Book Review: Frigg's Journey to Anasgar

Title: Frigg's Journey to Anasgar 

Author: Deb Cushman

Date: 2022

Publisher: Deb Cushman

ISBN: 979-8-9864924-0-7

Length: 260 pages

Quote: "Nobody ever attacks Nadavir, and if they did, the Council wouldn’t allow girls to fight,"

So of course, a page later, a troll army threaten to attack Nadavir, the enchanted caverns where Frigg and her dwarf tribe live. The dwarfs are peace-loving magical creatures, though conscious of the need to be prepared for battle, and share their caverns with many other magical creatures, but they bar trolls and humans in the interests of peace. 

Frigg is not just any dwarfling. She's the daughter of Dvalin, the chief of the tribe, and Namis, whose tragic disappearance has created a situation of gender inequality in Nadavir. Females have laid aside the magic amulets that facilitate their power of shapeshifting, no longer leave the caverns (even "traditionally" disguised as males), and don't even have a school for their girls any more, although Frigg has learned to read somewhere. Dvalin was sure Namis shapeshifted, while out picking berries, and was prevented from shifting back.

So the men of the tribe organize an expedition to Anasgar, another dwarf cavern, to confer about the problem of trolls seeking entrance to dwarf caves as the trolls are being crowded out of their own territory by humans. Before their expedition can start, however, the trolls storm the cave and lock them up. The grown-up women who agreed to the emergency order when Namis was lost are afraid to travel. Frigg and three other young magical creatures, Ping the faery, Tip the elf, and Cricall the unicorn, set out for Anasgar. 

The adventures they have along the way, and the difficulty they have gaining an audience in super-xenophobic Anasgar, are meant to appeal most to middle grade readers but should hold older readers' attention through at least one reading. You know Frigg will succeed but it's amusing to read how she'll do it, with a little help from her friends. 

One aspect of this otherwise traditional fantasy may delight some readers and break others' suspension of disbelief: Cushman's dwarfs don't kill anybody, even in battle. They beat people up. Cushman's trolls have enough sense to stop fighting before they are badly hurt, but some humans (who deserve worse) may suffer concussions. 

Another possibly divisive aspect of the story is the dwarfs' religion. The dwarfs are devout, and they pray to Old Norse deities (as well as name some of their children after them).for help in casting runes for guidance. Real runes are an alternative alphabet designed to be easily carved into wood or stone; slightly different "futharks" (rune alphabets) have been preserved, and the front pages of this book contain an illustration of one. How or how often they were cast for fortunetelling purposes is subject to debate by serious historians.

Adults who can keep a straight face while reading about medieval battles where no one is badly hurt, and don't mind reading prayers to Freya and Odin, could enjoy sharing the many short chapters of this book with beginning readers. Adults who enjoy whimsy and gentle fantasy can enjoy reading Frigg's Journey to Anasgar all by ourselves. 

The Son of a Boy I Used to Know

(I wrote this some time ago, and sat on it, for enough years that the teenager who inspired it can't possibly be in high school now, so that no local teenager would die of embarrassment.)

In high school I had a low opinion of boys, generally, even and especially the ones to whom I felt short-lived attractions. I'd learned secondhand that Teen Romance usually lasts about a week before I learned firsthand that physical attractions are lucky to last that long. I knew about love, because several relatives celebrated fiftieth or even sixtieth anniversaries, and love was not what the sillier kind of girls squealed and giggled about and the nicer sort kept strictly to ourselves. I accepted that some of the boys my age would someday become men a real woman could respect, but that would be "then." "Now," in grades nine and ten, most of the boys were noisy, clumsy, empty-headed messes whose all being sent to another school would, I thought, have been a big improvement at mine.

But there were kids who stood out from the crowd. We had a reputation for being an insanely competitive school, and the best way to stand out was to have a Major Talent that allowed you to do something better than some or all of the teachers did. There was a girl who was believed to write better poems and songs than the teachers did, a boy who was said to have more talent for music, and a boy who used to show the boys' coach how tennis ought to be played. 

Call him John Doe, the star athlete. He had a nice enough face, earned good enough grades, even seemed quiet and levelheaded. He was a year ahead of me, but all the interesting classes were open to all the grades, so he was in one of my classes anyway. I remember thinking that if I ever started feeling silly about boys he'd probably be the one I had a crush on, but, possibly because he was the same sort of mixed breed I was and had too much similar DNA, that never happened. But he was much admired; he didn't seem to have much time for high school social life, but he did speak to me on a few occasions, which boosted my social status nicely.

I never thought John Doe was perfect, or an ideal, or a hero.

I never daydreamed about marrying John Doe.

I did think it was cool to watch John Doe playing tennis, or basketball, or any other sport. It was like watching a star athlete on television, only live, right there in the school gym.  

My brother loyally expressed even lower opinions of most of the boys in my classes than I expressed, and mine were pretty low. I groused that Joe Jones was a kiss-up teacher’s pet; my brother wrote a story about Jones and one of the teachers being caught smooching in a closet and having their heads cut off by a Mad Mullah. Even my brother respected John Doe

We hadn't had cross-country running in previous years but, when John Doe reached grade ten, the coaches decided we needed that sport. So we had it. John Doe had his year to be recognized as the best cross-country runner in the state. He was a team player in baseball and basketball, too. Football was starting to be denounced as a violent sport. (At the time, at the NFL level, it was violent.) John Doe did not play football.

During John Doe’s sophomore year this was not such a terrible problem; the Touchdown Twins were still in grade twelve. My brother was in grade five. The high school football team got respectably close to the state championship. The junior high school football team had a tiny problem—tiny, un-athletic guys wanting to be on the team, while big strong athletic guys went out for other sports that seemed cooler because of John Doe. In the next two years this problem spread to the high school team.

Meanwhile, as had become traditional, the school band rated high enough in the high school band competitions to be invited to play on the Capitol steps. The invitation always included a week-long tour of Washington, D.C., and even kids who weren’t in the band saved their money to go along and take the educational tour of all the museums and government buildings. Everybody who was anybody at school, except me. My parents said, “Even apart from the question whether that new, young teacher can possibly chaperone that many kids in a big wicked city, which we do not for a moment believe, the weather alone at that time of year would make it stupid to travel. You’re not going.”

Coach Smith taught sixth grade social studies and coached the junior high school football team. My brother looked like football material to him. At the end of the year, when teachers and students were assigned for the next year, my brother was assigned to Coach Smith’s homeroom. “You’ll make a good quarterback,” Coach Smith gloated. 

All sorts of thinkers and writers and preachers were now saying that a Christian should not play football. My brother was a Christian. He was going to run cross-country, like John Doe…even if he had to do it at another school. Next year, both of us were transferred to another school. My brother ran cross-country, but not on a team, or in competitions.

I did not want to be transferred. I did not appreciate my parents’ ruling that my brother and I were the team. We'd stopped bickering and become friends, but why ruin a good thing by overdoing it?

In addition to my being burdened with his school choice problem, that year I was also offered a baby-sitting job and told, “That’s nice. Now go and tell them that you two are a team, and make sure they pay your brother, too.”

Actually the father of the children I was going to baby-sit had come home before the mother did, one day, and been caught kissing a previous baby-sitter. I might have heard that story but wasn't thinking about it; I considered myself a repulsive baby-faced troll in any case. I wailed and carried on all evening. "Nobody hires sixth graders to baby-sit. They'll think I'm saying no in the most hateful, sarcastic way..." 

