Netflix Unwittingly Reveals Serious Trouble in Body Politic

I have been a constant critic of Netflix offerings, which I consider too often tasteless, sensationalized, and politically warped… but then, I’ve just described the character of the entertainment industry for most of my time on earth; and for the most part, I’m afraid that these NF hacks are giving the public what it craves.  Panem et circenses.

I’ve been able to watch to the end neither of the two episodes of the documentary serial Dirty Money that I’ve undertaken to watch.  My blood pressure spikes, and I pull the plug on the ordeal. There’s no reason to endure needless misery. But the true misery behind these botched stories doesn’t have an “off” switch and isn’t going away.

Hard NOx addresses the Volkswagen scam of a couple of years ago, and actually originating in corporate decisions made six or eight years ago.  (The word play in the series titles is probably the point in these features where the most creativity is lavished: nitrogen oxide is a toxic byproduct found abundantly in the burning of diesel fuel.)  VW attempted to market its new diesel line in this nation as incredibly clean.  Had the claim been true, the car would have achieved stunning fuel mileage without facing the public with an unsavory trade-off in pollutants… but the claim was a deliberate lie.  Management had at first mounted a straight bluff, but performance tests eventually unmasked the fraud.  A recall followed, and the motor was indeed redesigned—but not so as to reduce the toxicity of its byproducts.  Instead, it was fitted with special software that cleverly disguised its true performance under the simulated driving conditions of most tests: a “defeat device”, as it’s known in the biz.  Yet this subterfuge, as well, was doomed to be detected once tested vehicles were removed from the lab and examined closely in actual drives.

VW was disgraced, lost tens of millions in sales, and paid hundreds of millions in damages and fines.  End of story?

No, not exactly.  What most annoys me about the documentary format, as practiced in our time, is its apparent tolerance of shamefully lengthy and subjective intrusions on the part of the documentarian.  We see this one in the opening frames taking his VW fraudster for one of its last spins and liberally dropping F-bombs to show outrage.  Why, he’s a raped consumer, just like you and me!  He’s one of us, and he’s going to get to the bottom of this!  The bulk of the film thereafter is in fact pretty disciplined and informative, though hints about corporate greed are salted in regularly.  The level of preachiness usually hovered in an implicit gray zone, and was tolerable.  I hit the “off” switch with about six minutes to go, however, when we were informed that President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accords had given the green flag to Big Business for further ruination of the environment.

I’m not going to stray this morning into the vast boondoggle which is “climate change”.  Suffice it to say that the complete and willful mischaracterization of resistance to the Paris agreement—a scam exponentially greater than VW’s—terminally disrupted my attention to the doc’s intended message.  In European idiom, it was a red-card foul.

The other blunders were ratiocinative.  I can forgive a foolish F-bomber for supposing that Big Government is the mortal enemy of Big Business, and that we need more of the former to chasten the latter.  It’s a stupid proposition, and the doc’s own evidence shows its fallacy: European governments are encountering vastly more trouble than ours did as they try to get the stinking VW off their narrow streets because… because agencies within those governments are on the take.  The “Bigs” are forever sneaking under the sheets with each other.  More regulation means more pressure for small businesses to stay in compliance, which means more bankruptcy among the shoestring-budgeted competition, which means that big businesses become bigger—and fewer, and more influential upon public policy.  Big business is big government.

Most Americans still don’t understand this, even as the sun is setting upon their basic freedoms and a corporatist night without stars descends.  Netflix isn’t brainwashing anybody here: it’s recycling to the masses the dismally ignorant pabulum that they think they know for gospel truth.

And then, yesterday… another documentary in the same series, titled Payday.  I won’t supply many details: the piece is well done up to a point, and you can fill in the background if you wish by watching it—watching all of it, if your stomach is stronger than mine.

Scott Tucker is not a particularly likable fellow, and he found a way to game the system.  Specifically, his organization offered loans that people supposed themselves to be paying off when, each month, the loan’s renewal fee was simply being siphoned from their account.  In effect, they were screwed if they didn’t pay off principle and interest within about a month.  Now, almost everyone who needs a quick $300 to get by is inexperienced in complex contracts, so most Payday customers believed that the monthly deduction from their bank account was in fact applied only to principle and interest.  Many ended up paying a grand for those three quick “c” notes.

Disgusting?  Yes, I fully concur.  I’ve been there—not with Payday, but with an outfit calling itself (at the time) Christian Business Solutions.  For $5,000, CBS sold me some cheap software whose functions could have been performed with pen and paper.  At the time, I had a stay-at-home wife and young son and was facing imminent unemployment.  Upon requesting from CBS the assistance that was implied in the deal, I was told that a) the company had disbanding, and b) I should be capable of drumming up my own business without the “team” holding my hand.  I had deposited five grand in this preacher’s collection plate, and for that I got a sermon on growing up and doing things for myself.

Did I want to break a few of the Reverend’s ribs?  Oh, yeah.  Did I want to see his family terrorized by a SWAT team, his assets so thoroughly confiscated that he couldn’t afford a lawyer, and his indictment so larded with malfeasance that he was facing life in prison?  No, I would have settled for sixty seconds alone with him in an elevator.  Scott Tucker was treated to all of the above by our “justice” system.  He behaved like a scoundrel and a sleaze… but everything he did was legal.  You can’t put a man in a cage for life because his marks are too dumb to read a contract.

Except that you can, actually.  In the US of A, twenty-first century version.  The prosecutors interviewed on the doc determined that an “ordinary person” would have a “very hard time” understanding the contract they signed… and so they decided to treat the “perpetrator” like El Chapo.  Apparently, all of the “victims” interviewed were just fine with living in a depraved police state—and I place “victims” in quotation marks because these people truly fell victim only to their own fear and gullibility.  Like me.  I lost my money because I behaved like an idiot.  In a way, the “preacher” was right: I should have been a grown-up and made my own way.

We who vote every two years for an ever more intrusive state do not crave the life of grown-ups.  We want Nanny to come between us and the evil corporations (which exist, to begin with, because Nanny’s rules have killed off all the small competition).  We want exploitative capitalists living in 10,000-square-foot mansions to be taxed at a 90 percent rate and tossed in an oubliette if they squeal.  We’re pathetic.  We disgust me.

Who Wins History’s Game When Half the Deck’s Cards Are Wild?

Every time I read the phrase, “Historians will look back at this time and say…” I have to sigh.  Some of the trends currently complicating our lives may not leave anyone to read or write history if they continue; and in any case, historians must be published to be read, and to be published they must write what flatters the prejudices of their day.  I’ve given up on looking for a history published by an academician that considers on-the-ground facts in the South prior to the Civil War.  Even Marc Engels’ Clash of Extremes, recommended by a professor whose judgment I thoroughly trust, edges tentatively into the proposition that the war wasn’t primarily about slavery by reviewing speeches made in Congress and writings left by congressmen.

What about the fact that guerrilla leader John Mosby, perhaps the Confederate most wanted by the Union at a certain stage of the war, was smuggled to safety by two unsupervised slaves after being badly wounded—this with federal lines mere miles away, a reward on his head, and freedom a very likely bonus for his delivery?

In the same way, we never discuss why the western Ukrainians—you know, the ones in whose behalf we’re supposed to inaugurate World War III—sided with Hitler so as to oppose Stalin.  Uncle Joe is always presented as the lesser of two evils, though comparative body counts leave that a very dubious proposition.  Naturally, Winston Churchill couldn’t possibly have made such a miscalculation!  Naturally, when Churchill, coming away from the Yalta Conference, wrote that we had to “appease” Stalin, no tasteful historian would juxtapose his diction with Neville Chamberlain’s.

Okay… so the past belongs to Hollywood’s film library.  Sad, but perhaps inevitable.  I look into the future—that terrain about whose character future “historians” are to declare the truth retrospectively.  More and more, I’m dazzled by the number of wild cards in the deck.  The future.  Who could possibly come anywhere close to predicting it, especially in these days of technology-fueled trends that continually shift the goalposts of possibility?  In so many ways, I sense that we’re headed straight into an abyss—an interconnected, almost labyrinthine series of abysses, such that we steer into the one on the left if we miss the one on the right.

But not all the wild cards bear the image of the Grim Reaper.  Take China.  The PRC has been a force for pure evil since before my lifetime.  The Communist elite was behind Korea, behind Vietnam… now it’s saber-rattling around Japan and India, having already swallowed up Tibet and Hong-Kong, and simultaneously suckering African nations into surrendering the reins of power with “generous” loans.  (Of course, one of the chapters in our inerrant college history book tells us that Truman was absolutely right to dismiss that arrogant, insufferable bastard MacArthur, who would have deposed Mao and delivered China to Chiang kai-Shek.)

