Oedipally Wrecked

 

Charlie Kirk presumably has a biological father who molded him and his big head into whatever you would call him now, and I believe he is honestly straight married and isn't, in fact, closeted in any way. Also, he would play the mouth harp if the droopy-eyed SOB, lit from below as if telling a scary campfire story, in an angle reminiscent of his Georgia mug shot, depicted above, told him it was necessary to soothe an old man's slumbers.

(Get your mind out of the gutter--that's from the Bible, it is! )

There are big men, manly men, men who have never shed a tear in their lives, who want this apparition of bad-assedness in office, not because he is good at anything, but because of images like this. His followers can tell one another he wants vengeance and is a Bad Spanking Daddy because the "Russia Russia Russia thing" was his villain origin story, and they want him to be right. 

Like little kids who love their Daddies, they can't see he didn't need an origin story, he's just kind of generally dumb and bad. He wants to punish people for noticing what he did and "disrespecting him". 

In short, they want a motherfucker, and here he is. And this photo is looking pretty damn motherfuckerly. 

The Litter Box, Or: WTF is Up With These Weirdos?

 

The Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota repeated last week a bizarre hoax claim which has been debunked that children are being allowed to use litter boxes in schools https://t.co/cgxDpN1Lo7

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 3, 2022

I know this is really far down on the list of story priorities, except it isn't really, not when Pizzagate morphed into Q and wankers are trying to storm libraries because gay people are reading stories while dressing in colorful costumes. 

So, when a handful of people try to tell a tale of kids using litter boxes in schools because they "identify" as an animal, wow.  These rubes are actually running for office. I'm not 100% on this, but I think the litter box thing was operant in a recent post of Matt Schlapp of CPAC when he began: 

"We go in the toilets and we believe God creates boys and girls and guns are legal and murders are rare."

In Kansas, they go in the toilets: in some weird dystopian metropolis, there are kids with bunny ears dropping their pellets in a sandbox set up in the gender neutral lavatory. 

Can real people think this is even a thing? That the sanitary concerns would not be something any reasonable institution would balk at? That parents whose children did their business outside of regular indoor plumbing would not be seeking psychiatric help?  

Public Lion, Private Mutton

 

The side-by-side comparison of Josh Hawley showing a power fist to the 1/6 protesters and later his madcap, long-legged flight from the same folks, is perhaps as genius a representation of the performative "tough guy" attitude of Trump World as you could want to see. It shouldn't be forgotten that Hawley was the first US Senator out of the gate indicating that he would protest the certification of Biden's election, which at the time struck me as a pure cynical stunt bound for tears. 

But it also struck me that Hawley was far from the only one who would have been likely to do such a thing, because being a massive troll is the rage (literally) in GOP politics. Whether it's dressing up one's finest Army/Navy store gear to go watch immigrants at the border and take a goofy little boat ride or taking holiday family photographs with everyone from the pater familias on down kitted out for a replay of Ruby Ridge or the Waco stand-off, signifying militancy and even the desire to overthrow the government is treated as quite normal. 

It's what they've pulled the discourse down to. Take the endless 2nd Amendment signifying about citizens taking up arms against their own government (you know, the government that our elected officials are representatives of) that Rep. Jamie Raskin had to patiently explain was...well, horseshit. 

And of course, a lot of these gunslingers just want to get strapped up so they can feel safe at the Chipotle or to menace random POCs or as a form of conspicuous consumption. Overthrowing the government might be something they vaguely support, but not in a whole life-disruption kind of way.

Hawley's shameless dash from the violent insurrectionists he definitely was insisting shortly thereafter were no such thing* can be compared to Steve Bannon's desire to "go medieval" regarding his "misdemeanor from Hell". Other than as a possible personal hygiene pledge, I'm not sure what he meant by that, but other than running his mouth after the hearing (where he was found guilty on both counts), it's hard to say what he means to do, other than possible appeal. 

But what's funny is his claim that it's the members of the 1/6 Committee that are "gutless" for not coming to his contempt hearing when he was the one who couldn't even be bothered to go to them, even to take the Fifth or flip them off or whatever actual confrontation could have been made. It's political theater--he's being performatively defiant, but it boils down to name-calling. 

