Lee As Pain

                When I was in Grade 11, I drew a picture of Robert E. Lee in pencil. The photo copied is a perfect capture of the man’s eyes, of their mixture of stern command and sadness. I drew this picture because I admired him. I hung it in my highschool locker.

                Twenty-five years later, a group of white men, also admirers of Lee, gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the removal of his statue from the newly-named Emancipation Park. They clashed with counter-protesters, and one of them drove his car into a crowd, murdering a 32-year-old mother. At a press conference, The President spluttered some words in Lee’s defense, asking reporters if they also wished to pull down statues of other slave-owners like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

                In his lifetime, Lee was a central figure of The United States’ Civil War, and his story is one of heroic contradictions. He was a soldier who abhorred violence, and totally obedient until he betrayed his country. He was a racist slave-owner who disliked slavery. He commanded the Confederate Army in its most glorious victories and ignominious failures. For Northerners, he was both traitor and honored adversary.

His legend began in The Civil War, but it has been rewritten many times since. After the war, he joined the American pantheon of heroes. Politicians used him as a symbol of reconciliation between North and South, a hero to salve the wounded pride and sorrow of a defeated South. He became an avatar of the Lost Cause, a narrative of the Civil War that highlights noble soldiers defending their homes and State’s Rights, while downplaying or ignoring slavery. In many ways, Lee is The Lost Cause, a noble soldier who fought for his homeland, while disliking slavery and secession.

Lee has also become an icon for intolerance. Former Confederate soldiers, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, formed the Ku Klux Klan to thwart The Reconstruction and punish newly-freed slaves. Their numbers swelled in the 1920s and 30s. They were joined by Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists in Charlottesville. To them, Lee is a hero of the white race, who battled a tide of uppity niggers, race-traitors and weaklings.

A new Lee narrative is circulating. You can find it easily by Googling “Who was Robert E. Lee”, and finding one of the many copy-paste articles about his history. It casts Lee as a cruel slaver. Here, he is a blunderer who just couldn’t figure out them gol-dern military tactics, his greatest victories credited to the even-greater incompetence of his rival, George McClellan. It goes out of its way to point out that Lee wouldn’t have wanted monuments of himself. Its sole aim is to justify the removal of statues.

All over the South, Confederate statues are being removed, including images of Lee in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and Baltimore. To the architects of this movement, Lee is a symbol of the violent racism that caused the Civil War, and endures today. The public statues of Lee, mounted on Traveller, are a reminder of the humiliation and suffering of slavery, and the enduring institutional racism that came after.

None of the narratives about Lee is completely true. Too many stories claim him. Only Lee knew the full narrative of Lee, but we can come close to discovering his true character by studying history.

If you take the time to read many different accounts, you will see a creature of perfect physical and moral discipline, tortured by his own deficiencies. You will meet a truly gentle person who was also a killer. You will see a man unlearning outdated military tactics, and quietly mourning thousands of deaths he caused. You see him take responsibility for failure, and his soft-spoken humility. You must reconcile a man of such heroic character fighting on the wrong side of history, for an immoral government founded by proud and greedy men. You will come to learn the pain behind those stern, sad eyes.

In 1861, Lee was forced to make a terrible choice. He could either command the Union Army, or return home to fight for his native Virginia. His choice was personally heartrending. And yet, Lee’s personal pain at his decision to fight for the Confederacy caused far more external pain. It filled thousands of surgeons’ buckets with sawed-off limbs. It crowded thousands of graveyards. Would the Confederacy have lasted long without his talents?

The pain did not end after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. It spoke through generations, inspiring some, and inciting others to violence. Rip down all the statues of Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, Roger Taney, Braxton Bragg, or the rest of those Confederate losers, and it will elicit hardly a peep from the public. Target Lee, and it’s a different story. It is no coincidence that the violence of August 12^th was fought over his statue. One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War ended, people are still dying because of Robert E. Lee.

In Grade 11, I made a monument to Lee in my locker. Knowing what I do now, would I keep that pencil drawing on display? That’s a tough one. When I drew that picture, I didn’t give a thought to slavery. I admired Lee’s self-control and self-denial, his cunning in battle, and his resolve in overwhelming adversity. But, if I could explain to myself that other people might think it an endorsement of slavery, or that I was a Klansman, I would be embarrassed. I’d be defensive, then guilty. Then I’d probably take it down. The process would be painful.

“What a cruel thing is war; to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbours, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world!” ~ Robert E. Lee

What is Magic?

During World War I, three Portuguese kids met the Virgin Mary.  I'm not sure why people paid attention.  Kids say a lot of dumb stuff.  My kid, for instance, claimed to have an invisible sister named Marceline last month.  I laughed at her, and I was correct to do so.  Early 20th-Century Portugal was a different time and place, and for whatever reason, these kids were big news.

The kids told people to go hang out in a field and await a miracle.  And over the course of months, people waited.  About a hundred thousand of them travelled to Cova da Iria.  Newspapers sent reporters to cover the event.  

Then, on October 13, 1917, something happened.  Nobody is sure what.  The Catholic Church now refers to this event as "The Miracle of the Sun".  Of the people who experienced it: 

• One third of them saw something freaky happen to the sun.  It flashed different colours, or zig-zagged across the sky, or two suns appeared.  
• One third of them experienced conflicting weirdness, like their wet clothes drying spontaneously.  
• And a third of them saw a bunch of crazy idiots losing their minds over nothing.  

My grandpa Charlie, were he alive for me to ask, would tell me that those religious nutcases saw what they wanted to see.  He was a rocket scientist and physicist, and science was his faith.  Religion and magic are the realms of crooks and crazies, he might say.  He would have said that atmospheric dust created the illusion of The Miracle of the Sun, or that the loonies saw a parhelion rainbow, or maybe they were just staring at the sun for too long and hurt their eyes.  

Charlie failed to get any of his kids to become scientists.  But I inherited his sceptical mind.  In the aughts, I was burned by unsourced left-wing, libertarian websites, and I honed my bullshit sensor.  I like my ability to sniff the false garbage that circulates on Facebook, and I like the idea that we can prove stuff by testing it.  I like the label of "sceptic".  

I also want to believe in magic.  When I was a kid, I loved the stories of trolls lurking under mountains in D'Aulaire's Book of Trolls.  In my twenties, I became entranced with H.P. Lovecraft's tales and their moral that unspeakable terror lies beyond the borders of human knowledge.  Now, I write my own stories, and all of them are supernatural.  

That, and I've seen some weird shit.  I  had an out-of-body experience when I stopped breathing on an operating table.  I've seen ghosts.  I've felt tingling energy flowing through a woman's fingers into my back. I've stepped into rooms and glades, knowing that their was an invisible presence with me.  These are not the words of a sceptic.  

I desperately want magic to be real.  My senses tell me that it is.  Yet science consistently refutes ghosts and energy and chi.  My cousin once shared somebody's theory with me that since science never detects the supernatural, it must be very rare.  Brain misinterpretation of data and mental illness, however, are very common.  Therefore, most people who see supernatural things are either mistaken or crazy.  

So that's me.  I couldn't have seen my dead friend Nick looking down from his old apartment window on Broadway.  I saw some other guy who looked like him and my brain filled in the rest.  

At this point, I want to repeat a phrase beloved by alternative and pseudo-scientific therapies everywhere.  If you're a sceptic, you'll hate this: "(fill in the blank) harnesses the body's remarkable ability to heal itself."  This phrase makes my skin crawl.  But it's pretty much the only scientific evidence for magic that I can think of.  

