Dan Riley's Blog, page 29

Good News/Bad News

First the good news…
In an effort to get the new year of blogging off to a good start, I spent more time looking under the hood of the blog than I normally care to do, and in so doing found that The Nob had more followers than I originally calculated which means that I might be sending a bigger check than previously announced to Doctors Without Borders. My original plan was to base the donation on the total number of followers…or Nobbits…the blog had at the end of 2015. But it seems (and I can still be wrong on this) that Google’s Blogger has disabled the function which allows people to sign on as Nobbits. Therefore it was impossible for there to be more Nobbits at the end of the year than there were at the beginning. However, the "subscribe" option and Google+ were fully functional through the year and 67 new followers came onboard. There also was a nice spike in the number of Twitter followers.
This all leaves me with one of those dreaded moral dilemmas compounded by a financial consideration. If I combine original Nobbit followers with Google+ followers with Twitter followers, we’re looking at approximately a $1500 donation. That’s about 5 times more a donation than announced in last week’s post when I was looking at a paltry number of 25 Nobbit followers. I don’t want to lawyer my way out of giving more money to such a worthy cause as Doctors Without Borders, but my original plan technically only committed me to giving according to the number of Nobbits I had at year’s end. So what to do?
What I’m going to do is throw myself at the mercy of public opinion as represented by you, loyal Nob readers. Big check? Not so big? You tell me…
Which brings us to the second issue raised in last week’s post, Blogger’s troublesome comments tool. My research this week revealed that the problem is not unique to The Nobby Works. Fellow blogger Laura Iancu provides this helpful assessment of Blogger’s commenting tool:

When it comes to leaving comments using Blogger’s native system, most people end up confused. Blogger gives way too many options and this alienates commenters and stops the conversation. Unless all your friends are already on Blogger and know what to do. However, you can leave comments with Google+, LiveJournal, WordPress, TypePad, AIM, OpenID, Name/URL or Anonymous. Occasionally you will end up with someone choosing Anonymous and signing their name at the end of the comment. And that’s simply because Blogger does a lousy job at letting people know that for the Name/URL option the URL is actually optional. And it is perfectly fine to leave a comment even if you don’t have a blog/website.

So with that in mind, I invite readers…especially those frustrated in past attempts at commenting…to use the comment option to leave an opinion on how big a check I should send to Doctors Without Borders. If you’re still confused or uninterested in using the comment tool, then just hit the like button and I’ll count every like as a vote for sending the bigger check.
Oh, and now for the bad news…
This clown may still be our next president, and last night he was heard boasting about how big and fat his brain was. I believe there’s a psychological term for his condition.  

The Check is in the Mail

Just about a year ago, I announced the formation of My Polar Bare Club. To quote myself, here’s how it works:

For everyone who signs on to be a follower of the Nobby (known as a Nobbit), between now and midnight December 31, 2014, I pledge a nickel to charity for each day I plunge into the pool. To clarify, the Nob currently has 25 Nobbits, all of whom are automatically enrolled in the Polar Bare Club. If there were no more Nobbits going into 2015, that means every day I jump into the pool would be worth $1.25 to charity, which may sound laughable, but given that I was in the pool 337 days in 2014, that comes out to $421.25. If we double the Nobbits, that would make it $842.50…and if we get 100 new Nobbits…well, then we’re talking some pretty serious coin and you should understand why the baseline is only a nickel.

Alas, the club was a failure on multiple fronts. The first being that my dips into the pool…skinny or otherwise…were considerably fewer than anticipated. That was due to a combination of factors…extensive travel, abnormally stormy southern California weather, and a troublesome pool filter. In the end I only got into the pool 202 days this year.
To compound the failure, no one new signed up to be a follower of the blog, aka a Nobbit. Why that’s so is hard to figure. Activity at the blog actually grew in 2015, and before pitchers and catchers arrive for spring training in 2016 (I’m looking at you, David Price) The Nob should top 200,000 in page views. Why, among all this thousands who visit the site, not a single one signed up to be a follower…and thus a passive contributor to a worthy charity is a bit beyond me. I’ve heard frequent complaints over the years that Google’s Blogger tool which hosts The Nob not only fails to be user-friendly but is outright hostile to users. I wish I understood more about this and could then remedy the situation, but so far I’m at a loss, and may have to consider taking the blog elsewhere if Google can’t be more helpful.
Nonetheless, a pledge is a pledge and with that as my maxim I’ve written out a check for $252.50 as a donation to Doctors Without Borders, which I had designated as the recipient when I announced the club last year. As it turns out, it was another year fraught with danger for the Nobel Peace Prize winning organization. Not only was it on the front lines in the battle against Ebola in West Africa but its humanitarian presence in the most hostile environments on earth put it in direct line of fire in 2015--October 3, it lost hospital, staff, and patients to American bombs in Afghanistan; October 15, it lost a hospital in Yemen to Saudi Arabian bombs; November 28, a hospital and numerous lives lost to Syrian bombs.
It is humbling to consider the bravery and compassion that Doctors Without Borders volunteers stand for…without arms or armor. If one could dare claim kinship with such people, it would be enough to feed one’s pride in our species for the length of the new year at least. 
I won’t take that dare, but I will surrender to my predilection for grand Don Quixote-like gestures and commit to another year of My Polar Bare Club in hopes that next year at this time the check I put in the mail to Doctors Without Borders is bigger and better. Until then, thanks to the 25 Nobbits who made this year’s check possible. 

