The tenacity of life

“If at first you don’t succeed, try again.  Then quit.  No use being a damned fool about it!”—WC Fields

I turned 60 this year.  I guess I’m oldish.  I’ve been thinking about the people I saw when I was young who were that age, and by now the Grim Reaper’s caught up with almost all of them!

I’ve had a pretty good life.  But I still want to contribute more to the world.  I haven’t worked much over my life, and I’m not proud of it.  I hope it isn’t too late to do more.

Langston Hughes wrote a famous poem, “Mother to Son,” comparing life to a staircase.  There’s one line, “Don’t you set down on the steps/ ‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.” Sometimes I feel like I’ve been sitting on the steps of my life…

A few years ago Greta Thunberg was complaining about the problematic world older people were bequeathing to the younger generation.  I couldn’t help recalling that fifty years ago, many of us were saying the same thing about the world we were being left.  I guess it’s every generation’s fate to turn into their forebears.  We turned into our parents and our children will turn into us.

Treasure

When I was young I read a fable about a farmer who was dying.  He told his sons, “I have a treasure buried on my land,” but didn’t tell them where it was. After his death, they dug up every inch of the land to find the treasure, but found nothing.  But their digging left the land in such good shape that it produced big crops, and they made a fortune after all.  That father understood motivation!

I’ve always been interested in gold rushes.  I was reading Pierre Berton’s book about the Klondike gold rush, and there was one fact I noticed.  Thousands of prospectors went there, and the total amount of money they invested in their adventure—travel expenses and food supplies and equipment—was even greater than the value of all the gold the place produced! (That gives you an idea of the odds they faced.) People made fortunes without going there, just by selling them supplies.  There’s a country song that goes “All the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverley Hills, in somebody else’s name.”

I read that pirates burying treasure is a cliche, like walking the plank.  Captain Kidd’s the only pirate known to have buried his treasure.  With most pirates, if they made a big score they’d spend it as soon as they could because they didn’t know how long they’d live to enjoy it.

When I was young, we had a treasure for the eyes.  Every fall we’d get the Christmas catalogues from Eaton’s and Simpson Sears.  It was fun to look through them and feast our eyes on the wares, especially the toys and candy. (The clothes didn’t interest me much.) Indeed, I mention this because just the other night I was dreaming about the catalogues’ candy pages!

Yet it didn’t occur to us to want the stuff bought for us.  My parents didn’t raise materialist kids!  In fact, when they asked me what I wanted for Christmas I could rarely think of anything in particular…

Anyone remember the Buried Treasure treat?  It was a cone-shaped combination of ice milk and sherbet that would have a little figure inside that would appear once you finished it, a bit like a Kinder toy or a Crackerjack prize.

Remembrance of music

I have a huge Chinese dictionary with thousands of characters in it.  Lately I’ve been writing the characters down one at a time, fitting the meaning of each mostly into a single line.  And when a character is also used in Japanese writing, I’ve included its pronunciation in that language. (My computer has fonts for writing Chinese and Japanese characters.) I’m almost finished, and all that’s left is some of the characters under the water radical.

As I work on this summary, I’ve been listening to classical music on YouTube.  Stuff like symphonies and concerti and sonatas.  A lot of it I was already familiar with:  there are a couple of melodies I remember hearing when I was young, and I’m hoping to hear them again somewhere.   One of my favourite piano concerti is Edvard Grieg’s A Minor piece.  I read somewhere that when Grieg was a boy he spent a lot of his time in dreams, which sounds like me.  Just now I’m listening to Chopin’s polonaises:  he composed over two hours worth!  

Before that I heard all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas.  Hearing them today, these sonatas are a revelation.  I think my favourite is the one called “Appassionata.” There’s one melody that I’m pretty sure I heard in a TV commercial back in the 1960s, for bathroom tissue or something. I used to play piano when I was young.  I could play just about all of Mozart’s sonatas, and some of Haydn’s.  But Beethoven’s sonatas were out of my league!

On the other hand, my sister Moira was playing piano in university, and I got to hear her playing just about all of Beethoven’s sonatas.  Listening to them now, I remember hearing them back then.  I was really lucky to be exposed to all this incredible music at that age.

