Qana has become the new Guernica.
As in the aerial bombardment of the Basque city of Guernica, Spain, on April 26, 1937, by a Luftwaffe squadron, the dropping of precision-guided bombs by Israeli warplanes on July 30, 2006, on the Lebanese village of Qana amounts to the same thing: a site of senseless murder of children.
There is as yet no poet to console the mothers of Qana, "Do not weep, madre, God will fill their bullet holes with candy," nor is there a Picasso to scream outrage in paint.
But there is one thing we in the United States can do: stop funding Israel's military adventures.
If we do not, you and I in America become responsible for the dead children of Qana: our taxes and our votes have made them possible to the tune of $3 billion a year, not counting loans and loan guarantees and other forms of aid that some estimate may yield a total 10 times that figure, or even higher.
This is about 15 percent of all U.S. foreign aid. U.S. aid to the 6 million Israelis equals all aid to the 840 million people in the entire continent of Africa. This is disproportionate.
What is the purpose to be served by aid to Israel? Israel is not and has never been a poor country. Our aid to Israel does not gain the United States influence; on the contrary, our troops are dying in Iraq because of our ties to Israel. Why continue, then?
Culturally and religiously, our ties to the State of Israel, founded in 1948, are much more tenuous than the Israel lobby would have us believe, certainly not enough to justify the $85 billion the United States has given it since its founding.
Let's say, for example, that the United States should give aid to Israel because there are Jewish citizens who wants this. First of all, U.S. Jewish support for the State of Israel is not unanimous; many orthodox rabbis at the time of the country's independence thought it was an enormous heresy to establish Israel before the Messiah came to do so.
Even if there were unanimous support, according to the U.S. Census, there are 5.1 million U.S. Jews, who make up less than 2 percent of the population. Given that there are 37.8 million African Americans, or 12.8 percent of the population, shouldn't aid to Africa total multiples of aid to Israel or, conversely, aid to Israel be sliced downward several multiples?
I once admired the plucky Israelis, their social democracy and their self-defense. Over time, however, it has become clear that Israeli social democracy serves only those of the right ethnic background and their "defense" has become a constant attack. Israel even elected as prime minister a war criminal, Ariel Sharon, who was responsible for the 1982 Sabra-Shatila, Lebanon, massacre.
The new attacks on civilian targets in Lebanon, along with the bombing of UN posts to eliminate possible neutral witnesses, leave the observer no choice but to conclude that Israel has lamentably become a rogue nation.
Whatever Israel chooses to do now, it must do on its own -- without U.S. support, or dollars.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Friday, July 28, 2006
Foxy Fox
Another television season is upon us without anyone having yet unmasked the hidden agenda behind the cynical humor broadcast by the Fox television network.
Fox shows such as "The Simpsons," "Family Guy," "Arrested Development" and "Malcolm in the Middle" have in common an over-the-top humor that skewers everything and is, frankly, quite funny. You might think that good satire is the salve that American democracy needs -- but in this instance you'd be wrong.
Behind Fox's media farrago of dysfunctional families, venal politicians, hypocritical hypermoralists and even corporate greed, lies a very unfunny message right out of Dante's Inferno: you can't believe in anything and your generous heart will only be broken if you strive for better, so abandon all hope.
Bart Simpson's celebration of slackerdom, diabolical infant Stewie in "Family Guy," "Malcolm's" sadistic mother and figuratively castrated father, and Ken Lay-esque corporate defrauder George Bluth in "Arrested Development" all paint the world in the color of deep despair.
Yet Fox, whose commentator Tony Snow was tapped to be George W. Bush's press secretary this year, is an odd bearer for a message of despondency. No one who examines the facts can walk away unconvinced that, starting from its inception as a brainchild of Reagan political operative Roger Ailes, Fox Cable News and its affiliates were conceived to operate as a propaganda beam.
Bush and Fox share a fondness for the most flowery of family values, misty eyed hand-on-heart flag waving and Christian evangelicalism's waggingest moral finger.
So if this is the neocons' broadcasting megaphone, you'd think, this is not your father's Republican Party. Not quite: it's your grandfather's or great-grandfather's GOP. Let's recall that the America conservatives want to conserve is that of 1906 or 1806 -- not 2006.
Indeed, having failed for generations to win in the open marketplace of ideas, conservatives have seized upon a new formula to complement their fear mongering: ridicule everything until nobody cares. Then right-wing operatives can hack democracy to pieces without opposition.
Fox shows such as "The Simpsons," "Family Guy," "Arrested Development" and "Malcolm in the Middle" have in common an over-the-top humor that skewers everything and is, frankly, quite funny. You might think that good satire is the salve that American democracy needs -- but in this instance you'd be wrong.
Behind Fox's media farrago of dysfunctional families, venal politicians, hypocritical hypermoralists and even corporate greed, lies a very unfunny message right out of Dante's Inferno: you can't believe in anything and your generous heart will only be broken if you strive for better, so abandon all hope.
Bart Simpson's celebration of slackerdom, diabolical infant Stewie in "Family Guy," "Malcolm's" sadistic mother and figuratively castrated father, and Ken Lay-esque corporate defrauder George Bluth in "Arrested Development" all paint the world in the color of deep despair.
Yet Fox, whose commentator Tony Snow was tapped to be George W. Bush's press secretary this year, is an odd bearer for a message of despondency. No one who examines the facts can walk away unconvinced that, starting from its inception as a brainchild of Reagan political operative Roger Ailes, Fox Cable News and its affiliates were conceived to operate as a propaganda beam.
Bush and Fox share a fondness for the most flowery of family values, misty eyed hand-on-heart flag waving and Christian evangelicalism's waggingest moral finger.
So if this is the neocons' broadcasting megaphone, you'd think, this is not your father's Republican Party. Not quite: it's your grandfather's or great-grandfather's GOP. Let's recall that the America conservatives want to conserve is that of 1906 or 1806 -- not 2006.
Indeed, having failed for generations to win in the open marketplace of ideas, conservatives have seized upon a new formula to complement their fear mongering: ridicule everything until nobody cares. Then right-wing operatives can hack democracy to pieces without opposition.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
A Grateful Nation
Few things fix the mind on the here and the hereafter -- and the way human beings consign others to ford the pass between them -- than a funeral with full military honors at Arlington Cemetery, such as one I had the occasion to attend this week.
In almost every respect, the occasion was uncommon. The family party was small. The wound caused by the nearly year-old death was almost healed. The death itself had come peacefully in the deceased's bed at home. The veteran was a female naval intelligence officer during World War II.
More than a funeral, it was an inhumation. There was no bathos, nor rage at the loss of a loved one at the hands of a negligent, selfish president waging a criminally stupid war in the Persian Gulf. World War II was indisputably the last "good war."
Instead, there was an astounding display of quiet dignity on the part of the U.S. Navy. A marching band, what looked to my civilian eye as a battallion of sailors, a horse-drawn caisson with a casket draped in the stars and stripes, a color guard.
I was reminded of Kennedy's funeral. My older son thought it was someone else's cortege, not his grandmother's. Perhaps Rumsfeld's (I only wish!). It was beautiful.
The band played "Come, Holy Ghost." Then we processed to the burial site to the sounds of the Navy hymn, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save." We stopped. Six sailors held a flag over the cremains. The Navy chaplain led us in prayer. We stood.
A line of about six sailors formed, raised their rifles and fired a three-rifle volley. The practice has its origins in an ancient war custom of bringing all fighting to a halt to remove the dead from the battlefield. Once each army had cleared its dead, it would fire three volleys to indicate that the dead had been cared for and that they were ready to go back to the fight.
Finally, the six escorting sailors folded the flag to the sounds of "America, the Beautiful." A sailor handed it to the military chaplain, who then presented it to the next of kin with the following words, "On behalf of the President of the United States, the Chief of Naval Operations and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your mother's service to this Country in World War II."
Then came the bugler's "Taps."
"Taps" was composed by the Union Army Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, while in camp at Harrison's Landing, Virginia, in 1862. It became known as "Taps" because it was often tapped out on a drum, whenever a bugler was unavailable, and was widely used by both Northern and Southern armies.
Restless thoughts followed me in the hush and quiet that ensued that sweltering day.
A part of me had been rebelling, fighting within me to scream out the rage of thousands of mothers at the inhumanity of war. I came of age at a time in which such displays in the face of the military were common, as the government was waging another useless carnage, in Vietnam. Yet the effect of the military's psychological operation on me had been uncanny.
Still a vaguely agnostic Christian, I had prayed with feeling and been moved at "Taps." My rebellious feelings had felt undignified in the face of young boys who might be called upon to die, no matter how cruelly meaningless the conflict.
It's a clever thing to have these ceremonies, one family by one family, out of sight from the glaring eye of the press. I had been challenged at the gate due to my press badge; I was there as an individual, not a reporter, so I hid it thereafter. But I then realized this is a part of war the military wishes to hide.
No recruiter would want young men to see what their mothers might face. No dissembling president using pointless war to dole out billions to cronies would want the public to know at what human expense.
In a sense, all military funerals are efforts to assuage the guilt and responsibility of military and political leaders for having taken someone from a family and returned that person dead. It's the least a grateful nation can do. All such funerals are a human response in the face of a shameful reality; they are cathartic ceremonies and a public confession that we are a murderous species.
How much more grateful all of us might be if war's casualties were much rarer, the occasions far nobler!
Such, at least, was true in the case of the military service rendered by this one Second World War Navy lieutenant I went to mourn, one whose intelligence analyses undoubtedly saved thousands of American lives and millions of others from the scourge of the Axis powers. Full military honors, in this instance, were a fitting coda to a life's struggle, well fought.
In almost every respect, the occasion was uncommon. The family party was small. The wound caused by the nearly year-old death was almost healed. The death itself had come peacefully in the deceased's bed at home. The veteran was a female naval intelligence officer during World War II.
More than a funeral, it was an inhumation. There was no bathos, nor rage at the loss of a loved one at the hands of a negligent, selfish president waging a criminally stupid war in the Persian Gulf. World War II was indisputably the last "good war."
Instead, there was an astounding display of quiet dignity on the part of the U.S. Navy. A marching band, what looked to my civilian eye as a battallion of sailors, a horse-drawn caisson with a casket draped in the stars and stripes, a color guard.
I was reminded of Kennedy's funeral. My older son thought it was someone else's cortege, not his grandmother's. Perhaps Rumsfeld's (I only wish!). It was beautiful.
The band played "Come, Holy Ghost." Then we processed to the burial site to the sounds of the Navy hymn, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save." We stopped. Six sailors held a flag over the cremains. The Navy chaplain led us in prayer. We stood.
A line of about six sailors formed, raised their rifles and fired a three-rifle volley. The practice has its origins in an ancient war custom of bringing all fighting to a halt to remove the dead from the battlefield. Once each army had cleared its dead, it would fire three volleys to indicate that the dead had been cared for and that they were ready to go back to the fight.
Finally, the six escorting sailors folded the flag to the sounds of "America, the Beautiful." A sailor handed it to the military chaplain, who then presented it to the next of kin with the following words, "On behalf of the President of the United States, the Chief of Naval Operations and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your mother's service to this Country in World War II."
Then came the bugler's "Taps."
"Taps" was composed by the Union Army Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, while in camp at Harrison's Landing, Virginia, in 1862. It became known as "Taps" because it was often tapped out on a drum, whenever a bugler was unavailable, and was widely used by both Northern and Southern armies.
Restless thoughts followed me in the hush and quiet that ensued that sweltering day.
A part of me had been rebelling, fighting within me to scream out the rage of thousands of mothers at the inhumanity of war. I came of age at a time in which such displays in the face of the military were common, as the government was waging another useless carnage, in Vietnam. Yet the effect of the military's psychological operation on me had been uncanny.
Still a vaguely agnostic Christian, I had prayed with feeling and been moved at "Taps." My rebellious feelings had felt undignified in the face of young boys who might be called upon to die, no matter how cruelly meaningless the conflict.
It's a clever thing to have these ceremonies, one family by one family, out of sight from the glaring eye of the press. I had been challenged at the gate due to my press badge; I was there as an individual, not a reporter, so I hid it thereafter. But I then realized this is a part of war the military wishes to hide.
No recruiter would want young men to see what their mothers might face. No dissembling president using pointless war to dole out billions to cronies would want the public to know at what human expense.
In a sense, all military funerals are efforts to assuage the guilt and responsibility of military and political leaders for having taken someone from a family and returned that person dead. It's the least a grateful nation can do. All such funerals are a human response in the face of a shameful reality; they are cathartic ceremonies and a public confession that we are a murderous species.
How much more grateful all of us might be if war's casualties were much rarer, the occasions far nobler!
Such, at least, was true in the case of the military service rendered by this one Second World War Navy lieutenant I went to mourn, one whose intelligence analyses undoubtedly saved thousands of American lives and millions of others from the scourge of the Axis powers. Full military honors, in this instance, were a fitting coda to a life's struggle, well fought.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
World War IV?
News this week from and about the Middle East ranges from the worrisome to the ridiculous, all leading to the question: are we headed for World War IV?
When was World War III, you ask? That was that long, intermittently hot and cold war between the USA and the USSR, with fronts in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, the horn of Africa, Angola, Nicaragua, etc., the war we once thought would never end ... or would end in a mushroom cloud.
We may still get a mushroom cloud, but it won't be deployed from a superpower's silo (unless Dubya does it ... all bets are off on that). Most likely it will be a "dirty bomb" set off by a Muslim zealot ... or an atomic bomb in the nuclear arsenal that Israel is said to possess.
But that comes a bit later than now. That's what Israel could do, in desperation, when Washington and Jerusalem finally succeed at uniting all the Arab nations and, with the grand jihad on, the Arabs are at the gates. That day is no longer very far away, but right now we're still at the beginning of a conflict.
This one, it seems to me, is very similar to the beginning of World War I in the late summer of 1914. For about a month or so barely a day passed without one European country declaring war on another. These days, instead of war declarations we have the fireworks of car bombs, home-made missiles, and aircraft and artillery counterattacks.
But then, does any Arab nation have the bomb under wraps? Then what?
In World War I, Europe fought from trenches and in relentlessly insane advances of mere meters until 8.5 million lives had been expended, 21 million had been wounded and an added 7 million went missing in action.
Twenty years after the end of the war to end all wars, the world went into another paroxism of murder and we, humanity, managed to kill, over nearly 6 years, an estimated 65 million people -- that's about 30,000 people killed every day.
About 40 million were killed in wars between 1945 and 2000, including World War III. And that's a picnic compared to the coming war, since death tolls per atomic bomb are counted in megadeaths (equal to 1,000,000 deaths).
So I'm beginning to think that the term "terrorist" has been misapplied altogether. The odd bomber here and there, even the Sept. 11 suicide attackers, haven't been really all that terrifying.
All they did was wreck a couple of the world's ugliest buildings (and, yes, more lamentably kill about 2,000 people), or in several foreign cities wreck a couple of trains (and, more lamentably again, kill several hundred people). But if you weren't there, or if you don't believe everything on television or radio, their impact was not all that significant.
In the grand scheme of things, these events were tiny. For example, most people in Afghanistan, where the Sept. 11 attacks were planned and directed, had no idea about the planes crashing into -- "What's that you say? Buildings a hundred storeys tall? Nice fairy tale, ha, ha ha." -- the World Trade Center.
So, the main effect of these "terrorists" has been annoyances about the truly stupid things done in the name of security, such as checking everybody's shoes after the one real shoe-bomber sailed through checkpoints even though he was a known suspect.
The real terrorists, I would contend, are sitting in the Oval Office and the Israeli prime minister's office. They're the ones launching World War IV with insane warring that will, as sure as the cows eventually come home, goose some lunatic to start using an A-bomb to show his is bigger than the other guy's.
On that score, Dubya makes me very scared.
When was World War III, you ask? That was that long, intermittently hot and cold war between the USA and the USSR, with fronts in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, the horn of Africa, Angola, Nicaragua, etc., the war we once thought would never end ... or would end in a mushroom cloud.
We may still get a mushroom cloud, but it won't be deployed from a superpower's silo (unless Dubya does it ... all bets are off on that). Most likely it will be a "dirty bomb" set off by a Muslim zealot ... or an atomic bomb in the nuclear arsenal that Israel is said to possess.
But that comes a bit later than now. That's what Israel could do, in desperation, when Washington and Jerusalem finally succeed at uniting all the Arab nations and, with the grand jihad on, the Arabs are at the gates. That day is no longer very far away, but right now we're still at the beginning of a conflict.
This one, it seems to me, is very similar to the beginning of World War I in the late summer of 1914. For about a month or so barely a day passed without one European country declaring war on another. These days, instead of war declarations we have the fireworks of car bombs, home-made missiles, and aircraft and artillery counterattacks.
But then, does any Arab nation have the bomb under wraps? Then what?
In World War I, Europe fought from trenches and in relentlessly insane advances of mere meters until 8.5 million lives had been expended, 21 million had been wounded and an added 7 million went missing in action.
Twenty years after the end of the war to end all wars, the world went into another paroxism of murder and we, humanity, managed to kill, over nearly 6 years, an estimated 65 million people -- that's about 30,000 people killed every day.
