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Saturday, February 20
THE CORPORATE-AMERICAN
by
Lloydville
on Sat 20 Feb 2010 12:52 AM PST
There is something fantastical, ghastly, almost demonic about seeing a corporation as somehow equivalent, existentially, to a human being. Could a religious person, for example, ever refer to Exxon Mobil as "a child of God," as a "dear soul"? The idea is profoundly unsettling.
It doesn't seem like a view one could arrive at simply by specious legal arguments or moral depravity in the service of a political ideology -- it would seem to require something more, some sort of neurological disorder, some actual and fundamental damage to the brain itself.
Thursday, January 14
CHRISTIANITY MUST BE DESTROYED!
by
Lloydville
on Thu 14 Jan 2010 12:57 AM PST
As Jesse Dylan observed on Facebook yesterday, "And the asshole of the year . . . the person with the least compassion . . . the everything wrong with religion award goes to . . ."
Who else could it be but Christian ghoul Pat Robertson, whose narcissistic wickedness knows no bounds? Pat loves to taunt and judge the suffering people of this world, especially at the times of their greatest agony, by blaming them for their own misfortune, as proceeding from their unwillingness to worship God according his formulae.
Most recently he has blamed the earthquake in Haiti on the fact that those Haitians who fought the French for their liberty, two hundred years ago, succeeded because they made a pact with Satan, offering to worship him in return for his aid. The nation and all its people -- like the little girl below -- have been cursed ever since, says Pat. (Robertson also blamed the catastrophes of 9/11 and Katrina on the sinfulness of the victims, i. e. on their failure to endorse his social agenda.)
What any of this might have to do with the actual Christian Gospels is beyond rational conjecture. Robertson's Jesus seems to be a zombie god, who came to gloat over the corpses of the dead, as a way of gaining converts through a kind of moral terrorism, instead of that uncanny rabbi of the Gospels whose heart ached so inconsolably for human suffering that he wanted to give up his own life to alleviate it.
CNN showed video today of people in Port-au-Prince waiting outside a medical clinic, which was only partially intact, for emergency service. Amongst them lay the corpse of an infant under a dirty scrap of sheet. I wish Pat Robertson had been there, so he could have lifted back the shroud and shaken his finger at the child, crying, "This is what comes of worshiping Satan!" He seems to have cast himself as a cartoonish Hammer Film monster in some demented remake of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! The irony of the genre and the role is apparently lost on him, though.
I don't personally believe in Hell as a literal place -- only in the hells we make for ourselves here on earth. I doubt if even Hieronymus Bosch could have depicted the hell Pat Robertson has made for himself, off in his own little hermetically sealed world of self-righteousness. It's something that almost doesn't bear thinking about.
From a recent article in The New York Times:
KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians,
whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited
in the United States, arrived here in Uganda's capital to give a series of talks.
The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan
organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” —
and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the
traditional African family.
For three days, according to participants and audio recordings,
thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national
politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as
experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people
straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay
movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the
marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual
promiscuity.”
Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive,
saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that
could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for
homosexual behavior.
Poor misunderstood evangelicals! Yes, they wanted the Ugandans to hate and fear homosexuality as they hated and feared the Devil, and yes, they wanted laws against it -- they just didn't want the penalties for it to be so harsh. Forgive me if I barf.
Once, on a Polish freighter crossing the Atlantic, I met a lovely German woman of a certain age who had lost a brother on the Russian front in WWII. So many years later she still wept when she spoke of him. Discussing the holocaust, she said, "We knew the laws against Jews were wrong -- but killing them! We could not imagine that."
This excuse won't wash any more. Dehumanizing and demonizing people, identifying them as agents of the Devil, always leads to murder, eventually, along a path too well marked in human history to be followed innocently, except by moral imbeciles.
The "gay agenda", if such a thing exists, isn't dark. I've known scores of gay people and not one of them has ever had the slightest interest in "converting" straights to homosexuality, having sex with children or destroying the institution of marriage. The mere fact that so many gays want to participate in the institution of marriage shows a respect for it that's harder and harder to find among straight people. You can see their aspirations as misguided, but not dark.
The "Christian" agenda, by contrast, is often, and repeatedly, as dark as it gets. The Catholic bishops who shuttled child-abusing priests from parish to parish to protect the name of the church belong in jail, and could easily be put there if there were the political will to apply the RICO laws concerning criminal conspiracy against them. 
