Lab-lit-a!

It has surprised a lot of people who know me to find out the extent of my interest in science – in particular astronomy, geology, and evolutionary theory – and the depth of my involvement in the evolution vs. creationism/ID debate. This is due to the fact that there has long been a split between the humanities and science. It is a split that has troubled me for a long time.

Literary theory has become rife with talk of “oppressive narratives” and the like, a rootless orientation that views not only literature but life itself as a collection of “stories,” either “oppressive and from the dominant culture,” or as an act of resistance against said oppression, without any consideration as to how stories get to be told in the first place.

In order to tell these stories we must have more than just human culture and language – we must have brains, we must have mouths, and in fact I would argue that perhaps we can tell stories because we have opposable thumbs – and yet, I have rarely come across anyone who wants to talk about the scientific realities that underlie our storytelling.

Science is seen as “dehumanizing,” as a “white male oppressive narrative,” just another viewpoint, with no privileged position, and therefore literature just floats along, disembodied, disconnected from the factual and the real. And so we have the ultimate degradation of literature, literature as “spiritually uplifting” Wonder Bread, nice narratives meant more to comfort than confront. Even the rape and murder of a young girl is portrayed with all the sentimental mush (and kitsch) of an angel pendant:

Generally speaking, the sex-murder of an adolescent offers little that’s good. But in The Lovely Bones, mom and pop hook up and so do Ray and Ruth, whose body Susie is allowed to occupy just long enough to have real, true, beautiful sex for once in her afterlife. “I had never been touched like this,” she tells us. “I had only been hurt by hands past all tenderness. But spreading out into my heaven after death had been a moonbeam that swirled and blinked on and off. . . . Inside my head I said the word gentle.” The book ends with a glow.

Every impulse in every sane reader must shriek No! at this pabulum. It’s not lovely that Susie’s been slaughtered, hacked, and dumped in a pit. It’s not lovely that icy Mr. Harvey gets his comeuppance by a conveniently dropped icicle as the pit containing Susie’s body parts is being drained, leading us to assume that her remains will be found and that she will finally get a lovely stone.

Nice thought if you can abide it. Unfortunately, it’s false to all human experience to find “growth” in tragedy. In fact, the dull truth is that pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.

According to Jeffrey Sharlet, a journalist/provocateur who helped inspire this essay, and Andi Mudd, a spectacularly unwondrous college student who assisted in researching it, The Lovely Bones and its ilk “deserve a public shaming.” That’s because BBoWs [“Brooklyn Books of Wonder”] are escape novels, albeit garnished with intellectual flourishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.” [Emphasis mine]

It’s no surprise to me that I have avoided such novels as The Lovely Bones, The History of Love, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, all of which are mentioned in the above article by Melvin Jules Bukiet. Their titles alone shriek their sentimentality and sugar-coating of the realities of life.

But there is something else: science is missing in literature. I am not talking about science fiction – I am talking about scientific fact. Whereas television courtroom dramas detail the plodding methods of lawyers (though also made melodramatic through highly unlikely twists and turns), it seems that the only genre dealing with scientific fact is the forensic science drama – and those are extremely inaccurate.

Melvin Jules Bukiet goes on to say:

Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality. BBoWs elude reality to avoid the taint of anger or cynicism or the passion for revenge felt by real people in similar situations. Instead of telling a story of brute survival, BBoWs indulge in a dream of benign rescue.

Surely that is the kind of “rescue” that those who argue that science is just “another narrative” dream of – an escape from reality, from pain and necessity. I remember, in one of my college lit classes, getting into an argument with someone of this opinion, that science was “nonsense”; it culminated with me asking her if she believed in the science that had manufactured the car that had brought her to class that morning. She said nothing after that, but her glare was palpable. I had transgressed the role assigned to women, ostensibly by feminists – victim, empath, and right-brained child-hugger. If I wanted to write, why didn't I write what "women [should] write about" - having my period, feeling "connected" with other women (sometimes I do, sometimes I don't), or wanting or raising a child?

Hoo, boy. Talk about an oppressive narrative, talk about taking a privileged position, this reassumption of helplessness, collectivity, and irrationality by women.

While these people are celebrating their newly-found liberation of being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, I discovered another article in American Scholar that brought together three of my favorite subjects: literature, science, and Valdimir Nabokov (Lolita! My favorite novel!) in an elegant call for the reintegration of scientific fact into art and literature – and for seeing literature as a creative and intellectual act, beyond narratives of race or gender oppression.

For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.

[Interestingly enough, this mirror’s Dennis Prager’s complaint about boys and girls being taught to completely escape gender roles, but in a more reasoned and informed manner than Prager displayed.]

