The Invisible Library

John Dickerson at Slate wants to know why GW was reading the Stranger on his Vacation:

On his summer vacation in Crawford, Texas, George Bush read Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger. I’m not sure what to make of this. It’s usually college freshmen who suddenly take up the French existentialist’s slim volume, and then usually to impress some literature major with wavy hair.

[…] Whatever the reasons, Camus’ story line is ripe for geopolitical literary misinterpretation. The main character, Meursault, spends much of his life as the young George Bush did, engaging in escapades that demonstrate little drive or motivation. On a visit to the beach with friends, he gets into a fight with some Arabs. Later, he finds one of the Arabs and without much further provocation shoots him repeatedly. During the circus-trial that follows, and the long hours Meursault spends in jail, he is remorseless and unable to engage in contemplation. On the day of his execution, he has a flickering thought that he might have lived another life. But mostly he’s excited about the day and hopes that everyone will cheer for his death.

[…] This is no time to be vague. The president uttered the word “crusade” a single time when talking about fighting terrorists and critics in Europe and the Middle East still use it as proof that his war aims are motivated by 11th-century wide-eyed religious zealotry. Surely someone is going to think that Bush read the book because he identifies with Meursault. There’s got to be another explanation. Does his experience in Iraq push him to read works replete with themes of angst, anxiety, and dread? Was the president trying to gain insight into the thinking of Europeans who are skeptical of his plan for democracy in the Middle East, founded as it is on the idea of a universal rational essence that existentialists reject? Did he just want to read something short for his truncated vacation? This may be the first time that national security demands an official version of literary criticism. We want a book report!

One can only speculate. The cynic in me wants to say that he was just going for a short read. He thought it was the cliff notes to a much longer work (something involving sexy strangers who like leather boots and stern looks, dropping by a ranch to pay a lonesome cowpoke a visit?) The navel gazer wants to believe that, after fifty years of aimless drifting, he is having a late life awaking. That his mind, suddenly sober with the sight of all the carnage it has wrought in the Arab world, craves introspection and so he reached for the one familiar piece of introspective literature at hand (perhaps one of the twins left it laying around after scouring their old college books, looking for booze money tucked between the pages?) Or maybe he didn’t read it at all, just carried it around in the hopes of lookin’ smart to all them French folk that are trying to clean up his mess with the help of the UN over in Syria? We may never know. And it is probably fruitless to even ask.

Americans love God. Love, love, Love! God. Pat Robertson and George W. Bush say so. And they wouldn’t lie. According to recent statistics, 90% of Americans profess belief in the invisible Man that lives in the clouds. 9 out of every 10 Americans think an anthropomorphic dude with a flowing white beard and preoccupation with shellfish and butt sex cares about fetuses, who they vote for and which language the Bible was really written in. ¹ I’d think, being King of the Whole Friggin Universe, he might be more interested in what Black Holes and Pulsars are up to but that’s just me. 9 of 10 people you and I know, think otherwise. Which sounds pretty damn impressive. Except, it’s not true:

• The percentage of American adults who identify themselves as Christians dropped from 86% in 1990 to 77% in 2001. This is an unprecedented drop.
• Confidence in religious institutions has hit an all-time low.
• There appears to be a major increase in interest in spirituality among North Americans. However, this has not translated into greater church involvement.
• Mainline denominations have been losing membership for decades in the U.S.; conservative denominations have been growing.
• At the present rates of change, Islam will become the dominant religion in the world before 2050 CE.
• At the present rate of change, most Americans will be non-Christians by the year 2035 CE.
• The numbers of “unchurched” people has increased rapidly in the U.S. These are individuals who have not attended church in recent months.
• Agnosticism, Atheism, secularism are growing rapidly.
• Interest in new religious movements (e.g. New Age, Neopaganism) is growing rapidly. In particular, Wiccans are doubling in numbers about every 30 months.
• The influence of the central, program-based congregation is diminishing as more cell churches are being created.
• Many Christians have left congregations and formed house churches - small groups meeting in each other’s homes.