The Mormon elders (like chief prophet Gordon B. Hinckley, above) who committed tax-exempt church funds to defeat the law in California granting the civil, secular rights of marriage to gays need to be prosecuted, too, for misuse of funds. At the very least, the Mormon church should have its tax-exempt status revoked immediately and permanently. I am perfectly content for the Latter Day Saints to function as a political action group -- they're welcome to meddle in Caesar's things to their hearts' content, defying the teachings of Jesus with all the scorn and contempt they can muster. I am not, however, content to subsidize them in this role. 
There are many good people who believe
that consensual sex between adults of the same sex is perverse, morally
wrong -- but does anyone in their right mind really believe that it falls into the same category of moral depravity as conspiring
in the rape of children? The mere fact that Rick Warren suggested a
moral equivalence between these behaviors was enough in itself to
identify him as an unbalanced kook. 
The pathetic evangelical homophobes (like Scott Lively, above, and Don Schmierer, below) who incited the Ugandans to murder probably broke no civil laws, just the laws of God, upon which they defecated publicly. 
I hesitate to speak for Jesus, but since very few seem inclined to these days, I'll just say this -- I think he would be richly pleased, and truly served, if every "Christian" church on the face of the earth just quietly disappeared. Only then, I suspect, would there be a chance of his message being heard.
Thursday, November 26
GRATEFUL LAYS
by
Lloydville
on Thu 26 Nov 2009 01:11 AM PST
I went to a prep school once upon a time -- just me and five hundred other bewildered boys off in the woods of New Hampshire. We were required to attend chapel eight times a week in the building above.
On the last night of every term, "The Last Night Hymn" was sung there. These are some of the words:
Saviour source of every blessing,
Tune my heart to grateful lays:
Streams of mercy never ceasing,
Call for ceaseless songs of praise.
It's a song for Thanksgiving, too. The phrase "count your blessings" has never had much resonance for me. With streams of mercy never ceasing, you might as well count the drops of water in a river flowing past you.
The image of the streams of mercy was called into my consciousness three times a year from the time I was thirteen to the time I was eighteen. It's taken all the rest of my life to begin to understand what it means.
Thursday, November 19
STEPLADDERS!
by
Lloydville
on Thu 19 Nov 2009 12:07 AM PST
They lurk in closets, utility rooms, sheds and garages -- seemingly innocent, ordinary home implements . . . and yet they hold the potential for doom, sudden and ghastly.
Do we take the warning labels on them seriously? No! We laugh at them -- until we tumble backwards into nightmare, into injuries, multiple, grievous injuries . . . or death!
Sunday, November 8
SENATOR POOT
by
Lloydville
on Sun 08 Nov 2009 08:29 AM PST
When I hear Joe Lieberman talking these days it doesn't sound like human speech. It sounds like a series of soft farts.
Wednesday, November 4
JESUS AS CAESAR
by
Lloydville
on Wed 04 Nov 2009 01:33 AM PST
Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.
-- Matthew 22:21
Somebody didn't get the message!
You have to wonder if anybody on the extreme Christian right ever actually reads the Gospels. I personally suspect that many of them just get briefings with all the out-of-context quotes that seem to support the social and political goals they've already embraced and would embrace even if Jesus had never set foot on the earth.
Jon McNaughton, the guy who painted the image above (and whose narrative ambition I sort of admire), has depicted Jesus as a kind of President of Presidents, the über- generalissimo of the American state. This Jesus is presenting the republic with a copy of the Constitution, instead of a copy of the Sermon On the Mount, as though he's the actual author, or Holy Ghostwriter, of the document.
There's no doubt that the Constitution owes a lot to the Christian tradition, with its radical respect for the worth of each individual before God, but really -- if Jesus wrote the Constitution, or even Ghostwrote it, do you think he would have left in the original clauses allowing slavery, which evaluated the worth of a slave at three-fifths the worth of a white person? A perusal of the actual Gospels would suggest otherwise, which may be one reason the extremists can't afford to peruse the actual Gospels.
We may be grateful for the Christian influence on the Constitution, but while we're at it, how about a little gratitude for the Masonic influence? Many of the Founding Fathers were Masons, and the Masonic tradition has always incorporated a radical respect for all religions. As President, George Washington, a Master Mason, the highest rank in the Fraternity of Freemasonry, met with Jewish leaders and told them that Jews would not just be tolerated in the new republic but welcomed as full citizens of it. That attitude, which is one reason America has, to an almost unprecedented degree among nations, risen above violent religious strife between its peoples, is not one which has normally characterized the Christian tradition, with its long history of virulent anti-Semitism. It is quintessentially Masonic, though, and also, one might add, most perfectly in tune with . . . the actual teachings of Jesus.
