Hildegarde

I once posted to this blog–and I’ve posted to various Internet forums over the years–a rule of thumb for supporting and acclaiming nations and their political systems around the world:  if the place has to pass laws to keep its people from leaving, you don’t want any part of it.

Today, I’m ready to offer another:  if supporting whatever cause it is you think is a good idea this morning requires you to rail on and on about the Jews, you’re on the wrong side, and you need to quit.

No, I’m not talking about the Rick Sanchez mess, although that was mildly interesting for about half a minute.

I’m reading Alan Dershowitz’s The Case Against Israel’s Enemies, and having my mind boggled on a regular basis by–well, by all of it. 

I also have to congratulate Dershowitz on doing what I’d thought to be impossible.  I now have even less respect for President Jimmy Carter than I did before. 

There is one thing, though, that I’d never encountered in a clear enough way to have brought home to me.  Everybody else has probably figured all this out already.  Bear with me.

A remarkable number of the people who excoriate “the Jews” in this book do so by describing them in terms that sound like…well, that sound like what anti-American ranters use to explain what they think is so awful about America.

Materialistic.  Bourgeois values.  That kind of thing.

Of course, there’s all that “they rule the world” thing, and being perceived to rule the world will get you resented, whether or not it’s actually true.

But as far as I can tell, Jews were being verbally beat up for being materialistic, crass, grubby, money-loving, middle class dolts long before anybody could even imagine that they ruled anything–right down to the Middle Ages, certainly.

It’s an interesting point, on some level, although I’m not too sure what level yet.

I do think that the specific items in the list that makes a group of people anathema matters–that it matters if you’re being beaten up for being middle class instead of for being religiously fanatic, for instance.

And I wonder why this particular set of attributes–the prosaic dedication to the business of life, really–has, in all times and all places (and not just the West) caused such a visceral, hyperbolic reaction from so many people.

But I don’t actually have answers to any of this, and it’s about time I started the day, for real.

Georgia Xenakis lives.

Every once in a while, something comes along that makes me think that if you could become a believer by sheer force of will, I’d do it.

And yes, this is the second post of the day.  And yes, I have read all about Malcolm Muggeridge.

But the new issue of Free Inquiry has come out, and with it a new installment of the depredations of Shadia Drury.  I give you the link, because this time the article is online:

http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=reinventing_christianity

And let you make of it what you will. 

In case you don’t remember, Drury is the columnist who has seemed to make a career out of making a hash out of the Middle Ages, with little forays into making a hash out of the philosophy of Edmund Burke. 

And with this article, she has a bit of my sympathy–if I were a Christian, I’d wince at the very idea of having Terry Eagleton as a champion.

But, with all that said, it appears that it doesn’t much matter if Ms. Drury can read the original language of the texts she’s supposed to be explicating, or even if she has access to excellent translations of them. 

I give you the following:

>>>To triumph, the Church had to obscure the cruel and callous aspects of the founder’s religion. For example, Jesus thought that there were only two alternatives—heaven or hell. On Judgment Day, each of us will be consigned to one or the other. This meant that someone guilty of a trivial misdemeanor may share the same fate as a brutal dictator. Without obliterating the abnormally vicious doctrine of hellfire, the Church invented purgatory<<<

That’s a direct quote.  I didn’t elide it.  I didn’t make it up. 

Shadia Drury thinks purgatory is the place people go when they have just minor sins, while hell is the place they go when they have major ones.

I’ll recommend a perusal of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Catechism of the Council of Trent, and, yes, the works of Thomas Aquinas, which Ms. Drury claims to know a lot about and has even written a book about.  When Drury writes about Aquinas, she often sounds as if she hasn’t read him so much as she’s just made him up.

But all those sources could have told her what purgatory actually was, and saved her from making this error.

In the first place, nobody–and certainly not Christ–ever claimed that minor sins got you sent to Hell.  That can be determined from all four Gospels, and should be obvious in the story of the good thief.

