Privacy at Risk: A Book Review

According to Newsweek writer Jessica Bennett in her December 3, 2007 article entitled “Smile! You’re on Camera,” the average American is caught on tape 200 times a day.

This isn’t news to Christopher Slobogin, author of Privacy at Risk: The New Government Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment. This very important, well-written book should be required reading for every government employee from the local rookie police officer to the president. Slobogin, law professor at the University of Florida’s Fredric G. Levin College of Law, writes clearly and in depth about the different kinds of surveillance the government practices on its citizens and, perhaps more importantly, the lack of legal regulation of these surveillance practices. He also eruditely proposes expanding the fourth amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures to include these new technologies the founding fathers could never have imagined.

Slobogin introduces his book by defining and enumerating the two types of surveillance: physical and transactional. Using the American Bar Association’s Standards on Technologically-Assisted Physical Surveillance, Slobogin divides the technologies available into five categories: cameras, tracking devices, telescopic devices, illumination devices, and detection devices (capable of revealing concealed items, such as the x-ray scanners at airports, for example).

He then divides transactional surveillance into two types: target-driven, where an agent of the law uses a commercial data broker or snoopware to mine information on a specific person, and event-driven. As an example of an event-driven transactional surveillance, Slobogin writes,

“Say, for instance, that the police know that a sniper-killer wears a particular type of shoe, … that he owns a particular type of sweater, … and that he reads Elmore Leonard novels. … Once police obtain the credit card numbers of those who bought, say, the type of sweater found at the murder scene, they can trace other purchases made with the same card, to see if the relevant type of shoe or book was bought by any of the same people. Of course, if there is a match on one or more of the three items, the surveillance may then turn into a target-driven investigation.”

Why is Slobogin’s book so important? As he points out in “A Preview of the Book,” on page 17, “The [Supreme] Court’s willingness to declare that persons cannot reasonably expect their interactions with businesses and banks, their daily wanderings, and even some of their conduct at home to be free from suspicionless, warrantless surveillance by the government is contrary to societal mores and other legal norms.” Thanks to his research and very well-reasoned arguments, we have the information we need to combat the government’s post 9/11 trend toward warrantless surveillance and an easily understandable method whereby the judicial system can oblige legislatures into creating useful laws to protect us from unreasonable surveillance without compromising the government’s ability to investigate crime.

The strength of Slobogin’s arguments lies in the fact that his reasoning is neither liberal nor conservative. His point of view is not a compromise between political polarities; it is rather inclusive of both the public’s right to privacy and the government’s need to know. To quote Benjamin Franklin, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Slobogin translates this in contemporary terms thusly: “we must make sure we are ‘secure’ from government overreaching as well as from criminals and our enemies.”

The impact of the recent developments in surveillance technology haven’t really affected the majority of Americans yet. In case the reader isn’t sure about the effects of losing his or her public privacy, Slobogin succinctly writes “Anonymity in public promotes freedom of action and an open society. Lack of public anonymity promotes conformity and an oppressive society.”

In a section entitled “The effects of being watched,” Slobogin says that “in addition to its effect of behavior, [closed circuit television] might trigger a number of unsettling emotional consequences.” Quoting Jeffrey Rosen’s work The Unwanted Gaze: The Violation of Our Privacy, Slobogin writes, “it’s considered rude to stare at strangers whom you encounter in public.” He extrapolates that the “cyclopsian gaze of the camera eye may be equally disquieting, and perhaps more so, given […] the unavailability of normal countermeasures, such as staring back or requesting that the staring cease.”

If this isn’t enough to trigger unease in the reader, Slobogin refers to the research of Roger Clarke (http://anu.edu.au/people/RogerClarke/DV/CACM88.html), who summarizes the dangerous consequences of what he calls “dataveillance,” including “wrong identification, blacklisting, denial of redemption, witch hunts, unknown accusations and accusers, denial of due process, prevailing climate of suspicion, adversarial relationships, inequitable application of the law, decreased respect for the law and law enforcers, reduction in the meaningfulness of individual actions, reduction in self-reliance and self-determination, stultification of originality, increased tendency to opt out of the official level of society, weakening of society’s moral fibre and cohesion, and a repressive potential for a totalitarian government.”

Slobogin doesn’t leave us in fear without recourse, however. In his chapter five, “Implementing the Right to Public Anonymity,” he writes about accountability, cleverly entitling a section “Watching the Watchers:”

“How do we make sure that the police refrain from using cameras in a discriminatory fashion?… Self-reports probably will not work…

How might we ensure access to the information necessary for accountability? David Brin has argued that the best way to control the government (and everyone else) in a surveillance-happy ‘transparent society’ is to watch the watchers. Camera tapes could be audited periodically – or the watchers really could be watched, by cameras. That method would not only capture the facts necessary to determine whether conduct of surveillance standards are obeyed, but also bring home to operators the panoptic effects their surveillance has on others, thus perhaps curbing voyeuristic and other unnecessary observation.” (p. 133, italics mine)

Slobogin concludes that a “continued development of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence” would render physical and transactional surveillance “constitutionally visible” while continuing to make these types of surveillance available to the government whenever it really needed them.

Is Slobogin’s work as important and necessary to our privacy and security as I think it is? Take the case of Hasan Elahi, an art professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, whom the FBI mistook for a terrorist in June 2002. For six months, he answered their questions and passed their polygraph tests. Eventually he developed a website where he posts photographs taken with a cell phone every few minutes, detailing his location and activities (http://trackingtransience.net/). Lest you think his work absurd at best, logs on his site tracking the people visiting it show that authorities regularly continue to monitor him.

