It's often the small things that make a difference.
Giggling through an otherwise boring transaction in which the bank staff just can't spell your name (three times). Gliding through traffic after a satisfying workday. Finding the perfect parking spot even thought it's 8pm. You feel you have the karma and nothing can touch you.
Sure, having karma is itself a contradiction in terms. Karma just is, like grace. No one owns it.
Like The Zone. Capitalized. Mysterious. Undefinable. Without clear borders. It's a strangely satisfying state of mind that comes from nothing (no drugs, sex or rock and roll), probably doesn't last too long, but what a high when it's there!
Showing posts sorted by date for query sex. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query sex. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Whither Romance
Playing with etymology I chanced upon the origin of the English word romance: it comes from the Old French romanz ("verse narrative"), related also to the modern French roman ("novel"), gaining its modern sense only in the 17th century. So is everything romantic at the core a fiction?
Did the relatively modern sense related to matters of the metaphoric heart, come to be accepted just in time for the industrial revolution to turn romance into prosaic mating?
Indeed, it strikes me that the industrial age brought about the most intense denial of such a scientific development in the form of something known as Victorian mores or customs, the Manicheism of the 19th century that survived into the 20th. The major change brought about by the sexual revolution, in whose ramparts I valiantly fought, was the beginning of an admission that a lot that happens with regards to romance is actually biological.
Romance involves a temporary suspension of the brain's critical functions, induced by what must no doubt be a flood of pleasure-inducing chemicals, so that we become convinced that this one other person, suddenly encompassed within our ego's expanding boundary, is astoundingly special and even necessary to our survival.
Thus, I would argue, the claim that certain public figures whose sexuality has become known are "sex addicts" is absurd. Once we have experienced it, we are all to some extent "addicted," or uncommonly willing to seek, the pleasure of romance.
The label gets flung at men -- Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, etc. -- largely because women have different biological goals.
Men are biologically set to impregnate as many women as possible, a goal that is fulfilled in sexual consummation. Women are biologically set to become impregnated, carry the potential human being to birth and then provide at least the indispensable nurture needed for the infant's survival, a goal that is best fulfilled in marriage or some form of long-term commitment.
Such a set of mechanisms explains why men move on quickly and women hang on.
Similarly, the pattern explains why men are eager to call a taxi right after orgasm, while women keep up the romance until they get a ring around their fingers. Biology also explain why the romance ends early in courtship for men and on the honeymoon's first night for women.
Women are just as "addicted" as men. Except ... can one really call what seems to me a natural process an "addiction"?
A therapist I know, who has no direct personal knowledge of either Clinton or Woods, claims that not only is there such a thing, but that the former president and the golfer are prime addicts. Funny, no women ever get mentioned, even though if there were such a thing as sex addiction, I might have postulated my friend, who is of the female persuasion, as an exemplar.
All of which is apropos of nothing more than writing a new post finally giving expression to an idea I have been mulling for some time. You may disagree. Of course, you would be wrong.
Did the relatively modern sense related to matters of the metaphoric heart, come to be accepted just in time for the industrial revolution to turn romance into prosaic mating?
Indeed, it strikes me that the industrial age brought about the most intense denial of such a scientific development in the form of something known as Victorian mores or customs, the Manicheism of the 19th century that survived into the 20th. The major change brought about by the sexual revolution, in whose ramparts I valiantly fought, was the beginning of an admission that a lot that happens with regards to romance is actually biological.
Romance involves a temporary suspension of the brain's critical functions, induced by what must no doubt be a flood of pleasure-inducing chemicals, so that we become convinced that this one other person, suddenly encompassed within our ego's expanding boundary, is astoundingly special and even necessary to our survival.
Thus, I would argue, the claim that certain public figures whose sexuality has become known are "sex addicts" is absurd. Once we have experienced it, we are all to some extent "addicted," or uncommonly willing to seek, the pleasure of romance.
The label gets flung at men -- Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, etc. -- largely because women have different biological goals.
Men are biologically set to impregnate as many women as possible, a goal that is fulfilled in sexual consummation. Women are biologically set to become impregnated, carry the potential human being to birth and then provide at least the indispensable nurture needed for the infant's survival, a goal that is best fulfilled in marriage or some form of long-term commitment.
Such a set of mechanisms explains why men move on quickly and women hang on.
Similarly, the pattern explains why men are eager to call a taxi right after orgasm, while women keep up the romance until they get a ring around their fingers. Biology also explain why the romance ends early in courtship for men and on the honeymoon's first night for women.
Women are just as "addicted" as men. Except ... can one really call what seems to me a natural process an "addiction"?
A therapist I know, who has no direct personal knowledge of either Clinton or Woods, claims that not only is there such a thing, but that the former president and the golfer are prime addicts. Funny, no women ever get mentioned, even though if there were such a thing as sex addiction, I might have postulated my friend, who is of the female persuasion, as an exemplar.
All of which is apropos of nothing more than writing a new post finally giving expression to an idea I have been mulling for some time. You may disagree. Of course, you would be wrong.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Catholic Charities? Not!
Thursday, my busiest day, I couldn't write a post on The Washington Post front page news that the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington threatened to discontinue the services to the poor provided under contract with the city if the Washington, D.C., City Council approves a gay marriage bill. I howled with laughter.
Funniest of all was listening on the radio to the spokesman of the local Catholic Charities talking about tenets (I swear it sounded like "tenants") in syntactically awkward statements that conveyed the distinct impression that he didn't know what the word "tenets" means -- let alone what the tenets of Catholicism are.
There is no tenet on which to hide behind in this case. No one is asking the Catholic Church to declare that a civil marriage between people of the same sex is sacramental, much less to host such a ceremony. In fact, archdiocesan officials are standing on the quicksand of hypotheticals (see their own Web site) that, precisely in the light of their own alleged faith, simply do not wash, as follows:
You mean, like the Knights of Columbus in Silver Spring, Md., and several Catholic churches, a stone throw from the bishop's residence, rent their halls for dances for divorced people who obviously have the intention of coupling?
These three hypotheticals come from their Web site.
Allow me at this point to interject that I was once a board member of precisely the D.C. area Catholic Charities, during the tenure of Archbishop Hickey. I knew then and know now that these charities are only nominally "Catholic." Nationally, Catholic Charities USA estimates that between 45 and 55 percent f their funds come from the Catholic Church; and much the same is true locally.
The contracts with the District of Columbia are a way to raise revenue. Much the way most nonprofits actually make handsome amounts of money that results in the occasional scandal when some official gets too greedy, Catholic Charities, like the Catholic Church, is, in strict financial terms, a business.
Pace, Catholics! The same is true of every other religious organization or church. Some are more baldly money making, other less so.
Now if the Archdiocese of Washington wants to demonstrate its purity of belief in the evangelical counsels (feed the hungry, give to drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit those who are sick, etc.), let it do so without government contracts. Let it give out of its community's generosity, not that of the rest of us.
Let's go one step further: let the Archdiocese of Washington renounce the exemption that allows it to sit prime land and buildings for which it pays not a penny in real estate taxes. The church exemption diminishes the funds available for services to the poor -- and D.C. is a leader in generosity to the unemployed and poor.
Now those are policies and principles directly traceable to the words attributed to a Galilean woodworker of two millenia ago. Archbishop Wuerl may have heard of the man, he was known as Jesus of Nazareth.
Funniest of all was listening on the radio to the spokesman of the local Catholic Charities talking about tenets (I swear it sounded like "tenants") in syntactically awkward statements that conveyed the distinct impression that he didn't know what the word "tenets" means -- let alone what the tenets of Catholicism are.
There is no tenet on which to hide behind in this case. No one is asking the Catholic Church to declare that a civil marriage between people of the same sex is sacramental, much less to host such a ceremony. In fact, archdiocesan officials are standing on the quicksand of hypotheticals (see their own Web site) that, precisely in the light of their own alleged faith, simply do not wash, as follows:
What if an employee wants medical benefits for his or her same-sex partner?
You mean the Catholic Church even hires gay people? (Indeed, yes; more secretly guarded that the pedophile files -- pedofiles? -- is the number of supposedly celibate priests who have died of AIDS.)
All right, let's keep a straight face here. Where is it forbidden to provide the insurance benefits as required by law, even if it is more than you think you should pay?
Even in the direst Catholic condemnations of homoeroticism, of which there are many, the teachings are consistent in calling for charity (that is, loving kindness), always well beyond one's minimal duty. It's not like the Church has ever confronted massive and uncontrolled altruism and had to stop the excess of kindness.
Even in the direst Catholic condemnations of homoeroticism, of which there are many, the teachings are consistent in calling for charity (that is, loving kindness), always well beyond one's minimal duty. It's not like the Church has ever confronted massive and uncontrolled altruism and had to stop the excess of kindness.
What if a gay couple wants to adopt a child?
So? Do Catholic charity groups only promote adoptions and foster parents among people who subscribe to the entire code of Catholic Canon Law?
No Muslims, Jews or Protestants, whose standards of marriage and coupling, and a host of other moral and doctrinal ideas differ radically from those of Catholicism, may ever adopt or become foster parents through a Catholic agency?
No Muslims, Jews or Protestants, whose standards of marriage and coupling, and a host of other moral and doctrinal ideas differ radically from those of Catholicism, may ever adopt or become foster parents through a Catholic agency?
What if same-sex couples want to use a church hall for for non-wedding events
You mean, like the Knights of Columbus in Silver Spring, Md., and several Catholic churches, a stone throw from the bishop's residence, rent their halls for dances for divorced people who obviously have the intention of coupling?
These three hypotheticals come from their Web site.
Allow me at this point to interject that I was once a board member of precisely the D.C. area Catholic Charities, during the tenure of Archbishop Hickey. I knew then and know now that these charities are only nominally "Catholic." Nationally, Catholic Charities USA estimates that between 45 and 55 percent f their funds come from the Catholic Church; and much the same is true locally.
The contracts with the District of Columbia are a way to raise revenue. Much the way most nonprofits actually make handsome amounts of money that results in the occasional scandal when some official gets too greedy, Catholic Charities, like the Catholic Church, is, in strict financial terms, a business.
Pace, Catholics! The same is true of every other religious organization or church. Some are more baldly money making, other less so.
Now if the Archdiocese of Washington wants to demonstrate its purity of belief in the evangelical counsels (feed the hungry, give to drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit those who are sick, etc.), let it do so without government contracts. Let it give out of its community's generosity, not that of the rest of us.
Let's go one step further: let the Archdiocese of Washington renounce the exemption that allows it to sit prime land and buildings for which it pays not a penny in real estate taxes. The church exemption diminishes the funds available for services to the poor -- and D.C. is a leader in generosity to the unemployed and poor.
Now those are policies and principles directly traceable to the words attributed to a Galilean woodworker of two millenia ago. Archbishop Wuerl may have heard of the man, he was known as Jesus of Nazareth.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Hitting On and Getting Hit: It Takes Two
There's a disturbing one-sidedness among women blogging and commenting about public, unwanted, but perfectly legal male attention in a way that paints the man as a figurative predator and the woman as a figurative victim. The truth is that genius and stupidity are abundant in both sexes and this leads to plenty of misunderstandings.
