Category: Religion

Absurdity

The Irony of Conservatism

Politics dictated FDA policy?  Say it isn’t so!

According to this NY Times piece, the Bush Administration (they get the blame because, after all, he was the Decider) bade the FDA to meddle with contraception when it suited a certain agenda.

What I find so delightful about this, as with the Dover PA decision on Intelligent Design in the classroom, is that a Republican judge, this time a Reagan appointee, made the call.

The thing is, contraception and all that it implies really ought to be a conservative issue.  I mean, really—it has all the hallmarks of the last 60 years of conservative philosophy built on the rights of the individual, the freedom from interference being chief among them.  You would think conservatives would have leapt on this a long time ago, staking it out as exemplary of the idea of American Individualism and the freedom to act as a moral agent, dictating one’s own destiny and making determinations about how one will live one’s life free from government meddling.  Handing both men and women the tools—provided by the free market, to boot—to manage their own lives in accordance with their formulation as individuals of the American Dream should have been a slam dunk for conservatives.  They should have been cheering for it since the days of Margaret Sanger.

What is more, given the attitude of the communist states, which dismissed Sanger and the entire notion of family planning as a bourgeois, capitalist plot to undermine the growth of the collective, this should have been part and parcel of rearing a generation of people cumulatively opposed to Soviet style socialism and collectivism.

Everything about the Choice movement smacks of good ol’ fashion American Values!  It is the perversity of the debate that is ironic, that it should be those who are castigated as liberal soldiers in the march to socialism and its destruction of all things individualist and  true blue American who are the champions of the idea that people ought to have full say in the when and if of having children.

How did this happen?

Well, it has occurred to me that one of the singularly binding features of human political reality is the in-built hypocrisy of claiming that you (whoever you are and under whatever system you live) wish to be free.  When you look at that claim—and Americans are by no means exempt—what it means in practice is the freedom to be autocratic in your own way.  Even back in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan you heard members of the Mujahadeen claiming thay they were fighting to be free.  But free to do what?  And for whom?  Certainly they didn’t mean freedom for their womenfolk.  No, they meant freedom to be oppressive in their own unique way, and apparently it’s not much different here.

Freedom is a slippery term.  Anyone with half a brain realizes that absolute freedom is not viable.  Freedom must be tempered by responsibility.  The edges of what constitutes responsible use of form is fuzzy, of course, and so we have laws to constrain those whose situations or philosophies run counter to the common good.  The irony of the pioneer image, the Mountain Man who went west to escape the constraints of civilization is that they never did and for the most part really didn’t want to.  The first thing settlers wanted once they had established themselves was law and order.  The mountain men were by and large entrepreneurs who depended on the civilization they supposedly disdained in order to make a living.  And they had to perforce accept the local laws of the native populations with whom they trafficked.  Freedom does not mean lawless.

What it means is living within a framework according to your own desires.  You accept the framework while making your own place within it through your own choices and actions.  How well this works out depends on many things.

When conservatives claim to represent American values for freedom, the image they seem to have in mind is one locked in the amber of time that discludes equality for women.  It is freedom for men.  Not that they do anything and whatever they might wish to do.  No, it is that men determine the framework and then work according to their will to build something within it.  But the image tends to ignore the framework, seeming to take it as given that it exists as something out of nature, god-given, pre-extant.  It is an old, hoary, knotty kind of image that harkens back to notions of the frontier and the need for growing populations and the presumed biblical virtues that allowed us to dominate this continent (displacing, killing, and otherwise bilking the natives out of the land along the way).  What it did not include was the image of women running businesses, holding political office, and certainly not bedding down with anyone they liked any time they liked just to have fun.

Basically, though, women as equals alters the framework, and everyone has to shuffle to find a new way to live within it.

So much for the vaunted champions of American individualism.  But still, it is a profound irony that the rhetoric—so powerful, so eloquent, so persuasive—should represent the polar opposite of what it is intended to.

But some of them, apparently, seem to get it. Good for you, Judge Korman.

culture

No, um, well, You Know What Over 18!!

I have said for years that the convulsions of the Religious Right over abortion has less to do with fetuses than with sex.  Now that we have proof over time that Abstinence Only education DOES NOT WORK, these folks have decided that rather than recant they will go on an even wilder offensive by attacking university level programs.

All I can do anymore is shake my head and wonder  “Just what is it with these people?”

But what really annoys me are the many politicoes who go along with this nonsense and can’t seem to muster the nerve to tell them to, well, fuck off.  I mean, really—they can’t honestly be that numerous.

Or can they?

culture

One Last Absurd Act…

The obsession the Right has had for lo these many years with people’s sexuality has received a final “gift” from the Bush Administration.

This is like grade school stuff.  It’s classic “If we don’t tell them about it, they won’t want it” thinking.

