Rhinocrisy

Here’s one to add to the “list of insights other people have probably already had”:

This morning I was at Mission Comics staring at some comic books - graphic novels, in fact - which are a medium I find attractive for reasons too numerous to list here. If you’ve read Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” you’re probably familiar with his presentation of the comic as a truly modern art form, whose loud, brash strokes and larger-than-life characters are appropriate allegorical vehicles for the oversized problems of the world. And as our cynical self-critique has become more elaborate, as the demand for analysis has become more stringent, comics, and the characters in them, have become more complex and fraught - a post-modern art-form, a digest edition of the contemporary mind. By peering through its pages we may get a glimpse of the cross-section of our gyri.

As usual^* I am meandering towards my point - Anyway, I was looking at these comics; my companion commented on the revisionist nature of a lot of the work - hashing and rehashing old characters and storylines, reinventing them and updating them to reflect more modern sensibilities, or merely to explore the familiar tropes when pressed and extruded through the gears of a new apparatus.

This is nothing new, of course - art has always been collage-work, and maybe there is even a kind of prestige to be found in the artifice of reference. Shakespeare relentlessly plundered, from Plutarch and Ovid and many others. Did he even have a single original story? Is there such a thing? Perhaps not - the diet of words we’re fed on is itself formed from the regurgitations of thousands of generations preceding us; we are creatures built of contingencies. And of course, as Qohelet said, there is nothing new under the sun.

However, I don’t feel out of place in suggesting that contemporary art - contemporary media in general - elevates this kind of autophagy to a central principle. Practically all we produce is reconstructed from existing fragments - mashups, remixes, samples in music, “reboots” of film and television franchises, an endless parade of sequels, retellings of fairytales or children’s classics as seen through the bleary, fever-reddened eye of the present.

And simultaneously, as the lexicon of our culture expands, our memory (and therefore the body of reference we can draw on) narrows - we’re quickly going to proceed from chewing on our toes to swallowing up our own esophagus, Klein-bottle-like. Check out this Wired article suggesting reboots of scifi film and television stories, including the still-active television show Heroes, itself a shameless digest of superhero comics. The culmination of this trend will probably be publications composed only of chapter-heading quotes and a bibliography.^†

To visit and revisit the past - even the recent past - is either the product of trauma - we are so overwhelmed by the events of the past century that coprophagia is a nutritional and digestive requirement - or else it is the product of fear. We fear the future, and we fear the presentation of new ideas, now that we are all so well-trained in the art of deconstruction. The scope of our problems is ever-broadening, but we long ago eradicated our traditional frameworks for addressing them. There is no way to imagine our future. So we re-imagine our past, again, and again, until all our flesh is consumed.

Meanwhile, the dragon looms ahead.

^* I really ought to stop having these fanciful asides to my habitual readership, which surely does not exist. One can’t form habits around such an irregular basis.

^‡ A disgusting coinage if ever there was one, as if words and ideas were so much birdseed to be held in vessels to attract the maddened and voracious flocks (viz., you, my dear readers). We ought to find the invidious bureaucrats who created the term “content provider” and scourge them till their skins are a tartan of bruises.

I’ll admit, I’m not sure exactly which trench I’m lying in, here. I’m a bit of a wanderer, and I suspect I’ve been tunneling back and forth across the battlefield haphazardly, crossing over my own ditch more than once^*. Nevertheless, people are certainly throwing up a fog of war and running around brandishing their rhetoric at each other, so I feel like I should take a position in this War on Xmas^† arrangement.

In brief: I’m a big fan of Christmas. I’m not in any way a Christian, though I do have a more than usual fascination for it. I’m probably better read in certain parts of the Bible than many nominal Christians (though I’m certainly no expert), and I’m more opinionated than I have a right to be on certain hermeneutic questions. But I’m definitely a dabbler; and I have no interest whatsoever in being Saved.

As kids, despite our serious Hindu upbringing, we celebrated Christmas for many years in the secular fashion - decorating the tree, waiting for Santa, opening presents - until, eventually, even that splash of taint became too much for my increasingly orthodox parents. Nevertheless, we got our fair dose, and I still have fond feelings for the holiday as a result. Christmas is fun.

I feel I am in a privileged position here, compared to many other groaning Christians, who have fidgeted uncomfortably through dozens of Christmas masses and other generally odious lectures about the merits of Christ, barked at them by priests and vicars who make lackluster storytellers at best. I, on the other hand, get to enjoy the stuff almost unadulterated, comfortably shielded by secular society. That, of course, is what I enjoy most about Christianity: it’s an abundant store of mythology, rich (if occasionally incoherent) storytelling. The Nativity story is an excellent example: the birth of a golden child, a heroic figure destined to liberate a downtrodden people from bondage. His parents, poor folk, are hunted by a diabolic king determined to snuff out his life in the cradle, before he can grow to manhood and threaten the power of the oppressive empire. Crackerjack stuff, if you get to hear it divorced from any sanctimonious posturing.