The two most recent examples of which I am aware are my cyberfriend Heartinsanfrancisco's So Many Fools, So Little Time, which tells a vignette of an overheard street approach to a "very attractive young woman" by a young man on a bicycle, and Schrödinger’s Rapist, which purports, amid much frothy giggling, to dispense advice to young men in such a situation.
In both instances, there was a chorus of unanimity from women canonizing the notion that in these situations men are always willful and wrong, not merely mistaken, and that women are innocent and hapless, not merely inconvenienced. An approach on the public street that does not involve physical contact or profanity is not morally equivalent to rape no matter how you slice it and dice it, and there are two players in that scene.
Sure, some men are cads. But some women are foolish.
The woman in So Many Fools gave her name to the stranger, first thing, instead of ignoring him. A commenter told of a "friend" (herself?) who allowed a total stranger, a man who was not a professional photographer, to take her picture. Not a day passes, particularly in the summer, that I see young women in variations of near-undress in the public sidewalks of my city.
Why are women surprised that returning the attention of an unknown male contemporary, giving a stranger of the opposite sex a physical image of yourself or walking around half-naked convey messages that they are open to a conversation, to being objectified or to inspiring fantasies of naked activities?
I'm not endorsing the men.
The young man on a bicycle didn't take the hint when the attractive woman clearly attempted to break off the conversation some moments later. The "photographer" was apparently arrested for masturbating in the public company of a whole batch of photos of foolish women who had let him take their picture. And, yes, many men do undress women in their heads due to a huge swath of anthropological reasons that, I agree, do call for change (a whole other post).
Yet in the case of casual, public approaches by men who are obviously physically attracted to a woman -- they do not know whether she has read T.S. Eliot -- the responsibility for decorum falls upon both the man and the woman.
I cannot think of a reason for a woman to let a stranger in a metropolitan area photograph her, other than sheer narcissism. Um, what could that be for? What is being photographed here, her PhD thesis on Francis Bacon? Similarly, I cannot find any excuse for "photographer," other than pathology.
However, if the attractive young woman was slow to convey her disinterest -- Heartin deems that acceptable -- then perhaps we ought to cut the young man some slack for being slow to get the message.
Similarly, if an adult woman wears a low cut dress that does not exactly draw attention to her frontal cerebral lobes, the men might be excused if their fantasies get away from them, so long as they stay as mere fantasies.
Still, might there not be a woman who dresses attractively to attract and, indeed, meet the man of her dreams unexpectedly? Is it not possible that a suggestively attired woman is actually seeking to inspire fantasies in at least one particular man?
MIght we all simply relax a little about the mishaps and miscommunications between men and women? Isn't it possible that women, as well as men, bear the burden of mixed and missed signals?
The two most recent examples of which I am aware are my cyberfriend Heartinsanfrancisco's So Many Fools, So Little Time, which tells a vignette of an overheard street approach to a "very attractive young woman" by a young man on a bicycle, and Schrödinger’s Rapist, which purports, amid much frothy giggling, to dispense advice to young men in such a situation.
In both instances, there was a chorus of unanimity from women canonizing the notion that in these situations men are always willful and wrong, not merely mistaken, and that women are innocent and hapless, not merely inconvenienced. An approach on the public street that does not involve physical contact or profanity is not morally equivalent to rape no matter how you slice it and dice it, and there are two players in that scene.
Sure, some men are cads. But some women are foolish.
The woman in So Many Fools gave her name to the stranger, first thing, instead of ignoring him. A commenter told of a "friend" (herself?) who allowed a total stranger, a man who was not a professional photographer, to take her picture. Not a day passes, particularly in the summer, that I see young women in variations of near-undress in the public sidewalks of my city.
Why are women surprised that returning the attention of an unknown male contemporary, giving a stranger of the opposite sex a physical image of yourself or walking around half-naked convey messages that they are open to a conversation, to being objectified or to inspiring fantasies of naked activities?
I'm not endorsing the men.
The young man on a bicycle didn't take the hint when the attractive woman clearly attempted to break off the conversation some moments later. The "photographer" was apparently arrested for masturbating in the public company of a whole batch of photos of foolish women who had let him take their picture. And, yes, many men do undress women in their heads due to a huge swath of anthropological reasons that, I agree, do call for change (a whole other post).
Yet in the case of casual, public approaches by men who are obviously physically attracted to a woman -- they do not know whether she has read T.S. Eliot -- the responsibility for decorum falls upon both the man and the woman.
I cannot think of a reason for a woman to let a stranger in a metropolitan area photograph her, other than sheer narcissism. Um, what could that be for? What is being photographed here, her PhD thesis on Francis Bacon? Similarly, I cannot find any excuse for "photographer," other than pathology.
However, if the attractive young woman was slow to convey her disinterest -- Heartin deems that acceptable -- then perhaps we ought to cut the young man some slack for being slow to get the message.
Similarly, if an adult woman wears a low cut dress that does not exactly draw attention to her frontal cerebral lobes, the men might be excused if their fantasies get away from them, so long as they stay as mere fantasies.
Still, might there not be a woman who dresses attractively to attract and, indeed, meet the man of her dreams unexpectedly? Is it not possible that a suggestively attired woman is actually seeking to inspire fantasies in at least one particular man?
MIght we all simply relax a little about the mishaps and miscommunications between men and women? Isn't it possible that women, as well as men, bear the burden of mixed and missed signals?
Monday, September 21, 2009
Delusions and Consequences
Is it your fault if a relative you drove to a hospital doesn't like your choice of venue or somehow gets sicker, even though you didn't choose the equivalent of a refugee camp clinic in Chad over a peer of the Mayo Clinic? You had two apples, a red delicious and a granny smith and with the best intentions you chose one over the other.
Is it your moral, philosophical or psychological fault if the person you gave the apple to gets an indigestion or just plain doesn't like the taste? There are people -- often enough they are women taught to apologize for their mere existence -- who would beat themselves up, who would engage for hours in exploration of the chain events that any small and largely apparent choice brings on.
You decided to major in English literature and not accounting, so you failed as a novelist and live in a garret in East St. Louis, but your accounting-major classmates have already retired to mansions in Provence. You turned left rather than right at a certain intersection and a truck laden with hundreds of pounds of bananas backed into your car three blocks later.
Remember, we're not talking legal here. Lawyers could argue that a matricidal maniac should not be punished harshly because he is an orphan, but that's not the kind of issue on which I want to dwell.
Responsibility, to my mind, turns on whether we actually have choices. I would argue that most of us have extremely few meaningful choices and it's a delusion of grandeur -- or Calvinism, depending on your mileage -- to think otherwise.
If I were given the choice of being 15 again to relive it all, given what I know now, I would like to think I would make choices that would make me either rich as Donald Trump or famous as Albert Schweitzer or, at a minimum, irresistibly handsome to women ranging from Heidi Klum to Janet Reno. But it's just not so.
Let's take Heidi Kulm and Janet Reno. Attractiveness to the opposite sex is based on a wide range of biological factors that pair certain groups of men and women with each other and the results ... are happenstance. An actress once told George Bernard Shaw that if they had a child it would be beautiful and brilliant, only to hear from Shaw that the reverse would be true if the child inherited her brains and his beauty.
Social norms have tended to accentuate some aspects over another. Indeed, in its pursuit of study, the Jewish tradition has historically pushed its most intelligent people to marry. A rabbi's son was once the dream husband. Conversely, the rule of priestly celibacy in Catholicism assured that, at least during the long medieval night, the era's most educated and talented men of western Europe either did not reproduce or spawned children born into social disadvantage.
I belabor birth, because one's birthplace and parentage remain the most meaningful and decisive factors in lifetime social and economic outcomes -- democracy and everyting else notwithstanding. Unlike many Americans, I did not get to choose mine, which is why I am not particularly proud of being American -- or of occupying a given quintile in U.S. income distribution or hailing anciently from a particular corner of the world.
It's simply not true that being superior makes you white or being smart makes you rich or being chosen by Uncle Sam makes you number one. Even if it were, what did you have to do with any of those?
So what makes you think that you had a real choice in the hospital for your relative? You didn't have a choice between the Chad and Mayo clinics. At worst you had a choice between equally mediocre hospitals operating in the midst of a collapsing system.
We all do our best -- and, yes, we can choose not to -- and consequences spring whether we like them or not. I'm not even sure that doing one's best makes a difference, except to ourselves.
Is it your moral, philosophical or psychological fault if the person you gave the apple to gets an indigestion or just plain doesn't like the taste? There are people -- often enough they are women taught to apologize for their mere existence -- who would beat themselves up, who would engage for hours in exploration of the chain events that any small and largely apparent choice brings on.
You decided to major in English literature and not accounting, so you failed as a novelist and live in a garret in East St. Louis, but your accounting-major classmates have already retired to mansions in Provence. You turned left rather than right at a certain intersection and a truck laden with hundreds of pounds of bananas backed into your car three blocks later.
Remember, we're not talking legal here. Lawyers could argue that a matricidal maniac should not be punished harshly because he is an orphan, but that's not the kind of issue on which I want to dwell.
Responsibility, to my mind, turns on whether we actually have choices. I would argue that most of us have extremely few meaningful choices and it's a delusion of grandeur -- or Calvinism, depending on your mileage -- to think otherwise.
If I were given the choice of being 15 again to relive it all, given what I know now, I would like to think I would make choices that would make me either rich as Donald Trump or famous as Albert Schweitzer or, at a minimum, irresistibly handsome to women ranging from Heidi Klum to Janet Reno. But it's just not so.
Let's take Heidi Kulm and Janet Reno. Attractiveness to the opposite sex is based on a wide range of biological factors that pair certain groups of men and women with each other and the results ... are happenstance. An actress once told George Bernard Shaw that if they had a child it would be beautiful and brilliant, only to hear from Shaw that the reverse would be true if the child inherited her brains and his beauty.
Social norms have tended to accentuate some aspects over another. Indeed, in its pursuit of study, the Jewish tradition has historically pushed its most intelligent people to marry. A rabbi's son was once the dream husband. Conversely, the rule of priestly celibacy in Catholicism assured that, at least during the long medieval night, the era's most educated and talented men of western Europe either did not reproduce or spawned children born into social disadvantage.
I belabor birth, because one's birthplace and parentage remain the most meaningful and decisive factors in lifetime social and economic outcomes -- democracy and everyting else notwithstanding. Unlike many Americans, I did not get to choose mine, which is why I am not particularly proud of being American -- or of occupying a given quintile in U.S. income distribution or hailing anciently from a particular corner of the world.
It's simply not true that being superior makes you white or being smart makes you rich or being chosen by Uncle Sam makes you number one. Even if it were, what did you have to do with any of those?
So what makes you think that you had a real choice in the hospital for your relative? You didn't have a choice between the Chad and Mayo clinics. At worst you had a choice between equally mediocre hospitals operating in the midst of a collapsing system.
We all do our best -- and, yes, we can choose not to -- and consequences spring whether we like them or not. I'm not even sure that doing one's best makes a difference, except to ourselves.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Why do the heathen rage?
Taking a leaf from Chani's Sacred Life Sunday series, our text this morning is Psalm 2:1. In the words of the King James translation, it runs "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?"
