Why I Love America

The Fourth of July - that's what I've always called it in my head. It's not "Independence Day" to me - not really. On the fourth day of the seventh month of the year, I feel roots and heritage and ties and all the weight and guilt and joy of community. I also feel celebratory in a very personal way. After all, on the day of fireworks and parades and The Pops on the TV out on the deck in the back of the house where my dad sat to eat popcorn in the flickering blue of the screen in the dark after we'd lit our sparklers and written our names in trails of light in the air ... on that day, it was almost my birthday ... and then my grandmother's ... and then my dad's ... and later on, the next thing became my wedding anniversary. The fourth day of the month of July is big for me.

So I wonder - what is it about these national days that seems to encourage national griping? We feel silly in celebrations more of the mid-twentieth century than of our current day, perhaps. Nobody wants to feel as if they still live on the set of Mad Men. Not really. Today I've seen all the "but remember" wet blanketing and its Janus-faced cousin, "because of the military," posts and broadcasts and talking and defending, and now I want to say something.

I don't love America because America is the best place that God ever made. There have been a lot of good places in history and on our planet. But I do love America. I love our brash hopefulness and our resilience, most of all.

Remember the movie Apollo 13? Two scenes in that movie are made of such distilled American mentality that they say it all for me. Jim and Marilyn Lovell are in their backyard, looking up at the moon, after their party. He says to her, "From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it's not a miracle, we just decided to go."

Then there's the scene at Control in Houston, when they realize they've made square pegs and round holes between the parts of the craft.
 [Several technicians dump boxes containing the same equipment and tools that the astronauts have with them onto a table]
Technician: We've got to find a way to make this
[square CSM LiOH canister]
Technician: fit into the hole for this
[round LEM canister]
Technician: ... using nothing but that.

And they do it!!

That's why I love America. We dare. We dare to dream of possibilities that don't yet exist - and we stride out into our possibilities and fix it when we get there.

We're about to fix health care, I think. It might take us another hundred years. We don't really want to fix it the way the Old World fixed it - and really, we probably shouldn't. In America, we need to do things the way that works for Americans. But we can, and we will, and I think we've started to. Whenever we have remembered that we're all Americans, and that we can and should take care of each other, we have fixed all kinds of things. We opened our colleges to returning veterans and paid their way -- and got the most incredible generation of ideas, corporations, innovations, and public servants imaginable. We stopped pretending that those who don't own land, or women, or black people weren't people. We realized we all have a stake in this land we love. And we opened up the vote. We freed our slaves (finally!), and we have been hammering and rubbing away at the vestiges of inequality ever since.

We know, deep in our starred and striped hearts, that all men are created equal, and that the tyranny of the rich and powerful is not for us. It's time to fight for that idea once more. Here we are again. One nation. Indivisible. This is our heart, and this is our soul, and this is how we work it. Our nation is The People of The Idea, and that idea is a fair playing field and a sure and certain knowing that we are, all of us, rich and poor and black and white and brown and gay and straight and Christian and Muslim and Jew and Buddhist and pagan and heathen and Native and ordinary and extraordinary ... every single one of us, right to expect liberty and justice for all. And for that, I love America.

Plenty: What is it good for?

Photos like this have been circulating in cyberspace, mainly in response to the ongoing Occupy movement. It is a rebuke. It is meant to demean the protests and filthy protesters as hopelessly naive and unbelievably silly in the face of more "real" problems.
As a rule, we Americans definitely need a little consciousness-raising about the state of the world beyond our own borders. No need to try to prove our need - it's obvious. We expect things like drinkable water and safe places to sleep. We think of these things as normal, and we forget how much better our situation is than the situations where people are regularly starving, under siege, and in danger.

However, it is a logical fallacy to posit that A is not B : therefore A is not C. The two propositions have very little to do with each other, in fact. That my neighbor beats his wife and kids doesn't really change the evil done by him to his employees. Two evils. Two inequities. Two situations of oppression and wrong. That is what we are looking at in those pictures.

And this brings me to my point. We, in this land of the free and home of the brave, in this land of land - and money - and expertise - and resources of all kinds - we have a very embarrassing problem we have to solve. We have PLENTY - and we have plenty of it. What are we supposed to do with it? What is it for? Once we've accepted the fact that there are places with so much less than we have that it takes the breath away ... are we supposed to live like them in order to help them? (Some of us do exactly that as often and as completely as they can.)

But what of the wealthy? What of us who have things? Stuff? House and goods and plenty and food and health and enough money for a turkey on Thanksgiving? How ought we to live? Some options are ...

Embrace the sucker!! Go for the gusto! Consume! Gather up! If you've got it, flaunt it. Use your gold card, your keyless entry, and your shiny, sparkling cache of prestige and just wallow around it in. The lifestyles of the rich and famous are to die for. Eat! Eat! Eat! And drive the most ostentatiously enormous vehicle you possibly can.

Has there ever been an era like ours, when so much has been worn so vulgarly by so many? Besides ... I'm pretty sure we've been well and duly warned about this choice.

And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God. (The Gospel according to St. Luke)

Okay, so, if go for the gluttony isn't an acceptable response, how about its opposite? What if we could all be monks and nuns? If we all took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and we lived in cloisters and we didn't procreate ... oh. Yeah. That's a problem.

We need professed praying people, I believe. We need them to answer their vocations to pray for the rest of us, for one thing. If you think that's a cop-out and isn't any kind of work at all, then you don't understand the life of prayer. It's work. I think it's necessary work. But if we all do exactly the same kind of work, our collective work won't work for the collective. Somebody has to do the temporal work in this temporal world.

So THAT's my question. How do we do ordinary, temporal work in an era of science, technology, conveniences and plenty? Can we?

One thing is for sure. Workers who pay the taxes that build roads and inventors and laborers who fill the land with fiber optic lines and computers and cars and trains and maps and books and copy machines ... these people are worthy of their hire. Wealth has to be proportional, not just opportunistic, if a nation is going to prosper and advance. In this era of our history as a nation, we need to take stock of our deeply fascinating belief that wealth and purchasing power are the measure of humanity. We have to stop envying wealth if we are to begin treating it as the responsibility it is.

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

And then, maybe then, maybe when we remember that wealth equals responsibility, maybe then we will remember that the least of these are the brethren of our Lord ... and therefore they are our brothers, too. Maybe we will learn one day that plenty is good for everyone if only we will share.

