Bug Eyes

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Science fiction and horror are close kin.  Once relegated to the cheap rack of “genre fiction,” both have now developed considerable literary sophistication, perhaps in the wake of their ability to bring in money.  I used to attend used book sales.  Two of the big ones in central Jersey were the Bryn Mawr sale, held just outside Princeton, and the even larger Hunterdon County Friends of the Library sale.  Both were springtime events and highlights on my calendar.  I always had a list with me when I went, but there were also so many books I’d never heard of and that looked fascinating.  One such book was the science fiction anthology, Bug-Eyed Monsters, edited by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg.  The garish cover was half the appeal, and, well, monsters go without saying.

Although I’ve mostly moved to the horror end of the spectrum, there were some good stories here.  Bug-eyed monsters were a staple of 1950’s sci-fi, gracing the covers of pulps, often menacing women with their tentacles.  Some of the tales here share that kind of wide-eyed wonder at the sheer power of imagination, while others are much more subtle.  Monsters, of course, lurk between genres, bursting into consciousness when something unexpected is discovered.  They also have strains of religious awe associated with them.  That’s obvious in a couple of the stories as well.  Since I’m trying to read through my own books while stores are closed, I decided to spend some time with my monsters.  The problem with story collections, however, is you can’t discuss them all in the short format to which I limit myself here.  Besides, some of them I didn’t like.

Monsters deserve to be treated with respect.  In the “golden age” of sci-fi they were often played for titillation.  Most of the monsters in this collection are from outer space.  Some are homegrown, generally in the scarier tales.  We are afraid of those who are different.  Monsters, as more than one of these stories indicate, can be more humane than humans often are.  It’s no surprise that they tend to represent the foreigner, the person whose culture and appearance are different than our own.  Titillation apart, these narratives often ask us to stop and consider what might happen if we really did listen.  Would we not improve ourselves if we could learn from those we fear?  In these days of government-approved xenophobia, perhaps we should dust off our copies of the old genre fiction.  Even in those days we were encouraged to be open minded like our monsters.

Learning To Fly

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It’s perhaps the most deeply rooted human dream.  Flying.  Women Who Fly, by Serinity Young, is a fascinating book.  Subtitled Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females, the book covers all of these and more.  The dream of flying is played out in many ways here, but often the narrative comes back to how patriarchy imprisons women.  Is it any wonder they want to fly?  Very wide in historical scope, the book can’t cover all cases in equal depth.  It nevertheless demonstrates how pervasive the idea is.  Beginning with ancient female figurines bearing bird-like features, Young moves through the related concepts of captivity, transcendence, sexuality, and immortality, showing how female characters are related to these idea in universal and unrelenting ways in the form of flying females.

There are many lenses through which to view patriarchy.  It can be explained as a consequence of settled agricultural existence with its subsequent division of labor.  Such a scenario raises questions of whether women dreamed of flight before that, and I believe the answer must be yes.  For as long as we’ve observed birds and associated the sky with gods we have longed for flight.  Although birds make it look easy, it is an incredibly difficult and costly adaptation.  Still, women dream of travel without obstacles (let the reader understand) to the realms where deities dwell.  It is difficult to summarize a book that covers so much historical territory.  Young doesn’t limit herself to western religions but also spends a fair bit of time among Buddhist, Hindu, and Daoist ideas of flying women.  She covers mythical, folkloristic, human, and historical flying females all the way up to modern astronauts.

As I was coming to the close of the book the real message hit me—I can be thick at times, although much of my own writing is metaphorical—men have actively tried to clip women’s wings for a long time.  Often under the auspices of religion.  Think of it: for centuries of existence the major monotheistic traditions have refused female leadership.  The one (inevitably male) god has set up a boys’ club of sacerdotal leadership.  As Young points out, even the named angels in the Bible are male.  I used to comfort myself with the explanation that male leaders were simply too self-centered to consider others, but it is becoming clearer, the more I read, that men have always had a tendency to try to keep women down.  And thus they fly.  There’s much in this book for both women and men to ponder.

