The Religion of X

2 Comments December 24, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

While I never considered myself comically deprived as a child, as an adult I have come to understand that I missed quite a bit. Much of this comes through the Marvel Universe that I discovered through various superhero films that have captured the interest of the movie industry. Initially I felt a little silly looking for profundity among all those bulging biceps and impossible pecs, but I’m beginning to understand that just because a book is illustrated doesn’t mean it’s facile. All of this is a way of saying that I watched X2: X-Men United over the weekend. With my understanding of evolution and genetics, minimal though they be, I always find the “mutant” explanation a bit hard to swallow. Nevertheless, these heroes have such a multiplicity of gifts, and the movies are dark enough to suggest something deeper than guys running around in tights. All I know of the X-Men I learned through the first movie, and I’ve never watched the extras. X2 introduced a new character (to me) that seemed to have been designed for a blog like this.

Nightcrawler is portrayed as demonic in shape and coloration, resembling Iblis more than anything else, is the most religious X-Man I’ve so far encountered. His hideout in the movie is an abandoned church in Boston, and when he is discovered he is in the midst of praying. During the course of the movie he prays the rosary and recites Psalms, making him a truly conflicted character—demonic in form and devout in soul. Comic book writers have long drawn on religious themes, but the shaping of “profane” characters as “religious” would appear a venial kind of blasphemy to many. If cartoon characters, however, are to resemble the real world at all religion must play into the Marvel Universe. After all, it plays into the fantasy world of the Tea Party on a regular basis. The concept of a religious demon is biblical, as James notes in his epistle, “the devils also believe, and tremble.”

There is something deeper going on here, however. Nightcrawler not only believes, but worships. The issues of prejudice and racism are clearly present throughout the movie(s). And as the story comes to its climax, Phoenix—whose name already suggests resurrection—rescues her X-compatriots in an act of self-sacrifice. Religion, as it plays out in X2 is messy and ragged around the edges. But it is clearly present. In the Marvel Universe gods and humans mix with unnerving ease, and the gods aren’t always the most powerful of the heroes we meet. After seeing the movies I’ve come to realize that a developed backstory exists for this universe and some scholars of religion have begun to notice. And once that happens, a theology is never far behind. I suspect it will remain a matter of debate whether the book is better than the movie or vice-versa. In the meanwhile, I’m thinking I’ll need to find the third member of this trinity and see how the story ends.

Evolving Instinct

3 Comments December 23, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

Evolution has appeared as a threat to the Christian establishment ever since Charles Darwin worked out a mechanism by which it could work without God. In the western world, particularly in the United States, evolution has always been a religious issue; it seems that if we remove God from the development of humankind we remove him from the universe. The thing is, natural selection works on such an elegant scale that the scientific endeavor itself almost hinges on it. And still people believe. I flatter myself with thinking I’m a creative sort, and so Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution provided an intriguing consideration of how we might become creators in a world lacking a creator. Well, I shouldn’t be so crass; Dutton has no atheistic agenda—he is interested in exploring what natural function the human love of art might have. We do know that art appears well before civilization itself, and Dutton has a suspicion that natural selection’s lesser known sibling sexual selection might have an explanatory role. He isn’t willing to go all the way and say art is just a mating strategy, but art and love are no doubt bound closely together.

I read The Art Instinct wondering if there might be some collateral insight into the origin of religion. I wasn’t disappointed. Within the first ten pages religion entered the discussion and it never really left. Not that sexual selection evolved religion, but the traits of the religious often parallel those of the artist. As Dutton points out, some theorists almost equate religion and art. For me one of the main features of this thought experiment was the innate questioning of reductionism. While there is no doubt a stark beauty to the idea that an atomistic theory might explain every weird little thing that we do in the name of art and religion, real life just doesn’t feel that way. The reductionist will counter that emotions have evolved as well, and surely there is a measure of truth in that. Nevertheless there is too much that goes unexplained in this mechanistic worldview. Even Dutton occasionally uses the language of the soul.

