Have you ever had one of those nights when your mind kept going back to something you didn't want to think about, and then you went to sleep, finally, only to wake up about 3 am for further brooding over the things you didn't want to think about?
I made the mistake of reading through a volume of poetry by Sharon Olds last night before I went to bed, and the power of one of her poems started me off thinking about the extremely gory details of the worst night of my life, the night after Eleanor, then 10, fell during a girl scout trip to the local skating rink and broke both bones in both arms, and after I got her to the local ER, she had to be transported by ambulance to a Children's Hospital about an hour away, where they set her arm without the right kind of anesthesia because they couldn't tell how much and what kind of painkiller she'd gotten at the local ER. This poem just brings it all flooding back:
The Green Shirt
For a week after he breaks his elbow
we don't think about giving him a bath,
we think about bones twisted like white
saplings in a tornado, tendons
twined around each other like the snakes on the
healer's caduceus. We think about fractures and
pain, most of the time we think about pain,
and our boy with his pale set face goes
around the house in that green shirt
as if it were his skin, the alligator on it with
wide jaws like the ones pain has
clamped on his elbow, fine joint that
used to be thin and elegant as
something made with Tinkertoy then it
swelled to a hard black anvil,
softened to a bruised yellow fruit,
finally we could slip the sleeve over,
and by then our boy was smelling like something
taken from the back of the icebox and
put on the back of the stove. So we stripped him and
slipped him into the tub, he looked so
naked without the sling, just a boy
holding his arm with the other hand as you'd
help and old geezer across the street, and
then it hit us, the man and woman by the
side of the tub, the people who had made him,
then the week passed before our eyes
as the grease slid off him--
the smash, the screaming, the fear he had crushed his
growth-joint, the fear as he lost all the
feeling in two fingers, the blood
pooled in ugly uneven streaks
under the skin in his forearm and then he
lost the use of the whole hand,
and they said he would probably sometime be back to normal,
sometime, probably, this boy with the long fingers of a surgeon,
this duck sitting in the water with his L-shaped
purple wing in his other hand.
Our eyes fill, we cannot look at each other,
we watch him carefully and kindly soap the damaged arm,
he was given to us perfect, we had sworn no harm
would come to him.
Why this poem brought back that particular harm on this particular night, I don't know. It was spring when it happened, and maybe there was a smell, in addition to the poem, to trigger all the details of memory. We are all healed now. It's daytime. The sun is out. The azaleas and rhododendrons are blooming. I need to wake up.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Being Humane
I am not a big fan of Ann Mccaffrey's dragon series, or Eragon. My favorite story about dragons is E. Nesbit's The Dragon Tamers. You can find this story in two places I know of: The Book of Dragons by E. Nesbit, which is a collection of her dragon stories, and The Book of Dragons selected and illustrated by Michael Hague, which is a gorgeous book and a good introduction to the tradition of stories about dragons.
There are many things to like about Naomi Novik's dragon novels, the Temeraire series (His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory). Her next Temeraire book, Victory of Eagles, is scheduled to come out on July 8, 2008, my birthday (hint, hint). One of these days, Peter Jackson may make a movie based on the first book. Novik's premise is that in the days of the Napoleonic wars, the British are using dragons much as they used horses, except that the dragons have more mobility and, well, firepower.
In the second book, Throne of Jade, Temeraire finds out that dragons in China are treated much better than dragons in England. Rather than sleeping outside on the ground, being given raw cows and sheep to eat, and only allowed to breed at special grounds set aside for the purpose, Chinese dragons get cooked food, have special houses with heated floors, and are revered and encouraged to breed, although the Chinese are interested in which dragon breeds with which other dragon to produce the best offspring. Temeraire himself is an "Imperial," the best kind of dragon, and it was a mistake that his egg landed in British hands. The hands it landed in are those of a former navy captain, Laurence. Temeraire, like all dragons in these novels, can talk, and he and Laurence discuss the cooked Chinese food after the first time Temeraire has eaten it:
"Well, I only hope you will not find it indigestible, from so much spice," Laurence said, and was sorry at once, recognizing in himself a species of jealousy that did not like to see Temeraire enjoying any Chinese customs. He was unhappily conscious that it had never occurred to him to offer Temeraire prepared dishes, or any greater variety than the difference between fish and mutton, even for a special occasion.
But Temeraire only said, "No, I like it very well," unconcerned and yawning; he stretched himself very long and flexed his claws.
At the end of Throne of Jade, Laurence offers to stay in China if Temeraire would be happier there, and they discuss it:
"You would rather go home, though, would you not?"
"I would be lying if I said otherwise," Laurence said heavily. "But I would rather see you happy; and I cannot think how I could make you so in England, now you have seen how dragons are treated here." The disloyalty nearly choked him; he could go no further.
"The dragons here are not all smarter than British dragons," Temeraire said. "There is no reason Maximus or Lily could not learn to read and write, or carry on some other kind of profession. It is not right that we are kept penned up like animals, and never taught anything but how to fight."
"No," Laurence said. "No, it is not."
Laurence, who has from his first introduction to the dragon corps, spoken out against the abuse and neglect of dragons, continues to learn about the similarities between "owning" such a sentient creature and slavery, which in good-guy 19th-century British fashion, he opposes. In the fourth book, Empire of Ivory, he is forced to "understand the accusations which had been made" against him and his fellow British dragon officers:
That they had stolen medicines, cultivated for the use of the King's own subjects, was only the least offense; the foremost, that they had offered a territorial challenge, by invading in the company of their own ancestors, as Kefentse considered the dragons of the formation to be; and in league with enemy tribes had been stealing their children, for which he offered as one portion of evidence that they had been travelling with a man of the Lunda, notorious kidnappers."