Cancelled Easter

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The year they cancelled Easter.  Well, not exactly.  Perhaps I’m merely a product of the commercialization of my time, but my thoughts go back to the Grinch.  “It came without boxes,” he said, “it came without bags” (and any more might be copyright infringement).  You get the point—holidays aren’t reliant upon their trappings.  Can Easter come without colorful eggs?  Without baskets and bonnets?  Without Peeps and chocolates?  Yes, it can.  We’ve taken another holiday with religious origins and associated it with what you can buy.  I know it’s more than that for some people.  It’s singing stirring hymns (all of which can be found on YouTube), and dressing nice (which can still be  done at home), but mainly I think it’s the sense of togetherness that’s missing.  The freedom of bursting from our personal tombs in which we’ve been stuck for three weeks.

Around here snow was falling on Good Friday.  A friend told me her company decided since everyone was working remotely they would give them an extra holiday that day.  Others of us slogged on as usual, for unlike Christmas, the Easter/Passover complex is not about getting days off work.  These are, I guess, working class holidays.  Our capitalistic outlook wants us to spend money, though, on holidays.  Halloween (on which I foresee a plethora of plague doctor costumes) has become almost as lucrative as Christmas.  The spring holidays—St. Valentine’s, St. Patrick’s, and Easter—encourage spending as well.  Can we not get to the heart of a holiday without pulling out our wallets?  Spring holidays are all about the return of life after winter.  It was snowing, but I could hear lawnmowers in the distance.

With capitalism growing old and sluggish, the next spending holiday isn’t until Mother’s Day, yet another spring celebration associated with flowers and life.  My wife has been saying that what she misses is being out to see things coming back to life in spring.  Some of the trees are putting on quite a show already.  Magnolias and dogwoods have started to scatter their petals with the snowflakes.  Our daffodils have been blooming since March.  The forsythias are already going green.  Life is returning.  That’s what Easter, and in its own way Passover, is all about.  Life after imprisonment—freedom.  Liberation.  We have to put them off this year, but they’re all movable feasts.  We keep quietly apart in the hopes that life really will return after disease and death.  And it will come regardless.  It always does.

Bunny or No?

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Since we’re in the midst of a smaller holiday season (capitalistic societies can only get away with one major holiday season because the workers must work) many people are wondering whether they should go to church for Easter tomorrow.  I’ll confess I woke up from a nightmare this morning where I accidentally forgot about COVID-19 and went to church.  I stepped inside and the building was full.  I tried to find an empty pew to socially distance myself from all but the Divine, and there was no room.  I felt infected as others started to cough around me.  In real life I’d just read from the World Health Organization’s situation report (number 80, located here, in case you want to see) that we’ve just reached day 100 since WHO received its first notification of this new disease.  The report has guidance for those who feel compelled to gather for religious services.  It makes for very interesting reading.

WHO, like certain political parties, knows that people will listen to their religious leaders rather than reason.  (And still our universities cut positions in their religion departments since, apparently, it is best not to know about such things.)  Recognizing that a secular, science-based organization simply can’t compete, WHO urges religious leaders to spread the word about evidence-based responses to the outbreak.  Don’t gather large Easter-day crowds (they also mention Passover and Ramadan), but, interestingly, do keep the services going.  WHO recognizes the psychological (you can’t say “spiritual”) value of religious belief.  It gives people hope and comfort.  It keeps them going in difficult times.  Call it mental health, but the World Health Organization has wellbeing right there in its title.

Photo credit: ItsLassieTime, via Wikimedia Commons

Ironically, the same day I saw an email from the other acronym in my life, SBL (the Society of Biblical Literature).  They were releasing their annual report showing the dismal job market figures for the discipline over the last year.  These jobs are fading and although WHO recognizes billions of people are motivated by religion our smartest institutions are shifting their money away from understanding it.  The COVID-19 outbreak puts us in this strange place where disjunctures become focal points.  If you look at a field of uniform gray long enough you’ll stop seeing anything at all.  You need contrast for vision to work.  WHO recognizes that religious observance constitutes a major challenge for the effort to keep people isolated.  Universities now in isolation, continue to see no reason to study this.  I’m waiting to awake from this nightmare.

Post-Pandemic

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Something I’ve noticed: throughout this crisis business people have been fretting how hard it will be to reestablish everything “like it was” when this is all over.  I wonder if they’re not thinking big enough.  It seems to me that a system as fragile as capitalism is bound to tumble when something suddenly becomes more important than money.  Humans and mortality.  Most people fear death.  Religion, historically, has come to fill in that space, but as we grew more and more confident in our ability to prevent large-scale death capitalism, the real opiate of the people, stepped in.  Make money!  Buy things so that those of us with lots of money will get even more!  We’ll live extravagant lifestyles and laugh at those of you who’ll keep spending to keep us where we are!  Then people stop spending.  Nobody’s laughing now.