It's possible that it's Bannon who has the best grasp of this ethos in his grubby way--after all, he made a bit of money off of homo ludens, He knows very well that people will pay real money for fake things because they love the thrill of sport and the sense of getting over. They will pay money for a wall that doesn't materialize. They'll wear tricorn hats and knickers and talk up a game about how they want to storm the castle. Shit. they will even sit in a medieval monastery (maybe) and train to be New World Order Knights.  It's all an amazing LARP--

It's just one where people can die. Trump World people have been living a fantasy. They still want to run away from the real world results. They swarmed behind Trump like sheep--but it's beginning to smell like mutton in here. 

*UPDATE: Oh my word, I totally forgot this chiclet-head had written in favor of Timothy McVeigh and the militia movement when he was a little 15-year-old spud. He learned exactly not one grown-up thing in the interim. Not one. 

Jesus, Guns, Babies, and American Exceptionalism

 

Rep Brian Babin (R-TX): "The United States of America has always had guns. It's our history. We were built on the Judeo-Christian foundation and with guns" pic.twitter.com/vldB0ODaS7

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) May 25, 2022

When Senator Ted Cruz got visibly disturbed during an interview and walked away after the words "American Exceptionalism" were spoken, something snapped into frame for me:  so much of American history seems to assume our current status in the world is the result of faith and superior firepower. The idea of the gun as a sacral part of our national religion isn't really just a metaphor for some of us--it is reality. 

The religious right has long suggested that if "they" (a tyrannical leftist, probably godless Communist, government) come to take the guns away, the Bibles are next. It always sounded like fear-mongering to me of the typical "Red Scare" tropes, but it also resonated as tangentially white supremacist to me because gun-grabbing was the impetus of the uprising in the neo-Nazi classic The Turner Diaries. I'm starting to see it, though, as an artifact of our founding myths, and it defines the divide in our politics--what makes the US unique or great? Are we a creedal nation or a story of blood and soil? And was any of this especially ordained by God? 

Leave it to the "Jesus, Guns, Babies" lady for clarifying this for me--even though she lost her bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination (or did she? Mike Lindell is asking, so, uh, there's that). The quick capsule review of American history that a lot of people seem to have absorbed goes a little something like this: 

Christopher Columbus discovered the promised land in 1492, then the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock to form a shining city on a hill, so America overthrew British tyranny, had a civil war over states rights, freed the slaves, conquered the West (by killing most of the people previously living there) and then kicked everyone's ass in WW2 because we have nukes now, so thank you Jesus and Smith & Wesson. 

          And they called it manifest destiny. And it was good.

I may be exaggerating, but I don't think I'm off by that much. This is why CRT and the 1619 Project have set the usual suspects off--it challenges their post-Columbian chapters of the American Bible. It's like arguing against creationism.  It fiddles with a worldview where American primacy is founded in freedom and God has always been on our side. They don't see the past is existing outside of the formalized, handed-down from Mount Rushmore version*, and then continue to operate as if might made right. 

And that's where the guns come in. The iron rod is how the faithful Americans earn their New Canaan. The land is purified in blood, because we're in times of tribulation. Wars. Rumors of wars. Pestilence. Famine. You know. Same shit, different century. So you have to be morally and militarily prepared. 

And how do the people in the Church of American Exceptionalism mentally cope with the violence? It's supposed to happen.  It's the Abrahamic sacrifice to show fidelity in order to get that which has been promised. The Lord provided a sheep for the holocaust--and it's hopefully other people's babies. 

That sacrifice is supposed to make us exceptional and give us the freest and most prosperous country on earth. It's why people all over the world want to come here, after all, whether we want them to or not.