The Chinese elite is aging, however.  They’re human.  They must die, and fairly soon.  The Chinese people are fed up with them, even though a system has been engineered to ensure a continued habit of servility and sycophancy among the masses.  (The system’s effectiveness at deep programming explains, I suppose, why so many Chinese who escape to the US persist in voting for intrusive government.)  How many more generations of despotism can be sustained?  Leftists view human beings as blank slates, capable of infinite “education” and devoid of any fundamental moral beacon.  The rest of us know better.  How far into the future can the PRC spread its evil across this planet before Chinese of the rank and file demand an end to it?

What goes through Xi Jinping’s head?  We know (or suppose we know) that he doesn’t believe in any reality beyond this world’s.  What, then, does he hope to get from this world which will balance the evil he has introduced and is introducing into it?  He’s already an old man.  How many years does he expect to enjoy power—and how can he enjoy it when so many rivals must surely surround him?  How does it all end?

Or take our illegal immigration crisis.  California is our window into the future.  Imagine large cities across the country overrun with people who don’t speak the mainstream language, demand that our extravagant public subsidies be paid out, have no high-tech employment skills, are promised yet more handouts by the candidates of the statist party, sometimes serve as conduits (willing or otherwise) for gang activity, have no political tradition of self-determination (like the Chinese), and have lost their ancestors’ knowledge of working the land productively.  How does this end?

At some point, and sooner rather than later, we run out of money.  Won’t our “guests” beat a retreat as they see that day looming?  How many of them will sicken of the gangs in their midst and resort to the vigilantism for which a corrupt Mexican system always punished their fathers brutally?  As parts of urbanized Europe have become “no go” zones ruled by Sharia law, will we see large tracts of our nation breaking into self-policed islands of relative stability?  What will be the central government’s response to this balkanization?  Will it be favored and exploited as the stepping stone to some quasi-imperial central power structure (a.k.a. “divide and rule”)—or will we see, with the emergence of a permanent oligarchy, the creation of a national police force (lovingly imagined by Barack Obama during his original candidacy for president) that cruises our streets with 50-caliber machine guns mounted on Humvees?

And, at that point, will the state grow ever more autocratic… or, in light of its depleted and over-stretched resources, will the central authority lend a tolerant ear to talk of a looser national confederacy?

There’s an old Highland saying: Feigh ar a dheiradh—“Wait for its end.”  Who knows how a game of draw-poker played with twenty-six wild cards finishes?  Both worse and better than we can imagine, most likely.

Political Correctness, A+: Artistic Quality, F-

Nothing on “the scene” is currently interesting me–or perhaps I should say, more honestly, that everything in public life and contemporary culture so disgusts me at the moment that I’m trying very hard to direct my attention away from it.  So the idea came to me that I would again share a little of what I’ve been writing for a book.  This opus, to be titled Literary Decline and the Death of the Spirit, gathers together a lot of what I’ve wanted to say about the literary art for almost forty years.  In fact, some of it was composed several years ago… but the bit I’ve decided to post today was put together last week.  It’s intended as an example following a rather more abstract discussion.  So…

b) how a story profits artistically from depth of character

Examples are always welcome in abstract discussions.  I learned much from the previous chapter’s examples simply in composing them.  I offer the following extended illustration, then, by way of clarifying the importance in a story of deep characterization—of a palpable presence of free will—to generating an artistic sense of mystery.

Say that we have a feminist yarn about a society which eradicates males.  Readers will have inferred long before now that I attribute to academic feminism, perhaps more than to any other single source, a rash of careless readings that has beaten the finesse out of literary studies.  Every one of Chapter Four’s examples features an insistently feminist interpretation that has created a challenge to literary appreciation.  As the imperative to observe an orthodoxy—a party line—grows more and more strident, interest in or tolerance of individual characters who do more than project the Woman’s Perspective (i.e., are three-dimensional human beings) begins to wane… and we end up with narratives that harangue rather than provoke thought.

So in designing my hypothetical, I will not only not deny, but will stress that I am handling subject matter in whose typical message or “moral” I place no confidence.  Yet I still fancy that I can visualize this narrative growing in artistic strength to the degree that it pays more attention to character.

Let us dub our protagonist Nadya Ventura—again.  (If anyone in the wide world bears this name, I wish a) to apologize for appropriating your handle, and b) to congratulate you upon having the perfect moniker for an adventure/romance novel.)  Nadya leads the charge against the male sex.  She appears in all major battle scenes.  We can locate our story in the future so that blood spatter doesn’t render our pages obscene: perhaps all annihilation is accomplished with ray-guns.  However the cause is carried forward, Nadya is always in the vanguard.  Lots of action fills our book, and lots of courage, skill, resourcefulness, and intelligence flows from Nadya.  She is a genuine super-hero.

So far, our narrative is a mere cartoon.  One would like to think that even in today’s academy, it would find little support for being placed on the syllabus of a Contemporary Novels course.

Now let’s tweak the text.  Let us say that Nadya enters into conflict (verbal conflict) with her entourage of triumphant Amazons concerning the fate of the vanquished males.  Some wish the prisoners to be carted off to a kind of gender-Auschwitz for instant vaporization.  Others (emulating what Herodotus tells us of the Scythians) advocate blinding the captives and enslaving them.  Perhaps others pronounce themselves content merely to have all surviving males transformed through hormone therapy and a little elementary surgery.  Nadya considers all of these options inhumane and somewhat disgusting.  As debate proceeds, it is evident that she occupies a small minority of opinion.  Eventually she stands alone, refusing to concede… and a powerful bureaucracy has her posted to the highly undesirable Planet Ogygia, sidetracking her career and jeopardizing her life.

The narrative is growing more interesting, is it not?  The word “inhumane” crept into my condensation of events above: it was no mere slip of the pen.  Nadya has become something more than a two-dimensional poster for militant, sophomoric feminism.  She appears to recognize (or to begin to recognize) that the essential problem in human relations is abuse of power, and that relations between men and women have traditionally modeled just a few possible forms of such abuse.  An inner universe is opening up as we follow her reflections, its boundaries at least as veiled in shadow as those ringing Planet Ogygia.

We could do yet more—much more.  What’s a romance without some romance?  So how do women address this side of existence in an all-female society?  We could have them put the enslaved males to bedroom service prior to being executed, rather in the fashion of Ariosto’s expatriate Amazons from Crete; we could picture them as opting for a “lesbian only” habit of life; or, if the story indeed has a futuristic turn, we could give them robotic lovers, engineered and programmed to precise specifications.  Nadya could enter into conflict with her peers or superiors in any one of these scenarios.  She might become too attached to her lover-slave to surrender him for “nullification” at the mandated moment.  She might find that her female companion, upon receiving a promotion, begins to demand favors rather than to pursue an equal relationship.  She might tire of her cyber-amant for some reason that she can’t quite define, stalked by the uneasy, creeping conviction that the arrangement is reducing her, as well, to a machine.  In the novel’s long version, she might work through all three options and register major dissatisfaction with each.

I find that Nadya is beginning to grow very interesting—and ever more “literary”.  Again, I have deliberately (and somewhat archly, with more smug irony along the way than I could hope to deny) chosen a subject whose moral assumptions are repugnant to me.  I am not remotely receptive to the prospect of feminist world domination.  Yet I would still find something to enjoy artistically in this hypothetical narrative as Nadya progressed from a crude stereotype to a vibrant human being who wrestles with issues involving freedom, fairness, generosity, and self-respect.

An adversary might protest loudly, “Well, of course you take increasing delight in the narrative arrangements just described! With each one, you are undermining the theme that a women-only utopia would be a better place.” In response, I would offer to make Nadya’s supervisor, Sister Carrie, the main character; and Carrie, as indicated in all of my previous suggestions, would resist Nadya’s reactionary tendencies at every step. It is Carrie who would want the prisoners enslaved and emasculated prior to eventual execution, and who would become Nadya’s lover prior to innovating a culture-wide shift to gigolo-robots. All of the story’s action could filter through Carrie’s mind: she could indeed be its narrator. “The pleading of the prisoners before they were administered the ‘exit pill’,” she might say, “was disturbing to me. But I recognized my duty, and I imagined the chorus of silent pleading from generations of women who had feared to lift up their voices. Their volume drowned out the prisoners’ cries completely.” And later, this: “I had grown very fond of Nadya, and banishing her to Ogygia pained me deeply. But I knew that I might lack the strength needed to accomplish our mission if my darling Nadya continued to undermine it from the pillow. No sacrifice I made for the cause ever cost me more dearly.”

