Author: unspywriter

Two Steps Back

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I have tried my entire life to overcome my legacy as a Southerner. Now, there are good things about being from the South, but we seem to have a hard time kicking our racism habit. We do stupid things then blink our eyes in feigned innocence and proclaim we had no idea. Yes, you did. Sometimes we take things that try to mitigate our former ignorance and decide to make them ours. We just don’t get it.

Who is the “we” I’m talking about? Some white people who can’t or won’t move out of the 19th or 20th Century as far as racism is concerned.

After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, many jurisdictions in Southern states closed their public schools to thwart the intent of the ruling. This happened in my home town. Because all public schools were closed, the segregated, African American schools were, too. The difference was white families pooled resources, formed “private academies” which held classes in the former public school buildings, hired the former public school teachers, and education went on much as it would have as a public school. African Americans who could afford it moved to jurisdictions that didn’t close their public schools, but most black communities tried to hold classes in church basements or private homes, without the resources the private academies had, i.e., a wealth of trained teachers, current textbooks, and extracurricular activities.

I attended one of these “academies” for several years, but at the time I didn’t understand the implications. To me, it was just school. My education certainly didn’t suffer. When I entered public school in the 6th grade, I was reading at a higher grade level, my math skills were two years ahead, and most of the 6th grade was a repetition of what I’d already been taught. Though I received a more than decent education, I’m not advocating these “academies.” The point is African American families didn’t have these options, and by the time public schools were re-opened, many African American students were academically far behind their white peers. Some never caught up.

In 2004 my home state, the Commonwealth of Virginia, had one of those rare moments of insight. After receiving a gift from an estate of one million dollars, the Commonwealth established the “Brown v. Board of Education Scholarships” for those who missed out on educational opportunities when the public schools were closed. Let’s recall who actually “missed out” on a chance for an education? Not me, and not all the white kids in the “academies.” I’ll concede that there were some white children who did not attend the makeshift academies, but they were few.

Since the inception of that scholarship, 70 have been awarded–some (and the Commonwealth won’t say how many) have gone to whites. The administrator of the scholarship fund indicates that both white and African American children lost the opportunity to go to school and so both should be eligible for the scholarships. Indeed, she wants to get the word out to whites so they can take advantage of it. I think she has her proportions skewed. The vast majority of people who “lost the opportunity” for an education were African American, and I believe that’s where the scholarships should go. As I said, I didn’t lose a chance for an education nor did the great majority of my classmates, and, consequently, I don’t deserve such a scholarship. I would never dream of even applying for one.

One of the African American recipients of the scholarship raises a good point. What if one of the scholarships went to a member of a family who supported segregation? That, to me, would be a slap in the face to those who fought and bled and died for equal opportunity. The person who thought up the scholarship indicated he certainly had African American, not white, students in mind. He indicated he had a hard time accepting that white children’s education suffered. I agree.

So, this post is titled, “Two Steps Back.” What’s the other step? I find this so outrageous, I don’t know if I can write much about it without elevating my blood pressure. Someone setting up the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans this past weekend hired “comedian” Reggie Brown, an Obama impersonator. Brown came on stage in his Obama persona and proceeded to tell racial joke after racial joke. The attendees hooted and laughed, but when he switched to dissing the slate of Republican Presidential hopefuls, he got booed and booted from the stage.

I’m sorry, when is it acceptable for anyone to make racial jokes? Some talking heads on morning TV tried to spin it as the audience expressing disapproval of Brown’s schtick, but, come on, if you hire an Obama impersonator for a mostly white, very conservative group, you knew exactly what you were getting. And if you watch the YouTube video of the event, you’ll see the audience thought he was hilarious until he started in on making fun of Republicans.

These are the days when my optimism about a post-racial world wanes. Sadly, neither of these backward steps surprises me.

We Will Not Go Back

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I’ll begin by apologizing to my male friends, if they feel they are being bashed. I’m a feminist, yes, but I like men. (Far too much for my own good, if my past relationships are any example.) That, however, doesn’t stop me from asking, “When will men just shut up and let women decide about their bodies?”

Because women are the only gender who can actually gestate a fetus, I feel, and I always have, that we should get to say when or if we do that. For some reason, men–well, a lot of Republican men–can’t stand that. In an unprecedented attack on women’s ability to make serious decisions about their health and well-being, Republican men–and women–in state legislatures have offered bill after bill to restrict access to abortion. From bills that define personhood as the moment sperm fertilizes egg (meaning a condom is an abortion to them) to proposals that women would have to prove their miscarriages were spontaneous to bills that suggested criminal charges against doctors who perform abortions and the women who seek them, we have seen a year thus far in which the dystopia described in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale  looms.

Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum recently declared that women who seek abortions for the health and survivability of the mother are essentially lying. Then, we learn his wife had a second-trimester dilation and extraction to save her life. Apparently, though, the only way to convince Santorum it was necessary was to point out that his existing children would lose a mother. Mrs. Santorum had had a risky in utero procedure to correct a fetal defect, but it failed and the fetus became a source of sepsis for its mother. Even knowing the now-dead fetus would result in his wife’s death, Santorum hesitated before agreeing to the procedure. In the meantime, Mrs. Santorum went into premature labor, and the die was cast. When someone pointed this out to Santorum after his “women are lying about needing abortions” statement, his response was? Oh, our abortion was different. Not that I would have voted for him under any circumstance, but the hypocrisy just floors me. Abortion for my family but no one else–that’s what he means, people.

This is why, damn it, I want to make my own decisions about my body–because I have the intelligence, the information, the knowledge, and the ability to make important choices. I don’t want a man to hesitate before he says, “Oh, okay, save the mother if nothing else can be done.”

A reporter in Afghanistan once asked a man why he hesitated to bring his struggling, pregnant wife to a doctor so she wouldn’t have almost died. “It’s no matter,” he said, “I can always find another wife.” Many men in America are that close to thinking of women the same way. We are baby machines to them, uteruses with legs. We exist only to gestate, and the fetus’ well being takes precedence, even when it is the potential cause of a woman’s death. That is not acceptable.

And I love babies. I have the three cutest grandchildren in the world, and I respect their mothers’ choices. Moreover, I’m glad they were able to make that choice, that it wasn’t made for them by anyone else. I look forward to the day when no child is an accident and every child is wanted. I look forward to the day when a woman can think long and hard and make the choice best for her by herself, with no recrimination. I marched in the streets for choice, and I thought we’d already seen that day. Now, I see it slipping away through the crass manipulation of emotions by people who hate women, who believe we are incapable of making a choice after a rational, internal debate, that we lie in order to kill babies.

As if this renewed assault against a legitimate, legal, medical procedure isn’t enough, rightwingnutjobs are now focusing on contraception–as in the banning of it. This is their vision of America: Women burdened by constant pregnancy who won’t be able to compete with men in the boardroom, in Congress, anywhere. Their nostalgia for medieval times rivals that of the Taliban.

Yes, I sound angry and abrasive and all those words men use against women who believe in choice. Just understand what choice means in this instance: The woman decides. Not the government, not the minister, not the doctor. The woman. Most of the time she decides to give birth, and that’s perfect because that’s her choice. We cannot take away the other side of that choice because if we do, there is no choice without options. If a woman doesn’t want to give birth, she should have the choice not to, preferably by unfettered access to contraception. As a last resort, she must have access to safe, clean, properly performed abortion.

Anti-choice men need to understand this: We will not go back.