Of course, even as Laurence is forced to understand his behavior, the reader is forced to see it in light of something we now acknowledge to have been wrong, the enslavement of Africans.
I like the way Novik weaves this thread in and out of her story--that it's not humane to treat anyone the way the rigid hierarchy of the British Empire proscribed. And by extension, of course, the fiction asks us to examine how far we have come. Do we still breed horses for our own purposes? Yes, and their legs break. Do we still have puppy mills? Yes, because they're profitable (and we have plenty of them right here in my home state of Ohio: http://columbusdogconnection.com/PupMillsInOH.htm).
Do we have a right to buy and sell animals? This may sound like kind of a wacky question, but I don't think it goes too far. If we didn't regard animals as "ours" and think that we can do with them whatever we like, the worst kinds of abuse couldn't happen. By extension, the less we regard children as "ours," the less we feel a right to educate them in whatever narrow way we believe, and the less chance there is that the person who has "custody" of a child feels so alone that she has to leave the napping child in the car just so she can run in to the store and buy food for supper, or that he feels overwhelmed in the way that can lead to physical or verbal abuse.
I do think we have a right to buy and sell animals for food; I do it myself. But I buy beef and chicken, not to mention eggs, from local farmers, because they see a point in letting the animals use their legs and see the sun, while big food companies tend to treat animals in any way that will maximize their profits, both because they can and because few people are interested in finding out what happens to those animals. If you don't like to read books like The Jungle or the more recent Fast Food Nation, you're not alone, but ignoring a problem allows it to persist. I might even go further--the rhetorical effect of Uncle Tom's Cabin was to demonstrate that if you don't speak out against evil, you are part of it.
Less of the feeling of "ownership" and more of the feeling of "custodianship" would benefit the dragons of Britain in Novik's fictional world, and certainly the animals we still feel the right to breed in this world.
If you're interested in this issue, you might take a look at the Humane Society website:
http://www.hsus.org/
There are many things to like about Naomi Novik's dragon novels, the Temeraire series (His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory). Her next Temeraire book, Victory of Eagles, is scheduled to come out on July 8, 2008, my birthday (hint, hint). One of these days, Peter Jackson may make a movie based on the first book. Novik's premise is that in the days of the Napoleonic wars, the British are using dragons much as they used horses, except that the dragons have more mobility and, well, firepower.
In the second book, Throne of Jade, Temeraire finds out that dragons in China are treated much better than dragons in England. Rather than sleeping outside on the ground, being given raw cows and sheep to eat, and only allowed to breed at special grounds set aside for the purpose, Chinese dragons get cooked food, have special houses with heated floors, and are revered and encouraged to breed, although the Chinese are interested in which dragon breeds with which other dragon to produce the best offspring. Temeraire himself is an "Imperial," the best kind of dragon, and it was a mistake that his egg landed in British hands. The hands it landed in are those of a former navy captain, Laurence. Temeraire, like all dragons in these novels, can talk, and he and Laurence discuss the cooked Chinese food after the first time Temeraire has eaten it:
"Well, I only hope you will not find it indigestible, from so much spice," Laurence said, and was sorry at once, recognizing in himself a species of jealousy that did not like to see Temeraire enjoying any Chinese customs. He was unhappily conscious that it had never occurred to him to offer Temeraire prepared dishes, or any greater variety than the difference between fish and mutton, even for a special occasion.
But Temeraire only said, "No, I like it very well," unconcerned and yawning; he stretched himself very long and flexed his claws.
At the end of Throne of Jade, Laurence offers to stay in China if Temeraire would be happier there, and they discuss it:
"You would rather go home, though, would you not?"
"I would be lying if I said otherwise," Laurence said heavily. "But I would rather see you happy; and I cannot think how I could make you so in England, now you have seen how dragons are treated here." The disloyalty nearly choked him; he could go no further.
"The dragons here are not all smarter than British dragons," Temeraire said. "There is no reason Maximus or Lily could not learn to read and write, or carry on some other kind of profession. It is not right that we are kept penned up like animals, and never taught anything but how to fight."
"No," Laurence said. "No, it is not."
Laurence, who has from his first introduction to the dragon corps, spoken out against the abuse and neglect of dragons, continues to learn about the similarities between "owning" such a sentient creature and slavery, which in good-guy 19th-century British fashion, he opposes. In the fourth book, Empire of Ivory, he is forced to "understand the accusations which had been made" against him and his fellow British dragon officers:
That they had stolen medicines, cultivated for the use of the King's own subjects, was only the least offense; the foremost, that they had offered a territorial challenge, by invading in the company of their own ancestors, as Kefentse considered the dragons of the formation to be; and in league with enemy tribes had been stealing their children, for which he offered as one portion of evidence that they had been travelling with a man of the Lunda, notorious kidnappers."
Of course, even as Laurence is forced to understand his behavior, the reader is forced to see it in light of something we now acknowledge to have been wrong, the enslavement of Africans.
I like the way Novik weaves this thread in and out of her story--that it's not humane to treat anyone the way the rigid hierarchy of the British Empire proscribed. And by extension, of course, the fiction asks us to examine how far we have come. Do we still breed horses for our own purposes? Yes, and their legs break. Do we still have puppy mills? Yes, because they're profitable (and we have plenty of them right here in my home state of Ohio: http://columbusdogconnection.com/PupMillsInOH.htm).
