The Devil's Day: Or, The Uses of Odium

So I heard a week or so ago that some neighborhoods were determined that their kids would dress up and do trick-or-treating on Saturday night rather than tonight, the actual Halloween night, because "we can't have the devil's celebration on the Lord's day."

Now, I'm quite familiar with the position that Halloween is Of The Devil. I've just never bought it. I think, not to put too fine a point on it, that it's bunk.

In my recent love affair with liturgical Christianity, I discovered something radically enthralling about Sunday. It's a feast day, every Sunday of the year: a Feast of Our Lord, equal to nearly every other day of celebration in the calendar. Sundays are not counted in the fasting time of Lent. They are not meant for days of maudlin sobriety. You do not wear black on a feast day. You do not beat your breast, you do not act sad, you do not walk softly, you do not observe a radical decorum. On a feast day, a day actually set aside for joy and laughter and dancing and eating, I for one actually feel more inclined to be grateful and fill my mouth with praises, more inclined even to be reverent: because it is part of "the unforced rhythms of grace," as Peterson's Message puts it.

I do not think this is what is meant by "The Lord's Day" in usual Christian parlance. So when a distinction is drawn between "The Lord's Day" and "the devil's day" there is already a problem about what goodness we are upholding as against the supposed badness of Halloween.

In fact, I think the problem with Halloween is the same problem that occurs with days like Mardi Gras and April Fools and New Year's Eve: the wild indecorum stretched to the point of self-caricature. A secure devout public would not, and has not, quibbled with this self-caricature, seeing it as a healthy way of addressing that aspect of our humanity.

An insecure devout public, on the other hand, feels threatened by even self-caricature of indecorum and insobriety. An insecure devout public, which feels guilt even for its legitimate celebrations, cannot countenance celebration in others. And yet whether the devotion of the Christian public is secure or insecure, God is sovereign. So the quibble about such holidays, such feasts, I submit has very little to do with the Lord at all, and very much to do with how much control some humans feel they deserve to have over other humans' behavior.

Do people sin on Halloween? Sure. They sin every other day of the calendar, too. Is there an emphasis on death? Sure. People die every day, too. Shouldn't we have a day in which we make fun of death and evil? Shouldn't we have a day in which the scariness of these things is caricatured and therefore rendered less scary?

I'm not referring, by the way, to neopagan celebrations of Samhain. In a predominantly Christian society Samhain doesn't really figure, except as it is another variety of behavior that is intolerable to those who want control over the whole populace. The irony is that most of those people don't know anything about Samhain; they think it's about people drinking blood or sacrificing cats to the devil or something, I don't know. I don't know much about Samhain either, but I suspect it is analogous to a feast day, a day celebrating changes in the year, a day of reflection and gratitude and eating and joy -- a day, oh, kind of like the Feast of Our Lord. No, it isn't Christian; but it is fully human, and anything fully human ought to be fully respected as such. Unlike Christians, pagans don't proselytize, they don't go out recruiting followers, so I don't think their presence in our midst is going to do anything but make some Christians wonder why they aren't having the fun they're entitled to on the Lord's Day. That is where the threat of paganism lies -- to the establishment, not to God, who wants us to have feasts.

The devil's day, in my opinion, is not a day in which we make fun of evil and death by dressing up in its clothes. The devil's day is any day we completely waste in self-pity and self-involvement, in quarrelling and sulking and avenging imaginary wrongs. That can happen any day, and it can happen even on days in which we observe all due decorum and lace ourselves tight. In fact, miserly self-denial of this sort is a perfect breeding ground for devil's days.

Am I therefore advocating wholesale laissez-faire? Um, didn't St. Paul have to field this question, like, more than once? Why are we still debating whether it's a good thing to have days set aside for topsy-turviness? It's in the Bible! God likes it! Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Liberty: which means not being constantly behaviorally beholden to people who think they ought to be the ones calling the shots.

There, I'm glad I got that off my chest. That rant was about fifteen years in the making. I'm here all weekend. Try the candy corn, and be sure to tip your Catwoman-dressed waitress on your way out.

What A Woman Wants. No, Not Anything to Do With Mel Gibson.

A few years ago, long enough for some of the bitterness to fade but not so long that I can't remember the frustration, I got into a spot of bother on a Harry Potter email discussion list. You see, there were some people with entrenched opinions about Ron and Hermione, mainly having to do with their ongoing low-level conflict. They liked Hermione a great deal and were quite vocal about their distaste for Ron's character and intelligence. Well, one day I got kinda tired of the gratuitous Ron-bashing and decided to speak up for him in a couple lively posts.

