Where The Heck I’ve Been

Where the hell have I been?

Well, I’ve gotten back into reading for one. My mind had gotten a tad lazy, so I’ve been pouring myself back into books. I’ve also been battling something of a bout of depression, so that’s been distracting me. It’s not really an excuse, to be frank; I’ve let this blog slide, and that has to stop.

Thing is, most of my writing energy has been going into work on a new short story called “Opal Honey of the Big Deep River.” I’m posting an excerpt for your edification. I would very much like any comments you might have on the matter.

“Opal Honey of the Big Deep River”

Opal Honey of the Big Deep River. Casey Stock liked the way it tasted.

The Big Deep River is the reason the town of Bolingbroke exists. Despite the name, it’s a minor river in coastal Virginia, draining into the Rappahannock. The first settlers on the Peninsula simply found it to be the biggest of the rivers and creeks in the area, and so named it appropriately. The Big Deep was navigable, which separated it from most of the little waterways that cut across the countryside, and that combined with flat terrain and fertile soil made the site good for putting down; goods could be easily carted to Tappahannock or taken by boat to Fredericksburg, and Harry Bolingbroke’s little farm, fence posts hammered down in 1828, became a big farm, and then a hamlet, and then a village. The settlers came from as far north as Herlihy, Pennsylvania and as far west as Richmond. Casey Stock came from Lodi, New Jersey a century-and-a-half later. Opal Honey came from nowhere.

It was wooded, too, like the rest of the East Coast, and the first clearing had been done by Harry Bolingbroke himself with his two sons and his brother. The forest in the area was light, and the clearing done slowly as the farm grew; later, as the farm became a village, there were more hands to work at the confounding of nature, to hem in the woods and provide this little bastion of civilization with a little more soil, a little more land. The clearing of a forest is a small war. But with that wood they built the Methodist church and the small town meetinghouse, both of which were the same building and eventually had to be expanded. The new families needed land, too, and so they cut down the trees and blew the stumps, and used the wood to solve both problems. It was really very elegant. But then the word came down that Opal Honey didn’t approve, and for a time, Bolingbroke stopped growing.

Of course, when Casey Stock moved there with his mom in the summer of 1997, it was growing again, and nobody, now, nobody believed in that sort of thing, things like Opal Honey. The old legend was sort of laughed off, a bit of local folklore from the earliest days of settlement. The stories barely even circulated: Opal Honey, known also by the childish Ojja-Wojja, was the boogeyman of Bolingbroke’s children. But a century earlier, this town had been frankly cowed to absolute pieces by the name that Casey found so delicious.

Casey was such a kid, though; wild in his way. Every seventeen year-old is wild in their own way, I suppose, but Casey was particularly such. Not that he was rowdy; he didn’t go about causing trouble like some kind of maniac. He was just a bit troublesome. He liked to stir things up and watch everything go to pot. He was a lanky kid with a tameless shock of hair and that scraggly mustache kids grow when they want to feel like they’re adults. And he felt that way, damn sure; he’d contradict his teachers, wrong as often as he was right, and he hated the town. He would hop on his bike and bike to nowhere, and come back. He stuck to the roads, and all he saw were unhappy woods kept at bay by trucks and asphalt.

School was better; moody though he was, he wasn’t a pariah. He had his friends, likeminded kids who wanted to get out of the town and into the city, or simply wanted something to complain about, who wore black and boots and fancied themselves intellectuals above and against the other boys, who wore flannel and went hunting and loved the town because it sat on the edge of a world where hunting was still possible. But Casey Stock and Sam Del and Andy Lachlan looked down on those guys and so he made his bed in the town of Bolingbroke among the self-professed intelligent crowd who made a show of reading Marx just to confound their largely-Republican neighbors. Not that they understood Marx, or even paid much deep attention; sometimes it was Margaret Atwood or Ayn Rand or Isaac Asimov; there was nothing coherent they were searching out, feeling out, pursuing. But Casey, Sam, and Andy would still trot them out at lunchtime when they ate alone, looking deathly serious as they drank RC Cola and ate their soggy fries.