"If they think that, they're too stupid to work with," Dad said, "but I don't believe they are. If you can't make that woman give a fine young man a job, you're not fit to take care of three children anyway. Four, actually. You two can't just abandon your sister. Go and tell her that you can work for a dollar an hour, which will be ten dollars a week, but your brother has to get at least half as much, and your sister should get one dollar a week for behaving her little self and giving those three a good example."

So we baby-sat as a team. Actually it worked out pretty well. Working for wages was the best part of grade ten. On weekends we were allowed to go into town together, partly to make sure all our friends knew I wasn’t pregnant or anything gross like that, spending our wages and seeing those of our friends who also went into town on weekends, which wasn’t most of them. In the local newspaper we read about John Doe’s cross-country running trophies. I wondered whether I would ever in my life get to see our nation’s capital.

Next year, I wanted to go back to my own rightful school so much, and my brother wanted to continue where he was so much, that we were finally allowed to separate during the daytime. I felt lucky that year. After the best summer teenaged siblings ever had, me baby-sitting and my brother running errands for a Real Construction Crew, I went back to my school. My official enemy had left, my official friends had remained friendly, and my locker was next to John Doe’s.

I still didn’t feel attracted to him, partly because I’d become partial to, shall we say, Jim Brown, who had about as much claim to being John Doe’s friend as anyone else had. I just basked in the envy of people who saw me actually talking to John Doe, who didn't talk much.

"Hi."

"Hello."

"If you see Jim before I do, tell him..."

High school social status: The only thing worse is when, in a small town or close-knit church, adults let it carry on into real life. Even about the people you honestly like in high school, you don't know enough to have any idea which ones might become friends in real life.

I never stooped to pretending I needed John Doe’s help to open my locker. I observed that he didn’t date; he wasn’t rich. He seemed to feel lucky to be good enough to be allowed to be the star athlete, instead of having to help take care of a disabled mother, like my official best friend Jane Smith, or an alcoholic father, like Jeff Miller whom my brother and I always pitied. (I’ll say this, though, on behalf of Jane and Jeff and some others I knew. Fewer people knew that they were doing real grown-up work but I had more respect for them than I had for the rich kids.)

In the homecoming game Jerry Johnson was quarterback. There were minimum height and weight requirements for the high school team. Johnson hadn’t met them in grades ten or eleven; it was officially claimed that he’d met them in grade twelve, but, looking at him, I wondered exactly what was in his boots at the time. At eighteen he was finally three inches taller than my brother and I. When the radio announcer screamed, “Thirty-five! Thirty! Twenty-five! Twenty! That kid can run! Touchdown! Jerry Johnson ran forty yards for a touchdown, bringing the score to 7-36, visitors still in the lead…” even my father was impressed. “Good run for a scrub,” were Dad’s words. The football team won no trophies that year. John Doe won a few more trophies, though, and Jim Brown bagged one as well.

That winter we visited my Aunt Dotty in Florida. Florida let sixteen-year-old tourists take the Graduate Equivalency test and, if we passed, go straight into college. My official enemy had gone to summer school and skipped grade twelve. People had been impressed. I could not resist the opportunity to beat his time by qualifying for college halfway through grade eleven.

I passed the test and then spent the spring term moping and goofing off, because now what was I going to do? Going back to high school seemed pointless. I wasn’t old enough to get a “real” job, go to Berea with Jim Brown, or even get into a Christian college that was close to home. The only face-saving option left to me, with my shiny G.E.D. certificate, was a Seventh-Day Adventist college in Maryland. Nobody else from my part of Virginia had ever gone there. That school had more foreign exchange students than it had students from Virginia.

“Well,” my parents and brother said, several times that spring, “at least you’ll get to see the nation’s capital.”

That summer my brother died. When I say I don’t remember much else from that year, I don’t mean that I’ve repressed memories. I mean that the days I remember were all pretty much alike: sad. I stayed busy. In other years the things I did had been fun. I didn't feel like going anywhere but the library, with anyone but my sister and the children we used to baby-sit. I had nothing to write letters about, even to Jane Smith, and didn't write to anybody or draw closer to any school friends in adult life.

Jim Brown didn’t finish a degree at Berea College. I’ll always wish him well. He did not become the sort of man I wanted to marry, though he did earn a degree at a public university and get a decent job.

John Doe found a job and a wife. So did Jerry Johnson; so did Jeff Miller. Jane Smith found a job and a husband. I’ll always wish them well, too.

I found jobs, found friends, spent about half of the next thirty years in our nation’s capital, married a nice diplomat and lived happily until cancer entered the scene. Then I came home. 

The Bible says that young widows should remarry, for money if they can't earn enough on jobs, rather than ask anyone for help. As a forty-year-old widow I met a few dozen men my age and learned how true it is that, when people are single at age forty, there is a reason for this. I met exactly one man I wanted to see twice.

Handsome faces pop up on movie screens, television screens, computer screens. Nice-looking two-dimensional images. Shadows of real men that some other women, somewhere, might or might not consider attractive. Personally I don’t care. I see a good-looking young man and think, “He is (or would be) a good model for something he is (or might be) wearing,” or “He’d look the part of this or that character in a movie,” or, “If I’d married this or that fellow I used to date, and had a son, would that son look like this?”

The afternoon before I sat down to write this high school memoir for The Nephews, I saw a young man on the street. He was running like John Doe. I knew John Doe had a son. I knew who that young man had to be.

I never felt physically attracted to the father, much less the son.  I felt a different kind of pleasure, though, watching John Doe's son run.

It was the pleasure of remembering when his father and I, and my brother, and Jim Brown, were the age he is now.

It was the pleasure of seeing that his father’s genes have been passed along.

It was the pleasure of having become one of those older residents of small towns who feel that we know a lot about young people when we’ve never actually talked to them, merely because we used to know their parents.

It was the pleasure of having become an old aunt who can appreciate the beauty of teen athletes, male or female, in a purely aesthetic way.

It was the pleasure of having reached one of the milestones in life.

What I want to impress on the minds of The Nephews, if the minds of teenagers can conceive of such a thing, is this: Aunts aren’t young, nor are we mothers, so you may think we have dull, joyless lives. That’s not true. There are pleasures peculiar to middle age and to aunts. This post is about one of them. If it doesn’t make sense to you yet, just remember that Romantic Love didn’t make sense to you ten years ago.

(Music link: It does relate to the story, sort of. This is one of those links from a delightful book I recently helped someone edit: a popular marching band tune often heard at high school sports events. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5bcpjUjLpU)

E-Book Review: Stepping Stones on the Pathway Home

Title: Stepping Stones on the Pathway Home 

Author: Steve Leasock

Date: 2022

Publisher: Steve Leasock

Length: 18 pages with illustrations

Quote:  "You desire happiness, harmony and balance in your life. So, what’s the problem? Why aren’t you satisfied with the life you live? The trouble is that you are taught to search for something to make you whole. But, honestly, ask yourself how, and more importantly, why should you search for completeness. You are the totality of your being in this moment. So, in actuality, everything is already within you."

It amazes me that this kind of thing still finds a market. If it's what somebody wants to hear, who could that somebody be? Most of us long ago discovered the simple and sensible solution to the Problem of New Age Gibberish:

1. You don't need to listen politely. All the social acceptance the speaker needs is already within him. Feel free to change the subject or walk away whenever the platitude count in the atmosphere gets too high for your personal tolerance.

