President Obama Enters HU Debate

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We’ve been hassling about faith and nonbelief here and here at the HU (and special thanks to commenter John Hennings for his Christian point of view on the matter). President Obama’s address at Notre Dame yesterday is being excerpted on the liberal blogs (here’s James Fallows), so of course I’ve stumbled across it. What appears to be a key passage:

… the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.

I guess Obama would be an agnostic theist, but God forbid anyone should hold me to that. Touching on the faith-vs.-reason debate between Noah and eric b. (I think), Obama would appear to identify religious belief with faith: “the belief in things not seen.” But, hey, maybe not!
Full text and video at the Huffington Post.
While I’m here, I might as well give John’s comment for easy reference: (UPDATE: actually, two comments. John followed up with an answer to my question about the context for Christ’s “closet” statement, a remark that, taken on its own, appears to forbid prayer before others. John also tells us a bit about the history of National Prayer Day, concluding “it’s difficult to promote prayer without coming across as self-righteous and Pharisaical, or maybe even becoming so (just a little bit?).” My guess: the people making a fuss about Obama and Prayer Day would have to work their way up to being Pharisaical. But now … John.)
  

I’m a Christian. I entered this fascinating discussion late. I’d like to take it back to the quoted text (Matthew 6:5-6). The common interpretation of this scripture by those who read it in context is that Jesus is forbidding praying for the purpose of looking pious to others, not necessarily all public prayer. The quote is from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ longest continuous monologue in the Gospels. Among other things, the Sermon on the Mount repeatedly calls people to exercise a purer morality, one that comes from a righteous attitude of the heart. In other words, intent matters as much as action. This was revolutionary in an age and a place where the Pharisees, the leading religious sect, were advocating strict compliance to an externally visible, rules-based religion, and using social opprobrium to enforce it. A tendency toward Pharisaical legalism and its accompanying hypocrisy is endemic to humanity and probably all religion. We want to reduce God to a genie in a lamp. If we follow the rules, we get what we want. The God Jesus is talking about wants a real relationship, and He (for lack of a gender-neutral personal pronoun) wants to help us become better than what we are. It’s the difference between an ATM machine and a parent, or between a prostitute and a loving spouse. Correcting this fundamental mistake and enabling real connection with a loving divine creator were what Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection were all about. It’s also why He got so enraged about hypocrisy.

I think communal prayer can be an effective and even instructive part of worship, and it is hugely beneficial to spiritual intimacy and fellowship in smaller groups, as when “two or three are gathered together.” However, trying to please people instead of God is a constant danger in prayer and almost every other aspect of worship or life in general. Consequently, it’s one many of us talk about a lot, like teachers harping on drugs in schools.

Apparent contradictions in the Bible can often be resolved by looking at the text in context — often the immediate context, but sometimes scripture as a whole. That said, Noah makes an excellent point that as in science, there are some things even the most knowledgeable people of faith (e.g., Ravi Zacharias or Norm Geisler) don’t fully understand and can’t adequately explain. I like Noah’s comparison to the mystery of gravity; one of my other favorites is the dual wave/particle nature of light, since it reminds me of the Trinity — a mystery so puzzling that Christians came up with a name for it. It sounds much more impressive to say “Oh, that’s the Trinity,” than to say “We really can’t explain why Jesus talks about God the Father and the Holy Spirit in third person sometimes and first person others, why He claims to be God, and yet He talks to God, and doesn’t contradict Jewish monotheism, etc. It’s a real puzzler.”

Part 2!

First, thanks for the kind words. After all that about pleasing God and not people, it’s ironic that I‘m happy to have pleased you, but I respect your opinions, so I guess it makes sense.

