Category: history

Art

Transparencies of Days Past

Gradually, given enough time, I’ll both learn proficiency with the new digital medium and transfer my best images from nearly forty years of photography.  I’ve been doing this “in between” all the other things on my plate and it hasn’t had top priority, but once in a while I find some old negatives or, in this case, transparencies that make me wonder, for only a moment, why I’m doing anything else.  I finish working something like this over…

abandoned-house-copy.jpg

…and I get a thrill such as I used to whenever I first made a new image that I thought was worth a damn.

What’s fun now is  that I barely remember taking some of these photographs, but I remember them.  This was an abandoned house behind the property of the people I once worked for.  Furthermore, I shot this with my view camera, a 4X5 Linhof.  I very much wanted to do fine photography and I was raised on the idea that the f64 Group—which had members like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, and others—were the gold standard.  Most of them shot with large format view cameras.  When I finally acquired one and started working with the format, I fell in love.

Negative size relates directly to print quality, that much is obvious, and I could make some very large prints from 4X5 negatives.  But the color work!  This was shot on a long obsolete Ektachrome, E3.  Through most of the 60s on until, oh, the mid 80s or thereabouts, amateur transparency film was E4.  That designates the emulsion type and the processing type.  E3 had been the studio standard for decades and even up through the mid to late 70s large format transparency film was E3.  I could process this myself at home, but it was a magnificent pain.  It required re-exposure part way through the process.  But it possessed a color saturation and vividness e4, as far as I’m concerned, never had.

This particular one, though, had problems.  When I pulled it out of the sleeve it was clear that I had probably been the one to process it.  The image was washed out, heavy in the cyan range.  It may not have been properly stabilized, I don’t know.  But there was enough to it to make it worth scanning.

Once in Photoshop, I was able to revive the original color, much to my surprise, and the image is as sharp as one might wish.  I took it further by erasing a couple of superfluous details, ramping up the contrast a bit, then de-saturating it somewhat for a kind of “aged” look.  Little else was done.  The original exposure had captured everything I needed in good register.

The view camera kit weighed about thirty pounds and I lugged it all over for several years, trying to make “important” images.  A lot of it turned out to be magnificent garbage, but some…well, some came out not too badly.

You’ll find this one and a couple others now on the Zenfolio site.  Enjoy.

Art

Robert A. Heinlein: Grand Master

I finished reading William H. Patterson’s large new biography of Robert A. Heinlein yesterday.  I knew I wanted to write something about it, but I gave it a day to simmer.  Frankly, I’m still not sure what to say other than I was positively impressed.

Basically, Patterson achieved the remarkable goal of demythologizing the man without gutting him.

I’ve read any number of biographies of famous (and infamous) personalities which tended either to be hagiographic (and therefore virtually useless as any kind of honest reference) or a brutal airing of personal failings in some sort of attempt to drag the subject down to “our level” and resulting in a catalogue of reasons to think ill of the person under study.  (This is one reason I tend to urge people that if they like an artist’s work, read it all if possible, see it all, listen to it all before finding out about them as human beings.  Too often the person, depending on the book, spoils the work for many.)

Patterson has done something useful for aspiring science fiction writers.  (Hell, for any kind of writer as far as that goes.)  Heinlein’s reputation casts a long, dark shadow across the field.  He is one of the pantheon of timeless Greats and in many ways the most intimidating of the lot.  It is, I think, useful to know that he had just as much trouble getting started—and staying started—as any other decent writer.  (Harlan Ellison has observed that the hard part is not becoming a writer but staying a writer, that anyone basically can get lucky at the beginning, but over time the work simply has to stand up for itself.)

The legend has been repeated ad nauseum, how Heinlein saw an ad for a short story contest, wrote a story, then decided to send it to Astounding instead of the contest because Campbell paid better, and it sold.  That story was Life Line.  From there, up was the only direction Heinlein went.

The reality is much more as one might expect.  True, he sold that first story to Campbell and sold more, but not without rejections getting in there and Campbell making him rewrite some of the pieces and not without a lot of wrestling with reputation and deadlines.  Writing is hard damn work and this book shows what Heinlein had to go through.  Yes, he was better than most, but he wasn’t teflon.  And he had to learn, just like any of us.

Reading about time spent living in a four-by-seven foot trailer on $4.00 a day while he sweated a new story makes him suddenly very human.

But also very admirable.

The other problem with Heinlein is that he did codifying work.  There were time travel stories, generation ship stories, alien invasion stories, and so on and so forth before him, but he wrote a number of stories—all lengths—that more or less set the standard for how those stories should be done.  He wrote “defining” stories, and for a long time people gauged their work and the work of others by that gold standard.

One gets tired of having such a bar hanging over one’s head all the time and naturally a reaction emerged over time that was as nasty as it was inevitable, casting Heinlein as the writer to work in opposition to.

