Mark W Tiedemann

Category: culture

  • Ada Lovelace Day

    I just discovered that there is a day for this brilliant woman.

    Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, a scholar, and wrote what is arguably the very first computer program in an essay about Charles Babbage.  Of course, since she was a woman at a time when women were considered not to have either brains or rights, she would have been seen as an anomaly at best, a monster at worst.  Since she had some position, however, she has not been forgotten or dismissed.

    Warning: personal opinion follows.

    Women who denigrate the idea of Feminism and fail to understand how tenuous their position is vis-a-vis  history cause me heartburn.  If they think about it at all, they seem to believe Woman As Property happens in the Third World and nothing like that can happen here (wherever the particular Here happens to be).

    But then you run into something like this.  One paragraph from this report says it all:

    Females do not have voting privileges, but are generally allowed to speak at meetings, according to Klaetsch. Sunday’s meeting was the first time in recent history that St. John’s Council President Don Finseth exercised his authority to prevent females from speaking, church members say.

    This is in Wisconsin.  Recently.  I grant you, this is not a state practice, but in these times when so many people seem to feel that religion trumps civic law, it’s a disturbing thing to behold.  The question in my mind is, why don’t all the women there pick up their marbles and leave?

    Because they either buy into the second class status accorded them or they like something about the condition they inhabit.  Western women have it easy in such matters—no one will stone them if they get a little uppity.  For them, this is a “lifestyle” choice, at least functionally.  In parts of the Middle East and Africa it’s life or death.

    Back when I was in high school, in the supposedly enlightened United States of America, in 1971, I took an architectural drawing class.  The room was filled with boys.  All boys.

    One girl was taking the class.  Where was she?  The teacher put her in a separate room, the supply room at the back, with her own drafting table and tools.  Why?  Because the morons inhabiting the rest of the class wouldn’t leave her alone, wouldn’t let her do her work, teased her, ridiculed her, abused her, told her she was weird, unnatural, a lesbian, that she wanted to be a man, that all she needed was a good screwing and she’d get this crazy notion of being an architect right out her system.  I heard this, witnessed some of it.  It made me profoundly uncomfortable at the time, but I didn’t understand it other than as the same run-of-the-mill bullying that I myself had been subjected to all through grade school.

    But it went beyond that, I now see, because what was doing ran counter to some idea of what the relative roles of men and women are “supposed” to be.  Did the boys indulging the abuse understand that?  No, of course not.  They were parroting what they’d grown up seeing at home and elsewhere, with no more reflection or self-awareness than the hardwired belief that Real Americans all love baseball that Communism was automatically evil and John Wayne was just shy of the second coming.  Analysis would be the natural enemy to a traditional view that maintained an absurd status quo and should therefore be resisted, hence anyone among their peers that preferred reading to sports was also an enemy.

    So celebrate Ada Lovelace Day.  No one, male or female, should accept restrictions imposed by cant and tradition and national dogma.  But until it is entirely recognized that we are all of us People first, male and female next, and that equal rights accrue to people, not types, none of us are safe in our predilections and ambitions.

  • In Charge and At Large!

    Over this past weekend I had a couple of conversations with some people about the whole prom night controversy and one of the things that got said, which I’ve heard many times before in other contexts, was that, “don’t you think the people in authority know what they’re doing?”

    As if that is any answer when they demonstrate that, clearly, whatever they’re doing it has nothing to do with common sense, ethics, or any kind of honesty.

    I’ve  been hearing that rejoinder for decades, ever since Vietnam, and I keep coming back to that scene in All The President’s Men when Deep Throat lectures Robert Redford about the nature of the administration and he tells him, really, these are not very smart guys.  It was a revelatory moment for me, way back then, and ever since I have had a difficult time accepting any kind of authority Just Because.

    Because no, I don’t think many of these folks who are In Charge know very well what they’re doing.  They got these jobs on some kind of popularity contest basis and as long as nothing requiring a great deal of thought comes before them, it’s just administrative blank-filling.  But when they actually have to make a decision about something for which there is no line on the form…

    The school board—and maybe some of the parents as well—in Itawamba County, Mississippi, reacted from personal revulsion.  They looked at Constance McMillen and thought  “Oh, that’s not right!” and gave it no more thought, because, hey, who’d gainsay them?  The Students?  Big deal.

    But when Constance sued their asses, it changed to a “who the hell do you think you are?” affair and those In Charge, in a fit of pique, demonstrated even more clearly that, regardless of right or wrong, no  student was going to dictate to them, nosirree Bob, and most especially not some tuxedo-wearin’ dyke…I can picture the seething, redfaced rage at the presumption of that girl, tellin’ us we can’t bar anybody we damn please from the prom, like she has rights…

    They reverted to the school yard and turned it into a pissing contest.  Do I think they know what they’re doing?

