the dumping ground

Pensoj

2010-04-20T00:23:00.003-04:00

Mi scivolas se mia geedziĝa estas finata.

Mi geedziĝis kun mia edzino antaŭ preskaŭ dekdu jaroj, konante ŝi antaŭe tri jaroj. Kiam ni geedziĝis, mi kredis ke nia amo sufus por tutaj niaj vivoj. Sed, ni estas tie ĉi nun, kaj mi ne povas diri ke mi konas se ŝi plu amas min ... aŭ se mi plu amas ŝin.

Kiel ni venis al tian lokon? Kiel povas du geviroj, kiuj diris ke ili amos ĉiam, rivi kie ili ĉiam, aŭ preskaŭ ĉiam, koleras? Mi ne povas feliĉigi ŝin plu. Kiam ŝi leviĝas matene, ŝi parolas kolere al mi; kiam ŝi revenas al hejmo poste sia laboro, ŝi parolas kolere al mi. Estas kiel ŝi ĉiam koleras, al mi, al aliulo, al ĉiuj kaj al ĉiojn. Kaj kiam ŝi koleras, ŝi uzas vortojn malbonegajn. Hieraŭ mi devis fermi la porton de la ĉam ke ŝi estis, ĉar ŝi estis kolerdiranta "Fiku tion! Fiku! Fiku!" denove kaj denove, unu foje poste alia. Ŝi ofte faras tion, kaj mi ja dormemas de tio.

Mi ja dormemas, kaj mi ne povas kontinui tiel. Hodiaŭ vespere, mi demandis de mi se mi povas kontinui geedziĝe tiel, kaj mi komprenis ke mi ne povas. Ni jam geedziĝas dekdu jarej. Kiel oni kontinui tiel por kvardek jaroj ke ankoraŭ venas? Kiel oni kontinui tiel por tridek jaroj ke ankoraŭ venas? Dudek? Mi ne povas, kaj mi ne certas ke estas iu kiu povas, sen feliĉeco sufa por diri "Mi amas mian edzinon."

Mi ne certas plu se ŝi plu amas min. Estas kiel nia geedziĝo mortis.

Ankaŭ, ni havas tri gefiloj; la plijunaj aĝas malpli unu jaro.

Mi ne volas por ili grandiĝas kun deedziĝo de ilia gepatroj ... sed mi ankaŭ ne volas por ili grandiĝas kun la kolero de sia patrino ĉiam kie ŝi estas.

Sinjoro Eternulo, aŭskultas mian preĝon, kaj trovigu por mi la respondon de tia problemo, ĉar mi ne scias via vojo.

canto iv

2008-12-16T16:15:00.001-05:00

Canto IV begins as Dante awakens in the first of nine circles of hell.

There are no levels of hell mentioned in the Bible, where hell is generally a miserable place to be, if not a place of actual, eternal torment. The Greek word most commonly translated as hell in the New Testament is hades, which is more or less equivalent to the Hebrew sheol used in the Old Testament. The term refers to a more or less universal destination for the dead; good, bad, or indifferent, everyone ends up here.

Whether Alighieri based his detailed soteriography of hell on ideas he inherited, or created it from scratch, I have no idea. The hell of “Inferno” is an inverted cone of nine concentric circles, gouged into the earth by the impact of Satan when he was cast out of heaven. Overseen by devils who see that the damned are appropriately tormented for their sins, each circle is marked by the type of sin that defined the character of those imprisoned there, with the sin worsening the deeper into hell you go.

Damnation in the First Circle isn't that bad, all things considered; actually, eternal separation from God is easier for those imprisoned here than for the undecideds whom Dante saw chasing the banner in Canto III. That's because the First Circle is home to the righteous pagans and unbaptized infants, people who would have believed in God if they had been given the chance. In their commentary novel “Inferno,” Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle remark that this is the saddest circle of all because the absence of torment allows those imprisoned here the illusion of contentment.

It's here that we see the first actual example of any sort of biblical teaching about hell. Dante, hearing the woe-begotten sighs of those confined to the First Circle, asks his guide if any have ever left this circle. Those whom Virgil names are a brief Who's Who of personalities of the Tanakh, such as Adam, Noah, Abraham and David. Church teaching is that the Old Testament saints, some of whom Virgil names, waited in Limbo until the coming of Christ, whom the Apostle Paul wrote descended into hell (Greek hades) and freed those imprisoned there.

But it wouldn't be much fun to have Limbo empty save for the souls of unbaptized infants, so Alighieri fills the First Circle of hell, many unnamed souls packed so thick that he compares them to a wood, until he comes to a castle that houses a laundry list of exalted ancients. On the way there, he is greeted by a group of ancient poets who (naturally) hail Virgil as their chief.

The castle is an interesting thing. Dante notes that it has seven walls circling it, each with a gate that leads inward, and at the center is a meadow filled with the somber, quiet shades of the most righteous. This probably is the Elysian Fields, where Virgil claimed in “The Aeneid” is where the virtuous dead reside, which makes his pre-eminence among the dead here ironically appropriate.

The dead whom Dante names here are an interesting mix. He begins with heroes, mixing mythological figures like Hector and Aeneas, with historical figures like Caesar and Brutus -- not the Brutus who killed Julius Caesar, but the Brutus who liberated Rome from the Tarquins. Surprisingly, at least to me, he also includes here Saladin, a Muslim leader who fought the Crusaders during the Middle Ages, and who was so well known for his compassion and dignity that there were legends that he actually was a secret Christian. (According to one story, when Richard Lionheart became ill, Saladin not only refused to press an advantage against him, he sent supplies and medical help to his ailing foe.)

Following the warlike souls, Dante notes the philosophers: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and others who are noted for laying the foundations of mathematic and scientific disciplines, like Euclid and Ptolemy, and Galen the physician, and a few other classic names like Cicero and Seneca and the mythical singer Orpheus. The only reason we're given for these people's presence in Limbo is that they were great thinkers whose name and fame remained until Dante's time, so that God was inclined to be merciful and spare them further punishment than the oblique sadness that permeates the First Circle.

And that is itself telling about Alighieri. While a lot of the sins depicted in his hell get a poetic comeuppance in their punishment, it seems he's only too willing to make exceptions for those he likes and approves of, since, like the rest of us, he supposes that God must feel the same way that he does. Thus the damned souls are damned for the actions that he believes are worthy of damnation, and those who are granted respite or a commuted sentence get it because he believes they should.

If that's revealing about Dante, it's revealing about all of us who are quick to pronounce God's judgment on others. Too often, it's not God's judgment that we are pronouncing, but our own, and the presumption we have in ascribing to God our own petty biases and hatred should chill us to the bone.

After he beholds all those magnificent souls in the castle of the First Circle, Dante takes his leave of the First Circle and, with Virgil as his guide, follows the path to a region where nothing shines.

canto iii

2008-11-18T22:28:00.001-05:00

This canto contains what the most recognizable line in "The Divine Comedy," and possibly one of the best-known lines in Western literature. It is the sign above the entrance to hell: "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here." That line encapsulates the miserific vision of hell: no hope, no escape, just unrelenting torment, day after day, year after year, until even the mountains have been worn down to grains of sand, and even then, there is no relief.

The finality of such a sentence is one of the reasons I don't particularly care for the doctrine of hell. As avoidable a fate as it may be to those who set the doctrines, an eternity of searing torment is still too much, too late. The torments of Dante's hell offer no redemption to those incarcerated there, as the sufferings of this life may; nor is there an escape, as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle provide in their own "Inferno" novel.

And yet readers have returned to "The Divine Comedy" for centuries, despite objections to the severity of hell.

A lot of the reason for the poem's appeal begins to come clear in this very canto. Alighieri uses some apocalyptic imagery in Canto I, placing savage animals in Dante's path that commentators see as representing both political states and worldly vices; and Canto II saw garden-variety mysticism in the intercession Beatrice makes on Dante's account to rescue him from the dark wood; but so far we have seen none of the turn-your-head sorts of images that we associate with "The Inferno." Until now.

Here at the entrance to the land of the dead, unearthly moans assault Dante's ears with a din that he renders in a manner both poignant and unsettling. The people uttering these tormented cries run through the vestibule of hell, stung by hornets and wasps as they chase a banner that flutters in the breeze, just beyond their reach; their tears mixing with blood as they fall, to be consumed on the ground by worms.

And this picturesque torment is just what occurs in the vestibule to hell; the sin for which these people are being tormented endlessly is one of cowardice, not one of the more horrible sins that mark the lower circles of hell. Those punished could not bring themselves either to follow God nor to live lives of open sin. Virgil likens them to angels who neither fought with God when Satan rebelled, nor sided with the Devil. The price of their cowardice is that neither heaven nor hell will admit them.

And in this procession of banner-chasers is where we find a cipher for one layer of interpretation of "The Inferno." Dante claims to recognize several members of the crowd, but comments only on one, whom he accuses of "cowardice in making the great refusal." Alighieri makes no further comment on this, but commentators apparently believe it was Pope Celestine V, who resigned the papal office five months later and gave it to Pope Boniface VIII..

From what I can tell, Celestine V's papcy is remarkable only for its brevity, and even his successor was inconsequential. The issue Alighieri has with Celestine seems to be solely that he relinquished his papal office. And to a man like Dante, who took a bullet not once, briefly, but over much of his adult life, for his views, that decision to reject the Seat of Peter must have been not only incomprehensible, but reprehensible as well.

And, after all, that's what hell is all about? Setting aside our theological bases for hell, the people we most would like to see in hell are the people who are unlike us. A hundred years ago in the United States, native fundamentalists conflated dislike of hard-drinking Irish workers and Italian immigrants, with religious differences that Protestants have the Roman Catholic Church. Today it's not uncommon to hear conservative preachers calling down God's wrath upon pro-choices, gays and lesbians, and environmentalists; or for liberal Christians to get snarky and suggest that when things go wrong for the GOP, it's because conservatives aren't following God. Hell's a great place to send people who aren't like us, because they clearly deserve it. If they didn't, they would be more like us.

Canto III is also where we see Alighieri begin to draw more fully upon Greco-Roman mythology to flesh out his vision of hell, from its soteriography to its personalities. Virgil here refers to the Acheron, one of the rivers that flowed through Hades; and Dante himself beholds Charon, the ancient oarsman whose job it was to ferry the dead across the River Styx. A widely held religious view in the Middle Ages was that anyone who worshiped pagan gods actually was worshiping a devil, a belief Alighieri himself seems to have held. He portrays Charon not just as an old man, but one "with eyes of glowing coal," with no patience or pity for any who dawdle.

The entire experience is too much for poor Dante. Although he had resolved at the end of Canto II to put aside fear, he notes that even years after this experience occurred, he still trembles at its mere recollection. Now having crossed the Styx a living man, he is witness an earthquake accompanied by a bright light, and he passes out.

canto ii

2008-11-16T01:56:00.000-05:00

The first time I ever tried the high dive, I was too scared to jump.

It was agonizing. The whole time we had been at the pool, I had been watching one kid after another climb the ladder, walk or even run the length of the board, and then dive in. Some of them had jumped, some of them had cannonballed, and a few had actually dived, arms stretched out to part the water before them. It looked like a lot of fun, and so I had decided to give it a shot.

It didn't feel as easy as it looked, though. For one thing, the top of the ladder seemed much higher off the ground than it had seemed when I was on the ground. And the diving board didn't feel very once I was standing on it. I walked carefully out to the end of the board, and froze. There were kids down in the water, playing and splashing about, and having a grand old time, and I knew that it was perfectly safe just to jump off.

But I couldn't do it. Heart in my throat, I carefully turned around and walked back to the ladder, which I climbed back down to terra firma.

So I think I can understand the reaction Dante has at the start of Canto II. At this point, he is still in the dark wood, in sight of the holy mountain and not yet on his way down into the circles of hell. It's at this point that Dante has the only sensible reaction anyone can have at the mouth of hell: What am I thinking? I can't go down there!

When I stood at the end of the diving board, I'm fairly sure I tried to psych myself into making the jump. I'd been off regular diving boards plenty of times. I'd seen dozens of kids jump off the high-dive that day alone. (I had the same problem trying the zip line at an Afs camp in New Zealand in 1987.)

Dante does the same thing. Journeys into hell are a pretty common thing in literature, after all. Odysseus made such a trip in “The Odyssey”; Heracles went there at least twice; the Bible teaches that Jesus descended into hell to free all those who had died in faith; and so on. Dante calls to mind two other such stories, in an attempt to put his impending descent into perspective.

The first tale he mentions is Virgil's own “Aeneid.” In that poem, Aeneas, one of the surviving members of the royal family of Troy, visits hell and discovers that he is destined to be the ancestor of the Roman Empire, which will restore a golden age to the earth under the august leadership of its first emperor. (Coincidentally, I'm sure, Virgil wrote “The Aeneid” during the reign of Augustus Caesar.) The other tale Dante mentions, which I've never read, comes from a medieval vision of the Apostle Paul descending into hell. (2 Corinthians 12 tells of Paul having a vision of heaven.)

What's interesting about these reminders is that, to Dante, they underscore his unworthiness of such an undertaking, which he is sure he will regret. He is neither a great Trojan lord, not a hero of the faith, like Paul, and is fairly sure he is going to regret such an undertaking once it has begun.

Perhaps it would be useful here to differentiate between Dante the character in the poem, and Dante Alighieri the poet. Dante the character is practically shaking with fear here, humbly considering himself unworthy of the task set before him; Dante Alighieri is using this to lay the foundation for declaring his worthiness to his readers.

And that justification comes swiftly from the mouth of Virgil, who as the premiere poet of ancient Rome naturally is going to make an impression on Dante. Virgil explains that he was in Limbo, the first circle of hell, where, as Alighieri explains in a later canto, virtuous pagans and unbaptized infants go when they die.

Virgil explains to Dante that he was sent to his side from Limbo by Beatrice, who came to him straight out of heaven to see to lead Dante away from the wild beasts that had been threatening him on the hillside. And not only Beatrice, but two other women from heaven, are calling for him. (Though I count three besides Beatrice: the Virgin Mary, Lucia and Rachel.)

Dante finds this heavenly encouragement more than enough, and he resolves anew to go into hell, with Virgil as his guide.

So what's at work here is that Alighieri, in presenting his Dante avatar as fearful and unnerved by the trip, essentially is casting himself as a humble sort of fellow who would never presume on his own to say any of what follows in the remaining cantos of his own poem. As a result, the journey he takes, the things he claims to see, and the political ramifications of what he finds there – such as political foes suffering the torments of the damned – acquire a gloss of greater credibility.

The closest I've ever come to hell was attending middle school for three years, but at the time, that high dive felt pretty close. I tried it again later that same day, and after some of the other kids in line teased me for wanting to chicken out a second time, I made the jump.

Unlike Dante, I had a blast.

canto i

2008-10-25T17:40:00.001-04:00

Probably one of the most important things to remember as we started reading "Inferno" is that it's about a man who is going through a mid-life crisis.

The first canto of "Inferno" sets the story at halfway through Dante's life, roughly around the time he was 35. Dante's family were associated with the White Guelfs, which political alliance had fallen out of favor with the ruling class in Florence, forcing him into exile away from his wife and children. To some extent, though the poem is thoroughly imbued with religious meaning, the despair that marks this first canto reflects the political/spiritual anguish Dante feels as one has been wronged. He is suffering from a sense of grievous wrong, and he hopes that justice one day will prevail, both spiritually and politically, as the wrong is made right and those who have been humbled are exalted.

The canto begins in a dark wood, where Dante has been suffering deeply, and where he encounters a brace of wild animals: first, a beautiful leopard that keeps blocking his way for all that it is enchanting to look at; secondly, a fierce lion; and lastly a terrifying she-wolf. It's a common device to use animals to represent either an attitude that matches that animal's demeanor, or at least a person who possesses that attitude. The notes in my copy of "Infero" mention that these animals all represent political powers -- the leopard, Florence; the lion, the royal house of France; and the wolf, no less than the papal see. Yet the same three also correspond to mortal vices: worldly pleasure, ambition, and avarice. What is significant is that the animals all keep Dante from mounting the hill that he is trying to climb, presumably to escape the fearsome woods and gain some perspective on where he is.

At this point, Virgil arrives and explains to Dante that he can never make it up the hill, because the she-wolf eats all who pass that way and becomes only the hungrier for having eaten. Dante's way out is to go down, through the depths of hell, where he will witness the torments of those confined to eternal fire; but of greater importance to the poet Dante, it seems, is the coming of the Greyhound that will destroy the she-wolf and return her to hell from whence she was set loose, and that will deliver Italy.

The writing about this Greyhound is decidedly messianic in style, to the point that the greyhound feeds on virtues like wisdom, love and "manfulness," which fits the other apocalyptic imagery of the canto. But it also works on a political level, apparently, since it may refer to any number of other political figures from Dante's life, especially given the rather limited range of the Greyhound's dominion.

I've always found Dante's choice of Virgil for his guide to be interesting, but in many regards it makes sense. Dante was Italian, and Virgil himself was an Italian, from the Golden Age of the Roman Empire. As a scholar, Dante doubtless had studied Virgil's "Aeneied" extensively, and in any event, he refers to himself as Virgil's disciple and student. One thing that is mildly worth noting: Virgil's epic "Aeneid" also depicted a trip to the Underworld, as Aeneas sought counsel from the shade of a prophet there, as Odysseus once had as well. The shade Aeneas visited, whose identity temporarily eludes me (I last read "The Aeneid about 15 years ago), spoke of a coming gold age for Aeneas' descendants. The terms of Virgil's prophecy were clearly intended to describe Augustus Caesar, but some people have tried to interpret them around Christ.

Which of course is only fitting. The messianic expectation is archetypal, common to all people; just as we all believe that things used to better Once Upon a Time, we all have the hope that One Day Things Will Be Better Again.

And I suppose, when we're in a situation where our hopes and dreams have been thwarted by political machinations and bad luck, as many of Dante's had been, such an expectation and hope only makes sense.

blogging through 'inferno'

2008-10-15T23:06:00.004-04:00

If you read back over the past few years that I've been blogging, you're quickly going to reach a few conclusions:

I write a lot.
I write about a lot of things.
Some of the things that I write about, I write about a lot, like a man picking at a sore, or like a man who is hopelessly in love. (Sometimes even like a man hopelessly in love with picking at a sore.)
If something about my writing has struck your fancy, it can be hard to deal with all the other crap on the blog to follow the thread all the way through.

I decided tonight that I want to try something different. Starting tomorrow, I want to blog exclusively about Dante's "Inferno," one canto a night, until I have finished. Then, perhaps, I will continue through the rest of "The Divine Comedy," although the last time I tried reading Dante's masterpiece, I never made it more than halfway through "Paradiso."

Dante's epic poem is a phenomenal piece of literature. Although he did not invent the doctrine of hell, nor even create the doctrines and images expressed in it, there can be no doubt that it is his vision of hell; his beautifully haunting pictures of the circles and cornices of hell, filled with the damned who are buffeted by gale-force winds, submerged in muck, burned in fire or frozen in ice; that has defined hell in popular understanding for all the centuries since. Some of the details are changed -- Satan is more commonly seen as king in hell, rather than a prisoner there, each of his three mouths chewing on a different traitor -- but our grotesquely exaggerated sense of elaborate punishments, too ironically chosen for the person's defining sins, has its deepest root in Dante's poem. The Wood of Suicides appears in "Sandman"; Dr. Strange once led Marvel's band of mutants through the Nine Circles in the pages of "Uncanny X-men," and authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle were once inspired to journey through hell themselves, in their own "Inferno."

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to hell. I hope you come with me.

jesus h. christ

2008-10-14T13:17:00.001-04:00

the big easy

2008-10-12T22:24:00.000-04:00

Finishing up here in New Orleans tonight. The city has been absolutely amazing, and I've loved how relaxed a lot of the city is where music and entertainers are concerned. Even now, months from Carnival and Mardi Gras, you can't go anywhere without encountering live jazz music, often from amateur musicians playing for tips.

It's been tremendous. We've loved pretty much every minute of it.

Of course, tonight we visited Bourbon Street for dinner with the extended family. Probably a place I would have enjoyed more if I were 14 years younger and didn't have impressionable young girls with me.

waiting for hammerfall

2008-10-09T22:46:00.002-04:00

The Dow is around 8500 now. So I think it's a fair question; what do we do for work, if layoffs happen?

Me, I'm simultaneously looking for work and trying to build my free-lance client base so I can have the bases covered either way. And if my clientele builds, theoretically I can recommend friends for other work, like web design, photography or illustration that are related to what I do but outside my ability set.

And because Natasha and I own our own house, live in a city with a high demand for rental property, and still are making our mortgage payments, we've talked briefly about letting the spare room or -- if we can find a way to make it work -- potentially the entire house, though I'd prefer to avoid that alternative if we can.

The big thing right now is to reduce expenses however we can. We make our own bread, and as many of our meals from scratch as we can, which has kept our food bill fairly steady the past year, particularly with the garden providing beans, tomatoes, and some other vegetables. I've been relying on the library more than ever for books and movies, and expect that if it comes to it during the winter, I'll probably spend most of the day there as well, using the WiFi connection to get my work done in a building where I don't have to foot the heating bill myself.

Some friends of ours came up with a great way to reduce their expenses, by sharing a house with another family. It gives them all full access to an entire house (for the most part), for half the price. Utilities are cut in two, food becomes cheaper per person because of the economies of scale, and the hosting family gets extra money for their mortgage while the second family is saving on their rent.

One perspective that I have found helps is to consider that everything you buy assumes the intrinsic value of the money you spent buying it. Thus, if I spend $14 on a pair of pants, those pants are worth $14 even if I can't wear them anymore. So, rather than throwing them out (and tossing my money into a landfill) or simply recycling them (thereby tossing my money into a recycling bin), I find some other use for the material, to get more bang for my buck. Thus I have a rug made of old jeans; a tote bag also made from denim that saves me 2 cents every time I use it at the supermarket; a blanket-in-progress made from socks and other clothes too worn out to be useful as clothes, but quite warm as a blanket. Our trash output has dropped to one garbage can every month, OR LESS; we spend no money on fertilizer, because we compost so much; and I'm in the process of turning an old vanity sink into a game cabinet because I saw a new use for the wood and basic structure, with a few alterations.

If more of us had this attitude, and for a longer time -- it used to be standard practice for Americans, as in the rest of the world as well -- we probably wouldn't be in quite the dire straits that we're in now.

there's no one as irish ...

2008-10-08T20:47:00.000-04:00

... as Barack O'Bama

d'oh!

2008-10-08T10:59:00.001-04:00

I just realized yesterday that when I applied for a certain position at the university, I attached a cover letter for a different position I was applying for elsewhere at the university.

Somehow, I don't think I'm going to get the interview.

random memory

2008-10-07T12:13:00.002-04:00

Back in 1987, I attended the former Edmund Ignatius Rice College in Rotorua, New Zealand, while I was living there as an exchange student with AFS.

I have a lot of memories of the place, from David Baines beating up two of the fourth-formers who had been giving me a hard time; and Mark Wirihana teaching me how to a taiaha; down to learning the Hail Mary, despite being Protestant and saying "mumble mumble mumble" during chapel whenever we were called upon to pray in unison. But one memory stands out right now, for whatever reason.

My sixth-form homeroom teacher was Brother Philip, a decent enough guy, all things considered. He was long on patience, which you had to be at an all-boys high school that was about to merge with an all-girls high school and your job was one that probably would face the ax when the music stopped. Actually, you had to be long on patience in being a teacher at an all-boys' high school.

One fine afternoon, at the end of the school day, I took it upon myself to stack all the desks in Brother Philip's room. I would pick up one, and lay it flat atop another. I would then pick up a third, and carefully balance its feet atop the feet of the upended desk. After that came a fourth desk, which also would be placed, upside-down, so that in short order there were four desks stacked together, nearly touching the ceiling.

Now repeat the process until every last desk in the room has been placed into these rather awkward arrangements.

Just as I began to survey my work, it suddenly hit me: School wasn't over, and it was time for maths class. So I grabbed my bookbag, exited through the door and went down the hallway into Ms. Gosnell's class, where we were about to have a test. It didn't even occur to me to go through the door that joined the two rooms, which is probably just as well, considering what happened next.

About ten minutes into the test, Brother Philip entered the room, looking slightly aggrieved. He walked over to Ms. Goswell, spoke to her in hushed tones for a minute, and after she shook her head in dismay, left the room as quietly as he had entered.

A day or two later it hit me that he had been trying to figure out who had left him with such a mess to straighten out. At the time, I was hard at work on surds or the Pythagorean theorem or some other bit of math that I had mastered a year or two earlier back in the States, so while I registered his presence in the room, it never occurred to me to snicker or giggle, which surely would have given me away.

If they were asked, none of my classmates ratted me out. And I never told a soul that it had been me. Until now.

small acts of decency

2008-10-06T17:09:00.002-04:00

Next month my friend Shelly is turning 40.

She's going through a difficult time right now, separated from her wife, marginalized by her own parents, and feeling at times quite alone in the world. She's my best friend; I've known her for 20 years, more than half my lifetime. So I sent her a note and asked her if she wanted to get together next month to celebrate her birthday.

You would have thought from her reaction that I had just paid off her mortgage.

My friend Walks in the Rain, who I am sure will keep me from ever getting conceited or feeling special about myself, recently told me, "Congratulations, you're a decent human being. which makes you above average." It calls to mind the many times I have failed even these basic acts of decency, and how far below the standard I really am.

How can we stand to live like this, where a simple kindness is above average? How can we bear to look at ourselves in the mirror?

