And I need more grace than I thought

Sometimes the wheels of my mind turn exceedingly slowly. I'm sitting here listening to The Congos- Heart of the Congos and Tan Dun's Water Passion after Saint Matthew and thinking about Geds' post, This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours. Do I agree that "by allowing and even celebrating the gates around Christian culture we have diminished ourselves"?

Knowledge of the history of the Christian religion is certainly essential to any attempt at genuine understanding of the world as it is today. I couldn't truly understand The Congos if I didn't understand both the religious and political influences on their music, and the Water Passion would probably be unlistenable if I didn't appreciate the story behind it- I try to be open-minded, but opera is really not my thing. A great deal of art in the modern world draws on a history rich in Christian themes; perhaps all art does these days. Even bands like Modest Mouse, as cynical and atheistic as they come, play songs like Bukowski, songs that would be meaningless in a world without Christ.

So while I agree with Geds that evangelical culture has drawn a wall around itself, the non-evangelical world doesn't seem to be affected. These gates are one-way, I guess.

There are Christians who ignore the gates, too. I recently read The Irresistable Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, by Shane Claiborne, a young evangelical who lives in a commune in Philadelphia. My brother aspires to living in a similar house in Seattle; he and my sister, who recently applied for Mission Year, take the failure of Christian pop culture very seriously. There is a small but genuine evangelical youth movement that is tending toward hippie issues like pacifism, poverty, racism and social justice instead of focusing on banning gay marriage, and there is a part of me that thinks this is great. Religion doesn't have to be about othering people who believe differently and condemning harmless behavior. It could be a force for goodness in the world, even if the motivation is love for a God who doesn't exist.

I'm not convinced, though, that a civilized Christianity is more true to the core beliefs of the historical church. The Christians I know are convinced that their religion is all about beauty and truth, love and sweetness and light, but the core truths of Christianity don't lead to happiness. The idea that morality comes from a central authority, the idea that people are innately evil, the idea that blood is the only adequate payment for sin, and so many other doctrines have caused so much misery in the past two thousand years. Christianity divides the world into sinners and saved, and if heaven and hell are all that matters, any cruelty in the name of saving souls is justifiable. The history of Christianity bears this out. A truly moral religion would be forced to apologize not only for the Crusades, the subjugation of women, the justifications for slavery, and the genocide of the natives in the Americas, but also for the doctrine that led to these horrible events.

A truly moral Christianity would require repudiation of much of what is Christian. Of course I would prefer people to choose what is right over what their religion tells them, and as an atheist I believe that they can, but unfortunately I don't think it likely that most believers would be willing to make that choice. I think that many Christians, if forced to choose between what is right and historical church doctrine, would choose doctrine. They might do so apologetically; I've heard it before, "well of course I believe that women should be respected and treated well, but 1 Timothy 2: 11-15 says 'A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety' so I'm sorry but women can't lead men, that's just what the Bible says so it must be right."

To me the epitome of a mainstream music worthy Christian band is mewithoutYou. They're really good musically, and their lyrics aren't even that pretentious. I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear them on the local alternative rock radio station, and their band members are even cool and indie and run their tour bus on vegetable oil. The thing is, though, they're still a Christian band. Their sweet indie music is full of the effacement of self in favor of loving God that amounts to living suicide. The problem is not how Christian doctrine is being sold; they're doing that very well. The problem is the doctrine itself.

Maybe what Christianity really needs is a break from the past, a willingness to forget how things are supposed to be according to church tradition. The benefit of remembering the past is supposed to be that you learn from it and don't repeat mistakes in the future, but when it comes to religion, you're not always allowed to learn and change. When doctrine forbids deliberate change, maybe it's better to just forget.

Jericho's second season

The first season of Jericho was OK. I sat down and watched it at one point a few months ago when I was bored and ill and up all night and it was the only TV show I could find that had a whole season's worth of episodes available online for free. I really liked some aspects of it, particularly the post-apocalyptic themes and the secret agent storyline, and I could listen to the guy who plays Hawkins talk all day and not get bored; he has the most wonderful voice. Other aspects were kind of annoying, like how none of the women were good for anything, and how the town kept "running out" of gasoline and then the next episode people were driving all over the place, and the resemblance some of the plot points had to a 9/11 Truther conspiracy theory.

