There’s this terminally hip bar, I can’t remember the name, and I’m drinking too much gin, smoking cigarettes that don’t belong to me and — here’s my confession — reading aloud from the Gospel According to John. Those I’m reading to, they’re friends mostly, and friends of friends, and I doubt a single one of them believes any more than I do in God the Almighty, let alone in Jesus Christ and his amazing Technicolor resurrection. A blond girl named Lauren takes the book away from me, but only so she can read for herself. “It’s almost Ginsberg,” she sighs.
I’ve been carrying John in my coat pocket all week, ever since it came in the mail from Grove Press, along with the three remaining gospels, Genesis, Exodus and six more installments from the Bible, each individually bound in slick trade paperback. There was a press release, too. “The most radical approach to the Bible since Gutenberg,” it said. And in that terminally hip bar, listening to Lauren read John 20:11, I begin to believe the hype.
They’re called “Pocket Canons,” and they’re priced at $2.95 apiece. Each one has a celebrity introduction (by E.L. Doctorow, Charles Frazier, Doris Lessing, Kathleen Norris and Bono, among others), followed by the King James text, from which not a single thy, thou or thine has been omitted. They’re slimmer than a Palm Pilot, and not much bigger all around. In England, where nearly a million copies have sold, the fundamentalist Christian set is already screaming bloody sacrilege. One can only imagine how their New World brethren will react as the American edition hits bookstores — 24 shopping days shy of Christmas — on Dec. 1, 1999.
Probably it won’t make much difference what they say: Even the planned first printing of 600,000 should be enough to put a Canon in the pocket of every post-ironic street cynic from Manhattan to San Francisco. Lauren has me thinking — now she says she wants to trade me my Gospel for a drink, which she points out is twice as expensive — that the fundamentalists should be nothing short of terrified. The most radical approach since Gutenberg: If infidels like Lauren start reading the Bible, if this Jesus character catches on the way that, say, Harry Potter has, mankind’s greatest work of literature — the cornerstone of Western culture and of Judeo-Christian morality — may just be freed from the hands of bigotry before Patrick Buchanan manages to shut the library doors for good.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
The Bible has a serious image problem. In the 28 years I’ve been alive, its never quite been respectable reading. The Christian right has done its share to give the Bible dirty political connotations, and the Mormons have made it socially suspect, but I think no group has made the Good Book look worse to more people than the otherwise innocuous Gideons.
Because I was raised Jewish, in a secular big city way, the first Bible I ever encountered was in a motel room. My family must have been on some sort of vacation, taking New England by Pontiac. I don’t recall any of the sights, not a single battlefield or riverbed, but I do remember one night opening drawers in an artificial woodgrain cabinet by my bed and finding a book — left behind by some previous motel guest, I assumed, for me. A fat red book, hardcover and packed tight with words. When my mother saw what I was holding, she snatched it from my hands as if it were a roach trap. “That’s not for you,” she said, or maybe, “That’s not for us,” and then she proceeded to tell the not-quite-literate me about the kind of things that “we” didn’t read.
As a lesson, it stayed with me, but less because of what my mother said than because the distinction she drew so perfectly fit my nascent snobbery. It wasn’t a Jewish thing, per se, not reading the Gideon Bible in motel rooms. (I’ve never met a Catholic, Protestant or atheist, who’s condescended to do so either, or at least not one who’s willing to admit it.) Rather it was a class thing, a socioeconomic thing, most fundamentally a cultural thing.
Motel rooms, with their rubberized decor and their economy room rates, were some place decent people spent the night only because they had no better option. Otherwise, those motels were the territory of polyester traveling salesmen with pedophilic histories who loved God the way they loved little boys and who would undoubtedly one day be found accidentally dead at the shallow end of someone else’s swimming pool.
With their bright vinyl covers and the plain-spoken pages in between, those Gideon Bibles matched the traveling salesman sensibility the way a Prada bag fits a Condi Nast girl. The Gideon Bible gave all Bibles a bad name for me the way one poisoned batch of Tylenol sometime in the early ’80s has made me forever wary of acetaminophen.
And had it not been the Gideon Bible, it could have been virtually any other edition in print in the second half of this century. Packaging a Bible to fit the churchgoer sensibility is like preaching to the converted. More crucial, translations into a familiar vernacular make Jesus sound like the idiot savant pseudo-Messiah he almost certainly was and lend God all the apparent moral authority of, say, Rudolph Giuliani. Biblical stories simply don’t work when the players are mortal, life-size, familiar. Told in remedial English, the miraculous sounds inane. Consider the astonishing appearance of Jesus, risen from the dead, in the final chapters of John. First, the King James translation:
Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land full of great fishes, an hundred and fifty and three, and for all there were so many, yet was not the net broken. Jesus saith unto them, ‘Come and dine.’ And none of the disciples durst ask him, ‘Who art thou?’ knowing that it was the Lord. Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise.
Now the same story, as told in the “Good News New Testament” (text copyright 1966 by the American Bible Society):
Simon Peter went aboard and dragged the net ashore full of big fish, a hundred and fifty-three in all; even though there were so many, still the net did not tear. Jesus said to them, “Come and eat.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. So Jesus went over, took the bread, and gave it to them; he did the same with the fish.
“Come and eat,” Jesus tells his disciples in “a translation that is at the same time faithful to the original text as well as clear and natural to the reader.” This guy is the Messiah? He sounds more like my mother.
Partially it’s a matter of my “Masterpiece Theater” complex: Like all too many Americans, I’ve been conditioned to believe that something old and European is culturally superior to something new and American, regardless of its actual quality. Certainly it’s true that the language of the King James Bible would have been more commonplace to a reader in 1611 (the year the King James translation was completed) than it is to somebody today. But the miraculous, too, has grown foreign to our ear. More important is the simple truth that no translation before or since 1611 has given the Bible the authority of perfection. Here is the voice of God; if King James’s translators had themselves been omniscient and omnipotent, they could have done no better.
