Self destructing phrases

Certain phrases are false if they're true and true if they're false.

We know this from the old liar's paradox. I can give it to you in the Cretin version, but I'd rather give you a cretinous version of it: "Everything I say is a lie." You see, if the statement is true, then it's false, but, if it's false, then it's true. These are not, I would argue, paradox at all, because they do not seem to be true.

"Literal reading of the Bible" is a self destructing phrase. No one, no matter how stupid, and I mean that, reads the Bible literally. Any person who took the Bible literally would have to be Roman Catholic, to start with, due to "Take, eat, this is my body given for you," and then he or she would have to be a Catholic from before the 2nd Vatican Council. Additionally, though, such a person would read the Revelation of St. John and expect exactly what it says, a dragon with ten heads, for example, and would never, ever say that that "represents" something like the E.U. Such a person would also think that the builders of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem were incompetent, as Nehemiah said they "built with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other." That person would also think that David was not a king of Judah and Israel, but, in fact, a sheep, since the Lord was his shepherd.

No one, least of all the people who talk most raucously about how they want a "literal interpretation of the Bible," reads the Bible literally.

"Government spending" is a self-destructing phrase. I was polled recently and asked how much of a voting issue it was for me to "stop government spending."

Government spending? Which government? I presume the U.S. government is intended, but which level of it? Is it important for me that my city stop spending funds? Of course I am supposed to assume that the phrase refers solely and exclusively to the federal government, but if I am "against government spending," I can only make the phrase have meaning by thinking in an analogy to a human being. If I am against my child's spending, it is because I want my child to save for college. Is that what I want, then? I want the U.S. federal government to build up a bank balance?

In reality, I am against spending on the Strategic Defense Initiative. This anti-ballistic missile treaty defying program has sucked out $3,000,000,000,000.00 of our tax money to protect us from the Soviet Union's intercontinental ballistic missiles. It doesn't work. It can't work. It can't work for that, at any rate. No American citizen's health is improved by it, and no American citizen's poverty is relieved, and no American citizen's drug habit is reduced, and no city's infrastructure is bolstered, and no wetlands are protected, and no rail systems are built with it, and no broadband is laid, and no smartgrid is built. It sits there sucking, and no one seems to question it. However, the people "against government spending" will not be up in arms about it. No. They'll be furious about Welfare -- the thing that accounts for less than 0.01 of our domestic spending. They'll be furious about museum funding. The phrase "government spending" is not "government" or "spending," but "domestic spending on the poor and needy and culture and cultural products not your own."

"Taxes" is not self-destructive as much as it is empty political calories. It's a symbolic link, in Internet terminology. When you click on that verbal icon, it redirects you to another concept. Instead of taking you to "taxation," it takes you to "individual income tax." The people out there with signs and turning purple with rage are all about "taxes," but they do not mean taxation: they mean the income tax, and that is the only form of taxation they mean.

"Public health" is a self-destructive phrase. I know that I am more likely to use it than the people I've been railing at, but it's a phrase that takes itself apart. Health is individual, not public, and public is necessarily unhealthy.

Recently, the governor of the state I am in justified continuing banning alcohol sales on Sunday only on the grounds of public health. I watched youngsters try to argue for or against his position. Inevitably, they all argued for his position, but they found themselves, being under twenty-one, arguing his logic rather than his position. They argued that the public is healthier without alcohol than with, and therefore alcohol sales should be prohibited at all times. (In fact, my own view is that the ban on Sunday sales is a bit of left over religious bigotry. I suspect that it was originally aimed at Catholics, not sobriety.) The reason that this governor felt no compunction in making such a weak and stupid argument was because he had "public health" to hide behind. A phrase without meaning, a phrase that disassembles in the mind, is a phrase that can hide an elephant.

In the works, but it's so haaaard

What's up next?

Unlike the serious-minded, personally affecting post below, which took a long time to write, I have one that practically writes itself, except for finding the time. My next topic and theme is
The Laziest Generation
(it's yours).

I've been asked to keep the forgiving, reflective, "we're all sinners" tone out and to go for the throat, and I'll try. I must say, though, that BBC deciding to run "Super Power Season" has certainly been a major help in pulling out the knife and putting away the bandages. Every time some "Internet entrepreneur" comes on to say, "Like, we have to look at things from the perspective that things themselves ask for," I want to grab a garrote.

Back as soon as I can find the time. It shouldn't be long.

Auto de, Auto da, Auto dum (revised)

[Note: I had originally written this in pieces, and the results were uneven. You can read them, below, in "De, Da, Dum."]

I work at a place where there are rumors that a statement of faith is coming. It's not so remarkable. Many, many, many parochial and non-parochial institutions have things like that. Heck, entirely secular places have these statements of belief that employees have to sign, but they're called "statements of principle" or "memos of understanding." It got me thinking, though, about why a group that has given absolutely all credible evidence of belief in behavior needed to be sent through a signed confession.

There's a lot of it about.

Does anyone here remember the hubbub of the flag pin in the presidential elections last year? It was all about wearing a pin showing the U.S. flag. Only patriots wore them, and anyone who didn't wear one was no patriot. Oh, my European readers will not believe anything so trivial really happened, but it was an encouraging improvement. Before that, there was a furore about the "Pledge of Allegiance." Back in the late 80's and early 90's, politicians vied with one another to say it loudest. They also made sure to sing the national anthem, or bits of it. (The fact that this came from Lee Atwater is not surprising, really.) When they were all singing and pledging and swooping their arms over their hearts with greater and greater passion and stage tears at the mention of soldiers, it prompted me to think that the ministers of Lilliput, who had to dance on a high wire to get elected, were chosen on a more rational basis than conservative politicians in the U.S., because the public was more entertained by a high wire walker than these old white men trying to look grave without looking dead. The flag pin, in comparison, didn't bite down.

The idea was that by his pin shall ye know him. By his pledge shall he be known. FoxNews has been convicted of passing along an e-mail slander about candidate Obama in 2007-8 that claimed that he "refused to say the pledge of allegiance." This is part of the portfolio they were building of proof that he was secretly a foreign agent.

Think about that. Do you not wonder now why no one ever made Robert Hanssen say the pledge?

You see, the thing about all such pledges and tokens is that they represent a search for a set of magical words, a set of words that, if spoken by the unbeliever, will cause the cursed tongue to burst into flames. They therefore represent a wish rather than a tool. They testify to the desire of the affected group, not the social coherence of it. A group can be entirely uniform in belief, completely loyal, entirely certain, and yet it can reach for the formula of the loyalty oath, the pledge, the confession of principles that all "real members" must sign or say or sing or dance (really, in some societies it's a dance). Indeed, the groups that employ these devices frequently are quite homogeneous.

In each case, the invocation of the magic is a demonstration that the group feels like it is impure, is fearful that it is infiltrated, is nervous that its ideas or ideology haven't strength enough to survive a test (whether the test is foreign trade, education, free speech, open assembly, or discussion varies group to group and place to place).

When the Republican Party goes after a Purity Pledge, swearing to pure Ronald Reagan, they not only grant Reagan the apotheosis that Christian fundamentalists within the party really ought to object to, but they also seem to say that they are afraid that these principles are not capable of surviving in their party without such oaths. Particularly, the device is aimed at "accountability." A politician who "passes" the purity test (with its connotations of sexual inexperience being simply another troubling aspect, given that this is a party most dogged by closeted politicians and hidden pedophiles currently) can then be "held to account" when he or she casts a vote that presumably violates the pledge or test later. What's implied is that the pure principle cannot survive the jarring of practicality or negotiation. What is actually stated is that the demand is for inflexibility and "pure" or nothing. It is an ideology that exists in and emerges from the framework of war.

