Politics and Masturbation

I’ve been in the mountains for a few days, recharging, relaxing, and reflecting. On my return I learned that a major political party in the United States has nominated for the United States Senate – a once august body populated by giants – a person running on an anti-masturbation platform.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. In Alaska the same party nominated a man who thinks Social Security is unconstitutional and believes that the federal government should quit sending tax dollars to Alaska. Alaska! Louisiana will probably return to the U.S. Senate a man who consorts with prostitutes, South Carolina Democrats nominated a man under indictment for viewing child porn, and, should the Republicans retake the House of Representatives, the new Speaker of the House of the United States will be a permanently tanned man who apparently sleeps – literally and figuratively – with lobbyists.

But back to anti-masturbation. I’m not sure that is a winning political platform. Most everyone does it and I’m guessing that, like me, they would just as soon government agents not watch. I’m pretty sure the government agents feel the same way.

First, let’s give the candidate her say. She says,

“It is not enough to be abstinent with other people, you also have to be be abstinent alone. The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery, so you can’t masturbate without lust.”

Parsing that statement we see that her major premise is that one cannot masturbate without lust. Therefore, because lust equals adultery, masturbation equals adultery.

Well.

Suppose you are married and you fantasize about your spouse while you masturbate. How can that be adultery? Or suppose you have sex without lust? Many women and not a few men occasionally engage in the sex act without lust at all. I suspect it happens rather often in long-term relationships.

I think the candidate is confusing sex with lust. One can lust without sex and one can sex without lust.

Death of Onan by Franc Lanjšček

At least she didn’t invoke Onan, the poor man God killed for not following orders. God instructed Onan to impregnate the widow of his brother so an heir to that kingdom would be born. Onan had sex with his dead brother’s wife all right, but he practiced coitus interruptus, thereby “spilling his seed on the ground.” Since sometime during the Reformation, some religious leaders have claimed that God killed Onan for masturbating, but God really killed him for disobeying orders. Moreover, people in those days thought that a man’s supply of seed might be limited.  That concern was not uncommon in early societies with small populations. For instance, it is said that the Navajo Owl God, Neeshjah, warned his people not to masturbate.  They did not know that men continue to produce sperm long after they have any business siring offspring. (Another piece of evidence that the Universe is a random, chaotic place. A designing intelligence surely would have coordinated men and women’s sexual desires and abilities and ended them at the same time rather than allowing the absurd continuation of male sexual desire long after women reach the age where they don’t much care any more. Oh wait! Maybe that’s why God invented masturbation! It probably has saved innumerable marriages.)

I can’t leave the subject of Onan and coitus interruptus without quoting Tom Stoppard who wrote this bit of dialogue for two characters in his play “Arcadia.”

Septimus […] I am sorry that the seed fell on stony ground.
Thomasina: That was the sin of Onan, wasn’t it, Septimus?
Septimus: Yes. He was giving his brother’s wife a Latin lesson and she was hardly the wiser after it than before.

But back to the anti-masturbation candidate. I see she also once announced on national television, “American scientific companies” had created “mice with fully functioning human brains.” A person less kind than me might suggest that the reverse may be true.

And so I conclude that this candidate in Delaware has little chance of winning, at least if the voters are honest with themselves. While masturbation is seldom a conversational topic in polite society, we all do it. As Lionel Trilling wrote more than half a century ago, “. . . there is almost universal involvement in the sexual life and therefore much variety of conduct.” No one wants the government in our bedrooms watching.

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Speaking of adultery, as we were there for a minute, today is the 50^th anniversary of Ted Williams last baseball game. He hit a home run at his last at-bat and John Updike was in the stadium and wrote a classic bit of literature about the experience. Read about it here. Read the real thing here.

Updike had scheduled an adulterous liaison that day and told his wife he was going to the ball game. When he arrived at the woman’s apartment, she was gone. So, he went to the game. Already, at the age of 28, Updike knew about marriage. He wrote, “The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories.” And, every so often, some lustless even listless sex.

2009 World Series

I’m not much of a sports fan now, but I was when I was a child and  I’ve hated the New York Yankees ever since they beat my Milwaukee Braves in the 1958 World Series.  Not that I hold a grudge, you understand.

I was a baseball player myself as a child.  I played first base in Little League.  They put me there because I was too slow for anything else. Later I would learn that slow is sometimes good, as when lovemaking, drinking fine wine, and watching sunsets, but it is not good in baseball.

I also couldn’t hit worth beans, so I crouched really low in the hopes that the pitcher wouldn’t be able to find a strike zone. Because I was such a lousy hitter, I was at the end of the batting order.  One time I hit a single. After I got on base, our lead-off hitter walked, which sent me down to second base.

So there I was, standing on second base, a place that I had never been before, enjoying the view — you can see all kinds of things from second base that you can’t see anywhere else on a baseball diamond — when our next batter ripped a pitch into deep deep right field. We didn’t have a outfield fence so a well-hit ball just rolled on forever across the pasture, until it hit a cow patty or an outfielder caught up with it.

