Racist and Cowardly Statements by Michele Bachmann

According to the Washington Post, Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann reacted to pending executive action on immigration reform with the following statement:

"The social cost will be profound on the U.S. taxpayer — millions of unskilled, illiterate, foreign nationals coming into the United States who can’t speak the English language."

And how does she back up her offensive use of the word 'illiterate'? She claims she heard it from 'American Hispanics on the border". Apparently she thinks she can escape responsibility for her racist comments by blaming them on people from the same ethnic group she is attacking. That's cowardly.

Same Old Paranoia About the ACA

This morning I decided to catch up on the tempest in a tea pot surrounding Jonathan Gruber and his comments on the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  As far as I can tell, the controversy is about old videos where Gruber laments the fact that political gamesmanship was required in negotiating the wording of the ACA so that it fit the conventions mandated by the Congressional Budget Office to avoid being classified as a tax increase. I'm not sure why this gamesmanship is a surprise to anyone because determining how to phrase a bill is part of the negotiating process that leads to its creation. Legislators know phrasing is critical because as the New York Times points out the difference between a law being labeled a tax increase or something else eventually comes down to how it's worded.  Phrase it one way and it's a tax increase, phrase it differently and it's a penalty.  The thing is, at the time the ACA was created both Democrats and the Republicans passed the bill fully aware of its wording and how important that was.

It's too bad Gruber didn't realize how important his own words were when he commented "people are too stupid to understand the difference" but I guess we'll just have to live with it. Nothing has really changed - the ACA is in place, it's withstood some very withering attacks and it's finally starting to do some good. Now is the time to build on that success, not search for conspiracies that don't exist.

Duane Harkness

What is the Meaning of a Text?

At a recent meeting of the U District Philosophy Cafe we discussed various theories of how a person might determine the meaning of a religious text. In my opinion, theories of textual interpretation fall along a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum you've got formalists who claim meaning is contained within the text itself. This is a static meaning that is independent of the context within which the text was either written or read. Formalist meaning is 'embedded' in the text and it is the reader's job to 'extract' it as objectively as possible. At the other end of the spectrum you have subjectivists who claim meaning is defined exclusively by how a reader reacts to the text. This reaction is determined by the person's unique cultural, historical and psychological background. To a subjectivist the text itself has no inherent meaning because a new meaning is created every time a person reads it.

I don't agree with the formalist position. I don't think it is ever possible to eliminate a reader's psychological and sociohistorical background from the reading process. If I'm afraid of wolves, my reading of Little Red Riding Hood is going to be very different from someone who was raised by wolves. Our readings will be different no matter how much psychological therapy or academic training I go through. In fact, if I go through wolf recovery therapy that is going to have its own unique affect on how I read the text. I also don't buy the idea that we can create an objective method (such as New Criticism) that can lead us past our personal biases to an objective reading. There is no such thing as the view from nowhere.

That said, I don't fully agree with the subjectivists either. Meaning doesn't lie solely in the realm of the reader's private psychology. If that were the case, it would be impossible for a reader to discuss the meaning of a text with someone else. The closest we could ever get to a public conversation about textual meaning would be a comparison of the social, historical and psychological backgrounds that led to our individual reactions. I think discussing the meaning of a text serves a unique and useful social purpose beyond just comparing our psychologies.  For me, meaning is neither a static essence embedded in the text nor the simple sum of emotions experienced by a reader at a given moment in time. Rather it is a complex, distributed, dynamically changing assembly that includes many interrelated components such as the intent of the author, the historical background from which the text arose, the psychology of the reader and even physical characteristics of the text itself such as font and paragraph structure. Some of these factors are static but others such as the sociohistoric background of the reader are dynamic. Interpreting a text is the process of assembling these components into a coherent and useful whole. 

I thought about discontinuing this blog and starting a new one because I had changed e-mail accounts and didn't know how to re-configure blogger to use the new one. Fortunately I found a post describing how to do that so this is now my active blog again. Sorry for any confusion.