A Stick of Dynamite

Two big questions today: 1) What are you doing about the holes in your education? and …

2 ) Are you on the right side of the defining issues of our times?

I heard an interview a little over a month ago on the Diane Rehm show with David Reynolds, a scholar who has written a new book about Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reynolds called Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential and important American novel ever written. After all, upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln supposedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”

I felt a pang of uneasiness listening to the interview because I’d managed to make it into my 5th decade without ever reading the book.

Not anymore. I finished it a few hours ago. There were a couple of surprises. First, I had always imagined Uncle Tom’s character would be like an “Uncle Tom,” a black person who kisses up to white people for favor. That is not true. Instead, Uncle Tom is a Christ-figure, someone who selflessly suffers for the good of others, both black and white. He is a model of non-violent resistance and every good thing about Christianity. The second surprise is the Christian message of the book. I was prepared for what Stowe would say about slavery. I was not prepared for what a mighty evangelical preachment the book would be. I imagine this frustrates as many readers as it inspires, but in the 1850’s I believe it was truly inspirational. She veers into overwrought sentimentality at times, especially in the account of the death of a child in the middle of the book. Apparently, she borrowed heavily from the melodramatic constructions of her British contemporary Charles Dickens, who has a child named Little Nell die in a similar manner in a serialized novel of his called The Old Curiosity Shop. Oscar Wilde, in referring to the Dickens work, said, “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell,” and one tends to believe that applies to Beecher’s book, too.

But for all that – the sentimentality and evangelical fury, and even her misguided portrayals of black people as super-sensitive spiritual beings – Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a powerful book, a veritable stick of dynamite. What Stowe got right was her indictment of the system of slavery and how that system befouled both the North and the South. She correctly saw that it made no difference that there were nice and gentle slave owners – the morality of the individual people involved was inconsequential next to the evils of the system. Stowe felt she was divinely-inspired to write the book, and, while one might argue with the fervor of her theology, I’m led to think God did move her to write this book to help put an end to America’s original sin.

So back to my questions. The first is from my own awareness of the holes in my education. Oh, I’m sure you wonder how anyone who is a product of the Flint, Michigan Public Schools could say this. Be that as it may, what I’ve decided is to do something about it, rather than lament it. There’s nothing wrong with being self-educated. All you have to do is turn off whatever reality show is on and pick up something you know is a classic. The next hole in my education I plan to fill in is Middlemarch by George Eliot. How about you?

My second question comes from thinking a bit more about Harriet Beecher Stowe. She took a stand against slavery when it was controversial. She didn’t wait to figure out which way public opinion was going to go on the issue. And she got it right. I wonder what you think today’s issues are, and what you are doing about them?

The Keeper of the Flame

The answer became clear during the encores.

I hung out last night with my wife and son and Paul McCartney, along with 60,000 or so of our closest friends at a sold-out Comerica Park in Detroit. Sir Paul shredded my eardrums as he took us on a tour of Beatlemania (All My Loving) to Wings (Band on the Run) to all-time sing alongs (Hey Jude) to emotional ballads (Eleanor Rigby) to stirring tributes to fallen bandmates (Something, begun on a ukulele that once belonged to George; A Day in the Life which morphed into Give Peace a Chance in honor of John) to awesome pyrotechnical displays (you can check out my son’s video of Live and Let Die on You Tube and hear me say, “It’s a little smoky here) to a Detroit concert-only Motown tribute (a cover of Marvin Gaye’s 1962 song Hitchhike). After two and a quarter hours (during which he never left the stage), 69-year-old Paul McCartney did two encore sets.

The first featured Lady Madonna, Day Tripper and Get Back. The second was Yesterday, Helter Skelter and Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End. By the end of The End he’d been on stage for almost three hours.

Are you kidding me? 69 years old and he’s doing that? And he still has those songs in his hip pocket to pull out for encores?

Somewhere along the line the answer became clear.

The question, of course, is why. Why does a 69-year-old do this? Why isn’t he at his Scottish estate, sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, counting his billions?

Because he is doing what he alone in the world can do. And he’s perhaps the best ever in the history of the world at doing it. There is something timeless, life-giving and transcendent about Sir Paul keeping alive the legacy of The Beatles, along with the rest of his music. He is obviously filled with joy on stage as he moves around like a kid and is able to still perform his songs in the keys they were originally written in. He has found the Holy Grail, the fountain of youth, the magic elixir. It is doing what you were made to do.

