A meditation cum fable on death, and death's relationship to love. Can death and love coexist? Saramago plays with this question with delightful results. His work gets much stronger once he digs into this question, and the first half of the novel drags a bit getting there. Nevertheless, a recommended read.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Katagiri explains how simply being present in the moment can alter the structure of time and space. I am reminded of the scene in "The Matrix" when time slows down for Neo, and bullets seem to float in the air. Katagiri shows how sitting in meditation and being present in the moment will allow us to disarm the bullets flying at us in our lives. Most highly recommended.
Zafon gives us a meditation on the pain of unrequited and/or forbidden love, disguised as a mystery. If ever you have loved that which could not or would not love you back, and if ever you have then found solace in words on a page, then this a story for you. One major plot twist (you'll know it when you read it), feels a bit forced, but all in all Zafon delivers a fine yarn. Recommended.
Thich Nhat Hanh, working with the teachings of ancient Master Lin Chi, demonstrates how practicing mindfulness and sitting Zazen are like watering the seeds of enlightenment that already exist within us. For those, like myself, who are perhaps too eager in their efforts at spiritual growth, Thich Nhat Hanh offers this timely teaching of Non-attainment. Thich Nhat Hanh helps us to see that there is no enlightenment to be attained, only mindfulness of our true nature, which already is enlightenment. The book's subtitle, "Waking up to who you are", encapsulates this refreshing, essential guide to simply stopping and being. Thich Nhat Hanh puts it best, "Being fully present is enough to occupy us our whole lives." Most highly recommended.
Warner knows Zen. Of course, he would immediately deny "knowing" Zen, since as he so entertainingly explains in "Hardcore Zen", Zen enlightenment is all about direct experience, and can not be "known" by anyone, but can be directly realized by all those willing to put in consistent hours on the meditation cushion. Warner's is a refreshing perspective, as he draws on his experiences in punk rock and monster movies to arrive at the same insights that have at times seemed stifled by more traditional presentations. Warner's only serious mistake is his insistence on Zen Buddhism's superiority to other forms of religion or spirituality. If we are to collectively survive the 21st Century, then people of all faiths and spiritualities must join together in a spirit of peace and cooperation. Making a joke out of the faiths that people are willing to die for only increases the chance that they might choose to do so, and Warner too frequently falls into this trap. But when Warner sticks to his Zen basics he offers much that is helpful. Recommended.
Klosterman does fiction! He's still got the same unmistakable voice, but shows off some adroit storytelling. Of course, like Klosterman, I am a thirtysomething white American male who played high school football and watched the mid-80's Georgetown Hoya basketball team, who are referenced multiple times; i.e. I can relate to everything Klosterman says. But I wonder how this book plays to those who do NOT know that the Hoyas were famous for, among other things, wearing t-shirts under their basketball jerseys, which was a big deal back in 1984, and which Klosterman riffs on at least 2 or 3 times. Finally, I'm not sure about the ending. It works reasonably well, but something a tad more subtle might paradoxically have had more impact. Nevertheless, Klosterman maintains his postmodern punch throughout, and has made the transition nicely from the guy you'd want to get drunk with and talk about sports and music, to the guy you want to tell you about your life in his fiction. Highly recommended.
Hammett practically invented the hardboiled crime genre, and in "Red Harvest" he shows everyone exactly how it's done. Hammett provides a hero, the Continental Op, who struggles internally with the dirty work that must be done if he is to do the right thing, but at the same time never hesitates in the clutch; a femme fatale whose potency outstrips those of the male gangsters she manipulates like marionettes; and a plot that stays one step ahead of the Continental Op (and the reader) until the mystery explodes to a conclusion. The Continental Op's dry wit holds it all together. "Red Harvest" shows exactly why they've been riffing off of Hammett for decades, but never surpassing the original. Highly recommended.
There is always something surprising about love, and Schickler nails this quality in his enchanting Manhattan romance. Read this book and you will want to go find the love of your life, or go kiss her (or him) if you are fortunate enough to have already found her. Schickler throws in an unexpected suspenseful ending that elevates "Kissing in Manhattan" from an ode to romantic love to a statement of the redemptive power of love in all forms, including the love of one's enemy. Highly recommended.
Oddly enough, I was most struck by the fact that the main character in this novel references indie/alternative bands from the story's time period, but otherwise seems more like the type to listen to Top 40. The novel presents a regular gal who picks up a bad drug habit that leads to self (and other) destruction. Perhaps the incongruous indie rock stands out because O'Nan otherwise does such a good job of crafting his protagonist, Marjorie, as a typical small town girl whose life got derailed by a serious drug problem. Had she listened to The Cars instead of Husker Du, I would have bought it hook, line and sinker. Still, O'Nan delivers a fine addition to the noir genre. Recommended.
As we continue our honeymoon with Barack Obama, who, among many other things, is the symbolic repudiation of our spectacularly unpopular 43rd President, it is easy to forget that as recently as 2004, when "The Plot Against America" was published, George W. Bush was at his zenith. Convincingly re-elected by an American public still aching from 9/11; landing on aircraft carriers in full "Top Gun" regalia, mission, ahem, accomplished. Whether Roth intended it or not, his work speaks as much to the time it was written in as it does to the time it was written about. In portraying an America that went haywire in 1940 by following a famous aviator to the brink of partnership with Nazi Germany, Roth sheds light on an America ready to follow its Air National Guardsmen cum Commander-In-Chief to Iraq, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib. By showing us where America might have gone in 1940, Roth, with his accustomed storytelling mastery, takes us exactly where we were headed in 2004. Very highly recommended.
There comes a time in every marriage when you realize that your spouse is in many ways not the same person that you fell in love with and married. Debut novelist Rivka Galchen takes this symptom of impermanence to its logical extreme in "Atmospheric Disturbances", with a protagonist, Dr. Leo Liebenstein, who believes that his wife has been replaced by an impostor. This conceit works magnificently, as the rupture in the Liebensteins' marriage bursts from the page like a sliced-in-half orange popped open by inverted peel, with all the juicy bits sticking out. For Galchen, the juiciest parts of intimacy are the little things, the shampoo-laced scent of hair, the tidal shifts of a partner's moods. Reading Galchen, one is convinced that intimacy is nothing other than the constant sharing of a thousand of these little details per second. One is also convinced that if enough of a couple's details begin to diverge, whether from madness or just a dull drifting, then the thread of intimacy is lost. And this unraveling, as in the case of Dr. Leo Liebenstein, leaves us at our most vulnerable. Galchen gives new meaning to that classic rock cliche "love the one you're with," i.e. intimacy is all that prevents your wife from becoming a complete stranger, which is just a short step from a total collapse of meaning, a dangerous line straddled by Dr. Leo Liebenstein. Galchen is riveting in her debut. Highly recommended.
In excruciating detail, author Mun tears the protective skin of family from her teenage protagonist Joon. Joon, left utterly exposed, is thrown to the wolves of sexual violence and addiction, among other perils. Mun's rich layering of Joon's character prevents "Miles From Nowhere" from becoming just another cautionary tale, e.g. Joon gets high not just to escape the misery of her conditions, but to get high. As a social worker I would love for the "counselors" who would have helped Joon to have come off a little less pathetically, but Mun plays them as another sad shortcoming in an adult world that does little to protect its own children. Depressing, beautiful prose. Highly recommended.
Gibson weaves several compelling storylines together in this thoughtful thriller. The hook for me was the indie-rock-star-chick-as-investigative-reporter bit; imagine Kim Deal on the beat for "Wired" magazine- what fun! Plenty of thought provoking nods to post 9/11 murkiness keep things deeper than they might otherwise appear. Highly recommended.
Pelevin has little use for that rule of good writing, "show, don't tell", as his characters often seem little more than props for Pelevin's extensive metaphysical soliloquies. However, Pelevin's respective takes on existential dilemmas, the Russian soul, and globalization have enough flair and substance that one can forgive him for using this novel as his personal soapbox. Throw in some horny were-creatures and a lot of intellectual name dropping (Camille Paglia!) and you've got the makings of some fine beach reading for the intellectual set, or is that the intelligentsia? (read the book and you'll get the joke) Recommended.