By the time I discovered Heinlein, during my own golden age at 11, 12, and 13, he was already being touted as “the Dean of Space Age fiction.”  In my reading he was up there with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, the other two giants.  It was as if he had come right out of the box that way, never having been anything else, never having had to climb up any ladder of success, never, seemingly, having had to learn anything.  One of those people who simply appeared, complete and omnicompetent, already polished and important.

And for a long time I didn’t like him.

Which was odd, because years later I noticed that I had read more novels by Robert A. Heinlein than any other SF writer.  By choice, obviously, since no one was making me do that.

The reason for the dislike was bound up with the actual process of reading one of his books.  Later, I was happy to recall the story, the characters, the message, but while reading it—and being unable to put it down, whatever it was—I disliked it intensely.  I realized finally it was because, unlike so many others, he made me think.  He had a gift for portraying the process of figuring things out and would take you through it, and make you question assumptions.  It was work to read one his books, but it was also work I couldn’t seem to get out of.

Later in life I was very grateful for that.

Past the legend and the success, though, came the controversy.  He broke ground, tilted at windmills, said things that shook people up.  Sometimes the people he made uncomfortable were those you thought should be uncomfortable, you agreed with him, and it was delight to see them lampooned so effectively.  But other times he made you uncomfortable and that wasn’t so much fun.

Sometimes he fell flat on his face.  (I wonder how many other novels by such popular writers are so universally derided as I Will Fear No Evil.)  But the impact of the fall was proportional to the chance he took with the work.  The trajectory was pretty damn high.  When he missed the impact would leave a big crater.

By the time I was beginning to try my own hand at writing SF Heinlein had become the Great Target.  Just about any group in SF that had a grudge or an axe to grind could take aim at Heinlein and bitch about his politics, his solipsism, his sexism, his pedantry, his arrogance.  And while I could see where many of these arguments were coming from and where they were going, I always thought they missed a big point.  There wouldn’t be many of these arguments if he hadn’t opened the field for the debate.

Maybe that’s crediting him with more influence than he deserves.  It’s still difficult to judge.  But people still get worked up to a froth over Starship Troopers and its presumed fascism or Time Enough For Love and its self-indulgent solipsism or The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and its political demagogy or…

To put it in perspective for myself, Heinlein was the first author I read who made me question gender inequality.  I never read his women as subservient to anyone.  They were all, to my mind, their own people, fully realized, and free.  He was the first author I read that pointed out clearly that political cant is a disease of all political ideologies, left, right, or center, and that they should all be mistrusted.  He was the first author I read to make it clear that ethics and morality, personal loyalty, and conscience are stateless and should transcend parochialism and provincialism.

Later, in discussion with people who took a less generous view of the man and his work, I could see and acknowledge that he had failed to support his own theses quite often and occasionally seemed to work against his stated ideals.  Fine.  He told stories.  Sometimes characters take over (actually quite often) and do things on their own.  Sometimes a conscious set of ideals have to work against in-grown proclivities.  Everybody has to work hard to transcend personal prejudice.  And Heinlein showed that, too.

Was Robert A. Heinlein the greatest SF writer ever?  No, I don’t think so.  But then, there’s no such thing as “The Greatest” anything.  He was one of the very best.  Was he even the most important?  Well, taking the Beatles argument, a case could be made—that argument being that while the Beatles were not in any single way the best band ever, what they did opened the field and sort of gave permission for others, who were often much better, to do what they did.  Heinlein fits that description and fits it handily.  So what if some of his work is dated or quaint or embarrassing archaic?

Reading Patterson’s book restores context and without that it is difficult at best to make an honest judgment of anyone.  Against the times in which Heinlein lived and what happened to him during the course of a life lived according to a different set of cultural expectations than ours, we see just how extraordinary much of Heinlein’s work truly was.  He ceases to be a relic, a holy icon, and becomes a talented, intelligent writer who did some damned good things.  Flawed, occasionally incomprehensible and from time to time a bit intolerant, the man emerges from the shadow of the legacy and the legacy itself becomes more relevant, because it begins to make a larger sense.

This volume only takes us up to 1948.  The year he married his third wife, the one who became almost as legendary as he was, two years before the film he worked on that set a standard for “realistic” science fiction in cinema, before the decade that saw his rise to an enviable prominence within SF and even in the larger reading world.  Patterson has done a remarkable job of telling a coherent story comprised of a dizzying array of facts.  A handful of writers at the time more or less made science fiction—Asimov, Clarke, de Camp, Sturgeon, Van Vogt, and Heinlein.  Heinlein remains the most controversial.  This book goes a long way toward explaining why.

I can’t wait for volume two.

career

Myself As Antique

We started cleaning the garage this weekend past.  Made a lot of headway.  We tackled boxes which we haven’t touched since we moved in, almost 19 years ago.  Time flies when you have other things to do.

This morning I continued.  There were a few boxes of assorted odds and ends that I needed to cull through.  In doing so, I found this photograph.mark-1977.JPG

Donna has only seen me without a beard once.  She didn’t like the effect, mainly because int he years during which I’d had a beard I somehow misplaced my chin.  Anyway.  This was back when I was a trim young fella on the make, as it were.

