LOOK BACK IN PASTA: My Reason article about the Flying Spaghetti Monster is now online. A quick footnote: In the time since that story appeared in the print edition of the magazine, the statue has been removed from the courthouse grounds, along with the other spiritual statuary mentioned in the piece. Apparently, faced with a choice of allowing every religion or no religion to have a place on public property, the local authorities have opted for a clean lawn.
LETHEMANIA: My new column for Reason is a report from a conference on copyright that I attended last week. One of the speakers there was Jonathan Lethem, so here, in his honor, is a passage from Fortress of Solitude:
I considered now that what I had once loved in this record, and certain others -- Remain in Light, "O Superman," Horses -- was the middle space they conjured and dwelled in, a bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream....It was the same space the communists and gays and painters of celluloid imagined they'd found in Gowanus, only to be unwitting wedges for realtors, a racial wrecking ball. A gentrification was the scar left by a dream, Utopia the show which always closed on opening night.
My mom, who knows I'm a Lethem fan, lent me her copy of Fortress of Solitude a while ago, and I've been lazy about returning it. I brought it along to the conference and got the author to sign it for her -- which seems a little odd, now that I think about it, considering the relationship between the book's protagonist and his mother.
On Tuesday the lesbian assassin of Vince Foster won Pennsylvania's presidential primary. In the larger contest for the Democratic nomination, though, she still lags behind a jihadist sleeper agent who is simultaneously a secret Muslim, a secret Communist, and a secret Republican. Whoever wins their race will go on to face a brainwashed puppet of the Viet Cong, and whoever wins that race will then get on with the modern president's central task: serving the interests of Mexico. It must be true, I read it in my email.
Also, June's print edition of Reason is now out. I have two stories in it: a slightly revised version of my Web piece on The Wire and The Sun, and an entirely-new article about the Flying Spaghetti Monster's arrival in Crossville, Tennessee.
Excuse me, Judge? You issued a sweeping, house-to-house search warrant based on a highly questionable anonymous call that turned out to be phony. You refused to allow individual hearings for children, grouping them together like cattle. You accepted the testimony of an expert on "cults" who only learned about FLDS from media accounts, rather than an academic who'd studied them professionally for 18 years.
You've ruled the existence of five girls between 16 and 19 who were pregnant or had children was evidence of systematic abuse, even though in Texas 16-year-olds can marry with parental consent. You've ruled young toddlers are in "immediate" danger because of their parents' beliefs or what might happen 15 years from now, not because anyone abuses them.
From the evidence presented publicly, I do not believe that the children have been sexually abused or physically harmed. Allegations of forcible rape turned out to be bogus, and only five girls 16 to 19 years old were found pregnant or with children -- probably about the same ratio you'd find if you rounded up all the kids in my neighborhood....
In Eldorado, no one alleges YFZ parents are themselves abusing children. Instead the allegation (in court, at least) is that they're teaching their kids that a woman's highest calling is giving birth and raising children and that it's acceptable to get married at an early age. Even if it were true, and the allegation was disputed, can this really be enough to seize children from their homes?
Hanson has been covering the case heavily on his excellent blog. Also invaluable: The Polygamy Files, a blog by Brooke Adams of The Salt Lake Tribune, who has been on the fundamentalist Mormon beat for years. One piece of good news: Judge Walther has reversed her decision to separate FLDS mothers from children less than 12 months old.
And yes, it may turn out that there was some genuine sexual abuse in that community. If so, it should be punished. But even then, the approach the government has taken would be deeply harmful overkill, for reasons expressed pithily by Les Jones:
Imagine that some parents in a school district were accused of child abuse. Now imagine that the authorities took every child from the elementary, junior high, and high school away from their parents and put them in foster care. That's a rough analogy of what's happening in Texas.
The difference, I guess, is that the FLDS parents belong to a "cult." And once you've applied that label, it's just a quick step to assuming they do everything en masse.
Also, May's print edition of Reason is out. I have an article in it about the human rights group Witness (a topic I've tackled before). [Update: And now the piece is online.]
That clip is called The Church of Oprah Exposed; it is, among other things, a promo for Carrington Steele's book and DVDDon't Drink the Kool-Aid: Oprah, Obama, and the Occult. (Yes, of course there's an Obama angle. Apparently Jeremiah Wright isn't the only controversial preacher in his life.)