 Now on to Tom’s questions.
My argument (with some borrowed bits) that Christ wasn’t forbidding all public prayer goes like this: First, it’s consistent with the rest of the chapter, starting with verse 1: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of people, to be seen by them. Otherwise, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Second, He himself prayed in front of others in Matthew 11, Matthew 27, and Luke 9, although the first two were VERY brief, and in the other, we don’t know what was said. He also strongly implied that group prayer was okay in Matthew 18, verses 19 and 20: “Again, I assure you: If two of you on earth agree about any matter that you pray for, it will be done for you by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there among them.” I know one of these was already referenced, but I think the two verses quoted together strengthen the case. Side note: I am walking right past the theological questions this passage raises, like to whom those verses apply and what it means to be gathered “in His name” – at least for now. I have to go to work eventually.

Finally, the Acts of the Apostles (also written by physician/historian Luke) describe the Apostles and other early Christians as praying both privately and communally. There are recorded instances of the Apostles and early believers holding each other accountable on points of doctrine. Consequently, one would not expect this to go without dispute if at least some of them understood Jesus as totally forbidding prayer in front of others. Paul even called Peter on the carpet once. It wasn’t related to prayer, but it was about trying to please people instead of God (Galatians 2). 

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that the Gospels portray Jesus as habitually slipping off and praying in private. So He practiced what he preached, to the point frustrating the Apostles and others attempting to track Him down.

… the annual National Day of Prayer and national days of prayer in general are intended to promote prayer, especially prayer for the nation. Congress and occasionally the President have been proclaiming them since 1775, although not unanimously. They’re based on the idea that prayer makes a difference in the real world, and until they were made annual, mostly associated with times the U.S. was in a jam. They’ve always been ecumenical and therefore respecting no particular established religion. Also, they’re resolutions, not laws that people have to follow, so most have not had Constitutional issues with them. Being seen as a supporter of prayer was probably also the right answer politically for most of our history. The history of national days of prayer and their more recent promotion by the evangelical community can be viewed on these sites (http://www.religioustolerance.org/day_pray2.htm, andhttp://www.ndptf.org/about/index.cfm). The problem with all this, obviously, is that it’s difficult to promote prayer without coming across as self-righteous and Pharisaical, or maybe even becoming so (just a little bit?). Jesus managed to do it by living as unpretentious, sincere and unselfish a life as one could live (which must have made the occasional claims of deity simultaneously jarring and more credible). If we had more credibility, as we once did, this would be more accepted. It still is accepted on a peersoanl level from Christians with whom people have personal experience and a relationship of trust. 

Time

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I just used the official CPI calculator,  a great site. My salary in 1989, namely $37,000, would now be equal to $63,628. I can’t believe the difference. So much time has gone by.

Gail Simone Hearts Diana Sue

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I finally read the first collection of Gail Simone Wonder Woman comics, (“The Circle”). It’s definitely an interesting take on the character. In fact, among post-Marston creators, Simone is, I think, alone in avoiding the pratfalls which have plagued virtually every creator who has tackled WW after Marston. (Unless you want to count Alan Moore’s Glory.)

So how does Simone manage not to be tripped up by the bondage lasso, or the incredibly poorly defined mission to man’s world, or any number of other traps Marston has set for his unwary followers? Well, she does it primarily by writing fan fiction, and by treating WW as a Mary Sue — a character who the author loves too much. Fantasy author Mercedes Lackey says as much in the introduction to the volume, where she starts out by saying that she never liked Wonder Woman the character, and then goes on to praise Simone for creating a Wonder Woman that she (Lackey) could love. The ultimate standard, in other words, is not craft, or thoughtfulness, or originality, but loveability. Lackey wants a Mary Sue, and Simone delivers.

“Mary Sue” is usually a term applied to fan-fiction characters, where it tends to be seen as as a deadly insult. And there are many manifestations of it which are certainly unpleasant. I talked in an earlier post, for example, about the way in which League of One is basically all Mary Sue fanscruff pander, reveling in WW’s strength and purity and general awesomeness until you just wish she’d die tragically and beautifully already and get it over with. And there’s definitely more than a touch of that in Simone’s version too, with everyone and their aunt racing to tell WW how mega-awesome she is. Super-intelligent gorilla warriors fall on their knees before her; intergalactic genocidal Khund warriors build statues in her honor all over their planet. And while I don’t need WW to whine as much as Spider-Man or (god forbid) Greg Rucka’s version of the character does, it would have been nice to see Simone give the sainted Diana a self-doubt once or twice in the volume (and no, accepting your inevitable death without blinking doesn’t count as a self-doubt.)

