The County Clerk Who Cried Religion

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That Kentucky county clerk is back on the streets, as long as she promises not to interfere with the clerk’s office issuing marriage licenses to gay people. My reaction to her situation is that anybody who strongly objects to their job requirements for personal reasons should look for another job. Same-sex couples now have the legal right to get married. Nobody has the legal right to stop them. It’s as simple as that, regardless of any objections the county clerk might have, including objections based on her particular interpretation of a book she considers sacred.

In a lighter vein, someone named Jim expressed himself on Facebook (the link is no longer universally available). You might lift your voice in song if you know the tune: 

I am the very model of a modern fundamentalist
I’m not merely judgmental, I’m the absolute judgmentalest!
I always follow scripture and I act on God’s authority
But marital longevity was never my priority.

I married first one husband, then two others, then another one
Because I think one man is pretty much like any other one.
I’ve never been too troubled by the dubious legalities
Of sex outside of marriage or of other trivialities.

But when it comes to icky stuff like homosexuality
I’m always very strident with my Puritan morality.
In short in matters biblical and spiritual and Calvinist,
I am the very model of a modern fundamentalist!

In questions of behavior I fall back on my Old Testament
(Though saying no to shrimp is way too much of an impediment).
I pick and choose the verses that support my little weltanschauung
And pledge never to change my mind from now til götterdämmerung.

I’ll ride this hobby horse until I’m richer than a sybarite,
There’ll always be good money in denouncing godless sodomites.
I’ll put my name as author on some books that I can barely read
And get a show on cable to inform the world what God decreed.

My husbands all agree that I know more about what marriage is
Than five Supreme Court justices whose law my faith disparages.
In short in matters biblical and spiritual and Calvinist,
I am the very model of a modern fundamentalist!

In fact, when I see what is meant by constitutionality
When I can do my job with requisite impartiality,
When I can join in marriage two young men who might be thespians,
Or issue nuptial licenses to enterprising lesbians,

When I can see that love is love no matter what the sexes are
And understand that gays are just like me and my three exes are,
In short, when I have finally got a dose of moral clarity
I’ll find out what is meant by the idea of Christian charity.

Til then I’ll flout the law and draw my wages from the county tax
Which is what God would do if only He was up on all the facts
Til then in matters biblical and spiritual and Calvinist,
I am the very model of a modern fundamentalist!

Cutting the Cord (Thanks to a Hard-Working Man)

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The Verizon website said their technician would get to our house around 9:30 pm to do our installation. The anonymous dispatcher said it would really be around 8:15 (only three hours after the original 5 pm deadline).

So it was a pleasant surprise when the technician called at 6:30 to say he’d be at our house in fifteen minutes. He arrived as promised and quickly got to work.

Four hours later, he was done. Among other things, he’d had to string 350 feet of cable from our basement to a telephone pole two blocks away, working in the dark on a hot, humid night. It was an impressive performance.

When we thanked him and said good-night, we assumed he’d be dropping off his van at some Verizon garage and then get home by midnight or so. No, he’d actually be driving to Newark to do some work for another customer. He explained that Verizon is forcing their previously-unionized technicians to work 60 hours a week.

We didn’t ask what time he started work yesterday. But on a good day, if all goes well, he puts in 12 hours. That’s not 12 hours in an air-conditioned or heated office. That’s 12 hours of driving around, in good and bad weather, carrying equipment, going up and down stairs, climbing on roofs, drilling holes, stringing cable, attaching electronic gizmos to inside and outside walls, while also dealing with people like us. Sometimes in the dark. 

Do you think it would be a good idea for Verizon to hire and train more technicians, so their employees wouldn’t have to work 12 hours a day (or more), five days a week? We all know the corporate business model is to get as much work as possible out of workers while providing as little compensation as possible, but there are lots of Americans who could use a decent job. It would be good for the country and even good for the corporations if they’d spread some of the wealth around.

Cutting the Cord (the Saga Continues and Continues)

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how-about-never

Verizon told us they’d be at our house between 11 am and 2 pm to install our new fiber optic connection (good-bye, Comcast!). The installation was supposed to take three hours and might require work on the outside of our house.

After a while, I checked our order status on the Verizon website. A note had been added. The technician will arrive between 1 pm and 5 pm. Ok, whatever.

The afternoon wore on. No technician. No word from Verizon. No email, no phone call.

But another visit to their website reveals an updated note: the technician will arrive between 7:45 pm and 8:45 pm. Really? To do a three-hour job that might involve working outside? In the dark?

Ok, let’s contact Verizon. First, a brief online chat. Second, a phone call to “customer service”. Third, another phone call to “customer service” after the first call disconnects.

The Verizon representative is surprised to hear that Verizon technicians do installations at night. So am I. I ask her to confirm that this is actually going to happen. Or will the technician actually show up tomorrow morning? Or never?

She contacts the dispatcher, who confirms that the technician will be arriving tonight. I’m not convinced.

Meanwhile, the website has a new note: the technician will arrive between 9 pm and 10 pm:

verizon 1

verizon 2

I find this new promise even less believable than “between 7:45 and 8:45”. Our technician will be working past midnight to finish this job? I express my skepticism and repeat my request for confirmation.

