Read This Book: "The Time Traveler's Wife"

First of all, fair disclosure makes it essential that before I review The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (2003, San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage), I must tell you, dear reader, that I am mad for anything dealing with time travel. It might very well be my favorite science fiction/fantasy theme, and I will read just about anything that even hints at dealing with the concept.

That disclosure taken care of, this is a fabulous book. I can’t think of any better descriptive word. I was entranced by the story, by the way the story is told, by the characters - it is just a fabulous story, fabulously well told. I’ve been having trouble finding books that will hold my attention just lately. This one grabbed my attention and did not let go; I only didn’t sit and read it straight through because of things like, oh, having to work.

We are taken into the life of Henry DeTamble, who is able to travel through time. Well, able might not be the best word - he spontaneously travels through time, not able to control when he goes, or where, or how much time he spends in the past or, less often, the future. This turns out to be a genetic trait, something that eventually comes to be called Chrono-Displacement Disorder. Because, after all, every condition must have its own name here in the twenty-first century. Different things trigger his travels. The first time it happens is on his fifth birthday. His parents have taken him to the Field Museum in Chicago for his birthday, and he just does not want to leave. That night, he travels there again and spends the night with an older version of himself. It will not be the last time he spends time with himself in an older or younger edition.

While he cannot control his travel, Henry often travels to particular places and events. He visits his mother’s death in a car crash over and over. And he often goes to a particular meadow, where he gets to know a girl named Claire. The first time they meet, Claire is six years old and Henry is thirty-six. As they meet again and again through the years, Claire falls in love with Henry while he already knows that they will eventually marry. After a two-year period in which they do not meet, Claire comes across a non-time-traveling Henry when she visit’s the library where he works. She is 20, he is 28. She practically jumps him; he has no idea who she is since all of the times he has time traveled to visit her he has been older than he is on that day. She tries to explain who she is, what their relationship is, but he is clueless and she has to ask him out.

The story, like Henry, jumps back and forth through time. That might have been difficult to follow, except that the author indicates for every scene what the date is and how old both Claire and Henry is at the time. It also brings a heartbreaking tone to the telling, as the reader waits for something to happen that we know will take place but some of the characters do not know. It all works wonderfully, though, to draw the reader into the story.

The characters are wonderfully drawn. We see them warts and all, intimately. I can’t recall too many novels where I have felt so much a part of the lives of the characters, as if they are living people rather than ink on paper with just a semblance of life. It is easy to care for these people, and to worry about what will happen to them.

If I have any quibble with the book at all, and it is a small one and probably just a relic of my own perceptions, it is that it often seems to be taking place in an earlier time. Despite the pop culture and pop music references to places like McDonalds, to people like Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, the book had a feel of taking place in some earlier era. I’m not quite sure why that is, but it was sometimes jarring to me to see some of the modern references.

On the other hand, the inclusion of actual historical events provided what was, for me, one of the most poignant moments in the book. Henry, having traveled into the future as well as the past, knows what will take place on the morning of September 11, 2001. He has told Claire about it, and on that morning she wakes up early only to find Henry and their daughter sitting in front of the TV. “How come you’re up,” she asks him. “I thought you said it wasn’t for a couple of hours yet.” His reply to her is, “I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to listen to the world being normal for a little while longer.” That scene brought tears to my eyes. It made so much sense to me. I miss that normal, non-paranoid world, that world where a congressman hearing a construction worker using a nail gun didn’t automatically think it was weapons fire and cause a panic and the shutdown of a whole office building in Washington, D.C., which happened yesterday, as I write this.

Enjoy this book for just what it is, an extremely good story. Or enjoy it for the ideas it presents the reader to think about at leisure - and there are plenty of them in there. But please, read this book.

Oooooh. Secrets...

In his Senate hearings today, General Hayden - he's Bush's nominee to head the CIA, in case you haven't been keeping up with the circus that is Washington - said something today that I thought was interesting. He said that the CIA needs to get out of the public eye and back into the business of learning secrets. Not a direct quote, but close enough to his gist for government work.

It made me laugh. That secrets thing always does.

Now, I know that in what passes for the real world, the gathering of things people and governments try to keep secret and then keeping them secret is part of the cat-and-mouse game that is the intelligence establishment.

I know that.

But it just sounds so childish.

"I know something you don't know! Neener, neener, neener."

And it isn't just the government that does it. It's all those secret societies. The Masons. Skull and Bones. All those top businessmen and government boys who gather at the Bohemian Grove in northern California and do whatever they do every year. It's religions, too, some of them. The Mormons act like the world would come to a screeching halt if someone told what goes on in their temples. Never mind that anyone who wants to know can find out on the internet. It's even some businesses. I used to work for a company that acted like the next week's work schedule was a state secret or something. They would never let anyone see it until the day before it began.

People seem to have the notion that knowing something no one else knows, or that very few other people know, makes them all special or something. They don't mind letting you know that they know something you don't. In fact, sometimes that seems to be the whole rationale for having secrets - so that they can brag about it. I think of it as the "if I told you, then I'd have to kill you" syndrome.

But, God forbid you let on that you don't care about their secrets. Or that you tell them you think they're acting like a five-year-old about the whole thing. Then they'll tell you that you're just jealous that you don't know what they know.

No. I'm not.

Really.

You all can go play with your secret decoder rings all you want. I'm going to go do something, oh, intelligent.

Warren Jeffs, Osama bin Laden, and the FBI

The FBI has finally gotten with the program and put Warren Jeffs on their 10 Most Wanted list, right alongside fellow polygamist Osama bin Laden. Jeffs was profiled on "America's Most Wanted" on Saturday night, from what I understand, and the mainstream media is finally waking up to the fact that there is a cult right here in the United States that marries off girls as young as 12 years old to much older men and kicks teenage boys out of the community because they constitute "competition" to the older men who want to marry these children.

Don't believe it? You can read about this so-called "prophet of God" on the ABC News website. Jeffs is the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, known as the FLDS, an offshoot of the Mormons. The two churches have been separate entities for several decades, as the LDS church in Salt Lake City are anxious for everyone to know. The FLDS follow doctrines that the LDS officially quit teaching long ago, such as plural marriage (or polygamy, with one man having many wives). The Salt Lake church still has the scriptures teaching plural marriage as part of their official canon, even though their official position is that they excommunicate anyone found to be practicing polygamy - but that is another topic for another time. The FLDS church never stopped the practice, and in fact it is one of the main tenets of their belief. A man, they believe cannot enter the Celestial Kingdom (their highest degree of glory) and become a god himself without having at least three wives. Many FLDS men have many more wives than that. Jeffs himself is said to have at least 50 wives.

Understandably, the government has a bit of problem with all of this and has indicted Jeffs on several charges having to do with sanctioning - indeed, arranging and officiating at - the marriage of such young girls as well as for molesting a male relative. This has sent Jeffs on the run, and no one outside of his followers, which number as many as 10,000 or more in the US and Canada, have seen him for over two years. I don't know what has taken the FBI so long to make catching this man a priority, unless they are afraid that they could have another situation on their hands like they did in the 1950s when they police raided the FLDS headquarters in northern Arizona in the 1950s but ended up with few or no convictions and much sympathy given to the poor fundamentalist Mormons for having their religious rights stepped on.

By letting this go on for so long, there is a very real possibility that when the Feds to catch up to Jeffs they are going to have another Waco on their hands. People who know much more about the FLDS than I do, people like Jon Krakauer (quoted in the ABC News story linked above), who wrote a book called Under the Banner of Heaven, which touches on the FLDS and their practices, fear that is what will happen.

I think the real point here is that just because someone cites a religious belief for something, that does not mean that it should be tolerated if it otherwise violates laws such as those protecting children from abuse. I'm a big fan of the First Amendment, but I don't think anyone ever intended the free exercise clause to protect people who marry off 12 year old girls to men sometimes in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. And I don't think it was meant protect people who kick teenage boys out of their own homes, ostensibly for things like watching television or talking to girls, because those boys constitute a threat to the older men who want to accumulate a collection of young wives.

If this has piqued your interest in the situation with Jeffs and the FLDS and you'd like to know more about some of the unbelievable things that have been going on right here in the United States for longer than most people realize, I would recommend that you read Jon Krakauer's book, Under the Banner of Heaven, which I mentioned above. I wrote a review of that book (scroll down to the second post; it will have the title of Krakauer's book in the post's title) in January, which will give you some idea of the territory Krakauer covers there.

Things just aren't going that well for the Bush administration right now, are they?

I shouldn't read this stuff. I know it'll tick me off. But sometimes I just can't help myself.

I spent a good deal of last Sunday reading two articles about the Bush administration. I'm sure the White House isn't happy about either of them. The first, “The Iran Plans”, by Seymour M. Hersh, appears in the April 17, 2006 issue of The New Yorker. The other, available in the online edition of Vanity Fair, is “Senate Hearings on Bush, Now”, by Carl Bernstein (yeah, of Woodward and Bernstein, for those of you old enough to remember Watergate). The first article discusses an administration plan to bomb Iran in order to stop its nuclear development program. The second calls for Senate hearings to investigate the Bush administration. In light of the revelations in the first article, the plea in the second takes on more importance and immediacy.