There used to be a religious advertisement in The Washington Post that contained a small "column" sermonette by some Protestant evangelical that was perennially headlined Why Do the Heathen Rage? Even when I believed in Christianity I could never get very far before the sheer kookiness of the writer overwhelmed me. The author was a Southern preacher right out of Flannery O'Connor.
Turns out that among O'Connor's papers was found a draft novel 378 pages long, titled precisely “Why Do the Heathen Rage.” It is clearly an unfinished work that reveals O'Connor's literary mind in its 17 -- count 'em -- versions of a single porch scene.
O'Connor, like me, was a Catholic; like me she was intrigued by Protestant preaching, particularly the rambling low-church evangelical genre predominant in the South where she lived. To her the idiom must have been familiar; I still need subtitles for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
All the above goes to say that this question is resonant to most of humanity that I have come across. Let's hear the Psalmist once again:
Pace, Republicans! I imagine a similar outrage must have struck GOPers when Bill Clinton managed to accede to the male Holy Grail of oral sex at the office, without the tablets of family values parting a Red Sea of blood from his body. Not only that! His enemies were forced to resign. Among them, you will recall, one Newton Leroy Gingrich was found cavorting with a church choir singer while his wife lay dying of cancer.
Not all of us, however, take part in hijinks in the Oval Office or under the Capitol's dome.
To most of us the "heathens" (the Douay translation says "Gentiles") are ordinary folk, such as the lazy but imperious boss who gets acclaim for one's work, the colleague who gets raises undeservedly, the myriad of salespeople who sell us defective products under deceptive terms, the lover who cheats on us and yet "wins" the approval or envy of peers. And so on.
We do everything right, we tell ourselves, yet the other guy (it's usually a guy) overtakes us from the slow lane.
The Bible's solution doesn't quite do it, either. Take Psalm 2:4-6:
Actually, to me, quite apart from Christianity or faith or dogma or anything of that sort, the question means something entirely different, something quite fitting now that I am an avowed apostate.
Why do I, the heathen, rage? Why did I, the heathen in believer's clothes, rage when I laughed at the author of Why Do the Heathen Rage?
How dare I rage at Dubya, when I defied the oaths I have taken?
Here the Bible, an anthology of certainly valuable writings that, at a minimum, display a whole history of thought and emotions and lives and human experiences, does come in handy.
Unzipper thy Olde Bibles and open to Isaiah 37:28-29 and read (a little out of context because I am not interested in the possible grand Christological issues underlying the passage) the following
It was my Oedipal daemon, the sprite of wounded professional pride in the face of failure or shortcoming, the fury of furies set loose on those I thought mocked my efforts or set arms against them and the final Götterdämmerung at the summit, when all is left but the descent to Hades.
There was an inner dialogue similar to that Isaiah sets up between God and the heathens. The divine voice in me knew perfectly well the rages of the demonic voice. I was a demigod, willing my own defeat as I ordered the Earth scorched to cinders.
That was all before I became a man, realizing that, heathen though I may be, I do no longer rage, for it serves no purpose for what little life remains. Perhaps that is why we all ask this question so insistently.
There used to be a religious advertisement in The Washington Post that contained a small "column" sermonette by some Protestant evangelical that was perennially headlined Why Do the Heathen Rage? Even when I believed in Christianity I could never get very far before the sheer kookiness of the writer overwhelmed me. The author was a Southern preacher right out of Flannery O'Connor.
Turns out that among O'Connor's papers was found a draft novel 378 pages long, titled precisely “Why Do the Heathen Rage.” It is clearly an unfinished work that reveals O'Connor's literary mind in its 17 -- count 'em -- versions of a single porch scene.
O'Connor, like me, was a Catholic; like me she was intrigued by Protestant preaching, particularly the rambling low-church evangelical genre predominant in the South where she lived. To her the idiom must have been familiar; I still need subtitles for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
All the above goes to say that this question is resonant to most of humanity that I have come across. Let's hear the Psalmist once again:
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, "Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us."The thought came to me when Dubya could come to power unelected, order wiretapping on Americans, out his own country's intelligence officer and imprison people indefinitely without trial, all in defiance of his oath of office to the Constitution ... all with utter impunity.
Pace, Republicans! I imagine a similar outrage must have struck GOPers when Bill Clinton managed to accede to the male Holy Grail of oral sex at the office, without the tablets of family values parting a Red Sea of blood from his body. Not only that! His enemies were forced to resign. Among them, you will recall, one Newton Leroy Gingrich was found cavorting with a church choir singer while his wife lay dying of cancer.
Not all of us, however, take part in hijinks in the Oval Office or under the Capitol's dome.
To most of us the "heathens" (the Douay translation says "Gentiles") are ordinary folk, such as the lazy but imperious boss who gets acclaim for one's work, the colleague who gets raises undeservedly, the myriad of salespeople who sell us defective products under deceptive terms, the lover who cheats on us and yet "wins" the approval or envy of peers. And so on.
We do everything right, we tell ourselves, yet the other guy (it's usually a guy) overtakes us from the slow lane.
The Bible's solution doesn't quite do it, either. Take Psalm 2:4-6:
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.The Psalms have this thing with a king who will reign forever and "smite" anyone who even looked at us the wrong way. So? I want my smiting done right now!
Actually, to me, quite apart from Christianity or faith or dogma or anything of that sort, the question means something entirely different, something quite fitting now that I am an avowed apostate.
Why do I, the heathen, rage? Why did I, the heathen in believer's clothes, rage when I laughed at the author of Why Do the Heathen Rage?
How dare I rage at Dubya, when I defied the oaths I have taken?
Here the Bible, an anthology of certainly valuable writings that, at a minimum, display a whole history of thought and emotions and lives and human experiences, does come in handy.
Unzipper thy Olde Bibles and open to Isaiah 37:28-29 and read (a little out of context because I am not interested in the possible grand Christological issues underlying the passage) the following
But I know thy abode, and thy going out, and thy coming in, and thy rage against me.This reminds me of a T-shirt I bought one summer at Rehoboth Beach. On a black background it features a silver skull engulfed in golden flames. Over the years I came to call this image the picture of my inner, raging daemon.
Because thy rage against me, and thy tumult, is come up into mine ears ...
It was my Oedipal daemon, the sprite of wounded professional pride in the face of failure or shortcoming, the fury of furies set loose on those I thought mocked my efforts or set arms against them and the final Götterdämmerung at the summit, when all is left but the descent to Hades.
There was an inner dialogue similar to that Isaiah sets up between God and the heathens. The divine voice in me knew perfectly well the rages of the demonic voice. I was a demigod, willing my own defeat as I ordered the Earth scorched to cinders.
That was all before I became a man, realizing that, heathen though I may be, I do no longer rage, for it serves no purpose for what little life remains. Perhaps that is why we all ask this question so insistently.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Les Scandales Politiques Américains
In the manner of Art Buchwald's famous column explaining Thanksgiving's Day to the French, which was reprinted every year for decades after its 1953 debut, I would like to explain to readers of Le Monde why Mark Sanford is news in the USA.
Here's the QPFD (les questions démandés plus fréquentes -- or frequently asked questions):
Q. Quelle hypocrisie ! Dans un pays avec ce taux de divorce, les affaires extra-conjugales seraient-elles rarissimes ? (No translation needed, just imagine a French man with handlebar mustache and beret dropping his paper on the outdoor café table as his arms raise with indignation demanding vengeance from the heavens.)
A. My dear François, extramarital affairs are not all that uncommon in the USA and the divorce rate is high. The real puzzle, however, is the fact that all surveys (sondages) since Kinsey's have found that men cheat (tromp) more than women, leading me to wonder whether adulterous women take on several lovers to offset the imbalance (déséquilibre). (Hence Sanford's trip to Argentina [la terre du tango] in search of illicit love.)
Q. So they are normal men. But being punished they want a revenge on their fellows, what a nice mentality!
"Normal" in France, as I understand it, involves presidents who must either have suitable number of mistresses (maîtresses) to stay in power or else wives who are incurable man-chasers. Unfortunately, my friend Pierre, that happens only in France.
Q. I wonder whether the notion of lying is always used for sexual stuff, no? The reason or the cause of Clinton's problem has always said to be because he lied (not because he had sex with Monica) which appears to be a wide hypocrisie. Do you have other examples?
Lying (mentir), my adored Fifi, isn't always about sexual things (les choses sexuelles). I'd bet that Clinton subscribed to the school of thought that what Monica did to him and his cigar did to her was not "sex." To him these deeds did not encompass the act that the Founding Fathers (les Péres Fondateurs) had in mind when they referred to "sexual Congreff" (l'Asamblée carnale), where we got the tradition of lobbying (le lobbying).
Q. Why private life has to do with politics? OK the guy had not to boast and to defend about familiy values, right, but we think that if politicans's private life was respected, there will be much less problems.
Jacques, Jacques, Jacques! This is the land of the Scarlet Letter (la Lettre Écarlate). If Republicans didn't make hay (le foin) out of the immorality ascribed to everybody else, on what platform would they ever be elected: balanced budgets? peace and prosperity? fair taxes?
As if!
Q. Et Abe Fortas ... had he to renounce because he lied about his payments. Or was it merely what we call "délit d'initié", when someone has hidden interest ? (Which is not lying.)
Ah, ma belle Louise, you have studied our history well. But here lying about money is still lying. Especially about money (l'argent), which is ten times more important than sex.
Q. I have always been very suprised that apparently all Americans finally accepted Bush lying about the supposed weapons; nothing happened to him as it happened to Clinton. He lied. OK he lied. Too bad. Period. End of the story. That is why I dont really believe that lying is such unforgivable in the USA.
Hmm ... interesting point. Nothing happened to Clinton, either, now that I recall. It was Gingrich and Livingston, the Right Wing nut witch hunters (les chasseurs de sorciéres de l'Aile Droite noix) who had to quit because of their affairs (liaisons condits).
Q. Irangate. That sounds to be a very complicated story, but lying does not seem to be the main fault, was it?
Sorry, but I was out of the loop, Michélle.
Here's the QPFD (les questions démandés plus fréquentes -- or frequently asked questions):
Q. Quelle hypocrisie ! Dans un pays avec ce taux de divorce, les affaires extra-conjugales seraient-elles rarissimes ? (No translation needed, just imagine a French man with handlebar mustache and beret dropping his paper on the outdoor café table as his arms raise with indignation demanding vengeance from the heavens.)
A. My dear François, extramarital affairs are not all that uncommon in the USA and the divorce rate is high. The real puzzle, however, is the fact that all surveys (sondages) since Kinsey's have found that men cheat (tromp) more than women, leading me to wonder whether adulterous women take on several lovers to offset the imbalance (déséquilibre). (Hence Sanford's trip to Argentina [la terre du tango] in search of illicit love.)
Q. So they are normal men. But being punished they want a revenge on their fellows, what a nice mentality!
"Normal" in France, as I understand it, involves presidents who must either have suitable number of mistresses (maîtresses) to stay in power or else wives who are incurable man-chasers. Unfortunately, my friend Pierre, that happens only in France.