The historical context of this photograph is rich.  Firstly, it is the young me.  That’s about as interesting as that gets.  Secondly, the setting.  Shaw Camera Shop.  4468 Shaw Avenue, St. Louis.  It had been in business since the late Forties and it was, hands down, my favorite job.  I was the lab tech and later lab manager.  I worked there for 20 years, made fast friends (many of whom are gone) and played out some of the great dramas of my life partly within its confines.  It was a black & white custom lab and at its peak we were doing the printing for several color labs, most of the independent camera stores in St. Louis (of which almost none remain) and three of the local yearbook companies.  Lots of pictures.  This shot shows me behind the front counter, the film cabinet behind me.

Thirdly, the print itself is of modest historical interest.  It was shot on Kodak Instant Print film.  There was a time when Polaroid held the monopoly on that kind of technology.  You wanted to take pictures without bothering to send the film to a lab, you used Polaroid.  Kodak muscled in while Polaroid suspended production during a strike.  They—Polaroid—subcontracted the manufacturing to Kodak till the strike ended.  During that time, Kodak got a chance to really take Polaroid’s process apart and a year or so after Polaroid resumed production, Kodak announced a new product—instant print film.  They claimed it was all their own.  Polaroid sued.  And won.  So this print is an example of a short-lived phenomenon.  (It wasn’t very good—I’ve put some effort into making this one easier to look at and sharper, but there’s only so much you can do.)

Shaw Camera Shop is long gone.  The owners for whom I worked, who I loved like a second family, had problems—Earline had battled cancer for decades and finally lost and Gene just didn’t want to continue anymore.  I was just beginning my writing career and knew if I bought the business I’d have to give that up.  So Gene sold it to someone who was ill-suited to running it and he ruined it.

Today, the building houses an antique store, Gringo Jones.  Last year was the first time I’d set foot in the place since a few weeks after it closed up as a lab.  The new owners pretty much gutted the interior to suit their needs, but I could still walk unerringly through to where everything had been.  I doubt I’ll do that again, though.

Anyway, it was a pleasant surprise to find this.  I have other pictures of Shaw and myself from that time.  I didn’t, of course, realize just how much I liked that job until it was gone.  But the memories are still there.

culture

Institutional Abuse and its Discontents

William Donahue is the head of the Catholic League in America.  Basically, he’s an apologist for all things Roman Catholic, and he comes across like an old line political boss from Chicago or the Lower East Side.  Loud, aggressive, with just enough facts to make him sound like a heavy-weight in more than just bluster.

In the recent revelations about child abuse in European Catholic institutions and some allegations that the current Pope was responsible for some of it because he was in charge of the supervising organization at the time (which seems like a fairly straightforward argument to me), Donahue went on the attack and in one instance from the Fifties he blamed the parents for not going to the police.

Everyone I have ever known who is not a Catholic has the same reaction—why didn’t the parents call the police?  Catholic reactions vary depending on age, but by and large this really misses the point.  All it says about these people who didn’t call the authorities is that they were truly devout Catholics, which is just what the Church wanted them to be.  They believed their priests.

And let’s be honest, it took most of the Seventies for the whole issue of child sexual abuse to emerge from the shadows of “We don’t want to know about this” Ostrich behavior on the part of society in general and most of the Eighties to learn just how not innocent some children can be before this matter drew serious attention.  Prior to the Seventies people tended to think kids “made shit up” all the time and couldn’t be trusted to (a) tell the truth or (b) know what the truth is.  The myths about who does what and when still pervade the culture and the majority of folks (probably) still think pedophilia is the same as homosexuality.  So to assume that way back then people would run to the cops when a little kid said “Father so-and-so played with my wee-wee” is naive and a bit amnesiac.

Add to that the strong hold Catholicism asserts on its adherents…

A reasonable question is, what about non Catholic institutions?  A report here discusses the numbers for Protestant churches and the difficulties in collecting and collating the data.  The numbers actually place the incidents on par with claims made against the Catholic Church.  The numbers aren’t that different.

What is different is the institutional reaction, and that’s where people like Donahue come in.  Protestant denominations do not have the same centralized organizational structure that the Catholic Church has.  When a local minister gets into trouble, or when a bishop finds himself in legal straits, it’s on him.  What makes the Catholic situation odious is the whole attitude the Church takes toward the obligations it expects from its adherents, the responsibilities entailed on the part of the priest, and the level of betrayal which ensues both when abuse is alleged (and demonstrated) and when the Church has moved to cover it up.

Blaming the parents is a cheap shot.  They were being good Catholics and trusted their priest.  That’s what it meant to be a Catholic then.  I recall no such obligation of trust in my days as a Lutheran.  Sure, we expected we could trust our pastors, but he didn’t enjoy any special immunity if he did something he shouldn’t have done.

It is not the numbers that are at issue in this.  It is the betrayal.  The nature of trust involved and the destruction of that trust.  Do I think these people were foolish to hold such opinions of their parish priests?  Maybe.  Do I understand it?  Sure.  That’s what they were taught.  The heinous nature of the betrayal only made the break harder to achieve and more painful to endure.

