The All-American rollercoaster
It’s been one of those rollercoaster weeks for fans of intelligence in the U.S. On Wednesday, we watched a US President deploying bone-crushing intelligence and rhetorical gifts in pursuit of progress in health care policy, one of the most pressing moral issues of our time.
Now there’s this:
New Charles Darwin film is ‘too controversial’ for religious American audiences
Daily Mail Reporter (UK)
12th September 2009A new British film about Charles Darwin has failed to land a distribution deal in the States because his theories on human evolution are too controversial for religious American audiences, according to the film’s producer.
Creation follows the British naturalist’s ‘struggle between faith and reason’ as he wrote his 1859 book, On The Origin Of The Species.
The film, directed by Jon Amielm, was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has now been sold to almost every territory in the world.
But US distributors have turned down the film that could cause uproar in a country that, on the whole, dismisses scientific theories of the way we evolved.
Christian film review website Movieguide.org described Darwin as ‘a racist, a bigot and a 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder.’
The site also stated that his ‘half-baked theory’ influenced Adolf Hitler and led to ‘atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and generic engineering.’
Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.
‘That’s what we’re up against. In 2009. It’s amazing,’ he said.
‘The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.
‘It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There’s still a great belief that He made the world in six days.
‘It’s quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules.
‘Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn’t saying “kill all religion”, he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people.’
I suppose it’s time to change the last few seconds of the trailer to “Not coming anytime soon.”
CONSOLATIONS
One of the most beautiful and creative websites I’ve ever seen
A marvelous review by the incomparable Eugenie Scott
Roger Ebert waxes rhapsodic about Darwin
Darwin in five minutes
Big Brothers (2 of 2)
Older siblings can have a strange and scary power over their youngers. So experienced, so judgmental, and so good at pushing buttons.
I was the middle of three, and so both receiver and wielder of that power. I could get my younger brother to completely lose his mind with a well-timed twitch of my eyebrow and rarely missed the chance (sorry, Randy). My older brother could do the same to me.
Ron’s five years older, so I was in kindergarten when he was in fifth grade and therefore automatically an Ewok to his Obi-Wan. By the time I entered junior high, he was halfway through high school. I started college right after he finished. There was just no catching up.
I know Connor (14) has the same effect on his sisters. They try to dismiss his teasing or criticisms, but it’s not easy. He aims, he fires, they fall.
The same is true with his observations about life in general, which are always delivered with the devastating finality of Judge Judy. He tells them how it is; they mutter “nuh uhh,” then collapse into brow-knitted self-doubt.
That dynamic was only one of my concerns when Connor delivered one of these pronouncements a few days ago. From the next room, I heard Delaney (7) sharing a conversation she had with a friend at school. “I told her I didn’t really believe in God, but I was still thinking about it. She said she didn’t know anybody else who…”
“Lane…” Connor said, then sighed with exaggerated patience.
She stopped. “What?”
“Lane, you really shouldn’t talk about religion at school.”
“Why not? It’s interesting.”
“You shouldn’t talk about it because you gain nothing and it gets all your friends to hate you.”
Unquote.
Pause.
“Nuh uhh.”
“Yes. It does, Lane.”
It took every bit of my strength to stay in my chair.
I had at least three reasons to be concerned about this. First, I wanted to know if he was speaking from painful experience. If not, I wanted to be sure Delaney completely disregarded his advice, since these astonishing conversations are a big part of her unique engagement with the world. And if it WAS something he experienced, I might need to revisit the advice I give to parents around the country — to encourage their kids (and themselves) to discuss belief and disbelief openly in hopes of moving us toward that world in which differences in belief are no big deal. The whole idea of engaged coexistence turns on questions like this.
I waited until after dinner, then told Connor I’d heard their conversation. I said this was something I needed to know the truth about because parents come to me for advice on these issues, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Had this ever happened to him? Had he ever had friends begin to hate him because of religious differences or conversations?
