Movie Review: The Africans

I watched this educational film at Berea College. Berea required all students to attend Cultural Events and write about them. I tried to write things about these events that would be fun for someone who hadn't been there to read. As some of The Nephews are in or considering colleges, I think posting a few notes on the Cultural Events of our day may give The Nephews an idea of the kind of letters I want to receive. 

College students' blogs about shopping, games, lovers' quarrels, and how cool it was to watch La Picadora confuse the teacher into three minutes of silence, are not nearly so interesting as blogs about what the teachers are actually trying to teach them and how they, the students, are taking it...This was a movie about geography. I was supposed to be reporting on it for a music teacher. Sometimes that sort of mix-up makes reports more interesting. 

Would it have been more interesting if I'd noted who the narrator was? Probably. Even when I was young and cute I never was perfect.

THE AFRICANS: A TRIPLE HERITAGE

The Africans: A Triple Heritage opens with the image of a signpost covered with dozens of signs pointing in all directions. This symbolizes the variety, conflict, and confusion the narrator finds in contemporary African cultures, which he says have all been shaped by three major influences.

During the discussion of the first influence, traditional African civilizations, the narrator purposely misquotes John 1:1, “In the beginning was the water, and the water was with God, and the water was God.” This reflects Africa’s longing for water and the significance of the Nile River in ancient Egypt, but to Christians it’s offensive.

Traditional African music and dance feature very briefly in the discussion of traditional cultures. Neither the music nor the dance last long enough for this observer to identifiy a pattern. Complex drumming and colorful costumes flash past our ears and eyes.

Other aspects of traditional African cultures discussed include close ties to nature, the economic importance of women, and a lack of interesting exploration beyond one’s own tribal territory. Human beings are believed to have originated in Africa, to be “more native than cattle or maize,” so civilization itself is a legacy of early African cultures—especially Egypt, the home of Moses.

The second influence on modern African culture was Islamic culture, which might also be called African in the sense that the Arab Peninsula was once connected to Africa. Although the Muslim countries are the homes of traditional music and dances, the only music that is really considered Islamic, and exported to other countries, is traditional “cantillation” of prayers, scriptures, and hymns/poems. A short fragment of one “song” illustrates Islamic music in Africa. It is sung without accompaniment by one voice. I recognized the Arabic words “God is great...by the grace of God” and guess that the rest of the words are also Arabic, probably from the Koran.

Although Muslims use and participate in casual translation from the Koran for teaching purposes, a true translation of the words of the Prophet is considered impossible. Those who want to understand the Koran learn Arabic. The film does not discuss the ways in which this Islamic cultural tradition has both promoted and prevented literacy and literature in Africa. When boys, and less often girls, have had the opportunity to study the Koran and Muslim-approved books, Islam has exposed them to a rich body of literature in many languages. When elementary education has come from non-Islamic sources, it has been viewed as "corrupting" the students. 

The most important aspect of Islamic culture is of course the words of their Prophet, with all that they involve. “Never send to know for whom the muezzin tolls: he calls for thee.” The muezzin, a religious official, summons everyone to prayer five times a day. Prayer is uttered with the face toward Mecca, so a side effect of this rule was the invention of the compass. Islamic Africans are not always punctual in business but they are punctual in prayer.

One feature of Islamic culture that is clearly shown, but not discussed, in the film is the strict rule of modesty. Women cover their hair, and sometimes their faces; men's jackets and shirts completely cover the tops of their trousers.

The third influence on contemporary African culture is “Western” culture from Europe. (The background music in this film is mostly European-type, but is never featured enough for any piece to be identified.) European food, love of natural beauty, “Western” clothing, the building of “citadels of authority,” and the use of European languages represent the European influence on Africa.

Although the narrator certainly displays a love of natural beauty, he disapproves of European food—especially meat, and most particularly pork. In some traditional African religions and philosophies animals were believed to have souls, to be “brothers” to humanity, and to be “sacred” or “unclean.” (A tenor voice sings a simple repetitious tune in a language I don’t recognize, accompanied by percussion and electronic keyboards.) Europeans felt free to kill their “brother” creatures for science or for profit. (An elephant is shot; as it falls, it is surrounded by other elephants, who touch it and vocalize over it very much like humans who can hardly believe that one of their group has been injured. Then a soprano voice sings a slow, high-pitched, descending melody as if mourning for the elephant.) For Muslims, no animals have good or bad souls or sacred natures, but the pig is unclean. Yet, for European money, Muslims will touch, handle, and butcher the pig. They then do a special ritual of “cleansing” before they can pray or enter a mosque. (At this point, there is no music; the narrator’s voice echoes grimly in the silence.) This section of the film is carefully structured to convey more of the narrator’s feelings than his words express.

The last portion of the film digresses away from Africa’s heritage and focusses on Africa’s ecology. The forest was traditionally said to be the sacred place of ancestral spirits. Under European influence, many forests were destroyed. As Europeans sought asylum in their churches, Africans sought it in their forests, but “the forests have no refuge.” Deforestation dries and sterilizes the land. It can be said that “the ancestral spirits are displeased” as precious watercourses dry into blowing sand. Famine results from the destruction of forests and thus of farmland. “Taking up the White man’s burden” has not solved the problem; White men have generally been more ready to take up their neighbors’ wealth than to take up any burden of alleviating their neighbors’troubles. The narrator suggests that traditional religious beliefs, which at least preserved some ecological awareness, might be preferable to those versions of science and Christianity that ignore the ecological impact of “development” on the land.

In conclusion, the narrator says, Africa’s land and heritage must be preserved, for since Moses was drawn out of the Nile River, the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic world owe the beginnings of their faith to Africa.

In my opinion this film is a good example of the filmmaker’s art, and the narrative might even be a good piece of literature, but I find it impossible to write about in terms of music. More use of African music might have distracted from the narrative point, or merely have cost more than the filmmaker could afford.

Each President Had Something to Teach Us

(Reclaimed from Blogjob and slightly updated. Each President's name should still link to the Amazon page for a book, usually one he wrote.)

This post started out as an exercise in improvisation: “Improvise a speech supporting or refuting the statement that each of our past Presidents has something to teach us.” I limited myself to the ones that people I knew remembered…

Woodrow Wilson: Though not allowed to vote, a woman can function as President. (At least if she’s Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, who, even in Virginia’s Fightin’ Ninth District, was a woman you didn’t meet every day.)

