirty other college campuses (although he Brown chapter disbanded in 1986). In it’s heyday, the Brown chapter of RASP sponsored and annual thirty-hour dance marathon to raise funds for the American Cancer Society (since redheads are especially susceptible to skin cancer), but most of its energies were devoted to defending the honor of redheads whenever it was maligned in the mass media.

That was also what drove Steve Douglas, a former musician who in 1982 left his job in a band, to launch Redheads International, which produced a newsletter, cosmetics and T-shirts bearing slogans like, “Don’t mess with red’ and “Redheads do it in color.” The Redhead Book, self-published in 1982 by Al Sacharov of Takoma Park, Maryland, sold several thousand copies, prompting New America Library to come out in 1985 with the Redhead’s Handbook, a sort of “everything you’ve always wanted to know about redheads but were afraid to ask” treatise.

This is not to suggest that red-heads are about to emerge as a new political force. Even in Scotland and Ireland, redheads are believed to comprise only some 10 percent of the population. Sacharov says redheads make up nearly 5 percent of the populations of Russia, Denmark, England, and Sweden, but only 2 percent of Americans. RASP claims that there are 9 million red-headed Americans, which is more than 4 percent. (DO not ask how these statistics are compiled: red-headology is perhaps the least scientific of the sciences.) On the other hand, redheads do turn up just about everywhere: among Hungarians, Egyptians, Australians, Israelis, and even among certain Nigerian tribes.

Obviously, most of the myths about redheads can be traced to the fact that they are such a tiny and conspicuous minority. But do any of the superstitions have any basis in fact? In the words of Tom Robbins, red-headed author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, “Could they be right about redheads? Are we really moonstruck mutants whose weaknesses are betrayed by the sun?”

The study of redheads as a science has long been neglected, partly because geneticists and dermatologists have had more pressing matters on their minds, and partly because of the lack of animal models suitable for experimentation (the yellow mouse is the closest approximation). British dermatologist H.C. Sorby, who discovered the “pink constituent” of human hair in 1878, believed that the substance influenced nothing beyond one’s hair color. As recently as 1952, the existence of this “pink constituent’ was challenged; conventional dermatological wisdom held that red hair was caused solely by the absence of the factors that make hair dark.

But a smattering of studies conducted over the past twenty years suggests that while most of the ancient folklore is ridiculous, there may be a germ of truth to the notion that redheads are physiologically different from others in significant ways—and these differences can sometimes affect redheads’ behavior.

The color of hair depends on the amount and type of melanin (dark pigment) granules present in the cortex (central core) of the hairs, and this in turn is dictated by the hair-color genes we inherit from our parents. All mammals, including redheads, have melanin, but redheads have much less of it than others do. Just as dark colors tend to obscure light ones, so a very active gene will obscure a red gene—which explains why it usually takes two red-haired parents to produce a red-haired child. (Not always, though, as my case demonstrates: because it’s produced by a recessive gene, red hair often skips a generation or two.)

What wasn’t known until the mid Eighties was just what substance (if any), in the absence of melanin, made redheads’ hair red—rather than, say, green or blue. But in 1969, after conducting a series of experiments on humans and animals, Dr. Peter Flesch of the University of Pennsylvania concluded that the substance that causes red-headedness is iron-based. Thus a redhead’s pigmentary system operates somewhat differently from those of brunettes and blonds, whose pigment is predominantly melanistic: a redhead’s hair and skin are more vulnerable to the effects of sun, wind, cold heat or careless handling. Flesch concluded that red coloring has a great deal to do with redheads’ unique genetic and historical development. Unfortunately, Flesch died before his study was published, and he was unable to pursue its mind-boggling implications any further.

More recently, two dermatologists at the Harvard medical school, Thomas Fitzpatrick and Madhu Pathak, classified the people of the world according to the reaction of their skin to the sun. There are six categories. The first group—people whose skin burns most easily, always peels, never tans—consists entirely of blue-eyed, freckled redheads, mostly of Celtic lineage. A few redheads with splotchy pigmentation turned up in the second group—people who burn easily but minimally and can tan to some extent—but this group consists mostly of blonds. There are very few redheads in the remaining four groups, which consist of people who have darker more sun-resistant types of skin.

This study reinforced the view that redheads are set apart from the rest of humanity in important physical ways. As Pathak puts it, “Redheads are three-time losers.” For one thing, he says, red pigment is an inadequate filter of sunlight, so redheads’ skin is more likely to burn when it is exposed to the sun, and wrinkle as it ages. For another, redheads are more susceptible to skin cancer than anyone else. When ultraviolet rays damage DNA—the “genetic blueprints” of life—darker skin types can repair the damage, but redheads’ skin can’t.

