Literary Passages, Notes on Academia

 
To compensate for the preceding three days of Lovecraft, some highbrow-type literary notes:

•I saw Janice Erlbaum read last night, and she was good, as always.  She also preceded the actual reading from her new book, Have You Found Her, with a few “hai-poo,” short poems in a quasi-haiku form invented by a friend of hers that need follow only one rule besides (vaguely) resembling haiku: the final line of each poem must be “Shat myself.”  I believe one of hers went:

Anal sex
Not as good as advertised
Shat myself

Another started: “High colonic…”  But you get the idea.  Don’t let this stop you from reading Have You Found Her.

•I was interested in fiction writing myself once, apparently, or at least Naomi Camilleri recalls a fiction-writing class we took together in college better than I do and has written a long, funny comment about it on one of my old Retro-Journal entries, so it’d be a shame if you didn’t read it.

•The writing I remember most vividly from college is the comedic Film Bulletin (a weekly comedy flier doubling as a guide to the Brown Film Society’s upcoming screenings), in which we often made jokes (depending on the mix of staffers at the time) about things like Susan Sontag, lesbianism, Luis Bunuel, documentaries about the Holocaust, and George Lucas, so I was greatly amused to read this almost self-parodic passage from Camille Paglia’s latest Salon essay, which sounds like something we might have written.

(In other film news, Woody Allen’s next movie will reportedly feature two steamy lesbian scenes between Scarlett Johannson and Penelope Cruz, making me think Woody has become more comfortable with the whole dirty-old-man thing — and inspiring one of my old Film Bulletin colleagues to say he now plans to make this the first Woody Allen movie he’s seen in eight years.)

•On another collegiate note, one Brown official was arrested for “lewd and lascivious behavior” a la Larry Craig back when we were studying there, but I think that story in the New York Post yesterday about a Montreal professor may be even more embarrassing.

•Last night, instead of hearing Janice read, I could have attended a Brown alumni event explicitly marketed (for the first time, as far as I can recall) as a singles mixer and offering, in typical Brown fashion, the chance to meet the “male, female, or transgendered individual” of your dreams.  Hardly surprising from a school that devotes a whole webpage of its official health information to detailed instructions on how to clean your sex toys.  Brown students will never know from their school’s site’s section about tobacco that they’re fifty times less likely to die if they switch from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco — but they’ll know how to clean and store their vibrating butt plugs.  Ever true.

Lovecraft Epilogue: The Parodies

Since Lovecraft, who I blogged about for the past two days and will finish with today, had such a distinctive style — depicting a universe in which no familiar cosmology applies and hideous, tentacled alien gods rule a heartless dark universe — he is, of course, easy to parody, with things like:

•an imagined speech showing us what it would sound like if a Cthulhu-worshipper — instead of a Mormon — had to convince Americans that he shares their basic faith and values

•some clever recipe suggestions for people planning Lovecraft parties

•a story about what the Cold War might have looked like had it been fought by superpowers engaged in a race to accumulate Old Ones as weapons (this item and the previous one were pointed out to me by Arkansas state representative Dan Greenberg, who suggested legislation called the Edifice Complex Prevention Act to prevent legislators naming buildings after themselves — but has not yet, to my knowledge, introduced legislation to prevent the use of non-Euclidean geometry in building unholy alien temples)

•a brand-new Lovecraft mock-children’s-book called Baby’s First Mythos

•and, as I may have mentioned before, the photo-narrative adventures of Plush Cthulhu

But tomorrow I promise to move on from horror to Valentine’s Day.

P.S. And in what sounds like some sort of parody set-up but isn’t, Guillermo Del Toro (who as I mentioned yesterday directed the Lovecraft-influenced Hellboy) has been seriously rumored to be the possible director of both Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Tolkein’s The Hobbit (the ongoing legal complications with the latter project making it unlikely Peter Jackson will direct, tragically). That would be like simultaneously directing Winnie the Pooh and Alien V — which would also be a pretty sweet gig.

Creeping Tentacles of Lovecraftian Horror -- and Janice Erlbaum!

I’m pleased to see that today marks the release of the new book by Janice “Girlbomb” Erlbaum, whose previous book was my May 2007 Book Selection. That earlier book recounted her harrowing experiences as a teen runaway and shelter resident, and the new one, Have You Found Her, recounts her experiences as an adult returning to the same shelter and taking one of the girls there under her wing. And the first of several readings of material from the book occurs tomorrow night at 8pm at Happy Ending (302 Forsythe St., on Broome St.), which I’ll attend, sore throat permitting.

