The Breaking Time

All Times Break

I was extremely happy when Damien Williams agreed to become a contributor here and submitted this piece for our relaunch. In his own wonderful style, it pulls together classic lore, poetry, mysticism, and pop culture for a fascinating meditation on this blog's core theme.

They tell you never to start a story with a quote, so I won't. I'll start with two. Here we go:

“It is said that what is called 'the spirit of an age' is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.” - Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, 1716

“. . .The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand. . .” — "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats, 1920

And then there is, of course, the ever-popular I-Ching Hexagram 23 (~1,000 BCE), aptly titled Breaking Apart:

This pictures a time when inferior people are pushing forward and are about to crowd out the few remaining strong and superior men. Under these circumstances, which are due to the time, it is not favorable for the superior man to undertake anything.

The right behavior in such adverse times is to be deduced from the images and their attributes. The lower trigrams stands for the earth, whose attributes are docility and devotion. The upper trigram stands for the mountain, whose attribute is stillness. This suggests that one should submit to the bad time and remain quiet. For it is a question not of man’s doing but of time conditions, which, according to the laws of heaven, show an alternation of increase and decrease, fullness and emptiness. It is impossible to counteract these conditions of the time. Hence it is not cowardice but wisdom to submit and avoid action.

 We have always lived in the breaking times. We have always felt that every period of major upheaval is the end of the world, the final days, the utter Apocalypse, come at last. And we're right. Every major shift of perspective ends the world in which we lived, and brings to bear a completely new perspective. In fact, most often that perspective is necessarily new, because the only ones who survive the shift (or collapse, as some would have it) are those who can adapt to the radically altered contexts in which they find themselves.

As ever, we must adapt, or we will perish, and this isn't news.

Rapture time: Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies

In case you were wondering, here's a chart. Larger version here.

According to some calculations, most seeming to stem from the fundamentalist preacher Harold Camping, this Saturday, May 21 is the Rapture. Among those who do not hold with this, the typical reaction seems to be "party!"

While predictions of imminent apocalypse have a long pedigree, and one not just confined to Christianity, the Rapture is a recent and mostly American invention, arising out of 18th century Puritanism.

Growing up in the rural part of the Bible Belt, where mainstream and open-minded denominations rubbed shoulders with the more esoteric fundamentalists, this idea in particular always struck me as among the strangest. I remember a particular religious bookstore with a bargain bin of apocalypses, containing predictions that Gorbachev, hippies, AIDS and computers, among others, were signs of an imminent end.

At one point, around 4th grade, I acquired the sort of fascination with the concept that only a child can muster. After taking down a Bible and skipping forward to Revelation, I decided that the world would end the next week, around 10:40 in the morning, during the language arts portion of class. I waited quietly at my desk, inwardly relieved when the appointed time arrived and my teacher was not devoured by serpent beasts. Or harlots, for that matter, who I assumed were some type of badass female supervillain.

Later, I understood the roots. Poverty and upheaval are key to the American story, creating fertile soil for visions — not just religious or Christian — of sudden triumph. It is a hard world, and those who endure long enough would dearly love for the sky to open in their favor, just once.

In best secular fashion, more and more people are getting in on the celebration, and NPR is even asking for a soundtrack. After all, in my lifetime, we've had the Bomb, homegrown terrorists, Y2K, foreign terrorists and economic strife. As long as I can remember, things far more real than Rapture have loomed.

But here we are, still alive, throwing a party. Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies.

John Murray Spear builds a Machine God

Over at Coilhouse, I've got a piece on the relatively obscure John Murray Spear, a middle-aged pastor who decided to build, well, you see the title:

Ah, the 1800s were a simpler time. Before that whole Civil War mess, America was in the throes of the Second Great Awakening, with the Northeast so thoroughly scorched by religious fervor that a swath of New York was dubbed “the Burned-over district.”

Amidst this, Spiritualism was all the rage, too, so it didn’t initially attract much notice when John Murray Spear, a middle-aged Universalist pastor in Massachusetts, claimed to be receiving messages from dead men. Sure, it was somewhat strange that instead of talking to a deceased relative for comfort, he claimed that a “Band of Electricizers” made up of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, had chosen him to bring a messiah into the world. But, in a twist fitting a new era, this savior was a machine, one that would, Spear relayed, “revolutionize the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.”