According to Hersh’s article, the Bush administration, led by civilian leadership in the Pentagon, are determined to attack Iran and destroy its capability to carry out the enrichment of uranium. While the administration claims to be pursuing diplomatic solutions to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear development program, Hersh’s sources say that Mr. Bush sees “saving” Iran as his “legacy” and that the administration thinks the only solution to the problem is regime change, which they believe will only come with war. Perhaps the most troubling claim is that the administration is ready and more than willing to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event such an attack is launched. Also troubling is that Hersh quotes one diplomat as saying that there are clearly those in the administration who would be “unhappy” if a diplomatic solution is actually found and that, at any rate, according to one of Hersh’s European sources, the Bush administration believes that “diplomacy is doomed to fail.”

America’s European allies are not any happier with the idea of a nuclear-capable Iran than the administration is, to be sure, but they think that bombing is a bad idea and that if the US persists in its apparent determination to bomb, it will only strengthen Iranian President Ahmadinejad rather than convincing Iranians to run him out of office. On the other hand, the Bush administration seems to believe that Ahmadinejad will only respond to threats. That is not, apparently, the view of some of the military advisors in the Pentagon who, again according to Hersh’s sources, have been trying to talk the administration at least out of considering the use of nuclear weapons. Some are said to be ready to resign rather than approve of such an action. I don’t know about you, but I find all this quite disturbing. We apparently have a president with a messiah complex, surrounded by top-level advisors - Dick Cheney his vice president, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld leading the pack - only too ready to encourage him. The White House has been incredulous at the military reluctance to use nukes, saying that the option came from them in the first place when it is questioned.

Taking into consideration the contents of Hersh’s article, Carl Bernstein’s article calling for a Senate investigation of President Bush and his administration takes on added importance. Urging such an inquiry is certainly a serious step, but I’m sure Bernstein knows this, given his role in the Watergate affair that culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon. In fact, one of the things he addresses in the article is the care with which any investigation should be approached. It must not, he says, be a “fishing expedition”, but be focused on very specific issues and concerns even though, as he says, there are a lot of fish to be had.

Bernstein identifies several possible lines of inquiry that should be pursued in an investigation of the Bush White House. There are the lies Bush and his administration have told, and whether they have been used as a “matter of policy” to hide and defend the president’s and the administration’s actions. What kinds of lies does Bernstein mean? He is referring to the insistence - without any concrete proof produced - by the administration that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to gain support for the war in Iraq, to statements after the fact that “nobody anticipated the breach of the levees” in New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina in the face of evidence that the possibility had been reported to Bush before the hurricane made landfall, among many others. There seems to be an almost reflexive concealment by the administration of anything that it feels might reflect badly on it or that might lead to it not being able to do whatever it wishes.

Another issue that Bernstein says should be addressed is the competency of the president, the vice president, and some of his top-level appointees. More than just the competency of the president should be looked at because, as Bernstein writes in the article, there is a good deal of evidence that the policies and ideas of the administration that some see as illegal or unconstitutional come as much from Cheney as they do from Bush. While Bernstein does not come right out and say it, this goes to the question of who is really running the administration. In this regard, the observation of Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, himself a retired colonel, that it seems to him that Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld form a decision-making “cabal” outside the bureaucracy. Also worrying is Bernstein’s report that Colin Powell has been known to make statements in private that call Vice President Cheney’s emotional stability into question. Because Powell served with Cheney in the first Bush administration, he would be in a position to recognize changes in the vice president’s mental state.

A huge issue that Bernstein feels should be investigated is the way that the Bush administration has evaded responsibility for its actions, not only by lying about various issues but also by concealing their actions by claiming executive privilege in order to avoid disclosing information and by fashioning the doctrine of “unimpairment”, through which the administration claims that the president, especially in a time of war, can essentially do anything he wants to do. This harks back, as Bernstein points out, to Richard Nixon’s famous (or infamous) statement to interviewer David Frost that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Even conservative columnist George Will, writes Bernstein, has called that attitude as dangerous as terrorism.

Some of the practical applications of the doctrine of unimpairment are chilling. They include wiretaps without court order (one of the things that got Nixon in trouble all those years ago); the claimed authority to hold prisoners of war, even US citizens, indefinitely and without habeas corpus; and the administration’s unusual attitude toward torture and that position’s repudiation of the Geneva conventions, the provisions of which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales reportedly called “quaint” in a memo written when he was White House counsel. Of course, Mr. Bush has claimed that his administration does not condone torture. What he did not say was that it all depends on how one defines “torture”. Another manifestation of the attitude that nothing must stand in the way of what the Bush administration wants is their common tactic of painting any critic as a malcontent, a traitor, or a coward. This has been seen in the leak of Valerie Plame’s position as a CIA agent in order to discredit her husband after he wrote an article contradicting administration statements on the issue of WMDs. It was seen in the attempts to marginalize Representative John Murtha, an ex-marine, after he spoke out against the administration’s position on Iraq. It may also be working in the recent firing from the CIA of Mary McCarthy on allegations that she was one of the sources for information on a network of covert CIA prisons, published in articles that won journalist Dana Priest a Pulitzer Price recently. Not coincidentally, there have been comments by partisans of the administration that journalists who publish such articles should be tried and sent to prison for writing about such things.

The case Bernstein makes for an official investigation into the Bush administration is persuasive. That he isn’t the only one worried about the things the administration is doing only adds to his argument. There are the retired generals who have called for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation (they, too, are being subject to a campaign of marginalization by the administration, by the way). There are the members of Bush’s own party who are beginning to question some of the administration’s actions. There are the European diplomats, cited in the Hersh article, who worry that the administration might be about to do something one called “catastrophic” in Iran, as well as the high-level US military personnel who are said to be ready to resign rather than acquiesce to the use of nuclear weapons by the administration. In light of all this, such an inquiry as Bernstein proposes in his article seems an urgent priority.

There is a lot more in these articles than I've been able to outline here. Both of them make some very good points, and whether you think you will agree with them or not I don't think you'll regret reading them.

Random thoughts...and a bit of a rant

I was going to be better about writing here. I really was.

I've been collecting little items I want to write about, writing little notes to myself about things I want to comment on or explore.

But I just haven't found the time to sit down and write. Or I haven't made the time to do so. Or by the time I'm finished with work every day (my job involves a lot of writing), I just don't want to sit down and string words together anymore for awhile.

For example, for some reason the other day I thought it might be fun to start a secret society. Don't know what spawned that thought. Might have been an ad for The DaVinci Code. They're really pushing that movie ahead of its release. But, anyway, I got to thinking about how that might be a hoot. Then, again, I've been told I have somewhat of a twisted sense of humor.

And then, when I was watching The Breakfast Club on tv the other day, it occured to me that it is an amazing thing that anyone survives high school. It's brutal. I mean, I liked school and I still threatened to quit near the end of my senior year. You see, there was this riot or street fight or whatever you want to call it the day we got out for spring break that year and they locked down the school (although way back then, that isn't what they called it) and there were police helicopters circling the school and shots were fired and the whole thing. Scared the crap out of me, and I did not want to go back.

But it isn't just that. It's the games that go on, the mental torture that anyone who doesn't fit in is subjected to. I think that whoever decided that it was a good idea to put that many bodies with all those raging hormones into such a small space and force them to stay there all day, five days a week, must have been a sadist of the first order. It creates a meanness, a ruthlessness that I think you probably don't even find on the battlefield in a war. Like I said, I liked school, or at least the process of learning. But junior high and high school were torture, mostly, because I was the two things one simply cannot be at that age - smart and overweight. The casual cruelty was almost overwhelming sometimes.

It became a much more poigniant question - how do we survive high school? - when I happened on the film Bowling for Columbine yesterday on tv. I suppose they were showing it because it was the anniversary of the massacre. Michael Moore seems to blame it on the gun culture in the United States. And that might be part of it. But I think most of what caused that, and what causes much of the violence that goes on in schools, stems right from the way some people get picked on, to the point of mental torture, in high school culture. This is not to give those boys a pass on what they did. That was not the way to handle their hostility. On the other hand, if the reports of the sort of ridicule they were subjected to are even partly correct, it isn't hard to see where the hostility came from. The huge problem, I think, is that no one ever really does anything about the bullying, about the way teenagers treat each other. It is always just passed off as "the way things are". And that's a shame, because it doesn't have to be that way.

Follow: Weekly Anamnesis

I don’t follow very well. Never have, probably never will. I think it’s genetic.

It hasn’t made life easy, either, not being a good follower. It’s pretty much made faithful adherence to a religion out of the question. God knows, no pun intended, that I’ve tried, but it has just never been a good fit. And it isn’t just religion. Membership in any organization tends to be a problem sooner or later. And school. Well, that is just a pain in the…well, you know. Because not following usually at least implicitly connotes leading. And leading can really cause headaches.

It all has to do with out unofficial family motto: Question Authority.

