Found this this morning. I love the song, and the parody is highly amusing, and I can post this if I want to and nobody can complain about it. Ha ha ha ha!
31 December 2007
30 December 2007
Filling space
That's all I'm doing here is filling space. Haven't posted in a while, wanted to post. But there's not much to say. I have an appointment for my flight physical on Friday so I can apply to a regional carrier, or at least begin discussions. Wednesday I'll go apply to be a temporary FedEx driver, which will probably be pretty decent. I think tomorrow I'll put in for a temp data entry job. We'll see what happens. I think the FedEx job would actually be more fun, but how much do you think they pay? Probably not enough. It would be nice if I could come up with, say, about $500 above and beyond getting paid, but I don't know how to go about doing that. If you have any ideas for how to make a quick $500 let me know.
I have to undecorate the tree tomorrow. I should take a couple pictures; it's pretty sad now, how dry it's gotten. But as dry as the tree is, it hasn't dropped needles at all--actually, I'm looking at it right now and, I haven't vacuumed under it since we put it up and it's got maybe 20 or 30 needles under it total, if that many. But it looks like a freeze-dried tree. Still pretty, though. If anything it sort of matches the decorations more.
Ah, me. If anything more exciting happens I'll post something. Certainly the upcoming Iowa fiasco/caucus should be worth comment.
I have to undecorate the tree tomorrow. I should take a couple pictures; it's pretty sad now, how dry it's gotten. But as dry as the tree is, it hasn't dropped needles at all--actually, I'm looking at it right now and, I haven't vacuumed under it since we put it up and it's got maybe 20 or 30 needles under it total, if that many. But it looks like a freeze-dried tree. Still pretty, though. If anything it sort of matches the decorations more.
Ah, me. If anything more exciting happens I'll post something. Certainly the upcoming Iowa fiasco/caucus should be worth comment.
19 December 2007
Why does she put up with me?
Last night Smittygirl laid a page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal on my bed. I didn't read the whole thing, just skimmed it; the article was about how regional air carriers are having trouble finding pilots. Which amazes me. All of my flying career I dealt with people who fervently believed they couldn't get airline jobs on the outside because so many pilots got furloughed by the American airlines after 9/11. Of course six years later even though the airline companies themselves are still in rotten financial shape, there are more flights than ever--and international companies are growing by leaps and bounds as the world gets richer. Since most ex-military pilots probably would have no trouble moving overseas for a few years to build hours with a foreign flag carrier--indeed, most pilots of any sort would do so because building hours is too expensive to do on your own--there's a pilot shortage now. Not at the main carriers, but at the regional level. In fact they're hiring first officers for regional carriers with as few as 400 total flight hours and as few as 50 total multi-engine flight hours.
I haven't flown in two years so I know I'm not a top candidate for any flying job. But I have over 1100 total flight hours and over 900 total multi-engine hours and already have my commercial multi-engine and instrument certificates. Surely a regional carrier like American Eagle or Comair or ExpressJet would take a chance on me as quickly as on a fresh-faced new kid straight out of pilot school with 450 hours. Right?
Smittygirl isn't wild about the idea of me taking a job flying. It's a relatively dangerous job--though, as she pointed out last night, it's not like being a fireman or something. Flying is safe on a relative basis--if you fly twice a year the odds of your being on a plane that crashes is outrageously slim--but risk increases with frequency (as with all things; the risk of dying by accidentally stabbing yourself with a feather pen may be outrageously low but it's much higher if you fancy such pens and use them all the time). There are, on average, between 1 and 2 airline crashes per year in this country (in some years there are none, including 1984, 1993, 1997, 1998, 2002, and 2005; the average over the last 25 years is close to 1, maybe about 1.1 or so), so the odds are very low, even for a professional pilot who makes, say, 45 flights per month (I'm guessing that's about average for a regional carrier but I could be way off). But plane crashes are horrifying things and regardless of how slim the odds of one occurring are, the fear is still going to be there.
But she knew after showing me that article that I'd want to look into getting a job with a regional carrier. I've already looked at American Eagle's website, and they're taking applications for pilots with 400 hours. Comair wants 600. ExpressJet won't say what they want but they encourage you to reapply in 3 months if you're rejected for not having enough flight hours. Mesa Air, which operates flights for Continental, United, Delta, US Airways, etc, is taking applications with 500 flight hours.
She knew I'd be hungry to apply. She'd probably rather that I did something else. She showed me the article anyway. I'd have been happy to assume I had no chance and forget about it.
Last night at the chinese restaurant, I got a fortune cookie. My fortune read: You are a happy man. Smittygirl is a huge part of why that's true.
I haven't flown in two years so I know I'm not a top candidate for any flying job. But I have over 1100 total flight hours and over 900 total multi-engine hours and already have my commercial multi-engine and instrument certificates. Surely a regional carrier like American Eagle or Comair or ExpressJet would take a chance on me as quickly as on a fresh-faced new kid straight out of pilot school with 450 hours. Right?
Smittygirl isn't wild about the idea of me taking a job flying. It's a relatively dangerous job--though, as she pointed out last night, it's not like being a fireman or something. Flying is safe on a relative basis--if you fly twice a year the odds of your being on a plane that crashes is outrageously slim--but risk increases with frequency (as with all things; the risk of dying by accidentally stabbing yourself with a feather pen may be outrageously low but it's much higher if you fancy such pens and use them all the time). There are, on average, between 1 and 2 airline crashes per year in this country (in some years there are none, including 1984, 1993, 1997, 1998, 2002, and 2005; the average over the last 25 years is close to 1, maybe about 1.1 or so), so the odds are very low, even for a professional pilot who makes, say, 45 flights per month (I'm guessing that's about average for a regional carrier but I could be way off). But plane crashes are horrifying things and regardless of how slim the odds of one occurring are, the fear is still going to be there.
But she knew after showing me that article that I'd want to look into getting a job with a regional carrier. I've already looked at American Eagle's website, and they're taking applications for pilots with 400 hours. Comair wants 600. ExpressJet won't say what they want but they encourage you to reapply in 3 months if you're rejected for not having enough flight hours. Mesa Air, which operates flights for Continental, United, Delta, US Airways, etc, is taking applications with 500 flight hours.
She knew I'd be hungry to apply. She'd probably rather that I did something else. She showed me the article anyway. I'd have been happy to assume I had no chance and forget about it.
Last night at the chinese restaurant, I got a fortune cookie. My fortune read: You are a happy man. Smittygirl is a huge part of why that's true.
18 December 2007
Sheep suspension seems an odd topic for clothing store iconography
Which Smittygirl immediately laughed about for being very... vocabulary intensive. Can you explain the Brooks Brothers symbol any better? I sure don't get it.
Here We Come A-Grishaming
Partly in order to increase my total of books read for the year, and partly because I've had Skipping Christmas in the house for at least three years, I decided it was time to read two John Grisham books in a row. Brief reviews will follow the jump. I started with 
The Runaway Jury. This is a story about tobacco litigation and a juror with a rather specific plan in mind.
We all know what Grisham is capable of and what he's good at, and this is a great yarn. The book may be 400+ pages long but it reads quickly and, like any good thriller, you want to keep reading and find out what happens next. Nothing new or unusual here. This isn't the greatest thriller in the world. It's probably not the greatest legal thriller in the world, and probably not even Grisham's best. But it's good enough, and that's good enough. I enjoyed it, and you can assume if you've read The Firm or any of his other works and enjoyed them, you'll like this one, too.
My favorite thing about The Runaway Jury was that the nasty bad evil character is actually likable. He's not really evil except in a somewhat esoteric sense, and he's surrounded by worse people anyway; he's just a mercenary who lets himself get excited about what he does. It's nice to see that. You know he's a bad apple and the people he works for are unethical and deserve what's coming to them, but by the middle of the book I really found myself liking him. He's sort of like a kid. It's nice to see somebody really enjoy their work, even if their work is very very naughty indeed.
I followed that up with
Skipping Christmas. This book was made into a movie last year, or maybe in 2005, called "Christmas with the Kranks," starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis. You may have seen it, although not too many people did and it was poorly reviewed. I talked to somebody while I was reading it this season who thought the movie might have been better if they'd made it with a couple of b-list actors in the starring roles, because then they might have been able to stick to the book a bit more and not cater to the whims of the big names. I don't know. I didn't see the movie.
The book is charming; it starts out reasonably enough, the main characters get in suitably over their heads, but it ends with a nice heartwarming Christmas moral. Actually it's pretty standard stuff, but it's a nice ride and when Grisham published it the story was pretty fresh. You find yourself wanting to bop Luther over the head a couple times, though--just give in on this or that, you can put the dang Frosty up and get a tabletop tree so the neighbors won't talk and then you won't seem like such a nutjob. But so it goes. Some people become more fervent in their beliefs the more they're challenged on them, true believers, and Luther is one. Doesn't make him a grinch but he sure can come across that way from time to time.
Funny though: the book is structured like, and written in a tone befitting, a legal thriller. More noticeable to me perhaps as I'd just finished The Runaway Jury, but it was occasionally a bit distracting. I wish I could cite specific examples from the text, but I think it was more a feeling than anything specific. Still, if you haven't read this, don't let the lousy movie dissuade you. It's a fun Christmas story and a quick read, just right for this crazy season.
The Runaway Jury. This is a story about tobacco litigation and a juror with a rather specific plan in mind. We all know what Grisham is capable of and what he's good at, and this is a great yarn. The book may be 400+ pages long but it reads quickly and, like any good thriller, you want to keep reading and find out what happens next. Nothing new or unusual here. This isn't the greatest thriller in the world. It's probably not the greatest legal thriller in the world, and probably not even Grisham's best. But it's good enough, and that's good enough. I enjoyed it, and you can assume if you've read The Firm or any of his other works and enjoyed them, you'll like this one, too.
My favorite thing about The Runaway Jury was that the nasty bad evil character is actually likable. He's not really evil except in a somewhat esoteric sense, and he's surrounded by worse people anyway; he's just a mercenary who lets himself get excited about what he does. It's nice to see that. You know he's a bad apple and the people he works for are unethical and deserve what's coming to them, but by the middle of the book I really found myself liking him. He's sort of like a kid. It's nice to see somebody really enjoy their work, even if their work is very very naughty indeed.
I followed that up with
Skipping Christmas. This book was made into a movie last year, or maybe in 2005, called "Christmas with the Kranks," starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis. You may have seen it, although not too many people did and it was poorly reviewed. I talked to somebody while I was reading it this season who thought the movie might have been better if they'd made it with a couple of b-list actors in the starring roles, because then they might have been able to stick to the book a bit more and not cater to the whims of the big names. I don't know. I didn't see the movie.The book is charming; it starts out reasonably enough, the main characters get in suitably over their heads, but it ends with a nice heartwarming Christmas moral. Actually it's pretty standard stuff, but it's a nice ride and when Grisham published it the story was pretty fresh. You find yourself wanting to bop Luther over the head a couple times, though--just give in on this or that, you can put the dang Frosty up and get a tabletop tree so the neighbors won't talk and then you won't seem like such a nutjob. But so it goes. Some people become more fervent in their beliefs the more they're challenged on them, true believers, and Luther is one. Doesn't make him a grinch but he sure can come across that way from time to time.
Funny though: the book is structured like, and written in a tone befitting, a legal thriller. More noticeable to me perhaps as I'd just finished The Runaway Jury, but it was occasionally a bit distracting. I wish I could cite specific examples from the text, but I think it was more a feeling than anything specific. Still, if you haven't read this, don't let the lousy movie dissuade you. It's a fun Christmas story and a quick read, just right for this crazy season.
Here We Come A-Grishaming
Partly in order to increase my total of books read for the year, and partly because I've had Skipping Christmas in the house for at least three years, I decided it was time to read two John Grisham books in a row. Brief reviews will follow the jump. I started with The Runaway Jury. This is a story about tobacco litigation and a juror with a rather specific plan in mind.
We all know what Grisham is capable of and what he's good at, and this is a great yarn. The book may be 400+ pages long but it reads quickly and, like any good thriller, you want to keep reading and find out what happens next. Nothing new or unusual here. This isn't the greatest thriller in the world. It's probably not the greatest legal thriller in the world, and probably not even Grisham's best. But it's good enough, and that's good enough. I enjoyed it, and you can assume if you've read The Firm or any of his other works and enjoyed them, you'll like this one, too.
My favorite thing about The Runaway Jury was that the nasty bad evil character is actually likable. He's not really evil except in a somewhat esoteric sense, and he's surrounded by worse people anyway; he's just a mercenary who lets himself get excited about what he does. It's nice to see that. You know he's a bad apple and the people he works for are unethical and deserve what's coming to them, but by the middle of the book I really found myself liking him. He's sort of like a kid. It's nice to see somebody really enjoy their work, even if their work is very very naughty indeed.
I followed that up with Skipping Christmas. This book was made into a movie last year, or maybe in 2005, called "Christmas with the Kranks," starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis. You may have seen it, although not too many people did and it was poorly reviewed. I talked to somebody while I was reading it this season who thought the movie might have been better if they'd made it with a couple of b-list actors in the starring roles, because then they might have been able to stick to the book a bit more and not cater to the whims of the big names. I don't know. I didn't see the movie.
The book is charming; it starts out reasonably enough, the main characters get in suitably over their heads, but it ends with a nice heartwarming Christmas moral. Actually it's pretty standard stuff, but it's a nice ride and when Grisham published it the story was pretty fresh. You find yourself wanting to bop Luther over the head a couple times, though--just give in on this or that, you can put the dang Frosty up and get a tabletop tree so the neighbors won't talk and then you won't seem like such a nutjob. But so it goes. Some people become more fervent in their beliefs the more they're challenged on them, true believers, and Luther is one. Doesn't make him a grinch but he sure can come across that way from time to time.
Funny though: the book is structured like, and written in a tone befitting, a legal thriller. More noticeable to me perhaps as I'd just finished The Runaway Jury, but it was occasionally a bit distracting. I wish I could cite specific examples from the text, but I think it was more a feeling than anything specific. Still, if you haven't read this, don't let the lousy movie dissuade you. It's a fun Christmas story and a quick read, just right for this crazy season.
The Runaway Jury. This is a story about tobacco litigation and a juror with a rather specific plan in mind. We all know what Grisham is capable of and what he's good at, and this is a great yarn. The book may be 400+ pages long but it reads quickly and, like any good thriller, you want to keep reading and find out what happens next. Nothing new or unusual here. This isn't the greatest thriller in the world. It's probably not the greatest legal thriller in the world, and probably not even Grisham's best. But it's good enough, and that's good enough. I enjoyed it, and you can assume if you've read The Firm or any of his other works and enjoyed them, you'll like this one, too.
My favorite thing about The Runaway Jury was that the nasty bad evil character is actually likable. He's not really evil except in a somewhat esoteric sense, and he's surrounded by worse people anyway; he's just a mercenary who lets himself get excited about what he does. It's nice to see that. You know he's a bad apple and the people he works for are unethical and deserve what's coming to them, but by the middle of the book I really found myself liking him. He's sort of like a kid. It's nice to see somebody really enjoy their work, even if their work is very very naughty indeed.
I followed that up with
Skipping Christmas. This book was made into a movie last year, or maybe in 2005, called "Christmas with the Kranks," starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis. You may have seen it, although not too many people did and it was poorly reviewed. I talked to somebody while I was reading it this season who thought the movie might have been better if they'd made it with a couple of b-list actors in the starring roles, because then they might have been able to stick to the book a bit more and not cater to the whims of the big names. I don't know. I didn't see the movie.The book is charming; it starts out reasonably enough, the main characters get in suitably over their heads, but it ends with a nice heartwarming Christmas moral. Actually it's pretty standard stuff, but it's a nice ride and when Grisham published it the story was pretty fresh. You find yourself wanting to bop Luther over the head a couple times, though--just give in on this or that, you can put the dang Frosty up and get a tabletop tree so the neighbors won't talk and then you won't seem like such a nutjob. But so it goes. Some people become more fervent in their beliefs the more they're challenged on them, true believers, and Luther is one. Doesn't make him a grinch but he sure can come across that way from time to time.
Funny though: the book is structured like, and written in a tone befitting, a legal thriller. More noticeable to me perhaps as I'd just finished The Runaway Jury, but it was occasionally a bit distracting. I wish I could cite specific examples from the text, but I think it was more a feeling than anything specific. Still, if you haven't read this, don't let the lousy movie dissuade you. It's a fun Christmas story and a quick read, just right for this crazy season.