Put another way, later translations, while more secular in their language, are less so in an essential respect: In 1611, the Church may have been fractured but religion enjoyed a universality it has never seen since. To translate the Bible in the 20th century is to set it against the prevailing culture, to wage a holy war on behalf of Christianity generally, and one particular sect of Christianity specifically. The translation found in, for example, the Gideon Bible, carries a missionary burden. Of course the King James translation did, too, but it was written free of the propagandistic demands placed on later translations; the King James translation had the luxury to serve literature and art as faithfully as it served the church. In the Gideon Bible, belief is a necessary condition; in the King James Bible, as in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” or Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” suspension of disbelief is sufficient.
I’ll admit there’s something disconcerting about these Pocket Canons. They’re the approximate format of the City Lights Beat Poets series. The cover photos, done in the merciless black-and-white of downtown art photography — a deserted country road opens Exodus, while a huddled man lost in shadow hovers over Job — and the glossy stock on which they’re printed has about as much in common with the embossed leather preferred in Gutenberg’s day as the God of Abraham has with the God of Jesus. That Psalms is introduced by U2′s Bono, or even that Mark is prefaced by Barry Hannah, sounds like the opening of a none-too-promising “Saturday Night Live” skit. There’s a high-speed cultural collision happening here. The question is whether it’s a case of fusion — or fission.
I know fission when I see it. A couple years ago, Verso sent me its new edition of “The Communist Manifesto” (which has, now that Marx has followed God to the grave, an awful lot in common with the Bible, at least from a marketing standpoint). Verso is unrepentantly leftist: Reprinting “The Communist Manifesto” could not have been intended as either an act of archeology or one of absurdism.
Yet the book’s svelte design — publisher Colin Robinson called it slim enough to fit in the pocket of a Donna Karan dress “without ruining the line” — and Verso’s aggressive distribution program — plans called for the book to be sold at Prada boutiques — suggested a political identity crisis bigger than any comrade Gorbechev ever faced. But the coup de grbce was the cover illustration: A simple red flag painted by post-communist pranksters Komar and Melamid. (Before the Soviet government expelled them, the two famously executed official portraits of themselves as Lenin and Stalin). It was as if only under the protective cloak of irony could Marx’s most famous book save itself from looking ridiculous.
The Bible, too, has been variously cloaked over the centuries. The 1977 paperback edition of the Good News New Testament — the translation that has Jesus telling his disciples to “Come and eat” — is one of the most inexplicable in design. The words “GOOD NEWS” are emblazoned atop a photo-montage of picture-postcard Hollywood, as if to lend the screen magic of Roy Rodgers — whose Hollywood Boulevard star is pictured alongside the Palladium and the Wax Museum — to the life of Jesus Christ. Why? Because with the Son of Man dubbed to sound like you and me, something is needed to rescue the gospels from the banality of our early-to-bed lives. And in 1977, flea-bitten Hollywood was the closest thing we had to the mysterium tremendum.
I’ve seen these Good News Bibles around for as long as I can remember. Usually I find them in cardboard boxes at garage sales, not so incongruously grouped with the thrillers and bodice-rippers. “Ten for a dollar,” I’m told. Inevitably, the person making the offer, male or female, is fat and ugly.
I’m being shallow here, but marketing is a shallow subject. I have never stooped to buy a Good News Bible at a garage sale, even for 10 cents, certainly because it’s a “Today’s English” translation, and also because my peers would respect me a whole lot less if they ever caught me reading it. But the former explanation is unfair (if I’m awed by Don DeLillo in today’s English, why should I assume that the Bible can’t be brilliantly rendered in my own tongue?) and the latter is circular (nobody I commonly associate with reads the Good News Bible because nobody else I commonly associate with does so). And while both nonetheless certainly have their place, I suspect the primary reason for my aversion to the Good News Bible is a sort of false causality every bit as idiotic as it is potent: If I read the Good News Bible, I will grow fat and ugly.
Which at last brings us back to the Pocket Canons. If the Bible is to be read by the urban sophisticate demographic — if it’s to be taken back from the fundamentalist Christians — it has to enhance that demographic’s image: People like Lauren have to be convinced that reading the Bible, like drinking Diet Coke, will make them thin and beautiful. Just as the Good News Bible played on the Hollywood dreams of middle America, the Pocket Canons have to reveal more urban sophistication than Lauren has seen in her lifetime.
In truth, though, the King James Bible is shockingly modern, unlike “The Communist Manifesto.” It’s a measure of the power of biblical stories that they don’t age, that they said as much to the medieval mind as to the ancient, that they’ve exerted an influence over works as dissimilar as Martin Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ” and Michelangelo’s “Pieta.” The greatest artists of any era — I use artist in the broadest sense — eventually turn to the Bible for their stories, not because they’ve run out of creative energy, but rather because they’ve recognized that the Bible is the “Arabian Nights” of our civilization: that it contains every possible story. Andy Warhol’s “Last Supper,” Norman Mailer’s “Gospel According to the Son,” these aren’t the heavenly insurance policies of aging men. They are the work of artists who spent a whole lifetime developing the craft needed to confront such material on their own terms.
But I also mean there’s a way in which the Bible seems peculiarly millennial — or perhaps the millennium seems peculiarly biblical — in aesthetic sensibility. Here are narratives every bit as unreliable as the most postmodern dada doggerel and as melodramatic as the most indulgent prime time TV, stories that recklessly cross high culture with low in the interest of moral absolutes that may or may not lend meaning to life. We’re crashing a New Year’s ball at which David Foster Wallace, David Lynch and Jacques Derrida are the guests of honor. Is it any wonder that Bono’s at the back of the room reading Psalms?
I meet Grove/Atlantic editor-in-chief Morgan Entrekin at his downtown Manhattan office. What with his unshorn blond hair, Entrekin could be a figure from the Bible, an old testament prophet perhaps, albeit one in new testament jeans. In addition to the Pocket Canons, this season Grove will publish books by William S. Burroughs, Dennis Cooper and Darcey Steinke — hardly Pat Robertson’s bed-time reading — and it seems almost obligatory to ask him what Matthew, Mark and Luke are doing in such company.
