Category: current affairs

culture

Original Intent

According to recent polls, a growing number of Americans believe that the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights in order to guarantee that our government will not impose any kind of tyranny upon us.  That an armed populace is a bulwark against government oppression.

As far as it goes, there should be no argument over this.  Especially at the time it was adopted.  It was a statement that declared that the authority for military action, domestically, resided with the People.  Even then, however, a group of citizens was not much of a match for a well-trained and equipped military force, and anyone even slightly acquainted with the history of the revolutionary war should be aware that the biggest problem Washington et al had was equipage and training.  The famous instance of the Prussian drill master Baron von Steuben, while part of American myth, nevertheless points up a real problem of the Continental Army—the men didn’t know how to fight.  Washington’s army, to put it mildly, fared poorly in just about every engagement with the British it had.  Just having guns made little difference.

Fast forward to today and the problem is multiplied.  To imagine a gaggle of weekend warriors mounting a successful resistance to a modern military force is absurd.

However, this is becoming mainstream opinion, that because so many Americans have firearms in their possession our government will not engage in dictatorial practices.  It enjoys a certain logic and in the past this has been a not altogether fallacious argument.

Taking this as a basis for rejecting any kind of control over the manufacture and dissemination of firearms for the purposes of community safety is taking original intent out of context and ignoring basic realities.  This isn’t a frontier nation anymore and the phrasing of the Second Amendment itself suggests it was never intended as a guarantee that John Q. Smith, esquire, would be absolutely free of constraint.

We have no rules that absolutely free us of constraints of one kind or another.

My own personal pick for absolutist appraisal is the First Amendment, but we have many rules regarding use of language and freedom of speech.  (I would hazard a guess that many of the same people arguing for complete freedom from even the hint of constraint on their Second Amendment rights have no problem with constraints on Speech, as indicated by support of various forms of censorship from pornography to flag burning.  Cherry picking “rights” is a great American tradition.)  We have such rules in order to maintain a civil society, a goal the Founders fully endorsed.  Barring the capacity of individuals to self-police personal conduct, we have laws to control misuses.  We get along quite well (usually) with said laws and in some instances wish these laws were stronger, all in the name of maintaining the kind of society with the types of security we wish to enjoy.

I personally have mixed feelings about all possession laws.  Telling people it is a crime to simply possess something, to my mind, is a pernicious act of intrusiveness that is fraught with the potential for abuse.  Just having something it is against the law to have invites fraud, entrapment, and a loss of other freedoms.  I can well understand the civic interest in not allowing individuals to have something, but beyond removing it once found, criminalizing possession is a road to hell many people who have been set up on false drug possession charges know all about.  It ceases then to be about public safety and becomes a contest of will between people and authority.  It’s fair to say that the Drug War has become less about drugs than about the power of agencies to enforce their will.  The purpose of the original laws is lost in the subsequent political and legal struggles between two ideologically opposed factions.  (If it weren’t, then spending money on treatment would not be in the least controversial.  At its simplest, this is about conformity, not safety.)  I also have little optimism that any kind of confiscatory rules would do anything other than create another drug war type conflict and again, safety would take a back seat to ideology.

As it is anyway.

For the record, I do not own a gun.  Not because I am opposed to them, but because I believe one should not own something one is not prepared to treat with diligence and respect by taking proper training, keeping responsible track of it, and maintaining it properly.  No one should treat a firearm like the old clunker that keeps failing inspection but gets driven anyway. I have neither the time nor inclination just now to qualify at a range and stay qualified.  Furthermore, I do not live in such a way that it would be useful to me.  That could change, I admit.  As a child, I grew up with firearms.  Hunting with my dad was a regular thing, something we gave up when apparently part of the necessary equipment among far too many hunters became a cooler chest loaded with beer.  Safety, dammit!

That said, there are a couple of items both sides should be more aware of in this, because the debate is heading toward another national deadlock, and just now we don’t need another divisive issue based on nonsense.

Deaths by firearms are decreasing.  Have been for some time.  You can check the FBI crime stats for this.  A growing fraction of gun deaths is suicide.  It may well be argued that if these people did not have ready access to a firearm, their self-inflicted deaths might be delayed or prevented.  The salient factor here is mental health, something we as a nation seem loathe to address.  There is a stigma attached to mental health problems which we stupidly maintain and people who need help fail to get it, often with calamitous results.  PTSD among returning veterans has been shining a light on this, but the fact is it remains a problem for the general population, one which for whatever reason we want to deny.  (Of course, we also don’t want to spend any more money on health care, which is another matter.)

The dramatic, Rambo-esque shootings that have spotlighted gun violence in the last several years are exceptions.  Tragic as they are, they do not represent the vast majority of either gun deaths or American gun owners.  In almost all of these instances, other factors have been primary in the incidents, involving mental health issues.  In a way, such events are like earthquakes.  Unpredictable, horrible, lamentable.  Unlike earthquakes, we have the tools to do something about them before they happen, but again this involves attitudes about mental health, and since the rhetoric surrounding this issue has acquired as part of its machinery a rejection of government intrusion into our personal lives, we are stuck in a quandary.

Secondly, we have already seen that “assault rifle” bans do very little in terms of actual decreases in gun violence.  Most, the vast majority, of shootings are done with handguns.  The “ban” is little more than an æsthetic statement.  High capacity magazines may be another matter, but the fact is we’re talking about banning something because of the way it looks more than anything else.

That said, we really need to stop pretending æsthetics don’t matter.  We know personality changes under certain circumstances, and as ridiculous as it may sound, we also know it is true.  Fashion would not be the industry it is if people did not experience modifications in self-image and, subsequently, behavior by wearing different kinds of clothing.  Consider the changes in demeanor involved with motorcycles.  A person can be one way and then, donning leathers and climbing aboard a Harley, he or she can for a short while be very different.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, these changes are mild, short-lived, and fun, but they are real.  And for a fraction of people, they go beyond manageable.

When you look at the mass shootings and the types of weapons involved, it seems obvious that, within whatever passes for conscious decision-making with these people, they are playing a role, one which involves some sort of para-militarism.  They are assaulting positions, enacting retribution, fighting a war no one else around them seems aware of, and they have equipped themselves accordingly.  While most of us play act from time to time, we keep it within our control and within the bounds of social convention.  Again, we’re talking about people who seem to have a less solid grasp on the reality the rest of us share.

A reality which is getting holes punched in it by the extreme rhetoric of political posturing and the paranoia that emerges out of responding to claims that our rights are under threat.

Two things about that, related to each other.

When President Obama says that talk of government tyranny is absurd, because here we are the government, he is correct at least in an ideal sense.  We The People are supposed to be in charge.  That we don’t seem to be is the direct result of the consistent and traditional lack of involvement in politics by average citizens.

Nevertheless, there is a confusion in this stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding of the term The People.

I’ve grown up listening to the dinner table dissections of the Second Amendment and what the Founders meant.  Separating out one clause from another, that “militia” is something distinct from “the people” because of a problematically placed comma.  It took some time before I realized that they were all missing the point.

The Founders, if nothing else, were world class grammarians and rhetoricians.  They knew the meaning of words, the intent of phrases, and used them very precisely.  When they said The People they were not talking about Joe Whatsisname down the block, they were talking about a political aggregate.  The People is us as a polity.

You can tell because when they meant something to apply to individuals, they used Person.  Read the other amendments.  The People was not a catch-all term that stood in for Me and You as isolated individuals.  It meant the community from which government, in this place, derives its authority.

The British were not marching on Lexington and Concord to bust down private doors and confiscate fowling pieces, they were marching to seize the local armory—which was there for the local militia—which was made up of local people, many of whom did not own their own weapons (they were bloody expensive!)

