Chapter 30
A Handful of Dust
On September 11, 9/11 in the first year of this millennium, suicidal murderous desperados toppled towers of trade and plowed into a pentagon of power. Others died in an empty field, foiled by some brave souls who refused to go darkly. Calling 911 could bring no one to help much any of that. No one, from Earth, could answer well.
Yet great things happen on and above Earth every moment, from heroic heart anywhere, ordinarily inexplicably, in many ways. Earth’s books are full of fiction and fact and of myth and history, and we enjoy fiction and myth while telling ourselves that fact and history are more important. And hardly any Earthlings recognize that paradox, because they let their heads hide their hearts.
How, for example, can history tell us what a rich preppy was thinking, floating alone in an ocean a half-century ago? How can history tell us what happened to a persecutor of Christians riding on a rural road for that purpose two millennia ago? How can history tell us whether the God of Moses wrote the Bible, or the scribes of Joshua? How can history tell? And how not?
More, however, I want to know what we’re doing today, we humans of the United States of America, the most powerful nation on Earth. If it’s all about war, why do more sports heroes commit violent crimes than do soldiers? If it’s all about peace, why do so many of us watch football Monday nights?
If it’s all about family, why do we call those sports-heroes role-models, and why don’t we say that Achilles was hectoring? If it’s all about love, how do questions like these arise, like a Phoenix hiding from the sun? But, who gives a crap, as we deny federal funding to a day-care center?
Why do we deny federal funding to a day-care center that’s proven its social acceptance since the beginning of the second war to end all wars? Could it be because it’s in an African Methodist Episcopal church, the church of Rosa Parks? Could it be because this book is wholly fiction?
Nothing in this book before this chapter has happened, but everything in this book has happened. God’s name is not Bob, but in New Orleans I knew a man named Bob who thought he was a brother to Jesus and, dressed in a sheet and carrying a mop-handle for a staff, went on a pilgrimage to Biloxi.
That A.M.E. child-care center is in New Orleans, fictional or not.
“Holy Walker to Biloxi” was the headline in the Times-Picayune.
“I told them exactly who I was,” said Bob, when I showed him the article in the newspaper, which said he had refused to identify himself when the police arrested him for walking in the middle of interstate highway 10. The parables of Christ did not happen, but they all happened. But what does it matter?
Some may say this book distorts history, and others may say it corrects history. More are likely to say nothing, because they don’t know history, or don’t care, or both. I will answer them all by saying that this book is fiction, but I will also tell them all that the spirit of this book is fact and that this book accurately represents the spirit of humanity over the two millennia before and after Christ, and I will tell them that myth is truer than fact. And I will show them that our myths are more about war than about peace, and so are the books we call scripture, and so is our history.
Historically knowledgeable people know that the Bible was not compiled into what is now called the Bible until long after anyone who had walked with Jesus was dead, and so they might say that the Bible isn’t the word of God more than is any other word anyone might write. So, some historians become atheists.
But historical authenticity doesn’t have to matter to anyone who has the truth in his or her heart. From the heart, the mind falls easily in line, and the soul then rises in easy grace. Jesus said that, except loving God, nothing is more necessary than loving one’s neighbor. Yet neighbors calling themselves Christians readily kill neighbors who don’t. Oh what a parabolic paradox!
The Bible is most famous for two qualities: its goodness and its contradiction of itself. Of the contradictions, the one most horrible is the one between Moses and Joshua. That is, between the Ten Commandments and the Israelite invasion of Canaan, between saying God ordered us not to kill or steal and saying God ordered us to slaughter all the Canaanites to occupy their land, between commending neighborliness and commending genocide. How does a paradox become so parabolic?
A historical contradiction these millennia later is the one between something that happened near the end of the last past millennium in communist China and something that happened near the beginning of this millennium in Palestinian Canaan. In China, a young man stood in front of a communist tank and is remembered now as a symbol of humanity’s fight for civil rights. In Canaan, a young woman stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer and barely made the next week’s issue of Time.
When the young man stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese driver stopped. When the young woman stood in front of the bulldozer in Gaza, the Israeli driver crushed her. Here’s some more fact, myth, etc.
Kenneth Clark, a prominent American psychobabbler of the time of the culmination of the United States civil rights movement of the twentieth century, said that loving one’s neighbor is psychologically burdensome. Was he right?
Senator Joseph Moakley said: “Everyone I knew growing up in South Boston was baptized, issued a union card, and enrolled in the Democrat Party.” That grotesque testament to bigotry and corruption is engraved in stone, marking the change of the name of a park on Boston’s Old Harbor, from Columbus Park to Joe Moakley Park.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
The so-called Republican Party responded to the sixties shift in the so-called Democratic Party’s vote-solicitation strategy by changing the party of Lincoln to the party of the politicians deserting Governor Wallace’s sinking ship. That is, the party of Abraham Lincoln changed to the politics of Strom Thurmond.
So, Senator Moakley dies of cancer on his side of America, and President Reagan dies of Alzheimer’s disease on his side of America. I don’t know how two Irishmen can be so divided from one another, party-to-party and coast-to-coast. But I know it isn’t all about the French. It’s all about bigotry!