I and others want literature to return to the artfulness of literary art and to reach out to science, now that science has at last found ways to explore human nature and human minds. Since these are, respectively, the subject and the object of literature, it would be fatal for literary study to continue to cut itself off from science, from the power of discovery possible through submitting ideas to the rule of evidence.

There are many ways in which science can return us to and enrich the art of literature. We could consider human natures and minds as understood by science and as represented in literature, not just as seen through the approved lenses of race, gender, and class, but in terms, for instance, of the human life history cycle, or social cognition, or cooperation versus competition. Or we could develop multileveled explanations that allow room for the universals of human nature, and for the local in culture and history, and for individuality, in authors and audiences, and for the particular problem situations faced in this or that stint of composition or comprehension.

One way to use science to approach literature (and art in general) is to view it as a behavior in evolutionary terms. Why do art in general and storytelling in particular exist as cross-species behaviors? Asking the question in these terms makes possible a genuinely theoretical literary theory, one that depends not on the citation of purportedly antiauthoritarian authorities, but on the presence of evidence and the absence of counterevidence, on examining human behavior across time and space and in the context of many cultures and even many species.

The humanities have always accepted the maxim that biologist D’Arcy Thompson stated with sublime simplicity: “Everything is what it is because it got that way.” How it got that way starts not with the Epic of Gilgamesh but much further back: with our evolving into art-making and storytelling animals. How did our capacities for art and story build and become ingrained in us over time? How do we now produce and process stories so effortlessly: what aspects of the mind do we engage, and how?

Contrary to the populist propaganda about “Big Science” (right-wing propaganda that is ironically heir to the post-modernist/literary solipsist and extreme-left feminists movements) as a sterile and dehumanizing force, threatening our values and our emotional lives, science is a profoundly human act. It demystifies that which scares us. It makes new questions and new mysteries possible.

Science does not have the freedom that art and literature do – it cannot. Scientists are not and should not be “free to ask any question” if the question is skewed to advance an agenda, or is irrelevant, or is simply not sensible to ask at this point. That may mean that many questions appropriate to be asked tomorrow will not be asked today, which is unfortunate, but that also means that tomorrow, when we do ask the question, we will have a trail of research showing us why the question is now possible to be asked.

Art and literature do not need to supply that paper trail, but science must. However, art and literature do need to have their questions grounded, at some point, in reality, in scientific fact, or they will become floating bubbles, self-contained, beautiful but useless, and subject to the wind.

Some years ago I went to a friend’s art opening, and he started gushing about his latest idea – a sculpture, to scale, of the solar system. “Um,” I said with a smile, and went on to tell him how I, as a teen-ager, simply tried to draw the moon in orbit around the earth to scale, and ended up taping sheets of paper together until I at last had a scroll that reached a length of about 40 feet.
“Oh,” said my friend, disappointed, but simultaneously fascinated. “Well, maybe I’ll just do a surrealist ‘found object’ installation, then: ‘UNIVERSE (ACTUAL SIZE).’”

When I raised this issue at After the Bar Closes, Louis supplied this link to Lab Lit, which I hope to explore further. Thanks, Louis!

Expelled: PZ, Darwin, and Now, Jackson Pollock

UPDATED: Richard and Greg weigh in. Richard mentions me *shimmy!* and Greg has the equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of links about Expelledgate (including my characteristically ladylike and demure THOSE FASCIST FUCKS THREW PZ OUT OF THE THEATRE RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME! rant.)

I'd like to take this moment to thank those intelligent design theorists who have given me what turned out to be a shitting-bricks-but-ultimately-awesome roller coster ride.
---
Well, now Mark Mathis has backed off of the “PZ Myers was being disruptive” lie and has confessed to Denyse O’Leary – the biggest information leaker since Robert Philip Hanssen – that the real reason that he expelled PZ from Expelled was money, and his own pettiness.

You should know that I invited Michael shermer to a screening at NRB in Nashville. He came and is writing a review for scientific American. I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more.

Mark Mathis, did you think that this nitwit Denyse could keep a secret? No, Denyse goes and posts this admission on her blog for us to see. Thank you, Denyse. That is precisely how she ruined the screening of the creationist film “The Privileged Planet” at the Smithsonian, by not staying mum about how this is a stealth “documentary” for the intelligent design camp.

*We pause here for a fit of laughter*

But that’s not all, folks. The story just gets better and better. The writer of the film has weighed in at After the Bar Closes.

As I said on my blog, as a documentary filmmaker, I'm under no obligation to be objective.