About 40 million were killed in wars between 1945 and 2000, including World War III. And that's a picnic compared to the coming war, since death tolls per atomic bomb are counted in megadeaths (equal to 1,000,000 deaths).
So I'm beginning to think that the term "terrorist" has been misapplied altogether. The odd bomber here and there, even the Sept. 11 suicide attackers, haven't been really all that terrifying.
All they did was wreck a couple of the world's ugliest buildings (and, yes, more lamentably kill about 2,000 people), or in several foreign cities wreck a couple of trains (and, more lamentably again, kill several hundred people). But if you weren't there, or if you don't believe everything on television or radio, their impact was not all that significant.
In the grand scheme of things, these events were tiny. For example, most people in Afghanistan, where the Sept. 11 attacks were planned and directed, had no idea about the planes crashing into -- "What's that you say? Buildings a hundred storeys tall? Nice fairy tale, ha, ha ha." -- the World Trade Center.
So, the main effect of these "terrorists" has been annoyances about the truly stupid things done in the name of security, such as checking everybody's shoes after the one real shoe-bomber sailed through checkpoints even though he was a known suspect.
The real terrorists, I would contend, are sitting in the Oval Office and the Israeli prime minister's office. They're the ones launching World War IV with insane warring that will, as sure as the cows eventually come home, goose some lunatic to start using an A-bomb to show his is bigger than the other guy's.
On that score, Dubya makes me very scared.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Dead Faith of the Living
The argument developing in the Anglican Communion over the election, as head of the U.S. Episcopal Church, of a woman bishop who has blessed gay civil unions brings to mind a phrase of the late historian of Christianity Jaroslav Pelikan.
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living," Pelikan told an interviewer with the U.S. News & World Report in 1989. "Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."
In his Jesus through the Centuries, Pelikan insistently reminds the reader just how much of what is attributed to Jesus is really in the eye of beholders throughout history. This is something that the author of the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History and Development of Doctrine should know well.
The Jesus of the gospels shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in the moral status of homosexuality, same sex orientation and so on. The absence of direct teaching from Jesus on sexual behavior was so patently obvious that it continued in the teaching of those who lived and accompanied Jesus while he walked this earth.
It's not until at least 30 years after Jesus' execution that we have the very first imprecation against homosexuality (and almost every form of sexuality outside marriage). This comes from a man who first persecuted Christians, then changed his mind and became, to be anachronistic about it, more papist than the pope; I'm referring, of course, to the apostle Paul, a man who never actually met Jesus in the flesh, the way you and I might have.
Paul felt he had to introduce a farrago of maledictions upon a wide range of sexual behavior, although he admits to a "thorn" in his own flesh, the nature of which could very well be precisely the activity he deplores. No greater temperance leader than a former drunk.
But never mind Paul. What was Jesus concerned with?
Take Jesus' "basileia theou," a Greek phrase commonly translated as 'Kingdom of God," which I think is more aptly rendered as the "reign of God." In what could easily be described as Jesus "constitution" of the new realm, the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-11; Luke 6:20-26), he exalts the poor, the meek, the mourning and those who hunger for justice; he reviles those who are rich, who are satisfied, who are laughing, who are blessed by men.
In brief, Jesus up-ends every known social order in history, including many that churches and clerics have blessed from their questionable perch as spokesmen for God.
In the remainder of the discourse surrounding the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not once -- not a single time -- dwell on the subject of homosexuality, and never on the subject of the appropriate sex of priests.
Indeed, Jesus has no kind words for priests at all. The one time he portrays one, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest is in too great a hurry to get on with his priestly business to care for someone who lies wounded at the side of the road. Throughout the gospel narrative priests show nothing but hostility toward Jesus.
Oddly enough, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has insisted that the message of the General Convention that elected her is that "we're more interested in feeding hungry people and relieving suffering than we are in arguing about what gender someone is or what sexual orientation someone has."
Jefferts Schori was referring to the adoption, at the Cincinnati, Ohio, convention held in June, of a new initiative, called ONE Episcopalian, which seeks to rally Episcopalians -- one by one -- to the cause of ending extreme poverty in the world. It's not a bad idea, considering the average influence and wealth of Episcopalians, who include the father of the current U.S. president.
Each Episcopalian who joins the advocacy campaign will pledge that "We believe that in the best American tradition of helping others help themselves, now is the time to join with other countries in a historic pact for compassion and justice to help the poorest people of the world overcome AIDS and extreme poverty."
The campaign will advocate fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing additional resources for basic needs education, health, clean water, food, and care for orphans in the poorest countries -- and a pledge to assure one additional percentage point of the U.S. budget to this purpose.
That's a lot more like what the Jesus in the gospels was talking about.
(Telling trivia quiz: What percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product (or gross national income) do you think goes to foreign aid? Click here for an answer. A good article on the myths about foreign aid is found here.)
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living," Pelikan told an interviewer with the U.S. News & World Report in 1989. "Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."
In his Jesus through the Centuries, Pelikan insistently reminds the reader just how much of what is attributed to Jesus is really in the eye of beholders throughout history. This is something that the author of the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History and Development of Doctrine should know well.
The Jesus of the gospels shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in the moral status of homosexuality, same sex orientation and so on. The absence of direct teaching from Jesus on sexual behavior was so patently obvious that it continued in the teaching of those who lived and accompanied Jesus while he walked this earth.
It's not until at least 30 years after Jesus' execution that we have the very first imprecation against homosexuality (and almost every form of sexuality outside marriage). This comes from a man who first persecuted Christians, then changed his mind and became, to be anachronistic about it, more papist than the pope; I'm referring, of course, to the apostle Paul, a man who never actually met Jesus in the flesh, the way you and I might have.
Paul felt he had to introduce a farrago of maledictions upon a wide range of sexual behavior, although he admits to a "thorn" in his own flesh, the nature of which could very well be precisely the activity he deplores. No greater temperance leader than a former drunk.
But never mind Paul. What was Jesus concerned with?
Take Jesus' "basileia theou," a Greek phrase commonly translated as 'Kingdom of God," which I think is more aptly rendered as the "reign of God." In what could easily be described as Jesus "constitution" of the new realm, the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-11; Luke 6:20-26), he exalts the poor, the meek, the mourning and those who hunger for justice; he reviles those who are rich, who are satisfied, who are laughing, who are blessed by men.
In brief, Jesus up-ends every known social order in history, including many that churches and clerics have blessed from their questionable perch as spokesmen for God.
In the remainder of the discourse surrounding the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not once -- not a single time -- dwell on the subject of homosexuality, and never on the subject of the appropriate sex of priests.
Indeed, Jesus has no kind words for priests at all. The one time he portrays one, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest is in too great a hurry to get on with his priestly business to care for someone who lies wounded at the side of the road. Throughout the gospel narrative priests show nothing but hostility toward Jesus.
Oddly enough, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has insisted that the message of the General Convention that elected her is that "we're more interested in feeding hungry people and relieving suffering than we are in arguing about what gender someone is or what sexual orientation someone has."
Jefferts Schori was referring to the adoption, at the Cincinnati, Ohio, convention held in June, of a new initiative, called ONE Episcopalian, which seeks to rally Episcopalians -- one by one -- to the cause of ending extreme poverty in the world. It's not a bad idea, considering the average influence and wealth of Episcopalians, who include the father of the current U.S. president.
Each Episcopalian who joins the advocacy campaign will pledge that "We believe that in the best American tradition of helping others help themselves, now is the time to join with other countries in a historic pact for compassion and justice to help the poorest people of the world overcome AIDS and extreme poverty."
The campaign will advocate fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing additional resources for basic needs education, health, clean water, food, and care for orphans in the poorest countries -- and a pledge to assure one additional percentage point of the U.S. budget to this purpose.
That's a lot more like what the Jesus in the gospels was talking about.
(Telling trivia quiz: What percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product (or gross national income) do you think goes to foreign aid? Click here for an answer. A good article on the myths about foreign aid is found here.)
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Why the Bush Regime is Un-American
The second Supreme Court declaration that even people kidnapped to a U.S.-run offshore dungeon have a right to due process draws a clear line separating the regime of George W. Bush from the form of government envisioned by Thomas Jefferson.
Ever since Bush invaded Iraq without provocation in 2003, I have been resisting the comparison to a certain German leader who invaded Poland 66 years ago citing pretexts as flimsy. The pressure to avoid, for the sake of appearing reasonable, an examination of similarities between Bush and Adolf Hitler (along with other fellow right-wingers) is no longer worth withstanding, Godwin's rule be damned.
"As an online discussion grows longer," wrote Mike Godwin in 1990, "the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
Yes, and in this instance, the parallels are no longer casual or merely skin deep:
-- Hitler failed to win the majority of the votes cast in 1933 but simply seized power by judicial fiat. Much the same thing happened with Bush and the elections of 2000 (some say 2004 was a repeat).
-- Hitler concocted a series of flimsy claims concerning Polish hostility, including a border incident (now known to have been faked), to justify invading in 1939. Bush rejected all doubts and concerns regarding the intelligence used to justify invading Iraq; all of it has proven completely and absolutely false.
-- Hitler used an alleged Communist plot behind the torching of the Reichstag (German parliament) as the excuse to sign a decree declaring a state of emergency and suspending constitutional rights; subsequently the Third Reich went beyond the bounds of even its own law in detaining and spying on its citizens. Bush used Sept. 11 as the excuse to suppress civil liberties through the Patriot Act; unsatisfied with several legal mechanisms to take emergency action, the Bush regime launched a vast secret telecommunications and banking operation to spy on citizens.
-- In the parliament, Nazis regularly disrupted proceedings until they got whatever measure they wanted approved. In Congress, Republican majorities in committees have routinely approved outlines of legislation, rather than actual bills, and then filled in whatever language they wanted, running roughshod over the opposition.
-- The Hitler regime persecuted homosexuals. The Bush regime has demonized homosexuals for rhetorical purposes.
-- In 1943 Hitler banned abortion. The Bush regime has impaired access to abortion and claims to wish to ban abortion.
-- Hitler managed to get Mussolini, Franco and later regimes in Hungary and Romania to pursue opponents, some deemed dangerous. The Bush regime has contracted with countries to jail and torture alleged "terrorists" without trial or due process.
-- Nazis gathered in Nuremburg to chant in unison "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" in a display of mindless fanaticism; Republicans put on a similar display when they gathered in New York to chant "USA! USA! USA!"
These and other possible parallels are meaningful so long as you allow for cultural and contextual differences. As Mark Twain cannily put it, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
Beyond these parallels lies my core point: Hitler, Bush, Franco, Mussolini, Cromwell, Bossuet, Primo de Rivera, Peron, Louis XIV and many others of their ilk have in common a basic disdain for the citizenry and a fundamental opposition to democratic processes.
"L'etat c'est moi" (I am the State) was the spirit of Louis XIV, which is echoed in the pseudo-legal explanations of authoritarian ideologue Alberto Gonzales, U.S. attorney general, in defense of torture and spying on citizens. So long as an act is authorized by the hyperpowerful chief executive in the White House, the Bush regime has repeatedly claimed, it is lawful and constitutional and needs neither congressional approval nor judicial review.
This is the political theory of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, bishop and writer of the 17th century, who drew up the classic defense of the absolute monarch and the divine right of kings. Save for Bossuet's religious impulse, a straight line runs from Bossuet to José Antonio Primo de Rivera ("the best fate of ballot boxes is to be smashed"), the ideologue of Spanish Falangism and ideological kin to Mussolini and Hitler.
Bossuet's thinking also is echoed in views that will sound more culturally familiar to Americans, those of Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell. A dissenter from Presbyterianism, Cromwell believed in providentialism, the idea that God actively directs history through the actions of "chosen people" whom God "provides" to serve divine purposes.
Cromwell thought he was one such person during the English Civil Wars; Bush has given every indication that he thinks himself a latter-day Cromwell.
Indeed, at the core of all its arguments, the Bush regime contends that the democratic experiment launched by Jefferson and his peers was a noble idea that should be pursued at some tranquil time in the future, but that it fails to keep us safe in what the regime terms a present emergency. It's the old Vietnam era saw about destroying the vllage to save it.
A Cromwellian, divinely inspired leader-in-crisis, however, is not what the Constitution envisions in its Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Americans forget that last clause, "to the people," which signifies that the sovereign of the United States is not the man in the White House, not Congress, not the Supreme Court, not even all three together. They are mere hirelings, as are their counterparts in the states.
In the USA, "we the people" rule ourselves.
Ever since Bush invaded Iraq without provocation in 2003, I have been resisting the comparison to a certain German leader who invaded Poland 66 years ago citing pretexts as flimsy. The pressure to avoid, for the sake of appearing reasonable, an examination of similarities between Bush and Adolf Hitler (along with other fellow right-wingers) is no longer worth withstanding, Godwin's rule be damned.
"As an online discussion grows longer," wrote Mike Godwin in 1990, "the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
Yes, and in this instance, the parallels are no longer casual or merely skin deep:
-- Hitler failed to win the majority of the votes cast in 1933 but simply seized power by judicial fiat. Much the same thing happened with Bush and the elections of 2000 (some say 2004 was a repeat).
-- Hitler concocted a series of flimsy claims concerning Polish hostility, including a border incident (now known to have been faked), to justify invading in 1939. Bush rejected all doubts and concerns regarding the intelligence used to justify invading Iraq; all of it has proven completely and absolutely false.
-- Hitler used an alleged Communist plot behind the torching of the Reichstag (German parliament) as the excuse to sign a decree declaring a state of emergency and suspending constitutional rights; subsequently the Third Reich went beyond the bounds of even its own law in detaining and spying on its citizens. Bush used Sept. 11 as the excuse to suppress civil liberties through the Patriot Act; unsatisfied with several legal mechanisms to take emergency action, the Bush regime launched a vast secret telecommunications and banking operation to spy on citizens.
-- In the parliament, Nazis regularly disrupted proceedings until they got whatever measure they wanted approved. In Congress, Republican majorities in committees have routinely approved outlines of legislation, rather than actual bills, and then filled in whatever language they wanted, running roughshod over the opposition.
-- The Hitler regime persecuted homosexuals. The Bush regime has demonized homosexuals for rhetorical purposes.
-- In 1943 Hitler banned abortion. The Bush regime has impaired access to abortion and claims to wish to ban abortion.
-- Hitler managed to get Mussolini, Franco and later regimes in Hungary and Romania to pursue opponents, some deemed dangerous. The Bush regime has contracted with countries to jail and torture alleged "terrorists" without trial or due process.
-- Nazis gathered in Nuremburg to chant in unison "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" in a display of mindless fanaticism; Republicans put on a similar display when they gathered in New York to chant "USA! USA! USA!"
These and other possible parallels are meaningful so long as you allow for cultural and contextual differences. As Mark Twain cannily put it, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
Beyond these parallels lies my core point: Hitler, Bush, Franco, Mussolini, Cromwell, Bossuet, Primo de Rivera, Peron, Louis XIV and many others of their ilk have in common a basic disdain for the citizenry and a fundamental opposition to democratic processes.
"L'etat c'est moi" (I am the State) was the spirit of Louis XIV, which is echoed in the pseudo-legal explanations of authoritarian ideologue Alberto Gonzales, U.S. attorney general, in defense of torture and spying on citizens. So long as an act is authorized by the hyperpowerful chief executive in the White House, the Bush regime has repeatedly claimed, it is lawful and constitutional and needs neither congressional approval nor judicial review.
This is the political theory of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, bishop and writer of the 17th century, who drew up the classic defense of the absolute monarch and the divine right of kings. Save for Bossuet's religious impulse, a straight line runs from Bossuet to José Antonio Primo de Rivera ("the best fate of ballot boxes is to be smashed"), the ideologue of Spanish Falangism and ideological kin to Mussolini and Hitler.
Bossuet's thinking also is echoed in views that will sound more culturally familiar to Americans, those of Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell. A dissenter from Presbyterianism, Cromwell believed in providentialism, the idea that God actively directs history through the actions of "chosen people" whom God "provides" to serve divine purposes.
Cromwell thought he was one such person during the English Civil Wars; Bush has given every indication that he thinks himself a latter-day Cromwell.
Indeed, at the core of all its arguments, the Bush regime contends that the democratic experiment launched by Jefferson and his peers was a noble idea that should be pursued at some tranquil time in the future, but that it fails to keep us safe in what the regime terms a present emergency. It's the old Vietnam era saw about destroying the vllage to save it.
A Cromwellian, divinely inspired leader-in-crisis, however, is not what the Constitution envisions in its Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Americans forget that last clause, "to the people," which signifies that the sovereign of the United States is not the man in the White House, not Congress, not the Supreme Court, not even all three together. They are mere hirelings, as are their counterparts in the states.
In the USA, "we the people" rule ourselves.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
ISO 19YO BLONDE
When my marriage first fell apart, I told friends in that whistling-in-the-dark humor you develop for such occasions that now was my chance to find a 19-year-old blonde. The men leered back, the women gasped. Little did I know that I would get to fulfill my dream.
Before I go into that, let's take stock of what's involved in this dream.