Janice displays that admirable willingness to confront reality — even the ugly bits — with honesty and humor that I’m implicitly praising on the blog this month. Much of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror writing (reviewed here yesterday) also concerns moments of confrontation — finally beholding the full horror of what’s really going on behind the veil we mistakenly think is reality — and that tone, as well as certain favorite tropes of Lovecraft’s, have recurred frequently in later sci-fi and horror works.

Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” famously depicted ancient alien horrors being unearthed in the Antarctic, an idea that recurred in:

•The Thing (already made into a movie twice, with John Carpenter possibly planning to remake his own movie)

•X-Files: Fight the Future

•Alien vs. Predator

Carpenter also comes darn close to using the title (though not the Antarctic setting) for his thoroughly Lovecraftian (and good) horror movie with Sam Neill, In the Mouth of Madness, which employs the narrowing-veil-between-reality-and-a-horrible-other-world trope.

Bablyon 5, of all things, spawned a TV-movie called ThirdSpace in which members of the space station’s crew experience unsettling dreams of an ancient city that turns out to be a malevolent force encroaching on our universe.

Hellboy was even more blatant, with a cabal of occult Nazis summoning a tentacled god from the depths of outer space — with this summer’s impending sequel, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army perhaps bringing us still more Lovecraftian elements (not coincidentally, there have also been rumors that Del Toro might direct At the Mountains of Madness).

References to the Old Ones and other ancient, pre-human menaces abound in comics and sci-fi novels (John Byrne made such beings the “First World” of which DC Comics’ New Gods characters, created by Jack Kirby, are supposedly the “Fourth World” descendants, soon to be replaced by a Fifth World — but more about that in May).

I even played around with references to Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in one of my old college newspaper columns, likening the mind-blowing reaction of the narrator upon seeing Cthulhu’s non-Euclidean tomb to the mindboggled reaction I had to seeing a giant stained-glass window of the Michelin Man — who was dressed in a loin cloth and kickboxing toward the viewer — on display at the Museum of Modern Art about seventeen years ago, part of an exhibit of the many strange old ads featuring France’s beloved rubber-bodied map salesman cartoon character, whose nickname “Bip” is not, it turns out, the sound a carhorn makes in French but rather a shortened form of “Bibendum,” since the character’s original slogan was that Latin word, roughly meaning “Let us drink!” and he often held a beer stein — unthinkable today in a character meant to encourage travel by car.

•••

Would that horror movies, which currently seem to be emphasizing torture and gossip-like viral threats to teenagers, would devote more effort to truly mindbendingly-disturbing, rather than simply grotesque, things. I think Poe, David Lynch, and (for all his flaws) M. Knight Shyamalan are on the right track. Indeed, I’d often thought before seeing Shyamalan’s work that it was odd few directors had tried to create horror from moments such as the all-too-quiet ones preceding thunderstorms, when the peaceful field in front of you just doesn’t look quite right, the lighting being slightly off, that sort of thing (instead of just something jumping right at you!). The quiet and unsettling 1970s movie Picnic at Hanging Rock probably got that tone down as perfectly as any movie ever has, and everyone should rent it right now.

And I suppose Blair Witch had its moments, primarily the ones created by its quieter passages — the weird, old Colonial-days stories that could have been straight out of Lovecraft or some creepy Puritan legends I remember reading as a kid in New England — not the shaky-cam-in-the-woods stuff, in my (perhaps unpopular) opinion. The fact that the Blair Witch sequel, with more money to burn, was reportedly a completely hackneyed, conventional supernatural thriller seems like vindication of my view that there wasn’t much there there to begin with.

If mindbending moments (of which the first Ring had a few, I suppose) are good horror fodder — like that time I thought the family cat Oscar had a piece of straw on his chin and he opened his mouth to reveal a large, live grasshopper within, which flew out at me — I think filmmakers everywhere could learn a thing or two by going back and rewatching the (once more, very Lovecraftian) British 1960s sci-fi movie Quatermass and the Pit, likely an influence on X-Files, in which Londoners are plagued by terrible dreams and visions of hobgoblins but discover the source is an unearthed Martian spaceship rather than demons. This explanation is little consolation, though, as our heroes gradually realize that humanity’s whole idea of demons is in fact an outgrowth of psychic emanations from this ancient vessel, and that furthermore humanity was created by the Martians to be a race of berserk, telekinetic warriors. This, needless to say, portends trouble.

