Meditations on Virtue

**WARNING**
Today's entry contains highly abstract thought. Try to keep up.

Aristotle once said that excellence is not an act, but a habit - and I'm not just quoting him to class up this site. He had a point. The virtues we admire, such as justice, industriousness, and giving good backrubs, require a lot of careful activity. But, with all respect to Aristotle, I would propose that there is an exception.

I used to live and work (though not at the same time) in a town called Elkhart, Indiana ("122 days without an Amber Alert"). Among other attractions, Elkhart is home to the "RV/MH Hall of Fame & Museum." The name requires a bit of translation: "RV/MH" is an abbreviation for "Recreational Vehicle/Manufactured Housing," and "Manufactured Housing" is a euphemism for "Trailer Parks." So, in effect, I've just confessed that I come from a city that boasts of having a Trailer Park Hall of Fame. Well, what the hell - you aren't reading this journal to watch me keep my skeletons in the closet.

This museum is just one of the reasons why the otherwise small and unremarkable city of Elkhart appears three times - more often than any other city - in a remarkable little book called the Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. Elkhart's deep footprint in the world of bad taste comes from being the world's leading fount of mobile homes, van conversions, and my old hated nemesis, the bumper sticker. I hope I don't make myself infamous for saying this (and it's unlikely to happen, since I only have six readers), but what Athens was to philosophy, Elkhart is to tastelessness.

And this leads me to the point that ties together paragraphs one through three of this entry in a segue so subtle it makes me wish there was a Nobel Prize category for it: of all the virtues, wouldn't you think that having decent taste would be the easiest? You don't have to do much of anything. All it takes is to NOT get ridiculous tattoos; NOT re-sod your back lawn with Astroturf; NOT make puns on the word "halibut"; and above all, in the name of all that is sacred, NOT plaster your car with empty-headed bumper stickers. How hard can it be? Yet there is an entire city that has significantly lightened the travel budget for the Encyclopedia of Bad Taste research staff, by assembling in one place (and building entire industries that cater to) a very large number of people who just plain don't know how not to be tacky.

The reason I got to thinking about this subject is my friend and colleague Poolhall (not his real name), who has just successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on the topic of Virtue Ethics (I would have done this, but I have a blog to think about). It may be hard to believe after what you've just read, but he's way more abstract of a thinker than I am. Congratulations, Poolhall, and best wishes.