The Methodist church, of course, wasn’t the meetinghouse anymore, but it still sat at the center of Bolingbroke village, which turned in concentric circles around it, or more specifically, around the square in front of it. Casey discovered this quickly, and used the natural flow of the narrow village streets to direct his travels as he biked through. It was, he would admit privately, a genuine positive that he could bike so unencumbered through traffic so light. It was a primal pleasure, like flight, and distracting and pure, that ceaseless and seamless maneuvering through the town he otherwise despised as a collection of illiterate peasants, not that he’d ever say that aloud. That, well, that was private, and he wasn’t even sure he believed it. As with many things he wasn’t very sure about – Marx, God, and Ellen Macaffey, who was taller than him and lean and dark-haired and certainly used coconut mango shampoo – he could ignore them when he pedaled. He’d focus on the road and its curvature and the little bumps beneath black rubber tires, the bridge over the Big Deep River, with the blur to either side of him (and the one in his head) relegated to memory.

He didn’t really know his mother. Not that she was distant, but more that Casey was thoroughly self-oriented. He would fight with her disinterestedly, about grades and the detentions he’d get from calling his teachers stupid, and ignore her at dinner while considering nothing at all. Elizabeth Stock was unhappy about that, and about many things, but Casey didn’t much care. Terror and infatuation occupied him with startling frequency, but not his mother; he wasn’t very concerned with her or what she wanted from him. He wasn’t resentful of her, really, but he frankly felt he couldn’t be bothered. He felt vaguely guilty about this, but it was only ever vague.

In a year things would be very different. For now, though, you’ve got a good picture of Casey, who came to Bolingbroke in a huff like the moon crosses the sky, and then suddenly eclipsed.

In a year, there he’d be, marching deeply into the empty woods beyond the village, the trees that seemed to stretch forever even as they crowded behind him. Feeling shut in even in this expanse, the road and his bike an unthinking distance behind him, as night crept into the sky and darkened it shade by shade by shade, he would stop, dead in the realization that he was afraid. He’d feel his way through the woods with the same aimless wandering that guided him through town, anticipating turns and stretches and creeks and fallen trees, following the instinct that drew him in, wending and weaving along this invisible path he’d dowsed. In a year, he wouldn’t know how long he’d have been walking, in what direction he had come from, or how to return. He’d hear the water rushing through a gully far away, but wouldn’t know enough to guide himself by it. He would come in search of the Ojja-Wojja, Opal Honey of the Big Deep River. And there he’d see a sudden light crest the curve of the earth like the rising sun.

But he didn’t know that when he first heard the name.

Man and Superman

Guest post by Ian Koranek

I love superheroes.

I started watching X-Men and Batman: The Animated Series when I was in the third grade and was instantly hooked. Although the latter proved to be the only of the two worth a damn, I’ll always be grateful to the former for introducing me to those characters. As Brian has written about countless times (this blog is called Saint Superman after all), superhero storytelling is about purpose and vocation. Superman goes around helping people and protecting people and saving people for no other reason than it’s the right thing to do.

I’ve always wanted a t-shirt that said, “What Would Spider-Man Do?” Peter Parker, you see, is achingly noble. He always puts others needs before his own, constantly putting on his costume and stopping the bad guys at the cost of his own personal happiness. I’m sure Brian would have no problem canonizing Spidey.

However, I think there is a significant danger in looking to superheroes solely for examples of how to live life vocationally. One of the greatest motion pictures ever made is It’s A Wonderful Life. The protagonist, George Bailey, has none of Superman’s strength nor any of Batman’s gadgets. Yet he dedicated his life to giving himself to the people of Bedford Falls. He was just a regular man and the moral of the story is that a regular man can and does make a difference. However, that film was released in 1946, a good sixty-three years ago. Have any comparable stories been told since? Or are all our vocation driven heroes in red and blue tights?

I can think of one. Several years ago, an episode of The Drew Carey Show depicted this concept beautifully. In the dead of the winter, there was a terrible snowstorm blanketing Cleveland. Winfred-Lauder, the company Drew worked for in the series, was letting their employees go home early. Drew was going to get a ride from a group of co-workers (who had deemed themselves the “positivity club”) but seconds before he could leave, his computer spontaneously caught fire. He stayed to put the fire out and his co-workers left without him.