*We pause here to run to the ladies' room to laugh and, er, expel at the same time!*

But that's not all. It looks like Mark Mathis is padding his audiences with his own staff.

The film was just silly, with virtually zero scientific content, which, of course, is not surprising coming from Ben Stein - a comedian, speech writer and game show host . . . but not a scientist.

I'm hopeful that anyone with the least bit of intelligence (no pun intended) will see straight through the film's hokey attempts to distract viewers from the lack of scientific credibility with appeals to their emotions - like the dark lighting, foreboding music and harsh camera angles that set the scene for Stein's interview with - dun dun dun - biologist Richard Dawkins, an avowed atheist.

Or worse, the countless images and references to Nazis that culminate in Stein dopily wandering through the Dachau concentration camp pondering the ways in which the "Darwinian gospel" was a "necessary but not sufficient condition" for the atrocities that took place there.

But the real silliness came after the credits rolled, when the audience had a chance to pose questions to Mark Mathis, the film's producer.

One woman said it was morally reprehensible to equate the death of six million Jews with Darwin. I clapped, and was astounded when nearly everyone else remained silent.

I shot my hand up to ask a question. "The intelligent design movement has gone to great lengths to argue that intelligent design is not religion, that it's science. And you made a whole film arguing that it is religious. How do they react to that?"

"Well," Mathis said, "I guess it makes them a little uncomfortable."

Some arguing ensued concerning the scientific merits of ID, and someone asked, "Where's the evidence? Where are the peer reviewed papers?" to which Mathis proudly proclaimed, "Actually, there are ten peer reviewed papers."

A guy in the front row scoffed. "Ten papers?" he asked sarcastically.

Mathis told the guy not to interrupt, and then mockingly called him "Mr Darwinist." Zing!

He began calling on others in the crowd, who asked friendlier questions. But Maggie and I quickly realised that we'd seen some of these people before - earlier that evening, in fact, working at the movie's registration table. These friendly audience members worked for the film? Had Mathis planted questioners?

People asked what they could do to help the film succeed, and a young woman in the front row inquired: "How can I pray for you and for the movie?" Mathis grew excited. "We need to start a grass roots movement!" he said, encouraging people to tell their "networks" about the movie and to get as many people as they could to go on opening weekend.

Another man in the front row wondered about the film's premise that supporters of ID are being silenced. He pointed out that a recent trial about the teaching of intelligent design held in Dover, Pennsylvania, gave supporters of intelligent design all the time in the world to make their case, but most of the 'leading lights' of ID didn't even show up.

When Mathis was responding, the guy asked another question, and the producer shot back, "How about you let me finish talking?" Then, a security guard for the film approached the calmly seated man and told him, "I may have to ask you to leave."

"Does anyone else see how ironic this is?" the guy asked.

"Shut up!" someone shouted from the back.

Now that’s what I call honesty and integrity – filling a theatre with plants who yell "Shut up!" and "Darwinist!" at anyone who asks real questions (as opposed to “How should we pray for this film’s success?”) at a film that purports to be about "free academic inquiry."

(Now, I thought it was bad when someone screamed, "Read Mein Kampf!" at me during the Q&A. "I have!" I yelled back. And I have. Whom do I sue to get that part of my life back? By the way - do you want me to name a little kampfing film that broadcasts the "news" of its "struggle" in the same manner as Hitler's ponderous, whining book? Do you? Can you guess?)

I saw this film, Expelled. The reviews are out there at Expelled Exposed, and despite my background as a movie critic myself I don’t have much to add to what has already been insightfully articulated about this astonishingly inarticulate film.

Just let me just add this comment: If the intent of Expelled was to draw a line between Darwin and Hitler, the effect was to make a film that was as banal and inartful as Hitler’s attempts to be a portrait artist. (Did you know that Hitler was a frustrated artist?) If you believe in this film and in prayer, you’d better start praying, because its specious message aside, its construction blows goats.

If the intent was for Stein to be the right-wing Michael Moore, the effect is a right-wing version of whatever ends up (mercifully) on Michael Moore’s cutting room floor. Moore is a blowhard but at least someone is keeping his ego (somewhat) in check. Not so with Stein. Expelled is a mess!

Ironically enough, on Sunday I caught the tail end of a debate between atheist Frank Zindler and conservative Jew Dennis Prager. I don’t care for these debates, but I had no idea who Prager was, and wanted to learn about him. Well, at the end he stood up and, like an old time fire-and-brimstone preacher started railing against little girls who play with trucks (moi?) and the “secularist, nihilist, Nazi-Communistist crap, like Jackson Pollock, that passes for art today – go to any gallery and see the effects of secular atheists on our culture! See the crap that passes for art today!” etc.

