Like Lipstick on Schadenfreude

I don't know how people like Andrew Sullivan or Ariana Huffington do it, how they write opinion about the state of politics day after day after day. I can still get my head around the idea of a print - including electronic print - reporter amassing and distilling facts from wire services and colleagues in the field to come up with 'Polls Show Prohibition Costing Hoover Crucial Votes' or 'Hearst Deal Likely to Solidify Roosevelt's Lead.' But as truly insane and lamentable as things (what things? nearly all of them! pick one, and just see if it's not insane and lamentable!) are now in this country, and this election, I am incredulous that anyone with an analytical, rational, or even humane bent can be calm enough to render opinion on all this obscenity. Admittedly, I don't get paid for it, which might well be a great tonic for wordlessness, but I'm verklempt. Vollständig. I can't begin to think about it properly in its entirety, let alone take an opinion.

That being said, as the Sarah Palin circus grinds on twenty-four hours a day, the one thing I am absolutely certain of is that I feel sick for her, and I also feel sorry (although more mitigatedly so) for McCain. When her nomination was announced, my first reaction was that it was patently a slick and dirty tactical move: the Democratic Convention seemed very successful, galvanizing millions of exhausted and angry voters. So the Republicans timed this bizarre announcement to take a bit of that attention away.

And that succeeded. She was a crazy pick, an unknown who had figured nowhere on McCain's short list. Plus, unlike those (Above-) Average White Guys McCain was considering, she was a woman, a (rather fertile) mother, a hottie, an elsewherian, and politically quite distinct from McCain. Like Reagan or Bush II, and unlike McCain, for Palin there is a set of ideas on which she will not compromise, and which undergird all her opinions, and which must always be beyond discussion or negotiation. We have seen that there are plenty of voters who can relate to that, if, admittedly, sometimes in the 'I don't know nothin bout art, but I know what I like' manner.

My first reaction was that, being ostensibly a tactical move, it would be short lived. It would serve its purpose of notoriety, exultation, hairstyle commentary and scandal, and then when the attention had died down in a couple weeks, the McCain campaign would find a way to release her back into the wilds of Alaska and settle down with a more predictable, truly marriageable partner. Rural grassroots support for Palin would carry over to the new VP candidate easily, provided a convincing exit narrative had been contrived and managed adroitly. The new candidate would continue to mention Mrs. Palin and her values, and she would continue to be a presence in the campaign, heroic, lionized, as though she had actually died for the struggle. He would promise to uphold her - and 'the American Public's - ideals as he took up her mantle. She would live on as a Photoshopped patron saint, her all-too-human imperfections fallen away effortlessly in post-mortem hagiography and cable-news apathy.

But that didn't happen. Or it hasn't happened yet. And while I do not for a second believe McCain should have picked her (nor that it was McCain who did), nor that she should have accepted, her precipitous rise to stardom based, apparently, on looks, maternity, domestic oil production, and an antagonistic relationship to northern fauna, has, in addition to showing how little news is actually possible to unearth on a 24-hour news station, catapulted this very average madonna-executive into the vicious world of international sarcasm. Every aspect of Sarah Palin to which we have access has been vilified ad nauseum. Even her pregnant daughter and her jock boyfriend/sudden fiance are global laughing-stocks. I may find the boyfriend an atrocious little boy personally, but that is of course irrelevant for very many reasons (just to start, neither of them are running for anything except cover, and neither are responsible for the choices of their elders, let alone the Republican Party), and I would have known nothing about him, his (18-year-old's) stance on matrimony, his sporting preferences, his measurements, his academic record, his misogyny, or his apparent willful ignorance had McCain's handlers not proposed this wild scheme to Palin, nor she accepted. We are all idiots, sinners, bad friends, worse enemies, and only cautious good-doers: that two average rural high-school students are now in the position of being lampooned and excoriated globally for being two average rural high school students is disgusting, and something that should trouble us all.

***Break in the middle of this long post: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Atlantic said something similar and different here, so if you are tired with my position, or my crappy way of expounding it, you can go there, and have a different exposition of a different argument which comes out to a similar injunction: to not be so bloody mean. Or something. Close.

Part of my point is that we're all imperfect, and we all do stupid things, immoral things, and tasteless things. The majority of us are fortunate in that usually only about twenty other people know about them. And while I do not think Mrs. Palin is without culpability in any of this - she is an adult; she could have said no - whatever it is that motivated her assent does not mean that what she is experiencing now, as arguably the most famous person on earth, is to be relished. It is as lamentable as the rest of the heretofore unimaginable crap which daily assaults us.

For me, it was terrible to see her with Katie Couric. She looked at times like she was going to cry, and she was so nervous that even with her notes she frequently couldn't form complete sentences. Instead, she strung together repetitive dependent clauses and catch-phrases that had nothing to do with the question asked. For me it wasn't sport; it was rather like canned hunting. She may be a nice lady, or she may be an execrable human; she may be bright, and she may be utterly incurious; she may be both, always, at the same time. And it may be the case that it was nothing but hubris and a thirst for self-aggrandizement at any cost that drove her to accept the nomination. Manifestly, however, whatever her innate and cultivated aptitudes, and however much one agrees with or loathes her values, she is not ready for Vice- or real Presidency.

McCain is old enough to have said,' What, wait: --who??' and insist that the Party let Palin's family, her political experience, and her global curiosity mature a decade or so before inviting her into national politics. And McCain, as the Presidential candidate for the Party, the person who would have to work with the Vice-President for up to eight years, would, under ideal circumstances, have been able to, expected to, and insistent upon, personally vetting all potential candidates. She, likewise, could have reiterated the famous 'thanks but no thanks' and gracefully suggested that she had a few years more of study, and a few family matters to attend to, before taking the national stage. But, as fame now consistently outscores looks, smarts, and likability in polls of what Americans would prefer to have, her acceptance of the nomination is well within the bounds of normal American behavior. It may be sad, but it is hardly counter-cultural.

And it is because of that fact, the fact of her more strident, obvious, palpable, and less Photoshoppable humanity (especially as versus 30-year political veterans) - not because I agree with her on international or domestic issues, not because I see myself in her womanhood or motherhood, not because I, too, have a complex family, have made mistakes or misjudgments, have succeeded at some things at the expense of others, or have neglected to cultivate parts of myself - that I deeply empathize with her and her family right now, being the brunt of jokes no normal person (even a gorgeously postmodern, outlandishly cynical, Liberal one) could ever have never imagined, every detail of her life scrutinized in absurd fashion, her sartorial choices alternately mimicked and lampooned, her marginal, symbolic, token, silent role as envisioned, extrapolated to its (not entirely illogical) end as potential Ruler of the Last Great Empire.

I hate the whole thing. She shouldn't be there. She is suffering, her family is suffering, friends of friends of her family are suffering. And the country, all the millions and millions of us who are doing no-so-very-well-thank-you-at-the-moment-already will suffer tremendously should someone of so little curiosity and rationality end up as head cook, let alone Captain, of this blighted Narrenschiffe. -- Look, Margaret Thatcher was unique. Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, Tansu Ҫiller, and Megawati Sukarnoputri were unique, and I'm only picking up the notable notables. There doesn't have to be a woman, or a black guy, or a gay guy, or an ex-bishop, or a prole, or relative of a prole, or a person with a disability, or a person with a large family, or no dependents, or a preference to baklava over awamat -- or a Poodle-studding business or a temporary obsession with lapidary. There just has to be a truly exceptional, historically grounded, ethically centred, utterly visionary, multiply capable, unfailingly prudential and unwaveringly calm individual of whatever genetic or gonadic makeup.

Do I think it was a brilliant cynical move? Sure: it got them what they wanted, which was attention. Do I think we all suffer when those in power think tactically rather than strategically, and of Party rather than country or world? You bet. And I'll see you in Paraguay!

A Wretch Like Me

In the Weekend Journal, Lee Siegel gave a much more dignified and historical view of the U.S. 'culture wars' than I ever do, blinded as I am by the undignified results of the historical process he outlines. In his piece Siegel asserts that part of the communication gap is the product not solely of the two sides' differential weighting of 'culture' in their political reckonings, but their distinct ways of defining it. For Liberals, culture is a Vermeer or a Mahler symphony, while today's Conservative cannot but view culture, as Siegel says, in the anthropological manner, as 'the practice of getting through life.' Culture is thus what you do with your season tickets for Liberals, and how you live your life for Conservatives. While the Left has long asserted that 'everything is political,' it might now be equally true to claim that for the Right 'everything is cultural.' I'd say the two mean the same thing, but I can't hear myself think over the blaring Shostakovich or the stream of messages from church about the fundraising.