The odd thing was, the instant I stuck up for Ron people started accusing me of being a closet Hermione-hater. Just imagine my amazement and frustration when my repeated insistences that liking Ron did not mean hating Hermione -- that building up one did not require tearing down the other -- that defending his actions didn't require making some sweeping moral attack on her character -- fell on deaf ears. They believed so strongly that Hermione was bullet-proof and Ron was reprehensible that there was no getting through to them, and they grew verbally extremely aggressive, not to say violent, both to the character and to me.

Sound less than rational to you? Sound a little...hysterical?

Now, arguments about fiction are pretty much harmless. Except by causing annoyance, frustration, and strained relationships, they don't have much to do with real life. But this scenario is a symptom of a logical disconnect that happens because of a psychological choice people make, and it happens with important issues too.

Like with the choice to self-identify as against feminism or feminists.

I've heard a lot of anti-feminist arguments in my time, that range from, "Oh, that's not a good thing to be. You don't want to be like one of those bra-burners," to "But what about all the horrible things women do? You're not going to make them out to be innocent angels, are you?" to "I think women are equal, but I support traditional gender roles and I think it's a mistake to be shrill in opposing them. It smacks of power hunger." All these arguments have one thing in common, an axiom reached by psychological choice long before any intellectual arguments are brought to bear: You can't help women without unjustly hurting men.

It has a corollary: People who want to help women are mostly, if not solely, interested in hurting, or causing injustice to, men.

I reject both premise and corollary.

One of the things that makes humans (by God's grace) a highly developed species is the ability to plan for long-term benefits for its society. Surely no one would deny that the well-being of half the population is in the interest of everyone. Nor would it seem illogical to assume that if there is a power imbalance between two groups of people, made all the more intractable by long practice, that carefully weighting the law in favor of the weaker party is, in fact, justice. Yes, such justice ought to be self-evident, and yes, it's a shame that legislation must be so weighted. It also ought to be self-evident to seventh-graders that they shouldn't have a war with perfume samples while doing an English lesson, but I had to send two of them to the office a few years ago for doing just that, and was pretty mortified (as a timid student-teacher) at the thought of having to call these boys' parents and inform them of what they'd done, since it rather reflected on my control of the class.

The point is, where there is no enforcement, no clemency sometimes even bordering on arbitrariness, there will be abuse of power. It doesn't just happen in Afghanistan, folks. It happens right here, and we don't do anything about it because it is mortifying to our sense of civilization.

I've seen and heard arguments in some specific situation against a feminist position that characterized the judicial weight toward the woman's cause -- as in a rape or divorce case -- as a grave miscarriage of justice. But I have noticed that the objection is rarely based on the specifics of the case; rather, it is more often directed at the bedrock idea that a woman should ever win a case against a man. As if that one victory were dangerously cracking open a pair of floodgates through which female usurpation of power would soon force its way rushing through. Likewise with raising issues of women's health -- as if caring more about women's health means caring less about men's.

It doesn't.

As a feminist since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I have never seen the granting of due justice to women as a way of hurting or dehumanizing men. In fact, I've been rather famous for appreciating the full humanity of men, in the face of indisputable familiarity with the abuses of power of some of them. And since I met more feminists, I realized that there's a veritable rash of this appreciation of male humanity among them. If we're not careful, girls, we'll lose our man-hating street cred. Don't let the secret get out!

Sorry, that was sarcasm. And sarcasm in the mouth of a woman is proof positive of her harpydom. Won't happen again.

I have met many people in my short adult life that match a lot of profiles, sometimes more than one profile at once. I know men who are as feminist as they can possibly be while still being misogynists. I know women who refuse to identify themselves as feminists because of the term's taint of liberalism (since this was once a description of myself I have a special sympathy with them.). I know feminists who change their name when they marry and feminist-haters who urge other women to vote. Everybody has stumbling blocks and frustrating complications in their lives; because humans just do.

My point is pretty simple. When Freud asked the famous question, "What does a woman want?" he neglected to ask an actual woman on purpose because he knew he wouldn't like her answer. A woman wants justice. Because people want justice, and women are people, and they've been denied it a hundredthousandweight of times. J.S. Mill said all this stuff a hundred years ago, but I'll restate it. Granting due justice to one person is good for everybody. Yes, it means sometimes taking power and privilege from people who've had it a long time, and that has to suck for them in the short term. And as Arthur Ashe remarked about his battle with AIDS, people never are inclined to ask, "Why me?" about the pleasant things, but with unpleasant things they nearly always raise the question of whether they deserve them.

