Investigations of a Spiritual Variety

I’m invested in spirituality, not religion or dogma. No matter how my parents protest, I wasn’t raised in a religious household. Although we celebrated Christmas and Easter, didn’t eat fish on Good Friday, and prayed before meal and bedtimes, I was never taught scripture. We went to church once, a passion play. I was four years old. I cried until my parents took me home. “Why are they beating that man?” I wouldn’t get a sufficient answer until later in life. As a kid, I knew God lived in the sky and Jesus helped the poor and died on the cross. That was it.

            Then grandparents began to pass away. My parents, lapsed Catholics soured to the Church by a priest who insisted they were marrying for lust, began to attend church services once more. I didn’t go at first. I was intimidated. God was like a club from which I’d been excluded. Yet, even if an invitation were extended, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a member.

            Tired of feeling like an outsider, the summer of my freshmen year of college I picked up my parents’ Bible and read it cover to cover. My life changed.

            I didn’t fully understand what I read. Yet, the concept that stuck was that something out there was watching over me. It loved me, wanted me to do well. So, I prayed for things. I got them in rapid succession: a girlfriend, a major that was right for me, writing awards, straight As. Everything lined up bam-bam-bam.

            My prayers became more outlandish. I wanted more.

            Family members died, family drama ensued. It drove me nuts. Writing got tougher. Relationships became harder to manage. I read different spiritual texts, not wanting to understand them, but for them to tell me how to get what I wanted. I thought there was something wrong with me. Maybe I had somehow earned God’s disfavor. Maybe I was Job. Maybe this religious stuff was all bullshit. Ultimately, I lost belief.

            The truth is I lost belief in myself.

            I’m glad I did. To quote Kabbalah, “How is wisdom found without first stumbling over it?” For me, this stumbling has been essential. It’s opened my eyes. I’ve realized prayers are not always answered and even if they are, it doesn’t mean your personal deity answered them. In fact, it most likely means you believed enough in yourself to get the job done. I don’t necessarily believe there is some great being watching over us all day, loving us, making sure we’re doing okay. Some days are just better than others. And I don’t believe there is some kind of cloudy toga party or fiery inferno awaiting us after death. I live in the present. Yes, I look to the future, but as Buddha says, “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”  Yet, there is still something mystical about our world, some dream-like reality I find woven into our everyday, physical, plain Jane lives of “reason.” Since the belief systems that have grown throughout history are so intrinsic to our species’ development, and can enrich lives if one don’t dismiss all of it as bullshit in an effort to be “right,” I can’t ignore them.

            This summer I’ve read religious text after religious text, from the Bible to the Bhagavad-Gita to God is Not Great and many, many more. I’ve pursued scholarly articles, discussions, and histories to supplement my understanding. I’ve found it fascinating. Most eye-opening has been the scholarly views that eschew the scriptural literalism of the crazies we see every day (May 21^st, 2011, the day we all had a good laugh) in favor of truth. My respect and understanding has been elevated not only for these texts’ ideas, but for their impact on literature and thought.

            I’ll be sharing my findings piece-by-piece. Don’t expect them to be in chronological order or grouped by faiths. I’ll start with Genesis in the Old Testament, move to Buddhism, Kabbalah, etc. What is most important is not to prove which religion is right or wrong (a futile exercise), but to help more people understand what has become garbled. “Wisdom is the path to enlightenment,” Buddha says. I just want to turn on some damn lights.

No Expectations – Cowboys & Aliens

As long as you go into Cowboys & Aliens with no expectations you won’t be disappointed. It’s titled Cowboys & Aliens for god’s sake. I didn’t know if I should expect comedy, western, horror, or sci-fi. I definitely didn’t expect the next Citizen Kane (or my personal favorite, Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans). What I got was two-hours of mindless entertainment made better by the filmmakers’ attempts at giving the audience characters to care about and seeing Daniel Craig (James Bond) and Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones) together onscreen.

Cue man-love.

The plot is simple: aliens invade the Old West, taking helpless citizens for experiments in order to eventually enslave them to mine gold. At least I think so. It’s never explained well. But who cares?