Everybody knows, or has seen it on the street: a 40- or 50-something driving a red sports car. In a Volkswagen commercial, it's described as an "ego emission." Instead of Rush Limbaugh's drug of choice, Viagra, some men get the red Triumph.
I am fifty-ish, have mostly gray hair and carry what personals Web sites charitably describe as "a few extra pounds." My marriage fell apart: I knew I was screwed (or rather, not likely ever again). I am not exactly bait even for post-pregnancy Britney.
So I went to support group meetings, to dances, to various socials and uncovered that I am not exactly unattractive, that -- Deo gratias! -- women look at faces, at intelligence, at grace and charm (and, yes, some also look for hefty wallets, but we'll overlook those). So if you find yourself in a similar situation -- no, you are not dead in the water at middle age; even men look beyond the obvious.
But you're still not 17 or 22.
I was thinking such thoughts during a trip across the country. On my flight back, the plane stopped somewhere in the Midwest (Chicago? I guess, that's in the middle somewhere, no?).
That's when the plane started to fill up and next to me (I was on the two-seat side) sits down a young woman who is blonde. She needs help with this and that and I gallantly provide what help I can offer. She sits down, I go back to my book.
Drinks come and they make me feel talkative, so I start a conversation. She is 19 years old. I smile a mile wide but of course she has no idea why. She thinks I'm just being friendly.
I decide to play Dick Cavett, the friendly talk show host who encourages shameless public narcissism by figures from whom one can't fail to learn something. (I'll never forget Orson Welles talking on Cavett's show about the lawsuits after "War of the Worlds" and the one claim that they actually paid: news shoes for a woman whose heels broke in the middle of a panicked rushing crowd. Trivia to tuck that away for moments such as this one.)
A 19-year-old young woman probably wants to tell the world where she is going and why. Indeed!
My putative fountain of youth was from Lyons, Kansas.
There is such a place. Look it up: I have. Population 3,732 (2000 Census), it is a farming community near a campsite used around 1540 by the expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in his search for the Seven Cities of Gold. (Conquistador: "Where are the Seven Cities of Gold" Indian: "Over there, yonder, can't miss them.")
She was coming to Washington on an internship, she recounted in a voice that seemed to grow squeakier by the moment. My mind computed the political implications and legal ramifications of the word "intern" in the 00's; I didn't like the outcome. But, hell, who's a little airplane flirting going to hurt?
So I asked what kinds of issues she was interested in and what organization she was coming to work for. I rapidly became ever more horrified as she detailed the entire Religious Right's political agenda, as if the entire world agreed, and as the internship sponsor she named one of those neocon organizations that I am sure have "666" carved on their headquarters' entrance.
Of course, I forgot! Nineteen-year-old blondes no longer wear flowers in their flowing tresses as they journey to San Francisco. They're more likely eager to wear jackboots in the Political Gestapo, as they seek to immolate homosexuals and "baby-killers."
And their history! I got a lecture on how conservative John F. Kennedy really was -- never mind that I had actually been alive the day he was shot.
Those blue eyes began to look beady. That smile to seem sinister as I pretended -- oh, how I pretended! -- to be amused. She flicked her hair back, she made eye contact; she was clearly flirting. I was clearly horrified.
Once I managed to steer matters to more neutral topics I found there was little common ground. Neither music, nor literature, nor movies nor even TV (I had a TV then) drew a single connection. Her blonde hair looked ever more bottled.
Then it was her turn. Whether she knew the tricks or was genuinely naive, she charmed with questions about Washington. Cognizant that I was with The Enemy I wasn't exactly eager to help her succeed, yet soon enough she began to remind me of my kids.
That's when the bubble burst and I simply turned into a surrogate father-figure. By the time we got to Washington I pointed her to the right Metro train and was happy to see her, her 19-year-old blonde hair, squeaky voice, beady eyes and neocon views go.
Maybe it's a 91-year-old I should be looking for ... I can talk a good game about FDR, Sinatra, the "Thin Man" series and that bestseller, "The Citadel." Or is my voice too squeaky, my eyes too beady, my views too conventional?
Before I go into that, let's take stock of what's involved in this dream.
Everybody knows, or has seen it on the street: a 40- or 50-something driving a red sports car. In a Volkswagen commercial, it's described as an "ego emission." Instead of Rush Limbaugh's drug of choice, Viagra, some men get the red Triumph.
I am fifty-ish, have mostly gray hair and carry what personals Web sites charitably describe as "a few extra pounds." My marriage fell apart: I knew I was screwed (or rather, not likely ever again). I am not exactly bait even for post-pregnancy Britney.
So I went to support group meetings, to dances, to various socials and uncovered that I am not exactly unattractive, that -- Deo gratias! -- women look at faces, at intelligence, at grace and charm (and, yes, some also look for hefty wallets, but we'll overlook those). So if you find yourself in a similar situation -- no, you are not dead in the water at middle age; even men look beyond the obvious.
But you're still not 17 or 22.
I was thinking such thoughts during a trip across the country. On my flight back, the plane stopped somewhere in the Midwest (Chicago? I guess, that's in the middle somewhere, no?).
That's when the plane started to fill up and next to me (I was on the two-seat side) sits down a young woman who is blonde. She needs help with this and that and I gallantly provide what help I can offer. She sits down, I go back to my book.
Drinks come and they make me feel talkative, so I start a conversation. She is 19 years old. I smile a mile wide but of course she has no idea why. She thinks I'm just being friendly.
I decide to play Dick Cavett, the friendly talk show host who encourages shameless public narcissism by figures from whom one can't fail to learn something. (I'll never forget Orson Welles talking on Cavett's show about the lawsuits after "War of the Worlds" and the one claim that they actually paid: news shoes for a woman whose heels broke in the middle of a panicked rushing crowd. Trivia to tuck that away for moments such as this one.)
A 19-year-old young woman probably wants to tell the world where she is going and why. Indeed!
My putative fountain of youth was from Lyons, Kansas.
There is such a place. Look it up: I have. Population 3,732 (2000 Census), it is a farming community near a campsite used around 1540 by the expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in his search for the Seven Cities of Gold. (Conquistador: "Where are the Seven Cities of Gold" Indian: "Over there, yonder, can't miss them.")
She was coming to Washington on an internship, she recounted in a voice that seemed to grow squeakier by the moment. My mind computed the political implications and legal ramifications of the word "intern" in the 00's; I didn't like the outcome. But, hell, who's a little airplane flirting going to hurt?
So I asked what kinds of issues she was interested in and what organization she was coming to work for. I rapidly became ever more horrified as she detailed the entire Religious Right's political agenda, as if the entire world agreed, and as the internship sponsor she named one of those neocon organizations that I am sure have "666" carved on their headquarters' entrance.
Of course, I forgot! Nineteen-year-old blondes no longer wear flowers in their flowing tresses as they journey to San Francisco. They're more likely eager to wear jackboots in the Political Gestapo, as they seek to immolate homosexuals and "baby-killers."
And their history! I got a lecture on how conservative John F. Kennedy really was -- never mind that I had actually been alive the day he was shot.
Those blue eyes began to look beady. That smile to seem sinister as I pretended -- oh, how I pretended! -- to be amused. She flicked her hair back, she made eye contact; she was clearly flirting. I was clearly horrified.
Once I managed to steer matters to more neutral topics I found there was little common ground. Neither music, nor literature, nor movies nor even TV (I had a TV then) drew a single connection. Her blonde hair looked ever more bottled.
Then it was her turn. Whether she knew the tricks or was genuinely naive, she charmed with questions about Washington. Cognizant that I was with The Enemy I wasn't exactly eager to help her succeed, yet soon enough she began to remind me of my kids.
That's when the bubble burst and I simply turned into a surrogate father-figure. By the time we got to Washington I pointed her to the right Metro train and was happy to see her, her 19-year-old blonde hair, squeaky voice, beady eyes and neocon views go.
Maybe it's a 91-year-old I should be looking for ... I can talk a good game about FDR, Sinatra, the "Thin Man" series and that bestseller, "The Citadel." Or is my voice too squeaky, my eyes too beady, my views too conventional?
Monday, June 26, 2006
Lynching Words
Perhaps it was the Washington Post story on Sunday about a DWB ("driving while black") horror that primed me, but I was appalled during a taxi ride today to hear a woman recount with alacrity that her son, obviously white, had applied to college describing himself as "African-American."
Let me paint the scene for you.
I have overslept and in a vain attempt to "win the day" and make it in to the office first, I flag down a cabbie whizzing by my building. The female cabbie, one of relatively few in this city, seems a little gruff, but I later discover that what I attribute to personality is merely a choppy foreign accent. Another detail important to this story: she's black, I'm not.
I give her my destination, she starts driving. I take out a novel I am reading and ignore the vehicle until we come to a stop a few blocks later.
In Washington cab drivers can pick up as many as five passengers, so long as no one is taken more than five blocks out of their way. It's common, on the leafy avenue on which I live, for cabbies to cruise their way downtown and slowly fill up their cab. For them it spells the difference between making merely $11 for a 25-minute drive and making up to $55 for more less the same effort.
About five blocks from where I am picked up, a tall, spindly, graying and very pale middle-aged white woman flags my cabbie. She stops, my destination is cited as the priority (first come, first served), the new passenger agrees. She gets in, smelling of mothballs; it is clear that she is not going to work. She seems chatty; I leave the chatting to the two women and dive back into my book.
Before the driver has time to roll up all the windows and turn on the air-conditioning to accommodate the new passenger, the new rider has found the flimsiest of excuses to announce that she once lived in Africa. It turns out the driver is from Liberia and the passenger lived in that West African nation and met every minister and president while she lived there.
There is no question in my mind that Memsahib (the title Indians used for British colonial officers' wives) has no idea how outrageously patronizing she sounds. She quizzes the driver about her family name and origins, just so she can show off that she somehow can identify the driver's tribal origins. Meanwhile she mourns the loss, in the aftermath of a military coup, of what was obviously a mansion in an august neighborhood whose name the driver apparently recognizes.
Then she spouts the detail that arouses my ire.
"My son was born in Africa," she says, "and he applied to college identifying himself as, you'll never guess, ha, ha, 'African-American.' "
I count to ten and decide to ignore this. But the woman won't let it rest. She goes on to blather about how American blacks are not African-American, not like her surely very pale, very white son.
I can resist no longer.
I point out that by identifying himself as "African-American" in college applications her son has taken the place of a descendant of slaves; surely her son has no American slaves among his ancestors. Affirmative action, which I wholeheartedly applaud, exists to redress the deleterious effect of three centuries of slavery and one century of discrimination -- not as the source of amusement of Memsahib.
The uneasy driver, trying to find a middle ground between her passengers, comes to her aid, saying, "of course, the father is black."
"No," says my fellow passenger.
"But you were a missionary," the cabbie adds helpfully, galloping once more unto the breach.
"No," she declared, "we were doing aid work."
I ask with which agency and out tumbles "USAID."
An "aha!" moment dawns. USAID is the Agency for International Development, an agency of the State Department, ostensibly the benign side of U.S. foreign policy in the Third World.
Part of what it really does was depicted in the Costa-Gavras film State of Siege, in which Yves Montand plays the role of USAID agent Dan Mitrione (who is given another name in the movie). Mitrione, a cop and FBI bully, was sent to Brazil (1960-67) and Uruguay (1967-70) as a USAID official, ostensibly to deliver the latest techniques in city traffic control.
Known for saying that torture should inflict "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect," Mitrione made the torture of political prisoners under the military regimes with which he worked a routine and coldly scientific practice until he himself was kidnapped and killed in 1970 by the now-extinct Tupamaro guerrillas.
Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
USAID ... you name it, they've done it: union-smashing, bribing, covert torture-training. Their least harmful works have been to subsidize the export of unneeded and expensive U.S. goods that have ended up ruining local manufacturing and local farmers in developing countries.
All this and more comes cascading through my brain and I realize it is way too much for what remains of the cab ride. Besides, my putative student, the USAID Memsahib, lacks the pre-requisites for U.S. Imperialism 101.
So I try a more direct, personal approach.
"You were a representative of the U.S. government, living at the highest level, far above everyone else. Your son didn't have an iota of the experience of what a real average African lives through," I say. "When he calls himself 'African-American' he is essentially lying and obtaining for himself an opportunity set aside for those much needier than himself whose opportunity was stolen 400 years ago."
To which the woman has two things to say, the relevancy of which the reader will judge: (a) she is Jewish; (b) I am "a pig."
I smile. When the insults spew out, they have no argument to make.
Still, this woman is not alone in this very cosmopolitan Washington, in which so many lead or have led affluent lives abroad (not all for groups as awful as USAID) and now bask in the self-satisfaction that they have bestowed what they conceive of as their superior way of life to people of whom they think fondly, but never quite as equals.
Tucked under the "joke" that her son is "African-American" is the active negation of an identity asserted by American blacks as a part of their communal regeneration. Very much like all the humor about "political correctness" made popular by the neocons, it's a cover for attempting to turn back the clock -- in this case, to the days of Jim Crow.
The net effect is that since lynching black people is not merely illegal but also socially frowned upon, some whites are reduced to lynching words, black words that might give non-whites the idea that maybe they're entitled to a share of power and wealth.
I find it appalling and wrong, precisely because I am white and I am an American.
(This post is retroactively part of Julie Pippert's Hump Day Hmm and BlogRhet's "Let's Talk About Race, Baby" week long initiative.)
Let me paint the scene for you.
I have overslept and in a vain attempt to "win the day" and make it in to the office first, I flag down a cabbie whizzing by my building. The female cabbie, one of relatively few in this city, seems a little gruff, but I later discover that what I attribute to personality is merely a choppy foreign accent. Another detail important to this story: she's black, I'm not.
I give her my destination, she starts driving. I take out a novel I am reading and ignore the vehicle until we come to a stop a few blocks later.
In Washington cab drivers can pick up as many as five passengers, so long as no one is taken more than five blocks out of their way. It's common, on the leafy avenue on which I live, for cabbies to cruise their way downtown and slowly fill up their cab. For them it spells the difference between making merely $11 for a 25-minute drive and making up to $55 for more less the same effort.
About five blocks from where I am picked up, a tall, spindly, graying and very pale middle-aged white woman flags my cabbie. She stops, my destination is cited as the priority (first come, first served), the new passenger agrees. She gets in, smelling of mothballs; it is clear that she is not going to work. She seems chatty; I leave the chatting to the two women and dive back into my book.
Before the driver has time to roll up all the windows and turn on the air-conditioning to accommodate the new passenger, the new rider has found the flimsiest of excuses to announce that she once lived in Africa. It turns out the driver is from Liberia and the passenger lived in that West African nation and met every minister and president while she lived there.
There is no question in my mind that Memsahib (the title Indians used for British colonial officers' wives) has no idea how outrageously patronizing she sounds. She quizzes the driver about her family name and origins, just so she can show off that she somehow can identify the driver's tribal origins. Meanwhile she mourns the loss, in the aftermath of a military coup, of what was obviously a mansion in an august neighborhood whose name the driver apparently recognizes.
Then she spouts the detail that arouses my ire.
"My son was born in Africa," she says, "and he applied to college identifying himself as, you'll never guess, ha, ha, 'African-American.' "
I count to ten and decide to ignore this. But the woman won't let it rest. She goes on to blather about how American blacks are not African-American, not like her surely very pale, very white son.
I can resist no longer.
I point out that by identifying himself as "African-American" in college applications her son has taken the place of a descendant of slaves; surely her son has no American slaves among his ancestors. Affirmative action, which I wholeheartedly applaud, exists to redress the deleterious effect of three centuries of slavery and one century of discrimination -- not as the source of amusement of Memsahib.
The uneasy driver, trying to find a middle ground between her passengers, comes to her aid, saying, "of course, the father is black."
"No," says my fellow passenger.
"But you were a missionary," the cabbie adds helpfully, galloping once more unto the breach.
"No," she declared, "we were doing aid work."
I ask with which agency and out tumbles "USAID."
An "aha!" moment dawns. USAID is the Agency for International Development, an agency of the State Department, ostensibly the benign side of U.S. foreign policy in the Third World.
Part of what it really does was depicted in the Costa-Gavras film State of Siege, in which Yves Montand plays the role of USAID agent Dan Mitrione (who is given another name in the movie). Mitrione, a cop and FBI bully, was sent to Brazil (1960-67) and Uruguay (1967-70) as a USAID official, ostensibly to deliver the latest techniques in city traffic control.
Known for saying that torture should inflict "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect," Mitrione made the torture of political prisoners under the military regimes with which he worked a routine and coldly scientific practice until he himself was kidnapped and killed in 1970 by the now-extinct Tupamaro guerrillas.
Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
USAID ... you name it, they've done it: union-smashing, bribing, covert torture-training. Their least harmful works have been to subsidize the export of unneeded and expensive U.S. goods that have ended up ruining local manufacturing and local farmers in developing countries.
All this and more comes cascading through my brain and I realize it is way too much for what remains of the cab ride. Besides, my putative student, the USAID Memsahib, lacks the pre-requisites for U.S. Imperialism 101.
So I try a more direct, personal approach.