17 December 2007
Call Me Mr. Smitty
I must get two things out of the way that have been bothering me for several years:
1. I think George W. Bush has been and is a terrible president.
2. I can say that as much as I want and nobody can complain at all.
The first of those has been true at least since January 2003. The second has been true since, well, about 11:30 this morning. It is good. And it is bad. And there's more after the jump.
Switters would want me to embrace my inner contradictions, rather than attempting to resolve and eliminate them. I hate the Air Force, and have for years. I miss the Air Force, and will for years.
Buddha would want me to take the lessons from the past six years, but to forget, or ignore, the pain, the anger, the hatred, but also the joy and the excitement. Forgetting the emotions, I could draw from the past and use the lessons in the present to inform my choices and live better.
Switters had the easier plan. Buddha was probably right. I don't reckon I'll get either of them fully in hand.
Still, I am out. A few days of roadblocks and annoyance later, I am out. It was almost as if the Air Force's last gasp was to remind me why I wanted to get out so badly, why the endless stream of bureaucracy and the endless line of "no because" "it's not my job" clockpunching caged rats were reason enough, in the end, for me to get away. There were other reasons. No doubt over the next few months I'll be writing about them here. I kind of look forward to it. I have conflicting emotions about my time in the service: I'm proud of having served, certainly, proud of my service. I don't think what we've been doing for the last four and a half years was a good idea. Proud of my service though I am, I don't think it compares in the half to what folks in the Army and Marines and even the Guard are seeing and doing.
Some servicemen complain about "missing the war." In every war this is the case, airmen who are left behind manning the pursestrings and supply chains, sailors who deploy but ride a desk, soldiers who go to the desert and do nothing but schedule patrols instead of going out on them; there are always people who feel like they didn't do enough. To some degree that feeling affects everyone who's served and hasn't seen combat, and even some of those who have. Plenty of people are glad not to have had to fire a shot in anger, but when asked what they did in the war, these folks always shuffle their feet, inspect the tops of their shoes, and mutter something about logistics and enabling the war effort. I don't want to be one of those shufflers, but as the experience in Djibouti shows I was most definitely an enabler and not a fighter.
So be it. If I'd wanted to carry a gun through the desert and shoot people I'd have joined the Marines. I don't think I could shoot somebody anyway, not without being real damn scared, and I've never been that scared so I don't really know what I'd do. I hope not to find out. Enabler I was, but that was enough for me, if not all I could have done. I should be proud of that. I may not have done much in my time in Djibouti, but it was a cog that had to be filled, and by filling it I opened a space for somebody with actual skills to go out and build the schools and train the troops and drill the wells, and that was good. I may not have dropped the bombs that started the Falluja offensive in 2004, but I refueled the guys who did so, and they couldn't have done it without our crew. (That was a fun flight. I'll tell the story later.)
Still, the memory of the "enabling" that I did, over Iraq if not over Afghanistan (which I still maintain is a "good" war), is tainted somewhat by my fervent and longstanding--indeed unchanged for those who remember my rant following the 2003 state of the union address--disagreement with and disapproval of the war in Iraq. I helped with that whole Iraq thing; now please tell me why, again?
But I served during the middle of the 2000s, the Aughts, and this is what we're doing now, we're fighting to maintain some semblance of peace in a civil war we enabled in a country with no value to the world apart from its oil, a product our president's family made much of its money extracting and selling. I might as well have been in the Ugandan military, which did the same thing to the Congo. (The only difference is that Congo was right next door to Uganda, so the war was a lot cheaper. You didn't hear it from me, but Canada and Mexico both have oil.)
But I don't want to be stuck thinking that for the rest of my life. After all, regardless of how I feel about the actions underway while I was serving, I did at least join up and serve and do something. A small and decreasing percentage of Americans do that--even, if not especially, among the vocal right-wing hawk minority on college campuses (or should I say grad school campuses, which is where all the wingers go when they realize they've been supporting the war for four years and all their friends are going to expect them to actually go fight in the damn thing after graduating).
Which is not say that I disrespect or hold anything against people who don't or haven't or won't serve. Most of my good friends are in the group, and I respect what they do and have done in their lives every bit as much as they respect what I've done. The only people who bother me are those who stand in the back shouting "Go, Go, Go!" and never actually go themselves. Support the war or not, support the troops however you think you can (a yellow magnetic ribbon on your car, made in China no doubt, I don't really think does much, but that's just me; a tin of cookies, on the other hand, instantly and measurably boosts morale), but if you're going to stand up and declare that we MUST fight this war or MUST fight that one, and you're able-bodied, you had damn well better wedge yourself into a uniform and go fight it. Otherwise shut your yellow mouth. (And if you dare vote to send people out to die you really ought to be encouraging, if not demanding, that your own kids go off to war, too, you filthy hypocrites.)
Man I've been waiting a long time to say that. Congress can suck my dick!
That feels good. And I don't mean Congress doing you know what, I mean utilizing my right to free speech, which I apparently had to give up for a few years even in an unofficial capacity.
I know the regs. I can say whatever the fuck I want to as a private citizen and if my CO gets his panties in a wad and wants to call in the goddamned NCIS because I called the president a weiner, he's a fucking moron who doesn't know what's legal and what isn't and he should talk to the fucking lawyers first before sending me off to do it. God damned fucking piece of shit. And then try and make up for it by saying "sorry about your cat." Lameass motherfucking cocksucker.
Whee! Sorry about the language there but that's been stewing for 15 months. The longer it cooks the worse it gets, I swear it's not my fault.
Anyway. So that's that. I've already started the job search, and while I know I'll soon have to get used to a new set of must-do's and can't-say's, I look forward to it all the same. Truth be told work gives structure to our lives. Shame, that, but so it goes, we aren't living in the Magic Kingdom. I hope that some day I'll get to be a grown up, and say what I think (after thinking about it) instead of holding it in until it becomes an impotent profanity-laced diatribe. Maybe someday. Where is the post-scarcity economy anyway? Is it coming soon? I thought we'd be there by now, I want my Whuffie!
1. I think George W. Bush has been and is a terrible president.
2. I can say that as much as I want and nobody can complain at all.
The first of those has been true at least since January 2003. The second has been true since, well, about 11:30 this morning. It is good. And it is bad. And there's more after the jump.
Switters would want me to embrace my inner contradictions, rather than attempting to resolve and eliminate them. I hate the Air Force, and have for years. I miss the Air Force, and will for years.
Buddha would want me to take the lessons from the past six years, but to forget, or ignore, the pain, the anger, the hatred, but also the joy and the excitement. Forgetting the emotions, I could draw from the past and use the lessons in the present to inform my choices and live better.
Switters had the easier plan. Buddha was probably right. I don't reckon I'll get either of them fully in hand.
Still, I am out. A few days of roadblocks and annoyance later, I am out. It was almost as if the Air Force's last gasp was to remind me why I wanted to get out so badly, why the endless stream of bureaucracy and the endless line of "no because" "it's not my job" clockpunching caged rats were reason enough, in the end, for me to get away. There were other reasons. No doubt over the next few months I'll be writing about them here. I kind of look forward to it. I have conflicting emotions about my time in the service: I'm proud of having served, certainly, proud of my service. I don't think what we've been doing for the last four and a half years was a good idea. Proud of my service though I am, I don't think it compares in the half to what folks in the Army and Marines and even the Guard are seeing and doing.
Some servicemen complain about "missing the war." In every war this is the case, airmen who are left behind manning the pursestrings and supply chains, sailors who deploy but ride a desk, soldiers who go to the desert and do nothing but schedule patrols instead of going out on them; there are always people who feel like they didn't do enough. To some degree that feeling affects everyone who's served and hasn't seen combat, and even some of those who have. Plenty of people are glad not to have had to fire a shot in anger, but when asked what they did in the war, these folks always shuffle their feet, inspect the tops of their shoes, and mutter something about logistics and enabling the war effort. I don't want to be one of those shufflers, but as the experience in Djibouti shows I was most definitely an enabler and not a fighter.
So be it. If I'd wanted to carry a gun through the desert and shoot people I'd have joined the Marines. I don't think I could shoot somebody anyway, not without being real damn scared, and I've never been that scared so I don't really know what I'd do. I hope not to find out. Enabler I was, but that was enough for me, if not all I could have done. I should be proud of that. I may not have done much in my time in Djibouti, but it was a cog that had to be filled, and by filling it I opened a space for somebody with actual skills to go out and build the schools and train the troops and drill the wells, and that was good. I may not have dropped the bombs that started the Falluja offensive in 2004, but I refueled the guys who did so, and they couldn't have done it without our crew. (That was a fun flight. I'll tell the story later.)
Still, the memory of the "enabling" that I did, over Iraq if not over Afghanistan (which I still maintain is a "good" war), is tainted somewhat by my fervent and longstanding--indeed unchanged for those who remember my rant following the 2003 state of the union address--disagreement with and disapproval of the war in Iraq. I helped with that whole Iraq thing; now please tell me why, again?
But I served during the middle of the 2000s, the Aughts, and this is what we're doing now, we're fighting to maintain some semblance of peace in a civil war we enabled in a country with no value to the world apart from its oil, a product our president's family made much of its money extracting and selling. I might as well have been in the Ugandan military, which did the same thing to the Congo. (The only difference is that Congo was right next door to Uganda, so the war was a lot cheaper. You didn't hear it from me, but Canada and Mexico both have oil.)
But I don't want to be stuck thinking that for the rest of my life. After all, regardless of how I feel about the actions underway while I was serving, I did at least join up and serve and do something. A small and decreasing percentage of Americans do that--even, if not especially, among the vocal right-wing hawk minority on college campuses (or should I say grad school campuses, which is where all the wingers go when they realize they've been supporting the war for four years and all their friends are going to expect them to actually go fight in the damn thing after graduating).
Which is not say that I disrespect or hold anything against people who don't or haven't or won't serve. Most of my good friends are in the group, and I respect what they do and have done in their lives every bit as much as they respect what I've done. The only people who bother me are those who stand in the back shouting "Go, Go, Go!" and never actually go themselves. Support the war or not, support the troops however you think you can (a yellow magnetic ribbon on your car, made in China no doubt, I don't really think does much, but that's just me; a tin of cookies, on the other hand, instantly and measurably boosts morale), but if you're going to stand up and declare that we MUST fight this war or MUST fight that one, and you're able-bodied, you had damn well better wedge yourself into a uniform and go fight it. Otherwise shut your yellow mouth. (And if you dare vote to send people out to die you really ought to be encouraging, if not demanding, that your own kids go off to war, too, you filthy hypocrites.)
Man I've been waiting a long time to say that. Congress can suck my dick!
That feels good. And I don't mean Congress doing you know what, I mean utilizing my right to free speech, which I apparently had to give up for a few years even in an unofficial capacity.
I know the regs. I can say whatever the fuck I want to as a private citizen and if my CO gets his panties in a wad and wants to call in the goddamned NCIS because I called the president a weiner, he's a fucking moron who doesn't know what's legal and what isn't and he should talk to the fucking lawyers first before sending me off to do it. God damned fucking piece of shit. And then try and make up for it by saying "sorry about your cat." Lameass motherfucking cocksucker.
Whee! Sorry about the language there but that's been stewing for 15 months. The longer it cooks the worse it gets, I swear it's not my fault.
Anyway. So that's that. I've already started the job search, and while I know I'll soon have to get used to a new set of must-do's and can't-say's, I look forward to it all the same. Truth be told work gives structure to our lives. Shame, that, but so it goes, we aren't living in the Magic Kingdom. I hope that some day I'll get to be a grown up, and say what I think (after thinking about it) instead of holding it in until it becomes an impotent profanity-laced diatribe. Maybe someday. Where is the post-scarcity economy anyway? Is it coming soon? I thought we'd be there by now, I want my Whuffie!
11 December 2007
Holy shit
I just got a phone call from the office. My final out day is the 17th of December. I'll be a free man on the 18th. If I seem a bit high strung for the next week this is why.
05 December 2007
A plea for common sense
Listen up all current and potential future owners of Bed & Breakfast Inns:
If you absolutely insist on having music playing on your website, you need to have a mute button. It needs to be clear and readily evident to even slow-thinking internet users. Furthermore, the darned thing needs to actually work when a user clicks it. Not work for two seconds and then start playing again. Not work only as long as the mouse pointer is hovering over the mute button. If I click mute, the music should stop and stop for good until I say otherwise.
If you don't have tech staff capable of figuring out how to code such a thing--I certainly don't know how to do it but, and this is important, I know it can be done--then please don't put music on the website. Please
I may not like the song you've chosen. I may be at work. I may be using the computer at 1:30 in the morning and don't want to wake up my significant other who I'm trying to surprise with a visit to your inn. I may be listening to other music I actually like and don't want the interference.
The only good reason to have music on a website is when the website belongs to a musician, band, or music producer. Just because you can do it on Myspace doesn't mean it's a good idea generally. All of you who had blaring music I couldn't figure out how to turn off? I just navigated away from your website and won't bother researching whether to stay at your inn or not. You're off the list. I doubt anybody is going to choose your inn on the basis of the music on the website, but you can certainly turn customers off if they can't turn the music off.
Sheesh.
If you absolutely insist on having music playing on your website, you need to have a mute button. It needs to be clear and readily evident to even slow-thinking internet users. Furthermore, the darned thing needs to actually work when a user clicks it. Not work for two seconds and then start playing again. Not work only as long as the mouse pointer is hovering over the mute button. If I click mute, the music should stop and stop for good until I say otherwise.
If you don't have tech staff capable of figuring out how to code such a thing--I certainly don't know how to do it but, and this is important, I know it can be done--then please don't put music on the website. Please
I may not like the song you've chosen. I may be at work. I may be using the computer at 1:30 in the morning and don't want to wake up my significant other who I'm trying to surprise with a visit to your inn. I may be listening to other music I actually like and don't want the interference.
The only good reason to have music on a website is when the website belongs to a musician, band, or music producer. Just because you can do it on Myspace doesn't mean it's a good idea generally. All of you who had blaring music I couldn't figure out how to turn off? I just navigated away from your website and won't bother researching whether to stay at your inn or not. You're off the list. I doubt anybody is going to choose your inn on the basis of the music on the website, but you can certainly turn customers off if they can't turn the music off.
Sheesh.
03 December 2007
Pic Problem Fixed
We're status quo ante on the picture issue; clicks on pics will again show the pic in your browser instead of downloading.
More Smittytree!
I had a lot of posts to get up this morning; the next two are both new as well. But this one has cool pictures so I'm putting it on top. We spent Friday night decorating Smittytree and listening to Christmas music (incidentally, Sarah McLachlan's Christmas CD, Wintersong, is terrific), and took several wonderful pictures. Hopefully my camera battery isn't too dead for me to download the pictures. Hang on and I'll meet you after the Jump.
Okay, you remember the pictures from before of the tree and the tree with lights. Well, since you followed along after the jump you'll probably agree to indulge me with way too many pictures. I'll keep it quick, though.
First we put on all the glass orbs, which we mostly picked up at Jo-Ann, the fabric store. And since the tripod was already set up, I took this picture.
Next we opened up Smittygirl's box of ornaments, which are all terribly nice and fragile and scare me somewhat. The first to go on were these incredibly delicate beautiful blown glass pieces. And she added the bow that we had on the tree last year.
Then we started digging into the box of ornaments, and found the snowflakes and the stars from the Phillipines, and added those. The stars rock; there are only two of them but they're very cool. Here's a nice closeup of everything: orbs, blown glass, snowflake (it's turned to its side so you can only see part of it, just below the center of the picture), and the star is near the top left.
The tree was still missing a little something. Mainly that's because it's so big I guess. We went back to Jo-ann on Saturday and picked up some poinsettias and berries, and now the tree seems complete. It's very nice, I hope you'll agree.
And here's a final closeup with a little of everything.
I was playing around with exposures on every picture, so the color shifts reflect only my pathetic experiments and not the actual lighting conditions in the room. The warm yellow pictures are nice, but the cool blue ones are good, too. Trouble is I don't really remember what I was doing different each time. Duh, great experiments, huh, where you don't write down what you were actually doing.
Now all I need to do is get on the ball and get the lights put out and the porch decorated; then I can put the decoration boxes in the storage locker downstairs and start to reclaim the living room.