Many on the Right feel everyone should have the freedom to own weapons.  They think, implicitly, everyone is capable of proper usage of guns and that just because a certain number of individuals clearly intend to use them to the detriment of others, that that is no excuse to keep them out of the hands of everyone else.  They are supportive of education in proper use of firearms.

So why the different attitude toward sex?

I expect this question never to be answered in such a way as to be persuasive to those who think sex is something that ought to be left in the gutter and in the closet, who think that teenagers ought not be told about it in the vain hope that they won’t use it, but I am so utterly and profoundly tired of this infantile crap.

So you’re squeamish and you react negatively to words like “penis” and “vagina” and the idea of the one sliding into the other sends shivers of revulsion down your spine.  But oddly enough you probably don’t have a problem with images of gunshot wounds or swords cleaving limbs from torsos.  You have no problem with the idea of strapping someone to a chair or table and applying pain in order to extract information.  You’ve got no problem with dumping toxic waste into rivers or landfills as long as you can live apart from it in the style and manner to which you’d like to be accustomed.  You have no problem prosecuting a president for a blow job but one who has ordered the slaughter of hundreds of thousands based on twisted and erroneous information is okay.

Here’s the trade off—I won’t call you a sociopath and try to enact legislation to require you to seek psychological counseling if you would just get out of people’s sex lives!

Do you have any idea how much misery, suffering, and pain the ignorance of matters sexual causes, globally, every day because you, whoever you are who thinks this kind of repression is somehow moral, can’t stand the idea of people making love outside the bounds of your narrow moral vision?

In certain countries, where marriage is the norm for 11, 12, or 13 year old girls, there is an unfortunate and horrible physiological syndrome these girls suffer if they become pregnant.  Because their bodies are capable of intercourse and they’re dropping eggs, pregnancy is not uncommon, but because their bodies are not fully mature, it can cause a tear between the uterus and the bowel, which results in a constant leakage of waste fluid out of the bowel.  Over time, the condition festers, can often lead to plasmotoxosis and septisemia, probably an early death, but before that it cause these girls to begin to smell horribly.  They are then ostracized and cast out of their communities.  Before the absurdity of Abstinence Only informed our policies, American sponsored health organizations, like Planned Parenthood, were addressing that problem.  They couldn’t change the custom of early marriage but they could provide contraception and reliable education, and for a time they were making inroads in stopping this.  Bush’s people cut all that funding and now the problem is back in full.

Point  being, not all the services provided by these “evil advocates of irresponsible carnality” are for the purpose of allowing people to screw recreationally whenever they want—there are serious, serious health issues involved.

There are many such instances of unfortunate side-effects of sex which these policies have exaccerbated and I am fucking sick and tired of it!

So along with Bush and his cronies, I would like all you sex-aversive morons to kindly leave as well.  Many of us do not share your revulsion.

Enjoy your parting shot while you can.

End of rant.

culture

In This Corner…

Recently I engaged in yet another cycle of debate with someone who insists that science is a religion.

This is a tiresome argument on one level because it is one with all sorts of things that fall under the category of “I know it when I see it.”  But on another level, it’s a rather interesting question.  Not that science itself, as practiced by people who understand it or appreciated by those who don’t practice it but at least have a grasp of its nature, is a religion, but certainly people make religions out of all sorts of things.  So the question arises, what are the necessary and sufficient constituent elements of religion?  And which of those constituent elements does science (a) possess or (b) lack?

On the one hand, I’d like to be able to shut down the folks that blithely,without thought, make that allegation, that science is a religion.  On the other hand, I am interested in the psychology of religious adherence.

It would be easy to say the one element both share is Faith.  One has to believe that something is efficacious in order to base one’s thoughts, ideas, or life on the principles embodied by a given discipline.

I dismiss this out of hand because a lifetime of rubbing up against religious folk has convinced me that, for many (especially those who make this particular argument) faith alone is not sufficient.  It’s not enough that you express a belief in a religious philosophy, you have to demonstrate it.  You can’t sit at home on Sunday and be a good believer, you have to show up where the others can see you being a believer, and mouth the words they all mouth, and show them that you believe.  Ironically, of course, this is proof of a sort, something faith is supposed to do without.

Faith wavers, but that alone does not make it unreal, so it is clear that people put their faith in many things—family, friends, money, political ideologies, the Lottery, the fact that the sun will appear in the morning—but these things do not constitute religions.  (One can jokingly make a case for any of them, but there are no churches associated with most of them except by the longest stretch.  I’ve made the case before that sports constitutes a religion—people get passionate about it, build great cathedrals for the practice of it, attend services regularly, and argue doctrine [designated hitter, college basketball ranking for the finals, etc]—but obviously, though some folks treat it that way, they do not believe regular observance at football or baseball games will get them to heaven after death.)