If a religious institution makes its priests swear to agree to the dictates of dogma, it is presumably because the institution is in a struggle not among, but against all other religious organizations. If it has them swear to be religious, then it is at war with non-religion or with Satan. If it has them swear to be exactly in the model and mode of a particularized list of things and thoughts, then it is at war with conceptual interchange and fearful of that enemy. Oaths, in other words, create and announce their own enemies. If a political group has its members swear to the founding idea of the party, then it is against the opposing position. If it has its members go to a list of particular points, then it is against discussion and modulation and negotiation (against, in other words, civil exchange). No harm comes to a society if people are at war with evil, or Satan. Considerable harm comes if a society is in civil war. Considerable harm comes to a group if it is in intramural war.

(not my photo)

The purity pledge, the idea of cleanness, ends up slashing the throats of those who devise such tests. The institutions, whether they're church affiliated colleges or businesses or political parties, that institute oaths and pledges for purity are stipulating a "not them" as the definition of "a good one of us." This is, first of all, an identity built on opposition, which is guaranteed to be absurd or tragic. Secondly, though, it means that the person who devises the oath is subject to the same examination by the next test giver. "Are you Baptist enough, friend," the test giver asks the test maker. "I see that you ask them to swear that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, but you do not make everyone swear that it is the inerrant literal Word of God." In turn, that reformer is challenged, later, by another who can say, "I love the oath that you have devised, but you did not have the statement of principle say anything about how we all affirm the sanctity of unborn life, and we certainly don't want any baby killers around!"

Once an instrument of purity, or Puritainism, is in place, "purity" goes on indefinitely. Our friends the Menonites are pure. To them, the most fundamentalist protestant churches are hopelessly corrupted by man. Each element of a defining principle can become exaggerated to become an identity, and then a test question, and all in an effort to sort out the good from the bad on the assumption that the bad cannot speak lies and the good will never hesitate to swear.

"Auto de fe" is the original of what we now know as the "auto da fe." Originally, it was an act of faith. If you were sorry for your sins, you would show it in an act of faith. No one would tell you to, and no one would tell you how. The confessor would simply watch to see if you did something that showed that your faith was back so that he could be sure that you weren't paying lip service to the oaths. You see, the old church folk actually knew that people could be forsworn, that bad people had no problem swearing that they were good, that people without conscience would gladly swear to whatever was convenient. The auto de fe was not a test imposed by anyone, but rather a sign manifested by the will of the person.

Well, we all know what happened. Once the institutionalized fears came in, once the Roman Catholic Church became convinced that its ideas might not stand up in free interchange, they adopted tests of faith. Then came hunts for heretics. Then came increasingly elaborate tests to prove that a person was or was not serving Satan or Martin Luther. Then come the Inquisitors. After a person was tortured, that person would sign or say a grand confession in public, and this was the auto da fe. What had been a sign from the person became a testing outcome for assessment.

It's sad, amazingly sad, to see tests come in like this -- attempted tests of the soul, of the heart, of the mind, as if some combination of syllables could be an ascultation of the inward self. It's sad, deeply sad, to see Christian schools, particularly protestant ones, adopting, increasingly, oaths, as if unbelievers will not sign or that they will somehow demonstrate their non-belief. It tells us that the groups at the helm are afraid that their faith is not strong, that their ideas cannot survive free exchange, that they believe that prosecution of their members is better than construction of their ideology. What's more, it tells us that they are, in their fear, willing to forgo looking at a person's expression of faith in favor of demanding a formulaic satisfaction of a ritual.

If the Republicans want to be a party again, they need to have dissent, debate, and discussion, and not purity. If protestant churches want to triumph, they need to have faith -- faith in the power of Christ, power in the Word that conquered the world -- faith in life's diversity and the glory of God who creates not in one type, one model, or one mold, but in endless variety.

In Re "Pray for Pills"

While we're waiting for the thing on the purity tests, let me meander a moment.

In 2002, just as the Bush administration began to secretly torture people and employ "black sites" for prisons, and as, at the same time, the Pentagon sought permission from the Justice Department to begin to torture at Guantanamo Bay, and as it became very clear that such things were happening and that they were going to try to start an unprovoked war against Iraq, the mood in New York City's hedonistic areas was tense. Down in the Bowery, the stenciled motto I saw spray painted over and over, though, was "Pray for Pills."



Hardy-har-har, most people thought.

"This is no time for juvenile puns," my friend said, more or less. She was right.

I was fascinated by the secondary meaning, though, and the irony. I was interested in how the graffiti painter's attitude was unclear and unstable. The message itself was disposable -- a taunt typical of the punks (this was the Bowery, after all), where one attempts to puncture all sanctimony, including sanctity, and no good reason is necessary. The vehicle of the taunt, though... that was interesting. And then there is the question of exactly how much of a taunt it is, and who is being taunted. Pray for "pills" gives us "peace/pills" in tension and interchange: that is interesting.

The old "generation gap" of the 1960's, which was the most tiresome trope in journalism, theoretically went away when the Baby Boom became the journalist. (The term was nothing more than a way of saying that children occupy different horizons of expectations from the parents, which must inevitably be true, even if the generation is 1310-1330 AD.) It was tiresome for triteness, but it was noisome for taking itself seriously. "Help! I don't understand my teenager" is the subject of a never ending fascination of publishers, but the fools had the gall to present this one as if it were a once in eternity phenomenon.

The fact that the delinquent teens would make babies that would result in a second boom that would have a gap was presumed minor, and when the day came it was greeted as a marketing opportunity. The boomlet was my generation. The echo boom was the punks. (And they got to express their exasperation with "generation gaps" and "togetherness" and the pomposity of changing the world by using their only available tool: withering irony instead of manifestos. A great expression of the rage here.) After America stopped talking about "generation gaps," it adopted Douglas Couplan's foolish "generation integer" stuff, and all of that was marketing. Pepsi and Doritos and Budweiser sought out the characteristics of the generation to sell it product, not to communicate with it or educate it or reconcile it. In fact, the "generation integer" transition to marketing meant that firms wanted to exaggerate differences between parent and child so as to innovate product lines. There was money in making a generation gap, and it was annoying to both the marketing directors and the youngsters when the elders refused to play along and were early adopters.

Imagine, then, my surprise at encountering a silent generation gap when it comes to pills and peace. The graffitist is young, without a doubt, and her or his writing shows it.

"Pray for pills" can put "pill" in a linguistic interchange with "peace" and suggest either that the author wishes nothing, nationally, but only a personal high obtained from dope, or that national peace and medication are related, if not causal, or that pills will be the savior that we pray to and for. In any resolution of this irony, the author betrays the idea that the pill is greater than the individual will. In fact, for the author, it's assumed. If the author is being satirical, instead of merely ironic, the point to the satire is aimed precisely at the substitution of "pill" for "will" or "God" as the agent by which hope may be sought in time of distress.

I had the misery of being a good bit ahead of the nation in questioning what is now an accepted trope ("medicalization of mood"). Back in 1991, before Prozac Nation's self-indulgent and unenlightening novel made investigative and timid pieces possible, and before those lead to more thoroughly investigative and enlightening pieces, I held out the question, and anyone who is honest keeps it as a question, of whether the human brain's manifestations of mood (chemical production) are synonymous with its causes of mood? If not, is preventing the manifestation of mood tantamount to a treatment of the cause?

Suppose that substance Q is in the brain of people at rest. Does it make placid feelings? If a person is too tranquil, and we prevent the production of Q, are we treating the somnolence, or are we preventing the expression of the disease state? Either way, are we not effectively ceasing to ask anymore about the cause and therefore leaving it to heal, worsen, or remain without medical intervention?