Okay, you remember the pictures from before of the tree and the tree with lights. Well, since you followed along after the jump you'll probably agree to indulge me with way too many pictures. I'll keep it quick, though.First we put on all the glass orbs, which we mostly picked up at Jo-Ann, the fabric store. And since the tripod was already set up, I took this picture.
Next we opened up Smittygirl's box of ornaments, which are all terribly nice and fragile and scare me somewhat. The first to go on were these incredibly delicate beautiful blown glass pieces. And she added the bow that we had on the tree last year. 
Then we started digging into the box of ornaments, and found the snowflakes and the stars from the Phillipines, and added those. The stars rock; there are only two of them but they're very cool. Here's a nice closeup of everything: orbs, blown glass, snowflake (it's turned to its side so you can only see part of it, just below the center of the picture), and the star is near the top left.
The tree was still missing a little something. Mainly that's because it's so big I guess. We went back to Jo-ann on Saturday and picked up some poinsettias and berries, and now the tree seems complete. It's very nice, I hope you'll agree.
And here's a final closeup with a little of everything.
I was playing around with exposures on every picture, so the color shifts reflect only my pathetic experiments and not the actual lighting conditions in the room. The warm yellow pictures are nice, but the cool blue ones are good, too. Trouble is I don't really remember what I was doing different each time. Duh, great experiments, huh, where you don't write down what you were actually doing.
Now all I need to do is get on the ball and get the lights put out and the porch decorated; then I can put the decoration boxes in the storage locker downstairs and start to reclaim the living room.
Lauderdale Returns
I've been thinking lately about Lauderdale. I've had three months here to do something with it and I haven't done a thing. Not sure why. During that time I haven't worked on much else writing-wise, either. But in the last two weeks I've taken a couple of days and worked mostly on writing. I've got three ideas in the pot right now and am dialing in on one of them. Two of them have titles (Wymer's Women and Lovebug Season), and the other one I've been referring to by the shorthand Adams-Koza--this is a really exciting project but one I won't be able to do alone. And there are about three other ideas behind those, things I've worked on in fits and starts and have some ideas for but nothing concrete enough to occupy meaningful space in my mind. I've rambled on for a long time after the jump, but I wouldn't post it if I didn't think at least some people might want to read it.
Friday I spent about four hours plotting Lovebug Season, enough that I've identified the three major problems I have to fix before I can timeline and start writing. One of them I've already solved, although I should probably write that down before I forget what it was. The third one I can probably start writing without solving, because it has to do with the epilogue and how much of one there should be. The biggest problem is with one of the characters; two of the three main characters in this story are amalgams of different people with fictional elements added. I like to say one is about half one person and half another, while a second is about a third me, a third another person, and a third nobody at all. But the third character is too similar to someone I know and needs a good bit of work before I can proceed. No big deal, though; I had the same problem with Gil Cass at first and he's unrecognizable as the person he used to be based on nowadays. Of course Gil Cass has yet to make an appearance in any story I've been serious about. He remains my second-oldest still extant character.
Last night though, lying in bed, I started mulling over Lauderdale again. The book had a lot of problems, I think at least five of my readers are well aware. I'd started working on several of them, in fact before I left Africa had written a fourth draft to solve a few. But the problems remaining were still fairly serious. At least one of my readers had mentioned that the entire focus of the book could stand a change, and when you get a response like that you know you have big issues. And I don't even want to talk about the problems like the puerile wink-wink treatment of sex or the narrator's obsessive cataloguing of mundane daily events early in the first third (or half) of the story. And the fact that about halfway through the book started to turn hardboiled and never figured out what it was trying to be. Ugh. I don't want to go into the whole mess.
I had spent some time last week going through in my head what needed to be fixed. The first novel I ever wrote, The Tragic Kingdom, once I finished it and had someone read it, I basically put it away and never tried to edit it or anything. And I doubt I ever will, it remains what it is: a warm-up. At least I want to view it that way. After I finished that I spent about eight years noodling around on different projects, including a sequel/rewriting of that book that took up gobs of time and produced a half-dozen projects that made it to about chapter five or chapter fifteen before petering out in a mess of political-junkie detail. I wasted three years trying to get a college book off the ground; I have at least four aborted attempts stored on my hard drive, two or three of which produced characters I very much like, but none of which looked capable of turning into anything useful. Three of them were too autobiographical; the fourth seemed like it would go somewhere and had a good cast, but I never got a handle on the plot and gave it up. I could go back to that one.
In any event, when on a 2005 deployment I sat down and returned to the long-cold ideas folder that contained one essay and an introduction and decided to give a go to writing about Fort Lauderdale, it came easy. I knew by the time I was halfway through, or more, that there was going to be serious reworking required on the first half, if not the whole thing. But it was so much fun to write, so easy to write. I so enjoyed the time I spent at the cabin writing it, and when I finished it up within three weeks of arriving in Africa I knew I had something that had to go out to readers so I could at least get a good idea of what it felt like to somebody who wasn't the inspiration for the narrator.
I knew it needed more help than I let on, so I'm apologizing for that now to my readers. I appreciate your help nonetheless and your comments have informed much of the changes I'm going to be making. The key thing, though, was this. It's been a year since I finished the second draft and sent it to readers. For most of that year it has sat and gathered dust (literally, because I printed the damn thing at Staples).
The question, really, is, am I going to write a novel? Am I ever going to be serious enough about this to publish something, or am I just one of those people who thinks they can write so they talk about how they're working on a novel, and maybe by the time they're fifty they actually produce something and give it to their spouse to read, and their spouse smiles and humors them and says it's wonderful, and it just ends there. Is that what I'm going to do? I don't need any reminders that I'm more than halfway to 50 and haven't actually published anything longer than a newspaper editorial.
After I got up and spent an hour putting down my thoughts about how to fix Lauderdale, things I've known for a while but hadn't collected in one place, I went back to bed--after two, so I've been dragging this morning--and I continued to think about it. Not about Lauderdale specifically anymore, but about what I was actually doing. Was I going to sit down and rescue this piece of fiction? It's not everybody who can commit themselves to writing a novel-length piece of fiction and have it all hang together, and I've done that twice now (although whether The Tragic Kingdom actually "hangs together" is a judgment perhaps best made by Ayzair and not by me), and though the quality isn't the best plenty of lousy novels have been published. Some have been hyped and made into bestsellers and made their authors a lot of money.
It is hardly a secret to regular readers here that I have no fucking clue what to do with my life. Law school? Grad school? This job, that job? Raging bender? Flying? Teaching? You name it, I've considered it, and I probably think it would be fun. And I also can't commit to it, either. Sometimes it's outside factors; I mean, I'd be in law school right now if the AF could get its act together, but I've said all there is to say about that. But if events don't conspire against me I still am incapable of settling on a course of action to guide my life.
In the past, at any of the innumerable opportunities I've had in life to sit down and say, damn, I don't know what to do with myself, and ponder the future, I've always known that I wanted to write. It's one of the few, if not the only, consistencies in my life. Shit, I used to want to go into politics, but I've decided that even decent politicians are shitheads and the system is too broken to be worth wasting one's time in. Even voting seems barely worthwhile anymore, but it's the only thing I can do. Speaking of which I need to change my registration.
Anyway. Last night I was thinking. The problem I have with writing... well, there are several, but one that kept me up for a while was this. I abandon finished projects and half-finished projects because they don't measure up to my standards, which are ill-defined at best. Actually, my standards change to suit the subject. If ever I write something good, like the Everglades piece, I find reasons why I can't publish it. I can find a reason not to try to publish anything, everything in fact that I've ever written. It's either not very good, not good enough to be worth trying, or it's good but nobody would want to publish it, or whatever. A thousand reasons.
Self-confidence has never been a strong suit of mine. It's why I lift weights, actually, it's what I'm compensating for (I maintain 100% of weightlifters and bodybuilders and so forth are compensating for something; not "most," all. Some of them are short, or have little wangs, sure, and some of them got picked on as kids or didn't get enough love from Dad growing up, but even the ones for whom that's not the case, and I think that's most of us, are still compensating for something, and it's just a question of whether they know what it is, are willing to admit it, and whether that stops them or not). I had hoped the military would help with this but it didn't, really. Yaay, I can fly a plane. I almost washed out of pilot training on three or four separate occasions and at one point in February of 2003 desperately prayed that I would wash out just so I wouldn't have to fear it anymore. Really. I've never told anybody that. It was a hard month. I did hook a checkride during that period of time. I could have washed myself out then, but I was too chicken to SIE (self-initiated elimination) and, when the chips were down, I was too proud to fuck up the 85 ride because I knew I was good enough to pass the damn thing. I am so goddamn screwed up in the head sometimes it's not even funny. I know now I was a better pilot than I ever let myself be in UPt and should have finished better than I did. That's not to say I was great; I'm too easily distracted and the sky and the cockpit both are just full of shiny objects to break my concentration. But I could have been middle-of-the-road instead of barely competent, and I proved that to my own satisfaction in the 135 and learned to actually enjoy flying most of the time.
Anyway. I think you can see where this is going. Writing isn't that hard for me. What's hard is the idea that I'd have to sign my name to a thing and send it out there for other people to decide whether it's worthy or not. And it's not like the industry is easy to break into or anything; hell, about a year ago I recall an agent copied word-for-word some of Jane Austen's lesser-known novels and sent them out under a fake name to a bunch of publishers as a first-time writer trying to break into the game. A couple of them caught on, but the ones that didn't, every single one of them, rejected the "manuscripts." Classics all, of course. Fucking asinine industry I want to break into, isn't it? Part of what's wrong with the world. You know one of the biggest first novels of recent years, Cold Mountain? I read that. I didn't really like it all that much, but it got so much damned press it was a fucking bestseller for weeks, and they made a movie out of it (which I watched with my folks, once... and sold it later because none of us had any desire to see it again, although it did convince my father and I both to look for the Foxfire books), and author's sophomore effort was roundly denigrated by the reviewers. Of course whether the reviewers have any fucking clue what's good or not we have no idea, really. Anyway. I hate this industry, that's the point here, but for the last 15 fucking years it's the only industry I've consistently wanted to be a part of.
I just lack the confidence to do it. And I'm never going to just magically develop it, either; that ship has sailed. I never picked that up in my childhood and you don't get it when you're thirty. You either accept it for what it is, and you lift weights and remind yourself of it every time you do and get on with your life, or you don't accept it and turn your back and spend the rest of your life in therapy wondering why you never seem to succeed at anything. Fuck that. I've tried the therapy thing. It worked for what I needed, but I don't have free access to a psychologist anymore, or won't soon, and anyway people who spend their lives in therapy are just the saddest sort of people I can imagine. When the economy goes in the tank and we're all living with half the standard of living we thought we'd have at this point in history are you going to be able to go to a shrink? No. Self confidence or not, the ability to get up in the morning and do what you have to do comes from within you, and that ability has only a small foundation in self-confidence. The rest of it comes from knowing you have to do something whether you believe it'll work or not.
Anyway. At one point last night I debated whether I was just avoiding the obvious and this was in fact what I was "supposed" to be doing with my life, writing. And then I slipped into what has been my standard philosophical debate of late, whether indeed there is any "supposed" at all, whether the notion of humans having prechosen paths that we need only follow to find happiness, a notion I simply cannot square (are we really to believe that some people are called to be garbage collectors while others are called to be billionaire CEOs?). This was not necessarily a productive area of debate and thankfully I drifted off to sleep eventually, although by the time Smittygirl was up and getting ready for work I was still unable to rouse myself from bed having had only a few hours sleep.
Meanwhile I've used three separate spoons to stir the milk into my tea this morning, each time carefully setting the spoon aside so I'll know to use it to stir milk into the next cup.
So. I'm at an interesting juncture in life right now. Soon I'll be married, and we're planning to move to a more favorable climate. I can't take work right now because I'm still on active duty, despite the fact that my resignation's been in since September. I've covered all this and the situation isn't likely to change soon. By the time I can get a job, I'll be looking at a wedding and honeymoon in the very near future, and then a potential move, so I won't be trying to get a long-term career-oriented job. I'll just need money. That should be a relatively stress-free thing, then, whenever it comes to pass, and as a friend of mine has pointed out in the past it's often easier to be productive at writing (or whatever else) when you have a lot to do than when you have nothing significant to occupy you.
Last night at the store I was reading the cover of a collection of Washington Irving stories, and learned that he was the first American to make a living exclusively from writing, something remarkable then and still not terribly common today. There are of course a number of very successful commercial fiction writers who make their living exclusively by writing books, but that number isn't terribly large, probably fewer than 100 in the whole country. Most writers teach or have other work on the side, and even many of the very successful ones supplement their income in that way. It's life, you gotta do what you gotta do to get by. I'm lucky; my gorgeous fiancee happens to also be smart as a whip and enjoys her work, so I don't have to worry about supporting a family solo. I will have time, in my life, even though I'll have to work, to write. And if I'm going to be serious about it, now is a great time to start it. I can't do much else, and with the move completed, much of the wedding planning accomplished, and things set for a while, I have little reason not to jump into it.
Lovebug Season remains deeply intriguing, but I feel a compunction to revise and finish Lauderdale, to not simply leave it and move on, because if I do that, if I continue that trend, where will it end? Probably never. I'll get to a point with Lovebug Season, maybe even finish it, and decide it's not good enough and move on to another project, and so on. Bad idea. Whether this is what I'm supposed to do or not, whether indeed any of us are meant for anything particular at all, the fact remains that self confidence be damned this is what I want to do.
The real question is why has it taken thirty years for me to reach this point? Have I been here before and failed to capitalize on it? I hope not; if so, don't tell me, I don't want to know. Now, if I miss this opportunity, it's not like I'll never have another. But I will kick myself, and I've been doing that for most of my life. It's time to grow up.
Friday I spent about four hours plotting Lovebug Season, enough that I've identified the three major problems I have to fix before I can timeline and start writing. One of them I've already solved, although I should probably write that down before I forget what it was. The third one I can probably start writing without solving, because it has to do with the epilogue and how much of one there should be. The biggest problem is with one of the characters; two of the three main characters in this story are amalgams of different people with fictional elements added. I like to say one is about half one person and half another, while a second is about a third me, a third another person, and a third nobody at all. But the third character is too similar to someone I know and needs a good bit of work before I can proceed. No big deal, though; I had the same problem with Gil Cass at first and he's unrecognizable as the person he used to be based on nowadays. Of course Gil Cass has yet to make an appearance in any story I've been serious about. He remains my second-oldest still extant character.
Last night though, lying in bed, I started mulling over Lauderdale again. The book had a lot of problems, I think at least five of my readers are well aware. I'd started working on several of them, in fact before I left Africa had written a fourth draft to solve a few. But the problems remaining were still fairly serious. At least one of my readers had mentioned that the entire focus of the book could stand a change, and when you get a response like that you know you have big issues. And I don't even want to talk about the problems like the puerile wink-wink treatment of sex or the narrator's obsessive cataloguing of mundane daily events early in the first third (or half) of the story. And the fact that about halfway through the book started to turn hardboiled and never figured out what it was trying to be. Ugh. I don't want to go into the whole mess.
I had spent some time last week going through in my head what needed to be fixed. The first novel I ever wrote, The Tragic Kingdom, once I finished it and had someone read it, I basically put it away and never tried to edit it or anything. And I doubt I ever will, it remains what it is: a warm-up. At least I want to view it that way. After I finished that I spent about eight years noodling around on different projects, including a sequel/rewriting of that book that took up gobs of time and produced a half-dozen projects that made it to about chapter five or chapter fifteen before petering out in a mess of political-junkie detail. I wasted three years trying to get a college book off the ground; I have at least four aborted attempts stored on my hard drive, two or three of which produced characters I very much like, but none of which looked capable of turning into anything useful. Three of them were too autobiographical; the fourth seemed like it would go somewhere and had a good cast, but I never got a handle on the plot and gave it up. I could go back to that one.
In any event, when on a 2005 deployment I sat down and returned to the long-cold ideas folder that contained one essay and an introduction and decided to give a go to writing about Fort Lauderdale, it came easy. I knew by the time I was halfway through, or more, that there was going to be serious reworking required on the first half, if not the whole thing. But it was so much fun to write, so easy to write. I so enjoyed the time I spent at the cabin writing it, and when I finished it up within three weeks of arriving in Africa I knew I had something that had to go out to readers so I could at least get a good idea of what it felt like to somebody who wasn't the inspiration for the narrator.