Do we have a right to buy and sell animals? This may sound like kind of a wacky question, but I don't think it goes too far. If we didn't regard animals as "ours" and think that we can do with them whatever we like, the worst kinds of abuse couldn't happen. By extension, the less we regard children as "ours," the less we feel a right to educate them in whatever narrow way we believe, and the less chance there is that the person who has "custody" of a child feels so alone that she has to leave the napping child in the car just so she can run in to the store and buy food for supper, or that he feels overwhelmed in the way that can lead to physical or verbal abuse.
I do think we have a right to buy and sell animals for food; I do it myself. But I buy beef and chicken, not to mention eggs, from local farmers, because they see a point in letting the animals use their legs and see the sun, while big food companies tend to treat animals in any way that will maximize their profits, both because they can and because few people are interested in finding out what happens to those animals. If you don't like to read books like The Jungle or the more recent Fast Food Nation, you're not alone, but ignoring a problem allows it to persist. I might even go further--the rhetorical effect of Uncle Tom's Cabin was to demonstrate that if you don't speak out against evil, you are part of it.
Less of the feeling of "ownership" and more of the feeling of "custodianship" would benefit the dragons of Britain in Novik's fictional world, and certainly the animals we still feel the right to breed in this world.
If you're interested in this issue, you might take a look at the Humane Society website:
http://www.hsus.org/
Friday, May 16, 2008
It's Official
Now it's official. I live in a backwater. Here's the front-page headline from today's Mount Vernon News, my small town newspaper:
Sewing the Seeds of Economic Change
I have news for them--you need to sow them there seeds if you want them to grow.
Sewing the Seeds of Economic Change
I have news for them--you need to sow them there seeds if you want them to grow.
Milder
One of my friends reminded me yesterday about the "myth of education"--basically, it's the hope that, if you teach someone something, they'll act better and be of more value to the world. Obviously it doesn't always work. And another of my friends, a scientist, agreed to write a letter to the editor explaining why "creationism" and Darwinism" are not equally valid theories. So I'm mollified, for now.
I don't think I'll ever be mild, exactly, but I hope that when I get old, I'm more like my parents than their neighbors the Scotts. They used to have an amicable relationship, picking up each others' mail and newspapers when they left town (something my parents do a lot now that they're retired). Then the Scotts started yelling at kids who rode their bikes through the hedge at the end of our dead-end street (my parents own the entire hedge, and it's indestructible--once we even set it on fire, and it came back). They told my parents to forbid kids to skateboard over or play around in the hills of dirt left when a plumber had to dig up some pipes in the yard. Finally the Scotts laid down the law--either my parents told the neighborhood kids to get out of their yard, or the Scotts wouldn't speak to them anymore. Ron calls this the "dread Scott decision." My parents wouldn't agree to ban kids from the yard, and the Scotts no longer speak to them.
My calming process consisted of painting in and around the new bathroom. There's lot of trim that needed a last coat, after being hammered on. The walls needed touchups where equipment scraped them. The doorway had to have primer on the new wood parts. The door had to be stained. For the first coat I painted on a polyurethane/stain combination in "golden oak," but then we decided it didn't match the rest of the doors in the house enough, so I went back and got a "golden maple" poly gel, which is much pleasanter to work with. I had to repaint the bedroom wall around where the new door went in. Little fiddly painting and varnishing tasks with lots of different colors of paint and brush changing and washing up are very calming.
I resolve to be, if not exactly milder, at least the kind of person who doesn't get old and end up snapping at kids who want to play in my yard. The kind of person who says this kind of prayer:
Muzak, by Kevin Young
When old, do not let me bark
at passersby--let me be
like the slow motion, down-
the-street dog, ignoring
the cardinals, the colors
he cannot see, even us
as we tiptoe by--
Friend, please save me
from being the neighbors'
fool hound who woofs loud
at every grey squirrel, stray
noise, or lab rushing past
to meet some lady--from being
that cur who cannot help but howl
all night like newlyweds
keeping the world awake. O terrible
angel of the elevator, the plane,
insufferable unquiet we pray to, afraid--
Please make me mild
Actually, I don't think I have any chance of aging in a doglike way. The best I can hope for is probably to hiss quietly at anyone who dares to disturb my comfort.
The Scotts are loud in many ways; every night my parents hear them calling in their cats, who all have food names: "MUFFIN! PUMPKIN!" OH CUPCAKE!" My parents say it sounds like they're hungry. The example of the Scotts has not caused me to give up calling in my own cats, but it does amuse me to think of the food names as I stand in the dusk yelling "SAMMY! CHESTER! SABRINA! SABRINA! COME HERE, SABRINA!" And I do wonder what my neighbors think. I half expect an old lady named Sabrina to come walking up the street some night in answer to my call, the way I once made a young man in Cape Girardeau, Missouri do a double-take as he walked along the road--in those days, I amused myself by leaning out of the car window and yelling "HI, MAX" to every person I saw. The young man must have been the first (and possibly the only) person I'd passed who was actually named Max.
