Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Thomas Paine: Someone you should get to know

I just read a fairly painful biography of Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of the Modern Nations by Craig Nelson). However, despite the technical difficulty of getting through the text, I'm really glad I stuck it out, just for the sake of getting to know about this amazing individual.

I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of American History is shamefully thin. So forgive me if I go mushy about something everyone else already knows. I've decided they should assign Common Sense as required reading in high school American History, and I'm looking forward to reading Rights of Man.

Paine was a revolutionary among revolutionaries, a visionary among visionaries. In a community of extraordinary enlightenment thinkers, he was able to surpass all of their abilities to break out of the prejudices of the age.

This is a man who could see past monarchy in a time when it was taken for granted. Not so special...all of those revolutionaries did. But unlike those more commonplace icons like Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton, etc., he also championed universal suffrage (i.e. not property-based voting rights), abolitionism, feminism, something like Social Security and a one-time grant to young adults to start out in life. And he got himself into a lot of trouble for advocating Deism as opposed to the more narrow organized Christianity.

The breadth of his knowledge and vision is mind-boggling. He designed working bridges, wrote on economics, political science, religion, law. In his own time his writings were both blockbuster best-sellers and banned on two continents. Though he could have gotten rich on his published works, he deliberately refused royalties, in order to reduce the printing costs and make his work accessible to all. He was an active participant in both the American and French Revolutions (and was even a legislator in France until things got really nutty, when he was locked up for 8 months, escaping execution by a sheer accident).

His advanced thinking got him many friends in the most advanced circles. But his intellectual honesty also ended up alienating many of those same friends, as they could not or did not care to understand his meanings. In addition, interested parties published twisted interpretations of his works, which often created violent mobs against them.

As a society we nominally espouse many of the principles first set forth by Thomas Paine. But if he were to come back today and state the same things he did then, I suspect he'd still be controversial, misunderstood and condemned. Can you imagine anyone today proposing that every young adult should, as a right, be officially handed, let's say, $10,000 so that they could start a business or go to college or do whatever they needed to, to become a productive member of society?

I found this particular biography (which I actually listened to on CD) very hard to follow. It roughly follows the major chunks of his life: early life in England to age 37 in 1774; participation in the American revolution; return to Enlightenment gentleman's life in England; participation in the French Revolution; and return to America. But within these chunks, the text jumps around a lot in time, and not for any good reason, as far as I can see. The jumps seemed to me more like a stream of consciousness rather than in the interests of following any clear themes. The one thing that I found extremely valuable about the book is that it quotes liberally from Paine's works and correspondence, which really gave a good feel for his ideas and his historical context. Amazon reviewers gave the book 4 1/2 stars, though, so maybe my frustration is just because I generally don't read history books.

As one tidbit of trivia, after reading some of this material, I realized that there are several references to Paine's works in the preamble to The MTA Song (which you can listen to here)

I'm adding Thomas Paine to my list of people I'd like to meet, if they ever invent a time machine.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Labor Day Greetings

I was cleaning out my email spam folder when I noticed something surprising. I had several spam emails with the subject "Happy Labor Day" and "Labor Day e-Card".

Now, do I actually believe that the emails actually had something to do with Labor Day? Of course not. Did I even click through to the links in the emails, to see what they were really trying to sell me? Certainly not.

What I found interesting, though, was the fact that some spammer actually thought that Labor Day was something that would get a victim's attention. Spam subjects often address deep human fears: Body part size. Accessibility of prescription drugs. Finding Love. And now...labor.

I did a whois search at Sam Spade for the URLs that were linked in the message, and it looks like they lead back to US service providers. In other words, the originators of this particular spam do not seem to be in Eastern Europe or Nigeria or whatever. This would appear to be home grown, culturally-sensitive spam.

Apparently spammers are betting that Americans are starting to recognize that their labor is something to worry about or maybe even celebrate. Why else spam about it?

You might answer my observation by pointing out that spammers simply thought that people, having a day off, would be more likely to be on their computers and responding to spam. But I don't recall ever receiving a Memorial Day greeting or a July 4th greeting or even a New Year's greeting. Labor Day seems to be something special that spammers are guessing would attract people's attention. In my books, that's a good sign.