11/29/04

11/22/04

But though I'm unable to close my eyes and peacefully fall asleep in the snug bed of certainty, still the lullabies of Religious Broadway sing sweet in my ears. I'm the last to deny the beauty and overarching value of spiritual solace or the decorum and approbation of denominational social order. I'm the village atheist who lingers at the church doors come Sunday, watching the others file in, a smile half-mocking and half-wistful barely visible on my face.

In the past, I've always contended that there is spirituality and then there is religion. While the former applies to the inner person, a guide to the soul and perception of the lost and found worlds of introspection, the latter has always been about politics. And yet, even the most entrenched and bulwarked Triumphal Order Of The Almighty, girded in iron and tipped with steel, has a thread, a installed base of spiritual teaching, a backbone to hold the entire edifice erect.

Christianity is an interesting example. One of its most foundational disputes, reaching back almost to Calvary, is the one the Protestants broke away from the Catholics over: are we saved by works or by grace? Or, more loquaciously, do we earn the desired state of favor with God, the state that grants us peace in this life as well as participation in the next, through our actions in the world, be they prayer, righteousness, alms to the poor, charity to one's neighbor or whatnot? Or is that favor bestowed only by the inponderable Big Himself as a gift, a draught of light and enlightenment, descending without cause or knowable purpose or most specifically favoritism due to apple-polishing by the recipient?

Now right there you see the separation of spirit and muscle in the church. We've got here an organization that claims to be in the salvation biz but spends a pretty big chunk of its time on real estate speculation and realpolitik. Somehow that gasoline-and-water character has to come to some kind of colloidal suspension without blowing up or fizzling out. In a world full of soldiers, you can't just ignore the Black Baron when he offers you a fat donation with the insinuation that he'd like a little something in return. But amble too far in that direction and pretty soon you haven't got a religion anymore, just a holy yardsale with a big sign that says "EVERYTHING MUST GO!" It's your daughter and your ducats here, boy, and it necessitates some egg-walking techniques straight off a Who cover.

In the long run, it becomes necessary to make a two-state agreement. While the priests that like owning the local populous love that salvation by works thing, a tool made in heaven for the extraction of wealth and support from all-too-sinful local bosses, all the mystics and serious theory muckymucks avow as one that the Kingdom of God is a diamond ring that Woolworth's doesn't sell. No you can't get heaven (oh you can't get to heaven) in a model T car (in a model T car) ... Nor a mercedes neither. And you also have to make room for Gracie to allow those total bastards who grind their fellow men's bones to make their bread right through their fabulous careers to have last-gasp deathbed conversions and donate their hard-won booty to mother church -- uh, I mean achieve salvation. Yeah. That's the ticket.

Greasy temporalities aside, what we're talking here is the need for religion to address both the inner and outer man, the soul in solitary confinement in the black box of the mind and the meat gyrating through time and space to the tune of Git It Afore It Gits You. Looking at it as a problem in social and psychological engineering, those conjoined twins need very different diets to stay healthy. Sure, the body should be enjoined to go out and do good -- that's all a body can do to show its rectitude, and action speaks a lot louder than cant of any quality. And it's really really good for the community as a whole.

But the poor bastid in the cranial cavity? He's stuck there without nook or cranny of real escape, watching Body TV, not even a bowl of popcorn for company. And it's clear, bitter clear as cold tea, that the only way The Ghost of Personality Present is leaving his itty bitty living space is either (invisible) feet first, snuffed out like a proverbial candle, or by a rub from the Hand of God. It's up to the church to provide that rub, or at least the possibility of it, to prevent the prisoner in his despair from taking the body on a bone-grinding spree just for kicks. That is, of course, if the church has any sense of responsibility at all.

Even the Holy Moly Roman Catholic Line Up Sign Up And Donate Your Way To Paradise Church has come around to seeing the importance of grace in recent times, healing the aforementioned rift with their erstwhile rivals (and leaving only, oh, a dozen others to squabble over, but that's another story). But in any extended version of this movie, you gotta answer the question "Are we saved by our works or by Grace?" with a resounding, irrefutable "Yes."

11/15/04

Yep rock. That's the way it's been, that's the way it is, that's the way it's probably going to continue to be, people being people and all. The Law of the Jungle didn't get to be Law by just sitting around licking its balls, y'know. Are you really that surprised?