I don't think I'll ever be mild, exactly, but I hope that when I get old, I'm more like my parents than their neighbors the Scotts. They used to have an amicable relationship, picking up each others' mail and newspapers when they left town (something my parents do a lot now that they're retired). Then the Scotts started yelling at kids who rode their bikes through the hedge at the end of our dead-end street (my parents own the entire hedge, and it's indestructible--once we even set it on fire, and it came back). They told my parents to forbid kids to skateboard over or play around in the hills of dirt left when a plumber had to dig up some pipes in the yard. Finally the Scotts laid down the law--either my parents told the neighborhood kids to get out of their yard, or the Scotts wouldn't speak to them anymore. Ron calls this the "dread Scott decision." My parents wouldn't agree to ban kids from the yard, and the Scotts no longer speak to them.
My calming process consisted of painting in and around the new bathroom. There's lot of trim that needed a last coat, after being hammered on. The walls needed touchups where equipment scraped them. The doorway had to have primer on the new wood parts. The door had to be stained. For the first coat I painted on a polyurethane/stain combination in "golden oak," but then we decided it didn't match the rest of the doors in the house enough, so I went back and got a "golden maple" poly gel, which is much pleasanter to work with. I had to repaint the bedroom wall around where the new door went in. Little fiddly painting and varnishing tasks with lots of different colors of paint and brush changing and washing up are very calming.
I resolve to be, if not exactly milder, at least the kind of person who doesn't get old and end up snapping at kids who want to play in my yard. The kind of person who says this kind of prayer:
Muzak, by Kevin Young
When old, do not let me bark
at passersby--let me be
like the slow motion, down-
the-street dog, ignoring
the cardinals, the colors
he cannot see, even us
as we tiptoe by--
Friend, please save me
from being the neighbors'
fool hound who woofs loud
at every grey squirrel, stray
noise, or lab rushing past
to meet some lady--from being
that cur who cannot help but howl
all night like newlyweds
keeping the world awake. O terrible
angel of the elevator, the plane,
insufferable unquiet we pray to, afraid--
Please make me mild
Actually, I don't think I have any chance of aging in a doglike way. The best I can hope for is probably to hiss quietly at anyone who dares to disturb my comfort.
The Scotts are loud in many ways; every night my parents hear them calling in their cats, who all have food names: "MUFFIN! PUMPKIN!" OH CUPCAKE!" My parents say it sounds like they're hungry. The example of the Scotts has not caused me to give up calling in my own cats, but it does amuse me to think of the food names as I stand in the dusk yelling "SAMMY! CHESTER! SABRINA! SABRINA! COME HERE, SABRINA!" And I do wonder what my neighbors think. I half expect an old lady named Sabrina to come walking up the street some night in answer to my call, the way I once made a young man in Cape Girardeau, Missouri do a double-take as he walked along the road--in those days, I amused myself by leaning out of the car window and yelling "HI, MAX" to every person I saw. The young man must have been the first (and possibly the only) person I'd passed who was actually named Max.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Boom!
I am so angry I'm about to explode: Boom! There's been a controversy in my small town lately about a middle school teacher at the public school both my kids attended/are attending. Years ago, I heard he gave handouts on how people and dinosaurs lived together but required his students to hand them back in at the end of class, lest a parent find out that he was teaching creationism again. This year, some parents filed suit against him for allegedly burning a cross into their child's arm. He has also been accused of faith healing at a meeting of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at the school. The school system has warned him not to teach his religion (some non-denominational type) in public school, but this year they asked him to take down the ten commandments from his classroom wall and remove the bible from his desk. He's tried to make the controversy all about removing the bible, but as the ACLU has pointed out, if he wants it for personal use, he could keep it IN the desk, rather than out where the students can see it (and, according to students, where he can read from it out loud during class).
Why am I so angry? Well, the teacher's supporters have been very vocal in the local newspaper, and I wanted to speak out in support of the school board. I wrote what I thought was a fairly civil letter. Here, judge for yourself:
I support the school board investigation into Mount Vernon Middle School teacher John Freshwater's advocacy of his religion in the classroom. I am the parent of a MVMS seventh-grader and a MVHS ninth-grader, and I can assure you that I would have protested had either of my children been assigned to Mr. Freshwater's classroom because I have been told he teaches creationism, rather than science.
I find it curious that most of the letters to the editor support Freshwater's position because most of the people I know do not support the teaching of a particular religion in public schools.
This case should not be about an individual; it is about one of the main ideas on which our country was founded: Freedom from state-sponsored religion.
So what happened after this letter appeared in the local newspaper? I got a religious pamphlet sent in the mail, anonymously. No return address. Certainly no signature. ("What's next," I asked. "A flaming cross on my front lawn?") Well, what came next is this letter:
I am writing in response to Jeanne's letter to the editor and her stated support of the school board. Jeanne found it curious that most of the letters supported Mr. Freshwater because "most of the people I know do not support the teaching of a particular religion in public schools."
Maybe, Jeanne, you have surrounded yourself with people that tend to think and believe as you do. I believe this issue is about teaching what some people believe to be the truth. I am not talking about the truth of God's word. I am talking about the way many people think the earth was created. There are those that believe the truth to be that the earth came by accident, it just happened. Those people believe in Darwinism.
Then there are those that believe the truth to be that the earth did not happen by accident, it was created. These people believe in creationism. Both "isms" have scientists that support these two theories. Most people that I know believe the way I do, that the earth was created, it was not an accident.
This issue is not about religion; it is about teaching the truth. Your truth, I assume, is Darwinism, my truth is Creationism. What is wrong with teaching both theories, which are both supported by scientists? Jeanne, it takes a lot of faith to believe in a creator, and it takes a lot of faith to believe that the earth came from nothing. If you are willing to keep the teaching of Creationism out of the public schools, then let's be fair and remove the religious teaching of Darwinism out of the public schools also.
