Category: Religion

Art

Denial of Agency and Being Off Base

Recently I participated in a brief exchange on Shelfari that annoyed me.  On a science fiction thread a commenter said he (or she) had recently read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and had enjoyed it even though the fictional conceit was off base.  I asked why and the response was  “His worldview is off-base because it is humanistic – it excludes God.”

That annoyed me.  Actually, it pissed me off.  The exchange ran a little while and then I suggested it be moved or abandoned.  The admin allowed that it was a troublesome thread and it would be better to just stop it.  I withdrew (except for one more exchange about why it had troubled me since as it continued it turned into a typical “does god exist” thread.  My annoyance was with the assumption that stories can be judged automatically off-base because they don’t take into account a particular belief.

When pressed, the original commenter admitted that it was Asimov’s world view in general that was the problem—which means that the beliefs (or disbeliefs) of the author were used a priori to judge the quality of the stories.

Here’s the problem with that:  fiction is about the human condition and the writer is responsible for getting the character and interactions within a story right.  In other words, to tell the truth about people, how they feel, what they do, why they think or act certain ways.  To do this, the writer must imaginatively assume the viewpoint of the characters (to greater or lesser degrees) in order to treat them honestly so what is then written about them is a true picture.

To do that, the writer must be an observer, a very accurate observer, a student of people, of humanity, even of civilization and culture.

To claim that a writer cannot write truthfully about the human condition unless he/she already holds a particular world view is sheer, slanderous nonsense.  At its most basic, it suggests that to hold a particular world view might guarantee that a writer not only can but will write the truth, and that simply doesn’t follow.

But further, it suggests that the truth of human beings is hidden from a writer who doesn’t believe a particular way.  Extend that, and you can take the position that a writer of any other religious view must be incapable of writing accurately and truthfully about people as compared to  a writer who holds a preferred view.  You are immediately immersed in the unsolvable debate over which view is the Truth (capital T) and which false.  Or, furthermore, you would have to accept that a believer would be incapable of writing as honestly about atheist characters, since that is a world view not shared.

We would, very simply, be unable to speak honestly and truthfully to each other.

One would have to accept that stories written (truthfully, honestly) by a believer would somehow be different than stories written (honestly, truthfully) by an unbeliever.  But that would deny the universality of human experience.

On a meaner level, this is a denial of agency.  It’s very much like the argument put forth by those who think Shakespeare is a pseudonym for another author, one of which is the Earl of Oxford.  The argument says that “William Shakespeare” lacked the education and aristocratic sensibility to have penned works of such insight about nobility.  This completely discounts the richness of imagination writers must apply to any subject of which they lack first-hand knowledge.  It says I, if I were Shakespeare, could not possibly have imagined what I wrote and told the truth so accurately because I didn’t possess the proper “world view.”  You can see this argument used against any author or group of authors another group (usually not authors) seek to deny validation.

(I suggest finding a copy of the late, great Joanna Russ’s How To Suppress Womens Writing  for a detailed examination of this process.)

It suggests two things that are false—one, that there are human experiences to which only select groups are privy and that no one on the outside can possibly know about, and two, that human experience is not universal on some basic level that underlays all successive experiential additions.

If a religious writer wrote truthfully about two people falling in love and an atheist wrote about the same two people, and both told the truth of what they observed and described the experience of those two characters honestly, how might they differ?  For either of them to make the case, within the story, that their world view mattered in the telling of human truth, the author would have to intrude and, to greater or lesser degrees, proselytize.  You would end up with a bad story at best, propaganda at worst.

Throw a dozen or two dozen stories on a desk without attribution.  No one knows who the writers are.  Tell me what the beliefs are of the author of each story.  (This presumes excellent stories, truthful stories.)  The idea that an atheist, a humanist, would write “off base” stories because of their world view is a denial of agency.  What that says is that no writer not a believer could write a truthful story about believers, or that a believing writer could not possibly write a story about atheists.

Nonsense.

On the question of whether the universe would be depicted differently, well now that is a bit more interesting, but the fact is that the universe is how it is and both atheist and believing scientists see it, measure it, explain it pretty much the same way.  They may argue over first causes, but in the advent of thirteen billion years since that event, both see the cosmos essentially the same way.  Atoms operate the same way for both, gravity is the same for both, the life and death of stars…

But in fact, it was not the stories that prompted that initial remark, but a knowledge of the author’s world view that colored the perception.  (Of course this is one more reason I tend to tell people that if they really love an artist’s work, see, hear, read as much of the work as possible before finding out anything about them.  The personal facts of an artist’s life can ruin the appreciation for the work.)  This is a dishonest gage.  It sidesteps the only valid metric, which is, does this story say true things about people?

I won’t go so far as to say that a writer’s world view doesn’t affect the work.  The whole point of doing art is to express personal opinions about subjects.  But at the level of good art, all authors’ work must hold up in the court of truth, and to suggest that certain world views de facto  prevent someone from telling the truth about the subject at hand is overreaching at best.  You can certainly say of certain writers “his/her beliefs so color their work that it is skewed from truth” but it is not correct to say “these beliefs guarantee that their work will be skewed from truth.”

It also suggests that personal experience can be disingenuous at its core if it leads to conclusions inconsistent with a preferred world view.

Denial of agency indeed.

 

 

culture

9/12

I didn’t write anything for yesterday’s commemoration.  Many others, most far better suited to memorializing the day, said a great deal.  My paltry mutterings would add little to what is, really, a personal day for most of us.  Like all the big anniversary events, the “where were you when” aspect makes it personal and maybe that’s the most important part, I don’t know.

Instead it occurred to me to say something about the element of the disaster that puzzles most of us, even while most of us exhibit the very trait that disturbs us deeply in this context.  One of the most common questions asked at the time and still today is in the top 10 is: how could those men do that?