The Rebel Jesus

Video created by Nescio K 

Jackson Browne’s Rebel Jesus is one of my favorite Christmas songs for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I owe my master’s degree in religion from the Hartford Seminary to rebel Jesus. The reincarnation of Jesus Christ as social/political rebel was one of those seismic cultural events of the 1960s…as impactful on a theological level as, say, “the British invasion” was on a musical level.
In simple terms, the reincarnation was brought about by two movements…one activist in nature, the other intellectual. Martin Luther King Jr. epitomized the former by leading black churches in the name of Jesus into the streets to fight for civil rights. Harvard theologian Harvey Cox epitomized the latter with his profound book The Secular City. In his book Cox argued that the time had come for the churches to break out of their Sunday morning bubble and embrace and challenge the secular world with their faith. This was not an entirely new concept. The early abolitionist movement was firmly rooted in the churches, as was the American labor movement. But Cox’s writing gave the idea of a socially engaged church intellectual ballast for a white, educated audience and helped align many mainstream churches with the civil rights movement, inspired clergy and nuns to join the anti-war movement, and would be the foundation a decade later for liberation theology which rose up against repressive rightwing regimes throughout Latin America. It also got me recruited into the Hartford Seminary, which was conscientiously attempting to seed its student body with political activists, such as I had been during my undergraduate years. 
The irony…and there’s always irony…is that the same thinking would, in the 1970s, give rise to a counter conservative, religion-based political movement called The Moral Majority, which would morph over time into the Christian Right wing of the Republican Party and hopelessly pervert an essentially compassionate religious philosophy with a vengeful political one. You cannot get into an argument with an evangelical Republican without them justifying their fervor for, say, right-to- life in terms of the civil rights movement. For progressives, it has been a nagging, painful reminder to be careful what you wish for.
In any case, it was accepted as fact in those heady 60s days that Jesus was a radical if for no other reason than he opened the gates of heaven up to the meek and dispossessed. Heaven…or Olympus as the Greeks called it…had been the province of the powerful. Jesus was radical in telling those of humble roots that they had a place there and a personal relationship with God. In that regard alone he was one of the first democratizing figures in history. And when you add the Sermon on the Mount, one of the most sustained pieces of rhetoric in the New Testament directly attributed to Christ, you have the blueprint for modern social justice. It’s a speech Bernie Sanders could deliver without embarrassment (okay, maybe a little embarrassment, especially over the archaic sex talk).
What holds Jesus back from being a revolutionary on the order of Thomas Paine or Martin Luther King Jr. is his dubious assurances to his followers that so much of what he envisions of a just and ideal society can be deferred until heaven...after they've passed from this secular world. That not only undercuts the action items on his agenda--i.e., turning swords into ploughshares, caring for the needy, and loving your enemies--but it gives his followers an excuse for putting off for today what they fool themselves into thinking they’ll do tomorrow. Rather than taking up the hard work of being Christian to the word of Christ, they take the shortcut of being Christian to the dictates of their very flawed pastors...or worse, their manipulative politicians. To counter this, I’m all for putting Christ back into Christmas…so with that in mind I wish everyone a Merry Christmas in the name of the Rebel Jesus:

All the streets are filled with laughter and lightAnd the music of the seasonAnd the merchants' windows are all brightWith the faces of the childrenAnd the families hurrying to their homesAs the sky darkens and freezesThey'll be gathering around the hearths and talesGiving thanks for all God's gracesAnd the birth of the rebel Jesus
Well they call him by The Prince of PeaceAnd they call him by the SaviorAnd they pray to him upon the seasAnd in every bold endeavorAs they fill his churches with their pride and goldAnd their faith in him increasesBut they've turned the nature that I worshipped inFrom a temple to a robber's denIn the words of the rebel Jesus
We guard our world with locks and gunsAnd we guard our fine possessionsAnd once a year when Christmas comesWe give to our relationsAnd perhaps we give a little to the poorIf the generosity should seize usBut if any one of us should interfereIn the business of why they are poorThey get the same as the rebel Jesus
But please forgive me if I seemTo take the tone of judgmentFor I've no wish to come betweenThis day and your enjoymentIn this life of hardship and of earthly toilWe have need for anything that frees usSo I bid you pleasureAnd I bid you cheerFrom a heathen and a paganOn the side of the rebel Jesus.


