Just Another Poor Boy

Just Another Poor Boy Off to Fight A Rich Man’s War

I heard from my sister-in-law this weekend, about my oldest nephew winning a school prize. He’s a brilliant kid, and according to the school website – of course his school has a website – planning to major in drama and political science. The drama I knew about. He’s got a beautiful singing voice and can act as well. But political science? Not politics, I hope, I’m thinking, as I read this bio –

I’ve got two nephews, actually, this one and his younger brother, and they are both brilliant, and both beautiful (have been, ever since they were tiny kids, but we don’t tell them this anymore, you know, cause you don’t once they get to be sixteen and seventeen), and I know everyone thinks that about their own, that they’re both brilliant and beautiful, but these two really are.

And how I want them safe from this damn war, and from George Bush’s America. I want them out of that world.

I do realize that the two of them likely are safe. And that my kid, six now, also beautiful, also brilliant, she’s probably safe too.

But then I think about the kids that aren’t. The one from my Honors World Lit class last fall, who came into my class a week before the final to tell me that he would miss class on Friday, because he was driving to Little Rock to enlist in the Infantry.

“God, no,” I said, involuntarily.

He flinched: apparently, he had been getting that reaction a lot.

“Why?” I asked, unable to stop myself.

“I just think it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “I think we owe it to our country. To defend our country.”

I just gaped at him. I wanted to smack him up the side of the head and ask what the hell he had been listening to – Lee Greenwood? Rush Limbaugh? Did he think either of them were on their way to Iraq?

Instead I asked what his parents thought about this. (He was 18 years old, a sweet and lovely young boy, not extremely bright, considering he was in an honors class, but far from stupid.)

“They’re pretty mad,” he confessed.

“You really ought to think about it,” I said. “You really ought to talk to a few people who have been through this. Do you know anyone who’s been to a war?”

He said he didn’t. I told him about some people I knew about, who never had gotten over their wars. He wasn’t listening, though, and off he went. I haven’t heard about him since.

I think about him, who maybe isn’t as brilliant as my nephews, but surely his parents love him as much as we love them. I think about my student who went to Iraq, and has been back nearly a year now, and looks worse each time I see him. He wasn’t even wounded, not badly – the fingers on his left hand were cut when he was jumped from behind by an Iraqi with a bayonet, and the nerves were severed. The VA surgeons can’t fix the nerves, so he has no sensation in three of his fingers, and sometimes when he’s working on his truck he’ll smell something like bacon cooking and that’s how he’ll know he’s burning his fingers, but you know, other than that, no biggie there ( as he puts it).

No, the problem is his skin and his liver. And the VA doctors can’t figure out what’s up with those. His skin keeps peeling off – like all of it at once – and his liver is dying. Why? Who knows. Not the VA. Not George Bush. (Though I’m sure George is doing some hard work feeling this student’s pain.)

He’s about 23, this student. He thinks he might be dying, though the VA doctors won’t come out and say so. He’s hoping to finish his degree. He is brilliant. His family loves him like we love our nephews.

I’ve got another student. She’s got a four year old daughter. She’s being mobilized soon. Her mother’s going to take the four year old. Who will have to do without her mother for a year or two or forever.

And I know the arguments, believe me: I know my students all signed up in the big gamble: pay for my education and if you need me to defend my country, I will. They understood the deal when they took the money. I know that. So do they.

Here’s the thing, though.

(A) What kind of suck-ass deal is that? Most civilized countries educated their citizens without requiring them to put their fucking LIVES on the line in exchange.

(B) And second, you know, it would be different if there were any kind of justification for this war. If my students were giving up their lives, and making their children orphans, and the parents of all these soldiers were giving up their beloved children, for some kind of worthwhile cause, it would honestly be a different matter. But everyone knows this war is a lie. My student is dying for nothing. That four year old is being orphaned for nothing. Those parents are losing their sons for nothing. It’s unbearable.

It rained all Sunday in Fort Smith this weekend, a cold, foggy, grim rain. And that’s what I thought about.

News from Louisiana

Whenever I wonder why I left Louisiana, something like this shows up in the news to remind me.

