Guns, Words, Meanings -- an Originalist Proposal

Isn’t it strange that the Supreme Court “originalists” can ignore perfectly clear statements when it suits their political agenda.  There is no question that the Founders wrote this preamble to the Second Amendment, the only such explanatory statement in the Bill of Rights: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...”  It is also clear that they did not write “a free Country.” So any state that wishes to regulate arms should so in the language of the amendment. The law might read something like this: “We the state of _________, being desirous of having a well regulated Militia, do hereby enact the following legislation:

All persons wishing to keep and bear arms shall register as members of this state’s militia.   Any person denied membership in the state militia shall also be denied the keeping and bearing of arms.  Reasons for being denied such membership may include criminal record, mental or emotional disability, membership in an organization whose aims and purposes are inimical to the laws and statutes of this state or of the national government, or such other reasons as would normally disqualify an individual from being a member of the state militia or the federal military.  Every person so registering shall be deemed to consent to a full review of their qualifications to serve under this legislation.

Be it further enacted that the arms described in this legislation shall be limited to those currently or in the future to be issued to individual members of the state militia, or such arms as may be useful for developing appropriate skills for eventual service, including such lesser arms as shotguns and smaller caliber weapons, and that no arms of greater firepower than those mentioned above shall be allowed to persons who have so registered, unless said persons shall be actively serving in a local, state, or federal entity that issues them such arms.

This law shall include the following exceptions:

1.     Persons whose physical condition may disqualify them from active duty, but who otherwise meet the standards of the militia.

2.     Persons under the age of military service who indicate their willingness to register for the militia when they come of age, and who take appropriate pre-militia training in the responsibilities of bearing arms.

3.     Persons who, having registered for the militia and passing the age limit for service, or who have passed the age limit for service prior to the enactment of this legislation, unless and until they no longer qualify, except by age or physical disability, for such possession.

Be it noted that registering for the militia in no way implies that a person is liable for militia duty except under such circumstances as shall seem to the legislature and the executive to require a general call-up of all such persons.  Nor does it imply that any person who does not seek the right to bear arms need register under the law.

Persons who do not wish to meet these requirements shall have 90 days following the passage of this law to turn in arms currently in their possession, and shall be compensated for those arms according to their current value.  Alternatively, they may choose to render these arms permanently incapable of use, and submit them to inspection after their disabling, after which they may retain these items.

Time Present and Time Past

            Rolling Stone has just announced its “100 Greatest Song Writers of All Time.”  Oddly,  these all-time greats were born between 1911 and 1989.  So Rolling Stone, like those pre-Darwin clergymen, evidently has a peculiarly unscientific notion of time.  (Even those old guys saw “all time” as 75 times longer than RS.) Just for fun, let’s re-do the all-time list, in the spirit of Richard Thompson, the British singer who replied to a similar list of “greatest songs of all time” by recording an album that started with “Sumer is icumen in,” which dates from before 1260 CE.

The oldest known song, with words and notation, is around 3400 years old.  Some hymns over 1000 years old are still being sung.  But for Rolling Stone, “all time” began whenever Robert Johnson (b. 1911) wrote his first number.  That means, among other things, that my own mother was a teenager by the time the first of the all-time great songs was written.  In fact, except for Hank Williams, all the top 25 started writing in my lifetime, and only Chuck Berry and Leiber and Stoller were born more than 5 years before me.  So by the time I got my first transistor radio, about 1957, I was able to listen to each of these composers hot off the 78- or 45-press.  Very flattering, but then I can listen to almost all the known writers before them just as easily.  

Oddly, lists of the 100 greatest scientists of all time, which you might think would skew more heavily to the modern era, usually begin over 2400 years ago. Of the two such lists I found, 82-88 of the 100 scientists ere born before the oldest of the RS musicians. Various top ten scientist lists never mention anyone born in the twentieth century, except for one credit to Alan Turing.

