Things I Learned about Bay Buchanan

I just watched Bay Buchanan on ABC This Week.  Bay is a conservative activist and the sister of conservative commentator and former Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

I was intrigued to learn two things today, from the show and also from my reading online.  First of all, Bay was a single parent for years, and she recently wrote a book about that experience entitled Bay and Her Boys: Unexpected Lessons I Learned As a (Single) Mom.  I appreciated the description of the book on Amazon, especially as I consider the tendency of some conservatives to badmouth single-parent homes: “Twenty-three years ago, Bay Buchanan was thrown–or as she says, dumped–into the world of single parenting. It wasn’t a popular time to be raising kids solo, especially as a rising star in the conservative movement. But she quickly realized she needed to overcome the hurt and confusion and focus on giving her all to her children…Buchanan also wants to change the national dialogue about single moms with a shot across the bow of both conservatives and liberals. This book is the first step by a prominent conservative to be there for all mothers: standing with them, inspiring them, and arming them with tools that will help their kids succeed in life.”

Second, I was interested to learn that Bay converted to Mormonism years ago, when her family was staunchly Catholic.  Rob Howe’s 1996 article about Bay in People magazine narrates: “Working in Sydney as a bookkeeper, she met an American who introduced her to the Mormon faith before she returned to the U.S. two years later. In a painful break with the family that took years to heal, she converted in 1976. When she married William Jackson, a California attorney, in a Mormon ceremony in 1982, only brother Henry attended. ‘I’d have preferred everyone being there, but they have to make their own choices,’ she says.”  This somewhat shattered my stereotype of the Buchanan family, as people who think alike on politics and religion.  On politics, that may be the case (though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some difference of opinion).  On religion, not entirely!

I found Bay’s book on Amazon for an inexpensive price, so I ordered it.  Here‘s a good discussion with Bay about her book.

Atlas Shrugged, Part I

I watched Atlas Shrugged, Part I last night.  Although the movie got bad reviews, and there is talk that Atlas Shrugged, Part II will get a new cast, I decided to watch the movie for three reasons.

First, I absolutely love the trailer for the movie—-its music, its drama, its powerful characters, its sense of mystery, and its reference to Ayn Rand.  Second, I watched some clips of the movie on YouTube (see, for example, here and here), some of which accompanied comments by a consultant to the movie about how the scenes illustrate Rand’s philosophy (see here, here, and here).  What I saw wasn’t that bad.  The acting was all right, I guess, or at least it was on the same level as the acting in other movies that I have seen.  Plus, the actress playing Dagny was nice to look at.  Third, I loved the book, Atlas Shrugged, which I read over a decade ago.

But when I actually watched the movie, I did not care for it that much, for a variety of reasons.  For one, the acting appeared to me to be stiff, and the characters struck me as cold.  I had a hard time feeling anything for them.  Whereas I could tolerate watching scenes in isolation, sitting through the entire movie was quite an ordeal.

Second, parts of the movie seemed to me to be unrealistic.  I find it hard to believe that James Taggart could meet with a handful of political cronies and get legislation passed as fast as he did.  Moreover, some of the legislation struck me as contradictory and as arbitrary: the antagonists wanted to stop or prevent monopolies, yet they passed an “anti-dog-eat-dog” rule to suppress competition and to force people to use the services of Taggart Transcontinental.  The movie was trying to show that these antagonists preached equality and the common good, but I wish that they spent more time demonstrating why they thought that their policies would promote the common good.  And my critique on this point extends to the book as well: Ayn Rand tended to present the proponents of views with which she disagreed as caricatures rather than as people who supported their viewpoints, as mistaken as those viewpoints were.  Reading the book, that was not a problem for me.  Watching it on my TV, it was.