“Well…no,” he said. “Not anymore. But younger kids do that.”
“Someone stopped being your friend when you were younger?”
“Well…no. But one time this kid freaked out because I told him I didn’t think God was real.”
“And he hated you from then on?”
“No, I guess not. He just freaked out for a minute, you know, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you don’t believe in God, how can you not believe in God?’ blah blah. Then everything was fine. We were still friends and everything.”
I was relieved. This is exactly what I’ve heard from countless parents–the vast majority of the time, kids engage, they freak out, they move on. I asked Connor not to discourage Laney from talking about these things with friends, and he agreed.
At bedtime I asked Laney what she thought about Connor’s advice. She shrugged. “It’s not true. My friends don’t hate me. They think it’s interesting.”
I told her that I’d chatted with him and found out that it had never happened to him. I encouraged her to keep it up as long as she found it interesting.
“I know. It doesn’t bother me when he says things like that,” she assured me. “I just think…” She shook her head dismissively and sighed. “…brothers.”
Fear and Loathing in Chicago
Today’s post was supposed to be the traditional Shaming of the Bystanders to encourage donations to Foundation Beyond Belief. But events have o’ertaken me.
Laurie Higgins, one of an apparent two members of a group called Illinois Family Institute (italics theirs) is doing what so many conservative religious groups do best: working 24/7 to keep people terrified — especially of people who are different from themselves. Ms. Higgins has now interrupted a long screed warning about a carnival of recreational abortion and Logan’s Run-style euthanasia that the Obama adminstration is said to be working on (why doesn’t anyone tell me about these things?) so she could frighten Chicago parents about the presence of a high school math teacher whose religious views do not conform to James Dobson’s.
Worse yet, he’s an atheist. And a non-closeted one.
It’s not that he’s mentioned his views in class, or tried to recruit students, or made use of equations that always come out to 666, or worse yet, zero. The stated concern is that students might look up to him. The IFI suggests that concerned parents request that their children be transferred to another teacher, and furthermore implies that if they aren’t concerned, they bloody well should be.
“It’s all about diversity and choice,” she writes. Using the latter to flee the former, I guess.
The good news in all this is that the teacher in question is the bright, funny, and level-headed Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta. If anyone can handle this kind of nonsense well, it’s Hemant.
Like other sufferers of RFD (Religious Freedom Deafness), Ms. Higgins is making herself an incredible pain, but when there’s someone of Hemant’s caliber in the hotseat, it can all end up rather well. In the end, by simply being normal and allowing Ms. Higgins to be decidedly otherwise, he’ll bring credit to us all. And the non-crazy majority of religious folks will learn something about the non-crazy majority of the nonreligious, which means some genuine good can come out of it.
How he first caught their eye
She attacks
He replies
She issues an “open letter”
(etc)
Keeping forbidden fruit from taking root
It’s funny/sad/scary how many things we humans get not just wrong but precisely backwards.
We try to make ourselves safe from terrorism by military force—in the process, creating deeper anger and much more fertile ground for terrorism.
We try to raise moral kids by inculcating unquestionable rules and commandments—which turns out to be “worse than doing nothing” because “it interferes with moral development.”1
We try to prevent teen pregnancy by abstinence-only sex ed, which results in equal or greater rates of teen pregnancy. 2
Some of us try to protect our kids from religious fundamentalism by shielding them from all exposure to religion—an ignorance that results in many secular kids being emotionally seduced into religious fundamentalism.
And in our fervor to protect our kids from risks, we often deny them the chance to develop their own risk management smarts—which then puts them at far greater risk.
The whiplash reply to this line of thought is often, “Oh, so you’re saying we should raise kids without rules, encourage them to enjoy unprotected multispecies sex at age twelve, and let them cartwheel down the middle of the freeway while smoking?”
That’s right. Those are the two choices–ya diametrical, dualistic, black-and-white, not-more-than-two-options-seeing putz.
(Sorry, that was harsh.)
