Lowest Common Denominator Theater...

The God Habit

2010-02-17T12:36:00.001-08:00

I'll cut right to the chase: I'm not sure that I believe in God anymore.

Actually, let me be a little clearer about that. I still believe in God, more or less, but I don't know what in the world God means to me, or if He's what I always believed He was.

I was raised in a Christian home, beginning at age three. I remember when my parents got "saved", not because I was there, but because my mom sat me down and told me about it. She told me about how she and dad had given their lives to God and were going to start taking my brother and me to a place called church. I remember getting dressed up for it, and riding in the back seat of my parents' gold Chevelle to the big stone building. I remember being told over and over that the cardinal rule of church (for a three year old) was being QUIET, and I remember immediately forgetting that cardinal rule when I was led into the big sanctuary with the amazing paintings on the ceilings. I remember being quickly shushed, but I was three, and being shushed didn't dampen my spirits about the wonder of it all.

My parents were-- and are-- excellent Christians. They owned Christian book and gift stores for many years. They are devout, more or less (and I mean that as a compliment-- both the "devout" and the "more or less"). They would be very unhappy to hear what I am about to admit. I'm pretty unhappy about it myself, but that doesn't change it.

I was in church this past Sunday and I was angry. The anger wasn't about anything in particular, really. Over the past several years, I have been increasingly angry at God in general. I think it started back when I tried to attend Zion Bible College (and may that hallowed establishment burn merrily to the ground). Interested readers can explore my history with Zion via my earlier blog on the subject-- frankly, it would greatly illuminate what is yet to come. The point is, I have been God's problem child for years. And the funny bit is, I have no reason to be. God has taken excellent care of me. I am married to the love of my life, I have talents that take care of me financially and give me great pleasure, I have two unbelievably gorgeous and engaging kids, I have experienced a modicum of success in most of the things I have tried my hand at, I am healthy, decent-enough looking, and generally of a happy disposition. I have nothing, really, to complain about.

The problem is that, if these are the ways God has chosen to love me, then He is speaking the wrong language. My love language is not gifts. It is quality time. I like the gifts-- and, in fact, one of the reasons I have been reluctant to talk about this is my fear that God will capriciously yank the gifts away from me out of spite, to "teach me a lesson"-- but the gifts just don't mean love to me the way sensing God's attention and presence and delight in me would. Basically, if I am a little boy and God is my father, he's been one of those fathers who works so long and so often that his kid barely knows what he looks like, but who sends along a lot of gifts to try to make up for that fact.

In short, I'm a whiner. Fine. God isn't the sort of hands-on affectionate father that I want, and I just can't seem to satisfy myself with the distant gift-giver father, especially since even His gift-giving seems so erratic. I mean, what about the much better Christians than myself who haven't gotten anywhere near the blessings I have? How can I even think of my good fortune as God's gifts when they seem, on the macroscopic scale, so random and purely coincedental? Why should I have experienced such blessings, whiner that I am, when so many better people than me have experienced nothing of the kind?

So I was in church and I was angry. I was outright pissed off, and the reason is simple. I didn't want to admit it to myself, but when I finally faced it, I couldn't deny it. I'm mad at God-- furious at him-- because I really value believing in Him, and He has made it almost impossible for me to continue to do so.

It's like this: imagine that when I was young, my Christianity was a grapevine. It sprouted from the ground swiftly, and I was completely assured that it would grow wildly, massively, into a gorgeous vineyard of faith, from which I could press the wine of wisdom and enlightenment. So, to shelter that vine, I built a stone wall around it. For the past thrity years or so, I've been guarding that stone wall, maintaining constant vigilance in defense of it, waiting for it to grow and bloom and bear its limitless fruits. On this past Sunday, I actually opened the door of the stone wall, looked in, and saw something extremely disheartening. The vine hasn't turned into a vineyard. It hasn't grown at all. In fact, it looks more or less dead.

I haven't really talked to God in any meaningful way-- at least regularly-- in years. I do believe in Him, more or less, but I just don't believe anymore that He has the time or the interest to hear my thoughts and concerns. My prayers have never seemed to make any difference to Him, and logically it doesn't make any sense to me that they should. I mean, if God is God, then he knows what needs to happen and is on it already. If He isn't on it, and is waiting for me to let him know what needs to be done, then he can't be God. Right? So what's the point? I expect the pious ones would say, "the point is that prayer brings about a relationship with God", and that's fine and good. I want that-- more desperately than I can express-- and yet prayer seems only to prove the lack of relationship that God wishes to have with me. My prayers go nowhere. There is no response, no difference in any outcomes, not even any sense of some meaningful presence. They are words in a cave, bouncing back as echoes, sounding silly and inane. Completely pointless.

If prayer at least meant that I could sense God listening, and caring-- if prayer ONLY meant proof of the relationship-- then I'd keep it up. It doesn't though. I never made a conscious choice to stop praying, but over the past several years, my silence to God has been the practical result.

So I asked myself, this past Sunday, do I really even believe in God anymore? The answer was, grudgingly (or stubbornly), yes I do. But I don't believe that God is who I always thought he was.

I used to believe that God thought I was special, that he loved me specifically and wanted to spend time with me. I used to believe that prayer made a difference to him, because he cared about us and wanted us to express our wishes and concerns and fears and desires to him, so that we could watch him address them, and thereby show us his love for us. Now, I don't believe those things. I am angry at God because I really, really want to believe them, but I cannot maintain the illusion anymore that my experience with God has borne those beliefs out. It hasn't, and I am too tired of it all to pretend anymore.

I do have one more prayer for God, and he may consider it a constant: prove me wrong. I want to be wrong. I've prayed this prayer before, and I suspect I will pray it until I die. I don't expect anything special to come of it, though. Not because God can't answer, but because, for whatever reason, he chooses not to.

I hope it's good enough to believe that he's out there, because that's all I've got left. Prove me wrong.

Off the Cliff

2009-05-11T08:27:00.000-07:00

We conservatives are oft heard referring to to threat of incrementalization-- what is commonly known as "the slippery slope". For instance, if it makes sense to help the poor and unfortunate by forcing their employers to pay them eight dollars an hour, why not nine? Why not fifteen? Why not fifty, with full medical benefits, child care, and a brand new Prius for them to drive to work? Or in another common example: if it is incumbent upon the government to grant marital benefits to homosexuals, then why not to vegesexuals? Or people who want to marry their pet marmosets? Why should they be excluded? And don't try to suggest such people don't exist. We all know they do, and if it's OK to marginalize them now, it won't be once we begin to slide down the-- say it with me-- "slippery slope".

What I am beginning to wonder, however, is if the slippery slope has already come and gone, probably sometime during the Clinton years. What if there was a cliff at the bottom of that slope, and we're already off it, falling, speeding toward terminal velocity, beyond any hope whatsoever of going back? Pretty hopeless, eh? I'd sure like to think otherwise-- I'm a generally optimistic guy-- but I think it may indeed be too late. Here's my evidence.

The other day, I heard a very well-known conservative talk show host (not Rush Limbaugh, thankfully, but one of his fill-ins) agree with a caller on the following point: the Democrats won the last election because people no longer cast their votes on ideas and issues, they cast their votes based on which candidate their favorite comedians, singers and actors say is cool. Therefore (this caller claimed) we should embrace this new reality and send out our own army of comedians, singers and actors, intent on making conservative candidates cool enough for these dolts to vote for.

The host, woefully, agreed whole-heartedly.

I don't need to tell you what is wrong with this, but there are probably a few others who don't see the point, which is this: for the first time in the history of planet earth, people are making their most important life decisions-- decisions about their leaders, about their spirituality, about what to stick in their mouths, heads and hearts-- without depending on critical thinking, a study of the issues, or conversations with people of different perspectives. For the first time in history, these weighty decisions are being made based on peer pressure, cool-factor, fictional representations, and the opinions of people paid to pretend to be other people (actors). This is bad enough. What's worse is that our own leaders are not suggesting that we fight this tide of intellectual laziness, but that we embrace it.

Take, for example, the recent announcement that supreme court justice Souter is planning to retire. Conversation immediately turned to who Obama might choose as his replacement. One would assume the conversations might have centered around any potential candidate's legal and intellectual qualifications. Perhaps there might have been some in-depth analyses of the candidates' experience, record, writings, education, etc. In short, one would have expected that the main issues would revolve around said candidate's ability to actually perform the duties required by the highest court in the land. Alas, this was not the case. What, instead, has been the meat of the discussion about Justice Souter's replacement? Whether this person will be a woman. Or a black. Or maybe a hispanic.

This should seem utterly preposterous to our leaders-- a superficial mockery of what the office of Supreme Court justice stands for-- and yet it apparently doesn't. These ridiculously meaningless and insignificant considerations are debated with utter seriousness by the "watchdog" media. No Republican leader, so far as I know, has said "Wait a minute. Shouldn't we actually be discussing this person's legal qualifications a bit more than their gender or the color of their skin? I thought judging people on those details was wrong and racist?" No GOP leader is saying that because if they did they'd instantly be called wrong and racist. That, however, is no excuse.

This, unfortunately, is the reality of the post-Obama-election-age. The country's first MTV president has finally firmly established the fact that a slim majority of Americans now vote for a presidential candidate based entirely on what the TV tells them. And I'm not even talking about the news media. I am talking about singers and actors, about fictional representations of the world as seen through the lens of programs ranging from The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live to Family Guy and Gossip Girl. We conservatives get sidetracked complaining about the "liberal media", but the sad reality is that Americans aren't getting their political views from NBC News, CNN, and the Washington Post. They are getting them from Brian Griffin (the dog on Family Guy, for you uninitiates), Sheryl Crow, and Tina Fey. They are abandoning their most important decisions to fictional characters, from Stephen Colbert to Matt Damon (and yes, he is a fictional character; all of his lines are written by moveon.org and George Soros). Most Americans believe-- subconsciously, if not overtly-- that Sarah Palin is a character played by Tina Fey. They have no more idea of what Ms. Palin has actually said than they do the words of the actual consitution of the United States.

For the first time in history, average Americans now judge entire populations of people -- specifically conservatives and Christians -- based entirely on their fictional representation, rather than on actual observations of any specific conservatives or Christians. Try this: ask any liberal what a conservative and/or Christian is like. They will give you some variation of the popular stereotype, i.e. they are anti-science, bigoted, homophobic, hate-filled, brainless, hayseeds and rednecks. Nod wisely, and then, as innocently as possible, ask them this: do you know conservatives and Christians like that? Can you name names? Prediction: the liberal will hem and haw a moment, and then blurt out the name of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. You may choose to remind them that they probably don't know those people (and likely have never even listened to their shows), but such a reminder would be pointless and will probably just get you fired, ostracized, and called a bitch by some gay gossip columnist. In short, it really isn't worth the effort, because your liberal friend is utterly convinced that the representation he/she has seen on TV is true and accurate, even if they don't personally know anyone like that.

I think the people that propose that we conservatives embrace the "popularity contest" mentality of the post-Obama age recognize the truth of what I am proposing. They know that we are over the cliff-- there's no turning back. It is no longer possible to appeal to the masses based on logic, experience and debate. Thus, these leaders tell us, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

The problem is, conservatism will never be "cool". Conservatism relies on a moral, intellectually honest, logic-based worldview. It cannot be tranformed into something that is merely shallow, hip, and rooted in instant emotional gratification. Even if we wanted to, we cannot promote conservatism in the same way that Democrats can hype liberalism. It'd be like trying to hawk broccoli at a baseball game: "GET yer nuTRICious BROCK-leee! Steamed FRESH and HOT! GOOD and good FOR ya..." It'd be funny, but nobody'd be buying it. If we can't convince people to eat their veggies by getting them to actually care about what's good for them, then there is no hope whatsover. In the same way, if we cannot convince the country to vote conservative based on what is best for themselves and the country, there is no way we will get them to vote conservative based on how yummy it is. Liberalism may be an abject failure in terms of effectiveness and intellectual soundness, but its got the market cornered on yumminess, and that's pretty much all anybody cares about anymore.

This is why I fear that the argument for the "slippery slope" is now officially moot. That argument only works when there is time to stop the slide. I fear that that time is now past. Take a look around. The slope is history. We're off the cliff now, falling into the abyss. All that's left now, I suppose, is to enjoy the ride.

Wheee.

Released Surveillance: American Torture May Indeed Function as Terrorist Recruiting Tool

2009-04-24T09:55:00.000-07:00

Recently, the Obama team has released records of “torture” methods used by the Bush administration on terrorist militants. While the Obama team has chosen not to release any of the life-saving information obtained via said torture methods, they have made a rather serious and damning proclamation about the dangers posed by such actions. America’s use of torture on terrorist detainees, the administration claims, will function as a recruiting tool within the Al Qaeda’s terrorist network.

Unfortunately, they seem to have a valid point, as evidenced by the release of a recent surveillance document. The following is a transcript of a covertly recorded conversation between an Iraqi teenager and a terrorist recruiter. It may well change your position on the current torture debate.

-----(transmission begins with the sound of a closing door)-----

“So you are considering a career as an Al Qaeda terrorist, yes?”

“Well… I guess so."

“You have reservations. This is perfectly natural. Tell me, what is the nature of your apprehension?”

“I don’t know. I mean, what if I get caught? You know? I mean, the Americans… they’re the most powerful military in the world. I hear they torture their prisoners for information. I just… I just don’t know if I could face something like that. I mean, it isn’t all just fun and bombs, you know?”

“You hear correctly, my young friend. The Americans do torture captured terrorist militants. I have a brother in Gitmo. I had two friends who were at Abu Graib. You probably know them. Muhammad and Muhammad.”

“Muhammad’s boys? Yeah sure. My older brother went to school with them. We all used to play cops and suiciders in the back yard.”

“Indeed. The point is, all of them have witnessed and experienced the great Satan’s torture techniques.”

“And lived to tell of them?”

(indistinct; possibly a snicker) “You could put it that way. Let me show you a picture. This was just released by the new American President. It is a ‘candid’ photo of what torture looks like at the hands of the Americans.”

(gasps) “What are they doing to that man?”

“They are grabbing his face. This is what they call a ‘face grab’.”

“Let me guess: this was right before they cut his face off with an electric knife?”

“You would think so, right? I mean, that only makes sense. Alas, no.”

“Did they force him to eat broken glass, maybe?”

“Not a single shard.”

“Then they gouged out his eyes. With a spoon, right? They popped out his eyes and made him look at himself as they urinated on him. Is that it?”

“No, no, and no.”

(Horrified) “Then what? Oh, Allah, what did they do to him?”

“Nothing. After the face grab, he went to the commissary and had a nice rice pilaf and coffee. Weak coffee, I understand. The Americans try, they really do, but they just don’t know how to brew the bean. It’s surprising, really.”

“That’s it?”

“That is it.”

“But surely they were merely teasing him. Surely the next day… I mean, what about Abu Graib? The things I have heard—”

“Are mostly camel fodder. Do you want to know what really happened at Abu Graib?”

“I’m not sure I do. I… I have nightmares…”

(noise of a drawer opening, closing. A pause.) “What is this? A fraternity party at Mosul U?”

“It is from an American newspaper story. This…” (suppressed laughter) “This is a picture of the ‘cruelty’ committed at Abu Graib.”

“…this?”

“Yes.”

“Are those ladies’ panties?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You are yanking my chain.”

“I yank no chains. This is what they call torture. There are Americans for whom this would be a sort of secret fantasy. And not a few of our own countrymen. Am I right? Huh? Yes?”

(Sheepish laughter) “Maybe. Yes. Ah-hah ha!”

(Mocking voice) “Oh no! A dog is barking at me! A leashed dog! I might get dog spit on my nice prison jumpsuit! Oh my goodness gracious! Dear me, there are ladies underpants on my head! Oh what will they do next? A lap-dance? Please, no!”

(Both laughing.)

“All right, all right, I get the point. But that can’t be all they do. I mean, the Americans, they’re as wily as the devil. They play terrible, godless games with their prisoners. I have heard how they can get inside a man’s very own mind, make him afraid, play on his deepest terrors. They have technology that makes nightmares come true, that brings a man’s secret horrors to life.”

“Alas, this is true. My brother, Muhammad, in Gitmo. He has experienced this.”

“He has? What? Tell me! What was his greatest fear?”

(Long, meaningful pause.) “Caterpillars.”

(Ten seconds of silence.)

“Caterpillars?”

“Well, that’s what he told them. They asked him what he was most afraid of, and it was the first thing that came into his head. He considered telling them he was terrified of hot fudge sundaes, but he thought even they wouldn’t believe that. So he said caterpillars.”

“Ooookay. So what did they do? Bio-engineer some sort giant carnivorous caterpillar and drop him off in a forest full of them with only a chicken bone for a weapon?”

“You’d think so, no? I mean, that would have been pretty cool. Scary, yes. But cool.”

“Dead cool.”

“No.”

“Then what? Tell me!”

“They put him in a room with one.”

“One what? One caterpillar?”

“Yes.”

“A regular caterpillar? No genetically enhanced fangs? No poison barbs?”

“Not so much as an electric stinger.”

(laughing again) “You are yanking my chain! Come on, admit it!”

“I tell you, I yank no chains. This is what the Americans do. And you know what? You know what is the most amusing thing of all? They feel bad for it.”

“No!”

“They do! They really do! They berate themselves for it. They conduct big crying fits on their Sunday morning talking shows, telling each other how horrible they are, how they must apologize and beg our forgiveness before we get really mad and do something equally bad to them! Like, oh I don’t know, spilling hot chocolate on them or something.”

“No way!”

“Yes way. They are so riddled with guilt that they give us Korans and prayer rugs—while we are in their custody! They give us lawyers to defend us. It’s true! It would be funny if it wasn’t so totally pathetic. But still, I mean come on, it is pretty funny, is it not?”

“They do know what we do to their people when we catch them, right?”

“Are you kidding? We send them videos! We broadcast the beheadings like spectator sports! We drag their bodies around the streets like piñatas and send them the pieces that are left! It doesn’t matter!”

“Impossible. It must be a trick.”

“Shh!” (Long pause, then whispering) “Do you hear that?”

“What?”

“Stalking… footsteps… coming for you… look out! It’s a… paper tiger!”

(both laughing)

(Falsetto voice) “Meow, meow! Do you have a lawyer! Meow! Are you comfortable? Do you need a new Koran? Meow, meow! Tell me where the bomb is or I’ll… I’ll take away your dessert! I may even grab your face a little! I may stick you in a room with a fuzzy bug! Mee-OW!!”

(growing serious) “That’s all well and good, but what about…”

“Yes, tell me. Get it all out. What is your last worry?”

“Well… what about… waterboarding?”

“I see. You have heard of this. Do you know what it is?”

(pause) “I’ve heard… things. Even the Americans are terrified to talk about it.”

“This is true. And that should tell you everything you need to know about them.”

“But what is it? Do they stick you in a box and fill the box with water until you drown?”

“No. But that’s a pretty good one. Try again.”

“Do they… do they nail you to a board and force you to drink so much water that your stomach explodes?”

“Allah akbar, boy, where do you get this stuff? Heavens no.”

“Well, what is it then? I have to know!”

“You say you have older brothers, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever go to the pool with them?”

“Ugh, yes. They used to tease me. They’d dunk me under the water and then let me up and laugh at me, and then do it again and again. My mother would get so mad at them. Once, I got so much water in my nose that a little bit came out my mouth. It tasted really gross and I had to go sit by the side of the pool for a few minutes. My mom gave me some Fritos and Kool-aid. I hated those guys.”

“Welcome to the resistance, my young friend. Muhammad here will suit you up and get you your machine gun. You have to grow your own beard.”

“Yes sir!”

“And son?”

“Yes sir?”

“If you purposely get yourself caught by the Americans just to go to Gitmo and have Harry Potter audiobooks played at you, I will come there and cut off your head myself.”

(grinning) “You totally would, too. Meow!!”

----- (laughter. Tape ends) -----

Bumper Sticker People: a Useless Response

2009-03-20T07:40:00.001-07:00

It's pointless to offer them a response, methinks, the Bumper Sticker People. Not because they don't deserve it, but because they don't have the mental capacity for it. If they did, they wouldn't be Bumper Sticker People. They are the ultimate expression of the sociology of our age. Where people in John Adams' and Thomas Jefferson's time expected their ideologies to be expressed in lifetime bodies of written works and three hour extemporaneous speeches, the intellects of today are happy to be represented by half a dozen words glued to the backs of their cars. But for the sake of argument, and not a little amusement, let's explore these one-line ideologies a wee bit deeper.

1) IF YOU AREN'T ANGRY, YOU HAVEN'T BEEN PAYING ATTENTION!

On the surface of it, this seems like a pretty bipartisan statement, right? And yet, is there any real question in your mind that the car bearing this bumper sticker belongs to a hardcore liberal Democrat? Of course there isn't. For some reason, anger is nearly synonymous with liberals. Can anyone really deny that they are generally the most pissed-off, self-righteous and unhappy people one will ever have the misfortune of meeting? I thought us puritanical racist war-mongering conservatives were supposed to be the irate ones, all red in the face and full of spittle-flying diatribes. If that was so, wouldn't we be the ones wearing the bumper stickers claiming how awesome it is to be pissed off all the time about stuff? But I digress.

I wonder if the people who live by that bumper sticker are still angry. After all, the new Democratic president has kept a bunch of the dreaded Patriot Act in place. He's also insulted our greatest allies while reaching out to Iranian and Taliban whackos, miss-spelled the one single word of Russian he emblazoned on a gag gift to Russia's leaders, lied about his knowledge of those AIG bonuses, done more immediate and direct damage to the nation's economy than any president in history, and cannot say more than four coherent words in a row without the assistance of a Teleprompter. These things, I imagine, could be construed as reasons for people to get angry. How much do you want to bet, however, that the Bumper Sticker People are still talking about George Bush when they tell us all how pissed off we should be? Hating George Bush is a nearly orgasmic experience for the BSP. For them, the anger only points to Republicans. The ugly litle secret, though, is that the BSP aren't angry with Republicans because they've been "paying attention" and had their ire righteously stoked, despite what their bumper stickers might say. The ugly secret is that the BSP are angry because they just don't know how NOT to be. They're miserable, unhappy people, and they can't rest until everyone else is miserable too. Republicans just make the easiest targets for their anger. Maybe because most Republicans are actually pretty happy? Hmmm.

2) WAR IS NOT PRO-LIFE!

No? Apparently allowing bad guys to run rampant over the earth, killing at their perverse whims, keeping millions of people imprisoned in poverty and fear, seeking power no matter what the cost to the lives of their minions, THAT's pro-life, right? This bumper sticker is the rallying cry of the pacifist, and we all know how great pacifism is in the global scheme of things. How about a new bumper sticker for pacifism, one that really gets to the nub of the issue: PACIFISM: LETTING THE BAD GUYS WIN SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME!

How is this attitude any different than Ghandhi allowing his wife to die of pneumonia because the pennicilin injection would "commit violence" against her body? How is it any different from the religious nutjobs who won't take their dying children to the hospital because "if God wanted them to live, he'd save them Himself"?

Pure pacifism only makes sense if your worldview is only as small as one single person. It falls apart as soon as you realize that the world is a big, scary place, full of bad guys who will hurt whoever they want if good people with guns don't stop them. Pacifism is the greatest ally of the worst people in the world. After all, what more does a murderer want than for his victims not to fight back?

To the contrary, war is one of the most pro-life activities a human can engage in. It is the choice of those who understand real love, who know that real love sometimes means sacrifice and pain, all in the cause of something far greater and better than any single individual. War has saved millions more lives than it has cost, just like surgery has saved far more blood than it has shed. Anyone who cannot see this is that especially dangerous kind of idiot-- the one whose idiocy is a loaded gun just waiting for a bad guy to pick up.

3) HATE IS NOT A FAMILY VALUE!

What about hating George W. Bush? Is there any doubt that the BSP who proudly proclaims this little ditty avidly teaches his kids that conservatives are the lowest form of human life and that if they don't grow up to vote Democrat they will probably be disowned and turned over to the mainstream-media thought police? Interestingly, most of the conservatives I know (including myself) do not hammer their kids with dogma about how evil Democrats are and how we should all hate this or that people group. The fact is, we want our kids to grow up to think for themselves, to come to their own conclusions based on intellectual pursuits. We will try to lead them in the best directions, but we most assuredly will not simply pound them into hating the people we disagree with. And I'll go a step further: conservatives themselves don't hate the people they disagree with. We don't think Democrats are evil. We just think they are stupid, or misguided, or short-sighted. Generally, we feel sorry for them, and for the people their policies have hobbled.

Of course, there are exceptions. There are a few crazy militia types and racists out there, working to teach their kids to hate those whom they hate. They are the fringe, the loons, the moonbats. The fact of the matter, however, is that mainstream hate is taught almost exclusively among the Democratic ranks. For them, hating conservatives and Republicans and George W. Bush and Sarah Palin and Christians and NRA members is more than just a family value, it is an outright virtue.

Example: I had a liberal friend who once pointed me to a news story about a pastor who'd gotten accidentally electrocuted by his microphone while standing in a baptismal tank in front of his entire congregation. She thought this was funny. I, myself, didn't even laugh when Saddam Hussein was executed. It was simply justice, pure and simple-- a dirty, sad job that morality demanded, but not something to celebrate. My liberal friend, who prides herself in being compassionate, caring, and filled with love, thought the accidental public electrocution of a pastor-- whose only sin was believing a philosophy she disdains-- was humorous.

Now ask yourself: who is really teaching hate?

4) TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL!

I really am a little mystified about why this one bothers me so much. Maybe it's that, when I see this bumper sticker on someone's car, the driver is almost always some granola-jockey kid who surely has no children of their own. I have two, myself, and I have to admit that being instructed on child-rearing by a childless BSP raises my ire just a wee bit.

Then again, maybe it is the obnoxiously self righteous implication that any parent needs to be told this. I am trying to imagine a scenario where the sight of this bumper sticker might actually make a positive difference in the mind of a cruddy father. He sees the bumper sticker while screaming at his kids, stops, and thinks to himself, "You know, maybe they're right. This whole 'teaching my kids poorly' thing may not be the best choice after all. Maybe I should do what the bumper sticker tells me to do. I can't imagine why it didn't occur to me before. It seems so obvious in retrospect." Maybe I'm just a cynical bastard, but I'm having a hard time imagining that scenario actually happening. The truth is, ALL parents THINK they are raising their children well. Even the liberal ones who are teaching them hate as a family value. Thus, the only person this bumper sticker really benefits is the childless moron who displays it, since it allows them that one essential thing all liberals need: an excuse to believe they are better than everyone else.

On the other hand, maybe the thing I hate most about this bumper sticker is the unspoken fact that what it really means is this: TEACH YOUR KIDS THE STUFF I WANT THEM TO BELIEVE IN!

In other words, why should the public education system do all the work?

5) IF YOU CAN'T TRUST ME WITH A CHOICE, HOW CAN YOU TRUST ME WITH A BABY?

This is a new one. I saw it for the first time the other day, and I have to admit, when I read it, I was pretty stumped. It's a damn, damn good question.

I thought about it for quite awhile. Here's what I finally came up with. The essential flaw in the axiom is that it creates a false division between the two statements. I don't remember much about algebra, but it seems to me that if you reduced this bumper sticker to its most basic elements, it would look like this: "How can you trust me with X, when you can't trust me with X?" In short, there is no distinction between trusting someone with a choice and trusting them with a baby, when the choice in question is about what they'll do with the baby.

Remember recently when that muslim guy (who, somewhat ironically, started a muslim television station to show Americans that not all muslims were violent) cut off his wife's head because she wanted to divorce him? Let's imagine him with a bumper sticker on his car that reads: IF YOU CAN'T TRUST ME WITH THE CHOICE OF WHETHER OR NOT TO SAW OFF MY WIFE'S HEAD, HOW CAN YOU TRUST ME WITH A WIFE?

To which we might all say, "good question." But you see the problem, yes? You cannot seperate the two concepts. The choice is not distinct from the person the choice is about. The choice IS the person. The only difference between the choice to kill an unborn baby and the choice of a muslim man to kill his wife is that it is illegal for a muslim man to kill his wife.

At least in this country.

So far.

6) SOMEDAY SCHOOLS WILL HAVE ENOUGH MONEY AND THE MILITARY WILL HAVE TO HOLD A BAKE SALE TO BUY MORE BOMBS.

Response: Someday good guys will have finally killed all the bad guys and obnoxious self righteous twits will have to go back to writing shampoo jingles instead of oversimplistic bumper stickers.

7) INSTEAD OF WAR INVEST IN PEOPLE!

This one is sort of a cop-out, because if we don’t wage war against the bad guys, they’ll probably kill most the people the bumper sticker claims to want to invest in. This, in fact, is the perfect picture of liberal compassion in action

IN CONCLUSION: I suspect that the bumper sticker is by far the most popular form of expression of those with a more liberal bent, since it allows them to feel smart without the burden of actually thinking.

I've never put a bumper sticker on my car, mainly because my ideologies are bigger than a four by twelve inch piece of vinyl. Further, I can defend them in great detail, without a Teleprompter. I don't often get into those kinds of discussions, however, because those of opposing viewpoints get irrational and even occasionally violent about it. They are insulted, offended and infuriated by the idea that anyone would expect them to have a logical defense to their bumper stickers. We live in a sound-byte culture, perfectly suited to the simplistic philosophies of the Bumper Sticker People. Not only would one of our nation's founder's extemporanneous speeches bore them to death within ninety seconds, the typical liberal of today wouldn't even have the capacity to understand it, much less debate it. This is not an insult, just an observation. Maybe I could sum it up with a bumper sticker of my own: "Those who can think, do. Those who can't, use bumper stickers".

Or to quote one more bumper sticker I recently observed: "I THINK, THEREFORE I VOTE CONSERVATIVE."

The Difference Between Arrogance and Ego

2009-01-26T08:28:00.000-08:00

This will be relatively short by my standards, methinks. It's an idea that just popped into my head a few days ago and I wanted to get it down while it was still fresh. I've wondered a lot over the years about where the fine line is between arrogance and ego. I believe in my skills, so does that make me arrogant? I used to think so, but then I watched all of those superstars accepting awards and adding the obligatory words of self deprecation, and found myself thinking, "what, did you just win the cosmic lottery? Did you not work extemely hard to hone those skills? Did you not make great sacrifices and slave away at crap jopbs, paying your dues along the way, all in effort to make it to that podium? Take some credit for it! Don't pretend you just got lucky, you liar!" False humility is so annoying to me, because it not only denies the speaker the credit he/she is due, but it creates an erroneous belief that the best among us just got lucky breaks, or that God loves them more than the rest of us, or that excellence is in no way connected to effort. So, I wanted to reject false humility, but not cross the line into outright arrogance. So where is that line? This is why I have pondered it, and this is what suddenly occurred to me the other day.

The whole consideration is moot, because there is no line.

Follow: to say there is a line between X and Y is to imply that X and Y are very similar, and that the gradation between them is hard to spot. The difference between arrogance and ego, however, is not fine. They are not even remotely similar. They only look somewhat similar on the surface, at least to a simple-minded observer. At their core, they are as different as night and day. In a nutshell, here is why: arrogance is bred out of insecurity, ego grows out of confidence. When you remember the source, suddenly they don't seem very similar at all. Arrogance is someone who doesn't believe in their worth pretending that they do, trying to fool the rest of the world into thinking they are better than they really are. Ego is someone who is utterly convinced of their worth, at least in some area or skillset, and who is operating out of that confidence. Arrogance is pointed outwards and is a mask; ego is pointed inwards and is a spotlight.

I came up with this analogy, and I like it. Arrogance is like someone who paints the outside of their house to look like a mansion. They go to such great lengths to perfect the illusion that they completely neglect the interior of their house, allowing it to fall into disrepair and ruin. Ego is like someone who forgets to mow their lawn or weed the flowerbeds because they are too busy renovating the inside of their house, strengthening it, painting and refurbishing, decorating and cleaning, making it exactly the sort of house they want to live in, and knowing they have the skills to do it. The arrogant homeowner only cares what the neighbors think. The confident homeowner, secure in his ego, only cares about what he or she thinks.

It's probably not a perfect analogy, but I'm working on it. I guess the most important thing to remember is that both the arrogant and the ego fail out of pride-- the arrogant out of its lack, and the ego out of its excess. Fair enough?

Maybe the Best White Can Hope For is a Presidential Pardon...

2009-01-21T14:13:00.000-08:00

I, like most of the rest of planet earth, watched a good bit of the coverage of Barack Obama's inauguration this last Tuesday. As always, I marvel with pride at the fact that we are able to achieve "regime change" every four years in this great country, and that we do it seamlessly, civilly and with great pomp and circumstance, notwithstanding the few-- but vocal-- moonbats who actually booed President Bush when he appeared on the dais.

I watched Obama's speech, and listened to the poem that followed, at least as much as my attention span allowed (which, in the case of the poem, was about as long as the third word) but what struck me most was the benediction, given by Reverend Joseph Lowery. I bet a lot of us remember that, and for many of us, it is possibly the most notable moment (other than the unfortunate flub during the actual swearing in). The reverend's benediction got some of the most noticeable applause lines and laughter from the millions there on the mall. And it was, in many ways, sort of cute. The Reverend seems like a very likable guy, with his affable demeanor and gravelly voice. And yet it left me feeling sort of dirty and unsettled.

I just have to ask a few questions about it, for clarification's sake. Maybe someone out there can help me out.

First, where, exactly, as the Reverend declaimed, does "black" have to "get in back"? I mean, I really must be missing something. Are there still buses rolling the streets with "whites only" sections in the front? I am being just a bit facetious, of course, because I know this is not the case. Forced segregation has been outlawed for decades. So what is the reverend referring to? Who is telling black to get in back anymore? I know I'm not, and I can honestly say I don't know anyone who would. If anyone I knew attempted to force an African American individual into any sort of subservient position based on their skin color, I-- and everyone I know-- would speak out loudly against it, decrying such stupidity. And I may be wrong, but my attitude toward such intolerance seems to be mirrored everywhere I look. Thus, Reverend Lowery's comment leaves me a little confused.

Second, where is "yellow" not "mellow"? I assume "yellow" means Chinese, or maybe anyone of Asian descent. And I assume "mellow" means relaxed and at ease, mainly because (I am inferring this from context) the yellow person in question feels loved and respected, with no correlation to the color of their skin. Again, forgive me, but where are Asian Americans judged poorly for being "yellow"? Where are they not allowed to be "mellow"? Granted, not many of the Asian Americans I know are particularly laid back and relaxed, but that isn't because they are reviled for their skin color-- it's because they are very smart and have a remarkable work ethic. But surely, obviously, I am missing something.

Third (and not in any particular order), can someone tell me where "brown" can't stick around and the "red man" can't "get ahead, man?" I mean, again, I might be wrong, but my guess is that "brown" means Hispanics, and are they not now the largest minority group in the country? That fact doesn't seem to make any sense if "brown" ain't allowed to "stick around". And what about the red man? I really don't want to sound nit-picky, but aren't Native American offered exclusive rights to open multimillion-dollar-earning gambling casinos all across the country? Moral conflicts aside, no one can argue that that's a pretty damn good way to "get ahead", at least financially.

Again, certainly and obviously, I am missing something.

And, finally, what about the white man? Regarding them, Reverend Lowery asked this: when will white embrace what is right? Hmmm. That one I think I might be able to answer: The white man will embrace right when he arises en-mass to confront the stench of slavery, many of them giving up their homes and lives in an effort to abolish its abominable practice and save its victims. White will embace right when they legislate equality for minorities under the law and when they vigorously oppose any official segregation of different races. Furthermore, white will embrace right when they elect a man of a different skin color to the White House. When those things happen, maybe then Reverend Lowery will be able to say "Glory, hallelujah, we have at last evolved into a people of respect and equality. Congratulations to all races. We have overcome."

One hopes to live to see the day when all those things come to pass. I wonder when it will happen?

I wonder if Reverend Lowery will notice when it does?

Politics Over Personality

2008-12-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

As an underground conservative working in the arts community, I tend to suffer a bit from the Elijah mentality. That is, it is easy to look around and say, "I am entirely alone! I am the last true Republican conservative in a liberal Democrat emotional mudslide! Send sustenance, oh God! Send me some ravens with copies of 'The Weekly Standard' in their talons!"

Alas, one of the places I turn to when I feel this way (albeit very secretly) is conservative talk radio. I am an avid aficionado of the Maha-Rushie, listening to his program on my iPod at every opportunity. I like Glenn Beck's rattled every-man logic quite a lot as well. Laura Ingraham strikes me as one of the most balanced and moderated voices out there. On the other hand, however, unlike many of my underground conservative brethren, there are one or two of those radio voices I don't love. In particular, I don't like Sean Hannity, and I'll explain why.

I'd like to say that Sean Hannity is probably a fine individual, even if I don't like his show, but I'm not sure even that is true. Anyone who throws around the term "You're a great American," like he does, spending the compliment on anyone and everyone based on the mere qualification that they can obtain a telephone and dial his show's number, is suspect in my (admittedly rather long) book. Frankly, he is only bearable on his Fox show because he is offset by the relatively more odious Alan Combs (although I fear I must admit that I'd sooner drink a beer with Combs than Hannity, as long as we don't talk politics).

But all of that aside, my issue with Sean Hannity is really my issue with current politics in general. The problem with the discussion of American politics is that it is bogged down with the relatively superficial vaguaries of personality instead of idealogy. It's easy to preach to the choir about how awful the enemy is, but it does nothing to engage those who are on the fence, or even to bolster the intellectual arguments of the faithful. As much as I'd like to think otherwise, Hannity strikes me as simply a mean-spirited dimwit whose main argument against the opposition is that they are dopey-looking, silly-sounding, anti-American dum-dum-heads.

In a nutshell, while I tend to agree with Hannity that Howard Dean's famous barbaric yawp is funny, I do not think that it is reason enough not to vote Democrat.

Here's the problem: I am convinced that most of those who voted for Barack Obama and all the rest of the Democrats were not voting for the primary ideals of liberalism. They were voting against George W. Bush, even though he wasn't on the ballot. Why? Because they've been trained to dislike him personally. Not for his policies, specifically, or his Republican ideologies, or even his record. They simply voted for Obama because they don't like Bush himself, personally. Poor John McCain couldn't get out of Bush's shadow enough to differentiate himself-- and let's be honest, he doesn't have all that winning of a personality either.