In fact, are we not preventing any awareness of it? By effectively disrupting the evidence of cause, by putting a lid on the box, are we not preventing, quite effectively, any access to the box's contents? Obviously, the manic whose mania is suppressed is unlikely to think about the cause of the mania, but, additionally, are we not also making it difficult or impossible to even ask what the reason is, if symptoms are interrupted so fully as to have no access point?

To put it another way, isn't it identical to invading Iraq? It looks like there's a problem, but asking whether the problem is the man or the system or the neighborhood or the objectives of the man is time consuming. If you're a "CEO-president," you're impatient with long explanations. Besides, you decide that your oath of office is not to the Constitution of the United States, as every other president's had been, but "to keep Americans safe," and so you want to fix the problem. Therefore, you decide that, although you don't know the causes, you don't care. You know the symptom, and you have a weapon. Once you invade, you invade, but you are then there, and now you have to figure out the things you considered time consuming before invading, or else you have to just plain stay there, without an exit strategy.

I say that I had the misery of it, because I paid the price in ridicule for questioning the wisdom of doctors without being one. After all, the pharmacology could not be susceptible to logic. Logic must not be applied in these cases, for the market knows best.

Now, though, what I thought is thought by many, but most of the many have gone to conclusions. They are for or against medicating mood. They are certain that it's good or bad. I am still not. For me, it's still a question. I do not know whether medicating psychological, rather than psychiatric, complaints is wise or not. I suspect that it is done too frequently. I am sure that it is done unsafely, but the central question of cause is still open for me. The brain is far too complex for my analysis, and the mind is vaster still.

What is curious, though, is what all the commercials for Zoloft, Alli, and Viagra have done to one generation of Americans and what they haven't done to another. These commercials, and the doctors who are victims of the cutty sarks and firm featured suits the commercials send to their offices, have created a whole generation that has grown up with a complete assumption that pills are more powerful than will. You see, a previous generation believed that "no pill can make me do something" or feared that "any pill that changes my mood has raped my soul." This attitude toward medication that affected the mind was profound. There was a baseline hatred and fear of the concept that any pill could make a person, could force a person, could interfere with the most intimate, inward self. Therefore, the person believed that such medications could always secretly be fought, secret-agent-tied-to-a-chair style (the character of Morpheus in "Matrix"), or that any thing that did this was going to shatter the person and make suicide or mercy killing the only virtuous act.

I grew up sickly. I was in the hospital a good portion of my life before adolescence, and I had been subjected to narcotics before I saw the drug fear films of the 1970's. I was afraid of "smack" and "H" and "horse" and the rest for their ability to instantly transform the polite human into the depraved slave, but I didn't know that I had, in fact, been on those drugs in their polite forms on several occasions. When I realized that what the world was afraid of was the same thing, the idea that a drug could be fought off or that it would break the self was impossible to hold in the mind. I was well aware that they could be "fought off" and that, even when they were not, they never touched the inward self.

Attitudes we see now toward depression, bipolar, erectile dysfunction, mania, PMDD, fibromyalgia, etc. are all reflective of this underlying question. The people who speak aloud of their mood and mood affecting disorders are of the generation or paradigm that accepts the pill as above the individual will. Those of us who are, either by birth or marketing or suffering, also, though, accept that the pill is temporary, that it is not, in fact, a breaking of the self or fixing of the self (the honorable obverse of the pill as psychic pollutant, as psychological rapist). This is why we can come up with taunting, teasing, slogans like "pray for pills." The very same joke is no joke to some large segment of America. Those of the other mental generation hear all of these things with shame and shock. For them, each one is an admission of weakness, of lack of integrity. The need for the pill should be countered with a muscularity, a fight, for any pill is a loss of virginal honor.

It's Coming

You know, I thought the last one was wonderful. I thought it was going to get me an invitation to the editorial board of The Dial. I braced for the impact of dozens... nay, hundreds... of learned letters about the ongoing Romanticism of lyric poetry.

Anyway, them's the breaks of the cookie crumble.

I am working on something much less fun in tone, much less lively in style, but much more socially useful. It's a discussion of why purity pledges continue to be demanded, despite always having been disasters for those proposing them. However, there is writing it, and then there is linking it, and then there is coloring it in.

De, Da, Dum

I have written before about how, once we announce that we are offended and that we must be appeased, we have achieved the ultimate power, because the power to take offense exists independently of anyone giving offense. When our goal is harmony, instead of peace, then the most offended and most displeased person has power over the whole of the group.

Consider the United States Senate today. Its paralysis over the "notification to filibuster" is not only troubling because it says that the least happy have power to stop all things without having any necessary reasons or programs. The Republicans have not actually had any ideas for reforming health care. Their idea has been, pretty much, to stop malpractice law suits. That, needless to say, has nothing to do with health insurance. However, they feel perfectly justified in stopping all efforts at extending insurance, even efforts that they had once sponsored, under threat of filibuster, because they are not in charge.

Harmony and unison are not identical, and peace and harmony are not the same thing. Having all sides agree is not only not necessary, it is not beneficial. Having all sides cooperate is desirable, but they never will until they understand that they must honor an overriding rule that is above their individual good.

It's like pluralism. Pluralism is not relativism. Pluralism and inclusiveness is not the same thing as indiscriminate inclusion. Pluralism is a positive ideology, and it has within itself a principle of exclusion. "We allow in all groups, so long as they accept the idea of including all groups that are themselves open to inclusion" is the philosophy of pluralism. Democracy is not merely "the people vote," but rather "the people always vote to determine their government." Therefore, a democracy cannot vote to get rid of the democracy, and any vote to abolish the democracy is not democratic.

I feel like I have to point these things out, because too few people seem to know them. I feel that I need to state them rather than finesse them out philosophically because they are both axiomatic and elementary. One could take the time to work through examples and reason quietly over days and weeks to make the propositions likely, but these are, in fact, a priori within the concepts themselves. My only stretching is extending to the idea of consensual behavior. It isn't axiomatic or elementary, but I have come to believe that it is likewise inescapable that consensus means agreement when all sides understand that they cannot have their way. I.e. consensual politics, consensual corporations, consensual kindergartens, consensual communes, and consensual online editing communities are all possible only when each person gives up striving for her or his pure vision. "Consensual" is therefore an antonym to "pure" or "revolutionary" or "orthodox." The orthodox, pure, and revolutionary exist only with the application of unequal power.

I needed to do that quickly, and with none of my verbal playground stunts, because I want to talk about the auto de fe, the auto da fe, and how stupid people get when they're stressed out.

A number of conservative organizations are embracing purity tests, oaths, and other declarations these days. It has long been a feature of the conservative impulse, incidentally, as the very idea of 'return to glory days' means that one has the mindset that there is a largely invisible but inherent threat in the present, and 'return America/England/Australia/Canada/Sweden to its glory days' means that one believes that the present citizenry may be contaminated with beliefs that destroy the greater good. When this is combined with religious principles, the desire for a declaration is oddly unchanged. Many organizations associated with the Southern Baptist Church are now moving toward oaths, and this is merely the latest step in a curious evolution for a church that was once known as "the Independents" and criticized for having no unity at all. However, the way the oaths come in and the way they are organized is quite like the conservative "purity test." Instead of "creeping socialism" or division over Ronald Reagan, the presumption is that Satan is working inside those who will not sign or swear, as inward doubt is a mark of an absence of perseverance of the saints and grace (I suppose). Additionally, the institutions in question (mainly colleges) believe that they are "mission" oriented and therefore must convert, and conversions can only be performed by those who are "called" to be missionaries.

We need not dwell very long on the effectiveness of these instruments. It is self-evident that they do not work. They are like a net designed to keep the very large and the very small, while the middle sized get away. They succeed in keeping only the feckless and the fools, while the conscientious and convicted flee, and this is true whether they are applied in religion, in politics, or in culture.

