That Is What Fiction Means; or, We Are In the Hands of a Madman

Apropos of Hell, a writer I like on Twitter/X wrote on July 23:

As ever, the downside to being an atheist is that I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person with even a remote connection to this despicable organization is going to hell. 

He was referring to the Gaza Humanitarian Organization, which certainly is a despicable organization, set up by the Trump administration to pretend to deliver aid to suffering people in Gaza - but really to draw them to delivery sites so that the IDF can massacre them.

I sympathize, I really do, and I realize that his post is an anguished cry of helplessness expressing what many people feel about the horrors in the world. That's nothing new.  It probably is why people invented the notion of post-mortem punishment, as Dan McClellan argued in the video I discussed last time: people suffer terribly, those who torment them not only get away with it but thrive, so why not threaten the bad guys with punishment after they die?  It seems to make those who invent the notion feel a little better.  But it does nothing to help the sufferers.  It doesn't stop their suffering now or undo their pain.  Promising that they will sit at Abraham's right hand and view the torment of the damned doesn't help them either.  There is no Hell, there is no Heaven, but even if there were, the threat doesn't slow the bad guys down.  Someone, it seems to me, has not escaped his religious upbringing.

It's also unwise to make assumptions about divine justice.  In the context of Christian tradition, it's just as likely (zero equals zero) that Hell will be full of Muslims who dared to resist or attack the Holy Land given by God to His Chosen People, while the Christian Zionists behind the GHO who blessed Israel will spend eternity in Heavenly bliss.  Anguished helplessness tends to make people overlook such things.

I see many posts on social media from people who react to the horrors in Gaza by saying that they're praying for peace, that God will end the suffering and give the children comfort, that Allah will destroy the evil state of so-called Israel, and so on.  These are as empty as the post I quoted above.  If a powerful deity cares about these things, it can do something about it.  In the Yahwist traditions, it has done so before.  The logical conclusion is that it is content with the way things are going and has no interest in stopping it.

The same applies, I think, to atheists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson: "You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, 'You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?' ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing."  Those who lack the cosmic perspective include Tyson himself: "Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country."  Like other religious teachers, Tyson contains multitudes and can be quoted on any side of any issue.

I was also set off on this topic by a song I heard on my community radio station on Friday: "The Day the Politicians Died," by The Magnetic Fields.

 

I was infuriated by it.  Unfortunately I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person in this band will go to hell ... just kidding.  If every politician died tomorrow, nothing would change.  The world would face the same problems of organization and distribution that it faces now, without the limited expertise that our institutions do have.  But I don't know, maybe The Magnetic Fields are MAGA?  It doesn't matter, because I've heard numerous people from all over the political spectrum express fantasies along these lines, as if politicians were a distinct race that can be extirpated.  They consider other politicians not to be politicians, so they don't really want all politicians to die, just the bad ones.  Bernie Sanders, Obama, the Clintons, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar et al.; or Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron De Santis, Mike Lee, Lauren Boebert et al. -- they aren't really politicians, they're doing the Lord's work and will be spared.  It takes a lot of determined stupidity to think like this. 

I have no exact solutions, but as a general principle I believe the only way to stop suffering is to stop inflicting it; not in a wishful afterlife, but in this one.  You can't wipe out the bad guys, because your own side has an ample supply of bad guys.  Removing either Hamas or Israel from the face of the earth would not end the conflict.  (Which reminds me of another post I saw recently, that confused "war" with "conflict."  More on that soon, I hope.)  It can only end through negotiation, and then making change happen.  Killing and terror just create more angry, vengeful people, guaranteeing that the killing and terror will continue.  And hoping for eternal punishment won't end it either.

Aw, Hell No

I don't usually like engaging with videos on subjects that demand careful attention; I'd rather work from text, which can be quoted and analyzed more easily.  But I've been watching the work of a popular YouTube guy, a biblical scholar named Dan McClellan who's also active on TikTok.  I first encountered him in the Twitter feed of Candida Moss, whose book The Myth of Persecution (Harper, 2013) I liked a lot. I found him offputting then, and still do, but he knows his stuff and is good on matters of fact.  But matters of fact about the Bible tend to bleed into questions of doctrine, as in this short video. 

 

McClellan isn't as different as he might be from the Christian TikTokers he takes on.  As you can see in this case, he draws in traffic with a catchy line, "There is no biblical concept of hell."  At least he doesn't begin by gushing "This video will BLOW YOUR MIND!"  He quickly explains that there are several biblical concepts of post-mortem punishment, and I can go along with his account of the development of ideas about the afterlife in Judaism and Christianity.  I believe I've seen another video where he goes into differing terms such as "Hades" and "Gehenna," which some English translation render as "Hell."

So that much is good.  I don't think the translation of specific words is that important: if you're being burned by the fire that is not quenched, gnawed by the worm that is not sated, it's not going to matter whether you're in Hell or Hades or Gehenna.  As McClellan says, the New Testament has several conceptions of post-mortem punishment, as it has several conceptions of what you must to do be saved, and what is required of you after you've been saved.  If you take such things seriously, that can't be reassuring.  It's why so many Christians are anxious and unsure that they won't be condemned after all.  Quibbles about terminology are like fussing about whether Jesus' name was really or some variant of Yehoshua: do the purists on that issue, who generally don't know any more Aramaic and don't fixate on the Aramaic forms of other Biblical names, think that the Savior won't hear their prayers if they don't address him by the exact correct name, or pray in flawless Aramaic or koine Greek?  Maybe he won't, I don't know.  

I think it's more important that Jesus in the gospels is consistently punitive, though of course he forgives sins when he's in the mood.  (Aren't human tyrants always marketed with touching stories of their occasional generosity and kindness? You don't want to see them when they're mad, though.)  God isn't consistent either, he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy (Exodus 33:19, quoted in Romans 9:15).  As McClellan points out, Paul doesn't talk about post-mortem torture - that's Jesus' shtick.  But the default setting of the New Testament is that you are in danger of God's wrath, and you can only escape it through Christ.  As I've argued before, this is a widespread human assumption, older than Christianity and found beyond the borders of Christendom. As with any belief about the afterlife, there's no evidence for it, but it's what many people take for granted anyway.  It isn't something that wicked priests invented to control the masses; the masses believe it on their own, and may even have invented it.

Many Christians and what you might call Christian-adjacent types don't like the idea that a loving god would condemn them or people they like to eternal torture, though they're willing to throw Truly Bad People under the bus.  Maybe they're right, but they have to work hard to forget that Jesus didn't see it their way.  The time, for some reason, was very short, and the gospel must be proclaimed far and wide, but he came to save a few; most would not find the way to safety.  The promise of salvation depends on, and is meaningless without, the threat of punishment. Whether you'd end up in Hades or Hell is, it seems to me, a distraction from the main message of danger and safety.

Of course many of his fans react as if McClellan had come up with this information on his own, the way people react to Bart Ehrman or Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky. That goes with the territory.  When I read the comments under his videos I often wonder how many of them really understand what he's telling them. Many of the reactions are of the typical Internet line that he DESTROYED the Bible Thumpers.  SCHOOLED them.  And so on. It doesn't matter whether they understand, as long as they're on the Right Side.  

As someone who's read a lot of biblical scholarship over the past forty-five years, I don't see it that way.  McClellan likes to invoke "the data" and intone that the scholarly consensus "absolutely" disproves the apologists' claims, and in many cases he's right; but scholars aren't always as unanimous as he implies, and the scholarly consensus has changed in the time I've been following the field.  I agree with much of what McClellan says, but I'm wary of being too absolute about it.  The data about Jesus are too sparse, vague, and contradictory to say much with certainty about him.  Many different reconstructions have been constructed from the data, and despite archaeology and some manuscript finds, very little new data have  been found in the past century.  Compare William Shakespeare, who lived much more recently than Jesus, in a period and place that is much better documented.  But we know surprisingly little about him, almost new documents have turned up in the past century, and his biographers use speculation, often very free, to fill in the yawning gaps. (See David Ellis, The Truth About William Shakespeare: Fact, Fiction and Modern Biographies, Edinburgh 2013.)  The great English scholar and churchman Dennis Nineham quoted his teacher R. H. Lightfoot "lamenting that New Testament scholars 'are "so hot for certainties"; if only they would sometimes say, 'we simply do no know'".  But scholarship abhors a vacuum.  So do believers and unbelievers.