In the second place, no matter how enormous your sin–even if you’re Hitler–it is forgiven if you ask for it to be forgiven.  And, going back to the Gospels again, Christ gives this ability to forgive any and all sins (no matter how major) to Peter, in the famous “you are Peter, and on this rock” speech. 

Which means that no matter how enormous your sin, you can go to Heaven. 

So what’s purgatory for?

Justice requires that if you do something bad, you pay for it some way.  And some people who commit sins pay for them on earth with earthly punishments.  Assuming those sins have been absolved–formally or by a perfect act of contrition–those people go directly to Heaven.  Yes, even if they’ve been Hitler.

But now let’s say Hitler has a change of heart on his deathbed, confesses and is absolved on his sin.

He is therefore destined to go to heaven, but he has received no punishment for the sins he has committed.

He therefore goes to purgatory to work off the debt he owes for the things he’s done, and only then does he go on to heaven.

A person who did not pay for his sins in life but had only small ones spends a small time in purgatory.  A person who did not pay for his sins in life but had very large ones spends a very large time in purgatory.

But purgatory is not a special place for people with just little sins instead of big ones.

Really, it wouldn’t take much more than half an hour to find out what purgatory really means.  You can even google it.

But Shadia Drury didn’t bother, for the same reason she never bothered to find out if her pronouncements on Aquinas and Burke had any positive relation to reality.

She’s a shoddy researcher and a careless one, but she cares more about making points with an audience that is apparently as ignorant of these things as she is than she does about her own integrity.

The trouble with Tuesdays is that I’m up, but I’m not up.  By the end of the week, I get tired at the end of the day.  On Mondays, the get-up-at-four-thirty thing is a shock.   On Tuesdays, I just want to go back to bed.

Instead of that, I’ve got this big cup of tea and the computer, and I’m very glad that I have most of my correcting done so that I don’t have to rush around and do it. 

Last Friday, I did it in the car, hoping to wait out the incredible rain.  It didn’t work.  Today there isn’t any rain, which is the good news.

The bad news is that I now have confirmation that I’ve got a right to be screamingly annoyed at the BBC people who do the David Suchet Poirots, and annoyed in a way that isn’t  just the usual bitch-because-they-changed-a-book-I like way.

The BBC production of Appointment with Death isn’t just bad, and it isn’t just inaccurate.  It isn’t even a production of Appointment with Death.

Let me backtrack a little here.

Back when I still had a VHS machine and a lot of cassettes, some of those cassettes were of the Peter Ustinov productions of various Poirot novels and the Margaret Rutherford productions of various Marple novels.

If you’ve never seen these, you might as well know that the big problem with them is the actor and actress who play the principle roles.  Peter Ustinov is as unlike Poirot as it’s possible to be, and Margaret Rutherford is so unlike Miss Marple that Christie–who was Rutherford’s close friend–complained about the casting choice.

You can’t say, either, that none of those productions ever changed anything about the books.  They changed a lot.  One  of the Margaret Rutherford productions is actually the Poirot After The Funeral just sort of dressed up for Miss Marple.  There was a fair amount of eliding this and dressing up that to make the stories more “dramatic,” and Rutherford’s actor-husband was brought in to play a sidekick the Miss Marple of the books never had.

But inaccurate on some points as those productions were, what they never did was take a book and rewrite it from scratch.

The BBC Appointment with Death not only does that, it does it badly.  

It takes a workmanlike Christie plot and turns it into an incoherent hash that makes so little sense, it’s hard to follow.

 And the worst of it is that, as far as I can make out, it does so for no particular reason.  It’s not a political thing.  No political points are made that I can see.  The changes do not make the story more dramatic.  They do not make the story more fair-play.  They don’t do anything except create a mess.

The Ustinov version of this same book, by the way, changes things in just one way.  In the book, you know that the murder victim has looked over the shoulder of person A and seen person B, but since the segment is from the point of view of person A, you don’t know who B is.  In the Ustinov murder, you’re given a shot over A’s shoulders, so that you do know who B is.