What I think is worth talking about is why they do not work, and yet why people keep reaching for them, year after year, making the same historical mistakes, the same psychological mistakes, and the same cultural disgraces.

Does anyone here remember the hubbub of the flag pin in the presidential elections last year? It was all about wearing a pin showing the U.S. flag. Only patriots wore them, and anyone who didn't wear one was no patriot. Before that, there was a furore about the "Pledge of Allegiance." Back in the late 80's and early 90's, politicians vied with one another to say it loudest. They also made sure to sing the national anthem, or bits of it. It prompted me to think that the ministers of Lilliput, who had to dance on a high wire to get elected, were chosen on a more rational basis than conservative politicians in the U.S., because the public was more entertained by a high wire walker than these old white men trying to sing or look grave without looking dead.

Well, the thing about all such pledges is that they allow the certain to seek out a set of magical words, a set of words that, if spoken by the unbeliever, will cause the cursed tongue to burst into flames. They therefore represent a wish rather than a tool. They testify to the desire of the affected group, not the social coherence of it. A group can be entirely uniform in belief, completely loyal, entirely certain, and yet it can reach for the formula of the loyalty oath, the pledge, the confession of principles that all "real members" must sign or say or sing or dance (really, in some societies it's a dance). In each case, the invocation of the magic is a demonstration that the group feels like it is impure, is fearful that it is infiltrated, is nervous that its ideas or ideology haven't strength enough to survive a test (whether the test is foreign trade, education, free speech, open assembly, or discussion varies group to group and place to place).

When the Republican Party goes after a Purity Pledge, swearing to pure Ronald Reagan, they not only grant Reagan the apotheosis that Christian fundamentalists within the party really ought to object to, but they also seem to say that they are afraid that these principles are not capable of surviving in their party without such oaths. Particularly, the device is aimed at "accountability." A politician who "passes" the purity test (with its connotations of sexual inexperience being simply another troubling aspect, given that this is a party most dogged by closeted politicians and hidden pedophiles currently) can then be "held to account" when he or she casts a vote that presumably violates the pledge or test later. What's implied is that the pure principle cannot survive the jarring of practicality or negotiation. What is actually stated is that the demand is for inflexibility and "pure" or nothing.

It is this latter principle that ends up slashing the throats of those who devise such tests. The institutions, whether they're church affiliated colleges or businesses or political parties, that institute oaths and pledges for purity are stipulating a "not them" as the definition of "a good one of us." This is, first of all, an identity built on opposition, which is guaranteed to be absurd or tragic. Secondly, though, it means that the person who devises the oath is subject to the same examination by the next test giver. "Are you Baptist enough, friend," the test giver asks the test maker. "I see that you ask them to swear that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, but you do not make everyone swear that it is the inerrant literal Word of God." In turn, that reformer is challenged, later, by another who can say, "I love the oath that you have devised, but you did not have the statement of principle say anything about how we all affirm the sanctity of unborn life, and we certainly don't want any baby killers around!"

Once an instrument of purity, or Puritainism, is in place, "purity" goes on indefinitely. Our friends the Menonites are pure. To them, the most fundamentalist protestant churches are hopelessly corrupted by man. Each element of a defining principle can become exaggerated to become an identity, and then a test question, and all in an effort to sort out the good from the bad on the assumption that the bad cannot speak lies and the good will never hesitate to swear.

"Auto de fe" is the original of what we now know as the "auto da fe." Originally, it was an act of faith. If you were sorry for your sins, you would show it in an act of faith. No one would tell you to, and no one would tell you how. The confessor would simply watch to see if you did something that showed that your faith was back so that he could be sure that you weren't paying lip service to the oaths. You see, the old church folk actually knew that people could be forsworn, that bad people had no problem swearing that they were good, that people without conscience would gladly swear to whatever was convenient. The auot de fe was not a test imposed by anyone, but rather a sign manifested by the will of the person.

Well, we all know what happened. Once the institutionalized fears came in, once the Roman Catholic Church became convinced that its ideas might not stand up in free interchange, they adopted tests of faith. Then came hunts for heretics. Then came increasingly elaborate tests to prove that a person was or was not serving Satan or Martin Luther. Then come the Inquisitors. After a person was tortured, that person would sign or say a grand confession in public, and this was the auto da fe. What had been a sign from the person became a testing outcome for assessment.

It's sad, amazingly sad, to see tests come in like this -- tests of the soul, of the heart, of the mind. It's sad, deeply sad, to see Christian schools, particularly protestant ones, adopting, increasingly, oaths, as if unbelievers will not sign or that they will somehow demonstrate their non-belief. It tells us that the groups at the helm are afraid that their faith is not strong, that their ideas cannot survive free exchange, that they believe that prosecution is better than construction. What's more, it tells us that they are, in their fear, willing to forgo looking at a person's expression of faith in favor of demanding a formulaic satisfaction of a ritual.

If the Republicans want to be a party again, they need to have dissent, debate, and discussion, and not purity. If protestant churches want to triumph, they need to have faith -- faith in the power of Christ, power in the Word that conquered the world -- faith in life's diversity and the glory of God who creates not in one type, one model, or one mold, but in endless variety.

Of Me I Sing

Once upon a young sap rise, upon a stripling, I sat at the Smith-Corona with Red Man chewing tobacco in a cheek, beside a Peavey 400 Watt bass amplifier stack, and wrote, all night long, at poetry. The poetry that emerged, when I was fifteen through seventeen, was exceptionally anxious, as if a compensation in workmanship for the slapdashery of my surroundings and habits and habitus, and then I had a psychotic break known as college. Actually, the first year of college did not teach me much, in this respect, but it let the little maniac driving the poetry get a concussion, a skinned knee, and then, finally, a complete break. When I did not learn my lesson or win my freedom, the poetry that I wrote from ages nineteen to twenty-four was calculatedly anarchic, indebted, frustrated (sexually, physically, emotionally, and financially), and a long form code for the puzzlement of how a world that works so well in other respects could be so utterly lunatic for humans.

If you looked through the whole of this blog, you would find evidence of why "poetry" is "wrote" and why this is to the greater glory of the world. You would discover that having written it is the best thing for me and for you, alike.

(A creek in Baltimore that is much safer now that I will not pollute it with metaphors.)

However, all of those years meant I approached the curse the way that a pre-menopausal person does: as a sufferer, and therefore as a person trying to make the best of it. I always wanted other people to recognize just how bad it was (and by that, I mean how wonderful the poetry was, for poets are driven by the depths of their pain or the severity of their visions or the power of their philosophy or the height of their molehills), and I could never find anyone else who would really get it.

Well, there's nothing for it, if you're a poet, but writing a manifesto. If your poetry won't get your readers (those afflicted looking people otherwise known as friends or students), then a manifesto might do it. Of course, what you, the poet, never realize is that you're waving a white flag, that you've failed to enunciate things in your own medium (poetry, painting, appearing shaved and naked in a public fountain -- whatever your art is) and have resorted to prose and political programs, but nevertheless it's really, really attractive.

Mine was: narrative voice, war upon, hatred of, destruction to be wrought.

The social drinker trying a drunken, stoned verse form was one disguise. Another was the schizophrenic eliminating connectives. Another was the pre-verbal infant with atemporal descriptors of action. Henry Green's dangling modifiers as a method of suspension really appealed to me, even though that was theft. Finally, I thought description without action might do it. Aside from all of these things having been done by other poets, all of these things had failed in the hands of every writer of every form (except Green, and one wouldn't want his bank account). Additionally, each of these was not merely tried, but done successfully every single day by actual schizophrenics, autistics, drunks, infants, and Alzheimer's patients. My self-hatred and hatred of the lie of writers and the false "history" inherent in narrative was hardly an excuse for emulating Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man."