I urge you to read Privacy At Risk and find ways to halt the insidious tendency of our current legislation to support unreasonable and unwarranted surveillance of our persons and homes. With Congress set to take a vote sometime this summer to make the expiring provisions of the Patriot Act permanent, it is important to take action now. Begin by informing yourself with Privacy at Risk. Other resources include the American Civil Liberties Union page on surveillance and the Patriot Act (http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/17326res20030403.html) and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee’s tips for local organizations to pass resolutions at the community and municipal level to protect privacy and liberty (http://www.bordc.org/).

Contest Results

February 17, 2008

10:59 p.m. EST

Dear Readers:

If anyone is interested here are the answers to the Pop Quiz about celebrities and their quotes:

(1)   F

(2)   P

(3)   S

(4)   C

(5)   A

(6)   J

(7)   H

(8)   B

(9)   N

(10)        K

(11)        O

(12)        D

(13)        M

(14)        L

(15)        E

(16)        T

(17)        R

(18)        Q

(19)        I

(20)    G

The answer to the extra credit question was ‘M’ the quotation attributed to P.T. Barnum: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” As it turns out, he never said that. Here’s the full story from Bartlett’s Quotations at http://www.bartleby.com/66/19/5619.html:

Barnum doubted ever having uttered these words, though he conceded he may have said, “The people like to be humbugged.” See the appendix to A.H. Saxon’s biography, P.T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (1989), where it is claimed that the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute, but none of them ever die” originated with a notorious con-man known as “Paper Collar Joe,” (real name, Joseph Bessimer) and was later falsely ascribed to Barnum by show-biz rival Adam Forepaugh in a newspaper interview. Barnum never took pains to deny it, and even thanked Forepaugh for the free publicity he had given him.

No one entered the contest, sadly, but that just means I get to keep the $25 prize.

 

Sincerely,

David

Funeral Customs in America: A Book Review

In the first season of HBO’s historically accurate western Deadwood, Al Swearengen’s minion, E.B. Farnsworth confesses his betrayal and begs him not to feed him to the pigs − just in case there really is resurrection of the body upon Christ’s return. Given the paucity of data regarding the afterlife, what happens to us after death remains the most fascinating question, the final frontier, as it were. Just this side of death, however, we have a wealth of information about funeral practices and the cultural belief systems that give rise to the variety of options for preserving or disposing of the body.

            For an in depth look into the history of the contemporary funeral, I recommend Sam James’ The Evolution of Funeral Customs and Beliefs in America: Including Science and Technological Developments and the Increased Desire for Creamtion and Natural Burial.

            Originally written as his undergrad thesis at Erskine College in South Carolina (www.erskine.edu), James has made available his work at http://www.lulu.com/content/802053.

            James makes it clear in his author’s note that his book is not meant to be an “all-inclusive history of funeral services in America.” Rather, he attempts to give the reader a clear and concise picture of how the modern American funeral industry came to be. Starting with the Pilgrim’s emigration to the New World in 1620, he explores the history of death practices to answer sociological questions such as: why do we embalm? When did cremation begin? What is a green cemetery? And so on.

            As is often the case, monetary gain as well as curiosity was the motive for the first colonist’s opening of graves in the new land they discovered. Quoting Roger and Walter Echo-Hawks’ text Battlefield and Burial Grounds: The Indian Struggle to Protect Ancestral Graves in the United States (Minneapolis: Lerner, 1994), James’ opening sentence in his first chapter reads: “We brought sundry of the prettiest things away with us and covered up the corpse again.” These words, supposedly spoken by a scout from the Mayflower shortly after it arrives at Plymouth, elucidate the first recorded instance of grave robbing by Europeans in the New World.

            Thus James begins a most fascinating account of the history of funeral rites in America. While the customs surrounding the death of a loved on vary from place to place, even home to home, James’ thesis is that “what stands true for all cultures at all times is that death is meaningful.”

            The number of laws developed to protect and regulate the dead as well as the amount of money spent on funerals proves this thesis, according to James. He writes, “While customs differ, it is widely agreed upon that a failure to treat the dead with respect and a failure to memorialize their life, well lived or not, is inherently wrong.”

            James then gives us a quick snapshot of the modern American “traditional funeral.”

“[It] consists of a funeral director going to the deceased’s place of death, placing their body on a cot and bringing them back to the funeral home. Upon arrival back to the funeral home, the body is embalmed ─ which sanitizes, preserves and restores the body ─ then the body is dressed in whatever clothes the family chooses, it is casketed in whatever casket the family picks out, the body is laid out, viewed, driven to a church or rolled into the funeral home chapel for a funeral ─ typically conducted by a minister ─ driven in a hearse to the cemetery, carried by pall bearers to the grave, committed to the grave by spoken words and prayer, enclosed in a vault and buried eighteen inches underground.”

            Contrast this sterile procedure with that of the Pawnee Indians, a nation of about 2,500 individuals who resided in what is now the state of Oklahoma. They had a form of government called the council elected by the people, carried out diplomatic relations with England, France and America, never fought against the United States, even allying themselves with the U.S. against other Indian tribes. In return, they were moved from their land by white settlers, beat up by other Indian groups, and were completely unprotected and unsupported by the U.S. government. (James, pp. 9-10)

“The body was painted red by priests and was clothed to enter the spirit land. Red paint, for many Indians, is symbolic of life. The body was given gifts to be enjoyed in the afterlife. They had laws to protect the grave, demanding that it not be disturbed. It was a common belief that a disturbed grave could evoke the spirits and the living could be harmed. The body was wrapped in a coat of that all important animal, the buffalo (Echo Hawk, p. 48).”

