I have been opining for a few weeks now in the confines of Facebook. This means only 156 of my self-defined nearest and dearest (who else, then, could one call a “friend;” Facebook, as a kind of postmodern egalitarianism allows no other designation) get to see these pearls.

I mean them to be entertaining at best, I suppose, and thought-provoking if they are to satisfy even my very few deepest desires. Instead I get a concatenation of bad readings, and, hence, I am taken to task for having said what someone else read—and not for what I actually wrote.

But this is not yet another lament merely about the degradation of good writing, and the even more rapid deterioration of comprehension attributable to poor attention and atrophied reading skills. I won’t completely insult my readers who simply don’t get it by suggesting, as well, that perhaps they have lost a step or two in the department of being able to think while doing something else, like reading. Contemplation is becoming a lost human capability.

Whatever the causes, I am sure that at least one of them is the general deterioration of the communication skills of those who, increasingly, are assuming the reins of trying to shape public opinion and individual judgment and perceptions. Writers and opinion makers (not to mention the marvelous talking machines who appear in various live action media, both in real time and by delayed transmission, whether over the airwaves through television channels, or through the larger pipe of the Internet on the multitudinous and multiplying sites that offer streaming versions of video and film, and even broader distribution of screeds prepared in various print and online media, and then re-transmitted or cross-linked or distributed by whatever means via the vast inner web of social networks) have become an industry, and words—more or less all they’ve got besides hacked phone conversations and doctored and staged videos—are the same sort of commodity as U.S. cattle and pork, bloated on the antibiotics and hormones that render them harmless, even as they are deployed and distributed for the significant task of providing sustenance, not of our physical bodies, but the body politic. Unfortunately, like the run of most American red meat, poultry, fresh water and ocean fish and crustaceans, words are the commodities of a monster industry that has long since forsaken quality, nutritional value, and wholesomeness, dare I say purity?, for pure volume, to feed the widening craw of the public, demanding more and more, like vast seas of krill and plankton devoured by the disappearing herds and pods of whales. We’ll never run short of words, I’m sure, but they will have long since lost their value as food (if this has not happened already) by the time we whales have ourselves become extinct even as we feed on them.

I recently encountered one such zealous young buck of a proselytizer, full of zeal and righteous indignation, and a raft-load of platitudes, stock phrases and what I used to teach my classes in Freshman Communication some 42 years ago was the propaganda tactic of “glittering generalities.”

Don’t look for substance in the prose of young Mr. Carl Gibson, 24, and “of Lexington, Kentucky, [and who] is a spokesman and organizer for US Uncut, a nonviolent, creative direct-action movement to stop budget cuts by getting corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.” I’m not picking on Mr. Gibson for any particularly good reason other than that he is the latest individual with a rant to make a point he fails to prove whose online excrescence was pointed out to me by “Reader Suppported News,” an organization constantly begging for money so they can send more and more such links to more and more such long-suffering sorts as myself who gave in to the weakness of donating at one time or another to what seemed like a worthy cause and a good idea at the time. It was mainly a way of paying for the privilege of having the touch put on me periodically (at shorter and shorter intervals) on the pretext that I wait breathlessly for the political ejaculations and expostulations of the likes of Mr. Gibson.

In all fairness to him, RSN also features the stringent, when not scolding, astringent, when not altogether sour, tendentious, when not totally condescending pronouncements of the failed candidate for governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and perpetual Washington outsider, though he did serve, exhibiting the same endearing qualities above elucidated, on the cabinet of President Clinton, for one term as Secretary of Labor, a great deal of which time he spent clarifying the myriad ways in which they (not him, but “they”) were getting it wrong. I will grant you, he knows how to make a career of it, first retiring his post to take on a university professorship at the esteemed Brandeis University and the decamping, when, no doubt, he saw there was little chance for political ascendancy to the gold-domed State House on Beacon Hill in Boston as chief executive officer of the commonwealth, to another university on the west coast. And Mr. Reich, of course, is far more polished, far more suave rhetorically speaking, and far more ready with numbers and data that seem to subscribe to the support and propagation of meaningful information. So, he’s usually a tad more convincing than the likes of Mr. Gibson. But for every Mr. Reich, there are legions of Mr. Gibsons, and his female counterparts, and they do as little justice to their cause in persuading the American public at large to the wisdom of progressive ideology and liberal political philosophy in general as the Republicans, however tainted by whatever the latest strain of virulence (in the present case a virus that apparently is found in tea), are effective in persuading the followers: acolytes and rabble alike, who avidly follow the liberal press and media. There is, in the end, enormous mutual reinforcement of increasingly antagonistic positions. And not the least of the problem is that, I have to admit, fools like me are wasting time and their breath pointing to the shifting rhetorical sands on which both bodies—with their opposing positions—stand; sands which erode with every passing gust of hot wind, the source of which shifts itself from right to left, from east to west, from north to south, and which seems to be inexhaustible.

In any event, I mean to present the smallest sliver of evidence, and counter evidence by way of observation and direct citation of commonly accessible sources of data and information, of the faults in the foundation of the protestations and exhortations of the Mr. Gibsons. If nothing else, this explains the frustrations and the inevitable shutting down, nearing the depths of despair, in which I find myself when viewing the world outside the confines of my cozy ken of familiarity, trust, and home comforts.

Here’s just one paragraph from his RSN essay, entitled, “Austerity, the Wrong Prescription,” which appeared today, 2011 August 9, on the RSN website [http://bit.ly/mSUR6j]. It’s the sixth paragraph into the piece, which opens with a bit of ham-handed, exploitative melodrama about the plight of some imagined patient whose doctor threatens to cut off the patient’s blood supply, meals, therapy and, if that’s not enough, pain medicine… but it only gets worse, and the metaphor gets stuck in one’s gorge, so the real threat is asphyxiation on one’s own vomit if your were entirely to swallow this prose (all of which appears beneeath a captioned photo of a mother and her daughter embracing next to all their household goods, having been evicted from their foreclosed home… no facts, no explanation, just sheer gut-wrenching pulling of your heart strings and any other organs that the thin fingers of Mr. Gibson—I assume they’re thin; I can’t imagine a young man with his agenda, or his subject: “Austerity” being a candidate for an anti-obesity clinic—can grasp and pull with all his incompetent might).

Republicans like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell continue to give our teachers, cops, firefighters and other public services the axe, all to protect these failed “trickle-down” policies that have blown holes in our budget since the Reagan years. Their adherence to such flawed policy ignores reality – the economy has tripled since 1973, but median income has actually gone down since then. Something is trickling down, but it certainly isn’t wealth.