"You were a representative of the U.S. government, living at the highest level, far above everyone else. Your son didn't have an iota of the experience of what a real average African lives through," I say. "When he calls himself 'African-American' he is essentially lying and obtaining for himself an opportunity set aside for those much needier than himself whose opportunity was stolen 400 years ago."
To which the woman has two things to say, the relevancy of which the reader will judge: (a) she is Jewish; (b) I am "a pig."
I smile. When the insults spew out, they have no argument to make.
Still, this woman is not alone in this very cosmopolitan Washington, in which so many lead or have led affluent lives abroad (not all for groups as awful as USAID) and now bask in the self-satisfaction that they have bestowed what they conceive of as their superior way of life to people of whom they think fondly, but never quite as equals.
Tucked under the "joke" that her son is "African-American" is the active negation of an identity asserted by American blacks as a part of their communal regeneration. Very much like all the humor about "political correctness" made popular by the neocons, it's a cover for attempting to turn back the clock -- in this case, to the days of Jim Crow.
The net effect is that since lynching black people is not merely illegal but also socially frowned upon, some whites are reduced to lynching words, black words that might give non-whites the idea that maybe they're entitled to a share of power and wealth.
I find it appalling and wrong, precisely because I am white and I am an American.
(This post is retroactively part of Julie Pippert's Hump Day Hmm and BlogRhet's "Let's Talk About Race, Baby" week long initiative.)
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Love as Capital
A correspondent's inquiries have sparked some thinking about the difference between "falling in love" and "love" and the possible nature of romantic love, starting from the premise that it's the glue between men and women.
To date, to kiss, to fall in love are all components of love. Sometimes it's a coup de foudre, sometimes it's gradual. But they're all one thing. Or are they?
For years I believed that, while love between a man and a woman began with passion and sex, it somehow transmuted into something else "higher," less lustful, more spiritual. Although I was not a son of Calvin or Jansenius, I found Western dualism a hard thing to shake: I'd been taught there is something relatively base (matter) and something much nobler (spirit), and that the spirit lived on long after the matter died and decayed.
The philosophical lineage of these ideas we can leave for another essay, but I will venture that, viscerally at least, they have wide currency. Certainly, children know this:
John and Mary sittin' in a tree
k -i - s -s - i - n -g ...
first comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes a baby in a carriage.
Once there are diapers and schools and homework, out goes the passion, the mystery, the hormonal drive. If a man and woman survive within a marriage, you suppose it is because their love has changed from sizzle into something else entirely different. Charitably you call it companionship.
But in fact, with divorce now normal, this construct falls apart.
There is no "higher" romantic love. Eros will always involve taking leave of one's senses and doing the irrational for reasons of the heart, as Blaise Pascal wrote, that reason does not know.
So falling in love is suspending reason; while loving is, perhaps, persisting in the madness against all evidence to the contrary. Her guffaw, which irritates everyone, is to you a charming little hiccup; his flatulence does not smell.
Does love, then, exhaust itself? Could romantic love be, as my correspondent suggested, an essence stored up as a treasure in limited quantities?
If love is a substance itself, if one distributes it too freely its value drops. Or, as in some traditional cultures, love as capital is expressed in a certain status, such as virginity.
Could you run out of this capital, this essence, could you be forever devalued without a virginity of some sort? Is this what happens to marriages and love affairs? Is love spent out?
If love is capital and falling in love an expenditure of capital. Love might be a gamble -- or an investment.
My heart resists this. Love seems inexhaustible so long as people exist to be loved.
To date, to kiss, to fall in love are all components of love. Sometimes it's a coup de foudre, sometimes it's gradual. But they're all one thing. Or are they?
For years I believed that, while love between a man and a woman began with passion and sex, it somehow transmuted into something else "higher," less lustful, more spiritual. Although I was not a son of Calvin or Jansenius, I found Western dualism a hard thing to shake: I'd been taught there is something relatively base (matter) and something much nobler (spirit), and that the spirit lived on long after the matter died and decayed.
The philosophical lineage of these ideas we can leave for another essay, but I will venture that, viscerally at least, they have wide currency. Certainly, children know this:
John and Mary sittin' in a tree
k -i - s -s - i - n -g ...
first comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes a baby in a carriage.
Once there are diapers and schools and homework, out goes the passion, the mystery, the hormonal drive. If a man and woman survive within a marriage, you suppose it is because their love has changed from sizzle into something else entirely different. Charitably you call it companionship.
But in fact, with divorce now normal, this construct falls apart.
There is no "higher" romantic love. Eros will always involve taking leave of one's senses and doing the irrational for reasons of the heart, as Blaise Pascal wrote, that reason does not know.
So falling in love is suspending reason; while loving is, perhaps, persisting in the madness against all evidence to the contrary. Her guffaw, which irritates everyone, is to you a charming little hiccup; his flatulence does not smell.
Does love, then, exhaust itself? Could romantic love be, as my correspondent suggested, an essence stored up as a treasure in limited quantities?
If love is a substance itself, if one distributes it too freely its value drops. Or, as in some traditional cultures, love as capital is expressed in a certain status, such as virginity.
Could you run out of this capital, this essence, could you be forever devalued without a virginity of some sort? Is this what happens to marriages and love affairs? Is love spent out?
If love is capital and falling in love an expenditure of capital. Love might be a gamble -- or an investment.
My heart resists this. Love seems inexhaustible so long as people exist to be loved.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Slings and Arrows
Nothing reminds me more of the powerlessness of a single individual than sitting down first thing in the morning in a car that refuses to show signs of life no matter how you insert and turn the key in the ignition.
It's not just the helplessness of being unable to displace 1.6 tons of metal and upholstery down the road to the mechanic. Nor is it the patent inability to impress upon roadside assistance staff that waiting for two hours is not really your idea of fun.
Nor is it, finally, the notion that there's really nothing you can do about the frustration but to let it bore holes in the thin veneer of confidence in life you had finally developed.
Shakespeare said this, and so many other things, best:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
As you wait for things to get better, for help to arrive, for someone to show the slightest pity, you begin to think of the myriad ways in which a seemingly vast army fires its slings and arrows at you in daily living.
Think of the phones that don't work, the computer components that weren't right or didn't work out of the box. The bus driver who couldn't be bothered to stop where you wanted, even though you rang the bell. The fellow worker who doesn't care if his sloughing off means you have to work harder.
At every turn the slings and arrows chip away at your armor until one day you lie bleeding, wondering just how long you can hang on all alone.
Do you take it or do you fight? Which do you think is better? What if you lose?
In the end, you know, you'll lose. In the end you'll be aged and alone and no one will understand any of your references, if they bother to try to understand you at all.
It's not just the helplessness of being unable to displace 1.6 tons of metal and upholstery down the road to the mechanic. Nor is it the patent inability to impress upon roadside assistance staff that waiting for two hours is not really your idea of fun.
Nor is it, finally, the notion that there's really nothing you can do about the frustration but to let it bore holes in the thin veneer of confidence in life you had finally developed.
Shakespeare said this, and so many other things, best:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
As you wait for things to get better, for help to arrive, for someone to show the slightest pity, you begin to think of the myriad ways in which a seemingly vast army fires its slings and arrows at you in daily living.
Think of the phones that don't work, the computer components that weren't right or didn't work out of the box. The bus driver who couldn't be bothered to stop where you wanted, even though you rang the bell. The fellow worker who doesn't care if his sloughing off means you have to work harder.
At every turn the slings and arrows chip away at your armor until one day you lie bleeding, wondering just how long you can hang on all alone.
Do you take it or do you fight? Which do you think is better? What if you lose?
In the end, you know, you'll lose. In the end you'll be aged and alone and no one will understand any of your references, if they bother to try to understand you at all.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Saying the L-word
Is there any other word in the English language so fraught with ecstasy, anxiety, depression, thrill, and even hate as the L-word? And no, I don't mean "liberal." I mean the other one, the four-letter L-word: "love," as in "I love you."
Why does it feel as perilous as the nuclear button when it sits on the tip of the tongue, about to roll off into the ether? Why is it so easy to bathe our children and families in it, yet it is so hard to say to a lover?
In its pure, laboratory form, love is great. Walking through flea markets. Repainting your place together with the inevitable dab on the tip of the nose. A trip to Paris.
In real life, love comes alloyed.
Love comes with balls and chains: she wants, he wants ... something that has nothing to do with what you signed up for. And, oh, when did you ever sign up for anything?
Should the guy always say it first? What does it mean when it is said in one of those steamy moments one can't quite describe in a family blog?
What if she doesn't say anything when he says it? Does it mean it's all over?
Some people say it all the time. In one family I know, its members always take leave of one another with the words, "Bye, I love you." The farewell seems to guarantee a warm closure. If the person departing gets hit by a truck, you don't have the angst-ridden remorse of not having declared your affection: he or she knew, at the home's portal, that there was love.
Others are afraid it will lead to legal proceedings.
And what about responding to "I love you"? From my years in newsrooms, where no conversation is private, I've heard many a co-worker's side of the following phone call:
"I love you," she says.
"Me, too," he says, hoping no one realizes what everyone does.
Me, too? OK, so it's a crowded newsroom where you might not want to broadcast your affection.
But what about rewinding to Saturday night, in the wee hours. The traffic outside has died down as has your passion. You turn to her, look in her eyes and say, "I love you." Your heart is racing, a band is playing the Coronation March in your head. You are in bliss.
Then, without skipping a beat, seconds later, she says, "I love you, too." Now you've done it!
You're both in love. Flea markets, remodelling, Paris. Or is it?
Was she too quick? Why didn't she just say, "I love you" (emphasis on "you")?
Is this merely a courtesy? Maybe it's like on those mornings when your parakeet has died, your son's run off with his high school teacher, your car's just blown up in the parking lot. Then someone says, "How are ya?" You reply, "Fine."
"I love you."
"I love you, too."
Maybe we should say "I glove you" just to test the reaction.
Why does it feel as perilous as the nuclear button when it sits on the tip of the tongue, about to roll off into the ether? Why is it so easy to bathe our children and families in it, yet it is so hard to say to a lover?
In its pure, laboratory form, love is great. Walking through flea markets. Repainting your place together with the inevitable dab on the tip of the nose. A trip to Paris.
In real life, love comes alloyed.
Love comes with balls and chains: she wants, he wants ... something that has nothing to do with what you signed up for. And, oh, when did you ever sign up for anything?
Should the guy always say it first? What does it mean when it is said in one of those steamy moments one can't quite describe in a family blog?
What if she doesn't say anything when he says it? Does it mean it's all over?
Some people say it all the time. In one family I know, its members always take leave of one another with the words, "Bye, I love you." The farewell seems to guarantee a warm closure. If the person departing gets hit by a truck, you don't have the angst-ridden remorse of not having declared your affection: he or she knew, at the home's portal, that there was love.
Others are afraid it will lead to legal proceedings.
And what about responding to "I love you"? From my years in newsrooms, where no conversation is private, I've heard many a co-worker's side of the following phone call:
"I love you," she says.
"Me, too," he says, hoping no one realizes what everyone does.
Me, too? OK, so it's a crowded newsroom where you might not want to broadcast your affection.
But what about rewinding to Saturday night, in the wee hours. The traffic outside has died down as has your passion. You turn to her, look in her eyes and say, "I love you." Your heart is racing, a band is playing the Coronation March in your head. You are in bliss.
Then, without skipping a beat, seconds later, she says, "I love you, too." Now you've done it!
You're both in love. Flea markets, remodelling, Paris. Or is it?
Was she too quick? Why didn't she just say, "I love you" (emphasis on "you")?
Is this merely a courtesy? Maybe it's like on those mornings when your parakeet has died, your son's run off with his high school teacher, your car's just blown up in the parking lot. Then someone says, "How are ya?" You reply, "Fine."
"I love you."
"I love you, too."
Maybe we should say "I glove you" just to test the reaction.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Happy Father's Day, Andy Brown
I have just finished watching the pilot episode of the television show that eased my way to healing my "distraught heart." That's the term the narrator and one-man Greek chorus uses for the malady afflicting the main character, Dr. Andy Brown (Treat Williams), when told the good doctor speaks out loud to his dead wife.
The show is Everwood, a family drama set in an eponymous fictional town in Colorado, to which world-renown neurosurgeon Brown has moved from New York City with his son Ephram (Gregory Smith) and daughter Delia (Vivien Cardone) after the death of his wife Julia (Brenda Strong) in a car accident. In the picture above, from left to right: Ephram; Dr. Abbott the local doctor (Tom Amandes), jock son Bright (Chris Pratt); Delia; Andy; Amy Abbott, Ephram's love interest (Emily Van Camp).
Throughout the show, the most powerful character for me was the affable, sometimes corny, always quick-with-a-quip Andy. The character is fiftyish, only a year younger than me, yet often enough I adopted him as my role model. I ached as he attempted to communicate with his concert-piano genius son, he engaged in rediscovering love in middle age, attempted to grapple with his own demons and those of others, even as he made a fool of himself.
This particular drama never topped the charts through the four years that it ran before its last episode on June 5, but it was the top of my "must see" TV for two and a half of those years. It was, however, a show that delivered to TV-land the two essential actresses of the top-rated Desperate Housewives. Wisteria Lane's deceased Alice, whose death and narrator role set off the first season of Dantesque desperation, played in an earlier incarnation, so to speak, none other than Andy Brown's Julia. Similarly, Marsha Cross was Dr. Abbott's HIV-infected sister before she was Bree Van De Kamp.
But as narrator Irv (John Besley) might have said in Everwood, you could find out that and more anywhere else.
My interest in Everwood arose in a particular way. For 25 years I had not had a television; then I bought my first color TV in the middle of Everwood's second season in the winter of 2003.
Like Everwood's Andy Brown, I suffered from a distraught heart. My wife had left after 27 years of marriage and I was living in an emotional haze as confusing as Andy's and with difficulties communicating with my younger son that rivaled his own struggle with the sarcastic, often cutting Ephram. Amid the disintegration of my family, I was ripe for the picking of any television producer with a clever way to pluck at the heartstrings.
No surprise, then, that when I found Everwood, it became my sacrament, my therapy and my most precious entertainment. Case in point: I was asked to serve on the board of a nonprofit for which I volunteered and only agreed when I found out that board meetings did not coincide with the show.
My first viewing of the pilot came later, when I was given the boxed set of the first season, which had begun in 2001. For one summer I eased my Everwood-withdrawal with the episodes I had never seen before.
My viewing it again on Father's Day this year -- today -- probably has something to do with my knowledge that Andy and Ephram, who started out so rough with each other in the Oedipal struggle depicted in the pilot, gave me hope. Over the years they eventually talked things out, and as Andy stabilized and Ephram matured, they came to have a worthy relationship.
It's a hope that has not come to fruition in my life yet. Today, neither of my sons has called nor written. (Really, it's not their fault, even though it's a symptom: their mother, in a classic case of pre-emptive rejection, banned the celebration of Mother's Day; the now-grown children's assumption was that I felt the same way, even though I do not, see here.)
Nor am I on the path to a final romantic resolution, all tied with a bow as TV could do in the final episode, when Andy finally wooed the woman we've all been cheering for him to connect with.
Still, two weeks ago, when the camera panned away from the final kisses and embraces, to reveal the sleeping town of Everwood in its last night, I wished I could go there once again one day. Alas, I can't. There is no Everwood; the show, indeed its network, has been cancelled.
But I can still spend Father's Day with my favorite father and wish Andy, wherever he is, a well-deserved day.
The show is Everwood, a family drama set in an eponymous fictional town in Colorado, to which world-renown neurosurgeon Brown has moved from New York City with his son Ephram (Gregory Smith) and daughter Delia (Vivien Cardone) after the death of his wife Julia (Brenda Strong) in a car accident. In the picture above, from left to right: Ephram; Dr. Abbott the local doctor (Tom Amandes), jock son Bright (Chris Pratt); Delia; Andy; Amy Abbott, Ephram's love interest (Emily Van Camp).Throughout the show, the most powerful character for me was the affable, sometimes corny, always quick-with-a-quip Andy. The character is fiftyish, only a year younger than me, yet often enough I adopted him as my role model. I ached as he attempted to communicate with his concert-piano genius son, he engaged in rediscovering love in middle age, attempted to grapple with his own demons and those of others, even as he made a fool of himself.
This particular drama never topped the charts through the four years that it ran before its last episode on June 5, but it was the top of my "must see" TV for two and a half of those years. It was, however, a show that delivered to TV-land the two essential actresses of the top-rated Desperate Housewives. Wisteria Lane's deceased Alice, whose death and narrator role set off the first season of Dantesque desperation, played in an earlier incarnation, so to speak, none other than Andy Brown's Julia. Similarly, Marsha Cross was Dr. Abbott's HIV-infected sister before she was Bree Van De Kamp.
But as narrator Irv (John Besley) might have said in Everwood, you could find out that and more anywhere else.
My interest in Everwood arose in a particular way. For 25 years I had not had a television; then I bought my first color TV in the middle of Everwood's second season in the winter of 2003.