Religious faith is supposed to stand regardless of challenge.  The kind of faith science engenders requires that adherents be willing to ditch a belief if it is proven wrong.  Semantics aside, that’s a clear difference.

But religion embodies things other than faith and that’s where it gets thorny.  Why isn’t science a religion?

Does it have a priesthood?  You could make a case for that.

Does it have associated ritual?  Yes, certainly—peer review if nothing else.

Does it have worshipers?  Fans, certainly, and I suppose you could say that any collection of amateur devotees can be said to worship something if they go far enough.

Does it demand worshipers?  Ah, well, depending who you ask….

To what end would the worship of science lead?

Do worshipers derive the same sort of warm comfort from science as they might from religion?

We’re getting into questions of sociology now.  Which leads to a question of intent.

Do scientists actively seek to build a community of worshipers?  I would say not.  Supporters, yes, but they prefer supporters who understand what they’re supporting.

Do scientists insist that the trappings of science be inculcated in daily life?  Like, for instance, rosaries or St. Anthony medallions, crucifixes on bedroom walls, a Bible in the house?  Do they argue over which trappings are important?

We get into a fairly complex arena of interchangeable motifs.  Anything can be retasked for a purpose for which it was not originally intended.  So you might argue that while a religion always intended that its trappings be seen and used as objects in support of worship, this is not the case in science.  If people subsequently embue such things with an aura of religious potency, this is clearly a mis-use per the original intent.

So is it the continuation of original intent, allowing for slight modification over time, that informs a religion with its particular identity?  Perhaps.  This can also be seen as a transmission of ideas over time, which certainly science relies on as well.

We reach a point, again, where just about anything can be described functionally as a religion if we deconstruct it sufficiently.  By the same token, we can do the reverse, and argue that anything is merely a manifestation of community involvement in matters of importance to that community, which renders even religion as nothing more than a kind of tribal custom, meaningless outside the context of a given community, no different at all from politics, music, theater, art…or science.

Those who claim that science is a religion are not making anthropological observations.  They are engaging in an attempt to bring science to a level with religion, make it the same as religion, and thereby stripping science of any special capacity to challenge religious claims.  The fact that it really does get difficult to state a necessary and sufficient condition for what constitutes a religion makes it equally difficult to debate the point clearly for lay people.

The one element I have not mentioned is god.  (Forgive me, I always spell that with a small G because it is not, to my mind, a proper name.  It is a designation of a concept.  Which god?  Zeus?  Queztelcoatl?  Odin?  Vishnu?  They are all proper names for gods.  By the same token, I tend not to capitalize “human” for much the same reason.  It is a category.  Over time, the plethora of gods have gradually been subsumed into a concept, at least by many people, of one god, and yet…it is a category.)  The inclusion of god (or gods) into the make-up of all the foregoing descriptors inevitably characterizes those agglomerations of doctrine and ritual and architecture as religions.

There is no god in the necessary and sufficient descriptors of science or scientific practice.

Metaphorically, much literature alludes to false gods—money, power, certain idols, celebrity, etc.  But in all these it is implicit that the objects in question are not gods, but are only seen as such by those who are being judged as worshipers by those who disapprove of that worship.  Fair turnabout would then argue that if a religious person making that argument really believed that the bestowal of godhood onto one of these objects is sufficient to define it as a religion, albeit a false one, then you must admit that it is only such bestowal of godhood on the accuser’s object of worship that makes it a god as well—hence no actual deity, only the assertion of a believer.  Not wanting to open that particular can of worms, I think most religious people who condemn false gods admit, at least to themselves, that really the objects in question aren’t gods even to those who seem to be worshiping them.  At most they are distractions.

No, it is the assertion that there is an actual deity that separates the concepts.

But it does pose a most interesting question—is god real if no one believes in it?

The religious will say yes, absolutely.

The scientist will likely say probably not.  The scientist will say Show me proof.  If none is forthcoming, belief is not so much denied as never credited.

Functionally, then, we come to a clear difference.

And yet, the argument continues.  Why?  Because there is strife between them.  They both represent differing views of the Real.  Religion seems incapable, as a discipline, of regarding any challenge to its hegemony as anything other than a religion.  Religion can only be legitimately displaced by another religion.

It cannot be ignored.  It cannot be sidestepped as irrelevant.  It cannot be seen as obsolete.

Which it is not.  But for those who insist on categorizing science as a competing religion, there is very little traction out of their own extinction.  In my opinion, they have missed the point of both religion and science and have been conscientiously digging a rut for themselves ever deeper.

For the benefit of both, I believe, a sound distinction should be found.  Perhaps there is one that answers all the questions I’ve put forth here.  I am one of those who basically “knows it when I see it” and find it difficult to succinctly characterize the differences.  If it is, indeed, simply the inclusion of god in the mix, then there ought to be no argument between the two.  But it seems to me that there is something much closer to home embodied in the question.  There is an issue of consequence inherent.