Without saying I agree or disagree with what I assume is some point buried in there somewhere—fact is, I’m not sure what the point is, and I will say I think John Boehner is a bonehead and a politician (of which there is no greater insult at present to hurl in the direction of a public figure) and Mitch McConnell, about whom the worst I can say is, he’s a Republican Senator and, of course, a politician. As the old lady who never voted said, “why encourage them?” Mr. Gibson speaks of “reality,” but then does not even give a muzzy picture of that reality.

Here’s my rebuttal to but this one paragraph, early in the essay, and after which he lost me, so I don’t know what he had to say, if he ever did, in fact, get around to saying anything that I haven’t seen or heard or read already some time in the past 30 years:

Whatever the merits of what Gibson says escape me) because at the start lack of definition and the manipulation of numbers undermine any substantive point he wants to make. He says the “economy” has “tripled” since 1973. definition of economy, or the metric used. Yet, the median income has “gone down” in that time.
1973 (July): U.S. population was 211+ million. 2010 (April): 308+ million. In that same time the gross national product (GNP) rose from a little over $5.5 trillion to nearly $59.5 trillion. The economy didn’t increase 3-fold, but 10-fold. However, on a per capita basis, the increase per citizen was a factor of 730%. This means nothing unless we factor in inflation, which amounted in 37 years to 391+%. In constant dollars, the actual difference in the size of the economy per capita was just shy of 187%, not quite twice.
All else being equal, and not factoring in all other phenomena (e.g., an increase in purchasing power, irrespective of income fluctuations; many goods are far cheaper because we put almost all consumer product production off-shore), the average citizen should be seeing an economic benefit commensurate with a rise in the “size” of the economy of almost twice the benefit when Nixon was still President.
Is this a fair assessment? I don’t know. I do know this kind of thinking is muzzy and misleading. And hardly a cogent argument.

Until the right forsakes the childish, racist, and irrational obdurate stubbornness of the Tea Party, and begins to accept the reality of the need for not only cutting out what can be cut in government with minimal injury to the great preponderance of the American public, while accepting that this will still not leave us in a financially balanced condition, and until the left accepts that the President can not create jobs, or make stones bleed (never mind give forth money), and until both sides agree to sit down to hammer out a common understanding of and definition of “fairness” to all strata of what is, in fact, a stratified society—while avoiding incendiary language of class and privilege and power, we will stew in our own juices, braising and braising until not only all sinew and fat, but the meat and bones of our being all disintegrate into a noxious fluid that can no longer sustain us as a nation.

And we won’t be able to do any of that until everyone agrees to look truth in the face, and however ugly or gut-wrenching the facts may be, never mind the conclusions one must draw from those facts. And once we look truth in the face, and accept it as this thing called reality (and reality is not the fantasy drawn by Mr. Reich, or Mr. Gibson (as an avatar of a far greater number of inarticulate zealots), no more than by Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Kristol), then maybe we will be able to deal effectively with that reality.

Things are, of course, neither as bad nor as good as the last person you heard from made out. If they painted a picture of rosiness or gloom, mistrust it. It’s wrong. The rhetoric is bad, I guarantee it. And you must go back to the only things we have: the true meaning of words, and the irrefutable facts embedded in numbers that anyone can verify.

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An outdoor table at a café somewhere deep in the heart of Provence. Morning of market day.

Perhaps it's that I haven't been here with my full consciousness intact during the warmer seasons in some time. Six months ago, it was winter, and hardly anyone sat out of doors, even in full sun, with the thermometer hovering in the 50s in daylight. A year ago I was preoccupied with the health and well-being of a loved one, also here, on a valedictory trip, for whom I ended up still grieving six months ago. I was not disposed to take note, as is my usual wont, of the behavior of my fellow humans here in La France Profonde—winter or summer.

This summer, thank goodness for lack of a better to thank, such preoccupations have waned, if not been eclipsed. I am free once again to take note both of the good or bad going on around me.

One thing is certain, and it has more to do with mores and the prevailing statutory winds 3500 miles away in Cambridge, MA, the place I still tenuously call home. It is certain that, if for no other reason than that it is forbidden by law to smoke tobacco products virtually anywhere, I am breathing more freely when back home. The difference between breathing freely in an urban environment, including the out of doors, and otherwise is subtle, that is, until you are otherwise.

I had forgotten somehow that France, both in the urban milieu and in any communal aggregation, such as a town square in even the smallest hamlet, is otherwise for an American. You do not breathe freely. Or let me put it this way, the air is perpetually fragrant with the smell of cigarette tobacco smoldering. Usually it's no further away than your nearest neighbor.

Europeans cling to their habits, and no wonder. Taxed to the hilt—bitch all you want about the United States and the Tea Party nuts notwithstanding, it remains a fact that the marginal tax rate in the U.S. is a mere 27% on average, and topping out at 35% for high income individuals—the French worker pays a marginal tax of 40% of income, as much as 50% if you fall (or have been born or stumbled) into a "high income" category. On top of that they pay a 19.6% sales tax (they call it "value added tax;" which requires a sufficiently whimsical disposition of mind to accept having virtually every consumer article sold made more valuable by the privilege of having its price increased by nearly a fifth). The price of cigarettes and gas may be appalling to us Yanks, but in France, a liter of diesel fuel (the cheapest you can use; which explains the repugnant savor of diesel fumes pervading the air not polluted already by cigarette smoke) now costs about one euro, thirty cents (this computes to $7.14 a gallon. The other day, while waiting to purchase my copy of the local daily paper, I watched a woman write a check for 14 packs of Gauloises Filtre (that would be cigarettes made of two of the most aromatic yet paradoxically milder tobaccos in the world… Turkish and Syrian; it's still tobacco, however, and Gauloises produce the smell and smoke that constitute the ur-experience of sucking in second-hand byproducts): total cost 64 euros. That's a cost per pack of $6.63… not bad you might say, given that the cost of a pack in Massachusetts was recently pegged at $7.04 (by contrast it's $5.46 in "tax-free" New Hampshire; and it's $5.51 on average across the U.S.). However, remember the nominal marginal income tax rate in France, and the significantly lower average individual income per year. Tobacco is, in a more pronounced way, a legal drug here in La Belle France, with that many more financial reasons to need one for relief of one's troubles.