I saw him the last time he played in Detroit – at Olympia Stadium in May of 1976. I am telling you he was better last night than he was 35 years ago, and he was pretty darn good 35 years ago. And never, ever, could I have imagined then that I would be taking my son with me to see him blow our minds decades in the future. It was fitting to be in a baseball stadium, because it’s baseball that is supposed to sentimentally fuse generations together in our culture. That job was done by good old fashioned rock and roll last night – and not only did I see plenty of parents and kids together but grandparents and grandkids together as well. Amazing. (Also fitting to be in a baseball stadium because in my memory when rock and roll was starting, we all thought rock musicians would have careers that lasted even shorter than those of baseball players – we figured by 30 it was over. How wrong was that?)

Paul’s last words (after singing “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make”) were “See you next time” and I believe him. Maybe next time I’ll be with my grandkids. And hopefully, by then, the ringing in my ears will have cleared up.

Javier, John, Julia and Jeff

News item: Javier Bardem appeared before the United Nations in Geneva yesterday supporting an international treaty to protect actor’s rights. “Bardem wants movie tickets to drop in price to dissuade potential movie pirates.”

I am with you, Javier! Not that I really care about actor’s rights (sorry, but it’s hard to muster much sympathy for anyone who goes home at night to two amazing trophies – an Oscar and Penelope Cruz), but it is now possible for a cheapskate like myself to do the dinner part of “dinner and a movie” for less than the movie part. As ridiculous as this sounds, coming on the heels of the new Harry Potter movie breaking all sorts of box office records last weekend, I wonder, “Who goes to the movie theater anymore?” There must be someone going, but it sure isn’t me. I think we’ve been to the movie theater twice since Christmas.

And it’s not just the cost that stops me. It’s what’s showing. I realize my demographic (middle-aged grumpy white guy) comes in a just above “deceased” on the list of demographics film studios are trying to capture. Be that as it may, there still are movies being made that I want to see. It’s just that most of them hardly show up at my theater. What does show up seems to be something like “Fast, Furious Vampire Transformer Apes Battle the X-Men, Captain America, Thor and the Green Lantern.” If you want to see a really good movie – like last year’s wonderful film Get Low, you have to be creative. And good luck seeing Biutiful, the movie Javier Bardem was nominated for Best Actor for last year at a theater.

I watch movies all the time in the comfort of our home. Most recently I saw Nowhere Boy, a biopic about John Lennon’s adolescence. The story goes a long way towards explaining the forces that propelled Lennon to write some of the world’s greatest pop tunes and become such an iconic figure. In a nutshell, he was raised by a loving (but undemonstrative) aunt who stepped in because his father had deserted his mother, who wasn’t fit to care for him. Unbeknownst to John, his mother was living around the corner with a man she wasn’t married to and their two daughters. Eventually the family secrets come out (as they always do) and John begins to have a relationship with his mother – who is the sort of life-of-the-party type of gal whose constant kissing and affection is a little much for a teenage boy with sexual urges to puzzle out. (Which helps you understand why Julia, the song he wrote about her ten years or so after the time in his life this movie covers, sounds like a love song.) Just as the triangle between John, Julia and Aunt Mimi is getting sorted out, Julia is tragically hit and killed by a car as she crosses the street in front of Mimi’s house. (John meanwhile is a few blocks away playing guitar with his new friend Paul.) John was simultaneously loved and rejected, taken in and abandoned, and that tension is all over his music.

To the best of my knowledge, Nowhere Boy never played in a theater here. We were looking for it. It was released in the UK in 2009 and in the US in October, 2010, to coincide with what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday. It is a compelling movie about a compelling figure. I sit scratching my head wondering why this movie never played here, while Zookeeper, which I would need to be paid at least four figures to sit through (okay, I lied, I’d watch it if someone paid me three hundred bucks, but that’s my limit!) gets promoted like crazy and is playing at every theater in town. Somebody help me understand this.

Let me ask you – what percentage of movies do you see in the theater versus the percentage you see at home? Would those numbers change if the prices were lower? Of course, I’m not optimistic that movie theaters are going to lower their prices anytime soon for the sake of Javier Bardem or his American lookalike Jeff Munroe. Guys like Javier and me will just muddle along, staying home with our trophy wives, watching what we want to see.

Moral Ambiguity, Casey Anthony and Foreign Films

Is the universe moral?

I touched on this topic briefly in yesterday’s post and am going to expand on it today. In March, I wrote one of my favorite blog entries called “Oh the Humanity,” where I managed to tie together Jesus, Gandhi, Tiger Woods and Charlie Sheen. Today it’s moral ambiguity, Casey Anthony and Foreign Films. (I write these blog entries, by the way, to get these weird connections out of my head and into yours – like how when you have a song stuck in your brain and someone else hears you humming it and picks it up, somehow, magically, you are suddenly free of it.)