I'm talking about the placebo effect.  If you give a sugar pill to a group of people and tell them it will cure their illness, a bunch of them will get better.  Who do placebos affect?  Henry K. Beecher, the scientist who practically wrote the book on the placebo effect, said that they affect about one in three people.  Here's another funny one.  There's also such a thing as a noncebo.  This is a harmless substance that, if the patient believes it is bad, will have detrimental effects.  

What is central to placebos and noncebos is that they hinge on belief.  They help or harm because people believe they will.  The reason it works is something to do with expectation, but the science seems really fuzzy.  The point is that your health is, to a large part, subjective.  If you truly believe that acupuncture, reiki, or cutting gluten out of your diet will make you healthy, it might.  Even if you think that you will be healed by sneaking into the Vatican and taking a draught from the Pope's toilet, there is a one in three chance that it will work.  Belief!

So let me express my own beliefs.  I believe that the placebo effect is magic.  I believe that the Miracle of the Sun was magic.  I believe that ghosts and chi energy are magic.  And I believe that these things can exist alongside science.

The immanent physician, Dean Ornish, made a quote about science that I like.  He said, "A valid scientific theory is predictive, verifiable, and replicable.  To me, that's beautiful."  In the spirit of that, allow me to give magic the same treatment.

Magic is unpredictable, unverifiable, and subjective.  

Magic can never be quantified by science, because there is never any guarantee that it will work, even in the hands a master.  When it works, it sometimes doesn't work as advertised.  Furthermore, because magic is subjective, the presence of sceptical minds makes it less likely to work.  One person will see two suns rising and be moved to prostrate tears, while another will observe nothing.

Science is great.  It has elevated our humble species.  We live longer, we build astounding things, and we rule the planet.  It provides a great baseline for existing on earth.

However, sometimes weird shit happens.  When magic occurs, it is awe-inspiring, terrifying and cathartic.  It is wonder at seeing two suns rise.  It is inexplicable terror in a lonely place that makes your heart pound.  It is a terminal cancer patient beating the disease.  It can change your life, or become your reason for living.  If you refuse to believe in miracles, it makes them less likely to happen to you.

So believe.  

Robin Williams, Sadness, and the Lie of Success

After a day of musical rehearsing which should have been enjoyable, I got home last night feeling like I wanted to be somebody else.  I laid in bed and wondered to myself why everything has to be such an effort.  I wanted life to be easy.  Then, my wife, who was browsing Facebook, told me that Robin Williams committed suicide and I cried.

Robin Williams was not my favourite comedian, nor celebrity.  Rik Mayall died recently, for instance, whose comic work I hold in higher esteem.  While upset, I was not moved to tears.  Normally, a dead celebrity produces a shoulder shrug and a "meh".  In fact, I've spent much of my life chortling at Robin Williams' roles in sappy dramas like Patch Adams, What Dreams May Come, and that concentration camp movie, the name of which I care not to remember.  Yet I cried when he died.  Here's why.  

The first reason is obvious.  He spent so much of his life trying to cheer people with his comedy, to improve lives, and make life on earth better.  Those dramatic roles he chose were often inspirational people who taught us the importance of joy, laughter, and life.  To suicide himself seems to render his work fraudulent, like he was lying to us the whole time and in the end, sadness wins.  

It is not as simple as that.  His death should not be the entire meaning of his life.  

He battled depression.  I know what that's like.  I know what it's like to obsess over joy and sadness.  The depressed always do.  We wonder why we're not as happy as we should be, we wonder when we'll stop being sad, and we worry about the happiness ending.  An evil self-critic is constantly nattering at us.  Yet when that voice is silenced, the joy we taste is overwhelming.  Its memory sustains us through the brutal times.  I suspect, though I'll never know for sure: the non-depressed do not, and cannot, appreciate joy the way our fellowship of the sad experiences it.  

In short, he was more than just a sad clown.  Yes, that was really Robin Williams rolling on the ground, weeping and pouring gasoline on himself in Death to Smoochy.  He drew on his personal despair to make the role of "Rainbow" Randolph real, so real that many viewers were disturbed.  But that was also him in Dead Poet's Society, drawing on his energy as a nurturer, trying to help us live and see through all the bullshit that makes us unhappy.  

However, this is not what made me cry.  

What made me cry is this: Robin Williams had a huge house and tons of money.  He had talent.  He had fame.  He had children.  He had work whenever he wanted it.  He had professional respect.  His acting roles inspired and moved millions of people.  In short, he had success.  Yet he still hated himself.  

His death exposes a great lie: Success = Happiness.  I was taught that if I strove to improve myself and my lot in life, my reward would be happiness.  But it's just not true.  Wealth, fame and power did not save Robin Williams, and it cannot save me or you or anybody else.  

This is either the saddest thing ever, or the most freeing.  It's sad because I will constantly be duelling my personal demons.  But it's freeing as well, because I now see how little Success actually matters, and how little Failure matters conversely.  I can stop worrying about it.  A life of happiness can be lived without them.  This leaves me with more time to pursue actual happiness instead of stuff that doesn't matter.  

As I lay in bed last night, talking about Robin Williams with my life, I could see how easily I could die like him.  Someday, I could hate myself so much, be so full of despair and regret, that I asphyxiate myself.  If that day comes, it won't matter how famous or rich I am.  But just thinking about it has made that future seem more dim and distant.  I can be happy this instant, regardless of the success of my career.  Right now, the trees are green, the cat is fuzzy, my kid wipes the table by herself, and I love them all just a little bit more.  

When Robin Williams killed himself, he was not thinking about me or my happiness.  Yet his life and death have touched me and instructed me in a profound way that none of his movie roles ever could.  Thank you and farewell, O Captain, my Captain.  

Epistemic Closure and Me

In his article, "Revenge of the Reality-Based Community", conservative Bruce Bartlett describes his fall from favour with America's Republican Party.  In it, he uses the term "epistemic closure".  In his context, he uses the term to describe a state of affairs where forms of cognitive dissonance can be comfortably ignored within a bubble of like-minded friends and Fox News.  Basically, he argues that conservatives have created a system where they can ignore not just contradictory viewpoints, but evidence, science and yea, reality itself.  This is not just an issue for Bruce Bartlett and conservatives.  It's everywhere. 

One of the things I try not to take for granted is the stunning rise, during the youth of my generation, of the internet.  As a shy high school student, I called the internet for the first time in a computer lab in my high school.  The computer went shhhhh boing eeeboing-boing.  It was all text-based.  Now the internet is an essential service.  It's the flagship invention of our Information Age.  As a writer I can research any topic without leaving my home.  As a consumer, I could watch movies on Netflix all day and never see them all.  And as a Man I can... do other stuff.

The Truth, as based on evidence and scientific findings, has never been more available.  Yet people seem more confused than ever.  For my lifetime has also seen the rise of something sinister: extremist politics.  Since that day in the early 90's when the school's computer went boing-boing, the world seems to have filled with evangelical Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, radical free-marketeers, paranoid left-wingers and conspiracy theorists.  These groups were around when I was a kid.  However, what makes them more powerful today is that they can pick up a keyboard and find hundreds of people to agree with them.  They can live their lives avoiding cognitive dissonance and differing viewpoints, digging themselves deeper in layer-upon-layer of justifications, gradually believing stranger and more incorrect things.  I know how easy it is to get caught in this world, because ten years ago I was One Of Them.