            Other fascinating facts from James’ valuable work include the “LifeGem,” an innovation in the cremation process whereby the carbon is collected from the ashes left by cremation, sealed and pressurized into a .25 to 1.3 carat diamond ranging in price from $3,000 – $10,000. The most recent trend in the funeral industry is the idea of direct or natural burial in “green cemeteries.” To qualify as “natural burial” in a “green cemetery,” one must prepare the body for burial…

“without chemical preservatives and [it] is buried in a simple shroud or biodegradable casket that might be made from locally harvested wood, wicker or even recycled paper, perhaps even decorated with good-bye messages from friends.”

A natural burial ground often uses grave markers that don’t intrude on the landscape. These natural markers can include shrubs and trees, an engraved flat stone native to the area or centralized memorial structure set within the emerging forest that provides places for visitors to sit. As in all cemeteries, there are careful records kept of the exact location of each internment, often using modern survey techniques such as GIS (geographic information system).

 

Planting native trees, shrubs and flowers on or near the grave establishes a living memorial and helps from a protected wildlife preserve. A completed natural burial preserve is a green place with trees, grasses, and wildflowers, which in turn bring birds and other wildlife to the area.” (The Centre for Natural Burial, http://naturalburial.coop/about-natural-burial/)

 

            I don’t want to give away any more of the bounty of information, James has compiles in his thesis, though I would like to wrap up this review with a few comments about the work itself. James’ writing is not the dry, complicated and obfuscating text one would expect with academic writing. Instead, he writes in an accessible style meant for the average reader to comprehend without seeming to “dumb it down” or patronize the reader’s intelligence. Nor does he lean to a flowery style meant to bring attention to his writing capabilities (though they are more than adequate to the task). He lets the facts speak for themselves, and I found myself drawn along from one fascinating topic to another.

            The only criticism of his work I have is this: I would have preferred an index so that when I needed to look up information, I could have done so easily. I hope that James will consider publishing a second edition with an index and submit his work to a publishing house that can give it the marketing it deserves.

           

   

POP QUIZ

A Contest of Famous

 

Quotes and

 

The Celebrities who

 

Said Them

 

THE RULES

1. Match the quotations in the left column with the correct attribution in the right column.

2. E-mail me at my Myspace page (http://www.myspace.com/liberazoo) Or at davirand@hotmail.com with a list of numbers and letters. For example: 1) S; 2) B; 3) C

3. Each correct match is worth 1 point. For extra credit (worth 1 additional point), type the words EXTRA CREDIT at the end of your e-mail with the number and letter of the one quotation/attribution which the famous person admits s/he never said but it is popularly believed that s/he really said it.

3. The entry with the most points wins a $25 money order.

4. If more than one entry has the same number of winning points, the winner will be determined through a random drawing by an independent judge (other than myself).

5. In your e-mail, include your name and address so that I can make out the money order and send it to the winner.

6. Entries must be received by midnight on February 15th, 2008. Winner will be declared by e-mail in my blog on myspace and my blog at http://davrand.wordpress.com

 

THE CONTEST

 

(1) “I’ve got ‘Merry Christmas’ tattooed on my left thigh and ‘Happy New Year’ tattooed on my right thigh. Why don’t you come up and visit me between the holidays?”	A. Jerry Seinfeld, American Comedian
(2) “We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.”	B. George W. Bush, American President
(3) “Man’s role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.”	C. Leonardo Da Vinci, Italian Inventor and Artist (1452-1519)
(4) “Every part of an element separated from its mass desires to return to it by the shortest way.”	D. Jean Anouilh, (1910-1987), French Playwright
(5) “Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.”	E. Richard Sheridan (1751-1816), Irish Playwright
(6) “What? Me, worry?”	F. Mae West, American Actress (1893 – 1980)
(7) “Smoking kills, and if you’re killed, it ruins your quality of life.”	G. Dorothy Parker, U.S. Author, Humorist, Poet, & Wit (1893 – 1967)
(8) “I have very strong opinions. Sometimes I even disagree with them.”	H. Brooke Shields, American Actress
(9) “God helps those who help themselves.”	I. Henry Louis Mencken, American Humorist, Journalist, and Critic (1880-1956)
(10) “For men will be lovers of the self…ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”	J. Alfred E. Neuman (Mascot of Mad Magazine)
(11) “I would prefer not to.”	K. Paul (in a letter to Timothy, paraphrase of King James version of the Bible, Tim. 3:2,7)
(12) “I like reality. It tastes like bread.”	L. Moliere (1622-1673), French Playwright
(13) “There’s a sucker born every minute.”	M. Phineas Barnum (1812-1846), U.S. Showman
(14) “A lover tries to stand in well with the pet dog of the house.”	N. Benjamin Franklin, American Statesman and Inventor (1706 – 1790)
(15) “I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.”	O. Bartleby, the Scrivener (a character of Herman Melville’s, American Author, 1819-1891)
(16) “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”	P. Thomas Alva Edison, U.S Inventor (1847-1931)
(17) “Vice is its own reward.”	Q. Lewis Carroll, English Logician, Mathematician, Photographer, and Novelist (1832 – 1898)
(18) “The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.”	R. Quentin Crisp, English Author (1908 – 1999)
(19) “Church: A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to people who will never get there.”	S. Margaret Mead (1901-1978), U.S. Anthropologist
(20) “If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”	T. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish Playwright, Author.