    No, I don’t think such people are very smart or have good reasons for what they do and I think people who defend their actions on that assumptions themselves don’t give these matters much thought and would likely do as bad if not worse a job.  And that seems fairly consistent with what I see as a given in this country, that, when people get together in a large enough bunch, I.Q. is the first casualty.  No one wants to rock the boat, no one wants their sacred cows slaughtered, and no one wants to offend their neighbors.

    Is it any wonder things are a mess?

    Just askin’…

  • Prom Night, America

    Constance McMillen wanted to go to her high school prom.  Like most students in the United States, she doubtless saw the event as the capstone of four years of effort, a gala event for students that represents a reward for getting to the end of their senior year and, presumably, graduating not only from high school but into adulthood.  One night of glamor and revelry, dressed at a level of style and affluence many might never indulge again, to celebrate the matriculation into the next level of independence.  A party where students can show themselves—to their peers and to themselves—as adults.

    It has become something more, probably, than it was ever intended to be.  Patterned after high society “debuts” at which young ladies of good breeding (and potential wealth) are introduced to Society (with a capital “S”) in a manner that, when stripped of its finery and fashionable gloss, is really a very expensive dating service, with the idea of creating future matches between “suitable” couples, the high school prom is a showcase, a public demonstration of, presumably, the virtues of a graduating class.  Over the last few decades, even the less well-off schools strive to shine in what a prom achieves.  Instead of a local band in the high school gym, with bunting and streamers and colored lights to “hide” the fact that normally gym class and basketball are performed in this room, the prom has become elevated to a decent hotel with a ball room, a better-priced band (or a DJ), and all the attributes of a night on the town in Hollywood.  Tuxedos and gowns are de rigueur and students’ families spare no expense to deck their children out in clothes they really often can’t afford.  Limousines transport the budding fashionistas and their knights errant to the evening’s festivities and you know this cost a fortune.

    Students may be forgiven for believing that it’s for them.

    In its crudest terms, the prom is for the community, a self-congratulatory demonstration of how well the community believes it has done by its youth.  It is a statement about what that community would like to see itself as.  It is—still—a match game, from which future marriages may derive.  It is a staged exhibition of affirmation that the students have come out the end of twelve years of “schooling” the way the community wants them to.  It is, in short, less about the students, and mostly about the school and the community that pays for it.

    (Match game?  Certainly.  And in this, the students play the game.  Truth in advertising requires that I make a disclaimer here.  I did not attend my high school prom.  It was 1973, a time of volcanic social upheaval, and for years I used the excuse that I didn’t go because I didn’t want to participate in an antiquated, farcical, “establishment” exercise in peurile stagecraft.  The truth was, however, I didn’t go because I couldn’t get a date, and without a date, what’s the point?  Part of the shine of prom night is to demonstrate your suitability as a future spouse, your “eligibility”, and showing up solo would be a clear statement that you’re unwanted goods, rejected.  Why couldn’t I get a date?  Ultimately, I’ll never know, but after asking 86 girls and getting a consistent NO, I gave up.)

    So when someone—anyone—wants to attend the prom in a way that violates those community expectations, you may be assured there will be a negative reaction.

    The last time we saw this sort of reaction was—probably—when blacks and whites started going to the prom as couples.  (Especially a black male with a white female, and if the female was blonde, oh my the reaction increased, because there has always been something particularly provocative about the idea of black males touching white females in this country.  This has largely passed now in this country, but when I was a teenager it was guaranteed to cause a fight, certainly an uproar, and many a racist conversation over dinner.)  I personally recall an instance in which a couple of males with LONG HAIR were forbidden to attend the prom unless they got their hair cut to a “proper” length.

    Clothing is a big deal.  Jeans are probably frowned upon, certainly t-shirts.  Another instance I recall was a prom queen who showed up in a dress with a neckline that descended to her navel.  She was already there.  The guardians at the gate quickly assembled a bouquet of flowers three times the normal size and instructed her to hold it up to cover her skin, at least until all the photographs had been taken.

    So we now see a lesbian wishing to bring her date to the prom, dressed in a tuxedo.

    How many violations can we count!  Sexual orientation, dress code, and—probably the most innocent yet deadliest of them all—an expectation that the evening was for her.

    She sued.  The court said her rights had been violated.  She gets to attend.  What does the school do?  What, in effect, does the community do?

    Cancels the prom.