He found out the next day that the driver of the car he was supposed to be in had hit a patch of ice and crashed, killing everyone in the ironically named positivity club. Drew, convinced that God has spared him, decided to radically change his life. He got the idea that his tedious job was worthless and that he should perhaps become a minister. He went down to his local church to talk to a pastor and see how he could go about making this a reality.

As he was waiting in a pew, a woman came in, and mistaking Drew for a man of the cloth, began to seek his advice. I don’t remember all the details of her sad story, it has been years since I’ve seen the episode. But if I recall correctly, she was a widow and single mother, and one of her children had a severe medical condition. “I’m sorry,” Drew said, “I wish there was something I could do.” “Not unless you can give me a job”, she replied.

It was then that Drew came clean with her. “I’m not really a minister, I’m the Human Resources Director at Winfred-Lauder. Come by tomorrow morning for an interview, and I’ll do my best to find you a job.”

Drew realized that there was dignity and purpose and meaning, indeed moral force, in his occupation. There is certain attitude among members of my generation, I think. There’s this idea that a regular, 9-5 desk job is for losers. Those are only for people who are boring and have no imagination, passion, or spirit. They’re just menial wastes of time. I was a theater major and due to my path in life, am still surrounded by actors and comedians. This attitude is prevalent, trust me.

I truly believe that being a performer and entertainer is my vocation. But for God’s sake, if everyone was an artist, society would collapse. St. Paul tells us, “For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function…since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us exercise them” (Romans 12:4-6). My father was a “desk jockey” for his entire career. I would be wrong, not to mention ungrateful, if I had some smug resentment for him. I can tell you, by the way, that my father is not a passionless man. (You should get him started on the Tridentine Mass, geez…)

Speaking of parents, my Mom always said to me that it didn’t matter what I did for a living (as long as it wasn’t, in her words, “illegal or immoral”. A qualifier which killed my dreams of pimping and drug dealing, but I moved on.) All labor, no matter how tedious it may seem, contributes to the betterment of humanity and is therefore in the service of God.

[NOTE: As originally posted, this piece cut off in the middle of "service". It has been restored.]

The Incarnationalist Manifesto

As per my recent revival of literary reading, my recent appraisal of the coterie of present-day young Catholic writers, and my recent hunger to write well and write regularly again, I’ve decided to hammer out a rough statement on Incarnationalism, the artistic philosophy I and my compatriots hashed together a few years ago. An attempt was made some time ago by my present-day roommate Ian Koranek, but we both found it insufficient, as it was more a statement of personal beliefs than of artistic principles. I hope that giving it a shot here and publishing it here might encourage my fellow-writers and artists of a Catholic persuasion to consider adopting it as an operating philosophy.

Incarnationalism: the word refers to the belief that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” It is writing in the tradition of Dostoevsky, Chesterton, and Waugh. It is modern. It is narrative. It is coherent.

1. God is real, and life has meaning.
2. Incarnationalist art and literature is representative of the world, therefore it portrays a world wherein God is real and life has meaning.
3. Art is not an abstracted ideal, and does not exist for its own sake in its own world.
4. Incarnationalist art has function in the real world. It is art with social purpose, and isn’t divorced from lived human experience; therefore, it is not abstracted to the point of unintelligibility, and respects the intelligence of its audience.
5. The Incarnationalist believes in truth and beauty, but does not separate truth and beauty into all-encompassing ideals.
6. The Incarnationalist is concerned with portraying a world in which human life is charged with grandeur and meaning, but not romanticized.
7. The Incarnationalist respects the role and function of God and of grace.
8. The Incarnationalist is responsible for their work.
9. The Incarnationalist is not above their audience.
10. The Incarnationalist is traditional; they do not reject narration or coherence.
11. The Incarnationalist is a revolutionary; they portray a world at odds with the commercial, disposable culture which surrounds them.
12. The Incarnationalist does not laud or espouse violence in their work.

