The shapes a bright container can contain!
—Theodore Roethke, I Knew a Woman
The shapes and colors you contain
Paralyze my lonesome brain
It did not lessen your appeal
When you suggested I get real
Who I am and who you are
Mean I must love you from afar
I hear the voice of sanity
Saying how it’s gotta be:
“Forget her smile, her voice, her hair
Cry a lot and look elsewhere”
I should just give up on love
My hopeless heart has had enough
by Richard W. Bray
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
—Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Miles and miles of empty
Surround our lovely Earth
Human beings are blessed to share
The planet of our birth
We devastate and plunder
And treat it like a sewer
With rapacity to horrify
An interstellar viewer
We’re stupid and we’re greedy
And violent and cruel
Who came up with such a lot
Of self-destructive fools?
Everything that we create
Will decompose and rust
All of our accomplishments
Will tumble down to dust
Existence is a gift
Don’t misuse your ration
You must defy this dreary life
With kindness and compassion
by Richard W. Bray
Studied half my life
To be a healer
And I ended up as bad
As the neighborhood dealer
I thought I’d be dashing
I thought I’d be rich
Didn’t expect to be
Big Pharma’s little bitch
I got pills for the kids
I got pills for their mamas
If I push enough product
It’s a week in the Bahamas
I don’t care about your body
I don’t care about your bones
Just need to make money
To pay off my loans
I don’t care what you eat
I don’t care if you work out
Pushing my prescriptions
Is what I’m about
I don’t care how you feel
So don’t waste my time
Your words don’t contribute
To my bottom line
by Richard W. Bray
Ted Haggard
Have you ever been arguing with someone and you felt that there was something wrong with her argument, but you couldn’t figure out what it was? Perhaps she was utilizing some form of logical fallacy. A fallacy is an unsound argument based on faulty reasoning. Logicians have identified scores of fallacies.
Here are some examples of common logical fallicies:
Appeal to fear
“Are you sure you want to give me a ticket, officer? I play golf with the chief of police.”
Things could get pretty ugly around here if I don’t get what I want.
Appeal to pity
You should go out with me because forty-three women have already turned me down and I can’t take much more rejection.
Circular Reasoning (A=B because B=A)
Lebron James is the greatest basketball player of his generation because nobody else is as good as he is.
My mom is terrific because she is wonderful.
Appeal to Common Practice
It’s no big deal to leave trash on the ground in a parking lot. A lot of people do it.
But Mom, all the other parents let their kids stay out until dawn, so you should too.
Post hoc (causal) fallacy
When the rooster crows, the sun rises. Therefore, the rooster causes the sun to rise.
The Lakers won last night because I wore my lucky sweater.
False Dilemma (or False Alternatives)
It will either be hot or cold tomorrow.
You must be a Lakers fan or a Clippers fan.
Slippery Slope
If we allow gay marriage, people will start marrying their dogs.
If we ban Hummers because they are bad for the environment, eventually the government will ban all cars.
Non Sequitur (“It does not follow”)
That man is an awful person because he is wearing a blue sweater.
I cannot eat a cupcake because it is Tuesday.
Loaded question
Have you stopped wetting your bed yet?
Do you still have a Spongebob lunch pail?
Distinction without a Difference
I’m against capital punishment, but I believe we should execute serial killers.
I don’t have a sweet tooth; I just love to eat candy.
One of the most common fallacies is ad hominem, which means attacking a person instead of addressing her arguments.
Here are two examples of irrelevant ad hominem argument which have nothing to do with the legitimacy of a person’s arguments:
1)
Dave: I think the death penalty is a good idea.
Larry: Who cares what you think? You are a stupid, pathetic loser and your mother dresses you funny.
2)
I’m not going to listen to any of your arguments because you wear Member’s Only jackets and you sleep with a Teddy Bear.
An Ad hominem argument is a great way to avoid the merits of another person’s arguments? Many English teachers say that it is never appropriate to engage in ad hominem arguments. But is it legitimate to attack a person for being hypocritical? My answer is: Sometimes.