Warren G. Harding: It is hard to find good things to say about President Harding, but he did leave a generous bequest to a church college. You don’t have to remain a member of a church to be loyal to the people whose fellowship you have abandoned.

Calvin Coolidge: Quiet is good.

Herbert Hoover: A person who genuinely rises above the love of money may be hated more than a corrupt sell-out like Warren G. Harding. (My grandfather was a great fan of President Hoover.)

Franklin D. Roosevelt : Polio survivors are strong and tough.

Harry Truman: Any U.S. citizen can be President.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: Hating the Third Reich has nothing to do with hating German people. Hating some of the idiotic things people do in the names of other demographic groups has nothing to do with hating those kinds of people, either, though very few other ethnic groups have ever achieved anything as easy to hate as the Third Reich. 

John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you but…” Or, if the Old Left’s most beloved icon of the twentieth century were around in this century, he’d be mistaken for a Right-Wing Wacko Bird. (Though he was not one, and could prove it...if the idiocy of the Left Wingnuts didn't push him into being right-wing.)

Lyndon B. Johnson: It’s possible to die from guilt, if you have been the worst President of the century.

Richard Nixon: It’s possible to live with the guilt if you were only the third worst President of the century. (Nobody liked President Nixon much, but at the time the EPA was a big improvement over what we’d had before–nothing–and the food stamps program was an even bigger improvement over what we’d had before–donations of incredibly bad food to poor people.)

Gerald Ford: A nice guy can be President if he’s tall, decent-looking, and extremely rich.

Jimmy Carter: The President of the United States can walk on his own two feet, in public, no matter how the guards carry on. (Carter may not be remembered among our best Presidents, but he’s been a world-class public relations man for a world-class charity.)

Ronald Reagan: An aging actor who’s never had a good part before can be a great President if that happens to be the type he plays best.

George H.W. Bush: American body-type prejudice is truly ridiculous. (Although he was taller, stronger, and more dangerous than President Reagan, fair hair and a tenor voice caused him to be tagged as a “wimp.”)

Bill Clinton: An easy way to distract attention from ordinary bad ideas is to blame each bad idea on a subordinate employee. An easy way to distract attention from disastrously bad ideas is to get caught in a stupid lie about whether you got someone else’s clothes dirty. An easy way to be fondly remembered afterward is to claim the credit for subordinate employees’ good ideas. 

George W. Bush: If your father has started a blood feud, and you get yourself elected to public office and get thousands of your constituents killed in an act of war aimed directly at you, it is possible to look wholesome enough on TV that many Americans will forgive you for it.

Barack Obama: A President who has really learned from all the foregoing examples, especially that of W Bush, can sponsor some of the world’s worst ideas and still be reelected…at least, by virtual ballots.

Donald Trump: If you have enough money you can get away with anything, even standing up to those who have even more. Maybe. (I don't like Trump but the people who hate him manage to be even more unlikable than he.)

Joseph Biden: If you had a good close look at a job, five or ten years ago, and said you were too old for the job then, chances are that you're still too old for that job now. Or: Bland, nice, likable people can be real disasters if they get into positions to be manipulated by people with bad intentions. 

British readers, who are having a big week...God save your King from the mistakes of his counterparts over here. 

Image of past Presidents, looking worried, by Sgarton at www.morguefile.com/archive/display/937429 .

Posted on September 24, 2015 Categories History Tags president of the United States

Book Review: The Canaan Legacy

Title: The Canaan Legacy

Author: Michael A. Kahn

Date: 1988

Publisher: Lynx

ISBN: 1-55802-156-6

Length: 385 pages

Quote: “But men like Graham Anderson Marshall don’t bury pets in Wagging Tail Estates.”

Rachel Gold wants to find out what Marshall did bury under a memorial to “Canaan, 1985,” with a legacy for maintenance in ludicrous excess of the posh pet cemetery’s standard fees. Rachel is a heroine in the great Hollywood tradition. She might have been a corporate lawyer if she hadn’t preferred to abandon the career for an amateur detective adventure, then stay home and have babies. Not until the adventure is in full swing will it occur to her that Canaan’s little coffin can simply be opened. 

There's something to be said for the heroic detective, like Sherlock Holmes or Mrs. Marple; something to be said for the flawed but still brilliant detective, like Sam Spade or Lord Peter Wimsey. There is also, sales figures show, something to be said for the accidental detective who gets through a novel a few steps behind the reader. The Canaan Legacy generated sequels and a reprint. If you like a detective who makes you laugh, this novel is for you.

First Crush

Did I have a first crush? How do we define these things?

In high school, when I started to feel attracted to male bodies, I didn't let myself have crushes on the owners of those bodies. I practiced what I've written about "How to Bust a Crush." 

In first grade, though, because other people hadn't started yet to ask annoying questions about whether I had any particular feelings about boys yet, I was free to notice that a young man I saw every day had the Perfect Face. He drove the bus one of my little "friends" rode to school, was another one's uncle, and was also one of my second cousins once removed, so he was even hired to do a few odd jobs for my parents. 

I didn't think he was a perfect person, and I had no idea why pop culture insisted that women and girls were supposed to look for the perfect male face. I preferred stories where girls looked for treasure, or trained their own horses, or had whatever other adventures, on their own. But I'd found the Perfect Face. What a young man is supposed to look like is what my Cousin John Doe looked like in his early twenties.

That was about as far as it went. I remember making up a few stories that called for a leading man--not that, at that age, I was telling these stories to anyone or writing them down--and thinking that of course the handsome hero looked like John Doe. But more often the stories I made up were about women, or, if they were about animals, they were about "girl" animals.

John Doe was still growing, in his early twenties, only a little less conspicuously than I was between ages five and ten. After I was about ten I didn't think his face was perfect, or even closer to perfect than the other cousins' faces, any more. I didn't like him better than, or as well as, most of the other relatives either. If I wanted to see "one of those Does" it would have been the niece, who was in some of my classes at school and was about as close to being a friend as any of the other kids adults called my friends.