Yes, the dispatcher still says the technician will arrive between 7:45 and 8:45 pm, even though the website disagrees. I express an opinion or two to “customer service” and we say good-bye.

Comcast, I already miss you and you haven’t gone away!

Perspectives and Perspectives

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In writing about perspective, I’m a little concerned that I may be conflating or improperly jamming together two different kinds of perspective. But I think the two kinds have enough in common to justify discussing them at the same time. One kind of perspective is the personal or individual kind. The other is more social or abstract. 

Here’s an example of the first kind. On her first day of kindergarten, this little girl’s parents strapped a movie camera to her chest so she could film everything that happened “from her perspective”.
 school

That’s a kind of perspective each of us has. It’s even fair to say that the camera has a perspective (as in “the teacher was visible from the camera’s perspective, but her desk wasn’t”). Cameras lack consciousness, but they do record data from a particular point of view. Do all inanimate objects have perspectives? There doesn’t seem to be any reason to say that a bottle of water has a perspective, but there are probably some difficult cases. At any rate, every individual perspective begins with a physical location (the here and now) from which the world is perceived or, as in the case of the camera, from which data is recorded.

However, there is more to a perspective than location, because a location from which nothing is being perceived or recorded isn’t really a perspective. We might say, for example, that the ocean is visible from the perspective of that mountaintop, but that would only be another way of saying that an observer on top of that mountain could see the ocean. Mountaintops don’t actually have perspectives. Like any other location, a mountaintop can only play a role in someone or something else’s perspective (and it can be a very helpful role, which is why telescopes are often put on mountaintops).

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s very little difference between a camera’s perspective and a person’s. But I think perspectives occupy a range from the very simple to the very complex. Cameras and bacteria have relatively simple perspectives; you and I have more complex perspectives; redwoods (?) and rabbits fall somewhere in between. (The HAL 2000 computer had a perspective, although I’m not sure where it fit on the continuum.)

How is a person’s perspective (or HAL’s) more complex than a camera’s? If it worked properly, the camera above was able to roughly capture some of what the little girl saw. If it was set to record sound, it also captured sounds similar to the ones she heard. But the camera couldn’t do more than that. It couldn’t even approximate how her new shoes felt or how her lunch tasted. Relatively complex organisms like us have a variety of senses that allow us to gather information about our bodies and the world around us, giving us relatively complex perspectives (some neurologists think we have as many as twenty-one senses; it’s agreed we have more than five).

But other factors besides sense perception affect our perspective. For example, it’s said in this review of The Diary of a Teenage Girl that the movie “aims to tackle a coming-of-age story from a girl’s perspective”. That doesn’t mean the director filmed the movie so that every scene was shot as if we in the audience were looking through the girl’s eyes (some directors do that kind of thing, and it gets annoying fairly quickly). A film being made from a certain character’s perspective means that the events and characters in the film are portrayed as they might have been experienced by that particular character, for example, by a teenage girl who had a certain background and a certain set of memories, beliefs, emotions and needs. The director tells the story as if this particular teenage girl were telling it. 

This is the broad sense of perspective that’s captured by the phrase “this is where I’m coming from”. During a conversation, I might express my opinion on the topic at hand, but simultaneously admit that my opinion is partly determined by who I am and where I’ve been. We all understand, or should understand, that how we experience and evaluate the world depends to a significant extent on our individual perspectives.

So what’s the other kind of perspective I mentioned hundreds of words ago? That’s the social or abstract kind referred to in titles like these: “Spender’s Anthropological Perspective Was An Eye-Opener”; “Forgiveness From a Humanist Perspective”; and “The Russian Perspective”. Anthropological, humanist and Russian perspectives aren’t the same as personal perspectives, but they don’t float around in the ether either. They’re connected to the individual perspectives of, in these three cases, anthropologists, humanists and Russians. I think I’ve got something to say about that kind of perspective, and how the two kinds are related, but, from my perspective, that’s enough for now. 

In the Meantime

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Our official cord cutting is only two days away. Good-bye, Comcast (the “triple play” people)! Hello, Verizon (the fiber optic people) and Ooma (the telephone people)! 

Assuming we can still communicate with the outside world at that point, I might finally be ready to post what I’ve been intermittently working on for the past two weeks: a more detailed account of what it means to have a perspective.

Or maybe I’ll treat our rupture with Comcast as a deadline. Deadlines provide motivation and there are so few of them when you’re retired (of course, there’s always the Final Deadline all flesh is heir to). I don’t want my most recent thoughts on perspective to be lost to the world just because Verizon isn’t able to safely transmit my packets of data hither, thither and yon! Comcast has been able to do that most of the time (I give them that).

In the meantime, here’s some musical entertainment from Neil Young. His voice rubs some people the wrong way, but he’s made some wonderful music, especially when he plays loud, like he usually does with the three guys in Crazy Horse. “Like a Hurricane” is one of his best songs. This is the studio version from 1977 and an energetic live version from 1986. They’re both eight minutes long, so this should hold you until Wednesday.

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