Here is an example of a situation where an ad hominem argument is clearly inappropriate:
Let’s say my doctor tells me after a checkup that my blood pressure is too high and I need to lose weight and I should quit drinking and smoking. I respond: “What are you talking about, Dude? I see you drinking and smoking at my bar every night and you are seriously overweight.
My ad hominem is illegitimate in this case because my doctor is giving me medically viable advice even though he doesn’t practice what he preaches. He went to medical school and he knows what he’s talking about.
Here is an example of a situation where an ad hominem argument is appropriate:
Speaking of practicing what we preach, what about someone like megachurch preacher Ted Haggard who righteously espouses clean living and family values—until he gets caught in a hotel room with a male masseur and a bunch of meth? Does Haggard’s behavior render his message any less legitimate? Yes, because he is bolstering his argument by holding himself up of as a paragon of someone who is living a righteous lifestyle.
by Richard W. Bray
sooner or later it all gets real
—Neil Young, Walk On
I can find you a bed
I can fix you a meal
You can cry on my shoulder
When the shit gets real
I can offer my friendship
I can lead you to the well
We can talk and we can laugh
And we can sit for a spell
Gotta haggle with the world
And hold on to your soul
Sometimes you gotta fight
And sometimes you better roll
I can point you to the people
Who are fighting for peace
But the torments of this world
Ain’t never gonna cease
I’ll treat you like a guest
But I cannot live your quest
You’re ready for the world
And you’re fully grown
Just try and do your best
I think you’re ready for the test
Some things you gotta
Face on your own
by Richard W. Bray
Jan Murray
Sometimes I like to do the Grumpy Old Man routine with my students: “When I was your age, Sonny, I had to walk barefoot to school in the snow, and the long, arduous journey was uphill—both ways.”
None of this is true, of course. My parents always provided me with good shoes and it’s only snowed once in Claremont in the last fifty years. I stole that joke from one of my childhood heroes, Bill Cosby. I still love to tell that joke, but I no longer attribute it to Cosby. Once the most avuncular man in America, Cosby is now, allegedly, nothing but a sick old creep.
Bill Cosby’s fall pains me; I spent so much time with his comedy LPs as a kid, and it really felt like I knew him. One of my favorite Cosby albums was called I Started Out as a Child. It took me over a decade to get the joke in the title. Another Cosby album title was also quite funny: To my brother Russell, Whom I Slept With (but I still haven’t completely worked out its implications).
The comedy albums of Cosby and The Smothers Brothers were a big part of my childhood. (For you younger readers, albums, also called records, were large flat black petroleum-based disks that created marvelous sounds when played on something called a turntable. Albums were very fragile, which may have accentuated the reverence we had for them). In junior high school I discovered the more “mature” comedy records of George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Cheech and Chong.
When I was a kid, back in the dark ages before VCRs, HBO, and Comedy Central, in order to see the great comedians, you had to watch the three major talk show hosts: Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, and Johnny Carson. I would rush home to see Mike Douglas in the afternoons and Merv was on in the evening, but Carson, the King of Comedy, was on after my bedtime, so I would listen to The Tonight Show through the slats in the hall door while my parents thought I was asleep. If I laughed too loud my mom would shout, “Go to bed.”
The old-timer comedians like Buddy Hackett, Jack Benny, and Henny Youngman that I loved to watch on tv when I was a kid frequently spoke about something called “working the Catskills.” Since there was no google back then, I asked my dad what the Catskills were. He said that they were mountains in upstate New York (hills really, by California standards) where people from New York City used to go on vacation.
Decades later I was watching a PBS documentary on the history of Jewish Comedy in America which went into great detail about the Catskills (also known as the Borsch Belt). One of the people featured in the documentary was Jan Murray. I thought, “Jan Murray is Jewish. Who knew?” Then it dawned on me–the overwhelming majority of the comedians I revered as a kid were Jewish. And as I think about it now, the non-Jewish comedians from my youth like Cosby, Bob Hope, George Carlin, Red Skelton, Flip Wilson, Danny Thomas, and Johnny Carson are really the exceptions.
by Richard W. Bray
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
I love you when you’re mean
I love you when you’re mad
I love you when you’re angry
I love you when you’re bad
Love is not a smorgasbord
For me to pick and choose
Always have to clean my plate
When I’m digesting you
I love you when you pout
I love you when you cry
I love you when you’re dirty
I’ll love you till I die
Love is not a sometimes thing
Love is not a switch
I love you as an angel
I love you as a bitch
by Richard W. Bray
Somebody finished
All the drink
Somebody puked
In the sink
And who trashed your apartment
And filled it up with stink?