Faith

 Dostoyevsky said, “You can’t be a socialist and believe in God.  You either believe in the Kingdom in this world, or the one in the next.” I’m a half-assed agnostic, but I do believe in the socialist movement.  I believe that a society’s success should be measured not in its overall prosperity, but in the prosperity of its least prosperous members.  And I also believe that the power of big business is something that must be confronted rather than appeased.

One of my heroes is Bernie Sanders.  His vision of social democracy may be milder than mine, but it’s an important step forward.  I think that the Democratic Party were foolish to choose Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden over him, and I still hope that 2024 will be different. (And if you can believe that they won the nomination “fair and square,” you can believe anything.) Some people keep saying “Bernie’s not a Democrat.” Well, he’s more of a Democrat than Trump, isn’t he?  Who’s being a self-defeating purist now.

Another thing that bugs me is Democrats blaming Clinton’s 2016 defeat on Sanders not being more supportive.  Firstly, that’s blatantly unfair.  Bernie could have double-crossed the Democrats and defected to the Green ticket, and might even have won!  But he played it safe, campaigned for Hillary and actually delivered an even more solid share of his supporters than she’d delivered for Obama back in 2008.  

Secondly, two can play the blame game.  The polls during the primary showed Clinton with the same dicey narrow lead over Trump she’d have in November, and Sanders with a much wider lead:  he was clearly the safer bet.  But some Democrats kept insisting that Hillary was more “electable” because she was a centrist…

Another hero of mine is Jeremy Corbyn.  His detractors keep saying “He lost twice,” as if that were the last word about him. (The same with Bernie.) Yet in 2017 he managed to take away the Conservative majority.  And the accusation that he enabled anti-Semitism within the Labour Party is nonsense.

Opponents of Brexit have some nerve blaming their failure on Corbyn.  He campaigned against it, despite his past criticisms of the EU, then took a pragmatic approach and tried to effect as less drastic break.  He would have actually succeeded, but the Liberal Democrats abstained on the key vote!  Then Keir Starmer persuaded the party to demand a second referendum, which backfired badly in the 2019 election.  A second referendum wouldn’t have been wrong, but the proposal was disastrously ill-timed and turned a crucial bloc of voters against Labour in crucial seats.  Voters who rejected Labour over the second referendum made the wrong decision for the wrong reason, but it was a predictable backlash.

Soon after becoming Labour leader, Starmer launched an anti-left purge starting with Corbyn, as needless as it is dictatorial.  His thinking is clearly along the lines of “Screw the left, they have to vote for us anyway.  Or if they don’t, there aren’t enough of them to matter.  Or if there are, they can serve as a scapegoat!” What could possibly go wrong?  It’s time for the British left to form a genuinely socialist party.

Socialists often have to defy the Official Difference and risk the accusation, “If you aren’t with us then you’re with the Bad Guys!” Sometimes you have to risk making a bad situation even worse if there’s to be any real chance of making it better.

Collections

I’ve collected a lot of comics.  I got a lot of them 15 or 20 years ago when I was into Ebay big time.  A lot of them are comic strips, reprinted dailies and Sunday clippings.  I have the reprinted series of Peanuts for a period over 30 years, as well as stuff like Dick Tracy and Popeye and Little Orphan Annie and the theatre-themed On Stage.  I’ve had a lot of reprints of Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side.  My Sunday clipping collection includes stuff like Prince Valiant and Li’l Abner and Terry and the Pirates and The Heart of Juliet Jones and Steve Canyon.

I also have some comic books, though I’m not really into superheroes.  It’s more stuff like Uncle Scrooge and Little Archie and Richie Rich.  I also have some less-known stuff like Howard the Duck and the futuristic Magnus, Robot Fighter.

It isn’t just American stuff.  I have some British comics like The Beano, which would publish annual versions every December.  I have quite a few French-language comics with Tintin and Asterix the Gaul.  And I also have some translated manga from Japan.  Some of it is masterpieces, like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of Wind Valley, about a teenage girl in a future world coping with environmental disaster. (I have a feeling they could turn it into the next Game of Thrones!) I also have Shigeru Mizuki’s four-part Showa series, which combines a history of Japan under Hirohito with his own autobiography.  He lost an arm in World War II, which actually saved his life because he got moved back from the front lines!  After the war, parallel to Japan’s recovery, he became a big comic book artist.