2. Never give money to the people who spout this kind of platitudes. All the money they need is already within them.

3. If troubled by lingering memories of these platitudes, read the Bible aloud until they go away.

I would like to be at least slightly polite to the e-friend who shared this e-book with me, so I'll say that the cut-out landscape pictures are very nice to look at. The illustrator of this book should have no difficulty finding better books to illustrate.

Making Twitter and Holiday Shopping Better

Before its purchase by that Tesla guy, Twitter circulated this "meme quiz": 

"

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear “holiday shopping” is __________ because ________. What I get most excited for is ________, whereas __________ drives me bonkers. I’d think about getting some sort of tech product as a gift if _________, but not if ________. If I’m shopping for a tech gift, I’ll start by looking at ________. If I’m shopping for tech products from a wish-list, my first stop would be ________; if I have nothing to go on, I’ll look for tech gift inspiration on/in __________. Thinking about holiday shopping as a whole, Twitter helps make the process better by _________, but it’d be life-changing if I could use Twitter to _________ while shopping for the holidays.

"

1. Well...the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "holiday shopping" is "I'm glad nobody I know does much of it." A growing number of well-off Americans, especially "Bobo" types, have reached an agreement that Christmas is for charity. If people need money, it's better to give them cash than to buy things they may find it inconvenient to exchange. 

The exception is fast-growing children. Any time of year when you see friends' children's wrists or ankles sticking out is a good time to buy new clothes for children. The beginning of a new school term is a traditional time to give kids new clothes if you're just culling out what your own little darlings have outgrown. Otherwise, the only thing that makes Christmas special is that shops are always full of Christmas-theme wrapping, whereas at other times of year you might have to look for wrapping paper that reflects the child's interests on Zazzle. It's important to know the child: some kids like nothing better than to shop, perhaps first for "boring clothes" and then for books, toys, or videos as rewards, with their aunts, and some hate a crowded shopping mall even more than their elders do and would prefer a quiet walk to any amount of prezzies. 

2. Because shopping in between Thanksgiving and Christmas is such a mess. 

For North American Christians, at least, early winter is supposed to be a spiritual experience. There's Thanksgiving at the end of the normal growing season, and then Canada gets some Ordinary Time before the official Advent season starts, and then Christmas arrives. So we give thanks, and our churches don't usually specify a time for penitence as in the Jewish holidays but perhaps they should; anyway we have some weeks to prepare to celebrate the Incarnation of Christ. 

Of course Jesus was not born in December. His date of birth was deliberately obscured but, if He was born approximately six months after John the Baptist, at the time of a census taken prior to tax collection while shepherds were out in the fields with their flocks, it must have been closer to what is now Canadian Thanksgiving than to what is now Christmas Day. Partying around the time of the winter solstice was a tradition in Pagan sun-worshipping cults but is not recorded in the apostolic or early Christian church and was discouraged by the early Protestant reformers. It crept in from the traditional stories about St. Nicholas of Myra (the real saint was more interesting than Santa Claus is) and keeps creeping back, even among those who angrily reject Nicholas as a postbiblical saint and not to be trusted, because of the idea of giving. Missions that distribute food, clothes, etc., to people who need them, have a great need for donations in early winter. So people who know that the holly and ivy aren't Christian, as well as they know that "Santa Claus" is a little joke some adults enjoy playing on children, find ourselves singing "The Holly and the Ivy" and "Here Comes Santa Claus" and so on in aid of urban missions. Nostalgia raises funding. So does freezing cold weather. When Jesus was born, He and His Parents probably suffered more from sweat and flies than from frost and snow, but when raising money for people who may actually be temporarily homeless on snowy nights, few Christians quibble about the historically inaccurate image of the Holy Family being temporarily homeless "In the Bleak Midwinter" too.

I still think of the "holiday shopping" season as a time to ham it up in aid of the Salvation Army, before they sold out to the federal government. Ring those bells! Sound carries better in frosty air. Traditional carols usually sound better when performed by small groups but the weather in which other people tend to freeze out is the weather in which my voice can really soar...one of several ways in which my celiac genetic quirks function as super-powers.  People hit the stores with their holiday bonus packets and their shopping lists. One's mission is competing with selfish interests for the money left over from buying new clothes for children and tokens for friends, so it's a time to play shamelessly on their heart strings. Dig out every old traditional falsehood that stirs a memory. Sing whatever the crowd were listening to in Christmas seasons of their youth. In some neighborhoods Latin gets the big checks stuffed into the kettle; in some neighborhoods Hanukah songs do, or 1950s kitsch does. Think about children whose house burned down when somebody cranked up too many space heaters, and sing whatever works. You can get a 1980s banging back-beat with a Salvation Army bell if you need one. 

And faking is likely to be discovered and resented, but when I really was limping about with a stick as a result of walking to work in new "athletic" shoes, especially when ice was on the ground, was when the kettle filled up and I was collecting money in my hat. "Holiday shopping" crowds are scared of any condition that looks as if it might be contagious, including simple tiredness or a raspy voice from singing too long, but they love to ooze empathy over a simple injury that won't spread to them. They're so tired, they imagine that they can really relate to anyone leaning on a crutch! So if you do manage a strain, sprain, or fall while celebrating, by all means dedicate it to a respectable mission. 

How does this relate to Twitter? Unfortunately, it doesn't. Twitter is too new to be part of any real cultural tradition yet. The good news for Twitter is that, because "holiday shopping" is such a mess, people might turn to Twitter before they plunge into it. 

Before Twitter adopted that awful "filtering" idea, Twitter was a great place to tweet to friends, "What are you buying for whom? What would you like to get?" Twitter could have been very helpful in cases where the same child's multiple aunts and uncles all saw the sale on one toy the child might like, at the same store, and wanted to be sure they didn't ruin the toy by giving the kid half a dozen of it and nothing else. Now, of course, the algorithm that stuffs people's Twitter feeds with paid ads and tweets from commercial accounts, and blocks the "low-quality" tweets from their actual friends, makes Twitter unreliable for one of several purposes for which it ought to excel. Twitter should abandon filtering and make sure people see all the tweets from all the individuals they follow.

3. What I get most excited for is the family news, actually. After you start earning your own money and buying your own things, gift exchanges are more of a time of tedious obligations, noting things like "X got me a Y, I'll have to buy a Z for X" (and when I was younger some of the cousins seriously might have wanted a Z, as in car) and "X got me a Y, no doubt in the expectation of being invited to share it...how often?" 

The sort of thing oilmen's children used to expect at Christmas.

The sort of thing they might get: $33.99 at Wal-Mart.

4. The shameless commercialism drives me bonkers. I know a lot of stores desperately need to "get back in the black" and are hoping to do it on Thanksgiving Friday, but starting to push "Black Friday Sales" a week before Thanksgiving is tacky. Retailers should try to be a little bit calm about the hope, the thought, of money. 

5. I'd think about getting some sort of tech product as a gift if it were something the person wanted and could use. I'm not wild about video games, even if they do in fact count as training for a career in today's Army. I think kids learn more from real books than from "educational" games. I think most young people today need things that help them unplug from the Internet now and then, maintain contact with the real world, prepare to survive the crash of the computer fad. But if one of The Nephews needs a computer for school, well the father of some of them would be the one to build it, but I'd be happy to chip in. If they're going to use it for work or school, they should have a good one. And, once again, that's the kind of thing aunts and uncles could discuss on a revived, unfiltered Twitter.