Those who already knew anything of the man might have figured he had simply snapped. Spear’s outspoken views on abolition and women’s rights, among other topics, led a number of churches to drive him out, and, in 1844, after a particularly vigorous denunciation of slavery, he was beaten and left for dead in Maine.

He recovered, and, in 1851, with the Electricizers’ plans dancing in his head, quit the ministry. Two years later, he began his work on the machine, with a result stranger than fiction.

The Rundown: bodies on the highway

The body of a man killed execution style and wrapped in bin liners lies by the side of the Acapulco-Mexico highway November 16, 2006. REUTERS/Stringer

*Drug Wars A stunning set of pictures inside Mexico's drug war. Fair warning, the picture above is one of the least graphic in the set, which includes everything from blinged-out .45s and narco-saints to headless bodies hanging from a bridge. A harrowing look inside how ugly a drug-fueled civil war is.

*New Haven uses SWAT team to crack down on nightlife New Haven, Conn. has apparently decided people drinking and attending strip clubs is such a dire threat that it needs to use the SWAT team — with masks and assault rifles, no less — to round up the patrons, on a search warrant that produced a single, unrelated charge. This comes on the heels of Operation Nightlife where police started rounding up clubgoers and were widely reported to have attacked and tased a Yale student. Bunny Colvin's rant from The Wire — "call something a war, and pretty soon everyone starts acting like warriors" — comes to mind.

*LGBTIQQAA Yes, that's now the going abbreviation. I remember when it was gay and lesbian, then, around the time I was in college, LGBT became popular, and that was fine. But at this point, the acronym's stretching to the point of uselessness.

There is a term, however, that covers all those groups and their struggle for rights without resorting to a ludicrous degree of political correctness or tongue-twistingly garbled abbreviations: human.

*Catholics in US overwhelmingly support homosexual unions Many do this in direct defiance of their official hierarchy, and in percentages greater, in some cases, than the rest of the mainstream populace. A reassuring sign and a reminder that adherents to a creed don't always follow the attendant hierarchy. Again, the lesson is to be careful lumping traditions into too-neat boxes. There is No They.

*Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? A surprisingly decent series on the rise, hybridization and collapse of a subculture(s?) by Steven Hyden over at The Onion's AV Club. A good look at the way grunge and alt music linked into culture trends in one of the last eras before rock n' roll (along with mass music in general) splintered or become totally retro. Particular kudos for the way Hyden manages to balance enthusiasm with a realistic look at the limits of art.

*Experimentation, orgasms and the rise of anal sex Slate journalist William Saletan looks at changing sexual trends. Interesting material here on a social revolution steadily continuing in the background, though some of the "whoa" tone in Saletan's is a little puerile.

*'39 Queen doing an acoustic (what? yes!) presentation of one of the peppiest, saddest songs ever written about space travel:

"You want to repent, repent from your prison cell"

I usually wait until after events have unfolded a bit more to write about them. That's partly because my day-to-day work schedule doesn't leave as much time for writing here as I'd like, and partly because I prefer to get a look at the bigger picture and round my observations up accordingly.

But this Sept. 18 speech by Johann Hari deserves recognition for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, it's right and extremely eloquent. Hari goes into the documented proof of Ratzinger's malfeasance without becoming bogged down; grounding his speech in a common-sense appeal while summing the issue up perfectly:

"He talks about repentance, there is no other group of criminals in the world that we allow to say 'sorry' and walk free. You want to repent, repent from your prison cell.

There are people who will tell you we've come here to be anti-Catholic. Well, I disagree with the ideas of all religions, but I can think of nothing more anti-Catholic than what they're about to do in Hyde Park. They are about to cheer a man who covered up the rape of thousands of children of Catholics. Is there anyone here who can think of anything more pro-Catholic than what we are doing, trying to bring that man to justice."

Listen to the whole thing.

The speech is also worth noting because Hari, while an unapologetic atheist, gets that one of the main virtues of secularism is its ability to unite diverse creeds under a common legal and political framework, bringing them all a basic measure of peace and justice while giving individuals the space to reject, mix or follow those belief systems as they choose (Hari's column on free speech is a must-read on that front).