I also have some Mad magazine reprints.  They include a lot of comics, with some really sharp satire.  Like the time they showed 1950s parents lecturing their teenagers, “Young people today, their clothes and their dancing and their language—it’s all too much!” Then they showed the parents back when they were young in the 1920s, wearing raccoon coats and dancing the Charleston and saying “Twenty-three skidoo, small change!” Another time they had children’s definitions, like “An aunt is to give you clothes for your birthday instead of toys,” and “An uncle is to pinch your cheek and you can’t pinch back.” They made fun of singer Bobby Darin a lot, like the time they did a Dick & Jane-style feature on Greek mythology, with him as Narcissus!  And they also did “TV shows we’d like to see,” with a commercial where a guy in doctor costume says “What do doctors take for headache and pain relief?  How should I know, I’m only an actor!” And they did famous quotes in their true context, with Teddy Roosevelt saying “Speak softly a carry a big sticky gooey sundae up to my room!” and John Paul Jones a newlywed saying “I have not yet begun to fight with my wife.”

My photo

I’ve often performed in the chorus of the Toronto City Opera, and this photo was taken by Barbara’s husband (also called James) when we were doing Pietro Mascagni’s 1890 opera Cavalleria Rusticana back in 2010 or so.  I’m a peasant in 19th-century Sicily.

Let me say a bit about Cavalleria Rusticana.  It’s an example of a verismo opera of the late 19th century, more “realistic” than older operas.  The title translates as the sarcastic “rustic chivalry.” To the more sophisticated northern Italians, Sicily looked backward and Arcadian, something like Newfoundland looks to some Torontonians.

The plot is about how Turiddu was in love with Lola but while he was away in the army Lola married Alfio the local hawker, who’s well to do but out of town most of the time.  After coming home Turiddu took up with Santuzza, who ended up with a reputation as the village skank.  But then Lola reignited her torch for Turiddu—remember that her husband is out of town most of the time—and Turiddu dumped Santuzza.  So Santuzza squeals to Alfio about his wife’s infidelity and Alfio insists on a knife fight with Turiddu, who ends up dead.  There’s lots of great music.  

It’s only one act long, so we performed it with Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, another one-act verismo opera about a married couple in a travelling theatre group that performs commedia dell’arte shows, but adultery leads to murder.

I use that photo as my avatar on Twitter, with the handle Captain Snark.

Manners

There’s a webpage, Comics Kingdom, where you can follow all of today’s King Features comic strips and (here’s the part that’s really worth paying for!) several vintage strips from the ‘50s and ‘60s and such, like Rip Kirby and Johnny Hazard and Buz Sawyer.  You can also post comments with each day’s episode, and we sometimes say snarky things.  I wonder how the writers and artists who created those strips would feel about that—I suppose they’d be happy that some people are still reading their work today and care enough to say anything about it.

One of the vintage strips I follow is the soap opera strip The Heart of Juliet Jones.  The latest story is about a young woman who meets a young man and they become grifters conning people out of their money.  In one episode the girl’s father showed up, and when the boy saw him for the first time he said “Who’s the old creep?” In my comment on that episode I quipped “Emily Post he isn’t.”

It reminded me of a real-life incident when Beau Brummel met a guy who was with the plus-sized Prince Regent, and he said to him, “Who’s your fat friend?” (Brummel must have been pretty slender himself, fitting into all those dandy clothes.) But I think he actually did know the Prince and they’d used to be best buddies but now  weren’t getting along, so he was deliberately being rude to him!  So it isn’t really a bona fide entry in the rudeness championship sweepstakes.  What can you do about deliberate rudeness?  In such cases, you can’t very well say “Don’t do that, it’s rude.” If they listened to you that would defeat their whole purpose. It’s like telling a thief, “Don’t steal that, it’s too valuable.”

Another example of deliberate rudeness was on that TV show American Idol.  In one episode Simon Cowell said to some hapless singer “What.  The.  Hell.  Was.  That?” Of course the purpose of such rudeness is to grab the attention of scatterbrained young TV viewers, which is contemptible.  (I’ve never watched that show and only know of that bit because they showed it in a promo, which shows they think this is the kind of thing that will get people to tune in.) Rudeness sometimes, as in that case, takes the form of aggressive rhetorical questions.  When your boss says “How could you be so stupid?” he isn’t really interested in why you were stupid; he’s just getting in your face!

My sister saw the recently-deceased Jean-Luc Godard at the Toronto film festival about 30 years ago introducing his Yugoslavian war-themed Forever Mozart.  She says he was very rude, in that Parisian way. (And the movie disappointed her too.) Funny how the French and the English both have an image as etiquette sticklers, yet they’re also notorious for pointed rudeness!