I suspect McClellan wanted to convey that no one knows what Jesus taught about the afterlife, to forestall any claims about it, and I think some of his fans decided that they could fill in the gap with their own wishful thinking.  It's possible that the clashing concepts in the gospels go back to Jesus himself. When the time is short and the gospel must be proclaimed with the help of the Holy Spirit, consistency is not a priority.  Jesus was not a systematic theologian but a back-country revivalist, exorcist, and end-times preacher, not a serious scholar of Torah.  If he had teachers or other influences, we don't know who they were; scholars can only infer them.  As McClellan indicates, the gospels show the influence of religious speculation and writing of Jesus' time and place; he may not have bothered to think hard about them when the Spirit drove him into the wilderness (Mark 1:12) after his baptism. Or he might have.  It's fun to speculate, and I do it myself, but speculation isn't evidence, let alone certainty.

The Race Is Not To The Swift

A few days ago I wrote "White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't 'white' as 'black,' and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds."  I was a bit vague because although I knew I'd seen it, I didn't have any examples to hand.

The next day I began reading Ruined City, a 1938 novel by Nevil Shute, who's best known nowadays for his 1957 post-nuclear war novel On the Beach.  Ruined City is about a successful English banker named David Warren whose life is derailed when he learns that his wife has been having an affair with an Arab prince.  Everyone refers to the prince as "black," including Warren, who in a fit of anger drops an N-bomb but then corrects himself.  "In that he was unjust, and he knew it; among the six or seven strains that went to make Prince Ali there was no negro blood."  That's actually funny - as if it wouldn't be unjust if Ali did have "negro blood" - but I don't think Shute meant it to be.

This terminology is, I believe, more common in British writing than in American, and it's why it's often difficult to tell which race/ethnicity a character is meant to be - for example, Othello - because the writers are sloppy and don't care.  The scientifically-minded Shute (he was an aeronautical engineer and several of his novels deal with flying machines) cared enough to be exact in his labeling, but that led to comedy, as it still does.  (Are "Hispanics" a "race"?  Are Sunni and Shi'a Muslims "ethnicities"?)  Most scientists in Shute's heyday held beliefs about race/ethnicity (and sex/gender) that are considered embarrassing today, but they are still with us in slightly different forms. 

Although many people, and I include scientists here, are desperate to preserve race as a valid category, I've yet to see any persuasive case made to do that.  I can't find the public-radio program that touted BiDil, a handsomely-funded drug for heart failure that claimed to be more effective for "patients who identify as black."  It was boosted even before the FDA approved it in 2005, but it bombed, for several reasons. One, it was overpriced, and since it was just a combination of already existing generics, insurance companies substituted the generics.  Two, "in every study, however, the amount of variation within each racial group was far larger than the differences between the between the groups ... As a result, 80 to 95 percent of all black and white patients will likely have indistinguishable responses to each medication.  Although racial differences might exist, they are irrelevant for the majority of patients" (167).  "Whatever the causes of its failure, NitroMed laid off most of its workforce and stopped marketing BiDil in January 2008 [165]."

Despite this, BiDil continues to be touted as a road not taken, if only in principle; GoodRx, the drug discount site, still recommended it as late as 2023.  "Some Doctors Want to Change How Race Is Used in Medicine," this NPR podcast reported in 2022, surprised that some doctors don't want to change, because they believe that there are black kidneys and white kidneys.  It's tempting, and comfortable for many people, to see racism as a problem only among ignorant hillbillies, but that notion doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  Many highly-educated people, not all of them white, won't give up their belief in racial difference until you pry it from their cold, dead hands; and even then, a new generation takes it up.

I don't object to treating "race" as a scientific category because of "political correctness," or even from scientific correctness, though it has been debunked enough times that if you believe in Science you shouldn't rely on it.  What I want to know is how it's a useful category, and by "useful" I don't mean "useful for making a billion dollars by repackaging existing generics."  I mean something like what bearing it has on any issue of scientific significance.  (See the quotations from Noam Chomsky in this post.)  What I've seen so far is a complacent assumption that it must be significant somehow, even if no one has any idea what or how.

* David Jones, "The Prospects of Personalized Medicine," in Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Jeremy Gruber (Harvard, 2013), p. 163.  Future page numbers refer to this article. 

Barack Is Back!

It appears that the only Barack we've got launched a tirade against a room of big Democratic donors the other day.

“I think it’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions. And it’s going to require Democrats to just toughen up,” Obama said at the fundraiser, according to excerpts of his remarks exclusively obtained by CNN.

“You know, don’t tell me you’re a Democrat, but you’re kind of disappointed right now, so you’re not doing anything. No, now is exactly the time that you get in there and do something,” he said. “Don’t say that you care deeply about free speech and then you’re quiet. No, you stand up for free speech when it’s hard. When somebody says something that you don’t like, but you still say, ‘You know what, that person has the right to speak.’ … What’s needed now is courage.”

And more.  In a way these remarks are unexceptionable, but that's just it: they're platitudes.  If you imagine them being delivered in Obama's grating scold's voice, they become more annoying, especially when you remember that the speaker collaborated with the most far-right elements of the GOP in the apparent hope that they would be nice and work with him.  He let Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy continue before the Republicans asked for them (he later admitted it was a mistake, but so what?).  He appointed a commission of deficit hawks in hopes they'd demand cuts in Social Security, and when they didn't he accepted the demand anyway (though again, he wasn't able to do it).  He fired at least two staffers when right-wing attack media lied about them.  Having kneecapped potential opposition in advance, he scolded activists who criticized his right-wing, anti-immigrant, antigay policies publicly.  

And speaking of whining:

WHAT SOME WOULD HAVE PREFERRED: “Now, I know there are some who would have preferred a protracted political fight, even if it had meant higher taxes for all Americans, even if it had meant an end to unemployment insurance for those who are desperately looking for work.” The assumption here is that he would have lost the fight. It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does. 

Read the whole post, which consists of quotations from one of Obama's press conferences.  His apologists like to claim that he was helpless because the Democrats didn't control Congress, but that's false. They did control Congress for the first two years of his term, but he was still appeasing the Republicans anyway.

Of course at other times he put up his dukes and announced his readiness to take on all comers (these are from the same press conference);

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY: “And I will be happy to see the Republicans test whether or not I’m itching for a fight on a whole range of issues.”

WHAT HE SUSPECTS: “I suspect they will find I am.”

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY: “I’m happy to have that battle. I’m happy to have that conversation. I just want to make sure that the American people aren’t harmed while we’re having that broader argument.” 

He took a similar tack in a meeting with CEOs in 2009:

"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

It was an attention grabber, no doubt, especially that carefully chosen last word.

But then Obama's flat tone turned to one of support, even sympathy. "You guys have an acute public relations problem that's turning into a political problem," he said. "And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices."

According to one of the participants, he then said, "I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you. But if I'm going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation."

No suggestions were forthcoming from the bankers on what they might offer, and the president didn't seem to be championing any specific proposals. He had none; neither Geithner nor Summers believed compensation controls had any merit.

After a moment, the tension in the room seemed to lift: the bankers realized he was talking about voluntary limits on compensation until the storm of public anger passed. It would be for show.

I think his leaked remarks to his donors are the same: for show.  They bring to mind Kamala Harris giggling "I told you so!" to a room of her fans.

“Stop looking for the quick fix. Stop looking for the messiah. You have great candidates running races right now. Support those candidates,” Obama said, calling out the New Jersey and Virginia elections, according to the excerpts of his remarks.

