American Revolution

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In these days when America seems to be a nation purely for purposes of stoking Trump’s ego, and the Supreme Court agrees that’s our purpose, many of us are looking for some sense of balance.  I think that was behind, at least subtly, our family trip to Valley Forge this summer.  It was there that we purchased The 10 Key Campaigns of the American Revolution, edited by Edward G. L’Engel.  Now, I’m no fan of reading about wars; I’ve always believed that “rational” beings could come up with better ways of resolving differences.  Some guys like to fight, I know.  And in the case of American liberty we had a king who only wanted to use America for his personal glory.  Wait.  What?  In any case, I would not likely read a book about war, but I feel I need to find some connection to the country that existed before 2016.

My wife and I read this book together.  It is an edited collection, which means that the chapters are uneven.  Some military historians like to get down to the details whereas I prefer a wider sweep.  Nevertheless, as a whole the book gives a pretty good sweep of what happened during those revolutionary years.  Starting with Lexington and Concord, prior to the Declaration of Independence, and moving through the campaign to take Quebec, the loss of New York City, the battles of Trenton and Princeton, Ticonderoga and Saratoga, Philadelphia, Monmouth, the battles in and around Charleston, and finally, Yorktown, the essays give an idea of the breadth of the fighting.  The authors also make the point that this was a civil war, the first of at least two in this country.

Americans have, until the internet, learned to get along with those who are very different.  Now we hang out in clusters of those like us and hate everyone else.  That’s one of the reasons why, living many years in New Jersey, that we unplugged and got out to see these sites.  I visited Lexington when I lived in Boston, and we visited the scene of the battles at Princeton and Monmouth, as well as Washington’s Crossing, when we were in Jersey.  We’ve been to New York City and Philadelphia, of course, but these cities have changed much, showing what can happen when people cooperate instead of being divided against each other.  The same is true of Charleston, which we visited a couple years back.  Although not my favorite book of this year, strangely this one gave me hope.  Maybe America can overcome this present crisis as well.

Posting

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I’ve seen The Post before.  Maybe it took recovering from a vaccine to make me realize, however, just how much we’ve lost with the rise of electronic publication.  Yes, there is now a shot at recognition by the lowliest of us, but publication used to mean something important.  Consider how Watergate, the coda to the film, brought down Nixon.  Now we have a president who could’ve never been elected without the world of the internet, and who is coated with teflon so thick that even molesting children can’t harm him.  I work in publishing these days.  I often reflect on how important it used to be.  Ideas simply couldn’t spread very far without publication.  That’s what makes The Post such an important movie.  It’s the story of how the Washington Post came to publish The Pentagon Papers.  Said papers revealed that the United States was well aware that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, even as the government sent more and more young men to their deaths.

There are many ways to approach this film, including the doubt that it instills in even free democracy, but what struck me as the vaccine was wearing off is how publication has become a more challenging and endangered as the Wild West of the internet continues to expand.  Newspapers used to be the harbingers of truth.  Early in the history of the broadsheet, however, there were those who’d make things up in order to sell copies.  (Capitalism is always lurking when skulduggery is afoot.)  Over time, however, certain papers gained a hard-earned reputation for reliable reporting and publication with integrity.  A story going out in the early seventies in the Washington Post could influence history.  Now it’s owned by Jeff Bezos.

There was a time when a book might change the world.  Now there’s a little too much competition.  Publishers of print material struggle against the free, easy access of the internet.  All that publishers really have to offer is their reputation.  Those that have been around for a long time have earned, the hard way—you might say “old school”, the right to tell the world the truth.  Now the truth comes through Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called these days and more often than not consists of lies.  Of course I don’t believe the internet is all bad.  I wouldn’t contribute daily content to it if I believed that.  Still, I fear we’ve lost something.  Something important.  And right now we have nothing to replace it.

Books and Mormons

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Some time ago we went to see Book of Mormon on tour.  I really knew very little about it other than it was consistently praised as being very funny.  I’m always a little concerned about poking fun at anyone else’s religion because I know people take their beliefs very seriously.  As I reflect on the show (which was quite funny) it seems that it wasn’t so much poking fun at the Latter-day Saints so much as it was poking fun at religion itself.  That’s less problematic as it’s not singling anyone out for ridicule.  It’s a system that’s being made light of.  Or at least any religion that is an effort to convert others.  There’s a kind of violence to it.  And if Book of Mormon is about anything, it’s about missionaries.  Amid the laughs it makes some valid points—trying to convert people without first trying to understand their culture is a fraught activity.