The author of this comma-spliced and otherwise error-filled letter is James Fehrman. At least he signed his letter. I don't know him, and now I don't want to know him. What I want is for one of my friends, preferably a scientist, to write a letter telling him EXACTLY what is wrong with teaching both "theories."
I am absolutely through with civil discourse, at least for today. I am in the mood for Howard Nemerov, who wrote this poem the year I was born(1960):
Boom!
Sees Boom in Religion, Too
Atlantic City, June 23, 1957 (AP) --President Eisenhower's pastor said tonight that Americans are living in a period of "unprecedented religious activity" caused partially by paid vacations, the eight-hour day and modern conveniences.
"These fruits of material progress," said the Rev. Edward L.R. Elson of the National Presbyterian Church, Washington, "have provided the leisure, the energy, and the means for a level of human and spiritual values never before reached."
Here at the Vespasian-Carlton, it's just one
religious activity after another; the sky
is constantly being crossed by cruciform
airplanes, in which nobody disbelieves
for a second and the tide, the tide
of spiritual progress and prosperity
miraculously keeps rising, to a level
never before attained. The churches are full,
the beaches are full, and the filling-stations
are full, God's great ocean is full
of paid vacationers praying an eight-hour day
to the human and spiritual values, the fruits,
the leisure, the energy, and the means, Lord,
the means for the level, the unprecedented level,
and the modern conveniences, which also are full.
Never before, O Lord, have the prayers and praises
from belfry and phonebooth, from ballpark and barbecue
the sacrifices, so endlessly ascended.
It was not thus when Job in Palestine
sat in the dust and cried, cried bitterly;
when Damiem kissed the lepers on their wounds
it was not thus; it was not thus
when Francis worked a fourteen-hour day
strictly for the birds; when Dante took
a week's vacation without pay and it rained
part of the time, O Lord, it was not thus.
But now the gears mesh and the tires burn
and the ice chatters in the shaker and the priest
in the pulpit and Thy Name, O Lord,
is kept before the public, while the fruits
ripen and religion booms and the level rises
and every modern convenience runneth over,
that it may never be with us as it hath been
with Athens and Karnack and Nagasaki,
nor Thy sun for one instant refrain from shining
on the rainbow Buick by the breezeway
or the Chris Craft with the uplift life raft;
that we may continue to be the just folks we are,
plain people with ordinary superliners and
disposable diaperliners, people of the stop'n'shop
n'pray as you go, of hotel, motel, boatel,
the humble pilgrims of no deposit no return
and please adjust thy clothing, who will give to Thee,
if Thee will keep us going, our annual
Miss Universe, for Thy Name's Sake, Amen.
The poem has an even greater effect if you read it out loud. I hope that at the end of it, you are not trembling with anger, as I am. It's a hard way to begin the day, but evidently somebody has to do it. I guess this is the main reason I endure the underemployed adjunct life--because I hate ignorance. I hate it with every fiber of my being. "What else could she have done, being what she was?"
But since my local paper only allows one letter to the editor every 30 days, I will have to endure this latest example of ignorance in silence. Where are the other people in this school district who hate it???
Why am I so angry? Well, the teacher's supporters have been very vocal in the local newspaper, and I wanted to speak out in support of the school board. I wrote what I thought was a fairly civil letter. Here, judge for yourself:
I support the school board investigation into Mount Vernon Middle School teacher John Freshwater's advocacy of his religion in the classroom. I am the parent of a MVMS seventh-grader and a MVHS ninth-grader, and I can assure you that I would have protested had either of my children been assigned to Mr. Freshwater's classroom because I have been told he teaches creationism, rather than science.
I find it curious that most of the letters to the editor support Freshwater's position because most of the people I know do not support the teaching of a particular religion in public schools.
This case should not be about an individual; it is about one of the main ideas on which our country was founded: Freedom from state-sponsored religion.
So what happened after this letter appeared in the local newspaper? I got a religious pamphlet sent in the mail, anonymously. No return address. Certainly no signature. ("What's next," I asked. "A flaming cross on my front lawn?") Well, what came next is this letter:
I am writing in response to Jeanne's letter to the editor and her stated support of the school board. Jeanne found it curious that most of the letters supported Mr. Freshwater because "most of the people I know do not support the teaching of a particular religion in public schools."
Maybe, Jeanne, you have surrounded yourself with people that tend to think and believe as you do. I believe this issue is about teaching what some people believe to be the truth. I am not talking about the truth of God's word. I am talking about the way many people think the earth was created. There are those that believe the truth to be that the earth came by accident, it just happened. Those people believe in Darwinism.
Then there are those that believe the truth to be that the earth did not happen by accident, it was created. These people believe in creationism. Both "isms" have scientists that support these two theories. Most people that I know believe the way I do, that the earth was created, it was not an accident.
This issue is not about religion; it is about teaching the truth. Your truth, I assume, is Darwinism, my truth is Creationism. What is wrong with teaching both theories, which are both supported by scientists? Jeanne, it takes a lot of faith to believe in a creator, and it takes a lot of faith to believe that the earth came from nothing. If you are willing to keep the teaching of Creationism out of the public schools, then let's be fair and remove the religious teaching of Darwinism out of the public schools also.
The author of this comma-spliced and otherwise error-filled letter is James Fehrman. At least he signed his letter. I don't know him, and now I don't want to know him. What I want is for one of my friends, preferably a scientist, to write a letter telling him EXACTLY what is wrong with teaching both "theories."