Is there not a better way to construct society?  Sure, some means of exchange is necessary, but do we have to give such power to an abstract concept such as money?  Granted, gods are abstract concepts too, but at least they’re spiritual rather than material.  That which is made of mere physical stuff is bound to disappoint eventually.  When our sun balloons out into a red giant, everything we know here on earth will be gone.  The physical stuff anyway.  I know this opens me to accusations of wishful, wistful, escapist thinking—maybe something spiritual will come rescue us—but I assure you it’s not that.  What I’m referring to is meaning.  There’s value in it, and you can’t buy it.

The coronavirus crisis has us all, on some level, asking about the meaning of it all.  God hasn’t intervened, and the numbers are still climbing.  Nature dictates that they will eventually stabilize, and decline.  Our capitalist society, however, is scrambling to figure how to make sure everyone pays their taxes, their bills, and somehow manages to find toilet paper (which is a great investment at the moment).  Are these the bases for meaning in life?  Can’t we do better than that?  Can’t we find a system that values what is truly unique and rare?  Each and every person on this planet.  And some of us would go a step further and include our animal people too.  Life.  Life is value.  Money can be thrown away, as we all know.  Sometimes quite easily.  As long as it lands in the coffers of those with too much, everybody’s happy.  Well, not everybody.  Maybe not even most.  Perhaps it’s a good time to reassess our priorities.

Look, Don’t Touch

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It’s spooky.  Going to the grocery store, I mean.  In the best of times I don’t get out much, but since groceries are only really in supply (somewhat short) after senior hour, and since I’m an early riser, I head to Giant at 7:00 a.m.  Nobody’s talking to anybody else, unless the check-out line is long.  Even then it’s brief.  Most people (including myself) are wearing rubber gloves and face masks.  I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this in a horror movie or two.  As in The Body Snatchers, we’re afraid of each other, not knowing who might be “one of them.”  Gun sales, meanwhile, are booming.  Since I get in once the seniors have checked out the toilet paper and high fibre cereal are decimated.  I’m glad I’m vegan because most of that stock remains untouched.

The funny thing is daily life for me is otherwise pretty normal.  I’m an introvert who normally works from home and has no one beyond family check in on me.  I don’t normally buy out the grocery store, however.  I don’t hoard.  (Yes, I have a lot of books but they’ve been bought slowly, over many years.  And only one copy of each.)  So it seems that when non-introverts are forced inside they hoard.  And purchase firearms.  Or maybe I’m missing something.  I think back (if I can) to before this all started.  Going to a crowded grocery store on a Sunday afternoon where nobody was wearing gloves.  You could see their faces.  There was chatter.  Now when we get home we’re supposed to leave our groceries outside where the squirrels will get them before we do.  Then we disinfect them and wash our hands before and after washing our food.

A work colleague in New York City reported seeing grocery delivery individuals wearing hazmat suits.  We can’t see with whom we’re dealing any more.  The truth about introverts is that we’re social creatures as well.  We just require smaller doses than most.  That doesn’t mean we all want to live on a desert island.  Our quietness is a mask, you see.  We observe.  We try to help when we can.  That’s why it’s me in the grocery store.  My special talent is waking up early.  I’m not yet a senior, according to public transit or grocery shopping guidelines.  My hair is turning gray, though, and my beard is white.  You won’t see it though, if we pass in the grocery store.  Like everyone else, I’m wearing a mask to get through this crisis.

All the Tea

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I’ve been reading a lot about China lately.  Political scientists have been interested in its economic growth for some time and it has rivaled the GDP of the United States in such a way that it’s an open question as to which is the larger.  With so many things to keep track of in daily life, I’m loathe to add poli sci to the list, but I’ve always found history fascinating.  China has long been the target of Christian missionaries.  Finding a culture that had developed quite differently, in some sense socially distant, they were anxious to make them in their own image.  China had its own religious heritage of folk traditions, Confucian beliefs, and Taoism (as well as Buddhism and Islam), and Christianity’s claim of being the only true religion caused considerable social turmoil.  One such event was the Taiping Rebellion in the nineteenth century.