           

What’s missing? First, what almost everyone calls “the great age of American popular music,” from say 1910 to 1950.  Look up the term “Great American Songbook” and you won’t find a single person on the RS list.  Nor will you find a single jazz musician.  Then, of course, anything before 1925, of any sort.  And even more recently, any songwriter from other genres, such as musical theater, cabaret, etc. 

           

So here’s my quick list of genres and songwriters who belong ahead of at least 2/3 of the RS list:

1.     Maybe the greatest of all – Anonymous. Wrote all the ballads, folk tunes, etc. from “Greensleeves” on up.  No one will ever come close.

2.     The great hymn writers: Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, William Billings, etc.  People still sing their songs every week throughout the world, a hundred and more years after their deaths.  Take that, “Imagine.”

3.     The true classics: Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, and others.

4.     The nineteenth century’s greats, especially Stephen Foster

5.     Musical theater and operetta: Gilbert and Sullivan (the first rappers), Victor Herbert, Rodgers and Hart (and Hammerstein), Lerner and Loewe, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Sondheim, and more

6.     Tin Pan Alley: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Yip Harburg, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Sammy Kahn, Johnny Mercer—Wikipedia lists 50 well-knonw names  in this category alone.

7.     Jazz and Blues: Leadbelly, Ellington ,Hancock, Coltrane, Basie, Mingus, Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, all the way back to Buddy Bolden

8.     The Europeans, Kurt Weil, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, and others less well-known here.

Last but not least, the true “one hit wonders.” John Newton of “Amazing Grace (actually a two-hitter with “Zion City of Our God”), Mel Tormé (“Chestnuts Roasting”), Julia Ward Howe, Katherine Lee Bates (“America the Beautiful”).  Let’s end with the greatest one-hit wonder of all time, the man whose one song is sung pretty much every day of every year to large audiences, and has been for at least as long as anything by the writers in Rolling Stone.  Every time you go to a baseball, football, basketball or hockey game, professional or college, you’re likely to hear his number. A rough estimate suggests that limiting ourselves to just those venues, more people have heard his song in person over the past half-century or so than are alive today.  So, far behind Anonymous in compositions, but perhaps his/her only competitor for audience, Francis Scott Key and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

To Prepare a Face to Meet the Faces That you Meet

            There’s a new acronym making the rounds, joining the internet’s WTF, LOL, IMHO, and such.  But this one is about real life, and it’s caught the attention of the New York Times, with an essay followed the next day by  “Readers Discuss” item.  Since such reader weigh-ins are quite rare (I could find only one other in the past three months), evidently we’re on to a new social issue of gender discrimination.  Except we’re not.

            The ugly term is “Resting Bitch Face,” described thus by the first writer to bring it up: “RBF is a face that, when at ease, is perceived as angry, irritated or simply … expressionless.”  Obviously the noun before face suggests that this is a problem for women rather than men.  Numerous readers replied, explaining that it’s just their face, that they’re always being told to smile more, that their father has the same expression and no one ever comments on it to him. 

            Why do I believe that this is almost entirely a non-issue? Well, for one thing, the case is largely bolstered by photos of actresses and other female celebrities, who are caught in hundreds of poses annually, some of which must be non-smiling.  Nor are non-smiling looks the result of gotcha shots.  I just looked at 40 Vogue covers.  Of the 40, only 4 showed a full smile, and one of those was of Audrey Hepburn.  The standard Vogue photo is serious, intense, often slightly aggressive.  Look at full-page ads in magazines and you see the same thing: more than half the women – and men – look bored or irritated.  My own emotional reaction to these pictures is that  these beautiful people are so superior to us that they needn’t deign to give us the benefit of a smile.

            As for ordinary life, here’s where we need to do something I usually don’t – go all evolutionary on the issue.  Why do we smile?  Because we want to send one of a very few messages: that we are harmless, that we are friendly, or that we hope you are harmless, friendly, and perhaps helpful.  Of course we can smile to ourselves, but most of those smiles come when we are having a mental or non-present-moment parallel to the others: reading or recalling something positive, seeing something non-human that we find funny, attractive, uplifting, etc.