Weddings

2008-10-06T14:12:00.001-04:00

We kept our own wedding pretty simple, but I wish in many ways it had been even simpler. (Or more unusual. Some couples get married in an underground chapel just outside Hellertown, Pa., on Halloween.)

Couples should do what works for them, and never mind what their parents think. Purple wedding dress, ripped or stone-washed jeans, red-orange fezes -- whatever they like. We did Communion for the two of us, instead of a Unity candle; a friend of mine and his wife did Air Communion.

Ken's explanation was that he and his wife had planned to take Communion together. Unfortunately, the person in charge of Communion had forgotten to place either element in the appropriate place, with the result that they had to "fake it." They went through the motions of taking Communion, drinking nonexistent juice from empty cups, and eating nonexistent bread from empty trays.

a chain letter for good luck

2008-10-05T22:59:00.001-04:00

Do not throw this letter away. It has the power to bring you good luck and prosperity; failing to follow its directions could lead to disaster. This letter has been around the world nineteen times and has been translated into twenty-three languages.

It began in late 1864, when it was dictated to Mary Todd Lincoln, U.S. President Lincoln's wife, through a medium, by the spirit of her late son Tadd Lincoln. Despite Mary Lincoln's great belief in the spiritual world, her husband would not let her follow its instructions, and early in 1865, President Lincoln was shot and killed by John Wilkes Booth. Mary Lincoln went mad with grief and eventually was consigned to an asylum.

After President Lincoln's assassination, the letter was discovered by his vice president and successor, President Andrew Johnson. President Johnson neglected the letter and was impeached, but at the last moment he remembered the letter, and sent out 10 copies to various heads of state and childhood friends, and he was acquitted by one vote.

This is not a hoax; the chain letter has power from the spirit world. Hundreds of people have ignored it and suffered the consequences. In 1892, Pierre Jean Hugo received a copy of the French version of the letter and threw it out, and broke his leg the next day after falling down the stairs. A neighbor of his, Francois Duchatellier, also received a copy. Monsieur Duchatellier sent out ten copies and a week later inherited a chicken farm outside Digne. His great-grandson later sold the chicken farm for $10 million to Frank Perdue of Perdue Chickens.

In the early twentieth century, the archbishop of Sarajevo received a copy of the letter, and thinking himself immune to such letters, rejected it. Six months later, he was assassinated and Europe was plunged into World War I, perhaps the bloodiest conflagration the world has ever seen. But when Jafar Abu-Shabazz in Kenya received a Swahili version of the letter in 1938 and sent out ten copies, he not only married his childhood sweetheart, but he escaped World War II when several of his friends and neighbors were conscripted and died in the military.

Send no money; money has no place in spiritual matters. Simply make ten copies of this letter and send them to friends, relatives or strangers via e-mail or a regular postal service within one week, then sit back and wait for your luck to change. U.S. President George Bush didn't believe in chain letters, but when he mailed ten copies in early 1991, he was able to defeat Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War with minimal casualties. President Bush sent a copy to Ted Turner, and as a result of his own diligence, Ted Turner was able to establish CNN as a credible news organization with its spot coverage of the Gulf War.

Ten copies are all that is needed to bring good fortune. Don't be like Northwood High junior Michael Rogerstein who failed to copy the letter in 1963. He broke his leg two weeks later and was unable to attend the prom with his girlfriend. Instead, she went with Virgil Forrest and married him instead, and didn't even invite Michael to the wedding. Gillian Anderson sent out copies and as a result has become a famous actress for her performance as Dana Scully on the X-Files.

Just send out ten copies. It works!

romans 14

2008-10-04T01:05:00.003-04:00

In this chapter, Paul frames the issue of acceptance in terms of our appetites, focusing on meat and vegetables.

I've heard that the issue here is that the meat had been offered as a sacrifice to idols, and now was being sold in the market for people to eat. (I seem to recall that the Greek word translated as "unclean" in the latter half of 14 is different from the Greek word used elsewhere with regards to kosher law, but I won't swear to it, and my concordance is buried somewhere right now, out of reach.) Some Christians regarded the meat as spiritually polluted, tainted from its association with pagan deities. Others saw it quite sensibly as meat that they could buy more cheaply than the best cuts the supermarket offered. (I may be conflating this with 1 Corinthians 8, where Paul also talks about such matters.)

There are plenty of parallels I can think of in contemporary Christian circles today: music, movies, TV, liturgical and worship styles, and just about everything else. I've heard Christians wax eloquent about the spiritual taint of secular worship (or rock music), of secular movies and programs, and of church services that remind them negatively of churches they used to attend. Getting personal, to this day, organ music at church kills any interest I have in the service. Acoustic guitar ramps me right up, though.

What I find interesting is that while most preachers I've heard have indicated that the people who wouldn't eat the meat were the ones with "weak faith," Paul never says so. Maybe those who refused to eat meat had weak faith because they feared defiling themselves with meat sacrificed to idols; but maybe those who ate the meat had weak faith, because they took too much license and supported a pagan temple system.

It also is interesting that Paul frames the issue of weakness and strength in terms of appetites, specifically food appetites. Food is one of those basic drives in all of us, more fundamental than enjoyment of beauty, more primal than the sex drive. Leave a person without food and she becomes grumpy and irritable, but once you give her something to eat, it's amazing how high those gustatory sensations can take you. In fact, food is one of the basic identifying things of a culture, along with dress and language. Think about it. American food is high in meats and starches; Mexican food is high on peppers, corn and beans; and so on. Food is one of the ways we can judge who is "in" and who is "out."

And Paul is saying that whatever you think about your food, be firmly convinced in your own mind, but give a break to your neighbor who just doesn't get it as well as you do. Eat their meat to avoid causing them to stumble; don't eat your meat so that you don't offend them needlessly. (And don't you love that he prefaces this whole weak-and-strong-faith discussion with the counsel to love one another?)

I'm also struck by the placement he gives this along with the Sabbath, and the issue of holy days. Whether it's your base appetite, or the loftier matters of holy days and religious observance, his message is the same: Work with one another, and don't be quick to beat your breast and wail over your brother's sinfulness in not getting it as well as you do, since Christ has accepted each of you. That would, conceivably, mean breaking one of your religious rules -- or following one of somebody else's -- to avoid causing difficulty for them.

I believe C.S. Lewis wrote about this in "The Screwtape Letters," about how, but for careful work and planning, the Church of England might have become a hotbed of charity, goodwill, and understanding.

Applications.

Applications.

Applications.

I remember a brief conversation a couple months ago, where the Bible study leader asked us what made us disinclined to like another person, and it played into the issue of clean and unclean. I think Paul is making in essence the same argument here, or at least a rather related one, that we have no right to shrink away or look down on other people because of those little things that seem so important to us. (Tattoos, preferring Pete Seeger to Tammy Trent, or actually enjoying listening to Jerry Decker on the Christian radio.)

Another example is one of dress. I remember hearing criticism when I was younger about the way "young people" dressed so inappropriately. Paul essentially would be saying here, "Don't sweat it so much. It's not a case of inappropriate:you::inappropriate:her. Each age group has its own standards of modesty and propriety."

Discussion: How can you tell if someone is not "really" a Christian? What behavior or attitudes do they exhibit that cause you to suspect they're only culturally or nominally a Christian, and not as committed or as real a follower as you? Or why would you look down on another Christian as not getting it? Heck, I have a few friends who are staunchly conservative. One in particular talks about Patriarchy Done Right, the way God wants it; he supports the government's use of torture as an interrogation technique; and regularly talks about culture wars, and how God has chosen to bless the Republican Party because it has a culture of life. He also has no problem with the government's rescue plan giving $700 billion to wealthy corporations and their heads, because "that's how the world works." I'm sure we both regularly shake our heads in disbelief at each other.

There's also the issue of the Tyranny of the Easily Offended. I'm sure you're familiar with it; it's the sort of thing that makes it difficult to say even "damn" or "hell" in a room of adults, because of a misapplication of Ephesians 5:4; or the discomfort that ensues when grown men have long hair or earrings; or when respectable people have piercings or tattoos.

For that matter, there's also the issue of how this affects how we approach sharing our faith. What parts of our lives should we be willing to adjust in order to include others outside of our faith. What is not negotiable? I'd say issues of justice, but that's about it.

Let's say my neighbors are Muslims. They had hoped to complete the haj expected of every good Muslim, and make the pilgrimage to Mecca. They've been saving their money, and were planning to go at the end of Ramadan this year. Suddenly, though, the economy has gone sour and their money is gone. (Though strictly speaking, they're not supposed to be investing it since that involves usury -- work with me here.) For my neighbors, that's a cause of great disappointment and grief, because they are required at least once in their lives to visit Mecca. I could talk with them about how Jesus is much cooler than Mohammed, because he only requires us to journey to him, and we can do that anywhere -- or I could sympathize with them in their loss.

Taking another tack, if my neighbor has made her living as a prostitute and is arrested or gets HIV, that's not a time for ha-ha-ing her over getting her just desserts. It's a time for sympathy and compassion, and mourning with her, and doing what I can to help her materially. The issue isn't one of "supporting her immoral lifestyle"; it's one of supporting her,

Or let's leave the hypothetical. My best friend of 20 years is transgendered. His parents have disowned him, his mother claiming a spiritual obligation to do so; and his wife has pushed him out of the house and done a lot to cut him out of her life, to the point that she didn't want to do anything with him for her birthday, but went out with his parents. Earlier, she and his sister planned an entire family visit without telling him about it or involving him at all.

I don't fault my friend's wife, entirely. It's a difficult situation she's in, and very painful for her. But there's more moralizing and judgment going on here than an attempt to embrace him as he is and seek a solution together. It's more of a parting of the ways, breaking into two camps and disavowing the legitimacy of the other, and failing to seek a resolution that is not in line with her (and her mother- and sister-in-law's) understanding of what proper Christian behavior from him should entail.

Less extreme examples. I had a friend in college who on principle wouldn't congratulate someone on having a baby out of wedlock, because they had been sinning. I didn't even think about it. I congratulated this person at once. I also read the names of AIDS victims when the AIDS quilt came to town, because people had died, leaving holes in the communities where they had lived, and it made sense to grieve with them that grieve. Same reaction when a dear friend was decloseted to her parents before she was ready, and her life became a living hell while they all reeled at her perceived immorality.

Justice, we can't be silent on. "Justice, justice you shall pursue," the rabbis conclude is the message of the Torah, and it makes sense to me. Writing a column for the newspaper, you get a feel after a while for what makes people stand up and take notice. I discovered that you can talk frankly about your faith, and people will react in a positive way if you're saying something meaningful. You can even talk about the True Meaning of Christmas and call people to repentance, and people not only listen, they'll respect what you have to say.

To an extent, though, how much does this matter in our church? It's like your series on Galatians two years ago. I don't recall seeing that much of a works theology at work in our church, nor such rampant legalism. I'm not cognizant of any real dissonance over doctrine, not like I saw back in college, where every little thing is a matter of Absolute Truth. Or maybe I'm just projecting, because it doesn't matter to me for the most part, so I don't notice when it matters to others until they make it matter to me.

And I'm sufficiently disengaged from evangelical culture to know if doctrinal matters like eternal security, glossolalia, prelapsarianism, and dispensational theology really command people's attention like they did when I was in college and people considered me unteachable and unspiritual because I rejected hardline Calvinist thinking. At least I never hear people talking about these things after the service. (Maybe they do in other settings,)

The closest I've come is finding some people uncomfortable over my views on biblical inspiration and literalism because they're not properly evangelical, and far as that goes, Matt Nolan got a kick out of seeing how much he and I agreed on such issues.

faith at a child's level

2008-10-03T21:07:00.001-04:00

Evangeline inadvertantly has reminded of something a friend once said, about relating to God through imaginary friends when she was child.

Like many children, Evangeline has plenty of stuffed animals, none of which has mattered much at all to her. Until her grandmother died. Then, suddenly, she bonded to a handmade stuffed rabbit she has had since she was born, which she calls Cinderabbit. Evangeline has slept with Cinderabbit every night since Grandma's funeral, and for a while took her everywhere she went as well.

As my friend observed with her imaginary friends, so I have seen with Evangeline and Cinderabbit. Cinderabbit demands nothing in return from Evangeline for the comfort she gives. She stays as close as Evangeline wants, loves her unconditionally, and listens to the moans and sighs Evangeline doesn't know the words to express.

She couldn't be any more real if her coat were made of velveteen.

veep debate

2008-10-03T20:15:00.001-04:00

I was struck by a few jabs she was able not only to get in, but to twist about as well. She correctly pointed out that Biden had criticized Obama on several points and now was professing agreement with him; as well as another point or two that my mind is blanking on right now.

But by and large, she succeeded primarily in the sense that she did not ever become totally incomprehensible, and never had to use a lifeline. For the most part, she stuck to campaign talking points, and I was disappointed to hear her repeat things that McCain had argued in his debate with Obama, and things that Obama had satisfactorily deflected at the time. (Voting against funding the war, for instance.)

I believe the gap between Obama and McCain is widening, and in Obama's favor. If this continues, I've little doubt that he's going to win the popular vote. Whether that carries into winning the election as well may be another matter.

'old yeller' and grief

2008-10-03T14:53:00.001-04:00

Evangeline didn't cry when Old Yeller Died*, but then she didn't cry over "The Bridge to Terabithia" either.

The book -- one of the best "boy and his dog" stories ever told in the English language -- takes place in Texas, not long after the Civil War. The boy's name is Travis, his little brother's name is Arliss; and the dog comes into their lives while the father is on a cattle drive up north.

Disney added the quarantine to draw out the conflict and give viewers time to accept the inevitable. The book was much more direct. In it, Travis realizes his dog probably has got rabies from fighting the mountain lion, so he calls him over, puts the muzzle to the dog's head, and pulls the trigger.

"Your mother told me about the dog" remains one of the best understated lines I've ever come across in a children's book.

I admit it was a surprise to me that she didn't cry when Travis had to shoot the dog, but then I've noticed that Evangeline internalizes a lot of her grief and then expresses it through other ways, particularly in art. When we lost Isaac, she took to drawing with a passion she hadn't shown in months. When we attended her grandmother's funeral, Evangeline merely grew very quiet when it was time to scatter her ashes, and said nothing at all on the subject until a few hours later, when she finally broached the subject with me in private.

She has inadvertently reminded of something a friend had said once, about relating to God through imaginary friends when she was a child. Like many children, Evangeline has plenty of stuffed animals, none of which has mattered much at all to her. Until her grandmother died. Then, suddenly, she bonded to a handmade stuffed rabbit she has had since she was born, which she calls Cinderabbit. Evangeline has slept with Cinderabbit every night since Grandma's funeral, and for a while took her everywhere she went as well.

As Rykie observed with her imaginary friends, so I have seen with Evangeline and Cinderabbit. Cinderabbit demands nothing in return from Evangeline for the comfort she gives. She stays as close as Evangeline wants, loves her unconditionally, and listens to the moans and sighs Evangeline doesn't know the words to express. She couldn't be any more real if her coat were made of velveteen.

* She isn't a John Wayne fan, either.

dear governor

2008-10-02T21:49:00.002-04:00

It's new-CLEAR, not new-KEW-ler.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

We now return to the debate, coming live over NPR.

books to ban

2008-10-02T16:47:00.003-04:00

I was perusing the list of most commonly challenged books in the U.S. on Wikipedia and noted that James and the Giant Peach was number 56 on the ALA's list of most challenged books of the '90s. I'm sorry, but did I miss something when I read that book?

Must be the anti-rhino views expressed by the author.

Hemingway made the list 3 times, and Mark Twain twice. I could be mistaken, but I expect that's because Twain uses the N-word, which use has overshadowed the remarkably nonracist sentiments expressed in "Huck Finn" particularly; and because Hemingway often writes about wounded men unable to have sex.

Honest, it also floors me when people want to ban books. I haven't read all the books on that list, but I've read a good deal of them, and none of them seemed remotely worthy of being banned. I can't even see them as that objectionable, at least those that I am familiar with. What's noteworthy is the books that didn't show up, at least when I casually skimmed the list. "Mein Kampf," for instance.

Let me clarify. There's banning in the sense that firemen come to your house and douse your private library with kerosense, and there's banning in the sense of "I don't want that in my house" or "You shouldn't read that." Perhaps "banning" is too strong a word for that sense, but in any event I can't see telling people not to read most of these books either. Many of them in fact are books that I would consider "must-reads" and many others fall under "Yeah, I really ought to read that."

I read "Old Yeller" to Evangeline when she was in first or second grade; and this past summer we were cracking up over "The Canterbury Tales." "All's Quiet on the Western Front" might be a little heavy for her as a bedtime story, but that's more of an age-appropriate issue, sort of like not letting her watch "Blazing Saddles" or read "Lord of the Flies" until she's older.

Still, I don't think there's a book in existence that deserves to be destroyed, with the possible exception of "Jane Eyre."

who'll stop the rain (new lyrics)

2008-10-01T23:18:00.001-04:00

Long as I remember, rain's been coming down.

Clouds of mystery throwing confusion on the ground

Must be ten years gone now, trying to find the sun,

And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain.

I went to Virginia, seeking shelter from the storm.

Caught up in the fable, I watched the tower burn.

Broken vows and new starts never loose the chains,

And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain.

Heard the children singing, how we cheered for more.

We huddled close together, trying to keep warm.

Still the rain kept falling, pouring on our ears,

And I wonder, still I wonder, how to stop the rain.

lightsabers and adamantium

2008-10-01T14:35:00.002-04:00

How's this for a geeky discussion? It's a thread over whether lightsabers can cut through adamantium.

As every Star Wars fan knows, lightsabers can cut through everything. And as every comics fanboy knows, adamantium is the nearly indestructible metal used in Marvel Comics. Ultron the homicidal robot has been made of it since the alloy was first discovered; Wolverine's skeleton is laced with it, which makes him even tougher; and just about anyone whom the writers and editors at Marvel want to make more dangerous, has access to it.

Still, while Adamantium is nearly indestructible, let's stress "nearly." The metallurgist who created it did so in an attempt to recreate the unique alloy in Captain America's shield. He failed; in the Marvel Universe, the shield remains the strongest alloy in existence.

The shield has been broken only once that I'm aware of. At the conclusion of the 11th issue of the Secret Wars miniseries back in the mid-1980s, Doctor Doom killed Spider-man, the Hulk, and those members of the Fantastic Four, X-men and Avengers who were present with a single bolt from the blue. When they were all restored to life in issue 12, Captain America's shield had a long shard missing. (He was able to restore it at the conclusion of the issue, owing to residual omnipotence in the air following Doom's defeat.)

Doom succeeded in breaking the shield only because he had stolen the power of the Beyonder, a being so powerful that Marvel editors at the time equated him with God.

So the real question isn't whether a lightsaber can cut through adamantium. It's whether it can cut through a metal so tough that only God can break a piece off.

bailout blues

2008-10-01T14:12:00.002-04:00

I'm not opposed to the government stepping in and bailing out some of the financial giants that have gone down the past week. To borrow a metaphor from The Daily Kos, when your patient has gone into cardiac arrest, you need to keep the heart functioning. The financial sector is the heart of our economy.

What I object to is that there has been little effort made to provide support for Joe and Jane America who have lost their homes in this bubble burst; i.e., the benefit they will receive from this will amount to the "trickle down." Those who stand to benefit the most are the power brokers and uberwealthy whose decisions and actions put the economy into this mess.

From what I understand of the bailout that was rejected Monday -- and I can't imagine the one being considered now differs much in this regard -- is that there will be no golden parachutes for CEO's hired *after* the bailout. Those who presided over the worse financial collapse in seventy years, however, still get theirs.

What's up with that? This may be how the world works, and how it always has worked, but I see no reason why we should tolerate or accept it, nor that we should facilitate it. Our government was founded to protect the people from tyranny, and in my book that includes economic and financial tyranny as well as political.

My point is, and remains, that the people who have presided over the crash of WaMu, Lehman Bros., AIG and the others are not entitled to turn a hefty profit over their greed and incompetence. The U.S. Government was, the last I knew, planning a rescue operation that would reward them personally for their failure, and then closing the barn door after all the horses had left, so there would be no more golden parachutes for later failures.

I call that wrong. Anyone with me?

grief

2008-09-30T11:06:00.001-04:00

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
-- William Shakespeare

alarmism?

2008-09-29T22:58:00.003-04:00

Revelation 6:5-6:

When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, "A quart of wheat for a day's wages, and three quarts of barley for a day's wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!"

Being a bit dramatic here? Maybe. On the other hand, you try living on unemployment checks, a little part-time work that has dried up, and the odd free-lance assignment you can find, for three months, with no insurance for two months, and see how calmly you take the economy going to hell in a handbag while leaders of both parties preen and posture and prepare to bail out the wealthy power-brokers who screwed it all up, while accusing each other of posturing and telling the people who need help the most, "Sorry, you have made your bed and now you must lie in it."

Yeah, I'm a little preoccupied about the mess, and I've been praying for grace and faith for myself, wisdom and compassion for our congressional leaders, and common sense and compassion for the fat cats who have driven us to this point.

Still, it's hard not to see some divine action in here. God has used us to judge and lay low a number of empires and evil regimes the last hundred years or more. It's not hard to picture him saying, "And now I shall judge the ax." We have done a lot on the international scene that we have felt justified in doing simply because we could and it was in our "national interest," as though that meant it automatically was in everyone's best interests -- wholesale destruction of the American Indian nations, for starters, without getting into our colonialesque behaviors in Africa and Asia.

And if I'm being melodramatic and expecting the worst, let me just say that expecting the worst means you're rarely disappointed, and occasionally surprised in a pleasant manner.

alcohol and me

2008-09-29T22:13:00.000-04:00

I got drunk, once. Not out-and-out drunk, but it was the most serious buzz I've ever had, and I'm sure it showed. A group of us had taken a tour of a private school with LEEDS Platinum certification, to get a sense of what could be done to make the charter school greener.

We went back to the house of the new principal to debrief and discuss our impressions, and he offered a variety of wines and beers. I picked a beer, and although I thought I went slowly, I also hadn't eaten anything all day.

Bad move. I realized about halfway down the bottle that my eyes were semi-glazed, and slowed down. We finally left the house about 90 minutes later, so I had plenty of time to detox, but I'm forever grateful that I had hitched a ride with another board member.

truer than fiction

2008-09-27T10:50:00.002-04:00

It's been observed many times by many people that nothing ruins a book quite like being told you have to read it.

There is, however, one book that stands out as an exception to this rule. Not even English class at John Paul College could dim the torch of this book as its light flickered through the dreary annals of required reading. That book was William Golding's "Lord of the Flies."

It's a short book, probably not even 200 pages, but I remember being fascinated by the stark realism that permeated the book. As the story begins, a group of boys has been stranded on an island with no adults. The boys, three of whom are named after major characters in "Coral Island," plan to establish a utopian society on this island while they wait for adults to come and rescue them. There's fresh water to drink, there are pigs they can kill for meat, and fruit they can eat, and one of the boys has Coke bottle glasses they can use to start fires when they need to.

But there are signs early on that their society will be less utopian than they intend. Without the restraining influence of adults, the boys' behavior becomes wilder, more dangerous, and angrier. Soon there is Betrayal. Torture. Murder. The boys soon split into two tribes, and under the sway of their leader, the tribe of choirboys launches a war of extinction against the other.

Eric Ziolkowski, my religion professor freshman year of college, cited "Lord of the Flies" as an example of the Christian doctrine that human nature is depraved. With a chuckle he described the book's view as pessimistic, and got a huge laugh. From what I could tell, I was the only one in the class to think Golding's depiction of human nature was pretty accurate.

It would be nice to think that violence and hatred -- and their close cousin, callous indifference -- don't come naturally to us, that, as Lieutenant Joe declaims in "South Pacific," such values have to be carefully instilled. It would be nice to believe in the noble savage, ruined by corrupt civilization. Life has taught me otherwise. It is not society that is corrupt but we ourselves. Society, if anything, acts as a deterrent. The evidence lies no farther away than the nearest school.

I've often suspected that people who talk about socialization as a benefit of public education either didn't attend a public school, or were part of the group that made it hell for the rest of us. In my recollection, at least, it was no picnic. It was in sixth grade that one of my classmates decided it would be funny to put pins into the cap of his pen and stab people in the rear end with them between classes, when teachers couldn't see what he was doing. Another schoolmate, when he was 17, picked up two 12-year-old girls at the mall, and took them both back to his home where he raped and murdered them both. It wasn't just where I grew up, either. A few years ago, a senior in Norde Bastille beat a freshman so badly the younger student had to be taken to the hospital, all because he had moved the senior's book bag out of the way so he could seat down and eat lunch. If it was anything like the fights they used to have in my high school, teachers had to force their way through a crowd of spectators packed shoulder to shoulder at least six people deep.

Nobody has to teach children to hog all the best toys and refuse to share. That's just natural and -- God help us -- even logical. It makes sense. At least to some degree, we have to be selfish in order to survive. But human nature goes deeper than that. No one needs to teach us how to be petty, cruel and vicious either. Every child wants to be well liked, but for some reason most children also want to decrease the popularity, esteem and success of others.

When we enter preschool or kindergarten, I doubt very many of us are reminded by our parents to call another child a "poo-poo head." We just do it. The school bully who shakes down smaller kids for their lunch money isn't strapped for cash. He's doing it because he enjoys the rush he gets from causing fear and humiliation.