Did I learn anything from this "first crush," if it counts as a crush? I learned that, to my eyes, the perfect face is not typically White nor typically Cherokee, but distinctly biracial. 

Much later I remarked casually to one of my sisters that some other face looked almost like the Perfect Face, and she said--I didn't see it myself--"He looks like you." 

Nonsense, of course. The Perfect Face has copper-toned skin. I have sallow skin. 

Book Review: Osama Tio Sam

Title: Osama Tio Sam 

Author: Eduardo del Rio, "Rius"

Date: 2005

Publisher: Grijalbao

ISBN: 0307274047

Length: 192 pages

Quote: “Es dificil expresarle al Tio Sam el agradecimiento por todo lo que le ha dado al mundo.”

Did the cartoonist known as Rius seriously believe that the evil U.S. government funded the 2001 attacks on the U.S.? Probably not. Did he have a following who expected him to entertain a few conspiracy theories in a way that would make them entertaining even for U.S. readers? Absolutely. Did he have the sort of mind that could do that? Definitely. Did you want to check out the proof while eating or drinking? Definitely not if you'd borrowed the book from a public library. Though far below the comedic standard that made its author internationally famous, this book is still a coffee-snorter.

Rius had just passed age 70. (His drawing hand was slipping, visibly. In 2005 this book made readers sad.) "Communism" had been the religion of his youth. He had never missed a chance to bash the U.S. government or, for that matter, to laugh at the clueless gringos of the North, even in books he wrote with the serious intention of educating his Mexican readers. There was self-parody in his cartoon characters' exaggerated loyalty to all things Mexican (or lack thereof), but underneath the self-parody, yes, he chose to live in Mexico. Conspiracy theories existed in 2001 and it's likely that, underneath the self-parody of this book, Rius thought there might have been something in them. The book is still satire. Rius satirized everything and everybody.

In Osama Tio Sam regular readers recognized Chon and Gumaro and the other "Agachados" characters, but they weren't drawn as well as they used to be. When hand lettering was used the letters were bigger and sloppier than in Rius's earlier books. More of the lettering was done on a computer. The computer allowed more source material to be pasted in. Rius's books had often been collages, with source material copied and pasted in the original languages. (Rius always wrote in Mexican Spanish but often read and quoted things printed in English, French, Italian, and other languages.) His readers apparently welcomed the assumption that they could read material in any language for themselves and needed translations only when Gumaro could translate something into slang in his amusing way. Did they welcome the violence of some of the cartoons pasted into this book? Rius's early books were always provocative, with no sympathy for the richies who kept Gumaro underpaid, but they weren't violent or vulgar. Some of the cartoons pasted into this book are both.

Despite his fluency in English and his U.S. fans, Rius chose not to write in, or have his books translated into, English. If you have the choice, courtesy requires you to use the language of the country you are in. Rius's readers were visiting a fictional town in Mexico and Rius agreed with his character Gumaro, the lovable idealist schoolteacher, that people learn best when lectures target the advanced students, motivating the others to try to catch up. If you wanted to know what his characters were saying you would study Spanish beyond tourist level, would recognize sources and song lyrics and slang. Amazon now offers some translations. I feel that these translations violate the spirit of books in which Gumaro exhorted his audiences to eat a "Mexican" diet of natural corn and beans and pepitas rather than the richies' and gringos' contaminated carne. 

(And yet I find myself remembering that cartoon sequence in the English my mind supplied rather than the Spanish in which it was printed. "What you got against carne," flesh, growls a young woman whose C-cups appear to be struggling to get out of the child-sized T-shirt she's wearing. "Er, um, nothing!" Gumaro blushes, in such a way that you know that, as a good child of the 1960s, he'd eat a possum if one of his students' parents had cooked one, and he'd never withhold the comfort of a manly embrace from a girl who seems to want that as desperately as she needs an adult-sized shirt...but, when he's able to buy his own food with his scanty salary, he's a vegetarian.)

Gumaro was like the young Pete Seeger. You were free to think his politics were a load of toxic waste, but you had to like the misguided young man. And in this book, it seems, Gumaro has been fully convinced of some of the wildest conspiracy theories. 

“The North American people are the least well-informed in the world...they ignore all the things their government does...ignore everything that happens outside of their borders,”'Rius explained in the blurb on the back of the book. He didn't usually bother apologizing to his U.S. readers. He wrote for the sort of people he could trust to roll their eyes, but not take offense, when gringos was used to mean them while americanos was used to mean everyone else but them. That sort of USAmericans can be trusted, also, to accept this accusation. We sort of do ignore what happens outside of our borders. We know it's all being reported in ways that serve people's interests so, unless we know people in a certain country well enough to feel that their interests are ours, our usual response to foreign news does tend to be "Whatever." 

Rius's goal, I think, in confusing William Walker with George Herbert Walker Bush, and similar unlikely "mistakes," was not to say that either Rius or Gumaro knew nothing about the U.S. history being mangled in the book, but to motivate readers to look up the facts in serious books.  Socialism might have worked in Russia if we hadn't pushed them into an unsustainable arms race,  federal employees killed both John and Robert Kennedy, and the West Was Won with the participation of John Wayne...we know he's getting these things wrong, so maybe we'll look them up and get them right.

I think the facts of both the 2001 attacks and the Kennedy murders are bad enough without adding unsubstantiated rumors to them. Rius actually admits, in the text, that his charges of collusion between Osama and Tio Sam are only rumors. So why bother even typing them out? Possibly to review the history of U.S. relations with Mexico; to understand why, when they hear this kind of rumors, some Mexicans would hardly put anything past their Uncle Sam. Our relations with Mexico have been, on the whole, neighborly, but...self-serving. Very very self-serving. 