Two kids standing in line for recess. One kid asks another kid why he’s got two mothers instead of a mom and dad. The kid explains it’s because his mothers are gay.

“What’s gay?” asks the first kid. (The two kids are seven years old.)

“Gay is when a girl likes another girl,” says the child of these two women.

Down swoops the teacher, screeching at the child of the two women – the son of the gay women – that gay is a bad word, that he shouldn’t use that kind of language in school – and send him to the office. He gets sent to a early morning “behavioral clinic” all the next week – starts at 6.45 in the morning – where he is forced to write “I will never say gay in school again” over and over.

And now? Because the mother of this child has objected to her seven year old son being told that what she is is bad and evil?

The teacher who did this to her son is suing the mother. For fifty thousand dollars. Because the mother defamed her.

Louisiana. What a fine state. Every ignorant redneck should move there.

http://www.365gay.com/newscon04/12/120104schoolSuit.htm

(Via Atrioshttp://atrios.blogspot.com/)

Okay Then

Not that Rush's faith-based listeners will care, but South Knox Bubba, one of my favorite Bloggers, points out why Rush is Wrong, as usual:

http://www.southknoxbubba.net/skblog/

This time Rush is making his old favorite claim about how Nature is the real source of pollution.

You remember this meme. Reagan picked it up, too, when he claimed that, you know, trees pollute? Rush is yapping about Mount St. Helens polluting, and how because it's polluting right now, and that's all natural and such...

Oh, go read the link. SKB does such a good job, you don't need to listen to me.

Ho Ho Ho

Here’s an interesting story: It’s from an Australian newspaper, citing a study published in psychiatric journal.

“In the December issue of the Psychiatric Bulletin, psychiatrist Lynda Breen wrote that the belief that Father Christmas "knows if you've been bad or good" helps teach children the difference between right and wrong.”

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11554218^1702,00.html

Dr. Breen is saying, from what I can tell, that teaching your kids to believe in Santa helps develop their moral character, because you can use Santa as a moral agent. Which I did often with my daughter* – as, for instance, when she was telling an obvious lie at age four.

I said, “Is that a lie?”

“No, it’s not,” she said, firmly, even though it obviously was.

“You know Santa crosses six presents off your list every time you tell a lie. You know that, don’t you?”

She gave me an extremely worried look. “Really?”

“Really.”

After a few moments of serious consideration, she asked, “How many presents do I have on my list?”

Now I suppose I used Santa the way Far Right Christians would use Mr. Jesus – as a kind of figure that wasn’t me, that knew when my kid was doing right or doing wrong.

But there are major differences between Santa and Mr. Jesus.

(1) Santa is a relatively benign threat. Screw up with Santa and he just won’t bring presents. Mr. Jesus will consign you to a lake of fire for ever and ever and ever. That’s sort of like threatening a four year old with a nuclear weapon, now, isn’t it?

(2) Santa goes away. That is, at about age five or six, the kid does, in fact, figure out that Santa’s not real. (Some kids will figure this out about Mr. Jesus, too, but many will not.) At this point the kid is in prime position to do an essential, important thing: internalize the moral code.

That’s vital. It’s vital because at this point the kid starts making herself act right. That is, the kid does what she should not because Jesus tells her to, but because she knows it is the right thing to do.

If the moral code is internalized, the kid has nothing to rebel against. If it’s Mr. Jesus or Daddy or the Pastor telling Kid what to do, Kid, come about age 13 or 14, is going to be rebelling up a storm. Or attacking herself or himself up a storm – some of them go that way. Or marrying an abuser – some go that way.

Or other things.

Dr. Breen also says that when kids figure out that Santa is mythical, this is also good for the kids – something I have also discovered to be true in my daughter’s case. She knows, now, that Santa, and the tooth fairy, and dragons, and so on, are all mythic critters, and this both interests her and gives her a kind of deep philosophical problem to wrangle with.

I'm all for giving six-year-olds deep philosophical problems to wrangle with, btw.

“Is Santa real?” she asks me.

“Well,” I say, “he’s real is a way. He’s real in the same way that love is real. Or fairness is real. Does fair exist?”

She thinks this over.