Q. I wonder whether the notion of lying is always used for sexual stuff, no? The reason or the cause of Clinton's problem has always said to be because he lied (not because he had sex with Monica) which appears to be a wide hypocrisie. Do you have other examples?
Lying (mentir), my adored Fifi, isn't always about sexual things (les choses sexuelles). I'd bet that Clinton subscribed to the school of thought that what Monica did to him and his cigar did to her was not "sex." To him these deeds did not encompass the act that the Founding Fathers (les Péres Fondateurs) had in mind when they referred to "sexual Congreff" (l'Asamblée carnale), where we got the tradition of lobbying (le lobbying).
Q. Why private life has to do with politics? OK the guy had not to boast and to defend about familiy values, right, but we think that if politicans's private life was respected, there will be much less problems.
Jacques, Jacques, Jacques! This is the land of the Scarlet Letter (la Lettre Écarlate). If Republicans didn't make hay (le foin) out of the immorality ascribed to everybody else, on what platform would they ever be elected: balanced budgets? peace and prosperity? fair taxes?
As if!
Q. Et Abe Fortas ... had he to renounce because he lied about his payments. Or was it merely what we call "délit d'initié", when someone has hidden interest ? (Which is not lying.)
Ah, ma belle Louise, you have studied our history well. But here lying about money is still lying. Especially about money (l'argent), which is ten times more important than sex.
Q. I have always been very suprised that apparently all Americans finally accepted Bush lying about the supposed weapons; nothing happened to him as it happened to Clinton. He lied. OK he lied. Too bad. Period. End of the story. That is why I dont really believe that lying is such unforgivable in the USA.
Hmm ... interesting point. Nothing happened to Clinton, either, now that I recall. It was Gingrich and Livingston, the Right Wing nut witch hunters (les chasseurs de sorciéres de l'Aile Droite noix) who had to quit because of their affairs (liaisons condits).
Q. Irangate. That sounds to be a very complicated story, but lying does not seem to be the main fault, was it?
Sorry, but I was out of the loop, Michélle.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Neither Rude nor Wrong
Pit good manners against a thought-out moral standard and I'll always choose the latter.
In the play A Man for All Seasons, which chronicles Sir Thomas More's refusal to accept the putative children of Anne Boleyn as legitimate heirs to the throne, the question is put this way:
Indeed, what principles? Both are of tepid, Episcopalian upbringing, a worldview in which purity is wearing white gloves. Yet both had the effrontery of agreeing with each other as they shared the laughter of female camaraderie -- Norfolk's fellowship -- that I had been "inappropriate."
In the name of what morals was I at fault for telling of a boy who acted on a matter of conviction that did not meet with the approval of peers? One need not agree with the boy's views to admire his moral courage.
I could not get a response philosophically sharper than the edges of a jellyfish. Impropriety seemed to consist only of whatever feels edgy. Propriety seemed to amount to a mannerly anomie of studied indifference.
Manners be damned.
In the play A Man for All Seasons, which chronicles Sir Thomas More's refusal to accept the putative children of Anne Boleyn as legitimate heirs to the throne, the question is put this way:
DUKE OF NORFOLK: But damn it, Thomas, look at those names.... You know those men! Can't you do what I did, and come with us, for fellowship?Something like this arose when, in the context of a conversation about the upbringing of boys as opposed to that of girls, I mentioned a teenage boy who, on principle, had declined girls' invitations to bed. My interlocutors, two middle class American women, cringed at my allegedly "inappropriate" talk of sex, without ever quite citing a principle.
THOMAS MORE: And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?
Indeed, what principles? Both are of tepid, Episcopalian upbringing, a worldview in which purity is wearing white gloves. Yet both had the effrontery of agreeing with each other as they shared the laughter of female camaraderie -- Norfolk's fellowship -- that I had been "inappropriate."
In the name of what morals was I at fault for telling of a boy who acted on a matter of conviction that did not meet with the approval of peers? One need not agree with the boy's views to admire his moral courage.
I could not get a response philosophically sharper than the edges of a jellyfish. Impropriety seemed to consist only of whatever feels edgy. Propriety seemed to amount to a mannerly anomie of studied indifference.
Manners be damned.
Monday, January 05, 2009
On Equality
With Martin Luther King Jr. Day coming, it seems appropriate to share some thoughts prompted by a discussion I've been having on the subject of equality. Defining equality, its source, whether it is desirable or achievable is a little harder at first blush than it might seem.
There is, of course, the possibility that the expenditure of effort attempting to achieve equality is wasted.
Equality, after all, cannot be a state in which there are no differences between human beings. Such a state is not possible, at least at the observable level from the perspective of human beings.
Seen from the more distant perspective of the grand scheme of things -- the "God's-eye view," if you will -- the differences we see among ourselves are not operationally significant to the cosmos. Yet from our perspective, which is the only one we can possibly hold with some degree of plausibility, there are differences and they are significant to our existence.
We are different in the principal dimensions, height, length, volume, space and time -- let alone skin color, sex or nationality. No single human being is equal to any other in an algebraic, a-equals-a sense -- except conceptually.
It's the abstract concept of a human being, of which we are individual instances, that gives rise to the idea of equality before the law and material equality.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges evoked some of the problems that such abstract conceptions entail in his 1942 short story Funes, the Memorious. Long one of my favorites, the story is about a ranch hand who hits is head and acquires a memory so prodigious that "he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."
We are different, indeed, from ourselves. Which "me" has a right to equality: the "me" in pre-school, the "me" in university or the "me" nearing death? Am I less or more equal as a child, an active adult or a senescent man?
In any case, is theoretical legal and material equality of all human beings -- assuming that it is possible -- desirable?
Legal equality means that the same principles should apply to all. Yet in legal systems that attempt a rough kind of equality, such as the case of most Western systems, the principles often have to be twisted in knots to establish "equality" between vastly disparate individuals. Is it really equality if we have to redefine the terms so that they can apply?
Something similar might be asked of material equality. There might be no contest that all human beings should be able to satisfy basic survival needs (although we might argue about what those are), but if one man has a mansion, should everyone have a mansion?
Finally, we come to the cause of inequality, which is twofold: nature and nurture. Some of us are born female, some rich. One is a natural happenstance, the other an entirely human construct.
Dr. King was fully cognizant of the philosophical problems. He merely asked that we use a logic of the heart in our behavior toward one another.
There is, of course, the possibility that the expenditure of effort attempting to achieve equality is wasted.
Equality, after all, cannot be a state in which there are no differences between human beings. Such a state is not possible, at least at the observable level from the perspective of human beings.
Seen from the more distant perspective of the grand scheme of things -- the "God's-eye view," if you will -- the differences we see among ourselves are not operationally significant to the cosmos. Yet from our perspective, which is the only one we can possibly hold with some degree of plausibility, there are differences and they are significant to our existence.
We are different in the principal dimensions, height, length, volume, space and time -- let alone skin color, sex or nationality. No single human being is equal to any other in an algebraic, a-equals-a sense -- except conceptually.
It's the abstract concept of a human being, of which we are individual instances, that gives rise to the idea of equality before the law and material equality.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges evoked some of the problems that such abstract conceptions entail in his 1942 short story Funes, the Memorious. Long one of my favorites, the story is about a ranch hand who hits is head and acquires a memory so prodigious that "he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."
We are different, indeed, from ourselves. Which "me" has a right to equality: the "me" in pre-school, the "me" in university or the "me" nearing death? Am I less or more equal as a child, an active adult or a senescent man?
In any case, is theoretical legal and material equality of all human beings -- assuming that it is possible -- desirable?
Legal equality means that the same principles should apply to all. Yet in legal systems that attempt a rough kind of equality, such as the case of most Western systems, the principles often have to be twisted in knots to establish "equality" between vastly disparate individuals. Is it really equality if we have to redefine the terms so that they can apply?
Something similar might be asked of material equality. There might be no contest that all human beings should be able to satisfy basic survival needs (although we might argue about what those are), but if one man has a mansion, should everyone have a mansion?
Finally, we come to the cause of inequality, which is twofold: nature and nurture. Some of us are born female, some rich. One is a natural happenstance, the other an entirely human construct.
Dr. King was fully cognizant of the philosophical problems. He merely asked that we use a logic of the heart in our behavior toward one another.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Thou Shalt Partake of Sex
What if, instead of mortification of the flesh, abstinence, avoidance, belts and locks and scarlet letters, our religions and reigning ethics had an imperative principle to seek to slake fleshly desires, to engage in carnal pleasure, to seek out every lickerishness, to open the doors of every bedroom and heap praise on the randy hearted?
You'll say that's why they invented the Internet and its seemingly endless parade of porn.
But, no, I mean an imperative: something like "remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day," yet for sex. Certainly our bodies drive us to extremely silly and oft-reckless behavior in response to the stimuli that cause sexual arousal.
To provide an example of a philosophical version of the drive was my intent in penning the ninth of my godless commandments four years ago:
From the point of view of survival, sex is principally reproductive. We spawn ... for what? It's not the oft-cited notion that our children are there to have someone to care for us in old age -- ha!
To my mind, the biological point of reproduction is to replace each individual within a species after death, and to provide sufficient replacements to withstand environmental pressures against the species continued existence. If we spawn in large enough numbers, the worst catastrophe won't wipe us all out.
Not for nothing individuals in some species die after reproductively successful sex. The praying mantis female bites off the male’s head immediately after, sometimes during, sexual intercourse. Perhaps it was in a related sense that the dualistic, sex-conflicted English Victorians called orgasm "the little death."
Certainly, also, reproduction was what Pope Paul VI was thinking about in 1968 when he issued the immensely imprudent encyclical Humanae Vitae, reaffirming Catholic docrtine's opposition to artifical means of contraception.
Still, then and now critics in and outside scientific circles have noted that even animals don't engage in sex merely to reproduce. Sex also serves to cement social bonds.
Regular sex with a caring partner, or three, is also recognized among humans as a significant factor in one's happiness, one's degree of patience and tolerance toward others. Doesn't the world seem rosy when one walks out into the street from the arms of a good lover?
Remember, then, to partake, now and then, prudently, with willing and able partners of an appropriate age and suitable health.
Remember, also, that sex has consequences, from irretrievable affection to parenthood to death. Clicking sex into operation, as with software, carries with an implied end-user license agreement. Read his or hers carefully because, even if you don't, the other person's EULA kicks in immediately -- as does yours.
All this notwithstanding, dare to give yourself to another in one of life's most pleasant endeavors.
You'll say that's why they invented the Internet and its seemingly endless parade of porn.
But, no, I mean an imperative: something like "remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day," yet for sex. Certainly our bodies drive us to extremely silly and oft-reckless behavior in response to the stimuli that cause sexual arousal.
To provide an example of a philosophical version of the drive was my intent in penning the ninth of my godless commandments four years ago:
Thou shalt enjoy the flesh of others, respecting their own desires as well as thine and taking responsibility for any consequences thereof.Today these words feel as unsatisfactory as they day I wrote them, especially since the underlying notion behind this set of ethics I have proposed, is the universally agreed notion that prizes human survival.
From the point of view of survival, sex is principally reproductive. We spawn ... for what? It's not the oft-cited notion that our children are there to have someone to care for us in old age -- ha!