As when, last year, U.S. corporations wanted to go on making and selling more glyphosate products, despite abundant evidence that glyphosate is making millions of people ill or sick, that glyphosate is the reason why today's youth really have lower median scores than we had at their age, and that glyphosate certainly encourages cancer. But they ran into a problem: Glyphosate has become less useful for its intended purpose every year, as the poison sprays always do, and meanwhile people have become more aware of the harm glyphosate does. A few people really are evil enough to say "Well, if glyphosate actually cripples or kills my neighbors instead of only making them feel discouraged with their gardens, then I ought to be able to acquire their land at even cheaper prices." My neighborhood happens to have been cursed with one of them. But most people would actually prefer to have less breathtaking roses than to "weed'n'feed" their roses with stuff that gives their daughters migraines and makes their grandchildren forget what they've studied on exam day. So...in Europe the farmers say "Send it to Africa," of things they don't want. Some of us say "Send it to Mexico." Not the ones of us who do our own grocery shopping and notice where our fruit and vegetables come from, but, unfortunately, we do allow people who lack that basic life experience to conduct trade negotiations and make deals that depend on Mexicans buying that nasty "Roundup-Ready" corn we no longer want to burn in our car motors. Some of us forget that what goes around in Mexico has a way of coming around here in just a few hours. Possibly the thinking was "At least Mexican people aren't Irish," though some of them are, "so they won't be suffering from celiac sprue," but the reality is that (a) though only people of Irish descent have the celiac gene, people of all ethnic groups can have pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate, and (b) people who don't have pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate have other reactions, some of which may be more life-threatening. 

Mexicans are quite right to distrust us. People with names like Biden (Bidens are weeds) who demand that Mexicans honor "deals" like that? Mexicans are providing excellent models of civic virtue by letting them live. We should know better than to trust people like that, too. We should insist that our government show due respect to our kind, patient, generous neighbors. 

Song: We Don't Need Nuclear Reactors

As regular readers remember, the Appalachian Power Company's Aaron Walker was talking about building a nuclear reactor in Wise County, Virginia, last year. The position of this web site is that no new power plants should be constructed until every "consumer" account in the Point of Virginia has at least had the right to refuse to become a "producer" account. 

Last winter, I wrote a batch of Antinuke Songs and sent them to a "solarpunk" 'zine. I may have told some people at APCo that Antinuke Songs were being written, too. Anyway, the'zine didn't snap up the songs, which are folk not punk, but APCo personnel now say they've not heard any talk about building new nuclear power plants lately.

Well, that's nice. Now where's my rack of solar cells?

This one is sung to the tune of the "We don't need no education" song from Pink Floyd's "Wall" album. Click here for the original words and video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U (I suppose this one is sort of punk.)

 Hey people, leave these hills alone

We don't need nuclear reactors

We have plenty of sunshine

Round the houses where we're living

Why put our lives on the line

Use sunshine

Don't put our hills on the line

You want nuclear reactors?

Put them in your own back yard

Mountains full of good spring water

Don't need to be cut and scarred

Use sunshine

Don't put our mountain springs on the line

We can build you generators

You can pedal at your seat

If you need more than just sunshine

That's an easy need to meet

Use sunshine

Don't put our neighborhoods on the line

You may not blow up this mountain

You may not blow up the town

Bad enough to smash the atoms

Out on bare unwanted ground

Use sunshine

Don't put human lives on the line

A Book I Refused to Sell: The Exorcist

Book Too Bad to Sell: The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

This one is not a book you can buy from me. I heard about, but didn’t see, the 1974 movie, so when I found this former bestseller at a benefit sale I bought it. I paid a dime. After reading the book I feel that I was overcharged.

Here’s what I knew could be expected from The Exorcist: A child, whose parents don’t believe in demons but who may be possessed by one, becomes ill and, in addition to all the normal disgusting things sick patients do, says a lot of bad words. A priest is called in to exorcise the demon. Priest dies. Child recovers. The only intellectual curiosity I was able to bring to this book was the question of whether it had more of a plot than that. The answer is that it has...but people never talked about the plot, because it’s an incompetent plot. Our standards for cheap horror stories have been raised by Stephen King. I can’t imagine how Blatty ever got this clunker printed.

The child’s parents are divorced. The father’s name is Howard. The child starts chatting with someone called “Captain Howdy” via Ouija board. (This device was marketed as a board game, along with Parchesi and Monopoly, in leaflets in cereal boxes in 1973.) The mother has a foul-mouthed alcoholic friend. When teachers note that the child has become hyperactive, she’s started using bad language just like Mommy’s friend Burke. Then the child really starts acting out, coming downstairs into a grown-up party and wetting the carpet. There’s a suggestion that Burke has been “outside” the child’s bedroom. The child’s not the only one who saw him.

So what does the mother do? She calls a doctor and starts frantically feeding the child psychiatric drugs. The child gets sicker. This actually happens and there’s nothing supernatural about it. The child doesn’t need exorcism, although Burke and the child’s mother might need that. The child needs detox.

But, for whatever reasons, Blatty didn’t spin a simple tale of the kind of child abuse by a family friend that was indeed going on in 1974. At the time there was a lot of sympathy for the idea that “a gentle sexual initiation” that didn’t obviously damage the body of a preadolescent child might be considered a good thing—or where the psychological consequences were the stuff of horror movies. But Blatty seems to want it to be part of the reality of the story that the evidence against Burke is just a bonus effect thrown in by a Demon of Fevers and Confusion. A lot of things apparently are being done, and we never find out who’s doing what.

Clearly the standards for popular horror fiction have been raised by Stephen King, whose novels may feature demons with the power to becloud characters’ minds (consider the powers of evil in Pet Sematary), but always make it possible for the reader, at least, to figure out what’s supposed to be going on.

Blatty, I suspect, just wanted to sell a lot of copies by breaking a current taboo. Certain rude words really had been unprintable, and seldom used in company that was “mixed” either in genders or in status levels, for long enough that some readers really wanted to read examples of how the words were used. Blatty did not actually tell them. In The Exorcist the sort of people who used bad language use it, but they don’t use it realistically; they use unprintable nouns where in real life they would have used unprintable verbs, and vice versa. The child utters obscenities she might have heard her mother actually use, but the laborers use obscenities like a lot of foreign exchange students who hadn’t been here very long.

The title suggests that The Exorcist ought to be a psychological study of a priest. Perhaps Blatty didn’t pick the title; he doesn’t even try to write anything so challenging. All three of the priests who get speaking parts are flat characters, given little more in the way of personality than the child. The narrative is such a flimsy connection between gross-out scenes that there’s room to imagine that Father Karras, the priest who gets the biggest part in the book, just might have been the baddie, the “sick priest” who, in the moments of doubt and depression we’re told he’s had, committed the blasphemies that awakened the demon. But if that had been what Blatty was trying to say, why didn’t he say it? Possibly because he wasn’t really trying to say anything; just trying to cash in on people’s fascination with the forbidden by writing a book with lots and lots and lots of formerly unprintable words in it. He shows no more concern with Karras’s soul than with Regan’s. Which makes his book a kind of psychological pornography.