Fortunately, though, I got better. Poetry might not be a disease, but being a poet as a young person is certainly co-morbid, and I was cured of poetry by a great, vast, yawning horror, on the one hand, and getting my personal oil pan filled to the requisite number of quarts, on the other.

(The shelf fungus is in the tree from seedling but only grows when the tree is down)

Now the days are no more when I worry with contributing my voice to the world or my wisdom to the lifeless sea measureless to man where the drains go. (The Dear knows no one keeps, hears, or profits by wisdom, even the wisdom of "In all thy getting, get thee wisdom," (Prov. 4:7; all the fundamentalists in the blogosphere seem to get the citation wrong or not know it at all) so it flows out from life, from experience, from meditation, and goes down to the sunless sea.) However, I again have to mess with poetry, but this time from the outside, as an hygienist with a dental pick.

Recently, I was explaining "Kubla Khan" to a class of students, and I did the advanced thing. I explained that the foreword should be there, that it's part of the poem, that the poem isn't a fragment, that the poem isn't about the son of Genghis Khan at all, that the poem is about poetry and creativity, etc. Afterward, I realized two things. First, the students were going to wonder about Coleridge's Christianity, because that's the kind of place and region I am, and that, more broadly and generally, they were going to doubt that Coleridge "meant" for the audience to understand all that. If I could convince them that the poet did expect some audience to "get" it all, then they were going to have every right to ask why someone writes a poem with that much philosophy and theory in it, and that started me thinking, and the fruits of that thinking are here in this blog.

Well, not so far, but in the next bit.

"Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race" -- Gladstone, 1890

The Romantics set out their manifesto, and they called the tune for a lot of what has happened since then. In many respects, poets today are still Romantics. The 1798 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads does in prose what the poets had apparently failed to do in poetry: start a movement. Let's remember that that's the preface to the second edition. In other words, the book had been out, but it wasn't Romanticism until they explained it.

I won't go on about that, but I will point out that the one formal feature that the Romantics announced was a re-invigoration of the lyric. Now, a lot of this is horse flop, because the whole Warton, Percy, Gray, Thomson stuff had been doing lyric, but this was a manifesto. The lyric is in. The lyric is it. The poem of personal emotions recalled in tranquility is The Poem. In fact, most people, when they think of "poetry" can only think of verse about the author's emotions. They can't even conceive of any other thing being poetry. That's how completely we are Romantics.

Once the subject of poetry must be the poet's reaction or psyche, then there is no choice but to start looking for interesting psychological states, reactions, and persons. Let's find the emotions of uneducated people! Let's find the emotions of victims of abuse! Let's find and then express the emotions of Seers, and let's demand that poets have super-duper special emotions to express. After all, even lovers of such poetry recognize quickly that the general run of emotions that are commonly felt are commonly expressed, commonly adequately; therefore, poets either needed to be scientists about perception or philosophers of feeling or radicals of sensation.

Stupid people, and never underestimate their number, read "Kubla Khan" and started taking dope. Stupid people, and never underestimate their persistence, began putting themselves in dangerous and meddlesome positions to collect "experience." As graveyards and psych wards fill, and as poetry becomes handmaid and gateway to psychiatry, both the arbitrarily intellectual and the gluttonously sensational run out of things to fuel them. (I never had the courage for the latter or the originality for the former.) The quality of the poetry itself is irrelevant, if not impossible to determine behind so many assumptions of reception and production.

So, young poets, do you want a manifesto? I have one for you, in all seriousness. I have great love for poetry, recite it to myself nearly every day and read it without being asked, and I read contemporary poetry as often as I can, and so I make an offer -- an amicus brief.

If you want to revolutionize poetry, write social verse.
If you want to change poetry, return to satire. Try odes. Try any form of occasional or public verse. Evacuate the ego from the attempt and replace it with the common good, and see what happens. Replace the personal desire and Desire as the subjects with Classical or Abrahamic virtues and see how those work as motives for poetry.

If you are trapped by social and political language, and you absolutely are, then poetry is a political and social act, and not by any means, ever, a personal one, unless you have the good sense, as I did, to quit it. The only personal element is saying "no."

Non Think

KFC, which used to be Kentucky Fried Chicken, which used to be Colonel Sanders's Kentucky Fried Chicken, is running a television ad that simply will not stop. The theme of the ad is "Unthink." In the midst of snap cuts, the voice of Chris from "Northern Exposure" speaks without a pause, and the camera slams from close up to two shot to three to close up, to twirl about the product, to zoom on faces, to smoke from the hot food, and out and back. The camera work is like the party scenes from "Laugh In," when they wanted to show the go-go dancers, or like a kung fu fight scene, when they have a heavy set actor with hands softer than newly hatched ducklings and the director makes up for it with a stop-motion montage of poses that give the illusion that someone is actually moving.

It is absurd, of course, that they want us to "unthink." One can imagine the advertising pitch meeting: "Our goal is to get the consumer to forget everything they think about KFC. They think of us as grease and fat. We want them to un-think those thoughts."

One could note that this is taking place even as the Republicans are trying to get us to unthink in the same way, which is to say forget, everything. For example, they maintain that the economic collapse is after Obama's inauguration. That is flatly not true, and they know it, but that's not the point: the point is to unthink. From polls that add up to 165% to disagreeing with themselves to being for pay as you go, until it's proposed by the president, there is a campaign of relying on public ignorance of what goes on in Congress or a campaign to cause unthink.

However, it isn't merely the "unthink" that gets me. Chris from "Northern Exposure" (when the actor is just a voice over, he's Chris from "Northern Exposure," since that was his use on that show -- the voice of calm, of philosophy, of moralizing, and therefore the actor providing a voice over for restaurants is curious and challenging) reads copy that requires unthinking, too -- unthinking the English language.

What Chris from "Northern Exposure" promises us, if we merely go into KFC, is the exciting opportunity, once we manage the Zen Koan of UNTHINK (possess nothing... hold emptiness... think the unthought) is that "great fall off the bone flavor." Now, synesthesia is fine. I have no problem smelling a beat, tasting a vision, or feeling a fart, but I do wonder what the taste of falling off "the bone" is.

Is this the taste of gangrene, or merely necrosis?

There are some of you without access to U.S. television sets, and many more who have not seen this campaign. To you, I say, "Congratulations." In fact, my topic today is, of course, to respond to the monumental insult of this campaign, but I cannot see it in isolation. I see in it either a profound laziness and unthinking response on the part of the client (KFC's marketing chicken wing), or a very nasty coalescing of cultural currents, whereby many are now concluding that Americans are not only extremely stupid, but that they are incapable of being otherwise, and "thinking," "thought," "knowledge," and "English" are alike detriments.

Consider the Tea Party jackanapes. These creatures are bizarre. They showed up, spurred on by FoxNews Channel, to protest Obama immediately after his inauguration -- before he had any legislation passed -- to protest what he was doing. They were supposedly protesting all the taxes he was inflicting, even though he hadn't proposed, much less passed, a single tax. They screamed their anger, carried guns, flirted with the Lyndon LaRouche crazies, mixed libertarian, racist, GOP loyalist, racist, and independent deficit hawks together, and they were funded by Dick Armey. See their attempts at a convention. They were angry first, had the reasons second.

Thinking and facts, reasons and reasonableness, were not appropriate. Those things were either afterthoughts or signs of, as with Sarah Palin's discourse, "Gotcha journalism." Questions were all traps, and knowledge was all unnecessary. The emotion was real, and that was sufficient.

They were ready for fall off the bone flavor.

My Apology to Ford Motors and to Nissan

I would like to formally apologize to Ford Motors and to Nissan. I did not purchase a 2010 Ford Fusion hybrid, the way I planned to. I am sorry. I had a slight windfall from my summer teaching, and I planned to use it for a down payment.