I knew it needed more help than I let on, so I'm apologizing for that now to my readers. I appreciate your help nonetheless and your comments have informed much of the changes I'm going to be making. The key thing, though, was this. It's been a year since I finished the second draft and sent it to readers. For most of that year it has sat and gathered dust (literally, because I printed the damn thing at Staples).
The question, really, is, am I going to write a novel? Am I ever going to be serious enough about this to publish something, or am I just one of those people who thinks they can write so they talk about how they're working on a novel, and maybe by the time they're fifty they actually produce something and give it to their spouse to read, and their spouse smiles and humors them and says it's wonderful, and it just ends there. Is that what I'm going to do? I don't need any reminders that I'm more than halfway to 50 and haven't actually published anything longer than a newspaper editorial.
After I got up and spent an hour putting down my thoughts about how to fix Lauderdale, things I've known for a while but hadn't collected in one place, I went back to bed--after two, so I've been dragging this morning--and I continued to think about it. Not about Lauderdale specifically anymore, but about what I was actually doing. Was I going to sit down and rescue this piece of fiction? It's not everybody who can commit themselves to writing a novel-length piece of fiction and have it all hang together, and I've done that twice now (although whether The Tragic Kingdom actually "hangs together" is a judgment perhaps best made by Ayzair and not by me), and though the quality isn't the best plenty of lousy novels have been published. Some have been hyped and made into bestsellers and made their authors a lot of money.
It is hardly a secret to regular readers here that I have no fucking clue what to do with my life. Law school? Grad school? This job, that job? Raging bender? Flying? Teaching? You name it, I've considered it, and I probably think it would be fun. And I also can't commit to it, either. Sometimes it's outside factors; I mean, I'd be in law school right now if the AF could get its act together, but I've said all there is to say about that. But if events don't conspire against me I still am incapable of settling on a course of action to guide my life.
In the past, at any of the innumerable opportunities I've had in life to sit down and say, damn, I don't know what to do with myself, and ponder the future, I've always known that I wanted to write. It's one of the few, if not the only, consistencies in my life. Shit, I used to want to go into politics, but I've decided that even decent politicians are shitheads and the system is too broken to be worth wasting one's time in. Even voting seems barely worthwhile anymore, but it's the only thing I can do. Speaking of which I need to change my registration.
Anyway. Last night I was thinking. The problem I have with writing... well, there are several, but one that kept me up for a while was this. I abandon finished projects and half-finished projects because they don't measure up to my standards, which are ill-defined at best. Actually, my standards change to suit the subject. If ever I write something good, like the Everglades piece, I find reasons why I can't publish it. I can find a reason not to try to publish anything, everything in fact that I've ever written. It's either not very good, not good enough to be worth trying, or it's good but nobody would want to publish it, or whatever. A thousand reasons.
Self-confidence has never been a strong suit of mine. It's why I lift weights, actually, it's what I'm compensating for (I maintain 100% of weightlifters and bodybuilders and so forth are compensating for something; not "most," all. Some of them are short, or have little wangs, sure, and some of them got picked on as kids or didn't get enough love from Dad growing up, but even the ones for whom that's not the case, and I think that's most of us, are still compensating for something, and it's just a question of whether they know what it is, are willing to admit it, and whether that stops them or not). I had hoped the military would help with this but it didn't, really. Yaay, I can fly a plane. I almost washed out of pilot training on three or four separate occasions and at one point in February of 2003 desperately prayed that I would wash out just so I wouldn't have to fear it anymore. Really. I've never told anybody that. It was a hard month. I did hook a checkride during that period of time. I could have washed myself out then, but I was too chicken to SIE (self-initiated elimination) and, when the chips were down, I was too proud to fuck up the 85 ride because I knew I was good enough to pass the damn thing. I am so goddamn screwed up in the head sometimes it's not even funny. I know now I was a better pilot than I ever let myself be in UPt and should have finished better than I did. That's not to say I was great; I'm too easily distracted and the sky and the cockpit both are just full of shiny objects to break my concentration. But I could have been middle-of-the-road instead of barely competent, and I proved that to my own satisfaction in the 135 and learned to actually enjoy flying most of the time.
Anyway. I think you can see where this is going. Writing isn't that hard for me. What's hard is the idea that I'd have to sign my name to a thing and send it out there for other people to decide whether it's worthy or not. And it's not like the industry is easy to break into or anything; hell, about a year ago I recall an agent copied word-for-word some of Jane Austen's lesser-known novels and sent them out under a fake name to a bunch of publishers as a first-time writer trying to break into the game. A couple of them caught on, but the ones that didn't, every single one of them, rejected the "manuscripts." Classics all, of course. Fucking asinine industry I want to break into, isn't it? Part of what's wrong with the world. You know one of the biggest first novels of recent years, Cold Mountain? I read that. I didn't really like it all that much, but it got so much damned press it was a fucking bestseller for weeks, and they made a movie out of it (which I watched with my folks, once... and sold it later because none of us had any desire to see it again, although it did convince my father and I both to look for the Foxfire books), and author's sophomore effort was roundly denigrated by the reviewers. Of course whether the reviewers have any fucking clue what's good or not we have no idea, really. Anyway. I hate this industry, that's the point here, but for the last 15 fucking years it's the only industry I've consistently wanted to be a part of.
I just lack the confidence to do it. And I'm never going to just magically develop it, either; that ship has sailed. I never picked that up in my childhood and you don't get it when you're thirty. You either accept it for what it is, and you lift weights and remind yourself of it every time you do and get on with your life, or you don't accept it and turn your back and spend the rest of your life in therapy wondering why you never seem to succeed at anything. Fuck that. I've tried the therapy thing. It worked for what I needed, but I don't have free access to a psychologist anymore, or won't soon, and anyway people who spend their lives in therapy are just the saddest sort of people I can imagine. When the economy goes in the tank and we're all living with half the standard of living we thought we'd have at this point in history are you going to be able to go to a shrink? No. Self confidence or not, the ability to get up in the morning and do what you have to do comes from within you, and that ability has only a small foundation in self-confidence. The rest of it comes from knowing you have to do something whether you believe it'll work or not.
Anyway. At one point last night I debated whether I was just avoiding the obvious and this was in fact what I was "supposed" to be doing with my life, writing. And then I slipped into what has been my standard philosophical debate of late, whether indeed there is any "supposed" at all, whether the notion of humans having prechosen paths that we need only follow to find happiness, a notion I simply cannot square (are we really to believe that some people are called to be garbage collectors while others are called to be billionaire CEOs?). This was not necessarily a productive area of debate and thankfully I drifted off to sleep eventually, although by the time Smittygirl was up and getting ready for work I was still unable to rouse myself from bed having had only a few hours sleep.
Meanwhile I've used three separate spoons to stir the milk into my tea this morning, each time carefully setting the spoon aside so I'll know to use it to stir milk into the next cup.
So. I'm at an interesting juncture in life right now. Soon I'll be married, and we're planning to move to a more favorable climate. I can't take work right now because I'm still on active duty, despite the fact that my resignation's been in since September. I've covered all this and the situation isn't likely to change soon. By the time I can get a job, I'll be looking at a wedding and honeymoon in the very near future, and then a potential move, so I won't be trying to get a long-term career-oriented job. I'll just need money. That should be a relatively stress-free thing, then, whenever it comes to pass, and as a friend of mine has pointed out in the past it's often easier to be productive at writing (or whatever else) when you have a lot to do than when you have nothing significant to occupy you.
Last night at the store I was reading the cover of a collection of Washington Irving stories, and learned that he was the first American to make a living exclusively from writing, something remarkable then and still not terribly common today. There are of course a number of very successful commercial fiction writers who make their living exclusively by writing books, but that number isn't terribly large, probably fewer than 100 in the whole country. Most writers teach or have other work on the side, and even many of the very successful ones supplement their income in that way. It's life, you gotta do what you gotta do to get by. I'm lucky; my gorgeous fiancee happens to also be smart as a whip and enjoys her work, so I don't have to worry about supporting a family solo. I will have time, in my life, even though I'll have to work, to write. And if I'm going to be serious about it, now is a great time to start it. I can't do much else, and with the move completed, much of the wedding planning accomplished, and things set for a while, I have little reason not to jump into it.
Lovebug Season remains deeply intriguing, but I feel a compunction to revise and finish Lauderdale, to not simply leave it and move on, because if I do that, if I continue that trend, where will it end? Probably never. I'll get to a point with Lovebug Season, maybe even finish it, and decide it's not good enough and move on to another project, and so on. Bad idea. Whether this is what I'm supposed to do or not, whether indeed any of us are meant for anything particular at all, the fact remains that self confidence be damned this is what I want to do.
The real question is why has it taken thirty years for me to reach this point? Have I been here before and failed to capitalize on it? I hope not; if so, don't tell me, I don't want to know. Now, if I miss this opportunity, it's not like I'll never have another. But I will kick myself, and I've been doing that for most of my life. It's time to grow up.
Lauderdale Returns
I've been thinking lately about Lauderdale. I've had three months here to do something with it and I haven't done a thing. Not sure why. During that time I haven't worked on much else writing-wise, either. But in the last two weeks I've taken a couple of days and worked mostly on writing. I've got three ideas in the pot right now and am dialing in on one of them. Two of them have titles (Wymer's Women and Lovebug Season), and the other one I've been referring to by the shorthand Adams-Koza--this is a really exciting project but one I won't be able to do alone. And there are about three other ideas behind those, things I've worked on in fits and starts and have some ideas for but nothing concrete enough to occupy meaningful space in my mind. I've rambled on for a long time after the jump, but I wouldn't post it if I didn't think at least some people might want to read it.
Friday I spent about four hours plotting Lovebug Season, enough that I've identified the three major problems I have to fix before I can timeline and start writing. One of them I've already solved, although I should probably write that down before I forget what it was. The third one I can probably start writing without solving, because it has to do with the epilogue and how much of one there should be. The biggest problem is with one of the characters; two of the three main characters in this story are amalgams of different people with fictional elements added. I like to say one is about half one person and half another, while a second is about a third me, a third another person, and a third nobody at all. But the third character is too similar to someone I know and needs a good bit of work before I can proceed. No big deal, though; I had the same problem with Gil Cass at first and he's unrecognizable as the person he used to be based on nowadays. Of course Gil Cass has yet to make an appearance in any story I've been serious about. He remains my second-oldest still extant character.
Last night though, lying in bed, I started mulling over Lauderdale again. The book had a lot of problems, I think at least five of my readers are well aware. I'd started working on several of them, in fact before I left Africa had written a fourth draft to solve a few. But the problems remaining were still fairly serious. At least one of my readers had mentioned that the entire focus of the book could stand a change, and when you get a response like that you know you have big issues. And I don't even want to talk about the problems like the puerile wink-wink treatment of sex or the narrator's obsessive cataloguing of mundane daily events early in the first third (or half) of the story. And the fact that about halfway through the book started to turn hardboiled and never figured out what it was trying to be. Ugh. I don't want to go into the whole mess.
I had spent some time last week going through in my head what needed to be fixed. The first novel I ever wrote, The Tragic Kingdom, once I finished it and had someone read it, I basically put it away and never tried to edit it or anything. And I doubt I ever will, it remains what it is: a warm-up. At least I want to view it that way. After I finished that I spent about eight years noodling around on different projects, including a sequel/rewriting of that book that took up gobs of time and produced a half-dozen projects that made it to about chapter five or chapter fifteen before petering out in a mess of political-junkie detail. I wasted three years trying to get a college book off the ground; I have at least four aborted attempts stored on my hard drive, two or three of which produced characters I very much like, but none of which looked capable of turning into anything useful. Three of them were too autobiographical; the fourth seemed like it would go somewhere and had a good cast, but I never got a handle on the plot and gave it up. I could go back to that one.
In any event, when on a 2005 deployment I sat down and returned to the long-cold ideas folder that contained one essay and an introduction and decided to give a go to writing about Fort Lauderdale, it came easy. I knew by the time I was halfway through, or more, that there was going to be serious reworking required on the first half, if not the whole thing. But it was so much fun to write, so easy to write. I so enjoyed the time I spent at the cabin writing it, and when I finished it up within three weeks of arriving in Africa I knew I had something that had to go out to readers so I could at least get a good idea of what it felt like to somebody who wasn't the inspiration for the narrator.
I knew it needed more help than I let on, so I'm apologizing for that now to my readers. I appreciate your help nonetheless and your comments have informed much of the changes I'm going to be making. The key thing, though, was this. It's been a year since I finished the second draft and sent it to readers. For most of that year it has sat and gathered dust (literally, because I printed the damn thing at Staples).
The question, really, is, am I going to write a novel? Am I ever going to be serious enough about this to publish something, or am I just one of those people who thinks they can write so they talk about how they're working on a novel, and maybe by the time they're fifty they actually produce something and give it to their spouse to read, and their spouse smiles and humors them and says it's wonderful, and it just ends there. Is that what I'm going to do? I don't need any reminders that I'm more than halfway to 50 and haven't actually published anything longer than a newspaper editorial.
After I got up and spent an hour putting down my thoughts about how to fix Lauderdale, things I've known for a while but hadn't collected in one place, I went back to bed--after two, so I've been dragging this morning--and I continued to think about it. Not about Lauderdale specifically anymore, but about what I was actually doing. Was I going to sit down and rescue this piece of fiction? It's not everybody who can commit themselves to writing a novel-length piece of fiction and have it all hang together, and I've done that twice now (although whether The Tragic Kingdom actually "hangs together" is a judgment perhaps best made by Ayzair and not by me), and though the quality isn't the best plenty of lousy novels have been published. Some have been hyped and made into bestsellers and made their authors a lot of money.
It is hardly a secret to regular readers here that I have no fucking clue what to do with my life. Law school? Grad school? This job, that job? Raging bender? Flying? Teaching? You name it, I've considered it, and I probably think it would be fun. And I also can't commit to it, either. Sometimes it's outside factors; I mean, I'd be in law school right now if the AF could get its act together, but I've said all there is to say about that. But if events don't conspire against me I still am incapable of settling on a course of action to guide my life.
In the past, at any of the innumerable opportunities I've had in life to sit down and say, damn, I don't know what to do with myself, and ponder the future, I've always known that I wanted to write. It's one of the few, if not the only, consistencies in my life. Shit, I used to want to go into politics, but I've decided that even decent politicians are shitheads and the system is too broken to be worth wasting one's time in. Even voting seems barely worthwhile anymore, but it's the only thing I can do. Speaking of which I need to change my registration.
Anyway. Last night I was thinking. The problem I have with writing... well, there are several, but one that kept me up for a while was this. I abandon finished projects and half-finished projects because they don't measure up to my standards, which are ill-defined at best. Actually, my standards change to suit the subject. If ever I write something good, like the Everglades piece, I find reasons why I can't publish it. I can find a reason not to try to publish anything, everything in fact that I've ever written. It's either not very good, not good enough to be worth trying, or it's good but nobody would want to publish it, or whatever. A thousand reasons.
Self-confidence has never been a strong suit of mine. It's why I lift weights, actually, it's what I'm compensating for (I maintain 100% of weightlifters and bodybuilders and so forth are compensating for something; not "most," all. Some of them are short, or have little wangs, sure, and some of them got picked on as kids or didn't get enough love from Dad growing up, but even the ones for whom that's not the case, and I think that's most of us, are still compensating for something, and it's just a question of whether they know what it is, are willing to admit it, and whether that stops them or not). I had hoped the military would help with this but it didn't, really. Yaay, I can fly a plane. I almost washed out of pilot training on three or four separate occasions and at one point in February of 2003 desperately prayed that I would wash out just so I wouldn't have to fear it anymore. Really. I've never told anybody that. It was a hard month. I did hook a checkride during that period of time. I could have washed myself out then, but I was too chicken to SIE (self-initiated elimination) and, when the chips were down, I was too proud to fuck up the 85 ride because I knew I was good enough to pass the damn thing. I am so goddamn screwed up in the head sometimes it's not even funny. I know now I was a better pilot than I ever let myself be in UPt and should have finished better than I did. That's not to say I was great; I'm too easily distracted and the sky and the cockpit both are just full of shiny objects to break my concentration. But I could have been middle-of-the-road instead of barely competent, and I proved that to my own satisfaction in the 135 and learned to actually enjoy flying most of the time.
