Monthly Archive for February, 2007

Dominionists and the rise of fascism

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dvanhorn
on February 16, 2007
in Books
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Last night, I spent my snowy Valentine’s evening at the Cambridge Forum’s hosting of Chris Hedges, who spoke about his latest book, American Fascists: the Christian Right and War on America (right now, the #3 bestseller on Powell’s). He spent fifteen years at the New York Times and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. He left the paper in 2003 shortly after the furor he caused in his Commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois (text available here, video available on YouTube: part 1, 2, 3, 4) in which he spoke against the war in Iraq. He was booed and jeered. His mic was cut twice. Finally, he was asked to leave and escorted off campus by security. He was denounced in a Wall Street Journal editorial. He was issued a formal reprimand by the New York Times. He was also right.

The thesis of his new book, American Fascists, is that there is a strong parallel between historical fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s and the contemporary dominionists movement—the radical Christian Right—in the US. (Hedges makes an important distinction in terms: dominionists are often mislabeled evangelicals or fundamentalists, but Hedges argues evangelicals and fundamentalists have historically advocated the withdrawal from secular society and away from the structures of political power. Dominionists seek the opposite, to highjack power and create a Christian empire).

Hedges’s talk began with a short memoir of his life growing up in rural New York state. His father was a Presbyterian minister and an early activist for gay rights, including same sex marriage. At the time Hedges was an undergraduate at Colgate, there was no gay student group. His father, who was speaking and counseling many of the gay and lesbian students, tried to convince them to start one. When he couldn’t find anyone to found the group, he turned to his son and told him he would have to do it, irrespective that he was not in fact gay. Hedges did found the club and his subsequent lunches were marked by the cashier calling him a faggot after each time he paid for his meals. He made it his undergraduate mission to seduce the cashier’s girlfriend.

Hedges would go on to earn a Masters degree from Harvard Divinity School, with the goal of being ordained and following in his father’s foot steps. (During the course of his talk, it would become clear that Hedges was endowed with the oratory skills of a preacher—as one audience member would later put it during the question and answer period: the boy can leave the seminary, but the seminary may not leave the boy). It was during his days in seminary that he would first be warned of the threat of Christian fascism; his ethics professor, aged 80, presciently said that when they, the students, were his age, they would be fighting a fascist movement from the Christian Right. At the time, it seemed unlikely to them, but this was a man who would know. He went to Germany in 1935 and ‘36 to work with the underground anti-Nazi church, The Confessing Church. He was detained by the Gestapo, who suggested he return to the US. He took the suggestion, leaving on a night train, and smuggled hours of film footage of the pro-Nazi churches he had accumulated. Placing framed photos of Hitler in his suitcases, the film went unnoticed by the border police beneath them.

It was only after he graduated that he decided to become a journalist, although he remains a believer. He spoke about his own faith, which informs his deep humility in the face of the unknown. He learned that the word of God is unknowable, and that those who speak for God, those self-appointed prophets, were dangerous. He learned that doubt and belief were not mutually exclusive. He learned that the Bible was not literally true: written by men, inconsistent and certainly fallible, it represented a history of people’s struggle with the unknown, rather the answers. Other religions, seen through this light, represent similar struggles through the unknown, equally valuable, equally correct.

Although I’m not a believer, Hedges values and ideals were close to my own. That his faith could inform his sense of doubt, his value of diversity and tolerance, his lack of righteousness, and his sense of struggle to do good with humility were refreshing, and inspiring. Having such belief, one can understand Hedges’s anger with the Christian popular movement in this country that teaches (selectively) the literal word of the Bible, that castigates homosexuals as moral deviants, that partitions the world into the saved and the damned, that teaches against science, against doubt, and against rational discourse—the struggle for understanding at the heart of Hedges’s belief. Cocksure and righteous, they seek to impose their will on the rest of us. In their view, we shall either be converted or eliminated.

American Fascists starts by quoting in full Umberto Eco’s essay “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen ways of looking at a blackshirt“, which lists fourteen characteristics of Ur-Fascism. Among them is a cult of tradition, a rejection of modernism, a despise of intellectualism and thinking, a rejection of dissent, disagreement and diversity, a culture of machismo and heroism, a contempt for the weak, and systematic use of newspeak. Hedges makes the case that the dominionist movement posses all of these characteristics.