Syrian refugee children leaning out 
for the spirit of the Rebel Jesus 

Violent Night

Violent night, Holy hell night, All is fear, all is frightRound yon victims, mothers and childs
Unholy shooters so mental... 
and wild
Kill in disturbing peaceKill in disturbing peace.Violent night, holy hell night, People quake At the sight Gunfire streams from madmen afar NRA hosts singAlleluiaArms their Saviour is born,Arms their Saviour is born
Violent night, holy hell night,Sons of guns, right's pure might,Derangement beams fromWayne LaPierre With the reign of darkening despair,Gun rights, Lord, at Thy birth,Gun rights, Lord, at Thy birth.Violent night, holy-hell night,Common sense,Lend thy light;Founding Fathers let us sing,Second 'mendment not our KingArms as Saviour is gonzo,Arms as Saviour is nuts

Now, everybody sing:

Prayer Wars

As I've written before, once upon a time I was a praying fool. Even though I pray no more I pretty much know where the impulse to pray comes from…and where the satisfaction from prayer comes from, which I think makes me a fairly reliable neutral observer whenever all-out war breaks out between the pro-prayer empire and the anti-prayer rebellion as it did last week. The casus belli was this provocative New York Daily News front page following the terrorist attack in San Bernadino. 
  A number of liberal politicians and pundits joined forces with the Daily News in criticizing Republican politicians for responding to the mass killing with calls to prayer rather than action. Within minutes it seemed the entire Internet was ablaze with the usual sound and fury signifying nothing but our hopeless addiction to cultural friction. I followed the battle from the ramparts overlooking Charles Pierce's Political Blog on Esquire where it raged for days over a scorched thread hammered by an incessant volley of comments between believers and non-believers. For those with normal lives to live who couldn't take the time to observe the carnage, let me draw upon my reportorial skills to sum up the debate this way:
Believer: You're going to burn in hell!
Non-believer: Fuck you!!

If I can add a little badly-needed nuance to the debate, I'd say that people on one side of it revere the act of prayer and regard it as the best…sometimes only--way they have to express sympathy with those they see suffering; people on the other side hold prayer in the same low regard as magic incantations like hocus-pocus or fairy tale spells like bibbity-bobbity-boo. In other words, we're talking about some deeply-held views here that are unlikely to ever be changed in an Internet poo fight. Nonetheless, in my self-proclaimed role as arbiter here, allow me to begin by granting the non-believers a victory on the merits in this latest outbreak of hostilities. The pro-prayer forces either didn't understand the point the New York Daily News was making or willfully misread it in order to cast themselves--as many of them are prone to do--as victims of religious persecution. The message clearly was not an attack on prayer per se, but an attack on politicians who substitute a call for prayer for doing the job they were voted on to do. We do not go to doctors in time of pain and expect them to dismiss our pain with a call for prayer. We do not go to police in time of fear and expect them to dismiss our fear with a call to prayer. And we don't need political leaders to sidestep their responsibilities as civic servants by assuming the role of pastor. This dodge is particularly aggravating because it has become routine for politicians in the pocket of the NRA to use it again and again as a sop to voters in response to our incessant gun violence.

Thomas Moore, former monk and one of our favorite spiritual writers and thinkers here at The Nob, preordained this cowardliness in his Dark Nights of the Soul:

Religion, too, often avoids the dark by hiding behind platitudes and false assurances. Nothing is more irrelevant than feeble religious piousness in the face of stark, life-threatening darkness…Religion easily becomes defense and avoidance. 

Here's a story I tell on myself for the possible benefit of others: I went to college on a full scholarship, which was dependent upon my maintaining a 3.0 average, which should've been doable except I was in over my head with Intermediate Spanish. I prayed a lot in those days to El Grande Padre for help in passing the class…too much time spent on my knees which would've been better spent in the language lab cost me my scholarship. The lesson: prayer--whatever emotional or spiritual comfort it may provide--is not a substitute for hard work and clear thinking.

The vacuous, dead end calls for prayer by the politicians cited by the New York Daily News contrasted with the call for prayer by James Ramos, Chairman of the San Bernardino Board of Supervisors, during the Board's press conference after the mass killing. Ramos made his request for "thoughts and prayers" for the victims and their families in the context of a report on the shooting and the steps the Board would be taking to protect county employees in the future. The Board had dutifully stepped up to its duties, and the call to prayer was supplementary. Had the Board done nothing more than appear before the public to link hands and offer prayer, there would've been justifiable citizen outrage.

It's also significant that Ramos called for thoughts and prayers. The inclusion of thoughts there (and Ramos is not the only politician to be so deft) is a tacit acknowledgement that prayers aren't for everybody. And herein should lie the common ground where both the Prayer Empire and the No Prayer Rebellion find their peace. As much as prayer is a poor substitute for policy, it can be and often is a reasonable facsimile of contemplation and reflection. This is a truth about prayer that sinks beneath the mighty wisdom of non-believers who too often dismiss prayer as wishful thinking and mock the prayerful when their prayers don't come true. They don't seem to get that what many people call prayer is what other people call introspection. The anti-prayer argument that if prayer worked why didn't it prevent the tragedy in the first place holds only if you view prayer narrowly--and childishly--as a preventative. Prayer for many is reflective…a time to put themselves…even if momentarily...in the place of the sufferer. No one should begrudge anyone else such a moment because such moments are one of the ways we build a compassionate community. 