The first few episodes of the second season have been pretty stellar, though. Apparently the show isn't that popular, but I think it's great. Popularity isn't necessarily the defining factor when you're telling a good story, and like Kung Fu Monkey says, this show has become radically subversive. I just watched Episode Five, and it reminded me of nothing so much as a composite of certain incidents from the Iraq war. The incident in Fallujah, before we burned it to the ground, where those contractors went into the city and were killed, and their bodies were mutilated and strung up by a mob. Numerous incidents of corruption during the reconstruction. Arbitrary imprisonment of occupied citizens without trial, and "misunderstandings" that resulted in the death of innocent children in their homes. The major difference is that the victims of corporate-government oppression here aren't Iraqis, they're Americans. The pretty little girl who gets shot is blond, and the men who string up the contractor are American farm boys, doing what anyone would do in their situation.

The most dangerous threat to the impulse to war is sympathizing with the enemy. Empathy, I am convinced, is the root of morality. If you can imagine yourself as the person you oppose, if you can feel what they feel , if you can truly know them, war becomes impossible. When it comes to people who live halfway across the world, who speak a different language and pray to a different God, empathy isn't that easy. Stories like this help bridge the gap, and we need more like it.

You can watch all of season two of Jericho here, on CBS' page, free and completely legit.

If heaven is on the way

So I was talking with my mother-in-law the other day, and the conversation went like our conversations usually do, where she talks about 95% of the time, and I say "mmhmm" and "oh really?" and "yeah" a lot. She was telling stories about how she got into trouble in high school, but then got diverted onto the subject of how inconvenient it was for everyone she knew when the school district policy started to require forced integration of the school districts, which meant that the bus rides for some people took longer. She honestly couldn't see any need at all for integration of schools, because after all, the people she knew would never harass black students, and if the black students all sat at one table at lunch it was just because they wanted to. All integration was to her was a pointless hassle, and at that point I really didn't have anything to say.

My in-laws and the people I've met here in St Louis since moving here last summer are not bad people. They are intelligent, educated, middle class white folks who insist that St Louis is not, in fact, in the South, but is in the Midwest and so must be untainted with horrible horrible racism. It puzzles me, that they don't see it. St Louis is about half white and half black, I think, although I don't know the current statistics; we are currently living in my grandmother-in-law's house, which is in a neighborhood with exactly zero people who aren't lily white. I go to the grocery store around the corner and it's no more diverse than the stores in rural Washington state where I grew up. On the other hand, if you go up to the northern part of St Louis county, communities there are almost 100% nonwhite. My in-laws' social circle does not include a single person who isn't white.

The way money is spent by the local governments here reflects this segregation to a degree that makes my skin itch. The neighborhood here, which is white and upper middle class, is perfectly safe. You can leave your doors unlocked when you run to the store and you can walk alone at night. I get the impression that the nonwhite neighborhoods are rather dangerous; the principle advice I got when I moved here about how to get around the city was to not go north of downtown or across the river, because doing so means you're going to get shot. It's not just dangerous crime, either. The VA hospital downtown is in a part of town that is right on the edge between a university campus and, to the north of it, a patch of urban poverty recognizable by ancient, poorly maintained, or abandoned buildings: it's a 'black' part of town.

Some of the history of the area is outlined in these posts by The Infamous Brad, which I found via Orcinus. The shooting he talks about occurred in Kirkwood, which is a suburb of St Louis that is only about ten minutes from where I'm living now. Orcinus also gives a link to a previous discussion of sundown towns that mentions Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, which I thought was very interesting. It's easy for a white kid from a white town like me to grow up almost completely ignorant of the complexities of race in our society, but it seems to me like it ought to be more difficult to stay ignorant when your white town is right next to a black town and the difference is so stark. My in-laws do manage to be ignorant, though.

It makes me wonder if the difference between us really is just that I read so much science fiction at such an impressionable age, or if there actually is less racism in the Pacific Northwest like I used to assume. Or maybe the type of racism in Washington- the kind people don't talk about- just doesn't pass along to the next generation as reliably.