Perhaps more important than Hedges’s observation that there are parallels between dominionist and fascist movements, is that he has a powerful analysis of where this movement comes from and how to deal with its rise. Hedges observes a culture of despair. Economic despair in the US has left large swaths of the population despondent. There is a cultural and social emptiness. Capitalism has robbed us of our spirit, bankrupted our communities, and exploited every aspect of human life. Reality has become unbearable and dominionism puts forth a constructed alternate reality that offers reprieve. Paramount to maintaining this alternative reality is an isolation from the outside world, hence the insular structures of Christian media, community, and values that undermine critical thinking.

Hedges believes the people involved in this community to be good, earnest, and hard working people, but overwhelmed by personal despair, tragedy, and loneliness. In many ways, I see Hedges as a perfect supplement to Richard Dawkins. He is everything I found lacking in Dawkins. Whereas Dawkins is somewhat of a geopolitical ignoramus, Hedges has a deep understanding and firsthand experience. Whereas Dawkins’s religious prowess is unsophisticated, Hedges’s is not. And whereas Dawkins sees the cause for belief to be mystical, irrational, and superstitious, Hedges can explain why people embrace these things, with a basis in socioeconomic factors. On the other hand, the subject of their criticism is largely the same, and both are fighting for a tolerant society that values reason, science, diversity, etc.; their goals are largely in common. Dawkins sees “moderate” religious institutions and the unfounded respect—the off-limits status of belief—as partly to blame for allowing such bigoted and irrational movements to survive, while Hedges likewise claims that government, higher education, religious and charitable institutions have wrongly allowed the dominionists room to grow. Dawkins, like Hedges, identifies many of the same characteristics that Eco lists, and both see the dire consequences of this movement coming to power, but it is only Hedges who appeals to a convincing historical analogy.

Hedges acknowledges the massive inroads into power the dominionist movement have made, as seen by the spread of homo- and xenophobic legislation, the cowing of political heavy hitters such as John McCain who used to lambaste the intolerance of the Christian Right, and the “[f]orty-five senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives [who have] earned approval ratings of 80 to 100 percent from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups: the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council.” However, he still understands that as of yet the Dominionist movement is largely a marginal one. The worry, Hedges contends, is that the movement is well poised to be a revolutionary political force in the event of a large-scale terrorist attack, a series of ecological disasters, or an economic meltdown. Faced with crisis, the country may turn to the protection and comfort of the alternative reality offered by the dominionists and we will witness the destruction of American democracy in its wake. The stuff of V for Vendetta would no longer be an abstraction.

The movement has already secured a vanguard military body in Blackwater USA—the mercenary firm founded by dominionist millionaire Erik Prince—which employs some 20,000 mercenaries. (Incidentally, Jeremy Scahill, formerly of Democracy Now!, has a new book on the firm, due out soon: Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He recently spoke on the topic in an interview on DN!). Their handiwork can be seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans, the latter of which Hedges believes to offer a grim glimpse of a future under the boot of dominionism, with the oppression usually reserved for others visited upon ourselves. Hedges also observes that despite the movements isolation from, and condemnation of, almost every US institution, there are two exceptions to this rule: the police and the armed forces. They actively recruit their followers to join the state troopers and local police and to enlist in the military, they hold supportive rallies and are constantly lavishing praise upon both, and they have penetrated the chaplaincy of the armed forces to an alarming degree (claiming a huge percentage of the chaplain positions—50 to 70 percent if I recall correctly).