Meaning, of course, how could they abandon what we consider personal conscience and common humanity to perpetrate horrible destruction at the cost of their own lives.

The simple answer is also the most complex:  they were following a leader.

I’m going to string together what may seem unrelated observations now to make a larger point and I will try to corral it all together by the end to bring it to that point.

Firstly, with regards to the military, there are clear-cut lines of obligation set forth, the chief one being a soldier’s oath to defend the constitution.  There is a code of conduct consistent with that and we have seen many instances where an officer has elected to disobey orders he or she deems illegal or immoral.  There is a tradition of assuming that not only does a soldier have a right to act upon conscience, but that there is an institutional duty to back that right up.  The purpose of making the oath one to the constitution (rather than to, say, the president or even to congress) first is to take the personal loyalty issue out of the equation.

To underline this a bit more, a bit of history.  The German army prior to WWII was similarly obligated to the state.  German soldiers gave an oath to protect Germany and obey its laws.  Hitler changed that, making it an oath to him, personally, the Fuhrer.  (He left in place a rule explicitly obligating the German soldier to disobey illegal or immoral orders.)

Unfortunately, human nature is not so geared that people find it particularly easy to dedicate themselves to an abstract without there also being a person representing it.  (We see this often in small ways, especially politically, when someone who has been advocating what is on its own a good idea suddenly comes under a cloud of suspicion.  Not only do people remove their support of that person but the idea is tainted as well.  People have difficulty separating out the idea from the person.  The reverse is less common, that a bad idea taints a popular leader.)  Dedicating yourself to supporting the constitution sounds simple in a civics class, but in real life people tend to follow people.  (Consider the case of Ollie North, whose dedication to Reagan trumped his legal responsibility to uphold the constitution and its legally binding requirement that he obey congress.)

Next example.  Many years ago, when I was still a teenager looking for a job, I answered an ad for a salesman position.  When I arrived for the interview I found myself in a large room with a group of people all of whom were receiving a sales pitch for the product by one man, who was doing a first-rate job of boosterism for it.  It was a reference book, maybe even an encyclopedia, I don’t clearly remember.  But his pitch was to our potential to make a lot of money selling this product, that it required dedication and belief in ourselves and what we were selling.  He was a good speaker, he got people fired up.

But he didn’t say much about the product.  My questions concerned that and what it would mean for the consumer, but except for the most cursory description, he talked very little about it.  He summed up his twenty minute pep talk by asking if there was anyone still not convinced this would be a good job.  I and a couple others raised our hands.  When I did so, I expected to be given an opportunity to ask about the product.

Instead, he gave us a sad look and said “Well, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I was stunned and, by the expressions on the faces of the others who’d raised their hands, so were my fellow skeptics.  I said, “You’re not going to ask why?”

“Please leave,” was all he said.

Dazed, we left.  I realized much later that what he—his company—were looking for were people who, for their own self-betterment, would be willing to sell anything to anyone.  They did not want skeptics.  It might have been the greatest encyclopedia on the planet, but that didn’t matter.

The Joyce Meyer Ministries are in town this week, apparently.  This is an institution that makes an overt connection between religious fealty and material success.  People give great amounts of money to it to “spread the word” and some of them achieve a certain amount of success.   As with other grandstanding televangelists, the claim is certainly true for herself, her family, and closest associates, but many people have given everything to her and ended up with nothing.  The deeper question, though, is why would anyone continue to give to her institution if, as she claims, it is faith that actually pays off?  Can’t that be handled privately?  Or in another church or institution?

Which of course leads one to wonder at the elasticity of the faithful with regards to those ministers who have been exposed as frauds.  I have no real question as to the motives of people like Jim Bakker or Ted Haggerty or Jimmy Swaggart or even Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson.  I do have deep questions about those who continue to follow them despite revelations of impropriety and fiscal deceit and self-aggrandizement.

I had a customer once who was part of the Democratic Party machine in St. Louis and as long as you weren’t talking about politics he was a good guy.  But when elections were upon us, he would come in an just go on about this candidate or that, and always with the same  “We’ve got to see him elected!”  One year he was working on behalf of someone who had obvious credibility problems (and later was indicted), but his dedication was absolute.  When I pointed out the problems with the candidate, he just looked at me like I had lost my mind.  “But the alternative is a Republican!”  So what? I said.  Better an honest Republican than a crook.  The subsequent harangue I received made it clear that it did not matter who the candidate was or what he or she did, as long as they were Democratic there was simply no question of his support.

I watched people I knew become absolutely enamored of Ronald Reagan, almost from the start.  As his presidency went on and problems emerged, some simply would not abandon him.  They had dedicated themselves to the man and it didn’t matter what he did.  He made them feel “like a real American.”  There are people still who think Nixon was framed and those still who, despite detailed information about his personal life and his presidential decisions think that Kennedy walked on water.  No doubt there will be those who think Bush was one of the greatest presidents ever.

When we ask ourselves about the motives behind 911, this all-t00-human flaw must be at the top of the list.  The men who hi-jacked those planes and wreaked all that havoc had been living here.  They saw the people in their neighborhoods, they spoke to us, they breathed our air—and while I am not one of those who sycophantically hold the United States up as the shining model of political perfection and social maturity, by comparison this is a free country, a good country (which makes our failings and shortcomings all the more painful, because we have fewer excuses)—and yet they did that.  It is legitimate to ask “where were their consciences?  Where was their skepticism?  Where was their ability to make valid judgments?”

Many would like to believe that such men are so different that they cannot be understood.  They weren’t rational, they weren’t “normal,” they weren’t Like Us.