A must read for tennis and sports fans, Wertheim's "Strokes of Genius" takes you inside the greatest match in tennis history. Wertheim is at his best when he goes behind the scenes to add depth and texture to Nadal and Federer's clash. Just one example among many, Wertheim describes a tennis researcher's finding that Federer consistently wears a different facial expression in matches with Nadal, a grimace rather than a Mona Lisa smile, than he does against any other player. Wertheim would have been wise to delete, or at least significantly append, his many lengthy play-by-play recaps of big points in the match; they add little to our understanding of the match and can not begin to capture the awe inspiring nature of these athletes competing with one another. With Nadal vs. Federer we finally got to see what would happen if the unstoppable projectile collided with the immovable object. The result: indescribable beauty. So read Wertheim to understand why this was not only the best tennis match ever, but perhaps also the finest single sporting contest in memory. Then go watch the match on DVD and marvel at what we humans at our best are capable of.
Gaiman's "Anansi Boys" rests almost entirely on the tension between the protagonist Fat Charlie and his brother, the god-like Spider. Unfortunately, Spider is an all too obvious metaphor for the aspects of Fat Charlie's Self that are secluded in his unconscious, his Jungian Shadow. Gaiman's attempt to dramatize depth psychology via mythology is just too heavy handed to surprise and delight the reader. Gaiman also drops the ball with his villain, who is a caricature and contributes little to the novel's tension. "Anansi Boys" does pick up steam as it goes, and comes to life as the action segues from London to the Carribbean island of St. Andrew's. But as my first exposure to Gaiman's work, "Anansi Boys" did not leave me thirsting for more.
Friday, February 29, 2008
INSIGHT
I tell myself that the reason that I have a television is not because I enjoy much that's currently on TV, but because I fear being the guy who can't help but mention in conversation that he doesn't have a television. Basically, that means my fake self image is that of a closet snob.
The real reason that I have a televison is that it is a remnant from my prior life as a TV sports junkie. I am currently in recovery not by choice but because I have sacrificed my viewing pleasure to the higher calling of raising my children in a TV-free environment (it sits behind a curtain in the basement, waiting for the day when all of my children have left for college), while also preserving the family coffers from the cable bill. Which means my real self image is that of a martyr.
I tell myself that the reason that I have a television is not because I enjoy much that's currently on TV, but because I fear being the guy who can't help but mention in conversation that he doesn't have a television. Basically, that means my fake self image is that of a closet snob.
The real reason that I have a televison is that it is a remnant from my prior life as a TV sports junkie. I am currently in recovery not by choice but because I have sacrificed my viewing pleasure to the higher calling of raising my children in a TV-free environment (it sits behind a curtain in the basement, waiting for the day when all of my children have left for college), while also preserving the family coffers from the cable bill. Which means my real self image is that of a martyr.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Why Ohio State Lost to Florida in the So-Called National Championship Game
Like most sports fans, I was surprised to learn of Florida’s upset of Ohio Sate in the current version of college football’s mythical national championship, the BCS National Championship Game. Seemingly every expert, pundit, or oddsmaker had installed the Buckeyes as prohibitive favorites. It came as a collective shock when Florida managed not just to pull off the unlikely upset, but instead opened the proverbial can of whoopass in a 41-14 rout, with observers commenting that the final score could have been much worse had Florida not gone out of its way to not score in the 4th quarter.
Upsets dot the sporting landscape. David does beat Goliath, from time to time, when his slingshot is true. What David doesn’t usually do is crush Goliath so bad that David has to go easy on the suddenly gentle giant, lest he embarrass the big fella. Had Ohio Sate lost a nail biter, a la Houston’s Phi Slamma Jamma getting stunned at he Buzzer by NC State in the NCAA final in 1983, or had they simply been defeated decisively in a competitive but losing effort, like heavily favored Green Bay to Denver in the 1998 Super Bowl upset, none of us would be wondering “what happened to Ohio State?” But after the beat down last Monday night, the question lingers.
The most popular theory floated to date is that the 50 day layoff between the Buckeyes’ last game and the BCS final, the longest layoff between regular season and bowl game in college football history, was the root cause of Ohio State’s listless performance. By all accounts, the Buckeyes were as dull as the Gators were sharp. If there is a word for the Buckeyes’ play, it is one of the most damning words in sports, “flat.” According to the 50-day layoff theory, an extra week off somehow translated into an emotional no-show by college football’s number one team in the biggest game any of the Buckeyes had ever played in. You’re telling me that an extra week of practice leading up to the game meant that the Buckeyes somehow couldn’t get up for college football’s Super Bowl, the game for All The Marbles?
As they say across the pond, bollocks! Ohio State did get up for the Super Bowl, and they won. Only the Super Bowl happened 50 days earlier, in the state of Ohio, when the Buckeyes defeated their archrival, the Michigan Wolverines. It says here that the reason Florida wiped the field with the Buckeyes is because the Gators played as if the national championship was the biggest game of the year, and the Buckeyes played as if they had already won the biggest game of the year 50 days prior. Intellectually, all of the Buckeyes’ players probably realized that the national championship was supposed to mean more than the Michigan game. But emotionally, they knew that it did not.
Did the Buckeyes’emotions, or lack thereof, betray them when it seemingly mattered most? I’d argue that the Buckeyes’ EQ was working just fine last Monday, despite the misinformation that their intellect was supplying. Because at Ohio Sate, especially in a year when the Buckeyes and Wolverines are undefeated and ranked, respectively, #1 and #2, the Ohio State-Michigan game IS the Super Bowl. College players get their signals from three primary sources, their coaches, the fans, and the media, and all three of these sources were sending the message to the Buckeyes loud and clear that the Michigan game was the one they absolutely had to win. I am not privy to what Coach Tressel tells his players, but I know that his predecessor won something like 90% of his games but couldn’t beat Michigan, and was unceremoniously fired. As long as he beats Michigan, Coach Tressel can lose every single bowl game and he’ll still have his job. Knowing this, Coach Tressel would be a fool not to treat the Michigan game as the Super Bowl. Any smart employee puts his greatest efforts into the area his boss says is job one.
As for the fans, I’d love to see the results of a poll asking the Buckeye faithful how they would choose between beating Michigan or winning a bowl game. Put it this way: if the Buckeyes go 12-1 and win the national championship during a year there is no undefeated team, and their one loss was to Michigan, many Buckeye fans would call that a bad year.
And the media, more than anyone, was invested in turning this year’s Michigan-Ohio Sate game into the next installment of The Game Of The Century. The media lives and dies by stories, and nothing makes a more compelling story than sworn enemies slugging it out for absolute supremacy. This year’s Ohio State-Michigan game gave the media the equivalent of USA vs.USSR in World War III, whereas Ohio State vs. Florida was more like Great Britain vs. Argentina for the Falkland Islands (only this time Argentina won). To think that such signals from the all-pervasive media did not influence the 19 and 20 year-old Buckeyes is hopeless naivete.
One final ingredient can not be ignored in the flatbread Ohio State served up Monday night. Call it a missing ingredient: the non-existent playoff system for Division I college football. As long as there is no playoff in college football, Ohio State-Michigan will always be bigger than any bowl game, no matter how they dress it up and no matter what they call it. In college basketball North Carolina vs. Duke is every bit the rivalry Ohio State vs. Michigan is in college football. But North Carolina could, God forbid, lose to Duke three times during the regular season and ACC Tournament, and if they went on to win the national championship everyone would act like they just won the lottery and paint Chapel Hill Tarheel blue. The losses to Duke would be chalked up as part of the competitive gauntlet that prepared the Tarheels to capture the greatest prize of all. All that because in college basketball the national championship is as real as real gets in the make-believe world of competitive game play. In college football the national championship remains a myth. Which means that whatever happened last Monday night, Ohio State can end the season with a resounding and genuine Mission Accomplished (although that might smack too much of another mythical victory, i.e. the mission in Iraq declared accomplished by our commander-in-chief that day aboard the aircraft carrier, a “Dewey Wins” scenario with far graver consequences for us all).
Like most sports fans, I was surprised to learn of Florida’s upset of Ohio Sate in the current version of college football’s mythical national championship, the BCS National Championship Game. Seemingly every expert, pundit, or oddsmaker had installed the Buckeyes as prohibitive favorites. It came as a collective shock when Florida managed not just to pull off the unlikely upset, but instead opened the proverbial can of whoopass in a 41-14 rout, with observers commenting that the final score could have been much worse had Florida not gone out of its way to not score in the 4th quarter.