To my mind, the biological point of reproduction is to replace each individual within a species after death, and to provide sufficient replacements to withstand environmental pressures against the species continued existence. If we spawn in large enough numbers, the worst catastrophe won't wipe us all out.
Not for nothing individuals in some species die after reproductively successful sex. The praying mantis female bites off the male’s head immediately after, sometimes during, sexual intercourse. Perhaps it was in a related sense that the dualistic, sex-conflicted English Victorians called orgasm "the little death."
Certainly, also, reproduction was what Pope Paul VI was thinking about in 1968 when he issued the immensely imprudent encyclical Humanae Vitae, reaffirming Catholic docrtine's opposition to artifical means of contraception.
Still, then and now critics in and outside scientific circles have noted that even animals don't engage in sex merely to reproduce. Sex also serves to cement social bonds.
Regular sex with a caring partner, or three, is also recognized among humans as a significant factor in one's happiness, one's degree of patience and tolerance toward others. Doesn't the world seem rosy when one walks out into the street from the arms of a good lover?
Remember, then, to partake, now and then, prudently, with willing and able partners of an appropriate age and suitable health.
Remember, also, that sex has consequences, from irretrievable affection to parenthood to death. Clicking sex into operation, as with software, carries with an implied end-user license agreement. Read his or hers carefully because, even if you don't, the other person's EULA kicks in immediately -- as does yours.
All this notwithstanding, dare to give yourself to another in one of life's most pleasant endeavors.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The Human Loneliness
When Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, settled on a title for her autobiography, it was "The Long Loneliness," in part a reference to the lover she lost for her faith, in part a reflection on the human condition. We all endure the long loneliness.
This came to me last weekend when the company of a special friend was denied me and I realized that I do not have many friends at all, despite living in the same city now for roughly 30 years.
Speaking with friends and mulling this over, I also realize that part of the reason is that I am overly critical. The vast majority of people are tedious: they talk about themselves, their possessions, their trips, their lifestyle and their work.
The friends one knew in college, those with whom one could talk about politics and philosophy until the wee hours while nursing beers warm, they are all gone. Maybe they never existed.
Deep in the human heart there is instead a gaping gnawing, living hole. A black hole that tells us that, in the end, we're all on our own.
Friends will call you when they want something, want to tell you something. We know that humanity is essentially self-interested.
Lovers may assuage the loneliness, but they will never fill it. I have a broken marriage as witness.
In the absence of a God, there is nothing to fill that void that is felt most acutely when we are alone and in need. As in the story of Jesus, we will all know the experience of being deserted by everyone.
The human loneliness explains a multitude of endeavors -- religion, love, literature and art, the search of riches and power and sex -- yet none of them ever overcome that sense of living without rhyme or reason, loveless, artless, without any real wealth or security in the end, questionably or temporarily attractive, in a word, alone.
This came to me last weekend when the company of a special friend was denied me and I realized that I do not have many friends at all, despite living in the same city now for roughly 30 years.
Speaking with friends and mulling this over, I also realize that part of the reason is that I am overly critical. The vast majority of people are tedious: they talk about themselves, their possessions, their trips, their lifestyle and their work.
The friends one knew in college, those with whom one could talk about politics and philosophy until the wee hours while nursing beers warm, they are all gone. Maybe they never existed.
Deep in the human heart there is instead a gaping gnawing, living hole. A black hole that tells us that, in the end, we're all on our own.
Friends will call you when they want something, want to tell you something. We know that humanity is essentially self-interested.
Lovers may assuage the loneliness, but they will never fill it. I have a broken marriage as witness.
In the absence of a God, there is nothing to fill that void that is felt most acutely when we are alone and in need. As in the story of Jesus, we will all know the experience of being deserted by everyone.
The human loneliness explains a multitude of endeavors -- religion, love, literature and art, the search of riches and power and sex -- yet none of them ever overcome that sense of living without rhyme or reason, loveless, artless, without any real wealth or security in the end, questionably or temporarily attractive, in a word, alone.
Friday, November 07, 2008
The Hem of His Garment
Just as walking the streets of Washington besieged by beggars I occasionally wonder if this is what it might feel like to be God (imagine 6 billion supplicants), reading the post-election punditry makes me think of President-elect Obama in the role of Jesus followed by a mob seeking miracles every which way.
So, the magic of the Obama victory is already fading as the urgency of the problems ahead make themselves felt. We are now all supplicants with a yen to be healed.
Heal us, Obama, from the calamity of being the only leading industrial nation that fails to aid individuals in need -- those who are sick, unemployed, disabled, young, or in old age; give us a womb-to-tomb system of social insurance.
Heal us, Obama, from the scourge of war that has blighted nearly every American generation; make us a nation of peace.
Heal us, Obama, from the arrogance of thinking that we are "Number One" by right rather than happenstance; instill in us the humility necessary to accept the global responsibilities bestowed on us by fate.
Heal us, Obama, from our smugness and false pride, from thinking that our ethnicity or sex or particular manners or beliefs are the best; help us become tolerant of one another and of all others.
Amen
And they besought him that they might touch but the hem of his garment. And as many as touched, were made whole. (Matthew 14:36).The pundits and politicians from the right are insisting that this is a "center-right" country and that the economy, meaning the plutocrats, not the uninsured, unemployed, or those simply struggling, comes first. Not to be outdone, the liberal-left insists that the 8-million-vote margin is a mandate and that President-elect Obama should beware of the Clintonite wolves in sheep's clothing who gave us NAFTA, no health care reform and the Gringrich version of welfare.
So, the magic of the Obama victory is already fading as the urgency of the problems ahead make themselves felt. We are now all supplicants with a yen to be healed.
Heal us, Obama, from the calamity of being the only leading industrial nation that fails to aid individuals in need -- those who are sick, unemployed, disabled, young, or in old age; give us a womb-to-tomb system of social insurance.
Heal us, Obama, from the scourge of war that has blighted nearly every American generation; make us a nation of peace.
Heal us, Obama, from the arrogance of thinking that we are "Number One" by right rather than happenstance; instill in us the humility necessary to accept the global responsibilities bestowed on us by fate.
Heal us, Obama, from our smugness and false pride, from thinking that our ethnicity or sex or particular manners or beliefs are the best; help us become tolerant of one another and of all others.
Amen
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Have Sex
Our text today is, yet again, one of my godless commandments(1) namely: Thou shalt enjoy the flesh of others, respecting their own desires as well as thine and taking responsibility for any consequences thereof. Some people may argue that we don't need a philosophical imperative to have sex, but I would argue that we humans could use a positive and universal imperative about sex.
Let's face it: without sex we're very likely to end up screwing someone else in any number of unpleasant, non-sexual ways. Ever wondered whether the history of Iraq might have been different in the last four years if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had gotten laid, but good? Besides, none of us would even be here without sex!
All right so the matter of principle is not so much whether, but how one should have sex. The commandment puts forth two conditions that I suspect are universally necessary for ethical purposes:
In the first, your pleasure is equated to the pleasure of another. You have a legitimate claim to receive pleasure and there is nothing wrong with desiring sexual pleasure and obtaining it; but the consequence of that is the duty to be concerned with and desirous of giving pleasure -- which is a pleasure all its own.
In other words, sex is not just for you: it's for you and the other person -- who is a person, not a toy (except, obviously, in the case of masturbation with toys, about which ... later). This also excludes all forms of sex for power (this is the definition of rape), money, or anything other than giving and receiving of pleasure.
There's something about us mammals that is relieved and assuaged in the feeling of full frontal nudity, skin to skin, with someone we chose to so so voluntarily -- nay, eagerly. This is why masturbation with toys falls short, except in times of necessity, other than to provide temporary release -- in a sense, it's not really sex.
Secondly, sex is a path to reproduction and a way to get diseases and even a way to express particular feelings about another, to the point of sometimes being called "making love." When we have sex we risk becoming parents, becoming ill and even dying, or becoming sentimentally entangled with another person.
We can be called upon to give a response -- in other words, responsibility -- for our action, by stepping up to motherhood or fatherhood, which is usually a role that lasts a lifetime. We can be faced with giving or receiving a terrible disease -- and telling all others who may be or have been exposed to us in similar ways, "get checked for X because I have it."
Last but not least, I've been told there are hormones similar to those that induce bonding between parents and children. These are stimulated with sex to the point that all sex has some emotional and psychological consequence.
None of this draws a straight line to the altar, nor to deciding whether to have or abort a child, nor does it cure a single disease or broken heart. The point of responsibility is not some formal piece of paper or law nor a textbook answer. Responsibility is needed because, precisely, we live in an uncertain world.
In such a world we must answer to ourselves and our fellows, especially those with whom we have sex, for our actions.
------------
(1) PS to George, this is the ninth (there are ten).
Let's face it: without sex we're very likely to end up screwing someone else in any number of unpleasant, non-sexual ways. Ever wondered whether the history of Iraq might have been different in the last four years if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had gotten laid, but good? Besides, none of us would even be here without sex!
All right so the matter of principle is not so much whether, but how one should have sex. The commandment puts forth two conditions that I suspect are universally necessary for ethical purposes:
- We must engage in mutual pleasure giving as well as receiving.
- We must take responsibility for the consequences, such as pregnancy and disease.
In the first, your pleasure is equated to the pleasure of another. You have a legitimate claim to receive pleasure and there is nothing wrong with desiring sexual pleasure and obtaining it; but the consequence of that is the duty to be concerned with and desirous of giving pleasure -- which is a pleasure all its own.
In other words, sex is not just for you: it's for you and the other person -- who is a person, not a toy (except, obviously, in the case of masturbation with toys, about which ... later). This also excludes all forms of sex for power (this is the definition of rape), money, or anything other than giving and receiving of pleasure.
There's something about us mammals that is relieved and assuaged in the feeling of full frontal nudity, skin to skin, with someone we chose to so so voluntarily -- nay, eagerly. This is why masturbation with toys falls short, except in times of necessity, other than to provide temporary release -- in a sense, it's not really sex.
Secondly, sex is a path to reproduction and a way to get diseases and even a way to express particular feelings about another, to the point of sometimes being called "making love." When we have sex we risk becoming parents, becoming ill and even dying, or becoming sentimentally entangled with another person.
We can be called upon to give a response -- in other words, responsibility -- for our action, by stepping up to motherhood or fatherhood, which is usually a role that lasts a lifetime. We can be faced with giving or receiving a terrible disease -- and telling all others who may be or have been exposed to us in similar ways, "get checked for X because I have it."
Last but not least, I've been told there are hormones similar to those that induce bonding between parents and children. These are stimulated with sex to the point that all sex has some emotional and psychological consequence.
None of this draws a straight line to the altar, nor to deciding whether to have or abort a child, nor does it cure a single disease or broken heart. The point of responsibility is not some formal piece of paper or law nor a textbook answer. Responsibility is needed because, precisely, we live in an uncertain world.
In such a world we must answer to ourselves and our fellows, especially those with whom we have sex, for our actions.
------------
(1) PS to George, this is the ninth (there are ten).