Aliens looking for gold—yes, you read that right. As Olivia Wilde’s character explains, “They’re the same as you.” Gold serves to provide the film’s protagonist, Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig, yes the name is a pun) with his eventual turn. Before Jake and his lover were abducted by these same aliens and he lost his memory, he was an outlaw. Gold was his means of getting out of the business. Except that he robbed Harrison Ford’s gold. And Harrison is pissed.

Ford’s character, Col. Dollarhyde (yes, another pun), rules the town of Absolution. He’s introduced in a nifty scene where he brutally interrogates a ranch hand by stringing the guy between two horses and having them almost pull him apart. Ford’s a great bad guy, and he seems to be enjoying himself, especially in the scene where he tells a boy of slitting a dying man’s throat in the aftermath of an Apache settlement raid. Good, grumpy Ford stuff.

The film’s first hour sets up its drama: Craig and Ford’s characters have to work together with other townsfolk in order to understand the alien menace. Other characters include Sam Rockwell’s Doc (well done), Keith Carradine’s sheriff (finely acted), Adam Beach as Ford’s surrogate son (sadly wasted in a stock role), Paul Dano as Ford’s dimwit biological son (Dano is miles from his There Will Be Blood character), Clancy Brown’s preacher (who has the best lines) and Olivia Wilde’s townie with all the mystical answers. The film’s penchant for sexualizing Wilde is obnoxious. She sports a see-through gown with hard nipples in almost every shot. This reinforces the modern image of beautiful women being doe-eyed and in need of food.

Cowboys & Aliens is nothing to gush over. It’s just good fun. The alien design is great. The monsters thrill. They’re nasty, violent critters. The last hour of the movie is all action, special effects, and character turns, most of them done well, some not. I would have liked to see Ford’s character turn happen gradually instead of him defeating the aliens and going, “Well, I’ll be a good guy now.” Craig is good, too, but he’s basically Eastwood’s Man with No Name. All he does is scowl. But he has presence, which helps the audience want to follow him.

I had to laugh at the film’s last lines. Ford’s character, now a good guy, tells Craig he is looking for a dependable man on his ranch. Leaning against a post below the saloon, he says it like a come-on: “I need a good man around here.” I couldn’t help but laugh at the filmmakers’ knowledge of all those still-little-boys, like me, who saw Cowboys & Aliens simply to see Indy and 007 in the same movie. B-

Of note is this video, which may be the highlight of a string of recent humorous Ford late night appearances. In it, he berates an old co-star. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWTtMdXAazs

Don’t just take my opinion. Here are some more reviews:

http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110727/REVIEWS/110729987/1023

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117945693?refcatid=31

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20483470,00.html

Pickers Can't Be Choosers

“Am I a Christian?” No. While I agree with many of Jesus’ teachings, I don’t buy he was the Christ, the only Son of God. Aren’t we all? Don’t we each share divine power if not in body, then in mind and soul? I’m skeptical of religion, but still have a willingness to believe. Like the poster in Fox Mulder’s office, “I Want To Believe.” I believe Jesus was a political badass who challenged Jewish religious authorities by decrying the very hypocrisies freethinkers do to our churches today. It got him killed. (The running around three days later with fresh, bloodless wounds I’ll tackle in another post). I don’t have many problems with mainstream Christianity or Christians. Yet, I cannot condone the actions of groups, especially the Christian Right, when they fly in the face of their own teachings and defeat themselves with their own logic.

            Last year an openly gay judge overturned Proposition 8 in California. This summer New York passed laws allowing gays to marry. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy will soon be obsolete. Lots of conservatives, at least the ones confident enough in their opinions to blab them all over TV, these same people who’ve long attacked homosexuals, have made it known homosexuality is wrong, and letting homosexuals marry degrades the institution of marriage, and in turn, rends the very social fabric of the United States. I want to focus first why they say homosexuality is wrong, according to their biggest supporter: God.

            Using the Book of Leviticus, they quote the passage (20:13) wherein God decrees men lying with other men are an abomination and such acts punishable by death. Women lying with other women aren’t mentioned. Apparently, God likes lesbians (he is a man, right?). Also, notice homosexuals need to be killed for their crimes against the Lord. Okay, this is what the Bible says. The Christian Right quotes it correctly. What is at the heart of their argument is the Word of God. Obviously for them, he is the be-all, end-all authority. What he says flies every time, all the time. No matter what we on Earth or here in America think, no matter how times change, our word cannot supplant God’s because God’s word is law.

