On Writing that #@%& Essay

We’ve passed the halfway point in the semester (wait…what?!), and your Final Essay is due soon (wait…WHAT?!). You’re starting to feel the burn…you have nothing to say…but you have to say something. The mere sight of a blank screen puts a knot in your gut and makes your palms sweat. You try to put it out of your mind; it’s not due yet, so maybe you’ll just procrastinate on it until—$#@% it’s due TONIGHT!!!1!@!! And then you’ll spend that last-minute panic attack hating yourself, convinced you completely deserve the F that you just know you’re going to get on this utter disaster that you didn’t even spell-check before submitting because holy crap it’s 11:59. Sound familiar? Yeah. Me too.

I’m not the world’s foremost composition-and-rhetoric expert—not by any stretch of the imagination—but I do have an MFA in writing, and I am a guy who sometimes writes 5,000-word essays for fun (yep, I’m a nerd). I’ve learned a few things in pursuit of that hobby that you may find helpful, so here’s some unsolicited advice.

1. Start early. Better yet, start now. If you don’t know what you’re going to write about yet, you won’t know what you’re going to write about at the last minute. The difference is that if you start it now, you have time to figure that out and you don’t have to do it in a panic. Also, the earlier you start writing on your essay, the earlier you’ll start thinking about it, and the longer it has to marinate in the back of your head. Not all of the writing process happens at the keyboard. Once you’ve started working on a project, it will be there running in the background while you’re doing other things, and that eureka moment is likely to come while you’re doing something completely unrelated. Walking to the cafeteria or driving to pick up your kids. As an example, this point came to me while I was cleaning my cat’s litter box (it’s also my third point #1).

2. Let It Suck. Your first draft is going to be bad. That’s okay. First drafts are always bad. We’ll get back to this later (and you’ll fix it before you turn it in), but for right now, just write. Just write. No matter how bad it is, if you’ve got something on the page, you’ve got something to fix. A blank page is just that: blank.

3. Keep It Small. You’re not going to write a successful 8-page essay on “imagery in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” Entire books have been written on that topic. Books. Plural. You might, however, get a successful essay out of that image that shows up in chapter 47, of her hair falling loose dangerously close to the grinding machinery of that steam-powered threshing machine. You might get a successful essay out of examining how that image works as a metaphor for the precarious position of a poor woman in Victorian England, and how that is one of Thomas Hardy’s dominant themes throughout the novel. Or you might choose to take a different approach to that same chapter and write about how the one person offering to take her away from that precarious life is her wealthy rapist. Either way, keep it focused on something small enough to manage in the space you’ve got. And eight pages may feel like a lot when you’re just sitting down to write it, but it’s really not all that much room. Remember, the opposite of focused writing is vague writing, and vague writing doesn’t tend to get the best grades.

4. If you know exactly what you’re going to write, you’re (most likely) wrong. I have seen far too many times when someone wrote a beautiful introduction to their essay, then proceeded to shoot themselves in the foot trying to stick with what they had written in that introduction. Writing projects have a way of getting away from us—of turning out differently than what we sat down to write—and the best way to deal with that is to expect it from the beginning. To that end…

5. Write your introduction last. Sometimes you’ll also see this phrased “write it backwards,” but I don’t like that because it’s not really accurate. In my experience it’s something more like this:

• a] Notes and rough ideas (see below);
• b] Rough body paragraphs;
• c] Essay structure/outline;
• d] Refined body paragraphs;
• e] Transitions between the paragraphs;
• f] Conclusion;
• g] Introduction.

Sometimes c and d can be reversed. Some people prefer to start with an outline; there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you remain flexible enough to rearrange your essay if it becomes necessary. This list also only talks about the first draft. Immediately after that, you’ll start reading through the whole essay for flow and continuity and language issues.

6. Start with notes. Use index cards. While you’re doing your research (or reading what you’re planning to analyze), write down the important stuff on index cards. And by “the important stuff” I mean both the relevant details you’re finding in your readings (quotes and such) and your own thoughts about your subject. Be sure to jot down the relevant sources (the bibliographic data) and page numbers on those cards so you can go back to your sources later, and so you have that information when it’s time to write your works-cited list.

Index cards have two primary advantages: one, they force you to keep it short, and two, you can easily shuffle them around while you’re figuring out your structure. Also, according to cognitive scientists, handwriting notes (as opposed to typing them) tends to be better for learning and retention.

7. Write your body paragraphs as mini-essays. Each of your body paragraphs, as you get it closer to finished, should resemble a mini-essay detailing a specific element of your argument (e.g., why X-character or Y-event relates to your main topic). For each element, your goal is to introduce it, analyze what is significant about it, and conclude with why it is relevant to your greater argument.

8. Eschew the thesaurus. (See what I did there?) As a student, you’ve been exposed to a lot of overwritten material. It’s entirely possible you’ve even had teachers encourage you to mimic that sort of writing, because it’s “what academic writing is supposed to look like” (or some such nonsense). Don’t. Seriously. Just don’t. The best writing is simple and direct, and gets its point across without a lot of effort. I like to say write like you’re explaining it to a smart high-school student. Ineloquent applications of unnecessarily obfuscatory verbiage and etymologically arcane esoterica render the trajectory of any presented suppositions virtually impossible to disambiguate. That’s not good writing.

9. Be prepared to rearrange at any point. As you get your body paragraphs more refined, you may find that the most logical progression of your argument isn’t exactly what you expected it to be. Usually it’s going to follow the organization of the book you’re discussing (e.g., chronologically from beginning to end), but sometimes a better structure will present itself. Sometimes you may discover that the most interesting thing showing up in your body paragraphs isn’t even what you planned to write about. Sometimes your intended conclusion will totally implode (I’ve had this happen on a major assignment, and it’s really disturbing). That’s why I put outline/structure so late in the process up there, with the option to move it even later, because your ideal structure isn’t always clear from the beginning.

10. Be prepared for your conclusion to change. Obviously, if your body paragraphs start leading to a conclusion other than what you thought you were going to write, then you need to be ready to adapt your conclusion accordingly. When this happens—and it does happen—it’s a lot less painful if you haven’t already committed yourself to a specific conclusion.

11. Now that you have written your conclusion, go back and write your intro. Because it would have been pretty hard to write an effective introduction to an essay when you had no idea what it was going to end up talking about, but now that you know what’s going on inside, you know how to set your reader up to ride along with you.

Pro tip: In the introduction, when you mention the things you’re going to talk about in your essay, list them in the same order that they’re going to show up. If your introduction says you’ll be discussing how Tess was wronged by John Durbeyfield, Alec d’Urberville, and Angel Clare, your readers will expect you to discuss the characters in that order.

12. Proofread! Proofread! Proofread! Read it through slowly, putting your finger under each word—maybe even saying each word, or mouthing it—and stop at the end of each sentence, to make sure that sentence really saying exactly what you want it to say. When you think you’re getting close to finished, read the whole essay aloud to someone. Or at the very least record yourself reading it and listen to that recording. If you can, have someone else read it back to you. These exercises will help you discover the rough spots, such as awkward language, or unclear analysis, or non-sequitur transitions. Depending on how seriously you took that “Let It Suck” advice up above, this stage may involve several passes (even dozens of passes) as you take the raw material of your rough draft and mold it into a finished essay.

13. When you’re satisfied that it’s finished, it’s (most likely) not. First-year undergrads tend to start with this notion that you can hammer out a good essay in a couple of hours, in the middle of the night after staying out too late with your friends, before it’s due in the morning. More advanced students realize that it takes more time than that, and more preparation. Graduate students often spend most of the semester working on the final essay for that 600-level class (or sometimes that essay is the cumulative result of a semester-long project). Graduate-degree candidates work for multiple semesters under the supervision of thesis advisors, who read every word critically, usually through several revisions. Professional-grade writers go through numerous revisions (often dozens of them), first on their own, then with feedback from colleagues, then with feedback from agents or editors, and finally with feedback from publishers. When you read that story or essay that is just sublimely written, you can rest assured that the first draft looked absolutely nothing like what you’re reading. In fact, likely as not, the first draft looked kinda hopeless.

I say all this not to discourage you as you’re writing your essays, but to emphasize that, as with any creative endeavor, writing is never—ever—a straight-through, beginning-to-end process. It’s more of a process of continuous growth and refinement. The more open you are to that process from the beginning, the more you open yourself to the possibilities of what you can create.

—Jay Parr

The Devout Agnostic

by Jay Parr

I am a devout agnostic. No, that is not an oxymoron.

After considerable searching, study, and introspection—and, having been raised in the Protestant Christian tradition, no small amount of internal conflict—I have come to rest in the belief that any entity we might reasonably call God would be so alien to our limited human perceptions as to be utterly, and irreconcilably, beyond human comprehension.

Gah. So convoluted. Even after something like a dozen revisions.

Let me try to strip that down. To wit: Humankind cannot understand God. We cannot remotely define God. We wouldn’t know God if it/he/she/they slapped us square in the face. In the end, we cannot say with any certainty that anything we might reasonably call God actually exists. Nor can we say with any certainty that something we might reasonably call God does not exist.

To horribly misquote some theologian (or philosopher?) I seem to remember encountering somewhere along the way, humankind can no more understand God than a grasshopper can understand number theory.

I mean, we can’t even wrap our puny little heads around the immensity of the known physical realm (or Creation, if you prefer) without creating incredibly simplistic, and only vaguely representative models.

Let’s look at some of the things we do know. With only a handful of notable exceptions the entirety of human history has happened on, or very near to, the fragile skin of a tiny drop of semi-molten slag just under 8,000 miles across. That’s just under 25,000 miles around, or a little more than two weeks’ driving at 70 mph, if you went non-stop without stopping for meals or potty breaks.

Even that tiny drop of slag can feel pretty vast to our little human perceptions, as anyone can tell you who has been on a highway in the American West and looked out at that little N-scale model train over there and realized that, no, it’s actually a full-sized freight train, with engines sixteen feet tall and seventy feet long and as heavy as five loaded-down tractor-trailers. And even though you can plainly see the entire length of that little train, it’s actually over a mile long, and creeping along at seventy-five miles per hour. Oh, and that mountain range just over there in the background? Yeah, it’s three hours away.

If we can’t comprehend the majesty of our own landscape, on this thin skin on this tiny droplet of molten slag we call home, how can we imagine the distance even to our own moon?

If you look at this image, in which the moon is depicted as a single pixel, it is 110 pixels to the earth (which itself is only three pixels wide, partially occupying nine pixels). At this scale it would be about eighty-five times the width of that image before you got to the Sun. If you’re bored, click on the image and it will take you to what the author only-half-jokingly calls “a tediously accurate scale model of the solar system,” where you can scroll through endless screens of nothing as you make your way from the Sun to Pluto.

Beyond the Moon, we’re best off talking about distances in terms of the speed of light—as in, how long it takes a ray of light to travel there, cruising along at about 186,000 miles per second, or 670 million miles per hour.

On the scale of our drop of molten—er, Earth—light travels pretty fast. A beam of light can travel around to the opposite side of the Earth in about a fifteenth of a second. That’s why we can call that toll-free customer-service number and suddenly find ourselves talking to some poor soul who’s working through the night somewhere in Indonesia—which, for the record, is about as close as you can get to the exact opposite point on the planet without hiring a more expensive employee down in Perth.

That capacity for real-time communication just starts to break down when you get to the Moon. At that distance a beam of light, or a radio transmission, takes a little more than a second (about 1.28 seconds, to be more accurate). So the net result is about a two-and-a-half-second lag round-trip. Enough to be noticeable, but it has rarely been a problem, as—in all of human history—only two dozen people have ever been that far away from the Earth (all of them white American men, by the way), and no one has been any further. By the way, that image of the Earthrise up there? That was taken with a very long lens, and then I cropped the image even more for this post, so it looks a lot closer than it really is.