Greil Marcus’s book Lipstick Traces, possibly the most important book ever written about punk, strangely digresses for pages about this film and its anarchic energy — and I don’t blame him in the slightest.

If there is anything to be learned from dark dreams, perhaps it’s time, right here in this blog entry, that I started the potentially-regrettable club I’ve long contemplated: a Bad Dreams Club in which members deliberately try to give themselves nightmares and then recount them to each other. Dreams are nature’s virtual reality, after all, and it seems a shame not to explore them. Do you dare?

Book Selection of the Month: "The Best of H.P. Lovecraft"

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (Third of Four): “The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Blood-Curdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre”

Lovecraft, despite writing of all sorts of eldritch, supernatural monstrosities from other, dark dimensions that drive men mad and haunt their nightmares with visions of terrible power (indeed, despite being the Poe-influenced inspiration for half the horror and sci-fi stories along those lines that you’ve seen), was basically depicting the same godless, brutal, Darwinian world that convinced his contemporaries, the eugenicists, that all life must be seen as a biological struggle for survival, with bourgeois civilization but a thin and phony veil over the far grimmer truth. Indeed, there are abundant reminders in Lovecraft’s work of the popularity in his day of eugenics (across the political spectrum, as noted in my December Book Selection of the Month, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism).

True, there are alien horrors with batlike wings and writhing tentacles that bare little resemblance to humanity, but so often in Lovecraft stories, there are in addition humans who are described as being of a “low type” or “half-caste,” who are the harbingers of the more alien threats to come. The subhumans range from the low-intelligence swamp-dwellers on the outskirts of New Orleans who herald the coming of the world-crushing alien Cthulhu in his story “The Call of Cthulhu” (perhaps the best short story of all time) to the inbred New England clans who spawn the half-human “Dunwich Horror” (despite efforts by big-city health officials and college professors to intervene).

In one of his many archaeology-influenced stories, “The Rats in the Walls,” Lovecraft depicts a man who, digging down through successive sub-basements in his ancient family home, gradually realizes his family has dwelled on the site not for centuries but for millions of years, maintaining in that time a long family tradition of cannibalism and the covert farming of an even more subhuman race upon whom to feed. These are the kinds of things, one suspects, Lovecraft expected humanity to find waiting for it if it continued to probe and investigate a universe coldly indifferent to our happiness and survival.

(And if you think a eugenics theme was abnormal in 1920s sci-fi, check out the original Buck Rogers novellas, which explicitly depicted Buck waking up in a future dominated by the only-partly-human Mongol hordes led by Asian despot Killer Kane, who had driven the white race into the last bastion of democracy and freedom in the world, a megacity in the midst of what had once been America. Kane plainly inspired Flash Gordon’s Ming the Merciless of Mongo, Marvel Comics’ futuristic Kang the Conqueror, and Star Trek’s Khan, who is basically a fusion of Buck and Kane — a genetically-engineered, world-conquering superman who gets frozen in the twentieth century and wakes up centuries later. Sci-fi icons owe a great deal to Buck and eugenics.)

•••

Lovecraft was keen to depict not a world where certain beings were evil or sadistic but rather one in which, unbeknownst to humans, the universe is dominated by creatures so vastly beyond our own understanding and powers that we cannot begin to fathom what their purposes may be — but will likely be destroyed by them anyway, simply because we are so tiny and fragile in comparison and may, like vermin at a construction site, get in their way. The core of Lovecraft’s work was a handful of stories employing his “Cthulhu Mythos,” stories in which people (often professors or archaeologists) unearth increasingly disturbing evidence of the existence and imminent return of utterly alien Elder Gods, Outer Gods, Old Ones, Deep Ones, and the like, some the size of mountains, festooned with slime and tentacles, worshipped by obscure and ancient cults, sleeping in tombs the shapes of which obey no Euclidean geometry.

Many fans lament that Lovecraft’s intellectual heir and sequels-writer, the Lovecraftianly-named August Derleth, being Catholic, imposed a conventional moral order upon this dark chaos, with some of the aliens in the good camp and some in the bad, perpetually at war.

Tomorrow, I’ll describe some of later works of sci-fi influenced by Lovecraft — including at least a few popular films — but I think it’s worth noting in passing that in addition to the more obvious examples (cases where the primary menace is something not seen but rather lurking in an alternate dimension that threatens to unravel all human comprehension), Lovecraft probably also influenced pivotal 1960s “New Wave” science fiction writer Michael Moorcock (who in turn influenced, among others, my favorite comic book writers, Bryan Talbot and Grant Morrison) with his lists of random, dark portents in “The Call of Cthulhu”: outbreaks of madness reported in one section of the globe — depraved dreams among nuns in another — bleeding from the eyes among scientists studying the darkest reaches of space — you know the drill…

And, as explained in the Wikipedia entry about the Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraft and a few other writers of his time, including Robert E. Howard, deliberately referenced bits of each other’s fictional universes within their own, so technically, Conan the Barbarian walks the same grim world as the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred and the Goat with a Thousand Young, which is sort of cozy and reassuring.

