Hildegarde

Joann is being buried today, and I find I’ve got neither the time nor the inclination to write anything comprehensive, never mind oherent.

But there are a couple of things.

First, somethinig from a blog or two back–you can say a lot about Joel  Osteen and the prosperity gospel, but you can’t say that he’s raking in cash because he gets people to send it to him when he preaches on television.

I’ve never seen  Osteen ask for money even once.  There’s no part of his televised sermons in which he gives an address for you to send contributions to.  He does publicize his latest book, but it’s published by, I think, Simon and Shuster, and he suggests you go get itat your local bookstore. 

I presume he charges admission when he speaks, but so do all the other motivational speakers, and next to the juggernaut sales machines most of them are, Osteen is refreshingly without hucksterism.

Second, Obama’s speech may or may not have been “appropriate”–have I gone into my rant about how I hate that word?–but it wasn’t something new.  Other presidents have done it, most recently George  H.W. Bush.  Reagan went around to schools personally and gave talks, including taking questions and answering them on very controversial political subjects in some cases, without even the American left having vapors.

Which brings us to the lesson plan–Obama may or may not have had a different speech in mind in the beginning, but we can’t festablish that from the lesson plan, which seems to have been based on the one they used for H.W.’s talk. 

And that lesson plan included the infamous “write a letter explaining how you can help the President” activity that has so many of the right wing energized. 

Personally, I think it’s too bad Obama didn’t talk about public policy and political ideas.  It might have helped students like my kid of last year, who wrote a paper explaining that “McCain is a Republican, which means he’s a Liberalist.”  Last week, I put Sonia Sotomayor’s name on the board and asked them to write for fifteen minutes telling me who she was.  Better than half of them identified her as the “octomom.”

Third, I don’t know if Robert is right about 35% of Democrats being “truthers”–that is, people who think the Bush administration planned and carried out 9/11 on its own–but it’s certainly true that there is a nutcase fringe on both sides.

Everything Mab says about the conventional street wisdom about the US in Russia is spouted here by our left wing nutjobs–in fact, most of it was invented here, in our own left-of-center little magazines, and only exported to Europe and Asia. 

The difference, to me, is that MSNBC is not giving any of these people their own television show, and nobody seems to be electing them to Congress. 

The public face of the Democratic Party has not become identified with these people in the way that the public face of the Republican Party has become identified with their fringe.

And it’s not because the “liberal media” is engaging in biased reporting here.

It’s because the conservative media is giving these people a platform.  Whatever possessed FoxNews to give Glenn Beck an hour in prime time–or to feature the likes of Michelle Malkin and Michelle Bachmann on virtually every single show they do? 

Mab can be reassured, total up the nutcases on both sides, and you’ve got a minority.  Which means that a party that caters to the nutjobs is going to end up driving away everybody else.

Which was my point yesterday.

Finally, as to the artists being asked to write things in favor of the health care plan–I don’t see that as any more sinister, or less clunky and stupid, than the Bush administration’s paying conservative journalists to pump for the war in Iraq, which they did.

The chief difference here seems to be that whereas at least some of the artists complained about Obama’s project, the conservative journalists either took the money and ran, or refused it an kept their mouths shut.

When that broke, a number of journalists lost their jobs and one, Maggie Gallagher, seems to have mostly lost her career. 

This is not a situation any of us, left or right, should be happy with.  And although, unlike Mab, I don’t think that the journalists involved are cynical–I think both Beck and Malkin believe every word they write–I also don’t think the Republican Party can survive for long if this is what they seem to be about. 

I think we’re headed back to the days when no respectably intelligent person will be willing to call himself a conservative. 

What William F. Buckley took fifty years to build up, Glenn Beck seems capable of taking down in one.

A few days ago, I published a post on this blog called “Cold,” and then forgot to explain why I was calling it that.  More interesting, nobody bothered to point out that the title was senseless given what came after it.

This one is called Cold 2 for the same reason the last one was called Cold–it is cold, where I sit.  It’s barely September and I need a sweater in the mornings. 

Well, okay, a cotton sweater.   But you know what I mean.

At any rate,  I probably should have called this post “Crazy,” or something similar.

Some of the people who comment here see Arts and Letters Daily, but for those of you who don’t, go here:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/06/obama-school-speech-malkin-rick-perry-opinions-columnists-tunku-varadarajan.html

And I am at pains to point out, before you start, that this is an editorial on the Forbes website, whose parent publication (Forbes magazine) calls itself “the capitalist tool.”

In other words, this is not a lefty magazine hosting an Obama supporter.  

Which makes me happy, really, because it means that WFB Republicans re still out there somewhere.

That said, let me get to the point–which is the absolutely lunancy that has erupted on the right–and especially on right-leaning major media, like FoxNews–since the election.

Now, let me pause for a second to point out–before Robert yells at me–that the left can be just as lunatic in its own way.  God only knows there was enough silly screaming about Bush being a “fascist” and his administration being an exercise in “theocracy”–apparently by people who didn’t know the definitions of either word.