The Fall of Icarus

 

I've been thinking about one of my favorite poems, lately:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree....

 because suffering in the sense of grave and unmistakable tragedy has struck with alarming regularity. Of course, there's COVID-19, which has become the fatal backdrop, our mise en scene. But recently, a small town in Canada suffered a heat dome for several days, enduring temperatures wildly uncommon to that area, and basically spontaneously combusted. In Europe, massive flooding events have occurred, causing the loss of lives and previously unimaginable damage. In Florida, we have witnessed a residential building fall in the night, where residents went to sleep never suspecting the terrible changes to come.  (Sinkholes are so common to this area that I tend to assume either dramatic subsidence or building that didn't meet the requirements of the environment the building was sitting in.)

Our world is changing, and tragedy related to climate is becoming a norm,  And yet it stays, in some peculiar sense, a tragedy taking place as if always elsewhere and elsewhen. Faith might be part of the reason why--whether to laugh or cry about that, I can not say.  

I think the ancients knew the better part of the cause--hubris. Like the fall of  Icarus, tragedy befalls people when the protagonist (all of us) can not take the good advice of others and do sensible things, can not hear the warnings and portents of our Daedalus, but fall prey to a fatal flaw. We soar on technological wings, but can't moderate and bristle at the idea of accepting nature's limits. We are fucked and fall, hard, limbs thrashing into the drink. 

But it needn't be that way. Daedalus understood the dangers and as he flew, he did not fall. Also, I think of another case so similar--that of Phaethon driving the fiery chariot of Helios across the sky, and losing control (a metaphor for climate change if I ever heard one). His father had warned him, but this was because he was all too familiar with the rigors of the diurnal journey.

It's not that living with technology and doing it well and without further harm to environment can't be done, it's just that it has to be done skillfully and mindfully. We can survive as a species, but only if we pull our heads out of our asses. We need to grow up and be responsible and ever so careful. In the Anthropocene, we need to become the fathers and mothers, the good stewards, of the planet. 

Otherwise, we fail.

The Lord of Misrule

#CPAC #AmericaUncancelled pic.twitter.com/mVqBuF2blY

— William Turton (@WilliamTurton) February 26, 2021

The appearance of Donald Trump in effigy as a brazen figure (he sure is brazen!) has been likened to a Golden Calf as a description of his idol status within current conservatism and the irony that a largely Christian group has apparently turned to the worship of Trump as a cult figure. And I'm not arguing that it's not! But the image here might best be referred to in terms of "a troll" . 

The depiction isn't particularly flattering, and the flag-themed shorts and flip-flops are clearly comical. This is the equivalent of a Mardi Gras float, not necessarily an object of veneration. But you can see the idea--"They think we are a cult, but we can laugh about being a cult. It's silly!" The way some people speak of Trump as an "Emperor God", but like, ironically, man.

So it's kind of a joke. Well, it is and it isn't. I've thought a bit about the figure of what Trump means and especially how it relates to gatherings like his rallies and CPAC. He's not intended to be a genuine leader in the "doing things that matter" sense (people like Mitch McConnell do those things). His job is one of mascot. He's a modern conservative brand spokesperson. As such, he can afford to be, not a ruler (he works better as a figure out of power, anyway, for the sake of grievance) but a Lord of Misrule.

And this is the weekend of his feast. CPACchannalia. It's the festival of the Turning Point of tables and the saying of things that aren't so. There will, of course, be funds raised for the Guy and the promise of fireworks.

(I think, however, one should also recall, and why should we not, that Trump's mythos now contains its own Gunpowder Plot). 

I'm just not sure if any of them have read Frazer. Or even have entertained the notion that every party has an end.

The Gift of The Wiseguy

This isn't a very nice prank, but it does have some seasonal appropriateness:

A man who appears to be the person who left a gift-wrapped box of horse manure outside the home of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Saturday spoke with AL.com via phone late Sunday evening, calling the incident an "act of political theater."

L.A. psychologist Robby Strong provided AL.com with convincing evidence that he is the man behind the now-infamous incident, which attracted the LAPD's bomb squad and other law enforcement personnel to Mnuchin's home in the city's Bel Air neighborhood.

He defended his decision to drop the box of manure - which he says he got from a horse-owning friend - off at Mnuchin's house as a "prank" aimed at raising the awareness of Americans about the idea that "Republicans have done nothing for the American worker" and other political topics.