The paradox of tolerance, as Hedges sees it, has allowed the intolerant to amass more power than can safely be ignored. Media, universities, intellectuals, churches, and the government must stand up and oppose this movement. Beyond an intellectual confrontation, a legal and legislative battle must be waged by enacting hate crime laws as has been done in Canada. Hedges noted that on several occassions at the dominionist rallies he attended, the speaker would make a remark to the effect of eradicating gays, or immigrants, or some other ‘degenerate’ segment of the population, and then sneer and laugh and remark ‘we could never say these things in Canada, they’d throw us in jail’, which Hedges takes as evidence that they [Canadians] may be sane. I’m not so sure. Incendiary speech is not protected under the First Amendment in this country, although the burden of proof (that of ‘intent’) is extremely difficult to meet, but I would be very skeptical of any speech law reform. With any law, as with war, it is difficult to judge the consequences from the outset. I am so skeptical that reasonable reforms could be enacted that could not be made through interpretation to apply to legitimate speech. Hedges charges the movement with sedition and supposes this a legitimate ground for silencing the movement, but sedition should be protected in my opinion. What could be charged against the dominionists that could not, perhaps through contortion and misrepresentation, be charged against the Black Panthers or Malcolm X, for example? There is no need, in my mind to meddle with these things. Our position can overcome through the engagement of rationality alone, not with the movement itself, which is clearly irrational, but with policy makers, with institutions that can exert influence, and with the populace. The KKK was not defeated through hate speech legislation, but a raising of the collective conscientiousness. The same will suffice here.

But more importantly, as Hedges offers in his analysis, the surest way of defeating this movement is to fold back into the mainstream these large swaths of discontented people. A new New Deal is needed. Economic prosperity, jobs, healthcare, and security (in the real sense of the word) are needed. If we can address the very real causes of despair, these utopian movements will simply vanish. Historically, the US industrialists of the ’20s and ’30s saw the corporatism of Mussolini’s fascism as an attractive way to fight Roosevelt’s New Deal. Contemporary corporatism, which is the reluctant midwife of the dominionist movement, likewise needs to be confronted and challenged. As Hedges points out, much of this country looks like the third world and failing to address the causes of despair is simply, as he says, self immolation. The lessons of American Fascists are, as an audience member said, like a fire alarm in the night.

Foreign fevers, shot and shell

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dvanhorn
on February 14, 2007
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Last night, I rented The Pentagon Papers, the 2003 (made for TV?) movie about Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the top secret 7,000 page history of the war in Vietnam, prepared by the Pentagon. The document, colloquially known as the Pentagon papers, exposed widespread deception by the government that spanned four presedential administrations. Although being one the most compelling stories of whistle blowing in the history of the U.S., it’s hard to imagine the movie being worse than it is—it is quite possibly the worst movie I’ve seen in years. And yet, when the New York Times Co. v. United States Supreme Court decision was read, in which the press’s right to publish the classified report was affirmed, I couldn’t help from being moved. Justice Black wrote in his opinion (emphasis added):

In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.

Our contemporary press is negligent in this paramount responsibility. We’ve seen the withholding of stories of illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens, circular corroboration with the administration in the mythical threat of WMD in Iraq, withholding of stories of illegal prisons overseas and “extraordinary rendition”. We now see the New York Times headline: Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, US Says. The press has cowed under powers of the governed and the consquences have been apparent.

Dawkins, The God Delusion

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dvanhorn
on February 13, 2007
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Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, popular science writer, and Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is a highly regarded and widely read scientist. His latest book, The God Delusion, lays down his case for Atheism and against religion.

This book is not the kind of book I would pick up and read on my own, but it was sent to me with overwhelming enthusiasm from my father who had recently read it. Normally, any discussion of religion, even one which repudiates it, I find boring and my brain immediately shuts down in response. But, I’m generally in search of common ground between my and my father’s ideological convictions, and atheism is one of them (gay rights, immigration rights, drug decriminalization, and widespread disgust with Democrats have proved to be other commonalities; beyond that, things diverge, rapidly). So I gave it a whirl. Despite its breezy and accessible style, I found the book hard to read at length. It ended up taking me a month or so to read, putting it down and reading other things during breaks. Part of the problem is that Dawkins says everything no less than three times, and part of it is that chunks of the book are silly to the point of indigestion.

Dawkins’s book first lays out the kind of religion that is the subject of his attack. It is a fairly restricted concept, but one embraced by a large group of people throughout the world. The concept is that of a personal, all powerful, supernatural being that is responsible for the existence of the universe and all phenomenon within. The three Abrahamic religions fall under this concept, but Dawkins casts his net wide: “I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.” Having established a “God Hypothesis,” Dawkins turns to historical arguments and “proofs” for God’s existence and his own argument “Why there almost certainly is no God.” Both of these chapters are of the silliest kind. His argument against God’s existence is one from a complexity point of view: the complexity of the universe we observe could be explained by reference to a being that willed it, but anything complicated enough to design the universe would need, in turn, for its own complexity to be explained in some way. An infinite regress lies here. QED. On the other hand, Darwinism provides an explanation for the observed complexity that presupposes no such complex being arising from nothingness.