Seriously, that’s been a part of the family for at least three generations now, beginning with my grandfather way back in World War I. Grandpa Frei was in the German army (my other grandfather was on the American side, but that’s another story), and not all that pleased about it. Family legend goes that he didn’t like an order he was given one day and punched out his commanding officer. Fortunately for the family’s posterity, he somehow managed not to get a date with the firing squad. I understand it was a pretty close thing.

My father continued the tradition in yet another arena. His family, being German (although by then they had made it to the United States), were Lutheran. I don’t know if they were good Lutherans - Grandpa died before I was born and I don’t recall Grandma ever going to church - but they sent my dad to confirmation classes at the Lutheran church. Which was fine until the priest (minister? I’m not quite sure what Lutherans have) informed his class that once they had been received into the church, they were not to associate with nonbelievers any more. Well, my dad was a friendly kind of guy and that didn’t sit very well with him. The way I hear the story, Dad abruptly stood up, told the guy to go to Hell, and never went back. He attended church services very rarely after that, and not very happily. When I had my bout with authoritarian religion (and it was a doozy), he respected my space, but he tried his darnedest to reason me out of it. I think my only regret is that he passed before I came to my senses.

And then there’s me. I should know not to even try to follow. But I get these bouts of wanting to “fit in”. I’ve mostly learned my lesson by now, but its been a rough road sometimes. There was the religion thing. I’m still recovering from that. I’ve tried, from time to time, to join organizations. That has rarely worked out, either. The most successful effort was community college honor society, but that had a lot to do with the fact that I found myself in leadership positions fairly quickly. Alas, that was also where I discovered that leading can be just as much of a pain as following. That was a lesson that was only reinforced once I transferred to university to do my upper division work.

The university I attended was small, private, and very good. Most classes were small (I was in a few that had less than ten students each), and many of them were either seminars or involved a lot of small group work. My sociology of religion course was like that. Groups were not usually assigned, and after the first few weeks of class they became more or less static. The group I ended up in were all good students, but not necessarily very ambitious. Once they discovered that I always did my reading, several group members began to slack off. I would know what was going on; all they had to do was come along for the ride.

I finally got tired of that, and decided one evening when I was feeling particularly lazy that I wouldn’t do my assigned reading for the next day’s project. Well, I skimmed it, I think, but that was just me being my typical OCD-prone self. The next day in class, after we got into our groups, I just sat there. Pretty soon someone asked who had done the reading. Everyone looked at me. I said something along the lines of, “Don’t look at me. I didn’t do it.” They thought I was joking. Panic ensued when they realized that I was absolutely serious. No one else had read because they were so used to me guiding them through the projects. So we had nothing to offer when the professor called on our group. My group-mates didn’t like that very much at all. Let's just say that they were a bit irritated at me for letting them down.

And so they learned a lesson (I hope) that I had already figured out. Following is not something you want to do blindly because, more often than not, if you follow without paying attention to where you are going, you may very well end up where you don’t want to be, in circumstances that you might not find comfortable.

If you want to find out more about Weekly Anamnesis, check out http://weeklyanamnesis.blogspot.com.

Fame

There has been some talk in the news lately about GawkerStalker, a new feature at Gawker.com that allows people to post sightings of celebrities in Manhattan along with maps to the locations in a very nearly real-time manner (the site says it takes something like fifteen minutes for a sighting to be put up). Apparently the whole point of the exercise is that people viewing the site can see where their favorite celebs are and, if they are close enough, try for their own sighting.

All this has created somewhat of an uproar, with some celebrities complaining that real stalkers could use the site in ways that could cause the celebs to come to harm. The management of Gawker.com claims that this isn't so, and that the celebs should not complain because they trade their privacy for fame. I'm not so sure how much of a threat the site really is - I think if someone is determined enough to stalk someone, star or not, they'll find a way to do it. On the other hand, I think it adds to a culture that has already taken celebrity-worship to ridiculous lengths. And, I don't think anything that could even conceivably help a stalker is really necessary. I've never even seen the point of the whole southern California "Maps of the Stars' Homes" phenomenon.

Then, again, I don't understand celebrity worship in the first place. They're just like everyone else, only better known. I'm not saying that there aren't artists whose work I really like and whose careers I follow. But it is their careers I follow, not them. And I'm not going to pretend that I don't think it is cool that I've met a famous person or two myself, and seen others differetn times and places. But those encounters were just that - kind of cool - not life-changing experiences that define my existence.

Perhaps my perspective on the whole thing has to do with having grown up in Southern California, with the famous (and infamous) pretty much all around. I went to school with kinds whose parents who were in show business; people I knew in high school had dated people in the business. The first six and a half years of my life, I lived across the road from a film director who was quite famous in his time, and whose work is still considered classic today. After we moved from that house and my grandmother moved in, he would come down and talk to her across the fence while she did yard work. My dad knew a number of actors who happened to live in our area. So, the famous and semi-famous were not exotic creatures, but neighbors. Additionally, part of my feeling about celebrity worship also likely comes from having known a few people who were (and I imagine still are) caught up in that lifestyle. I knew a girl when I was in junior high who was so fanatic about one star that she went to each weekly taping of his television show. When she wasn't there, it was all she talked about, something her whole life revolved around.

Whatever has caused it, my attitude has always been that any performer only owes the public the best performance he or she can give. Where they shop, who they date, what they do with their spare time - none of that is any of my business. Anyone or anything - such as GawkerStalker - that tries to promote the idea that these celebrities owe us any look into their private life is simply wrong-headed. I don't imagine the people who run that site would like it very much if one of us walked up to them while they were having dinner in a restaurant and demanded that they give us a formal seminar on website creation, right then and there. Because that's what they are doing - they are demanding that because someone is a performer, they are obligated to perform on demand, even when they are not receiving any compensation for it. Which is just unreasonable.

Anyway, I saw a report yesterday that George Clooney, who is on record as being fairly antagonistic toward intrusiveness into performers' private lives, has come up with a solution to the GawkerStalker problem. He has asked the celebrities themselves to flood the site with fake sightings in order to render it useless. I think it is a wonderful idea. It doesn't call for abridging anyone's free speech or for censorship of the internet. It simply takes GawkerStalker's claim that it is exercising its free speech and demonstrates that free speech is a two-way street. You go, George.

Conspiracy Theories

First of all, I have to say that I love Jon Carroll. Carroll writes a column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He is probably the best -consistently the most interesting - columnist I’ve ever read. I want to be able to write as well as he does one day. One of the things I like so much about Carroll’s column is that even though he is published in the Datebook section of the Chron, the entertainment section, he writes about everything - the silly and the serious, the trivial and the essential.

You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m going to share a Carroll column with you all. Well, yeah. It was inevitable, I suppose, when I found myself hunting through my purse for scraps of paper to make notes on as I read the thing in the restaurant at dinner last night. That’s always a bad sign.

Carroll’s March 31 column - which I had a link to here, but which didn't work, but you can find him on the Chron's website - addresses the subjects of conspiracies, conspiracy theories, and September 11. He begins by noting that some of the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 are beginning to attract more serious attention. He mentions some other subjects that attract conspiracy theorists - the JFK assassination, UFOs, the princes in the Tower - and allows that the people who study these conspiracy theories are in it for the truth, for the most part, rather than for the notoriety of it. But he also says that most conspiracy theories are built on coincidences that cannot be proved to be any more than that. Then he floats the idea that speculation about conspiracies surrounding 9/11 are really irrelevant, although of historical interest, because there are so many real, ongoing conspiracies that affect our daily lives an that we have more of a chance of doing something about. But, he says, we go off in pursuit of these amphorous, historical conspiracy theories to avoid thinking about the real - and frightening - problems that face the world.

I have to admit that I both agree and disagree with what Carroll says in this column. I do think conspiracy theories are a way of diverting ourselves. Its kind of like watching a horror movie. We know we live in a big, bad, scary world and we occasionally need to look for even bigger, worse, and more frightening things that might or might not be true or possible in order to occupy our minds so that we won’t worry so much about the thins we know are true and real and can harm us.

I also agree that we have much more provable theories than “who really drove the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon” right in front of us. Carroll mentions the current culture of government secrecy, for example. We really should pay more attention to these conspiracies than we do. They affect important issues that affect millions of people in their daily lives, and if we don’t attend to them, the people perpetrating these actions are going to get away with what they are doing.

However, I do not agree that it follows, as Carroll implies, that all of this makes the question of what really happened on 9/11 irrelevant. If things were not as we have been told on 9/11, I want to know. It is something we need to know. Now, some of the conspiracy theories floating around about the events of September 11 are very big, bad, and scary. Some of them are, frankly, pretty unbelievable. I hope all of them are simply built on a bunch of coincidences that do not mean anything. Still, given some of the things that have gone on since then - passage of certain provisions of the Patriot Act, more and more government secrecy, warrantless wiretaps (didn’t anybody learn anything from the Nixon administration?), the seeming nonchalance with which certain folks in the government regard the use of torture, among others - I want to be very sure that those theories are built on nothing but coincidence.

At this point, I’m not quite sure which frightens me more - that there are enough of Carroll’s “coincidences” around for people to find enough material to float these theories in the first place, or that from what I’ve observed about how some of the people in my government appear to think and operate, it isn’t that big a stretch for some of the theories to start sounding rational.