Upsets dot the sporting landscape. David does beat Goliath, from time to time, when his slingshot is true. What David doesn’t usually do is crush Goliath so bad that David has to go easy on the suddenly gentle giant, lest he embarrass the big fella. Had Ohio Sate lost a nail biter, a la Houston’s Phi Slamma Jamma getting stunned at he Buzzer by NC State in the NCAA final in 1983, or had they simply been defeated decisively in a competitive but losing effort, like heavily favored Green Bay to Denver in the 1998 Super Bowl upset, none of us would be wondering “what happened to Ohio State?” But after the beat down last Monday night, the question lingers.
The most popular theory floated to date is that the 50 day layoff between the Buckeyes’ last game and the BCS final, the longest layoff between regular season and bowl game in college football history, was the root cause of Ohio State’s listless performance. By all accounts, the Buckeyes were as dull as the Gators were sharp. If there is a word for the Buckeyes’ play, it is one of the most damning words in sports, “flat.” According to the 50-day layoff theory, an extra week off somehow translated into an emotional no-show by college football’s number one team in the biggest game any of the Buckeyes had ever played in. You’re telling me that an extra week of practice leading up to the game meant that the Buckeyes somehow couldn’t get up for college football’s Super Bowl, the game for All The Marbles?
As they say across the pond, bollocks! Ohio State did get up for the Super Bowl, and they won. Only the Super Bowl happened 50 days earlier, in the state of Ohio, when the Buckeyes defeated their archrival, the Michigan Wolverines. It says here that the reason Florida wiped the field with the Buckeyes is because the Gators played as if the national championship was the biggest game of the year, and the Buckeyes played as if they had already won the biggest game of the year 50 days prior. Intellectually, all of the Buckeyes’ players probably realized that the national championship was supposed to mean more than the Michigan game. But emotionally, they knew that it did not.
Did the Buckeyes’emotions, or lack thereof, betray them when it seemingly mattered most? I’d argue that the Buckeyes’ EQ was working just fine last Monday, despite the misinformation that their intellect was supplying. Because at Ohio Sate, especially in a year when the Buckeyes and Wolverines are undefeated and ranked, respectively, #1 and #2, the Ohio State-Michigan game IS the Super Bowl. College players get their signals from three primary sources, their coaches, the fans, and the media, and all three of these sources were sending the message to the Buckeyes loud and clear that the Michigan game was the one they absolutely had to win. I am not privy to what Coach Tressel tells his players, but I know that his predecessor won something like 90% of his games but couldn’t beat Michigan, and was unceremoniously fired. As long as he beats Michigan, Coach Tressel can lose every single bowl game and he’ll still have his job. Knowing this, Coach Tressel would be a fool not to treat the Michigan game as the Super Bowl. Any smart employee puts his greatest efforts into the area his boss says is job one.
As for the fans, I’d love to see the results of a poll asking the Buckeye faithful how they would choose between beating Michigan or winning a bowl game. Put it this way: if the Buckeyes go 12-1 and win the national championship during a year there is no undefeated team, and their one loss was to Michigan, many Buckeye fans would call that a bad year.
And the media, more than anyone, was invested in turning this year’s Michigan-Ohio Sate game into the next installment of The Game Of The Century. The media lives and dies by stories, and nothing makes a more compelling story than sworn enemies slugging it out for absolute supremacy. This year’s Ohio State-Michigan game gave the media the equivalent of USA vs.USSR in World War III, whereas Ohio State vs. Florida was more like Great Britain vs. Argentina for the Falkland Islands (only this time Argentina won). To think that such signals from the all-pervasive media did not influence the 19 and 20 year-old Buckeyes is hopeless naivete.
One final ingredient can not be ignored in the flatbread Ohio State served up Monday night. Call it a missing ingredient: the non-existent playoff system for Division I college football. As long as there is no playoff in college football, Ohio State-Michigan will always be bigger than any bowl game, no matter how they dress it up and no matter what they call it. In college basketball North Carolina vs. Duke is every bit the rivalry Ohio State vs. Michigan is in college football. But North Carolina could, God forbid, lose to Duke three times during the regular season and ACC Tournament, and if they went on to win the national championship everyone would act like they just won the lottery and paint Chapel Hill Tarheel blue. The losses to Duke would be chalked up as part of the competitive gauntlet that prepared the Tarheels to capture the greatest prize of all. All that because in college basketball the national championship is as real as real gets in the make-believe world of competitive game play. In college football the national championship remains a myth. Which means that whatever happened last Monday night, Ohio State can end the season with a resounding and genuine Mission Accomplished (although that might smack too much of another mythical victory, i.e. the mission in Iraq declared accomplished by our commander-in-chief that day aboard the aircraft carrier, a “Dewey Wins” scenario with far graver consequences for us all).
Saturday, November 11, 2006
A Few Thoughts on the Recent Election
There are many lessons to be drawn from this election. As everyone acknowledges, it is a rebuke from the American public for the current war in Iraq, where we are in the ultimate damned if we do damned if we don't situation; As I heard it said on the radio this morning, there is not much support for bringing the troops home immediately because it would probably make things even worse, but at the same time there is not much support for keeping the troops there much longer because they don't seem to be making things any better. So the vote had less to do with arguments about what to do next than it did with frustration at the Bush administration for putting us between this rock and a hard place.
But there is more to it than that. Bush's fatal political mistake this year, one he belatedly attempted to correct in the final weeks of the campaign when he publicly disavowed his "stay the course" rhetoric, was an inability to connect with the American public about the reality of the situation on the ground in Iraq. The American public might have been able to stomach the situation in Iraq if Bush had more effectively over the past year acknowledged the problems with the military campaign and called upon America to make the difficult but important step (from his perspective) of continued sacrifice to overcomethe setbacks in Iraq. But Bush until very recently, when it was already too late politically, continued to paint a rosy picture of progress and approaching victory in Iraq that was out of joint with the actualsituation on the ground. The American public was left with two possible conclusions. Either their President was not being straight with them, or their President was ignoring reality. I believe that this impression, from the American public's perspective, was as much if not more important in this election than the actual state of the war inIraq.
Another problem the GOP had in this election cycle was the taint of scandal. Democrats are as prone to scandal as Republicans, but this time it was almost exclusively the Republicans who got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the GOP has had its hands on the steering wheel for the past 12years in Congress, and as we all know "absolute power corrupts absolutely...."
But astute observers of this election will realize that there was more to this election than just GOP gaffes. Bill Clinton's political genius was his ability to capture the political center. The party that captures that political center is the party that will lead in America, and in this election the Dems exhibited a renewed capacity for holding the center. They strategically ran candidates in conservative strongholds that allowed them to win House and Senate races in places like Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Montana. The radicalized bases in both parties make it difficult for both of them to hold to the center for extended periods of time, so usually the center goes to the party that is hungrier. Right now the Dems are hungrier, and have, for today, nailed a formula to appeal to the political center.
The story for '08 will beif that center holds. Losing a national election in the fashion that the GOP has is necessarily a time of identity crisis for the losing party. The question right now for the GOP is simply "who are we?" For 5 years the GOP's definitive identity has been strength in the war on terror. Due to a confluence of circumstances, that identity does not have the traction it once did (the reasons why would make an interesting debate for another day). The GOP is now tasked with the inevitable political chore of redifining itself to correspond with the chamging political landscape. To do so successfully it must negotiate some tensions within its own ranks, having to do with the aforementioned radicalized elements and the political center. To cut to the chase, the GOP must make the most difficult decision it has made in some time, ie. parting ways with the Rovean politics that has empowered its hold on the majority and the oval office for the past 6years. Hilary Clinton is oft criticized as a polarizing figure, but shehas nothing on Mr. Rove, whose avowed strategies are energizing the GOPbase and getting just enough moderate votes to hold power. This strategy worked like a charm for 5 years. But the landscape has, as ever, shifted, and I don't believe that Rove, as powerful a strategistas he has been, has shifted with it. Rove was an (evil) genius for a time, but his performance this year makes it highly dobtful that he can lead theGOP to victory in '08. His art does not capture the center.
On a final note, I believe the McCain or Guiliani campaigns are moretroubled than appears on the surface. I don't see how either of them appeal to the GOP base without alienating the very centrists who give them their crossover appeal. Perhaps a lesser known mainstream conservative like Romney is a safer bet to capture the center. As for me, where do I get an Obama '08 sticker? His politics may not be centrist, but I believe he has the charisma to make up for that with thevoters. Time will tell....