I’d like to open this up to dialog, so that it can be hashed out and broken down and revised until it represents an honest engagement, both literary and artistic, with Catholicism and the modern world.

Housekeeping

I’ve added a new chunk on the blogroll — “Wild Intellects.” It’s basically a bunch of people who either I described or have described themselves as belonging to the Catholic literary generation I described in “Bohemia’s Parish Church: Wild Intellects in Catholicism” a few days ago. I will not lie about my ambition here; I do want us to pool our talents, but at the very least acknowledgement of our commonalities would satisfy me.

I’m also wondering if, perhaps, you guys prefer the current format of a big post more or less sporadically, or the old one of regular, daily blogging that often got bogged down in its very frequency, but sometimes inspired me to write a lot about something simply by virtue of being forced to think about it.

Thanks in advance for your thoughtful responses, sure to be genius.

My Father, the Mystic

I suffer — if such a word can be applied to so minor an ailment — from irritated cuticles. I don’t know if this is common, as I’ve never asked, but they hurt quite often, growing red and swollen, seemingly without cause.  The pain, minor as it is, is quite distracting, and I tend to exacerbate the problem in my attempts to fix it; often, I simply resort to band-aids, the flesh-colored strips on the terminus of at least one digit, and often more. It’s been going on for as long as I can remember, and used to cause me quite a bit of distress; as a kid, I worried about whether or not this represented a real problem, but I’ve more or less accepted that, sometimes, reaching into my pocket to draw out a twenty will be a mildly unpleasant experience. Time dulls pain.

As it happened, though, one evening a solution of sorts presented itself. I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old — perhaps younger, but certainly not older — and awash in the self-doubt of youth (which I’ve written about again and again and again),  with my dad awash in the certainty of age. He’s a full-time trucker and a part-time mystic, who teaches and sings about a theology I vehemently disagree with. His faith is stubborn — much as mine is — even when his own confidence falters, which I’ve seen, and he’s a believer that all Christians can be miracle-workers, a sort of pre-modern (but not pre-Christian) appreciation and respect for the supernatural world that so often eludes we wannabe mystics and elders and shamans. Taking seriously his role as my religious instructor, rebellious towards that as I was, he would use our shared time during long summer trips in the truck to impress upon me his faith and why he believed it and what it meant. For him, that translates, practically, to speaking in tongues and healing. The first I’d seen again and again and again to the point of pedestrian disinterest, but the second — that seemed new, and more importantly to my burgeoning adolescent mind, verifiable.

So I asked him, in a wide-eyed mixture of disbelief and supreme, unthinking, unassailed hope, to see if he could go about healing me. Imagine the scene; an adolescent boy and his strong-featured blue-collar father, sitting together on the bottom bunk of a Freightliner Century Class’s sparse, functional, monotone cab (which always reminded me of the USS Defiant, full of cubbies and cabinets and other hidden, tucked-away spaces). He clutched my left index finger in his hand, not tightly, but with a gentle firmness, in contrast with the ferocity with which he closed his eyes and held them shut, surely contributing to the crows’ feet that make of them a parenthesis. He prayed in roughly the formula I grew up learning: first, to thank God for the grace you request, under the assumption that God will grant anything faithfully asked and to demonstrate your belief that God has done it and will do it and is doing it. “Thank you Father God,” it went, “for granting this healing to Brian’s finger.” He spoke of God’s fidelity in the past, as though challenging God to be consistent (which we’ve all done), his promises of healing (a helpful reminder in case he’d forgotten), and his own confidence that God would prove beneficent now.

Regardless of the reasons, I wasn’t healed then, although it’s worth noting that this was part of a string of intrusions of various forms of Christianity in my life along the road to my eventual conversion. Whatever happened, the event has been fixed firmly in my memory as significant, a moment of a true meeting with my dad, who’d always been something of a distant, if familiar, figure due to his job, which took him across the country for weeks at a time. We’d always talk about music and science fiction — and both in the form of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, struggling in vain to teach me the lyrics to “The Time Warp” and “Science Fiction Double Feature” —  sharing thoughts about Star Trek and the cheap sci-fi novels he bought in truck stops that inevitably made their way down to me, but this was significantly different. It was my first mature confrontation with religion, and has inevitably colored my approach and understanding of religion ever since. In those days, before I was religious, before I had the slightest comprehension of who I was in the world or what the world was or what it meant, before even my wildly conflicted teen years, I got a glimpse of Christianity as something whole and practical and present in the real world, that God was capable of penetrating through the cloak of the material plane and acting plainly. My dad had on another instance, which may have been the same trip, prophesied for me according to his practice, and again with absolute confidence; both incidents profoundly impressed upon me how otherworldly the world could be, how porous the boundaries could seem.