P.S. And since Lovecraft looked a bit like Lurch from the Addams Family — and indeed, since their worlds were somewhat similar — why not take this opportunity to watch Lurch’s most beloved musical performance?

Book Selection of the Month: "The Irrational Atheist" by Vox Day

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (Two of Four), February 2008: The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens by Vox Day

Vox Day (Christian, conservative columnist, videogame designer, electronica composer) is in agreement with me on one thing, and that is that in some sense there isn’t much to say about atheism. There is no God, and life goes on. End of story. That’s why I don’t normally blog about atheism (this “Month Without God” is special) nor seek out local atheist clubs or Godless community groups or what have you — to my mind, that’d be a bit like saying that my friends and I are bound together by our common belief that there isn’t a tenth planet named Gybrat. Who cares?

Further, I am always wary of people who want to pack a broad cultural agenda into a small philosophical compartment, so I would never insist that there is a distinctly atheist brand of ethical thinking, aesthetics, or attitude — just as libertarians, whose philosophical common ground is merely the belief that markets work and government doesn’t, should be wary of anyone claiming that there’s a definitive libertarian lifestyle or artistic mode (or theology, for that matter). Anyone who asks me what “the” atheist moral code will be or how atheists shall spend their Sunday mornings is barking up the wrong tree — like someone who demands to know how I expect him to find water underground if I insist that divining rods don’t work — though I’m certainly happy to make recommendations based on other considerations having nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of God, namely utilitarianism.

Day is inclined to see the recent crop of prominent proselytizers for atheism — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Michel Onfray — as people who “protest too much.” If there’s nothing to atheism proper except an absence, why do these people have to go on about it so much? Day has decided to fight back.

He is annoyed by, as he puts it (in words that I must confess have come almost verbatim out of my own mouth at times), Harris-style atheists’ claim “that Man is on the verge of vanishing in nuclear fire unless billions of idiots can be forcibly stripped of their belief in nonexistent sky fairies.”

•••

After some initial insulting of atheists, Day makes some powerful, damning points about the stats on people murdered by atheists vs. people murdered by religion. One’s impression of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris — who rely on claims of religion’s murderous tendencies more than I realized — must be diminished (I should confess I have only read Onfray’s atheist book but have seen Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris speak in the past two years, and they’re good enough to be preachers). Still, there is no God to be seen, and Day wisely says the book’s goal isn’t to convince you there is one, only that the recent crop of atheist authors make bad arguments.

He also makes the powerful and fair point — based largely on his gamer-spawned knowledge of military history — that only about 1% of wars have in fact been attributed to religious motives and, perhaps most damning of all, argues that the Hitchens/Harris/Onfray tactic of shunting 100 million nominally-atheist murders at the hands of communism over into the religion column by declaring communism a sort of “secular faith” is bogus. Fair enough. (He conveniently totes up the number of people killed by avowedly atheist regimes in tabular form.)

Of course, Day sometimes pulls semantic fast ones analogous to calling communism a religion, as when he lumps “Low Church” atheists (that is, people who simply describe themselves as unaffiliated with a church or religion in surveys without actually calling themselves atheists — people who I’d say are more likely “those too apathetic to care about anything including religion” rather than true atheists) in with atheists proper in order to shoot down a stat from the UK showing atheists are far more well-behaved and law-abiding than the religious. Lump in those who fail to call themselves atheists but also fail to attend church or affiliate with any particular religion, and the crime stats suddenly skyrocket. But so what? Sounds less like an indictment of atheism and more like evidence that religions can’t hold onto their flocks (likewise, atheism cannot be blamed for teens turning to Satanism and engaging in bad behavior as a result — it wasn’t atheism that taught them they had to choose between Jesus and Satan, so in some sense there’s nothing in the world more Christian than Satanism).