Do I think institutions ought to expect, command, and hold such trust?  No.  That’s on the Church, though.  For fifteen centuries they’ve rejecting any kind of “eyes open” approach on the part of congregations.  Trust has always been expected to be absolute and blind.  Now they’re paying for it.

It’s just too bad so many innocent people have to fork over the interest.

culture

Ada Lovelace Day

I just discovered that there is a day for this brilliant woman.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, a scholar, and wrote what is arguably the very first computer program in an essay about Charles Babbage.  Of course, since she was a woman at a time when women were considered not to have either brains or rights, she would have been seen as an anomaly at best, a monster at worst.  Since she had some position, however, she has not been forgotten or dismissed.

Warning: personal opinion follows.

Women who denigrate the idea of Feminism and fail to understand how tenuous their position is vis-a-vis  history cause me heartburn.  If they think about it at all, they seem to believe Woman As Property happens in the Third World and nothing like that can happen here (wherever the particular Here happens to be).

But then you run into something like this.  One paragraph from this report says it all:

Females do not have voting privileges, but are generally allowed to speak at meetings, according to Klaetsch. Sunday’s meeting was the first time in recent history that St. John’s Council President Don Finseth exercised his authority to prevent females from speaking, church members say.

This is in Wisconsin.  Recently.  I grant you, this is not a state practice, but in these times when so many people seem to feel that religion trumps civic law, it’s a disturbing thing to behold.  The question in my mind is, why don’t all the women there pick up their marbles and leave?

Because they either buy into the second class status accorded them or they like something about the condition they inhabit.  Western women have it easy in such matters—no one will stone them if they get a little uppity.  For them, this is a “lifestyle” choice, at least functionally.  In parts of the Middle East and Africa it’s life or death.

Back when I was in high school, in the supposedly enlightened United States of America, in 1971, I took an architectural drawing class.  The room was filled with boys.  All boys.

One girl was taking the class.  Where was she?  The teacher put her in a separate room, the supply room at the back, with her own drafting table and tools.  Why?  Because the morons inhabiting the rest of the class wouldn’t leave her alone, wouldn’t let her do her work, teased her, ridiculed her, abused her, told her she was weird, unnatural, a lesbian, that she wanted to be a man, that all she needed was a good screwing and she’d get this crazy notion of being an architect right out her system.  I heard this, witnessed some of it.  It made me profoundly uncomfortable at the time, but I didn’t understand it other than as the same run-of-the-mill bullying that I myself had been subjected to all through grade school.

But it went beyond that, I now see, because what was doing ran counter to some idea of what the relative roles of men and women are “supposed” to be.  Did the boys indulging the abuse understand that?  No, of course not.  They were parroting what they’d grown up seeing at home and elsewhere, with no more reflection or self-awareness than the hardwired belief that Real Americans all love baseball that Communism was automatically evil and John Wayne was just shy of the second coming.  Analysis would be the natural enemy to a traditional view that maintained an absurd status quo and should therefore be resisted, hence anyone among their peers that preferred reading to sports was also an enemy.

So celebrate Ada Lovelace Day.  No one, male or female, should accept restrictions imposed by cant and tradition and national dogma.  But until it is entirely recognized that we are all of us People first, male and female next, and that equal rights accrue to people, not types, none of us are safe in our predilections and ambitions.

Absurdity

Avatar

Okay, so I contributed to the James Cameron Self Love Fund and saw AVATAR. Yesterday we went to the 3-D showing (no way I would spend money on the normal view, I can wait for the DVD the way I do with 99% of the movies I see anymore).  I’ve had a day to think about it now and I’ve come to some conclusions, which are hardly profound, but I think worth saying.

Let me say up front that I wasn’t bored.  Visually, this is a stunning achievement.  But that’s what everyone is saying.  It is, in fact, the best 3-D I’ve ever seen.  Often in the past the effect is minimal and the cost in headache high.  This was neither.  And it fully supported the visuals rather than masking mundane or poor image elements.  Pandora, the planet involved, is magnificently realized.  Cool stuff.  Real gosh wow.

The biology is problematic.  You have a wide mix of lifeforms analogous to Earth.  Some big lumbering critters like hippos or rhinoceri that also have features of a dinosaur, and some small things that are clearly wolves, and one big nasty cat-like thing that’s like a sabertooth tiger.  It’s unclear if any of these creatures are mammalian, but it doesn’t matter much.  Dinosaur analogs.  Most of them apparently four-legged.  But the “horses” the natives ride are six-legged, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ thoats.  How does that play out in evolutionary terms?  Well, maybe that’s a quibble.

How then do you evolve humanoids out of this?  Well, maybe that’s a quibble, too.  This film is not about science on any level, regardless of the few bits of dialogue suggesting there are, you know, scientists, and that there is a studyable cause to any of this.