One of the decisions parents have to make is how best to approach the issue of alcohol. Since most of us can be assumed to share the goal of raising kids who will use alcohol responsibly and safely once they are of legal drinking age, the question is about how best to get there.
Once again, it’s research to the rescue. And once again, it turns out that the advice of our jerking knee is precisely wrong. Children are more likely to develop dysfunctional and unhealthy habits regarding alcohol if it’s made into forbidden fruit and a magical rite of passage into adulthood.
“The best evidence shows that teaching kids to drink responsibly is better than shutting them off entirely from it,” says Dr. Paul Steinberg, former director of counseling at Georgetown University. “You want to introduce your kids to it, and get across the point that this is to be enjoyed but not abused.” 3
In his landmark 1983 study The Natural History of Alcoholism, Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant found that people who grew up in families where alcohol was forbidden at the table but consumed elsewhere were seven times more likely to be alcoholics that those who came from families where wine was served with meals but drunkenness was not tolerated.
Vaillant also looked at cross-cultural data, finding a much higher frequency of alcohol abuse in cultures that prohibit drinking among children but condone adult drunkenness (such as Ireland) and a relatively low occurrence of alcohol abuse in countries that allow children to occasionally sample wine or beer but frown on adult drunkenness (such as Italy).
Moderate exposure coupled with mature adult modeling is the key.
Vaillant concluded that teens should be allowed to enjoy wine on occasion with family meals. “The way you teach responsibility,” he noted in 2008, “is to let parents teach appropriate use.” 4
Religious and cultural traditions that forbid forbid forbid often end up with more dysfunction per acre than those that teach and encourage moderation. Southern Baptists joke even amongst themselves about their hypocrisy regarding alcohol. My mother-in-law once went to a hotel that was completely filled with conventioneers — yet when she went to the hotel bar, it was completely empty.
“Where is everybody?” she asked the bartender.
“It’s a Baptist convention,” he said, “so they’re drinking in their rooms.”
____________________
Fascinating article about the Baptist resolution condemning alcohol consumption — complete with a demonstration of the weak art of argument by scriptural cherrypicking (on all sides)
____________________
1Quoted in Pearson, Beth, “The art of creating ethics man,” The Herald (Scotland), January 23, 2006.
2Abstinence Education Faces An Uncertain Future,” New York Times, July 18, 2007; Bearman, Peter and Hannah Brückner: “Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Jan 2001), pp. 859-912.
3Quoted in Asimov, Eric, “Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges?” New York Times, March 26, 2008.
4Ibid.
Love, sex, and death (in rapid succession)
ERIN, 11: “Hey guess what we were learning about in Health today.”
(Erin loves Health. She is fascinated by the human body. She wants to be a doctor.)
MOM: What?
ERIN, smiling: S-E-X.
MOM: Oh yeah? And what were you learning about it?
ERIN: We learned that when you have sex you can get horrible diseases like AIDS and die.
[Dad buries face in hands, quietly weeps for the species.]
ERIN: What, Daddy?
DAD: The first thing they taught you about sex is that it can kill you? Holy shit.
ERIN: Oooooo, the S-word! Well it’s true, isn’t it?
DAD: (*Sigh*) Yes, it’s true. If you are careless, you can get a horrible disease and die. Did you know you can also die if you eat carelessly?
ERIN: Yeah.
DAD: And if you drive carelessly?
(Erin wants to drive more than anything in the universe. I often let her reach over from the front passenger seat and control the wheel in empty parking lots and in our subdivision. The high points of her current life.)
ERIN: Well yeah, if you’re careless and don’t use your brain.
DAD: But what if the first time you heard about eating, we just said, “Oh, eating? That could kill you.”
ERIN: Dad. When I started eating, I was like an hour old, and it was just booby milk. (Giggle.)
DAD: Fine, driving then. What if the first time we talked about driving, we just said, “Oh, driving? You can die doing that.”
ERIN: That would be annoying.