Some scientists speculate that the physical gulf separating the reds from the non-reds traces back to the dawn of human evolution. In 1952, the dermatologist F.J.G. Ebling wrote a monograph for the World Health Organization, which noted, among other things, that redheads are generally more numerous in northern latitudes. Dr. Flesch seized on this point in 1969 and theorized that the first specimens of Homo sapiens lived in colder climates—usually in the north—a conclusion he deduced from his belief that they had a hairy coat covering their entire body. According to him, the eventual disappearance of this hair enabled mankind to thrive in warmer climates as well.

The disappearance of body hair also made human skin vulnerable to the sun, however. At that point, Flesch theorized, when exposed to warmer climates, red-headed humans with darker hair and skin thrived. But others, who were red-headed and fair-skinned, were so vulnerable to the sun that they only thrived in the colder northern latitudes, which is where most redheads are found this day.

This theory holds forth the intriguing possibility that the first humans may all have been redheads—that the development of darker hair and skin were later stages in human evolution. To be sure, Flesch’s thesis represents a minority opinion: most scientist think the first human-like creatures appeared not in the cold north, but in eastern and southern Africa and Java. But Flesch bolstered his thesis with this tantalizing evidence: red hair shafts are the thickest. A redhead needs only 90,000 hairs to give the appearance of a full head of hair; by contrast, a black-haired person requires 108,000, a brunette 110,000 and a blond 140,000. That being the case, argued Flesch, it’s not unreasonable to presume that redheads’ thicker hair is a survival from the dawn of human evolution, when thick hair provided necessary protection from the cold.

Do these physical differences influence redheads’ behavior? That question hasn’t been studied. But one researchers findings seem to suggest that, for whatever reasons, redheads do behave differently from other people. In 1977, Israeli psychiatrist Michael Bar reported that red-headed children are three or four times more likely to develop “hyperactive syndrome”—whose symptoms include overexciteability, a short attention span, easily sparked feelings of frustration and, usually, excessive aggressiveness.

Bar arrived at these conclusions after comparing the behavior of forty-five red-headed boys and girls between the ages of 6 and 12 with that of a control group of non-red-headed children. The evidence from such a sampling, of course, is far from conclusive. Still, Bar contends, the study points to a generic link between red hair and hyperactive behavior. “It is possible,” he adds, “that the characteristics attributed to certain ethnic groups, like the Vikings’ adventurousness or the Irish temperament, are connected to the high incidence of redheads among them.”

Since both my head and my daughter’s are as red as they come, and since neither of us has exhibited any of the symptoms described by Bar, I naturally give his claim short shrift. Besides, even if you could prove that the Irish are innately hot-tempered, that wouldn’t prove a link with their hair color: as stated before, redheads comprise only about 10 percent of the population of Ireland.

If many redheads seem aggressive, overexcitable or easily frustrated, the most likely reason is that they’re responding to the way people treat them. Being a redhead can be exhilarating or traumatic, but it’s rarely dull.

“I’ve been watched my whole life,” says Sandy Rubin of Philadelphia, who has flaming red tresses. “I walk into a room and I’m noticed instantly.” Another red-haired friend of mine notes that, in the presence of red-haired women, even older men become adolescent, frisky and familiar: “They feel they already know your name, which is ‘Red.’”

Movie star Arlene Dahl, who claims direct descent from the tenth-century Norwegian explorer Erik the Red, argues that, contrary to the stereotype, the typical red-headed personality is characterized by confidence, inner security and a sense of humor. “I think men are fond of red-headed women because generally we don’t take ourselves too seriously,” she says. “Since childhood, many of us have been teased about our red hair and freckles, and we’re used to it.”

Are redheads really different from everyone else, or do they just act differently because they’re perceived as different? It’s a chicken-and-egg question, so you can answer it however you wish. Personally, I subscribe to Flesch’s theory that redheads are endowed with more iron than other mortals. It doesn’t change anything, but it’s comforting to think about on a summer’s day, as I sit alone beneath an umbrella, swathed in towels, watching my blond or brunette friends frolic on a sunny beach.


