DCJApr-May2009

Volume 58

APRIL-MAY 2009

58. 6: FORGET THE TWEET, SEND ME A POSTCARD 25.5.2009

Some guy with a name composed of left over Scrabble letters (no vowels) from one of those Balkan states composed of a few hundred pissed-off people who are still arguing over which practitioner of which religion raped whose great-great-grandmother first, and whose “profile” describes him as a “freedom fighter, IT engineer and Elvis impersonator,” wants me to be his “friend” on Facebook. What quirk of Google and “six-degrees of separation” caused this guy to drop out of cyberspace onto the desktop of my computer? Is this some guy who once handed me a long forgotten business card at a café in some burg along the Dalmatian coast? Or, maybe he knows somebody that I know, or somebody who knows somebody that I know that once shook the hand of Jimmy Hoffa? What’s the connection?

Rather, why the connection? Will he next want me to “follow him around” on Twitter while he reports house burnings in his holy war on his neighbors of the “other religion?” Something weird is going on here, so pandemic pshycologcal need for people to “have friends,” especially friends who will feign interest in their circadian doings of great moment that they are texting into their PDA when they should be reading a book, gardening, or even thinking.

Djyzyjic Scrabblysevisic isn’t the only one who want me to be his friend. There is some strange guy from Napa who keeps asking me to come up and have some wine with him (Sure, and should I bring my Barbra Streisand records?) There’s a guy from Salt Lake city who claims to know me (Right, I went to school with one of his wives.) These are like people you met at a cocktail party thirty years ago and forgot them before you got to your car; and now they want to “re-connect” and “tweet.” No thanks. I just know that what comes next is an invitation to buy some life insurance, meet somebody who looks like Bernie Madoff, or to pay $10K to become a Thetan in Scientology. “Hi, I’m your greedy capitalist friend and religious weirdo.”

Before I go further I should say that I have some long and dear family members and friends who are on Facebook and maybe Twitter. But I knew them before and, hopefully, will long after this latest ripple in the zeitgeist burns itself out. They were already in my address book, and I prefer to contact them by phone or standard email, especially because the Facebook platform might “connect” them with our mutual “friend” from the Balkans or one of the other of my strange new buddies.

Back in the days of dial-up email I wrote a piece about an old postcard I had found in a sidewalk stall in Hong Kong [“Messages Bearing Music,” DIMSUM, Volume 7, Spring 2003, Pp. 116-118]. It was written from Hong Kong, in Chinese, by a family member of a Dr. Chan, who was at the time (1907) in Edinburgh, and I wondered what ships it had taken to get to Scotland, and how it got back to that stall in Hong Kong. It reminded me that not all that long ago people who migrated to other countries or traveled abroad for long periods were literally out of touch with those “back home” for long periods of time. I began traveling in the postcard days. I could go to a post office and have an operator dial a home number then direct me to a phone cabinet when the connection was made. I would then have a breathless conversation for a few expensive minutes. Or, I could receive a piece of old mail at the American Express office or Poste Restante (general delivery) at some city in Europe. The time of receipt might be two or three weeks from its postage.

These days an international calling card is relatively inexpensive and the call can be made from a mobile phone. Internet cafés are ubiquitous and cheap, WiFi is becoming more widespread, and many hotels have in-room internet connections. In short, one is never more than a few feet and a few clicks from sending or receiving email and even Internet video communication. One is never really “away.” These days I receive email in which people assume I am still abroad; they did not have to think about having to put international postage on an envelope with a geographic address because wherever I am I will get the email.

But there might be another “cost” to such speed and convenience of communication. In the article cited above I wrote: The magician has his price. For me, so much of the allure of travel is related to being in a different time and place. The ubiquity of cyberspace, and instantaneous communication through it, remove some of the sense of geographic and temporal distance. The low cost of E-mail means that the mundane and trivial matters that used to be left behind now can follow one around the globe. Did I want to be reminded about that root canal appointment after having spent an afternoon exploring Kyoto?

Then there is what might be referred to as the “aesthetic” of traditional (or “snail”) mail. Electronic mail just doesn't lend itself to certain sentiments. The kinesthetic of typing is not at all like putting pen to paper, and selecting “bold” and “italics” for “I love you” seems like the equivalent of sending plastic flowers. Adding a typed smiley-face doesn't help either.