This seems a good juncture to again reference that most grossly ignored teaching of Jesus:

5And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 6But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

In reflecting upon my own experience among the prayerful, I realize that my prayers were much like Stephen Colbert's confrontations on his old show with what he called "a formidable opponent." Because I understood the complex "supreme being" I was praying to (God/Jesus) to be all-knowing, it was incumbent upon me to speak clearly and honestly. Fortuitously, the inner voice I developed in my piety helped me to eventually evolve a writer's voice that stressed clarity and candor...which is not to imply that writers who emerge from non-pious backgrounds cannot achieve such literary virtues. All I'm saying is that was my path, so I'm not all that quick to dismiss prayer…certainly not quiet, private prayer…as a good. The thing about ostentatious, public prayer, however--whether at the dinner table, a political event or (God help us) in a restaurant--is that the audience is not God or conscience, but other people. The purpose of what I call performance prayer is demeaned by the vanity of it--the attempt to show off one's piety to others. 

The New York Daily News got it exactly right--God isn't going to fix our national epidemic of gun violence. But if we take our respective thoughts and our prayers into a private sanctuary…a closet or otherwise…and contemplate the trouble we're in, God or intellect may guide us in choosing leaders with the courage and will to fix it…and that would be a win-win for believers and non-believers alike. 

An Arresting Development

True confession: Bond films are one of my guilty pleasures ever since boyhood chum Mike Blowen and I stumbled on From Russia with Love which was playing as the backend of a double feature with Fluffy, a Tony Randall romp about a crazy professor and his pet lion (those were better days for lions). So naturally we chose Spectre, the new one Bond, as our stepping out on Thanksgiving weekend movie.
Here’s what New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis wrote about Spectre in her review: “There’s nothing surprising in Spectre, the 24th ‘official’ title in the series, which is presumably as planned.”
Holy spoiler alert! “Nothing surprising”? I’ve seen every one of these official and unofficial Bond films multiple times and I’m here to tell you that the ending to this one is outright shocking. And for those worried I’m about to ruin the movie for them, I must say that Bond films are really quite impervious to spoiler alerts because they are as dedicated to formula as is a Grand Prix F1 race. You know where all the twists, turns, straightaways and danger signs are before you watch it. What’s more, with a Bond film, you not only know where the finish line is (the big, secret, doomsday industrial complex in a remote, impenetrable location) but you know who is going to cross it first…Bond…James Bond..with a bang and a woman. 
There’s about 20 minutes more of playing time in Spectre after the requisite world-saving explosion, and then the film climaxes this way: Bond ignores his arch-villain’s pleadings to be killed; Bond tosses his gun into the Thames; and M appears over the prone body of the bad guy and places him under arrest. 
Anyone who’s been watching American movies since Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson came to embody “liberal Hollywood’s” belief that the courts could not be trusted to dispense justice…or, to put it another way, that the only answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun…knows that long before the odious Wayne LaPierre of the NRA made that the punchline of our time filmmakers have been romanticizing pistols over judicial process. All the big, flashy action film franchises, from Bond to Bourne to the Die Hards, Lethal Weapons and Robocops, end with the bad guys being killed rather than cuffed. The same is true of singular hits, like Training Day, Heat, End of Watch, The Departed….
There are exceptions of course--like the Hannibal Lechter films, where the villain conducts much of his mischief from behind bars; fact-based films, like The Untouchables, where an arrest is dictated by actual events; and smart films, like Fargo, which appeals to a more sophisticated audience that doesn’t need its bloodlust sated all the way to the closing credits. But generally speaking, arrests in good guys/bad guys movies are as rare as waiting for sex until the second date (which… another spoiler alert…also happens in Spectre). Building the climax of Spectre around an arrest doesn’t seem to be a capricious choice either. About two-thirds of the way through, a main character delivers some anti-gun dialog (which also should’ve been surprising to anyone paying attention). Though the dialog does nothing to lessen Bond’s body count on the way to the climactic scene, it does add critical context as to why he tosses his gun away.
I don’t want to make too very much of this and appear to be setting the producers of Spectre up for a Nobel Peace Prize, but at a time when we are desperately in need of any public stand against the nonstop gun violence, both in our public places and our public entertainment, even this slight nod toward sanity is welcome. How much of an impact a scene or two in a Bond film can have on the escalation of gun violence is uncertain. But surely if it’s worth paying out millions for a passing product placement in a Bond movie to sell watches or gin, it must be worth something for 007 in a passing moment to say “no” to guns. Perhaps this will be…excuse the expression…the first shot fired in Hollywood’s return to a sense of social responsibility it all but abandoned when it decided to lift the wallets of 18-24 males rather than lift their consciences.
Surely, it seems, as if the NRA would like to see more movies take a stand against guns. After all, why else would they automatically and persistently wag a finger at Hollywood violence whenever there’s another mass shooting? Of course, if the NRA’s tears after every shooting weren’t of the crocodile variety rather than casting blame elsewhere they would be inviting Hollywood and the mental health community to join them in trying to guide our society out of its bloody downward spiral.
First Amendment purists get uneasy when responsibility for the gun death epidemic…either by mass killers or killer cops…gets linked to any kind of creative expression…even the Michael Bay kind. But we can’t be connecting dots between a mass shooter mouthing off about “No more baby parts” and politicians mouthing off about same, while denying that an endless tsunami of violent films has no effect on young impressionable minds. This is not a call for government control of violent levels in films, but it is another call for moviemakers to start taking the gun crisis and its role in creating it seriously. 
And how ironic if a character famously known for his license to kill is the one who leads the film industry there? Tell me that wouldn’t be a surprise.