    Now everyone is angry at the lesbian.  It’s her fault.  She took their evening away.

    Really?  As I said, students can be forgiven for believing that prom night is for them.  Maybe it would be fairer to tell them when they’re freshmen that, in fact, no, prom night is not for you, it’s for US.  It’s to make US feel good, feel secure, feel justified, feel vindicated, validated, and reaffirmed that the vision we have for our kids and the community we wish to live in will not soon perish from the Earth.  How dare a single student presume to change the rules of the game and assume that this is somehow her night, as if, somehow, she had any rights at all?

    Because she is, still, a student.  She doesn’t have her diploma yet, only the promise of one, and until she has that piece of paper in hand, she’s a Child.  Prom night is only so she can get a taste of what it could be like to be an adult.

    The hypocrisy is profound.  All the accoutrements of the modern prom clearly—CLEARLY—reveal that among the other expectations students have for the night, many of them, is that at the end of the dancing and the lights and the pretty clothes and the fake debuts and the pretending at a class status most of them will never have they will get laid.  I say hypocrisy because no school official or community leader would ever admit that, yet they accede to the use of privately-leased limos and the holding of proms in hotels, exercising no control whatsoever on the after-hour activities.  Not, I hasten to add, that they could keep students from indulging themselves anyway, but by relinquishing their traditional roles of control of an ostensibly school activity they tacitly approve that activity on that night.  Which makes perfect sense, since, as I said, part of the ritual is matchmaking.

    How could they control it?  Simple.  Put the event back in the high school gym, forbid limousines, require parents to escort their kids to and from the prom.

    Oh, but the local business community would suffer!  All that money!

    Hypocrisy.

    And it gets pointed up by a young woman who wishes to show up as herself, flaunting the fact that her sexual proclivities run counter to the norm—because whatever the reality is between individuals about their relationships, to the public at large homosexuality is inevitably, inextricably tangled up with sex.  People can wink and squint and avert their gaze at what most 17 and 18 year-olds are doing and pretend that, really, maybe they’re not, but Constance McMillen put it right out there.  Showing up at the prom underlined so many of the realities of that night that it made people squirm.

    But rather than deny the hypocrisy, the school canceled the prom, thereby proving that prom night is about their expectations, not about the students.

    Now Constance has engaged on another suit, this one to force the school to hold the prom.  I hope she wins.  Because for four years, high school students are allowed to assume that prom night is their night, and to have it revealed in such a blatant and spineless way that, no, it’s not, requires an answer.  If you advertise something in a particular way, you should deliver.  As for Itawamba County, Mississippi?  Suck it up and live with it.

  • Celebrity and Unread Books

    J.D. Salinger is dead.  Age 91, he died, according to reports, of natural causes, at home, away from the media.

    I confess—I never read him.  Catcher In The Rye is one of those touchstone books everyone had read, but not I.  For whatever reason, it never crossed my path.  I remember those bright red covers in high school, sort of wondered about it, but…

    We can’t read everything, and some books, if you don’t get to them at a certain period in your life, you might as well not bother.  I doubt Holden Caulfield’s adventures would mean to me now what they would have back then.  Besides, I have a lot of other stuff to read and I know I’ll never get to it all.

    Not long ago, the screenwriter Josh Olson (A History Of Violence) did an essay about the problem of time and professionalism.  I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script nails on the head certain issues all professionals face, that of giving time to those seeking validation, unwarranted assistance, or just some kind of reason to feel put upon.  I’ve been guilty myself of violating some of these strictures—wholly unknowing, naively—but, once I realized the mistake, never repeated it.  Some authors get downright strident about this issue and occasionally sound like screaming paranoid misanthropes when they finally come back at someone for not getting it.  See, it’s a no-win situation.  You take the piece and read it and it’s awful, you have a choice—tell the truth or lie.  Either one will get you into trouble and you end up looking like an ass.  But what if it’s good?  You still have a problem.  There is a lot of “good” work out there that will simply never find a publisher or producer.  It ain’t fair, it just is what it is.  There’s not enough room in the world for every piece of work.  So what do you do?  Recommend this person to your agent or publisher?  And what if it continues to be unsalable for any of a hundred reasons that have little or nothing to do with the work in hand?  You don’t run the universe, but if your acquaintance still can’t sell it, you look like either a moron or obviously someone who didn’t sincerely go to bat for the work.

    But in my case, this seldom comes up.  I’m one of those who doesn’t sell well most of the time.  It hurts, but there are reasons, and I’m not going to take advantage of people who have no stake in my career to either vent my frustration or climb over other people who may be just or more deserving.  (Maybe I’m a sap for doing that, but you have to live with yourself and shouldn’t do things that might make that difficult.)  But it does apply to reading in general—there just ain’t enough time for all the great books in the world.

