Caleb Crain

Oregon, free state

Just a few days after posting, my chart is out of date. On May 2, the Oregon Senate approved a bill authorizing same-sex domestic partnerships (link via Towleroad). Since the Oregon House has already approved it, and the governor is expected to sign, I ought to add another line to my chart:

2007 Oregon

1844 Oregon

To be consistent, actually, I should add in the right column all the states and territories that outlawed slavery between “1818 Illinois” and “1844 Oregon.” In other words, no sooner did I wonder why the pattern I’d noticed hadn’t yet “been broken by the passage of gay-union laws in states like California, low in the right column not because they abolished slavery later but because they didn’t exist until later,” than Oregon broke it for exactly that reason.

Abolition and gay marriage

Four years ago, I wondered on this blog whether 18th-century abolition causes 21st-century gay marriage. Or, to put it less mystifyingly, and more precisely, I wondered if the order in which states abolished slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would predict the order in which they instituted gay marriages or civil unions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first. At the time, I only had two data points, Vermont and Massachusetts, but I predicted that New Hampshire would legalize gay unions before New York would, preconceptions about the isle of Manhattan notwithstanding. Today the New Hampshire legislature passed a bill authorizing same-sex unions, which the governor is expected to sign.

Not that I’m the sort to say I told you so or anything. Nonetheless, in triumph, I thought I’d revisit my data. Four years ago I came up with my 18th/19th-century list by ranking the states according to the proportions of slaves to total population reported in the 1790 census. That was laziness on my part; I did it because I didn’t have at hand a list of the years each state abolished slavery. I’m still lazy, but today such a list is readily available, so here’s a comparison based on slightly better 19th-century data and a few more years of 21st-century data: side-by-side tables of states in the order they instituted gay marriage or civil unions (through a court ruling or legislation) and in the order abolished slavery (through a constitutional provision, legislation, or a court ruling):

Advent of gay marriage or civil unions

1999 Vermont
2004 Massachusetts
2005 Connecticut
2006 New Jersey
2007 New Hampshire

Abolition of slavery

1777 Vermont
1780 Pennsylvania
1783 Massachusetts
1783 New Hampshire
1784 Rhode Island
1784 Connecticut
1799 New York
1802 Ohio
1804 New Jersey
1816 Indiana
1818 Illinois

Sources: Human Rights Campaign and Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860, qtd. by Afrolumens Project’s FAQ about slavery in Pennsylvania

As you can see, I went the extra mile and colorized the state names to make it easier to see the pattern. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but I think it’s a pretty striking one. I would have thought that by now the pattern would have been broken by the passage of gay-union laws in states like California, low in the right column not because they abolished slavery later but because they didn’t exist until later. But though California has come close, it hasn’t passed gay civil-union laws yet.

My new prediction, then: gay marriage in Pennsylvania, which looks overdue.

More on torture, sympathy, novels, and streaming media

My post earlier this month, on torture, novels, and human rights, has met with more response than my meanderings usually do: a response at Hermits Rock, and a post and a comments thread at the Valve. I’m also told that a recent book by David Griffith, A Good War Is Hard to Find, makes an argument similar to mine, and even starts by comparing the novel and movie versions of the torture scenes in Deliverance.

A few commenters at the Valve somehow figured out that I’m not a cognitive psychologist, alas. Fortunately, this morning I happened to stumble across some confirmation of my irresponsible hunches. Even though I didn’t know about it when I wrote my original post, it turns out that there is evidence that watching violence on screen changes the brain, according to "Mind-altering media," an article by Helen Philips in the 19 April 2007 issue of New Scientist:

Brain imaging and other physiological measures also reveal changes in emotional responses to violent images as a result of viewing violence or playing violent games. Bruce Bartholow of the University of Missouri, Columbia, has found that people with a history of game playing have a reduced brain response to shocking pictures, suggesting that people begin to see such imagery as more normal. Another study found that frontal lobe activity was reduced in youngsters who played a violent video game for 30 minutes, compared with those playing an equally exciting but non-violent game. This brain region is important for concentration and impulse control, among other things. A region called the amygdala, important for emotional control, was more aroused in those who experienced the violent game.