It might be good to start thinking of the Gospels as "the lost books of the Bible", and to deal with the irony of this, since the world would probably be a better place all around if they were the only books of the Bible.
Sunday, May 31
OUR TOWN COUP DE THEATRE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 31 May 2009 12:11 AM PDT
[Image©James Estrin for the NYT]
I noticed first that the dead characters were all facing different
direction in the space. They weren't lined up in rows, but were at
angles with one another. I noticed too that when the stars were
mentioned -- and here Wilder sounds like Spinoza, whom he loved, and
Thomas Carlyle, whom he does not mention -- the characters all looked
up as one at the sky. All of them are sitting there looking for
something. The play states this, and the director has gotten all of
the dead characters to stare in front of them, slightly up, with faces
of intense, determined concentration. They are not resigned nor are
they really at peace. They are looking forward. They never deviate
from this, except when they look up, as one.
Then Emily takes her famous fantasy journey back to the morning of her
16th birthday. (Here I begin to cry even as I write this.) And then
the surprise happened. I wasn't ready for it, I wasn't looking for it,
I wasn't expecting it. I didn't even realize it was happening -- until
I smelled something. Bacon and eggs! A curtain in the back of the
theater opened, revealing the morning of Emily's birthday, but this
time... the characters were in period dress, the kitchen was decorated
and fitted exactly as a kitchen would have been in 1910, and the snow
was falling outside the kitchen window and the sun was rising, with its
beautiful rays penetrating and lighting up the scene. This time, no
exaggerated gestures, no 'inwardness' at all -- just a family breakfast
on a beautiful winter's morning, with real bacon and eggs being cooked,
and Mrs. Webb looking as if she had stepped out of an old family
photograph. What is going on here is the physical beauty and
historical specifics of a day in the life, a concrete day in the life
-- and the characters are completely lost in it. No inwardness, no
'feeling', no reflectedness; and yet all the unnoticed loveliness of a
Spring morning in Chevy Chase, or on Macomb Street with Brutus the dog
and an overnight seventh-grade blood brother.
Thus when Emily gave her famous speech -- 'Goodbye, Grovers Corners' -- she
did not turn to the audience, nor even to the poignant, vivid, colorful
scene before her (hitherto, all the actors had been in grays and browns
and blacks, all muted and blending into each other.) Rather, Emily
turned inward and bowed her head and turned away from the audience, and
grieved for what she never saw. And then the Stage Manager bade us
good night, and the lights went out. Fade to black.
What I take this all to be about is exactly what Charles Isherwood said
in his review for the Times -- "... a feat of stagecraft that transmits
the essence of Wilder's philosophy with an overwhelming sensory
immediacy." It's not just the bacon and eggs -- it is the alienation
of human existence. We neither see what's happening on the surface nor
do we see what's happening below the surface. The characters in the
breakfast scene at the end of the play are completely unaware of the
beauty and actual lyricism which exists all around them. The
characters in Act Two are aware of the emotions underlying everything,
but not of any "God's-eye" cutaway that is required for the meaning of
those events to be understood. The characters in Act Three are
looking forward -- there is a little teleology here and I was reminded
of John Steinbeck's 'loss of teleology' in his mid-career -- but to
what? They are certainly not looking backward. The dead have, to use
Kerouac's phrase, 'retired from Samsara'. They don't 'like it' --
Wilder's line -- when the living come to call on them on their windy
hill. They are definitely not looking backward. And they are so far
from the particularities of the winter light of a 16th birthday, and
the 'odorama' of the memory, that Emily can barely express her loss, so
absorbing and consuming it is.
Back to the main body of Paul Zahl's report on David Cromer's production of Our Town (scroll down for the conclusion).
Monday, September 15
WATER
by
Lloydville
on Mon 15 Sep 2008 07:42 AM PDT
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet
an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,
"Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a
bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
This is an excerpt from a commencement speech given a couple of years ago by the writer David Foster Wallace (above), who committed suicide this week at the age of 46. I don't know Wallace's writing, although it has quite a reputation, but I've been struck by many of the quotes from it that have appeared in various notices of his death.