“So,” you might ask: “Why all that harping about soap-opera women? Isn’t that bigotry, that stressing and straining to see women in a negative light?”
“I don’t think so,” I’d say to you. “And the reason is in the Old Testament, in the book of Proverbs. It’s in Proverbs 18:1: ‘Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom.’”
The way I see it is that I expect that from a man, but I would rather not expect it from a woman. I see that as an observation that mankind is generally bigoted against himself, and I would rather hold women to a higher standard. I try to hold leaders of nations to a higher standard because of the responsibility of their positions. I wish to hold women to a higher standard also for that reason. But more because they’ve shown that they have it in them. They’ve shown that truth through all of storied time. And so I hope they won’t be cheap as men. I mean as hypocritical as they.
But why listen to me? As far as I can tell, I acquired my information from forty years of watching television in a nuthouse, after defending myself against a rape charge in a court of law. Remembering breaking a football-helmet someone loaned me to ride a motorcycle in Afghanistan, by falling off the bike and onto a rock, I think I might be in a coma. Remembering hitting a car head-on as I drove home drunk from a court-appearance, and driving on with no further notice of the incident, I think I may be dead. Or maybe I am from outer space. Anyway, obviously, I’m alien.
But, if I’m alien, how did the twenties roar so much? Wasn’t the movie Born Free about lions, and weren’t Marilyn Monroe and Malcolm X and the junior Martin Luther King and George Herbert Walker Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev and Yasser Arafat born in the 1920’s, and don’t lions roar? And didn’t Leo Tolstoy die in the previous decade, the one in which Rosa Parks was born to us? Oh, what a web anyone can weave from the details life presents! Oh, what a web of mail.
Oh, what a web of mail Richard the Lionhearted, the Plantagenet king called Richard Coeur de Leon, must have worn crusading while Robin Hood and his merry men with Little John and Friar Tuck stood on the Island of the Mighty defending his return, against the John they forced into the Magna Charta. The end of futile feudalism, for the sake of maid Marion, at least in mythic hope?
But underline the maid Marion, and think of the children raped, boys and girls, yours. Think of another movie, Bastard Out of Carolina, about that sort of thing. Out of Carolina, as though such depravity is particular to Appalachian geeks and not pertinent to moneyed geeks from the cradle of liberty to the city of angels, from Rome to Sri Lanka.
Anyway, now a more trivial question. The CNN reporter who anchors his network most of our afternoons raised to his audience the question of how to pronounce Porsche. The answer he offered was that a family was named Porsche, but that it doesn’t matter. Do you think that families’ names don’t matter, that families don’t matter?
A minute on the World Wide Web might have told him the Auto Union engineer Ferdinand Porsche fostered that brand and the Audi trademark through his engineering, and a moment of inquiry on the anchor’s production set surely might have raised someone who knew enough German to tell him how Dr. Porsche pronounced his name.
Is this trivial? Or is it fundamental? Is it trivial whether Ferdinand is a Spanish name, or whether Dr. Porsche was Jewish? Well, maybe it seems trivial to you, but is the doctor’s life or yours trivial enough for you to let news announcers blow it off for nothing except their separate selves, sucking your integrity out of yours and into theirs.
Is it trivial that the same CNN anchor in the soap-opera time-slot tried to make vengeance the main issue between a mother whose son, emulating commercial television-wrestling, killed a daughter? When the daughter’s mother forgave the son but questioned the motherliness of his mother, the anchor said: “So she gets nothing.”
I don’t know. I don’t understand. I don’t understand what’s wrong with NAFTA, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. I hear politicians of the United States of North America saying that what’s wrong is that trade should be fair and not free. I don’t understand a difference between fair and free, while I do understand poor people saying that it isn’t fair that freedom doesn’t feed their families, while I don’t understand politicians twisting their own words to delay the sharing fairness freedom cannot but ultimately bring. I don’t understand what politicians do.
I don’t understand our greed for private wealth or power. Instead I see on Earth much wealth for all, to share by any words that we may call. What’s fair is fair to all of us on Earth, and politicians must of course see that. So I do understand fairness, and by that freedom, justice. Freedom, justice, for all. That’s what we say. But what are we?
Who are we, this self of you and me, with my unwillingness to get up mornings? Who am I, to be angry at my neighbors for their anger at me, while we all awaken in the middle of the night or when the clock-radio comes on, remembering to do all that stuff again, in face of death? Who are you and I in all the wealth of Earth, the glory of life?
I know a woman whose family name is Linda, Spanish for beautiful. She’s Jewish, and her family was ostracized from Spain from the inquisitions. Her given name means Rose of Sharon, and she is well-fed but ill-tempered, these centuries later. How do such transitions happen, in Spain or Germany? Anywhere you know on Earth or off?
What are you going to do with our self, with his or hers, with yourself? Are you going to use the short time you think you have on Earth to stack up some Cadillacs, cars named for a French imperialist against native Americans, autos admired by African Americans calling them hogs? Or are you going to be worth more than dingy opinions.
The same CNN anchor, on a still later broadcast, expressed agreement with an e-mail from his audience, complaining that television reporters use the word “basically” to refer to rhetoric that is by no means basic. Basic, fundamental, is beauty, truth.