Because "Justice for All" is still a good idea

My earlier post, "Because It's Right," brought some objections from one of our culture's Haves. That is how it goes. Whenever the Havenots object to the Haves, the Haves counter with "because it's mine, not yours - that's why." I've been thinking about this perspective lately. Is there, actually, something fundamentally unjust about the Haves relinquishing any of their goods or wealth for any reason? Is it unlawful to make a law saying that they must do so?

Awhile back, I heard the cultural anthropologist, Mary Catherine Bateson, speak at a gathering around her newest book, Composing a Further Life. In the context of our elders demanding to be heard about subjects other than a hand-out, an entitlement, or some other self-interest, while making the point that it is the elders who ought to have the wisdom to help lay plans for a viable future, she began to speak about "access."

(As an aside, she also said, "age brings wisdom ... but only if you've done your homework.")

To illustrate the concept of having "access," she drew the lines between the civil rights movement (access to the political process by those not in the racial majority), the women's movement (access to equal pay for equal work), and the Americans with Disabilities Act. None of these things, she asserted, were about privilege. These were movements that demanded access to the wider world, and the special concessions, changes, alterations in the status quo which needed to occur were not the elevation of a particular group to protected or privileged places. These were changes needed for us to make the playing field functionally level.

This point - the functionally level playing field - is one of the points made by development economics expert Ha-Joon Chang, in his book, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism. His illustration is the foot race. Ready? Set? Go! And all the children across the land are allowed to race. Everyone gets to work hard and strive for excellence and make something of himself. No one is excluded from the American Dream. Everyone has the same chance as everyone else ... except ...

The kid with one leg doesn't have a functionally fair chance. If you were born into chaos and/or poverty, you do not have the same chance as the children of privilege. If your school did not perform in its responsibility to you, you did not have the same chance. Working hard does not overcome all obstacles. It doesn't have that much power. Working hard can do a lot. But it cannot do everything. And this is why we have gradually tweaked and changed and written and rewritten the laws of the land. Most of the time, most Americans would, I think, desire to have an actually and functionally fair chance for everyone. We're willing to handicap the players that need it, and flatten the corners of our sidewalks for wheelchairs, and even go overboard a bit to correct racial bias in the workplace and colleges. We're Americans. We believe in liberty and justice for all, and we know how to fix our problems. Eventually.

In fact, we're good at this! We Yanks can improvise our way into armored vehicles when the unarmored ones keep getting blown up. We know how to make do and mend. We can look around and say, "Too much money is going into the escape hatch of depressed and overwhelmed men on the way home from work! They're coming home drunk and nasty, and beating up their wives and kids!" ... and then make such a wide correction as the utterly unworkable and silly Prohibition years ... and then get over ourselves and fix the correction so that it doesn't make fifty times the problems it attempted to solve.

And that is what we need to do now.

For several decades, we have tried to free up our most success-likely innovators and chance takers. We have been throwing off the shackles of regulations, and giving tax breaks (which were originally agreed upon as "temporary") to the wealthiest of the land. We have made it easier to hire by making workers less protected, and we have made it easier to fire by the same mechanism. States do not have to determine their own livable minimum wage - the feds did that - thank goodness - or else most of the work force in some states would currently be in need of public assistance in even greater numbers than they currently are! We have been trying to throw off all the rules and strictures that keep us from national prosperity, but the result has been more than we bargained for. The disparity between those at the top and those at the bottom has become unsustainable. Again.It is to our national shame and national peril that this is true:

The megarich hold more of the nation’s wealth and collect more of the overall income today than at any time since right before the Great Depression.

Henry Ford was right. There is a basic component to success, and it is as true for the nation as it is for the corporation. It is not justice to make a few people rich by means of making a severely under-provided worker class. Justice is provision for a functionally level playing field.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is:
Make the best quality of goods possible
at the lowest cost possible,
paying the highest wages possible.

Henry Ford

Because It's Right

A couple of days ago, in conversation with my husband during the news, he said these words. "We are going to have to start doing some things in this country, not because we can 'afford' it, but because it's right." We were talking about the bogus fear mongering over social security, and how fouled up our healthcare delivery and payment systems are, and all the rest of it. (You know, cheerful, dinner hour conversation, 'specially chosen to aid the digestion with calm and happy thoughts. ... e-hem!)

Apparently, we stopped talking about this topic before I was done running on in my own head. I suspect this to be the case because when I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep at 3:00 this morning, I was thinking of more and more to bring to the discussion. So ... I got out of bed, took a few notes so I wouldn't forget the main points in my head, reminded myself that black tea is a bad idea in the late evenings, and finally went back to bed. This is my answer to the question, should the tax advantages currently being extended to the wealthiest members of our society be stopped? Is it fair to charge the wealthy for being wealthy? Is it fair to make them more responsible for the expenses of our government, more burdened with the cares of others than their less prosperous neighbors?

Yes.

That's my answer. If you don't really want to fiddle about with my reasons, you can pretty much stop there. That's my actual answer. But if you're interested, these are my reasons.

1. Yesterday, all across our land, the plain speech of Elizabeth Warren made headlines and facebook conversations and editorial columns. In case you missed it, here is what she said.

I hear all this, you know, "Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever." No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there-good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea-God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

I agree with her. I think we do have an obligation as a social group, a civilization of humans, a nation and a people, to uphold that kind of social contract. Basically, her position is, "We're all in this together, and we ought to act like it."

2. Now, the chief thing I am hearing in opposition to her position of the unity of our people is this: But that's not fair! People who've earned their money have a right to keep it and do what they want to with it. You can't penalize people just because they have money! That's not fair!

This is what I call, The Argument of the Fourth Grade. This is the sense of "justice" and "fairness" that we are supposed to grow out of. It's adolescent and silly to pretend that all men being "created equal" means that all people are on their own to make their way as best they can, and if the starting gun goes off, and that kid didn't make it to the finish line first, then he's just the loser and that's all there is to it. Never mind that he has only one leg. Everyone gets to run, and so it's a completely fair race.

Fourth-graders are also outraged when they don't get to spend their allowance on whatever the hell they want and still expect other things to be purchased for them. Fourth-graders believe that all money that comes to them through their own lawn mowing, babysitting, trash removal, and garden weeding is discretionary income, and that they should be able to buy what they want and then someone else ought to make it possible to give them what they cannot buy on their own. That's how life works in fourth grade. We're supposed to grow out of that. We're supposed to learn how to be responsible for more than our own pleasures. (And don't say that the rich dude has to use his money to re-invest in his business. That money isn't subject to income taxes. It doesn't count in this matter.)