We live in an age of endlessly-echoed mythology, more so than ever in our history. Not only do we have wizened old wizards and gravel-voiced grannies to remind us of why we're here, we've got them 24/7 on the Wizened Old Wizards And Gravel-Voiced Grannies Channel, available through your local cable monopoly for a surprisingly affordable extra charge. There's enough meaningful narrative out there in teevee- radio- music- movie- newspaper- magazine- internetland to choke a winged horse with leftovers for her litter of colts and fillies. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is becoming one of those ten-thousand-headed Hindu gods (and you thought Christianity was bad!).

Now it may just be my positioning in the midst of the first flood of the Booby Bane (Dude, that's Baby Boom. It is?), but one of the memes I see coming back and back and back is that venerable chunk of cheese, the New Age. Yes! The future! The wunnerful wunnerful future! Robots to do the dirty work! Flying cars for your morning commute! A genetically modified chicken in every pot! And, o'course, let us not forget, let us never forget Universal Peace And Love, Charity and True Fellowship! Cue the orchestra somebody -- OHHHH, THAT BROTHERHOOD OF MAAAAAN!!!!

To quote the internet, LOLOLOLOL. Or as a friend of mine put it after 9/11, "Gee, the Age of Aquarius sure didn't last long." The pendulum swings and having swung swings on. Stupid pendulum.

Okay, so now we're back to whatever mythological state the world was in before it got into the state we just flushed down the crapper, Football Hero America or something. Fine. Bullies are the big men on campus again and all the girls wanna be cheerleaders again and fags and geeks and (insert ethnic slur of choice here) better just watch out. As usual. Shut your mouth, nerd! Let's have us a war!

But -- maybe, just maybe, it ain't as foul pitch sulphur tar pit black as it smells here. Maybe there's a little ray of light in all this ghastly foppery.

Despite protests from the creationist/intelligent design/ Flintstones-as-documentary camp, the best evidence suggests that h. sapiens has been around for a goodly long while, 200,000 odd years, and only a smidge of that time was spent being civilized. Nineteen twentieths of humanity's history was tribal, isolated bands of hunter-gatherers living by their wits or whatever passed for them, distrustful of strangers and constantly on the move. We evolved specifically to operate under that scenario, and in a lot of ways it still shows. The mass culture of agricultural civilization is brittle and artificial at best, subject to any number of disturbing aberrations from alcoholism and obesity to serial murder. As the population density rises, an increasing percentage of the group succumbs to the stress of too many apes and starts howling at the moon or into microphones.

Another percentage takes a different tack: it goes underground.

Back when in the old old days, before the New Age was even a disturbing glitter in Timothy Leary's eyes, there wasn't any of this upscale movie-star mass-market woowoo stuff going on. If you were a bohemian you were by-gawd subterranean, skulking around in the basement of society listening to the big cars roaring by overhead. Long hair on men was dangerous, boy. Wearing funny clothes, listening to weird music, taking the wrong drugs -- why, you could get arrested even. But that was the glory of it all: it wasn't normal. It was a tribe unto itself, a tiny outpost of natural man in the midst of the City's crapulous wholesale puppet-show, a minute, brilliant star of sanity.

But the twentittith century, love it or leave it, was dawn not just to quantum mechanics and internal combustion, nosirreedog. It also brought forth the plague of mass marketing. Didn't take them smart boys in the corner offices long to stick their big sticky cookiehooks right into the middle of that bohemian scene and rip it right off, music, funky clothes, slang and all. And suddenly, all the puppets got soul, all the robots started wearing bluejeans and long hair, started bleating washed-out imitations of rebel-yell electric music, presented a horrendous daily mockery of the covert tribe of Other, a mockery made all the more acrid by the clueless belief on the part of the perpetrators that they really were cool, man.

There were a few raisins mixed in with the dead flies. The anti-war movement of the 60's only succeeded because the great mass of people comprising it had a common vision, however blurry or confused. A few outside people got rich enough to start playing the mass-market game themselves. But in the end, it was death by oatmeal: oceans of pablum engulfing the sharp pointy reefs of the counterculture that was loved so dearly, so direly, so fatally into extinction.

Ah, but look! The Great Dumb Mass Market is moving on! The bozos are leaving town! Square is the new hip and the braindead pod people have another set of templates to emulate and mutate into unrecognizabilty. Hey, know what? Fringies is fringies again. The real beatniks can go back to finger-popping and sunglasses-wearing with no danger of being mistaken for somebody who doesn't know a Modrian from a milkshake and just bought the beret.

But if you ever mention the New Age again I swear I'll puke all over your Birkenstocks.

11/8/04

Exclusive! The Thaddeus Gazette Official Exit Poll!

11/1/04