And truth does not come from someone who’s too lazy to take a minute for conversation, or for button-pushing to be sure he’s telling the truth. Yet CNN anchors such laziness with the slogan “the most trusted name in news”.
The only people who trust CNN are people as ignorant as that anchor, and people who hope that watching CNN will educate them to the point that they can buy a Porsche while remaining as ignorant as that advertising anchor.
And here’s another fact, from the Boston Sunday Globe: “Wayne J. Oliver of Fall River was ticketed in Freetown on Feb. 25, 2002, for driving 40 miles an hour in a 35 m.p.h. zone.” Mr. Oliver is, of course, black.
And the Globe didn’t report that until 2003, as part of an editorial. I wonder how Mr. Oliver’s doing now in this millennium, and whom he trusts.
How trivial are you?
Some may call this book judgmental. But neither facts nor fiction are judgmental in themselves. I have simply said how I see things, hardly having once said how I feel. So any finding judgment from this book must find it in and of themselves. They must find it in their hearts, not in mine. But they must look.
And rarely do we look. English-speaking Earthlings who use the word “really” are people who are used to referring to things that are not real. Those who use the phrase “true fact” are people who are used to presenting as facts things that are not true. That is, those people are liars, and they are nearly every English-speaking person.
The bishop who replaced Cardinal Law as Archbishop of Boston because Law disregarded law was respected for conciliation and reconciliation, and that’s the general approach of humanity in the face of caught corruption. Rather than change the situation, humans load up a few scapegoats, and profess the lies again. People say that priest pedophilia is a crisis in the church, but the crisis is in the children. If anything is Satanic on Earth, it’s priests molesting children! What would Jesus do?
Jesus said that Heaven is made of such as children, and neither Law nor any of the convicted pedophile priests has apologized to the children. They have apologized to other parishioners and to the church in general, but not particularly to any children. In their fear of mundane law, they still deny the crime itself.
And Massachusetts law, the law of the pilgrim-founded commonwealth that founded Thanksgiving as a holy day, protects the church and its leadership from prosecution for responsibility. That is, law made on Beacon Hill in the cradle of liberty protects Law from the law. That is, that state protects the church. Whom may we thank for that, God? The church, the state, you, us? Whom?
Oh, and on and on, clingons being role models for sleaze, setting the example for sleaze in ancient Rome and in modern America. Setting the example is the most important method of leadership, in the military and in commerce and in families. Yet, United States Air Force officers fly like birds and raped women on their primary training-ground, following and setting the example of their clingon commander in chief.
And on and on! How does Barbra Streisand, singing more like a bird than those Air Force officers fly, reconcile her having said in Madison Square Garden that she desires that all people should get along together despite their differences? How does she reconcile saying that on Manhattan with Joshua’s effort to kill all the Canaanites, and how does she reconcile her decrying victimizing women with what Clinton did to that female intern? More basically, how do any of us reconcile hypocrisy? Most basically, how do we reconcile ourselves to it? And how do we justify our reconciliation?
Of course clingons are many on Earth. Roman Polanski, wanted in the United States for molesting an adolescent girl and hiding from the charges in France, directed Tess. He based the film on the English novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, about a rich man molesting an adolescent girl. So Polanski got richer and thereby gained in acclaim, as no one complained. The United States has laws against profiting from crime. But Roman’s on the lam, not where he needs to pay. But who cares?
Count Leo Tolstoy didn’t care to be a count, although the culture of his country called it his birthright. He preferred accountability to being a count, and so he wrote one of the longest books ever written, in an effort to show his love. And he showed it partly by saying that people don’t know what they’re talking about, not even the count. Thank God he didn’t live long enough to see what Stalin made of communism. Or to see what mental-health professionals are doing in their pretensions.
Another example of what mental-health professionals are doing in their pretension is a study to discover whether promiscuity is biological or psychological. One doesn’t need a doctorate degree in a mental-health profession to know that promiscuity comes from the same psychological disorder that caused Napoleon to wish to rule more than one country. It’s about pride of conquest as a measure of personal superiority.
That kid named Billy, in the twentieth century after Christ’s crucifixion, spent 5 ½ years in the world’s largest walled prison, and the first thing he learned there was that prisons are not correctional institutions. Even in the United States of America, prisons are not the correctional institutions the various governments of the united states and their federal government call them. They are institutions of vengeance, wherein the staff is corrupt and hateful like the inmates, even the mental-health professionals there preaching first that the inmates have no right to their service, to any hope of a better life than being a brunt of vindication. So those who don’t die there return to society worse for the wear, most of them similarly seeking vengeance, if they didn’t before.
That kid Billy, whether or not he was incarnated new or anew, spent those 5 ½ years fighting to correct himself by the professed standards of mankind, while officials demanded that he waste that time, taking jobs other inmates needed and desired, stamping license-plates, printing flyers, etc. And, after the retribution of homelessness society in general required regardless of lessons, he spent 6 ½ years working for a homeless-shelter. There he discovered that the executive staff was more interested in its fame and fortune than in the fortune of its guests. He discovered that the Lincoln County wars are nothing near to ended, however over.