So we talked about sex. It was not the first time, but the first since it became associated with the Grim Reaper. We talked about the fact that it is a good thing — the most important part of being a living thing, in a way, because without it we wouldn’t exist.
We talked about the fact that sex is something our bodies enjoy, and that evolution made sure of that, and why. And yes, that it’s something for later, and that there can be serious consequences if you let your body shut your brain off.
Mostly I was just sad. Not for my kids, since it wasn’t the first time they’d heard about sex, but for the millions of others who have to wade through fearful bullshit about shame and sin and death before they discover that sex, like a dozen other human joys, is a wonderful, natural, and good part of being fully human — one to be handled with care, to be sure, but first and foremost good.
My cover is blown
I get some doozies in my inbox, but yesterday brought something genuinely new — a message from a secular humanist who is concerned that I am too, uh…too…well heck, I’ll let you figure it out:
HELLO DALE AND ASSOCIATES, 14 OF APRIL IN 2009!
AFTER READING A BUNCH IN YOUR WEBSITE [PARENTINGBEYONDBELIEF.COM], I CONCLUDED THAT YOU HAVE NOT MOVED BEYOND “RELIGION” AT ALL OR NOT FAR.
“BEYOND BELIEF” I FOUND UNTRUE…..TRUE?I FOUND SEVERAL DECLARATIONS OF HOW YOUR “REALITY” IS.
YA’LL EVEN BORROW A FEW IDEAS FROM THE WORLD OF CONVENTIONAL “CHRISTIAN RELIGIOSITY”, I BELIEVE.
ARE YOU LOCKED IN THESE IDEAS – “GOOD” AND “BAD [EVIL]” , THE IDEA THAT “DEATH” IS REAL, ETC?
THE TAINT OF “RELIGION” IS SO PERVADING IN OUR WORLD THAT ITS SMELL OR IDEAS SNEAK IN ALMOST EVERYWHERE, I FIND.DO YOU REALLY TAKE PEOPLE IN YOUR SEMINAR TO A PLACE OF “AUTHENTIC FREEDOM”, I BELIEVE, THAT HAS A HUMAN BEING BE ABLE TO BELIEVE EVERYTHING AS “TRUTH” AND TEST EVERYTHING FREELY AND INDIVIDUALLY?
THEN, I BELIEVE, THAT THE “HIGH TRUTHFULNESS AND USEFULNESS” OF WHAT I CALL “HIGH TRUTHS” WILL BE PROVEN IN THE OUTCOMES OF OUR HOLDING THAT “HIGH TRUTH” AS A “FACT” IN THE FLOW OF LIFE THAT’S TRULY “LIFE-GIVING!”.
THERE ARE A LOT OF “LOW TRUTHS” THAT TEAR DOWN LIFE, BIND MINDS, DESTROY THE HUMAN COMMUNITY OF ONENESS, CREATE WAR, ETC.
THESE ARE USEFUL IN ONLY TEACHING WHAT’S NOT TO BE HELD, I BELIEVE, AS “TRUTH” FOR THE POOR RESULTS THESE “TRUTHS” PRODUCE.
ONE OF THE LOWEST TRUTHS IS THE IDEA HELD BY SOME THAT “I AM RIGHT AND YOU ARE WRONG”.
IS THAT THOUGHT IN YOUR MIND, WORK AND BOOK, DALE?ARE YOU A “CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS INFILTRATOR”?
OR, HAVE YA’LL CREATED YOUR OWN “RELIGION” WE MUST NOW BELIEVE AND FROM WHICH WE MUST OPERATE IN LIFE?
OR, WHAT’S UP…….?DO YA’LL GIVE A REFUND FOR YOUR SEMINAR IF A CLIENT DOES NOT FIND IT ULTIMATELY USEFUL OR A NEW THOUGHT?