6. I'd not think about getting some sort of tech product as a gift unless the person really wanted that particular thing. Tech companies were raking in the money while other companies languished before the COVID panic, so they should need the least help to recover. I'd much rather buy gifts from local crafters, or failing that locally owned stores, or failing that at least real-world gifts from the local Wal-Mart. 

7. If I'm shopping for a tech gift, I'll start by asking the local wizards at Compuworld what they have. I'd really prefer to take the recipient right into the store and make sure of getting the right thing.

Compuworld has increasingly specialized in HP gadgets, although they take all kinds of things in trade and can offer good prices on used non-HP stuff. They remember your tolerance for other brands. If, however, I was shopping for someone who obviously needed a new non-HP gadget that would work with what per school or office had, I'd look at Best Buy or Wal-Mart instead.

8.If I'm shopping for tech products from a wish-list, my first stop would be Amazon, of course, the Home of the Wish List. Amazon does not always, or even often, have the best prices on much of anything but books so it would be a place to see what someone's gadget of choice looked like and how much to try to avoid paying for it. 

Here let me say: I have an Amazon Wish List that may seem as long and unmanageable as the Big River Itself. It shows a wide range from new to antique books, from fantastic bargain prices to outrageous collector prices. For those friends who are not really familiar with Amazon, what youall need to know is that prices and availability change daily. During the last week someone tried to buy one of my books, reported that Amazon was out of copies, asked me to pick another book, and while I was picking found the original book back on the site at a better price. That sort of thing happens with the rarer books all the time. Books sold on Amazon are usually in no worse condition than the books in a well used public library, and I don't mind a few marginal notes or even dog-ears at all. I expect you to buy the cheapest printed copy available. Do not send me a Kindle copy if there's a printed copy. Hard or soft covers don't matter--get the best price.

But, about Twitter? Here is where Twitter can play a role in really helping stores market products to Twitter users. I've said many times that if we were willing to put up with the kind of clumsy, pushy, obnoxious advertising associated with commercial television, we wouldn't be online. There's a much better kind of advertising--when individuals, knowing that this is the kind of conversation that should be public, tweet to stores, "Do you have X product at the Y location? Can you get X by Tuesday?" and so on. Local friends and followers are going to see that and notice it. As long as it's not shoved at the customers, as long as a customer started the conversation and the store's social media person just answers the questions, Twitter can be a really useful part of the shopping process. Stores could tweet the countdowns, "We have 7 of these items at the Y location...6 as of 10 a.m...5 as of 3 p.m...we've ordered more and expect  them on Wednesday..." Twitter could get in on the action, offering clickable links with commissions for Twitter when a customer mentioned a product in a Twitter conversation.

9. If I have nothing to go on, I'd look for tech gift inspiration...not. I'd give the person a book.

10. Thinking about holiday shopping as a whole, Twitter helps make the process better by...It doesn't, currently. Or at least I don't trust it to. I keep checking my lists of Tweeps and seeing people who still use Twitter, but I've not seen their tweets in years. Twitter has to start by either losing the whole idea of "filtering," or else "filtering" only commercial tweets to make sure that only about one tweet in fifty comes from a corporation, and that includes news media. If, once again, people could be sure of seeing our friends' tweets in real time, then Twitter could really help simplify shopping and bring stores and products into social conversations without offending anyone.

11. It'd be life-changing if I could use Twitter to...Oh for pity's sake, Twitter, get real. Why would I want Twitter to be life-changing? I've already become a Christian and a wife and a widow. Twitter's role in my life is minor compared to the real life changes. 

It would be cool, though, if I could use Twitter to check prices, sales, and availability before I shopped, at any time of year. Instead of paging through different store sites before grocery shopping, for example, just get on Twitter and tweet to each local grocery store, "What's your price on Bush's pinto beans today?" Then other people might tweet the same question, or might just check the store's profile page and see the prices the stores had quoted earlier in the day, and they might want to tweet, "How many cans of those beans do you have left on the shelves?" I'm thinking of Bush's pinto beans because the last time I went into Food Lion they were running a sale on that particular item. Knowing Bush's reputation I was willing to gamble that those would be just last year's beans, not contaminated beans, and willing to buy them at the sale price. But when I was in the store, they'd run out of Bush's pinto beans and were selling Luck's pinto beans for the same inflated price as Bush's. Bah! I left the store with no beans at all. Everyday shoppers hate that kind of experience. Preventing it would be a real benefit to everyone, save lots of unnecessary driving and irritation, and it might bring stores enough focussed, satisfied customers that they'd be delighted to pay for the blue tick to prove that they were the actual account for that local store.

Connectivity and the Virus Guilt Trip

Local health pundits advise that three distinct virus are travelling together this winter, collaborating to make the maximum number of people suffer the maximum amount of mild unpleasantness. There's a head cold virus, a weakened strain of coronavirus, and a flu-type virus. 

I went into town last week and was exposed to the head cold virus...

It could have been worse. The reason for this trip into town was that my electricity went out, with a soft but audible pop as if a transformer had blown out about a city block away. Due to corporate greed I no longer have the option of trying to report a power outage with my faithful little cell phone, which would send messages if I walked to the right place. The company is really pushing clunkier, less serviceable phones, which I've taken a vow not to adopt. If the company wants my money they'll work with the phone that works for me. So I had to walk a little further to use someone's phone.

But whose? No really close neighbor has a phone, for the same reasons I do. People are boycotting the stupidphones. In the next little group of houses are two houses that I think still have traditional "land line" phones, but the yuppie types who live there aren't at home at 11:00 on a Tuesday. Then there's a subdivision in which I don't know anybody, or well I know I've met one resident who is still alive but I don't know which house is hers. The convenience store where those horrible people sent the cats to a shelter has been sold, again, to someone who's not open for business yet. The charity resale store may still have a land line phone, but it's always closed on Tuesdays. Then there are several blocks of houses in which I know several people who have had handy little cell phones, only, for years, and they're not taking stupidphones as a substitute either. Neither cell phone nor land line people are at home.

But there's the Grouch. He is Google's ideal customer for the stupidphone that doesn't actually do anything for you--it exists to allow other people to spy on you. Having no real purpose for whatever he does with his phone, he has time to play with all the "apps" Google keeps endlessly "updating" to collect more data about him, his fingerprints and what makes his hands perspire, his face and what he looks at longest, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I suspect he has a crush on "Alexa." I knocked on his door.

After a long time the door opened just a crack. A haggard unshaven face peered around the door. No move was made to unlock the storm door. "I've got COVID again," the Grouch rasped feebly. "Go away." 

The convenience store ought still to have a land line. They didn't. The library opens late on Tuesdays. The lawyers used to have secretaries and paralegals keeping their offices open while they were in court, but now I think most of them are on one voicemail system. The hardware store used to have a land line but I'd heard they'd cut it off. None of the small stores would be likely to have a phone. The store that displays the pricier books reviewed at this web site does not have a phone. Did the gift shop still have a land line phone? I went in to ask. They didn't, but the owner of the building, who thinks it's important to her image to have whatever is new and trendy whether she knows how to use it or not, had left her stupidphone on the charger, enough hours ago that they were able to call the electric company.

The storekeeper had a school-aged child in the store. That would have been where the head cold virus came from. Children pick these things up at school. From an immunological point of view there was a lot to be said for keeping children at home until puberty so their immune systems could mature, then sending them to boarding schools so they could build immunity to airborne virus away from the rest of society. 