“Make sure that the DNC has what it needs to compete in what will be a more data-driven, more social media-driven cycle, which will cost some money and expertise and time,” he continued. 

Again, not such bad advice, though I wouldn't trust the DNC with my money, and he apparently didn't mention Zohran Mamdani, whom various party leaders are doing their best to undermine - "Vote Blue No Matter Who" was never meant seriously.

Tuck Me into Your Procrustean Bed, Big Daddy

If you need more evidence that our discourse around "race" and "ethnicity" stinks to high heaven, look no further than the freakout over New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his college applications.  Corey Robin had a good post about it on Facebook today.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a blip of a story that temporarily seized the media and folks on Facebook about Zohran Mamdani's college application, where he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American, while specifying very clearly that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. The media, Mamdani's opponents in the race, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American.

In fact, Mamdani is Asian American and African-American.  His parents are South Asian by ancestry, and his father was born in Uganda, as was Zohran.  Robin continued:

Long story short: the Mamdani family, especially on his father's side, firmly identified with being African. It was critical to their identity and family story, particularly when Idi Amin kicked out people of Indian descent, claiming that because they were not Black, they were not African. (If you've ever seen Mississippi Masala, which I saw when it came out and recently re-watched, it tells that story, and of course Mississippi Masala was made by Zohran's mother and Mahmood's wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair.) Mahmood Mamdani has written at length on the importance of his, and his family, being African, creating a world for themselves in Uganda and Tanzania, not as part of an Asian diaspora, but as Africans, or as Asian-Africans, if you will.

The ethnicity boxes on college applications (and just about everywhere these days) are notoriously Procrustean, like the ethnicity boxes for the US census.  What box should young Zohran have marked, since there evidently wasn't a "South Asian" one, and as Robin says, "African" was also legitimate.  Africans aren't "racially" monolithic anyway; due to the slave trade, most black Africans in the US were from sub-Saharan western Africa.  White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't "white" as "black," and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds.  Racial categories on the US census have varied over the years.

Consider another complicated case: what "race" or "ethnicity" are Latin Americans?  Many have predominantly European ancestry, though Spaniards haven't always counted as whites in the US.  But Germans and Poles have also contributed to the mix.  So have Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians.  Many have predominantly "Indian" or "Native American" ancestry, and speak indigenous languages as well as or instead of Spanish, though Americans tend to limit both of those categories to North American Indians.

I've told before of the diversity training session twenty years back at the Big Ten University where I worked, whose instructors told us that "Sunni" and "Shi'a" are ethnicities.  They definitely are not, any more than "Catholic" and "Protestant" are ethnicities.  I protested, and the instructors insisted that they were so.  So I let it go.  As I've also indicated before, I don't object to university diversity programs and policies on general principles, only to the ignorance and incompetence of the people who manage them.

I've been collecting anecdotes on this topic for a long time around here, such as the white liberals who thought it hilarious that a white American woman could set herself up as a Zen master, or who mock the Bible as the work of old white guys.  (Wait, wasn't it written by illiterate Bronze Age shepherds?)  I wish I could track down the white liberals who declared that race is as real as nappy hair, but that claim seems to be lost.  If hair color or texture were "racial" markers, then my brothers and I (born to the same parents) would be of different races. 

Then there was the Congressperson who threw a tantrum when a Sikh was invited to deliver a prayer in the House of Representatives.  First she claimed he was Muslim, then when corrected she insisted that non-Christian prayers should not be allowed in Congress even though Muslims and other non-Christians have led prayer there before.  Do I really care that she doesn't have a fine-tuned knowledge of racial, ethnic, or religious difference?  No, not really.

The people who attacked Mamdani's choices on his college applications postured as good liberals concerned for the well-being of real blacks and Asians, though they showed that they didn't understand the issues involved, and didn't care.  They're just throwing any mud they can at him, in hopes that some of it will stick.  One would think that in a time of resurgent US racism, they'd be more circumspect, but of course not.

Those Were the Days...

One of my current projects is reading some of the bestsellers of the 1950s, especially those my parents owned and left around the house. When I was about 6 my father brought home a box of books a co-worker had given him, I think with my mother in mind -- she was more of a reader than he was, especially of fiction. (He was ambitious, though: among the books he got for himself were G. Polya's How to Solve It and John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. I don't think he read them, though.) I remember poking through the box and being disappointed that it contained nothing for kids.  But over the years I read some of them.  Those copies are long gone, but I've tracked down those whose titles I remember.

Right now I'm going through The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor, originally published in 1956.  It sold very well and was filmed twice, once with Spencer Tracy and again for television in 1977, starring Carroll O'Connor.  It's an interesting story of the last political campaign of Frank Skeffington, an Irish-American machine politician in an unnamed city that resembles Boston. There's general agreement that The Last Hurrah is an accurate depiction of big-city politics in the first half of the twentieth century; one famous Boston pol objected to it at first as a portrait of himself, but when it became popular he claimed he was the model after all.

What I find interesting so far is that although everyone, including Skeffington, stresses that his style of politics is on the way out, partly because of the advent of television, it doesn't seem to have vanished yet. Take these remarks by Skeffington to his nephew, about a prominent local political reporter:

Second, while he did cover politics around here for a number of years, there’s no guarantee that he really understood very much about what he was covering. The fact that he was a newspaperman would suggest that he didn’t. It’s a point of pride with most of our political journalists that they don’t know a great deal about politics; if they did, it would interfere with what I believe they call their ‘objective analyses.’ The finest example of an objective analyst we’ve ever had was a reporter named Mulrooney who used to write a City Hall column. He was so objective that he didn’t know where City Hall was. That was no handicap, however, as he wrote his column for ten years without ever leaving the house; they used to call him ‘Mattress’ Mulrooney because it was believed that he never left his bed, either. Towards the end of his career it was rumored that some informer had smuggled in some valuable information to him: facts about the size of the city, who the officials were, how many parties we had, and what year it was....

I must say the most of our journalists don’t seem to be too strong on facts; no doubt they have an occupational distrust of them. 

Anyone who's watched the antics of the political press corps today should find that this description still applies to many of them.  So far The Last Hurrah is entertaining; I look forward to the rest of it. 

Let Jesus Sort Them Out

 

I was horrified by this image, which a Christian friend shared on Facebook.  It came with a post declaring that it "touched me in a powerful way, as it shows the precious girls running through water, to get to JESUS."  Not to quibble, but it looks to me like the girls are running on water, and why not? They're dead, and no longer bound by the limitations of the flesh. The flash floods that killed them rose far above their heads.  I'm sure this person wouldn't want to deny the supernatural elements that the picture takes for granted.

"People around the world need to see the joy on the girls faces and the warm, excited embrace of Christ."  Eeeuuw.  Just eeeuuw.  Christians never stop to think what they're revealing about their psyches when they write stuff like this.

I clicked on the original poster's profile, and something symptomatic was going on.  He was distraught over the lost girls, praying in tears.  Didn't he have faith that an excited Jesus would take them to his, erm, bosom?  That they weren't dead, but sleeping?  Someone commented that seven girls had been rescued, praise God!  Doesn't that mean that those precious girls didn't get to go straight to the Pearly Gates and be with Jesus forever?  Do they want them to be separated from their Heavenly Father?  

C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere that deep in our hearts, we all believe that we are immortal. But if that were so, why would we see death as a bad thing, instead of a portal to a higher existence?  By Lewis's reasoning, it would seem that deep in our hearts, we don't believe we're immortal.  In an excellent book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Pantheon, 2019), the philosopher Martin Hägglund showed that in traditional orthodox Christianity, mourning the beloved dead shows a dangerous, even sinful lack of faith.  He quoted St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and C. S. Lewis berating themselves for feeling sorrow when someone dear to them went to be with God.  In general Christians have a great deal of difficulty reconciling their lively faith with their humanity.  As Sappho wrote, we know that death is an evil, or the gods would be mortal. (Lest someone try to claim that the Christian God became mortal through the incarnation, let me point out that he was only mostly dead, and rose again. He knew that mortality was an evil - but then according to Christian mythology, death is a curse he laid on us.)  