Hence in a small farming community, of the sort which any one of the villages surrounding mine constitutes, where there is a larger aggregate number of retirees, and the rest of the people are tradespeople, blue collar workers, farmers or farm workers, there is a much greater number of smokers. And they are still free from the encumbrance of no-smoking laws as long as they are sitting (standing, kneeling, squatting, hunched over or lying) outside. Go to any café and the air is redolent (if that's the word) with cigarette scent, but worse, with the smoke itself. If there is air, it is the unconscious air of a race that is used to, long since, living in close quarters to their fellow creatures, with the accompanying blatant disregard of that which many an American is so zealous to protect: personal space. So cigarettes dangle from fingers and lips in any number of angles and precarious states of balance kept unconsciously and insouciant by the smoker. I've watched smokers, at home and abroad, and what dwindling number of smokers I see in the U.S., who suck down their poison in public view, are far more avid and frequent puffers. The French, equally indolent by contrast in this habit as in so many other behaviors, puff far less often, and allow the smoke to circulate far more generously—I've always seconded the view that, despite the apprehensions of American tourists, the French are a warm and generous people at heart. At bottom, they clearly pay little heed to where the smoke they've paid dearly for drifts and swirls, eventually finding its way into the lungs of every nearby individual, citizen and visitor alike.

But the purpose of this late assortment of peevish observances on the specific, if not hoary, subject of smokers' abuse of others' rights, however slender is the sanction by law, is to observe one more thing.

Again, this is purely by observation and anecdotal personal data collection, but it seems in the 23 years I have been visiting and part-time inhabiting these climes, I have seen what I would call a wanton increase in a brand's market share among these people who are otherwise among the most chauvinistic I have ever viewed. It's not Gauloise, a brand the smoking of which was well-nigh patriotic and a duty during World War II (still the Big One for the French, despite their own misadventures in what they call Indo-China, and despite the misfortunes of an embarrassing set of protracted repressive exertions—of which the present ugliness in Libya, for all its ghastly excesses, is only a mere reminiscence—in France's last colonial hurrah: Algeria).

It's Marlboro, still flagship and pride of the fleet formerly known as Philip Morris, and now designated by the innocuous, meaningless, and virtually pseudonymous Altria Group. It means not very much, if anything at all, to the French who suck down the smoke of that cancer-plagued throwback, the Marlboro Man, and irrespective of gender or age (virtually; it's still difficult to purchase tobacco products in France if you look anywhere close to 16 years of age… though I've seen butts alight in the hands of children), who tap tap tap the filtered end to tamp down the tobacco, in a gesture that is only one of so many symphonic gestures that somehow romanticize an act that amounts, after all, to an act of excruciatingly slow self-immolation.

Full Disclosure: I used to smoke cigarettes, including Gauloises and even Marlboros, which were the brand I favored if only to assist in my last gasps, as I forcibly quit cold turkey at the age of 24. I will never, I am sure, forgive myself.

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In an article that appeared in the NYTimes today, 2011 June 26, Jon Pareles, the chief popular music critic of the paper (according to Wikipedia), speaks of the transition of recorded music collections to the so-called “cloud,” that is, the creation of virtual storage of our personal recordings on Internet servers elsewhere than our physical whereabouts and accessible using computers for playback at will, and all perfectly legally. In the process, the writer reports on a forthcoming project of the Icelandic musician/celebrity, the mononymous Björk. The patronymic, for those of you who care, among the dozen or so people who have never heard of this eccentric individual, is Guðmundsdóttir. She seems to me to attract more attention than her musical exertions warrant (with bizarre makeup worn in public, the wearing of masks, and offbeat clothing, albeit a voice with a range of three octaves and the accolades of various award-granting bodies and a very much smaller number of professional musicians; I do note that she has covered far more songs of others than she, apparently, has been covered… decidedly a unique, if not an acquired, taste). Her followers tend to be fanatical, devoted, inarticulate, but passionate in their advocacy of the “genius” of her compositions and performances, and yet they are well-distributed globally, if not legion. It’s safe to grant her, if nothing else, the legitimacy of being designated avant garde (Charles Baudelaire, André Breton and, well, take your pick, dance a slow gavotte to this one wherever they find themselves at this time).

I’m not one, despite my reputation and my occasional tone, to disparage anyone and anything out of hand. I prefer to take it as it comes. Some things come, frankly, and I’d just as soon they keep on going until they’re out of sight on a far horizon. Fortunately entertainment figures, even those of undeniable cultural impact, have a manageable presence in my life, especially insofar as I take certain fundamental precautions. As much as possible my Facebook pages and profile are under lockdown, an enclave in cyberspace reserved as much as I can control it that is reserved for friends (by my definition); and as for friends who allow their enthusiasm in public to exceed their prudence, I can always exclude this or that pronouncement. I don’t watch television, and, indeed, given my cable subscription would only see about 22 stations (apparently; I haven’t checked) for the paltry sum I pay each month for the privilege. I listen to NPR, or I don’t listen to the radio, and I turn it off if what I’m hearing doesn’t interest me. Don’t get me started on local on-air presences in Boston the likes of Emily Rooney who manages to surpass her father in being irritating sometimes to a loathsome overload of that quality.

I avoid crowds, and have cut way back on phone conversations. In short I pick my friends, and control the time I spend with other people. My life is my business, and I like it that way. I’ve had some major distractions in my life of the kind that, had I the choice, I would have avoided altogether, but I didn’t have the choice… and, let’s just say I’m still recovering, and have chosen my own means and methods.

One result is I have a great deal more time to indulge in activity that has apparently become a luxury for the preponderance of the rest of the world, especially that preponderance within the locus of my ken. One activity is actually to take note of what is going on around me, to think about it, to examine its details, not only to smell the roses, but to see the bugs on the petals, and the variations in color, to perceive the inalterable cycle of their lives, and the lives of so many other living things, flora and fauna alike. I have time to ponder the excrescences of other creatures, including my fellow creatures (not just male, but female: men and women, boys and girls alike).

Another result is the ratification of some truths I had long since felt I had detected, and assured myself were worth the effort of testing their verity. In short, I actually pay attention to what people say, or write (though there is so much less and less of what is written at length that warrants the time it takes to see if it’s worth taking the time—a new corollary to Catch-22), or tweet, or text, or chirp, or grunt (listen… you’d be surprised, so much of human utterances fall into these two categories).

As for Björk, who from the distance at which I prefer to observe her, when she floats into my consciousness like the evanescent being she seems to want to project that she is (though she occupies no more and no less space, as far as I can tell, that a human of her size should; though she apparently lives and breathes and procreates—I note that she is now a mother with her partner, another professional eccentric and recognized, in some circles, as yet another avant-garde “genius,” Matt Barney), I will acknowledge her fame. I’d call it notoriety, if not infamy (not to put too fine an edge on it—but that’s only because she has elected somewhere along the line to communicate in English, as opposed to, say, exclusively in Icelandic), but then there are those who still seem to think I’m a curmudgeon, and I’d rather not encourage them.