Beyond the Moon, the distances get noticeable even at the speed of light, as the Sun is about four hundred times further away than the Moon. Going back up to that scale model in which the Earth is three pixels wide, if the Earth and Moon are about an inch and a half apart on your typical computer screen, the Sun would be about the size of a softball and fifty feet away (so for a handy visual, the Sun is a softball at the front of a semi trailer and the Earth is a grain of sand back by the doors). Traveling at 186,000 miles per second, light from the Sun makes the 93-million-mile trip to Earth in about eight minutes and twenty seconds.

Even with all that empty space, our three pixels against the fifty feet to the Sun, we’re still right next door. The same sunlight that reaches us in eight minutes takes four hours and ten minutes to reach Neptune, the outermost planet of our solar system since poor Pluto got demoted. If you’re still looking at that scale model, where we’re three pixels wide and the sun is a softball fifty feet away, that puts Neptune about a quarter of a mile away and the size of a small bead. And that’s still within our home solar system. Well within our solar system if you include all the smaller dwarf planets, asteroids, and rubble of the Kuiper Belt (including Pluto, which we now call a dwarf planet).

To get to our next stellar neighbor at this scale, we start out at Ocean Isle Beach, find the grain of sand that is Earth (and the grain of very fine sand an inch and a half away that is the Moon), drop that softball fifty feet away to represent the Sun, lay out a few more grains of sand and a few little beads between the Atlantic Ocean and the first dune to represent the rest of the major bodies in our solar system, and then we drive all the way across the United States, the entire length of I-40 and beyond, jogging down the I-15 (“the” because we’re on the west coast now) to pick up the I-10 through Los Angeles and over to the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica, where we walk out to the end of the Santa Monica Pier and set down a golf ball to represent Proxima Centauri. And that’s just the star that’s right next door.

See what I’m getting at?

What’s even more mind-bending than the vast distances and vast emptiness of outer space, is that our universe is every bit as vast at the opposite end of the size spectrum. The screen you’re reading this on, the hand you’re scrolling with—even something as dense as a solid ingot of gold bullion—is something like 99.999999999% empty space (and that’s a conservative estimate). Take a glance at this comparison of our solar system against a gold atom, if both the Sun and the gold nucleus had a radius of one foot. You’ll see that the outermost electron in the gold atom would be more than twice the distance of Pluto.

And even though that nucleus looks kind of like a mulberry in this illustration, we now know that those protons and neutrons are, once again, something on the order of being their own solar systems compared to the quarks that constitute them. There’s enough wiggle room in there that at the density of a neutron star, our entire planet would be condensed to the size of a child’s marble. And for all we know, those quarks are made up of still tinier particles. We’re not even sure if they’re actually anything we would call solid matter or if they’re just some kind of highly-organized energy waves. In experiments, they kind of act like both.

This is not mysticism, folks. This is just physics.

The crux of all this is that, with our limited perception and our limited ability to comprehend vast scales, the universe is both orders of magnitude larger and orders of magnitude smaller than we can even begin to wrap our minds around. We live our lives at a very fixed scale, unable to even think about that which is much larger or much smaller than miles, feet, or fractions of an inch (say, within six or seven zeroes).

Those same limitations of scale apply in a very literal sense when we start talking about our perception of such things as the electromagnetic spectrum and the acoustic spectrum. Here’s an old chart of the electromagnetic spectrum from back in the mid-’40s. You can click on the image to expand it in a new tab.

If you look at about the two-thirds point on that spectrum you can see the narrow band that is visible light. We can see wavelengths from about 750 nanometers (400 terahertz) at the red end, to 380 nm (800 THz) at the blue end. In other words, the longest wavelength we can see is right at twice the length, or half the frequency, of the shortest wavelength we can see. If our hearing were so limited, we would only be able to hear one octave. Literally. One single octave.

We can feel some of the longer wavelengths as radiant heat, and some of the shorter wavelengths (or their aftereffects) as sunburn, but even all that is only three or four orders of magnitude—two or three zeroes—and if you look at that chart, you’ll see that it’s a logarithmic scale that spans twenty-seven orders of magnitude.

If we could see the longer wavelengths our car engines would glow and our brake rotors would glow and our bodies would glow, and trees and plants would glow blazing white in the sunlight. A little longer and all the radio towers would be bright lights from top to bottom, and the cell phone towers would have bright bars like fluorescent tubes at the tops of them, and there would be laser-bright satellites in the sky, and our cell phones would flicker and glow, and our computers, and our remotes, and our wireless ear buds, and all the ubiquitous little radios that are in almost everything anymore. It would look like some kind of surreal Christmas.

If we could see shorter wavelengths our clothing would be transparent, and our bodies would be translucent, and the night sky would look totally different. Shorter still and we could see bright quasi-stellar objects straight through the Earth. It would all be very disorienting.

Of course, the ability to perceive such a range of wavelengths would require different organs, once you got beyond the near-ultraviolet that some insects can see and the near-infrared that some snakes can see. And in the end, one might argue that our limited perception of the electromagnetic spectrum is just exactly what we’ve needed to survive this far.

I was going to do the same thing with the vastness of acoustic spectrum against the limitations of human hearing here, but I won’t get into it because acoustics is basically just a subset of fluid dynamics. What we hear as sound is things moving—pressure waves against our eardrums, to be precise—but similar theories can be applied from the gravitational interaction of galaxy clusters (on a time scale of eons) to the motion of molecules bumping into one another (on the order of microseconds), and you start getting into math that looks like this…

…and I’m an English major with a graduate degree in creative writing. That image could just as easily be a hoax, and I would be none the wiser. So let’s just leave it at this: There’s a whole lot we can’t hear, either.

We also know for a fact that time is not quite as linear as we would like to think. Einstein first theorized that space and time were related, and that movement through space would affect movement through time (though gravity also plays in there, just to complicate matters). We do just begin to see it on a practical level with our orbiting spacecraft. It’s not very big—the International Space Station will observe a differential of about one second over its decades-long lifespan—but our navigational satellites do have to adjust for it so your GPS doesn’t drive you to the wrong Starbucks.

Physicists theorize that time does much stranger things on the scale of the universe, and in some of the bizarre conditions that can be found. Time almost breaks down completely in a black hole, for instance. Stephen Hawking has posited (and other theoretical astrophysicists agree) that even if the expanding universe were to reverse course and start contracting, which has not been ruled out as a possibility, it would still be an expanding universe because at that point time would have also reversed itself. Or something like that; this is probably a hugely oversimplified layman’s reading of it. But still, to jump over to popular culture, specifically a television series floating somewhere between science fiction and fantasy, the Tenth Doctor probably said it best:

So far we’ve been talking about physical facts. When we get into how our brains process those facts, things become even more uncertain. We do know that of the information transmitted to our brains via the optic and auditory nerves, the vast majority of it is summarily thrown out without getting any cognitive attention at all. What our brains do process is, from the very beginning, distorted by filters and prejudices that we usually don’t even notice. It’s called conceptually-driven processing, and it has been a fundamental concept in both cognitive psychology and consumer-marketing research for decades (why yes, you should be afraid). Our perceptual set can heavily influence how we interpret what we see—and even what information we throw away to support our assumptions. I’m reminded of that old selective-attention test from a few years back:

There are other fun videos by the same folks on The Invisible Gorilla, but this is a pretty in-your-face example of how we can tune out things that our prejudices have deemed irrelevant, even if it’s a costume gorilla beating its chest right in the middle of the scene. As it turns out, we can only process a limited amount of sensory information in a given time (a small percentage of what’s coming in), so the very first thing our brains do is throw out most of it, before filling in the gaps with our own assumptions about how things should be.

As full of holes as our perception is, our memory process is even worse. We know that memory goes through several phases, from the most ephemeral, sensory memory, which is on the order of fractions of a second, to active memory, on the order of tens of seconds, to various iterations of long-term memory. At each stage, only a tiny portion of the information is selected and passed on to the next. And once something makes it through all those rounds of selection to make it into long-term memory, there is evidence in cognitive neuroscience that in order to retrieve those memories, we have to destroy them first. That’s right; the act of recalling a long-term memory back into active memory physically destroys it. That means that when you think about that dim memory from way back in your childhood (I’m lying on the living-room rug leafing through a volume of our off-brand encyclopedia while my mother works in the kitchen), you’re actually remembering the last time you remembered it. Because the last time you remembered it, you obliterated that memory in the process, and had to remember it all over again.

I’ve heard it said that if scientists ran the criminal-justice system, eyewitness testimony would be inadmissible in court. Given the things we know about perception and memory (especially in traumatic situations), that might not be such a bad idea.

Okay.

So far I have avoided the topic of religion itself. I’m about to change course, and I know that this is where I might write something that offends someone. So I want to start out with the disclaimer that what I’m writing here is only my opinion—only my experience—and I recognize that everyone’s religious journey is individual, unique, and deeply personal. I’m not here to convert anyone, and I’m not here to pooh-pooh anyone’s religious convictions. Neither am I here to be converted. I respect your right to believe what you believe and to practice your religion as you see fit…provided you respect my right to do the same. Having stated that…

Most of the world’s older religions started out as oral traditions. Long before being written down they had been handed down in storytelling, generation after generation after generation, mutating along the way, until what ends up inscribed in the sacred texts might be completely unrecognizable to the scribes’ great-great-grandparents. Written traditions are somewhat more stable, but until the advent of typography, every copy was still transcribed by hand, and subject to the interpretations, misinterpretations, and agendas of the scribes doing the copying.

Acts of translation are even worse. Translation is, by its very nature, an act of deciding what to privilege and what to sacrifice in the source text. I have experienced that process first-hand in my attempts to translate 14th-century English into 21st-century English. Same language, only 600 years later.

Every word is a decision: Do I try to preserve a particular nuance at the expense of the poetic meter of the phrase? Do I use two hundred words to convey the meaning that is packed into these twenty words? How do I explain this cultural reference that is meaningless to us, but would have been as familiar to the intended audience as we woulds find a Seinfeld reference? Can I go back to my translation ten years after the fact and change that word that seemed perfect at the time but that has since proven a nagging source of misinterpretation? Especially in the translation of sacred texts, where people will hang upon the interpretation of a single word, forgetting entirely that it’s just some translator’s best approximation. Wars have been fought over such things.

The Muslim world might have the best idea here, encouraging its faithful to learn and study their scriptures in Arabic rather than rely on hundreds of conflicting translations in different languages. Added bonus: You get a common language everyone can use.

But the thing is, even without the vagaries of translation, human language is—at best—a horribly imprecise tool. One person starts out with an idea in mind. That person approximates that idea as closely as they can manage, using the clumsy symbols that make up any given language—usually composing on the fly—and transmits that language to its intended recipient through some method, be it speech or writing or gestural sign language. The recipient listens to that sequence of sounds, or looks at that sequence of marks or gestures, and interprets them back into a series of symbolic ideas, assembling those ideas back together with the help of sundry contextual clues to approximate—hopefully—something resembling what the speaker had in mind.

It’s all fantastically imprecise—wristwatch repair with a sledgehammer—and when you add in the limitations of the listener’s perceptual set it’s obvious how a rhinoceros becomes a unicorn. I say “tree,” thinking of the huge oak in my neighbor’s back yard, but one reader pictures a spruce, another a dogwood, another a magnolia. My daughter points to the rosemary tree in our dining room, decorated with tinsel for the holidays. The mathematician who works in logic all day imagines data nodes arranged in a branching series of nonrecursive decisions. The genealogist sees a family history.

