you can't see the thin air

I had a medical appointment today. I was under the impression that it was supposed to be a referral for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, so I went in all ready to explain that techniques for correcting irrational beliefs in order to improve one's outlook on life are all well and good, but if my beliefs are rational CBT isn't going to be helpful. I firmly believe that my expectation that my health is not going to significantly improve in the future is realistic, and furthermore, that accepting this hard truth is more helpful and healthy than continuing to deny it in the hope that positive thinking will magically cure me.

Turns out this referral wasn't actually for CBT, it was for drugs. The doctor I saw wasn't at all interested in hearing about my memory, concentration, or comprehension problems, and she wasn't at all interested in my history of extremely bad reactions to ridiculously low doses of various medications. What she was interested in was writing me a prescription for Prozac.

I'm not excited about the prospect of taking Prozac, although I agreed to it, of course; I don't ever feel comfortable not agreeing to a suggested course of treatment, because I'm very afraid that if I am ever the least bit non-compliant, for ever after every doctor will point to it and say "Well, it's too bad you didn't agree to this treatment, or you'd be well now. It's your fault you're ill." I'm not sure how rational this fear is, although it has some basis in how I was treated in the Army. Anyway, taking Prozac isn't that big a deal. I am fairly certain it will make me ill just like Effexor did, and I will vomit for a few days, lay about in bed feeling like I'm dying and then I'll recover and not take it anymore. I just wish that I could hurry up and get past the phase of treatment where doctors insist that making me more ill is the best way to treat me.

When going through my medical history with this most recent doctor, we discussed previous medications' lack of benefit on the pain relieving front. She was concerned that I may not be taking medication with the right attitude; her worry is that my cynicism is actually preventing the medication from working like it's supposed to, causing medications that would otherwise relieve my pain to do nothing.

This philosophy that attributes supernatural powers to my emotions is, I think, the worst thing about going to the doctor. I'm not a religious person, nor am I superstitious. I let go of my childhood faith when I could no longer convince myself to pretend to believe in a gigantic Santa in the sky causing good things to happen to good people and bad things to happen to the bad; I couldn't even believe in fate. Things happen because they are caused to happen by real things that exist in the real world, not because you wish they would happen, or pray for them to happen, or believe that they will happen, or deserve for them to happen. This is true of disasters and good fortune alike, and it's true whether I like it or not. It's also true whether you like it or not, which is why mostly I don't give a crap what other people believe about the world. I recognize that there is a human inclination to assign causation to things, and as this seems to be a fairly universal trait (that even I haven't missed out on) I might as well accept it.

It does get to be a problem, though, when it interferes with my health care. I wish I knew how to change things.

Whenever someone asks me how I am, I am reluctant to lie and say that I am doing well, but I am also reluctant to lay bare the truth; I am afraid if I mention constantly how much pain I am in, people will see me as nothing but a whining hypochondriac. So in order to keep people asking me how I am, I don't tell them how I am. Instead, I tell them that I'm cold. It communicates that I am clearly miserable, and yet it's not so negative that no one wants to hear about it. In fact, in the current situation it's interpreted as a reaction to my first winter in the Midwest, and so people are eager to tell me all about how cold its been and how to stay warm and about their thyroid problem that made them always cold.

However, for Christmas this year, I got: a sweater, a down coat, slippers, a hat-glove-scarf set, long underwear, and the most fabulous electric blanket.

I'm going to need a new strategy.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W.B. Yeats

the Evil Hermit

It's 3am Christmas Eve, and I'm sitting awake contemplating the merits of consuming large quantities of energy drinks and coffee tomorrow so that on Christmas morning I will be vomiting my guts out. I wouldn't have to go out and be cozy with people whose names I can't remember. I wouldn't have to smile and nod and say "thank you" when people give me things I don't want and pretend like I feel like family. I could stay home in bed alone, ill but at peace.

War:

You can’t end it by disarmament conferences. You can’t eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation—it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages—all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers—yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders—everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.

Why shouldn’t they?

They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered.

They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are!

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket—that and nothing else.

