WILLIAMMORGAN.NET

So here’s one for Randy Cohen, who writes a column called “The Ethicist” in the New York Times Magazine:

I was at a store today returning an item. I had lost the receipt. When they refunded my money (in the form of a gift card), they refunded the current price ($40) instead of the sale price I paid ($30). I consider myself an ethical person, yet I kept the money. My reasoning is always this—it balances out the numerous times I have made it home, looked at a receipt, and found that I was overcharged for an item. (Yes, I know that I could always return to the store to get the item discounted, but that takes gas and time and some complex explaining.)

I justify my decision in part because it doesn’t happen very often. It seems like the good deals just about balance out the bad deals. If I were getting way too many undercharges, I’d start to consider it dishonest. I also follow a few other rules:

1. I always correct the cashier if he or she counts out the wrong amount of money. I don’t want a cashier to get in trouble for having a short drawer, especially when the “bonus” I receive is most likely paying for the mistake of another cashier or another store.
2. I only accept the money if it’s a store that I frequent regularly. In other words, I’m not taking a $2 bonus from a store the first time I’m there. If it’s meant to balance out mistakes, I can’t justify taking the money from a store that hasn’t had time to overcharge me.

Ethical or unethical?

(One last example: It’s like stealing from work. If they’re buying staples bythe ton, and you’re printing lots of documents at home using expensive ink-jet cartridges, isn’t it a fair trade? Stealing a copy machine wouldn’t be, but a box of staples?)

What a strange, disturbing story: The State of California has declared a fiscal emergency and instead of sending out tax refunds, education grants, money owed to small businesses for purchases, and funding for counties to maintain essential services is sending out IOUs that can’t be cashed until October! Try paying your rent or credit card bill with that!

I know many real citizens will be hurt by this, but in an abstract way I think it’s funny. California is just an extreme example of how citizens currently run this country. I put the primary blame on the anti-tax crowd (like Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform). They start with the assumption that all taxes are bad. The real question we should always ask ourselves is this: “Do we want this service enough to pay taxes for it?” The anti-tax shouters won’t even let us get to this question.

Here’s the real problem, and the one that explains California’s problems: most Americans are anti-tax and pro-services. I know that in California’s last round of ballot initiatives (meant to rescue their government) most polls showed around 70% of Californians saying, “Yes, I want all the services listed, but I will vote no on all tax increases.” And that’s exactly how they voted. This entire approach—fueled by the mindlessness of the anti-tax crowd—encourages greed, which isn’t a good way to run a state. The federal government  can borrow money, but California doesn’t really have that option.

So I’m feeling sorry for you, but you brought it on yourself. One thing I have to say about Missouri: we may be severely anti-tax, but we match it with a dangerously low level of services (in our endless quest to turn our state into Mississippi).

One last thing: A great example of this thinking is when states sell assets to maintain services without raising taxes. It’s clearly a bad decision—like me borrowing money this year based on my 2012 salary—but it lets you be greedy and anti-tax. Missouri did it with MOHELA, and California did it with the lottery—both under anti-tax Republican governors.

I read an interesting study on children and happiness (that I’ve probably mentioned before) that claimed children make people less happy unless you constantly reflect on how happy they make you. It makes sense. It’s like friendship or marriage. If you dwell on the negatives and annoyances and the way they get in the way of what you would otherwise be doing, they’ll make you miserable. Focus on the good things and they’ll make you happy.

Today’s example…an example of what? An example of how a single moment in a day can overpower any negativity. I often walk Lily to school and we have to take an old, busted sidewalk on a busy road. There are lots of highlights along the way: the neighborhood dogs Cinnamon and Chocolate Milk (not their real names), the dangerous bend, the wagon wheels to crawl under, the lollipop store, the crosswalk buttons, our hiding spot for objects found along the walk, etc. Lily’s highlight is the Mini-Stage. It’s just an old telephone pole that has been chopped to a height of 3 inches. For some odd reason it’s stuck right in the center of the busted sidewalk, only a foot from the road. We have to stop while Lily steps upon the mini-stage to perform a few songs. Her recent performance began with a rousing modification of “Twinkle, Twinkle”:

Twinkle, Twinkle, Dinosaur, Letting out a great big ROAR!

Since I had not previously heard this version, the ROAR came as a bit of a surprise! She followed it with another modification, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Traffic Light,” and a wonderful curtsy. Then off to school.

Who knows what passing motorists think. Who cares. It makes my day every time.

Speaking of morality: Wouldn’t it be great to be a former president who continues to appall people 35 years later? I’m fascinated by Nixon because he’s such a mess of contradictions. People may hate the politics and policies of Bush and Clinton, but Nixon is different. You can respect some of his accomplishment and at the same time be disgusted by others and ashamed of him as a human.