But he did his work there well for l’amore de Santa Clara and didn’t complain, until he discovered that the bigotry of those executioners went beyond raising themselves. It went to denigrating anyone not like them, different from them in any of the ways the law of the United States of America proclaims should not be cause for discrimination: creed, race, sex, etc. Finally, finalizing his employment there, he complained about the racial discrimination, first to the executive management, then to the board of directors. It went way past the exigencies of money, or greed for private wealth.
So, the executive management and the board of directors agreed to fire him, to turn him loose to be homeless again, and more angry. So, having been an honored soldier in the United States Army before he committed his crime in that life, he sought reemployment assistance from government and civilian nonprofit agencies responsible for such help. But they returned to the retribution, and so the kid turned to the court of public opinion. He wrote a book you won’t accept, because it is too true.
But, before being fired, before being blown out of the box as he may have blown others out of it as Billy the Kid against the corrupt ranchers of Lincoln County, he spent many Friday evenings in Coyne’s Bar in South Boston trying to figure out why homeless people and public-housing-project-dwellers spend much of their tiny bit of money there, and he didn’t find a reasonable answer until after L’Amore de Santa Clara fired him. The old man named Jim, who every open afternoon sits on the same stool to watch television there, told him he should have kept his mouth shut.
“I guess you’ve learned your lesson now,” said Jim.
“A coward dies a thousand deaths,” Billy did not answer.
Nor have I told you that Lev asked Billy how he managed to suffer the corruption at L’Amore de Santa Clara so long. He answered that he believed in the ostensible purpose and somewhat actuality of the shelter, but that he had another reason, too. He said he had the hots for a hypoglycemic Roman Catholic theologian who worked there doing whatever she wished, mostly helping huddled masses immigrate to the United States of America, while executive management paid her to council substance-abusers. She did what she fell into doing well, and that seems to me as well a Taoist thing.
Jim of the bar did not ask Billy how he’d done so many things, so many little things. So Billy didn’t tell old Jim he hadn’t watched many soap-operas or attended many sporting-events in that life of his on Earth, as he didn’t tell him that Earthlings invented sports to train citizens for war, or that tragedy preceded comedy in classical Earth drama. So, of course, he didn’t even think of telling him he was Billy the Kid, and he didn’t tell him he’d mostly only watched as I have, or that all of us should first do that, before we preach. And he didn’t tell him he was we, as we didn’t tell him he and we are leaves of grass. We don’t sing loudly of our self. We sing light like rain.
And neither did we call Jim a French corporal. These days, I’m reserving that term for such as the human-resources specialist with the Jack Kerouac poster on her wall, and for others who try to excuse voting for corrupt politicians, or to excuse any other part of their own corruption, by saying that all politicians are corrupt. The corrupt politicians themselves, like the executive management of L’Amore de Santa Clara, I prefer to call American corruptorals. That is as Hitler was a German corruptoral.
But who cares about Billy the Kid? As I said, we can’t keep track of every little brat in the universe. We can’t keep track of every meager member of a homeless shelter, homeless or employed. The Kid is one of those microcosms for our minds, if one considers the Lincoln County wars as much like any wars, if one considers courage of conviction, dedication’s part in that. That is, if we consider judgment, arrogance, killing, lying. That is, if we consider how all fits together. And its price.
And, if we do, degree is no excuse, and the argument that one’s subterfuge is in the interest of a greater good either now or sometime down the road is exactly the same as Hitler’s and Napoleon’s. I don’t know which part of me to present first, or which part of you you find most important at each of your moments. That must be clear to any honest sense, how far our little deeds can carry out, to grander self.
But, again, of course, this is all fiction? Who killed Norma Jean and Joan of Arc? Why pick on the French for using the word “on” as though it means “we” or “everyone”? Is the actuality that other peoples feel so but don’t say such so plainly an excuse for blame? Perhaps the French are not such hypocrites?
We wrote this chapter only because the ghost of Leo Tolstoy happened to run across the ghost of Billy the Kid, and me. That is, we fell together in neighborly attention to much else. So you may wish to skip the rest that’s here. But we’ll move on.
The executive management of L’Amore de Santa Clara must have known that they were not in the business of helping the homeless, that they were in the business of begging and stealing for their own aggrandizement, and the board vetted their placement there. Clingons apparently pervade the universe. Was Billy the Kid a child?
Of course not. He was a murderer in one century, and in his next chance in the next century, the last of that millennium, he was worse. And his method for seeking retribution was to seek the wisdom of the millennia of humanity before his life on Earth, and he responded to what he learned from that by trying commercial hospitality, and quitting it for alienation. Then, silly as he was in sophistication, he went to work for a homeless-shelter, for more money than he’d ever earned, and hardly wondered.
His salary increased notably while he implemented the principles he’d learned in prison and college and the Army and in ten years as a respected hospitality professional in his effort at retribution, although he expressed the principles loudly at every opportunity while the people increasing his salary violated every principle themselves. He thought maybe they knew he was a convicted felon and so thought his industry to be out of desperation and his morality to be in accord with theirs. He thought they thought he might be one of them, not meaning what he preached. Can you guess another answer?