More to the point, the poorly-behaved unchurched remind me of the stats showing that church attendance itself is correlated with good behavior — but that’s no surprise: I would hardly expect someone prone to mugging people to be a stickler for punctuality, friendly social activity, or weekly moral lectures, whether divinely inspired or purely secular (as it happens, the Ethical Culture Society building in New York City was host to the Harris speech and one of the Hitchens appearances I saw and was also the site of the Christian services I briefly attended after being talked into accompanying my Christian then-girlfriend, Dawn Eden — and I doubt too many of the attentive, well-behaved audience members at any of those events were heroin-addicted burglars).

•••

It is interesting and a bit alarming that for all Day’s jabs at Bush and the Iraq War throughout the book, he actually recommends the Crusades as a model for Western survival, saying (oddly for a libertarian, as Day turns out to be) that democracy, secularism, and material wellbeing are weak things to oppose to jihad and that the West must instead recognize that it faces the same choice that it did 1,000 years ago: the crescent or the cross. Jesus, I hope not.

He’s more convincing pointing out (again, in a delightfully rational-looking tabular form) the huge numbers of people killed in various nominally-atheist historical actions compared to the trifling number killed, for instance, by the Inquisition (the latter being only about three per year — tragic though any death is — or roughly 1% of those put on trial), primarily for falsely claiming to be Christian converts rather than for mere unbelief itself. The Inquisition had no authority over professed Jews or Muslims and followed courtroom procedures that were very advanced and civil by the standards of the day, which, remember, was not so far removed historically from the era of trial by combat and other barbarisms, as my historian friend Christine Caldwell Ames can explain, delighting and appalling listeners with her explanation of the Inquisition’s forgotten good points, not to mention its sado-masochistic impulses, depending on what sort of party crowd she’s talking to.

Day does us all a service by exposing as false some of the glib slogans of atheism, such as “religion is the cause of most wars,” but he is himself so vituperative that at one point it’s as if he literally can’t think of any words damning enough to direct at his enemies (a bit of a relief) and simply lists — in tabular form again — dozens of statements from Hitchens’ book that Day considers self-evidently absurd, though I actually found most of these statements to be among the more reasonable ones Day dissects…which leaves me suspecting that Hitchens in his own words would not seem quite as absurd as he does when paraphrased by Day (hardly a surprise).

One of Day’s strangest point-missing arguments is his criticism of atheists’ One Less God argument. This is the argument that since (most) religious people don’t believe in Zeus, Odin, etc., they are already well on the way to atheism and have implicitly accepted a certain amount of skepticism about supernatural claims — they just need to go one God farther in their skepticism to arrive at the intellectual consistency of the atheist. This actually seems like a pretty solid point to me, but Day’s bizarre, off-target response is to point out that Christians do not believe in just one more supernatural being than atheists — they believe in multiple supernatural beings, including God and Satan.

•••

Day is at his best when he avoids the philosophical and semantic arguments, where he tends to get tripped up, and sticks to the practical ones about religious vs. secular human behavior. He makes the interesting point, for instance, that if the possibility of nuclear war with Iran (or nuclear terrorism) is one of the chief pieces of evidence that religion is dangerous, surely those dangers could be used as arguments against science as well. Religion has existed for thousands of years without destroying the planet, observes Day, yet science risks killing us all after a mere three centuries on the scene. (This argument is not so different from the concessions I make to cautious Luddites in my article on nanotech in the March issue of Reason.)

But then, the cure for such problems as mass-murder by the state and acts of terrorism is not necessarily religion or Luddism — as a libertarian like Day should know — but something more akin to the pragmatic utilitarianism that he repeatedly dismisses. Not all atheists are communists, just as not all religious people are terrorists. Instead of arguing over secondary cultural characteristics when trying to prevent slaughter, why not just stick to condemning the slaughter directly, promoting an awareness of and aversion to human suffering?

But hey, such moral concerns are precisely why I’m still something of a conservative — even, by some (non-statist) measures a moderate social conservative — instead of a left-libertarian. And why I’ve even been expressing my sympathy for the students of Leo Strauss (who feared that if intellectuals let it be known there’s no God, there’d be social chaos) for twenty years now and picked Strauss as the first author praised on ToddSeavey.com, lest anyone think I’m oblivious to the immense moral stakes involved here.

If one insists on trying to tote up the social effects of religion vs. secularism, though, it must be admitted that no matter how good religion’s track record arguably is so far, the present-day situation involving Iran and al Qaeda has to weigh into the calculus. I for one do not trust divinely-inspired mullahs to be the peacekeepers of the new era. Nor, it seems, does Day, since he admits Islam is the cause of a hugely disproportionate share of violence and ethnic conflict around the globe. All it takes is one nuke going off in New York or London to skew his stats back in a pro-secularist direction, so I for one would like to see theism defused (so to speak) before it comes to that.