It all starts with not wanting to be wrong.  In 2001, the world's political landscape changed suddenly when The World Trade Center in New York was destroyed.  Sitting American President George W. Bush experienced a huge upswing in popularity.  I hated that.  His presidency was already infamous for its stupidity and dishonesty, so when he said that a cell of fanatic Muslims was responsible for the attacks, I doubted him.  I wondered if, because he benefited from the attacks, he might be responsible.  I turned to the internet to satisfy my doubt and found thousands of viewpoints that reinforced what I already wanted to believe: "I am not wrong in doubting".

This was my gateway into the world of epistemic closure that is far-left conspiracy theory.  Every conspiracy theory needs three things: an antagonist, followers who feel victimized, and a will to believe.  For small-c right-wingers, the antagonist is a vast organization that includes corrupt politicians, communists, media outlets and hordes of deluded thralls.  Small-c left-wingers blame different organizations.  Fanatic Christians and Muslims believe the Devil is at the centre of the conspiracy.  Others think it's freemasons, extra-terrestrial intelligences, or a race of reptile men.

I was in the small-c left wing camp.   I felt I was the victim of a group of shadowy rich men who continuously tread on my rights as a human, elect and bribe politicians, control dishonest media outlets and make a mockery of democracy.  As I write this, this theory doesn't sound so crazy.  That's how a conspiracy gets you: it starts somewhere real.  William Randolph Hearst was a rich man who influenced politics with money, owned yellow media outlets and drove America to war.  Rupert Murdoch, with his ownership of Fox News, is Hearst's modern counterpart.  The world is full of rich men who love to wield their power.  

I lived in this world for several years.  Every day I would log on to whatreallyhappened.com and check out the array of news sources which spanned mainstream outlets, to hazy sites like infowars.com and prisonplanet.com, to sketchy publications like Pravda and the official media outlet of Saddam Hussein's government, to the lowest level of left-wing newsmaking: angry bloggers sitting in their basements making stuff up.  I was angry, too.  Who wouldn't be angry in a world where 9-11 was an inside-job by the American government?  Or Al-qaeda is an invention of Israel's Mossad?  Or hundreds of American soldiers die daily in Iraq and are not reported? 

I wanted this world to be true.  It wasn't just about being right or not being wrong.  Believing in a story like this added meaning to my life: I felt like I was doing something important in opposing the conspiracy.  And believing in the conspiracy made me feel smarter than everybody else. 

Then, suddenly, I stopped.  I was tired of being angry and powerless.  I was reading something claiming that yet another group was responsible for 9-11.  At this point, I had heard that 9-11 had been engineered by Al-qaeda, the CIA, the NSA, NORAD, the Bush White House, the Mossad, the Israeli Army, Cubans or the Rothschilds.  "So which group is it?!" I exclaimed.  And I had no answer.  For you see, I didn't know.  I wasn't there and I didn't see.  I would never really know, it was beyond my power to know, and it was not my responsibility to know.

That was step one of my recovery and it felt great.  My anger dropped away so suddenly that I sighed.  I stepped out of my house into the sunlight, breathed warm autumn air and felt great. 

Step two of my recovery was a little more difficult.  At this stage I looked at my past beliefs and realized that not only did I not know what happened, but my past claims were most likely wrong.  It hurt to admit.  In trying to add significance and importance to my life, I engaged in insignificant and unimportant activity.  In trying to be smarter than everybody else, I became ignorant.  In trying so hard to be right, I was wrong.  

Step three was a little easier.  I realized that there are people in the world who knew what happened.  These are people who are trained to know.  There are intelligence experts all over the world who agreed Al-qaeda is responsible.  There was also Al-qaeda itself, that claimed responsibility for orchestrating the attacks and training the pilots.  The simplest explanation was that these people were right. 

It's easy to fall into the trap of epistemic closure.  I feel embarrassed about the things I thought and said, but I have to remind myself how easy it is to believe incorrect information in the age of the internet.  It's even easier now.  On Facebook, an article with a crazy title goes viral quickly and people will share it without checking sources. 

Let's take a look at this shitty internet situation.  I just Googled the word "reptoid".  Here are the first ten results.

Result 1: Wikipedia.  Anybody can edit Wikipedia.  Because of this, it has a reputation for inaccuracy.  Unfortunately, it's the only search result that is critical of the idea that reptoids control the world.

Results 2, 3, 5 and 6: Conspiracy websites Reptoid Research Center, the Reptoid Wiki and the Alien Research Wiki.  These sites will tell you that a conspiracy of anthropomorphic, maneating reptiles are masquerading as humans and ruling the world.

Results 7 and 8: YouTube videos of reptoids Johnny Depp and Alex Jones supposedly shapeshifting.  (The Alex Jones shapeshifting video is especially silly: yet another example of conspiracy theorists claiming other conspiracy theorists are part of the conspiracy)

Results 4 and 9: results unrelated to the reptoid conspiracy.  A guy nicknamed reptoid has weird photos and a Swedish magazine is named "Reptoid". 

Result 10: Urban Dictionary.  Absolutely useless for anything.  It's uninformative, not funny and fuck fuck fuck I hate Urban Dictionary. 

Here is the point I'm trying to illustrate.  If somebody tells you that Queen Elizabeth II is a shapeshifting flesh-eating reptile, it's difficult to find proof on Google that she's not.  The only sane site on the first page is the perpetually-scorned Wikipedia.  To search further, you will have to wade through scores of unsourced frightmongering conspiracy sites, irrelevant links, broken links, advertisements, mirror sites and porn to find something useful.

It's the Information Age, people.  Why is it so hard to find sourced evidence that reptoids don't exist?  It should be front-row, centre.  Instead, Google has provided me with a series of results that will support an unhealthy belief-system, hedged by random crap.  The Information Age was supposed to disseminate knowledge.  Instead we have a multimedia minefield where banner ads decorate the desperate squeals of mentally-ill persons trying to be correct. 

There has to be a better way.  How about this, Google?  How about letting media outlets, universities and research companies register as "scientific" or "sourced", and if you search with a specific Google setting, these results will come up first?  If Google can SafeSearch porn, it can help the world filter its bullshit, ads and inane yammering.  

In honour of this occasion, I am going back over my posts on this blog and deleting one that was poorly-sourced and spreading misinformation.  I won't tell you which one, though.  It's still hard to admit that I've been wrong.

http://pharaohphobia.blogspot.com

Nemesis Returns

Once again, Nemesis has returned to punish my hubris. As a teenager, she haunted me. Again in University she dogged me. She is back and she will not rest until my career lies in ruins and my friends and family hate me.

Her bargain is simple. I get to play a really fun strategy game. I get to be the leader of a tribe and raise them to a world-spanning empire. I develop their technologies and tinker with their government. But in exchange for playing with the lives of millions, Nemesis destroys my free time for daring to play the role of god. The bargain is unequal yet still I slaver for the game of the bitch-goddess. And as my talents go to waste and my social life collapses, she laughs.

It says "Start", but not "End".

Her game is Sid Meier's Civilization. I first became hooked when the game was ported to the Super Nintendo. If I close my eyes I can still hear every note of the endlessly cycling modern-era music, inspiring nausea.