“Fair exists if people act fairly,” I say. (You can take the professor out of the classroom…). “Santa exists if enough people act like he does.”

She ponders this existentialist poser. Yes, I am giving my six year old existentialist fodder to chew on. And you know what? She likes it. She comes to me nine or ten days later and asks me if that is the same way people believe in heaven.

“Well, yes,” I say. “It is, I suppose.”

“So if enough people believe in heaven, does heaven exist?”

“Huh,” I say. “Good question. Jews don’t worry so much about heaven,” I point out, as a PSA. “Our business is mending this world.”

“I know, I know, I know. But if enough -- ”

“I don’t know,” I said, stumped by a six year old. “What do you think?”

“I think it might,” she said. Then she said, “Kate believes in Heaven.”

Kate’s the one at her school whose mother thinks God doesn’t like Halloween.

“Yeah?” I say.

“So do a lot of people at my school.”

“Well, Jews don’t not believe in heaven,” I say. “We just don’t think you should obsess about it all the time. We think if you’re always worrying about heaven, you know, it’s like always worrying about what you’re having for dessert. You don’t eat right if you’re always fixated on dessert. And also, it’s not what God made us for, heaven. He made us to mend this world.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And off she went again, still thinking deeply.



* I know, Jews aren’t supposed to have Santa. We have a Christian grandparent, so we do Santa too.

More Trouble from the Anti-Evolution Crowd

Dover, Pennsylvania joins the ranks of American public school systems teaching anti-evolution nonsense in its high schools:

“The school board has ordered that biology teachers at Dover Area High School make students "aware of gaps/problems" in the theory of evolution. Their ninth-grade curriculum now must include the theory of "intelligent design," which posits that life is so complex and elaborate that some greater wisdom has to be behind it."

(http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/11/30/MNGVNA3PE11.DTL)

The school board claims it’s just offering “intelligent design” as an “alternative,” but as everyone who has followed this intelligent design scheme knows, and as the proponents themselves admit further down in the article, this is just the latest in the Christian Right’s attempt to impose their religious worldview on the public school system.

Patricia Nason at the Institute for Creation Research, the world leader in creation science, said her organization and other activist groups are encouraging people who share conservative religious beliefs to seek positions on local school boards.

"The movement is to get the truth out," Nason said by telephone from El Cajon (San Diego County). "We Christians have as much right to be involved in politics as evolutionists. We've been asleep for two generations, and it's time for us to come back."

Emboldened by their contribution to President Bush's re-election, conservative religious activists are using intelligent design as a new strategy of attacking evolution without mentioning God, Scott said.

"There is a new energy as a result of the last election, and I anticipate an even busier couple of years coming on," Scott said.

She called intelligent design "creationism lite" masquerading as science. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 banned the teaching of creationism -- which holds that God created the world about 6,000 years ago -- in public schools on the grounds of separation of church and state.

John West of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the main sponsor and promoter of intelligent design, defended the theory he says addresses "evolution follies."

Look, if Conservative Christians/Fundamentalist Christians/Wingers of whatever stripe want to believe that God created the world in six days 6000 years ago, you know what? That’s their business.

If they want to corrupt our education system, and destroy our system of science, and make our future scientists less competent, well, that’s our problem.

They’re enemies of the truth, these people. And Bushco is their ally.

The article is a good one, btw – extremely thorough, and gives a list of other schools and counties that have jumped on this bandwagon.

And you'll know they are Christians...

This one's rich. Via Atrios, (http://atrios.blogspot.com/) we learn that the "networks won't run an ad by the UCC which says "like Jesus -- the United Church of Christ seeks to welcome all people, regardless of ability, age, race, economic circumstance or sexual orientation.""

In other words, a Christian church wants to run an ad saying they'll welcome everyone into their congregation (Hey -- What would Jesus do?), but CBS and NBC won't run the ad because, well, Christians -- and Bushco -- might get squeaky. Might think this means that the networks are, you know, approving of gay people or something. Heaven forbid that TV executives do anything, anything at that the Christian Right might not approve of.

What was that noise you were making about a liberal media again?

The original story is linked to Talking Points Memo:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_11_28.php#004131

Science Bad

Bushco is cutting funding for the National Science Foundation -- I’m shocked, I tell you! Shocked!

