Twitter Me This

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Techoncrat I’m not. At least I understand that to be authentic in this world you need to be on social media. I have a Twitter account. Have had for years. I don’t follow it religiously, but then, I don’t treat any social media like holy writ. The other day I noticed a disturbing trend. Donald Trump’s tweets end up on my bird feed. No, I didn’t accidentally follow him—I have a natural aversion to fascists with delusions of divinity—but nevertheless his mug shows up so frequently that I tend not to follow the bird maybe as much as maybe I should. I wonder how someone thinks s/he has the right to buy part of my consciousness.

Tweet or honk?

Tweet or honk?

The world-wide web is without laws, like the subconscious mind. Thoughts from around the world—at least the affluent part of it—milling, swirling about in an electronic soup thickened by irony. It’s addictive. The opiate of the masses. Perhaps it is a religion after all. Tweets are micro prayers. Blogs are sermons. Facebook is coffee hour. All these connected minds have created a consciousness of their own. Like Victor Frankenstein, we too know what it feels like to be God. It’s not a particularly joyous place to be. Does God, I wonder, lack the control that we experience on the Internet?

I like Twitter. It doesn’t demand much. The only problem is that to stay on top of things you have to have it going all the time. I turn it off and when I come back on I’ve missed hundreds of tweets. And then there’s Donald Trump again. I can come up with my own nightmares, thank you. I don’t need Twitter to suggest any.

Perhaps this is the apotheosis of capitalism. The ability to buy anything, including space on somebody else’s bird feed. Buy the most powerful office in the country, if not the world. Buy hatred and distribute it freely. One thing you can’t buy is intelligence. At least, up until now, some universities still understand that. It has taken me years to gather Twitter followers, like Mrs. Partridge the family band-mates fall behind in a neat, technicolor line. I have no money. I have very little influence. I’m really not a very good capitalist at all. I give away for free what universities charge for. Just like in the classroom, few pay attention. What do I expect? Who really listens to sermons anyway?

Factor Fiction

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An article on CBS that my wife sent me tells how Costco mistakenly labelled a shipment of Bibles as fiction, setting off a tweet-storm. Some offended, some applauding, a 140-character barrage ensued as Costco apologized. What was the fuss about? As a person who has experience with both fact and fiction, it has become clear to me over the years that these categories are not nearly as sharply defined as they might appear. We make labels to help us categorize a confusing reality. Our brains, nevertheless, easily accept fiction as fact, at least for purposes of getting along in the world. The earth is spinning, right now, at over 1,000 miles per hour. We don’t perceive it, and in fact, it took not a few deaths and apologetic clerics before it was admitted that evidence we don’t feel proved the case. Each day we choose to believe the fiction that we are holding still and the sun goes overhead. Is anybody tweeting about that?

One of the angry bird calls pointed out that Costco (which apparently now has an imprimatur) doesn’t label their Qurans as fiction. How many Christians have read the Rig Veda and not wondered whether its proper label fell on that side of the pricing gun? The matter of fact or fiction is one of opinion. Even those books bearing the label of non-fiction are interpretations of evidence. When it comes down to ultimate truth, where it lies is always a matter of faith. Who buys a Bible at Costco anyway?

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When I was a child and Amazon did not exist, buying a Bible was itself a kind of sacred act. You wouldn’t think of going to Wal-Mart to do such a thing. You went to the Christian bookstore (or, I suppose, if you grew up in a city, a secular bookstore might do). You talked to clerks who knew the differences between versions. The place smelled of leather and velvet. It was a place dedicated to the truth. Costco is a big box store. Buying in bulk implies something. Ironically, those who angrily tweet about the Bible’s label don’t seem to realize that Bible selling is big business. You won’t find much in the way of small publishers’ literature in such a store. Next to your giant cartons of cereal and immense packages of diapers, why not tuck in a Bible as well? When you get home you can tweet about how much money you saved buying eternal salvation in bulk.

Skynet

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Of cultural innovations, none rivals the internet. Engulfing the world in its wide web, the constant availability of signal has changed everything. In the past five years, civilization has become something that it was not. Take today’s northeast blizzard, for example. Apocalyptic meteorologists (are there any other kind?) are sincerely telling the camera that nothing like this has been seen in recorded history. Meanwhile, my wife’s company sends a Honeywell alert to our phone saying the offices will likely be closed, and please make arrangements to work from home. The snow day is dead. One of the simple joys of life, that delightful naughtiness of playing hooky, is now extinct. Work knows where you are at all times. You are being watched. Sound paranoid? I have known people who had firsthand knowledge of employers following them on Facebook to make sure they didn’t say anything that might make the company look bad. The world is not the same one into which I was born.

