SO?

I tuned into some PBS program last night with a priest talking about god and the problem of evil and it all sounded more or less nonsensical. Or maybe it was making way too much sense: like somebody parsing a poem and draining all the life out of it although each particular was perfectly reasonable and logical. He said you might explain Auschwitz by saying that God takes the longer view and makes the apparent and timely evil into something unpredictably good in the long run. So what? Is that a comfort to anyone there but the Nazis? Another view the priest put forward is that God is an artist and like Seurat paints in little dots and humans can’t see the big picture only the dots. Again, so what? If the world is your dot, that’s what you need to pay attention to. Of course, then he had to read from the Book of Job, and don’t get me wrong, I love the grandeur of Job. It’s marvelous and moving and puts me in mind of what I loved about Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” particularly with its cosmic imagery and the questions that have bedeviled (begodded?) Westerners for centuries. But that cosmic view is the problem - what difference does it make? People like the priest always make it seem as if the point is to decide whether there’s a god or not, but while they work on figuring that out, life goes on and you might just as well do a crossword puzzle for entertainment. If that god has nothing to do with here and now and good and evil and such, then fine, let that god fool around with the universe and I’ll get on with whatever I’m about. The last story the priest told before I went back to watching something more entertaining was about William James, I think. How James looked around at all the things in his library and then looked at his dog and thought how the dog could see those things but never understand them. The priest’s obvious point was that we were the dog in God’s library. Well, I don’t know if James said that really, but I can imagine his dog thinking, “Poor Will, he’s too nose blind to smell the mouse trails at the corners of the room, he can’t just sit quietly, stare into the fire, and savor the moment but always has to be scratching at paper with his little stick, and when we go walking, he’s so slow and clumsy. But he tussles my ears and I love him.” This last is because the dog gets the important things about inter species relationships. I don’t pretend that this is some final word on the subject, it's just that what I tuned into seemed to ignore any particularly human reason for caring about the matter.

Gemstone: Hawk's Eye

Ten Years On

As I watch the commemorations of that September day, the feelings that come to me are much as they were then. There is disbelief at the sheer scope of the tragedy, sorrow for the pain of the victims and all who loved them, pride in the humanity of the many brave souls who risked everything to aid others -- risked and lost but in the losing won so much. I remember watching several days later as the stars of America gathered to support the families of victims and knowing bone-deep that on that day there had been not a dime’s worth of difference between me and them and indeed much of the world as we watched the 11th unfold. And I took comfort in the messages of commiseration that came from everywhere, from the offers of a village in Kenya to send cattle to the condolence of Queen Elizabeth of England.

But now there is a new feeling, a kind of resignation. What I feared then might happen as a result of that day became reality, and now must be lived with. The rush to flaggery that alarmed me then continues to undermine the vision many of us cherished of a world moving toward peace and justice. I feared that a peculiar patriotism would react by becoming jingoistic and the record of that happening is too long to cite. A blank check was given to people in a position to use 9/11 to further their own aims of power both personal and national.

And so, to use a homely metaphor, both shoes dropped and life went on. I have a private set of beliefs that are somewhat religious and they are: when there is a huge tragedy then the sacrifice is meant to awaken in the living a common purpose toward righting wrongs. Ten years on I believe that any hope of a better world requires still more sacrifice.

Gem: black onyx

The Rich and the Ruthless

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer [dvd: 2010]
Once again I am reminded that the ruling class is actually the predator class. Even the benign image of the good shepherd glosses the truth that the flock is kept for fleecing and eating. This documentary is the story of Eliot Spitzer who might have been president, who almost forestalled the Wall Street tumble that pulled the whole economy into the avalanche. I will never understand what could make someone pay thousands of dollars for sex and I will never understand how a man who had made such powerful enemies would give them a way to bring him down. This film is much like a travelogue, a trip to a faraway world where the very rich and ruthless live.
Gem: meteorite

And Still

The Tillman Story [dvd 2010]

And still. After seeing documentary after documentary on the perfidy of the powerful, after living through decades of history, it is still as if I forgot to take my reality pills and so I am once again astonished at the rulers’ audacity, at their capacity for deception. This story, which focuses on Patrick Tillman but is about his entire family, begins with suggestions of dire news to come yet takes time to celebrate the life of a son, a brother, a husband, a young man whose joy of living in an athlete’s body is irrepressible.

The basic story is well known: Pat Tillman was a rising star in the NFL who set aside his football career in order to join the army rangers with his brother after 9/11. First sent to Iraq, the Tillman brothers were then transferred to Afghanistan where Pat was killed. The first reports were that he died heroically and was awarded a silver star, but reports were later amended to state that he was killed by friendly fire. A thoroughly tragic event to be sure but not appearing all that weighty with import.

The first realization that the Tillman family is blessed with a gift for truth came for me at the scene of the memorial service for Pat Tillman which opens with a platitudinous eulogy by John McCain who solemnly states that everyone will meet again in heaven. Pat’s youngest brother takes the podium and, speaking from a heart you know is broken, calls this bullshit, that his brother never believed in heaven and is just dead. Later in the film, after the army realizes that the Tillmans, particularly Pat’s mother Mary, want the truth of his death, the full and honest truth, an army recording emerges that has one voice referring to atheism as “religious” and saying that it is perhaps this religious difference that won’t let the Tillman family just let go. In an often chilling film, I found this one of the colder episodes and I am still pondering all the implications. Another moment came when I paused my dvd player in order to read from an M-4 report shown on-screen that the truth of Pat Tillman’s death should be kept from the public so that POTUS and the Secretary of Defense would not be embarrassed for making untrue statements when they used the young man’s death to whet the nation’s appetite for more war. That would be George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

By the time he reached Afghanistan, Pat had become more than disillusioned with the war, he planned to speak out against it when he was out of the army. That position has been taken by his brother, Kevin, who has published a small book with a very big message: The Transparent Pillage.

While watching generals and congressmen at the hearing on the Tillman coverup, I was reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago which showed a drawing of a very bland, suited man and was captioned something to the effect: Often the predator evolves to appear indistinguishable from its prey. Today, I have difficulty believing that the rulers are the same species as the rest of us, that they use words like honor and integrity as anything other than bait.

Gem rating: Obsidian