Sublimity remains a noble state. The feeling that we have standing before a painting that yanks our very consciousness into itself, or when a symphony sweeps us to places we can’t begin to articulate, or a poet distills in a handful of words what an entire lifetime has taught us—these experiences certainly don’t feel like electrons racing through a gray matter racetrack. Even stepping out the door on some autumn mornings can bring the essence of life into a single, compact moment when nature’s art transcends the human capacity for understanding. Science, at such times, is the farthest thing from our minds. Or at least mine. Perhaps it’s a personal defect. As Dutton notes in his Afterword, his thesis has raised the ire of reductionists and the religious alike. To me that sounds like he’s probably headed in the right direction. Religion may not be art, but art is life. Reducing life to a series of earning opportunities in a godless marketplace may make me believe in Hell yet.

Umbrella Apocalypse

2 Comments December 22, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

Broken ribs and twisted, tortured limbs hanging useless under a leaden sky. It was a scene of carnage. I knew the world was supposed to end yesterday, but I didn’t believe I would experience it, but the evidence was indisputable. It was the apocalypse. For umbrellas. Winter storm Draco had melted by the time he reached the East Coast. I awoke to the apartment shuddering in the wind, and I could hear the rain pelting the windows. I had one more day to go to work before two things: the end of the year and the end of the world. And I would be relying on New Jersey Transit. The very thought makes me want to cower in the closet. My bus stop has no shelter—it’s just an exposed street corner, not far enough away to justify a drive. I stood in the rain, faithful umbrella held like a shield in the blast of Draco’s breath. The bus, of course, was nearly half an hour late. I stumbled up the stairs, glasses dripping, and decided that today, only today, I would take the subway across Manhattan. After all, the world was ending.

The lines from the Port Authority to the bowels of the subway are like those old documentaries of massive lemming migrations off a cliff. My turn. The card reader said “Card Already Expired.” Metrocards don’t expire; you charge them up and recharge them when they’re empty. I still had money on my account, but with other lemmings close behind, and rush-hour grade lines at the recharging machines, I decided to fight the dragon on the streets. It was with a certain Cervantesque tilting at the wind that I made my way across West 41st Street, umbrella forced into a tiny cone by Manhattan’s famous wind tunnels. Twice I was blown off the curb. Then at 5th Avenue the wind defied both the laws of physics and the agreed conventions of meteorology and slammed me from north and south simultaneously, my umbrella bucking in my hands like a terrified stallion. It sustained two broken ribs, metal twisted in opposite directions, flesh flapping uselessly. By the time I reached Grand Central, it couldn’t close, so I dumped my companion into a garbage can with other umbrellas and went on alone.

When I got to the office I discovered my hat was missing. While it would be more dramatic to say that a stocking cap blew right off my head, the truth is that it must’ve fallen out of my coat pocket. I was wet, buffeted, and without two items with which I began the day. The sky was still black as I looked out on the scene of the final battle from The Avengers movie. It had been an apocalypse all right, for the umbrellas. Chicago may be the Windy City, but New York is the Umbrella Killer. When I made it home as early as 6 p.m., I knew the world had ended for certain. I read the Cajun Night Before Christmas and went to bed, thinking of all those poor, dismembered umbrellas. Today is the day after the end of the world, and I am huddled here waiting for the dawn.

Don Quixote rides out of Manhattan yesterday with Sancho Panza wondering at his denuded umbrella.

Southern Comfort

Leave a comment December 21, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

Once upon a time, long before Hurricane Katrina, the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature held their annual meeting in New Orleans. It must’ve been an incongruous sight: the Big Easy filled with right proper professional religionists discoursing eruditely. While there, my family purchased the Cajun Night Before Christmas, by Trosclair. A cute knock-off of Clement Moore’s “A Visit from Santa Claus” (‘Twas the Night Before Christmas), the story unfolds of a fur-bedecked Santa visiting a destitute, but grateful family on the bayou. Each year I try to reach deep in my southern roots to find an accent that accommodates the poem, and read the story the week before the holiday comes. A number of factors have suggested that perhaps this year Christmas might catch many people on a more subdued level. Crushing poverty is a reality, guns are too readily available, and the one percent don’t get close enough to humanity to contract the common cold. Even the effects of Katrina have refused to dissipate completely. Her sister Sandy visited the Big Apple, and things still aren’t quite right.

