A New Day

I didn't see Walker or anyone from his eighth-grade class in the crowd shots at the inauguration, but he told me they were standing "somewhere in between the Washington monument and the Capitol."

I liked Obama's speech. I didn't like the poem much ("praise song for the day"), and I left to get lunch when the second (second?!) reverend came on, which Eleanor told me was a mistake, because he rhymed and she was amused.

One kind of change I'm hoping for has already been promised--an end to semantic discussions of what "torture" is and the resolution to do less of it. One of the other changes I'd like to see is less prayer. Fewer reverends making everyone bow their heads in public. I'd like to know more people who actively try to find good things they can do, and fewer who need to sit and have it prescribed for them by a church. Yes, I'm still mad about all the homophobia in churches (not my Episcopalian church, I'm glad to say), but the defense of ignorance and hate by some American churches is literally a national disgrace, especially when fanatical church members are allowed to "home school" their children.

What I liked most about the inaugural speech, though, was the way it looked forward. It didn't gloss over the past, but it wasn't mired in it.

Sara Paretsky's Bleeding Kansas, which just came out in paperback, is a story of what happens to a group of neighbors because of the way they're mired in the past, both their personal past and the political past. A big aspect of the personal is the extreme fundamentalist Christian belief of one family, the Schapens, and their unwillingness to leave their neighbors alone, which results in more than one death, culminating with the death of one young man in the war in Iraq.

And because I just watched the movie Cold Comfort Farm again, I'm irresistably drawn to the metaphor of the old woman who excuses all of her controlling behavior by repeatedly crying about how she was the victim of some unspecified act in the past. The joke of that movie is that it doesn't matter what she saw in the woodshed. You'll never know. Get over it.

My hope for the country now is that we can remember the past without getting caught up in the same old arguments. You know, it's kind of like marriage. You can have the same old arguments all the time. Or you can get over it and go on together.

As Jenny Allen says in her essay "Forgive or Forget?" in the February issue of Good Housekeeping:
"If you're always getting mad, you're not the sensitive person or the thoughtful person or the careful person. You're just the person who is yelling "I can't believe you did that" all the time. And that, as I've said, is your problem. Even if it's his problem, it's your problem.
Sometimes you just have to ignore the offensive or selfish or clueless thing.
Or you have to decide it's funny. I'm sorry to sound like Norman Cousins, but almost everything is, sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner.
Can't you ever be irked? Can't you ever be angry? Yes, but you have to get over it.
You have to lighten up.
You have to cut him some slack, and then more slack, and more."

Okay, so at least for the rest of this week, I'm going to try to lighten up. Because more perspective is a good thing. Or it would have been, if the tv crews had taken more long shots of the crowds!

Guilty Pleasures

Since I read everything and am not big on guilt, I have few guilty pleasures as far as books go. The things I check out of the library and read just for fun (recently: Paretsky's Bleeding Kansas, Keillor's Pontoon, the Davidson catering mystery I already mentioned, and mysteries by Laura Lippman, Margaret Maron, and David Baldacci) aren't really guilty pleasures; they're just mind candy. I learned to enjoy mystery novels in the last few years, so there are still more of them I've not read.

My car books are guilty pleasures, though. I know this because one time a male person who teaches Sociology at OSU came by my car while I was waiting for a kid to come out of school, and I was a little embarrassed to respond to his genial "what are you reading?" Car books are paperbook romance novels that my friend Amy's mother passes along. I keep one or two under the seat of my car at all time so I always have something to read in an emergency, like a longer-than-anticipated wait or forgetting to take a book with me. Car books are the kind of books that you can read for a while happily enough but don't have to take in the house to finish. More than just embarrassing, though, car books can actually be bad for you. If you read enough stories about women getting romanced by rich and powerful men, your own life suffers by comparison, no matter how good it is. Also, the farther back in history the romance is set, the more passive the female character has to be. Amy and I can tell when her mother is more depressed than usual, because we start getting more 16th-century Scottish highlands romances with pictures of Fabio bare-chested on the covers. When her mother cheers up, we get Jennifer Crusie, set in the present day, and J.D. Robb, set in the future. (Note: these last two are good enough to take in the house and finish. I went out to the car to see what my current books under the seat are, and they're Belva Plain's Secrecy and Katherine Kingsley's The Sound of Snow.)

Besides romance novels, there are other books that are guilty pleasures because they're bad for you. Some fantasy novels are like that. I'm talking about the ones marketed to the "young adult" audience, like the Sword of Shannara, itself the best of a bad genre--and it has lots of lesser imitators. Bad fantasy has two dimensional characters, no rules (and often no limitations) for the magic, and it promotes the idea that violence solves all problems by showing that the only way to defeat evil is to be stronger than the evil.

Ron mentions action/adventure books that feature lots of testosterone-fueled explosions and some tactical thinking as guilty pleasures for men. I asked if he meant co-authored books with Tom Clancy, and he said those were the best of the genre, and there are lots of worse examples. I'm guessing that the bad thing about these books is that your own life suffers by comparison--it's less exciting, and you're less powerful in it.

So I'd like to know--what other kinds of guilty pleasures are available? Do you have a favorite that I haven't mentioned here? And why should you feel guilty about reading it?