“I try to publish quality books,” he says. “This is probably the best book of all time.” I ask him how it fits Grove’s market. “The market for the Bible is everybody,” he tells me. And the Pocket Canons? Are they targeted, as most books are, at a specific subset of everybody? Entrekin tells me a story about sitting on a airplane next to two nuns. He says he was minding his own business, reading a Pocket Canon. The nuns got interested. They wanted to see. They wanted to know where they could get some Canons of their own.
What Entrekin says is true: Everybody is smitten by these books. (He’s no exception. When, at the Frankfurt Book Fair a couple years ago, the editor of Canongate — the British publisher of the Pocket Canons — showed him the first rough mock-ups, he bought American rights on the spot.) But nuns are not Grove’s core audience. Nor are bookstores in places like Nashville. But the orders keep coming. It was Entrekin who first called the Pocket Canons “the most radical approach to the Bible since Gutenberg.” As I’ve said already, a single night at a terminally hip bar convinced me that he was right. But only after talking to him about their genesis — and their exodus from the U.K. to America — can I fully appreciate why.
“The moment I finished reading Charles Johnson’s introduction to Proverbs in manuscript,” Morgan confides, “I had someone run to the bookstore to buy me a copy. I’d never read Proverbs before. I always thought it was so old-fashioned.” Proverbs was a book of the Bible I’d never taken the time to read either. Certain proverbs are as familiar to the Western ear as classic Madonna (“As you sow so shall you reap.”). But 31 chapters of advice more sensible than your great aunt’s shoes? Anyone who can find the poetry in that deserves a National Book Award.
Charles Johnson won the National Book Award in 1990, we’re told in an author bio printed opposite the first page of his introduction. We also learn that he’s a “widely published literary critic, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter, essayist and lecturer,” and that he’s “one of twelve African-American authors honored in an international series of stamps celebrating great writers of the twentieth century.” Already Proverbs assumes a certain appeal: Johnson’s name on the cover serves as a sort of testimonial, a thumbs-up from the world of literature and philosophy (and cartooning). Charles Johnson is respectable because he appeared on a postage stamp; Proverbs is respectable because a man of postage stamp stature likes it.
But the sales pitch is more nuanced than that. From Johnson’s essay, we learn that he’s a Buddhist, and, even more compelling, one who converted from African Methodist Episcopalianism. Alone among religions, Buddhism has achieved a sort of diplomatic immunity in our culture, or, rather, Buddhism is the Switzerland of religions. Buddhists are respectable in both the religious and secular worlds. We suspect practicing Episcopalians of zealotry, whereas we esteem practicing Buddhists for their enlightenment. And a practicing Episcopalian turned Buddhist? Thy will be done.
Yet Charles Johnson hasn’t forsaken Proverbs. In fact, he finds that it complements his new faith:
In the world’s religious traditions, eastern and western, the Way of understanding and wisdom begins by sumptuously feeding the
spirit and starving the illusory sense of the ego into extinction … and is realized through a worldly practice that gives priority to the experience of our elders (our global inheritance) over ephemerae in a life that
embodies humility, service, and a culture’s loftiest ideals
If this Buddhist, this man who our society can admire for his faith without condemning him for his religion, sees our global inheritance in that old testament verse, who are we to dismiss it as old-fashioned? Or, as Proverbs says, “Doth not wisdom cry?”
Johnson’s religious affiliation and his literary reputation lend Proverbs just the sort of respectability it needs in the wake in the Good News Bible, the Gideons and the fundamentalists, but in all this smug consideration of packaging, it’s easy to lose sight of the most pressing point: What he says is right. Proverbs does feed the spirit, and sumptuously. Of course we already know the lessons. We know that good is good and bad is bad. But, like any clichi, it’s so commonplace that the truth of it loses friction. Proverbs revivifies the obvious by rejecting its everyday clothing in favor of its Sunday best:
My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.
If they say, ‘Come with us, let us lay wait for blood,
let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause’:
Let us swallow them up alive as the grave;
and whole, as those that go down into the pit:
We shall find all precious substance,
we shall fill our houses with spoil.
Cast in thy lot among us;
let us all have one purse;
My son, walk not thou in the way with them;
refrain thy foot from their path:
For their feet run to evil,
and make haste to shed blood.
Good is good and bad is bad: that’s the gist of those 13 lines, of Proverbs, of the whole fat Bible — but to leave it there makes about as much sense as reducing the whole of Shakespeare to a one-line executive summary.
To call the Bible great literature is not merely to speak of its superior sentence structure. Proverbs is part of a much larger project. Somehow we forget: The Bible is our moral heritage. Its moral authority grows out of its literary merit, and its literary merit grows out of its moral authority. These two sides are as inseparable as the front and back of the same page.
Perhaps we don’t need to read the Bible to accept that good is good and bad is bad, but unlike the Christian right’s knee-jerk ploys, the Bible demands of us more than acceptance. Jesus spoke in parables not because they made it easier to understand his message, but because they made it more difficult. Beyond mere acceptance, the parables demanded engagement by his disciples.
Just so, the Bible, with its myriad contradictory stories, its archaic and often temperamental phrasing, its anachronistic opinions on slavery and women, its half-truths and outright lies, requires of us something quite apart from belief in any specific religious system. To read the Bible is not, as the fundamentalists would claim, to learn how many years ago the Earth was created, or even necessarily to accept the existence of God, but to fight for clarity in confusion, for light in darkness. In film, theater, painting and literature, we find truth in falsehood through the alchemy of art. We earn truth. We achieve wisdom.
The real importance of the Pocket Canons lies in their own lie, the act of cultural subversion that has Lauren chasing after John. Of course the Bible is no better because a Buddhist postage-stamp model with a National Book Award approves of Proverbs or because Revelations bears a Reni Burri image of a mushroom cloud on its cover. But a deluge of 600,000 clever, jaunty Pocket Canons with their trumped-up hipper-than-thou posturing may just break the spell cast on the Bible by the fundamentalist right. If so, it won’t just be Genesis and Exodus, Job and Proverbs, Luke and John, we’ll rescue from the land of the dead, but — freed of its own dirty, inbred, small-minded, vinyl-covered, polyester-suited reputation — morality itself.