I suspect I agree with Mr. Siegel's view of the two sides' perception, or definition, of culture, but disagree with any hint that culture, however construed, does not markedly influence our political stance or voting decisions. For example, liberal or conservative, 21st century or 18th, certain values are implicit in Western culture. Those values then condition not merely our decisions, but what questions we are even capable of asking en route to taking decisions on one issue or candidate. If this is true, not knowing who Mahler is does not invalidate the many shared assumptions, or cultural inheritance, the non-Mahler-knowing individual has in common with his operagoing, Irigaray-reading, International-Herald-subscribing counterpart.

And this brings me to a post I aborted when it went off in so many directions. One of my points was going to be about the insipidity of the Left's unceasing plaint that the Right always want to 'legislate morality.' In the name of all that is Magna Carta, children, that's what laws do! We may believe that a given legislation legislated morality wrong, or that a candidate poses a threat to what we believe is right, but to the extent that we are not in fact discrete, isolated monads but rather members of a polity - a culture, perhaps, even - with assets, concerns, needs, streetlights, highways, and social institutions (and whatever else you want to throw in there) in common, proscribing first-degree murder or grand larceny has rather more in common with the Decalogue than with a text on descriptive economics.

Laws against murder, theft, rape, and child abuse reflect legislators' and governments' (and, we hope, under a representational system, their constituents') moral stances on those issues. (Yes, they are also expedients toward a society's stability, security, and continuity, and it wasn't in hopes of cultivating a God-fearing, Republican citizenry that Hammurabi promulgated his set of suggestions) but when Liberals assert that single, low-income mothers should have access to social services, medical care, parenting resources and financial assistance, they are as much taking a moral stand about a society's responsibility toward bettering mothers', poor peoples', and childrens' lives as are religious Conservatives with regard to the same society's responsibility toward embryos and fetuses when they argue that we as a society have some responsibility for the unborn. Either is an attempt to 'legislate morality' just as is enacting laws against domestic violence or armed robbery.

Obviously the Left has come to grasp this to a greater extent than Siegel gives them credit for: in many states as fully as at the national level, a candidate from either major party with any hope of winning must, for example, trot out his religious credentials and attempt to convincingly portray his personal friendship with Jesus Christ as the most important and influential relationship in his life (I don't remember sola φιλíα from any theology I've ever studied, but that's politics for you!). He must conjure up a spiritual rags-to-riches story to entrench the narrative of the relationship in voters' minds not only as the bedrock of his views, obviously, and as guarantor of good, clean, ethical behavior if elected (his party represents God, after all, and he is the current incarnation of his party), not to mention proof of his just-like-us faith, falls, and redemption (literally, too, for those of you somehow outside the reach of American media), but also as an arc that will be replicated in his saving us and the country, as well, just as he through grace was able to save himself. Religion becomes theatre, however heartfelt it might actually be in some candidates, and we end up with a bunch of agnostic aspirants and speech-writers falteringly inserting Martin Luther alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. into word-heavy but content-free campaignspeak.

'You Have to Think Like a Pilot.'

When I started this blog, my reasons were:
a) people told me to do it ('people' also told me I should get married, and we know how that went);
b) I figured it would be a good exercise in discipline (it wasn't);
c) it seemed like a better, more socially-sensitive outlet for my tirades than foisting long ranting emails about pepper grinders in the shape of roosters on people who just wanted to know if I wanted to get some dinner Thursday. (Success!)

And with some generous periods of silence, I've managed fairly frequently to write at least something. Which I think is good and proves I should be doing this or, minimally, that however crap whatever it is I'm going on about at any given time is, I have sufficient motivation to go on about it, and in this forum, rather than face-to-face, in a journal, through email, or by stealing a megaphone and standing outside yelling about poor taste in front of terrifyingly misconceived subdevelopments. So far so good; I think I am content with the 'Just because I'm not Goethe doesn't mean I shouldn't have a blog' stance.

But once it kind of evolved into having a voice/persona behind it - even if the focus or the voice itself changes at times, because we can say each little slant is part of the larger, overall slant - I kept thinking about all the goofy tags. Few serve any practical taggy purpose: nobody does searches for 'appalling taste' or 'Tuscan toilets,' and if they do, I don't think they want to end up here. Nor would a serious-minded searcher for Amelia Earhart trivia get very much rewarding stuff by clicking on her name in my tags. For what it's worth, I know which picture I have of her, but I have no idea why she's in here, what kind of a point I would have making to have had need of natty early-20th-c. aviatrices to support it, but I see her name every time I look at the blog, since she is up near the top of the tag list under A.

There are a couplefew problems. One is the disincentive of how much effort it would take to winnow down all the tags and to make new, sensible ones that might actually provide a clue as to what a posting is about. And it would be a very dull list. Another is that I like how the tags applied to a post better illustrate its content, just in a different way, than labeling it very precisely with what topics it literally contains. Then, too, I still find some of the goofy tags amusing to myself, and if this is really a blog, then that's my target audience: so as long as I keep chuckling nothing else should matter. I like having three entries obliquely or explicitly referencing 'bad monkeys' and another four mentioning Gauloises cigarettes, even if the postings are more substantively about interior design or telephones or pastry cream disasters.

And I imagine I could at least get rid of the ones that only link to one or two posts. 'Amelia Earhart' would be one of that group. But in many cases there is no reason to think I will only ever have one post that mentions that thing or person, so why take it out if I'm going to put it back in, I say. Still, I do think I could afford the time at some point to lose tags for types of wine and just have all fermented grape products under one 'wine' label, for example, without substantively compromising integrity. I could move all three 'fatuous boobs' and both 'idiocy' references to, perhaps, 'fatuity,' 'overarching incompetence,' or 'inanity,' depending on the content. But the thing is, when the posting is really a rant, or some ghastly stream-of-consciousness catalogue of aesthetic sins, and I go all over the place connecting things that in no way relate to each other except thematically and only to myself in some damp corner of my brain, I do go through the list of tags and often find one to append that I wouldn't have thought of had I not had such a long list. And today, I had to add 'China,' which I almost have many times but didn't because I had enough 'Chinese __________' tags. I didn't, on the other hand, make a new tag for 'Nestorians,' but I am sure I will have to at some point, and then it's going to end up between 'neo-Darwinism' (1 link) and 'neuroses' (likewise just the one) unless those have been excised by that point as having been insufficiently utile for all the nonexistent topic-shoppers reading my tag list hoping to find something truly worth reading.

You have to think like a cornichon.

Lipstick and Pitbulls

I am so speechless about The Whole Sarah Palin Thing that I can't even finish a post about it I started a few days ago, let alone write about more recent developments, such as her speech tonight. But I reiterate, that a candidate for a national office (or in more populous areas, state or even municipal office) seems like someone one would like to have a beer or Barolo (or hunt moose or go to the symphony) with is truly insufficient grounds for a vote in his or her favor. Nonetheless, it does appear to me that this vote of the 'common man,' with his presumed demonstrable less-than-vigorously-cultivated critical-thinking skills is precisely what McCain was informed that Sarah Palin could deliver, and which his preferred vice-presidential choices, meanwhile, would preclude. Sarah Palin's positions on some issues may yet remain a mystery, some other positions may be objectionable or ideal to one side or the other but, if it is indeed true that what motivates the Common Man most in an election is the candidate's life's resemblance to that of the voter, Mrs. Palin, despite her 'extreme' attributes like moose-hunting, midnight suns, and marathons, takes 'common' to dazzling, giddy new heights:

--mother
--new mother
--working new mother
--small town
--blue-collar, steelworker husband
--child with disability
--married high-school boyfriend
--PTA member
--husband in labor union
--son in military
--hunting, fishing, snowmobile racing
--no passport for most of life
--pregnant teenage daughter
--mispronouncing foreign words as proof of patriotism
--beauty queen
--big hair
--wacky and whimsical children's names
--believes religion and science are at odds; chooses religion
--anti-intellectual; Obama's education/Constitutional expertise disqualify him

Surely her life story has many aspects with which an 'average' American person can relate. It's a compelling narrative of a strong, opinionated, charismatic, attractive woman. And, like the majority of American citizens, she was not born into inherited wealth: in her sudden rise to the national stage, she embodies the long-cherished image of the United States (or 'America,' as she would say) as the Land of Opportunity: that anyone can make it here and that hard work and tenacity matter more than pedigree. It is a great story; I just wish it had built slowly to a climax rather than suddenly to a punch line.