In 1997 I aquired Civilization II for my Mac. How many hours vanished into that void? I could not say. But when I returned to University I was playing it when I should have been studying. I must have been playing it in 1998 as well because I remember thinking to myself that I should be learning about Hinduism or practicing for the Saskatoon Symphony. Historical footnote: I got kicked out of the Symphony. Coincidence?

I managed to dodge Civilization III in 2005 on virtue of it being a stanky retread of Civ II.

But some of you may have noticed that I didn't write any blog posts this January. Eris protect me, Nemesis is back. And I'm not even playing the recently-released Civilization V. It's the old Civ IV and I'm helpless again. I am so powerless that I would rather be playing it that the latest addicto-thon for the PS3, Skyrim.

Gilgamesh sez, "Dude, your baby's crying."

I told my wife I wouldn't be playing Civ IV single-player anymore the other day. But today I came down to my office to write. "I'll just check out the Carthagenians." An hour later, I said to myself, "You're playing this game. You should stop." Two hours later, I finally managed to regain control. Thank Eris I managed to halt myself before the sun set. If I had let myself, I would have played deep into the night and woken exhausted.

Help. Me.

With Greatest Sympathy

I'm going to try very hard not be trite in this post.

Being a parent has given me a perspective that I lacked at this time last year. A year ago, I would not have been arrested by this picture which I discovered as I surfed the internet. Scratch that. Not just been arrested, but moved to weeping.

It's a picture of a baby from over a hundred years ago. His eyes are vacant and trusting. He looks like a sweet little boy, maybe with an unfortunate haircut, but sweet nonetheless.

Here's the thing. It's Hitler. I must have been one of the only history buffs in the world who hadn't seen this image until now, and I also missed the commentary and uproar it stirred. It's a bit of a cognitive dissonance. World War II propeganda turned Hitler into a demon and history and legend have transformed him into the most evil man who ever lived. Up until this point, I had not dwelled much on Hitler's past. I had known he was a shrimpy geek who was refused service by the Austrian army but was subsequently accepted into the German army and gassed on the Western Front. I also knew he was a mediocre artist. Before that, however, I had no idea. He might as well have rocketed out of the earth with a belch of flame and sulphur and a "Mwa-hah-hah-hah-hah!"

Yet there he is. There are no horns, no blood-spatters and his eyes do not appear to be luminous red. Adolf Hitler was once a sweet little kid who didn't know anything. A year ago, I'm sure the same thoughts would have formed. What brought tears to my eyes was the fact that when I saw this picture, I was holding my own baby in my lap. In her eyes is that same vacancy and trust. When I enlarged the resolution of the picture to look at it more closely, she recognized Hitler as another baby, leaned forward and smiled.

That was what broke my heart. Hitler started at the same place my baby did. I'm reasonably certain my little girl won't become a perpetrator of genocide during her lifetime, so what happened to him to so utterly destroy his humanity? What turns a sweet little boy into a paranoid butcher of millions who needs a child or soldier to watch him sleep lest a menacing spectre only he can see wake him screaming in the night? Was he emotionally and physically abused by his parents? Did an uncle touch him? Was he mocked until he cried or beaten for being short and brown by his schoolmates? How did World War I destroy him? What spiritual toll was exacted for years of having his simple, impressionistic artwork ignored? Or was he always just irredeemably broken?

And that was that. I FELT SORRY FOR HITLER.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

Are YOU an Authoritarian?

I had an interesting/disturbing conversation with some family members yesterday. It was about the upcoming Canadian election. We got into the topic of Stephen Harper's undemocratic proroguings of Parliament. It wandered a bit, then ended when I, in a shocked voice, asked them, "Do you... want a government that just shoots people?" They must have looked at each other and silently decided that the conversation was over. They changed the subject.

This conversation put into focus for me that Harper is not acting alone in his undemocratic actions. He has the support of people in our country who no longer believe in our constitutional, parliamentary monarchy and would prefer a powerful government with an unaccountable dictator who "gets things done". These folks are what are called authoritarians. Are YOU an authoritarian?

Answer these questions and your score will reveal how authoritarian you are.

1. Do you believe that politicians are all yappy crooks and we should get rid of them?
(a) No.
(b) Yes.
(c) No, only that one politician I like is honest. We should get rid of the others.

2. Do you believe that national leaders should hide information from their citizens?
(a) No.
(b) Only in the interests of National Security.
(c) Yes, if the information contradicts my views.

3. What is a terrorist?
(a) "Terrorist" is only a label. One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
(b) A terrorist is somebody who uses fear, economic disruption and war to achieve political ends.
(c) A terrorist is somebody who opposes my government.

4. Should terrorists be tortured?
(a) No.
(b) Only in the most dire emergencies and lives can be saved.
(c) Yes, please. Can I help?

5. Criminals. We hate 'em, right? Should they vote?
(a) Yes.
(b) Not while they're in prison.
(c) No. They've forfeited their rights as citizens. Let's force 'em to make combat helmets!

6. What's the best way to keep the crime rate low?
(a) Ensure healthy communities through a strong economy and/or social programs.
(b) Hire more police.
(c) Hire more police, make it easier for them to arrest and convict people, oh and let's make some more laws for people to break.

7. Panhandlers are always asking for money and making you feel bad and, besides, all they do is spend their money on booze. How do we get rid of them?
(a) My annoyance with panhandlers is caused by my own feelings of fear, guilt and inadequacy. Deal with those emotions and panhandlers won't be so trying.
(b) Form public awareness groups to ask people not to give to panhandlers.
(c) Arrest them for loitering. Can't beg for money in the drunk tank, can you, stinky?

8. Our soldiers occasionally commit atrocities. Should we prosecute them?
(a) Yes, in the public court system.
(b) The military courts can handle that stuff on their own. They're not biased at all.
(c) Plunder and rape are historical rights of soldiers. If we want to keep morale high, we sometimes have to look the other way. So no.

9. Media information can be contradictory. What's the best way to make sure you know all the facts?
(a) Listen to and watch all media available to hear all opinions.
(b) I have a news source that is fair and balanced. I only need to pay attention to that one: the other media lie all the time.
(c) Why listen to the media when I can listen to the President/Prime Minister/Il Duce/Der Fuhrer talk?

10. Some criminals just have to be killed for the good of society.
(a) No.
(b) Only after a trial by proper authorities.
(c) Just criminals?

11. Artists, musicians, actors, playwrights, filmmakers and writers should receive funding and tax credits for:
(a) Skillfully produced and engaging art.
(b) Art that does not contradict public policy. Pornography and treason must not be funded by taxpayer money.
(c) Artists ought to do what the government asks them to do if they want funding.

12. Oh oh. It's that pesky asshole, Pastor Fred Phelps and he's not just picketing gay funerals anymore. Oh my God. Is he seriously picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and screaming at the bereaved that their loved one is burning in hell? What's to be done?
(a) If you need to do something, make some noisy public display that drowns out Fred Phelps and shows support for the families.
(b) Fred Phelps ought to be arrested for disturbing the peace.
(c) This way, Fred. Step into the car. Just move that spade out of the way. You'll need it later. So... pray much?

13. A bunch of eggheads at the university are saying that the government shouldn't be holding those protesters without charge. What's the best course of action?
(a) Join the protests.
(b) Stay home. There must be a good reason why the government is doing that. It'll sort itself out.
(c) There's nothing worse than intellectuals trying to tell us what's what. Let's go yell at them for being so mouthy!