A Writer’s 10 Commandments

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Several months ago I found “The 10 Commandments of Fiction Writing” inWriter’s Digest magazine. The list so resonated with me that I printed it out and taped it to a bookcase right next to my writing area. In the months it’s been there, I’ve glanced at the list from time to time, not necessarily for inspiration, but for affirmation. Writers always question why we do what we do, especially when the acceptances are few and the rejections many—or like me, when you find the whole rejection process so ego-bending, you get anxiety attacks when you contemplate submitting work. Glancing at these brief “commandments” helps focus me at times, mocks me at times, but reminds me a lot of the time that I can’t be anything except a writer.
Here they are with a few thoughts of my own.
I
Take yourself seriously
Sometimes hard to do when you don’t see the success you think you should have. I think part of taking yourself seriously is to do things that successful writers do—read, hone your craft, learn from your failures, continuously study writing. You have to write to be serious about writing.
II
Act like a professional.
That means not sending snarky e-mails back to a magazine or agent or publisher who rejected you. You can’t burn any bridge, narrow as it may be, you’ve built. It also means not stalking agents at writing conferences, insisting your manuscript will make you both rich. By the way, I’ve never done either of those things, but I’ve seen them happen, and I’ve been on the receiving end when I was an editor. For me, acting like a professional means be a professional writer. Check that spelling, use proper grammar (dialogue involving an uneducated person being an exception), master punctuation. When I was an editor, nothing said “unprofessional” to me more than a misspelled, ungrammatical, mis-punctuated mess. “You’re the editor; you’ll fix it,” wasn’t an excuse I’d accept.
III
Write your passion.
Note this didn’t say, “Write what you know.” It means write what stirs you, what inspires you, what makes you sit down at the keyboard and write. Your passion is all your own. No other writer will feel about that passion the same way you do. You may share the object of that passion, but yours is unique. No one can write about it as you do, so do it.
IV
Love the process.
For me, there’s nothing like the times I write when the words pour out as if they’ve taken control of my fingers on the keyboard and insist I make them take form. Then, I’m head over heels in love with the process. When the words hide in my head and refuse to stand in the light of day, loving the process is harder. That, however, is part of the process, so perhaps this one should be, “Love/Hate the process?”
V
Read—a lot.
It never ceases to amaze that people who call themselves writers don’t read a variety of other writers. They stay within a shared genre or limit themselves by reading only fiction or only nonfiction. As I look at the books in my bookcases or on my Kindle, the only word to describe my reading interests is “eclectic.” Some might say eccentric, but I’m going with eclectic. My life is a perpetual struggle to balance the two loves of reading and writing—when I’m doing one, I feel guilty not doing the other. A literary triangle, perhaps? One thing that has disciplined me is joining a couple of book clubs, one in person for nonfiction, one on-line for fiction. Peer pressure does have an influence.
VI
Stick to a schedule.
This is my biggest struggle. I genuinely try to write a little or edit something every day. “Try” being the operative word. When I retired, it was to devote more time to writing, and I have, but it hasn’t been the daily exercise I wanted it to be. I’ve tried setting specific days or times, but other things (i.e., life) pop up. I won’t be content until I’m “working” regularly at writing.
VII
Be critical of your work.
Let’s face it, not everything we write is gold. Trust me, it isn’t. I look back on my collection of short stories published more than a decade ago and realize, though the guts of the stories are good, I wasn’t ready to be published. I won the publishing contract in a contest, it had a deadline attached, and I took that bait and swam with it. I didn’t have the time to be critical about it, and that’s why I need to have something else, something I have been more critical of, published. As much as I’m glad I had the opportunity to be published, I don’t want that one book to be my only writing legacy. I’m about to start a writing critique group, an offshoot of the local writers group I belong to, and I hope that will help not only in being more critical of my work and in receiving constructive criticism but helping others, too.
VIII
Develop thick skin.
So, maybe a person who already has insecurities shouldn’t become a writer? I’m still amazed when someone tells me he or she likes what I’ve written. I know I like what and how I write, but I know I’m not for everyone. Frankly, the rejections are why I rarely submit work. I haven’t yet learned to separate the writing from the person. A rejection of a story I’ve written is a rejection of me. Intellectually, I know that’s not the case, but emotionally I can’t help it. The only way to overcome that, I know, is to keep submitting because one day the rejections will stop.
IX
Trust your editors.
When I was a reporter for an aviation magazine, my editor was a frustrated author. He’d published a novel in the 1950’s that won some awards and recognition but had nothing published since. This meant when he was my editor in the 1970’s, he rewrote everything. The first time it happened I thought my article sucked so much that I’d be fired, so I went to him for a critique. Oh, no, my article was fine, good even; he just wanted all the articles in the magazine to sound as if he’d written them. The light bulb came on—I wasn’t a reporter; I was a glorified researcher. That experience makes it hard for me to trust editors, and yet I know the time for me to continue to be my own editor is past. Trust has to start sometime. When I became the editor of that same aviation magazine, I had a “happy to glad” rule—if happy was the right word, I wouldn’t change it to glad without a damned good reason. The reporters who worked for me responded better to that than total rewriting, so I did learn something after all.
X
There are no certainties.
Ain’t that the truth? Not every manuscript is destined to be published, much less a best-seller, but we still play the odds. That’s because there’s no certainty it won’t be published either. It’s the uncertainty that keeps us writing.

National Short Story Month – The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Writers

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I was pretty excited about National Short Story Month (May 1 – 31). Though I don’t consider short stories my first choice in writing (despite the fact my only published book is a collection of them), I read a lot of them. My intention for this past month was to pick 10 short stories meaningful to me and write about each. Because of a cold that knocked me for a serious loop, I only managed three—Harlan Ellison’s “A Boy and His Dog,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.”

I’ve left you with the impression that I don’t read any modern short stories. Not true. I was working my way up to that before I got sick. Since I can’t cram seven more stories into a single post, I’ll do a quick list of stories and collections I recommend.

First, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Master of Horror, Stephen King, but the story I recommend is considered one of his “mainstream” works: “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.” (They shortened the title for the movie.) A marvelous character story and tribute to, well, redemption.