Here is what Pareles elected to quote of what I can only infer was an exchange he elicited on the subject of her latest project, if not specifically on the subject at hand… his assignment for this Sunday’s Times:

“I’m excited to embrace a different handshake between the object and sound,” Bjork said in an e-mail. “It seems like every couple of decades this takes a somersault, and I enjoy the fresh point of view, like the honeymoon of the new format where you can really have an effect on the overall direction, and things like enjoyment, love and freedom matter again.”

She added, “I definitely wanted the songs to be a spatial experience, where you can play with lightning or a crystal or the full moon and the song changes. I would like to feel the apps are equal to the song in the same way I have always aimed for the music video to be equal to the song: the 1+1 is 3 thing. Not that it works every time, but you have to aim for it.”

Of course, I am capable of perfectly well understanding what she’s saying here. Even her sentences parse, though not as well as her more direct opining on the subject of sexual gender preference, as she is quoted, somewhat in the way of non sequitur, if not altogether incongruously, not to mention utterly gratuitously, in her entry on Wikipedia, which struggles and mainly succeeds in not being sycophantic and breathless.

However I am hard put to understand what the hell she is talking about, especially as it regards her nominal expertise… matters of music, if not more specifically song composition.

The question I am left with for her, if not more pertinently for Mr. Pareles, is whatever happened to listening to music for the ineffable pleasures it affords as a sensory and emotional experience as restricted necessarily to the sense organs with which we have been endowed? That is, our ears and the rest of the apparatus in our heads that connect these organs with the hearing centers of the brain. As long as most of us, as far as I understand it, are not endowed with the capability of synesthesia, as it’s called, and though I would never testify to an understanding of what Ms. Björk is saying here I am pretty certain she is not talking about synesthesia, either for herself or for the masses.

We’ve long since left the dock and the shore is no longer in sight of that great ship that is taking us to some foreign land where we will, I gather, hear with our finger tips rhapsodically or whimsically stroking the touch sensitive screens of personal sensory devices. No one has as yet persuaded me that a small slab composed of mainly synthetic, mostly toxic materials, comprising highly advanced technological devices which compromise, all at once and every time we use them, the higher order, if fundamental, senses of hearing and sight.

Rather than walk at a respectable and health-enhancing, if still unhurried, pace, down a country road and take in the sights nature still provides once we’ve abandoned our vehicles, and take in the sounds of our fellow creatures, never mind the wind, say, ruffling through several acres of mature grains of wheat as they rustle on their stalks in the meadow, here’s what we do. We press painful stubs of listening devices into our ears, if we are not actually trying to isolate from the booming chaos about us the sounds being reproduced, distortion-laden and truncated as to the range of tones to which the ears are susceptible with great subtlety. Simultaneously, we squint at screens that show us comical simulacra of humans cavorting or emoting in close-up—images otherwise meant to be viewed at life-size or nearly so in some projection that naturally allows us to view them selectively and without distraction.

If I understand Ms. Bjork correctly, she is thrilled to imagine that somehow the experiences we have enjoyed for several thousand years (and cultural anthropologists may somehow date our first efforts at making music even further back) no longer suffice, but require the manipulation that I am only guessing she means to imply by the use of imbecilic tropes: lightning, full moons, and crystals… the stuff of fantasy and fairy tales and wondrous, as any child will tell you, in and of themselves. And the “1+1 is 3 thing”? That only reminds me of a joke I recall from junior high school wherein simple definitions of serious disorders could be expressed arithmetically. I seem to recall that believing 1 + 1 = 3 defined psychotic.

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Early today it looked like the bad weather had its back broken for good, and yesterday’s warm dry air that induced shutters to open wide and flies to come out of their torpor to buzz at closed windows would stay. The temperature creaked its way just barely into the sixties, Fahrenheit. Today started as a repeat of the first day of the new year, but then surrendered to what cannot be denied. It’s winter. A ceiling of clouds dropped in the early afternoon, meaning it darkened sooner than the actual sunset, invisible behind Mont Ste.-Victoire in the distant haze.

It’s turned into an early day for me. I ate my dinner and was done by seven, the soonest I’ve dined in the evening, I believe, in several years. Afterward, I had the choice of turning in, or taking one quick turn around the village in what should have been twilight, but was pitch darkness all around our hill.

The village is even darker than usual in spots, because in one of those commonly bizarre occurrences of rural French life there are no more lights lining the parking lot that abuts the village at its entrance. The lights not only illuminated the chief parking area for buses and visiting vehicles, they marked the edge of the embankment it sits on before dropping just on the other side of a log fence, about knee high, onto the tops of trees whose trunks emerge from the ground about 50 feet below. One day this past fall, the villagers awoke to discover a tangle of wires emerging from the earth in each of the four spots where, the night before, had stood the streetlights. No one has said when they will be replaced.

There’s a re-alignment of the pools of cool intense blue-white light that spill from the leading edge bulbs they use so incongruously in this little enclave first settled in this form in the twelfth century. There are more than vestiges of how it must have looked then, even as we slowly capitulate to the advance of time, and the allure of modern niceties. Besides the streetlights, it is in recent memory, for example, that the place, the town square overseen by the huge elm in front of the chapel at the head of the houses that ring the square, had its packed earth and sand paved over with asphalt. Soon after that, the mayor at the time decided to bow to the wishes of certain villagers who wanted the parking, usually done willy nilly and as one found space, demarcated with paint, permanently. Aside from the incongruity, this flies in the face of the freedom the French feel as an entitlement to park wherever they please, as long as they leave the barest amount of room for any other vehicle to pass, going in or leaving. Not so strangely, no car or small truck is ever out of place, every space taken up in summer, and civilly ensconced between the painted lines. I chalk this up to the village being largely occupied by foreigners, like me. I am one of the only Americans in the entire village, and the only one with a house that looks out on the square. There are Swiss, Germans, Scots, British, the Austrian innkeeper and his French wife, and a Parisian or two, who in some regards are also considered foreigners—unlike the Marseillaise. And we all of us, northern Europeans and a Yank, are from orderly, constipated, society, where civility demands we not draw attention to ourselves by parking outside the lines.

There is room, all told, for about 15 cars or small vans and trucks.