Anyway. I think you can see where this is going. Writing isn't that hard for me. What's hard is the idea that I'd have to sign my name to a thing and send it out there for other people to decide whether it's worthy or not. And it's not like the industry is easy to break into or anything; hell, about a year ago I recall an agent copied word-for-word some of Jane Austen's lesser-known novels and sent them out under a fake name to a bunch of publishers as a first-time writer trying to break into the game. A couple of them caught on, but the ones that didn't, every single one of them, rejected the "manuscripts." Classics all, of course. Fucking asinine industry I want to break into, isn't it? Part of what's wrong with the world. You know one of the biggest first novels of recent years, Cold Mountain? I read that. I didn't really like it all that much, but it got so much damned press it was a fucking bestseller for weeks, and they made a movie out of it (which I watched with my folks, once... and sold it later because none of us had any desire to see it again, although it did convince my father and I both to look for the Foxfire books), and author's sophomore effort was roundly denigrated by the reviewers. Of course whether the reviewers have any fucking clue what's good or not we have no idea, really. Anyway. I hate this industry, that's the point here, but for the last 15 fucking years it's the only industry I've consistently wanted to be a part of.
I just lack the confidence to do it. And I'm never going to just magically develop it, either; that ship has sailed. I never picked that up in my childhood and you don't get it when you're thirty. You either accept it for what it is, and you lift weights and remind yourself of it every time you do and get on with your life, or you don't accept it and turn your back and spend the rest of your life in therapy wondering why you never seem to succeed at anything. Fuck that. I've tried the therapy thing. It worked for what I needed, but I don't have free access to a psychologist anymore, or won't soon, and anyway people who spend their lives in therapy are just the saddest sort of people I can imagine. When the economy goes in the tank and we're all living with half the standard of living we thought we'd have at this point in history are you going to be able to go to a shrink? No. Self confidence or not, the ability to get up in the morning and do what you have to do comes from within you, and that ability has only a small foundation in self-confidence. The rest of it comes from knowing you have to do something whether you believe it'll work or not.
Anyway. At one point last night I debated whether I was just avoiding the obvious and this was in fact what I was "supposed" to be doing with my life, writing. And then I slipped into what has been my standard philosophical debate of late, whether indeed there is any "supposed" at all, whether the notion of humans having prechosen paths that we need only follow to find happiness, a notion I simply cannot square (are we really to believe that some people are called to be garbage collectors while others are called to be billionaire CEOs?). This was not necessarily a productive area of debate and thankfully I drifted off to sleep eventually, although by the time Smittygirl was up and getting ready for work I was still unable to rouse myself from bed having had only a few hours sleep.
Meanwhile I've used three separate spoons to stir the milk into my tea this morning, each time carefully setting the spoon aside so I'll know to use it to stir milk into the next cup.
So. I'm at an interesting juncture in life right now. Soon I'll be married, and we're planning to move to a more favorable climate. I can't take work right now because I'm still on active duty, despite the fact that my resignation's been in since September. I've covered all this and the situation isn't likely to change soon. By the time I can get a job, I'll be looking at a wedding and honeymoon in the very near future, and then a potential move, so I won't be trying to get a long-term career-oriented job. I'll just need money. That should be a relatively stress-free thing, then, whenever it comes to pass, and as a friend of mine has pointed out in the past it's often easier to be productive at writing (or whatever else) when you have a lot to do than when you have nothing significant to occupy you.
Last night at the store I was reading the cover of a collection of Washington Irving stories, and learned that he was the first American to make a living exclusively from writing, something remarkable then and still not terribly common today. There are of course a number of very successful commercial fiction writers who make their living exclusively by writing books, but that number isn't terribly large, probably fewer than 100 in the whole country. Most writers teach or have other work on the side, and even many of the very successful ones supplement their income in that way. It's life, you gotta do what you gotta do to get by. I'm lucky; my gorgeous fiancee happens to also be smart as a whip and enjoys her work, so I don't have to worry about supporting a family solo. I will have time, in my life, even though I'll have to work, to write. And if I'm going to be serious about it, now is a great time to start it. I can't do much else, and with the move completed, much of the wedding planning accomplished, and things set for a while, I have little reason not to jump into it.
Lovebug Season remains deeply intriguing, but I feel a compunction to revise and finish Lauderdale, to not simply leave it and move on, because if I do that, if I continue that trend, where will it end? Probably never. I'll get to a point with Lovebug Season, maybe even finish it, and decide it's not good enough and move on to another project, and so on. Bad idea. Whether this is what I'm supposed to do or not, whether indeed any of us are meant for anything particular at all, the fact remains that self confidence be damned this is what I want to do.
The real question is why has it taken thirty years for me to reach this point? Have I been here before and failed to capitalize on it? I hope not; if so, don't tell me, I don't want to know. Now, if I miss this opportunity, it's not like I'll never have another. But I will kick myself, and I've been doing that for most of my life. It's time to grow up.
Friday I spent about four hours plotting Lovebug Season, enough that I've identified the three major problems I have to fix before I can timeline and start writing. One of them I've already solved, although I should probably write that down before I forget what it was. The third one I can probably start writing without solving, because it has to do with the epilogue and how much of one there should be. The biggest problem is with one of the characters; two of the three main characters in this story are amalgams of different people with fictional elements added. I like to say one is about half one person and half another, while a second is about a third me, a third another person, and a third nobody at all. But the third character is too similar to someone I know and needs a good bit of work before I can proceed. No big deal, though; I had the same problem with Gil Cass at first and he's unrecognizable as the person he used to be based on nowadays. Of course Gil Cass has yet to make an appearance in any story I've been serious about. He remains my second-oldest still extant character.
Last night though, lying in bed, I started mulling over Lauderdale again. The book had a lot of problems, I think at least five of my readers are well aware. I'd started working on several of them, in fact before I left Africa had written a fourth draft to solve a few. But the problems remaining were still fairly serious. At least one of my readers had mentioned that the entire focus of the book could stand a change, and when you get a response like that you know you have big issues. And I don't even want to talk about the problems like the puerile wink-wink treatment of sex or the narrator's obsessive cataloguing of mundane daily events early in the first third (or half) of the story. And the fact that about halfway through the book started to turn hardboiled and never figured out what it was trying to be. Ugh. I don't want to go into the whole mess.
I had spent some time last week going through in my head what needed to be fixed. The first novel I ever wrote, The Tragic Kingdom, once I finished it and had someone read it, I basically put it away and never tried to edit it or anything. And I doubt I ever will, it remains what it is: a warm-up. At least I want to view it that way. After I finished that I spent about eight years noodling around on different projects, including a sequel/rewriting of that book that took up gobs of time and produced a half-dozen projects that made it to about chapter five or chapter fifteen before petering out in a mess of political-junkie detail. I wasted three years trying to get a college book off the ground; I have at least four aborted attempts stored on my hard drive, two or three of which produced characters I very much like, but none of which looked capable of turning into anything useful. Three of them were too autobiographical; the fourth seemed like it would go somewhere and had a good cast, but I never got a handle on the plot and gave it up. I could go back to that one.
In any event, when on a 2005 deployment I sat down and returned to the long-cold ideas folder that contained one essay and an introduction and decided to give a go to writing about Fort Lauderdale, it came easy. I knew by the time I was halfway through, or more, that there was going to be serious reworking required on the first half, if not the whole thing. But it was so much fun to write, so easy to write. I so enjoyed the time I spent at the cabin writing it, and when I finished it up within three weeks of arriving in Africa I knew I had something that had to go out to readers so I could at least get a good idea of what it felt like to somebody who wasn't the inspiration for the narrator.
I knew it needed more help than I let on, so I'm apologizing for that now to my readers. I appreciate your help nonetheless and your comments have informed much of the changes I'm going to be making. The key thing, though, was this. It's been a year since I finished the second draft and sent it to readers. For most of that year it has sat and gathered dust (literally, because I printed the damn thing at Staples).
The question, really, is, am I going to write a novel? Am I ever going to be serious enough about this to publish something, or am I just one of those people who thinks they can write so they talk about how they're working on a novel, and maybe by the time they're fifty they actually produce something and give it to their spouse to read, and their spouse smiles and humors them and says it's wonderful, and it just ends there. Is that what I'm going to do? I don't need any reminders that I'm more than halfway to 50 and haven't actually published anything longer than a newspaper editorial.
After I got up and spent an hour putting down my thoughts about how to fix Lauderdale, things I've known for a while but hadn't collected in one place, I went back to bed--after two, so I've been dragging this morning--and I continued to think about it. Not about Lauderdale specifically anymore, but about what I was actually doing. Was I going to sit down and rescue this piece of fiction? It's not everybody who can commit themselves to writing a novel-length piece of fiction and have it all hang together, and I've done that twice now (although whether The Tragic Kingdom actually "hangs together" is a judgment perhaps best made by Ayzair and not by me), and though the quality isn't the best plenty of lousy novels have been published. Some have been hyped and made into bestsellers and made their authors a lot of money.
It is hardly a secret to regular readers here that I have no fucking clue what to do with my life. Law school? Grad school? This job, that job? Raging bender? Flying? Teaching? You name it, I've considered it, and I probably think it would be fun. And I also can't commit to it, either. Sometimes it's outside factors; I mean, I'd be in law school right now if the AF could get its act together, but I've said all there is to say about that. But if events don't conspire against me I still am incapable of settling on a course of action to guide my life.
In the past, at any of the innumerable opportunities I've had in life to sit down and say, damn, I don't know what to do with myself, and ponder the future, I've always known that I wanted to write. It's one of the few, if not the only, consistencies in my life. Shit, I used to want to go into politics, but I've decided that even decent politicians are shitheads and the system is too broken to be worth wasting one's time in. Even voting seems barely worthwhile anymore, but it's the only thing I can do. Speaking of which I need to change my registration.
Anyway. Last night I was thinking. The problem I have with writing... well, there are several, but one that kept me up for a while was this. I abandon finished projects and half-finished projects because they don't measure up to my standards, which are ill-defined at best. Actually, my standards change to suit the subject. If ever I write something good, like the Everglades piece, I find reasons why I can't publish it. I can find a reason not to try to publish anything, everything in fact that I've ever written. It's either not very good, not good enough to be worth trying, or it's good but nobody would want to publish it, or whatever. A thousand reasons.
Self-confidence has never been a strong suit of mine. It's why I lift weights, actually, it's what I'm compensating for (I maintain 100% of weightlifters and bodybuilders and so forth are compensating for something; not "most," all. Some of them are short, or have little wangs, sure, and some of them got picked on as kids or didn't get enough love from Dad growing up, but even the ones for whom that's not the case, and I think that's most of us, are still compensating for something, and it's just a question of whether they know what it is, are willing to admit it, and whether that stops them or not). I had hoped the military would help with this but it didn't, really. Yaay, I can fly a plane. I almost washed out of pilot training on three or four separate occasions and at one point in February of 2003 desperately prayed that I would wash out just so I wouldn't have to fear it anymore. Really. I've never told anybody that. It was a hard month. I did hook a checkride during that period of time. I could have washed myself out then, but I was too chicken to SIE (self-initiated elimination) and, when the chips were down, I was too proud to fuck up the 85 ride because I knew I was good enough to pass the damn thing. I am so goddamn screwed up in the head sometimes it's not even funny. I know now I was a better pilot than I ever let myself be in UPt and should have finished better than I did. That's not to say I was great; I'm too easily distracted and the sky and the cockpit both are just full of shiny objects to break my concentration. But I could have been middle-of-the-road instead of barely competent, and I proved that to my own satisfaction in the 135 and learned to actually enjoy flying most of the time.
Anyway. I think you can see where this is going. Writing isn't that hard for me. What's hard is the idea that I'd have to sign my name to a thing and send it out there for other people to decide whether it's worthy or not. And it's not like the industry is easy to break into or anything; hell, about a year ago I recall an agent copied word-for-word some of Jane Austen's lesser-known novels and sent them out under a fake name to a bunch of publishers as a first-time writer trying to break into the game. A couple of them caught on, but the ones that didn't, every single one of them, rejected the "manuscripts." Classics all, of course. Fucking asinine industry I want to break into, isn't it? Part of what's wrong with the world. You know one of the biggest first novels of recent years, Cold Mountain? I read that. I didn't really like it all that much, but it got so much damned press it was a fucking bestseller for weeks, and they made a movie out of it (which I watched with my folks, once... and sold it later because none of us had any desire to see it again, although it did convince my father and I both to look for the Foxfire books), and author's sophomore effort was roundly denigrated by the reviewers. Of course whether the reviewers have any fucking clue what's good or not we have no idea, really. Anyway. I hate this industry, that's the point here, but for the last 15 fucking years it's the only industry I've consistently wanted to be a part of.
I just lack the confidence to do it. And I'm never going to just magically develop it, either; that ship has sailed. I never picked that up in my childhood and you don't get it when you're thirty. You either accept it for what it is, and you lift weights and remind yourself of it every time you do and get on with your life, or you don't accept it and turn your back and spend the rest of your life in therapy wondering why you never seem to succeed at anything. Fuck that. I've tried the therapy thing. It worked for what I needed, but I don't have free access to a psychologist anymore, or won't soon, and anyway people who spend their lives in therapy are just the saddest sort of people I can imagine. When the economy goes in the tank and we're all living with half the standard of living we thought we'd have at this point in history are you going to be able to go to a shrink? No. Self confidence or not, the ability to get up in the morning and do what you have to do comes from within you, and that ability has only a small foundation in self-confidence. The rest of it comes from knowing you have to do something whether you believe it'll work or not.
Anyway. At one point last night I debated whether I was just avoiding the obvious and this was in fact what I was "supposed" to be doing with my life, writing. And then I slipped into what has been my standard philosophical debate of late, whether indeed there is any "supposed" at all, whether the notion of humans having prechosen paths that we need only follow to find happiness, a notion I simply cannot square (are we really to believe that some people are called to be garbage collectors while others are called to be billionaire CEOs?). This was not necessarily a productive area of debate and thankfully I drifted off to sleep eventually, although by the time Smittygirl was up and getting ready for work I was still unable to rouse myself from bed having had only a few hours sleep.
Meanwhile I've used three separate spoons to stir the milk into my tea this morning, each time carefully setting the spoon aside so I'll know to use it to stir milk into the next cup.
So. I'm at an interesting juncture in life right now. Soon I'll be married, and we're planning to move to a more favorable climate. I can't take work right now because I'm still on active duty, despite the fact that my resignation's been in since September. I've covered all this and the situation isn't likely to change soon. By the time I can get a job, I'll be looking at a wedding and honeymoon in the very near future, and then a potential move, so I won't be trying to get a long-term career-oriented job. I'll just need money. That should be a relatively stress-free thing, then, whenever it comes to pass, and as a friend of mine has pointed out in the past it's often easier to be productive at writing (or whatever else) when you have a lot to do than when you have nothing significant to occupy you.
Last night at the store I was reading the cover of a collection of Washington Irving stories, and learned that he was the first American to make a living exclusively from writing, something remarkable then and still not terribly common today. There are of course a number of very successful commercial fiction writers who make their living exclusively by writing books, but that number isn't terribly large, probably fewer than 100 in the whole country. Most writers teach or have other work on the side, and even many of the very successful ones supplement their income in that way. It's life, you gotta do what you gotta do to get by. I'm lucky; my gorgeous fiancee happens to also be smart as a whip and enjoys her work, so I don't have to worry about supporting a family solo. I will have time, in my life, even though I'll have to work, to write. And if I'm going to be serious about it, now is a great time to start it. I can't do much else, and with the move completed, much of the wedding planning accomplished, and things set for a while, I have little reason not to jump into it.
Lovebug Season remains deeply intriguing, but I feel a compunction to revise and finish Lauderdale, to not simply leave it and move on, because if I do that, if I continue that trend, where will it end? Probably never. I'll get to a point with Lovebug Season, maybe even finish it, and decide it's not good enough and move on to another project, and so on. Bad idea. Whether this is what I'm supposed to do or not, whether indeed any of us are meant for anything particular at all, the fact remains that self confidence be damned this is what I want to do.