Because the story, basically, is hackneyed, cynical, and cliched.  I have to hand it to Cameron, he rips off the best.  Strong elements of Anne McCaffery’s Pern in here, as well as Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and a nod to LeGuin (The Word For World Is Forest), Poul Anderson (Call Me Joe), even Joe Haldeman (All My Sins Remembered).  If I dug through my memories I could probably come up with at least half a dozen more clear “borrowings” all mixed in.  There’s not an original idea in any two minutes.

The plotline, however, is straight out of post-colonial self-loathing and Western angst and while there is much to be mined from that pool that is legitimate for drama, its deployment here was purely sentimental button-pushing.  All the triggers were in place, with strong connections to the American Indian, Vietnam, and even a bit of Afghanistan just to bring it up to date.  And it was all thrown into the mix regardless of the logic behind it, which is profoundly flawed.  The few genuinely interesting touches are overhwelmed by the self-righteous indignation Cameron clearly wished to evoke.  We see Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and Custer’s Last Stand all in service to making a statement about…

The Big Bad Nasty Western Corporate Oligarchy Bent On Destroying Everything To Mine The Last Fragment Of Coal.

In this case, Unobtanium.

Which is somehow worth the cost of an expedition that would bankrupt the planet for the next century.

Which, if we buy the premise that interstellar travel is now practical, would be a pointless exercise in colonial assholery with no upside in terms of profit or prestige, because that one assumption means we’ve solved our energy and resource problems  and the scenario depicted rests upon a 19th Century mindset that would no longer be supportable—just as it pretty much isn’t now.

Which makes AVATAR a rather stupid movie.

Not that there wouldn’t be a way to actually sell this with a little extra work.  With a bit more imagination.  With less desire to beat up on a cultural motif that doesn’t actually need a half-billion dollar 3-D piece of propagandistic hyper sentimentalized derivative schlock movie to achieve.

Very simply posit that these trespassers are rogues.  It could be done in any of a number of ways and actually make a better story.  Not much better, perhaps, but it might be a little less cynical…

Why am I bothering to detail all this?  Because, beautiful as this film is—and it is beautiful—it pisses me off to see so much money dumped into a third-rate piece of hack writing when there are fine artists and projects begging for a little support, who have stories that would benefit the world much more than this dead-end preaching.

End of rant.

Absurdity

Rude Behavior Redux

What follows is an old post from my original website, back in 2005.  I’m reposting it because of a revisitation.  Yesterday I had a knock on the door and there were a couple of people from some small church, spreading the good news.

Now, there is irony here, because I’ve just started reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.  I didn’t read it when it first came out because it received so much attention and there was an enormous quantity of posturing, both pro and con, regarding it, that I decided to wait till the furor died down.  Besides, it’s not like I needed convincing on this point.  But I appreciate well-reasoned arguments and in the last couple of years I’ve become acquainted with Bart Ehrman’s work on textual criticism, so last month I spotted both the new paperback edition of The God Delusion as well as Dawkins’ new hardcover on evolution, The Greatest Show On Earth.

So 150 pages into The God Delusion, my Saturday is briefly interrupted by two well-meaning folks wanting to save my soul.  I did not let them linger.  “I’m an atheist,” I said.  Their faces fell and I smiled.  “Don’t worry, it’s not catching.  Unless you have a functioning brain with more than a smidgen of education.”

The man frowned, the woman continued to look alarmed.

“I have one question,” I said.  “I see you have a Bible with you.  Have either of you actually read it?”

“Of course,” the man said.

“Really?  The whole thing?  All the way through?”

“Well…” she waffled.

“In that case would you please tell me why Jesus has two contradictory genealogies?”

They both looked baffled.

“Matthew and Luke,” I said.  “You have read them?  Matthew One has a genealogy and Luke Three has a genealogy, tracing Jesus’ lineage back to David.  They contradict.  I was wondering why.”

“No, they don’t,” he said, flipping open his Bible.  This was too good to be true.  He found the one in Matthew and skimmed it.  “Okay.  Luke…?”

“Three.”

He flipped to that.  Found it.  Read it.  Looked up at me with a puzzled expression.

“They aren’t the same.  How come?  I mean, if this is supposed to be inerrant—I assume you believe it is?—then how come they don’t match?  Just curious.  And one other thing, while we’re on that point.  If Jesus was supposed to be the son of god, how come both genealogies trace him back through Joseph?  Because Joseph is only his step-dad.  How come they don’t go through Mary?  I’m just curious, I’ve never heard a good answer to that.”

The man started to look angry, but the woman actually asked, “What do you think that means?”

“Well,” I said, “it means someone got something wrong.  Either that book is not inerrant like you think it is, or it’s just a bunch of bullshit.  Have a nice day.”

I shut the door.  Rude?  Perhaps.  But as I explained in the following essay, I feel the rudeness is first manifest on their part.  So without further ado, I will proceed to my thoughts on the occasion of a visit from some Jehovah’s Witnesses back in 2005…

*******************************************************************
The other day, two nice ladies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door.  This was, in fact, their third visit.  On the previous two, they had spoken with Donna, who was polite and nice and somehow left them with the idea that they had a potential convert here.  They had left literature and apparently decided to return.  This time, they got me.