It isn't just fringy Christians who talk about a Church of Oprah. In 2002 the deeply mainstream Christianity Today published a famous article, "The Church of O," that makes a more respectful, less paranoid argument that Oprah is a spiritual leader. The best quote in it comes from a Bible teacher in Chicago: "I like Oprah. I'm a closet groupie, though, because her theology's a little off." Another Chicago Christian -- the infamous Rev. Wright -- has a good line as well: "Somebody who makes $100 a week has no problem tithing. But start making $35 million a year, and you'll want to renegotiate the contract. You don't want to be a part of 'organized religion' at that point."
Over in the ivory tower, Prof. Kathryn Lofton of Indiana University has taken a slightly different approach, arguing that "Oprah does things in a religious manner, but she is not a religion." She goes on:
"She endorses some modes of theological existence, but dislikes many more. For her, religion implies control and oppression and the inability to catalog shop. The only way religion or religious belief works for Oprah is if it is carefully coordinated with capitalist pleasure. Thus, the turn to 'spirituality' -- the non-dogmatic dogma that encourages an ambiguous theism alongside an exuberant consumerism," Lofton said.
In Winfrey's view, Buddhism isn't about meditation and renunciation, it's about beaded bracelets and fragrant incense. "Christianity isn't about Christ's apocalyptic visions or the memorization of creeds, it's about a friendly guy named Jesus and his egalitarian message. As long as you can spend, feel good about yourself and look good, your religious belief will be tolerated on Planet O. The religion of Oprah is the incorporated faith of late-capitalist America," Lofton said.
Sort of a mellower, bourgier version of the spiritual jacuzzi I described in Reason in May 2003. That article concluded with a look at Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius, and other "joke religions" -- I wrote it too early to include the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- so I shouldn't end this post without mentioning that Oprahism has manifested itself in that sphere as well. Here's one more YouTube clip:
For extra credit, read the comment thread on that film's YouTube page. The Carrington Steele crowd has discovered the video and seems to be taking it literally. God bless the Internet: bringing mutually incomprehending tribes together since 1969.
Now we have the Jeremiah Wright "scandal," which frankly makes me like Obama more. If you don't have a friend -- a real friend, someone who means something to you and sometimes influences your decisions -- who occasionally expresses a nutty opinion ("The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color") or an impolitic truth ("a country and a culture controlled by rich white people"), then you really, really need to get out more. Obama's connection to Wright is like his cigarette habit, his willingness to talk about his past drug use, his fondness for gritty TV shows -- it's a sign that there's an actual human being in that suit after all, no matter how empty it may seem when he's blathering about "an insistence on small miracles" and the like. It's a sign he might know a thing or two about the real America after all.
This morning Obama delivered a speech on the subject. It goes on endlessly, as his speeches often do, but it makes the essential, obvious point:
As imperfect as he may be, [Wright] has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions -- the good and the bad -- of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
I guess you either understand this instinctively or you don't. And then, of course, there are the people who understand it but will continue to pretend they don't, the better to smear Obama as a secret jihadist, Weatherman, or Farrakhanite.
[T]he lyric was written by Bunny Jones, a straight black woman with a family. Jones employed gay people in her New York hairstyling salon, and many of them became her close friends. When the gay rights issue got hot and heavy she decided that it was time for a positive statement.
"She is the opposite of Anita Bryant," states Bean.
I found that clip on the Queer Music Heritage website, which also informs us that the songwriters Ronnie Wilkins and John Hurley were lovers. Wilkins and Hurley wrote two major hits, one of which was "Son of a Preacher Man," which takes on new dimensions if you imagine it sung by a guy rather than by Dusty Springfield or Aretha Franklin. It may well be autobiographical, since Hurley himself is a gospel singer. (As is Carl "I Was Born This Way" Bean. That's Archbishop Carl Bean to you.) So I take back what I said about Tiny Tim: "Son of a Preacher Man" is the gayest song ever.
The other big hit written by Wilkins and Hurley? It's "Love of the Common People," which is, depending on how you prefer to think of it, a great country song by Waylon Jennings, a great soul song by the Winstons, a great reggae song by Nicky Thomas, or a great '80s pop song by Paul Young. Also, this guy plays it on the accordion, which is totally gay.