And there were apparently large hunks of Europe that bought this nonsense, so that mainstream presses, magazines and television stations gave credence to the “Bush engineered 9/11 himself to have an excuse to invade Iraq” idocies.

But that’s there.  Here, that kind of thing was relegated to the more breathlessly hyperventilating left wing magazines, and the Internet, where crazy is a time of day.

What’s going on on the right at the moment is definitely being given credence by mainstream news outlets, which is what FoxNews is, but it isn’t just a matter of FoxNews or talk radio.  We’ve had the spectacle of several United States Congresspersons and state elected leaders going right off the deep end, too.

I don’t really care that much about the people who call Obama a Communist.  They need dictionaries as badly as the people who called Bush a fascist, but in a way that’s tit for tat.   We can discuss, at some other time, what it means that Americans now behave this way to each other, but that’s a different issue from the one I’m going on about now.

What absolutely floors me is the sort of paranoid lunacy that has become the staple of nearly all the discourse about what the Obama admiistration is or is not doing.

Screaming that a public option in the health care reform bill amounts to a socialist takeover of America at the same time that you’re trumpeting your desire to preserve Medicare is sloppy thinking.

Screaming that the President of the United States addressing American schoolchildren via satellite television hook-up on any subject at all constitutes “brainwashing” and “indoctrination” is a medical condition requiring Thorazine. 

I won’t bother to go into some of the more astonishing things I’ve seen lately–Glenn  Beck, now with his own hour-long show on Fox, eating up air time to analyze the artwork at Rockefeller Center and point out how it’s all coded support for Communism; calls from state legislators and even one United States Congresswoman that parents keep their kids home from school so they don’t have to hear Obama speak; state legislators in Texas saying it’s about time they seceded from the Union.

Yeah.  Like that worked out really well for the least people who tried it.  And that was before the United States Army had tanks..

Unlike the conventional wisdom Mab reported in Russia, I don’t think the country is going to fall apart.  The nutcases are relatively rare, they’re just loud.

What does worry me is that we’re going to come out of the Obama administration with the American right wing in about the place it was when William F. Buckley, jr, set out to revive it.

Richard Hofstadter could say quite confidently in 1960 that there was no such thing s a conservative intellectual tradition in America.  He missed what Buckley was doing in spite of the fact that it was right in front of his face, but he was responding to a reality.nonetheless.

The right had itself a spectacular crack-up during the Roosevelt administration, and a crack-up of precisely this kind–a descent into kookiness, paranoia, and recreational hyperventilation.  For twenty years, there was no intellectually or politically respectable opposition to New Deal ideas, and for twenty years after that–

Well, if you want to know how the Sxties happened, forty years of lopsided leftism might be a good place to start.

I lost all interest in Survivor when I found out that it was not a show about who could survive longest in primitive conditions, but one in which staying on the island or leaving was dependent on being voted off or not. 

Call me cynical, but I was fairly sure I knew what that meant–no middle aged woman would ever win the thing, because the middle aged woman would be the first one voted off. 

And, in the first couple of seasons, from what little I could see, I was absolutely right.

Mostly, I don’t understand reality TV, in spite of the fact that I just spent nearly a year watching as much of it as I could, because next year’s  Gregor will be set at a reality TV show.

Okay, it’s a great set-up for a fair play mystery. You’ve got a bunch of people stuck together in a house…

The one show I liked at all is called America’s Next Top Model, which seemed to be mostly like a game show with extras.  It also intrigued me that people who came out of that show actually managed to get careers, as do people who come out of American Idol–and big ones, too. 

These seems to be something incredibly right about that–that there should be some avenue through which people who are not born connected to the entertainment professions can get their work seen and heard by people who probably are anxious to hire them. 

But I think the whole reality show phenomenon is a case of “something else.”  For whatever reason, television seems to always be stuck in a rut–the endless parade of detective shows and doctor shows is almost mind numbing.  The West Wing was a good enough show, but I think it benefited from the fact that it was simply something else.  I’m fairly sure that Dallas benefited from the same thing in its time.

Surely, this has got to hold for books, too–that after hundreds of versions of the same thing, over and over again, people just get hungry for something else. 

Anything else.

I know a lot of fans of mysteries who never read anything else, don’t want to read anything else, and will go on reading what they read until they die, but the general public can’t be that dedicated.

Eventually, a diet of all one thing gets boring for anybody–not because the  books (or shows) are bad, just because they’re what we’ve been doing for a really long time.

And I think, as well, that the something else doesn’t have to be all that good, as long as it constitutes a change of pace.

I’ve become totally fascinated with one called Megan Wants a Millionaire.

At first, my interest was mostly of the train wreck kind.  The idea of this was that Megan  Houseman, who had been on two Rock of Love cycles, was now going to have a cycle of her own, finding herself a man to marry who had at least a million dollars. 

The concept by itself was staggering, but the level of stupid was really something like a kind of genius–if this woman and her two best friends (who appeared to help her at one point) pooled their IQs, they couldn’t have come up with a three digit number.

What Megan seems to have going for her that is supposed to make some millionaire want to marry her is really blonde hair, a lot of perkiness, and breast implants the size of Lake Michigan.