No?  How many of us questioned Bush’s program?  How many of us on this day ten years ago would not have backed his program?  Even in Congress, very few stood up to say “Wait a minute, what are we doing?”

Yes, I know, it’s more complicated than that.  And it is.  But then, it’s more complicated for the other guy, too.  And yet, it comes down to something very similar—go where the leader tells you to, do what the leader orders.  Ask no questions, after all the leader knows best.

Cults work because people want to follow a leader.  They have little trust in their own decision-making abilities, little confidence in their own ideas, even their own personalities.  On some level, the need for validation from a guru is essential for their ability to even get out of bed in the morning.  And I’m not talking about Moonies or Krishna or even the Sword and the Arm of the Lord or Aryan Nation, I’m talking about ordinary people with normal lives who dedicate a part of their psyches to an external source of affirmation.  It can be anything from a favorite musical group to a politician to a preacher, or even something as intimate as a lover or a friend, or something both intimate and impersonal, like AA or Alanon or a survivor’s support group.  What makes this hard is that the tendency is not always bad but sometimes is very positive, very necessary.

It is all-too-easy to hand over too much of yourself to someone else because it is easier than doing the necessary work for yourself.  Most of us do something like this at one time or another, probably a lot of us transfer our dedication from one thing (or person) to another regularly, in a kind of psychic load-sharing routine.  But some of us simply invest everything in one place, one person, and surrender our ability, even our right, to withdraw, to question, to say no when a demand becomes unreasonable or the relationship toxic.

I don’t believe in people that way.  I don’t believe in anything that way.  I don’t draw my validation from a blind commitment to a guru.  I did at one time but I grew out of it and now I find it bizarre when I encounter someone who does that to the point of being unable to accept criticism of the little god at the center of their being.

Which has led me to understand a reaction I’ve had for a long time.  Maybe we’ve all felt this.  When someone comes up to you and starts going on about how so-and-so or this-and-that saved their life, is the greatest thing ever, is the reason they function, I—and probably most everyone—automatically pull back, suspicious and a bit uncomfortable at the protestations of fealty.  I get uncomfortable around the hyper-patriotic and the extremely religious who insist on telling you how much they love their country or their god.  I wrote a little about that here.  I feel, justifiably or not, that they aren’t quite rational about this and maybe not quite reliable.  If the choice came between doing what was right and following their guru into hell, what would they do?

I don’t like that feeling, but I think I understand it now.  That level of dedication to something external suggests to me that they aren’t all there, that they’re using that dedication to make up for an absence of Self, and not just any self, but the self that can act independently of blind faith.  I find I don’t entirely trust them.

And it could be a lack of trust about almost anything.  When faced with that kind of dedication, I find myself almost automatically shutting down certain lines of communication, self-censoring, placing certain topics off-limits.  I don’t know what kind of reaction I’ll get if I say certain things.  I don’t know what this person will do if they feel I threaten their guru.  Most likely cut off similar lines of communications with me.

But that apparent inability to separate out a personal zone of skeptical self-awareness from the object of their obsession tells me that they will not always act on rational premises.  Actions may take the form of insisting certain books be removed from library shelves all the way to…flying planes into skyscrapers.

The 911 hijackers had to indulge a kind of interpretive censorship about everything they saw or heard in this country during their stay.  But it was an interpretation based not on their personal standards of right and wrong, their own skeptical assessment, but on what they had been told they would see by their guru.  Their guru used their culture to reinforce his vision and they had surrendered enough of themselves to his vision that they committed an atrocity.

The difficulty in all this is that we all interpret things based on who we listen to and what we’ve heard.  What the hijackers did, up until the moment they boarded those planes, was not particularly different from what any group does that is dedicated to a cause that seems to run counter to the larger culture.  Eco-terrorists go through the same processes.

I have always held myself apart from the influence of gurus.  Or tried to.  I will use my own judgment, thank you, and often it puts me at odds with momentary protestations of fealty for ideas or persons that I might even agree with, at least in part.    It’s hard work, continually reassessing—which part is me and which is them—and I can understand the impulse of hermits to extract themselves entirely from a culture in order to try to find which is which.  But that doesn’t work, either, because we need feedback in order to perfect judgment.

The lesson of 911 for me was not new but came with added force:  it is never good to follow a guru.  You may agree with someone, work with someone, associate yourself with their ideas, even like them, but trailing along after them like children after the Piper is never good.  Because you must always be able, when they one day turn to you and say “You have go do X for the cause,” to tell them no.  You have to be able to do so even if you don’t.  You may judge that what they’ve told you to do is a good idea—but you must make your own judgment.  It’s a pretty safe bet that if they tell you to go kill a bunch of people in the name of X, they do not have your or anyone else’s best interests at heart.

That goes for gurus, cults, churches, and governments.

culture

On Symbols and Fair Use

When you have a dream about an argument, maybe it has some weight and should be written about.  Recently, I posted a photograph on my Google + page.  This one, in fact:

 

My caption for it was “What more is there to say?”  Partly this was just to have a caption, but also to prompt potential discussion.  As symbol, the photograph serves a number of functions, from melancholy to condemnation.

It did prompt a discussion, between two friends of mine who do not know each other, the core of which centers on the divergent meanings of such symbols for them and a question of sensitivity.  I won’t reproduce the exchange here, because as far as I’m concerned the question that it prompted for me was one of the idea of “sacredness” and the appropriate use of symbols.

Which immediately sent me down a rabbit hole about the private versus public use of symbols.

Essentially, we all have proprietary relationships with certain symbols.  Since I already posted the image, the sign of the cross is one, and not just for Christians.  As a symbol it has achieved that universality advertisers dream of.  It is instantly recognizable as the sign for a faith movement just about everywhere.  It’s possible some aboriginal tribes in the beclouded valleys of New Zealand don’t know what it is, but on the level of international discourse it carries across all lines.