Humans are also infamously prone to hyperbole. Just ask your second cousin about that bass he had halfway in the boat last summer before it wriggled off the hook. They’re called fish stories for a reason. As an armchair scholar of medieval English literature, I can tell you that a lot of texts presented as history, with a straight face, bear reading with a healthy dose of skepticism. According to the 12th-century History of the Kings of Britain, that nation was founded when some guy named Brutus, who gets his authority by being the grandson of Aeneas (yeah, the one from Greek mythology), sailed up the Thames, defeated the handful of giants who were the sole inhabitants of the whole island, named the island after himself (i.e., Britain), and established the capital city he called New Troy, which would later be renamed London. Sounds legit.

In the beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain beheads the huge green man who has challenged him to a one-blow-for-one-blow duel, right there in front of the whole Arthurian court, but the man picks up his head, laughs at Gawain, hops back on his horse, and rides off. Granted, Gawain is presented as allegory rather than fact, but Beowulf is presented as fact, and he battles a monster underwater for hours, then kills a dragon when he’s in his seventies.

Heck, go back to ancient Greek literature and the humans and the gods routinely get into each other’s business, helping each other out, meddling in each other’s affairs, deceiving and coercing each other into to do things, getting caught up in petty jealousies, and launching wars out of spite or for personal gain. Sound familiar?

As for creation stories, there are almost as many of those as there are human civilizations. We have an entire three-credit course focused on creation stories, and even that only has space to address a small sampling of them.

Likewise, there are almost as many major religious texts as there are major civilizations. The Abrahamic traditions have their Bible and their Torah and their Qur’an and Hadith, and their various apocryphal texts, all of which are deemed sacrosanct and infallible by at least a portion of their adherents. The Buddhists have their Sutras. The Hindus have their Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita. The Shinto have their Kojiki. The Taoists have their Tao Te Ching. Dozens of other major world religions have their own texts, read and regarded as sacred by millions. The countless folk religions around the world have their countless oral traditions, some of which have been recorded and some of which have not.

Likewise, there are any number of religions that have arisen out of personality cults, sometimes following spiritual leaders of good faith, sometimes following con artists and charlatans. Sometimes those cults implode early. Sometimes they endure. Sometimes they become major world religions.

At certain levels of civilization, it is useful to have explanations for the unexplainable, symbolic interpretations of the natural world, narratives of origin and identity—even absolute codes of conduct. Religious traditions provide their adherents with comfort, moral guidance, a sense of belonging, and the foundations of strong communities.

However, religion has also been abused throughout much of recorded history, to justify keeping the wealthy and powerful in positions of wealth and power, to justify keeping major segments of society in positions of abject oppression, to justify vast wars, profitable to the most powerful and the least at risk, at the expense of the lives and livelihoods of countless less-powerful innocents.

A lot of good has been done in the name of religion. So has a lot of evil. And before we start talking about Islamist violence, let us remember that millions have been slaughtered in the name of Christianity. Almost every religion has caused bloodshed in its history, and every major religion has caused major bloodshed at some point in its history. Even the Buddhists. And there’s almost always some element of we’re-right-and-you’re-wrong very close to the center of that bloodshed.

But what if we’re all wrong?

If we can’t begin to comprehend the vastness of the universe or the emptiness of what we consider solid, if we can only sense a tiny portion of what is going on around us (and through us), and if we don’t even know for sure what we have actually seen with our own eyes or heard with our own ears, how can we even pretend to have any handle on an intelligence that might have designed all this? How can we even pretend to comprehend an intelligence that might even be all of this? I mean seriously, is there any way for us to empirically rule out the possibility that our entire known universe is part of some greater intelligence too vast for us to begin to comprehend? That in effect we are, and our entire reality is, a minuscule part of God itself?

In short, the more convinced you are that you understand the true nature of anything we might reasonably call God, the more convinced I am that you are probably mistaken.

I’m reminded of the bumper sticker I’ve seen: “If you’re living like there’s no God, you’d better be right!” (usually with too many exclamation points). And the debate I had with a street evangelist in which he tried to convince me that it was safer to believe in Jesus if there is no Christian God, than to be a non-believer if he does exist. Nothing like the threat of hell to bring ’em to Jesus. But to me, that kind of thinking is somewhere between a con job and extortion. You’re either asking me to believe you because you’re telling me bad things will happen to me if I don’t believe you, which is circular logic, or you’re threatening me. Either way, I’m not buying. I don’t believe my immortal soul will be either rewarded or punished in the afterlife, because when it comes right down to it, even if something we might reasonably call God does exist, I still don’t think we will experience anything we would recognize as an afterlife. Or that we possess anything we would recognize as an immortal soul.

To answer the incredulous question of a shocked high-school classmate, yes, I do believe that when we die, we more or less just wink out of existence. And no, I’m not particularly worried about that. I don’t think any of us is aware of it when it happens.

But if there’s no recognizable afterlife, no Heaven or Hell, no divine judgment, what’s to keep us from abandoning all morality and doing as we please—killing, raping, looting, destroying property and lives with impunity, without fear of divine retribution? Well, if there is no afterlife, if, upon our deaths, we cease to exist as an individual, a consciousness, an immortal soul, or anything we would recognize as an entity—which, as I have established here, I believe is likely the case—then it logically follows that this life, this flicker of a few years between the development of  consciousness in the womb and the disintegration of that consciousness at death, well, to put it bluntly, this is all we get. This life, and then we’re gone. There is no better life beyond. You can call it nihilism, but I think it’s quite the opposite.

Because if this one life here on Earth is all we get, ever, that means each life is unique, and finite, and precious, and irreplaceable, and in a very real sense, sacred. Belief in an idealized afterlife can be used—twisted, rather—to justify the killing of innocents. Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out. The implication being that if the slaughtered were in fact good people, they’re now in a better place. But if there is no afterlife, no divine judgment, no eternal reward or punishment, then the slaughtered innocent are nothing more than that: Slaughtered. Wiped out. Obliterated. Robbed of their one chance at this beautiful, awesome, awful, and by turns astounding and terrifying experience we call life.

Likewise, if this one life is all we get and someone is deliberately maimed—whether physically or emotionally, with human atrocities inflicted upon them or those they love—they don’t get some blissful afterlife to compensate for it. They spend the rest of their existence missing that hand, or having been raped, or knowing that their parents or siblings or children were killed because they happened to have been born in a certain place, or raised with a certain set of religious traditions, or have a certain color of skin or speak a certain language.

In other words, if this one life is all we get? We had damned well better use it wisely. Because we only get this one chance to sow as much beauty, as much joy, as much nurturing, and peace, and friendliness, and harmony as possible. We only get this one chance to embrace the new ideas and the new experiences. We only get this one chance to welcome the stranger, and to see the world through their eyes, if only for a moment. We only get this one chance to feed that hungry person, or to give our old coat to that person who is cold, or to offer compassion and solace and aid to that person who has seen their home, family, livelihood, and community destroyed by some impersonal natural disaster or some human evil such as war.

If I’m living like there’s no (recognizable) God, I’d better be doing all I can manage to make this world a more beautiful place, a happier place, a more peaceful place, a better place. For everyone.

As for a God who would see someone living like that, or at least giving it their best shot, and then condemn them to eternal damnation because they failed to do something like accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior? I’m sorry, but I cannot believe in a God like that. I might go so far as to say I flat-out refuse to believe in a God like that. I won’t go so far as to say that no God exists, because as I have said, I believe that we literally have no way of knowing, but I’m pretty sure any God that does exist isn’t that small-minded.

So anyway, happy holidays.

This is an examination of my own considered beliefs, and nothing more. I won’t try to convert you. I will thank you to extend me the same courtesy. You believe what you believe and I believe what I believe, and in all likelihood there is some point at which each of us believes the other is wrong. And that’s okay. If after reading this you find yourself compelled to pray for my salvation, I won’t be offended.

If you celebrate Christmas, I wish you a merry Christmas. If you celebrate the Solstice, I wish you a blessed Solstice. If you celebrate Hanukkah, I wish you (belatedly) a happy Hanukkah. If you celebrate Milad un Nabi, I wish you Eid Mubarak. If some sense of tradition and no small amount of marketing has led you to celebrate the celebratory season beyond any sense of religious conviction, you seem to be in good company. If you celebrate some parody of a holiday such as Giftmas, I wish you the love of family and friends, and some cool stuff to unwrap. If you celebrate Festivus, I wish you a productive airing of grievances. If you’re Dudeist, I abide. If you’re Pastafarian, I wish you noodly appendage and all that. If you don’t celebrate anything? We’re cool.

And if you’re still offended because I don’t happen to believe exactly the same thing you believe? Seriously? You need to get over it.

If Elected as Your President…

by Jay Parr

Well, it’s getting to be election season again. I’m sure you’ve noticed. Fox News hosted the first “debate” recently, and there are, what, seventeen candidates going after the Republican nomination now? At least on the Democratic side it’s mostly Hillary against that plucky underdog Bernie Sanders. That is, unless Uncle Joe decides to throw in his hat.

So I’ve decided it’s time for me to announce this: Under no circumstances will I be running for the office of President of the United States of America. No way. Just ain’t gonna happen. Or, to paraphrase that old Sherman dude, if nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve.

First of all I was an adventurous and nonconformist poor kid in my teens and twenties (okay, and thirties). There’s way too much dirt to be dug up on me. Sure, my response to most of it would be, “Yeah? And?” But no one wants their friends to end up becoming collateral damage, right?

That and I really have no stomach for the machinations of politics. I get a bellyful of politics and diplomacy just trying to advocate for our students, here in my bottom-rung administrative position for the BLS Program. If I had the entirety of Congress trying to stymie me at every turn (Every. Single. Turn.), I would probably either have a psychological breakdown or a psychotic break. Think, “Hammer-Wielding President Rampages Through Capital!”

Anyway, it’s still fun to think about what one would do as the “leader of the free world,” so why not?

I’m thinking my campaign slogan would have to be SHAMELESSLY LIBERAL. Something along those lines anyway, and I don’t think “What a Pinko” has quite the right tone for a presidential campaign.

Anyway, I hear you say. Enough of this navel gazing, what would you do?!

Universal Health Care: Single-payer style. You need a doctor, you go to a doctor. Doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire or homeless, a veteran or an artist. Every citizen, every veteran, every President, every billionaire, every college student, every crack addict, every member of Congress (yes, every member of Congress), has the same level of coverage. I am firmly of the opinion that for-profit health insurance and for-profit medicine are among our great societal evils, in that they profit handsomely on the misfortunes of others. So let’s take them out of the picture; you go get the medical care you need, and your taxes pay your doctors’ salaries. Yes, your taxes will go up. Yes, the doctors’ gross incomes will go down. You’ll still be paying less for your healthcare, and your doctor will still be making the same net income, maybe more, after our taxes also pay for her education. Which brings me to…

Access to Education: At any level. Free of charge. Any student who is doing reasonably well can attend any public university, in-state or out-of-state, to any level, absolutely free, with a stipend for living expenses, and can finish a BA, an MA, an MFA, an MDiv, a PhD, a JD, an EdD, or what have you, and walk away totally debt-free. Also paid for by our taxes. It’s not as expensive as you might think (a fraction of our annual spending on our recent wars, less than we spend incarcerating nonviolent offenders), and in the long run it is simply in the best interest of the nation to invest in an educated populace. Educated people contribute more to their communities and to their countries, both in tangible contributions to GDP and in intangible contributions to quality of life. When the reason a talented and motivated young person doesn’t pursue her PhD in engineering is because her family’s working-class background makes it financially untenable, it’s not just that child that suffers. It’s all of us. When the person who would have discovered the cure for diabetes is stuck flipping burgers in West Cowtown because the cost of education is prohibitive, it’s not just she and her family that suffers. It’s all of us. When the poor black kid from Baltimore starts his lifelong career in the corrections system at fourteen simply because he is presumed to be a criminal by everyone he meets, that’s one more life lost. One less chance for the world to have its next once-in-a-century artist, musician, scientist, statesman, what have you, and at a cost several times higher than providing him with a top-notch education.