Earlier today I read this quote from the Florida prosecutor who put Casey Anthony on trial: “We are disappointed with the verdict today. (But) we did our job. The jury did their job. This is justice in America.” How does that strike you? Does it sound like he’s blaming the failure to convict in this case on both the jury and the justice system? What if he’d said, “Hey, we had to prove that she murdered her daughter beyond a reasonable doubt, and according to the decision of the jury we failed to do that”? My opinion is the majority of Americans believe two things about the Casey Anthony case – first, that she is guilty, and second, that the prosecution did not prove its case and the jury had no choice but to let her walk.

Actually, I think the majority of Americans believe three things about this case. The two I just listed and this – that somewhere along the line Casey Anthony will get hers. We believe that somehow God, the universe, fate, circumstance or whatever you want to call it will take care of her.

Which makes the news I heard this morning that Casey Anthony has already been approached about having her own reality show hard to stomach. That doesn’t exactly sound like divine retribution.

It’s interesting to me that we believe eventually things will sort themselves out in the face of all sorts of evidence to the contrary. We don’t want to think about this but thousands and thousands of crimes go unsolved every year. People, quite literally, get away with murder all the time. And as for our justice system that the prosecutor in Florida commented on, well, it does have its flaws. One of the more delightful conversations I once had was with an African-American judge who told me that when he was an attorney he was known as “the black Perry Mason” in Benton Harbor because he never lost a case there. On the other hand, he said, “I never won a case in Grand Rapids, either.” There is a very interesting relationship between the median income level of a community and the percentage of court cases that end in a conviction. In a nutshell, the higher the median income level, the more likely it is you are going to jail when on trial for anything in a community. I'm telling you that if Casey Anthony were tried in Grand Rapids we'd be having a different conversation today.

All of which brings me back to the challenges story-tellers like novelists and filmmakers face. They have to create their own universes and decide how moral that universe is going to be. Readers and watchers demand, however, that things make moral sense in books and movies. Suppose you were watching a Brad Pitt movie where right in the middle of it Brad was going for a walk and a piano fell from the sky and killed him. And that was the end of the story! The film just ended with Brad Pitt crushed by a piano and he didn’t resurrect and become a superhero with strange musical powers or have his death avenged by an angry group of music critics. We’d tell our friends, “Hey, I went to that new Brad Pitt - Piano Guy movie and it sucked. Don’t go see it. It’s terrible.” No, we want stories that make us feel good. We want heroes that learn something (like don’t walk under falling pianos) and become better people (starting support groups to help grieving families cope with IFPDS – Instant Falling Piano Death Syndrome.)

We were playing with our new On-Demand movie toy a few nights ago and found the German movie Das Boot. I knew this movie won a bunch of awards but had never seen it. So we watched it. I’m going to tell you what happens and I don’t care about a spoiler alert because it’s 30 years old. You’ve had your chance to see it. The movie is about a German U-Boat in World War II. It is agonizing and excruciating as they deal with the amazingly difficult life in their submarine and then are shelled mercilessly during some naval action. The climax comes as they try to slip past the British through the Straits of Gibraltar. They don’t make it. They have the stuffing pounded out of them and the submarine sinks to the bottom of the sea. Through heroic, superhuman effort the crew works together to patch up the sub and miraculously are able to get it to lift itself off the sea floor and head for home. They make it back to Germany, and are just enjoying a hero’s welcome when some enemy airplanes come out of nowhere and bomb the submarine station and the sub and the entire crew is blown up. And the movie ends! Talk about a piano falling out of the sky. They went through all this anguish to get home and when they do they get blown up. But foreign films don’t labor under the same sort of requirements that American films labor under. Foreign filmmakers don’t answer to Hollywood studios that demand a happy ending – they get to explore irony instead.

And irony is often a more accurate snapshot of reality. Stuff happens. In the Richard Rohr book I referred to in a recent post he calls this the “necessary sadness” of life. The rain falls of the just and unjust. Heroic people are blown up just while they make it back to safety, while a woman who most probably murdered her infant daughter is rewarded for the instant fame accompanying her deed with offers of money and more fame. And here’s the thing I want you to contemplate – when the inevitable books and movies about Casey Anthony do come out, we will tolerate them because they are non-fiction. Sadly, we know the world works this way. But as a work of fiction – I’m telling you an author wouldn’t be able to sell that script anywhere.

Why Your Wife is Reading a Novel and You Aren't

Do you read novels?

Would it surprise you to learn the odds are overwhelming that you answered “yes” to this question if you are a woman and “no” to the question if you are a man? It’s said that 85% of the readers of novels today are women. I’ve been puzzling over why this might be true.