What really got my attention, though, was what put a stop to the show, at least for the moment.  One of the millionaires involved, an investment banker named Ryan Jenkins, is being “sought by the police” in the murder of a swimsuit model named Jasmine Fiore, whose body was found in a suticase in a trash bin.

Okay, by now, they may have picked him up.  But Megan Wans a Millionaire wasn’t his only show for VH1.  Jenkins also appeared on I Love Money–except “appeared” may be the wrong word, since the season (season 3) he filmed hasn’t aired yet.  Now people are saying that it may never air at all, because Jenkins is supposed to have told his friends that he won that season.

I wonder, continually, who volunteers to go on these things–not the quasi-game shows, like American Idol or ANTM, but the dating shows, the humiliation shows (which is what Money seems to be), the get-everybody-in-a-house-and-film-them-24/7.

I don’t think  I know the answer to that yet, but maybe next year somebody could run an America’s Next Great Detective show, and investigate all the conestants on the rest of them.

A few years ago, there was this really terrible movie called Drop Dead Gorgeous, about a teen-aged beauty pageant in a small town in Wisconsin.  It had Kirstie Alley in it, and Kirsten Dunst, and a number of other people you’d recognize on sight if not by name–including Amy Adams in what must have been one of her first major film roles; if you’d told me she was going on from that to a solid career, I’d have been astonished.

I don’t like this movie very much.  I like a lot of really bad movies–Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion comes to mind–and I  have nothing in principle against hatchett jobs.  I just want my hatchett jobs to be within screaming distance of accurate, and this was not.

What it was was a two hour (or somewhat less) venture into making fun of the Midwest, and in just the way you’d expect–look at all the stupid shallo religious people!

Okay, I did sort of like the Lutheran Ladies Gun Club.  But that’s an aside.

The thing is that, dislike this movie or not, I own a copy, and I watch it on ocasion, in spite of the muttering under my breath about how they got it wrong.  I own it because they got something absolutely right, and that’s what’s wrong with the entire Motiviational Aspirational  Think  Positive mantra of whole whacking segments of American society.

The movie is filmed as if it was raw interview footage for a documentary about thie small town pageant, and at one point–one of my favorite points–a thickset, masculine-looking farm girl on a tractor gives a vigorous speech about how, even though most people would think she couldn’t win a beauty contest, she’s going to do it, because, as  Tony Robbins says, the “only thing that make me a loser is me.”

And then the tractor blows up and kills her.

Later on, there’s a scene in the hospital room of last year’s pageant winner, who is close to killing herself with anorexia nervosa, graced by a perky blonde candy striper who talks as if she’s addressing mentally disabled two year olds (turn those frown lines upside down!), done so beautifully that you want to reach through the screen and ring her neck.

I do know, of course, that a lot of this is just reaction formation–the way people behave when they know they don’t have any control over their lives, and it scares them.

And I know that some of it is just sensible policy–if you go into something believing it’s impossible, you won’t do it.  If you go in convinced you’re going to win, you may give yourself a psychological edge that gets you where you want to go.

But a fair amount of it seems to be a kind of modern mental illness, born of the illusion of control that is so much a part of being a Western person in the twenty-first century.

After all, compared to the Middle Ages, or even the period of the American Civil War, we can control a lot of things.  Dying young, as I’ve noted before on this blog, is now anomaly.  My children had only ever heard of polio beecause we had reissued copies of Superman comics from the Thirties.

I think this may be where our very odd legal culture comes from–that legal culture where not only do people sue over things that would have been considered idiotic even in the Fifties, but juries award them huge packets of money when they do.

I think a lot of people, although they don’t understand how “xcience” can fix things, do think it fixes things, everything–that there is no material barrier to everything going right, so that when something goes wrong, it must be either malice or negligance.

But what really gets to me about all this is how much of it is now being channeled as a religious message. 

We preach Christ and Him Crucified, St. Paul said, but Joel Osteen preaches Christ as a sort of all-encompassing sugar daddy.  God–he actually rarely says Christ; it’s almost always just God–wants you to be happy and  prosperous. 

We’re coming to another of those places where I really have no idea how to solve the problem I’ve identified.   Fatalism doesn’t seem to me to be a very good idea, and there’s nothing I’d like less than to  adopt that sort of Western European/strangely adolescent attitude of “oh, yes, it’s all so terrible and boring.”

There’s got to be a middle ground  in here somewhere.

So, Joann died the morning before yesterday.  She was probably already dead when I  was writing the blog, but I didn’t hear about it until later, when I was wandering around in the supermarket not doing much of anything, and my phone did that thing where it refuses to ring, but the voicemail and the voicemail tone come through fine. 

I checked to see who called, and I knew as soon as I saw the caller ID what had happened.  And it wasn’t as if it was unexpected.  It made me feel sort of aimless and floaty anyway.

And I wonder how much of what goes through my mind a lot when I’m not watching it is the result of simple old age–okay, not so old, but you know what I mean–and what is the result of all the deaths in my family over the last few years. 

