Porcupine’s Gazette · PeterPorcupine.com

Iranian Government Stupidity

If you can’t suppress a population’s beliefs or traditions or language, the only thing left is to destroy their land and their historical objects. That’s what the Iranian government is doing to the people of Gilan province and their ancient trees:

[T]he authorities have ordered the cutting down of dozens of two-centuries-old mulberry trees in the northern Gilan province under the pretext of fighting local superstitions. Some people are placing candles and ribbons under them as part of an ancient ritual. It seems that the Iranian judiciary issued an order to stop this by cutting down the old trees.

The American poet Stanley Kunitz wrote about another tree massacre, one caused by a vulgar fool who sold his land to an oil company:

The War Against the Trees

The man who sold his lawn to Standard Oil
Joked with his neighbors come to watch the show
While the bulldozers, drunk with gasoline,
Tested the virtue of the soil
Under a branchy sky
By overthrowing first the privet-row.

Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids
Were but preliminaries to a war
Against the great-grandfathers of the town,
So freshly lopped and maimed.
They struck and struck again,
And with each elm a century went down.

All day the hireling engines charged the trees,
Subverting them by hacking underground
In grub-dominions, where dark summer’s mole
Rampages through his halls,
Till a northern seizure shook
Those crowns, forcing the giants to their knees.

I saw the ghosts of children at their games
Racing beyond their childhood in the shade,
And while the green world turned its death-foxed page
And a red wagon wheeled,
I watched them disappear
Into the suburbs of their grievous age.

Ripped from the craters much too big for hearts
The club-roots bared their amputated coils,
Raw gorgons matted blind, whose pocks and scars
Cried Moon! on a corner lot
One witness-moment, caught
In the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars.

The people of Gilan province should gather up every chip and branch they can find and make tools and works of art from them, and pass these on to their descendants. And they should especially take seeds and cuttings from the trees so that some day, when the local fools are out of power, a new generation of wishing trees can be planted to take the place of the old.

Why is that college president smiling?

Because he’s raking in a fortune. Higher education should exemplify moral leadership, but institutionally it too often presents little more than moral bankruptcy and corruption.

The Golden Journey to Samarkand

Porcupines are far more intellectual than people realize. We just wear our erudition lightly. We are slow moving, near sighted, and we spend a lot of time sitting and thinking. We are perfectly adapted for scholarship.

Samarkand State University Museum of Zoology.

This porcupine likes to explore universities around the world, and today is browsing Samarkand State University in Uzbekistan. (Good morning, Uzbekistan.) Unfortunately the English-language link on their website doesn’t seem to work, and PP’s learning does not extend to Russian or Uzbek.

They do prominently feature their zoological museum, of which we highly approve. Like every part of the former Soviet Union they are cursed with a number of ugly Modern buildings, but they have a few nice older ones as well.

Peter Porcupine would like to visit someday. Are there any English-language bloggers there?

Samarkand State University.

Planting Trees in Cameroon

Porcupines like trees. We therefore highly approve of this local project in Cameroon to replant trees in an area that has become deforested due to over-exploitation. (Good morning, Cameroon. It shall be such work as your descendants shall thank you for.)

George Wither says:

He that delights to Plant and Set,
Makes After-Ages in his Debt.

From: A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne: Quickened With Metricall Illustration (George Wither, 1635).

The Cult of Social Work

Academic departments of Social Work, like their kindred departments in Schools of Education, are more like cults than scholarly enterprises. FIRE reports today that the Binghamton University Department of Social Work is retaliating against a student who dared to challenge the cult’s leaders:

The department ordered the suspension of a master’s student for one year with no guarantee of return, required him to apologize, and demanded that he publicly disavow his own views after he put up posters challenging the department for having hired the executive director of the Binghamton Housing Authority (BHA)—an agency the student thought was responsible for social injustice.

Golden Kangaroos

Coins are often among the most beautiful emblems of any country’s identity. Herewith I begin a series of lovely examples. Today’s specimen: the 2008 one-ounce gold Kangaroo from Australia.

Australia's 2008 gold Kangaroo.

(Good morning, Australia.)

“The decision to ban the gnomes…”

That wins my prize for journalistic-phrase-of-the-day.

Ishmael on Individuality

The question of what makes something an individual—or conversely not an individual but a collection—is a long-standing one in philosophy. Melville offers this illustration in The Chase—Second Day:

They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.

Bierce and His Devil

“It’s getting hard for me to think of Ambrose Bierce as anything but the quintessential, though unrealized, poster boy for PTSD.” In the same way that Kay Jamison has gone back and identified many creative artists who suffered from manic-depression, I think the time has come, now that we have a better handle on it, to go back and identify people in the past who had PTSD. Jonathan Shay has made a good start. There are surely many more to be found.

The King is a Fink

Polite speech needs no legal protection. Insults do. I worry that a whole generation of Americans fails to understand this.

Very like a porcupine

I just wanted to live quietly in the woods.