Raven Steals the Sun

I don't remember what I was doing but somehow earlier today I stumbled upon this picture of a tattoo, which shows Raven, which in the folklore of many of the Native tribes on the northern west coast of America is a creator god figure. There is a story that many tribes tell in different ways, but which comes down to this: once upon a time there was no light in the world. The light was kept away by an old man (or Eagle or Seagull in some variations) who kept it locked up tight so that only he could possess it. Raven tricked his way into a place in the household via the old man's daughter (some variations say he courted her, some say he turned himself into a tiny pine needle in her tea so she swallowed him down and became pregnant) and stole away the light, scattering it across the world to form the moon, sun and stars. The old man was angry but in the end he could see how beautiful his daughter was so Raven got away with it.

I really like this story, for a lot of reasons. I think monotheistic religions are poorer for their lack of trickster role models. Ravens have always symbolized the battlefield in my mind, and I like that this story puts a harbinger of death in the position of one who brings light to the world. This is probably not the spin a Native storyteller would put on it, but it was the first thing that occurred to me when I heard this story. I like that the hero of this story is a frail bird who obtains his goals through subtle trickery instead of violent confrontation. I think it tells a true story, in the sense that it says things about the way the world works that are true.

Anyway, so this tattoo is something that I wouldn't mind getting. I won't, because I don't want to lay claim to a culture that, when it comes down to it, my ancestors purged from the land in a violent genocide; I don't really have any right to it. Its a beautiful tattoo though.

Gluttony

Being poor means always watching where your money is going, and keeping a stranglehold on all those dollars spent on frivolous things. Americans are taught by advertising and the lifestyles portrayed as normal in media that shopping is an essential pursuit. Buying things, owning things, having a life full of objects, is fundamental to life. Everyone is supposed to be upper middle class, which means owning an extravagantly large house in a suburban neighborhood, and filling it with things you don't need, just because that's the default in our culture, even if you can't afford the things you buy, and even if they don't make you happy.

This kind of consumerism was on ample display today, Black Friday, the biggest collective orgy of spending all year. All the stores have sales, so of course everyone has to run out and see how much they can spend so they can show off their wealth to their family and friends. On the way home from my mother-in-law's house on Thursday evening, we passed by a line of about 40 people camped outside a Best Buy. It was only about 6:30pm, but they were camped out there in the 35 degree darkness, ready to wait all night until the store opened at 6am, so they could get in first and get the special sale on whatever.

Combine this disgusting wealth obsession with the celebration of genocide we call Thanksgiving, and this weekend has made me rather squeamish.

I'll see you on the other side

I have just finished watching every single Jericho video available on CBS.com, something like 20ish episodes. Its a decent show, although watching it makes me wonder why shows like this- the 'group of ordinary people in dire circumstances' genre- always reinforce gender stereotypes so forcefully. I mean really, would it be too much to have just one woman in the town who can shoot a rifle? Shooting a rifle is well within the physical limitations of a woman. Or is the black FBI agent exactly the right amount of multiculturalism? I guess maybe I should be glad that the women were allowed to be 'strong women' as long as they stayed in their Biblically Defined Roles of nurse and schoolteacher and waiter-at-home-while-the-dashing-men-go-out-to-save-the-day.

Not that I'm objecting to dashing men, not really. And the FBI agent has the most deliciously rich voice I've heard on television in a long while; the best male voice anyway, the woman who plays Beth Turner in Moonlight has a wonderful voice also, although she over-plays hers. I think his voice is the only Southern accent that I've ever really liked, instead of just tolerated.

As a direct result of watching way too much television lately, I've got an Aquabats song stuck in my head. "Chemical Bomb" is a song that I haven't heard at all recently, despite my 20 minute search for the CD this evening. Since I couldn't find it, I'm stuck with "We Will Become Silhouettes" by The Postal Service, another soft and sweet song about war with WMDs. I remember reading stories written in the 70s that were full of abject terror about nuclear war, they were dark and difficult to read. I don't know by what mechanism this terror has changed, but it has, to the point where the most poignant art about these fears is light and resigned and listening to it, you almost get the feeling that the bright light of the explosion might be beautiful.