The main problem with the Hannitization of politics is that, once we reduce the discussion to an argument over who looks the funniest, sounds the dumbest, lies the most, produces the most scandals, or looks the most or the least presidential, we are doomed to a relatively equal slap-fight. There are liars, cheats, thieves, incompetents and screw-ups on both sides. Of course, we on the conservative side at least aim for a higher standard, and arguably there is less out-and-out corruption on the Republican side, but our politicians are a long, long way from perfect. Therefore, the moment we allow the discussion to center on personalities instead of idealogies, that is the moment we surrender our greatest and most meaningful tool in the debate: the soundness of our core ideas.

I propose this: next time we have a discussion about politics, challenge all involved to avoid reducing it to a slap-fight about personalities. Challenge yourself and your conversants to have the discussion without mentioning any specific politician, even by inference. The more we can center the debate on ideals and common sense concepts, the more succesful we will be. And this goes for politicians themselves, progressing all the way through this next election. No name calling or insults or smack-downs. As fun as they are, they reduce our message to a mere popularity contest, a mere debate of one-liners and put-downs. If it comes to that, we will be doomed, not only because it takes away the irrefutable strength of our core convictions, but because, let's face it, pretty much all of the one-liner writers are on their side.

Think about it: why are we conservatives? Is it because we love George W.? Hardly. Is it because Obama is a snarky, pompous elitist? Not in the least. We are not conservatives because of personalities. We are conservatives because we believe in personal responsibility, and the power of the free market, and liberty. We are conservatives because we believe everyone and anyone can achieve, and should be free to, without the roadblocks of a nanny state, or the hobbling of a welfare state. We are conservatives because we believe government's job is, contrary to current experience, extremely limited and necessarily small, and that a huge, tax-and-spend Washington D. C. money machine is a proven failure and should be mercilessly pruned. We are conservatives because we believe in the sanctity of life, and are willing to make the pragmatic, difficult, and honorable choice to sacrifice it in the short term so as to preserve it in the long term. We are conservatives because we recognize that a simple-minded ideal of universal peace only foments the bloodthirsty tyranny of murderers.

And the reason these ideologies will win, if we subtract from them the shifting superficialities of personalities, is that, deep down, almost everyone shares these core beliefs. It's true. Reduce conservatism to the lowest common denominator and almost everyone agrees with it. In their personal lives, all but the most suicidally liberal would use lethal force to protect their families from evil people. All but the most deluded radical knows that he cannot give millions away to charity if his wallet is empty. All but the most knee-jerk Democrat drone knows that he cannot freely fulfill every whim of his child without reducing that child to a helpless, directionless bum. Where the rubber of action meets the road of life, nearly everyone is a conservative. Our duty is to help them see that what is true for themselves is true for nations and governments. This message, however, will be instantly lost the moment we allow it to be hijacked into a debate over personalities.

Conservatism does not need to be redefined. It needs to be unvarnished. It needs to be stripped of all the labels and fluff and superficial personality worship and defamation that well-meaning conservatives have bogged it down with. Under all the tripe, the machine of conservative is still well-oiled, effective, and universal.

It's time to de-Hannitize our message. The discussion isn't about this Democrat's cheating or that liberal's lies. It's about the strength of our ideology versus theirs. If we can manage this, we will see a vast reawakening to the logic and common sense of conservatism.

If we keep arguing personalities, we'll be stuck defending George W. Bush's pronunciation of "nuclear" and Sarah Palin's wardrobe forever. Think about that, and then ask yourself-- Politics or Personality: which do you think will be more effective?

New Democratic Talking Points: "Change Nothing"

2008-11-13T10:49:00.000-08:00

(Intercepted Document from the New Democratic National Committee)

------CONFIDENTIAL------

If you are not a card-carrying member of the Democratic National Convention, an affiliate of the cabinet of the current President-Elect, an employee or editor of a national news organ, then stop reading immediately and destroy this document.

OFFICIAL STANDARDS AND PROCEDURES FOR CONTINUED DEALINGS WITH ROGUE CONSERVATIVE THINKERS AND POLITICIANS (IF ANY ARE TO BE FOUND).

On the heels of our smashing victory this last November, we, the new Democratic leaders of this country, have cause to rejoice. We must not, however, be lulled into a false sense of security. Our foes are still out there, and they may be even more dangerous in their current, defeated state. After all, the last thing their cause needs is martyrs. The work of destroying our opposition has only just begun, and that work can be summed up in two, all-important words:

CHANGE NOTHING.

It will be tempting to adopt an attitude of magnanimous reconciliation with our opponents, or to soften the viciousness of our attacks. This is a sign of lingering humanity in many of our members, but under no circumstances should these primitive instincts be indulged. That which we have used to defeat the conservative (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Republican) ideologies must be continued verbatim, with no break and no exception. "Change" may be an extremely effective mantra for wooing the proletariat, but it is the last thing we wish to implement in terms of our ongoing manifesto. Our new President Elect has shown his understanding of this by peopling his cabinet entirely with our best old-guard liberal warriors, so let us all follow his example and remember the basic principles which have carried us thus far.

Here, in brief, are the guiding axioms that should continue to define our attitude to the remaining conservative underground and any recalcitrant Republican politicians who dare not defect to our side, if in ideology only:

NUMBER ONE: REPUBLICANS ARE STUPID.

This cannot be emphasized enough. This is our first and most effective attack, and it should be repeated above all others. Did it matter that George W. Bush scored higher grades than Al Gore? Not at all. Does it matter that he reads more books in a year than the typical Democrat voter will read in his lifetime (although, in all fairness, he does not watch anywhere near as much television)? No, it doesn't matter. As we so importantly learned during the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings a decade ago, it isn't the facts that matter, but rather the seriousness of the allegation.

Calling someone stupid works on the grade school playground and it works in the world of adult politics for the same reason: calling someone stupid means that their words can be legitimately ignored. THIS is the point. The last thing we want any of our people to do is start listening to the arguments of the other side. As we have long known, debate does not help our side, for the simple reason that our rank-and-file are, in actuality, rather ignorant themselves. As we know, eighty-percent of our own people do not know who Harry Reed is, and only slightly more can name the current vice president. Historically, our members do not vote on issues or ideology; they vote on emotion. They vote on what makes them feel “cool”, or “caring”, or “broad-minded”, or “sexy”. It has been said that Barack Obama is the first “MTV” President, and we are not ashamed of this. This is, in fact, the pinnacle expression of how our Party has always worked. We must, if anything, continue to craft our Democratic brand to represent this strength. This means assuring that our voters continue to vote based on emotion and cool-factor, rather than on boring intellectual facts. We must do everything in our power to prevent ideas from cluttering our voters’ judgments. In short, our best tools involve stifling debate, but under the guise that we'd love to have a debate, if only our opponents weren't so stupid. This way, we can allow our members to continue to feel smart, while freeing them from the burden of actual thinking.

NUMBER TWO: REPUBLICANS ARE HICKS, RUBES, REDNECKS, HILLBILLIES, HOOSIERS, HAYSEEDS or whatever synonym is colloquially relevant.

This is second only to the first in application, and it is mostly the purview and responsibility of the entertainment media to spread this attack. Our own politicians must continue to be viewed as above making such degrading accusations, but it should be made obvious that they are thinking it, and simply being too gracious to say so. Late night comedians in particular are granted free reign in spreading the rumors that:

Conservatives enjoy incest at every opportunity.

Conservatives own guns, leave them lying around their shacks loaded, and fire them at every opportunity, usually at cuddly animals and homosexuals.

Conservatives are religious whackos that handle snakes, pronounce “God” as “GAWD”, and include country and western music as a central tenet of their faith.

Conservatives are terrified of black people, and, in fact, people of any other color, and have probably never seen or spoken to one.

Conservatives subsist entirely on Twinkies, deep-fried sticks of butter, and buckets of gravy, which they both drink and bathe in (often at the same time).

See? The jokes pretty much write themselves, mainly because we’ve been making them for so long. It does not matter that the jokes are unoriginal, cliché, or even knee-jerk obligatory. All that matters is that they demean and belittle our enemies in a way that works.

Many of our members feel a twinge of dishonesty about this tenet for two reasons: one, most Republican politicians are, in fact, wealthy upper-west-side urbanites with nary a gun cabinet or a pick-up truck in sight, and two, most of our rank-and-file constituency are gun-toting, pickup driving, rednecks, rubes, hicks, hayseeds, hoosiers, hillbillies, etc. It must be emphasized again that these mere “facts” must be ignored for the good of the Party. It does not matter that our political opponents are possibly more urbanized and intellectual than we are, simply because the allegations stick. We have been making them for so long that the idea of a redneck conservative politician is an absolute institution: people know it before we even say it, furthermore—and this is the main point—they know it not because it is true, but because we’ve been saying it for so long that people simply see what they expect.

Secondarily, it does not matter that the vast majority of our constituency is, in fact, rednecks, hicks and hayseeds, because of one very simple thing: they do not acknowledge it. They refuse to think of themselves as such, even though they know they are. We provide for them the important service of giving them someone else they can look down on, someone whom they can feel is even less backwards and inbred than themselves. Voting for us becomes simply a nominal evidence that they are not what we’ve claimed our opponents are. After all, what is more important to the redneck than fooling himself into thinking he is better than the “redneck” who might rule him?

NUMBER THREE: REPUBLICANS ARE RACISTS

This must be handled delicately lest it back-fire, but it is one of the deadliest bullets in our arsenal. As with the previous two points, it does not matter if the allegation is true, but merely that it be made, seriously and with absolute assurance. You must trust your own indignance, even if it is baseless. If we have been able to convince the voters of this country that the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Underground Railroad is, against all probability, a racist party, then you must trust your ability to make the accusation stick as well. Fortunately, today’s voters’ understanding of history is apocryphal at best, thus they actually believe that Republicans were the party of segregation, rather than Democrats. We have not yet had the sheer audacity to imply that Governor George Wallace, who enlisted the militia to block entry of black students into an Alabama high school, was actually a Republican, but we’d venture to guess that most people probably believe it anyway.

It may seem ludicrous on the surface of it, but it is absolutely essential to maintain the appropriate sense of outraged indignance whilst making accusations of racism, lest the accusation be seen for the farce that it is. One must not smile or giggle, even if the accusation is made against a conservative candidate who has adopted or married a person of a different race, supported racially-harmonizing issues, or is even of a non-white race themselves. There need be no supporting facts or evidence in the least. In fact, the more the accuser relies on actual evidence, the less convincing the accusation will probably seem. As any race-racketeer knows, racism is best accused on terms of “instinct”, rather than evidence. As we’ve learned in this country, if a person of color accuses a white of racism, it is true, period. Argument or denial by the accused will only deepen their apparent guilt. If handled well, there is no escape from the accusation of racism, as evidenced by the legions of conservatives who have been buried by it in the past.

Now that we have a black President in the White House, some of you may feel that this tool has become somewhat ineffective. To repeat the main point of this dispatch: CHANGE NOTHING. Accusations of racism have been a lethal tool against our opposition in the past, and they remain so today. The fact that we now have a black President in the White House simply means that, as far as we are concerned, forty-seven percent of voters are still racist. You must use this angle to its fullest effect.

NUMBER FOUR: SHOW NO MERCY

Joe Lieberman spoke before the Republican convention, supporting John McCain. Now that we have won, is this the time to welcome the Honorable Senator back to our camp with open arms, exhibiting our respect of his dissenting views in a country that purports to value freedom of thought? Recent events give us the answer to that question. Just as we have convened to see how best to punish, belittle and excommunicate the traitor, Joe Lieberman, we must not allow ourselves to show the slightest compassion on our enemies now that they are down. They will attempt to reorganize, even in their decimated state, and just as we have arisen from the ashes of the George W. Bush years, unified and unstoppable, they will surely attempt to rally themselves for 2012 and beyond. We are now in the perfect position to crush them utterly.

Our first tack must be to further the idea that Conservatism is dead, the Reagan years are over, and that Republican ideology must be redefined to conform to modern reality (i.e. liberalism).

Further, we must support and fast-track the Fairness Doctrine, shutting down on-air expression of conservative ideas. We must continue to redefine dissenting thought in all its forms as hate speech. We must inflame our base into threatening their conservative associates into silence. We must make our members believe that it is good and just to crush the opposition, with threats and shouts if effective, and with violence (such as the glorious displays at the Republican Convention earlier this year) when necessary. We must continue the campaign, consistently rallying our troops to avoid the temptation to debate issues or engage in polite discourse. Conservatives remain our enemy, and like a virus, they must be destroyed utterly, lest they return in the future, rallied and immune to our opposition. Now is the time to complete the work we have begun, ever vigilant, and more dedicated than ever.

That which has worked so far will continue to work. Our voters do not really want change. They want what they have always wanted: to be told they are smart and good for voting against the purported conservative dimwit redneck racists. They want to be promised things, even if we never really follow through with granting those promises. They want to be convinced they are victims, that the evil conservatives have held them down, and that it is time to make those conservatives pay, figuratively and literally.

Despite the apparent landslide of this last election, our majority is slight. Now is the time for us to create further dependence on the government, greater desire to be coddled and provided for, and even less belief in the potential for success. If we accomplish this mission, fully cementing a majority in this country who will vote entirely on emotion and on who promises the most goodies, rather than ideas and what is best for the country, then we will never again have to fear losing power. The few remaining conservative Republicans will become, quite literally, a party without a country.

Only then will we be able to rest.

Say hello to the new Democratic Regime. Just like the old Democratic Regime.

Dispatch From the New Conservative Underground: It's Worse Than We Thought

2008-11-06T20:38:00.001-08:00

I work in the creative industry, therefore it will surprise no one that I am constantly surrounded by Democrats, most of whom are fairly hardcore liberal. Most of them are not bad people, but they are passionate about their politics, despite the fact that most of them truly do not know what they are talking about. Being a liberal in the creative industry is like being high at a Grateful Dead concert: you don't have to be the one smoking it to be under its influence. Most of the people in my field are Democrats simply because you can't be cool (or even particularly tolerated) if you are anything else, and creative people are very enamoured with being cool. I don't engage my colleagues in political conversations for the same reason prison inmates don't bend over to pick up a dropped bar of soap. I just keep my head down and do my job, and usually we all get along fine.

Today, however, I had my first serious freak-out of the new Obama era.

I was working in an editing suite with three other guys. One of these guys, who I will call Bob, spent a good portion of the day loudly voicing his glee about what the Obama presidency was going to be like. The other two guys nodded and agreed as Bob plowed on, assuming, as a matter of course, that everyone in the room agreed with him.

I have not been so sincerely freaked out in a long, long time.

It started with Bob disgustedly calling those who dared vote different than him "f--king hayseeds". This did not particularly surprise me. I am long accustomed to Democrats utterly belittling and insulting those who disagree with them. A few minutes later, however, Bob mentioned an acquaintance of his who'd attended the Republican National Convention. He said that this person had been appalled by the violence that was committed against many of the attendees. Bob blithely admitted that the violence had indeed occurred, and then explained to this acquaintance, "the fact that you people don't understand why that was justified is why you are going to lose this thing."

Did you hear that? I mean, really? According to this particular liberal Democrat, violence against people who disagree with him is justified.

I should point out that Bob is not a complete whack-job. He's successful. He's apparently happily married. He's a father. He's even relatively likeable when he isn't talking polotics. And Bob thinks that dropping cement bags onto the windshields of busses full of conventioneers and spitting on seventy-year-old women is justified, simply because those people dared to be Republicans.

How, exactly, are people like Bob different from terrorists?

I'd sure like to believe that Bob is the great exception, sort of like the Republican racist or the Boy Scout child-molester (contrary to popular belief), but then I began to recall more of what his party has always been about.

Barack Obama himself never once spoke out against the violences committed against Republicans at their convention. Strangely enough, on our own side of the campaign, one couldn't even mention Obama's middle name without John McCain calling an emergency press conference to condemn the guilty party. Amazingly, however, McCain's strained nobility didn't translate across the aisle. During the last debate, Obama managed to effect an air of wounded transcendence at the idea that someone might have shouted something ugly about him at a Republican rally, but was apparently all right with the idea of bags of human feces being lobbed at Republican conventioneers. Bob would certainly approve.

These are the people who've just won the White House.

This is the same party that spawned Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Pucs Coalition, which regularly extorts massive donations from corporations lest they be deemed "racist" by the morally impeccable Jackson. Similarly, this is the same party that planted the seeds of the current economic catastrophe by threatening to picket banks as racist if they didn't grant more and more sub-prime home loans. This is the party that foments men like the baton-weilding Black Panthers who attempted to block the polling place in Republican-heavy voting areas, happily resorting to threats instead of debate. This is, in short, the party of simple thug-politics and mafia-style threats.

These are the people who now control the majority of the government.

Bob's party is the force behind the "fairness doctrine", which is interested in fairness in the same way that George Orwell's fictional "Ministry of Peace" was interested in Peace (for those of you who've not yet read "1984", the Ministry of Peace was, of course, concerned with waging war). This is the party that shuns debates of ideas, choosing instead the forced silence of anyone who dissents. This is the party of shouting down the speeches of those they oppose, rather than engaging them intellectually. This is the party of Barack Obama, who refused to debate John McCain in Town Hall-style meetings across the country. This is the party of Al Gore, who refuses to debate anyone in the scientific community (or any other community, for that matter) on the issue of global warming. This is the party of Michael Moore, of propagandistic movies and bumper sticker slogans, of one-sided diatribes of all kinds, but never of rational discussions of ideas. This is the party of belittling and mocking, of comfort in the like-minded crowd, because the group-think of the crowd so easily supplants any need for personal intellectual honesty.

This is the party that admits that the question of when life begins is "above their pay-grade", and yet, even in the face of that uncertainty, defaults to killing that potential life, and then dares to call it a virtue.

This is the party that admires Karl Marx, who taught that truth is variable based on whatever furthers the cause. This is the party that has made that philosophy a synonym for politics.

I hate to say it, but I think things are actually a lot worse than we originally thought. This is the party that is now firmly in charge of our country.

Bob had a lot more to say. He said that Obama was already planning to use his army of millions of online cyber-brutes to harrass his opponants, pressuring and threatening them into fast-tracking the new president's deliciously liberal agenda. Most of the facets of that agenda, Bob explained, had to do with forcing companies to adhere to debilitating "green" retrofittings (much like what Obama claimed he'd cripple the coal industry with) and supplanting "straight-capitalism" with "new socialistic capitalism". Bob wasn't just blowing smoke. He wasn't making any of this up. He knew his stuff. He knew the terminology and the numbers. He knew how this internet army came about (Clinton and Howard Dean) and about the uncomfortable alliance between Clinton's DNC and the new Obama regime. He knew dates and names and specifics. Bob was very much in-the-know.

Maybe Bob is wrong. Maybe Obama really will settle down into the sort of mainstream, centrist presidency that so many presidents seem to succumb to, regardless of political inclination. Maybe Bob doesn't represent his party when he says that violence against Republicans is justified and understandable. Maybe Bob is just one angry, gleeful exception in the liberal Democratic juggernaut that is now controlling everything.

Oh God, I do hope so. But considering the history of the Democratic party, up to this very day, I don't think Bob is wrong at all. I think Bob is, in fact, in the dead-center mainstream of his party.

I used to keep my head down and avoid talking about politics among my colleagues because I was worried about getting into a senseless argument. Now, for the first time, I am actually worried to even admit I am a conservative. Now, for the first time in my life, being a conservative could potentially be physically dangerous.

Welcome to the New Conservative Underground.

This Former Republican says: If You Can't Beat 'Em...

2008-11-04T18:48:00.000-08:00

Well, it's almost nine o'clock on election night, and it's a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama is the new president. I was upset by this at first, but then I realized something, something that has set me free.

I've realized that I've been wrong all along.

Let me explain. I was raised by well-meaning, but obviously deluded parents. They worked hard to instill in me the same misconceptions they themselves grew up with, and as a result I have been a victim of those misconceptions my entire life. Thus, when I saw that the most liberal-minded democratic candidate of all time was about to assume the presidency, those life-long, deeply ingrained misunderstandings led me to believe that this would be an awful, even frightening thing. "How is it," I thought to myself, "That the majority of this country can fanatically support a man who represents the exact opposite of the ideals I was raised with?" And for the first time in my life, I asked a question that very few people ever honestly pose to themselves: Is it possible I am wrong and they are right?

It was an epiphany. I am shocked and amazed that it took me so long to realize how wrong I have been. And I have to tell you, it is extremely freeing to come over to the other side.

But I fear I am not being as specific as I should be. Like those who suffer from the disease of alcoholism, the first step to healing is admitting one's specific problem. Let me take a deep breath and face this.

I was raised to believe in personal responsibility. It was, in fact, the cornerstone of my family's belief system. I was taught that if I was ever to succeed, it was up to me to do the hard work of making it happen. I was told that no one would give me a free lunch. I was made to buy my own first car and pay my own way through college. As an adult, I have struggled and worked long, hard jobs, all because I believed it was my responsibility to take care of myself and my family. In short, my life view was summed up by the idea that I, and I alone, was responsible for my own health, success and family.

What a prison I had constructed for myself! To think of all the time I spent trying to work it out on my own, struggling to learn and grow, slaving through the days to hone my talents into marketable skills. How much time I wasted trying to create new products and valuable services, all to achieve my own success, to take care of myself and my family. In short, how very long I struggled to reach that elusive and teasing American Dream! Oh, what a fool I was! For now I see what the majority of the rest of this country sees, what the rest of you have apparently known all along: it ISN'T my job to take care of myself and my family. It's the government's!

WHAT a relief!

You know, I laugh now, looking back on how I felt during the election. I was so annoyed at people for not seeing the apparent folly of Obama's statements about "being our brother's keepers" when his own brother was living in a shack for twelve dollars a year and his aunt was living in a rat-infested slum in Boston. Now, of course, I see the real truth. Obama didn't literally mean we should take care of our brothers. What he really meant was that the government should take care of our brothers (and aunts). This explains how he intended to help his slum-living Aunt, and I see now that it is a much more loving method than just sending her some of his own money. Instead, once he becomes president, he'll just send her a bunch of everybody else's money. I understand now that it wasn't Obama's job to help Aunt Zeituni specifically, since she is just one of the millions of children of the government, meant to be taken care of like chicks under a huge, federal wing. It makes sense to me now. I used to be so shamelessly literal.

Similarly, I used to labor under a delusion of ownership. I was plagued by what Congressman Jim Moran recently called "the simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it." Never mind what Thomas Jefferson (the slave owner) meant when he said "a wise and frugal government... shall leave [men] otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it had earned". It was quite the two-edged sword of heresy I lived under: the idea that I had to work hard for myself and my family, and the idea that what I earned by that hard word was mine. Only now do I see the folly of my ways, and now that I have rejected them, I feel such a sense of complete freedom.

Shall I describe it? Now I can finally- finally!- let it all go. No longer do I have to work hard day and night to make a way for myself and my family. No more will I have to struggle to create new products that the market may wish to enjoy. Finally, I can catch up on all that wonderful TV I've been missing because I'd been working so hard. Now, finally, it's someone else's duty to take care of me! How completely and utterly freeing! Here, all this time, I had resented the fact that the government takes away thirty percent of my income. Now, finally, I see that if I simply give up, lay back, and do nothing, that same government will give me chunks of someone else's thirty percent! What a complete and unadulterated fool I have been, working so hard and trying to be self relient! Obama, and you, the rest of the country who figured this out a long time ago, have finally shown me the way.

It's a new day. It's a "what's in it for me" day. This is the moment where I officially abandon the idea of personal responsibility and making it by myself. After all, I'm a victim. I was misled by my parents, taught a narrow-minded and probably racist litany of lies about character and hard work and wisdom and good choices. Now I see the truth: choices don't matter, because if I make a mistake, I can abort it (even in the third trimester, and I won't even have to pay for it). If I screw up, the government will take care of me anyway, so why even try? Why work so hard to be the one creating the income for everyone else, when I can be the one sponging it up? Let the Joe the Plumbers of the country be the schlubs to go out and work their butts off. They may be sucker enough to think its still worth it to be self-reliant, but I have seen the light. I have learned that it is better not to try, because trying just means having more and more taken away. I have learned that this is the "gimme" country. So gimme. I want mine. I don't want to work for it anymore. Why should I? It wouldn't be mine to keep even if I did. I want someone else's, because they have too much and don't deserve it, even if they worked for it.

I'm late coming to this party, I know. Most of the country is in line ahead of me. All of you who voted for Obama got here first, but I'm shouldering in with you, lining up outside the federal coffers for my chunk of the handout. The bank doors are open. We've finally gotten to that fabled point where we are voting in a president because of the free goodies he's promising us. I know it means the end of the country is at hand, but it isn't here yet. There's still at least a few more years of good looting to be had before everything is completely broke and all the producers flee the country like rats from a sinking ship. Until then, at least for a little while, there will be plenty of wealth to spread around, so get outta my way. I want mine.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Hallelujah, Reverend Wright, pass the collection plate.

Political Vomit 2: Bumper Sticker People

2008-09-10T07:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I don't think I quite got it all out yesterday. This has been accumulating for awhile.

Part of the reason that it is easy for a mild-mannered, reasonably intelligent conservative-minded guy like me to get a little depressed about things is that, by all appearances, the rest of the country is in complete disagreement with me and my personal views. Everywhere I look, there are bumper stickers and yard signs snidely deriding my beliefs, proclaiming the deity of Barack Obama, and trumpeting snarky, self righteous one-liners about how horrible people like me are. Some of them are pretty funny ("Republicans for Voldemort '08") and some of them are so sappy they rot your teeth ("one day schools will have enough money and the navy will have to hold a bake sell to buy a..." yadda yadda, I think I'm gonna puke, 'scuse me, I feel so dirty for even quoting this), but all of them amount to the same things I mentioned yesterday: Republicans are evil, mean, war-mongering, intolerant, gun-toting, over-religious bitter clingers-- with absolutely no exceptions-- and you should all be dreadfully ashamed of yourselves, hit with plastic bags of feces, sued, impeached and shot.

Besides the bumper stickers and yard signs, just watch any television, movie, or listen to any popular music. It is absolutely undeniable-- I mean, come on, even the most liberal-minded of you can't deny this and keep even the slightest shred of respectability-- it is absolutely undeniable that the vast and nearly unanimous majority of our entertainers (including the broadcast news media, with the single exception of most talk radio) are passionate adherents to democratic political philosophy. It is an axiom. If you are an artist, actor, singer, writer, or entertainer in any way, two things are true about you: Your job is to be heard and seen by the general public, AND you are a liberal-minded democrat. The result: nearly every message we hear in our media-saturated culture, either directly or indirectly, mirrors the messages of the bumper stickers and yard signs.

It is no surprise, really, that the entertainment community as a whole is liberal democrat. If it is true (and it is) that Democratic beliefs are rooted in emotion, then it makes perfect sense that it'd appeal strongly to a demographic whose very livelihood is based on the conjuring and commerse of emotion. Artists of all stripe work in the world of manufacturing emotion, first in themselves, to create the product (drama, music, art, news*, etc) and then in the general public, through the sale of that product. Emotion is their single currency. It's all they understand. I know this, because I am an artist, and I know a lot of other artists. Of course they are not all ruled exclusively by emotion, but I know from personal experience that it takes an effort of will for an artist not to be. Thus, again, it makes perfect sense that a political idealogy based on feel-good intentions and lofty motivations (regardless of actual result) would appeal to the great majority of artists.

It's no surprise, either, that young people are also almost entirely democratic. Young people are all ruled by emotions. It's the very nature of being young. We who are no longer particularly young remember it well. We all made stupid decisions and said moronic things and got into sticky situations because our emotions made it seem like "a good idea at the time." If you don't agree, I'm sorry, you were never a teenager. Also, let us not forget that the single most important thing to any young adult is being as attractive and cool as humanly possible. There is NO way that a young person can be attractive and cool AND be known as a Republican. (I recall the episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" in which the main character is so disgusted by the fact that his gorgeous romantic partner is a Republican that he loses all desire for her; 'nuff said). On the other hand, there is no quicker and surer way to proclaim your coolness than to mock Republicans, mindlessly parrot democratic talking points, and march for global warming/world peace/save the polar bears/protect abortion-on-demand rallies.

Face it: young people, while pretending to be the most free-minded and individually unique of us all, are the most lock-step lemmings imaginable. "You can be cool believing anything you want! Er, as long as it's the same thing me and George Clooney and Moby believe."

At the end of all this, the result is that we are absolutely inundated with the message that democrats are the vast majority, that they alone are cool and well-adjusted and socially conscious, that democratic beliefs are the only responsible choice, and that Republicans are evil, uncool, hate-filled neanderthals with rebel flags tatooed on their very fat butts. Thus, for a guy like me, looking around at our culture, it is easy to get depressed. It looks as if everyone is aligned against me and my beliefs.

But I've begun to suspect something. You wanna know what it is? I don't care, I'm gonna tell you anyway.

They're ALL bumper sticker people. What I mean is that it only seems like the rest of the country is aligned against conservative beliefs because democrats are the LOUD ones. They're the ones whose political beliefs are rooted in emotion, thus they are passionate and angry, and this makes them militant and vocal. From the news anchors to the guy currently waving the "impeach Cheney" sign on the courthouse lawn across the street from this very coffee shop, they are believers in the spectacle as argument. They are big ones for rallies and marches, shouted chants, chaotic disruptions of speeches, throwing fake blood and real feces, spray-painted epithets and, yes, bumper-sticker plastered cars.

I have fairly strong political convictions. I quite like to debate them, because I am very keen on honing my own convictions via sharpening them against smart people who might disagree with them (even though-- and I'm not joking here -- smart people who disagree with me are getting harder and harder to come by). But I don't have any bumper stickers on my car. I never have. I don't put up yard signs or chant slogans. And I definitely don't believe in the persuasive power of spitting on old ladies as they try to enter conventions.

In short, I'm not one of the loud ones. And here's the part that gives me hope: I don't think the majority of the country are, either. I think most of us are doing our jobs, raising our kids, thinking through our political and moral convictions, and voicing them only in the quiet but earth-shaping act of voting. We look with dismay at the militant, spittle-flying diatribes of our angry democratic neighbors, and with disgust at the snide, belittling attitudes of the entertainment media, and we just go on silently anyway, unswayed in our convictions because we are not the sort to be persuaded by emotion alone (even if it would make us a little cooler to Keith Olberman and Tim Robbins).

We're the ones that really move the country, and this is why the loud ones are so very, very loud. They hate that we, the quiet ones, are, in actuality, driving the nation. We, who work too hard to attend protest rallies, who respect people too much to shout them down at their speeches, who believe in logical thinking too much to reduce our convictions to snarky one-liners, we are the mighty unseen who carry this country and make it work. And yes, this gives me hope.

Even if it means Al Franken thinks I'm a big fat idiot.

*And if you think news is not interested, first and foremost, in conjuring emotion, consider that most famous news axiom of all, "if it bleeds, it leads."

ADDENDUM TO YESTERDAY'S POST: The Polar Bear Debacle

My general advice to any political minded person, republican or democrat, is the advice I try to follow: 1) verify the rumors before you make them the foundation of your convictions. 2) Check and know your sources before you try to use them in an argument. And 3) Use your brain just a little teensy bit more than you use your heart. With this in mind, I did some research on the Sarah Palin Polar Bear debacle my friend "Ruth" was so exercised about.

I discovered a lot of things, but the only one that really matters is this: the entire controversy is based on the numbers of polar bears. Are they increasing or decreasing? As with all such things, it depends on who you read. I found this article about it, from a site dedicated to debunking the opponents of man-made global warming and proving that we humans are the vilest creatures to ever leave a trail of slime on this poor, abused planet. Here's the quote that was meant to prove that polar bears are in dire doom:

"Yet recently there have been claims that polar bear populations are increasing... While polar bear numbers are increasing in two of these [various polar bear] populations, two others are definitely in decline. We don't really know how the rest of the populations are faring, so the truth is that no one can say for sure how overall numbers are changing."

Let's turn off our emotions for a moment and look at this together: the article states that two populations are increasing, two are declining, and two are unknown. At best, mathematically, does this not mean that polar bear numbers are, in fact, generally the same as always, with some variation in specific populations? I thought the numbers were supposed to be plummeting? This is the whole reason they were supposed to be endangered, yes? The best the self-proclaimed defenders of the poor polar bear can do is claim that the numbers of polar bears are unchanging? Forgive me if, like Sarah Palin, I don't find this incredibly moving.

In fact, if two of the populations ARE, in fact, increasing, as the article states, how can we be certain that any changes made for the good of the declining types of bears would not harm the numbers of the type that are increasing? I guess, like any good democratic philosophy, it's noble and just that the bears who are benefiting be punished in favor of the bears that are less-well-off.

Despite what the polar bear blogs say("Oil and gas extraction can be very damaging to arctic ecosystems including the polar bears."), even Alaska's Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, who "rejected every point" Palin made about the polar bears, admitted that the threat to polar bears did not come from the petroleum industry (it comes from your SUV, you stupid Republican war-monger). So. What does this leave us with? Turn your emotions back on. That rankled, itchy, hot feeling in your chest? It's justified annoyance at being hoodwinked.

Political Vomit

2008-09-09T07:11:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the coverage of the upcoming election and talking to people about it, and I feel like if I don't spew some of the thoughts that have been locked in my head during this time, I'll go into some sort of mental constipation overload. Thus, the following may not be particularly coherent, organized, or digestible. It is, after all, political vomit. Here goes.

I met a couple at the park the other day whilst watching the kids. They were very nice, and I quite enjoyed connecting with them as our kids threw sand on each other in the sandbox. They'd just moved to St. Louis from California, where they had both worked in the film industry, thus we had some immediate common ground. Their son was wearing a tee shirt with the word PEACE on it, framed in the appropriate symbol. Not too surprising, of course, but somewhat indicative. Shortly, the couple began talking politics with me, assuming that I was, of course, in complete agreement with them in their decidedly liberal views. I was sad, because I realized that what had begun to look like a burgeoning friendship was suddenly doomed. NOT because I cannot tolerate democratic friends, mind you. Quite the reverse, in fact: I sat feeling rather dejected in the knowledge that, if these nice people knew I was a Republican, they'd suddenly and disgustedly shun me.

After all-- and this is the point-- Republicans are EVIL, aren't they? It was apparent that this nice couple believed in that supposition entirely. From George W. Bush on down, Republicans are evil, selfish, hate-filled, war-mongering capitalist pigs intent only on dropping bombs, jailing homosexuals, and shooting things with guns. Republicans are incapable of love, compassion, generosity and grace. For example, when asked about Cindy McCain's adopting an Asian child whom she'd brought to this country for a life-saving surgery, a caller on a radio talk show stated with dripping disgust, "she's just looking for a new servant to manage her mansions." Enough said.

Being a Republican means being a pariah. It's not the same in reverse. Have you noticed this?

We have quite a few Democratic and liberal friends. Hell, we have Socialist friends. Do most hardcore Democrats have Republican friends (that they know of)? I'd hazard a guess that they don't. We, as Republicans, can have liberal friends because, for the most part, we see liberals as wrong, and potentially dangerous when in positions of high power, but that's all. We don't think they are evil. We don't believe they deserve to have bags of human feces thrown at them as they attempt to enter their convention. We don't wish them horrible misfortunes. We believe that the rank and file Democrat truly means well. Thus, we don't hate them. We can and do befriend them.

Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, believe that Republicans are the pure essence of evil. Me. They think that I, your friendly neighborhood coffee-drinking, Potter fan-fiction writing, goof-off computer animator and very occasional blog writer, am EVIL. It goes without saying: you don't make friends with evil. You fight evil. You shun and hate evil. In a culture ruled by political correctness, marches for peace, and tolerance for all, Republicans alone deserve nothing but scathing mockery, violent protest, and complete rejection. Because we, people like George W. and John McCain on down to little old me, are the devil incarnate.

It's cool to hate people like me. It's hip to mock us. Not that the mockeries are fair or even representative of us. I've never shot a single living thing, for fun or for food. I'm an artist. I listen to System of a Down and Evanescence and Three Days Grace. But that doesn't matter, because Republicans like me are ALL-- without exception-- gun-rack truck-drivin' redneck factory workers or rich white wanna-be-slave-owning industrialists. We're all selfish, arrogant, and stupid, and we ALL listen to country and western music. Right? As far as the left is concerned, these are the things that virtually define being a Republican. I'm a Republican, so do the math. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

That's the first thing that has been bugging me about the political world. After all, how do you discuss issues calmly with someone who is absolutely certain that you, your leaders, and everything you stand for is the earthly manifestation of pure, liquid evil?

But there's something else.

I, like pretty much every other semi-conservative Republican with a pulse, was excited about Sarah Palin's appointment as McCain's running mate. Up until then, I was not a huge McCain supporter. Palin I like though, for a variety of reasons. You get the point. When we expressed this excitement to one of our Democratic friends, she recoiled. This friend, who I will call Barbara, was completely disgusted with Palin. Why? "Well," she replied, "the whole beauty pageant thing..."

...

... what?

I'd not even heard about "the beauty pageant thing" at that point. I looked it up, worried, certain that Palin must have some horrid, nefarious past in which she'd cheated in the pageant, or been paid to judge falsely, or had broken the knee of another contestent with a tire iron. As it turns out, she was merely in the Ms. Alaska pageant. She came in second. That was enough for Barbara. To my wife I said, "as an attractive woman, does it offend you that apparently being attractive means you are stupid and incapable of leading?" She didn't need to answer. She did, of course, and her answer wouldn't surprise anyone.

Another friend of ours, who happens to be a Socialist-leaning Democrat (we'll call her Ruth), was equally repulsed when we brought up Sarah Palin at a recent gathering. Ruth believes Bush is the anti-christ (not entirely jokingly, either) but she was, at first, cautiously hopeful about Sarah Palin. Until her speech at the Democratic convention, that is. As she talked about her response to Palin's speech, Ruth repeatedly used the word "horrified". My mouth was agape. I'd seen the speech. Depending on your philosophy, I could imagine you disagreeing with Palin, but to be repeatedly "horrified"? I asked why. What policy or position did Ruth object to? Turns out it wasn't really any of her specific policies, it was the way she was so vicious and mean, the way she attacked the Democrats.

"You mean," (I didn't say) "She hurled plastic bags of infected urine at them and dropped sacks of dry cement on their buses from overpasses?" Oh wait, no, that was the Democrats. Not the leaders, of course, but I've noticed that those same leaders didn't verbally object in any way to the actions of their followers. Thus, we have to assume that that kind of attack is all right with both Ruth and Barack Obama. No, stating facts and critiques about one's opponant from the stage, with a smile and a confident tone of voice-- that's uncalled for and unforgivable.