A Red-Headed Hall of Fame


WOODY ALLEN (born 1935), film director
ANN-MARGRET (born 1941), actress
ARNOLD (“RED”) AUERBACH (born 1917), basketball coach
LUCILLE BALL (1911-1989) , actress
WALTER (“RED”) BARBER (born 1908), sports announcer
BORIS BECKER (born 1967), German tennis champion
SARAH BERNHARDT (1844-1923), actress
LIZZIE BORDEN (1860-1927), acquitted of murder
DON BUDGE (born 1915), tennis champion
JAMES CAGNEY (1899-1986), actor
MICHAEL CAINE (born 1933), actor
JIMMY CARTER (born 1924), U.S. President
WINSTON CHURCHILL (1874-1965), British Prime Minister
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (1451-1506), Italian explorer
CALVIN COOLIDGE (1872-1933), U.S. President
ALICE CRIMMINS (born 1938), convicted murderer
OLIVER CROMWELL (1599-1658), British Lord Protector
GEORGE A. CUSTER (1839-1876), U.S. Cavalry officer
ARLENE DAHL (born 1924), actress
EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886), poet
ELIZABETH I (1533-1603), Queen of England
ERIK THE RED (tenth century A.D.), Norwegian navigator
MIA FARROW (born 1945), actress
SARAH FERGUSON (born 1959), Duchess of York
LYNETTE (‘SQUEAKY”) FROMME (born 1948), Presidential assailant
GREER GARSON (born 1908), actress
JOHN GLENN (born 1921), astronaut and U.S. Senator
ARTHUR GODFREY (1903-1983), radio and TV personality
HAROLD (“RED”) GRANGE (1904-1989), football player
RED GROOMS (born 1937), artist
NELL GWYN (1650-1687), actress
RITA HAYWORTH (1918-1987), actress
HENRY VIII (1491-1547), King of England
KATHERINE HEPBURN (born 1909), actress
WILLIAM (“RED”) HOLTZMAN (born 1920), basketball coach
RON HOWARD (born 1954), actor/director
ISABELLA I (1451-1547), Queen of Spain
JAMES I (1566-1625), King of England
JESSE JAMES (1847-1882), outlaw
THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826), U.S. President
VAN JOHNSON (born 1916), actor
JOHN PAUL JONES (1747-1792), U.S. Naval Commander
SONNY JURGENSEN (born 1934), football player
DANNY KAYE (1913-1987), actor
JOHN F. KENNEDY (1917-1963), U.S. President
TED KOPPEL (born 1940), television journalist
ROD LAVER (born 1938), tennis champion
VLADIMIR LENIN (1870-1924), Russian revolutionary
SINCLAIR LEWIS (1885-1951), novelist
MYRNA LOY (born 1905), actress
MAN O’ WAR (“BIG RED”), champion Thoroughbred
SHIRLEY MACLAINE (born 1934), actress
BETTE MIDLER (born 1945), actress/singer
NAPOLEON I (1769-1821), French emperor
NERO (37-68), Roman emperor
MAUREEN O’HARA (born 1921), actress
IGNACE JAN PADEREWSKI (1860-1941), Polish pianist and statesman
BONNIE RAITT (born 1949), singer
VANESSA REDGRAVE (born 1937), actress
WALTER REUTHER (1907-1970), labor leader
MOLLY RINGWALD (born 1968), actress
TIM ROBBINS (born 1936), novelist
CHARLES (“RED”) RUFFING (born 1904), baseball player
JILL ST. JOHN (born 1940), actress
SALOME (14-62 A.D.?), Biblical dancer
MARGARET SANGER (1883-1966), birth-control pioneer
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616), English playwright
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950), Irish playwright
MOIRA SHEARER (born 1926), actress/dancer
BEVERLY SILLS (born 1929), opera singer
RED SKELTON (born 1913), comedian
MAGGIE SMITH (born 1934), actress
WALTER (“RED”) SMITH (1905-1982), sportswriter
BLAZE STARR (born 1932), stripper
DANIEL (“RUSTY”) STAUB (born 1944), baseball player
TITIAN (1487-1576), Italian painter
SPENCER TRACY (1900-1967), actor
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910), author
MARTIN VAN BUREN (1782-1862), U.S. President
VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853-1890), artist
GWEN VERDON (born 1925), singer/dancer
ANTONIO VIVALDI (1675-1743), Italian composer
MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN (1892-1918), German aviator
ROBERT PENN WARREN (1905-19889), U.S. Poet Laureate
GEORGE WASHINGTON (1732-1799), U.S. President
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR (1028-1087), King of England
TOM WOLFE (born 1931), writer

This article originally appeared in Town & Country, August 1991. Copyright 1991 by Dan Rottenberg. Reprinted with the author's permission.
Readers may learn more about Dan Rottenberg and read more of his work at http://www.danrottenberg.com