The article also references what is apparently overwhelming scientific documentation of a link between television viewing and increased aggressive behavior in children, so overwhelming that one developmental psychologist calls the ambivalence about the link in the mainstream press exasperating. The implication is that reporting on the research has been befuddled in much the way that reporting on smoking and global warming once were.

Of course this doesn’t necessarily prove the other lemma in my hypothesis, that reading novels is good for you.

What you can see of Grozny

In a "Diary" about a recent visit to Grozny, Chechnya, published in the 22 March 2007 issue of the London Review of Books, Tony Wood writes:

It is hard to tell exactly where Grozny begins: it still consists for the most part of rubble-strewn patches of ground. Low, single-storey houses lie in ruins, entangled in dry, dead bushes; apartment blocks stand ragged, some blown open by shells, others peppered with bullet holes, yet others consisting now of nothing more than fragments of concrete — one or two bones from a skeleton. For a few miles there is nothing but ruins and rubble, half-homes that would seem to be uninhabitable. But then you see washing hanging from balconies, lights in a window here or there. There have been many images of Grozny after the Russian bombardments of 1994-95 and 1999-2000, and the memory of them goes part of the way towards preparing you for the devastation. The biggest shock is not the scale of destruction but the idea that anyone at all can live in this desert; that anyone could have returned to it and wanted to start again.

Wood’s description was so grim that I found myself wondering, as I read it, whether the devastation was visible from space — by the satellites and low-flying planes that feed data to Google Maps, to be specific. I put the article aside a few weeks ago, meaning to check, but forgot to, in part, I think, because I feared that Wood must have been exaggerating. Could the destruction really have been of such a magnitude, and the evidence of it still so abundant half a dozen years after the last major bombardment? And then there was the possibility that Wood was telling the truth, but that the wreckage wouldn’t be identifiable from a pure vertical angle. Maybe, if you were looking straight down, a bombed building would look very much like an intact building. Or maybe it would look like an empty field, and be invisible for the opposite reason.

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. The maps at Google fully support Wood, and it’s very easy to identify a bombed building: the walls are often still standing, at least in part, but the roofs never are. So, when you look from above, instead of seeing the single homogeneous rectangle of a roof, you see all the elaboration of the building’s floor plan — the interstitial division of the building into individual rooms. They look uncannily like printer’s trays, the wooden boxes that typesetters once used to store their type, one compartment per letter.

For example:

Sometimes you can see more evidence of the building’s state in the shadow it casts. The sun seems to fall through this building as through a skeleton:

Sometimes all the buildings in an area are skeletons, but sometimes the skeletons are standing beside intact buildings on the same block, confirming Wood’s observation that some residents of Grozny are living next-door to rubble:

If Ronald Firbank were a peak-oil fanboy . . .

. . . he would probably have written cocktail-party banter along these lines:

"I heard a most interesting broadcast today," Mrs. Kelso said firmly. Fluffy entered the room carrying a dead mouse.

"Funny, I never noticed that place on the ceiling before," Irving said.

"If you’re looking at the place I am," Fabia said, "I think it’s the shadow of the knob on that lamp."

"You look terribly uncomfortable, Mr. Bush," Mrs. Kelso said. "Why don’t you sit on one of the less ornamental chairs. In the broadcast I heard," she went on, "a scientist explained how very close our planet is to being drained of its natural resources. He seemed to think it quite likely we would run out of them before men have learned how to harness solar energy or the tides, in which case we would all either starve or freeze."

"Oh, Mildred," Irving said, "he sounds like that discredited alarmist to me."

"I’m sure it made very good sense as he explained it," Mrs. Kelso said. "The first thing to go will be coal."

"We could all go down South and live, until the food started running low," Alice suggested pleasantly.

"Collard greens with salt pork? Not for me thank you," Fabia said.

"I don’t think it’s a joking matter," Mrs. Kelso said.

"Are these goblets Bohemian glass?" Marshall asked.

"Of course I don’t know why I’m criticizing you," Mrs. Kelso said, ignoring Marshall. "Being an inveterate apartment dweller, I’d be totally hamstrung if the electricity or the gas were to go off."

From chapter 3 of John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies (1969), which one hopes the NYRB folks will soon restore to print, along with their lovely editions of Schuyler’s sublime Alfred and Guinevere and his silly What’s for Dinner?. (Of course, and for the record, it probably won’t in fact be coal that goes first.)