Let us pray.
What did I say?
BY LILLIE WADE
(11/10/99)
Sadly, Lillie Wade is not alone in being uneducated and yet smugly
confident in her opinions about race and gender. I just found out last
week that my 19-year-old cousin, who is black and a freshman at a small
private university, thinks in many of the same ways that Wade does.
Both of these young women seem to have bought into the all-too-popular
belief today that it is people of color who are hung up on race. The
party line for this generation is that if
those pesky black, brown, yellow and red ones would stop carrying those
chips on their shoulders, they would realize that race is no longer with
us and we could get on with the serious business of just being human — that the real racists today are people of color and their liberal white sympathizers.
As I told my cousin this past weekend, there are major problems with
this line of thinking. It makes anecdote (my best friend didn’t get
into Harvard because of affirmative action) and feelings (black
women hated me because black men found me attractive) into theory. Such
an approach makes intelligent, rigorous analysis impossible. It is a set
of narrow-minded blinders that prevents us from thinking about
interracial marriage in anything more than the most worn-out “isms.”
If Wade came into my office hours for assistance, I would encourage her to
look into the historical, geographical and political usages of the
term — for starters. I would also encourage her to stop “barely
listening” and shutting out what boggles her mind and try to
understand why someone might compare her ideas to Nazi notions of
miscegenation. But I have a feeling that she just might stare back and see me — a black anthropologist who studies Asian-American families and
who is married to a Jewish man (how’s that for identity politics?) — as
just another one of those angry black women who still has an ax to
grind about Nicole and O.J.
– Jacalyn Harden
I find it amazing that all Lillie Wade could find to discuss about
interracial marriage was the hostility of nonwhites to the topic. What
about the lynchings and home bombings done by white men “hostile” to
the notion of interracial marriage? Hostility might make you “feel bad,”
but at least you have the opportunity to live another day.
– Deborah Taylor
In answer to Wade’s question, “interracial” marriage does cause a great
deal of conflict for the most bigoted and emotionally constipated members
of society — black, white and otherwise. The Civil Rights movement also
provoked much conflict between
the “races,” in that the most racist members of the “white” group mobilized
against it. The Allied armies and anti-Nazi resistance fighters of World
War II provoked conflict with the Third Reich; if they had not resisted
the forces of tyranny, there would have been a “peace” of sorts. The point is
that the conflict is more than worth the just peace and freedom that follows.
– A.D. Powell
Wade says that her professor,
when asked where she could find writings supporting her position, said,
“There is, but it’s old, and a lot was racist. You could read Nazi
literature.” Wade then interpreted that she was “being compared to a Nazi,”
which is something of a stretch to begin with. The article’s subtitle,
however, referred to “having a professor call you a Nazi.” So “You could
read Nazi literature” became “You’re a Nazi!” While this transformation may have made the episode seem a little more dramatic, it was a rather serious distortion of what actually occurred.
As a graduate student, I can testify that “political correctness” on
campus is neither the universal plague that those on the right imagine, nor
the complete and utter myth that those of us on the left committed to
freedom of thought and expression would hope. Occasions when students are
truly prevented from expressing their beliefs should be noted and critiqued,
but this was plainly not such an occasion.
– Paul Waldman
Lillie Wade missed the point in her article about
having her views dismissed by her professor. The
professor did his job by telling her what current academic thought on the subject
of interracial marriage was. Wade did not even
listen to the professor’s viewpoint. She had already
dismissed him as a reliable source because he used
“clichid jargon about giving center stage to the
marginalized.” She writes that she barely listened
because she was trying to find a way out of the
conversation — because he did not agree with her.
One of the purposes of college is to experience new
points of view. Wade had the perfect opportunity to
have a dialogue with this professor and understand the
complexities of the issue. Instead, she chose to
ignore research that contradicted her and search for
research that validated her own hypothesis, which was
admittedly based on anecdotal evidence. If her paper
was to have any merit she would have had to address
that contradictory research. Basically, Wade needs to grow up and realize that
she’s in college now.
– Tim Sherman
Freudians prefer blonds
BY DAMION MATTHEWS
(11/10/99)
For Damion Matthews to rely on Donald Spoto’s “definitive” biography on Monroe — featuring
research that was reckless at best and irresponsible at worst — is just plain inexcusable.
Spoto relied on unnamed “witnesses” and anonymous “sources” to paint
Monroe’s last psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, as a control freak who had a
sexual obsession with Monroe and a quasi-incestuous relationship with his
own sister; thus Spoto’s most outrageous claim, that Greenson ordered
housekeeper Eunice Murray to adminster an enema to Monroe on the night
of Monroe’s death, must be taken with a huge boulder of salt.
As far as Spoto’s claim that Monroe and DiMaggio were going to remarry
at the time of her death (his “evidence”: quotes taken out of context
from a DiMaggio biography), DiMaggio — through friends — told columnist
Liz Smith that he and Monroe were not planning to retie the knot.
Forgive my tending to believe DiMaggio more than Spoto.
And, forgive me for feeling ill when Peter Swales proclaims
Norman Rosten as “perhaps [Monroe's] most loyal and closest friend in
the world.” Like so many “close friends,” Rosten hopped on the Monroe
gravy train by penning not only two books about her, but an opera!
Lee Strasberg had 10 years to fulfill Monroe’s wishes to have her
belongings distributed; don’t blame Anna Strasberg for not doing what
her husband should’ve done a long, long time ago. No doubt, she and
Christie’s are very, very happy that he didn’t.
– Lisa Davis
Los Angeles
Naked World: Malawi president condemns traditional sex rituals
BY HANK HYENA
(11/11/99)
You note that “the Old Testament itself is loaded with atrocious sex
laws, such as the decree that unmarried rapists are required to marry their victims.” While I won’t argue that the Old Testament has a few laws that are at odds with current cultural trends, I do feel that
this particular law is fair given the cultural context at the time.