Third, I thought that the movie took away the sense of mystery that propelled me to keep on reading the book.  When I was reading the book, I was wondering who John Galt was, and I kept on reading in order to find out.  But Part I of the movie has already strongly hinted at who John Galt is: John Galt is taking the wealthy industrialists of the world to a utopia where they can achieve with minimal government interference standing in their way.  Plus, the movie strongly hints that Galt was the one who invented a motor that would stop the motors of the world.  If my memory is correct, this stuff appeared later in the book, which was why I kept on reading.  But Part I, by including this stuff early on in the story, takes away that sense of mystery.

There was one part of the movie that moved me: When Dagny at the end shows up at Wyatt’s oil fields, which he has burned up in protest against collectivism.  Dagny screams “No!”  The reason I found this scene poignant is that Dagny and Hank Rearden are being left behind to make the best of a bad situation—-to achieve and to stimulate the economy in a world where the government is stifling that. 

GCB

I watched part of ABC’s GCB last night.  GCB is based on the book Good Christian Bitches.  There are Christians who are screaming “persecution” in response to this show.  Some have glibly stated that there would be an outcry if there were a program called GMB, with the “M” standing for Muslim.  In this post, I’ll list some thoughts:

1.  I don’t think that Christians should only be portrayed positively in stories and media.  The impression I get from folks on the religious right is that any negative depiction of Christians amounts to persecution.  In my opinion, though, religious hypocrisy is fair game when it comes to stories.  We’d have to eliminate a lot of literature if we could only accept the stories that depict Christianity or religion positively.  George Elliott’s Middlemarch had a religious hypocrite, Bulstrode.  There was the cold guy in Jane Eyre who told young Jane that she was going to hell.  There’s Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.  There’s the Bible!  Then, going to the evangelical realm, there are Christian movies that depict one or more Christian character negatively.  I think of the movie Hidden Secrets.

2.  I do like to see some positive portrayal of religion in stories and in media.  One reason is that many Christians are good folks, and their religion inspires them to do positive things.  Another reason is that faith and the search for meaning are a part of our (and many other) cultures, and so stories that talk about the big questions can be quite powerful, when they are well-written.  Overall, I feel that television, the movies, and books are positive when it comes to their depiction of religion and spirituality.  I think of such programs as Six Feet Under, Desperate Housewives, Dexter, LOST, and a host of others.  I did not watch all of GCB last night, for it did not particularly draw me in.  But I hope that it’s about much more than bashing Christians, and that there will be something deep and reflective about it (but I’m not optimistic).  The movie Saved! also lampooned the evangelical sub-culture, but I liked it because it had positive things to say about faith—-where it is right, where it can go wrong (in the author’s opinion), etc.

3.  I can somewhat sympathize with my evangelical friends who feel that society is tolerant of everyone and everything—-except for them.  What would the reaction be to a show that depicted Muslims, Jews, homosexuals, or African-Americans in a negative light?  Shouldn’t we refrain from condemning all groups, including evangelical Christians?

I do not have a good answer to this question.  I think that, on some level, evangelical Christianity is fair game because of its prominence in American society (though, of course, many evangelicals would claim that they are marginalized in the United States).  I myself am not against acknowledging that people may have problems with elements of Islam or Judaism.  The West Wing, for example, talks about Islamic extremists, but (in contrast to Islamophobes) it does not apply that label to all Muslims.  So I’m not sure where I land on this question of depicting groups.  I’m against stigmatizing entire groups of people, but I also realize that stories reflect reality, on some level, and there are times when people use their religion in evil ways.  In my mind, it’s acceptable to highlight that.

Reflections on Projects for Black History Month

For the last two days of Black History Month, I was planning to blog about the chapter on civil rights in Joan Hoff’s Nixon Reconsidered.  But I changed my mind on that, for a variety of reasons.  For one, the chapter discusses African-American civil rights and also feminism, and I didn’t want to go off course more than I already have (since my blogging through Dean Kotlowski’s Nixon’s Civil Rights ended up discussing Native American and feminist issues, which are not exactly relevant to Black History Month).  Second, Hoff discusses African-American issues outside of her chapter on civil rights.  There is a solid chance that I will one day read Hoff’s entire book and blog through it, but I won’t be reading and blogging about any of it for the last two days of Black History Month.