Finally, enjoy an excerpt of a recent talk by Joss Whedon:
The final passage gives Joss away as another member of my secret team infiltrating humanism with some perspective and empathy regarding religion. Put a blood pressure cuff on and check the dial as he gets to the final sentences:
The enemy of humanism is not faith. The enemy of humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker part of man that is in every humanist, every person in the world. That is the thing we have to fight. Faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God is believing, absolutely, in something with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers.
The other shoe
I mentioned last time that I’m getting a sudden flurry of conversion attempts in my inbox.
One is particularly persistent. It began last November:
Dear Dale,
I’m writing an essay on the negative effects of spanking children and while researching I couldn’t help but come across your web site. I skimmed through it and I’m kinda confused; you mentioned your religious beliefs and I can’t help but wonder if you are an anesthetist or a Christian?B___
I amazed myself by foregoing about 37 different wiseguy responses to “anesthetist.” Instead, I replied Here are some useful links to corporal punishment studies. And I am an atheist. All the best to you.
The reply:
Thanks for replying Dale and just to let you know, you and your family will be in my prayers. Maybe one day soon you will open your hear to God.
I sure hope you do
God Bless
B___
Fair enough. On Thanksgiving I received this:
Dale,
I just wanted to wish you and your family a Happy Thanksgiving. I hope that one day you and your family will find God in your lives.
God Bless and your all in my prayers
B___
I haven’t the slightest objection to this kind of thing. But I knew, from long experience, that the other shoe would drop. It took less than thirty minutes:
Just wanted to say one more thing, I know you don’t believe in God, but one day he will return and when he does it will be God, who you will explain yourself to God. Not me or anyone else.
This is the carrot and stick — first the appeal to love and comfort or high principle, and then…The Stick.
One of my favorites happened in May 2007. After a profile about me and my work appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, I got a letter:
Dear Dale,
I’m sending these booklets to you so that you know God loves you. When you die, you don’t die like a dog. You will go on forever!I’m 74, & received Christ into my life at age 11. I’ve never regretted it for a minute.
Love, & Rejoicing in the Lord Jesus,
Virginia H—
Again, very nice. But enclosed were two signs of God’s (shall we say) burning love for me: a Jack Chick tract, including this panel:
…and a second pamphlet:
YOUR FIRST SIX DAYS IN HELL.
As I said — I’ve seen that second shoe drop too many times to be surprised anymore.
I’ve always found it curious, and telling, that Christianity offers release from our greatest fear — death — but is so factually implausible that it’s been necessary to back up the gift with the threat of eternal hellfire if you don’t accept it.
Morality works in the same carrot-and-stick fashion. I saw this at work last summer as I stood in an endless line at Six Flags Over Georgia. A teenage scamp with a Christian day camp T-shirt ducked under several of the rails and cut in front of us in line.
Two minutes later his bright pink tie-dyed Jesus-fish shirt was spotted by one of the camp counselors. The counselor sidled over and reasoned with the lad, using the reciprocity principle:
“Michael, what are you doing? How would you like it if these nice people all cut in front of you?”
Wait for it, now…
“If I see that again, you’re out of the park.”
Whenever somebody insists that anyone who lacks the guiding example of Christ in their lives will quickly arm himself and bloody the streets, I
1. Note that I, though bereft of Jesus’ influence, have (so far) resisted this temptation, and
2. Note that street bloodying has actual, legal consequences beyond the Tsking of the Christ.
In other words, even if all positive appeals to principle failed to reach me, there is an earthly stick ready and waiting right behind that carrot.
What’s most interesting to me, though, is how effective the appeal to principle and conscience generally is — how well, on balance, we tend to behave. But when we don’t — and sometimes we won’t — there’s another shoe.
Edumacation
It’s been a couple of weeks now since the nation was introduced to the execrable Michele Bachmann (R-MN) when she called for witchhunts to ferret out “anti-Americanism” in Congress.