Anyway I reported the outage to a young man, reported that it had lasted long enough for me to walk two and a half miles before I came to a working phone. The electric company has been out of touch with the way people actually do things for a while. They ought to have automated the power outage line to the point that one could simply text in the time and location of a power failure and get as much of a reply as a desk worker can give ("500 OTHER CALLS IN NEIGHBORHOOD, CREW WORKING ON BROKEN CABLE NOW" or "NO OTHER CALLS IN NEIGHBORHOOD, CREW DISPATCHED"). They've not done this.

But the young man actually said, "I don't know how relevant this is to you, but they make me ask...Would you like to download our app to your phone so you could receive messages about power outages?" 

The storekeeper and a few shoppers could hear this. It was quite a laugh.

Where does one begin? The whole phone culture is dead, dear. It choked to death on greed. Kids and the sort of embittered retirees, like the Grouch, who think there's something liberating about having no goals or deadlines in their lives any more, may have time to play around with "apps" but responsible adults do not. If phone culture can be revived, companies need to think about how they are going to receive and respond to the customers' messages. Phone contact between companies and customers needs always to originate from the customers. It's not a company's place to call customers' attention to itself. This is a hierarchical relationship. It always was and it always will be. If you want to continue earning your living from being paid by customers, deal with it.

Y'know what I liked best about my little Tracfone, aside from the fact that the phone folded up to the same size as a dollar bill folded twice, and fitted into the same billfold in my pocket...I liked that in most of my part of the world, there are only certain locations where cell phones actually connect to wi-fi transmitters. People know where to walk to to pick up the signal when we want to send messages or check for expected messages. In winter random text messages from people like the Grouch, who have no better use for their time and money than to use cell phones to try to make conversation, would sometimes reach me on the day they were sent. Live calls almost never did. In summer almost no incoming messages came through unless I walked out looking for them. I was the one paying for the phone, and I was the one in control of how much the phone could distract me from my writing. I liked that feature. Never looked back. You'd have to pay me quite a lot to reconnect the old land line phone at the Cat Sanctuary. 

The stupidphones' "unlimited calls and messages" feature is a bargain only for people who want to spend a lot more time making calls and sending messages than most of us do. Immune-compromised bedfast patients who do their entire social lives by phones might need to pay every month for unlimited calls but most of us can easily hold it down to less than an hour of phone time per month. But of course the stupidphones do seem to pick up "unlimited calls and messages." Nine out of ten of them seem to come from automated phishing systems purporting to sell insurance, and nine out of ten of the others come from pests. People I know who try to use stupidphones don't know how to make calls or send messages, as Google changes that every week or two, but they're getting all kinds of automated messages from corporations. "Download our app so we can send you messages"? Seriously. I wouldn't consider having a device that would receive that kind of messages for less than $250 per month, paid to me, in cash, between 6 and 7 a.m. on the morning of the first of the month.

The inanity of the electric company's shortsighted effort to push "apps," in a neighborhood where we don't do phones any more, left me speechless, quivering with silent derisive laughter. I barely remembered to thank the storekeeper for sharing the owner's phone. 

Anyway, just before the sun went down, the electricity was reconnected, and life went on. On Thursday morning I felt tired, sneezed twice, ate my usual garlic clove and added a Vitamin C tablet, and that would have been the end of it if the glyphosate poisoning incident had not occurred on Thursday afternoon. Saturday and Sunday were warm days. I spent them sitting in a bundle of blankets and shawls, with the 200-watt heater at my feet, sweating out the cold. 

Some extremely nice person had sent me a book from Amazon, earlier in the week, and the seller wanted a good service review on Amazon. Last time I checked, Amazon was still not posting actual reviews of products from people who hadn't spent $50 at that site with a credit card as distinct from a giftcard. Apparently the person who'd bought the book had done that and could at least rate the service, so how prompt was the service, they wanted to know, on Friday. 

The book had not arrived on Tuesday, I replied. I'd go into town again this week and have another look. 

Saturday night I checked messages online. (Doing my 24 hours of Net-freedom in the good old Seventh-Day Adventist way gives me a chance to read messages during the daytime on Friday and then on Saturday night.) The sender of the gift book had checked with the post office and verified that the book was waiting for me there, they wanted me to know.

Right. So in my current glyphosate-damaged condition, how much good could 48 hours of sweating-out have done? 

I worked my usual night shift, got to bed about 5:30 a.m., woke up hearing the odd jobs man revving his engine as he drove past. 9 a.m. He had no idea whether I'd want a lift into town or not. Somebody was paying him to do something in the neighborhood today. If it was one of my cousins, he was being paid for a day in any case, but he'd just love to spend part of the day driving me around, or driving somewhere for me, and angling for an extra tip. 

He's one of the last old coal miners who were laid off with black lung. I give him five-dollar jobs when I can, and don't ask whether he spends the extra money on trashy women (he claims to know a few, up around the mines) or beer or both. I did not have five dollars.

I sneezed, once. Only once, but it was still the watery kind of sneeze that means you're still shedding head cold virus. It was going to be another mild, sunny day, a good day for strolling around town and doing errands. I was going to spend it sweating out those last few holdout virus. The physical strain of walking out in the wind might cause me a little more coughing and sneezing. I could stand that. Coughing or sneezing in town might cause a panic, or even send some frail older person to the hospital. I did not want that.

The odd jobs man drove around a few neighbors' houses, off-loading feed sacks in this and that barn. I went outside as he headed back toward town. 

I remembered him saying, "Don't come near me if you've been exposed to that virus! I've got black lung already. COVID might kill me." 

"Go on!" I yelled, waving toward town. "I've had a cold! Go away!"  

So, maybe I can walk to the post office tomorrow. Maybe this warm air will not have collided with more season-typical air to cause a rain or snow storm yet. Maybe, but this is still Virginia and you still have to plan on the weather doing whatever is most inconvenient. It's 53 degrees Fahrenheit at the weather station, T-shirt weather if you're walking in the sun. I am sitting indoors with a 200-watt heater at knee level, blasting hot air through the bundle of blankets and shawls.

I figure this is going to be a day of low-grade guilt trips, whatever I do, and the guilt trip I least want to take would be the one where I walk into town enjoying the beautiful weather, pick up the book, then feel just tired enough to start sneezing again. People who do not particularly care about me panic because they've spent two years hearing talking heads on television tell them that any of these silly little viruses is likely to kill someone. "Get that virus carrier out of here!" Someone in any crowd in this little town is likely to be an acquaintance of mine. With my luck it wouldn't even be the odd jobs man. It 'd be some dear little ninety-year-old church lady, and my head cold virus would give her fatal pneumonia. 

It's not the other bookseller's fault, Amazon. It's mine. I still feel guilty, but this is a level of guilt with which I can live.

People employed in the technology industry think this kind of situation should no longer exist. In their minds everybody drives into town, probably in separate cars, every day and when their books reach the post office they go in and scan the code on the package into their stupidphones and...

In real life, even when people have stupidphones and have paid the monthly fee, nobody I know has yet been able to use one to scan a code. And I don't drive to the post office. And whatever schedules corporations may set for themselves, they still have to wait for customers to do things at our convenience, not theirs. You want people to go to the post office on the day something is delivered? You need to make an offer to pay those people for that. You need to pay us enough that we can afford to hire young, healthy drivers who don't have black lung, or AIDS, or COPD, or cancer, or lupus, or any other drain on their immunity, or live with anyone who does.