For my own part, I remember when Frank Zappa appeared on the CBC radio show Cross-Country Checkup attacking censorship in the music industry.  He kept saying things like (sarcastically) “Oh yeah, that’s real intelligent,” and to one school principal he said “You should be fired!” He also insisted that anyone who disagreed with him on this issue was mentally ill…

When someone’s table manners are lacking, it’s one thing to make specific criticisms.  What’s annoying is people who point it out with aggressive gibberish, as my brother occasionally did.  Some people would be well-advised to spend a bit less time judging other people’s manners, and a bit more minding their own.  The actor Maximilian Schell interviewed Marlene Dietrich for the fascinating documentary Marlene, and at one point she said, “You should go home to Mama Schell so she can teach you some manners,” when anyone can see that she was the one being rude!

As for minding my own manners, I generally make an effort to be polite.  When I’m waiting in line for service at a convenience store, I’ll pretend to take an interest in their goods just so it won’t look like I’m cooling my heels.  When a bus driver starts to leave but stops long enough to let me on, I thank him—after all he didn’t have to do that!  Back when I took ballroom dancing lessons at Arthur Murray studios, they had a lot of dance parties, at which I’d make an effort to dance with every woman there, and when I saw a new girl I’d try to dance with her first. (Cynthia, my dance instructor, said I’m a gentleman.) To tell the truth, I wasn’t doing it out of politeness:  I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I liked having a scheme where I set out to dance with every girl!

Some people are rude to everyone, and you have to feel sorry for them, really:  they tend to have few friends.  But what gets to me is the Eddie Haskell types who’ll be perfectly polite to people they see as their equals, and especially to their superiors, but rude to people they see as lower in status.

One example is servants.  Muhammed Ali, the boxer, once said “I don’t trust people who are nice to me but rude to the waiter.  That’s how they’d treat me if I were in that position!” Billy Wilder was a great Hollywood filmmaker, but according to Frank Sinatra’s valet he was rude to servants. (I’ve got the impression that great directors are often “pain in the neck” types…) Being rude to servants, it seems to me, is one of the worst things you can be in this life!  There are stories of New York millionaires who’ll chew out their servants in front of guests—you’d think that even if they don’t care about the servants’ feelings, they’d at least care about making the guests uncomfortable.  But maybe they’re really doing it to impress their guests!  It’s actually pretty easy to make an impression on people if you don’t care what kind of impression you make. (Like when schoolboy Marlon Brando wrote the word “shit” on the blackboard in really big letters with kerosene, then set it on fire…)

Another example is children.  I mentioned Eddie Haskell before:  on Leave It to Beaver he was Wally’s teenage friend who was unctuously polite to grownups but nasty to the Beaver.  And so you’ll sometimes find teenagers being rude to younger kids.  Their attitude is “I’m more mature than you so I don’t have to respect you!” Which is to say, they’re being semi-mature…

I come from southeastern New Brunswick, where the nearest city is Moncton, and I saw a documentary involving Moncton mayor Leonard Jones, who caused controversy with his opposition to official bilingualism, a hot-button issue in a city with many Francophones as well as Anglophones.  It showed this 1968 incident where radical French students from the University of Moncton confronted him at a city council meeting.  He was incredibly rude to them!  I could scarcely believe what I was hearing, and I was thinking “Come on, you’re supposed to be the mayor!” (Later on, New York mayors Ed Koch and Rudolph Giuliani were often rude to people, yet it was presented as a sort of style.  I hope that style doesn’t catch on…)

I think there was a lot of that in the 1960s.  Many students were demonstrating against things like the Vietnam War in the United States, but the older generation often refused to view them as fellow citizens exercising the free speech that seemingly makes America great. Their attitude was, “You haven’t earned our respect!” On the contrary, some of them preferred to think of them as spoiled children, who needed to have obedience beaten into them.  This naturally culminated in the Hard Hat Riot of 1970, when construction workers busted up an antiwar demonstration on Wall Street, like Berlin Storm Troopers breaking up communist rallies in 1930.  They were outnumbered about five to one, but they had makeshift clubs. Notice that these hard hats didn’t organize a counter-demonstration:  this wasn’t about offering an alternative position, it was about shutting them up!  The union man who organized this hooliganism was later given a post in the Nixon Administration.  Very corrupt.

