256. REALITY WARS, OR, THE WHITE BOYS' GUIDE TO STOKING THE SINS OF OMISSION

From the Archives. (September 2006) In an article I wrote for our local indy rag some years ago, I talked about the fact that, even though my ex and I were together for ten years and declared our commitment to each other in a public ceremony, my family of origin continued to list me as single on their family trees.

They were cordial if a bit uncomfortable when I brought Mud to our family gatherings and usually included those awkward how’s your er um how's Mud doing? questions in conversations when she wasn’t there, but consistently refused to acknowledge the significance of our relationship in any formal way.

In other words, their actions attempted to make real people around them invisible in order to ensure their own comfort.

It is no coincidence that the Judeo-Christian god granted Adam the right to name things.

And yes. You are right. Ding ding ding! I AM writing about the power wielded by people who are allowed to name things and define reality. Again.

Because inquiring minds want to elucidate the fact that our dominant society insists that a huge facet of the lives of one in ten of us be rendered invisible.

(And let's don't forget that their insistence is not limited to queers. They also want poor people and black people and AIDS babies and leather afficionados and the homeless to vanish for their continued comfort.)

How threatening would it be to their carefully manufactured worlds if our official documents reflected the actual data??

Did you know that 4 corporations publish nearly every textbook used in our public schools system and that these publishers hold hearings in which groups of, say, so-called Intelligent Design advocates are allowed to fill the entire hearing room and then insist on their opinions being printed as facts? Yes, all too often, this group’s turnout and volume dictate what schoolchildren are taught as reality.

It's no surprise that organized Christofascist groups are the primary ones showing up either. No big surprise that fundies pays speechwriters big bucks to change the names of things in order to make the wrong seem right and idiocy seem intelligent and pesky principles seem obsolete.

I guess, given these dysfunctions, it should be no surprise that the Governator is intent on redefining reality for his state too.

Yep, I read today that California has been legally bound to offer an inclusive curriculum in their public schools since the seventies. The result is that men and women excel in equal numbers in textbooks (i.e., if Barbie says Math is hard, then Ken does too).

Then, this year, the legislature took this law a step further and approved a bill requiring state textbooks to "accurately portray in an age-appropriate manner the cultural, racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity of our society."

Finally! Lesbians will be depicted as something other than pathetic man-hating spinsters who drown in the wells of loneliness that are the fairy-tale fate of unmarried women (when, near as I can tell, the actual fate of far too many women is to hide in women's shelters from the violent men in their lives who wish to control their every move).

The governator viewed this bill as too threatening and vowed to veto it, so as a compromise, the legislature amended it to say only that textbooks will not reflect adversely on people based on their sexual orientation.

That’s STILL too much reality for the governator though, so he vetoed this version too.

Good thing this man is in a position of authority and gets to name things, eh?

193. WANT SOME TORTURE WITH THOSE CHEERIOS?, OR, THE GEOMETRY OF ATROCITY

From the Archives

(February 2006) I’ve been staring at the newest Abu Ghraib photographs.

(Yes, the ones that Bush & Co. tried so hard to keep under lock and key.)

The first batch was bad enough, but these are definitely worse. They also confirm that American soldiers beat at least one prisoner to death ... and for what? Loyalty to an administration that’s eager to eliminate anyone who challenges it?
Because they were just following orders, sir?

(But no John Wayne noble soldier bullshit can justify this one, fellas, so don’t even start in on It’s a Grand Ol’ Flag or that old following orders routine.)

What we have is lies on top of manufactured weapons on top of human blood smeared from one end of a holding cell to the other on top of white Muslim asses with bright red cigarette holes burned into them.

(Nothing to wave your stupid yellow ribbons about either, folks.)

So how many Americans do you figure are following what’s really going on at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo?

It’s time we recognize the necessity of bearing witness to the atrocities that are happening in our time. With our tax dollars. In our name.