My adversary will fire back that I have now delivered the story into the hands of an “unreliable narrator” whom readers will perceive as a fanatic—and that I am hence, once again, undermining the work’s theme to suit my own taste. This manner of response would signify to me that I could do nothing to placate my critic; every move I might make in the direction of radical feminist liberation would be viewed as secret sabotage… and so it would be, in a way. Because every move I have in mind would simply pry open the monomaniacal plot and slip in touches of characterization—of weighing options, of venting frustrations, of regretting missed opportunities, of grieving the loss of present joys in the future (each element of which list, by the way, may be observed in the words assigned to Medea by Euripides). The insurmountable wall separating me from my adversary isn’t really politics or ideology at all, or not in this artistic context: it is the issue of allowing evidence of individual inner life—of free will—into the text versus banning it rigorously. If I have my way and one or more characters, no matter who they are, reflect in detectible fashion upon events, then my opponent’s desired effect is already compromised; for in his our her fictional vision of utopia, nobody has an independent thought. The world is so “perfect” that all of its surviving inhabitants merely live their waking hours in undifferentiated unity, never being driven into that moment of intimate personal questioning which indicts at least a tiny bit of dissonance between inside and outside.

No room for mystery here; and without the mysterious space created by affirmations of character, there is also no reality other than the purely objective world of sensory impressions. There is no soul here, and no beauty. It is a landscape, for that matter, where robots would feel entirely comfortable, and where one could no longer distinguish between the despiritualized human and the clever machine.

The Right Not to Be “Offended”: Psychic and Spiritual Suicide

I’ve been trying to gather together some old articles and new ideas about appreciating and teaching literature. In the process, I composed the following paragraph about interpreting the hero’s interludes with Circe and Calypso in Homer’s Odyssey:

So in what respect has this combination of characters provided a tantalizing, artistically indefinite commentary upon events? If only today’s young student would pursue these echoes down the corridors of experience! I believe the mythic presentation tells us that sex spells death to the soul if it has no context, no reason for being other than a self-annihilating, unedifying pleasure—infinitely renewable but infallibly, immutably annihilating in each of its reprises. What does Penelope offer that two goddesses cannot? Context; purpose. Children to raise; a home with which one’s identity readily and permanently fuses; companionship as the body ages and years in this world dwindle. In the living world of Ithaca and in the embrace of his living wife, Odysseus will find a forever-sameness within whose bounds change is natural and welcome. In the dead world of a goddess’s icy beauty, he finds an undying sameness that suffocates any possibility of meaningful change. And in what other terms would we cast a spiritual definition of human life, if not as an ascending sequence of deaths and rebirths—of changes that lead to an ever more significant, identity-assertive unity?

Of course, I was immediately struck upon rereading these words by how “offensive” they would be to just about any young person enrolled in a college English program.  And then I had the further thought… “Why?”  If your old Uncle Clyde sidled up to you during the holidays and began, “Wilbert, my boy, you have a bit of potential, but you also have a lot of major problems.  Here, I’ve made a list…” well, you would take a bathroom break and then squeeze through the window above the tub.  But I speak not of such cases.  Imagine, rather, that you happen to read a piece about the health risks of corn flakes or mashed potatoes.  Say that your favorite food has been targeted.  Are you “offended”?  Would you write the author a scathing email?  Or if this person delivered his culinary death sentence from a rostrum, would you spring up and chant, “Hey, hey, ho, ho!  This food Nazi’s got to go!”

Or what if you received a recall on your car because the airbag has a nasty habit of inflating spontaneously as soon as the driver reaches 60 m.p.h.?  Would you not take heed of the notice?  Or would you fire back, instead, “I love my car.  This message offends me!”

We seem to be surrounded by people who are “offended” by the existence of firearms, and hence by any mention of or reference to them… except in the context of a grotesquely violent Hollywood flick where the cool antinomian studs are heisting the evil corporate mogul’s Moon Rock.  They are “offended”, these sensitive plants among us, if the presence of guns in gang activity is underscored, or if the proliferation of gang activity in certain subsets of the population is remarked, or if a certain race or ethnicity happens to overlap that certain subset significantly.  We can’t say much of anything to put our highly “offendable” brethren on their guard, and we can’t wage a public discussion in the interest of reducing the dangers that circulate around them.

Certainly a teacher cannot analyze a text and propose that it carries a warning against promiscuous recreational sex.

If you find yourself constantly among the “offended”, may I ask how you ever propose to learn anything?  You cannot be warned of a peril.  You cannot be confronted with an example that may reflect negatively upon your own practice.  You cannot be introduced to a fictive world where your own values are not applied and promoted.

So how do you learn anything?  How do you grow up?  What motivates you to discard your diapers and put on a pair of big-boy pants?

Where is your pride in being an intelligent adult?  Where is your humility as a member of the human race?

Where is your sanity as a free citizen allowed to cross the street without a government mediator interpreting traffic signals for you in a non-offensive manner?

My New Novel (Part Two)

One more selection from the preface of my new novel… and by the way, Seven Demons Worse was its title under a very different and much earlier guise.  The new release is titled Worse by Seven.

In Seven Demons, Evans moves along in Part Three to seek out a desert space where he… does what? Almost kills himself with idle wandering until he decides to have another go at life? The nature of his “redemption” while straying through a sandy wilderness far west of his university never becomes clear. In the version of the novel before you, Evans’s reanimation through his acquaintance with Carmen makes his journey west far more comprehensible, I believe (I hope), though he himself constantly questions its purpose. I would argue that his purpose is illuminated by his explicit frustration in trying to find it. He’s looking for his soul. Ostensibly, he has to go back and mop up after resigning his professorship by mail. An apartment must be emptied, a car sold… these are details that I had ignored earlier, but that a story of life in the real world cannot afford to pass by. Yet he understands from the start that such details are the trip’s pretext. He is not in a position, psychologically or spiritually, simply to have another go at being happy with yet another woman whom he has met quite casually and treated rather better than her recent predecessors. He no longer trusts his judgment: he has fooled himself too often in relying on his compromised conscience. He needs to see a rigorous, objective test run on his moral stamina, and perhaps even more on his sheer physical self-control (which is pretty much the same thing, if you stop and think). He continues westward, therefore, with an irresistible inclination to put himself in harm’s way.

I remember being forced to read one of Norman Mailer’s novels as a college freshman, and I recall the protagonist as a virulent womanizer whose addiction to sex has diminished his manly fortitude practically to nothing in his own eyes. (I observe this, by the way, to be a fully—if ironically—genuine consequence of skirt-chasing: men actually lose their self-respect as virile men.) Mailer’s character ends up walking along the parapet of a skyscraper to restore a bit of his soul’s energy. In the original version of my narrative, I can’t see Evans as having done anything much different in traipsing through a space resembling New Mexico’s White Sands and being reprieved from death only by a blind chance. That’s not the end I wanted. It doesn’t bring together all the story’s tortuous (and torturous) strands: the academic world full of haughty hypocrisy, the beloved wife snatched away rudely, the affairs with campus carnivores intended to be a kind of fist-shaking at heaven… the domineering mother, the elusive father, the small-town whited-sepulcher church… the budding love of a worthy but vulnerable human being who must not be mishandled any further… all of these sources of tension must be addressed. What is essentially a Maileresque dance atop a skyscraper doesn’t address any of them—and most certainly does not propose a Christian resolution.

If my “Christian” critics had wanted to lance Seven Demons Worse at its most exposed point, their target should have been the ending. Indeed, if I had staged some supernatural conversion in the sand dunes where Evans falls on his knees, cries, “I hear you, Jesus—you died on the cross for my sins!” and blubbers himself into ecstasy, most of my critics would probably have considered a stay of execution for me. But here I will share a confession of my own. I have never been able to fathom the spiritual content of the boo-hooing displayed at the thought of the Savior’s being cruelly butchered because the justly enraged Father demands a blood sacrifice. The ritual analogies attempted here simply muddy up the terms of redemption impossibly for me; I cannot find in this jumble of scapegoating and human sacrifice a compelling expression of how the wayward heart might be realigned toward humility, hope, and the worship of goodness. Maybe it’s my fault. Like Evans, I’m sure I have some missing pieces. As his literary creator, though, I cannot put into Evans’s experience sentiments that have no basis in my own. The God he seeks must be the God I have sought—and whatever peace and renewal he finds must be such as I have found.