Mormons in the Mist

My favorite Mormon

Hello(Selected verses; find full musical version here)
ELDER PRICE:Hello!My name is Elder PriceAnd I would like to share with youThe most amazing book. ELDER GRANT:Hello!My name is Elder Grant.It's a book about AmericaA long, long time ago.ELDER PRICE:It hasSo many awesome partsYou simply won't believeHow much this book can change your life.

(snip)
ELDER PRICE:Hello!ELDER HARRIS:Hi!ELDER PRICE:My name is-ELDER GREEN:Jesus Christ!ELDER GRANT:You have a lovely home!ELDER CROSS:Hello!ELDER YOUNG:It's an amazing book!ELDER SMITH:Bonjour!ELDER WHITE:Hello!ELDER HARRIS:Ni hao!ELDER WHITE:Me llamo Elder White!
ELDER GRANT
Are these your kids?
To break up the 32-hour trip home from SouthAfrica this summer, we stayed over in London a few days…just enough time to see at long last the stage musical The Book of Mormon. The creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are not, as the Brits say, my usual cup of tea. I’ve never been able to last through any episode of South Park, their TV show, nor any of the feature length movies they’ve made. But we gave Book of Mormon a try based on the suggestion of people we trusted and as a result our trust in those people is now sky high. It was one of the best nights at the theater we ever had…catchy music, hysterical (albeit outrageous) lyrics, and not a little philosophical provocation.

Coincidently on our recent follow-up trip to Johannesburg I got to watch through my hotel window real life Book of Mormon unfold…without the catchy tunes or funny lines, but with no less philosophical provocation. As in Parker and Stone’s creation, two classically attired Mormons in ties, white shirts and dark pants were trolling the streets of Africa attempting to enlist black converts to a religion which until rather recently specifically barred black men from even becoming priests. The road they were working was lined with taxis and their drivers waiting to whisk away weary players from the nearby casino. There were also people handing out flyers for various businesses, street artists singing and dancing for their supper, and poor folks just looking for a handout. I’d walked that street a few times myself with my studied see-nothing/hear-nothing tunnel view look straight ahead. That is my usual look whenever I feel a stranger in a strange land, but it was particularly severe in Jo’berg, which, if you haven’t heard, is one of the most crime-ridden cities on earth. So it was rather stunning to see these two Mormon missionaries, surely as alien to African culture as I, walking up to all these dark, distant people in an attempt to sell them on an American pioneer religion of quite dubious relevance to their lives.
Mormons walk away without making a sale, Jo'burg, 2015
Quite dubious relevance to my life as well, truth be told. I’m rather brutal when they come calling at my door…and that’s even with knowing that to get to my door they have to climb a long, steep driveway, which in summer can suggest Brigham Young's trek across the plains. I either don’t answer the door when they come or immediately shut the door on them when they catch me off guard. The last time they were here, however, they caught me digging in the garden. As portrayed in The Book of Mormon, they were polite to a fault:
ELDER BROWN:Hello!ELDER HARRIS:Ding dong!ALL:And if you let us in,We'll show you how it can be done!ELDER GRANT:No thanks?ELDER GREEN:You sure?ELDER GRANT:Oh, well.ELDER GREEN:That's fine.ELDER GRANT
Goodbye!

Unless Abby Huntsman--my favorite Mormon with her pulpy, luscious lips--comes knocking, I do not have time for anyone selling religion door-to-door, and I told my unwelcome visitors so. As they cheerily turned to depart, one of them complimented me on the statue we have standing at our front gate. “Thank you,” I replied. “That’s Don Quixote, the  icon of missions in vain.” He laughed, and in doing so scored more points with me than he ever could’ve scored with his book of Mormon. 
I get lots of affirmation for my cold-hearted dismissal of these folks from my cohort of liberal thinkers, be they atheists or not. As a lot, liberals…progressives…whatever we call ourselves these days…do not relate well to door-to-door solicitation, whether it’s for solar panels or Jesus. We just don’t like having people come to our homes unsolicited trying to sell us things. We pretty much hold such people in contempt…or ridicule at best.
But I must say in watching those two young men working what must have been for them a very strange and lonely road in Johannesburg that day gave me a different perspective…if just for the moment. For the first time ever I thought about what deep conviction it takes to go out into the world and try to convince total strangers to see the world as you do. The liberal mind is repulsed by such behavior because the liberal mind by definition believes everyone should be free to come to his or her own conclusions about how the world works. 
Liberalism pays a price for its reluctance to engage others in conversion…at least political conversion. On state and local levels throughout the US, liberalism is losing the battle for hearts and minds in stunning fashion. Every off-year election sees significant drop-offs in voter participation, especially among more progressively inclined voters, resulting in election of legislatures ever more extreme in hostility toward women, children, minorities, workers, and the environment. This is an issue that only seems to be growing as an obstacle to advancing a liberal agenda, and political operatives, organizers, and activists on the left and center seem incapable of matching their rightwing counterparts in building energy and enthusiasm for their beliefs.
I once asked a friend from a Mormon family if her people really believed in all that nonsense about the Angel Moroni, the golden plates, and the magic underwear. She replied, and rightly so, that in the context of Christianity’s foundation in a virgin birth and an arising from the dead, the Angel Moroni is not all that far-fetched. And then she made an even more salient point: Mormons--like Catholics, Hindus, Muslims--are not really as committed to the details of their religion as outsiders think they are. In fact, she said, the community Mormonism creates, at least for her family, is far more important to adherents than the actual theology.