Image credit: Wu Youru, via Wikimedia Commons

A complaint of evangelical pastors, even in the United States, after Billy Graham had come through town was that local people, all riled up on revivalism, had unrealistic expectations for what their local churches could do.  Viewing this from a different angle, the issue was that one outlook on Scripture could lead to consequences that others didn’t understand.  The same thing applies to Taiping.  Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion, had read his Bible (the activity encouraged by missionaries) and became convinced he was the brother of Jesus Christ.  He set about trying to establish what is called the Heavenly Kingdom.  This clashed with the government of China during the Qing Dynasty.  Eventually foreign powers even got involved.  The end result was between ten and thirty million deaths.  That’s right, ten to thirty million.

Religious ideas are powerful.  This is one reason that repressive governments often try to outlaw religions.  Other governments (including some not too far from here) use religions for political ends.  True believers are great followers.  I first learned about the Taiping Rebellion only relatively recently.  I’ve been reading snippets about China for several years now.  Its economic power may well be greater than that of the country in which I grew up.  Perspectives are shifting.  Vast numbers of people die because of religious conflicts.  If you’re one of them the real tragedy is that, in Stalinistic terms, you become simply a statistic.  There’s a reason authoritarian governments try to keep the opium from the hands of the people.  I’m no political scientist, but history reveals much about religion and its discontents.

Denying Reality

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The science-deniers in the White House have had to accommodate themselves to evidence-based facts and they look none too happy about it.  Science denial has a long and venerable history in a certain type of evangelicalism.  Science teaches us that most things are more complex than they seem and this is also true of religions.  There are evangelicals all over the board, but those claiming the name most loudly have been outspoken Trump supporters.  The administration has had a three-year spree of decrying science and now that a very real virus is killing us they have no choice but to listen, albeit reluctantly.  So why do certain strains of evangelicalism deny science?  Is it all for profit?  Is there some kind of biblical mandate?

As someone who spent many years making a living as a biblical scholar (and it still plays into my work), I often think about this.  There is the underlying reliance on miracle as opposed to naturalism, for sure.  If God can do anything then science is ever only contingent.  Any moment a miracle (a word that doesn’t occur in the Bible, by the way) could happen and there’d be no way to measure it.  The main reason, however, goes back to Genesis and its creation stories.  When you read a book first impressions are important.  The Good Book begins with a theological account that eventually came to be taken literally.  It’s as if someone decided to live by a poem, taken as fact.  Some things can’t be expressed except with metaphorical language.  But since this creation takes place up front, any challenge to it is an affront to the Almighty.

The antagonism set up by Darwin’s discovery of evolution set the whole confrontation in motion.  Evangelicals in the late 1800s were feeling pushed into the corner by the overwhelming evidence that the creation accounts in Genesis were not factual.  This insult to miracle has simmered for well over a century—the Scopes trial, well into this period, took place 95 years ago.  Fear that the Bible’s loss of science authority might somehow lessen its spiritual message became a ditch in which to die.  Big business learned, back in the seventies, that evangelicals made great followers and could constitute a voting bloc if only a cause could be raised around which they’d rally.  We all know what that was.  That issue has led to the denial of science and the acceptance of anyone ill-informed enough to accept such denial.  Only after learning that you must fight pandemics with science has the White House had to start changing its story.  When it’s all over, however, it will go right back to denying everything.

WHO Cares?

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During this time of crisis my employer has suggested keeping an eye on the World Health Organization website.  I’ve been doing that with a nearly religious fervor.  I’ve been looking over the daily situation reports.  These not only contain advice not poisoned by government agendas, but also list the new outbreaks and provide pages of statistics.  The numbers differ from many news sources, but WHO tracks new cases, the number of deaths, and the vectors of transmission.  I’m trying to make a learning exercise out of this, instead of just further cause for panic.  More secretive world states, WHO warns, are preventing containment by under-reporting.  You’d think that in a time of global crisis that even autocracies would want to cooperate.  You’d think wrong.  

Photo credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), via Wikimedia Commons

WHO has indicated that some nations (the usual suspects) are keeping numbers down not through effective measures, but through not reporting them.  Since honest reporting helps to trace, track, and understand transmission, such nations are essentially holding out hope that they’ll somehow bend this crisis to their advantage and appear stronger than they actually are.  I’m guessing these nations are male. 

