The day before yesterday was International Literacy Day

Not that I'd actually ever heard of this, but seems like an appropriate enough prompt.

Now, I'd love to to get rid of religious texts as much as the next Koran-hating, soon-to-be-burning (apparently not anymore), Southern evangelical minister with really awful facial hair. But that's where our paths diverge, of course, because I mean to relieve the world of all religion, including mister child-molester-meets-1800s-train-conductor-face's Christianity, not just the ones he deems a threat. (And only a threat to his religion and country, not to the secular world as a whole, as I see religion for the most part.)

That, and my firm belief, buttressed by human history, that prohibition as a methodology for social transformation is usually unhinged from reality. What bothers me more than the destruction of books, which I'm generally against, is the thinking that doing so will effect a desired outcome; that it will somehow stem the supposedly rising tide of supposedly dangerous Islam. (In all fairness, all religion is increasing all the time; that's just part of the deal, especially in the West. Interestingly, of the big three, despite their progenitor status, the Jews have been the worst at this.) In fact, it usually has the opposite effect, as it would here, of fomenting opposition to whatever the mechanism of suppression. And we shouldn't need a general in the field and our president to tell us that.

Not only does this conflate a small faction of violent fundamentalism with its mainstream religious counterpart--a point I've been known to concede if not proffer, though here I'll take the moderate tack--it perhaps belies an insecure uncertainty that the "best" religion, here Christianity, will win out. And so it goes, they must burn certain books, they must ban the construction of certain buildings. All to protect the children, of course. Ironically, it would seem they don't have enough faith (wow, I never thought I'd think that) in their own, well, faith to believe their children will make the same supposedly correct decisions as they have--at least when it comes to what flavor you want your theology-kool-aid.

Hey! You've got your Islam in my Bible Belt!

(Pray harder stupid)

Despite my opinions about the destructive role of religion in society (as this and many other things these days illustrate), I'm all for the freedom of expression, ethically and Constitutionally, and that includes the freedom to worship how one pleases. But if you want to start putting restrictions on religious liberty, I say start with the extremist elements of ALL religions here in the good-old U.S. of A. So that would mean Pastor Facial-Hair-Nightmare and his Fifty Fools in Florida are out of the country and the Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan gets built on the hallowed ground of the once great Burlington Coat Factory.

But more about that another time.

A reminder to my anti-South inclination of Southern worth.

The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Flannery O'Connor, born 85 years ago today in Savannah, Georgia (1925), who wrote two novels and 32 short stories and who said: 'I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.' When she was six, she and a chicken that she taught to walk backward appeared on the news. She later said: 'I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.'

After college, she went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and then spent time at the Yaddo Writers' Colony. At the age of 26, she was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had killed her father when she was a teenager. At the time, doctors told her she would live for another five years, but she survived for nearly 14 years. She moved back to Georgia so that her mom could take care of her, to a 500-acre family farm in Milledgeville where she raised chickens, ducks, hens, geese, and peacocks, her favorite. She arose every morning when the chickens first cackled, went to 7:00 a.m. Mass in town at Sacred Heart, returned home and wrote for a couple of hours each day, until she felt too weak or tired.

As she herself put it, she wrote about 'freaks and folks.' She said, 'Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.'

In her sickly 14 years on the farm with her mother, O'Connor wrote two dozen short stories and two novels filled with her freakish, obsessive characters, crazy preachers, murderers, outcasts.

Her most famous stories include 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,' about a silly, annoying old woman whose entire family gets murdered by a man called The Misfit, and 'Good Country People,' about a pretentious young woman whose wooden leg is stolen by a Bible salesman.

Many of Flannery O'Connor's letters are collected in a volume called The Habit of Being (1979), edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald. And despite O'Connor's premonition that 'there won't be any biographies of me, because lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy,' a new book about her life came out just last year, written by Brad Gooch and entitled Flannery (2009).

Flannery O'Connor said, 'The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.'