The real question is why has it taken thirty years for me to reach this point? Have I been here before and failed to capitalize on it? I hope not; if so, don't tell me, I don't want to know. Now, if I miss this opportunity, it's not like I'll never have another. But I will kick myself, and I've been doing that for most of my life. It's time to grow up.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
This is such a weird little book, quite unlike any other novel I've read recently, but it's just a joy. It's the first book by its author, Paul Torday, and one of a handful of books I've picked up after reading reviews in The Economist. Thank goodness one of their reviewers has an oddball taste in literature because I haven't read a bad one from their selection yet; this may be the best yet. The rest of the review follows...The author and the book are fully and completely British in every way, so there are some things here that are confusing to a yank. Yemen is referred to as "the" Yemen every single time it's referred to at all, a Britishism dating back to the Empire that I've never fully understood, and there are extracts from Hansard, without much explanation of what that is. However, the book contains a handy glossary, which is part of the narrative and used for mild comic effect--a "gillie" is described as a "man or boy employed on many Scottish rivers to stand at your elbow and explain why you are unlikely to catch a fish wih your present technique." Herein the Hansard is described as a the official record of the houses of Parliament.
There is nothing at all bad about any of this of course. And there's not much to complain about in the book itself, either. The characters are drawn well and are intriguing, the various plot threads are wound tightly together and each affects the other in meaningful ways. The twin romances surrounding the main character, Dr. Jones (if indeed he is the main character), are so excruciatingly well drawn you practically fall in love with him, too. This is a good sign.
Of course the premise of the book is ridiculous: a plan to introduce highland salmon fishing to the Yemen. The salmon would swim up a seasonal stream during the monsoon season, spawn, and then... well, then, says the project's creator, that's up to Dr. Jones to figure out what to do with them. Of course Dr. Jones is not just skeptical at first; he dictates a memo indicating precisely how stupid the idea is and that he won't waste a moment's time on it. Then, of course, politics gets in the way and off we go.
I loved this book, and the thing is, despite it's quirkiness (that's the word I was looking for earlier), I'd be happy recommending it to most any of my friends. It's just that charming and fun, and it's a quick read. This may be the best novel I've read this year.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
This is such a weird little book, quite unlike any other novel I've read recently, but it's just a joy. It's the first book by its author, Paul Torday, and one of a handful of books I've picked up after reading reviews in The Economist. Thank goodness one of their reviewers has an oddball taste in literature because I haven't read a bad one from their selection yet; this may be the best yet. The rest of the review follows...The author and the book are fully and completely British in every way, so there are some things here that are confusing to a yank. Yemen is referred to as "the" Yemen every single time it's referred to at all, a Britishism dating back to the Empire that I've never fully understood, and there are extracts from Hansard, without much explanation of what that is. However, the book contains a handy glossary, which is part of the narrative and used for mild comic effect--a "gillie" is described as a "man or boy employed on many Scottish rivers to stand at your elbow and explain why you are unlikely to catch a fish wih your present technique." Herein the Hansard is described as a the official record of the houses of Parliament.
There is nothing at all bad about any of this of course. And there's not much to complain about in the book itself, either. The characters are drawn well and are intriguing, the various plot threads are wound tightly together and each affects the other in meaningful ways. The twin romances surrounding the main character, Dr. Jones (if indeed he is the main character), are so excruciatingly well drawn you practically fall in love with him, too. This is a good sign.
Of course the premise of the book is ridiculous: a plan to introduce highland salmon fishing to the Yemen. The salmon would swim up a seasonal stream during the monsoon season, spawn, and then... well, then, says the project's creator, that's up to Dr. Jones to figure out what to do with them. Of course Dr. Jones is not just skeptical at first; he dictates a memo indicating precisely how stupid the idea is and that he won't waste a moment's time on it. Then, of course, politics gets in the way and off we go.
I loved this book, and the thing is, despite it's quirkiness (that's the word I was looking for earlier), I'd be happy recommending it to most any of my friends. It's just that charming and fun, and it's a quick read. This may be the best novel I've read this year.
30 November 2007
Crazy Pictures
I've been playing with my camera a bit lately, as I mentioned earlier. No lighted Christmas tree pictures, but I might have to fool with that, too. Anyway, here is a picture of Tampa taken from the balcony.
I've been playing with the tripod and it worked pretty well considering that it's darn close to falling apart. Next nice night we have I'm going to try some nice nighttime skyline pictures.
Anyway, using the tripod I took about 10 pictures at various apertures and shutter speeds. I should have used a single aperture and varied the shutter speeds for this to work best, but it was my first attempt. I combined all the pictures using a program called Qtpfsgui (no, that's really the name) and used a basic tone formatting filter to come up with this.I frankly don't think that's any better than the first image, and probably is worse, really. Not that interesting; I definitely need to play a bit more, and maybe try some close-up things, too. You can see where the mimosa leaves in the lower left were being blown about by the wind.
I wanted to get something really cool, though, which meant using a funky fresh filter I don't understand. This one is called Fattal. I think that's the name of one of the developers. After about 27 tries I came up with this here. This I think is pretty cool, although of course it doesn't look a thing like a real picture. Still, it is nifty.
I don't know what is up with blogger but for some reason on this post it seems to be forcing you to download the full size pictures instead of just linking to them in the same window like it's supposed to. In any event, rest assured there's nothing hiding in these pictures to infect your computer. And the third one really is cool.
29 November 2007
Smittytree!
It's that time of year again! Yaay! Last year Smittygirl and I got an adorable little tree from the Target down on Gandy and decorated it. I don't think I have pictures, but it was very cute. This year we went back to Target and looked at small trees again, but there were only four to choose from and they were only $5 less than a six foot tree. So we have a six foot tree. Yaay, it feels like a real home with a real Christmas Tree! I've missed that so much the last few years, I can't even tell you.
Of course, we got Smittytree on a busy Sunday this weekend, and had other errands to run and chores to do, so we set the tree up and watered it and let it relax a little, but didn't decorate. So here is Smittytree before:
Of course we had to put the topper on right away, to make sure the tree knew it was loved. But I of course can't decorate during the day without Smittygirl (decorate the tree myself? It's a family thing, and we're a family now) and we've been ungodly busy this week in the evenings moving and cleaning and whatnot at Smittygirl's former apartment. Last night, after investigating the horrible racket being made by one of the vent fans on the roof of the condo, we put lights on the tree.
I could take another picture today and show you, but that would be silly because you couldn't see the lights. But I've been playing with the manual feature on my camera lately--it's always been there, but I never could figure out how to make it work--and let me tell you, it's like a new love affair with this thing now. I'm taking all my pictures on manual. It has a 2-second exposure setting, and this is what the tree looks like (from a different angle; I steadied it on the bookshelf):
Sweet, huh? Tonight maybe we'll add a few more decorations, and I'll take another picture.
Christmas is so much fun. Now if only I knew what to get ANYBODY on my list...
Of course, we got Smittytree on a busy Sunday this weekend, and had other errands to run and chores to do, so we set the tree up and watered it and let it relax a little, but didn't decorate. So here is Smittytree before:
Of course we had to put the topper on right away, to make sure the tree knew it was loved. But I of course can't decorate during the day without Smittygirl (decorate the tree myself? It's a family thing, and we're a family now) and we've been ungodly busy this week in the evenings moving and cleaning and whatnot at Smittygirl's former apartment. Last night, after investigating the horrible racket being made by one of the vent fans on the roof of the condo, we put lights on the tree.
I could take another picture today and show you, but that would be silly because you couldn't see the lights. But I've been playing with the manual feature on my camera lately--it's always been there, but I never could figure out how to make it work--and let me tell you, it's like a new love affair with this thing now. I'm taking all my pictures on manual. It has a 2-second exposure setting, and this is what the tree looks like (from a different angle; I steadied it on the bookshelf):
Sweet, huh? Tonight maybe we'll add a few more decorations, and I'll take another picture.
Christmas is so much fun. Now if only I knew what to get ANYBODY on my list...
26 November 2007
I Am Not Alone
Read this. Or skim it anyway. It's long. Or just follow the jump and read on. I am pleased this morning to find that although I've spent a good deal of time sitting here reading instead of doing something productive, I've learned I am not alone in wondering what to make of Christian doctrines of eternal damnation.
This paragraph comes from a site written by a Christian seeking to debunk notions of hell. I can't find his name, but he links to tentmaker.org. Anyway
I asked this question earlier, in the dream post. What are we, indeed, to make of a God who is Love but who condemns millions--billions--of His created souls to everlasting torment in hell? The notion of an eternal hell, a lake of fire if you will, is a great contradiction in teachings of Christianity. How can we love our neighbors and turn the other cheek if we're being taught that the Blessed will be saddened "Not in the least" (Martin Luther) by seeing their loved ones tormented in hell?
What kind of religion of love produced this:
St. Thomas Aquinas: "That the saints may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly, and give more abundant thanks to God for it, a perfect sight of punishment of the damned is granted them."
Peter Lombard: "Therefore the elect shall go forth…to see the torments of the impious, seeing which they will not be grieved, but will be satiated with joy at the sight of the unutterable calamity of the impious."
Jonathan Edwards: “The view of the misery of the damned will double the ardour of the love and gratitude of the saints of heaven.”
John Calvin: "There are babies a span long in hell."
J.I. Packer, writing in Christianity Today in 2002: "...love and pity for hell's occupants will not enter our hearts."
That's not a religion of love! That's a religion of hatred! Of glorying in the damnation of others! That right there, that kind of talk, that is what leads to hatred here on Earth, leads to people supposing themselves good Christians seeking to destroy all those who don't believe as they do! And the men who wrote those lines supposed themselves great Christians, great leaders of the faithful.
It's this doctrine, this doctrine that hell is real and final and that seeing souls tormented there will please the holy, this doctrine has spread so much hatred and wrath in the Earth--in the real, actual Earth, that we're stuck with right now no matter what comes next.
Compare against the Buddha, who said that because death means nothingness, no more consciousness, then the current life is all we have. Thus we must seek enlightenment in this lifetime, and thus we must do good and have mercy, and seek to ease the suffering of all those who share the Earth with us, because we all have just this short time. Life is suffering! Life is dissatisfying! But it is so for all people, and so we must each work to reduce the suffering of our brothers. What a great message!
And look again at Christ's message: turn the other cheek! Repent! Love they neighbor, and do not speak badly about him. Watch your tongue, only speak positively or not at all; engage in right works, have charity, be kind to all others, show them the light. Teach them of God's mercy and love. Overcome your enemies with love, as Christ overcame his enemies with love; lo, for Christ overcame even the grave with love. Christ didn't teach us to slay the wicked, he told us to love them and teach them. The Bible doesn't include any reference to "babies a span long in hell;" indeed, it may not even reference what we think of as hell.
MT 15:13-14, ...Every plant not planted by my heavenly Father will be rooted up, so ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind...
Not everyone who comes saying they know the word of God really knows, not everyone who teaches in the name of God teaches God's word.
MT 15:9, Their worship is a farce, for they replace God's commands with their own human teachings.
So much of religion is a human construct, it's tempting at times, especially for me, to say ALL of it is. But worship that ignores or cherry-picks parts from God's teachings is a farce. And worship that creates new layers not evident in God's teachings--babies a span long in hell, for instance, or indeed even the lake of fire itself--is worse still, not just a farce, but a man-made construct applied onto God's teachings by a preacher who doesn't think God's word is enough to win converts on its own.
That's the greatest damnation right there, people who feel they must add something else onto God's teaching to win people to the faith, because God wasn't good enough until they came along. Limbo, which Benedict XVI recently abrogated, is a good example. People asking questions about God wondered what became of unbaptized babies, so Catholic theologians created the idea of limbo, which has no scriptural basis. They added on to God's religion because it wasn't good enough on its own. How arrogant is that? It's the concept of Limbo that led to John Calvin's baby quote I've repeated here. Calvin was rejecting the Catholic creation of Limbo for what it was, a human farce, but he erred by insisting on something that Jesus certainly never said, that doesn't come from the Bible itself. Hell? Translated from "sheol" and "hades," both words meaning nothing more than "hidden" or "covered up" and both referring to the grave. What happens after death? You go to sheol--you are hidden, covered up, and we don't know any more beyond that.
Funny, mystical Talmudic Judaism and all that, but here they were thousands of years ago admitting that frankly, after you die, you go to sheol, the hidden place, and that's all there is to say about that. Indeed, let's go right back to Genesis, where God said that the penalty for eating from the tree of knowledge was death, not eternal damnation in a lake of fire. (I don't read Genesis literally and believe in evolution, but I like this part of Genesis a great deal because not only does it show God threatening Adam with death rather than eternal damnation, it shows God giving Adam a choice--God gave Adam free will from minute one.)
How about Cain and Abel? Cain was banished, not sent to an eternal lake of fire and damnation. Cain and Abel is a parable and not a literal story (in my view), but if the writer seeking to teach from this parable also wanted to teach about eternal damnation, why would he simply have Cain banished? Hell is a recent invention, not ancient at all. Indeed, the Mosaic Law in Deuteronomy and Leviticus discusses blessings to come in this life, on this Earth, and curses that may come in this life, on this Earth. The penalty for disobeying God's commandments wasn't eternal torture in hell, it was real. It was present, and it was handed down by judges who's job was to determine what you had done wrong, and punish you in accordance with the law laid down by God. This is all very earthly stuff, and there's no mention of eternal damnation here.
The Jews burned children alive in the valley of the son of Hinnom (ga ben Hinnom, Gehenna in Greek, a place name that would later be translated as "hell") to appease their god Molech. God says in Jeremiah 32:35 that such a thing never even entered His mind. Why would God say that if He intended to--in fact was at that very moment--burn millions of souls in a lake of fire for all eternity? The fact is, the Tanakh has no mention of hell in it at all. It refers to death as sheol, being hidden and covered. It admits that death is unknown and unknowable. It does not claim the existence of hell.
Jesus spoke to listeners well-versed in the Tanakh, with great understanding of what "sheol" meant, and with a long cultural tradition of what ga ben Hinnom (Gehenna) was--a valley where the ancient Jews had sacrificed their children, angering and saddening God. A valley where the Jews had burned hundreds of thousands of the Assyrian invaders, the army of Sennacherib, after God slew them in the night as they laid siege to Jerusalem. A valley that in Jesus' time was a trash dump, a place where the bodies of executed criminals were thrown, where the refuse of the city of Jerusalem was burned. To be sent to Gehenna meant to be utterly wiped away from memory, burned with the garbage and common criminals. It did not have the connotation of eternity, except in the sense of being forgotten. It was a real a present calamity, and a threat that the Jews would have well understood--to be threatened with burning in Gehenna meant being forgotten by all, including God.
That's what hell should be, really, not a lake of pain and torture but the notion of being forgotten forever, never to return. That is what Jesus warned of. If the souls of the blessed will be raised again from the Earth, what will happen to the souls that were condemned? They will be forgotten. They will no longer exist. The blessed won't take comfort in watching the damned writhe in agony; they will have forgotten the damned. They won't remember them at all.
That's my own interpretation of course, and I just warned against that, but it is at the very least closer in my mind to what Jesus actually taught and what his listeners actually understand from their own religious writings than is any lake of fire or any span of babies.
Buddha said death was nothingness. Here we see that sheol also is an unknown end, the grave, being covered, being hidden. Jesus spent time in sheol, where He was hidden, covered, unknowable. When He returned He didn't describe his time in a burning lake of fire. He didn't even describe His time at all. He didn't come back and talk about a bright light, a corridor, meeting all his friends who'd passed away. He didn't bring a message from John the Baptist or Moses. He didn't spend time hanging with His pals. He was hidden. He defeated death and rose again from the grave, and that is sufficient, that is enough. That is all that we need to know. And Jesus' words and actions are consistent with sheol simply being a place of nothingness. What did Jesus do in those three days? He was gone, removed from the Earth, as we must all be. But he came back to show us that it could be done through faith in Him and God.
Here's another good bit. From Isaiah, 46:10, "I will do all my pleasure." God will do everything He wants to do. He is God, after all. 55:11-12, "It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it. You will live in joy and peace..." And what is it God wants to do? Ezekiel, 33:11, "As surely as I live, says the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of wicked people. I only want them to turn from their wicked ways so they can live." If God will do all He pleasures, and he wants everyone to live and does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked, why would hell exist? Why would God, who created everything, create a place for the wicked to be tormented for all eternity if He doesn't take any pleasure in that? Why, also, would any Christian theologian exclaim that the righteous would take pleasure in seeing the torment of the wicked, if God Himself would not? What were these people smoking?
Indeed, continuing on in Ezekiel 33, God notes that He will destroy those who are wicked, and again that the wicked shall surely die. Die, be destroyed. They will not rise again from sheol, in other words, but where does God say here that He will torment them eternally in a lake of fire? Why would he do that? He just got through telling them he wants them all to come to Him, and if that is what He wants then surely in time He will cause it to happen.