- "War is a Racket", Major General Smedley Butler, 1935

Too scattered to blog, but I thought I'd preserve this link. It's a good post: You Don't Have to Be Pretty.

Til we crack the code

Mitt Romney gave a speech today somewhere in Texas, purportedly to rescue his campaign from the rise of Mike Huckabee, who is a Southern Baptist preacher. Romney is, of course, a Mormon, and he gave this speech hoping to calm fears about his religion among the evangelical base. I remember, when I was young, seeing books and pamphlets and videos that warned of the Evil Cult of Mormonism and equated it with Satanism and the Heaven's Gate cult (I really think that in some ways Heaven's Gate was preferred, as at least they had the decency to off themselves and save Good Christians the trouble), and so it amazes me that he thinks he ever had a chance of getting elected in 2008. The idea of the fundies being forced to choose between the Evil Cultist and Hitlery is amusing, but I really think they would mostly just stay home instead of voting.

Religion is a terribly political issue in this election, right up there with gender and probably more so than race. I've seen people freaking out because Obama's middle name is Hussein, which means he's a Muslim, never mind that he's a member of the United Church of Christ (I think). I've read at least three or four different articles about how the Democrats, those filthy atheists, have suddenly discovered the religious voter. Issues are cast in religious terms; even global warming is 'stewardship of the earth,' health care laws are moral because Jesus said to take care of the poor, and of course the War on Terror is an apocalyptic battle between Islam and Christianity.

While I've known enough religious people who are genuinely good to believe that religion in the public square is not necessarily pernicious, I think that it often can be. Christianity in the form of modern evangelical millenialism has influenced American public policy in subtle ways; I think it was at least partially responsible for the invasion of Iraq, it is certainly responsible for our support of Israel's rights over the rights of other countries and peoples, and it's responsible for things like abstinence-only sex ed and reduction in government support for contraception. Religion can be very very harmful.

Which is why it irritates me that the current electoral climate requires Presidential candidates to say things like this:

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

like Romney did today, in order to reassure voters that they're electable.

Contrast this with someone who did, in fact, get elected to the Presidency of the United States:

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814

(Ok, so maybe "elected to the Presidency" is a simplification, but he was Vice President and then President and, of course, wrote the Declaration of Independence and was a genuine Founding Father, and so maybe he ranks a little higher than Mr. Romney in the conservative hierarchy of political thought.)

Torture and Blubber

While looking for the quote in the post below, I spent a fair amount of time browsing quotes from Kurt Vonnegut's books, as I was under the mistaken impression that the neon-tubes in the forehead idea was Vonnegut's. This is actually one of my more reasonable recent memory glitches; I mean, really, that sounds like something Vonnegut would write.

Anyway, I found this interesting little essay written by Vonnegut in 1971, titled "Torture and Blubber", which apparently was published in the New York Times. It was written about the war in Vietnam, but it applies to the war in Iraq equally well. A few gems from the piece:

I am sorry we tried torture, I am sorry we tried anything. I hope we will never try torture again. It doesn’t work. Human beings are stubborn and brave animals everywhere. They can endure amazing amounts of pain, if they have to.

and

The American armada to Indochina has been as narrow-minded and futile as the Spanish Armada to England was, though effectively more cruel. Only 27,000 men were involved in the Spanish fiasco. We are said to have more dope addicts than that in Vietnam. Hail, Victory.

Never mind who the American equivalent of Spain’s Philip II was. Never mind who lied. Everybody should shut up for a while. Let there be deathly silence as our armada sails home.

"And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways," Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. "There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else, He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a supreme being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when he robbed old people of their power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?"

"Pain?" Lieutenant Schiesskopf's wife pounced upon the word victoriously. "Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us about bodily dangers."

"And who created the dangers?" Yossarian demanded, He laughed caustically. "Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead? Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't He?"

"People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads."

"They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony or stupified with morphine, don't they? What a colossal, immortal blunderer!"

-Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Social Safety Nets in Action

Gary Farber is just some guy. I don't really know him; he has a blog, but I don't read it, and he comments on Obsidian Wings, which I read, and maybe a few other places but I've never really talked to him. He has health problems that keep him from working, that have kept him from working much for years and years; because he's been ill for so long, he doesn't have enough credits in the Social Security system, and so he is not eligible for Social Security Disability. He's applying for SSI, which he's been denied and is appealing, but even if he does get approved for that, the maximum amount he's eligible for is $623/month. It's been a year since he applied, and best case scenario is it'll be another year before he knows if he's eligible or not for any aid.

In political circles, people talk about welfare like it's easy to get on, and once you get on you're set because the government pays for everything you need. In reality, if you're poor and ill in America, the government would really rather you just lay down and died. I am not sure if its really true that society has some sort of obligation to the weak and ill and poor. If there is no obligation to help your neighbor, what's the point of society? But I'm hesitant to say there is an obligation, that anyone is owed anything. Prescriptions for the behavior of others are always dangerous.

However, even if it isn't necessarily morally wrong not to help those who genuinely need it, it would still be neat if we could figure out a way to structure society so that the ill, the disabled, and the needy were treated with dignity and respect, and were provided for when they can't provide for themselves. The only other options are what Gary is facing: eviction, hunger, medical needs going unmet, homeless in the winter in Colorado, death by freezing under a bridge somewhere. Maybe there is no moral obligation for society as a whole to help the people who face these things, but it would sure be nice.

And it's not like anyone reads this thing, but still, Gary has a set up for donations and subscriptions to his blog so that maybe he can keep living indoors.

Also on the social justice front, a Lt. in the US Army, Elizabeth Whiteside, is being court-martialed for attempting suicide while in Iraq. Its a complicated story- what suicide attempt isn't- but the bare details are these: she was in charge of a trauma team in Iraq, working nonstop in the middle of the results of war; she became more and more depressed about the situation, which included a senior male officer who harassed his female coworkers and subordinates; she regularly received very high marks on performance evaluations and was loved by the team she led in Iraq; she had a dissociative panic-attack-type episode and shot herself in the abdomen, but hurt no one else; charges against her include "wrongful discharge of a firearm, communication of a threat and two attempts of intentional self-injury without intent to avoid service;" if convicted, she may be put in prison for life and will absolutely be ineligible for any kind of veteran's benefits, including physical and mental health services.

This unhealthy impulse to blame victims for their circumstances in order to deny them any help scares me. I don't want to live in a world that is so heartless and difficult, and I don't understand the people who work to make things this way. I mean, I get that if you have compassion for someone, that means empathy creeps in, which means you start to imagine what life would be like for you if you were in that situation, but I don't understand the depth of cowardice that refuses to face that fear and instead chooses to deny all possibility that disaster could befall Our Kind of People.

Its just as cold and dreary as it looks.

.

Hairy-legged bra burner

Walking about with bare legs while warm air blows through the house from the heat vents is an incredibly different experience when one's legs are covered in hair. The sensation does tend toward the creepy-crawly, but it's mild enough that I have yet to experience it as pain, and after much thought I have to say I kind of enjoy it. Being able to feel the air currents with your legs is neat, and its still so unexpectedly noticeable a feeling that it resets my expectations about life.

Not shaving my legs is one of the things that has led me to re-think feminism. I don't remember ever calling myself a feminist seriously, although of course I believe women are equal with men in all important ways; I grew up knowing that I was perfectly brilliant enough to do anything I wanted to do, and it never occurred to me that anyone would think my gender had anything to do with that. Although I did encounter people who believed that a woman's place is in the kitchen, this idea was completely foreign to how I viewed myself and the world, and so I never took them very seriously. They were infuriating, but it was so clear to me that they were wrong that I never invested much time in the philosophical objections to their point of view.

Ceasing to shave one's legs, though, is for some reason almost a capital crime in this patriarchy-influenced world, and nevermind that I did it mostly to reduce the amount of pain in my morning routine, the reactions that otherwise rational people have had to my decision to do this have drawn me to feminism. I've started reading a selection of feminist blogs on a daily basis (Echidne of the Snakes, Figleaf, Shakesville, and Feministing among others); I came across this article in the New Statesman, entitled Is feminism dead? via Figleaf, although it was written by one of the contributors to Feministing, Courtney Martin. Martin's description of feminism is one that I can really get behind, particularly this part:

Radical authenticity: This facet of feminism gets talked about far too little in my opinion. A visionary twenty-first century feminism should aim to support both men and women to be their most authentic selves in the world, shedding prescribed gender roles and really getting in touch with their authentic desires, passions, and ethics. Feminist workplaces, for example, would nurture both men and women having present relationships with their children and fulfilling work lives. Men should be empowered to express a complex range of emotions, just as women must learn how to handle conflict healthily and assertively and take care of themselves, not just everyone else.