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I happened upon a web page the other day advertising for an Advanced Assistant Professor in Digital Shakespeare Studies. A poem by any other name we would tweet. So we have become part of this collective mind known as www dot. The internet is aware that it is still snowing, but only in an academic sense, since it’s not going anywhere. The internet has never had a three-and-a-half hour commute home because of an accident on a single highway in New Jersey. Oh, and don’t forget to check your work email when you get home. We may have sometime more for you to do once you’ve clocked out. Maybe I should see what my social network is up to.

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LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google +—they all suggest people that I might know. Someone I might rate, or like. The internet, after all, knows which of its myriad sites I’ve viewed, whom I’ve emailed, and what I’ve purchased. The ads from those companies show up on every website I visit from now on, world without end. ThinkGeek emails me every day. My new best friend. Google + is the more intellectual Facebook, I’m told. Whenever I log on, it tells me with whom I might want to connect. Just now Newt Gingrich showed up in my list. Should I add him to my circles? Or should I just venture out into this blizzard and hope I make it to New York City alive? To me, it seems, the odds are equally good in either case.

Isaiah Thwarted

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Back in January, out of a sense of curiosity on a number of points, I began tweeting the Bible. I wondered how long it would take, at 140 characters a day, to type the King James Bible into Twitter. Since that time, I have not missed a day. Until this week. International travel and business travel with uncertain Internet access have been overcome as I flew with Bible in hand to keep it going. On Monday I was just wrapping up the flood story. Clearly this was going to take a long-term commitment. Then early this week a message popped up on my Twitter account stating, “You cannot send messages to users who are not following you. Learn more,” so naturally, I learned more. Unfortunately I am not now, nor have I ever been, a techie. Just a sentence in and words I don’t understand begin to flummox me, building confusion on confusion. What it appears to be telling me, in layman’s language, is that I can no longer post to Twitter.

Apart from the personal rejection such impersonal messages inevitably engender, this development brought to mind the famous verse from Isaiah 40.8, “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” Hath the Lord been stopped by Twitter? Technology changes rapidly, and those of us who’ve never had any formal training in it sometimes feel like we’re driving a car on a dark country road at night with no headlights. I’m not really sure how this all works, but I try to send daily thoughts out into cyberspace and, yes, what you say can and will be used against you. And I wonder about old Deutero-Isaiah sitting there in Babylon peering into an indefinite future.

Our abject dependence on the Internet has changed us as a species. I’ve recently read about how technological innovations have become the evolution of the human species. This collective brain we refer to as the Internet has revolutionized the way we do business, but it has also introduced a component of fragility into the equation. Electronic information is untested in the long term. Some of my earliest writing projects now exist only on three-and-a-half inch floppies, most of which are tucked away in some musty corner of the attic. And what if the earth passes through a comet’s tail or a nasty solar flare jets out our way? Doomsday scenarios have been based on such things (just remember Y2K and smile). So maybe Second Isaiah was onto something after all. Printed books have been known to survive for at least half a millennium, and in rare instances, a couple thousand years. And the pagan sources on which parts of the Bible are based, written in clay, last even longer. And one of the earliest stories recorded was that of a worldwide flood.

Problematizing Noah

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As I continue to Tweet the Bible, I’ve been working through the story of Noah. Considering the number of children’s items imprinted with the friendly, smiling Noah and Mrs., and the cute, predatory animals they’re taking aboard their private yacht, the utter belligerence of the story is frequently lost. There is one seriously peeved God behind this. “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart,” Genesis 6.6 states. And it only gets worse from there: “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth… for it repenteth me that I have made them.” Indeed, the wrath of God is emphasized more than the wickedness of the humans that have spawned it. No matter what is done, it seems, God will still be in a rage.

The truly striking aspect of this account comes, however, when Noah is instructed on whom to save. “Thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife,” verse 18 dictates. Men first. Now, we cannot judge a product of the past against standards of the present day, but it is quite clear why many women find the biblical text less-than-friendly. Even the animals are explicitly paired from the start do not receive the radical disjointing that the women receive from the men. If the purpose is to procure a new generation, arguably pregnant women could have done that with the men treading water above the remains of Eden. If survival is the point of the story, as the saying goes, ladies first.