I guess a lot of rudeness comes from people reacting instantly, without considering what they should say or do.  That’s common with children.  Some kids I knew in school were deliberately rude to me.  It was about raising their status at the expense of mine.  Like when they quote you to make fun of you, and of course they start not with “He said…” but “He goes…” I said the other week that I could forgive being hit, but not being judged.  Well, that was a form of judging!   Or I’d be bicycling down the street and this crowd of kids would see me and jeer me on the spot. (I doubt any of them would have done this alone; they felt the empowerment of numbers!)  For me, it was running a gauntlet.  For them, it was their automatic response.  When you’re automatic with someone, it shows that you don’t respect them enough not to be that way!  And I was expected to ignore it all, of course.  Did that mean that I could be rude to others and expect them to ignore me?  It meant that I, being the sensitive, angry kid, was the “weak link.”

I’ve seen the funny 1950s educational short Manners in School, in which a terrible child actor gets manners lessons from an animated chalk figure with the imaginative name Chalky.  Among other things, kids got taught to say “Yes” instead of “Yeah,” and “No” instead of “Uh-uh.” (The ‘50s was the golden age of micromanagement.) They said in it that if you’re rude other kids won’t want to play with you, but I’m not so sure about that.  Seems to me that it’s the badly-behaved kid who’s popular with his peers, because he’s doing what they’re afraid to do!

An underrated movie

In 1996 I saw Todd Solondz’ art film Welcome to the Dollhouse.  It doesn’t exactly fit into the “underrated” category because some critics praised it, including Ebert and Siskel.  But others disliked it and called it glib.

It’s a grim comedy about a girl in a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey and her difficult life.  Ebert’s review said “Her parents say they love all their children equally.  They’re lying.” Her nickname at junior high is Wiener Dog, and her experience there is as painful as mine was.  The movie is a comedy about the painful experiences some of us go through in our youth.

I met a guy once who’d interviewed a lot of Hollywood people, and he said his hardest interviews were Steve Martin and Todd Solondz.  I imagine Solondz has Asperger’s Syndrome like me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Martin does too. (I think the interviewer was an Aspie too, but that’s another story.) I saw a photo of him once and he looked like a stereotypical geek.  And his movies are definitely geeky!

One critic, in The Globe and Mail, complained that this movie lacks that adult perspective where you can forgive others, and forgive yourself.  To tell the truth, that’s actually what I liked about it.  It’s the strong people who forgive, but I have to admit I’m one of the weak people.  If you knock me down, I can forgive that because it’s just violence.  But if you judge me, I promise, I will judge you too.  If you treat me as “the weak link” and I don’t do my best to make consequences for you, that means I am the weak link!

Compare Welcome to the Dollhouse to The Man in the Moon, a movie with some similarities.  That movie takes a more forgiving approach, but to me that makes it a lesser achievement.  I think of the scene where young Reese Witherspoon unilaterally forgives her father for beating her.  To me this felt like an uneven reconciliation, with the daughter doing all the “work.” I prefer the honestly unforgiving.

There’s one scene where the girl gets a bad grade on something, knows her parents won’t like it, and begs the teacher to improve it a little.  But the teacher is intolerant of grade-grubbing and says “Don’t you have any dignity?” What it’s really about, of course, is that an insecure teacher takes grade-grubbing as a challenge to her authority.  Then the teacher makes her write an essay about the evils of grade-grubbing and recite it in front of the whole class.  As she does so, the teacher keeps saying “Speak up!” but she can’t. (In the movie Clueless there’s a scene where high-schooler Alicia Silverstone tells her lawyer father how she improved a poor grade with some shameless grade-grubbing and he says “What did I tell you, that’s what I want you to be doing!”)

There’s also a scene where she gets in trouble while the  nasty boys who started it escape blame, and her parents get called into school.  She says “I was fighting back,” but her mother just says “Who taught you to fight back?” (She should have answered “Hitler!” This is a Jewish family, remember.)

There’s also a subplot about the older brother having a combo band where he plays a clarinet, giving it an odd klezmer sound!  Another player is thin-skinned and quits the band in a huff, then later he’s asked to come back so they can play at the parents’ wedding anniversary, but he only does so after the brother agrees to pay him $200!  In one sense this guy’s being childish, but in another sense he knew what he could get!