By that I mean that the acceptance of one or the other discipline as a guiding principle is seen to have consequences in morality and ethics and, for one side, in the afterlife.  Setting aside the extremist position that so-called godlessness leads to rampant immorality (it is a hard thing to prove as no regime  has ever succeeded in stamping out belief in god, only particular manifestations of worship), the larger question is simply this: is the belief in other things not included or inculcated by religious practice (the universe as revealed through scientific inquiry) de facto counter-religious?  In other words, is the practice of science inevitably destructive of religious expression?  Conversely, is religious observance inevitably destructive of scientific inquiry?

If both are indeed religions, then the answer is likely yes. That would make them competitors, with contrary agendas.

But if there is a sound distinction (which I suspect there is), then the answer is no.

Given all these questions, I invite discussion.  I am curious.

culture

The End of Hell

Yesterday, our reading group did the last canto of Dante’s Inferno.  We reached the center, climbed the hairy haunch of Satan, and emerged to a place where above could be seen stars.  I’m told each volume of the Commedia ends with stars.

There is in this final fabrication a very science-fictional scenario which can easily be read as a depiction of a singularity.  All motion has ceased except for the flapping of Satan’s wings and the gnawing of his three mouths on the bodies of the ultimate betrayers, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.  (As in most other places in the Inferno, Dante mixed post Christian Era figures with Classical forms.  He is talking about Reality, not denominations.)  Ice is everywhere, there is a brief description of the center of the earth being the point where all weight is drawn equally.  Time stops.

Dante seems to have grasped the notion that Absolutes embody extreme conditions, that the core of absolute evil will be a thing where the normal laws of motion, of sight and sound, of behavior all exhibit impossible manifestations.  All is in suspension.

Imagine cutting your finger.  Imagine the razor edge of a blade sliding through the flesh.  Now imagine that moment, frozen in time, always being the single sensation you experience, constantly, without beginning or end.  Eternity.  Pretty bad.  Now imagine being constantly eaten.

Now consider:  Dante’s theme is that all these people have done this to themselves.  Satan didn’t put them here, hasn’t manufactured these punishments.  The inhabits did it all on their own.  They are trapped in their own constructions.

To escape, all they have to do is imagine a way out of their own concepts and then accept it.

They can’t.

That is the blade through the flesh, tautologically locked into a continuous feedback loop.

Dante was not, furthermore, positing that the “truth” these folks turned their back on has much of anything to do with god or ecclesiastical law.  It is entirely to do with their concepts of what constitutes Reality.  By Reality, we mean that which we do in the world.

What has become clear through 34 cantos is that Dante was concerned not with the tropes of his poem, but with the realities of the denizens he introduces as he and Virgil descend toward Malebolgia.  This is not a religious work.  In this sense, it more closely approaches science fiction than fantasy.  The ghost in the machine which dominated the lives and decision-making of all these souls permeates the narrative like a Turing Test, set to determine which are aware, which are not, and which are aware of the alternatives and refuse to accept them.  Like some pernicious form of nano technology, these people have built their own torments.  Inferno is a parody of the Earth, of life, stripped down and fine-tuned to give the inhabitants what they have acted like they’ve wanted.  Traps, cul-de-sacs, isolation chambers, pain generators…

And the curious element that recurs throughout is how little they pay attention to anything outside their own small place in the pit.  Many resent Dante coming into their midst, seeing them, but then seem to forget about them as soon as Virgil takes Dante onward.

Inferno is a piece of psychology.  And the lowest pit is reserved for betrayers who used the excuse of the greater good in order to turn on a friend or leader.

Dante was a believer in self-retribution.  No matter what fate these folks suffered in life—and many landed in prison or were murdered or otherwise brought to ugly ends—the ultimate punishment is always the damnation of their own inability to see past their own corruption.  It is that which condemns them, which sequesters them.  You get the deep feeling that any of them could leave if they could just see.  But they can’t.  They are morally blind.

Some seem to prefer where they are.  They do not want to be “saved.”

Extending this, it would seem that Dante was of the (then heretical) opinion that achieving Paradise was something within our own grasp simply by making a choice.

Choice.  The ultimate punishment exhibited in Hell is Satan’s own.  He had questioned god’s decision to give humanity free will.  He argued that if given the authority he could guarantee humanity’s worship of god, that he would make the ideal boss.  He apparently didn’t get the whole notion of free will.  And in the end he reins over (or under) a realm occupied by people incapable of choosing any other path than the utterly solipsistic one  that brought them here.  He is stuck in the hole, plugging the way between what is now Hell and Purgatory, eternally in the presence of people who are there because they simply lack the capacity to be anywhere else.  They are chained to their devotions.