And that's what is so engaging and so chilling about "The Lord of the Flies." We live it. It doesn't matter if you're in church, Sunday school, or at a soccer game. Children are never more than a few minutes from anarchy and savagery. All that holds them in check is the presence of a mature adult to remind them how they should behave. Let the adult leave the room for a minute, and the savagery emerges. Sometimes it's only spitballs and cruel names, but sometimes it's much more. And sometimes, it doesn't even matter if the adult has left the room.

You're not going to find "Lord of the Flies" kept in a genre any more specific than fiction, or (more deservedly) literature, but the truth is that it's horror through and through. Literary convention may have persuaded us that a book must use preternatural monsters to externalize the human condition, but those boys show a true face of humanity, unpleasant as it is. The phrase "man's inhumanity to man" is a strange one, as "inhumanity" seems to be one of the hallmarks of humanity.

A week after we marked the seventh anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers, Jon Stewart made a sobering point on The Daily Show about 9-11 and all the battles that have been waged because of it. "Nineteen people flew into the towers. It seems hard for me to imagine that we could go to war enough to make the world safe enough that nineteen people wouldn't want to do harm to us."

Obviously, we can't. We won't stop violence by answering it with more violence, but we also won't stop it by ignoring it. The truth is, we simply won't stop it, period. All it takes for violence to occur is a single man with a gun, or even a kid with a baseball bat.

And that is a level of horror that fiction can never reach.

This post was re-written from a similar post by The Brucker. Anyone who reads it should feel free to re-write it again, and keep the meme going.

romans 7

2008-09-26T03:46:00.001-04:00

Romans 7 contains one of the most human pictures in this epistle so far. In the middle of some intriguing but admittedly abstract explication upon the relationships among Law, sin and God, Paul shoves theology aside for a moment and explains something that anyone, of any religion, can relate to.

In a couple sentences, he sums up the frustration of every child who wants to please her parents; of every husband who wants to do right by his wife; of every person who wants to do what she knows she should, but finds it easier and more natural to do something else instead. Here's how Paul puts it:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Romans 7:15-24

Paul answers his question in verse 25, when he says “Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord!” And of course there are plenty of examples of dramatic changes touted by deliverance ministries. You know the sort of thing: the drug addict who suddenly finds that heroin no longer holds an attraction; the alcoholic who stops drinking cold turkey; the abuser who suddenly realizes what a cad he's been to his family, and changes.

You can find them, but a large part of my spirit positively recoils at the thought of them, as they remind me of the slick salesmanship of Pentecostal preachers who use them as an example of how following Jesus ends all your problems and makes your life hunky-dory. A better example might be of the Apostles who bickered and fought for three years over which of them was greater in the Kingdom of God, which of them had given up more, and which of them was more faithful. It took a while, but they eventually grew out of it and discovered the heart of Jesus' message as he saw it, to the point that Matthew the collaborator and Simon the zealot were united in martyrs' deaths.

CHANGE IN PAUL
Of course, since Romans is Paul's letter, if we want a character-driven example of change, we might want to look at Paul himself. Romans undeniably is a book of theology, but it's more than that: It's a book of Pauline theology, chronicling Paul's own ruminations and insights into the nature of God, growing out of his own frustration with the Law and his inability to be faithful as he knew he ought to be.

I see Paul as someone who, as a Pharisee, earnestly desired to know God. He studied the Torah, memorized whole portions of the Tanakh, and undoubtedly was recognized as an up-and-coming rabbinical authority. His ambition was to serve God zealously by jealously observing the Torah and allowing no sin to enter his life. And yet he found that the Law that was meant to bring him life instead brought him only condemnation; and that sin seized upon the opportunity provided it by the Law and blossomed into death within him.

From what I've read in his letters and in the book of Acts, I think Paul was so vehemently opposed to the Way, not because it held that Jesus was the Son of God, but because its teachings about grace and forgiveness (rather than strict observance of Torah) ran counter to everything that he believed. And on the road to Damascus, he came face to face with the failure of his reliance on observance of Torah, and the house of cards collapsed.

The change that took place in him led to a reordering not just of his epistemology, but also to his relationships. His wife either separated from him or asked for a divorce, and many of the men he had been close to now became his opponents.

Jesus talks about change as well, obviously, a shift from outward adherence to a code, to inward attention to the heart and the attitudes that manifest themselves in behaviors. Don't just keep from killing people; you also have to avoid hating them. Don't just settle for only the just penalty the law allows (an eye for an eye was actually a rather liberal, soft-on-crime position for that point in history, where you could kill someone for personal injury); instead, forgive those who hurt you.

RELYING ON THE FLESH
I've always understood this passage of Romans to refer to the struggle with sin, that even though our spirits are redeemed, our flesh remains corrupt and struggles with the sin nature -- but Christ, who has redeemed the spirit, also will redeem the body. Thus I see it as redemption as an ongoing journey, which is why Paul gives thanks to Jesus for delivering us from this body of death: beginning in this life, continuing through the rest of our lives, and then into the final redemption of the flesh.

It's easy to rely on the flesh, on our own earthly efforts or will, and to see it as evidence that God is working in us, to change us. I have a friend who gives great credit to Jesus for his formidable self-control. He has a tremendous problem with anger -- he can't stand when someone criticizes him or disagrees too sharply -- so over the years he has learned to tamp down the volcano of white-hot rage, which he sees as sanctification. He is, after all, not exploding at people – not usually, anyway – but you can see the anger simmering just beneath the surface.

In many ways he unwittingly has made a spiritual fetish out of his self-control, and he boasts as though it was a great accomplishment of the Holy Spirit in his life that he never wants to have sex with his wife, contents himself with bland food, and has managed to drive out many pleasures from his life because they're addictive or too worldly.

I was taught early on in my Christian years that Judaism was a dry and lifeless religion, obsessed with rules and laws that we aren't obligated to follow. Aside from mischaracterizing Judaism, the people pushing this particular view also often pushed strict rules and requirements in terms of Christian behavior. That's pretty minor stuff, though; I don't know that we have many people at our church who deal with legalism that shallow. To the extent that legalism is a problem, I expect it's more doctrinal and internal than behavioral.

I'm reminded of a book by Larry Crab called "The Pressure's Off." In it, Crab talks about people who ironically live lives of quiet subjugation to the Law, even as they claim to be free of it. Ask Natasha and myself about our children and why they're well-behaved, and you'll probably hear me say something about the amount of time we spend with them, reading books, playing games, involving them in running the household, and being involved with their lives. It's all by the grace of Christ that they're turning out so well, because we've been doing what we're supposed to as parents. (And I love to hear what a great dad I am, and that my kids are turning out great.)

Of course the truth is that you can do everything right and have it all go wrong, because no one really does it all correctly. I lose my temper at the girls, say stupid things to them, get annoyed when they act like children and overreact, and at times get too strict or too lax with them. That my girls do as well as they do IS an act of grace. I've known other parents who do everything right, and still have a horrifically hard time with their kids. The rule of influence remains in place, but the Law does not shape how things work; if it did, no adult would be functionally sane, because our parents all failed in crucial ways according to the Law.

And of course that can be crushingly painful. I have a dear friend in Georgia who is gay, and her mother seems to take it as a personal indictment of herself as a parent. "If I had done a better job, my daughter wouldn't be a lesbian." And of course the appeal to Law -- I did everything right, so she should be straight -- has had a great effect on their relationship, since it turns the issue into one of my friend's supposed disobedience to God and rejection of the moral lessons her parents taught her, rather than walking through their relationship with grace and love.

LIVING BY THE SPIRIT
If there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, we must stop condemning ourselves and one another for real or imagined failings where the Law is concerned, and instead work together. Evangeline and I have been reading Romans together at bedtime, and shortly after this is a passage about the gospel's ministry of reconciliation -- something Law does not allow, since Law only recognizes hitting the bullseye or the shame of missing the mark.

A side issue that comes up during these discussions is the fallacious trifurcation of Torah into three segments: the sacrificial law, the ceremonial law, and the moral law. While these are great descriptions of the different functions of Torah, the truth is that the Hebrews made no distinction as I've heard many evangelicals do. You know the sort of thing I'm talking about: Christ fulfilled the sacrificial law, and the ceremonial law was only for a different dispensation, but the moral law remains in effect and binding upon us today, which is where we go to give one another all the tsursis we do over behaviors we find objectionable. The Israelites made no such distinction, and neither does Paul. His argument is that all the Torah was fulfilled in Christ, and so we are free from all its demands so that we may live in the Spirit instead.

Living in the Spirit therefore means living the sort of life modeled by Christ, what you also could refer to as living under his lordship. In a sense, it means approaching situations less from a right-wrong moralistic stand than from a good-bad perspective, where the good under consideration is how actions affect people. I have a transgendered friend, for instance, whose mother was advised by her pastor that God would want her to disown him (!) -- a moralistic stand that takes no consideration of the relationship or how such personal rejection is going to play out on a person.

The adult who is addicted to pornography isn't in sin because she turns to pornography for sexual gratification, and the solution isn't just to remove her erotica from the house -- though that's not necessarily a bad idea -- but it's more in the lines of understanding what she is seeking from pornography, and where she can find it in a healthier, better context. Emotional intimacy with her husband, for instance.

Or to use the example of my TG friend. The moralistic stand is to say this right or wrong; a better, more christocentric response is to walk with my friend, stay close, and not let the moral issues of right or wrong enter the relationship. By seeing my friend as a person -- by seeing him as Christ, honestly, which he is either in acts of sin (which Christ has identified with), or in righteousness (for all our righteousness gains meaning in Christ) or really just in being human (for Christ became human and identified with us in all our shame) -- I can escape, hopefully, the pitfall of self-righteous judgmentalism, and be the voice of Christ in his life, because I don't cast him aside over something that I disagree with him on. The beauty of the gospel is that we all have beauty and value, no matter how we vote, what we eat, how we look, or what we do.

I always remind myself that prostitutes, thieves and extortionists, and even lepers with hideous open sores all felt comfortable talking to Jesus and asking him for help. The only people who didn't feel comfortable with him were religious people like me, who felt they were something special for being so religious or righteous.

I say this not as one who has perfected it, but it's an idea I've understood a long time, and it's one that has made me more socially liberal as time has gone on.

The struggle I find I have more is keeping the attitude of Jesus even toward people who encourage behavior or attitudes contrary to what he teaches. Political example, just because it's been on my mind a lot lately. We're engaged in a war right now, in Iraq, that is unjust by any standard I'm aware of for just wars. Iraq never attacked us, nor from what we can tell did it even pose any threat to us when we massed our troops at its borders and then spilled them in.

The war was encouraged and approved of by the cultural elite of our nation -- a people who are just as disproportionately NOT represented in the military as they are disproportionately represented in the halls of power where the decision to begin the war was made. Congress is overwhelmingly made of wealthy white leaders, while those fighting and being killed in Iraq are more largely (though not entirely) Hispanic and African American ... and remember, for a long time after the war started, they didn't have adequate protection.

That gets me angry, and it makes me even angrier when I recall that many ministers, including Franklin Graham, hailed the war as something that God approved of. And of course GWB did a great job of playing the faith card during two presidential elections to win the support of the Christian Right.

An economic example, since that is also on my mind a lot. Our nation has a problem with runaway consumerism and has for years. We consume vast amounts of the world's resources for no reason other than that we can, and to do it, we've pushed wages down abysmally low overseas. Workers drip sweat in the fields and children lose fingers in sweatshops so we can have low-cost clothing and DVD players that we'll throw out when we feel we've used them up. Our own destructive spending habits have been further fueled by predatory lending practices in America that have allowed the middle class to feel prosperous even as wages stagnated, savings shriveled up, and debt ballooned.

And yet I STILL hear people spewing nonsense about it being our right to squander our resources, get exorbitant salaries and golden parachutes for failure. And despite the lip service we all give to protecting the environment, I don't see many people making even half the effort that my family and I have made to reduce the amount of trash we throw out. (Check the garbage can after church some day -- wasted food and drink, wasted paper that could have been recycled, and a barrel load of trash after a two-hour worship meeting. That just isn't right. Those are resources we're squandering.) It's as though no one has made the connection between caring for creation and their lifestyles. We expect that by agreeing it's a shame that things are so bad, we somehow are part of the solution, even though we're not even taking baby steps toward solving the problems.

In many ways, all that makes me pretty angry too.

And yet, you know something I've noticed? Jesus can be pretty kind to the Pharisees too. He ate with them, accepted their invitations to go to their houses, and didn't mind having late-night discussions with them. He only got impatient with them over their judgmentalism. Aside from some admittedly spectacular repudiations, he treated them as kindly as he did the lepers, prostitutes and Samaritans who came to see him. He never even called Caiaphas or Annas names for arresting him.

John 14:15-16 gives another example of how the Spirit is the key to obeying God and to true transformation. In that example, the context is about Jesus being the Way to the Father, and the talk about vines and branches. "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father."

I don't know if I've said anything new. I wrote something related to this a few years ago, about how the Cross transforms every moment of our lives so that it becomes an experience of intimacy with God, and even the crummy moments testify to his love.

I think that one thing the Law does, is it keeps us focused on ourselves and our misguided sense of our own importance and righteousness. "I did what you wanted, why aren't you doing what I want?" And of course there's a whole cottage industry of this snake-oil in American Christianity. We have preachers telling us how to raise our children so they're guaranteed to turn out right, peddlers of a false gospel telling us how to make God make us rich, and other shysters and con men telling us how to be healed or delivered from our problems, and always if we fail, the answer is: It's your fault. You didn't have enough faith or follow what the Bible says.

Walking in the Spirit means being less concerned with how righteous someone is than being concerned with how they are -- which was always the intent of the Law, but not what sin has done with it. The Torah said not to commit adultery, so that we would not sow pain and heartache in our marriages; living in the Spirit means your goal is not to satisfy the requirements of the Torah, but your goal instead is not to hurt your wife and children, or (for that matter) the woman whom you would have involved in an illicit relationship based on falsehood and deception, which at its inception would have been steeped in corruption.

I think we drift to the Law because its measurable benchmarks are easier to relate to. It's easy to tell if you've committed adultery, and to pride yourself on not having done so. It's not so easy to say "I've never been drawn intensely to someone other than my spouse." The Law also lets us wriggle out of our motives; i.e., "Yes, I'm insanely angry at this person, but it's his fault and here's why." The Spirit puts our hearts on the line and forces us to admit "Yes, I'm insanely angry at this person, and I need to repent of that anger."

palin for president

2008-09-25T22:30:00.000-04:00

'activist' judges

2008-09-25T11:03:00.002-04:00

Whatever your opinion on the issue I think we should all be worried about courts that overturn laws simply because they don't like them, even if it's an issue you personally support. What will strike their fancy next?
Read the quote in context

You mean like Brown v. Board of Education, where a group of activist judges took it upon themselves to overthrow the entire social order in the South, and discard a hundred years of segregation? That was hardly a constructionist reading of the issue. It clearly was justices overturning laws "simply because they don't like them."

I tried for an entire day to think of a different response that would put this activist/constructivist argument in perspective, but couldn't. I understand the conservative reasoning on this, but I don't buy it. This is a case of justices doing something just and interpreting the law, which the Constitution requires that they do, rather than merely advancing a political philosophy.

And really, would you want a strict Constructionist reading of the Constitution? Even if such a thing were possible -- which it's not -- I'd hate to live in a 21st century governed by the attitudes, mores and beliefs of latter 18th-century America. We're the same country in the sense of continuity, but our demographics, technology, economy, politics, and geopolitical position are radically different from theirs. Heck, even Jefferson felt that the nation should ditch the Constitution every 30 years or so, and start again from scratch, to reflect the changes in society.

If you wish to assert a constructionist view of the Constitution, the burden of proof is on you to show how a criticism of "activist judges" can be leveled in the case of same-sex marriage rules but does not apply in Brown v. Board of Education -- which, it should be noted, also overturned the court's previous "Separate but Equal" ruling.

The Constitution makes the point quite directly that the rights not expressly given to the federal government are reserved for the states. Either by similar wording or by precedent -- sorry, I'm too befuddled right now by sleep problems to recall which -- the rights not expressly given to government at all belong to people.

So while I disagree with Roe v. Wade, I don't see that as ruling by judicial fiat. It's a statement that the Constitution does not give government -- at any level -- the right to dictate whether a woman can have an abortion. And since the government lacks that right, it means the individual woman has the right to choose.

how i feel

2008-09-24T17:42:00.001-04:00

How do I feel sometimes? Powerless.

Unable to get a job.
Unable to give my kids the social chances they need.
Unable to keep them challenged and interested at school.
Unable to forge a way that I once saw as clearly as burning sword.
Unable to gain acceptance while retaining my integrity.
Unable to keep others from sliding into bitterness and despair.
Unable to cry, "Land ho!" and hope that it is not another cresting wave.
Unable to write two meaningful sentences that no one else has written a thousand times before.

Other times I merely feel overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed by an economy that is tanking so fast that the Ti-D Bowl man has drowned.
Overwhelmed by the demands of being a parent.
Overwhelmed by social machinery I've never understood myself.
Overwhelmed by doubt that keeps me spinning too fast to read a map.
Overwhelmed by the feeling that life has become a spectator sport.
Overwhelmed by the alienation others around me feel.
Overwhelmed by the sea that rises and rolls, mile after mile, without release.
Overwhelmed by ideas that want to be shared and stories to be born if only I had the discipline and the will.

Still other times I feel more capable.

acts 22

2008-09-23T11:01:00.001-04:00

What's striking about the uproar in Acts 22 is what it's not about.

A quick bit of background. In Acts 21, the Apostle Paul had shown up in Jerusalem with some Gentile Christians and had gone to the Temple. A group from a rival sect of Christianity that was decidedly less liberal than Paul on matters of Torah, told people that Paul had defiled the Temple by taking Gentiles there and that he had been preaching anti-Semitism wherever he went. The ensuing riot was bad that the Roman commander had to bring his army into the city and arrest Paul to save his life.

So, in Acts 22 Paul addresses the crowd from the relative safety of the soldiers' barracks. He starts speaking in Aramaic, the popular language of Judea at this time, and the crowd calms down immediately. "Didn't someone say this guy has been spreading hatred against the Holy City?" someone says. "That can't be true, listen to him talk. He speaks our language with a native accent. He's one of us."

Paul begins talking about his credentials, and they're impressive. He was taught by Gamaliel, a well-known and respected member of the Sanhedrin. Probably by this point people are starting to feel a little uncomfortable about how they've been acting. Paul shares his story. He mentions that he persecuted followers of the Way, even going all the way to Damascus to have them thrown into prison.

Back when The Point was first launching its North Brunswick congregation, I remember Tim asking why we thought non-Christians were so hostile toward Christianity and the gospel. There were the expected answers about pushy Christians engaging in drive-by evangelism, like the annoying fellow who tries to strike up a conversation so he can give you a tract; somebody mentioned some of the scandals that rocked Christianity in the 1980s, like the Bakkers and Jimmy Swaggart, or the more recent scandal of child molestation in the Catholic church; and someone else mentioned the sometimes pugnacious behavior of prominent evangelical leaders like Jerry Decker and Jason Falstaff. And someone probably mentioned that the gospel runs counter to all the values of the world.

If that's the case, if people are supposed to greet the gospel with hostility, I'd expect the crowd to lose it somewhere between verses 6 and 16. That's where Paul talks about his surprising conversion to the Way, his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus, his miraculous healing, and his decision to be baptized. These are all things that mark Paul's conversion experience.

It's not like people are going to miss that. The Way began in their city some 20 or 30 years earlier. The book of Acts notes that when Peter preached on the Day of Pentecost about 3,000 people became believers. The Jews who were not followers of the Way still knew them. They were related to them, bought and sold with them, and worshiped with them at the Temple or (in the suburbs) at the synagogue. If anyone in the world at this point in history knows the story of Christianity, it's the people of Jerusalem.

Truth is, no one seems to care. If Paul had stopped here, it seems like they would have said, "Eh, it's OK. Sorry about the misunderstanding."

But of course, Paul never did know when to stop. Look at what gets everyone's outrage. It's in verse 21, when he says that God told him to go and preach to the Gentiles. And that's when people start clamoring for his blood. It's not the gospel that drove them to a fury: It was racism, plain and simple.

Even the Sanhedrin, in Acts 23 didn't really care that Paul was a follower of Christ. The Pharisees, who got short shrift in the gospels, are completely willing in verse 9 to let Paul go, since — as far as they're concerned — their only difference with him pertains to his interpretation of the doctrine of the Resurrection. (That Jewish-Christian relations are not as close today as they once were owes a lot to the last 1,700 years.)

So I think about that question Tim asked, maybe three years ago. The answer I gave is "the chip on our shoulder." I've talked with many people, including Jews, about Jesus and what I've found in him, and what I've found is that people don't mind an honest discussion about religion and spirituality. Many even find it interesting.

What they don't like, of course, is being lectured, and pressured, and being beaten with the Hell stick. And of course no one likes getting into a discussion with someone who expects there to be a fight and so is ready with the biggest stick, best stock answers, and nicest boxing gloves so they can be guaranteed a win.

Paul's audience reacted badly to his message because of their issues. Christians' audiences today react badly because of ours.

waste of time

2008-09-23T03:08:00.001-04:00

OK, I am now convinced that "Second Life" is a total vortex where time is concerned. I have now deleted my account. Five hours wasted in one week is too many.

a personal hell

2008-09-19T14:43:00.002-04:00

How can you take "you're going to hell" as anything but personal when someone makes you their pet project, even if it's just for one conversation?

I don't dispute that that is the popular evangelical doctrine; what I am saying is that it is hard not to take such a statement personally when it is meant personally. "You will go to hell, unless you accept Jesus as your personal savior."

It doesn't bother me as a point of doctrine if another religion indicates that I'm hellbound. It's abstract, it's cerebral, so who cares? There's something in the delivery, though, that makes me cringe. Good news shouldn't be "You're going to hell"; and looking at the New Testament, it wasn't. Instead it was "Everything that you've been looking for, everything that you see wrong in the world around you, the answer is in Jesus Christ, whom God has raised from the dead."

I'd be such a bad evangelical.

Bullwinkle assassinated

2008-09-18T21:55:00.002-04:00

forgotten power

2008-09-18T13:26:00.004-04:00

What's happened to us? We never hear songs like this anymore, or at least I don't, unless I'm listening to recordings. Music used to be something that inspired us, drew us together, made it possible to get through hard times together, and even made drudgery bearable.

Nowadays it seems like it's an empty exercise in narcissism, either of the singers who write only about themselves, or in the listeners who use their iPods as a shield against the world. It's hard to believe that only forty years ago, people were using music to bring an oppressive establishment to its knees here in America, speaking up for Civil Rights, protesting war, and not only imagining a better world, but believing that it was within our power to create it.

Where are the Pete Seegers of today? Does no one perform powerful music this beautifully anymore? I was in tears listening to this song, and I hope that you were too.

sermon on the mount

2008-09-17T22:08:00.001-04:00

Matthew 5-6 comprises most of Matthew's account of the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew's gospel, this is where Jesus teaches the Beatitudes, calls his followers the salt and the light of the world, and then begins teaching about his relationship with the Torah.

Jesus begins by saying that he has not come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets but to fulfill them. He's pretty firm on this point, going as far as saying that the least stroke of the Torah will not disappear until everything has been accomplished, and he warns not to teach others to disregard the Torah.

What's interesting is that right after this, Jesus begins setting up a contrast between what the Torah says and what he expects of people. In my Bible, Chapter 5 is broken into sections, with titles like “Murder,” “Adultery,” and “Divorce.” Six of these in a row begin with Jesus saying, “You have heard that it was said” or something similar. In each of these cases, Jesus raises the bar from an external behavior proscribed by the Torah to an internal one that meets a higher moral standard, one that usually only the person involved can know.

We all know the drill. It's not enough not to murder someone; now you can't even hate them. It's not enough to keep from adultery; you're not allowed even to desire someone other than your spouse. It's not enough to desire only what the Law allows; you're supposed to forgive the lout who put out your eye and broke your tooth.

This is in sharp contrast with how the rabbis of Jesus' day had come to view the Torah. Over the centuries, rabbis and other teachers had added a second layer to the Torah, much of which is recorded in the Babylonian Talmud, an oral law that served as a fence around the sacred Torah. The idea was that if you followed the oral traditions, you wouldn't inadvertantly break the requirements of the Torah. For instance, the Torah forbids boiling a kid in its mother's milk; thus, it is forbidden to mix meat and dairy, so that there is no risk of accidentally breaking the Torah proscription. The Torah forbids working on the Sabbath, so rabbis imposed a limit on how much walking a person could do – a Sabbath day's walk – so that no one accidentally would walk too far and break the commandment.

Jesus is also setting a fence around the Torah, but in the opposite direction. If someone wrongs you enough that you want to kill him, he says, clearly you must address your anger, rather than simply struggling for the self-control so you don't kill him. The unsettled rage may one day still lead to murder, if it was that strong in the first place. Similarly, while some folks have gone to the extreme route of suppressing women, blaming them for every act of lust a man commits, even for rape or adultery; Jesus says it's the man's responsibility to control his attitudes toward women. (He also undercuts the contemporary practice of men issuing a get to divorce their wives over minor offenses,stipulating that the only reason a man may divorce his wife is if she in unfaithful.)

Thus, while we often erect barriers based on the idea of regulating our external behavior – don't associate with people whose lives are deemed immoral or in rebellion to God – Jesus wants the focus to be on us and how we view other people. That's where the revolution of God begins, not in how we act, but in how we think and feel in our hearts, because those inward attitudes are the well that brings either life or death to those who drink from it.