E-mail is mail stripped to its essentials and, in the end, most of us dump it or leave it buried somewhere on our hard-drive. [Tweeted text messages are even more ephemeral.] It's mail that hasn't had the experience of actual travel; it hasn't been canceled, and shipped, fondled, mangled, and carried around in a pocket for days, or used as a bookmark. Email may have content; but it lacks substance. There's no coffee spill on it from that cafe in Sienna, no stamp that says Marrakech, or Djakarta, no envelope from The Hotel Metropole, or a postcard picture of the place to which the words “wish you were here” actually refer.

I'll probably continue to travel with my laptop and cell phone, but I won't be leaving my pen at home either. I rather like the idea that somebody in the year 2073 might discover one of my postcards in a street stall in some foreign city and wonder, as I do about Dr, Chan, what dimension of time and space its author might be traveling through.

Somehow, I feel a greater kinship with Dr. Chan than I do with that strange guy who wants me to pop up to Napa for a glass of Pinot Noir.
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© 2009, and 2003, James A. Clapp

58. 5: PEKING STORY, by David Kidd (1988), CHINA MARINE, by E. B. Sledge (2002), and THE PIANO TEACHER, by Janice Y.K. Lee, a triple BR, 5.21.2009

When I first encountered Beijing the year after Tiananmen Square the streets still jingled with bicycle bells and he soft whirr of the chains of Flying Pigeon bicycles and the ubiquitous and amazingly versatile utility trikes. China was called (among other things) zixingche da guo, the Kingdom of Bicycles. I wandered through gritty old hutongs, the compounds of narrow residential lanes that it felt like “breaking and entering.” I will never forget, but have a reminder photo, stopping to pee in a public toilet built into the wall of the hutong—where China was still very much in an olfactory way, still back in the 1940s.

Cut to my sixth and most recent visit in 2008 and the jingling bike bells have all but gone silent, replaced by the horns of Beemers, Benzes and Jags, the expensive models, precariously operated by the newly automotive Chinese—with cell phones. In the span of a couple of decades the city I was only beginning to know is almost transmogrified, jumping headlong into capitalism and international style and culture. My sense if Beijing before I went there was very much shaped by the Mao era and by books such as René Leyes Victor Segalen, novels such as Seymour Toping’s The Peking Letter, and by grainy photos of broad empty avenues and people sweeping up after Gobi dust clouds and industrial plan emissions. Concrete grey is the default color of much of Beijing. That was not the Beijing I found when I arrive in the Deng era; even the place I knew then is rapidly disappearing. I manage to get only a couple of photos of those guys in Mao suits and caps (although one can still find more in regional cities and towns).

So I have to rely on excellent accounts such as David Kidd’s Peking Story to take me back to the Beijing of my youthful imagination. There is the title—Peking—and the cover photo, a black and white of the author in his early twenties, epicene, self-possessed, staring confidently back at the camera, and unfiltered cigarette dangling from his fingers. Kidd writes from an era I could only try to imagine. His years in Peking, from 1946 to 1951 were transformative for both him and the city, which is why he could subtitle his account “the last days of old China.”

Kidd was a student of Chinese culture, reasonably fluent in Mandarin and, given that his dedication is to the American Ambassador to China, appears to have been well-connected. That may be how he ended up living in the mansion of a wealthy traditional family. His story opens with preparations to marry Aimeé Yu, one of the daughters of the pater familias. But the old man dies just as they are married, and the decorum of mourning erases their honeymoon. Had they not been required by the American authorities to find some sort of cleric to officiate they could have married according to Chinese custom, wherein a marriage “letter” was prepared and “chopped” the newlyweds and witnesses. Divorce, should it become necessary is achieved simply by tearing up the letter.

The reader gets the feeling of being on the edge of changes. The 101-room mansion, filled with children, spinster aunts that chain-smoke cigarettes and play mahjong, surrounded by immensely valuable antiques, seems an anachronism more befitting a medieval seigneur in some rural town rather than an urban residence. But in 1946 sprawling Beijing still contained residue of the past beyond the Forbidden City.

But not for long. Soon Red troops are being quartered in the house’s courtyards and the eventual control mechanisms of the new order begin to clamp down on the old way of life. What this reader found interesting were the little details. For example, the Communists considered dogs to be a waste of precious food (or food themselves?), and dogs soon began to disappear. There was also an explanation for those photos I remember of people sweeping the streets; that was a task that was meted out as a punishment for minor infractions.