I don’t like proselytes.  I don’t like telemarketers either.  I see them as essentially of the same species of intrusive “you don’t know what you want because you don’t know what I’ve got to sell you” school of bullying.  I don’t like aggressive salesmen.  If I’m wandering through a store, and someone approaches with a polite “Are you finding everything okay?  My name’s Mike, if you have any questions…”  That’s fine.  If I have questions, I’ll go find Mike or whoever and ask.  If I don’t, and he approaches again, my inclination is to leave.  He’s stepped over the line as far as I’m concerned.  Telemarketing is worse–I’m not even in their showroom–and religious proselytes are from one of the circles of hell.

Here’s the deal: to knock on your door and present you with salvation, they have to make a basic assumption–that you have no clue about the nature of reality and even if you think you do, you’re wrong, because they know the skinny on god’s plan.  In other words, they have to assume you’re stupid, ignorant, or tacitly in league with evil.

If I walk into a church to hear the services, maybe some of this assumption has some basis–if I weren’t looking for something, I wouldn’t have walked into the church.  But I’m in my home, minding my own business, and there comes a knock on the door.  They have come to find me, to tell me I should be in church–theirs–and that they have brought with them the Good News.  They have interrupted my time, intruded on my day, and have insulted me besides.

I realize most people may not feel this way–the insulted part.  For most people, such visits are just an annoyance.  Something about it bothers them, maybe, but it’s an ill-defined unease, and they’d just as soon forget about it after the missionaries leave.  If they had wanted to ponder the ultimate questions, they’d be doing it somewhere else–like a library or, even, a church.

Proselytes, however, never assume you have done this.  And if you have, and your conclusions are other than what they have to offer, why, then, you have slid into error.  You must be saved.

When they showed up, I recognized them from their two prior visits.  Donna was napping, so I decided to deal with them.  I really didn’t want them coming back, and neither did Donna, so I decided to take the time to convince them they weren’t going to find receptive minds here–in fact, they would find active minds that had already dismissed their message as more of the same old rubbish.

Rubbish.  Dare I call it that?  Why be polite?  It’s rubbish.

In specific, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were founded in 1878 by Congregationalist minister Charles T. Russell announced that Christ had already returned–invisibly, four years earlier–and that the world would end in 1914, when the Final Battle of Armageddon will occur, after which only 144,000 people of all those who have ever lived with reappear in heaven.  (In 1884 he started the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society to spread this message.)  Russell died in 1916.  He might have thought Armageddon was taking a long time to be fought, as Europe had turned into the bloodiest battle ground in memory.  He was succeeded by Joseph Franklin Rutherford, who officially called the movement Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, in 1931, declared in a fit of prophecy that “millions now alive will never die.”

The original date of Armageddon and the End of the World passed 17 years earlier, but the difficulty of getting the date wrong has never bothered proselytes of apocalyptic faiths.  They just move the date forward, with each new prophet, each new error.

The whole emphasis of apocalyptic groups is on death and destruction.  Everything is about to go up in flames, come crashing down, blow up, dissolve, melt, disappear, perish with requisite rivers of blood and torment.  All this comes from the Book of Revelation, which is the centerpiece of such movements.  I guess they really like all that metaphysically and symbolically bizarre imagery.  The rest of Scripture seems so tame in comparison.

So while the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a specific example, in general there are dozens if not hundreds of these little sects, all preaching that the end time is nigh and we’ve got to get right with the lord.  Rubbish?

Indeed.

But I wanted to make a larger observation about insult here.  They come to your door and insult you.  You should be insulted.  You should take offence.  Because at base they are flat out telling you that your life has no meaning.  Never did, never will–unless you accept their version of reality.  Even then, everything you’ve done up to that point is irrelevant and error-filled.  Empty.  Devoid of meaning, pointless.

It’s insulting.

They asked me if I had ever been a church-goer, and I explained that, yes, one time I was a Lutheran, but that had been dissatisfying, so I went on a search for a different faith.  I went through a short list of all the different religions I’d visited or given a try–Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam, Bahai, Krishna, Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal–after which I came away satisfied that they were all incomplete, wrong, or, more fundamentally, based on the same misapprehension of the universe.

(You might ask, have I not just insulted them by suggesting that what they do is pointless?  No, because I don’t go door to door trying to convince people they’re wrong.  There is more than one reason to practice a religion, more to faith than doctrinal purity, and who am I to judge someone else’s method for coping with the world?  I may write my opinion down and even publish it, but no one is forced to read it.  My conclusion is all mine and if someone asks, I’ll express it.  The insult is in the intrusion.)

One of the ladies asked “Don’t you think you were searching for something?  Why else would you have gone looking like that?”

Good question.  And at the time I was searching.  But I don’t believe I failed to find it.  I did find it.  I found an answer.  But the impulse to search is more mundane.  “We’re raised that way,” I said.  “We live in a culture where not to believe in something is unacceptable.  From the time we’re old enough to understand English, we’re told about Jesus and that it’s a good thing to go to church.  Just to fit in, one feels the need to belong to some kind of congregation.”

