A lost word.

One of the things that being a writer causes, for some of us at least, is a love of words. The other day, I was in a bookstore and I came across one of those 1950's Odd Sex exposes' that packaged themselves as journalistic, investigatory, and scientific, but were actually written for shock, outrage, and titillation.

As I read through the table of contents my fingers traced the words on the aging paper: "Homosexuality," "Lesbianism," "Sadism," "Masochism." Okay, nothing new there. And then I came across a word I thought was strikingly pretty, a beautiful word, one that I'd never read before and was immediately saddened by its disappearance from the common lexicography.

Undinism: arousal by the presence of water.

I knew what an undine was: a water spirit or nymph. In German mythology, the nymph Undine fell in love with a mortal and had sex with him, and in doing so lost her immortality.

What a lovely word! Especially in an era of wet t-shirts, and Playboy's whole invention of the wet lingere look, and the popularity of calendars of handsome young firefighters washing their, uh, equipment. It's so sad that this trilling, poetic term has all but disappeared, and is so often confused with the crasser urolagnia.

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(Hmph. Wikipedia incorrectly identifies Oenone as a "mountain nymph." She was not: she was a nymph of fresh mountain water, especially water that fed vinyards. It's no mistake that her name comes from the Greek root for "wine" and is actually pronounced "win-o-nə").

We Work Hard, So You Don't Have To!

Send in the scrubbing bubbles!

President Bush worked nearly three hours on Thursday to design a new U.S. policy in Iraq, then emerged to say that he and his advisers need more time to craft the plan he'll announce in the new year.

Holy Shazbat! That's real dedication. A whole three hours. With, like, a break for coffee now and then. A trip to the bathroom. Must have been rough. Grueling. As bad as a patrol in the Iraq desert, complete with IEDs and snipers. Really.

I don't particularly care for Barak Obama. He's a callow youth with little experience, either as a legislator or an executive. But callow youth has one advantage: the passion of conviction, an unshakable sense of right and wrong untrammeled by experience and that passion leads him to say things that, in the abstract, sound right:

Our soldiers are not numbers to add just because someone couldn't think of a better idea, they are our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and friends who are willing to wave goodbye to everything they've ever known just for the chance to serve their country.

As Hilzoy observed: "It is an astonishing thing to have a military willing to accept civilian control: to go off and fight and die without insisting on the right to decide when their sacrifice is worth it and when it's not. It is an extraordinary gift. And if we value it, as we should, we owe it to the men and women in the military to be the best citizens we can possibly be, especially on matters of national security."

Someone in my friends list is evil. Evil, I tell you!

Damn you, whoever you were who turned me on to Girls with Slingshots. I really shouldn't be reading this right now. I don't have the time!

Conspiracy theories and tolerance

Ed Brayton an article today about an incredibly lunatic rant posted at the far-religious-right website Americans for Truth (no link: you want it, look it up yourself, using AltaVista if you have to) in which Peter LaBarbera rants that "gays" are undermining society by coming out of the closet to their friends and family and denying those people the right to demonize homosexuals. No, really, that's his argument: when a gay man comes out and puts a human face on homosexuality he makes it so hard for other people who already like him to suddenly hate him, and that's just so unfair of him to use such a dirty trick.

But one of the things is the comments field caught my attention. Commentor NonyNony wrote:

Right-wing conspiracy theories are about fear of the "other" - some group who is NOT LIKE ME is trying to infiltrate my world and make it different.

The odd thing is, I don't consider myself a right-wing conspiracy theorist, but I completely and totally accept the fact that the world is full of "others" who are not like me and who are trying to infiltrate my world and make it different. After all, that's what I've been trying to do with my blog and my stories and my life: inflitrate the worlds of others and make them different. There's a reason the Journal Entries has had the tagline, Any resemblance to the actual future would be cool.

One aspect of these conspiracy theories that I have never bought into is the naturalization of the "other": the victim of the conspiracy is subject to influence and change, but the conspirators never are. They "are what they are," never subject to change. Even when they are open about their nature, their nature is internal, inherent, and unchangeable. The only way to win is to isolate, to partition, and ultimately to crush the other.

One of the things that bothers me most about "tolerance" and "multiculturalism" has adopted similar rhetoric. We used to be a "melting pot," and then we became a "salad bowl." (Steven Colbert then rightly pointed out that we're headed to becoming "lunchables": "heremetically sealed groups of like-minded citizens."). Speech codes and "speech zones" effectively wall us off from the give-and-take of debate. Alarmingly, even religious has learned to make use of this tool: Prof. Mark Taylor claims in his NY Times Op-Ed that he was ordered to "apologize" to a Christian student who felt threatened by the professor's recommendation that he read Nietzche. The kid reserved to right to keep his "natural" inclinations pure. "Tolerating" others is a disquieting disengament, a refusal to engage in the healthy give-and-take of debate, of a willingness to not look underneath the veneer and examine the foundations. Both "conspiracy theorists" and the "tolerant" engage in the same game, but for different reasons: one is looking for a fight in the wrong place, the other is simply putting off the fight for another day.