Monday, August 25, 2008
Whither Marriage
The Edwards affair once again brings social notions of marriage and its obligations to the fore, all of which leave me uncomfortable and intellectually unsatisfied. People mean different, disparate and often contradictory notions while using the same word.
Ask the average man or woman on the street about marriage and you'll get answers such as "a sacrament," "a commitment," and "a contract." What do these mean?
I still have the actual illustrated Baltimore Catechism no. 1 from way back when the dinosaurs roamed, which Sister Catherine Agnes used to teach us in second grade that "Matrimony is the sacrament by which a man and woman bind themselves for life in lawful marriage."
Sister also used one of her classic and mildly scary illustrative stories -- which I later learned had not been her own invention, but part and parcel of a U.S. catechetical teaching method devised in the 1930s -- to drive home the point. Here's how I remember it:
One need not have been a child in a pre-Vatican II American Catholic school to agree that, traditionally in the West, marriage has meant that a man and a woman publicly committed to mutual and exclusive sexual congress, with childbearing and rearing in mind, along with a series of social and economic obligations that flowed from parenthood, for as long as both would live.
Social mores have amended that commitment in almost every respect. A man and woman? To have sex? Exclusively? To have children? To rear children properly? For life? No, no, no, perhaps (say some economic studies), and ha-ha!
Perhaps that's because marriage is a contract.
Traditionally, again, in marriage a propertyless woman was conveyed to a man for the purpose of bearing an heir and keeping house, in exchange for economic benefit. In the Cinderella scenario, the aspiring, talented, voluptuous woman provided sexual, childbearing and house-managing services to the handsome, well-heeled man, a prince of a fellow.
Some view marriage, then, as the sole surviving universally legal and respectable form of prostitution. In exchange for unnecessary, ephemeral promises in ceremonies whose luster barely survive the very day they take place, a man gets sex and a woman gets money -- even though in contemporary society, marriage is utterly unnecessary for either.
I mean, if it is a contract: who is selling and buying what, why and how do the terms make sense?
If not, why then, marriage?
Ask the average man or woman on the street about marriage and you'll get answers such as "a sacrament," "a commitment," and "a contract." What do these mean?
I still have the actual illustrated Baltimore Catechism no. 1 from way back when the dinosaurs roamed, which Sister Catherine Agnes used to teach us in second grade that "Matrimony is the sacrament by which a man and woman bind themselves for life in lawful marriage."
Sister also used one of her classic and mildly scary illustrative stories -- which I later learned had not been her own invention, but part and parcel of a U.S. catechetical teaching method devised in the 1930s -- to drive home the point. Here's how I remember it:
There was once a little girl who was very sick. Her family and the parish and everyone prayed and prayed and prayed so she would not die. She lived. Years later, she died in a car crash. She had been married three times and went straight to hell. Better that she had died when she was young and pure.Save your gasps for the comment box.
One need not have been a child in a pre-Vatican II American Catholic school to agree that, traditionally in the West, marriage has meant that a man and a woman publicly committed to mutual and exclusive sexual congress, with childbearing and rearing in mind, along with a series of social and economic obligations that flowed from parenthood, for as long as both would live.
Social mores have amended that commitment in almost every respect. A man and woman? To have sex? Exclusively? To have children? To rear children properly? For life? No, no, no, perhaps (say some economic studies), and ha-ha!
Perhaps that's because marriage is a contract.
Traditionally, again, in marriage a propertyless woman was conveyed to a man for the purpose of bearing an heir and keeping house, in exchange for economic benefit. In the Cinderella scenario, the aspiring, talented, voluptuous woman provided sexual, childbearing and house-managing services to the handsome, well-heeled man, a prince of a fellow.
Some view marriage, then, as the sole surviving universally legal and respectable form of prostitution. In exchange for unnecessary, ephemeral promises in ceremonies whose luster barely survive the very day they take place, a man gets sex and a woman gets money -- even though in contemporary society, marriage is utterly unnecessary for either.
I mean, if it is a contract: who is selling and buying what, why and how do the terms make sense?
If not, why then, marriage?
Friday, August 15, 2008
Contra Feministe
One of my newer favorite feminist feeds, Feministe, has been doing a series of numbers on traditional religious positions in an uninformed way that I, as an agnostic and former believer, find profoundly embarrassing.
Yes, Feministe folks, I agree that abortion should remain legal in the United States, the claim of the virgin birth of Jesus raises some pretty thorny questions and biblical dicta on homosexuality are ... um ... not au courant, to say the least. But that does not necessarily mean that
Central to all three is the their limited point of view.
Because she is "pro-choice" -- yet another abortion debate weasel word, but don't get me going -- is her position, Kaelyn seemingly cannot imagine that people whose religion makes abortion a very grave immorality would hold that the ideal law would ban such a thing.
Yet one need not revisit the hoariest theocracies to find explicit links between religious and political views -- John of Leiden, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Ghandi -- among folks with whom I imagine Kaelyn might find some common ground.
Similarly, Sam made a somewhat more forgivable mistake in hanging her intellectual hat regarding the virgin birth on a particular set of passages in Isaiah, which she deems "mistranslated." The birth narratives in the gospels owe as much to pagan sources as to Judaic; it was simply inconceivable to the ancient mind that a great personage would not have been born amid all manner of miraculous portents.
In her more recent and even more measured posts, Sam's even more forgivable limitation is that she does not seem to be able to see beyond her own time. Weighing whether to chuck biblical rejection of homosexuality or modernity it is clear that her dogma is the modern age. I have never been certain that being modern was always best and a solid reading of history supports that view.
In sum, my criticism is not about the opinions but rather the way they are delivered, which tend to make contrary opinion look more reasonable.
Yes, Feministe folks, I agree that abortion should remain legal in the United States, the claim of the virgin birth of Jesus raises some pretty thorny questions and biblical dicta on homosexuality are ... um ... not au courant, to say the least. But that does not necessarily mean that
- ipso facto, it is illogical and beyond comprehension that someone would be "politically opposed to safe, legal abortion and reproductive health services," as KaeLyn wrote;
- the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth hinges on a mistranslation of Isaiah, as Sam wrote; or
- the biblical injunctions against homosexual sex are inherently outdated, as Sam, somewhat more trenchantly than above, wrote.
Central to all three is the their limited point of view.
Because she is "pro-choice" -- yet another abortion debate weasel word, but don't get me going -- is her position, Kaelyn seemingly cannot imagine that people whose religion makes abortion a very grave immorality would hold that the ideal law would ban such a thing.
Yet one need not revisit the hoariest theocracies to find explicit links between religious and political views -- John of Leiden, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Ghandi -- among folks with whom I imagine Kaelyn might find some common ground.
Similarly, Sam made a somewhat more forgivable mistake in hanging her intellectual hat regarding the virgin birth on a particular set of passages in Isaiah, which she deems "mistranslated." The birth narratives in the gospels owe as much to pagan sources as to Judaic; it was simply inconceivable to the ancient mind that a great personage would not have been born amid all manner of miraculous portents.
In her more recent and even more measured posts, Sam's even more forgivable limitation is that she does not seem to be able to see beyond her own time. Weighing whether to chuck biblical rejection of homosexuality or modernity it is clear that her dogma is the modern age. I have never been certain that being modern was always best and a solid reading of history supports that view.
In sum, my criticism is not about the opinions but rather the way they are delivered, which tend to make contrary opinion look more reasonable.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Why Neo-Conservatism Deserved to Fail
As the veritable Thermidorian Reaction that began in 1980 with Ronald Reagan winds to a close with the failed presidency of George W. Bush, the failure of neo-conservatism seems to have been pre-ordained. Some analysts are concerned with why, wondering -- by way of the overdone "brand" cliché -- it is no longer "selling," but I'm more interested in why it never deserved to succeed, so we collectively learn the lesson once and for all.
Setting aside right-wing intramural disputes concerning the term, for my purposes "neoconservatism" is the generally new brand of U.S. conservatism that emerged from the first Reagan electoral campaign onward. Earlier U.S. conservatives had been elitist and roundly unpopular advocates of a puny misanthropy consisting of balanced budgets and neutrality in world wars, along with a dash of racialism.
Enter the Boomers of 1980-2008, a swarm of opportunists and demagogic ideologues who wrapped themselves in the flag, their professed love of (unborn) human "life," their avowed family values and their Christian faith.
Never mind that they became the most corrupt profiteers since the Grant Administration. Forget that they killed life for many infants and children who depended on public aid. Let's also overlook the many foreign and U.S. people killed in unprovoked military aggression from Grenada to Iraq. Nor shall we mention that their faithless, divorced Ronald Reagan papered over their cynicism about values and that his poll-reading henchmen manipulated religious opponents of abortion with empty promises. We shall turn eyes otherwise concerning the none-too-devout myriad sexual exploits of folks from Newton Leroy Gingrich to Larry Craig.
These inherent hypocrisies are only part of why neoconservatism richly deserves its grave. Consider the following qualities of neoconservatism:
Setting aside right-wing intramural disputes concerning the term, for my purposes "neoconservatism" is the generally new brand of U.S. conservatism that emerged from the first Reagan electoral campaign onward. Earlier U.S. conservatives had been elitist and roundly unpopular advocates of a puny misanthropy consisting of balanced budgets and neutrality in world wars, along with a dash of racialism.
Enter the Boomers of 1980-2008, a swarm of opportunists and demagogic ideologues who wrapped themselves in the flag, their professed love of (unborn) human "life," their avowed family values and their Christian faith.
Never mind that they became the most corrupt profiteers since the Grant Administration. Forget that they killed life for many infants and children who depended on public aid. Let's also overlook the many foreign and U.S. people killed in unprovoked military aggression from Grenada to Iraq. Nor shall we mention that their faithless, divorced Ronald Reagan papered over their cynicism about values and that his poll-reading henchmen manipulated religious opponents of abortion with empty promises. We shall turn eyes otherwise concerning the none-too-devout myriad sexual exploits of folks from Newton Leroy Gingrich to Larry Craig.
These inherent hypocrisies are only part of why neoconservatism richly deserves its grave. Consider the following qualities of neoconservatism:
- Anti-democratic: propounds a hierarchically ordered society, along the sex and ethnic lines that have traditionally divided American society (when "men were men" and "the colored weren't uppity"), with white males of northwest European origin at the top.
- Socioeconomically Darwinist: embraces beggar-thy-neighbor policies of extreme individualism and privilege for the asset-owning few, deemed under Calvinist ideas to be divinely rewarded with riches for their efforts;
- Authoritarian: touts notions of "natural law" and religious values, rather than unfettered inquiry, as bases for public policy (eg., stem cell policy);
- Anti-American: emerged aided, abetted and allied to foreign fascistoid movements alien to the ethos of the American democratic experiment, such as the right-wing axis of The Washington Times and the Unification Church, the more secretive Franco-era Spanish Catholic Opus Dei movement (in which Justice Antonin Scalia participates), and the even less well-known Tradition, Family and Property international movement;
- Aggressively lawless internationally: holds the United States unaccountable to U.S. ratified international law whenever convenient, such as in the peacetime mining of Nicaraguan ports, bombing of Iraq, unprovoked invasion of Iraq, Grenada, Panama, Dominican Republic (to name just a few) and also in a similar roster of abuses in international trade;
- Anti-intellectual: in a bid to appear "populist" the elitist neocons have bound themselves in a straitjacket of doctrines that fly in the face of the best that modern, current study teaches and, as a result, have failed to deliver broad-based prosperity (admittedly not their goal) or even its semblance (a propaganda necessity).