That's a challenge, because all we can know of other people, unless we know them well, is what they do, and it's on that basis that we usually judge them. Well, that and what's in our hearts and what motivates us. It's so easy to grow angry at another person because of what they do, without ever stopping to wonder why they do it. I know of a mother, for instance, who this year pulled her son out of Gary Barker Charter School. It's a great school, and it was offering her son, a child with special needs, a lot of personal help and resources. He's now in the Nova Bastille public school system, where he's less likely to get the individual attention a child in his situation needs. Is she a bad parent? Did she make a wrong choice? I want to say yes, but I really don't know.

That admittedly is a rather simple example, since I don't know the woman or her situation well. To be completely fair and honest, I'd have to look at the times in my own life right now where there are conflicts or grudges against other people, and see what baggage I'm carrying them.

Backing up a minute: Jesus says “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” There have been a lot of politicians over the years who have used this phrase to describe America, inadvertantly or deliberately suggesting that our nation has some special place in the economy of God, or that we have a special contract with the Divine to work his will upon the earth.

That's patent nonsense, as nations are kingdoms of this world, and however much we spiritualize our nation's actions, we attribute them to our inherent godliness at our own peril. But the politicians are right about one thing: This saying of Jesus wasn't about individual believers. It's about the church as a gestalt; i.e., how a community of believers behaves.

the legacy of Pete Seeger

2008-09-17T15:49:00.002-04:00

For much of this afternoon, Evangeline has been singing an adjusted protest song from the 1960s:

If you love your Uncle Sam,
Support your troops in Iraq.
Bring 'em home --
Bring 'em home.

She's also decided that one of her goals this trimester -- students at Gary Brucker Charter School get to individualize their course of study -- is to write and perform a song of her own composition. I got ten bucks says it's a protest song about something at the school, in the footsteps of Arlo Guthrie, who wrote his first protest song in fifth grade, about a math test.

raising children with a wild streak

2008-09-17T12:53:00.001-04:00

I, like many college professors, yearn for rarer traits -- curiosity, passion, a wild streak. Yes, teamwork and leadership skills will help your child to implement someone else's ideas, and extensive extracurricular activities will foster responsibility. What your child really needs, though, is an inventive, self-reliant, restless spirit.

For me, the heart-wrenching interview moment is when we ask these teenagers what they would choose to do on a day spent alone. Many say they never have the chance. Worse still, some have no answer at all. This should disturb and sadden any parent. In the end, my scholarship votes ride on two questions: Is this someone that I'd be excited to have in my class? And is he or she open to being changed by my class? Class rank and extracurricular activities are less important than genuine individuality or enthusiasm. It matters not whether someone is bold or shy, worldly or naﶥ. Is there a flash of determination, a streak of independence, a creative passion, an excited curiosity?

We need more students like the ones who leave after graduation to work as missionaries or in the Peace Corps. More like the ones who start successful businesses while in school. More like the ones who find the courage to go overseas for a summer or a semester because they know their own worlds are far too small.

Some students are team players and high achievers, but I'd trade them for stubbornly creative iconoclasts. Some students as children were taught to color inside the lines, watch Barney the purple dinosaur, and always ask permission. We need students who found out what Crayons tasted like, loved reading "The Cat in the Hat" and paid little attention to rules -- students whose parents encouraged their children's curiosity.

-- Mark Pruett, from "Raise children with a wild streak"

smokin'

2008-09-17T12:51:00.001-04:00

Mushrooms sauted in oil, with melted pepperjack cheese. Add a dash of crushed red pepper, and sprinkle with garlic powder.

Wrap it in a tortilla and eat it.

Yowza. That's good.

temptation in the wilderness

2008-09-16T21:43:00.000-04:00

To me the most interesting part of Matthew 3-4 isn't the story of Jesus' baptism. It's the temptation in the wilderness, when Satan appears to Jesus and challenges him to find out whether he's really the son of God.

Let's back the scene up a bit. Jesus goes down to the Jordan River to be baptized. That's not particularly surprising; everyone was being baptized. Dress an Essene up like Elijah, preaching repentance out in the wilderness like a crazed prophet – the first crazed prophet since Malachi and the others – and it's pretty reasonable for religious fervor to sweep the countryside. People are hungry to know more of God, to hear about him, to fill the void in their lives. Jesus, who at the age of 12 had felt such a strong desire to connect with God that he actually ditched his parents and stayed at the Temple in Jerusalem to ask questions, is surely going to go down to be baptized as well.

I'm going to contend that Jesus probably didn't think of himself as the Son of God at this point. I think he saw himself as a person who believed strongly in God, perhaps even as someone with a unique understanding of God, but I don't think he had any notions of his own divinity at this point. When he went to be baptized, I think he was trying to draw closer to God and to understand the Voice that he had heard calling him for years. And when he came out of the water and heard that selfsame Voice say "This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased," he got more confused than ever and went out into the wilderness to sort it all out.

Matthew writes that Jesus was in the wilderness, fasting, for 40 days and 40 nights. The whole reason for this fast was for Jesus to set aside his earthly physical needs and understand the deep stirrings in his soul that had intensified since his baptism. The longest I've ever gone without food was for six days; if Matthew is to be believed, Jesus did it for nearly six weeks. During that time he would have stopped having bowel movements, though for a while he would have felt the urge just from out of habit; he would have felt a little irritable from the lack of gustatory stimulation he was accustomed to; and he would have started getting weaker after the third week or so. Matthew says that after 40 days, Jesus was hungry. A better word is "starving." When you've gone that long without food, your body has used up its stores of fat and even excess muscle. By this point, it's starting to digest itself.

And then, Matthew says, Satan appeared and tempted him.

I should state right here that I'm not wholly on board with the popular evangelical view of Satan as the embodiment of evil. In the book of Job, we saw ha-Satan in an adversarial role, challenging God's position on Job's righteousness and leading to Job being sifted like wheat, so that Job and everyone else could see what he really was made of, and where his faith truly came from. I see the same thing happening here. I imagine Jesus walking through a desert place, alone, hungry, hot and weary beyond belief, when he comes across an old man. The stranger is courteous to a fault, probably even giving Jesus a drink of water. If he makes Jesus think of anyone, it's not the mythic figure of Samael but of his own father or one of his father's old friends.

They fall to talking, and after discussion has gone this way and that, the old man cuts to the very heart of the struggle that has definied Jesus' every waking moment for the last six weeks. "If you are the son of God," the friendly old man says, "turn these stones to bread." Find the answer to your question, and get something to eat. Resolve your hunger, both spiritually and physically. Don't put yourself through this any longer, you can settle the issue once and for all.

In "The Brothers Karamazov," the Russian author Fyodr Dostoevsky suggested the issue here was that by turning stones to bread, Jesus would offer the people physical proof and a physical reason to put their faith in him. "Believe in me," he would say, "and I'll fill your bellies!" Proof means no doubt, and no doubt means no faith. If our eyes can see clearly, what need have we for faith, which hopes for things not seen? I think Dostoevsky had the right idea, but he had the wrong audience in mind. Satan is asking Jesus to prove to no one but himself what he's been wondering at least since his baptism: Is he the Son of God? It seems preposterous; all Israel is the son of God. It's the pagans whose deities run around having children with mortal women, or the "sons of God" from the early chapters of Genesis who do this. And yet the Voice at his baptism called him a son, and that corresponds with a yearning Jesus has felt his whole life. It would be so nice to have proof, one way or the other. If he is, then he has bread and can eat; if not, then he can laugh at the silliness of the whole affair, go home and get something to eat.

Jesus rejects the offer. He wants to know, but he wants to know God's way, and God works with faith, not evidence.

The second temptation is similar to the first: Throw yourself off the Temple, and let the angels save you. Again, it's proof positive, since Psalm 91 promises all sorts of rescue to the man who puts his faith in God. And what's more, it broadens the scope. It's not just Jesus who would know, but the Sadducees who teach the people, and the people as well – everyone gathered near the Temple would see him start to plunge, and then witness him being caught by angels, and know him to be someone special. If the angels don't save him, then the nagging emptiness is gone, once and for all; but if they do save him, Jesus will have an instant audience for his message.

And that, I think, starts Jesus wondering: message? What message? Up to this point, perhaps, he's been preoccupied principally with questions about his own identity and his own relationship with the Almighty. He's schooled in the teachings of Hillel, though, and he knows that no one exists as an island to himself. We are all one vast archipelago, connected by stretches of earth, rock, and sand that are only superficially obscured by the sea. When the tides pull back, we remember our interconnectedness once more. If Jesus is the Son of God, then surely he has a message to share with the people, a message that comes straight from the heart of God, a message that will transform not only people but their society as a whole. Perhaps he imagines that message as a mighty wave itself, rising over the islands, drawing the water down to reveal the vast and unseen mass of land that joins all lands together, revealing the connections that we have willed or allowed ourselves to forget so that we can view one another with hostility. Not only Judea, but all the world could be swept up in this new understanding.

And then, from atop a high mountain, Jesus sees all the kingdoms of the world, stretched out in all their glory and finery. He is in the position of Caesar himself, able to bring calamity or peace to the Celts in Britain, to the Gauls in France, to the desert-dwellers in Assyria, and to those who live along the Nile. All he would have to do is make his voice a trumpet, and the entire world will hear his message, from Spain to India. He's not even asked to prove whether he is the Son of God; it's assumed as a given. Instead, the temptation comes as an offer: "Worship me, and all this will be yours."

This one's a no-brainer, really, but it also sets the tone for the ministry Jesus will work at for the rest of his life. When he performs miracles, they are never self-serving like the miracle of bread would have been; and invariably he will tell people to keep quiet about them, lest the crowds come to him for the wrong reasons. He teaches people where they are, even in crowded cities or temple courts, but often he withdraws to lonely places in an attempt to escape the crowds. And Jesus never, never seeks political power. When Peter, thinking of the conquering Messiah, rebukes Jesus for prophesying his death, Jesus returns with a withering "Get thee behind me, Satan! You do not have in mind the things of God, but rather the things of men."

Jesus' entire life from this point is a repudiation of the third temptation. In rejecting earthly power, although he probably didn't realize it until late in his ministry, Jesus accepted a lonely end on a cross, tortured to death by the very political power he had spurned.

This is all well and good, but it ultimately means nothing if it doesn't speak a truth into our lives. The best applications come when we find something within each character to identify with, both the noble and the ignoble. It's safe to look at Jesus and see how he resisted the temptations when they came his way – far too many people point out that he relies on Scripture, as though this were a new insight – but there's no real application there, nothing that speaks to me as a person who struggles with sin, no insight into what snares may lay me low -- and no warning of the danger I may pose to someone else when I point them to a road other than God's.

First, I suppose, is the value of uncertainty. His response to the temptations reveal that Jesus consistently rejected things that would prove his divinity, either to himself or to other people, and he also rejected the position where he could enforce his will upon the people will they or no, even when it was for their own good. For my part, I'm also content not to argue over or to seek proof for areas of faith, not even to hold God to the test. I reached the point some years ago where I could join Puddleglum in saying that I would be on Aslan's side, even if there was no Aslan to be on the side of, even acknowledging that there may very well be no Aslan at all, beyond our own imagining.

And in that vein, I don't feel very tempted to power, not often at any rate. I get disturbed regularly by the push and pull of Christians who have whored the church to one political party or another, and who think that we can make the world a more righteous, more godly place if only we can pass the right laws and elect the right people.

Which leaves me to identify with Satan.

A lot of commentators have noticed that the temptations Satan hits Jesus with ultimately point the way toward the Cross, and more than a few have noted the irony that he may have caused Jesus to realize the part he would play in God's plan of redemption. They go straight to the heart of Jesus' identity and his mission, particularly when Satan offers Jesus the ownership of the Roman Empire. I can't help but wonder if that might have been ha-Satan's intent; i.e., if he's a member of God's court rather than wholly in rebellion to the Divine Plan, was his appointed role in this case to steer Jesus to a greater understanding of his role? (Of course, that could be the ironic intent that Satan was unaware of, given God's omniscient ability to play both sides of a poker game.)

I don't think I've encouraged people to put God to the test, not in a long time; nor have I encouraged stuff like using God to satisfy earthly wants and needs. I get turned off by teaching like that fairly quickly. But I do like to take opposing views and encourage people to sift through the wheat to remove the chaff, and I wonder if I've ever destroyed or hurt someone in the process by encouraging them to ask questions they weren't ready for. How often, I wonder, have I filled the role of an adversary and unintentionally caused someone to stumble?

The ancient Hebrews believed the Satan to be an office in the heavenly court that an angel was appointed to. I wonder if the angel felt any grief over the misery that came to Uz all because of what he said to God concerning Job. I wonder if he felt remorse over suggesting to David that he take a census of the fighting men in Israel, when David did, and famine broke out as a result. If angels have souls, does that angel feel his own soul is soiled by what he did?

bible reading

2008-09-16T01:10:00.000-04:00

The preacher at church issued Sunday what he called The Bible Challenge. It's where you read a passage of Scripture from one religious tradition, and then read a passage of Scripture from another religious tradition, and see if you can tell from the flavor of the Scripture which is actually from your religion.

Well no, not really, but that would be fun. He did do something similar, where he had 10 quotes projected onto the screen and we had to figure out which ones actually were from Scripture and which ones weren't. Among the most popular goofs were the Karl Marx quote "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" and two proverbs: one that says a righteous man cares for his animals but the wicked abuses them; and a second that urges giving strong drink to those who are in mortal pain. Some others I think were thrown off by a quote from a pastoral letter, where Paul lays out the requirements for a "bishop."

But enough. The longer-term idea is to combat biblical illiteracy by challenging us to read five chapters of Scripture a day, and then to journal about them, as though journal were a verb and not a noun. If anyone gerunds it into journaling -- i.e., "Did you do your journaling today?" -- I may have to resort to lethal force, at which point I will promptly withhold strong drink from those who are perishing.

Monday's passages are Matthew 1-2 and Acts 1-3. I will forego the expected kvetching about reading passages of Scripture that I read not that long ago and that are read so frequently that it becomes almost impossible to see anything new in them. Yes, I shall forego such kvetching, and in its place, I will simply write the following, which doubtless will be quite convoluted and unsimple. Just be glad it's in English.

First, the genealogy. Everyone knows that this genealogy flatly contradicts the genealogy given in Luke's gospel, so I won't even pretend I'm saying anything new here. I've heard some people say that Luke's gospel is the genealogy of Mary, but it certainly doesn't say that in Luke's genealogy. They're both patrilineal.

But Matthew builds his genealogy around two key figures from Israelite history. The first is Abraham, from whom the Jewish people claim descent; and the second is David, whom the Tanakh treats as the gold standard for kings. Thus Matthew is linking Jesus to the Abraham, the man whom God made his covenant with; and with David, whom God make a second covenant with. Astute readers are bound to make the connection and see how Matthew is casting Jesus as a new Abraham, representative of a new covenant; and also to see the claim that Jesus, as a direct descendant of David, is heir to the promise that God would make David's throne an everlasting one.

The third leg of Matthew's genealogy is the time after the Babylonian exile. I'm not sure what he's attempting here, unless it's tying Jesus back into the joy of returning from captivity -- something I'm sure Matthew's contemporaries probably felt they could understand, as the Jewish people were scattered all across the Roman world at this point, and even in Judea, they were under the rule of a foreign power, with a king who was not even one of them. (Herod was an Edomite, or a half-Edomite. I think it was the latter.)

So that's the genealogy. Jesus as the author of a new covenant between God and man, Jesus as heir of the promise to David, and Jesus as the promised homecoming. All that makes sense, since Matthew's gospel was written for the Jewish reader.

Moving along, we come to what for me has long been one of the iffy parts of Matthew. It really seems like he's cherrypicking the verses he wants to cite as prophecies about Jesus, doesn't it? He quotes Isaiah 7:4, the virgin will be with child; Micah 5:2, out of Bethlehem will come a ruler; Hosea 11:1, "out of Egypt I called my son"; and Jeremiah 31:15, a voice heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her childern. And then he has one about "He shall be called a Nazarene," but no one really knows where he got that one. I've heard it linked to a few, including one about a branching bush in Isaiah, but each one's a stretch.

Which, of course, some of the others are as well.

"Out of Egypt I called my son," is a pretty good example, when you recall that passage continues "and the more I called him, the more he turned away." Hosea of course was describing the relationship between God and Israel in the Tanakh, where God literally called Israel out of slavery in Egypt and then, as the Scriptures recount, watched as the people engaged in one form of idolatry after another. Heck, the next verse says "They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images."

And this is supposed to be a prophecy about Jesus? Yikes!

I really don't know what Matthew was thinking with this one. Hosea tells a beautiful story, of course, through the tragedy of his own life, where he married a prostitute and watched as she had children with men other than him -- and then redeems her in the end, and restores her to his side, removing her shame. It's a parable about what God was saying he would do with Israel, and through a christocentric lens, it's easy to see Hosea's behavior as a foreshadowing of Christ's behavior. But Matthew for some reason links Jesus not to Hosea, the hero of the story, but to Gomer.

A little earlier in the passage, Matthew cites the prophecy about "the virgin will be with child, and you shall call his name Immanuel." That's a great Christmastime verse, but there's two problems with it. One is that Isaiah actually said the almah will be with child, almah being the Hebrew word for "young woman," and "virgin" being only a tertiary meaning, according to the scholars I've read.

We can cut Matthew some slack on this one, since he's quoting the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Scriptures made sometime in the previous few centuries, and the rabbis who translated it from Hebrew and Aramaic presumably had no pro-Christian bias at work in the translation process. Evidently they felt the Greek word for "virgin" was close enough to the sense of almah that they would use it, instead of the Greek word for "young woman," and so they went with it, however much contemporary Hebrew scholars disagree.

But if you read the prophecy in the original context, it's pretty clear that Isaiah was talking about the more immediate situation facing King Hezekiah, namely the army that was laying siege to Jerusalem. Isaiah spells it out in 7:16, when he says that the land of the two kings besetting Judah will be laid waste. As the chapter goes on, Isaiah gets specific about Egypt and Assyria attacking the two kings. So it's hard to see this as a particularly messianic passage either.

I don't subscribe to an American view of prophecy, where the prophecy must refer specifically to one and only one event; I realize that these things often have layers of meaning and relevance, like an onion. David's psalm about being betrayed by a friend finds its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus' betrayal by Jesus, and yet it had meaning to David's life as well, and undoubtedly to the rest of us as well.

But come on. I'm not even touching the passages in Micah or Jeremiah, but I think there still are some interesting questions that I've never heard addressed satisfactorily from a pulpit about Matthew's approach to prophecy. Ernie Trask, formerly the pastor at St. Andrew's on the Roundabout in Rotorua, New Zealand, did mention the Hosea 11:1 prophecy in this vein once, but his commentary on it essentially boiled down to "What are you going to do?"

So what gives?

Luke chooses his Scriptures a little more judiciously when he puts them into Peter's mouth. They're not cited as prophecies, but merely as Scriptural guides for the sort of situation they're in, because of the whole Ish-Kerioth affair.

Anyway, it's late, and I haven't much else to say about Acts. Matthew 1-2 showed the lead-up to Jesus' big debut, and the first three chapters of Acts show the lead-in and debut of the church. Luke reinforces the parallels to David by connecting Judas' betrayal of Jesus to a psalm David wrote about being betrayed; and he connects Pentecost to the promises given in the book of Joel.

One other tidbit I've thought of lately is that Pentecost shows God's continued commitment to undoing all that is wrong with the world. Christ's resurrection shows that even death is being undone; Pentecost reflects a lifting or unraveling of the Babel curse. At Babel, languages were confused and the people were broken up into 70 different nations. On the Day of Pentecost, there surely were many nations unrepresented, but the people who were there miraculously heard the early church worshiping in languages that the speakers couldn't know but the listeners understood completely. It's a reversal of Babel, and a sign that God wants to put the human race back together again, through Jesus.

'fahrenheit 451'

2008-09-14T23:32:00.000-04:00

And the latest book finished that I should have read decades ago: "Fahrenheit 451." And a copy autograped by Ray Bradbury himself, no less, courtesy of PaperBackSwap.com.

This is a book I should have read back when I was a teen, but somehow I never did. I read several other Bradbury books, including "The October Country," "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and "The Martian Chronicles," along with "The Illustrated Man" -- but I never read "Fahrenheit 451," for reasons that escape me. My father and I were pretty thorough in our Bradbury blitz, from what I thought.

It's a widely celebrated book, dealing as it does with book burning, which sadly remains a problem even today. I bought it with the intent of giving it to Evangeline to read sometime. She is, after all, getting to an age where she's able to read beyond the immediate surface of the story, and to contemplate the deeper currents that move below and through the words. (As you may recall, she made me immensely proud of her several weeks ago, when she started expounding upon CCR's "Who'll Stop the Rain," and how it wasn't really about the weather.)

Still, what sort of father would I be to give her a book to read that I haven't read myself? I trust her to select books that are appropriate for her, but if I'm going to give her a book, I want to make sure I really do endorse it as appropriate for her age.

The book's about a fireman named Guy Montag, living in an America where books are illegal. Those who own them are whisked away for re-education, and their books are burned by the firemen. Books, after all, contain ideas, and those ideas can be dangerously subversive and interfere with the happiness that is everyone's God-given right.

Looked at in that light, you're likely to expect the book to be about a totalitarian state that is trying to keep people in the dark, as any number of petty thugs with small minds and big Cultural Revolutions have tried over the centuries. The book is a little more insidious than that, though. It's about how we have done this to ourselves.

There are essentially two poles that Montag moves between, and each is revelatory in what it says about America as it may have been, and America as it may be. The first pole is Clarisse, an unusual 17-year-old who stops to enjoy the world around her. While cars drive past at 100 mph or more, their drivers not caring if they hit someone (or, worse, enjoying the prospect), Clarisse walks. She smells flowers, listens to the wind, and looks at the leaves. She tells Montag stories she's heard from her uncle about the Way Things Used to Be, when people talked with one another, and neighbors knew one another, and people stopped to enjoy themselves and allowed themselves to be miserable at times. She's the naif innocent, but she represents the purity of what even in the 1950s Bradbury sensed was being lost.

The opposite pole is Beatty, the fire chief. He's slick, he's polished, and he's the ardent apologist for the cold new world that Bradbury has painted. He talks about how the American people dumbed themselves down, and how this has led to greater contentment and happiness. No one had time to watch "Hamlet" any more, so they contented themselves with reading synopses of great works of literature, so they could know the story and be informed. Ideas became simple and sterile, and being entertained has become the goal of every person.

Montag's wife, Mildred, for instance, spends her day in a room with television screens on three walls, watching shows that are computer-altered to appear personalized for her, down to the ads. The shows are stupid, pathetic, utterly banal -- but to Mildred, they are her family. The thought of not watching the TV -- of not getting a fourth TV screen to complete the room -- is unbearable. When Montag does turn the TV off at one point, she gets hysterical.

And just think, Bradbury wrote this in the 1950s, before the days of widescreen TV, before we had 24-hour cable and satellite signals, and before the advent of the Internet with its personalized entertainment options.

In Montag's world, books were banned because no one read them anymore, and not enough people cared. Books are dismissed as meaningless and impenetrable, and so the ideas they contain are lost, because those ideas could make people uncomfortable.

It's an interesting book, and it probably would have been better read at a time when I wasn't six hours into a dreadfully insomniatic night, but I'm glad I finally read it.

But as for Evangeline, I decided to save it for her for a little later. She's reading "The Sword in the Stone" right now, and she has plenty of other kid books she likes to read. I don't need to pile a mile-high stack of literature on her right now. Let her be a kid and read books she picks out because she enjoys them, without fear of condescension from her old man over their quality or what a good book should be.

That's how my parents let me read, after all, and it worked out just fine. She'll get to "Fahrenheit 451" when she's ready, even if it's not until she's 38.

'freaky friday'

2008-09-14T03:01:00.001-04:00

It may be unpopular to say this these days, what with schaudenfreude and all, but I liked the "Freaky Friday" remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan."

"Freaky Friday" ostensibly is based on the book by Mary Rodgers, though Evangeline (who read the book and enjoyed it) assures me that neither movie follows the book too closely. In a nutshell, the plot is that a mother and her daughter end up switching bodies and seeing life through one another's eyes for an entire day. In the original movie, it was because they both wished they could change places, at the same time; in the remake, it was because of a Chinese fortune cookie gone bad.

I have to say, I liked the remake quite a bit. The original movie, made in the early 1970s with Jodie Foster, was decent enough, I suppose. The girls liked the funny stuff, like when the police chased Annabel to the marina and suffered one mishap after another -- a squad car gets cut in two at one point, though neither officer is hurt -- but it seemed to me like the movie never got past the obvious jokes. (Nor particularly past some rather narrowly defined expectations for young girls. All Foster's Annabel wanted to do was to put on makeup and brush her hair.)

The remake, because it was made only seven or eight years ago, had a drastically altered treatment of the story. The original mother was a stay-at-home mom, and so you had the standard jokes about a teenager getting overwhelmed by laundry, carpet cleaners and other housewife stuff. And of course there was no real conflict between the mother and the daughter. It was just "Boy, she doesn't appreciate how rough I have it and how easy she has it." The remake follows a widow who is remarrying and a 15-year-old daughter who resents the interloper, and really plays into the mother not understanding her daughter and her situation nearly as well as she thinks she does.

And of course, Jamie Lee Curtis kicks ass. So does Lindsay Lohan for that matter, however unpopular it may be to say that, what with the popularity of schaudenfreude and her misfortunes the last several years. She doesn't upstage Curtis, but she definitely plays a better teen and mother-in-teen's-body than Foster did.