Agatha Christie, in addition to her many (many) novels, also wrote several collections of short stories involving her best-known characters. The ones I recommend revolve around Miss Marple. Though I always found Miss Marple a little grating on the nerves with her false modesty, any of Christie’s short stories with Miss Marple is a gem—the mystery presented, discussed, resolved so succinctly.

Kurt Vonnegut—I miss him every day—has had several collections of short stories as well. Pick any one of them up, and he will transport you—into the past, the future, someone else’s head, his head. You won’t be disappointed by any of them.

Not because he’s a writer friend of mine but because his collection is so evocative, I’ll include Cliff Garstang’s In an Uncharted Country. (I mention him after Vonnegut because he might not like being so close to King. ;-D ) This is a collection of linked short stories about people and life in a fictional town in the Shenandoah Valley. Cliff links the stories in interesting and provocative ways, and there’s not a disappointment in the bunch.

If you think Vladimir V. Nabokov and your next thought is only, Lolita, think again. He has a large collection of short stories (The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov) that will horrify, intrigue, sicken, delight, and amaze you. You begin to understand how seeing your father murdered in front of you creates an incredible writer.

Ray Bradbury’s “Beggar on the Dublin Bridge” has a hint of the fantasy Bradbury is famous for, but, mainly, it reminds you that opportunities lost can’t be recovered.

Be patient. I’m getting to the women in just a moment.

A literary e-magazine I subscribe to on my Kindle is One Story. Aptly named, it publishes a single story every three weeks. All the ones I’ve read have been excellent and by up and coming writers (which gives me hope I’ll be one some day), but “Filament” by K. L. Cook is a stand-out. If you don’t have or want a Kindle, you can purchase the stories individually as they’re published on the web site (click on the link).

So I don’t let my feminist sisters and brothers down, here are some stories by women writers I’d like to highlight. A lot of these are classics as well, and it’s not that I don’t like modern short stories. A lot of them just don’t give me the “kick in the gut” the “oldies but goodies” do. Oh, they are perfectly structured and punctuated, grammatically flawless, but many are so faultless, they move me only intellectually, not emotionally.

Sarah Orne Jewett – “A White Heron”

Willa Cather – “Paul’s Case”

Edith Wharton – “The Mission of Jane”

Edna Ferber – “The Afternoon of a Faun”

Dorothy Parker – “Big Blonde”

Eudora Welty – “Death of a Traveling Salesman”

Flannery O’Conner – “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

Joyce Carol Oates – “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Like Bradbury’s “Beggar on the Dublin Bridge,” there are a lot of missed opportunities here—darn that “three-week” cold—but there’s always next year.

National Short Story Month – William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”

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A few months ago I took one of those Facebook quizzes–which Southern writer are you? I came up as William Faulkner. Faulkner was typical of the Southern men I grew up with–hard-drinking, hard-working, philandering, and overwhelmingly brilliant. In each of his works I’ve read, I’ve found a piece of my Southern heritage, sometimes a snippet I don’t particularly want to acknowledge. Faulkner, at least, forces me to examine it.

“Barn Burning” was a story I read both in a high school American Lit class and a college one as well. During the discussion period in the college course, a student who had no rural roots posed the question, “What’s the big deal about a barn burning anyway? It’s just a building. It wasn’t the person’s house.” The professor opened it up to the class, and there were several of us who grew up on farms who were happy to explain that the barn is the heart of a farm. You store animals, equipment, feed there. My Dad’s main “barn” was a complex of buildings, all interconnected, which was the farm’s nerve center. The loss of a barn brings physical damage in the loss of tangible assets, but it is also a symbolic loss as well. If you’re a subsistence farmer, and you lose your barn, you’re out of business.

This was why armies burned barns when they went through a country, this is why the Soviets scorched the earth and a lot of barns in Ukraine in World War II to leave nothing for the Germans to use, and this is why Abner Snopes burns barns to address insults he feels he’s been dealt in Faulkner’s short story.

The story opens in a store where the justice of the peace is hearing an accusation from a Mr. Harris, whose barn has been burned. Mr. Harris describes a dispute with Snopes over a pig getting loose and coming onto Mr. Harris’ land and rooting in his corn. The first time, Harris sends it back. The second time, Harris sends fencing so Snopes can build a better enclosure for the pig. The third time Mr. Harris sends Snopes a message that it will cost a dollar for him to get the pig back. Snopes sends a black man who works for him with the dollar and a message for Harris:

“He say to tell you wood and hay kin burn.”

“What?”

“That whut he say to tell you. Wood and hay kin burn.”