Kidd and his wife decamped for America before things got worse. They eventually separated and he returned alone after the Cultural Revolution was over to see if he could locate some of his in-laws. The old mansion and its antiques were gone and the family dead and/or scattered into crowded and mean accommodations. He did find a few relatives, one, and aged “aunt” who told him about “Bloody August,” a month at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution that was never reported in the West during which red Guards hauled thousands of people out of their homes and beat them to death with clubs. As a lo wai (foreigner), Kidd would almost certainly have been a victim.

Kidd could have crossed paths with another American in the years immediately after WWII. E.B. Sledge came from quite different circumstances. Instead of being immediately sent home after bloody combat at Peleliu and Okinawa, Sledge was assigned to be a China Marine, with rather ambiguous duty in Peking in 1946. Possession of Peking was being contested by the Kuomintang and the Communists and there were still Americans in the city. American sentiments were, of course, slanted toward the Nationalists. There were still Japanese around, although they had surrendered. The last thing Sledge’s First Marine Division wanted was to become a casualty of the reinvigorated Chinese family spat.

Determined to make the best of a difficult situation Sledge befriended their barrack houseboy and got him to teach him some Mandarin. He made forays into the city, observing the people and their customs and visited parks, monuments and the Forbidden City. Sledge was no social anthropologist, and he has been fighting Asians in the South Pacific, but he combined a certain American Southern gentility with a realism about his circumstances. Like David Kidd, he too became involved with an educated Chinese family. The Soongs—not the famous Soongs(1) who were intimately connected with political power in China --were what we would regard as an upper middle class family; the father, Y.K Soong, was a physician and both wife and daughter were educated. The family had also “adopted” a former Japanese prisoner of war, a Belgian Catholic priest, Fr. Marcel von Hemelryjck, who was fluent in Chinese as well as Russian, French and Japanese. Sledge communicated with the family, who spoke French, through the priest, at dinners and social occasions at ghe Soong home. He write that “Meeting the Soong family and Father Marcel was one of the happiest events of my entire life.”

After he returned to the states Sledge corresponded with the Soongs and Fr. Marcel. But after the Communist takeover of Peking he never heard from the Soongs again. Fr. Marcel has relocated to a Catholic university in America. Not long after he passed away. Sledge went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Biology and had a long teaching career. But it is clear that the war, and his time as a “China Marine” were indelible features of his life.(2)

It is a bit of a stretch to include a novel set in Hong Kong that straddles the Japanese invasion in 1941, but it, too, is a story of a lo wai, in this case a young Englishwoman who comes to Hong Kong when her husband is transferred there, and becomes involved with a Chinese family as The Piano Teacher. Although Claire Pendleton is clearly a hireling of the wealthy Chen family to teach their young, but uninterested, daughter the piano, she is introduced to the society of wealthy British and Chinese who remain after the war. She also meets Will Trusdale, the Chen driver, who, we know from chapters set before and during the war, had a love affair with the wealthy Macau daughter of a Chinese and beautiful Portuguese woman. Author Yee has clearly done her research on the period, especially about the conditions in the POW camp in Stanley.(3) But there is a flatness of the characters in this story. Yee spends more time describing clothing and jewelry than she does on the mores and motives of her lead personalities. Claire is a minor kleptomaniac, but we don’t get to know why. There is no piano teaching in the story. There is a lot of partying that gives the tale a feeling of imminent change (which there certainly is), but the Japanese we get to know most about is an officer who keeps Trudy Liang as somewhat of a comfort woman, but maintains for her some of the comforts to which she is accustomed. Trudy helps keep her British lover, Trusdale, alive, but then she disappears. Unfortunately, all the characters in this novel seem stereotypical and never seem to be able to get beyond that. The real stories of Westerners and their encounters with Chinese families, as recounted by Sledge and especially Kidd, seemed much more alive.

Dad and daughter alongside moat north of Forbidden City, Beijing

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©2009, James A. Clapp

1. See Sterling Seagrave, The Soong Dynasty (1986)
2. He also wrote With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
3. I recommend Prisoner of the Turnip Heads: The Fall of Hong Kong and the Imprisionment by the Japanese, by George Wright-Nooth and Mark Adkin (2000)

58. 4: ONCE WE WERE 5.10.2009

When your life spans the rapid social change that has occurred from WWII to the present it is easy to reflect that you are living at a time of great and fundamental transformation. As a kid I listened to “The Shadow” and “Gangbusters” on my little Arvin tube radio and read my first book, Smiling Jack and the Daredevil Girl Pilot, based on a newspaper comic strip character of the time. I remember making my first phone call and nervously asking the operator to connect me to some “exchange” like “Belmont 3437.”