The flood story is a complex account of a deity with anger management issues and a preference for the company of men. Although theologians may say with a wink that God has no gender, clearly the Bible begs to differ.

Humans and animals alike are victims of the divine wrath, and even though humanity survives the flood can the relationship with deity ever be the same again? How do humans face a creator turned destroyer, knowing that they will never really please him again? The weight of such divine displeasure is surely greater than all that water pressing our ancient cousins into fossils on the primeval sea bed. I think back to all the children’s toys with the happy little animals and a smiling Noah and I know they resemble the biblical version only in the most fleeting of fashions. Yet the myth lives on.

What shape is your ark?

Cain’s Dilemma

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As I tweet the Bible into cyberspace, Cain strikes me as a most misunderstood character. Mercilessly portrayed as an ungrateful boor, the first vegetable farmer in folklore is demonized as the father of all sinners. Genesis, however, is impossibly vague on Cain’s crime. A close reading of Genesis 4 indicates that Cain was the first human being to offer a sacrifice to a higher power. Being a tiller of the soil, that sacrifice was of the fibrous kind, bereft of any fat or blood. The divine nose (metaphorically) is turned up at this attempt at pacification. In steps Abel with his bloody slaughter of animals and God is well pleased. Traditionally, Christian readers have attributed Cain’s evil intent toward Abel as jealousy. Genesis doesn’t seem to bear this out. “But unto Cain and to his offering he [the Lord] had not respect.” Cain was not jealous, but “wroth.”

Much later in time Paul of Tarsus will tell fledgling Christians that God is “no respecter of persons.” Still, in that first moment of divine favoritism, prior to any explicit instruction being given, we catch a glimpse of the future of this nascent religious movement. Even today, the literalists tell us, God expects something from us. What, exactly, differs from interpreter to interpreter. Cain’s crime was simply being human. Even more poignant in this case is the fact that the divine allowance for consuming meat has not yet been made. Abel raises animals for God’s appetite while Cain raises vegetables for human consumption. No sentient being is harmed in Cain’s offering. Abel, one might say, is the first killer in human history.

We all know the story. Cain will rise up against his brother and slay him. He will then receive a prototype of the mark of the beast and scamper off to rustle up a wife somehow. All this before the third natural born human being, Seth, is even conceived. Beowulf will reflect Cain’s dilemma centuries later, as Grendel is the spawn of the first murderer. The descendents of Cain are routinely demonized while the children of Seth repeat the cycle of divine favoritism over again. Here is Cain’s problem: God will like whom God will like. The rest cannot earn divine favor. The bloody consequences of this reading of history continue to play themselves out even today. Those who need divine approbation will go to any lengths to feel special, while all of us, the true heirs of Cain, have to work it out as best we can under silent skies.

Paradise by Half

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Some times the Bible is best taken in small doses. I’m no technical guru, but I do know that Twitter doesn’t always display the Bible bits I type in daily. Perhaps in some far distant future civilization that has learned how to recover “data” from fried pieces of digital storage devices, the Bible will be woefully incomplete. Maybe not woefully, depending on whose point of view sees it. Reading over passages worn smooth by timeless repetition, it is sometimes difficult to notice the harsh undertones. My twittering is up to Genesis 3 now, the infamous Garden of Eden episode. Over the last few days I’ve tweeted, “And the Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done?”

The weary “blame it on the woman” trope aside, several things stand out. God seems to be interested only in Adam. Perhaps the divine Dad wants to take his boy aside for a man-to-man chat, but it seems more likely in the context that Eve is simply irrelevant. Even Adam’s response is completely void of Eve, “I heard,” “I was afraid,” “I hid.” For a man about to shove the blame off onto his significant other (sorry, Tea Partiers, nowhere does Genesis say Adam and Eve were ever married), he is strangely circumspect about his recondite female. Even God sounds surprised, “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” Hmmm, who else is there in the Garden? Adam suddenly abandons the first person singular and begins his response with, “The woman whom thou gavest…” Blame anyone but Adam. The tragic disappearance of Eve until blame is to be attributed should warn us that the remainder of the Bible will not be a happy book.