14. Gun violence is out of control. The innocent are dying in the crossfire. What's to be done?
(a) Nothing. It's sad, but sometimes innocent people must die upon the altar of freedom. Besides, prohibition pumps money and power into the hands of smugglers, black marketeers and gangs.
(b) Guns must be controlled and licensed. If you want to own a gun, you have to take a safety course. Concealable weapons need more control than long guns. RPGs, flamethrowers and artillery are completely prohibited.
(c) No citizen should be able to own a gun. It's for their own good.

15. Some weirdo scientist is telling you to turn a knob that will electrocute somebody. He's yelling at you to do it. You:
(a) Walk out of the experiment.
(b) Protest, weep and cry but turn the knob anyway.
(c) There must be a good reason for this. He's a scientist, after all. Bzzzt!

You did it! Add your score thusly: For every answer of (b), give yourself one point. For every answer of (c), give yourself two points. Compare to the list below.
Score:
(0): I don't believe you got a score this low. Go back and do it again.
(1 to 10): You believe in personal freedom. You see a logical need for order in society but worry about too much government control. You are most likely either a student, a hippie, a libertarian or an educator.
(11 to 20): You have strong authoritarian tendencies. Your belief in democracy is shakey. Cameras and cops make you breathe easy. You would rather be safe than free. You are most likely a person living in a gated community or parent concerned about some kind of moral panic.
(21 to 29): You are an authoritarian. You don't really believe that democracy works and you would feel better if somebody would just "take care of things". You yearn for a powerful leader to tell you to do things and what to believe. You are most likely a strict soldier, survivalist, angry cop, religious housewife, somebody who lives on a compound for some reason, or a brooding revolutionary hunched alone in your basement in front of your computer monitor, writing insane blog posts and waiting for the day you seize power.
(30): Henry VIII, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin.... *sob*... Why did the Lord take them from us so young?

Enough with the semi-joking already. Liberté, égalité, fraternité: remember that? It's not just French bullshit. It's the essential ingredients to a democracy or republic: liberty, equality and brotherhood. Liberty is the important one here. Large numbers of nosy police and soldiers cramp liberty's style. You cannot have freedom and have armed men imposing strict laws at the same time.

Everybody, look deep inside, especially if you vote Conservative or Republican. Are you really a democrat? Do you believe in your republic/parliament? I'm asking you because I fear for your mental health. A sick society is a society that is dishonest with itself. If you can admit to yourself that you don't believe in democracy and you are an authoritarian, you will be happier. Every time you invoke democracy in the name of hurting, jailing and killing people you don't like, it sounds a little more hollow and we all know it.

So go ahead and admit it. You'll feel powerful and maybe afterwards we can have an honest talk about all y'all going off and forming a little dictatorship in Arkansas with Sarah Palin as your despot.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

The Legend of the Knockout Blow in Debates

I just watched the 2011 English Leaders debates on CBC, streaming live on the internet with viewer commentary. When the debates finished, I was excited. For the first time in a long while, I saw the people on stage talking instead of shouting at each other. It was civil and thoughtful.

More than this, as an avowed enemy of Stephen Harper, I was excited. I had the powerful impression that he had lost the debate. Online polls suggested that people were impressed and surprised by the performances of Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff. By contrast, Harper spoke plainly, rarely to his opponents and habitually into the camera, never allowing himself to become excited, but making himself a total bore in the process.

Then, a few hours later, I started clicking news stories about the debate. As the spin wheeled forth, I began to seriously question my sanity. The debate these political pundits described bore no relation to the one I had seen. They described a debate in which an unflustered Stephen Harper, for six minutes, sparred with his opponent, Michael Ignatieff, and won the debate because he didn't allow himself to lose his cool. And Jack Layton made some off-colour remarks. The end.

I began to pack my bag for a lengthy stay at one of Saskatchewan's fine mental institutions. Clearly, my perception of events was deeply flawed and it was only a matter of time before little glowing gnomes appeared in my peripheral vision and started telling me to stalk Miley Cirus. But then I remembered, and with a huge sigh of relief I exclaimed, "Oh yeah! The media have their heads up their collective asses!"

The source of the madness claiming that Stephen Harper won the debate is the Legend of the Knockout Blow. You see, a long time ago, there was a magic man with a big chin. Giant-chin-man once had a debate with a man who patted women's bums and all the mooses and beavers came to see them talk. (A godless commie was also in the debate, but nobody remembers him). Until the debate, the Bum-patter was very popular. Then, Giant-chin-man said, "You had an option, sir!" and Bum-patter sputtered and gibbered and all the forest creatures cheered, "Hurray!" and made the magic man their Viceroy of Evil.

Since that day in 1984, the media have been hungering for another Knockout Blow. Every election, political commentators judge the performance of our politicians by saying, "So-and-so failed to deliver a Knockout Blow, so therefore the other guy won!"

It's been 30 years since Mulroney's Knockout Blow on John Turner. None other has occurred. It is time to stop expecting our politicians to deliver them, because they don't happen. It is nice to hope for them, but madness to expect them.

Every year except this one, the media consortium that governs the leaders' debates has tried to encourage Knockout Blows by presenting debate formats that glorify sound-bite politics, giving each person very little time to present their case. It's always devolved into candidates shouting over each other, trying to deliver the Knockout Blow. Finally we have a format that is inspiring thoughtful debate with minimal interruptions. Please, let's stick to it and junk this childish yearning for something that happens less often than a blue moon.

So, now that we've gotten that out of the way, allow me to indoctrinate you with the correct version of events, free from the intellectual shackles of Knockout-blowism. Ignatieff was sensible but stiff. Layton was lively and funny, which is surprising because he's sucked so hard in debates-past. Duceppe was likeable but irrelevant.

And Harper was a huge snore with his beady eyes searing into the camera and droning away on his dull talking-points. He started off the debate boring, then was a little more boring midway-through, then varied his act by being insensere. Then he bored us during the healthcare debate and finished with words of inspiration in his closing remarks: inspirational only because they inspired me to check my watch and restlessly tap my foot. In conclusion, if I hadn't known that Stephen Harper was onstage I would have sworn that a giant, boring black hole had opened above the soundstage and was sucking anything interesting or exciting into a vast parallel universe of tedium and deflected questions.

But whatever, this is Canada and we like our politicians boring, so maybe he did better than I thought. There's no accounting for some tastes, eh hosers?

Oh yeah, and while I am truly anti-Harper and cringe at the idea of the Green Party splitting the vote further, Elizabeth May should have been there. And I'm also sick of the media casting every election as a simplistic black/white two-way battle when there are in fact five major parties competing for our vote. But those issues are for another rant.

Remember: Anybody but Harper. For the love of God and your democracy, anybody but Harper.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

Why I'm Not Voting for Stephen Harper this Year

Okay, I admit it. This will come as no surprise, but I have never voted for Stephen Harper, the Conservative Party or its predecessors the Canadian Alliance, the Reform Party or the Progressive Conservatives (dumbest party name ever). However, just so I'm not mistaken for some ideologue who votes for the party his parents voted for out of habit, I like to give reasons why I'm not voting for Harper. It's only fair.

In 2004, I didn't vote for Harper because I heard that he was a member of a Christian sect that recently stood outside a tavern and prayed to God to make it collapse. I figured it would be a bad idea having a guy like that guy in charge.

In 2006 I was disgusted at the Conservatives' stance against criminals. They wanted to make more laws that would create more criminals and then they wanted to strip those criminals of their democratic rights as citizens and not allow them to vote.