Hell is the hunger
That’s taking you down
Hell is the hope
That cannot be found
Hell is waking up
On the dirty side of town
Cashed in your soul
For the lowest bid
Somebody ditched your wife
And abandoned your kids
Always had a reason
For everything you did
Hell is the hunger
That’s taking you down
Hell is the hope
That cannot be found
Hell is waking up
On the dirty side of town
Opportunity melts into
A big pile of sad
Don’t blame your mother
And don’t blame your dad
Somebody threw away
Every chance you ever had
Hell is the hunger
That’s taking you down
Hell is the hope
That cannot be found
Hell is waking up
On the dirty side of town
by Richard W. Bray
Simone De Beauvoir
What about romantic love? Is it merely, as the scientists say, a trick played upon us by the chemicals in our brains, an evolutionary mechanism that provides a bond that will last long enough to increase a human offspring’s chances for survival? Yes, probably. But so what? Romantic love’s utilitarian origins don’t preclude it from being good and beautiful.
There are several indications that the experience of heterosexual romantic love is in many ways different for men and women? (I should point out, however, that men and women have many more characteristics in common than we have differences. We are not two separate species. Furthermore, there are myriad variations within members of each gender. And both nature and nurture account for differences between men and women: men’s and women’s brains function somewhat differently and, across cultures, we tend to be socialized in very different ways.)
Several years ago, Johnny Carson asked cartoonist Kathy Guisewhite: “What’s the difference between men and women?”*
Guisewhite replied: “I really don’t think men sit around discussing women the way that women are constantly obsessing about men. You know, we’re constantly asking each other, ‘Why are they like that?’ or ‘Why do they do that?’”
Guisewhite has a point. Women certainly do spend more time talking about men than men spend talking about women. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. And for most of Western history women were legally and socially subservient to men, passed along as chattel from father to husband. This is still their situation in many parts of the world.
When your very existence is dependent upon pleasing someone who is bigger and stronger than you are, someone who has the legal right to assault you at any time, knowing your oppressor becomes an essential survival skill.
In her book The Second Sex, French feminist icon Simone De Beauvoir describes “The Woman in Love”
Since she is anyway doomed to dependence, she will prefer to serve a god rather than obey tyrants—parents, husband, or protector. She chooses to desire her enslavement so ardently that it will seem to her the expression of her liberty; she will try to rise above her situation as inessential object by fully accepting it; through her flesh, her feelings, her behavior, she will enthrone him as supreme value and reality: she will humble herself to nothingness before him. Love becomes for her a religion (The Second Sex 643).
De Beauvoir chooses an epigraph for “The Women in Love” by Lord Byron which declares that romantic love is “to a man’s life, a thing apart”, while it constitutes “woman’s whole existence.” This is not entirely true, of course. Most men do fall in love, and a few of us have even died from a broken heart.
But how many men do you suppose would go out and buy a book like Relationship Rescue by Dr. Phil?
*Carson and Guisewhite quotations are reconstructed from my fallible memory
by Richard W. Bray
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with your girlfriend
I do it because I’m your friend
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with your girlfriend
I won’t stop till you comprehend
She’s snooty and snotty
And hurtful and mean
She’s hateful and haughty
And gross and obscene
She’s pompous pretentious
And full of manure
A definite menace
She smells like a sewer
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with your girlfriend
To help you is all I intend
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with your girlfriend
You’ll see that I’m right in the end
Her charm is a lie
She’s not all she seems
I look in her eyes
And I see all my dreams
She’s sexy and graceful
And lovely and free
Why’d she pick you when
She could’ve had me?
by Richard W. Bray
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