There are many lessons to be drawn from this election. As everyone acknowledges, it is a rebuke from the American public for the current war in Iraq, where we are in the ultimate damned if we do damned if we don't situation; As I heard it said on the radio this morning, there is not much support for bringing the troops home immediately because it would probably make things even worse, but at the same time there is not much support for keeping the troops there much longer because they don't seem to be making things any better. So the vote had less to do with arguments about what to do next than it did with frustration at the Bush administration for putting us between this rock and a hard place.
But there is more to it than that. Bush's fatal political mistake this year, one he belatedly attempted to correct in the final weeks of the campaign when he publicly disavowed his "stay the course" rhetoric, was an inability to connect with the American public about the reality of the situation on the ground in Iraq. The American public might have been able to stomach the situation in Iraq if Bush had more effectively over the past year acknowledged the problems with the military campaign and called upon America to make the difficult but important step (from his perspective) of continued sacrifice to overcomethe setbacks in Iraq. But Bush until very recently, when it was already too late politically, continued to paint a rosy picture of progress and approaching victory in Iraq that was out of joint with the actualsituation on the ground. The American public was left with two possible conclusions. Either their President was not being straight with them, or their President was ignoring reality. I believe that this impression, from the American public's perspective, was as much if not more important in this election than the actual state of the war inIraq.
Another problem the GOP had in this election cycle was the taint of scandal. Democrats are as prone to scandal as Republicans, but this time it was almost exclusively the Republicans who got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the GOP has had its hands on the steering wheel for the past 12years in Congress, and as we all know "absolute power corrupts absolutely...."
But astute observers of this election will realize that there was more to this election than just GOP gaffes. Bill Clinton's political genius was his ability to capture the political center. The party that captures that political center is the party that will lead in America, and in this election the Dems exhibited a renewed capacity for holding the center. They strategically ran candidates in conservative strongholds that allowed them to win House and Senate races in places like Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Montana. The radicalized bases in both parties make it difficult for both of them to hold to the center for extended periods of time, so usually the center goes to the party that is hungrier. Right now the Dems are hungrier, and have, for today, nailed a formula to appeal to the political center.
The story for '08 will beif that center holds. Losing a national election in the fashion that the GOP has is necessarily a time of identity crisis for the losing party. The question right now for the GOP is simply "who are we?" For 5 years the GOP's definitive identity has been strength in the war on terror. Due to a confluence of circumstances, that identity does not have the traction it once did (the reasons why would make an interesting debate for another day). The GOP is now tasked with the inevitable political chore of redifining itself to correspond with the chamging political landscape. To do so successfully it must negotiate some tensions within its own ranks, having to do with the aforementioned radicalized elements and the political center. To cut to the chase, the GOP must make the most difficult decision it has made in some time, ie. parting ways with the Rovean politics that has empowered its hold on the majority and the oval office for the past 6years. Hilary Clinton is oft criticized as a polarizing figure, but shehas nothing on Mr. Rove, whose avowed strategies are energizing the GOPbase and getting just enough moderate votes to hold power. This strategy worked like a charm for 5 years. But the landscape has, as ever, shifted, and I don't believe that Rove, as powerful a strategistas he has been, has shifted with it. Rove was an (evil) genius for a time, but his performance this year makes it highly dobtful that he can lead theGOP to victory in '08. His art does not capture the center.
On a final note, I believe the McCain or Guiliani campaigns are moretroubled than appears on the surface. I don't see how either of them appeal to the GOP base without alienating the very centrists who give them their crossover appeal. Perhaps a lesser known mainstream conservative like Romney is a safer bet to capture the center. As for me, where do I get an Obama '08 sticker? His politics may not be centrist, but I believe he has the charisma to make up for that with thevoters. Time will tell....
Some Recent Thoughts on Religion
Here are some of the religious questions I have been wrestling with:
The Jewish messianic expectation that shapes how we encounter Jesus. In my opinion Jesus did invite those who would follow his way into a new kind of relationship with God. Jesus’ relationship with God was real, but because Jesus was a cultural human being existing within his Jewish milieu, the depth of his relationship with God led him to the only meaningful conclusion within his experiential framework. For Jesus to encounter God as he did, and to draw others into this relationship along with him, was to live out messiah-ship, to coin a phrase. But in casting Jesus as messiah outside of his time-bound Jewish cultural framework, the only framework in which it really makes sense, we are stuck with an image frozen in time, and we lose the, in my humble opinion, deeper significance of what Jesus accomplished, which is to draw us into deeper relationship with God. Jesus as messiah is, then, a cultural anachronism that is more hindrance than aid, as it fixes Jesus as something otherworldy, strange and supernatural when Jesus’ project and meaning is really about that closest reality of all, everyday waking life.
The meaning of the resurrection. Anyone engaged with Christianity has to come to terms with this. I prefer to leave it clouded in mystery as historical event. But the meaning to me is clear, as victory over suffering, evil, and their trump card, death. Whatever the events actually occurred that have come to be known as the resurrection, what was accomplished was that the relationship with God that had been opened by Jesus, Jesus’ continuing role as guide, our continuing opportunity to experience this relationship, was in no way defeated by the evil, suffering, and death suffered by Jesus. The resurrection symbolizes that our guide Jesus is with us still, that our relationship with God is intact in the face of ongoing evil, suffering, and death, and that to relate to God through our guide Jesus is to partake of this eternal life guaranteed by the resurrection. The actual literal events of the resurrection, if recorded on videotape, probably would appear to have little to do with this victory.
Here’s where the going gets choppy: The Christian claim that God acted decisively in human history through the life and resurrection of Jesus. Christianity gets into even more trouble than it does with its messiah-trip when it goes on its “final answer” trip. I am irredeemably from the one truth, many paths spiritual school. I get off the Christian bus whenever it makes any exclusive truth claims. Jesus’ truth was to draw us into relationship with God, not to proscribe what form that relationship must take. Unfortunately the Christian “God acting decisively…” claim falls far too easily into this dismal trap, and this Christian claim is the albatross wrapped around the faith’s neck, with appalling evangelism its foremost symptom. I don’t see how you separate Christianity as it is preached and practiced from this claim, and I don’t see a way forward for Christianity as a helpful religion without extracting the church from this claim. Like it or not, saying that God acted decisively through Jesus elevates the Christian’s spiritual life above others. Of course, the old all-religions-are-equal solution is equally unsatisfying, because if that is the case then why bother practicing any of them, it would seem to be little more important than picking your favorite flavor of ice cream. This problem is the question for religion in the 21st century. If we do not find a creative answer to it all that shall be left of religion by the end of the century will be warring fundamentalisms. This question haunts me every day.
The second coming. Sorry, Jesus is not coming back. Jesus, our guide to relationship with God, will rejoin us when we on earth rejoin him by following the path to God’s kingdom that he pointed us towards. Jesus lives eternally on this path, and we will meet him again together when we make it a good bit further down this path. A problem for Christianity is pushing the work of salvation work onto Jesus. I disagree that the world is broken, only to be saved by Jesus. Whatever is broken is only going to be fixed by us chickens. “Savior” imagery must give way to “guide” imagery if Christians are to contribute to that work. Jesus points the way, but we must walk it.
Here are some of the religious questions I have been wrestling with:
The Jewish messianic expectation that shapes how we encounter Jesus. In my opinion Jesus did invite those who would follow his way into a new kind of relationship with God. Jesus’ relationship with God was real, but because Jesus was a cultural human being existing within his Jewish milieu, the depth of his relationship with God led him to the only meaningful conclusion within his experiential framework. For Jesus to encounter God as he did, and to draw others into this relationship along with him, was to live out messiah-ship, to coin a phrase. But in casting Jesus as messiah outside of his time-bound Jewish cultural framework, the only framework in which it really makes sense, we are stuck with an image frozen in time, and we lose the, in my humble opinion, deeper significance of what Jesus accomplished, which is to draw us into deeper relationship with God. Jesus as messiah is, then, a cultural anachronism that is more hindrance than aid, as it fixes Jesus as something otherworldy, strange and supernatural when Jesus’ project and meaning is really about that closest reality of all, everyday waking life.
