From The National Post, via cycling.finial.com:
In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body’s nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “that all men are created equal”—and yet this Founding Father believed that blacks were inferior. Jefferson tried to limit slavery in the new nation, and yet he owned about 200 slaves, of which he freed two in his lifetime and five upon his death.
How to explain this contradiction? Was he simply content with a policy of gradualism? Did the “Negro President” know he depended on the additional 60% weight given to the slaveholder vote under the three-fifths compromise? Or was he simply unable or unable to give up the slaves that buttressed his extravagant, indebted lifestyle?
Troubling questions, these, and still debated by scholars more versed in his life than I. Today’s tour of Monticello gave us a fascinating glimpse into the life and mind of a great statesman, philosopher, and citizen farmer—and an all-too-human portrait of ideological inconsistency.
It’s sobering to ponder that we too are rationalizing our stand on an issue that is also very much ethically urgent and on which future generations may judge us harshly. We pay lip service to preserving nature for our grandchildren and to living sustainably, but in reality few of us actually practice what we preach. My biking notwithstanding, I certainly am not, not with the cross-country road trip or the jet-set life, the non-regional food and the foreign-made clothes. Just like we puzzle over Jefferson’s ambivalence on an issue that is now so clear, so too may observers two centuries hence puzzle over the divide between our rhetoric and our deeds.
The National Aquarium in Baltimore is extraordinary and well worth a visit. We saw sharks and rays (and volunteers feeding them!) as well as corals, frogs, and even rainforests.
In Washington, D.C., aside from visiting some of the obligatory monuments, we went to the George Catlin exhibit at the Renwick, which Knox found very moving. Also noteworthy are the Smithsonian Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery exhibitions: Joseph Cornell’s boxes, Josephine Baker, America’s presidents. The new National Museum of the American Indian, too, contains a wealth of art and information and is housed in an intriguing building that is reminiscent both of the Pueblo cliff dwellings and of the Guggenheim.
We left DC and headed straight into Dixie. Our first stop was Manassas, where the first battle of the Civil War was fought and quickly shattered the naïveté on both sides that the conflict would be glorious and short. It was particularly interesting to see first-hand how alive the old South is: reading in one brochure for the Museum of the Confederacy about how Jefferson Davis “led the country to its destiny,” you would never guess that the Union forces won. Similarly, on the door to a gas station convenience store (where the cashier was an older black man), we saw a rather disturbing “missing” poster.
As I write this, we are in Charlottesville, VA, site of the University of Virginia. We will tour Monticello tomorrow.
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A quick dispatch from the road:
New Haven: Dominated by Yale, this is a lively university town punctuated by neo-Gothic architecture. The Harry Potter movies could have been filmed here! I never quite realized how much history has come out of Yale.
Philadelphia: A city that has obviously seen more prosperous times, the birth place of America boasts some lively neighborhoods once you walk away from the tourist attractions.
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One of the problems I’ve noticed in my trips is that it is something of a hassle to record your adventures after the fact. On the Newfoundland bike trip, for example, every few days I would sit in camp updating my hand-written journal. When I got back home, it took me several weeks to slowly transcribe those notes into my computer, and several weeks more to actually pull a few entries and blog about them. In fact, it was so much hassle that my life had already moved on and I did not get to blog as much as I wanted.
To fix this problem, I’ve been lusting after a voice-recording solution so I can record my adventures on the fly. Finally, last night I bought a Belkin TuneTalk for iPod. I just tested it out, and it seems to work fine! I’ll be using it on the cross-country move trip.
My dream is to get voice recognition on my computer so that I can automatically transcribe my audio logs into text files. Unfortunately, voice recognition on Linux appears to be pretty much dead at this moment (email me if you know of a one that is currently available). I may have to take a risk and buy Naturally Speaking and hope it works on Wine….