We have separated these things in our communities since WWII, true, so we no longer have the reality of a local militia anymore.  We mistake the National Guard as one, but it’s not, really.  Militias were vital when we as a nation eschewed large standing armies and had to rely on the availability of a ready pool of volunteers who had, presumably, trained through local militia organizations.  We needed them especially when we have a frontier.

But the idea that we have a right to take up arms against the government is false.  This country never allowed for that.  Shays Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War…in each instance, the response has been to put the rebellion down and strengthen the adherence to the federal constitution and government, because what we are building here is not a haven for quasi-libertarian laissez-faire self empowerment at the expense of community.

Rights are not settled outside the idealized confines of academic discourse.  They are living things, constantly tested and argued, limited and expanded, revisited and revised.  My right to swing my arm ends when the end of my arm touches the end of your nose.  Sounds reasonable, but in reality we are always trying to determine both where the end of my arm actually is and how far out you can stick your nose.  The dance of negotiation and compromise is what has built this country, despite the misapprehension that it is absolute individualism that did it.  The community is the seed bed in which the flower of constructive individualism grows.  They need each other, but the relationship is symbiotic.

The rhetoric of armed resistance has one other major shortfall, and it’s fatal.  Power does not work here through the barrel of a gun, it works through the ballot box and the willingness of the population to accept the determination derived from the vote.  We do not collapse into sectarian violence here because we have a long tradition of viewing elections as the final word, at least until the next election.  When it’s done, we go home, we do not tear down city hall.  The day enough people decide they must take up arms to get their way, all that ends, and we will pay dearly to put it back together again.  Likely the thing being defended will be sacrificed in the initial exchange of fire, and for my part I sincerely doubt we have the collective wisdom in sufficient degree to revive the experiment.

Common sense should tell us that there are some people who simply should not have access to firearms.  We have to figure out how to address that reality.  All or nothing approaches which ignore this will end up at best irrelevant and at worst destructive of the nerves that allow us to be a country.

Absurdity

Wrong Is Right: Political Absurdity Incarnate

Eleven North Carolina state representatives are attempting to do something which has been illegal in this country since the ratification of the Constitution.  Namely, establish a State Religion.

Here’s what they’re trying to pass:

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

This resolution flies in the face of two centuries of settled law.  Furthermore, it also takes a run at the decision which was settled by the Civil War.  I think it’s fair to say that there is more than a smidgen of secessionist sentiment and some borderline treason there.

Need I add that the eleven representatives in question are all Republicans?

If the Bill of Rights was not clear enough about the intent of what America meant by “freedom of religion” and the quite tangible rejection of such meddling of government into the arena of religious expression, the Fourteenth Amendment made clear just which set of laws held the upper hand.  (For those not paying attention, there has been a steady tremor of right wing rhetoric in the last year or several directed at repealing the Fourteenth Amendment, for exactly this sort of purpose, to return to states the sole right to dictate to their citizens how they should conduct themselves as Americans, at least in the view of a given state.)

Why this should need to be rehearsed again and again I do not understand, but it’s been obvious for some time that the advocates for religious establishment—North Carolina House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes and his ten colleagues, for instance—are not interested in embracing religious liberty.  The only purpose of establishing a state religion—and please, while I realize there is no phrase in the two clauses quoted above that expressly state that North Carolina is establishing said religion, it takes little reasoning to realize that the only utility in claiming a right to make law concerning religion is in order to do exactly that—is to (a) enforce not only public conformity but private as well and (b) deny equal rights to religions that do not meet a given criteria.  One does not, under these conditions, even have to overtly pass a proscriptive law to seriously erode the ability of non-sanctioned religions to operate.  All one needs to do is deny recognition in favor of a preferred denomination.

The hue and cry of hyper-sensitives for the last couple of decades who claim religion—their religion, specifically—is under assault and requires extraordinary protective measures is at its base disingenuous.  (I could remark that, unlike certain institutions that must put up with mobs of sign-wielding and often aggressive picketers trying to block access, there are no widespread attempts to block people from attending church.  And unlike those other institutions, if someone tried that, no one would argue much at all if the police hauled them away.)  No one has passed any laws forbidding prayer—no, there are no laws banning private prayer, only public practices in certain places, which is not the same thing— nor has anyone successfully mounted legislation to rescind the tax exempt status of religious institutions across the board.  Christianity enjoys pride of place among all other religions in this country, so much so that it is virtually impossible to be elected to public office unless one prescribes to one denomination or another.  The president publicly announces prayer breakfasts, Congress opens with a prayer, and successful attempts to block zoning advantages churches have are rare.

This is about nothing but intolerance and a desire to make laws about how people conduct their private affairs. (Conformism to religion is about as personally invasive as you can get.)  One of the manifest ironies of all this is how many of the people who think this is a good idea also claim Libertarian values and do not see the contradiction inherent in their position.

Or don’t care.

But this North Carolina proposition has gone a few steps farther and it will be interesting to see what happens if it gets out of committee and onto the floor.  If it actually passes, the federal response will be fascinating to observe.  Religion aside, this is a state claiming the right to ignore national law.

culture

Undeserved Entitlement

It’s wearying, this constant reminder that we live in a culture that has standards at odds with lofty goals.  People make special conditions for their principles.  The people lamenting the “ruined” lives of the Steubenville rapists would no doubt feel completely different had the victim been their daughter.  But there’s no hesitation to indulge in public shaming since it’s their favored sons who are going to have pay a penalty for indulging what we too often give implicit permission.

I remember clearly the moment the disparity really struck home for me.  I was maybe eighteen or nineteen, watching a Sixty Minutes segment on some aspect of sexuality.  Most of the report is a fog.  It had to do with attitudes in Italy, where publicly available contraception had caused a huge stir (for obvious reasons) and Sixty Minutes did its usual job of crunching numbers and finding relevant interviews.  The bit that stuck with me was a breakdown of premarital attitudes of Italian males and females.

Something like 80% of Italian girls (premaritally) wanted to marry a man who had had sexual experience.  Close to that percentage of young Italian men insisted they would only marry a virgin.

How was this to be addressed?  Where were all those young men going to get the experience their future wives desired if not from the very girls the men would then refuse to marry should they provide said experience?

I worked this over for weeks, trying to make sense of both the disparity and a culture that accepted this without much question, with an “of course” attitude that expected boys to get laid before marriage and demanded girls keep their legs crossed.  Regardless of the stated principles of society, down deep where people live in their skulls, this is the common attitude, and has been thus for millennia.

That’s the attitude we’re seeing on full display in the reaction to the Steubenville trial.  Oh, they were just being high-spirited boys!  They didn’t mean anything by it!  Why ruin their futures with a guilty verdict for doing what we all expect undisciplined unreflective un-self-aware young males to do?  I mean, there but for the grace of Twitter…!

And the girl?  Fox has named her, an absolutely unconscienable act of malice and insensitivity, and most of the networks have been focusing on the “promise” of these boys now endangered and the hell with the girl.

Because she shouldn’t have been there.  Because she’s one of those girls that teased the bull and “got what was coming to her.”

We have halfway internalized the idea that women are allowed to have sex lives, but on some level it seems a lot of people think that if indeed a woman wants to partake of sex outside the rigid guidelines of past traditions then she should be willing to accept it no matter what form in comes in.  That any woman who wants to have sex outside of marriage (before, during, after, or remaining unmarried) has forfeited the right to be selective.  Whether we say that or not, this is at the heart of the reaction to this case.

And somehow, the idea that we should teach young men not to rape is viewed in some quarters as an absurd idea.

Why?