Overall, I’m glad that I read and blogged through Kotlowski’s Nixon’s Civil Rights this month.  I first saw the book at a public library a few years ago, but I did not have the time to read it then, since I was trying to concentrate on preparing for my comprehensive exams, and I already had enough books on my plate.  I was contemplating the possibility of reading and blogging about it during February, 2011, but I decided instead to read and blog about W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.  During earlier Black History Months, I was curious about the disagreement between those two African-American leaders, especially because it was often discussed in Roots: The Next Generation, which I watched for several Black History Months.  I also noticed that many African-American conservatives gravitated towards Booker T. Washington, whereas some African-American liberals preferred Du Bois (and this characterization is far from absolute).  I figured that I should read what these figures themselves had to say, before I read about Richard Nixon’s civil rights policies.

How did Kotlowski’s book compare with my expectations?  When I first saw the book in the library, I did not know if it would be enthralling or dry.  It turned out to be both.  I think that the book was enthralling when it discussed the complexity of Nixon—-how his rhetoric and personal attitudes were regressive and conservative, and yet many of his policies were progressive.  It was also enthralling when it discussed the personal reasons that Nixon had for opposing racism, as well as how Nixon boldly stood up to Southern states.  But, ironically, the book was also dry because of Nixon’s complexity, for it was hard to admire fully a President who waffled all over the place before he could arrive at a position, plus some of the discussion of policy was dry.  But the dryness is a huge part of why the book is a valuable resource, for a mark of solid research is that it acknowledges complexity and gets into detail, while meticulously documenting the details.  It’s good when a piece of non-fiction can have enthralling novelistic elements, and Kotlowski’s book did, to a certain extent.  But, in other areas, it did not because it’s ultimately not a novel, but a work of research.

I’m not sure what I’ll blog about tomorrow, the last day of Black History Month (since February 2012 has 29 days).  We’ll see, though.  Stay tuned!

JL Sathre on 25 Things She Learned from Opening a Bookstore

In her Sunday Superlatives for today, Rachel Held Evans linked to a post by JL Sathre entitled 25 Things I Learned from Opening a Bookstore.  It’s definitely a funny read!

I identified with Number 8:

” If you put free books outside, someone will walk in every week and ask if they’re really free, no matter how many signs you put out .  Someone else will walk in and ask if everything in the store is free.”

Okay, I wouldn’t ask if everything in the store is free, but, if I find a choice book outside for a really low price, I do ask the clerk if it truly is that price.

I didn’t identify as much with Number 7:

“If you put free books outside, cookbooks will be gone in the first hour and other non-fiction books will sit there for weeks.  Except in warm weather when people are having garage sales.  Then someone will back their car up and take everything, including your baskets.”

I tend to go after non-fiction books when they’re outside: political books, religious books, self-help books, etc.

Check out the other items on her list!

Happy Birthday, Dickens!

Today is Charles Dickens’ birthday!  The only Dickens book that I have ever read is A Christmas Carol (see my write-ups on that here and here).  I watched movies for David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist.  They were pretty entertaining movies.  I think of the manipulative spinster in Great Expectations; the abusive step-father and the slimy Uriah Heap in David Copperfield; the drunk who laid down his life for somebody else in Tale of Two Cities; and the story in Oliver Twist about an orphan who suffers poverty until he learns that he is part of a rich family.  Good heroes.  Villains who catch one’s attention.  Good stories.  I should probably read the books sometime, but I have a hard time with Dickens’ thick style.  I have been interested when people have told me that Dickens was a Christian, however.  And he apparently had strong beliefs, for he is a critic of Sabbatarianism in A Christmas Carol (see my links above).