Well, I wasn't thrown out this time, either. I walked out. I stomped right out of there. I work in a museum dedicated to education, and the art world doesn’t deserve to be insulted by yet another cultural ignoramus who is scandalized by Haydn. (Apparently this dork who refers to evolutionary theory as a nineteenth century throwback thinks that music reached its nadir in the eighteenth century with Mozart!)

If you don’t like Pollock, or Georgia O’Keeffe, or Klimt or whoever, fine. But don’t deign to make global, purportedly “objective” statements on behalf of humanity about how this stuff is “bad” or “nihilistic” or “destructive to our youth” because you won’t take the time to at least understand it.

Don’t tell me that “atheists can’t be artists.” I am an artist. Just watch me, Bub. I’m writing a poem about what you said yesterday, Dennis Prager.

Remember, Adolph Hitler also wanted to be an artist, but wasn’t one – and his vision of National Socialist art was the kind of thing that conservative Christians would like to see: banal, safe, repetitive, derivative. Does anyone besides me see the irony of conservative Jews (Ben Stein, Dennis Prager, et al) echoing the statements of Joseph Goebbels in his speeches against "degenerate art" also known as "modern art?" Anyone? Anyone?

Um, Bueller?

This is the Alexander Calder Flamingo sculpture at the Federal Plaza as seen in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (while Ferris sings in the parade). Ferris run! Run away from the atheist, nihilistic Calder! Think of your salvation!

The Designer Really Oughta Open a Restaurant

(Things I post because I can’t find a complete and unedited version of Genet’s Chant d’Amor on the Web):

Day No. 1:
And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”
“I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”
“You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.

Day No. 2:
“Today,” the Lord God said, “let’s do land.” And lo, there was land.
“Well, it’s really not just land,” noted Vishnu. “You’ve got mountains and valleys and—is that lava?”
“It’s not a single statement,” said the Lord God. “I want it to say, ‘Yes, this is land, but it’s not afraid to ooze.’ ”
“It’s really a backdrop, a sort of blank canvas,” put in Apollo. “It’s, like, minimalism, only with scale.”
“But—brown?” Buddha asked.
“Brown with infinite variations,” said the Lord God. “Taupe, ochre, burnt umber—they’re called earth tones.”
“I wasn’t criticizing,” said Buddha. “I was just noticing.”

Day No. 3:
“Just to make everyone happy,” said the Lord God, “today I’m thinking oceans, for contrast.”
“It’s wet, it’s deep, yet it’s frothy; it’s design without dogma,” said Buddha, approvingly.
“Now, there’s movement,” agreed Allah. “It’s not just ‘Hi, I’m a planet—no splashing.’ ”
“But are those ice caps?” inquired Thor. “Is this a coherent vision, or a highball?”
“I can do ice caps if I want to,” sniffed the Lord God.
“It’s about a mood,” said the Angel Moroni, supportively.
“Thank you,” said the Lord God.

Day No. 4:
“One word,” said the Lord God. “Landscaping. But I want it to look natural, as if it all somehow just happened.”
“Do rain forests,” suggested a primitive tribal god, who was known only as a clicking noise.
“Rain forests here,” decreed the Lord God. “And deserts there. For a spa feeling.”
“Which is fresh, but let’s give it glow,” said Buddha. “Polished stones and bamboo, with a soothing trickle of something.”
“I know where you’re going,” said the Lord God. “But why am I seeing scented candles and a signature body wash?”
“Shut up,” said Buddha.
“You shut up,” said the Lord God.
“It’s all about the mix,” Allah declared in a calming voice. “Now let’s look at some swatches.”

Continued...

“Shouts & Murmurs -Intelligent Design” by Paul Rudnick The New Yorker, September 25, 2005.

Now from the Wedge Strategy:

GOALS
Governing Goals
To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God.

Five Year Goals
To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory.
To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science.
To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda.

Twenty Year Goals
To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.
To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its innuence in the fine arts.

To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

Now, come on. Does any one idea “permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life” and is our diverse and pluralistic religious, cultural, moral and political life to be “permeated” by intelligent design forever?

“To see its influence in the fine arts,” bwahaha. Good luck with that, peasants. If there’s anything the fine arts cannot tolerate, it’s dogmatism and puritianicism of any stripe.

They just don’t get it, do they?

UPDATED: Whereas the true meaning of life is to be found written on refrigerator magnets!