Of course the movie isn’t to everyone’s taste, and there’s quite a bit of stuff you can object to, like when the spoiled younger daughter gets kidnapped (don’t ask) and the  mother’s grief gets shown in a ridiculing way.  This was also the case with Happiness, Solondz’ follow-up and his most popular movie.  Overall, I found it creepy and off-putting.  But it did have some moments of bracing, hilarious honesty that appealed to me.

One is the movie’s opening sequence where the heroine dumps her boyfriend John Lovitz, and he takes it hard.  He asks “Is it another man?” and she answers “No, it’s just you.” (Some women would pretend it was another man just to ease his hurt, but she clearly isn’t smart enough to do that.) Her next boyfriend is a Russian immigrant.  She asks “What did you do in Russia?” and he answers “I was a thief.” There’s a scene where a baseball coach father says to his player son “Don’t fuck this up!” And there’s also this moment when a father comes clean with his son, but it’s too tasteless to talk about here.  See the movie and you’ll know which scene I’m talking about…

Solondz’ movies after Happiness haven’t been as popular. (One of them, Palindromes, got a Salon magazine review with this palindromic headline: “God!  A ‘No sir, prefer prison!’ A dog.”) I must mention that he made a sequel to Happiness titled Life During Wartime, in which all the original movie’s characters are played by different actors!  For example, the John Lovitz character becomes a ghost played by Paul Reubens, better known as Pee-Wee Herman.  I liked the line where a Jewish woman says about herself and her husband, “We voted for Bush and Cheney because it was good for Israel, even though we know they’re both total idiots!” Actually, Jewish-Americans tend to be loyal Democrats…

Religious beliefs

I think my favourite book in the Bible is Proverbs.  There’s a line in it “Upon the hoary head [frosty with grey hair] is placed the Crown of Wisdom.” (Though people like Ronald Reagan show that older folk can be as foolish as their juniors…) I also like the line “The spider takes hold with her hands, and is found in kings’ palaces!” And I like the line in the Gospel, “As you have done it for the least of you, you have done it for me.” Some years back they canonized Father Damien—now that’s a saint I can believe in!  He did it for the least of the people around him…

I’m not the religious type.  I’m a half-assed agnostic, not even ready for the cold comfort of atheism.  In the Gospel Jesus walked on the sea and invited St. Peter to join him, but Peter was afraid to, and Jesus said “Oh, ye of little faith!” I can understand how Peter felt:  he must have wondered, “What if my faith makes no difference and I drown?” then “What if my faith isn’t STRONG enough to make the difference and I drown?” When St. Paul visited Athens he noticed a temple with the dedication “To the Unknown God.” To me that’s really profound! (On my Tweeter profile I wrote the line in the original Greek: To^hi Agnosto^hi Theo^hi.)

On a more intellectual level, considers Occam’s Razor:  the principle that other things being equal, the simpler explanation is preferable.  Atheism is simpler than theism, and other things are essentially equal.  Someone invented a scale for religious belief where 1 is “I’m a certain theist,” 4 is “I’m agnostic,” 5 is “I think there’s probably no God,” and 7 is “I’m a certain atheist.” On that scale, I guess I’m 4.5:  the odds seem to be against theism, but I’m not really an oddsmaker on this…

I can say that I believe in the Devil, because I believe that the Devil is within us.  And I can also say that I believe in hell, because I believe that Ronald Reagan is there. (I like to think that he and Ayatollah Khomeini are cellmates there…) Atheists often emphasize that they don’t believe in the negative aspects of religious faith like the Devil and hell, yet in those aspects my belief is actually stronger!

Someone asked non-believer H.L. Mencken, “When you face the Great Throne of God, what will you say then?” Mencken answered that he’d say “I’m sorry, gentlemen.  I was wrong.” Something very disarming about that.  Non-believer Stephen Fry said he’d say to God, “Why do you give children bone cancer?” I was thinking that I’d say, “You’re one sick fuck, you know that?  Like the time you told Abraham to tie up his son and execute him, and at the last moment said ‘Just kidding.’ Do you think Isaac ever trusted his father again?  Who do you think you are, God?”