And not just in my family, either.   There have been two friends and a student, as well. 

And lots of these people, including Joann, have been younger than I am.

In fact, looking back over the course of time I’ve spent on tis earth, two things strike me as very odd:  the number of people I’ve known who’ve died, and the number of women I’ve known who have never married.

In the people I’ve known who’ve died category, I’m not talking about the poeple of my parents’ generation, who got old and “passed away,” as they liked to put it, at around the time you’d expect.  My mother got very upset when my aunt Loretta died, because she was seventy-nine, so young (my mother was in her eighties)–but the woman had been smoking two packs a day for fifty years.  I thought she had a constitution of iron.

But of the kids I went to elementary school with, there are a few who died in Vietnam, but also four who were killed together in one of those drearily regular car crashes on Clapboard Ridge, and one who died when the small plane he was flying crashed near an airfield in Danbury.  That was Billy, and the one thing he’d wanted to do since he was small was fly.  He got his license at about the time we were  all juniors in high school.  He was killed when we were all about twenty-six.

Then there were the people I knew in college, some of whom died of AIDS in the early days of the disease, before there were effective treatments for it.  One woman was murdered a few years ago in a case fmmous enough to have become the subject of a few of those half-hour true crime cable shows.  One of my closest college friends died o a brain aneurism when we were all not quite thirty.  Renu Narang died last December as I reported here before.  A couple of others died of breast cancer, one just last year. 

But the business with the women not marrying is just as odd, in a way.  Statistically, something like 96% of all Americans marry at least once.  But in my mother’s family, out of ten girls, only four of us ever married, and one of those was married for exactly four days when she was seventeen.  That was how long it took her father to find out where she’d run away to, catch up with her, and get the marriage annulled.

Among my women friends from college, the marriage count is just as dismal–although a woman  I knew slightly actually made the television news with her wedding, which she held at the bus stop where she met her new husband, in Manhattan.  Then they rode away on a bus, leased somehow from the Transit  Authority for the occasion. 

I have no idea where I’m going with any of this, or what it is supposed to mean, it’s just been on my mind lately.  I also can’t stop thinking of how many people I know who seem to have done not much of anything–never married, never finished college, never travelled extensively, never–well, never. 

My father used to tell me not to assume that because someone hadn’t done the kind of thing I found important, they hadn’t done anything, but there really is a state of not having done anything. 

I’m blithering.  Maybe I only think I know what I mean. 

I promise to be more cheerful tomorrow.

Which is what it is today.  I’ve got a rather odd week-end planned, assuming that the status of everthing and everybody stays as it is–that is, that nobody dies.  I’ve got some stuff to do tomorrow, and then I’m going to reread a couple of Harry Potter novels that I have hanging around–the first, and the seventh.  Actually, I’m not rereading the seventh.  When we first got it, my sons took it and spirited it away, and I’ve only just come across it again.

Just as an aside–the book of Shadia Drury’s that has me held in a state of morbid fascination is called something like Aquinas and Modernity.  I looked it up, too, and it’s cheaper than the one you guys found, but it’s still expensive for a paperback.  I assume the price tags are the result of the books being classified as “scholarly.”  And, yeah, I know.  If the articles in  Free Inquiry are any indication, her pretentions to scholarship, especially in the Middle Ages, are, well, what can we say?   Weak.

And as to a book in the library saying that angels are pushing the planets around:  I see nothing wrong with the book being there, but something wrong with announcements about it made in science classes in such a way as to imply that that theory is equally scientific.

Which is what was being done in Dover–in spite of the fact that there is no (none.  zero.  zilch) actual scientific work in Intelligent Desin, no refereed papers, no experiments, nothing, in spite of the fact that none of the people pushing ID is trained in the field (the only biologist is not an evolutinary biologist, and his claims have already been refuted, he’s just not listening), what the school board in Dover wanted to do was to present the situation as “evolution is a theory that not all scientiests agree about and there’s equally convicning scientific evidence for Intelligent Design.”

Which is not true.  

But today I want to get to a smaller and much more practical issue, because right now I’m in the midst of mapping out two new Gregor Demarkian mysteries in my head.  

I’ve said that I nearly always start books with a character and let the character take the lead, and that’s ninety nine percent.  It’s even half true in this case. 

But for the last couple of months,  I’ve been considering a situation that intrigues me both with its logistical possibilities and with the nature of the character that would have to be at the center of it.

And it’s a very interesting situation, even though the main “fair play” clue would be a literary reference not everybody would get.

But what’s become very clear to me is that this particular idea would not work with  Gregor Demarkian as the detective.  He’s got the wrong kind of mind for it, and the wrong set of references to really understand it. 

I wonder about that sometimes, the fact that all of us come equipped with sets of references we don’t even realize are references, that we think of as just “normal.”  And those references determine not only a lot of what we think about the world, but a lot of what we notice.  Father Tibor sees God everywhere.  Bennis tends to see class.

One of the things you can do with an idea that is outside your detective’s ken is to start a new series, which has occured to me.  I don’t want to give up writing Gregor, but the idea of another series, with a different set of characters, is intriquing, and when  I suggest it people sometimes actually seem interested. By people here, I mean, people in a position to know whether somebody would pay me for it.