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Advocacy on One's Own Behalf
During the four years in which I was paid to advocate on behalf of my own diffuse ethnic group, I occasionally referred to my work as "the Hispanic biz," from which I was grateful to depart. Decades later, as a blogger who happens to be Hispanic, I am watching a blogosphere in which identity is almost a profession entitled to disrespect everyone else for shock or sympathy value.
Since when is defending the ethnicity, sex or sexual preference into which, no doubt, you wisely chose to be born, or the religion your sagely selected parents brought you up in, a ticket to fame, fortune and a get-out-of-shame card when you spill your offensive bile against others?
Still, here are the nagging philosophical conundri: What is the value, if any, and what are the ethical limits of advocacy on behalf of one's own interests, culture, point of view? What about when one blogger's identity treads on another?
Since when is defending the ethnicity, sex or sexual preference into which, no doubt, you wisely chose to be born, or the religion your sagely selected parents brought you up in, a ticket to fame, fortune and a get-out-of-shame card when you spill your offensive bile against others?
- In Fernham, a wannabe feminist literary analyst, devotes a post to a paper she heard about Jorge Luis Borges' translation of Virginia Woolf's A Room of Her Own, parroting the notion that the version is "fatally muted," despite her mangling of Spanish because she doesn't speak the language!
- My adored Bloguera posted a funny but somewhat excessive slam on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, admittedly an unrivalled collection of blowhards, because they called the chairman "presidente" in the Spanish version of their Web page -- even though presidente happens to be an accurate translation of the title for the head of a committee.
- Then there's Gawker's dizzying spin on the New Yorker cover caricature of Barack Obama: early in the morning they were outraged, by noon they recognized satire and in the afternoon they talked their way out of it by pretending that they were undergoing the five steps of "how you were supposed to respond."
Still, here are the nagging philosophical conundri: What is the value, if any, and what are the ethical limits of advocacy on behalf of one's own interests, culture, point of view? What about when one blogger's identity treads on another?
Thursday, July 10, 2008
A Survey of My Political Opinions
Continuing my top 10 influential books, I turn now to my politics and three emblematic books that informed the views I have developed: 2. Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver; 3. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell; 6. All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
All three are widely known and their authors do not, unlike the obscure Catholic writers of the preceding post, need introduction. What may need explanation is how they, and the genre they represent, influenced me.
I was first drawn to Soul On Ice as a classic first-person cri de coeur (cry of the heart), rather than for its ideas. It was the early 70s, I was a white college student with no experience of the South nor of the petty-apartheid that Cleaver and his kind had endured.
From before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, I remembered as a child separate drinking fountains and bus seating in Washington, D.C., but I completely missed the fact that an amusement park I went to was only for whites. In brief, I had very little in common with Cleaver, or so I thought.
My secondary school years in Latin America had exposed me to crushing poverty, but not to overt, accepted, legally sanctioned racism. However, I had come to see that want was not merely a failure of the prevailing economic system, but a feature, greasing the wheels of commerce with the anxiety to succeed.
A child of the McCarthy Era, I could never call myself a "Communist," but like many of my age, time and circumstance, in the face of appalling poverty I found liberation theology appealing.
Cleaver added to my religious political economy dimensions I had not considered. For the first time I realized that parallel, or somehow enmeshed with the hierarchy of socioeconomic classes, were the strata of race and sex. Atop the pyramid was the white man, followed by the white woman, then the black man, and at the bottom the black woman.
This seems obvious today. In 1970, to a young man from a family that possessed relative privilege and capacity to shelter, it was startling.
Cleaver's spicy terms were experientially discomfiting. He wrote about how black women cried out "Jesus" during lovemaking, thinking always of the iconic blue-eyed Jesus of American Protestantism. He spoke of the forbidden lust of white women for the fabled large black banana and the white Massa's exploits in the slave quarters.
How aroused he made me feel! How ashamed of myself I felt in discovering how easily I could lust like a slaveowner!
He, and writers like himself, whom I devoured, also reminded me that my Mediterranean looks were far from those of the revered Teutonic Jesus and that I and my forebears had not been part of that equation. Where did I fit in this revolution that simply had to happen to bring peace and justice?
Orwell's Homage, to my mind the best 20th century work in the English language, fit with the more overtly ideological works to which I was drawn. I found in Orwell's experience of the suppression of the Anarcho-Syndicalists by the Stalinists, the key lesson in intramural sparring within the Left: you can never trust the Stalinists.
This reconciled my budding and amorphous leftism, which I styled as Anarchism (but was not), with my anti-Communist upbringing. The Soviet Union was a useful bogeyman to help keep in check the ruling classes -- the undefined and always mysterious "them" who were the Wizards of Oz -- while the revolution had been, in theory, perhaps necessary and even good. But something had gone badly wrong once Uncle Joe took over the Party.
There is an ample literature of warnings from the Left about the potential for disaster in Soviet authoritarianism by figures no less distinguished and disinterested than Rosa Luxemburg. All of which was fine if I projected myself into port World War I "red" Berlin.
Yet here I was in North America, with capitalism chugging along quite fine, thank you very much Comrade Vladimir Ilych. Which is why a more sober voice such as Orwell's, and later Edouard Bernstein's, led me to milder electoral forms of reform-minded socialism, such as they have had in Western Europe.
Finally, there's the question of my own role. I never conceived of myself as a propagandist or revolutionary. I was too bourgeois for that. Yet change could be had through the power of the pen, I learned, when I first saw a 1930s movie called "The Front Page," later remade in 1974.
That's how Woodstein influenced my life. At a crucial time in my development, they showed that a reporter could, with honesty, integrity and without setting out to confirm foregone conclusions, bring to light information that, by itself, could cause change.
Our North American system of political and economic power has since adjusted to its vulnerabilities at the hands of the press, which is slowly being killed -- some say transformed -- by this very medium.
All The President's Men, however, was about the brief moment in which two unknowns could bring down a president.
All three are widely known and their authors do not, unlike the obscure Catholic writers of the preceding post, need introduction. What may need explanation is how they, and the genre they represent, influenced me.
I was first drawn to Soul On Ice as a classic first-person cri de coeur (cry of the heart), rather than for its ideas. It was the early 70s, I was a white college student with no experience of the South nor of the petty-apartheid that Cleaver and his kind had endured.
From before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, I remembered as a child separate drinking fountains and bus seating in Washington, D.C., but I completely missed the fact that an amusement park I went to was only for whites. In brief, I had very little in common with Cleaver, or so I thought.
My secondary school years in Latin America had exposed me to crushing poverty, but not to overt, accepted, legally sanctioned racism. However, I had come to see that want was not merely a failure of the prevailing economic system, but a feature, greasing the wheels of commerce with the anxiety to succeed.
A child of the McCarthy Era, I could never call myself a "Communist," but like many of my age, time and circumstance, in the face of appalling poverty I found liberation theology appealing.
Cleaver added to my religious political economy dimensions I had not considered. For the first time I realized that parallel, or somehow enmeshed with the hierarchy of socioeconomic classes, were the strata of race and sex. Atop the pyramid was the white man, followed by the white woman, then the black man, and at the bottom the black woman.
This seems obvious today. In 1970, to a young man from a family that possessed relative privilege and capacity to shelter, it was startling.
Cleaver's spicy terms were experientially discomfiting. He wrote about how black women cried out "Jesus" during lovemaking, thinking always of the iconic blue-eyed Jesus of American Protestantism. He spoke of the forbidden lust of white women for the fabled large black banana and the white Massa's exploits in the slave quarters.
How aroused he made me feel! How ashamed of myself I felt in discovering how easily I could lust like a slaveowner!
He, and writers like himself, whom I devoured, also reminded me that my Mediterranean looks were far from those of the revered Teutonic Jesus and that I and my forebears had not been part of that equation. Where did I fit in this revolution that simply had to happen to bring peace and justice?
Orwell's Homage, to my mind the best 20th century work in the English language, fit with the more overtly ideological works to which I was drawn. I found in Orwell's experience of the suppression of the Anarcho-Syndicalists by the Stalinists, the key lesson in intramural sparring within the Left: you can never trust the Stalinists.
This reconciled my budding and amorphous leftism, which I styled as Anarchism (but was not), with my anti-Communist upbringing. The Soviet Union was a useful bogeyman to help keep in check the ruling classes -- the undefined and always mysterious "them" who were the Wizards of Oz -- while the revolution had been, in theory, perhaps necessary and even good. But something had gone badly wrong once Uncle Joe took over the Party.
There is an ample literature of warnings from the Left about the potential for disaster in Soviet authoritarianism by figures no less distinguished and disinterested than Rosa Luxemburg. All of which was fine if I projected myself into port World War I "red" Berlin.
Yet here I was in North America, with capitalism chugging along quite fine, thank you very much Comrade Vladimir Ilych. Which is why a more sober voice such as Orwell's, and later Edouard Bernstein's, led me to milder electoral forms of reform-minded socialism, such as they have had in Western Europe.
Finally, there's the question of my own role. I never conceived of myself as a propagandist or revolutionary. I was too bourgeois for that. Yet change could be had through the power of the pen, I learned, when I first saw a 1930s movie called "The Front Page," later remade in 1974.
That's how Woodstein influenced my life. At a crucial time in my development, they showed that a reporter could, with honesty, integrity and without setting out to confirm foregone conclusions, bring to light information that, by itself, could cause change.
Our North American system of political and economic power has since adjusted to its vulnerabilities at the hands of the press, which is slowly being killed -- some say transformed -- by this very medium.
All The President's Men, however, was about the brief moment in which two unknowns could bring down a president.
Monday, June 30, 2008
On Taking a Deep Breath about the Economy
Some years ago a sermon I heard from a priest trying to buddy up to the congregation began with the words, "we all cheat on our taxes." What better moment to thread back to my series on a nonreligious ethical decalogue, and its economic morals, than right after a stock market low and an oil price peak.
Professionals of religion, like conservative politicians, spend way too much worry on sex and too little on economics. Yet the reality that undergirds the only reasonable way to live is that we can all survive only if we focus on respecting the means by which our fellows weather the challenges of ill fortune.
This is the problem with the chain events leading to both the stock market plunge and the oil price surge. Watch the market go up now that I've written this ... and here comes the oil price drop. It actually doesn't matter if the fluctuation reverses, the point is that we are at an unstable moment brought on by unsavory doings.
Some of those are the deeds of the "they" we're always complaining about. "They" unloaded houses on people who couldn't afford them, with mortgages obtained with at least significant omissions of fact, a debt which was then resold and finally repackaged as securities that were sold at values that criminally understated the risk.
In my view, the stock market is reacting to a string ofwrite downs reports of losses that are likely to continue for a year or so. The fluctuations come with people who rush in at each low, buy cheap, then sell quickly. Thursday, it seems, there were fewer buyers, perhaps because people are running scared.