Tonight, as I stepped out, and as has been true every night for the past two weeks, there were perhaps six vehicles in all in the place. I walked slowly down the hill toward the parking lot. As I walked, and behind me, I heard the slam of shutters. As I turned to look, I saw the last movement of thin tall decrepit louvered shutters, as they were pulled to, on what had been the home of Frieda, the doyenne of the village. She now resides in a nursing home in another town nearby, slowly sinking into senility. My not quite so elderly neighbors drove out at the beginning of last week to visit her and bring her champagne for her 97th birthday. She had occupied the house for likely 50 or 60 years, and always declared to me, when I greeted her on one of my infrequent visits of late, before she was moved out as too feeble, that she was Swiss, and that she was 93, and that she didn’t speak French so well. Maybe so, but better than I. The house was sold by her family to finance the move and more luxurious quarters in her retirement home.

I turned back to proceed, and a little further on, at the foot of the village, a door opened and from the lit interior of a miniature dwelling someone emerged, barely out of the door, and stooped to put down a box, between the glass-paned inner door and the shutter/doors, that remained open, even in the chill air. I walked past the tiny house—some of the houses in the village are as small as 30 or 40 square meters, about ten times that number in square feet. The shutters of the single window on the ground floor also were thrown back, and light shone out filtered and softened by what I knew were curtains that let on the kitchen. I did not peer in as I walked past, though it’s customary, I’ve noticed, to do so. At least the tourists do it.

I lit a forbidden cigarillo, ignoring the huge black lettering, “Fumer Tue” on the lid of the box. It was a little difficult in a bare, but persistent breeze to keep the Bic lit, until I turned my back on the wind. When I turned again to continue walking, a dog approached, followed by its owner, his head down as he walked around the bend in the road into the village. “-nsoir!” I heard, as I said “Bonsoir” myself only partly in response. We otherwise paid no attention to one another

I traversed the narrow parking lot, across the width of it. The lot affords room for perhaps another dozen and-a-half, or two, cars, plus the spaces established on the asphalt deck with the same trim precision as the place for two buses. There is a regular traffic of huge tourist buses in the summer. They come for a stay of perhaps 15 minutes. We are a minuscule, but important, local destination despite the absence of any significant remaining edifices. For one, we have been the birthplace of the man who, in effect, put an end to the Reign of Terror, by putting an end to Robespierre. If that wasn’t enough of a gift to the motherland, he proceeded to spearhead making Napoleon general of the armies. The little guy knew what to do from there. There’s also a tower, a salvage job on the ancient donjon of the old castle, now otherwise completely gone. From the top of the tower is an uninterrupted vista of the entire countryside, as we are the highest point for about 20 miles in any direction. My little town.

I noticed for the first time, no doubt because of the absence of the night glow of the former streetlights, that the lights of Tavernes, and farther away, only a little smaller, a much greater concentration of lights: Barjols. The visibiilty indicates the cloud cover is hanging very high. The lights of Tavernes lay under a smear of the remnant of the sunset, probably by refraction, through a tear in the clouds at the horizon, a faint salmon-pink and orange smear. Down on the plan, the plain below us, I could trace the road only by the distinct pairs of headlights of four cars in caravan, speeding toward Salernes. They disappeared as the road turned around the base of our hill.

I turned back up the hill and walked back the way I came. I looked at the wee Christmas tree, festooned with twinkling lights, with presents hanging from it, wrapped in red mirror mylar wrap and gold ribbon and bows. This, courtesy of the town’s Department of Public Works. Pathetic. I continued past my house, to go further up the hill, to the rear of the village, where I knew more lights were visible in the distance. As I walked I heard a vehicle driven hard, probably in second gear. One must drive carefully as the passage is narrow between the stone houses lining both sides of the street in an unbroken assemblage, one house to the next, as snug as townhouses on any cross street in any major city, only these are at least seven centuries old.

One must be careful, but this is France. It doesn’t mean one must be slow. I scurried out of his path, to the only thing that resembled a lay-by, a place where the street pavement bloomed into a small open area in front of the old town hall, and the tower. Sure enough, the vehicle appeared, another cheap Japanese clone of a Land Rover, possibly a Suzuki, a Toyota, or something more exotic. They’re indistinguishable especially in the almost non-existent light in an antique microscopic village in the middle of nulle part, nowhere. Naturally this mec pops out from between the house of the Foves and the ruin opposite, and heads directly at me. I was standing in his intended parking space. No lines here though. He gave me the five seconds I needed to scurry back out. He pulled into the space and sat there. I didn’t wait, but continued my walk.

A mangy cat, that was somehow well-fed, but with patchy fur, squatted in the middle of the street, his head holding malevolent eyes pivoting around as I walked past him. He just sat there. I walked to the edge of the hill to see past the trees, and there were the lights of Regusse, and beyond that village, Moissac-de-Bellevue, which sits overlooking the national forest that has its backside in Fox-Amphoux, on the road to Aups. Aups, the market town, sits in a declevity further northeast than Moissac, and its lights can’t be seen. I finished the cigarillo, and flicked it in the direction of the cat, too far away to even get close. He continued to squat.

As I walked back down, past the cat, the silent empty houses, I heard another vehicle, and yet another car starting up. Just down the hill, practically at chez moi, a pair of headlights appeared, hesitated, and then this new fellow stopped completely and proceeded in reverse back in the same direction. The imitation Land Rover had re-started his ignition, backed up slightly in my direction, and proceeded forward down the hill after the other car. A tiny mystery inside another one.

I got to the front door. I stuck the large skeleton key in the lock, and let myself in. I could be in bed by eight.

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Perhaps it’s my mood. Perhaps it’s that I have been here it will be two weeks tomorrow. It has been sunny for two of those days. At least overcast the rest. Today is a corker. But before I get to today, let me do a quick review.

There seem to be three kinds of overcast here: a sort of uniform dun color, cloudless and without variation. Or there are variations, a sort of mottling of the grey, from a deep shade to one that is almost white. And finally, there are discernible clouds, at their best with breaks that allow the sun to peek through. When and if the sun does appear on such days, it is never for long. Rarely is there precipitation in its usual forms, rain or snow. However it has rained I’d say for about six days out of the 11 that have been overcast; one day it poured all day. On that day, the one before Christmas Eve, Yann informs me that the water in his pool in Aups rose about 2-1/2 inches. Other days it rained on and off, usually lightly, and one day, it snowed in the late afternoon for perhaps three-quarters of an hour. I took a photo of the light blanket of snow in the village square in front of my house—the one with a tree that is variably 225 to almost 600 years old, depending on the historian and tree expert who is making the assessment. I posted the photo on Facebook and put in what was then a mirthful and sarcastic caption, aimed at my friends in the Northeast of the U.S., who were braced for a blizzard that dumped anywhere from a foot to a foot and-a-half of the white stuff. It had snowed, and I was being generous, perhaps an inch-and-a-half here. The following day, the sun made one of its rare appearances. The temperature rose into the high 40s. And all the snow had disappeared at about the same time it started to snow 24 hours previously.