(I know that I've used that photo recently, but it's more germane this time.)

I could explain why I didn't use that money for the down payment. The Cash for Clunkers program was going, and many people were saying that there simply were no good cars to get at that time, that the fuel efficient vehicles would not come to market for a year or two. Oh, I once told someone that I wanted my next vehicle to be a Chevy Volt, but I was joking. After all, I suspect that the Volt will never exist.

In fact, if anyone who reads this knows a journalist, would that person mind suggesting a topic of investigation: the Chevy Volt. It would be dead easy to track when GM has made press releases for the Volt. Simply put those in one column of a word processor, and in the other column, track gasoline prices the week or the two weeks before. Then look at the releases/sales of fuel efficient vehicles by other manufacturers. I would venture a thesis that General Motors will never produce the Volt, that it is merely the "clean coal" of GM: a public relations device designed to keep the public and press from asking them why they have no fuel efficient vehicles available for sale in the U.S. I could be wrong. They only have to make the car to prove me wrong. I doubt they will, but a journalist could help matters (and the country) by making this bluff more well known.

Anyway, news began to reach me that my job was not secure. Then word reached me that my employer would no longer make contributions to my retirement. Then word reached me that my employer was going to "look at" health insurance. I knew that meant that the prescription plan would go the way of the Dodo, or at least the way of the Buffalo (rare, expensive, dangerous). I held my money in fear and spent it on books and CD's and pills and car repairs.

"What a jovial and merry world would this be, may it please your worships, but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief, discontent, melancholy, large jointures, impositions, and lies!" -- Corporal Trim to Uncle Toby

I also need to apologize at the same time to Nissan Motors. I have owned Nissan cars before. I cannot say that my Datsun 310 hatchback was an especially happy relationship, but it was a long relationship. If a marriage is miserable, at least it might be long. (I got rid of it for a Subaru that made me very happy. That car was everything my Nutsad was not.) I am willing, more than willing, to believe that the 310 hatchback I had was the worst Datsun ever made and that I was unlucky. I am ready to love again, and Nissan is about to offer something that would make me very, very, very happy: the LEAF.

I want that to be visible again: the Nissan LEAF is going to be an ideal second car.

97% of Americans drive less than 80 miles in a day.

Most of us drive less than 60 miles in a day.

So, a totally electric car that goes 100 miles on a charge will mean all of your daily driving without using a single drop of gasoline. It means being in rush hour driving with no noise, no stink. It means an acceleration curve that can only be beat with a drag racer. It means going very fast. It means going for $0.02 per mile. My current car gets 29 mpg, and I drive for $0.09/mile. It means that it's the equivalent of gasoline costing $1.00 a gallon.

If you have trains or planes, you can take those for your long trips. If you have a second vehicle, you can use that for your long trips. The LEAF is going to cost the same as any other mid-sized sedan.

I want it.

I won't get it. I'm sorry.

Ok, so I'm poor. We'll grant that at the outset. I make less per year, net, than the car will cost, probably, or just about the same. That's one factor. The economy is scary, and my job is scary, as stated above. But that's not what I wanted to say. If I wanted to say that, I would only be saying what everyone says.

Instead, I wanted to point out to the auto companies that I have already purchased a car, despite not having a new car. You see, I have to stay alive. To do that, I am assured that I need to stay on male contraceptives, heart thinners, scab breakers, sugar eaters, and palliatives. Now, lets take all the co-pays and the "premium non-formulary" charges and add them together, and then lets take the charges for the insurance premium itself and add that in. Guess what? It's more than a car payment.

Ok, and then let's toss in my foolishness, my luxuries. We'll take my satellite radio per month, my Netflix per month, and my ISP. All of these are small. None hurts. Why, it's piddling. I can afford it! Let's add them together, though.

The point that I am making, here, is that economists wonder and manufacturers fear and fume that Americans are not purchasing. Oh, yes we are. When our purchases, our major purchases, are already made in the form of maintaining our lives, we're not buying cars. When the majority of us are indebted to live, we do not live beyond the debt.

Do we wish to? Oh, yes, but others have already calculated exactly how much we have left after our food has been consumed, and they have already taken it from us. If you want us to buy cars, work for prescription reform.

Adaptation/Abruction

Years ago, when amateurism looked like something new, when it even seemed like an invention or discovery worthy of Time Magazine's yearly benevolence, I wrote -- and Heaven help me, enjoyed writing --an article on film adaptation. (I did not want to be part of a social revolution. I wanted to contribute knowledge to high school students who use the Internet for everything.) I enjoyed it for the pleasure of analysis, which is the complementary joy of English composition. Composing (writing) is bringing the stray herd of words and ideas together and making them all behave, making them function toward an end. Analysis is the breaking down of objects, and I love to examine and re-examine and then recombine. (My next will address how sad it is that such a fundamental concept as the difference between synthesis and analysis is forgotten and consigned to Philosophy class, when it's everyday knowledge. It could even be Business.) It is why we speak of "creativity," after all, for the ability to make a new thing from the old is as near to creation as most of us who lack plastic skills will ever get.

(A chimp has the ability to know that its reflection is an image of itself.)

In that article, I said that film adaptation (well, I implied that I said it) is not properly judged for literalness or inclusiveness or total fidelity, that a film is a separate artwork from its source and should function accordingly. How, then, is it an adaptation at all? If your movie of "Along Came a Spider" isn't going to try to be the same as the book I read, then how is it an adaptation? Well, I implied that films are adaptations of a thing in the original, not the whole. One adapts the theme, the aesthetic, the plot, or the worldview of the original, and then one employs the devices and strengths of film's art to do the thing the source did, whether that source was a ballet or a cartoon. One judges the adaptation by the achievement of the sameness within the newness. (It's like composition in that regard; the same words, but a new arrangement.) You keep the plot of the novel, or you achieve the same philosophy as the novel, or the same "point" as it, or the same worldview, or the same "effect" as it, but you use what film does to do it. If you succeed, you have adapted (made to fit). If you fail, you have not.

Adaptation is, therefore, an analytical composition. (The sentence in the Wikipedia article now saying, "it is derivative" was not mine, but amateurs are amateurs, and there's no stopping the boob Asp -- someone with a mania for categories and containers and little interest in the substances inside them -- from stomping along after one writes. I was ever comfortable with impermanence, as the achievement alone was my thrill.)

Alles klar?

There is a "however" coming in this essay. The "however" is with interesting people, like Stanley Kubrick, and dullards, like Roland Joffe. Kubrick's "The Shining" violates the plot, aesthetic, and theme of Stephen King's The Shining, but it's a better film than King's novel is a novel. (Some people say the same about his "A Clockwork Orange," which absolutely violates the intent and worldview and theme of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, but I feel that both novel and film are great.) Kubrick's film is not the same at all. It is, in a sense, not an adaptation. However, his artistry and intellectual heft and cultural timing were such that we among the intelligentsia and literati and professoriate forgave him, blessed him, and honored him, and the cinephiles, who never cared about the source works to begin with, carried him about on their sloped shoulders, moth larvae and nits in a displaced nimbus around his frenzied comb-over.

Stanley Kubrick was an interesting person. He was canonized, in the academic sense. He became a lesson in film school, and dull wits always learn the wrong lessons from school.

The problem with dullards is that,

"Some are lost in the maze of schools
And emerge as coxcombs Nature meant for fools." (Pope)

The follow along directors after Kubrick are a loutish lot, half aware, half there. Where he could ignore almost everything Stephen King wrote in order to return to his solitary theme of the duality of the human psyche and civilization's Jungian shadow, he could do so because American, and western European society, was wretched, like Alex de Grand in "A Clockwork Orange" hearing the reminder of his cultural heritage, Beethoven, with the very same theme. How does a world of urban and urbane and polite and political deal with the shuddering bulk, the terrifying grin, the ravenous evil, of holocaust, genocides, and laissez-faire starvation?

