Author Archives: Tin Man

VGC 140

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This weekend I had one of those transcendent experiences that doesn’t happen to me much anymore.

I went down to the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the 140th anniversary celebration of the Virginia Glee Club, the men’s chorus I sang with in college and law school. It was my first visit to Grounds (as we call the UVa campus) since my previous visit in 2003. I lived and/or worked at UVa from 1991 to 1999, so this weekend felt like a time warp, like the events of my life had been chopped up and rearranged in a different order. Things that happened in the 1990s seemed more real and recent to me than anything that has happened in the last decade.

I took Amtrak down to C’ville on Friday morning, checked into my room at the Red Roof Inn around 2 pm, and then made a beeline for the Rotunda. I had a few hours to kill before the weekend’s festivities started, and I wanted to take a long walk to see what had changed and what had stayed the same.

I walked around Central Grounds and saw the Special Collections Library, which is new since my last visit. More importantly, I visited the three dorms I lived in during undergrad. I didn’t actually go in, but I took lots of photos.

Neurons in my brain associated with different memories kept firing in random order. I was at UVa from age 17 to age 25, so while walking around on Saturday, I’d suddenly feel 19 years old, and then 17, and then 18, then 22, and so on. Years in my life were more distinct back then, because I changed so much during that time; I was a very different person in my second year of college than I was in my first, and I was even more different during my third and fourth years than I was in either of the first two. In different years I lived in different places and had different friends and was part of different social groups. It wasn’t really until my third year that my college life began to gel.

I saw so many people this weekend that I hadn’t seen in ages, and a few that I hadn’t even remembered until this weekend. I got to reconnect with four different conductors. There was a reception. There was a concert. There was a banquet. There was lots of singing. There was lots of drinking. I ate a Gusburger at 2 in the morning. I visited the Glee Club house. I got very little sleep.

God, it was a great weekend.

And now I somehow slip back into the present.

Earthquake in Japan

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I only recall experiencing one moderate earthquake when we lived in Tokyo. I was alone in our apartment on a Saturday afternoon, sitting at the computer, when suddenly the chair I was sitting in began shaking. Then I realized the room was shaking. It lasted maybe 10-15 seconds.

It was pretty mild; nothing fell over. But what an unsettling feeling it was. So I can’t even imagine what yesterday’s 8.9 earthquake felt like, even if Tokyo wasn’t the epicenter.

My high school in the Tokyo suburbs was apparently fine. Since the train system had stopped running, they used the school’s bus system to get everyone home that they could.

Earthquakes are freaky, even when there’s no damage. Especially if it’s a mild quake, the whole thing happens quietly, which makes it even freakier, like this unseen force is doing something to you. Jesus. You think you’re in a solid building, which you think is sitting on solid ground, and then you realize that the foundation on which you’ve lived your whole life is not solid at all.

Everything beneath us is slipping and sliding.

Supreme Court on Westboro Baptist Church

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This morning the Supreme Court ruled that Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist “God Hates Fags” cult have a First Amendment right to protest at funerals, as long as they stay in legally designated areas and are quiet and nonviolent. Westboro had picketed the funeral of a soldier, Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq. Snyder’s father then sued Westboro for damages and was awarded $2.1 million. The Supreme Court overturned the verdict.

As loathsome and despicable as the Westboro folks are, I agree with the Court on this. I tend to take a pretty strong position on the freedom of speech.

Surprisingly, the decision of the Court was not unanimous. One justice dissented: Justice Alito. He argues that Westboro was properly liable for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

At first I thought, wow, Alito and I have something in common: we both hate Westboro! At least Alito’s heart is in the right place!

But, no. This paragraph from his dissent really pisses me off:

Other signs would most naturally have been understood as suggesting—falsely—that Matthew was gay. Homosexuality was the theme of many of the signs. There were signs reading “God Hates Fags,” “Semper Fi Fags,” “Fags Doom Nations,” and “Fag Troops.” […] Another placard depicted two men engaging in anal intercourse. A reasonable bystander seeing those signs would have likely concluded that they were meant to suggest that the deceased was a homosexual.

Oh, heaven forbid that it should be implied that someone is gay, even falsely! What a horrible defamation.

A few paragraphs later, we see this:

In light of this evidence, it is abundantly clear that respondents, going far beyond commentary on matters of public concern, specifically attacked Matthew Snyder because (1) he was a Catholic and (2) he was a member of the United States military. … While commentary on the Catholic Church or the United States military constitutes speech on matters of public concern, speech regarding Matthew Snyder’s purely private conduct does not.

I wonder if that’s the real reason Alito was so bothered by Westboro — because of their anti-Catholic bias? There are six Catholics on the Supreme Court, and five of them didn’t let this get to them. Only Alito, who can’t seem to control himself at a State of the Union Address, took it so personally that it warped his judgment of the First Amendment.