In the case of the Kerr County flash floods, which killed far more people than just the children at Camp Mystic, we're looking at what used to be called an act of God.  I've noticed that many Christians are squeamish nowadays about that kind of language, but it belongs to them and they shouldn't be allowed to distance themselves from it.  Not all Christians feel that way, of course, but they're still inconsistent about it.  By the time they get around to praying for the victims of this or that disaster, the damage is already done; it wouldn't occur to them to ask God not to make the disaster happen in the first place.  But after all, Jesus needs more angels to help him make rainbows.  God made the floods, and the Lamb reaps the harvest.

Once again I'm struck by how exactly the 18th-century philosopher David Hume described the ordinary believer's conception of God and his providence:

He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it. 

The Facebook friend who shared the image is the same person who lost her car keys and didn't find them until she'd spent a couple hundred dollars replacing them.  Meanwhile her friends prayed that they would turn up.  They also exhibited the understanding of their god that Hume described.

The poster on Facebook identified the artist behind the image as Afton Burkard, which I mention because artists should get due credit for their work, no matter how creepy it is.  But on the original post someone added a community note that the image is AI-generated, which seems more likely. 

All I Really Want to Do...

There was a flurry of concern online last week about a San Francisco bookstore that declared it would no longer sell books by J. K. Rowling. The store made the decision after Rowling, a billionaire and anti-trans troll, announced that "she would use her personal wealth to fund the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, which describes itself as a legal fund to support 'individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.'"

There are valid concerns about such a move, but most of the discussion I saw exhibited the usual confusion about freedom of expression, censorship, and gender. People seem to be overlooking the fact that booksellers are also book buyers, and they're no more obligated to buy a given book than their customers are. It would be worrisome if Amazon or Barnes & Noble were to decide not to carry books by a certain author, but that's not likely to happen, and I'm not sure I'd object if they did.  Every case has to be evaluated on its own merits.  In this case, Rowling has made her personal brand inseparable from her politics, rather as Elon Musk has done, or Orson Scott Card before them. Uncomfortable as they are, boycotts are a valid tactic, even when I oppose specific cases.

I wrote about this at length a decade ago, 

when a new GMO-free grocery was targeted for boycott, because the owners had posted on their Facebook page that they opposed same-sex marriage and "one of the store’s co-owners linked to a libertarian article arguing that stores should have the legal right to refuse to serve gay customers."  It seems to me that since the owners took pains to state their beliefs publicly, it's acceptable for gay and pro-gay potential customers to react to those beliefs.  In particular, if the owners of a business declare publicly that they want the "right" not to serve me, I have the right to take them at their word, and not give them my business.  If they don't want my money, far be it from me to give it to them!...

[Comics artist and blogger Barry Deutsch] drew a distinction between choosing not to patronize a business whose owners have views one abhors (which is okay) and making others aware of the owners' abhorrent views and presenting a more or less united front of people who choose not to patronize that business (which is not okay); I'm having trouble grasping where the difference lies.  It's not as if we're talking about someone's personal, privately-held political beliefs; we're talking about someone's beliefs that they publicized on their business's Facebook page, thus advertising their politics along with their business. It's they who chose to connect their business and their politics. [Barry] argued that a boycott is not a good way to persuade the owners that they're wrong; well, an antigay declaration on Facebook is not a good way to persuade potential customers to patronize one's business. One commenter complained that a boycott isn't meant to persuade but to coerce and punish; I think he's right, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.  Again, [Barry] doesn't mind my taking my money elsewhere, and I wouldn't be doing that to persuade them either.

It seemed to me that the people who called the bookstore's action a "ban" were the same kind of people who would deny that getting books removed from public libraries or public school libraries is a ban. After all, they say reasonably, if you want your kids to read filth you can always buy it for them on Amazon; it's not censorship to remove books from a library, since no library can stock all books.  They conveniently forget that the pressure groups want laws passed that will force librarians to remove books they dislike.  That's government action, and by their own definition it's censorship.

I've been wondering how younger kids feel about Rowling's stance and actions.  After all, the Harry Potter books getting long in the tooth now; the first was published in 1997, the last in the series in 2007.  Will a new generation of kids be swayed by the batty opinions of their parents' favorite author, or will they be turned off by them?  One independent bookstore's boycott won't affect Rowling's net worth, but a generation's antipathy might. 

In the Court of the Ochre King

Another month down, and I haven't been productive, at least not here.  I've been too active, if anything, in comments under some videos on YouTube and Facebook.  I hope to bring some of those thoughts here.

Meanwhile, I found Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary uplifting.  But I quickly began to worry.  As with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' upset against Joseph Crowley in 2018, I noticed that many celebrants forgot that Mamdani won a primary, not a general election. She did win and go to Washington, and has so far managed to defeat Democratic party-hacks and MAGA scumbags hired to try to dislodge her.  I hope Mamdani will do as well, but the struggle isn't over yet.  The frenzy of bigotry being hurled at Mamdani, not only by Republicans but by Democratic elites, outstrips what I remember seeing aimed at AOC.  On the other hand, Mamdani has a little more political experience than she had, and seems well-prepared to take on his bigoted haters.  But I'm taking nothing for granted.

For an old guy, I have to concede that Donald Trump has a remarkable level of energy.  He travels around the world, he posts a flood of deranged, subliterate junk online, he's face-to-face with the media constantly.  His speaking seems to be getting rapidly less energetic and coherent, but overall he's not slowing down. That doesn't make him good, it makes him even more dangerous.  What chills me is how little even people I know who dislike Trump know about what is going on.  This is boosted by a poll I saw reported today, which found that "Nearly half (48%) of Americans haven’t heard anything about the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’" and "Only 8% of all Americans name Medicaid cuts as a detail of the bill they have heard about."  While the corporate media should be criticized harshly, I think my fellow citizens need to be responsible for their inattention to matters that will affect them.  As I think Ta Nehisi-Coates said: you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

Speaking of corporate media, NPR continues to appall me.  In the wake of the shooting of two Minnesota state legislators and their spouses by a MAGA assassin, Morning Edition's A Martinez baited one of their colleagues on June 17:

Martínez: If you have a gun, are you thinking about taking it with you when you go places? And if you don't, are you thinking about buying one?

Scholten: Personal protection is certainly top of mind for lawmakers today and especially after this incident. We are reviewing a lot of our own internal safety protocols to see what else we might be able to do to keep ourselves safe, even in our own home. Even with the best security, we see here that it wasn't enough to stop or wouldn't have necessarily been enough to to stop the shooter in this instance.

I encourage everyone to read the whole story, and even more, to listen to the audio so you can hear Martinez working himself up to a peak of excitement at the idea of gun battles at political events in Minnesota.  State Representative Hilary Scholten stayed calm throughout; Martinez, who often confuses news with sports and action movies, should be fired.

There's so much more, but this will do for now.

My Imaginary Friend Can Beat Up Your Imaginary Friend!

I've often seen variations on this theme.  This time I figured out what is wrong with it.

There may be people living on other worlds, but if there are we don't know anything about them.  Myself, I take for granted that they would have cultures and histories and fateful blind spots, just as we do. Of course, I could be wrong.  But any statements or representations of them are fictional, "fairy tales" as the village-atheist meme has it, where someone projects his or her opinions onto them and gets them back endowed with authority.  They can fairly be called "religious."  It's completely normal, but the people who invent or share such memes believe that they're enlightened, superior to the gullible masses.  On the contrary, they are part of the masses.

That's basically it.  I might explore its implications some other time, but this will do for now.

Traditional Values

So much going on, I can't keep up.  I'm too old for this!

Right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg fell back on a long-standing talking point the other day:

The left does criticize the countries that Goldberg deplores here.  Not always, of course, and not always as consistently as I could wish.  But overall in the US it's the center (or near-right, to label it more accurately) and the right (meaning practically off the scale) that embrace them.  Trump, for example, conspicuously left Saudi Arabia out of his first-term Muslim ban, along with the other nations in Goldberg's list, but the embrace is bipartisan.  