Then, of course, there were the polar bears. There's always the polar bears. Apparently, Palin refused to sign some bill that would declare all the polar bears endangered. Ruth was absolutely beside herself about that. As far as she was concerned, Palin was intentionally trying to kill off the polar bears. I'm not exaggerating. She really believes that, with a passion. I tried, fleetingly, to discuss it with her, to offer a lucid argument, but she simply couldn't hear it. I could see it on her face. No argument mattered. Just the polar bears.

I went for a walk, completely flummuxed. I couldn't quite put my finger on what bugged me so much about talking to Ruth, or, for that matter, Barbara and the rest of the Democrat/liberals out there. I finally realized what it was, and it was a revelation to me. Here's what it is:

Republicans like me base our positions on logic. We base it on thinking through the facts, discussing them with people who both agree and disagree with us, listening to arguments on both sides, and coming to a defensible conclusion. Our Democratic friends do not seem to do that, and by extrapolation, I can only assume that this is not a typical characteristic of Democratic philosophies in general. Democrats don'tseem to think about issues-- they feel about them. For our Democratic friends, issues are, first and foremost, emotional. The feel-good response is the right one, even if it doesn't really work out in real life.

Further, anyone who disagrees with a Democrat or argues with them is assaulting their feelings, and therefore invalidating them. Anyone who contends with the "science" of global warming, therefore, hates the environment and are evil. Anyone who believes welfare might actually harm the poor who come to rely on it hates the poor and wants them all shipped off to an island somewhere. In short, to a liberal-minded person, if the argument is not emotional at it's heart, there can be no argument at all. It didn't even begin to occur to Ruth that Sarah Palin might have had good, logical reasons for not signing a bill that felt as good as one protecting polar bears. Despite whatever I said to logically argue Sarah Palin's possible perspective on it (like, for example, the fact that they said the same thing about the caribou, and we all know how well they fared, despite the predictions) Ruth was completely unable to hear a logical (non-emotional) argument. If the motivation isn't emotional, it isn't a motivation at all. Instead, Ruth had to invent a potential motivation for Sarah Palin based on emotion: hate. Sarah Palin hates polar bears. To me, it would be truly funny if Ruth didn't believe it so ardently. Sarah Palin hating polar bears is the only thing that makes sense to a person who bases their decisions solely on feelings.

Ugh. That's about it. Enough political vomit. The bottom line is I am so very tired of feeling afraid to admit I am a Republican, since it has become such conventional wisdom that Republicans are stupid, mean, hateful and backwards. I'm a people-pleaser; I want to be liked! But, thankfully, not enough to change my hard-thought convictions. I'll just go and vote, like I always do, without making a big thing about it, just like the vast majority of those who are like me.

And I am tired of not being able to have a healthy debate about issues because you cannot argue with someone's emotions. It just insults them, because deep down, they believe you are invalidating something central and very personal to who they are. Honestly, I have no problem with feelings. I am a sensitive, emotional guy, and I am passionate about my views, but moreso because I have thought them through so carefully. In fact, the more my worldviews are backed up by careful, daily scrutiny, the more impassioned I am about them, because I am increasingly confident in their rightness. Political decisions must be logical first.

But you can't say that to a liberal. Mostly because if you do, they'll know you are a Republican, and everyone knows Republicans are evil.

(sigh.)

Note to the Kirkwood Killer: a Qualified Retraction...

2008-02-09T07:31:00.000-08:00

(Note: this is a follow-up to the previous post, "A Note to the Kirkwood City Council Killer". If you didn't read that, this won't make much sense. If you did read it, it's probably a good idea for you to read on.)

OK, so it's been a few days, now. The Kirkwood City Council Gun-wielding murderous madman has been the subject of lots of conversation and speculation in the local and national news media. I know quite a bit more now about who the guy was and what his ongoing complaints were. For one, I know his nickname was Cookie. I know I said I'd never remember his name, but a handle like "Cookie" -- especially for a construction worker -- is pretty memorable.

I also know that the Kirkwood city council had been an obsession of Cookie's for several years. I know that he used to run a construction business and parked his equipment on the street, resulting in over a hundred-fifty tickets. I know that he felt uniquely persecuted by those tickets, but apparently not persecuted enough to stop parking his construction equipment on the street. Strange, that, but I'll save that for another blog. I know that he felt it was his duty to make spittle-flying diatribes at any and all council meetings until the council determined that, if they wished to get anything done, they'd have to order him to stay quiet. I know that they considered banning him from the meetings altogether but that the mayor decided against it. I know that the city council forgave all the outstanding tickets-- several thousand dollars worth of fines-- in a conciliatory gesture. I know that, despite this gesture of goodwill, Cookie continued to pursue his legal right to make a vitriolic ruckus during council meetings. I know that his "freedom of speech" case was thrown out of court a few weeks ago. I know now that, bafflingly, his mother and brother apparently believe his vendetta was justified and rational. And maybe most important of all (at least according to the standards of our myopic culture) I now know that Cookie was black.

I didn't know that when I wrote the Note to the Kirkwood City Council Killer. It wouldn't have made any difference if I had. Apparently, though, the fact that Cookie was black changes the dynamics of the entire affair for lots of people. I don't understand that. Does morality change a little depending on a person's skin color? Does a crime become more heinous if the perpetrator is white and more justifiable if the perpetrator is black?

That's not a rhetorical question. I'm actually asking that, because the evidence is that loads of people believe that.

Yes, I know a lot more about Cookie now. But I want to put all of that aside for the moment. A good friend asked me if I really meant what I said about Cookie being a "forgettable lump of human debris"? She challenged me to consider that he, too, was a life worth considering. A life worth mourning along with the others. I thank her for asking that. In a less specific way, my wife has been asking me that kind of question for a long time.

Bleah.

I don't want to think about that. I really don't. And I think I know why. It's very simple. What Cookie did was so awful- so surprising and devastating and meaningless- that I want to be able to package it up into a neat, containable box of blame. If I can convince myself and everyone else that Cookie was a horrible, worthless monster, then the tragedy becomes manageable. Why? Because Cookie's dead. He can't spread his stupid, random, murderous insanity around anymore. The world is a safer place. It didn't make sense for a few minutes there, but thankfully the source of the senselessness was killed -- virtually by his own hand, how about that for poetic justice? -- so the world is, once again, a relatively safe place to raise my kids.

But balance demands a less simple answer. I don't want to face it, damn it! But things aren't quite that easy, are they?

I've had this mental picture of what a healthy soul looks like. It's like a ball suspended in space by four strings. Each string is anchored to the four elements of personality: emotion and intellect, belief and knowledge*. In the truly healthy individual, the soul is suspended equidistant between all four polarities. There is, in short, a perfect balance between reason and faith, hope and reality. When an individual exercises one aspect of their personality while neglecting the others, the result is an imbalance that will inevitably lead to error. For instance, the person who values knowledge over belief will forget how to have faith. They will land on atheism and feel all the more superior for having overcome the "irrationality of belief". They will become, in effect, too smart for their own good. On the other hand, the person who immerses in emotion while neglecting reason will find themselves hopelessly gullible, ruled by the vaguaries of their emotions. This person will adopt any belief system, no matter how arcane or preposterous, as long as it makes them feel meaningful and special.

The reason I mention this here is just to illustrate how hard balance is to maintain. When I allow myself to immerse into rage at Cookie and loll in the merciless delight of blame, I am ignoring the alternate fact, as my friend implied, that Cookie is also a casualty in the larger scheme of God's world. God loved Cookie just as much as He loves me. It wasn't true for me to say that no one was Cookie's advocate. God was. God loved Cookie. God doesn't approve of what Cookie did, but neither does He approve of me calling another of His kids a worthless speck of human debris.

Cookie was broken, yes. The human side of me wants to throw that which was broken away, forget about it, despise it. But the spiritual side of me needs to remember that God wants to fix what is broken. He wants to make it better even than it was to begin with. God loves the broken. In fact, I think it's undeniable that His heart is especially inclined towards them, probably because, being their Maker, He knows what they can be. He sees their desperate unhappiness and knows only that He made them for delighted joy, and He wants them to know it.

"But wait!" a part of me warns stridently, "Let's not get all mushy about what God may think of this idiot in the heavenly realm. Of course God loved him. God loved Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer, too, but they had to pay the earthly price for their crimes. Murderers don't get let out of jail just because they find God and get divine forgiveness. It's fine to remember that God loves everybody, but make sure you keep a grip on the human reality that we all have to live in."

And that's just it. Balance. Two worlds that have to fit together, not only out there, where the spiritual rubber meets the earthly road, but here in my own heart and mind and soul. It's hard. Really, really hard. Exhausting.

So to answer my friend's question: no, despite what I said earlier, I can't think that Cookie is a forgettable lump of human debris. I want to, but I can't let that overcome the delicate balance of grace (which in my heart is tenuous at the best of times). God loved Cookie and made him for better. God mourns Cookie's destruction along with the rest. I should, too, or at least try to. Cookie was broken, but not worthless.

I'm still glad he's dead. Not necessarily because he deserved it, but because he is no longer tormented by his brokenness, and no one else will die at the hand of that brokenness. I wish Cookie had been surrounded by people who loved him enough to steer him to balance (as my friend steered me). I wish he'd been loved enough by his mother and brother to be redirected toward healing. It could've happened, and we might have celebrated Cookie's re-emergence into the brotherhood of humanity. He could've been taught how to live. Instead, Cookie was encouraged and propelled to his doom by his own family, who even now seem to live in a black box of bitterness, apparently convinced that Cookie's final rampage of mad hate was justified.

In short, the horror of what cookie did is not simple to explain. Worse, it isn't simple to contain. The seeds of his brokenness are still rooted in his family. The brokenness that destroyed Cookie and his victims is still alive and well. God would see that brokenness healed, and I should make it my mission to pray and work to that end. I hope I remember. Left alone, in a vacuum of lovelessness and bitterness, that brokenness will inevitably result in more horrors. And not just in Kirkwood. Brokenness, by degrees, is universal. It's true all over the world. It's true in my own heart.

In human terms, that's not very reassuring. But in God terms, it's endlessly comforting. Because if God loves even the most broken, even the most dangerously cracked of us, and wants to redeem and delight them with His love, well then His love is bigger and more powerful than I can comprehend. If God's love is that fierce for the most broken, then he loves me that way, too, no matter how cracked and broken I often am.

You know, if I connected with God's undying and fierce love for me more often, I suspect I'd have an easier time remembering His love for guys like Cookie. If I sometimes doubt that God really and completely loves me (and I do), of course I'll find it nearly impossible to extend that love to the worst of villains.

Balance is so damn much work, but I guess that's the work of being human. I owe it to God, and I owe it to myself.

And yeah, I even owe it to Cookie.

* No, intellect and knowledge are not the same thing, and nor are emotion and belief. Intellect is the garden knowledge grows in. Emotion is the seedbed for belief. Developing intellect leads to an increase in knowledge, just as immersion into emotion results in a plethora of beliefs. One may be dependent on the other, but they are distinct and exert their own unique gravity on the soul.

A Note to the Kirkwood City Council Killer

2008-02-07T19:49:00.000-08:00

I did the math already. I figured out exactly where my family and I were when the shootings at the Kirkwood council meeting took place tonight. My wife and I had just gotten back from a walk around our section of Kirkwood, about a mile from downtown.

My Sister-in-law had fed our two children- our five-year-old boy and two-year-old Girl- and we chased them around for a few minutes and put them to bed. I finished preparing the potatoes for our dinner while the kids chattered and giggled in their room, hyper from playing with their aunt. My wife and I had a relaxed dinner in the living room and chatted about getting the sagging foundation of our house fixed and the funny things our kids did today. When we were done, I scolded the kids (trying not to smile at the mess they'd made of the bed they share) and told them to quiet down and go to sleep.

My wife commented that the sirens seemed unusual.

Barely a mile away, some guy whose name I didn't yet know had already shot and killed a policemen outside the City Hall. As I tucked my kids in, he was stalking crazily around the council chamber, in full sight of thirty residents, possibly even some kids, possibly even kids not unlike my own, firing at anyone who got in his way and shouting "shoot the mayor!" Apparently he succeeded. According to what we've gleaned from the local news, which is even now still flashing and warbling away in the next room, this random guy killed five people. I am assuming one of them was the mayor. I met the mayor once or twice. He seemed really cool. I liked him. And I don't like people easily. He reminded me of both of my grandfathers. He shook my hand as my wife and I went to vote this past presidential election. And now he's dead, along with four other people.

Apparently, the gunman shot at one of the attendees who was throwing chairs at him to bring him down. Damn, that takes guts. I hope the guy that did that isn't one of the dead ones too, but he probably is. That guy I'd liked to have met. Throwing chairs at a guy who's shooting people to kill is what a man does.

Shooting people because you have a crazy, whacked-out grudge isn't what a man does. That's why I am writing this note to you, that guy with the gun whose name I didn't know a few minutes ago. You know what? Even now I can't remember your name. Why should I? You're dead too, now. But if what the Bible says is true- and I believe it is- then you are out there somewhere, and maybe somehow you will be able to read this. I hope you do, because I want you to understand what I said. I'll repeat it:

Getting a gun and killing people over some stupid grudge isn't what a man does. That's the choice of a weakling, a mongrel, a human cur. Pointing a gun at an unsuspecting person and pulling the trigger doesn't take courage. It's the most cowardly thing a person can do. It's weak. It's a sign of a mind so cracked, either by defect or by will, that it has departed from the brotherhood of humanity.

What you need to know, you whose name I cannot nor will remember, is that those you left alive will not look at your actions and wonder if you were justified. No one will say, "Wow, he was really upset! I wonder what awful thing they did to him to push him so far? I wonder why they deserved to be killed?" No. Nobody is thinking that. No one is your advocate. No one is on your side. No one is thinking what you did was brave. No one sympathizes for you. There will be no plaques to honor you or your silly, stupid, pathetic cause.

In fact, in a way, you are worse than a terrorist. At least a terrorist can claim to kill for a noble cause, even if it is insane and twisted. Why did you kill? We know enough of the why. I heard the word "zoning". I heard that you used to have a construction company here in Kirkwood. I hear that you felt you'd been unfairly treated somehow. I probably don't need to tell you what I am about to say, do I? You probably know it by now. After all, you're dead, and I can only guess that being dead gives one a whole new perspective on these kind of things. But I am going to tell you anyway. Here it is:

No one believes zoning is a good reason to go on a killing rampage in front of innocent people and children. No one.

The world will forget about you, if it hasn't already. But while you are still on the world's mind, you should know that we are not pondering the validity of your complaint. We are just thinking you were a weak, sick, misguided coward who knew, like any monkey does, how to point something and pull a trigger. The world is grieving for those you killed, not you. We are wondering how best to honor the victims. The innocent people who saw you will wish forever that you had not been born. The children who might have seen your stupid, pathetic rampage will be broken, in some small part of their little hearts and minds, until they grow old and die. We will all take a tiny, insignificant bit of solace in knowing that at least you, too, are dead. And we will all wonder, for a short time, how a human being can allow themselves to shrink and shrivel into such a tiny, worthless little speck of cowardly bitterness? How can a person allow themselves to believe that killing the unsuspecting over a stupid grievance is justified? How can a person fool themselves into thinking a gun equals strength?

I'm glad you're dead, you whose name I won't remember. Not because I hate you. You don't deserve an emotion that strong. You were a bug. A bug with a gun. I'm glad you're dead because you were too stupid to know how to live. You were too weak to know how to be a man. You were a cur with rabies. I only wish the first policeman had seen the foam on your lips before you got close enough to do your wimpy, weakling work.

And the rest of you who think pointing a gun means strength, are you watching? Are you seeing how we'll honor the dead, rather than consider what wrong they did to their killer? Are you seeing how we will soon forget the killer but revere his victims? Are you taking notes? I hope you will remember that the person who pulls the trigger on the unsuspecting is known for what he is: a weakling and a coward; a sick, tiny, forgettable lump of human debris. I hope you are watching. It isn't too late to learn how to live. It isn't too late to abandon weakness and learn, at least a little bit, how to be strong.

It is too late for you, though, the gunman lying dead a mile or so away, the guy whose name I already can't remember. You could've learned how to be strong, but you refused.

The guy who threw the chairs at you was strong. I hope he lived. I want to see what courage looks like. After all, I've seen enough of what abject weakness looks like.

(Update: the mayor was not, in fact, killed. He was wounded, but I do not know how badly. The guy who threw chairs at the gun-wielding weakling also survived. Five others were not so fortunate. The gun-wielding weakling is dead, too, but he hardly counts.)

Jesus Loves Gay Dumbledore

2007-10-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

So the news came out that J. K. Rowling always thought of Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry, as being gay. OK, to all of my fellow Christian friends, take a deep breath.

First, if you are the sort of fundamentalist drone that hates gay people, then you are also the sort of person who wouldn't look past the word "witchcraft" in the sentence above, therefore you already hate Harry Potter. Paint your protest signs and have at it. People like you always need a witch to burn. Frankly, you should thank Ms. Rowling for making it so easy for you.

If, on the other hand, you do not innately hate gay people, seeing them instead as Jesus did-- as people worth loving, despite the sinful nature that plagues the rest of the world-- then let me ask a rather revolutionary question: Does it matter if Dumbledore was gay?

Let me address some of the knee-jerk responses that popped up in my own head.

Response 1: WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN? There is a hysterical, prissy little part in a lot of us Christians, methinks. It represents all those fussy Sunday school teachers and churched old ladies that many of us grew up with. It is their collective voice that speaks up in our subconscious whenever we find ourselves laughing uncomfortably at a joke on Family Guy or sneaking a peek at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. It is the voice of guilt and fretting and manners and propriety. This is the voice that, when presented with something like homosexuality, or drinking alcohol, or cuss words, immediately and stridently calls out "Shame On You!". In the case of a gay Dumbledore, the old lady voice demands that we protect the children, who are, let's be honest, Harry Potter's prime market.

OK. Fine. But what, exactly, are we protecting them from? I've read all the books more than once and never guessed that Dumbledore was gay. If we needed the author to point it out to us, how can it be an active part of the book? And if it isn't part of the book, how are the "Children" at risk? I mean, if Dumbledore was seen to be checking out Harry's butt at any point, or caught with a stack of child porn in his desk, then we'd have a problem. And if any of that happened in the books, I (thankfully!) missed it. My kids will read the Harry Potter books someday, and unless someone makes a big deal out of it (like my fundamentalist friends) they'll never guess that, in the author's imagination and nowhere else, Dumbledore might be gay. So in this case, I feel OK patting the little old lady in my conscience on the hand and telling her to go knit a doily.

Response 2: SHE'S PROMOTING GAY PEOPLE! OK, maybe. So? Are we to think that, because Ms. Rowling thought of Dumbledore as gay, she is trying to indoctrinate the minds of the world's youth with homosexual cravings? If this is so, she did a pretty horrid job of it, considering that, as I mentioned above, none of us, after reading her books, had even the most remote idea of Dumbledore's apparent sexual preference. If she was trying to make a preachy point about gay tolerance, I might suggest she was being a little overly subtle about it. If her gay theme had been as prevalent and obvious as, oh, say, her Christian themes, then we might have had a problem. Still, just for the sake of argument, what if she had made it obvious in the story?

Hmm?

Do we Christians hate gay people? Some of you do, and you are the ones who, like I already mentioned, are already calling J. K. Rowling a witch and burning her books (probably because you can't burn the actual witch anymore.) But Jesus doesn't hate gay people. The Bible says homosexuality is a sin. But so is gluttony. And so is lying. And so is thinking sexy thoughts about the cute wife next door. A whole whopping lot of us Christian types commit those sins everyday, like it or not. Jesus loves us, though, doesn't he? Yes, he does. But not those gay people? If we believe that, then we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. If we are going to condemn J. K. Rowling for merely thinking that Dumbledore might be gay, then we are admitting that we think homosexuality, even in thought only, is a special kind of sin deserving of a special kind of hatred. If we go down that road, I think we can be pretty sure that Jesus doesn't go with us.

Do we not believe that a gay man could be as wise as Dumbledore? Or as generally good? All the best people in the history of the world have been sinners. Some have committed sins a whole gigantic, whopping lot worse than having homosexual leanings. Some guy named David killed a man so he could steal his wife. God called that same guy a man after his own heart. If David had lusted after another dude, though, instead of the lovely Bathsheba, then what? Do we think God would've said, "Now you've gone too far, Dave. You could've just committed murder over a babe, but you had to go and look at that dude's butt. You disgust me."

I mean, really.

Response 3: IT'S A MEDIA STUNT! Maybe, but come on, that's not a sin, really, is it? And honestly, I don't think that's what it is. Ms. Rowling seems to be very true to her characters and her stories, and Harry Potter has already made her more money than Gringott's, so what'd be the point? As a writer, I know how characters can become their own. You don't control them, entirely, at least if you want to be true to them. If you want to write them as real characters, then you have to let them be different than you. Ms. Rowling once said that it wasn't until she was half way through her first Harry Potter book that she realized she was writing fantasy. She says she just suddenly noticed that there were unicorns in her book and said to herself, "this is a fantasy story!" She admitted that she, herself, wasn't even much of a fan of fantasy stories. That's how stories go, however. I am a firm believer that the best writer is the one who offers as little interference as possible; the best author let's the story write itself. I am willing to bet that Ms. Rowling didn't intend to make Dumbledore gay any more than she intended to write a fantasy story. I am willing to bet that somewhere along the line, as she allowed Dumbledore to be his own character, she just noticed it. Hmm. Dumbledore's gay. How about that? Didn't see that one coming.

Either way, what does it matter? Would we kick a gay person out of our church? Or would we love on them just like we'd love on anyone, regardless of the sins that they struggle with? I hope the latter. And if so, what do we do with a gay Dumbledore? I think the answer is pretty obvious.

If we want to be known as the kind of people who love, just like Jesus loves, then let's at least start with fictional characters. Treat it as practice for the real thing.

Mr. Hyde in the Mirror...

2007-07-11T10:06:00.000-07:00

I have a picture in my mind of a certain kind of person. See if you come up with the same picture. This is the kind of person who gets a perverse, inexplicable pleasure from the horrible tragedy of other people. This person seeks out word of such events with the passion of a lover, as if feeding, vampire-like, off the suffering of others. When this person hears of such a tragedy, they devour any and all information they can about it, savoring every morsel of detail, relishing the most horrible particulars. This person especially loves news of the horrible death of children. The more gruesome and painful, the more ghastly the destruction of such innocence, the more this person laps it up. This person is, in short, a glutton of others' pain, a gleeful, morbid feaster on the most helacious losses this world has to offer.

Can you picture this person? Is he or she terrible? Bloodthirsty? Demonic? Does this person look like you?

No?

The media seems to think so.

I was listening to the radio the other day and the news came on. I have trained myself to quickly turn it off when the news comes on, but that day I forgot. The newscaster began her broadcast with the following words: "Coming up: news on a horrific accident today involving the deaths of several children." She said it with a calm, reasonable, even jaunty tone. As if this were something we'd all be dying to hear. Are we? I sure as hell am not. I turned it off as quickly as I could.

I really want to know: Am I unusual? I, personally, do NOT wish to hear all about the horrible tragedies and losses of other people. I find it so unsettling and gut-wrenching that I can hardly bear it. But do the rest of you like it? The news media seems to think you all are desperate to hear it, would be glued to your TVs and radios in the hopes of hearing every bloody, horrible, life-sucking detail. Is it true? Do the rest of you love hearing about the horrific deaths of children?

If so, tell me: how are you any different from that ghoulish person I described above, gorging on the tragedies of others? It isn't as if there is some moral obligation to hear such things. Virtually never is it the sort of situation that any of us can remedy or affect. It simply paints horror over our lives, fills us with fear and pathos. I have to believe most of us are not such horribly evil and bloody-minded people as to secretly delight in such news. Please, tell me I am right.

If I AM right, and most of us are repulsed by such stories and do not want to have them broadcast at us in day-glo color, then how is it that the media has gotten it so wrong? How is it that the media thinks we are so horribly perverse that we'd delight in such news and never tire of the gory details?

Several months ago, I scribbed some thoughts on this trend, called it "No News is Good News", in the sense that maybe it'd be better to just turn off the news altogether. Check it out: http://georgezilla.blogspot.com/2006/05/no-news-is-good-news.html

At the time, it was an annoyance, an irksome realization of the type of news that always made the top stories, and a musing about why. Now, I don't want to just comment on it. This should be addressed. This should be changed.

I want to do something about it. If I am right-- if all but the sickest and most perverse of us DO NOT want to hear such awful stories as if they were candy, then I want to do something. Any ideas? How can we all let the media know that we are not the ghoulish freaks they think we are? I'm open for ideas.

Being a Papa...

2007-06-21T14:36:00.000-07:00

I was without my people this past Sunday, which was Father's Day. I wasn't thinking about this on-purpose because it was Father's Day. I just happened to be missing my people in general and my little dudes specifically and I discovered, quite by accident, the core of what it means to be a Papa. I'd always been aware that the emotions connected to becoming a parent weren't just joyful (when the kids are being cute) or a nuisance (when the kids are unplugging my computer). It isn't just love, either, anymore than a poem is about spelling. I've been aware, from the beginning, shortly after my little boy was born, that there is something enormous and scary underneath the love and the joy and occasional annoyance and the laughter. There is something down deep, in the bedrock of my immovable core. The feeling is really, really hard to describe. It's as if the most numbing fear and the most iron-clad courage could be smelted into an emotion so gigantic that it is hard to see, the way a climber can't really see the mountain he is scaling.

Anyway, I figured out what it is. Becoming a Papa means suddenly having something in your life that you would die for. Without question or the slightest hesitation.

Up until that little baby man was born, the idea of dying for something was nebulous and challenging. I hoped I'd be able to die for my faith, if called to do so, but I had my doubts. I assumed that was the sort of commitment you'd only know you could make when and if the moment came. I wanted to believe I would die for a cause. But the truth of the matter was I never expected that to happen. And deep down, I was pretty comfortable with that expectation.

Having little people changes that. I'd die for them without the slightest second thought. I'd do it gladly, if it meant saving them, protecting them. When they were born, the whole question of whether there was something in life I'd die for stopped being a question. As unlikely and remote as that event might be (and it's pretty remote, thankfully), it's still a reality that is a part, a conscious part, of my every day. That's the explanation for that gigantic, dark undercurrent beneath the joy and the annoyance and the pleasure and the frustration of parenting. And I don't expect it'll ever go away.

Heavy, eh?

Majority Blues

2007-06-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

This is just a short little word balloon that I've occasionally found dangling over my head. I hate being the majority. I am as hopelessly majority as you can possibly imagine. I am a white, middle-aged male. I am a Christian AND a Republican. I live in America. I have no disability. I was born of relatively successful parents and I am, curently, relatively successful. My vision is slightly better than 20/20. I am a little over six feet tall. I'm not overweight. I don't smoke, I'm not an alcoholic, I don't have any native American, African, or latino in my bloodline. I can't even claim to have dyslexia or ADD.

OK, so maybe being me ain't all that bad. But still.

You wanna know what being the majority means? It means being the only ethnic, racial or religious group that anyone, anywhere can mock and ridicule and give hate speeches about without any fear of lawsuits or even contradiction. In fact, most of us in the majority are so filled with inane, pointless guilt about being the majority that we'll agree whole heartedly with the worst things said about us on the off-chance that all those in the minority might like us a little better. We're like the pathetically mis-guided geek in my junior highschool who thought he could cut out the middleman and curry favor with the rest of us by walking up to classmates, grinning and saying "I'm stupid." The worst crime anyone in the majority can do is to have the temerity to defend one's self.

For instance, to the argument in favor of reparations for African Americans because of slavery, I wish to say I agree whole-heartedly. In fact, I am in favor of even more than the traditional two-hundred acres and a mule. Any ex-slaves should be paid in full, in today's dollars, for every hour they worked and be given control of a proper percentage of their former slaveholder's estate, with interest. They should then sue the slaveholder for wrongful imprisonment, and the slaveholder should be jailed and/or given the death penalty, depending on the severity of said imprisonment, as well as the number and treatment of those slaves. I've read Frederick Douglass's biography, and I have, if anything, an overdeveloped sense of vengeance. The problem is finding any living ex-slaves. Right? I mean, it would make as much sense for anyone living today to collect or pay reparations for crimes last committed in the 1860s as it would for the great-grandson of a dead murderer to go to the electric chair, with the grandchildren of the victim cheering on.

But imagine anyone in the majority making that argument. Sure, they might do it, but they'd be resigning themselves to being purely and seamlessly hated, reviled and possibly audited by the pooled resources of the IRS and the Rainbow Push Coalition. Even more than they already are.

Being in the majority means not being allowed to have a meaningful opinion on much of anything. I am not allowed to have an opinion about abortion (how dare a MAN have an opinion about something as feminine as pregnancy!?), or gay rights (easy for YOU to say that marriage is between a man and a woman, having been BORN STRAIGHT!), or Affirmative Action (what's a WHITE GUY know about the oppression of other races, apart from being the oppressor!?), or a multitude of other topics. The logic of this seems to me (in my majority arrogance, no doubt) to be somewhat like a jury being told they have no basis to judge a serial killer because, not being either serial killers themselves or a serial killer's victims, they can have no experiential perspective to judge from. (serial killer's bumper sticker: Keep Your Laws Off My Victim's Body!)

I suspect that the jealousy of the majority to be in the minority, with all the protections and benefits thereof, is the explanation for so many new diseases and genetic ailments. One isn't an alcoholic anymore, one is born with the "alcohol gene". Fat people aren't gluttons, they are the victims of "Big Fast Food". Smokers are beleagured dupes of the tobacco industry. From Repetitive Stress to Restless Leg, there's a Syndrome for everybody. Why? So we can claim our own little minority and feel a little better. I may be a white anglo-saxon censervative male, but I've got Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, dammit. I go to support group. I feel the pain of the people. Peace, brother. Stick it to the Man.

(Sigh) Ohh, to be in the minority. To have a pack of lawyer sharks ready to nastily devour anyone who dared make a joke about my beliefs or the shape of my nose or my tendency to forget where I put my car keys. To be given special business opportunities and loans and college admittance just because of my genetics or my gender. To be revered for my perseverence and grit, called a hero, even if all I did was slink illegally across the border to get a job laying bricks. To finally, finally, have a socio-political-racial group I can blame all my problems on! With the full support and slavering indignance of at least one major political party, of course.

It could happen, you know. Us white Christian middle-aged Republican males could be overtaken by another group, probably liberal-leaning Mexican former-illegal-aliens. Contrary to popular belief, I'd be all for it. They may want to be the majority now, but they'll live to regret it, methinks. Just wait until they are sitting in their golf carts with their poverty-stricken white teenage caddy listening to some talk show host denouncing the "brown Democrat Catholic old-boys network". Then it'll be cool to be a complaining white Christian Republican, because we won't be the majority anymore.

Mixed blessings are the best we in the majority can hope for.

On Being a Closet Republican

2007-06-15T13:56:00.000-07:00

I am a Republican.

There. I said it. And it was hard. You wanna know why? There's a lot of reasons.

First: I am, by profession and by natural inclination, an artist. Try being an artist and a conservative at the same time. It isn't that there aren't any other Republicans in the creative arts, it's just that they are so out-numbered and out-diatribed by their uber-left-wing brethren that if they so much as blink Republican they'll get verbally eviscerated. It isn't just that the creative arts industry is more-or-less lockstep liberal; it is the unspoken, ironclad assumption that everyone in the industry shares exactly the same liberal philosophies and utter hatred of Republicans and conservatism in general. No artist ever asks another artist "So whaddaya think of George Bush?" It is a matter of course that any other artist agrees that Mr. Bush is a homophobic, war-mongering, brain-dead hater of the poor who should be impeached, flogged, spat on, and either hung or made to go live in a spider hole.

On election day a few years back, I was working away in the animators pen when one of the owners of the studio came in and asked us all point blank who we'd voted for. I avoided answering, pretending to be too absorbed in my work to respond. She rounded on me, noting my silence, and said "Well I hope you at least voted democrat." That was the year of the whole Gore/Bush debacle, where for weeks no one really knew who'd won. There was an actual pall of terror over the entire office. One of my co-workers told me that if Bush actually won, rapists would not be punished and the environment would be "destroyed". I smiled, knowing she was being amusingly hyperbolic.

She wasn't. She stared at me as if she was marking the enemy, as if she dearly wished there was a Thought Police she could report me to.

I am an adjunct professor at a local college, in the art department. Walking through the offices, I am inundated with the most anti-Bush, anti-Republican, hate-filled posters and signs I've ever seen. Imagine trying to be comfortable with people who have a sign on their wall declaring (not in so many words, but in essence) that they'd despise you if they knew you were a Republican?

Second: I am a Christian. That may seem like a surprising reason for it to be hard to admit being a Republican, considering the well known stereotype that all Christians are Republicans (as well as homophobic, war-mongering, brain-dead haters of the poor). It would come as a great surprise to many, of course, to learn that there are in fact (gasp!) many Democrats and even liberals in the church. Political affiliation does not necessarily dictate religious beliefs (or lack thereof). I do believe that there are probably more conservatives than liberals in the church walls, but I can testify for a fact that some of my best and most respected Christian friends are Dems (and they aren't even in the creative industry!)

Discovering this, wise churches have begun distancing themselves from assumptions of political homogeny, making every attempt to welcome and embrace those of any political bent. It has almost become cool for a church to boast a rainbow of idealogical/political representatives. Fine. But the result is that I, at least, have found it difficult to admit being the typical Christian conservative for fear of being labeled an intolerant right-winger. If politics is even mentioned in a Christian setting, it is pretty much only in terms of "there is no right and wrong view and we love everybody and if you are a Democrat then good for you because we aren't even remotely like those twits in the Moral Majority." In the modern church environment, it has actually become rather taboo for anyone to admit to being a Republican. Modern Christians feel vaguely embarrassed by it, the way modern Italians might feel embarrassed by that Uncle who admits he is in the Mob.

Third: Watch TV a little. For anyone who watches any TV, or listens to the kind of music I happen to like (modern rock), or absorbs any form of popular culture at all, it is instantly apparent that Republicans are more or less the source of all evil, dorkiness and self-rightousness in the world. I want to be cool. I can't help it. And it is apparently impossible to be cool and a Republican at the same time. Period.

But I am ready to admit it. I am a Republican. Not just a conservative (that's quite a bit easier to say), but a true Republican. I resign myself to being uncool. To being a pariah amongst my co-workers. To being a bit of an anachronism among my Christian friends.

This is not to say I agree with everything Republicans say or do. Far, far from it. Today's Republicans, for the most part, represent true conservatism about as much as a lightning bug represents lightning.

I can explain why I am a Republican by explaining, in a ridiculously brief analogy, what I believe is the primary, elemental difference between Democratic and Republican idealogy. At it's core, it has nothing to do with abortion, or gay rights, or school vouchers. It has everything to do with perspectives on money and wealth.

Imagine a mountain with a plataeu on the top. The mountain represents financial success.

Republicans believe the mountain is scalable. It is steep, difficult, and you have to choose the route up carefully. Not everyone makes it; some get stuck under an overhang or lost in a crevasse, but scaling it, making it to the plateau of financial independence on top, is possible. Anyone can do it. It is merely a matter of planning, perseverence, education and yes, a little luck. But anyone, anyone at all, regardless of your background, your skin color, your upbringing, your neighborhood, your handicaps or even your general intellect, can make it to the top.

Democrats believe the mountain is unscalable. You are simply born somewhere on that mountain, and wherever you are born, you stay. Sure, plenty of people struggle to get a little further up the mountain, and a few lucky ones make some progress, but that is extremely rare and not to be depended on. Position on the mountain is a matter of pure luck and happenstance, with those on the top being the fortunate bastards and those on the bottom the unfortunate victims.

Further: Republicans believe that those that reach the top of the plateau are inclined to help those who are still struggling to climb. Republicans believe it is the responsibility and the desire of those on the top of the mountain to throw down ropes to pull more people to the top. Even more, they believe it is the natural result of success that more people make it to the top, both by helping and encouraging those that are struggling to climb.

Democrats believe those that reach the top are disinclined to help anyone else get there. Democrats believe, in fact, that those on the top grind their heels on the fingers of those still climbing, and kick off those that are getting close to the top, so as to preserve their exclusivity. To be sure, Democrats believe that those on the top should be pulled down from the top, so as to equalize society and lessen the disparity between the the lucky bastards on the top and the unfortunate victims at the bottom. After all, if it is impossible for those near the bottom to climb to the top, the only way to alleviate their awareness of being at the bottom is to pull everyone else as close to the bottom as possible. What Republicans think of as encouragement to climb, Democrats hear as taunting. What Democrats call equalizing society Republicans hear as making sure everyone is poor.

Considering that analogy, I am my own example of why I am a Republican. I believe the mountain is scalable. And while I myself have not reached the top, I have thrown ropes out behind me and I am trying, clumsily but steadfastly, to help some of my friends and family climb up along with me. I've done well. I do what I love, and I make pretty good money at it. I see the potential for me to do even better, not because I primarily want to be wealthy, but because people just tend to pay those that do what I do really well. I like the view from here, and I really, really want others to get here, too. And even higher. Whenever and wherever I can, I throw down ropes to try to pull somebody else a little further up the mountain. I can't haul them up by main force, but if they want to make the effort to climb, I'll show them the way I came and try to give them a helpful yank. And if I ever reach the top, you can bet that there will be a whole gaggle of my friends and family and even just some hangers-on who'll get there right along with me.

And if we do get there, we'll turn around and try to help some more people up, too. Not exactly because it's the moral thing to do, but because the view from the top just feels like it'll be better if it's shared. I am certain that not everyone agrees with me. Perhaps there are some people who are driven to make the climb to the top only to step on the fingers of everybody else. But I really don't think they are the majority. And I'll tell you one more thing:

If I find people like that up there when I get there, I might reconsider kicking people off the top.

How I Almost Didn't Survive Bible College...

2007-06-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

(WARNING: This is one of those long ones, although I've broken it up into convenient little chapters. If you get bored with it, you can always just scan through, find the headings and see if they strike your little fancy. The one called "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" is probably the most important chapter. The one called "The Four Young Turks" is kinda funny.)

My Mom had this idea that I’d make a good preacher. She had, I suspect, the same sorts of visions and dreams for her son as do most Christian Mamas. She imagined me, as only a wistfully proud Mama can imagine, before an enormous, responsive crowd, dynamic, spirited, full of that perfect charismatic balance of strength and compassion, hellfire and grace.

So I thought: what the hell. I ain’t doing anything else with my life at the moment.

I was in my early twenties at the time. I’d already had two misadventures with two different colleges, a semester each. One of those colleges had been Liberty University, home of Jerry Falwell (as discussed elsewhere). The other was Terra Technical College, where I haphazardly pursued something called Commercial Art. I do believe (and I think my parents can back me up on this) that I more-or-less flunked out.