Figleaf's commentary on what feminism means for men has also been great; as a man, he focuses more on how anti-feminist worldviews hurt men. Which maybe reveals something about me, that I think including men in feminism is a big priority, but really his feminism is humanism, concerned with everyone's happiness, which I think is something to strive for. Like he says, "radical authenticity and not some kind of made-up crap about how women are just life-support systems for pussies and men are just wallets with feet" leads to more satisfaction with life for everyone. Changing our cultural story about gender is not a zero-sum game where women gain at the expense of men; we can all gain.

I'm still not sure I'd call myself a feminist, at least not primarily. Feminism intersects with a lot of things in my life, not just civil rights causes like disabled rights but also my personal search for who and what I am, now, what my life should be and what is most worth doing when the resources I have are so limited. I've always tended to the philosophical, but lately I've been forced to become a little monk, not really able to move and so I do nothing but sit and think. The feminist paradigm is an interesting one, and it rings more true the more I learn about it, but I'd rather have a term that includes feminism as part of a comprehensive human rights worldview. I suppose humanism might the term, but I don't know. Maybe there isn't a term like this yet, but there ought to be.

no title

Pain is not simple or discrete. It is not homogeneous, straightforward, or consistent. At the same time, it is both enduring and in constant flux; it never goes away and yet somehow it is never possible to shine down a grating white light and stick a pin through the middle of pain so that it can be held down and examined from all angles.

Rather, it bleeds through the body in endless permutations, flaring brightly at a touch and casting flickering shadows in the compression of a muscle. In stillness, it pools like rot or quicksand, and in movement it blares like an unexpected accident, so sharp it barely registers.

The colors of pain are more varied than the human brain is capable of believing. Even I who am so well-acquainted with pain, as soon as it moves or changes I cease to believe in the form it took before. I forget. When the pain I feel is blue and brown like an old bruise, or green and sharp as the smell of limes, I don't believe in the crimson and orange pains of sudden, foolish movement. Primary colors aren't the end of it: the deep dark reds of core muscle fatigue are different than the fresh new slap of pain in the skin or the dull firelight ache of a headache that's settled in for a long stay. There is a pain that is nothing but shadow, and then there is the white hot pain of cold temperatures soaking into the bone through muscle and tendon and skin.

I know that all of these things exist, because I have lived through them and will again, but still, I forget how bright the colors are so quickly. I am over-exposed to the brightness of existence, and so as often as possible my mind chooses blindness; it is blindness to past and future pain, and so I am left with only the present and the colors that inhabit my body in this moment.

One Week of Food

Sometimes it's easy to forget how fortunate I am. I'm a complainer by nature, always negative, and circumstances lately have reinforced that tendency. I'm glad, though, that I live in a country where if I am so poor that I can't afford to buy all the food I want to eat I can fill out tons of annoying paperwork and get food stamps. Not everyone is so lucky. The smiles on the faces of the family in the last picture in this photo essay astound me; I think that if I had so little, I would be angry and despairing.

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.

The trap I set for you

Sometimes it seems like dozens of separate events are conspiring to force me to think about one thing, chance conversations, books read and YouTube videos happened upon all focusing me on a single idea. Its odd that I think of it like this, as though there is some agency manipulating my world, even though I don't believe that the world works that way. I suppose it's part of what makes me human, the tendency to view unrelated things as part of a plan that centers around myself. Perhaps there is something at work in my subconscious, working out my opinions on things without the help of logical thought.

If that is the case today, my subconscious isn't finished, as I have no coherent opinion. I read this post today, though, and thought about prayer and the nature of God, and remembered all the things that have pointed me at this thought, and so I am writing this.