True Belief taken to its (Il)logical Conclusion

I came across this on CNN yesterday, dateline Badshahkili, Pakistan:

A battle for the airwaves between two Islamic preachers with their own FM radio stations in Pakistan escalated into bitter fighting that killed at least 24 people.

You can read the entire article here: http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/03/28/pakistan.battle.ap/index.html

Apparently what happened was that supporters of the two clerics decided to fight it out after the men started criticizing each other's beliefs during their respective broadcasts. A local tribal council banned them both from the airwaves and they were banished from the region, but followers of at least one of the men have continued to run a radio station from a nearby village.

Now this was not just a riot or even a gunfight, like they used to have in the Wild West. Among the weapons used by these religious believers were assault rifles, hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. There were 24 killed in the fighting, and among the 14 injured were two children. And these were not the first deaths in the conflict - five were killed in February in earlier fighting between the two groups.

There are larger issues at hand in the region, of course. The region in question is in northwestern Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. The Pakistani government, according to the CNN report, has less than firm control of the region, and radical religious groups, including members of the Taliban, have a certain amount of influence. But the fact remains that this is violence based on the theory, I suppose, that anyone who disagrees with one's religious beliefs deserve to die.

And that is one of the issues I have with religious belief taken to the extreme. This theory is not found just in radical Islam. It seemed to be pretty popular during the Inquisition. You saw it during the Protestant Reformation, because goodness knows that it wasn't only the Catholics burning the unbeliever and the unorthodox believer at the stake or torturing them until they confessed their (often nonexistent) sins.

You also see this feeling in practice, if not admitted to, by those who would withhold things like condoms in AIDS ravaged Africa and vaccines against cervical cancer from those deemed too young to be engaging in sexual intercourse. You see it in those who would make abortion illegal again. Most of those on that side of those arguments likely wouldn't admit it, but at bottom their idea is that anyone who has sex who they think isn't supposed, or who decides for some reason to end a pregnancy, deserves to die. You an hear it when they claim that allowing the vaccine or condoms "just encourages them to go out and have sex."

Sometimes, the true believer's contempt is only thinly veiled. I have personally seen one very prominent televangelist say on television that while he "couldn't" advocate the execution of gays on the airwaves, that he knew his followers knew "how it would be" when "we take over." The statement was accompained by a wink that left no doubt exactly what he meant.

I have to say that while there are people in this world who I disagree with very much, who I disagree with violently, I have never wished even one of them any physical or mental harm. Maybe that makes me soft. Maybe it makes me stupid. Maybe it makes me a loser. I don't know. But it seems awfully, oh, uncivilized, to want to destroy all difference in the world.

Messages

You hear it all the time: “Don’t shoot the messenger.” But sometimes it’s really, horribly, almost impossibly difficult not to want to do so, at least figuratively.

The job of the electronic media is to be a messenger, and the messages those who participate in that endeavor are entrusted to deliver are the daily stories of what is happening in the world, in our country (whatever nation we happen to live in), and in our communities. Some do that better than others, but they usually manage to do that to at least some extent - although sometimes what they find important doesn’t quite jibe with my idea of what is important to know. But that’s another issue for another time.

The problem I’m having with the messenger is that they seem to think that it is also their job to relay another set of messages. Apparently we, the public, have been deemed not to be intelligent enough to know what to think and how to feel about the events the media reports to us. So, sometimes in not especially subtle messages, the reporters and the newsreaders try to instruct us in those areas. The national broadcast networks aren’t as bad about it as the cable networks and local news broadcasts are, but it seems to be a growing trend at all levels. The local media in my own area in central California tend to be especially blatant about it.

I hear it every day. Things never go wrong anymore; they only go “horribly wrong”. Funny, I never had anything go “wonderfully wrong”, so that if something goes wrong, that it might well take a horrible turn seems like a foregone conclusion. And there are no accidents anymore, it seems. Each one is a “tragic accident.” Well, while I’m willing to concede that some accidents could be classed as “comic accidents”, usually no one is hurt in those and they end up on America’s Funnies Home Videos instead of on the evening news.

That isn’t the worst of it, though. The worst of it is how those accused of certain crimes are tried and convicted in the media long before they ever go to trial in the judicial system, sometimes before they are even arrested. If you think the rest of the United States got hit with the circus surrounding the Scott Peterson trial, where a man was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for killing his wife and unborn child, just think how it played where I am, where it was a local story. Before there had even been any revelations that the husband might have been involved in what was initially called a “disappearance”, there were some in the local media detailing what tactics the prosecution might want to use in convicting him of the crime. Not saying that I don’t think he did it; I’d bet money that he did. It just seemed to me that finding an impartial jury after all those messages from the media would be fairly difficult. And so it turned out to be; the trial was held in another jurisdiction. The media got its message out quite successfully on that one.

It’s tempting to think that this sort of message-sending by the media is a relatively new phenomenon. It isn’t. I happen to be re-reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff at the moment, and I came across this passage, where he is describing the press conference where the seven Project Mercury astronauts were introduced to the public. “It was as if the press in America,” Wolfe writes,

for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a single nervous system. In the late 1950s (as in the late 1970s) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone should be established and should prevail;…the animal’s fundamental concern remained the same: the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings! (Wolfe 1979, p. 101; emphasis in the original)

In truth, this probably goes back far further than the 1970s or the 1950s, but it certainly prevails and seems even more fervently served up today.

All this probably bothers me a lot more than it really should, and I tend to take it a lot more personally than I likely should. Still, I feel insulted that someone, some organizations that do not know me at all, have decided that I am so stupid - that the community is so stupid - that we need to be sent messages telling us how to feel about the issues and events of the day.

This entry was created as part of a project called Weekly Anamnesis, which you can find at http://weeklyanamnesis.blogspot.com/

Well, that was interesting...

Last I was here, I didn't think any of the versions of the Mitt Romney essay I wrote (if it can indeed be graced by the definition "essay") had posted. But apparently I just didn't wait around long enough for it to appear since, lo and behold, I returned this evening and there they were. All three tries. Well, I've deleted the first two - they'll probably disappear sometime - and the third one, the one that finally looked right to me (and if there are any typos don't tell me). Well, goodness knows, my computer is just like my car - I know how to use it, but I couldn't explain how it works to save my life.

And speaking of the Romney thing, it seems as if he isn't the only one with foot-in-mouth disease these days. Of course, I'm talking about Bill Bennett and his comments on lowering the crime rate. Sometimes I just don't know what people are thinking about when they let these things come out of their mouths. But, honestly, it doesn't surprise me that he said what he did. That's par for the course. The thing that amazes me is that he doesn't understand that it wasn't the abortion part of the comment that is the real problem. I mean, anyone with a brain knows he turned right around and said that his abortion solution would not be ethical. No, that isn't the problem at all.

The problem is, he seemed to have no problem implying that African-Americans are more inclined than other folks to commit crimes. And that is exactly what he said when he chose to use the example of "Black babies" or however he put it. But now he can't understand, so he says, why everyone is so mad at him. Is he really that stupid? Or that out of touch?

Ah, well. I think we should just all consider the source and move on.

So, let's move on to Boy George's latest appointment. No, not John Roberts. That's already a done deal. I mean Harriet Miers, the woman Mr. Bush appointed today to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the Supreme court. It seems like he would be kind of shy of appointing someone without specific qualifications for the job. Again. So soon after the Mike Brown brouhaha. Okay, at least she's an attorney. And I'm well aware that there have been other justices who had quite illustrious careers on the Court after having had no previous judicial experience.

That isn't what bothers me. What bothers me is that there is no readily available documentation of her stance on various issues. And I'm pretty soon there won't be much forthcoming. Of course, I've a sneaking suspicion that this is exactly why she was nominated in the first place. And I'm very afraid that she is the ideologue that the neo-cons have been trying to get on the court for a long time to tip the balance away from moderation and toward the far-right agenda. I hope I'm wrong. I'll repeat that. I hope I'm wrong. I'm not all that happy with the cynical thoughts that run through my mind every time my government does something these days. But bless their pointed little heads, I don't trust any of them any farther than I could through a piano with five elephants sitting on it. Not Bush. Not Cheney. Certainly not Rove - I feel like I should take a good bath with a scrubbing brush and plenty of lye soap every time I read about that man. Not any of the administration currently in place in DC.

Oh, and there's one other thing that bothers me about Ms. Miers. She's been described as a converted Democrat. It is a sad truth that converts are often (not always, but often) the most rabid and dogmatic members of whatever group they have converted to - in this case the Republican right wing. I don't know if they think they have something to prove - faith, loyalty, whatever - or if that they just had to be extra-convinced to convert in the first place. But (and I've been there and recovered) converts, be they religious, social, or political, often take the most extreme positions available in their new belief system.

Well. We'll all find out, I guess. Probably not in the hearings but instead, if she wins confirmation, when she starts writing opinions for the Court - or rather when her clerks start writing opinions for her. Of course, that's not always a bad thing, I suppose. Warren Burger is reputed to have written his own opinions when he was Chief Justice. Poor man couldn't put together a coherent sentence, from what I've read of his opinions.