Harris sends the black man away with the pig, and that night, his barn burns to the ground. Harris then brings Snopes before the JP to have him charged. The Justice of the Peace, however, sees that Mr. Harris has no real proof that it was Snopes who burned his barn. Harris tries to compel Snopes’ younger son–the story is really from his point of view–to speak up the boy stays quiet. The Justice has no choice but to dismiss any complaint against Snopes.

As Snopes and his son leave the store and walk down the street someone calls Snopes a barn burner, and his son, named Colonel Sartoris after Snopes’ Civil War commanding officer, launches himself at the man and gets roughed up in the process. Snopes pulls the boy away and takes him home. When they arrive, Snopes’ wife has their wagon packed. This is when you realize this is not the first time Snopes has been accused of barn burning. In fact, Sartoris’ entire life has been a constant journey from town to town, farm to farm, where they live and work briefly then pack up and move on. Yet, you can see this is a boy who adores and worships his father despite his father’s obvious flaws. Sartoris is conflicted far beyond a young boy’s ability to rationalize. He hopes no one will upset his father and release the nasty, vengeful man Snopes really is. You can also see Sartoris is getting tired of the life he’s living. Cracks are beginning to appear in the armor of fatherhood Snopes surrounds himself with.

Snopes reminds me of an uncle of mine, my father’s brother John Marshall, who got the Scots-Irish temper. He never burned a barn, but he found other ways to get back at people who he felt had offended him–turning another farmer’s cows out so they wandered off and took weeks to round up, putting sugar in the gas tank of yet another farmer’s tractor. There are lots of examples, none of which are as serious as barn burning, but costly in their way. All this got my Uncle John the same reputation that Snopes in Faulkner’s story had–be careful what you do or say to this man.

Snopes and his family go their next sharecropping gig. The owner of this farm sends a black man to tell Snopes to come see him and to make sure he comes to the back door. Snopes dresses in his best clothes and brings Sartoris along as he goes to meet his new boss. However, Snopes not only goes to the front door, he deliberately walks through a pile of horse droppings and tracks horseshit through the house and on an expensive French rug. Snopes has also deliberately come at a time when “The Major,” the farm owner, isn’t at home. With The Major’s wife near to faint from the ruination of her rug, Snopes and Sartoris leave, Snopes’ boots still tracking horseshit.

A few hours later, The Major sends the rug to the house the Snopes family have moved into on the farm, with the instructions that the rug be cleaned and sent back up to the main house. Snopes’ wife offers to do it, but Snopes tells her he’ll take care of it. Snopes spreads the rug in the dust, cooks up a pot of lye, and has Sartoris’ sisters “clean” the rug. Now, pure lye will burn, so the rug is now clean of horseshit, but a ghost of itself.

Needless to say, The Major is not happy with the result and informs Snopes that the cost of the rug will come out of his share of the corn crop. In a twist, Snopes brings The Major before this town’s Justice, claiming the redress is too much. Snopes–you can see him, hat in hand, deferring to the Justice, playing innocent–asserts that he’d never cleaned such a rug before, so he shouldn’t be held accountable for cleaning it the wrong way. He did, he claims, exactly what The Major told him to do.

“He brought the rug to me and said he wanted the tracks washed out of it. I washed the tracks out and took it back to him.”

When the Justice reminds him he didn’t take the rug back in the same condition it was before he dirtied it, Snopes has nothing to say. The Justice finds against Snopes but reduces the amount of corn Snopes has to forfeit to pay for the rug. When the corn is harvested, Snopes will have to give 10 barrels, or $5, from his share to The Major.

Sartoris hopes that’s the end of it, but by the time they reach the wagon, Snopes is muttering that The Major won’t get the 10 barrels, or even five barrels. They get home and Sartoris stays outside, listening to the birds and other sounds of nature as night falls. Then, he hears his mother begging and pleading with his father. Sartoris dashes into the house to see his father emptying all the lamp oil into a kerosene can. Snopes orders Sartoris to get “that can of oil we were oiling the wagon with.” Sartoris protests, but Snopes orders him again.

“Then he was moving, running, outside the house, toward the stable: this the old habit, the old blood which he had not been permitted to choose for himself, which had been bequeathed him willy nilly and which had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust) before it came to him. I could keep on, he thought. I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face again. Only I can’t. I can’t…”

Sartoris does what he was told but begs his father to send the black man to warn The Major, as he had done all the previous times, so ardently Snopes makes his wife hold the boy while he goes off to make The Major pay. However, Sartoris breaks away, but he doesn’t run after his father. He runs to The Major’s house and without knocking bursts in and breathlessly shouts, “Barn! Barn!” Even though Sartoris is put out of the house, The Major has figured out what he means.