But I am not going to take you through a litany of seemingly nostalgic reminiscences like those that are circulated by the “senior set” who use computers and the Internet to lament Bakelite phones. Sure, now I can order MP3 files of “The Shadow” and “Gangbusters” and listen to them on my iPod. I actually found a first edition of the Smiling Jack book on the Internet and ordered it (now that was nostalgic). And yesterday I made a phone card call from Hong Kong and talked to my 92-year-old mom for ten minutes with “next-door” clarity, and for less than a buck.

One more thing I remember as a kid: America was the greatest nation in the world and had just beaten the Nazis and the Japanese and saved the world from tyranny. The sixty years up to the end of he 20th Century were very much the “American Era.” It wasn’t without its problems, but we, in some sense by default, were Numero Uno in many things. That’s probably over, and the question is whether America will ever achieve the dominance it won along with the victories in Europe and the Pacific. It might well have been an anomalous period that might never occur again.

China is considering buying General Motors. You remember the saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA.” China already makes Jeeps outside Beijing and Buicks near Shanghai, just as well as we ever made them. They make computers (assembled my MacBook Pro), the best-selling Lenovo and a lot of other durables. They don’t make only plastic crap. They hold notes for $700 billion of George Bush’s “off the budget books” Iraq war, so they can afford to buy American corporations if they wish. Their banks, which used to be notorious for bad loans, are better off than “number one in bad loans” banks, and their people—and government—are not mired in debt.

If you travel internationally you can appreciate the status of a faded champion in subtle ways. American airlines have a shabby feel, with lousy food and rude service. The United boarding lounge staff at SFO seemed almost to take joy in telling patrons they were 25 seats overbooked and treating them like their government never bails them out. Homeland Security seemed a bit more friendly, but we still had to walk in our socks over filthy floors. American hotels are grimier and looking like their “fourth star” is broken. Not so, as many who traveled to China during the Olympics will attest, in places that used to look ad feel decades “behind” America. Airlines, airports, service personnel, security, and hotels often put us to shame and shabbiness. Our infrastructure, public and private, is often badly in need of repair and replacement.

Many Americans, Rush Limbaugh, and some other jerks like him excepted, hope Barack Obama will be able to rescue us from us from the fate I feel we have put ourselves in for—“has beens.” But I don’t think he can, or anyone can. He might be able to stem or top some or most of the stupidity and cupidity that has made us a nations of wastrels and managed to create a huge economic disparity in spite of our putative egalitarianism. Obama is seen as (except those idiots who have called him both a fascist and a Communist) a progressive and a pragmatist. But he really just needs to be a reformer first. He must get us to change our stupid, wasteful and greedy ways. He’s going to get resistance from an entrepreneur I flew back from China next to about his policies on American corporations who take their business off shore. This guy claimed that when he took his several companies to China it “doubled” his employment back home. But he was talking about his management people, not the more numerous production people. If China buys GM that slippery logic won’t fly.

War is a big problem. We have spent hundreds of billions gearing for a type of war we can possibly fight without harming ourselves. Other nations, including those who have fundamentalists who espouse suicide, are, or will soon acquire those sorts of weapons. We opened Pandora’s nuclear box. Then we went and squandered hundreds of more billions unsuccessfully fighting wars we had no business in starting and no particular tactics toward “winning.” Korea, Vietnam and Iraq were and are all civil wars. We had no real effect on any of them other than depleting ourselves. Moreover, with them we started our own civil “culture war.”

Inexorably, our wealth was squandered, then shifted, by thirty years of economic policies crafted by the plutocrats who funded the campaigns of Reagan and the Bushes, who argued that taxes were inherently evil, and any political agenda to enhance or repair our social and physical infrastructure, or to protect our precious resources, were “socialistic.” To finance their wars and keep money flowing to the top one-percenters they borrowed us into a pit of penury—just laying the “taxes” on future generations. Emboldened, they stole elections, perverted institutions such as the CIA and Department of Justice, launched preemptive war, defecated on our honor with Abu Ghraibs and drowned our values with waterboards.

Obama can repair some of that, but he is still mired in Afghanistan, a toilet that flushes away empires and will provide the heroin to help you forget about it. It is a tragic place where they blow up girls’ schools and execute women for entertainment, but there is no way we are going to stop them. The brutal religious fundamentalists who like it that way will fight us to the death and thank us for making them martyrs. Ironically, the Americans closest to them are our religious fundamentalists. The industrialist that flew with me thought that the reason China remains communist is that it is "not a Christian nation." Ironically, some Chinese converts feel the same way. But they have had this huge economic advancement under communists I had to reply.