Part of Dawkins argument is that the God’s existence or non-existence should be subject to the same scientific scrutiny as any other phenomenon. His claim is that a universe in which God exists would be very different from one in which God does not exist. Thus experimentation can shed on light on which we find ourselves in. Again, this all seems silly to me. Deductive reasoning alone can provide no insights into the nature of the universe in general, and with regards to God’s existence in particular. Deduction is concerned only with meaningless symbols. To relate to the outside world, we must endow the symbols with meanings—assumptions we suppose to be true. Analytic proofs of God’s existence (non-existence) would either presuppose God’s existence (non-existence) axiomatically, or prove the existence (non-existence) of any concept that could be substituted for the God symbol in the proof, i.e. my dog, unicorns, the color blue, etc. This is true despite the efforts of the logical big hitters from Aquinas to Gödel (arguments due to the latter were not taken up by Dawkins, despite Gödel being the most important logician of the past century and a man who truly believed God’s existence to be provable through formalism alone). On the other hand, empiricism seems a hopeless avenue as well due to the special nature of the God concept Dawkins wishes to refute. What could count for evidence against God’s existence? What can stand up to the trump card that is “God works in mysterious ways”? Surely the kind of God that Dawkins wishes to disprove is one capable of creating a universe in which there is no evidence of its existence. In fact, I would imagine this is the universe believers would assume we live in and that it is the nature of faith to stand within a context devoid of evidence. I bring these points up not because I wish Dawkins had dealt with them more thoroughly, but because I wish he hadn’t addressed them at all. It gets us nowhere with regard to a discussion of what role, if any, religion should play in society. The rest of the book stands just as valid independent of these two chapters, and thus are stronger without these early claims that God most probably does not exist: arguments which are unlikely to hold sway over believers since I, an unflinching atheist, find them dubious.

Another contention of Dawkins, and one that I find much more agreeable, is that religion and its consequences should not be placed beyond the realm of reason and debate (wholly different from whether God exists or not, in my view). “A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts—the non-religious included—is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other.” He goes on to quote an impromptu speech by Douglas Adams (to which Delusion is dedicated) in Cambridge, shortly before he died (transcribed in his posthumous book The Salmon of Doubt):

Religion … has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? — because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you’d like; everybody will have an argument but nobody is aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I musn’t move a light switch on Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’.

Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics verse that, Macintosh instead of Windows — but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe … no, that’s holy? … We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.

Dawkins makes an example of the undeserved respect of religion in the realm of conscientious objector status, an example I find compelling and personally feel the status quo to be abhorrent:

By far the easiest grounds for gaining conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prizewinning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.

Dawkins strengthens his argument from a disavowal of the special status of religion to one of disavowal for religious institutions in general, however “moderate” they appear. His argument there is that moderate religious structures pave the way for superstition and tolerance in the face of violence when it is predicated on religious grounds. He recounts a number of crimes such as sexual mutilation, the murder of doctors who provide abortions, the current war in Iraq, the God given rights of Jews in Israel, executions for “thought crimes”, etc., all of which Dawkins argues are supported in part by moderate religious structures that pave the way for, and make palatable, the eventual fundamentalism they engender. This I find to be Dawkins most daring thesis and one which I support. It constitutes only one chapter, but an important one at that. Make no mistake, Dawkins is arguing not only for atheism, but against religion.

Following this chapter is another important chapter which lays down another thesis worthy of support. Dawkins, as he says in the preface, would like believers to walk away from the book as non-believers. I find that unlikely. But he would also like to see a change in consciousness about how society talks about the religion of children. He wants us all to collectively shudder when we hear the words “Christian child” or “Muslim child” or “Mormon child”, etc. We should find the language no more strange than “Marxist child” or “Republican child” or “Beatnik child”. A child may descend from Muslim or Christian or Marxist parents, but that doesn’t mean that they ascribe to that system; instead, they should be described as “children of Marxist parents”, etc., until they are of an age to decide their own affiliations to religious, political, and economic identities. This seems very reasonable and uncontroversial. But then Dawkins drops a bomb in second to last chapter: religious indoctrination of children is child abuse. The chapter places this kind of abuse of children far above and beyond the damage, on the whole, caused by priestly sexual abuse. He writes, “Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” Mealy-mouthed, Dawkins is not. He quotes the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s 1997 Amnesty Lecture at Oxford, which argues for freedom of speech in all but the special case of educating children:

Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.