Big Apples and Big Easies may seem to have little in common, apart from how much money is available to assist in hurricane recovery. They both also participate in Christmas, being havens of Catholicity. Yet after the hurricanes some in New York and New Jersey were without power several days, but parts of Louisiana were simply abandoned. The will to help the disadvantaged seems to have improved since 2005. Considering changes at the top, this isn’t necessarily a surprise. Nevertheless, tragedy throws into sharp relief what we consider human decency. Too bad it takes a disaster to make us more human.

What sticks with me about the Cajun Night Before Christmas, apart from the flying alligators, is the profound hopefulness that the poem conveys. Those with so little take so little to improve their lot. Yet those with too much insist it is their right not to be taxed at all. Those who live in a shack don’t expect much from Santa. They have learned through the disappointment of experience that double standards are endemic in life and while some are unbelievably rich, the poor are happy with just the smiles of children. Ironically, Santa is the great equalizer here. While the children of the wealthy may expect and receive more, the children of the humble are also allowed a portion of hope. As I remember New Orleans, in the palmy days before Katrina, it was a city that knew Mardi Gras was far more humane than Lent, and that even a city marked my radical inequities (let those with eyes to see read) could come to a joyous accord when sins are about to be atoned. And even if he has to commandeer alligators, Santa will visit the poorest children the night before the holy days.

No Year’s Eve

2 Comments December 20, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

So the world’s supposed to end tomorrow. Again. These apocalypses have been coming thick and fast lately; it’s getting so that each end of the world is within sight of the previous end. Of all the strange ideas that religions have given us, the end of the world is the most insidious. While some may choose not to believe it, many politicians of record have actively attempted to provoke the end of time to force the divine hand at bringing a little bit of heaven to earth. Scary thing is, some of them had the power to annihilate us all in the process. Unlike past eschatons, however, this one derives from the interpretation of Mayan artifacts, strangely making it more believable to some people. Those exotic peoples of the past! They just knew so much more about worlds ending than we do. And I know otherwise intelligent people who believe that this is the last day of the earth.

Of course, if we take the earth’s temperature there does seem to be some cause for alarm. That’s not the Mayans’ fault, though. Some of these self-same fracking politicians have insisted that since the Second Coming is near it is alright to destroy the ecosystem that supports all life on the planet. Those are pretty high stakes if they turn out to be wrong. Oh, but they can make a healthy profit margin on the side, so at least they can go out in style. But what would a Mayan apocalypse mean to the firmly committed Christian? It would be very hard to recover from that, should Q’uq’umatz be behind it all.

The events of the past week have been more than a little rough. And the self-same politicians line up on the side of the NRA as they campaign for Jesus’ early return plan. The overall prognosis seems iffy at best. It is like the feeling the dinosaurs must’ve had on the evening of the asteroid. Some of them had brains the size of walnuts, an allegory too plain to require spelling out. What these eschatological episodes teach us is that human life is fragile. Madmen with guns remind us of the same point. I’m expecting, however, that things will be pretty much the same as ever tomorrow morning. I’ll be expected at work, the wheels of the sluggish economy will turn ever so slowly, and politicians will keep doing what they do best. Those counting on Mayan counting will find themselves in the company of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Harold Camping. All of us will find ourselves in a world where religion is perhaps the only power actually capable of total destruction. But if we wake up with aliens swarming the planet tomorrow we’ll honestly be able to say that we’d been warned.

The face of things to come?

Merry X-Man

2 Comments December 19, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

Comic books were hard to keep up with for a kid of limited means. Consequently, I never heard of the X-Men until the movies started coming out. Since I suppose I fit the profile of the guy whose life has devolved into day after long day in the office, superheroes are burdened with living life for me. I’ve watched the X-Men movie a few times, but after reading Jeffrey Kripal’s Mutants and Mystics my latest viewing took on a different angle. Of course, Mageto is presented as being separated from his parents at a concentration camp in Poland as the film opens. A child on trial for his ethno-religious heritage. That, and the fact that he’s a mutant, lends him a perspective on evolution not shared by many. His scheme to transform world leaders into mutants is premised on his understanding of evolution. He tells Senator Kelly, however, that God is too slow. That apparently minor line may bear more weight than it seems at first.