Some of us, especially those who watched her rise in Minnesota, were not shocked. While in the Minnesota House, Bachmann noticed that most college professors are politically liberal. Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion (that education generally leads to the left), she declared that colleges have a hiring bias toward liberals, who then indoctrinate students into liberal thinking, perpetuating the cycle. She called for legislation requiring that Minnesota colleges hire 50 percent Republicans and 50 percent Democrats.
(The bill was DOA.)
I do think education leads to the left by exposing the mind to the wider world, to a variety of ideas and people, thereby reducing fear of the Other — a fear Bachmann still has in spades. This acceptance of difference is at the heart of the divide between liberal and conservative thinking. Conservatism embodies our evolved tendency to value what is familiar, shared, and traditional while distrusting the unfamiliar or foreign. Liberalism tends instead to distrust sameness and to see greater value in diversity and change.
This election captures that distinction spot-on. One candidate, the familiar and safe archetype of the politician/war hero, has benefited from (and at times encouraged) fear of the unfamiliar, and therefore unsafe, Other.
If it’s true that education leads to the left and diminishes fear, fear-based campaigning should increase in effectiveness as education levels decrease, and you’d expect states with the lowest per-capita educational attainment to favor the fearmongering candidate.
The list below ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia in order by proportion of college degrees in the population (highest to lowest). Those in blue are favoring Obama (as of Nov. 1). Those in red favor McCain. Black indicates a current toss-up:
TOP THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (15 blue, 2 red)
District of Columbia
Massachusetts
Maryland
Colorado
Virginia
New Hampshire
Connecticut
New Jersey
Minnesota
Vermont
Kansas
California
New York
Washington
Utah
Delaware
Illinois
MIDDLE THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (7 blue, 8 red, 2 toss-up)
Rhode Island
Hawaii
Nebraska
Missouri
Oregon
Arizona
Florida
North Dakota
Georgia
Ohio
Montana
Pennsylvania
Texas
Iowa
Oklahoma
Wisconsin
Alaska
BOTTOM THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (12 red, 4 blue, 1 toss-up)
South Dakota
North Carolina
Maine
New Mexico
Tennessee
Michigan
Alabama
Idaho
Louisiana
South Carolina
Indiana
Kentucky
Nevada
Wyoming
Mississippi
Arkansas
West Virginia
[Source: Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the 2003 Current Population Survey, U.S. Census Bureau, 2003-04, quoted here. State electoral polling via FiveThirtyEight.com.]
When it comes to strength of support in each state — the percent of the population by which the candidate is favored — the correlation is even clearer. Eight of the 10 bluest states, i.e. where Obama support is highest by % of pop (DC NY CT VT CA IL MA DE) are in the top third educationally, while 7 of the 10 reddest states, i.e. where McCain support is highest by % of pop (ID AL WY AR LA KY TN) are in the bottom third educationally.
Bill O’Reilly calls me a “secular progressive,” and as labels go, it’s damn close to perfect. But religion and conservatism aren’t my real enemies. They are symptoms of something much more fundamental — ignorance and fear — and education is the remedy for both. If wanting a better-informed, less fearful world makes me an elitist, then honey, we ALL ought to embrace that label.
(N.B. To save y’all some emailing, rest assured that I know there are many people of great intelligence and worth who lack a college degree. I have only used the college degree stat as a general indicator of educational attainment. But I do think it’s fair to say that susceptibility to political fearmongering tends to decrease as education increases. Kirk out.)
Name the Brazilians!
- October 07, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, diversity, fear, humor, My kids, Parenting, values
- 19
Most of the time, our family life is typical. But every so often, without warning, a Monty Python sketch breaks loose.
Connor (13) asked the other day why there are bad names for black people but not for others. At first I didn’t understand what he meant. Then I realized he meant exactly what he had asked.
It’s not the first time I’ve been made aware that he is growing up in a very different day-to-day environment than I did. I once asked him if middle school kids still told jokes about people who were different from them.
“Different how?” he asked. I assumed he was just torturing his liberal dad.