In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parent to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Dawkins cites testimony from a number of correspondents who suffer psychological damage from their religious upbringing and quotes interviews from his documentary Root of All Evil? in which he talks to Pastor Keenan Roberts whose

[...] particular brand of nutiness takes the form of what he calls Hell Houses. A Hell House is a place where children are brought, by their parents or their Christian schools, to be scared witless over what might happen to them after they die. Actors play out fearsome tableaux of particular ’sins’ like abortion and homosexuality, with a scarlet-clad devil in gloating attendance. These are a prelude to the pièce de résistance, Hell Itself, complete with realistic sulphurous smell of burning brimstone and the agonized screams of the forever damned.

When Roberts is asked by Dawkins about the possible psychological trauma, Roberts responded, “I would rather for them to understand that Hell is a place that they absolutely do no want to go. [...] I think there’s a higher good that would ultimately be achieved and accomplished in their life than simply having nightmares.” I was taken aback by some of the things attributed to religious figures throughout The God Delusion, Hell Houses being one of them. I told myself, if such things do exist, then the kind of religion Dawkins was critical of is an overly simplistic kind of faith and worship, a parody, far more base than what is actually practiced (in part because I share an office with a rather intelligent and reasonable young scientist who also has aspirations of becoming a rabbi); but it was a day or so after reading these passages that I got The Evangelical War on Science, a segment on the “Crooks and Liars” video podcast to which I subscribe. The segment is an excerpt of Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary Friends of God. After seeing just a few minutes, I knew that Dawkins was in fact characterizing the mainstream US evangelical community, and probably far from parodying them, he is being generous. (The dogma exhibited toward children in Friends of God also lends credence to Dawkins claim of abuse).

Taken together these last two chapters (the real final chapter is only a conclusion, allowing Dawkins to repeat himself again) constitute the most interesting and provocative substance in The God Delusion. The much milder midsection focuses on Darwinian explanations for the existence of religion in societies, the roots of morality (again with a Darwinian basis) with reasons for being good in a God-less universe, and the mutability of the moral zeitgeist as evinced by history. Although not nearly as silly as the early does-he-or-doesn’t-he-exist business, these three chapters are largely boring and unenlightening, to me, at least. Yes, of course, one can be good even if God doesn’t exist. So what? The stranger phenomenon for me is that some believers find this difficult to accept, whereas I’ve always felt a person with God on their side is far more capable of doing horrendous acts since the “Will of God” would seem to trump all worldly concerns (I’ve always found it disgusting that, at least in the Big 3, personal morals are subordinate to God’s Will—as if we should act in an immoral way if God desires it; when God asks you to sacrifice your son, the correct answer is ‘fuck you’, not ‘yes, masta’).

So I can’t share the same effusive praise my father had for it. There are two good chapters that are thought provoking and fairly bold. Moreover, I find them very close to being right. On the other hand, I wish that Dawkins had a little more of the philosopher in him. Constructing air tight logical structures is not his forte. The meandering give-and-take prose leads to an overall softness in his arguments. Better would have been to drop the does-he-doesn’t-he crap. The thesis of childhood indoctrination as child abuse stands just as solid even if we suppose God exists and the Bible is literally true. Likewise the thesis that moderate religion paves the way to extremism and violence is logically independent. What a leaner, stronger argument it would have been had he left the silly crap out.

Finally, at a few points in the book (admittedly not many, but more than once), Dawkins dabbles with analysis of current affairs. He does this once very early on in the book (page 1): “Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres”, etc. etc. Certainly, religion plays a role in all of the things he mentions, some more than others. But to suppose that religion is the key element of these conflicts, or moreover that were there no religion, these conflicts would simply not arise, is not only fanciful, but dishonest. It strikes me as no better than the “because they hate our freedoms” rhetoric. There are serious geopolitical factors at play; they are ignored at great peril. It’s unfortunate that as highly regarded an intellectual as Richard Dawkins can fall into such ignorant tripe on his opening page, no less.