Not because I couldn’t make the grade, mind you. I was never what anyone would call slow. I did, however, apparently suffer from a terrible deficiency of give-a-damn. I just couldn’t seem to make myself care about grades, or my future career, or getting all my financial aid papers filled out so I didn’t actually get the boot before I had the chance to by-gosh flunk out. I think I know now why. I had always been (and am to this day) one of those individuals others call a People Pleaser.* One of the problems of being a People Pleaser is that one is always stretched between the vagueries of their own desires and the insistent, doglike need to be what others want one to be. In my young-adult years, it was hard enough to know what I myself wanted to do (other than draw pictures and kiss girls), so I often ended up following the course of least resistance, attempting, albeit half-heartedly, to do what my Mom seemed to wish I would do. She never actually pressured me. That’s the curse of living with a lifelong People Pleaser: you can manipulate them without even trying, without even knowing you are doing it. If Mom didn’t actually tell me what she thought I should do with my life, I tried to divine her wishes from vague comments and discussions. Then I’d go at it. Sorta. Just enough to make Mom, well, pleased. For a time. The end result, of course, was that my heart was never really in it, and in the end I never truly did what I wanted or what Mom wanted.

And in this mode, I decided it was a good idea to go to Bible School.

Before I actually get to Zion, however, a little background.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I graduated from a private Baptist high school whilst attending a Pentecostal, even teasingly Charismatic, church on Sundays. It may come as a surprise to non-churched types, but this was akin to having Ted Kennedy for a Dad and dating Anne Coulter. I spent most of my time defending the one to the other, while all the time knowing that apart from the niggling details of their doctrines, they were basically the flip-sides of the same coin.

Friends from high school had gone on to some of the well known Baptist colleges, including Pensacola Bible College and even the infamous Bob Jones University (where, apparently, girls and boys had to walk on separate, color-coded sidewalks, even "Christian" rock music was considered of-the-Devil, and the chancellor, Bob Jones Sr. the third, was not-so-affectionately referred to by some of the students as "triple-sticks"). I strongly suspected that the Baptist college atmosphere wouldn’t be good for my art (or my desire to kiss girls), so I met with the assistant Pastor at Faith Memorial Church in Sandusky, Ohio, my Assemblies of God weekend church.

Zion Bible College, in Rhode Island, was what we discussed. It was the alma mater of said Pastor, an Assemblies-affiliated Bible college. It was small. It wasn’t all stuffy and legalistic like those Baptist colleges, and perhaps most importantly of all, it was what my Pastor called a "Faith College". I cottoned quick to what that meant: it meant that there was no tuition, per se. You paid what your faith led you to pay, and they operated that way on… well, faith.

I applied. I packed. I kissed Jenna goodbye (also discussed elsewhere, and if you’ve read that, you’ll know that said kiss produced a mixed emotional response, to say the least), and my parents drove me to Rhode Island.
Zion was indeed small. It was outside of town, a cluster of non-descript buildings, of varying styles and sizes, at the end of a long road, surrounded by woodlands. The chapel and assembly building was new, neatly bricked with a glassed in breezeway and modern swoops and peaks. Other buildings were smaller, obviously refitted for use as classrooms and offices, and not very expertly so. The dorms were old and crotchety, fusty, with threadbare carpets in the halls and tiny, milky windows. There was a gatehouse at the only entrance. The cumulative effect was of a very carefully discreet, low-budget insane asylum.

Mom and Dad stayed with me while I checked in. We waited in lines with other apparently fervent and hopeful Bible students. We paid our first tuition installment. I bought and collected my uniform. Uniforms were for real at Zion. Mine, like all the mens’, was a white shirt, red tie, navy farrah slacks, and a gray blazer. The girls’ was more or less the same, but with a skirt instead of pants, and one of those little red floppy bow-tie kinda things instead of a tie, of course**. It was a little unnerving how much the uniform of this spiritually progressive, Spirit-led, Pentecostal Bible college looked like an even cheaper version of the uniforms I’d seen my high school friends wearing at the legalistic, Bible-thumping Baptist Universities, but I quickly put that out of my head. This was a Faith School, dammit!

Then, after an unnervingly meager dinner in the college cafeteria, Mom and Dad left.

I was alone there, in a strange dorm room, in a strange place, in a strange state, surrounded by total and perfect strangers. I was, to my great shock and dismay, so utterly lonely and heartsick that it was a deep ache. I couldn’t stay there, I knew. It was preposterous that I should. Alone there, for the first time, my connection to home driving serenely away and getting further away every minute, I felt like I was drowning. I wanted to do something desperate to call the whole thing off. And I would have if I could have thought of a way. Today, in the age of cell phones and the Internet, I could have done it. I could have called Mom and Dad back, told them I couldn’t do it, couldn’t stay in this cheap, plywood anthill full of over-zealous charismatic twits (which was how I suddenly, shockingly saw them all). Or I could have chosen not to call, and found strength in that decision—the comforting knowledge that I could call it off, but wasn’t going to, was choosing not to. I could have gotten online on my computer, from the stark strangeness of that dorm-room, and messaged friends back home, created a little bubble of comfort, connecting with them, and sharing the fear and loneliness, spreading it thin to make it more bearable. But this was the early nineties. I’d never heard of the Internet, and cell phones (car phones, we called them back then) were a rarity, a completely unthought-of and nonexistent part of my little mid-western life. I was utterly alone, as disconnected from everything familiar and comfortable as I had ever been.

My only option was to mince down the long, threateningly foreign-looking hallway to the pay-phone in its decrepit, ancient wooden booth, use precious minutes of my calling card, and call Jenna. Even her voice was such a comfort I struggled to hold back tears as I talked to her. We talked for a few minutes, which was about all I could afford. Then I went back to my room. My room-mate, who I dreaded meeting, hadn’t arrived yet. Most of the dorm rooms were, in fact, empty, as I had arrived a day or so before everyone else would. I unpacked, spreading a tiny, ephemeral bubble of familiarity – the toe-nail clippers grandma Haubert had bought for me, the shampoo Mom had provided, my CD collection and stereo – around the room.

That night, I slept without a fan for the first time in a long, long time. The absence of its comfortable hum, what I’d come to think of as my audio blanket, made the room seem huge and cold, full of tiny noises, creaks, empty spaces spreading off into the dark corners of the big, mostly empty building. I lay there and I hated that place.

The next day my room-mate arrived. He was about twenty-one going-on fifty. He apparently, by all observations, thought humor was a sin. I was surprised that he didn’t actually unpack a whip for repentant self flagellations, perhaps offering to let me borrow it whenever I might feel the need.

Fast forward.

Fortunately, Zion did not turn out to be entirely and seamlessly as bad as that first night. I put on my uniform, I began going to my classes. I ignored, as politely but as totally as I could, my room-mate. People began to sift into my life. Here are a few snapshots.

The Humorless Joker

I met him at dinner in the cafeteria, that first week. Where does one sit when one knows nobody in a semi-crowded cafeteria? Is there a handbook for this? There is that terrible awkwardness of joining a populated table, where conversations are clacking along just fine without you, and where your presence might not be perfectly welcomed, or (much worse) even noticed. On other hand, you hate the idea of sitting alone, hate the idea of missing out on those subtle first steps of the social dance, where friendships are seeded and sifted, because later, when the dance has picked up and everybody has settled on their varieties of partners, you find the steps are too thick and fast and you end up sitting along the wall holding a cup of punch in front of you like a shield, watching everyone else while trying desperately to avoid eye-contact with any individual person.

I sat down at a table with one other guy. It seemed safe, since there was no previous conversation to interrupt, but the possibility that I might be the ingredient to cause one to happen. His name was Nick. He was a skinny guy, latino, with lank dark hair like raven wings, always flopping over his brow and causing him to tilt and jerk his head, flipping the hair back into place. Nick was from Nebraska. He told me about his home, the farm he’d grown up on. His eyes were grave as he spoke, never leaving mine, studying me. I nodded and ate. He didn’t seem to need me to respond, so I didn’t. At the end, he asked me, his expression not changing, his eyes not leaving mine, if I believed him. It seemed like a weird question, but I was in a weird place. Maybe it was a Bible School Christian thing. We were, after all, supposed to be all about beliefs. I told him, in what I thought was a reassuring and meaningful voice, carefully tailored to contain no great emphasis, but just a statement of fact, that I believed him.

He scoffed at me, mirthlessly. He told me he was actually from New York City and that he’d been joking. His face still didn’t smile, his eyes were still locked on me. He apparently found it irresistibly gullible and ridiculous that anyway could seriously have believed he was from anyplace other than New York City, and especially not from anyplace as hopelessly backwards and un-hip as Nebraska. I, myself, grew up in Ohio. I don’t think I brought that up.

The English Twit

Another dinner, a week or so later. I had begun to meet more people, but we were all still inter-mingling, kicking each other’s social tires. I found myself at a table one evening surrounded by a new group containing several international students. One of them was this little English guy, who I found interesting, mainly, because he had that English accent. Here, I told myself, was part of the reason one went to college: to mingle with those of different cultures and backgrounds. I was enthralled. He chatted, in that natty little accent, with the entire group about serious spiritual issues, points of doctrine, differences in international church structure. I congratulated myself on being so urbane, on becoming acquainted, possibly even friends, with someone so… so… well, someone so English-sounding.

There was a six-inch rule at Zion. This meant that boys weren’t allowed to get within six inches of girls. No hand-holding. No arms around shoulders. No friendly hugs. And heaven forbid, no kissing, for God’s sake. (I’ll come back to the English twit in a moment, don’t worry.)

As I began to make friends at Zion, a few of those friends turned out to be girls. I wasn’t "interested" in them, per se. I have, however, always found it easy to befriend females, often easier than with those of my own gender. I was with a group of those new friends one evening, killing time, wandering the campus bookstore, trying not to spend my last four or five dollars. One of my female friends, Jill, was leaning over, looking at some backpacks, talking about something or other. Standing behind her, I spontaneously drummed lightly on her back with the sides of my hands, like a cartoon masseuse, making her voice vibrate. She smiled, amused, speaking with exaggerated slowness. We all laughed. It was silly and totally forgettable, just a bored bit of physical humor.

Someone called out, their voice piercing through the babble of the bookstore. It was the English twit, halfway across the store. His eyes were dreadful, serious, admonishing, and, so it seemed to me, grimly triumphant. "Six inches, Brother!" He called urgently. "Six inches!" And he watched, to make sure I’d stop violating the rule, possibly even drop to my knees in repentance on the spot.

In my mind, I strode over to him and without a word punched him in the neck, as hard as I could. He went down like a house of cards. Then I went back to my new friends and we didn’t even deign to mention the affair. Only in my mind, though.

Chris, the Little Rocker (and Friends)

I met Chris while standing in line for something, I can’t remember what. There we were, dozens of us, in the common room, all looking nearly identical in our grays and blues and red ties. Chris was ahead of me. He was little, almost rodent-like, but there was something I liked about him. There was something about him that didn’t fit in with the typical goddy little cookie-cutter personalities of the Zion devout. There was a patch sewn onto his backpack. It bore the name of some Christian rock group or other. I was, at the time, a great devotee of Christian rock music (maybe I’ll write about that later. But that’s a big maybe). I seized on that, having come to the very unpleasant realization that most Zion types, like my room-mate, listened pretty much exclusively to (shudder!) Praise Music. They sang along when they listened to it, as if they actually liked it. And they got … emotional… about it. I felt a little like Winston, in George Orwell’s 1984, daring to make contact with someone who might, might, share my unorthodox predilections, terrified to be found-out, but desperate for a confidant.

Chris, unlike me, was unapologetic about his musical preferences. We loved many of the same bands. He was passionate about music, partly because he himself had been the lead-singer for a Christian rock band back in his hometown. Not a famous band (even by Christian rock standards), but he was fiercely proud of this fact nonetheless. He came back with me to my dorm room, looked over my CDs. I had steadfastly refused to display them openly, lest my room-mate denounce me. And here we both were, in his presence, discussing bands with names like Bloodgood, and Tourniquet, and Barren Cross. Not just Christian rock bands, but Christian heavy metal bands. I watched my room-mate out of the corner of my eye. He never said anything. I felt very slightly, very cautiously, emboldened.

Chris introduced me to a small (I have to resist the urge to call them "rag-tag") group of similar-minded guys. There was Russ, the extremely amiable, slightly shy guy who’d been a paintball freak in his previous life (he had brought his paintball magazines with him, and the incredible depth and dedication of the tiny but busy world they represented shocked and amused me endlessly). There was Ben, one of the most "normal" guys there, slight, affable, a closet chess-player with a wonderfully expressive and sharp mind. There was Kevin, who insisted he had been the youngest guy to be a cop back in his hometown in Florida (Doogie Houser of the cop-field, we called him), whose ridiculous self-importance as such was perfectly off-set by his boyish, almost childish silliness and inane wit. There was Joe, who’d been a skater before getting God and coming to Zion, and whose loveable guilelessness and lack of demands on life was as sweet as a nut. Joe had a dozen or more slang terms for testicles, and he employed them in variations of the following sentence: "How about I kick you in the cluster‡ about ten times?" Roughly translated, this meant something like "that’s a dopey idea, smart-guy", or "I’ll learn you good". For example:

Me: "Hey Joe, can I drink one of your Cokes?"

Joe: "How about I kick you in the nads about ten times?"

It wasn’t so much the words, but the gentle smile and hopeful tone of voice he’d always say it with, as if he genuinely hoped you’d agree to it. I once told him kicking people’s units must be his spiritual gift. I drew a caricature of him with his foot hoiked back and a huge grin on his face. It was a poster for his ministry. He’s coming to your town to kick YOUR unit! The caption read.

Shortly after befriending this group, I learned a wonderful and liberating truth. Apparently my dorm was the serious dorm: the dorm where only the grimmest and most joyless students of God’s Word went. I was able to arrange to move out of that dorm and into the dorm occupied by my new group of friends. This made a huge difference in my overall attitude.

Christie and Sara

I apparently fall in love fairly easily. I only know this now, at this moment, as I am beginning to write about Christie and Sara, because I am recalling writing, elsewhere in this journal, about at least three other lost loves, and as I think on it, I can think of at least one more worth writing about. Hmmm. That seems, at least to me, to diminish the overall impact of the following story, and maybe that’s OK, because I don’t think I was technically in love this time. Still, it was a near thing.

I met Christie (the one I was smitten by) first, but I got to know Sara (the sister-like friend) a lot better. Ironically, they were room-mates. They shared a room in that forbidden Neverland known as the Girls’ Dorm. I think I set foot in there once, on a special cleaning duty or something, and I felt like a penitent taking a tour of Shangri-la. Anyway, I had seen Christie around campus several times before I met her. She was, to my peculiar and complicated tastes, the female equivalent of one of those desserts you find on the menu in a ridiculously expensive French restaurant, the kind of dessert with lots of curli-cues around it and a price that requires a downpayment and collateral, and a name like "Decadent Chocolate Cream-filled Suicide with Buttercream Demiglaze Wake".

She was tall (being tall myself, I’d always been oddly attracted to girls that were "built to scale"), with dark wavy hair and huge, brown eyes. She was breath-taking, meaning that, when I was looking at her, there would come a moment when I’d have to remind my brain to tell my lungs to breath, or else I’d rather embarrassingly faint. My other loves, looking back on them, were quite a bit more holistic, but I think most men (and maybe some women) would understand the ecstatic, drunken captivation of loving a creature of plain physical beauty, beauty of so many facets that it filled-in (at least for a while) those spaces that were normally reserved for intelligence, personality, similar tastes in movies, shared appreciation of Indian food, etc. It wasn’t that Christie lacked in any of those other areas. It was just that, for me, any other considerations were drowned out, for those couple of months, by the glare of her ethereal, uniquely perfect (by my standards) beauty.

I saw her for the first time in the commons. She was sitting at a little table with another guy (it was Tony, a guy from my dorm, dark, confident, just the sort of guy, I told myself, girls like Christie were normally seen with) and when I noticed her, I stopped. She glanced up, at almost the exact same moment I saw her, and our eyes met. Normally, when that happened, I’d jerk my eyes away, subtly but quickly. Don’t mind me, I wasn’t looking at you, my expression was carefully tailored to say. I was just glancing around the room, and I happened to look in your direction. I’ve forgotten you already. Carry on. This time, however, I forgot to look away. Part of my mind set off alarm bells that I was actually staring at this girl, but the alarms were distant, tinkling. Because, as another part of my mind chimed in with a secret, giddy whisper, she was staring back. Her expression didn’t change, but she was definitely looking at me, her eyes on mine. She didn’t smile, or frown, or raise her eyebrows. She just looked at me looking at her. Two seconds, maybe three, went by (but slowly), and then I finally broke my eyes away, did my glancing-idly-around-the-room trick. But the effect was spoiled, I knew. My heart pounded. I knew it wasn’t what it seemed like. She’d been looking toward me, not at me. There was probably a clock directly behind my head and she was trying to read the time, waiting for the gangly clod with the vacant expression to step aside. Maybe she was near-sighted and had forgotten her glasses, and what I thought was a long, meaningful look was actually just a bored stare at a tall, blurry shape. It was probably that. Had to be that.

It happened two other times before I ever actually spoke to her. It became hard to keep coming up with innocuous explanations for those looks, but I managed. I have a good imagination.

Sara, on the other hand, was cute. She wasn’t breath-taking, but she was cute. The best part of that was that I wasn’t afraid to talk to her. She had a delightfully bizarre wit and a quick mind. I think it started one day in class, when we were sitting near one another. I wrote a silly poem, something inane and goofy, called "The Tinsel Teacher" (if I can find it, I’ll include it here, at the end). She, being equally bored, read it over my shoulder. She told me she liked it, in a ridiculously dramatic and meaningful tone of voice, and I told her she could have it, matching her mock-graveness. She covered her heart with her hand, biting her lip as if she’d just been given the blessing of the Pope. The next day, she gave me a poem of her own, written in another class. It was called "Brother Pierce’s Tie". It was funny. We amused each other in the weeks to come with passing these ridiculous little short poems and free-verse inanities to each other, secretly handing them off like love letters as we passed in the halls between classes. I vaguely suspected that this was more than just an amusing diversion for Sara, but I didn’t pay any attention to that, even when she passed me the one with the title "I Love Ewe" and a little drawing of a sheep on the top. The first lines were, "I love ewe. Ewe are nice." I considered it, a little, then dismissed it. She probably didn’t really mean anything by that.

It occurs to me, again, this very moment, that my insecurities sabotaged me a quite a lot in the world of dating women.†

Christie and I finally met and talked one evening at dinner. We were at a table with at least a dozen other people, but she ended up sitting across from me. We talked, fairly innocuously, but we clicked enough to become what I was willing to call, very guardedly, friends. She became a part of my circle. We all went to the beach once, carpooling together in a gigantic 1972 Cutlass belonging to one of the guys in my dorm, laughing, running around, climbing rocks, and then, finally, as the sun burned low into the waves, collapsing on the hill overlooking the water and engaging in the sorts of long, meaningful discussions that belong only to Bible students and NOW members. On an evening a week or so later, I asked her to come along with Ben and another girl to go get donuts and coffee (which was the Zion equivalent of a night on the town). It happened before I even realized I was doing it. She said yes. It was the closest I ever came to asking her out. It wasn’t cheating on Jenna, I told myself, because there was no way in Gehenna that Christie was interested in going on a date with me. She was just going out with friends. There was no romantic intention or expectation. Surely not. Of course not.

Oh God, oh God, please, I prayed, please prove me wrong…!

I never did find out.

But speaking of which:

Russ’s Sister

I didn’t intend to cheat on Jenna (who ever does?). I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t even cheating. Every pleasure was a guilty pleasure at Zion – eating a donut, seeing a movie, listening to the new CD from a beloved band—so it is hard, even in retrospect, to know what was really and actually a sin and what wasn’t. Russ’s sister came to visit him one weekend. She was also cute and also not breath-taking (but she had a blonde coyness that I, personally, found distracting). We all went to see a movie. She sat next to me. At some point, she said she was cold. I gave her my coat, a gigantic down-filled affair, to cover with. Eventually, somehow, as these things happen, we ended up shnuggled-up under that coat somewhat more than could be explained by being cold. We held hands most of the movie.

Later, in the dark, before curfew, we all went to a local park. I found, inexplicably, a bright yellow teddy bear lying in the grass near a stand of bushes. It was headless. I jokingly presented it to Russ’s sister (was her name Linda? I can’t recall), and to my surprise, she accepted it as if I’d somehow arranged for it to be there, just for her. She hugged it, smiling a funny, ironic smile.

I found out a couple of weeks later that she’d kept that headless bear. She washed it, somehow, and slept with it. This gave me a bizarre mixture of feelings. I never pursued it, though.

Brother Pat

Brother Pat was the headmaster of Zion. We were encouraged to call all the teachers, and yes, even each other, by the terms of endearment "Brother" and "Sister". We didn’t do this with each other, but we never failed to call Brother Pat "Brother" Pat. It fit, somehow, in his case. And not for the reason you’d probably think. Brother Pat was huge, fat in that round, roly-poly way that is more beach-ball than giant. He was in his late-forties, I’d guess, with grey hair and a grey beard, and we were all, every one of us, convinced beyond a question of a doubt that he was gay. It wasn’t just that he was un-married, and showed no apparent interest in finding any female companionship (not that we’d have known it anyway, of course). It wasn’t just that everything about his personality exuded a vaguely disconcerting sort of mooshiness. It was those things, and a hundred other tells, but mostly, enormously, it was his voice.

Brother Pat had that kind of high, lisping, ingratiating voice that is as quintessentially gay as pink triangles and good fashion sense. Is it homophobic, technically, to find such a voice vaguely repulsive? Maybe. That’s another blog (written, I might add, by another blogger). We didn’t dislike Brother Pat because he seemed to be gay. We disliked Brother Pat because he was (at least to us, and I’ll admit, perhaps unfairly) just one of those people who are by their nature really easy to dislike.

Once, my room-mate (the good room-mate, a guy named Tom) spontaneously concocted a song about Brother Pat, with accompaniment on his guitar. Tom was a good-natured guy, but because of some sudden and dramatic changes in the "Faith" financial policies of Zion during our time there, Tom got kicked out of school by Brother Pat. The apparent unjustness of it rankled us all immensely, stoking our already healthy dislike of the headmaster into a blazing furnace of righteous indignance. The song, which we recorded in its virgin spontanaeity, was fairly raw and superficial in its assessment of old Brother Pat. But damn weren’t it funny! A lyric excerpt:

(gentle melodic interlude)
All I can say is, Lord, please, grant me some napalm,
To put in their stuffing some day.
All I know is that He’s beyond the usual,
And what I’ve learned Is, Brother Pat, (dramatic pause)
You are a homosexual. (resume with increased tempo, rallying, building)
Oh, Brother PAT you are a big fat homosexual,
And I know that you really (indistinct, but sounds like "oughtta suck swine")
All I can say is that someday God will venerate
So go please stick up your butt a big fat grenade.
Thank you.

We played it over and over that day. Once we played it for a guy on our floor who, while we all loved him, was one of those guys that took it upon himself to occasionally tell the "hard truth" about the sins of his friends. His name was Dave, and while he was listening, he had that look on his face. Before the tune was finished, Tom looked Dave carefully in the eye and said "We know it’s wrong, Dave."

I know it was wrong for us to dislike old Brother Pat so much. We all knew it then. I think Brother Pat simply summed up everything about our experience at Zion, which, for us, was mostly not so great, in a neat, chubby, lisping, grey-bearded ball.

For me, Brother Pat came to represent everything I hated about Zion during a chapel service one day.

He was standing up there at the podium, after the service. We were all singing worship songs. I’ve never liked worship music, and I’ve always, especially since my days at Zion, been suspicious of people who really, really get into worship music. Worship music, it seems to me, is supposed to be for God’s benefit, not mine. I don’t like it, quite. It’s all just a little too schmaltzy for me. Too nice. Too… tame. Worship music at Zion, well, it was not something you laughed at or dismissed. Regardless of what denominational name Zion went by, in its zealous heart, Zion was that most misunderstood and legendary type of religious organization known simply by the word Charismatic. Not just a little bit, either. Zion was Glory-hallelujah, slain-in-the-spirit, Holy-rollin’, let-the-spirit-lead, prophesyin’ and speakin’ in the tongues of angels Charismatic. I’ll explain more about that later. For now, back to Brother Pat.

He stood there as we all sang the worship songs, me hankering to go get some lunch (or what commonly passed for it at Zion) but evidently the only individual there with such pedestrian and ungodly concerns. Brother Pat swayed. He had his head thrown back, his eyes shut, deep in the throes of worshipful ecstasy, singing and singing, his high tenor voice ringing out over the speakers, leading us through the choruses again and again. There was no end in sight. Presently, I stopped singing. I was getting angry. It was a cold, resigned anger, something I realized had been stewing in me for a long time. It was like a noise that doesn’t register to your ear at first, but then when you do notice it, you realize has been droning on for a long time.

For the first time, I dropped the pretense of like-minded, soulful rapture. I just couldn’t hold it up anymore. My hypocrisy muscles were exhausted. The anger, the hate, was crowding out my normal instinct to fit in and be like folks. I stared- no, I glared at Brother Pat, my arms dangling straight at my sides. There were no words to that anger, just raw sensations and instincts. There were a lot of angles and facets to my anger, but at that moment it was all about the way Brother Pat told us the words to each line of the choruses before we sung them, leading us along the way he’d undoubtedly heard the worship leaders on all those beloved Hosanna Praise albums. Surely he hadn’t forgotten that the chorus words were projected onto the wall behind him, as they always were, in letters a foot tall. Or that, for pretty much all of us, we’d sung these same choruses at least ten thousand times before. No, he did it because that was part of the stir, part of the massage. He did it because those were the cues to get the crowd whipped into a goddy, ecstatic froth. And there were lots and lots of people at Zion who positively lived for that froth, flung themselves into it desperately and passionately, tears streaming down their faces, blubbering, swaying, sweating.

Raise your hands, Brother Pat told us in his ingratiating, wheedling voice. All around the room, hands shot up. No one withheld. I didn’t withhold. My hands went up, too, and I hated myself for it, for mocking God and myself with a mere mimicry, a mere doglike obedience. I looked through a forest of arms and hands, most flung upwards with breathless abandon, some, at least, raised because this was the game, this was the way to prove holiness and penitence and closeness to God, and at least a tiny few, like my own, raised simply so as not to be found out, not to be pointed at and decried as unworthy, unbelieving, unbelonging. But I only raised my hands. I didn’t blubber, I didn’t sing. I stared straight ahead, through that forest of arms and hands, and my eyes were locked on Brother Pat.

Now waaaaaaaave your hands, Brother Pat cried over the music and the wailing, gibbering crowd. Waaaaaave your hands. Let’s all offer to God a waaaaaaaaaaave offering….!!!

I couldn’t. I didn’t. My façade fully crumbled. I dropped my arms to my sides. I gathered my books and I left.

And that was when my hate of Zion Bible College, for hate was what it was, poured into the convenient figurehead of Brother Pat. It was the moment when I stopped going along with the ridiculous displays of religious fervor because of my fear of being found out, when I realized I was now going along because I was actually being commanded, myself and everyone in that room, despite what might actually be happening in our hearts, to perform orgiastic displays of mutual, "corporate" worshipful ecstasy.

A fucking wave offering.

The Day of the Earth Stood Stupid

Chapel at Zion was deadly serious business. There were assigned seats. I honestly don’t know what the official purpose for that was, but I know that the end result was that I couldn’t sit with any of my like-minded friends and find some solace in their shared disdain and suspicion of the sorts of things that most often occurred during chapel (and it occurs to me that that very well might have been the official reason for assigned seating). All the men sat on one side of the chapel auditorium, all the women on the other. We all sat in the same seat every time. Mine was smack dab in the middle of a gaggle of guys from my original dorm—the serious dorm, if you recall. The looks on their faces as they filed into their seats, Bibles in hands, was grave and solemn, but also disquietingly intent. Hungry. They’d sit. They’d stare straight ahead. There was very little chatting or movement among them. They weren’t here for conversation. They were here to meet Gaaaaawd.

There were three elements to every chapel service (and we had chapel every weekday, at eleven AM). There was worship, then the message, then worship, always accompanied by an altar call. Like I mentioned earlier, at Zion, worship was serious business. Divine business. It started innocuously enough; choruses, always projected onto the walls; old standards that ninety-nine percent of us, having grown up in like-minded churches, had sung hundreds, thousands of times before. But the choruses were a cue. The choruses were when the devout really, really got God. There was no mistaking it. Getting God wasn’t a quiet, personal, intimate experience. It was loud. It was demonstrative. It was varied. For some, like the two Asian guys that always sat side-by-side front row center, it meant dropping onto their knees on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, tears and snot running freely down their faces, repeatedly bowing full-length on the floor, flinging themselves forward and popping back up again, arms high, in what looked to me for all the world like a cartoon "Oh great swami! We’re not worthy!" caricature. For others, it meant hopping, two-footed, boinging up and down as high as they could go, their ties flopping and flailing around their heads. Then there were the gigglers. The guys in the row in front of me, from the serious dorm, ironically enough, were apparently going through a great giggling phase. They called it (I kid you not) laughing in the spirit. They’d end up collapsed on the floor, lying between pews or in the aisles (which, in a world of perpetually skirted females, sorta explains why they had the girls in the other half of the room), cackling, giggling, guffawing, breathless, helpless with an inane, directionless, delirious mirth that I found, more than the rest, positively creepy.

As I mentioned, Zion, being Charismatic, believed strongly in "letting the spirit lead". This meant that one never knew, precisely, when a chapel service might be over. No one ever complained about this, because we all understood that concerns as earthly and petty as lunch (especially lunch at Zion) were laughably trivial compared to the ecstatic, exhausting rapture of worshipping God for an hour or two. There was rarely an official ending to chapel. It just sort of petered out, the unwashed, such as myself, trickling out early to go eat. The truly righteous and devout remaining, remaining, until there were only a few left, congratulating each other silently and solemnly on being so perfectly united with God.

One day, though, things were different. Brother Pat led the worship service. It all started more or less as usual. Choruses on the wall. Brother Pat’s piercing voice reciting the lyrics to us as we sung them, enraptured, trembling. There were the sobbing penitents, the boinging, flailing dancers, the cackling laughers in the spirit crowding the aisles. But then, somebody got slain in the spirit.

If you’ve never seen anyone slain in the spirit, this is how it goes. One person is being prayed for, invariably up in front of a huge crowd of worshippers. This person is almost always being prayed for by a church leader, a pastor, a preacher, a prophet. The prayee is emotional, sometimes trembling, sometimes sobbing. The prayer is loud, commanding, and, incidentally, usually has a southern accent+. The emotion between prayer and prayee builds, builds, and then—WHAMMO! The prayer touches the prayee’s head (or, in some cases, whallops it) with the palm of their hand, and the prayee crumples to the ground as dead. This, apparently, is a sign of unusual, advanced goddiness, and is revered in Charismatic circles as the ultimate display of divine power through a minister. If Jimmy Swaggart is any indication, apparently it is also a great way to get goddy babes.

That day at Zion, during that chapel, somebody rediscovered Slaying in the Spirit. It happened down front, right before the huge, thronging, babbling crowd. There was a slow, vast movement as the prayee went down, a sort of slow-motion wave and a sudden quiet rippled over the crowd. It was as if the entire crowd shuddered, shivered. There was a moment of uncertainty, of awed wonder. It was a sign of God’s presence, certainly. But it was also a break in the typical corporate emotional coitus of worship. People blinked, looked around, waiting to see what everyone else would do.

Brother Pat arose from his seat on the stage, where he’d been calmly, proudly (though vaguely half-liddedly) watching the proceedings. He moved to the podium. He raised his hands. Then, after a long, pregnant pause, he began to moan.

The crowd, relieved, responded immediately. There was a vast, shuddering moan from the room as every eye watched, enthralled. Brother Pat moaned again, swaying slowly. He did it rhythmically, the high tone of his voice slightly breathless and trembling, vibrating. He didn’t say anything. He just led them in… in a moan offering, I suppose. And the crowd, eager and overcome, followed along, the emotion of the room rising, rising, tremulous, like an ocean wave cresting, curling, preparing to crash forward.

And then it did crash. The room exploded in a mutual climax of superheated emotional gratification. The laughers screamed, cackled, rolled on the floor clutching themselves. The dancers writhed, flailed, racked with spasms of delight. The tongue speakers babbled, the runners bounded, the kneelers flung themselves, leaving dark streaks of snot and tears on the nappy carpet. More were slain in the spirit. I saw the Prayers. They stalked around the room with purposeful strides, their eyes roaming the crowd, their right hands raised in preparation, palm out. The anointing was on these few, and boy did they know it. They merely touched the screamers, the babblers, the laughers, and down they’d go like bags of bricks. They lay everywhere. The dancers leaped over them, the Prayers stepped over them gingerly, delicately, never looking down, their eyes wide, full of fire, terrifying.
This went on first for a half hour past our normal lunch time. Then a full hour.

Brother Pat was alternately leaning on the podium, head bowed, one arm raised high over the thronging crowd, or he was seated on the stage, in his chair along the back of the platform, head bowed, nodding, arms raised. To my eyes, he seemed to approach the podium every time the crowd seemed to be settling ever so slightly. He’d approach and moan some more, apparently too enraptured to form words. The crowd would explode again.

By the time this had been going on for an hour and a half past lunchtime, I gave up. I gathered my things, climbed in shame and embarrassment over the bodies of the gigglers, the slain, threaded my way to the door. There was Ben, standing by the exit, arms crossed, his face blank, just watching. Russ was behind him, in the shadow of the alcove. I knew the look on his face. Russ wanted it, but he couldn’t seem to get it. He wanted to speak in tongues, and feel the gigantic electric God-surge of being slain. Russ desperately wanted to get close to God like all those others were, but he couldn’t. Russ didn’t think any of it was fake, or put on. He believed in it, and believed that God was singling him out as unworthy. I saw that look on Russ’s face, of misery and desire and pure and simple woe, and I wanted to climb onto the stage, bury my hands in Brother Pat’s fat, mooshy neck, and strangle the moans out of him.

Part of that rage was for Russ’s broken heart, but part of it, I know now, was for my own. Because deep down, I believed the same thing as Russ, feared the same thing. Deep down was the terrible fear that they were meeting God in that messy, cacophonous crowd, and that I was wrong, unworthy, rejected.

I came closer at Zion Bible College to abandoning my faith than I ever had before. Not because I was afraid God didn’t exist, but because I was afraid God just didn’t want me, didn’t see me as worth a laughing fit, or an emotional rapture. How could I be of God if I didn’t feel that trembling ecstasy of worship? How could God desire me, or I know him, if I was actually freaked-out by the fiery eyes of the Prayers, with their out-stretched, slaying hands. Obviously, one of two things was true: Either God was not the God I thought I’d known and longed for, or God Himself had turned me away, shut off His spirit from me whilst pouring it all over the hundreds of others in that room. Both thoughts were dreadful.

The few of us that ate lunch that day did so in a sullen, rejected silence. It was miserable.

I walked past the chapel building that day at about four-thirty. I could still hear the worship music echoing out, muffled by distance. I could still, faintly, hear the rapturous sounds of the gigglers, the dancers, the babblers, the prayers. I didn’t know, in that moment, who I hated more: them, God, or myself.

Fire and Desire

The Slain-in-the-Spirit fervor on campus lasted a few weeks. I dreaded chapel. On one hand, I was certain that the entire display was a self-generated farce, a religious/emotional gang masturbation designed to create a standard for judging who was the holiest one of all, simply by making it a matter of who could jump the highest, cackle the loudest, babble the tongues-iest, stay the longest, and most important of all, slay the most. After all, it’s a hell of a lot easier to judge those things than to measure the content of another’s heart.

On the other hand, I was equally certain that it was me that was wrong. They were communing with God in some way as deep, as inexplicable to me as the English language is inexplicable to a mosquito. I prayed to feel what they felt, I begged and pleaded that God would lay it on me as He obviously did to the rest of the masses at Zion. I tried desperately to prepare my heart for Him, to get it right, to guard my thoughts and sweep up the dust of my soul, to make myself worthy of God’s full expression and presence. Nothing worked. I tried to let my emotions go, tried to catch the wave as it passed over the crowd in chapel, but it always drifted right over me, skipping me. God was neglecting me, rejecting me, dismissing me, pouring Himself on everyone else around me, apparently indiscriminately, but always, always bypassing me. As if He didn’t know me. Or worse, knew me and decided He didn’t like me.

In the middle of this, Ben, Chris, Russ and the rest of our gang huddled like refugees. We didn’t talk about it much. Each of us, by degrees, was struggling with the same internal tug-of-war. We satisfied ourselves with silly rebellions, meaningless little bold stands.

I had a contraband television. Yes, one of the Zion rules was no televisions in your room. I don’t know why. I had a little black and white TV that could fit in my dufflebag. Russ and I were holed up in my room one night watching Total Recall, finding some solace in the mindless, silly violence of it. There was a knock at the door. We jumped up guiltily, turned off the TV, stowed it away somewhere, then I answered the door. It was Nick, the Humorless Jokester, who had sneered at me for believing his "joke" that he’d grown up in Nebraska. He needed to borrow something, I don’t remember what, a tie or a belt or something. He was dressing up to go to a tent meeting somewhere. He had that look in his eye, the one that said I’m King of the Holy Hill, I’m communing with the angels even as we speak, I gots the secret of the universe burnin’ on my tongue and I’m just itchin’ to lay it on somebody, and right now I’m lookin’ at you…

He was freaking me out, with that direct, burning stare. I told him I didn’t have anything like what he was looking for, but he didn’t make to turn away from my door. He just stood there, his face on fire with quiet, intent fervor. I started to close the door on him, slowly. He stopped the door with his hand, his face framed in the crack, then pushed it back open a little. He leaned in, bringing his face close to mine.

"You been slaaaiiiin yet?" He said. His voice was quiet, conspiratorial, almost leering. I was at a total loss to know how to respond. I stared at him. No words came. He didn’t blink. He didn’t move at all. "Fire and desire," he said, lowering his voice even more. "Fire and desire…"

I was sincerely freaked out. How does one respond to such a thing? Part of me wanted to laugh at him, scream at him, yank the door all the way open and ram him against the wall. Another part of me sobbed, if you were the Christian you are supposed to be you’d know what this means! You’d know what to say! You’d get dressed and go along with him, to be slain alongside everybody else, or maybe even to do some slaying! But God doesn’t want you! You aren’t even as good as this humorless asshole in God’s eyes!
On the razor-edge of that struggle, I simply pushed the door shut on Nick, against his gentle but persistent pressure, closing it on his grave, hungry face.