But again, I think Day should know, as a libertarian, that his secular political philosophy — which is also mine — is a better guarantor of respect for rights than people’s notions about the grand structure of the cosmos. If the New Atheists and I must concede that a religionist like Day can be respectful of people’s rights, Day must concede that I can be — and furthermore, that this calls into question Day’s repetition of the common religious assertion that without God there can be no basis for moral judgments.

Does Day really behave well only to avoid Hell? Somehow, I find myself thinking too highly of him to believe that, but maybe he really is a barely-restrained monster. I, by contrast, am a nice guy, and not because I think God’s watching. Interestingly, and contrary to the thinking of many Christians, Day claims that motives are irrelevant and that only actions matter — and were he a utilitarian, I might say he was being coherent. Presumably, though, he thinks God judges character, not just utilitarian outcomes — as would any good Aristotelian concerned with predicting people’s future actions, of course. I don’t see how, given his philosophical beliefs, Day can say only actions matter, though I think I know why he says this: having argued forcefully that (as a practical matter) only Heaven and Hell can incent good behavior, he can’t bear the thought that the dreaded atheist who nonetheless does behave well without such incentives has done something Day considers difficult and implausible. If motives mattered to Day and he were to confront the fact that I behave as well as a Christian without the carrot and stick of Heaven and Hell, he might just have to admit that I am his moral superior.

•••

Alas, Day spends only a page on the one atheist argument that actually matters: The Argument from Lack of Evidence. In a very sloppy way, he admits that there is no evidence for God yet insists that one has no good evidence for much of anything, from quantum mechanics to whether your relatives love you (utterly false — there is ample experimental evidence for quantum mechanics and every reason to base one’s belief that one is loved on observational evidence such as how people treat you). There is simply nothing else in ordinary human life believed with the utter, yawning abyss of evidencelessness that is religion. And that is why — in all likelihood — there is no God, and no fully rational, sane person who considered the arguments would ever again believe otherwise, even if Day were to prove conclusively that Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris are mentally retarded and that nine out of ten atheists become amoral menaces who commit mass murder. Still no God. Suck it up and face reality.

But then, Day’s relationship to reality and evidence may be shakier than he lets on. He tells us by way of argument against The Argument from Hallucination that he has had both a supernatural experience and drug-induced hallucinations and therefore knows the difference between the two, which, needless to say, is not the most reassuring eye-witness testimony one could ask for.

Since just a few pages later in the book, he asserts that Jesus’s claim to have existed before Abraham suggests that Jesus was privy to multiverse theory and modern conceptions of the spacetime continuum, I would not be surprised to learn Day was actually experiencing drug-induced hallucinations during the writing of the book itself. He also asserts that the Book of Revelation accurately predicted the European Union, which is the sort of reading-into of vague prophecies that makes one question his trustworthiness even when assembling some of his more numerical-historical data (almost any vague-enough prediction is likely to come “true” given 2,000 years or more of history to play around with — something worth keeping in mind not only when dealing with people who believe in Bible prophecy but when listening to the supposed insights of Nostradamus).

Day manages to hold the high ground logically and morally at times, when he points out irresponsible hyperbole by the New Atheists, but within pages he is accusing atheists of being “childish” and “irrational” and amoral and parasitic and “insane,” until his whole screed degenerates rapidly (in what he might himself concede is a flagrant example of “projection”) into lamentations/paeans about the ineradicable, inevitable, and profound irrationality of humanity in nearly all aspects of life, supposedly making skepticism and scientific reasoning futile. All of which is a bit like saying that because crime is rampant, the man who proposes to live honestly must be fooling himself. Rationality is possible, and so is a respect for the lives and liberty of others. The fiction of God is not necessary for these things, regardless of the good or bad done in His name, and regardless of the quality of the arguments advanced for or against Him.

Vox Day, Author of "The Irrational Atheist," plus Hitchhiker's' and Star Trek's Rules

Tomorrow I hope to post my review of The Irrational Atheist, a book that responds to the recent wave of “New Atheist” arguments from people like Michel Onfray (whose Atheist Manifesto I reviewed yesterday) and Christopher Hitchens (who I’ve seen debate twice in recent months). Today, though, a review, as it were, of the author of Irrational Atheist, Vox Day.

One of the first things likely to strike an atheist reader is that Day sounds young, smart, hip, and funny, so one can’t simply dismiss him as a crusty old man repeating tired dogma instead of making thoughtful arguments. I think he gets into some unproductive semantic knots but scores many useful points, as I’ll explain tomorrow.

