Athens & Jerusalem

You Could Weep

2009-11-07T23:53:00.001-05:00

From an essay I am grading:

One Russian communist, George Kennan, stated the benefits of communism.

Ay-yiy-yiy.

On Feiffer

2009-11-07T23:09:00.002-05:00

I've been reading Jules Feiffer's Explainers, the Fantagraphic collection of the first decade of his cartoons in The Village Voice. Fun & good. For the politics: yes, he's on the left, but he skewers the left too - liberals anyway. A gimlet eye for folly, wherever located. And more to the point: when he's at his best, what he's doing is reproducing the way people talk, the self-delusion and the silly jargon, with satire & artistry so good that the politics are beside the point. I wonder if David Mamet read Feiffer - some of their concerns with language, I think, have much in common.

Numbers

2009-11-07T01:28:00.002-05:00

Assume Muslim Americans continue to shoot up our soldiers, citizens, etc. How many dead before:

1) We do not let Muslims into the army.

2) We do not let Muslims into the country.

3) We disarm all Muslims in the country.

4) We encourage Muslims in the country to leave, citizens or no.

5) We all are shouting Allahu Akbar, because we have been conquered.

If you cannot come up with any numbers, I suggest you are refusing to take the problem seriously.

Katherine Patterson's Bridge to Terabithia

2009-11-06T14:41:00.004-05:00

Just read it for the first-time - for those who don't know, a young-adult novel with a Plot Twist. I will not mention the plot twist. It's a well-written novel - but there's a troubling element in it. It's set among poor, white Southerners (PWS) in the 1970s, with a few richer, hippyish characters (RHC) in it. While there is some sympathy and realism in the depiction of the PWS, the RHC are depicted in a uniformly positive manner, while the culture of being PWS is, softly softly, treated as something to be liberated from. The usual preaching against traditional religion - you know, where unbelievers go to Hell - takes up some space. Ultimately, it seems to me self-love: the writer, and the librarians who buy the book, are the same sort of people as the RHC; and they get to feed the book to children of the PWS, and learn 'em to be more enlightened. Ugh. If the PWS were PBS, or Natives learning how to be Properly European, or just Poor Folk learning to be Nice like the Rich Folk, oh the shock of recoil! But not here, in comfortable disguise.

It's just an element, I should hasten to add. There's other stuff in the novel, much good. But this bit I don't like. (Briefly looking around the web, I notice I'm not the only person to pick up on the anti-Christian elements.)

By way of contrast, with my favorite Lord of the Rings: Samwise loves Frodo without wanting to be Frodo. We aren't told about Samwise's miserable home life, with a close-minded Hobbit family; and that Samwise can only learn to be individual and liberated by rejecting Hobbit culture as he learns to love Elves. Samwise is rooted, in himself and in his community; and he also loves Elves. Tolkien doesn't condescend to Samwise; and Patterson condescends to most of the characters in her book.

I have an unhappy feeling that if I read all the Newberry Award winners in the last generation or two, I could make a similar criticism of a great many of them.

Parts of this Blog have not Paid Whiskey Tax since 1792

2009-11-05T23:53:00.003-05:00

And them same parts wear Bowie knives. And if any revenuers step foot on this here blog, they should keep both them facts in mind. Just a friendly word of warning. God bless, and good evening.

Parts of this Blog Have Not Voted for a Democrat Since 1824

2009-11-05T12:11:00.013-05:00

Why do I listen to conservative talk radio? Because conservative talk radio is still valuable in exposing real inaccuracies that circulate freely in the mainsteam media -- inaccuracies that usually seem designed to buttress left-wing or Democratic talking points.

Take the case of the electoral history of New York's 23rd congressional district, where Democrat Bill Owens beat Conservative Doug Hoffman two days ago. It seems like I've been hearing for weeks that this district has been in Republican hands since before the Civil War. That's an odd statement to begin with, since the borders of congressional districts keep shifting around. For example, once upon a time the 23rd congressional district was in Manhattan. So what does it mean when one reads in an AP story that:

A recent Siena College poll showed [Republican Dede Scozzafava] finishing a distant third behind Owens and Hoffman. And in this upstate New York district, Republicans never finish third. In its different configurations over the years, a Republican has represented this part of New York since 1852.