As cold and academic and clinical as Christianity could sometimes seem — it is, after all, a religion profoundly interested in the Word, and therefore in ideas — I caught right there and then a notion that it was more than Sunday bible studies, that it could be functionally present and interact with the world. In this, I was a pagan; I broadly understood — much as I denied it — that the world is supernatural, that the supernatural is relevant, and that it can both interact with us and be interacted with. This was a sort of a primitively sacramental view of the world I held then, and something profoundly attractive to me even now, much as I’ve advanced past it. Its the root of honest, virgin paganism, if you will, untouched by revelation but certainly aware of the breadth of the world, the horns at midnight, the ghosts in the night, the silent wolf around the bend in the river. Heh. It’s even the root of romanticism, which is probably what’s attractive about it.

I eventually came to appreciate the force of my father’s devotion to the Scriptures, how it colored his vision, but that came later. First was the mist; only then followed Brigadoon.

Bohemia’s Parish Church: Wild Intellects in Catholicism

I disagree.

Oh, it doesn’t matter terribly what I disagree with. There’s so much of it out there that it’s probably better to just go ahead and say, generally speaking, that I disagree. Much of what I write here turns into invective against hypocrisy, or rather a culture utterly at odds with the values it claims to profess, or (rather still) a culture unaware that Christianity holds the specific values it does, rather than those we sometimes wish it did. Suffice to say, whenever it comes to politics or ethics, I quite simply disagree. Be it prevailing wisdom on sexual ethics or human meaning, I find something objectionable. Should it come down to whether cynicism is justified or whether there’s room for hope or the importance of history or the prevalence and purpose of ideology, somehow it’s found wanting in evaluation. Catholicism has made me a studied contrarian, and under the veneer of my Church-going sneer and my sarcasm is a mind at conflict with the world.

I’ve always been something of a societal outcast; in high school, I was a Fight Club Kid, those guys who spend all their time reading the book and quoting the movie, embracing its nihilism to the best of my limited ability and writing sick and funny stories about blasé violence and social dejection. I listened to Nirvana and thought — although I did not practice — the art of self- and societal abnegation. I was a rollicking ball of contradictions, a Catholic conservative radical neo-Luddite individualist who longed for the community of art. I wrote and I drew and I painted deliberately provocative images: Communist propaganda posters, suicides captioned “My God, what have I done?”, poems about suburban revolution, the French revolution, the Russian revolution, stories about girls committing suicide by drinking paint thinner, about wild men in wailing deserts, about the decay of civilization. I wrote political essays about coming world wars I felt inevitable, about social movements inspired by Gandhi I wanted to form, about satyagraha as poorly as I understood it, about the Beatles and Spider-Man. I was sixteen and bored and restless for revolution and the gleaming glory of death and sex and hunger. My Catholicism tempered all of these, but by no means suppressed them. I was a wild intellect in search of a world to believe in; at best, the Catholic faith provided me with little more than a feeling of glib superiority and a mild entry into mysticism I began to look into tentatively my senior year of high school.

As I’ve matured — and I have — I’ve come to appreciate both its truth claims and its inherent drama, tense with history, caught up in heroism and adventure and all the things I’ve been after my entire life. It became my primary lens for art and literature and the world, the glasses through which I saw everything (apart from my actual glasses through which I literally see everything), and as I immersed myself in a small artists’ community, Catholicism and literature and art and theater and history all seemed to commingle into a gracious narrative and vision of the world as teeming with the splendor of creation and with meaning and significance and moral force. Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poetry I had despised in high school, seemed a prophet. The world was charged with the grandeur of God. My nihilism faltered. My belief in dissipation flamed out. Suddenly, everything mattered. My friends and I, our little artistic-theological commune, called it incarnationalism, a theory of art that strove to depict the world as teeming with angels and devils and saints, a bleak and blotted paradise, a world that was transcendent as much as it was staunchly material. We never did get around to writing that manifesto.