According to one survey, 76.5% of adult Americans identified themselves as Christians in 2001. But less than half attend church regularly, if at all. A similar study found that those who practice what they preach is a modest 30% and falling. The survey breaks it down like this:

• 30% are totally secular in outlook
• 29% are barely or nominally religious
• 22% are modestly religious
• 19% regularly practice their religion.

If 60% of those who claim to believe in God act just like us Atheists, are they really religious? More importantly, do they really believe in God or are they just saying so to be polite? We are conditioned from a very early age to equate belief in God with good behavior. But what if in fact we do the reverse and equate good behavior with a presupposition that the person in question believes in God?

I know from personal experience that this is often the case. My in-laws thought I was a nice guy until my wife told them I was an Atheist. Her mother gave me suspicious looks for the first year we were married, to make sure I didn’t have baby’s blood staining my teeth or smell like I’d just been raping puppies out back. She eventually realized I was actually a good person and yet I didn’t believe in Jesus, or pray or anything like that. I think she’s still trying to figure out how that works.

In many places, specifically, the South where I currently live, this equation Good People=Theist is a given. It is assumed that you are a believer and more specifically, a Christian, regardless of the facts or actual behavior. ² And since first impressions are so important, well, so what if your girlfriend’s grandmother thinks you and she get up early on Sundays and go pray at Church (the other one, across town. No the other one, next to the one with the neon sign. No the other one) rather than sleep off a hangover form the party the night before? What she doesn’t know won’t make Thanksgiving any more awkward than it has to be.

Except, it’s not really even that conscious. Most people profess to believe in God, because they’ve never given it any real thought. God, like the wind through the trees, is just there. You don’t have to think about it or really invest any actual energy in believing in Him, except maybe on Easter or Christmas and even that’s more about candy and presents. So, what was the question again? Oh sure, I believe in God. But let’s skip church and go see Snakes On a Plane instead. That Samuel L. Jackson is one smooth motherfucker!

After much frittering and sillyness trying to find a way to set up an online print shop to make Zombie Jesus Loves You T-shirts, I’ve decided to go the quick and easy route and just post a large version of the image, a very big, high quality JPG that you can copy to your heart’s content, print out onto whatever kind of iron-on paper you like and make all sorts of cool Zombie Jesus Loves You shirts, totes, underwear, what have you. For free. I’m not in this for money. What I do ask is that you send me pictures of whatever you make and I’ll post them here.
Other fun, blashemous images and such to follow shortly…

One day, after thirteen rude customers in a row, a waitress named Mary throws a plate of clams in the face of a fat man from Laredo who keeps calling her Sugar. She promptly stomps into the kitchen, kisses a bus boy named Henry full on the mouth and slams the door behind her. She tosses a few clothes into a suitcase, picks up her cat, Lucy, hails a taxi down to the docks, walks strait out onto the planks and boards the first boat heading anywhere.

The boat is captained by a Cuban Ex Patriot named Jorge Veluptus. He is heading for Havana with a boatload of illicit knobs. He wants to turn on all the down-trodden people of his homeland and start a revolution. Mary and Jorge make wild passionate love on the deck of the ship, the Insolent Navigator. Jorge names Lucy Second Mate.

Mary’s unholy temper and boiler room lingo frightens the crew, an assortment of one-legged former whalers who fear that having a loose woman aboard is a sure sign of doom. Omens of giant waves, midnight squalls and unmitigated swooning fill their sleepless nights. But, they reach Havana without so much as a rain shower blotting their voyage. As punishment for their mental mutiny, Captain Jorge locks the sailors in the hold and sinks the boat. There is no room for Insolent Navigators or superstitious one-legged sailors in their new world.

They take to the streets of Havana, Mary and Jorge, drunk with love, swilling Molotov cocktails, holding roses between their teeth, mowing down police with tommy guns loaded with silver bullets

Mary seduces young boys and shy, bisexual girls to their cause. All she has to do is lift her skirt and they fall madly in love with her vagina.

A blind woman selling paieya bestows upon Jorge, Che Guevara’s old beret

Lucy rouses the hackles of every tomcat from Havana to Guantanamo Bay. The cats are the foot soldiers of The End, racing calico bedlam through the palace and hissing at all those foolish enough to stand in their path.