In 2008 Harper revolted me with his comment that ordinary folks don't care about art. As I explored in this post, I don't think he's incorrect. I merely understood loud and clear what he meant: "I don't care about art".

So here it is, 2011, and Harper is running again. Normally, my not voting for Stephen Harper wouldn't be news, or even worthy of a blog post. This year is special. It's special because if he wins, he'll be justified in pulling all his undemocratic horseshit. Read on.

It's fair to say that Harper has been a clever Prime Minister. Since he first formed a minority government, he's known exactly where he is. He knows that he can't get everything he wants because Parliament won't let him. For his first term (2006-2008), he laid very low indeed. He even, dare I say it, governed well. He was receptive to the wishes of the people and he tried to work with Parliament. What resulted was a government that was moderate and responsive.

During this period, I have to admit that I was surprised. I wondered, fleetingly, if Harper was worthy of my vote. But then I thought about it a little more and realized that Harper was biding his time. He had his own Conservative dreams and would have loved to realize them, but he had three left-wing parties breathing down his neck, constantly threatening to topple him if he didn't play ball. He knew that if he governed as a populist, he could maybe win a majority government and then truly do what he wanted, free of meddling.

In 2008, he made his bid for a majority government, called an election and got another minority. It was immediately obvious to me that he was frustrated and losing his patience. The man has dreams after all. He had plots to hatch and Parliament was getting in his way. Harper's government went from being clever to ruthless. This began a new phase for the Conservative government, what I call the "undemocratic" phase.

Since 2008, he has since done everything he could to do to push his agenda and thwart parliament. Remember this? He shut down Parliament. Twice. In 2008, after the election, he told the Governor General to shut down the show. Why? Because it looked like some other parties were going to form a coalition government. Then he did it again! In order to keep a Parliament prying into allegations that Canadian soldiers had handed prisoners to torturers, he closed down parliament. Why? "Uh... the Olympics are on... or something..." Can you imagine that? Imagine the government of the United States shutting down because there were Olympics happening! It would never, ever ever happen. Is Canada even a real country? Disgraceful. Disgrace, shame and INFAMY!!!

Why does this bug me so much? These are our elected officials. He was using proroguing, a rule used in the past to allow our elected officials to go home and help their constituents, to prevent himself from losing power and getting embarassed during the Olympics. If he is re-elected, what kind of message are we sending him? We are telling him it's okay to thwart democracy.

Well, it's not. It opens the door for future abuses, and greater ones. What's stopping Harper from shutting down Parliament whenever it's inconvenient for him? What's stopping him from closing Parliament indefinitely? Legally, nothing. The Governor General can legally do just about anything here, and he/she usually does whatever the Prime Minister asks. The only way to keep Harper accountable for this total bullshit is at the polls. Vote him out!

Need another reason? Okay. How about this? His government was found in contempt of Parliament. His own government! This is the first time in the history of Canada that a government has been found in contempt of its own Parliament! Why did this happen? He's buying some really expensive military jets from the States and refuses to tell Parliament how much they really cost.

Well, Steve, we have a right to know. It's our money and our elected officials get to find out what you're up to. That's why we have Parliament and opposition parties. What are you hiding? Why are you hiding it?

Once again, if we re-elect that guy, it's sending the wrong message. If we put him back in the PMO, it tells him, "Go ahead, Steve. Govern without our consent or knowledge. We think you're cool for being such a rogue! Would you like to hit us over the head with a truncheon?"

(The funny thing is that, you know what? I think the Canadian Forces could use some modern jets. Those junky CF-18s are nearly thirty years old. The Americans seem to be getting a bit, um... unreliable. We can't continue to rely on them to protect us from commies and we need to be more self-sufficient. Bring on the multi-million-dollar hardware. Just be truthful about how much it costs.)

This undemocratic strain in Harper's governing style is now leaking into his campaigning style. If you want to attend a public rally where Harper is speaking, you have to submit to a pre-approved identity check. Then, once you're there, if Harper's goons see that you're wearing a T-shirt they don't like or not acting enthusiastic enough, they can toss you. Then when Harper takes the podium for questions, we only get five. If we ask him why we only get five questions before he leaves, he refuses to answer.

But here's what makes this scary. Our loveable mounties, the beloved RCMP, have recently admitted that they've helped Harper investigate and remove people Harper doesn't like. Can you imagine that? Our national police force is helping the Conservative party conduct its unwholesome business!

I'm reading now that Harper has actually apologized for chucking people out of his gatherings. Is an apology really in order? What does this apology really mean? Is he sorry for being creepy and undemocratic? I doubt it. He issued the orders in the first place. Surely he thought about the moral consequences and decided to do it anyway because he didn't want to be embarassed. No, what he's really sorry for is that people called attention to his George-Bush-style campaigning.

Dear Canadian readers, Harper has kept his minority government since 2006. He has been waiting for his majority for a long time. I now know in my heart what he wants. He wants American-style Republican government. It's not religious, because if it was, they would actually abide by Jesus' wishes to live poor and await the next life. It's not capitalist, because if they were true capitalists they would want fair trade, not monopolies. They don't really believe in smaller government because they spend billions on authoritarian institutions like the military and police. They're not democratic because they are hell-bent on locking more people behind bars and then denying their right to vote. The only word I can use to describe them is Opportunists. They wrap themselves in religious, capitalist and libertarian rhetoric when they are, in fact, the antithesis of all they proclaim. They are servants of powerful men who want more power.

Don't believe me? Go ahead and vote for Harper. Give him his majority and see. Then come back in four years, read this post and weep.

Alternately, why don't we all save ourselves a lot of trouble and vote the crooks out? If we hand government to another party, I guarantee Harper won't run again. We'll be rid of him and maybe, just maybe, the Conservatives will get the message that it's not okay to pull this bullshit.

I once took a political leadership class in university. In it, my professor told me about many of the constitutions of other, less-democratic countries. These constitutions are well-thought-out and sincere in their desire for democracy. However, powerful dictators in these countries routinely declare martial law, choose not to hold elections and make people disappear at night. By contrast, Canada has very few legal safeguards on our constitutional monarchy. Our Governor General has the power to roll tanks through the streets, dissolve Parliament on a whim and choose not to hold elections.

Why doesn't it happen here? It just isn't done. We have inherited a British Parliamentary tradition of fair play, compromise and reverence for our method of legislating and certain things you just don't do.

Well it's being done now. Harper isn't playing fair. Rather than compromising, he is finding sneaky ways to circumvent Parliament. I know a few people who like Harper because he "gets things done." What price are you prepared to pay for getting things done? Any dictator can "get things done" by waving his hand. And where does it end? If the Conservatives are not handed their asses, this bullshit will continue with other governments, no matter which party is ruling.

So please, dear Canadian readers, when election day arrives, vote NDP. Vote Green. Vote Liberal (even though they started this proroguing bullshit in the first place). Vote for the skeleton of Abraham Lincoln. Vote for the giant, malevolent toad who only you can see and tells you to do things. Take your ballot and wipe your ass with it.

Anything, anybody but Harper.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com

Review of "Julian" by Gore Vidal

For the longest time I thought Gore Vidal was this weird character-actor who always played dignified guys with excellent diction. I also knew that he had written the screenplay for "Myra Breckenridge", which appeared in a book called "The 50 Worst Movies of All Time" (Vidal has apparently disowned it). Imagine my surprise when, a few years ago, I discovered that his movie career is actually secondary, and that he is a novelist foremost. He has written an impressive number of historical novels, one of which is "Julian", the life-story of Julian the Apostate (331-363 A.D.), a Roman Philosopher-Emperor who tried to fight Christianity and revive the worship of the Hellenic gods during his short reign.