Then there’s all the ancillary characters - Santa Claus, Sinterklaas, Black Peter, the Krampus, Rudolph, elves at the North Pole, or even later additions like Scrooge and Frosty the Snowman. In a culture that I fear suffers from an appalling lack of mythology, Christmas is chock full of it.

This is probably a depressing perspective for those who feel that what we should actually glean from Christmas is the glory of Christ and nothing else. I’m uninterested in worshiping Jesus; I like him, and I think he’s a compelling hero. But I also think Luke Skywalker is a compelling hero (and in a similar vein), and I’m not about to light candles for him.

I’ve always been a merciless syncretist; if we’re free to pick and choose the best bits from here and there (and leave behind the dross), we can assemble quite a bouquet. My interest in maintaining Christmas - in maintaining any body of stories - is to preserve the health of the field, to keep it vibrant and diverse. Stories thrive as living things - when they are shared among us, and warmed by repetition, by passage through thousands of lips. They form bright cords that knit us together, bring us close. More, please.

^* This allows for the horrifying possibility that I might sneak up on myself and shoot me in the back.
^† While I’m aware that the proper etymological origin of the X in Xmas is from the Greek Χριστός, its resemblance to the Cross always strikes me as a little weird. Jesus must get a wicked head-rush from being tilted up at a forty-five degree angle all season.

By the way, as requested, I’ve also started writing a comic. It’s not Fascist Popsicle Stand, and it probably won’t be ultra-funny, but I think it’ll be good reading.

It’s time to start bringing this thing back from the dead. To start off with, here’s a bit of stuff I’ve been working on lately. This is one segment of a story about a girl and an angel:

“The girl is wild,” Catherine said. She was tall and pale, her posture impeccable and the folds of her long blue dress carefully aligned. Her thin, firm hands held each other tightly.

Madeline’s father shrugged, indicating his indifference. “The girl is as she is,” he said.

“You have let her run unchained for too long,” the lady responded sternly. “It is a wonder she can even read.” She turned her gaunt, serious face towards the window and stared through the lace at the shadow of the sun. “She needs to learn what it means to be a woman.”

He ran his fingers across his mustaches, smoothing them against his lip. “What could I do about teaching her to be a woman?” he muttered. “Do I know anything of it?”

“You might have hired a governess, at least.” She stared her father down. He avoided her eyes, frowning pensively.

“She had a tutor.”

“But no one to teach her etiquette,” her aunt snapped. “Does this matter not indicate that you have let her go too far?”

“Raymond is a good boy,” he grumbled defensively. “He is a good match for her.”

“My God, Aaron, are you yourself so deranged? Can you so easily pass over indecency?”

Madeline kept her gaze firmly on her feet. Her toenails were crusted with dirt. She curled her toes over, hiding them in the shadow of the drawing room table where Aunt Catherine would not see them. She imagined the carpet was a pool in the middle of the woods. She perched on a rock beside it, pressing her foot against the cool surface of the water. There were fish in the pool; they came up and kissed the bottoms of her feet.

I remember a few years back when the Media Lab at MIT announced that it had developed a “sound laser”, a prototype device that could focus sound, laser-like, in a particular direction. I’m not exactly surprised to see the Guardian report that a weaponized version of the thing is being used as a crowd control device against G20 protesters in Pittsburgh. This is, after all, what our society seems to think engineering is most applicable to: better and better ways to hurt, kill, and torture each other. Hopefully the machines will come quickly and slice us into cube-shaped biotic units so that we’ll finally stop hurting each other.

About a week ago, the man convicted of blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 was released by the Scottish government and sent back home to Libya on account of his terminal prostate cancer, declared a free, but not an innocent, man.

Readers of this blog^* are expected by yours truly to be savvier than most, so I trust that you’re all at least marginally aware of the argument that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was not the bomber, and that Libya was in fact in no way involved, but that, because they were a more convenient scape than the likely perpetrators hiding in Syria or Iran, and because most Westerners tend to squint when looking at Muslims enough that a Libyan is just as good as a Persian to them, and because America was about to go to war with Iraq and needed to keep certain relations (especially with Syria) relatively friendly, al-Megrahi was made to be that which he was not.

If you’re not, you might want to read this piece by Hugh Miles in the Independent on the subject. Unfortunately, he’ll probably have no further opportunity to clear his name, but it helps to know.

^* If ye still remain after my especially protracted silence - I promise to get back on it in the near future!

In response to Sonia Sotomayor’s old remark, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Newt Gingrich said: “The sentiment struck me as racist and I said so. Since then, some who want to have an open and honest consideration of Judge Sotomayor’s fitness to serve on the nation’s highest court have been critical of my word choice.”