The public meaning is also fairly clear—it represents an idea and an institution.  The entire apparatus of the Christian faith is symbolized by it, the buildings, the books, the robes, the songs, the defining mythologies, and the philosophical ideas.  Publicly it is by and large regarded as a force for good.  Publicly, the ideas embodied suggest if not entirely represent a fundamental tendency toward morality and a stated ambition to achieve peace, love, and the concomitant positives associated with a redemptive philosophy.

But the private meanings are wildly divergent and stem from  both personal experience and long intellectual examination.  In some instances it is difficult to see how certain conclusions can possibly be based on the same thing.

So the question in my mind is, which is more valid?  Which should be protected?  The public meaning or the private?  And should they be kept separate?

In other words, in relation to the photograph above, does the “sacredness” of the symbol allow for not only a condemnation of the obvious vandalism that broke the stone cross in the first place but also a refusal to countenance sympathetic commentary for the breakage?  For those who find the symbol personally important, such assaults are seen as insensitive.  A violation.  Such sympathetic comments also yield a judgment of the person making the comments.  Obviously, this an antagonistic situation.  But what concerns me here is not so much the antagonism but the mutual rights of the antagonists to use that symbol each in their own way.

Let’s take something more secular.  Flag burning.  Obviously the symbol of the flag is a potent one, and with powerful public meaning.  Just as clearly, there is powerful private meaning and again this personal meaning can be wildly divergent.  And again, the question is, which meaning takes precedence?

More to the point, which meaning should take precedence?

If as some believe the image of the flag should be protected, rendering its use subject to specific prohibitions and allowable uses, does it still have utility as a symbol or have we reduced its capacity to represent ideas?  Or have we simply declared certain ideas related to it illegitimate?

Which goes directly to the question, can an idea ever be “illegitimate” as an idea?

Historically it’s clear that when a state attempts to bar the public dissemination of an idea, depending on the idea in question, an underground almost automatically springs up and suddenly the state has a problem it may not have had before—namely, a resistance movement.  One of the things that made early Christianity so powerful was its official banning by Rome.  The state drove it underground where it could not be observed or tracked and it grew on its own until the movement was so powerful that one day it emerged and became the state.

Like all such movements, it was then faced with exactly the same problem its predecessor faced—ideas it could not tolerate that needed banning.  And like most such movements, it fell right into the trap of political expedience and suppressed the free exchange of ideas.

It didn’t even keep the same symbol.  Originally the fish, the Ichthys, was the primary symbol, and we’ve seen it resurgence today as an alternative to the cross.  (The other prominent symbol came under Constantine, the Chi Rho, which includes a cross as an X overlain on a P, and enjoyed almost continual use as a subordinate Christian symbol up the present.)  But by the early 3rd Century, the cross had become so identified with Christianity that Clement of Alexandria could call it the Lord’s Sign.

As such, it was the banner for the emergent and often militant quasi-secular institution that was the Roman Church.  The fact that it was a Roman form of execution is possibly relevant for this aspect as early on it would have had dual meanings—for many as a sign of punishment more than of sacrifice.  (Interestingly, there is a historical quibble with the cross as symbol based on Jesus’ execution as the Greek word in scripture is stauros, meaning an upright stake, without the cross-beam.  This is a quibble, since it was the Romans who crucified Jesus and the term was crucifixion.  But even in this we see the process of abstracting out meanings for different uses, since the emphasis is placed by Christians on sacrifice and, later, resurrection through the same symbol.)

The symbol has been retasked over the centuries.  As such it demonstrates the natural process by which the free use of symbols serves preferred purposes.  Once the meaning becomes fixed and institutional protections are put in place to guarantee one and only one meaning (publicly) you begin to see a gradual loss of vitality once you step outside the precincts of an agreed-upon iconographic definition.  It is then that institutional problems creep in and a breakdown of original meaning can occur.  If one is using the symbol to define something into existence without regard for what it may mean to others, then you produce a situation in which only two responses to the symbol are possible.  Complete acceptance or complete rejection.

To make arguments of fine distinction becomes a sisyphean task.  To say, for instance, that practices defended by the symbol are not really consistent with that symbol, to those on the outside take on the appearance of special pleading and even self-selected blindness.

Easier to dismiss the symbols and talk about the thing itself.  It is possible for a symbol to obstruct this kind of discourse by insisting on its own unity and, if you will, sacredness.  To criticize the point of contention is then to criticize the entire edifice, good and bad, and this is counterproductive.  For example, return to the whole flag burning question.  When the United States is engaging is actions that citizens regard as antithetical to their idea of “America”, wrapping these actions in the cloak of the flag binds them in with everything that is acceptable, even admirable, about America and makes it difficult to argue that the actions in question are not American—or, as happened during Vietnam, that the people leveling criticism are themselves patriots when they are seen to be criticizing the entirety of America rather than just one set of bad choices, since the choices have been “blessed” by the symbol of the country.  At some point it became necessary to shove aside the symbol since its use in the debate had become obfuscatory and divisive.  The dialogue that needed to happen was hamstrung because instead of being about an immoral war it became about the morality of the whole country, as symbolized by the flag.  Because the flag was held by many to be “inviolate” it became almost impossible for the opposition to use it to effect.  It had been taken out of its own utility because the public meaning had become fixed and ran counter to the private meaning of many of the citizens.

If this sounds like a great deal of abstract nonsense, take another example of the misuse of a protected symbol.