If that’s the case, and the Christian Right are really, as they claim, keeping God’s sacraments in the United States, then his word should be followed to the letter, no matter what “word” that may be. There’s no picking which of his words to follow. If he said it, you do it.

A webpage found at www.answersingenesis.org tells all stringent Christians how to win a debate on ethics in these cases. They claim the Word of God must be followed at all times because it is an unbreakable, unchangeable word. The words of men, however, should not be followed because they are unstable. Men make their words law and have systems set up to change those laws whenever they feel like it. Since these laws are governed by man, man decides which to keep and which to follow. He picks and chooses. According to the above website, Christians can win debates against secularists or atheists (or people with common sense) by bringing up these points. It continues with how to end all rebuttals: what’s in the Bible is rock hard because it comes straight from God; what is in man’s hands is malleable and thus, unstable, because it comes from man. Obviously, we cannot live in an unstable world of unstable laws.

            Basically this amounts to “I’m right and you’re wrong.” If that’s the case, and they follow the Word of God as closely they claim, where are the blood sacrifices of animals in their churches, also found in the Book of Leviticus? What about burnt offerings of fruit and grain? If they claim to follow the Word as they say, they better have big-ass beards because they’re not allowed to shave them. They cannot eat shellfish. They cannot eat pigs. But pork is great! Yeah, well, “That no eating pork stuff is a Jewish thing. It’s in the Old Testament.” If they’re citing Leviticus, then they better follow all of its rules or else they’re no better than those people who they claim turn God’s words into man’s laws and make them unstable and ultimately destroy them. You don’t hear the Christian Right crying for gays to be killed. No, that would be bad publicity. That would be too extreme. No, they’ll tolerate gays, but they can’t get married. Oh, and Leviticus also says hate and intolerance is a sin. It, like homosexuality, is an abomination before God. So hatred thrust toward gays by the Christian Right is precarious for them. Not only do they flout human laws of decency and compassion, they ignore God’s law. While no one may punish them for their hatred (it gets good ratings), I’m surprised the Christian Right isn’t concerned with the Big Daddy in the Sky. With all the hatred they throw about, they should know, since they study the Bible so deftly, he will damn them for eternity.

            If gays are going to hell anyway, then why be worried what they do on Earth?

            If gays degrade the institution of marriage, why allow divorce? Larry King and Hugh Hefner’s multiple marriages degrade the institution exponentially with every divorce.

            If being gay is unnatural, why is there evidence of homosexuality in the natural world, such as with bears, elephants, rats, buffalos, chickens, lions, penguins, gulls, frogs, snakes, turtles, moths, octopi, wasps, crabs, monkeys, and gorillas? Isn’t the natural world the very basis of natural concepts? If anything, it’s unnatural for a percentage of a species not to be gay.

            I’m also surprised at the Christian Right’s lack of knowledge of American history, or maybe, what history they pick and choose so well. Does this quote ring a bell?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…”

Ah, but I’m forgetting—that phrase was written by a man, and thus, unstable!

Atlas Sucked - Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

No sugar-coating it: Atlas Shrugged makes my skin crawl. I find its central philosophy mean-spirited, naïve, narrow-minded, and hypocritical. Although it tries to pass itself as liberation from common thought, its methodology is terrifyingly close to the government oppression Rand experienced in her youth. Philosophy aside, Rand is a so-so writer. When she sticks to philosophy, or even setting description, she’s not bad. Her philosophy is convincing, passionately argued, and her descriptions hit notes of beauty, especially those of cities and their ties to her characters’ psyches. Yet when she tries to develop three-dimensional characters whose speech, thoughts, and actions represent a reality outside of her political machinations, she fails miserably. I realize overtly political novels sometimes sacrifice character development to make their points. But does the reader need a seventy-page speech to understand Rand’s intentions when her characters, plot, and themes should speak for themselves? In the last third of the book, I felt I was being hit over the head with a hammer page-after-page. If Rand’s skills as a writer matched hers as a philosopher, I would have enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. I can disagree with a book’s themes and still find them interesting, but here, when Rand constantly tells instead of shows, she treats her reader with the same self-absorbed patronizing her Objectivist characters do to those “inhibiting the motor of the world.”