Maybe it’s all just beyond me. As I insinuated, we don’t pay all attention to every little brat in the universe. Maybe the CIA operates homeless-shelters as breeding-grounds or recruiting-agencies for jobs like Lee Harvey Oswald’s. I know the United States Government paid Billy the Kid and other drunks well in Afghanistan to be incompetent while its overt mission was to collect intelligence. Perhaps it’s a vast conspiracy on all wings. Maybe no one flies on wind. Or maybe nothing’s matter?
Death to Smoochy? When I feel as though I’m part of everyone, of all life and all races and species on Earth as I hope goodness is in Heaven, I wonder about O. J. Simpson and Michael Jackson and Woody Allen and how people support them, without looking to see how they grew, from their parents to be money-mongers. I wonder how we support them wrongly but not rightly. And, of course, I wonder at their influence on children, theirs or ours. How do the sins pass on?
Death to Smoochy was a movie that hardly moved anyone, a film at the beginning of this millennium about corruption called nonprofit. I can give reasons for its hardly moving anyone, reasons like greed displacing self-interest, general clingonism. But I won’t understand how my species has no faith or knowledge in or of its self. And I won’t understand our lack of care for our children.
Ed Norton starred in that film, presumably acquiring his name from the sewer-worker whom bus-driver Ralph Cramdon browbeat when he wasn’t too busy browbeating his wife, shaking his fist in her face and threatening to knock her to the moon, in the fifties TV sitcom weirdly called The Honeymooners. Maybe it was called The Honeymooners because there were no children in the show, just ours watching.
Who kills Smoochy? Who kills any neighbor? Who is killing you, making you divorce your childhood sweetheart for someone who can help you buy a larger or smaller or faster or slower automobile? Who is having you take headache-medicine or heroin so you’ll feel better than you would were you not trying so hard at such, while you have your happiness at hand, while you ignore your heart? Aliens? Who?
How can anyone kill Smoochy, if Rush Limbaugh remains in our air? At some point, we have to realize in ourselves that drug-addicts and wife-beaters and child-molesters and murderers need treatment, and that we need honesty to treat them. We need to recognize that our weaknesses are not our strengths, not rush to admire others’ weakness, to excuse ours. We need to humbly work at what we feel.
So what and how was Billy the Kid’s income, hanging out in that boomtown? The Bob who tried to walk to Biloxi down the middle of an interstate highway was a bouncer for a gay-bar on Bourbon Street, and his family was wealthy by common Earth-standards. He told me he found five-dollar-bills beneath his bed after men he took home left his one-bedroom apartment on Dauphine Street, and he worked part-time restoring paintings for the New Orleans Museum of art, once a Michelangelo. Over the hearth of the apartment, which had become a hearth for a gas heater, hung an El Greco portrait. Life on Earth is complicated. Bob called me a mud-pie.
Meanwhile, I love the maples of Michigan and Massachusetts, and the white sand of the keys off Belize, and the black rock of the Kabul Gorge. I love Cajuns and Chinese, red-beans and rice. I love Mondays and Sundays.
According to Tolstoy, Commander-in-Chief Kutuzov, the prince and general who preferred to let Russian weather defeat Napoleon and his imperial army, rather than sacrificing more of his tired depleted troops to do that job to no positive end beyond praise for himself, said to his troops in the presence of thousands of French prisoners of that war: “While they were strong, we did not spare ourselves, but now we can even spare them. They too are men. Eh, lads? . . . . But after all is said and done, who asked them to come here? It serves them right, the bloody bastards!”
I can hardly think of a clearer expression of the spirit of bigotry and vengeance that would not be necessary were all of us always to carry the spirit of fairness and sympathy that that quotation expresses as clearly. And the answer to the question of who asked them to come here is the emperor Napoleon, as it might have been the president Johnson or any other leader putting his or her pride in front of his or her people’s welfare, and rationalizing such egocentrism as for the greater good, and calling on people to pray for that nonsense, as though good God would take such a side. It’s taking advantage of God’s letting people live by their hearts. Yes? No?
The Ten Commandments. The Sermon on the Mount. October 1066; May 30, 1430. May of 1876, west of Fort Abraham Lincoln. November of 1965, two Sundays before Thanksgiving. The Boston massacre, the storming of the Bastille, Gettysburg. The church at Shiloh, Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki, the mists of Avalon. The World Trade Center and the Church of the Nativity. Mother Teresa and Father Geoghan. Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson. Beginnings, endings. What?
Whom or what do you believe: Teresa or Diana? William Bonney or Ned Kelly? Jesus Christ or Pat Robertson, Carter or Kennedy? East or west or north or south, left or right? Whom do you trust? Your heart?
“Hurrah!” shouted the Russian corporals, to all of Kutuzov’s little speech.
I don’t understand partisanship, as I don’t understand how black is more or less beautiful than white, and I don’t understand how homosexuals are called gay. One’s hope of being gay must diminish when the leader of one’s nation says that one’s love is not as sacred as William Clinton’s for Hillary Rodham. A dear friend of Lev’s in New Orleans was homosexual and killed himself, blew a bloody hole in his head as he sat beside his partner on their sofa in their home they’d shared for years.