The Refrigerator

As we drifted into the chilly months of Fall in Rhode Island, I became hopelessly broke and consistently hungry (I may have already indicated that the food at Zion was neither good nor plenty). To remedy this, I took a job as a security guard at a hospital in Providence. The most difficult part of the job was getting there, since I didn’t have a vehicle. Fortunately, enough of my friends also worked there that there was usually someone to carpool with. Most of us had the late shift, from three in the afternoon until eleven at night. Apart from staying awake, it was one of the easiest jobs in the world. Each night we simply took a walkie-talkie from the charger in the security office inside the main building, then walked out to one of the several parking lots scattered around the urban center surrounding the hospital. We’d climb a small flight of stairs into a tiny guard shack which overlooked the parking lot. Our primary job, so far as I could tell, was to make sure none of the cars actually drove away by themselves. Or something.

I came to work prepared. In my dufflebag I usually brought the following:

1) Any homework (hah!)
2) A book to read, usually something by Dean Koontz, for whose work I had an inexplicable fascination at the time.
3) My little black and white TV, on which I could watch Batman the Animated Series at six.
4) Foodstuffs and drink, if I could afford them.
5) A radio/CD player with some of my favorite tunes.
6) A small ceramic heater (borrowed)
7) A Sega Gamegear (also borrowed; my favorite game was called "Columns")
8) Drawing and writing paper and pens/pencils.

I have always been pretty comfortable with my own company, so for the most part this was an easy job for me. I wrote stories and silly poems and the occasional letter. I drew lots of pictures. Eventually, two weeks in, I got my first check. It was for just under two hundred dollars.

I thought I was the richest man in the world.

The first thing I did was to bum a ride with a friend to McDonalds. I bought three Big Macs. One I ate in the car on the way back. The other two I ate in my dorm room. I was so stuffed I felt vaguely sick, but I didn’t regret it.

The second thing I did was to get some groceries. No more going to sleep hungry for me, no sir! I went with my friends to the grocery store, and I can’t imagine ever being happier spending money than I was on that day. I bought lunch meat and cheese, condiments, milk, cereal, bags of chips, various munchies. I came back to my dorm with two paper bags stuffed to overflowing. I started to unpack. Most of the goods would be left inside one of the bags, stored in the community refrigerator in the basement commons.

My room-mate, Tom, warned me. Food cannot be left unattended in the refrigerator, he said, and the dead certainty of his voice should have deterred me. It would be stolen, he added, filling in what my blank expression indicated I hadn’t understood. I laughed. Preposterous. I have always been a trusting sort. Come on, I said to him, this is a Bible college! I happily wrote my name on the bag, folded it over and pushed it onto the top shelf in the basement fridge.

It didn’t last even until the next morning.

All my food—my milk, my cheese, my lunch meat—everything I had worked for for two weeks, saved for, dreamed of, and then collected and bought on that joyous day at the Giant Eagle store… gone. They barely left me so much as a slice of cheese. But the bag was still there, of course.

I was enraged. But pointlessly so. What was I to do? I had never, ever, felt so completely disillusioned and forlorn.

I tried again. A week or so later. This time, I thought, I will protect my goods with a shield of conscience. I mean, come on, this is a Bible college! We are students of the Bible! I said this to myself, with great emphasis, as I wrote all over the bag that contained my food. I wrote in giant black magic marker words, covering my bag with references and verses, all of which pertained to thievery. Right along the top, in words two lines thick, I wrote "THOU SHALL NOT STEAL!"

The bag was empty the next morning.

I considered filling the bag again, then lying in wait all through the next night, hidden behind the couch in the commons, ready to jump out and apprehend the thieves. I knew, though, by then, that there was more than one thief. There were probably a dozen. With great sadness and disillusionment, I decided a loaf of bread, some cheese and a pack of Eckrich hard salami wasn’t worth instituting a nightly vigil for. And I gave up believing that my fellow students, who pranced and cackled and slayed with the best of them every chapel afternoon, had enough of a shred of actual active conscience to not steal my lunch.

The next day, in chapel, I watched them, energetically gyrating in all their myriad religious ecstasies, and I wondered which ones were expending energy they’d absorbed from the blissful noshing of my purloined groceries. And my hate of them solidified, hardened, crystallized.

The Four Young Turks

Not every waking moment at Zion was as bad as it would seem. My friendship with Ben, Russ, Kevin (Doogie Houser Cop), Joe (with the unit-kicking ministry), my room-mate Tom and others was sweet as a nut.
Tom liked to play Sonic the Hedgehog on the Gamegear. He was addicted to that game for a while. He’d play silently, intently, curled up on his bed as if ready to physically spring forward if the game suddenly required it. Then, whenever he’d lose a guy, he’d let out a great lurching spasm and a yell. It was always the same yell, and it was vaguely syllabic. It sounded like "SCHVEITZENHEIMEN!!" I am pretty sure that it was something made up, a sort of pig-german. But if it means something horrible, I apologize.

Being a Bible college, there was a strange pre-requisite for musical talent among the students, especially for the guitar. I suspected I was about the only guy in my entire dorm that was not a guitar player or, at that very moment, learning to be a guitar player. Tom was fantastic. Ben was learning. James, the soft-spoken, truly wise Canadian guy€ across the hall was as good as Tom. All over the dorm were guitars. One evening, Tom was idly picking and strumming in a corner of our room as several of us lounged around chatting, looking at comic books, not studying. James came over, brought his own guitar, and somehow, a spontaneous jam session ensued. It weren’t praise music, by Zion standards. It was, in fact, a sudden blending of talents, James’s style and Tom’s style, winding together, complimenting each other, spinning and lofting, like birds circling on higher and higher breezes. It rocked, a little, but mostly it was just a totally free-verse rhythm, joyful and frivolous. It was green sometimes, blue other times. It simultaneously went on for about ten minutes and two weeks, accompanied by low appreciative murmurs and words from the guys assembled. I looked around at those faces I had come to love, saw them smiling, nodding, jiving to the music, saying "yeah!" and "woo!" and for that moment, all the crap at Zion, all the horrible food and thieved salami and cacklers and fire and desire was worth it, just for that ongoing moment of joy, shared as a whole with my favorite people, the people that knew me and loved me, and who I knew and loved. I thanked God for them. To me, just maybe, that was real praise music.

I recorded it. I recorded a lot of spontaneous moments during those months, on a cheap old radio/tape player. I have a tape of it all somewhere. I’m going to find it and I am going to record it onto my computer somehow. If I do, I might link some of the best of it here. I may include a bit of the spontaneous jam session I described above. But I will definitely include the entirety of The Most Annoying Song in the World.

The Most Annoying Song in the World was recorded by a group of us that went by the name "The Four Young Turks". Ben, one of the Turks, was being taught to play guitar by Tony, another Turk, who was extremely good. Ben had learned a total of two chords, and he asked Tony if he could play a song using just those two chords. Tony said sure, but it’d be (here we go) The Most Annoying Song in the World. Ben saw this, of course, as a personal challenge. The next day, the song was born. A week later, it was recorded in secret (so to speak) in a disused bathroom next to the commons in the basement. Ben and Tony were on guitars, accompanied by Tom on bass and topped off by a small keyboard/drum machine. It became, in a tiny, underground way, a campus anthem. Copies were passed around as if they were copies of the Bible in communist Russia. The song was beloved by all the Zion outcasts, such as ourselves. It was a brow-knitting puzzle to everybody else, although for the most part, nobody who wasn’t part of "the Underground" ever even heard the song.

Until the Freshman Banquet.

Each class held an annual banquet. These were generally tasteful affairs, with Zion’s equivalent of fine dining and haute couture. All members of that year’s class would attend, along with school leadership, including Brother Pat, of course, and a remarkably intimidating old woman we all knew as Sister Evelyn. Sister Evelyn was that peculiar kind of old that, when she was in good spirits, made you want to find a street you could help her across, and when she was in nasty spirits, made you want to hide behind a bank vault door. She was rarely in what anyone could call good spirits, however. She had the jutting jaw and gigantic, inch-thick glasses of a world-class ear-grabber. She was the Pentecostal equivalent, I suppose, of Mother Superior.

Nobody screwed with Sister Evelyn.

Well, at this year’s Freshman Banquet, somehow, the Four Young Turks had been arranged to play. They were going to feature, of course, The Most Annoying Song in the World, which was, as far as I know, the only song they knew. Nobody quite understood how this came about. I suspect someone on the planning committee who was "in the know" suggested the idea to the rest of the planning committee, who were blissfully ignorant. The end result was that we all knew that when the Turks hit the stage, very few people in the crowd, particularly Brother Pat and Sister Evelyn, were going to know what hit them. None of us knew how they were going to respond. Expulsion, at a school like Zion, was never out of the question. We were pretty sure that wouldn’t actually happen, but only pretty sure. We almost called it off the night before.

Word had gotten around. When we all started setting up, an hour before the Banquet, we realized that there were an awful lot of folks from other classes hanging conspicuously around, grinning in a disquieting way. It was the sort of grin that said "I’d never do this kinda thing myself, but if you’re gonna do it, I sure as heck ain’t gonna miss it."

The Banquets always took place in the cafeteria. A small stage was set up, tablecloths and candles were placed on the tables. Strings of crepes were hung. We set up the stage with microphones and amps. I had written a skit to precede the drama. There was one element I desperately needed for the script, one essential but hard to find item that the script somehow couldn’t work without. Fortunately, there was a big guy in our class who did some handyman work on the side. He told me where I could find what I needed.

The Banquet began with a speech by Brother Pat. It was a standard boilerplate Bible School speech. We all attended with that kind of dazed concentration that belies accomplished attenders of speeches and sermons everywhere, who know how to nod and murmur assent wherever necessary, while letting their minds spin off elsewhere. Down in front of the stage, several rows of folding chairs were set up to accommodate the inexplicable number of sophopmores, juniors and seniors that had shown up to support their freshmen brothers and sisters. They all watched and listened with an unusual amount of polite attention.

Soon it was time for the skit.

We’d set up a dorm bed and a little desk on the stage, scattering the necessary room elements around so that everyone recognized the set as a typical Zion dorm room. Ben was studying at the desk. I came in loudly, slamming the door. Humor ensued. The script was in the classic Saturday Night Live style, taking one basic joke and replaying it in increasing absurdity. Ben was the serious, studying room-mate and I was the obnoxious, noisy room-mate, always promising to be quieter, to finally understand. Oh, yeah! Finals! I’d say, as if the idea had just occurred to me, as if finals was the kind of the thing that happened to other students. I promised to be quiet, assured him I was just going to get something to eat. This meant, of course, wrestling with increasing violence with a cellophane bag of chips, which I finally pulled apart so enthusiastically that they flew everywhere. Ben glared. I apologized, promised to be quiet, and then went on to more ridiculously noisy endeavors. Finally, I vowed that I got it, I understood. Quiet was the key. Mum’s da woid. In a stage-whisper, I told him I was just going to work a bit on that wobbly leg on my bed. I touched the bed as I spoke, demonstrating a very slight wobble. Quiet. Peaceful. Meditative. Ben glared, then finally, turned back to his books.

I pulled an electric circular saw from under the bed. I had been so glad to find a circular saw for this climax! The noise of it filled the cafeteria as I pretended to saw off the bottom of the bed leg. The crowd was perfect, roaring, laughing, hooting.

And that was the cue. Ben stood up, pushing the desk away. He confronted me as the rest of the Turks came onto the stage carrying their instruments. You want noise? Ben called to me. We’ll show you noise! And then they hit that first (of only two, if you recall) chords. It jarred through the room like a rusty saw.

The rows of chairs along the front emptied spontaneously as the song began. The crowd leapt up, laughing, screaming, roaring, delighted, conspiratorial grins on all their faces. The Four Young Turks were all dressed in vaguely Devo-esque black turtlenecks and black jeans. They all had their hair slicked straight back. They danced as they played, bounding and hopping as only white boys that don’t really know anything about how to dance can.

The Most Annoying Song in the World was sort of a punk song. With a few melodic, strangely mellow interludes. Punctuated with primal screams from Bill. It contained lyrics with phrases like "Kick ya in the knees, ohhh, what a bad day!" and "Magnanimous!" and "Just relax, there’s a guitar solo comin’ on!"

Across the cafeteria, behind the waving and shouting upperclassmen, the rest of the freshmen looked by turns confused, or delighted, or offended. Brother Pat stood, his lips pressed into a thin white line. At one point, I saw Sister Evelyn looking around the room for whoever was in charge of the sound, methodically dragging her index finger across her wattled neck in the classic "kill it" gesture. Nobody was in charge of the sound. We’d set it up ourselves.

The song finally reached its rather bizarre, draining climax. There were cheers, there were boos. The lights flashed. The Turks bowed.

And that, fortunately or unfortunately, is where my memory of that night peters out. Nobody got expelled. As far as I know, nothing was ever officially done or said about the appearance and performance of the Four Young Turks at all. After all, we hadn’t broken any actual rules.

But I just bet that a lot more oversight went into deciding on the entertainments for future banquets from then on.

Conclusion

I ended my time at Zion Bible College after one semester. Jenna drove to pick me up in her Dad’s Oldsmobile Delta 88. I didn’t take her on a tour or introduce her to any of my friends (partly because I didn’t really care for any of them to meet her, and partly because I was just so anxious to be shut of the place). I simply piled my things in the trunk, jumped in and left. We were on the road within half an hour of her arrival. We drove through the night.

I didn’t know if I would be going back next semester. I think I expected not.
I was not a great expert at keeping track of long-distance friends, so I have completely lost touch with Ben, Russ, Kevin, Joe, Tom and all the rest. But I do wonder, sometimes. Did they go back? Did they graduate? Did they find a way to mesh their own understanding and love of God with the crazed religious lunacy of the rest of the campus? Or did they drift, as I almost did?
I wish I knew. I wish I’d kept track of them.

There are times in life that are hard, that are full of challenges and conflicts, that, in the moment, seem so hopeless and difficult and aimless that you lose yourself in them, fearing you will never get through them. And then, eventually, you are through them. Time goes by and you look back with wonder on that time, and you say to yourself, "That wasn’t so bad. It had its dark moments, but really, it was kind of exciting. Why, I’d almost like to do that again, if just for one day." There are times in life, that in retrospect, you realize weren’t really as bad as they seemed.

Zion was not one of those times. Zion was exactly as bad as it seemed. I have wondered what became of my little refugee circle of friends. But I’ve never, ever wanted to go back to Zion.

*So far as I have ever observed, I am the only person I have ever known to actually call himself a people pleaser. Although even I don’t do it very openly. The problem is, as a people pleaser, I want people to like me. People like honesty. And yet, people seem to vaguely disdain People Pleasers. You see the conundrum, yes?

** An article of clothing that I am perversely doomed, by too much private Christian school, to think of as bookishly sexy.

‡ or "unit", or "grapes", or "package", etc, etc, etc. But always "about ten times."

† Recall that I was, at this time, carrying on a long-distance relationship with Jenna; a relationship that existed purely as a guilty exercise based on a balance between my belief that I owed her my devotion (because she, apparently, needed it so much) and the haunting, occasional insecurity that she was the best I’d ever be able to get.

+ Often worn just for the occasion.

€ Not that that’s a rarity or anything.

Dead Bird Walkin'...

2006-11-22T10:21:00.000-08:00

Today, on the way to work, I heard the following story on the radio. It was a simple little blurb at the end of the news broadcast, the kind of story that newspeople like to call "lighthearted".

It is the day before Thanksgiving, and as is traditonal, the President has come forward and granted a pardon to the turkeys, two of them in this case, that had been carefully selected (by some sort of federal turkey committee, we must assume) to be served as the main course at the White House, come Turkeyday afternoon. This begs a rather cynical question, methinks. Are we to believe that President W. and the clan, along with the secret service and staff, are not, in fact, having the oh-so-traditional (not to mention yummy) turkey dinner on Thanksgiving day? Personally, I find that difficult to believe. Imagine it. There they all are, George and Laura and the twins, the Secret Service huddled around the kiddie table, all of them eating re-heated leftovers. "Nice goin', dad." One of the twins says ruefully. "Had to go and pardon the turkey again. Didn't you learn your lesson last year?"

The news story went on to explain what will become of the pardoned turkeys. They go to Disneyland. No kidding. They actually serve as grand marshalls at the Disneyland parade. One would think that eventually, somewhere along the chain of command, once the press stops paying attention and nobody is thinking about the famous freed birds anymore, that they are most likely gonna get eaten anyway. Mmmmmm, presidentially pardoned poultry...

I listened to this and I thought: We are a bunch of complete idiots.

I hear George W. Bush, like most presidents at this point in their term, is concerned about his legacy. Here's a way he could've really given his legacy an appropriate boost.

Imagine it: reporters and photographers gathered on the lawn of the rose garden, burbling amongst themselves, testing their equipment, readying their cameras and recorders. A blue platform stands at the end of the White House's side entrance, flanked by Secret Service and marines in dress uniform. George W. Bush emerges and the crowd applauds politely. Mr. Bush approaches the podium with the presidential seal on it, glances to the side, drawing everyone's attention to the two turkeys standing bewildered in cages displayed on the side of the platform. They are grand old birds, fat and docile, their feathers plumped out and their old lady's wattled heads looking resplendently red in the noon sunlight.

The president grips the podium. "Ladies and Gentlemen. Today, before you all, I hereby grant a full and unconditional pardon, effective immediately..." He pauses, smirking a little, glancing around the crowd of press and staffers. "To the butcher in charge of dressing these two delicious looking birds."

A man in the front row stands up quickly and dutifully. He is wearing butcher's apron and a high white chef's hat. He draws a butcher's knife from his apron belt as if it were a sword, then offers it handle-first to the commander in chief. Bush nods to the man, reaches down to accept the knife. He holds it up, grinning. "I'm gonna do it myself!" He exults. "I'm goan' EAT them mah' fahs."

And George Bush steps smartly over to the cage, yanks the first bird out and ...

Well, then pandemonium ensues. But still, that'd be a legacy maker, wouldn't it? I mean, does the president really make a statement by performing the same dopey, milquetoast idiocy that presidents have been doing for the past 59 years? Neh. Butcher them birds and eat 'em raw. That's what I say.

Fundamentalists and Left-Wingers: Seperated at Birth?

2006-10-02T11:35:00.000-07:00

This is just an amusing and probably meaningless observation (probably, I say, but you never know, so pay attention):

There are always two kids of people in the world. Take any social see-saw and you'll find it's true: one is either an Elvis person or a Beatles person; a math person or a grammar person; a chocolate person or a fruit person; a Napoleon Dynamite person or ... well, just NOT a Napoleon Dynamite person.

One of the most polarizing social see-saws is the political/religious one. On one extreme end of this see-saw you have the ultra-conservative fundamentalist Bible-thumpers. These are the people who see Black Helicopters and the Illuminati behind most world events. They hoard batteries, guns and water for the imminent apocalypse. They home school, not because they believe they are better teachers than those in the public schools, but because they believe all teachers in the public school system are athiest/communist members of a leftist cabal bent on converting all children into anti-God homosexual PETA-members. On the other extreme end of the political/religious see-saw are the radical leftist ultra-spiritual mother-earthers. These people are the ones who believe religious dogma is a disease far deadlier than AIDs (which they secretly view as a badge of honor). On the other hand, they like crystals, and Wicca, and meditating to become one with the spiritual/universal plane. They eat organic vegan and consider meat-eaters murderers. They believe America is the most ultimately and irredeemably evil entity in the universe and indirectly root for terrorists to blow us all to smithereens. They would gladly die for the cause of A) someone's right to kill a fetus, or B) preserving the existence of a single spotted owl.

The interesting, amusing thing about people on both extremes of this spectrum, as my wife has recently noticed during a trip to a local health food store, is this: ultra-right-wing-fundies and ultra-left-wing-earthers, upon purely superficial inspection, look exactly the same! Take away the words on the bumper-stickers and T-shirts, and there is virtually no way to tell them apart, despite their drastically polarized belief systems!

Examples: both tend to be into health food, vitamins and natural remedies. That's why we first noticed this while in a natural food store: it is one of the few places where both factions of the political/religious see-saw intermingle with no apparent animosity. Fundies and Earthers both love the idea of healing through Royal Jelly and homeopathy. They both love all-natural organic foods and abhor irradiation and 16 letter words in ingredient lists. Positive-thinking and shark's cartilage and bee-sting therapy and the spiritual/psychic power of magnets; these are all favorites of both factions, strangely enough.

But it doesn't stop there.

Both sides look and dress similarly in many ways. Fundies and Earthers both tend toward an austere, plain form of dress. The women tend not to wear much make-up and to have rather cavalier attitudes towards shaving certain body-areas. The men like sandals and goatees and glasses. Both factions wear angry and provocative slogans about their core beliefs (and both factions have loads of core beliefs) on their persons in the form of t-shirts, buttons, patches, jewelry and caps. Both factions tend to have the same expression built into their faces: I dare you to disagree with me, the expression says, I'm pissed off about the state of the planet and the country and the way you're dressed and the things you're eating, so please PLEASE disagree with me so I can vent some rage on you with a self-righteous and endless diatribe.

Both factions are serious. Both have little or no sense of humor, except when it comes to sarcastic and vicious statements about those that disagree with them. Both are essentially unhappy. Both could have their worldviews summed up with the bumper sticker slogan, "If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention".

Both the Fundies and the Earthers utterly hate anyone who disagrees with them. They both believe the other is Evil and Deadly. Neither are thinkers. They defend and attack their positions unquestioningly and instantly, as a purely reflexive action. They are, in short, miles beyond self-examination and introspection. Screeching about persecutions and offenses is their equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "Blah blah blah!" to block out any reasonable argument. Neither the Fundies nor the Earthers can bear to hear even the most calm dissent. And both, in their own way, believe God is irrevocably on their side.

Isn't it funny? In a more-or-less non-ha-ha funny kinda way? Despite what they may think, the Earthers and the Fundies are far more similar than they'd ever admit or imagine. They'd probably be best buddies if it weren't for the fact that they have to hate each other.

I am a Christian, and grew up around Christians. Many of them were and are, I am reluctant to admit, Fundies. Not quite the bomb-throwers some Fundies are, but some of them come close. They wear argumentative Christian T-shirts and caps and listens exclusively to Praise Music. They thinks abortion clinics that get bombed deserve it, although they wouldn't go plant any bombs themselves (in that respect they are a lot like the non-killing Muslims in my previous blog). Most of them are absolutely and unassailably positive of their convictions, although they detest and abhor any discussion that might cast any doubt on those convictions. They proclaim the house of their beliefs solid and able to withstand the onslaught of the most ferocious storm, as long as you don't actually approach that house, or touch it, or even look at it too closely, and certainly as long as no actual wind or rain is allowed to fall on it.

Whenever I visit my funadmentalist friends, I find myself praying a prayer like this: Oh God, protect me from absolute certainty. Protect me from never being able to listen to a reasonable argument, and considering it's veracity, even if it defies my deepest beliefs. Help me to always be ready to engage my brain before I engage my mouth. Help me to avoid the lure of self-righteous condemnation of those who disagree with me.

I don't want to be a moderate, necessarily. I don't want to be wishy-washy. I do have strong beliefs. I just want to be able to defend them with love and respect for those who disagree with them. I want to always know why I believe them- not just that I do- and to be able to explain those beliefs (and this is the important part) in a way that people can hear, not just in a way that makes angry noise.

I guess that must be what the Bible means when it says one can speak with the voice of angels, but if you don't speak with love, you're just flappin' your gums, making a ruckus, essentially annoying everybody.

At any rate, that's a bit off topic- just a little personal rabbit trail.

I just thought it was interesting that, when you remove the actual words, both sides of the political/religious see-saw look and sound almost exactly the same. They're like brothers in a civil war. By definition, they share the same earthiness and graveness, the same plainness and angry slogans and spittle-flying diatribes, the same utter intolerance of those who disagree. I guess this is a good thing for the rest of us. Makes them easy to recognize and avoid.

God save us from absolute certainty, and those who espouse it. They deserve each other.

The Muslim Mafia

2006-09-19T08:11:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about this for a long, long time, but I have refrained from saying much about it, either here or elsewhere, because of one very important factor.

This is going to be about Islam. The one factor that has kept me from making the strong statements and judgements I am, perhaps unfortunately, known for on this very timely subject is the fact that we have someone in our lives who is a devoted Muslim, a person whom we trust implicitly and who we like immensely. She is, in fact, something of an icon in the local Muslim community. She gives speeches on the subject and makes annual trips to Mecca, where she spends much time in prayer and quiet devotion. She is kind, caring, thoughtful, humourous, highly intelligent and generally just a joy to be around.

It is her I think of first when I begin to respond to the current events involving the Muslim world. It is her I think of when I see news footage of bearded men in turbans firing automatic weapons and speaking serenely of the death of my children. It is her I think of when I hear Islam referred to as a religion of peace.

Well, that is officially changed as of now. It was the Pope's speech that did it.

I didn't listen to the speech. I didn't even know, or care (being neither Muslim nor Catholic), that it was going on. The first I heard of it was the day after, when excerpts of it were being played on the radio and TV, and the first responses of the Muslim world were coming in.

As far as I understand it, the Pope quoted some ancient text in which a Muslim and a Catholic were discussing Islam. The Catholic said (and I very much paraphrase) "Show me anything new Muhammad brought to the world of religion, and I will show you violence and coersion." So maybe the essence of that idea is right, maybe it is wrong. What is extremely telling, however, is the response of the Muslim world in general. Frankly, I think it is funny, in a black-comedy sort of way.

"Call us and our Prophet violent, will ya!?" They shriek. "Take that back right now or we'll kill you and your children! Take it back or we'll burn your churches and piss on the ashes! We'll dance on the graves of your families! Take it back or die a thousand deaths! We'll show YOU to call us violent!"

I mean, really. If it wasn't true, it'd be a farce. It's Mel Brooks doing religion.

And it struck me as familiar somehow. I mulled it over and I finally realized what it was. It's not so much religion as farce: it's religion as mafia.

The traditional mafia M.O. (at least according to Hollywood) is for the pinstriped goombah to sell insurance to local businesses. "Pay us up and I can insure you against us smashing ya moichendise and maybe ya nose. At least until next month." The Muslim Mafia says "Pay us respect as a Religion of Peace and maybe we won't send our goons to saw off your head and bomb your churches. Until next month."

Sure, there are lots of Muslims who don't saw off heads and hide missiles in their basements. They aren't members of the Muslim Mafia. But what I find utterly dismaying, and frankly disgusting, about your average non-killing Muslim is that they will not, under any circumstance, condemn the actions of their hacksaw wielding brethren. Even our good Muslim friend, when I asked her about the violence and the killings enacted in response to those dopey Muhammad cartoons, essentially defended them by pointing out alleged atrocities performed against the Muslim world by the American military/political machine. She essentially said, "Well, Muslims are angry and oppressed, so any violent response is legitimate."

She would say that was not what she meant. In so may words. But that's what her response still boils down to. Hers, and that of the rest of the non-head-sawing-off Muslim world. "We've been opressed and insulted. You brought it on yourselves. I might not be planning to kill you and your family myself, but if other Muslims are, well, you probably deserve it. Also, don't you dare say we're violent. I'm not, so it's unfair to say Muslims are. I'll sue you if you say it. Or some other Muslim will bomb your house. So take it back."

There are terrorists in the Christian world as well, as many Muslims point out. Absolutely there are. The Ku Klux Klan is a prime example: murderous, hateful thugs bent only on death, coersion and intimidation. The vast majority of Christians, however, utterly and loudly condemn the Klan. They distance themselves from such loons, speak out forcefully against them.

The Muslim world won't speak out against their terrorists. They defend them, if by nothing else than their silence.

If there are atrocities being committed against Muslims by our soldiers or our government, we speak out against that, too. If our soldiers did indeed commit those awful rapes and murders in Iraq, I, for one, would see that they got the death penalty, quickly and economically. I do not, instead, defend their actions by pointing out that plenty of other American soldiers have been blown to smithereens by Iraq-made roadside bombs.

That, however, is what Muslims - even non-head-chopping Muslims - do. Ask any Muslim: was it OK for the terrorists to torture and mutilate and then dance proudly over the bodies of those two American servicemen? What do you think they will say? The words will vary, but the response will be along the lines of "Well, Muslims are offended and insulted and pissed off. I may not have done it myself, but I sympathize with those that do." No Muslim, in my experience or observation, will ever say "No. That wasn't all right. Paying back a wrong with raw vengeance is also wrong. I renounce that, and I reject those who call themselves Muslim and commit such acts."

Oh, how it would be refreshing to hear a Muslim say that. Oh how it would restore my faith in the Muslim world if they didn't simpy respond with their own allegations and angry threats. If they would stop justifying murder as a response to insults, or even disagreement. How refreshing it would be even if one Muslim said "We don't all want to saw off your head and kill your children, but I sympathize with the fear and trepidation you feel because of those of us who do!" Even that would amount to a monumental gesture towards understanding and something at least attempting reconciliation.

Instead, the Muslim Mafia sits serenely back and makes us a deal we can't refuse: Embrace us. Follow our dictates. Respect us as a Religion of Peace. Or we'll kill you. We'll probably kill you anyway, or die trying, because even those of us who wouldn't kill you won't lift a finger to stop those of us who will. But hey, that'll be later. For now...

That's a nice family you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to 'em...

Defective Hearts

2006-09-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

I am married. To give some idea of how I feel about the woman I won, let me say that I pursued her, helplessly, rather unabashedly, and occasionally nearly against my own will, for ten years. She was one of my best friends all that time. We met when she came into my Dad's bookstore looking for a job and I, in a very uncharacteristic gesture of raw pursuit, took her phone number from her application and called her to ask her to go out with me. I loved her the moment I saw her. Yeah, yeah, cheesy and dopey, but true as the blue sky and the green earth below. I loved her helplessly and titanically and I knew, if this woman turns out to be half as spectacular as my heart said she was the first time I met her, I was smitten beyond words. I would chase her to the ends of the earth, woo her until my dying breath, for nothing more than a contented smile on her face and the knowledge that I put it there. And she ended up being even more than I expected. Love like this does happen. If I wasn't living it, I wouldn't believe it.

Hell. I AM living it, and half the time I don't believe it.

Still, we fight. I think we fight even more because we love each other so ferociously. It's ironic, but if you give it a little thought, it makes sense. So we had a fight on the way to church the other night. Like always, it was about some annoying, meaningless little thing that happens to be about the same emotional shape as something much bigger and more deeply rooted. For me, it's usually about the fact that, lovely as she is, my wife reminds me of my Dad, with whom I have always had a quietly desperate, arid relationship. One doesn't need a degree in psychology to know that bad father-child relationship crap is the best fertilizer to grow marital strifes in. Like all our other arguments, we proceed into them whole-hog, knowing we will eventually work through it and that out commitments to each other are rock solid, making such arguments relatively safe. On the other hand, I have been particularly raw about some of these issues lately, and this argument was really raking the wounds.

We arrived at church in a cloud of bitter acid, neither of us yet giving an inch and, for my part, feeling very hurt. I was in no mood to be at church. I could hardly bring myself not to snarl at people who approached me, and I was certainly in no frame of mind to hide what was happening between us for the eyes of polite society.

We went in. We sat down. The music started.

We go to a large church, a huge church. There were several hundreds of people in attendance that Saturday evening. I sat there fuming, stewing in emotions that felt, at the moment, like rejection and loss, like being misunderstood and uncared for. In that multitude, I felt utterly lonely and bereft, hollow as a gourd and lost as innocence.

And that's part of why I was so quietly shocked to see her in the row ahead of me, five or six seats down. It explains part of why I responded to seeing her so strongly, but it doesn't explain everything. Let me go back a bit.

For the sake of propriety I'll call this woman Sadie. I met her four years ago or so, when I first came to my church. When I met her...

How can I say this? How can I put it in the proper context without cheapening it? Bottom line: things like this shouldn't happen. That's what I thought when I met her. There shouldn't be the capacity for this in my heart. If there is, something is terribly wrong. If there is, hearts are defective. There's been a terrible mistake.

I am a man, and men, at least, will know what I mean when I say that you occasionally see or meet a woman and find yourself physically attracted to her. Big deal. The less scrupulous of us will fantasize about her. The very less scrupulous will pursue her and maybe woo her into an affair. Those of us committed to our marriages will recognize it as merely a knee-jerk meaningless erotic response and shut it down, think about Ernest Borgnine eating pizza or simply look the other way. This- plain sexual attraction- doesn't stop at marriage, and the best of us are trained mentally to deal with it and dismiss it. It's relatively easy, with practice.

Physical attraction is one thing.

Meeting Sadie, however, was different. Sexual attraction was part of it. Sure. In the same sense that grammar is part of a Shakespearean sonnet.

OK, I'm circling this, afraid to land on it, afraid of how it will sound and simultaneously afraid of diminishing it. Here's what it was: when I met Sadie, I loved her. You ask (as do I), was it like when I first met my wife?

A little. Maybe more than a little.

Being around Sadie was like being with someone you'd loved passionately in a previous life, loved with an intensity that was too strong for death to erase. Sadie was lovely to me; lovely in the classic sense. She effortlessly, apparently against her own will, exercised a totally specific magnetism upon me, so real and strong and palpable that I tended to overcompensate, fighting it. Where I would give a friendly hug to other people at church, or touch their arm while chatting, or even just shake hands, I never touched Sadie. I couldn't, for the terrible fear that somehow touching her might result in some sort of spontaneous reaction that would reveal the secret of my complete thrall for her for all to see. I couldn't touch her, not for all the awkwardness in the world, because I so desperately wanted to.

I stood ridiculously far apart from her when we talked. And here's the rub of it all-- because of certain involvements at church, we did have to talk. We had to spend time together. O Cruel Fate! I loved that time together and loathed it in equal parts! Of course she didn't reciprocate those feelings. I knew that. She was, like me, married, and apparently happily so. She was content and well-loved and completely beyond and above any such wild and reckless emotions, especially for me. I knew that. It had to be so. Because if it wasn't so... if she did reciprocate in her heart...

O cruel, awful, capricious fate.

But after a while, Sadie moved away. I didn't have to see her anymore. And that was good. Out of sight, out of heart. Because as much as she held me in her thrall, it was a useless, pointless, ultimately unfulfillable thrall. She moved away and I was relieved, because I wouldn't have to struggle with that horrible duality anymore. At least not overtly.

And then, that Saturday night at church, a year or so after she'd moved away, in the midst of a terrible, hurtful argument with my wife, there, in a crowd of thousands, was Sadie, only a few feet away. That seemed then, and it seems to me now, like one whopper of a coincidence. It turned me inside out.

I wasn't going to talk to her. Wasn't, wasn't, wasn't. So I stood off to the side at the end of the service and refused to look in her direction. But- and this was important! - I didn't duck out immediately. Sadie approached me. She touched my arm and smiled and greeted me. We talked for several minutes. She was back in town for a couple of days, visiting. Things were good for her. We exchanged trivialities. We stood about five feet apart.

Sigh.

I don't love her. I don't love Sadie. But I recognize, when I am near her, the capacity to love her, hugely and ferociously. The feeling is irrepressible. It is giddy and terrible and frightening and inspiring. But in the end, sadly, it is just insipid. Pointless. Empty. Silly. Ultimately, tragically, useless.

WHY is that possible? I assumed, growing up, that sexual desire for a variety of women wouldn't stop after marriage. I prepared myself for that. What I never considered, however, was the possibility that there would be more than one socket for abject adoration in my heart! That doesn't seem logical or right! Why would God design hearts that way? How can it not but lead to sadness and loss, or at the very least, this occasional sense of abject, pitifull emptiness at the Unfulfillable Wow? My picture of the romantic heart had been of a power junction with one socket: True Love Goes Here. And now, because of the timing of meeting Sadie again, so unexpectedly and poignantly, I was face-to-face with the fact that there are, apparently, more sockets. There may even be a whole line of sockets, a whole line of potential loves. This seems so horribly, unfairly wrong to me. To me, to my wife, even to Sadie.

So my wife and I, we worked out our problem that night. We rode home. We made up. But I was haunted by Sadie, by the love that wasn't, and couldn't be. It affected me. So the next morning, rather unexpectedly, I just told my wife about it.

She knew, of course. She wouldn't have brought it up, but she knew, and was glad we talked about it. Talking about it took some of the power of it away, which is understandable, I guess. That was a good thing, a healthy thing. My wife once again proved how unbelievably rare and wonderful she is by listening and empathising and helping me work through it. I told her because I choose her, always and forever, and I want to be current with her, and her with me. That is the intimacy of marriage, and I wanted it to be real. Talking about Sadie with my wife was essential. I discovered it after the fact, and so I am extremely glad I did it.

She said she saw us talking at church. She said she could see what was happening for at least one of us. The distance. The carefulness. The things that so obviously weren't happening, but could've been.

So that is the end of the story- what story there is. But I was left to wonder and worry over this idea of defective hearts. It just seemed wrong. Totally and unthinkingly stupid. Cruel. Dangerous. A cosmic bad joke.

I went for a bike ride in a local park, surrounded by trees and winding paths and one of those peculiar woods-bordered ponds that people in the midwest call lakes. I thought about defective hearts and did what I do best, which is yell at God. I am a petulant, argumentative, distrustful son to my heavenly Papa, but at least I talk to Him about it. I rail and I whine and I carp and I accuse. Fortunately, I know He made me this way and I know His love makes Him patient. I yell at Him about it because I believe, in my deepest heart, that God wants me to ask Him the hardest questions. If for no other reason than that it keeps me talking to Him.

I am an artist, thus I am visual. As I rode, I imagined my original idea of my heart-- a single power junction with one socket: True Love Goes Here. Then I imagined pulling back a curtain and seeing more sockets, identical to the first. I imagined standing back, taking in those additional sockets, then looking up, looking around, seeing additional rows of sockets, lined out above and below. In this odd little mind-movie, I took steps backward, widening my view, turning, and saw row upon row of sockets, lined up in stacks and columns, diminishing upward in a dim blur of perspective. I turned on the spot, and what I had thought was an intimate little room, a shrine to one love, one special socket, was instead a cathedral of mythic proportion, halls upon halls of sockets, each one a potential love, a power-connection to grandeur. All empty, however, except for my one special socket, the one with my wife's name on it.

And suddenly, as has happened on a few other occasions in my life, it was as if God put His hands gently on my shoulders and turned me-- just enough to shift my perspective a few degrees, to give me the slightest, tiniest hint of the view from His side of things. It was extremely subtle, but it made all the difference in the universe.