This is, by the way, one of the main bases of fundamentalist Islamic practices in this regard, that men have no control over their libidoes and the only solution is to keep the women in cages to spare the hapless males the temptation.  I mention it here because in Islamic sha’ria law it is so blatantly obvious, but we in the West more or less nurture a similar idea.  It is a ridiculous abandonment of an idea of teaching and training that is taken for granted in most other areas of life.  We assume we can teach people to behave when it comes to just about anything else.  It would be laughable if a defense were mounted for a thief that said, “Well, that house should not have been there, looking so prosperous.  My client couldn’t help himself seeing such temptation.”  We would laugh and unsympathetically sentence the thief for his crime.  Because we assume people can learn, can be taught.

Except in sex.  Gosh, when it comes to that, there’s nothing we can do.  Despite evidence to the contrary, despite programs that do just that—programs that are fought tooth and nail by people who seek to blame the woman because their feckless men can’t understand limits, boundaries, and seem to have the notion that any sex they can get (and get away with) is just their due.

The added fact that these boys were football players just makes it even more absurd.  How could such youth not be given complete sympathy?  They are the standard bearers of our culture.  Football is next to christianity to some people.  You can’t take that away!

We privilege our athletes too much in the first place.  Males who already believe they have rights to other peoples’ well being who are also athletes make for an ugliness of which we should ourselves be ashamed, because we’ve handed them the keys to the house and implied that any harm they do we’ll put down to “boyish enthusiasm”—because we don’t want them to be punished when what they do is so important to us.

I’ve got no sympathy for these boys.  They thought they were getting away with something.  They furthermore didn’t think what they were getting away with was really wrong because they bragged about it.  I want to know how come they missed the part that says fucking someone who has not said, very explicitly and very soberly, yes is absolutely wrong.  By bragging about it, they not only demonstrated that they didn’t think it was wrong but that they felt they deserved it.

And The Culture seems bent on validating their belief.

Shame on us.

culture

Banks Passing

One of the founding members of a band I have loved and followed since I first heard them over 44 years ago has died.

Peters Banks  was the original guitarist for Yes.  As noted in the obituary, he recorded the first two albums with them before being asked to leave, to be replaced by Steve Howe.

The video below is from 2007 and shows a performance by Banks of a piece from his first solo album, Two Sides of Peter Banks, which was released in 1973.

I have written elsewhere about the peculiarity of certain musicians within certain milieu.  Banks, outside of Yes, was a first-rate player.  He did not shine so much with Yes, but a large part of that is probably because Anderson and Squire were going in one direction and Banks had other ideas in mind.

In the last few years I’ve found and purchased three other Banks recordings.  All instrumental, very layered works, part jazz, part rock, part Something Else, I’ve listened and admired the distinctiveness of his sound.  He did other bans after leaving Yes (Flash, Empire) and a lot of session work.  I’ve always been impressed by the list of players on that first solo album, though.  He had Phil Collins (Genesis), Jan Akkerman (Focus, Brainbox), John Wetton (King Crimson, UK, and later Asia) Steve Hackett (Genesis) and others, all first-rank players, all fitting together seamlessly in a wonderfully eclectic musical experience that showcased a wide range of influence and style and ambition.

Here’s a rare video from a Yes session with Banks on guitar:

Time catches us all eventually.  It’s good some things are not forgotten soon.

Farewell, Pete.

 

 

culture

Meaning, Cults, Freedom

Recently, I finished reading Lawrence Wright’s new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollwood, & the Prison of Belief, about Scientology.  It’s a lucid history and examination of the movement.  I wrote a review of the book over at the Proximal Eye, here.  In that review, I touched on a few of the concerns I harbor in regards to religious movements, Scientology in particular, but all of them in general.

The central question in Wright’s book—and indeed in others, for instance Jon Krakauer’s Under The Banner Of Heaven about Mormonism—is the question of volitional surrender.  Why do people hand over the keys to their being to institutions and ideologies that are often based on dubious claims, led by people with clearly autocratic tendencies, to live lives of functional servitude, if not physically certainly intellectually?

There are separate questions here, concerning different stages.  For those born into a group, being raised within its codes and customs, the Outside is by definition alien and the individual is required to do exactly the reverse of the adult who comes into that group from the Outside.  The same question can apply to the apostate who has grown up knowing nothing else—why would you throw over all that you know to embrace this Other Thing?  (The Amish offer an excellent example of the problem, with their practice of rumspringa, a kind of wanderjahr for the youth to go see the outside world and decide for themselves whether to stay or leave the community.  It would seem to be a fair practice, offering freedom of choice, but how fair can it be?  One can read a book about another culture, “know” it intellectually, but that’s a far cry from being able to operate within it, or understand it on any visceral level.  Instead, it’s a kind of wilderness test, which more than likely causes sufficient anxiety that a return to what one has known one’s entire life is virtually guaranteed except for the most adventurous—which may serve the community by culling out those so independent-minded who may cause problems later by nonconformity.)

It would be easy to dismiss certain problems with cultism by seeing past eras as offering essentially little to counter the claims of a charismatic proselyte offering a path to transcendence, but the fact is most of these movements seem immune to any kind of counterargument for those who seem determined to join something that offers them such a path.  For the first generation of Mormons, it didn’t matter that Joseph Smith was obviously coming up with his revelations out of his own head.  When his wife called his bluff on polygamy, all she managed to do was sheer off a splinter group and increase the resolve of the core followers.  What was happening was a sophisticated con, but it didn’t matter, not to those surrounding Smith and later Brigham Young.  It was at that point no longer Smith’s revelation but theirs.  He couldn’t have stopped if he had wished to.  The intricate and alchemical brew of group coherence had happened and it had become Another Thing, an Experience that was true as an experience, regardless of the facts or the motives behind its inception.  The followers had created it and made it its own entity.

Which would suggest that the thing being believed in is less important than the clear need on the part of the acolyte to believe.

Subsequently, this creates a hermetic seal around the object of belief, because belief is not real unless it is absolute.  Criticism of the tenets of faith are not so much attacks on details as on the act of believing.  The whole being of the believer becomes so intertwined with the thing believed as to be one and the same, inseparable.  Personal.  And yet, curiously dispassionate.  It’s not so much a choice as an inevitability, a recognition, an “of course” moment, a “how could I have been so blind?” revelation…

…which automatically renders any question of “how can I be so blind?” inadmissible, unhearable, unsupportable.

It has nothing to do with intelligence.  It’s all about meaning.

The central question of all philosophy is simple: Why am I here?  Even philosophies that seem to render this as an unanswerable—and therefore purely academic question—start from there.  It’s a good question.  What is my purpose in this life?  Religion supplants the inward-directedness of this by offering more cosmic possibilities, often of an unknowable nature, which require belief.  Faith.  No matter what, there is a purpose, a point, and even if I can’t see it, it is at least there.  Meanwhile, here are some guideposts, some rules, some practices that will keep me on a path more or less in sympathy with this higher purpose.  By serving this belief in a telec universe, our own sense of purpose can be, if not answered, at least validated, even if the cause is abstruse or abstract.

Trusting that purpose will be fulfilled simply through faith is not sufficient for the organizations commanding the obeisance of their membership.  If there is a purpose, then actions must be taken to fulfill it, and in lieu of any other clear program, conversion becomes their raison d’être.  They must be seen to be purposeful.  What higher purpose, then, than to change the world.  The clearest way to do that is to convert the world to their cause.  (This is functionally impossible, because there has always been and will always be competing doctrines, but it does raise an interesting question of what would they do if they achieved this end?  After the point at which everyone believed in the same thing, what next?)  And so the continual proselytization such institutions sponsor. (This has the added benefit of redirecting any kind of skepticism from the proselytes potential to ask questions of their own faith into a concern for the potential converts lack of faith.)