You know, I’m a writer and I value words, but I also know that reading a hundred descriptions of abuse did not have the same impact of my seeing one photograph of a real human being reduced to a battered collection of chipped teeth and vomit and feces stains and hematomas all wrapped up in swaths of plastic wrap (to better what? Stew him in his own blood?).

So let that image sink in while you eat your Cheerios, dear readers.

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I downloaded some of the images and have been studying them the way I study Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians—in an effort to understand this geometry of atrocity.

I suppose these images are the twenty-first-century version of those black-and-white photos of cops and their dogs attacking nonviolent black protestors or that Vietnamese man who is one second away from getting his brains blown out by a soldier.

... So, yeah, back to my recovering-Seventh-Day-Adventist pal’s question regarding why anyone would voluntarily watch violence.

Here’s what I believe: Artists must walk into the fire with our souls bared and our eyes wide open and feed on the nightmares that are happening in our midst. And we must find a way to use these images—especially the horrific ones—in a manner that makes it impossible for people to hide inside their iPods and ignore what’s being done in their names.

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Meanwhile, did anyone else note that this Outsource Everything administration contracted control of our ports to the Arabs?

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And did you know that this past Sunday was EVOLUTION SUNDAY?

This little soire didn’t receive the publicity that Frist’s Creationist Sunday event garnered, but Evolution Sunday is part of the Clergy Letter Project—a religious response to fundamentalists’ insistence that real Christians must choose between modern science and their religion.

Turns out over 10,000 ministers disagree with Frist’s fundamentalism. They signed a letter stating that evolution is “a foundational scientific truth” and say that rejecting it “is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”

They also said

We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.

The bad news is that most of the signatories are from mainline Protestant denominations, which are shrinking nearly as fast as evangelical fundie churches grow.

And here’s an interesting spin on a vote that actually endorses incorporating intelligent design into South Carolina classroom materials.

John Drake opened his AP article thusly:

COLUMBIA—The Education oversight Committee voted Monday to reject standards for high school biology that deal with teaching evolution and insisted the curriculum incorporate critical analysis.

Now I know you’re probably thinking his “critical analysis” involves evidence-based methodologies, but he’s actually referring to creationism.

And now I’ll end on a personal note.

My triathlete ex Tree just found out that she has a 69 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has only radiation treatment and an 81 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has chemo and radiation. (She elected for chemo, naturally.)

So please give yourself a breast exam. Today.
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161. SINGING ... ABOUT THE DARK TIMES

From the Archives

(October 2005) So. Scientists have determined that the 1918 flu pandemic was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. Scientists also speculate that AIDS is a monkey virus that jumped directly to humans.

Now bear with me ‘cause I’ll come back to that. But, in the meantime, anthropologists argue that humans have survived as a species, in part, because our ability to communicate allows us to weed out, through ostracism or physical elimination, the bloodthirsty bullies who would destroy our communities.

Unlike chimpanzees, we homo sapiens manage to silence our bullies in an effort to sustain our species.

Yet homo sapiens engineered the Holocaust. The Crusades. Destroyed priceless cultural artifacts—destroyed thought—during the Dark Ages and beyond. Introduced untold atrocities in the twentieth century. Engineered the disasppeared. And Rwanda. And Darfur.

Now we have reached another juncture when the Christianists have become the arrogant, aggressive iron-fisted bullies who are attempting to silence alternative viewpoints, to silence diversity.

In our time, it is the Donald Trumps of the world—the people who say, with glee, You’re fired! as we sit on our couches eating popcorn and celebrating such meanness—not the Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings Jrs or Bobby Kennedys of the world—who are revered, some photogenic asshole on Survivor who flexes his abs for the camera while stabbing a teammate in the back who is lauded as the new American hero.