Aside from the overcast, the temperature ranges within a narrow band on such days between 33 or 34 degrees fahrenheit to barely 41. Most days it has been within a narrower range, of 37-43 degrees, not quite enough for snow. For years and years snow was rare. More recently, the natives can expect to see snow every year at least once or twice. It predictably will snow every year that the towns and villages have apportioned a part of one year’s budget to acquiring a snow plow. They are assiduous enough that the snow is gone from all the local roads within less than a day of the end of a snowfall.

My mood, which seems in sync with the weather, is tempered by at least one recollection of this time of year, and actually several, which themselves are linked together. My late wife and I first came to Fox-Amphoux in the dead of winter in the year 2000. We had decided tentatively to purchase a house in the south of France. We thought the prudent thing to do was to visit at other times of year than the optimal high seasons of warm weather, late spring to early summer, and fall through October. These had been the only times we had previously traveled to our beloved Provence. The discovery that our nearby market town, Aups, was also a significant truffle market in the late fall through early spring seemed to be promising, and the further discovery that the truffle harvest hit a high note with the fêtes des truffes which occurred traditionally on the fourth sunday of January, which in that coming year would occur virtually on my birthday… an augury if there ever was one. We booked rooms at the Inn in old Fox, the inn that is now across the square from my front door. As it turned out, that visit was a clincher, more or less. The weather was ideal almost throughout, with the singular irony that only on the day of the truffle celebration did it turn bitterly cold and overcast. “Cold” is of course a relative term. The Foxois and the Aupsois assured us it was cold. It was just freezing, what we came to learn was a typical temperature in winter, at least at the start of the day.

Further recollections of past sojourns at this time of year are more and more dark. Linda was diagnosed at the beginning of January in 2003 with the cancer to which she would eventually succumb. It was only the first winter here she would miss, though she was to have a chance to return. She would from time to time insist I visit chez nous, alone if need be, in order to have some respite, though she would always say over my protestations that it was important that we use the house, and check on it, regularly. I won’t belabor this account with remembrances of the several visits I made, sometimes by myself, and sometimes with friends, until she died, and then again the same year. That had been my last visit until now.

Last year, of course, my new, but once again late, beloved Jody and I were on the eve of leaving for Fox, for her long anticipated trip with me for the holidays. It would have been our first chance to return after the magical summer we spent together in 2009. This was not to be. That day, the good doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital found the tumor, which would lead to her demise, a scant two months ago tomorrow. And I cancelled our flight and our trip that night.

My present sojourn is my first chance to return since another much briefer, also magical, journey for Jody last July. It was perhaps the last time as well that she enjoyed anything that resembled a break from her almost unceasing ordeal since the previous January.

I am the wrong person to suggest that the weather, in fact, is in sync with my mood. I neither have the ego, nor the credulity. It is not bad here. It is fitting. And once again, I try to assure myself that this environment is the one most likely to induce a more rapid process of recovery for me. The time alone, if not total isolation, seems anodyne, if difficult to swallow, like necessary medicine.

The weather this visit that I’ve described is a first for me. It has induced a sense of claustrophobia about the house, which I’ve never experienced before. Today is a culmination of that feeling. The precipitation is truly that. There is nothing visible in the air, unless one looks into the middle distance, or any close surface, where the fine mist, almost a miasma, makes itself evident in the tiniest droplets of water imaginable. It shrouds windows and windshields, glasses and the screens of digital cameras. At speed in a vehicle, and only at speed, does it behave properly as precipitation. Otherwise it is more accurately a coalescence. Looking into the distance, toward familiar landmarks, only reveals what resembles flying through clouds. One can see only as far as what could be traversed in a minute or two on foot. The near foothills of the Alps have vanished. Greyness pervades, tempering everything, squeezing out all color but the most funereal of tints.

There is, I will admit, a somber beauty here even to what I describe. Like pieces of music in a minor key. Like paintings by Whistler or Eakins, umbral and vague.

The weatherman has predicted this weather will break, and we’ll see a return to the usual sunshine, clarity and crispness. Temperatures will climb into the 50s during the day, and barely reach freezing at night. That will happen with the coming of the new year.

I very much hope so.

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The lowest level person working for the TSA that you are likely to encounter at an airport security checkpoint is what they call a TSO. Here is the job description, which appears under the rubric “Find Your Dream Job” on the TSA website:

Transportation Security Officer [TSO]

Duties and Responsibilities: Implements security-screening procedures that are central to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) objectives and that will serve to protect the traveling public by preventing any deadly or dangerous objects from being transported onto an aircraft. Assists in conducting screening of passengers, baggage and cargo. May be required to conduct screening at any airport that provides commercial services to the public. Assists in monitoring the flow of passengers through the screening checkpoint to facilitate the orderly and efficient processing of passengers. Maintains close communication with supervisors regarding any issues that might reveal a weakness or vulnerable area of security screening that is discovered in the course of screening duties. Participates in information briefings concerning security-sensitive or classified information.

Key Skills

* Ability to learn the theories, dynamics, and factors underlying the aviation screening process to enable authoritative and independent handling of screening functions.
* Ability to learn to operate basic security equipment such as X-ray machines and hand wands at screening checkpoints
* Ability to work with persons of diverse backgrounds
* Ability to communicate non-technical information effectively to others

A TSO is paid a base salary in band D on the TSA wage scale. This pay does not include extra compensation, which is localized by assignment (location, hazard, etc.)

Now Band D runs from minimum to maximum thus:

D         $25,518         $38,277

I did the math, and the pay per hour, before taxes, for this basic salary scale is $12.27 minimum, and $18.40 maximum.

The minimum Federal wage per hour is $7.25, as it has been since 2009.

The TSA is actively recruiting.

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When I went Thanksgiving dinner shopping the other day, it was one of the first times I had gone shopping altogether in about two months. The refrigerator has been totally empty for a week.

I am making the turkey, and so, by default, at least one stuffing treatment. Or dressing as more refined people like to call it. I bought a pound-and-a-half of plain ground pork for sausage, that is, without any spices or herbs already mixed in. I also bought a small bag of local Cortland apples. I knew I already had some yellow onions.

I bought a small chunk of cheddar cheese. One chunk of fairly decent cheese, and this one said on the label it had been aged two years, is a good thing to have around, in case there’s a sudden craving, or you have a guest, especially one with a craving for cheese.