    Salinger is not likely to be on my shelf anytime before my own demise.

    What I don’t get in people like Salinger is the recluse stuff.  I admit, to me it looks like a pose.  He’s never been out-of-print.  Nor has he ever had to write another novel.  I sometimes wonder if he engineered it so that he could just stop when he was on top.  Not a bad strategy, especially if you subsequently can’t finish another book.  But I admit, one of the reasons I’ve always done the work I’ve done has been a secret desire to be in the limelight.  Art of any kind has a bit of performance about it and artists who shun the stage always struck me as insincere.  I’m probably wrong about that and that’s okay.  I just don’t get it myself.

    But J.D. Salinger, who published his three volumes way back when and took the accolades to the bank ever since, who eschewed publicity and thereby generated mountains of it, has died, and has done so quite publicly even though he was at home, out of the limelight, with family and friends, apparently getting what he wanted.  Famous for rejecting fame.

    In the meantime, another writer, of considerable talent and certainly more productivity, is in the process of dying on the other side of the country, and except for the community of people who love her books will likely die largely ignored by the media and the public at large.  Kage Baker writes science fiction.  Her series of novels and stories of The Company are fine pieces, the first few exquisite disquisitions on history.  She writes fun yarns about characters who are both fully realized and compelling.  No, it’s doubtful any of them would ever become iconic in the way that Salinger’s relatively meager output has, but then I bet Kage’s, page for page, are a lot more fun.

    I’m not suggesting that there is any cosmic unfairness going on here.  The Universe doesn’t give a damn about fair.  The very idea is absurd.  I’m just saying that the perverse manner in which our attention gets manipulated often results in overlooking wonderful things.  Such is the case with my own indifference at age 15 or 16 when I should have read Catcher In The Rye, but instead…let me see, that was 1970 or 71, so I would have been reading Heinlein and Clarke, Bradbury and Zelazny, Henderson and Asimov.  (I read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged about that time as well, not to mention a goodly dollop of Dickens, Hugo, Twain, and Hemingway.)  I had my sites set on what I thought were loftier planes of literary territory and this one just…slipped by.

    My point?  Only that it makes no sense to regret what you haven’t gotten to, especially if what you have discovered has enlivened your existence and widened your vistas.  If you haven’t read certain books because your were busy reading others, well, good for you.  The only sad thing would be is if you didn’t read certain books because you couldn’t make up your mind which and didn’t read any.  Or, worse, if you didn’t read any because you had no idea there was anything worth while inside them.

    But I would urge anyone reading this to go find a Kage Baker novel right now and indulge some wonder.

  • Quote For The Coming Times

    “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” Buddha

  • Avatar

    Okay, so I contributed to the James Cameron Self Love Fund and saw AVATAR. Yesterday we went to the 3-D showing (no way I would spend money on the normal view, I can wait for the DVD the way I do with 99% of the movies I see anymore).  I’ve had a day to think about it now and I’ve come to some conclusions, which are hardly profound, but I think worth saying.

    Let me say up front that I wasn’t bored.  Visually, this is a stunning achievement.  But that’s what everyone is saying.  It is, in fact, the best 3-D I’ve ever seen.  Often in the past the effect is minimal and the cost in headache high.  This was neither.  And it fully supported the visuals rather than masking mundane or poor image elements.  Pandora, the planet involved, is magnificently realized.  Cool stuff.  Real gosh wow.

    The biology is problematic.  You have a wide mix of lifeforms analogous to Earth.  Some big lumbering critters like hippos or rhinoceri that also have features of a dinosaur, and some small things that are clearly wolves, and one big nasty cat-like thing that’s like a sabertooth tiger.  It’s unclear if any of these creatures are mammalian, but it doesn’t matter much.  Dinosaur analogs.  Most of them apparently four-legged.  But the “horses” the natives ride are six-legged, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ thoats.  How does that play out in evolutionary terms?  Well, maybe that’s a quibble.

    How then do you evolve humanoids out of this?  Well, maybe that’s a quibble, too.  This film is not about science on any level, regardless of the few bits of dialogue suggesting there are, you know, scientists, and that there is a studyable cause to any of this.

    Because the story, basically, is hackneyed, cynical, and cliched.  I have to hand it to Cameron, he rips off the best.  Strong elements of Anne McCaffery’s Pern in here, as well as Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and a nod to LeGuin (The Word For World Is Forest), Poul Anderson (Call Me Joe), even Joe Haldeman (All My Sins Remembered).  If I dug through my memories I could probably come up with at least half a dozen more clear “borrowings” all mixed in.  There’s not an original idea in any two minutes.