Interestingly, the names of the countries on the overall list don’t always match those I’ve learned in my own study of geography.  The Vatican, for example, is listed as “Holy See.”  I know that’s its name, but it seems kind of odd against Lichtenstein, Peru, and Mozambique.  The Holy See, last time I noticed, had 6 cases.  The number gave me pause.  With a population of just over 600, Vatican City does seem to be a male nation.  It’s a country of clerics. 

Those in ministry toe a difficult line during a pandemic.  Governments are telling people to isolate themselves to halt the spread of disease, and yet clergy, like medical professionals, often have to put themselves in harm’s way.  I think of how Pope Francis had laid hands on the sick, even when it must’ve been difficult to do so.  Local churches have, for the most part, shut down.  Clergy are self-isolating, social distancing.  It is the socially responsible thing to do.  How it fits within an ecclesiastical view of life, however, must be quite a balancing act.  I often think of how I’d be acting if I were a minister.  Would I go to the home of someone suffering in isolation, or would I be afraid of infecting my own family?  Would I be a nation reaching out to the rest of the world with largess, or would I be a holy see cut off from the people?  I don’t have an answer.  I wonder if anyone does.

More Than Books

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Careers.  A pandemic is no time to think about changing jobs unless you’re forced to, but I often wonder if I got it wrong.  No matter what my job was, I wanted it to be about books.  When I was considering ministry it was largely because of the Good Book, and I did a lot of reading of books about it.  Over time my mindset morphed to that of a professor and the book-lined study was my icon.  I admit I’m fixated at that stage.  Now I’m an editor.  Life would’ve been different if I’d become a librarian.  Susan Orlean’s The Library Book is a volume that opens up the cloistered lives of librarians and shows just how vital libraries remain.  I have to confess that before reading this I don’t recall ever having heard of the central Los Angeles library fire of 1986.  Now I can’t forget it.

More than just an account of the fire—although a suspect was arrested it still isn’t clear that he was guilty—this is a book about libraries.  An account of the fire alone would not have been so interesting.  Orlean tells us about this history of the Los Angeles Public Library and the importance of libraries around the world.  She introduces us to several librarians and gives us insight into why they became such and what it is they do.  Here’s a hint: it’s a lot more than re-shelving books.  And there’s the sad tale of an unsolved fire that destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of books.  Having had hundreds of books destroyed by water myself, some parts of this book were difficult to read.  Books are vulnerable, like butterflies they must be treated with care.  The idea of them burning, then being soaked, is distressing.

Like many people, I suspect, I began this book thinking libraries were on the way out.  The internet has changed things.  What I didn’t fully appreciate is that libraries have been evolving to keep up with the times.  And that they provide social services, such as a place out of the weather for the homeless.  I experienced this myself in Montclair, New Jersey.  When accompanying my wife there on Saturdays when she had to work, if I finished with the bookstores early I’d head to the library.  You could sit there for free.  I always have books with me, so I could read.  I could use their wifi for free.  Libraries, you see, are all about giving.  They give so much to the community.  Now that we’re living hermetically sealed lives, it might seem strange to think of libraries as places of social gathering.  And of course they’ll have books.  Orlean’s account makes me think perhaps my career has been off-track.  Perhaps I should’ve been a librarian.

Disease Divine?

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I suspect many religious people are wondering where God is amid the current pandemic.   Theodicy (explaining the suffering of the innocent while defending the goodness of the Divine) has always been the bête noire of monotheistic belief systems.  (Polytheism has the advantage of always being able to blame another god.)   People have been pointing articles out to me that show the religious implications of a crisis.  I’m not at all surprised by the irrationality of the subjects.  The first article was an opinion piece in the New York Times.  It makes a good case that the religious right paved the way for the COVID-19 contagion in the United States.  The religious right is anti-science because they (wrongly) believe the Bible is a science book.  Even a small dose of seminary could cure that ill.  Katherine Stewart nevertheless makes a strong argument that the survivors of all of this will know whom to blame.  Science denial is not the same as authentic religion.

From NASA’s photo library

The other news stories that arise are of evangelical leaders defying government bans or guidance, even when delivered by messiah Trump, to large gatherings.  One of the main reasons for this is that said messiah kept saying the coronavirus was nothing to worry about.  Only when re-election seemed unlikely with all the uneducated dead did he finally start issuing warnings to avoid such idiotic congregating.  In the midst of it all, Jerry Falwell Junior (why did all these evangelists have to propagate?) decided to reopen Liberty University.  No doubt confident that God will keep them from any harm, the university officials decided it would be good to gather students from all over the country and put them together in dorms again.  If you’ve ever lived in a dorm I’m sure you can see why the decision is anything but wise.