It begins with a correspondence between two philosophers, Priscus and Libanius, during the reign of Theodosius I, many years after Julian's death. Together, the two conspire to publish Julian's secret memoir. Priscus sells the memoir to Libanius with some notes. Libanius writes on the manuscript as well, seething that Priscus keeps withholding sections of the memoir and asking for more money. Thus Julian's life work is interrupted constantly by the two philosophers as they berate each other, discuss morality and offer differing accounts of the history.

"Julian", amongst other things, is a criticism of the effects of power. From the moment his uncle Constantius murders his father from paranoia, Julian is abused by the Roman state with all its bureaucracy, intrigue and fear. In his secret dreams of power, he wishes to be Emperor and do things differently. As he first tastes power as Caesar of the West, he is energetic, destroys pointless ceremony and thwarts the powerful. But as his day as Emperor dawns, despite his philosophic training and morals, he finds himself miscarrying justice and making concessions to powerful men. Corruption leaks in: where Constantius had his decadent eunuchs leeching money and resources from the state, Julian has a cadre of dubious Hellenic priests and magicians making their fortunes from his rule. Paranoia begins to haunt him, just as it did his uncle. As one reads, one begins to ask, despite obvious religious differences, if Julian's reign would have been similar to his uncle's if he had ruled longer.

More than anything, "Julian" is a lament for the vanished Hellenic world. The main characters of the novel are all pagans. As Julian follows his quest to restore the old gods, everywhere he is confronted with omens that his efforts are too late. The old classical world is vanishing, replaced by a new, ugly world. As the pagans lament the shortness of Julian's reign and the fall of old Rome, the reader is struck with further significance of which the characters are unaware: that in little over a century, Rome itself will collapse under the weight of barbarian invasions and its own corruption.

"Julian" has also been called a critique of Christianity. I'm not sure that's exactly the case. Whatever Gore Vidal's thoughts on Christianity are, and I bet they are not that friendly, the anti-Christian sentiments of this novel are the time's own. The main characters, being pagan, are hostile. The criticisms levelled at Christianity are merely echoes of Porphyry, Libanius, Julian's known published works, and other neoplatonists. Is this really criticism or is it just journalistic retelling?

Despite definitions of what "it is", the anti-Christian sentiments seem to have stirred me up. Without a doubt, this novel was the impetus for my writing "My Damn-Fool Search for Religion" post - a post that seems to have lost my blog some readership, by the way. The hypocritical, sleazy and maddening origins of the early Church are examined: the contradictions in the Bible, the corruption of the Bishops, and the exportation of pagan rituals and gods as sacraments and saints. But the book also features what has to be the stupidest religious nightmare of all time: what is the Holy Trinity Made of? For those of you who are unaware of this debate in which hundreds of thousands of human lives were lost, what do you think? Are The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit made from the same substance or are they made from different substances, are they different people or are they made from the same substance but they're different somehow? Be careful how you answer, because 1500 years ago, your life would be in jeopardy.

So far, I haven't touched on the structure, dialogue or story of the novel. That's because, as far as I'm concerned, it's perfect. The story is thrilling. The characters are brilliant and products of their time, not 20th-Century-people slapped into an antique setting. Every detail is slavishly researched. If I ever write a book this thoughtful and excellent in every way, I would die a happy man. I give it my highest rating possible and recommend it as required reading for anybody with a brain and a thirst for knowledge.
5 arbitrary arrests out of 5

As a side note, this is something I have always wondered. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, here's the background. Rome was an awesome place with awesome art. Then it got divided in half between east and west. The western half fell to barbarians, beginning what is known as the Dark Ages, when art, literature and intellectual thought were in a primitive state. The eastern half of the empire lived on for 1000 years as the Byzantine Empire.

To give you an example of how crappy the Dark Ages were, let's look at some coins:

Here's a solidus of Julian the Apostate from 360, before the Dark Ages. The profile is of good quality and striking. Obviously, somebody of artistic skill crafted it. The tails side isn't so great, but you can tell what's going on. There's a guy with a captive or body held in submission.

Here's a coin of Marcian, who became Emperor in 450, ninety years after Julian. Under his reign, Rome was sacked by the Vandals, which officially marks the end of the West. The bust is looking a little more cartoonlike for sure. But what the hell is that thing on the right supposed to be? According to Wikipedia, it's Victory. Victory is looking a little shabby, kinda like Rome itself was.

Here's Zeno, who had a reasonably long reign at the end of the 400's. Oh dear. Zeno himself looks like he was rendered by a talented six-year-old. Victory looks like a fallen angel with droopy wings. Did contemporary Romans have any sense of irony about this like we do?

Poor Emperor Maurice and his family ended up headless and floating in the Sea of Marmara in 602. Perhaps he was beheaded by his usurper, Phocas, who saw this coin and figured Maurcie was so ugly he had to die. Victory is at her most abstract yet. Any more abstract and she would be a crayon drawing of a head with legs and feet sticking out of it.

Things were worse in the Western half of the Empire, where they stopped making coins altogether. Germans were running around whacking the heads and penises off of statues. Then they all retired to Africa and had a big laugh.

So here's my question. What was the Byzantine Empire's excuse for having sucky art? The West was overrun by barbarians. They have a good reason for entering the Dark Ages. But what was going on in the East? Constantinople was never sacked by barbarians. Why is there such a shocking and lasting decline in the quality of their craftsmanship?

If "Julian" is to be believed, the ascendancy of Christianity caused it. At the time of Libanius and Priscus, the Christians were just closing down all the Hellenic schools. There are constant references to the new style of "ugly" art. Could it really be that the Christians had their own abstract and austere style of art that they favoured over the photorealistic tradition of the Greeks? Did Christians cause the Dark Ages just as surely as rampaging Germanic tribes?

I suspect the truth is not so clear-cut. But on the other hand, maybe it is. I won't know until I spend a little more time reading the history. I have all sorts of vile anti-Christian words dripping from my fingers right now, so maybe it's best to stop this post now before I lose more readers.

Maybe I'll read a nice book about Jesus next. I have to get rid of some of this Christ-anger. Maybe I'll read Ben-Hur. Incidentally, Gore Vidal wrote the original screenplay for the 1958 movie Ben-Hur. Just goes to show you that Gore Vidal has affected our lives beyond reckoning. He might just be watching you right now...

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

My Damn-Fool Search for Religion

I was raised an atheist. Then one day when I was fifteen, my kitten died in the dryer. It seemed unfair to me that such a tiny, loving creature would die meaninglessly. Thus began my quiet quest for divinity.

I began very cautiously. I was already aware that organized religion was repellent to me. One only needs to learn about a single crusade to discover that there is a down-side to large groups of grouchy people who think everybody else should think the same way.

It was when I was playing the last movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony in the Saskatoon Symphony's viola section that I was touched with the divine. Call it a chemical reaction in my brain if you must. But it started as a tingle that spread from my shoulders and filled me with euphoria. I felt something tug my consciousness upward. I soared even as my body played tremelo in place. It was fucking amazing.