Well, I've vented enough I guess. Be interesting to see how long this one takes to appear.

Open mouth, insert foot...

This is interesting. Sad. But I think it shows what a state we've gotten ourselves into as a nation.

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has refused to apologize for comments he made advocating the wiretapping of mosques in order to fight terrorism. An apology was called for by various mosques, Islamic organizations, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Romney had made the remarks Wednesday, September 14, while speaking at a conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, in Washington, DC. Even though he was warned that his comments stereotyped all Muslims as terrorists, he stood by his remarks on Friday, saying that he wasn't suggesting anything that isn't already being done, but just that he thinks more of it should be done. In his Wednesday remarks, Romney also said that moe should be done to monitor foreign students studying in US colleges and universities. The remarks were made in the context of calling for far more money and attention to be put into domestic intelligence activities. A Romney spokeswoman called his position a "realistic view" of what steps are needed to fight terrorism. Romney's comments take on added import because he is seen as a possible contender for the Republican nomination for US president in 2008.

In all fairness (which seems to be more than he is willing to extend), Romney used mosques as a "for instance" in his speech, which some supporters are saying advocates the wiretapping of all houses of worship when viewed in context. But, who believes he was really advocating the wiretapping of churches and synagogues as well? What do you think Romney's reaction would be if he found out the government was bugging his Mormon place of worship. I mean, after all, the Mormons have a belief, little discussed outside the faith for obvious reasons, that the nation will "hang by a thread" and the Mormons will rush and take over and save it. Some would look askance at advocacy of that belief, I think. No, if anyone really thought Romney were really advocating bugging anyone but Muslims, he would quickly have to kiss his presidential aspirations good-bye.

lma confronts the arrogance of belief, and then reflects on part of her own history of belief...

I've become extremely disillusioned with my exploration of belief systems as I run into more and more believers of all stripes who seem to think that they have the right to dictate to everyone else what to believe. One can't have an intelligent conversation about beliefs, it seems, without someone getting all defensive and asserting that he or she has all the answers and that if you don't believe the same thing, well, you're just wrong. I've had a run-in or two like that in the past day or two, and I'll tell you that it's left a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm really seriously considering just closing up shop on my formal (well, about as formal as I'm capable of being) study of belief systems and just let everybody go off into their little corners and play their little holier-than-thou games. The funny thing is, it isn't just the religious that do this. It comes up in the realms of politics and science in just about the same way. Somebody is always convinced that they have all the answers, when they in reality don't know a damn thing except what's going on inside their own heads. It's really mental masturbation at its worst.

I don't know. Maybe it's just that I'm tired right now, and it's hot, and my last little nerve ending is really frayed. I know there are very many believers in all religions who are completely sincere and wouldn't think of ever forcing their beliefs on anyone. But I had someone tell me, after I had left a comment on something they had written in their blog, that I had no good reason for leaving the religion that I had previously been a member of. He doesn't know me from Eve, for God's sake, but he insinuated that I had left not because of a lack of belief in the tenets of the faith but because I had sinned, and that there was really no good reason for anyone to leave that church. Now, I thought that was just the least little bit totalitarian. I always thought that religion was a matter of conscience. But apparently this guy's position (and that of the church, which shall remain nameless) is that once you join up with them you don't get to leave unless you petition them to do so. Well, I haven't done that, and I probably won't, since to do that would just be to continue to give them power over me. I'm not willing to grant that power to them. Hell, I wasn't willing to do that when I attended the church; why would I do so now?

It's been a long time since I've really been a part of that religion, and I was never a particularly faithful member. As I said, I never gave them the power over me that they expect all good members of the church to cede over to them, and I never bought into some of the doctrines. Other doctrines weren't really explained to me before I was baptized, and I wouldn't have become a member of that church if I had understood what they really stand for. Mine was what they call a "baseball baptism" or a social baptism. When I was in high school, I knew a lot of members of that church and they were oh, so good at pulling people into their orbit. It was one of those "it seemed like a good idea at the time" situations. I was pretty sure almost immediately after baptism that it wasn't where I belonged. However, I'm nothing if not fair-minded, and I gave it some time and tried to honor the baptismal promises that I had made. Gave it something like thirty years, off and on - although more off than on the past twenty-five or so of those years. But there was this pull exerted. I went back more than once after I said I was through with them. Last time I did that was summer before last. It lasted about three months, even though I had determined to give it a year. That seemed like a fair shake. But they had me teaching a Sunday class once a month, and one day I was standing up there teaching and all of a sudden I had a revelation. I didn't believe anything that was coming out of my mouth, and I never had. Not really. I had always known that at some level, but that day it was like a whole different kind of knowledge, almost on a cellular level.

Before, I had never understood why so many of the people who leave that church are so angry. There's a whole internet forum frequented by those who were once faithful and have left, or who were born into it and never felt like they belonged there. I haven't had to put up with even a hundreth of what some of the people on that board have. But I found my anger, too. Anger that I had wasted so much time giving lip service to something I knew to be untrue. Anger that I had not fought harder for myself when one of the married men in the congregation couldn't keep his hands off my hair even when I asked him to not touch me. When I complained about it, I was told that, oh, he's just like that. And, it was implied, because I am not the most attractive woman in the world, that I should accept male attention wherever it offered itself. Excuse me? Then there was the ever-present question: "So, when are you getting married?" "Never," I finally answered one man when asked me that. "I don't intend to sell myself into slavery."

Oh, and there's the anger about being constantly told that I wasn't good enough because I was unmarried with no kids. That I wasn't really entitled to opinions because I am a woman. That I wasn't a good enough church member because I wasn't a member of the correct political party. That I wasn't nearly as smart as I thought I was. I'm getting pissed off again as I sit here and write this just because I kept going back, hoping things had changed. See, that's what got me back that last time. I had attended a Sunday meeting just to see if the building would fall down when I walked in the door. I had done that occasionally, just sort of checking in to see what was going on and how things had changed. I had heard rumors, and I wanted to check them out. And so, one of the women got up to speak, and during her talk she quoted Professor Dumbledore, out of the "Harry Potter" books. Well, I thought, maybe things have changed. That't wouldn't have flown at the time I'd last been to church.

But nothing had changed, not really. Anyway, not for the better. Things were just getting more and more culty, more and more controlling. So, I'm an apostate now, at least to their way of thinking. I don't hold any of the people in the church any ill will, generally speaking. There are a few individuals who I would like to give a good talking to, but since that a) won't ever happen, and b) would be a waste of my breath anyway, I just try to let it go. Easier said than done, unfortunately, but I'm getting there. Actually being able to write this all down is a step in the right direction, actually. This is the first time I've been able to do this. I've tried before, and I just ended up getting pissed off and giving up. I'm learning to deal.

I didn't mean to go on for so long. I'm not even sure I intended to go in this direction when I sat down to write. And I suppose that this doesn't have much to do with my writing, not a good thing since this is supposed to be a writing journal above all else. Well, almost all of my writing energies have been going into my paid employment lately and what other writing I have been doing is more in the way of fiction than non-fiction. So I guess this will turn, for a little while anyway, into more of a general writing journal than one targeted to a specific writing project, which is where it began.

Don't worry. I don't have any intention of turning it into one of those "and then I did this, and after that I went there" blogs. Nothing wrong with those, you understand. But that's just not my style. I'm still grappling with understanding the world around me - see my last couple of posts for more on that particular circus. So, I'll be talking more about general things, dropping in an essay from time to time on stuff that's going on in the world, and trying to find the time to see where - if anywhere - the project that this blog was originally created for will go. Because it isn't that I've lost my interest in belief systems; it's just that I've lost patience for the moment with a certain segment of the believers who people them - the ones arrogant enough to think that they should be able to dictate to everyone else what their beliefs should be.

Always with the questions...

After breakfast this morning I was sitting at the table trying to read (about the early archaeological explorations of Mesopotamia, actually) and things just started popping into my mind. They pretty much grew out of all the talk lately about Scientology (around Tom Crusie and his strange behavior) and the "20/20" segment last night about Kaballah. So I put my book down (well, the library's book) and started jotting. This is what resulted.

Issues relating to religious/spiritual belief:

1) Is it sane to hold religious/spiritual beliefs? (Some would say no, actually.)

2) Should holding religious beliefs be privileged? (Should speech codes saying that one cannot say anything bad about a religious belief be allowed? There was an interesting opinion piece about this in the Financial Times this week that I only scanned and that I have to go back and read more closely.)

ITEM: I think that professing a belief that there is not God/gods or that religion is not valid is, in fact, a religious belief in the sens that it is a belief about religion.

3) What is religion? Who gets to decide?

ITEM: I don't actually think, based on the little that I know about it, that Scientology is really a religion, but should that be up to me? (I don't think so.) Can we say that religion, like art, is anything you can get away with?

4) Is it possible to say that some beliefs are "bad" and that other beliefs are "good"? (There are separate practical/legal and theoretical components to this question. Also, it can be relevant to other kinds of belief than religious/spiritual beliefs.)