As for China, it was the well-known leftists, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who brought the Chinese Communist Party into the community of nations. It's usually crazy feminists and leftists who object to Islamic oppression of women, and the Right denounces them for their atheism and contempt for traditional values - until, as with George W. Bush, they decide to invade them ostensibly to protect the rights of women.  (Whatever objections Israel has to the Kingdom, they have nothing to do with its treatment of women.)

The same leftists also criticize our own country for its violations of human rights at home and abroad, and are accused of double standards about that.  Or we criticize reactionary violence against gay people, and are accused of applying corrupt Western values to traditional societies; also false, we criticized our own country first, and still keep having to do it. 

As other commentators pointed out, this question came up in the context of the New York City mayoral race.  Candidates were asked about their allegiance to Israel, which ought to be odd in a local election. Yes, New York is a major city with a sizable Jewish population, but foreign policy shouldn't be a central issue. 

The rest of Goldberg's rant is predictably disingenuous, ignoring Israel's record of violence against Palestinians and its neighbors, which is hardly in the distant past. I believe that Goldberg is also distorting Zohran Mamdani's remarks, and the question he was asked.  It wasn't about recognizing Israel diplomatically, though that is not an unfair question.  He was asked if he recognized Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.  No country has a "right to exist," and it's not clear what "as a Jewish state" is supposed to mean.  You'd think that it's proper to criticize any country that defines itself in terms of ethnic or religious purity -- but as always, "we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: 'Look! We’re a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry–a religion!' When we tire of this game, we get suckered into another: 'anti-Zionism is antisemitism!' quickly alternates with: 'Don’t confuse Zionism with Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!'" Again, the left, especially in the US, has a long history of rejecting the idea of race as the basis of a nation; if I reject the claim that the United States has a right to exist as a Christian nation, why wouldn't I reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish one?  It's the right that defends, even celebrates it, and that includes Jonah Goldberg in his defense of Israel.

Wooing Him From the Dark Side to the Dark Side

NPR's Steve Inskeep struck again this morning.  I was dawdling in bed, but I bounced even before this seven-minute absurdity was over.

INSKEEP: So I want people to know we talk from time to time. I don't really ask about your personal life, and I don't want to go too far here, but have you ever had a breakup like this?

SWISHER: Not like this. Not publicly like this. It's really quite strange, actually, but it's sort of in keeping with their relationship over the last year or so as Musk became very close to Donald Trump.

That's how it began, and it didn't get any better.

SWISHER: Well, I think they've had - you know, he sort of fell in love quickly, didn't he? He sort of went crazy, jumping up and down, doing the chainsaw thing, dedicating his life, moving into Mar-a-Lago, all this stuff, and shifted rather dramatically. Because he sort of was somewhat neutral in politics, had voted for Obama, you know, had a relationship with Trump in the first term, but certainly wasn't, you know, as deeply in love with him as he - and I hate to use these terms, but it's really been quite intense, calling himself BFF or best buddy or first buddy or whatever the heck they used.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

SWISHER: And Trump reciprocated, too.

If you have time and a strong stomach, click through and listen to the audio.  Later on, Swisher says of Trump and Musk that "they're not serious people"; neither are she and Inskeep.  Remember this the next time someone calls NPR a radical-left outlet.

Also, this is weird: NPR's Scott Horsley reported that according to the Congressional Budget Office, Trump's tariffs "could cut the federal debt by $2.8 trillion" in the next decade, while the Associated Press reported that the CBO forecast that Trump's budget bill would "spike deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade."  Horsley didn't mention the latter forecast, which seems to me a bit one-sided.  Horsley mentioned the effect of tariffs on wine prices, which inspired Inskeep to say:

INSKEEP: Hope you're able to pour yourself a glass, Scott. Thanks so much.

HORSLEY: You're welcome.

But back to the Musk-Trump clash.  Liberal and left commentators were very excited about it yesterday, and you'd have thought that the two titans were clashing in person, face-to-face, instead of remotely.  They were also excited by Musk's threat that Trump's relations with Jeffrey Epstein were going to be revealed, as if Musk weren't a recreational liar who's posted false predictions often before, and as if the Trump-Epstein connection weren't well-documented already. What happens when two habitual liars clash?  Do they cancel each other out, like matter and anti-matter?  None of this is really news anyway.  Many people had predicted that Musk would terminally piss off Trump, and vice versa; the only question was how long it would take.

Rumors are swirling like the dust from the Canadian wildfires that are making my eyes burn even as I write this.  First I read that Trump and Musk were going to meet to iron out their differences, then that the White House had denied it.  But it does seem that some highly placed Democratic centrists believe they see an opening to woo Musk to their side. May their memory be a curse.

The Farewell Symphony

The writer Edmund White died yesterday at the age of 85.  I just stumbled on the news this morning online, but so far, as of tonight, I haven't seen any mention of it in my social media.  My connections there include numerous gay media, publishers, and citizens, so I'm surprised.  I had numerous disagreements with him, but he was a fine writer, courageously chose to be openly gay before many of his contemporaries, he helped open the way for two generations of queer writers, and was very productive.  His most recent book, a memoir, appeared earlier this year; he was productive to the end.  Despite longtime poor health, his death seems to have come suddenly.  I'll miss him, despite my disagreements with him.

In particular I want to highlight a point on which I strongly agree with him:

A canon is for people who don't like to read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in order to be considered polished, well rounded, civilized. Any real reader seeks the names of more and more books, not fewer and fewer.

According to the Guardian, White produced more than thirty books in numerous genres, contributing his share to "more and more books." I prefer his essays and biographies to most of his novels, but it's time to go through all of them again.  It happens that I recently reread the first two, Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples, so I'll go on from there.

Your Call Is Very Important to Us

 This has been getting some attention:

Musk: My frank opinion of the government is that the government is just the DMV that got big, okay, so when you say, like, let's have the government do something, you should think, do you want the DMV to do it?

My first impulse, like other people who commented on it, was to defend the DMV.  I think I remember some surly staff when I first got a learner's permit in 1967, but since then my experiences have been overwhelmingly positive.  In the past few years I've been to the BMV (as it's known in the Hoosier State) numerous times, not just for my own business but accompanying immigrant friends who needed an interpreter, and the staff have been wonderful: knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly.  The same is true of other government offices: Social Security in two different cities, the office in Chicago where I got my senior discount transit pass, and so on.  Numerous commenters under that post agreed, talking about DMV experiences around the country.

My second impulse was that what this drug-addled liar describes sounds to me not like government offices but private corporations: the impossibility of reaching a human being, being put on hold for hours, being stonewalled, being denied reasonable remedies ...  Most of the complaints I see about stagnant, inefficient, and unfriendly bureaucracy refer to the private sector.  Just try to cancel a newspaper subscription, or your cable service, or any number of other business dealings. Try to get a refund on your ticket for a canceled flight.  Try to talk to a real person without navigating complex menu trees that eventually dump you into an hour-long hold. And then there is the garden of earthly delights that is private health insurance.  These time sinks are the result of companies trying to boost profits by cutting service, which is labor-intensive: hence the menu trees, hence the call centers outsourced to poorer countries.  Next, breathing down our necks, will be AI telephone customer-service robots.  We'll hear a lot about their labor-saving, money saving superiority, but not very much about the actual costs of running and maintaining those systems.

I don't blame the phone center people, who often struggle with English & are hamstrung by the scripts they're given, but they try.  I blame the people at the top, people like Musk. 