Reincarnation

At church this morning, the pastor preached about the Joseph story and how God worked good out of bad in that situation.  The pastor said that life is unpredictable—that things do not necessarily turn out as we plan or foresee—but that God is still at work.  He appealed to his own life to support this.  He said that, in college, he wanted to become a pastor, but things did not initially turn out that way.  But he stated that he would not have traded those years of waiting, for he met the lady who became his wife (who later passed on) and had a son, and, eventually, he pastored a church.

How would that account, however, for people’s lives being cut short?  Off and on, I’m reading a book called Soul Mates, by Richard Webster.  Webster believes in reincarnation, and the evidence he offers is that people who remember their previous lives usually do not recall them as glamorous, which is realistic, plus there are cases in which the information that they offer about their previous lives can be verified.  I seriously doubt that my church would embrace reincarnation, perhaps because Hebrews 9:27 affirms that human beings are destined to die once, and afterwards to experience the judgment.  But, in my opinion, reincarnation might allow God to be working good, even when people’s lives are cut short.

Reincarnation shows up in Judaism.  On Rachel Held Evans’ blog, an Orthodox Jewish couple (Ahavah and Michael) answered questions about Orthodox Judaism (see here).  Michael stated his own Orthodox Jewish conception of the afterlife, which is based on Jewish sources and mainstream Orthodox Jewish opinion:

“When a person dies he undergoes a series of judgments in order to purify his soul from his unrepentant sins of this life.  The first of those is the judgment of the grave.  Soul stays with the body for 1yr and suffers as the body undergoes the initial stages of decay.  This is a judgment that even most of the righteous go through. After that there are a series other judgments dependent upon one’s deeds.  If one was not completely righteous, but is fortunate enough to be mostly so, he will be beaten a certain number of times by an angel with a fiery rod, in order to purify his soul, and then be able to ascend into Gan Eden to await the resurrection.  If one was in between, or even wicked, he will descend into hell for one year. After which he will be given the choice of either being reincarnated into another body for a second go, or he can choose to descend into hell again for the full expiation of his sins.  A wicked person (who is wicked in each subsequent life) will only be reincarnated three times, a person who improves each incarnation, up to 1000 times.”

Richard Webster quotes the Koran as saying that “God generates beings, and sends them back over and over again, till they return to Him.”  But he does not offer a specific citation for that, and I couldn’t find a place on the Internet that provided a specific citation (but see this site).  Many Islamic sites that I saw emphatically disagreed with reincarnation, and this site quotes the Koran as saying that God will not send a person back to work righteousness, for his soul is separated from the world until the resurrection.

Making One’s Way In the World

I’ve been rereading Stephen King’s IT, and I’ll be blogging through it on and off.  In this post, I’ll blog about making one’s way in the world.  I’ll be drawing from “Part 1: The Shadow Before”.

For the theme of making one’s way in the world, I think of three characters: Elmer Curtie, Stan Uris, and Bill Denbrough.

1.  Elmer Curtie started a bar called the Falcon, and he expected his clientele to consist primarily of bus-riders, since it was close to major bus-lines.  But most of the bus-riders were women or families with small children, not the sorts who would frequent bars.  And, when sailors or soldiers came in for a drink, they didn’t stay long, since “you couldn’t very well go on a bender during a ten-minute rest-stop” (page 25).

Curtie was accumulating a lot of bills, and he was thinking about moving to Florida from Derry, Maine.  But then, there were men who were coming into his bar.  They were young and polite.  Curtie eventually figured out that his clientele was gay, but, by that point, he didn’t really care, for he was making money.  Moreover, “the Falcon was the only [bar] where rambunctious patrons did not regularly demolish the whole place”, for “There were no women to fight over…and these men…seemed to have learned a secret of getting along with each other which their heterosexual counterparts did not know” (page 26).  While there were rumors about horrible activities taking place at the Falcon, they were untrue.