[It's a long explanation. I urge you to look at some of the books on Kubrick. The author of The Short Timers, the collection of short stories upon which "Full Metal Jacket" was ostensibly based, wrote an essay for Esquire or The New Yorker or something that I read some years back that talked about his conversations with Kubrick during the adaptation and Kubrick's obsession during that process with Jung. That obsession, whether articulated in Jungian terms or not, is present throughout Kubrick's films. To be too brief: imagine that we have an inherited savage in our subconscious, a violent, gleefully hateful thing that is not the "id," but the negation of civilization. Civilization has to let that creature out in a safe form, if it is to function. Individuals in tightly controlled and anesthetized societies must reconnect with the savage, or else the savage will emerge in a crazy way. Wouldn't it be a good thing for a Jew after the war to examine that, to see in the holocaust and Mi Lai alike an expression of the savage in every apple faced youngster? Wouldn't it be good to take intellectuals, the ones partly to blame for the rise of the mechanized evil of the Reich, and make them confront their own culpability?
Don't believe me. It's ok. They're just movies. The point is that other people think this is happening and so are happy to see a novel by Stephen King turned into a meditation on how suburban marriage (and what would become the main text of "Fight Club" as the "feminizing" of men) can be another control that is susceptible to the Shadow.]

The little shoal of broken heads, scattered wits, and eager tits known as the other directors married the self-congratulatory Film World with the despair-induced coma of post-Modernism ("post-mortemism" is an old joke, but I think there's merit to it, because post modernism is not merely a collection of works without a manifesto, a series of nervous tics without a disease, but it is also a profoundly despairing "movement," in that it proclaims the vaccuum of Movement art; whatever emptiness we may now see in movements, giving up the effort is rather cheap) to announce "Whatever it is, it's alright." Oh, Donald Kaufmann's "Adaptation." doesn't count, so don't even bring that up.

No, if you'd let me...

Look, it's just that it's...

Ok, fine, let's do talk about it.
"Adaptation." doesn't count because it is an examination of adaptation. To say that it is an adaptation that examines adaptation is incorrect, because the adaptation within the examination is merely more cogitation. As a film, it is purely discursive. There is no "inside" to it at all. The film is completely outside itself at all times. Every element of the film, whether visual or spoken or gestured, is not a reference to a world, but a reference to potential references. Each thing is a question, not a statement, and certainly not a statement about the art object that is putatively source.

Now, can I proceed?

No? Well, we'll have to argue about that particular movie some other time, then. Better yet, go to Film Comment and get cheers from the chorus. Meanwhile, I'll while away the mean.

So, these vacuoles that I'm referring to -- wretched creatures like the "remake" of "Wings of Desire" into "City of Angels" or "Bedazzled" or "Wicker Man" -- and the "adaptations" of works of literature like the Roland Joffe horror shows "Fat Man and Little Boy" and, of course, the most flightless, bloated, emetic turkey of them all, "The Scarlet Letter," passed themselves off as "different artworks." Anyone who complained that they had done violence to their originals got dismissed the same way that a fanboi is dismissed for saying, "But Rochester should never have blond hair!"


Because we had recognized that adaptation was not literalism, the film world had taken that as license to "riff on" source material. Because post modernism had used history in original works (like Mason & Dixon by Pynchon) freely as a metaphor, and because commercial media had begun to re-spin source tales over and over again (endless Christmas specials with the same Scrooge-vision for the regular characters of one's favorite TV drama or comedy), film makers had decided that the historicity and factuality of the source had no relevance. In fact, repetition or fidelity was "square" (or, when Gus van Sant did it in his "Psycho," "super post modern"), and so it was the duty of film makers to prove their artistic mettle by artless meddle, and every person unappreciative could be, should be, and must be, one tribe or another of Philistine.

What, then, do we do when new works, completely new works, use the names of old works? Do we say these are adaptations, when both the creators' intent (announced, usually) and execution are not to adapt any aspect or element of the original, but merely to "riff on the classic" or "tell a story the original author didn't get?"

Let me put a case to you away from film to make it clearer. Rod Stewart, who is a fine soccer player, sang a version of Tom Waits's "Downtown Train" and had a top 40 hit, back when there were such things. Stewart's version reiterated the chorus quite a bit, as well as introduced an orchestral marshmallow in both speakers to occupy any quiet, and his producing machine also made sure that there were sweeps of sentiment that simplified any possible irony. Waits's song had been complex, melancholy, and even bitter, and Rod's song had been a rendezvous between lovers. Stewart said, though, that, while he respected Tom Waits, he thought he found things in the song that Tom had missed. So, folks: is he "riffing?" People who would hesitate to object to a violently free film will quickly sneer at Rod Stewart's comment, and yet he kept all of the same lyrics and generally maintained the chord structure. He changed the aesthetic of the song. He kept the frame and changed the heart, because his purposes were different from the original purposes.

Ok, so here's my position. When you adapt, then that's no big deal: you adapt. When, though, you "riff," you have some duty to acknowledge that you are creating a new artwork by creating a new title. If you wish to muddle about with the Gawain story to make it fit the 1950's audience, then have the grace to call your title "Prince Valiant."

Microsoft did a very, very evil thing some years ago when they decided that Java's cross-platform programming language was a threat to their goal of One Ring to in the Darkness Bind Them. They wrote their own version of Java that would run only on Windows machines. This was known as "polluted Java." They released it free, and all sorts of polluted Java got out. It was like a virus, some thought. The biggest thing is that people couldn't tell if they had "real" Java or polluted Java applications, and so they couldn't tell, without laborious testing, if their Java applications were cross-platform or not. Well, an "adaptation" of "The Scarlet Letter" that has Hester and Dimsdale grooving in the woods while Micmac Indians teach the Puritains how to tolerate is polluted art.

"Riffing" on Beowulf is your business. Have a ball! Prove that you have no slavery to history (or fact) by simultaneously insisting that Christian influences in the work are not historical (thus belying your historical freedom as a post-modernist) and thereby continue the work begun by the Nazi scholars but now in the name of your Robert Graves quoting Wiccan friends and merging "myths" from different continents, centuries, and ethnicities in the belief that there must have been some gigantic vanilla porridge of Story underneath that you -- you clever dickens, you -- can decode. Go on! Have fun. Be a director who claims that Beowulf bored him at age 14 and therefore it is a boring work, and be a man who is so filled with satisfaction and self that he cannot realize that he has just admitted that his mind has not grown from early puberty. Go on! Get money for the project. Work with sinews and CGI to erect hundreds of thousands of tent poles in theater seats, and mistake that for interesting -- but do so under the banner of the U.S.'s PG-13. Declare artistry while feeding a multi-input, single-output media machine, and hope for a Christmas release and lots of dolls to be sold. Go on!

Do NOT call it "Beowulf," though. Call it "Wild Wolf, Monster Slayer" or "She Dragon: It's Really Hot in Here." Call it "Handsome and Grendel."

What is being done is not, simply put, adaptation. What the film makers are doing is not any attempt at adapting. It is an attempt at taking a title, of replacement. Roland Joffe wanted to replace Hawthorne's tale with his own, and Gaiman, the pleasures of The Graveyard Book notwithstanding, is not to be forgiven his involvement in the theft film of "Beowulf." As technology has allowed films to tell impossible tales faithfully, film makers have decided to cease even adapting. By itself, that would merely leave room for future films -- a future "Lord of the Rings" trilogy -- but it is combined with a gleeful kleptomania and pollution.

Film makers, know this: Post modernism is no cover for theft, and it is no excuse for being a polluter. If you will not adapt, then do not steal. If you will take a name, then be aware that you risk pollution. There are stakes on the table, and some of us still care.