    The plotline, however, is straight out of post-colonial self-loathing and Western angst and while there is much to be mined from that pool that is legitimate for drama, its deployment here was purely sentimental button-pushing.  All the triggers were in place, with strong connections to the American Indian, Vietnam, and even a bit of Afghanistan just to bring it up to date.  And it was all thrown into the mix regardless of the logic behind it, which is profoundly flawed.  The few genuinely interesting touches are overhwelmed by the self-righteous indignation Cameron clearly wished to evoke.  We see Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and Custer’s Last Stand all in service to making a statement about…

    The Big Bad Nasty Western Corporate Oligarchy Bent On Destroying Everything To Mine The Last Fragment Of Coal.

    In this case, Unobtanium.

    Which is somehow worth the cost of an expedition that would bankrupt the planet for the next century.

    Which, if we buy the premise that interstellar travel is now practical, would be a pointless exercise in colonial assholery with no upside in terms of profit or prestige, because that one assumption means we’ve solved our energy and resource problems  and the scenario depicted rests upon a 19th Century mindset that would no longer be supportable—just as it pretty much isn’t now.

    Which makes AVATAR a rather stupid movie.

    Not that there wouldn’t be a way to actually sell this with a little extra work.  With a bit more imagination.  With less desire to beat up on a cultural motif that doesn’t actually need a half-billion dollar 3-D piece of propagandistic hyper sentimentalized derivative schlock movie to achieve.

    Very simply posit that these trespassers are rogues.  It could be done in any of a number of ways and actually make a better story.  Not much better, perhaps, but it might be a little less cynical…

    Why am I bothering to detail all this?  Because, beautiful as this film is—and it is beautiful—it pisses me off to see so much money dumped into a third-rate piece of hack writing when there are fine artists and projects begging for a little support, who have stories that would benefit the world much more than this dead-end preaching.

    End of rant.

  • Secular Charity

    On the chance that you’re like me and don’t really want to hand your money over to a religious organization and trust that the charity work you think you’re paying for won’t be redirected into missionary work, here is a link to a list of secular and atheist charities.

    I’m not at all sure if anyone assumes atheists are the functional equivalent of Scrooge at this time of year—assuming anyone thinks about it at all—but it’s nice to be able to point out that, in fact, we’re not.  If you think about it for a minute, atheists ought to be more likely to support charitable work, since we believe that people are all we’ve got.  God, in my view, isn’t going to make anything better for anyone—it will be the hard working and generous guy or gal over there who shell out to help out.  It’s always burned me a bit when I hear individual generosity re-attributed to a deity who, in my view, had nothing to do with the generosity and, if real, has a lot to answer for over the need for charity.

    So if anyone is looking for a non-religious venue for giving, there’s a list.

    Or you can just find someone who’s having a hard time this year and help them out directly.

    Merry Christmas.

    (And no, that is not hypocritical—Christmas has been a functionally secular holiday for a very, very long time now and I don’t feel at all hesitant to use the name.  Even if Jesus wasn’t real, a lot of what is attributed to the character is pretty worthwhile.)

  • A Little Bragging

    It’s my blog, I get to be self-indulgent.  I want to brag a little.  I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep this up, but for now it feels good to be able to make these claims.

    I’m 55.  I am amazed at that fact when I stop to think about it.  I don’t feel 55.  But having never been it before, I’m not exactly sure how it’s supposed to feel.  In any event, I am, as I say, 55.

    This morning I went to the gym.

    I went to the gym after walking the dog—about a mile, that’s what we usually do—during which hegira I had to run a full block twice to avoid loose dogs.  (Coffey will not back down, no matter what, and the last thing I need is to have fighting dogs at my feet.)  I’ve never been a great runner, but I can run a city block full out and not have to sit down.

    At the gym, I went through my new routine, briefly as follows:

    Crunches, curls, tricep extensions, leg curls, extensions, calf raises, bench press, dips, shrugs, straight bar curls, cross-overs, legs press, flies, rows, pectoral flies, shoulder raises, latimus pull-downs, and a few assorted other motions totaling 19 separate exercises.  It took about an hour and twenty minutes.

    I’m benching 205 (which is down from my best, but still), the bar curls run from 45 lbs up to 90 lbs, lats at 180 lbs.  Everything else falls within those parameters.

    I weigh about 170 to 175.  I’d like to drop ten pounds, but I really have little to complain about.  Bit of a spare tire, but overall I’m pretty solid.