Still, the truth is that WW was more or less intended as a Mary Sue to begin with. Marston loved her (even arguably overmuch) and he created her more or less to be loved by his readers — girls and boys alike. Nor was Marston’s version especially given to self-doubt (though unwavering confidence is a lot less irritating when you’re not subjected to it in internal monologues.)

So there’s a sense in which Simone’s Mary Sue pandering — her transparent puffery of the character — is very much in the spirit of the original. And Simone’s love of the character allows her to deal with the character’s structural problems as any good fan-fiction writer would — by reducing them to fan in-jokes. WW’s embarrassing bondage heritage is mentioned in passing by a callow Nazi, who cracks wise about wanting her to tie him up in her magic lasso. Then WW swoops in and threatens him with the real Lasso of Truth and he goes all weak-kneed like a baby man. The unfortunate sartorial choices Marston bequeathed are similarly deflated; there’s a really cute moment where an admiring onlooker mentions “I just want to say as a gay man that I miss the high heels on your boots…” The lesbian implications of Paradise Island get similarly defused in a joking aside (WW’s love-interest notes that courtship on Paradise Island must be between women, and WW responds “Aren’t you the observant one.”)

The humor in the book is probably the best thing about it — and the best moments of humor are those in which WW is most like a Mary Sue. Which is to say, since Mary Sue is often thought of as being an author surrogate, the high points of the book are those in which WW and Gail Simone seem closest to one another. My single favorite line in the comic comes when Diana Prince is having a birthday party at work. She’s musing about the fact that hugging her coworkers in gratitude for the surprise party would be frowned upon, and she thinks: “It is a strange culture that outlaws the hug. On the other hand…there is cake, and that excuses much.” Another gem is when WW looks at the statues the Khund have erected to her…which attempt to honor her by depicting her as a brutish looking Khund. WW looks at them, and then thinks to herself that she wants to call a friend (Donna Troy, I think) on her cell phone because she’d be really amused.

In some alternate timeline, perhaps, there’s a perfect Gail Simone fan-fic Wonder Woman, which is entirely composed of such moments — all romantic comedy banter, goofy relationship moments, and slice-of-life silliness, with the super-heroics mentioned occasionally in passing but never allowed to interfere with the real focus. Unfortunately, in the more hum-drum world we inhabit, Simone is writing a corporate comic, and there are certain hoops she’s got to jump through to get her paycheck. She has to, for example, make her story a comic, which means she needs art. And so we’ve got drawings by a number of pencillers (Terry Dodson and Bernard Chang predominantly). As mainstream illustrators go, neither is horrible. But just because they don’t make me want to gouge my eyes out doesn’t mean that they actually add anything of value to the story.

Simone also needs DCU continuity porn, and she needs pulp action. She provides the first of these eagerly enough, and with some panache. Sure, the level of background knowledge needed to follow the story is pretty much ridiculous; I was occasionally at sea, and I’ve been obsessively reading Wonder Woman comics for months now, plus I actually know who Gorilla Grodd and the Green Lantern Corps and the Khund are — lord knows what an actual novice would make of this. Still, if you’ve already decided you don’t care if anybody but die-hards can follow you, it’s pretty great to end up with gorillas fighting Nazis. That’s genuine silver-age wackiness, damn it.

The pulp action is a little dicier. Simone has a certain amount of pulp smarts; she’s able to make Wonder Woman’s tactical ability somewhat believable — but only somewhat. . Whenever WW makes a brilliant military move the special pleading is audible. When Alan Moore has Rorschach outthink people, you feel outthought yourself. When Simone has WW outthink people, you always feel she’s throwing the character a bone. “Oh, the super-villain has you by the neck in your Diana Prince form…but luckily for you, the wall behind you is rotten, and you can knock through it with your head! The alien Green Lantern is going to beat the snot out of you — but luckily he flinches every time you say “Khund”, and you can use that to your advantage!” It’s not that it’s especially dumb. It’s just that it’s advertising itself as especially smart, and it’s not that either.