Blaise Pascal came up with the honestly cynical Pascalian Wager:  if God exists you’d better get on his good side,   and if He doesn’t believing will do no harm.  But does God really care what you believe?  Really, “If you don’t believe you’ll go to hell!” isn’t an argument for believing, it’s an argument against doubting.  Would God really send people to hell for not believing in Him?  Only a petty god would do that.  If you’re God you’re the elephant in the living room, and it shouldn’t matter whether people believe in you or not.  What it’s really about, of course, is that the existence of non-believers often has the effect of reminding believers that they don’t feel completely secure in their own faith, and insecurity breeds intolerance.  Does God exist to justify the people who believe in Him?  That would be solipsistic. (My big word for the day!)

The Greek philosopher Epicurus asked whether God is able and willing to intervene in the world to make things better. “If He’s able and willing, why is there still evil and suffering in the world?  If He’s able but not willing, he’s malicious.  If He’s willing but not able, he’s impotent.  And if he isn’t able or willing, what’s the use of gods?” I suppose that God gave us free will, then let us stew in our own juice.  Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the only love in the universe is the love that we sentient beings often make.  Wouldn’t that make our love more important?  I suppose you can look at love as an act of rebellion against the dog-eat-dog universe!

If you say you believe in God, I really don’t know any better than you.  I suppose that the advent of Christianity and Islam and other religions has all been part of the process that’s led to creating a world where people have freedom to think.  And religious differences are actually necessary for us to evolve intellectually.  I think of the story of the Tower of Babel where God made everyone speak different languages so they’d stop being obsessed with building an infinitely high tower and seeing nothing else. (In a way, when Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward he was building his own Tower of Babel.) Does the story apply to religions as well as languages?

One of the many controversial points of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is in the chapter “You Can’t Pray a Lie.” In a moment of crisis Huck decides that his friendship with runaway slave Jim is more important to him than the religion he’s been taught, in which helping a slave escape is as bad as running off someone’s cattle, and he says “All right, I’ll go to hell then!” Some grownups didn’t want children reading this because they relied on fear of hell as a control mechanism. (For his part, Mark Twain pointed out that parts of the Bible were unfit for children!) For me, it’s a startling, brilliant moment:  it’s about making your own moral judgements, taking responsibility, growing up.  It’s downright existential!

There’s a line in one of the non-Paul Epistles, “If someone says ‘I love God!’ but he hates his brother, he’s lying.  Because how can you love something you’ve never seen when you hate what’s right next to you?”  How do people love what they’ve never seen?  I suppose most people love the idea of God.  Which is to say, God is an idea.  On Tweeter the other day someone asked “Where is this God I keep hearing about?” and I answered “Everywhere and nowhere…”

Granted that religion fills the emotional needs of many people.  But so can atheism:  I imagine that for some people atheism is a way of taking responsibility.  In the neo-noir The Usual Suspects one of the characters admits that he no longer believes in God, but still fears Him! (As Machiavelli pointed out, love may come and go, but fear stays there.) I guess that’s the modern dilemma, or one not so modern…

For the last word, Mahatma Gandhi said something I like. “When I was young, I was taught that God was Truth.  But now I realize that Truth is God!”

Regrets

Goodfellas is a great gangster movie with a great ending.  Ray Liotta ignored warnings to stay out of the drug trade and got caught red-handed, so he escapes prison by ratting out his murderous friends, who go to jail forever.  Liotta enters Witness Protection and now he has to live like normal law-abiding people.  In the morning he goes out and picks up the newspaper and remembers Joe Pesci shooting people.  The soundtrack plays “My Way,” with Sid Vicious singing “Regrets, I have a few, but then again too few to mention…” 

Of all celebrity deaths, I think Sid Vicious was the one that disturbed me the most. (Someone said that “My Way” only works when the singer is less smart than the song, and that the Sid Vicious version is the only good one.  Personally, I like the Elvis version too.) But I digress.

What things have I done or not done that I regret?  I try not to second-guess my younger self with “I should have done that instead of this.” (The soldier in the Civil War novel Cold Mountain muses that regret is the eighth sin.) Looking back, I remember in college when people were friendly with me, and in hindsight I wish I’d reciprocated, but I just wasn’t ready!  I also wish that I’d developed my singing and acting talents at an earlier age—I finally started doing that in middle age, joining an opera group.