Campaign Finance Reform: The billionaire Koch brothers want to eliminate all limits on campaign contributions so that the wealthiest citizens can basically buy the government. I want the opposite. At the very least I would like to see individual donations limited, and corporate donations and superpacs eliminated altogether. I even like the idea of going a step further and requiring candidates to campaign under uniform conditions (think of NASCAR’s equipment restrictions): Each candidate campaigns through a standardized system supported by tax dollars, through which their sponsored bills and voting records are shown, they have the opportunity to comment on their votes, and they can make positional statements. Advertising reminds voters to study the candidates, make their choices, and to vote on election day. And hey, let’s make election day a national holiday while we’re at it.

Automatic Voter Registration: Oregon just did it. We can do it nationally. Anyone who is eligible to vote is automatically registered upon receiving a driver’s license or state-issued identification card. Other mechanisms may also be explored to catch the people who have neither (e.g., Social Security rosters). The idea is that anyone who is eligible to vote is registered by default. To further encourage participation, it would be worth exploring a small stipend for each voter, to be issued when the ballot is cast at the polls (or when the absentee ballot is processed). For less than the costs of recent campaigns, each voter could be offered a few bucks to encourage her to actually show up and vote. Democracy simply doesn’t work when most of the population doesn’t bother to vote.

Eliminate the Political Party System: The party system mostly works to keep representatives in line with the wishes of an elite power base. Independent candidates are rarely elected (there are 2 in Congress, out of 535 members), and that leads anyone with political aspirations to align themselves with one major party or the other. From that moment they endure pressure to vote certain ways on specific items of legislation and even on whole issues. This pressure, in effect, means they can no longer represent their constituencies or even their own consciences, because they are beholden to represent their political party. When there are no sides of the aisle, no party affiliations, that pressure is removed and the candidate can run, and the representative can represent, according to their own convictions and the wishes of their constituencies.

Eliminate Corporate Lobbying: Another method by which a monied few exercise disproportionate influence on political outcomes. No energy-policy debate can be balanced when petroleum-industry interests are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into lobbying efforts. Likewise, no healthcare-policy debate can be balanced when insurance-industry interests are doing the same. Lobbying is a $3,250,000,000.00-per-year business. That’s over a thousand dollars a year for every single person in the country. Imagine what could be done with that money if it weren’t being used to skew political outcomes in the favor of the wealthiest individuals and corporations.

Restructure Congress: In 1789, there were about 30,000 constituents per representative in the House. Today, there are some 700,000 constituents per representative. That makes each seat more powerful and thus more subject to big-money influence. It’s time to go back to representatives who actually know their constituencies; in today’s world of teleconferencing and telecommuting, we could easily go back to one representative for every 30,000 constituents. Yes, that would make the House some 10,000 members. No, it would not be necessary to assemble a 10,000-member House of Representatives at the Capital building for every session of Congress. Each member could work from a local office in her district, accessible to her constituents. That office could be her designated location for voting and for filing legislative documents. Floor debate could be held with a combination of in-person and electronic attendance. A representative could serve her entire term, in fact, without ever setting foot inside the Beltway.

Eliminate the Senate: Having two senators per state skews senatorial representation in favor of the less populous states: Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Delaware, and Vermont each have only one representative in the House, and they each have two senators. California, with 53 representatives and a far greater population than those seven states added together, also has two senators. Further, having two senators who represent a large and wealthy state means those senators are far more likely to be influenced by big-money interests within their states (and maybe even from outside their states). Basically, senatorial representation is in no way representative of the populace, and is far too subject to big-money interests. It’s a throwback, a mimicry of the equally non-representative House of Lords. Let’s get rid of it.

Marriage Equality: Wait, I hear you say. The Supreme Court just did that. Well, not exactly, and not completely. Yes, Obergefell v. Hodges was definitely a step in the right direction, but a Supreme Court ruling is an interpretation of constitutional law. It is not, and should not be, federal law or even federal policy. The ruling also has its limitations, and I’m sure you’ve heard about folks agitating to resist, or ignore, or otherwise malign the Supreme Court’s authority in this matter. I’d like to put an end to all that.

The first order of business would be separation of church and state in the marriage business. A couple of ways this could be done: 1) Perform all legal marriages in the courts, as is done in Mexico, and let the spouses also have a non-legally-binding church ceremony if they’re so motivated; or 2) Separate the role of officiant (i.e., representative of the state in the matter of the marriage to be performed) from that of ordained clergy (i.e., representative of the church), and create a process by which a person can have herself authorized to officiate a wedding ceremony. Anyone would go through the same process, ordained clergy or otherwise, but it would be a separate process, a legal process, and the role of officiant would be understood to be (and literally) a legal role independent of any religious ordination.

On the matter of marriage equality, I would also go a step further than simply same-sex marriages. Marriage equality needs to be for everyone. As marriage is the legal codification of a committed relationship, and the legal status carries certain rights and benefits, the legal framework should accommodate any configuration of committed relationship. This means not only same-sex marriage, but nonbinary-gender relationships and consensual polygamy in any configuration (polygyny, polyandry, or other polyamorous arrangements). I don’t have this all sorted out, because I’m not a gender-studies person and the math can get complicated in a hurry, but the basic idea is that there is a status for spouse and one for co-spouse, and that the legal rights carry between anyone in that status (and yes, in theory, one could be in more than one multiple marriage, with branching relationships of co-spouses in either direction). My one caveat would be that all parties in the marriage would be required to sign the license to add a new member.

A Legal Third Gender: Here are the facts: Not all people identify as the gender they are assigned at birth. Not all people identify as either gender. Not all people even fit into binary gender categories at birth (i.e., intersex). There needs to be a legal gender category for people who don’t fit into that binary. I like “nonbinary” as a catch-all term, myself (“other” is, after all, quite literally othering). And yes, there are countless subdivisions of nonbinary gender, but in the end it’s a small enough population that I’m inclined to think one catch-all category is sufficient for most legal purposes (I’m talking driver’s licenses and the like) . Of course, finer distinctions can be made where they’re called for, but any legal document that notes gender needs to have a nonbinary option.

End Mass Incarceration: We love to call ourselves the “land of the free,” and yet we have an embarrassing percentage of our population incarcerated, most of them minorities, and most of them for nonviolent crimes. Zero-tolerance drug laws, three-strikes policies, and other hardline legislation mean a lot of people are serving years- and decades-long sentences over petty lifestyle offenses and what I like to call crimes of poverty. Oh, and it costs us a ridiculous amount of money. As in, enough money to make college free for every student in the country. Justice would be better served, and in the long run it would cost us a lot less money, if the majority of those prisoners had their sentences lifted. Of course, amnesty isn’t quite that simple, as most of those prisoners, by virtue of their disadvantages from having been prisoners, will need financial support and career rehabilitation to help them get reestablished in society. In the short term, implementing such an amnesty policy would be herculean, but it shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. So here are some thoughts on how to correct the situation in the long term.

End the War on Drugs: The War on Drugs hasn’t done a whole lot to reduce drug use in this country. Most of what it has accomplished (aside from creating an enormous prison population) is to drive the black market for drugs further underground and make it more violent. Prohibition taught us that illegal distribution creates violent gangs, whereas legal distribution creates a peaceful business culture. It also taught us that, all moral objections aside, where there is demand for a product or a service, someone will provide a supply. The demand for weed isn’t going away. Neither, unfortunately, is the demand for harder drugs such as heroin, cocaine, crack, meth, et cetera. The solution is not to attack the suppliers of those demands with militarized law-enforcement agencies. All that does is create a militarized black market. Instead, we should allow businesses to create legal, taxed, and regulated supply streams, at prices that can out-compete the black markets, and let the economy run its course (how often do we see black-market liquor these days?). Instead of sinking revenue into futile attempts at enforcement, we generate tax revenue, which we in turn use to discourage the more violent elements of the market, and to provide quality rehabilitation services to those who need them.

Decriminalize Prostitution: Most people who engage in prostitution do so because they have little choice. We must create a legal system which protects those sex workers from further harm and recognizes their vulnerability to abuse, instead of criminalizing them for engaging in what may well have been a last resort for survival. Sex workers should be able to come to law-enforcement agencies knowing that they will find sympathetic advocates. The current reality is that most sex workers find themselves unprotected, in lawless conditions, because approaching law-enforcement agencies will most likely result in slut-shaming and denigration at best, and arrest and imprisonment at worst.

Decriminalize Poverty: Let’s face it, in the final analysis the vast majority of people in prison are there because they are poor (and minorities). The wealthy Duke student gets busted with ten grams of weed, his family knows a good lawyer who keeps the kid out of jail, and maybe successfully argues to have the arrest expunged because, you know, wouldn’t want to ruin the kid’s career potential over a youthful indiscretion. The poor black kid from a bad Durham neighborhood gets busted with the same ten grams of weed, the entire system presumes it to be one sign of a larger pattern of criminality (not helped by the fact that he’s not very good at code-switching into white “civilized” speech), he gets assigned a green public defender straight out of a bottom-tier law school, and there’s that time he got busted for throwing a rock at a cop car on a dare, and next thing you know the kid’s serving a good chunk of his twenties in county.

Outlaw Private Prisons: The incarceration of prisoners should never be a for-profit business, and allowing it to run as such only encourages prisoner abuse. The corrections system also allows prisoners to be paid well below minimum wage for assigned work; combine that with a for-profit prison and you basically have slave labor.

End Capital Punishment: Two words: Posthumous exoneration.

Police Reform: It has become obvious to me that there needs to be a sea-change in the attitudes of police agencies. There seems to be a default assumption of criminality on the part of law-enforcement personnel in far too many of their interactions with the citizenry. Police departments need to be demilitarized, and shows of military-grade force on the part of police departments needs to come to a stop nationwide. Right now. The climate of policing needs to shift such that police personnel interact with the public from an assumption of innocence, that the person they are facing, even the person they are detaining, is a fellow citizen trying to do his best to get by. Even if he runs. Gunfire should be reserved for situations in which the officer or nearby civilians are actively under threat of imminent harm. I’m even starting to wonder if the average beat cop may even be better off without that sidearm. That will bring me to my ideas on gun control in a bit.

But first, I think policing could be improved with a couple of other little adjustments. First, fine revenue should be divorced from municipal budgets in such a way as to remove any pressure on police personnel to generate fines (and most fines should be eliminated anyway, as they disproportionately impact people with lower incomes). There should be no room for even the perception that a police officer’s primary role is to ticket law-abiding citizens for minor offenses. I also think a lot could be done for the quality of policing if the starting salary were somewhere in the range of $50,000.

Gun Control: I’m going to lose some people here. I’m okay with that. I’ve hit on an idea that I think might help reduce some of the insane gun violence in our country without inciting the “well-regulated militia” to revolt. Here it is: You get to keep your guns. No one is going to come and take them away from you. Some of them might become a little harder to buy in the future, and some of them you may not be able to sell to anyone but the government for destruction. But you can keep them. The catch: If you have that firearm in public it must be unloaded and in a locked case. If the firing chamber can be disassembled without tools, it must be disassembled. If you have ammunition, it must be in a separate locked case. That way, you can still go hunt on private property or shoot at the firing range. But if anyone walks into a big-box store with a holster on her hip, or walks down the street with a rifle on his back, we don’t have to wonder if that is someone about to go on a killing spree or a law-abiding citizen who just happens to be an open-carry activist. Because anyone in public with an uncased and loaded firearm is not a law-abiding citizen. Possession of an uncased firearm would be a primary offense under this law (which is to say you could be arrested on sight for it), and such possession within sight-lines of a school, hospital, place of worship, shopping area, performance venue, or other public gathering place would be a felony.