Arguing with the Almighty

“I read the book of Job last night – I don’t think God comes well out of it.”

– Virginia Woolf, in a letter to a friend

“Why is it that when we talk to God we’re said to be praying, but when God talks to us we’re schizophrenic?”

– Lily Tomlin, American humorist

On Sunday, July 1, 2007, I had the radio on at work and heard a broadcast interview with a Cuban voodoo priest. In Cuba, he said, voodoo priests pick one spirit and stick with it – in Haiti you can get to know many.

When visiting a Pentecostal church, he was told that the Holy Spirit was present. He replied to the effect that that was a vague explanation and he needed to know the spirit’s name. He told the Pentecostal people that he personally knew of 147 spirits and needed to know which one was the “Holy Spirit” so he would know how to behave toward it.

Where fundamentalist, literalist versions of Western culture’s religion are morally absolute, this Cuban priest expressed a far more diverse view of reality, and ultimately one that was more flexible. By morally absolute, I mean that if you commit a sin and do not repent, you will be punished. You will go to Hell, you will not pass Go, you will not collect two hundred dollars.

In Haitian voodoo, according to this priest, if you have an abortion, for example, this is not good. However, he said, “sometimes people have to do what they have to do.” Later, you are allowed to argue with the gods, and it is a possibility that they will understand the conditions that led to your decision and act.

On Judgment Day, here in the Western world, are we going to passively sit in the defendant’s chair while God or some celestial being weighs out the measure of our lives and pronounce the final verdict? Or do we, too, get the chance to ask for clemency, beg for mercy, resolutely remain defiant, or say a few final words? Are there mitigating circumstances in your Heaven?

In my personal experience in various Christian churches, particularly the literalist or fundamental ones, God is almighty: He sets the laws of the universe in motion and we either obey or are punished by going to Hell – no ifs, ands, or buts.

Contemporary Christianity, particularly Tele-Christianity, from the likes of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker to present day preachers such as Joel Osteen, presents a God that is primarily a material provider. You may pray to this God for solutions to your everyday problems and material needs – the sort of God one would expect of middle class, prosperous Americans. Hell and Judgment are downplayed if mentioned at all. These are uncomfortable topics for a soft, contemporary audience (oops, I mean, congregation. I keep forgetting that church is not an excellent example of dramatic theater. In one church the pastor explained to me that the people in the pews were “congregants,” and that God is the “audience.”)

If we go back far enough in time (or far enough away in space) when life was tough and serious and the questions of justice, morality, and punishment were real and immediate, we will find serious theology taking place regarding the question of mitigating circumstances and forgiveness on the day of judgment.

In the Old Testament, there are two times a mortal man argues or at least bargains with God. The first is in Genesis 18:23-25, when Abraham bargains with God over the lives of the citizens of Sodom and Gemorrah. If you recall, God tells Abraham that He plans to destroy the two wickedest cities in the ancient world, perhaps because he has relatives there, his cousin Lot and his family. Abraham responds:

“Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? What if there should be fifty innocent within the city; will You then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent fifty who are in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that the innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”

On page 56 of God: A Biography, author Jack Miles writes, “Abraham bargains the Lord down from fifty to forty-five to forty to thirty to twenty to ten. ‘To one?’ the reader hears in his mind, and so surely, does the Lord. ‘To none?’ ”
As we already know, Abraham does not find even one because when the Lord (in the form of two men) and Abraham come to visit Lot, the people of Sodom to the last man surround Lot’s house and demand to rape them.
Incidentally, Miles concludes that the sin of Sodom is not one of sexual morality – neither homosexuality nor rape – the sin of Sodom is of power.

Miles writes “the ‘men’ whom the Sodomites want to ‘know’ are God. The virginal daughters when Lot offers them instead are human. Human sexual autonomy, always indirectly an affront to God’s control over life, here become a direct affront; in fact, a literal sexual attack.”

It is interesting to note that apologists (not in the sense of being sorry as in “apology,” but meaning “one who speaks or writes in defense of something”) for homosexuality in the bible conclude that the sin of Sodom is one of hospitality. The people of Sodom are not being “nice” to their guests. Miles, however, places the sin squarely as one of attempting to usurp God’s power.

Yes, Abraham argues a case concerning divine justice before God, with the people of Sodom as defendants, Abraham as their advocate (or lawyer) and God as both prosecutor and judge. However, God proves to be correct, Sodom is destroyed, and the first case of humanity v. the Lord of Israel comes out God – 1, Sodom – 0.

When the Lord tells Jonah to preach to the recalcitrant people of Nineveh, Jonah does not want to; he resists. Instead of preparing an argument, a list of good reasons, why Jonah himself is a poor choice for the task, Jonah simply runs away. Jonah resists, but does not argue.

When the Lord tells Moses to lead His people the Israelites out of captivity to the promised land, Moses is afraid. First he fears that the people won’t listen to him or believe what he says. God allays this fear by giving Moses a magic stick that can turn into a snake among other powers. This power to perform miracles will convince the people, first the Israelites then later the Egyptian magicians, that Moses does indeed speak for God. Then Moses is afriad that he lacks the ability for public speaking. Moses’ second attempt to weasel out of God’s demand makes God angry. He then promises Moses that his brother Aaron will do any sermonizing that Moses doesn’t feel up to. Finally, Moses agrees (or rather, runs out of excuses) and takes his wife and children to Egypt. Never does Moses propose a rational argument contrary to God’s will. He assumes that God is Almighty and therefore always right and only half-heartedly tries to escape the job. Unlike Jonah, who has the intestinal fortitude to run away, Moses can only offer the excuses of his own weakness (“I’m too sick to come to work today”) and gives in almost immediately.