But I thought of a specific regret just the other week.  It goes back to 1996, when I was writing my Ph.D. thesis. My supervisor and I did not have good chemistry.  I found him inflexible and became defensive, and the thesis suffered. I kept writing things or saying things to him because I just couldn’t think of anything else to say, and in the end I was lucky to pass.  For his part, he thought I wasn’t taking it seriously. (I know this because he later admitted it to me!) The only reason I didn’t ask for a new supervisor was because there was nobody else.  Maybe I should have gone to the University of Toronto, with its bigger faculty, instead of York University.  But that isn’t the regret I had in mind.

In the spring of 1996, after a long period getting my research notes in order, I finally started writing the thesis.  I’d handed in the first chapter and prepared to write the second:  I was moving on not because I saw the first chapter as “finished” but because I didn’t want to waste time.  But the catch was, I’d have to write the second chapter very soon, while the material was still fresh in my mind.

My supervisor was going to spend the summer in Hong Kong, and in our second-last meeting before his departure came an unexpected development:  he wanted me to add an “overview” to the first chapter.  And he wanted me to spend the next two weeks working on it and give it to him at our last meeting so he could look at it in Hong Kong and send me his feedback.  But for me this was unfeasible because I needed to start the second chapter soon, and it couldn’t wait two weeks. (In addition, I wanted to get his feedback before he left.)

When the Nazis attacked at the start of the Battle of the Bulge, General Eisenhower told his subordinates, “This is an opportunity!” I decided to look at it as an opportunity to improve the thesis.  I’d write the overview as quickly as possible and send it to him so he could give me feedback before leaving, then turn to writing the second chapter.  Of course, it showed that I’d written it in such a hurry. (I made the no-brainer mistake of confusing the Treaty of Nanjing with the Treaty of Tianjin!)

I actually missed my last meeting with him when we would have talked about the overview, because I got the time wrong. (Was I unconsciously missing it deliberately because I feared his reaction?  It wasn’t conscious anyway.) When I finally got his written comments, it wasn’t pretty.  He called the overview “vague, simplistic and often mistaken” and said that it reflected “basic weaknesses.” I gave an opinion in one place because I couldn’t just recite facts, and his comment began with a “No!” exclamation.  (I later figured out that it was one specific sentence he objected to.) I tried to find another member of my committee to talk to about the overview, but none of them was available and I got sent to (I kid you not) a professor of Japanese history!  That didn’t do much good…

I understand that from his perspective I was doing a slapdash, half-assed job.  But from my perspective, I was trying to play ball with him and make the thesis better, and he was being like one of those teachers who make you regret that you even tried!  After he came back I sent him another draft where I tried to meet him halfway and address his points.  But it still had the sentence he objected to, and he saw only that, and none of the changes I’d tried to make.  In his response he repeated the same thing he’d said before, ignoring the changes.  He left out the “No!” exclamation, of course, but otherwise it was exactly the same, as if he’d forgotten writing it earlier.  I can’t work with someone like that, where you try to make changes to please him but he just acts like you’ve made no changes at all.  After that I gave up on trying to please him.  Since I couldn’t work with him, I had to fight him, and I ultimately wrote ten drafts. (After the seventh he declared the thesis “unexaminable,” and I had to demand an examination anyway.) On more than one occasion, you won’t be surprised to hear, I came close to quitting the whole thing.

What do I wish I’d done?  I wish I’d said to him, “Sorry, the overview will have to wait till you come back from Hong Kong.  I’m ready to write the second chapter and can’t afford any delay in doing so.” If I’d known he was going to ask for the overview and had time to think, maybe that’s what I’d have done.  But it came on me as a surprise, and I had to make an immediate decision on what to tell him.  And I was afraid he’d say “You can’t write the second chapter until you’ve improved the first!” and I would have had to ignore him and write the second chapter first anyway.  Which wouldn’t have improved our relationship.  When the eager to please meets the hard to please, feelings get hurt.

In the end, I did pass, but I felt like a burnout.  I remember thinking when I started out, “I don’t really care about the degree.  I just want the experience of writing a doctoral thesis!” By the time I was finished, it felt like a century since back then. (The hardest part is waiting months for feedback, worrying that the latest draft won’t get you any closer to finishing, and being proved right.) It was like in the movie Easy Rider, when the two of them finally make their fortune from a drug score and Dennis Hopper says “We did it!” but Peter Fonda says “We blew it.”

But that’s all in the past, of course.  I don’t expect to be in a situation like that again, so there isn’t much I can learn from it.  I guess I could tell today’s doctoral students about it, and they could learn something useful.