Liberals, as is their wont, seem to have mastered technology for the good of the cause. Barack Obama’s two election victories were case studies in how to manage databases for electoral success. Left-leaning activists readily employ social media to launch movements, like Black Lives Matter, or to shame some institutional miscreant into apology or resignation. Yet this mastery seems ineffective in countering the rightward tilt of the nation’s legislative bodies. There are no doubt multiple layers of explanations for this. The philosophical provocation I experienced watching two Mormon boys trying to convert Africans suggests one. That is that a virtual community is not a real community. Ultimately it will take liberals of courage and conviction to overcome their aversion to venture into American neighborhoods election after election to sell voters face-to-face on policies and principles that will make them part of a bigger, stronger, more caring community. To say, in short, "Hello."      

Salvation

The suffering of Matt Jamison
My favorite character in Tom Perrotta’s brilliant satire The Leftovers is Rev. Matt Jamison. In Perrotta’s novel, which is the basis for the HBO series The Leftovers, 140 million people worldwide mysteriously disappear in an instant. There are those who believe that the mass departing is what many have anticipated as The Rapture. But Rev. Matt doesn’t buy it because, he argues, if it had been the real Rapture he, as a good and righteous man, would’ve been part of it.  So he spends most of the novel gathering and distributing damning evidence against those who departed to show that God never would’ve called them but not him.  
Matt is the perfect embodiment of the perverse Christianity that has been running wild in our streets since the Moral Majority announced itself in full hypocritical splendor in the 1970s. Now rebranded as the Republican Party it runs even wilder today as they’re about to celebrate the birth of the child of the most famous refugees in Christendom by standing at our borders and howling, red-faced into Judgment Day, “No room at the inn!”
Unlike these perverse Christians too abundant in our midst, Rev. Matt is an evolving character...perhaps because he is not so much the creation of a God as the creation of artists (or screenwriters at least) who have an obligation to a character's arc. To hold an audience—which, ironically, is content to let its own existence flatline—TV producers must show their characters’ growth, or at least movement from point A to B (or this being HBO, point A to J or K, thereabouts). So it was with Matt Jamison as the HBO series moved beyond the confines of the novel into season 2. Matt abandoned his obsession with producing nasty dossiers on those whose vanishing fill him with envy. Instead, he engages in other unpleasant aspects of perverse Christianity—he wallows in self-pity; sticks his self-righteous nose in the lives of others; is judgmental, overbearing, and clueless in imposing his particular way to salvation. 
Through his misguided efforts all he gains is the disdain of and alienation from others. Then the accumulated circumstances of life…bad turns, bad timing, bad luck…break him. In an exhilarating Leftovers episode entitled…wait for it…"No Room at the Inn," Matt lives through a kind of greatest hits of Christian myths--the one foretold in the title of course preceded by a more less Immaculate Conception, followed by a poor man's Book of Job, and concluding with a kinda, sorta crucifixion. The Matt who is reborn after willingly taking the place of another in his suffering is no longer the vengeful and pious zealot we’ve come to know. He’s liberated, accepting and finally relaxed in his own skin. ”Suffering breeds compassion,” he says, which the casual viewer may take as a line aimed at the “degenerates” who humiliated him in the public stocks. But those who have been following Matt’s character arc know this is self-analysis, which the righteous fool from the novel would not have been capable. Matt is no longer alienated from us, he is us at our best because suffering should breed compassion…and compassion should be the endgame, or the game's not worth playing.
The Leftovers is sometimes admirably too ambitious for its own good. It wants to examine all there is in our world as regards belief and disbelief, faith and science, superstition and skepticism, the supernatural and the psychotic…and it wants to be fair and true to the diversity of human experience in those areas. Sometimes the cynic gets the applause line…sometimes the true believer does. The producers strive not to take sides so as to settle the arguments, but to keep the discussion vibrant and alive. They do tip their hand somewhat, however, in their musical choices. The "No Room at the Inn" episode, for instance, ended with Regina Spektor's provocative Laughing With:

No one laughs at God in a hospitalNo one laughs at God in a warNo one’s laughing at GodWhen they’re starving or freezing or so very poor
No one laughs at GodWhen the doctor calls after some routine testsNo one’s laughing at GodWhen it’s gotten real lateAnd their kid’s not back from the party yet
No one laughs at GodWhen their airplane start to uncontrollably shakeNo one’s laughing at GodWhen they see the one they love, hand in hand with someone elseAnd they hope that they’re mistaken
No one laughs at GodWhen the cops knock on their doorAnd they say we got some bad news, sirNo one’s laughing at GodWhen there’s a famine or fire or flood
But God can be funnyAt a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke, orOr when the crazies say He hates usAnd they get so red in the head you think they’re ‘bout to chokeGod can be funny,When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right wayAnd when presented like a genie who does magic like HoudiniOr grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa ClausGod can be so hilariousHa haHa ha
No one laughs at God in a hospitalNo one laughs at God in a warNo one’s laughing at GodWhen they’ve lost all they’ve gotAnd they don’t know what for
No one laughs at God on the day they realizeThat the last sight they’ll ever see is a pair of hateful eyesNo one’s laughing at God when they’re saying their goodbyesBut God can be funnyAt a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke, Or when the crazies say He hates usAnd they get so red in the head you think they’re ‘bout to chokeGod can be funny,When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right wayAnd when presented like a genie who does magic like HoudiniOr grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa ClausGod can be so hilarious
No one laughs at God in a hospitalNo one laughs at God in a warNo one laughs at God in a hospitalNo one laughs at God in a warNo one laughing at God in hospitalNo one’s laughing at God in a warNo one’s laughing at God when they’re starving or freezing or so very poor
No one’s laughing at GodNo one’s laughing at GodNo one’s laughing at GodWe’re all laughing with God
Regina Spektor sings Laughing With
That song would seem to tilt the scales toward the believers, or at least believers with a sense of humor and perspective. But then the title theme to all of season 2 is Iris Dement’s classic Let the Mystery Be:
Everybody's wonderin' what and where they all came from.Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done.But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me.I think I'll just let the mystery be.
Some say once you're gone you're gone forever, and some say you're gonna come back.Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour if in sinful ways you lack.Some say that they're comin' back in a garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas.I think I'll just let the mystery be.
Everybody's wonderin' what and where they all came from.Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done.But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me.I think I'll just let the mystery be.
Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory and I ain't saying it ain't a fact.But I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory and I don't like the sound of that.Well, I believe in love and I live my life accordingly.But I choose to let the mystery be.
Everybody's wonderin' what and where they all came from.Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done.But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me.I think I'll just let the mystery be.
I think I'll just let the mystery be.
I hope I haven't misled anyone into reading this as a TV review. My intention here is to post a reminder of the character arc of our civilization…as it attempts to move from barbarity and bigotry to enlightenment and tolerance. The free thought and unfettered creativity that The Leftovers advances is a hallmark of our evolving civilization, and we can't ever let it be killed by its enemies without or within.    Iris Dement sings Let the Mystery Be

Lady Marmalade

Allen Toussaint died this week. He was 77, and in his lifetime he had his hands on so much quality music as performer, songwriter, or producer that his name practically became a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that whatever you were about to listen to was going to be worth it if he had anything to do with it. What was most surprising to me in reading his obituary was that he did not write Lady Marmalade, but merely produced the most famous version of it by LaBelle.

Lady Marmalade is one of those songs that I would always describe as one of my favorites if you ask, but would always forget if I tried to name my top 10 or 20 or even 30. Maybe that explains how it only ranks as #479 on Rolling Stones' 500 Greatest Songs of All Time...it's not really a slight to the song itself, just a testament to how many great songs there are to choose from. Anyway, I love the song because, like the best of pop music, it's joyful; it's also clever lyrically, and of course it's very sexy. It falls in that in that wet and warm tradition of pop song that can also serve as softporn...a tradtions that stretches back to Betsy Smith longing for a little sugar in her bowl to the Pointer Sisters singing the praises of a lover with a slow hand to Lucinda Williams begging to be unsuffered to whatever's been happening in rap and hip-hop that's flown unnoticed beneath my musical radar. 

Of course much of such music struts its blackness loud and proud, and the overt sexuality of black music is one of the main reasons it was segregated from the mainstream for so long in America, and only gained entry and acceptance via white interpreters like Elvis. (And while I'm on it, let's just say for the record that no where near enough serious scholarly attention is paid to the role of black sexuality in defining Anerica's ongoing racial struggles...for all the talk about systemic racism and the historic legacy of slavery and fatherless families someone somewhere has got to get around to talking about white fear of the black penis as being the root cause--no pun intended--of all our racial woes.)

Anyway, imagine my shock when I learned that the uber sexy and black Lady Marmalade was written by two of the most white bread guys ever working in music....Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan. Nebraskan Crewe has some real pop music cred as the writer of many of the biggest hits for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons...it's his songwriting chops that fuel the fun and energy of Jersey Boys. Nolan's resume features I Like Dreamin', one of those songs that turns pop into pap by the end of the first verse. Still these two non-black guys managed to turn out Lady Marmalade...and what's more they did it by leaning heavily  from A Street Car Named Desire by that old white gay guy Tennessee Williams. Their famously seductive refrain is lifted from a Blanche DuBois line: "Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir."