Like Everwood's Andy Brown, I suffered from a distraught heart. My wife had left after 27 years of marriage and I was living in an emotional haze as confusing as Andy's and with difficulties communicating with my younger son that rivaled his own struggle with the sarcastic, often cutting Ephram. Amid the disintegration of my family, I was ripe for the picking of any television producer with a clever way to pluck at the heartstrings.
No surprise, then, that when I found Everwood, it became my sacrament, my therapy and my most precious entertainment. Case in point: I was asked to serve on the board of a nonprofit for which I volunteered and only agreed when I found out that board meetings did not coincide with the show.
My first viewing of the pilot came later, when I was given the boxed set of the first season, which had begun in 2001. For one summer I eased my Everwood-withdrawal with the episodes I had never seen before.
My viewing it again on Father's Day this year -- today -- probably has something to do with my knowledge that Andy and Ephram, who started out so rough with each other in the Oedipal struggle depicted in the pilot, gave me hope. Over the years they eventually talked things out, and as Andy stabilized and Ephram matured, they came to have a worthy relationship.
It's a hope that has not come to fruition in my life yet. Today, neither of my sons has called nor written. (Really, it's not their fault, even though it's a symptom: their mother, in a classic case of pre-emptive rejection, banned the celebration of Mother's Day; the now-grown children's assumption was that I felt the same way, even though I do not, see here.)
Nor am I on the path to a final romantic resolution, all tied with a bow as TV could do in the final episode, when Andy finally wooed the woman we've all been cheering for him to connect with.
Still, two weeks ago, when the camera panned away from the final kisses and embraces, to reveal the sleeping town of Everwood in its last night, I wished I could go there once again one day. Alas, I can't. There is no Everwood; the show, indeed its network, has been cancelled.
But I can still spend Father's Day with my favorite father and wish Andy, wherever he is, a well-deserved day.
Monday, June 12, 2006
If I Founded a Religion
If I founded a new religion, it would be like one of those novels in which the protagonist struggles, yet in the end sees a new and better life ahead, one wrought by a transformation full of insight.
What do I mean? Let's see ...
In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, mile-high military absurdity ends in the quiet triumph of a secondary character who succeeds, in an uncanny, unbelievably impossible way, at finding a path out of war. The story ends with the reader's laughter at the thought that all is possible. Pity Heller had only one good novel in him -- but, hey, that's more than most of us.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams have a similar breakout feel to them. Whether it's escaping Nurse Ratched or humdrum life on this planet, both transport the reader to new possibilities. Of course, On The Road by Jack Kerouac does the Route 66 version.
Considerably less action packed, the tale of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, lends itself to a cinematic happy ending as Franco Zeffirelli discovered in making his 1996 adaptation.
Then there's the ironic touch of Fifth Business, the first of the Deptford trilogy by Canadian writer Robertson Davies. I was reading this novel the day my younger son was born. The entire trilogy is a deeply Jungian exploration suitable, of course, for religious mythmaking. Although there isn't a happy ending, the final insight turns the story inside out, leaving that "to be continued ..." feel of a good myth that never really ends.
I closed the book, called the hospital and learned that mother and son were well.
But perhaps the style of mythmaking I like best is that of John Irving. I particularly liked The Hotel New Hampshire, which was poorly received by critics, and The World According To Garp, the novel that made him rich. All of Irving's novels have a gentle ironic humor as his plots pile on a cast of oddballs in situations that are often grotesque -- as life really is.
But the pain is always meaningful, even though rarely in the way those who inflict it think it is, and, again counterintuitively to the conventional thinker, the pain often leads to conversion and redemption, as in the beloved work A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Why haven't I launched a religion, then ...? That's easy.
I find that I am more often than not mired at the beginning of my plot (and humanity's, really), or too far from that final insight. Or else I am at the end of reality, with nowhere to go, as in trummer-literatur (rubble literature) of my favorite author, Heinrich Böll.
A Nobel laureate, Böll was a German Catholic whose pacifist family was resolutely opposed to the Nazis. Unlike the present pope, Böll managed to avoid enrollment in the Hitler Youth; but even Böll could not avoid being drafted into the Wehrmacht (army).
He was sent to fight in Russia, where he was wounded (inspiration for the novella "The Train Was On Time," which revolves around the thoughts of a soldier returning to his unit on the Eastern Front). He was rotated to the fortifications of France and was captured during the Normandy invasion. Eventually he was repatriated to his native city of Köln, then bombed out, much as the settings of so many of his stories and novels.
Indeed, his "last" novel was his first, "The Silent Angel," published nine years after his death. The work is set in an unnamed smoldering German city right after defeat in May 1945; an army deserter, Hans Schnitzler, searches the widow of his fallen comrade Willy to give her the man's greatcoat, which contains an important note in its pocket.
An excerpt:
The priest was startled to see a figure suddenly rise before him, his thin yet swollen face grimaced nervously, and he clutched his hands around the thick hymnal.
"I beg your pardon," said Hans. "Could you give me something to eat?"
His gaze wandered across the priest's sloping shoulders, past his large ears, to the square in front of the church: old trees in bloom, their trunks half buried in rubble.
"Of course," he heard the priest say. The voice was hoarse and weak, and now he looked at him. He had a peasant's face, thin and strong, a thick nose, and remarkably beautiful eyes.
"Of course," he said again. "Will you wait here?"
"Yes." Hans sat down again. He was amazed. He'd made the request because it occurred to him that the priest would have to try to help him, but he was amazed to find that someone actually existed who would agree without hesitation to give him something to eat.
I find we are all similarly stunned.
What do I mean? Let's see ...
In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, mile-high military absurdity ends in the quiet triumph of a secondary character who succeeds, in an uncanny, unbelievably impossible way, at finding a path out of war. The story ends with the reader's laughter at the thought that all is possible. Pity Heller had only one good novel in him -- but, hey, that's more than most of us.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams have a similar breakout feel to them. Whether it's escaping Nurse Ratched or humdrum life on this planet, both transport the reader to new possibilities. Of course, On The Road by Jack Kerouac does the Route 66 version.
Considerably less action packed, the tale of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, lends itself to a cinematic happy ending as Franco Zeffirelli discovered in making his 1996 adaptation.
Then there's the ironic touch of Fifth Business, the first of the Deptford trilogy by Canadian writer Robertson Davies. I was reading this novel the day my younger son was born. The entire trilogy is a deeply Jungian exploration suitable, of course, for religious mythmaking. Although there isn't a happy ending, the final insight turns the story inside out, leaving that "to be continued ..." feel of a good myth that never really ends.
I closed the book, called the hospital and learned that mother and son were well.
But perhaps the style of mythmaking I like best is that of John Irving. I particularly liked The Hotel New Hampshire, which was poorly received by critics, and The World According To Garp, the novel that made him rich. All of Irving's novels have a gentle ironic humor as his plots pile on a cast of oddballs in situations that are often grotesque -- as life really is.
But the pain is always meaningful, even though rarely in the way those who inflict it think it is, and, again counterintuitively to the conventional thinker, the pain often leads to conversion and redemption, as in the beloved work A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Why haven't I launched a religion, then ...? That's easy.
I find that I am more often than not mired at the beginning of my plot (and humanity's, really), or too far from that final insight. Or else I am at the end of reality, with nowhere to go, as in trummer-literatur (rubble literature) of my favorite author, Heinrich Böll.
A Nobel laureate, Böll was a German Catholic whose pacifist family was resolutely opposed to the Nazis. Unlike the present pope, Böll managed to avoid enrollment in the Hitler Youth; but even Böll could not avoid being drafted into the Wehrmacht (army).
He was sent to fight in Russia, where he was wounded (inspiration for the novella "The Train Was On Time," which revolves around the thoughts of a soldier returning to his unit on the Eastern Front). He was rotated to the fortifications of France and was captured during the Normandy invasion. Eventually he was repatriated to his native city of Köln, then bombed out, much as the settings of so many of his stories and novels.
Indeed, his "last" novel was his first, "The Silent Angel," published nine years after his death. The work is set in an unnamed smoldering German city right after defeat in May 1945; an army deserter, Hans Schnitzler, searches the widow of his fallen comrade Willy to give her the man's greatcoat, which contains an important note in its pocket.
An excerpt:
The priest was startled to see a figure suddenly rise before him, his thin yet swollen face grimaced nervously, and he clutched his hands around the thick hymnal.
"I beg your pardon," said Hans. "Could you give me something to eat?"
His gaze wandered across the priest's sloping shoulders, past his large ears, to the square in front of the church: old trees in bloom, their trunks half buried in rubble.
"Of course," he heard the priest say. The voice was hoarse and weak, and now he looked at him. He had a peasant's face, thin and strong, a thick nose, and remarkably beautiful eyes.
"Of course," he said again. "Will you wait here?"
"Yes." Hans sat down again. He was amazed. He'd made the request because it occurred to him that the priest would have to try to help him, but he was amazed to find that someone actually existed who would agree without hesitation to give him something to eat.
I find we are all similarly stunned.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Straw Man
Missing from the hoopla over the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the fact that there was no such insurgency, nor much less Al-Qaeda influence, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. All of it stems from a U.S. invasion and occupation based on George W. Bush's lies.
So, in effect, Bush has simply destroyed the straw man he set up as a whipping boy for his right-wing voters. You know, the gullible guys (they're mostly guys) who are now cheering as if this were a football game.
The next shoe to drop -- wait for it -- will be when the Bushies spring a "surprise" attack on Osama bin Laden in October, as close as possible to congressional elections ... or is Osama being saved as the October surprise of the 2008 presidential election?
Everybody does know that the Bushies are saving Osama for the best news cycle propaganda-wise, right?
This isn't historical drama: it's a transparent ploy by a president whose war policy is opposed by two-thirds of the electorate.
In fact, already the conventional analysts are saying they don't expect the insurgency to abate one whit. Although they claim to be Christian, the Bushies forget the lesson of the 2nd century writer Tertullian, who wrote, "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church."
Indeed, according to the Jerusalem Post, Al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri has proclaimed al-Zarqawi a martyr. "God bless the prophet of Islam in Iraq, the persistent hero of Islam, the Holy Warriors Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," al-Zawahri said, "who are confronting crusaders and their apostate aids and the merchants of religion."
Not only is there no abatement, but the Al-Qaeda no. 2 is calling for a rejection of a Palestinian referendum and for more violence in Darfur in response to UN intervention. "I call upon every Muslim and everyone who has faith in Sudan, and every fervent Muslim in Darfur to confront the Zionist Crusader plot to occupy the lands of Islam," he said.
Far from solving anything, this new murder dressed up as an act of bravado and bluster, will ensure that "mission accomplished" will be the last thing ever said of Bush's misadventure in Iraq.
So, in effect, Bush has simply destroyed the straw man he set up as a whipping boy for his right-wing voters. You know, the gullible guys (they're mostly guys) who are now cheering as if this were a football game.
The next shoe to drop -- wait for it -- will be when the Bushies spring a "surprise" attack on Osama bin Laden in October, as close as possible to congressional elections ... or is Osama being saved as the October surprise of the 2008 presidential election?
Everybody does know that the Bushies are saving Osama for the best news cycle propaganda-wise, right?
This isn't historical drama: it's a transparent ploy by a president whose war policy is opposed by two-thirds of the electorate.
In fact, already the conventional analysts are saying they don't expect the insurgency to abate one whit. Although they claim to be Christian, the Bushies forget the lesson of the 2nd century writer Tertullian, who wrote, "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church."
Indeed, according to the Jerusalem Post, Al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri has proclaimed al-Zarqawi a martyr. "God bless the prophet of Islam in Iraq, the persistent hero of Islam, the Holy Warriors Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," al-Zawahri said, "who are confronting crusaders and their apostate aids and the merchants of religion."
Not only is there no abatement, but the Al-Qaeda no. 2 is calling for a rejection of a Palestinian referendum and for more violence in Darfur in response to UN intervention. "I call upon every Muslim and everyone who has faith in Sudan, and every fervent Muslim in Darfur to confront the Zionist Crusader plot to occupy the lands of Islam," he said.
Far from solving anything, this new murder dressed up as an act of bravado and bluster, will ensure that "mission accomplished" will be the last thing ever said of Bush's misadventure in Iraq.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
The Real Dangerous Border
God bless those Canucks, they've made my point for me: the dangerous border lies north of us, not south. Someone, give George Bush a compass, please!
No less than 50 Al-Qaeda connected folks have been discovered trying to cross from Canada into the United States, all of them with nefarious purposes. That's not counting the bunch just detained in the vicinity of Toronto.
How many along the Rio Grande? None. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
That's not because the northern border is more fiercely defended. It is not. I have crossed it many times and have seen teenagers allowed into the United States on the strength of the names handwritten on their school notebooks. Or, in the reverse, I have witnessed disheveled folk with no sign of a gainful occupation accepted into Canada as landed immigrants on the hunch of a border inspector.
Granted, most of that was 30 years ago. However, some of it was just after 9/11.
In comparable times, I crossed into Mexico and back. What a difference! Guard dogs, inspections of everything imaginable, questions, questions, questions. Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin had nothing over the Tortilla Curtain.
What's the difference? Come on, take one guess ... yes, that's it!
I admit it. Swarthy Alfonso Queda from Suchitlan, Mexico, whose great-great-grandmother some hundred times removed was probably raped by a Muslim invader of medieval Spain, likely looks a lot like good old Al Qaeda. Certainly more than beefy pink, red-headed Al Caton from Hamilton, Ontario.
Yet Osama's operatives don't appear to have chosen the southern route.
Who wants to wander aimlessly through a desert in areas in which even experienced people native to the region die of thirst? (No 70 virgins await you in Muslim heaven for that.)
Moreover, what university educated Muslim, fanatical though he may be, wants to have to hide among the most downtrodden people in the U.S. Southwest, in slums surrounded by the most bigoted kickers in the whole country?
Finally, courtesy of what once was called the British Commonwealth, loads more people from Muslim countries have links to someone in Canada than to anyone in Mexico. (In fact, Osama's grievances would probably be directed squarely and accurately at his own home-grown pashas, rather than the West, had it not been for a century or three of British mischief in the Near East -- but that's a thought for another post.)
In the end, the conclusion is all the same: the "homeland security" angle to "immigration reform" is just so much hot air and pandering to the GOP's bigot base.
Ask Osama, G-men, if you don't trust me. (Oh, wait, I forgot ... you guys let him get away!)
No less than 50 Al-Qaeda connected folks have been discovered trying to cross from Canada into the United States, all of them with nefarious purposes. That's not counting the bunch just detained in the vicinity of Toronto.
How many along the Rio Grande? None. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
That's not because the northern border is more fiercely defended. It is not. I have crossed it many times and have seen teenagers allowed into the United States on the strength of the names handwritten on their school notebooks. Or, in the reverse, I have witnessed disheveled folk with no sign of a gainful occupation accepted into Canada as landed immigrants on the hunch of a border inspector.
Granted, most of that was 30 years ago. However, some of it was just after 9/11.
In comparable times, I crossed into Mexico and back. What a difference! Guard dogs, inspections of everything imaginable, questions, questions, questions. Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin had nothing over the Tortilla Curtain.
What's the difference? Come on, take one guess ... yes, that's it!
I admit it. Swarthy Alfonso Queda from Suchitlan, Mexico, whose great-great-grandmother some hundred times removed was probably raped by a Muslim invader of medieval Spain, likely looks a lot like good old Al Qaeda. Certainly more than beefy pink, red-headed Al Caton from Hamilton, Ontario.
Yet Osama's operatives don't appear to have chosen the southern route.
Who wants to wander aimlessly through a desert in areas in which even experienced people native to the region die of thirst? (No 70 virgins await you in Muslim heaven for that.)
Moreover, what university educated Muslim, fanatical though he may be, wants to have to hide among the most downtrodden people in the U.S. Southwest, in slums surrounded by the most bigoted kickers in the whole country?
Finally, courtesy of what once was called the British Commonwealth, loads more people from Muslim countries have links to someone in Canada than to anyone in Mexico. (In fact, Osama's grievances would probably be directed squarely and accurately at his own home-grown pashas, rather than the West, had it not been for a century or three of British mischief in the Near East -- but that's a thought for another post.)
In the end, the conclusion is all the same: the "homeland security" angle to "immigration reform" is just so much hot air and pandering to the GOP's bigot base.
Ask Osama, G-men, if you don't trust me. (Oh, wait, I forgot ... you guys let him get away!)
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Confessions of a "Futbol" Hater
For the eight and a half years that I lived in Argentina, when I was between the ages of 9 and 17, whenever a soccer championship approached I fervently requested of the Divinity that the national, or most popular, team ... lose.
Why was I such a heretic in soccer-mad Argentina at the age that most boys are fans, not foes, of sport? Let me count the whys.
Because when the favored local team beats a rival the fans come out in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
Because when the leading team then wins a regional or national league championship, even more fans, some from the team's defeated following, come out in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
Because when a national selection team wins an international championship, the Libertadores de America Cup or the World Cup, out come millions of people (in addition to the regular fans of particular teams), people who have never even imagined the feel of a soccer ball's leather, in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
What's my beef with sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves?
First of all, they all claim "we" won.