Immigration reform:  A path to citizenship for dreamers and past illegal immigrants, and reasonably open borders for people who would come to live and work in the United States. As with drugs and prostitution, I am essentially proposing a legal path for what is already happening on the black market, and a recognition that our current laws tend to criminalize actions taken out of sheer necessity. As things are, illegal immigrants are literally second-class citizens in this country. Our immigration and naturalization system considers the fact that they are in the US illegally more important than anything they may come to law enforcement agencies about, be it that they were cheated out of pay for work they’ve done, or that they were detained, imprisoned, and forced into slave labor, or even that they were raped, physically abused, and forced into prostitution.

And So Much More: Comprehensive sex education and free, no-questions access to contraception for students. Close GITMO (not like Obama didn’t), not just the prison camp but the whole base, and give the land back to Cuba. While we’re at it, close all our bases in foreign nations where our presence is a signal of oppression and not cooperative peacekeeping. End our involvement in sundry military engagements, significantly downsize our standing military, divert those funds into improving the quality of life in our own country and taking care of the veterans who have made lifelong sacrifices in the line of duty. End subsidies for fossil fuels and subsidize development of domestic renewable energy sources. Subsidize a shift away from point-source power plants to distributed generation and storage of energy (rooftop solar, neighborhood-level wind generation and power storage). Subsidies to encourage the development of offshore wind and desert solar generation. Mass transportation at a level that can effectively compete with personal transportation, both on a local level and on a city-to-city level. Road-use taxes and fees to subsidize mass transportation and encourage use of alternative, non-car modes of transportation. A legal class of intermediate city vehicle between the highway-rated passenger car and the 25-mph NEV (“neighborhood electric vehicle,” essentially a golf cart).

As it turns out, putting together a platform for president means thinking deeply about a whole lot of issues. I’m gaining on 4,000 words here and still haven’t addressed any number of major issues. But I’m done. I’ve run long, I’ve run out of time, and I’m not really running for president anyway so I don’t even have to answer your questions if I don’t feel like it. And of course, these are all just my opinions. Some of them are more thought-out than others. Some of them may be downright uninformed, but that hasn’t stopped any number of presidents from doing any number of things in the past. The ideas in this post have been a long time in the making, and I am glad to see certain candidates talking about some of these ideas, and calling attention to a lot of things that have been very wrong for a very long time. I am even glad to see our sitting president, with whom I have had my disagreements, using his lame-duck position to get serious about some of the things that he has been talking about for a long time.

And I will leave you with this: No matter your political convictions, please please please (please!) take the time to keep yourself politically informed, to research your candidates, and at the very least, to get out on election day and vote. Democracy only works if the people participate. Otherwise, it reverts back to some form of plutocracy, in which the wealthy hold all the political power and we hoi-polloi become more and more disenfranchised. So for the love of all that is sacred and holy, please, vote! Or to put it a different way…

You Can’t Want What You Want

by Matt McKinnon

I am somewhat taken aback by the national and international attention to the Rachel Dolezal story. When I first read of it (on the BBC website of all places) I was confused: why is this news, much less international news?

It has only gotten worse.

I shudder at what amounts to a feeding frenzy from both conservatives and progressives alike, with each new detail from her past trumped only by each successive interview she gives.

But what I find fascinating is how we think of and treat the question of “race” itself. We know it’s not biologically “real,” that it is a social construct, that it is actually a relatively recent convention born out of a Modern misapplication of biology to earlier attempts at classification based first on language and later physical appearance.

Contemporary science no longer thinks in terms of “race” as a biologically-based set of qualities that separates groups of people used for taxonomic purposes. For science, “race” has been rendered antiquated at best and completely useless at worse.

We know all this.

Yet in most any given discussion of the Dolezal case, little of this subtlety ever seems to be displayed. Or when it is displayed, it carries relatively little weight, especially when, in the light of the very public transgendering of Caitlyn Jenner, the possibility of being “transracial” comes up and is summarily dismissed.

Mikhail Lyubansky, a specialist in the psychology of race at the University of Illinois, explains the history of the idea of “transracial” in describing adoptions where children of one “racial category” are adopted by parents of another. These children are understood “to be spanning their own and their adoptive parents’ racial categories.” Thus these folks, he contends, are really “transracial.”

But the attempt to call Dolezal’s identity “transracial” and compare it to Bruce Jenner’s transgendering into Caitlyn Jenner is met with disapproval. Lyubansky continues:

This description…makes sense when describing both trans men and trans women, meaning that it fits equally well regardless of direction. Applying this concept to race makes little sense to me. ‘Trans’ refers to a lack of fit between biology and identity, but there is no biology involved in race.

Exactly. There is no biology involved in race the way there is biology involved in one’s sex: biology determines one’s sex while society and culture determine gender, and one’s gender identity is determined by him or herself. Gender identity is more like “race” in that it is a social (and psychological) construct: the issue for transgender people being that their biological sex does not match their gender identity.

But then, why can’t “trans” here refer to a lack of fit between a social construct (race) and one’s racial identity? We are left wondering: maybe perhaps, because a social construct is harder to overcome?

If race is not based in biology and is completely and wholly a construct of society and culture, then why is it impossible to move within this social construct (from “black” to “white” or vice versa) and yet it is possible to move when the biological fact of one’s sex does not fit one’s identification of their gender?

As Lyubansky suggests: a transgendered person is “trans” in that her sex (male) does not correspond to her gender identity (female). She is really a woman, despite what her biology is. But, it seems, a transracial person cannot be “trans” in that her race (white) is not decided by biology but by social convention. And while this is not biology, is it something more?

After all, no one with any sensitivity towards the trans community would ever suggest that a transgendered person is “pretending” to be someone she is not (charges many have levied against Dolezal) but rather is changing the appearance of her body to match her sexual identity—being who she really is despite her physiology—since who someone “really is” ultimately comes down to how they identify themselves, right? Like changing the physical appearance of one’s body to match one’s racial identity?

Not so fast.

Lyubansky argues that the application of “transracial” in the case of someone like Dolezal is “logically flawed and socially problematic in that it ignores the oppression of both those who are transgender and those who have had to live with real racial discrimination.”

So the problem is not the biology of race, since there is no biological basis there. Nor is it the social construct of race itself (since gender is also a social construct), but rather the fact that this social construct has been used to oppress other groups by the dominant group.

But can’t this also be said of gender?

And moving from the dominant group to an oppressed group is “logically flawed and socially problematic” because it ignores the oppression of both those who are transgendered and those who have lived with racial discrimination. But a person who is biologically a man can become a woman because that is how she identifies herself even though some of the same dominance-oppression issues undoubtedly apply between male and female.

Something does not quite add up.

I want to be clear here: I agree that a transracial move is socially problematic and that there may be more than a little “white privilege” at work in the concept of an avatar-like existence manifesting in any old racial group it likes, but I fail to see how it is illogical. Historically insensitive? Perhaps. Outside the norm? That too. But illogical? No, not if race really is just a social construct. After all, social constructs get deconstructed and reconstructed over time. And the growing acceptance of the transgendered community is a prime example. Race, in fact, is another.

It’s true that the specifics of this case are troubling, and I suspect there are some psychological issues that need to be addressed. I also don’t think Dolezal went about any of this in the right way (though I’m not sure what the right way would look like) and her past actions while at Howard (like suing the school for racial discrimination because she is white) leave her credibility more than a little questionable.

But this doesn’t get to the underlying idea: why switching sexual identification is possible, logical, and even socially acceptable but switching racial identification is not.

Unless we simply don’t want it to be.

Unless, regardless of the science involved, we really do think that race is more than biological, deeper than mere appearance or culture: based in our bodies and social histories and constitutive of who we are in a way that is even more basic than chromosomal. We seem to have an essentialist mentality when it comes to race, despite having dispensed long ago with “essences” in the way we think about things. Perhaps this “social construct” of race is so real (more real than biology in fact) that a person really is African American—or they are not, based not on identification, but rather on something more, something essential, something ontological that transcends an individual’s assent, choice, or identity.

This would explain the criticism directed towards folks our society identifies as African-American but who either don’t display the characteristics expected of them (Bryant Gumbel) or have the audacity to think of their identity in more complex terms (Tiger Woods). From this perspective, you cannot choose to be African-American any more than you can choose not-to-be—if indeed you really are African-American (a judgment left to society and not the individual).

Lawrence of Arabia told us as much in the 1962 film of the same name while taking part (as a white Englishman) in the Arabian Revolt against the Ottoman Turks. While recovering after being flogged by Turkish soldiers who discovered he was white, T.E. Lawrence announces that he is leaving the revolt:

Lawrence: “I’m not the Arab revolt, Ali. I’m not even Arab.”
Ali: “A man can be whatever he wants. You said.”
Lawrence: “I’m sorry. I thought it was true.”
Ali: “You proved it.”
Lawrence: “Look, Ali. Look.” (Shows him his white skin.) “That’s me. What color is it? That’s me. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Ali: “A man can do whatever he wants. You said.”
Lawrence: “He can…but he can’t want what he wants.” (Still displaying his skin.) “This is the stuff that decides what he wants.”

This seems to be the way most of us tend to think about race, at least when we don’t really think too much about it: that there really is something physical if not biological about what it means to be African-American, or Arab, or white. Or rather that there is something more than physical that includes but goes deeper than appearance and determines one’s “race” and “racial identity,” something that, unlike sex and gender identity, we cannot escape or change.

Ponder on that for a moment: Caitlyn Jenner can escape the misalignment of her sex and gender identity but Lawrence and Dolezal cannot escape the misalignment of their “race” and “racial identity.” That seems strange to me.

The fact of the matter is that most of our classification systems when it comes to humans are hopelessly flawed and messy, based in linguistics (Celtic, Germanic, Hispanic/Latino, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, etc…) but having outgrown their parochial origins to become descriptions of ethnic groups and the individuals who comprise them.

The uncomfortable truth seems to be that our society is wedded to race: that we are wedded to race. Oh sure, we may speak ill of it, admit that it is a social construct, deny that it is actually rooted in biology or science, pretend that we don’t see it, opine for a society that transcends it, and so on. But the fact is, we cling to it in an essentialist and ontological manner that says more about our own history, hang-ups, and issues than it does about any “real” identifiers.

And the even more uncomfortable truth is that the idea of changing one’s racial identification seems absurd and illogical—more absurd and illogical than changing one’s sexual identification.

I cannot help but wonder if underlying this is the assumption that the real absurdity, the real illogicality is the suggestion that non-whites would ever be able to do this, or that most whites would want to.

I’ve noted in this forum before that Benjamin Franklin was opposed to the influx of Germans into “English” Pennsylvania, arguing that they could no more become “Anglified” than they could become “our Complexion” (southern Germans were regarded as “swarthy” and not “white”). But guess what? They did become Anglified as well as “white.” As did many other “ethnic” populations who were historically regarded as “not white”—Italians, Jews, Irish, Eastern Europeans. After all, social constructs change over time.

But I suspect that underneath the way most of us so easily cast off this idea of transracial identity lurks the notion that “white” is a pure category and that “real” non-whites (those of recent African descent and not Germans, or Jews, or Irish, or Italians) could never make the switch. It is not, as Lyubansky argues, applicable “regardless of direction.”

Only certain light-skinned folks, this line of thinking goes, would be able to do it. Historically called “passing,” this in itself raises all sorts of issues about white hegemony and the effects it has on the psychology of being “non-white” in America. Furthermore, many would suggest that no sane white person would choose to identify as black for any other than sociological study (John Howard Griffin) or personal gain (the movie Soul Man unfortunately comes to mind). But then again, I wonder if not so long ago folks thought the same way about the idea of men identifying as women and women identifying as men. And yet, we are working to change those social constructs as well.

For now, however, it seems pretty clear: Rachel Dolezal, like Lawrence of Arabia, can do whatever she wants…

…but she cannot want what she wants.

We have bound ourselves to a social construct that is skin deep.

But made it so much more.