I bought two pullman loaves, at one and-a-half pounds apiece, of Iggy’s seven grain bread. I had the store slice it, which eliminated one set of cuts I would need to turn the bread into small dice of bread, very small. It also made it easier to let the bread dry out a bit, to be more absorbent of other flavors, before cubing it.

I bought a half-gallon of fresh cider, apple cider, unfiltered, and so forth and so on.

I got a half-dozen eggs, because eggs are the perfect food in the absence of food possibly even healthier for you in larger quantities. Again, a contingency item, used as needed. A staple. Sometimes I end up throwing away some eggs. But none at all means none at all.

I already have butter, in case I choose to use it, for more than a bit of its flavor.

I also know I have cheesecloth for making a shawl for the turkey, which will be soaked first in oil or oil and melted butter, and then draped over the entire bird but especially the breast. If you baste it every 15 minutes or so, it keeps everything mighty moist and the bird has no trouble turning a nice mahogany brown.

I also bought a tub of fresh cranberries. David said he will be making some, but I can always put these in the freezer. It will be nice to have on hand in case there is a lot of leftover turkey. I like to polish it off with a reserve of stuffing and cranberry sauce. Even cold, all of them taste wonderful. For as long as you can make it last, or can stand eating it.

And finally, I noticed they had these tiny wooden crates with a red plastic mesh cover containing the contents, which is some weight of clementines. I bought the whole crate. That’s the way it’s sold in any event. Pretty cheap. Six or seven dollars for a bunch of them. Jody introduced me to them.

There was a period when she really enjoyed having them, and she ate quite a number of them, going through at least a few of these micro crates. I ended up having to throw most of the last one out.

They’re mighty good. I’ll like working my way through them, and offering them to guests. Then, I’ll see.

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I’ve just noticed something about the true nature of Facebook. The insight should have happened sooner, as those who used to work with me when I was getting a paycheck for a living came to expect, but I’ve been distracted for some time.

I’ve been on Facebook quite a long time. Not exactly since the Winklevoss era, but one was still required to have certain email address domains, e.g., harvard.edu, in order to be instantly vetted. And when young Mark Zuckerberg was furiously, and perfidiously, keyboarding his first lines of code for what would become Facebook, I was deeply involved in the mortal fate of my late wife, who had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer.

Obviously Facebook has become quite a phenomenon. Even discounting the many redundant subscriptions (it’s beyond me how people sign up more than once, especially under the same name, but it keeps happening to people with advanced degrees), the people who are dead now, and the legion of pranksters, merry or otherwise, there’s still a significant number of people on the planet who “belong.” If not 500 million, then we are, I am sure still in the neighborhood of some multiple of 10^8.

It’s my guess that most of the subscribers are fairly well off, access to a computer (or a smart phone) and a certain amount of idle time being prerequisites for regular participation. I would add a certain amount as well of self-absorption, but that would be cynical.

So, I’ll spell out what I’ve noticed is the business of Facebook, no matter what Zuck and his buddies spew out through their laughable public relations apparatus (Public Irritation is what they should call it; they have a knack for programming, there is no doubt, but there’s an equally brilliant knack for coming up with precisely the wrong mechanisms to add to their Rube Goldberg device of a website… or precisely the wrong ways to apply what are otherwise innocuous features… with the result that what they mainly accomplish is pissing people off in the midst of their deep self absorption—oops, there I go again). I don’t blame Zuck or his cohort for not understanding what business they’re in. I had many clients who had no idea what business they were in. Some of them even paid me to tell them. In addition to Zuck’s public displays of evidence of a perverse personality, he has demonstrated not a small dose (it’s possibly a tyrannical dose; I mean that in the sense of “tyrant-size,” several times larger than king-size) of grandiosity, with a soupcon of messianism. Not unfamiliar, if ironic, traits in a secular Jew from the United States.

The facile, if not the glib and cynical way of putting it is, Facebook is bread and circuses.

What I’ve noticed is that no matter what position on the political spectrum you occupy, and I have friends on the left, on the right, in the center… fancy themselves progressives, liberal, conservative, libertarian, what have you—and why isn’t there a “what have you” or even a “whatever” political party? careful, trick question—if they are not otherwise occupied with documenting online the minutiae and quotidian bustling around they do, they are excreting the latest, usually doom-laden or darkly predictive or pissed-off handwringing their particular political leanings induce them to share with us, the great unwilling.

It’s all to no effect of course. No one actually has a solution in mind, unless they’re in the government. I have no doubt that policy and decision makers in the government also have Facebook accounts. I daresay they don’t do their work in these precincts, but at their desks using databases that so far Zuck cannot access, though he’d no doubt share them with the highest bidder, once he does.

Probably, it’s entertainment for those who actually do hold the levers of power, that is, reading these ridiculous pronouncements, usually pompous, and always self-righteous, earnest and rife with certitude.

It may be, levers of power at their fingertips or not, they are no more powerful than we mere plebes at fixing what’s wrong, in which case, they probably need the relief. We all need relief—it’s become a perpetual condition—but I’m already making the case that “relief” is the mildest of the benign ways of characterizing Facebook.

However, all in all, this doesn’t solve the problem of knowing what to do about what increasingly leaves us feeling helpless, hopeless, and misanthropic. Everyone has myriad friends on Facebook, but there is no question that equally everyone has found an enemy out there in the real world to bitch about. The end result is, there are many “wrongs” perceived. Consequently, there are as many “rights.”

Many are presumptuous enough to imply there are solutions to the woes and tribulations they excoriate. No one, not a one, offers a single word of substantive, coherent exposition of what that solution may be. In this, they are no better than anyone who runs for and eventually serves in office, but I would guess, without knowing that every politician in America has a Facebook page, or public profile, so they’re in the same leaky boat as the rest of us.

The fact is, I don’t know, no more than you, what the truth is. There are many “truths” out there on the internet, and virtually all of them have been cited ad nauseam on Facebook, from the left and from the right, with all the stops on the local train that runs between them. However, it’s an old, sorry and tired adage that “lies have many fathers, and the truth is an orphan” (I think the reference originally was to wartime…).

So, in my view, which I have no doubt will be attacked, feebly or vociferously, it is very much like the enchainment of the mass flying public that Al Qaeda, with the help of the Federal government and the Department of Homeland Security, places us: sans shoes, sans belts, keys, loose change, old love letters, overdue balance statements, and soon, it would appear, bereft of any dignity or sovereignty as an individual if only for the few moments it takes to be dosed with x-rays or to have our private parts groped by a stranger in vinyl gloves, though absent medical training—that we have allowed ourselves to be enchained by Facebook.