His political punishment is to have his recordings trickled out to the public in small, obscene batches. The last installment came this atrocious support of abortion:

Speaking to Charles Colson after the January 1973 Roe v Wade decision legalising abortion, the president said: “I admit, there are times when abortions are necessary, I know that.” He gave “a black and a white” as an example.

He is pro-choice in case we need to abort interracial babies! Tough to beat that one. (Of course it’s important to remember that as late as 1967 it was a felony in some states for  blacks and whites to have sex, live together, or get married. Thus Nixon wasn’t too far out of step with the times.)

All week long I’ve heard ads on the radio for an upcoming concert at the St. Charles Family Arena. Normally I wouldn’t care, except for two factors that amuse me:

1. As its name suggests, the St. Charles Family Arena was built (with taxpayers’ money) with a specific purpose in mind: to provide Christian entertainment for the conservative city of St. Charles, Missouri. Of course they couldn’t say that—separation of church and state and all that—but they made it clear with the name and with comments like these:

I like the name St. Charles Family Arena because it keeps in the forefront of everybody’s mind what kind of entertainment we will present.

Unfortunately, they quickly discovered they the taxpayers would lose money if the arena focused too much on the “Family” part of its name. So they started scheduling Wrestlemania, IFC Caged Combat matches, and even an indoor football team that goes by the quite unfamily name of the Rage. But where to go from there?

2. The great double-bill of Judas Priest and Whitesnake! Could you get less family-friendly than that? (Yeah, but it wouldn’t be easy.) The commercial’s juxtaposition of “Come rock with Judas Priest and Whitesnake” with “July 1 at the Family Arena” keeps throwing me off. Add to that the blasting of “Breaking the Law” in the background and it’s a bit odd.

I guess money allows you to redefine family to include a band that earned #3 on the Parents Music Resource Center’s list of most offensive songs.

Note on my previous post: Certain crimes change the ordering of attributes. Example: Mike Tyson isn’t a boxer who got busted raping a woman; Mike Tyson is a rapist who was also a good boxer. Phil Spector isn’t a music producer who murdered somebody; he is a murderer who produced music. Michael Jackson is a child molester who also sold a lot of albums. Art doesn’t override morality.

As the title says, it has been a really strange couple of days in the news. Before I get a chance to process any event, something else happens. C’mon, I’m still working my way through Wednesday’s amazing 2-0 soccer victory by the U.S. over Spain, the #1 team in the world. Easily the best game I have seen them play (though 9 games out of 10 they wouldn’t have been able to survive the relentless attacking and would have lost).

(1) Then add in the death of Farah Fawcett. I mention it only to connect to my overshare for the week: my mom probably knew I had entered puberty when I won a small version of this foxy Farah Fawcett poster and hung it on my wall. It  was probably 1982, making me about 12. I’m guessing  that it threw her off a bit, but then maybe my dad said, “Naw, it’s cool, he’s 12, and I’ve also got to say it’s kinda nice.” Besides, I wasn’t the only one digging it in the 70s. She supposedly sold 12 million copies of it, twice as many as any other female superstar. And it wasn’t even a black light velvet poster!

As a side note, what strikes me now is how “natural” she looks. No, I’m not talking about the obvious—I’m talking about the clear lack of plastic surgery. Those were the days when you could be sexy without being phony.

(2) Then Michael Jackson dies and steals her thunder. Let me be very clear about this: I don’t give a damn! I don’t want to read a bunch of stories about how successful and difficult his life was. I don’t want to see him treated as a victim of fame. The man was a child molester, and in death he should be given the same level of respect we give other child molesters. CNN has a dozen headlines related to Jackson and they are unanimously positive. Apparently our obsession with fame can overcome the rape of a child (or children).

(3) Responses I did not have to this news (borrowed from the MSNBC story):

“No joke. King of Pop is no more. Wow. It’s like when Kennedy was assassinated.”

(4) Ah, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. Standing up for the sanctity of marriage. Sorry, buddy, but when a hypocrite goes down he goes down hard. And I wish social conservatives would talk a bit more about what really harms marriage in America. It’s not gay marriage or civil unions—it’s selfishness, adultery, and divorce. But that’s not going to stop John McCain, Newt Gingrinch, Rush Limbaugh, and Rudy Giuliani (who have, I believe, 10 marriages between them). Perhaps not any worse than Democrats, but it’s also not an issue that Democrats make the foundation of their party.

I do have to say this about Sanford’s press conference: It seemed sincere. It made me like him because he was honestly emotional. That’s pretty rare in politics. (Of course he is probably being labeled a “sissy” and being shunned by his followers right now.) He seemed terribly in love with both his wife and his girlfriend (even if his love for his wife was respectful instead of passionate). Even his e-mails to his girl—which I did read and then realized I had moved from public interest to voyeurism—seemed filled with genuine tenderness (and a surprising amount of poetry). A terrible act but a response that deserves a touch of respect.