What that does is to make the story more fair play than Christie’s original.  Person B is the murderer, and that scene is the one in which the reader/viewer should be able to figure it out.

The kind of changes made in the BBC Appointment with Death are just bizarre.

In Christie’s original–and the Ustinov fairly accurate production–our murder victim is a gross, foul, evil older woman named Mrs. Boynton, once the wardress in a women’s prison, now playing wardress to her stepchildren. 

In fact, she’s got the whole lot of them terrorized, and in a bind.  It’s the Depression, after all.  There aren’t many jobs out there even for people who need them.  The Boyntons have a huge fortune, but Mr. Boynton left Mrs. Boynton with a life interest in the estate, so that she controls the money.  She’s used that control to make their lives utterly, unendingly miserable.

She’s a good character, Mrs. Boynton, one of Christie’s best.  And in the original story and the Ustinov production,  both her motives and the family dymanic they’ve created make perfect, if chilling, sense. If you still think Christie writes cozies, go look at Mrs. Boynton.

In the BBC production, Mrs. Boynton is just as foul as she ever was, but she has somehow become married to a British lord with little money and an obsessional hobby for archeology.  The British lord has a grown son from an earlier marriage, and is on top of it completely besotted with the old bat, who we are given to understand does not treat him the way she treats everybody else.

I have no idea what all these extra people are doing in the plot, and I don’t think the people who made this movie do either.  After marrying Mrs. Boynton off to a British Lord, they eliminated the actual lady married to a British Lord (Lady Westholme), who is also an American but now a British subject and an MP. 

They changed the murderer to one whose motive is fuzzy and not quite believable, added a subplot about finding the skeleton of John the Baptist, and I don’t know what else. 

The result is not just a travesty of Christie’s book, it’s a bad movie.  If this was the first of the David Suchet Poirots I’d seen, I’d never go back to see another.  If I hadn’t already read some Christie, I’d never read any.

It’s silly, I suppose, to bitch and scream about the way movies change books.  Every once in a while, though, a movie comes along that doesn’t just trash the book, but trashes itself.  And this is one of them.

Eck.  The whole thing has me so enormously annoyed, I barely know what I’m saying.

I’m going to go do something sensible.

So, I’ve been thinking.

Isn’t it possible that a good policy could be wrongly implemented, and be bad in its implementation but good if implemented correctly?

The movement for equitable funding of schools is not stupid or vicious, and I don’t see that it’s inherently totalitarian, either. 

It says, simply, that every school district should be as fully funded as any other, that where you live should not impact the resources available to your child at his public school.

In the US, schools are generally funded by local real estate taxes. This situation creates a number of anomalies.  Rich school districts (Wilton and Westport in CT, say, or Armonk in New York, Beverley Hills in California, Winetka in Illinois) fund their public schools lavishly.

And I use that word advisedly.

Schools in districts like these not only have shiny new buildings and enough textbooks and school supplies to serve all their students several times over.  They often have full working professional grade theaters so that the drama club can do musical comedies, local-reach television and radio studios so students can produce their own shows, Olympic sized pools to use for gym class.  They offer every sport under the sun, and provide every kid who wants to learn a musical instrument with the instrument, free of charge, as long as he’s in the program.  They offer dozens of AP courses, plus half a dozen languages (Wilton even offers ancient Greek). 

People bitch about American public schools, but a first rate American school system beats anything on earth.

Down the road at the poor school, though,  the building is falling down, kids have to share books, and teachers stop at Staples to make sure they’ll have chalk for class.  Sports are restricted to one a season–usually football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring–if they are offered at all. 

Some of these poor schools are in inner cities, where the expenditure is high but the results are abysmal, for a number of reasons.  But some of these poor schools are in poor rural districts where the expenditures are low because the people just don’t have the money to pay for all the bells and whistles.

What equitable funding advocates usually want–what they advocate for–is to move funding from local districts to the state government, and then to provide every school district with enough money to provide a Wilton-level facility to its students.