People want religious specialists who thoroughly understand their tradition.  I can say from experience, both as an erstwhile seminary student and a seminary professor, that the time given to become an expert is insufficient.  The older I’ve grown the wider the perspective I’ve tried to step back to see.  To be an expert on a religion really requires some facility with understanding other religions.  To understand, say, Methodism, you need to understand Anglicanism.  To understand Anglicanism, you need to understand Catholicism.  To understand Catholicism, you need to understand early Christianities.  To understand early Christianities, you need to understand Judaism.  And so the widening concentric circles go.  Nobody can be an expert in all of them, and each of these religions mentioned has, in its own right, sub-specializations that have their own experts.  Who has time to learn the religion of those they intend to convert?

Any religion that makes supernatural claims (and many of them do; it’s their nature) makes extraordinary allegations.  Those allegations, when examined closely, reveal some improbable elements.  Trey Parker and Matt Stone, two of the authors (most famous for South Park) apparently said that they had no intention of making fun of anyone’s religion and a spokesperson for the Latter-day Saints indicated that no real offense was taken, acknowledging that it’s parody and parody is only offensive if it’s taken seriously.  Many religions have thin skin when it comes to parody or satire.  The serious part is that some religions, in real life, take conversion of all others with a zeal that could (and does) become dangerous.  Still, this musical is very funny, as long as it’s not taken too seriously.

Spades Are Trump

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Sometimes it feels like the world is against you.  I can imagine that if you’re African American it feels like that much more often than if you’re not.  Racism, systemic and horribly pervasive, should disappear with education and with exposure to other people and cultures.  Still it persists.  Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s novel Ace of Spades, conveys what it feels like to be singled out because of race.  This it does in a dark academia setting.  Nevius Academy is a private school where typical teen concerns loom large—sex, drinking, getting into a good college.  Chiamaka is a queen bee, a hard-won position that she struggles to keep her senior year.  Devon is also a senior, but from a poor family.  His mother works hard to keep him in the music program there, with the hopes that he’ll make it into a premier program to develop his talent.  Then threatening things start to happen.

Not natural allies, Chiamaka and Devon eventually team up when they realize that Nevius Academy’s secret society, Aces, attempts to destroy the lives of students of color.  The plot runs very deep; a white supremacist faction runs the school and for the pure thrill of it, ruins the chances of the two Black students they admit every ten years.  These two victims fight back.  Added to the racial drama, Devon is also gay.  As the story unfolds, Chiamaka discovers that she is also.  This proves yet another facet of life that leads to ostracism and, in Devon’s case, beatings.  In other words, this isn’t exactly a cheerful story.  Given what has happened politically in the past year it becomes believable that such places might exist.

The darkness of this academia is right there on the surface in this novel.  Our high school years are formative ones and the decision to build up only to destroy during this period is a particularly monstrous one.  In this case the school itself almost becomes a monster.  Fueled by the collective hatred of generations of administrators and alumni, it consumes students of color.  Of course, this story was likely intended as a parable.  Fiction is often where we cry out to be heard.  Àbíké-Íyímídé’s novel became a bestseller a few years back, so hopefully that cry has been heard.  To be effective, however, hearing is nothing without action.  Books can be agents of change.  Our current climate of trying to ban them only perpetuates misplaced hatred.  If only we could encourage reading and understanding instead.

Not Personal

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I’ve read that horror and dark academia go together.  You might almost say like peanut butter and chocolate.  One example of this is Confessions, a novel by Kanae Minato.  There are no monsters in it, but two people driven by revenge.  The difficulty with such a book would be to describe it without giving too much away.  So I’ll start by placing it in the category of dark academia.  It is a middle-school story with a distinct darkness and dread to it.  As a kind of epistolary novel, it’s told in several voices, beginning with a teacher in Japan and her final lecture to her students.  The lecture is final because her four-year-old daughter had died on the school grounds.  More than that, she was murdered by a couple of the students.  The novel explores the motivations and actions of the students involved, and sometimes their parents.  The school setting makes it dark academia.