Now, the real question is, I suppose, should I change what I eat for breakfast (Rice Krispies and sourdough toast and strawberry jam in this case), or is it natural for me to be thinking about this kind of thing so early in the morning?

And the other question is, Is there any point in the consideration of beliefs and belief systems where the questions slow down and there begin to be some kind of answers? Because it seems like my list of questions about all kinds of belief (not just religion) just keeps getting longer and longer, while any kind of answers, even preliminary ones, are very hard to come by. I'm beginning to think that there aren't any answers.

Frustration...

Am I completely out of my mind? Or is it true that the world is a strange, strange place where people who claim to understand how things work are delusional at best? The “stranger in a strange land” is such a cliché d concept. But it’s how I feel sometimes - and sometimes it’s how I feel most of the time. Things that most people accept most of the time, without question, as just the way things are (a phrase I despise), I find to be completely absurd. Conversely, things that I am interested in are looked at by many other people as marginal, if not completely subversive. If I had a nickel for every time someone has told me I think too much, I’d be a rich woman.

The thing is, things lately seem to be getting stranger and stranger al the time, and at an increasing rate. Sometimes I don’t recognize the world as the same one I grew up in. As silly as it sounds - and believe me, I realize how silly it sounds - I occasionally wonder if someone up in the future developed time travel, got back into the past at some point, and changed history. Forget the fact that even if time travel is possible (and some physicists seem to be coming around to the idea that it might be), I believe that there must be a mechanism that makes event-changing paradoxes impossible. I know, of course, that there are people who would be happy, even eager, to tell me that even just thinking about things like time travel is a sign of instability. Those would be the same folks who think having an imagination is a dangerous thing. But never mind.

What I am tempted to do is study the world for a while, to try to figure out what is really going on. Not to try to figure out the world. I’m pretty sure that’s not possible. That is like men trying to figure out women. Or vice versa. (By the way, that’s one of the things that puzzle me about the world: Why do male and female H. sapiens so often behave as if they are separate species?) No, my aim is more to find out about myself in the world. Am I nuts? Or is it the world that is crazy? By the numbers, it must be me who has the problem. I’m vastly outnumbered, after all. But I’ve also heard it said many times that if you wonder if you’re crazy, you aren’t. So, I figure it’s a legitimate field of study. Call it an anthropological (sociological? psychological?) study of myself in the world. Maybe the first one ever. Nah. I wouldn’t be so lucky as to have that original a thought.

Perhaps, as my first speculation, my whole problem has to do with the fact that I came to awareness of the world as a social and political entity in the 1960s. More and more, I see that decade (or at least the essence of it) as a sweet anomaly, where the expectations for the world were different than they ever had been, different than they ever will be, for that short time. Not that I have an utopian vision of the sixties as a golden age or anything. It started ugly and ended uglier. But for a brief time it seemed like more folks than usual took the ideas of peace freedom and equality as seriously achievable. God knows that hardly anyone does anymore. Oh, lots of people say they do, but most of them seem to have pretty peculiar (as least from my point of view) definitions of what peace is, who should get how much freedom, and what really constitutes equality.

Perhaps I come to this at least partly out of frustration over the writing project that this blog was created to serve. I set out to write about the things people believe, why they believe them, and the things that their beliefs lead them to do. Only the biggest thing I’ve figured out so far is that all most people have in common over belief is a shared attitude that anyone who doesn’t believe what they do is either evil, deluded, or psychotic, and probably deserves what ever bad comes their way. This is not a pretty state of affairs. And, more to the point here, this is not the way I remember things from when I was growing up, I wouldn’t say that this realization has disillusioned me, if only because it was something I already suspected. It’s a hard point to miss, especially in the post-9/11 world. It does disappoint me, though. I had hoped we had gotten smarter than that. But it is starting to seem to me that rigid dogmatism is an inborn trait in H. sapiens. Some individuals have overcome it, but the vast majority have not. I cannot even say that I have gotten completely over it on some levels, but at least I’m trying.

That leads me to another thing I’d like to figure out about the world in relation to my own attitudes. I can admit that I might be wrong. I do that readily and fairly frequently, although it I know I’m right I’ll do everything I can to prove it. Still, I’ve been told that this ability to admit error is odd, and I suspect that a lot of people see such admissions as a sign of weakness. For my part, I just cannot understand how people can be so certain of things that there are no solid proofs for. Things like, but certainly not limited to, the nature of God or even that God, or the gods, actually exist. I want to understand that disconnect. Why can I say, “I don’t know” where other people cannot. Why can I see logic in most sides of most arguments, even when I don’t agree with them? Most people, at least in my native culture, seem to think that understanding an argument is the same thing as believing it. Admitting that the other guy has a point, much less admitting he is right, is seen as a betrayal of one’s own dogma.

Another puzzle, brought up - and definitely not for the first time - by something I saw in a news report a few days ago. Why do so many people get into a position where they have the authority to tell others what to do along with the power to enforce those orders? This extends even to the wish to be able to control the personal habits of others. It would never cross my mind to want to do that. Of course there are perfectly legal things that other people do that bother me or that I think are stupid or unwise (and there is a difference there). That doesn’t mean that I want the power to prohibit them from doing these things.

Another thing (that sometimes ties into belief and sometimes does not) that I cannot understand is the urge to secrecy. It is something I’ve been know to refer to as the “I know something you don’t know, neener, neener, neener” syndrome. Don’t laugh. It’s pervasive. I can, of course, understand the personal wish for privacy. I’m a pretty private person myself, and some things are just on one else’s business. I can even understand the concept of industrial secrets, even though I think that gets carried way too far at times. Same thing with government secrets. I suppose there are some things that it is better for those with nefarious purposes not to know, but I often think that classified information is classified so that our own citizens won’t discover them. The Pentagon Papers are a case in point. The thing is, most of the things that are classified are probably already old news to our international opponents.

All of those kinds of secrets are, however, at least partly understandable. What I don’t get are the secret sorority and fraternity initiations, the secret societies that keep all kinds of secrets - I’m talking all the way from the Masons to the Moose to the top leaders who go to Bohemian Grove once a year - to the religions that very seriously and strictly protect their secret rituals, all the while denying that they are secret at all, but are simply sacred. As far as I can see, all that is just childish. And I say that as someone who once went through a sorority initiation. God knows, nothing immoral went on there, nothing illegal, not even anything particularly embarrassing. As I recall after all these years, there was some passing of candles, some religious content as it was associated with a religious group that I associated with at the time, and some sort of pledge sworn to. Oh, and we all wore white dresses that were supposed to signify purity or something like that. No big deal. But supposedly secret. I thought it was silly even at the time.

I could go on and on about all this. This essay as I originally wrote it made at least a couple more points. But I think I’ve gotten my point across by now. No need to belabor it further, even though I didn’t get to all the stuff I can’t understand that gets done in the name of governmental and social control. It’s pretty clear, I’m sure, that I’m pretty much of a malcontent.

Or, maybe I haven’t made any point at all. Perhaps I’ve just rambled on about all the things that bug me. Maybe this will get all the frustrations out of my system and I can just get back to my original writing plan or some variation of it. I kind of doubt that, though. I know that at a certain point - and I know right where that point is - my train of thought seems to veer off on a kind of parallel tangent. But as I see it, it is all related and comes down to what I said at the beginning - the world seems to be much stranger than it used to be. Or maybe it’s just the people in it. This stuff, or most of it, didn’t used to seem to go on as much as it does now. Or if it did, it didn’t seem to matter if some folks chose not to play. There seemed to be room for individuality, while now it seems like any sort of difference from what is considered “normal” is seen as pathological. At least that’s so where I come from. But that is another rant, and I won’t go there now.

Well that's interesting, or...lma reads the newspaper

Sometimes when I talk about doing research into beliefs systems, people automatically assume that I'm either looking into religion or else that I'm into fringe beliefs...UFOs, ghosts, ESP, reincarnation, things like that. When I tell these folks that belief actually touches virtually every aspect of their lives in one way or another, they often look at me like I just arrived on one of those UFOs.

But I took a quick look through the front section of my local newspaper today. I found that it illustrates very well the diverse ways in which belief plays a part in everyone's lives. Personal belief, societal or cultural belief - it doesn't really matter. They all interact to affect the things we do and the things that happen to us, or to other people all over the world. Now, it's true that religious belief often comes into the equation, no matter what aspect of life is being affected. But as we will see, here and later, religious and political beliefs find their way into some pretty unbelievable places.

Now, I'm not even going to touch on the "day-after-Easter" stories reporting on yesterday's various religious services. And I'm not going to factor in the stories related to the continuing Terri Schiavo case. It goes without saying that those are vitally connected to the things that people believe. But look at these other stories.

"States beginning to focus on inmate rehabilitation", reads the headline on page A3 of my local paper. A reprint from the Los Angeles Times, this story talks about how Governor Schwarznegger (that's still a trip to think about, but that's another issue for another day) of California is urging his state to get with the program and put more emphasis on the rehabilitation of prisoners and less on punishment and warehousing. Apparently this is the coming trend after about thirty years of those who advocate rehabilitation being accused of supporting "ineffective mollycoddling." Certainly, in the recent past California's official position was that prisons were for punishment, not for rehabilitation. This a huge change in an institutional belief that has an effect on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of individuals' lives.