What Act 60 in Vermont actually did was to keep the local funding, more or less, and to try to equalize expenditure by raising local real estate taxes to cover discrepancies in funding between districts. 

It then used a formula for those discrepancies that pretty much did the opposite of what the equitable funding movement wants–it set the lowest school expenditure as the standard, rather than the highest.  Then it raised real estate taxes in any town that wanted to provide their children with more than the benchmark.

That is, it ended up penalizing towns for wanting to spend more than the minimum on their local schools.

I don’t think the advocates of equitable funding are being disingenuous when they say that equitable funding in Vermont was badly implemented, or that it wasn’t what they wanted. 

In fact, it wasn’t what they wanted.

Whether it could have been done their way and worked is still out for judgment.  We just don’t know. 

And my problems with equitable funding are not addressed by better implementation.

But it seems to me that it is quite possible for me to want X and to support what I think is an attempt to get X done, only to find that the nuts and bolts don’t work out the way I’m expecting them to.

In the case of Act 60, a fair number of equitable funding advocates were arguing against it even as it was being passed.  Support for the bill was largely coming from people so doctrinaire that they were incapable of hearing any criticism of the actual bill because they were too busy identifying in their heads with their imaginary ones.

Oh, and from those poor districts who didn’t care what way equitable was defined, as long as it meant that richer districts didn’t have more than they did.

And I’ll quarantee you that the day to day politics of those two groups of people were, literally, polar opposites. 

But in terms of the doctrinaire thing, you saw much the same process during the health care debate this past summer. 

In fact, you heard it in the comments on this blog.

I’m a long-time advocate of universal single payer.  I think there are good reasons why serious health care cannot function well as a market.

But single payer is not what we got, and this bill is largely a disaster on almost every front.  It will almost certainly reduce the numbers of people with coverage, make the coverage of the rest of us worse, and raise premiums through the rooftops.

But since most of the people making those points were Republicans, a big swath of people supported the health care bill as it is because they automatically support anything the Republicans oppose.

And they don’t believe that the bill as is will actually do all those things like reduce coverage and raise premiums because–well, the Republicans are saying that, and the Republicans always lie.

The Republicans shouldn’t get too complacent about this, though, because a good hefty chunk of their own base does the same thing, only in reverse.   In fact, playing to the conviction that all “liberals” do is lie is why Ann Coulter has a career.

This is, at least in part, what I was talking about when I was talking about identity politics–this is the politics not of convictions, but of  self-identification as part of a group. 

The point is not actual identificaion with any particular policy or set of policies. The point is to construct a personal identity first and worry about the rest later.

Or never.

Because if you feel you have no anchor, no you-ness of you to hold your feet to the ground, the chances are that finding something to substitute will be your first and most important goal.

Let me try to say, again, that I don’t think most people have this particular problem.  In fact, I know they don’t.  

This is a minority problem, but it’s a minority that’s growing. 

And it remains on my list of the mysteries of human nature.

So, it’s Saturday morning after a long week, and a week that isn’t really over yet.  I find myself sitting here with my huge cup of overbrewed tea–forty ounce cup, two teabags, steeped twenty minutes (and no, it doesn’t get cold)–thinking that I’ll just wander off and listen to harpsichords. 

Mostly it’s a feeling that I suddenly have nothing to say.  And that’s interesting, because I don’t think that’s happened for years.

If I am thinking about anything, it’s the entire idea of “identity politics.”  I don’t mean the actual function and structure of them, but the need so many people have to establish an identity.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve never felt the need to go out and get one myself.  I always felt I had one.  In fact, identity for me has always been a given, even when I was traveling (a lot, when I was younger) or switching off professional or private roles.

There is, that is, a Janeness of Jane, an Oranianess of Orania, that has been with me from the beginning and that isn’t going to go away as long as I live.

That there are people out there for whom this is not true seems to me to be obvious, I jut don’t understand the feeling.  I don’t know what it would feel like to not have a meness of me–to somehow need to define something amorphous and call it myself.