It was a shotgun house, but the suicide was by pistol, if it was a suicide. Homosexuals’ commandeering the word “gay” is like Jews’ commandeering the word “Semitic”, though not as extreme or as tragic. The Episcopal Church, in considering whether to appoint a bishop, worried about his homosexually but not about his being a divorced father of two. What is anyone trying to gain?
The biblical proscription against homosexuality is in the Old Testament and vague and not as directly attributed to God as are the Ten Commandments. It’s in the book following them in time if not in commonness of sense or sensibility, while the biblical proscription against adultery is specific and plain in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Where is anyone looking to find?
In the Old Testament, the proscription against adultery is in the Ten Commandments, which the Bible says God directly delivered to Moses. In the New Testament, it’s in the Sermon on the Mount, in the same chapter as the Beatitudes, directly attributed to Christ. The Bible says that Jesus told his disciples in that sermon that divorce causes adultery on the part of divorcees.
What kind of pastor would commit himself to that, and why does the Episcopal Church consider homosexuality a concern but not divorce or adultery or deserting one’s children in the interest of either?
You might ask how homosexuality is important anyway, and the answer is in the paradox of the word. “Homo” means same, while “sex” means different. But I know you don’t get it.
We must exact with Barbra Streisand’s words: “My idea of a perfect world is . . . a world in which all of us are equal, but definitely not the same.”
For us, but more for the children, the lambs.
But lo so many words! Francois Marie Arouet, in his little book Candide, ou l’Optimisme, which he wrote more than a century before Tolstoy wrote his huge book War and Peace, said all Tolstoy said and more, and more plainly. And he was French and wrote in French for France, and yet Napoleon arose as Hitler arose in the face of Faust. Yet, in the end, I believe optimism shall prevail, and that’s why some kid wrote this one more book. In the face of the failure of Lev and Voltaire.
From France to Russia and from England to India, fiction has been foisted on us. From England, consider Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. From an Englishman with a childhood in India and a wife from the New England state named for green mountains, and years of life in all three places, consider The Jungle Books. This book and those are in between War and Peace and Candide, in length. But a diamond sparkles more than coal, however mining feels.
Anyway, forget this book. Here’s your reading assignment for the term. Read Candide, War and Peace, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and The Jungle Books. Read them in that order, and read them once again in that order, the order of their modernity. Then, having done that, read the Bible and preach what then makes sense to you in it, as do all Christians and Jews, anyway. If you do that, you’ll lose any need you might now have for the Koran, or for Joshua or Saul of Tarsus.
But you won’t do that, and Patrick Henry McCarty will be run out of South Boston on a rail. Readers of this little book will ostracize him from membership in his condominium association, to exorcise his trusteeship.
Massachusetts, the home of Harvard University and the biggest-writ signature on the Declaration of Independence, is now spending tax money to threaten prosecution of people for not wearing seatbelts, to deprive them of their freedom to walk through the valley of death without fearing evil. And Massachusetts, the home of the Puritans, has with its seatbelt statutes statutes against prosecuting church officials for condoning anything: crimes against children, crimes against freedom, anything.
Ethics and philosophy are weird subjects, especially when called theology. That Episcopalian was appointed bishop not despite being homosexual but because he was homosexual in a church founded for the purpose of adultery, for divorce for Henry VIII. And the most trusted name in news reported not one word about the effect of the divorce on the priest’s children, among all its words around the subject.
In human life, a question far more important than all of Tolstoy’s explicit philosophy is why Sonia and Denisov didn’t marry. Or maybe they did, and that is a question gone with the wind, like the question of whether Rhett gave a damn about Scarlett, in the end. My faith says endings are but new beginnings.
Time is abstract, or at least expressing it in numbers is. But, nevertheless, we look upon the end of one millennium as a beginning of a new millennium, and we can well ask what lessons we’ve learned from the old one and are showing in the new one. So, lets look at the first three years of this third millennium, A.D.
Despite the wonders of modern electronic technology, the world’s main money city and its main motor city lost electrical power simultaneously. In response, the most trusted name in news advised people to stock up on bottled water and to visit redcross.org and not to be too extravagant with their air-conditioning. How about the people who can’t afford bottled water or computers or air-conditioning and don’t have enough income to stock up on anything? That is, what about the people most hurt by that situation the air-conditioning caused? Let them eat cake?
Most of the humans to whom I’ve raised the question of why Rachel Corrie has received so little honor say she had no business being there. I wonder what business a movie actor, whose main claim to fame is being outrageous in his profession and his life, had in Iraq defending a regime that quelled disagreement with it by burying people in mass graves without bothering to loose the ropes that tied the people’s hands while the soldiers’ bullets entered their brains. More curious is that the same actor played in a film saying that love makes subterfuge and smart unnecessary.
The problem is sense and sensibility. The problem is that humans, for all their claim to being superior to the beasts they eat in their ability to reason, are generally too insensible, too senseless to reason, or too lazy. Instead they fulfill their need to think themselves good by picking a side someone told them was good, and then desperately rationalizing any excuse to stay on that side. The problem is that most people are more like Hitler than like Moses, by being like Kate Plate.