"The thing I live by is a rule of transparency and I was exercising my First Amendment rights," Strong told AL.com. "A few years ago when [a Supreme Court ruling] said that corporations are persons and money equals free speech, that is so absurd and my rule of thumb is now that if corporations are free speech, then so is horses***t."

He also likened his act to that of the individual whose birthday we now celebrate, who became famously irate at the money changers who gouged regular folks in the name of religion.

It makes a certain kind of timely poetic sense--if this tax bill was rushed to be signed for the holidays, then it is practically simple good manners to return a gift to the Trump Administration in kind. And while we enjoy the benefits of a court ruling that labelled money as "speech", and then produced politicians who would only recognize their big money donors as their true constituency, how then are we to discern why boxes of poo or any other physical item of value, can't be speech, if it is used as a means to convey grievance to the effect that people in high places have forgotten the people who don't have dollars at their ready disposal, but can bestir great loads of shit?

And why not horseshit? For twenty years, we have known of the great good Christmas spirit of Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo, and for years before him, there was the Caga Tio of Catalan.  Christmas, lest ye forget, is based on the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which represented a turning of the tables where the rich and poor would change places and prank gifts were a part of the merry-making.

I rather hope, then, that Robby Strong is granted a little leniency for his high spirits .In fairness to the family Mnuchin, I do believe it would have been fairer had he spread it around, though. Surely there are many others who deserve something carbon-based, and not actually coal, in their stockings.

The Stress of Their Disregard

The reckoning we've been having over sexual harassment has been piling on names and stories of harassment and assault in a way that that can tend to enervate.  For some, it's a reminder of their own assault, harassment, or other abuse; for others, a discovery that the world is populated by too many abusive men entrusted with too much power over others' livelihoods; or maybe it's a mixture of both. It can be a shock to recognize the blind eye that has been turned to the abuse of others from people who considered themselves protected, or to come to terms with the degree that people with quite clear vision aided and covered up the exploitation and dismissal of the humanity of other people for their own personal reasons. 

It's a fucking lot to accept, although a lot of people who have been through it kind of already knew. The insult added to all this injury is the commentary of people who either haven't grasped the pain and waste of all this cultural sexual/sexist bullshit, or will happily lay the blame for all this at the feet of the victims. 

A lot of the handwringing has been about how the allegations against powerful men will now derail their careers and cast a pall over whatever work they've done--there's a better point to be made (as Caroline Framke at Vox has done) about how abusers have been gatekeepers that have hounded out and silenced good talented people from their fields. They could have brilliantly mentored them, building teams and encouraging fledgling enthusiasm, but chose to just be petty and treat them with a kind of disregard. I think of Charlie Rose, saying that he felt that he was "pursuing shared feelings". He, the celebrated interviewer--could not be bothered to ask the women what they felt? No--he disregarded them. Their feelings did not matter. The good, productive journalism they could have assisted in did not matter.

I feel the same sort of recognition regarding the allegations against Rep. John Conyers.  This employee was disregarded. The patterns of protection from his circle against the accuser's claims just seem too familiar to discount. Her ability to do her job was jeopardized by the very person she was working for. How can that be productive? Whatever good Rep. Conyers has done, I have to consider this sort of thing very seriously because it speaks to his effectiveness as a public servant. 

With the politicization of sexual harassment,  sexual abuse, and rape claims, the defenses are not a great look for any culture. We learn that Congress really has created a system where sexual malefactors never learn from their fuckups.  We learn that anti-gay activist Tony Perkins is okay with same-sex sexual harassment, if the perpetrator is also vocally anti-gay and in the process of gathering political power.  These are examples of disregard--people not caring who is harmed. 

In the defense of former Judge Roy Moore, the arguments go further: Pastor Flip Benham claims Roy Moore may have favored underage girls because older women were either married or tainted. It's disgustingly reminiscent of the abstinence lessons that compare a woman who has lost her virginity to chewed gum.  It disregards a woman's value as being about anything but what is between her legs. Pastor Earl Wise performs an astonishing act of victim-blaming, managing to cite the young girls being pursued as having asked for it and looking like they were 20 years old, anyway.  I would be interested to know if Pastor Wise has made this mistake about the age of young girls, himself, and whether he ever felt himself the prey of their "sweet dreams". 