Matteo Ricci, Mandarins, and Moksha...

So, R. gave me a copy of What Makes You Not a Buddhist, which is a brilliant little book that brilliantly feeds into my particular prejudices, except that it lays out a solid argument for what I get too cranky to articulate beyond the level of whininess. Moreover, it is written by a Tibetan Buddhist, and 'Tibetan Buddhism' is at the moment the preferred flavor for those who are too young to have been 'Zen' before its huarache-wearing disciples were supplanted by 'Tibetan' flocks in Tevas and Birkenstocks. What binds the two groups beyond their shared fondness for open-toed shoes is a distaste for 'organized religion,' 'dogma,' and a purportedly mediated experience of the Divine, as well as the sense that what they perceive as lacking in Christianity can be found in a bastardized version of a tradition that, being exotic, they have no bad memories of.


I have been wanting to write a semi-sensible rant on this for a while, because it ties together Chesterton and the Dalai Lama, which not so many things do, really, if you think about it, and also because it fleshes out to an extent what I have said about the secularized (and thus inaccurate/irrelevant) and largely pernicious vestiges of Calvinism that haunt even a stolid, fourth-generation atheist in this country. What Chesterton had to say on the one hand was this little nugget: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.' In The Everlasting Man he also said this:

'They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best thing is to be far away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.'

And the reverse of the vantage point of that Confucian to a distant and exotic Christianity is what we take with us as we look at Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Our parents never threatened us with bardo if we misbehaved; we were never disappointed with Tara if our entreaties to the Eternal appeared to go unanswered. We can approach Buddhism with open arms and hearts because we have no (substantive or distorted) history with it, whereas we cannot even view a (likewise quite distant) thirteenth-century Christian contemplative from a perspective untainted by our views on the Reformation, the Inquisition, colonialism, or even every terrible or just mediocre pastor or believer we've ever known.



Chesterton again:

'The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda' (super-double-bold-italics mine).

But metaphors can only go so far, and I would quibble with Chesterton's only to the extent that even as our Londoner looks more charitably on a Confucian or a pagoda than he does on a Christian or a cathedral, he still does so ineluctably from the balcony of his apartment or the front porch of his Georgian, or Queen Anne, or 'Tuscan' home. He comes into life with a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung from within which he can never fully remove himself, however many embroidered Hill Tribe jackets his closet holds. Whatever sympathy he may find himself to hold for the precepts of karma and moksha, and whether he decides he ascribes more to the concept of atman or of anatman, he is, like Matteo Ricci under his Confucian silks, ever and always a Westerner, regardless of the extent to which he claims, or purports to reject, his own spiritual heritage.


As the Dalai Lama asserted many times in the 1994 John Main Seminar (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus), though there are many similarities between teachings in the Gospels and Buddhist works, just as there is no one type of man, nor no one type of spirituality or spiritual practice suited to every individual equally, there can be no one tradition that incorporates all the teachings of all the world. The Trinity is not equal to the three kayas - but there are 'parallels and similarities,' just as there are between mahabrahman and the Christian God when viewed in His aspect as ultimate ground of being. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that reaching too far abroad for spiritual insight frequently creates more confusion in the seeker than wisdom or equanimity. To gloss over these significant differences and the culturally-specific origins of Tibetan Buddhism is to demean both the Tibetan tradition and the Western would-be bhikku. What he likely adopts under these conditions is neither Christianity nor Buddhism. He cannot extricate himself from his patrimony - however ill understood it may be in his case - nor can he successfully through sheer force of will insert himself into the story of millennia of Himalayan spiritual inheritance. He begins with misunderstanding his own religion and ends with exoticising, romanticising, cheapening - and misunderstanding - a different one.

I didn't get to the eminently sensible Buddhism book (written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, originally from Bhutan). But now I fully intend to, since I was at least able to start. This has been simmering a long time. Like, years and years. It's good to let it go.

"'Et tu, Brute,' rief Er auf Lateinisch

--wie est dort die Landesprache war."

I've apologized once, and I've apologized twice, and I've apologized more than that, too, for when my rhetoric verges over into the preachy ~

~ See, the thing is, much as I might love Dominicans, I grew up when and where I grew up, none of which admittedly were the best of all possible places or times and any of which maybe should have been the thirteenth or fourteenth or seventeenth century but were not and, accordingly, while I have absolutely no bad feelings whatsoever about 'prædicare' since I can't speak any Latin other than 'Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat,'* I cannot help but wince, shake a little, and discreetly and in an eminently ladylike fashion vomit inside my mouth from smelling the imagined leeching vapors of petroleum by-products from obstreperous and designed-to-impress synthetic altar-flower arrangements basted with 'Inspired-by-Nature' 'fresheners' at 7 AM sharp every Sunday anytime I find myself within 26 miles of 'preachy'~

So it is that every time I go off on caritas, agape, empathy, compassion, love, the Beatitudes, the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux, Nagarjuna, Dostoevsky, Avalokitesvara, or even Common Decent Neighborliness, I always feel as though I have too much product and too many extensions in my hair, too overwhelming a desire to restate endlessly the obvious with an ever-increasing lack of delicacy, decency, and eloquence, too great a tendency to tripthongize my dipthongs, and a garish and enormous Daughters of the Confederacy pin tacked to my (it would be, under the circumstances) abundant bosom.

So, as a sop to myself and those of you who find my exhortations as tiring as I do, here is a panel from my favorite comic strip writer, Peter Blegvad, whose Leviathan ran in the Independent and to which I was as addicted when I lived in Greece and Suffolk as I was to Gauloises Bleues and those pull-out, frame-able sections about minerals, indigenous beetles, and traffic patterns in the Sunday El País.


*'It's not the heat; it's the humidity.'

'Even he,

to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart.' - Douglas Adams (patently, no less!)

So, I had some fish and chips and beer with the exhusband the other night. The musician one, not the gay one. Not that that one isn't a musician, too; they both are, and they both even play winds, just to make it more confusing, and they both teach, and they were both born within twenty-four hours of the other one. One grew up on an island; one lives on an island now, and the one who grew up on one also lived on the island of Honshu, which is where my brother and his family live now, although, apart from some mad air-guitar, the brother is rather less a musician than my various exhusbands, making him, at least, easy to distinguish. They were also both brown-haired and the same height, unlike my brother, who is not the same height as anyone. So you see how it can get infernally confusing to distinguish between them.

Despite all that, the exhusband is, naturally, dismayed at the tone the blog appears to be taking. All I can say is, A) I tried to maintain the coyness as regards spirituality and belief as long as I could, turning to overt ethical stances stapled to implicit conclusions to guide readers gently, fluidly, and subtlely into an occasional New Thematic Realm. I still reserve the right to call down imprecations on Mobil stations disguised as El Greco paintings, forests, or Roman hippodromes, and I patently intend still (not only to continue to overuse 'patently,' 'unsurprisingly,' and 'manifestly' but also) to insert irrelevant photos of perfume bottles, typographical coups, Central Asian needlework, and obscenely adorable palm-sized animals. But the fact is that if my ethical preoccupations obtrude herein - and they do - then surely the basis for them should likewise. Still, I realize that there are very many sound and good people who can get behind this or that stance of mine, but not fully with what leads, in my heart, at any rate, up to it.



But then, for them, I think: read backward. Start and stop with the praxis, which many would argue is the meaty part anyway, and leave the θεωρία to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. And, frankly, we end up at the same point, anyway, which is that if you are doing good, you're doing good, and if you're not - well, we both suspect you'll know it. The only difference is that I was pleased at some point to realize not only that there was an Urgrund behind all those values, choices, and yearnings, but that, conveniently felicitously, I already believed in it.

So, fine.

and B) I did contemplate, after a long-overdue recognition that having a multiply-segmented life was driving me a bit insane, the notion of having a post welcoming readers to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. But I didn't bother because I never tried hard enough to have it come out amusing. So I opted instead for the Invisible Awkward Segue. Of course that's never a good idea, even if you're not trying to be de Man or Derrida. And so I am sorry. It was obtrusive; it was steep, sudden, and unwarranted, and it was probably a lot like basking in the middle of an Elle article on comparative depilation and then at the turn of a page being caught unawares in the midst of the final, prescriptive chapter in the still-typo-ridden galley version of some hand-wringing dissertation on the loss of the second-person vocative particle amongst the last fourteen speakers of X.