The real problem, though, is with the handling of one of the characters central contradictions: she’s supposed to be an avatar of peace, but she constantly is battling costumed yahoos. To her credit, Simone confronts this problem directly: every time WW goes into battle, she starts thinking about how much she likes fighting and how, at the same time, the Amazon code calls for ending fights as quickly as possible.

The problem is that repeating something and actually thinking about it are two different things. The issues of peace, violence, and non-violence which Simone raises are both complicated and (to me at least) important ones. They’re worth struggling with. But neither Simone nor WW struggle with them; instead, they merely present facile answers and treat the problems as solved. This is irritating and, frankly boring; it robs the narrative of much of its tension. For example, in the last story, WW is faced with a situation where she has to try to save the Khund, even though if she does so they’ll return to their genocidal ravaging of neighboring stars. The alien Green Lantern I mentioned before is all for wiping out the Khund, who murdered his daughter and threaten his homeworld and the rest of his space sector.

I mean, I am adamently opposed to the death penalty, and I think genocide is A Bad Thing. But…the way Simone structures the problem here, there is a pretty fucking good argument for allowing the Khund world to be destroyed. Reinhold Niebuhr would almost certainly say pull the trigger; I think you’d have a really good case under Just War theory as well. Gandhi would no doubt say you shouldn’t do it — but Gandhi was an extreme pacifist, and Wonder Woman is , you know, not. So you’d think, given all that, that our heroine might have doubts, or be conflicted, or have some level of moral conflict. But WW and her loyal sidekick Etta Candy don’t even hesitate; they’re just like — no, no, we have to show mercy to the Khund, that’s obviously the right thing to do. And not only are they certain down to their socks, but they convince everyone else too! Etta talks to a godlike ichor for five minutes and, hey presto! Godlike ichor reverses its position on capital punishment. These moral problems are just that simple. If only Orson Scott Card had known; Ender’s Game could have been a lot shorter and less tortured.

In the end, then, maybe I spoke too quickly when I said that Simone managed to avoid the traps Marston laid for her. She does outmaneuver several of them…but she’s left with maybe the biggest one of all, which is that, unlike most any other super-hero outside of Mr. A, Wonder Woman was actually about something. Marston had stuff to say, in his cranky way, about real issues, peace and war among them. His solutions to these problems were more or less crazy (have woman rule over the world and teach men submission and love as a way to combat war), but they were thought through and existed in a coherent (if cracked) belief system. Marston, in short, wasn’t glib. Simone, at least on these issues, is. When you write a comic about the glorious icon that is Superman, you don’t need to really think too hard about what the character means, because the character has always been vacuous. Writing Wonder Woman, though, forces you to confront some actual content — which is unfortunate when all you really want to do is love her and maybe create some entertaining genre product, more or less in that order.

_____________

This is the latest in a series on post-Marston version of Wonder Woman.

Update: Simone herself has a gracious note or three in comments (keep scrolling.) She points out that there are currently two volumes of her WW series available, and that a third is forthcoming shortly.

Why newsmagazines love the word “ironic”

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WHEN NBC hired Ben Silverman in May 2007, he was the hottest executive in the television business, the man who had a hand in bringing reality shows and “The Office” to America. He also happened to be taking a job he had dreamed about as a junior high schooler hooked on television: the top programmer position at NBC.

That’s the lead for a New York Times profile headlined “NBC Hired a Hit Maker. It’s Still Waiting.” The reason for the headline is that, after his hire by NBC, Mr. Silverman has gone from being hot to proving sort of a dud.