(Faulkner quote)

Breaking Silence - For My Son by Patricia Fargnoli

The night you were conceived
your father drove up Avon Mountain
and into the roadside rest
that looked over the little city,
its handful of scattered sparks.
I was eighteen and thin then
but the front seat of the 1956 Dodge
seemed cramped and dark,
the new diamond, I hadn't known
how to refuse, trapping flecks of light.
Even then the blackness was thick
as a muck you could swim through.
Your father pushed me down
on the scratchy seat, not roughly
but as if staking a claim,
and his face rose like
a thing-shadowed moon above me.
My legs ached in those peculiar angles,
my head bumped against the door.
I know you want me to say I loved him
but I wanted only to belong--to anyone.
So I let it happen,
the way I let all of it happen--
the marriage, his drinking, the rage.
This is not to say I loved you any less--
only I was young and didn't know yet
we can choose our lives.
It was dark in the car.
Such weight and pressure,
the wet earthy smell of night,
a slickness like glue.
And in a distant inviolate place,
as though it had nothing at all
to do with him, you were a spark
in silence catching.

from Necessary Light. (c) Utah State University Press, 1999.



Lest we forget all the Baptists. Even the NE doesn't look too good. At least there's more diversity of kookiness. Still, the West is looking better and better: down w/ God, up with Pot.

What a Dick & Bogart's North Korean Blowout

I recently watched the infamous Nixon interview (Is it redundant to call something Nixon infamous?). Not the movie of the play based on the interview, but the original.

There’s no way Nixon could be a politician now. His speech, mannerisms, and sweaty odd-looking face would be enough to make people not vote for him—besides the crap that comes out of his mouth, not limited to the stuff Hitchens writes below.

I’ve heard it plenty before that even in his first loss to Kennedy in ‘60 was due to the discrepancy in their TV images, that Jack knew how to work it and Dick didn’t. But supposedly that must have been countered by the time he won two in a row. Whatever coaching they did, wouldn’t be enough today. The sweating thing especially: in old movies I’ve seen, there are these incredibly sweaty guys, sometimes the main character—think Carl Malden or Gene Hackman. Unless they’re in the jungle or playing sports (or having sex) stars don’t sweat, not naturally and thus uncontrolled. But just that face, too. That shit is old school.

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Hitchens on Richard Nixon from his column at Slate.com:

The impressive thing is that even in the smallest details, the obsessive nastiness and criminality of the bigger picture is further delineated. The foulness of Nixon's mind was not "compartmentalized" between one issue and another. For example, like most "family values" Republicans, he was distressed by the Supreme Court's finding in Roe v. Wade. But, like almost anybody, he could imagine an exception where abortion might be excusable or even desirable. "There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape." The association of ideas between the first mental picture and the second one is so clear as to be—if it were not so hideous—pathetically laughable in an individual, and really quite alarming in a president of the United States.

As so often, his remarks about black Americans are crude and often sexual, while his innuendoes about his Jewish fellow citizens are more sinister. And, as ever, the worst interludes of anti-Semitism occur when Nixon is chatting to his friend Billy Graham. This time—February 1973—the two cronies are discussing Jewish opposition to the evangelical Campus Crusade movement. What the Jews don't seem to get, observes Nixon, is that they bring dislike on themselves. Why, just look at the record—disliked in Spain, disliked even in Germany. It could be America next. "What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up." To this aperçu (incidentally suggesting that anti-Semitism "in this country" is not located all that "deep down," since it's being vented in the Oval Office), he adds, "It may be they have a death wish. You know that's been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries."

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Here's my impression and paraphrasing of Hitchens at a talk/interview he gave recently. I found the video at this pretty cool site: FORA.tv (thanks Allan).

(I know this poster is Chinese, but as close as I can get. Relax.)

Attempting, what he thinks an impossible task, to describe what life is like inside contemporary North Korea, Christopher Hitchens, after already likening the nation to that of George Orwell’s 1984, draws one contrast. While there is no mention of religion in the book, the state having taken the place of all things, the purported irreligious communistic country, North Korea, is, rather, similar to a particular western faith: Christianity. The president, the country’s founder, and his son, the current leader of the commi-esque party and the military, not president, are fused into one identity. Only, the president has been dead fifteen years. Hitchens quips, “It’s only one short of a trinity.”

Apparently, he's almost here. Won't that be a lot of fun. Actually, though, I feel better now that I know, like most heirs apparent of even anti-western countries, he was educated in liberal European schools. Sure, know your enemy. But now matter how careful and restrictive, they will encounter more people and things that counter the homegrown isolationist tendency.



Just look at what Europe did to Bogey.