Stone, Prime Green

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dvanhorn
on February 5, 2007
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Robert Stone’s lates book, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, is a memoir of his life in the sixties. Stone is a revered novelist, the author of A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, and others. His work has won him the National Book Award (for Dog Soldiers) and secured a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, among other decorations. As far as I know, Prime Green is his first book length work of non-fiction and although I’ve not read any of his novels, I’ve heard good things from good people.

The memoir begins in the late 1950’s with a twenty-year-old Stone working as a Naval petty officer on the USS Arneb, tracking sunspots on the south of the Indian Ocean. Stone is discharged in 1958. He grew up poor in Brooklyn and after his discharge, returned to New York and landed a job at the New York Daily News. While taking a narrative writing class at NYU, he met his future wife Janice. The two were soon married and in 1960 bought bus tickets to New Orleans, “being the most exotic but affordable destination the Greyhound Corporation afforded romantic newlyweds.” They arrived shortly before Mardi Gras and moved into the French Quarter. Stone worked on an assembly line and the two struggled with poverty. Janice worked collecting the census almost until the day she gave birth to their first daughter at the Huey Long’s Charity Hospital. Late in her pregnancy, Stone flirts with the idea of abandoning her for a life on the road with the International Gospel Theatre (sic), playing the role of Chief Temple Guard in the production of The Cup, which the IGT advertised as “North America’s most reverent and moving commemoration of Our Lord’s sacrafice.” Returning home from the audition and invitation to join the troupe, he confronts his young wife trying to muster enough to tell her he is leaving:

I looked over at Janice. And I thought, She’s done it to herself, committed to all this too young; she was just a kid. Committed to a louse like me, she’ll find out what a selfish creep I am. She can pass the baby to her parents; they could help her, and she could have a life. In turn I could have a life and cross those continents and oceans to where life was richer. To embrace fate, to live out the cruel rituals of life at the core of the flame, to do and to see everything. Oh, wow! To have the courage to be brutal and to reject convention and compromise. Chief Temple Guard was only the beginning.

I snuck another look at her, and ineed she looked beautiful. And being so young, she looked innocent and trusting. She looked as though she loved me.

So. At that moment I knew that I was not going anywhere. I loved her and that was fate. If I stood up to leave, my legs would fail, my frame wither, my step stumble forever. All my strength was subsumed by this rash, so unwise, too early love. There was no hope, except in this woman. She would give birth, and the new life would assert itself and take over our center and prepare to replace us. Instead of far continents it was boring parenthood; we would just roll down the old biology road like every other sucker. Trapped by nature’s illusion, like a bug by a predator’s coloration.

I felt infinitely relieved, happy for a moment as I would hardly ever be. I thought: This rejoicing shows my mediocrity. Just another daddy Dagwood bourgeois jerk. Because if I had been destiny’s man, I thought, I would have walked—strided away with my bus schedule and backpack, ready to ride from Chicksaw Lake to the Great Slave. But I was not, I could not, not any more than I could fly. I guess I also knew at about that moment that I would never leave her, not ever, that this thing was forever. Not Bob. Not your daddy, children. Leave your mother? No.

Shortly after his daughter is born, the three moved back to New York’s Lower East Side on St. Mark’s off of Bowery, but not before his time in New Orleans inspired what would become his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. They didn’t spend long in New York. Stone was soon awarded a writing fellowship at Stanford, which took the troika West for the first time. It was during his time at Stanford that Stone would become friends with Ken Kesey and other now famous beatniks like Neal Cassidy and Ken Babbs. He and his wife ate ungodly amounts of peyote at a Coltrane concert. He was introduced to acid by Richard Alpert, Ph.D. (aka Baba Ram Dass, Dr. LSD, Jr.), Timothy Leary’s research partner at Harvard, and Vic Lovell, the man who turned Kesey on to LSD (the dediction of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest reads “For Vik Lovell, who told me that dragons don’t exist. The led me to their lairs.”) Stone used his time at Stanford to write his first novel, but returned to New York before finishing and shortly before the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens. The Fair would inspire Kesey and others to paint a school bus in all manners psychedelic with the word “FURTHUR” in place of a destination and set out across the country for Queens. Stone got on the bus, figuratively and literally, for the return trip to California. Stone later traveled to Mexico with Kesey who was on the run from the law for possession charges. His book was published and receives critical acclaim. He and his family moved to Hollywood while Paul Newman made it into a film (retitled WUSA), much to the later regret of Stone. He and Janice had a son and later expatriated to London for several years. Finally he traveled to Vietnam as a reporter in 1971. His experiences would inspire his second novel, Dog Soldiers.

