Those Who Help Themselves

I wish I had some beautiful story to tell today, but I'm afraid I don't. It was a highly ordinary day. I went to my ten o'clock history and legend class, where the instructor discussed a theory as regards the earliest and only arguably historical dynasties of China. The theory was as follows: the Shang believed that di--perhaps translatable as heaven, god, or some supreme ancestor--was the source of good stuff. The successor dynasty, the Zhou (or so the theory goes) introduced a strong note of "di helps those who help themselves"--or at least who have certain virtuous qualities, referred to as de (the same de as in the Dao de jing). Therefore, any text purporting to be from the Shang that places a whole lot of emphasis on de is very likely to be a Zhou period forgery. It's an interesting theory, though one would really like to see more evidence. Does de ever appear in undisputed Shang dynasty inscriptions, and in what context...etc.

After class, I had the overly-optimistic fantasy that I might be able to complete the next step in my department-changing efforts. The ladies of the history department were out to lunch. In fact I saw them leaving just as I was going in. I had some tasty fried wide rice noodles, just like chow fun at home only tastier, for my own lunch. Bought some more books. Headed back to the history department, and waited until the ladies arrived. They know me now as the troublemaker who wants to switch departments. The one I have to deal with is always angry and impatient. Wanting to switch departments is a sign of great disloyalty, I suppose. She read my petition, insisted that several sentences of it were wrong, and also said that before I brought a revised version back to her I would have to take it upon myself to get my history department advisor's signature. Damn. I was kind of hoping she would help me with that.

I hung around until half-past two, but the class I was planning to go to had been rescheduled to a different building to hear someone else's lecture, which started twenty minutes before the class did. So by the time I found out about that, I was already late and decided to just screw it and go home.

And that was just about it for the day. At home I worked on the amusing round doormat I am crocheting out of plastic bags, and then I got some actual work done, translating some passages from Chavannes' introduction from French into--well, I was going to try to translate them into Chinese, but it turns out that brain doesn't like trying to forge connections between two different foreign languages, and prefers to pass through English first. Isn't that funny and strange? Mulish brain just acted stubborn and wouldn't do the thing. So I translated them into English and decided to leave Chinese for another day.

My news pick is this absurd story about a UW instructor who likened George W. Bush to Hitler in a soon-to-be published article and now has legislators baying for his blood and trying to get him fired. It's one of those tiny indications that the freedom of speech Americans take for granted is constantly being eroded in small and quiet ways. The university defended its choice to hire him and didn't cut the guy off, but the legislators are pretty mad at the university for that choice.

Of course, it would be easier to argue on the guy's behalf if he weren't promoting a highly unlikely and totally cracked conspiracy involving lots of racy speculation and not enough research. (I don't think that's what's bothering the legislators though. They'd be even more against it if it were even more convincing--I'm betting.) Seems like a good example of the decay of academic standards to me, but on the other hand, he did serve up a pretty funny insult:

"[I'm] not comparing them as people, [I'm] comparing the Reichstag fire to the demolition of the World Trade Center, and that's an accurate comparison that I would stand by," he said.

He added: "Hitler had a good 20 to 30 IQ points on Bush, so comparing Bush to Hitler would in many ways be an insult to Hitler."