What I don't hear in any of these arguments is any empathy for why these accusations are being made, or any acceptance that Moore may have behaved inappropriately at all. The accusers are disregarded. But of all shocking defenses, I have to go to Stephen Moore--who equated Roy Moore's underage predation with...being pro-choice.  Of all the nonsensical claims that could be made his has the worst math. Both the issues of reproductive choice and not getting raped rely on a respect for bodily autonomy and the world where support for reproductive liberty equals child molestation only exists where one divides both sides by the proposition that women have no rights that a man need respect.  This is horrific. Women, their right to and ownership of their bodies, are disregarded. For the sake, as near as I can tell, of tax cuts. 

And of course, President Trump likes Moore too. And he would.

This is the disregard that stresses us; the claims that we are liars when we talk about our abuse, or that our abuse doesn't matter because we are taking things the wrong way. This is the narrative that we don't know what is best for us, and the lie that our careers are only made possible by support of "great men". This is the dismissal of children's innocence. This is the blame that falls on victims. This is sexism and class war.   This is religion reinforcing a cultural crime. 

And while I hate it all, I am glad we are finally airing it out, even though there will be lies, and bullshit, and tears all around. Because too many people have been disregarded and we need to stop and recognize we all benefit when we all can live our potential. 

The above scene is Bernini's Apollo and Daphne. Daphne was a nymph pursued by Apollo who chose to be a tree rather than succumb to his advances. Things happen in mythology for reasons.  The title of this post is a call-back to the novel by Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard. Who got his title from here. 

This isn't Art, and Not a Good Point

I guess, arguendo, different people will have different ideas about what constitutes "art". Art is something like porn was for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: You know it when you see it. This is a definition that doesn't satisfy, and as every good internetizen knows: YMMV. (For what it's worth, if you just put the search words "porn" and "potter" in a search engine now, you will be confronted with pages of Harry Potter porn links. Some of them might conceivably be at least a little artistic, porn and art not being mutually exclusive.) But I think the standard where an image of the red-headed comedian holding aloft a fake-blood-covered Donald Trump mask in an imitation of a beheading falls a bit short of art, and seems a bit more like political porn.

There is a stuffiness about discussing "redeeming social value". Art isn't always redemptive--it can sometimes be cynical and stark as all hell. But points have to be given on the basis of whether a piece effectively conveys what was intended--and I can't say that this does. The "Trump" imagined by Kathy Griffin's pose is, perhaps, a gorgon:

Or a dragon or a giant or a lamia or any other sort of beast that can be beheaded in a legend without our considering that entity as human, but fully monstrous. In a profession where targets are "roasted", audiences are "killed", and failing acts "bomb", this over-the-top symbolism might make sense: It was comedy that killed the beast. (After the tagline of most renditions of King Kong--substituting "comedy" for "beauty".  Contra Keats, what is beautiful is not always true, but comedy usually works because of a kernel of truth. Truth, reality, is the anti-matter to a lying regime. But it only works if the joke doesn't need to be bloody explained.)

We don't live in such times where we are dealing with mythological creatures in a way where an audience accepts legend as our referent. Donald Trump is, whatever his faults, a human man, and the worst thing we can say about his policies is that they are centered in dehumanizing others: criminalizing immigrants, privileging some religions over others, encouraging punch-down violence. Where, then, is the sense in dehumanizing him, and making violence a matter of smirking exultation?

It was misguided, and not supported by most liberals, and Griffin herself has now apologized. As a bad bit of art that should be and was rubbished, that should be that. And yet we now have a counter-example to whatever violent image fuckery we on the left mean to decry-- "But Kathy Griffin". This is absurd, and completely expected.