The Swastika, as symbol of the Nazis, was given legal protection by the Nazi regime.  It became illegal to desecrate it in any fashion.  It was applied to all official documents.  It was applied to published speeches, laws, passports, even scientific papers.  it became the absolute public identity of the German people and any dissent or attempts to set aside Naziism and its symbols in a debate over private meaning and public policy was prosecutable.  True, once an outlaw, the law didn’t apply to you, but in order to argue with the symbol and what it stood for, you had to become an outlaw.  It fixed the meaning of Naziism and rendered all dissent illegal.  Documents lacking the symbol were designated illicit.

There is, you see, great danger in “sacrilizing” symbols.

So what has this to do with an argument over sensitivities and judgments?  Since private meaning is exactly that, private, it would seem incumbent upon us to respect that each of us may have experiences and come to conclusions that are entirely at odds with public meanings.  If an expression of that dissension can be labeled insensitive, it can only be valid in the matter of other private meanings.  To claim the public symbol as one and the same with your private meaning as a way of preventing or invalidating critical remarks of the public symbol and its public meaning—by leveling the charge that the critic is being insensitive—can be seen as an attempt to remove the public symbol from the free exchange of ideas, to “fix” its meaning as inviolate even for those who see it as wholly otherwise.  This is hardly fair use since so often a return conclusion is offered about the nature of the critic—a conclusion which may be accurate or may be completely beside the point.  In either case, it is not an invitation to dialogue but a wall built to protect against the possible erosion of private meaning by means of critical examination of public symbols—and their public meanings.

My apologies if this has become a bit abstruse, but it’s a difficult topic to deal with in less than precise language.  The ideal is to always keep in mind the distinction between an idea and the holder of the idea.  Since many people, on both sides of any issue, insist on identifying themselves personally with an idea, this can be a problematic stance.  As many Christians say, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” depending on how closely the sinner identifies with the sin in question this may simply not be possible.  But it’s a start at acknowledging that experience is important and may not be invalidated by simple recourse to symbols—especially symbols that enjoy special protection from criticism.

Anyway, this is offered as a basis for discussion.  It would be interesting to see what comes of it.

culture

Republicans, Rent Boys, and Rhetoric

Another outspoken advocate of Public Morals has been caught with a hand slipping into the cookie jar of Craig’s List sex.  Yes, he’s loudly anti-gay and, yes, he’s a Republican.

Now, I don’t for a second believe being a Republican has anything to do with this, any more than I believe being Catholic has anything to do with pedophilic priests.  I think we largely have the cart turned ’round the wrong way.  I think there is something about both organizations that attract such people, and while you can lay full blame on the Catholic Church for coddling these criminals, you can’t really blame them for creating them.  They came pre-flawed, as it were, and merely found a place to flourish.

There are theories.  Heavens, there are theories!

In this particular instance, I’ll go along with a combination of two.  One is the self-loathing of the deeply-closeted gay.  Publicly declaring it perversion, privately unable to keep it under control, and then doing the dumb bit of soliciting for sex via venues that have in the past proved their potential for public exposure.  It’s as if subconsciously they’re crying out “Help me!  Catch me so I can be humiliated into a cure!”  Of course, it doesn’t work that way, but who ever credited one’s subconscious with logic?

The other part is more sinister and has thousands of years of history to back it up and that has to do with the privileges of power.  The assumption that high status comes, automatically, with perks denied ordinary mortals.

Or should be denied them.  Which brings the perversion into it.  Not sexual perversion, but the perversion of presumed status.

See, the powerful have always had access to whatever they wanted, regardless of what the law says.  (Margaret Atwood chronicled this in The Handmaid’s Tale with the visit to the private party where the high mucky-mucks of Gilead get to party down with all the vices they have publicly denied everyone else.  Privilege.

Now I can get with the idea that status confers perks.  I can.  You work your ass off to achieve position, there should be some things open to you that ordinarily wouldn’t be.

But not of the illegal variety.  I’m talking about no waiting at the best restaurants, preferred seating at theaters, powerful people willing to take your call with no fuss, that sort of stuff.

Not crazy sex with rent boys or call girls, which (a) shouldn’t be illegal to begin with and (b) shouldn’t be denied as illicit and perverse.

But I think one of the things about power is this whole “access to the forbidden” aspect that makes what ought to be available to all something to be denied the general public, put in a box of legislative occlusion, and then indulged behind the most closed of doors, because getting away with it is half the thrill.

It seems the loudest proponents of so-called Family Values are the ones most often caught in such hypocrisies.  But if you look at it from the angle of privilege seeking to maintain something solely for itself, then you can look at all of history to make sense of it.  Popes and priests with mistresses, even while condemning the whole notion of adultery and fornication for the unwashed masses.  Aristocrats indulging their every whim, kings keeping courtesans, and let’s not even get into the misuse of young boys.

I do not say that such things never and do not continue to happen at every level of society, but no one pays attention to someone making minimum wage when they bitch about immorality even while they’re fucking their best friend’s wife or diddling their brother’s kids.  Except to put them in jail when they’re caught, at least in the latter instance.  Such people have no ability to effectively shield their behavior.

What to make of all these Republicans who keep getting caught in blatant hypocrisies?  Is it a Republican disease?  Surely not.  Democrats get outed in pecadilloes.  There is a significant difference, though, in the ideologies.  The Republicans have allied themselves to this whole puritanical anti-sex faction and it is often the worst of them in terms of oppressive legislation and rhetoric that get caught doing almost exactly what they condemn.  Not so much with the Democrats.  I don’t necessarily excuse the behavior, but there’s a considerable difference in the level of hypocrisy.