Funny, non-sappy video on You Tube (by someone who knows how to write music):

Note this commenter's remarks:

Reading comments i noticed that creationists sound rather childish and less educated than those arguing against them. Creationists use biblical fables, simple, abstract concepts of love and very low level baseless claims (like the comment below mine) and get responses that they probably cannot comprehend, supported by logic, scientific theories and big words.

Good luck with the art world!

SECOND UPDATE: Oh, please! Now William Kristol in today's New York Times yokes art into the service of propaganda with his column, "Democrats Should Read Kipling." Sir, I have read Rudyard Kipling, being that he was second to Edgar Allen Poe in my list of favorite authors. While it's true that Kipling identified with the colonizers rather than the colonized, Mr. Kristol, in your simplistic characterization of Republicans as the beleaguered ruling class and the Democrats as the “opposition,” you reveal your sad lack of knowledge of history and even more tenuous grasp of literature. Kipling understood as you do not that the relationship between the empowered and the disenfranchised is never so simplistic as you make out. You, sir, are also no literary critic.

Read the train wreck of a column if you want. Scott Horton has, and he summed up my sentiments precisely:

George Orwell, my favorite essayist, described reading Kipling’s poetry as “a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life.” That, I have to admit, is much the attitude I have towards Bill Kristol’s New York Times columns. They’re so bad, so predictable, so thoroughly clichéd that it’s a sort of malicious treat to read them. And today’s exercise, “Democrats Should Read Kipling,” which offers us Rudyard Kipling supposedly through the optic of Kristol reading Orwell, is a veritable stale Milk Dud. It’s too bad to resist.

Creationists (Kristol is also an apologist for intelligent design) just can't create.

Incest (the Diary)

If I could travel in time it would be a difficult choice, but I suppose I’d go back to Paris in the 1920s. The film Henry and June is set in Paris of the 1930s, though there are anachronistic elements that evoke the previous decade. Here, Anäis Nin and June Miller, wife of the writer Henry Miller, flee Henry’s apartment after an argument and end up in a speak-not-so-easily. This is a flawed film, but beautiful and worth seeing.





My first novel also includes Nin and some mentions of Henry Miller, but they’re only side characters in my portrayal of Antonin Artaud and Robert Desnos.

(Desnos was an atheist in a foxhole, by the way, fighting the Nazis in the French Army and in the French Resistance. He died in a concentration camp with a student who had studied Desnos’ poetry at his side. Desnos is my hero, and so is Artaud, though for different reasons.)

Nin’s great autobiography of this time is Incest.

Read a scene from my novel here. Enjoy! (Genet coming up, I promise.)

UPDATED: My, it certainly got quiet around here. ;-) (Although the "You'll Be Sorry" post passed 2300 hits, and this post, 400. Thanks!)

What I Wrote on April 14, 2003

UPDATED: It's interesting, in contrast, to read what our buddy Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute wrote on March 14, 2004 regarding Iraq.

I was not working for the museum at the time, but for a private consulting firm, one of the clients for city government, for which I had previously worked. It is strange to look at this piece now, over four years since I wrote it.

What made me think of and post this is, I blatted my brains out off-topic at someone else's blog about Iraq and unfortunately, since my blood was up, got into all the harassment that I went through in 1999 (long story) culminating in my call to the FBI. Another commenter called me a liar, essentially. Well, I did my duty as a citizen and there's a record of my call out there somewhere at the FBI. I put two-and-two together about a past bombing and notified the FBI in early 2001. [UPDATED: The Ritz Theatre today is a thriving dance theatre.] No connection, as it turns out, to Moussaui or the KKK (there was a note with "KKK" left at the scene) or anything like that - and no resolution to the case of the bombing of a then-Asian cinema - but the people behind the harassment of me and other city employees and officials have left the neighborhood, and at least one of them has been charged with another crime (extorting sex from his female renters).

UPDATE: The Justice Department announced a settlement in this case. More background on the case. I wish to stress that I am not one of these plaintiffs. I am a homeowner who was harassed by the group that this man supported. To this day I do not know if they were involved in the bombing but I have my suspicions. Also, it was ironic that about the time of my phone call to the FBI the KKK rallied at the State Capitol, and I invited Senator Paul Wellstone speak at a counter-event sponsored by the YWCA the night before. (I spoke to Tom Lapic, who also died in the crash that killed Wellstone.)

Painful memories, really, painful and scary memories of this time. But I stood up. I did something. I accomplished something, even if it was little in the ultimate scheme of things. This is what I was doing in the months before September 11 turned my workplace, located right next to the Federal Reserve Bank. into an obstacle course of chain-link fences and men with submachine guns. I must say my family has been much more fortunate than the families of other military personnel.