Speak for yourself, masked man. "We" didn't win anything. The people who won are the 11 men who trained a lot. Unfortunately, these are the same fools who, when someone puts a microphone in front of them (hugely bad idea), come up with gems such as: "We played hard and the other team fought hard too, but I guess we had better spirit."
Pro-found! One point for soccer players over American football players: they don't say "dee-fence." But that's because Americans have essentially stunk at soccer so far and are light-years away from making a dent in the sport.
Second, when it gets international, soccer becomes the worst instigator of hate-a-thons.
Argentines call Brazilians names, racism pops up, bloody dictatorships prop themselves up; there's even one recorded war (Honduras-El Salvador, 1969) set off by an international soccer match. (Trivia: Hondurans expelled all the Salvadoran immigrants and found themselves suddenly lacking mayors, watchmakers, cobblers, essential folk; the Salvadorans are known in Central America as the hardiest, rise-to-the-top folks in the region.)
Thirdly, like almost every commercialized sport, soccer promotes illiteracy and stupidity and big soccer events simply impose both on the majority, fans or not.
Take the term "fútbol," as the sport is called in South America. It comes from "football," which is what the English youths who brought the sport called it in the 1880s. But then there's "orsaid" (or-SYDE), for off-side and a whole variety of sandlot Spanglish that makes the players look even more illiterate than they are already.
Of course, to folks as poor as Brazil's legendary Pelé once was, futbol has been the path to upward mobility, much the way basketball remains in South Central LA, South Side Chicago, Harlem or Anacostia. But think of the millions of shattered dreams!
Fine, you may say that my attitude is a betrayal of guydom, that maybe I just didn't get the "sports gene" all guys get. Guilty as charged! My sons never had my competition for the sports pages.
In the next two months I intend to studiously avoid all talk, broadcast or news of the FIFA World Cup. I can't stand futbol!
Why was I such a heretic in soccer-mad Argentina at the age that most boys are fans, not foes, of sport? Let me count the whys.
Because when the favored local team beats a rival the fans come out in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
Because when the leading team then wins a regional or national league championship, even more fans, some from the team's defeated following, come out in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
Because when a national selection team wins an international championship, the Libertadores de America Cup or the World Cup, out come millions of people (in addition to the regular fans of particular teams), people who have never even imagined the feel of a soccer ball's leather, in sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves.
What's my beef with sweaty, smelly, noisy droves honking cars, blocking traffic, making an absolute nuisance of themselves?
First of all, they all claim "we" won.
Speak for yourself, masked man. "We" didn't win anything. The people who won are the 11 men who trained a lot. Unfortunately, these are the same fools who, when someone puts a microphone in front of them (hugely bad idea), come up with gems such as: "We played hard and the other team fought hard too, but I guess we had better spirit."
Pro-found! One point for soccer players over American football players: they don't say "dee-fence." But that's because Americans have essentially stunk at soccer so far and are light-years away from making a dent in the sport.
Second, when it gets international, soccer becomes the worst instigator of hate-a-thons.
Argentines call Brazilians names, racism pops up, bloody dictatorships prop themselves up; there's even one recorded war (Honduras-El Salvador, 1969) set off by an international soccer match. (Trivia: Hondurans expelled all the Salvadoran immigrants and found themselves suddenly lacking mayors, watchmakers, cobblers, essential folk; the Salvadorans are known in Central America as the hardiest, rise-to-the-top folks in the region.)
Thirdly, like almost every commercialized sport, soccer promotes illiteracy and stupidity and big soccer events simply impose both on the majority, fans or not.
Take the term "fútbol," as the sport is called in South America. It comes from "football," which is what the English youths who brought the sport called it in the 1880s. But then there's "orsaid" (or-SYDE), for off-side and a whole variety of sandlot Spanglish that makes the players look even more illiterate than they are already.
Of course, to folks as poor as Brazil's legendary Pelé once was, futbol has been the path to upward mobility, much the way basketball remains in South Central LA, South Side Chicago, Harlem or Anacostia. But think of the millions of shattered dreams!
Fine, you may say that my attitude is a betrayal of guydom, that maybe I just didn't get the "sports gene" all guys get. Guilty as charged! My sons never had my competition for the sports pages.
In the next two months I intend to studiously avoid all talk, broadcast or news of the FIFA World Cup. I can't stand futbol!
Friday, June 02, 2006
The Idiot
Friday afternoon, minutes to closing. I'm sick, trying to supervise my company via e-mail. Then I learn that someone has committed a devastating error: he has e-mailed proprietary internal information to all our customers, instead of our publications.
I am surrounded by idiots!
Two people checked this. One was less experienced than the other, his oversight is forgivable. But the other, who has been setting up this routine e-mail for five years, what is his excuse?
I would like to put him in front of a firing squad, then have the squad shoot and miss killing him, the way the French did in Madrid when Napoleon invaded Spain.
(People talk about the "cruel Spanish," but no one ever mentions the round-the-clock summary executions by the French in Madrid, with firing squads so exhausted that they routinely missed and left people bleeding to death for as long as three days.)
OK, so I won't execute anybody.
Instead, let me ponder the idiot for a moment. The Greek idiotes had nothing to do with the 19th- and early 20th-century common word for a condition now called "profound mental retardation."
To the Greeks, the word was more closely connected with the name that Sigmund Freud gave to the unconscious center of very basic, visceral desires, such as hunger, rage, and sex. I'm referring, of course, to the Id.
(Yes, yes, the Greeks didn't develop scientific theory about the unconscious, but their art and culture showed an intution of it, much as Fyodor Dostoevsky explained guilt with pristine clarity 40 years before Freud came along. This is why Nietzsche was absolutely right in calling Greece the cradle of every archetype in Western thought. But I digress.)
The Greeks believed that democracy could only thrive if people participated in public life and concerned themselves with the interests of the community. Those who focused too intensely on their own self-interests without regard for the commonwealth were called, you guessed, idiotes. The selfish idiot made bad decisions for the community and eventually his incompetence is what stuck to the word, instead of the original selfishness.
The ancient Greek sense of an idiot explains perfectly well what is going on in our economy and our society. Everywhere incompetence reigns supreme, from the White House to the tradesmen that service your house.
Indeed, yesterday a military helicopter crash in perfectly good weather killed four people in Georgia. So I searched for military helicopter crashes and got over 4.8 million hits. Crashes in Georgia, in Iraq, in California, everywhere.
There's even a Web site for military humor with a whole category of jokes about helicopter crashes!
Based on an actual 1995 purchase by the Royal Air Force of Chinook helicopters similar to the one crashed in Georgia, I'm guessing that each one of these babies costs about $60 million.
So, ha, ha, funny, a group of 20-somethings piloting the craft, or a group of 40-somethings who built it or maintained it, just wasted $60 million of our tax dollars! (And let's not forget the human loss.)
When you observe the self-serving leadership and the self-serving tradesmen and the self-serving military incompetents and all the idiotes that seemingly have taken over, is it such a mystery that everything is going so wrong everywhere?
At the core, incompetence flourishes because we have lost attentiveness to detail, caring, pride in one's work, or a genuine interest in the effect of one's behavior on the community at large. The citizenry and the mass of employees have become atomized Ids, looking after their primal urges and little else.
The company be damned, the taxpayer be screwed, the nation go to hell, the world ... the world doesn't even exist to the Id.
I am surrounded by idiots!
Two people checked this. One was less experienced than the other, his oversight is forgivable. But the other, who has been setting up this routine e-mail for five years, what is his excuse?
I would like to put him in front of a firing squad, then have the squad shoot and miss killing him, the way the French did in Madrid when Napoleon invaded Spain.
(People talk about the "cruel Spanish," but no one ever mentions the round-the-clock summary executions by the French in Madrid, with firing squads so exhausted that they routinely missed and left people bleeding to death for as long as three days.)
OK, so I won't execute anybody.
Instead, let me ponder the idiot for a moment. The Greek idiotes had nothing to do with the 19th- and early 20th-century common word for a condition now called "profound mental retardation."
To the Greeks, the word was more closely connected with the name that Sigmund Freud gave to the unconscious center of very basic, visceral desires, such as hunger, rage, and sex. I'm referring, of course, to the Id.
(Yes, yes, the Greeks didn't develop scientific theory about the unconscious, but their art and culture showed an intution of it, much as Fyodor Dostoevsky explained guilt with pristine clarity 40 years before Freud came along. This is why Nietzsche was absolutely right in calling Greece the cradle of every archetype in Western thought. But I digress.)
The Greeks believed that democracy could only thrive if people participated in public life and concerned themselves with the interests of the community. Those who focused too intensely on their own self-interests without regard for the commonwealth were called, you guessed, idiotes. The selfish idiot made bad decisions for the community and eventually his incompetence is what stuck to the word, instead of the original selfishness.
The ancient Greek sense of an idiot explains perfectly well what is going on in our economy and our society. Everywhere incompetence reigns supreme, from the White House to the tradesmen that service your house.
Indeed, yesterday a military helicopter crash in perfectly good weather killed four people in Georgia. So I searched for military helicopter crashes and got over 4.8 million hits. Crashes in Georgia, in Iraq, in California, everywhere.
There's even a Web site for military humor with a whole category of jokes about helicopter crashes!
Based on an actual 1995 purchase by the Royal Air Force of Chinook helicopters similar to the one crashed in Georgia, I'm guessing that each one of these babies costs about $60 million.
So, ha, ha, funny, a group of 20-somethings piloting the craft, or a group of 40-somethings who built it or maintained it, just wasted $60 million of our tax dollars! (And let's not forget the human loss.)
When you observe the self-serving leadership and the self-serving tradesmen and the self-serving military incompetents and all the idiotes that seemingly have taken over, is it such a mystery that everything is going so wrong everywhere?
At the core, incompetence flourishes because we have lost attentiveness to detail, caring, pride in one's work, or a genuine interest in the effect of one's behavior on the community at large. The citizenry and the mass of employees have become atomized Ids, looking after their primal urges and little else.
The company be damned, the taxpayer be screwed, the nation go to hell, the world ... the world doesn't even exist to the Id.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Time Machine
I am sick. Sore throat. Coughing. Sputtering. Sneezing. Mild fever.
Remember when you were a kid? You could take a day off from school, lie in bed and mother would bring you cookies and puzzles?
I want a time machine.
Remember when you were a kid? You could take a day off from school, lie in bed and mother would bring you cookies and puzzles?
I want a time machine.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Man-time, Woman-time
Have you ever found yourself in a conversation with someone of the opposite sex about your relationship with this person (sigh!)? If they're talking of their future together, he is thinking of next week and she is looking to that distant time in which they'll both be rocking their chairs on a porch.
You have entered (clear throat, put on Rod Serling voice) the man-time, woman-time zone.
Time isn't an absolute. As a reporter I learned there's journalist time, for example. You're a reporter, you go interview people or you go to the scene of the fire, whatever. You go back, write the story and move on. Next morning a reader picking up the paper exclaims: "Look at that, Martha, the old train depot on the other side of town burned down!" That's the public's news; your news as a reporter is the story that will come out the following day. So journalism time is always ahead of public time.
OK, you'll say that with 24/7 Internet coverage that's a thing of the past. Still, face it, the news you're reading in the fastest news site is "olds" to the reporter who wrote it five minutes ago, who is now working on the story you'll read several hours or days from now. The reporter is always a step ahead.
Much the same happens with men and women. At that first long, warm kiss, the guy is wondering what she'll be like in bed on the third, seventh or umpteenth date; the woman is designing her future bridesmaids' outfits.
That's not just because guys tend not to think of marriage, but merely a function of how far ahead they each think.
In one group of which I am a member, women have to be told that they can't sign up for an event a month ahead, while organizers find themselves pleading with men to RSVP at least two days before.
Why is that? I'm not exactly sure.
Part of this may have to do, of course, with a difference in time pressures. A study published some time ago in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that while women and men had similar amounts of free time in 1975, by 1998 women had 30 minutes less leisure time per day than men.
However, last fall the Bureau of Labor Statistics' second annual American Time Use Survey revealed that women spend an average 42 minutes a day more than men caring for children and their households, while men spend 34 minutes a day more on the job. The net yield is that women's leisure time is, on average, 8 minutes shorter every day.
Deborah Tannen, author of several books on the differences in male and female behavior, focuses on qualitative distinctions. Women spend more energy connecting with others, men spend more energy focused on particular tasks that may or may not involve others.
We're still at sea as to why the different perception and use of time -- much less what to do about it. I suppose first comes awareness of the difference, which of course is somewhat stereotypical and need not apply to every last individual man or woman.
It helps to know that when I think future and she thinks future, we mean entirely two different things. My inclination is to deal with the immediate before the long-range.
"In the long range we're all dead," remarked John Maynard Keynes.
I may well be hit by a truck tomorrow; so if I worry too much about the day after tomorrow, what a waste of today that is!
You have entered (clear throat, put on Rod Serling voice) the man-time, woman-time zone.
Time isn't an absolute. As a reporter I learned there's journalist time, for example. You're a reporter, you go interview people or you go to the scene of the fire, whatever. You go back, write the story and move on. Next morning a reader picking up the paper exclaims: "Look at that, Martha, the old train depot on the other side of town burned down!" That's the public's news; your news as a reporter is the story that will come out the following day. So journalism time is always ahead of public time.
OK, you'll say that with 24/7 Internet coverage that's a thing of the past. Still, face it, the news you're reading in the fastest news site is "olds" to the reporter who wrote it five minutes ago, who is now working on the story you'll read several hours or days from now. The reporter is always a step ahead.
Much the same happens with men and women. At that first long, warm kiss, the guy is wondering what she'll be like in bed on the third, seventh or umpteenth date; the woman is designing her future bridesmaids' outfits.
That's not just because guys tend not to think of marriage, but merely a function of how far ahead they each think.
In one group of which I am a member, women have to be told that they can't sign up for an event a month ahead, while organizers find themselves pleading with men to RSVP at least two days before.
Why is that? I'm not exactly sure.
Part of this may have to do, of course, with a difference in time pressures. A study published some time ago in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that while women and men had similar amounts of free time in 1975, by 1998 women had 30 minutes less leisure time per day than men.
However, last fall the Bureau of Labor Statistics' second annual American Time Use Survey revealed that women spend an average 42 minutes a day more than men caring for children and their households, while men spend 34 minutes a day more on the job. The net yield is that women's leisure time is, on average, 8 minutes shorter every day.
Deborah Tannen, author of several books on the differences in male and female behavior, focuses on qualitative distinctions. Women spend more energy connecting with others, men spend more energy focused on particular tasks that may or may not involve others.
We're still at sea as to why the different perception and use of time -- much less what to do about it. I suppose first comes awareness of the difference, which of course is somewhat stereotypical and need not apply to every last individual man or woman.
It helps to know that when I think future and she thinks future, we mean entirely two different things. My inclination is to deal with the immediate before the long-range.
"In the long range we're all dead," remarked John Maynard Keynes.
I may well be hit by a truck tomorrow; so if I worry too much about the day after tomorrow, what a waste of today that is!
Monday, May 29, 2006
Ratzinger at Auschwitz
This Sunday's papal visit to Auschwitz was marked by a clever speech of shameless self-promotion in which Papa Ratzinger never once apologized for his own supportive role in the regime that brought about the death camp.
His speech begins by stating that words fail before the horror of Auschwitz, then he launches into about 2,000 of them. (You can read the full text here.)
Ratzinger distances himself from the events: he refers to himself as "a pope from Germany" as if he were speaking of a coincidence, as if he had not worn a Nazi uniform and uttered and performed Nazi salutes and marches and songs. What does he think we think Hitler Youth did all day?
Throughout it all, there's not one word of personal shame. To the contrary, he praises himself for going to the site of the death camp, not once but several times.
The deafening arrogance of his speech is so overpowering that observers have already strained to hear humility where it was entirely absent. In an Agence France-Presse story run by the Brussels-based European Jewish Press the curious following sentence appears: "He asked God why he remained silent during the 'unprecedented mass crimes' of the Holocaust." One oddly placed pronoun suggests that Ratzinger engaged in a public soul-searching wholly absent from his speech.
Of course, he could not have done so. Not only was Ratzinger not silent while the ovens were burning people, he was lending his voice to sieg heil. Now Ratzinger feels entitled to pose the psalmist's rhetorical questions concerning God's silence and responsibility, but conveniently the pope evades his own, or that of his country and countrymen.
Instead, Ratzinger has cleverly turned a moment that should have been of repentance into one of whitewashing. In his roster of victims the first is a Polish priest -- Maximilian Kolbe. Then the Poles, "along with the Jewish people." Indeed, in bringing up the figure now synonymous with the Shoah -- the 6 million -- Ratzinger applies it to "six million Poles"!
The next group of victims is -- hold on to your hats -- the Germans. Welcome to modern history according to Ratzinger: those poor witless people who by the millions marched all over Europe killing, raping, pillaging and, yes, exterminating a few million Poles (and, oh yes, some Jews alongside for the ride), did all that because they had been promised "future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and prosperity." Oh, the suffering!
By this logic Lt. William Calley and Spec. Lynndie England, since they surely were promised something akin to honor, prominence and prosperity by George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson, shouldn't have to bear responsibility for the My Lai massacre or Abu Ghraib torture. Who, then, is responsible for anything?