For some reason I watch no television at all when Molly is at home. Okay, I watch soccer, but that’s a form of relaxation more than actual television viewing. When she is gone, I pick something off the DVR that I recorded months ago because it sounded good. Last night’s was Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. It is a documentary about Mark Everett, singer for the band Eels, and his search to learn more about his emotionally distant father. Typical enough, except  that his father was Hugh Everett, a brilliant physicist responsible for one of the stranger modern theories.

As the husband of a psychologist, my first response was to analyze Mark. Let’s see: Father was “peculiar” and lacked an “emotional vocabulary” (in the words of Hugh’s best friend). Always wore a suit and tie, even at dinner. Published a stunning dissertation then quit physics when it didn’t get respect. Sister has schizophrenia and commits suicide. Mother dies young of cancer. Father has heart attack at 51. Mark says “Crazy runs in the family” and tells a chilling story about his only physical contact with his father when he found him dead on his bed when Mark was 19.

Happy Father’s Day! My family is a 9.5 on the normal scale compared to this one. But as Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The least strange part of the story was Hugh’s actual theory. I have an interest but little true knowledge of quantum physics. His theory was based on a rejection of Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Principle. Although quantum mechanics is always bizarre, that theory always borders on mysticism to me: “physicists concluded that human observation of a microscopic event changes the reality of the event.” How can observing change the actual world?

Hugh seems to have reversed the question. Instead of asking, “Why doesn’t the quantum world act like the larger world?” he asked, “Why doesn’t the larger world act like the quantum world?” His answer—in my limited knowledge—seems to say that it does but that we can’t observe it. In quantum mechanics, objects can be in more than one place at a single time. Observation supposedly forces them to stick to a single location. But what if they still remained in every possible location and only our angle of observation made it seem like the object was fixed? To reverse it, what if larger objects were also in multiple places at the same time, only seeming static because of our subjective observation?

I ramble, but Hugh’s theory seems to say this: Every time the world presents us with two options, we actually choose both. In an alternate universe, we continue in the path that life would have taken had we made the other choice.  My only response would be take take it further. Every moment of life involves infinite choices, and any theory of parallel world would have to include a  constant and infinite subdivision of our selves. I’ve spawned a billion parallel universes while typing this entry!

His theory can lead to weird beliefs like “quantum immortality” (i.e. in one of these universes, something is invented or something happens that allows that version of “me” to live forever, thus it’s impossible not to be immortal). Pretty cool, and it doesn’t seem that strange to me.

What to say after my return from the family’s first pilgrimage to Orlando? I want to rip on Mickey Mouse—to be the hypercritical parent who refuses to allow his kids to choose Toy Story as the theme for a birthday party—but I don’t have it in me. Disney is what it is, both the theme parks and the movie company. You aren’t paying for experiences as much as for future memories and nostalgia (if you went as a kid).

The closest reaction that can compare with my Disney feelings was at the Grand Canyon. Yeah, you can say how it would be better without all the crowds and buses, but you have to admit that within the confines of modern American tourism it is done really well. It’s crafted. Engineers and psychologists work together to make the experience work. Of course this means you can feel manipulated if you step back and look at it, but in the center of it all it feels comfortable. That’s their goal. They want you to think the world of Disney is as natural as a national park.

I have the same mixed feelings with their selling of experiences. If you have the cash, they’ll sell you a new feeling. Want to swim with dolphins? Drive a race car? Go up in a balloon? Have lunch with a princess? They’ll make it happen. Again, I’m impressed that they figure out what people want and then package it. My personal attitude is that that very simplicity makes the experiences not worth the money, but others obviously think differently.

I won’t be going every year, but I have no problems with having dropped a few nickels into Mickey’s pockets. In the modern capitalistic world, everything in moderation is the best a parent can hope for (without moving to the woods and dropping out).

While it doesn’t come across in the plot summaries or in a first-time read, the other great trait that I forgot Dostoevsky possesses is a great sense of humor. His books are so serious that it’s easy to overlook how funny they are at times. Admittedly it’s a different type of humor than Don Quixote: no vomiting into Sancho’s mouth in this one! What it has is satire—more specifically, they’re really set-ups that caricature groups of people who thought differently than Dostoevsky in real life. Like everything with Dostoevsky, it’s successful because he both understands psychology and can’t truly hate his opponent. He makes them look both ridiculous and oddly sympathetic.

Example: The fabulous scene where Mr. Burdovsky (a.k.a. “Pavlishchev’s son”) and his friends get humiliated by Myshkin and Ganya. Their youth, their spouting off half-digested ideas that have been worked into a frenzy in isolation, their moral emptiness sourrounded by self-righteousness, their attempts to cover uncertainty and a lack of confidence with shouts and demands—pretty damn funny when you get the joke. The equivalent for me would be a group of students that confronted me before school with demands that I change their grades—not because grades matter, and not as a favor, but as a demand because it simply isn’t right. Myshkin annihilates them because he simply doesn’t believe it yet completely understands.