The first chapters of Genesis have a lot of uncovering going on. God, like a detective in a CSI drama, tries to uncover the mystery of the naked man. When man is found naked he blames the woman, not even bothering with her name. Much is revealed here. Coming as it does as the first biblical story of human interaction, this tale sets the stage for all subsequent developments. From this point onward, with rare exceptions, the story will be a male narrative. Women will be assigned to, literally, support roles. Is it any wonder that women gather to protest against women’s rights, when under the thumb of such teaching? I suggest that what is required is even more uncovering. If we examine the bare facts of the Bible, we might be able finally to get to the root of this problem. That root lies deep in the literal interpretation of mythology.

Who's missing?

Hidden in Plain Sight

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I have been tweeting the Bible for nearly a month now, and tomorrow—the thirtieth tweet—will see the end of Genesis 1 and the first words of Genesis 2. One of the occupational hazards of having been a biblical scholar for many years is the constant rereading of the same text over and over. I couldn’t even guess how many times I’ve read Genesis 1, in numerous languages, trying to find a key to unlock what is going on there. It is definitely not science—for that it would have had to have been written after science had been invented. Religion and science share that feature: they are human endeavors to understand the matrix in which we find ourselves. Anyone who is truly honest will admit to not being able to trust her- or himself all the time. We have all been betrayed by our convictions now and again. In this day of arrogant religious leaders and arrogant scientists we have little hope of coming to an armistice. Those who claim a special position for the Bible really couldn’t handle the truth in any case.

My twitter verse for today reads, “I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the even”. Sense units in any text are where we, the readers, draw the limits. Taking this bit as a cue (indeed, the whole of Genesis 1 supports this), God intends humans to be vegetarians. The predatory gleam in the eyes of our religious politicians and televangelists belie their convictions given in public forums. The first rule God instates, after informing our primordial couple to have lots and lots of sex, is not to harm other creatures. At least the sex part seems to have gotten through, although many branches of Christianity repudiate it. The harm part we have received with ambivalence.

In a related development, an op-ed piece in yesterday’s newspaper gives instructions for properly disposing a worn-out Quran. While Christianity has no uniform opinion about where an old Bible goes to die, I find in this question a snapshot of the contradictions inherent in holy writ. We treat certain texts as sacred, and yet, is not the human expression in written form itself some kind of sacred act? Book-burning, no matter the book, strikes deeply at a visceral level those who’ve ever tried to reduce their ideas to what might be replicated on a page. It is our highest human achievement. All texts are sacred. Some may be misguided, and others are blatantly wrong—perhaps even evil—but they are the essence of a human endeavor. Perhaps this is the key I have been seeking all along.

Let there be light

A Strange Confirmation

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I’ve been tweeting the Bible. Many years ago I lost track of how many times I had read it, but tweeting seems to be a way to examine the text carefully, 140 characters at a time. As a college student who’d recently learned about textual criticism (many years ago), I approached my local pastor and asked him if we could try something at church. I had a big, old, black leather Bible set up in the vestibule and made announcements—and even had it printed in the bulletin—that we were going to copy the Bible. I placed a three-ring binder and a pen next to the Bible, and I asked the parishioners to write down a verse in the notebook on their way in or out of church. I wanted to see how long it would take, and to give the laity an idea of how difficult it was to copy accurately. (Hey, I was young and idealistic!) The Bible sat there many months, perhaps a couple of years. I would occasionally check on progress, and was surprised to see we were still in Genesis. We hadn’t even reached the flood yet. And mistakes? Ye gods! It was like the Bible had been written on another planet. I now see the many problems with the way the experiment was set up, but copying the Bible is a revealing exercise nonetheless.

My tweets are with the King James Version of the Bible, and over the weekend I discovered something. According to the KJV, seed-bearing plants are male. Note Genesis 1.11 “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself.” This corresponds to a post I wrote late last year about the notion of distorted masculinity in the biblical worldview. The operating assumption seems to be that male and seediness go together. Since the Bible is literally right, somebody better get out there and explain the facts of life to the female plants that constitute roughly half the flora on this planet. Herein lies the rub: ancient assumptions no longer hold sway. Trees are not all “hes,” and yet many treat the surrounding context of a literal seven days (only one day in Genesis 2) as worthy to take down science itself.

Once in a while I have my own gripe with science—or at least its cousin technology. I was looking forward, many years down the road, to putting all my Bible tweets together into a seamless whole. The tweet I twittered on Sunday, however, never appeared. I can’t go back and add the missing 140 characters now, because that would throw the order off. And those ancient scribes thought they had it hard! Maybe there is an object lesson at play here. Maybe the utter devotion to a text has the potential to lead the righteous astray. As a society we’ve built a tremendous world of luxury around ourselves (well, most of us), and isolated ourselves from the wild animals and masculine fruits of biblical times. And yet, when we look at the text up close, we often find things we might not expect. Or even support. I will dutifully carry on my Bible tweeting, but like any human venture, my Bible will never be perfect.