The quote above is particularly resonant. It reminds me of Walter Benjamin's notion of the "phantasmagoria" associated with each age in history -- those dreams that a whole epoch dreams and can't recognize as dreams, because everyone is having them. He's referring to cultural assumptions so profound and so unexamined that they're simply experienced as part of the environment, like water, or air -- things noticed only when they're absent. (Curiously, Benjamin, pictured above, also committed suicide, in much different circumstances.)
It seems to me that the principle task of any critic, of art or culture, is to discover the phantasmagoria of his or her time and disenchant people out of it -- so it can be seen. It is, as I've written before, a delicate task -- like letting a dreaming person know he's dreaming without waking him, because as soon as he awakens, his defenses, his unexamined assumptions about things, will reassert themselves.
Phantasmagorias exist in the regions of our culture unexamined or devalued by the official, that is to say, the conscious, culture. In the 20th Century, for example, the official culture dreamed that the Victorian Age had been left behind in Modernism's dust, and thus it could not see how the central art form of the age, movies, was essentially Victorian. The official culture dreamed that certain kinds of movies, like musicals, were frivolous and escapist, and thus could not see that they represented some of the century's most radical experiments in cinematic form. The official culture dreamed that Las Vegas was a vulgar cultural aberration, and thus could not see that it was the one place where the 20th Century was anticipating the future of our cities most perceptively (while also, paradoxically, keeping the Victorian tradition of the "universal exposition" alive.)
Image © Paul Kolnik
These observations will seem like clichés a hundred years from now, in retrospect, when we've awakened from our current dreams. It's the job of a cultural critic to get inside our dreams while we're dreaming them.
So how's the water where you are?
Monday, July 28
A T. S. ELIOT QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 28 Jul 2008 01:34 AM PDT
. . . damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation -- of salvation from
the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives some significance to
living.
This comes via Tony D'Ambra and his films noir web site. Its application to film noir is perhaps obvious, but it has a profound relevance to the modern age in general. Without knowing the quote, I wrote something similar in a previous post on this site, WHORES: A VALENTINE'S DAY MEDITATION, about Baudelaire's obsession with prostitutes. Eliot's observation comes from an essay on Baudelaire and it sheds a terrifying light on many otherwise baffling phenomena of our time. It explains why middle-class American teens sometimes go ballistic and murder their schoolmates, then kill themselves. It explains why hopeless Palestinian kids strap on bombs and martyr themselves in order to kill Israeli civilians.
Our culture values survival and comfort above all other considerations, and denies the horrifying truth that life without meaning, without transcendent purpose, is worse than death. Anything that promises meaning, even if it's the meaning inherent in damnation, or in a spectacular pursuit of oblivion, is better than a life spent, as Blake puts it, "wailing on the margin of non-entity."
Tuesday, January 1
A NEW YEAR'S GREETING FROM JULIAN OF NORWICH
by
Lloydville
on Tue 01 Jan 2008 12:47 AM PST
All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well . . .
Monday, December 24
NO ROOM AT THE INN
by
Lloydville
on Mon 24 Dec 2007 02:46 AM PST
When
very young kids hear the Christmas story for the first time, and you
then ask them what they remember most about it, they will invariably
say, "There was no room at the inn." That looms larger than the
cute animals, the happy shepherds, the magical gifts. Kids know
what the story is really about, where it really begins -- in rejection,
exclusion, humiliation. These are subjects that preoccupy very
young kids. Growing up, we tend to find ways of managing these
preoccupations, but they never leave us.
Christmas is not just about the hope renewed by the birth of a child --
it's about the ways hope is lost. If sorrow and despair don't
figure into your understanding of Christmas, the story of it won't add
up to much. Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the happiest Christmas story in post-Biblical literature precisely because it is the saddest Christmas story in post-Biblical literature, may be the best proof of that.
Here's an incredibly powerful holiday tale from the Flickhead blog -- a most appropriate meditation for the season.
Wednesday, December 12
NUESTRA SENORA DE GUADALUPE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 12 Dec 2007 03:34 PM PST
Today
is the feast day of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, the Mother of God, who
in 1531, not long after the Spanish Conquest, appeared to Juan Diego,
an Indian convert to Christianity, on a hill outside what is now Mexico
City. To the amazement of Juan Diego, and to generations of
Mexicans since, she appeared in the form of a young Aztec girl.