There are many definitions of cults, some of which contradict, but at base it is a tricky thing because a “cult” bears sufficient semblance to well-established religions that the only apparent difference is size.  If a charismatic preacher with a hundred followers claims to speak directly to god, he’s a nut.  But if the pope makes the same claim, it is accepted as a matter of faith and accorded a kind of respect the preacher cannot command.  Size.  A hundred people can be deluded, but a billion?  At that level, we tacitly acknowledge that Something Else Is Going On.

My own test has to do with permeability.  Is there egress equal to ingress?  How easily can people leave?  What restrictions are placed on individual interaction with the so-called Outside World, if any?  It’s one thing to claim that people are free to leave at any time, but if the organizational structure requires a cutting off of contact, a limitation of information from outside the group, whether physically imposed or simply a matter of conformity to the group, part of its identity, then it becomes a question meriting a closer look.  Cult? Or religion?  Or, more accurately, cult or church?  The Amish offer an apparent open door, but it’s not really.  Young Amish go out on their rumspringa utterly unprepared because all their lives up to that point have been lived in a bubble that limits information, limits experience, limits contact, and then makes it an either-or test.  (That the limits are self-imposed does not matter since they are self-imposed in  order to avoid group censure.) They are unequipped to make the kinds of judgments and choices so many of us take as a simple right to associate with whom and in what way we choose.  (The big difference regarding the Amish is they do not proselytize.  They don’t go out actively recruiting.  This, to my mind, removes them from cult status and makes them simply what might be called a Pocket Culture.)

A cult guards itself from the Outside by demanding its members shut out anything not wholly contained within the cult.  It actively discourages interface with the world at large.  Sometimes it will go so far as physically impede such contact.

But the members will accept this.  The question brought up by Wright’s book is, why?

If one genuinely believes that their salvation is at stake, that they risk losing an eternal soul should they question—if, in other words, fear is the motive for strict adherence to a set of doctrines and behavioral restrictions—then it is possible one is being abused.  We have ample evidence and example of abused children remaining intransigently loyal to their abusers.  The possibility of inhabiting another condition, whether “better” or not, is unthinkable, because they risk their identity.

Within the precincts of certain ideologies, part of the experience is literally seeing the world in a different way.  The “truth” of the doctrine is exampled in this seeing.  Things “make sense” in ways they never did before.  (It doesn’t matter here that this new way of seeing can happen with any conceptual breakthrough and that if we’re lucky it happens all the time, throughout life, as a natural part of learning.)  That apparent “clarity” can become so important that anything which endangers it must be avoided, actively shut out.  Questions about the central doctrines simply cannot be entertained when the stakes are so high.

In this way, the apparent glassy-eyed acceptance of conceptual weirdness within certain cults makes sense as the only possible path for someone who has achieved a fragile balance because of a framework of belief and is afraid of losing it by questioning the very beam on which they now stand.  The tragedy is that this balance should be theirs no matter which beam they stand on, but the institution has convinced them that it is not theirs should they question or leave.  People feel they have found a home, but a home is a place from which you can come and go as you please, bringing back what you find, enlarging it and decorating it with new things.  The door is never shut in either direction.  Wright’s subtitle posits “the prison of belief” and that pertains when the door is shut and you either don’t leave or if you do you can never come back, which turns the world to which you’ve escaped into just another prison.

Ironically, the one in the deepest cell may be the figure at the center of the movement.  The founder.  Jim Jones, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, all the others.  None of them could stop being who their followers thought they were.  Ultimately, it killed them all.  They had even less freedom to leave.  Their task was to design the prison and always be in it.  One wonders if they in any way fulfilled their own definition of purpose.

culture

Guns and Popes

2013 is shaping up early to be one of those singular years in which people will be asked “Where were you when…?”

Two things of note at the moment, both of which have the slimmest of connections—or maybe not, depending on your perspective: this is the first largely popular effort in support of gun control since the late Sixties, at least rhetorically, and, if the polls are to be believed, demographically; and the first resignation of a sitting pope since 1415.

Connected?  In terms of the kind of faith some people bring to certain givens, perhaps.  But in both cases, core ideologies are being challenged by external pressures that have grown so great as to impose change.

External pressures?  In a word, reality.

Let’s start with the Pope.  It came as a shock even to the non-Catholic world, his resignation.  After eight years, he’s had enough.  He is an old man—Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927—and aside from everything else that is not an easy job.  He became pope during a time of internal strife and public ignominy over the child sex abuse that has been an ongoing problem for the Catholic Church for decades now.  What, from all I can see from the outside, he tried to do was continue to reassert a traditional model of Catholicism on a body religious that has been fractured and mutating since Pope John XXIII and his Vatican II reforms.  Every subsequent pope since has been trying to put certain genies back into a bottle that is cracked if not broken.

The failure of the Catholic Church to deal with the abuse scandal, however, points up another problem that predates even John XXIII and goes to the image the Vatican has of itself, namely that it is in some very real way a separate authority from the secular world in which it operates.

John XXIII was in very significant ways trying to address that very issue through Vatican II, namely that till then the Church had held itself so apart, ideologically and philosophically, from the world that it did not feel obligated on any level to admit to changes in that world which had a bearing on how it conducted itself.

I go on a bit about John XXIII because of the ironies nascent within his reign.  See, he was the second Pope John XXIII, and I think it many ways he chose that name because the first of them had been technically an antipope.  That’s relevant in this instance because of the media fillip about Ratzinger being the the first pope since Gregory XII to resign—and Gregory XII reigned as pope simultaneously with the first John XXIII.

As well as simultaneously with Benedict XIII.

Three popes? This was at the end of a century or more of intense change throughout Europe, culminating in the Western Schism (1378 – 1417) which came to a close when all three of the sitting popes—one in Rome, one in Avignon, one in Florence—abdicated and a new election was held and Martin V became pope.  The question central to orthodoxy, of course, is how could such a thing possibly occur since by convention popes are elected at the influence and direction of God.

The other part of this has to do with the resignations themselves, which were hardly voluntary, but coerced.  John XXIII himself was imprisoned afterward and had to be ransomed.  The last pope to decide for himself to step down was Celestine V, who quit the job five months after having it thrust upon him in 1294 when he realized how inept he was politically.  The man—Pietro Angelerio—had been a monk and hermit and found himself, at age 79, impotent to have his decrees enacted or enforced.  He quit.  (Dante placed him in the antechamber to hell for cowardice, because the one who followed Celestine V was Boniface VIII, whom Dante places firmly in Inferno.)

None of this reveals divinity but political deal-making and squabbling.  However, by tradition everything to do with the papacy becomes the direct will of God (who moves by mysterious ways we are told).

Clearly, though, the actions of the Vatican since the second John XXIII bear all the hallmarks of a secular state that has turned conservative and is trying to reimpose some kind of authoritarianism upon an increasingly willful populace who have problems Rome has been unwilling to admit exist much less attempt to address in any concrete way.  It has all come to a head with the child sex abuse scandals.

To be clear, no one except the least informed suggests that this is a problem solely of the Catholic priesthood.  The fact is, in terms of numbers, priests who do this are no more numerous than in any protestant denomination—in fact, there may be a bit less—and the numbers aren’t high.  Not in terms of priests.  In terms of victims, there may be considerably more than in other denominations because of the internal policies of the Catholic Church, and it is there that the distinction has force.  Because the Church, even when they found out, left these priests in place, sometimes for decades, and imposed its authority on the victims to silence them, first by playing on their Catholicism and then later with threats or pay-offs.  In a protestant church, if a minister is found out doing this, the police are called and he’s arrested.  He is handed over to the state authorities because he has committed a crime.  Rome does not recognize such authority with regards to its officers (priests).  This is, for them, an internal affair, and they will handle it, thank you very much.

Except the world has changed and this is wishful thinking on their part.  Yet, they stick to their core ideology in face of this changed world, trying to pretend that they still represent, in their practices, something relevant.  They may very well, but not at the expense of ignoring what is around them.