I am absolutely through with civil discourse, at least for today. I am in the mood for Howard Nemerov, who wrote this poem the year I was born(1960):
Boom!
Sees Boom in Religion, Too
Atlantic City, June 23, 1957 (AP) --President Eisenhower's pastor said tonight that Americans are living in a period of "unprecedented religious activity" caused partially by paid vacations, the eight-hour day and modern conveniences.
"These fruits of material progress," said the Rev. Edward L.R. Elson of the National Presbyterian Church, Washington, "have provided the leisure, the energy, and the means for a level of human and spiritual values never before reached."
Here at the Vespasian-Carlton, it's just one
religious activity after another; the sky
is constantly being crossed by cruciform
airplanes, in which nobody disbelieves
for a second and the tide, the tide
of spiritual progress and prosperity
miraculously keeps rising, to a level
never before attained. The churches are full,
the beaches are full, and the filling-stations
are full, God's great ocean is full
of paid vacationers praying an eight-hour day
to the human and spiritual values, the fruits,
the leisure, the energy, and the means, Lord,
the means for the level, the unprecedented level,
and the modern conveniences, which also are full.
Never before, O Lord, have the prayers and praises
from belfry and phonebooth, from ballpark and barbecue
the sacrifices, so endlessly ascended.
It was not thus when Job in Palestine
sat in the dust and cried, cried bitterly;
when Damiem kissed the lepers on their wounds
it was not thus; it was not thus
when Francis worked a fourteen-hour day
strictly for the birds; when Dante took
a week's vacation without pay and it rained
part of the time, O Lord, it was not thus.
But now the gears mesh and the tires burn
and the ice chatters in the shaker and the priest
in the pulpit and Thy Name, O Lord,
is kept before the public, while the fruits
ripen and religion booms and the level rises
and every modern convenience runneth over,
that it may never be with us as it hath been
with Athens and Karnack and Nagasaki,
nor Thy sun for one instant refrain from shining
on the rainbow Buick by the breezeway
or the Chris Craft with the uplift life raft;
that we may continue to be the just folks we are,
plain people with ordinary superliners and
disposable diaperliners, people of the stop'n'shop
n'pray as you go, of hotel, motel, boatel,
the humble pilgrims of no deposit no return
and please adjust thy clothing, who will give to Thee,
if Thee will keep us going, our annual
Miss Universe, for Thy Name's Sake, Amen.
The poem has an even greater effect if you read it out loud. I hope that at the end of it, you are not trembling with anger, as I am. It's a hard way to begin the day, but evidently somebody has to do it. I guess this is the main reason I endure the underemployed adjunct life--because I hate ignorance. I hate it with every fiber of my being. "What else could she have done, being what she was?"
But since my local paper only allows one letter to the editor every 30 days, I will have to endure this latest example of ignorance in silence. Where are the other people in this school district who hate it???
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The Pesthouse
I have a morbid fascination with books that describe contagious diseases. Probably it's not good for me to read them, though. After my first decade of motherhood with two children that got really, really sick from catching every single germ that hit town, I still have some paranoid habits, like carrying antibacterial wipes in my car and purse and requiring everyone with me to use them. And I do this despite the fact that adenoid surgery at the age of six helped my first-born to actually get through a cold without two weeks of ensuing sinus infection and coughing all night, and getting older actually helped my second-born to catch a cold without the same kind of two weeks. It's been a couple of years (knock on wood) since I had to use the nebulizer. Those of you who still are in those days of being up at night with a child who can't stop coughing and then sterilizing all the equipment with vinegar and water and then going out to buy more of those drugs that make the kid hyper....it's a hard time. But it passes, and now I have kids who actually have immune systems that work.
Mothers get scarred for life, though. So when I saw The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace, at the library, I had to check it out. And it's a two-for-one pleasure-- not only is it about contagious disease, but it's a post-apocalyptic novel! In fact, the contagious disease part is a smaller part of the story than I would have expected from the title. (It's even a smaller part than it was in Ann Benson's The Burning Road, which I loved.) This story begins in Ferrytown, where you can get across a big river (the Mississippi?) to continue your journey west. The characters, Margaret and Franklin, start their journey at the Ferrytown pesthouse, because it turns out that the sickness that sent Margaret there is not fatal after all. The sign of being assigned to the pesthouse is the shaving of all body hair. Once the hair has grown back enough, the person is presumed to be well enough to go out into the world.
Most of The Pesthouse is about the journey of two characters through the new American wilderness, rife with bandits and other dangers. They make it through, in part because of judicious use of Margaret's baldness and then Franklin's decision to shave himself to make himself appear to be contagious. But when they get to what they thought was their destination, they realize that their picture of the world was not complete. The charm of the book is the completion of this picture of the American west. I always like the description of something from our time after the apocalypse:
The road, indeed, seemed built--by how many laborers and over how many years? at what immense cost? --to take great weights. Its now damaged surface, much degraded by the weather and time, comprised mostly of chips of stone, loose grit, and sticky black rubble, which only the toughest of plants--knotweed, sagebrush, and thistle--had succeeded in penetrating.
I guess we give the author artistic license with his sentence fragment there.