It is now January 5th.  2009.  We have witnessed the meltdown of everything we thought was a successful business model in this country—in the world—and there are no doubt people who have lost everything who don’t understand what brought them to this hill.  They had choices along the way to stop taking profits and invest in something real, but they couldn’t get off the ride.  Someone else, they assumed, would pay the price.  Well, someone else did.  But so did they.

Metaphorically, I find the parallels fascinating.  It’s almost tempting enough for me to attempt a fantasy to take advantage of the insight.  But then again, it’s not that deep of an insight.

What I will be interested in is what lies ahead, in Purgatorio.  Will it be peopled by the collateral damage of all the machinations of those in Hell?

Meantime, I’m writing a new science fiction novel.

culture

Koan

A note I jotted to myself sometime in the past.  I don’t recall the circumstances, but the question posed feels universal.

The spiritualists cringe and argue against any description of self-conscious life as mechanism, that any mere machine is necessarily only an accumulation of parts and processes that can never rise above its own origins.  They offer in its place a description that makes of us a vessel to contain an essential self that is gifted from without, a near complete something that a priori transcends the mechanistic.  From where?  Choose your own myth of origin.  But they all presume a Maker.  The question must then be put—what separates the divinely made from the “naturally” made or, later, the self-made?  Are they not in the end all simply made things and as such all mechanisms?

culture

Seekers and Sowhats

I don’t keep abreast of new television very well.  I’ve drifted into a mental space wherein I’m dimly aware of new things.  I hear about them on the radio or from friends or occasionally I see a notice on a website.  But I’ve long since lost the habit of keeping track.

So when I started hearing about this new fantasy show, Legend of the Seeker, it seems that it was already airing and I’d heard nothing about it beforehand.  I didn’t get much in the way detail from anyone, other than short recommendations (“Oh, you should see it, it’s good!”) or facial expressions that were difficult to interpret.

Normally, as I’ve said before, I can watch fantasy.  Movies and television, whatever, I can sit for an hour or two and suspend my disbelief, and just go with it.  I have a very difficult time reading fantasy.  My idea of really good fantasy is basically material that, if it had a more rigorous grounding in the plausible, would be science fiction, but doesn’t make the cut.  I liked the fantasy of The Twilight Zone (both the original series and the 80s remake).  Ray Bradbury comes to mind as a fantasist I can read.  Or Harlan Ellison.  Occasionally Ursula LeGuin.

In terms of epic, sword & sorcery, thud and blunder stuff, I have no patience.  I very much enjoyed Delany’s Neveryona books, but they were more anti-fantasy.  As was, in its way, China Mieville’s excellent Perdido Street Station.  I enjoyed Hal Duncan’s Vellum though I haven’t yet gone out of my way to read the sequel.  I look at my book shelf and see very little in the way of that sort of fantasy.  Mary Gentle’s terrific Ash saga, Avram Davidson’s Phoenix and the Mirror, Jack Vance’s Lyonesse…

It’s a short and elite list.  I receive this sort of stuff in the mail now to review and I give them a few pages.  You can see it pretty quickly, certain conventions of language and character, setting and conceit, that work their way between the cracks of the words to say “here there be no sense or reason, only action and portent.”

As I say, usually I can watch these sorts of things and just go with it.

I watched most of the premier episode of Legend of the Seeker last week online.  (I can do that now that I have dsl!  It’s cool!)

I say I watched most of the premier.  Did not finish.  Too much predictability.  Too much of it based on stupidity.

Let me just take the opening sequence, which is a chase.  We begin in media res with two women fleeing on horseback.  They are not exactly dressed for this, the one wearing a screamingly white gown that billows around her.  This gown is also a swoop neck affair that shows off her chest quite nicely.  Bridget Regan, playing the part of Kahlin, is nothing if not fetching.  More on that later.  I can forgive the wardrobe malfunction under the assumption that they didn’t have time to change clothes—at least until later, when they tell the story of the fall of their order, and you get the distinct notion that there was time not only to change clothes, but to make a better escape, one less fraught with the possibility of imminent capture.

But back to the chase.  Here are these two women—witches of sorts we learn later, but it is implied by their dress and demeanor—who weigh in at about 115 to 125 pounds, riding two fairly good-size horses.  They are being chased by four men in full medieval-style armor.  Assuming they are the best available, they’ll weigh in between 180 and 220.  Add 30 lbs of armor, a bit more if you include the swords and knives.  Their horses are no bigger.

But they’re catching up.  There’s a sequence of a bowman shooting from horseback at the two women.  Not a bad shot either, but at full gallop any accuracy would be pure luck.  Nevertheless, he hits one square in the back.

The wounded one tries to continue, but ends up falling off her horse, rolling down a hill to a stream bed, there to die after the other one—her sister—abandons her horse to minister to her.  The death scene takes a couple of minutes.  A secret book must be gotten to somewhere else.  Leave me, sister, I’m done for.