            Start with babies.  We smile at them, get them to smile at us, and thereby make the most basic of human connections, after providing them with food.  Babies who never smile are of great concern, as they seem to lack normal affect.  As we grow older, we learn to smile when approaching people, when we want to ask them for something, when we recognize them, admire them, and so on.  Taking it back to adult evolution, smiles are one of the most obvious ways to say “I come in peace.”  Remember Mr. Spock?  Not only did he greet people with a weird hand signal, he maintained a stolid face more than 99% of the time.  (I found a fan site that catalogued Spock’s smiles: as a child before he learned Vulcan ways, when he was drugged, and once – a very important moment – when he finds out he has not, as he feared, killed Kirk.)  We smile, androids don’t.

            So smiling has always been one of the clearest signs that we are not an opponent and that we hope you aren’t either.  We have also become extremely adept at reading facial expressions, and again, see it as a sign of abnormalcy when someone can’t describe facial expressions accurately.  We know the Duchesne smile, where the involuntary movement of muscles near the eyes confirms that the mouth’s smile is real.  Evil smiles, cruel smiles, arrogant smiles, hopeful smiles, casual smiles, ecstatic smiles – we know them all.

            We also know the opposite of smiles.  We know when a parent is angry at us as soon as we see their face, sometimes even when we only see their eyes.  Even dogs react to frowns, especially when they connect the look to something they’ve just done. 

            So we have been wired from birth, and to some extent from a time when we had not yet split off from other large hominids, to know what facial expressions mean in social context.  In fact our reactions to facial expressions are so fundamental that they occur in the parts of the brain we share with many ancestors, even non-mammals.  Just as we jump even before we know what that snake-like thing on the path really is, we react to the emotional message we’re receiving from a face before we can process and review the reaction. 

            Then, when we process, we usually go for the most commonly experienced explanation. (“When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”)  Why would this person be angry?  Have I done something?  Are they dangerous? Why do they look distressed?  Has something bad happened? What a pleasant half-smile; I imagine they’re a nice person.  Some of those who commented on the article complained that they were told to be more cheerful, others that they were asked if there’s anything wrong. So it's not just a case of demanding a behavior, but sometimes of offering help.

            In fact, we not only decide about others on the basis of their expressions, we often use their expressions to persuade others to share our view.  Look at any newspaper doing an article on a politician.  If the accompanying photo was shot at a neutral time, not at a moment of pleasure or dismay (e.g. winning an election or receiving news of a terrorist attack), its easy to tell where the paper lies on the political spectrum: if John Boehner is frowning or Chris Christie is raging, it’s left-leaning; if they’re smiling, it’s right-leaning.  Just flip the left-right for photos of Obama or Hilary Clinton (If there’s balance, that says something about the publication’s integrity.)

            Imagine an analogous situation.  Someone you know says “People coming toward me often look away abruptly or even veer from my path.”  You reply, “Well, I’ve noticed that when you walk, you often clench your fists.”  "But that doesn’t mean anything.  Its just the way I walk when I’m thinking.”  Our hands and  our faces need to be open in greeting if we want our fellow homo sapiens to feel comfortable around us.

            It may be true that some faces are structurally more friendly-seeming than others.  But do you know of anyone without a birth defect or an injury to the face who cannot smile?  The studies of Paul Ekman and others show that when people practice positive faces they experience positive moods, and vice versa, event when the are acting as test subjects, without any emotional stimulation.  I was once speaking to a Buddhist (Buddhists are mentioned in the article as among the great smilers.) and quoted the proverb, perhaps first stated by Abraham Lincoln: “Every man over 40 is responsible for his own face.”  The Buddhist agreed.  Those whose faces, in repose, are nearer to smiling than to frowning suggest to everyone they meet “I am enjoying life, I hope you are too.”  Try it; you’ll like it and so will they.