Well, does it have to mean anything? It sounds good, after all: it maximizes the significance of a win by the Democrats (which happened) and minimizes the importance of a win by the Republicans (which didn't). Why look any more closely at it than that?

Indeed, I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't look any more closely at this obviously silly meme until yesterday, when I heard a caller on Michael Medved's show complain about it. The caller pointed out that the entity formally called NY-23 had elected a Democrat as recently as 1990. Of course, NY-23 was a very different place even then: it was centered around Albany and Schenectady. But doesn't that expose the absurdity of generalizing about a congressional district's representation, since in the case of most districts the particular geographical combination they represent is probably no more than a decade or two old?

In his Washington post column today, E.J. Dionne keeps the meme for its propaganda value, but offers a little more historical accuracy:

[V]oters in the [NY-23] district (parts of which have been Republican since Abraham Lincoln's day) staged a different kind of rebellion. Furious that big conservative money and national personalities such as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck had forced out Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava -- the official, moderate, locally chosen Republican candidate -- they turned to Owens.

"Parts of which"? Now, we're getting somewhere. Like a lot of mainstream media memes, the Republicans' long dominance of NY-23 seems to have originated at the Daily Kos. Five months ago, a diarist there named silver spring pointed out that

NY-23 is a true political anomaly. It is one of only two remaining districts in the United States where at least part of the district has not been represented by a Democrat since 1852 (the other is Pennsylvania's 16th District which includes Lancaster County, most of which has not been represented by a Democrat since 1830.[...)]

It turns out (and I'm trusting silver spring for this information) that there are three counties in the district (Jefferson, Franklin, and St. Lawrence) that haven't been part of a district electing a Republican to Congress since the 1850s. Two more counties in the district (and parts of a third, Essex) haven't been part of a district electing a Democrat since before 1900. The district's other five counties (and parts of Essex) have all been part of districts electing Democrats at some point since the end of World War II.

This is interesting political trivia, but it really shouldn't carry much weight as a political talking point. A relevant talking point would be something like: "No part of NY-23 has been part of a district that's elected a Democrat to Congress since 1978." An even more relevant talking point would focus the specific vote totals in historical elections for the various counties that now compose NY-23. But something tells me the people in the media who've repeated the 1852 meme aren't concerned primarily with accuracy.

The caller to Michael Medved's show yesterday had only to reference to Wikipedia's article on NY-23 in order to show that the oft-repeated line about NY-23 was bunk. What's disturbing is that, in the twenty or so hours since then, the Wikipedia page seems to have become a battleground as some editors seek to defend the meme as best they can. Here was the page as it appeared early yesterday afternoon. And here's the paragraph added to the page at 16:09 GMT, November 5:

New York's 23rd congressional district has historically been one of the most Republican districts in United States. The district has been in Republican hands since 1873 (under various district numbers), and almost half of the district — including the largest city, Watertown — have not been represented by a Democrat since 1851. In parts of the district, the last non-Republican Representative was a Whig.

Since then, a few edits have tried to walk back or undermine this partisan paragraph: "almost half" has become "a large part"; "Whig" has become "Democrat"; "1873" has become "1994"; etc. Recently, some person -- no doubt interested only in accuracy and fairness -- added these amusing sentences:

However, newly discovered evidence from CNN establishes that in 2009 Bill Owens was elected "the first Democratic congressman from th[e] region since 1872." The New York Times confirmed this discovery, noting that "the district has been solidly Republican since the 19th century."

It seems to me that the ongoing Wikipedia edits make two things clear: (1) it's dangerous to rely on Wikipedia for information about anything controversial, and (2) it's silly to talk about the historical representation of congressional districts when their boundaries have often been radically redrawn. As for the larger story of the 1852 meme (which somehow seems to have become an 1873 meme), the lesson I'm drawing is that I need to be even more vigilant in questioning "facts" I hear in the media.

If We Can Put a Man on the Moon....