The horror part comes through the slow building of the ruined lives that follow in the wake of the murder.  Believing that one form of revenge is at play, the reader finds subtle shifts as characters become monstrous.  One is clearly a sociopath.  Another is becoming one.  The idea of people harming one another because of their grievances is real enough.  We are emotional beings and sometimes our pain for those we love reaches a point of striking out.  Most of us learn to refrain, accepting that suffering comes into every life.  A minority insist on bringing others into their personal hell.  This novel explores people like that.  This makes it a horror story.

Originally written in Japanese, it has a kind of gentleness to it.  A decorum.  Underneath, however, trouble is brewing.  It accumulates over the novel as additional perspectives join the narrative of what happened.  Stories like this take a bit of rethinking for those of us who like to believe our narrators.  Most events have more than one outlook and Confessions ably guides us through several, reaching a conclusion that is both satisfying and chilling.  This is one of those novels that underscores what a fraught time middle school is.  Powerful emotions are at play and even though they may be sublimated for adults in society, they still exist.  We learn when we can and can’t act upon them, and how we may do so.  That’s a large part of education, beyond simply learning from books.  As reading becomes more and more electronic, I do wonder if we’re ushering in a new darkness that hasn’t been fully considered.

Stigmatic Thoughts

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Stigma is a funny thing.  Almost a superstitious mindset.  Especially when it concerns a non-contagious agent.  When a person becomes a victim of such an agent, the tendency is for others to withdraw from them, as if afraid they might catch it.  One such instance of this is cancer.  When someone is diagnosed, many people either keep silent or distance themselves from the person who received the diagnosis, as if even saying the word might put them in harms way.  Being married to a cancer survivor, I have experienced that firsthand.  Another instance, I recently discovered, is when you’re the victim of a scam.  Not only do you feel bad for your loss, but others tend to step back silently, as if they too might contract scam germs.  In both these cases, and many others, it’s easy to feel isolated.

As social animals, humans long ago learned that shunning is an effective tool in controlling social behavior.  A shunned person leaves a community or withers and dies within it.  As much as we value individualism, it means nothing if there’s no social group to acknowledge it.  Stigmas can lead to a kind of shunning.  A perhaps more lighthearted example is the person who tells others they’ve seen a UFO.  There’s adequate documentation that, beginning in the forties, the US government instituted a policy of ridicule to prevent such reports from proliferating.  It worked.  I remember growing up in the sixties and seventies that anyone who’d claimed to’ve seen such a thing was socially stigmatized with ridicule and claims of insanity.  We crave the approval of others.  Stigma and the associated shunning are among the most effective forms of social control.

As an introvert, I think quite a lot about this.  I’ve moved several times in my life and it takes quite a long time for me to get to know people.  Even now, having lived in my current town for over seven years, I know only four others in town  by name and none of them socialize.  One of the reasons I keep at this blog is that it develops a sense of community.  Those who are really successful on the internet develop followings of thousands, or millions.  My posts tend to be thoughtful (I hope) and often deal with stigmatized subjects.  (Although it’s starting to gain some respect, horror is a stigmatized genre.)  I very much appreciate my readers.  These thoughts are in my head and I let them out to roam on this blog.  I do hope that this post on stigma doesn’t lead to any shunning.  It’s just something I’ve noticed over the years.

Aging

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M. Night Shyamalan’s horror is thoughtful.  Old is a little difficult to accept because it’s very difficult to keep artificially aging actors at a steady rate, either by make-up or substitution.  And it seems that the mysterious beach that ages people but also heals them should, in some way, make exploring its medical possibilities somewhat difficult.  Still, it is a noteworthy day-light horror offering that has an underlying ethical question.  I will need to include a spoiler to discuss that ethical issue, but before I get there, a vacation brochure.  Individuals, and families, are brought to a resort where everything’s perfect.  Then they are driven to a remote beach and discover that they really can’t leave.  And they age at a rapid rate.  (This may make you think of a Gilligan’s Island episode, but this one has no laughs.)  The aging is first noticed with the children and by the time the adults realize what is happening, it’s too late.