I like this part of the book because things turned around financially for Curtie in an unexpected way, plus Curtie learned to respect people, whether or not he agreed with their sex lives.  And this was during the 1980′s, when homosexuality was more stigmatized than it is today.

2.  Stan Uris and his wife Patricia were Jews, who experienced their share of discrimination over the years.  For some time, both of them received financial assistance from Patricia’s parents.  But Stan decided to quit his job at H&R Block and to start his own business, which “All four in-laws agreed…was a foolhardy move” (page 47).  But he became a success.  I like the following passage on page 48:

“[Stan's] work with Corridor Video had brought him into contact with some of Atlanta’s richest and most powerful men—and [Stan and Patricia] were both astonished to find that these men were mostly okay.  In them they found a degree of acceptance and broad-minded kindliness that was unknown in the North.”

Contacts are helpful for people who want to advance—in academia or other lines of work.  I find making contacts to be quite daunting, myself.  I have the same fear as Stan and Patricia: will these people be “mostly okay”?  Or will they be snobbish and judgmental?  It’s a pleasant surprise when I do meet people who are “okay”—who are down-to-earth, accepting, broad-minded, and kind.

I also like this passage because it goes against a stereotype that the North is liberal and broad-minded, whereas the South is backward and prejudiced.  People can surprise us!  My hunch is that this passage is rooted in reality, for who knows how many people Stephen King has met?

3.  Bill Denbrough had a hard time fitting into his Creative Writing classes at the University of Maine.  He wondered why his colleagues couldn’t just appreciate a good story as a story—rather than trying to read into it sexual and political undertones.  When Bill wrote a story about a boy who conquers a monster in the cellar, his instructor gave him an “F” and put on it “PULP CRAP!”  As Bill is about to throw his story into the fireplace, he sees a Grateful Dead poster, and he thinks, “Pulp?  Fine!  Let it be pulp!  The woods were full of it!”  Pulp can succeed!

Bill then submits his story to a magazine, and the fiction editor buys it for $200.  The assistant editor adds a note saying that the story is the best horror story since Ray Bradbury’s “The Jar”.  When Bill informs his instructor of his success, he receives an “F” for the course, and a note asking, “Do you think money proves anything about anything, Denbrough?”  Bill then writes a book and sends it to Viking Press because he likes its logo (and Viking is the press that published my copy of It), and Viking purchases the book.  Bill gains success, marries a movie star, and lives happily ever after…until Bill has to confront Pennywise, of course!

I doubt Stephen King’s beginning as a writer was this rosy, since I have read that he received a lot of rejection letters in his early years.  But I like the concept of continuing to look for opportunities, even after one has received rejection, and of following one’s heart, even when the rejection continues.

When to Ask Questions

I have started to reread Stephen King’s It at nights to cure my insomnia.  I’m being reminded that I really enjoyed “Part I: The Shadow Before”, which gives background on the adult lives of the members of the Loser’s Club.  In this and other Stephen King books, I often find myself enjoying Stephen King’s development of his characters, but then that becomes lost once the book starts to become a horror book—which is what Stephen King writes!  But perhaps my impression of It this time around will be different, and I will see depth in the horror parts of the book, not just the parts about character development.

On and off, I will blog about parts of this book that stand out to me.  This will be similar to what I did when I was reading two of Robert Heinlein’s science fiction books and blogged about the bits of wisdom that were in them.  Sometimes, what I blogged about was integral to the plot; often, it was not.

On page 10, Bill is fixing his brother Georgie’s paper boat.  We read: “George watched him closely, but without speaking or questioning.  Bill didn’t like George talking to him while he did stuff, but George had learned that if he just kept his mouth shut, Bill would usually explain what he was doing.”

When should I be quiet, and when should I ask questions?  When I was at Jewish Theological Seminary, an older lady was helping me with my Hebrew, and she often quoted to me (in Hebrew) an old Jewish saying that “the shy person does not learn.”  The meaning of this saying is that people who are bashful about asking questions will not learn.