            Atlas Shrugged sets up a wonderful mystery: “Who is John Galt?” Is he myth? Is he Savior? What has he to do with the declining state of the nation? You see, the United States is passing laws so that the private business sector is slowly being eaten by an undeserving collective. The heads of these successful private businesses, such as steel baron Hank Reardon, can only watch as their creations fall into the hands of legislative leeches. Some business leaders, like Reardon and Dagny Taggert, fight these laws, while others mysteriously disappear. Companies on which the USA depend seem to dry up over night, their CEOs and founders gone by morning. Where are they? Who has taken them? As these blatantly totalitarian laws are passed and ratified, a large portion of the working class riots, not for better working conditions, fair pay, or benefits, but so that CEOs will leave the factories, laboratories, and mills under the control of average people. Finally, after the government controls even the sciences, John Galt swings in to the rescue. The creative minds of America haven’t disappeared. They now live in Galt’s Gulch in the Colorado Rockies where they have formed a community for those they feel deserve it (although the number one rule of this “community” is that no man is to work for anyone but himself). With most of the creative minds gone from mainstream America, Galt believes it’s only a matter of time before they stop “the motor of the world” and  reclaim the government.

            Rand must be commended for her novel’s unique premise. I was hooked from page one. I wanted to know the identity of John Galt, the reasons for the disappearance of so many able-bodied men and women, and what made such successful characters achieve so much in their lines of work. I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. I didn’t want a good read. I wanted an experience. I got one. There were times when I was thrilled, moved, and polarized. Many times I had to close the book and ponder what exactly Rand meant. Each time I did I learned something. I must admit parts of Rand’s philosophy coexist with my own, like her tenets of everything in life having to be earned, questioning the status quo, and embodying your beliefs and standing by them no matter the circumstances. What terrified me, however, was that if you do not measure up to Rand’s yardstick of mental, personal and material progresses, then society is better off without you. Yes, there are a lot of undeserving people in the world. There are leeches. But the world is not black-and-white. You cannot divide it into the Brains and Backs.

Rand does. Her protagonists are the Brains, beautiful, well-spoken, rich, and always right. Their integrity never fails. The novel’s antagonists, the Backs, are ugly, stupid sheep following one another to oblivion. They represent almost all of American society. Apparently, nurture never trumps nature in Rand’s world. Though she spends time documenting her protagonists’ successes, she offers no real explanations of how it has changed them. It seems they’ve always been smart and driven, like all Brains. While railing against organizations and institutions she finds immoral, she acts like a dictator, giving passage only to those who worship her philosophy. She does not forgive. If Galt’s Gulch’s motto is every man for himself, what room is there for children, parents, or learning curves? And if there’s no room for those, how can Rand expect her characters to form any sort of governing body except the one in which they ultimately replace?

            Rand also fails as a writer. This book is long, long, long. Why state what I mean in a sentence, she seems to say, when I can do it in several paragraphs? Her dialogue is absurd. Characters sermonize for paragraphs on end. They aren’t alive. They’re echoes of Rand.

            She dismisses religion, yet makes John Galt a figure to be worshiped. The ultimate insult to her readers’ intelligence comes when her protagonists, none of them trained in weaponry, break John Galt out of prison at the novel’s end. These businessmen and women waltz into a military prison with small arms and the guards literally drop their guns in awe, as if they are overwhelmed by the supreme intellect before them and, helpless, forget to shoot these entitled, tyrannical mother fuckers.

And so it seems Rand expects the same of her readers. Drop your jaw at her intellect. Or, just drop the book. And if you’re debating if Objectivism is right for you, remember The Who—“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” D

Obscenely Flapping - The Long Walk by Stephen King

Sometimes, Stephen King frustrates me. I always look forward to reading his work, yet am seriously disappointed when he doesn't meet my expectations. That’s to be expected given his position in American culture. He is the Master of the Macabre. While he’s earned that title through stories that resonate as much as they thrill, his ideas and intent are sometimes sabotaged by B-movie dialogue, odd similes and metaphors, and hazy writing. Though I haven’t read half of his prodigious output (over fifty books in thirty-five years), some of it, like ’Salem’s Lot, Misery, and On Writing, I love from a reader’s and writer’s standpoint. In those works, I gladly went wherever King wanted without questioning how we got there. Other books, such as The Shining and The Stand, are highly enjoyable, but arbitrary plot devices (Jack Torrance forgets about the boiler, the Hand of God decimates Randall Flagg’s followers) lessen the impact of the material. What frustrates me most is King seems to know better. His columns in Entertainment Weekly (his hilarious Shoe-Dini article last year had me in tears), his interviews, and his political opinions, point to an intelligent man with a realistic grasp on his perceptions. He knows how to articulate, damn it. With The Long Walk, however, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King loses his articulation and yes, poise, by squandering a great concept in favor of cheese.