The real deal breaker is that Blatty insisted not only on getting the rude words all wrong but also on getting the medical details all wrong. You don’t feed that much Librium to a 75-pound child in the hope that that child will ever go back to school again. Or walk.

So this one is not A Book You Can Buy From Me. If a child starts saying rude words just the way one of the parents’ friends does, it’s probably a bid for attention—needed attention. If the child says the parents’ friend has been outside the child’s bedroom, dumping a whole bottle of pills into the former friend as he lies concussed on the floor might be the sort of thing a jury would understand, but don’t even think about doping the child. 

Butterfly of the Week: Leyte Rose

This week's butterfly may be a critically endangered species, or it may be a rare mutation of another species. The Internet displays plenty of hits for Atrophaneura leytensis or Pachliopta leytensis, and most of them are either lists or questions about whether leytensis is really a distinct species at all. Some of the lists are lists of endangered species that may not be imported into other countries than the Philippines. The butterfly is certainly rare and obscure. Few people are claiming to have seen or photographed one. If, however, it is a variant form of Pachliopta phegeus, it's also found on Mindanao, Cebu, and some other islands, and is not rare or obviously threatened at all. The IUCN Red Book admits that leytensis may belong to the same species as phegeus. Not all scientists agree: 

https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/NEVA_17_0377-0392.pdf

Here's one of very few pictures said to be of a living leytensis, rather than a museum specimen.

Photo courtesy of Geocities/Oocities.

In flight, the peculiar way the Roses can hold their hind wings, and the darker shading on the inner part of the upper wings, can give this swallowtail an odd, un-swallowtail-like silhouette when viewed at some angles:

The body is dark above, with red visible sometimes on the head and sometimes only on the tail tip, almost like a firefly.

Several of the Roses look similar to this, but species show consistent, though subtle, differences in the size and shape of the white spot on the hind wing. Christian Schulze has published a detailed illustrated guide to classifying the butterflies by their spots. The butterflies themselves probably use scent to help them recognize the spots of potential mates as distinct from similar species with which they can't mate.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christian-Schulze/publication/282029603_Identification_key_of_the_genus_Pachliopta_Order_Lepidoptera_Family_Papilionidae/links/5601ae9408aed9851827ca38/Identification-key-of-the-genus-Pachliopta-Order-Lepidoptera-Family-Papilionidae.pdf

Leytensis means "of Leyte island" in the Philippine archipelago. The Rose Swallowtails, now known as the genus Pachliopta, aren't the only group of living things that includes a species thought to be peculiarly found on this island. Leyte is also believed to have its own particular species of turtle and of some plants.

Pachliopta leytensis caterpillars are known to eat only one food plant, Aristolochia philippensis. Whether they can survive on any other food is not known.  

Book Review: And Then We Were Women

Title: And Then We Were Women

Author: Dee Brestin

Publisher: Victor

Date: 1994

ISBN: 1-56476-343-9

Length: 175 pages

Quote: “Oliker found that, rather than siding with the wife against the husband, a woman is much more likely to…strengthen her friend’s marriage by helping her to see the situation from his perspective…or by diffusing her anger with humor.”

I've found that airing a disagreement, though generally a bad idea, is a good way to test the sincerity of a female friend. If the complaint were something like "He hit me and broke two ribs," a good friend will say "Don't go back to that house tonight." If it's the sort of disagreement couples usually have, the friend who doesn't say "Oh, forgive him!" is licking her lips. Lose her.

Some women have that kind of friends. Some do not. If they let themselves be sucked into the corporate nomad lifestyle, it won’t matter; they won’t stay in one place long enough to have time-tested friendships anyway. Considering this, I’m not sure why churches need a Bible study guide on the topic of women’s friendships. The Bible says relatively little about women’s friendships, specifically (though it affirms the value of the one it notices) and, frankly, whether “friends” are same-sex or opposite-sex does not determine their potential for damage to marriage. Sincere Christians respect their friends’ marriages. Insincere Christians don’t and whether same-sex friends form “bi-curious” sexual relationships (less common), or flop into bed with their friends’ mates (more common), or just introduce unhappiness into the home through envy or gossip, is not the sole determining factor of the damage done to any children affected.

However, some church groups just like to hold weeknight Bible studies, and what’s wrong with reading Scriptures about marriage and trustworthiness?

One thing: This book seems to aim at solving problems that I've not seen in the real world. I've not seen a lot of fear that women's groups are going to encourage all the women to leave their husbands and move into a big feminist commune. In real life even feminist consciousness-raising groups did not actually want to do that. Serious feminists know that the changes that benefit women have to work for women who are at home with babies, and the sort of idiotic idealist feminists who think it might be possible, or desirable, to lock all the men up and make them raise all the babies, have neither the organizational skills nor the money to organize the communes they fantasize about. And real church ladies' Bible study groups are more concerned about (1) getting people motivated to show up every week, and (2) reminding them to focus on the Bible rather than on gossip.

"The story of Hannah teaches us that...?"

"Hannah in the Bible wasn't drunk when she bowed down in silent prayer, but Hannah Mae Smith got drunk at her sister's graduation party and..." 

I think this book could have been improved by a more careful study of C.S. Lewis’s Four Loves (or Five Loves), which distinguishes between philia (the “higher” kind of friendship based on shared interests and synergistic partnership) and storge (the “lower,” more primal, affection we feel for things, places, and people just because they are familiar).

There are women, for whom Gwen Macsai was speaking when she wrote a thoroughly forgettable book called Lip Shtick, whose idea of female friendship is definitely storge. These women bond by screaming around the partitions about exactly what they’re doing in public restrooms. Any two of them can bond because all of them not only have the same bodiy functions but like to chatter about them. Body-babbling is a symptom of a more serious disease: these women tend to resent difference, especially the differences between them and women who have talent, interests, personalities, or taste. 