Meantime, the four soldiers, who weren’t that damn far behind—close enough, in fact, to hit one of these women with a bow shot—are nowhere to be seen.  Finally they appear at the top of the hill.  Pausing to watch.

Convinced to continue on, the surviving sister picks herself and runs.  And the four men on horseback, who had been catching up, can’t catch her now.

At this point I’m thinking, “oh, this isn’t good.”  Not about Kahlin’s plight, but about the story itself.  This is idiot plotting.

But Kahlin’s an eyefull and worth watching.

There’s a barrier, a mystical field of energy, which Kahlin manages to open with some magic.  She enters the rift and escapes her pursuers.  Who then sit and argue about whether or not to pursue, and then decide to.  Meanwhile this barrier has obligingly remained open, waiting for them to finish their ruminations, and as soon as they enter, it closes up.

How come it didn’t close up immediately after Kahlin entered?

Well, if that happened, then the rest of the show could not proceed along it’s absurd path.

We come now to the Seeker, who is a young fellow who doesn’t even know he’s special.  He was brought as an infant into this country to be raised by a good man and his wife, who had no children then, if the tangled thread of his origin story is to be understood.  They vowed to do their best.

They then had another son, who ends up being the guy in charge of the land.  But while dad tells this son that his brother isn’t really his brother, he doesn’t tell him anything else.

Huh?  Why tell the kid anything?  That would guarantee, of course, that sibling in charge couldn’t be tricked into thinking his brother (not) is evil and to be hunted down in league with the men who had been chasing the witch.  Who has come to find the adopted kid, of course, and the wizard who’d brought him here.

These people act like idiots in very specific and annoying ways.  The action carries the story as long as you don’t think too hard about any of this, but since motivation all hinges on what all these people know or don’t know, it becomes difficult to understand why they did or do what they did or do.  Simple things, like KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT ABOUT THE KID, HE’S IMPORTANT AND SOME BAD MEN WANT TO KILL HIM.

But furthermore, the faithful brother, who ostensibly grew up with this orphan as a brother, turns on him without too much deliberation on the word of a stranger who had come to this land from somewhere it should have been impossible to come from.  Because of the barrier, you see.  Familial feeling, presented as solid in the one instance, decays almost instantly.  Now the circumstances would seem sufficient, but given all the other idiocies to this point…

I said I would come back to the scoopneck gown.  Yes, yes.  Bridget Regan…she’s the stuff of fantasies (sexual in this case, at least in my case), a real beauty, fiery eyes, graceful, fine skin…and a nice bosom.  Would be a shame to hide that bosom.

Sp when everyone who is supposed to be hooked up for the quest finally is, it’s determined that she needs different clothes.  That white gown would stick out like a bonfire under the right conditions.  Better she wear something that would blend with the forest.  We’re in Robin Hood territory now.  So a friend takes them to his home and they get kitted out.  The wife makes an outfit for Kahlin.  She comes out to show it off.  Very woodlandy, now, long sleeves, leather, green and brown—with a scoopneck front, depending from shoulder tip to shoulder tip.

Everyone else, mail or female, is pretty much covered up to the chin.  Not Kahlin.  Can’t hide that cleavage, now, can we?

At this point I turned it off.  I was turned off.  The Seeker acts like a dunce—he’s been told nothing, but that doesn’t forgive his lack of any common sense.  The wizard doesn’t really want to be bothered with all this and thought he’d ducked it by coming to this land on this side of the barrier.  Silly wizard, he knew all about Destiny, which is what the Seeker is caught up in, and should know better.  Things catch up.  And they do.

There are any number of minor quibbles up to this point, but the major one I have is the rather unsubtle co-option of the religious subtext into a second-rate fantasy plotline.

The Seeker is Richard Cypher.  How clever.  A cypher, a code, as if we didn’t realize that this was pure allegory.  The code here, of course, is that poor Dick is Jesus.  Look at the plotline.  The evil lord Darken-Rahl took over the land where Cypher was born and, because of the prophecy that the Seeker would find him and kill him, he orders every firstborn male child slaughtered.  Jesus/Moses/Richard escapes, grows to manhood, and has to come back to fulfill the prophecy.  He’s the chosen one, the one who can read the cryptic language in the Book of Lost Shadows (cryptic = code = cypher) and can weild the sword of power (of course you knew there’s be a special sword).  Swords are always good stand-ins for the Cross, of course.

Richard’s brother is Michael.  I predict at some point in the series Michael will become Richard’s lieutenant—the archangel, avenger, etc.