I can’t see the title “X-Men” without thinking of Xmas. Probably the fact that it is now mid-December has something to do with it, along with the bumper crop of Keep Christ in Christmas media this year. Yard signs, church marquees, bumper stickers. People who don’t know the history of their own holiday fear that they’re losing its meaning. Already by the twelfth century the abbreviation Xmas was in use—this is a centuries old tradition that predates American white Christmases by several hundred years. The X is not a substitute, but rather a symbol. A religion that has lost its appreciation of symbols has become just another set of onerous laws.

Maybe we can learn a lesson from our X-Men and their too slow deity. Not having read the X-Men when I was young, and even now noting that there are just as many X-Women as Men, I had to puzzle out the name on my own. Of course, it wasn’t too hard to see the connection of Charles Xavier with his clan of adopted mutants, and therefore the origin of their X. It is a symbol and no one disparages Cyclops his sight or Storm her lightning (miracles all) for having an apocopated title. I think, too, of how the Grinch stole, and returned, Christmas. Dr. Seuss created a tale that captured the essence of Christmas without so much as a religious vocable in the the book. And his eponymous character has come to represent all those who refuse to celebrate when occasion calls for it. So when God is too slow, X-Men, or even a Grinch in a pinch, can keep the X in Xmas.

Christmas Incorporated

3 Comments December 18, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

A number of years ago I wrote a short book on holidays for children. Like most of my books, it was never published. I wrote it when I learned that good books explaining in simple language whence various American holidays came appeared not to exist. The literary agents I contacted quickly showed me why. In any case, I remain curious about holidays and so I read Penne L. Restad’s Christmas in America: A History. There’s a wealth of gifts in this brief book. I’d researched the subject a little bit myself, so I already knew some of the origin stories, but if you’d like to know why we have Yule logs, egg nog, or why Santa prefers red, this is the book for you. As I’ve noted in previous posts, Christmas is a fairly recent star in the constellation of American holidays. In fact, those of us who work for secular companies know just how few holidays Americans officially celebrate. Having lived three years in the Scotland, I know how seriously holidays are taken in at least one corner of Europe.

Christmas didn’t really catch on in America until the nineteenth century. Industrialization was beginning and more and more was expected of the worker who made the robber barons wealthy. It is no accident that the American Christmas had many of its origins in New York City where much of the industry ran non-stop. Restad, however, makes a very good point that Christmas has always been both pro- and anti-commercial. Owners of large retail chains saw the opportunities to sell goods to time-stressed individuals while the giving of presents often promoted a selflessness uncharacteristic of those who stand to profit from consumers. Restad notes the increase in goodwill that Christmas generates in society as a whole. Indeed, I have seen more people giving to the homeless during the past two weeks than I had seen so far this year.

One aspect of Christmas that I hadn’t expected to find in Restad’s treatment was the early emergence of the “prosperity gospel.” Of course, it wasn’t called that in the early twentieth century, but in the millennia since the Christmas story actually originated, some in the church began to take their own righteousness far too seriously. Seeing that clergy who knew how to tug the soul-strings just right could easily gain wealth, they started to suggest that God wants you to be rich. They seem to have overlooked who was born in a stable because there was no room in the inn. Search the Gospels and your search will be in vain if you attempt to find words to console the rich. The “prosperity gospel” is as much a lie today as it was when it began, back in the days when dubious clergy looked for a way to excuse their comfortable lifestyles while many of their flock suffered want. Christmas in America shows itself to have a little bit of the social gospel built in, for it is clear that even the Devil can site Scripture for his own purposes.

Faith and Freedom

2 Comments December 17, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

Schadenfreude is not my usual response to the downfall of a religious leader—with perhaps the exception of televangelists. After all, religious leaders are only human. Occasionally one crosses a very serious line, as the news about Nechemya Weberman, a Hasidic counselor who was found guilty of molesting a girl under his profession care, reveals. The sad part of this situation, apart from the tragic consequences for his victim, which are very serious in their own right, is that the Satmar Hasidic community insisted that it should have had the right to do its trial in secret. Sects that take their cue from the Bible are seldom fair to women. The Bible, after all, is not a very female-friendly tome, no matter how much feminists may try to rescue it from its androcentric world. Religions based heavily on the Bible feel they have the right to judge by their own standards—something a secular court can’t understand. It is back to the paradigm of the two swords here.