Why? Why, it’s to cut domestic spending, of course!

Not because science is evil or anything! Heavens no! Not because science is all about evil- uh – evolution and critical thinking and well, contradicts the Bible and stuff.

Couldn’t have anything to do with that.

It’s because we don’t have enough MONEY.

But we do, as the article points out, have enough money for such things as “the Yazoo Backwater Pumping Plant in Mississippi.”

Which oddly enough benefits the district of a couple of Republican senators, who are defending it:

“Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran of Mississippi, both Republicans, [say the project will save] lives and protect homes and businesses.”

“But Melissa A. Samet, a lawyer at American Rivers, an environmental group, said: "It's a horrible project. It will drain wetlands so that farmers can intensify production. In the process, it will damage natural resources that are vital to wildlife and clean water."”

Here’s the whole article about the cuts, in the NYTimes today.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics/30spend.html?oref=login&oref=login)

Concerned Women for America -- Honest!

Okay, there are some targets one should not pick on – as its says in the Torah, you don’t go tripping a blind guy, or making fun of total morons – but these women from the CWA are stepping up to the plate, and even if they are too ignorant to live, that makes’em fair game in my book.

In this essay, and I use the word loosely, Rachel Mafaffey and Eva Arl attempt to explain to us why mothers really ought to stay home with their children. (http://www.cwfa.org/articledisplay.asp?id=6606&department=BLI&categoryid=commentary)

Let me note, for the record, that while I don’t see any pressing need for mothers to spend all their time at home with their children, or home-school them, or sew all their clothing, and make all their own bread, and preserve all their own fruit, meanwhile running a successful business out of the garage, if women want to do that sort of thing, it is perfectly cool with me. Because (here’s the deal, Ms. Mafaffey and Ms. Arl) that’s what feminism is actually about: women get to do whatever it is they want to do with their own lives.

Can I repeat that one time?

Feminism means that a woman’s life is her life. It means her body is her body. She gets to decide what to do with both of those things. If she decides she wants to spend her life raising a passel of kids, that’s her decision. If she decides she wants to be a professor of anatomy, that’s cool too. If she wants to be a stripper, a law professor, a snowboarder, a rock star, a veterinary assistant, whatever. It’s up to her. <-- This is the actual feminist position.

Ms. Mafaffey and Ms. Arl, however, in their essay, state the traditional anti-Feminist strawman position:

“Feminists tell us that we don't need a man to be successful and that traditional marriage is the ultimate oppressor of women. Groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) claim women need a career to be fulfilled. To them, it is demeaning for women to care for their babies, and therefore we should reject the roles of wife and mother for work outside the home.”

Okay. What feminists said that? Can you cite them? It may be true that feminists mainly agree that women don’t need “a man to be successful” – but come now, Ms. Mafaffey and Ms. Arl. Are you going to argue that women do need men to be successful? That without a man in her life a woman cannot be counted as succeeding?

And, depending on how you’re defining “traditional marriage,” the second part of your claim may or may not be something a feminist at some point may have said.

But everything after that is just balderdash made up about feminists by groups such as the CWA.

And that paragraph is just the one of the many problems with this essay.

Take, for example, their dubious assumption that women are working outside the home in order to “be fulfilled.”

Take that claim and tell it to the woman that fill my classrooms – the ones working 36 hours a week at Wal-Mart and Goody’s and Wendy’s. Ask them just how fulfilled they are, when they get home to their passel of children every night, and how happy they are about their “choice” to work outside the home.

No, Ms. Mafaffey and Ms. Arl, despite what you have learned from Dr. Laura and from your minister and whoever else it was, most women aren't working to "be fulfilled" or because they are evil, selfish critters, or because the feminists have brainwashed them into thinking it will make them happy, or because they hate babies or whatever. Most women work for the same reason most men work, you idiots: because they need the money.

Here's an idea: Why don't the two of you get a job one time, earn yourselves few bucks, and buy yourselves a clue?

Just a suggestion, mind you.

Yer all Big Liberals Over There!