Loving Day, Once Again

by Joyce Clapp

Today is Loving Day, the anniversary of June 12, 1967, when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that interracial marriage had to be performed and recognized in all 50 states (Loving v. Virginia). It is also a day by which we may or may not know how the Supreme Court is going to rule on a similar issue: Same-sex marriage (as of this writing, we don’t know yet). I’ve spent the last week Googling “SCOTUS” every couple of hours, knowing full well that if they didn’t announce on Monday that they weren’t likely to announce for the rest of week, and also knowing full well that when they did announce, it would hit Facebook and Twitter within minutes. And yet…I kept checking.

It is odd, waiting for SCOTUS to decide if you’re married. Well, if you’re legally married. Well, if you’re legally married in all 50 states, since you are already legally married in 36 states and may very well stay married in some of those states regardless of what the Supreme Court does. And thankfully, your mother says you’re married, no matter what SCOTUS does. I spend a lot of time lately feeling faintly queasy. I can only imagine how those of our friends that have children with their same-sex spouses feel, considering the implications there.

I can only begin to imagine what Richard and Mildred Loving felt like, around this time in 1967. Interracial couples were not nearly as common as they are now, and the U.S. was living through a really hard time. It’s not that we aren’t living through a time of gaping inequality and racial tensions now (let’s not kid ourselves), but it was worse in 1967. Brown v. Board of Education was just a touch over 15 years old and most schools were still in some state of segregation (the more things change, right?). Malcolm X had been assassinated only two years previously. The 1960s were a decade when we saw church bombings, the Civil Rights marches in the South, and the Freedom Riders doing their work because interstate busses were still segregated. This wasn’t an easy time to be an interracial couple.

“Tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.” (Richard Loving)

So I can’t imagine sitting in my home in Washington D.C. with my children, waiting to see if I was going to be allowed to move home with my family to a state where not ten years previously, sheriff’s deputies had stormed my home, barged into my bedroom, arrested myself and my spouse, and said of the marriage certificate on my wall, “That’s no good here.”

My wife and I are fortunate to be married in a different United States. We are on the side of history. We went out recently for a ghost tour of Greensboro and we weren’t the only interracial couple on the tour. At my wife’s brother’s wedding recently, we were 1 of 5 interracial couples present, including two guys showing off recent engagement rings and grinning like mad. We held hands through visiting the zoo and only garnered a couple of dirty looks. The lesbian character in Pitch Perfect 2, which we saw recently, volunteers that she’s moving to Maine and getting hitched, and it’s a non-event (other than a lot of happy squeals). My non-straight students wander in to my office to talk about wedding plans and ask relationship advice just like anyone else, because they are just like anyone else. My straight students ask me how spring break with my wife was, just like we’re anyone else, because we are just like anyone else (and then they ask me relationship advice and what they should do about that Spanish class).

And in the meantime, we wait nervously to see if SCOTUS is going to catch up with history and society, whether the story is going to be ‘we didn’t want redefine marriage’ (an institution that I’m glad has been ‘redefined’ over the years – who wants to be their husband’s property?), or whether the justices are going to look at the words from 1967 and do their job:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State. (Chief Justice Warren)

The obligatory rings picture, taken on on our legal anniversary.

I felt like I was going to have something long and impassioned and sociological to say when I signed up for posting for Loving Day, one of those nice chewy posts that make good reading and discussion. But that’s not the case today. It’s simple. I love my wife, I’m lucky I can live with her in this time and place, and I’m lucky that in North Carolina right now, she inherits if I die, and I can call the Veterans Administration for her, and we can make medical decisions for each other without gobs of very expensive, possibly legally shaky paperwork. I hope that in the eyes of the law, we remain legally married after the Supreme Court makes its decision.

The Phantom Wind

by Matt McKinnon

It’s hard to imagine how a 25-year old man can be handcuffed and put into a police van, seemingly in reasonable health, and then emerge 30 minutes later barely breathing, almost unable to walk, with three cracked vertebrae, a crushed voice box, and a nearly severed spine.

Hard to imagine how he had no other broken bones or even visible signs of trauma—other than those fatal injuries to his neck, injuries normally associated with a high-speed car accident.

It must have been some phenomenal force that did such damage to those three neck vertebrae and nearly severed his spinal cord and yet had no effect on the van itself or the officers safely strapped in their seats.

It must have been some supernatural force that hyperextended his neck, backwards and forwards, and caused those vertebrae to fracture and crush his spinal cord.

It must have been some invisible ghostly force that mysteriously left no trace on the metal cage that housed him or the van that transported him or the officers who arrested him.

A phantom wind that blew across the Charm City on that breezeless Sunday morning, capable of such selective destructive force—tornadic almost in the way it chose a victim there in the back of the van but left those in close proximity untouched, secure in their gentle fate.

No high gale warnings that still spring day, the waves on the harbor lazy, unconcerned, unaware of the hurricane wind with sniper precision that passed, unseen by human eye, untraced by Doppler radar, unyielding through the city streets and touched down there at only one place, only one time, only one victim.

Like some violent demonic wraith called forth from the aether itself, or out of a poem by Edgar Allen Poe.

That chilling wind.

That killing wind.

That specter wind that blew before in Baltimore.

There are names for the ride it takes you on—names that some in Baltimore know all too well:

A rough ride. A cowboy ride. A nickel ride.

Its ghosted trace is known well enough by courts and juries too, and by police departments whose “official policies” betray its shaded existence and try in vain to soften its deadly blow.

But somehow still it howls.

In 1997 that same wind blew Jeffrey Alston, arrested for speeding in his BMW, handcuffed, shackled, and supposedly strapped to a bench in the back of a police van, but, officers later claimed, in Houdini-like fashion, was able to free himself and leap headfirst into the partition, breaking his neck and leaving him a quadriplegic, later to die from complications. A jury disagreed with this “official” account to the tune of 39 million dollars.

But the wind remained aloof.

In 2005 that same wind blew Dondi Johnson, arrested for urinating in public and also placed, handcuffed but not in a seatbelt, in the back of a police van. It likewise blew him clear across the vehicle, breaking his neck and snuffing out his life. A jury awarded his family 7.4 million dollars.

But the wind escaped notice.

It blew again just two years ago, though this time the victim, a young white woman named Christine Abbot, survived to tell her story…and to sue the sue the City of Baltimore. Since, well, you cannot sue a phantom wind.

It has also blown in Philadelphia, paralyzing two in similar fashion.

Undoubtedly it has blown elsewhere before, outside of public gaze, this astral gust that appears briefly from nowhere, mysteriously tracks only police vans, and then is gone, leaving only the broken bodies of handcuffed detainees in its wake.

It’s hard to image such a phantom wind.

It must make for one hell of a rough ride.

Life as Art: In Front of the Class

by Linda Levanti, Asheville, NC, senior in Humanities

I have a great vantage point from my position in the back of the classroom. Seated near the large picture window, with a glorious view of the massive walnut trees planted during the golden days of the Biltmore Era, I’m quite content. The wall to my back encloses this pleasant space, where like a cat curled on a sunny window ledge, I’m more or less out of sight. I don’t often speak, satisfied to watch the activity from my sanctuary in the corner. Who’d have thought that one day I’d decide to become a teacher? Certainly not I.

It was the unconditional patience and encouragement of my kindly neighbors in a tiny, old-world village in central Mexico that set me on my path to teaching. It’s a constant challenge to communicate even simple thoughts when faced with a language barrier, something we rarely experience in the United States. Accepting me into their beehive of daily activities, these aproned Madonnas were as happy to teach me some Spanish as I was to share a few words of English. I’m humbled and grateful for the many good humored teachers who helped me along the way. Nonetheless, there were still many times I felt terribly isolated by language, and a stranger in a strange land, in spite of the warmth of my Mexican family.

Shortly after my return to the United States I started volunteering at the local community college in an adult education class to satisfy certification requirements to teach English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). My experience had fostered a desire to help those living in the United States whose struggles with a foreign language are likely a great deal harder than mine had been in Mexico. I want to make a difference in the lives of those who are committed to learning their new country’s language. After completing my training program, I stayed on at the college; I like helping in the classroom. And, the opportunity to quietly observe the instructor, while reinforcing my novice teaching skills, fit in with my predilection for staying out of the spotlight. That is, up until last week.

The class began quite as usual. As students filtered in, I handed out worksheets, and Monica, the level 4 instructor, began to teach. The lesson for discussion was subject-verb agreement. And so, Monica taught English and I helped Monica, that is until her phone rang mid-lecture, and the baby-sitter informed her that her infant daughter was ill…could she come home right away? Monica’s eyes sought mine, pleadingly, as if to say, you do have your certification. Other than the one evening I had student taught an adult class many months before, an experience replete with sweaty palms and horrible stage-fright, I had not taught a class on my own. I wasn’t feeling inclined to do so any time soon. But under the circumstance what could I say? Monica left for home, and I was on! And on my own.

It was performance time, and I flashed back on the frightened five year old I’d been at my first dance recital. The delicate pink ballet slippers I’d laced onto my feet, when told it was time to go on stage, no longer felt as enchanting as I’d imagined them. I was scared silly. All the wisdom and life experience I’d gained in nearly fifty years was reduced to the size of a quivering child. Thrust in front of the classroom, with the students’ inquiring eyes focused on me, I felt a vulnerability that caused every fiber in my body to scream “run”, which is what I had done at that first ballet recital. Not a pretty picture when you want to be a teacher. But I was no longer five years old, and fleeing was not an option. My saving grace is that age and hard won experience has provided me with an unwavering resolve, and so I stayed put and opened my mouth.

At a total loss for words, the immediate need to say or do something was bewildering. Quite unexpectedly, I felt as if a stranger had taken control of my senses and I began to dance. Not literally, but in a way that expressed my individuality. Performing as both marionette and marionettist, I was acutely aware of the tension in the strings that propelled my initial movements as an imperfectly executed pirouette spun me from the front of the room toward the large table that was the students’ shared desk. As I drew a chair closer to my audience, inviting them to join me, I remembered how much I had loved my ballet slippers; how good it felt to lace the ribbons and twirl across the polished wooden floor. Without a script, I listened to myself conduct the class. The words flowed and the teacher in me sounded so confident. She was enjoying herself! In getting on stage, I was introduced to a part of me I had never met, someone who seemed to like dancing for an audience. I’d caught an astonishing glimpse of my potential self in those moments in front of the class.

Art critic, Michael Kimmelman, wrote in The Accidental Masterpiece that “Life itself might be an art.” If my experience was any indication, I agree. Good art, when real and not contrived, fuels a deep and lasting impression upon viewer and artist alike. It can do that when we let go, and get out of our own way. I believe that this sentiment is essentially what Gunter Berghaus wrote about in the “Happenings and Fluxus” chapter of his book Avant-garde Performance. Based on the idea of unconventional and spontaneous artistic expression that compels the interaction of performer and audience, art is created that shatters life as we know it, effectively changing who we are into something new. The certainly unplanned accident of my performance in the classroom that day exemplified what both “Happenings” and “Fluxus” stand for. Reflective of Jean-Jacques Lebel’s portrayal of the “characteristics” of Happenings, it became a moment of “breaking down the barriers between art and life…[to] transform human beings, and make them change their old ways of seeing, feeling, and being.” It was terrifying and exhilarating.

Initially, my performance fell flat on its face. I wasn’t like Monica. My audience was confused by this unsure presentation of a teacher. I’ve since learned that many students see their teachers, myself included, as if we’re all cut out of the same academic “fabric”, and whether it’s Monica or myself at the head of the class, we are “all knowing” and greater in stature than the students there to learn English. In part, this is a cultural issue and likely a misinterpretation of Americans in general, but nonetheless, it makes for a very tough audience. I was faced with a chasm I had no idea how to bridge. Human nature being what it is, I’m sure they recognized my fear. Those sorts of things speak clearly in any language. Did they realize the degree to which my teaching had become the performance of my life? Probably not, but I do think they recognized themselves through the cracks in the perfect image they had constructed of me as an “American” teacher.

