NFL Hours

I needed a good laugh this morning and fortunately, quite by accident, I found "The Hours" on TV. I had never seen this film, which has a marvelous cast and won many awards. It is a dense, multi-layered drama about depression and suicide and art, and I couldn't stop laughing as I watched it. The characters are hilarious. Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf, who never lifts her chin from her chest and never smiles, speaks in a whispered monotone throughout the entire film. Indeed, I started humming along with her lines - duh, duh, duh - always the same note but with slightly varied cadence. At one point she actually says: If I have to choose between Richmond and death, I choose death. Now that is a funny line. And what is in Richmond? A beautiful house, where she feels a prisoner, with servants whom she fears, a husband who adjusts his entire life for her sake, total freedom to work, and a writer's study which I would give worlds to have. Virginia, it seems, is a deeply troubled novelist who is married to a saint, but appears to be in love with her best friend, whom she kisses on the mouth with great passion.

John C. Riley's husband to Julianne Moore's character is simply too good to be true. The only insight we get into his imperturbable character is that he is a World War II veteran who, reading between the handful of lines in which he tell us this, had a rather bad time of it among the atolls and Japs. And so at every moment I expected him to go nuts, screaming at his chronically depressed wife to snap out of it. But he doesn't. And why? Because he is so utterly clueless. He's a like a character in a cereal commercial, cheerful, sincere, and reflexively devoted to his family. No wonder his wife is a lump of depression - no one could match such witless happiness. She has a son, and another on the way, and all she can do is think about her deeply suppressed lust for her female friend, whom she kisses on the mouth with great passion, when she is not planning to kill herself. What is her problem? Is it the drear of suburban 50s life, the utter predictability of it, the soul-stomping conformity? No. She's reading Virginia Woolf, which would be enough to send any blue hausfrau over the edge. And so she zombie-walks through her life, like Virginia herself, unsmiling, monotone-voiced, and so utterly self-absorbed that it is an act of bravery for her to bake a cake with her five-year-old.

Now we come to Ed Harris' character, The Poet. I capitalize it because he is supposed to be what everyone imagines a poet to be. Except he is dying of AIDS, lives in a graffiti-crusted loft in Manhattan, and has just won The Carruthers. The Carruthers? What is that? A poetry prize. And that's the problem - it sounds like a poetry prize. If he had won the Schmelman Prize I might have believed any of this, but he didn't. In this movie, nobody does anything that a human being might actually think, feel or do. It is all so contrived - so much about what wealthy, elitist  film-makers think such people ought to be like, that none of it is believable. Instead, it is laughable.

The Poet's first line in the movie was my tip-off. The Meryl Streep character goes to see him in his scabrous loft to tell him she's taking him to the award ceremony and giving him a party. She sees he has been troubled by unreal visitations. "Were your friends here?" she asks, and when he says they were, she wants to know what they were like. "They were like black fire," replies The Poet. OK, that was when they truly lost me. No poet talks like this. Not only is that a cliché, boring metaphor, it is the way that the writer and all the other elitists who made this film think a poet should talk.

It is writing about character types in the way the film-making elite think they should talk and act, presumably because they think the public thinks they should be this way, that so turns me off in what passes for serious drama these days. I remember, in the awful film, "Contact," by Zemekis (whose recent film "Flight" also turned me off) the philosopher, played by Matthew McConaughey, talks in a contrived, stilted and pretentious manner for the sole reason that this is the way the film-makers think really intelligent people are supposed to talk.

And then there is Meryl Streep's character. She is an editor who lives in a Manhattan apartment that could exist only in the imagination of a Hollywood art director and could scarcely be afforded by the Sultan of Brunei, in contrast to The Poet's filthy loft, reachable only by the seediest elevator in New York. Note the implied class distinction: The Poet, who pours his blood into his work, lives in sunless squalor while the editor, who merely corrects the grammar of what poets write, lives in high-rise luxury. Is it possible that an accomplished poet cannot afford a decent apartment? I mean, he did win The Carruthers after all. And when he topples himself out the window to his death (I say "topples" because he does not merely fall and is too ill to throw himself), we are left to wonder whether he has finally found life unbearable, or he just cannot face another trip in that repulsive elevator.