“You know…different races. Different nationalities. Different gender. Handicap. Sexual orientation. Hair color.” I was momentarily aghast at the number of categories that leapt to mind, not to mention the number of verbatim jokes I could instantly recall. And they kept coming. “Weight, intelligence. Religion.” I lowered my head. “Birth defects.”
“You told jokes about people with birth defects?” he asked incredulously.
“No! Not me,” I lied.
In fact, I was always the comedian in school. Dale needs to learn when it is time to be funny and when it is time to pay attention was a common report card comment — right next to the ‘A’, thank you very much. I protested that the official “time to be funny” never seemed to arrive. Having chosen comedy, I engaged all the genres of my tasteless time. Fat jokes. Quadriplegic jokes. Black hitchhikers and Polish lightbulb changers and Chinese shlimp flied lice. And yes, any and all birth defects.
This question was different but clearly related. “There are rude names for others,” I said, “not just blacks.”
“What about for white people?”
“Honkey,” I said. “Cracker. Peckerwood.”
He laughed. “What about the Chinese?”
“Chink, slant, gook. You’re telling me you’ve never heard those?”
He was shaking his head in disbelief. “Never. I’ve heard Grandma talk about A-rabs,” he said, leaning on the ‘A’ — “and you can tell what she means.”
“Well, it gets a lot worse than that.”
“Like what?”
“Is…is this for a social studies report or something?”
“I just never heard these. It’s crazy. What else? I’m just curious.”
I looked at him sideways, finally deciding he was not pulling my leg. My teenage son was hearing his first genuine ethnic slurs not in the school corridors but from his dad. I thought about pretending we’d exhausted the list, then decided he could handle it — that hiding hateful stuff from him is less productive than looking them in the eye, giving him a chance to flex his own moral judgment.
“Well, some others for people from the Middle East are towelhead, raghead, camel-jockey.” I paused. “Sand nigger.”
“DAD!”
“I’m sorry, jeez, you asked! Did you only want the pretty slurs?”
He shook his head again, slowly. “What about countries? Like Germany.”
“You mean krauts?”
“What, like from sauerkraut?”
“I guess.”
“Italy.”
“Wop, dago, goombah…”
“You’re making these up!”
“…guinea, greaseball…”
“France!”
“Frogs. Or cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.”
He laughed so hard he turned red. “Why?” he asked at last.
“Well, some people think they caved in too fast to the Germans in the Second…”
“No, I mean…okay, I can see why somebody would make up rude words for people who are really different from you. Still rude, but I can see it. But the French?”
I thought about it for a minute. “Well, I guess it depends on whether you’ve been in conflict with someone, one way or another. We don’t have a name for Greenlanders, as far as I know, because our interests and actions don’t overlap. If they did, I guarantee we’d come up with a slur in a heartbeat. Some people resented France for costing American lives in the Second World War, and some get mad when they don’t support U.S. policy.”
“So we probably don’t have anything for Mexicans.”
“You’re joking.”
“Oh wait. Okay…yeah, I know some of those.”
There’s a large and growing Mexican-American population in Atlanta, which means an increasing perception of conflicting interests — most often groundless — and resentments stoked in part by angry talk radio.
“What about Brazil?” Connor asked.
I thought about it. Brazil. “Hmm. No…I don’t think we’ve ever had enough to do with Brazil to call them anything.”
Ahh, but the century is young. If that shoot-first devotee of Teddy Roosevelt makes it to the Oval Office, can a name for the Brazilians — and the Belgians, and just about everyone else — be all that far behind?
Drugs are bad…m’kay?
I had an unusual interview two weeks ago.
I sleep through most media interviews now, since the questions tend to be the same, and in about the same order: Tell me a little about your book, Why do nonreligious parents need their own separate resource, How do you deal with moral development, How can you help kids deal with death without an afterlife, Isn’t it important to believe in something greater than ourselves. Before I know it, I’m being thanked for a fascinating hour I can’t quite remember.