Kahlin…intriguing spelling for a name whose roots are apparently from Catherine, which means “pure.”  Hence the white gown?  Her title is Confessor.  Well.  And the men who confess to her fall in love with her.  I’m seeing by circuitous paths a road to Mary here.  Mary Magdalene or the Virgin?  Does it matter?  When she touches a man she is able to make him do her bidding.  (I’m thinking, because of the nature of the effect of her Confessor role, she’s more Magdalene than Mom, but I doubt they’ll push it much past the platonic.)

It gets thicker, of course, but the bottom line is that whole Seeker saga is loosely based on Christian mythology.  No surprise, a lot of fantasy is.  But, as is also the case in much fantasy, it is Christian mythology through the lens of a Crusader, ala King Arthur, Percival, the knights, etc.  This is Jesus with a sword set to actually supplant the king and free the country.  Robust, aggressive Christian allegory, no wimpy sermons or anything like that, and Richard’s John the Baptist (the wizard Zed) kicks ass.

And of course, Darken Rahl is just plain evil, much the way Herod the Great was depicted.  He’s easy to hate.  (Darken Rahl…hmm…Darth Raul?  Would they dare?)

Why am I picking on this little tv show?  Because it is clear that a lot of money has been spent on it.  The acting is pretty good, the sets are nice, the special effects are none too shabby, and some effort was made to establish a story arc that has a lot of symbolic meaning.  Lots of money.  For what is essentially substandard fare.  We are to look at it and be awed.  Kahlin’s marvelous chest is to be ever on display and will probably be ever out of reach, so a degree of ongoing sexual tension will be permanently in place.  Likely as not, she’s a virgin, and probably at risk to lose her powers if she sleeps with a man.  That’s a cheap prediction, but so much else is so derivative in this thing that I’d almost be willing to wager real money on it.  So Richard and Kahlin will travel on, probably collecting a band of followers (merry men?  disciples?) along the way, and never consumate the quite evident desire already between them.

As I said at the beginning, normally I can watch this sort of thing with nary a twitch.  I can find all the flaws later, but when it comes to movies and television I’m a bit of a sucker.  I always turn into a ten-year-old and am willing to be amazed and delighted and generally that happens.  But sometimes it just doesn’t work.  It just gets more irritating, beginning with the essential idiocy of the characters.  It is a plot driven by people who seem incapable of simply asking a straight question.  Information is withheld for no good reason and the consequences are always dire.  Sure they are.  If you don’t tell someone that there’s a hidden pit with spikes at the bottom in the field they want to walk across, well how hard is it to predict their surprise, shock and horror at betrayal when they step in it?

This could have been much better.  They have a lot of talent, obviously, but alas no brains.

Oh, and that magic sword?  Didn’t do Richard a lick of good the first time out.  Is it possible that someone actually has to learn how to do something in this world?  He picked it up and the scrollwork along the blade glowed with promise.  But he lost his first fight, which also cost him the book he was supposed to keep out of Darken Rahl’s hands….

It may also do well.  But I think largely because the audience will care not a whit for anything other than how it looks and the allegorical buttons it pushes.  And after all, Richard has—wait for it!—A Destiny!  There is no way he can (a) get killed or (b) fail.  Really.  He can’t fail.  People in fantasies with destinies don’t.  It’s in the contract.  To agree to have a destiny commits the powers that grant such things to ensuring that, no matter how few brains the recipient of said destiny possesses or how little ability is demonstrated in using what brains exist, the recipient will, somehow, succeed.

A neat twist to this would be to discover that Richard is, in fact, Darken Rahl’s son.  That would be interesting when it comes to the final showdown.  Will junior axe dad?  Or will he “save” him?  Stay tuned.  I can’t wait.

But I won’t watch.  No, not even for Kahlin’s marvelous charms.

Literature

Thinking, Thinking…

I’m supposed to be reassessing this weekend.  Instead, I’ve being reading, cleaning house, being interviewed for a YouTube video…

That was a bit surreal.  I have no idea how it will come out, but it will get some exposure (pun intended), and since we live in a highly visual time that might be better promotion than anything I actually write here.

Still, it was amusing.  My interlocutor asked a few questions to set the general direction of my rants and let me go.  He intends to edit it down to digestible bits and put up one or two 10-minute segments on Dangerous Intersection.  Mark Tiedemann on History.  Mark Tiedemann on Religion.  Mark Tiedemann on Sex…

I should also have been doing more writing this weekend.  Donna spent the night at her sister’s house, so I had the place pretty much to myself from about five on, and here it is seven in the morning and this is the first scribbling I’ve done.  I am such a lazy ass at times.