Essentially, we jabber happily at each other, usually in the crypto pseudo language of texting (so nuanced, so suited to convey sincerity): “OMG!!?! Did you catch Jimmy and posse at the Flaming Unicorn lol, c u l8r…” Alternatively, the more earnest, clinically beset with psychoneurosis or other disorders, or just plain generally pissed and with time to kill reading the mainstream press, online and off, across the spectrum of utter political lunacy so as to “like” and “share” it all with the rest of us, known henceforth as noted as the critical mass of the unwilling.

We each of us have become the subject of that famous quote of George Bernard Shaw’s to the effect that some hapless woman who crossed his withering attention cause him to observe that although “she has lost the art of conversation, but unfortunately not the power of speech.”

And we are apparently content to do this, to be in this state, content to take our daily dose of the “soma drug” of Facebook, and to do nothing else, really (all 500 million, give or take, of us).

Marx (Karl, not Groucho), Ghandi, and King reel on the streets of paradise. Why we don’t get off our asses and actually do something about what generally fuels the air of misery and discontent we breathe, anesthetized by our pretty good lives, in our nice homes, and our late model cars, with our cute children, and cuter grandkids, or our buds, bffs, and inexorable ineffable “friends” of whatever age? You’re asking me? I didn’t think so.

And when this fairly typical screed of mine is read, it will be promptly forgotten, because time and Facebook never stop. Each is eternal, in the sense that the now is eternal. Both move on inexorably, with us or without us to take notice. But speaking of now, right now, I have to get online and check Facebook, to see if this has been posted with the proper link to my blog. I mean, what’s important?

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It’s possible it’s a good gauge of the state of one’s mind, the condition of the interior of your refrigerator.

What items are in there? How many? When are they from? Can you remember the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the items you find? Did you really want to remember them?

What circumstances have altered, if any, in the interim? How does the status quo overall compare, then and now? Are there new people in your life since you acquired the food in the refrigerator? Have any left?

It took me a little over three-quarters of an hour, the time it took to play a new album I purchased, to clean out my refrigerator of all perishables that had long since perished, all spoiled foods, all foods past their sell date, past their pull date. The album is “Good Things” and the lead talent, a singer, is Aloe Blacc. It was wonderful music to accompany what I was doing.

There were by my rough count, approximately 25 different containers of food. Reusable storage, take out containers, glass bowls, a ceramic bowl, and a fair number of containers for prepared food (dining in, as opposed to taking out) were among the assemblage. All washed in soap and hot water and disposed of, or put in the dishwasher, or dried and put away for future storage use.

I had no idea mold grew in so many colors, and with such different textures. In a refrigerator!

The refrigerator is now virtually empty, which is as it started as my return from France at the end of July. Jody moved out during the first three days in September. Hence all the food is from the last month she lived here, her home for almost 11 months. It has remained here ever since.

She lived another two months and four days. She has now been dead for two weeks.

Until I cleaned out the refrigerator, I would have told you that what has been happening over the past 12 weeks has been happening to someone else. Well, perhaps. But he seems to have left and given back my life to me to do something with.

I don’t remember where all the food I threw out came from, why it was here, who brought it, and why that particular choice was made. It may easily, except for some Indian food, have been that I was responsible, for choosing it and serving it, and keeping what was left. No idea.

What I remember is how it was each day, when food was something to be attended to, and Jody had to have choices, and every opportunity to eat as much as she wanted, which was never very much, not during that last month here. It would fluctuate after that. And for the last week and-a-half or slightly more, she ate nothing at all.

When she was well, eating and good food were one of the three rings in our daily circus. It was an immediate and continual chance to celebrate being alive.

That’s what I remember, and am unlikely to forget. Unless that other guy comes back to take over again. It seems unlikely when I’m making progress like this.

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I am not speaking of Leviathan, though Stanley Fish is treated by so many people with a reverence equal in magnitude to the awe and fear due the mythical sea monster… Fish, I’m afraid, is a sea monster of a different order. In the great sea of academia, he is a creature sailing on the momentum of past achievement and (depending on your point of view) former intellectual fame or notoriety.

I’ve been reading his blog on the New York Times “Opinionator” pages on-line off and on for several years. It seems every entry is more and more vexing. His latest, which coat-tails on the suddenly (once-again) compelling issue of plagiarism among high school and college students, is finally, for me, the last straw.

The back of this camel—forbearance in the face of bloviation and extreme moral relativism (the position he nominally espouses; one critic says he’s something worse, and that is, a “fatalist”)—has been broken and Fish, I am sure, will quake in his beautiful bespoke shoes (my fantasy; he has certainly made enough money, and I think he probably thinks he deserves it), will have to grapple with my “comment” to this latest apostrophe of his. In all events what he says always makes himself one slippery fish indeed. It’s no less true in this case.

Here’s the URL of the original “Opinionator” blog entry of Fish: http://nyti.ms/fish_plagiarism

And here’s my comment, in case the editors do not see fit to print it, or it ends up so far down the column you may have trouble finding it:

Either this is sophistry of the worst kind (the index of which is a moving measure determined by Mr. Fish as a function of time passing), or Mr. Fish is approaching retirement age. It would be nice to see him take with these putatively sidetrack skirmishes* as equally a clear position as he does with other, more marquee, ethical issues, or just shut up. The proposition that this is not a philosophical matter, on the thin (practically non-existent) self-referential Fish viewpoint is ridiculous. To allow the inference that plagiarism does not raise ethical questions (and if ethics are not the province of philosophy, then it means millions of humans since the beginnings of self-consciousness have been deluding themselves) is to commit an ethical breach of another sort. Mr. Fish’s clever, if not so subtle, disclaimers and self-exculpatory remarks: “I’m reporting, not endorsing…” are becoming truly repugnant. Maybe it’s time to quit Stanley, or at least stop taking The Times’s money for this twaddle. Cashing in on your highly inflated reputation is a pitiful thing to witness.

* The U.S. Dept. of Education reported upwards of 18 million enrolled college and university students in the country in 2007. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 1.7 million post-secondary teachers employed in 2008. If these numbers define a minor sequestered skirmish in the great war to win a now requisite credential, a post-secondary certificate or degree, to seek a likely underpaid job in the worst job market in 80 years, I’d hate to hear what Mr. Fish thinks is a “major battle” in that war. This is a statistical indicator that Mr. Fish’s chief interest is in reading his own words… as opposed to making sense, never mind dispensing wisdom.

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