Incredibly, I did a word search to see if the article mentioned Fred Silverman. Not so incredibly, there was no such mention. But, 29 years before the hiring of Ben Silverman, NBC hired Fred Silverman as its president. Fred Silverman was hot because of his success as president of ABC; then, at NBC, he unleashed a string of duds, and in 1981 he got kicked out. (He did some good stuff too, as Wikipedia points out, though at the time I think Brandon Tartikoff got all the credit for Cheers and Hill Street Blues.)
The parallels are amazing. Silverman … Silverman. Hot, hired by NBC, not hot … Hot, hired by NBC, not hot. And the two hirings are almost exactly 30 years apart! The only flaw is that Silverman 1’s hotness derived from the kind of show critics describe as “pablum” (Charlie’s Angels, Laverne and Shirley), whereas Silverman 2’s hot period includes The Office, your prestige sort of comedy, alongside genuine crap vehicles like The Biggest Loser. 

The other drawback, of course, is that the parallels add up to a king-size “so what.” But there they are and there’s no denying they’re kind of goofy. A decent newsmagazine could stick the word “ironic” in there and get itself a nice paragraph. 

Again with the Sullivan

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He does a feature called “The View From Your Window” where readers send in pictures of what they see outside their homes. This time, Montreal.  That’s my town and I don’t even recognize the view. I believe the steepled building behind the trees is one of our many churches, but which and where? They are now mainly used as parking garages and Buddhist temples because of the Quiet Revolution.

Partially Congealed Pundit: Sci-Fi Is Too Literature!

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Back in the dim dark past, when I was only a hooded fetus, I carved my thoughts directly on the computer screen with crude stone tools, producing material more or less at random since I had no hit count to tell me what the people wanted. Most of this stuff has just been sitting on my hard drive for years and years now — poems, short stories, essays, zines, drawings, insulting notes about comics professionals; that sort of thing.

Anyway, I thought I might as well make like Dante Rossetti and disinter some of these effusions for your viewing indifference, dear blog reader. My plan is to post something from the archives every Friday. Eventually I’ll inflict poetry on you, but Bill’s piece about his own childhood encounters with science-fiction and suspending disbelief made me think of this essay, which I wrote way back when I was in college in 1991.

Reading it over, I still like the central idea, though the earnest defense of sci-fi’s literary bona-fides made me roll my eyes. Ah well. For better or worse, here it is.

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In his introduction to his anthology of science-fiction short stories The New Tomorrows, Norman Spinrad defines science-fiction as anything which is marketed with a sf label on its cover. Although this definition doesn’t seem to be very illuminating, the point which Spinrad is attempting to make is that the sf label is simply a marketing device rather than a true definition of a genre. In other words, science-fiction books have every bit as much (or as little) literary merit as any other form of literature, and that each science-fiction book should be read and judged individually rather than being forced into a single easily condemned category.

The difficulty with this is, of course, that science-fiction books do share certain characteristics which provide a large amount of fodder for the painfully (at least to those of us addicted to sci-fi) and just about uniformly nasty reviews which grace the pages of such publications as the New York Times Book Review when such journals stoop to writing about science-fiction at all. One of these characteristics is that works of science-fiction almost uniformly call for the reader to suspend disbelief to an extent which is far greater than that required in most other kinds of writing. Even in such stories as “Metamorphosis” by Kafka, which deals explicitly with fantastic elements, the suspension of disbelief is nowhere near as extreme as that required in a science-fiction book. In “Metamorphosis”, Gregor Samsa turns into a bug. In Brightness Falls From the Air by James Tiptree, Jr., faster than light travel exists, as do several alien races, at least one of which can communicate easily with humans, and another of which produces a substance which can heal the wounds from a deadly human poison for which there is no other cure. Besides this, the book also deals with several periods of time distortion and a vast alien entity of indeterminate characteristics. I could go on for paragraphs, but the point is fairly clear. And yet, if one is willing to accept all this, the book is really wonderful: exciting, surprising, and even thought-provoking. Still, it is most definitely (despite Norman Spinrad) a science-fiction book, insofar as the suspension of disbelief is a function of the reader’s willingness to accept the tenets of science-fiction rather than on any special effort on the part of the author.