Unexpectedly presented with an instructor they were not accustomed to, the students initially responded to me by withdrawing. My discomfort increased and I felt myself teetering on the edge of the stage, an abyss between myself and the students huddled in the audience. They were reticent to speak; our previous interactions had been minimal. I experienced something that my instructors at NCSU had said about teaching foreign language classes, something that applied to me as well. Students are often afraid to speak for fear of looking foolish or making mistakes. Student or teacher, we all want to do well and look our best. There were moments during that two hour class when I stumbled. I recovered, the world didn’t come to an end, and I kept going. When I performed for that class, it wasn’t perfect. I was nervous at times, and lost my way. And then art happened in one spontaneous moment of laughter.

I’d laughed out loud at how much fun I was having in spite of it all. I couldn’t be frightened any longer. It was just too silly. The students thought it was tremendously funny, and so did I. At that moment the feeling in the room transformed each of us. The “American” teacher, who fell off the stage, wasn’t really any different than they were, and they gladly joined me in my dance. I had their attention. The chasm disappeared, and my students got that it was OK to try, and it was acceptable to make mistakes. We laughed, exchanged ideas, and as we became partners on that stage, no longer separated by perceptions of culture or class, we were performers and audience alike. I reflect that it was much more than just the subject-verb agreement of English grammar that we learned about that day. The art of authentic communication became a Happening. The Happening became the universal language of human interaction. I’ll never know who learned more that day, me or them. I do know that together we created an accidental masterpiece that will remain a vivid image in my mind for years to come.

My son, who is a wonderful artist believes that art should exist only for the moment and then be gone, to allow for other inspirations to take its’ place. My performance in the classroom reflects that sensibility. I’ve learned that art is not the result of paint and brush, nor is teaching, simply the rules of English grammar. They are only the tools we use to express the essence of who we are. When I teach, the art itself is ethereal, but its’ effect lingers on. Like any artist who performs for an audience, I’m sure there’ll be wonderful experiences as I teach and those that may not inspire great art. Either way, it will remind me that life, if lived as art, is its own accidental masterpiece.

* This essay was originally written for an assignment in Ann Millett-Gallant‘s class The Art of Life, in which the students are asked to create and partake in an act of performative art, then write about their inspirations, their interactions with their audience, the performance itself, and the results. The fortunate timing of Linda’s unplanned teaching stint as this assignment was approaching led to this “accidental masterpiece.”

Regarding my choice of the kitchen photo from among many possibilities, Linda writes, “… of all the photos, you pick the staged photo my husband took of me with a large beer bottle “caguama” and mug! My husband thinks that it’ll make me look like a borracha! (drunkard) which is really funny as I rarely drink.”

Mere Murder?

by Jay Parr

A month ago, around 5:15 PM on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 10 (right about when our transfer information session was getting underway here at UNCG), about 50 miles down the road from here in a neighborhood adjacent to the Friday Center in Chapel Hill, 46-year-old Craig Hicks entered the condo of his twenty-something newlywed neighbors Deah Barakat and Yusor Abu-Salha, and firing seven or eight shots, murdered them both and Yusor’s younger sister Razan Abu-Salha. I will not use the word “allegedly” here because Hicks turned himself in just hours later, and readily confessed to the killings. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month, you’re well aware of this incident by now. It’s not even news anymore.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around these shootings ever since.

Mr. Hicks’ that’s-my-story-and-I’m-sticking-to-it is that it was all over a parking dispute. It is pretty widely known by now that Hicks was in ongoing conflict with any number of his neighbors, about the use of limited parking spaces in the complex and other similarly-urgent matters, but murdering three people over it seems—well—just a tad disproportionate to me. There’s obviously more going on here, even if Hicks really does think it’s that simple.

More importantly, there’s more going on here even if Hicks is just a nutjob.

The problem here is that the dead are three observant young Muslims, while the killer is a white man who, in the end, represents mainstream America as a whole. That is to say that, for the vast majority of us, gentle reader, Craig Hicks ultimately represents you and me. That being the case, this senseless killing spree—carried out by one unstable individual, with no evidence of any real forethought or planning—can’t help but be much, much more than just one senseless killing spree by an unstable individual.

Let’s take a look at the players here. The dead are Deah Barakat, a 23-year-old second-year dental student at UNC Chapel Hill and and an active participant in an international charity working with displaced refugees; Barakat’s wife of six whole weeks, Yusor Abu-Salha, a 21-year-old graduate from NC State, who had been admitted to begin the same dental program in the fall and who was heavily involved in the same charity work; and her younger sister Razan Abu-Salha, a 19-year-old sophomore in architecture and environmental design at NC State, active in a charity for deaf advocacy.

They were kids. A married couple in the first third of their twenties, and her younger sister who was still a teenager. I don’t consider myself all that old (my firstborn is only two and a half), but I was already married and getting divorced when Mr. Barakat was born, so it wouldn’t be a bit of a stretch to say that I could have been their father. For that matter, so could Hicks.

They were achievers—if not overachievers. At 23, Deah was already in the second year of dental school. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve advised who at that age had yet to figure out that if they couldn’t handle general bio, general chem, and calculus in the same semester, maybe they shouldn’t plan on going to medical school. This guy had already been in dental school—no less rigorous than med school—for a year and a half. His new bride was no less of an achiever, having finished her bachelor’s degree and been accepted into the same dental school at the ripe old age of 21. I know less about her younger sister, but being a sophomore in architecture at 19 is nothing to sneeze at. They were clearly dedicated students, and they came from families that obviously valued education. Among the few things I know about their families are the facts that Deah’s sister has a doctorate degree and that the girls’ father is a psychiatrist (i.e., an M.D.).

They were also very giving people. Deah was heavily involved in a charity that provided dental care and support to refugee children. Yusor gushed on her Facebook page about the time they had spent in Turkey, and the people they met and the work they did while they were there. Razan was also involved in charity work, at an age when most mainstream-American teenagers are routinely and utterly self-involved. I guess what I’m saying here is that, had these kids been Christian instead of Muslim, other students their age would have been openly making fun of what pious goody-goodies they were. I mean really, married in their early twenties? Don’t drink at all? Up to their eyeballs in charity work? What are you guys, some kind of evangelicals?

Those are the dead. Three overachieving, charitable youths, who also happened to be observant Muslims.

From what I can find of the killer, he’s a paradox in many ways: Skeptical of all forms of religious extremism, loudly in favor of marriage equality and women’s equality and access to reproductive healthcare including abortion when needed (all of which I can get behind), but also kind of an extremist in his anti-theism and apparently rather belligerent about running around intimidating folks with his firearms, both of which I have problems with. I took a look at the public postings on his Facebook page. Once you get past all the clickbait it’s an interesting glimpse into his anti-theistic views.

But here’s the thing: For all his paradoxes, and for all the ways in which some of us may find his opinions distasteful and his actions reprehensible, in this case he represents all of white mainstream America. He’s the old white boy with the Midwestern background and the revolver on his hip. The one who shot three young Muslim students to death in their own home.

Sure, he’s not exactly a shining example of the mainstream American. I mean, he is in his mid forties and was studying for an associate of applied science, so not exactly an outstanding scholar. He’d had a series of crappy jobs and a couple of failed marriages, and a daughter who didn’t really want anything to do with him. He seemed to have had frequent altercations with any number of his neighbors, more than one of whom had complained about him, and it would seem he had a penchant for showing up armed to air his grievances. Apparently that wasn’t the first time he had shown up at his neighbors’ door over parking or noise, and he’s also reputed to have mocked the young women over their hijab on several occasions. So not exactly a friendly neighbor. And not exactly someone I want representing me as a white male mainstream American. But the fact remains: He’s the white dude here. He’s the “American,” regardless of where any of his victims were born or raised.

Hicks also had a collection of guns. Something on the order of a dozen of them. That does not make him exceptional among gun owners in the United States. However, it has been established that among developed nations, the US has considerably more guns per capita—and considerably more gun deaths per capita—than pretty much anyplace else. That alone puts every single one of us at greater risk for gunshot-related injuries or death, just by virtue of being in the United States.

But it goes beyond that. Despite what the fear-mongering portion of the media might have you believe, most of the people with those guns are not minorities. In fact, most of them are conservative, rural, white males. Even fewer of the open-carry activists (I prefer “bullies”) are minorities. Brown people in this country seem to learn that brown people carrying guns in this country are a bit more likely to get shot on sight, so you’re not going to find a lot of brown open-carry activists. No, the open-carry crowd is almost exclusively white. In fact, I would argue that strutting around in suburban shopping centers while openly loaded down with military-grade weaponry takes a level of hubris that is almost exclusively associated with white privilege.

That was Hicks. The white guy with the guns. In a country that has an exceptionally high percentage of white guys with guns.

For the record, I’m not completely opposed to guns, personally. I have on occasion enjoyed shooting targets at firing ranges and shooting cans out in the country. I won’t have one in my house, but that’s partly because I have a toddler who is—by mere virtue of being a toddler—a very unpredictable variable. However, when she is of an appropriate age, I do want her to learn to handle and use a firearm, if for no other reason that when she inevitably stumbles across one she will be able to handle it safely and confidently. If I did own a firearm, I can tell you that when it was not at the target range it would be stowed in a secure and locked gun safe, empty, maybe even partially disassembled, with any ammunition (if there was any ammunition in the house) locked up in a separate location. I sure as hell wouldn’t want it out and loaded and on my person on a daily basis. There’s just way too much to go wrong there, and for my personal anxiety level the risk of an accidental shooting outweighs any security I might gain by walking around armed.

The other problem with having firearms around constantly is that, put simply, people get angry. We all have irrational moods. Granted, some of us have them more often than others, but we all, without exception, get into moods when we are tempted to do things—or maybe we actually do things—that we wouldn’t do in a levelheaded state of mind. As a friend of mine, a writer and generally placid person, pointed out in a discussion on this topic, “I have been angry enough to want to shoot someone in the face.” If we’re all honest with ourselves, I think most of us have been there at some point or other in our lives.

The problem becomes when a bunch of us—and inevitably the more belligerent among us—actually have handguns strapped to our hips, because that’s when it becomes a matter of mere impulse control between “angry enough to want to shoot someone in the face,” and someone (or as it were, three someones) actually getting shot in the face.

Compound an overly-well-armed America with an Islamophobic America, and the odds get even worse for these victims. And before we start saying we don’t live in an Islamophobic culture, let’s take a look at the major spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the last few years, much of it seemingly related to a surge in anti-Muslim rhetoric in the media. Let’s take a look at the disproportionate attention given to violence by Muslims—even if it’s a video of a single murder by ISIS extremists, specifically designed to be a spectacle, and the media are playing right into the terrorists’ hands by lavishing it with attention. Let’s take a look at the disproportionate attention given to the fact that the perpetrators of that violence are Muslim—not that they’re off-the-deep-end radicals, or that the vast majority of their victims are Muslim, but that they themselves are Muslim. Let’s take a look at the fact that any time a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, every single Muslim in the Western world is suddenly at a higher risk of a retaliatory attack.

Seriously, how much anti-agnostic rhetoric did you hear after Tim McVeigh blew up a huge chunk of downtown Oklahoma City—killing well over a hundred people and well over a dozen children—in the largest terrorist attack in the United States before 9/11? I was loudly agnostic at the time, and I don’t remember getting so much as a second glance. How much did the US media shout that the IRA were Catholic terrorists? And how many pundits did we hear shouting that we should ship all the Catholics back to Rome or wherever they came from, or that we should ship all the agnostics back to I-don’t-know-istan?