Iraq was the wrong war. Afghanistan was a country that we neglected all through the 1990s, the country that I had fervently wished the United States to engage militarily during the civil war, and we are losing the crucial war there now. And we will pay for both mistakes.

REMEMBER THIS DAY IN HISTORY, FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL

No, I am not talking about the supposed end of the reign of Saddam Hussein. Though I have no love for Saddam, I am not cheering the interior decorating that we have accomplished in Iraq.

This is why: Since 1982 I have opposed and protested America’s support for Saddam Hussein. I stood up in class at North High and denounced our President—then Ronald Reagan—for giving money and weapons to a man who invaded Iran, stifled dissent, and slaughtered his own people. When I said that if we shipped chemicals to Iraq Saddam would gas the Kurds, my classmates thought I meant cheese curds. They taunted me for caring about people so far away. (Many of these kids subsequently joined the military, and some may even be in Iraq at this moment.)

In 1988, after using chemical warfare against Iran, Saddam did gas the Kurds. I wrote yet another letter to President Reagan urging him to finally punish this brutal dictator. In the Senate, Jesse Helms and Al Gore sponsored a bill to strip Saddam of his favored status. It passed the Senate in one day, and I was heartened. But the Reagan Administration worked with Republicans and conservative Democrats to defeat the bill, and America continued to give Saddam $700 million a year. It wasn’t until 1991, after Saddam invaded Kuwait, that America went to war with Saddam Hussein.

I will remember this day in history because it is the day—after the tragedy of Iraq’s Museum of Antiquities being looted—that the Iraqi National Library, one of the greatest libraries in the world, burned to the ground.

I am a writer who works for historic preservationists. You may not know that I have been studying Arabic and Islamic cultures on my own since I was fourteen. It’s more than just taking belly dancing lessons! It means learning an elaborate system of honor and tradition. It means learning the many contributions that Arabia gave to Medieval Europe, enabling the Renaissance. It means understanding that Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of the West.

Secretary of State Colin Powell certainly knows that one can’t just go to Wal-Mart to replace Assyrian or Babylonian artefacts. But his promise to “repair” the damage done, while well meant, is naïve. Any preservationist knows how difficult, time-consuming, and costly it is just to maintain ancient works due to normal wear and tear, let alone repair them due to vandalism. To repair smashed artefacts will be impossible. Some things simply cannot be restored.

It is worse with the Iraqi National Library. That is completely gone. Archives from the Ottoman Empire; written correspondence of the 16th Century Royal Court; military diaries, photographs, microfiche of Arab newspapers dating back to the 1900s—they are gone forever. Hand-written notes from King Hussein of Mecca were rescued by Robert Fisk, a British reporter currently in Baghdad. Scraps were all that he could preserve—tantalizing snippets relating to a British soldier whom I consider to be a kindred spirit, T. E. Lawrence, otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia.

Think of trying to “recover and repair” the treasures of a sacked Vatican. Think of Oxford or the Library of Congress burning to the ground. Think of losing the entire collection of Michelangelo’s or da Vinci’s works. Some things are irreplaceable.

One could say that the looting and the destruction are just the unfortunate side effects of war, but the vastly more difficult task of securing oil fields has been accomplished by the Coalition with a minimum of destruction. Likewise, while hospitals are overrun by armed gangs, Baghdad’s Oil Ministry is untouched because it has U.S. soldiers guarding it. In addition, observers in Baghdad report that accelerant was used on the library, and that the stealing of larger pieces from the museum bespeaks of a professional job. That said, it should be remembered that historians and archaeologists repeatedly pleaded with the Pentagon to follow international procedures for safeguarding these institutions.

As for me, I certainly can’t blame ordinary Iraqis for raiding palaces and government buildings. But I cannot believe that they would take up arms in order to raid hospital maternity wards, or the museum, or the library. The artefacts in the museum were stolen not from their display cases but from the locked vaults in which they were placed to protect them from the bombing—which, ironically, they survived.* The gangs involved in the library burning were armed and particularly violent, destroying copies of the world’s oldest Quar’ans as well as inventories and records.

I personally suspect—and this is my own theory—that Saddam Hussein himself could be behind the destruction, that he exhorted his men to destroy the hospitals and cultural sites. Saddam warned of “an inferno,” after all—and he knew that this administration, in its zeal, would not listen.