Whether we like it or not these days, unmarried women without a family
who lived at the time of the writing of Deuteronomy were basically
doomed to be poor for the rest of their lives. Making a rapist marry the
victim is a way of ensuring that the woman, and a potential child, are
provided for. For the Hebrews, to have a single woman with a child in
the throes of poverty was a worse crime than to have her in a difficult, forced marriage.
– Stephen Waters
Austin, Texas
The kingmaker speaks
BY FRED BRANFMAN AND DAVID WEIR
(11/12/99)
The only thing more disgusting than Pat Buchanan’s racism and
homophobia is Pat Choate’s tendentious, tortured and finally
ridiculous defense of the indefensible. His responses on questions
related to the Holocaust represent a kind of political psychosis
characterized by delusions and hallucinations.
As for the left-right-center flake-fest of the current Reform Party
leadership, it is a demonstration of politics as usual: Winning is
more important that political principles. It’s also goofy and bound
to fail. America certainly
could use an alternative to the two main parties that could offer a
rational critique of the current power structure, but anyone who
believes the Reform Party represents this alternative belongs in the
same loony bin with Choate and Ross Perot. Pat Buchanan, on the other
hand, isn’t a bit crazy — he’s just in business, and his products are
hate and an intellectually dishonest and distorted view of American
society. His supporters belong in a hospital; Buchanan belongs in
the “dustbin of history.”
– Joseph Duemer
Potsdam, N.Y.
Pat Buchanan is not, never was and never will be a viable candidate for
president of the United States. No matter the posturing and proclamations
about being for the interests of the common man; Pat is a mouthpiece
for the religious right.
Efforts to turn the discussion to economic issues are transparent. Jesse Ventura won the Minnesota governor’s race because he appealed to the “mind your own damn business” sensibilities of the voters. It had nothing to do with his economic philosophy. Of course he said he was fiscally
conservative. Who would vote for anyone who said otherwise?
The difference is that Pat appeals to the “your business is my business
and I’ll tell you how to run your business” sensibilities of religious
fundamentalism. He has pandered to the sympathies of the religious
right since he first took pen in hand. So what if he appeals to anyone’s economic interests? It’s not the economy anymore, stupid. It’s me. And Pat Buchanan should leave me the
hell alone.
– Russ Miers
Gore’s premature obituary
BY ERIC BOEHLERT
(11/11/99)
The pundits have wanted to get Clinton for so long, and for so little reason,
they are taking their impotent furies out on Al Gore. They think that they
still have their old power of making or breaking politicians, and want to
break Gore just to prove it.
Unfortunately for the press, the American public has gotten into the habit of
not listening to them. Meanwhile, print and broadcast journalists
have tarted up and watered down what they used to call “hard news,” in the
mistaken idea that the people will take them more seriously if they are
indistinguishable from the Weekly World News.
When Al Gore rides into the Oval Office next year and takes a Democratic
supermajority with him into both houses of Congress, the pundits will be as
surprised as the CIA was by the collapse of Communist Europe.
– Tamara Baker
St. Paul, Minn.
Screw the polls! The vote is not taking place today, nor tomorrow, nor
for another 11 months! Why should voters care about poll standings? The
media should be reporting on who the candidates are, not on how far one is
ahead of the other in the minds of people who are just as uninformed as
you and me — unless we’ve totally thrown over the idea that we vote for
candidates based on their views and traits in favor of simply voting for
whoever is most likely to win.
Let the campaigns use polling data for their own purposes; the news media
should never report poll results. Doing so taints the political
process. It sends the message to the voters that there is no point in
voting, because the election has already been decided without their input.
It breeds complacency on the winning side and disheartenment on the losing
side. And pundits wonder why people stay home in droves on election day!
– Keith Ammann
Albany, N.Y.
No littering
BY ARTHUR ALLEN
(11/12/99)
Arthur Allen writes in “No Littering” that “the American Society for
Reproductive Medicine Thursday recommended that its 9,000 specialists reduce
the number of embryos they implant” in order to prevent an “alarming” rise
in multiple births. Allen cites the numbers of children born in multiple
births, but it is the number of pregnancies that lead to those births that
actually matters in determining the risks involved. Using Allen’s own
numbers, 76 percent of successful assisted pregnancies result in one child and
another 21 percent result in twins — so 97 percent of these pregnancies present no problem
at all. The other 3 percent would be no problem if the parents allowed selective
reduction of the excess embryos. To avoid the problems these 3 percent of cases
represent, the ASRM would be willing to lower the odds of successful
fertilization for the other 97 percent of patients. This seems like a bad deal for
most patients and another example of the kind of media-enabled hysteria that
increasingly guides policymaking. Calling fertility specialists “medical
cowboys” and multiple births “litters” substitutes cheap shots for thought –
if the ASRM (and, presumably, Allen) want to address this problem, a more
measured response is to call for reduced embryo transfer in those patients
unwilling to consider selective reduction in any event.
– Michael Dardia
San Francisco
Unarmed and under fire
BY AUSTIN BUNN
(11/11/99)
Each woman who served in Vietnam has an “individual” story, which does not
necessarily represent the experiences of all of us.
In my case, in one unit assignment, I was assigned and carried a weapon
during alerts, and would have used it if necessary.
It is now recognized that all of us who served in Vietnam were exposed to
Agent Orange and other chemicals. The high percentage of children with
genetic birth defects born to women and men who
served there, is not “just a coincidence.” Nor is the high percentage of
cancer among Vietnam vets.
The reunion in Olympia this week is not just for WACs, but includes enlisted women and officers of all
branches of service. Clare Starnes, and those who assisted her in putting this together, have
done an outstanding job of finding women who served in Vietnam, something
that neither the Veterans Administration nor the Department of Defense has managed, or bothered, to do in all these years..
– Elaine L. James
LaGrange, Ga.
“Fair use” vs. foul play
BY MARK GIMEIN
(11/10/99)
It is ironic that the L.A. Times, the finest newspaper in the United
States, would be a party to the lawsuit against
Free Republic, since the Times depends on the free flow of information for its own
livelihood. In so doing, the Times is suppressing discussion in the
public square — hampering the freedom of those wishing to discuss current
events by burying the dissemination of said information underneath a hill of legal
Machiavellianism.