So I left second base and headed for third, as fast as my slow little legs would carry me.  But what should have been a three-run home run for my team turned out to be a triple play for the other team, because I was so slow that both my teammates behind me on the base path caught up with me at third base and you can’t have three runners on one base —  it’s against the rules — so all three of us were out and that was the end of the inning.  I don’t remember whether I ever got to third base again in my baseball career, but I suspect that was the day when, in my childish mind, it first dawned on me that I’d never play for the Braves or the Yankees and that I would need to find a different career.

Baseball is an elegiac sport.  If you don’t believe me, rent the movie “Field of Dreams.”  And, if there is a heaven and if I get there, I’ll take Jenny DiMaggio, our ball-playing Border collie, to see the Yankees play the Braves. Every game will be an all-time, all-star game.  Derek Jeter and Tony Kubek will turn double plays for the Yankees, throwing to Lou Gehrig at first.  Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth will watch as Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews lift home runs over their heads into the stands.  I’ll be able to hear Yogi Berra’s jokes behind home plate as Whitey Ford and Mariano Rivera throw pitches past lesser Braves’ batters and Joe Torre and Del Crandall will take turns catching for Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, and Greg Maddux.  Red Barber will call the games and Red Smith will write about them.             .

And the games will be played, as baseball games should be, on sunny afternoons.  Night games, caused by the baleful influence of television and all the money it brings, will be a thing of the distant past.

Oh, one more thing: Since it will be heaven, the Yankees will lose, at least some of the time.

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For more on the 2009 World Series I recommend this from Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post.

Book Reviewing in the Age of the Internet

Over at The New Yorker — we bloggers like to say things like that; it makes it seem like we are brothers and sisters of the professionals — Farley Katz has begun reviewing books on the “The Cartoon Lounge.”  His first effort is a review of “Straw” by Darryl Strawberry.  Darryl Strawberry, in case you’ve forgotten or never knew or don’t care, was a professional baseball player with a drug problem.

Actually Katz doesn’t review the entire book, only the cover.  Here is his explanation,

Let’s face it, books are hard to read. They are big and papery, and are full of so many words it would take many minutes, perhaps hours, to actually read one. Here in the Internet Age I don’t have the time for that, so I’ll be reviewing books for The New Yorker based solely on their covers.

And wait until you see what he uses as a rating system.

Elections, Baseball, and Burke

From time to time I dip into George Will’s writing to see what the Burkean wing of the Republican Party is up to. Actually, I’m not sure the Republican Party any longer has a Burkean Wing; it may have only a few Burkean feathers left.

This week Will had a piece about the varying rules that the Clinton campaign has suggested for deciding who wins the current Democratic primary. While I seldom agree with Will about politics, I almost always agree with him about baseball. In 1960, he reminds us, the New York Yankees played the Pittsburgh Pirates in the steroid-free World Series. In the seven game series the Yankees outscored the Pirates 55-27.

Unfortunately, baseball’s rules — pesky nuisances, rules — say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.

Which is why the game is up for Senator Clinton. Senator Obama is going to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. Clinton could borrow Yogi Berra’s assessment of the Yankees’ play in the 1960 series, “We made too many wrong mistakes.” But let’s get to the Burkeans.

Burkean, of course, refers to Edmund Burke of England. Burke is widely, and with some justice, viewed as the father of modern Anglo-American conservatism. He famously abhorred the French Revolution. Change, being inevitable, should come slowly. More, liberty is just one of many benefits that civil societies confer and the French, to Burke’s mind, were ignoring all the others, which would result either in tyranny or civil chaos. As it turned out, the French got both; no surprise to Burke. He just as famously chided the British government for goading the American colonies into war and eventually supported their move for independence.

Law, for Burke, guarantees the interests of the governed because it is law passed and secured by their representatives. Law is legislative command combined with protection of the civil rights of the governed. Prudent governing requires gradual and moderate reform of existing institutions; suddenly changing or replacing them is a bad idea, as is governing in abstractions unmoored by concrete experiences. (And concrete nouns) It is a bad idea for an empire to slap a colonial tax on tea merely because it is within Parliament’s “right” to do so. Worse is a government exercising its power for an abstraction. Invading a country to bring “democracy” is a bad idea, especially if that country has no democratic institutions to begin with. Our “neo-cons” are not Burkean conservatives. To them he would apply his aphorism, “. . . a great empire and little minds go ill together.”

By Burke’s lights, the Bush administration’s leaders are not conservatives at all; they are radicals. Our Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia are free-thinking judicial activists. Originalism, as practiced by Thomas and Scalia, is not conservative; the changes they seek would be rapid and immoderate, supplanting overnight a legal order now decades old. You can pick the first ripe tomato or pull the plant up by its roots to get at the tomato; if you pull it up, you won’t get any more tomatoes. Radicals pull up the plant, real conservatives — and liberals — wait for more tomatoes.