Meanwhile, we have elected a president who used his Daddy’s connections to weasel his way out of serving in the armed services but now dons war gear in an effort to pass himself off as a hero. And a mean-spirited, heartless preacher who shows up at gay children’s funerals waving a “God Hates Fags” placards and shouting to the boy’s mourning parents that their child is in Hell where s/he belongs is celebrated as a moral hero by people who consider themselves moral.

We worship the biz school detritis of suburban America—the glamorous, consumer-branded offspring of corporate CEOs and the idle rich who will do anything in the name of bidness and retaining their status among the economic elite.

So I guess it makes sense that the Christianists have followed suit and realized that American citizens want a mean Jerry Falwell-type and not some kind-hearted country bumpkin Will Campbell-type who admonishes us to fulfill Christ’s directive to love one another, damn it!

Evangelists who once proclaimed Jesus’s message of love and inclusiveness now strut their power on stage and their hatred over the radio waves, garner control from their tax-protected pulpits and rake in millions spreading hatred as God’s unerring truth.

Modernity, twentieth-century German Jewish philosophers Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno argue, is marked by a superstitious worship of oppressive force (and by a concomitant reliance on oblivion, poet Carolyn Forché would add).

I fear people who are convinced that they hold the only version of truth, perhaps because I grew up surrounded by too damn many fundamentalists who wanted to control my and everyone else’s mind, body, and soul. I fear people like Eric Rudolph who are so convinced that their god gives them the right to silence all other interpretations of truth that they believe they are justified in walking into a bar and spraying nails into fellow human beings.

And I fear the neighborhood Eric Rudolphs who spread homohate and misogyny across their kitchen tables and backyard fences.

Today, American universities, like universities in Tehran and other theocracies, are teeming with students who “have an unwavering moral compass that is not swayed by public opinion” (as several grad. students informed me before refusing to complete a writing assignment that required them to argue both sides of an issue).

It’s no longer paranoid to imagine American students reporting professors who don’t espouse the presidential administration’s iron-fisted policies to some thought Gestapo that will monitor library books and e-mail and telephone calls, hold us without cause for indeterminate periods of time without ever pressing charges because we spoke out in the name of justice, democracy.

Professors who dare discuss a controversial topic (or who insist that students stick to the topic instead of monopolizing discussion time with their repeated bigotry) are dragged through the mud in newspapers and punished for preaching reason.

Meanwhile, a university degree is something to be purchased, just a piece of paper that suburban parents buy for their children like designer clothes.

But what about knowledge for the sake of knowledge, enlightenment? That’s what kept me working to pay my tuition even when I was exhausted, what keeps my artist friends and me up nights reveling in new ideas and exploring new ways of thinking and seeing and interpreting and moving in the world, our place in it.

My mother used to threaten to send me to Bob Jones University when I mocked Baptist doctrines and I count my blessings every day that religious school vouchers were not available back when I was a kid. I try to remember to recognize how fortunate I am that I was able to attend public schools where—at least in some cases—such narrow doctrines were challenged.

But today Christianists are in a position to hold their children prisoner to these ignorant views, to define the conversation within the parameters of their own narrow world view. And, since Reagan did away with balanced reporting, Christianists can purchase television shows (on, say, the National Geographic channel) that assert their so-called Intelligent Design or whatever philosophy they’re currently espousing as scientific truth without justifying it.

Did you know that there are two different rafting tours down the Grand Canyon: one for scientists and one for people who espouse the theory of intelligent design? Ponder that. And even the once-credible New York Times spends far too much time furthering the president’s agenda instead of presenting objective news (but that’s a topic for another day).

What comes to us via our TV screens and the radio and in our newspapers today may not be factual, may instead be whatever message a sponsor paid for us to hear.

Or shall I just state the obvious: Our reality is determined by the market.

Christianists would argue that science is but an advertisement as well, but some of them have never even taken a legitimate science course from a legitimate scientist. Why then should they be allowed to lecture about this field of expertise?

So many Americans—like Bush’s current Supreme Court nominee—base their world view solely on what they define as the perfect word of God and insist that patterns found in our natural world are immaterial.