This particular idea, however, would fit very well into Gregor’s universe, it just couldn’t be satisfyingly investigated by Gregor himself. 

And that leaves me with a set of possibilities, none of which I know much about. 

Why do people read series, for isntance?   It’s obvious that lots of people read them in order to follow the lives of the main core of characters from one book to the next.   It’s also obvious that a lot of people have a lot of trouble reading third person multiple viewpoint, and my guess is would have even more with first person multiple viewpoint.

Would a series be just as satisfying to a reader if the main character changed from one person to the next in a small set of continuing characters?  Would it be possible–after twenty-two Gregor Demarkian novels–to produce one where Bennis was the detective, or Tibor was?  Or one written in first person rather than in third?  What about one from the point of view of one of the more minor continuing characters–say, Russ Donahue or Hannah Krekorian?

Or, take it in another direction–how about a series in which each book was written in the first person point of view of a different character in the main core set? 

Or maybe I’m just getting more literary here than I ought to.

But here we come to one of my other problems with genre.  Genre determines not only narrative arc, or at least underlying narrative arc, but also reader expectations about muc m ore than that arc.  Mickey Spillane was once quoted as saying that if a book got boring, the best thing to do was shoot somebody–but he’d have said something different if the books he’d been writing were romances.

In a world of people who read for entertainment and escape, I don’t know the answers to questions like these.  To me, any of these experiments would be inherently interesting, but the fact is that they all represent much more work on the reader’s part than just doing the normal thing with a series. 

But then, I also tend to think that a book that makes me work is a good thing. I get the impression, more and more, that I’m in a minority there.

Okay, this is not the kind of problem any of you could be expected to solve,and I’m not going to solve it either.

But I’m thinking.

Just before Thanksgiving last year, I went into a supermarket–well, what passes for a supermarket out here–looking for a turkey breast.  This was not turkey for Thanksgiving itself.  For that,  I get a whole turkey.  I think I had somebody coming for dinner, or something.  Whatever the reason, I wanted a turkey breast.

I couldn’t find one in the fresh meat section.  I went over to the frozen stuff and found a big pile of the things in that open, deep bin at the bottom.  I looked around among them, finally found one big enough to suit me, and grapped it by the looped handle of its mesh packaging.  

It was way down under a whole bunch of these things, and it was hard to get it to come out.  So I pulled, really hard.

And it came.

It brought five or so more of the things up with it.   They bounced out of the freezer case and onto the floor, except for one of them, which hit me square on the top of my left foot.

You ever get hit by a seven pound turkey breast on top of your foot?  It breaks about a million tiny bones, and there’s nothing the doctor can do about it.  You swell up.   You take a lot of ibuprofen.

But what really struck me about that incident was this:  it was exactly the kind of thing that occurs on some badly written sitcom, and when you watch it you roll your eyes and wonder how anybody could expect you to believe something like that.

I was reminded of that incident yesterday, which went like this:

I had a fairly important appointment at one fifteen, for which  I had to do a great deal of preparation.  Things had to be photocopied.  Other things had to be gathered together and put in order if I wasn’t going to sound like a complete idiot.

I really should have started prepping for this thing at least a week in advance, but of course I’d left it all to the last minute.  So, just to make sure I didn’t screw it all up, I got myself up at four thirty in the morning, had tea, got showered and dressed, got ino my car ad headed out

I got to the place I knew I could make copies just as the doors opened, ran around organizing all my stuff and getting the right number of copies of each, found a computer I could use and printed some stuff off that that also had to be copied, organized all my material, looked at the clock and realized it was almost one already.

So I jumped up and ran, jumped in the car, did too much in the way of miles per hour, found a parking space too far away from the door to be comfortable, locked up, ran some more, reached the door, and found it locked. 

Panicked beyond belief, I got out my phone and called the person I was supposed to meet…and was greeted with complete  bemusement.

Our appointment is for next week.

So, okay, you know.   On one level, this is just funny.  But it did occur to me that under no circumstances would I use either of these incidents in a novel.  I wouldn’t, because they just don’t sound “real” to me. 

I don’t know how this is possible, since both these incidents are thoroughly real.   They happened to me. And yet, somehow, they don’t feel entirely real even when I talk about them, and I know without even having to check that they would sound compltely fake in fiction.

I read something once that said that fiction has to be plausible, where life needs only to be possible. 

I suppose that would work well enough in this case, but I  still find the whole thing a little unsettling.

It’s not just that fiction, if it is to be worthwhile at all, should reflect the way we live now, and what we are–and please,  by that I don’t mean that you can’t have historical novels or fantasy ones.

It’s that I keep rememberingn that line from Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest:  it’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen.

It’s that I  keep remember another of Kesey’s lines, from his second novel, Sometimes A Great Notion.

Some things aren’t the truth even if they did happen.

So, let me start here–in general, I agree with Cathy.  What went on in Dover was not about making a religion out of science, in spite of the fact that some people claiming to be supporting the science side acted in their usual idiotic way.