I think there is a fundamental pathology involved with people who so publicly seek to condemn sexual activities and an even deeper one in those who condemn what they themselves indulge.  There’s an obsession with sex that, contrary to the rhetoric, is far deeper than any norm one might acknowledge.  People who condemn it with such stridency are probably so obsessed with it that their public stance can only be seen as that of an addict who wants everyone else to take care of his problem for him.  If it is rendered unavailable to everyone, removed from access, then he (or she, but it seems a condition more of males than females—that may be just an aberration of reporting or maybe the women are more careful, and possibly less hypocritical) won’t be able to indulge, temptation removed.

This is making one’s incapacity to control one’s self everyone else’s problem.

Which is particularly annoying when it shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

What I suspect some of these loudmouthed moralists would be should they be propositioned by a mature, healthy person who just wants a roll in the sack, is rendered impotent.  Normal consensual sex?  How dare you suggest such a thing!  I think without the flavor of the illicit (and how much better if it were also illegal) it would be…threatening.  There’s no power to wield, this person is here willingly, there’s no way to guarantee control.  And it would be done with a presumption that it’s—gasp!—okay.

I’m remembering Jim Bakker, whose impropriety now is fading into the mists of ancient history, but as head of the PTL indulged himself regularly, but (apparently, and at least in one instance) through the use of ruffies or their equivalent.  When Jessica Hahn, one of his parishioners, dropped the dime on him with the full story, two things happened that I found interesting.  First, all Bakker’s followers blamed Hahn, even though she had been drugged.  Secondly, Hahn apparently discovered that she couldn’t live with the hypocrisy—she liked sex and doing it under the cloak of sinful, illicit ignominy just didn’t play.  (What she subsequently did with her career may be of questionable taste, but she never apologized for it or tried to make herself out to be anything other than herself.)  But as a by-product of the first thing, Bakker was able to receive a public “cleansing” by admitting his sins and “being forgiven”, which I now believe added a layer of thrill.  You can’t experience that thrill if you don’t do anything wrong, so…

Run down the line of such preachers and you see the same pathology as I described with these moralizing politicians. The ultimate was Jimmy Swaggart, whose weeping performance before his followers was disturbing on so many levels—but if seen as part of the thrill may make perfect sense.

I’m not sure the genie will ever be put back in the bottle, and for that I’m glad.  But these folks keep trying.  Unless sex is dirty, I’m guessing, it just isn’t as much fun.

Nor is it a perk.  If everyone can do it, without guilt, freely and consensually, where’s the special privileges for becoming powerful?

I think we would all do well to stop voting for people who run for office on any kind of sexual morality platform.  Public health is different, but these folks aren’t combining the two.  If anything they’re making it worse, with their jihad against contraception and this nonsensical abstinence only education, which has been repeatedly shown to not work.  They are doing the country a disservice.

Besides, it’s getting boring.  Utterly predictable, and as boring as the evolution/creationism debate.  Which, oddly enough, the same people seem to be involved in…

 

culture

How To Put This As Delicately As I Can…

Governor Rick Perry, who may or may not be running for president on the Republican ticket (any day now we may—or may not—get an announcement) has put out a call for a great big Texas style get-together prayer meeting.  He has a passel of preachers coming to harrangue about the problems of America.

There’s only a couple of problems with the guest list and what it says about Perry.

He has one preacher who said that Hitler was sent by god to force all the Jews back to Israel (part of the Grand Design).

Another insists that not one more permit be issued for another mosque anywhere in the United States.

We have another who claims that the reason Japan’s stock market crashed was because the Emperor had sex with the sun goddess.

Still one more claims that demons are being released through the good works of people who are doing those good works for all the wrong reasons.

And still another claiming that the Illuminati are still extant and that the Statue of Liberty is an idol to a false god and that the Illuminati seek to reduce the population of the world to half a billion and that Obama’s health care program is the start of the purge.

Perry himself has claimed that this meeting is important for policy reasons—that here the nation will learn what to do to set ourselves back on track.

Hmm.

How can I say this without offending anyone…

I can’t. So I’ll just say it.

This is balls out insanity, absurdity carried to the level of national circus, religion administered like fluoride in the water but with the effect of morphine.  People who swallow this nonsense are—

Careful there now, everyone is entitled to their beliefs, no one’s point of view is superior to anyone else’s, we have to be tolerant and allow people who hold their opinions as they see fit.  This is after all a country that holds with freedom of religion.

Except that another of the invited preachers has stated quite forcefully that only christians should have freedom of religion, that the Founders never intended it to extend to any other group.  So much for tolerance on that end.

No, it is time we collectively began calling this what it is.  Bullshit.

But dangerous bullshit.  All the jokes aside, the possibility of directing national policy based on what some crackpots have gleaned from the Bible, as if there were no other way to see the world, is infantile and potentially destructive to the planet, since many of these folks are panting for the Apocalypse.  They hunger for Armageddon.

And those who sit in their audiences and lap this up as if it were intellectual ambrosia—of course it must be, look at the signs, it was prophesied, look at the state of the world—validating their apparent revulsion for the things they see around them.

It is, simply, the politics of bigotry, of intolerance, of ignorance, of fashion, rhetoric designed to trigger emotional responses based on shock and fear and, let’s be honest, stupidity.  And all of it packaged with the imprimatur of a holy book, as if by claiming it all comes from Genesis through Revelations the vitriolic condemnation of whatever one happens to find offensive or simply incomprehensible is justified and actions based on that condemnation are mandatory if we are to “save” the world.  Or just America, as I’ve noticed most of these folks don’t seem to have much use for anything outside our borders.

It is possible these politicians that dally with this cultural miasma believe they can play with it, a mongoose dance with a venomous cobra, and, after winning the election, can act according to their possibly more rational inclinations.  But it seems that there is a gravitational effect they have failed to consider, and the longer the GOP plays with this nonsense the more distorted and irrational their direction becomes.