Humans talk about voting on the issues, but few of them care enough about politics to know the difference between Honey Fitz and Sugar Fits, the difference between John Francis Fitzgerald and Joseph Patrick Kennedy. Few know the difference between George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush, and fewer the difference between John Quincy Adams and John Adams. Is ignorance the ideal of human society, after all these millennia? Is ignorance the present epitome of its reason?
How many Kennedy fans or African Americans know whether either Kennedy assassination occurred before or after the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act, or before or after Dr. King delivered his dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? Yet those events are benchmarks for both of those sets of United States citizens.
How many humans have read Le Mort d’Arthur or Das Kapital?
How many have read the Koran or the Bible or Wealth of Nations?
How many citizens have read the Declaration of Independence?
A main benchmark of humanity is in Canaan, the bigotry there in the Holy Land. More than three millennia ago, Israelites and Philistines invaded that land simultaneously. Now, the Philistines are largely forgotten, because their name has evolved into the word Palestine, and because their race absorbed into the general population of the land, as most history and culture is largely forgotten.
The Israelites are not forgotten, because their religious beliefs have both supported their claim to the land and kept them separate from the general population, and because their religion is also the foundation of more recent religious beliefs called Christianity, and because they wrote for themselves. The next step in this process of bigotry was the founding of Islam, about a half-millennium after the Crucifixion. So then Jihads, and then Crusades, and now Zionist and Islamic terrorism.
Those last two paragraphs tell simply what happened, in names for or against God. And one need not travel so far into the past or away from the United States to find the worst example of bigotry born on hypocrisy. We have hardly mentioned Ireland in this book, but Ireland is that worst example with people killing each other in the streets, not because they’re of a different race or religion but because they give themselves different names for worshiping the same person, that humble forgiving loving savior. Whether Jesus is fiction or myth or God, those people of Ireland are grotesquely perverting his message. They are plainly ignoring his beatitudes.
Worse, his second commandment. However, nothing human is simple. Now, complicating this horror story has been Hitler and still is what calls itself the most trusted name in news. Hitler slaughtered six million Israelites, creating enough sympathy for them to make sympathy for most of the present populace of Canaan insignificant in western-world consideration. While those people, who now call themselves Palestinians, try to defend against their displacement from their homes to create a homeland for the Zionists, the most trusted name in news calls the defenders “radical Islamists”.
Yet, wonderfully basically, the government of the United States does not try to call the most horrendous and so least justifiable act of that effort at defense “terrorism”. The United States government calls its effort to stop the cycle of greed and revenge the war on terror, and the terror is in the cycle of greed and revenge, whatever religion, whatever reason. The terror is in bigotry, in our thinking we’re better than others, and so have more right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness than the next person. And the terror won’t stop until all of us stop the hypocrisy of calling it religion.
But both bigotry and the hypocrisy that feeds it are so endemic to humanity that the last decade of the second millennium after Christ was called the me-generation, and cheating and lying ramped to high regard from California’s Stanford University to the United States Military Academy in New York, coast to coast. Stanford was the site of the best-reputed graduate school of psychology, and West Point was the site of Benedict Arnold’s ill repute. So, a question is: What’s this world coming to?
Of course, in that question, is how the Roman Catholic Church began its third millennium of existence supporting pedophilia. The excuse the church rationalized was that letting the truth be known would do what it did, undercut the reputation of the church as something good. We honor courage of convictions, while the church by which many of us measure our morality crassly claims cowardice of convictions as sensible, as just and good. And we call it all effective business management.
The most trusted name in news betrayed our trust in that as well. After the priest most accused of those grotesquely unfatherly horrors was defrocked and imprisoned and strangled in prison by an inmate who had been molested as a child, CNN continued to call that monster Father, and it professed sympathy for him.
But the craziness of words, particularly the word “religion”, marked the fortieth anniversary of King’s dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A judge, in the city where Rosa Parks gave Dr. King the opening to express his dream, ordered that a monument to the Ten Commandments be removed from the justice building of the capital in which George Wallace drew his line in the dust.
Religious or not, the Ten Commandments speak the decency any honest person finds in his or her heart. And, whether or not God gave them to us engraved in stone, someone wrote them for us in a book to which we all have access. No one sues against tax-paid monuments to Jefferson’s reference to the “Creator” endowing us with unalienable rights, and no one sues against “In God we trust” on our coins, our little federal reserve monuments to mammon. If not clingons, who? You?
Yes, you. It’s your world, life and death, eternity. I have referred much to myth and heart, and now I’ll ask what myth you hold in your heart. Norse myth, the myth of the whitest of all peoples, says that the only way to go to their version of Heaven is to die in battle. Such myth says that, if you happen to die peacefully, perhaps as a fond and caring grandparent, you’ll be thrown to the discretion of a female deity inferior in that mythology. Remember that Joshua died of old age, and then ask yourself how happy you are, with whatever you think you have or feeds your head or heart. Then ask yourself the question clear: Which myth does your heart prefer?
Amid the gay-adultery question, the most trusted name in news presented in its coverage no one not politically or religiously motivated toward the question. CNN, in other words, in its presentation to its trusting audience, totally left compassion out of that question. And it does the same with war and peace, and so does every other frankly grubbing network. Yes, the most trusted names in news are irresponsibly heartless.