            In an alternate-history America, World War II lasts until the 1950s. Paranoid citizens adopt a totalitarian government run by “The Major.” One hundred teenage boys participate in The Long Walk, a contest of who can walk the farthest without stopping. If a contestant’s foot speed falls below four-miles per hour, he is warned by soldiers riding in halftracks beside the walkers. A contestant is shot after three warnings, or as the characters put it, “buys their ticket.” Ray Garraty is seventeen, might be gay, has a girlfriend he loves, a mother he may want to fuck (Freud, you asshole), and a “Squadded” father. Squadding is the arrest of political dissidents. It's a hushed-up practice, yet nevertheless public knowledge. Garraty hasn’t seen his father since he was a boy. He signs up for The Long Walk seemingly oblivious to its fatal consequences.

            Walking with Garraty are a host of token characters: McVries, the wise, sarcastic best friend, Bartkovich, the jerk, Stebbins, the mysterious one who never gets tired, Scramm, the good ol’boy, Olson, the bullshitter. Though colorful, we’re never allowed into their psyches. As they provide Garraty with their obligatory backstories, their inane dialogue (here’s the norm: “I’ll tell you where you can stick [insert any noun]. It’s long and dark and the sun never shines there.”), spouted during the most implausible moments, erases their credibility. Even Garraty is two-dimensional. Emotionally unstable, wishy-washy teenage boys are realistic. Garraty, however, never has a stance on anything. Hell, it’s never even stated why he signs up for The Long Walk. McVries says “they all want to die,” but that allows King to easily paint the contestants with a dictatorship-is-bad, look-what-it-does-to-the-human-spirit brush. The antagonist, always one of the highlights of King’s work, is equally disappointing. The Major makes fleeting appearances in his ceremonial jeep to shout platitudes, but his character lacks presence. The reader only knows his physicality, never what makes him tick. He does not inspire real fear or dread.

            You’d think a grueling, sick contest in a totalitarian America would come with political themes. Yet, all we have here are teenage boys making weightless insults and waxing about breasts and death. It is especially grating when King mentions historical aspects of his alternate America, like the storming of a Santiago Nazi nuclear bunker in ’53, and does not elaborate. Elaboration is needed since King begins every chapter with a quote from the present day. He quotes You Bet Your Life, The Gong Show, The New Price Is Right, and it made me wonder: Would these shows exist in an alternate reality? Same goes for King’s music references. If U.S. dictatorship Squads its citizens, why does it put up with counterculture music?

            Equally frustrating is King’s writing. A third person narrator interrupts the boys’ conversations (yes, after walking over two hundred miles, they still have conversations as if hanging around a locker room) with beautiful, haunting depictions of nature and crowds. At times, I was wowed. Then, I’d cringe at such similes as, “They stood silhouetted against the darkening sky like Indians.” Why Indians? If he’s going for darker skins, why not Italians? If they’re silhouettes anyway, why not Norwegians? Objects also “obscenely flap.” This phrase reads like the novel’s key words, mentioned at least three times over the course of the walk. Things are always “obscenely flapping.” One character “[rips another] to his feet.” How one can rip to something? I haven’t had much luck.

            When King publishes under Bachman, it’s as if he digs up a manuscript he wrote in his early twenties, fixes spelling and grammar errors, and says, “Good to go.” That sounds harsh, but I thought the same when I read the first Bachman book, The Rage, and found it more dismal and derivative than The Long Walk. That book was written by a young man angry at school, authority, and girls, and it reads like it. While not as bad as that novella, The Long Walk certainly treads that territory (pardon the pun). While it provides is an interesting concept, easy readability (I read it in 3 days), occasional humor, and King’s trademark Maine setting, it lacks is fully developed themes and characters that make the ending, which is supremely creepy in its ambiguity and possible connection to The Stand, matter to readers. C