Maybe we were originally meant to love endlessly and perfectly. Maybe that is how we were designed way back at the beginning, in Eden. Maybe, rather than being a sign of defective design, all those necessarily dormant sockets represent a more perfect design than our fallen-ness allows us to explore. I imagined trying, in my fallen imperfection, to plug Sadie's love into one of those other sockets in my heart. What would happen? Would I experience love times two? That which I share with my wife and a new love, equal and unchallenged, for Sadie?

No. I couldn't. In my fallenness, my love-current is sadly limited. The current would split, and probably not equally. The result would be jealousies and unfulfillment. Frustration. Bitterness. Neither Sadie nor my lovely wife would get the love they deserved and I would most likely grow hard and empty, unable to love anyone with all my heart.

I sensed God very quietly telling me: It isn't the design of your heart that is faulty. Your fallen-ness, inherited from your father Adam, cuts you off from the ultimate love current, which means you simply cannot power more than one socket. That one socket is my gift to you, though. It is a hint of what is to come, once the curtain is pulled aside completely. Enjoy it as fully and unabashedly as you can! Let it be a tantalizing vision of what love might be like on the other side of this life, when the current won't be restricted!

And I thought-- maybe this is what Jesus meant when he said there isn't marriage in heaven. Maybe it's a heresy, but it feels right to me: maybe marriage isn't diminished in heaven, as I'd always rather despondently thought. Maybe all other relationships are simply elevated to the level and intensity of the best marriage relationship! If that is the case, I suspect earthly marriages will still have a special significance, perhaps in the same way that the Jews have a special significance to God, even though we gentiles are grafted into the tree. But still: I imagine a time out of this earthly life when all those sockets in my heart, which are necessarily dormant now, dark and empty, are lit up with some fantastically unlimited love current and we are all capable of loving endlessly and with complete fulfillment.

Then again, maybe that's all crap. I'm not gonna make a doctrine out of it. But it feels like if it is wrong, it is standing right next to the truth in the lineup.

Either way, I am back to a place where I am trusting God's nature. I am trusting His design. I sense, when I complain to Him about it, that He smiles indulgently and confidently and says to me in a joyful whisper: "Just you wait, son. Hang on. Wait it out. The truth of it all will blow you away. Trust me." And I can't help but smile myself, because I sense He can't wait to show me, can't wait to toss me, all of us, into the oceans of joy He's got waiting for us.

So I sigh a wry, relatively happy sigh and promise to wait it out a little longer.

The Tree on the Dock

2006-07-19T09:46:00.000-07:00

This story ends on a downbeat, but I don't want to emphasize that. I'll say it up front first. My Grandpa killed himself when I was nine years old.

We found out on an early spring afternoon the day it happened. My brother and I were in our shared bedroom playing a little kid version of football. It resembed actual football only inasmuch as we used a football to play it. There were no rules, per se, and I don't even think we kept any sort of score. It was mainly an excuse to shove one another around on the carpet next to our bunk beds like sumo wrestlers.

The phone rang downstairs, which didn't even scratch our attention. Phonecalls were part of the adult world and utterly inconsequential to our mad, hyper, essentially tiny world of Empire Strikes Back bedspreads and Space Legos and Cleveland Browns posters. Half a minute later, we heard mom make a noise, a sort of restrained scream. I didn't know the word "woe" back then, but when I learned the word, years later, I thought of the sound that mom made that day and understood it immediately. Kev and I stopped playing football instantly and looked towards our open bedroom door, towards the half flight of stairs that led down to the living room and kitchen, ultimately toward the source of that terrible, alarming sound from mom. The conversation that had been droning on down there was eerily hushed now. Dad's voice did most of the talking. No more sounds of woe came from mom. We went back to playing football.

Kev had possession a few minutes later and we were assuming the sumo-football position again when dad came upstairs and knelt down next to us. He told us quietly and as carefully as he could that grandpa had died. I understood it but I didn't get it. I think the same was true for Kev. When dad finished telling us (grandpa had been his father; it was a very short speech), Kev moved to start the game again. Dad gently asked him if he knew what it meant that grandpa had died. We both said yes. We both went back to playing again, with that new knowledge there, working its way into our minds like a seed putting down slow, slow roots.

That night, mom and dad were gone. I didn't know then where they'd gone and I don't know now. They were evidently attending to all those terrible mundanities of arranging a funeral, helping grandma cope, figuring out how much it was all going to cost and how they were going to pay for it. The old lady that lived in the farmhouse a half mile distant from our house came and stayed with Kev and I. Her name was Mrs. Byers. She and her husband were friends of mom and dad's. We used to walk to their house on summer evenings and play shuffleboard on their long, immaculately tarred driveway. The Byers's were like secondary grandparents to Kev and I. That night, Mrs. Byers let me stay up late and watch TV with her after Kev went to bed. On the whole, it was sort of a treat, although the show (some miniseries with lots of pirhannas and vampires and stampeding rhinos and obviously wildly tangential storylines) wasn't as good as I had hoped it would be.

I cried for the first time over grandpa's death at the funeral. I was ashamed of the tears, and I couldn't go look at the body, because I knew they would be uncontrollable if I did. I sat way back in the last row of the taupe folding chairs arranged in the little, non-air-conditioned funeral home and cried feircely and quietly, staring at the casket that barely hid his body from view. The tears and the grief were totally new, and even in the throes of the emotion, I marvelled at how powerful they were. It was like watching a thunderstorm inside.

Grandpa had left only a few hundred dollars. This, both grandma and mom and dad believed, grandpa would have wanted to go to his grandkids, Kev and I and my cousin Jenny. I am sure they were right. After the funeral, mom and dad took us out to go on a little shopping spree with grandpas last couple hundred dollars. It was dizzyingly thrilling to us, and I think it was a salve to mom and dad's hearts to watch us enjoy grandpa's affections that way one last time. We went to Hill's department store. Kev and I both got new baseball mitts. I got my first wristwatch. Its face had a little picture of Snoopy wearing a headband and holding a tennis racket. His arms were the watch's hands. The second hand was a tiny tennis ball that turned perpetually around Snoopy, always just out of reach of his racket no matter what time it was. The band was made of denim. I really loved that watch and often thought of grandpa, in a sort of distant, happy way when I looked at it.

To this day I don't know a whole lot about why grandpa did it. I know there was something about some medication he was supposed to be taking but wasn't. I know that despite his monolithic, gibralter-like solidity (to my eyes, at least) he was depressed. I think it had something to do with retiring and something to do with having an illness that grandma always called "sugar". All I know for sure is that it ended with him telling grandma he was going out one day, driving his car to Mr. Wiggs, buying some garden hose, then driving somewhere else to park and use the hose to pipe the exhaust into the car. It was, evidently, a pretty painless way to go.

When I was growing up, grandpa was the biggest man I knew. He worked at a factory that made chains, which was somehow mythical to me. His forearms were gigantic slabs, like rawhide stretched over steel cables. His belly was huge but incredibly tough, like a medicine ball under the fabric of his light blue short sleeve button-down shirt, through which could always be seen the ghost of a strappy tee-shirt. He always wore a black leather pocket-protector His hands were like grapples, bigger than my head. He had a perpetual crew cut, steely gray with a hint of black lingering above his ears. His face was like something made from granite, but not because it was hard; because it was so solid-looking, so essentially kind but immovable.

Grandma and grandpa lived in a small two story house with a little front porch and a larger, enclosed side porch. Unlike us, they lived in a neighborhood with very close neighbors, some of whom were their best friends, some of whom they had ongoing, petty squabbles with. The polotics of the neightborhood intrigued and amused me, partly because we lived in the country with very little by way of neighbors ourselves (apart from the Byers), and partly because the neighborhood was so essentially old and close that it was like an extended family with little alliances and fueds and ongoing inherited histories. Grandma and grandpa's house was on a corner lot one row of house removed from the Sandusky bay. The enclosed side porch, a tiny glassed-in room with very incongruous rainbow-striped carpeting (something bought on deep-discount, I am sure) and the pull-out sofabed completely filling one end, looked down a short length of dead end street and straight out over the bay.

The bay was, and is, magical to me. It was moody. Sometimes it was blue-green and laughing, throwing up confetti bits of spray around the dock. Other times it was mean and cold, gray as slate and choppy. On those days, reflecting the marching clouds that looked so low and busy over its flat horizon, the bay looked hungry and full of mystery. On those days I'd believe that the bay had grisly secrets: sunken ghost ships that arose at night and prowled the mists, seaweed choked skeletons that crawled blindly in the depths, seeking shore and long-lost loved ones. Like most boys , I wanted to believe those terrible things. I loved them and was terrified of them.

Grandpa loved the bay, too. Or so it seemed. Now I don't know if it was love or something else.

Kev and I would take turns spending a week with grandma and grandpa every year. I remember it was the highlight of my summer. I'd spend the days being fed grandma and grandpa's unique diet of TV dinners, Cup 'o Soup, greasy "hamburgs" covered in onion powder, and bowls of sugary cereal for bedtime snacks. We invariably ate off of folding trays in front of the television watching Hee Haw or westerns. Afternoons were spent playing with Marty and Chris, two kids from across the street, in their sandbox, or swimming off the tiny crescent of rocky beach next to the dock. There was virtually no sand at the beach, but there was a lot of gravel and scree, as well as the occasional interestingly rotting carp. What made the beach particularly magical though, despite the smell and the peasoup green water sucking at the rocks, was the gems. I knew they weren't real gems, but what did I care? They were sparkly and multicolored and myriad, dotting the beach in their hundreds and thousands. The story dad told me to explain the phenomenon was this:

Once, many years ago, when dad himself had been little, there had been a factory further along the shore of the bay. The factory made glassware: bottles, glasses, jars, cups and saucers, all sorts of different colored glass containers. A glass factory produced quite a lot of broken glass bits which the factory dumped very economically into the bay. Over the years, the smaller glass bits were carried by the tide, coming slowly back ashore all along the edge of the bay. Interestingly, the scouring of the water had left all the bits softened and dulled, essentially harmless to little naked feet and fingers. The results were the gems of the beach: curved traingles, irregular prisms, shallow broken concaves and lenses. The colors were myriad: shell pinks and dark bottle greens and midnight blues that were only a few shades from black until you held them up to the sun. There were even occasional bits with vine patterns or runic letterings stamped into them. Every now and then I'd collect some of the more interesting pieces, but never for long. There were too many to collect. And besides, the beach wasn't going anywhere. The gems would always be right there, no matter what.

The dock was actually a tiny man-made peninsula. It was formed by an outline of old creosote-soaked railroad ties, stacked and pegged together with iron bars, and then filled in with dirt and large, jagged white rocks. The dock stretched about forty yards out into the bay. It was maybe ten yards wide and had a dogleg to the left at the end. I didn't know who had built it, but it had to have been long, long ago, because a tree had grown on the dock. It grew a little further than half-way out, and it was huge. It was a weeping willow, its trunk fat and curved, deeply scored with ancient bark. It looked prehistoric to me, especially standing all alone out there among the spider-infested, bone-white rocks, enormous, draping its trailing whip leaves out over and into the water on both sides. There was only ever one boat tied to the dock during my time there, and it was a neighbor's little white rowboat, the oars tucked neatly inside and fishing tackle stored under the seats. The dock jutted out into the water to the left of the little shingle of beach. When we'd swim out into the bay from the beach, I never got very close to the slick, seaweedy black walls of the dock. I had explored the dock from the top, but for some reason I hated being near it from the water. There was something deeply awful to me about the trailing willow branches, bobbing limply on the water. Worse was the sound the waves made as they lapped against the stacked railroad ties: a sort of mushy sucking and smacking. It made me think of the secrets of the bay, the leaden, hungry look of the waves on windy days just before a storm.

I slept on the enclosed sunporch, in the big pull-out sofabed. Grandma and grandpa always let me stay up until they went to bed, promptly after the weather forecast on the eleven o'clock news. Then, I'd pull the cushions off the couch and grandma would help me unfold the bed. She'd put a sheet and a blanket on it and a couple of huge pillows and then she'd tuck me in. By that time of night, the porch's many windows were covered with brown slatterned shades that unrolled down on complicated string riggings that were completely incomprehensible to me. Grandma would give me an old Philco transistor pocket radio to sleep with, and I would tune it to WJR, the AM talk station out of Detroit. I'd play it very softly under my pillow. At midnight on weeknights, for years, the same radio show would come on. It was called Night Flight, and it was a sort of musical variety show. The host played soothing songs all night long, interspersed with his own melodic banter and the occasional odd non-musical recording of a comedy routine or a speech. The thing I loved most about the show was that it was presented as a journey, an all night flight to a different location every night. The show started like this:

Announcer, accompanied by sound effect of an airliner advancing down a runway, lifting off: "Night Flight 760, now departing Detroit International Airport..."

Host, with continued airliner sounds, diminishing to a gentle, distant roar: "Good evening, and welcome aboard Night Flight 760. I'm your captain, Jay Roberts, and tonight our destination is Phoenix Arizona, home of Heard Museum's excellent Native American displays, and Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture studio at Taliesin West. Our flight time tonight will be approximately six hours, so feel free to sit back and relax. There are pillows and blankets in the overhead bins if you'd like to sleep some of the way. Or, if you prefer, there are magazines in the seatback ahead of you. Either way, I'll be playing some music as we travel and keeping you company throughout the flight. For now, let's set the mood for the initial portion of our flight with this melody from the great Mel Torme and his enduring classic, 'California Suite'."

And so on. I'd go to sleep to such, and awaken occasionally throughout the night enough to listen to more, drifting in and out to songs like "Send in the the Clowns" (which, hearing for the first time, I found heartbreaking in the leaden depths of the night) and "In the Mood". I became faintly acquainted with bygone musicians like Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. Once I woke up in the predawn hours to hear a recording of an old comedy routine by Bob Newhart. I lay there, mummified in the blankets on the sunporch, the corner streetlight filtering through the shades in tiny stripes, and laughing into my pillow. It was hilarious, and I fell back asleep thinking all about it.

Grandpa almost always got up and left for work long before I ever woke up. The few times I was up and around with him in the morning made strong, nearly graphical impressions on me. The kitchen and dining area of their house was one tiny room just inside the front door. There was a formica topped table pushed against the wall under the single window. It had three matching chairs and a retractable lamp hanging over it. Grandpa would sit there in the dim pink dawnlight from the window and drink a coffee kind of drink called Pero. Grandma would invariably be at the sink or the stove. There was very little talk. I remember grandpa's lunchbox and his Thermos, the classic mottled green cylinder with the silvery screw off cap that you could drink out of. Years later, I asked for and received an identical Thermos from my wife for Christmas, and it was only after I unwrapped it and held it that I knew I had wanted it because grandpa had had one.

Memories of grandpa are like home movies with no sound. I don't even remember what his voice sounded like or the kind of things he'd say. He was the classical quiet type, I guess.

I remember watching him as he cleaned some perch he'd caught in the bay. He did it down in the basement, in a nook under the stairway. He used some electric tool to clean the scales off. I remember the sound of it, slightly harsher than an electric razor, but otherwise the same. I remember the smell of the fish, and my fascination with the way he'd cut them open, gut them, filet them for Grandma to fry up later that night. The basement was small but tidy, with work benches against two walls and what seemed like hundreds of tools hung neatly and categorically on brown pegboard.

I remember him walking home from work. The factory, Union Chain, was only a couple of blocks away, across a tree scattered grass lot with a baseball diamond on one corner. I'd walk down to the corner to meet him at the lot at twenty after three in the afternoon. The factory loomed over the park, all sooty, dust-choked banks of windows swivelled open, meandering ductwork, vents, smokestacks and blank metal doors. Noises came from the windows, distant voices, clangs, machinery. I never knew what it looked like inside, but I had this mental picture of something like an industrial version of Dante's Inferno: mostly shadows clogged with monumental chugging machines, lit only by the glow of molten metal in giant vats, glinting dully off anvil shapes and sweating, grimy, gritty men with hammers and strange, huge tools.

Grandpa would appear with thirty or forty other men as they all emerged slowly from the factory like ants leaving an anthill. They all looked happy enough, but weary. They scattered over the park in twos and threes, all of them walking home, slipping into the dense web of residential streets all around the factory. Grandpa would walk with two or three other men. He'd see me from far off, sitting on the corner waiting. He'd smile, but he wouldn't wave. As they got to where I waited and then joined them, the other men made a bigger fuss over me than grandpa did, but that never bothered me. They'd ruffle my hair and talk about how big I was, but Grandpa just guided me with a huge hand on the back of my head, or took my hand in his huge, calloused, meaty grapple. I knew he was always happy to see me, happy in a way that went completely through the loud, jovial happiness of the other men and out the other side, into something unspoken and somehow gigantic. But sad. Always sad.

My biggest and most substantial memory of grandpa, though, is the one I saw the most. Evenings at grandma and grandpas were almost indistinguishable from one to the other. Grandma made dinner early. We were usually done by five-thirty or so. And while she cleaned up, grandpa and I would go to the sun porch together. I'd play on the floor with my Legos or draw on scraps of cut apart paper bags and grandpa would just sit. He'd usually have something to drink in his huge, rocklike hand, and it was usually a glass of Cherokee Redpop with a pile of icecubes ticking inside. I would play on the floor by him, on that crazy rainbow striped carpeting, and he would just sit, his head turned toward the strip of bay we could see just past the dead end, watching the sun dip down into the water, laying its reflection out on the waves in a mad, glittering stripe. He'd sit that way for an hour or two, until the sky was a fading red ember and the glass in his hand was empty, beaded with ice cube sweat. Then he'd heave himself out of his big easy chair and go into the adjoining living room and turn on the TV for the night. And I'd follow.

That's all.

These are good memories. These are the things that made me, that still make me. I am, practically speaking, nothing like my grandpa. He was huge and quiet, a laborer, smiling but always, somehow, sad. I am huge as well, but goofy, never without something to say, a digital artist making a living on my butt in front of a computer. The only manual work I do, I do at the gym, on purpose, to avoid becoming a complete sloth. And yet, I have grandpa's blood in me, making me. I am formed by him, marginally because his genes define me, but mostly because I looked at him when I was growing up, studied him intently, and I said "this is what a man is." He was far from a perfect man-- I know that more now than I want to. But he was perfect to me then. Perfect enough, at least. He was Manhood. Even today, I climb that granite mountain that he still is in my memory, and I strive to be that sort of Man, too. To pick up where he left off. Ultimately, to get it right where he, eventually, couldn't.

And today I see my son look at me with those eyes. God, oh God it is so eerie, so humbling, so haunting. It's as if time laps back on itself and I am the one in the chair with the Cherokee Redpop sweating in my enormous hand. I am the one being watched by this little man that is so very, very much like me. What will I make Manhood to be for him? What mountain am I carving in his little heart, that will grow with him and become the mountain he climbs to be a Man? I hope it is a good mountain, an even better mountain. I hope so.

But I am grateful for my own mountain, the silent, solid granite mountain of my grandpa, and the distant, lost world he represents to me.

I hope I represent it well.

My Letter to Brad Pitt

2006-07-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

(Some of you know that I am good friends with Brad Pitt. The following, with permission, is a copy of an email I sent him yesterday. More to come, perhaps, later.)

Hey Bradster, how's it goin?

I was looking at the Yahoo homepage section about celebrity goings-on and I happened to find a little article about you doing some kind of speech or something in New Orleans telling the people there that they had to be environmentally friendly in how they rebuild the city. You know I love ya, brother, but I gotta tell you that made me wonder if you and Angelina and all those kids of yours have been spending a little too much time over in Guatemala under that hot, hot foriegn sun they have. I mean, you know I am as environmentally conscious aware as the next famous actor type, but I am just not sure this most recent approach is as carefully thought out as your speeches against homeless people having their toothbrushes confiscated by Republicans and your hunger strike against "odorless" garlic capsules, all of which you know I was totally on-board with and would have been right by your side with were it not for the fact that Angelina has that thing for me and I know it makes you all uncomfortable, which I totally understand, so don't feel bad. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah.

So I didn't really read the article or anything, but this whole thing about environmentally friendly rebuilding in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, are you sure that's a good idea? Here's my thinking: Say all those people down there go ahead and use, you know, like real wood and bark and, I don't know, like native dirt and grass to rebuild the city, and it becomes rather a bit of an environmentalist victory, and they open a theme park called something like Brad-land where they can show off all the ways they learned how to make concrete out of mulch and seaweed and a little cajun pepper or something so it not only makes great parking lots but actually smells and tastes pretty good, too. And then, the next year, it being New Orleans, some new hurricane comes along and flattens everything all over again and washes most of the city down into the ocean again. What then? Start all over again and rebuild again in an environmentally friendly way?

Listen, for the sake of the planet, Bradster: After a few more hurricanes, this whole approach could become an environmental catastrophe of really, like truly epic proportions. The entire area would be completely stripped of all those environmental bits and pieces that the people kept on using to rebuild the city; it'd turn into a desert wasteland! A tombstone to the overuse of the environment by unfeeling stupid people who keep on building in the geological equivalent of a bathtub!

I know what you're thinking. Here's how we could salvage this: environmentally friendly building in New Orleans equals, are you ready? Building everything out of chemically mass-produced heavy-polymer styrofoam!! That means no environmental resources are used up at all, AND, come the next hurricane, the entire city will simply float on top of the water, tethered to their foundations by retractable chains made of teflon fiber! Brilliant, right? It actually becomes a sort of tourist attraction. I mean, people would flood (ha! ha!) to New Orleans on the brink of a hurricane to stand on a balcony on Bourbon Street while every building in town bobs around like so many bits of pink styrofoam driftwood!

Anyway, have your people call my people and I'll help you put together a press release. This could be big, buddy!

Anyway, no, I advise against doing Fight Club 2. Sequels are out. What's in is the blockbuster icon-meets-icon flick. Maybe Batman versus the Lone Ranger? I'd see you as LR, but I don't know what Angelina would say. Tell her I said "hi" in a purely platonic way, OK?

Later!

George

Supermodels and Shrink-Wrapped Skeletons...

2006-07-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

This will be uncharacteristically short and pithy, I promise.

Sherah (my sis-in-law) and I were flipping around on TV a night or so ago and came across some inane show (that's rather an oxymoron, isn't it?) in which some fashion designers were sitting around judging a gaggle of models based on how well they would showcase the designer's wares. The models were all about 18 and, for the most part, morose-looking. The designers sat in lowback chairs talking about the models, who were arranged on the floor in front of them, in a way that inescapably reminded me of old-south plantation owners judging slaves at auction. They critiqued body parts and weight, curves and posture, face structure, hair, eye-shape. None of them actually got up and inspected any of the models' teeth, but it seemed about to happen at any point. The models, for their part, stood turning vaguely back and forth, keeping their expressions blank, apparently trying very hard not to look like their self-images were being systematically carved up by the brutally "objective" observations of their languidly lolling judges.

And then one of the judges referred to one of the models, a particularly dessicated-looking girl with a surprisingly plain, though not unattractive, face, and informed the other designers that the model had lost 15 pounds in two weeks in order to fit the ideal of the panel. She said it as if she expected the others to applaud politely. The model she had referred to looked, to put it bluntly, like a shrink-wrapped skeleton. She looked literally emaciated. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes were sunken and vaguely empty, and her body looked like something some enterprising survivalist would use to start a fire. And there she stood, having starved herself for two weeks to waste-off what precious little shape she'd had, probably listening to a hated voice in her head telling her "I'm FAT, I'm FAT, I'm FAT!", and believing every word of it.

Do I need to mention that this is just out-and-out sick?

Wind the years back to about 1999. I was living in Napoleon Ohio and working at a pizza joint whilst attending college. A waitress at this establishment, let's call her Emily, was a very attractive girl with a sweet disposition and an air of innocent naivete that was heartbreakingly endearing. She was, however, painfully thin.

It was typical, as the restaurant closed for the evening, for employees to have free dibs on leftover pizza from the buffet. We'd take home a few slices or even a whole pizza as a perk, since otherwise it'd simply go to the Dumpster out back. On one evening when there happened to be quite a bounty of leftovers, I mentioned to Emily that she should stock up a box for herself, as she occasionally did. "No," She said reluctantly, "I can't. I'm trying to lose some weight."

I am sure I blinked with speechless bewilderment. "Where?" I demanded. "From your hair?!"

She gave an embarrassed I've-said-too-much-already look and attempted to dismiss the subject. I persisted. I told her that, despite what the media implies, most men do not believe that skinnier is better. Only women believe that. To prove my point, I called the manager and two delivery drivers, all men, out of the kitchen area. With no preamble, I asked them if they preferred very thin women or women with a little more weight on them than Madison Avenue would deem appropriate. They all instantly answered that they preferred women with more "meat on their bones", as one of them put it. The equasion is simple, they explained (though not in these words): men are attracted to those details that make women different from men. Specifically, curves and "soft parts". The thinner a woman is, the less curves and, err, soft parts.

Of course, that is only true to a point. Too much weight tends to make the woman entirely "soft part", and the lack of any contrast tends to be less attractive.

All three men agreed with me (to Emily's hopefully instructive blushing) that she was, if anything, a might too thin and needn't be the least bit worried about partaking of some extra pizza.

I don't know whatever happened to Emily, but it is terribly apparent that she is not alone in the perception that men like girls skinny, and the skinnier the better. Almost without exception, I think any woman who actually asks the men she knows will find that, up to a point, the reverse is true. Skinny is the iron-clad mandate of the cannibalistic media and, indirectly, women themselves, who have determined that what the media says is beauty must be true.

So give yourselves a break, my beloved female friends. Eat a little more pizza. Ask the men you know what they actually think is beautiful and attractive. And believe them. There are far too many beautiful women going around sucked dry of all their confidence and physical self-respect because they've swallowed the impossible and ridiculous dream of freakish emaciation.

Can I hear from the men out there? Am I right? And women, what do you think?

Things my Kids Will Never Experience III: Life Before the Internet (or) How Pornography Became my Coworker

2006-07-08T10:21:00.000-07:00

This one is the biggie.

Have any of you realized that we adults living today are the last generation in the history of the planet to know what life was like before the Internet? Further, we are the only generation to have intimate knowledge of life both before and after the advent of the World Wide Web. Our experience is unique in the entire scope of history. Our parents were the last generation to live their lives looking things up in phonebooks instead of on Yahoo. Our kids will be the first generation to not know how to use an encyclopedia or the Dewey Decimal System. We are the generation right in the middle, who grew up thinking that "www" was a miss-spelling of the World Wrestling Federation, but who now use email and web-surfing for everything from work to entertainment.

Kinda makes you feel special, don't it?

Remember what it was like to write a report for school? My first written report was on Crazy Horse the indian. We didn't live anywhere near a library (my parents were notorious lovers of "country living", which was a prison sentence for me) and so I did all my research via good old Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Actually, I don't think our encyclopedias were Brittanicas. I don't remember what brand they were, but they were probably something my parents (or even my grandparents) bought from a door-to-door salesman. They had bright red hardcover bindings, with gold embossed titles on the spines. Near the top of each spine was a black bar with gold edging and a large gold letter in the center. In my case, I reached for the volume with the letter "C" on it, lay down on the fat carpeting of the living room floor rather hopefully with my spiral bound notebook and a couple of sharpened no. 2 pencils, and began my "research".

When you opened the encyclopedia, there was a smell. It was, I assumed, the smell of learning, of intelligence, of knowledge. In reality, it was the smell of large, heavy books that have occasionally spent months at a time in slightly damp cardboard boxes, forgotten after a move until someone pulls back a flap and says, "Hey, it's the encyclopedias! I s'pose we should put these on the shelf in the den or something." To me, the smell that wafted out of the "C" encyclopedia when I cracked it open seemed to raise my IQ ten or twenty points, and I completely ignored the waterspots and the slightly green patch on the title page. To me, those were signs of high-learning, like ivy on a university wall or a pocket protecter.

The pages were thick and heavy, as if the dense words and invariably black and white pictures that crammed the volume added their own weight to the paper. The encyclopedia was short- attention-span heaven. Every page was a deep-sea dive into something completely different and intriguing. In the years to come, when I was bored, I'd pull down a random volume and leaf through it, learning about the Doppler Effect, and Eisenhower, and how pigs are butchered, and the history or the automobile (up to 1965 or so). In the "A" volume, there was a ten page section of transparent pages displaying, in full color, all the layers of human anatomy, from the skeleton out. This was one I returned to over and over, relishing the creepy, ghastly skinless man that was so prosaically represented.

Writing a report was a grammatical and linguistic challenge, rather than a compositional effort. With only one source for facts, one simply had to re-arrange what the encyclopedia said so as to avoid the high crime of plaigerism (which, if it were to be found in my report, would quite likely have resulted in my breaking rocks on a chain gang in Georgia, according to my parents and teachers). Thus, where the encyclopedia stated "Even as a young man, Crazy Horse was a legendary warrior," I would turn aside and write (with many sideways glances), "While he was still a non-grown adult, Crazy-Horse was a fighting guy that was, um, legendary." Whew, that was close. Althought I probably didn't actually include the "um".

Going to the library was much different in the epoch before the Internet. Nowadays, if one wants a book on the subject of, say, spelunking in Wyoming, one merely goes to a station on a bank of computers and types "spelunking and wyoming". The library computer will immediately return a list of dozens of books, including travel guides, cave maps, spelunking technique handbooks, and quite possible connect you to a free online service that'll plan your complete Wyoming spelunking package including airfare, equipment rental, and a local native American guide complete with subterranean Wisdom of the Ancients. (it's important to conduct this search on a library computer, and not your home PC, since a standard Internet search will likely contain several pages of references to spelunking as some sort of acrobatic sex act with a porn star named Wyoming.)

In the days prior the Internet, one entered the library and approached, with the sort of low-grade dread that usually befits an unscheduled visit to the Principal's office, the stonehenge rows of card catalogues that was the Dewey Decimal System. Your information was in there somewhere, without a doubt. Dewey was extremely thorough. It would be there, information about a book about spelunking in Wyoming, typewritten (with an actual typewriter, including the subscript 'e's and the occasional bit of painted on White-out) on a thick, yellowed 3x5 card with dog-eared corners and a few pencilled addendums. That card was buried in the center of a two-foot-long horizontal stack of nearly identical cards, that stack laid out like a corpse in a narrow wooden drawer on well-oiled casters. The drawer had a metal name-plate on the front of it, displaying an even smaller card with something like "556.097 - 556.202" on it. Above and below this door, and on both sides, were more drawers, absolutely identical except for tiny incremental variations in the numbers on the nameplates. These stretched into their tens and dozens, occupying a gigantic block of wooden cabinetry ten feet wide and five feet tall. Next to the cabinet was another, identical cabinet. And another. And more and more. The eye couldn't contain it all. It was like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where the Arc of the Covenant is wheeled in a wooden crate into an endless maze of similar wooden crates stretching, as far as we can tell, into dark, catalogued infinity.

When you finally found the card referring to the book you wanted, you couldn't take the card with you to find the book. God help you if you removed a card from it's place in the System. Invariably, on the tops of the cabinets, were stacks of tiny, roughly cut squares of paper (usually with bits of bake sale flyers and Weekly Readers on the backsides) and very dull, tiny pencils. There were only two places on the planet that these tiny pencils were ever found: libraries and miniature golf courses. They were inevitably dull, greasy and so short that one instinctively felt he should be holding it with a pair of tweezers. In this manner, you scrabbled down the information for where to find your book, slid the drawer containing the appropriate card shut, and went off into the canyons of books to search out your tome on Wyoming spelunking.

When you got there, your book, without fail, was checked-out, leaving a tell-tale empty slot on the shelf. Next to it, however, would be a miss-filed book on spelunking as an acrobatic sex act with a hooker named Wyoming. The end result was that I, at least, usually left the library more knowledgeable than when I entered, but rarely about anything I had intended to learn.

Now, in the age of the Internet, who even needs to go to the library anymore? Many of the classics of great literature are actually available royalty-free to be downloaded and read right off your computer. And really, who needs books as reference anymore? If you want to know about spelunking in Wyoming (especially if you DO mean acrobatic sex with geographically-named prostitutes) or hiking in the outback, or refinishing your deck, or repairing your antique watch, or wooing your wife, or becoming an astro-physicist, you can find pages and pages of information regarding it instantly on your own home computer. Granted, the information may not be entirely accurate. It may, in fact, be entirely and fantastically false. When it comes to verifiable, reliable truth, the Internet is a bit like the Wild, Wild West. You may get shot down at high noon by a scam artist or a bit of surprise pop-up porn or a few made-up factoids, but you know that's a distinct possibility whenever you set foot on the dusty main street of the information superhighway. If one is careful, shrewd, and a little teeny bit cynical, it's possible to get what you want to know out of the Internet and make it out whole. It's easy. It's a little TOO easy.

Which brings me to porn on the Internet.

In one Simpson's episode, Homer's website is praised by Lenny as being "The number one non-porn related website on the Internet! Which," He adds, "makes it the five-hundred-thousandth favorite site overall." In an episode of Futurama, typical American schlub Phillip Fry tells us with glib finality, "Well, thanks to the Internet, now I'm bored with sex." Wow. So I am going to avoid getting preachy about the evils of Internet porn. What would be the point? The people who agree with me know it already, and the people who don't agree with me are probably so hopelessly jaded as to be beyond convincing. I will simply say this:

Back in MY day if one wanted to look at pictures of naked women brazenly showing off their girl parts, it was hard. It was (if you had even the remotest sense of shame) embarrassing. You had to go out in public and peruse the rack in the back corner of the drug store with all the metal faceplates hiding the covers of the magazines. Nobody believed (then or now) that you were reading Penthouse for the articles. When you stood in line at the cash register and laid your copy of Hustler on the counter, nobody assumed you were doing research for a paper on Crazy Horse. Buying porn was like buying condoms: there was only one purpose for it. And at least when you were buying condoms you were implying the luxury of a partner. When the clerk rang up your porn and asked you if you wanted a bag, you might as well have just answered in an overloud stage-whisper, "No, I'm gonna go use it now. Where's your bathroom? I'm gonna go MASTERBATE."

The first time I saw porn I was about twelve. Really! I was staying overnight at a friend's house. He took me out to a fort he had assembled from spare planks and construction debris, and there he produced, from the dirt beneath a slab of plywood, an issue of Playboy. The magazine was grungy and old and well-riffled. The pages were damp and moldy. On the cover was a frankly alluring image of a beautiful woman holding a white parasol and wearing a white, spring dress. The wind had caught her skirts and had blown them up, showing the fine curve of her bottom and the tops of her white stockings. She was looking at the camera with that look of vapid, idiotic surprise that men seem to like to think women will exhibit when something mortally embarrassing happens to them. It was intriguing and sexy. Until my friend opened the magazine and flopped out the centerfold.

I had never seen, or even dreamt of, what might be hidden under all the many layers of the demure female mystery. The closest I had come to exploring the hidden world of feminine delights was the lingerie section of the Sears catalogue. I liked the secrecy and suspense of it, the pure, unaulterated enigma of the female shape, and the untold delights I knew, instinctively, it represented to me, a boy who was going to be a Man.

Until that moment, I probably thought I wanted to know. I didn't. And I learned it a half a second too late. Shock does not begin to explain what I felt when I found myself staring at the proferred centerfold. It filled my vision, shoved the entire world aside in one clumsy, rash gesture. It was terrible. It was cold and horrid and creepy and threatening. It crushed all my burgeoning dreams of the mystery and beauty of women, of the delightful suspense of romance and intimacy, under that ten-ton image of naked reproductive anatomy. It spun a Kleig light onto my hazy, candle-lit fantasies of girls and romance and revealed only SEX, biological as a trip to the bathroom and raw as an anvil.

My brushes with porn from then on were as rare as I could make them. I am an unusual male specimen (or so it would seem) in that the raw blatancy of porn completely repelled me, and still does. When a group of guy friends produced a porno movie or a copy of Hustler for us all to ogle over, I'd sample it fleetingly and move on, sorry I had even glanced at it. Still, it wasn't difficult to avoid. After all, and this is the point, porn was hard to get! It was rare. It was shameful and forbidden. The guys I knew had to steal it from their fathers or grandfathers. Kids like us weren't allowed to buy it. We weren't even allowed to look surreptitiously at it in that back corner of the drugstore. It trickled into our lives irregularly and rarely, and was hoarded for exactly that reason.

And now, in one generation, thanks to the Internet, porn is more than easy. It is ubiquitous. In one generation, my generation, it has gone from a rare tittilation for the boldest of adults to something that shows up freely and without provocation in my own home. A completely innocent Internet search produces references to sexual jollies of all kinds and shapes. And God help you if you are doing an image search. As a digital animator, I search images on a daily basis looking for texture and reference materials. I have come to simply accept, as part of my dairly routine, that searches for anything so apparently prosaic as "antique doorknob" or "muscle-car hubcap" will produce the most random and absurd (and thankfully tiny) images of pornographic inanity. Today, porn is insistent. It doesn't hide in the corner of the drugstore behind metal faceplates. It jumps out at you, flashes it's worst like a deranged man in a trenchcoat.

Now, inquisitive boys don't have to wait to find a cast-off copy of Penthouse in the dumpster to hasten their knowledge of women's barest secrets. They don't have to slink off to the fort in the woods to peruse a lone, moldy centerfold, hidden under the floorboards. At the slightest whim, any boy or girl can simply type a word into a search engine and be bombarded. And the least of what he or she will discover is simply images of naked girlies. They may end up learning about things that make "spelunking with Wyoming" look like a day at the library.

But I don't think the Internet is evil. It isn't evil anymore than guns are evil or TV is evil. Well, OK, TV is a little evil. The Internet is just a thing, and humans use it, and humans are, well, confused at best about their own mental health and that of those around them. The Internet changes everything, irrevocably. It is without a doubt the greatest difference between the world of my kids and my world growing up. I am sad, for some odd reason, that they will never know what it's like to look something up in the encyclopedia, like I did. I am sad that I will have to be, quite possibly, fanatically vigilant about what they do online and even what their friends do online. I am sad that it has become so seemingly hopelessly difficult to protect their innocence in the face of the blindingly perverse hurricane of the Internet.

But I am no Luddite. I use the Internet, and generally I like it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the Internet is nearly essential to me and my occupation.

Still, isn't it funny that I live in an age when it'd be a relief to catch my son someday learning about sex from an old, musty copy of Playboy?

The Thing Behind the Thing Behind the Thing...

2006-06-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

I go to an awesome church.