Even St. Paul, in his earlier incarnation as Saul, does not argue with God in the form of His Son, Jesus Christ. Saul does not even admit that Jesus is the Christ. To argue with an authority one must first grant that authority power. Rather, Saul believes he is doing God’s work when he persecutes the Christians – he is defending the one true faith. Only after his conversion experience on the road to Damascus does Saul become Paul and accept Jesus as Lord, too. Nowhere does he ever argue with either one.

“There lived in the land of Uz a blameless and upright life named Job, who feared God and set his face against wrongdoing.” (Job 1:1)

Here begins the story of Job, the only other person aside from Jesus who apparently committed no sin. And it is vital to what follows that he be blameless. God is holding court and the Satan where he has been. It might seem odd that an all-knowing being would ask someone something He already knows, but for the sake of the story there has to be some dialog, and God being a major character has to have some lines, even if they don’t make theological sense.

Note that He doesn’t ask for Satan, but the Satan. At this point in history the word Satan is not a name, but a title, and according to William Safire in his book The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today’s Politics, it has its linguistic roots in “roaming” and “accusing.” So the Satan is rather like a Special Prosecutor or Inspector General, not at all like the Devil later in the Bible.

God asks the Satan: “Have you considered my servant Job? He then goes on to outline Job’s good qualities, to which the Satan replies: “Has not Job good reason to be God-fearing?” This implies that Job is being good, not for the sake of being good, but for the reward of a good life at God’s hands. In fact, we are told at the beginning of the story that Job is the “greatest man in all the East.” (Job 1:3)

God takes up the Satan’s challenge and makes a bet with the Accuser: “Very well, then,” says God, “everything he has in your hands, but on the man himself lay not a finger.” (Job 1:12). Now the Satan has permission from God to wreck a hell of a lot of destruction on Job’s household. Safire describes this thusly: “All of Job’s ten children are killed; his vast herds of sheep, asses, and camels are stolen or slaughtered; his home is destroyed by a great wind; but ‘throughout all his Job did not sin; he did not charge God with unreason.’ ” (Job 1:22) (Safire, pg. 5).

When this doesn’t work, the Satan complains that Job doesn’t break because he doesn’t personally suffer, only loses his property. God then gives him the okay to mess with his body as long as he doesn’t kill him. The Satan then gives Job sores all over his body. Job’s wife has had enough. She, too, has lost her children, home and wealth. “Curse God and die!” she tells Job, but Job says nothing sinful.

Then, three of his friends come to commiserate with him. Safire calls them “three eminent Eastern chieftans,” [a foreshadowing of the future “three wise men from the East” in Matthew?] and we can safely assume they are his colleagues and not his close confidantes or even neighbors. There really isn’t anyone equal to Job nearby. They see how bad his suffering is and remain silent, perhaps speechless with wonder.

Job sees them and says, “Damn the day I was born!” (Job 3:3) This, while not directly cursing God, is very close to it, and the three friends present arguments to Job concerning the reason for his suffering.

First, Eliphaz the Temanite: Can an innocent man be punished for no reason? Of course not. Somehow, somewhere, Job must have sinned and forgotten about it. Eliphaz goes on to say that suffering is good for the soul. “Happy is the man whom God rebukes!” (Job 5:17).

This argument doesn’t hold water with Job who demands that someone show him where he went wrong. He accuses God of “attacking him with no reason” (Safire, pg. 8) and “turns on Eliphaz as disloyal: ‘Devotion is due from his friends to one who despairs and loses faith in the Almighty.’ ” (Job 6:14).

Bildad the Shuhite’s argument claims that one of Job’s sons committed the sin and thus Job is held responsible and suffers the punishment, yet he can remain blameless. Job responds with “Indeed this I know for truth, that no man can win his case against God.” Job here introduces the idea of suing God, but realizes immediately that he could not possibly win. “If the appeal is to force, see how strong He is; if to justice, who can compel Him to give me a hearing?” (Job 9:19)

Finally, Zophar the Naamathite, gets a turn. He doesn’t offer any excuse like Eliphaz’s “all have sinned,” or Bildad’s “your sons got you into this mess,” but turns on Job directly, claiming that Job has a secret sin that Job must be hiding to himself. As if this were not enough, Zophar adds insult to injury with the statement that Job has somehow gotten off lightly. He says, “Know then that God exacts from you less than you deserve.” (Job 11:6)

Job gets really mad now and says to all three: “I wish you would keep strictly silent. That would be wisdom for you.” (Job 13:5) Here comes, according to Safire, the most irreverant moment in scripture. Job takes an oath, essentially an ultimatum or challenge to God Almighty. “Let me but call a witness in my defense! Let the Almighty state His case against me! If my accuse had written out his indictment, I would not keep silent and remain indoors. No! I would flaunt it on my shoulder and wear it like a crown on my head; I would plead the whole record of my life and present that in court as my defense.” (Safire, pp. 13-14)

When last we left Job, he was berating his so-called friends for coming up with lousy excuses for his suffering and challenging God to explain Himself, in court, if necessary. Before God makes an appearance, there is one last mortal discourse, Elihu the Buzite. According to Safire, he is the only speaker with a Jewish name and therefore may be written in by a later hand than the original author of Job. Elihu’s argument is that suffering may not only be the consequences of sin; instead, it may a form of discipline for the virtuous. In one sentence, Elihu finds God and Job both without blame.