So while Hari makes it quite clear that he doesn't believe in Christianity, there's no scolding Catholics. On the contrary, he praises those who've stood up to Ratzinger, especially their role in helping to reveal the extent of the pedophilia coverup, and notes that the ideals of the faith they practice demand a fight against papal corruption. Hari gets that defeating the Vatican's seeming exemption from basic justice is a struggle that transcends the usual arguments about divinity: the status quo is wrong under every moral system.

That's why the movement to hold the Pope accountable is important, even though the chances of seeing him arrested seem remote (he'll probably die of old age first); it's establishing an important precedent for prosecuting any bastard that thinks they can get away with this sort of crime, regardless of their station. This problem did not begin with Joseph Ratzinger, and it will not end, even after he is gone, until that justice becomes reality.

Not everyone bad is a Nazi

Terrible. But not a Nazi.

Okay, I've got to rant for a second, because this really bugs me. The Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, today made some really stupid comments about Nazism being "atheistic extremism" while visiting the UK. And thus, from some of his critics as well, kicks off the latest iteration of my least favorite Rhetorical Game — My Enemy is a Nazi.

I do not like the Pope. He's taken an already often repressive, meddling institution and made it even more repressive and meddling. His pre-Papacy activities within the Church mostly consisted of crushing the most promising threads of reform and dissent. He's endorsed positions that are rampantly misogynistic and homophobic. Lastly, and most unforgivably, he covered up for pedophile priests for years, something that should lead to his investigation, arrest and trial.

All those are very good and legitimate reasons to oppose Ratzinger and the views he advocates.

But he's not a Nazi.

Actually, reading his basic biography, it emerges that one of the few really good things he's ever done was desert the Hitler Youth after being drafted into it at the age of 14. 

So yes, he's not a Nazi, and it's lazy to throw around that accusation. By the same token, it's wretchedly stupid for the Pope to compare British secularists to Nazis as well but, at the same time, I don't expect anything better, given the Pope's general attitude on anyone that doesn't conform to an extremely reactionary version of Catholicism.

My concern is that the emerging flap about this overshadows the push to put the Pope on trial. While I don't that push is likely to succeed yet, it's an important step in breaking the idea that any institution is immune from prosecution for horrific acts.

It's also, of course, a popular rhetorical game on either side of the Atlantic, to dub those who have done bad things (as Ratzinger has) or whom one simply disagrees with, as Nazis. It's also a really bad idea. There are plenty of people in modern politics whom I don't like or whose policies I think will have a really bad impact, but until they start ramping up efforts to kill millions of people in death camps, I'll hold off on pairing them with Hitler. There are plenty of other epithets I can, and should, use.

In its latest incarnation, trying to boil Nazism down to Religion v. Atheism, from whatever side, is monumentally dumb. If anything, the history of atrocity in the 20th century is a stark reminder that people can kill, zealously, for many reasons, some of them having little to do with religion, or whatever one's opposing cause happens to be.

The Nazi Party consisted, among others, of Catholics, Protestants, atheists and agnostics united by an insane nationalism and a willingness to use tyrannical murder to accomplish their goals. And while we're at it, plenty of Catholics, Protestants, atheists and agnostics, among others, courageously fought the Nazis, in many cases losing their lives in the process.

The enemies, in any time, are fanaticism and repression, whatever the form. Those should always be opposed, because they're fanaticism and repression, whether those unleashing them use the excuse of a god or not.

The Rundown: Quotable edition

Fuck yeah grammarpunk

I love quotes and everything to do with them and so it seems fitting to base this edition of The Rundown on telling passages that sum things up perfectly. Like so:

* "Ethnographic studies have found that, during possession, ‘spirits’ may offer opinions or solutions to moral crises and may protect the individual from trauma and despair during times of violence." Mozambique's plague of spirit possessions.

* "If any one or more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own good requires that they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which was intended for them to occupy. They have only to be kept in that state, and treated like children to prevent and cure them from running away."

Running away from slavery was once considered a diagnosable mental illness.

* "There's stories of property owners who have court orders demanding their properties be left alone and they come in and demolish them" In Montgomery, the city government is using a local blight ordinance to target low-income homes — some in the middle of renovation or construction — for demolition. The owners are often billed for the cost and, when they can't pay (now being homeless) the city seizes the property for resale. Governments used to be at least more blunt about their intentions.

* "For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine." John Adams trash talks Thomas Paine. Epically.

* "There is a transexual prostitute on every floor, to satisfy customer requests" An interesting photo series on the quasi-legal Turkish brothels.