What are we to make of the civil crime that violates no religious laws for any one sect? What is wrong in one book is all right, or at least forgivable in the other. For a secular crime committed in a closed religious community in a country of religious freedom, who is to decide? These questions are decidedly more than rhetorical. Any religion that says women are here to serve men—and there are a disturbingly large number of such religions—can claim that God trumps gent d’armes every time. What’s more, they believe the decree is eternal and they are violating the divine will if they don’t keep to it. This situation is nothing new; at least as early as Tiglath-Pileser III, and probably earlier, ancient religions sometimes had to compromise under the hegemony of a higher power. But they were only biding their time until the political situation would grant their autonomy once more.

It is simplistic to suggest that the two swords represent the two hemispheres of the brain, but we do have a rational versus emotive issue here. Rationally, would an unseen force endowed with a human personality demand the unfair treatment of some people simply because of an unexplained favoritism? It does not seem likely. But religions are seldom logical. “Credo quia absurdum,” Tertullian is remembered as sighing—“I believe because it is absurd.” Theologically profound? Certainly. Helpful in society? Not so much. Freedom of religion is a classic ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail. Religions are free to declare their own beliefs, but their own beliefs may challenge the very authorities who grant them that privilege. Secular authority may have the ability to put to death, but resurrection is the prerogative of religion.

Rachel Weeping

3 Comments December 16, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

“In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.” I just can’t get it out of my head. The tragedy of Newtown, Connecticut is the madness of Herod repeated over and over again. I stand outside my daughter’s room and weep as she sleeps, terrified of what we’ve become. For the right of one person to own guns, twenty-eight are dead. The balance of power is way off-kilter, like a fishing vessel in a perfect storm. Those who protest are those who are unarmed who wish to remain that way. The bravado of the NRA says, “I would protect them, if I were there.” If I were there. I would feel no safer. Where was the NRA in Stockton, California, Iowa City, Iowa, Jonesboro, Arkansas, Littleton, Colorado, Red Lake, Minnesota, Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, Blacksburg, Virginia, DeKalb, Illinois, Oakland, California, or Newtown, Connecticut? Polishing their rifles in readiness, no doubt.

The time has come to put an end to easy access to guns. Life was more civilized in the days of the flintlock and musket—at least people had time to react or flee before another shot was loaded. Instead we tell people they will be safer if they can squeeze off forty-one shots before that crazy idiot shoots another. Drop to your knees and beg for mercy, you’ll be safer. While you’re down there, say one for a nation that loves its firearms more than its children.

Days like this it feels like God has us in his sights. The longer I ponder this the blacker my thoughts grow. We may blame the madman, but it is society that allows this to happen. Herod was king, and even the mother of God fled. But what of those left behind in Bethlehem? They paid the price for a man in love with power. I see a man in a cage, being sprayed by an upright ape holding a firehose. The man is one of the most vocal supporters of the NRA, but now he is the inferior being. “It’s a madhouse!” he cries. Yes, Mr. Heston, it is a madhouse indeed. Only those aren’t apes outside the cage, and those are firehoses in their hands. On further reflection, perhaps they are truly apes. Rachel is weeping for her children, while Herod reloads.

Slaughter of the innocents, 2.0

Bleak December

9 Comments December 15, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

Tragedy follows on tragedy in 2012. Maybe the world really is ending this year. Not even a week after a man accidentally shot his own seven-year-old son in western Pennsylvania, a gunman kills twenty school children, six adults and himself in Connecticut, and still the “Religious Right” advocates our God-given sanction to own guns. Various commenters rail that guns don’t kill people—please allow the evidence to disagree. Loudly. Violently. Twas the fortnight before Christmas and all through the school… Nightmare before Christmas indeed.

As a nation we have outlived our need for guns. The only real threat out there is other people who have guns. Even a simpleton can see that it is an insane spiral because no one trusts the other guy. A miniature arms race. A cold war within a nation, state, town, or school. Like the journalists who write the sad stories for the papers, I think of Virginia Tech, Columbine, and children who will never grow up. Wikipedia has an entire article entitled “School Shootings.” America has its own sub-page. I think of other children scarred for life because some people think that it is our right to “protect” ourselves. From what? Still, they’d swear it on a stack of Winchesters. Having been shunted around from job to job and apartment to apartment, I’ve lived next to many people that I found unstable and thank local laws that they were unarmed. The sack on Santa’s back this year is a sack of serpents, and it has been opened and there’s no way to get them back in.