Unfortunately, Job is not satisfied with this argument either, for it leaves God’s justice unaffected by the actions of human beings. In Elihu’s explanation, God is under no obligation to answer Job’s demand for a hearing.
Here enters God, and Safire says it best: “The Lord, apparently fed up with unending complaints about his misfeasance in office…comes roaring out of a whirlwind to jolt Job with the most intimidating series of sarcastic questions ever posed, beginning with ‘Who is this that darkeneth knowledge by words without counsel?’ ” (Job 38:2) (Safire, p. 15)

God goes on to blast Job with many examples of His power and magnificence, each showing the God is God and Job is not. This is precisely what Job expected when he asked for an intermediary (an advocate or a lawyer) to stand between him and the Deity. God’s purpose seems to be to scare Job into submission, and this seems to work. Job’s reply is no reply at all. “What reply can I give Thee, I who carry no weight? I put my finger to my lips.” (Job 40:4)

Job, by remaining silent, does not exactly back down. He admits no wrongdoing in challenging the Lord, he does not apologize for questioning Him. God, however, is not fooled and rages on in a second, scarier speech. “Dare you deny that I am just or put Me in the wrong that you may be right?” (Job 40:8)

Finally, Job caves in. He says to God that “I have spoken of great things which I have not understood, things too wonderful for me to know.” (Job 42:3) Safire wants to know what made Job stop questioning and give up his rebellion. So do we. But there is no clear answer in the text. The reason given that Job submits is the power of a personal revelation: “Now I see Thee with my own eyes.” (Job 42:5) But there is no explanation of what that personal revelation is.

God isn’t finished, however. He turns to the three friends and berates them. The fourth person, Elihu is not mentioned here, suggesting again that his speech was added later. Why was God angry? “Because you have not spoken as you ought about Me, as my servant Job has done.” (Job 42:7) After having rebuked Job for speaking in ignorance, God turns about and praises Job for telling the truth, at least part of the time. Is God claiming that the old religious explanations for suffering are untrue?

The ending is a happy one. God restores Job’s fortunes many-fold. He gets six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, fourteen sons, etc. For the three dead daughters, he gets three of the most beautiful women in the land. Why are the daughters not doubled as well? Safire explains that this would not be a blessing, but the author of Job shows “a curious modernity” (Safire, p. 18) by giving the women shares of Job’s inheritance. “Thereafter Job lived another hundred and forty years, he saw his sons and grandsons to four generations, and died at a very great age.” (Job 42:16)
W can we conclude? God wins again, as God always will. However, while Job did not come out of this with any kind of explanation for his suffering, he was well rewarded. Perhaps there are cases where bringing God to task for His actions has merit, but this is not an action to take lightly, unless you don’t mind being covered with boils for your trouble.

Safire goes on to point out a few of the lessons that believers take from the book of Job. Here is a partial list:

“1. Don’t ask God for any favors.

2. God is not a just God or an unjust God; God is just God.

3. God’s ways are not Man’s ways.

4. Don’t blame the victim. Suffering is no evidence of sin.”

Safire explains in his section on lesson number two that by the time of the author of Job in history, the idea of retributive justice was probably breaking down. “Retributive” comes from the same word as “retribution” and “tribute,” meaning a payment and to “re-tribute” means to pay back. Somewhere between the fourth and sixth centuries before Christ, there was no promise of payback in the afterlife as yet. That was to come with the New Testament. So, what does the author do to restore religious belief in a just God? Safire writes: “He rerooted religion in real life by taking God entirely out of moral law enforcement.” (Safire, p. 65)

Safire continues: “In [the author of Job’s] revision of the world, God could make commandments available to humanity that would help him bring the order of goodness to the anarchy of the jungle. However, his human creations could not impose that same order on God, or demand that God act as a moral policeman or Court of Claims. In Robert Frost’s The Masque of Reason, the modern poet has a much relieved God tell Job: “You realize by now the part you played/ To stultify the Deuteronomist/ And change the nature of religious thought./ My thanks to you for releasing me/ From moral bondage to the human race.” (Safire p. 65-66)

What does the author of Job propose in place of the hand of the Father in human affairs? Faith and prayer have a value in and of themselves. Safire says that the truly religious person in Joban theology not only worships God with no reward in mind but is uplifted by that unselfish love.

We are going to stop here with the theological arguments, but Safire goes on to use Job to make political arguments (Safire is after all a political writer; he was a speech writer for the Nixon administration). “The Book of Job endorses the vassal’s right to make demands on his lord. That not only inspired ecclesiastical, artistic, and political rebels to resist totalitarianism, but fanned controversies about the flow of fidelity up and down. When we pledge allegiance, we demand allegiance.” (Safire, p. 89).

The final question posed by Job’s and, let us not forget Abraham’s, attempt at changing God’s mind is this: What is to be gained by moving from total submission to divine authority to a more mature tension between God’s authority and human allegiance?

In the movie, Defending Your Life by Albert Brooks, the main character goes to court to prove his worth. If he wins, he is allowed to “move on.” (To where the movie doesn’t say.) If he loses, he returns to another life on earth to try again. What is the criteria? Not intelligence, not beauty, not even goodness of heart. It is courage. Shown again and again to have succumbed to fear, Albert’s character at last is sent back to earth. As his bus is passing the bus containing Meryl Streep’s character (she was shown to be courageous when she rescued her children from a burning building in just one example), he jumps off his bus to join her. For some reason this is an extremely dangerous thing to do, and, as the judges of the court are still watching his actions, they conclude that he has the courage to go on to whatever stage of existence is next.