Then, on page A7, the biggest headline on the page reads, "Some durggists balk at birth control." This has been an issue for awhile. I've seen stories about it online in places like Prevention magazine's website. Apparently, however, those pharmacists who believe that they are justified in not filling prescriptions for medications that personally offend their sense of morality, are becoming more vocal about their beliefs. There is an issue of the clash of rights here, of course, of whose belief should trump whose differing beliefs. As the article puts it:

Supporters of pharmacists' rights see the trend as a welcome expression of personal belief. Women's groups see it as a major threat to reproductive rights and one of the latest manifestations of the religious right's growing political reach - this time into the neighborhood pharmacy. (Fresno Bee, 27 March 2005, page A7)

Which, of course, also reminds the reader that while church and state might be officially separate in the United States, religion and politics are intricately intertwined.

Then, on page A9, I found a headline on a story that illustrates that belief can affect health issues other than those of reproductive rights. "Rumors of U.S. plot hinder vaccinations" outlines Islamic efforts in Nigerian, especially in the largely Islamic northern part of the country, to stop immunization programs because of suspicions that the vaccinations - first for polio and now for measels - are an American anti-Islamic plot. Again, politics and religion clash due to deeply ingrained beliefs. In this case, the clash of beliefs has resulted in the deaths, so far this yar, of at least 589 people, most of them children under the age of five.

So, we can see that beliefs are not just personal and do not just affect those who hold them. Sometimes the following of those beliefs can create discomfort, chaos, or even life-threatening repercussions in the lives of ourselves and others.

Maybe my own beliefs are intruding here. Because I defintely believe that each of us has an obligation to consider the wider repercussions of our beliefs in the world. This is not to say that the individual should abandon his or her closely held beliefs, but just that each of us should take care to really consider what effects our beliefs will have on those around us and on those we might never consider would be affected by our beliefs.

Well...I didn't mean for this to end with me on the soapbox. But I suppose that is inevitable when thinking and writing about such intimate things as beliefs. And, I think, it is also inevitable when I'm writing at the end of a long, busy day. Which this has been. And which is why I'm going to close this entry now.

I'm Back

Well, that was a longer sabbatical than I intended to take.

Had a family emergency, moved house, and just finally got my new phone line in so that I can get on here without going to the library and being subject to the half-hour and hour limitations of using their computers. Sigh. It was two months of stress, worry, and new experiences. But I think things are getting back on an even keel (although it makes me nervous to even say that - talk about magical thinking!), and I'm back at work on my writing.

I didn't even have time to do much thinking, much less research or writing, for awhile. Once I finally got moved in there's been more time. In fact, I'm reading a book right now that will certainly come up here when I'm finished with it (and maybe even before). I also learned a few things about my own beliefs while I've been dealing with the events of the past couple of months; those lessons might come into play here as well, although I don't think that the thrust of my work will be changed much - one of the things I've learned is that my belief system served me pretty well through it all. This was quite a relief, to be honest. I take it as a sign that my belief system, such as it is, is fairly well constructed and thought out.

Well, I suppose we'll see exactly what sorts of impact all the things that have been happening will affect my thinking in relation to this project. I suppose I have to suspect that all of the aftereffects might not have manifested yet; that remains to be seen. Of course, that's one of the more interesting aspects of belief, as far as I'm concerned. They can change, sometimes fairly suddenly, and sometimes the beliefs you think you hold the most closely are the first to change. I've seen it happen. In fact, I've experienced it.

Which brings me to the Terri Schaivo case. I quite surprised myself with my reaction to what is going on in Florida. I find myself horrified that her feeding tube was removed. Now, understand, I've always believed that someone in a terminal condition, or in a "persistent vegetative state", as Ms. Schaivo seems to be (at least according to medical experts appointed by the courts), should have the right to, in effect, say, "I'm done. No more." But in her case, there is no written directive or living will, as far as I can tell. The only word we have is that of her "husband" (how he can call himself that, I'm not quite sure), who doesn't seem to me to have the purest of motives. Yet the courts have constantly sided with him. I guess it comes down to the fact that I don't believe him when he says that she expressed that she wouldn't want to continue in her present condition. That's very subjective, I know. And the whole thing is frightening: I even found myself agreeing with President Bush when he said that in cases like this, that we should "err on the side of life." I can't remember the last time I agreed with anything that man said.

Anyway, I'm back.

It's not just about religion...

So far, I've written mostly about religion here. But I just ran across this example of what political belief can lead folks to do, another aspect of belief that I am quite interested in.

It seems that fiveDemocratic Party activists in Wisconsin have been charged with criminal damage to property for the slashing of tires on 25 of about 100 vehicles Republican Party activists had rented in order to get poll watchers and voters to the polls last November on Election Day. You can see the whole story, as reported by CNN, here. One of those charged is the son of a congresswoman and another is the son of the former acting mayor of Milwaukee.

In a way, it seems like a silly prank. Those who carried it out probably saw it that way, as a silly little action that would have the result of advancing the interests of their party and their candidates. But that's exactly how some of the principals in the Watergate scandal saw their activities as well, and that little prank nearly tore the United States apart. So it isn't just a prank; it's an offensive act. I'm a registered Democrat, and my first reaction to seeing that story is that those folks should be ridden out of the party on a rail, preferrably tarred and feathered. Which is why I am so interested in what made them do such a thing. They had to know that it was not only illegal but unethical. Yet they went ahead and did it. Just like a lot of people go ahead and do things they know will not reflect positively on themselves and the institutions they represent.

So, did they act out of belief, or just out of rank stupidity? Unfortunately, there is a good chance that they did it out of belief in their cause.

"Under the Banner of Heaven": A Reveiw and a few Thoughts

I’ve always been interested in the things people believe and why they believe them. Always. But about a year ago I first read a book that not only stirred my curiosity, my determination to look at belief more closely, but also opened up a new dimension of that interest that I had not really thought much about before. That was the question of what belief leads people – as individuals and as groups – to do. It wasn’t the only thing that emphasized this practical aspect of belief in my mind. Certainly, the events of September 11, 2001, made a lot of people aware that beliefs have practical consequences in the real world in a way that they had not thought about before. But 9/11 was such an overwhelming event that I had tried not to plunge too deeply into its implications, including the particular issue of belief and action.

When I read Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Random House, 2003), however, I realized that I could not ignore that aspect of belief. The actions that people undertake in the name of what they believe are an integral part of the examination of belief, belief systems, and the people who hold them. Belief isn’t only, or even mostly, internal. Everyone’s actions, every day, depend on what they believe, how strong their beliefs are, and how they think others feel about their beliefs. And, like it or not, our actions affect the lives of others, and others’ actions affect our lives every single day.

In Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer looks at the story of how belief impacted the lives of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, a young mother and her infant daughter, when two of her brothers-in-law came to believe that God was sending them revelations, including the instructions to kill Brenda and Erica. This is, of course, an extreme example of the impact of belief on individuals, but the reality is that sometimes belief leads people to do extreme things. That horrible 1984 case is, in turn, a jumping-off point for Krakauer’s examination of various offshoots of the Mormon faith which have not abandoned the early beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as introduced by the faith’s founder, Joseph Smith. These doctrines include plural marriage and blood atonement, doctrines that the official Mormon church, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, has long since officially abandoned and proscribed. Included in these offshoots are the so-called “Mormon fundamentalist” sects such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the United Effort Plan (UEP) or FLDS, as well as individual fundamentalist believers such as Brian David Mitchell, also known as Immanuel David Isaiah, who currently stands accused of the widely-reported kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart in Utah in 2002. Krakauer also looks at some of the events that such beliefs led to during the early years of what grew into the official church, when such beliefs were still openly held and practiced. Krakauer’s main examples of this aspect of the story are the events surrounding the introduction of plural marriage by Joseph Smith and the issues and events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre and its aftermath.

Other adherents to earlier, now mostly abandoned, doctrines of Mormonism included Ron and Dan Lafferty, Brenda and Erica Lafferty’s murderers. Raised in orthodox Mormonism, the Lafferty brothers came to accept the idea that the mainstream church had been wrong in abandoning plural marriage, blood atonement, and other doctrines and practices that the orthodox church currently denies. It is a story of what deeply held faith can lead people to do. Krakauer’s account of this story is a fascinating, meticulously researched, and well-written account that reads like a novel, one in which the flashbacks enhance rather than detract from the story.

Some might argue that the story Krakauer tells is really simply a story of religious belief used as a tool for rationalizing what these particular individuals chose to do in pursuit of their goals, or in revenge for the frustration of their goals, when they knew that their actions would violate the most deeply-held mores of the culture in which they were living. Indeed, one way of interpreting the story of Ron and Dan Lafferty is that when they were faced with someone who was standing in the way of their desire to practice polygamy, they used archaic religious doctrines from their own religious upbringing to justify the murder of their sister-in-law and niece, who they saw as frustrating their wishes. After all, it was Brenda Lafferty who urged Ron’s wife to leave him over his desire to practice polygamy. Further, she was the one wife, out of all the brothers’ spouses, who would not submit to their excursions into polygamous practice.