Now don't get me wrong here... I think that Meryl Streep is one of the truly great actors of our time. But in this film, in this role, she is off her game. Her normally fluid and spontaneous seeming gestures here are forced, the timing is off, and some even seem inappropriate to the moment. In short, she is bad in this movie, and as a friend of mine says, it takes a lot of work to make a great actor bad. Ed Harris, too, is bad in this movie - the only time I have ever found his work unconvincing. And Nicole Kidman, while the best performance - and the best nose - of the lot, is given so little of light and self-revelation to work with, she, too, is below par. Why? Because there is nothing at all authentic about the characters in this film, or the way they act, or the way in which they express themselves. This is pretentious pseudo-drama of the worst sort - made by elitists to condescend to the general public while impressing the members of their pretentious clique. Pretension - that is the word that kept running through my mind. "The Hours" is, ultimately and implicitly, about pretentious, self-absorbed people who merely got older without ever growing up.

Julianne Moore's character attempts to make a cake for her genial husband's birthday. It is a centerpiece of her role in the film, for she has to do it with her little boy. They struggle through a dreadful looking blue and brown concoction only to have her throw it in the trash, drive her son to an obese nightmare of a sitter, check in to a hotel where she finishes reading Virginia Woolf... and decides not to kill herself and her unborn baby. In a scene that comes from nowhere in this film, at the critical moment, the room floods with water, nearly flushing her off the bed. Now, just yesterday I had to have the drainpipe outside my house replaced since the toilets and showers clogged irreparably, and all I could think was, not that this benighted woman has reached the end of a meaningless existence, but that the hotel needs a good plumber.

The point here, which no one connected with the making of this film understands, is that the cake is the meaning. Making a birthday cake for daddy with your five-year-old is what life is about. But not for the penthouse-dwelling artistic elite who made "The Hours." The baking of that cake with that child for that reason gives life meaning. But they can't see that because they can't talk about such things at their parties and in their interviews. Let me be clear: I think that life, essentially, is meaningless. But it can, as no less a pessimist than Samuel Beckett has said, possess a meaning with which we have to power to invest it. None of these characters has that power, because they are all so pretentious and self-absorbed. And we are supposed to take them seriously and become absorbed in their drama. Not me, sorry; all I could do was laugh.

Meryl Streep's character, who lives with her female lover (whom she does not kiss on the mouth with great passion, presumably because they have been together ten years), is The Poet's one-time lover and now his only remaining friend. This is so because, as a poet, he of course drives everybody crazy, never bathes, and lives in a filthy loft reachable only by a grimy elevator in a graffiti palace on the Lower East Side. (Though he does have the most truthful line in the film: They only gave me the prize because I have AIDS!) Nonetheless, he has won The Carruthers and must be fêted despite himself, which the Meryl Streep character is determined to do, because, if she fails to give a good party, her life will be without significance. ("You give parties to hide The Silence," The Poet says, and we all cringe.)

I won't spoil the endings for you (there are several, cascading on one another with relentless gloom, and culminating in Virginia Woolf doing a bad impression of Ophelia). However, I will say that the Julianne Moore character, who, it turns out, is The Poet's mother, comes back for his funeral, leaving one to wonder, not why she did not kill herself, but how the hapless husband managed with two kids on his own. Not very well, one supposes, since his older child contracted a fatal disease and toppled himself out the window of a filthy loft. (Though what, I can't help but ask, happened to the other one who was nearly flushed down the hotel toilet?) But you may ask: What does all this have to do with the NFL?

During the commercial breaks in the movie, when I was being induced to buy pizza rolls and an Accura, I switched to the playoff game between New England and Houston. (The game is still on, though the Patriots seem to have things under control ((Houston's quarterback, Schaub, is one of the worst I have ever seen))). As I watched the game, in contrast to "The Hours," I could not help but notice that the NFL players, all vigorous, healthy young men, work so well together, clearly like one another very much, and, given the amount of hugging and butt slapping, seem, indeed, to be in love. And so the following occurred to me:

"The Hours," I was beginning to think, was the best argument I have yet heard against gay adoption, a question on which I am undecided. None of these women seem to care much for their children, indeed, are prepared to abandon and even to kill them or themselves. But then I reflected that the NFL players appear to have a healthy, productive attitude toward life. They work brilliantly and easily together, support each other, and appear to care a great deal for one another (though they do not kiss on the mouth with great passion, at least not on camera). And so my conclusion could not help but be that gay men should be allowed to adopt, but gay women should not.

So there you have it: another cultural dilemma resolved by a casual confluence of elitist drama and professional sports. Now that that is off my chest, I shall toast a pizza roll and go find out who made it to the AFC championship.

Two New

I have two new books coming out shortly. One is a collection of poetry, entitled Desert Songs; the other is a novel set in occupied France in the summer of 1941, entitled Singer, in the land of night. Both will be available on Amazon.com. I hope that you will take a look at them.