People Out There are actually organizing groups to resist the amount of, really, work the tech companies expect us to do for their benefit. Let Google jollywell pay us if Google wants to track our phone calls, some say. 

And I say, if Verizon really wants just one more spasm of planned waste and damage-to-the-environment just to sell me one more phone, they'd better make sure it is even more tailor-made for the convenience of me as a writer than my little Tracfone was. Try no audible ringer, no picture screen or non-text input of any kind, and--this is not even negotiable--displaying the origin of all incoming text messages so I never again inadvertently open a message from B because I'm waiting for one from A.

Book Review: Killoe

Title: Killoe

Author: Louis L’Amour

Publisher; Bantam

Date: 1962 (I have the 24^th printing, 1979)

ISBN: 0-353-13622-4

Length: 150 pages

Quote: “Come up to the house, boy. Tap has come home and he is talking of the western land.”

Tap Henry is about to lead his old pal Dan Killoe into a dangerous adventure, leading animals and tenderfeet to a new settlement further west. It’s another of the fast-moving adventure stories L’Amour cranked out for Bantam over the years; the easiest way to keep track of which ones you’d read was to remember the unusual family names of the main characters. Heroes? Villains? Most of them find it necessary to kill somebody in the course of the story; most of those killed deserved what they got, and Killoe gets into trouble protecting a stranger who’s appealed to him for help. You could say this story is about Dan’s and Tap’s friendship surviving the strain of their different beliefs as well as their adventures.

Butterfly of the Week: Louristan Festoon

The last species in the genus Allancastria, alphabetically, is also the most obscure. Again, the obscurity of Allancastria or Zerynthia louristana is partly due to uncertainty about whether it really qualifies as a distinct species. It is found only in western Iran, hence its name. It can look just like A. cerisyi, or so different that at one time it was classified in a different genus as Archon bostanchii. (The Archon genus are brown and tailless.) However, it was found to be able to hybridize with other Allancastrias rather than with Archons. It may have more of a brownish tone to its blackish and whitish markings than the other Allancastria species have, or not. Like the other species in the genus it's variable. Few photographs are available; the individuals photographed have swallowtail-type wing structure but lack the tails. Bodies are furry. Compared with the big American swallowtails and the huge tropical birdwings, the animals are very small. 

 

This individual is more colorful than several of those chosen to illustrate the species. It's also still alive; many of the few sites that do illustrate this species show poor little dead specimens on pins. Because it's rare, many people seem to want dead specimens on pins. One site even offers a dismembered specimen for sale, the collector selling each wing, the head and thorax, and the abdomen separately. At least one can hope that these killed specimens were among those that, according to Jangala magazine, have been successfully reared in captivity.

(You can read the whole relevant issue of Jangala online, in Spanish, at https://issuu.com/jangala/docs/180320 .)

Because these butterflies have always been rare and relatively little is known at them, they're not on the international endangered species lists (yet), but naturalists are watching them. The species does not have a lot of numbers to lose.

Some individuals in this species have white forewings with a few black markings, and pale gray or drab hindwings with black or dark drab markings. A British visitor to Louristan described them as "pale yellow...laced lightly with patterns in black and red." The undersides of the wings are often drab. Females are slightly larger than males. 

Mother butterflies in this species are not careful to place only one egg on a leaf. The eggs are round and may look white, creamy, or colored. Six or eight eggs may be placed together.

Photo by Mrehssani.

The caterpillar (note its resemblance to the deyrollei caterpillar) has a swallowtail-like shape, with a, slightly humped back. From some angles the markings might suggest the face of a snake or lizard. Like the other Allancastria species, the caterpillars eat vines in the genus Aristolochia; they may be able to use two or three species of these vines. The individual photographed is obviously showing no interest in those other eggs; groups of eggs laid close together are an indication that insect larvae are not shell eaters and won't be tempted to cannibalize one another.

Photo by Mrehssani, copyright, used under Fair Use.

 The more typical top view of the same caterpillar is at https://es.dreamstime.com/alancastria-louristana-butfly-caterpillar-larvas-o-oruga-de-alimentadas-con-aristolochia-sp-una-mariposa-rara-y-end%C3%A9mica-image178753462 .

While it lasts, there's also a painting, with n unobtrusive A. louristana caterpillar, being sold in aid of a conservation group: https://www.artistsforconservation.org/artists/19713/portfolio/price-greed-15346 . This link is likely to bebroken soon. 

The caterpillars pupate during the winter. According to the Jangala article cited above, when weather conditions are "unfavorable" they can stay in their pupal shells for two or even three winters, survive, emerge, and fly in spring. 

E-Book Review: The Gospel in Dostoyevsky

Title: The Gospel in Dostoyevsky 

Authors: Fyodor Maximovich Dostoyevsky, J.I. Packer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Gordon

Date: 2011

Publisher: Plough

Length: 214 pages

Quote: "The true content and context of Dostoyevsky’s great works is man’s struggle to find God, in the face of every imaginable temptation to deny Him."

It has been said, and said by Russians, that the Russian church has emphasized ceremony and neglected individual spirituality. This is one of the errors into which churches can easily fall; but then we must consider the testimony of Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky. He certainly thought a great deal about individual spirituality. His characters are characterized, even defined, by their spirituality or lack of it. Their spirituality is radical, defining their personalities and determining their actions. They are good Christians, or good people who are not yet Christians, or bad people as both a cause and an effect of their not being Christians. Their faith often leads them to do things that were probably more controversial then than they are now; they talk respectfully with sex workers and worry about the plight of abused children, and The Idiot is, of course, an intelligent man who is seen as an idiot because he ignores worldly wisdom and does what he believes Jesus would have done.

Though Dostoyevsky's novels have plots, Muggeridge's claim to have read them "like a thriller" is--not exactly suspect, so much as a reminder of what an unusual student Muggeridge must have been. In Dostoyevsky what catches people's attention, what is anthologized, and what is commented on, are the long speeches in which characters express Dostoyevsky's philosophical and religious ideas. Such passages may be considered flaws in the modern novel but Dostoyevsky's fans seem to read the stories, such as they are, for those long digressive speeches.

This book is a compilation of the scenes in Dostoyevsky's novels where the Christian characters expound their beliefs at length. They are not orthodox, though their denomination is presumably Eastern Orthodox. They express ideas like "What Jesus meant by Hell must be the inability to love" and "I'd be frightened to meet a truly godless man...What I have met were restless men." 

If you already have Dostoyevsky's major novels, the short commentaries by Packer, Muggeridge, and Gordon will add only a little to your library. If you've avoided the novels because they are so long, this book contains all the passages that are most often quoted, in their context, and may interest you enough that you'll want to read the novels after all. 

Bad Poetry: The Clapping of the Trees

One local lurker asked why I don’t write more overtly religious things.

There is a hifalutin answer. It goes like this: I am a radical Christian. What I write about life, I write about the Christian life.

But that still begs the question of why I write about this natural life in the natural world we know, rather than about the supernatural life beyond.

There is a hifalutin answer to that, too—not mine, but Francis B. Schaeffer’s. Schaeffer wrote that when people start to detach “religious” from “secular” thinking the battle is lost; everything they think, do, and write is going to be “secular” simply because “An autonomous lower storey will always eat up the upper storey” in the thought of a mind that divides itself into upper and lower storeys. Such a mind, Schaeffer imagined, would necessarily be like an apartment building where the renters of upstairs units had no use of the ground floor. They’d have nice views but no way to get out at them; eventually they’d starve up there, lacking access to the outside world.