Finally, after their brief cameo appearance beside the six million Poles, come the Jews, whom an unnamed "ring of criminals" wanted to "cancel."
Hitler Youth indoctrination was obviously quite effective. Decades after it, Ratzinger cannot bring himself to utter the word "Nazi" until the 8th of the 11th paragraph in the official English text of his speech. He cannot acknowledge that Auschwitz was constructed primarily to murder Jews -- not Poles, not Gypsies (another group upon whom Ratzinger lavishes attention as soon as he dispatches the requisite brief mention of Jews).
He wraps everything up speaking of "reconciliation," but again he botches it. Ratzinger is so uncomfortable talking about what his fellow Nazis did that he misses the one thing that could make reconciliation possible: repentance.
This is basic Catholic theology and he is the pope. Shouldn't he know this?
His speech begins by stating that words fail before the horror of Auschwitz, then he launches into about 2,000 of them. (You can read the full text here.)
Ratzinger distances himself from the events: he refers to himself as "a pope from Germany" as if he were speaking of a coincidence, as if he had not worn a Nazi uniform and uttered and performed Nazi salutes and marches and songs. What does he think we think Hitler Youth did all day?
Throughout it all, there's not one word of personal shame. To the contrary, he praises himself for going to the site of the death camp, not once but several times.
The deafening arrogance of his speech is so overpowering that observers have already strained to hear humility where it was entirely absent. In an Agence France-Presse story run by the Brussels-based European Jewish Press the curious following sentence appears: "He asked God why he remained silent during the 'unprecedented mass crimes' of the Holocaust." One oddly placed pronoun suggests that Ratzinger engaged in a public soul-searching wholly absent from his speech.
Of course, he could not have done so. Not only was Ratzinger not silent while the ovens were burning people, he was lending his voice to sieg heil. Now Ratzinger feels entitled to pose the psalmist's rhetorical questions concerning God's silence and responsibility, but conveniently the pope evades his own, or that of his country and countrymen.
Instead, Ratzinger has cleverly turned a moment that should have been of repentance into one of whitewashing. In his roster of victims the first is a Polish priest -- Maximilian Kolbe. Then the Poles, "along with the Jewish people." Indeed, in bringing up the figure now synonymous with the Shoah -- the 6 million -- Ratzinger applies it to "six million Poles"!
The next group of victims is -- hold on to your hats -- the Germans. Welcome to modern history according to Ratzinger: those poor witless people who by the millions marched all over Europe killing, raping, pillaging and, yes, exterminating a few million Poles (and, oh yes, some Jews alongside for the ride), did all that because they had been promised "future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and prosperity." Oh, the suffering!
By this logic Lt. William Calley and Spec. Lynndie England, since they surely were promised something akin to honor, prominence and prosperity by George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson, shouldn't have to bear responsibility for the My Lai massacre or Abu Ghraib torture. Who, then, is responsible for anything?
Finally, after their brief cameo appearance beside the six million Poles, come the Jews, whom an unnamed "ring of criminals" wanted to "cancel."
Hitler Youth indoctrination was obviously quite effective. Decades after it, Ratzinger cannot bring himself to utter the word "Nazi" until the 8th of the 11th paragraph in the official English text of his speech. He cannot acknowledge that Auschwitz was constructed primarily to murder Jews -- not Poles, not Gypsies (another group upon whom Ratzinger lavishes attention as soon as he dispatches the requisite brief mention of Jews).
He wraps everything up speaking of "reconciliation," but again he botches it. Ratzinger is so uncomfortable talking about what his fellow Nazis did that he misses the one thing that could make reconciliation possible: repentance.
This is basic Catholic theology and he is the pope. Shouldn't he know this?
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Fact, Fiction, Religion
In one response to my last post, a friend wrote that my arguments against the “Da Vinci Code” work because I know more than the average person, but that surely some other equally informed person could demolish my points.
Whenever we enter the realm of religion it seems that way largely because religion, at the core, is not about facts.
Most religions begin with one or several charismatic figures, historical or mythological: Abraham, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed. These figures utter delphic words about what life is, where we come from and to where we are going after death, and provide some cryptic guidelines for living.
Then come a class of imams, lamas, rabbis, priests or whatever else they may call themselves. These people -- traditionally male only -- wear certain special ceremonial or occupational clothes, perform or lead in certain ritual actions. The scholarly among them codify, interpret, canonize certain sayings of the religion's founder(s) along with words attributed to divinity and ultimately the code or interpretation or book -- the Bible, Talmud, Quran, Vedas -- becomes the object of veneration.
Moreover, the overwheling majority of people use religion for fairly simple things: propitiation, social discipline, self-satisfaction and a sense of security in a troubling world. They want pain removed, if they have pain; they like ritual acts that make them feel good about themselves; they want doctrines, teachings or holy writings that assure them that they are right. Very few people actually believe there is someone other than themselves in charge or seek enlightenment or submit to a whole-hearted life conversion -- especially if that endeavor might disturb them from continuing along they way they are.
The reason arguing about religion seems endless is not because people really care about religion, but because the facts are never really quite clear -- inevitably, but also conveniently, so. Does God exist? Did Jesus or Abraham? The evidence for a historical person named Mohammed who wrote the Quran is overwhelming, but obviously not for his divine inspiration. Gautama Buddha's tomb can be located, although we don't know for certain whether what we know about his life is accurate.
Even if we accept God, Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, or Mohammed as reality, what did they actually mean to tell us?
There are literally hundreds of Christian churches, each proclaiming themselves to be somehow the "bestest." There are at least a half dozen forms of Judaism. There are about as many variants of Islam and Buddhism. Can all of these be equally true and right and, indeed, bestest?
The quest is on ... endlessly.
You could not, however, easily find a lot of people who would tear down what I have said in my last post. Indeed, yesterday NBC aired an impressive documentary piece on its Dateline NBC show in which viewers were shown that the storyline of the DaVinci Code (click here to read the NBC story) is just what author Dan Brown said it was: fictional. Most historians agree that the facts are just not there.
Let's examine critically the notion of fact, just as we did with religion.
The idea of a fact is a relatively new, 18th century development from empiricism, the proposition that truth can be grasped through objective and verifiable observation. Western societies worship at the altar of facticity, yet facts aren't necessarily true.
You slap a table and decide that it is solid. But actually it isn't. There's a proportionally huge space between the electrons and the nucleus of atoms, so that the actual hard matter is really much less solid than our touch suggests. The actual pure mass of a transatlantic ship, say the Titanic, would be about the size of a baseball, if you managed to eliminate the subatomic empty space.
Even more, at the quantum level the physical laws that objective and verifiable facts confirm otherwise no longer apply, which is why modern physics has become the modern philosophy. Truth is a bit of a Russian matrioshka doll.
An image of that sort is what a charismatic religious leader would have conveyed in a pre-scientific world. In such a milieu it was accepted that demons and angels pulled us this way and that. It was also understood that we really don't know very much, that the storyteller is not as important as the story, and that some wholly invented stories teach truth.
Religion, in its theistic and atheistic forms, has never been about facts, but about what we intuitively find to be true. It takes wisdom to tell them apart.
Whenever we enter the realm of religion it seems that way largely because religion, at the core, is not about facts.
Most religions begin with one or several charismatic figures, historical or mythological: Abraham, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed. These figures utter delphic words about what life is, where we come from and to where we are going after death, and provide some cryptic guidelines for living.
Then come a class of imams, lamas, rabbis, priests or whatever else they may call themselves. These people -- traditionally male only -- wear certain special ceremonial or occupational clothes, perform or lead in certain ritual actions. The scholarly among them codify, interpret, canonize certain sayings of the religion's founder(s) along with words attributed to divinity and ultimately the code or interpretation or book -- the Bible, Talmud, Quran, Vedas -- becomes the object of veneration.
Moreover, the overwheling majority of people use religion for fairly simple things: propitiation, social discipline, self-satisfaction and a sense of security in a troubling world. They want pain removed, if they have pain; they like ritual acts that make them feel good about themselves; they want doctrines, teachings or holy writings that assure them that they are right. Very few people actually believe there is someone other than themselves in charge or seek enlightenment or submit to a whole-hearted life conversion -- especially if that endeavor might disturb them from continuing along they way they are.
The reason arguing about religion seems endless is not because people really care about religion, but because the facts are never really quite clear -- inevitably, but also conveniently, so. Does God exist? Did Jesus or Abraham? The evidence for a historical person named Mohammed who wrote the Quran is overwhelming, but obviously not for his divine inspiration. Gautama Buddha's tomb can be located, although we don't know for certain whether what we know about his life is accurate.
Even if we accept God, Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, or Mohammed as reality, what did they actually mean to tell us?
There are literally hundreds of Christian churches, each proclaiming themselves to be somehow the "bestest." There are at least a half dozen forms of Judaism. There are about as many variants of Islam and Buddhism. Can all of these be equally true and right and, indeed, bestest?
The quest is on ... endlessly.
You could not, however, easily find a lot of people who would tear down what I have said in my last post. Indeed, yesterday NBC aired an impressive documentary piece on its Dateline NBC show in which viewers were shown that the storyline of the DaVinci Code (click here to read the NBC story) is just what author Dan Brown said it was: fictional. Most historians agree that the facts are just not there.
Let's examine critically the notion of fact, just as we did with religion.
The idea of a fact is a relatively new, 18th century development from empiricism, the proposition that truth can be grasped through objective and verifiable observation. Western societies worship at the altar of facticity, yet facts aren't necessarily true.
You slap a table and decide that it is solid. But actually it isn't. There's a proportionally huge space between the electrons and the nucleus of atoms, so that the actual hard matter is really much less solid than our touch suggests. The actual pure mass of a transatlantic ship, say the Titanic, would be about the size of a baseball, if you managed to eliminate the subatomic empty space.
Even more, at the quantum level the physical laws that objective and verifiable facts confirm otherwise no longer apply, which is why modern physics has become the modern philosophy. Truth is a bit of a Russian matrioshka doll.
An image of that sort is what a charismatic religious leader would have conveyed in a pre-scientific world. In such a milieu it was accepted that demons and angels pulled us this way and that. It was also understood that we really don't know very much, that the storyteller is not as important as the story, and that some wholly invented stories teach truth.
Religion, in its theistic and atheistic forms, has never been about facts, but about what we intuitively find to be true. It takes wisdom to tell them apart.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
The Da Vinci Code Syndrome
All of a sudden, people who can't tell a cardinal from a monsignor, or a gospel from an epistle, feel perfectly comfortable pontificating about the Catholic Church's alleged conspiracy to suppress the story of Jesus' supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene.
The source of this malady? The DaVinci Code Syndrome. The symptoms are factless obsession with the Opus Dei, incongruous suppositions about the monolithic unity of the Catholic clergy, and conclusions drawn from fiction that don't hold water to the simplest critical analysis.
Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of sharp rocks of my own to hurl at Rome's stained glass windows, but these cream puffs from Dan Brown's work ... amateur hour!
The Opus Dei (Latin for "Work of God"), in which my mother and one of my colleagues once held the lowly rank of "cooperators," is indeed a hide-bound organization led by Spanish, fascistoid ninnies who delight in all manner of subtle code words and secrets. Their members once held a majority in the cabinet of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. They are exerting influence today on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and other Catholic, right-wing officials in Washington, and they have their point men in the Vatican. The Opus has an uncanny amount of money and assets; on occasion they have been blamed for the kind of brainwashing that made the Moonies and similar cults suspect.
Yet -- Deo gratias (Latin for "thank God") -- the Opus Dei does not yet control the Catholic Church by a long shot. To get a realistic sense of this, I recomment you read one of the best articles available today on the subject, written -- oh, surprise! -- by a Jesuit. Find it here.
As to the clergy, I wholeheartedly agree with Emile Zola that "civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest." Yet the Catholic clergy -- as its most recent set of scandals amply shows -- are a motley group of solipsistic egotists, mediocrities who could never make it in secular life, and an occasional exceptional talent as the exception to bolster the rule. The latter are often found in religious orders, such as the Jesuits, whom several popes felt they had to suppress to keep control.
Clergy plot? Good luck with that.
Finally, there's the whole-cloth story of Mary of Magdala, wife of Jesus, which is extremely old and hoary. In the past century alone it was floated as a revival of the 1956 Priory of Zion hoax in the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. More memorably for literature, a more intriguing and less conspiracy-ridden version of such a relationship appeared in the 1951 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, for which the Greek Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1955.
Still, there is no independent evidence that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived (or for that matter, Moses or Abraham), let alone a woman whose story is a wispy thread as a cameo player in the Galilean woodworker's drama. This is all fantasy and, in Kazantzakis' case, good literature.
So it annoys me no end when some wannabe Vaticanologists, who don't know spit, throw some easily dodged shots that make idiots of all Church critics. It gives apostasy a bad name.
The source of this malady? The DaVinci Code Syndrome. The symptoms are factless obsession with the Opus Dei, incongruous suppositions about the monolithic unity of the Catholic clergy, and conclusions drawn from fiction that don't hold water to the simplest critical analysis.
Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of sharp rocks of my own to hurl at Rome's stained glass windows, but these cream puffs from Dan Brown's work ... amateur hour!
The Opus Dei (Latin for "Work of God"), in which my mother and one of my colleagues once held the lowly rank of "cooperators," is indeed a hide-bound organization led by Spanish, fascistoid ninnies who delight in all manner of subtle code words and secrets. Their members once held a majority in the cabinet of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. They are exerting influence today on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and other Catholic, right-wing officials in Washington, and they have their point men in the Vatican. The Opus has an uncanny amount of money and assets; on occasion they have been blamed for the kind of brainwashing that made the Moonies and similar cults suspect.
Yet -- Deo gratias (Latin for "thank God") -- the Opus Dei does not yet control the Catholic Church by a long shot. To get a realistic sense of this, I recomment you read one of the best articles available today on the subject, written -- oh, surprise! -- by a Jesuit. Find it here.
As to the clergy, I wholeheartedly agree with Emile Zola that "civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest." Yet the Catholic clergy -- as its most recent set of scandals amply shows -- are a motley group of solipsistic egotists, mediocrities who could never make it in secular life, and an occasional exceptional talent as the exception to bolster the rule. The latter are often found in religious orders, such as the Jesuits, whom several popes felt they had to suppress to keep control.
Clergy plot? Good luck with that.
Finally, there's the whole-cloth story of Mary of Magdala, wife of Jesus, which is extremely old and hoary. In the past century alone it was floated as a revival of the 1956 Priory of Zion hoax in the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. More memorably for literature, a more intriguing and less conspiracy-ridden version of such a relationship appeared in the 1951 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, for which the Greek Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1955.
Still, there is no independent evidence that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived (or for that matter, Moses or Abraham), let alone a woman whose story is a wispy thread as a cameo player in the Galilean woodworker's drama. This is all fantasy and, in Kazantzakis' case, good literature.
So it annoys me no end when some wannabe Vaticanologists, who don't know spit, throw some easily dodged shots that make idiots of all Church critics. It gives apostasy a bad name.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Mothering and Fathering
The Mothers' Day just passed and the impending Fathers' Day turns my mind to the notion of mothering and fathering, so essential to all of us at some points in our lives.
Without both we would not be here. Without a mother we likely would not have survived our first year; without a father we can stumble through adult life. The roles are traditionally different. The mother nurtures the young, the father sends off the young adult into the world outside the family.
In families in which one parent is dead or absent, as the one in which I grew up, often a mother or a father will try to do both and ease the heartbreak in both child and parent. For there is no greater hole in the heart than when father is no longer sitting at the dinner table on Fathers' Day or when mother is gone from the hearth on Mothers' Day.
Yet I can attest, also, that the hole closes and heals when you begin to father or to mother your own child, or someone else's. Then, by happy and unintentional coincidence, you end up parenting the child inside you.
There is, of course, a certain mother and father chauvinism at work in how we recall our progenitors. My mother, now dead for years, used to think Mother's Day was better than Easter or Christmas; in my teenage years I thought that was a bit self-serving. Of course, the greeting card companies agree and the politicians would have nothing but good to say about fighting for apple pie and Mom.
But that's not how Mother's Day started.
Originally, it was a call for peace and disarmament. The holiday was first celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908, under the leadership of by Anna Jarvis, who had begun organizing women to improve sanitation in 1858 and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors after the Civil War. Her appeal to motherhood as an ideal of peace was embraced by Julia Ward Howe in a poetic proclamation of Mother's Day in 1870.
Two years after Jarvis' West Virginia celebration, Sonora Smart Dodd celebrated her father, William Jackson Smart, who had raised her and five other children in Spokane, Washington. Mothers' Day was officially proclaimed a holiday by President Woodrow Wilson, Father's Day by President Lyndon Johnson.
Parenting is about peace and disarmament, about nurturing, inspiring, and simply being there, all with no thought of recompense or reward. If the commercialism wears on you, you are not alone. Anna Jarvis protested against Mothers Day in the 1920s, once the holiday took off and commercialization set in.