The Catholic Church long ago constructed a narrative in which they try to live, one which serves the ideology that defines them.

Likewise, organizations like the NRA are currently constructing a narrative which serves the ideology that defines them.  Like the Church, they have elected to ignore reality and focus on a core set of premises which may at one time have served a purpose but which have become ever more problematic in a world that no longer functions the same way.

There is a faith element to both situations that is striking in how transparently at odds they are with the world we live in, but it is a faith held primarily by those who are insisting that their vision is the correct one in opposition to the context in which they operate.

The answer to gun violence is more guns?  Really?  The answer to pedophile priests is continued immunity from prosecution and more confidence in the institution that is shielding them? Really?  The answer to these is to do exactly the opposite of what is being asked for, indeed demanded, by the people who are feeling most victimized by dysfunctional practices?

What is obvious in both cases is that we are seeing widespread retrenchment and a hardening of ideological bastions against an assault that by any metric should be viewed as an opportunity for better and more constructive communication and involvement.  They are both responses to perceived threats.  The demand for accountability for child abuse by priests is viewed as an attack on Church authority instead of what it is—a demand for justice.  The demand for better controls on firearms is viewed as an attack on a presumed right of personal defense (and an implicit right to counter government abuse by violence) instead of what it is—a demand that people who should not have access to deadly force should in fact be kept from such access.

But furthermore, on both sides, there is a growing consensus that there ought to be a space in which safety can be taken for granted not gained by a willingness to assert personal force.  People want to know, with surety, that they can go to church and be safe, because that’s what church means.  They also want to know they can live in their neighborhoods and send their kids to school in safety and not have to worry about being ready to draw down on some nutjob gunning for an apocalyptic crescendo.  These are not just reasonable expectations, they are in large part what most people mean when they think of civilization.  It is not right that they be made to feel somehow marginalized because the institutions on which they should be able to depend are willing to sacrifice civilized behavior to defend an authority that, frankly, is not even under threat.

But when every comment, criticism, or conversation is seen as just such a threat instead of an attempt to find common ground, it is obvious that those defending the core ideologies are doing so with more and more irrelevance to the world around them.

The NRA started out as an educational organization and when they did that they were very good at it and very effective.  The organization was a good citizen.  But bit by bit their mission mutated from education to advocacy and their tone has become more and more stridently absurd, all in reaction to the boogie man of tyranny and at the expense of a valued place at the table.  The gun, for them, is becoming more important than people and public safety.  All because they have been constructing a narrative based on a false premise of an American past more faithful to bad Westerns than actual history.

We’ve heard the motto more and more lately, an armed society is a polite society.  This is patently false to anyone with a modicum of historical grasp.  Some of the most polite societies have been unarmed and some of the most violent and crude have been armed to the teeth.  There is a reason dueling was outlawed from the 15th century on by every country that aspired to be called civilized.  Might does not make right, not in the arena of public discourse—it only makes for arrogance, tunnel vision, and inequity.  Because right cannot be asserted by force, whether physical or intellectual.  Right must be demonstrable in and of itself, through actions and a willingness to admit error.

Something the Catholic Church has, in fact, been learning to do, but which it still hasn’t quite gotten a good handle on.

There is another way in which the two things are connected.  Some genies are too big to put back in their bottles.  John XXIII started a series of reforms designed to bring the church into sync with the world, to meet the needs of people in the modern age under circumstances that have unquestionably changed.  The Church seems to have been trying to deny this vision ever since, by electing ever more conservative popes who toe ever more conservative lines (the last reformer, John Paul I, met with a very early demise, and there are valid questions to be answered about the circumstances).  They are fencing with schism as a result and have certainly paid a price in attendance.  Likewise, the sheer quantity of firearms in this country and the culture in which they exist represent a genie of a different sort, just as unlikely to be put back in a bottle.  The landscape has changed.  In that sense, the gun lobby is defending something that doesn’t need defending.  It is what it is.  A new approach is required.  A reform of the culture.  We need desperately to tell ourselves a new narrative.  Because without that, all we’ll have is more of the same.

 

culture

Scouts’ Honor

My relationship with the Boy Scouts of America was not the most pleasant.  I was an oddity, to be sure.  I think I was at one time the only—only—second class scout to be a patrol leader.

Second class.  For those who may not have been through the quasi-military organization, the way it was structured in my youth was you entered as a Tenderfoot.  There were requirements for advancement.  Skills had to be learned, benchmarks achieved, and then, having passed through them, you matriculated to Second Class.  You were something of a scout, then.  It was assumed by your fellows that you knew a thing or three, wouldn’t get lost in the woods, knew how to police a campsite, etc etc.  Next up the rung was First Class, which signified a new level of competence and achievement.  The requirements were more stringent, trying, harder, and in many instances more useful, at least in the advent of civilization’s collapse and you made it into the wilderness.  (Likely you still wouldn’t last a week if those were the only skills you brought to the challenge, but they were better than nothing.)  First Class was where the really serious achievements could be made.  Once you fulfilled the requirements for the next level, you went up to…

Now, here I get confused.  Eagle Scout?  Or Life Scout?  Something like that.  The reason I don’t remember is because I never got there.  See, I never made First Class.

Now in a fair world, I’d have no carp, because I couldn’t fulfill the requirements.  I couldn’t swim and by the rules you had to in order to make First Class.  As far as it goes, very reasonable.  I was terrified of the water, and despite the lessons we all went to, I just couldn’t do it.

The problem was, there were other requirements which the other members of my troop did not have to fulfill because, well…the scout master just signed off on them.  (One was hiking a set amount with a pack.  The troop didn’t own a pack nor half the stuff that was supposed to be in it, so our scout master just signed off.)  Not many, but because we were basically an inner city troop, it was deemed that opportunity—or lack thereof—allowed for some sliding.  The rest of my peers made First Class.

Here’s my problem.  I went ahead and did all the rest.  I found the opportunity, got ahold of the necessary stuff, and did it all.  Except the swimming.

I did not get signed off on.  The extra credit, so to speak, made not one bit of difference.  I couldn’t swim.  No special consideration.

But special consideration—given, I think, mainly to save the adults a lot of work—was dispensed to the others.  In my 12-year-old mind, that constituted blatant unfairness.  Nevertheless, my complaints went unredressed, and months later I was elected patrol leader.  Buffalo Patrol.  My mother made our pennant.

I was a creditable boy scout.  I knew a bit about woodcraft already from hunting trips with my dad.  I could find my way with a compass, I could read a map, I could police a campsite, I could manage all the pesky but cool Daniel Boone stuff.  But I was never going to advance up the ladder into the stratosphere of superior scouthood because, well, I couldn’t swim.

But they didn’t kick me out.

There were other problems I had with them, institutional conflicts which I ran afoul of without knowing what was going on.  Years later, I understood.

The Boy Scouts are all about conformity.

The uniforms, the rituals, the youthful boyish comraderie, the classifications for advancement, the dedication to the troop above the individual, all of it was designed to impose a standard form ideal manliness on the scouts.

Now, by itself this is nothing unusual, nor if handled in a benign way a necessarily bad thing.  Civilization needs a certain amount of conformity in order to function.  It’s a dance, to be sure, between individuality and group coherence, one we wrestle with all the time.  But in order to be effective and beneficial, it kind of has to be both fair and honest with itself.  Just what is it we’re conforming to?  If everyone knows what that is, then everyone is (theoretically) free to participate or pass.  It’s only when you hide your intentions or won’t admit to them that problems emerge.

Which brings us to the current spate of trouble the Boy Scouts have been having for a couple of decades now.  They wish to disapprove of homosexuality.

Well, it is a private organization, which is something I think a lot of people forget.  Therefore, they have the freedom to be what they wish to be.