3. Then there's the argument about a "free market." We cannot restrict the money-makers in a free market, the argument goes, or they will become so discouraged in the making of money that they will stop and the whole thing will collapse.

The problem with this argument is glaringly obvious: there is no such thing as a completely "free" market economy in the civilized world. Further, being a "capitalist" society does not exonerate us from all other moral concerns, and unrestrained profit-making has the potential to turn into a humanitarian assault, as we have learned to our grief and peril on many occasions.

We have child labor laws (and we should); we have anti-slavery laws (and we should); we have laws about overtime and working conditions and sexual harassment. We have also had tariffs on foreign goods in order to protect our own workers and industries (we should). Yes, those laws are a pain in the arse sometimes, and sometimes they go too far and have to be corrected, but we don't really want a free-for-all. We do, in practice, recognize that there are less powerful people in the vast machinery of wealth and business who must have legal protections, lest they be used as machinery.

For a truly eye-opening, forehead-slapping, c'm'ere-and-listen-to-this, learning experience, find and view some video of author and Cambridge professor, Ha-Joon Chang, promoting his book. He's amazing. And he's right.

4. Old-fashioned "liberals," of the sort my parents warned me about ... the Kennedys, for instance, with all their brazen robber baron behavior and profligate use of hookers and the other perks of power, at least understood the concept of noblesse oblige. This concept is a better starting place than "every man for himself," "you make your bed, you lie in it," and "the self-made man." However, I would like to see us get past the power of patronage and the demeaning acceptance of a handout, and graduate all the way up to an understanding of Equitable Load Sharing. Here's why.

• Acceptance of reality helps everyone do what is possible. It is an opportunity to avoid everything from greed to envy because no one is asked to be other than he is. (A person who cannot afford health insurance is not asked to be healthy and report to work or else lose his job, this demand made of him as if he had adequate healthcare. Pretending poor people are rich doesn't make it so; pretending makes it mean.)

• Rather than a power relationship of haves and have-nots, benefactors and recipients, oppressor and oppressed, the paradigm becomes that of a functioning body, or, even better, a choir of voices. A good choir needs chorus, soloists, and all the parts being sung well. Asking the bass to sing tenor is a disservice both to the tenor part and to the sad, embarrassed bass straining for the high notes. In other words, to each as he is able, for the health and success of the whole.

• When the rich carry more of the financial burden of society (more in total load, and more in percentage of income), the poor are free to become better, healthier, more enthusiastic wage earners; without wage-earners, the empires of the rich will collapse. We ignore this basic principle to our peril.
  

5. The Bible has so many injunctions (and I do mean injunctions - God wasn't giving a helpful hint) for the care of the poor, the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the powerless, the blind, the lame, those who have no voice of their own ... the gleaning in the fields not picked too clean, the offering of a cup of water to a child, the clothing of the poor because this is clothing Jesus ... well, all there is to say about this is that if anyone uses the Bible as a reason for a nation to become heartless (and "nobody can tell me how to use my money or who I should spend it on" is heartlessness in the guise of 'merican Ind'pendence), that person is using the Bible improperly. I'm not going to belabor this point.

6. The Peter Parker's Uncle Argument: "With great power comes great responsibility." He was right. It is true. If you have much, of you much shall be required.

We know this! We understand that the abuse of power is an evil. We say things like, "pick on somebody your own size," and we address the problem of bullying, and we have finally learned to make laws stopping bosses from passing out favors in the workplace based on favors in the hotel room. We Americans have a long tradition of giving astounding amounts of foreign aid - because we have it to give - and so we should. We understand this basic idea.

Warren Buffett has said this stuff. Elizabeth Warren has said this stuff. My husband and I have discussed this stuff. Now that I've written it out, now that I've said this stuff, maybe I'll be able to get back to sleep at three in the morning. Thank you and good night.

Flippancy Impaired

It's hopeless.

There's no getting around it, no denying it, and no more pretense left. (Right? Never going to believe it again. Come on, self. You've learned it this time. Right? Right???)

Like a midget who keeps trying out for the basketball team, the deaf mute who wants to be in the opera company, the fat girl who wants to be in the ballet or the anorexic who wants to be a Sumo wrestler, I just can't get it through my thick head.

Stephanie doesn't do trivial. Stephanie is flippancy-impaired. Social dancing around it, and smalltalk sparring ... I just can't do it. Really and truly, I want to. I've wanted to for my whole life. It's obviously a skills set, and skills sets are acquirable - right? Wrong. Just wrong wrong wrong. And you know what's even wronger? Trying to get someone else to be serious. The idiot in the audience who objects to the comedian on the stage - that's me. And what's another name for that person? A heckler. I let myself become a heckler this week. (Go ahead ... kick me under the table. I know I deserve it.)

I'd like to think I'm in good company. After all, C. S. Lewis was no intellectual slouch, and he had a highly developed sense of the absurd and the ironic. Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and all the Chronicles of Narnia -- they're pretty solid proof that the man knew humor. And he didn't do flippant either. The junior tempter, Screwtape, gets letters from his mentor - the devil named Wormwood. And (remembering that "the Enemy" he speaks of is God) Wormwood explains this problem thus:

The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction, and it is specially promising among the English who take their "sense of humour" so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame.

Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is "mean"; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer "mean" but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful—unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can be almost entirely hidden from your patient by that English seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as "Puritanical" or as betraying a "lack of humour".

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it,

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

Okay. Fine. But what do you call a person who knows this and keep trying to participate anyway? Who goes to the show and tries to stop the performer?

A heckler, that's who. A heckler who needs, for some perverse reason, to try to get the performer to be serious. ---- Next time I stand in line for tickets at life's comedy club, will someone please smack me? Seriously. A distraction at best, and a useless and unwinnable conflict at worst, and for what? Sheesh!

Hi, everyone. I'm Stephanie, and I'm flippancy impaired.

Radiolab

This. Is. Fascinating.

One of the Radiolab podcasts. Riveting.

REBROADCAST: Detective Stories - Radiolab

Exactly!

"Socialism" is NOT a synonym for civilized cooperation. (I really like Deval Patrick!)

The Daily Show - Deval Patrick
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Ditto the hopes in Friedman's op-ed piece

Op-Ed Columnist
Looking for Luck in Libya
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 29, 2011

Welcome to the Middle East of 2011! You want the truth about it? You can’t handle the truth. The truth is that it’s a dangerous, violent, hope-filled and potentially hugely positive or explosive mess — fraught with moral and political ambiguities. We have to build democracy in the Middle East we’ve got, not the one we want — and this is the one we’ve got.