For Burke the real indignity of steroids in baseball would have been the rapidity with which they brought change. Over time, athletes improve naturally. Change is slow, as it should be. It was decades before Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. Greg Maddux’s 350th victory is sweeter than Roger Clemen’s. Even if our political conservatives are no longer Burkean, when it comes to baseball, all fans are Burkean; no matter what their politics.

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The photo at the top is of Bill Mazeroski hitting his walk-off home run to end the 1960 World Series.

Better Cheating through Chemistry

George Mitchell turned down a seat on the Supreme Court and negotiated a peace in Northern Ireland but he secured his place in history this week when he named baseball’s last twenty years “The Steroid Era.” I call it “Better Cheating through Chemistry.”

versus

Senator Mitchell is getting some flak by people ignorant of the difference between the criminal justice system and ordinary civil investigations. Much, if not all of it, is unjustified.

For instance, Senator Mitchell correctly draws conclusions from the fact that the players to whom steroid use has been attributed refused to talk to him. Mitchell was not a prosecutor; only an investigator hired by a private party — Major League Baseball — to conduct an investigation. He had no subpoena power and could not indict anyone. Had he had that power he would not have been able to draw conclusions from the players’ silence nor could he have commented on their silence. But his was not a criminal court of law and the players’ Fifth Amendment privilege not to incriminate themselves did not apply. Obviously, the players’ lawyers told them not to talk to Mitchell, but that is because their statements to Mitchell might have started a criminal investigation by law enforcement. It is perfectly appropriate that they chose not to talk to him; it is perfectly appropriate for him to draw conclusions from that fact.

Plus, his report is full of evidence that the players he named cheated. Mitchell had documentary evidence such as cancelled checks, receipts, etc. He also had the oral testimony of people who sold or injected the drugs. Some sports writers have complained about that oral testimony, calling it “hearsay.” It isn’t. But even if it was, it is still evidence and evidence from which a skilled trial lawyer — which Mitchell once was — can draw conclusions. We aren’t required to agree with his conclusions but that does not make them off-base.

As I have said before, Henry Aaron is still the home run king. Now we know that Roger Clemens is not the best pitcher in baseball’s history. And we know that baseball’s statistics for the last couple of decades should be thrown out at the plate.

In the case of Mitchell v. Clemens, Bonds, et al., the court rules in favor of Mitchell.

First Monday in October

It is the first Monday in October. A wonderful time of the year in much of the world. In the Northern Hemisphere, it’s autumn and the leaves are turning. In the Southern Hemisphere, the winter is over and the flowers are beginning to blossom. Here in the United States it is also the first day of this year’s Supreme Court term.

So, it is a day filled with dread. We’re trapped on a lee shore and the glass is dropping.

The New York Times editorialized about the beginning of the term in its Sunday paper. In describing the Court the Times wrote:

There are three hardened camps: four very conservative justices, four liberals, and a moderate conservative, Justice Anthony Kennedy, hovering in between.

This makes me crazy. Anytime I hear or read someone describing the Court and referring to the “four liberals” I hurl my harmless word-spears in the futile hope that someone in the media will take note: There are no liberals on today’s Supreme Court. Let me say that again: There are no liberals on today’s Supreme Court. There are five conservatives and four moderates. (I will admit the possibility that Justice Ginsburg is a liberal. In which case there are five conservative, three moderates and one liberal.)

Then the Times goes on:

If the justices act as umpires and call balls and strikes, this term could produce some real victories in voting rights, the death penalty and civil liberties. It could result in some terrible setbacks in these areas, however, if — as critics of the Roberts court have said — the court is calling balls and strikes but has moved the strike zone far to the right.

This too makes me crazy. I understand what an appealing metaphor it is for us to think of our judges as umpires; impartial paragons, standing behind the plate, objectively calling balls and strikes. But the metaphor is useless. If baseball was governed by a Constitution which said, “There shall be a zone known as the strike zone,” then the metaphor might be apt. Instead the strike zone is precisely defined in baseball’s rules; unlike the Constitution, where nothing is defined that precisely. A judge would be an “umpire” only if baseball umpires were allowed to decide where the strike zone is on each pitch and were free to change it as they wished.

One more time: There are no liberals on today’s Supreme Court. If any of you know anyone on the staff of the New York Times, please tell them.

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UPDATE – June 30, 2008 – It’s the last Monday in June and the Court has gone home for the year. For proof that no liberals sit on the Court, see our June post.

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UPDATE : July 7, 2008 – Nina Totenberg of NPR had a segment on this morning’s “Morning Edition” in which she analyzes this year’s Supreme Court. The audio segment is seven minutes long and about five minutes in I ready to heave my computer against the wall because all I was hearing was “conservative” wing versus the “liberal” wing. But, the last two minutes or so is an actual discussion of what I’ve been railing against: She actually notes that “liberal” is a relative term. Today’s “liberals” are really middle-of-the-road moderates, unlike the liberal giants of a generation ago.

UPDATE : October 6, 2008 – Our 2008 First Monday in October Post has arrived.