OK, there's all too much greed at the top of the anthill. We knew this, no?
But then there's "Us." You know, you and me, the "little people," as Leona Helmsley put it. Or, as my favorite Catalonian singer, Joan Manuel Serrat, puts it in his song
Uno de mi calle me ha dicho que tiene un amigo que dice conocer un tipo que un día fue feliz (A guy on my street told me he has a friend who said he knows a guy who was happy one day):
Our SUVs consume it, the plastic in our CDs comes from it, the electricity that powers our computers would not be possible without it.
OK, the Chinese are gas guzzlers, too. So? Most of them are like us -- "ignored, disoriented, contaminated" -- it's their faces, too, that show up in the mirror when we search for who got us to $4.61 a gallon gasoline. (That's the price at my corner, if it's cheaper than yours, come visit.)
In a way, we're as bad as the bad actors on Wall Street. Because every drop we burn comes thanks to an exploitative system that gives rise to the irrational rage of suicide bombers.
We have a choice here:
We can be greedy and fearful as our society bids us to be, striving to accumulate in order to consume things to make ourselves popular and good-looking and smart-appearing, all to stoke the machinery that keeps everything going just as always.
Or we can stop. Take a deep breath. Consider what respecting the means by which we and our fellows live really amounts to in hard, practical terms.
This need not mean becoming an anchorite in a cave.
It may mean reconsidering property, what is legitimately private and what remain our common legacy for future generations.
Or we may have to recalibrate pay differentials (I'm of two minds as to whether differentials should exist) as we know them so that they make sense. For example, shouldn't garbage collectors, who do the most odious work, be paid more than people whose work is pleasant or even enjoyable?
At a less lofty macro level, it may simply mean regarding the just wages and fairly held property of others with the same respect we regard what we claim as justly ours, meaning that perhaps we all need to winnow out what we don't need so that we can all have enough.
We can all have enough. I believe that and the facts supports me. Moreover, we can turn greed and fear into the joy of sharing and the hope of loving.
I'm not certain that we can eliminate all differentials, nor that we would want to, nor much less that I know how to do it, anyway. But I am certain that we can all survive together.
Professionals of religion, like conservative politicians, spend way too much worry on sex and too little on economics. Yet the reality that undergirds the only reasonable way to live is that we can all survive only if we focus on respecting the means by which our fellows weather the challenges of ill fortune.
This is the problem with the chain events leading to both the stock market plunge and the oil price surge. Watch the market go up now that I've written this ... and here comes the oil price drop. It actually doesn't matter if the fluctuation reverses, the point is that we are at an unstable moment brought on by unsavory doings.
Some of those are the deeds of the "they" we're always complaining about. "They" unloaded houses on people who couldn't afford them, with mortgages obtained with at least significant omissions of fact, a debt which was then resold and finally repackaged as securities that were sold at values that criminally understated the risk.
In my view, the stock market is reacting to a string of
OK, there's all too much greed at the top of the anthill. We knew this, no?
But then there's "Us." You know, you and me, the "little people," as Leona Helmsley put it. Or, as my favorite Catalonian singer, Joan Manuel Serrat, puts it in his song
Uno de mi calle me ha dicho que tiene un amigo que dice conocer un tipo que un día fue feliz (A guy on my street told me he has a friend who said he knows a guy who was happy one day):
a man as any:That's us, right? We reach for happiness with our cars and our homes and our fast, faster, fastest computers -- a lifestyle that daily guzzles down in minutes fuel formed over millions of years from prehistoric plankton and algae.
ignored,
disoriented,
contaminated as any,
bored, yet a little daring
when you least expect it
Our SUVs consume it, the plastic in our CDs comes from it, the electricity that powers our computers would not be possible without it.
OK, the Chinese are gas guzzlers, too. So? Most of them are like us -- "ignored, disoriented, contaminated" -- it's their faces, too, that show up in the mirror when we search for who got us to $4.61 a gallon gasoline. (That's the price at my corner, if it's cheaper than yours, come visit.)
In a way, we're as bad as the bad actors on Wall Street. Because every drop we burn comes thanks to an exploitative system that gives rise to the irrational rage of suicide bombers.
We have a choice here:
We can be greedy and fearful as our society bids us to be, striving to accumulate in order to consume things to make ourselves popular and good-looking and smart-appearing, all to stoke the machinery that keeps everything going just as always.
Or we can stop. Take a deep breath. Consider what respecting the means by which we and our fellows live really amounts to in hard, practical terms.
This need not mean becoming an anchorite in a cave.
It may mean reconsidering property, what is legitimately private and what remain our common legacy for future generations.
Or we may have to recalibrate pay differentials (I'm of two minds as to whether differentials should exist) as we know them so that they make sense. For example, shouldn't garbage collectors, who do the most odious work, be paid more than people whose work is pleasant or even enjoyable?
At a less lofty macro level, it may simply mean regarding the just wages and fairly held property of others with the same respect we regard what we claim as justly ours, meaning that perhaps we all need to winnow out what we don't need so that we can all have enough.
We can all have enough. I believe that and the facts supports me. Moreover, we can turn greed and fear into the joy of sharing and the hope of loving.
I'm not certain that we can eliminate all differentials, nor that we would want to, nor much less that I know how to do it, anyway. But I am certain that we can all survive together.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Heart Market News: SLTR Dips on CZX Surge
Turns out that, as with Microsoft and Yahoo stock, relationships with folk of the male persuasion are really vehicles of investment. So, at least, says a consensus of women, often expressed in a sentence such as "I'm investing in the relationship."
That's not how a small, admittedly unscientific poll of men felt at a recent discussion group I attended. When in a relationship, we men argued, men rarely have a particular end result in the future.
From what I have heard, however, a woman has almost certainly been thinking of marriage at the first kiss, or at least a stable long-term relationship (ticker symbol: SLTR*).
In the quest to amass shares, some women will entirely modify their looks, behavior, readiness to engage in sex. They will smile benignly at behavior that they abhor and sacrifice preferred entertainment in the quest to buy more shares at an increasingly ascending price.
Using this dollar-averaging approach, the female romantic investor aims to acquire a controlling interest in SLTR, with claims to a majority on the board, and an eye to reaping sizable dividends.
Men usually hear of the entire investment scheme when it goes sour: "I invested umpteen years in this relationship." (So that's why the curlers came out and the rolling pin got wielded and the bedtime headaches popped up as soon as she had the ring on her finger!)
To be fair, as women point out, men all have getting to bed in mind, or a friends-with-benefits arrangement, in other words, casual sex (CZX). However, the men counterpose, that's not a long-term goal or an investment strategy.
Yes, I've heard about the guy who argued that he deserved a romp in the hay because he paid for dinner. Frankly, I've never met him. Guy: if you have to argue that you bought the right to sex, you've already lost the argument.
What man is so utterly incapable of sparking an interest with strategic romantic timing in mind that he is reduced to unlikely barter? And when did the language of the stock market and the meat market merge into romantic thinking?
Did Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have the 1987 movie Wall Street subliminally pumped into the bedrooms of women all across the United States and the former British Commonwealth? I recall hearing that the gerontocrats in the Soviet Politburo cheered during the end credits at their private screening of the movie.
Did Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky replace Gideon Bibles in every hotel room with a copy Candace Bushnell's novel Sex and the City? I found the book so horrifically cynical I could not stomach reading it through to the end.
Silly me, I thought a relationship had to do with a state of connectedness, closeness or even family relatedness. A state that simply is, because one cannot help it. Not a set of stepping stones to the altar or to bed.
It is a state of being with another person that, sadly, sometimes ends. Or is interrupted. Or sours. Other times it happily brings people to physically coalesce or marry. It's not a game, with orgasm or marriage as the goalposts.
On first dates I have paid for dinner because I like to eat. Also, because I have hated to deal with either the math of check splitting or the risk of ruining my digestion with the discovery that she is a greedy, conniving chiseler. I like my romantic evenings free of unpleasantness.
To my mind, sex expresses feelings of affection and attraction. Moreover, weddings make the most sense when the couple intends to raise a family together (see here).
Whereas investing involves the outlay of money or capital in an enterprise with the expectation of profit, there's no profit in romance and relationship. It's all loss. You lose your head and heart to someone else's charms, real or imagined.
Love is its own reward.
* I was unable to find an actual company with the ticker symbols used here; if one exists, no reference to it is intended.
That's not how a small, admittedly unscientific poll of men felt at a recent discussion group I attended. When in a relationship, we men argued, men rarely have a particular end result in the future.
From what I have heard, however, a woman has almost certainly been thinking of marriage at the first kiss, or at least a stable long-term relationship (ticker symbol: SLTR*).
In the quest to amass shares, some women will entirely modify their looks, behavior, readiness to engage in sex. They will smile benignly at behavior that they abhor and sacrifice preferred entertainment in the quest to buy more shares at an increasingly ascending price.
Using this dollar-averaging approach, the female romantic investor aims to acquire a controlling interest in SLTR, with claims to a majority on the board, and an eye to reaping sizable dividends.
Men usually hear of the entire investment scheme when it goes sour: "I invested umpteen years in this relationship." (So that's why the curlers came out and the rolling pin got wielded and the bedtime headaches popped up as soon as she had the ring on her finger!)
To be fair, as women point out, men all have getting to bed in mind, or a friends-with-benefits arrangement, in other words, casual sex (CZX). However, the men counterpose, that's not a long-term goal or an investment strategy.
Yes, I've heard about the guy who argued that he deserved a romp in the hay because he paid for dinner. Frankly, I've never met him. Guy: if you have to argue that you bought the right to sex, you've already lost the argument.
What man is so utterly incapable of sparking an interest with strategic romantic timing in mind that he is reduced to unlikely barter? And when did the language of the stock market and the meat market merge into romantic thinking?
Did Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have the 1987 movie Wall Street subliminally pumped into the bedrooms of women all across the United States and the former British Commonwealth? I recall hearing that the gerontocrats in the Soviet Politburo cheered during the end credits at their private screening of the movie.
Did Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky replace Gideon Bibles in every hotel room with a copy Candace Bushnell's novel Sex and the City? I found the book so horrifically cynical I could not stomach reading it through to the end.
Silly me, I thought a relationship had to do with a state of connectedness, closeness or even family relatedness. A state that simply is, because one cannot help it. Not a set of stepping stones to the altar or to bed.
It is a state of being with another person that, sadly, sometimes ends. Or is interrupted. Or sours. Other times it happily brings people to physically coalesce or marry. It's not a game, with orgasm or marriage as the goalposts.
On first dates I have paid for dinner because I like to eat. Also, because I have hated to deal with either the math of check splitting or the risk of ruining my digestion with the discovery that she is a greedy, conniving chiseler. I like my romantic evenings free of unpleasantness.
To my mind, sex expresses feelings of affection and attraction. Moreover, weddings make the most sense when the couple intends to raise a family together (see here).
Whereas investing involves the outlay of money or capital in an enterprise with the expectation of profit, there's no profit in romance and relationship. It's all loss. You lose your head and heart to someone else's charms, real or imagined.
Love is its own reward.
* I was unable to find an actual company with the ticker symbols used here; if one exists, no reference to it is intended.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)