It’s sad that evangelicalism has decided to pander to the uneducated.  You can believe in Jesus (many mainstream Christians do) without parking your rationality in the farthest parking spot from the door.  Many of us, huddled in our houses, not having seen other living people for days, are trying to isolate this thing and drive it to extinction.  Meanwhile, those who trust their own version of the supernatural are doing whatever they can to ensure the virus continues to spread.  Why?  They have long been taught that science isn’t real.  Never mind that their cell phones work and they get the news of open dorms through the internet, the science behind it all is bunk.  An entire executive branch administration that doesn’t believe in science is as sure a road to apocalypse as any.

Prophetic Breakfast

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The irony doesn’t escape me—and why does irony always try to do that, anyway?—that Ezekiel 4:9 is about famine.  I’ve posted about the breakfast cereals from Food for Life (yet more irony, from Corona, California) before, but during this time of shortages at the local grocery stores, famine is an apt topic.  I don’t mean to underplay famine.  Death by starvation is something nobody should have to face, but looking ahead, who knows?  The reason I was eating Ezekiel 4:9 is that my usual cereal brand was sold out.  Empty shelves and the prophet seem symbolic, don’t you think?  The box quotes the verse as a kind of health-food recipe, but the point was, in context, that this was not something you’d normally want to eat.  This was food for hard times.

Ezekiel, you see, lived through the collapse of his own society.  In his case it wasn’t because of a virus, but imperial ambition.  The Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar was expanding and Judah was in the way.  The city was captured and Ezekiel, a priest, was exiled.  His symbolic action of eating poor food was to show people they ought to plan on this as “the new normal.”  Even now we hear people saying, “when things get back to normal…” but I also wonder if that will happen.  Collapse can occur slowly.  The thing about reading history is that we see centuries compressed into a few hundred pages.  Things take time.  Like restocking toilet paper.  Meanwhile empires crumble.

The Babylonian Empire didn’t last long.  Oh, it was long enough to mean some people knew nothing else, but looking back we can see that it held sway for decades rather than centuries.  In the middle of his book, Ezekiel changes his tune.  Once the temple is destroyed, when the worst has happened, he starts looking for a better future.  Many people have been under serious strain since November 2016.  Anxiety levels have been consistently high for damaging lengths of time.  I suspect the book of Revelation hasn’t been so well thumbed for decades.  The seventies were also apocalyptic times, as I recall.  Although we’re living through history, we each do it on the ground.  We experience it in our own little lives.  These seismic shifts can’t help but impact us.  It helps me to act like some things are normal.  I still get out of bed early.  I stumble into the kitchen and fumble on the light.  I settle down for breakfast with a prophet and wait.

A-changin’

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The other day, while engaged in a mindless task, I had Bob Dylan playing in the background.  When I say Bob Dylan I mean the Bob Dylan of the 1960s.  I was an infant when he was singing songs like “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”  As much as I cast the 1960s in a rosy glow, I was in fact a naive child through my portion of them.  I knew about the Vietnam War, but I couldn’t point to the country on a map.  Likewise, I knew about the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.  I also knew that we had walked on the moon.  My family at this stage didn’t listen to popular music.  I grew up with hymns in my ears and the culture in which I was swimming slowing becoming absorbed through my pores.  Dylan was part of the latter.

One of the reasons I don’t often listen to music is that I really listen to it.  It is so significant to me that I don’t like to relegate it to the background.  While I work from home, for example, I don’t put music on.  I find it difficult to concentrate because, truth be told, I’d rather listen to the music.  As I had Bob Dylan on, I was doing a task where I could listen as the rest of my body went into autopilot.  The angry white men who are running things now, it struck me, were alive in the sixties as well.  As much as they seem like aliens who were beamed down after the expansion of human consciousness, they were lurking in the shadows all along.  If they sing along to Bob Dylan they’re hypocrites.  We need another Dylan.