    I’ve started doing aerobics on the mornings I don’t do the gym.

    What, do I want to live forever?  No, not really, but I while I am alive I want to be able to physically do what I want.

    I am tired often, but it’s more mental than physical.  My knees bother me a bit and occasionally my left elbow complains, but nothing incapacitating, just annoying.

    I know men half my age who are incapable of a quarter of what I do.

    To an extent, this is an unfair comparison, because as we all know the United States is in the throes of an epidemic of obesity and lack of exercise.  Couch Potato Syndrome had taken root.  True, a lot of it has to do with the nature of work—more and more of it is behind a desk, at a computer, and even the work that does require some physical activity has far more machine assistance than ever before.  But a lot of the problem is self-inflicted.

    Anyway, I wanted to take a few minutes, on my own blog, to do a little bragging.  One of these days it’s going to fall apart on me.  Things fail.  But until then…

  • Prophets, Providence, and Problems: An Observation

    This is one of those notions I stumble on from time to time while daydreaming or free associating.  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about religion of late—as how could many people not be, what with the state of the world (he says with tongue in his other cheek, being both ironic and absurd)?—and trying to come up with some theory of it that might bleed off the poisons that seem to bubble up from it from time to time.

    Someone said something to me that triggered this idea and it’s probably not original.  But we were discussing Roman Catholicism and the observation was made that in its long history it has absorbed more than it has suppressed.

    “Of course it has,” I responded.  “That’s how it began, after all, as a congeries of pagan beliefs subsumed beneath an orthodox umbrella.  It is the perfect example of an assembled religion.”

    Regardless where the initial push came from, whatever its core ideology, the fact is that Roman Catholicism came to fruition as a political entity and it was a model of almost democratic universalism.  The holidays (holy days) are mostly borrowings from other disciplines, retrofitted to make people comfortable with the new paradigm.  Its rituals and mysteries are all adaptations of older religious ideas and practices, including a marvelous transplantation from Egyptian mythology of the entire Jesus myth (Horus—almost all of it is duplicated, including certain names, such as Lazarus, and the whole virgin birth motif, which itself is nothing particularly new).  The architects of Roman Catholicism, let us assume to be more gracious than not, recognized a core set of beliefs that did not of themselves require the trappings of a religion or its concomitant institutions, but also saw that most people would prefer (or require) all that such physical and cultural manifestations afford.  Romans above all understood in their bones the function of public architecture and ceremony.  They seemed instinctively attuned to the idea that to get people to behave a certain way they should live within the physical representations of the philosophies behind such behavior.  Romans were Romans as much because of their cities and roads as because of any political philosophy.  The two supported each other.  The church borrowed that big time.

    But as an assembled religion, it had a problem, which was the necessity to obscure all the past manifestations, cut the ties to all the pagan practices they’d taken over, and embark on a long-term campaign to evoke cultural amnesia in order to represent themselves as The Truth.  The problem with this is two-fold:  there are always going to be those who know the facts (because you can’t destroy all the evidence, if nothing else) and you have to be very careful about how you present and protect your core ideas, lest people start interpreting them any old way they please.

    Along comes the Protestant Reformation, which was at base a movement to return to the Church to its original principles and free it from the “corruptions” that had crept in over the centuries.

    The reformers, smart as they may have been, labored under a handicap, namely the overwhelming success the Roman Catholic Church had enjoyed in obliterating and subsuming all those borrowed elements.  The reformers at base believed many if not most of the trappings, which were largely secondary to the core principles, which amount to a set of principles quite separate from the “miracle faith” cult it had become.

    So when the Protestant movement began, they took as their goal the idea that the adaptations were the principle elements of their faith, and tried to return themselves to that basis as if it had had no predecessors.  The Catholic Church itself couldn’t just come out and say “Hey, you don’t understand, the whole idea is to adapt and absorb, not build a wall around a few iconic aspects and throw out everything that looks a little different.”

    Roman Catholicism had largely succeeded by being adaptable to local beliefs.  Look at the bizarre nature of Latin American Catholicism as ample proof of this.  Even to this day, the Catholic Church “compromises” its apparent principles to bring others into the fold—look at the recent attempt to retroactively reabsorb Anglicans.

    Protestantism began as a take-no-prisoners response to what some people saw as corruption—the willingness to concede and adapt.  But it assumed that the Church had been based on something originally “pure” and uncorrupted, a set of ideas that stood apart from everything else.  (To a degree, this was true, but not what the Protestants thought identified it as a priori “Christian” orthodoxy.)  They rejected the malleability of Catholicism, drew a line in the philosophical sand, and argued that the essential element of Christianity was the death and resurrection of a prophet they believed had no antecedents.  What that prophet said and what Christianity embodied as a set of principles for living took second place to the mysteries, and they shut their eyes to the possibility of truth in various guises.