Suffering, again, is an indispensable element of the formula: Evans must realize that suffering belongs to the righteous life in this vale of tears called Earth. The Beatitudes promise us no less. It is therefore unjust and immature to rebuke God because we suffer. If our suffering is “good suffering”, it indeed demonstrates that we are followers of God (who ended up on the Cross in trying to reach us through a fully human form). Yet there is also such a thing as bad suffering. Evans has managed to consume his fill of this during his wild run at the campus life’s “there is no God—I’m in control” caliber of pleasure. Indeed, he has discovered that Hell can scarcely be anything other than separation from God in a world entirely of one’s own making—right down to its luxurious indulgences.

The reality of bad suffering, then, must be balanced against the reality of good suffering. I cannot have Evans exiting the desert triumphantly with the mere dictum in his mouth, “Get back to doing your duty, and don’t ask questions” (or, as the great American philosopher Bill Belichick expresses it more succinctly, “Do your job”). This would be just a slight repackaging of his mother’s cultic devotion to building a superior bloodline while suppressing all personal affections that interfere. The duty at issue might be of a much higher sort—but the dedication to it would still be abject and without joy. Somewhere in his desperate desert meander, Evans has to discover joy.

In my first draft of the utter rewrite (and, by Part Three, I had thrown Seven Demons aside completely and was composing fresh), Evans’s “revelation” emerges from his mouth in the words, “Try again—try harder!” The mere determination to take one more stab at doing the right thing in life manifests an awareness that one has been forgiven past sins. Hence “try again” correctly states part of a truly Christian formula, I would argue, because it implies that all the figures on the ledger’s “debit” side have been canceled. You don’t start a new business if your old business hasn’t paid off its debts.

Now, being liberated to go forth and try again can certainly stir the heart to joy. Yet, as a formula, it still loiters dangerously close to the faithful legionnaire’s commitment to his marching orders. We mustn’t send Evans away to re-live the Charge of the Light Brigade. I therefore—after much anguish and many deleted phrases—amended the “try harder” part of the formula to this: “Try to find joy in how hard it is” (with “it” understood as the first part: “try harder”). To take joy in a formidable challenge is, it seems to me, a quite natural human response. The less arbitrary and more meaningful the challenge, the greater the joy, even in the event of ultimate failure. Knowing that you almost succeeded in leaping from your second-story window onto the oak tree’s limb when you broke your leg may give satisfaction to a fool: knowing that you saved two of three children rushing down-river in a flood brings a profound peace that mitigates the one failure, and that endures a lifetime. Is that peace a joy? We should strive to make it so, if only a sad joy. Though still embedded in suffering and regret, it also rests firmly on a sense of personal worth won through worthy endeavor. Try… and try to find joy in how hard it is.

Aware that we are weak and fallible human beings who must always come up a bit short—and aware, too, that God forgives us such inadequacy—we must try to recognize in our second and third (and seven times seventy) attempts an amplitude, a generosity, that defines the life of faith. The closest analogy I can think of would be one drawn from the sporting life—a kind of illumination dear not only to Coach Belichick, but to Saint Paul. I’ve heard many interviews of Hall-of-Fame baseball players where an admiring sportscaster, wide-eyed and breathless, asks the star about the game where he hit three home runs or struck out fifteen hitters. The immortal answers perfunctorily, perhaps with a touch of coolness. Then the interviewer asks about his subject’s fondest memory. The star’s face brightens, and he proceeds to share details of a fourteen-inning playoff game which featured, perhaps, no significant contribution of his own. What he recalls is the thrill of being utterly absorbed in an effort with everyone else on both teams—an effort whose boundaries were respected by all and whose worthiness of their dedication none of them questioned. The recollected joy here is the joy of trying, of striving in a complex and difficult contest. One side would win at last and one side lose. Yet all parties would look back, once the pain of failure had subsided, with pride and… and joy.

I believe Evans discovers this hidden and critical secret about suffering in God’s cause as he babbles into an empty desert sky. He finally understands that he was happier having spent one brief year with his wife than he could ever be over a long career of sharing beds with willing luminaries of the liberated, God-free intelligentsia—infinitely happier, even had he known in advance that they two would have only one year together. He realizes, likewise, that he will find happiness with Carmen not because he will necessarily make her happy or be made happy by her, but because he and she are both prepared to dedicate themselves fully to the attempt. For in the attempt lies the success… in the unlimited surmounting of small failures.

I don’t imagine that my formula will strike everyone as quite what a Christian should be proposing. I know that many, for instance, will insist upon some “free gift” packaging of salvation that absolves the ecstatic believer even from the obligation to try (let alone try harder) at doing good. This preference for what was called “enthusiasm” a couple of centuries ago—for the undiluted, irrational gush of rapturous adoration—has virtually destroyed the “maleness” of Christianity in our time, I fear. Leon Podles published a book longer ago than the appearance of Seven Demons Worse about the unhappy feminization of Catholicism; and not only has the Roman faith not recovered the ground lost with males over the intervening years, but it has lost much more—in the company, of course, of Protestant denominations spanning the entire spectrum of liturgical practice. Doctrine regarding sexual conduct is perhaps more illustrative of this fatal anemia than most of the church’s many other “evolving” positions. We are not to judge. Nobody, it seems, is to judge anything. Everything’s “okay” (or, as a prophetic book title from 1967 put it, “You’re okay, I’m okay”). Struggle is gone, because struggle produces suffering, and suffering cannot be good. Why (we’re told), the whole point of the Christian faith is to eradicate suffering! How will we ever do this if we make severe demands of ourselves or frown upon our fellows for mounting only a token defense of principle? Find joy in the challenge of accomplishing our high mission? But our mission (we’re told) is precisely to relieve ourselves and others of challenges!

Thus the new Christian—the new false Christianity. When my tale began life as Seven Demons Worse, it was rejected by many of the organized faith for daring to pry open a forbidden closet’s door. Now, as Worse by Seven, I’m sure it will be rejected by just as many who ostensibly profess the same faith because it “insensitively” proclaims the necessity of laboring up a steep, high staircase. Pardon me a smile at the irony of my having kept Baudelaire’s lines to open Part One in both versions. For daring to hint at the existence of Lesbian love, “Delphine et Hippolyte” won the poet a few days of legal detention in the midst of France’s smug, stodgy nineteenth century. Today the European Union’s arbiters of taste and manners would likely fine him a few thousand Euros—and also return him to jail—for hinting that anything whatever about Lesbian love was at all wrong in the least. Huston Evans is no Charles Baudelaire: he fights his way through deep melancholy to a triumphant sense of life’s worth in the context of a life that never ends. That doesn’t mean, however, that he should expect any better fate in the hands of the censors who define the “acceptable” in this world. Indeed, his sins are more damning for being more robust. Though he is only a fictional character, he may yet land me in Siberia.

My New Novel (Part One)

Yikes–it’s Wednesday!  How many of you suffer from the subconscious conviction that Christmas always falls on Sunday?  No matter.  I had predetermined that I would publish a couple of excerpts this week from the preface to my new novel, Worse by Seven.  My commentary therein isn’t at all different from the sort of thing i usually post in this space, it may induce one or two readers to download the Kindle version or purchase the hard copy, and… and it has become fairly evident to me that most people aren’t reading blogs over the holidays, anyway.  So I’ll indulge in a bit of self-promotion today and Saturday, and otherwise join our fearless leaders in a shutdown of activity.

From the author’s “Polemical Preface”

[The preceding paragraphs describe the immense difficulties I encountered when trying to interest self-styled Christian publications in a much earlier version of this book twenty years ago.]

Still, there was certainly a component of the Christian community (understood in a more general—and also more genuine—sense) that did read novels. A few such people sampled my book before our press collapsed… and of these, more than a few lodged an objection not easily shrugged off as insubstantial. I should note that all members of this “test group” were affiliated with a Southern Baptist institution to which I had a professional connection at the time. The somewhat squeamish character of their reservations, then, was perhaps to be expected—for they were distressed that the novel had chosen to tackle the sexual revolution, especially as it had evolved in the Ivory Tower during the Eighties.