Speaking of scoring points, though, it’s interesting how much Day’s background as a videogame designer — not a theologian — influences his philosophical arguments, usually in very positive ways. Many of his strongest arguments arise from his detailed knowledge of military history (used to address the question of whether religion tends to cause wars — with the same statistical savvy he uses to dispel the recently-popular idea that “Red States” are more socially-pathological than “Blue States,” a claim that apparently falls apart once we more closely track redness and blueness at the county level).

There are hints near the end of the book, though, that Day is a “gamer for God” in a more profound way than just having a handle on number-crunching and war scenarios. In one of those cases where someone offers a metaphor so elaborate that you start to suspect he thinks it’s more than just a metaphor, Day explains that game designers like to employ relatively simple, elegant code that can sometimes produce strange results without warranting completely erasing the program and starting over from scratch — and indeed, that one of the most delightful aspects of games is the occasional unexpected, seemingly autonomous actions undertaken by game character artificial intelligences that were thought to be completely predictable.

You wouldn’t want to erase the program every time strange results occurred, even though the characters (were they fully sentient) might think some of those strange results horrible, confusing, or unjust. They don’t realize that their short-term comfort is not what the game was designed for — it has a grander purpose they cannot perceive. Likewise, Day seems to be suggesting, God may have created a universe with a simple set of rules that produce sometimes-confusing results for the programs (us) dwelling within it, but this is not proof that the whole design is monstrous and useless and should be scrapped — not even when a malevolent rival designer (Satan) hacks into the program and starts interfering with the AI programs, a situation the designer could solve by wiping the board or, as a Christian gamer would argue is in fact the case, through the less-invasive technique of deploying a bit of the designer’s mind into the game disguised as a human being, in order to spread the word about how to resist the malevolent code (think of this as the twenty-first-century version of C.S. Lewis’s plainly sci-fi-influenced description of Earth as “territory seized by the enemy” in a cosmic war).

The Rules of Hitchhiker’s and Star Trek

Day’s generous view — that the universe isn’t fundamentally absurd, it just looks that way to all the people who live inside it — helps explain how Day can be a Christian and a big fan of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to which he refers repeatedly. Hitchhiker’s would strike most people (including its author) as a profoundly skeptical book, with interstellar bureaucracies and religions (such as that of the Almighty Prophet Zarquon) constantly interfering in disastrous and ultimately meaningless ways with the lives of innocents — not a vision of a just, reasonable universe. But again, Day might say, perhaps we just don’t perceive the larger purpose of the game (or more likely, Day is wrong, and the universe has no designer — but you can see how the metaphor might be a powerful one for someone of our game-loving time period). This attitude enables him to keep a sense of humor about the whole topic — even while being zealous enough to dismiss atheists at one point by saying that the difference between open-minded agnostics and (per Day) stubborn, combative atheists is that agnostics say, “I don’t believe in God because I don’t see how we can ever know if He exists,” while atheists (should rightly) say, “I don’t believe in God because I’m an asshole.”

As it happens, when I considered trying to write something for Star Trek back in 1995, as mentioned in yesterday’s Retro-Journal entry, I got a chance to read the actual rules of the Star Trek universe, or specifically, Star Trek: The Next Generation, since the writer’s guidelines I saw were written at the height of that show’s dominance of the overall Trek media empire (later series would be more action-oriented and emotion-driven). And many a writer must have looked upon those rules and despaired, since they forbid:

•depicting Starfleet personnel suffering from the routine neuroses and interpersonal emotional conflict common in our own era, these things having been eliminated

•depicting time travel or alternate realities (not that Trek has ever been without these things, but the producers rightly sought to keep it to a minimum by discouraging freelancers from leaping to those tired tropes first)

And, most relevantly:

•depicting a God-like alien being who tests humans to judge their worthiness to survive

That last one, too, had been overdone in Trek by that time — and I wish we could lay down a similar rule for humans considering starting a religion.