– Gary Garland
Yorba Linda, Calif.
A lot of people think it’s a shame Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott,
R-Miss., made such a spectacle of himself recently on “The Armstrong
Williams Show,” a cable TV talk show — carrying on in about the sin of
homosexuality and urging the
afflicted to seek the treatment they need.
Trent is a very powerful man in American politics, and it’s not often that
you get to hear a man of his stature reveal his most private thoughts on
sexuality, from gay sex to adultery to the new Baptist edict on wifely
submission to one’s husband. (Trent says “no” to that last command, by the
way, and I was disappointed that the interviewer didn’t follow up by asking
whether Trent is partial to submission himself.)
Lott not only angered gays and lesbians with his remarks, he also
embarrassed a lot of those show-me-the-money Republicans whose main
interest in human nature is how we can squeeze one more nickel out of those
irritating poor people. There are lots of nice, conservative, wealthy gay
men, and even a handful of eccentric lesbian millionaires, who would gladly
support Republican candidates if Little Trenty Preacher Boy would shut up
and stop annoying everybody with his quaint religious beliefs.
Lott was defended by comrades like his old friend, the House Majority
Leader Dick
Armey, R-Texas — the guy who called openly gay Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., a
“fag” and then claimed everybody had heard him wrong — who stuck out his
lower lip and told the press that if nothing else Trent and he were both
firm believers in the Bible.
Lott is such a Bible cultist that he has been holding up the nomination of
openly gay San Francisco philanthropist James Hormel to the ambassadorship
of Luxembourg,
simply because he does not want to send some sinner to represent the
interests of United States on foreign soil. Heaven knows, the people in
Luxembourg have been through enough without having to suffer some Yankee
pervert.
When I hear someone defending their political positions by saying they
“believe in the Bible,” my initial response is: So what? Thanks to the
foresight of our founding fathers, you can believe in little green
men if you want to, but you sure don’t see anyone defending that position
in the Senate by waving Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” around.
Many Americans who are not fastened at the temples to a Christian prayer
book are offended by politicians who justify their decisions by piously
quoting the Old Testament. The Bible is simply not where it’s at as far as
the constitution is concerned, Mr. Lott, and you should be as embarrassed
to use scriptures as your sword of truth in Congress as I would be to wave
a wand and say I was following the Tooth Fairy’s instructions.
The thing is, content aside, it’s really awkward these days to say you
“believe” in a book — or any media for that matter. Does Mr. Lott have any
idea how many editors went over that thing he’s holding in his hands and
calling “God’s word”? Trust me, right now, God’s probably crying on the
phone to his agent about how his publisher completely mangled Leviticus.
Savvy readers these days would do well to treat everything between two
covers as utter fiction, with more than a few typos to boot.
Lott says that there are plenty of homosexuals who manage to lead
productive lives because they repress their urges and remain abstinent.
Sorry, sir, we already know about that; it’s called being a closet
case. An unusually large number of gay people, in fact, have been so
unhappy and persecuted for their sexual orientation that they’ve opted for
suicide, the ultimate in abstinence. Nonexistence is probably the only way
to make sure that you never have a sinful human feeling ever again.
I’d really like to talk to the gays, bisexuals, lesbians and other
“sinners” in Trent Lott’s blood family and see if we could organize an
intervention. You see, it goes without saying that someone who Lott
loves dearly is gay — just as sure as Phyllis Schlafley’s son is queer.
One in 10 covers a lot of ground, as Alfred Kinsey and most American families
have found out over the years.
Trent’s nonheterosexual loved ones are probably more than a little hurt
that he is so painfully ignorant. They’ve no doubt been avoiding the
subject with him because he gets so upset, being confused about the
differences between alcoholism, kleptomania and sodomy. Let’s hope he
doesn’t call the Betty Ford Center in a panic and order a lavender bed
jacket — or perform a strip search to ferret out the k.d. lang CDs they
might have shoplifted. “Stop it, Trent! We’re largely sober and have
massive credit card debt!”
The wackiest thing about Trent’s public airing of his lunacy was that the
White House actually condemned it. Press Secretary Mike McCurry went so far
as to express exasperation that extreme beliefs like Lott’s were making it
impossible to have rational discussions in government. I find it plausible
that McCurry himself is nauseated by the fact that our government is held
captive to fundamentalist chauvinists, but how could our president allow
such frankness? Everyone knows that Clinton would rather give up blow jobs
forever than be publicly allied with gay causes like nondiscrimination,
the legalization of all forms of consensual sex or, heaven forbid,
sinfests like same-sex
marriage. This is a guy who can go to China and get tears in his eyes about
human rights, but when it comes to being brave on the home front, honey,
don’t ask me and I won’t tell you how horrible it really is.
Aw, I know I’m hard on Clinton — he’s just another coward in a system that
rewards the most charming hypocrites. Bigotry and conceit are the order of
the day, and Bible book-worshippers are among the few folks who still show
up at the ballot box. My own neighborhood polling place is set up in a
conservative church where we have to stare at posters ranting about God’s
Special Rangers just to punch our ticket.
Those of us who believe in fairies can only try to cast our spells with a
little bit more deliberation and see if we can come up with some unexpected
magic. Submit to me, Trent! — I know you’re hearing voices.
For those who missed it, Lott was asked on a radio talk show
whether he thought homosexuality was a sin. Instead of passing the question
on to theologians, whose opinion would be more appropriate, Lott answered
that he did. His answer was gobbled up by the carnivorous media and spat in
the direction of House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Instead of recusing
himself for a similar lack of professional competence, Armey pulled out a
Bible to “prove” that it was, adding that as a Christian he was
instructed to love the sinner and hate the sin.
Eager to exploit an opportunity for political advantage, the White House
joined the fray. Lumping all traditional religious believers with
Republican legislators, Press Secretary Mike McCurry said: “The president
thinks the American people understand how difficult it is to get business
done in Washington sometimes when you’re dealing with people who are so
backward in their thinking.”