The Farther Shore

I recently finished reading The Farther Shore, by Matthew Eck, and I found myself wishing that I had read this book when I was younger and reading books like Ender's Game; never mind that The Farther Shore wasn't published until earlier this year.

It amazed me how this book so perfectly reproduced the way I experienced my military service. Not that I ever got stranded in a city in Africa or accidentally killed kids or even fired my weapon in fear. None of the details are the same, but the essence of it is identical. The feeling of being just yourself, not a soldier, feeling like you don't know what you're doing or what you ought to do. Feeling like the soldier on either side of you is a stranger who might not even be a person the way you are a person, who might even be a monster, mad and untrustworthy. The absence of comraderie, the absence of purpose or conviction or confidence of any kind, whether in the rightness of your mission or in your own ability to keep yourself alive.

Military fiction is often written by people who have never been to war. This book makes me wonder if maybe the world wouldn't be a better place if more soldiers spoke up about what being a soldier is really like. I don't know if it would have kept me from enlisting; maybe my own wish to be a hero would still have overridden my better judgment. I should have known from the information I had at the time that joining the Army wasn't the way to make myself into the person I wanted to be. I can't help but think, though, that the current fashionable thirst for war would be not quite so fashionable if a higher percentage of the population knew what they were asking for.

Hairy Legs

I've been wiped out and incoherent the last couple of days, feeling like I got run over by a bus. I haven't even managed to read the political blogs like I usually do; I hate this feeling like I'm so dissociated from the world, wrapped in clouds and unable to connect with words on a meaningful level.

One thing that has crossed my mind and stuck long enough for me to grab hold and examine it, though, is the American insistence that women shave their legs.

For some reason- I really have no idea why- the skin on my legs has suddenly become quite sensitive, and whenever I shave I get razor rash, which then gets infected in places and gets all nasty and red, like so:

This is quite annoying, because although it doesn't really hurt that much in the grand scheme of things, every time I shave it happens, and it doesn't heal up between shaves, so it kept getting worse. The obvious solution was to not shave my legs until they get better, so I decided not to. This was about two weeks ago. As the picture above illustrates, they got quite hairy for a while, until my husband expressed his intense discomfort. My hairy legs, he said, were unnatural.

This response is about what I expected, although I did hope that he would relent once I explained that I was just doing it so the oozing sores on my legs would heal up. No such luck. He's a good guy, mostly, but not a liberal hippie the way I am. Questioning everything about the status quo doesn't come naturally to him, and I guess women with hairy legs are so out of the ordinary these days that the average man sees it as unnatural. So I shaved my legs again, so as not to cause a huge fuss.

It puzzles me that a society can get to this point, where the way things would be without outside influence is strange and offensive. People grow hair, it's in our genes; both women and men both, once they go through puberty, are naturally hairy. But if I grow out my leg hair, I'm not a normal American woman, I'm a freak, a butch dyke. When I complain about this in the hearing of my husband or other friends of mine who are male, they always come up with some variant of, well men who don't shave their faces are scary mountain men, so stop thinking you're especially persecuted. However, plenty of men grow out a beard at some point in their lives, just to see what it looks like. Growing a long flowing beard might make people look at you oddly, but men who do this are still men. They're not freaks, their sexuality isn't questioned.

I don't know of a single woman who has ever grown out her leg hair, just to see what it looks like. Even when I was in Africa with TMI, no one's leg hair grew out to it's full length; at one point a group of us girls grew our hair out long enough to wax it off, but mostly we all shaved at least a couple times a week. Even in Africa, we couldn't escape the cultural conditioning that says: body hair on women is disgusting. Its a curious disconnect from the way the world really is, and it puzzles me that more people don't sit back and ask why we do these things. Who decided that female body hair is so awful? Why do we all just sit back and agree to spend so much time and money shaving our skin so we look like infants?

It makes me wonder what other strange ideas might be hidden in my culture, what absurd assumptions lurk just beyond my detection.