The body-babbler type of "girl friends" take a lowest-common-denominator approach to a lot of things. As in Erma Bombeck’s story, they were the gals who sat around kaffeeklatsching about how hard it was to be good homemakers, who snubbed the woman who liked homemaking and did it well. They believe that “a friend doesn’t go on a diet when you’re fat.” Any woman who wants to claim these women as “friends” is doomed to a lifetime of “cozy,” familiar whining about being fat, living in messy houses, not feeling really close to their husbands, having unsatisfactory jobs or none, having old people’s diseases at early ages…Not that this type of women aren’t even worse if they’re allowed to clump together in offices, where if the company hires anyone who is honest, efficient, and dedicated, they make it their goal to get that person fired. Women who say that they don’t like women, or don’t usually like women, have these frightful females in mind.

There are women whose main concern in some social groups, at least, will always be to keep a good healthy distance from the body-babblers. They may be our neighbors; relatives, or childhood friends, but they’re not the friends, in the sense of philia, whom we really love for themselves and not for the sake of childhood memories. Our friends are synergistic partners in things we do. We love them for life but, since people move apart, grow apart, and die, we don’t necessarily have them for life…and the places they leave behind are not filled by tedious kaffeeklatsching.

A book about how, although women who’ve had “real friends” probably would at least send food to the emergency shelter if a kaffeeklatscher’s house burned down, our goal is actually to avoid cluttering our days with kaffeeklatsching conversation, might be helpful to the women who “just don’t know what to say to” us. They don’t have to say anything, someone could tell them. Probably, the less they say to us, the better. If our work involves selling anything they can buy it. Otherwise they should go their own way, unless, and until, they decide they want to turn off the useless gabble and focus on doing something as well as it deserves to be done.

Kaffeeklatschers have been known to decide to “befriend” some apparently “lonely, friendless” person who may or may not have a satisfactory social life (as it might be when successful artists or business people go back to church) but whose social life does not, in any case, include them. The best-case outcome, when this happens, is that the person snubs them tactfully and continues to avoid them charitably. At this point the kaffeeklatschers usually hiss and spit. “She’s such a snob!”

Synergistic friendship is the great breaker-down of demographic barriers. People who love working together don’t care about each other’s age, race, income or even sex lives, and if what they do together involves humanitarian work their friendship is likely to cross religious boundaries too…but irrelevant chatter is clutter, to be swept away.

I think this book could also have been improved by a closer look at the recent psychological and neurological research that was becoming available by 1994. If Brestin was going to discuss the idea of people “being” “left-brained” or “right-brained,” she might have discussed the newer studies indicating that people can profit from learning to use more of their brains; that women, too, can learn to process our awareness of reality through our left frontal lobes and make logical decisions without muddling through hours of babble about emotions. Not only is this more efficient, not only does it help others to perceive us as mature adults, but it does not interfere with our ability to wallow in feelings. We can still enjoy rooting for the school team, crying at weddings, and screaming with pleasure in bed.

Some logical left-brained men need to discipline themselves to get their natural share of enjoyment of their gardens, their dogs, and even their children. Women have had less cultural conditioning to need to work on that but some women still need to learn to deal with things that frighten them rather than being paralyzed by unnecessary fears. Friends can actually help each other…In 1994 I knew a woman who had been so terrorized by an incident of casual sexual harassment, on the way to a job twenty years ago, that she hadn’t had another job since 1974. A good group of female friends at church could have eliminated the public nuisance as well as encouraging this woman to venture out of her home. That’s not discussed in the Bible, directly, though when we read of teenaged girls as well as boys “keeping the sheep” we can be sure that those children had been trained to react to sexual terrorism in ways other than panic, but the Bible does not directly discuss whether little girls play in “more cooperative” ways than little boys do, either.

As it stands, I think And Then We Were Women is a nice, light, shallow little book for those who like to call their kaffeeklatsches either “book club” or “Bible study,” with nice little anecdotes about other nice church ladies and their daughters, but little actual information. Some phrasing (like “a rare right-brained man” in the acknowledgments) was outdated and fed the myth that church has more to offer people who didn’t get the benefit of much education. Overall this book was derivative, and not even of the most respectable sources, at that. Breskin fitted a few short Bible studies into the clichés of the commercial media, threw in a few nice little stories about her family, and called it a Bible study. Well, Beth Moore, Elisabeth Elliot, or Liz Curtis Higgs she was not.

Readers can still enjoy this book as light reading, perhaps a reminder to think good thoughts and practice what they already knew they ought to do. It’s not a book to inform or persuade, although it was marketed as one. It is a book to entertain.

 

Book Review: 82 Sins of the Church

Book Review: 82 Sins of the Church

Author: Cobus Van Der Merwe

Date: 1995

Publisher: Jacobus Van Der Merwe

ISBN: 978-1494432362

Length: 230 pages

Quote: “Children with good manners are always pleasing to every­one.”

Jacobus Van Der Merwe was a Boer, or South African of Dutch descent, who spent his old age in Kingsport, Tennessee. His English was fluent, but irregular. His understanding of the Bible was likewise…not so much irregular as foreign. Although he joined a charismatic church in Kingsport, his Dutch Reformed background comes out in the form of unusual attitudes.

Although it’s meant to provoke discussions among Christians in any country, 82 Sins of the Church was recognizably shaped by Kingsport. I think this book is part of Kingsport’s history and should be preserved as such. Kingsport has attracted some very distinguished engineers and inventors from all over the world, and Van Der Merwe was one of them.

For devotional use, the value of 82 Sins of the Church may actually be negative. There’s politically incorrect, and then there’s…well…

I’m put off by the sexism on pages 108-109: “A couple should never get married if they cannot make do on the man’s income. The main reason for the job shortage in the world we live in today, is directly ascribed to the greedy women, taking away men’s jobs…God’s Word says clearly that the man is the breadwinner.” Actually, the Bible mentions women musicians, scholars, builders, merchants, and “prophets.” When a Bible writer describes the ideal wife, in Proverbs 31, he spends as many words praising her business acumen as her religious devotion. The perfect wife doesn’t just weave; she has a home textile business that employs several “maidens,” delivers finished products to the merchants, and expands her business by investing in real estate: “She considers a field, and buys it.” Sociologists have generally ascribed the job shortage to technological development, laborers being displaced by machines.