But I was going on about Afghanistan. Even the great Obama will be brought down by it unless he can extract us soon. Perhaps if he pulled out and let the Taliban threaten Pakistan enough to take over those Paki-nukes the Pakistan army—always the default government if the country—would wake up, pull their troops from the Indian border and kick some Taliban ass. If we continue to let civil wars be our problem we will never overcome the damage of our own “culture war.” It is good to see America get some our respect back, but it feels a lot like the respect people give to sports figures who are past their prime; a bit like the sports star who “partied” a little too much and didn’t look over his shoulder.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp

58. 3: A LEAP OF FAITH 4.26.2009

Most of us, depending on what side of the theism line we are on, know how we feel about those on the other side. The theists worry that non-believers are going to be sinners punished with damnation; the atheists see credulous cretins believing in fairy tales. That is to be expected in an argument in which neither side has any evidence to prove its case and, in which the opponent is an anonymous other.

But what do you do when the person on the other side of belief is someone you know and perhaps even love. Shouting epithets across the street at the guy with the sign that says you are going to hell because your politics contradicts his faith is one thing, across the dinner table is quite another. Nothing can spoil a meal, or ruin a relationship like an accusation that you are evil, or an idiot for believing in angels and demons.

Faith is a curious cognitive causal connection of dots. It puts things together almost out of thin air. A sneeze becomes a minor exorcism of little demons rather than the action of pollen-agitated nasal cilia. Storms become the anger of the gods, seemingly from some deep need to install our human emotions as the clockwork of nature’s forces. It is not the “seeing” that is believing, but the un-seeing. Belief is a process of narrative invention. Belief is stories, written as parable and fable, not in mathematics and code.

Faith is also a significant anchor in many people’s lives, people who would be lost without their trust that a better (after)life awaits them and that they way they conduct their lives gives them some assurance of that outcome. It is manifestly easier to pray to or express anger at a deity that looks like you and understands English, Arabic, Farsi, or Mandarin. One need only look about them to see that many people need faith almost out of desperation. Life would have no worth or hope for them without faith.

Faith is therefore something we should not set out to destroy, anymore than the believer should set out to eradicate the infidel. I personally know and have known people for whom their faith is a precious gift to their lives and I would not attempt to convert them to my non-theism because I don’t think they could handle it or would love me for it. Indeed, there have been times when I wished I could believe what I regard as their blissful ignorance.

But reason is a harsh master. There is no Bible, Quran, or other sacred text to memorize and repeat, no liturgy, no rules about food or sex or clothing, no do’s and don’ts with merit or grace to account for, no promises other than the utility of rationality. Reason demands evidence, proof, something that can be apprehended by the senses, that does not violate logic. Faith gives reason nothing to work with except precedent, mystery and the intellectual joke of “intelligent design.” There is no more apt term than “a leap of faith,” a vault across the yawning chasm of unknowns and unknowables to a teetering precipice of credulity. Even “knowns” might be rejected in he leap of faith, by consigning Darwin or science in general to just a competing “faith.”

So there you are, across a dinner table or bed sheets that can seem almost an equal chasm, distanced from someone whose well-being and happiness are co-mingled with yours, but who has taken that leap. (I must necessarily write this from the POV of the non-theist, although there is no reason a believer could not fashion a case from his/her perspective.) History and personal experience have taught us that here is considerable jeopardy in such uneven relationships. My own mother, busied with her own mortality at age 92, now seems to accept my apostasy, or secretly believe that the expense of my Catholic education imbedded a subconsciously un-rejectable kernel of credulity in me that will insure our reunion in heaven (as she is assured of her reunion with dad.) Who would wish to disabuse her of such a comforting belief?

One of the “techniques” I have found useful in reaching an accord of sorts with believers (not all, mind you), is one that I employed in teaching graduate seminars for many years. I call it, for lack of a better term, “scrambling categories.” It comes from the fact that the positions of many believers are often not very well thought out; faith requires acceptance (“accept Jesus as your lord and savior”) not a conversion by arduous internal debate. Indeed, the non-believer has often put himself/herself through a lot more rigorous intellection.

Example.

Me: “I believe in Jesus.”

Believer (astonished): “You do?”

Me: “Yup.” (I really do, and this also keeps me from being consigned to being an infdel out of hand).

Believer: “Your pulling my leg.”