    Which is why Protestants burned more witches and killed more Jews than did Catholics, why Protestant treatment of natives wherever encountered has been harsher and in many instances more fatal than Catholic treatment of the same or similar groups, and why fundamentalism is far more a Protestant problem than it is Catholic.

    We arrive at the 21st Century and see many Protestant denominations “maturing” to the point where they recognize that Fortress Christianity is counterproductive and ultimately a wrong-headed approach—but we also see splinter groups from these major denominations more and more that cling ever more fiercely to the notion that the edifice is the message and the heathens must be stamped out, producing virulent strains of anti-rational lunacy.  (Certainly there are Catholic fundamentalists, but they seem to be a disfocussed, almost inarticulate collection of mystic loonies instead of militant dogmatists.)

    The very adaptability that made Roman Catholicism so successful for so long is based on the fact that they started off as a Rube Goldberg assemblage of beliefs and practices that recognized an idea that truth is a thread running through many fabrics, whereas Protestantism had its birth in the idea that there was only one true suit.

    Hence we find that the Catholic Church, for all its other irrationalities, is able to embrace Darwinism, Galileo, and admit it was wrong about the Jews, while the staunchest Creationists and, often, bigots come out of the Protestant movement.  White Supremacist groups are protestant.  The sputtering fear and hatred of Difference is protestant.  The clinging to Milleniallism and hopes for Armageddon are protestant aesthetics.

    Now, I see no way to address this problem unless Roman Catholicism is willing to come clean.  When a pope (not this one!) comes out and says  “Hey, people, you’re missing the point, and it’s our fault that you do” then we might start to see something ameliorative from within the whole Christian community.  But they can’t really do that.  After all this time, the “point” of Catholicism is its continual attempt to absorb.

    Which is better than some Protestant notions of slash and burn.

  • The Paradox of Popularity

    Over on her blog, Kelley Eskridge has a video of a “Bono Moment” in which you see two distinct types of fans interacting with U2’s lead singer.  Check it out and come back here.

    Okay, the guy in the t-shirt obviously is carrying on a conversation.  he may be being a fan, but he hasn’t lost his mind.  The female is being…a groupie, I guess.  Though the groupies I’ve met in my time have been a bit more specific about what they wanted and had a better plan on how to get it.  In any event, the questions Kelley raises are interesting and relate on so many levels to so many different things.  The fan reaction—mindless adulation bordering on deification—looks to me, has always looked to me, like exactly the same kind of nonsense people put into religion.  Mindless, utterly uncritical adoration of an image and the set of emotions with which that image is connected in the mind of the adulant.  You can see the same thing in politics.  To a lesser degree with less public personalities—writers, painters, photographers (I never knew anyone who elevated a photographer to the level of sex god, but I have known people who got off on sleeping with painters, and of course there’s a kind of Nabokovian/Bellow/DeLillo-esque subculture of writer groupies…) and other creative types—but actors and musicians seem to get all the dedicated obsessives.

    I’ve never had this happen to me.  I’m not sure if I’m grateful or resentful—having somebody want to associate themselves with you in a mindless swoon because your work has made them, I don’t know, climax maybe is on a certain level appealing.  But it’s appealing the same way porn is—something most people, if they’re at all sane and grounded, kind of grow out of and get over.  I know I would not find it very attractive now.  When I was twenty-five?  You betcha.  Bring ’em on.

    But if I’d had that then I think I’m fairly sure I would have wearied of it very quickly.  I long ago realized that sex, to me, involved the other person—emphasis on Person—and the best sex I ever had included the good conversations before and, especially, after.  (There is a point, of course, where you realize that sex is a conversation, of a very particular sort, and takes on a whole new dimension, which one-night-stands, no matter how good they might be, just can’t provide.)

    But the real problem with all this is that art is more than just any one thing and the artist is not the art.  The two are inextricably linked.  Here is a video discussing the question of artist-in-relation-to-muse which I find illuminating.  The notion that the talent “arrives” and you act as conduit through which creativity happens is not, as the speaker suggests, a new one, and it’s not one I’m particularly in sympathy with—it all happens in my brain, it’s definitely mine—but I certainly find her analysis of the psychology of following through intriguing and true.  Once the muse is finished with you on a given project, you do not continue to exist as though in the grip of the work.  There is a person there that pre-figures the work and who will be there after it’s done that has all the needs and wants and sensibilities of a normal human being.  To be treated as some kind of transcendence generating machine by people is in some ways disenfranchising.  For a writer, if the well from which inspiration and material are drawn is the honesty of human interaction, then the gushing idiot fan robs the writer, for a few minutes at least, of exactly that.