I’ve got nearly twenty books about the incident and trial, and I’ve read the decision, and I think the judge was absolutely right.  It’s not that “just mentioning” intelligent design constituted teaching it, it’s that doing what they did the way they did it implied that a) evolution was not proven in a scientifically valid way and b) intelligent design had scientific validity.

Both those claims are false–they’re worse than false.  Think of what would happen if school boards insisted on doing something similar with, say, gravity.  Gravity is a theory with which some people disagree–

They can disagree or not, but gravity is science. 

I agree, too, that evolution doesn’t “proselytize.”  From the beginning, biologists and science journalists have been reacting to challenges from religious groups.  Evolution is the only theory that needs defending to the general public, because it’s the only one likely to be challenged on the local level by the general public.  If school boards were sticking disclaimers about geology into earth science textbooks, then there would be popular science books about geology.

(I find it interesting that there isn’t much resistance to geology in public schools, since the findings of geologist do just as much damage to a literal reading of Genesis as evolution does.)

I don’t know if science is compatible with a belief in God.  I’ve never believed in God, so I can’t tell.  I do know that science is not incompatible with most forms of Christianity and Judaism.  It was Aquinas who said that all truth is one and therefore there can be no contradication between one form of truth or another.  If you think you’ve found such a contradiction, and the scientific finding can be proved, the chances are good that you’re misinterpreting scripture.

But then, neither the Western Church nor the Eastern Churches have ever based their Christianity solely on the  Bible.  It’s various forms of Protestantism that have trouble with evolution, and even then only those forms of Protestantism that choose to take that particular account in Genesis literally.

The convoluted way I put that was necessary becasuse virtually nobody even in the most literalist Protestant denominations takes the entire Bible literally.  Ask them what Jesus meant when he said “Take, eat, this is my body…” and they’re quick to point out that that is jsut a metaphor.

All that said, however, the fact is that a number of the most prominent “New Atheists” are belligerent, dismissive and woefully ignorant of the traditions they’re supposed to be critiquing.  I’ve developed a morbid fascination with the columns of a woman named Shadia Drury, who writes monthly for Free Inquiry, probably the best of the atheist magazines on offer.

It’s not just that she parrots every silly misunderstanding on the Middle Ages on offer anywhere–that’s bad enough, but I’ve gotten used to it–but a couple of months ago she managed to misinterpret both Thomas Aquinas and Edmund Burke.   I’d be willing to bet that she’s having trouble with Aquinas because she’s reading him in translation, but Burke?  The English isn’t even all that archaic.

Oh, she almost managed to nearly completely misunderstand the ideas of John Stuart Mill, and therefore botched the intellectual history resulting from them.

And she’s got a book out about Aquinas.  I haven’t been able to look.

But although I’m going on and on about this woman because she’s been on my mind lately, the fact is that the kind of thing she does is not unusual.

Richard Dawkins does indeed say that if evolution is true, then religion isn’t–and he’s a biologist, not just a random popularizer, and the most famous face of atheism now writing.

Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and virtually every writer for Free Inquiry and The Humanist seems to think that “theocracy” means “any religious imput in government at all, including elected representatives who consult their conscience before voting on bills, if that conscience is religious.”

In the case of evolution, stuff like this is largely counterproductive.  Not only does it fan the flames of the real Creationists, it makes a lot of perfectly sensible people wonder if the science really exists to support evolution.

And evolution so defined–as having to do with “something coming from nothing”–does not have the science to support it.

Actual evolution does, but that’s not the same thing.

I’m having one of those weeks, made even less satisfying than it might have been by the fact that my older son went back to college yesterday, which means he’s not going to be around to dump things on when they get overwhelming.  I think about this picture I have of us where I’m holding him–an infant in a singlet–in the air with one hand, and it seems impossible to me that he’s now twenty-two and able to yell at plumbers.

But at any rate, I’m having one of those weeks, and it was only  Sunday when it started, and what I ended up doing was picking up a book I’d been meaning to get around to for some time and hadn’t managed.  The book is The Order of Things, by James Schall, S.J., and before I go into the rant part of this, there are some things I need to say.

First is that Schall is the person I think of first when I hear one of those rants from very public atheists bout how all religious people are stupid, or how the difference between those of us who are religious and those of us who are not is that those of us who are not are thinking, which those of us who are have given up for something called “faith.”

Shall is a Roman Catholic priest–the “S.J.” stands for “Society of Jesus,” the offical name for the Jesuits–and it takes about five pages into any of his books to realize that he had a first class mind and a real knack for, uh, thinking. 

He’s also ferociously well educated, in the way that Jesuits used always to be, with a broad understanding of the Western tradition, a decent understanding of at least one nonWestern tradition, and the apparent ability to read five or six languages, at least one of them “dead.”

The scare quotes are there for a reason.  Latin is not actually entirely dead.   It’s still the language of the Church not only in Church documents, but in a number of  Church insitutions.  Priest-students at the North American College in Rome, which trains clergy to rise into the hierarchy and to be theologians, speak, read and write in Latin as if it were still in use today.