So while the first one went for the standard yuk-yuk-yuks, the remake reinterprets the story in some impressive and imaginative ways. It got more laughs from me, and deeper ones, than the original did, and went quite a bit further with the character development. It's not really clear that Annabel and her mother changed all that much in the original "Freaky Friday"; in the remake, the movie spends more time establishing their pre-Friday difficulties, and shows them realizing how selfish and myopic they've been about their relationship. By the time it's over, there has been major character growth for both of them.

I also saw the remake of "The Parent Trap," or most of it anyway, a while ago. It's not nearly as clever or as inventive as this one. It follows the original movie way too closely to have been worth doing. In my opinion anyway.

'the sword in the stone'

2008-09-14T02:54:00.000-04:00

Evangeline has been reading "The Sword in the Stone," by T.H. White, which (as its title would imply) is about King Arthur.

I snagged the book for her a few days ago on PaperbackSwap.com in one of those truly malicious bits of fathering. Evangeline hadn't requested the book, but I felt she should read it, so I got it. White's treatment of Arthur, which he continues in "The Once and Future King," is one of my favorite renderings of the legend.

"The Sword in the Stone" shows White at his finest, creatively speaking. His depiction of life in the Forest Savage and of Arthur's entire childhood with Sir Ector and Kay is entirely his, and it's filled with such attention to detail and wry wit that I figure it's bound to launch in her the same lifelong love of Arthurian lore that I've had, but at an earlier start. I've read her Tennyson's "The Coming of Arthur," and she's read a few of those kiddie storybooks that purport to be about Arthur but really say nothing particularly Arthurian, but this is the real thing.

It starts around the time Arthur is around seven or eight, still unaware of his parentage, and living in the care of Sir Ector. The book is riddled with memorable characters like Sir Grummore and King Pellinore, what; charming buffoons like the sergeant-at-arms with his heaving chest and the nurse who fusses over everyone; and (of course) Merlyn. During the course of the book, Merlyn teaches Arthur by changing him into animals, all with an eye on the day when Arthur will be crowned king and will have the chance to inaugurate a golden age where Might fights for Right, rather than making right.

"The Once and Future King," of course, was White's treatise on pacifism, as well as his exploration of the triumphs and failings of government, and you see a lot of this in "The Sword in the Stone." Arthur has a miserable time among the ants who are preparing for war; and falls in love with life among the geese, for whom war is a completely foreign concept. (Both stories appropriated from White's final and least impressive Arthurian work, "The Book of Merlyn.") And every other experience Arthur has as animal also shows him the danger of the mighty, such as the pike who tries to eat him in Sir Ector's moat, or mad Cully who nearly pins him with his talons when Arthur overnights as a merlin with the other raptors. (Probably my favorite passage in the book.)

Evangeline's not as far as all that, of course. She just got to the part where Arthur has met Madam Mim in the Forest Savage and is looking at an untimely end if Merlyn doesn't show up. Which, of course, he will.

So it's off to a good start. If she enjoys this book as much as she seems to be so far, I suppose I'll have to let read "The Once and Future King," and then lend her my copy of Steinbeck's rendition, not to mention Geoffrey of Monmouth and old Sir Thomas Mallory too. And then there's my "Camelot" soundtrack ...

'tehanu'

2008-09-14T02:40:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading Ursula LeGuin's "Tehanu" tonight, the fourth book in her "Earthsea" series.

It's been a long time since I read "A Wizard of Earthsea" or either of its two sequels -- "The Tombs of Atuan" and "The Farthest Shore," if you're keeping score -- so I had trouble recalling the details about a few of the major characters at first. I remembered Tenar right away, also called Arya, from the second book; and I remembered Ged, the wizard of the first book's title, but it was a stretch to remember their stories beyond the vague impressions that remained after more than fifteen years. I was completely clueless about Ogion, who figured prominently in "Tehanu," but who was a minor character gone after only a chapter or two of the first book.

But it was an interesting book, dealing with how our identity changes as we grow older, and yet remains tethered to who we were as children, quite apart from all the things we thought provided our identity in our adulthood. In Ged's case, his sense of self is in jeopardy because he lost his wizarding abilities after the events of "The Farthest Shore," and he's been a potent wizard since he was an adolescent. For Tenar, the loss is that she is a widow with grown children, and her own childhood was taken from her by the priestesses the Nameless Ones in "The Tombs of Atuan."

Then, of course, there's the child she's been caring for, for the past year, a girl whose parents pushed her into a fire and left her there to die. Her identity is wholly unknown to any of them. Names are important, as in many wizarding books, and she is known only by the name Tenar gave her, a name that means fire.

LeGuin wrote "Tehanu" in a style different from my recollection of the earlier Earthsea novels. Partly that's because Tenar is the main character, and not Ged, but I'm sure a lot of it is because LeGuin has matured both as a person and as a writer. It was a very relaxed, fluid style, and I enjoyed seeing how she chronicled the aftermath of "The Farthest Shore." It was very believable, and in sometimes very surprising how things changed.

interesting point

2008-09-14T01:38:00.000-04:00

Jesus was a community organizer.

Pontius Pilate was a governor.

Bring 'em home

2008-09-11T16:12:00.000-04:00

I love my Uncle Sam.

phone conversation

2008-09-10T10:53:00.000-04:00

Me: What's happening with your father? I was really sorry to hear.

Anthony: So was I. What do you mean?

Me: You told me he was terminal.

Anthony: I did?

Me: You said when I called that we couldn't talk right then because you were talking with your mom and your father was dying.

Anthony: No, I said I was on the other line with my mom, and that my phone was dying.

Me: Oh. (pause) Well, I'm glad your father is feeling better.

Anthony: Yes, it was a close thing, but we're all relieved it's worked out so well. He'll never know what you did for him.

media controls

2008-09-07T23:10:00.001-04:00

The McCain camp has announced that Gov. Palin will no longer answer questions from reporters "until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference." She apparently has made it a practice in the past not to talk to just any media, but only to those who put her in a favorable light.

Which ... really disturbs me. While McCain talks about straight talk and bringing us together, his campaign is contributing to further polarizing the nation by encouraging a divide in how we get our information. We don't need conservative media and liberal media, we need MEDIA, and we need politicians who aren't so afraid of the public that they feel a need to control how they appear in the media.

palin

2008-09-06T10:14:00.003-04:00

heminway, bush, and really bad books

2008-09-04T22:27:00.002-04:00

I was up late two nights ago, when to my surprise I started getting IM's. I should explain that it's a given that I don't get IM's; I'm over 30. No one instant messages me — or almost no one. It was a friend of mine from one of those places God Hath Forgot, one who has developed a razor wit and a great deal of artistic skill. For the sake of this transcript, I shall call her by her Indian name, Walks in the Rain.

On New Orleans legacy of President Bush
Dave: Natasha's brother Kevin lives in New Orleans. He and his wife were told "Evacuate or have ID with you so we know whose body it is."
WitR: I guess they weren't taking any chances after Katrina
Dave: Can't blame them. That'll be an albatross around Bush's neck about as long as Iraq will be. Twin failures.
WitR: is there room for another albatross around his neck? he's got a flock already
Dave: It depends. How many arrows does he have in that damn crossbow of his anyway?
WitR: secretly Cheney is his living quiver. That's why he always looks so uncomfortable.
Dave: Ah. The old +5 Quiver of Cheney. Guaranteed to hit an albatross at every turn.
WitR: if not quail.
Dave: And I guess that makes the GOP the crew of dead souls manning the ship.
(Clearly Cheney has a cursed -5 shotgun of birding)

On Samuel Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and other great literature
WitR: I have not read the poem since ninth grade and just barely remember that the crew is dead
Dave: For shame. I read the book just a few months ago to my kids.
WitR: well, i tend to forget things that i associate with ernest hemingway and my ex's music collection
Dave: You associate "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" with Hemingway!?
I think I'm going to be sick, just imagining how Hemingway would tell the story.
WitR: no, i associate everything i was forced to read for school with ernest hemingway
Dave: "The ancient mariner had been wounded in the war, and had never been able to have sex since."
It was assigned in freshman lit. I enjoyed it anyway.
"her hair was black, her lips were red, her skin was white as leprosy"
WitR: "There was a man. He shot a bird. Everyone died. The wind was cold."
you realize that i had more than one book assigned by hemingway, and yet we never got around to discussing his BLATANTLY obvious misogynistic issues
Dave: Well, you did go to a Christian high school. Misogyny is a fabrication of feminazis, don't you know.
WitR: no, really! we like women! we just don't think they should do anything that doesn't involve uteruses.
Dave: Unless their husbands or fathers tell them to.

On the coherency of the Inernet and those who write therein:
Dave: OK, I just read so-and-so's post. I can't tell if he's agreeing with you or dismissing your post as the first wave of analyseing (sic) Palin, or fluf. (sic)
His creative spelling doesn't make him easier to understand.
WitR: i can deal with creative spelling because my college roommate had a learning disability. It's the creative syntax and punctuation that throws me off.
Dave: If it were just creative spelling, I could manage. But he's got the syntax and punctuation too -- not to mention unclear and underdeveloped thoughts -- and the total leaves me at a loss.
WitR: I think he may just be a malfunctioning turing program
Dave: On the other hand, his "be-bop" post makes perfect sense.
WitR: maybe the closer he gets to agreeing with me, the better he writes
Dave: Doubtless that's true of us all.
The Buddha himself gained enlightenment, started agreeing with you, and wrote flawlessly.
WitR: i think if i'm the pinnacle of human development, someone is playing a serious prank on humanity
Dave: This is revelation to you?
WitR: merely stating the obvious for the elucidation of humankind
it's Zen
for my next trick i will clap one hand

On the latest attempts at the Great End-Times novel:
WitR: http://www.arrivaloftheprince.com/ <-- egads. this looks horrible Dave: Wow. How on earth do you find these things? WitR: facebook sidebar ad, actually. god only knows why it showed up for me, usually i get olivia cruises and photography classes Dave: You realize I have to buy you a copy of the book for Christmas now. Along with "The Eye of Argon." WitR: do it, and i'll send your daughters a starter beading kit Dav: We'll add the beading kit to all the other beading kits they have. You'll have to do better than that to threaten me. WitR: curses. foiled again. st. bernard puppy? Dave: Evangeline's allergic to dogs. Sorry. "it was inconceivable, but it was becoming clear that the earth's rotation was inexplicably slowing down" It's that whole lost day with Joshua all over again! Thank God NASA already has it figured out. "What happens if it keeps slowing down?" asked the President. WitR: i like how the Senate chaplain is now in high-level security briefings Dave: Good to know that Bush is still at the helm when Armageddon comes. "Doctor Wang removed a pipe from his coat pocket and began to fumble with it. He could not conceal the fact that his hands were shaking" Oh, thank God, it;s just his hands shaking. For a moment I thought he was going to get footloose. WitR: oh man. read the page on lucifer's DNA it involves Nephilim, naturally Dave: Of course. I hadn't realized it, but that whole tradition has roots in the book of Enoch. Pullman drew on a lot of that for "His Dark Materials." WitR: carey builds on a lot of angelology for the kushiel series, actually more of an alternate-universe setup there Dave: Where's the page on Lucifer's DNA? WitR: http://www.arrivaloftheprince.com/luciferDNA.htm Dave: I have to say, so far it looks better than "Left Behind." WitR: that's about like saying that Wendy's is better than McDonalds Dave: I didn't say it was high praise. WitR: honestly, reading the setup, it COULD be interesting, in THEORY, but sadly, the fact that the author is a Christian totally blows its chances of doing so Dave: His explanation of the book and Uizhun-Tabriz actually is pretty interesting. Too bad he didn't write the book that well. I hate to agree, but you're right. WitR: http://www.arrivaloftheprince.com/StoneTablets.htm <-- remember, kids: don't drink and Photoshop Dave: The only good writers in the Christian market are all dead. WitR: that's because no living author with a sense of decency would be caught dead in the Christian market if they're any good at all they have a major market presence anyway Dave: "The deciphered message of this tablet is: 14q43 215860406 215882973" My life has been transformed. WitR: yes! now you know God's mastercard number. Dave: Alas, they won't accept the cattle on a thousand hills down at the supermarket. WitR: yeah, but think of the amazon bill you could run up with it Dave: Adds a whole new meaning to "Forgive us our debts," doesn't it? WitR: indeed, though you have to wonder what God's credit score would be satan's is obviously 666 so given numerology, that would make jesus' a respectable 777 Dave: In this economy, it's probably dropped. Although Satan probably qualifies for a Bush tax cut. Jesus, being working class, it SOOL, being as he's a shameless grifter and leech on the welfare state. I bet his credit rating is in tatters. WitR: well, i'd imagine rather that he has little to no credit history, never having the wherewithal to apply for any Dave: Where have you been the last twelve months? That's no impediment to getting financing. WitR: yeah, but whenever he applies for a mortgage he keeps getting denied when he uses a house in Heaven as collateral >># That Lucifer was a mortal—and therefore had DNA. This fact is also in the Bible.<< Of course! I totally learned about Lucifer's DNA in sunday school.
Dave: Sure. It's right before the passage that talks about the collapse of the vapor canopy sending all the animals into the first-ever hibernative state.
Surely you remember that.
WitR: unfortunately there actually was a vapor canopy entry in the world history / bible class i took in high school
Dave: Well of course there was. You didn't think I was writing that by accident, did you?

edwards, palin scandals

2008-09-04T10:48:00.001-04:00

The news media sat on the scoop of Edwards' affair, collectively, for months. It only came out long after it was too late to matter. The pregnancy of Palin's teenage daughter was sat on for ... what .. twenty minutes? I call double standard.
Read the quote in context

I don't know how much the news media knew about Edwards before he admitted to the whole sordid affair, but honestly, would you take seriously a report that appeared in The National Enquirer? That's rather like taking the news media to task for failing to cover Bat Boy...

Couple points:

1) Edwards is a public person but at the time the Enquirer broke the news, he was not a presidential candidate nor even particularly clearly a favorite for the VP spot. I'm not sure what public good necessarily you think was neglected in this case. And again, I point out that the Enquirer is hardly a font of credible journalism. Perhaps the respectable news media should be all over the impending Bush divorce that the tabloids have been reporting?

2) Not that many years ago the news media dug into the story of Clinton's affair with such thoroughness that not only were the stories on how many news outlets were covering Zippergate, there were news stories about many news outlers were covering the coverage of Zippergate. Is that a liberal bias at work, a conservative bias at work, or merely pandering to the baser appetites of the public for salacious details about our leaders?

3) Kerry didn't even have an affair, but the media still dug into the private life of one of his campaign staffers and made her life a living hell.

4) Gary Bauer took the unusual step of holding a news conference during Primary 2000 to announce that he wasn't having an affair with his staffers, and was pretty much given a free pass. (I mean, really, there's not much of a better way to draw attention to a potential impropriety than to insist that it's not what people think, especially when no one publicly is thinking it.)

5) From I have been told by other journalists, the word around D.C. during the presidency of Bush the Elder is that he also was having an affair. I recall no coverage of this at the time. Further liberal bias at work?

I know that "liberal media bias" is an important shibboleth within conservative culture, but let's be fair. Repeat it enough, start assuming it from the get-go, and dang if you won't find boatloads of evidence of it. The New York Times could say that GWB walks on water, and the response would be "Those dirty liberals are suggesting Bush thinks he's above the law of gravity!" I mean, seriously, there are plenty of other reasonable explanations why the Edwards affair wasn't aired immediately, and the Palin situation was.

quickly, robin

2008-09-03T13:12:00.001-04:00

To the bat box!

I wish I had a place to put one of those around here.

that empty feeling

2008-09-03T09:59:00.000-04:00

La knabinoj are at school today.

For Evangeline, this is a return. She has finished third grade and embarked on a journey through fourth. She was a little nervous when we walked there this morning. It's a new grade, a new classroom, and a change from the summer, where she's been free of the artificial strictures of a school environment for two months.

For Rachel, it's a new world. She's visited the charter school many times, helping out as I volunteered in a class, and so she knows her teacher and many of her classmates as well. She was more excited than nervous, although one of the new classmates succeeded in making her feel nervous by invading her personal space almost as soon as she was through the door and asking her questions in a loud voice.

And me, I'm feeling a little discombobulated myself. I've been a stay-at-home dad for four years now. I taught each of my girls how to read, write and do basic math, and I've scheduled much of my life around them and their needs during that time, particularly this past summer. To the extent that one person can define another, their lives have defined mine for four years now, particularly Rachel for the last two.

And now they're somewhere else, and I'm left alone in the house to look for a job and work on my writing.

I'm going to be inconsolable when they go away to college.

hemingway meets coleridge

2008-09-02T00:34:00.002-04:00

My version:
"The ancient mariner had been wounded in the war, and had never been able to have sex since."

My friend Liadan's version:

There was a man. He shot a bird. Everyone died. The wind was cold."

the problem with teaching children

2008-09-01T22:09:00.002-04:00

The problem with teaching children is that they learn, and often it is not convenient for us that they do so.

I have been teaching the girls for some time now that it's important to conserve. Turn off the lights when you're not using them, take shorter showers, reduce what you use, reuse it in new and interesting ways, recycle things, and compost. You can call it being green, living in the balance, or living sustainably, but it boils down to common sense. It saves money and natural resources.

So tonight we're walking past the neighbor's house, and the girls stop to look at what he's throwing out. It's an old vanity sink, sans the sink. Nice, solid wood. A few holes where the pipes went, but for the most part it's pretty decent wood.

"You know, dad," the younger child says. "You could make a dollhouse with this wood."

I have to stop teaching my kids things.

reuse: plastic cereal bags

2008-09-01T03:59:00.001-04:00

I don't know if they're microwave safe, but the plastic bags that cereal comes in, inside the boxes, make a great substitute for waxed paper.

We had a get-together here at the house on Saturday, where I grilled some burgers. When I made the patties, I laid them between layers of a bag we had finished all the Cheerios in just a couple days earlier. I had pulled the bag apart at its seams, and cut it into quarters, so it was perfect for layering. Make four burgers, slap down a sheet of the bag, make four more burgers, and so on.

No need to buy waxed paper, no need to buy paper towels. I already owned the bags and had no other use for them, so this was ideal. I saved the money and threw out something I would have thrown out anyway ... after getting one more use from it.

'inferno'

2008-09-01T03:52:00.002-04:00

I just finished re-reading "Inferno" for what is probably the seventh or eighth time. Not the one by Dante Alighieri, the hauntingly beautiful first installment in his epic, "The Divine Comedy." This was the retelling, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Niven and Pournelle, predictably, set their story around a sci-fi writer who dies at a sci-fi convention and finds himself in hell. The book probably would have benefitted from another draft. Because the narrator is a sci-fi writer, much of the book is dominated by sci-fi talk, as the writer tries to find scientic explanations for what he encounters. And because it's a Niven book, it's chock-full of sly and not-so-subtle references to his other works. It gets a little distracting.

But I keep reading and re-reading the book. I've read it more than I read Dante's classic -- which, in all fairness to me, was among the books stolen from me when I left Haiti -- and more times even than I've read T.H. White's "The Sword in the Stone." Probably the only book I've read more is "The Lord of the Rings." Maybe. ("Inferno" clocks in at 237 pages. Tolkien's masterpiece is well over a thousand.)

Part of the appeal is that it is an easy read. Give me an uninterrupted afternoon, and I'll plow through "Inferno" in a couple hours. It's harder to do that with Ursula LeGuin's "Wizard of Earthsea" series, and impossible with "The Nibelungenleid," even setting aside matters of length. They just have more going on.

Undeniably, I also get a perverse kick out of seeing whom Niven and Journelle have placed among the ranks of the damned. There's Himuralabima, who invented bureaucracy; one of Niven's own fictional characters, from "A Time out of Mind"; two two authors themselves, presumably, in the identity of the dead science fiction writer, and Billy the Kid, among others. There's just enough information given in a few cases to identify other real people who were alive at the time of the book's publication, such as Kurt Vonnegut.

And part of it is also the hauntingly funereal beauty of the setting, which comes through despite the narrator's missing-the-point efforts to explain what he sees -- Niven and Pournelle's plains of frozen nitrogen in Judecca, hyperspatial conduits for Minos' tail, collapsed singularities around Satan's navel, and so on. The pit of flatterers remains grossly appropriate, as do the other ironic endings the authors describe: politicians frozen in the ice because they betrayed their own consciences for the sake of party loyalty, bulldozers that chase real estate developers, and the disinterested cruelty of the demons.

But a lot of the appeal is a pervasive sense of injustice. It's too much, too late. What purpose does such unending torment serve? We incarcerate criminals for a few years, maybe for many if their crimes were heinous and they lack the money to hire a good lawyer. But sooner or later, they complete their sentence, qualify for parole, or die. At some point, each of them is done and free to leave, if nowhere else, then at least to the final peace of the grave.

But hell? Nothing doing. Day and night, year after year, the torment of the damned continues. Dante depicts homosexuals tormented in a desert where fire falls from the sky like snowflakes, religious schismatics cut in half, violent wasters pursued by mad dogs, the violent kept in a river of boiling blood, and traitors frozen in ice. Judas himself is one of three sinners condemned to be chewed upon by one of Satan's three mouths for all eternity.

That's Dante's imagery, of course, but he didn't make it up ex nihilo. The doctrine of hell predated him by hundreds of years, and while he may have embellished it, Christians have subscribed to a belief in hell since the days of Rome. And I don't know of many Christians who don't find it at least a little problematic to think that the nice God we sing pretty songs to on Sunday could insist on torturing billions of people for all eterntiy. (And even those who resist saying so, usually will admit to difficulty when pressed, though they'll always insist that God is just in all he does.)

And he is, being God and all. May God be true and everyone a liar -- but hell still seems harsh when you get down to it. Are the joys of heaven possible only if the damn'd are writhing in eternal torment? Is there some sort of balance, and the Nine Worlds will come crashing down if the fire is quenched and the worm ceases to gnaw? Does hell exist so the elect can feel safe from people who hurt them in this life? (It's going to make heaven a lonely place if that's the case, since everyone hurts someone.)

"Inferno" gets going once Allen Carpentier pushes his guide into the Pit of the Evil Counsellors. He's struck by remorse, identifies increasingly not just with the plight of the damned but also with the sins that put them there, and discovers an interesting doctrine of hell; namely, that it's the hotbox God uses to get our attention when all else has failed. The worse we've sinned, the greater the heat, in hopes that something will get through to us.

(If you've read "The Divine Comedy," you'll recall that Virgil led Dante on his journey through the nine circles of hell, through their very center, thus to Purgatory and onward to Heaven, where Beatrice took over. Niven and Pournelle jumped to the logical conclusion that Dante's path shows the way for all the damned to leave hell, making it in essence a zeroth level of Purgatory and creating a universalist view of the afterlife that makes fundamentalists run screaming for the door.)

In the end, "Inferno" moves from being merely an updated vision of Dante's work, to a commentary on the work and on the doctrine of hell itself. I have no answers myself, just questions that echo in my own soul when I read this book, and that itself is a triumph of sorts, and why I keep reading this book.

just so we're clear ...

2008-09-01T02:34:00.004-04:00

I can't speak for my cousin and why she's so taken with Barack Obama, but here are a few of the things that I like:

He has a track record of working for the dispossessed in inner-city Chicago;
He has a proven history of working with people from both sides of the aisle. I've noticed that he hasn't engaged in any of the personal attacks that have come from the GOP corner.
He actually listens to advisers when they tell him things contrary to what he thinks.
He realizes that our nation has lost a lot of international standing in the past eight years and that the old days are over. We can no longer get what we want because we're America.
It's true he opposed the surge, which Sen. McCain supported and which apparently has quelled a lot of the unrest in Iraq. On the other hand, he also didn't support invading a sovereign nation without provocation, plunging an entire country into chaos, and destabilizing the entire region.*
Obama favors moving the United States to greater energy independence -- it is a matter of national security, as well as environmental security, and industrial and economic well-being. Remember, he has called for developing a Green Belt here in America, developing sustainable industry to take the place of the Rust Belt that languished and fell apart under the efforts set up by the Reagan and subsequent administrations of "Let businesses go and they'll do what's best." (Which they did -- for the bottom line, which involved moving outside the U.S. and laying off thousands of workers.)
As thrilled as I am that the Republicans -- FINALLY -- have nominated a woman for the vice presidential ticket, let me point out that should anything happen to Obama, Biden has a strong political resume and presumably would make a viable replacement. Palin's resume is too thin to say the same should anything happen to McCain.

On those things that concern you:

He is not a Muslim. Even if he were, that's no cause for alarm, nor even concern. Get over it.
Yes, he is black. Get over that too. In fact, I'd say that's an asset. Our past 43 presidents have all been sons of privilege, by and large. As white men they've come from positions of power, wealth, influence and uncounted privilege, and to some extent that's had to affect foreign policy. Obama has had to deal with the downside of America: he's been subject to racism, he's had to prove his worth time and again, and he's done it. In fact, he just recently paid off his college loans. Do you really think that a man who's had to prove himself so many times is just going to assume that the world will do what we wants, should he become president?
Also true, his experience at the national level is limited. The issue isn't experience as much as it is wisdom and willingness to listen to qualified advisers. Obama has plenty of experience at organizing people, building consensus, and getting things done in an above-board manner. Are people that different at the world stage? Small-minded people remain small-minded whether they work at the city clerk's office, the foreign consulate, or the Grand Assembly. Obama knows how to connect with people, just like GWB doesn't and Reagan did. GWB also has had great advisers, like Colin Powell, but he doesn't know how to connect with people, and he's ignored advisers when he disagrees with them. Look how that's turned out.
Yes, he's "liberal." I wish I knew what people meant by that these days, though, because it seems to an empty pejorative any more. GWB is billed as a conservative, even though he's gone on runaway spending sprees without a plan on how to pay for them, and he's engaged in nation-building of the worst possible sort. And my mother, God bless her, criticizes Obama for being liberal and yet she's voiced support in the past for abortion and physician-assisted suicide while laying claim to being a conservative. (On the former, at least, she agrees with Obama's stated position, if not McCain's, and Obama's position anyway is "We all want fewer of them, so let's work together.")