Now, if you’re not mentally impaired, I would hope that Sotomayor’s comment seems sensible - that is, that life experience can teach you things, and hopefully Sotomayor’s (viz., a “wise Latina woman”) rather tortuous life course renders her capable of finer discernment. It certainly seems hyperbolic to label her statement “racist”, as if white males had suddenly become some sort of oppressed class, and Sotomayor’s appointment would inaugurate a reign of terror in which the white male is subjugated and brought to his knees.

Newt is one of a parade of white men we’ve seen trotted out recently, men who by all rights should be utterly disgraced and ignored, but whose voices are, paradoxically, magnified almost in inverse proportion to their degree of humiliation. Dick Cheney, for example, a man who left office with his approval rating in a sub-basement sometimes used as an adjunct circle of hell, a man whom even his supporters compare to Darth Vader, is given equal standing to broadcast a reprehensible, pro-torture viewpoint alongside the currently elected president.

What the hell is going on? It’s quite simple, I say: Whitey is nervous. A black man is president. He’s appointing Latina women as Supreme Court Justices, for God’s sake. And worse, these people aren’t interested in being subservient to any white overlord - to the contrary, they’re armed with an alarming amount of gravitas, such that any white male challenger is swept from the podium by a casual brush of their elbows. To the cartoonishly racist this is probably an alarming turn of events. So it’s time to grandstand, and counter those minorities with strong, white figures who can detract from their stolen authority, and win it back where it belongs.

Unfortunately for humanity, they’re not exactly correct. Whitey is still in charge, and the balance of power still rests in the hands of white males, as we’re seeing by their frantic exercise of it to correct the current perceived threat. Too late, though. The crown is slipping.

Lest this seem too positive a note for this blog, let me end with a quote from Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”:

[T]he oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.

The king is dead; long live the king.

This blog serves to some extent as a barometer of my mental health - when it is effulgent and rife with words, it means I’m doing well, my confidence is overabundant, and I’m willing to project my useless blatherings onto the Interspores. When it becomes ghostlike and silent, except for the occasional tumbleweed post, it’s probably the reflection of some dark stormclouds over my head.

Based on this assumption I can construct for myself a chart of my mental health history over the past few years, using the number of posts per quarter. Here it is:

Evidently 2005 was a very happy year for me. I was in the full bloom of my youth, I was in excellent physical shape, I was living with the best set of housemates I’ve ever had, and I had just taken a step back into graduate school, which at the time seemed fresh and exciting.^* The proceeding three years are clearly the result of grim reality setting in, of a succession of defeats wearing down my patience and self-confidence - the usual business of a PhD program. The last few quarters are understandably muddled; I still haven’t learned how to walk in the surreal mooonscape of San Francisco.

^* I was also the much-beloved neighbor of a bevy of beautiful and charming twenty-year old girls, whose company I sorely miss.

Reiterating the hypocrisy of right-wing Christians in this country is a fruitless exercise, and I’m not exactly sure why I am about to embark on it. I suspect my rational mind must compulsively disentangle their dissonance.

Observe one Paul Broun, a Republican Congressman from Georgia, who wants us to proclaim a “Year of the Bible”, so we can get back to the Biblical principles our laws and fundamental values are based on. He’s most worried about a totalitarian government:

We are headed toward a total government control of everybody’s lives — a loss of freedom, a loss of our money, a loss of our private property — and it’s extremely critical now for us to go back to those foundational principles that this country was founded upon.

I find this infuriating, because it suggests to me that Mr. Broun has never actually read the Bible. The first Christian community, made by the Apostles, whose example we’re all supposed to follow, outlines principles diametrically opposed to what Broun describes above. In Acts Chapters 4 & 5, it clearly describes how the first Christians were meant to live - that is, they were expected to sell all their property and surrender their wealth to the Apostles, who would then dispose of it in the interest of the community. In fact, there’s even an incident where someone cheats a little bit, with drastic consequences:

But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession, and kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet. But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things. And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him.

And it was about the space of three hours after, when his wife, not knowing what was done, came in. And Peter answered unto her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much? And she said, Yea, for so much. Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out. Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.

This seems pretty clear to me: as I’ve suggested before, the early Christians lived according to something resembling Marxist democratic centralism, with a Politburo controlling the community’s wealth and decision-making. This conflicts with Broun’s claim that the Bible upholds the sanctity of private property; whence, then, does he make that argument? The Bible is not text to him, to be read and understood - it’s just a totem to be waved around. I thought that this was the problem that was supposed to have been corrected by the Protestant Reformation, when people first started reading the thing, and saying to themselves, “Wait a minute - none of this shit you’re saying is actually in here.”

When I fold my t-shirts, I hold them by the corners of the shoulders and make a snap-and-fold motion, folding them lengthwise in a single movement. I do this with the ease of long practice, even though I have never consciously noted this action before.

This is the sort of nonsense that would end up on my Twitter feed, if I had one. You guys should feel lucky I don’t.