Yet we all can celebrate motherhood and fatherhood in everyday ways -- without a holiday. I can paint no better picture of it than what I saw recently upon approaching the home of a friend I intended to drop in on by surprise one evening.
I approached the house and saw my friend teaching her young teenage daughter dance steps, her son prancing about, perhaps mockingly, yet in utter, unabashed joy. At one point another child, an older daughter, came over to enfold everyone in her arms. It was a charming, warm scene that I knew my arrival would only disrupt. So I stood there a few minutes peering in, as if I were watching a Disney movie about an idealized family having clean fun on a Saturday night ... only this was real.
I recalled a few moments of the sort that I had experienced with my sons and I envied that she still had that priceless time. Then I tiptoed to my car. In my last quick look everyone behind that window still looked happy and loved and warm.
And they were.
Without both we would not be here. Without a mother we likely would not have survived our first year; without a father we can stumble through adult life. The roles are traditionally different. The mother nurtures the young, the father sends off the young adult into the world outside the family.
In families in which one parent is dead or absent, as the one in which I grew up, often a mother or a father will try to do both and ease the heartbreak in both child and parent. For there is no greater hole in the heart than when father is no longer sitting at the dinner table on Fathers' Day or when mother is gone from the hearth on Mothers' Day.
Yet I can attest, also, that the hole closes and heals when you begin to father or to mother your own child, or someone else's. Then, by happy and unintentional coincidence, you end up parenting the child inside you.
There is, of course, a certain mother and father chauvinism at work in how we recall our progenitors. My mother, now dead for years, used to think Mother's Day was better than Easter or Christmas; in my teenage years I thought that was a bit self-serving. Of course, the greeting card companies agree and the politicians would have nothing but good to say about fighting for apple pie and Mom.
But that's not how Mother's Day started.
Originally, it was a call for peace and disarmament. The holiday was first celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908, under the leadership of by Anna Jarvis, who had begun organizing women to improve sanitation in 1858 and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors after the Civil War. Her appeal to motherhood as an ideal of peace was embraced by Julia Ward Howe in a poetic proclamation of Mother's Day in 1870.
Two years after Jarvis' West Virginia celebration, Sonora Smart Dodd celebrated her father, William Jackson Smart, who had raised her and five other children in Spokane, Washington. Mothers' Day was officially proclaimed a holiday by President Woodrow Wilson, Father's Day by President Lyndon Johnson.
Parenting is about peace and disarmament, about nurturing, inspiring, and simply being there, all with no thought of recompense or reward. If the commercialism wears on you, you are not alone. Anna Jarvis protested against Mothers Day in the 1920s, once the holiday took off and commercialization set in.
Yet we all can celebrate motherhood and fatherhood in everyday ways -- without a holiday. I can paint no better picture of it than what I saw recently upon approaching the home of a friend I intended to drop in on by surprise one evening.
I approached the house and saw my friend teaching her young teenage daughter dance steps, her son prancing about, perhaps mockingly, yet in utter, unabashed joy. At one point another child, an older daughter, came over to enfold everyone in her arms. It was a charming, warm scene that I knew my arrival would only disrupt. So I stood there a few minutes peering in, as if I were watching a Disney movie about an idealized family having clean fun on a Saturday night ... only this was real.
I recalled a few moments of the sort that I had experienced with my sons and I envied that she still had that priceless time. Then I tiptoed to my car. In my last quick look everyone behind that window still looked happy and loved and warm.
And they were.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Do you love me?
Spring makes even an old coot's thoughts turn to love, to the meaning of love, to what love really is. We need not even consider love for a child or a parent, a friend, or even humanity in general, all of which are self-evident, so let's focus on love of and for one person, romantic love.
In The Fiddler on the Roof there's a scene in which Tevye and his wife Golde come face to face with the shift from the arranged marriages of their era to the romantic love that would become the basis of their children's relationships, and their grandchildren's. "Do you love me?" he asks and she responds with a series of evasions until under his persistent questioning, she breaks into song:
Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house
Given you children, milked the cow
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?
I'll tell you what that is in the language of cinema: it's "My Beautiful Laundrette" as opposed to "A Man and a Woman."
Love, in my not so humble opinion, is not what you do. It's what you say, it's how you kiss, it's an openness to sharing your innermost feelings. It's physical and emotional; it's chemistry. And if you wash clothes and cook meals but don't say "I love you," it's a great master-servant relationship, but it's not love.
Then there's love denied, love lost, love crushed, love spirited away in misunderstanding. The aching, searing pain when we lose someone we love. Isn't that love, too?
Love is a rollercoaster. Hang on for the ride.
In The Fiddler on the Roof there's a scene in which Tevye and his wife Golde come face to face with the shift from the arranged marriages of their era to the romantic love that would become the basis of their children's relationships, and their grandchildren's. "Do you love me?" he asks and she responds with a series of evasions until under his persistent questioning, she breaks into song:
Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house
Given you children, milked the cow
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?
I'll tell you what that is in the language of cinema: it's "My Beautiful Laundrette" as opposed to "A Man and a Woman."
Love, in my not so humble opinion, is not what you do. It's what you say, it's how you kiss, it's an openness to sharing your innermost feelings. It's physical and emotional; it's chemistry. And if you wash clothes and cook meals but don't say "I love you," it's a great master-servant relationship, but it's not love.
Then there's love denied, love lost, love crushed, love spirited away in misunderstanding. The aching, searing pain when we lose someone we love. Isn't that love, too?
Love is a rollercoaster. Hang on for the ride.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Assimilate to what?
Given that bringing up immigration summons the cry for assimilation, let's consider a pertinent question I don't often hear answered: to what should immigrants assimilate?
The verb to assimilate has five meanings. Physiologically, it refers to consuming and incorporating nutrients into the body after digestion and the process of anabolism. Figuratively, it refers to incorporating and absorbing knowledge into the mind. The word also means to cause something to resemble another. In linguistics, it refers to altering a sound by assimilation, as happens when a language adopts foreign words (for example, the Spanish lazo and the English lasso).
The fifth meaning, also figurative, is what people have in mind in the immigration debate: to absorb immigrants, or a culturally distinct group, into the prevailing culture. Yet in all the meanings of "assimilate" something is consumed, absorbed, incorporated (literally, to become part of a body), after some process of digestion and alteration.
All of this, means B becomes somehow enmeshed in A.
In the case of a country, for example the United States, the question is: What is that A and why does it deserve pre-eminence? The answer is more complicated than it sounds.
History tells us that the first U.S. inhabitants were the Indians. The European colonists did not assimilate into Indian society. Are anti-immigrant advocates suggesting that we at last show some respect for the native inhabitants? Somehow, I think not.
History also tells us that what is today the United States became the colonial territory of three European powers: England, France and Spain. Which one of these countries' cultures deserve predominant respect? On what grounds?
Let's try history again. In thirteen of the North American English colonies, a civil war broke out in the 1770s, with the population so divided that an estimated 100,000 loyalists fled abroad at the end of the conflict. Moreover, cultural roots among whites were about evenly divided at that time between England and Germany, to the point that the issue of a national language for the United States was deferred in all the foundational discussions as too divisive.
(We might be singing "O, sagt, könnt ihr sehen" on the Fourth of July had the Deutsch, or "Dutch" prevailed, but then we're forgetting the "other Persons" of the Constitution, who were African and spoke multiple languages.)
So the English of the 1780s had deferred the language issue knowing they might not win; half of them wanted King George, anyway, the Germans didn't want to learn English (some of them still don't speak English at home).
Then they purchased land from France (the Louisiana territory) and Spain (Florida). By the 1840s and '50s, the third major European group of the early United States arrived: the Irish. They were certainly not English. They fled a famine induced by the British, the inventors of genocidal germ warfare, to dispossess the native Irish Catholic farmers of Ireland.
Remind me, in this mix of Africans, English, French, Germans, Irish and Spanish ... by what reason was only the culture and language of the English to be accorded legal supremacy, when even the English dared not debate it for fear they would lose a vote?
But wait, then there's the entire Southwest and West. That was stolen outright by war and conquest. The predominant language and culture there was not English. Why should the territory from Texas to California have to assimilate the culture and language of the last and most unlawful newcomers, the Anglos?
Much the same question could be raised about almost any corner of the Earth.
Take Israel. Jewish scripture says God gave them the land thousands of years ago. But those lands weren't uninhabited. If Jews can leave for 1,900 years and still lay a territorial claim upon their return almost two millenia later, what about the ancient Caananites and their descendants, who didn't leave at all? Who should assimilate to whose culture and language?
This is what 50 years of war in Palestine has been all about, proving once again the irrational, tribal and nonsensical nature of all the notions that one culture has an inherent right to dominate.
People have the inalienable right to their own language and culture. Asserting that right is in the best tradition of the United States (even though in many chapters of the nation's history it was not observed), as it is of the United Nations and of Lady Liberty, whose powerful gaze watches over both from her island.
The verb to assimilate has five meanings. Physiologically, it refers to consuming and incorporating nutrients into the body after digestion and the process of anabolism. Figuratively, it refers to incorporating and absorbing knowledge into the mind. The word also means to cause something to resemble another. In linguistics, it refers to altering a sound by assimilation, as happens when a language adopts foreign words (for example, the Spanish lazo and the English lasso).
The fifth meaning, also figurative, is what people have in mind in the immigration debate: to absorb immigrants, or a culturally distinct group, into the prevailing culture. Yet in all the meanings of "assimilate" something is consumed, absorbed, incorporated (literally, to become part of a body), after some process of digestion and alteration.
All of this, means B becomes somehow enmeshed in A.
In the case of a country, for example the United States, the question is: What is that A and why does it deserve pre-eminence? The answer is more complicated than it sounds.
History tells us that the first U.S. inhabitants were the Indians. The European colonists did not assimilate into Indian society. Are anti-immigrant advocates suggesting that we at last show some respect for the native inhabitants? Somehow, I think not.
History also tells us that what is today the United States became the colonial territory of three European powers: England, France and Spain. Which one of these countries' cultures deserve predominant respect? On what grounds?
Let's try history again. In thirteen of the North American English colonies, a civil war broke out in the 1770s, with the population so divided that an estimated 100,000 loyalists fled abroad at the end of the conflict. Moreover, cultural roots among whites were about evenly divided at that time between England and Germany, to the point that the issue of a national language for the United States was deferred in all the foundational discussions as too divisive.
(We might be singing "O, sagt, könnt ihr sehen" on the Fourth of July had the Deutsch, or "Dutch" prevailed, but then we're forgetting the "other Persons" of the Constitution, who were African and spoke multiple languages.)
So the English of the 1780s had deferred the language issue knowing they might not win; half of them wanted King George, anyway, the Germans didn't want to learn English (some of them still don't speak English at home).
Then they purchased land from France (the Louisiana territory) and Spain (Florida). By the 1840s and '50s, the third major European group of the early United States arrived: the Irish. They were certainly not English. They fled a famine induced by the British, the inventors of genocidal germ warfare, to dispossess the native Irish Catholic farmers of Ireland.
Remind me, in this mix of Africans, English, French, Germans, Irish and Spanish ... by what reason was only the culture and language of the English to be accorded legal supremacy, when even the English dared not debate it for fear they would lose a vote?
But wait, then there's the entire Southwest and West. That was stolen outright by war and conquest. The predominant language and culture there was not English. Why should the territory from Texas to California have to assimilate the culture and language of the last and most unlawful newcomers, the Anglos?
Much the same question could be raised about almost any corner of the Earth.
Take Israel. Jewish scripture says God gave them the land thousands of years ago. But those lands weren't uninhabited. If Jews can leave for 1,900 years and still lay a territorial claim upon their return almost two millenia later, what about the ancient Caananites and their descendants, who didn't leave at all? Who should assimilate to whose culture and language?
This is what 50 years of war in Palestine has been all about, proving once again the irrational, tribal and nonsensical nature of all the notions that one culture has an inherent right to dominate.
People have the inalienable right to their own language and culture. Asserting that right is in the best tradition of the United States (even though in many chapters of the nation's history it was not observed), as it is of the United Nations and of Lady Liberty, whose powerful gaze watches over both from her island.
Monday, May 01, 2006
A Dream of Lady Liberty
At the cutting edge of the debate impelling millions of immigrants in the United States to wrestle with staying home or going to work today, often a choice between a full stomach or dignity, is the question of what kind of society we want -- indeed what kind of world in the future. Yet it is also an argument about the past and who we are now.
This is why this is so emotional. At the core of the immigration debate lie images awash in our emotional freight about who we citizens of wealthy countries are as societies and our place in the world. This is not just a U.S. argument: in France they resent Arabic immigrants, in Germany it's the Turks, and even Italy, a net population loser for more than a century until the 1990s, now frets about Lybians and Albanians.
We nurture fond fantasies of who we are, the heirs of Napoleon and Goethe and Jefferson (but we don't claim Paisley, Stalin or Attila). Yet the G-8 countries have in common a history of expansionism, violence, enslavement of and disdain for people of other cultures. All immigration laws are everywhere, at heart, racist and xenophobic.
For example, the first U.S. immigration laws were enacted to keep out the Chinese, later darker nationalities who were not from Northwest Europe. Even U.S. humanitarian policy has always had the stench of selfishness and right-wing ideology. The USA would not admit the Nazi-fleeing Jewish passengers of the German transatlantic liner St. Louis in 1939; in 1980, the USA admitted 900 refugees from Communist Poland but only 1 from El Salvador, where murder and dislocation, at a rate of 300 dead a week, was U.S.-funded.
Not only are the myths misleading about the past, they do not contemplate a future in which the torch of power might pass to to another land, nor one in which the white northwestern European peoples of Europe and North America, no longer reproducing at replacement levels, become an imperiled minority.
Perhaps this is why this is such a hot button issue in Berlin, Germany as it it in Berlin, New York, because it summons our tribal instincts, our fears and preconceptions of ourselves.
It is also why the famous poem by Emma Lazarus, engraved at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, deserves a second read:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
We are so accustomed to thinking of the poor huddled masses that we forget the major paradigm shift Lazarus was proposing, in an age when it was still preposterous. Lady Liberty, more than 10 times taller than the Colossus of Rhodes to whom the poet compares her, is not merely one more male conquering giant, but a mighty woman who commands with her eyes while she sheds light in the world.
The USA, at whose eastern door she commands and gives light, is not merely a tribal extension of Europe, it is the first country formed as a state, without ever before having been a people, an ethnos, a nation. Its name is a concept: unity among various territories. How fitting that the locus of a dream of unity at a global level, the United Nations, is headquarters well within the gaze of Lady Liberty.
The United States and the United Nations stand as yet unrealized ideals of common human unity, the globalization of the altruistic impulse to rejoice, revel and develop resources together, thanks to our differences.
Are we ready for such a dream? Lady Liberty commands it from her serene perch.
This is why this is so emotional. At the core of the immigration debate lie images awash in our emotional freight about who we citizens of wealthy countries are as societies and our place in the world. This is not just a U.S. argument: in France they resent Arabic immigrants, in Germany it's the Turks, and even Italy, a net population loser for more than a century until the 1990s, now frets about Lybians and Albanians.
We nurture fond fantasies of who we are, the heirs of Napoleon and Goethe and Jefferson (but we don't claim Paisley, Stalin or Attila). Yet the G-8 countries have in common a history of expansionism, violence, enslavement of and disdain for people of other cultures. All immigration laws are everywhere, at heart, racist and xenophobic.
For example, the first U.S. immigration laws were enacted to keep out the Chinese, later darker nationalities who were not from Northwest Europe. Even U.S. humanitarian policy has always had the stench of selfishness and right-wing ideology. The USA would not admit the Nazi-fleeing Jewish passengers of the German transatlantic liner St. Louis in 1939; in 1980, the USA admitted 900 refugees from Communist Poland but only 1 from El Salvador, where murder and dislocation, at a rate of 300 dead a week, was U.S.-funded.
Not only are the myths misleading about the past, they do not contemplate a future in which the torch of power might pass to to another land, nor one in which the white northwestern European peoples of Europe and North America, no longer reproducing at replacement levels, become an imperiled minority.
Perhaps this is why this is such a hot button issue in Berlin, Germany as it it in Berlin, New York, because it summons our tribal instincts, our fears and preconceptions of ourselves.
It is also why the famous poem by Emma Lazarus, engraved at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, deserves a second read:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
We are so accustomed to thinking of the poor huddled masses that we forget the major paradigm shift Lazarus was proposing, in an age when it was still preposterous. Lady Liberty, more than 10 times taller than the Colossus of Rhodes to whom the poet compares her, is not merely one more male conquering giant, but a mighty woman who commands with her eyes while she sheds light in the world.
The USA, at whose eastern door she commands and gives light, is not merely a tribal extension of Europe, it is the first country formed as a state, without ever before having been a people, an ethnos, a nation. Its name is a concept: unity among various territories. How fitting that the locus of a dream of unity at a global level, the United Nations, is headquarters well within the gaze of Lady Liberty.
The United States and the United Nations stand as yet unrealized ideals of common human unity, the globalization of the altruistic impulse to rejoice, revel and develop resources together, thanks to our differences.
Are we ready for such a dream? Lady Liberty commands it from her serene perch.
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