2009-11-04T14:10:00.005-05:00

I've probably made this point a dozen times before, but I was thinking about it again this morning: I wish people would stop believing that scientists get the results they do because they're so darn smart. Now, most of them are pretty darn smart, but what really sets them apart is the process they use -- their willingness to submit themselves to the rigors of empiricism and logic -- and their patience in accumulating knowledge step by careful step. Probably a certain amount of intelligence is required to use the scientific method properly, but without the method even an exceptionally clever person is not going to be anywhere near as successful in figuring out and controlling reality.

A corollary of this is that that same clever person is not going to display anything like the same powers in situations where the problem is less susceptible of being understood scientifically. I'm sure the average sociologist is less clever than the average physicist, but I doubt whether sociology could gain the respectability of a science even if all the high-IQ types who now populate physics labs were to go into sociology instead. (Sorry, Monsieur Comte!) And no matter how bright Barack Obama is, we ought to expect him to have some serious trouble "solving" health care.

I worry that a lot of people really believe that nonsense about how if we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to avoid pitfalls like the Iraq occupation or the banking crisis. And that's silly. That's almost like saying, "if I can learn to speak Japanese, why can't I fix my relationship problems?" Without well understood and time-tested tools, some problems are just going to be very, very hard. And no person, however brilliant, is going to be able to solve them except perhaps by luck.

Opine, Opine

2009-11-04T00:05:00.002-05:00

So, with the Republicans winning Virginia and New Jersey, and the Conservative apparently barely falling short in upstate New York, I can say ... that the American people are against Democrats pissing away one trillion dollars and wrecking the health care system. I don't much see that they're for the Republicans, yet, and I don't much see that they have cause to be, yet. As I said last year on election night, the Republicans need to have a positive program to unite a center-right country. Or maybe not being Democrats will be enough by 2010 and 2012 - but I wouldn't bet on it. And they certainly won't have a mandate to do more than stop doing stupid Democraty things. I can see the center of the country in essence wanting the Republicans to be a blocking minority again, but not to have the initiative.

Still, we do seem still to be on track to have Obamacare run aground on the reefs of public opinion. (The Republicans are more looters than pirates in this nautical scenario.) Not a done deal, but I have hope that we shall not change after all. And all this with the Republicans still unable to block anything.

There are interesting questions also as to the nature of any revivified Republican coalition. A Hoffman loss would indicate that "it will be conservative" is not a sufficient answer. Christie in NJ was the squishy choice in the primary, and that seems to have been a good choice. But the tea leaves are still unclear.

Romney's unwillingness to endorse Hoffman when it mattered, however, does seem to be part and parcel of the pusillanimity of his character; I bet it hurts him in 2012, and a good thing too.

The Biggest Winner is the American People!

2009-11-03T23:14:00.009-05:00

Somebody decided to let them film "The Biggest Loser" at the White House tonight. I'm going to leap right past the jokes and say that I wholeheartedly approve of this. The more closely we can associate the nation's highest office with reality TV, the better.

In fact, I'd like to offer the White House a couple of suggestions. How about a show like "America's Next Top Model" where aspiring presidents compete against each other in the various skills a pol needs: fund raising, reading a teleprompter, lying, pandering to special interests, etc.? Or, better yet, how about getting something going with ABC's "Wife Swap"? In my fantasy, Michelle Obama could trade places with Sarah Palin. Imagine a "date night" where Sarah takes Barack four-wheelin' while Michelle tries to convince Todd to sell the snowmobile and send the kids to arts camp. Could there be anything not to like?

No: there could not.

Election Day

2009-11-03T11:51:00.002-05:00

* Light turnout; Withywindle was voter #91 at his machine, nearish 11AM.

* A person in a Bloomberg t-shirt approached Withywindle near the electioneering limit. Withywindle lost his temper and upbraided her for working for a man who had done an end run around democracy and got rid of term limits, informed he would never vote for Bloomberg or for anyone on the City Council who had supported him in his end-run, and stalked off toward the polling place without letting her get a word in edgewise. Goldberry admonishes Withywindle for uncivil behavior; but Withywindle does not regret it. Oh, if only it had been Bloomberg himself.

* Withywindle is glad the Conservatives have candidates up and down the line - even where they're crosslisted with Republicans, or even Democrats. He can vote futilely with the vague hope that it sends a small message. Plus, his conscience feels better.