You may think me crazy. But I'd like to see concrete scriptural evidence for hell as envisioned by Calvin and others. Instead I see Isaiah noting (53:11) that Christ's salvation would be satisfying to God: When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish, he will be satisfied. And because of what he has experienced, my righteous servant will make it possible for many to be counted righteous, for he will bear all their sins."
Even in Isaiah 66:22-24, the Lord does not threaten the unrighteous with eternal suffering. Their bodies will lie in a ditch, and the worms that eat them will never die, and the fire that burns them will never go out. The bodies will lie there, and all who pass by will be horrified (they certainly won't rejoice and find comfort in watching the bodies of the unrighteous burn). That certainly speaks to the notion that God will indeed destroy those who turn against Him, but it doesn't make any claims about lakes of eternal fire.
Hell is a human construction, a human notion, used by humans to frighten other humans into behaving in a certain way, a way that for many hundreds of years allowed the vast majority to live in grinding poverty while the privileged few grew fat off their work, all while claiming to glorify God. Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called "God is not great: how religion poisons everything." I agree with the latter clause, because we humans create religion and use it to exert power over others, even to the point of breaking the rules of the religion we created. God, on the other hand, is surely Great, if we could just get around to finally living as He suggested, instead of using Him as a sword and a ram to slay and batter those around us.
This paragraph comes from a site written by a Christian seeking to debunk notions of hell. I can't find his name, but he links to tentmaker.org. Anyway
How can a God who said He came to save the world –Who said He accomplished what He came to do (draw all mankind to Himself) end up terrorizing 99 percent of all humanity by burning them alive forever in a lake of fire!? Satan is the author of confusion, not Jesus. This doctrine which says that God is love and yet has allowed a course to run in which almost all of those He created will be ultimately estranged from Him is NOT sound doctrine, it does not bring peace to the soul, it TERRORIZES people! And it is perhaps the greatest lie Satan has ever perpetrated on this planet.
I asked this question earlier, in the dream post. What are we, indeed, to make of a God who is Love but who condemns millions--billions--of His created souls to everlasting torment in hell? The notion of an eternal hell, a lake of fire if you will, is a great contradiction in teachings of Christianity. How can we love our neighbors and turn the other cheek if we're being taught that the Blessed will be saddened "Not in the least" (Martin Luther) by seeing their loved ones tormented in hell?
What kind of religion of love produced this:
St. Thomas Aquinas: "That the saints may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly, and give more abundant thanks to God for it, a perfect sight of punishment of the damned is granted them."
Peter Lombard: "Therefore the elect shall go forth…to see the torments of the impious, seeing which they will not be grieved, but will be satiated with joy at the sight of the unutterable calamity of the impious."
Jonathan Edwards: “The view of the misery of the damned will double the ardour of the love and gratitude of the saints of heaven.”
John Calvin: "There are babies a span long in hell."
J.I. Packer, writing in Christianity Today in 2002: "...love and pity for hell's occupants will not enter our hearts."
That's not a religion of love! That's a religion of hatred! Of glorying in the damnation of others! That right there, that kind of talk, that is what leads to hatred here on Earth, leads to people supposing themselves good Christians seeking to destroy all those who don't believe as they do! And the men who wrote those lines supposed themselves great Christians, great leaders of the faithful.
It's this doctrine, this doctrine that hell is real and final and that seeing souls tormented there will please the holy, this doctrine has spread so much hatred and wrath in the Earth--in the real, actual Earth, that we're stuck with right now no matter what comes next.
Compare against the Buddha, who said that because death means nothingness, no more consciousness, then the current life is all we have. Thus we must seek enlightenment in this lifetime, and thus we must do good and have mercy, and seek to ease the suffering of all those who share the Earth with us, because we all have just this short time. Life is suffering! Life is dissatisfying! But it is so for all people, and so we must each work to reduce the suffering of our brothers. What a great message!
And look again at Christ's message: turn the other cheek! Repent! Love they neighbor, and do not speak badly about him. Watch your tongue, only speak positively or not at all; engage in right works, have charity, be kind to all others, show them the light. Teach them of God's mercy and love. Overcome your enemies with love, as Christ overcame his enemies with love; lo, for Christ overcame even the grave with love. Christ didn't teach us to slay the wicked, he told us to love them and teach them. The Bible doesn't include any reference to "babies a span long in hell;" indeed, it may not even reference what we think of as hell.
MT 15:13-14, ...Every plant not planted by my heavenly Father will be rooted up, so ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind...
Not everyone who comes saying they know the word of God really knows, not everyone who teaches in the name of God teaches God's word.
MT 15:9, Their worship is a farce, for they replace God's commands with their own human teachings.
So much of religion is a human construct, it's tempting at times, especially for me, to say ALL of it is. But worship that ignores or cherry-picks parts from God's teachings is a farce. And worship that creates new layers not evident in God's teachings--babies a span long in hell, for instance, or indeed even the lake of fire itself--is worse still, not just a farce, but a man-made construct applied onto God's teachings by a preacher who doesn't think God's word is enough to win converts on its own.
That's the greatest damnation right there, people who feel they must add something else onto God's teaching to win people to the faith, because God wasn't good enough until they came along. Limbo, which Benedict XVI recently abrogated, is a good example. People asking questions about God wondered what became of unbaptized babies, so Catholic theologians created the idea of limbo, which has no scriptural basis. They added on to God's religion because it wasn't good enough on its own. How arrogant is that? It's the concept of Limbo that led to John Calvin's baby quote I've repeated here. Calvin was rejecting the Catholic creation of Limbo for what it was, a human farce, but he erred by insisting on something that Jesus certainly never said, that doesn't come from the Bible itself. Hell? Translated from "sheol" and "hades," both words meaning nothing more than "hidden" or "covered up" and both referring to the grave. What happens after death? You go to sheol--you are hidden, covered up, and we don't know any more beyond that.
Funny, mystical Talmudic Judaism and all that, but here they were thousands of years ago admitting that frankly, after you die, you go to sheol, the hidden place, and that's all there is to say about that. Indeed, let's go right back to Genesis, where God said that the penalty for eating from the tree of knowledge was death, not eternal damnation in a lake of fire. (I don't read Genesis literally and believe in evolution, but I like this part of Genesis a great deal because not only does it show God threatening Adam with death rather than eternal damnation, it shows God giving Adam a choice--God gave Adam free will from minute one.)
How about Cain and Abel? Cain was banished, not sent to an eternal lake of fire and damnation. Cain and Abel is a parable and not a literal story (in my view), but if the writer seeking to teach from this parable also wanted to teach about eternal damnation, why would he simply have Cain banished? Hell is a recent invention, not ancient at all. Indeed, the Mosaic Law in Deuteronomy and Leviticus discusses blessings to come in this life, on this Earth, and curses that may come in this life, on this Earth. The penalty for disobeying God's commandments wasn't eternal torture in hell, it was real. It was present, and it was handed down by judges who's job was to determine what you had done wrong, and punish you in accordance with the law laid down by God. This is all very earthly stuff, and there's no mention of eternal damnation here.
The Jews burned children alive in the valley of the son of Hinnom (ga ben Hinnom, Gehenna in Greek, a place name that would later be translated as "hell") to appease their god Molech. God says in Jeremiah 32:35 that such a thing never even entered His mind. Why would God say that if He intended to--in fact was at that very moment--burn millions of souls in a lake of fire for all eternity? The fact is, the Tanakh has no mention of hell in it at all. It refers to death as sheol, being hidden and covered. It admits that death is unknown and unknowable. It does not claim the existence of hell.
Jesus spoke to listeners well-versed in the Tanakh, with great understanding of what "sheol" meant, and with a long cultural tradition of what ga ben Hinnom (Gehenna) was--a valley where the ancient Jews had sacrificed their children, angering and saddening God. A valley where the Jews had burned hundreds of thousands of the Assyrian invaders, the army of Sennacherib, after God slew them in the night as they laid siege to Jerusalem. A valley that in Jesus' time was a trash dump, a place where the bodies of executed criminals were thrown, where the refuse of the city of Jerusalem was burned. To be sent to Gehenna meant to be utterly wiped away from memory, burned with the garbage and common criminals. It did not have the connotation of eternity, except in the sense of being forgotten. It was a real a present calamity, and a threat that the Jews would have well understood--to be threatened with burning in Gehenna meant being forgotten by all, including God.
That's what hell should be, really, not a lake of pain and torture but the notion of being forgotten forever, never to return. That is what Jesus warned of. If the souls of the blessed will be raised again from the Earth, what will happen to the souls that were condemned? They will be forgotten. They will no longer exist. The blessed won't take comfort in watching the damned writhe in agony; they will have forgotten the damned. They won't remember them at all.
That's my own interpretation of course, and I just warned against that, but it is at the very least closer in my mind to what Jesus actually taught and what his listeners actually understand from their own religious writings than is any lake of fire or any span of babies.
Buddha said death was nothingness. Here we see that sheol also is an unknown end, the grave, being covered, being hidden. Jesus spent time in sheol, where He was hidden, covered, unknowable. When He returned He didn't describe his time in a burning lake of fire. He didn't even describe His time at all. He didn't come back and talk about a bright light, a corridor, meeting all his friends who'd passed away. He didn't bring a message from John the Baptist or Moses. He didn't spend time hanging with His pals. He was hidden. He defeated death and rose again from the grave, and that is sufficient, that is enough. That is all that we need to know. And Jesus' words and actions are consistent with sheol simply being a place of nothingness. What did Jesus do in those three days? He was gone, removed from the Earth, as we must all be. But he came back to show us that it could be done through faith in Him and God.
Here's another good bit. From Isaiah, 46:10, "I will do all my pleasure." God will do everything He wants to do. He is God, after all. 55:11-12, "It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it. You will live in joy and peace..." And what is it God wants to do? Ezekiel, 33:11, "As surely as I live, says the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of wicked people. I only want them to turn from their wicked ways so they can live." If God will do all He pleasures, and he wants everyone to live and does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked, why would hell exist? Why would God, who created everything, create a place for the wicked to be tormented for all eternity if He doesn't take any pleasure in that? Why, also, would any Christian theologian exclaim that the righteous would take pleasure in seeing the torment of the wicked, if God Himself would not? What were these people smoking?
Indeed, continuing on in Ezekiel 33, God notes that He will destroy those who are wicked, and again that the wicked shall surely die. Die, be destroyed. They will not rise again from sheol, in other words, but where does God say here that He will torment them eternally in a lake of fire? Why would he do that? He just got through telling them he wants them all to come to Him, and if that is what He wants then surely in time He will cause it to happen.
You may think me crazy. But I'd like to see concrete scriptural evidence for hell as envisioned by Calvin and others. Instead I see Isaiah noting (53:11) that Christ's salvation would be satisfying to God: When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish, he will be satisfied. And because of what he has experienced, my righteous servant will make it possible for many to be counted righteous, for he will bear all their sins."
Even in Isaiah 66:22-24, the Lord does not threaten the unrighteous with eternal suffering. Their bodies will lie in a ditch, and the worms that eat them will never die, and the fire that burns them will never go out. The bodies will lie there, and all who pass by will be horrified (they certainly won't rejoice and find comfort in watching the bodies of the unrighteous burn). That certainly speaks to the notion that God will indeed destroy those who turn against Him, but it doesn't make any claims about lakes of eternal fire.
Hell is a human construction, a human notion, used by humans to frighten other humans into behaving in a certain way, a way that for many hundreds of years allowed the vast majority to live in grinding poverty while the privileged few grew fat off their work, all while claiming to glorify God. Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called "God is not great: how religion poisons everything." I agree with the latter clause, because we humans create religion and use it to exert power over others, even to the point of breaking the rules of the religion we created. God, on the other hand, is surely Great, if we could just get around to finally living as He suggested, instead of using Him as a sword and a ram to slay and batter those around us.
23 November 2007
Until Proven Innocent
There is a lot to think about in this book. 
It is far from perfect, quite far. But it is fascinating, it is exceptionally well-researched, it makes an effort to include every known and provable fact about the case, and it certainly leaves no question as to who the real criminals were in the much-publicized case. Read more after the jump.
The case, of course, is the infamous Duke University lacrosse team gang-rape case of 2006. You remember when this was all over the news last spring and summer, when every news show had the faces of these rich, white Duke lacrosse players who had gang-raped and shouted racial slurs at an innocent black single mother who was studying for her degree at a nearby historically black college.
You may or may not remember what actually turned out to be the truth: there was no rape, no crime, the "victim" was lying, the prosecutor knew it, the prosecutor sought to put the three "rapists" in jail to help him win an election even though he knew they were innocent. The prosecutor actually engaged in a conspiracy to cover up exculpatory evidence, failed to actually interview the "victim" for over six months after the crime, and deliberately sought ways to make the lacrosse players seem guilty in the media before he ever made a single charge and despite multiple police interviews and DNA tests that showed they were innocent.
It was one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in recent memory, certainly the most public (which is sad, because the misconduct only really came out because the accused had good lawyers; poorer folks could easily have been sent to rot in jail to further this DA's political career). Worse, it was rather damning evidence that the mid-1990's spate of extreme political correctness on college campuses nationwide (remember the "water buffalo" incident?) hasn't gone away, as dozens of Duke University professors and much of the administration took a position that the lacrosse players were guilty without ever hearing a single piece of evidence.
This is one of those books that will make you mad. It made me mad. I couldn't read more than a chapter or so at a time before I had to put it down and walk away for a while. The only reason you can get through it at all is that you already know how it ends: you know the guys get off in the end, they're proven innocent. You know Nifong is in trouble. You know that. But it doesn't make reading about the intervening months especially easy.
Of course as I said the book has flaws. It needs a copyedit, badly. Very badly. One of the authors, KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College, is a noted blogger, and the book reads at times like a blog entry, very informal. That's fine, but the copyediting is blog-like, too--which is to say, there hasn't been any. Words repeat, are misspelled, there are words missing, punctuation is missing or inappropriate... it isn't awful, it's not on every page, but it's blatant (I'm not talking about "it's" v "its", I'm talking about leaving the e off the end of the word 'are') and distracting and takes away from the book's power.
Similarly, the authors are both guilty of using the same sort of loaded language against the professors, the DA, and the administration, as they accuse those actors of using against the team members. The lacrosse players were 'trashed' in the media. The assertions of the professors were 'outrageous.' Loaded words like that are thrown around on almost every page, and while as I was reading they fit right in with the narrative, they're a problem. Quite simply, they make the book an easy target as being "biased." It seems like the authors have an agenda (which they clearly do and admit to in the last three chapters), but the story stands on its own merits. You'd be plenty outraged by the facts as they exist without the additional hyperbole. The beast is cooked by the facts; there's no need to continue stabbing it with language.
All is not lost; the authors are not some wild-eyed arch-conservatives. Stuart Taylor, Jr., is a fellow at the non-partisan and centrist Brookings Institute (if you think Brookings is conservative, bear in mind an equal number of people think it's liberal; that's how we know it's centrist), a lawyer, and a legal reporter for a number of media outlets (almost entirely on the left of the political spectrum); KC Johnson is a history professor who's scholarly output focuses on American progressives and their role as dissenters from American foreign policy, a registered Democrat and public supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. These are not raving right-wingers. Johnson was once denied tenure for having the temerity to question whether a panel set up by CUNY to discuss the 9/11 attacks should maybe have at least one person who didn't think American foreign policy was the proximate and only cause of the attack. The very last chapter of the book is clearly Johnson's axe-grinding; two chapters before looks to have been Taylor's work, an attack on the grand-jury process and the inadequacies of the justice system to guarantee defendant's rights and prevent the innocent from being convicted.
It would be easy to write this book off as a right-wing attack on left-wing academia, and no doubt a number of the academics mentioned in its pages (disparagingly, for the most part) have said just that. Unfortunately for that story, the facts don't bear it out. In any other book, chapter 23, a plea for the rights of the accused in criminal cases, would be taken as so much left-wing hand-wringing when we should really be focused on victim's rights. Both authors actually appear to be somewhat to the left on the political spectrum--though to those on the farthest fringes of the left, moderate liberals are often seen as conservative (exactly the same phenomenon occurs on the far right; note the number of conservative politicians labelled "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) by the far fringe).