I have been realizing lately that I don't remember a great deal about my life. Perhaps this is natural, although it seems 22 may be a little young to be realizing that I'm losing huge gaps of memory; perhaps I'm just tired. Either way, it upsets me when I search for a memory and it isn't there. Yesterday (or the day before, or earlier- it all blurs together) I searched for a memory of my faith at the moment I lost hold of it, and the memory wasn't there. It makes me wonder: was it ever there? Was there ever a moment when I knew, when I stood up and declared my unbelief, when I took my fear in both hands and held on? Maybe there wasn't. I don't know.

I do remember some things, though.

I remember Josh and his black hair and ugly smile, and I remember learning that God's presence among his people doesn't affect the quality of character. I remember learning that either God isn't present or God isn't good and there is no other choice.

I remember hearing the silly excuse for faith that goes: either Jesus was a madman or he was the Son of God, and since he was obviously wise and good he must have been the Son of God. And I thought, well, what if he was instead some wise and good man manipulated into death by a God who desired to start a force of history that would get millions and millions of people killed? Maybe God thinks religious conflict is amusing. It fits the facts of history better, though it's a little melodramatic.

I remember being all fired up with missionary fervor until I realized that the Good News meant one of two things: either God condemned to death people who had never heard a damn thing about him, or it would be better for missionaries to be silent so as not to condemn those who heard and didn't believe.

I remember believing that God would help me when I needed him, all the way up to the point where I needed him, and then it was like the air was empty.

I remember knowing that God always answers prayers, with the often unspoken assumption that if all you heard was silence it just meant he was denying selfishness or foolishness. If you hear nothing, it just means he said 'no.' So I cried out to him to know if he loved me, and there was nothing. He didn't speak.

I remember being taught that perfection in Christ means the erasure of the self, and realizing that this is nothing more or less than death without eternal life.

But none of this was the tipping point. I don't know what the end of it was. Maybe I'm searching for the wrong thing, maybe I'm expecting a tense and emotional, gripping moment when really it was more of a drift, a gentle letting-go. It seems like I ought to remember, though.

more of the glory of autumn

I'm a digger of holes in the land

From The Bridge of San Luis Rey:

p. 6: [After witnessing the collapse of the Bridge] Anyone else would have said to himself with secret joy: “Within ten minutes myself…!” But it was another thought that visited Brother Juniper: “Why did this happen to those five?” If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.

p. 134 on: Brother Juniper became convinced that the world’s time had come for proof, tabulated proof, of the conviction that was so bright and exciting within him. When the pestilence visited his dear village of Puerto and carried off a large number of peasants, he secretly drew up a diagram of the characteristics of fifteen victims and fifteen survivors, the statistics of their value sub specie aeternitatis. Each soul was rated upon a basis of ten as regards to its goodness, its diligence on religious observation, and its importance to its family group. Here is a fragment of this ambitious chart:

------------Goodness ----Piety----Usefulness
Alfonso G. ------4 ---------4 --------10
Nina ------------2 ---------5--------10
Manuel B.------10---------10--------0
Alfonso V. ----(-8)-------(-10)-------10
Vera N. --------0 ---------10--------10

The thing was more difficult than he had foreseen. Almost every soul in a difficult frontier community turned out to be indispensable economically, and the third column was all but useless. The examiner was driven to the use of minus terms when he confronted the personal character of Alfonso V., who was not, like Vera N., merely bad: he was a propagandist for badness and not merely avoided church but led others to avoid it. Vera N. was indeed bad, but she was a model worshipper and the mainstay of a full hut. From all this saddening data Brother Juniper contrived an index for each peasant. He added up the total for victims and compared it with the total for survivors, to discover that the dead were five times more worth saving. It almost looked as though the pestilence had been directed against the really valuable people in the village of Puerto. And on that afternoon Brother Juniper took a walk along the edge of the Pacific. He tore up his findings and cast them into the waves; he gazed for an hour upon the horizon of that sea, and extracted from their beauty a resignation that he did not permit his reason to examine. The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.

p. 139: I shall spare you Brother Juniper’s generalizations. They are always with us. He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven. He thought he saw pride and wealth confounded as an object lesson to the world, and he thought he saw humility crowned and rewarded for the edification of the city.