That’s why I am proud of my president, really worried about him, and just praying that he’s lucky.
(Read the rest, HERE)

Stellar Flow Chart

Crimes Against Humanity

I am in my office, which is above the living room in my little house. The NewsHour is playing, and the menfolk are listening to a report about software

designed to safely store data about torture, murder, killings and other human rights abuses in countries around the world. It's meant to help human rights workers who are collecting that information and use it to document what went on -- or is going on -- in nations run by brutal dictators who might eventually be brought to justice.

It's pretty ingenious stuff, and my hat's off to the guy who invented this modern tool of resistance. His name is Jim Fruchterman - here he is, talking about this:


This is the sort of story that gives me great hope. In the same world that holds brutal dictators and their victims, there are men like this, asking themselves, What could I do with what I have that just might make this humanitarian problem less powerful? How can I help? I want to choose sides, and not just agree with the good, but also work for the good.

Tonight, when I was listening to the story from up here in my office, I heard the phrase of accusation, "crimes against humanity." That phrase came into being in the war-torn, modernizing, machine-making, bomb-dropping 20th century. That has a beautiful and grotesque irony to it, don't you think? What we did to each other became so enormous that we made a phrase to describe it. We, the people of the planet who decried the horrors of the World Wars, took a stand. There is no "us" and "them" at a certain point, we said. At that point, we're all us. Do that to them, we said, and you have done it to everyone.

Do not play this video if there are children nearby. This is the short French documentary Night and Fog. I have seen few things in my life more chilling.
Night and Fog Rare Holocaust Footage

There is no "us" and "them."

During this school year, I have read for a course in The Literature of Resistance. The above film was one of the documentary genre in History of Film. Over and over, the awareness has come to me, in class, and at work, and at prayer. There is no "us" and "them." All humans are included in the "humanity" against which crimes ought not to be committed.

There are a lot of reasons why I will always vote for public parks, public schools, public safety, public roads, and public transportation. These are the things we expect to find in a modern country, where there are more than enough resources for such things. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about health care - public, private, insured, uninsured, fee-for-service, wellness, crisis management, complementary, human-centered ... thousands of billing codes ... people sitting in their cars in the parking lot outside the emergency room, wondering how they will pay for it if they go in ... and how much more sense it would make, fiscally and practically, if we did not have such a disjointed and scattered way of going about it.

It's not a simple problem to solve, but we need to solve it. We need to solve it not only because we're throwing away both money and the health of a nation doing it this way, but more because there is no such thing as "us" and "them." A human being is a human being, and we have a moral and humanitarian obligation to stop pretending that the man left for dead by the side of the road is not our problem.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?
And he said, He that shewed mercy on him.
Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

You may say I am a dreamer

I am a Christian.
I believe the ancient Christian creed, partake in ancient Christian sacrament, read the sacred text, and follow the year's liturgical pattern. I feast on feast days, fast on fast days, and thank God for the example and prayers of the Saints.

I am an intellectual.
I study the minds of the ages in the written work they left us. I grapple with both logic and ethics, I admire both art and technology, and I work with conscious intention to understand and enact a life of educated honor in the world in which I live.

I am a woman.
I believe in Yin energy, and the darkly internal nature of generative power, embodied in women everywhere. I have borne children, and nurtured their years of maturing. I have taken to myself the Yang energy of a husband, and know that he has Yin energy of his own, but that mine is in my body as well as my activity.

I am an American.
I believe that the government of the people is necessary, that it should be done by the people, and that it is for the people. I believe in the public good, provided by the public will. I desire public roads, public parks, public education, and public radio. Where we have worked together for the good of all, America has been a noble and kind, as well as an inventive and buoyantly brash nation.

I am an optimist.

And I pray that the spirit of fear which so easily seizes mankind will begin again to recede from our shores.

The young and determined in the countries of the Middle East are waking to their inherent rights as humans. They are taking to the streets, and daring to believe what our founding fathers believed when our Great Experiment of a country began.

I am imagining what the world could be with free people everywhere, and the common good to guide us.

Adding the layers, working on the picture

(Hello, Recollected Life blog ... it's me. Remember me?)

After a sort of foraging expedition of the past few months, I now have more to say on the subject that keeps calling me. Being recollected, about life. What is a person? How do people work? When it goes wrong, what has happened? And why do people unfailingly believe there's such a thing as life going "wrong" or "right" in the first place? Obviously, we have the ability to self-reflect, imagine what is not yet a reality, and change our worlds ...

Gather it in. Collect it. Re-collect it. I do this in my religious life, and I do it all the time with "moments of clarity, attempts to focus, and questions to ponder in the intentional life" I'm trying to live. So ...I've just added another layer. In 2010, Karla McLaren wrote what I think is a fairly important book. The Language of Emotions: What your feelings are trying to tell you. She has addressed the modern, industrialized, socialized, urbanized, thought-laden, enlightenment-hounded, emotionally confused people we find ourselves to be.

I think she's brilliant. She went and studied and figured out and researched and assembled all of the components of this language we're so bad at in our era. (Because she did, I don't have to.) When I assert (as I have for about a decade now) that our emotions are like an instrument panel on a plane in flight, and that they carry information we need, and that we ignore our emotional feedback to our own peril, now I can open and re-open this book, and find the vocabulary and the studies and the research to re-ground myself in the practicalities of the thing. This is good stuff.

And it's another layer for my ongoing (personal) encyclopedia entry.

These models, these languages we all carry - they are the layers of transparencies in the encyclopedias we had on our home bookshelves when I was a kid. Do you remember those old encyclopedias? For the models of the human body or a reptile or an towering office building or anything else with three-dimensional layers, there were layers of clear overlays the reader could peel back, discovering the interconnected systems. (click on that picture of a version still being done - I love this kind of work!)

That is what this book of McLaren's does. It adds another transparency page for my model.

Back when I was taking the Human Studies course, Relationship to the Self, we had to come up with a model of the Human Self. I discovered that the Erickson model of psycho-social development closely paralleled the ancient system of chakras, which itself could be seen in concert with Martha Beck's change cycle (back to Square One at the beginning of all of life's changes, Square Two is ideas, Three is trial and error, Four is maintenance until the next propulsion smack back to Square One). Then there's the ongoing Blue Zones research, being done across the globe, where the healthiest and longest-living groups of people show that they all have the same "Power Nine" things contributing to their lives.