I know all the stated reasons for this war, and I do not accept them—not after I lobbied for so long for the United States to quit supporting the same brutal dictator we now claim to have toppled. Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 was on its last legs, no threat to the U.S., and the relative ease of the Coalition’s rout is evidence of that. That the Iraqi people are grateful to be pawns in our hypocrisy sours any pleasure I have at seeing the statues of Saddam pulled down amongst cheering crowds. It was the looters who cheered—now, although one must tune in the BBC to learn this, thousands are protesting the occupying soldiers for not protecting their cultural heritage. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, and if they are so mobile as to have easily been spirited into Syria, they can be taken anywhere, rendering a futile a geographical-based war. None of the September 11th terrorists were from Iraq. (Indeed, most of them were from Saudi Arabia, a similarly brutal regime whose ruling family, along with the family of Osama Bin Laden, enjoys close ties to George W. Bush.)

After the completion of my first novel I was developing several new writing projects: one on the life of Edgar Allen Poe, and one on the destruction of the Library at Alexandria. The accidental burning of that library by the Romans during a war between Julius Caesar and his rival Pompey robbed the world of many works by Aristotle, Socrates, Aristarchus, and countless other great thinkers from Greece, Rome, and the Orient. It was a disaster from which the world has never recovered, despite the efforts of Jewish and Islamic scholars who preserved and translated the few scrolls that survived two subsequent destructions. So is the loss of the Iraqi National Library a disaster from which the world won’t—can’t—recover.

In the words of Donny George**, the Director of Antiquities at the museum and an Assyrian Christian, “We waited there for about four hours until we met a colonel. And that day, he promised that he would send armored cars to protect what’s left of the museum. That was three days ago. But until now, nobody came…. It’s too late, it’s too late, it’s no use.”

You may disagree with my opinions about the U.S.-lead war against Iraq. You may not consider this destruction much of a loss compared to the U.S. having (hopefully) deposed a vicious and elusive dictator. One could make the argument that torture and death is worse than the loss of art and knowledge. But one could also argue that countless writers, historians, journalists, and scholars have endured torture and death to defend the survival of art and knowledge, of human thought and human endeavor, because it is the writers, historians, journalists, and scholars who believe that life is much more than mere survival.

But whatever you believe, this is my prediction for the future: As few people now remember the battle between Caesar and Pompey whereas many people remember the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, few in the future will remember the demise of Saddam Hussein whereas many will remember the world’s great loss of this unique and vital repository. History transcends battles and leaders and governments, even religions and ideologies and accepted truths. We have witnessed an immense violation of humanity’s soul, comparable to the sacking of Rome or the loss of the Alexandrian Library. Remember this day in history, for future generations even unto millennia are unlikely to forget or forgive it.

*Some artefacts were removed by museum personnel and subsequently returned. Though the destruction was not as bad as initially reported, it is still very serious, and the search for antiquities looted from Iraq goes on.

**My hero Donny George left his post in 2006 due to threats to himself and his family. He fled Iraq altogether. The fate of the museum remains precarious.

William Dembski and Barbarella!

Where do I begin? To tell the story of how great a link can be?

The Dembski story of a link that's hawt ID - The simple story that shows up this dumb theory?

Where do I start?

To top it off - as if anything could be more funny than William Dembski linking to a man who uses intelligent design in a, ahem, highly creative fashion - I just saw "Barbarella," the Ballet of the Dolls version - frigging awesome! - and John A. Davison just told me that he luvs me. [Update: we're off again. Whew. Just in time before I went to bed and cheated on him with my own boyfiend. *Wink!*] It's just a summer of love!

Oh, my stars. Dembski links to a site by a man who also claims to use intelligent design for Pleasurianism - "a mixture of intelligent design and Hefnerian Playboy philosophy":

ID Pleasurian philosophy is a non-religious amalgam of ID science and Hefnerian Playboy philosophy. It serves as a strategically unified and archetypal counter proposal to orthodox ascetic religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. It is also somewhat resonant with Wiccan and “mother nature”- based pagan cults (in the west) and Tantric Buddhism (in the east). Pleasurian-ism is an earthy, sensuous and physically celebratory form of “monistic idealism” or infocognitive monism.” Pleasurian science is naturally driven by the "pleasure of finding things out."

COWABUNGA! Count me in! Count me iiiiiiinnnnnnn! I can get behind that (or, er, any other place).

I believe in intelligent design! Hallelujah!

I'm a believer!

(Somewhere, in all of this, starting with the rise of intelligent design, through the Dover trial, Dembski's fart animation, and this, there is a sci fi space opera musical just waiting to be written. Complete with bacterial flagella costumes and a blood-clotting cascade dance sequence.)

(Starring a snarky belly dancer and surrealist poet enthusiast-librarian-pirate-secret agent-scribe. I'll get right on it, Mr. President!)