The ending of this story is frenetic. Sartoris’ screaming, The Major shouting for his horse. Sartoris then runs toward his father when he sees The Major gallop off with a gun. As he warned The Major, he tries to warn his father, but smoke is already rising and whatever action The Major now takes, he is well within his rights. Sartoris runs to his father, screaming for him even as he sees the glare of the fire, stumbling in the forest, and stops only when he hears the shots. For hours he sits in the dark sobbing, knowing what has happened and his part in it. “My father,” he says, “he was brave.” Then you realize he spoke of the father as a soldier who fought bravely and well before his descent to barn burner.

Sartoris ran to The Major with the intent of stopping his father, so his father could be in reality the way Sartoris thought of him, but what Sartoris really did was cleanse that “old blood.” There are many Southerners, myself among them, who would give almost anything for the same.

Rapture

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Did you think I was going to be writing about the event that’s supposed to occur May 21, 2011, at 6 p.m. local time? No, I’m going to write about the 1981 song, “Rapture,” by Blondie. This song was one of the earliest number one hits to feature rap–and with a white chick doing the rapping. “Rapture” was a mix of rap, jazz, pop, and several other genres and is probably Blondie’s best known hit.

Gotcha.

Of course, I’m going to write about the event predicted by self-styled preacher, Harold Camping, of Family Radio. The first point I’m going to make is that he always makes a big pitch for money, and his net worth is now estimated to be close to $80 million. I’m sure since he’s predicted he’ll be in heaven come one nanosecond after 6 p.m. tomorrow, that he’s distributed those millions to organizations that will be tending to all the victims of the end times to come. What? He hasn’t? Oh.

I’m an atheist. I was one in my heart for a long time but acquiesced to societal pressure and declared I was really an agnostic, i.e., that there was probably a god, but I hadn’t yet been convinced. Regardless of how I “came out” as an atheist, The Rapture is something I scoff at. I’ve heard about it since my grandmother pulled me into revival tents when I was a child. Truthfully, I found the whole concept of The Rapture terrifying on a couple of levels. First, the thought of being “snatched up” or disappearing is totally freaky to a child, and I didn’t really want to leave my dog behind. Being the inquisitive little snot that I was, I asked if my dog, Missy, could get Raptured with me and was told that dogs don’t have souls. Yeah, right, but that’s a topic for a different post.

My second, and probably most significant, fear about The Rapture was not being good enough to be Raptured. And that’s one of my problems with religion–that a seven or eight year old child would be terrified that she wasn’t good enough to be taken to heaven in The Rapture. When I finally figured out there was no god, that fear evaporated, and I slept much better at night. Still do.

I try to be reasonable about other people’s beliefs. Most of my Christian friends and I have come to a place of mutual respect–you don’t try to convert me, and I won’t try to convert you; we can have civilized debates, but we respect each other’s beliefs, or lack thereof in my case. It is difficult for me, however, to find that respect for people who blindly follow charlatans like Camping, who are clearly only in this for the money. (By the way, he predicted in the 1990’s that The Rapture was coming and had only a lame excuse of poor biblical scholarship as his reason why it didn’t. But send more money so he can do a better job of studying the Bible.)

I can’t respect parents who quit their jobs, stop paying their bills, and spend all their assets before May 21, so they won’t leave any worldly things behind. I especially can’t respect the mother in that family, who has a small child and another on the way, who is putting her belief in superstition above the care of her family.

I can’t respect another set of parents, these of three teenagers, who have also put their faith before their children. This mother told her 16-year old daughter, who disagreed with her mother’s contention about the impending Rapture, that she won’t be in heaven. The mother went on to say, essentially, “My children will be left behind, but, oh well, that’s god’s will.” If I were in child protective services in that state, I’d be on their doorstep come Monday. And Monday will come.

I can only disrespect a mother of two who was so certain she’d be Raptured but was sure her two young daughters wouldn’t be. In her “motherly” concern, however, she decided even though they’d be left behind, she didn’t want them to suffer, so she cut their throats. (Abraham and Isaac, much.) Thankfully, someone found them before they bled out and got them to hospital. And I guess the mother, and I use the term loosely, decided she didn’t want to wait for May 21; she cut her throat, too. In her mug shot, you can see a two-inch cut that appeared not to need stitches.

There are countless other examples, but, frankly, it’s just too depressing to recount just how ignorant modern-day humans can be. I could understand Homo Habilis believing in The Rapture, but not people with evolved forebrains. Then again, Homo Habilis’ brain couldn’t conceive the concept of religion, so who’s to say which of us is evolved?