* "Each time your heart beats, your body moves..." A beautiful video on the zen of firing a gun.

Everyone Forever Now - "Shooting a Gun" from Everynone on Vimeo.

A good day for There is No They

Jovanie Arvaezi, left, and Mark Vaccarino share an emotional moment at the West Hollywood rally celebrating the Proposition 8 ruling. “We hope to get married soon,” Vaccarino said. Mariah Tauger, Los Angeles Times

Yesterday was one. The morning saw the following statement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who refused to bow to violently vile anti-Muslim prejudice and defended the construction of a mosque in Lower Manhattan. It's worth quoting at length:

"Our doors are open to everyone. Everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it's sustained by immigrants -- by people from more than 100 different countries speaking more than 200 different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here or you came here yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

“We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That's life. And it's part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11, 2001.

“On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn't want us to enjoy the freedoms to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams, and to live our own lives. Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that even here -- in a city that is rooted in Dutch tolerance -- was hard-won over many years.

“In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue, and they were turned down. In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies, and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

“In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter's on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.

“This morning, the city's Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted to extend -- not to extend -- landmark status to the building on Park Place where the mosque and community center are planned. The decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building.

“The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

“Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

“This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that."

Then Judge Vaughn Walker eloquently declared Proposition 8 the unconstitutional, discriminatory waste of paper it is:

The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a household. Race and gender restrictions shapedmarriage during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage. Today, gender is not relevant to the state in determining spouses’ obligations to each other and to their dependents. Relative gender composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage under California law. Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.

---

Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy —— namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages.

A good reminder that there's more forces at work in the world besides ignorance and prejudice. It's also worth noting that Bloomberg is a Republican, that Ted Olson the lead attorney pushing for Prop 8's overturn, was a Bush administration official and Walker was appointed by Reagan. Something often overlooked in the fight for basic rights is that these issues shouldn't be the domain of one faction, but respected by everyone, whatever their views on other political issues. In Walker and Bloomberg's actions, there's hope that may one day be the case.

Yesterday the world took two steps, however small, to being a better place. There is No They.

The good side of Tribes (really)

This talk by Seth Godin makes an interesting follow-up to The Tribal Exemption, my post on the dark side of tribal groupings in every area from the arts to law enforcement, namely the tendency to support your own members regardless of what horrible actions they may commit.

I've got some major problems with this whole talk, from the "people join tribes because they want to change the world" canard (for the well-off maybe, for the rest of us it's survival and support) to the reduction of any form of communication to marketing speak to the confusion of basic persuasion and group behavior with tribalism (no, it's a little more narrow than that).

Godin seems to be associating emerging "tribes" primarily with middle- and upper-class social causes (though he does flash a picture of the Sopranos), with a few innovative entrepreneurs thrown in for good measure. Down the food chain a long ways, think of gangs — everyone from the Mafia and outlaw MCs to the Crips and Bloods — as tribes. A group that feels threatened bands together for fellowship, protection and the increase of their own power. Their stories reveal, in a way that Godin's doesn't that the core tenet of tribes tends to be their allegiance to one another, right or wrong.

So I wish Godin had delved, just a bit, into some of the ominous implications of phrases like "it's not for everyone" and "the true believers." 

Still, this talk has a number of interesting points and is worth posting as counterpoint to some of my own concerns.

Where I think he's dead-on is in the increased ability of technology to allow the creation of dispersed tribal groups based around similar interests or beliefs. Interestingly, cutting edge media has revived one of the oldest social forms (provocation thought: religions were ahead of the curve here, and began nigh-global tribes way before current tech).

Also, and most importantly, Godin, in a particularly eloquent moment, does get the key reason these tribes are becoming a more important force: people want to be missed.

People want such a thing because it is a Breaking Time: the old loyalties of nation-state and family don't seem to offer the same support or meaning to people they once did. In a way the increasing prominence of tribe (which has always existed) is due to people looking to fill that gap. 

Interestingly, the more tribes form, the more Godin's dreams about leading movements becomes quite difficult: members of existing tribes often turn inwards and seek only loose alliances with others. Contra Godin, established tribal structures have historically been extremely resistant to change and extremely defensive of tradition.