Or they did at least until very recently.  If it turns out that they’ve given that up in the last few years, I’m going to be very disappointed.

One of the reasons Schall cotinues to fascinate me is that he seems to be the only person besides myself to have figured out what I would think would be obvious–if we ever do discover that human beings are “hard wired” (genetically predisposed) to belief in God, this would be at least as good an argument for the existence of God as it would be an argument against it.

But what Schall is, of course, is a reminder that the public face of religion in general and Christianity in particular was not always that of cracker-barrel accented televangelist hawking prayer cloths that have been rubbed in the sand of the Holy Land for nineteen nineety five a pop.

I think it would be hard to underestimate the extent to which the phenomenon of the New (and newly aggressive) Atheism is the result of the the rise of those cracker-barrel voiced preachers to pretty much the only representives of belief in the public square.  We have no Jonathan Edwardses any more, and no Fulton Sheens.  We have Oral Roberts seeing ninety foot Jesuses in his back yard and D. James Kennedy trying to get the “no religious test” clause stricken from the Constitution.

(I also wonder just how much of the “elite” disdain for religion and religious people has less to do with the religion and more to do with the people.  Nobody sneered at Thomas Merton for becoming a Trappist, and his The Seven Storey Mountain was one of the great literary succsses of its day.)

But what struck me about Schall this time was a passage, just about a quarter of the way into the book, that went like this:

>>>The alternative to a creative order is said to be “evolution”, an order presupposed to no order or possible cause.  Though it can simply and legitimately mean a way to classify the differing beings that are found to exist over time both in the cosmos and on earth, “evolution” can mean, and generally does mean, a philosophy of how something comes from nothing.>>>>>

The actual discussion of evolution and “evolutionism” went on for a while after that, and quoting it here would be too cumbersome, but it’s easy enough to paraphrase:  evolution tells us not just how living thngs changed over time, but how they arose from “nothing.”

And two things occur to me immediately here.

The first is that this is a mistaken idea about what evolution actually says.  Evolution does not tell us how life arose on earth–and couldn’t.   Evolution as a fact, and the theory of evolution as an explanation of that fact, tell us only how the development happened once life had already begun to exist. 

Evolution would remain a fact, and the theory of evolution would be equally satisifying as an explanation of that fact, if life arose from nothing, or space aliens brought it, or God planted the first microorganisms in the primordial soup.

What’s more, evolution not only doesn’t tell us how life arose on this earth, it couldn’t if it tried.  Certainly scientists ask the question, but the answer will have to come from some other branch of biology than evolutionary theory.

The second thing that occurs to me is that I understand perfectly why Schall thinks evolution tries to tell us that “something came from nothing.”  Schall thinks it because there are a lot of very loud people out there claiming that it does, and those people persistantly portray themselves as “defending evolution.”

Some of you reading this blog know that St. Martin’s Press published a book of mine this year  called Living Witness, which takes place in a small Pennsylvania town during a lawsuit over the proposal to include materials on Intelligent Design in the school library and a sticker in school textbooks depicting evolution as a matter of opinion which would be countered by these materials.

Okay, that’s a convoluted way of putting it, but that was what in fact happened in  Dover–not, as it was characterized by the media, an attempt by the school board to actually teach Intelligent Desin.

But here’s the thing.  Intelligent Design is not science, but neither is the “evolution proves that there’s no God” and “evolution proves that life arose by chance mutations” mantra.

Evolution is a fact.  We have documentation out the wazoo that includes evolution within species and between species.  We have transitional forms that will take us from reptiles to birds.  Virtually every claim the anti-evolution side makes–there are no transitional fossils! there are examples of irreducible complexity!–is a lie, and most of the people on the anti-evolution side know it.

But the declaration that evolution proves that there is no God is a lie, too, and what’s more it’s the same kind of lie. 

It claims something for science that science cannot deliver.  

Science is the project of explaining natural phenomena by natural means.  It cannot tell us  if anything exists outside the material.   If miracles happen, science could not prove them to be true.   The best it could do would be to say that in this case, it had no explanation of what happened or why.

Enlisting “evolution” in a war of metaphysics does no good for evolution, no good for science, and less than no good for the cause of atheism.  It will convince nobody who isn’t convinced, and it will make an awful lot of fence sitters decide that evolution is less science than it is a form of theology.

Sometimes I think that the problem is that at least some atheists feel a desperate need for certainty of a kind science can never give them. 

If we are committed to intellectual integrity, to accepting as true only those things which reason can show us to be true, then we must be forever in the position of deciding against the existance of God on a negative–since I see no positive evidence of the existence of God, I cannot give intellectual assent to the idea that God exists.

But I can’t know.  

And if you need to know, then you shouldn’t be signing on with the secular project. 

Wheter you know it or not, you’re looking for religion.

This morning there was a link up on Arts and Letters Daily to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about fiction, and plots.