Except almost all boy scout troops are school-affiliated.  As long as they’re with a private school, again, it’s their call.  But if they’re attached to a public school—and I assure you, boy scout troops use school facilities, they get at the least tacit support from the school—then we have a wee bit of trouble over discrimination laws.

Still, I’ll set that aside for the moment.

I hope they choke on this.  Firstly, what they’re saying is the only boys they want are “red blooded all American heterosexuals who like girls!”  Wait, do they say that?  By discriminating against a “gay lifestyle” they damn well are.  The hypocrisy of course is that they give no brief on straight sexuality, either.  By long tradition, what they’re about in this regard is what might be called “wholesome manhood” which once meant that we simply do not tolerate sexuality of any sort.  The idea is that these are boys, they aren’t supposed to be concerned with sexual orientation or anything else concerning carnality.  “Wholesome manhood” is an ideal that pretends sex doesn’t exist until marriage and then you keep it to yourself.

By openly discriminating against a sexual orientation they are coming out in tacit support of a preferred model of human sexuality.  They can’t escape this because the only basis for distinguishing between gays and straights is sexual preference.  Which, by long practice, the Boy Scouts of America are there to suppress on both sides of that spectrum in favor of Wholesome Manhood.

At best, this is hypocrisy.  At worst, it’s fraud.

(One of the charming rituals I endured, as did all the boys in my troop and, I presume, all over the world, was a hazing called “Being Pantsed.”  This entailed being ganged up on as a Tenderfoot by all the others and being stripped of your trousers and forced to try to get them back in your underwear.  Of course, this is not supposed to have a sexual connotation, but the embarrassment was acute and went straight to issues of sexual modesty at a vulnerable time in a child’s life.  Most people who have endured this just laugh it off. Fine, upstanding youth, just larking about.  No subtext.  No connotative secondary implications. Hm.)

So if the Boy Scouts see it as their mission to educate young boys to be on the surface nonsexual, how come that wouldn’t apply equally to a gay boy?

Anyway, the second problem I have with this is that it is defining someone by one trait.  That gay scout might be the best trailblazer in the district, known more about outdoor survival than any dozen others, and be capable of earning fifty merit badges in a year, and yet all this “scout-worthiness” means nothing beside the horror of his sexuality.  Judging him by one thing.

As was I.  I couldn’t swim.

Of course, I wasn’t kicked out.  I suppose because they all assumed that, in spite of that inability, there was no question that I liked girls and, surely they guessed, wanted to do thoroughly Unwholesome things with them.  (Not really, I don’t consider sex unwholesome.  Their standard, not mine.)

Right now the issue is raging over an openly gay scout master.  But again, he’s being judged by one single trait—a trait the entire moral edifice of the Boy Scouts is traditionally not even willing to recognize in straights.

The Boy Scouts is a private organization.  But it is one which we as a culture have long handed our confidence and trust to, one which we have accepted as if it were a public institution, which status they have quite willingly accepted without bothering to correct.  The Boy Scouts like being identified with other public institutions and all things American.

Until now.  Now that they have been revealed as the particular kind of conformists they are, they remind us of their private status and hide behind it.

Fairness is one of the virtues they teach.  And honesty.

In my experience, they’ve never been either.

blog

2012

I was never so glad to see an election done than this past one.  The only comparable year in my experience was 1968 and I can’t honestly say that comparison is viscerally valid, as I was 13 most of that year, 14 right before the election, and most of the issues washed over me leaving me unfazed.  But ’68 was the year of Nixon and Humphrey and George Wallace, Vietnam, the Counter Culture and the Anti-War Movement, and a resurgent Republican Party in opposition to LBJ’s Great Society.  I sensed the acrimony, the bitterness, the ugliness, but most of it made no real sense.  Looking back, I can see that it was very much a revolutionary year and now I can make at least an intellectual comparison.  2012, politically, was a war.

I just finished reading Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, part of his epic series Narratives of Empire.  Lincoln chronicles, novelistically, the Civil War from the viewpoint of Washington and inside the Lincoln White House.  I have read enough period history to recognize the essential accuracy of Vidal’s setting and the nature of the events.  It was tonic for me since it is a full court display of a truly ugly period of political history.  We have encased Lincoln in the amber of the past and rendered him “safe” for our nostalgic alchemy, but it is always instructive to learn about what really went on.  For sheer vileness, one would be hard pressed to find another period in our history to top it.  All the thoughtless charges this past year that Obama was destroying the country, that his re-election would signal the end of liberty, the gutter-level spite in even the most passing of commentary—especially by those in the upper levels of our political institutions—are rendered commonplace by gaining even a smidgen of knowledge of earlier times.  Lincoln, who is now regarded as one of if not the best president we ever had, was at the time regarded even by his supporters as a first-class mediocrity, called “the original gorilla” by subordinates and a Press that was never, seemingly, satisfied with his performance.  His own cabinet was comprised of men who, each of them, thought they could do a better job.  Whereas Obama is only feared as someone who would take away liberty, Lincoln did (the suspension of Habeus Corpus chief among his actions) and yet, here we are, 150 years later, having a hard time wrapping our collective heads around the utter humanness of his presidency.

Still, we didn’t live through the Civil War, we lived through 2012, and personal experience matters differently.

My reasons for not voting for Romney I made plain.  What I found so disconcerting this past year is how little reason impacted those who were bent on ousting Obama.  Once I left the realm of contentless rhetoric and starting talking policy, eyes glazed over, mouths became slack, the body language of my conversents acquired the fight-or-flight posture of someone beginning to perceive a physical threat.  I can only conclude from my small and thoroughly unscientific sampling that most of the people I knew who intended to vote for Romney cared not at all about such things.  Policy made no difference other than as a prop to a personal disdain for Obama.  Without doubt, I’ve lost acquaintances over this.

Worse, the response to losing has been one of the most bizarre congeries of absurdities in recent memory.  The complete denial of reality startled me.  It has been an antic, carnival year in politics.

Interrupted for me personally by my first encounter with mortality, namely an attack of appendicitis that laid me up for nearly two months.  The first week of August I developed a “fluttering” in my belly that resembled stomach flu, but wouldn’t settle out.  By the time I got to the emergency room, it was a full blown agonizing Thing.  My appendix had perforated and I was in Barnes Hospital for a bit over a day.  A few weeks later, I was back in because, one, the wound had become infected, and, two, I had developed an abscess.  Two months after the initial event, I was pronounced healed.  Two months of soup and sleep and reading books and contemplating vulnerability.

For whatever reason, I do not consciously consider myself the object of much affection, so it always surprises me (pleasantly) when people display it toward me.  (I don’t really understand this in myself, since I am in many ways a rather self-centered person, but this never seems to extend to expectations that anyone else pay attention to me…desires, certainly, but not expectation…)  The degree of sympathy and well-wishing that came during my convalescence both humbled and delighted.  Thank you, my friends.

As I said, this did afford me an opportunity to read and I plowed through several books I might otherwise not have managed.

I began a new job this year, at Left Bank Books.  Back in 2011 I started doing work for them of an unusual sort—what we call downtown outreach.  Left Bank is our oldest independent bookstore (1969) and four years ago opened a second location in downtown St. Louis, which proceeded to be ignored.  Well, it takes a while for a new business (or a new location) to acquire recognition, but in this economy they couldn’t really afford to wait.  So we tried something and I started going around to the businesses downtown to introduce them to the fact that they now have a full-service bookstore right there.  Many folks knew about Left Bank Books, but only remembered the Central West End location.  Naturally, they were thrilled to learn there was one within walking distance.

I sort of doubt I had much to do with their increased sales this past year, but it didn’t hurt.  After a few months of my meeting with office managers, building managers, hotel concierges, and the like, sales took a turn for the better.