About 30 years ago David Gordon published Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial "Downsizing".  The notion of big corporations as "lean and mean" was a myth then, and I doubt things have changed.  When business-school manager-types take over non-profit institutions such as colleges, they cut professors and service staff while hiring more office drones.  I saw this happen at around the same time, the mid-90s, in the state university food service where I worked.  Kitchen workers were RIFed (for Reduction in Force, the kind of acronym these people adore) in time for the beginning of the school year, and the system was reorganized.  The result was that serving lines got longer, food quality declined, worker morale declined, but the people at the top boasted in bulletin-board memos that another manager had been hired for the central administrative office. This was supposed to make us feel good.  They also brought in counselors, to help us cope with the stress. The entire year was disastrous and the dining service didn't recover for years after that, but the guy who'd done it was kept on for another year at his six-figure salary. New hires were outsourced to a private temp company, resulting in layers of waste: time reports had to be done by in-house managers and again by the company.  Plus the company had to make a profit, so the university paid more for workers.  That debacle was abandoned after a couple of years.  I wonder how much money was wasted.

The government, especially under Biden, tried to fix some of those problems, such as unsubscribing to email lists and getting refunds from airlines, against intense panicky opposition by the big corporations.  I hold no brief for Biden overall, but as a non-rich retiree I benefited from some of his actions.  So did many others.

In a way Musk is only part of the problem, albeit an important part.  One commenter wrote that he sounds like a spoiled toddler.  I say he sounds like a spoiled toddler who was raised on "free-enterprise" propaganda by rich right-wing parents; and that's what he is. The defense of government service many commenters raised was valid, and I was pleased to see it. But I didn't note more than a couple who pointed out that Musk's line applied most accurately to private corporations.

The Best Catch There Is

 “There must have been a reason,” Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. “They couldn’t just barge in here and chase everyone out.”

“No reason,” wailed the old woman. “No reason.”

“What right did they have?”

“Catch-22.”

“What?” Yossarian froze in his tracks with fear and alarm and felt his whole body begin to tingle. “What did you say?”

“Catch-22” the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. “Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”

I dragged my feet on this post for several days -- weeks by now -- and then events upended some details, but the main point is unchanged.

I've found it difficult to write about US politics this year because 2024 shook so many of my beliefs and assumptions about politics.  Much of what I hear or read involves "what we can expect," what could or might potentially happen, and the predictions of experts of all backgrounds have proven spectacularly wrong.  Will Trump's economic adventuring and corruption bring about a recession?  Inflation?  Experts are happy to weigh in for the news media, but who in their right mind would trust them?  Even though our corporate overlords were proved hilariously wrong when they assured us that there would be a big-time recession in 2023, they still appear and are quoted breathlessly.  After all, eventually they'll be right.

The excerpt above from Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 has always haunted me. The thugs who invoked Catch-22 weren't Nazis but American military police.  It should never be forgotten that the US not only has a long history of authoritarian violence, we wrote the book.  There's a sizable portion of the American populace, not limited to MAGA, that approves of and indeed revels in police violence: shock raids, beatings, extra-judicial killings, disappearances.  I wonder how many of Trump's critics today remember George W. Bush's illegal rendition of prisoners to black sites for "enhanced interrogation"?  That's a euphemism that makes authoritarians across the political spectrum moan with sensual pleasure.  But all these practices fit into a larger context that Vincent Bevins discussed in his book The Jakarta Method, showing how the vast 1965 massacres in Indonesia provided a blueprint for US-backed atrocities around the world ever since.  I read it before the 2024 elections, and it troubled my sleep; still does.  It's not only about suppression of the left; dictators usually turn on their own side as they consolidate power.

What disturbed me about Trump's campaign against foreigners in the US was the way he, his spokespeople, and his supporters all assumed not only that every immigrant (undocumented or not) is a criminal but that if someone is a criminal the government can do to them whatever it likes, without due process or any limits at all.  It's Catch-22: they have a right to do whatever we can't stop them from doing.  By "criminal" they mean any infringement of the law whatsoever, real or imaginary: parking tickets, speeding tickets, outstaying their visas, crossing the border without asking "Uncle Sam, may I?" Someone who let a parking meter run out is no different from a rapist or murderer, and is at Trump's nonexistent mercy.  Never mind that Trump himself is a convicted felon, or that he has pardoned hundreds of violent convicted criminals.  (Or that his predecessors are all war criminals - but that's even less important.)

While cruelty pleases MAGA especially, liberals aren't immune to its pleasures either: the idea of punching Republicans, beating up Nazis, putting capitalists to the guillotine, starving hillbillies, etc. also turns on many liberals.  The political scientist Corey Robin recently wrote against the claim that "the cruelty is the point":

One of the claims you often heard during Trump 1.0, which I always thought was misleading, was that “the cruelty is the point.” If you know anything about the history of political intimidation and politically repressive fear, you know that the cruelty is not the point. Silence, obedience, and submission—subjugation for political ends—that’s the point. The goal of McCarthyism was to crush what was left of the New Deal left-liberal alliance, primarily in the labor movement, and it succeeded. The point wasn’t to be cruel.

Trump and some of his allies really are just sadists, psychopaths, and sociopaths. There is no doubt about that. But political intimidation and political repression does have a political goal beyond generic “cruelty.”

I see his point, and I think it should be borne in mind, but I also think it's a quibble that could be a distraction.  I think that for many people, especially but not only Trump and MAGA, the political goal is inseparable from the frisson they get from seeing bad guys punished.  If they could achieve their goal without making someone suffer, that would take away much of their pleasure in the achievement.  As I've written in connection with religion, while many people are uncomfortable with the idea of eternal torment for (other) sinners, many others demand it.  If they won't get to view the suffering of the damned from the bosom of Abraham, what's the point of salvation?  It helps that the idea of Hell is built into New Testament Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. This is a useful idea, I believe, since unlike sending random brown people to brutal prisons in El Salvador, Hell in whatever religious tradition is a fantasy.  It's not something people have to believe in, it's something they like to believe in.  And making it so, on Earth as in Hades, is still one of the most popular parts of Trump's agenda.

Snatched from the Maw of the Orphan-Crushing Machine

  

This is the sort of remark from Francis that won the hearts of many a non-believer, but I don't get the appeal.  

In the first place, while Jesus' teaching on eternal punishment was as inconsistent as the rest of his teaching, it was a theme he returned to often enough that I see no reason to believe it wasn't dear to his heart.  Some scholars have tried to get around it by pointing out that his teaching on the matter wasn't the fully-developed doctrine the later churches produced, but one could say the same of pretty much all his teaching.  He wasn't a theologian or a scholar, he was a back-country faith-healer and end-times preacher, and even if every word ascribed to him in the gospels were authentic (not likely!), we'd have a very sketchy set of doctrines just begging to be filled in by later followers.

A number of Christian apologists have tried to scratch out hints in the gospels of a more conciliatory doctrine that doesn't involve eternal torment, but hints are all they have.  (Yes, the second-century Christian thinker Origen of Alexandria was one such; but he was declared a heretic, and he lived in a notorious hotbed of Gnosticism, so not many would endorse his ideas if they weren't desperate for an ancient precedent.  For example: the evidence is dubious, but most scholars seem to accept a much later rumor that he made himself a eunuch for the Kingdom; should modern Christians follow him in that as well?)  If Jesus did believe and teach that no one would go to hell, that would count against the reliability of the gospels as a source of his teaching.

I've noticed that many of the same people who let wishful thinking be their guide will also denounce Christians with dogmas they dislike as ignoring the overwhelming two-thousand-year bulk of Christian tradition.  When they do it -- and Hell is part of that tradition -- it's suddenly of no account.  I understand why they do it, but I'm not obligated to respect their reasons or their conclusions.