Williams to Crewe & Nolan to Toussaint to Patti LaBelle....Voila! This is why we love diversity. This is why we love the metaphor of America as a melting pot. This is why love Love's Body...because it is the great common denominator...and the great communicator...and the great liberator...
Guichie, guichie, ya ya dada (da daeaea yea)Guichie, guichie, ya ya here (ooooh)Mocha choca lata ya ya (yea)Creole Lady Marmalade

Time Warped

This Halloween we traveled to Africa...and here's what was the scariest part about it--Time turns on you. It waits around every corner to jump out at you, dressed not as a humble workaday wristwatch or helpful hum-drum digital alarm clock, but as a hideous, demonic creature that not only wants to scare you out of your skin but scare itself into your skin. 
It starts with the trip to Los Angeles to catch a London-bound flight. As any resident of Southern California knows, there is now only a two-hour window for getting in or out of LA without becoming entangled in the nightmarish traffic which routinely spills out of the night and paints the day time black. Miss that two-hour window by 15 minutes for, say,  a pee or coffee stop, and you're in for a white knuckle ride of painful, excruciating slowness that allows plenty of Time for conjuring up the horrors of a missed flight. My particular horror was that I had left my passport behind. I knew I hadn't, but for three quarters of the trip to LA I was gripped in the fear that I had, and I didn't dare pull off to the side to check my travel bag in the back for the greater fear of finding that I really did forget it and could not turn back because I at least had to get Lorna to the airport where I would have to confess to her how badly I screwed up. 
Then in Heathrow in London, the fiend Time changes out of its White Rabbit costume, taunting you with cries of "I'm late...I'm late" and dons the guise of Chinese water torturer (or depending on your politics, CIA water torturer). And it's drip...drip...drip...the tick...the tock of every second on the clock as you wait out an 8-hour layover for your connecting flight to Johannesburg. There is only so much Merlot you can drink to pass the hours before you're in danger of just passing out and missing the flight...and beginning the wait all over again....only this time it's 24 hours, not 8.
You're lucky to make your departure...on Time...or in spite of Time....or at the mercy of Time...whatever...in any case Time is fully in control now. But you're still fool enough to think you can beat it. Your strategy for the 10-and-a-half hour flight to South Africa seems sound to the unsound mind--eat the meal, drink more wine, watch a movie...preferably a long, soporific movie like Exodus: Gods and Kings which will put you to sleep...which it does. But when you awake expecting a glass of orange juice and greetings welcoming you to Johannesburg, you find you still have another seven and a half hours to go...an average work day. There are more movies to watch...and TV shows...and self-help videos...and a 3-D map which has the effect of distorting the plane's 543 mph traverse down the African continent into a snail's crawl up some I.M. Pei glass tower. But you decide to pull out the book you brought for the trip and risk running down your iPad battery for prolonged, unexpected future delays (yes, there's a USB port on the plane, but in your hurry not to miss that 2-hour window to LAX, you've forgotten to pack your USB connector). The book is Jonathan Franzen's Purity, and as it frighteningly turns out one of his characters is having his own existential battle with Time. Andreas Wolf has just killed the stepfather of his 15-year old beloved who had been raping her for three years...and now Andreas wrestles with her question about the pain they just caused by bludgeoning the man to death:

"If time was infinite then three seconds and three years represented the same small fraction of it. And, so if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math there, in the infinitesimal duration of life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it...Infinitesimally soon, his own death would commence and render all of this unreal."

I chose to view the passage as a glass half-full and tried to draw a positive message from it. If time was infinite, then five more hours of flying time was the same small fraction of infinity as five minutes was...and besides I would soon be dead, rendering my current discomfort unreal. Voila!

When we finally arrived in Johannesburg, our hotel mercifully let us check in early so we could sleep through a breathtakingly gorgeous day. When we awoke it was dark again, except in other places, like California, where waking up at that moment would have made perfect sense. We tried to exhaust ourselves into more sleep...the tread mill, the stationary bike...more wine...then lights out. At 2 a.m. I was lying in bed "watching" a digitized simulation of the game being played back home between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders...two teams I hate. Father Time is an abusive parent. There would be a play and an arrow on my tiny screen moved forward or backward to indicate the success of the play. Then there would be a text message to detail the play--Chris Ivory over left tackle for 2-yd gain. Then came the wait for the next play...1 alligator...2 alligators...3 alligators. I would get to 75 alligators before the arrow...like the animation of the airplane on my in-flight monitor the night before...nudged. Text: Geno Smith bounces ball off Brandon Marshall's head. Incomplete pass.

Who is the audience for this technology, you wonder to yourself. After all, Time is Money...or so they say. And so it must be, for how else to explain all the nations of the world giving up their precious sovereignty to standardize Time...to agree on Time Zones...to uniformally recognize Greenwhich Mean Time, Coordinated Universal Time? Not for world peace, not for starving children and homeless refugees, not for an ailing planet...but so the trains and planes can run on time. And if Time is Money and Money is speech it must follow that clocks are people too. After all, we have grandfather clocks, why not grandmother clocks...and grandchildren clocks? How cuckoo can it be? Cuckcoo...cuckooo...cuckooo....

(BTW, Lorna knitted her way through the entire trip and Demon Time never gave a passing glance.)