This is a story that needs to be told. This book was much needed, as a historical work, as an attempt to force the named parties to come to grips with the truth of what they did, as an effort to provide public proof that the three accused men were indeed innocent of any crime and should never have been treated as they were by the police, the press, the DA, and their own university faculty and administration. It is precisely because the book was so needed that it's glaring problems are so bad--an important historical work that seeks (and needs) to be taken seriously should take itself seriously; another two weeks at the editing desk would have cleared up the copy problems, and a two-week rewrite could have neutralized the language. Then we'd have had a book that would have to be taken seriously; this one compares to much to a blog, and that's a shame. The last line of the book states that "it's the facts that matter," and that's true, but in such a political atmosphere as this book and this case play out, style goes a long way to getting people to pay attention to the facts.
It's a good read, a rather ripping yarn, and an important book; but it's not what it needed to be.
It is far from perfect, quite far. But it is fascinating, it is exceptionally well-researched, it makes an effort to include every known and provable fact about the case, and it certainly leaves no question as to who the real criminals were in the much-publicized case. Read more after the jump.The case, of course, is the infamous Duke University lacrosse team gang-rape case of 2006. You remember when this was all over the news last spring and summer, when every news show had the faces of these rich, white Duke lacrosse players who had gang-raped and shouted racial slurs at an innocent black single mother who was studying for her degree at a nearby historically black college.
You may or may not remember what actually turned out to be the truth: there was no rape, no crime, the "victim" was lying, the prosecutor knew it, the prosecutor sought to put the three "rapists" in jail to help him win an election even though he knew they were innocent. The prosecutor actually engaged in a conspiracy to cover up exculpatory evidence, failed to actually interview the "victim" for over six months after the crime, and deliberately sought ways to make the lacrosse players seem guilty in the media before he ever made a single charge and despite multiple police interviews and DNA tests that showed they were innocent.
It was one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in recent memory, certainly the most public (which is sad, because the misconduct only really came out because the accused had good lawyers; poorer folks could easily have been sent to rot in jail to further this DA's political career). Worse, it was rather damning evidence that the mid-1990's spate of extreme political correctness on college campuses nationwide (remember the "water buffalo" incident?) hasn't gone away, as dozens of Duke University professors and much of the administration took a position that the lacrosse players were guilty without ever hearing a single piece of evidence.
This is one of those books that will make you mad. It made me mad. I couldn't read more than a chapter or so at a time before I had to put it down and walk away for a while. The only reason you can get through it at all is that you already know how it ends: you know the guys get off in the end, they're proven innocent. You know Nifong is in trouble. You know that. But it doesn't make reading about the intervening months especially easy.
Of course as I said the book has flaws. It needs a copyedit, badly. Very badly. One of the authors, KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College, is a noted blogger, and the book reads at times like a blog entry, very informal. That's fine, but the copyediting is blog-like, too--which is to say, there hasn't been any. Words repeat, are misspelled, there are words missing, punctuation is missing or inappropriate... it isn't awful, it's not on every page, but it's blatant (I'm not talking about "it's" v "its", I'm talking about leaving the e off the end of the word 'are') and distracting and takes away from the book's power.
Similarly, the authors are both guilty of using the same sort of loaded language against the professors, the DA, and the administration, as they accuse those actors of using against the team members. The lacrosse players were 'trashed' in the media. The assertions of the professors were 'outrageous.' Loaded words like that are thrown around on almost every page, and while as I was reading they fit right in with the narrative, they're a problem. Quite simply, they make the book an easy target as being "biased." It seems like the authors have an agenda (which they clearly do and admit to in the last three chapters), but the story stands on its own merits. You'd be plenty outraged by the facts as they exist without the additional hyperbole. The beast is cooked by the facts; there's no need to continue stabbing it with language.
All is not lost; the authors are not some wild-eyed arch-conservatives. Stuart Taylor, Jr., is a fellow at the non-partisan and centrist Brookings Institute (if you think Brookings is conservative, bear in mind an equal number of people think it's liberal; that's how we know it's centrist), a lawyer, and a legal reporter for a number of media outlets (almost entirely on the left of the political spectrum); KC Johnson is a history professor who's scholarly output focuses on American progressives and their role as dissenters from American foreign policy, a registered Democrat and public supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. These are not raving right-wingers. Johnson was once denied tenure for having the temerity to question whether a panel set up by CUNY to discuss the 9/11 attacks should maybe have at least one person who didn't think American foreign policy was the proximate and only cause of the attack. The very last chapter of the book is clearly Johnson's axe-grinding; two chapters before looks to have been Taylor's work, an attack on the grand-jury process and the inadequacies of the justice system to guarantee defendant's rights and prevent the innocent from being convicted.
It would be easy to write this book off as a right-wing attack on left-wing academia, and no doubt a number of the academics mentioned in its pages (disparagingly, for the most part) have said just that. Unfortunately for that story, the facts don't bear it out. In any other book, chapter 23, a plea for the rights of the accused in criminal cases, would be taken as so much left-wing hand-wringing when we should really be focused on victim's rights. Both authors actually appear to be somewhat to the left on the political spectrum--though to those on the farthest fringes of the left, moderate liberals are often seen as conservative (exactly the same phenomenon occurs on the far right; note the number of conservative politicians labelled "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) by the far fringe).
This is a story that needs to be told. This book was much needed, as a historical work, as an attempt to force the named parties to come to grips with the truth of what they did, as an effort to provide public proof that the three accused men were indeed innocent of any crime and should never have been treated as they were by the police, the press, the DA, and their own university faculty and administration. It is precisely because the book was so needed that it's glaring problems are so bad--an important historical work that seeks (and needs) to be taken seriously should take itself seriously; another two weeks at the editing desk would have cleared up the copy problems, and a two-week rewrite could have neutralized the language. Then we'd have had a book that would have to be taken seriously; this one compares to much to a blog, and that's a shame. The last line of the book states that "it's the facts that matter," and that's true, but in such a political atmosphere as this book and this case play out, style goes a long way to getting people to pay attention to the facts.
It's a good read, a rather ripping yarn, and an important book; but it's not what it needed to be.
Until Proven Innocent
There is a lot to think about in this book. It is far from perfect, quite far. But it is fascinating, it is exceptionally well-researched, it makes an effort to include every known and provable fact about the case, and it certainly leaves no question as to who the real criminals were in the much-publicized case. Read more after the jump.
The case, of course, is the infamous Duke University lacrosse team gang-rape case of 2006. You remember when this was all over the news last spring and summer, when every news show had the faces of these rich, white Duke lacrosse players who had gang-raped and shouted racial slurs at an innocent black single mother who was studying for her degree at a nearby historically black college.
You may or may not remember what actually turned out to be the truth: there was no rape, no crime, the "victim" was lying, the prosecutor knew it, the prosecutor sought to put the three "rapists" in jail to help him win an election even though he knew they were innocent. The prosecutor actually engaged in a conspiracy to cover up exculpatory evidence, failed to actually interview the "victim" for over six months after the crime, and deliberately sought ways to make the lacrosse players seem guilty in the media before he ever made a single charge and despite multiple police interviews and DNA tests that showed they were innocent.
It was one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in recent memory, certainly the most public (which is sad, because the misconduct only really came out because the accused had good lawyers; poorer folks could easily have been sent to rot in jail to further this DA's political career). Worse, it was rather damning evidence that the mid-1990's spate of extreme political correctness on college campuses nationwide (remember the "water buffalo" incident?) hasn't gone away, as dozens of Duke University professors and much of the administration took a position that the lacrosse players were guilty without ever hearing a single piece of evidence.
This is one of those books that will make you mad. It made me mad. I couldn't read more than a chapter or so at a time before I had to put it down and walk away for a while. The only reason you can get through it at all is that you already know how it ends: you know the guys get off in the end, they're proven innocent. You know Nifong is in trouble. You know that. But it doesn't make reading about the intervening months especially easy.
Of course as I said the book has flaws. It needs a copyedit, badly. Very badly. One of the authors, KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College, is a noted blogger, and the book reads at times like a blog entry, very informal. That's fine, but the copyediting is blog-like, too--which is to say, there hasn't been any. Words repeat, are misspelled, there are words missing, punctuation is missing or inappropriate... it isn't awful, it's not on every page, but it's blatant (I'm not talking about "it's" v "its", I'm talking about leaving the e off the end of the word 'are') and distracting and takes away from the book's power.
Similarly, the authors are both guilty of using the same sort of loaded language against the professors, the DA, and the administration, as they accuse those actors of using against the team members. The lacrosse players were 'trashed' in the media. The assertions of the professors were 'outrageous.' Loaded words like that are thrown around on almost every page, and while as I was reading they fit right in with the narrative, they're a problem. Quite simply, they make the book an easy target as being "biased." It seems like the authors have an agenda (which they clearly do and admit to in the last three chapters), but the story stands on its own merits. You'd be plenty outraged by the facts as they exist without the additional hyperbole. The beast is cooked by the facts; there's no need to continue stabbing it with language.
All is not lost; the authors are not some wild-eyed arch-conservatives. Stuart Taylor, Jr., is a fellow at the non-partisan and centrist Brookings Institute (if you think Brookings is conservative, bear in mind an equal number of people think it's liberal; that's how we know it's centrist), a lawyer, and a legal reporter for a number of media outlets (almost entirely on the left of the political spectrum); KC Johnson is a history professor who's scholarly output focuses on American progressives and their role as dissenters from American foreign policy, a registered Democrat and public supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. These are not raving right-wingers. Johnson was once denied tenure for having the temerity to question whether a panel set up by CUNY to discuss the 9/11 attacks should maybe have at least one person who didn't think American foreign policy was the proximate and only cause of the attack. The very last chapter of the book is clearly Johnson's axe-grinding; two chapters before looks to have been Taylor's work, an attack on the grand-jury process and the inadequacies of the justice system to guarantee defendant's rights and prevent the innocent from being convicted.
It would be easy to write this book off as a right-wing attack on left-wing academia, and no doubt a number of the academics mentioned in its pages (disparagingly, for the most part) have said just that. Unfortunately for that story, the facts don't bear it out. In any other book, chapter 23, a plea for the rights of the accused in criminal cases, would be taken as so much left-wing hand-wringing when we should really be focused on victim's rights. Both authors actually appear to be somewhat to the left on the political spectrum--though to those on the farthest fringes of the left, moderate liberals are often seen as conservative (exactly the same phenomenon occurs on the far right; note the number of conservative politicians labelled "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) by the far fringe).
This is a story that needs to be told. This book was much needed, as a historical work, as an attempt to force the named parties to come to grips with the truth of what they did, as an effort to provide public proof that the three accused men were indeed innocent of any crime and should never have been treated as they were by the police, the press, the DA, and their own university faculty and administration. It is precisely because the book was so needed that it's glaring problems are so bad--an important historical work that seeks (and needs) to be taken seriously should take itself seriously; another two weeks at the editing desk would have cleared up the copy problems, and a two-week rewrite could have neutralized the language. Then we'd have had a book that would have to be taken seriously; this one compares to much to a blog, and that's a shame. The last line of the book states that "it's the facts that matter," and that's true, but in such a political atmosphere as this book and this case play out, style goes a long way to getting people to pay attention to the facts.
It's a good read, a rather ripping yarn, and an important book; but it's not what it needed to be.
It is far from perfect, quite far. But it is fascinating, it is exceptionally well-researched, it makes an effort to include every known and provable fact about the case, and it certainly leaves no question as to who the real criminals were in the much-publicized case. Read more after the jump.The case, of course, is the infamous Duke University lacrosse team gang-rape case of 2006. You remember when this was all over the news last spring and summer, when every news show had the faces of these rich, white Duke lacrosse players who had gang-raped and shouted racial slurs at an innocent black single mother who was studying for her degree at a nearby historically black college.
You may or may not remember what actually turned out to be the truth: there was no rape, no crime, the "victim" was lying, the prosecutor knew it, the prosecutor sought to put the three "rapists" in jail to help him win an election even though he knew they were innocent. The prosecutor actually engaged in a conspiracy to cover up exculpatory evidence, failed to actually interview the "victim" for over six months after the crime, and deliberately sought ways to make the lacrosse players seem guilty in the media before he ever made a single charge and despite multiple police interviews and DNA tests that showed they were innocent.
It was one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in recent memory, certainly the most public (which is sad, because the misconduct only really came out because the accused had good lawyers; poorer folks could easily have been sent to rot in jail to further this DA's political career). Worse, it was rather damning evidence that the mid-1990's spate of extreme political correctness on college campuses nationwide (remember the "water buffalo" incident?) hasn't gone away, as dozens of Duke University professors and much of the administration took a position that the lacrosse players were guilty without ever hearing a single piece of evidence.
This is one of those books that will make you mad. It made me mad. I couldn't read more than a chapter or so at a time before I had to put it down and walk away for a while. The only reason you can get through it at all is that you already know how it ends: you know the guys get off in the end, they're proven innocent. You know Nifong is in trouble. You know that. But it doesn't make reading about the intervening months especially easy.
Of course as I said the book has flaws. It needs a copyedit, badly. Very badly. One of the authors, KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College, is a noted blogger, and the book reads at times like a blog entry, very informal. That's fine, but the copyediting is blog-like, too--which is to say, there hasn't been any. Words repeat, are misspelled, there are words missing, punctuation is missing or inappropriate... it isn't awful, it's not on every page, but it's blatant (I'm not talking about "it's" v "its", I'm talking about leaving the e off the end of the word 'are') and distracting and takes away from the book's power.
Similarly, the authors are both guilty of using the same sort of loaded language against the professors, the DA, and the administration, as they accuse those actors of using against the team members. The lacrosse players were 'trashed' in the media. The assertions of the professors were 'outrageous.' Loaded words like that are thrown around on almost every page, and while as I was reading they fit right in with the narrative, they're a problem. Quite simply, they make the book an easy target as being "biased." It seems like the authors have an agenda (which they clearly do and admit to in the last three chapters), but the story stands on its own merits. You'd be plenty outraged by the facts as they exist without the additional hyperbole. The beast is cooked by the facts; there's no need to continue stabbing it with language.
All is not lost; the authors are not some wild-eyed arch-conservatives. Stuart Taylor, Jr., is a fellow at the non-partisan and centrist Brookings Institute (if you think Brookings is conservative, bear in mind an equal number of people think it's liberal; that's how we know it's centrist), a lawyer, and a legal reporter for a number of media outlets (almost entirely on the left of the political spectrum); KC Johnson is a history professor who's scholarly output focuses on American progressives and their role as dissenters from American foreign policy, a registered Democrat and public supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. These are not raving right-wingers. Johnson was once denied tenure for having the temerity to question whether a panel set up by CUNY to discuss the 9/11 attacks should maybe have at least one person who didn't think American foreign policy was the proximate and only cause of the attack. The very last chapter of the book is clearly Johnson's axe-grinding; two chapters before looks to have been Taylor's work, an attack on the grand-jury process and the inadequacies of the justice system to guarantee defendant's rights and prevent the innocent from being convicted.
It would be easy to write this book off as a right-wing attack on left-wing academia, and no doubt a number of the academics mentioned in its pages (disparagingly, for the most part) have said just that. Unfortunately for that story, the facts don't bear it out. In any other book, chapter 23, a plea for the rights of the accused in criminal cases, would be taken as so much left-wing hand-wringing when we should really be focused on victim's rights. Both authors actually appear to be somewhat to the left on the political spectrum--though to those on the farthest fringes of the left, moderate liberals are often seen as conservative (exactly the same phenomenon occurs on the far right; note the number of conservative politicians labelled "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) by the far fringe).
This is a story that needs to be told. This book was much needed, as a historical work, as an attempt to force the named parties to come to grips with the truth of what they did, as an effort to provide public proof that the three accused men were indeed innocent of any crime and should never have been treated as they were by the police, the press, the DA, and their own university faculty and administration. It is precisely because the book was so needed that it's glaring problems are so bad--an important historical work that seeks (and needs) to be taken seriously should take itself seriously; another two weeks at the editing desk would have cleared up the copy problems, and a two-week rewrite could have neutralized the language. Then we'd have had a book that would have to be taken seriously; this one compares to much to a blog, and that's a shame. The last line of the book states that "it's the facts that matter," and that's true, but in such a political atmosphere as this book and this case play out, style goes a long way to getting people to pay attention to the facts.
It's a good read, a rather ripping yarn, and an important book; but it's not what it needed to be.
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