It should not take the sting out of factual claims about what is happening on the right, however. The gorgon's head was never meant to shock us liberals, you know. Attention-sponge and thirsty-comedian Kathy Griffin was pushing RW buttons. And I would be afraid to wade in into her social media mentions right now, because that woman is probably getting cause to call the authorities--and that? Is as well worth talking about as her satire-misfire. I believe she intended no threat (does anyone seriously think even a D-list celeb is going to be a fence-jumper?) and is probably just being nearly Ted Nugent-levels of shit-talking stupid.

But if you come to "But Kathy Griffin" at me, I will "but BLM" forever. Or "but queer-bashing" forever. Or "but Portland" forever.  Because a ham-fisted visual message isn't the same thing as actual physical violence, any more than eating a menu is just as good as eating a sandwich. And while Griffin's message was botched, she wasn't actually trying to get anyone killed.

Medusa Freezes Men With her Face for a Reason

Sometimes I click on a link knowing it will enrage me--I do it anyway, because, hey, mad happens. So when confronted with a Rawstory title that says "Christian website: Don’t look at your wife’s face during sex to enjoy it even when she resists" I read and wonder. The upshot of the story is that a Christian website encourages women to always accept their spouse's sexual entreaties, and that men should press on, and not look at the woman's afflicted face so they can finish the job because her sorrow at being raped by her life-partner is her own damn sin:

“I know you love your wife, most men love their wives. But sin is ugly,” the writer remarked. “Your beautiful bride’s face becomes ugly during this sinful time that she is grudgingly giving you sex as she grimaces wanting you to ‘just hurry up and get it over with’.”

“So like the men who could not look at Medusa’s face otherwise they would be killed, realize that if you look on your wife’s face when she is displaying a sinful attitude toward sex it will kill your sexual pleasure and may actually make it much more difficult for you to achieve the physical connection and release that you need,” he concluded. “Sometimes we have to work around the sinful behavior of our wives and this will be one of those times.”

Maybe this sort of Christian should seriously consider asking their wives to wear a burqa to bed. Better yet, instead of a woman, they should fuck an empty burqa, since they don't consider women to be human beings with feelings they have any need to respect. (By the way, Donald, if you never wanted to have a bad hair day--the Burqa awaits you, too.)

But this isn't an unusual far-right opinion--Phyllis Schlafly certainly has never considered marital rape to be a problem that exists in the real world. She is ready to surrender it all for the D, I see, 'kay? And Michelle Dugger gives the extra-spicy advice to "always be available."

Roko's Basilisk & Pascal's Wager

Slate Magazine gave me some Food for Thought with a "Downworthy"-ish title:

The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time.

Dare I click?  (Duh, of course I did.)

Was it terrifying? (Well, no, it's a cybernetic version of Pascal's Wager, which should occur to most well-read people.)

Here at Strangely Blogged, I try to be pretty cool about spooky thought-experiments. (Right now I'm reading a really chill book by Brad Warner titled There Is No God and He Is Always With You which is helping reambiguate my relationship with That in Which I do Not Believe, Whether it Exists or Not.) But when my reading makes me wonder if there is good cause for a full-on freaking-out, well--I don't. I'm not sure how I missed this discussion at Stross' blog, but I get the basic idea of why this might provoke a crisis of consciousness for the cyber-inclined: living with the idea for so long that an information Omega Point might create an equivalent of the Christian Heaven, long after liberal theology has dispensed with the concept of a literal Hell, getting back to the idea of a material Hell (or material-enough for a simulated You, which you don't have a choice about) created by a potential superintelligence , one might be shocked to think that consequences for Thought Crimes might be inescapable.

The best system of living, whether one is subject to a computer simulation, the whims of a deity outside of time and space, or nothing at all, seems to be to just do your best. You can't know yourself for sure if you're really pissing off some God, or some evil computer, because most people aren't even aware that they piss off customer service reps, retail clerks, their co-workers. Start with friends, family, and your waitstaff, if you want to know how to be "good". Do them right. Work your way out. Be aware.

In Putin's Russia, Games Play You

I'm not much for watching sports in general for whatever reason, but I am a known watcher of clusterfuckery, and of that, Sochi thus far promises to be chock-full. I get it, of course, that Russia basically had to create a humongous infrastructure to accommodate games of an Olympic scale, but the missing bits are pretty surprising--and things like missing manholes covers are outright hazardous (ditto "dangerous face water").