In the last year, though, as I’ve been blogging — to keep my head on straight — I’ve encountered something: there’s an entire generation of wild intellects out there who have fought their way through the world to Catholicism, not as a comfort or a salve but as a drama and bulwark, something expressible and deserving of expression. It’s not me anymore; it’s we. It’s Nick Milne and Godescalc and Niall Mor and Ryan Carruth. Our lodestars are John Paul II and Mark Shea. We’re well-read and well-written. We’re fueled by pretense and old books. We study theology and literature and we drink imported beers. We travel if we can. We’re academics and we’re writers and we watch Battlestar Galactica and talk about the theology of commercials, or we look for it in Kill Bill or An Unexpected Light or Night Train to Turkestan. We’re liberal with conservatives and conservative with liberals, and while Christians, can’t identify with either the religious Right or the religious Left. Some of us have flirted with Marx, but ultimately didn’t like the cigar stink on his breath or the blood on his hands. Others have had their fling with Nietzsche or Kant or Barth before circling back around like John Henry Newman and the Prophet Chesterton. Fewer still use with the utmost dedication use the Oxford comma. We’re Matrix-watching icon-loving happy-with-life radicals who are at Mass every bleeding Sunday and still find the time to maintain these damnable blogs of ours.

If I didn’t think it was the most pretentious thing in the world, I’d even hazard to call us the “Found Generation.” But I suppose that’s pushing it. Even still, the commonalities between us as a community are striking, and I suppose only a lack of geographic proximity — as far flung as Ottawa, New York, Washington DC, and Rome — prevents us from taking over Greenwich Village. But I’ve always found myself around these people, and all my closest friends since college have been, to one extent or another, informed by this broad sense of the world, this parish church of Bohemia, and its getting to seem almost a generational marker of this particular crop of Catholics, a particular interpretation of “in the world but not of it” that makes us perpetual observers of our surrounding culture, aware and interpretive, yet somehow still disconnected. It’s a vision that lets us look at science and see mysticism, look at video games and see coherent visions of the world, and a refusal to contort ourselves to the ideological demands of culture without, at the same time, warring with it. We make our world and let it spread.

I think we might be a group.

Columbus Day Massacre

From my window, I can see the Empire State Building, a stunning tower over midtown Manhattan. It’s tradition — and has been for some time — to light up the tower festively to commemorate significant events; in the wake of 9/11, it was red, white, and blue. Last holiday season, it alternated between green & red and blue & white, Christmas and Hanukkah, respectively. There was even a mild stir last week when it was lit red & yellow to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, less a political statement and more an acknowledgement of the city’s thousands of Chinese residents. Controversial as that was, today’s fairly innocuous lighting hides a deeper controversy.

Yes, it’s lit up green, white, and red — the colors of the Italian flag, il tricolore – in honor of Columbus Day. Apparently this is a big deal here. I grew up in central Virginia, where the Italian-American community was and remains quite small, and where Columbus Day amounted to little more than a day off from school, if that. It was a day on which we recalled nothing in particular, celebrated in no notable way, and which was used as an excuse for nothing at all. Dull, tired, empty, meaningless — it was about as important as Arbor Day, and less so than International Talk Like A Pirate Day. And all of this for a holiday remembering one of the most ridiculously central figures in human history.

Here, though, it’s different. Because of the massive Italian population in the New York City area (of which I am a decidedly incredulous part), this is a huge deal. Less a commemoration of the man and his accomplishments, it’s a celebration of all things Italian, from pop music to Renaissance art, from pasta to dance, a celebration of abundanza an all its luscious, full, vibrant, velvety color. Delis across the city were closed. Phones at pizza places rang in futility, going unanswered. A class of gold-chain-wearing, rough-talking garbage men took the day off. And everywhere, the tricolore flew.