So I do apologize. I thought sneaking in more farm workers and food banks would help pave the way for the occasional saint, particularly if I made mention of how hard it was becoming to maintain a consistent voice. Now, though, I think it might be more consistent as a whole by not excluding one or other topics for the sake of maintaining a particular posture. The fact is, my spirituality is a part of my life, so it stands to reason it would be a part of this blog, as well, even if I demand to retain my right also to lambast (using the alt. sp. helps keep images of dry turkey and high-hatted Puritans at bay) examples of bad design, poor taste, petty theft, and my own misdriving, misjudgment, and misnavigation when I please.

Therefore, children: Welcome to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. Except for all the parts that aren't. Including this pretty little display from Black and Spiro:

My Sad Mazda, Sadder Still...

In other news, they robbed my car again, this time going into the trunk, and leaving it wide open after the plundering, too. May they enjoy the CDs of Ottoman court music and Jimmie Rodgers, and the spare tire, as much as I did. Interestingly, the old pairs of work shoes in the back remain where they were, but they stole my perfumes (they'll have a bloody existential crisis when they see how very little they smell like the vanilla-and-treacle scents at the store) and a stupid spiral notebook. If I thought any of this was going to be useful to someone, I wouldn't care, but this is just stealing-because-you-can. I could be wrong, but I doubt profoundly that many car prowlers would be thrilled to discover their loot consisted of Turkish classical music and yodeling!

'Humility Is Attentive Patience.'

-Simone Weil

I am entirely aware that sometimes on here when I go off on a tirade about compassion, my diction can get a bit too soaring or florid. Sometimes both, frankly, and when I get to the inestimable consequences of compassion my tone is apt to run from hortatory to incantatory through beatific and on to splenetic long before righting itself and sticking nicely to the pragmatic.

However.

My excuse is that what I am talking about is every bit as powerful as I make it seem. It is like a drug: its effects are that shocking, marked, and fast acting. And yet, most of us do not avail ourselves of it, except perhaps with those closest to us. And that stands to reason. Family members are on the one hand easier to understand than those we know less well; on the other, our hobby and pool of defendants would quickly evaporate were we to spend all our time divorcing and disinheriting our relatives. Given that fact, it makes sense at some point simply to accept that Aunt Jane always talks to much about Shih-tzus and Cousin David will probably never fully surmount his persecution complex.

Fine.

But leaving aside altruism (which we already were, anyway; admit it), it benefits every individual's own psyche to stop seeing others as failed versions of ourselves. Even if we share some similar goals - getting ahead in the company, working on our marriages, shopping less, not drinking anymore, being more involved in the community, cooking at home more often, working out again, whatever they might be - we are going at them with radically differing histories, distinct personalities, weaknesses, and strengths, and perhaps for vastly different reasons in the first place.

It was probably Thérèse of Lisieux who had this additional insight into handling difficult interactions with irritating interlocutors, particularly those whose failings seem most obvious to us, those whom we know enough about to wish instinctively to judge in their failure: Yes, maybe he did do it again -- but what about all the times he succeeded, and we weren't there, and he was too modest to gloat, or even tell us quietly of his unnoticed, private success?

I think looking at the evident weaknesses of others from that perspective is profound. We don't even need to do any uncomfortable self-inquiry to come up with something we ourselves recently struggled with, which is an equally useful but more obvious and labor-intensive strategy. We just have to acknowledge that we can't possibly know everything about another, and that that other might well be doing some rather good stuff while we're not around. And, that he might additionally have the virtue of humility, and thus even be worth emulating in that respect!

I say it is like a drug because whatever method we use to get there once we feel a sympathy with our brother and his situation, the anger dissolves just as surely as morphine kills pain. If you can imagine that someone is driving aggressively (I use driving so much because it does truly render people insane when they are trapped in their little boxes and feel so powerless about many factors and any little thing can seem a tremendous injustice) because his wife just had a baby or because he needs to throw up, you immediately lose the anger. If someone's stereo is playing crappy music too loud, it's not much of a stretch to recall that most of us were young at one time, too, and wanted to be cool and to display our coolness when possible so that it could be validated by others, as coolness, just like wit, style, or 'success,' is a cultural commodity which can only be conferred on an aspirant by the recognition of its presence by a consensus of the relevant audience. He's young, the music's bad, I'm not his target audience: so, so what? After the next light I can go back to listening to the riveting story about heirloom orchids in Florida.

I like the Thérèse suggestion because even if we were never young ourselves, and even if we can come up with absolutely no failings of our own to gain us conditional entry into some grandiose vision of the Mystical Brotherhood of Common Human Frailty, we can easily imagine that the individual tiresomely prattling on to us about the after-market package he bought for his Lexus could just have donated to the Red Cross, and is thus as short of sense as he is glucose and the blood to carry it to his brain.

'Dear Prudence

And in the tradition of Sunday posts wherein WNYC's 'On the Media' on the way home from church always seems to relate directly to whatever I had been thinking earlier in the day, here goes:

'On the Media' was on the Internet today. Well, it's always on the Internet if you want to find it, at http://www.onthemedia.org, but this time it was on the subject of the Internet. Here is the link for 'On the Media' on the Internet, on the Internet.

The show was an exploration of aspects of 'digital democracy,' in which such issues as maturity, anonymity, restraint, tolerance, hate, and even my old stand-by, compassion, arose. Surely our print selves, even with name attached and bound in book form, are not identical to our living, feeling, physical, social selves; the relationship between the two is, in many cases, increasingly tenuous the further away from the nexus of social reality, relationships, name, and reputation the writer gets. And anonymous comments on the Internet are about as void of social context as anything could be.

Some people cleave to politeness and consideration regardless of venue. On the other hand, while Ira Glass on the show told of vicious, hurtful things written anonymously to the subjects of a sad and deeply personal vignette on the 'This American Life' comments section, I've seen shockingly and unconscionably mean postings on web forums about religious life and vocations, in which troubled individuals pour out their hatred by calling non-habited religious, or religious of this or that community, all sorts of disgusting things. In the latter case, I should think the self-selection involved, in which all readers are presumably hoping for and working toward the same thing, would have precluded such puerile and nasty behavior.

And yet anonymity, and by extension all the Web, seem to offer an unlimited license to let the Id run free, to discard normal conventions and even ethics in pursuit of untrammeled expression of whatever caliber. I don't know that it's gotten worse in general, or that there are simply so many more people using it, but it does seem like now a greater number of rational arguments than before in every type of venue quickly degenerate into 'You're just stupid,' to which the counterargument these days runs, succinctly, 'F- you!'

...greet the brand new day.'

'It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.'

Said Benjamin Franklin (and you already know I love him recklessly), who preceded it with 'Poverty often deprives a man of spirit and virtue' and a semicolon, and tonight on the local NPR station KUOW a host had a brief interview with a Mercer Island pastor who wants to host a new Tent City at her church (and thought she was going to). The host asked Rev. Leslie Ann Knight, the United Methodist minister on whose church's property the encampment would be sited what she thought of the residents' protestations that such use of the church's property would force Mercer Islanders to look at portable toilets and showers. The reverend answered that those objections were not factually accurate, as the camp would be situated on the church grounds such that those facilities would not be visible from the street. She then went on with a bit of the humanitarian stuff one would anticipate and hope for, but I just want to climb under the covers into my pulpit for a minute here and attempt to digest the inhabitants' basis for resistance.

The interview was on today because Mercer Island residents have just filed a new lawsuit attempting to prohibit the city from allowing the camp within its borders. From court documents quoted in the Olympian newspaper: "Neighbors will be forced to look at Honey Buckets, temporary shower facilities, tents and an array of equipment necessary to serve the camp," the lawsuit says. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer likewise reports that residents complain 'the homeless camp would endanger the "comfort, repose, health and safety" of nearby residents, in part because the camp would be a "visual blight" on neighboring homes. It also asserts that the city of Mercer Island issued a permit for Tent City in violation of city law.'

The 'health and safety' issues have indeed been addressed by the Mercer Island authorities - including law enforcement, which will have a regular presence at the encampment including 'routine walk-throughs' - and by all previous host jurisdictions of Tent City's various incarnations, and it is patent that neither is adversely affected by the temporary residence's presence. That, however, is a factual matter, and thus easily resolved. At least in theory.