Despite all my qualms and its many ugly aspects, the tribal resurgence can fill a useful function. If it's a part of a person's identity, but not the only part and If it's a social force, balanced by others, then it can become a viable institution, curbing against the extremes of local loyalties while offering people a vital support structure that doesn't depend on a central authority. It's a big "if," but it might work.

The Rundown: Razing Arizona edition

Flank attack!

* LA boycotts Arizona. Arizona threatens to cut off power LA invades Arizona, rounds up supporters of draconian anti-immigrant law and deports them to Mexico. Ok, so I'm making that last part up (though, as Grumpy Owl points out, LA already has their marching music).

On another note, the fight over Arizona's law illustrates a number of interesting breaking points and important shifts. The first is how ill-equipped state lines mostly drawn in the 19th century are to dealing with today's environmental and resource issues. One of the major things states fight about is resources: who's stealing whose water, power, etc. Part of this is because environmental regions are hacked up, pie-style, between any number of arbitrary boundaries. The basic support system for a modern city stretches across many political jurisdictions, something that makes tackling disagreements or problems extremely difficult.

Also, notice that it's LA fighting Arizona: a city versus a state. Within Arizona, Phoenix is notable as a hot-bed of opposition to the law. As more and more people move to cities, they become greater centers of political power, often deeply at odds with the surrounding territory. Forget Red States and Blue States (one of the dumbest political memes of the past decade), look at a more accurate map and you'll see that the biggest political divide is urban-rural.

* New Social Networking Site Changing the Way, Oh, Christ, Forget It "Let someone else report on this bullshit." The Onion goes there. Spectacularly.

* Is the Drug War more militarized than the military? A soldier argues that raids in Afghanistan and Iraq often have more restrictions than SWAT teams busting in the doors of suspected drug traffickers. An interesting read.

* Robot conducts wedding in Tokyo No word yet on if the infernal machine seduced the bride beforehand. 

An interesting example of how culture can drive technology as much as the other way around. Japan has more (and often more sophisticated) robots than anywhere else in the world. This is partly because Japan's is a first-world industrial power with the resources to build such devices. However, there's also a cultural fascination that shapes what it builds with that capability, and what ends it's put to.

Speaking of...

* Because Every Country is the Best at Something Yes, Japan actually is number 1 in the world in the robotics department. The US leads in, uh, serial killers (send them to fight the robots, I smell a hit movie here). The UK leads in CCTV cameras and France in sugar beets. It's a strange world.

* The French Anti-Burqa Jihad An excellent column by Indian atheist Shikha Dalmia on the crusading and dictatorial impulses behind France's new law. Includes this passage, which could stand to be repeated often:

Nor will it do to justify this ban on grounds that it will save women from having to make painful personal choices. It is not the job of liberal governments to make personal tradeoffs painless--just possible. Giving individuals the right to exit without fearing physical retaliation provides an automatic check on oppressive traditions without taking away the crucial tool that minority communities in liberal polities have to perpetuate themselves: moral suasion. Banning the burqa or the Sikh turban or the Jewish yarmulke is tantamount to telling observant Muslims, Sikhs and Jews that they don't have a right to exist.

Despite years of sectarian bloodletting, if Indians still intuitively understand this and take a benign view of the burqa, it is hardly because they are inherently more rational. It is because their secularism has been shaped by India's dominant religion--Hinduism--whose non-monotheistic ethos allows the space for multiple faiths. In this sense, Hinduism is perhaps more profoundly in sync with liberal tolerance than monotheistic faiths.

More crucially, however, there is nothing in Hinduism that makes an individual's spiritual salvation anyone's business except the individual herself. By contrast, Hitchens, et al, who have been raised in the cradle of a Christian civilization, have imbibed a certain comfort level with the crusading notion that people can--and ought to--be saved even against their will. Hence, it does not matter if Muslim women don't regard the burqa as oppressive. They have to be given sartorial liberation in the same way that the heathens need to be given spiritual liberation.

This is a profoundly anti-liberal and anti-secular idea. Indeed, if the French and Hitchens were serious about either secularism or liberalism, instead of asking Muslim women to shed the burqa, they would be shedding their own proselytizing prejudice against it.

Amen. I've always found it interesting that the anti-Roman Christian sects ended up becoming the heir to the Roman Empire. Similarly, I can't help but wonder if a certain strand of atheism won't end up embodying the crusading and socially meddlesome mentality of its worst foes. The wheel turns...