It makes you think--how sad would it be for an athlete to train and work hard to make it to the Olympic Games, and then wipe out on a bit of sidewalk that terminated abruptly or get dropped by a broken elevator?  Woof, what a mess.

Review of Barbara G. Walker's "Man Made God"*

I was reading Barbara G. Walker's Man Made God in the car on a long drive (with my spouse at the wheel) to a family reunion out in the deep boonies of Central PA. I considered slipping it into my massive purse to whip out if I could tear myself away to sit on some swings or at a rock by the pond at the campground where the family was having our to-do, or if I was feeling exceptionally anti-social, I might even consider reading in front of people. (I have actually done such things in public, in what I hope wasn't seen as too demonstratively a rejection of further socializing. But damn, I have been known to get bored with small talk.)

But were I to get caught with this particular book, I'd have a little explaining to do if anyone were to inquire regarding the peculiar title: Man Made God. It could be taken a few ways. God is a construct of human beings--a fable, for example. Or, rather, "man", the gender, specifically, created the god most people are familiar with in our western culture. Or, if one were seeing with the eyes of a more apologetic cast, one might see it as a play on a "man-made" god--a fiction negotiated by cultures that naturally falls short of the real (Platonic?) God that could probably actually exist if we were able to properly conceptualize He, She or It.

If I were asked what I was reading by distant family members most probably in good standing in the Catholic Church, my answer that the book was about how the Christian church and its god was a spectacular fraud, derived from older mythology, yet perverted to be especially totalitarian, murderous, and especially misogynistic, would both fall a little short of a proper explanation, and also make me a good candidate for getting my invitation lost on the next go-round. (I kept my book in my bag and managed to deal in small-talk not to terribly badly, with the help of adult beverages and the useful gambit of talking to people about their children.)

But I would not have been too far from right in describing the book that way--and Walker does, in well-researched detail, pile up the sins of the Christian Church by demonstrating the many ways in which it "borrows" from other cultures. (It is a patchwork that openly borrows from Zoroastrianism, the Near Eastern Baal-worship, from the cults of Attis and so on. Persons familiar with her very excellent reference book, The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths And Secrets, which I also highly recommend, will feel themselves on familiar ground. Although, Judaism, from which it is most particularly derived, has derivations from Egyptian and Babylonian mythology, which also crop up in the Christian mythos. And since Islam is derived in part from the Tanakh and Christianity--and also Persian myth to some degree--it's one crazy derivative thing. Whoever said there's nothing new under the sun was spot-on when it comes to religion.)

This book is an excellent take-down of Christianity. There are parts of it I have an issue with--the Inquisition and its numbers, specifically. If we have ascertained that the Church had its share of pious liars, it should present no wonder to us that, depending upon the source one uses, one gets spectacularly different numbers regarding the body count of the Inquisition. As a person who really did look into pagan and magickal traditions on my way to unbelief, the figure of nine million heretics is sometimes used (which might have included the Cathars, the Jews destroyed by the blood-libel, and I don't know who-all else.) Walker gives some figures, but I neither believe nor disbelieve them. The point isn't made by exactly how many people were tortured, or how many were burned or killed via other means. That it was done at all, and that those methods were as good as a textbook for repressive regimes is what is especially repellent. With the disclaimer that people carried out unspeakable acts against their fellow human beings in the name of God and thought these things were good--that, too, is an horrific point that doesn't exactly need a quantitative point to be qualitatively despicable.

I would recommend this book for people who aren't sure how to close the door on organized religion. It will do a number on your ability to sympathize with a history that is mendacious at best, and at worst, is catastrophic in its capacity to do wrong. I think this book especially might hold meaning for feminists, but the essential message, that religion is designed by people to restrict knowledge, freedom, and to create "others" who need to be treated as subhuman (women) or destroyed (heretic and freethinkers) is accessible to anyone.

I pretty strongly recommend it.


(* Atheist and political reviews will still be posted under Strangely Blogged.)