One of the things that happens to Margaret is that she makes it safely to a place called The Ark. Margaret is given work, food, and a bed by the people who run the Ark, "Finger Baptists" who require that anyone entering rid themselves of anything metal. Eventually, though, Franklin and Margaret escape from the Ark when it is raided by bandits who had earlier kidnapped Franklin. They make their own way with a baby they have rescued along the way, and they create their own life: "they no longer felt defeated by America, as most emigrants had on the journey out, driven eastward by their failings."
I guess that for my second decade of motherhood I should try to be less driven by my previous failure to protect my children from disease, and take the warnings about the danger of antibacterial wipes and antibacterial soap more seriously. Now that we all have functioning immune systems, we should use milder soap, and probably fewer wipes, in an effort to delay the apocalypse.
Mothers get scarred for life, though. So when I saw The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace, at the library, I had to check it out. And it's a two-for-one pleasure-- not only is it about contagious disease, but it's a post-apocalyptic novel! In fact, the contagious disease part is a smaller part of the story than I would have expected from the title. (It's even a smaller part than it was in Ann Benson's The Burning Road, which I loved.) This story begins in Ferrytown, where you can get across a big river (the Mississippi?) to continue your journey west. The characters, Margaret and Franklin, start their journey at the Ferrytown pesthouse, because it turns out that the sickness that sent Margaret there is not fatal after all. The sign of being assigned to the pesthouse is the shaving of all body hair. Once the hair has grown back enough, the person is presumed to be well enough to go out into the world.
Most of The Pesthouse is about the journey of two characters through the new American wilderness, rife with bandits and other dangers. They make it through, in part because of judicious use of Margaret's baldness and then Franklin's decision to shave himself to make himself appear to be contagious. But when they get to what they thought was their destination, they realize that their picture of the world was not complete. The charm of the book is the completion of this picture of the American west. I always like the description of something from our time after the apocalypse:
The road, indeed, seemed built--by how many laborers and over how many years? at what immense cost? --to take great weights. Its now damaged surface, much degraded by the weather and time, comprised mostly of chips of stone, loose grit, and sticky black rubble, which only the toughest of plants--knotweed, sagebrush, and thistle--had succeeded in penetrating.
I guess we give the author artistic license with his sentence fragment there.
One of the things that happens to Margaret is that she makes it safely to a place called The Ark. Margaret is given work, food, and a bed by the people who run the Ark, "Finger Baptists" who require that anyone entering rid themselves of anything metal. Eventually, though, Franklin and Margaret escape from the Ark when it is raided by bandits who had earlier kidnapped Franklin. They make their own way with a baby they have rescued along the way, and they create their own life: "they no longer felt defeated by America, as most emigrants had on the journey out, driven eastward by their failings."
I guess that for my second decade of motherhood I should try to be less driven by my previous failure to protect my children from disease, and take the warnings about the danger of antibacterial wipes and antibacterial soap more seriously. Now that we all have functioning immune systems, we should use milder soap, and probably fewer wipes, in an effort to delay the apocalypse.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Old Man's War
I'm late to the Scalzi party--it's a good one, and I've been missing it! My friend who reads more SF than I do had what I consider a minor quibble about John Scalzi's wonderful first book, Old Man's War, and so didn't recommend it to me. He has a weird philosophy about not wanting to read books other people recommend anyway, so I guess that's why he didn't bring me the book, press it into my hands, and demand that I start reading it right then. This is what I would do to all of you if I could. I press the book virtually into your hands right now.
What did I like most about Old Man's War? Well, it has stuff. You know, science fiction stuff that's described in just enough detail to make it interesting, like the "beanstalk" elevator that gets the main character, John Perry, to outer space. It also has aliens. And it doesn't just have one or two, and it doesn't just describe them physically. They have mysterious motivations and philosophies, and there's an entire universe of them! Most of all, it has this great idea that old people would make good soldiers, if they only had physical prowess to match their decades of experience.
I found the description of Perry's transformation into a physical being capable of soldiering to be accurate, if a bit speedy. The process has just taken place (note that I'm carefully not telling you exactly what the process is; it would be rude to steal the author's thunder in that way), and the old man steps out:
"I placed my right foot forward and staggered a little bit. Dr. Russell came up beside me and steadied me. 'Careful,' he said. 'You've been an older man for a while. It's going to take you a little bit of time to remember how to be in a young body.'
'What do you mean?' I said.
'Well,' he said. 'For one thing, you can straighten up.'
He was right. I was stooped slightly (kids, drink your milk). I straightened up, and took another step forward. And another. Good news, I remembered how to walk. I cracked a grin like a schoolboy as I paced in the room.
What took me about a month to learn--how to walk again after walking like an old person for some years--takes Perry about a minute, but hey, this is fiction. It's good enough fiction that it brought me back to the coaching I got on how to hit with the heel first and then roll the foot and bend the knee at the end, and the days when I had to think about stepping like that in order to be able to do it.
The stuff in this book includes Scalzi's version of the feed. He calls it a BrainPal. When Perry gets his, he names it Asshole:
Apparently, there was very little Asshole couldn't do. He could send messages to other recruits. He could download reports. He could play music or video. He could play games. He could call up any document on a system. He could store incredible amounts of data. He could perform complex calculations. He could diagnose physical ailments and provide suggestions for cures. He could create a local network among a chosen group of other BrainPal users. He could provide instantaneous translations of hundreds of human and alien languages. He could even provide field of vision information on any other BrainPal user.