I had witnessed this lurid cultural debacle from a spectator’s seat rather than participating on the field of play—but my seat belonged to the first row of bleachers. Between 1972 and 1984, I studied at three different institutions of higher learning, eventually earning three degrees. Shortly thereafter, I began a career of teaching at various colleges that ended only a few months ago. My exposure to the lifestyle of the cultural elite, therefore, was lengthy.

In my time, I had seen one psyche after another, among both males and females, corroded dangerously by the prevailing ethic. When I began my academic apprenticeship back in the Seventies, the message was overtly hedonistic. (It has lately grown more self-righteously ideological: promiscuity not for pleasure’s sake, but to liberate oppressed minorities.) Back then, one was supposed to approach sex as among life’s most desirable joys, probably surpassing good food and a good sleep in many minds. To more than a few, I have a feeling that it even outranked food and sleep as a necessity. It was an “it”: an acquisition, a thing to be possessed and savored like a German-sweet-chocolate cake straight out of the oven. Educated adults were to understand this “itness” and to abstain from the childish or uncouth attachment of emotional significance to “good sex”. If both parties consented to dedicate their bodies (for a month, a weekend, or ten minutes) to plucking the forbidden fruit off the tree and sucking out its juices, then what ground remained for the moralist to grow livid and call down damnation? Would that bourgeois, probably Christian moralist have the same hang-up about other perfectly natural behaviors like going to the bathroom? More than once, I heard his kind dubbed “anal-repressive”.

The irony about the “anal-repressive” jibe was that it logically eliminated the possibility of love among the Enlightened without their ever having noticed. If sex is a kind of bowel movement involving the other side of the abdomen, what can it have to do with emotion? A physiological need cannot be considered a fine sentiment by any sensible person. The ability to sleep eight hours a night is no proof of delicate feeling. Yet the rock-and-roll mentality that saturated the society in which I grew up (and in which I observed very little growing up) persistently applauded itself as more “sensitive” and “caring” than its glowering, Puritanical parent generation. “All you need is love”—with the supplementation, apparently, of birth-control pills. At the same time, the refrain that “sex is just sex” was beginning to be sung by the same hipsters. I never could get an answer from any of them to the question, “So which one is it?”

Alas, the Christians I have tried to describe in my preamble held aloof from the fray of ideas rather than tearing into the other side’s contradictions, as I myself thought proper (and even compulsory for those of us whose business was ideas). My remote, unsoiled colleagues didn’t resemble the caricature of Christian self-discipline that the “educated” crowd drew of them except, perhaps one respect. They were not a bunch of trap-jawed males keeping their womenfolk barefoot, pregnant, and chained to the stove… but they did feel very uncomfortable about lifting the veils insistently draped by polite society. Let me return now to these ever-vigilant caretakers of propriety.

My book’s sin, for this more literate class of Christian, did not—of course—lie in promoting the “educated” view of sex as a natural joy for the laid-back (and sketchily toilet-trained); nobody ever accused my novel of that, and nobody who had read it ever could. Yet I seemed to have been doing something close to illicit promotion precisely by exploding the sexual revolution’s premises at close range. I was looking microscopically into a matter that good people agree to keep half a mile away, or to approach more nearly only if squinting through lowered eyelashes. It appeared that an author was doomed to make sex enticing (especially to impressionable young girls) even if he systematically, almost categorically revealed its host of spiritual risks in scrutinizing it. The scrutiny was impermissible. It was like giving a child a sip of beer to show him how vile the stuff tastes: what if the kid enjoys it?

Here I must set the scene more thoroughly. My tortured hero, Professor Huston Evans, had reached a vaguely suicidal decision to compete in elite campus dating games after he had followed a celibate adulthood’s path to marriage—only to see his young wife die within months. Evans’s state, at this point, is so deeply depressed that it becomes virtually nihilistic. The happiness achieved by his strictures having turned to ash in his hands, he can recognize no further virtue in fighting the good fight—for tomorrow, indeed, we die.

Through this tormented character, I tested the claims of the sexual revolution one by one. (Readers may believe or not, as they will, that Evans was truly a test vehicle for me and not myself under an alias: the novel isn’t an autobiography—but I’m too old now to bother about those who want it to be.) What I observed in peering imaginatively through this man’s eyes was that sex never has an emotional (I would prefer to say spiritual) value of 0. In other words, I am convinced that sex is never just sex (except, perhaps, in cases of pathological degeneration). Crude men will claim otherwise almost as a boast, or perhaps to challenge younger men to come down and join them in their psychological dunghill. When feminism, with the aid of the Pill, began to morph into a cult of promiscuity during the Seventies, “educated” women took up the same loud, hoarse boast. Female Ph.D.’s were now sounding rather like lifelong playboys whose only fear on earth was pregnancy, with its host of attendant shackles. Some of them, indeed, were sounding more like sailors on shore leave. These were the women with whom Evans felt he had some kind of score to settle. The vision of happiness they most derided was that for which he had most longed, and whose sudden loss after so much waiting seemed (in some associational manner created by his buried grief) all their fault.

And the poor man’s “vendetta”, if irrational, was not utterly incomprehensible. After all, the sexual revolution had indeed reduced his chances of finding what he sought to statistical zero, at least in an academic setting (with not much better odds to be found outside that setting). No man and woman could find enduring, mutually respecting happiness in such a climate; for, to repeat my thesis, a purely sensory savoring of sexual pleasure, as of a fine wine or a crêpe Suzette, is impossible for people of stable emotional health—yet such is the academic formula for sexual relations. The quixotic quest for “emotionally unengaged” sex—for that utterly detached joy in the “object”—must find itself diverted to one of only a few practical destinations. Evans had embarked upon an unwholesome journey to explore many of these, ripping up the scenery as he went.

Most natural for any tender, callow person is the tendency to fall in love with the partner, to be sure; but, among the experienced players of the game in an artificial world like Evans’s, this is also the least likely outcome. Much more often in these highly exploitative surroundings, one develops a contempt of partners as mere deliverers of “the thing” (a perverted sentiment felt especially often by men for their female partners) or a contempt of oneself as having developed an addiction-like dependency upon the thing (probably more common in females, since it requires introspection—but Evans explores these waters, too). Women sometimes want to get “the thing” out of the way as quickly as possible so that they may proceed to learn if they and their partners actually have a basis for friendship. Men seem to me more likely to push the envelope, seeking after ever more violent and unnatural ways to achieve “the thing” once they have grown bored with the old-fashioned way. Evans, I will note here, registers a new taste for physical violence—for a kind of vengeance on the world—before he retreats to the bedroom with his first conquest.

My design, in a way, was to write a little Inferno about de-spiritualized sexual experiences, with different levels of degradation implied here and there. Yet it seemed that most of the few self-identified Christian readers who nosed through that version of the book (and you’ve probably deduced by now that Seven Demons Worse was the first incarnation of Worse by Seven) couldn’t make out my Dantesque intentions. They saw the narrative as profoundly “off-color”. Neither of its versions ever had any explicit descriptions of sex acts or human anatomy (though the definition of “explicit” depends, I suppose, upon the beholder’s eye, and specifically upon how much imagination enhances that eye’s vision)—and, likewise, no references whatever appeared to any form of sex that might be called sodomy. Nevertheless, my harshest critics didn’t like my getting into Evans’s head. Sex is… hush… sex. Jack and Jill withdraw to the bedroom, the door closes, and… oh, Jack! Oh, Jill! Naughty, naughty! No analysis of either character’s reflections and feelings, please. If they’re not married, then something bad has just happened. And if they are… why, apparently nothing bad could possibly happen. The right and the wrong of it is all about being legal, not in the least about state of mind or disposition of the heart.

The Challenge to “Reaching Across the Aisle” Is Finding the Aisle

My son once remarked rather glibly that he’d like to run for public office some day.  I asked him over Thanksgiving if he had retained that ambition… and, after pulling a long face, he answered that he might seek office only if he could do so without raising the banner of either major political party.  Of course, this makes office-seeking a practical impossibility; but his response contained a sentiment that I have found very common in his generation.  They may speak of wanting to “cross the aisle” or wanting to “get something done”, a position which I have chided in them more than once; for why cross the aisle if error sits on the other side, and why get something done if activity leaves the world worse at dusk than it was at dawn?