The meaning of the resurrection. Anyone engaged with Christianity has to come to terms with this. I prefer to leave it clouded in mystery as historical event. But the meaning to me is clear, as victory over suffering, evil, and their trump card, death. Whatever the events actually occurred that have come to be known as the resurrection, what was accomplished was that the relationship with God that had been opened by Jesus, Jesus’ continuing role as guide, our continuing opportunity to experience this relationship, was in no way defeated by the evil, suffering, and death suffered by Jesus. The resurrection symbolizes that our guide Jesus is with us still, that our relationship with God is intact in the face of ongoing evil, suffering, and death, and that to relate to God through our guide Jesus is to partake of this eternal life guaranteed by the resurrection. The actual literal events of the resurrection, if recorded on videotape, probably would appear to have little to do with this victory.
Here’s where the going gets choppy: The Christian claim that God acted decisively in human history through the life and resurrection of Jesus. Christianity gets into even more trouble than it does with its messiah-trip when it goes on its “final answer” trip. I am irredeemably from the one truth, many paths spiritual school. I get off the Christian bus whenever it makes any exclusive truth claims. Jesus’ truth was to draw us into relationship with God, not to proscribe what form that relationship must take. Unfortunately the Christian “God acting decisively…” claim falls far too easily into this dismal trap, and this Christian claim is the albatross wrapped around the faith’s neck, with appalling evangelism its foremost symptom. I don’t see how you separate Christianity as it is preached and practiced from this claim, and I don’t see a way forward for Christianity as a helpful religion without extracting the church from this claim. Like it or not, saying that God acted decisively through Jesus elevates the Christian’s spiritual life above others. Of course, the old all-religions-are-equal solution is equally unsatisfying, because if that is the case then why bother practicing any of them, it would seem to be little more important than picking your favorite flavor of ice cream. This problem is the question for religion in the 21st century. If we do not find a creative answer to it all that shall be left of religion by the end of the century will be warring fundamentalisms. This question haunts me every day.
The second coming. Sorry, Jesus is not coming back. Jesus, our guide to relationship with God, will rejoin us when we on earth rejoin him by following the path to God’s kingdom that he pointed us towards. Jesus lives eternally on this path, and we will meet him again together when we make it a good bit further down this path. A problem for Christianity is pushing the work of salvation work onto Jesus. I disagree that the world is broken, only to be saved by Jesus. Whatever is broken is only going to be fixed by us chickens. “Savior” imagery must give way to “guide” imagery if Christians are to contribute to that work. Jesus points the way, but we must walk it.
Friday, March 24, 2006
TAP WATER OF LIFE
As I write this I am sipping on a glass of unfiltered tap water. And I am not keeling over and dying. This may come as a shock to you if, like most Americans, you would sooner drink warm, flat, diet caffeine free RC cola from your deceased grandmother’s attic than tap water, and consider it the healthier choice to boot. Drinking tap water is to the twenty-first century what bloodletting was to the twentieth century, a previously mainstream practice that everyone now recognizes as hazardous and, if taken too far, potentially fatal. Our enlightenment as to the dangers of tap water has coincided with the meteoric rise of bottled water. Since the breakthrough in plastics technology in the mid 1980’s that allowed the safe, convenient distribution of the single-serving translucent water-baring vessel, bottled water has saved millions of American lives from the silent killer lurking in our kitchen sinks and garden hoses. How else to account for the fact that in 2004 Americans purchased 26 billion liters of a liquid that they can get virtually free nearly everywhere they go? But since we all know that tap water will not really kill or even harm you, at least in America, the obvious question is why. Why, when we are willing to risk running out of gas to drive across town to save 2 cents per gallon, will we then go into the gas station quik-mart and pay a buck-fifty for something we can get for free from the sink in the quik-mart bathroom about twenty feet away?
Of course, another obvious question is why bother asking the first question this late in the game? Bottled water is now so visible it has attained the invisibility of the taken-for-granted; the average American now drinks an eight ounce “glass” of bottled water every day. We do not even see bottled water as bottled water anymore, we just see it as water. It no longer occurs to us that we are paying for something that we can still get for free. Bottled water’s transformation into water reflects a shift in American consciousness that dates back to the emergence of mainstream bottled water in the ‘80’s, but in twenty-five years is already so deep-rooted that it has made our consumption of bottled water nothing less than automatic. We would rather buy water than get it for free because we now automatically believe we are getting something when we buy bottled water that we don’t get out of the tap. The question of why we line up to pay 10,000 times more for a bottle of water than a glass of tap (according to Wikipedia) is important only if it is a springboard to understanding what we think we are getting in those plastic bottles. The new American consciousness desires to pay for what is free; how did this genie get out of, or should I say in, the bottle?
To understand what Americans are really buying when they pay for their bottled water one must first apprehend the central place that water holds in the western psyche. Water is used for purifying and cleansing rituals in two of the four major western religions, Judaism and Islam. But for those two western religions that shape the American consciousness, Christianity and Empiricism, the potency of water is revealed by both faiths’ vision of a “water of life.” Water is, symbolically, life itself. For Christians, water even exceeds life as Eternal Life (which I translate as living in God’s Kingdom in this moment here on Earth): “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water which I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John 4:14) The Christian journey into the eternal life of God’s Kingdom “right here, right now”, to quote early ‘90’s one-hit-wonders Jesus Jones, begins, of course, with baptismal immersion into water. To be born into the eternal life of Christianity is literally to be dipped into the water of life.
There is no greater challenge, and nothing more important in a Christian life than taking up the Gospel admonition to “love thine enemy.” But this Gospel teaching obtains because God’s love, symbolized as the light of the sun and the water of rain (which is a blessing in the sense of rain for your crops, and not, as often misinterpreted, a curse in the sense of “rain, rain, go away”) reaches all, even one’s enemies: “You have heard that it was said ‘love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:43-45) To live is to bathe in the blessing of God’s rain. Every act of hate, even against a deserving enemy (and there are no shortage of those in this world), is one step further into an arid dessert while God’s Kingdom is a rain forest. If God Is Love, and all life is a product of God’s love, then to drink from the water of life is to draw sustenance from the very source of life, eternal or otherwise.
But if water is central to the symbolic universe of the Christian religion, it is equally important for its rival claimant to the American consciousness. I place Empiricism, that soulless offspring of the western “Enlightenment”, alongside Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as the fourth major western religion because it’s scientific discoveries are a distant second to its primary function as a culture-bound belief system. The recent “Intelligent Design” debate illustrates how incompatible the dueling belief systems of Empiricism and Christianity have become as now predominately practiced, which is to say that they have both mutated into closed, fundamentalist belief systems. As such, they are both useless to a would-be Good Society, and have reduced us all to bickering over whose reductionist, fundamentalist worldview gets to be taught in our rag-tag public schools. The boundary between healthy religion and empiricism is blurry, and a Good Society would encourage its students to engage with the shades of gray rather than build a Berlin Wall between the two. Albert Einstein, our greatest scientist, perceived this blur: “I have found no better expression than ‘religious’ for confidence in the rational nature of reality, insofar as it is accessible to human reason. Whenever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism.”
Welcome to uninspired empiricism. And just as the water of life feeds the spiritual beings of Christianity, it likewise nourishes the biological beings of empirical science. Water is, if anything, even more central to the empirical view of life than its spiritual counterpart. Biological beings don’t just drink from the water of life, they are the water of life. We have all heard the statistic about how the human body is approximately 180% water in composition, with the corollary injunction to drink 39 eight ounce glasses of water per day (it was not until I began my current job in a hospital that I learned that drinking water by the gallon could actually kill you; we watch our heavy water drinkers like hawks so that they don’t dilute their bodies’ sodium levels to fatal levels- think about that the next time you are on your fifth one-liter bottle of Evian of the day). But as the empiricists adore nothing more than facts, I found this rather succinct passage that nicely captures the fact that we are basically walking water balloons:
“Water is of major importance to all living things; in some organisms, up to 90 percent of their body weight comes from water. Up to 60 percent of the human body is water, the brain is composed of 70 percent water, blood is 82 percent water, and the lungs are nearly 90 percent water. The unique qualities and properties of water are what make it so important and basic to life. The cells in our bodies are full of water. The excellent ability of water to dissolve so many substances allows our cells to use valuable nutrients, minerals, and chemicals in biological processes. Water's ‘stickiness’ (from surface tension) plays a part in our body's ability to transport these elements all through ourselves. The carbohydrates and proteins that our bodies use as food are metabolised and transported by water in the bloodstream. No less important is the ability of water to transport waste material out of our bodies.” (Interestingly, I found this passage at www.reiki.nu, a website devoted to the practice of reiki. Reiki is a healing tradition which straddles the boundaries between science, as evidenced by its empirical take on water, and spirituality, as its therapy is basically a “laying on of hands” as we would call it in the Episcopal Church. Although, as I understand it, there is no actual touching in reiki, but the healing does transpire between the healer’s hands and the patient’s body. I have no firsthand knowledge of the “empirical” benefits of reiki, unlike my straight teeth, which were incontrovertibly courtesy of my halitosis-plagued orthodontist. But the idea of reiki as I understand it, the blending of empirical scientific knowledge with a recognition of humans as spiritual beings, is exactly the kind of marriage between Science and Religion that is unimaginable to everyday, mainstream America. In our current climate your full buffet of choices is between being either a practicing religious nutball who, if you don’t shoot abortion clinic doctors yourself, regularly lunches with them, or being Mr. Spock, only without his gift for mind-melding or neck-pinching prowess, i.e. all the logic and none of the sex appeal. So even if reiki is as empirically therapeutic as a tanning salon, the reiki people are definitely on to something, which is basically the possibility that the human race lives out the 21st century.)