* Edited to add: Actually, he voted against funding for the troop when there was no timeline set for their withdrawal. McCain also voted against funding, when there was a timeline attached. Therefore it is just as accurate to say that McCain voted against the surge. And in any event, the real successes there seem to have flowed from the Sunni tribal leaders who have broken with the insurgency and with al Qaeda in Iraq, and not from any increase in U.S. troops.

on being different

2008-09-01T02:09:00.000-04:00

My friend Shelly visited the local Metropolitan Community Church Sunday morning. For those not in the know, the MCC is a Protestant denomination that identifies itself with the gay, lesbian and transgendered Christian community. Hang out in some evangelical circles, and you'll probably hear it dismissed as a false church, or at best a church that has it all wrong on matters of sin.

I've never been to one, but I like what Shelly has to say:

I also remember when younger all the hostility aimed at Metropolitan Community Church and the "gay Christians" who obviously were so deluded, as they were described in my evangelical circles. When I was there, all I heard was people who put God first and considered themselves humbly and really sought to be Christlike and accepting of wherever God put them. It didn't sound any different in terms of "kingdom living" than the conservatives who had good hearts, despite any theological differences.

I think the MCC church, however, understands suffering and sacrifice in ways that I never quite felt like the middle-class white evangelicals do. When you're found yourself rejected and abused and put down because of who you are and feel you can't change, when you feel constantly excluded because of what you've determined after years is your identity, you either become insanely bitter or you learn how to minister to the broken-hearted and hurting without judgment. These people were not bitter; they really found joy in knowing God.

to everyone who made it possible, thank you

2008-08-30T23:46:00.002-04:00

When the summer of 2008 is a memory, probably the strangest phenomenon to be recalled will be the emergence of my new denim tote bag as a status symbol.

The bag began, as these things are wont to do, as something decidedly nonbaglike. I imagine it beginning somewhere in the South, though it might well have been far outside the Continental United States, as an underpaid farmhand toiled beneath a hot sun planting cotton seeds. He probably drove a truck that scattered the seed, and he probably was paid slave wages. He may have been working there illegally, but even if he wasn't, chances are good he was being taken advantage of. I know of no region in the world with the phrase "as wealthy as a farmhand."

This denim tote bag is dedicated to you, whoever you are.

Over the weeks that followed, other workers had to spray the cotton with insecticides and other toxins, to kill the pests that might prey on the crop otherwise. These toxins, like the fertilizer that force the land to yield more than it is capable of, leach into our waterways, poisoning the fish and the rest of the ecosystem the fish connect to, including us.

I wish such things were not done, but I realize that sometimes a job is a job. Children must be fed, and so I dedicate this bag to the workers who dump these chemicals on the fields, whether they wear (or are given) proper protection or no. Your lives, and your labors, have value.

At some point another farm worker went through the fields and harvested the cotton. This also doubtless was done with the help of a machine, and this worker also probably was paid exceedingly poor wages. Do these workers bunk together in crowded huts to save money, so they can have a handful of cash to support their families? Many do.

This denim tote bag is dedicated to you, all of you, to your basic human dignity and to the value of your work.

The bales of cotton were picked, poured into a machine, and the machines removed the seeds from the cotton with mechanical precision. Such machines have brought a lot of progress to the world; they have helped to make processed, cleaned and spun cotton accessible to the world. I care little for the machines, but I acknowledge the people who work them.

This bag exists thanks to you.

And ultimately, the cotton was woven; it was measured, it was cut, it was dyed, and it was sewn together. Did a child do this work, laboring in a sweatshop in godforsaken conditions? It often happens this way, to bring us clothes at the low prices we see as our right. We don't see the sweatshops with children working all hours a day when they could be learning or playing, but they are there all the same, and our lust for the fleeting fashions of today is an affront to their dignity. It mocks their sweat, and turns a cold unfeeling shoulder to the injuries these workers endure to support our culture of consumerism.

It is a small thing, but this denim tote bag reaffirms their dignity and their value in some small way. This denim tote bag, after all, used to be a pair of pants.

An unmanageable hole in the right knee this spring led me to shorten my jeans into a pair of shorts. The material I cut off has been lying around the house ever since, until earlier this week, when I saw how there was enough fabric there to make a reusable bag of the size I take to the supermarket. So I cut the two shin pieces so they became flat squares, sewed them together by hand, and made handles from the inseam of another pair of pants that was hopelessly torn at the seat.

Miaj filinoj were completely taken with the project. They suggested other possibilities for scraps of fabric lying around the house, and Evangeline even stitched an entire side of the bag together once I showed her how to use a needle and thread. Today she used it to carry a package to the post office with me, and then later I used the bag at the supermarket, and kept myself from needing a plastic bag. There'll be a lot of that in the weeks and months to come.

Every time we buy something at the store, we need to remember that we are simply the final member in a long procession of people to come into contact with what we buy. Their labor, their time, an irreplaceable part of their lives, went into producing what we buy. When we casually discard their work, we disregard them and the dignity of their work. We do this to our shame.

But when we find a new use for their product, even if it's as simple as making a reuseable grocery bag from a pair of discarded jeans, we reaffirm that their work has value.

My girls get this message. Even though it's silly, they think the denim tote bag is a cool thing, and they're on the lookout for other ways they can reduce the amount of trash we throw out each day. Sometimes they see art projects in old newspaper, and sometimes they see new toys in broken things.

Hard to believe this all started with a pair of old blue jeans, but I guess they weren't as worn out as we thought.

stages of life

2008-08-28T10:33:00.003-04:00

Life comes in stages, not all of them pleasant.

Ten to fifteen years ago everyone I knew was getting married. The year Natasha and I tied the knot, there were three other couples we were friends with who made it official.

The weddings were followed within a few years by a prolonged slew of babies. My brother Herb and his wife, Pam, had a son. Natasha and I followed less than a year later with Evangeline. Then Ward and his wife, Rhoda, had a daughter. All told there are five little Learnlings running around right now, though the youngest is 5.

Last year I noticed a number of my friends were separating and getting divorced. The marriages that were pledged to last the rest of their lives were coming crashing down around them, and one by one, they were deciding to leave.

And now, while it is still summer, I can feel the first chill of autumn as wind stirs in the leaves overhead.

I buried an aunt last year, followed by an uncle. We buried Natasha's mother this summer, taken by an early frost. Now I have another aunt in Georgia who has been given two to eight weeks to live.

And my own parents, who at 68 have had good innings, are no longer as young as they once were. They're both slowing down, and though they've been there my whole life, it's increasingly plain to see that they won't be there forever.

The sun rises in the East and sets in the West, and as the day ends, all slips into darkness. This too is meaningless.

beautiful explanation of death

2008-08-28T09:19:00.003-04:00

A terminally ill man had been visiting his pastor. As he was preparing to leave, he turned to his pastor and said, "Pastor, I am afraid to die. Tell me what lies on the other side."

Very quietly, the pastor said, "I don't know."

"You don't know?" the man asked incredulously. "You're a Christian man, you're a preacher. Don't you know what is on the other side?"

The pastor had been holding the handle of the door to his study. From the other side of the door came a sound of scratching and whining, and as he opened the door, a dog sprang into the room and leaped on him with an eager show of gladness.

Turning to his parishoner as the dog ran to the center of the room and stood by the nice new ottoman, the pastor said, "Did you notice my dog? He's never been in this room before. He didn't know what was inside. He knew nothing except that his master was here, and when the door opened, he sprang in without fear. I know little of what is on the other side of death, but I do know one thing: I know my master is there, and that is enough."

And that's when he kicked the dog for piddling on the furniture.

May today there be peas within you,
And lettuce and watercress too.
May you trust God that you are exactly
Where you are meant to be,
Unless you're in Harrisburg, or
Just outside Augusta, Georgia,
In which case you're probably screwed.
I believe that friends are quiet angels
Who quietly bear us along when our wings
Have trouble remembering how to fly.
(So please don't drop me. It's a long way down.)

inconstant faith

2008-08-28T01:26:00.005-04:00

My experience with evangelicals is that there is a game of Pretend afoot that the faith has been largely consistent from the time of Abraham down to the present. Clearly there is some truth to this, but let's not kid ourselves. Doctrines, beliefs and attitudes have changed, and often are influenced by factors wholly extrabiblical. In some cases it's the touted biblical capitalism or Bible-based democracy -- neither of which has its basis in the Bible -- but in other cases it's matters directly based on the Bible.

Honest faith must also admit honest doubt, and honest doubts need to be acknowledged and explored. As has been said, God is big enough to handle tough questions, and it's not as though he's surprised when we ask them. Refusing to voice them -- or to consider whether a) there's some truth there, or b) it reflects a faulty understanding on your part -- will simply leave you with an unresolved question and a lingering, festering suspicion that you've been sold a bill of goods.

Satan's one example I love to toss out, since we hear tell quite often in pop Christian culture about the rebellion in heaven. It's a great story, and I love it as much as the nice guy, but it's not exactly in the Bible. It's quite a bit older than Milton, but as far as I can tell, it first gained traction a few centuries after the canon was complete.

The gospel presentation has changed too. These dates it's about what wretched sinners everybody is, and how God needs to punish them because he's so holy, so Christ stepped in and said "Punish me instead!" and now God's need for justice has been satisfied, so long as people accept Jesus as their personal savior. That's quite a bit different from Christus Victor, and differs also from the first recorded creed "If you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. For it is with the heart that you believe and are justified, and with the mouth that you confess and are saved" (1 Corinthians 10:9-10). There's nothing in there about confessing your sins, it's all about confessing Jesus' sovereignty.

Christians for centuries got married by having sex first and then getting their union blessed later -- sometimes years later -- by a priest, and in some places even had trial marriages that aren't that different from today's practice of premarital cohabitation. Nowadays it's heterosexual married families ûber alles. The insistence on marriage-vows-first very well may be closer to what God desires, but I don't think we're kidding anyone but ourselves when we claim that the way we do things now in the West is how they've always been done or properly should be done always.

Our interpretation of Scripture, our concepts of morality and justice, and many of our doctrines have changed, sometimes drastically over the past two millennia. (And no, I am not pulling some sort of da Vinci Code crap here about how the Nicean council suppressed views it didn't like, so please don't anyone argue that I am. I'm not talking about issues of heresy, just everything else.)

And so it is with hell. I haven't made a formal study of the issue, but there's little doubt in my mind that hell has got a lot more press in evangelicalism than it needs to because of fundamentalist tent revivals and the big emphasis on sin and repentance. And if ha-Satan has been tied to a rebellion in heaven that the Bible never says happened because of Milton's poem, it's pretty evident that the afterlife has been forever colored in the West by Dante's hauntingly beautiful poetry in "The Divine Comedy."

It's not only a fun thing to chase down the original meaning and intent of the Scriptures, it's essential that we do. Scrape away the barnacles and see what the hull of the ship is like underneath. What does the Bible really say about hell, about heaven, about demons, about Jesus, and about even itself? Quite often, I don't think it says what we've been taught to think it does, and though the investigation often leaves me with more questions than answers, I find that I prefer the uncertainty of faith to the cold hard certainty of what I was once taught to settle for.

One quick example of how hell has been developed, away from the biblical teaching. Matthew 25 shows the exalted Son of Man judging the nations, and separating them as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. To the goats, the wicked, he says, "Depart from me into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels." Funny thing is, the audience to that particular speech was a group of Christians. They recognized the Lord when they saw him, and asked in bewilderment, "But did we not heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons in your name?" If the term Christian has any meaning in the context of that parable, this group was in like Flynn. Or there's the servant -- not an enemy, but a servant -- whose talent is taken away and given to another; the servant whose debt was forgiven and then was beaten and thrown into prison. I've never heard these understood as anything but metaphors for hell, and yet the people being thrown there are all servants of the king/master/lord, thereby marking them as Christians. So is hell for?

hell just froze over

2008-08-27T22:46:00.001-04:00

Despite my earlier kvetching, I have beaten the system at its own game once again.

Rachel, despite being born two weeks too late to enter first grade this year, has been approved for first grade, owing to her course of education at home the past year. This despite the many assurances I have received over the years that no one ever gets an exception from a school district's cutoff date, never, no how.

Teachers and administrators alike at the charter school are amazed that I pulled it off.

That fluttering sound you hear is pigs flying.

my neural synapses fuse

2008-08-26T23:24:00.001-04:00

The girls and I visited the library today, mostly to get out of the house, but also to return the books we had borrowed that were due today. While we were there, Evangeline and I started practicing our Esperanto.

It works like this: I read her a word, and she gives me the Esperanto equivelant. Then I use the word in a sentence, and she has to translate the sentence. If I ask her a question, she has to answer me in Esperanto. (This has all sorts of insidious purposes. Besides teaching her the language, I pass on subversive ideas, like Bonaj demandoj ne havas facilajn respondojn. "Good questions don't have easy answers.")

So we're on a roll, going back and forth, and then suddenly Rachel interjects a translation on her own. An accurate one.

I should note that I have given her virtually no instruction in Esperanto. She's drilled me on some of my vocabulary, and she's heard me make simple requests in Esperanto, but otherwise it's stuff she's overheard me explaining to her fratino or she's picked up from our impromptu conversations.

So my brain pops the clutch over that one. I wrestle it back into gear, and then suddenly Evangeline starts correcting my grammar. "You forgot to add the -N!" she wails. (It's true. I keep forgetting to add the -N for the accusative case.)

Then I realize that while I'm using words I've learned from the more advanced lessons that Evangeline hasn't reach, she is having no trouble following me. Demandi is an infinitive; theoretically, all Evangeline should know is the verb forms. In practice, she's already converted it into a noun, demando/n, and doing the same with other verbs.

I used to be ahead of her, mostly because mi estas la instruisto; I am the teacher, and so I need to understand it if I'm going to teach her. I now realize that my vocabular is slightly larger, probably because I'm already bilingual and know a smattering of French and Spanish to boot, but she is rapidly eclipsing whatever advantage I have. Her brain is wired right now for language acquisition, while for me it's work.

So much work that my language center finally seized up and stopped working completely. We were having a little back-and-forth in Esperanto when I said, "Jodia estas los compleanos de your grandfather."

The girls looked at me like I made no sense. Which I didn't -- in four different languages. I had mashed them all together into one coherent statement that made sense only to me.

rolling my chronometer upward

2008-08-24T11:39:00.002-04:00

Today, August 24, is my BIRTHDAY. I am turning 38. I therefore am inviting everyone who reads this blog to join in celebrating this annual event in the manner that seems most appropriate.

Some suggestions:

Go on a pub crawl in my honor.
Visit the library and lose yourself in a dozen good books.
Go see "The Dark Knight."
Take up either suborbital skydiving, or parasailing in the upper Jovian atmosphere.
Write a letter to GWB, asking if there is any loose change under the White House sofa cushions that you can have.
Rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
Put on patriotic costume, and go out and fight crime.
Make "Hussein" your middle name.
Sit on a Whoopee Cushion during silent prayer at church.
While out in public, turn to an unsuspecting member of the opposite sex and say, very loudly, "Motel room? Why do you want me to go to a motel room with you?"

Please note that Suggestion 10 also has a comical effect during silent prayer at church, but is likelu to have you ejected from the service.

'the gameplayers of zan'

2008-08-24T01:15:00.001-04:00

It took about 400 pages, but the book finally has me hooked.

I figured Sanjirmil for Errat's killer almost right away, but was surprised by the nature of the game when it finally was revealed. That's actually pretty clever, both of the ler and of M.C. Foster, to have created such an elaborate system of simultaneous misdirection and preparation.

But man oh man, this guy needed to work on his pacing (and his dialogue) a bit more. Only a few scenes piqued my interest in the first few hundred pages, and they weren't enough on their own to keep me going. I haven't read prose this turgid since I was a newspaper editor. The book finally has my interest, and how, but I doubt that's going to be enough to get me to read the other ler books.

I'm on Page 406 right now; the forerunners have just figured out what the Game is about, and they are about to take action to secure the reservation. It's a lousy place to stop, but it's 1:12 a.m., and I need to.

stinking bueraucrats

2008-08-22T15:29:00.000-04:00

I'm the process of trying to get Rachel properly into first grade at school. She misses the cutoff date in our district by two weeks, so ordinarily she would be starting kindergarten in a few weeks. Ordinarily, except I homeschooled her for kindergarten, and basically got her to the level where academically she's ready to start second grade.

I did this with Evangeline three years ago, explained everything nicely to the superintendent's office, and got a letter from them essentially saying, "Hey, no problem. We'll put her in our system as a first-grader." I gave that to the charter school, and bang! zoom! she was in. No problem, right?

Not this year. This year I sent a letter and got a phone call from the superintendent saying he needed more information about the course of study we used before he could approve such an exception. So I wrote him a detailed letter explaining what material I used to teach Rachel to read, how I taught her to tell time and count change, what math books I used, and made up a checklist showing her levels of progress and achievement for kindergarten throughout the year. I e-mailed it to him as requested, and waited.

And waited.

Today I took a printout of the e-mail and its attachments to his office and gave them to his secretary. She was really nice; we chatted a bit, and it turns out she knows my name, and has seen the letter herself. She stamped the correspondence as received, and added a Post It note saying that I needed a response from him. (As I myself had indicated in each letter I have sent him.)

School starts in two weeks and I can't get a letter from this guy saying that Rachel is OK for first grade. Fortunately I've talked with the education directors at the charter school so they know that Rachel already is at or past a first-grade level in her subjects, so she can be educated accordingly. (At least we hope. I have fears that they won't know what to do with her, either. That was a problem Evangeline had three years ago.)

So what accounts for the foot-dragging this time around at the superintendent's office? Two things. For starters, relations between the charter school and the local district have soured somewhat over funding issues. Secondly, I'm beginning my third year on the charter school board of trustees. My name goes out on all the school's official correspondence, so the superintendent knows who I am, and he knows I'm not just a parent in the crowd.

I hope he surprises me and gives me that letter, but I have a sneaking suspicion he's going to drag his feet into the school year if he can.

recycled crafts

2008-08-22T02:23:00.002-04:00

We've already used broken plates and pottery to decorate our mailbox post. The girls even made our house number from pieces of broken plate. We'll be decorating a planter that way some time soon. (It's simple: You take broken coffee mugs or plates, and affix them to the post or other surface with the same adhesive you use for doing a ceramic surface on your sink. They sell the adhesive at home improvement stores, even the big, ugly, useless ones.)

I'm nearly finished with a rag rug made entirely from old pants of mine that had become indecent. (You stich 2-inch-wide strips together into three long strands, and then you braid them together to make a rope, then use carpet thread to stitch it together.)

My mother has taken a bunch of old T-shirts of mine that have outlived their usefulness as T-shirts, and is in the process of making them into a quilt. The quilt, when it is finished, will be something that we can use for years to come to keep ourselves warm.

These are all things we can do fairly cheaply, getting extra use out of things that once we would have thrown into the garbage. In every case mentioned so far, we're getting years of extra use out of the original items by changing what we use them for. If we do a good enough job at them, these can even be gifts with a personal touch for friends and relatives.

Here's a new one I want to try tomorrow: Making patterns and shapes from old crayons. The girls have plenty of these from trips to restaurants, where they routinely give children cheap crayons that break as soon as they're used for more than 30 seconds. I also seem to remember that you can make crayons into candles.

And I have a ton of old socks that I can't use. They have holes, they're stretched out, and they lost their mates, but mostly they have holes in the heels. So, here's an idea I have for those: another quilt, a patchwork that I make myself by sewing the socks together as I go. I don't know if that would be thick enough, or if I'd need bunting or whatever it's called, but as long as the socks are clean, it's not a bad idea. And again, it adds years of life to the material. Or I can get the girls to make sock puppets. Either way, it reduces our waste, makes something useful from something that has lost its usefulness, and it teachs the girl actual skills, unlike most of what passes for crafts these days. ("Let's glue stuff together and color with markers!" Bleah.)

Bit by bit, I want to cut into the trash we produce. A private school I visited Wednesday, one with LEEDS platinum certification, has set the goal of eliminating all trash within three years. Everything on site will be recycled, composted, or reused in some way so that it doesn't end up moldering in a landfill. That's an impressive goal, and one I want to emulate here at the house.

We already recycle plenty, and we compost a great deal too, but I really like the idea of finding crafty ways to turn trash into something that we can use and appreciate for years to come.

mike and me

2008-08-21T23:49:00.003-04:00

Several years ago, my friend Mike told me that he was transgendered.

At the time, I recall, it made little impression on me. He's a good friend of mine, and I knew he was a good person, and that was what mattered. I didn't know much about gender dysphoria, only the old cliche erroneously attached to homosexuals, about "being a woman in a man's body." We had some lengthy discussions pertaining about gender and identity, and life moved on. He was determined to remain a man for the sake of their three children, and that appeared to be that.

Of course, where identity is concerned, that is never that. When a person is required to be something other than what they are, the strain of the pretense builds over time and takes its toll in one area or another. Depression and withdrawal ensued, demanding their pound of flesh from his marriage and every other relationship he had.

And so, some months ago, Mike decided it was time to begin transitioning. He started taking antiandrogens, a prescription drug that suppresses male hormones, and something broke that had survived fifteen years of a sometimes tumultuous marriage. Earlier this year, Mike and his wife, Lynn, formally separated. He moved into an apartment of his own, started taking female hormones, and began going out increasingly as Shelly.

It's been rough. While she has found several transgendered friends in the city where she lives, she has had to face the bigotry of people who see her as a predator or a pervert. Her own parents recently cut her out of the will without even having the courage or the decency to tell him in person that they were doing so. Her father had the indecency to heap abuse on her when she decloseted herself to them about four months ago, calling her a despicable parent who was abandoning her kids, when the truth is that she's probably more involved -- still as a father -- now than when she lived in the house with them. The sickening irony here is that her father has been emotionally distant, verbally abusive, adulterous and a drunk most of Shelly's life -- and yet he has the audacity to lecture Shelly on how she's a bad parent.

And, despicably, a minister told Shelly's mom that they were right to disown her, that it was what God would want them to do. I don't get that. I really don't. Where does Jesus advocate or model any such moralistic stance with anyone? I see him as someone who stands by people, no matter what the choices they make, even if those choices are ones that he objects to. Prostitutes, adulterers, thieves and lepers with hideous open sores all felt comfortable and welcome in his presence.

And so, although people ask me how I can do it, I'm standing by Shelly, because she's my friend for years. I can't imagine not sticking by her. I've been genuinely upset by some of the stuff that other people have done in reaction to his decision to transition, but all the same ... I feel rather left adrift at sea by this whole thing.

It's odd in some ways that it's rattled me this much. I've had other friends, both men and women, tell me that they're gay, and it didn't even make me blink. In some cases, we've become better friends afterward. I've known Mike [Shelly] is transgendered for years, and yet this turn of events has left me unsteady, uncertain and, in a sense, staggering. I intend to stand by her, because we've known each other for so long and have always been close, but it's a challenge all the same. As much as I'm supportive of her, I just don't "get" it, probably because I've never felt that I was anything but a guy. It's a mystery to me how she can feel that she's actually a woman in a man's body and that these exterior changes are changing anything.

Yet there's no denying that she's happier, and more alive than I've seen her for years. I'm glad she's got friends, and I'm glad she's found a support network, and I'm glad that I can continue to be a friend for her. I'm glad she's willing to take the risk on me that I won't be a royal bastard and dump her too, to escape having to deal with my own confusion over her gender identity.

In the end, after all, my confusion is my problem and not hers, and given that she's paying such a heavy price for her own situation, it would be unfair and unreasonable to demand that she pay mine as well.

I just wish there were a chart for these waters I find myself sailing with her. I wish the sun were out, and that these uncertain clouds weren't darkening the sky. I wish I knew where we were going, and I hope the ship is seaworthy enough to get us there.

separated at birth

2008-08-14T21:49:00.003-04:00

This is not me. It is a picture of a preacher named Tom Green, sent to me by a close friend. He bears an uncanny resemblance to me:

I'm not sure which of us should be more disturbed by the resemblance.

paperback swap

2008-08-14T21:09:00.001-04:00

My latest plot to undermine the U.S. economy stands revealed, with my recent membership in PaperbackSwap.com.

The web site, which boasts hordes of bibliophilic members, is based on the decidedly sensible philosophy that if you're not going to read the book collecting dust on your shelf, chances are good that someone else will. The site provides a virtual clearinghouse for these books, giving avid readers a chance to pass old books along to new homes, keeping them out of the trash and in circulation. As this involves saving money and conserving resources, it clearly runs counter to our patriotic duty to spend recklessly.

But it is useful for saving money. Since joining about three weeks ago, I've found new homes for four of my old books, worth in aggregate about $40 bought new at a bookstore, or about $20 at a typical used bookstore. The new owners haven't had to pay a cent. (These books probably got snatched up so quickly because they're out of print, and have a strong appeal to a small demographic group.)

It works like this. You join the site, and agree to give away books you no longer read. The books can't be advance review copies, and they have to be free of water damage and in readable condition, and must have their covers. Once you list the books, any other member can request a book of yours, which you then ship at no expense to them. That might seem like a downside initially, but the flipside is also true. You don't have to pay a cent for books sent to you, either.