But, yes, as little sympathy as I tend to have with one side, the other inspires in me no warmth of affection.  Both have lately passed a farm bill (another farm bill—the word “pork” acquires new meaning under that a rubber stamp, year after year) which subsidizes mega-farming conglomerates and helps to drive small farms out of business.  Neither side is currently talking about securing the power grid against an Electro-Magnetic Pulse that could leave 90 percent of us dead in a year: both are too busy drawing lines in the sand over the Wall.  For the sake of full disclosure, I will say openly that I believe the endgame envisioned by Democrat master-puppeteers (an elite group which fully excludes useful idiots like Alexandria Octavio-Cortez) is to flood our system with public dependency until shortages produce riots in the streets—at which point martial law will be declared, elections suspended, and a dictatorial oligarchy settled into place.  I believe that certain Republicans share that vision, though their way of reaching it may take a detour.  (How about, for instance, inviting civil chaos by not securing the power grid against an inevitable EMP?)

A particular commentator whom I have followed on Twitter and whose personal journey in life has led her through the kind of misery and travail that I always respect posted last week a comment about reaching across the aisle only to wring “one of them” by the neck.  I get it.  At the same time, though, I’ve blundered into studying a series of cases where justice has grossly miscarried: the Steven Avery case in Wisconsin, the four young men originally imprisoned for the Carter and Haraway murders in Ada (Oklahoma), and Officer Daniel Holtzclaw’s outrageous 263-year sentence for sexual assaults never committed (also in Oklahoma).  Now, my friends on the Right appear to be generally comfortable with the assembly-line manner in our justice system shuttles cases from the “active” to the “closed” file.  As long as someone ends up in the jug, they’re happy—and the judges for whom they vote seem fully aware of this predilection.  Of course, when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller usurps unconstitutional powers and extorts Mike Flynn into an unlawful confession by bullying his son, the same justice-hawks suddenly develop a taste for fairness and due process—while the other side, on cue, is looking for a tree that will bear Flynn’s full weight.

Now, this past week, I see a flurry of “tweeting” (what an unconsciously apt verb for people who chatter away like starlings descended upon a field!) from the Right about what a bad boy Vladimir Putin is and how the cause of human decency and eternal truth compels us to stay in Syria and oppose evil actors everywhere.  Beyond the logistical impossibility of waging a worldwide war forever (for la paz empieza nunca, in the words of one Cold Warrior), how would we escape bombing ourselves at some point for our own malfeasance, if our crusade were sincere?  (Example: President Obama gave the order to “drone” perhaps as many as a thousand children located in close proximity to desirable targets.)  In our very imperfect world, should we not consider that the PRC’s objectives encompass the globe and include actually reading thoughts by means of cameras and interpretive software (a bit of intrusion already being practiced on Chinese citizens), whereas Putin is interested only in returning Russia to a world-power status as NATO annexes real estate all around him?  In short, shouldn’t we be cutting a deal with the lesser villain in order to hold the greater one in check?

All of this “aisle” stuff… if I am to reach across and strangle everyone who is promoting a ridiculous or ruinous position, I’ll need to combine the talents of the most implacable serial killer ever with those of the liveliest kangaroo.

So, my son… I do understand your perplexity—and I wish you and your generation much luck in trying to sort it all out.  Perhaps this explains the appeal of Octavio-Cortez: just go crazy and set the intellectual needle back to “zero”.  That failing, I can see no better place to begin than self-sufficiency.  Be radically skeptical, and be as stingy as Scrooge in the matter of handing control of your life over to Big Brother.  Make a circle around yourself of things you can handle on your own, and try to broaden the circle every month, every year.  Learn how to purify water.  Grow something to eat, even if it’s a few gojis on your window sill.  Take a self-defense course if you don’t want to pack a gun.  Put a little cash away in a safe place, and buy a little gold.

Could this be the platform of a new party, or of a transformed old party?  (The Anti-Slavery Party, perhaps?)  I don’t know.  I’m too old for such questions—or perhaps these are the questions that immediately make me feel very old.  I only know that everything seems to be headed in the reverse direction: dependency, and always more dependency.  As I receive the yearly bombarding of emails giddily wishing me happiness and good cheer—without any logical connection to real-world events or practical likelihood—I simply hit “delete, delete, delete”.  I will extend to you all, rather, the wish I have for my son: greater self-sufficiency.  Independence.  In my parlance, that translates as happiness and good cheer.

By All Means, Discuss Religion—But Think Before You Speak

I wonder if you have that “yes… but” feeling in discussions about religious faith as much as I do.  A certain discomfort with unqualified assertions has afflicted me throughout my adult life whenever this particular area of inquiry opens its wide vistas.

Take a column published by Dennis Prager yesterday.  I like Dennis Prager, but… but is the “goodness” or “evil” in human nature really just an “either/or” proposition?  It seems so here:

With the increasing secularization of society, less and less wisdom has been conveyed to young people. One particularly obvious example is most secular people, especially on the left, believe human beings are basically good. It is difficult to overstate the foolishness of this belief. And a belief it is: There is no evidence to support it, and there is overwhelming evidence—like virtually all of human history—to refute it.

Now… where to begin?  If humans are not basically good—i.e., are basically evil—then whence do they draw the knowledge (or wisdom) to denounce their own essential wickedness?  Common answer: from a basis in revealed truth, such as a sacred text.  Excellent… but there’s a problem.  Around the world and throughout human history, several tablets, parchments, oral poems, and other “documents” have claimed to carry word of right and wrong into our midst from on high.  The various messages thus assembled are, unfortunately, irreconcilable: some of them must be false.  The Aztec apparently believed themselves commanded by their sun god to tear the living hearts out of prisoners and children in sacrifice.  The Germanic and Celtic peoples of northwestern Europe were also practicing human sacrifice at the behest (so they supposed) of some deity.  We continue to excavate the remains of their unhappy (or perhaps ecstatic) emissaries to the Beyond from peat bogs.  The Koran encourages the slaying of infidels after Ramadan, as well as polygamy, wife-beating, and strategic mendacity to non-believers.  Mr. Prager’s tradition itself is not above suspicion.  Deuteronomy 21:18-21 exhorts parents and neighbors to join in stoning a disobedient son to death.

How do we know which sacred texts truly channel the voice of God, which are utterly false, and which garble the message?  If we ourselves are invincibly corrupt of understanding, what hope have we of ever deciphering the truth?  Do we—each tribe of us—simply cling to our inheritance and trust that it has been bequeathed to us by the true God?  So maybe we’re right and maybe we’re wrong… is that how it works?  Roll for Seven and pray not to get Snake Eyes?

Obviously not; obviously, something guides us in our interpretation of scriptural tradition and other metaphysical claims.  In fact, as civilized beings, we will not accept the mutilating of young girls on the grounds that the practice stems from religious tradition; our assumption (and I contend that it is a correct assumption) is that even those raised in such a tradition should nevertheless hear the voice of the true God clearly enough to be repelled by Female Genital Mutilation (not to mention cutting girls’ hearts out).  In such matters, God speaks to us personally even when not through our culture’s revered texts.  The defense from cultural conditioning offers a mitigating factor, at best. Our judges didn’t accept the Nazi “just obeying orders” defense at Nuremburg, and they were right not to do so.

This isn’t to say that we are “basically good”.  Aye-aye-aye.  Define “good” and “basic”, for starters; and while you’re at it, define “we”—define your self, your soul, as a coherent and integral reality.  For the soul is divided against itself: Mr. Prager and I can certainly agree about that.  But if one side (which he associates with feeling or impulse, calling it “brain”) bears the ruinous seed of animal behavior, the other side (which Prager styles “mind”) must be the source of our benign inspiration.  Which is more “basic”?  And why is feeling matched against reason in this neo-Platonic dichotomy?  Moral inspiration is almost always a “feeling”, whereas “reason” (as any honest academic can tell you) has authored at least as much wickedness on earth as blind lust or vengefulness.  Indeed, inasmuch as a crime approved by deliberation engages more of the criminal’s will than does a destructive burst of passion, “reasonable villains” are the worst in the world.

We expect people to have that special inner light illuminating their behavior: we consider it basic.  I think I know what Mr. Prager means to say.  Yes… but….

And then I happened to read another column by Robert Knight within minutes of Prager’s. Mr. Knight cites a Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who cites… well, here it is (idiosyncratic use of quotations and all):

Mr. Douthat explains the clash of worldviews presented in a new book by Steven D. Smith, “Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac”:

“What is that conception [of divinity advanced by paganism]?  Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.”