One more thing struck me when I saw the post above, though.  I've seen numerous variations on this theme on the internet over the years:

Why would Hell exist in the first place?  Why would you need to pay to stay or get out of it?  I've written about this before too: faced with solid ancient tradition about suffering after death, people just invent loopholes to get around it.  When the Pope let slip his rejection of two thousand years of Catholic tradition about divine Justice, that's what he was doing.  I wouldn't expect an elderly cleric to reject that tradition, of course: he has too much invested in it to do such a thing. But for non-Catholics and non-theists who get all excited about his qualms is, to my mind, like rejoicing over a child's lemonade stand raising money to save a few* orphans from the orphan-crushing machine.  It's the mildest, safest objection to a horrible, inhumane doctrine that, on top of everything else, is pure invention. There is no hell, there is no heaven, and anybody who claims to know how to escape one or get into the other is a scammer.  "Yeah, but he's a nice, kindly scammer who wishes nobody needed his snake oil!" should be embarrassing, but a lot of people think it's a sign of their good judgment and character.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Remember that Jesus taught that only a few would be saved, and most would be damned.  So "few" is precisely correct here.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

Kamala Harris addressed the Leading Women Defined Summit (what?) the other day.

 

She decried people who weren't doing anything, which was interesting because the people who aren't doing anything are the leadership of the Democratic Party, notably Senator Chuck Schumer.  She doesn't seem to have named any names here.  And then she said, "I'm not here to say 'I told you so,' but ..." (which of course she was) before bursting into her familiar drunken wine-mom laughter and adding "I swore I wasn't going to say that."  Okay, fine, but why say it to a crowd of her fans, who presumably voted for her?

A lot of people tried to tell her so during the campaign.  They told her it was a bad idea to defend and support Israeli atrocities.  They told her it was a bad idea to insult and mock important segments of her base.  They told her it was a bad idea to court the Cheney crime family.  They told her she needed to distance herself from Biden.  And so on. She ignored such good advice, preferring to listen to the worst people in her party.  If she had won despite all this, she could gloat and wag a finger at her critics.  It's entirely possible that she'd have lost anyway; but she lost, badly.

I hadn't watched this clip until I saw another one, in which her former running mate Tim Walz criticized her remarks.  Walz is often erratic, but he did a good job here.  He even admitted his own mistakes. True to Democratic establishment form, Harris blamed everyone except herself.

In Our Hands

Someone posted the above clip on Facebook the other day; luckily for me and this post, it was also available on YouTube.  (Probably it came from there.)  I haven't seen The Good Lie, a 2014 movie about Sudanese refugees in the US, and I don't know whether I will.  But this bit stirred up my urge to write.

It appears that the three young men have been brought to the US, and their caseworker (Witherspoon) has brought them to see the bald guy, who is evidently a farmer, presumably to stay with him.  (I said I haven't watched it yet.)  They ask permission to see his cows, and ask if there are any dangerous animals they should watch out for.  Permission received, they walk off, hand in hand.  The bald guy mutters, "I wish they wouldn't do that."  Given that this is America and he's the people of the land, the common clay of the New West, I sympathize with him slightly.  A good many gay American men would read the gesture the same way, except that they would jerk off to it.

Some commenters on the Facebook clip said that holding hands didn't mean the young Africans were gay, which is true, but added that it was no longer seen that way in Africa because of American gays, which probably is not true: it is because of viciously antigay bigots in Africa, abetted by viciously antigay American Christians.  (As some scholars have noticed before, non-Western bigots love to claim that homosexuality is a Western import, even as they happily import Western antigay religious and medical bigotry for their own agenda.)  As recently as 2019, though, I saw male African students in my college town holding hands with one another; it was orientation time for international students, and they'd probably been warned about US attitudes so they looked somewhat nervous, but they held on.

What I'm asking here is why men holding hands came to be seen as a sign of homosexuality in the United States.  During the US invasion of Vietnam, I read that American soldiers saw South Vietnamese soldiers holding hands and decided they were homosexuals. This fed their contempt for the ARVN, though it's likely that NLF and North Vietnamese men also held hands: they were just unlikely to be observed by Americans, and South Vietnamese troops were capable of as much manly violence as Americans could wish.  This was during the 1960s and early 1970s, and I doubt that American grunts had ever actually seen homosexuals holding hands in the US in those days.

Some might argue that men holding hands just is gay, it's common sense.  But it isn't, as shown by the number and expanse of cultures where it's routine.  Nor do those cultures accept male homosexuality.  In the US, norms of male-to-male affection have changed over time, and there's never been unanimity about them.  Walt Whitman's moist nineteenth-century poems about "adhesive" love between men seem to have appealed to many heterosexuals, as did the twentieth-century J. R. R. Tolkien's depiction of fondness between hobbits.  Academics, gay and straight like, refined the word "homosocial" to explain away these relationships, but couldn't explain why what previously had been endearing suddenly set off alarms.  In fact there had always been those who objected that there were "too many kisses in this work to avoid slander, suspicion and mockery."  Personally I favor slander, suspicion, and mockery of those trying to suppress displays of affection, but that's another post.

I associate holding hands with childhood: being required to hold someone's hand in public, while crossing the street, while standing in line with other children, and so on.  Children are ambivalent about it, if I may generalize from my own experience: it means you're a baby who can't be trusted to cross the street by yourself (which you can't), or you are ordered to hold the hand of someone you dislike, whose hands are sticky (unwashed isn't the problem, stickiness is).  But when they feel unsure or unsafe and can't crawl into someone's lap, they'll reach for someone else's hand.  It also signifies mutual belonging, for adults no less than children. Some Americans have explained foreign men holding hands to me as a sign of exceptional closeness and trust, but at best I think they're projecting.  At least it isn't always the case; men in other countries don't seem to need that much intimacy to reach for each other's hands.

Nor should they.  Numerous writers, such as the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, have stressed the importance of physical contact for all people, from infants to adults.  I remember someone telling me in the early 70s, about when Montagu's book was published, that American men could only allow themselves to seek touch through sex.  That's probably still true for many of us, but I have the impression that things have improved since then, and American men are more affectionate than they used to be.  But there's still room, and need, for improvement.  We must respect each others' boundaries, and no one including children should be compelled or pressured to give touch.  One reason I think it's important to push back hard on antigay bigotry is that it is used not only against sex between men, but against affection as well.  That's harmful not only to gay men but to straight ones, and it must not be tolerated.

Speaking of Coincidences ...

I recently read Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), pieced together by Jesse Green, with entertaining and informative footnotes, from the reminiscences of Mary Rodgers.  She was the daughter of the composer Richard Rodgers, and she knew a vast array of musical-theater people, from her parents to Stephen Sondheim and beyond.  The book offers up a spicy buffet of dish on all of them, including herself.  It's not for everyone; many readers were offended by her bluntness and openness.  "Make it meaner," she told Green when he showed her his early drafts; "Make it funnier."  He did.

Rodgers was also a composer, a writer, a producer.  Among her credits is the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress, which gave Carol Burnett her big break.  I believe I saw the first TV version, broadcast in 1964, but there have been two more since then.  She also worked on Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, broadcast on TV from 1958 to 1972, which I watched regularly in its first years.

In 1966 Rodgers composed a ditty known as "The Boy from..." for an off-Broadway revue, The Mad Show.  Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics, which parody the bossa nova hit "The Girl from Ipanema" but also draw on Rodgers' admitted tendency to fall in love with gay men, such as her first husband and Sondheim himself:

Why are his trousers vermilion?
Why does he claim he's Castilian?
Why do his friends call him Lillian?
And I hear at the end of the week
he's leaving to start a boutique.

The original recording was sung by the actress Linda Lavin, with a breathy -- indeed breathless -- delivery exaggerating Astrud Gilberto's in "Ipanema."  It took me several listenings to fully appreciate Lavin's performance, partly because the recording level was low, but it grew on me. 

Not being a musicals queen, I hadn't heard of Lavin until Rodgers mentioned her in connection with this song.  Then, a few days after I read Shy, I began seeing YouTube clips from a new sitcom, Mid-centuiry Modern, in which Linda Lavin plays the mother of one of the characters.  Interviews with the other cast members contain praise of her greatness and sadness for her loss; she died of cancer in the middle of production of the first season.  At some point I realized that her name rang a bell, but it took me a few days to make the connection.  If I were the kind of believer who sees the world that way, I'd say that God must have been in there somewhere; luckily, I'm not.