* Withywindle favors the proposition allowing some power company to trade land with the state so they can build a power line across a state park.

* Withywindle opposes the proposition allowing state prisoners to work for non-profits. He has just read Litwack's history of the Jim Crow South, and vaguely recollects abuses that might follow from such a scheme. He also worries that this means prisoners will lick envelopes for ACORN and get paid for it.

* Polling place was a public school basement; the PTA was selling baked goods for famished voters. WIthywindle bought a brownie and asked if the parents were satisfied with the school. They are.

* Withywindle is growing addicted to referring to Withywindle in the third person. The embarrassing thing is that Withywindle has never read the Gallic Wars, so it is an inexcusable affectation. (Do not ask what else Withywindle has not read; it is a shamefully long list. He consoles himself with the excuse that the educated man knows what he should read, even if he hasn't.)

Predictions

2009-11-03T01:16:00.001-05:00

Michael Bloomberg and Jon Corzine will still be rich twenty-four hours from now.

On Public Opinion II

2009-11-02T01:22:00.003-05:00

I've been trying not to add even more ill-informed blather about the upcoming elections to this corner of the blogosphere. Once election day is passed, I might say something in retrospect; prediction is clearly a fool's game. I'll just repeat how fascinating its been for me to watch how the Democrats policy-making has been constrained by public opinion alone, and that the elections' service as markers of public opinion is just as interesting as the rest of this process. That the election of governors in New Jersey and Virginia will (apparently) shape the contours of federal legislation is -- a wonderful proof of the power of public opinion, of the power of democracy. I think people were fooled into thinking that public opinion had no power because no one recently has run into its buzz-saw as hamfistedly as the Democrats have this year; now we know just how powerful it is. I do think last year's primary process and this year's health-care drama have highlighted the enduring health of the republic's politics. Or we can be pessimistic and call it a last hurrah; but still an impressive one.

Anyway, let's see what the results are come election day.

PS. I will probably be voting the Conservative ticket for mayor. I can't vote for Bloomberg, and I really don't want to vote for the Dinkins epigone. Thus continuing my tradition of bolting: back in 1993, I voted Libertarian for mayor - as did my sister Celduin.

You Go, Girl

2009-11-01T11:19:00.002-05:00

Mark Steyn misses the point, when he links to a story about Hillary being blunt in Pakistan. Steyn writes: Good thing those arrogant swaggering Texas cowboys aren't blundering around the world screwing up America's global relationships anymore. But look at what Hillary said:

"Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002," she finally asserted when challenged about Washington’s tough prescriptions for Islamabad. "I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to."

After having publicly doubted the bona fides of her hosts, she added, as an afterthought: "Maybe that's the case; maybe they're not gettable...I don't know. As far as we know, they are in Pakistan." At one point during the exchanges, when a journalist spoke about all the services rendered by Pakistan for the US, Mrs Clinton snapped, "We have also given you billions."

The US Secretary of State also took a swipe at the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies, telling the senior journalists, "If we are going to have a mature partnership where we work together" then "there are issues that not just the United States but others have with your government and with your military security establishment." She said she was "more than willing to hear every complaint about the United States'' but the relationship had to be a "two-way street."

I don't think "bumbling Democratic hypocrites" when I read this; I think "YAHOO! SAY IT, SISTER!" If the DNC had an ounce of brains, they would get a YouTube of Hillary speaking Truth to Pakistanis, and send it to every voter in America.

The Dependence of Thought-Skills on Knowledge

2009-11-01T02:26:00.005-05:00

A little while ago on this blog, I quoted Camille Paglia on the failures of elite education. Paglia complained that schools now produce graduates who (a) lack factual knowledge and cultural literacy and (b) are deficient in creativity and aptitude for independent thought. In a comment, Withywindle asked about the relationship between factual ignorance and inability to think independently.

It turns out that a writer I've always meant to read, E.D. Hirsch, has delved into this question and come up with plenty of evidence that it's nearly impossible to cultivate thinking skills without teaching facts.

More powerfully than any previous critic, Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be “critical thinkers” and teach them to “learn how to learn,” defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students—the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.