Me: “Nope. This I believe, on historical basis: I believe in the account that there was this First Century rabbi/carpenter who had some good things to say and did some good stuff. Actually, I rather like the guy because it seems he was for many of the same things I am for.”

Believer: “Like keeping gays and lesbians from getting married?” (OK, I realize that I am making the Believer sound stupid with this, but I just couldn’t resist putting it in. I will try to restrain myself.)

Me: “No, silly. I mean that he seemed to care a lot for the sick and the poor, and he didn’t seem to like rich people very much. He hung out with working class guys. I’m not sure about the Mary Magdelene being a hooker thing, but I can see how that would fit his values. In short, Christ was a bleeding heart liberal, certainly not a Republican.

Believer: “But do you accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God and your lord and savior?”

Me: No, just as a cool guy. Anyway, Jesus Christ was a name he probably never heard applied to himself. It’s Greek. He was Yeshua bar Yusef. As Jesus Christ he should have been called the son of Zeus.

Believer: “You’re trying to confuse me.”

Me: “You’ll get your own chance when you explain to me the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But let’s not get sidetracked here. Just because I don’t think Yeshua was the “Son of God” doesn’t mean I don’t take him any less seriously. For example, he brought the Golden Rule to Judea, the idea that we should treat people as we would have them teat us. I don’t know where he got that, but remember he sort of drops out of sight from age 15 to about 29 or 30, a long time. Maybe he went off searching for the Golden Rule. I like the Golden Rule.

Believer: “But that doesn’t make you a Christian. You have to believe that Christ is the Son of God.”

Me: “But I believe in the principles Christ—I mean Yeshua—espoused. If I believe in the principles of “natural selection” then I am a Darwinian. So, if I believe in Christ’s principles I am a Christian. Unless, of course, you want me to believe that Darwin is the Son of God, too. Maybe you would accept as a Christian someone who does not espouse Christ’s principles, but proclaims Christ as the Son of God? It seems that’s just what many people who call themselves Christians do.”

Believer: “Go to Hell.”

Me: “See ya there.”

OK the last part is just fooling around, but you get the point. I like Jesus as a secular-historical person with good, liberal principles he espouses for us all to practice, and the Believer likes him foremost as a Son of God and a lord and savior. If we agree on his principles it should at least keep us from killing one another, that is if we don’t get bogged down in a debate over monophysitism.

If I can be accepted as a “believer” of sorts, then I have a basis of legitimacy that allows for working the edges of a secular philosophy that is fundamentally consonant with what is arguably the essence of Christianity, even, perhaps, making the case that I am a more genuine Christian than some so-called Christians who ascribe ludicrous “what would Jesus do” values to Christ that contradict those fundamental principles. (How did Jesus feel about gays marrying, or torturing detainees at Gitmo, anyway? We know that the Old Testament said about gays, but wasn’t Jesus about some new covenant?)

Well, you get the idea; it begins to be sort of a negotiation, not only on what is believed, but what is the basis of belief. Once the old categories have been scrambled the one who has done more critical thinking about the reasons for what they believe, has the advantage.

In most societies faith is not something we leap into, but something slipped into our breakfast cereal when we are young and innocent. Later, it’ hard to get rid of it; it seems like it has always been there, everybody else seems to have it, and one doesn’t leap back, but first must fall into the chasm and climb out, arduously. Yet many of those who were not indoctrinated seem to find faith so easily, claiming they are “saved” out of some social convenience.

Recent surveys report a decline in religious belief in America, to nearly one in five with no faith at all. It might be because they are more easily defeated when we have the audacity to confront them, or that the insinuation of religious belief into the political realm has produced a counter reaction because some believers also seem to need faith to feel superior and “chosen.” But they are only those who have chosen to believe in something they have no way of knowing.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp

58. 2: GLOBAL WARNINGS 4.19.2009

“You have nowhere to go.”
The last line of George Lucas’s THX 1138

In the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, a single alien visitor and his powerful robot land their saucer-shaped spaceship in a park in Washington, DC. To demonstrate technological superiority they turn off all electrical and mechanical power on earth, illustrated in a montage of cities brought to a halt of stalled modes of communication and transportation. The “message” of the film is that unless humans find a way to live peacefully with one another—the film was made during the days of the Cold War and the proliferation of atomic weapons in the US and USSR—even more technologically-advanced aliens might have to step in like a parent among squabbling children and slap some sense into them.