While my search for the divine had been based completely in wishful thinking up to this point, I finally had some sort of indication. It was a physiological reaction of some sort. But I was unclear as to whether it was caused by Jesus, Mithras, a chemical reaction or midichlorians. (It was several years later that I learned of the existence of midichlorians from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. My midichlorian count is unusually high, you know). Whatever this feeling was, it was caused by music.

I decided to do some actual scholarly investigation on the world's religions to see what everybody had to say on the subject. Fruitlessly did I learn, fruitlessly did I wander. Did you know that the holy books and traditions of all the world's major religions are chock-full of useless information, contradictions and commandments now irrelevant to modern life? It's all "don't cut the hair above your ears" and Jesus getting mad at fig trees and this or that makes you unclean and "women, don't you contradict your husbands" and "Allah hates it when you hitch your camel like that, you know" and "when you die there's nothing: hurray!" and "when you die you float up to the top of the universe's skull and bounce around" and "welcome to heaven: here's your virgins".

I know what some of you are thinking. Organized religion has good aspects, it teaches morals, it has community and charity. Much of the music I was listening to after university had religious lyrical content which made me yearn for a religious community all my own. This is exactly what I was pondering when a girlfriend of mine invited me to Catholic services at Saint Thomas More chapel at the University of Saskatchewan. With some trepidation, I accepted.

Well, Saint Thomas More was everything I hoped it would be. It had (and has) a community of intelligent, enthusiastic worshipers. It has thought-provoking sermons. It has music and solemn traditions.

I desperately wanted to be a Catholic then. But I could not. Here's why:
1. The Old Testament is senseless and insane.
2. The New Testament was written from decades to over a hundred years after Jesus died. His lessons were preserved (mostly) through oral tradition, which is like a decade-long game of telephone in which Jesus preached something like "be nice to everybody" and we heard "purple-monkey dishwasher". Then several hundred years later, a bunch of people Jesus never met picked through everything and removed anything they didn't like.
3. Even assuming everything Jesus said was accurately recorded in the Bible, the Catholic Church is a huge, bloated, worldly organization which has amassed immense wealth, all the while espousing the beliefs of a homeless guy who asked us to live poor.
4. A two-second glance at the history of the Catholic Church - with its crusades, antipopes, illegitimate children, schisms, wars of conquest, child abuse cover-ups and Nazi lovin' popes - confirms that it would be an agent of pure evil if it were not alloyed with hypocrisy.
5. As Christianity spread throughout the world in its infancy, it appropriated all sorts of unwholesome gods and traditions from pagans and turned them into saints and holidays. Old-Testament God does not approve.
6. Saint Thomas More chapel's worshipers are not actually Catholic. I could have gone through that crowd and asked people if they thought contraception was evil and homosexuality is a sin. The answers I would have gotten, from the priests included, would vary significantly from what the Pope thinks. You get different answers from Catholics in Scandinavia, Africa or South America. Back in the day, this was called Heresy. But now it's called, "believe whatever you want as long as you give us money on Sunday."
7. And most of all, the Mystery of Faith is anti-intellectual. How does Jesus' blood banish original sin? The answer is: nobody knows, don't think about it. Shut off your mind and accept it.

I apologize if I have upset any readers. I strongly considered going back and deleting that last section. It's mean. But they are my reasons for not being a Catholic. By listing them, I don't mean to challenge your faith or convert you. It's not about you.

They almost won me, those Catholics. When I list my complaints, it is with deep anger from betrayal. Their community enchanted me and made me forget that Catholicism is a teetering tower built on a delusion, built on a sham, built on a lie with a solid foundation of myth. Somewhere under that dark tower is buried truth, but to unearth it would topple the whole structure.

I pick on Catholics, but honestly every religion I've investigated is guilty. Where people congregate and organize, power appears. Power is the great corrupter and turns any religious bastion into a fountain of wickedness that spews lies and guilt into the world.

As I again found myself metaphysically adrift in a leaky boat of my own devising, a simple phrase illuminated my dark world like a lighthouse. "King Kong died for your Sins". It's from a document called the Principia Discordia, one of the holy books of Discordianism, a poorly-known religion created in the 1950s based on worship of the Greek goddess Eris, appropriated as a goddess of change and chaos. It has been called either a joke masquerading as a religion or a religion masquerading as a joke.

Remember: KING KONG died for your Sins. It was the first phrase I read from Principia Discordia and it made me laugh out loud. As such, it is the only sentence from a religious tract that has motivated me to do anything. Honestly, I was never able to get my head around what Jesus dying has to do with original sin, so honestly, King Kong makes about as much sense. The Principia Discordia contains many such laughs and a philosophy that made me think seriously about the role of chaos and discord in my life. It doesn't ask me to do anything I don't want to do.

Though I had first read it a decade earlier, I began to seriously think about Discordianism as my religion. Eris-worship does not ask me to surrender my mind, does not ask me to speak to her through a priest who leeches money from me, does not make me feel bad about myself and helps me accept change when it occurs in my life. I decided to investigate further.

I joined an online Discordian forum in 2006, expecting to have philosophical discussions with good-natured and inquiring fellows such as myself. What I discovered appalled me. Even on this simple website which should have been fun incarnate, rigid power structures existed. The most avid users had formed a clique and expected new users to undergo a hazing ritual. Rather than engage me philosophical discussion, the clique argued with me using name-calling and concluded their posts with pornographic images that they supposed were funny.

I'm sure that from their perspective, their antics were hilarious. But to me, they were cruel and snobby. The lesson I've learned from all this is that I will never find a community of people to share my worship. Even Discordians, when they congregate, become insular and intolerant. It doesn't matter if your religious organization operates from St. Peter's square, a single mosque or even an insignificant internet forum. Power crystalizes like a kidney stone, halts divine flow in the holy urinary tract and causes significant pain.

It's been five years since I learned this hard lesson. Now I have but one simple religious observance. As commanded in the Discordian Pentabarf, I partake of no hot dog buns. But every Friday at the Cook household is now Hot Dog Day, when I joyously partake of a hot dog as also commanded by the Pentabarf. By doing so, I remonstrate against Judaism and Islam (no Pork), Hindus (no beef), Catholics, (no meat on Friday), Buddhists (no meat of animals) and Discordians (no hot dog buns). But if I miss Hot Dog Day, it's no big deal. As a self-declared Discordian Pope, I can completely rework the Discordian church as I see fit. While I don't necessarily believe there's a crazy lady named Eris running the show, I am at least satisfied that if she exists she's not mad at me for doubting her.

And here's the point in all of this. The Divine is not something reserved for certain places or persons. As individuals, I believe we all have the power to commune with the Divine, whatever you believe it is. We need not go anywhere or ask permission from anybody, we need not consult a priest or give money to anybody, we need not worry about what the community thinks. If you think something holy is out there, you need only pick up a pen, a paintbrush, a musical instrument, or simply clear your throat or head. While there is nothing wrong with discussing religion with others to discover your truth, I say to you that those who ask you to surrender your will, your intellect or your money to them on God's behalf are scoundrels. You can be your own church.

For those of you interested in not taking religion so goddamned seriously all the time, there are a number of religions other than Discordianism available for investigation. Check out Zen, for instance. It's classic. Christianity is to Judaisim as The Church of the SubGenius is to Discordianism: it's not exactly to my taste, but sequels are usually worse than the original. And of course, whenever fundamentalist Christians attempt to impose creationism on the public school system, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster also desires its due.

Remember, religion is supposed to make you happy, right? As humans, we are never as happy as when we are laughing.

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