James M. Redwine

english

Life Sentences

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When I was an undergraduate at Indiana University I wavered between majoring in English or Psychology. I ultimately concluded a life spent seeking answers to life’s mysteries from mice running mazes held less promise than one trying to find wisdom hidden in the words of pundits. Over the years since college I have often questioned my choice. The current hollow clanging of brass over Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford is only the most recent struggle of yin and yang between my two choices.

Attempted rape is a terrible crime and a false accusation of attempted rape is a terrible tragedy. Both can result in a life sentence of anger, fear, frustration and loss of control. And loss of personal control is the true source of the pain caused by either circumstance. Psychologists have cautioned parents for years to avoid pinning a child down. Such behavior can result in lifelong fear and angst.

And it does not take a psychiatrist to explain how being falsely accused can permanently damage a person. Most humans have been or will be falsely accused of something and can relate to the frustration of trying to disprove a negative. Such an unfortunate circumstance is made worse the greater the false accusation is spread. Of course, it is just as debilitating to be injured and to have one’s complaint ignored or disbelieved.

Unfortunately, Dr. Blasey-Ford and Judge Kavanaugh have become casualties of people who have convinced themselves that the greater good of controlling the U.S. Supreme Court overcomes any concern about destroying lives along the way. Blasey-Ford and Kavanaugh are just two white mice trapped in a maze of self-righteousness. We have seen this experiment before and will surely see it again.

Cosmogonism

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My great friend from our days at Indiana University, Dr. Walter Jordan, has an eclectic bent and a background in science. Over the years he has patiently striven to exposit for me numerous scientific phenomena. Occasionally I get it. However, even though I began college with the goal of defeating the Soviet Union in the space race, reality sat in during my freshman physics class.

It was not my fault that physics and I fell out of love when I was an eighteen-year-old freshman at Oklahoma State University. It was O.S.U.’s fault for seating the students alphabetically which resulted in my sitting right next to Dana Darlene Reno who was not only a fellow student but also Miss Oklahoma 1961. Somehow my mind never quite focused on the exciting mysteries of space and time. As for Miss Reno, I am fairly certain her ability to concentrate was not similarly impacted.

Regardless, it turned out that the formulation of sentences suited my abilities better than the formation of formulas. English and psychology were substantially less confounding to me than cascading atoms. However, my friend Walt has never given up hope that the light of scientific discovery might seep through my dark layers of linguistics. In fact, his most recent effort to lift the veil from my frontal lobe involved human speech and evolution. For Christmas Dr. Jordan sent me a copy of Tom Wolfe’s new book, The Kingdom of Speech, which points out that Charles Darwin’s claim that Natural Selection is the cosmogonism for the human race is disputable.

Darwin dearly wanted his theory to be the “Theory of Everything” (that’s the definition of cosmogonism) when it came to Homo sapiens. However, according to Tom Wolfe’s book, not only does Natural Selection not explain everything in Man’s development, Darwin was not even the first to have the idea. Wolfe posits that Darwin usurped the theory of Evolution from Alfred Russell Wallace and then spent the rest of his life, Darwin’s, trying to justify his chicanery.

The real problem for Darwin and numerous others such as the contemporary guru Noam Chomsby, was and is language. If Natural Selection is the total answer to Man’s rise from amoeba to atomic power, there should be gradations of speech such as from apes to humans; there are not says Wolfe.

Well, Gentle Reader, I know you might prefer, as did I, to daydream about things other than the lack of evidence for the progression of speech from specie to specie to us. If so, blame Walt. He is the one who sent me the book. I only read it because Peg threatened to have me clean the attic if she caught me with any idle time.