It’s a bit like teaching. In my last few years as a college professor, I’d hear my brain stem doing the teaching while my neocortex was planning dinner. I’d come back just in time to dismiss. That’s when I knew it was time to do something else.
But the interview two weeks back snapped me out of my usual snooze. I was a little wary anyway, as the station runs syndicated neocon culture-warrior nonsense of the Medved/Prager variety most of the day. Even so, I was not prepared for the very first question to come out of the host’s mouth:
“Without a higher power,” he asked, “how are you going to keep your kids off crystal meth?”
Wha?
Now I can see this kind of thing coming up at some point…but right out of the starting gate? This, of all questions, was knocking on the back of his teeth? When he heard he would be interviewing a nonreligious parent, the first thing that bubbled up was, “B-b-but how’s he gonna keep them off meth?”
I answered that instead of a higher power, I encourage my kids to engage these questions with the power of their own reason, the power of their own minds. There are many compelling reasons to stay away from self-destructive things, after all — including the fact that they are, uh…self-destructive.
He threw it to the other guest, a minister at a private junior high school, who answered confidently that the higher power was the one and only option. Without Jesus, he’d have no way whatsoever to keep his kids from whirling out of control and into the black abyss. Only by staying tightly focused on biblical principles, he said, can kids avoid utter annihilation.
Mmkay.
Ready for the follow-up? Trust me, you’re not:
“Now Dr. McGowan,” said the host with a chuckle, “I gotta tell you, when you talk about the Power of the Mind, it sounds an awful lot like Scientology to me. Can you tell me what if anything distinguishes your worldview from Scientology?”
What, if anything.
This is what we’ve come to as a culture. When you advocate teaching kids to reason things out, it sounds to some like the process of auditing past lives to become an Operating Thetan, casting off the evil influence of Xenu (dictator of the Galactic Confederacy) and battling the alien implants from Helatrobus that seek to control our thoughts and actions.
I apologized for being so very unclear, assured him I had intended to evoke nothing alien, supernatural, or magical by encouraging my children to think. I’ve also never “informed” them, a la Mr. Mackey in South Park, that “drugs are bad, so you shouldn’t do drugs, m’kay?” That’s commandment-style morality, and it’s weak as hell. Instead, we’ve talked about what they stand to lose, what others have lost, how addiction works, and what a fragile and fantastic thing the mind is.
I remember drawing that last connection vividly as a teenager. I knew that my mind was the key to any eventual success I might have, an asset to protect. I didn’t want to risk screwing it up for any kind of pleasure or thrill, and drugs were just too unpredictable in their effects. It was a simple risk analysis, clinched by the death of my dad as an indirect consequence of smoking. I got the message: When you put poisonous stuff in your body, you risk too much for too little. And I never touched so much as a cigarette. My kids have received that same message: Grandpa David never got to meet them because he became addicted to poisonous stuff, couldn’t stop, and paid with his life.
I came out of my study after the interview and Connor (13) asked how it had gone. “A little weird,” I said, “but fine.”
“What was weird?”
I looked him in the eye. “Well, his first question was how I’m going to keep you guys off crystal meth without religion.”
“Pfft,” Connor said. “As if it’s an issue.”
It was nice to hear his quick, dismissive snort. I know my kids really well, and though anything’s possible, I don’t see drugs as a serious threat. In addition to reasoning through it, we’ve talked about craving and addiction — that your body can be chemically tricked into thinking it needs the drugs, and that this can be hard to reason your way out of once you’re in the middle of it. That, plus a number of personal, family, and community assets, kept me from using. And all without a Savior in sight. I figure it has a good chance of working with my kids as well.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that both the host and the minister had gone through the requisite “lost years” of sex and drugs, only to be gloriously saved by coming to Christ. It can and surely does work for some. I’d just love to hear someone on that side acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, there are other ways as well — ways that involve no magic, no demigods, no thetans, no fervent, focused distractions — just the ability to draw on our own natural resources.