Having grown up "churched", I can speak with some authority on the subject. When I was a teen, I went to a Baptist private high school during the week and an Assemblies of God church on the weekend. For those of you who don't know what that means, it'd be like having Ted Kennedy for a father and dating Ann Coulter. You spend pretty much every waking moment defending the one to the other, eventually forgetting that, beneath the surface, they are both essentially two sides of the same coin.

The church I go to now is different. It is a relatively large church (some might even dare to label it a "superchurch" but I certainly haven't seen a cape, and frankly, it seems like there's Superchurch kryptonite all over the place), with its own unique issues, but for the first time in my life, I look forward to going to church. I love the people. I love the grace embedded in the message. I love the unique and daring approach to getting that message out there.

So a while back, I got involved with the programming team.

The programming team meets weekly to hash out the upcoming services. They examine the content of the message and organize the music, the stage design, any medias, and special events, even the announcements and offering, to best accent that message. Occasionally I have been able to contribute something helpful and occasionally I have been able to create a cool media to assist the service. It has been very, very enjoyable to be a part of the mechanism of such an awesome, potentially lifechanging message so effectively and artistically presented.

So I was surprised to discover, a few weeks ago, that I was getting a little reticent to go to the programming meeting. Wednesday would roll around and at some point in the morning I'd ask myself if I was going to the meeting. This, in itself, was a curiosity. Usually, there was no question. Of course I was going to go. I loved it. I looked forward to it. And all of a sudden here I was asking myself if I was really planning on it, and I'd find myself sorta saying "eeeehhh" with that little wobbly hand gesture that we think means "take it or leave it, whatever, I don't care" but that really means "neh."

And I sorta stopped going. On the surface, I knew I was particularly busy with work. We were selling our house and planning to move away. I was working on starting a new business. On the surface I just told myself I was too busy and preoccupied. And for a while I didn't look beyond the surface, because that was all I wanted it to be. Preoccupation. Busyness.

Well, I finally dug under the surface a bit and discovered there was more. Duh.

A saying goes around our church, and it is this: What is the thing behind the thing?

For instance, somebody might come in and say "Hey, why the holy heck don't the Pastor of this crazy church ask everybody to bring their Bibles and open 'em to the appropriate chapter and verse when he's preachin'?" Which is not something we do, and thankfully, if you ask me. After talking about it with this person for awhile, she might actually discover that, really, the lack of Bible totin' at church isn't really the "Thing". The "Thing" might be that religion has become a formula to her and she finds it easier to be told what to do than to seek Jesus herself. The "Thing" might even be that her world is more palatable if there are obvious codes of conduct that make it easier to determine who is good and who "needs prayer". There is almost always a thing behind the thing. What I learned for myself is that I am more or less like an onion, with layer after layer peeling back. There is a thing behind the thing behind the thing. Behind the thing.

So I went for a long walk and started peeling.

I figured the best way to determine why I was disinterested in going to the programming team meetings anymore was to examine, firstly, why I had wanted to go in the first place. Here's what I learned:

The thing: I wanted to contribute in a meaningful way to the powerful message my church was weekly presenting. I wanted to use my talents to support that message in an undeniable way. I am a damn talented guy, and I know God didn't give me all this talent just to make cool pictures and amuse people. So there I was, contributing in a big way, boosting the message, making a difference, sacrificing my time and energy for the good of the Body of Christ.

Yadda yadda.

The problem was I knew in my heart I was too essentially arrogant to be that altruistic. Thus I came to:

The thing behind the thing: I wanted to be seen and noticed. At heart, I am a performer and a ham. I have refined that urge now to the point that I cultivate accolades with my talents and skills, rather than by jumping up and down in the middle of a group of people yelling "Look at ME! Look at ME!" But that is still, in a different guise, an essential motivation. I wanted to get involved with the programming team because it would allow me a regular, huge audience for my cool movies and medias. Afterwards, people would approach me in the lobby and heap accolades on me, and I would smile and be all humble and thank them and soak it all up like the shameless attention hound that I am. Hear this: I don't like this about myself. And yet, I knew, under the altruistic layer of "Contributing Meaningfully to the Message", this, my tendency to muckrake praise with my talents, was possibly even a greater reality.

And yet, I do get that kind of praise everyday. I am fortunate enough to work (and be pretty durn good) in an industry that allows me to create and get attention for what I create. I have told my wife that it's fortunate that I get paid, but that's not why I do what I do. I do what I do because in the end, somebody always says: "Wow! That's fantastic! You're a GEEEEENIUS!" Thus I didn't really need the accolades and praise I got for making the cool medias at church. It was just gravy. There had to be something else. And that led me to:

The thing behind the thing behind the thing: I wanted to be involved with the programming team because the programming team was special. The programming team represents the hub on which the rather large and important wheel of the church turns. The pastors are on it. It wasn't quite a status thing (although no doubt that was some part of it). It was that I liked the pastors. I liked all the people on the team, the music leaders and the behind-the-scenes directors. They are thinkers and readers. They are funny and smart and beloved. They are challengers and people who appreciate being challenged. I wanted in. I wanted to be part of their circle. I wanted them to be my friends.

Because if they were my friends, if they invited me into their society and called me one of their own, then I'd know that I, like them, was a likeable person.

If that happened I knew I'd be able to like myself as me. I'd be able to accept myself and believe I was worth something beyond the cool medias I could create, beyond my rather prodigious skills. I realized I was weary and disillusioned with being defined by my talents, by what I could do. If the programming team welcomed me in and made me a friend, beyond the mere team meetings, then I was worth something as me, not just as the maker of the cool movies.

The problem was that the team didn't know it. And I was too proud to ask for it. The problem was that the good, wonderful people of the programming team already had their circles, their society of friends. Their dance cards were full. They might have made room for me, probably would have if I had told them what I wanted, what I was seeking. But that is the curse of wanting friends to prove your worth: if you have to ask for it, it nagates the hopeful benefit.

And when I finally realized what I had been secretly hoping for all along, and realized it was too much to ask and even unfair to ask, I became less interested in going. After all, I wasn't getting what I really wanted out of it. I know that is pathetic and selfish, and I know I will probably go back again now that I have learned this and accepted it. I know I will go back with a slightly purer motive (hopefully something that looks a little more like the original "Thing"!)

But before then, I made one more discovery.

The thing behind the thing behind the thing behind the thing: Is grace. What is it about that?! This whole thing about Grace is just so big, so nearly incomprehensible, so frustratingly too-good-to-be-true that ever since I was introduced to it (through my church, not so ironically) I have been struggling with it and fighting with myself and God about it and approaching it and backing away like a deer in the woods afraid of a trap but SO attracted to the gorgeous scent of it.

Grace says God loves me for me. Even more astounding to me, God likes me for me. Not just as one cell in the whole organism of humanity that God has to love because He made it. ME. Alone. Not for what I can do, or how funny I can be, or the talents in my hands, or the money in my bank account or the frikkin' car I drive. Me. The fact that minor key music makes my heart shiver. The fact that I am torn in the middle of my soul at the point where my ego pulls against my self esteem. The fact that I like to get attention, like a puppy grinning when you rub its belly. All the little quirky things that just make me essentially and irrevocably me. God loves them and likes them and wants to be friends with me because of them, wants to love on me because of them. All because of this baffling, unfair, unjust notion of Grace. Grace that means God sees me as He made me. Not as a jar full of duplicity and faults and doubt, trying desperately to perform new and amazing feats to distract and divert. How can that be? Is it possible? I circle this apparent truth like that deer... wanting to take it, but fearful in my core. Terrified in my core.

So I have tested it elsewhere, in places that matter less, where it is a little safer. Like the programming team. Just to see if it could be. To give it a trial run. And that's just no good. Humanity doesn't work that way, I think. We can try, and thankfully we get close sometimes. But only God truly sees us as us, not as the things we do, not as performers and posers. I guess that's a little of what it means when it says "man looks on the outside appearance, but God looks at the heart." I guess that's what that Biblical King was relying on when he turned his face to the wall and said, essentially, "God, you know how many times I've been a screw-up, but you also know that my heart has always been yours." He knew God didn't keep score counting deeds. He knew that God didn't mete out His love based on merit. He knew God loved him for being him. Period.

I want to know that. I don't yet. But I am smelling it, flaring my nostrils like that deer, trying to inhale it through the air, trembling on the knife edge of ecstacy and terror. And I know that it was essential to learn that there is no true human counterpart to it, no easy human training-wheels version of God's Grace that'll make that final leap of trust easier. We can only hope to be a shadow of it, and that I get. But the real thing is as different from our human conception of it as lightning is from a lightning bug.

Well, it's Wednesday. I wonder if I'll go to the programming meeting?

Skeet Comics, Inc.

2006-06-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

So several years ago, while working in the warehouse of a Service Merchandise store in Ohio, I started doodling a certain cartoon character. He'd show up on notes, or in sacastic little drawings tacked to the breakroom corkboard, or on shipping boxes, pallettes and dry erase boards. He was my first quazi-original character, and being slightly better at drawing than comiing up with names, I called him "Skeet".

Eventually, the character got a bit more artistically refined, and developed a more defined personality, as well as a family and an alter-ego named Weber. I began drawing little comic strips of Skeet, and entertained the idea of seeing "Skeet Comics" syndicated in newspapers across the fruited plain. I did, in fact, submit a package of thirty dailies and a dozen sunday strips to as many syndicates as I could, but lo and behold, the market was evidently not ready for a smart-alecky kid, his morally and intellectually responsible sidekick, and his hapless family. I did, however, recieve the very unusual compliment of a personal critique from the editor of King Features Syndicate (syndicator of "Peanuts", "Garfield", and "Calvin & Hobbes" and a few others nobody else ever heard of) saying Skeet Comics had great potential.

Anyway. Life takes its little turns and now I am a happy and fairly successful digital artist and animator with neither the time nor the inclination to pursue being a syndicated cartoonist anymore. Still, I have all these old comic strips lying around, getting dated and yellow. I still think they are sorta funny. I still like Skeet and Weber. So what the heck? I'll share them with whomever out there is fortunate enough and interested enough to stumble onto them.

Here's a quick sample of some of my favorites. Click on them to read the full-size versions. If you think I should load up some more of them, or (dare I suggest it) draw some more, do drop me a little line.

Skeet, like myself, spends a lot of time thinking of new ways to harrass telemarketers...

This is Weber. He had to be in this one since Skeet would never be seen voluntarily going to the library...

Skeet became a vehicle for me to express some of my own annoyances...

I liked the idea of a comics universe, where all the characters knew they were characters...

God Plays Tetris

2006-05-31T08:32:00.000-07:00

(note: this is a much longer post than I have ever included here, and it was not written in the form of a blog. I wrote this a year ago as a therapeutic exercise, a way to suck out the poison, as it were. My friend Cara, whose dearness to me is beyond words, suggested I write this. It is true except for a few small details changed in the interest of privacy. It rambles and gets a bit sentimental at points. It's personal and maybe more revealing than anything else here, and the God stuff in it may not mean much to a lot of readers. I can live with that. I like this. And it did suck out the poison. Maybe if you get all the way to the end, you'll see what I mean, even if you can't relate. Anyway, having given you that little warning, read on, my anonymous friend, and I would love to hear any thoughts or responses you have in response.)

This story begins, in every way except the chronological, with a girl.

I met her for the first time when I was twenty-four and she was twenty. A lot of romantic, wistful things have been said over the centuries about young adulthood, such as that it is a time of blooming, a time of heady thrills and first discoveries. And of course these things are true, as long as one remembers that running out of gas in a crowded intersection while driving a 1978 Volare with two dollars worth of change in your pocket counts in life’s dictionary as a heady thrill. First discoveries include the exquisite feeling of what it’s like to wake up on the day of a first date with the throb of a world-class zit on the tip of your nose. Young adulthood, because it precedes middle-aged adulthood, enjoys a very good PR campaign of selective memory and maudlin sentimentality. In truth, young adulthood is like a mean-spirited but unimaginative prankster. It yanks away all the freedoms of being a kid, but pays out very little of the joys of being an adult. Twenty-four is when life gives growing pains. It’s when everything is awkward at the worst of times and nothing fits quite right at the best of times, not one’s job, not one’s relationships, not one’s living arrangements, not even one’s car (even if it isn’t a 1978 Plymouth Volare with a broken gas gauge and a mouse living under the front seat).

I was skinny, tall, and gave the impression to most observers, including myself, of having a few too many elbows and knees. My dominant clothing style could be summed up by wrestling shoes (although I didn’t wrestle) and a fish-tie with a rhinestone for an eye.
Fortunately not at the same time.

That I can recall.

I can’t remember if I wore either of them to my interview for the job at Service Merchandise (although I suspect not; even then I had an inkling about the fine line between individuality and practicality) but I do remember that was the first time I ever saw her. She worked in the jewelry department, which dominated the center of the showroom floor with its complicated geometric perimeter of showcases and black velvet. She was twenty, which is on the whole a far more magical and enchanting age than twenty-four, especially when worn by a certain kind of young woman in the eyes of a certain kind of young (ish) man. Her name was Bethany.

What can I say that will describe the effect she had on me at that moment? The tidal force that she continued to obliviously and effortlessly exert on me from that moment on? Are there any words left in the English language that have not yet been homogenized, tamed, patented, green-screened and plastered onto cans of Diet Coke? I can only tell you what I saw the moment I looked at her. Maybe that will help.

She was pretty.

Note I didn’t say she was cute. Or sexy. Or hot, or gorgeous, or adorable. She was those things as well sometimes, just by being who she was, and usually without trying. But what she was mostly, when she got up in the morning, before the world had a chance to look her up and down and enforce any shifting editorial predilections, while she was still yawning and stretching, looking at herself in her bathroom mirror and reaching for her toothbrush... was pretty.

Short, light blond hair that bobbed around her face impishly. A ready, fresh smile that made the casual (or, in my case, the less-than-casual) observer wish for a handy field of clover to run giddily through. Eyes that superimposed innocence with knowledge, that looked at the world with a half-concealed smile, as if she saw the humor and adventure behind the mundanity and grayness that surrounded her, and that she was letting you in on that secret. She was impeccable but self-effacing. Funny. Smart. Adventurous. At ease with herself, her future, and the world around her.

But love, as everyone knows, is more than the sum of all its parts. Those things were the reason that the first time I saw Bethany I knew that this was a girl I could, and most likely would (and though I was loathe to admit it, already did) love hopelessly and unabashedly. But they weren’t the only reason. Sometimes it just happens: something inside clicks on, something you hadn’t suspected was even there, a power-surge that you realize, with naked surprise, you had been wired for all your life but hadn’t yet plugged in. You sense the angels nudging each other and hushing, aware of the momentousness of the event, knowing everyone will look back on this someday and say that’s when it all started. Your world goes quiet and (come on, admit it) slow-motion, your heart trips over itself then struggles breathlessly to catch up, and the gravity between the poles of the earth browns out for a few sluggish seconds as your entire universe suddenly, massively, realigns to admit this new, implacable knowledge: that no matter what, for good or bad, like it or not, from this moment on and only because of the sudden introduction of this person into your private world, your life will never, ever be the same again.

It was like that. But maybe a little more so. Really.

But, like I hinted in the first sentence, the story starts a little bit before that. Let me back up.
Three months earlier I was working at Cedar Point, a local amusement park. I worked in the largest gift shop in the park, between the main entrance and the Demon Drop ride. There is a peculiar surreality to working in an atmosphere of giddy tourists, overpriced plastic kitsch, and the mortal screams of one’s fellow humans as they plunged seven storeys just outside the store every sixteen seconds or so. I was one of two men (the other one was gay) working in a crew of about sixteen people, which is, for obvious reasons, a very advantageous arrangement from a romantic probability perspective. I started out dusting ceramic Snowbabies on glass shelves on my first day, and began dating Tracy by the end of the second week.

Tracy was cute (note I didn’t say "pretty") and likeable and had been engaged to a guy named Tom, the proverbial high-school sweetheart, until I came along with my carefully unassuming grin and a sympathetic ear. It turned out Tom was a bit of an insensitive, sloppy oaf (or, in the common parlance, a nineteen year old male), and all I did, in a spate of rather uncharacteristic common sense, was listen. I even (and this was playing it a bit bold, I admit) dared to defend Tom with arguments carefully tailored to be easily and rather pathetically defeated. This led to Tracy and I sitting on the hood of the Volare out by the bay that night, still wearing our Cedar Point work shirts, while she, with eyes downcast, told me she had broken things off with Tom that morning, and... well...

So we had a tumultuous and heady three weeks together, myself floating with the perverse pride of the gallant victor, my ego stuffed so full that bits of it stuck out, like socks and shirt sleeves out of the cracks of a poorly packed suitcase. I didn’t love her. But she was an excellent kisser and she had an amazing, demurely nubile body that she let me explore, a bit inexpertly and tentatively, in the after-hours darkness of my parents basement (no, never All The Way, but far enough around the bases that my mid-west Baptist choir-boy mind reeled for hours afterward like a ... well, like a twenty-four year old guy just beginning to pull back the curtain on the world of feminine delights).

One night, Tracy and I joined the others from our store crew for one of the park’s late-night employee events. From midnight until two, the Mean Streak roller coaster was open for employees only, and even better, they were running it without any lights. The Mean Streak was a ratcheting, bruising, whip-lashing roller coaster under the best of conditions, but at night, with no lights, nesting like a rattlesnake at the very tip of the Lake Erie peninsula upon which Cedar Point is built, the coaster was an unusual and unsettling thrill. A dozen of us made our way through the empty midway at midnight, past the closed stalls and hulking silhouettes of the rides, and I carried Tracy piggyback, her laughing voice both heard and felt on the nape of my neck.

We joined other groups as they moved out of the shadows like refugees in a post-apocalyptic novel, converging upon a dark mass of wooden lattice and coiling track out of which rang the sounds of roaring metal wheels and thin, giddy screams. And at some point, in the whirling blur of that night, after our first ride and before our last, we were stopped for a brief moment in the maze of the Mean Streak’s queue, surrounded by our friends and a sea of familiar faces, laughing, yelling, bobbing like flotsam at the base of a waterfall, and I looked down at her and our eyes met. She was panting slightly, as was I, from the ride and the running and the incessant, intoxicating screaming and laughter. And she smiled at me happily, and I kissed her. It was a quick kiss, salty and breathless and simple. But quick.

And that was, really, our entire relationship in a nutshell.

I came to work one day, a week later, to find out from at least three different concerned and whispering grapevines that Tracy had been seen the night before at Louie’s, a local bar favored by that portion of the Cedar Point employee populace that liked to drink alcohol in a manner that might be described as "excessive". This portion of the populace seemed to comprise, roughly, everybody but myself and, so I had firmly and smugly believed, Tracy. This part of the story unnerved me. The rest of the story, however, sent me hopelessly sprawling, my newly acquired masculine ego shattered like a Cedar Point Snowbaby on a concrete store-room floor. Not only was she seen boogying on the dance floor of this seedy, no-account den of pernicious and petty iniquity, she was seen kissing another man. And not even just any other man, but my personal antithesis, the very soul of everything that could be considered opposite of what I was. Glenn. My dark mirror.

Glenn worked the night shift in the same store, so Tracy and I only ever saw him as we were packing to leave for the afternoon. Glenn used pick-up lines. Confidently. Glenn slicked his hair and wore an ear-ring and called other men things like "chief". If somebody was casting a part for over-confident, sneering, weaselly male machismo, the other actors would see Glenn sitting in the audition room and simply walk out, dropping their scripts in the wastebasket as they went. Glenn had been hitting on Tracy (there is no other term for it; Glenn didn’t know how to flirt, but he had a PhD in hitting-on) since before I even knew her name. He was utterly tireless. He continued to hit on her while I was dating her. He was like the little dog that barks at you relentlessly every time you walk past the fence bordering its yard. You know it can’t bite you, and part of it may know that too, but it just can’t stop. Stopping isn't part of its nature. Tracy and I laughed about Glenn, shaking our heads, and oh how I delighted in the lofty smugness of that laughter, of having her, of winning her. Glenn was not a threat. Glenn was hardly even comedy relief. That wasn’t what I thought. That was what I knew.

When Tracy came to work that day, I think she understood straight away that there was nothing left to tell me. She pointedly and mercilessly failed to notice me all day long.

And thus it was over. I practiced a brand of mourning rage that became a perceptible pall around me for several feet. The same giddy tourists came in that day as they had every day prior, but the ones that walked away from my counter that day did so with a puzzled, distracted frown, as if, despite the cheery sun shining outside, from anywhere at any moment a crack of thunder might come pealing out of the blue and the air might turn cold as slate. Ah, the righteous, biblical pathos that can be conjured by the hand of a young, wronged lover.

It lasted a few weeks, diminishing gradually as the days went by. I faithfully stirred the stew of my misery, probing it constantly, keeping it alive, like a canker sore. Tracy dated Glenn and mooned over him pathetically and constantly. Glenn got tired of her and dumped her, which gave me the most confusing array of mixed emotions.

And in the meantime, I met Jenna.

Jenna was the manager of a block of several stores, including my own. She was not an unattractive girl, quite, and she had a brand of pathetic, gawky charm that was made all the more appealing to me by the rather obvious fact that she thought I was delightfully amusing. She was completely enamored with my attentions. I began seeing Jenna almost immediately, partly because she was sort of funny and partly because she salvaged some of the pieces of my ego, but mostly because if I stood her right in front of me, I couldn’t see Tracy. That was good enough.

If only I’d had the good sense, in the weeks to come, to go get plastered at Louie’s one night and find some handy anonymous babe to smooch on the dance floor. It had worked for Tracy. Who knows how things might have been different.

I think it could be said without fear of contradiction that Jenna fit me, in the same sense that one might say a remora fits a shark. She was made to cling, and I was made to let her. It was perfectly equal in every sense. I made her just as miserable as she made me.

In all honesty, by the end of our second evening together, I was asking myself how I was going to end it. I tried early on to do just that. We had been together for about ten days, which was just about seven days longer than it took me to realize that she was a little neurotic, needy, and obsessive. I tried, with a wishy-washy blend of subtlety and shmoozing, to tell her we both knew that this was just a summer fling. It wasn’t going to get serious. We should both, her as well as me, feel free to see other people. It was only fair. And it was certainly best to be honest with each other up front, right? I walked away thinking that ‘the little talk’ had gone remarkably well. I continued to think it had gone remarkably well until later that night, when she called me, asking shrilly and haltingly for me to rephrase what I had said. I couldn’t, she insisted, have meant to say that we had no future. No one could know such things. Was there something I wasn’t telling her? Had she done something wrong? How could I say it was all over before it had even begun to happen at all? Her voice rose and splintered, quivering on the tenth-storey ledge of hysteria and threatening to jump off at any point.

I know a little better now how to handle such things. I am a little stronger now. l am a little less concerned about making people like me. I have a much stronger sense of my own boundaries and where, exactly, my responsibilities lie when it comes to other people’s definitions of happiness.
I didn’t know any of that then. I caved, gloriously and with flying banners.

Several minutes later I very slowly hung up the phone, my head gently spinning. I felt I had just slid a hundred feet down a fifty foot slope. Horror began to dawn on me as I replayed the conversation tentatively in my head, examining it the way a man with a burgeoning hangover might look over a previous night’s bar tab. I had placated. I had soothed. I had made lofty promises and bold assurances. I had even, I realized with growing panic, used my understanding-boyfriend voice. All just to end the phone call, at any cost. Only now that the call was over did I begin to tally up what "at any cost" actually cost.

Six weeks later I was still with Jenna. I had abandoned all hope of ever being able to end things with her. Like the elephant that has grown up believing it can be held in place by a tiny hank of rope and a stake, I was trapped by my own self-imposed limitations. It wasn’t Jenna’s fault. She was made to cling. I let myself be made to be clung to.

When Cedar Point closed for the season, Jenna came with me to apply at Service Merchandise. We both got hired.

And it was out of this haggard, tired, weary rut of a life that I looked up, as it were, and saw Bethany for the first time, like a single ray of sunlight stabbing down through a lifetime’s worth of gray cloud-bank, lighting a spot that I knew I was meant, if only circumstances were slightly different, to be standing in.

Bittersweet is a word invented to describe something like what I felt in that moment, knowing I had chained myself to Jenna, and knowing I was being given a glimpse of what real love, the indescribable wow of complete and abject adoration, looked like. Heartache is an even better word for the feelings that consumed me in the weeks to come as I got to know Bethany, carefully and fleetingly, finding that not only did my conviction of her beauty and sweetness sustain itself in the face of constant reality, it grew. Exponentially. Heartache gets closer to the feeling, but it still isn’t perfect. What it felt like to me was much less poetic and endearing. What it felt like to me was a toothache of the soul.

Bethany was an artist and a voracious reader. She was funny, with a penchant for oddball, absurd humor. She was one of those extremely rare persons who is a thinker as well as a feeler, and knows it, with the result that she engages either her brain or her heart deliberately, depending on which best suits any given situation. The instance in which a half-desperate man made what the rest of us thought was a half-serious attempt to rob the jewelry department stands out in my mind.

He approached Bethany late one morning, asking to look at some watches on the side of the jewelry counter closest to the door. While examining the watches, according to what Bethany told the rest of us later, he inclined to tell her quietly that she should put all the money from her register, as well as an assortment of jewelry, in a store bag, pretend to ring him up and hand him the bag, and not act at all out of the ordinary or someone (rather unnecessary threatening leer) would get hurt. He claimed to have a weapon in his pocket. The rest of us became aware of what was happening when, a few minutes later, Bethany stuck her head out of the employee break room to quietly ask someone to call the police. A few of us had the opportunity to see the would-be perpetrator sitting meekly in the break room, "guarded" by the store manager (a shrill and angry former rich-girl by the name of Sophia) as he awaited the police. Nobody knew what Bethany had told him. She dismissed the incident, saying she had just reasoned with the man and that she had been confident he was harmless.

Later that evening, as I sat in the break room eating a tiny bag of chips and drinking a soda with Wheel of Fortune droning away on a bracket up in the corner, I found what appeared to be a very old straight-razor under a pile of napkins. It had what I assumed was rust on the blade. I puzzled over it for a minute before I recalled that this was the table the would-be stick-up man had been sitting at before the cops came and carted his scruffy and watery-eyed mug away.

It turned out he had committed at least two robberies before. In one of them, he had cut the employee bad enough to need almost sixty stitches on his right cheek and neck.

Bethany and I were both artists, which gave us an immediate connection. We became friends while talking about our projects, what mediums we preferred, arranging ways in which we could show each other our works. She was a painter, while I was pen and ink. I respected painters because, as good as I was at sketching and illustration, I couldn’t paint. This made her, on top of everything, professionally intriguing. It also gave us license to hang out in the break room talking animatedly and effortlessly, without arousing suspicions that either one of us had any other interest in the other than the purely professional and, at the very least, politely platonic. Jenna, who worked at the main checkouts near the store exit, and who was given to regular bouts of paranoid jealousies, never said a word about Bethany. I was that good at maintaining the illusion.

In a universe parallel to ours, one thin page of reality away, I finally realized the foolishness of my self-imposed imprisonment with Jenna. I recognized that, regardless of what actually happened with Bethany, I was only hurting Jenna and myself by wearily maintaining the illusion of my ongoing affections out of fear of her imminent emotional collapse. I broke it off with her. It went like this: One night after work, I walked her out to her car (which we had shared to work; sharing a car was a symbolic gesture of the sort of constant, relentless interdependence Jenna and I had enmeshed ourselves in) and stood facing her with the open front door between us. With no preamble, I told her it was over, and that really, as we both knew deep down, it had been over for quite a while. I didn’t give any details other than to sincerely (if briefly) apologize to her for letting the illusion spin out as long as it had, and to wish her happiness with whatever she did next and whomever she did it with. She was shocked speechless, and before she had the chance to rally her natural defenses against being left alone, I walked away. I didn’t know where I was going. I simply walked out of the pool of light the car was sitting in and kept going. I thought she would come after me. I was prepared for it if she did. I was prepared to run away.

It was a very big parking lot.

She didn’t come after me. She probably would have if I hadn’t at that moment passed Bethany who, in one of those undeniable quirks of fate that implies God is just ducking into the nearest doorway, humming and trying to look unobtrusive, was having some trouble with her car and was just getting out to have a look under the hood. I joined her as she raised the hood, aware of Jenna’s eyes burning on the back of my neck like laser sights, and together we stood there in the dim blue night and stared at the engine of her car, as if, at any moment, one of us might say something like "Well there’s the trouble right there," or "Yeah, that’s an engine all right."

I was not, nor am I now, a "car" guy. I could generally get gas in mine. Theoretically, I could change the oil and maybe a tire. Standing there, trying to look knowledgeably into the engine of Bethany’s car, my hands stuffed in my pockets to keep them from plucking at random mechanical doo-dads and possibly making a minor problem a bit more major, I felt the subtle, pervasive tremor of worlds quietly but massively moving, rearranging, destinies cycling like locomotives in a roundhouse. I cast my eyes sideways, helplessly and slightly giddily. Bethany stood next to me and blew her bangs out of her face in a characteristically female gesture, then smiled up at me. "Any chance a girl can get a ride with a big tall guy that obviously doesn’t know beans about fixing cars?" She asked brightly. I glanced back at the big white Olds ‘88 sitting thirty yards away, its engine idling, its windows mute reflections of the parking lot floodlights. It began to roll as I watched, steering away and drifting out of the pool of light. "I was thinking of asking you the same thing." I said, turning back to Bethany’s easy, sardonic smile.

We went to dinner instead. The strip that Service Merchandise occupied was a long, garish panoply of mini-malls, gas stations and franchise restaurants, which meant we had our choice of a dozen places to get essentially the same burgers and wings. She called her step-mother from the payphone, I called my dad. While we waited for them to come and get us, we drank sodas and ate appetizers and I told her about what had happened with Jenna. The entire story, from beginning to recent end. I felt freer and lighter than I had in, well, in longer than I had the capacity to recall at the moment, and in that moment I didn’t care what happened between Bethany and me in the future, if anything. All I cared about was that she was sitting there now, across from me, listening with interest and nodding in all the right places, and occasionally sipping her Coke in a distractingly wonderful way through a blue- and white-striped bendy straw. She merely listened. And at the end, as we stood outside in the cooling night air watching the busy road for our respective rides (her step-mom arrived first, which I was mysteriously glad of), she smiled at me with a quiet, thoughtful smile. And before she got in the car, she took my hand, lacing her fingers through mine briefly, and squeezing. She didn’t say anything at all, and that seemed, for that moment, exactly right.

The next day Jenna didn’t show up for work and Bethany and I sat openly and unapologetically together in the break room and had lunch, and this time we didn’t talk about art at all.

And what the hell, maybe we even went to dinner again that night.

But that never happened in this page of reality. In this world, I stayed weak. In this universe, I walked with Jenna out to the car that night, got in, and went back to her apartment (where I virtually lived) and ate spaghetti or grilled cheese with her and watched a movie on the VCR with her and at some point, I’m sure, I sighed an enormous, silent, aching sigh of regret.
The definition of pathetic, I might submit from my own personal experience, is regretting a choice even as one is making it.

I stayed with Jenna, stupidly and pathetically, until two years later she had used up everything that I had to give her to make life with herself something she could bear, then she dumped me. Quickly and surgically.

Before that happened, however, I quit my job at Service Merchandise to move away with her to Indiana, where her father and sister lived. She went on a few weeks before me, getting herself settled in and patting down a nice, manageable niche for me as well. I dutifully put in my notice, and when the day came, I said goodbye to everyone in the store. Throughout the entire day, l avoided catching Bethany’s eye, but I studied her secretly when I knew she wouldn’t notice. I saw her happily and easily waiting on customers, studied her laughing silently in the distance with her coworkers, glimpsed her at a table with friends through the slowly closing door of the break room. And when I sensed her looking in my general direction, I involved myself instantly doing the same sorts of things: laughing infectiously with my own crew, industriously performing the duties of my last day’s work, being efficient, being fun, trying to look, in short, as if my life was perfect and complete and not helplessly orbiting hers, desperately trying not to say notice me, notice me, please, please notice me, give me a reason, give me a thread, anything, give me that one tiny push that will make it okay for me to launch myself out of this penitentiary life and join you in the streaming sunlight that you inhabit as easily as a butterfly inhabits air, as a bee inhabits flowers...

But the end of the shift came and I found myself walking to the exit without even saying goodbye to her. I hated myself in that moment, hated the life I had chosen. If I had been even slightly the sort of man to think introspectively, I might have marveled about how often we come to the saddest and bleakest moments of our lives by just stubbornly putting one foot in front of the other and refusing to change direction out of sheer, stupid bloody-mindedness. But I wasn’t that sort of introspective man back then, and I didn’t think that. I trudged toward the exit, trying even then not to look like I was trudging, hoping still that she would notice me, call me back, help me somehow salvage the end of this thing that had never even really happened.

And she did.

She called my name, and when I looked back, she was coming through the discreet little half doorway that separated the jewelry department from the rest of the store. She approached me and we met just to the side of the main entrance, in the dim Stonehenge of the luggage and travel section. She told me, if I remember right, that she wasn’t going to let me leave without saying goodbye. I don’t remember what else we said. The words were probably unimportant and silly. I just remember looking down at her, with that careful, deliberate distance between us, and watching her lips make the words, watching the way the sun streamed in from the doorway and lay over her cheek and hair, painting her with surreal, heartbreaking clarity. She was smiling that easy little smile, the one that said ain’t life just a big ol’ fuzzy peach, even if sometimes you do just get a bite of the pit? For a few seconds, I was aware that I would most likely never see her again, and I soaked her up: the perfect circle of her face, her unguarded blue eyes, the white gold of her hair, her aura of happiness and light and quiet, oblivious strength and secret good things yet to come. The moment bled away quietly and unremarkably until it was gone, and then fate stood back, waited a moment, and cleared its throat discreetly, like a bellhop waiting for a tip

And then I shook her hand and left.

I shook.

Her hand.

And I left.

The most obnoxious thing about reality is that, unlike what one might expect from having grown up watching movies and MTV, it doesn’t pay any attention whatsoever when one’s personal circumstances turn bleak and hopeless. Nothing stops. The sun rather infuriatingly continues to shine. People still honk at you if you don’t hit the gas less than half a second after the light turns green. Telemarketer still call and try to sell you magazine subscriptions and aluminum siding. Statistically, grief only has the opportunity to really sink in for about forty minutes before the constant, relentless blur of reality strips it away in sad little shreds, leaving you disconcertingly distracted, confused, and a little punch-drunk, until three hours later you finally find yourself sitting by the light of the TV surrounded by beer cans and empty cartons of Ben and Jerry’s and trying to remember where you left your pants.

Ideally, after a major life devastation, reality would pause for a little while out of respect. It would at least turn bleak and grey for everybody else as well, with lots of dark thunderings and moody rainstorms that one could walk pathetically and aimlessly through, without an umbrella. In a perfect world, one’s environment would know what was expected of it.

But this isn’t a perfect world. That’s why God made heavy metal ballads.

Later that week, as I drove a carload of my worldly goods over the border from Ohio to Indiana (which is, in a sense, like quitting Marlboros to take up Camels) I listened to a lot of heavy metal ballads. I railed against my own weakness and the cruelties of fate and mourned the completely unromantic end of what was, apart from the whole "unrequited love" thing (which is wildly over-rated), a sadly unromantic little chapter in my life. As I progressed along the turnpike, getting gradually closer to what I thought of as my destiny (the way a prison inmate thinks of his cell as home) I slowly, inexorably reconciled myself to my future. The words "unremarkable" and "unromantic" continued to float through my mind at regular intervals, and I trained myself to get used to them. l introduced the idea to myself that real love was duty, not devotion. I slowly accepted the idea that passion was the rarity and prosaic was the reality. I sighed and settled myself, grudgingly but deliberately, into the bed I had made for myself. The one thing I consoled myself with was the melodramatic but undoubtedly true fact that, really, I had only failed myself. Bethany hadn’t needed me. She was art, and the world loved art. While I was heading off into a lifetime of grey doldrums and passionless relationships, Bethany was sailing into brightness and hope. Bethany didn’t need my love. Bethany breathed love. The world was full of men who would trip over themselves to tell her how amazing and lovely and breathtaking she was. She would choose well and in the end she would be better off without me. It was probably best I hadn’t had the guts to pour my love out to her.
Bethany was going to be well taken care of. It was a small and half-hearted consolation, but I knew it was true. Of course it was true.

The word "ironic" enjoys a liberal and fantastic joyride in the English language, based on the fact that very few people know precisely what it actually means. This is an understandable and perfectly acceptable occurrence, and language being the necessarily evolving thing that it is, there will no doubt eventually be a small and little-noticed change in the dictionary to account for it. As it is, the dictionary currently defines "irony" as "the use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning." The dictionary offers a secondary definition which most people would probably find a bit more familiar: "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs, often with poignant results." For instance, a man leaving a ballpark saddened that he hadn’t caught the winning home-run baseball would experience irony when he saw that the home-run baseball had in fact soared right out of the actual stadium and shattered his windshield.

I experienced one kind of irony when, a year after walking away from the possibility of real love in order to dutifully fulfill my role in the banal little play that was my life with Jenna, Jenna herself decided I was no longer the right man for her. Shock, rather than sadness or rejection, was probably a better description of what I felt following that event. Interestingly, however, l experienced a completely different, and altogether brilliant kind of irony when my forced re-introduction to the dating marketplace left me suddenly in the presence of a woman named Jael.

Jael had been one of my best friends for almost ten years. Before there was Bethany, before there was Jenna and Tracy, before anyone, there had been Jael. I had always loved Jael, and the love I felt for her was singular, enormous, and well known, like a national monument that everyone is familiar with and likes to occasionally go and have picnics in front of. Both of our parents knew about it. All of our friends knew about it. People who drove by in their cars while Jael and I happened to be standing on the street eating ice cream cones knew about it. My love for her was so thick and helplessly apparent that hiding it from her had never, realistically, even been an option. The only reason there had ever even been a Tracy and a Jenna and yes, even a Bethany was the simple fact that, on the annual rendezvous in which I stood in front of Jael and once again proclaimed my affections for her, helplessly and almost perfunctorily, she always lovingly but firmly said, in essence, "Get a life".

Which was generally really good advice, considering.

When Jenna dumped me, I began to examine myself much more critically than I ever had before. I began to see a pattern of self-defeating choices, of self-imposed weakness. Jael walked with me through those revelations, sometimes using the truth like a scalpel, and sometimes like a balm, but never like a hammer. Jael cared enough about me to hold a mirror up to me when I was ready to really look at myself. And gradually, I did begin to get a life. I picked up my art again. I spent some time alone. I wrote.