The other, disturbing thing about believing you’re one of god’s chosen is the arrogance. You, as a person, have decided you’ve been so good, so perfect–even though the son of the god you believe in admittedly wasn’t–you’re going to heaven, and you don’t give one whit about those of us you’ve decided aren’t. If you were truly Christians, you’d understand that The Rapture is not mentioned in the Bible, Jesus didn’t talk about it, and he’ll be really pissed when he sees how you’ve treated the rest of us.

If a single person commits suicide before this event to hasten the trip to heaven or in the aftermath because it didn’t happen, I lay the blame at the doorstep of Harold Camping. In some way, I wish I believed in a Judgement Day, because I’d like to be a fly on a cloud when he stands before St. Peter. (It’s a metaphor, people.)

See you next week. I promise.

Dead or Alive Redux

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Just a little mini-post today while I’m working on the next post for National Short Story Month.

I’m still reflecting on the death of Osama bin Laden. Really, I have no choice. Almost two weeks into the aftermath, it is still often the lead topic on a news cast.

After an initial, albeit reluctant, show of support for the President’s authorization of the mission and its parameters, the extreme right and extreme left have twisted themselves around on this until they somewhat agree. The right is in high dudgeon because they feel W didn’t get enough credit. Excuse me, but how can a person who has been out of office for more than two years get any credit for instructing the CIA to recommence its search for bin Laden and then authorizing a mission that requires the go-ahead from a sitting President? Oh, it was the enhanced interrogation techniques which W, who’d never fought in a war and who perhaps had the barest minimum of SERE training in his air guard days, insisted we use? Wrong again. As interrogation professionals (if there is such a term, and if there is, god help us) iterated then and now, putting someone in extreme pain or in fear of his or her life only gains you “white noise,” bogus intelligence given only to make the threat go away. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, whom the right asserted, incorrectly, was the source of the tip that let us to the compound in Abbotabad, was waterboarded 183 times and never gave up the courier’s name. It was another detainee in a CIA rendition center who gave it up after his interrogator “made friends” with him. My eroded respect for Sen. John McCain (R.-AZ) is somewhat rebuilt after his recent Post op-ed and his Senate speech setting the record straight about the use of torture and also for the fact he calls it what it is–torture, not the harmless-sounding euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

And, excuse me, we near-drowned someone 183 times in a three-month period, just about twice a day. Let’s not forget that. Khalid Sheik Mohammed is a despicable person, yes. He videotaped himself beheading reporter Daniel Pearl, but we should not have lowered ourselves to his level.

On the left, we have Michael Moore, whom I adore, and Rosie O’Donnell, whom I can’t abide because she doesn’t bother to get her facts straight, questioning the legally of hunting and killing bin Laden. “Double-tapped an old man in his pajamas” is about how Moore referred to it. First of all, bin Laden was a few years younger than I, and I’m not old. He was in his mid-50’s, not old and apparently not as infirm as we were led to believe. He was of an age where he still could have mounted resistance with any of the weaponry found nearby. Yes, he was in his nightgown-like sleeping attire, but when a Seal says, “Don’t move,” and you do, you accept the consequences. As I said in an earlier post, bin Laden would have shown that Seal no mercy had the roles been reversed, and the Seal’s death would not have been quick as bin Laden’s was. Again, as I said before, it would have been preferable to take bin Laden into custody and provide him the unique kind of American justice which has no equal in the world, and I’m not talking about a midnight raid with high-tech stealth and silenced guns. Though a trial would have offered its own problems, it was a desirable outcome, but we train our Special Forces quite well to make on-the-spot decisions and changes in tactics. Because I’ve never been trained that way and my research only gives me a theoretical perspective, I’m going to give the Special Forces the benefit of the doubt and accept they made the right call under the circumstances. And the President did, too.

I wish this incident would pass into history, already. It’s over and done with. We can’t, nor should we, change anything; however, as altruistic human beings we need to accept that bin Laden’s family can mourn the loss of their brother, uncle, father, husband, a death he brought to his own door, unlike the thousands of deaths he ordered then sat back and relished.

National Short Story Month – Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”

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This is the second of several posts for May celebrating National Short Story Month.

“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”

A story that starts so sweetly just has to be warm and cozy and delightful, doesn’t it? There are scenes of children playing and adults chatting about spouses, the weather, and taxes. The older folks complain that young people don’t follow traditions any more. Young boys scamper about, stuffing their pockets with rocks and building a pile of stones–typical boy stuff in a typical small town. Those of us who grew up in one of them (and in my case came back to one) will recognize this. How very bucolic and dreamy.