Klaatu, the “alien,” played by Michael Rennie in an aluminum foil suit, is a rather messianic figure backed up by an eight-foot cyclopean robot that can incinerate anything with its ray-gun eye. He has been sent by a federation of our galactic neighbors to tell us to get our act together and show us what might happen if we don’t. Although Klaatu is on a peace mission, he does not hesitate to have his robot, Gort, take out a few tanks and soldiers when they get too militaristic and wound Klaatu. He also exhibits some very “human” tendencies by getting close to an inter-planetary love affair with Patricia Neal.

The film was timely, well-acted, and, given the rising “Roswellian” atmosphere and the beginning of UFOs as a cottage industry, kept from getting out of hand by director Robert Wise. It also achieved a somewhat cult status in the phrase “Klaatu barada nikto,” a message from Klaatu to robot Gort not to use his powers to level the planet when Klaatu was briefly incarcerated by his hosts. Gort instead uses his powers to rescue Klaatu. After an admonitory speech by Klaatu in the concluding scene, he and his robot fly off in their spaceship leaving no more than a patch of scorched grass behind.

The message of The Day the Earth Stood Still is a forewarning that has been sounded by cool heads and Jeremiah’s from cinemas, book pages, political podia, and pulpits since the first technology expanded humans’ control over Nature, and over themselves: beware what you make; it might re-make you. It made a big impression on me and remains one of my favorite sci-fi films.

So it is a little upsetting to see this fine film destroyed in the 2008 re-make with the same title, starring Keanu Reaves as Klaatu. Reaves should have been as the robot since that role does not require any acting ability. The original was no doubt made for less that Reaves was paid and looks even better in comparison.

The new The Day the Earth Stood Still, which I saw on a flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, is clearly made for the video game generation. The spaceship, now a vague, spinning giant orb, lands in New York rather than Washington (stupid idea since Klaatu wants to speak to political leadership). Actually, these orbs land all over the earth. After emerging from a gooey chrysalis, Keanu-Klaatu essentially becomes a fugitive, running around New York with Jennifer Connelley, a doctor of gooey stuff and also a widowed mom for a cute Black kid with hair like Shirley Temple. Unlike the original, the purpose of the story gets completely lost in the video game fun. There are the requisite car chases, explosions, but hardly a hint of perhaps some intergalactic intercourse between Klaatu and Conelley’s Dr. Helen Benson.

Klaatu does meet a Nobel Laureate in math and helps him solve a stubborn problem, but nothing comes of that; Kathy Bates (the only real actor in the movie) is a stubborn Secretary of State, who “gets it” after the earth stands still, but the military are bent on kicking Gort’s ass—it’s the same old stupid, rigid military—and Gort, rather than using that cool death ray, unleashes a plague of metallic beetles or locusts that start eating everything in sight. Bates, by the way, plays the Secretary of State because the prez and vice-prez, like Bush and Cheney, have been evacuated to some safe place—just like 911.

Meawhile, Keanu-Klaatu, who was prescient in the beginning, becomes confused and powerless to stop the process, unless he somehow gets back to the big spinning orb. We are never sure why the destruction has to begin, apparently it is because all of the messing around with him has finally pissed of Gort. In the orginal we never get to see the awesome power of Gort, but are left to imagine what it might be. Certainly it would be something more than making your television go blank. But we need to see aqn empty Shea Stadium eaten by metal bugs. Reaves does make his way back to the orb, of course, and the devastation ceases and he and his orb and Gort go away—never having invoked “Klaatu, Barrada, Nickto,” and leaving we earthlings to our stupid ways, one of which is turning cool movies into this sort of crap.

When humans began to construct permanent settlements some 12,000 years ago they began to exercise dominion and control over their environment. By engaging in agriculture, animal husbandry, damming rivers and clearing forests, and creating technologies that made their lives more secure and efficient they became “man the engineer,” altering their environment as much as they could to meet their goals and desires. In the process they broke not only with their hunting and gathering nomadic past, but also with their traditional social forms and even their ancient deities.

Formerly metaphysically atavistic and pantheistic, humans eventually created anthropomorphic gods who would place them at the center of creation and bestow upon them permission to “multiply and subdue the earth.” Now nearly gods themselves, humans would seem to have found their place, with their intelligence and the permission to use it to make a world to their liking. All things seemed possible, life more secure, and perhaps one day in the far off techno-urban future, even eternal. Earth, air, fire and water were no longer simply elements of their existence, but through technology, factors of production. Mankind could consider the prospect of utopia itself. At the center of this utopia was the City.