In one sense, the author of Job is proposing that humanity grow up and become the master of its own destiny, not to run to God with every complaint, and not to use God as an excuse for one’s present conditions. This is the answer to the question: what is to be gained? We (every individual human) have the power to make change in our own life, a power God has invested in us, and a power we must use if we are to become more than children in God’s eyes.

Bibliography

The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today’s Politics by William Safire, Random House, New York, c. 1992.

God: A Biography by Jack Miles, Vintage Books, New York, c. 1995.

Another memo intercepted from the Office of Big Rocks

December 30, 2007
11:47 p.m. EST

The Interdeparmental Dept. of Monitoring Departments
Decentralized Unintelligence Agency
1457 W. Unknown St.
Washington, DC 20061
Dear Secret Cabal:

It has come to my attention (thanks to my many spies), that a question I had asked in a recent blog has been answered. Here’s the excerpt from Blog 1 – “Memorandum from the Department of Big Rocks”:

First, in the fourth paragraph, Chang writes that the scientists who are tracking said asteroid “initially put the odds of impact at 1 in 350 but increased the chances this week.” What?! Did they get more information that led them to draw a different conclusion? Or was this a case of circumstances changing (like the trajectory of the asteroid) so that the chances of a hit itself increased? In other words, what changed: the objective situation or the scientists’ perception of the objective situation?

You can all rest easy now. Ms. Chang wrote another article for Yahoo! News updating the condition of the asteroid nearing Mars which can be found at
[http://www.bnd.com/living/health/story/213959.html].

In this new article, Chang writes:

“The odds were increased to 1-in-25 this week after a Ph.D. student pored through the archives and plotted the asteroid’s motions before its official discovery. The new information allowed scientists to improve their calculations of the asteroid’s orbit and flight path.”

…thus answering the question of how the chances of the asteroid hitting Mars increased. Yes, they got more information. From a lowly student, no less.

However, the most interesting parts of the article were the quotes given by Don Yeomans:

“I think it’ll be cool,” said Don Yeomans, who heads the Near-Earth Object Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Usually when an asteroid is headed toward Earth, I’m not rooting for an impact.”

Thank you, Don. I was worried that a bunch of lab coat-wearing geeks at the Near Earth Object Program were standing around the water cooler, shaking their fists at the sky and cheering for a collision with a major metropolitan population center.

Everyone can now officially chill out, return to your homes, and guzzle the beverage of your choice. Except, of course, the conspiracy theorists and believers in the apocalypse. The end of the world is what we’re all hoping for, isn’t it?

Sincerely,

David “Duchovny” R. Farthing

P.S. Please forgive Don, any Martians who may be monitoring Earth News wire services. He didn’t really mean it.

Memorandum from the Department of Big Rocks

December 22, 2007
3:07 p.m. EST
NASA, Dept. of Big Rocks
Coco Beach, FL 32931

Dear Wayfaring Strangers:

I couldn’t resist throwing in this little note to you all regarding a news item I saw in Yahoo! News:

Asteroid May Hit Mars in Next Month

by Alicia Chang, AP Science Writer

(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071221/ap_on_sc/mars_asteroid;_ylt=AnDeaMWgPpCzLXhBFJ7DiK4PLBIF)

Here’s an excerpt:

Mars could be in for an asteroid hit. A newly discovered hunk of space rock has a 1 in 75 chance of slamming into the Red Planet on Jan. 30, scientists said Thursday. “These odds are extremely unusual. We frequently work with really long odds when we track … threatening asteroids,” said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Please click on the above link to read the entire article. I’m only going to bring up a couple of points of interest to me (and thus, I hope to you).

First, in the fourth paragraph, Chang writes that the scientists who are tracking said asteroid “initially put the odds of impact at 1 in 350 but increased the chances this week.” What?! Did they get more information that led them to draw a different conclusion? Or was this a case of circumstances changing (like the trajectory of the asteroid) so that the chances of a hit itself increased? In other words, what changed: the objective situation or the scientists’ perception of the objective situation?

Now, I am the first to recognize that philosophical questions like this are well outside the scope of a news article. Chang did an excellent job of reporting the science in terms we laypersons can easily understand. But I do have to wonder… what’s really going on in those NASA labs? Those white-coated men and women of science are people like you and me: that is to say, with prejudices, loves and dislikes, motives, and personal challenges. Exactly how do these people handle the intrusion of their personal lives into their work? This isn’t exactly a major worry of mine at present, but suppose an asteroid really was coming awfully close to Earth. I would hope that the folk interpreting the data were very, very sober that day, wouldn’t you?

I am in no way casting aspersions upon the fine academics and engineers at NASA. This question is purely hypothetical and intended only to get my readers to question their own assumptions about how the business of science is actually done here in really, real reality. Would you be willing, for instance, to be the first test subject to use an anti-gravity vehicle (flying car)? How about the first volunteer to try out a jet propelled backpack? Would you like to be the first person to use a transporter a la Star Trek?

The second interesting question I have about Chang’s article stems from her third paragraph:

“ The asteroid…is similar in size to an object that hit remote central Siberia in 1908, unleashing energy equivalent to a 15-megaton nuclear bomb and wiping out 60 million trees.”

I’m going to gloss over the obvious questions like: 1) where did she get the figures of “60 million” and “15-megaton,” and 2) is it pronounced “new-clear” or “nyoo-clear,” and move right on to a deeper question having to do with the public’s perception of science journalism.