There is also a simple answer, which is my own, my very own, dating back to the teen years in which I read some of Schaeffer’s books. My answer was: When I write about this natural world that I perceive concretely through my natural senses, I can stand to reread what I’ve written later. When I write about the vast spiritual dimension of life that my mortal mind cannot directly perceive, I always reread what I’ve written and think that, to put it very charitably, other people have written this kind of thing better. I’d rather recommend other people’s “Christian” books, as being good, than add another bad book to a pile of “Christian” books nobody needs to bother reading.

A few years ago I posted a couple of adolescent writing exercises whose lack of reader visits, re-visits, or comments tells me all I need to know about this, but here, for those who want another proof, is yet another bad Christian poem I wrote at the age of, I think, seventeen.

Listen to the night wind, the leaves rustling in the dawning.
Listen, and don’t mind that you must rise to watch the morning.
Rise up now, prepare yourself, and put your best dress on.
Lose no time to think about the good times that are gone.
What you thought were necklaces have turned out to be chains.
Take them off, and from your face wash all of last night’s stains.
What looks grey within the house, in sunlight may be silver.
Slip out now and latch the gate, and walk beside the river.
I am the herald of the King who always said he loved you.
Knowing what you thought of him, still, gladly he forgave you.
You thought you’d live the fast, loose life; you never would behave,
But crime won’t pay, and suddenly you found you were a slave.
Oh you who slaved and took no wages, life is now to change
From the coarseness you have learned to know to something new and strange.
You will not be a slave again, and your sons and your daughters
Will all be princes crowned and throned, both here and o’er the waters.
So come with me now through the hills to where the palace glows
With supernatural radiance beyond what language knows.
High among the mountains here it gleams with pearls and sapphires,
Safe from storm and winter wind, from foes, from floods and fires.
A long time was it building, for he had it built for you,
And so it had to be the best the builders could ever do.
Oh listen to the morning wind and follow where it leads:
Listen to the singing of the hills, to the clapping of the trees. 

x

Can People Recover Honor?

This one went live on Bubblews in 2014. Dump it or recycle it? I chose to recycle it. 

"A blush of red for shame" was the intended message of the color patch Bubblews demanded...

Above is what Morguefile pulled up for "blush." Below is a link to (for once) a relevant song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-Mnp6VAmEc

People often use the word "honor" to refer to displays of appreciation for something someone else has done. That's not what I have in mind. I'm talking about our internal sense that we have done what *we* should have done, first, and other people's perception that we have done what we should have done, second.

According to Ayn Rand's philosophy, a sense of honor is the only measurement people need to behave according to "unsentimental" "Objective morality." Rand apparently believed that a sense of honor is hard-wired into all humans.

According to more recent studies cited by Susan M. Cain in Quiet, Rand was objectively wrong. Hereditary physical traits shape a healthy introvert personality, but are extrovert personalities defined only by the lack of these traits? Some researchers think that what *really* makes people extroverts is failure to develop what these researchers call "a sense of shame." Whether it's described in terms of honor or shame, the point is that extroverts apparently just blunder through life without knowing when they're doing the right thing, except as what they do earns reactions from other people.

I'm glad I'm not an extrovert.

In July 2014, hundreds of Bubblers who also used Chatabout were informed that that site had just arbitrarily decided to halve payments that several people had already earned under the terms of their original contract. BubbleWS responded the next day with threats, at some point in the future, stop paying Bubblers altogether.

I was appalled to see some Chatters posting that they'd "eventually get used to" receiving only half their original pay...which was low enough. As if they hadn't noticed that, even if they could afford to sit around Chatting for hours without pay, many people who use Chatabout could not. Several Chatters had major disabilities; not all of them even got pensions. So these pathetic brainwashed were saying that they were willing to "get used to" enabling someone else, who was neither poor nor disabled we may be sure, to yank the lunch money out of some hungry wheelchair dweller's hands.

That's not something I want to "get used to." That's not something I think we should tolerate for a minute. People who failed to picket Chatabout's headquarters were inviting BubbleWS to refuse to pay us a few motnhs later.

How can demands for payment for work done be enforced? In a democracy they certainly ought to be enforced by laws that give corporations no privileges above those of ordinary individuals. The law ought to state that until Chatabout had made every possible effort to pay every Chatter the amount they originally offered, plus a fee for their inconvenience, the owners of Chatabout would have their assets seized and sold and, if necessary, their wages garnished.

 
But, as we all know, corporations exploit loopholes in the law...such as the fact that poor people, especially those with disabilities, aren't likely to file a lawsuit to recover five dollars, which is the amount most Chatters lost. The system wouldn't make it profitable to do so.

So what should all of us be doing about people who lack a sense of honor? In an enlightened society we don't kill them, at least not right away. We try, first, to correct their behavior by stirring up their evidently defective sense of shame. In other words we "shame" these people. We make it painfully clear to them that we no longer trust them to do the job in which they behaved shamefully. We don't have to hate them; there may be other jobs they can do very well. But we want everyone to know that what they did was shameful and cannot be tolerated.

A good example might be former President Richard Nixon, who cheated at the game of politics and got caught. Apart from that he may not have been an altogether bad man, or even an altogether bad President, but the United States made it very clear that Nixon's behavior as President was shameful and would not be tolerated. After a few years of public disgrace, Richard Nixon became a reasonably successful novelist and enjoyed an active and prosperous old age.

But we have too many bad examples of people who cheat and steal keeping their jobs, keeping the money they promised to pay for work that was done, even being allowed to spout pop-psychology cliches about forgiving and moving on. Thieves, which is what people who don't pay for work that has been done are, like nothing better than to change the subject from the fact that they owe other people money to blather about those people's "feelings."

Imagine if "Fix Facts First: Feelings Follow" were a federal law.

Chatabout site manager: "I understand you feel dissatisfied now because chaaange..."

Judge: "Fix facts first! Feelings follow! In addition to the $5 or $10 you owe each of those 10,000 people you will pay each of them $100 for every attempt to redirect a conversation about facts into a conversation about feelings."

With that kind of reforms we might even be able to restore common decency to the civil law system.

Chatabout site manager: "Butbutbut the original contract said I get to stop paying when I run out of money!"

Judge: "So, you will pay each of them $500 for presenting an unethical contract. You will take a day job and your wages will be garnished until your debt is paid. Additionally you are ordered not to use the Internet for any purpose until your debt is paid--you might have to go back to the age of telephones!"

Chatabout site manager: "Oh, noes! People would see me using a phone like some poor ignorant slob who didn't know how the companies are trying to cheat people out of a safe, affordable service! I'd be sooo embarrassed...I'd feel ashamed!"

Judge: "That's the POINT."

People with deficient senses of honor/shame do show emotional reactions such as embarrassment when others tell them they've done something shameful, so embarrassment may be a way to connect with whatever circuits their brains do have for learning to recognize shameful behavior.

When people have disgraced themselves by acting dishonorably, human societies have not always made it easy for them to recover their honor. There has, however, usually been an understanding that brave, loyal, generous behavior can "clear the name" of a person who has lost honor...although, in some cultural traditions, examples of behavior that has had that effect have involved the person's dying in some noble sacrificial way. 

