Three Songs

"Change we can believe in is back." It went away? Apparently. But I ask you, friends, who will rise up for change we can't believe in? Who speaks for the Alchemist?

"When will it end, oh lord, when will it end?" A few days ago, I heard Benny Morris on NPR, further expounding his view that Israel would soon bomb Iran, unless the US got their first. To his credit, Robert Siegel stepped right up with the "Stalin and Mao were deterrable; why not the Ayatollah Khamenei?" line of questioning, to which we got the fantastic(al) reply, with which we're all now quite familiar: the Soviets and Chinese were murderous, but rational. Meanwhile the Iranians are driven by religious zealotry, and care not for their own self-preservation, whereas Mao, for instance, he mighta killed forty million people, but that guy, he was rational. I eagerly await Doc Morris' take on the Khemer Rouge. It's an interesting spectrum: rational and very murderous vs. irrational and not so very murderous. I do not accede to the notion that the Iranian government is somehow less rational than any other, but I do wonder why irrational, illogical, unpredictable, waxing-and-waning bellicosity is to be considered so much more . . . existentially threatening than our various and sundry vast, monomaniacally ideological evil empires?

On a final, unrelated note, will someone please explain to these sociologists that the phrase "survival of the fittest" doesn't accurately describe the contemporary understanding of evolution, that it represents an hypothesis by a genius who nevertheless lacked the tools, accumulated knowledge, observational data, etc. to describe the mechanisms of the process he discovered; that for a man in a time before genetics or modern biochemistry, it wasn't all that unlike Newton's ether, say. In any case, the idea that we should seek to countermand students' impressions that the "survival of the fittest" is a valid social model, well, that's not an argument for changing the evolution curriculum, but an argument for abolishing school.