I ended up with Chakra Man ... a really boggling diagram, in which all the layers were present ... so it's kind of over-full of information. But this is what it looked like to me when I was taking that course. (if you click on it, it will be as large as a regular sheet of paper, and you'll be able to read all the parts)

My thinking goes like this. If the most ancient systems and the most modern research all look basically the same, they're probably all observing the same universally true phenomenon. And, within the developments and health of the organism (each human organism, and, I suspect, the amalgam of humans that form a culture) there are interconnected systems that can inform and aid, or can oppose and hinder, all the other systems and developmental curves.

A body has a nervous system, a cardiovascular system, a musculature, a skeleton ... a human has foundational chakra/developmental phase/elements, and life cycle elements that parallel the body's systems ... a society has all of these things too. It's very wheel within a wheel. And it's freaking hard to diagram!! I just might need to design the book of transparency overlays to explain what I'm talking about.

So here's the work I'm working on in my current work.

Cultural transparency: Blue Zones, Philip Zimbardo, and (I think ... but I'm not definite about this yet) Joseph Campbell. Something about the hero's journey is scratchy - but I don't know why or where, so that one's still in provisional status

Childhood transparency: the incredible and delightful currently researching Alison Gopnik and both of her most recent books, the concepts in The Continuum Concept, and Kevin Leman's work on Birth Order

Intra-personal transparency, for the emotional/personality type clarity page: Lenore Thomson, James Pennebaker, Martha Beck, and now, Karla McLaren

There's more, of course. Lots more.

But today, the big news is that Karla McLaren has written a book that explains the healthy, practical, useful, and clarifying use of our emotional systems. Emotions do not need to be ignored or denigrated, they don't need to be our confusing and eccentric masters, and they cannot be commandeered and tamed. Emotions don't work like that. They're out internal waterways, and damming them up or draining them dry are both seriously bad ideas.

Thanks, Karla. I am deeply grateful for your work.

Third Day Thoughts: That Thing I Do

I need to get this stuff written down.

Yarn fibers and hanks of thread.

Twisting maybe strands of belts or straps and
I cannot figure out what it is and
I know it is important
because it was given
to me
this past weekend.

I keep teasing the strands apart
running my fingers through it
like hair I'm trying to braid
behind my head.

Embroidery thread. First,
pull apart the strands.
Lay the threads against each other
so that their spun nature aligns

It is impossible to attend (be attentive, be in attendance) for a weekend of Testimony, Night, Woman at Point Zero, The Little School, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Death and the Maiden ... the palpable answering pain of my fellow students ... without being permanently changed. I was right. I'm back from The Village, and everything here is the same, but I am not the same. So everything's different now for me.

It's becoming a theme for the year.
2010: The Suffering of Others.
2010: The year my soldier came back from Afghanistan.
2010: The Year of Nazareth House. (Give if you can. Please. Click on the link and give if you love the people who love without condition of litmus tests. Color, creed, politics or past - none of it matters to these people. All they do is love.)
2010: The year I heard the pain of men whose women are destructive - several such men, concurrently and all in this year
2010: The Literature of Resistance




Pull apart the strands and feel
the places where it grabs
every tiny scratch or hangnail or rough
place on your fingers.

I hear you. I can feel you here
in the palm of my hand
and along the inner edges of my own touch
You are no longer

Softly faded into the neat and woven
threads of destiny and the history channel
is not pausing for a commercial
and I hear you now.



I find myself wondering if there is anything in the natural world that has its layers peeled back over and over, and yet neither dies nor hardens. Are cork trees like that, I wonder? Cinnamon, perhaps? I know why I was not peeled to this depth before now. I would have died in some way. I think the sounds of this sort of pain would have caused me to turn away in self-protective need ... and maybe that is what happened. Maybe we can stop our ears and block the sounds if we are not yet strong enough to hear them.

But now I've heard them. I cannot un-know, and I cannot un-hear. I got back off the island, left The Village again, I'm back at my flat in London, and I have no idea what to do about what I know and heard. How do I give this into the safe keeping of another?

I think this is becoming a "thing I do." A few weeks ago, my adult daughter called me from the army base, and asked, "What 're ya doin?" I was not yet fully back into the room in which I'd answered the phone -- I mean to say, I was still in the last clutches of my thoughts. And so, to give myself a few more seconds to become conscious again, I said, "Ruminating." She laughed and answered, "Yeah - because that is a thing - that you do." I suspect now that finding ways to help people hear is becoming a thing - that I do.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God
walking in the garden
in the cool of the day
and Adam and his wife hid themselves
from the Presence.

The knowledge of good and evil
the innocence of not hearing
and now it's gone
and there is nothing left to do but listen.

I heard Your voice
in the garden and I was afraid
because I was naked.
And I hid myself.

Lord, teach us to pray.

You've been erased - probably - maybe - well, it depends

I can't help it. Eraser and True Lies (and all of the Die Hard movies - yes, all of them) - I love them. I get in a mood to bash up some bad guys, and I put the disk in (and I set up the ironing board and get out the shirts or the altar linens), and Arnold or Bruce or someone like that just clears 'em all outa there. And no mess for me to clean up afterwards! It's a pretty good deal, I think.

Somewhere near the center of my chest and up in my neck and shoulders, bashing up the bad guys is connected to having a good clear-out. That's what Jean calls it in As Time Goes By. "A good clear-out." From under the stairs, from the back of the cupboards and the closets ... a good clear-out for donating things or taking them to the country house or throwing them away entirely. A good clear-out feels very action heroey to me.

And so, apparently, does moving all my RSS feeds to a new reader. Who are all these people I've been "following?" Why did I put that one in there? Oh, good grief. I haven't looked at that in ages! ... or, sometimes, Awwww.... I'd forgotten about that one. I wonder why he's not posted in a long time.

But one thing about a good clear-out (or thinning the carrots in the garden, callously discarding so many tiny orange strands, playing God like that ...) one thing about a good clear-out is the moments of pulse-quickening, "You've been erased." You, Mr. Snarkyman. The tools of irony, wit, and even bare-knuckle sarcasm -- you're not up to it. You're a whiner. You've been erased. Oh, my. This woman. I'd forgotten about her. No wonder I never follow that link and look at her page. That level of intensity over sock drawers and flea market finds ... no thanks. It's just not going to happen. Some stuff goes away because, like the denim jumper, it's just not me anymore. And some stuff goes away because I'm tired of averting my eyes. Erased. You're not coming to the new reader, you ... You've been erased.