To people who think that liking Ron means hating Hermione; to people who think defending women is to ignore their faults while punishing men's; to people who tell me they could never be feminists because that means being a harpy, a man-hater, or a liberal pinko commie -- I say, respectfully, that they suffer from a fatal misconception born of an unfortunate choice to draw lines between some ephemeral "us" and "them".

Further, I say that the moral or religious conviction that traditional gender roles are essential to our society because they entail the notion of a female as deficient or sinful and the male as her savior, teacher, or judge is itself sinful, because it misprojects the map of holiness. Greenland is three times the size it ought to be, and it screws with our ideas of reality. If that's dangerous thinking, it's only because it doesn't serve the status quo, not because it really violates God's plan for humankind. Here, too, to serve women is not to do a disservice to men.

I wanted to speak plainly about this because I get extremely tired of all the current political posturing about who's "us" and who's "them", over something that affects me directly every day, usually adversely. While respecting the humanity, integrity, and intelligence of those who hold different opinions from mine, I have to say that I hold these opinions precisely because I believe them to say something true about reality, not because I wish to be antagonistic for its own sake.

So, yeah, I'm a feminist. And I love males. They're not mutually exclusive.

Thank you and goodnight.

Tea and Brie

It's raining, steadily and heavily, like it hasn't in weeks. The weatherman didn't say it, but it looks like the remnants of Tropical Storm Matthew are giving us an end to our mini-drought. It is damp and cold, and outside it is gorgeous, everything wet and rich, the leaves beginning to turn.

I stopped keeping track of TS Lisa awhile back, and haven't heard anything, so I presume she's petered out or wandered off. And I had such plans for her!

My mood is an oil-and-water mood -- I feel trapped, with no refuge, then I feel more or less content and Okay. Shake me up and I'm a vinaigrette of sweetness and bitterness. I've been writing some, which is usually a good outlet, or else cathartic, or else lancing, or else distracting. I worry about our country, then I worry about me, then I worry about both, then I pray. I will not fear the ten thousands of people who set themselves against me round about....Thou O Lord art a shield for me, the glory and the lifter of my head....

Yesterday I woke almost too late to go to church. I popped out of bed at 10:18, pulled on some clothes, applied some scent and lip balm, and walked a block to St. John's. Since my car died I've been walking there a lot rather than bumming rides to Christ Church -- and most of the people I've made friends with at Christ Church are gone now, except for a few that I love, so I suppose it's as well I can't often go. The people at St. John's are getting used to me and my silent, stiff facade of gravitas, I think. They are now coming up to me in the coffee hour and asking if there's something I'd like to do. It is nice to be asked that; in order to make a connection at my old church, a very large suburban one, I decided (after six years or so) to find something to get involved with; and it worked. In a little church, people will ask -- you don't have the luxury of coasting on programs and many hands to help when you're small. I was introduced to some other library folk. There seems to be a disproportionate number of Episcopalian library people at St. John's, not that I'm complaining. Three of us (the other two women were both probably older than my mother) had a mind-blowing discussion about the decline of literacy and its political implications in the current national and global climate. If you had told me two years ago that it was possible to have such a cogent, erudite, and wide-ranging discussion at a church coffee hour, I would have laughed at you. Not that you can just walk into any Episcopal church and do that: people "give thanks always and everywhere", but people's minds and temperaments vary "always and everywhere" too. But to have it only a block from where I live! God gives me little gifts.

For my late breakfast today I had tea and French bread with the last of the Brie. A very nice, rainy day meal, taken with my eyes out the window on the dripping world.

I think I am frightened not of loss but of paralysis.

It strikes me that everybody knows their hearts. I do not think there is one person who does not know, under all the bluster, where they are wrong. But what to do about it; ah, there's the rub. Because oneself is not the only person who is wrong -- other people are, too -- and what do we do about them? I confess my method has its ups and downs: I leave them alone to figure it out. I leave them alone, and sometimes they never do confess; sometimes they grow worse. Sometimes there are things I can do, like voting W, the abusive husband of our country, out of office. But in everyday situations it just seems so wearifying to confront and confront and confront. Most often, I will not do it. Not just out of cowardice: I hate being confronted myself, with a passion, and I hate the whole business of removing specks and planks from one another's eyes. Everybody knows their limitations, their besetting faults, their unattractivenesses: why rub it in for them? Why scold, when they already have to stand before God as Dante stood before Beatrice, with face downcast? Why scorn, when their own sin has already put them in a state of isolation?