If the Church wanted to make itself relevant again, all denominations would band together and demand stricter gun control. No, it won’t stop every madman from massacring children, but if the Christian community really believes the Gospel it claims, it is far better to die than to kill. The next world is supposed to be better than this. The mother of the shooter, Nancy Lanza, appears to have been the owner of the guns. Probably they made her feel safer. She is now cold in the morgue because of them. Along with a classroom of children in the school where she worked. As the families of the murdered face Christmas this year, they will think that 2012 is the year the world ended. If only it would. But then, nature, and gun-ownership-rights activists ensure a future much more bleak than that.

Nikodem Nijaki’s photo of shoes on the Danube Promenade

A Big Joke

4 Comments December 14, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

On the evening table my wife left a token of hope for me to read in this hopeful season. New Jersey “Transit” claimed that the very next day riders of the extensive bus system would be able to track buses precisely on their smart phones. No more wondering “has the bus already come, or is it late (again)?” I laughed when I read this because that very evening in the Port Authority my bus never came. The frazzled and apologetic dispatcher said nobody knew where the driver was. Did anyone think to drag the East River? I wondered. As other buses pulled to the gate, drivers refusing to switch routes, the line grew and grew. The bus scheduled for the next half hour did not show. My daughter was waiting for me to fix dinner. On a good day I’m home by 6:30. This was not a good day. I laughed ironically at the article and went to bed. My morning bus leaves, in theory, before 6:00 a.m. A day later, in the Port Authority. My bus, which can now be tracked with precision, precisely failed to show up. I’m sure you know the dispatcher’s chorus—please join in—”nobody knows where the driver is.”

So what is a diatribe like this doing on a blog about religion? I’m as mad as Hell about this, that’s why! Every month I pay hundreds of dollars for a bus pass. I think the least New Jersey Transit could do is the courtesy of sending a bus. In case anyone from NJ Transit is reading this, a bus is a large vehicle that seats about 50 adults and generally runs the same way every day. It’s called a “route.” People use it to get to and from work. Of course nobody expects the executives of a company that services over 19,000 bus stops to take a bus to work. They probably have to be on time. I take the earliest possible bus from my town to New York City. Most days it is late and consequently so am I. For this I spend over three grand a year.

This is not about Hurricane Sandy. Buses have been back on schedule since Thanksgiving. What it comes down to is the fate of most capitalistic ventures—the working person butters the bread of the Executive Director who earns more than $260,000 a year. Last night I toyed with the idea of getting other disgruntled commuters to link arms and stand across the exit ramp, or to lay down in front of the buses until a bus for my route was sent. I suspect, though, that they realize as well as I do that Tiananmen Square doesn’t take much to morph into Times Square when an individual stands in the way of corporate gain. Tonight I plan to wear my good walking shoes. After all, I paid good money for them too. Unless, of course, anybody out there would like to drive this bus?

Ghost bus

Fanpire Club

4 Comments December 13, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

It has become an odd world indeed when thousands of people look to vampires for family values. Although I’ve not read any of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books, I have been curious at the reception they have received. A literary agent said, a few years back at an event I attended, that publishers want vampires. There is no end in sight. Perhaps it is my inherent trust of scholars that led me to read Tanya Erzen’s Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love It. Why would a religious studies scholar write about Twilight? Because Erzen realizes, as many scholars are beginning to that: 1. vampires are very religious monsters, and 2. many more people care about books like Meyer’s than they ever will about scholarly minutiae. I, for one, learned that I’ve missed out on a huge part of pop culture by insisting that my fictional reading must have at least an attempt at depth. Erzen ably points out that there may be truths beneath the surface even here.

When I first became aware of the Twilight books, I was surprised that no one seemed to be making the connection with Dark Shadows. I grew up with the subtle, sensitive vampire who was deeply conflicted. The books that serialized the television series were not profound either, but they evoked an angst that bespeaks a religious need deeply buried. Erzen is able to dig some of this out of Twilight as well. By interviewing fans for whom Twilight has become an ersatz religion, Erzen can show that even squeaky clean Mormon men can’t possibly live up to the vampire standard. The fantasy that has engrossed so many is an image of selfless love. As if Edward Cullen were a less chaste, and more undead Jesus. After all, he gives Bella eternal life and his love never grows cold. The values fit rather well with Latter-Day Saint theology, and provide a model for mortal family values.