Here comes a spoiler.  Old was released during the pandemic’s second year, so I suspect it wasn’t widely seen.  If you’re still waiting, here’s your chance.  Ready?  Okay.  So, this island’s aging properties have been tapped by a pharmaceutical company to test new drugs on patients with various diseases.  Instead of waiting years for results, they can know in a day whether a treatment, unwittingly taken by the clients when they first arrived, worked.  If a “client” has no symptoms for a day, it is the equivalent of years.  The company, although it is responsible for the deaths of the people in the trial, give the results away, saving many lives for free.  Here is the ethical dilemma—do you save thousands, or millions, by having one person die to test the drug?  The real issue is that it’s done without consent.  Those aging have no idea they’re test subjects. 

Consent is an ideal, but in fact life happens to us and we seldom have the right of refusal.  Perhaps that’s the more insidious message here—giving consent furthers the illusion that we’re in charge of our lives.  I’m sure all of us can think of things that happened to us not because we chose them, but because we were at the right or wrong place at the wrong or right time.  When some such thing transpires, it often takes us considerable time to regain our balance, to feel like we’re “in control” again.  I chose to watch Old, perhaps when it wasn’t a good time to do so.  Or did I choose it?  And whose morals are these?

Banning Books

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For many years I’ve celebrated Banned Books Week by reading a banned book.  What with Republicans wanting only white, hetero, history-denying titles approved, I’m pretty sure that most books I read are banned somewhere.  Banned books, of course, see sales bumps and benefit the publisher and author.  So instead of reading a noted banned book, this year I’ll hang out my shingle here with but shallow hopes that it will be read.  I’m pretty sure, any agents out there, that at least one of my novels would be a banned book.  Maybe all of them.  You see, in my fiction I’m not the mild-mannered, inoffensive person who blogs here everyday for free.  There’s a reason that I keep my pen name secret.  I’m pretty sure that most people who know me would be surprised, if not shocked, by what appears in my fiction.

Writing, you see, is where we express the ideas in our heads.  I may seem to yak about everything on this blog, but in reality, I’m quite guarded.  Many of the horror movies I discuss, for instance, have ideas or scenes that I simply leave unaddressed.  I’m trying not to offend anyone here.  (A friend of mine who does publish fiction mentioned recently that a significant other in her family suggested that her writing wasn’t controversial enough to be picked up by publishers.  I think there could be something to that.)  While my mother was alive, I took special care that she wouldn’t discover any of my fiction.  Now that she’s gone these two years, I still protect her name with my own nom de guerre.  I really don’t want to hurt anybody.  I do, however, need to express myself.

Some of my fiction is horror.  Some is just plain weird.  The novels are well written, I think, and I’m open to editing.  (Agents, I am an editor—I know how this game works!)  As long as we’re stuck in a morass of banning books, why not look at a writer who’s more controversial than you might believe?  I’ve been writing daily for going on half-a-century now.  Think about that.  Think about the sheer number of controversial thoughts one might have in that amount of time!  Add graphomania to the recipe, with just a squeeze of talent and you’ve got banned books to last a lifetime!  I’m not sure any of the books I’m currently reading (five actively, at this point) formally appear on a  banned list.  But if you want to find one that almost certainly will be, well, my shingle’s out there if you care to take a look.

A banned book, in some districts

Alien History

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If aliens sat down to read earth history, they’d get the impression that we’re a very warlike species.  While, no doubt, this is true for a large part of history, I’d suggest that at least since 1900 it hasn’t been so much that the species is warlike, but that its leaders are.  As long as we have “shallow bastards” (to use Frank Turner’s phrase from “1933”) leading us, is it any wonder?  Even with current world leadership given a pass, looking back over the big ones of the last century, it was mentally unstable leaders with fragile egos that led to wars.  I’m sure some national resentment across borders certainly exists, but would people just go and kill those in the next town over, in the “modern” world, if their leaders didn’t tell them to?  Think of World War II, brought on by a madman.  Yes, Germany had grievances, but war wasn’t the only way to solve them.  And killing Jews did nothing to help anybody.