Not that many of us aren't liberal, here at the university -- but we aren't, in fact, all liberals; and those of us who are liberal aren't liberal because we're sheep, you know. We're liberal because we've read widely and deeply and have thought about things, have evaluate ideas and have decided to be liberals.

Others of us -- like the guy in the office next to mine, for instance, who runs the campus rifle club, and some of the folks over in economics and a few in History -- have read widely and deeply and have thought about things, have evaluate ideas and have decided to be conservative, or libertarian, or socialist, or whatever.

But the folks at American Enterprise Institute aren't, of course, much interested in what's actually happening on campuses in America. They're interested in what they can sell. And George Will, among others, is perfectly happy to help them sell it, citing their study in his column in the Washington Post recently, (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15606-2004Nov26.html) as well as agreeing with Lakoff, the guy who thinks we just need more professors on campus who favor two-parent families (because, you know, most of us liberals hate two-parent families) and think non-Western literature is crap.

But here's a rebuttal of their flawed study that does an excellent job of showing exactly why George Will is an idiot for buying this soap job:
( http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V13/23/plissner-m.html)

Well, he's not an idiot. I shouldn't say that. He's a patsy. He wants to believe that the Evil Liberals are Taking Over the Universities.

So he's happy to read a study that confirms his Worldview.

Now why he wants to believe that, I don't know.

Maybe because it makes him feel better about his memories of all the professors he was not smarter than in school? Maybe because he feels inferior about his relative lack of graduate degrees?

Who knows. Whatever it is, it doesn't excuse this sort of sloppy thinking.

Hey, You Voted for Him

Remember how proud he was of all that Pell Grant money he had given out, so that all those lucky duckies who had lost their jobs to outsourcing, or you know, whatever, could go back to community colleges and retrain to be, well, surgical techs (and make six bucks an hour)?

Now that King George II is in, and doesn't have to worry about getting your smelly little vote, you can wave bye-bye to that money:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/11/23/us_aid_for_college_students_slashed?mode=PF

Color me really shocked.

More Fun from Georgia

So a high school principal in Georgia -- yep, the same Georgia where they're putting stickers on the textbooks advising their high school students that evolution (or evil-ution, as they like to pronounce it here in Arkansas) is "just a theory" -- got on the intercom and read his students what he thought was a very clever poem (what I guess he thought was a poem) which no doubt his minister or his brother in law the deacon or some other buddy emailed him. Then he was all surprised when a number of parents objected. Here's the link to the news story (http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/state/10299352.htm)

This school-prayer crowd puzzles me. First off, their own guy was against public prayer. Says so right there in their own text -- Matthew 6:6: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." Not: "Get you to a a public school, and gather ye round a flagpole, and pray ye in public for the edification of the unbelievers, verily, with much outcry ye shall do it!"

Second, and more importantly, there are no rules against praying in public schools. Little Wyatt can pray all he wants in school (though he can't obstruct the hallways while he's doing it). Sallie Mae can read her little New Testament to her heart's content (so long as she's not doing it during biology class). What can't happen is the Principal of the school, being a paid agent of the state, cannot lead the school in prayer, or organize a Bible session that has as its aim leading people to Christ: because if he did that, then he would be, as an agent of the state, endorsing a particular religion: saying that that religion was the true and correct one.

Christians obviously would not want him doing that if he were, say, a Wiccan, or a Muslim, or a Jew -- teaching their children to pray to, say, Allah, now, would they?

Why can they not see that those of us who don't worship Mr. Jesus would not want our children being forced to pray to their God?

Well, because they don't see us as real, actual people, of course. I do know that. It just really makes me nuts at times.

Anyway, here's the text of the poem our obtuse principal in Georgia read, which the urban legend site Snopes( ttp://www.snopes.com/language/document/newpray.htm )can give you the history of:


THE NEW SCHOOL PRAYER

Now I sit me down in school
Where praying is against the rule
For this great nation under God
Finds mention of Him very odd.

If Scripture now the class recites,
It violates the Bill of Rights.
And anytime my head I bow
Becomes a Federal matter now.

Our hair can be purple,
orange or green,
That's no offense;
it's a freedom scene.