But there's another thing about a good clear-out. It's the reason I used to put money in my books at school (which turned out to be a bad idea, since I could never remember which books), and it's the reason putting away the holiday decorations between Epiphany and Advent II or III is better than Christmas in July. There's the thrill of re-discovery.

In my old web crawler, under the headings of Books and Writers, or Homeschoolers (the two largest categories in my list) are a few real gems. "Families" and "Folks" are pretty promising boxes to sort through as well. It's reassuring. Restorative, even. It's an exercise in appreciation of the friends and family and peers and admirable people that surround me - people to whom I want to measure up - people who help me remember to laugh or to rewrite my work or to say thank you.

No, I'm not going to share my list. I won't say who's being erased. But you? Have I erased you? Probably not. If you read this blog, you're probably going into the witness protection program. I'll know where you are. Me 'n' Arnold 'n' Bruce. We only shoot the bad guys.

Totalitarian regimes ... like dormant recessive genes ... waiting to flare up at any time

Wrong in a thousand ways, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves, and it has to stop. Creating horrors to fix problems isn't okay.

Check!

Whaddaya think? Once a teacher always a teacher? Once an eight-year-old always an eight-year-old? Whatever it is, I have wanted and wanted and wanted a way to keep track of my always too-flexible tasks and obligations and goals.

You know the recommendation, right? Everyone says it. Keep a record. Keep a food diary. Keep an exercise log. Keep a calendar. Keep a schedule.

(groan ...)

It's not just this quarter's online course (no regular hours for study, but deadlines for assignments) and the goals of other outside work for school, together with sub hours at the library (ditto the irregular schedule) ... it's not just the desire to keep track of simple things like vitamins and exercise (seriously - I forget to eat) ... it's not even the writerly bewilderment that makes me sing, "Where did the ideas go, Long time pa-a-sing? Where did the ideas go? I used to know."

It's everything. It's the fact that a lot of my life proceeds by the clock, but on top of the clock's ticking there is a flux that works like a tide with no table. And I am tired of getting a mouthful of water and a tangle of weeds wrapped around my ankles every time things shift again.

So ... there it is. (You can click on it to make it big, right?) I saw someone else's and I made one for myself. There are no clock times on this Habit Keeper. It's not about when I do this stuff. It's about doing it at all. I've written my various activities (not the specifics of how or when - just the names of the things I do) across the top, in those slanty slots, and there are only four blank places for things I didn't think of today. ALL of the things are things I've obligated myself to do, and I know I won't get to each one of them every day. But at least this way, when I check something off, I'll have some sort of record of what on earth I'm doing with my time.

All it's going to take now is remembering to make the mark on the page.

The Siren Call of Easier

Remember this scene from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? The Sirens? So pretty. So ready to "love 'em up" - so ready to delay and stop and drink and slow and distract ... their calls are oh, so attractive - so hard to resist.

The guys were trying to get somewhere. They had stuff to do. They had a treasure to get to before the flood came and swept it away forever. And along the way, they heard the Sirens.

I hear them too.

I think I passed the place where two roads diverge in a yellow wood. I think that fork in the road was several miles back, and I'm already on the road less traveled by.

I decided to go to school, for one thing. And then I decided to create an interdisciplinary degree instead of staying within a discipline. I decided to go back to work - but not because we needed the money (we did - we do). I wanted to work at the library again. I have let everyone know I'm doing it, and I have recruited cohorts to help, and instead of keeping or using the curriculum available now (which is seriously inadequate for the current situations), I have decided to design and write a three, morphing into nine, morphing into 12-year religious education curriculum that I hope will be useful long after my body has returned to dust. The road more traveled by? I can't even remember where the turn-off was.

Last week, when Mary Catherine Bateson was speaking at her Marylhurst stop on the tour, I watched her and listened to the main points - but I also heard her humor and I heard her being a good sport about the stuff we can all complain about.

An aging body does have limits, after all. The woman's not delusional. She's aware that, at seventy, she cannot stand for very long at a time, for instance. So ... what did she do about it? She perched like a 20-year-old college student, and sat on a table! She's not tall. Her feet didn't touch the floor while she sat there - but she did swing them back and forth a bit. Bateson is not young - but she's not "old" either. Her road has been one of the less-traveled-by roads, that's for sure. And today I wonder what her Sirens have sung to her during her life. I wonder if she can still hear them, and if she would sometimes rather have a less profound life. I wonder if she still wonders if easier would have been nicer.

I've been listening to the people my age and older, and I've been hearing something lately. There are two kinds of people after awhile, and they get more and more obvious. There's the more usual type - the type that always seems to be looking for something that's not this. The good old days or the way things used to be or the way (they thought) things were when they were growing up.

And then there's the type that does life the Bateson way, pursuing meaning and depth and conscious understanding and deliberate choices. This type is honest about challenges, but seems almost never to be ready to complain or whine or doom-say or fuss at life. This type finds things to smile about and approve of everywhere they go. They talk about what they enjoy. They laugh easily. They work hard to make things better, but they don't stop for very long to discuss how they, personally, feel about it all. They just get on with the work - and they know the old days were not something to romanticize and long for. More tolerant of ambivalence. More ready to work for the parts of life that matter.

My Sirens go mute when the voice of people like Bateson is in my ear. This morning, I wonder if she was ever tempted to stay home and watch Masterpiece Mystery instead of getting her books and working on her projects. I wonder if she kept her house better than I do, or if she was as distracted about it as I am. My Sirens are the voices of my peers from days gone by, and they have learned to harmonize with the voices in my present life, and the whole crooning chorus sings as I pass by the water. "Why must you do it the hard way? Why not rest? Why not stop? Be contented. Stay at home. Nest. You love to nest. Nest and write and calm down and stop working so hard. Just nest. Rest. Nest. Rest."

You know what irritates me about the really dangerous Sirens? They tell the truth. I do love to nest. In my own good old days, when the kids were small, we all cleaned up around here together. I taught math, and dictation, and history, and nesting. They can cook, and they can clean (when they want to), and they know how to do their laundry, and they like the Christmas decorations to go up. And now - now that they're off in their own lives and I need not be teaching math or nesting - if I were a person to do it, nesting and hostessing and staying home to write would be my best path. It's a true path for me. The Sirens know their music well.