I don’t think they expected that answer, because they had no come back.  Besides, it has the virtue of being true.  Most people, I think, attend a religion for social reasons.  They were raised that way, and really, what harm does it do?  You can see this when Big Issues shake up a congregation, like over the question of ministering to gays or something, and the less doctrinaire manage to accommodate the change while the real fire breathers pick up their toys and go somewhere else.

This is not to say that all those people don’t really believe in god–but you don’t need an organized framework to have faith.  You can believe in all manner of thing without attending a church based on it.  The church part is social.

We got into the specifics of biblical prophecy.  They showed me passages they thought referred to present days.  Of course, they were so vague they could refer to any period at any time in history.  I pointed this out repeatedly.  I asked why they thought these passages meant now rather than a thousand years ago.  “Today, it is a global civilization.  Then, it was just one small area of the world.”  Well, that was a wrinkle I hadn’t thought of.

But “The World” is an adaptable phrase, and for each generation has a slightly different meaning.  Back when the bible’s books were being written, “the World” was that local slice.

The vagueness of the passages did not impress them.  When I told them that the battle of Armageddon had been fought long ago, at a place in the Levant called Megiddo, they didn’t know what I was talking about.  I explained that the infamous battle took place in 609 B.C.E. between King Josiah of Judah and the Egyptian King Necho II.  It was said to have been the bloodiest battle ever fought up to that time.

(Now, the British under Allenby starting their final offensive in 1918 at Tel Megiddo against elements of a retreating and regrouping Turkish army.  It hardly qualifies as the Last Battle–the British took 36,000 prisoners at a loss of only 853 dead.)

Armageddon, then, was already a historical event when Revelations was written.  It was in the past, not something yet to come.  Now, King Josiah had been one of the last great reforming kings of Judah–his death at this battle was symbolic of ultimate calamity among the Hebrew.  It is difficult to explain to people who don’t bother to learn about biblical history that Time is fluid in prophetic literature–the past and future easily swap ends, what happened will happen, and just referring to an event that has happened in the past is intended as part and parcel of an æsthetic tradition (rather like quoting an old piece of music in a new composition to underscore a connection, make a point).  What the writer of Revelation was talking about was the fall of Rome, which was at that time very much The Beast, and the calamity to befall Rome was on a scale with the calamity of Josiah’s death.  Of course, this being a Hebrew prophecy, Israel would come out on top–not unscathed, though, as only 144,000 Jews would survive to inhabit what was left.  We can assume the number is so low because of the cabalistic tradition of assigning mystic significance to numbers.  Twelve is such a number.  There are 12 tribes of Israel, 12 X 12,000 = 144,000.  What always seems forgotten by contemporary christian sects like the Witnesses is that this refers to Hebrew survivors, nothing else.  The number is low in real terms, probably as a nasty judgement on the part of John of Patmos that only 144,000 of the Chosen were doctrinally fit to be saved.  In any case, its significance is probably lost to the current politics of the days in which it was written.

To take Revelations as anything other than the political and mystical polemic of a dissatisfied Hebrew living under Roman rule (specifically under Nero) is to assign it importance all out of bounds with its original intention.

Neither of these ladies knew or accepted that John the Divine, composer of Revelations, was not John the Apostle, putative brother of Jesus.  Neither of them had the least grasp of biblical scholarship, nor did they care.

They continued showing me passages.  They asked what I relied on.  “Reason,” I replied.

“And what does that give you?”

“It gives me a basis for understanding what I can control and what I can’t.”

More passages.  I wasn’t giving them answers to which they had set responses.  I dismissed each passage and finally the older of the two asked, “We’ve shown you our proof.  Show us yours.”

“Certainly.  What kind of proof would you accept?”

“Nothing you have can possibly contradict the word of god.”

“Then why should I bring it out?  You’ve already made up your mind.”

And so it went.

They finally left, I hope more than a little befuddled.

They had shown up on my doorstep with the best intentions.  They were going to try to save my soul.

Why is this insulting?

Because it makes a whole raft of assumptions about me–or anyone they approach–that they can neither know or have a right to meddle with.  They have to assume that I am ignorant, that my life is empty (or just naggingly incomplete), that I thirst for something I have never tasted before.

I could turn it around and start discussing physics, or biology, or neuroscience.  I’m quite sure they’ve never brushed up against the more intriguing wonders of nature.  On the contrary, they’ve shut themselves up in a room bounded on all sides by a dogged certainty that nothing outside can possibly be of any relevance or interest.  The certainty of the closed mind.

When I showed them the contradictory genealogies in Matthew and Luke, that describe completely different lines of descent for Jesus, they dismissed it as a “Jewish thing, tracing from both lines.”  That didn’t make any sense to me.  I pointed out that both genealogies ended at Joseph and that if taken literally, this meant that Joseph had two fathers.  Would they accept a genealogist’s report that suggested they had two different fathers?  That point seemed to shoot right by them.  I didn’t even bother to make the larger point, that if this was the word of god, and literal, then the lineage should have been traced through Mary, not Joseph.  That would indeed have been revolutionary in its day, running counter to tradition, and leaving future generations to ponder the significance of this one instance where a lineage was traced through the woman.