We Have Never Been Modern

I recently read When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan (St. Martin's Press, 2019) for a book club, and have mixed feelings about it.  It's a well-done, readable history that draws on some familiar sources and delving into the archives, and on the whole I recommend it.  I learned about the history of Brooklyn, which usually is lost in the shadows of Manhattan, and got some insight into the rise and fall of cities.

What bothered me was Ryan's frequent invocation of "the modern idea of sexuality", with the implication that people used to have old-fashioned, inadequate concepts of queerness that we have, fortunately, moved beyond.  I think he knows better, as I'll try to show, but he keeps returning to that formula.  For example:

However, we can see that Roebling understood his love for his friend to be of the same cloth as his friend’s love for him; it is at most a difference of quantity, not quality. The idea of “homosexuality” had not yet emerged as a separate kind of male-male intimacy. What stands out from this story, aside from Roebling’s lack of shock or disgust, is the absence of any specific words for this type of desire (or the men who profess it) [40].

Or:

The idea that people had a fixed, inborn set of sexual desires that were permanent and could be used to classify humanity into groups was only just emerging among theorists in Europe. There was little agreed-upon language to even discuss those feelings. As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out in his essay, the job of the poet is that of language-maker, the person who documents and names the new experiences of the times [24].

I could quote many more examples.  There are a lot of problems in this theme.  For one, are the experiences Ryan is writing about "new"?  He's referring partly to the idea of community, of people classifying themselves into groups based on erotic interests and practice.  It's open to question whether this tendency is new, even in the US: the little communities of "mollies" in eighteenth-century England fascinated gay historians a couple of decades ago, for instance, and social networks and cruising areas are documented around the world, throughout history. There's a substantial literature on this.  I can't tell whether Ryan ignores it because it's not immediately relevant to the topic of queer Brooklyn, or whether he's unaware of it.  One can question how much mollies, sodomites, sapphists and other theorized their communities, but that's not very important unless one is determined to limit "community" to late twentieth-century commercial gay men's culture.  Unfortunately, many do.  But theorizing beyond an ad hoc minimum mostly interests only a small minority of queers, and even those few tend not to do it very well.

For another, as Ryan shows abundantly, "a fixed, inborn set of sexual desires that were permanent" doesn't accurately describe more than a minority of the men and women he's writing about.  This is most obvious in the milieu of sexually-receptive men ("fairies" et al.) and the men ("trade") who penetrate them, whether for money or convenience or both.  Ryan devotes a lot of space to this pattern, at least partly because it's so well-documented in old criminal records, newspapers, and medical literature.  He steps gingerly around the question of the actual sexual orientation of the insertive trade, who according to the lore were younger and would age out of the market as they married and found steady employment.  (This is debatable in many cases, but it's the lore.)

This idea is complicated further by talk of "sexual fluidity," that "We're all a little bit gay," that "most people are bi except for a few at each end of the bell curve."  Despite lip service to such slogans, bisexuality is regarded with skepticism and hostility by many gay men and lesbians.  Among gay men at least, there's a common belief that at heart, trade really only want to be penetrated, and the same gay men who believe themselves doomed by biology to be bottoms turn out to be tops with regard to the very tops they value so much.  (As I've argued before, this is reminiscent of sexist males' belief that all women are really whores at heart.)  There's an analogous uneasiness about femme women among lesbians.  Both concepts -- fixity and plasticity -- coexist in the supposedly modern concept of sexuality.  Ryan's evidence shows this, but he resists it; at least, he never seems to notice the contradiction.  I think it's significant that belief in a fixed homosexual nature arose and became dominant at the same time that evidence against it multiplied not only in accounts like Ryan's but in "common sense" talk about sex.  It's also ironic that "queer," Ryan's label of choice, was rehabilitated in the 1990s against the supposed rigidity of gay and lesbian identities, only to be folded back into supposedly scientific theories of biologically fixed sexual orientation.

To his credit, Ryan is aware of the historical connection of biological determinism and the "modern conception of homosexuality", which I've addressed here before.  Ryan writes:

Early twentieth-century medical science was dominated by the eugenics movement, which believed social problems were rooted in deviant bodies and inheritable traits. This movement reached its apogee with the sadistic, anti-Semitic science of the Holocaust, which has allowed us to conveniently forget the power and prevalence of the eugenics movement in America. Just as people of color, women, and queer people were gaining social power and becoming visible, eugenic science would be trotted out to prove that black people were less human, women were less intelligent, and queer people were a biological dead end that threatened to contaminate good (white) Americans [76].

He doesn't mention class, which was a fixation of the most respectable elements of the eugenics movement, and still is a fallback for it.  But he also writes that "Sigmund Freud’s system of psychoanalysis, and his ideas about sexuality residing in the human mind, only reached American shores in 1909. It would take long decades before they would supplant eugenic ideas about the body as our dominant way of understanding sexuality (and personality in general)" [77]  Is he really unaware that Freud became a whipping boy for feminism and post-Stonewall gay activists, who rightly attacked the psychiatric profession for its role in pathologizing women and homosexuals?  That was before we assimilated ourselves into the profession, and accepted biological determinism while forgetting its ties to eugenics.

He writes:

The same doctors who would define “the homosexual” as a biological class unto itself would also define “the pickpocket” that way, and “the woman who is erotically stimulated by hat pins” as well. Today, it seems natural to view homosexuality this way, and ridiculous to think that being a pickpocket might be a hereditary, biologically defined class. But this is the biased, thoroughly unscientific swamp from which our modern ideas about sexuality arose [77].

I agree, so I don't understand why he writes uncritically about "our modern ideas about sexuality" elsewhere in the book.  Ryan also seems to think that the modern concepts of "transgender" and "intersex" are somehow more valid than their predecessors, that nineteenth- and twentieth-century "fairies" and bulldaggers were really "intersex" or "transgender"?  These concepts, which might sometimes be useful, are just newer social constructions, with the same contradictions and inadequacies as older ideas. That's because "sex" and "gender" are still incoherent and poorly thought out -- possibly more than ever.

So, for example:

According to Ward Hall, a gay man who got his start in the circus in the early 1940s, these [sideshow] acts were sometimes performed by people who were actually intersex, but they were also done by effeminate men and masculine women whose gender presentations were already so at odds with what the audience expected that they believed them to be physically intersex as well [116].

Or again, of a self-identified "fairy" who

told Shufeldt that she was, in our modern terms, intersex (meaning her body had a mixture of typically male and female characteristics), and that she had previously been pregnant. Shufeldt disputed this with his medical examinations, which were so thorough they bordered on being a cavity search. It’s impossible to know what to make of Loop’s assertions. Did she truly believe herself to be intersex? Was this an elaborate camp put on by a fairy out to have some fun with a serious doctor? [79]

Was she "really" intersex?  Apparently not, but Ryan doesn't tell what word she used.  "Intersex" was intended to replace the older "hermaphrodite," which referred to individuals with "both" sets of reproductive organs.  Such individuals are vanishingly rare, so "intersex" might be a slight improvement.  But it seems to have been stretched to include a wide variety of traits, including smaller-than-average penises or larger-than-average clitorises, with the associated assumption of determined gender behavior such as dress or career choices.  And from what I see in online discussion, many people confuse "transgender" with "intersex," and many transgender individuals are trying to base their identities in biology.  It isn't only scientists who love eugenics and biological determinism.

When Brooklyn Was Queer includes a lot of interesting information, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in LGBTQ history.  Just pay attention to the man behind the curtain.  As so often happens, his theory is at odds with his data, but that's useful to know too.  I've never thought that I needed different words for my feelings for other men: it was our enemies who insisted that what I felt wasn't love.  "Same-sex desire" is just desire.  Despite many years of determined efforts to prove otherwise, men who love men and women who love women are biologically speaking just men and women.  Of course "men" and "women" are not obvious (or pre-cultural) categories either, but traditionalists again are the source of the confusion, because of their wish to police other people's gender and erotic lives - a wish that unfortunately is shared by many non-traditionalists.

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Page references are to the Kindle edition.