However, this is a story by Shirley Jackson, so there’s nothing bucolic and dreamy about it. “The Lottery” is the stuff of nightmares, and that’s what makes it another of my favorite short stories. (I’m not sure what that says about me, but I’m harmless. Mostly.) Most of Jackson’s work is dark because she sees things in the everyday that others don’t. Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Richard Matheson, masters of the macabre all, have acknowledged her influence on their work. When The New Yorker published “The Lottery” in June 1948, it received more mail about it than any previous story, most of it questioning why the magazine had published a horror story?

“The Lottery” describes one day for the 300 citizens of a small, rural town, unnamed and where it is we don’t know, nor does it matter. Jackson acknowledged she based it on Bennington, VT, her home town, something I’m sure didn’t exactly thrill her neighbors. In the story, every year at 10 o’clock on a particular day in June, the town–as does every town and city–holds a lottery. The responsibility for preparing for the lottery falls to one man, who is replaced by a volunteer when he decides he doesn’t want to do it anymore. Tradition is very important to the lottery, though necessary changes have occurred. The black box used to hold the lottery slips formerly held wood chips; however, when the population grew, the box was too small to hold all the chips. The man in charge of the lottery changed to paper. Over the many years of the lottery, much of the paraphernalia for the black box and the original black box itself have disappeared or disintegrated. Now a three-legged stool gets placed in the town square, and the black box sits atop it. Otherwise, everything is the same as it’s been for countless years and innumerable lotteries. One old man boasts that this is his 77th lottery, his “seventy-seventh time.”

The purpose for the lottery, other than it’s tradition, is never explained, which adds to the darkness of the story. Those would have been wasted words. It’s enough to know the lottery is and always will be.

As people arrive for the appointed time, they chat as friendly neighbors about harmless things. When I first read this story in high school and reached this point in the story, I remember thinking, how boring. They’re all standing around talking about commonplace things, much like my father at the cattle market or my mother at the hair dresser. What was so good about this story was eluding me.

Then, you feel the tension mount as everyone walks up to the black box when his or her name is called and removes a folded piece of paper. Everyone must keep the paper folded until all have chosen. There is a brief dispute about whether a young woman draws along with her family or her husband’s. Once that’s settled, the reveal can begin.

At a signal, people unfold their papers and hold them up for all to see. Jackson’s prose lets you “hear” the sighs of relief as paper after paper is blank–except for one, which has a black spot on it that “Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Yes, there are lots of allusions to dark and black things throughout the story. I always envisioned a colorless town with people in drab clothing, though there’s no such description.

Soon, it’s obvious someone isn’t owning up to having the black spot, one Tessie Hutchinson. She knows she has the dreaded piece of paper and even though she knows it’s futile to try to hide it, she clenches it in her fist. Her husband is the one who pries her hand open and shows everyone the paper with its black spot.

The villagers back way, leaving Mrs. Hutchinson alone, but they are only moving to pick up their stones from the pile the boys made earlier. Other stones are scattered about, and you get the impression they have been used and reused time and time again. Someone actually puts stones in the hands of Mrs. Hutchinson’s small son because everyone must participate. She begs and pleads, but no one–not her husband, not her children–will help her or stop the inevitable. This is tradition and must be upheld.

Shirley Jackson was renown for not giving interviews or explaining her stories, though the reaction to “The Lottery” compelled her to offer this:

“Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.” (July 22, 1948, San Francisco Chronicle)

Today, we read of stonings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and are repulsed. We attribute such actions to backwardness, and we are so smugly certain civilized people don’t do such things, that we have evolved beyond being slaves to tradition. Really?

Jackson was married to literary critic Stanley E. Hyman, who wrote the preface for a posthumous anthology of Jackson’s stories. He noted her purpose in “The Lottery” wasn’t to simply horrify but to incite subversion, and she was pleased when she learned the aparteid government of South Africa had
banned the story there because they considered it subversive. Many critics then and since have speculated Jackson wrote on the dark side because of a traumatic childhood or was neurotic–the usual reasons given when women write something other than children’s stories or romances. Hyman felt her writing gave voice to our inner, post-Holocaust, Cold War fears of mutually assured destruction and getting the enemy first.

One of Jackson’s two novels, The Haunting of Hill House, I read soon after I finished “The Lottery.” Don’t bother to see any of the movie adaptations. Just read the novel instead. It will scare the absolute bejesus out of you, not with gory, explicit scenes of mayhem or murder, but with the careful, thoughtful juxtaposition of words. Nothing else will ever scare you as much.

Except, perhaps, the last line of “The Lottery”:

“‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,'” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”