Yet this very capability for control, it seems, carried with it elements of fear, anxiety, guilt, and in the minds of some, a blasphemy. Most futuristic novels and films appear to focus more upon the “dystopic” expectations of future worlds rather than on utopian notions. In part, it may be that novels or films that portray ideal and idyllic future cities offers less dramatic prospects and are less interesting than places beset by human failings. Nevertheless, such dystopic visions must have their roots in imaginings that preceded their artistic expression.

But beyond this difference lies the hypothesis that the control and sophisticated technology of modern urbanized humankind may not be without some residue of guilt and anxiety. The theme that Man has overreached his human prerogatives, and tried to become godlike appears in nearly every age and society. The biblical account of the Tower of Babel warns against Man’s arrogance at believing he can reach heaven by means of his technological prowess. Like the Greek Icarus, he seems to overreach his human prerogatives, and fly to close to the sun. These “concerns” continue to resonate in both the actual and virtual world, as technology plays a more prominent role in human affairs.

Not to get MucLuhan-esque on you, but the irony of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still —that Earth better get its act together or some angry federation from the Milky Way is going to waste us—is the message. [Instead, you should read my series this past February in these (archived) pages, about “why we are in deep doo-doo.”] We supposedly only understand force or the threat of it. So, when we invent a creature who is to come and give us a “global warning” the warning is that he is going to kick our ass. Why don’t they just unleash a virus, or something, that makes us smart, that at least gives us some common sense. Well, we also know the answer to that one, and it too is scary—we might then become a race of Keanu-Klaatus and bore one another to death.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp

58. 1: HIPPITY-HOPPITY EASTER'S ON ITS WAY [Reprised from 4.13.2004]

Cardinal Ratzinger, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

For some reason I have never been able to wrap my perhaps overly rationalist mind around the whole business of The Resurrection. Somehow the whole “dying for the sins of Mankind” has always struck me as unnecessary, if not a religious subterfuge to offer forgiveness and redemption for transgressions people when really should pay for those sins. Of course, if you believe the biblical account that all mankind was redeemed by Christ’s death then you have to come up with something that is sufficiently momentous, or in the case of the crucifixion, appropriately horrific (thank you Mr.Gibson).

Believers will, of course, put my skepticism down to a lack of faith, and perhaps pray for me because I risk missing out on the Rapture, at which time I will not be able to go to heaven and hang out for eternity with the likes of Tim LaHay, Billy Graham, Pope John-Paul II, George W. Boosh, etc. According to them it won’t matter that I think that the Rabbi Yeshua Bar Yusef (or Jesus Christ) was a righteous man who had some darn good things to say about how we should behave toward one another, most of which has been ignored in favor of a load of bullshit that has been heaped upon his story. That he got a little too big for his sandals as far as the Romans and the high mucky-mucks in the Temple were concerned took some “big ones” as we might say today. How dare he preach non-violence, tolerance, and love thy neighbor. If he and his disciples knew a little bit about “shock and awe” he might not have had to go through that nail-up on the cross.

But then he had to, didn’t he-- “die” and “rise from the dead,” that is. That’s how you beat the Romans. When you think about it, it was quite a risk to take, but it was the only way to beat the Romans: create the myth of the resurrected leader, what some have come to call the “death victory.” And in about another 280 years it worked: Constantine converted and Christianity conquered the Roman Empire. And, as they say, the rest is history, a lot of it really ugly history.

But I digress from my theme: Easter, the “resurrection.” Not only do I think that Yeshua did not die on the cross for our sins, because we really are a bunch of jerks and don’t deserve that, but I don’t think he died on the cross, period, but survived (others, according to Josephus, had survived Roman crucifixion—Shonfield, The Passover Plot, 1966, P.155, not Matthew 28:5-6). I rather think that lived out his days with his fellow Essenes, and might even have finally perished at Masada.

Huh? Well why not. It’s plausible; there was no autopsy, not death certificate, and his friends and family did spend a good deal of time working on him in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. And, of course, non habeas corpus.

It’s OK if you prefer the story with the angel rolling back the stone on the tomb and announcing that “he is risen.” But I prefer to believe that Yeshua was whisked away by his friends, rested up, and went into the witness protection program. Mission accomplished.

But I still like Easter. It fits the season, one of rebirth and renewal. And if I don’t hold to the “personal savior” thing, I do hold to biting off the ears of my “personal chocolate Easter bunny” and inviting over Hans Blix to break anise-flavored Easter bread and join in some hunting for Easter eggs and weapons of mass destruction. Now that’s a Rapture I prefer not to miss.

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