'Comfort and repose,' however, are less amenable to objective measurement, and I believe the good citizens when they assert that they will be made uncomfortable by the presence of poor people visibly in their midst. I take them at their word that being 'forced to look at' so thin a veneer of civility, in the form of a portable toilet or camp shower, only feebly veiling the most basic and physical of human needs would perturb their repose.

But what else are we 'forced to look at' everyday? Thousands of things! Why should poverty be the one we refuse to admit into our line of sight?

Well, it's not. We see, if perhaps not look at, the poor every day. But unless you ride the bus or work at DSHS or the public defender's office or county hospital, the poorest of the poor are often conveniently arrayed in groups of one, thus obviating any need to register them consciously as part of a pattern. It's a lot like shoes: until you hang them over every door in the house by the 10s or 20s or 30s to prove a point to yourself, you don't really have to know you have 12 pairs of semi-identical square-toe black 2 1/2-inch-heel sling-backs.

And if you don't feel like proving a point to yourself, it might be hard to find a justification.

Unless the justification antecedes and supercedes the apparent matter-at-hand, such as mercy, or love, or compassion, might. And this is where I get cranky. I am not lying or exaggerating when I say the law-and-order issues are a straw man. All that stuff has been (tediously, thoroughly, exhaust/ingly/ively) covered in every 'concerned citizens' meeting ad nauseum since Tent City began. This is all about aesthetics, and not-in-my-backyard, and solecism, and apathy, and a terrible, horrible, blindingly unskillful misunderstanding of what Poverty in its deeper sense really looks like.

Poverty is saying 'I can't bear to be reminded of poor people having to shower, or poop.' Poverty is thinking 'My happiness is so brittle I can't risk it by looking on suffering.' Poverty is knowing that your late-summer luau-themed barbecue's ambiance would be utterly ruined by the sight of a homeless man shuffling back to camp eating a Slim Jim with two litres of Fanta (always cheaper than Coke!) tucked under his scabby arm.

Poverty is knowing the value of your house, but not the value of a man.

Again, I reiterate, every day we are forced to look at all manner of things. They may not register fully, as with one homeless person, or one stupid billboard, but in either case, the nature of vision being what it is, the majority of what gets processed by the optic nerves and the brain is information we haphazardly encounter, not stuff we asked for. I was 'forced' to look at three Hummers today. I think they are hideous, I think they offend terribly my refined aesthetic sensibilities: what redress do I have? The Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles more than once involitionally entered my field of vision: I am certain I shall never recover fully. I have likewise, despite my best efforts to the contrary, ocularly encountered orange plastic shoes, orange plastic flowers, 'Country Geese' as a decor element, 'Tuscan' toilets and 'Tuscan' subdevelopments, Unitarian lady ministers in pseudobatik two-piece ensembles with 'chunky' earrings, reality TV, 1960s architecture, 'flip-flops,' and people wearing their inside clothes outside.

Not to mention the green dumpster against which I was raped, the Albanian laborers in Athens serving as human donkeys with three-foot-high stacks of bricks laden on their bent backs, irreparably abused pets queued up for euthanasia at the animal shelter, the shooting we drove past on our way to register me for sixth grade at my new school, the three men beating up one guy on the freeway exit as I attempted to make it to a Nick Cave show in LA, the clear pure blue East Coast morning of September 11th, the black and hideous aftermath, the lover's hands reaching out to circle my neck, not caress my cheek: none of these I asked to see. None of these shall I ever fully surmount. --And these guys are worrying about Porta-Potties???

So the Bartender Says to the Horse --

Why the long face?

Alright, so I explained why I like and respect thinky atheists. But there are plenty of stinky atheists, too, and my bonhommerie is as stressed in thinking about them as it is with the feelgood self-help pseudopagans who take their spiritual direction alternately from 'Prosperity Gospel' quacks and shrink-wrapped plastic 'I Ching' sets from Barnes and Noble.

Part of the stinkiness I can't bear is their frequent supercilious meanness. Anybody who believes anything is dumb, not just different, wallowing smugly in willed ignorance, so restraint isn't called for: the idiots won't get the joke, anyway. Of course, religious people can be just as intolerant as this in their rhetoric, as well -- and knowledge of that fact is sometimes fodder for the mean atheists' lack of consideration. But for now I'm leaving uncharitable believers alone, since they really make my head bleed, and sticking with the angry atheists.

Now, before you say, 'And what about all those rants about Calvinists on here, Vif?', let me remind you they were not about real Calvinism nor even about John Calvin. When I go off on Calvinism it is about the entrenched and invisible secularized vestiges of Calvinism that underpin so many of our attitudes, habits, and neuroses here in the U.S. It's a bit like Althusser's ideology, a bit like Barthes' mythology, and a lot like a troublesome patch of morning glories which, despite having all the flowers and stems and leaves mowed down, are just as present as ever because their roots have already spread widely through the garden. You don't have to believe in the existence of God or John Calvin or even Geneva in order for these Calvinistic assumptions or aspirations to affect your view of culture, commensality, kindness, pleasure, and success. You just have to live in the United States for a while.

So, that having been resolved to all parties' satisfaction, my stinky atheist of the day is Mr. Eddie Izzard, who appears to believe that declaring his atheism over and over earns him a de facto Genius rating and the right to make jokes ridiculing the most heartfelt and sincere of beliefs. He likewise lampoons God and Jesus themselves in extended fashion as bumbling idiots, with Jesus as a sort-of sad sack sucker-Messiah who doesn't know what he is doing and doesn't much care.

Honestly, there are ways to do religious humor. I've seen plenty of stuff that succeeds mightily and yet doesn't offend even when it pokes fun at or contrasts particular beliefs or practices. And I don't just mean brilliant Jewish insider humor, but as well stuff from outside that yet manages to convey a level of respect for the subject. It is not impossible, not at all, but it requires subtlety, maturity - and compassion.

When people cry 'Is nothing sacred anymore???' they seldom intend their lament literally. Rather, it is a wish for a return to some measure of delicacy, consideration, and politesse: what most mean is 'Is nothing off-limits anymore? Is nothing private anymore?' and 'Is nothing beyond the bounds of decency and common courtesy anymore?' It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politeness.

And this is where Izzard's juvenile monologue about idiotic Creators and half-wit sons loses my interest. It was, and should have remained, settled a couple centuries ago that the natural sciences can tell us little of value about religion, and that religion likewise can tell us much about the cultivation of the soul but rather little about geology, or geometry, or cattle-breeding. That an individual has come to this epiphany in the 21st century and is shocked to find religion lacking in scientific insight (as in Izzard's version of Noah) just seems odd to me. A person can find himself unmoved by religion for various reasons, but that there is inadequate discussion of thermodynamics in John of the Cross is one, were it me, that I would feel slightly silly proffering as the crux of my atheism.

But I would also say that even if the individual believes the experiences of John, or Jonas, or Rumi or Rahman Baba to have been 'all in their heads,' ridiculing their interior experience, in addition to being uncharitable, mean-spirited, and thus indefensible morally, is also simply as stupid and pointless in a pragmatic sense as making fun of a friend who thinks he looks better in his new haircut than he does: it's his haircut; let him live in it. You have a right to your own path of haircut self-discovery, and if on it you decide you prefer to continue with the tried-and-true No. 3 in perpetuity, you absolutely are under no obligation to get a copy of your friend's style.

This reactionary approach moreover conduces to the sort of us-v.-them mentality that - you guessed it! - religion is famous, and endlessly parodied and excoriated, for: they're stupid, we're not, so join our club. That an atheist presumably above the fray should resort to the same dirty tactics he would quickly condemn in others is, while not shocking (since we're all only human) still lazy - and, again, puerile. I would cringe and wince and undoubtedly throw up a little in my mouth if I had to read my high school journals filled with every pithy quote from Camus and Gide and Rimbaud that I felt could serve to prop up my (age-appropriate, let me add) stance that Religion is idiotic crap for crappy idiots who like crappy things. Thank God no one gave me a microphone, because in my defensive and angry posture I, too, sounded a bit like a crappy idiot.

Although it helped me terrifically with French!

'The Starry Heaven above Me, and the Moral Law within Me.'

('Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.') - Kant

I have to say, I love atheists. Or at least I love the bright ones. Because, look, they are maintaining a consistent position: either a thing is provable solely by reason, in which case I will believe it, or is not fully accessible to rationality, and then I won't. And if I'm anything (which at my weight is not always certain) I, too, am some kind of Enlightenment-style humanist in many, many ways. Maybe it took me a long time to admit it, but I'm out and proud now. The only catch in my case being that I don't believe humans are the end of it, nor that everything that does or could exist is necessarily comprehensible to or articulable by human reason. Our reason could have limits, just as our sense of smell does relative to a dog's, or a bear's. And, certainly, relative to anything having unlimited powers of every sort.

But I understand the position. And the last point would be an absurd speculation from a rationalist point of view, since what would my reason know about the existence of such anythings? I also think that there are many breeds of atheists, particularly of the Enlightenment variety, who agree on many basic premises about the inhering dignity of man with those who arrive at that position due to a belief about the divine source of that dignity. In either case the 'Man is born free' position holds, and each appends from his perspective the implied-moral-imperative second clause without which the beginning is nothing but a quaint and inert metaphysical claim.

However, the group that does drive me nuts, and has since I was in high school, is the 'spiritual but not religious' crowd, the mass migration of which to Big Sur, the Napa Valley, and beach huts in Costa Rica would leave the greater Seattle area bereft of 70% of its tax base. The rationalist atheists have it hard, and they know it, and they take their responsibility seriously, because they realize it's up to them to figure things out. If one cannot rely on any Authority beyond one's own logic to give guidance, the responsibility is great and the burden a heavy one.

By contrast, the 'spiritual but not religious' people often accept their 'authority' from a multitude of sources: it doesn't have to be right, as a religious person might say; it doesn't have to add up right, as a rationalist might; it just has to feel right, the standards for which are as varied as the number of soi-disant gurus and self-help books in the world. What to me is more chilling to me than the unpleasant aesthetics of that reality is that this 'spirituality' can be as devoid of ethics as the user wishes.

An atheist indeed can be a maniacal Machiavellian egoist, to be sure, but I'm not talking about them, and I have encountered few in my personal experience. I think at the same time that far too many shade-grown-coffee-drinking hemp-clad 'yogis' and would-be bhikkhunis end up, in their ever-fluid quest for self-development or self-enrichment, becoming terrifically self-involved egoists themselves. If, admittedly, extremely bendy ones.

It seems to me that at base the one belief that unites most of these 'spiritual' individuals is this: there is a Power, some sort of divine something, and I owe Him/Her/It/They/Us some form of recognition, but it is up to me to discern what shape this recognition might take in my case. All too rarely does this Divine Power impart an ethical code, because ethical codes are the province of religions, and the 'spiritual but not religious' eschew religion, and religious authority, as being inherently oppressive. But while 'feeling good' is a reasonable criterion for adjudging the after-effects of a yoga class or colon cleanse, it is nonetheless insufficient proof of the moral rightness or wrongness of a given act. It is in no way parallel to the fearless and rigourous self-searching that both rational believers and rational atheists must undertake in order to live an ethical life.

Enlightenment thinkers adjured us to use our own minds and pursue freedom, rather than blindly ceding our will and our powers of reason in deference to the dictates of monarchies or the Church. However, were I forced to cede all my powers of thought, I would rather do so to the likes of thinky ethical atheists like Diderot, Condorcet, Hume, Mille, de Beauvoir, Zizek, Clarence Darrow, Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, James Connolly, Harriet Martineau, and James Rachels than to Oprah, The Secret, 'quantum mysticists,' or anyone aiming a burning hank of sage up at me from the Down-Dog asana.

'la grandeur et la vérité' - et l'absurde

Hmmm. I don't quite know what to make of this. And it's not the Philipponnat I'm sipping, either. I'd show you a picture, but the bottle is lodged between the hideous plastic vat of palm oil, a candle holder that belongs by the other ones nestled between the jungle and the television, a box of wire nails and a resin tincture I'm trying to remember to agitate. Not to mention the emergency extra cellphone that, despite its life of idleness, nonetheless manages to run out of steam every so often and emit a desperate chirping sound audible from the car. Which I'm charging.

So.

I gave a teensy decant of the in-process 'Catherine of Siena' scent to the dear and impressive lady I made it for, with a printout of its description and intent. (With ample caveats as to its need of more time and tinkering.)

But that's not my point.

My point is that I had not remembered that the French Resistance fighter, and Nazi prisoner, Fr. Joseph Marie Perrin, who was basically Simone Weil's guide into Catholicism, was a - yes, okay, it's obvious by now - Dominican. They met in Marseilles, had a long and close interaction in person and in letters -- and to me, I guess, the Little Manual of Perfect Prayer and Adoration - written, it should be added, during the occupation of France and his activities in the Resistance - seems to have been too envelopingly universal/catholic, as were what few of his thousand other works I've read, for one to be able readily to recall the author's particular/'partisan' Catholic spirituality. Simone Weil - who bridges the gap between fellow École Normale Supérieure brooding Gallic leftist alums like the preceding post's Sartre et tchums and the equally august roll-call of modern-day thinky Catholic converts like Chesterton, Merton, Jacques & Raissa Maritain, Dorothy Day, Claire Booth Luce, Avery Dulles, Graham Green, Brubeck (yes, Brubeck!), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Malcolm Muggeridge (yay! Punch! I never get Michael Bywater in here anymore) and even newly-minted Maronite, WSJ bigwig Peggy Noonan - was roped by a Dominican.

Anyway, since everything is strange and confluent and doubly-signified, and I have no hope of cohesion in this post, in 1946 Vogue magazine ran a spread called 'Portraits of Paris' of photographs by Messrs. Sartre and Camus. On the one hand, I admit this seems a bit like Wittgenstein offering up prose-poems about the rights or wrongs of the New Look; on the other, I do understand that these days Derrida or at least Baudrillard is invoked every time there is a change in heel shape or skirt length, and that every fashion magazine no less than every home-decorating periodical considers itself 'cutting edge. ' Still, it is a bit shocking considering the state of magazine journalism today, and I like to imagine Elle commissioning Ismael Kadare to do a photographic series on 'Sidewalks of Tirana,' which he fulfills with portraits of improvisational Rom 'habitation-artists,' impromptu scenes of trafficked 'sex artists,' and a 'location shoot' of 'hunger artists' in a car trunk lumbering across the immeasurable divide between Nogales and Green Valley.

Undoubtedly at this point that IS the Philipponnat talking, as it's taken me about an hour to write this that in any way makes sense even to me.

The Bidding Starts at $.99! (act now?)

From EBay:

'Description

This is a one of a kind Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus Cheetos! See how she is holding baby Jesus and looking down at him. It also looks like an angel. Depends on how you look at it. Now is your chance to own this rare and unique religious collectable! Approx. 1 1/2 inches long.

Good Luck and Happy Bidding!'

Kaneohe, HI

Architectural Indigestion

The last two Sundays, when I turned on NPR after church in the evening, the story I tuned into was on both occasions relevant to things I had been contemplating that day. This is not a blog about religion, but the topic does come up every now and then - if, I freely confess, primarily to blame the Calvinists for everything I can't blame on the Beats.

Today just before leaving, I was preoccupied with the topic of sacred architecture and, to a lesser extent, religious art, ornamentation, and sacramentals within a church building: in other words, the totality of the physical presence of a constructed sacred space. There are as many schools of thought on this as there are believers, non-believers, architects and art-haters. But there are two traditional purposes sacred architecture strives to fill: to present an invitation to the faithful and to the stranger, and to provide a physical, lisible symbolic representation of the individual's journey from the profane to the sacred. Now, NPR's story when I was driving back was about reconceiving and refashioning the newsroom not the chapel, but what it illustrates is that architecture is important, it can serve or hinder its putative goals, and that we, the victims or beneficiaries of an architect's design, do notice and are affected by the space.

What got me on to it first was writing about some of the perhaps surprisingly numerous shared beliefs of the Friends and Catholics. While every Christian church has some genetic resemblance to all others, there is not only serious doctrinal difference to address in comparing them, but also the subtler distinctions in emphasis among all the various ideas they still share. In other words, it's not just huge things like 'faith v. works' or literalness v. historicity, but how much stress is put on certain tenets at the expense of which other ones.