More striking is Erzen’s revelation that fandom does not equate to feminism. The women who are empowered to love in unorthodox ways are very much controlled by their men-folk in Meyer’s universe. As Erzen points out repeatedly the ideal lover here is an obsessive stalker with a penchant for abuse (although mostly unintentional). Freedom for women comes at a cost. They may be offered the best in some fields, but even today women do not find equal representations in positions of power in our society. CEOs? Evening news anchors on major networks? Senators? Presidents? Our society is one that talks the talk of equality, but stumbles when it attempts the walk. Vampires cannot exist without victims. Even in the most “advanced” societies in our world, women must struggle in a hierarchy for which the architects, contractors, and supervisors are mostly men. Perhaps women find vampires so fascinating because it matches their experience of a society that takes far more from them than it is ever willing to give back.

Chrismahanukwanzadan

5 Comments December 12, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

Happy holidays from a pluralistic world! Whenever I see the “Keep Christ in Christmas” signs that crop up this time of year, I think of the wonderful profusion of holidays that people from most faiths can share without being territorial about it. After all, the Pagans got there first—the Christian Christmas predates Jesus by centuries, it turns out. So when my daughter wished me a happy Chrismahanukwanzadan—from a mix of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Ramadan—I had to smile. Seems like some in the younger generation are really starting to get it. It doesn’t matter what you call it, but a holiday that celebrates people getting along is worth the effort. Being possessive of our holidays rings of hollow triumphalism—I feel happy because I have something that you don’t. Is this really the spirit of this secular season of giving wrapped in many confessional names? I’m sure shepherds and Magi didn’t exactly share a Weltanschuung.

Those who despair the lack of Christmas have not spent much time with history. As a cultural holiday the celebration of Christmas is younger than the United States, at least in this context. From the beginning Christmas was a pastiche of traditions from different religions celebrating aspects of Odin, Sol Invictus, Jesus, and Zarathustra, at the very least. Bringing these religious figures together into a season that represents the human need for light amid a dark and cold time of year, who would want to exclude others from their own holiday traditions? Having stood in the bleak fields of the Orkney Islands in a massive stone circle aligned to the winter solstice and constructed over a millennium before the birth of Christianity, I have to believe Christmas is one of the earliest expressions of human desire and certainly not limited to Christians.

What makes a holiday holy? Is it exclusive rights like those slapped on every movie you pop into the DVD player? The trademarking of an idea someone else thought of? Religions have a long history of forsaking the spirit of the law for the letter—its most familiar name is dogma. No matter who came up with the idea of doing what we can to bring a little light back into the dreary world around the time when night seems unending, it is a cause that any person of any religion, or none at all, can fully appreciate. Instead of marking territory, should not those who claim Christmas as their own be glad to share it with all? If the one who’s birth the church proclaims at this time of year in no way improves our outlook to others we might wonder if there should be cause to celebrate at all. My answer, such as it is, is Happy Chrismahanukwanzadan!

A holiday in anyone’s book

Mutants, Mystics and Memory

Leave a comment December 11, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

Paradigms. These patterns of thought are self-reinforcing and very useful. As anyone who’s studied foreign languages knows, paradigms are an effective way to keep all those impossible verb tenses in mind. Until you encounter an irregular verb. Once you discover irregular verbs, you start to find there are more of them than you wish. As with language, so with life. Like most boys, I grew up reading comic books. We didn’t have much money, so I wasn’t as fluent in super-heroese as some kids were, but I felt that irresistible draw to garish colors inking exaggerated muscle-tone under a costume that held a body capable of extraordinary things. Everything seemed possible. Then adult responsibility hit. Who had time for comic books and heroes?