    But it also sets the artist up to become a prisoner.  A prisoner of other people’s expectations.  Those expectations always play a part in anyone’s life, but certain aspects—the most artificial ones—get exaggerated in the instance of fan adoration.

    Watch Bono shift from one stance to another when he finally acknowledges the female.  No, he doesn’t stop being Bono, but it’s almost as if he says “Oh, it’s time to do this sort of thing now” as he first recognizes her presence and then automatically poses for the camera, with this not-quite-disingenuous smirk.  Because he also recognizes that, however silly this person is being, what she’s feeling right then is her’s and to claim it is artificial is wrong.  Maybe an artificial set of expectations led her to this point, but now that she’s In The Moment, the emotions are real.  If he’d ignored her or told her something snarky in an attempt to snap her out of it, all that would have resulted would have been an ugly moment, a bit of cruelty, and a lot of confusion on the fan’s part.

    Some—perhaps most—of us grow up to a point where, although our respect and admiration for certain artists is immense to the point of feeling like we have nothing meaningful to say to these people (and after all beyond “I really enjoyed your work” what do we have to say to someone we just don’t know?) we realize that they are human beings doing a job of work.  To idolize them is really a selfish act and blinds us to the possibilities in people who do not happen to occupy that slot in our pantheon of significance.

    I was fortunate.  Way back when I was possibly susceptible to becoming a kind of mindless acolyte, I had an opportunity to meet a couple of musical superstars under circumstances that allowed for the human element to dominate.

    The first was a chance encounter with Martin Barre, guitarist of Jethro Tull.  I worked at a camera shop and he came in when the band was in town.  He’d heard that the owner of the shop had a big camera collection, museum quality, and he was interested in buying all or part of it.  I had some of my own photographs hanging in the shop at the time and we ended up talking about photography.  Barre was a collector.  We had a ground upon which we could meet as rough equals and had a good conversation about it.  It lanced the boil of idolization for me (and resulted a couple years later in my being able to go backstage and talk to Ian Anderson and a couple of others, and because of the basis of my albeit small relationship with Barre, the interaction was satisfyingly ordinary in many ways).  Here was just a bloke who liked cameras and was a hobbyist and his talent, while I respected it enormously, didn’t get in the way of actually talking to him.

    The other was with Rick Wakeman and was amusing in the extreme and I’ll save that story for later.  But in both instances, I was able to just talk to these men in a way that standing in an autograph line would never have permitted, and consequently gave me—I suppose I could say “inoculated” me against the mindlessness of fan adulation.

    Make no mistake, I treasure both those encounters as peak experiences.  But I’ve never forgot that such people are gifted but ordinary.

    Ordinary in the way that we all are and few of us are without special qualities and talents.  The circumstances that lead to “stardom” are just that—circumstances.  (Stephen King, for all his gifts as a narrative writer, benefited immensely from a publishing environment that simply does not exist anymore.  Not that he wouldn’t have been significant anyway, but his stature would have taken much longer to achieve and might not have become what it is today without that initial synchrony.)

    (In an argument several years ago involving the president, my opponent kept pushing the position that criticizing the president was the same as insulting the country, to which I finally said “Damnit, the president is not the country—he’s an employee!  Well-paid, highly-placed, enormously powerful, but the son-of-a-bitch works for me!”  It was not a view my opponent had ever seemed to consider before.  It was for him a humanizing moment.)

    I’m not sure what, if anything, to do about fan adulation.  As I said, you can see in this exactly what happens in religious conversion.  The mindlessness, the abandonment of intellect, the handing-over, as it were, of the Self to the momentary care of someone who is seen as Other Than Ordinary.  I think anything that robs people of their self-possession is a bad thing, which is why I generally dislike being in large crowds—there is something about that many people being synced emotionally by a single event that disturbs me deeply.  But it seems to be a human characteristic.

    Which may be why I’m so very bad at determining the demographics of my own potential audience.  I can’t say who will want to read my books, not as a definable group to which marketing might be targeted.  I don’t buy books as part of a group, and if I did and I found out, I’d seriously re-examine my habits.  I’m not a commodity.  Either as an artist or as a fan.  And yet, to make a living at art, there’s a degree of having to cater to that kind of thinking.

    Another paradox, I suppose.