Just by joining the site and posting an initial 10 books, you get credit for two free orders. Each time you ship a book to another member, you get another credit. Thus, just for joining and having four books that other people wanted, I have six credits toward books that I want.

Alas, no one is offering any of the graphic novels by Alan Moore or Walt Simonson that I've been looking for. On the other hand, today I ordered a "Charlie Bone" book for Evangeline, and a Magic Tree House Merlin mission for Rachel. The site probably will come in handy for locating book club selections also.

So I ask everyone who reads my blog: Join me in sticking it to corporate America and standing up for un-American notions like thrift. Join PaperbackSwap.com, and take a stand against consumerism.

the floor is sanded

2008-08-10T11:54:00.001-04:00

And that about sums up the main event of yesterday. While Natasha went to rent an orbital sander, Rachel and I emptied the coat closet of coats and games, filling two of the last remaining free spaces in the rest of the house, her bed and the fourth kitchen chair. It is now possible to walk across the kitchen, but not to use anything in it, and it also is possible to sleep upstairs in two of the three beds. But that's about it.

Running the sander was a new experience, and an interesting one. We prefaced it by hanging up sheets over the kitchen doorway and the stairwell, and blocking off every route sawdust could take out of the living room, except for the front door and windows. Those we left open. After that, it was put in the earplugs, don a breathing mask, and shoo the children outside so I could get to work.

And work I did. I started a little after 3 p.m. and ended around 9 p.m., pausing only to eat dinner, sweep up the sawdust, and to change the grade of sandpaper to something finer than I had been using before. (We used 36, 40 and 120 for a progressively smooth coat.)

The finish on the wood took a while to get off, but the hardest piece of all was clearing up the stains where water or other aqueous substances had been spilled on the floor back when it was all becarpeted. I had a couple spots in the middle of the floor where the dog used to lie all the time that I felt like I was running the sander over so long that it seemed like it surely must wear a hole in the floor so it could fall through, into the basement.

Not atll the blemishes are completely gone. You can still see where the linoleum ended, and there are a few places where vistages of the water marks remain. We assume that a medium-color stain at least will make it harder to see those.

Other remaining tasks include renting an edger to finish sanding around the edge of the room, hall and closet, where the orbital sander couldn't reach. Then we have, what, a week until we put things back into the living room?

This must be why people have their hardwood floors done before they move into a house.

a good craft

2008-08-09T02:32:00.001-04:00

Rachel just completed a craft this evening that we're going to be using for years to come. It's a pencil holder, made from an empty salt canister with clothespins glued all around the surface of the outside.

Doing the craft was a snap. I took the clothespins apart, showed her how to glue them on, and then watched her do it. Since she's been attending some of the craft classes at the library lately, she decided to roleplay that we were at the librejo, that I was the libristo and this was the craft for younger children. (Which is why, she argued, her older sister had no part in it.)

I wish the crafts they did at the library were half this interesting and useful. Most crafts at the library or in other programs are unimaginative things like "Glue stuff to this cheap piece of plastic, add some wire ties, and now you have a butterfly to leave lying around the floor until it's been stepped on so many times that your father finally throws it, except you see it in the wastebasket two days later and throw a fit."

This wasn't a very complicated craft -- as noted, it involves dismantling clothespins and gluing them to a Morton salt canister -- but this is something no one is throwing out. Tomorrow morning, when the glue is all dried, Rachel is going to load our pens and pencils into it, and we'll have a nice, convenient place to keep them all, instead of leaving them lying on the countertop. My brother made one of these more than 20 years, and my parents still have it.

When did crayons and glue become the way to do crafts anyway? Wouldn't it be better if kids either made things that actually were useful, or at least learned the beginnings of a skill (such as braiding or knitting) that one day could lead them to produce useful things?

Show me the advantage in following the directions in a kit of self-adhesive precut shapes to make a cheap snowman that'll fall apart by Christmas. 'Cause I can't see one.

mi difektas mian cerbon

2008-08-09T00:32:00.003-04:00

Mi nomiĝas Davidon. Mi lernas Esperanton.

Miay gepatroy havas tri filojn: Brianon, Herberton, Wardon kaj min. Mi estas la tria. Mia plej maljuna frato estas Briano. Li studis Latinon du yarojn. Wardo kaj mi studis hispanan du yaron sed ni ne parolas ĝin. Herberto studis francon unu yaro kaj hispana unu yaro. Miaj fratoj parolas lingvon Anglan nur. Mi parolas la Creolon Francan de Haïtio ĉar mi loĝis en Haïtio du yaroj. (Mi estis instruisto de lingvon Anglan, kaj misiisto.)

Mi studias Esperanton kelkaj semajno, kaj mi kredas, ke mi ne malbone skribas (parolas) sed mi ne bone skribas (parolas). (Havu pacienco.)

Mi havis kvar hundojn. La unua nomiĝas Foncion. La dua estis Ajakso; mi havis lin kiam mi loĝis en Haïtio. La kvara hundo kiu mi havas estis Sandy. Ŝi mortis en 2005. (Mi kredas.) Mia tria hundo estis Hamleto.

Mia edzino kaj mi havas du filinojn, Evangelinon kaj Raĉelon. Mia edzino ne lernas esperanton, sed mi kaj niaj fratinoj bone lernas. Ni parolas Esperanton en nia domo, kaj en la librejo. Ni parolos en la lernejo.

Mi vespere promenas kun miaj filinoj.

Mi faras picon. Evangelino amegas mian picon. Raĉelo ametas lin, sed ŝi manĝas ĝin.

Mi skribis tiu, kaj mi studas esperanton kvin semajno!?

¡Hay caramba! Mi pli bone skribas esperanton pli Creolon Francan.

esperanto for fantasists

2008-08-07T02:06:00.002-04:00

One of the things I like about learning Esperanto is that the rapid progress you make encourages you to keep going, even when the only other person in your area who speaks the language is your 8-year-old.

Because it's a designed language, rather than one that grew organically, Esperanto has extremely regular grammatical rules. Verb conjugations, for example. It doesn't matter if the subject is first person or third, singular or plural, the verb ending is always the same. Thus it's mi estas, vi estas, ŝi estas and so on; compare that to English, where the same phrase is rendered I am, you are, she is.

Similarly, nouns always end in O, infinitives always end in I, adjectives always end in A, and adverbs always end in E. Only a little monkeying makes it possible to turn the same root into four different parts of speech: sano (health), sani (to be healthy), sana (healthy) and sane (healthily). So I can say Mi sanas or Mi estas sana, and thus I have two ways of saying "I am healthy," depending on the preferences of my native tongue and the strictures of the medium I'm using to write or speak.

It takes some getting used to. Saying "I make bread morningly" (Mi matene faras panon) doesn't come quite as naturally as saying "I make bread in the morning" (Mi faras panon en la mateno), but I have to give the language credit for flexibility. Especially since I'm assured that any root can be turned into any part of speech, which would indicate that I can say Ŝia onko nokte panas, but I really have no idea what it would mean to say "Her uncle breads nightly."

Ah well. I'm having fun, which is a good thing to say about any hobby, and as is borne out by the following:

1. La vampiroj manĝis la bluajn kukojn.

The vampires ate the blue cakes.

2. Ŝi renkontis la marvirinon kiu faras sekan panon.

She met the mermaid who makes dry bread.

3. Mi kredas kiu mia filo kaptis malsanan lupviron kun sukero kaj lakto

I think that my son caught an unhealthy werewolf with sugar and milk.

[Hm. Could I say that as "Mi kredas kiu mia filo sukere kaj lakte kaptis malsanan lupviron"?—ed.]

4. Vampiroj ne amas lupvirojn ĉar ili trinkis la brunan limonadon.

Vampires don't like werewolves because they drank the brown lemonade.

5. Dudek fantomoj ne vidis la butikon.

Twenty ghosts didn't see the store.

These are, of course, essential sentences in any language. The one I haven't figured out yet how to ask is, "Where is the bathroom?" Fortunately, here in my own house, my family can understand the question in English in the unlikely event that I need help.

one for heloise

2008-08-07T00:39:00.001-04:00

We decided a few weeks ago to rip up the carpet in our living room and make do with the hardwood floor that lay beneath it.

I'll spare everyone the sordid accounts of how it took us two weeks just to clear out the living room, and the tale (amusing though it must be) of how we chose the colors to paint the walls; and I'll even forbear to tell how Natasha and I each on separate occasions managed to hurt our backs so that we took turns being unable to walk without pained expressions for a few days.

Let me instead just say that under the rug in the hallway, we found linoleum. We sang the Bert and Ernie song about the letter L, where Bert sings "La la la ... linoleum!" but mostly we were annoyed. Who in their right mind glues linoleum directly to a hardwood floor?

Pulling the linoleum up was relatively easy. The glue and a layer of black gunk was different, though. Removing that was how I hurt my back. (Natasha had hurt hers ripping out the carpet.)

The good folks at Home Depot (motto: "No project so simple we can't make it expensive!") sell a chemical that's great at removing adhesives like this. The chief downside, besides the price, is that it comes with warnings like "May cause death or serious injury" in seventeen different languages. The advisories include notices like "Do not allow liquid to touch your skin" and "Do not breathe fumes" and "Looking at liquid may damage your retinas." And I'm supposed to put this stuff down, when? Maybe while the kids are running around the house during the day?

So while my back recovered and I learned to put my shorts on without bending either arm or leg, I pondered how best to remove black gunk without threatening my family or myself with permanent disfigurement. A visiting friend said something like "There must be an organic cleaner," and it suddenly hit me. Vinegar.

Duh.

Spray the black gunk with water. Let it soak, then scrape it up. (And why is it that a stucco trowel is useless with stucco but makes a fantastic scraper, while the scraper is only good for removing nails?) Once the gunk is gone, lightly spoon vinegar onto the floor, brush it around, and then wipe off the glue.

Easy, effortless, and no one has to suffer the sort of injury that would have made them a shoo-in for the Jerry Springer Show. The worst side effect is that the hallway smelled like apples for a few hours.

I even got to return the twenty-dollar can of cleaner.

calvin and hobbes

2008-08-02T05:18:00.003-04:00

My girls made a discovery recently, and dang if it wasn't a big one.

It wasn't my Star Wars figures, complete with their weapons, still inside my carrying case at my parents'. And it wasn't my wife's old Looney Tunes puzzle, either. When I was packing everything into boxes so we could paint the living room, they found my old "Calvin and Hobbes" collections.

They'd already read "Something Under the Bed is Drooling" and "Revenge of the Babysat," but these new ones had been secured on a bookshelf for so long I had even forgotten they were there. There were three or four of them, including "The Days are Just Packed" and "Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat." The girls love them, and will sit there for an hour or more at a time, reading them.

I can't say I blame them. I remember when "Calvin and Hobbes" first started running in The Pittsburgh Press; it was consistently high-quality in a way only a few strips ever manage to be. It had the high-humor quotient of Gary Larson's "The Far Side" or the more contemporary "Pearls Before Swine," combined with the same level of subtle and thought-provoking commentary that you might find in "Bloom County," though Watterson's topics were more timeless and less topical than the ones Berkeley Breathed's opus dealt with. (Yes, that pun was deliberate.)

For me, and I'm sure for many others, a lot of the appeal was that Calvin was a real kid. His strip wasn't artificially wholesome and sweet like "The Family Circus," and he wasn't as gentle-hearted as good old Charlie Brown. Calvin was a rapscallion, plain and simple, the sort of thing Dennis Mitchell could have been with a little more octane in his fuel; but he also had moments of great tenderness, remorse, and vivid imagination.

Re-reading these forgotten collections is like catching up with an old friend after 20 years and laughing ourselves silly over hijinks from college. There are the imaginary personae whom Calvin disappears into -- like Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man, or Tracer Bullet -- when he's bored or faced with some other challenge typical of first-graders; and there are the fantasies he acts out, all bizarre and immediately accessible to anyone who ever was a small child or at least knows someone who was. In the course of these collections, Calvin "turns into a bug," travels through time, and can't do his homework because "My parents forgot to pay the gravity bill."

And of course there's the people who populate his world. There are Mom and Dad, who have no names other than those, and virtually no identities beyond those roles; the babysitter who doesn't get him; there is Miss Wormwood, an archetypal spinster of a first-grade teacher who absolutely appropriately was named for the star in the book of Revelation that fell into the water and made it bitter; there is Moe, the fifth-grade bully; Susie Derkins, the girl next door who Calvin can't bear to admit liking; and of course Hobbes, Calvin's best friend, comrade-in-arms, and possibly just a stuffed tiger through whom Calvin channels feelings and thoughts he doesn't understand entirely.

Bill Watterson, who created "Calvin and Hobbes," stopped making new strips some years ago, wrapping the story up with a one of his great sledding comics, as Calvin and his tiger ride off into the future to see what's out there, much like Christopher Robin's discussion with Pooh about having to grow up, at the end of "The House at Pooh Corner." Since then, it seems like the newspaper comics get duller and duller each year. They go on long past the point they should have stopped, like "Doonesbury"; they retread the same three worn-out jokes, like "Garfield"; or they settle for merely cute and clever instead of brilliant.

There are a few strips worth reading, like "Pearls Before Swine" and "Foxtrot," but by and large, the comics section is something read out of habit rather than for actual amusement value these days. "Calvin and Hobbes" shows how high the medium can reach, when it's done by artists who really care about what they're doing.

Thanks for the laughs, Bill. And thanks for sharing them with my kids.

archaeological dig

2008-08-02T04:03:00.000-04:00

I never realized what an exciting world archaeology could be until this past month, when we started a dig in our living room.

The dig was a pretty straightforward affair. With the girls attending day camp at one of the theaters downtown, Natasha and I realized that we had two weeks before us in which we could empty out the room and give its walls a long-overdue fresh coat of paint. We could get rid of the ugly carpet, and possibly sand and buff the hardwood floor beneath it. Best of all, we could do it ourselves and save hundreds of dollars!

The walls are painted and the carpet has been removed, but what has been most interesing about this experience is the layers of history we have delicately unearthed on the first floor of the house, and then ruthlessly ripped up and destroyed, like amateur Indiana Joneses toppling ancient relics and statues of Anubis in the Well of Souls.

Our house is going on at least 170 years old, so we knew there were bound to be some surprises. The kitchen and master bath -- and doesn't every house want to have a master bath located off the kitchen? -- were added some time about 40 or 50 years ago, and plenty of other things have been added in the course of the house's history. Electric wiring, for starters, or the roof we put on a few years ago when we also added the new gutters, or the first insulation ever added to the house, just last spring.

Ah, but those are new changes to the house. It is one thing to see your own life's work, but it is another to behold the work of ages past and to let it pass through your fingers. It is to be like Belloq, who opened the Ark of the Covenant and stirred the dust of the stone tablets Moses once laid there. You risk being destroyed by the supreme revelation that will pass through your unworthy soul.

It might have been Crystal Skulls beneath the carpet. It might have been the Holy Grail. But, lo! it is linoleum, a long red sheet of it, glued directly to the hardwood floor by a homeowner of ages past, and on it lay the dirt and the dust of a thousand soles that have passed that way. And did those feet in ancient times walk upon England's mountains fair?

It is no wonder that a previous homeowner some fifteen years covered the floor with carpet. That red linoleum was about as ugly to look at as the color known as "institutional green," and removing it has left a long black swath of a substance formerly known as glue and a papery substance that may have been part of the linoleum. Removing that requires an evening with a cleaning agent that is so toxic you're not supposed to touch it, or even to breathe its fumes. I suspect that merely looking at will damage my retinas.

On the other hand, we have found that soaking the Gunk from Beneath the Linoleum in water making it easier to remove, and that rubbing what residue remains, with vinegar, also works. So we're trying that, though it means our hallway smells of apples.

The most interesting discovery, though, is the walls. Specifically, how they have changed over the past 170 years. There is a section of baseboard along the back wall of the living room that does not touch the floor. This, we believe, is where a doorway once stood that joined our living room (once a dining room) with our study (once the kitchen). Someone some time ago decided to close the wall up and create two separate rooms.

However, due to the Principle of Wall Conservation, in which a house must have the same linear footage of walls when you sell it as when you bought it, this person also removed a section of wall from another part of the living room. Unlike the new wall, this one appears to have been part of a load-bearing wall. Nothing has sagged unduly, but there is a place in an otherwise decent hardwood floor where 2-by-4's appear, covered in cement.

Ah, the wonders this old house can tell to those who study its secrets. I just wish I got the fedora and bullwhip too.

'order of the phoenix'

2008-07-31T22:22:00.002-04:00

Evangeline just finished reading "Order of the Phoenix" this morning. It took her about two weeks to finish, mostly because we made her stop reading so she could eat, go to the bathroom, and get outside.

A friend said she envies Evangeline the opportunity to read the books for the first time and to experience Harry's world. I'll allow for that feeling, but I have to admit that I don't envy Rachel her experience. By the time she gets to finish the Potter series, all the surprises and cliff-hangers will be part of the cultural white noise and will be lost on her, like Star Wars was.

When she and Evangeline saw "The Empire Strikes Back," they laughed out loud when Darth Vader said he was Luke's father -- because they suddenly got the joke from Toy Story 2 about Zurg and Buzz Lightyear. They have no way of appreciating just how unexpected that line was and how it commanded some level of our attention and interest in the intervening years until "Return of the Jedi."

the sh.. hits the fan

2008-07-31T01:23:00.000-04:00

I got a call from Mike tonight. I'd appreciate any prayers you would say for him for wisdom and support, because he needs them both right now.

Back in Februaryish, he came out to his parents, and told them that he and Lynn were separating, and that he was going to be transitioning into life as a woman. At the time, this went about as well as one would expect it to. His mom was crushed that he has decided to live a homosexual lifestyle, and prays that he'll return to Christ, and his dad -- who routinely cheated on his wife and was emotionally absent from and uninvolved with his children -- castigated him for being a selfish jerk who was abandoning the kids.

Still, he's 40, he'd rehearsed the discussion plenty in his mind beforehand, and figured that since they've known him for forty years, have seen him with the kids, and will have the chance to see him continue to be involved with his kids, that they would come around in the end. Or at least his mom would.

Well, surprise, surprise. Today he got a certified letter letting him know that his parents had revoked him as executor of their estate, removed him from their will, and left everything to his children instead.

They freaking disowned him, and they didn't even have the integrity to talk with him about it. They snuck around behind his back, with his sister, and then had the gall to claim the moral high ground, saying that this was his decision, and he has left them no choice.

How can people do stuff like that and still sleep with themselves at night? The issue to him isn't the inheritance, and it's not about being executor. It's that his mother and his sister are treating him like a moral and spiritual reprobate without even listening to him, changing family dynamics to exclude him, and effectively trying to drive a wedge between him and the rest of his family -- and then they blame it all on him, probably in the name of "tough love."

One by one his supports are being kicked out from under him: church, friends, and now family. I don't get it. This is supposed to be love? Or is it a moral message? "Look kids, this is how you should treat someone whose choices you disagree with."

He told me all this and was so overwhelmed by the sense of outrage I felt on his behalf that he started to cry. Aside from his therapist, who's paid to take his side, no one else has seen him as a wonged party.

Mike's going to talk to his folks some time soon, about the way they went about this. He thinks his mother's conscience is bothering her about this. She wrote the letter, and its tone suggests that she went along with her husband's Morally Righteous Anger and for the sake of avoiding a fight, rather than following her own heart.

Me, I'm just appalled ... and I'm glad that I can be there for a friend when he needs me.

bumper sticker

2008-07-28T13:10:00.001-04:00

So there's this bumper sticker I've seen at the charter school, on the bumper of a car owned by parents of one of Rachel's friends:

The question is, why do Republicans support Voldemort?

Death Eaters are major campaign contributors
"No more mudbloods" makes great policy on illegal immigration, too
The Dumbledore/Potter group is known for liberal attitudes
He has higher approval ratings among the general public than GWB
Anyone would be better than electing a Democrat

Vote in the poll

Perhaps it's also his tough stand on crime. His support for capital punishment is almost as strong as Texas' own, and he knows how to deal with party members who don't toe the line properly.

esperanto in revival

2008-07-26T03:15:00.002-04:00

So, as you may have noticed if you read my most immediately previous blog entry, I'm learning Esperanto, primarily with my older daughter, but to a lesser extent with my younger one, who has caught her sister's interest and my enthusiasm.

Apparently we're not the only ones. Deutesche Welle notes that Esperanto is experiencing a revival of interest, thanks in no small part to the Internet:

"The Internet has opened up new possibilities," Boris-Antoine Legault, a leading Esperantist in North America, told the Canadian Press. "Esperanto is a fantastic tool on the Internet as a bridge language."

Be it blogs, forums, or online tutorials, the Internet has allowed Esperanto to reach larger audiences than it used to. Pre-Internet, learning Esperanto generally meant ordering a book from a little-known publisher or perhaps visiting one of the few dusty Esperanto offices still open in a few larger cities.

Read the entire story

So it's not exactly a dead language, as my brother Brian claimed in a recent conversation I had with him. (I'll give Brian some slack, though: His chief contact with an Esperantist earlier was on an e-mail listserv with someone who insisted in writing all his messages in Esperanto with a delayed English translation, even though no one else on the listserv spoke the language.)

I have to admit, I made my initial contact with the Esperanto-USA through their web site, and while Evangeline is taking the postal version of the correspondence course, so she can enjoy getting mail, I've been doing my lessons via e-mail.

I found it interesting that the United Kingdom is about to see some Esperanto-language clothing ads, with subtitles. And of course, there was that 1965 horror film, "Incubus," with William Shatner that was filmed entirely in Esperanto. With what I imagine is a relative shortage of new literature, music, and TV or movies available in the language, those roughly 3 million people are a shoo-in market for anyone ambitious enough to tap into it.

So I'm not convinced that it's going to be attaining its goals of international understanding any time soon, but I am pretty sure that this is a language that's not going away any time soon either.

mia filino kaj mi lernas esperanto

2008-07-25T23:59:00.001-04:00

In fact, I just completed the second lesson in the free 10-lesson correspondence course. It's a simple but serviceable enough language that I can see why some Esperantists can be so pushy and dogmatic about making it into the international lingua franca. With only two lessons under my belt, I already can count to just shy of one million, I can speak in three tenses, and I'm even able to share some basic information about myself.

This is further than I got with two years of Spanish in high school, and about where I stood with Creole after six months of living in Haiti. It really is easy to learn. Evangeline is able to catch all the weird sentences I throw at her, like "Miajn amikojn estas grandajn insektojn" (My friends are big insects), and translate them into English with only a little difficulty. If we keep on pace, I think by the end of the year she and I will be able to have largely private conversations out in public.

That, incidentally, holds a lot of appeal for her as well. She wants to see if she can convince two of her best friends to learn the language so they can have a secret language at school.

Still, the ease of learning it aside, I can't see the language becoming more than a curiosity, a bit more established and enduring than Klingon, but not gaining the presence its strongest proponents would like. Even though it would be easy to adopt it as a lingua franca, particularly some place like in the European Union, I can't see any international government making the effort to do so. Lacking the support of a nation, a multinational corporation such as Deutsche Bank, or even a sufficiently large group, its status as an "artificial language" deprives it of the necessary gravitas to be taken seriously. Maybe if someone like George Soros -- the wealthy-as-all-hell financier is a native speaker of the language -- or some other well-placed and prominent Esperantist, were to back such an effort, it would come to something. But I'm not aware of anyone pushing such an effort at any level of government.

For those of us who do speak it, or at least who are learning to, it remains a great way to communicate with people from other countries whose native languages we may never learn. (And really, how many other languages can one person learn in a lifetime? This is my second second language, and I'm also working on Spanish.) In addition to some Internet groups and some literature written in or translated into Esperanto, there's also the International Passport Service, or whatever its proper name is, which matches interested Esperanto speakers traveling aboard with potential hosts in the country they're visiting, who also speak Esperanto. I may have to try that some day, if I ever get to Lesson 10. (In the meantime, there's a group of Esperanto speakers that meets just outside Nova Bastille. We'll have to check that out sometime.)

But, if anyone is still reading:

Mi havas tri fratojn.

Mia bela edzino kaj mi amas niajn belajn filinojn.

Mi ne havas filo.

Evangeline kaj Rachel faris bonan limonadon kun akov, lemon juice kaj sukero.

Evangeline amas ŝian patron, ŝian patrinon, kaj ŝian fratinon.

Mi estis instruisto.

Mi estas filo, frato, edzo kaj patro.

Mi ne estas limonado; mi trinkas ĝin.

Mi ne trinkas kafon.

Mi faras panon.

Ishtar kaj Hannah estas ŝia amikoj. Ili kaptis birdojn kaj fiŝojn. (Not really.)

Sanaj knabinoj estas belaj knabinoj.

Ŝia patro portis Evangeline.

Mi amas malvarman limonadon kaj malvarman lakton.

Evangeline, ŝia fratino kaj mi lernas Esperanto!

Mi amas miajn filinojn, mian edzinon, mi patro kaj patrino, kaj miajn fratojn.

unfinished thoughts on canon

2008-07-25T14:38:00.001-04:00

Something in a recent post by The Brucker about the doctrine of Christ's dual humanity and divinity has put me in mind of another post I've had in mind for a while but never written yet: Where exactly is the line between canon and noncanon?

Sometimes it's pretty clear; i.e., no one considers the Gnostic gospels to be canon, nor other inspired works like Fox's "Book of Martyrs" or "Pilgrim's Progress." But sometimes it's a little more ambiguous: Catholics include the Apocrypha, which Protestants don't. Martin Luther wanted to toss out both James and the Apocalypse. Orthodox Christians include books the Catholic Church rejects.

