Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 couldn’t be written today.  I’m not sure what temperature a Kindle or a Nook would burn at, but it certainly isn’t 451 degrees (233 degrees centigrade for those enjoying a saner temperature standard).  And burning those neat gizmos wouldn’t really do the trick—you’d really have to go after the whole internet.  I can turn on my laptop or Kindle and download just about any book I care to read, but that book still exists on some server somewhere.  You’d have to destroy them all.

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The first amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. states:  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press; or….”  Previously, perhaps in several posts, I underlined the point that this proves the Constitution is an evolving, living document that was written to adapt to new situations that would appear in our young democracy, something some sectors of our society and even some obstinate Supreme Court judges deny:  This is the first amendment—it wasn’t in the original document.

Today I will focus on those freedoms that deal with publishing—speech and press.  While Sixty Minutes (CBS) has suffered the same blows as all network news programs and is in a downward spiral, I still watched the segment last Sunday night about Greg Mortensen.  I remember when, several years back now, a colleague at work recommended the book Three Cups of Tea, a heart-warming portrayal of a person trying to do some good in this world.  I’ll confess that my first knew-jerk reaction was cynicism.  Someone who’s rich enough to go halfway round the world to climb mountains wants to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan?  I thought, “Either this guy is Paul on the road to Damascus, celebrating a personal epiphany, or he’s a con artist.”

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It always has been, of course. However, events recently have transpired so fast that not even the Warner Brothers’ roadrunner could keep up with them.  I will only comment here on two things that really bother me, but it’s obvious from previous blog posts that many things concern me about how the West is handling problems in that region of the world.  Today my two concerns are American duplicity and Muslim immaturity.

Duplicity is SOP in our State Department.  You have to wonder if that’s what foreign policy reduces to these days.  When the Egyptian revolution started, the diplomatic corps, led by Mrs. Clinton, struggled to figure out which side to support, the rebels or Mr. Mubarak.  It was clear that it’s time to change our foreign policy and people.  The duplicity resides in supporting some clearly tyrannical and oppressive governments and trying to topple some others.

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First off, let me advise my readers right up front that I love Broadway.  I’d much rather go see a bad Broadway or even off-Broadway play than watch any reality (far from it) show on TV.  In fact, if I were rich and had the energy, I’d be in NYC every week.  Both cost and energy keep my attendance down, whereas I won’t watch reality TV even if you paid me to do it (well, I suppose I do have my price—something like the last Megamillions jackpot would be nice).  I even enjoy regurgitated Disney schlock like Mary Poppins and The Lion King. My favorite show was the off-Broadway classic The Fantasticks, although I saw Phantom twice, once in NYC and once in Boston.

That said, last Friday I was struck by a segment of ABC’s Good Morning America where they had the cast from the revival of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes doing the musical number “Anything Goes.”  This music is so old that I played it in dance band in high school.  Right after or just before there was an ad for the new Broadway show The Book of Mormon, written by the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, with music by Robert Lopez.  This is new, very new.

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[I’m publishing tomorrow’s blog post a wee bit earlier to nudge it under the wire for St. Paddy’s Day.  We are faced with foreign policy disasters in the Middle East and tragic disaster in Japan, so perhaps a little Irish cheer is in order.  The following is an edited repeat from last year.  Ireland has been hit hard by the rot of the financial sector that spread round the world in 2008-2009, so she deserves a toast…raise a mug of green beer to old Eire.]

The title quote is by George Bernard Shaw.  Today is St. Patrick’s Day so I thought it was a perfect day to set the record straight: many great writers in the English language that you may have heard about are not English but Irish.  Shaw was one of them.  His plays and other writings poked fun at the English establishment, a commendable thing to do even today.  His biting wit transferred easily into words on the page and probably embarrassed everyone from royalty on down.  On the other hand, the endurance of his work over the years is proof of its quality—it is classic literature in the English language written by an Irishman.

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I’ll give retrograde conservatives credit—they always seem to be more focused than liberal progressives.  In fact, the general fickleness of liberal progressives is often amusing.  Already they are screaming “Chernobyl!” and “Three-Mile Island!”  and “Down with Nuclear Power!” when just months ago they were wringing hands about the oil spill BP caused in the Gulf of Mexico.  You can’t have it both ways, folks.  One example taken from Dave Lindorff, Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist, says it all—his ThisCantBeHappening.net article is titled “The Idiocy and Hubris of Engineers” and comes down hard on GE and their reactors.  Mind you, Mr. Lindorff has no scientific or engineering training and quotes only so-called experts that support his agenda—apparently idiocy and hubris are contagious?

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Those readers familiar with this website probably have visited the webpage “Steve’s Bookshelf” at least once.  A new addition to the subsection “Non-Fiction Recommendations” is Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia. I also have introduced the new subsection “Stealth Reads—Books by New And Promising Authors” where you will find Donna Carrick’s The First Excellence and Carolyn J. Rose’s Hemlock Lake.  Each of these books receives my recommendation, as does every book that appears on this page of my website.  I should hasten to add that neither Donna’s nor Carolyn’s novels is related to Matt’s book—they are associated only in that they appear in the same update to this webpage.  Matt’s blog can be found at the Rolling Stone website.  Donna and Carolyn also have their own websites.  All can be found on Facebook.

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Sunday’s N.Y. Times had a front-page article titled “Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By.”  This article is so naïve that it makes me want to cancel my subscription.  I suppose the true culprits are the editors who let such an affront to good journalism make it to the Times, let alone its front page.  What this article is referring to, of course, is the idea that all the uprisings across the Arab world are generated by ordinary people who have become fed up with authoritarian rule.  Al Qaeda has not been present in this process.  So far.  And that’s the problem.  What’s naïve is the foolish thought that they won’t be.

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Nowadays it seems that a wide sociopolitical spectrum describes the set of U.S. independent voters.  The techniques for defining them and counting them seem nebulous at best.  Of course, it’s hard to do the second if you haven’t done the first.  There are true independents, people who will not make a decision until the day of the election, for parties or people, although they will taunt you by saying that they tend to lean one way or the other.  There are the shifters, people who say they are Dems and vote GOP or vice versa.  Others will vote in one election and not another or not in primaries (in some states you can’t vote in primaries if you haven’t declared a nominal party allegiance).  Finally, some are third party voters who don’t vote unless they have a candidate (Socialists, Libertarians, etc)—they’re for an “independent party.”

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(Review of Steven Manly’s Visions of the Multiverse, New Page Books, 2011, ISBN 978-1-60163-129-9)

Visions of the Multiverse is a very readable introduction to some very strange concepts in physics.  Its advantage is that it’s short and requires no math expertise from the lay reader, even though much of it is really about mathematics.  However, it does require you to think about things.  Its disadvantage is that it’s short and requires no math expertise—in other words, you may arrive at the end somewhat dissatisfied by your lack of understanding of these topics.  If that’s the case, bless your soul, there are more meaty tomes (also with little or no mathematics) that expand on the ideas contained in this book.  (I’ll mention some of them below.)

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