On the other hand I hate watching people think they have a right never to be questioned. It is a besetting sin of mine, and so I hate it tenfold in other people, especially people with more power than I have. I think it is the crying sin of this age, and while many wise people of this past century have said you have to start with yourself to change the world, I do not want to start with myself while other people, with more power, have no inclination to do so. It is like a moral Cold War, with red telephones, voluminous treaties, and no glasnost or perestroika in sight.

How very tiring it all is.

For now, I think the most I can do is sip tea, and watch the rain, and pray.

A Thing About Choices

Yes, this is a political post. Some people will like where this is going and some people won't, which is part of what I want to talk about.

You know those trompe l'oeil pictures of the duck/rabbit, or the vase/faces? Look at them one way and the meaning is one thing; look at them another and the meaning changes completely.

I had those pictures thrown back on my memory a few years ago when I attended an informal lecture (with a cute Powerpoint presentation and everything) given by a man who studies words for a living and whose name I forget. He figured out who wrote Primary Colors based on the patterns of its syntax and vocabulary, and was asked by the FBI to help them try and find out who sent the Anthrax letters in October 2001. His presentation dwelled on the truism that even things that ought to look clear still fall prey to the duck/rabbit problem of interpretation, and concluded that though they had made some headway in looking for the suspect, the clues they had were not as singular as they seemed.

But back to his work on Primary Colors. When he published his analysis in the press and outed Joe Klein as the author, Klein vehemently denied the charge for a few months before finally giving in and copping to the authorship. In that few months' period of time, our professorial hero suffered a few difficulties in credibility, to put it delicately. He was jibed, and many people expressed doubts about the possibility of divining truth between the lines.

As far as I can tell, there's no point saying that such analyses and publishings ought not to have a personal angle, because there's always a personal angle regardless of the professionalism of the participants. Feminists say that the personal is political; and of course politics, by corollary, are personal.

It's the last month before a heavily-contested and highly contentious presidential campaign comes to an end. And surfing around, I can see that people have drawn their lines in whatever sandbox they're playing in. People who watched the same debate I did last Friday have come away without their convictions shaken, that George W. Bush is authentic, admirable, and righteous, and John (what the hell is up with that "F." the press keeps sticking in there? are they trying to make his name sound like Kennedy's?) Kerry vacillating, weak-chinned, and unjustifiably pugilistic. As for these undecided voters I keep hearing about, the things they say seem no less entrenched; it's just that they can't stand either candidate and are trying to make up their minds which one they hate least.

It's a duck/rabbit scenario with a vengeance, as far as I can tell: anyone who keeps track of my blogging and journaling these days knows that my opinions of Bush and Kerry are diametrically opposed to those adjectives I assigned to them above. I see people -- who both enjoy and appreciate the rights of women, care about the environment, and have a fairly catholic appreciation for various other liberal points of view that clearly do the world good -- defend Bush with fierce loyalty, and I feel an urge to shake them: "You are such a smart, liberal person; why do you keep saying his shit tastes like chocolate????"

And then I feel a check. I didn't like being on the receiving end of these sorts of comments back in the day. People would say to me, "Clearly you have a fine mind and a good grasp of reality. Tell me why you believe in God, again?" Or, "How can you defend a philosophy/religion/worldview that is clearly racist/sexist/classist/heterosexist?" I had no answer to queries like these except angry muttered responses like, "So you can be too intelligent to believe in God, can you?" The real answer to these queries, however, is that for better or worse I had made a choice.

The last time I voted in a high-profile election, it was during my last conservative hurrah, in which I still harbored anxious visions of a Supreme Court stocked with godless liberal ghouls who would slaver over increasing numbers of abortions, cancel Christmas, and poison the cultural air of our nation with talk composed of mindless, anti-hierarchical, colorless, genderless syntax. Sickened by the Florida brouhaha and secretly ashamed of the candidate I felt I was supposed to want, I said, "Well, Bush may talk like a parrot, but at least he won't blow up the world in four years."

Famous last words, she says hollowly.

The fact is that I had done all my franchised life what I pretended not to by registering Independent and never choosing a party ticket at the polls: more often than not I ended up marking every blank with a Republican choice, feeling vague guilt about not informing myself, as any good citizen of a democracy should, especially one registered Independent, about the candidates and issues. I figured that when in doubt, the Republican candidate, or conservative position, would best serve my own values wherever I had no surveillance or control.