And then, to my complete bewildered amazement, Jael and I were dating. And it was marvelous. My life so far had not prepared me for the speechless pleasures, the sudden joys, the heady passions and the blinding hope of being with someone like her. She was my muse and my delight. Even more amazingly, almost a decade later, she still is.

Irony. Incongruity between what might be expected... and what actually occurs. With poignant results.

I am thirty-six now, and being thirty-six, on the whole, is universally better than being twenty-four. A few weeks ago I was ruminating on the path my life has taken, the surprising, completely unexpected twisting road that has gotten me here, and I began thinking about some of the faces and names from that long-ago land of the nineties. Thinking back on the person I was then is a strange experience. The memories don’t feel like my own, but more like things I read in a book. Except for the memories of Bethany. I had thought of her occasionally over the last several years, and when I did it was always happily and hopefully. Somehow, for no apparent reason, I always suspected that we would meet up again someday. We would introduce each other to our spouses and children and, in some way, I would find myself officially closing the book on a chapter that had, until then, never felt completely written.

On a whim, I looked her up on the internet. This is hardly a foolproof or reliable method of gaining information about individual people. Names change, addresses change, records are old or incomplete. One might stumble on a promising listing on one of those people search sites, which would probably list references to eight or nine individuals with the same basic name living in as many different states. Or the person might have accomplished something noteworthy and had articles written about them. The person might even have his or her own personal website. Lots of possibilities. Hardly reliable, but you never know. I did a quick search for Bethany by her full, maiden name. I thought I might be lucky to get an ambiguous reference or two. I was really lucky. I got two entire paragraphs, and they weren’t ambiguous at all.

Bethany had died the previous July. The obituary didn’t say how, but offered an address for donations to a kidney foundation. She left only her father and her stepmother. She died unmarried.

A person can’t know how a shock like that will affect them. It is uncannily like falling suddenly down a flight of stairs that you had traversed without thinking a hundred times before. At first, there is just a creepy, numb calm as you lay blinking in the aftermath, trying without moving to take stock of your immediate responses, trying to see what will hurt most when you attempt to move again. But you can't really know the extent of the injury until you do get back up, if you can, and try to catch back up to the flow of life again.

I was surprised and dismayed at how deeply Bethany’s death affected me in the days following. Grief is not the knowledge of the death of a dear person. The knowledge of a death, when it becomes solid and implacable, is what makes the loss bearable, what helps us all, eventually, go on with life and find that, despite it all (even if a bit guiltily) we can be happy again. Grief, on the other hand, is the result of that moment- that innocent, waking lull- between thinking of a dear one and remembering, with a sudden, sickening jolt, that they are no more. Grief is, in effect, death-lag.

I found myself thinking of Bethany over and over throughout the week after finding her obituary, and being struck repeatedly a moment later by the awful lead weight of her death. My memories of her came back slowly but perfectly, like leaves coming to the ground in fall. The sadness and loss I felt was, at first, mysterious and nearly unbearable. I found myself unwilling and unable to sleep at night, and lethargic and disengaged during the day. Confused and unsure of who to share my grief with, I mourned in the humming silence of night and in every moment of daylight solitude. Tears were necessarily brief, stifled, but relentlessly fierce. I railed against God, pleaded with Him, challenged and berated Him, uselessly and inconsolably. In my rage and my strange, ferocious grief, I accepted no relief because I believed there was none to be had. My grief was a fist I shook in the face of God.

Irony. In 1994, I left Bethany without sharing my feelings for her, telling myself that she hadn’t needed me, that the world was full of men who would recognize her heartbreakingly rare beauty and loveliness. I was meant for the grey, mundane life of duty and routine, nailed to the wall with my own spikes and by my own hand. But Bethany was sunlight and roaring ocean surf, irresistible, breathtaking, priceless. Bethany would be all right. Bethany would be taken care of. And now here I was, in the science-fiction year of 2005, fulfilled, doing what I love, living with inexplicable love and surprising, daily joy, and Bethany... Bethany was alone. Single. And oh yeah, she was dead.

Irony.

Capricious, hateful irony.

In a universe parallel to ours, one thin page of reality away, I was with her when she found out about the illness that was going to gradually take her life away. I helped her make a list of the things she most wanted to do with her remaining time and I went with her as she checked each one off, walking with her and perhaps sometimes carrying her. I soothed her as much as I knew how as her days got fewer and harder. I made her laugh. I was generally pretty good at that. And in the end I held her hand and she left knowing that she was loved.

And what the hell. Maybe she didn’t even die. Maybe I gave her a kidney or something.

I have a two-and-a-half year old son named Zane, and he is the bright, solar center of my joy in life at the moment. He is all boy, which means that he is constantly giving himself minor owies, hurts, boo-boos and bonks. I think I am a good papa to him, and one of the ways I gauge that is by noticing how often he comes to me, alongside mama, to have his assorted bumps and bruises attended to. "Kiss it," he instructs gravely, nodding urgently and proffering up the necessary body part, "Kiss it, rub it." His confidence in my ability to make it better is unwavering, but that’s not what makes me deeply happy and proud to be his papa. Of course Zane knows papa can fix it- that’s elementary stuff for a two year old. What is primary is that he knows papa loves him enough to want to fix it. That is almost as good as the fixing itself.

One midnight, a week after I had found Bethany’s obit on the internet, I fell exhausted and depressed into bed. The bed in question was a futon in the guest bedroom, where I was sleeping for the night because I had a cold and didn’t want my coughing to wake Jael. The futon was open, which made it, in the most fundamental ways, more or less like a bed. One of the ways it was not like a bed, however, was in the fact that it had wooden armrests bracketing the top half of the mattress, just slightly higher than the mattress itself. The room was dark and I wasn’t, precisely, careful about how I fell full-length onto the mattress. The very loud and surprising clonk I heard was my forehead connecting heavily with the left armrest of the futon. It hurt for one bright, starbursting second, then I rolled over onto my back, covered my forehead with my hand gingerly, and laughing weakly at my own stupidity, said aloud the first words that came to my mind. "Kiss it," I said. I heard my own words in the closeness of the dark room and realized two things that made my heart break. I hadn’t said the words to the room, but to God. And I wasn’t talking about my forehead.

Tears streamed down my face as I lay staring at the ceiling, realizing that all my life I had thought I’d had a father in heaven, when what I really wanted, in the aching core of my heart, was a Papa. The father was busy, hard-nosed, rule-following, only peripherally interested, and because he was God, cruel. But the Papa cried my tears with me. The Papa not only knew why I had loved Bethany, but had loved her Himself as well. The Papa cared about what hurt me. The Papa wanted to make it better.

That night, I was finally able to let go- a little- of my grief and give it up to Papa. He didn’t make it all better at once, but He kissed it.

The next morning I went for a walk. It was a beautiful morning, early summer, with the sun streaming down like something you could catch in bowls and save for later. I thought some more about Bethany, about the loss of her, about the sadness of the words "what might have been". I replayed old memories and stirred just a bit more the stew of loss and regret. I felt different. Not better, quite, but... scrubbed. Exfoliated. Heading back, I turned onto a street near our house and started up the gentle hill to the next corner. There were some people on the sidewalk ahead of me, just a bit too far away for me to make out. One was a woman, the other was a little boy on a tricycle. As I watched them, it was as if a dusty haze in my head was suddenly blown away, as if God himself had taken my head gently between his hands and urged me to really look. The woman was Jael, my love and my treasure, my pearl of great price. The child was my Zane, studiously trying to unravel the mystery of pedal-power.

And this is the part where, were I an uber-Christian or a preacher, I‘d say that God spoke to me. I am not an uber-Christian or a preacher, so I won’t say that. But if I did say that, I’d say that what God whispered to me then, as I watched my sweet people in that moment before they looked up, and saw me, and smiled, and waved, was something like this: How often are you living in the past and not seeing the present I am giving you? How often are you mourning the faded gamble of a "what if" and missing the vibrant, wondrous reality of the right now? Do you forget that the past enjoys a very good PR campaign of selective memory and maudlin sentimentality? Do you still have to berate yourself for the faults you have shown as you’ve grown up? Do you still, really not understand what I mean when I say ALL things work together for good for my people?

Those were rhetorical questions. The answers were obvious, to both God and I. But if, in that moment, God did ask me those things, he also knelt down in front of me, looked me in the eye, smiled broadly and lovingly, then put his arm around me and walked with me to meet my Jael and Zane.

I guess the most remarkable irony of all is that life is like Tetris, with God managing the joystick. That’s funny, isn’t it? There he is, working with the crazily shaped blocks of all our bad choices and myriad, clumsy failures, and yet, if we let him do the work, he still finds a way to make something good for us. It wasn’t right that I let the days slip by without ever telling Bethany how wonderful she was, how I delighted in her presence. It was weakness on my part, and it shames me deeply. But God took that failure and used it, miraculously, to build a completely thrilling life with Jael, my true first love and most perfect companion. I am sad that Bethany may have never heard what I wanted to say to her back then. But I have this as my balm now: that the God who loves me like a Papa loved her just like I did, and more so. And unlike me, he was perfectly willing and able to show his love to her. He was not only able to make her heart happy; he loved her enough to want to. And since he is God, that is a quietly reassuring thought.

To Bethany, a beam of warmth and happiness and joy that the rest of us lost far too soon: I content myself in the knowledge that I may know you again in perfection.

To Jael, my living daydream, my indescribable wow: I vow to pursue you always, missing no more of the thrill of every moment with you.

To God, my Papa ... Kiss it. Rub it.

No News is Good News

2006-05-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

I live in St. Louis, which as most of you know is actually two cities in one. There is the Missouri St. Louis (in which I live) and the Illinois St. Louis, often referred to (in dark tones) as East St. Louis. East St. Louis is on the other side of the river, which, one might guess, is a euphemism used when "the other side of the tracks" isn't evocative enough. East St. Louis recently surpassed Detroit as the city in which one is most likely to be seriously inconvenienced in a karmic sense. Bad, baaaaad stuff happens in East St. Louis. I've never been there, but I know all about it. I know all the most intimate details of the heinous, horrific, senseless, gut-wrenching horrors that occur on the other side of the river.

How do I know all these things? Simple. These things are News.

I don't like to hear about these things. It isn't enjoyable learning about deaths and horrors on a daily basis. Frankly, all the gruesome details of all the terrible murders and deaths I've heard about over the years have formed a sort of black lacquer of constant low-grade dread over my heart. I have grown cynical and fearful. I am suspicious and worried, afraid for the welfare of my self and my wife, doubly afraid for my kids, growing up in a world where horrors are casually visited even on children. I know this is true because it gets told to me on the tens everyday on news radio. I hear about it from blank-faced, blandly attractive people every evening at 5, 6 and 11.

Horrors and deaths are News. Even more, they are the totality of the News.

OK, that might be a very slight overstatement. News also includes sports scores, the weather, and funny stories about singing parakeets and the baking of the world's largest cookie. A summary of the news would lead one to believe that the Cards might make the playoffs, it'll probably be hot this weekend, a child-killer lives down your street, drive-by shootings and rape-murders are rampant and growing, and the Islamists are about to get The Bomb. But it's all OK because there's a little boy in Fenton who grew a potato shaped like the state of Wyoming.

News is bad. Good things may be happening, but if they aren't funny, trivial and easy to make into a forty second human-interest clip, they aren't News. Horrors are News. Death, murder and fear are News. I don't know why this is, but let's just accept, for the sake of what follows, that this is the case. We all know it. No News is good News.

About a week ago, after hearing another horrific, jolting, casually read story about a long, gruesome death of a baby, I asked myself a question. A simple question. A question that made me stop, suddenly, as if at the edge of a cliff.

Why do I need to know this?

"Weeeell," a voice inside said, the voice I think of as the voice of The Culture. "You need to know what's Going On in the world. It may not be pleasant, but it's your responsibility to face reality. After all, you may be able to make A Difference." And at a first glance, that sounds fine. Knowledge is my duty. I may be able to help. I owe it to the world to bear my portion of the weight of it's pain and fear and loss. Let's call this the Guilt/Duty Rationale.

I really examined the Guilt/Duty Rationale, and I came to see two major problems.

The first one is a question of response. First, when I hear about a rape/murder, for instance, what, exactly, can I do about that? Can I help catch the perpetrator? In most cases, that would be highly improbable. Can I help the victim or the victim's family? Perhaps I could, but do I? Do any of us? No. There are just too many horrors to address. If we tried, we'd almost instantly be broke and burned out. Can I prevent such a terrible crime from happening again? No more than we can stop the rain. So what can I do, exactly? I can feel terrible. I can glom onto the fear and the dread. I can apply one more coat of lacquer to the shell of cynicism around my heart. But what, exactly, does that accomplish? How does that benefit anyone if the end result is simply a feeling of growing impotent dread? On these grounds, I reject the G/D Rationale.

The second problem is one of source. Is it fundamentally true that what we see and hear is all the News that is fit to tell? Is there instead a possibility that the News does not, in fact, represent a valid, reasonable, honest perspective of the world? Horrible things do happen, but we all know, on some level, that horrible things are not the only things that happen. So, if the News tends to only tell us the horrible stuff, how can we have an honest picture of the world? Is it possible that our worldview is being unneccessarily and even wrongly tainted toward the negative by the fact that all News is bad News?

I suggest the following radical, perhaps even heretical notion: There is infinitely more Good News out there in the world than the media, any media, would let us believe!

There are babies being born healthy and happy to overjoyed Mamas and Papas, who will love them enormously and train them up well and responsibly. All over the world, some people spontaneously help other people in huge ways and tiny ways. Flowers are growing in vacant lots, kids are still playing scratch baseball and soccer, from the tribes of Africa to the back streets of the Bronx. Sometimes alcoholics go to AA instead of killing themselves and others. Sometimes marriages come back alive. Sometimes people are quietly heroic in confronting their own demons, and defeating them. This happens the world over, everyday, millions of times.

There is more beauty in this world than could ever fit in a forty-second fluff piece on Channel 2. There is more light and good in humanity than the drive-by horror-mongers of the media would ever lead us to expect. The world is not all terrors and fears, regardless of what the clamoring 24-hour news media berates us with over and over. Those things are there, but they are not all that is there. Shame on the media for presenting such a skewed, dark, salacious view in the name of ratings and titilations. But shame on us more for letting them.

So let's boycott the News. I am. It does nobody any good to be bogged down with irresponsibly overweighted stories of murder and fear. There is a life to be lived if we can break the stranglehold of cynicism and fear we've come to believe in. Life and humanity are glorious the world over, regardless of what CNN and FOX news and Channel 2 say, not because horrible things don't happen, but in spite of them.

This goes for you people with the bumper stickers that read "If you aren't angry you're not paying attention". Consider the possibility that if you are that angry, maybe you're not paying enough attention to the right things.

This goes for you people who think the world is going to Hell and that things were better in the Good Old Days. Consider the possibility that the Good Old Days were only as Good as they seemed because you weren't being daily spoon-fed the individual horrors of the entire world by the drive-by media.

This goes for me and the rest of us living with the weight of the fear that there is an entire nation of wacked-out religious uber-nuts that would kill me and my family on sight. Consider the possibility that these people have always existed, and that they are a lot fewer than their media-amplified voices may make them seem.

In short, let's all lighten up, people! Let's break out of the fear and the suspicions. Let's let go of the terrific evils and horrors that aren't ours and that we can't fix anyway. Life will hand us enough hardship directly without us filling our plates with the world's share from the media's buffet of death-du-jour.

Good things do happen! Let's go find them. Let's celebrate them. Let's make them happen some more!

And for Heaven's sake, turn OFF the flippin' TV!

Confucius say: You can't rush a four-year-old

2006-05-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I have posted. This has NOT been for a lack of things to say. I called this blog "George's Running Social Commentary" because that is what happens in my head virtually everyday. Long before there was such a thing (or even such a word) as blogs, I pined for some outlet that would serve as an expression for all the random, poignant, funny, judgemental, irritating, sarcastic, thoughtful, philosophical, angry and/or bemused dialogues that fill my head everyday like letters in a bowl of alphabet soup (and with about as much order).

I wonder, does everyone have that kind of constantly running dialogue between their ears? It's like living with Howard Cosell in your head, except in my case he never talks about sports, only people and things and ideas, colorfully, carelessly, and rather politically incorrectly. "And coming up from behind," he says of the car getting ready to pass me on I-forty on my way to church, "Yet one more middle-aged housewife on the phone. Her face says everything, folks. She's nowhere to be found. Gone. On cellphone cloud nine. On this glorious day for highway driving, watch as she weaves over the lane dividers as if trying to shake off Al Quaeda pursuers. And now she's digging in her purse and applying makeup, all at the same time. Truly, we are observing a multi-tasking juggernaut of legendary proportion." And so on.

So, all that to say, I have had quite a bit to say lately. I just ain't been saying it. That doesn't mean you are all off the hook*. It just means you are gonna get it all in rapid-fire over the next few days. The good news is that I'll have to encapsulate a lot of it. Put on your seat belt. Here goes:

Have you ever noticed that kids are un-rushable? We have in our household now one almost- four-year-old and one almost-one-year-old (yes, we are still at that stage where you measure the months between birthdays and factor them into the kids' ages). Working at home, I have had the unique opportunity to witness my wife regularly trying to get Zane, the older one, ready for some outing or other. Almost without fail it is a bit of a minor ordeal. It isn't a matter of reluctance to go on Zane's part: he loves to go out. It is simply a matter of Zane's unspoken but apparently iron-clad stance against being rushed. He has no concept of hurrying. No sense whatsoever of being late or early. For him, life is in the journey, and the journey begins LONG before ever walking out the door. The journey is in going to put on his shoes, for instance.

"Hurry, Zane" Mama says, "Go get your shoes on and we'll go to the park."

Zane starts off for his shoes, determinedly and directly, for about three steps. Then, of course, he has to stop to push in the dining room chairs. Surely one wouldn't think of leaving until that was done. This leads to a discovery of some breakfast Cheerios scattered on the floor. Those musn't be picked up, per se, but they SHOULD be pushed around and stomped on carefully, making tiny little rubble piles like ant bombsites all over the floor. "Zane!" Mama calls exasperatedly, "Get your shoes on! It's time to go!" And Zane, rather bewildered, finishes crunching the last of the Cheerios before heading, for a few more steps, in the direction of his shoes. He is bewildered because he is thinking "What do you think I'm doing, Mama? This is all part of putting on my shoes. Just like walking three or four times around the living room chair, climbing up on my bed and tugging at my socks until they are flapping off my toes like rather stinky flags, spreading some toys around the kitchen floor, pulling the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and leaving it in the middle of the hall with the cord unraveled in a pile, asking Papa to play racing on his computer, and poking baby sister in the face with a plastic car until she cries, and then poking her a few more times to see if she'll stop. Duh." It isn't that Zane cannot move quickly, exactly. It is that it simply does not occur to him to not do any of the things that it occurs to him it might be fun, or even just part of the ritual, to do.

This is evidently universal to kids. I saw a dad and son in the changing area of the YMCA a couple days ago. The dad was pretty irritated, trying to hurry his young son along so they could leave. The son was systematically getting into each locker, pulling the door to, then getting out again and moving on to the next locker. "Come on, let's go!" The dad plead/commanded. "I AM!" The son replied, looking perplexed and annoyed. He was getting in and out of each locker rather quickly, he apparently believed. Duh, dad. Maybe the son was annoyed, too. Maybe he was thinking "You know, dad, you could take the lockers on the other side and we could finish this in half the time. Sheesh."

And I thought: Is this an instance where we might benefit by being more like kids? We adults know how to rush. We know how to schedule our days to cram in as much work and errands and deadlines and duties as possible. We get annoyed at our kids because they don't understand this. They don't get that there are things to do, appointments to keep, a clock to race. All the kid gets is that something looks fun and by golly he's gonna do it. That's his job. That's his one and only priority.

And we think that's a bad thing, do we?

Sure, we adults have responsibilities. Play isn't our one-and-only job description, like it is for four year olds. But it isn't excluded from our job description, either, is it? Is it? It better not be, or we are wasted-out zombies.

So here's my plan. I am going to choose to be unrushable as well. If I need to be somewhere at 6, I am going to plan to start getting ready at 5. It only takes me about 20 minutes to get ready (I am a man, see?). So what am I gonna do with that extra time between 5:20 and 6? I ain't gonna work. I ain't gonna squeeze in a few emails. I ain't gonna make a quick phone call or clean out my closet or prep dinner or return the frikkin' movie I rented last week that is already overdue. What am I gonna do? I don't know. Who cares. Maybe I'll sit on the bed and tug at my socks until they flap off my toes like rather stinky flags. I'm gonna go swing on the swings. I'm gonna leave early enough to stop at the lemonade stand on the corner and discuss business with the eight-year-old running it. I'm gonna see something fun and I'm gonna do it, by golly, by garsh. I'm gonna make play a part of my day.

Duh.

* "all" here being a term which means myself, the Howard Cosell in my head, and perhaps a few random internet surfers looking for housewife blogs with sexy bits. No sexy bits here. No housewives either. But there is a mention of swinging on swings at some point. Make your own joke.

Be a Good Boy and Drink Your Ovaltine...

2006-01-20T09:55:00.000-08:00

or How Bono Wound Up a Role Model

A curious thought have I.

I started discussing this with my wife a few weeks ago (all my best thoughts seem to occur while discussing things with her) and it has been percolating since then. Thus, it earns the status of being bloggable, so here it is. Let's hope I can make some sense of this.

It seems to me that one of the major changes that has occured in American culture in the last several decades has been the emphasis placed on role models. I mean, duh, right? There has been loads of blabber on TV and the radio and in scads of books about the need for good role models, about the responsibility of the people who are, by default, role models, such as movie stars and pro athletes. People argue and debate about how to give our kids good role models (as if we had any ultimate say in that), about how to become a good role model yourself, about how the worship of certain high-profile people is evidence of the death of morality in our culture, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

Lots of words have been spent on the subject. What I haven't seen is any discussion on why the role model topic has suddenly become such a hot button. Does anyone remember any editorials being written on the subject back in the forties and fifties? I may be mistaken, but it doesn't seem like there was much debate about role models back in the days when Orphan Annie was a radio show and vaudeville was still packin' 'em into theaters. If I am right in assuming this, then what changed? Why, in the age of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle has the discussion about the worthiness (or lack thereof) of role models become such a big deal?

Here's my hypothesis: I think the subject of role models has become important because we have seen a drastic and very sudden shift in the types of people who qualify as such.

Before the days of mass media, I am guessing that the term "role model" was probably not even in use. Back then, the moral authority, the person who established the standard and goal of behaviour, was probably much more local. Back when my Dad was a kid, he read about baseball heroes, listened to the Shadow on the radio, and saw Buck Rogers at the movies, but those people were distant, occasional figures in his life, almost like myths and legends. I doubt it would have occured to him to emulate them in any meaningful way (apart from swinging a bat in the backyard and pretending to sock a home run at Ebbets field, or blast spacemen like good ol' Buck Rogers), mostly because there was nothing real to emulate. Dad didn't know how Babe Ruth treated waitresses in restaurants or how many DUIs Lon Chaney had. He had no concept whatsoever of how those people behaved in everyday life, so there was no practical way for him to make any of those people into true behavioural role models. The result was that, for better or worse, role models were by necessity found closer to home, in the form of parents, teachers, politicians, and ultimately, religious leaders. Kids then may not have liked what the role models were telling them, may have resisted actively for some time, but as the Borg on Star trek always said, resistance is futile. Whether they want to or not, kids eventually emulate role models the way metal filings follow a magnet. It's built into our nature. It's necessary.

Then came TV, and I am guessing the process of altering the names on the pedestals of role modelhood started to change very slowly. At first, culture probably didn't even mind. So the kids were starting to talk like John Wayne or Burl Ives. They were upstanding, all-american types, and most of the time even when they were being "themselves" they weren't much different than their scripted versions (as far as anyone knew). They were polite and patriotic and non-threatening (unless you were a jap or, later, a commie, but that was jest fine, thank-you-very-much). They were that most novel of new entities, the "good role model". Eat your vegetables, Tommy, so's you can grow up big and strong like the Lone Ranger. Glory hallelujah, world without end.

But then TV and movies began to change. I suspect that advertisers and media executives started to grasp the golden concept that there is far more money to be made selling to society's seedier nature than to any starchy mass morality. Rock and/or Roll (as the Simpsons' Principal Skinner calls it) appeared on the scene and suddenly media became scary and lewd, full or innuendo and a brand of psychedelic weirdness that few adults could understand. Role models stopped being "good", and America found itself facing the nasty reality of the "bad role model", who not only acknowledged being bad, but revelled in it. Parents seemed (or so it appears) shocked that pointing out the plain badness of their teens' role models didn't make the teens turn from them. In fact, it had the opposite effect. In yer face, ya squares. That'll teach ya's to let media define proper behaviour.

And thus we have come to today, where role models are now of utmost importance, where we live with the fact that our kids purposely use bad grammer and sport nasty attitudes and wear visible thong underwear and jeans around their butts, all because that is the behaviour they have seen from their mega-huge and mega-hyped role models. It is so, so easy to launch into hysterics about this, and frankly, doing so is not entirely unwarranted. But this is the world now. There is no way to get that cat back in that bag (barring moving to the wilderness of Montana and throwing away one's TV, computer and radio, and even then, your prospects aren't great). But there is an aspect of this new cultural reality that I find intriguing, one that I also have not heard discussed anywhere.

Back in the days of Ty Cobb and vaudeville (and probably for the whole of history prior to that), society looked up for its role models. It looked to Mom and Dad and the President and the pastors and priests and rabbis. It looked, ultimately, to "the good" (or some hopeful facsimile thereof) and emulated that. Now in our media saturated world, culture looks aside, to elements of itself. Culture has said, in the postmodern age, "screw morality and the good, I wanna be like Mike. I wanna be like the movie stars and the athletes and the music icons with the clothes and the cars and the babes and the bling"*. The funny thing is that, looking aside for models to emulate, to copy, seems to have created a sort of terminal feedback loop in the culture. It's like standing between mirrors, seeing one's own reflection marching away into grey-green obscurity, until it vanishes altogether. It's like a Xerox machine making copies of copies over and over until there is nothing left but a Rorschack blot that could be anything but is most likely nothing. But mostly, it is like royalty back in the time of kings, intermarrying over and over, inbreeding to the point of freakish idiocy.

The simple fact seems to be this: the point at which culture decides to look at itself for emulation seems to be the point at which that culture sets itself upon a descending spiral towards confused, helplessly blathering oblivion.

Back in the day, for instance, folks were shocked at Elvis and his crazy, crazy hips. Now we have Nickelback singing about a guy's girlfriend sucking him off as he speeds deliriously along in his car, later getting caught by her dad while they are switching positions in the back seat. And this is, frankly, pretty mild stuff by modern standards. In the movie Team America, I saw a puppet poop on another puppet in an elongated, completely preposterous sex scene (which was still, I hate to admit, kind of shockingly funny). Any remotely objective observer has absolutely no choice but to admit that, from a pop culture standpoint, things have continued to escalate, to get more and more sexual, shocking, offensive, preposterous, perverse, challenging, stupid, and just plain gross. And this is no surprise whatsoever! How could it not? In a society that looks to itself to define its own role, the same concepts have to be constantly reinvented. A self-emulating culture is doomed to having to outdo its own previous iteration, but in the same essential way as the previous iteration outdid the one before it!

We see this all around us, it seems to me. And the very interesting thing to me is that I think we have finally crossed over that fine line where each new iteration stops being capable of outdoing the one before. I think we are entering that point where there is no new and interesting way to make jokes about sex, or poop, or deformity. We are running swiftly out of ways to be kinkier, or more shocking, or more disgusting. How many times can one say "fuck" before it stops raising any eyebrows? Culture has pounded the same note on the same piano for so long, louder and louder, until society has stopped really hearing it, and the piano wire is about to snap. What was once challenging and inventive has become pretty common, and then a stereotype, and then a parody. And now we are finally entering the point that it becomes just plain insipid, like a mentally ill person repeating the same bad word over and over, helplessly and without any meaning whatsoever.

So what happens then? What a question that is. When society finally blinks and shakes its head and reaches over and clicks off the roaring white noise that this downward spiral has produced, what will it turn to? Role models are always essential. We choose them helplessly and thoughtlessly, as a mere byproduct of being human. Rather understandably, when society lost trust in science, religion and politics, it turned to itself via the media. So when we finally reach that inevitable critical implosion of cultural nonsense, when we lose trust in that set of role models, who will we put on the pedestal next?

The optimist in me says maybe we, as a society, will take a step backwards, take a new look at "the good", but with the sobering knowledge that that cannot be found in any human institution. The optimist in me hopes that we will seek a role model in an even higher ideal of the good; in something bigger than us and far more trustworthy.

But the pessimist in me (and he's pretty noisy, I am unhappy to admit) says that that is an unrealistic pie-in-the-sky fantasy. The pessimist says that society will find something new and even more worrisome to aspire to. That the trend of societies from the dawn of time seems to have been to lower its sights, to descend, to give up hope and ideals and passion. The pessimist says that we may not choose to make evil into a role model, per se, because that isn't, from a practical perspective, any easier to achieve than good. The pessimist in me says we may just choose whatever's easiest. And that could be even worse. In fact, I don't think there's any "could" about it.

What a doom-and-gloomer, eh? But I am willing to be surprised. Who knows? Strictly speaking, moral history has always been more of a pendulum than a downhill ride. Over the ages, people just swing back and forth from the brink of evil to fanatical puritanism. It'd be nice if at some point we could just sort of land in the middle, but that is probably more abject wishful thinking on my part. So it could happen that society swings back the other way a bit, that we recognize the self-defeating mess that making role models of ourselves is and choose something higher (and less easy). I hope we do.

But what is most interesting to me is that, if my theory is right, the best thing most of us can do is to just sit and watch as culture sort of blasts over the brink of insipidity, like a pimped out Cadillac sailing over a cliff. Overreacting to the obvious descent of culture seems to be just a lot more of the same silliness, just more noise to throw into the already cacophanous maelstrom. There may have been a time for speaking out against it, back at the beginning of it all, when the momentum could have been slowed (although I doubt it), but now it just seems like wasted breath. All we can really do now is hug our kids close, try to teach them there is more to attain in life than just being sexy, famous and rich, and watch the big cultural role model machine begin to overheat, spin, shudder, and shoot sparks. I think we are watching the beginning of what is going to be a cultural train wreck of truly monumental proportions, and like any modern American, I am morbidly interested in seeing the final big crash.

It's what comes out of the silence that follows that I am a little worried about.

*and considering the history of failings of institutional morality, who can blame culture for finally losing some trust in those entities and looking elsewhere?

A Series of Unfortunate Events and Capital Punishment...

2006-01-09T07:52:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick thought (or so I hope; everything I write seems to want to be an article in The Economist, although I suspect their editors would chase me out the door with a pitchfork).

I was reading a children's book recommended to me by a friend. This is one of the books in the well-known "Series of Unfortunate Events" books, from which the movie starring Jim Carey was made last year. In the opening few chapters, this statement is made:

"Since their first encounter with Count Olaf, the villain's wickedness and deception had run rampant all over the Baudelaire's lives, and it had become difficult for the children to keep from becoming villains themselves."

I read this sentence, then stopped and stared at it. I had to read it at least once more before I could go on. Something about it needled me. Having read one of the other books in this series, I knew that the three Baudelaire children were unfailingly good-hearted and quite morally high-minded. I knew, therefore, that at no point, while under the malevolent thumb of Count Olaf, did they say to one another, "You know, this life of wickedness and deception has a certain lure to it, doesn't it? Maybe we should consider it for ourselves, eh? What the heck! Let's turn villain!" Thus, I can only think that the author must mean something else entirely by the phrase "it had become difficult for the children to keep from becoming villains themselves." In short, the author must mean that, in their attempts to escape the dangerous hands of the Count, the children might have done something which, had it been done by Olaf, would have been considered villainous.

Thus, villainy is defined by the action, not by the motive.

Am I right in guessing that the author feels that it would be better in the grand scheme for the children to have simply allowed Olaf to succeed in his evil aims than for the children to have engaged in any action that could, on a purely superficial level, have been described as villainous? For instance, if escape meant lying to a villain, or taking a villain's car, or trapping a villain in a locked room, are we to accept that that would make the children villains themselves?

I mean, what??

I recognize this philosophy as the same that says that enforcing the death penalty on a murderer reduces society to his level, making murderers of us all. The philosophy sees only the act, and never the motive (unless the act is racially motivated, then God help you). Frankly, I find this philosophy so utterly bereft of even the most remote intelligence that it astonishes me that anyone adheres to it. And yet, adhere to it many do, and with passion. I have friends who believe this with a fervor, and I do not believe they are idiots.

And yet...!

How could anyone truly not recognize the importance of motive in an act? The mugger in the garbage-choked alley cuts with a knife, but so does the surgeon in the operating room. We don't arrest the surgeon for assault or attempted murder, because we understand that it is not the action itself which constitutes the crime, but the motive and the goal (although the action must occur; no one goes to jail for simply having a motive, fortunately). It astounds and shocks me that some people claim there is no moral difference between the murder of an innocent woman at the hands of a rapist and the officially sanctioned death of that serial rapist for the protection of society. It absolutely floors me that some people would choose to do nothing to stop dangerous people (because it might require actions that dangerous people have utilized to cause harm and death to the innocent) and then do not feel responsible when dangerous people continue to cause harm and death to the innocent.

It seems to me that this is the fatal flaw in any attempt at morality divorced from God, morality on a strictly human level. If (as this philosophy seems to say) morality is not based on any universal code of right and wrong that originates, by necessity, in the heart and soul of man, then it must by necessity be defined merely by the action alone. According to this philosophy, it isn't wrong to kill a person because it is wrong to value her purse or her sex more than her life. It is simply wrong because it results in a willful death. Motive is utterly irrelevent and shouldn't even be considered or addressed. We shouldn't attempt to train our thoughts to value people and life, or to respect property, or to prefer truth and justice. These are apparently utterly irrelevent constructs of a religious worldview. Thus, a death enforced by the state for the protection of its citizenry is no different on a moral level than the death of an eight-year-old girl at the hands of her abductor.

And this is apparently perfectly legitimate to many people.

I truly want to understand this position, if I can. Surely I am missing something extremely lucid and poignant about it, am I not? I know that all the good-hearted and apparently intelligent people I know who believe this cannot simply be cold-hearted dummies. I am trusting in that confidence, because I do not want to believe they are cold-hearted dummies. And yet, if this is all there is to it, that the action alone defines the crime, and not the motive and the goal, then I am afraid I have no choice.

Maybe I should ask the Baudelaire children if they'd rather be knocked-off by Count Olaf than, maybe, steal his car and make a break of it. I wonder what they'd say?

the Boast of Christmas Past...

2006-01-02T17:13:00.000-08:00

It's finally over. The presents are unwrapped, my son's new toy car has one of its doors merrily broken off (not that he cares in the least), the tree, while not taken down yet, is getting dried up and crotchety. If it could talk it'd have a rheumy, cracked voice and it would say things like "Back in MY day, I'd get new water every morning. People stuck colorful boxes under me. There was this little monster that kept knocking ornaments off me. These days hardly anybody even remembers to turn my lights on in the morning. Nobody notices the old tree. Nobody comes and visits. It's gettin drafty in here. I'm losing my needles. Throw another tree skirt around my stump, would'ja?"

I'm not going to wax nostalgic about Christmas this year. It was pretty good. We didn't travel to see any family (who live several states away) and that was, frankly, the best gift of all. We stayed home, my wife and I, with our three-year-old and his baby sister, and we just chilled out. We turned on the old gas fireplace (does that qualify as an oxymoron?) and at four o'clock that afternoon, for lack of anything better to do, we packed everybody in the car and went to the park. It was bitingly cold. Zane ran around like a little wildebeest. My wife ran after him delightedly and I carried my daughter all bundled in my coat, her little round face the only thing visible, like an indian poking her head out of a teepee. It was great. It was so peaceful and pleasant that it was, to be honest, a little surreal.

I don't deserve this much happiness, do I?

I feel out of place in today's America. Am I wrong or does it seem like people are taking a strange, perverse, mirthless pride in being stressed out and miserable? A few years ago, my wife, who was then working in the corporate world, told me about a conversation she observed between several of her coworkers. They were all comparing escalating stories of how rushed and overwhelming their weekend schedules were. If I remember it, they went something like this:

"Ugh. Saturday was hell for me. I was on the road by eight with nothing but a coffee and a danish and a carload of kids. I had to coordinate four kids with two games, one rehearsal, and two practices between them. I didn't get home until ten!"

"Yeah, that's tough. Me, I was in the car at six because my son's soccer tournament was forty minutes away. The twins' piano recital was twenty minutes later across town. I got a speeding ticket, had a fender bender in the parking lot of the junior high, and got into a three-way fight with the umpire and another parent at my daughter's softball game."

Oh yeah? Well me and my kids slept in the car on Friday night to save time in the morning. We peeled out of the driveway at five til dawn and had to cut through eleven backyards to make the starter's pistol at the track meet! I had forty-three stops, made dinner in the trunk with a hibachi grill and a can of sterno while the car was idling at an intersection strategically positioned between Joey's tuba lesson and Tiffany's ballet tumbling class and STILL squeezed in a workout, two hours of research on this morning's report, five minutes' quality time with my wife, an oil change and a three-quarters of a lawn mowing."

Or something like that.

And that's the misery and stress some people actually choose. I look at the news and it would seem that the world is simply chock full of pain, loss, tragedy, death, destruction, want, greed, hate and overall, plain-and-simple bad mojo. A good chunk of the people I know are unhappy. A lot of them have crappy marriages. Most of them dislike their work. More than a few have experienced great personal losses of the size and scope that I cannot even wrap my brain around.

And here I am, in the center (my center, at least) of this great big stewing cesspool of yuck, and I'm happy. I feel guilty about it! I'm happy, damn it! I have unbelievably awesome kids (granted, they are 3 and 7 months, so they haven't had much chance yet to turn really awful), a career that pays pretty durn well, and that I would continue working at even if I stopped being paid, a gorgeous, delightful wife, good health, great teeth, a decent bowling average, and a mother-in-law whose company I actually enjoy.

Wow.

So what's the deal? I don't know, and to be truly honest, I don't care that much. This new American arms-race of stress and misery is one rat-race I am very happy to bow out of. I lose. Darn.

So anyway, this was just one big long ramble. I am gonna go have dinner now and do some work. Merry post-Christmas to you all, and for those of you intent on outdoing everybody else in the stress department, may you have a horrid and miserable new year, full of anxiety, noise, and breathless rushing.

That was sarcasm, by the way. (grin!)