Tweeting the Bible

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I have an underused Twitter account. My life isn’t so interesting that I need to give my few followers (fewer even than those who read this blog) updates throughout the day. In fact, I mainly use it to let my Tweethearts know what I’m blogging about on any given day. While reading a book on the influence of technology on religion (more anon) it struck me that one of the more interesting aspects of biblical studies is the fact that the well never goes dry. For those who read sacred texts, there is no end of interpretation. I’ve addressed this before on this blog—religion is as individual as each believer. The more I read biblical interpretations, however, the more I see the subtle textures and layers that readers find in the text, despite what most religious leaders desire. And I don’t restrict this to the Bible—any sacred text can be read in multiple ways. The Bible, however, has been foundational for this person that I’ve become, and so I’ve decided to do some close reading.

I’m going to tweet the Bible. (If you are one of my rare followers, don’t worry—read on.) I’m going to tweet the maximum 140 characters per message once a day. For this task I will be using the King James Version, arguably the most influential book ever written in the western world. Doubt me? Watch a presidential candidate debate. Or google Girl Scout cookies. Why am I doing this? Well, I wonder what the Bible says when it is broken down into byte-sized nuggets. At character 140 I will stop, and the next day I will begin where I left off the day before. This exercise will be a way of looking at the Bible from a fresh angle. Besides, it’s been a few years since I’ve read the entire KJV. I don’t pretend that nobody else has thought of this—I’m sure there are many Bible tweets out there. I’m curious, however, at 140 characters a day how long it will take, and what will emerge. Yes, I know that there are mathematical whizzes out there who could calculate the answer in a matter of seconds, but I just have to see for myself. The doubting tweeter.

A new look at an old book.

There may be occasions when I fail—isn’t the Bible about forgiveness anyway? In my job I travel quite a bit, and sometimes Internet access is dicey. Most hotels, however, still sport a Gideon Bible, so resources should be no problem. It will be an adventure, and the Bible could stand some adventure these days. Besides, interesting pericopes will give me something to blog about occasionally. For those who haven’t been subjected to years of higher education on the Bible (or other texts), a pericope is a passage cut out from its surroundings. It is the favorite of televangelists and other proof-texters who prefer to not to face the larger implications of reading the whole Bible in its context. I like to think of this exercise as Internet hermeneutics. So let the adventure begin. If you are really bored and want to follow a glacially paced Bible reading, my Twitter name is stawiggins. When interesting observations emerge, however, I will let my blog readers know as well. In the technical age, life is tweet.

Decade Fail

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In a recent newspaper report on the state of the nation, local journalist Tom Moran cites a Pew survey in which most Americans surveyed rated the current and swiftly ending decade as the worst one of their lives. As a professional academic who was ousted from a highly rated, long-term teaching post this decade after a Fundamentalist takeover of the school where I taught, I am inclined to agree. Five years later I am still searching for any kind of meaningful full-time work, while yesterday I spied an ad for a “Ghost Twitterer” (as if someone is so important that they can’t write their own 140 daily words) and bowed my head in sorrow. Maybe we really have sunk to a new low.

What really caught my eye, however, was the statement of a fellow professor at Rutgers (where I have been an adjunct for nearly three years). Ross Baker noted that “It has always taken calamities of almost Biblical proportions to shake this country out of its smugness and complacency.” While I agree with his assessment, the use of the phrase “biblical proportions” demonstrated once again that my chosen field of specialization has a solid place in the popular imagination. Generally “biblical proportions” is a phrase used to refer to disasters, something along the magnitude of a world-wide flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the plagues of Egypt. These mythological episodes have left a deep impression on our culture that the message of the Bible is a fitting one for the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Perhaps we are really in trouble if this facile view of the Bible is wedded to a facile misuse of the same book for constructing prejudicial public policies and ill-conceived conservative “reforms.” If the past decade has been a wash in this country, I would attribute it to a conservative evangelical political machine that churned out a president who literally would have been pleased to bring on the mythical Armageddon. During this bushesque reign of biblical proportions, I lost a secure job teaching Bible and haven’t been able to find any other full-time work. I would continue my rant but I have to polish up my résumé, and hone my succinctness skills, and try for a Ghost Twitterer position.