There’s wisdom to that, but things can get complex, at least in my life.  There have been times when my mind has wandered, and so I end up asking a question that has already been answered.  I guess that I was right to ask the question, for my knowledge became solidified once I received the answer.  But I end up looking like a dunce.  I should work on listening.

Then there were classes, in which participation was mandated.  As a result, I had to come up with things to say.  As a result, I asked a lot of questions, which probably annoyed people.  I mean, once I teach, I hope that I don’t get a student like myself—asking me questions that may require encyclopedic knowledge!  But there were times when I talked, and it wasn’t because of my participation grade.  Some of it was a matter of drawing attention to myself—since I can easily become lost in a crowd (or a group smaller than a crowd), and I feel a need to impress people in order to make friends, or to advance academically, or whatever.

I don’t really regret the times that I asked questions, for that was how I interacted with the material that I was taught.  Plus, many of the answers that I have heard have stayed with me and guided how I see issues today.  I think, however, that I should have tempered my asking of questions with other things: giving other students a chance to talk, listening rather than thinking of the next question I could ask, and even going to the library or doing research to try to answer my questions.  Ever since I have stopped taking classes (on account of where I am in my doctoral program), I have come to appreciate doing the last one.  And blogging has been conducive to my research.

“What Do You Want, Linoge?”

Yesterday, while studying, I watched the 1999 Stephen King miniseries, Storm of the Century. It was about a blizzard on an island in Maine, which affected a tight-knit community. I figured it was appropriate to watch yesterday, since I was at home from work due to all of the snow.

The gist of the plot is this: a “man” named Andre Linoge has come to the island in Maine and is causing trouble. First, he killed an old lady. Then, once he was arrested and was behind bars, he used his magic to make the residents of the island do things, such as commit suicide or kill each other. He also knows about the weaknesses and moral faults of the residents. He knows that the constable cheated on a test to get through college, that the mayor slept with a prostitute while his mom was dying, that three guys beat up a guy for being too effeminate, etc. Linoge’s line is “Give me what I want, and I will go away.”

Throughout the series, we’re wondering what exactly Linoge wants, and then we learn: Andre Linoge has lived for thousands of years, but he is now dying, and so he wants a child so he can pass on his knowledge to someone. Some rule bars Linoge from just taking what he wants, and so he needs for the islanders to give him this child. And yet, Linoge is able to punish the islanders if they don’t give him what he wants. He can make them walk into the sea and die, as he made the people of Roanoake disappear centuries earlier. Moreover, a part of Linoge is flying in the air with the kids, as he holds their hands; if the islanders don’t give him what he wants, then he will drop the kids, and they will die.

The islanders vote to give Linoge what he wants, but there is one dissenter: the town constable, played by Tim Daly. The constable encourages the islanders to trust in God and in each other, and he speculates that Linoge may be like a storm, which will soon pass. But the islanders give in to their own fears, for they believe that Linoge can cause more damage if he’s not appeased.

Trusting in God is a theme that appears in many of Stephen King’s books and movies, whether we’re talking about the Stand, or Desperation. In the miniseries, The Tommyknockers, the grandpa prays to God for help. The book and the miniseries for It don’t really have God, per se, but they talk about the value of community (in this case, the “Loser’s Club”) in banding together to overcome evil, plus there is some supernatural force bringing the “Loser’s Club” together. I often was comforted by Stephen King’s reference to trusting in God in the midst of evil, for the existence of evil (in the natural and the supernatural realms) drives me to God.

That said, I wonder what would have happened had the islanders told Linoge to take a hike.

Another point: As I said, Linoge liked to point out the moral failings of the islanders. In the book, Hollywood’s Stephen King, Tony Magistrale says that the point of this is so that Linoge can show the island’s inhabitants that they are really no better than he is, that they have no right to claim moral superiority to him. That raises a question: Can we confront evil when we have evil within us? I hope that we can, but hopefully we can do so with some humility.