"Sacrificial" is a point that needs to be emphasized. In cultures where the sense of honor was recognized in a corrupt way, the question has been raised whether mere suicide restored the honor of the individual. It doesn't. Suicide shows that the individual didn't want to live with the consequences of what had been done. When the person who committed suicide was the victim rather than the perpetrator of the shameful act, like Lucretia in ancient Rome, that may arouse reconsideration of the way society reacts to a shameful act, and accomplish some good for others besides the person who committed suicide. Lucretia was regarded as a noble lady but not a good example to follow. 

More typically, as when nameless, unadmired businessmen commit suicide rather than publicly admit bankruptcy, suicide seems to be the coward's way out of doing anything that might have restored honor. If your business has failed to pay its debts, the reasons for that may not be "because you are an idiot who shouldn't be allowed to carry around a postage stamp," but you still need to do work, probably low-status work because that's what you are likely to be offered, to pay off those debts before asking people to trust you or a business for which you are responsible again. Suicide only adds to the shame of any heirs or successors you might have had. 

Traditionally young men could hope to restore their honor in military service. Sometimes the meaning of this idea seems crass and unacceptable today--a man would try to repay his debts with loot from the other country in a war. Sometimes it seems genuinely honorable--in a just war, the homeland is being attacked, and soldiers risk their lives to defend it. Americans like this idea so much that the opportunity is now offered to young women too. "If you can't find a job that will pay off your student loans, join the Army. Con suerte you can put in seven years of service while we're not at war, travel and see the world as some sort of guard or nurse or pilot, and earn a military pension without having to take a single human life!" It's served many young people well and, rather than thinking of "the service" as an alternative to an education, today young Americans often count on their veterans' benefits as a way to fund their education. If the only blot on an American's honor is debt the person sees no way to pay, and the person is strong and healthy, military service is an ideal way to restore honor. All the person has to do is serve honorably. 

The difficulty for some people is that, as we grow older, it can be hard to maintain the strength and fitness military service demands. "What? They take scrawny little girls and sloppy fat boys and put them in jobs where they spend most of the day sitting down!" Yes, but it takes a certain level of fitness and toughness to stay alert enough to steer a plane or monitor surveillance devices, even while sitting down. So the Army may tell a forty-year-old slacker to go home and find some other way to pay his debts. Hillary Rodham Clinton famously claimed to have been told, in her thirties, "You're too old, you can't see, and you're a woman! Why would Uncle Sam want you?" Sailors have different responsibilities than soldiers so the Navy has traditionally accepted people who are physically disqualified for other branches of military service. People who don't do physical work or exercise regularly aren't even fit for the Navy. Fit, healthy veterans may be welcome to re-enlist even in their fifties, but couch potatoes may not even find a place in their neighborhood fire department or emergency medical service crew. The U.S. and Canadian armed forces publish booklets illustrating the specific moves they find important to maintain "fighting trim" for each branch of service. People working in health care fields are advised to use those books as daily workout guides, too. The workouts can help prevent back injuries at fifty or broken hips at seventy.

Another traditional way people were said to lose their honor was by being defeated, in battle or in any kind of competition. The way to recover honor, in that sense, was simple: play, or fight, or whatever, another round. Reopening wars just to recover a sense of honor is no longer recognized as an honorable alternative. Playing rematch games is still very popular. People's "honor" as champion athletes now seems to be a different thing from their personal honor; a good athlete's losing a game is attributed to the other player(s) catching a lucky break, the weather, distractions, etc., and the only reason why people ever stop paying to watch the rematches is that the athletic organizations find it more profitable to make them wait.

But some stains on people's honor are harder to clear than a debt that can be paid or a contest that can be repeated. Acts of cowardice, whether as petty as falling back on ad hominem insults when you can't answer a point in a debate, or as vile as molesting the child of someone who rejected you, all leave the same taint lingering on a person and make it difficult for others to trust or respect the person. A respectable citizen never has to play cards at all, but a person who cheats at cards is despised even when nobody is gambling on the outcome of the game. A decent human being doesn't have to be married, but a married person who cheats is not a decent human being. Only those directly involved in acting them out have any reason to care what your sexual preferences may be, but making them into your public identity amounts to "kissing and telling," which is despicable. Honorable people don't have to have children, but abandoning children is shameful. And so on.

Human societies have disagreed on what, if anything, might be said to restore a person's honor after the person has not merely fallen behind on payments or lost a competition, but displayed a shameful character. In English one cliche phrase for the way such a person survives is "roamed from town to town to hide his shame." 

Christianity has actually had some debates about whether baptism "washes away" the shame of unethical behavior in the past. In the early church, new converts from Pagan religions must often have been thrilled to hear that God would simply "wipe away" sins as heinous as human sacrifice--yet the converts themselves still wanted to restore their honor, when possible, in the ordinary way. We are not told that Jesus told Zacchaeus the tax collector what to do, but that Zacchaeus, overwhelmed by the honor of having the great Teacher visit his home, joyously proclaimed, "If I've cheated anyone, today I'll pay them back." We're not even told whether Mary Magdalene's "seven devils" were seven great sins or seven chronic diseases or seven forms of "spiritual oppression," or a combination of those; all we know for sure is that Jesus helped this beloved saint deal with some serious problems. We do know that a past that had certainly been embarrassing, probably shameful, was not considered to disqualify Mary Magdalene for the honor of being the first disciple given the Great Commission to preach the Gospel. 

We know, also, that some social shame lingered on, because the other disciples hesitated to believe the Good News on Mary's authority. There must have been some tendency to think "That's wonderful news--but after all Mary said it--how do we know that Mary even knows what she's talking about? Now that the Great Healer has gone, are the seizures and delirious visions going to come back?" (When first century Jews said someone "had a devil" they were often describing a painful disease whose primary symptoms were seizures and delirious visions.) When Jesus showed Himself to the other disciples He still had to verify Mary's word, vindicate her honor. Certainly there was some feeling of "When Jesus says someone is healed, that person is healed--permanently--even if it's Mary Magdalene." 

The question for us today is of course whether Jesus has in fact said that someone, whether it's a brain-damaged person like Donna Williams or a character-deficient person like Donald Trump, is healed. Sometimes people may even seriously believe that they've been healed, and be wrong. We want to believe that Trump has become a fine and honorable man, however late in life. We wanted to believe that Lauren Slater, being able to recognize and live with the symptoms of Prozac Dementia, would continue to write brilliant books, too.

Really restoring personal honor can seem to require miracles even today. For how long would Bill Clinton need to be a blameless husband before you could trust him? Even though Richard Nixon's only confirmed criminal activity--or James Earl Ray's for that matter--was political, would you ever have trusted them? Easy though it would be to clean up Hunter Biden's face, will anyone ever believe that he's cleaned up his behavior? 

The hasty BubbleWS version of this post (which did not anticipate the dishonorable behavior of BubbleWS' owner, Arvind Dixit) was suggested by news from the disgraced former Speaker of the House, Newton "Newt" Gingrich. Though not reelected to Congress after his divorce, Gingrich still had money and wanted to be remembered as the godfather of the self-steering car. Would you say he succeeded?

This web site is somewhat divided on the question of whether Donald Trump's effect on the United States' economy did anything to restore the personal honor he lost both by his bankruptcies and by his divorces. What do you think?

Can you think of anyone who has recovered his or her personal honor after doing something shameful?