Thanks, SR

Life and Faith

In The Calendar of Wisdom for today, Tolstoy states that "The life of a person without faith is the life of an animal." I am inclined to agree, though that raises the question: What is faith?

In the broadest sense, I think that faith is the acknowledgement by the individual that there is more to life than that which is natural and observable. To put it more succinctly: that essence precedes existence. Faith means accepting the truth that what lies at the heart and origin of life is something that is not itself alive; that existence arises from that which does not exist, yet which gives rise to existence. It is the willingness to admit that our existence is founded on, and depends upon, that which does not itself exist. Yet this non-existence is the essential nature of all that exists.

It is at this point that logic and reason must give way to faith. For any logician or scientist will tell you that something cannot be generated by nothing, and that non-existence cannot give rise to existence. In an attempt to accommodate this apparent truth, theologians and philosophers have long posited the concept of the First Cause. Most of Thomas Aquinas's proofs for the existence of god, for example, depend on the proposition that if things exist and are in motion, then something must have originally put them in existence and motion. This "something" becomes the first principle in a long chain of causation, of which the reality we experience is the direct result. In short, it becomes god.

That this cannot be so should be self-evident. If the First Cause is merely the original link in the chain of existence, then, while it may be a motive force, it cannot be qualitatively different than the existence which it puts into being and motion. This primal cause is, therefore, of the same, or at least of similar, character as the effects it generates. God thus becomes nothing more than the first principle of existence, and yet, if god exists, then something must have put god into existence, by the subsequent logic of the proposition. The god which is said to create existence must be embedded in existence and share its nature, which subjects that god to the inconsistencies and vicissitudes of existence; to its qualities and characteristics, with all their contradictions and shortfalls. Thus god is portrayed as jealous, angry, loving, forgiving, and at once the source of all good and of all evil. God is, in effect, superman, possessed of all of man's faults and virtues.

It is for this reason that I argue that any concept of god, as a generative cause or primal principle, must inevitably lead to contradictions which cancel out the concept itself. God cannot be both loving and vengeful, cannot be the origin of both goodness and evil, and, at the source of the concept, god cannot logically be a form of existence that was not brought into existence by something else.

For this reason, the concept of god becomes itself a contradiction which cannot be sustained by the very process of logic which coaxed it into being. Such a concept of god must, therefore, be rejected, not least of all because the conceptual god makes faith unnecessary. This is ironic, to say the least, but it is, nonetheless, inescapable. For if you posit god as the First Cause, or as the primal link in the chain of existence, then reality can be traced logically back to god, and no faith is needed to accept god's existence.

No, oddly, what is required is an acceptance of the illogical proposition (in conventional terms) that existence arises out of non-existence - that everything, in effect, comes from nothing. Only in this way can we find a ground for the exercise of faith. Anything less is merely musing on an idea, regardless of how complex it may be, that negates the possibility of faith. To put it simply: It is necessary to reject the concept of god in order to discover the possibililty of faith.

The Cliff vs. the Abyss

At some point over the holidays, I stopped watching the news. I simply could no longer stomach the frantic reports on the "fiscal cliff," combined with fatuous commercials and the customary idol worship of news anchors who have achieved positions of importance in our culture with, apparently, no qualifications whatsoever.

Now a purported deal has been reached, within hours of the deadline, to postpone, though not to avoid, our great national falling-off. Leaving aside the fact that the president and the congress have behaved in a manner which we would not permit our children - Don't wait till the last minute to do your book report! - they have, yet again, utterly failed to address, or even to acknowledge, the real problem facing the nation; namely, that we are spending ourselves to death. The raw fact remains that every day the federal government takes in one billion dollars in revenue, and spends three.

The president, in his unrelenting socialist ideology, has demagogued the current crisis as one not of spending, but of revenue - specifically, that the rich are not paying enough in taxes. This kind of cynical class warfare may play well with the masses (most of whom pay no taxes), but it utterly ignores the truth that even if the federal government were to confiscate all of the wealth of the wealthiest Americans, doing so would pay not even two weeks' worth of the debt. But as with everything else leftist, punishing success makes the "progressives" feel good about themselves, the facts be damned. Liberalism is narcissism, pure and simple.

We are broke. To paraphrase Walter Mondale: The president won't tell you that - I just did. The national debt so far outstrips the gross national product that it will take generations of sacrifice to begin to put our fiscal house in order. The media farce about the "fiscal cliff" was meant merely to distract us from the fact that we face a fiscal abyss. The left will do anything to obfuscate in the face of this reality, and the Republicans are too tongue-tied by years of failure even to object in a coherent fashion.