That’s why I was delighted to discover Jeffrey Kripal’s Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. The three sub-topics just about summed up my childhood. But, like Paul declared to Corinthians, the first time around, “when I became a man I put away childish things.” Turns out, maybe my desire to be grown up was premature. I commented on Kripal’s Authors of the Impossible earlier this year. In his work I’d finally discovered that academics can sometimes get away with asking unorthodox questions. Perhaps it was my exposure to biblical studies, a discipline which goes one of two ways—overly facile attempts to maintain a literal reading, or a staid, solid approach tied to serious linguistics and archaeological records—that forced me into a reductionist paradigm. Well, everybody else was doing it! Academic thought had little room for the unusual, the bizarre, the irregular verb. The same applies to our no-nonsense, money driven society. Just shut up and do your job.

Mutants and Mystics, however, shows that our repressed unusual experiences, like a freudian phobia, will find ways into daily reality. It is a mind-stretching book. As for Authors of the Impossible, Kripal is to be congratulated on allowing himself to consider walking down paths that most academics assiduously bypass. Coming to his work as a fellow student of religious studies, I see that he has arrived at similar conclusions to mine, although clearly more advanced. I’d just assumed that since I never had the serious backing of a serious university my way was the low-way. The way of the kid who just couldn’t bring himself to grow up. There is a reason we spent our formative years reading about heroes for whom the impossible was daily reality. Perhaps we were in training after all, and comic books prove the point of old Isaiah that a child may indeed hold knowledge adults often just can’t see.

Freud’s Nightmare

1 Comment December 10, 2012 Steve A. Wiggins

B movies are a guilty pleasure. Weekends sometimes allow for guilty pleasures, when I can check my mind at the door, take a seat near the screen, dim the lights and grab the popcorn. 1950‘s sci-fi reflects paradigms that have ossified in some people’s brains, it seems. It has been many, many years since I watched Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman. I was a child the last time I saw it. As an adult the message is strikingly different. The year is 1958, and my parents haven’t even married yet. Millionaire Nancy Archer has a run-in with an alien in a “satellite,” but he only wants her for her jewelry. Meanwhile her cheating sleaze of a husband, Harry, is making out with the redhead at the local, and plotting to kill his wife for her money. So far the story is fine, if tragic. Then the woman, enlarged by radiation, breaks free from her chains, rips the roof from the bar, and grabs her husband. To the local sheriff, there’s only one option—shoot the “monster.” He unloads a riot gun into her, and, hitting a transformer, electrocutes her. The crowd, aghast, run to see if her trashy husband is alive. The wronged woman they ignore. The metaphorical elephant in the room. Role end credits.

The misogyny of this story escaped me as a child, as did the sexual innuendo. I was only after the cheap thrills of cheap special effects. So I turned to The Incredible Shrinking Man, released a year earlier in 1957. Scott Carey, after sending his loyal wife Louise to the galley for a beer, is hit by a radioactive cloud while on his brother’s boat. An accidental dose of insecticide some months later sets him to shrinking—a freudian fear for all men. As he grows smaller, his will to dominate his wife—now a giant to him, increases. Many scenes end with a tiny man leaving his wife in tears. Even when he is supposed dead, but in reality is too small to make himself heard, Louise is reluctant to leave, in case he still needs her help. Like a short beer, I suppose. The spider scene, which no doubt caused nightmares when I was a child, follows on his monologue about having to dominate his new, tiny universe. The little man shrinks into non-existence with the realization that “to God there is no zero.” What he doesn’t say aloud is, “as long as one is male.”

These are the 1950s to which some political commentators (and not a few voters) wish us to return. Men fear being dwarfed by women. Call it radiation, or call it social regress, or call it paranoia—the message is all the same. Man must dominate. Women who overshadow are a threat. In the earlier film, Scott Carey is a passively shrinking man. By the next year, when Nancy Archer grows, it is now an “Attack.” Fast forward half a century. Dreamwork’s Monsters vs Aliens makes a parody of Nancy Archer, and Susan Murphy’s fiancé, Derek Dietl (who is clearly modeled on the smug, self-righteous newscaster in Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman) ends up alive, but shamed. The male alien who seeks to dominate her is destroyed. And the male monsters feel somehow less fierce in her presence. As this year’s political posturing clearly demonstrates, there is still a long, long way to go before true equality appears. Many men are clearly stuck in the black-and-white fifties. The full-color, larger than life Ginormica will hopefully better reflect the paradigms of the future.