But two radicalized young brothers blow up a trash can in Boston, killing the same number of people that Hicks did last month (yes, a lot more were injured), and they’re terrorists, and even though they weren’t affiliated with any Islamist terror organizations, a lot of attention is given to the fact that they’re Muslim. They’re Muslim Terrorists. And while yes, the rest of us are reminded that extremist violence can affect our lives at any given moment, every Muslim in America is at higher risk of being attacked just for being Muslim.

Two shooters representing a very radicalized arm of al-Qaeda storm into the headquarters of an irreverent Paris publication and shoot most of the editorial staff, and almost all of the attention focuses on the fact that they were Muslim, and that the publication had published images mocking The Prophet (pbuh). Not that they were Muslim extremists, mind you, but that they were Muslim. And they get presented by some particularly loudmouthed pundits as representing the entire Muslim world. And suddenly every Muslim in the Western world has to actively and loudly disavow the attack to avoid being associated with it. Because the assumption is that, as Muslims, they’re complicit. And even with all that disavowal, innocent Muslims all over Europe and the U.S. face a resurgence of anti-Muslim rhetoric, and mosques and schools are vandalized, and Muslims are harassed and attacked on the street, and the hate sites have a field day, and most of us don’t hear a word about any of that, because it’s not what sells advertising space.

And the end result of all this attention is that being identifiably Muslim in the United States (or much of the Western world, really) means constantly being under a heightened level of scrutiny from all directions. And it means being a lot more likely to encounter microagressions, intentional aggression, and even outright violence. In fact, on a daily basis a Muslim in the United States is five times more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than before 9/11.

Despite Hicks’ professed equal-opportunity anti-theism and despite his claim that it was all about parking (and maybe noise), I have trouble believing that the fact that these young students were Muslim had nothing to do with it. Had they been something a little less Other in the American zeitgeist, some plain-dress Christian denomination—say, Mennonite for sake of argument—would Hicks have been so compelled to murder them in their own home? I kinda doubt it.

image © Kevin Schoonover

Maybe in Hicks’ mind it really wasn’t about them being Muslim. Much like in various law enforcement officers’ minds (or in one particular wannabe law enforcement officer’s mind), maybe the decision to shoot really wasn’t about their victims being black. Not on the conscious level, anyway. However a lack of conscious motivation on the part of the shooter doesn’t make those victims any less black, or any less dead. Just as Deah, Yusor, and Razan are no less Muslim, and no less dead.

Maybe somewhere in Hicks’ mind this killing really was all about a parking dispute. It begs the question of how a mere parking dispute got so ridiculously out of hand that three innocent people ended up being ruthlessly executed in their own home (and clearly I don’t buy it anyway). But regardless of Hicks’ motivations in the moment—and regardless of whether or not he intended to make any statement larger than that of an enraged neighbor—his actions, in the wider context of our gun-toting and Islamophobic culture, make him the face of American terrorism: An armed, entitled, angry white male attacking an unarmed brown innocent (or three) because he felt threatened in some way or another. An attack which ultimately reminds everyone in that Other demographic that on some level they are outsiders, that they will always be outsiders, that they are hated, and that at any moment that hatred could blow up in their faces and end their lives, or the lives of their dearest loved ones.

That is not a mere murder. That is an act of terrorism.

Science in a Postmodern Age

by Matt McKinnon

I am not a scientist.

Just like many prominent, mostly Republican, politicians responding to the issue of climate change—trying their best to refrain from losing votes from their conservative constituencies while not coming across as being completely out of touch with the modern world—I am not a scientist.

Of course, if you ask most people who are in fact scientists, then somewhere around 87% of them agree that climate change is real and that it is mostly due to human activity (or at least if you ask those scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as reported by the Pew Research Center).

Then again, if you ask average Americans (the ones who are not scientists), then only about 50% think that human activity is the largest cause of climate change.

That’s quite a disparity (37 points), especially since getting 87% of scientists to agree on anything is not all that easy and arguably represents what we could call a scientific consensus.

This, of course, provides much fodder for comedians like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart as well as many liberals and progressives, who have come to see the problem of science and a skeptical public as a characteristic of contemporary American conservatism.

And this characterization is buttressed by the even more overwhelming discrepancy between the public and scientists on the question of evolution. A 2009 study by Pew found that only 54% of the public believe in evolution (22% of whom believe that it was guided by a supreme being) versus 95% of scientists (where only 8% believe it to be guided by a supernatural power). And that more recent 2014 Pew study bumped the public percentage up to 65% and the scientific consensus up to 98%.

That’s a gap of 33 points, a bit less than the 37 points on the issue of climate change. Sure there’s something to be said for the idea that contemporary conservatism is at odds with science on some fundamental issues.

But not so fast.

For while there is a large discrepancy between scientists and the American public on these core conservative questions, there is also a large and seemingly growing discrepancy between the public and science on issues that cross political lines, or that could even be considered liberal issues.

Take the recent controversy about immunizations.

Just as with climate change and evolution, a large majority of scientists not only think that they are safe and effective, but also think that certain immunizations should be mandatory for participation in the wider society. That same 2014 Pew study found that 86% of scientists think immunizations should be mandatory, compared to 68% of the public.

And the very liberal left is often just as vocal as the conservative right on this issue, with folks like Jenny McCarthy who has claimed that her son’s autism was the result of immunizations despite clear scientific evidence that has debunked any link. At least one study by Yale law professor Dan Kahan shows that those who fear childhood immunizations are pretty much split between liberals and conservatives.

Still, with an 18-point gap between scientists and the public on this issue, that leaves a lot of progressives seemingly in the same position as those conservatives denying the role of human activity in climate change.

Just as interesting, however, is the discrepancy between scientists and the public on building more nuclear power plants—a gap that is greater (20 points) though scientific opinion is less certain. Pew found that 45% of the public favors more nuclear power compared to 65% of scientists.

But what is even more intriguing is that all of these gaps between scientific consensus and public opinion are far less than the discrepancy that exists on the issue of biomedical science, from the use of pesticides to animal testing and the most controversial: genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

That same Pew study found that a whopping 88% of scientists believe that it is safe to eat genetically modified foods, a larger consensus than agree on human activity and climate change, compared to public opinion, which languishes very far back at 37% (a disparity of 51%!).

And 68% of those scientists agree that it is safe to eat foods grown with pesticides, compared to 28% of the public (a gap of 40 points).

But you won’t find many liberal politicians wading publicly into this issue, championing the views of science over a skeptical public. Nor will you find much sympathy from those comedians either.

It seems that when the proverbial shoe is on the other foot, then it is either not problematic that so many plain old folks diverge from scientific opinion, or there is in fact good reason for their skepticism.

Which brings me to my point about science in a postmodern age. For while it is true that there are good reasons to be skeptical of the science on the use of pesticides and GMOs, as well as some of these other issues, the problem is: who decides when to be skeptical and how skeptical we should be?

That is the problem of postmodernism, which strives for a leveling of discourse and has more than a bit of anti-clerical skepticism about it. For if postmodernism teaches us anything it’s that the certitude of reason in the modern age is anything but certain. And while this makes for fun philosophical frolicking by folks like Heidegger, Foucoult, and Habbermas, it is problematic for science, which relies completely on the intuition that reason and observation are the only certain means of discovery we have.

But in a postmodern age, nothing is certain, and nothing is beyond reproach—not the government, or business, or think tanks, or even institutions of higher learning. Not scientific studies or scientists or even science itself. Indeed, not even reason for that matter.

The moorings of the modern era in reason have become unmoored to some extent in our postmodern culture. And this, more than anything else, explains the large gaps on many issues between scientific opinion and that of the public.

And in the interest of full disclosure: I believe human activity is causing climate change and that immunizations are safe and should be required but I am very skeptical of the use of pesticides and eating GMOs.

But what do I know? I’m not a scientist.

R.I.P. Joan Rivers

by Ann Millett-Gallant

There were many tragic celebrity deaths in 2014, and I feel the most personally sad about the death of Joan Rivers. My husband and I loved watching her host the show Fashion Police. In response to her witty and often naughty comments, we would exclaim “Oh, Joan!” On Fashion Police, she critiqued stars’ outfits with bawdy and sometimes dirty humor.

Many considered Joan a nuisance, or a foul-mouthed “bitch,” names Joan would have reveled in. She was an unapologetic trailblazer; similarly to anti-conventional comediennes such as Moms Mabley and Phyllis Diller, she was decidedly not self-deprecating. Because she defied stereotypes and social mores for female comics, female performers of any genre, and women in general, Joan could be called a nonconformist feminist. She relates to many examples we study and critique in my course BLS 348: Representing Women.

Contrary to other female comics of the past and of today, she didn’t put herself down, but also didn’t quite put others down either. She “made fun” of others, always in the spirit of humor. Her critiques were never harsh, although some of her comments, especially on Fashion Police, quite literally hit below the belt. Following her death, the E! Channel showed a marathon of Joan’s greatest Fashion Police episodes, culminating in a tribute episode of the show in which her co-hosts, Giuliana Rancic, George Kotsiopoulos, and Kelly Osborn as well as the executive producer of the show, Joan’s daughter, Melissa Rivers, shared their memories of Joan and of the show, with laughter and tears. There was a series of clips from over the years of Joan’s characteristically vulgar pussy jokes. Another humorous montage was of clips in which Joan struggles to get her jokes out, as she cracks herself up. She made herself and others laugh. She also laughed at herself, making unashamed jokes about the effects of aging and her many cosmetic surgery procedures.

Throughout the footage about Joan’s death on TV, countless celebrities have said she not only made them smile, but that she was generous with her time, resources, and advice; many likened her to a mother, grandmother, or confidant. Fashion designers also called Joan a friend and an advocate. She coined the red carpet question “Who are you wearing?,” sharing the attention given to the dolled up celebrity with the designer of their garb.

I had seen the fascinating documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010), a few years ago and was compelled to watch it again when I heard she had died.

The film underscores that Joan was a pioneer for female comics. In 1983, she became the first comedienne on The Tonight Show. She left in 1986 because she was offered the chance to host her own show, The Late Show with Joan Rivers. The show only lasted for 1 season, due to poor ratings and lack of sponsorship. Her husband, Edgar Rosenburg, served as a producer, and according to the documentary, other executives working on the show blamed him for the problems and told her to get rid of him. She refused, the show was cancelled, and the couple eventually separated. A few months later, Rosenburg committed suicide. The film doesn’t suggest that Joan or her failed show was the direct cause of this, and his Wikipedia page states that he suffered from clinical depression.

Following the end of her show and the loss of her estranged husband, Joan’s career tanked. She continued to do any stand up she could and eventually made a huge television comeback by winning on the show Celebrity Apprentice. She proved herself a shrewd business woman, who took charge of her career and later created a line of fashion, jewelry, and beauty items for QVC.

At the time of her death at 81, she lived with her daughter and grandson in New York City, where she filmed a reality show and made appearances on QVC to market her line, traveled all over the country for stand up performances and appearances, and flew to Los Angles each week to film Fashion Police. Giuliana Rancic said Joan got to the set at 3 AM (they filmed at 8 AM) and would routinely have her special beverage during filming – a paper coffee cup with a straw, filled with white wine.

In September of 2014, Joan had had a routine, outpatient procedure, an endoscopy, which involved the insertion of a tiny camera to look down her throat into her digestive system. During the procedure, she went into cardiac arrest, was taken to the hospital, and was put into a medically-induced coma to allow her brain to repair itself. She never came out of the coma. Considering the high level of activity in her life, it seemed like a tragedy, similar to the recent and untimely deaths of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams. She hadn’t been slowing down, and her death was sudden. It made me sad. Then I realized that maybe this was the best way for her to go. She was at the top of her game, and her death was painless, without suffering or the knowledge of her impending demise.

I will miss seeing Joan on Fashion Police and red carpets. In her honor, I just purchased a Fashion Police t-shirt with the name for her team of fans, “Joan Rangers,” on the back. I will wear it proudly.