In addition to the quantity of science-fiction’s demands on one’s suspension of belief, I think that there is also a difference in the kind of belief which science-fiction demands. In “Metamorphosis”, Gregor’s family realizes that it is a little strange for their son to have been turned into a bug. In most science-fiction works, the characters accept as natural incidents and occurrences which are patently not part of the reader’s experience. In “Blue Champagne” by John Varley, the characters are real and believable, and the reader (at least this reader) is able to feel real pain at the story’s outcome. Even so, the entire premise of the story rests on the development of scientific equipment which can register emotions: if one does not accept this, then the story can’t work. And this element is not what the story is about: the piece is about relationships, the “unbelievable” facets of the story are not, as they are in “Metamorphosis”, the focus of the story’s attention. I think that science-fiction’s extensive reliance on belief can help explain why several of the field’s most respected authors often deal with matters of reality and unreality. Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress and Brian W. Aldiss’ Cryptozoic! both contain extremely long hallucination sequences which the reader believes are reality because of the standard suspension of disbelief with which he or she usually approaches a standard science-fiction novel. And Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle has his characters discover the flimsy nature of the world they inhabit, a world in which Germany won the Second World War due solely to the writer’s imagination and the reader’s acceptance.

The question, then, is not whether or not science-fiction is a genre, but whether or not the characteristics which make it a genre also somehow limit its worth as a form of literature. Ursula K. LeGuin contends that, to fulfill its true potential, science-fiction must be about people rather than about gadgets and hardware. In many cases, in the work of LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, and others, I think that this goal is achieved, and, moreover, it is achieved in writing about people who would not exist without the science-fiction worlds they inhabit: not because they are too weakly crafted to exist in the real world but because their actions and thoughts have been shaped by a different reality than that delineated in most works of fiction. Since the suspension of disbelief has allowed these characters to exist, it surely can’t be a wholly evil thing. Besides, science-fiction can be a lot of fun to read, which is, after all, a large part of what books are all about.

Doonesbury’s Alex and Leo: Sweet or What?

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UPDATE 3:  Going by comments, people who read this post may think that by Garry Trudeau’s “track record” I mean some pattern he has involving brain-damaged characters. Well, no. The track record business refers to the point raised in the post’s first paragraph, namely that I think Trudeau often takes the easy way out when he involves his characters in difficult matters. Examples would include Joanie Caucus’s longshot transition from housewife to congressional legal counsel (and wife of Rick Redfern) in the 1970s, and the triumphant arrival in the dumped Mike Doonesbury’s life of a young, beautiful and brilliant second wife in the 1980s. 
This is Update 3 because I thought of a couple more trivial updates first and stuck them at the end of the post.
And now let us return to our starting point: Alex and Leo … sweet or what?
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I guess it could be both. I still have a weakness for Doonesbury, though the strip is decades past its great days. Now comic geeks take notice of it only to roll their eyes, or such is my impression. Garry Trudeau has something of the feel of an Aaron Sorkin or Frank Rich: he does what he does smoothly, but you (okay, I) feel that he leaves out a lot when playing moral arbiter or heartfelt human chronicler.  He had the same faults in the old days, but his virtues were a lot stronger then, by which I mean that he was really, really funny.

Now Alex, Mike Doonesbury’s little girl, is romancing Leo, a boy who got blown up in the Iraq war. Leo is fighting back from very grave handicaps, chiefly aphasia.  Alex has her dad’s face and her dad is not good-looking; neither is she. Would Trudeau have assigned her to a victim of brain damage if she were pretty? Well, maybe, I don’t know. I’m inclined to doubt it because of Trudeau’s track record and because I haven’t seen any strips addressing why the two like each other. Aside from being a couple of nice kids, they don’t have much in common.
Caveat: I read Doonesbury on most days but not all days, so my data set is limited.  
UPDATE:  Ah yes, now about Alex being “cute.” And if that link is outdated, just find the Doonesbury strip for May 16.
UPDATE 2:  Yep, the link is outdated. Still, the one today (May 17) is pretty good: Roland Hedley Burton and his tweets.