But I can hear Bateson's voice, and it's getting stronger in my head. "More tolerant of ambivalence." "I'm still me - I am who I've been becoming my whole life." "Experience is the best teacher - but only if you do your homework." "Advocates for the future." We have longer, healthier, more active lives than ever before in human history, and the question before us is this: what are we going to do about it? With it? With this opportunity?

It feels like unnecessary difficulty in a lot of ways, but I will block my ears to the Sirens, and I will keep going. I turned fifty this year. That's how old Bateson was when she wrote Composing a Life. Now she's seventy, and she's written Composing a Further Life, to answer the questions. No ... to think about the questions. To posit some answers. To have the discussion. To wonder - in the deepest and wisest parts of our beings - what are we to do with this long life we're given? Evolution has granted our species a longer and longer period of time for reaching adulthood; active adulthood is so active that there is nearly no time for reflection, but we must make the time so that when we reach the second half of adulthood we are ready for it; and now we are being granted elder years like never before.

My sirens want me to want an olden days that, in truth, I always found slightly constraining. For a couple of decades I could see this freedom up ahead, and I tried to get ready for it. And now it is time. This is the year I begin composing a further life. Rest, in full measure. Reflection, in abundance. Activity to its fullest potential. Expansion beyond my expectations. It's not time yet for Easier.

Changing my mind about the kid in the principal's office

Last winter, during our annual trip out of town for walks and movies and relaxation at the coast, we watched the entire disc set of The Prisoner, and I figured out (again) that other people think I'm unmutual. I was bemused (again) at this notion, considering the strain of mental and emotional effort I have always, always expended trying as hard as I can to understand and be understood. It's hard to express how important this is to me - to understand and be understood. It's a need that flows from my sternum and from my lower back, and it has caused the deepest physical and psychic pain in my life when this need cannot be met. (yes, really)

I know, right? Weird. What's anyone else supposed to do with that level of intensity in one of their friends? What were all my friends and family supposed to do with that?

Mostly, people just love me anyway, and tolerate my relentless drive for clarity and understanding. Mostly, it's a good thing I married a man who would put up with such an intensity of endless conversations that start with my saying, "I don't understand this," and he will have the conversation with me for the thousandth time, parrying with my mind, refusing to give in just to make me leave it alone. (Thanks, honey. I think this has kept me out of both the loony bin and the pharmacy.)

See, back when I was a kid, I was never - no kidding, not one time - sent to the principal's office in school, except on errands, to deliver messages in the days before intercoms were ordinary, or to retrieve the naughty student and escort that student back to the ordered, stable, mutual and socially predictable classroom. The classic teacher's pet. The good child. The natural student, in fact so naturally at home in the classroom that I started studying my teachers for methods, pedagogy, and classroom management techniques at about the age of seven. When you're a kid, no one's really listening to the kinds of questions you're asking anyway, so no one thought my desire to understand and be understood was unmutual. I was just a kid - and when I didn't get real answers, I figured it was because I'd made an error in the way I asked the question. (yes, I really thought like that, even then) And the island was not such a bad place. If you grow up in a very mutual place, the fact of imprisonment does not fully impress itself on the mind until you've been a grownup for long enough to see people escape - or try to.

Is this too metaphorical? I will try to be understood. Here is what I mean.

The parents and teachers and babysitters and camp counselors and club leaders and recess monitors who surrounded me as I grew were all people who gave me the same set of rules for living. They really did love me, and I really did trust them, and because of this, I really did believe that the kid who got sent to the office was a kid who had done something immoral. Wrong. Bad. Naughty. I thought, I mean to say, that every rebel - every unmutual - was wrong. (yes, I really thought that)

And yet ...

There was a relative or two who hinted to me that beyond the walls and beaches of the island, there was a wider world. Sometimes the parent in some other household, or a teacher who didn't stay long, or even one of my peers would let me in on a reality I'd never imagined.

And now that I'm so old all of my own kids are grown, and I've seen many, many people younger than I am try to figure out how to avoid being unmutual, and I've learned about some huge ideas like "civil rights" and "racial equality" and "war crimes" being committed by our side.

If the sign says "Whites Only," but you drink from the fountain with your colored face, you have been unmutual. Uncooperative. But wrong? Not really.

If you're a child in a school, and you hit back when someone weak is being bullied, have you disobeyed the rules? Yes. Are you very, very likely to get into trouble for standing in the way of oppression? Yes. But have you done something wrong? Morally wrong? No. Sometimes the rules are wrong.

So now I've decided that sometimes, in fact, much more often than I knew, being unmutual is the best, more moral, most brave thing a person can do. And I've even changed my mind about the kids who got sent to the principal's office. I might finally be beginning to understand the difference between being cooperative and being good. Yes, really.

I wonder which one it is?

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Aaahhh... good old Robert Frost. I do love him. I thought of him today, and of this poem that caught my imagination for the first time about forty years ago. I have thought of "the one less traveled by" a lot of times in my life, and apparently, it's come 'round again. Two things, here before me, unexpected, obvious, and both branching off to parts unknown. Which to follow, I wonder? Which one is the one less traveled by? (And - poetic heresy, for sure - do I want to be on the one less traveled by?)

Road the First:

• my still fascinating rock-paper-scissors model of the human person. Somehow, I still want to include it in this degree I'm composing and assembling. We are what we are (the "rock" part); we cover ourselves in socialized behavior (the "paper"); and we choose and can alter our socialized selves (the "scissors"). Our social selves can alter the very composition of our "what we are" selves -- at least, to a point. Our core selves can be used in such a manner as to bend, or even to destroy our wills (prison camps, torture, or the child raised with no limits or guidance ... of these things mess with our basic composition and can smash our will so that we have a very hard time with our choice-making).
• This idea sits like a paper weight on the desktop of my brain, waiting for the best place in the arrangement of things. I still don't know where to put it, but it's just too attractive to throw away.

Road the Second:

• I have only just this weekend discovered that there is a new literary model emerging in the academic world. It's called Darwinian Literary Theory or literary studies.

• (background: I've finally hammered out what on earth the discussion actually says when it comes to evolution and the resistance to the idea of evolution in the natural world (thanks to a class that forced me to find these things out for myself if I wanted an A ... which I did ...). I suspected I would find out that I'd been handed a straw man to defeat, and this was true. Christians really and truly need not fear anything with Darwin's name or the word "evolution" attached to it.)

• Here's are sentences that makes me just about come to pieces in excitement:

  Many literary Darwinists aim not just at creating another “approach” or “movement” in literary theory; they aim at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted. They want to establish a new alignment among the disciplines and ultimately to encompass all other possible approaches to literary study.