Stone’s memoir is that of a bohemian life. It is full of reckless debauchery and hallucinogens. One memorable scene describes a famliy style, ie. kid friendly, nitrous party (the tank of gas itself was the legacy of a fellow graduate student who had taken to indulging in huffs in the hot tub, which subsequently lead to his fainting and demise by drowning):

And the kids so liked the balloons, and of course they liked the gas too. So to square it, even-steven it, we declared, we the adult authority, come on, kids, just one balloon’s worth to a kid. When, would you bevelieve, this one little tyke made this snarky face right at me and said ha ha or hee hee or some shit, “These aren’t balloons! They’re condoms!” And by the spirit of William James, they were condoms. We’d been getting loaded watching small innocent children sucking gas from condoms.

But the irony of this lifestyle coupled with the cause of social justice is not at all lost on Stone. He writes:

Life had given Americans so much by the mid-sixties that we were all a little drunk on possibility. things were speeding out of control before we could define them. Those of use who cared most deeply about the changes, those who gave their lives to them, were, I think, the most deceived. While we were playing shadow tag in the San Fancisco suburbs, other revolutions were counting their chips. Curved, finned, corporate Tomorrowland, as presented at the 1964 world’s fair, was over before it began, and we were borne along with it into a future that no one would have recognized, a world that no one could have wanted. Sex, drugs, and death were demystified. The LSD we took as a tonic of psychic liberation turned out to have been developed by CIA researchers as a weapon of the cold war. We had gone to a party in La Honda in 1963 that followed us out the door and into the street and filled the world with funny colors. But the prank was on us.

The memoir has its moments, but I have higher hopes for his fiction. What I liked most was the early stuff—living in New Orleans, poverty, young love, life without a safety net and youthful decisions that would prove to have major implications for the rest of his life. What will ultimately become dear beyond all else, at one point, hung by the thread of a naive boy’s perspective and desire for “authenticity.” The passage about his decision to stay with his wife, I found deeply moving. Stone also has an unsparing relfective criticalness that is admirable and inspiring. He has a strong sense of social justice, much of it developed during the subject period of the book, but Stone’s fallibility plays a central theme in the memoir and he often reproves his own inaction. The book is at its worst in dealing with the Merry Prankster episodes. The cult of personality and over hyped cultural reverence of this gang of characters is unsettleing, and moreover, boring (in general, not just in Stone’s account). Much of the book seems needless, yet Stone has a gift for economy of the word; in four lines he can reveal a devastating insight, beautifully turned. The end result is that about ten pages sear the mind, while you wonder why the rest where ever written.

Aqua Teen Jihadist Force

Published
by
dvanhorn
on February 2, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Boston has been overcome by hysteria surrounding the Aqua Teen Hunger Force marketing campaign. The swift reaction of the authorities has been to criminalize speech. Screaming fire in a theater has morphed into the mutterings of any counter cultural innuendo. The forces of repression have figured out how to succeed where there counterparts of the sixties failed. At the same time, we find the rebirth of the Dada spirit, so sorely lacking until Aqua Teen has come to save the day. When I first started wheat pasting Meatwads around Boston with his pronouncements on world affairs, I knew there was something deep in the concept of marrying empty pop culture images with that of social commentary. After conversations with friends I was turned on to the Situationalist movement, specifically to the books Lipstick Traces, The Most Radical Gesture, and Beneath the Paving Stones. I had no idea how old of a concept I was dealing with, or that my particular choice of couplings would be prove so prescient. I’m encouraged by the reactions on the two NYTimes blog entries covering the story [1, 2]. More importantly though, I’m encouraged by the reaction of the two arrested for the “hoax” to the media after posting bail (see the video in the second NYTimes link). Finally someone responds with the absurdity for which the situation demands. We need more of this.