There was a lot wrong with this piece–not the least of which was to imply that before this latest book, Thomas Pynchon wasn’t interested in plot; it was practically all he was interested in.  Go read Gravity’s Rainbow sometime, or V–but what struck me the most was this:

While sales of adult novels in hardcover are down more than 17% from a year ago, sales of young adult novels are up over 30%.

Accoding to the author of the op-ed, the reason for this anomaly is that young adult novels aren’t embarrssed to have plots, while adult novels–well.  It’s all the modernism and literary distaste for stories.

But most modern novels are not literary novels.  These days, most novels published her hardcover fit into the genres, and the genres are not known for lack of plot.

The writer of the op-ed–Lev something, I think, I’m sorry, it’s skipped my mind–blows by these with a reference to “supermarket novels” (meaning:  trash that isn’t to be counted as real books) right before he praises Thomas Pynchon for producing–a hard boiled detective novel!

Ah.  Here we are.  I don’t know how long this link will last, but here it is:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574377163804387216.html

and the writer’s name is Lev Grossman.

At least I got the Lev right.

At any rate, I’m not going to go into my standard rant here about literary intellectuals and the hard-boiled detective novel.   Suffice it to say that  think the reason why people like Norman Mailer and your youngish English prof at Yale head straight for the hard-boiled detective when they want to be “commercial” is precisely because the classic hard boiled detective novel represents the worst written fiction in the history of the English language.  Agatha Christie was a better writer than Raymond Chandler, because she was not a fraud.  My cats are better writers than Raymond Chandler, because they know enough to kill their mice and get it over with.

But the real issue for me in here is this–because Mr. Grossman acts as if adult genre novels do not exist, he manages also to miss the issue.  It’s not just sales of contemporary literary adult fiction that are down, it’s the sales of all adult fiction.  The genres are losing readers just as fast–and in some  cases faster–as the literary novel is.

If you actually look at the differences between adult fiction and young adult fiction, what stands out is not that one has plot and the other does not.  There’s more than enough plot in contemporary genre fiction, and it’s still falling off the planet.

The real differences between the two categories are in matters of technique and vocabulary–and, I think, in a result of technique that I don’t quite know how to categorize yet.

First, for the basics:  young adult novels have much more restricted vocabularies than adult novels do.  There are not so many “big words,” and what words are used tend to be used in their commonest senses and not in their precise ones.  Sentences ae shorter.  Paragraphs are shorter.  There’s a lot more dialogue.

In other words, young adult novels are by definition “easier to read.”  And, of course, the easier a novel is to read, the larger the potential audience.

Second, young adult novels are relatively restricted in terms of subject matter.  By that I mean that there are some things that have become common in adult novels that the publishers of young adult novels will not put up with–graphic sex scenes, for instance, and lots of foul language, and the kind of explicit gore than always made it impossible for me to finish any novel by Andrew Vachss.

This is, I think, a bigger issue than most publishers realize.  I don’t know when we began to think that a novel–or a movie, or a television show–was “better” the more clinically explicit it got in the scenes of death and sex, but my guess is that it was only better for some people.  The rest of us do a lot of cringing.  I turn away from the television set when the medical scenes come on in House, and I’ve never made it to the end of a Quentin Tarrantino movie.

I also think that these issues are bigger deals for book readers than they are for moviegoers and television watchers.  At the movies, I can always run out to the concession stand when the stuff I can’t handle comes on.  With television,  I can read a book through any show I’m watching and just not look up at the stuff I can’t stomach.

But the third thing is the most important–young adult novels tend to be the only fiction these days that is written with omniscient narrators.

In one way, this is the same issue as the first one–omniscient narrators make it much easier to understand a book than almost any other kind.   You don’t have to switch points of view and kieep in mind that one person might not have the same ideas or information as another.  You don’t have to ask yourself if the first person narrator is reliable, or worry that he’s going to end up being the murderer.

What you see is what you get.  If, on page six, you’re told that Johnny is a bully, then Johnny is a bully, and that’s the end of it. 

But as well as making a book easier to understand, an omniscient narrator does soemthing else:  he provides a steady, unquestionable, objective moral framework for the story.

And, in fact, young adult novels are usually expected to have such a framework.  In a novel for adults, you can play around with things like the possible advantages to smoking cigarettes.  In the real world–our world–the cigarette issue is not cut and drived.   Nicotine tends to be very good at enhancing concentration, for instance, and in providing mood regulators especially in people who are biochemically depressed.   I have a good woman friend who has smoked all her life on the following rationale:  when she’s very depressed her life isn’t worth living and she’s close to suicidal; when she takes anti-depressive drugs they run over her like a truck, wipe out any sex drive she might have and make her completely unable to do creative work: cigarettes get rid of the depression, allow her to work as well as she ever could, and leave her sex drive alone.  She added up both columns and decided that risking lung cancer was worth it.

You would never find a person like this as a character in a young adult novel.  The moral issues are too hazy.  In YA, smoking is bad, period. 

And that, I think, is what YA gives to so many people–fictional worlds without moral relativism of any kind.   Moral frameworks that are clear, absolute, universally valid and largely unquestionable.

I don’t think people are looking for plot when they go to YA.

I think they’re looking for morality.