Water also has a key secondary meaning in the symbolic world of empiricism. This identity reached full bloom with the broadcast on NBC in 1983 of the science fiction Miniseries V. V was your basic aliens-invade-Earth-to-eat-the-humans sci-fi fare, but with a twist. In addition to dining on Earth’s multiethnic population cum cuisine, the “visitors” also wanted our water, to be hauled away in their super-sized flying saucers. V, in addition to offering grade-A network TV entertainment (how I long for the days of network mini-series as cultural event amidst the current TV dessert of the real(ity)), cemented water’s status as Precious Resource. With this move, the empirical worldview, having laid the foundation of the body, or the internal, as water, now linked the “environment”, or the external, to water in similarly concrete fashion. The biological future of our bodies as water, i.e. the future of our very selves, became intrinsically connected to the future of the Precious Resource.
Salvation is just as real for the empirical worldview as it is for the Christian worldview. But unlike Christians, who would save us by saving our souls, empiricists will save us by saving our water (just to spell it out, remember, we are made from water- saving our water is literally saving us). Of course, empiricists must keep their need for salvation hidden from themselves (much like how as a Carolina fan I bury my need for Duke beneath a mountain of hate for Duke; Carolina fans all acknowledge that we can’t live with Duke, but we are all in denial of the fact that we can’t live without Duke). Empiricists hide their thirst for salvation in the best hiding place of all, the English language. On its website the United Nations preaches a little of the empirical Gospel: “Water is essential for life. Water is crucial for sustainable development, including the preservation of our natural environment and the alleviation of poverty and hunger. Water is indispensable for human health and well being.” The last line is invisible, but you can see it nonetheless. It reads “water will save us all”. Codewords like “sustainable development” and “the alleviation of poverty and hunger” are the empiricist’s equivalent of God’s Kingdom realized here on Earth (and with the way things are going they are as realistic as Jesus’ second coming).
Apparently, like the Millenarians, the Empiricists at the UN believe the time for salvation is already here, as they have declared the “International Decade for Action: Water For Life, 2005 to 2015.” But just as the year 2000 came and went for the Millenarians without the anticipated Rapture, the Decade for Action will leave the Empiricists struggling with a world still very much in crisis. Fundamentalist Christians and Empiricists are, ironically, in the same boat together. This boat sits on a lake of symbolic water, and, with passengers unable to compromise, it is taking on that water at an alarming rate. Perhaps if we all drink enough bottled water we can bail the boat out.
We are, indeed, up to something with all of this bottled water, and it does have something to do with salvation. Only it is a kind of salvation that neither the Christians nor the Empiricists had planned for us. Which, having sounded water’s depths for both Christianity and Empiricism, brings us back to the question of what we think we are getting in the bottle that does not flow from the tap. If one understands that Christianity and Empiricism, the bickering fraternal twins that divide the American mind, both regard water as life, then the necessary conclusion is that the act of purchasing a bottle of water is, symbolically, the attempt to purchase life.
This unsettling conclusion relates similarly to both the empirical and spiritual worldviews, as long as we remember that the Empiricists are every bit as on about salvation as the Christians. In order to streamline the discussion I am going to collapse the Christians and the Empiricists into one camp, a move that rests on my argument that the “saved” condition that the UN’s water-smitten Empiricists describe above is also a de facto state of grace. Just as Marx’s classless society was always just religion for atheists, the Empiricists’ vision of the salvation of and, implicitly, by water is a messianic movement for the secular (It is a testament to the potency of Jewish spiritual thinking that, try as we might, westerners are unable to get over the Messiah thing; it matters not whether the messiah is Jesus Christ, classless society, or H2O, we all just need to be saved.).
To get a better sense of the public act of bottled water consumption requires that we go behind closed doors. Bottled water’s first cousin, filtered water, is every bit as prominent inside the American home as bottled water is in the public square (To give a sense of how my home functions, my wife purchased a water-filter/water-pitcher, the kind any normal person never changes the filter on, at some point in the last eighteen months. I have not seen it since the day she brought it home from Target. It may be in that secret part of the house I have no access to where my wife also keeps all of my socks.) The act of filtering water in the home is the most important clue to solving the mystery of bottled water (and yes, I do fancy Miss Scarlet). Since American tap water, by and large, does not need to be filtered to be safely consumed, the act of filtering water is almost entirely symbolic. The water we get out of our taps at home or out of drinking fountains or sinks in public is not physically unhealthy. But it is, as all of our filtered and bottled water attests, truly repulsive. Tap water, 99% of which has no discoloration or aftertaste issues (in fact, according to Wikipedia, “a lot of the bottled water is actually very close to, or in fact is, tap water”), is repulsive because of the very fact that it is free. This interpretation comes into focus with our handy clue, filtered water.
Filtering water is a ritual of purification. Again, since American tap water does not need to be purified of any physically harmful content, the question remains as to what is being filtered out. The water of life that flows out of our taps is free, the equivalent of a gift. Quenching our thirst from the tap-water of life is drinking life as a gift, as a blessing, as grace that can be granted but never earned. Drinking free, healthy tap water is a powerful symbolic act. It links us directly to the source from which it flows, sans intermediary, and it links us to one another, as we all drink from the same source when we drink tap water. The act of drinking tap water is, symbolically, accepting that life is a gift of love, and is, at the same time, the choice to receive this gift in humble gratitude. The act of filtering tap water is symbolically the act of purifying the water by removing the state of grace.
I have said more than once that Christianity and Empiricism are dueling for the hearts and minds of America. This is, actually, abundantly false. They are both pretenders to a throne already buckling under the fat ass of American Consumerism, the fifth and final major western religion. It is America’s fundamentalist faith in Consumerism that makes the purification of tap water, via the filtration of any trace of grace, an act of salvation. The act of choosing to receive the freely given gift of grace is, by the logic of Consumerism, sinful, impure. We still like to believe the Beatles when we hear their anachronistic lyrics: “money can’t buy me love”. Consumerism knows differently, that love can only be bought. Love freely given and received has been made into an impure love. This type of love, the kind symbolized by the water flowing from our taps, must be purified. You don’t do anything chemically significant to water when you run it through your twelve dollar Target charcoal filter/pitcher. But, by running your tap water through that cheap plastic merchandise, you are processing your water through the marketplace. Like Holy Communion which symbolically transforms wine into the Blood of Christ, the filtration of tap water is a transfiguration of a free, i.e. repulsive, tap- water of life into a potable, i.e. commodified, form. Water that has been purified is water that has been Saved.
The salvation of water that begins with the sacrament of filtration is completed by the sacrament of bottling. Processing water through the marketplace, as one does with the variety of store-bought filters (someone who hooks up one of those expensive gadget filters directly to the tap displays more religious fervor than your cheap charcoal filter/pitcher type, but they are praying to the same God) is not enough. The water of life must not only be purified, it must be contained, which is literally accomplished every time a plastic screw-top tightens down on a bottle of water. Even better, bottling water for sale irrevocably marks the water of life as property that can be bought and sold. Bottling, then, is actually the final step in the filtration process. The water of life is completely purified of repulsive grace once it is bottled and tagged with a price. Bottled water says, yes, you can buy me love. In fact, bottled water tells us that in 21st century America, true, or pure love can only be bought.