Carolyn Forché notes, in her introduction to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, that

the gap between self and other opens up the problem of relativism that has bedeviled modern philosophy, politics, and poetry. Respect for otherness seems always to release the specter of an infinite regress. The language of religion therefore becomes quite important in this supposedly secular century, for religion traditionally makes claims for universality and unimpeachable truth.

And some of the most flagrant forms of institutionalized violence in our era, she notes, have been directed toward specific religions (during the Holocaust) or against religion in general (as in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe).

Religion in our age of atrocity bears substantial responsibility for human suffering.

I try to believe that most of us are reasonable people who are likewise appalled by the fact that we seem to be worshipping Donald Trump.

(Surely that must appall people at some level.)

I try to believe these people are grasping for morals in a world that feels increasingly out of control and meaningless.

The Christian church is an easy answer in such a world. It provides a social outlet for our children, still teaches the Golden Rule, offers up a (patriotic) version of the Ten Commandments, the promise of salvation, clear boundaries.

The problem is, the modern evangelical movement, the fundamentalists, are also attempting to introduce a new dark ages.

WHAT HAPPENS IF THE RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISTS SUCCEED?

A lawyer friend and I have long philosophical conversations as often as we can manage. Her lawyer husband was on Clinton’s shortlist to be the next Supreme Court justice and said, after the Meiers nomination, We’ve gotten it all wrong. We thought it was abortion, but it’s religion. The ultimate goal is not to overturn Roe v. Wade, but to force their religious beliefs onto the rest of us.

That writing’s been on the wall for some time now.

My friend is re-reading Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale now and it’s scaring the living shit out of her. She says she still can’t believe that we’re actually in a place where the possibility of waking up to discover that her bank account has been closed and her money placed in her husband’s account does not seem so far outside the realm of possibility anymore.

I think of the homeschooled Christianist children, the ones who never even get a chance to experience Enlightenment thought, in terms of Plato’s Parable of the Cave. They’re indoctrinated now, afraid, unable to turn their heads and acknowledge the light at the opening of the cave, and thus continue to insist that the world is black and white, without nuance, without subtlety. They’re rigid with fear and ignorant, yet insist that everyone else see the world through their narrow black and white lens.

There’s a reason Hitler went after the artists, the free-thinkers, first. A reason the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti was sent to forced-labor camp where his words were silenced.

Carolyn Forché notes that,

as North Americans, we have been fortunate: wars for us [provided we are not combatants] are fought elsewhere, in other countries. The cities bombed are other people’s cities. The houses destroyed are other people’s houses. We are also fortunate in that we do not live under martial law [yet]. There are nominal restrictions on state censorship; our citizens are not sent into exile. We are legally and juridicially free to choose our associates, and to determine our communal lives. But perhaps we should not consider our social lives as merely products of our choice: the social is a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protests disseminated. It is the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.

Still, I stand by Bertolt Brecht’s belief: In the dark times ... there will be singing. About the dark times.

Yet (Medea says, finally getting back to those scientists and the bird flu that jumped to the human species and making a huge specious leap), sometimes I wonder if we should compare this cowboy Christianist mindset that now dominates our land to rogue chimpanzee behavior that threatens whole species.

134. AGE OF UNREASON

From the Archives

(August 2005) So yeah I know I should probably just paste a hyperlink here instead of pasting an entire (brief) article, but just quit reading already if you aren’t concerned about the fact that only 28 percent of US citizens believe in evolution but 68 percent believe in Satan. And since Bush's endorsement of so-called Intelligent Design, the battle between faith and reason is growing stronger every day.

So here’s a damn good article:

WIDESPREAD IGNORANCE
by Sam Harris, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted on ALTERNET August 10, 2005

President Bush has endorsed the pseudo-scientific notion of "intelligent design" (ID) and declared it to be a legitimate alternative to the theory of evolution. This is not surprising, as he has always maintained that "the jury is still out" on the question of evolution.