First off, I’m not ashamed to admit I have a feminine side and will confess to reading novels. I just finished one called Empire Falls by Richard Russo. It won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so I knew going in that there was a darn good chance it would be a worthwhile read. And it is – it’s funny and sad and richly textured and Russo has not just created a few characters the reader cares about but a whole small town you care about. This novel, by the way, was made into a miniseries by HBO (which I have not seen yet) with an all-star cast including Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Ed Harris, Helen Hunt, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, etc, etc. Presumably, these men all read the novel, making me feel pretty good about my peer group in the 15%.

But here’s the thing. As I was reading Empire Falls I grew restless at times. I silently shouted (and if you haven’t tried silently shouting, I recommend it) “Quit beating around the bush and tell me what happens!” I still had 200 pages to go and was ready to know how it all was going to come out. It’s the immature male short-attention-span curse that comes from a lifetime of watching movies that resolve themselves in two hours, or better yet TV shows that take 30 minutes to do it. I blame Larry David, of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld fame. He has the most remarkable comic gift of creating layered stories and characters that all wind up colliding in the last two minutes of a half-hour long show. If Larry David can make all this happen to my delight and glee in half an hour, why give Richard Russo 483 pages to do the same thing? My guess is it takes the average person something close to 16 or 17 hours to read 480 pages, and that’s a guess based on nothing but my gut instinct that people read about 30 pages in an hour. Maybe I’m way off. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume I’m right. I just don’t think most men have the patience to keep going with something that takes that long to resolve itself. I mean a movie has to be monumental for us to even allow it to run much over 2 hours long – okay, we say, since it’s The Godfather or Schindler’s List we’ll allow it, but not for normal movies. We’ll allow two to three hours for once-in-a-lifetime blockbuster epics. But 16 hours for a book that’s not even about real people? No way.

That’s not to say men aren’t readers. Who do you think buys all those "14 Steps to Being a Better Leader" books that are out there? Men gravitate to numbered lists, results, “how-to’s,” and quick gratification. My hunch is women, on the other hand, don’t feel the need to be in a hurry. My guess is that when a woman finds a book she loves, she doesn’t want it to end, because she’s enjoying the writing so much. By the time the book finishes there’s a little period of mourning that has to take place before she can give her heart to whatever’s next on her shelf.

On top of that, I don’t think men want to willingly give themselves over to the ambiguous moral universes novelists create inside their books. We like the reality of the universe we live in (which may or may not be ambiguous, depending on the inclinations of any particular man). It’s hard enough for most of us to get through a day in one piece without throwing too many imaginary and creative worlds our way. So we go for non-fiction, while women while away the hours reading lavish stories set in far-away places filled with interesting characters. Sorry guys, but I think women are getting the better end of the deal.

Or maybe I’m out to lunch on this one. Let me know.

Genuine Wisdom

Do you make a summer reading list? I don’t formalize it, but I do have a number of books I intend to read this summer. We’re just back from a few days on the French River in Ontario, and in that beautiful setting I made some significant progress on a couple of books.

One of them is called Falling Upward by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. For a while people have been asking me if I've read Richard Rohr. Now I can gladly answer “yes” to that question and look down my nose at all those who haven’t, since he’s written more than 20 books.

This is a book about midlife spirituality, and it’s a treasure, best read and absorbed slowly. Rohr as a writer and thinker defies easy categorization – you can’t say “he’s conservative” or “he’s liberal” or “he’s radical” or “he’s traditional.” For one thing, he regularly writes against our tendency towards dualism, which divides and defines all things into either-or categories. He transcends into “both-and” thinking often, and how much richer, I kept thinking, American Christianity might be if it were able to adopt his approach. Here are a few choice lines for you to meditate on:

The ego clearly prefers an economy of merit, where we can divide the world into winners and losers, to an economy of grace, where merit and worthiness loses all meaning.

I worry about “true believers” who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all.

Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning.

The Eight Beatitudes speak to me much more than the Ten Commandments now. I have always wondered why people never want to put a stone monument of the Eight Beatitudes on the courthouse lawn. Then I realize the Eight Beatitudes of Jesus would probably not be very good for any war, any macho worldview, the wealthy or our consumer economy.

We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly.

Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.

Ironically, the refusal of the necessary pain of being human brings to the person ten times more suffering in the long run.

Life is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are.

A journey into the second half of our own lives awaits us all. Not everybody goes there, even though all of us get older … We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully … and never get to the “unified field” of life itself … many of us learn to do our “survival dance,” but we never get to our “sacred dance.”

Like it? If you are of a certain age (let’s say over 35 or so) get the book. It’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr, Jossey-Bass, 2011. Maybe, if you are under 35 or so, you’re ready for the book anyway, because life has dealt you enough heartache to realize pat answers and prescriptions don’t cut it. Either way, it’s worth falling into Falling Upward.