Now, the anti-clerical Friends may seem to be the furthest from the hugely organized Catholic Church - and yet in reality they both place tremendous emphasis on the need for individual discernment. Encyclicals and other writings, with increased vigor after Vatican II, insist over and over on the importance of an informed, passionate, and active laity, the need to question and to search for answers, and the importance of being an activist when convinced of the appropriateness of that course. Both churches, as well, lay tremendous stress on justice, including social justice, which is conceived in both traditions as emanating from and being necessitated by the fact of utter, radical equality among all people. The language is different, but the message is the same.

As fascinating as all that is (to me), one place there is a huge difference is in how meeting spaces are viewed by the two groups, which makes sense as they are meant to do different things. And I have no intention of going into that in any depth. But a Quaker meeting-house does not strive to invite, as do churches of most other Protestant and Catholic traditions, nor does it attempt to lay out a narrative or an argument, except of simplicity and the concept of the inner light within all present and all without. Friends would say we glorify God through our actions, and too many, or too-richly-decorated, things around distract us from the real issue, which is 'what are we going to do/ what does God want us to do?' Friends likewise assert that, rightly lived, life is worship, and if simplicity is integral to one's life, this value should of course carry over into meeting halls and the worship meetings within them.

I haven't given much of an explanation there, but it makes sense in a Quaker context. It does not make sense in the context of regular Protestantism, or in Catholic or Orthodox traditions, where the physical church is meant to inspire awe, create an atmosphere of reverence and solemnity, and lead us to contemplate the glory of God, a glory which exceeds that of the gilt and the plainchant, but which can be symbolized by them - by things we can apprehend through our senses and intellect. This, too, has an elegant and coherent logic, to which I'm also giving short shrift.

Additionally, in their beauty, churches, temples, mosques, and cathedrals are meant to invite the sinner in, that he might be led through beauty to Beauty. Again, part of the logic is that the place one worships God should celebrate His wonder through the highest efforts of human labor, and that being drawn to beauty is a noble and God-given trait - but since it is also true that humans like sparkly things, offering them a few in the place of worship is one way to help them keep coming back, in the hope that eventually more substantive things and a more mature understanding of the fullness of the religion will serve the same purpose.

However, even if you are not a beginner, there is something to be said for a holy space that looks like a holy space (unless you belong to a faith like the Friends within which this would make no sense). And I don't care if you believe in God or not, if you enter the Blue Mosque or the Hagia Sophia, a Thai temple or a Zen garden, the results of the care taken to evoke the majesty of the unknowable and the ineffable makes you believe in something. We were given our senses in the same package as we were given our minds, and unless you follow Mani or Mr. Calvin, I fail to see why punishing those senses in worship is necessary.

And that is my main point: the 1960s were regrettable. The 1960s were painful. The 1960s should have stuck to social reform and left style and design alone. That era is my proof that reincarnation does not happen, as I can attest that had I lived before, I would have done so much good in my life that not only would I not have been born when I would have had to witness the horrific legacy the decade wrought in the arts - but I would have taken every prophylactic precaution possible to ensure that my karma be so great that none of it would even have been perpetuated! So, since I'm here now, I wasn't here then, and the best I can do is to try to avoid imagining those puffy ladies' hats, those square ladies' suits, the clunky low heeled parsons' pumps with squared-off toes and ridiculous buckles, and the hideous architecture that evoked not so much the Great American Century as the Supreme Soviet. If I want to worship, I don't want to do it in a place that looks like the People's Recreation Hall and Refectory at Reeducation Center 29! There is a fairly crappy YMCA up the road, and a disastrous, menacing Albertsons a bit further on; I can always go to one of those if I need to savor a bit of Stalinist-gymnasium ambiance. I don't need to do it at church.

Crow au Vin?

To follow up on that lengthy introduction, this is the actual story...

As some of you know, I work in food. Some others of you know I volunteer in food. Some even know both, and maybe me, as well. Some know that the service aspect of my life is very important to me, and perhaps that I have tried to incorporate that into my paid work, as well, when the parameters of my job would allow that.

Well, one of my frustrations is that there are a great many people consumed with trying to send money to Myanmar, and now China, while our local food banks are short of both food and volunteers. Another one is that people are terribly worried about buying organic, free-range whatevers* for their own tables at the same time that they show no signs of being concerned about whether their neighbors are eating anything at all. And there are people whose lefty and self-righteous environmental obsessions are so narrow and myopic that they fail to take in the human cost, and the human aspects in the ethical equations that purportedly conscious and conscientious people make when deciding what, where, and how to buy.

And for me, labor issues matter. Fair treatment matters. Decent working conditions matter terribly. And, because I have worked in the often ridiculously poor conditions of commercial kitchens, finished out shifts in kitchens with second- and third-degree burns on the palm my sauteeing hand, worked with people who have previously worked in agriculture and meat processing, and have been an undocumented worker overseas myself, I would argue I have greater experience with the issue, and greater natural, visceral, direct empathy for the workers involved than do most people who simply have neither the experience nor the broadmindedness to consider the whole story of an ingredient, to imagine that the history of their organic, free-range, shade-grown tomato started a long time ago, in a language far, far away from their Whole Foods produce aisle.

So, when I read a disheartening story (you can just NewsGoogle 'Stemilt' and get one million hits, so take your pick) about Washington fruit workers in California having difficult times with a reputable and progressive agricultural firm, fruit producer Stemilt, which, frankly, among big companies has a great record with moving toward more organic practices and being quite decent with workers, I was impassioned, and I wrote a letter. I wrote a terse, angry letter with a (perhaps poetic but) mean closing line.

And a person, a live, human person like me and like the laborers, wrote me back. Okay, fine, Stemilt isn't General Electric, but I'm not Bill Gates, either. And it is a very big company, and I am not. And the letter wasn't condescending, although it had a valuable lesson. And the message 'Don't believe all that you read/hear' is one that we all, most especially myself, need to keep with us as much as we can. I work hard at being both humble and critical, and I think that, relative to many strains in our culture, I'm doing okay at both. That being said, however, we do all have our prejudices, even as we struggle against them, and it is precisely those that are most ingrained -- and thus most powerful in swaying our thoughts, emotions, and actions -- that we are least likely to perceive as they influence us.

Thus, after that terribly dramatic build-up, here are the letters. Mine first, then his, and then my response. While it is true that we live in a world that can be so alienating, and we can go for days or weeks on end without, if we so wish it, any in-person human interaction, and we can have so many 'contacts' in our Blackberries or even our social lives that are fated always to be just that and nothing more, it was shocking and gratifying and satisfying in my soul that someone at Stemilt read my angry words in the very human and compassionate way he did, and responded in such a human way.

To Whom It May Concern:

I applaud Stemilt's contributions to greener agricultural practices, but your treatment of Washington workers in California is disgusting and indefensible. I am a private chef, and my business focuses on local, organic, and seasonal ingredients as much as possible, but both my clients and I can get by just fine without your products from any state. As well, in any case where I am unable to ascertain the origin of product from the vendor, I will simply forgo that fruit, and that dish. My clients will already know why by that point, as I will be giving them information sheets next week about Stemilt's labor practices. We may be more concerned about the environment up here than people in other regions, but we are also concerned with the dignity of our fellow human beings who labor to provide us with the food that sustains our lives. May you reap the fruit of your inhumanity.

(My Name),

All the workers are harvesting the crops today in California as scheduled. No workers were removed. Be careful what you read. Stemilt is who it says it is, both environmentally and socially. Other peoples motives are what are at issue. This orchard attracts lots of great harvest workers because of the income it provides them due to its production and cleanliness. You would need to interview the workers to believe what I am telling you. The owner of this orchard is a humanitarian. It will continue to attract workers in future years because of this orchards environment.

(My Name), we are glad you care about people. There isn't enough of that concern in this world.

I felt compelled to respond to you. You seem like a person that cares,

Stemilt

Wow,

(His Name), thank you very much for responding to me personally. I work alone now, but when I worked in kitchens I really cared about my employees, many of whom were from basically the same demographic as agricultural workers, so I do know that it is possible, even in difficult, dirty, physical jobs, to create an atmosphere where workers feel valued. I also know that even big organizations can create overall cultures that are largely positive or mostly negative, and I applaud any efforts Stemilt makes to engender the former.

As for caring, I do. I think the food industry is unique, different than any other. There are famous artists in it, and there are tons of unskilled and semiskilled, invisible but equally vital contributors, too. And on the one hand, food is something we need every day and don't have to reflect on when we want to grab a hamburger to stop being hungry. On the other, it is an integral part of family celebrations, religious holidays, and rites of passage. And even though the poor can survive without shelter or new clothes, everyone has to eat to live. In fact, I volunteer at meal programs to help poor people get some food, to balance out the feeding-wealthy-people side of my life.