It turns out the Millenerians may have been on to something after all. Bottled water consumption grew steadily since the mid-1980’s, but in the years bracketing the turn of the millennium, from 1994 to 2004, bottled water sales shot through the roof with a 75% increase (according to data available at www.wcponline.com). The sheer tonnage of bottled water, in addition to the billions of gallons filtered in the home, indicate that a cultural tipping point has been passed. The Millenerians may have expected the end of the material world, but they unwittingly witnessed the end of the world as we know it. The Beatles’ world has given way to REM’s, who saw the end of the world coming in 1987, right when bottled water began to seep up all around us. The world has come to an end, but like REM, we all seem to feel fine. Perhaps because we are all so well hydrated. Or maybe because we really believe that true love in a bottle is only ever $1.50 away.
I would like to think that the glass of tap water I drank at the beginning of this essay was an act of rebellion. Maybe it was no accident that my wife brought home the water filter, and that it sits unused, but lurking, somewhere (beneath my socks). This tenuous situation symbolizes how close we are at all times to being seduced by the belief that you get (only) what you pay for. But every glass of tap water is a testament to the old-timey religion that this “intermarried” Jewish/Christian couple can agree on: the best things in life are free.
As I write this I am sipping on a glass of unfiltered tap water. And I am not keeling over and dying. This may come as a shock to you if, like most Americans, you would sooner drink warm, flat, diet caffeine free RC cola from your deceased grandmother’s attic than tap water, and consider it the healthier choice to boot. Drinking tap water is to the twenty-first century what bloodletting was to the twentieth century, a previously mainstream practice that everyone now recognizes as hazardous and, if taken too far, potentially fatal. Our enlightenment as to the dangers of tap water has coincided with the meteoric rise of bottled water. Since the breakthrough in plastics technology in the mid 1980’s that allowed the safe, convenient distribution of the single-serving translucent water-baring vessel, bottled water has saved millions of American lives from the silent killer lurking in our kitchen sinks and garden hoses. How else to account for the fact that in 2004 Americans purchased 26 billion liters of a liquid that they can get virtually free nearly everywhere they go? But since we all know that tap water will not really kill or even harm you, at least in America, the obvious question is why. Why, when we are willing to risk running out of gas to drive across town to save 2 cents per gallon, will we then go into the gas station quik-mart and pay a buck-fifty for something we can get for free from the sink in the quik-mart bathroom about twenty feet away?
Of course, another obvious question is why bother asking the first question this late in the game? Bottled water is now so visible it has attained the invisibility of the taken-for-granted; the average American now drinks an eight ounce “glass” of bottled water every day. We do not even see bottled water as bottled water anymore, we just see it as water. It no longer occurs to us that we are paying for something that we can still get for free. Bottled water’s transformation into water reflects a shift in American consciousness that dates back to the emergence of mainstream bottled water in the ‘80’s, but in twenty-five years is already so deep-rooted that it has made our consumption of bottled water nothing less than automatic. We would rather buy water than get it for free because we now automatically believe we are getting something when we buy bottled water that we don’t get out of the tap. The question of why we line up to pay 10,000 times more for a bottle of water than a glass of tap (according to Wikipedia) is important only if it is a springboard to understanding what we think we are getting in those plastic bottles. The new American consciousness desires to pay for what is free; how did this genie get out of, or should I say in, the bottle?
To understand what Americans are really buying when they pay for their bottled water one must first apprehend the central place that water holds in the western psyche. Water is used for purifying and cleansing rituals in two of the four major western religions, Judaism and Islam. But for those two western religions that shape the American consciousness, Christianity and Empiricism, the potency of water is revealed by both faiths’ vision of a “water of life.” Water is, symbolically, life itself. For Christians, water even exceeds life as Eternal Life (which I translate as living in God’s Kingdom in this moment here on Earth): “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water which I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John 4:14) The Christian journey into the eternal life of God’s Kingdom “right here, right now”, to quote early ‘90’s one-hit-wonders Jesus Jones, begins, of course, with baptismal immersion into water. To be born into the eternal life of Christianity is literally to be dipped into the water of life.
There is no greater challenge, and nothing more important in a Christian life than taking up the Gospel admonition to “love thine enemy.” But this Gospel teaching obtains because God’s love, symbolized as the light of the sun and the water of rain (which is a blessing in the sense of rain for your crops, and not, as often misinterpreted, a curse in the sense of “rain, rain, go away”) reaches all, even one’s enemies: “You have heard that it was said ‘love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:43-45) To live is to bathe in the blessing of God’s rain. Every act of hate, even against a deserving enemy (and there are no shortage of those in this world), is one step further into an arid dessert while God’s Kingdom is a rain forest. If God Is Love, and all life is a product of God’s love, then to drink from the water of life is to draw sustenance from the very source of life, eternal or otherwise.
But if water is central to the symbolic universe of the Christian religion, it is equally important for its rival claimant to the American consciousness. I place Empiricism, that soulless offspring of the western “Enlightenment”, alongside Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as the fourth major western religion because it’s scientific discoveries are a distant second to its primary function as a culture-bound belief system. The recent “Intelligent Design” debate illustrates how incompatible the dueling belief systems of Empiricism and Christianity have become as now predominately practiced, which is to say that they have both mutated into closed, fundamentalist belief systems. As such, they are both useless to a would-be Good Society, and have reduced us all to bickering over whose reductionist, fundamentalist worldview gets to be taught in our rag-tag public schools. The boundary between healthy religion and empiricism is blurry, and a Good Society would encourage its students to engage with the shades of gray rather than build a Berlin Wall between the two. Albert Einstein, our greatest scientist, perceived this blur: “I have found no better expression than ‘religious’ for confidence in the rational nature of reality, insofar as it is accessible to human reason. Whenever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism.”
Welcome to uninspired empiricism. And just as the water of life feeds the spiritual beings of Christianity, it likewise nourishes the biological beings of empirical science. Water is, if anything, even more central to the empirical view of life than its spiritual counterpart. Biological beings don’t just drink from the water of life, they are the water of life. We have all heard the statistic about how the human body is approximately 180% water in composition, with the corollary injunction to drink 39 eight ounce glasses of water per day (it was not until I began my current job in a hospital that I learned that drinking water by the gallon could actually kill you; we watch our heavy water drinkers like hawks so that they don’t dilute their bodies’ sodium levels to fatal levels- think about that the next time you are on your fifth one-liter bottle of Evian of the day). But as the empiricists adore nothing more than facts, I found this rather succinct passage that nicely captures the fact that we are basically walking water balloons:
“Water is of major importance to all living things; in some organisms, up to 90 percent of their body weight comes from water. Up to 60 percent of the human body is water, the brain is composed of 70 percent water, blood is 82 percent water, and the lungs are nearly 90 percent water. The unique qualities and properties of water are what make it so important and basic to life. The cells in our bodies are full of water. The excellent ability of water to dissolve so many substances allows our cells to use valuable nutrients, minerals, and chemicals in biological processes. Water's ‘stickiness’ (from surface tension) plays a part in our body's ability to transport these elements all through ourselves. The carbohydrates and proteins that our bodies use as food are metabolised and transported by water in the bloodstream. No less important is the ability of water to transport waste material out of our bodies.” (Interestingly, I found this passage at www.reiki.nu, a website devoted to the practice of reiki. Reiki is a healing tradition which straddles the boundaries between science, as evidenced by its empirical take on water, and spirituality, as its therapy is basically a “laying on of hands” as we would call it in the Episcopal Church. Although, as I understand it, there is no actual touching in reiki, but the healing does transpire between the healer’s hands and the patient’s body. I have no firsthand knowledge of the “empirical” benefits of reiki, unlike my straight teeth, which were incontrovertibly courtesy of my halitosis-plagued orthodontist. But the idea of reiki as I understand it, the blending of empirical scientific knowledge with a recognition of humans as spiritual beings, is exactly the kind of marriage between Science and Religion that is unimaginable to everyday, mainstream America. In our current climate your full buffet of choices is between being either a practicing religious nutball who, if you don’t shoot abortion clinic doctors yourself, regularly lunches with them, or being Mr. Spock, only without his gift for mind-melding or neck-pinching prowess, i.e. all the logic and none of the sex appeal. So even if reiki is as empirically therapeutic as a tanning salon, the reiki people are definitely on to something, which is basically the possibility that the human race lives out the 21st century.)