The main theme of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is pretty evident from these quotes. Its not a new concept, looking for the hand of God in disaster. In fact, the idea is so universal, I’m tempted to say there’s something about it hardwired into the human brain: the search for meaning, the desire to understand and to control the world around us, assigning cause and effect to those events that seem emotionally significant to us.

I’ve been reading The Slacktivist lately, and Fred’s essays on American evangelicals seem relevant here. Whenever religion doesn’t sufficiently guard against it, and maybe even when a guard is kept as well as it can be, religious rituals become a form of magic, an invocation of a higher power for our own purposes rather than working toward the supposed purposes of the higher power itself. The human desire to control all of life and death manifests everywhere we let it.

I believe this is the same impetus that leads medical professionals and laypeople everywhere to believe that the sick are able to choose health, whether by prayer and piety or by practicing cheerfulness as described by Sontag. In this case, religion and psychology are two sides of the same coin, used to quell the fear that the universe is indifferent to our pain. Humans have trouble internalizing the idea that the world is large and cold and bad things happen because of causes outside our control and comprehension. Natural disasters don’t pick their victims based on piety, and illness doesn’t strike those who are more melancholy than they ought to be. People die, good and evil, wise and foolish alike, and no choice that we can make will change even a second of our misfortune.

Each of us is a speck of sand thrown about in a storm, and it doesn’t matter at all- not to the storm, not to our chances of survival- how we feel about the ride or how fervently we pray and wave our arms in religious fervor so that God will save us.

But this truth is antithetical to the form of the human mind, and so every time an illness strikes and doctors don’t know why the cause is psychological, and every time a flood sweeps away whole towns of people the wicked are being punished for their sins. This mindset blames the victims of misfortune for not ordering their minds or souls so as to avoid disaster; it's not fair to the victims to add blame on top of misfortune, but we do it. It comforts the safe to think that lives that are happy and easy and free will remain so because they are better than the ill and the ruined, so I don't suppose this mindset will go away any time soon.

Mukasey

There are a lot of things going on in the political scene in the United States that I find pretty abhorent and disgusting; I've written about some of them here but some of them have just passed by, because my energy for outrage is no higher than my energy for anything else. I suffer from outrage fatigue as well as every other kind of fatigue I can think of (emotional, physical, mental... is there any other kind? I'm sure there is. Anyway.) It's gotten to the point where I seriously look at all the political maneuvering and campaigning and the money and the flashy ads and think to myself, I could be happy with this if only I thought that we, as a country, were trying, even a little bit, to do the right thing.

This is more or less how I've become a single issue voter. Don't get me wrong- there are a lot of things I care about. I care about the economy, about the war in Iraq, about the Gag Rule for international reproductive health aid, about habeus corpus, ENDA, and the things I hear about how the very richest Americans are paying a lower percentage of taxes than the middle class (18% v. 30%, according to... the comments sections on blogs that I've read on the past couple days but can no longer remember. Balloon Juice, possibly.). But, to get my vote, all you have to do is proclaim loudly and believably that you strongly oppose the United States torturing confessions out of captives who have been convicted of no crime.

I really wish that I was joking, but I'm not.

You would think the country masquerading as the Good Guys in a Cosmic Battle Against Evil could be persuaded that torture was, you know, wrong. Particularly since it doesn't even work. (see A Question of Torture by Alfred McCoy for a good review of the evidence, or this article for a brief overview.) This whole absurd drama drives me beyond words; I can't even describe how frustrating I find it.

Which is why today, for the very first time since we moved to Missouri, I wrote my Senators to tell them my opinion. Michael Mukasey has passed the Judiciary Committee and his appointment as Attorney General will soon be voted on and, according to the New York Times, he will probably be confirmed. Even though everyone who cares, including most of the Senate I have to assume, has read his written testimony weaseling out of defining waterboarding as torture, weaseling out of condemning the practice, weaseling out of being a decent human being, still he is seen as fit to command the highest law enforcement post in the nation.

It makes me sick, all the more so because I know that writing my Senators will change absolutely nothing.