I really thank you for taking the time to respond. It is individuals, whether in a for-profit business or a charity, that make decisions, make personal connections - and make a difference. I'm not famous or influential or anything, but I'll follow the story and eat whatever crow I have to, along with Stemilt cherries, on my blog, http://oisive-vitesse.blogspot.com as it progresses. Again, I know work in the fields is hard, but I applaud you for offering workers housing, and for paying wages that attract new workers.

I can't yet find updated news stories, but I will keep looking. I do know that there isn't much money in broadcasting cheery news, unless it is put at the end of the newscast and involves a child or a pet. Immigrant farmworkers have known for a long time that they're not as cute as they could be.

*This actually happened -- and not at a Whole Foods: I was innocently idling around the bulk-licorice zone (which unfortunately abuts the bulk-coffee zone), doing no harm to anyone, when some Birkenstock-shod, bicycle-helmetted Zen master accosted the poor stock-clerk and assaulted my ears with this unnecessary query: 'While I see on the label that this blend (why must it be 'this blend?' why can he not utter the word 'coffee?' why can none of them? it's so easy to say, only two felicitous syllables that so gently roll off the tongue? cof-fee! coffee! coffffffeeeee! why does it always have to be 'this blend,' or 'this roast' with these people???) is fair-trade and organic, I was wondering if it were also perchance shade-grown, as well?'

Alright, I don't know that he said 'perchance.' Probably he didn't. But he wanted to. And the poor seventeen-year-old grocery-store worker, who probably drinks Mountain Dew and Denny's coffee by the litre and was writing speed-metal lyrics in his head and finally starting to enjoy pouring bulk penne from bags into canisters picturing the bass he's going to put a downpayment on with his next check had to break his fleeting rapturous chain of thought to go grab some higher-up who has somehow managed to memorize all the individual PC attributes of each and every 'blend' the store has, just to let the Coffee Sensei know whether or not he's hit some arbitrary 2008 liberal-coffee-buying trifecta.

Which is just a way of saying that while I think we should be moved to take action when our conscience demands it, and we should strive to do as much good and as little harm in the world as we can, there are also other things that are, simply, overkill and fatuous, and serve primarily to artificially assuage the ego -- and result in very little effect at all. I wonder when the last time for most of the Yoga Coffee Dudes of the world was that they calculated all that they spend on their blends and contributed it to something better, let alone went and 'fair traded' their own labor for free at a very needy, local nonprofit...

'Joy Is Not in Things; It Is in Us,'

said Richard Wagner and perhaps, in his staunch Teutonicity, dying in Venice sufficed and he never regretted not having built a 'sun-drenched Tuscan villa' in Bayreuth. It doesn't matter; it isn't 'Tuscany' that is the problem. The houses, and their bathrooms, and their greatrooms, their wall treatments, thematic toilet-brush holders, disguised three-car garages, incongruous media centers and 'authentic details' could all equally well be replaced by 'Hobbit' or 'Siheyuan' or 'Iroquois Longhouse' style with the principle remaining the same. Part of the problem, as I mentioned before, is the lack of hope these buildings signify, but there are other disturbing aspects.

Yes, in a perverse sense, these homes are all about hope, or American optimism, at least in its basest form. They are a testament to material success, to the fulfillment, in all caps, of The American Dream of home ownership. But what appears to me bleak in this reading is the notion that anyone's American Dream reaches its dramatic finale in a tract home rather than an alpaca farm in the mountains or a high-tech ultra-green penthouse condo or a craftsman bungalow with a beautifully, lovingly, tended garden. Your visitors will know you have money -- but will they suspect you have a soul?

A more troubling aspect for me is that the 'Tuscan' home and all its necessary 'Tuscan' appurtenances represent the recent widespread conflation of 'lifestyle' with Life, which then gave rise to the current tendency to disprivilege or ignore the latter in favor of the more comprehensible and convenient former. The problem with Life, I suspect, is that invariably it must be lived. We fall into it sodden with drool and incontinence, often leave it in much the same manner, and in between --

Well, in between we stammer at countless beginnings, stare at the creeping minute hand through lots of tedious middles and cry to ourselves over unfortunate endings; we get punched, sacked, ridiculed, betrayed, lied to, and cut off mid-sentence just before brilliant ripostes. We give our hearts away, we sing babies to sleep, we take up astronomy, then Jung, then Uilleann pipes; we take photographs lest we forget it really was just that beautiful, once. We have one too many, we don't get the promotion, we sit on the edge of the dance floor waiting; we practice kissing with a pillow and proposing with a mirror, we sometimes get the girl and we sometimes get the grippe.

None of that can be purchased. Much of it wouldn't be a very good deal, anyway, at any price, and I suppose that is the point: better to try to ignore it, and then perhaps the breathtaking crescendo of life, what all those clogged sinuses and broken heels and soothing kisses have been leading up to - death, in other words - might get distracted and not disturb us, after all. Life can be boring, painful, taxing, and too long or too short. And it always ends poorly.

Lifestyle, by contrast, is a narrative the user can control. It begins and ends as you wish, and you can leave out any of the parts that don't suit your desired image. Lifestyle, moreover, is nothing but a commodity, and an imaginary one at that. It consists in the things a consumer buys to convey to others and to himself the persona he wishes to inhabit. It is cosmetic surgery for your life, and just as there is a code of conduct regarding what should and should not be said to the obviously pulled, pleated, and plumped, so, too, will your posture as suburbia-dwelling daimyo, pasha, doge, or Indian Chief remain unquestioned by your neighbors. After all, you didn't neglect to include thematic outlet covers.

I suppose part of the problem for me is that it's just all so rickety. They are in the main not nice houses, just expensive ones. The majority tend to have a distinctly Disney feel, as though around the next cul-de-sac our little boat will sail past Olde Siam. There is an attempt at wholesale replication on the one hand, and a jarring failure in execution on the other. Neither is appealing; both together are horrifying. All art incorporates older elements, some art cross-cultural references; nothing man-made can ever be wholly new. That fact notwithstanding, history, geography, and culture along with form give a work its content, its meaning. The meaning of these tract homes is simply 'Tuscan sells.'

Why is that more troubling than an older neighborhood filled with bungalows or ranch-style homes? Are not all houses, since the dawn of modern real estate, designed to sell, to appeal to the buying public? And what's more, was not the Atomic Age as executed in the American home a perfectly articulated lifestyle, as detailed and complete as the 'Tuscan' variety, down to its Saturn-shaped lamps, spiky, Sputnik table legs, and galactic-design curtain fabrics?

Okay, yes, in theory, but in the case of the 1950s, few people kitted out their entire house in space-age furnishings, and there were plenty of other 1950s looks that mixed with the outright futuristic ones harmoniously. One could have an up-to-the-minute television lamp atop a table from 1947 with no grave sensation of aesthetic malaise nor expectation of scorn from the neighbors. Additionally, the house would not come with an actual satellite in the front yard, which is as good an equivalent as I can imagine for faux-cracked walls, faux-aged fake beams, faux-ruined paint jobs, and murals in the toilet of someplace you are not but which the entire house contrives to make you believe you are. And, yes, too, houses and minimalls and BP stations reflect the aesthetics of the time, but there is the additional problem that the aesthetics of earlier times demanded better craftsmanship and genuine materials. Moreover, people bought furniture differently decades ago, as companies realized they could sell more over time if they offered 'sets' that could be acquired slowly as finances allowed: even the counterparts of today's neo-Tuscans would not have bought a whole new household worth of thematically-congruent furniture, appliances, and accessories when they moved up in the world and bought a better house.

Lastly, 1950s style didn't seem thematic in the 1950s, because it wasn't thematic. It was simply up-to-date. Muddled, forced and fauxed tract-home half-iterations of a Tuscan fantasy lifestyle seem tragic to me because they hold out a series of promises they can never keep. The garish, kooky exuberance of Atomic Age decor cohabited in its enthusiasts' hearts with the very real fear of nuclear annihilation. Gratitude for the end of the War was balanced with the grim knowledge of how the War ended and what that could portend for future conflicts. Satellite table lamp and cars shaped like rockets were symbols not only of the power of technology, but of the hope that with proper stewardship it would lead humanity to more good than ill. It hurts my soul to contemplate the hopes these McMansions encapsulate.