Which is one reason why I feel extremely betrayed.

I won't go into why I now believe the conservative platform doesn't serve either my needs or my values; it would require a feat of autobiography I don't yet have the hindsight to perform. I still feel vaguely ashamed when voting about issues that don't have an obvious partisan angle, as if I ought to know deeply and with perfect acuity what would help my city, or my county, or my state, or other people's cities and counties, as the case may be. But when a voting issue arises that is supported or opposed by one party's platform, I know much better where I am at.

Hello, my name is Lisa: I believe in God, I worship Jesus Christ, and I now vote the straight Democratic ticket.

The thing is, I feel much less like a sellout than when I was trying to pretend I loved Republicanism. I don't have to feel like the Judas I did when I dubiously agreed with conservative friends who say, "I don't understand how people can be liberal and call themselves Christians!"

And I won't be hypocritical enough to ask how people can love God, and love the people God loves, and vote for Bush. I know perfectly well how they can do it: uneasily, proudly, maudlinly, worshipfully, numinously. Any or all of the above. How can people trust the President? Because it's what we do. We respect the office, we want its occupant to be good, to be authentic and righteous and more or less Okay. There's nothing wrong with that and we couldn't have a country like ours if it were otherwise.

It's just that for some people, the disconnect ripens and what we're eating stops tasting like chocolate. This is how election defeats happen. We make choices, and we line everything else up with those choices. And what we don't have control over lines itself up in its turn.

I wanted Dean, not John Kerry. I thought the Saga of the Iowa Scream was a sophomoric and cruel characterization of a man I thought was trying to do right by his country -- much the same way I hated Clinton for benefiting from what (in my high-school years) I thought was ingratitude of the American public for not reelecting the first George Bush, who presided over a war for heaven's sake.

In other words, I made, and still make, choices in my franchised decisions based on all sorts of things -- policy, and an underdog's sense of fair play, and what I think serves my values and interests, and personal preferences in appearance, bearing, and erudition. And based on my own experience I don't actually think there are any undecided voters: I think there are voters whose choices make no Velcro contact with the available candidates.

I will not undertake the hubris of believing that because I feel it so, a reelection of Dubya will result in the appointment of Supreme Court justices who leer and sneer and hate women and poor people and intellectuals and gays and will poison our nation's cultural air with pious and two-faced, Orwellian, Nazi syntax. On the other hand, I kinda think that's happening even without the Supreme Court appointments. All over this country, as I see it, smart people are making choices based on what they think they're supposed to want. Step outside that safe zone of believing the President, and all kinds of hell could break loose -- and I do mean hell.

Joe Klein denied writing Primary Colors. But he did. For that window of a few months before he capitulated, the world didn't tilt on its axis, but people did wonder if all this work at getting to the bottom of people's written and spoken identity wasn't just an exercise in futility. Did they all recover from their doubt when Klein fessed up? Of course not. Did people stop trusting the President when he fessed up here and there, in dribs and drabs, under cover of more important press items, to making stubborn mistakes about 9/11, about Iraq? Of course not. To trust -- in a person, an office, or an intellectual endeavor -- or not to trust, requires a choice that is not easily undone.

But I can say that people who choose to stop tasting chocolate might find John Kerry a little more steady, a little more righteous, a little more committed, a little more humble -- in a word, a little more presidential than they might have thought before. It's funny how things look different, when you make a certain choice.

But though I'll be disappointed, I won't be surprised -- or overly disrespectful -- if some smart people I'm thinking of don't suddenly choose to see a rabbit where they saw a duck before. In an election year there isn't time for stuff like this, but I'd suggest they do what they do when trying to solve a trompe l'oeil picture -- look away from it for a minute. Look inward, look at yourself, at what you really think about things; look at the middle distance and see what's there. It changes you. It makes your focus different.

Here's something else. God's not going anywhere. I started honestly believing in God after I realized that all my wishing and thinking and articulating couldn't shake God's existence or non-existence one inch. Elections won't do it either. We could elect some Commie pinko raised from the DNA of Lenin and Patty Hearst, and it wouldn't stop God's mission to bring more love into the world. Equally, I have to believe that even if every horrible thought I have about Bush is true and he is elected, the world won't stop humming with the love and justice with which it was created.

Not that I don't think he won't make it difficult, or miserable for a lot of us. I'm never saying again that he can't make catastrophic wrongheaded mistakes. I'm ust trying to keep a balanced perspective for one blog entry, because the rest of the election cycle? I'm not pretending to be independent.

That's a choice I've made.