Or World War One.  The assassination of an Archduke need not have led to nations clashing with excessively deadly force.  Men with inflated egos and personal ambitions seem to have played a large role.  To any aliens reading this, some of us would like to take exception to this warlike generalization.  Human society is complex, and the jury is still out on whether democracy can really work when the electorate doesn’t bother to educate itself.  Or allow itself to be educated.  Still, my sense of my species is that we’ve managed to civilize ourselves out of being warlike, but we do have strong emotions that we need to learn to control.  Watching Washington flirt with war every day because of incompetence, well, dear aliens, we’re not all like that.

Image credit: NASA (public domain)

The world into which I was born seemed to be okay as far as national boundaries went.  Younger generations are raised to realize that colonialism was an evil, exploitive outlook.  There are those alive, unfortunately many of them in public office, who want to go back to acquiring more land.  And countries, sometimes artificially created (generally by Europeans), continue to break apart.  South Sudan became a country only in 2011, but Sudan appears to have been artificially held together by pressure from other nations.  I still don’t see why globalism and lack of war can’t coexist.  If nations had thinking persons in charge rather than macho men eager to show how big they are (aliens, this is a human fascination, I’ll grant you), we might well be able to live in peace.  If you want to take them back to your planet, you are most welcome to do so.

An Explanation

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Those of you who read daily might’ve noticed Friday, Saturday, and Sunday went by with no posts.  You may also remember I recently wrote about Job months.  There are also Job years.  This is an embarrassing and vulnerable thing to write, but my wife and I have been scammed for almost all of the money we had.  My computer had to be scrubbed (thus the silence of Job) and the last three days have been filled with filing incident reports, trying to remember what’s on autopay, and visiting the police and banks, making endless phone calls.  I have been a little distracted.  As my regular readers know, writing is therapy for me and I beg your indulgence as this blog, which has been pretty much daily for over fifteen years, might become a bit more sporadic.

I’m never been a great fan of the capitalistic system, but born into it, I have a general idea how it works.  One of the most difficult parts for me is when I think, “We’ll just…” and then realizing that we no longer have the financial safety net to do what ever “just” might’ve been.  This is not a welcome thing at 63.  I grew up poor, so I know what this feels like.  Retirement I don’t know what feels like, and it’s pretty clear that I never will now.  My books don’t sell well enough to provide more than an occasional book purchase of my own now and again.  That, of course, has been curtailed.

I do not understand the criminal mind.  I cannot comprehend how someone would knowingly target those of us who are aging and try to take everything we have.  At least one of the scammers was a young man.  My hope for him is that he may grow old and may, through some miracle, come to regret what he has spent his young life doing to complete strangers and try to help others instead.  I have my doubts that this will happen.  In any case, I know I have a couple of regular readers and I owe you an explanation.  Posts may become more regular again—I sincerely hope they will.  I do have some written in reserve.  But please know, as you read them, that they came from a different time and place.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Hello September

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Labor Day is as early as it can possibly be this year and as late as it can possibly be next year.  We live in a time of extremes. In any case, it’s our hello to September and our goodbye to summer.  Since I still think of weather quite a bit, I’m reflecting on how most of the month of August around here has felt like autumn.  A month that I normally think of as consisting of hot dog days as summer reinforces its grip has been one of chilly mornings requiring long-sleeved jogging togs, and even fingerless gloves indoors for a morning or two.  July was hot and rainy.  The kind of hot that saps your strength and energy.  August felt like relief after that, but now we greet September, wondering what might lie ahead.  Many of the trees around here have already started to change, which looked a little odd when it was only August.

A couple weeks ago

Autumn has always been my favorite season, as it is for many people.  It is poignant, however.  Summer has its endless lawn mowing, but trades that off with not requiring a jacket to be outdoors and plenty of sunshine.  More than that, even traditional capitalistic businesses tend to slow down a bit in the summer, if for no other reason, because many employees take vacation time and everything has to put on the brakes a little.  Because we work at breakneck pace for the remainder of the year, this more relaxed season is a welcome respite.  We know, as nights grow cooler and longer, that it is time to put that away for another year.  It’s a season of transitions which is what makes it so melancholy.  Work starts to feel more serious after Labor Day, but the holidays are at least within grasp.  Halloween is really the next on the list.