Water also has a key secondary meaning in the symbolic world of empiricism. This identity reached full bloom with the broadcast on NBC in 1983 of the science fiction Miniseries V. V was your basic aliens-invade-Earth-to-eat-the-humans sci-fi fare, but with a twist. In addition to dining on Earth’s multiethnic population cum cuisine, the “visitors” also wanted our water, to be hauled away in their super-sized flying saucers. V, in addition to offering grade-A network TV entertainment (how I long for the days of network mini-series as cultural event amidst the current TV dessert of the real(ity)), cemented water’s status as Precious Resource. With this move, the empirical worldview, having laid the foundation of the body, or the internal, as water, now linked the “environment”, or the external, to water in similarly concrete fashion. The biological future of our bodies as water, i.e. the future of our very selves, became intrinsically connected to the future of the Precious Resource.
Salvation is just as real for the empirical worldview as it is for the Christian worldview. But unlike Christians, who would save us by saving our souls, empiricists will save us by saving our water (just to spell it out, remember, we are made from water- saving our water is literally saving us). Of course, empiricists must keep their need for salvation hidden from themselves (much like how as a Carolina fan I bury my need for Duke beneath a mountain of hate for Duke; Carolina fans all acknowledge that we can’t live with Duke, but we are all in denial of the fact that we can’t live without Duke). Empiricists hide their thirst for salvation in the best hiding place of all, the English language. On its website the United Nations preaches a little of the empirical Gospel: “Water is essential for life. Water is crucial for sustainable development, including the preservation of our natural environment and the alleviation of poverty and hunger. Water is indispensable for human health and well being.” The last line is invisible, but you can see it nonetheless. It reads “water will save us all”. Codewords like “sustainable development” and “the alleviation of poverty and hunger” are the empiricist’s equivalent of God’s Kingdom realized here on Earth (and with the way things are going they are as realistic as Jesus’ second coming).
Apparently, like the Millenarians, the Empiricists at the UN believe the time for salvation is already here, as they have declared the “International Decade for Action: Water For Life, 2005 to 2015.” But just as the year 2000 came and went for the Millenarians without the anticipated Rapture, the Decade for Action will leave the Empiricists struggling with a world still very much in crisis. Fundamentalist Christians and Empiricists are, ironically, in the same boat together. This boat sits on a lake of symbolic water, and, with passengers unable to compromise, it is taking on that water at an alarming rate. Perhaps if we all drink enough bottled water we can bail the boat out.
We are, indeed, up to something with all of this bottled water, and it does have something to do with salvation. Only it is a kind of salvation that neither the Christians nor the Empiricists had planned for us. Which, having sounded water’s depths for both Christianity and Empiricism, brings us back to the question of what we think we are getting in the bottle that does not flow from the tap. If one understands that Christianity and Empiricism, the bickering fraternal twins that divide the American mind, both regard water as life, then the necessary conclusion is that the act of purchasing a bottle of water is, symbolically, the attempt to purchase life.
This unsettling conclusion relates similarly to both the empirical and spiritual worldviews, as long as we remember that the Empiricists are every bit as on about salvation as the Christians. In order to streamline the discussion I am going to collapse the Christians and the Empiricists into one camp, a move that rests on my argument that the “saved” condition that the UN’s water-smitten Empiricists describe above is also a de facto state of grace. Just as Marx’s classless society was always just religion for atheists, the Empiricists’ vision of the salvation of and, implicitly, by water is a messianic movement for the secular (It is a testament to the potency of Jewish spiritual thinking that, try as we might, westerners are unable to get over the Messiah thing; it matters not whether the messiah is Jesus Christ, classless society, or H2O, we all just need to be saved.).
To get a better sense of the public act of bottled water consumption requires that we go behind closed doors. Bottled water’s first cousin, filtered water, is every bit as prominent inside the American home as bottled water is in the public square (To give a sense of how my home functions, my wife purchased a water-filter/water-pitcher, the kind any normal person never changes the filter on, at some point in the last eighteen months. I have not seen it since the day she brought it home from Target. It may be in that secret part of the house I have no access to where my wife also keeps all of my socks.) The act of filtering water in the home is the most important clue to solving the mystery of bottled water (and yes, I do fancy Miss Scarlet). Since American tap water, by and large, does not need to be filtered to be safely consumed, the act of filtering water is almost entirely symbolic. The water we get out of our taps at home or out of drinking fountains or sinks in public is not physically unhealthy. But it is, as all of our filtered and bottled water attests, truly repulsive. Tap water, 99% of which has no discoloration or aftertaste issues (in fact, according to Wikipedia, “a lot of the bottled water is actually very close to, or in fact is, tap water”), is repulsive because of the very fact that it is free. This interpretation comes into focus with our handy clue, filtered water.
Filtering water is a ritual of purification. Again, since American tap water does not need to be purified of any physically harmful content, the question remains as to what is being filtered out. The water of life that flows out of our taps is free, the equivalent of a gift. Quenching our thirst from the tap-water of life is drinking life as a gift, as a blessing, as grace that can be granted but never earned. Drinking free, healthy tap water is a powerful symbolic act. It links us directly to the source from which it flows, sans intermediary, and it links us to one another, as we all drink from the same source when we drink tap water. The act of drinking tap water is, symbolically, accepting that life is a gift of love, and is, at the same time, the choice to receive this gift in humble gratitude. The act of filtering tap water is symbolically the act of purifying the water by removing the state of grace.
I have said more than once that Christianity and Empiricism are dueling for the hearts and minds of America. This is, actually, abundantly false. They are both pretenders to a throne already buckling under the fat ass of American Consumerism, the fifth and final major western religion. It is America’s fundamentalist faith in Consumerism that makes the purification of tap water, via the filtration of any trace of grace, an act of salvation. The act of choosing to receive the freely given gift of grace is, by the logic of Consumerism, sinful, impure. We still like to believe the Beatles when we hear their anachronistic lyrics: “money can’t buy me love”. Consumerism knows differently, that love can only be bought. Love freely given and received has been made into an impure love. This type of love, the kind symbolized by the water flowing from our taps, must be purified. You don’t do anything chemically significant to water when you run it through your twelve dollar Target charcoal filter/pitcher. But, by running your tap water through that cheap plastic merchandise, you are processing your water through the marketplace. Like Holy Communion which symbolically transforms wine into the Blood of Christ, the filtration of tap water is a transfiguration of a free, i.e. repulsive, tap- water of life into a potable, i.e. commodified, form. Water that has been purified is water that has been Saved.
The salvation of water that begins with the sacrament of filtration is completed by the sacrament of bottling. Processing water through the marketplace, as one does with the variety of store-bought filters (someone who hooks up one of those expensive gadget filters directly to the tap displays more religious fervor than your cheap charcoal filter/pitcher type, but they are praying to the same God) is not enough. The water of life must not only be purified, it must be contained, which is literally accomplished every time a plastic screw-top tightens down on a bottle of water. Even better, bottling water for sale irrevocably marks the water of life as property that can be bought and sold. Bottling, then, is actually the final step in the filtration process. The water of life is completely purified of repulsive grace once it is bottled and tagged with a price. Bottled water says, yes, you can buy me love. In fact, bottled water tells us that in 21st century America, true, or pure love can only be bought.
It turns out the Millenerians may have been on to something after all. Bottled water consumption grew steadily since the mid-1980’s, but in the years bracketing the turn of the millennium, from 1994 to 2004, bottled water sales shot through the roof with a 75% increase (according to data available at www.wcponline.com). The sheer tonnage of bottled water, in addition to the billions of gallons filtered in the home, indicate that a cultural tipping point has been passed. The Millenerians may have expected the end of the material world, but they unwittingly witnessed the end of the world as we know it. The Beatles’ world has given way to REM’s, who saw the end of the world coming in 1987, right when bottled water began to seep up all around us. The world has come to an end, but like REM, we all seem to feel fine. Perhaps because we are all so well hydrated. Or maybe because we really believe that true love in a bottle is only ever $1.50 away.
I would like to think that the glass of tap water I drank at the beginning of this essay was an act of rebellion. Maybe it was no accident that my wife brought home the water filter, and that it sits unused, but lurking, somewhere (beneath my socks). This tenuous situation symbolizes how close we are at all times to being seduced by the belief that you get (only) what you pay for. But every glass of tap water is a testament to the old-timey religion that this “intermarried” Jewish/Christian couple can agree on: the best things in life are free.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)