There are items in the cultural inventory that are not disposable. That is one of my objections, and I won't hide it. "Riffing" on a James Patterson novel does not bother me as much as "riffing" on George Eliot. The reason is not any dead white European snobbery, either, but rather than some items exist in a web of reference that constitutes culture, and when we release "polluted Java" into the stream, we are contaminating culture. Additionally, though, the simple fact is that this is not an act of adaptation. It is an act of erasure and rewriting. When the author or or studio executive has that in mind, then the result will be a new thing. It's much better if we notice that The Lion King is Hamlet than that Disney studios called it "Hamlet" and made it with cartoon lions singing Elton John songs, while they claimed that they "saw things that Shakespeare missed in the story" or that "Shakespeare is boring" and so they wanted to improve on it.

Why We Must Fill In Afghanistan

In Scythia, Bactria, and Colchis, we have innumerable problems. We have one of those tipping points in history where things have gotten flopped over, where offense is greater than defense, or defense is greater than offense, or where the methods of crazy are better than the strategies of police or polite. Something is wrong.

Never fight a land war in Asia, the man said. Well, sure. How about a vertical insertion?

Right now, the United States has a new decision on Afghanistan, not an old one, and yet we seem to be confined to speaking only in metaphors and language from the past. I am going to break with every single practice I have ever had, as a writer, and speak directly about a foreign policy matter. I will explain why I, and why I believe we as humanist and pluralist nations of the West, have to engage with the problem of Afghanistan. I am aided in this by the fact that the people who propose pulling out of Afghanistan are actually arguing for staying in place, but I am hindered by the irresistable poisoned honey of historical analogy.

First, let us deal with the one analogy that everyone will invoke sooner or later: Vietnam. Afghanistan resembles Vietnam in its political regime. Karzai, in the analogy, is either President Diem or, much more fittingly, Durong Van Minh, the corrupt leader who allegedly made deals with the Vietcong. Afghanistan is also supposed to resemble Vietnam in that the insurgency is “out there” with aid from another country and employing terror to paralyze and then capture the food/drugs of the nation. Supposedly, the U.S. military, which was supposed to have flubbed Iraq because all they did was learn lessons from Vietnam, is now incapable of dealing with Afghanistan, because it is just like Vietnam. Finally, Afghanistan is like Vietnam in that once we begin sending troops, we will be bled constantly by a defensive posture (either because we won't “get tough,” if you're a neocon, or because our brutality radicalizes the population, if you're a realist or suffer from sanity).

The problem with the analogy is that the President is right: it requires a faulty reading of history. Afghanistan is not in the same situation at all, and the Taliban is not offering communism. It is offering efficiency at the cost of freedom, fairness, and personal identity in a land where personal autonomy is vital. The defensive posture is always a problem, because it's always easier to inflict damage on a defender and run away than it is to obliterate a mobile force. This is why it was easy for the U.S. forces to take Afghanistan in the first place. Attacking someone who is trying to defend is easier, these days, than defending against someone who can come from any direction, including up or down. The problem of the Afghanistan government is critical, absolutely critical, because it means that the Afghani villager gets to choose between vicious efficiency or kleptocracy and insecurity. People may face dangers, but not for shabby treatment. Even with that granted, though, Karzai is neither Diem (the man who tortured his own people in his anti-communist crusade) nor Minh. He infuriates his people by acting like a tribal man, an ethnic man, and a war lord's friend, but not by being a tyrant. (Malaki in Iraq, incidentally, bears scrutiny that no one in the U.S. is giving. We so want that to be over that we have ignored another Very Bad Situation in the making.)

All of the mottos about Bactria the inviolate and inconquerable (Alexander the Great), where Napoleon and the British could not win, where the Soviets could not prevail, are beside the point. First, the U.S. demonstrated that its military could take and destroy the military and political leadership and civil institutions of the area. In fact, NATO troops could easily defeat any military Afghanistan ever were to develop. It's not even a battle.

Can any foreign power govern Afghanistan, though? That's the question our cliches haven't addressed. That's the question that gets to the heart of the case. Afghanistan had a centralized government in the 1970's. Although this was a brief period, it did exist. Prior to that and since then, tribes and ethnicities have opposed one another, and groups that migrated in or practiced religious variations six thousand years ago refuse to treat one another as fellow citizens. Karzai wants to help “his people” who speak his language and belong to his tribe, and other groups want theirs. He lets murderous creatures disgrace him and destroy governance because they are of his tribe. This is an educated individual choosing to adopt an atavistic model for social organization, a model that has within it an eternal animosity toward central government. It has deponent governments -- little centralized decision bodies -- based on the tribe and family, and it bears some resemblance to the satrap, but with no personal, blood, ethnic, or religious commander above the unit. It is pre-nation-state.

So long as all of the “leaders” of Afghanistan are leaders of tribes and populations, rather than leaders of places, districts, and persons – so long as geography and isolation mean that it is a set of perpetually warring tribes – no nation may govern Afghanistan, and there is no Afghanistan to govern itself. The very name is an arbitrary distraction. If we know for certain that there is no hope, in fact, of any 1970's Afghanistan ever emerging from this generation, then we would be better off thinking of districts and populations and fighting, organizing, building, and negotiating separately.

The Taliban introduces theocracy, but theocracy is vague. There is no magic in that. If you believe that there is something so mysterious about “theocracy” that we can only deal with it in the discourse that it sets for itself (holy war), then you need to look at your own history. All of Europe had experiments with theocracy, and the United States has had multiple adventures in theocracy (aside from Bob Jones University). From the Massachussetts Bay Colony to the Shakers, the U.S. has had its theocracies, and it is easy enough to study how they interact with stresses from outside. In general, they thrive most when they have an enemy. The best way to fuel a theocracy is to put on a Great Satan costume, for then you seem to justify the founding assumptions. Avoiding offense is impossible (see the rewards President Obama has received from trying to avoid offending Christian Fundamentalists in the United States: they call him the anti-Christ and see in his politeness proof that he is trying to fool them), and so the best way to win is to simply not play. Refuse to speak of winning and losing, of conquest and triumph. Do not speak of yourself at all. Speak of the population you are there for.

As for whether or not we must be there, when “it is impossible to win,” we must be there because it is impossible to win. Every person who makes the case that no army can prevail in Afghanistan reinforces the argument that our armies must prevail in Afghanistan.

I opposed the Iraq war. I was and remain ambivalent about the Afghanistan war. However, a nation-sized hole in the earth where the world says “No army can prevail” is very bad. There must be no such place. Somalia, the grand shamble of “failed states,” is very similar to Afghanistan in its tribalism, in the way that each group fights for its group identity and has no concept of a nation at all, but Somalia is, obviously, no place that world opinion regards as impenetrable. World opinion holds that Somalia could be “taken” in weeks but that it has no value to the world.

Afghanistan is important because we have said, for thousands of years now, that anyone who goes in there is safe from the nation states of the world. If you can get permission from the tribe (not the nation), you can do anything you want in Afghanistan, from grow opium to plan attacks on world trade. In the past, the stakes were not very high, because the thing that made one “safe” made the world “safe” from you, too: geography meant isolation in both senses. Now, though, one individuals can go in, embed, train, and, because of global transportation and trade links with Pakistan, India, and Iran, and because of proxy fights, fly away easily to fight elsewhere on a one-way ticket. Thus, if we say that Afghanistan is a place where one can be invulnerable, then the world's populations are all in danger, regardless of the threat. If al Qaeda were to disappear tomorrow and Osama bin Laden were to recant and repent, then the danger would be the same. The world's nations must not allow there to be a place that will refuse to organize and yet still benefit from global access and travel. That makes for a case of offense being far more powerful than defense.