I was at work.

I wrote at the beginning of the year about how much Mafia imagery and assumptions follow Italian-Americans around; let me just say that I was most pleased to find this particular aspect of my cultural experience (so recently reaffirmed!) decidedly absent. No, the floats were all Galileo and pop singers and commedia dell’arte. It was decidely Italian in a distinctly non-mafioso way, which really was a pleasant surprise.

And yet. We can’t forget the controversy this day seems to spark. As much as its lauds the cultural accomplishments of Italians, it’s a day celebrating specifically an Italian responsible both for much good and much evil, Cristoforo Colombo. Columbus, that fire-haired Genovese sailor, stumbled upon the Caribbean by accident, and proceeded to launch the European colonization of the Americas with his fevered tales of golden cities and horrifying wealth, speaking with the utmost confidence of things which he had not seen. Without him, perhaps the Americans would have been colonized, in fact, they likely would have. But it would have been slow, without the promise of endless, mythical wealth, and likely impeded by the natural barriers of jungle and disease.

Instead, Europe and its children (most notably the United States) stormed ahead full-force, and made it an essential project for four-hundred years to dominate and subjugate a continent. The slaughtering expeditions. The Indian Wars. And all of that falls squarely — ultimately — on Columbus. Of course, we’re here now, and we wouldn’t be without him; to that end, he is in a very real sense a spiritual father. So how do we take in both the good and the bad?

I wonder about this often, in this context and in others. How Germans and Italians deal with losing World War II and their legacies of fascism. How collective guilt and collective pride commingle. It’s a difficult issue, but communities are real existential entities with real existential histories. And this one — this community — is the entire Western Hemisphere that has been indelibly and eternally marked — and marred — by a Genovese sailor who thought he could sail clear to China.

The Prince of Peace

Well, President Obama has gone and won the Nobel Peace Prize in one of the most ridiculously confusing events of my young life. The award itself rings of parody; it cites little more than campaign rhetoric as grounds for its bestowal. Really, it strikes me as a joke, the sort of ridiculous thing people have been saying to mock the strange affection he warrants in so many. But there it is, in concrete history; it seems they want to fete him and ensure his place in history with a host of empty proclamations.

My old roommate True, over at the Blarg!, has written something I dare call pure genius about this whole affair. Acknowledging the mixed message this sends, he makes some very lucid points:

On the one hand let’s all be honest with ourselves: as much as those of us on the left love to wrap ourselves in the warm blanket of hope and change he hasn’t actually DONE anything yet. Yes he’s reached out and made it ok to talk again but he’s lacking anything so much as resembling concrete results. The Iranians will continue playing patty cake for the forseeable future, North Korea’s going to keep up with the “break up to make up” pattern until the blessed day that the dear leader finally dies, and Israel will continue to furiously avoid consummating the peace process so long as Bibi is running the show. As everyone keeps saying, as they would to a bright child, there’s plenty of potential for greatness here, but so far nothing to show for it. And as Joe Klein points out, coming from Europe this award has a bitter undertone of condescension, as if he’s being awarded simply for not being george bush. It’s a pat on the head to America for not electing another rowdy republican president, and while I’m happy they’re happy this is taking things a tad far. Finally, this continues the game of eternally rising expectations that’s been played to Obama’s detriment since the campaign. Basically unless he actually achieves a breakthrough worthy of the award by 2012 it’s going to become a millstone around his neck as the GOP, now with some actual ammo, would play the “failed messiah” card. Whether this prevents him from tearing Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee in half if they’re nominated is doubtful. Romney would be tricker, but I digress.

On the other hand though, the man does deserve SOME credit. In the current global environment promoting the ideal of peace and diplomacy is in many ways just as important as actual achievements. Obama not only was expected to achieve great diplomatic breakthroughs but had the added task of having to lay the groundwork by almost completely rebuilding America’s foreign policy from the smoldering wreckage left by the bush administration. The extent to which he’s done so so far as created a much more hospitable environment in which the diplomatic initiatives he’s pursuing now actually have a chance in hell of succeeding. And god knows a tonal reset was necessary; I don’t think most of this country realizes the extent to which we had become reviled.  I also think it’s plausible that this is less an endorsement of Obama than of the world view he espouses, the debate has simply become warped due to the man.