I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever be able to retire, and if I do, if these day off holidays will be so important to me.  I’ve been interested in studying holidays pretty much all of my professional life.  Never really a fan of the capitalistic ethos, after being thrown into that world I quickly learned to look at holidays as stepping stones to get me through the year.  The first four months are rough.  They do have holidays sprinkled here and there, but March and April and most of May are holiday free zones.  That’s one reason the more relaxed fit summer is welcome.  The pace picks up again tomorrow, but for today, at least, we have one last ounce of summer to live.

Missing the Rose

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It was Edinburgh, my wife and I concluded.  That’s where we’d seen The Name of the Rose.  Edinburgh was over three decades ago now, and since the movie is sometimes called dark academia we decided to give it another go.  A rather prominent scene that we both remembered, however, had been cut.  If you read the novel (I had for Medieval Church History in seminary), you knew that scene was not only crucial to the plot, but the very reason for the title.  In case you’re unfamiliar, the story is of a detective-like monk, William of Baskerville, solving a suicide and murders at an abbey even as the inquisition arrives and takes over.  It isn’t the greatest movie, but it does have a kind of dark academic feel to it.  But that missing scene.

Of course, it’s the sex scene between Adso, the novice, and the unnamed “rose.”  Sex scenes are fairly common in R-rated films, often gratuitous.  But since this one is what makes sense of the plot, why was it cut in its entirety?  Now the internet only gives half truths, so any research is only ever partial.  According to IMDb (owned by Amazon; and we’d watched it on Amazon Prime) the scene was cut to comply with local laws.  More to the point, can we trust movies that we stream haven’t been altered?  I watch quite a few on Tubi or Pluto and I sometimes have the sneaking suspicion that I’m missing something.  How would I know, unless I’d seen it before, or if I had a disc against which to compare it?  There was no indication on Amazon that the movie wasn’t the full version before we rented it.

The movie business is complex.  Digital formats, with their rights management, mean it’s quite simple to change the version of record.  Presumably, those who’ve pointed out the editing (quite clumsy, I’d say) in reviews had likely seen the movie before.  Curious, I glanced at the DVDs and Blu-ray discs on offer.  The playing time indicated they were the edited version.  Still, none of the advertising copy on the “hard copy” discs indicates that it is not the original.  Perhaps I’m paranoid, but Amazon does run IMDb, and the original version is now listed as “alternate.”  Now that I’ve refreshed my memory from over three decades ago, it’s unlikely that I’ll be watching the film again.  I’ll leave it to William of Baskerville to figure out why a crucial scene was silently cut and is now being touted as the way the story was originally released.

The Printed Word

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I miss them, newspapers.  Now, I’ve never been a great newspaper reader—I tend to live in my own little world, I guess, and I really have no taste for politics.  I still glance over the New York Times headlines daily (mostly) but that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about physical newspapers.  The other day we had a family creativity session.  This generally involves painting in some form or other and I realized with chagrin that we had no newspapers to lay down.  Nothing to protect the table top.  The same is true when we carve pumpkins, or do other activities that make you think that you want to protect your furniture.  Newspapers were always there.  We used to line our birdcage with them.  Made papier-mâché out of them.  They were handy to have around.

Josef Danhauser, Newspaper Readers, public domain. Image credit: Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, via Wikimedia Commons

We live fairly close to our means, so we don’t have lots of drop cloths lying about.  (Plastic is so much less feeling than paper.)  We don’t have rolls of butcher paper in our kitchen.  We even use cloth bags for groceries, so grocery bags are at a premium.  Our electronic mania has meant that physical creativity suffers.  I do applaud the saving of trees, but you sometimes just need the disposable broadsheet to catch the drips.  (And when I paint, believe me, there are drips.)  But perhaps this is a symptom of this insipid internet life into which we’ve slipped.  The other day I was searching for an electronic services store.  I’m not even sure what to call them anymore.  I had to go to the physical store (yes, they still make them) to have something looked at.

The website kept telling me a store with a different name was what I was looking for.  All I wanted to know was whether this was an actual store or some knockoff.  If you’ve purchased what are being called “dups” now you know that companies blatantly use other companies ads to sell cheap knockoffs that don’t resemble the product you wanted at all.  This all seems to be perfectly legal.  I guess I’m just nostalgic for the days when you had to have patience and doing things slowly was a sign of good quality.  The 24-hour news cycle has hardly been a benefit, and Trump could’ve never been elected without it.  And if you wanted to paint something, you’d just go to the stack of newspapers that every house seemed to have, and paint over any headlines you wished you hadn’t seen.