Did you notice that the above quote assumes that there was indeed an asteroid that hit Siberia in 1908? That something exploded in the air above Tunguska on June 30, 1908 at around 7 a.m. is supported by many eyewitnesses’ testimonies. For a collection of these eyewitness accounts with some amazing artist’s renderings of the event check out the site entitled “1908 Siberia Explosion: Reconstructing an Asteroid Impact from Eyewitness Accounts” by William K. Hartmann of the Planetary Science Institute based in Tuscon, Arizona.

[http://www.psi.edu/projects/siberia/siberia.html]

Hartmann writes about the reindeer herders who were camped roughly 30 kilometers (or approximately18.64 miles):

“One older man at about this distance was reportedly blown about forty feet into a tree, causing a compound fracture of his arm, and he soon died. Hundreds of the herders’ reindeer, in the general area around ground zero, were killed. Many campsites and storage huts scattered in the area were destroyed.”

You can also find out more about the Institute itself at its website:

[http://www.psi.edu/]

If you click on “About the Institute” on the left hand column of the home page you’ll find the following excerpt describing their collective mission:

“The Planetary Science Institute is a nonprofit science research institute focusing on the exploration of the solar system. Our scientists are distributed in 13 states, the United Kingdom, Italy, Russia, Switzerland and Japan. We are headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, where PSI was founded in 1972. We are involved in numerous NASA missions, the study of Mars, asteroids, comets, interplanetary dust, impact physics, the origin of the solar system, planet formation about other stars, dynamics, impact physics, and the rise of life.”

Quite an impressive institutional resume, I’d say. These are the people who have done the scientific detective work to back up their hypotheses with facts. As a writer and layperson (meaning I have just enough knowledge about science to be dangerous), I would consider information from PSI to be reliable and would have confidence in using these scientists as a source in writing an article about, say, the odds of an asteroid hitting the Earth.

While the theory of an asteroid explosion (more accurately called a “meteroid airburst”) for the Tunguska event is now widely accepted, the material composition of the body which exploded in mid-air remains controversial. The Wikipedia entry entitled “Tunguska event” relates this historical contoversy in section 3.3 entitled “Asteroid or comet?”

“In 1930, the British astronomer F.J. Whipple suggested that the Tunguska body was a small comet. A cometary meteorite, being composed primarily of ice and dust, could have been completely vaporized by the impact with the Earth’s atmosphere, leaving no obvious traces. The comet hypothesis was further supported by the glowing skies (or “skyglows” or “bright nights”) observed across Europe for several evenings after the impact, possibly explained by dust and ice that had been dispersed from the comet’s tail across the upper atmosphere. The cometary hypothesis gained a general acceptance amongst Soviet Tunguska investigators by the 1960s.”

By the end of the twentieth century, however, further research gave more credence to the asteroid theory rather than the comet. The author[s] of the Wikipedia entry conclude section 3.3 with the following paragraph:

“During the 1990s, Italian researchers extracted resin from the core of the trees in the area of impact to examine trapped particles that were present during the 1908 event. They found high levels of material commonly found in rocky asteroids and rarely found in comets.”

The note immediately following this paragraph reads “citation needed,” which means that an editor for Wikipedia felt that the statement was (to quote the Wikipedia help file) “dubious or sufficiently controversial as to demand ‘citation.’”

For the purposes of this weblog, I don’t have to rely on a “dubious” lack of citation. Hartmann cites other research that supports a “non-comet” conclusion:

“In 1993 researchers Chris Chyba, Paul Thomas, and Kevin Zahnle studied the Siberian explosion and concluded it was… a stone meteorite that exploded in the atmosphere. This conclusion was supported when Russian researchers found tiny stoney particles embedded in the trees at the collision site, matching the composition of common stone meteorites.”

And this brings us back to the original question I had regarding AP science writer Alicia Chang’s article about the possible asteroid striking Mars. In order to give her readers an idea of the size of asteroid 2007 WD5 which was discovered in November, she compares it to the “object that hit remote central Siberia in 1908.”

Chang’s article is clear, concise and, considering the time and column-length constraints familiar to every journalist, accurate to a fault. I am not criticizing Chang’s writing at all. I simply want to point out that popular science writing is quite different from technical writing, for example; and the writing that eventually makes its way into Discover magazine or Scientific American is different in both process and result from the articles that eventually get published in The New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of Glacial Geology and Geomorphology.

Writers whose job it is to pare down highly technical information from peer-reviewed science or medical periodicals into a form that a moderately sophisticated layperson can understand know exactly what goes into (and gets left out of) the average science column inch. The average reader of Yahoo! News, on the other hand, may not be aware of this literary alchemy and thus take for fact that an asteroid did indeed hit Tunguska that fateful summer in 1908. It simply isn’t possible for someone on a tight deadline to cite every source or check every fact with enough credible sources to guarantee some absolute standard of truth.

And this is the reason that Chang’s article speculating that an asteroid might hit Mars next month really got my attention. That is, after I got over the the giddy feeling from reading the headline: a sensation similar to the one when your next door neighbor’s house gets struck by the tornado and yours is spared, only in this case on a cosmic scale. After the excitement died down in my cynical soul, I asked myself the question I often ask after reading an article about science in a popular magazine: oh, yeah? Who says?

Sincerely,

David R. Farthing

P.S. Many thanks to the authors of the following websites where I did

research for this article:

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

http://www.nasa.gov

United States Postal Service Zip Code Lookup

http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/welcome.jsp

I Dream of Jeannie Online

http://www.idreamofjeannie.com/