budget cuts

I spoke with someone yesterday at the University of South Carolina's M.A. program in history of art (in the Art Department). They are fighting efforts to shut down their program completely. It is a successful program and the only such program in the state, but because of retirements and departures they are short on tenured faculty and therefore the powers that be decided they would be an easy one to shut down. Things aren't quite that bad here; I guess I should be grateful. It is a depressing time to be in academia.

Technological Optimism

In Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology, Robert Pool quotes from David Dietz, Atomic Energy in the Coming Era, published in 1945:

Instead of filling the gasoline tank of your automobile two or three times a week, you will travel for a year on a pellet of atomic energy the size of a vitamin pill....The day is gone when nations will fight for oil....

No baseball game will be called off on account of rain in the Era of Atomic Energy.... No city will experience a winter traffic jam because of heavy snow. Summer resorts will be able to guarantee the weather and artificial suns will make it as easy to grow corn and potatoes indoors as on the farm.

Reading Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture has left me with ideas that keep echoing, such as the idea that "We began to see the whole Creation merely as raw material, to be transformed by machines into a manufactured Paradise." (p. 56) I wish I could better get students to think hard about whether they really believe that technology will allow us to transcend all limits.

Snake Handlers

I heard a wonderful lecture yesterday by Nancy Hardesty entitled: "Baptists, Methodists, Snakes and Fire: 19th Century Religion in the South." She started her story with 19th century Methodists who emphasized the idea of sanctification. Her argument was that once you start validating religious extremes, people always want to go further.

She traced the story from the holiness movement to faith healing to baptism by fire to speaking in tongues to handling snakes to drinking poison. Those who handled serpents argued that their practice was required by Mark 16:17-18, but drinking poison was optional because the verse says: "if they drink any deadly thing it will not hurt them..." Snake handling is illegal in every state except West Virginia, where member of churches that followed the practice had enough political clout to prevent the passage of such a law.

Chiropractic

Am I the last person in South Carolina who has never been to a chiropractor? I'm going next week hoping to get help with a back problem that I've had since I had to pack and unpack my office in the move last December and which isn't getting better. I grew up in New York and Massachusetts in a culture where chiropractic was considered really low class. Several years ago I read the history of chiropractic in Norman Gevitz, ed., Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988) and it is not an inspiring story. Interesting, the focus for chiropractors who refuse to participate in the key compromise with mainstream medicine that gained them respectability is the local Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic.

Update: For a story about chiropractic as a hustle see How-to lessons on Making Light.

kindnesses

Several people have offered me kindnesses the last few days that went way beyond what I would have though I could ask of them. I was feeling undeserving, and then I remembered something said to me in another context: that's what God wants me to have. A mindboggling thought.

Bibliography

I'm busy going over student paper topics, some predictable and some intriguing. I do want to read the history of artificial insemination of farm animals, if there is business and social history in the story.

Russian Fish Processing Ship, Narragansett Bay

This ship has for several years anchored in Narragansett Bay for the winter, buying fish from local fishermen and processing and freezing the fish. Local speculation is that it is a former whaling ship.