And I hear the defense that these folks are not “real christians”, as if that is somehow encouraging.  If true, then they are mounting an assault on “real” christians, but the problem is, since they base much of this on a belief in the same ideology it’s difficult to attack them on how they’re in error.

August 6th is the date for this national prayer gorge.  If Rick Perry achieves the nomination, I think we should all be very afraid.  He may think he can control the tiger he’s riding, but he’s likely to get eaten along with the rest of us.

______________________________________________________________________

p.s.  There actually is a Republican candidate this time around that I find I could vote for.  It might be worthwhile to talk this man up a bit.  Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico.  Check out his Issues section.  He sounds like a conservative with a brain who is not afraid to use it.

culture

Independence Day

It’s the Fourth of July.  I’ve been pondering whether or not to write something politically pithy or culturally au courant and here it is, almost noon, and I’ve made no decision.  I think I pretty much said what I had to say about my feelings about this country a few posts back for Memorial Day, so I don’t think I’ll revisit that.

Last night we sat on our front porch while the pre-Fourth fireworks went off in the surrounding neighborhood.  Folks nearby spend an unconscionable amount of money on things that blow up and look pretty and we benefit from the show.  Neither of us like large crowds, so going down to the St. Louis riverfront for the big explosion is just not an option.  The older I get the less inclined I am to squeeze myself into the midst of so much anonymous humanity.

We’ll likely go to bed early tonight after watching the rest of our neighborhood go up in brilliance, starbursts, and smoke.

I suppose the only thing I’d like to say politically is a not very original observation about how so many people seem to misidentify the pertinent document in our history.  The Declaration of Independence is often seen as more important than the Constitution and this is an error, one which leads us into these absurd cul-de-sacs of debate over the religious nature of our Founding.  Because of the reference to Our Creator, people with a particular agenda seem to take that as indicative that this was founded as a christian nation.  Creator is a fairly broad, nondenominational label that encompasses any and all descriptions of gods or nature, but I won’t argue the idea that the men who wrote it were, if anything, more or less christians.  It’s a statement, though, that is intended not to establish that there is a god or that we are beholden to such a thing, but that there are some birthrights we all share that no mortal can blithely assume we don’t possess.  The only thing at the time higher than a king was a god, so, when you read the rest of the Declaration, it is clear that the intended meaning is that a power transcending kings grants us these rights.  They had not yet hit upon establishing a representative democracy, not insofar as every official was to be elected—they may have intended that a constitutional monarchy be used as a model, and Britain already had a history of putting constraints on its monarchs.  But to make the point absolutely clear that no monarch had the authority to take certain rights away, the went one step up.  The use of the term Creator is sufficiently vague and universal that any formulation of Natural Law is covered, even and including a Spinozan construction that makes Nature and God one and the same thing.  Essentially, the fact that people are here, part of the world, should automatically accord them certain status and rights that no one has a legal right to remove.

But it is a document of intent, namely intent to separate one people politically from another.  The form of the new republic is not addressed in the Declaration.  That work was left for the Constitution, and the way it was originally formulated there was not one mention of god or churches.  It dealt entirely with a secular formulation and I do not believe that was unintentional.  The Bill of Rights was included later, as a deal-making document that certain states insisted on before they would ratify the Constitution, and that’s where you find the establishment clause.

But the Constitution is a complex, legal document.  There are fine passages in the Bill of Rights, but in the body of the Constitution itself there are few phrases even close to the poetic heights of the Declaration.  The Preamble has some nice things, but we can perhaps understand why most people actually don’t know what’s in the Constitution.

A shame, really, because it would make things clearer to most folks if they did.  Why are things run the way they are is not explained by the grand polemical declarations of the Fourth of July document, but in the closely-reasoned blueprint of the Constitution.  There is also a reason soldiers swear an oath to uphold the Constitution—not the Declaration—and likewise why politicians are sworn in the same way.

Namely, it is because we have dedicated ourselves to an Idea.

Not a person or persons, but an Idea, and this ought to put paid to all this nonsense we’re about to hear about how this country is a christian nation dedicated to god.  It is not.  It is a nation dedicated to the idea that we are free to choose.  And sometimes what our neighbors will choose will run counter to what we may think is right or appropriate or pleasant or…but it’s their choice, just as it is ours to believe as we wish.

The Constitution is first and foremost a framework antithetical to cults of personality.  You want to see what cults of personality do to a nation?  Look at the old Soviet Union.  Or look at Libya.  Or North Korea.

I don’t give a damn what kind of “character” my representatives possess—I want to know that they will obey the law and do their jobs.  That’s all.  If they do that, they can be a bland or odious as they may.  If they don’t, I could care less what their character is like or their personal qualities.

Okay, so maybe I did have a few things to say of a political nature.  Must be in the air.  It is, after all, the Fourth.

Be safe.

culture

Teach the Controversy (!)

I wasn’t sure I’d do this, but I’m really pissed off.

This morning I opened my front door to find a flier lying on the porch.  I thought it was another local contractor ad or announcement of a barbecue-and-rummage sale, so I scooped it up to glance at it before dropping it in the recycle hopper.  Instead, I find in my hand a vile piece of unconscionable poison.  And it seemed like it would be such a nice day!

I’m not going to dignify this crap by citing the source.  The header of the two-side sheet reads: The Holocaust Controversy  The Case For Open Debate.  What follows is a putrid example of revisionist nonsense designed to suggest that six million Jews were not systematically slaughtered by the Third Reich.  In tone, it is reasonable.  It does not make many strident claims with exclamation points, just calmly asserts one bullshit “fact” after another (plus a photograph of an open pit containing the skeletonized remains of concentration camp victims labeling it a photo of typhus victims) to lay the groundwork for the claim that the Holocaust didn’t happen, that it is all a Big Lie assembled by a Zionist conspiracy to advance the cause of sympathy for stateless Jews in order to get them a state.