But the jury is not out—indeed it was well in before President Bush was even born—and anyone familiar with modern biology knows that ID is nothing more than a program of political and religious advocacy masquerading as science.

It is for this reason that the scientific community has been divided on just how (or whether) to dignify the spurious claims of ID "theorists" with a response. While understandable, I believe that such scruples are now misplaced. The Trojan Horse has passed the innermost gates of the city, and scary religious imbeciles are now spilling out.

According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution.

As the President is well aware, believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national importance.

Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious dogma.

More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy.

Unreason is now ascendant in the United State—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. Likewise, Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria" served only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that there is only one magisterium.

Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn't; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn't. It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort. The issue is not, as ID advocates allege, whether science can "rule out" the existence of the biblical God.

There are an infinite number of ludicrous ideas that science could not "rule out," but which no sensible person would entertain. The issue is whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that religious dogmatists believe—that God exists and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings; that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception (and, therefore, that blastocysts are the moral equivalents of persons); etc. There simply is no good reason to believe such things, and scientists should stop hiding their light under a bushel and make this emphatically obvious to everyone.

Imagine President Bush addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in these terms: "Behind all of life and all history there is a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful Zeus." Imagine his speech to Congress containing the sentence "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that Apollo is not neutral between them."

Clearly, the commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity and strangeness of many of our beliefs. Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words like "God" and "crusade" and "wonder-working power" mean to him. Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted that the Bush White House "is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery." This should trouble us as much as it troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world.

The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

A president who regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century—and he’s certainly not talking about the fact that 98 percent of our genes are the same as those of chimps! And, these days, our populace revels in its own ignorance.

Sadly, that describes a good portion of the populace of the deep South (and, yeah, I know I just raised some Southerners' hackles, but they also know that this is true. Plus, I'm from the deep south myself and I choose to live and beat my head against the wall here, so I'm going to say it anyway. Only now it's the entire country, seems like, and not just one region, that's embracing this unreason.

A commentor says “If there ever was an Anti-Christ, I would have to say that it is religion.”

BEST OF SPAM: Find Mr. Right and Keep Him. (No thanks. Saw enough hairy backs at the beach this past weekend.)

97. WILD IDEA

From the Archives

(May 2005) I had this wild dream last night, probably because I reread my entry BIG ENGINE, LITTLE RADIATOR and so was thinking about the theory of evolution and subspecies that survive and subspecies that become extinct and those idiots in Kansas with their insistence on so-called intelligent design and that little mustard plant that fixed its own defective gene etc. etc. etc. instead of falling asleep.

Anyway, in my dream I was a scientist sitting at a wrought-iron table outside a little café—the sort of place Ernest Hemingway describes in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”—smoking a cigarette and drinking a java and doodling on a newspaper while pondering the world.

And I said to myself, Self, we classify groups in a long historical glance but what if humans are really divided into two or more groups? If, like Cain and Abel, we are subspecies competing for the same land, the same products, our own laws.

Maybe mutations in our genes, these massive evolutionary changes that differentiate us, account for our superstitions, our insistence on religion, the differences between the reptilian brains of, say, a Kansas City flat-earther and an wiccan dude working in the creative force in Seattle.

My dream question was a radical one: Is there only one form of human walking around or could we be a collection of subspecies competing for survival in a common environment?

Odd dream. Had to write it down as soon as I woke up because I knew THAT wouldn’t stay with me for long!

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In other news, today I overheard a woman describe herself as having “free-hanging labia.” What a description! She also said, while describing a career change, “I feel like I’ve got my fanny hanging out there and everyone’s looking at my butt crack.”

The woman's got a way with descriptions.

LISTENING TO: That sexy Lucinda Williams song about masturbating: I take off my watch and my earrings, my bracelets and everything. Lie on my back and I moan at the ceiling Ohhhh my baby...