Shimmies to Duae Quartuncia, Stranger Fruit, Red State Rabble, After the Bar Closes, Afarensis, Clever Beyond Measure, Paralepsis, Bill Brookfield and Penny (did you get lucky, Bill?), William Dembski (feeling lucky, Bill?), and to Jane Fonda, Ballet of the Dolls, the stars, the bars, the barmen, and to the whole lovin' galaxy out there!

UPDATED: Remember all that guff about "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve in the Garden, blah, blah"? Well, according to Ken Ham's creationist sideshow it was Adam and Steve!

Between this, William Dembski becoming an unwitting porn star, and Sal Cordova thinking that he's Han Solo, I might not stop laughing for days! (And I mean "laugh" in the Inuit way, as in, "together in bed." *Wink!* )

Shimmies to Ed at Dispatches. Rhymes with...

Human Self-Transformation, Part 2

"Everybody knows that fairy tales begin with the line, 'Once upon a time.' But a trucker's tale begins like this: 'You ain't gonna believe this shit!'"

Thus begins the real-life fairy tale of diminuative trucker, hard-drinkin' and hard-cussin' grandma, and all-around poet and personality Teri Horton, who discovers what she thinks is an original Jackson Pollock in a thrift store and begins a crusade to get the art world to acknowledge her find in the documentary, "Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?"

(The British, love them, list the unabridged title, "Who the Fuck Is Jackson Pollock?")

As Teri's quest moves from honest persuasion (which is arrogantly dismissed by the infuriatingly conceited former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), to her attempts to create a provenance, or history, of the painting ("That's just shameless, Teri! Shameless!" gasps the director in obvious admiration as Teri giggles, quite pleased with her creativity - man, the story she comes up with is itself worth seeing this film for), to forensic science, you realize that these two worlds, Teri's hardscrabble, blue-collar, bohemian life, versus the pretentiousness and claustrophobia that has come to dominate the upper echelons of the art world, comprise a false dichotomy that is long overdue for a good smashing.

I believe Teri - I am convinced that she's got her hands on a genuine Pollock - but that's hardly the point of this film. She and Pollock are so alike in personality and in their private pain that it belies her supposed disdain for this "ugly" painting that she found. Despite what she says she saw something in that canvas that made her buy it and lug it around in her truck - and moreover, Teri is an artist herself, a dumpster-diver and bargain hunter, a storyteller and spontaneous comedian, a poet in the tradition of Andre Breton and Henry Miller, people who have really lived, whereas the art world, as with the writing world, has been invaded by cloistered, self-protective snobs.

But even so, it doesn't matter if the painting is a Pollock, for it's beautiful in its own right - as is Teri and her dream. Gauche, wise-cracking, foul-mouthed, and stubborn as a mule - sometimes to her own detriment - this beauty and her beast are on an adventure that raises questions about who owns art, who decides what art is, and who interprets art for whom. Art is supposed to be a process, after all; and after one sits through the tedious arguments by self-appointed "experts" harping on why all the Pollocks have been found, that there are no new Pollocks to be found, certainly not in (horrors!) thrift stories (oh goodness, no, the man simply shrugged off paintings, threw them in dumpsters, and handed them out like Halloween candy when his wife wasn't misplacing them!), and all of this filmed just weeks before a Pollock was found on the back of a sign advertising cars for sale, one is struck by how little these wheezebags embody the curiosity and passion that characterize an artist. It is Teri who is the masterpiece - a funny, eccentric, self-made, hard-boiled old character constantly growing and changing, and dancing in her dream of which those stuffed-shirt old art scholars maintain but a dim memory. Are they jealous of her? Afraid of her? Would it kill them to enter her world, as she has theirs, knock back a beer and let out an oath or two, and learn to live as, well, as artists do?

An Inconvenient Oscar

An Inconvenient Truth won the Academy Award for best documentary last night. It was a wonderful moment for Al Gore, who made an impassioned speech for acting now to head off the worst effects of global climate change.

In the meantime, the sages at Uncommon Descent have continued their "global warming is a Darwinist conspiracy" wail, illustrated with some Thomas Kincaidesque crap that William Dembski thinks is art.

It should be called egoarts.org! (After all, that's all intelligent design is, looking at the works of others and saying, "I could have done that!" when in fact they couldn't have done it, or even thought about it, without first seeing it done first.)

Over at AtBC, I posted the news about Al Gore's film (and noticed a subsequent posting at UD--I have a little shadow) and asked this question: designed, or not?

Yeah, abstract expressionism. I don't the the ID folks are big fans of real art. Elitist conspiracy, you know.

End of the Year Post: Elevation of the Magdalen

Otherwise known as "Hairy Mary." This will surprise you!

(Requested by Greg)