As of October, I started training as a bookseller.  I’m still doing some of the outreach, but now I have some steady hours (much needed!) and the bonus is I’m getting to know a bunch of very smart, very passionate, very cool people.

Donna also got a new job.  In a weird way.

At the end of 2011, she was dismissed from USSEC, the Job From Hell.  The less said of that the better.  The money, as they say, was great, but everything else sucked.  Frankly, that job was killing her (and not doing me much good either).  Entirely due to office politics, which she hates, she was set up to take a fall and fired.

Cause for Great Celebration and Gleefulness!

We’ve been becoming reacquainted this past year.  Except that the search for a new job turned out to be far more labor intensive than either of us anticipated.

However, she went back to doing what she loves to do—temping.  Of course, the problems with temping are simple: not enough pay and no benefits.  But she likes doing it!

Solution came in the form of an actual job offer from a temp agency to be a regular staff employee.  She works directly for the agency, takes what assignments they are now dedicated to getting her, and best of all she has benefits.  This is in most aspects a dream job for her.

We’re planning an actual vacation.  First one in several years.  (Long weekends aren’t actual vacations, we’ve learned this the hard way.)  But the best part is, she’s happy.

On the writing front, things are…much the same as they have been.  I finished the second volume of my alternate history trilogy (officially the Oxun Trilogy, consisting of Orleans, Oculus (now done), and Orient (forthcoming) and my agent loved it.  I have some revisions to make on it, but nothing major.

And we’re waiting.  I’ve decided to go ahead an write Orient this coming year anyway, just to have it finished.

I have placed a short story collection with a small local press.  Official announcement yet to come.

And I’m trying to write short fiction again.

My photography is continuing to improve (digitally) and I’ve taken my first steps into RAW.  Musically, well, I was playing fairly well until August…

The components of my youth are changing, passing away, metamorphosing.  Too many deaths of heroes, too many changes in landscape, too much maudlin reminiscence.  I won’t detail such things here.  Go back over my posts these last dozen months and you will see what I have mourned and remembered.

All in all, 2012 was a net improvement over the last few years in several ways, though I admit I have to think about it to see most of them.  The bout of appendicitis has been a bit of a wake-up call, with solemn contemplations of time left and mortality and reassessment.  I had blithely been living as though I had plenty of time left to do Everything I Want To Do, but even before August I was admitting that this wasn’t true.  August underlined it and put an exclamation point on it.

We do not make Resolutions normally.  I long ago knew that such things were little better than To Do lists that often get overwritten and superseded by circumstance.  But this time…

2013 will be different.  I don’t know how yet, but.

So be safe, be warm, love each other.  See you all on the flipside.

culture

Addenda Tragicus

I mis-reported something in my previous post.  I said Adam Lanza did this with a pair of pistols.  At that time, that was the report I had, from early news items that did not mention the assault rifle.  But he used one after all, so a correction is in order.  I also said 26 people had been killed, but that was students and teachers and did not include Lanza’s mother, who he killed at home and was apparently the first victim, nor Lanza himself.

I said “we are a people enamored with violence” and yes, I meant Americans, but obviously that is no real distinction, and the bizarreness of such incidents is hardly confined to us.  This report from China is about a similar tragedy.  (This man used a knife, and while some folks are making a point of the fact that none died as opposed to the Newtown event, I think that misses the central fact.  The report goes on to detail that this attack was only the latest in a growing number of similar assaults.)  Here is another detailing a slaughter in the wake of something we may sometimes characterize as a “western” trigger.  Then of course we have become so inured to stories of honor killings and the massacres of terrorists, it may be that we simply discount them and are willing only to focus on our own tragedies as if we should somehow be immune to this sort of thing.

But there are two things I want to add to what I wrote yesterday that I suggest feed this kind of inexplicable event.

The Westboro Baptist Church plans to try to picket the funerals of the children in Connecticut.  Why?  Why else?  Homosexuality.

But we are beginning nationally to discount them as nutjobs, obsessed with their own religious celebrity.

However, Mike Huckabee has weighed in, telling us that the shootings occurred because “we have systematically removed God from the schools.”*

When I talked about the kinds of stories we tell ourselves, this is an example.  Most people are going to shrug this off, the overblown posturings of a disappointed presidential candidate with a viewpoint sharply athwart mainstream.  But I think that also misses a crucial point.

I said we like very much to find reasons, to explain things, and in the face of the inexplicable we tend to grasp at anything that seems to offer a reason.  We are reluctant, it seems, to simply say “I don’t know, it was one of those things” and then keep looking for meaningful answers.  Meanwhile, these kinds of explanations hang around, suffuse the zeitgeist, drift about until sympathetic minds adopt them.

Theology 101:  if, as we find in many strains of christian thought, “god” is by definition “within each of us”—because we are his creations and, presumably, he loves us—then any one or number of us who go into a place bring him with us.  Furthermore, children are by christian operating principles “innocent” and certainly the special ones of Jesus’ attention.  Which means that god is inextricably linked to gatherings of children and a school is chock full of god.

Obviously, this isn’t what Huckabee and his ilk are talking about.  They mean we refuse to put up a crucifix in the classroom and hold organized prayers every day.  They aren’t interested in the nous and spirit of their propositions, only in the propaganda opportunities missed by means of the separation clause.  They don’t trust individuals to carry god with them wherever they go, they want public demonstrations and regular indoctrination seminars.

And because we won’t do that, they suggest that god is letting slaughter happen.  God, in other words, is holding hostages and killing them (he’s all powerful, right?) when he doesn’t get his way.

Back in the aftermath of Katrina, Pat Robertson was spewing a line that New Orleans had been inundated because we have shoved god out of our lives.  This in one of the most religious per capita nations in the Western Hemisphere.  “God doesn’t go where he’s not invited.”  He should have done a survey of the number of neighborhood churches there were (and are) in New Orleans.  It was a cruel, unworthy sentiment that was also based on the idea that his god punishes people because others ignore him—and then doesn’t tell anyone that this is the reason the tragedy happened.

Oh, Scripture?  You mean Sodom and Gomorrah and the search for the righteous?  Lot, who was so righteous he intended handing over his daughters to a mob of horny debauchers rather than risk pissing off his god by letting his messengers be diddled?  Lot, who then later got drunk in a cave and fucked those same daughters, at their contrivance (of course, because it’s always the women at fault) because they thought the whole world had been destroyed and it was time to act like Noah’s kids and repopulate?  That story?  Very uplifting.  (I got in trouble in grade school over that one for (a) bringing up the cave and (b) wondering how come if god could send angels to Sodom to warn Lot’s family he couldn’t have sent the same pair to the cave to tell them the world was okay.)**

You’ll forgive me if I find that kind of reasoning specious and insulting.

Obviously, it doesn’t matter to these people what may actually be going on in the hearts and minds of others, only what we appear to have going on.

So in the wake of a tragedy that, in any meaningful way is the equivalent of an earthquake or a tornado, we see certain folks adding to it by twisting the circumstances into an opportunity for theocratic propaganda.

Which, intentionally or not, feeds the paranoia of certain folks by reinforcing the kind of final solution thinking they may already be indulging and which may from time to time lead to more tragedy.

We have better stories than this.  We need to be telling them.  Often.  Loudly.

Oh, and Huckabee’s position on firearms?

“My position on the Second Amendment to the Constitution is as clear for me as the position held by most journalists toward the 1st Amendment. While I do not consider myself a “gun nut,” I proudly own a variety of firearms and enjoy hunting as well as sports shooting. But even if I were not a hunter or did not enjoy shooting, I would still be a firm believer in the 2nd Amendment right of Americans to own firearms for self-protection and as a matter of principle.”

But of course, using the same twists of logic he used about Newtown, we have no right to be safe from his god.  Not even children.  (Yes, I am making a point by making an extreme case.)