In fact, in almost the same breath with which he had invoked the
lightning, Lott also made an attempt to show that he was really progressive
in his thinking. Genuflecting to the therapeutic standard that
liberals and progressives have created, and under whose rubric everything
from alcoholism and cigarette addiction to gang activity and gun violence
is officially construed as a public health problem, Lott backed away from
the stern authority of the biblical text to explain that homosexuality was
a kind of disease and its victims should be helped “just like alcohol … or
sex addiction … or kleptomaniacs.”
But his bowing to the left proved even more damaging than his
original sin. “It’s an indication of how the extreme right wing has a
stranglehold on the leadership” of Congress, cried Winnie Stachelberg,
political director of the Human Rights Campaign, the 250,000-member gay and
lesbian political organization. Her comment was echoed by other gay
leaders, giving it the clear outlines of a party line. Lost in the outcry
was the fact that Trent Lott had gone as far as he had to show tolerance
for homosexuality, while establishing that it was a “lifestyle” he does
not approve of.
The things that are wrong with this picture are the result of formulations
that have been introduced into our public discourse by both left and right
in recent decades.
The idea that homosexuality is a “lifestyle,” of course, originated with
the left and is still maintained by many academics — specifically “queer theorists.” If “homosexuality” is a lifestyle — that is, a political
and moral choice — then it is perfectly appropriate for some to regard it
as an immoral “choice” and to reject it on those grounds. Furthermore, if
homosexuality is a lifestyle (and therefore a choice), it is perfectly
appropriate for politicians like Armey and Lott to make such comments when
they are responsible for billion-dollar AIDS programs made necessary by the
sexual practices of gay males.
But what if this is not the case? If homosexuality — as most centrist gays
now maintain (and as I personally believe) — is biologically innate, if it is a genetic given that cannot normally be altered by the assertion of individual will, then the moral and therapeutic posturing of politicians is completely
inappropriate and offensive. Gay activists like Congressman Barney Frank
must accept much of the responsibility for the misperception of
homosexuality in our political culture, and thus for the verbal
perplexities of conservatives like Armey and Lott.
The biblical injunction against homosexuality is real and cannot be argued
away (though not a few have tried). What, then, is the appropriate way for
a democracy like ours to deal with this problem? We are a pluralistic
society. We do not have an established state religion. We are in fact
composed of ethnic and religious communities so diverse that in other parts
of the world, war is the normal condition of their relations. Serbs and
Croats, Arabs and Jews, Christians and Muslims co-exist in America, but
elsewhere are at each other’s throats.
How did we achieve this? By requiring our official community to treat
everyone as an individual, equally, and by a single standard. It is perfectly
appropriate for Dick Armey, as a religious believer, to regard
homosexuality as a sin, just as it would be appropriate for any Christian
to believe that Jews are damned as unbelievers, or for Muslims to regard both
Christians and Jews as infidels, and therefore damned. Provided Jews,
Christians and Muslims respect America’s constitutional framework, which
regards each of us as a child of a single God who must therefore be treated
equally by secular authority, there is no problem. One nation under one
God. (Atheists are given the option of observing the form of this
miraculous arrangement without acknowledging the substance. It works just
as effectively.)
But as soon as people forget the limits of the political sphere and confuse
it with the realm of the religious, they are asking for trouble.
Lott and Armey should not have blurred this distinction. What
their private conscience tells them is one thing; what they pronounce on as
legislators is quite another. As it is written, “That which is Caesar’s must be rendered unto
Caesar, and that which is God’s unto God.”
From the context, it seems clear that neither Lott nor Armey actually
intended his religious comments to be political statements or policy
agendas. For that reason, it did no good for the presidential press
secretary or gay leaders to escalate the confusion that had already been
sown. There is no resolving of religious differences except by religious
warfare. That is why the conflict in the Middle East is so intractable, and
why our constitutional framework allows the same groups to co-exist here in
peace. Therefore, it is advisable for all parties in our political debate
to back off from such fundamental confrontations and seek out a common
ground.
The problem reflected in the flap over Lott’s comments is a mutual
problem of our political discourse, created by actors on both sides of the
political divide. It is time for those same actors to work together to draw
back from the language of religious warfare and attempt mutual solutions,
based on compromise, to the problems that affect us all.
THERE WAS A wonderful series of ads in the ’60s that showed people of various ethnicities munching happily on deli sandwiches and proclaimed, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye.” Well, you don’t have to be born again to love “The Apostle.” This little knockout of a movie, written and directed by Robert Duvall — who also plays the title character, a roving Texas evangelist — can strike you in the same way that Bible stories did when you first encountered them as a child. The story “The Apostle” tells is simple, plain, even stark. And yet, its meaning is teasingly mysterious.
“The Apostle” takes place in Fort Worth and a small bayou town in Louisiana. But for most of us, I’d guess, the well-appointed churches, Chautauqua tents, and roughhewn backwoods tabernacles that Duvall’s character (his nickname is Sonny, but he calls himself “The Apostle E.F.”) preaches in are as exotic and alien as the ancient civilizations of the Bible. The experience of watching “The Apostle” is a little like the way Greil Marcus described Al Green’s “The Belle Album,” the record Green made after a horrendous personal catastrophe led him to Christ. “Wandering through country bars and down Southern back roads,” Marcus wrote of Green, “he let you share a sense of peace.” “The Apostle” lets you share that peace, too. Before it comes, though, in the movie’s extraordinarily moving final scene, you share the turmoil of Sonny’s soul.
In a stroke of inspired simplicity, Duvall has chosen to tell “The Apostle” as if it were a Bible story. Beginning in Old Testament fury and atonement, the movie ends in New Testament acceptance and forgiveness. Basically, this is a parable about a sinner who offends God, sheds the trappings of his earthly life and goes into the wilderness to win back the Lord’s favor through good works.