Today is the Dante Group.  The penultimate canto in the Inferno.  We’ve moved through this in pretty good time.  Next weekend we’ll do the last canto and then wait till ’09 for Purgatory.  It has been instructive and I will probably, at some point, include some of what I’ve gleaned from Dante into my fiction.  I want to do another Quill story.  Quill is my pilgrim in search of meaning.  The only one of his pieces that has seen print is Chasing Sacrifice, published long ago in the pages of Science Fiction Age.  I’ve written one more since and it’s in submission now, but…

For some reason I’ve always had trouble writing short fiction in series.  A couple decades back I tried it with a character called Mix Sentenni.  Street kid who manages to work his way into the space industry and pull himself up.  I managed to write three stories, one of them a reworking on an earlier version.  One made it into print in Space & Time, the second one got me into Clarion, and the third was an updated, completely revamped version of the first one and sold to Tales of the Unanticipated.  And that was it.  Never came up with another Mix story, although you’d think it would be a great vehicle for further examinations of that particular setting.  Imagination failed.

Quill is my next attempt, but so far…I guess I’d be terrible writing a television show.

The notion behind Quill is to explore religious questions in a space opera setting.  I decided to do them at novella length to see if that helped.  And as I say, I written two.  If I can do three more at that length I’d have enough for a decent fix-up novel.  But…

I have a title for a third one and some ideas are churniung in my hindbrain.  We’ll see.  It would be nice.  But in this case, it’s also a matter of not wanting to grind axes on the page.  I want the stories to fall out naturally, not turn into polemic.  The Dante sessions are helping.

In fact…

culture

The Curmudgeon Speaks

The curmudgeon in repose observes the feckless maunderings of the primates in their dispeptic self-justifications.  Christmas is coming.  You can see it, feel it, sense it.  Not only in the more pleasant garnishments appearing too early (and hopefully) in stores and streets, but in the renewed efforts of those who can’t get past their own distorted misapprehensions and so fling the feces of their discontent at the crowds.

A couple years ago I received one these from an anonymous source.  It purports to be a letter from Ben Stein, based on a broadcast he did one Sunday on CBS.  From the page you’ll see that it was added to, taken out of context, and corrupted.  The source from whom I received it this year surprised me, so I shot back the link to this site.  Naturally, the person in question was miffed.  No one likes to be told they’ve been a patsy.

There’s an ugliness to this kind of thing that upsets me a lot.  Basically, it is the linkage of No Prayer to Ruin and Death.  All those people in New Orleans, in this formulation, lost their homes and lives because people elsewhere had stopped praying.  So god let the waves in to punish us—and then didn’t bother to tell us that’s what he’d done.

Never mind the whole dubious connection between prayer and anything remotely like the salvation of a whole city from a hurricane.  I recall once seeing a news broadcast from Italy of a priest standing adamnantly flinging holy water at approaching lava from a volcano, as if it would do anything to dissuade the destruction to avert.  Coincidence and serendipity account for enough weird conjugations in this world so anyone with a mind toward conflating unrelated events can point and say “See!  It Works!”  But really, all this attests is the cloying desire to feel that something in the universe actually cares other than your next door neighbor or the dog.

Basically the notion here is what?  We have barred public prayer from public school classrooms and tossed a couple of creches off public property and the result is that god, irked, inundates a city?  Or just allows it to happen?  And why would that be when the overwhelming majority of citizens in this country profess to believe in god and pray a good deal?  Once again we are told god is some kind of emotionally-stunted adolescent who needs our total attention, lest he throw a tantrum and kill a few hundred thousand people every now and then.  And then we go to church and are exhorted to give thanks to a god who “loves us” so much that…

I don’t need to address in detail, you all know what I mean.

Come on.  Do people really buy that?  I mean, the whole Christmas decoration thing is irritating and I can understand people not wanting their holiday messed up with politics, but to make the extra leap and suggest that we’re being punished over some superstitious equivalent of not throwing salt over our left shoulder when we spill it is a bit much.

Yeah, I know, some people really do think that way, but a lot of other people just tacitly let it go by as challenging it might make them look like Scrooge or something.  It’s such nonsense.  Why shouldn’t we be able to call something like this garbage without looking like curmudgeons?  It’s ugly.  It’s false.  It’s a lie on its face.  But some people just have to let the rest of us know how much we’re Not Getting It.  Some people have to send these lovely missives out just so we don’t get the feeling that Christmas is a time of love and good cheer and giving and that we should feel better about the world.  Some people just have to act like the midges they are and try to make us the same way.

Sigh…. and just when I was starting to feel festive.

So the holiday season begins.

Bah Humbug.

culture

So It Begins

This is a charming little story.

Priest dumps all over his parishioners.

Now, I was never a Catholic, but I once considered marrying a Catholic girl and went through some of the obligatory classes at her church.  We got to the part about promising to raise the children Catholic and I said no, that wouldn’t happen, and he (the priest) said then we couldn’t be married in the church and I said fine, then we’d continue living in sin and there wouldn’t be any children.

Kind of brought the whole relationship to a screeching halt, if you take my meaning.  Probably the best thing for everyone concerned.

I tell you this to give you some idea how I feel about priests (of any religious persuasion) threatening their audience.