I will cite one piece of twisty nonsense from the flier.  In one paragraph, the calim is made that in 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum revised the old claim of four million murdered down to one million.  It then goes on with a list of (uncited) claims of further numeric reductions, not by the Auschwitz Museum, but by “a French scholar” and “another mainstream Holocaust scholar” all the way down to half a million.  The wording is slippery.  I advise you to go to the link provided, which is directly to the museum, and read the detailed history.  The paragraph I mention in the flier leaves off with the suggestion that only a half million people were “actually” killed in total.

The Nazis murdered eleven million people, systematically, with calculation.  Nearly six million were Jews (the number vary above and below by a few tens of thousands, but they come from testimony given at Nuremberg, from eye-witness accounts, estimates of populations before and after the war, and many other methods of tabulations, not through “best guesses,” which is what the sheet of propaganda left on my porch would have one believe), but there were five million others—gypies, homosexuals, slavs of various nationalities, and political undesirables such as communists, socialists, social democrats, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people accused of being “asocial” or of “socially deviant type.”

This is not disputed by any credible authority.

Nor is Hitler’s obsession with the Jews, nor is the history of virulent antisemitism in Europe, nor are the claims made by various members of the Nazi regime, nor is the physical evidence of the camps.

Over a million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz.  It was a large camp and has become the symbol for all the others.  But bear one fact in mind before you quibble over numbers or intent: the Nazis built 20,000 of these camps.

Not all have ovens, not all had gas chambers, but all of them were forced labor camps and all of them were in the business of killing the inmates.  Conservatively, all you would need is a hundred deaths per camp to bring it up to two million.  Five hundred per camp and you get ten million.

People were worked endlessly, underfed, disease ran rampant, mass graves were common.  We have seen this kind of barbarism in our recent history, in Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia.  And yes, Stalin killed millions more.

The offensiveness of this shit is profound.  Yet here is this scrap of paper suggesting that, like the nonsense over evolution, we should “teach the controversy.”

Fine.  Here is the controversy I would teach.  The controversy of denial, that people would try so hard to say this never happened or, as is more likely of late, that it wasn’t “as bad” as has been stated.  The controversy that continually puts Jews under the spotlight, which is the same germinal thinking that resulted in this horrific bit of substantiated history.

I’ve had lengthy conversations with people who believe this.  The hallmark of them is that they managed never to directly address any evidence put before them.  Direct them to the Nuremberg transcripts, they say something about not having found “those” records.  Direct them to eyewitness testimony, they haven’t had a chance to validate it.  The snake-slithers of obfuscation and refusal to confront is incredible to behold, but the question that boggles my mind is this:

To what end do you wish to exonerate Hitler and the Third Reich?

Is it that you can’t imagine Europeans doing this?  Look what we did to the Indians.  Is it that you simply cannot bring yourselves to believe the word of anyone not a Christian?  Look at the lies spread in the name of Christ, up to and including the abuse of children by priest (and the fact that in Rwanda there were Catholic priests leading the charge in some areas to slaughter).  Is it that you can’t believe people could be that evil for no reason?  I can see that as a problem, because if they could do something like that, then so could you.

Here’s the ugly truth—circumstances permitting, most people can be that evil.  Just look at Rwanda.  That was over religion, birth rates, and water tables.  Cambodia was over ideology.

Oh, but those weren’t white people?  Europeanized, educated, civilized whites?  How could the home of Kant and Beethoven, Goethe and Mann harbor such vileness?

That’s the controversy.  The fragility of the thin veneer of civilization that keeps us “above it all.”  How easily is it stripped, broken, thrown away if we feel threatened.  (We just extended the Patriot Act another four years, a rather blatant violation of Constitutional liberties, and all just so we’ll feel “safe.”)

I shouldn’t have been surprised.  There are Nazis in my neighborhood.  But it does shock me, every time I find it.  Turn over a rock you always thought was harmless and even pretty and there are the maggots of the soul…

Holocaust Revisionism is evil.  It may be on par with the Holocaust itself.  “Oh, don’t pay attention to the screams behind that curtain—it’s not what you think.  Besides, isn’t it a fine curtain?  Do you really think the people capable of creating such a lovely curtain could be monsters?”

Got one word for you:  Wagner.

Have a nice weekend.

Absurdity

Still Here

old-new-may-2011.jpg

So, it’s the 23rd of May now.  I heard on the radio this morning someone claiming that we’re now in the Tribulations and that we’ve got 153 days before the actual end of the world.  That might be just about enough time for me to finish the rewrite on my desk and the new novel I am now half-finished with.

I thought about writing something scurrilous and amusing, but why?  People who would laugh at it don’t need to be reminded that this was silly and those who wouldn’t laugh likely wouldn’t read my blog anyway.  And there’s the story about the kids whose parents, utterly convinced that this was the weekend, had quit their jobs and went on Mission, handing out tracts and stopped paying attention to the college fund the kids were acutely aware of.  How many people have basically torpedoed their futures by reacting in similar ways to this thing?  It’s not funny, it’s sad.

But it’s not like this is the only thing people spend inordinate amounts of time and money on that make no sense.  Dedicated conspiracy theorists, the Area 51 crowd, Birthers, white supremacists, STURP fanatics, various fan groups dedicated to a tv show or music group among whom there are certainly members whose entire lives are dedicated to worship to the exclusion of all else, including personal relationships…

So I think I won’t crack wise about this.  It seems to me that the truly Left Behind are all those folks who’ve basically given up on life in order to feed their obsession with  being one of the Elect.  I just can’t really bring myself to find it amusing.