Book Stories

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I’m a headline browser.  Sometimes a story will make me sit up straight and click.  I was browsing the headlines in Publisher’s Weekly’s daily updates earlier this week.  One of their regular sections is on independent bookstore news.  When I saw “Oil City” and “Pennsylvania” in the same headline, well, I sat up straight.  I grew up very near Oil City, and attended Oil City High School.  One thing I noticed, even as a child, is that the nearest bookstore we knew of was over in Meadville.  (Eventually a B. Dalton’s, or Waldens, I can’t remember which, opened in the local mall that is now a very sad superstructure to visit.)  I would work the summers and after buying my school clothes would beg mom to take me to Meadville so that I could visit the bookstore.  It was a place that made me happy.

I don’t remember a bookstore ever being in Oil City (or Franklin, except a Christian bookstore).  I wish Raven’s End very well.  If it weren’t six hours away I’d drive there this weekend just to support them.  In these times of challenging human intelligence, we need more bookstores.  We need more readers.  That’s one of the reasons, I suspect, that Publisher’s Weekly informs readers of new bookstores opening.  As a young person you tend to accept things the way that they are.  In one of my philosophy classes I learned that this was called “naive realism.”  I also learned along the way that our brains evolved to help us survive, not to discover reality.  We have to work at the latter, and that means reading.

I live in the Lehigh Valley, a community that has had to remake itself after the closing of Bethlehem Steel.  I grew up in the Oil City and Franklin area which would eventually have to remake itself after the closing of Pennzoil and other large, heavy industries.  As I was growing up there I found books, but in department stores like Woolworths, or more commonly, secondhand at Goodwill.  People are changed by the books they read and, given their own devices, most won’t go online looking for books.  After work I tend to shut the computer down and pick up a book to read.  I also try to carve out reading time each morning.  I grew up without easy access to bookstores.  It gladdens me to see one opening in the small town where I began to realize the importance of picking up a book and learning about this ever-changing world.

Zoning In

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Born Jewish, and Unitarian by choice, Rod Serling believed in the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings.  Like many people, even Serling believed that season four of The Twilight Zone, which went to an hour format from the usual half, didn’t really work.  Nevertheless, the fourth episode of that season,“He’s Alive,” really should be required watching of every person in the United States.  This episode was written by Serling and it focuses on a young American fascist who’s having trouble gaining a following.  A shadowy figure then reads to him from what sounds exactly like Trump’s playbook, and soon decent people are raging along with him about foreigners and those who are different.  When the shadowy figure is finally revealed, we’re not surprised to learn it is Hitler.

The young man obeys without question, and soon it looks like he could be elected.  He has one of his best friends killed as a martyr to the cause.  He murders an old Jewish man who has cared for him since his youth.  He declares himself made of steel, with no feelings.  And when he ends up dead (everyone knows how Hitler’s career culminated), the spirit of Hitler rises from his body as Serling warns that wherever hatred exists, Hitler still lives.  Now this episode aired in 1963 but it could’ve been 2016, or 2024.  Prescient people, like Rod Serling, knew that mob thinking could be easily exploited.  Even in the first segment after the introduction the instructions are laid out.  Play on people’s fear of those who are different.  No matter how good things may be, people will be unsatisfied.  Add any power-hungry individual and you’ve got the recipe for a fascist overtaking.

The episode made me wonder if we could ever become a just society.  Ironically, that which calls itself “Christianity” these days stands in the way.  In its day, The Twilight Zone was amazingly influential.  It had a great impact on what was to follow and it’s still regularly referred to, even by those who’ve never seen an episode.  If only we’d pay attention to its message.  I’ve been making my way through the entire series, slowly, over the years.  Now and again an episode will really hit home.  I have to admit that I was physically squirming during “He’s Alive.”  It’s not that it is the greatest episode of the series, but its message is extremely timely.  The requirement for a better world is simple, but seemingly impossible to reach.  Treat others as you wish to be treated.