There is much to recommend the idea that being the mother of small children is a full-time job, in and of itself, and should provide the same kind of automatic recess from a corporate “career” that military service does…but “women shouldn’t take away men’s jobs” thinking doesn’t even work out well for young mothers. Some families preserve the biblical family-as-business model, using their home as their business base and integrating their children into the business. But the 1950s TV family structure, where childless wives stayed home all the time and made dusting and polishing into a job, was not an approach that ever served many people well. Nor was it biblical.

The Bible writers don’t prescribe one particular pattern for family life. The economic pattern they describe is the one where both parents lived and worked at home. Everyone was a “breadwinner.” Even small children were “known by their work” as soon as they were able to do any. Even disabled old ladies, like Dorcas, wove and sewed. The lady described in Proverbs 31 was an especially desirable wife because her weaving skills were good enough to earn money as well as saving money. When Paul wrote, “I would have the younger widows (re)marry (or) keep house,” he was telling the early church that his use of the masculine form in “If anyone will not work, neither let him eat” was applicable to able-bodied people of both sexes.

More confusion is to come. Van Der Merwe cites a letter from a friend in South Africa: “What the outside world (that’s you) does not real­ize, is that we do not have to do with civilized people, but barbarians—a sub-race that can never reach the standard of the [W]hite Christian race.” The writer of this letter complains that Nelson Mandela, like every other person who had a complaint against a non-Marxist government during the twentieth century, received some support from the Communist Party. He overlooks the fact that the Communist Party in its heyday treated it as their duty to try to support, and co-opt, every dissident on Earth; what people did with this support was up to them.

More disturbingly, he also overlooks the fact that Mandela was mentored by the nonviolent, non-Communist, committed Christian Albert Luthuli…and greed-blinded “Afrikaners” managed to ignore Chief Luthuli. The Christian magazine Van Der Merwe’s friend addressed had ignored his letter because Christians around the world felt that, when people refused to hear a message of peace from a man of God, those people invited a twisted version from the Evil Principle. Many were surprised and grateful that Mandela emerged as a left-wing Humanist leader rather than a violent, vengeful Communist Party dictator. Van Der Merwe complained that Christians in the United States had no right to denounce Bill Clinton unless they prayed for him. He does not write as if he spent much time praying for Nelson Mandela.

And what exactly was “sub-race” supposed to mean? The proper meaning of "distinct group within a race" fits the use in this book. Because the Republic of South Africa incorporated several pre-existing ethnic groups who had weakened themselves by wars with one another, it’s possible that Van Der Merwe understood Lane Sherman, as quoted on page 192, to be expressing resentment of the Zulu “sub-race,” or ethnic group, as distinct from the Venda “sub-race,” of which Van Der Merwe wrote with less resentment earlier in this book. However, one can hardly blame uneducated readers for hearing in “sub-race” an echo of “subject race.” Like “niggardly,” “sub-race” is not a term of racist hate but it is almost always an ill-chosen word.

Feminists are supposed to oppose “patriarchal” social structures, so I’ve always taken some contrarian pleasure in expressing love and pride about the patriarchs in my family. I know what Van Der Merwe has in mind when he writes about “Sin #49: Husbands Are Not Always Real Men” and praises the Real Man who “opens God’s Word at the breakfast and supper table…tells the truth at all times, regardless of the cost or consequences…provides for his family even if he has to do without…can give some leadership at home and work and is always prepared to listen to good advice” (pages 120-121), “rises early enough, works hard enough to provide enough…can apologize for any mistake…sets the example…visits the sick and bereaved and provides for the needy” (page 198).

Opposing patriarchal systems does not imply failing to appreciate that sort of men when we find them. What we oppose is the idea that a Y-shaped chromosome is enough to make any man a patriarch. In the Bible, Abraham travelled around with his flocks and herds and his extended family, apparently opposing cults that practiced human sacrifice. Kings called on Abraham for help and advice, yet he never called himself a king. Abraham listened respectfully to the advice of his wife and foster son, although they were both younger and less enlightened than he. When other people were around, his wife Sarah enjoyed basking in his glory by calling him “milord.” Privately, Sarah was a nagger (her name changed from “Quarrelsome” to “Princess” as her social status rose) whose demands reduced Abraham to tears. A patriarch never demands respect. He earns it—but, even so, he does not always get it. As C.S. Lewis once put it, he wears two crowns, but one is made of paper and the other of thorns.

In the current decade, as my generation find ourselves in the positions of patriarchs or matriarchs, I think we appreciate those of our elders who filled those roles well more than we ever did before. I haaate being the eldest surviving member of the direct line in my family. I want my Mommy, I want my Daddy! Almost every day! And of course I want due appreciation for coping with the burden of living without them! That said, we still need to beware of the tendency to take for granted that age, gender, or birth order makes people fit to hold authority over others. The oldest generation of a family have lived longer, and ought to have learned more, than the young. In many families the husband's seniority and wider experience are still among the assets for which his wife chose him, too. But in some families the elders are greedy, bossy narcissists, or drug-dependent old fools, and in the United States our Founding Fathers did well to strip them of legal authority to ruin the lives of the young. Elders should be honored in every way possible. In the natural order of things that means that they will have legitimate authority that the young will recognize and appreciate. In some situations it means that the young have to care for them as patiently and respectfully as possible, while working around the fact that they may, like King Saul in the Bible, be barking mad; this is no easy task and we're much better off for not having formal legal impediments to dealing with situations as they are.

Of course, many of the 82 Sins are theological rather than interpersonal issues. Van Der Merwe rebukes churches that are non-charismatic, that “do not seek or expect miracles, do not teach and practice demon exorcism.” He believes in “mandatory forgiveness”; some Christians believe that it is possible to talk about “forgiving” people who are still actively sinning. He thinks special liturgical interest should be given to Psalms 113 through 118. He objects to historical reading of the Bible when “the New Testament is not recognized as being directed to the church at all times.” He has an interpretation of the prophecies in the Bible, and thinks churches need to give more attention to this interpretation.