Sonny got the call at 12 and has been preaching ever since. He doesn’t care whether his congregation is a convention of men in neat business suits, a crowd at a scrubby revival tent or convicts on a road gang: He gives them all what he calls his “Holy Ghost power” at full wattage. His assistant and best friend Joe (country music legend Billy Joe Shaver, who has the pared-down resolve of a man who stepped back from the brink) is one of his converts, rescued from a life of crime. Sonny can’t even pass by a car crash without stopping to convert an injured young couple. When he succeeds, even looking death in the face isn’t enough to dispel his jubilation. He walks away saying, “Glory! Glory!” and when he returns to his car, where his elderly mother (a very amusing June Carter Cash) is waiting, he exults, “We made news in Heaven this morning, mamma!” Not much later, Sonny makes news in Fort Worth when he bashes in the head of the young assistant minister who’s taken up with his wife, Jessie (Farrah Fawcett). Taking it on the lam, Sonny sinks his car in a lake, tosses away all his identification, baptizes himself anew and sets out to build a new church and congregation. His travels lead him to rural Louisiana and Reverend Blackwell (the wonderful John Beasley, with his easy, gracious charm),
a retired minister who helps Sonny restore the clapboard church his own health forced him to abandon.
Practically the first thing Rev. Blackwell asks Sonny is, “Why should I trust you?” It’s a good question. Something of a showboater, Sonny appears to need to exalt himself almost as much as he does God. After Jesse succeeds in getting him expelled from his pulpit, he shows up at services in black shades and a sharpster’s white suit, jumping right up on the altar and showily putting a hundred-dollar bill in the offering. The fervor that spills out of Sonny is uncomfortably close to his rage; at times, you can’t tell whether he’s exhorting God or haranguing him. It’s creepy when he snips Jessie’s head from the family picture he carries with him (as if he could fill in the face when someone else takes her place) and even creepier when he restores her to the picture at an awkward angle. On the road Sonny meets a man gracious enough to let him camp out in his backyard, but the fellow is also wary enough to sleep with his shotgun.
Duvall gives us lots of reasons why we shouldn’t trust Sonny, and then complicates things by expecting us to trust Sonny the only way we can: by taking a leap of faith. He fixes it so we can deny neither Sonny’s need to make himself the center of attention nor the genuineness of his belief. Duvall doesn’t provide the easy out of making Sonny a snake-oil salesman and the congregation he builds at his One Way Road to Heaven church the suckers who fall under his spell. It’s easy to see the enthusiasm and energy and, yes, the showmanship they respond to in Sonny. Duvall doesn’t try to solve Sonny’s mystery: He puts his openness and affability right next to his anger, his generosity right next to his possessiveness, his humility right next to his pride, his sanctification right next to his earthiness.
It’s in the exhilarating worship scenes where Duvall hits full throttle. He jumps into them with the possessed energy of a man in a race for his life and the quick-wittedness of one who thinks on his feet. The performances Duvall has given in recent years in movies like “Days of Thunder,” “The Paper” and “A Family Thing” have the juice that was missing from the steely recessiveness that earned him praise in “Tender Mercies.” His work in “The Apostle,” which combines a master actor’s control with a showman’s wiles, is the best of his career. There’s such a strong sexual vibe to Sonny’s preaching, it would be amazing if he weren’t a womanizer. It’s no wonder that Toosie (Miranda Richardson, here as natural and unfussy as she usually is actressy), the receptionist at the local radio station, responds to his sermons with a flirty little smile and his kisses as if she’d just taken a deliciously sweet sip of lemonade. And it’s no wonder that after years of living with Sonny’s inexhaustible energy, Jessie’s frayed nerves are right on the surface. Farrah Fawcett gives a tense, compact performance. At one point Jessie tells Sonny, “We prayed together since before we were married — my knees are worn out.”
With its use of overlapping dialogue and storytelling that unfolds instead of being laid out, “The Apostle” recalls the open-ended freedom that characterized American movies in the early ’70s. For Duvall, directing appears to be a process of discovery and improvisation (he’s superb with actors) rather than one that follows a set blueprint. And yet the movie never meanders. Cinematographer Barry Markowitz’s images are unusually sharp and clear, as spare and uncluttered as Sonny’s whitewashed country church. The look of the movie is as straightforward as Duvall’s direction.
“The Apostle’s” deliberate lack of irony may throw some people. We’re so used to seeing big-time evangelists who are obvious charlatans, so used to the transparent power grabs of the religious right, that you may find yourself sitting through “The Apostle” waiting for Sonny to be unmasked. But Sonny isn’t a phony. The movie presents his deeds as matter-of-factly as miracles are presented in the Bible, without fuss or explanation. We’re asked to accept that a young woman near death after a car wreck begins to move again after Sonny prays for her, or that a man (Billy Bob Thornton, pulling off a startling cameo with a tricky emotional shift) who arrives at a Sunday picnic to bulldoze Sonny’s church would be stopped simply by Sonny laying his Bible in front of the machine and then, in tears, would be converted to Jesus. In the context of the film these incidents seem as natural as the raising of Lazarus. Like the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan, Thornton’s character (referred to simply as “Troublemaker” in the credits) simply appears to play his part in a story about faith as comfort in the face of almost unbearable hardship. We don’t know who he is, and it’s not important. What is important is that some burden seems lifted from him.
Duvall understands that in rural communities (particularly Southern ones) church isn’t just where you worship, it’s where you socialize, it’s a form of entertainment. At one point, a black woman herds her small twin boys onto the bus bound for Sonny’s church telling them, “We’re gon’ praise the Lord. We’ll have a good time,” and looking at her decked out in her Sunday best, who could doubt it? (There are few sights more colorful, stylish and joyful in American life than the sight of African-American women dressed for church.)
For us nonbelievers, the appeal of “The Apostle” is something like the appeal of gospel music. What’s wonderful about gospel — a sound full of honest dirt and honest sweat that seems to have its roots deep in the earth as it reaches toward heaven — has everything to do with this world, just as the faces of Sonny’s congregation look both transported and radiantly human. “The Apostle” honors its subject by seeing its contradictions as part of a whole. That’s why the most exultant hymn we hear, “I’ll Fly Away,” is about facing death, and why Sonny finds his greatest peace when the time comes to pay for his sins. This continually surprising film didn’t make me long for the next world, but it did make me exult in the possibility of what waits around the next bend in the road in this one. And that seems like miracle enough.