That is, certainly, what people do who define themselves by working very hard at their politics or their religion or even their “roots.”  So much of what the adopt as badges of who they are seems to me to be artificial. 

I’m not saying the things in themselves are artificial.  Greek folk dances and a craving for yuvalakia are genuine enough on their own.  I don’t have much use for the former–I don’t much like folk dancing generally–but I’ve got a regular date with the latter. 

The problem is that I know a lot of people who may or may not actually enjoy these things, but you can’t tell, because they’re so busy making sure they’re maintaining their “Greek identity.”  Most of these people are Greek-American at best, and at least the second generation born in the US.  Immigrants and the children of immigrants tend to be like the lead character in My Big Fat Greek Wedding and do a lot of eye rolling about all the Greekness around the house.

With politics and religion it’s worse, because the benchmarks for identity are more serious.  Your friends and neighbors can put up with your playing Yianni records and seving soggy spanikopita at your next party far more easily than they can handle your trying to install creationism at the local high school or municipal regulations to charge extra taxes for SUVs at the town hall.

I think the big problem with American political “discourse” (as we’re calling it these days) is that most of the politics. on both the right and the left, is fake.  Most of the people making the proposals have not come to those proposals by reflection or even by commitment.  They’ve come to them as another benchmark in establishing idenity, and the stress is on the identity, not on the proposals.

That’s why so many people can insist, over and over again, on advocating policies that they know do not work–that they know must end in disaster, even.  People don’t idolize Mao or Fidel or the latest Man of the People in subSaharan Africa because they agree with his policies, or even because they expect him to actually do some good.  They idolize him because idolizing him is a badge of identity.  It helps to nail down the themness-of-them, that they don’t seem to have on their own.

I’ve often felt as if I were blithering on this blog, but I now feel like I’m spouting almost complete gibberish.  And, as usual when I think I’m not being clear, what I’m thinking of is perfectly clear in my head.

I don’t understand how people cannot know who they are.

No, it’s more than that.  I don’t understand how people cannot have a single solid core of themselves that cannot be negotiated or denies.  There is a Janeness of Jane and an Oranianess of Orania, and it cannot be changed even when I want it to be.

I don’t mean that there aren’t things about ourselves we can change or negotiate.  I don’t mean that people never change in anyway at all. I used to smoke and now I don’t.  I used to be terribly timid and insecure and now I’m not.  I used to support differential-standards affirmative action and now I don’t.

But in all those cases, although I changed my mind, and even my habits, I didn’t change myself.  And maybe one of the reasons I can change my mind on even important things is that I don’t need to change myself when I do. 

The manifestation of this I am most familiar with is, of course, the tendency of Western academics and revolutionaries to adopt highly affected identities as “revolutionaries” or “leftists,” but it’s hardly the only manifestation out there.  I’ve seen people do it with religion (especially converts to Catholicism), and my guess would be that there’s a fair amount of it in the lamer wing of the militia movement.

If you think about it, though, this idea–that expressing a love of Fidel and wearing a Che t-shirt, or searching out the one church in the area allowed to give the Mass in Latin, isn’t a matter of conviction or honest desire, but a collecting of badges of identity–explains a lot about people who support policies in theory that they would never put up with in fact. 

The really horrible thing, to me, is the way they pass this identity crisis to their children, and the way at least some of those children adopt the identity in ways far more substantitive and real than their parents had any intention of their doing.

Lori Berenson.  John Walker Lindh.  That poor girl in Israel who tried to stand in front of the bulldozers and found out that not every government will pull back just because some silly adolescent is trying to make a statement to the press.

But, for one brief moment of lucidity, I present this:  I think you can tell the difference between a genuine commitment to a set of ideas and a pose for the sake of building an identity by whether or not the person in question is defining himself and everything he does in opposition to other people. 

If the drive seems to be not to be something, but to be not-like-them, you’ve got identity politics in the sense I’m talking about it here.

And I’ve got the feeling that there’s no point talking to people engaged in that enterprise.

They can’t hear you.

Okay.  I’ve got to go actually get something done.