The law is specific,
the law is precise.
Prayers spoken aloud
are a serious vice.

For praying in a public hall
Might offend someone with no faith at all.
In silence alone we must meditate,
God's name is prohibited by the state.

We're allowed to cuss and dress like freaks,
And pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks.
They've outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible.
To quote the Good Book makes me liable.

We can elect a pregnant Senior Queen,
And the 'unwed daddy,' our Senior King.
It's "inappropriate" to teach right from wrong,
We're taught that such "judgments" do not belong.

We can get our condoms and birth controls,
Study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles.
But the Ten Commandments are not allowed,
No word of God must reach this crowd.

It's scary here I must confess,
When chaos reigns the school's a mess.
So, Lord, this silent plea I make:
Should I be shot; My soul please take!
Amen

(Among other things, it's offensive because it's such a REALLY bad poem!)

Flea over at One Good Thing (http://buggydoo.blogspot.com) has some thoughts on Mr. Falwell's little joke about the National Order of Witches( http://mediamatters.org/items/200411230011).

She's also designed some teeshirts to go with his joke. Cool teeshirts, much cooler than his joke, and she's donating 10% of the profits to NOW (the actual NOW), so I think we all ought to go buy some, especially those of us who know wiccans:

http://www.cafepress.com/buggydoo

And even those who don't and who just really don't like Falwell and his ilk.

They'll make great Winterfair, Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Solstice gifts.

Go and buy!

Just a Theory

Here's a link for those of you in Cobb County, Georgia, and certain counties in Kansas and Wisconsin and Utah and other fine places in these United States where local school boards have decided that kiddies ought to be made aware that evolution is, after all, just a theory. (It's Cobb County, as I recall, that is compelling schools to put stickers on their science books saying that evolution is just a theory. Other places are doing other charming things. )

Anyway, here's the link, for those of you who would like to fight back:

http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/textbookdisclaimers/

More Fine News

And more fine news: Christian Pharmacists who won’t give women birth control pills because, you know, Jesus wants them to have babies. And states that have made such behavior legal.

(http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=710&u=/usatoday/20041109/pl_usatoday/druggistsrefusetogiveoutpill&printer=1)

And of course this is no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the Right-to-Lifers.
From the article:

“We have always understood that the battles about abortion were just the tip of a larger ideological iceberg, and that it's really birth control that they're after also," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood (news - web sites) Federation of America.

"The explosion in the number of legislative initiatives and the number of individuals who are just saying, 'We're not going to fill that prescription for you because we don't believe in it' is astonishing," she said.”

True Knowledge

So I take the kid to Aikido last night.

As I mentioned previously, it's been a rough week. In fact, it's been a rough month. We've not been making it to Aikido much. But we made it last night. The kid's dojo has three sensei, and the senior one was teaching last night, the one I like best; and most importantly of all, the idiot woman who spends the whole time talking on the cell to her idiot relatives was not there, so I could get some serious reading done during class time -- but I didn't.

Because it was nice to just sit in the balcony over the dojo and watch the five to seven year olds in the giant dojo in their tiny ghis doing their Aikido stances and rolls and throws while the giant sensei treated them so seriously and the rain pounded down outside and just be there then for while and not have to be anywhere else.

Then the sensei said something I liked*: he said, "When you have the black belt, only then are you really ready to learn."

All the kids in this class, of course, just have white belts. (The very first belt in Aikido.) Don't know if they knew what he meant.

But I did. It's exactly what Socrates meant when he went around Athens telling people he didn't know a goddamn thing, and what Jesus meant when he said you had to be like a child if you wanted to get to heaven and what the Chinese meant when they said when you reach the foot of the mountain more mountains appear and what I mean when I tell my students that having a Ph.D. only means you know how much there is to find out.

Or -- as my best professor in graduate school taught me, one cold November day sort of like this one -- the best attitude for anyone, when confronted with the knowledge that he or she does not understand something, is that of the Zen student: "I approach you seeking knowledge."

It's an attitude more of us out here in America need to adopt, I'm thinking.

*Actually he said several cool things, another one being that sensei, which I had always thought meant teacher, actually means one who goes before. It was an enlightening evening, altogether.