When Castro sees them coming, he pisses himself. In his dotage, he mistakes Jorge for the ghost of his old comrade in arms, come back from the dead at last, leading an army of Left Libertarians and mad cats to dance on the broken back of his failed idealism. Fidel weeps. Mary takes pity on him.

After the revolution, she and Jorge let Fidel live out his last days in the spare bedroom of their little hut on the beech. The sound of their midnight frolicking in the surf is the last he ever hears. He dies, quiet and repentant in his sleep, Lucy the cat curled up on his fat belly. Free at last.

_________

* After Camper Van Beethoven

The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens has their very own Titan Arum (the giant reeking “corpse flower”) which is about to bloom:

The titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) is one of the world’s most remarkable plants. Native to tropical forests in Sumatra, it produces a monstrous four- to seven-foot-tall flower head, which releases a monstrous stench of putrefaction at peak bloom (another name for the plant is the corpse flower!). The species rarely flowers in cultivation—the last time one bloomed in New York was 1939. However, Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s ten-year-old specimen has recently begun to flower. It’s expected to reach full bloom at the end of the second week of August.

Even better, they have a webcam.

John Rogers has a beautiful rant about how we should react to the recent capture of terrorists in London rather than the way we are acting:

I am just not going to wet my pants every time some guys get arrested in a terror plot. I will do my best to stay informed. I will support the necessary law enforcement agencies. I will take whatever reasonable precautions seem, um, reasonable. But I will not be terrorized. I assume that the terror-ists would like me to be terror-ized, as that is what is says on their nametag, rather than, say, wanting me to surrender to ennui or negative body image, and they’re just coming the long way around.

Osama Bin Laden got everything on his Christmas list after 9/11 — US out of Saudi Arabia; the greatest military in the world over-extended, pinned down and distracted; the greatest proponent of democracy suddenly alienated from its allies; a US culture verily eager to destroy freedoms that little scumfuck could never even dream to touch himself — I would like to deny him the last little check on the clipboard, i.e. constant terror. I panic, they win. To coin a phrase, Osama Bin Laden can suck my insouciance.
There are a million factors in this New World of Terror. You weigh ‘em, you process, and then you move on.

[…] You move on, building a better international society so that luddite fundamentalist criminal gangs/cults of personality are further and further marginalized.

Or, if you don’t understand 4th Generation Warfare at all, you move on, bombing the shit out of nation-states and handing your opponents massive PR victories. Either way, you move the fuck on.

Maybe it’s just, I cast my eyes back on the last century …

FDR: Oh, I’m sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we’re coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How’s that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We’ll be in the pub, flipping you off. I’m slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike … NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

… and I’m just a little tired of being on the wrong side of that historical arc.

Today I learned that Billy Ray Cyrus had a comic book, in which he fought the Black Knight in the thirteenth century. This was part of a short-lived imprint of Marvel Comics published in the mid-1990’s called Marvel Music. These comics featured biographical or fantasy/ adventure tales starring then-famous musicians and bands, similar in style to the Kiss comic book published by Marvel in the 1970’s.

I get a lot of spam. I mean a lot. How much is a lot? Try over 5000 pieces of spam in my inbox, per month. That’s not counting the between a dozen and forty spam comments I delete out of the blog every day. So I know my spam, can smell it at fifty paces. But lately, some of the messages I’ve been receiving have had an almost literary quality to them. Take for example this one I received the other day:

A literary ghost is, I think, a new departure in the psychic world. Im almost sure I saw Sillerton Jacksons head in one of the windows, just behind Sabina Wessons. Now they gain no inspiration to carry them through. For my deep pity is excited-that this intricacy of mind is placed in this dim age of toilsome work. Well, its over: here are the firemen coming out again, someone said at length. It was all in keeping, and all presented a practical and tradesman-like appearance. This is so obvious that it fails to amuse me. To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg. Appendix IVC opy of a Communication received at the Ouija Board through Mrs. I am a shadow and the life here, the shadow of a shadow. Here I find a mind in whose intricacies I should like to plunge. Perhaps you would teach me something about the present time. For my deep pity is excited-that this intricacy of mind is placed in this dim age of toilsome work. He gets so restless, being shut up with these long colds. The lady who was not in evening dress paused. No, the lily is mine, not his, he writes. But here I am confined and the rich day is hidden from me. Granny, did you wear feathers in your hair in the daytime? Did Grandpapa wear a white tie at two o’clock in the afternoon? For my presentation was probably too preposterous for an age of realism. The whole theatre wore a useful aspect that night when I saw it through your eyes. The men of the family said nothing, but I saw Hubert Wessons face crimson with surprise. Well, ma’am, the minute he heard the fire-engine, off he rushed like a boy. Nothing was sacred to Kate, and she feigned not to notice Grandmammas mild frown of reproval. I think my pleasant rector was not a horny person. The men of the family said nothing, but I saw Hubert Wessons face crimson with surprise. But here I am confined and the rich day is hidden from me. She rested her hand quickly on the hall table. Hazel dean and Henry Prest coming out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel together. Messages from the dead are usually very vague as to work and interests on the other side. But no one listened even to Sillerton Jackson. I am a shadow and the life here, the shadow of a shadow. Im almost sure I saw Sillerton Jacksons head in one of the windows, just behind Sabina Wessons. In Intentions we have The white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning. The whole theatre wore a useful aspect that night when I saw it through your eyes. Perhaps you would teach me something about the present time. He gets so restless, being shut up with these long colds. The later writings have been longer and more continuous.

Now, I don’t know who this Sillerton Jackson is or why his ghost keeps popping up behind Sabina Wesson but there’s something to this. It reads like a poor man’s William S. Burroughs, with a little too much stream in your consciousness but some lines have an almost haiku like quality. I’m especially fond of “The white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning.” That’s pure Basho. And sure, the adds for cheep Viagra and The Best Mortgage Rates, Ever! are in the attachments, so they’re still trying to sell me shit I don’t need but at least they’re trying to raise the intellectual milieu a bit while doing it.

David Byrne has a blog. What’s more, he recently reviewed a documentary called Jesus Camp, about summer camps where the Am Taliban indoctrinates children:

There were some perfect sound bites — at one point Pastor Fischer instructs the little ones that they should be willing to die for Christ, and the little ones obediently agree. She may even use the word martyr, which has a shocking echo in the Middle East. I can see future suicide bombers for Jesus — the next step will be learning to fly planes into buildings. Of course, the grownups would say, “Oh no, we’re not like them” — but they admit that the principal difference is simply that “We’re right.”

In another scene a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush, with his trademark smirking smile, is brought out and the children are urged to identify — many of the little ones come forward and reverently touch his cardboard hands.

I kept saying to myself, “O.K., these are the Christian version of the Madrassas (those Islamic religious instructional schools in Pakistan and elsewhere, often financed by Saudi oil money)…so both sides are pretty much equally sick, there’s a balance.” (Although it must be said the Madrassas provide some regular education and literacy where no other option is available, they do community work that is non-religious…and they take in aimless troubled youth.)

They want to turn the U.S. into the “Christian” version of Iran or Saudi Arabia. A theocracy. The separation between church and state, already shaky with Bush in charge, is under full frontal assault by this bunch — and they are well organized, too. The megachurches tell their parishioners who to vote for, what judges to support, letters to write, and where they should stand on the issues. Well, we all do this to some extent — even in casual chats with friends we attempt to deduce and arrive at a consensus of opinion; a sloppy democratic give-and-take on any number of subjects often gives way to agreement. But this is top-down messaging — no discussion allowed. There’s a scene in the Colorado Springs megachurch run by the Preacher who talks with Bush once a week — same deal as with the kids, only most of the attendees are pliant adults.

People give me weird looks when the topic of conversation turns to American religion and I mention groups like the ones in this film. As if religion is somehow so different once you cross the border into America. we don’t have anti-fundamentalist radar, people and it can happen here and already is. That’s the scary part.

The good news is that there are people who are making these documentaries. People like the gang over at Science Blogs, PZ Myers and the lot, who make it their goal to spread scientific knowledge, to combat this virulent drivel. And, in no small part, that’s part of why I became a Librarian. If I can get someone, anyone to read a book and think a little bit more critically about some of these things, especially children, then maybe we can stop these Jesus freaks from turning the next generation into a bunch of Zombies for Jesus.