Yes, lo so many words, where can it stop and where can I, and where could Homer or Tolstoy have stopped in this mythological world? I’ll stop after reminding you of one more parabolic paradoxical myth, ingrained in myth in this millennium.
Lev pointed out the mythological aspects of a lesbian rocker. Now let you and I compare her to a male rocker of questionable sexual orientation, while asking ourselves why which is more popular. That is, why we throw the myth of money more at one than we do at the other.
The male rocker is as famous for his prancing as he is for his singing, for what he calls his moonwalk while he calls himself the king of pop. And, while he may sing more sweetly sometimes, his lyrics do not have the depth or height or breath or substance of the Lesbian rocker’s. Yet you give him more of your money.
Could that be because he’s more like Achilles, while the lesbian is more like Hector? Now, in the question, is more than prancing on a stage, after the lesbian rocker lost her last close bid for the top of the pop-charts by coming out of her sexual closet, and the male rocker has been charged legally with pedophilia.
But maybe it’s still the prancing. The lesbian sat quietly in upholstered chairs while she discussed her sexual orientation in interviews on television. The male rocker, immediately after his indicting court-appearance, pranced before the crowd outside the courthouse, atop his limousine, to their cheers, his fans'.
Yet homosexuality isn’t a statutory crime while what we weirdly call pedophilia is, and surely most Christians or pagans would call pedophilia more destructive, more contrary to our norms of compassion, more contrary to love. In other words, most humans would call the male rocker’s behavior sicker than the lesbian’s.
Yet more people give him more of their money, and so we have to ask about the sickness, of the rocker and beyond. And the answer to the questions for society in general may be that it’s the same as the answer from the person claiming evangelism whiles saying that being Christian means learning to gloat about not being perfect.
That is, instead of repressing our memories of our deeds for which we might feel shame, we call them good and grand and gloriously audacious. So, if a rocker hangs his own child by a tiny foot from a balcony stories above pavement, the rest of us can say that there but for our shame could go we, or better me.
Another curious thing about the pop-rocker is that the Nation of Islam supports him. Remember that Malcolm X began his activism with the Nation of Islam and that a means he found necessary, for continuing his activism for the short time remaining before someone killed him, was to leave the Nation of Islam.
Remember that his reason was that the nominal leader of the Nation of Islam was accused of harem-building, and note that part of the notable behavior of the black male rocker is that he tries to make himself white. Consider the somewhat Freudian hypothesis that oppressing comes from despair of oneself.
But shouldn’t our compassion be for all? Maybe Wacko Jacko just likes to cuddle, as wife-beating football-players apparently like to huddle. His father admitted publicly to having beaten Jacko when he was a child, and maybe Jacko’s wacko because he feels the way he says he feels about children.
He says he loves children, not sexually but to give them the cuddling he didn’t get when he was a child. But, then, maybe the cuddling went too far, with his need for cuddling motivating him to seek reciprocation from the children, in wrong physical directions. So doesn’t this hypothesizing just suggest he needs treatment.
But how is someone so perverted and monetarily wealthy to get treatment, in a world where the most prominent psychologists and psychiatrists can gain their prominence and price by the same kind of sickness, a drive to be prominent by any means necessary, to assuage their own feelings of worthlessness.
I remember my sister, the one our uncle molested when she was nine, the one who asked me to take her to the bar where I met Mickey Rourke. Mickey Rourke was a tattooed poor-kid before he starred in a movie in which his character sold his soul and forgot about it, in the voodoo of Algiers across the river from New Orleans.
“I know who I am,” he keeps saying through his character in the film, and I hope we all do know who we are, deep in our hearts. But let me tell you a distantly related story that may seem trivial, unless one sees how much like most of us it is.
A news announcer named LaPierre broadcast begging to be given a break from a Boston cold-snap. His broadcast was for a Boston radio station, but he was broadcasting from St. Augustine, Florida. Caught, he said he wasn’t lying, but he was certainly misrepresenting. Mustn’t he have known there is no difference?
Oh what a web life is on this rich earth. LaPierre, Lev’s Pierre, Saint Pierre, so alike. Saint Augustine was from Algeria, whose administrative center is Algiers, not the one in Louisiana, or on a river.
The name of the bar where I met Mickey Rourke was the Déjà Vu. Its owners, Pam and Earl, had patented a drink they called the hand grenade.
They’ve sold that bar but now own one they call the Tropical Isle.
It’s in the hottest part of Bourbon Street.
But why did I bother saying this, in the face of the question of who has done the most killing, in New York or the Holy Land or anywhere else, Israelis or Palestinians? Why is because you bother to support your pipedreams more than you do the huddled masses that are your neighbors. Lo so many words, and mainly yours about you.
What, in hell or anywhere, are we trying to do? What is popular perspective, in this one more new millennium? What are we homo sapiens reasoning, thinking, seeking? What are we fighting against? Why are we fighting? Which way is up?
Betraying trust is the worst betrayal, because trust is the least strait gate to responsibility. And the money-monger news-media don’t even pick a side.
Except the side of mammon, in the name of objectivity.
A teacup in a tempest.