I’m squirming again… as I imagine Dennis Prager would be at this point.  A “leap toward the transcendent” could describe the motivation behind many a progressive program of ethnic cleansing or genetic modification.  What if I wish to fuse humans with robots so as to create a disease-resistant creature who (which?) can live for millennia?  That certainly doesn’t seem very natural… but my visionary leap encourages me to boldly go where no man has gone before (and to split infinitives that have never been split before, as one wag volunteered a while back).  A sense of natural order should dissuade me from being rash in this enterprise.  Maybe—just maybe—my “transcendent” trajectory is hubris rather than prophecy.  Nature teaches me that corporal life and death are inextricably bound; and, as a person of faith, I must believe that God has made them so by design.  For what would spur us to transcend our selfish desires and believe in higher dimensions if we did not know that our mortal clock might tick four score years, at most?  How would we learn compassion for others—the “tears of things”—if we humans were not all bound together by the miseries of sickness and aging, and of the loss of those who have sickened or died?

I cannot think of a cruder definition of paganism than this slapdash suggestion that it includes anyone who admires a sunrise or the Grand Canyon.  I appreciate what these authors are attempting to say—perhaps better than they do.  As a university professor until half a year ago, I was increasingly having to field comments from students whose bizarrely cultic beliefs were trying to spread their mauled wings in the open air of objective discourse.  One young woman, for instance, argued incessantly that her parents promoted a Satanist billboard only to make Christians see how intolerant their religion was.  Yeah… and I can hear an Aztec priest making the same argument if the twenty-first century should burst in upon him as he sharpens his knife.

The truth is that pagan witchcraft (which seems to be the practice most squarely in this article’s crosshairs) does not revere natural cycle at all: it seeks to disrupt nature, precisely—to make the moon stand still, to make trees uproot themselves and walk.  Historically, witchcraft occupied the same orientation to nature as does applied science today: both seek to make events behave contrarily to their natural programming.  To the sincere Christian, I venture to say that God is very much in nature, not sprawled back in His celestial recliner from the outside watching His wind-up gismo run itself.  That conception belongs, indeed, to the Darwinist (as well as to the ancient Epicurean, by the way).

Where do such “defenses of the faith” come from?  Sometimes I want to say, “With friends like these, what need has faith of enemies?”  A single notion seems to obsess an author here and there in search of a book topic, and… off we go.  Everything is X.  Were it not for X, we could return to the Garden.

Well… don’t stop reading—but don’t stop thinking as you read.

Christmas: Engineered Nostalgia or Orientation to the Future?

Certain things can be done best on those days when the sun rises over a heavy frost—like today.  This would be a good morning to tug on my high boots and wade into the briars and vines around my garden’s perimeter with a shovel.  If I embarked upon the same mission at warmer times of year, I would either have to gear up like a beekeeper or else risk blundering upon a bed of yellow jackets (not vestes jaunes angry about Macron’s gas tax, but the really angry insect whose sting is worse than a flying stone).  This wicked undergrowth is dangerous throughout most of the year both for the poisonous snakes it might conceal and for the tenderbox it creates around our house, should a tossed cigarette far down the road start a forest fire.  I used to hack at it with a swing-blade. Now I prefer the shovel.  Its shaft is twice as long as the serrated blade’s, so I get more acceleration into my strokes.  I also don’t have to bend as far into spots where the spines are especially prickly.  A shovel’s blade, if you angle it properly, can cut as fine as a saber.

Yet I may not go a-hacking today.  Yesterday was the fourth in a row of very drizzly December days (the French word brumeux keeps rattling through my brain).  I exploited the opportunity to sally forth—again with my trusty shovel—to level a field in the far back where I hope to plant grass and have a playing surface for young visitors someday.  The builders of our new home, in their hit-and-run, time-is-money fashion, took a run at the space with a bulldozer.  In my opinion, their efforts were more harm than help.  The “leveling” was extremely erratic, and the weight of the dozer compacted broken stone and red clay into a sheet almost as impenetrable as concrete.  Only when the surface has been thoroughly soaked can one strip away an inch or two of it with relative ease.  Yesterday I transported four wheelbarrows of the stony muck from the high side of my “field” (a sculpture in progress) to the low side.  Despite the cold temperature and the drizzle, I grew heated with the work and shucked off my cap.  Eventually, even my coat went by the board.  Later that evening, I felt a head-cold coming on.  Mother Nature always gives me a little slap-in-the-face of this sort when I become presumptuous.  Today may therefore simply be a time of rest and repentance.  Sorry, Mother!

My cleared space has paid some surprising dividends in terms of my making friends with the neighbors.  Last week I was shocked to see “the field” arrayed with what looked like two dozen tree stumps suddenly sprouted from its razed surface.  On closer inspection, I found that the “stumps” were turkeys picking through the recently shifted dirt.  I managed to get a shot of them—with a camera—just as they were starting to flutter off (see above).  My moving the upstairs curtain may have spooked them.

Similarly, I also blundered into a couple of yearling deer last week while hanging a sheet over my orange tree in anticipation of a frost.  Both sides were surprised… but I decided to “act normal” and go about my business.  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the deer, too, were going about theirs, casually and helpfully grazing my weeds away.  Always before, they had bolted away at the least sign of a human.  Of course, the bolting is a very healthy strategy around any primate, and I would be distressed to think that I was weakening their defenses by inspiring a false confidence.  Maybe they’re capable of distinguishing my wife and me from the rest of the species.

Whatever I get done during the winter months will determine what I get done over the rest of the coming year.  Hesiod says I should be mending the plow by a fire… but I have neither.  (We decided against a wood-burning fireplace because smoke torments my finicky sinuses.)  What I plant and where I plant it, however, will depend upon where I can adequately clear space—and some needs are more pressing than others.  My drainage ditches, too, require extension.  Those that I built last summer have been a resounding success; but the top of our hill, where the builder decided simply to dump massive amounts of large stone to give traction to his eighteen-wheel haulers, erupts into puddles every time a good rain falls.  While the job isn’t urgent, it also won’t grow any easier once the temperature starts rising again.

With all of this on my mind, I found myself explaining to my son in detail why I don’t feel free to take the long, long trip to Denver for Christmas.  I hate such trips, anyway: being confined in a tight space for three or four hours gives me a migraine.  I also hate large cities.  Yet if we were still in our previous home, we would surely hit the road for Parts West. The task of managing the new place has introduced a special complexity into the calculation.

My son, on the other hand, is beginning a “real job” (as opposed to the series of menial gigs that his college degree prepared him for), and December 24 is considered a work day; so his catching a flight to our part of the world is out of the question.  It’s the first Christmas he will ever have passed away from his parents, in his 23 years on earth.

No one is more distressed about that than I… but I’m convinced that my son understands my objectives for the property I’m trying to develop.  If we have a field of peanuts (protein), several thriving nut trees (more protein), pomegranates and gojis and prickly pear (antioxidants—and, yes, I have prickly pear cactus), apples and apricots (vitamins), and kiwi vines (latest addition—really strong in Vitamin C), then we will have created what I think of as a “survival farm”.  Water doesn’t seem to be a problem here.  Heat: I could convert my fireplace to burn wood in a crisis.  Electricity: do without… but may look into solar batteries next year.

If my son eventually has a family, he may one day very much need a place like this.  Nobody likes to talk about the several imminent catastrophes with which we are on a collision course—and, no, “climate change” isn’t one of them.  Just to give you an idea… our national power grid remains about 90% unsecured, making us unique in that regard among major industrialized nations; an Electro-Magnetic Pulse would cause most of us to perish within a year; such an EMP could occur at any time, not necessarily due to terrorism but simply because of solar flare activity; a solar event of this kind is overdue, as well as astronomers can tell; and our national conversation is consumed by… whether or not President Trump paid off a hooker to stay quiet.

I have relatives—no, I have a certain close relative who has reviled me for putting my property before my son.  She’s quite the typical over-educated, secularized, pampered, career-bureaucrat progressive, and she has decided that my sense of urgency about the future is all balderdash—though, of course, erecting windmills everywhere and impeaching Trump are among her top priorities.  I think of her now when I look at the lid of a tin of Planter’s Nuts that I bought off the discount rack at Walmart.  Across the festively decorated top are scrawled the words and phrases, “Family Traditions”, “Joy”, “Warm Wishes”, “Winter Happiness”, “Sweet Memories”, “Winter Wonders”, and—remarkable for both for its particular inanity and for its inconcinnity with the string of nouns—“Enjoy Love”.  There you have it.  Planter’s has captured in about a dozen words the new meaning of the “holidays” (and why “Happy Holidays” didn’t make the cut, I have no idea).  My relative is obviously of the persuasion that this secular caricature is the real deal.  I should therefore, cost what it may, be arranging those “winter wonders” and “sweet memories” out of respect for “family traditions”.  The only reason she wouldn’t say that I have a holy obligation to do so is that the word “holy” veers, for her, away from reality and into nothingness.