In truth, however, that seems a bit too Byzantine an explanation to be the whole truth. Every day, people get mad at others who stand in the way of their desires. And every day, people commit violent acts to remove those obstacles. Most of these people do not feel the need to fall back on some sort of religious belief system to justify their actions, to themselves or to others. That sort of long way around seems to me to be just too much work. In addition, the Lafferty brothers had a history of serious study of the doctrines they claimed as the reason for their crimes. It isn’t as if they killed Brenda and Erica and then said, as an afterthought, "Oh, and by the way, God told us to do it."

Another way to look at this story, one that Krakauer specifically brings up in the course of his book, is that Ron Lafferty, in claiming to receive revelations and, to a lesser extent Dan, in helping him to carry those revelations out, were victims of a delusion. Ron’s defense tried to use that argument in an insanity defense. However, one of the witnesses in Ron’s trial, Dr. Noel Gardner, a psychiatrist, testified that holding unusual religious beliefs does not necessarily mean that the person holding those beliefs is delusional. Gardner also testified that while Ron Lafferty might well fit the profile for one suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, most self-proclaimed prophets – including the founders of most major world religions – could be classed this way, and that very few of them were murderers. Consequently, it seems to me that one must finally conclude, at least on the basis of the information presented in Krakauer’s book, that Ron and Dan Lafferty were not mentally ill in a clinical sense, really believed that they were receiving revelations from God, and that their actions in killing Brenda and Erica Lafferty stemmed directly from, and were justified in their minds, by the beliefs they held.

The Laffertys' story is a fascinating one, even if only in the same sense that any disaster is fascinating. The wider story the books tells of the birth, growth, and schism of a new religious movement and its offshoots is equally interesting. I would be willing to wager that most Americans have no idea that there is an entire town in the Arizona desert, north of the Grand Canyon and near the Utah border, that lives a strictly religious, polygamous, lifestyle led by a prophet who wields near-total control over the lives of the town’s citizens, to the extent of reassigning the wives of apostates to other men. Even paying attention to such issues, I did not know about this particular group until I read Krakauer’s book. Likewise, I did not realize until reading this book that experts estimate of the number of fundamentalist Mormon polygamists at between thirty and one hundred thousand. Krakauer’s inclusion of the information about these groups serve as an illustration of the sort of schisms that have split believers in Joseph Smith’s teachings into widely diverse groups. This information also shows one of the sources of encouragement the Lafferty brothers might have had in their own split from the orthodox Mormonism of their upbringing.

Another aspect of Krakauer’s book that interests me is the fact that the mainstream Mormon church had problems with it, so much so that they denounced it publicly. I suspect that a huge part of what the Salt Lake church took issue with was Krakauer’s persistence in calling the folks who still believe in and practice things like polygamy and blood atonement “fundamentalist Mormons.” The mainstream church insists that there is no such thing as a fundamentalist Mormon and that people like Ron and Dan Lafferty and the polygamist sects are not Mormon (a label the church doesn’t much like anymore, anyway) in any way, shape, or form. And, it is true that the official church excommunicates anyone who publicly practices and advocates polygamy. I understand from those who might have reason to know that this might not necessarily be true of those who practice polygamy privately, but because I only have hearsay to go on I can’t say that I know this for sure. I do know that most of the prosecutions of polygamists in Utah have been on other grounds, such as child abuse, statutory rape, or welfare fraud, and not for the actual practice of plural marriage. There is, interestingly, one interpretation of current mainstream Mormon doctrine that holds that only the practice of polygamy in this world was halted, but that orthodox doctrine still accepts it as an essential practice in the afterlife. Whatever the official stance and actions of the Salt Lake church, among those excommunicated for nonorthodox practices are both Ron and Dan Lafferty.

A second part of the problem the mainstream church has with Krakauer’s book is that he discusses some very controversial aspects of the history of the church and the actions of some of its early leaders. For example, Krakauer asserts early on that the promotional materials handed out by mainstream Mormon missionaries neglect to mention that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, was married to at least thirty-three women and that he may have married at least one girl as young as fourteen years of age, or that Smith apparently denounced plural marriage to his followers even while he practiced it himself for a period of time before he announced that he had received a revelation endorsing the practice. Krakauer also claims that Brigham Young, who gained leadership of the early church after Smith was killed in jail, and who led the church to Utah, occasionally hired local Native Americans in Utah in his struggle against the Gentiles (to a Mormon, anyone who is not a Mormon is a Gentile). This was at a time when the United States government and the Mormon church in Utah Territory were on less than friendly terms. The role of these Native Americans was to harass Gentile wagon trains crossing the territory, presumably so that they would not be inclined to settle in the area.

This sort of activity culminated in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 11, 1857, in which approximately 120 members of what was known as the Fancher Party of emigrants – men, women, and children – were killed. Despite reports from some who claimed that most of the “Indians” who were said to have carried out the massacre were actually Mormons disguised as Native Americans, historians, Krakauer says, are divided on the issue of what Brigham Young’s intentions were with regard to the Fancher Party. The facts seem to be that Young’s first tactic was to blame the Native Americans, but that later he put the whole blame for the massacre on John D. Lee, Young’s own adopted son and a devout Mormon. Young was instrumental in having Lee tried (a second time), convicted, and executed for the murders of members of the Fancher Party. Was Young pursuing justice, as he claimed, or making sure his own complicity in the crime remained unknown? Again, historians are apparently divided as to the truth of the matter. What is clear is that the mainstream Mormon church, as an institution, is not interested in having anyone even speculate in public about the matter.

The mainstream church’s position on these matters, as I understand it, is that these “facts of history” are actually lies manufactured and disseminated by enemies of the church, meant to damage if not destroy the institution and its leaders, past and present. There are church authorities who have been known to advocate the idea that it is more important that histories of the church be “faith promoting” than that they hew strictly to the information discovered by historical scholarship. In an article in the Summer 1981 issue of the journal Brigham Young University Studies, Boyd K. Packer, one of the General Authorities of the church, said that “Some things that are true are not very useful.” Specifically speaking of the history of the church, he said, “The Lord made it very clear that some things are to be taught selectively and some things are to be given only to those who are worthy.” Going one step further, he addresses the issue of historical information that is already in print but does not support the church’s official history; he believes that such information should not be “disseminated.” It isn't just for prospective converts that the mainstream church wants to santitize history; I have heard reports that a current church lesson manual focusing on the life of Brigham Young represents him as having been monogamous even though there is plentiful historical evidence that he practiced polygamy. Again, I haven't seen this manual myself, but the reports are plentiful enough that I tend to believe them.

No wonder the mainstream Mormon church was upset with Krakauer for writing Under the Banner of Heaven. He makes a good case that the history set forth in his book is the result of solid historical research, and not just an attack on the Mormon church. It would have helped to strengthen his case even further if Krakauer had more thoroughly documented his research through footnotes, although he does include chapter notes and an extensive bibliography to aid anyone who wishes to validate his contentions in the book. Even by discussing these issues, however, Krakauer made himself a target of the mainstream church. You can find the defense he issued when the church attacked his book even before it was published online at http://www.randomhouse.com/features/krakauer/response.html.

The mainstream Mormon church does not help their case by its practice of limiting access to its official archives to researchers they deem friendly to the church. Nor does it improve its position through its treatment of Mormon scholars who do not toe the official doctrinal line in their publications. In a section of “Author’s Remarks” at the end of his book, Krakauer writes about two Mormon historians, Fawn Brodie and D. Michael Quinn, who were ultimately excommunicated from the church at least in part because they did not write history as the church wishes it to be represented. A third writer, Juanita Brooks, who wrote about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, is mentioned, but it is unclear weather she was excommunicated or left the church of her own volition. This sort of treatment of scholars who write the truth as they see it and not necessarily as the church sees it continues up to the present day. In the past month or two Grant Palmer, a devout Mormon and longtime employee of the church’s educational system, was disfellowshipped for the things he wrote in his book, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins. The mainstream Mormon church is clearly not fond of the concept of academic freedom.

In a way, Krakauer had it easier as a non-Mormon writing about the Mormon church’s early history and its later dissenters and schismatics. All the Mormon church could do to him was to denounce his book, which probably only called more attention to it and likely gained him more readers than he would otherwise have had. At any rate, the postscript added to the revised paperback edition of Under the Banner of Heaven, in which he addresses the church’s criticisms and concerns over his book, seems to indicate that the church was much more bothered by his book than he was by their criticisms.

All of this is a lesson for anyone interested in looking at and writing about beliefs and belief systems, especially religious beliefs but, more and more, political beliefs as well. Individuals and institutions, sometimes especially institutions, can be protective of their deeply held beliefs. The writer must realize going in that some folks are going to be highly sensitive about anything you might say about what they believe. What the writer considers completely non-controversial might be perceived by the believer as highly inflammatory. One of the many reasons I’m so interested in looking at beliefs and belief systems is that I want to see if there is any way to ratchet down the sensitivity so we can talk about the things we each believe without so much defensiveness and stress.