This makes intuitive sense to me. Just as people need to acquire memories of sensory inputs for them to function well in the perceptible world, they also need a head full of knowledge for them to make headway in the intellectual world. And in no real-life skill, from farming to carpentry, do we think memorization -- mastery of a body of straightforward facts -- is anything but vital. Even wrong facts are probably better than no facts: at least they give us a place to start thinking.

Oh, Come On

2009-10-31T17:33:00.002-04:00

Dave Eggers, in a book review in the New York Times of early, unpublished stories by Kurt Vonnegut:

It has been two years since Kurt Vonnegut departed this world, and it's hard not to feel a bit rudderless without him. Late in his life, Vonnegut issued a series of wonderfully exasperated columns for the magazine In These Times. During the darkest years of the Bush administration, these essays, later collected in "A Man Without a Country," were guide and serum to anyone with a feeling that pretty much everyone had lost their minds. In a 2003 interview, when asked the softball question "How are you?" he answered: "I'm mad about being old, and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, O.K."

Vonnnegut left the planet just about the time we, as a nation, were crawling toward the light again, so it's tempting to wonder what he would have made of where we are now. Would he have been pleased by the election of Barack Obama? Most likely he'd have been momentarily heartened, then exasperated once again witnessing the lunatic-strewn town halls, the Afghnistan quagmire, the triumph of volume over reason, of machinery over humanity.

The politics are so obnoxious that it's difficult for me to separate what I don't like in the content from what I don't like in the style - but this is phenomenally bad prose, isn't it? Bombastic cliche that reaches Bulwer-Lytton Award territory? I'm not just imagining it?

Miscellaneous V

2009-10-30T22:26:00.002-04:00

* Shirebourn was bubbling into his milk today. Goldberry commented on his "bubbling personality."

* I have occasionally talked about the awfulness of putting any value into sincerity. It occurs to me that the pop culture reference I want is to Linus & the pumpkin patch so sincere that the Great Pumpkin will stop and visit. I would provide a link to one of the good strips, but all Google gets me is images from the TV show. Bah, humbug.

* I got one of the better rejection letters today. Slightly modified for anonymity: Thank you for submitting your essay, "Withywindle Conquers the World" to The Withywindle Journal. The essay is very clear, very well researched, and perceptively grounded in the texts it cites, and as a result is persuasive in the case that it builds. The fact that it is very well written adds to its attractiveness. All in all, those who have read it think it is of publishable quality. However, despite its obvious merits, we have decided not to accept it for publication in our pages. The reason is basically one of fit. The essay offers [redacted Withywindlish specialties]. This makes it suitable for journals such as the Journal of Withywindle Studies, or perhaps Withywindle Theory. Why not, then, for The Withywindle Journal? [Redacted explanation.] That this is the case isn’t obviously or unmistakably so, or we would not have held the paper so long. This is a matter of judgment that occasioned discussion among the editors, but in the end this is where we have come down. I would recommend that you submit the essay to one of the journals that I mentioned, or others of their sort, and I wish you good luck in finding a venue for what is, in the end, excellent work.

Quot Regiones, Tot Sententiae

2009-10-30T20:48:00.006-04:00

When I lead class discussions, my usual M.O. is to push the arguments against whatever preconceived notions I think my students might have. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at guessing what those preconceived notions are actually going to be.

Part of the difficulty, I think, lies in moving from school to school as an adjunct. Students at different kinds of schools, in different parts of the country, are really quite different from one another in their default approaches to both history and texts. In the northeast, and especially at mid-rank schools, one finds a lot more skepticism and cynicism about anything "traditional" -- e.g., the moral or didactic value of classic texts, or the sincerity and benevolence of Western ideals -- than one does in the rest of the U.S.A. or at lower-tier schools. (At really excellent schools, the students tend to be so smart and fractious that the need to design class discussions around devil's advocacy is minimized.)

This isn't a surprise, I know, but somehow I'm constantly bemused when I discover that I'm nudging students to consider "possibilities" that are precisely what most of them have already taken as certainties.