• and this bit here, too:

  Brian Boyd (On the Origin of Stories, 2009) argues that the arts are forms of cognitive “play” that enhance pattern recognition. In company with Ellen Dissanayake (Art and Intimacy, 2000), Boyd also argues that the arts provide means of creating shared social identity. Dissanayake, Joseph Carroll (Literary Darwinism 2004), and Denis Dutton (The Art Instinct, 2009) all argue that the arts help organize the human mind by giving emotionally and aesthetically modulated form to the relations among the elements of human experience.

Is that gibberish without some kind of background or a little reading? I'm not sure I would have been able to see this even just a year ago. But I see it now.

My degree is called "Composing the Human Experience." If there are people who are currently figuring out that narrative is as vital to the understanding of humans as more traditionally quantifiable science is, and if I can get in on the discussion ... well, I think sparks have started to fly out of my scalp, and words have failed me.

So ... which road?

Or, better yet, do these two ideas converge?

Because the point of the story is the hero

In honor of my daughter's military service, and the service of the other soldiers we know and love;
In honor of every hero who pulled people and bodies from the wreckage on September the 11th nine years ago;
In honor of every mother who trains her child to struggle valiantly, "enduring the cross, despising the pain;"
In honor of everyone who turns away from saying, "They hate us," and turns toward generosity of spirit;

A re-posting of the following, from three years ago:

"Show me a hero,
and I'll write you a tragedy."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

And, of course, Fitzgerald could have written many a heroic story and tragedy. He knew that if you have the thing that gets your attention (the tragedy), then the writer or other artist fills in around it, and that background of tragedy makes the main point visible.

That's how background and foreground work. It is true if you are merely assembling a bulletin board in a classroom - you get the elements together, staple them on the board, and then you can "see" them. Get the elements together, back them with dark paper so that they're framed, and you will see them. It's the edges and the background and the contrast that show us a thing.

And this is true for heroes. Heroes are the ones that stand out in the foreground against the background of tragedy. During the last century, these have had names like Schindler - a Sudenten-German Catholic businessman who saved the lives of over one thousand Polish Jews during the Final Solution; and tenBoom, whose Dutch family helped Jews without forcing conversions, and even provided Kosher food and honored the Sabbath; and Rusesabagina.
Paul Rusesabagina.

This from Roger Ebert: In 1994 in Rwanda, a million members of the Tutsi tribe were killed by members of the Hutu tribe in a massacre that took place while the world looked away. "Hotel Rwanda" is not the story of that massacre. It is the story of a hotel manager who saved the lives of 1,200 people by being, essentially, a very good hotel manager.

It would have been possible to reverse the effects in this movie, and to have filmed it so that the background was the heroism of this good man - but that is not the story they told. They told the story instead of a very good hotel manager. The background of genocide was the chaos against which the clarity of his goodness was startling.

And yet, being able to see the thing in the foreground seems to be a learned skill. We have to figure out what it is we're looking at. We have to train our inner eyes to see.

As youngsters of about the ages of ten and fifteen, my little brother and I went together to the theater and we saw the movie they'd made about Corrie ten Boom's life. A worse day I have rarely had. While I watched in an agony of nauseated fascination, poor Clark had to leave the theater over and over, going out to the concession stand to get more napkins for us to wipe our eyes and blow our noses on. (To his credit, he did keep bringing his stunned and terrified self back to the seat after these short breathers.)

When it was over, the scenes that haunted me for years afterwards were all scenes of helplessness in the face of great evil. I did not remember the foreground. To my youthful inner eye, that was a movie about evil. Good people try to stand up to it. Of course they do. What else would they do? And the evil crushes everything in its reach, killing babies in front of their mothers, and crushing hands with the butt of an angry gun. I tried to be brave. I tried to identify with the obvious heroes of the story. But to my inner self, that was a movie about the helplessness of good people.

Now I think I know why I heard a story of evil. Look at that poster! Does that look like a story of the power of a hero? Thinking back on it, I wonder now if the movie makers drew the background so much for effect that the foreground was lost to it. Now look back at the movie poster for Hotel Rwanda. Look at the way the main character is larger, and rises above the horrors he takes action to stop.

And what does the poster for Schindler's List say about the movie? Look closely. The list of Jews slated for death (or worse) in the prison camps marches across the trusting hand of a child, joined together with the grownup person who will rescue the little one. The threat is there. The menace is there. It's horrible. But it's not the point. The hero is the point.

And shame on the people who made the strength and power of evil the point of the beautiful and courageous story of Corrie ten Boom and her family. I can admit that my sheltered teenage life was little preparation for her story at all. But now that I have seen that poster again, I think I was not the only one with an unfocused inner eye. Shame on them.

Stories of heroes are by necessity stories of wars and disasters and great and grave difficulty. Of course they are. Heroes do strive for goodness in the face of evil. That is what a hero is. But the point of the story is not the background. The point of the story is the hero. There is nothing for Kenneth Branaugh to do (or Sir Laurence Olivier before him), and no story of Henry V to tell if there are no soldiers dying in agony on the fields of Agincourt.

Look at that poster. What is that story supposed to be about? War? That is in the movie, and that is not what it is about. The agony of dying men? That is in the movie, and that is not what it is about. The difficulty of knowing one's own courage in the face of terror? That is in the movie, and that is not what it is about. This is a movie about a heroic leader. A hero.

In the past few decades, I have heard these things about hero stories:

"When we saw The Sound of Music in the theaters, we really thought it would only be a little while before that would happen in America." (!!!) "What would happen?" "Communists would take over, and we would have to flee."

Uh-huh. A story about Nazis marching across Europe, and occupying Austria is to the viewer's inner eye a story about "Communists" on another continent coming across the ocean and ... marching us around? A story about restoration within a family and what it really means to serve God - a story about sacrifice and love of country and what romantic love is for ... that's a story that says to you "the Commies are coming, the Commies are coming"? Really? Wow. What kind of inner distortion sees that?

Here's another one, re: the movie Schindler's List. "Well, it was pretty good, but they didn't need to include all that nudity." Nudity? In a story about the heroism of one man in the face of the Nazi menace, amongst the terror of angry soldiers, and the horrors of the death camps, the viewer remembers gratuitous nudity?

Background and foreground. Getting them mixed up makes for some very bad story telling, and apparently it also makes for some very bad story hearing. Mythical or otherwise, modern or ancient, well-known or unknown, a hero is a person who "feels the fear and does it anyway." And the point of the story is the hero.