Others of the 82 Sins are social and political. Van Der Merwe identifies with those who seem to believe that “resistance” to abortion is a matter of political agitation, rather than personal ministry. He rebukes Christians for suing each other in court. He rebukes both the churches that “do not teach against divorce” and the ones that “condemn divorced people.” He complains, in his charmingly eccentric use of English, that “Pastors are fearful, muzzled, proud, greedy and affirmative.” (It takes him three pages to explain what he means by this, but he does have a point.) He thinks children need to participate in formal, audible prayers at school. He has been active in prison ministries, and thinks more Christians need to be. He thinks secular commentary, at least jokes and sports stories, have no place in the sanctuary and should not be used to liven up sermons.

Other “sins” are matters of church subculture. Kingsport is more heterogeneous than some of the towns around it, less dominated by First Families, more open to immigration. Cultural differences among its churches reflect the economic status as well as the temperaments of the congregations. So many of Kingsport’s churches do stress greeting rituals and eye contact that I suspect Van Der Merwe’s complaints here come from his having chosen a church where he seemed to “fit in” economically, and then realized that affluent Anglo-Americans look down on the folksy Dutch cultural customs Van Der Merwe wanted to bring with him.

Intensive eye contact is typical of mainstream Anglo-American culture. Apparently it’s also typical of mainstream Dutch or Boer culture, since Van Der Merwe fails to recognize it among the “bad manners” with which he reproaches “Ugly Americans”; much of the world would place our shameless eyeballing behavior high on the list of obnoxious American manners. Some cultures have rules that a modest person never holds eye contact with a member of the opposite sex, other than the person’s own wife or husband, for longer than a moment; or that younger people, or subordinates, never hold eye contact with senior or superordinate people; or that eye contact is optional, usually used for emphasis after a conversation has begun. Van Der Merwe places great emotional emphasis on people’s being able to “look you square in the eye.” He seems not to realize that when some people, even in the United States, might have started to form such a habit we were asked "Why are you staring? What's wrong?"

His list of 82 Sins is random, as his short reflections on these practices occurred to him, rather than categorical. There are sequences where one thought seems to have led to the next, and sequences where he seems to have put down his list for a few days and come back to it on a whole new train of thought. I’ve discussed the list in a more organized way than Van Der Merwe presents it.

So, this is not a book to share with non-Christians or with very young people. It is a book mature Christians can appreciate as historical commemoration of a distinguished resident of Kingsport. It could even be used by groups of mature Christians as a starting point for study and discussion—Bible and otherwise. It should never be used in such a way as to give Christian-phobics the idea that Van Der Merwe ever spoke for any substantial number of American Christians.

82 Sins of the Church ceased to be a Fair Trade Book last winter. I sold the copy I physically owned before that. Prices for this privately published book are already rising. At the time of writing I can offer it, should you want to buy it here, for $10 per book + $5 per package. But Van Der Merwe no longer needs $1.50, so if you don’t need this one to complete a collection of Kingsport history…there are better devotional books in the world, even at this web site.

Posted on September 27, 2015 Categories Book, ChristianTags charismatic church, Dutch Reformed Church

Book Review: Bake Your Own Bread

Title: Bake Your Own Bread

Author: Floss and Stan Dworkin

Date: 1972

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

ISBN: 0-03-091886-3

Length: 197 pages plus index

Quote: “Bread baking is a lot like married love. The first loaves of bread you make are not the best you’ll ever make, but they’re better than any you’ve ever bought.”

The subtitle of this book is …and Be Healthier. True? Yes, in the sense that your kitchen probably contains fewer germs than a commercial bakery, and if you eat or freeze your bread while it’s fresh you won’t have to add any preservatives. When you start using whole-grain flour and meal you’ll be even further ahead.

That said, it’s also true that for some people, e.g. this reviewer, good health will not be possible until we stop eating bread altogether. Sad but true. The good news is that, once we achieve gluten-freedom and reprogram ourselves to think of wheat products as things that made us sick rather than things we crave, reading and even using this book won’t make us hungry.

(The day this review was written and posted on Blogjob, I was actually starving out a cold...no, the thought of fresh-baked wheat bread didn't torture me any more than the thought of fresh cat kibble did.)

Other people can safely eat bread in moderation, but when they bake bread and have it in the house they tend to binge-eat it. Some of these people are undiagnosed celiacs who will be cured of stubborn chronic conditions when they go gluten-free. Others are allergic to one or more of the other chemical compounds of which wheat is made, but are not gluten-intolerant, and may be able to use bread as long as they don’t binge.

Unfortunately, people in either of those two categories are likely to be drawn to the idea of baking their own bread. Binge-eating homemade bread may be a little safer than binge-eating factory-produced bread, but if you’re a carb-craver who really likes bread, baking bread may be a bad idea for you.

If you are not, and are not feeding, a carb-craver, you’ll enjoy having a book that contains complete recipes and detailed instructions for 34 different kinds of bread. Bread has its place in a balanced diet for most people, and learning to make your own is definitely worth the trouble. Baking bread at home is a great rainy-day treat for children; they’ll love all the mixing, kneading, and shaping. And you’ll always have not only good food to pack in a box lunch, but a conversation piece to take to parties and a gift your friends will recognize as “from the heart.”

Bake Your Own Bread also contains a long rant, unfortunately still mostly accurate, about the hazards of using factory-made foods. It’s not much fun to read but it does explain some, not all, of the emotion with which people discuss the pros and cons of “natural,” “organic,” and home-cooked food. Why do I say “some, not all”? Because in 1972 food crops hadn’t been genetically modified; selectively bred, yes, but bred only for traits that occur naturally in the plant genus being bred. The new hazards of gene-spliced foods, made from plants that have had DNA from animals or disease germs spliced into them, are only beginning to be confirmed. Much of the new information about these new hazards is still available to the general public only on the Internet; type “genetically modified grains” into your search engine if you want to spend a lot of time online becoming increasingly perturbed. Or you could skip the unpleasant reading and just start buying local organic grain.

Floss Dworkin died recently, “suddenly” and “too young,” in her late seventies. Her obituary lists Stan Dworkin as a survivor. There’s quite a lot of information about Stan Dworkin on the Internet but, so far as I’ve read, what’s not about the books he co-authored with his wife is about a younger man by the same name. 

Bread image from Agathabrown at Morguefile: www.morguefile.com/archive/display/189538

Posted on September 29, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book, frugal, HealthTags homemade bread, natural food