Now the debt ceiling crisis looms again in sixty days, and the buffoons in congress and the amiable incompetent in the White House will burble at one another again for our entertainment, and to the further detriment of the nation.  And what will be accomplished? Nothing of any substance.

What is needed, first of all, is a national figure who will tell the truth to the American people - the truth about the crisis we face and the sacrifices we will have to make in order to fix it.  Such a one does not, and dare not, exist at the moment. Beyond that, certain structural reforms are essential. We must impose terms limits on elected federal government officials: four terms for House members, two for senators. We must cap federal spending at a fixed percentage of GDP - certainly no more than 20, I should think. We must adopt a flat income tax, again, fixed at a reasonable rate (I would say a maximum of 17%). And we must have a constitutional amendment requiring the congress to balance the federal budget. Only then, I think, can we begin even to hope for a resolution of a crisis in the history of the nation that threatens its very life.

Six-toed Health Care

I watched with amusement and dismay a report today concerning the cats of the Hemingway House. My son and I visited the house in Key West on our vacation last summer, and he was charmed and fascinated by the population of felines, many of whom had six toes on their paws, and some, even seven. These cats were a special favorite of Hemingway, and he mandated their care and the maintenance of their kind in his will. Now, his house, which is a museum open to the public, is a haven for them - dozens of them.

Today Fox News reported that a federal government agency has been sending undercover agents to the house disguised as tourists to follow and photograph the felines. This was done, the government declared, in order to enforce a 1966 animal protection law which it is alleged the Hemingway estate is violating by, the bureaucrats argued before a court, using the cats to lure tourists to a commercial enterprise.

Now, as I understand it, the 1966 statute was intended to protect animals that might be in danger of exploitation. Specifically, it was meant to ensure that animals used for commercial purposes such as circuses, petting zoos, television commercials and movies, are not mistreated. But in this case, the law was stretched by anonymous and officious government bureaucrats to include a historical museum, where no less than People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals examiners found the cats "fat, happy and relaxed." (My son and I saw this ourselves: They just about run the place, and seem perfectly comfortable, even in the presence of gangs of tourists, who wonder at them and dote on them.) Not so the purveyors of big government and more official intrusion. They went to court and secured an order that would require that the Hemingway cats be rounded up every night and put in cages, rather than being given the run of the house, which they have had for decades.

This is pernicious nonsense, of course. But what is really disturbing about it is that at no point in this process of government meddling and spying (on cats!), did any bureaucrat in the hierarchy ask: Are you kidding? The cats own the house (as all cats do), they are well fed, lovingly cared for, allowed their liberty, and even PETA has given its blessing to the Hemingway estate for the quality of their care.

But we are not dealing with care or reason or even reality here: We are dealing with government bureaucracy. And that means that nothing - not facts or truth or humanity - can be allowed to interfere with the enforcement of regulations. And so, unless the court order is overturned, Hemingway's beloved cats will become wards of the state, which means, among other things, they will be rounded up routinely and caged for their own good.

You can, I suppose, see where I am going with this. These are the same kinds of people who have just been given responsibility for the nation's health care system. And if these brainless bureaucrats, secure in their anonymity and freedom from firing, will do this to cats, what do you think they will do to human beings? We will, no doubt, be rounded up and caged (metaphorically) for our own good by functionaries who are accountable to no one, and for whom regulations trump reason, and compliance substitutes for conscience.

Congratulations, America: You are about to get the "free" health care you so eagerly desired. I just hope that the cats survive.

Whore of B

I remember as a young man listening occasionally to fundamentalist Protestant ministers on television who referred to the Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon. I thought at the time that it was a hysterical and scabrous characterization; the result of years of indoctrination in fringe theology, driven by a crass profit motive. But now, after decades of reflection and realization, I believe I understand what those canting poseurs meant.

It has taken me nearly fifty years of thought and soul-searching and life experience to come to the following conclusion: The Roman Catholic Church is an evil institution. Let me say it again: By its very nature, reinforced by its traditions and institutional behavior, the Catholic Church is a force for evil in the world.

I no longer see how any right-minded or well-intentioned person can subscribe to its teachings, nor how any earnest searcher after truth or the divine in man can succumb to its authority. The Church is a vile corruption of the teachings of Jesus, on whom it claims to be founded. That vague and illiterate man (if we can judge by how little we know of his origins and the fact that he committed nothing to writing), seems to have preached the virtues of poverty, self-neglect, absolute love and universal peace and tolerance, all concepts inimical to the Catholic Church as we know it. That the Church should claim its authorship from such a character is nothing more than farce at best, and blasphemy at worst. The Catholic Church has no more to do with the nature and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than does the current federal government with the principles of the Founding Fathers.