Ironically, I suppose, the love for my son that transcends Facebook-ready photos is precisely what keeps me preoccupied with my spring preparations.  My “winter happiness” includes busting my ass on a bed of rock and clay because I don’t want my child and his children to face certain agonizing starvation in the world being created by people like my oh-so-wise relative.  The irony would lurk in my being excessively immersed in the here-and-now, if one wished to deconstruct my practice; because if I claim a belief in higher realities, why not simply let this life’s chips fall where they may?

If you require a full answer to that question, then I won’t be able to supply it in the space I have left.  Try this thumbnail version: a person who lives for here and now does not sacrifice our very finite opening for self-gratification to the service of others.  A person who lives for an eternity where his fusion with God’s will may grow complete becomes very busy during his few terrestrial moments with giving others a little “extra time” to figure out the path.  I know that I may one day have to shoot those turkeys with something other than a camera.  In the meantime, I want them to settle in and peck my spaces to their avian heart’s content.  That’s why I don’t rent another bulldozer and raise hell pounding and crashing all over my premises: that’s why everything I do is with a shovel, a hoe, an axe, a rake, or a pick.  I want to raise as few seams as possible between “now” and “later”. In my view, the here-and-now should not be at war with the durable: it should unlock the enduring, if not the eternal.  As for those who scoff at undying truth and higher reality, I think they often abuse what we have now and may just carry us to the brink of existential calamity with their obsession over “warm moments”.

I’ve sent my son the photo of those turkeys as a Christmas card.  He gets it.  We’re not about huddling over “warm winter memories”, he and I.  We’re about adjusting our egocentric impulses to the requirements of a future that accommodates someone more than ourselves.

Would a Jury of Twelve Good Minds Be Better Than a Jury of Our Peers?

Last week I heard a certain television personality portray the kind of “loser” who (and I paraphrase, for I don’t have every detail by heart) inhabits his parents’ basement at age 30, plays video games in his underwear, and believes that “9/11 was an inside job”.  Lest I myself appear to meet the last qualification, I stress that my “takeaway” from the mass of contradictory 9/11 analysis has never been that it was an “inside job”.  My concern, rather, is that we cannot know what truly happened in such a scramble of disingenuous patching and plastering.  Naturally, the “wackos” turn out in full force to speculate when so little is nailed down… and this—another point I have stressed over the years—merely serves to discredit further any honest search for answers.  Indeed, a classic tactic of Soviet disinformation was to publish and circulate outlandish conspiracy theories about any event that the Party desired to conceal.  People quickly sigh, “There’s that annoying kid screaming about a wolf again,” and turn their backs.

I understand that the TV personality in question is something of a comic and caricaturist.  I’m not going to pretend offense at the genre.  There’s a real risk, though, of our admitting such witty slapdashery into our serious processing of events.  Excessive finesse—not being able to see the forest for the trees—characterizes the pettifogging scholarly world, and it can be very tiresome and enervating to behold; but excessive generality typifies the undisciplined lurches of popular group-think, and—entertaining though it can be—brings great risk.  At worst, it produces lynch mobs.  Even at its best, it creates shallow minds that imagine they have thought through an issue just because they’ve been able to torture a couple of weak analogies into a couple of cartoonish stereotypes.

Now, I would be writing almost nothing in this space if I could speak only with an expert’s authority.  I don’t have such authority in very many subjects.  I actually enjoy speculating, though, and suppose it to be healthy if done in a “maybe I’m wrong, but…” vein of poking around.  I hope I may attempt a general statement today that doesn’t put me in the camp of the caricaturist skipping merrily over details to sketch out a shocking, balloon-like picture.

Certainly in legal matters, I have no formal credentials whatever.  I expressed some genuine vexation last time with the slipshod manner in which judgments can be made from the bench, however… and I was stunned by how much applause I drew, some of it from people clearly more knowledgeable than I.  I had already planned on staying within this area for one more imaginary stroll; and I’ll begin down that path now after repeating that I’m just out for a stroll—I am not a trained jurist and expect that I will overlook a few intricate, important details.

Nevertheless… I can say with some assurance that a bad judge wouldn’t have a chance to pass an unjust sentence if the jury did not first convict; so my focus this time is on that “jury of peers”.  It’s important in a free republic, to be sure, for a defendant’s case to be heard by ordinary blokes like himself, and not just Milord in a powdered wig.  I see an increasing problem, though, with our “ordinariness” as jurors.  Let’s assume, against everything that practical experience has taught me, that those of us with a college degree or other evidence of ability to think independently (not that the former signifies the latter any more) have a chance of being selected and seated.  Even if my college major were biology, I could easily get lost in the muddy layers of today’s DNA evidence.  If a prosecutor tells me that the defendant’s DNA was on the knife, and the defense attorney says, “Sure, but the cops planted it,” how am I to weigh the two claims?  So the prosecutor says, “It was a hot day, and Smith’s hand sweated as he clutched the murder weapon,” that sounds plausible.  Then the defense attorney says, “Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.  The State has found far more DNA on this handle than sweat could possibly leave.”  Wow.  Now I’m ready to toss a coin.  What I’ll do in reality, of course, is cast my vote on the basis of how I feel about cops, how I feel about Perry Mason over here and Hamilton Burger over there, how I feel about the defendant’s looks… and now I’m no better than the hyper-politicized judges about whom I wrote last time.

But what else can I do?  I’m in over my head.  I am being asked to arbitrate scientific questions over which people with graduate degrees might have an honest and long-standing argument.

In the real world, of course, the exchange I imagined above is unlikely to happen just because most of the heavy artillery is sitting behind the prosecution’s table.  The State (any state) has unlimited resources to go out and recruit expert witnesses—or so its agents seem to think, sitting prettily on our tax dollars.  Prosecutors appear also to know how to “share” evidence with the defense, as legally required, in ways that bury the good stuff.  (For instance, in Steven Avery’s trial, a computer disk that could well have proved exculpatory was very sketchily described at the end of a long list of items submitted to the defense just before the deadline.)  Unless the defense attorney is a high-priced racehorse, he probably doesn’t handle clients involved in complex cases on a regular basis.  The State has a team whose members are well versed in every contingency—and they probably “click” like a team, knowing how to apply finesse here and there during the presentation without quite straying over legal foul lines.

Add to this the jury’s preconditioning.  For some reason, our courtroom dramas on TV have shifted heavily to the prosecution’s side.  The Defenders, Perry Mason, and Abraham Lincoln Jones have yielded the floor to Law and Order and a huge kennel of elite CSI evidence-hounds. Strange, isn’t it, that the era of Eisenhower and gray flannel suits actually seems to have registered more sympathy for the poor guy in the docks than for the Machine That Keeps Our Streets Safe…. Henry Fonda single-handedly argued a hostile jury into acquitting in Twelve Angry Men. Now we have former prosecutor Kelly Siegler lending her expertise on a serial basis all over the nation to transform cold cases into indictments.

I can’t easily account for whatever societal shift is expressed in this morphing of our popular culture.  But the crux of my argument has already been made: that juries today are too often in over their heads.  Would I, with three degrees, be able to understand an intricate matter of tax evasion or copyright violation?  I very much doubt it.  If a homeowner whose house burned in a brushfire decided to sue the U.S. government for not combating climate change, would you be able to evaluate the merits of the case on both sides… or on either side?

My very tentative suggestion is that we create a “jurist profession”.  Make “jurism” a major in college.  Give the major different specializations—tax, civil, criminal, etc.—and require that graduates not only be re-certified yearly through an objective test, but that they lose their certification if detected in demonstrable incompetence, bias, or abuse.  Pay them well.  The investment would more than justify itself in the number of cases not fouled up and cycled through retrial by our system right now.

Wouldn’t you rather be making your case to twelve people like this if the neighbor who tussled with you about the property line turned up dead in his rose bushes, and then the State decided that putting a tidy frame around you was the best way to close the file quickly?  Do we even really have “peers” living around us any more, in any profound sense?  Personally, I’d rather have my freedom depend on twelve people who know the law than twelve random high-school graduates with driver’s licenses and voter ID’s.