And then, what about noncanonical works that the canonical ones refer to? Jude does this twice. Once, he cites the apocryphal Book of Enoch, where Satan and Michael bicker over where to hide Moses' body before God finds it and there's ANOTHER huge row; and then later on, he refers to God binding angels in chains of adamant for their rebellion, a pretty clear reference to what Zeus did to the Titans who sided against him. Canonicity was recognized later; at the time the New Testament was being written, there doubtless was a host of other communication, discussion and even writing that to some extent formed the context in which the New Testament audience understood the epistles and other books we now regard as canon. I think we can get the essentials without that context, but surely there are a lot of ahas we're missing (or misunderstanding) because we lack the background noise that Paul and the others took for granted.

How much do you want to bet the what-the-heck-were-they-thinking passages like Noah flipping out because Ham had seen him naked, or Tzipporah saving Moses' life by circumcising their firstborn and throwing the foreskin at his feet, would make sense if we had more extrabiblical material from that era?

deconstructing ccr

2008-07-24T16:11:00.002-04:00

"He's not talking about the rain, he's really talking about ..."

And with those words, Evangeline began a discussion Sunday night about Credence Clearwater Revival's classic song "Who'll Stop the Rain." Her analysis: Far from being a weather report, Fogerty's song is a social commentary about all the things that are wrong with society, and how we all cry out for someone to set things to rights. She even rattled off the names of some people through the ages who have been "trying to find the sun": Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, and Barack Obama. I felt for a moment like I was talking with Charles Wallace astride Mrs. Whatsit as we looked down upon a shadowed world.

This was a strong teachable moment. I suppose I could have jumped on it and asked her whether it would be best to wait for someone else to find the sun, as the voice in the song does; merely to find the sun; or to work to dispel the clouds. Further questions would involve how you would go about dispelling clouds of mystery.

Alas, I am too intrigued by symbols and their many uses, and how often the deeper (and even relatively obvious) meanings of a song can be lost of us because we fail to go deeper than a merely superficial reading.

Evangeline, for instance, obviously realized that the song isn't about average annual precipitation, but the truth is that she usually hears this song when it's raining and has been for a while. It's a natural association, rainfall and a song asking who will stop rain from falling; just as it's an obvious association to sing "Have You Ever Seen Rain?" in the middle of a prolonged period with no rain at all, as we've already seen this summer. (And no, that song isn't about a drought.)

Many listeners don't reach that stage of abstract thinking. The song has a catchy tune, it's sung with feeling, and it has a rustic sort of sound to it, and that's about as far as they go. If they do latch on to any meaning, it's usually a result of the repeated chorus "And I wonder, yes I wonder, / Who'll stop the rain?" They're not likely to catch the cynicism about governmental five-year plans and New Deals, nor the barren view of Woodstock, because they're using the refrain rather than the opening lines as the cypher to the entire song. The verses, instead of being filled with hunger for the redemption of society, instead become a maze of disjointed images, pointing nowhere and meaning nothing.

The result of this is the trifurcation of the song into three entities. First is the essence of the song itself, whatever it may be in abstraction, if in fact it is anything. Second is the song as Fogerty sings it, with his own interpretation of its meanings, import, and motivation. The third is the song the listener hears and understands herself to be listening to.

In fact, this is what happens with any song or story as it is communicated. The song exists as an entity to itself; the performer imbues it with a meaning and direction of her choice, driven by the context of her own life experiences; and the audience receive the song in themselves, coloring it according to their own prejudices and experiences. In many cases the gulf between the song as the performer delivers it and as the audience receives it is so vast that it's unclear what shared experience they have had, if any. Such is the case particularly with shallow readings of a song or a story, such as the woman who hears Elton John's "Daniel" and equates it with her grandson, who is not leaving tonight on a plane and whose eyes are just fine, simply because his name is Daniel.

But that disparity persists even with more mature readings of songs. Earlier in this post, I shared my own understanding of "Who'll Stop the Rain": that it views Woodstock, the cultural flower of the 1960s counterculture, as an effette exercise in changing the world. That's based on my own understanding of the first two lines of the third verse of the song -- I have no idea what Fogerty intended, nor to be honest, have I given it much thought what happened in Virginia that he would have sought shelter from the storm there, or what tower burned. (Probably someone will tell me, and it'll be so obvious I'll start to drool with my newfound idiocy.) But even if I did have specific interpretations of those lines, they would be informed by the context of my own life, and the weight I give each line or word would reflect those biases.

That's apparent from all the readings of Don McLean's "American Pie." McLean wisely has never said what the song is about, with the result that "definitive" readings have it as a chronicle of the 1960s, as seen through the changes in America's music scene; as a response to the assassination of President Kennedy (and, one presumes, to his brother and to Dr. King); and to the Vietnam War. I've even read interpretations that tie it to the Crucifixion, because of the references to the king with his thorny crown, and to satanic figures like the Jester and the Devil himself.

In the end, as I told Evangeline, songs belong not just to the performer, but to listeners as well. She's free to impart her own meaning to symbols of rain, towers, golden chains, and clouds whenever she sings "Who'll Stop the Rain," and even to change words to suit her fancy and preference more. I learned the song by listening to CCR perform it, and Evangeline has learned it by singing with me. The song no longer belongs to CCR or to their label; through that chain of passage, it has come into her possession as freely as any folk song. She already rearranges it for her own vocal range, just as I did for mine, and one day, she may even play it on the piano, choose her own chords, and compose a whole new bridge between verses.

It's her song. The arrangement, the lyrics and the notes are all her own to choose.

And so is the meaning.

ouch

2008-07-24T15:32:00.001-04:00

My wife just forwarded me a news story from MSNBC about a woman who stabbed herself in the foot, with a sword, during a Wiccan ceremony:

Katherine Gunther, 36, of Lebanon, Ind., pierced her left foot with the sword while performing the rite at Oak Hill Cemetery, police said. Gunther said she was performing the ceremony to give thanks for a recent run of good luck. The ceremony involves the use of candles, incense and driving swords into the ground during the full moon.

Read the whole story

Rather unsympathetically, I suppose, my first thought is "I guess her good luck ran out."

A bit less unpleasantly, I find an ironic comfort in knowing that it's not just Christians who feel some times that the Divine has an unpleasant sense of humor when it comes to hearing our prayers. It's rather like praying for a sign, only to be given one that says Speed Limit 55; or asking for a financial break, only to be run over by an armored car headed for the bank with a load of deposits. (Still, I've never heard of any getting injured that badly at a prayer meeting.)

Best wishes to Ms. Gunther for a speedy recovery from her injury. I had the misfortune of putting a nail through my foot once, and that's nothing compared to a sword.

old square toes

2008-07-16T06:49:00.001-04:00

Monday night at Bible study, as we were reading the Parable of the Sower, Dean Zimmerman and I touched very lightly on the question of Satan: his identity, his role, and his relationship to God. It was a tangent, so we moved on without discussing it in-depth, but I'm curious to hear what others have to think.

Many, if not most, Christians in America regard Satan as chief among the Fallen; that is, they believe that Lucifer was created as the highest of all angels, second in power and authority only to God. His status led to pride, and when he discovered that God intended for humanity to be pre-eminent among his creations, Lucifer rebelled and became Satan, the adversary, leading a third of the heavenly host in rebellion against God. They failed, were cast out of heaven, and are marking time until the Judgment, doing what they can to mar God's creation. Lucifer went from being an angel to becoming the Devil, and the angels who rebelled with him became demons.

The difficult thing about this, for me, is that it's largely extrabiblical if not unbiblical. The story I just summarized is found in the book "Paradise Lost," by John Milton, rather than any of the 66 biblical books Protestant Christians consider to be canon.

The ancient Hebrews considered the Satan -- it was an office in the heavenly court -- to be an agent of God, rather than an evil creature bent on the ruin of God's plans. His job was to take a contrary view so that the truth could be determined through a thorough cross-examination, a role much like the "Devil's advocate" we use in argument today.

We see this principally in the book of Job, where ha-Satan comes before the Presence. There is no remonstration or hostility expressed, just the question, "Have you considered my servant Job?" and the response, "Does Job love you for nothing? Look at all you've given him." The role also surfaces in the parallel accounts of the census David took in the latter days of his reign, in 2 Kings and in 1 Chronicles. In one account, God incites David to take the census and then smites him; in the other, ha-Satan makes the suggestion. (You also can see ha-Satan at work in the life of Ahab, when the prophet Micah describes an angel that suggests putting a lying spirit into the mouths of Ahab's prophets so that Ahab will go to battle and be slain.)

That view of ha-Satan is not entirely what we see in the New Testament, but I want to suggest that that is largely because we're reading the New Testament through the filter of our preconceptions. The tempting in the wilderness is similar in nature to the testing of Job, to see what Jesus is made of; and even the "demons" of the New Testament are better rendered as "unclean spirits," which I find works well too. The afflictions described in the gospels -- epileptic fits, self-inflicted injury, aphasia -- can be seen as coming from a medical or psychological condition, which also would qualify as an "unclean spirit" in a poetic sense.

The view of Satan as subservient to God did shift to the more familiar dualistic one during the intertestamental "silent period," a borrowing from Zoroastrianism, another Eastern religion practiced near Judea. (Not entirely surprising, since a lot of Jesus' teaching style is Socratic, undoubtedly an influence of the Seleucids and the other Hellenizers in the hundred years before Jesus' birth.)

Precisely because it is late in coming, I think we need to view such a dualist God/Satan view of the world with some suspicion. Don't we say that older revelation is the standard by which we gauge newer revelation? If it weren't for passages of Scripture like 2 Isaiah, which speak of God's desire to bring the Gentiles into his kingdom, or for places like Zechariah, that very clearly foretell the Crucifixion, it would be harder to see a connection between the Tanakh and Christianity as we know it and practice it today.

So, thoughts? Where does everyone stand on this Satan thing, and why?

greatness

2008-07-15T10:59:00.001-04:00

"Some men are born great, and some have greatness thrust upon them, but most just want a second serving of ice cream."

without feathers

2008-07-15T10:57:00.001-04:00

Woody Allen, in his anthology "Without Feathers," writes:

And Abraham awoke in the middle of the night and said to his only son, Isaac, "I have had a dream where the voice of the Lord sayeth that I must sacrifice my only son, so put your pants on." And Isaac trembled and said, "So what did you say? I mean when he brought this whole thing up?"

"What am I going to say?" Abraham said. "I'm standing there at 2 a.m. I'm in my underwear with the Creator of the Universe. Should I argue?"

"Well, did he say why he wants me sacrificed?" Isaac asked his father.

But Abraham said, "The faithful do not question. Now let's go because I have a heavy day tomorrow."

And Sarah, who heard Abraham's plan grew vexed and said, "How doth thou know it was the Lord and not, say, thy friend who loveth practical jokes, for the Lord hateth practical jokes and whosoever
shall pull one shall be delivered into the hands of his enemies whether they pay the delivery charge or not."

And Abraham answered, "Because I know it was the Lord. It was a deep, resonant voice, well modulated, and nobody in the desert can get a rumble in it like that."

And Sarah said, "And thou art willing to carry out this senseless act?"

But Abraham told her, "Frankly yes, for to question the Lord's word is one of the worst things a person can do, particularly with the economy in the state it's in."

And so he took Isaac to a certain place and prepared to sacrifice him but at the last minute the Lord stayed Abraham's hand and said, "How could thou doest such a thing?"

And Abraham said, "But thou said ---"

"Never mind what I said," the Lord spake. "Doth thou listen to every crazy idea that comes thy way?"

And Abraham grew ashamed. "Er - not really … no."

"I jokingly suggest thou sacrifice Isaac and thou immediately runs out to do it."

And Abraham fell to his knees, "See, I never know when you're kidding."

And the Lord thundered, "No sense of humor. I can't believe it."

"But doth this not prove I love thee, that I was willing to donate mine only son on thy whim?"

And the Lord said, "It proves that some men will follow any order no matter how asinine as long as it comes from a resonant, well-modulated voice."

And with that, the Lord bid Abraham get some rest and check with him tomorrow.

mi learnas esperanto

2008-07-11T07:36:00.002-04:00

This is the summer Evangeline decided to break all our brains.

In order to keep the children's brains from atrophying during the summer, I like to have the pick a research project or other academic sort of goal that they can work on, in addition to any new math concepts that we study and the standard reading goals.

This summer, Evangeline decided she wanted to learn a new language. We live in a part of Iowa with a heavy Hispanic population, but she didn't want to bolster her Spanish skills. I speak Haitian Creole, though not fluently, but she didn't want to learn that. She chose instead to learn Esperanto, that most famous of invented languages, which none of us speaks.

Esperanto is designed for ease of learning: There are no irregular verbs or nouns, spelling is a cinch once you grasp the language's flavor, and even the vocabular is fairly accessible, since it draws principally from European roots. If you speak a European language, the language is supposed to be a snap.

Additionally, studies have shown that studying Esperanto makes it easier to master other second languages. Many years ago in Britain, a school taught German to a control group for four years, and Esperanto to another group for one year, followed by German for three years. At the end of the road, the second group had a much stronger mastery of German than the control group.

Another incentive for learning Esperanto is that it is politically and culturally neutral; that is, you can speak Esperanto with someone from China, and you don't need to worry about sounding like an idiot, because it's a native language for neither of you. The words aren't laden with political significance because of one piece of history or culture; it's effectively a common middle ground.

I can vouch for how easy it is to learn, myself. At the end of the first lesson, I already could conjugate verbs into past, present and future tenses, and inflect nouns into nominative and objective cases. The only barriers to communication were that I had to stop and recall the vocabulary as I spoke (as did Evangeline as she listened), and that because of the nature of the vocabulary list in Lesson One, all we could talk about was bread, cake, coffee and tea.

Lesson Two, which I've sneaked a peek at, includes information on adjectives and personal pronouns. Some auxiliary information in another flier also introduced numbers and colors. The language is so easy that, as Evangeline pointed out, we can now count just up to 1,000,000, even though we've been studying the language for less than a month.

In fact, I see two chief difficulties. First is that no one around here speaks Esperanto, that we know of. And second ...

As I said, we live in an area with a lot of Spanish speakers. Many signs and notices are bilingual. And I've been trying to teach Evangeline and Rachel how to speak Creole. The result is that I already speak to them in a medley of three languages -- English, Spanish, and Creole. Add to Esperanto to this mix, and I have visions of the girls learning four languages, and being able to separate none of them.

beer

2008-07-10T18:26:00.002-04:00

As a friend of mine has also said, I also don't always agree with George Will, but he never says anything that sounds stupid to me.

Case in point, his recent article on beer.

a million monkeys at a million typewriters

2008-07-09T12:46:00.003-04:00

Five years ago, researchers at Paignton Zoo in England gave six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys a computer for four weeks to see what they would do. Mathematicians assure us that given time, those monkeys eventually would produce the complete works of William Shakespeare.

These monkeys didn't.

Instead, you will note that they produced a copy of "Jane Eyre" in just under 10 minutes. (Well, not really. They produced pages of the letter S, which I maintain is still an improvement over Bronte's book.)

work and slavery

2008-07-07T15:15:00.001-04:00

This post rocks.

Do you know how rare it is to find someone talk about slavery in the Bible, relate it to the modern world, and actually contribute something meaningful and insightful to the discussion? I've been a Christian for 20 years now, and Bible-based Brucker's post is the first one I can recall.

To introduce his thoughts, which admittedly are buried in some other (no less interesting) comments, let me expound a bit. There are usually two situations in which biblical slavery comes up. The first is when a skeptic, antagonistic or merely skeptical, argues, "How can you claim that Christianity is a moral religion, when it never expressly disavows slavery?"

Alas, it does not. Abolitionists used passages of Scripture like the book of Philemon and the first 20 chapters or so of Exodus to point out that God preferred for people to be free, yet slave owners in the South also would point out that Paul reminds slave owners to treat slaves with dignity, and reminds them that in Christ slave and slave owner are equal -- though anyone who is familiar with the autobiographies of people like Frederick Douglass may question how many slave owners actually followed those directives.

The second place place such discussions usually surface is in church Bible studies, where pastors and other leaders draw an uneasy and usually weak parallel between slavery and employment, noting that "It's really not the same thing."

What I like about Brucker's post is that he says, "They're exactly the same." Slavery in Israel was voluntary; a person with no money in the world could sell himself to someone wealthier for a period of six years, during which he was guaranteed food, work, and a place to stay. It was, all things considered, quite like the Colonial practice of indentured servitude. And, as Brucker points out, it's not that different from modern employment either, particularly when it involves a contract.

Not all chains are made of iron; sometimes they are made of dollars.

seven deadly sins

2008-07-06T03:52:00.001-04:00

Greed:	Very Low
Gluttony:	Low
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Medium
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	Very Low

The Seven Deadly Sins Quiz on 4degreez.com

coming to terms with comic books

2008-07-06T03:33:00.002-04:00

I finally found a way that makes it easier to stomach what Marvel and DC keep doing to my favorite superheroes.

If you've read comic books for any length of time, then you know how awful they are for much of the time. There's a never-ending parade of bad guys who want to rule the world, rob banks, and even specifically nettle specific heroes. They're faced with, and invariably defeated by, a smaller but also never-ending parade of good guys who are just as atrociously dressed and who got their powers in the same improbable ways (chemicals, radiation, genetic flukes or alterations, and aliens).

The worst part is the stories, which often fall into a predictable routine. Maximus has retaken the throne of the Inhumans from his brother, Black Bolt, the rightful monarch, and sent the royal family into exile. Galactus is going to eat the Earth unless his cosmic hunger can be averted. A psychotic madman is terrorizing Gotham City, and Batman has to find him.

By the time you turn 16 or 17, you start to realize that even the comic books about interesting heroes usually aren't worth buying, and so you start to look for specific authors: Mark Waid, Neil Gaiman, J. Michael Straczynski, Brian Michael Bendis. Sometimes you even hear about legendary and definitive runs from years past, like Frank Miller's treatment of Daredevil and Batman, Walt Simonson's stint on Thor, Tom DeFalco's amazing run on Spider-man, or Alan Moore's take on Swamp Thing.

But if you keep reading the same title long enough, you're going to notice some recurring problems. For one thing, no one gets older. Franklin Richards has been 5 years old for more than 30 years, even though the Fantastic Four surely have celebrated his birthday a few times in there. For a second thing, some storylines seem to keep repeating. How many times has Galactus threatened to eat the Earth after the immortal Lee-Kirby story where he was thwarted and pledged never to try again? And for another thing, the long-term storyline is about as clear as a pile of mud three feet deep.

A lot of that is due to the duration of the comic book characters. Peter Parker first became Spider-man in the 1960s, when he was 15 years old. In the more than 40 years since then, he's aged only to his late 20s, with his story being told in as many as four separate titles in one month. That's a lot of storytelling to pack into thirteen years' chronology, with the result that attempts to keep the chronology clear usually just make things more confusing.

But the lion's share of the blame for the confusion comes from something else: the change in creative teams, which usually comes every five years or so.

Walt Simonson often is credited with the definitive run on Marvel's Thor comic book. When Stan Lee created Thor back in the 1960s in "Journey into Mystery," he was pretty much just another guy in a cape with some unusual powers. Thor moped around for Jane Foster, a nurse who worked for his alter-ego, Donald Blake. Rather like Clark Kent's relationship with Lois Lane, Blake loved Foster, but she had no time for him, and instead preferred his alter-ego. As the comic continued, there were occasional nods to Thor's roots in Norse mythology, but it wasn't anything big, and it got mixed up in a big potpourri of other myth that included the Greek pantheon too.

Simonson came onto the scene in the early 1980s and gave the book a massive overhaul. On the first page of his first issue on the title, he began by having some unknown being destroy a star and begin forging a weapon from the core of the star. By the end of the issue, he also had introduced a new character, Beta Ray Bill, whose claim to the power of Thor was as strong as Thor's own.

As the story unfolded over the next several issues, Simonson drilled deep into the rich tapestry of Norse myth, firmly establishing Thor as a member of the Norse Aesir, giving his readers a crash course in that mythology and the stories the Vikings used to tell, and gradually racheting up the tension until you realized that the weapon being forged from that exploded star's core was the flaming sword that Surtur would use to set in motion Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, and destroy the Nine Worlds.

By the time he had finished his story, some five years later, Simonson had revoked Thor's identity as Donald Blake and given him a new alter ego, got rid of Odin as head of the Norse gods and replaced him with Balder, destroyed the rainbow bridge Bifrost, and established a truly stunning cast of supporting characters, from Volstagg the Voluminous of the Warriors Three, Balder, Frigga and the rest of Thor's family, Lorelei, and a host of children (!) who also lived in Asgard. It was tremendous, it was inspiring, and for me at least, it launched an abiding love for Norse myth. If the comic had ended there, it would have been enough.

Alas, it did not end there. Tom DeFalco, who had done an excellent job on Spider-man in the 1980s, took Simonson's place, and turned it into ... I don't know what. In the few issues that I bought and read, Thor fought the Celestials, started fighting with Irish and Egyptian deities, and became less interesting and distinctive a character. In fact, some of the changes Simonson made to the character -- having him grow a beard and wear armor, making him look more like the Thor of myth -- were dropped immediately. Odin came back not long after.

Last I heard, Thor was back to being Donald Blake, too.

In other words, in terms of continuity, Simonson's run on Thor might as well not have happened. In fact, a second writer revisted the whole Ragnarok storyline, although he apparently wrapped it up by having Thor change history at the end of the story arc, so that it had never happened.

That sort of thing happens a lot in comic books, and if you're a serious fan of a character or even a particuarly well written story, it can be frustrating and galling beyond the ability of words to express. If Norman Osborne impaled himself on his goblin glider in the 1970s, what was he doing alive again twenty-five years later? If Mysterio dies at the conclusion of Kevin Smith's Daredevil story, why is he bedeviling Spider-man six months later? If the Outsiders knew Batman's secret identity five years ago , why are they so shocked when he reveals it to them now? And how many times does Peter Parker's Aunt May have to die? (Or Captain America, for that matter. Steve Rogers blew up at the end of WWII, he died when his body rejected the Super Soldier serum in the 1990s, he was killed by Onslaught in 1997, and most recently, a sniper shot and killed him.)

A lot of it's because these characters are so old, and so loved by such a number of people. Each time a new writer comes in, she has a choice: keep her predecessor's supporting cast in place, leave the hero in the same general situation as for the last 30 issues or so, or return a more familiar starting place?

Most writers prefer the second choice. So you get some really convoluted stuff, like "That wasn't Aunt May who died; it was a genetically altered actress impersonating her!" Or "The Iron Man you've known has always been in the service of Kang. Now we'll bring in another one from a different timeline!" In the past several years, straightforward storytelling has taken a beating at both CD and Marvel as heroes long dead have returned to life. The new Captain America is none other than James "Bucky" Buchanan, Rogers' partner in WWII. Oliver Queen, the original Green Arrow, came back from the dead, as did Hal Jordan and the entire Green Lantern Corps, and at DC Comics, their entire multiverse was restored to life in "Infinite Crisis," ending nearly 20 years of a single, straightforward continuity with one DCU.

This sort of thing aggravates me, because I liked it better the way it had been. DC's continuity, previous to "Crisis on Infinite Earths" was a bewildering mess, with storylines taking place on parallel earths, and even crossing over annually as the company lurched from one crisis to another. The new continuity under Jeanette Kahn eliminated that confusion and gave the impression of history, with one generation of heroes making way for the next generation, so that by the present time, Wally West was the third hero to bear the name Flash, Kyle Rainer was the third to be Green Lantern, and so on. The history made the DCU more realistic, and more entertaing to visit.

But of course, other people liked it the other way. And because opinions run so strong on these things, it's not surprising that the policy should change as one group gains dominance and the other loses it. Is Lex Luthor a mad scientist, or a corrupt businessman? Did he know Clark Kent as a boy in Smallville, or did they meet for the first time in Metropolis? It depends who owns the story.

The same is true of Marvel's situation with Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. The two of them were married about 20 years ago, and ever since then, fandom has been evenly split on whether it's a good idea or not. In the time that they've been married, Mary Jane was killed in a terrorist attack (it turned out she was kidnapped before the attack), and she's left Peter. (They reconciled.) Most recently, their marriage was retconned out of existence via deal with Mephisto to save Peter's Aunt May.

I'm firmly on the side of the marriage, and I'm not alone. It keeps boiling down to a question of whose vision of Spider-man prevails at any given time.

Back when I started this meandering bit of prose, I noted that I had found a way to make peace with it. It's simple: View it as a cycle of literature, handed down from one storyteller to another. Never mind questions of continuity, and how the stories hang together. Consider each storyteller's take on the character as a separate contribution and interpretation of the character. Most of them suck, but some are incredible -- Mark Waid's "Birthright," for instance, in which he depicts Superman as an outsider who must earn the trust of Metropolis, or JMS' first several issues on "Amazing Spider-man," where he reinterprets the hero around totemistic lines and makes Peter a teacher instead of a photographer, or Bendis' stellar run on Daredevil.

It doesn't even matter if they conflict with one another. "Birthright" differs widely from John Byrne's "Man of Steel," but they're both excellent reinterpretations of Superman's origin. They're part of a cycle of literature, not a continuing story. That's much easier to stomach, and sometimes, the storytellers even surpass themselves.

And that's what makes them worth reading.

r.i.p., nancy

2008-07-06T02:21:00.001-04:00

We are all rivers, and Mother is our source. Whether we are close or far removed makes little difference. Her passing brings a drought that we must weather as best we can until the snow of another season brings relief.