The Church has, over the centuries, been the purveyor of violence, intolerance, ignorance and injustice. And throughout most of its institutional history, it has been a haven to criminals of the worst sort, including thieves, liars, corrupt politicians, murderers and pedophiles. On this last point I have much to say, and have tried to say it in these pages. But suffice it to say that the abetting and cover-up of the crimes of child molesters has gone on throughout the entire history of the Church, and continues to this very evening, when the Los Angeles Archdiocese has compelled the records of hierarchical protectors of pedophiles to remain sealed from public scrutiny.

Beyond that, for generations, the Church, through its system of Catholic education, has been guilty of myriad crimes against children. By this I mean the systematic indoctrination of innocent little boys and girls in a body of dogma that makes no sense, and, more seriously, that rationalizes superstition and religious intolerance, enforced by the most vile threats of corporal punishment and eternal damnation. I was, myself, the victim of such browbeating from the ages of seven to eighteen. I and my fellow child-students were routinely beaten, terrorized, and solemnly threatened with an eternity of fire and torment if we did not submit ourselves absolutely to the authority of Holy Mother Church. That any mother would terrorize and abuse her children so is beyond my comprehension.

We were told, on a daily basis from the age of seven (the age of reason, as the Church terms it), that if we did not comply with every jot and iota of its teachings, we were destined to rot in hell fire for all eternity. What sane adult, with even the scarcest solicitude for children, would impose such terror on innocents? Who,  claiming any form of humanity, would abuse the children in their care in such a fashion? We were ritually herded into church three of four times a week, forced to confess (and often to invent) sins which we whispered in the dark to anonymous priests, begging for forgiveness, subjected to regular humiliation and corporal punishment, including, screaming, slapping, whippings and beatings. And all of this was elevated to the level of divine intent by a sexually confused and criminal clergy, represented to us as God's vicars on Earth.

I have stated here before, and I repeat again: The Catholic Church is a conspiracy against the innocence of children. The number of confessed pedophiles, and those who have enabled and protected them, is but a shadow of the actual number of violators of children. I have no hesitation in going so far as to state that every member of the Catholic clergy is complicit in those crimes, for those who did not commit them knew about them, and those who did not know about them did not want to know. All are guilty, either directly or indirectly, and the ones who are guilty by silence are not less so than those whose consecrated fingers raped and molested children.

There is a long and unbroken history in the Church of crimes against children, and against humanity at large. Founded on the poor shepherd of Palestine as it claims to be, the Church's own wealth, crimes  and arrogance condemn it far beyond my power to do so. But the worst of its sins remain those against the most harmless and innocent in its care: the children of the Church, who could neither understand nor resist the brutality and inhumanity perpetrated against them. Coldly, cunningly and calculatedly by men and women who wore the black mantel of righteousness, which was nothing more nor less than the black shirts of the fascists with whom they conspired so cravenly in the century past.

Bad to verse...

Midnight

When the last bell-struck
Hour of the night
Has flicked its tongue
Into the ear of sleep
We waken if we dare
To see the dark,
Reach out to fold
Its slender flanks
And kiss its cheek
And hide our face
Within its velvet seams
And give it thanks
That it has put an end
At last to dreams



Dawn

What is that pallor
On the brow of night?
Is darkness dying,
Infected by the light?
There must be a remedy
To cure this bright decay,
Quench this inflammation
And put an end to day



What is it that fringes
On the shore of this
Unsleeping night?
Flotsam
Jetsam
Remnants of intent.
Here a bottle there a page
Wood and cloth and
Tailings indistinct
Stained with oil
Choked with weed
Too obstinate to sink.
The sea beyond
Is vast and heaving
But I cannot resist the spell
Of this its leaving,
For every sodden portion
Tells a tale an epitaph
Of passengers and crew
Of motor and of sail
Of trash and treasure
Tumbled into blue
Horizoned deep
To find its resting here
In jumbled aimless sleep.
This bright glass is laughter
That broken frame despair
A book begun
But never read
A brush that busked
A new bride’s hair;
That which held such promise
Now lies fallow --
All that's sown in depth
Will die in shallow.
As we journey hence
From calm to storm
From breeze to rising wind
Our vessels leave behind
A spall from where we had begun:
A puzzle for another time and mind,
Another sleepless night awaiting sun.