We can do better than this.

_______________________________________________________

* Does it need pointing out that what did the killing did not come from within the school?  That, metaphorically, evil broke in?  Yeah, well, maybe it does…

** Yes, I state it crudely—it is a crude story and deserves no better.

 

 

culture

Insanity

Doubtless whatever I say, someone will find fault, take offense, withdraw into positions, place guard dogs at the gates and lookouts in the towers.

We are a people enamored of the idea of violence.  We like the idea that when it gets down to the proverbial nitty gritty we can and will kick ass and take names.  Americans are tough, not to be messed with, ready to exact justice by knuckles or 9.mm.

Until something like this happens and then we recoil from our own defining myths with a collective “but that’s not what we meant!”

Adam Lanza murdered 26 people in a grade school, 20 of them 1st graders.  Children.  Reports indicate he shot some of them multiple times at close range.

Someone, somewhere, by now has made the argument that had any of those kids been armed, Lanza would have been stopped.  Maybe not in the media (but I could be wrong) but in living rooms and over dinner tables.

Because we are almost as obsessed with Finding Reasons as we are of retaining an image of personal power born of a romanticized version of a Frontier that for the most part never existed.

Back in the metaphorically rich Sixties, at one of the last “above ground” meetings of the Underground, there was a session dedicated to the proposition that it was encumbent upon good revolutionaries to set about killing all newborn whites.  Because, the argument ran, through no fault of their own they were destined to grow up to be part of an oppressive ruling elite and it was necessary to nip this in the bud before the conditions of oppression found new blood to enforce the status quo.

Now, this was not acted upon.  I bring it up to make the point that people adopt narratives and take positions that in their extremity produce bizarre ideas.  The vast majority never come to fruition—they are ideas, discussions, bandied about by people who, in their own way, are trying to find explanations for and impose order upon a world that seems chaotic and malign.  To some extent, we all do this.  There is even an upside to it—fiction writers produce cathartic works that thrill and entertain.

And, in a sane world, go no farther.

But there are always those who internalize the narrative extremes and find cause to act.

We’ve had a string of these recently.  Just this morning there was another report of a shooting, in Newport RI I believe, some loon snapped off fifty shots in a mall or on a beach.  No one was injured this time.  All we have is the lone gunman shooting at the demons around him.

Demons?*

Listen to some of the rhetoric of the past couple of decades, rhetoric that once had a limited audience, but since the age of Cable and the Internet has blossomed with a concomitant ease of isolating narrow bands of data, enabling people to create bubbles and live in them in ways never before possible, seems today more concentrated, vitriolic.

Back in the early days of the Moral Majority I heard Falwell preaching blood in the streets.  End Times Nonsense.  The Apolcalypse is upon us.  Final Days.

Insanity.

But that does not mean these people—preachers and preached—are themselves insane.

No doubt there will be an attempt to characterize this young man as mentally ill.  How else could he have done this?

I believe this misses a crucial point.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt made the case that Eichmann—and by extension most of his colleagues in the Third Reich—was not evil, not in any classical sense of being demon-possessed or mentally deformed.  He was a functionary, a bureaucrat, doing a job.  The most you could say is that he had bought into a paradigm that was at base evil, but it came from many factors.  Key among them was the narrative he had accepted that allowed him to think along certain lines that led to Holocaust.

It’s frightening because it tells us that any one of us could be just like him.

If you live inside a bubble, your view of the world is distorted, the solutions you may find will be at odds with the common, but you do not need to be clinically insane for this to take hold.

Which brings me to one of those gnawing, irritating factors in the second half of this issue.  The guns.

Lanza did not do this with an assault rifle, which has become the icon of mass killings.  He had a pair of pistols.  Automatics, to be sure, but that only makes what he was able to do faster, not any more terrible. And here is the frustrating point that so many of us of a certain generation wrestle with.

I grew up in a house full of guns.  My father was a gunsmith at one point.  We had the equivalent of a small armory in the house.  Several of them were antiques, but a number were quite modern.

It never occurred to me once to use one to settle a problem.  And trust me when I say that if anyone would have fit the profile of one of these killers, it would have been me.  Bullied, ignore, frustrated, introverted, socially inept, and very, very stressed from a feeling of injustice in the way I was treated.

It never crossed my mind to kill anyone.

In terms of the weapons themselves, I treated them with the utmost respect, fully aware of their power and potential (we hunted).

Now.  What the hell has changed?

I do not here side with the NRA.  They have taken it upon themselves to advocate a position which crosses the line into inanity, but which is based on the self-perceived rights of a constituency which for a very long time was perfectly mainstream.  But like other such issues, a worm of right-wing paranoia has crept in.  They do not come right out an say it, but they represent people who believe in their bones that the 2nd Amendment gives them their sole guarantee that the United States will not become a tyranny.

What I will say is that this position makes it very difficult to even discuss rational limits on firearm possession.

Something which once was entirely at the determination of local authorities.

(I find it ironic that people who reject “federalism” out of hand for any number of other matters—schools, healthcare, poverty relief, etc—depend more and more on a federal solution to even state attempts to control firearms.)

An insistence that people like Lanza are mentally ill in some way combined with this absurd stance on a presumed right to not only own but potentially use lethal force for political purposes and a marrow-deep suspicion of government has created an unconscionable situation.  We can all of us not only imagine but I suspect name people who should not own guns.  Neighbors, even.  They are not insane.  They may be irresponsible.  It’s likely some of them—many of them—side with the no-limits attitude of the NRA.  They may simply espouse a worldview born out of narrative completely at odds with reality.

The scary thing here is how close this issue brushes up against 1st Amendment rights.  If, as I seem to be suggesting, we need to look at the kinds of stories we’re telling ourselves about ourselves, doesn’t that border on advocating censorship of some kind?

No, I do not.  But it should be recognized how closely entwined the two things can become.

What I do advocate is some kind of program that punctures all these bubbles people have been living in.

When the Republic was founded, the fact of the matter is the “armed forces” was The People.  We didn’t have much of a regular army—in fact, rejected having one—and our various police forces were not very good.  The fact is, a substantial portion of the population lived in isolated, frontier regions where owning a firearm was not only desirable but essential.  We live upon that founding narrative, even though the frontier is long gone and the fact is that the police and the armed forces are so far and away better equipped than any citizen soldiers might be that the idea of resisting them is almost laughable.  But the fact is, we likely wouldn’t resist them.

But this nonsense over the intent of the 2nd Amendment is silly.  The phrase is “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” not “the right of persons (or the right of people)” to do so.  The Framers understood language, sometimes clearly far better than we do.  By not saying simply “persons” or “people” but instead “the people” they made it clear they intended a political entity, not individuals under any circumstances.  They meant that the militia was the local community, that used to muster to drill from time to time in the town square, and as things became more and more settled, fewer and fewer individuals owned firearms of their own.  They would get them from the local armory if need be (which is exactly what the British were on their way to seize at Lexington and Concord).  What they meant was the right to exercise military force belonged to the citizens.

Let me finish by pointing out that the one thing we seem reluctant to talk about, on either side, is precisely that lost element of responsibility I mentioned earlier.  What the hell happened to us?  We have gone from, presumably, a nation of responsible adults to a nation of emerging armed camps with no ability to teach the next generation anything of value.

I do not know why Adam Lanza did what he did.  I would very much like to know why he thought what he did was not only acceptable but his only option to redress whatever ingrown, isolated, paranoid wrong he thought needed redressing.  I want to know why he thought that was okay.

That is just as important, if not more so, than rationalizing this asinine debate over the proliferation and possession of firearms.

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* No, I do not believe in demons as in “Satan’s minions” or spawn or what have you.  But some folks do believe in them and act accordingly.