On the Sad State of Popular Music

Ambiguity

As of my beginning writing this, it’s about 4 pm, Monday the fifth of October. I promised to begin regular blogging again today, but my connection is not cooperating.

I am a big fan of burrito places. My favorite restaurant chain in the world is Chipotle; I could eat there every single day if I though I could afford/get away with it; it is my great cross that I cannot do either. I have gone through stretches where I’ve eaten there or at Qdoba – effectively the exactly same restaurant – daily. The food is exquisite, the service excellent, the prices reasonable. In fact, as a testament to the considerateness of the staff, I have a small story to tell. On two or three separate instances, I have been stopped in the middle of my order  — chicken burrito, pinto beans, hot sauce, sour cream and cheese – and informed that the pinto beans are cooked with bacon grease. Baffled, I say “That’s ok,” and they shrug and move on. It’s only on getting to my seat that it hits me: they thought I was Jewish.

Now, this is not an entirely unexpected phenomenon; I have the Italian features of my dad with my mom’s pale English skin. The result is sort of broadly Mediterranean, and I’ve been mistaken for Greek and Middle Eastern alongside Jewish. But I’m certainly not furiously Jewy; I’m ambiguous enough that such a leap certainly wouldn’t have been warranted were it not for one little thing: my hat.

Since 2005 or 2006 I’ve been in possession of a broad knit skullcap, having first realized they looked good on me after my mom purchased me a cheap Jamaican hat while she was on a Caribbean cruise. I upgraded to one with a more muted and less pan-African color scheme during my whole Judaism phase. I liked having a religious signifier which, if imprecise, certainly made clear to the casual onlooker that I took this part of my life seriously and served as a reminder to myself as to who I was and what I was trying to do, even as it advertised my own religious confusion.

To some extent, though, I really liked that ambiguity. I was intoxicated at the thought that, as I biked through the Fan the people I passed would think “check out that big Jewish guy.” It seemed like I was sneaking into another camp and passing for a member, partaking, if surreptitiously and in shallow breaths, of another culture and way of being. I was mistaken at least once for Muslim, but by and large I was assumed to be a Jew (once by a ridiculously gorgeous waitress; it was all I could to not run with it), and that gave me a great deal of satisfaction. Not that I was ashamed of my Christianity, but I was dealing with grave doubts and I was, I suppose, trying on this other identity. I eventually built up something of a reputation as “the Catholic in the yarmulke.” It was all in the hat.

But, to speak honestly, I’m a natural and studied contrarian. I like straddling the middle and moving through identities. I’m a conservative with liberals, and a liberal with conservatives. With anarchists I am a statist, while statists find me maddeningly anarchical. With protesters I decry protest, while I prod those who believe everything is great. I’m no patriot, but I love my country. I’m no pacifist, but I’m opposed to war. I’m a linguistic purist who embraces change. I’m a prude who curses. I’m a moralist who sins. I’m a collectivist to libertarians, a socialist to followers of the free market, a know-it-all to teachers and a believer in the face of doubt. Not to say I don’t have things I believe in, but to me one of the great strengths of Catholicism is its ability to weave between ideology, and thus allowing me to assume a number of ideological aliases for the sake of argument. I live in ambiguity. It is, I suppose, my natural milieu.

I think it was easier to embrace that ambiguity, though, in Richmond; while I lived on a university campus which roiled in its diverse population, there weren’t any entrenched ethnic or religious communities. In inhabiting that middle zone, I wasn’t encroaching on anybody; I could listen to Hasidic reggae and Buddhist rap and go to the Muslim film festival and dream about being crucified and at most I would Irish up the blood of some university kids. 0I live now, however, in New York City, in a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood, not far from a large Hasidic colony, in walking distance to five Catholic churches, two synagogues and at least one mosque. This is a place of strictly delineated ethnic and religious identities. I’m not sure this is a place where ambiguity can thrive.

I suppose the time of experimentation is over.