Photo credit: Rowland Scherman, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

That’s putting quite a burden on an artist, I know.  But Dylan captured the spirit of the times.  Even as scientism was growing the reality of the Zeitgeist was obvious.  I grew up in the chaotic seventies.  The eighties were bland with the Reaganism reaction—angry white men wanted to get rich at others’ expense, and we let them.  Not enough time has passed for history to decide on the spirit of the fin de siècle, I don’t think.  You see, we seem stuck in a feedback loop.  Dylan’s lyrics are as necessary now as they were more than half a century ago.  I’m growing weary of angry white men and their petty concerns.  Maybe I need to listen to music more often. 

The Essentials

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The current crisis, in my mind, dates to Thursday, March 12.  That particular day, at least in my socially distant location, the pandemic became a panic.  Decisions were made to have employees work remotely.  Zoom or Skype meetings were substituted for the face-to-face variety.  Church services were cancelled.  There was a run on toilet paper.  This final aspect has me really vexed.  Why toilet paper?  Experts say if we kept to our usual buying habits there would be plenty for everyone, but the survivalist mentality kicked in and people began hoarding.  If the apocalypse was coming, they wanted to go down fighting with clean underwear on.  We were in Ithaca the next day to see my daughter.  We ordered out from a local restaurant.  When we got home we found a role of new toilet paper in the top of the bag.

According to my amateur dating technique, we’ve been in this state for 13 days now.  Toilet paper, tissues, and paper towels are nowhere to be found.  I looked on Amazon.  They can get you toilet paper, but you’ll need to wait until May.  Why?  Ironically, because it’s being shipped from China.  Yes, the nation where the pandemic erupted has toilet paper aplenty.  Here in the greatest [sic] nation in the world, there’s none to be found.  What does this tell us about a country that self-identifies as “Christian”?  Whatever happened to “if someone demands your coat, give them your shirt also”?  Or perhaps more to the point, “turn the other cheek”?  How has a nation of Bible believers responded to a crisis?  By becoming selfish.  By stockpiling toilet paper.

I’ve spent a lot of time camping.  I’m fairly comfortable with the ways of nature.  Like most other people I prefer a nice, private restroom with all the accoutrements, but if bears can do it in the woods, why can’t we?  I have my Boy Scout guide right here.  But it suggests using toilet paper.  If books could be ordered, I suspect How To Poop [this is the family friendly version] in the Woods would be a current bestseller.  Trump says he wants everyone back to work by Easter, but the toilet paper ordered from Asia won’t even be here by then.  And will offices have access to some secret stash that only those who buy in bulk can find?  Hoarding makes any crisis worse, but this particular one seems especially mean spirited.  It makes me realize just how great America has been made.

All Been Ready

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As the pandemic stretches on and getting things in stores—or even from Amazon—isn’t assured, my thoughts go back to Larry Norman.  Specifically to his song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.”  Made famous for many by its use in the 1972 rapture film A Thief in the Night, the song recounts the state of those “left behind” when a piece of bread could be exchanged for a bag of gold.  The lyrics are haunting in their sincerity.  Here in Pennsylvania, as in neighboring New York, non-essential businesses have closed, per order of the governors.  Periodic forays to the grocery store show the empty shelves of panic buying.  Norman’s song rings in my ears.  Only this isn’t a biblical plague.  We’re just acting like it.

No doubt technology has been of great use in keeping us aware.  I do wonder, however, at how panics seem to come more quickly now.  Slowing down manufacturing will have a knock-on effect for things down the road, of course.  Right now we’re all wondering how we’re going to get through yet another day just sitting in the house.  Meanwhile the lawn is beginning to grow and I’m going to have to get out there with the push mower soon.  I’d been planning on shopping for a better one this year, but plans seem to have suddenly pooled at my feet.  What is essential travel anyway?  Does it count a trip to the big box hardware store to buy a reel mower?  Should I even bother about the lawn when there’s no toilet paper within a fifty-mile radius?  I wish we’d all been ready.

The funny thing about all this is how it makes us focus on the here and now.  While we’re waiting for things to “get back to normal” we’re being told nobody knows how long this might last and we should plan to hunker down for some time.  The International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (being held in Australia this year) was cancelled.  Many of us in the discipline have had our lives revolving around the Annual Meeting in November for all of our adulthood.  If that meeting’s cancelled how will we even know when Thanksgiving comes?  Can it even come without the crowds at the Macy’s parade?  Best not to look too far ahead, I guess.  The rapture is a fictional construct, but the effects of a pandemic are eerily similar.  I do wish all of us had been ready.