Since that appearance, she has become both patron saint and national
symbol of Mexico, the embodiment of its own peculiar form of
Christianity. She endured through all the anti-clerical episodes
of Mexican history and her image is omnipresent in the country today --
an abiding solace and guide.
This Christmas season might be a good time to think of her children who
are living in the United States without proper documentation, in
constant fear of the law, scorned and reviled by many but working hard, supporting their families
here and back in Mexico and contributing untold millions to our economy.
These are, for the most part, good and gracious people, industrious and
committed to sacrifice almost anything for their children's
future. We are lucky to have them among us. Their children are our children.
Feliz navidad, compadres!
Tuesday, November 13
D-DAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 13 Nov 2007 12:23 AM PST
This
picture has an aura and authority that may become harder and harder to
appreciate. It was taken by Frank Capa, who went into Utah Beach
with the first wave on D-Day, 6 June 1944. Utah Beach was, as it turned
out, the most hellish sector of the invasion, where the most casualties
occurred. Even before that became known, Capa would certainly
have been aware that he was risking his life to record the moment on
film, that there was a good chance he'd never return from France, even
if he managed to get ashore there. But he knew how important the
invasion was -- what a visual record of it would mean to everyone
praying for its success, and to future generations.
In modern warfare, there would probably be video cameras attached to
the landing craft, capable of transmitting live images to a command
center somewhere, but in Capa's time a real live human being needed to
be there with a camera to bring back pictures of the assault. A
life had to be put on the line for it.
Capa could assume, too, that his pictures would have a built-in
authority as proof of his witness. Today, in the era of
Photoshop, when photographs can be faked almost beyond detection, the
photographic medium has lost some of this authority. We have to
think retrospectively to summon up what the image above and the one below meant to Capa
and his contemporaries.
There was a tragic but somehow fitting end to Capa's experiences at
Utah Beach. He survived but most of the photographs he took did
not. A nervous lab assistant back in England tried to dry Capa's
rolls of 35mm film too quickly -- and all but eleven of the images were
destroyed. But this just served to make those eleven images more
precious -- to remind us of all that was lost on D-Day, all the lives
of young American soldiers that ended on the invasion beaches.
The eleven images that do survive are miraculous things. It's
like having photographs of the last day at Thermopylae, of the battle
on Bunker Hill, of the furthest advance of Pickett's charge. The visual
records of future wars will be more extensive and more useful to
military planners, but they won't have quite the human dimension, the
spiritual dimension, of Capa's pictures. They may make us shudder but they won't make us cry -- as Capa's do, or should.
Friday, November 2
JACKSON'S END
by
Lloydville
on Fri 02 Nov 2007 12:15 AM PDT
Stonewall
Jackson is buried in Lexington, Virginia, near the Virginia Military
Institute, where he taught before the Civil War. But his arm,
which he lost at Chancellorsville, where he received the wounds that
killed him, is buried near that battlefield.
When Jackson's shattered arm was cut off after the battle it was
thrown onto a pile of amputated limbs, as was customary, but his
chaplain decided to retrieve it and he took it to the nearby farm of a
relative, who buried it in the family plot. Eventually a small
stone marker was erected over its final resting place.
The grave can be visited today, but it's not easy. When I toured
the Chancellorsville battlefield two summers ago, with some relatives,
we had to park at a gate about a mile from the cemetery and walk to the
grave. My eighty year-old mom was along, and she made the trek
with the rest of us, in the hot Virginia sun.
The cemetery was beautiful -- a small fenced-in plot on a knoll
overlooking cornfields, shaded by old trees. There was no
particular emotion associated with visiting the site. An arm is a
tool. It was like visiting the grave of Stonewall Jackson's
sword. It was the walk with family that was moving -- and
surreal, like the Civil War itself. We Americans are going to
take up arms and kill each other in great numbers, they said back
then. We are going to make a pilgrimage to the grave of Stonewall
Jackson's arm, we said generations later. Somehow it all made
sense. I kept thinking of Jackson's famous last words:
Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.
There are some mysterious, unexplainable journeys that just have to be made.
Sunday, October 21
THE DIFFICULTY OF DEALING WITH GOD
by
Lloydville
on Sun 21 Oct 2007 09:08 AM PDT
A guy is talking with God and he says, "God, what is a million years to you?"
God says, "A million years is a second to me."
The guy says, "God, what is a million dollars to you?"
God says, "A million dollars is a penny to me."
The guy says, "God, could I have a penny?"
God says, "Sure -- just a second."
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