The uses of the BrainPal get even more interesting in the sequel to Old Man's War, entitled The Ghost Brigades (I'm halfway through it). The kinds of philosophical questions raised by human use of technology get more interesting, too--and they start out pretty interesting in Old Man's War:
The next step of evolution is already happening. Just like the Earth, most of the colonies are isolated from each other. Nearly all people born on a colony stay there their entire lives. Humans also adapt to their new homes; it's already beginning culturally. Some of the oldest of the colony planets are beginning to show linguistic and cultural drift from their cultures and languages back on Earth....you've lived long enough to know that there's more to life than your own life. Most of you have raised families and have children and grandchildren and understand the value of doing something beyond your own selfish goals. Even if you never become colonists yourselves, you still recognize that human colonies are good for the human race, and worth fighting for. It's hard to drill that concept into the brain of a nineteen-year-old. But you know from experience. In this universe, experience counts.
When I finish The Ghost Brigades, I'm going on to read The Last Colony and then all the other Scalzi books I can find, probably starting with the one about Jane Sagan, even if it is only available in hardback, and the one about Jane and Perry's daughter Zoe, which is coming out this August. Not only that, but I'm joining the considerable party of readers who follow Scalzi's blog Whatever. It's like what Holden Caulfield imagined all those years ago--you finish a book, and you can virtually call up the author and talk to him about it. Everyone's invited, but you'll have more fun if you've read his books, and maybe the books of his friends... For mother's day, I got a trip to the bookstore to find some of the books on the list I keep. We have a credit card that gives us a book dollar for every thousand dollars we spend, or something like that, so I got a bunch of books I've been wanting to read, including The Ghost Brigades and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. It's a great week to be underemployed.
By the way, at the bookstore I went to, Borders, I found The Ghost Brigades in SF, Little Brother in YA, and Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic in the children's section.
What did I like most about Old Man's War? Well, it has stuff. You know, science fiction stuff that's described in just enough detail to make it interesting, like the "beanstalk" elevator that gets the main character, John Perry, to outer space. It also has aliens. And it doesn't just have one or two, and it doesn't just describe them physically. They have mysterious motivations and philosophies, and there's an entire universe of them! Most of all, it has this great idea that old people would make good soldiers, if they only had physical prowess to match their decades of experience.
I found the description of Perry's transformation into a physical being capable of soldiering to be accurate, if a bit speedy. The process has just taken place (note that I'm carefully not telling you exactly what the process is; it would be rude to steal the author's thunder in that way), and the old man steps out:
"I placed my right foot forward and staggered a little bit. Dr. Russell came up beside me and steadied me. 'Careful,' he said. 'You've been an older man for a while. It's going to take you a little bit of time to remember how to be in a young body.'
'What do you mean?' I said.
'Well,' he said. 'For one thing, you can straighten up.'
He was right. I was stooped slightly (kids, drink your milk). I straightened up, and took another step forward. And another. Good news, I remembered how to walk. I cracked a grin like a schoolboy as I paced in the room.
What took me about a month to learn--how to walk again after walking like an old person for some years--takes Perry about a minute, but hey, this is fiction. It's good enough fiction that it brought me back to the coaching I got on how to hit with the heel first and then roll the foot and bend the knee at the end, and the days when I had to think about stepping like that in order to be able to do it.
The stuff in this book includes Scalzi's version of the feed. He calls it a BrainPal. When Perry gets his, he names it Asshole:
Apparently, there was very little Asshole couldn't do. He could send messages to other recruits. He could download reports. He could play music or video. He could play games. He could call up any document on a system. He could store incredible amounts of data. He could perform complex calculations. He could diagnose physical ailments and provide suggestions for cures. He could create a local network among a chosen group of other BrainPal users. He could provide instantaneous translations of hundreds of human and alien languages. He could even provide field of vision information on any other BrainPal user.
The uses of the BrainPal get even more interesting in the sequel to Old Man's War, entitled The Ghost Brigades (I'm halfway through it). The kinds of philosophical questions raised by human use of technology get more interesting, too--and they start out pretty interesting in Old Man's War:
The next step of evolution is already happening. Just like the Earth, most of the colonies are isolated from each other. Nearly all people born on a colony stay there their entire lives. Humans also adapt to their new homes; it's already beginning culturally. Some of the oldest of the colony planets are beginning to show linguistic and cultural drift from their cultures and languages back on Earth....you've lived long enough to know that there's more to life than your own life. Most of you have raised families and have children and grandchildren and understand the value of doing something beyond your own selfish goals. Even if you never become colonists yourselves, you still recognize that human colonies are good for the human race, and worth fighting for. It's hard to drill that concept into the brain of a nineteen-year-old. But you know from experience. In this universe, experience counts.
When I finish The Ghost Brigades, I'm going on to read The Last Colony and then all the other Scalzi books I can find, probably starting with the one about Jane Sagan, even if it is only available in hardback, and the one about Jane and Perry's daughter Zoe, which is coming out this August. Not only that, but I'm joining the considerable party of readers who follow Scalzi's blog Whatever. It's like what Holden Caulfield imagined all those years ago--you finish a book, and you can virtually call up the author and talk to him about it. Everyone's invited, but you'll have more fun if you've read his books, and maybe the books of his friends... For mother's day, I got a trip to the bookstore to find some of the books on the list I keep. We have a credit card that gives us a book dollar for every thousand dollars we spend, or something like that, so I got a bunch of books I've been wanting to read, including The Ghost Brigades and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. It's a great week to be underemployed.
By the way, at the bookstore I went to, Borders, I found The Ghost Brigades in SF, Little Brother in YA, and Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic in the children's section.
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