On Kennan's Long Telegram, in class today

2009-10-29T16:48:00.001-04:00

Me: It isn't ordinary to send a telegram so long. Notice how Kennan uses clipped sentences.

Student: It's as if he sent a twitter 8,000 words long.

Me: Yes! Yes! Exactly.

That was a nice moment.

Note to Self

2009-10-28T22:56:00.002-04:00

When you post something on your blog that is wrong, the term of art is not "loopy misinformation." It is "an erratically-sourced blog post."

PS. Self: you will save time if you make this a macro.

When High School Graduates Ruled The World

2009-10-28T22:01:00.002-04:00

Never mind ancient history like World War II, when the unmatriculated Hitler and Mussolini were running large chunks of Europe. As recently as the early 1950s, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin ran much of the world - none of them a college man. (Churchill went to a military academy, Sandhurst, but that's not quite a college.) But since that golden age, it's been a dreary succession of ever more credentialed world leaders. But think! - in living memory, high-school grads ruled the world.

Disclosure

2009-10-28T11:53:00.006-04:00

I just wanted to let readers of this blog know that I know some things about Levi Johnston that are huge. I mean, really damaging. Stuff that could embarrass even him. Oh, yeah. You'd better believe I've got the goods.

I haven't revealed what I know, because I'm not going to hurt Levi that way. That's how decent a person I am. But I thought it was important to let everyone know that I could. Reveal things that would hurt him, I mean. You know, if I wanted to.

When a Martian reads Lyle the Crocodile

2009-10-28T02:08:00.003-04:00

What on earth will they of us? It is a very strange book. And funny, but how will the Martian be able to tell where the humor is?

Miscellaneous IV

2009-10-26T22:36:00.004-04:00

1) Did you know that enough blacks voted in the South in the 1948, 1952, and 1956 presidential elections to tip a number of states to the Democratic column, and obscure the decay of the Solid South as whites drifted to the Republican party? No, I hadn't either. Fascinating.

2) LBJ's father was a state representative; various other family members were in Texas politics for generations beforehand. I'd somehow thought he was a schoolteacher come from nowhere; I hadn't realized he was minor political royalty. Which I suppose is a more typical American success story: minor political royalty can become major political royalty. (Mind you, for minor political royalty, the Johnsons were pretty hardscrabble. Gascon or Welsh nobleman, del modo Tejano.)

3) Obama's political style is something like that of a Brezhnevian apparatchik faced with glasnost; remarkably incompetent when faced with free men. This isn't just a criticism of Obama or Chicago politics, but of most local and state politics in the United States: machines dominate, the actual haggling of free men is limited. A Madisonian point: only in an arena as vast as the Federal Government are we still free of machine dominance. (And, I suppose, in select states and localities.) But let the Obami have their way, and the machine will become Federal as well.

4) I am by now largely indifferent to the death of Iraqis. A process well-advanced by 2008; but the advent of Obama means I can no longer summon up compassion for a people I am pretty sure we are going to abandon to their hideous fates in short order. I can't do anything to help them, and so I don't care.

On Anglo-Catholics

2009-10-26T00:52:00.003-04:00

But of course this is the model for the Catholic Church as a whole. Let them all become Maronite, Uniate, Anglican, with married priests and a celibate core for the high hierarchy. (This is how the Orthodox Church works, no?) I do suspect they will make that particular change before I am dead - or else, precious jewel of celibacy or no precious jewel of celibacy, the Church will collapse from lack of vocations.

And then Goldberry started Laughing Uncontrollably

2009-10-24T23:43:00.002-04:00

As she read me this article:

Safety investigators are highly skilled at solving the mystery of plane crashes. But with Northwest Flight 188, which landed safely, they are tackling a different puzzle: what went on in the cockpit to cause it to fly for 500 miles without radio contact, and well beyond its destination?

On Friday, investigators sought to explain why the two pilots of the Northwest flight, bound from San Diego to Minneapolis-St. Paul, did not begin a normal descent when they should have on Wednesday night.

The pilots, Capt. Timothy B. Cheney, 53, of Gig Harbor, Wash., and First Officer Richard I. Cole, 54, of Salem, Ore., said they had been involved in a heated discussion about airline policy and lost track of where they were.