As I said, closed minds.

The desperation of the proselyte is sad.  There is so much in this world, so many wonderful things, that to turn one’s back on it all in order to hawk a third-class ticket to an afterlife that is doubtless nothing like anything imagined, if there is one at all (which I very much doubt) is pathetic.  We know we have this life.  Why waste it on pursuing the salvation of those who probably don’t need it?  Why waste it on the pretzel logic of religious interpretations that leave you in no position to grow?

But I won’t start knocking on doors to ask this question and offer an alternative.  I believe we all have choices and that they should not be coerced.  I believe the salesman should leave you alone until you have a question.  I believe telemarketers should leave you alone in the evenings.  I believe proselytes should stop assuming we’re all idiots.  They should understand that their seeking me out that way is really offensive.  I would never presume.

But, as they say, this is all preaching to the converted.

At least I didn’t force anyone to hear the sermon.  I may not believe in god, but I’m polite.

culture

Legacies

Comparisons of the disaster of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor break down in the aftermath.  What I remember is getting a phone call from my wife to turn on the news, any news, and then seeing the images on CNN.  I then called several people, including some on the west coast, early as it was.

It was a binding experience.

Then the silence of the skies for next few days.  All planes grounded.  We don’t pay attention to all that background noise until it disappears.

And I remember wanting to strike back.

But at who?

I am not a reflex pacifist.  I do not believe in turning the other cheek as an automatic gesture.  The world, in aggregate, does not yield to such gestures until much blood is spent, and disgust comes to the aid of the peaceful intent.  Strike at me,  hurt my family and friends, threaten my home, I have no compunction about the use of violence.

But not thoughtless lashing out, flailing, blind retaliation.  That does less good than the habitual use of peaceful surrender.  If we were to find these people, we needed to be smart about it, and move carefully.  When caught, punishment must be determined accordingly.

That was not to be.  I watched our so-called leaders turn this event into a justification for major abuse globally.  The sympathy we had from the entire world evaporated as the United States began stomping around acting like a pissed off child whose lunch money had been taken by a bully.  But we were not small and weak, so embracing the automatic response of schoolyard tactics resulted in calamity.  I was horrified by the unfolding nightmare of the Bush years, all done supposedly in my name as a citizen.

The aftermath of Pearl Harbor was horrible but not cause for self-loathing and shame.  We rose to an occasion that demanded sacrifice and we came to the aid of a  world gone mad.  The enemy was clear, the stakes enormous, the calculations easy enough.  Ugly as WWII was, our response was as close to noble as war can bestow, and we have carried ourselves with pride born out of that period for going on 70 years now.

Not so after 9/11.

We were struck in 1941 by a nation that officially declared war upon us.  We knew who they were, what they stood for, and where to find them.  It was a conflict of clear adversaries fighting as nations.

The 9/11 aggressors were a band of people more like the mafia, with no nation, no formal declaration of war, and no clear face.  We had a few names, a few associations.  We didn’t know how to deal with this, so we pretended it was just like any other war, shoved the awkward details into the box called War, and attacked as if nations could be blamed.

After WWII we could expect and received formal surrenders from nations authorized to sign such instruments.  Rebuilding began, and it could be argued that THAT was the real victory.

Who will sign a surrender in this conflict?  Who can?  What would it look like?  And how do you rebuild something these very same enemies keep knocking down and by so doing make us knock them down as well, along with all the innocent people who just get in the way?

There was a time hatred could not act on its own in such a vast theater—it required nations to enable it and give it reach.  That’s changed.

It seems to me we need to start figuring out how to rid ourselves of hate.  We can’t do that if we keep hurting the very people we need to help.

Our job has been made infinitely harder because of the schoolyard bully mentality of the administration that dragged us into this fray in the aftermath of national tragedy.  We may never regain the credibility needed to address the real issues.  That is the loss I continue to mourn on this day.

The dead cannot be blamed for the acts of the living, and revenge is a cold legacy for the sacrifice of the honorable.

current affairs

Quote of the Day

It cannot have escaped those who have attended with candor to the arguments employed against the extensive powers of the government, that the authors of them have very little considered how far these powers were necessary means of attaining a necessary end. They have chosen rather to dwell on the inconveniences which must be unavoidably blended with all political advantages; and on the possible abuses which must be incident to every power or trust, of which a beneficial use can be made. This method of handling the subject cannot impose on the good sense of the people of America. It may display the subtlety of the writer; it may open a boundless field for rhetoric and declamation; it may inflame the passions of the unthinking, and may confirm the prejudices of the misthinking: but cool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT, good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused. They will see, therefore, that in all cases where power is to be conferred, the point first to be decided is, whether such a power be necessary to the public good; as the next will be, in case of an affirmative decision, to guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the power to the public detriment.

from Federalist # 41, by James Madison