Retro-Journal: TMBG, UK, DC, and ABC, Late 1995

I heard from Andrea and Howard Rich’s employee Chris Whitten that correspondent John Stossel (whose 1989 20/20 segment about deregulation called “Relaxing the Rules” had helped confirm my coalescing libertarian views) had shown up at one of Victor Niederhoffer’s monthly “Junto” political discussion meetings and said he was looking for new staffers to work for him at ABC News. I applied to work there, two years of writing ads for Kaplan having grown a bit dull. Stossel had seen my articles for Reason (a gig I had pursued at the suggestion of the Institute for Humane Studies’ Marty Zupan and had been assigned to by then-editor Virginia Postrel, having first learned of the Institute for Humane Studies back during college from my friend-since-kindergarten Paul Taylor). So all libertarian roads led me to Stossel, who hoped to have me start working at ABC in the fall of 1995 — and as it happened, Kaplan laid off half its marketing department, including me, halfway through 1995 (you only need just so many people to write and design ads that say “Take Kaplan and get a higher score” over and over again, so I’d foreseen this eventuality).
In between the two jobs, that meant, in effect, I got a full-length summer vacation for the first time in the four years since college — the perfect time, obviously, to plan one’s Star Trek novel. And I don’t just mean fan fiction. With the advice of friends Liz Braswell and Scott Shannon, who’ve worked for Star Trek’s spin-off publishing empire in different capacities, I had some actual plot outlines percolating, just in case the ABC gig didn’t work out. (And six years later, when I left ABC, I’d return to that idea during another vacation between gigs — but that vacation would also end with me getting a real job, at ACSH, instead of remaining immersed in a Deep Space Nine plot.)
One wonderful thing I did take with me from Kaplan was a fellow employee, who became my girlfriend and was, in her own way, as nerdy as I — a fact made clear on one of our early dates. On July 9, 1995, we saw They Might Be Giants in Prospect Park in Brooklyn for a mere $3 — just days after viewing Fourth of July fireworks together — and two out of three of her ex-boyfriends, also nerds, unexpectedly turned out to be at the concert as well, greeting us both with a minimum of awkwardness.
It was frankly less awkward than our weird Bastille Day visit to the “Fun Fair” on Roosevelt Island, that centrally-planned island in the river just east of Manhattan being a desolate and modernist Potemkin Village — home to an old insane asylum, a collapsing smallpox hospital, and many U.N. employees — even when not filled for a day with desperate carny-barkers. I’d mention the place’s strangeness and artificiality in a Reason article eleven years later, my first stab at writing about it, for New York Press, having been rejected in the mid-90s — but nothing goes to waste.
I was reminded of the effectiveness of the TMBG event as a catch-basin for local nerds just a few years ago when I had a similar experience at a screening of Muppet highlights in Brooklyn, at which I unexpectedly bumped into several people I knew — including one woman I’d dated, who was herself on a date. That time I was the nerd ex-boyfriend unexpectedly but quite effectively drawn in by a powerful nerd-filter.
Nerdy romance was ultimately doomed in the case of me and the Kaplan vet, with her moving to Indiana  — and wanting children, unlike me. These two factors combined to form her short story published in Red Book, of all places, in which a mother and sad young son cope with the absence of the boy’s father, a story that I may, in retrospect, have had some influence upon.
•••
Some other people with whom I shared milestones that year:
•My father turned fifty, and I have to say, that doesn’t seem very old to me now — nor very long ago.
•My diminutive and beautiful lawyer friend Alex Dickerson was the only person I knew besides me with enough sense to want to see Babe, the movie about the talking pig, before the Oscar nomination for Best Picture was announced, after which adults everywhere suddenly woke up to the fact it was awesome.
•Arch-conservative friend Jim Kalb — an unabashed traditionalist who questions the very idea of individual rationality — led a monthly or so Tuesday Night Traditionalists gathering (TNT — totally unrelated to the coincidental same-named Tuesday gatherings led by one of my more left-wing friends, Gersh Kuntzman, around the same time, at which the primary tradition under discussion was getting more beer). Kalb’s gatherings took place at a bar on the Lower West Side, and they helped to sharpen my ideas about tradition and innovation, stirred over the preceding few years by my encounters with paleoconservative thinking. Paleocon John Carney, now an occasional combatant in the Debates at Lolita Bar I host, was another participant and a friend of short-term Stossel underling Brian Taylor from their days as political trouble-makers together at SUNY Binghamton.
Kalb made me realize my innocent and naive philosophical youth was ending — and my respect for tradition growing — when he pointed out the possible cultural hollowness of my enthusiasm for the cable access show Concrete TV, consisting as it did of fast, well-edited video montages of martial arts, Godzilla, action-movie car crashes, machine gun battles, and vintage stripper reals, often set to speed metal. In retrospect, I also realize how shallow he probably thought I sounded after one TNT gathering when I said I was basically “a New Wave guy at heart,” and he somewhat passive-aggressively asked what had become of New Wave a decade on, the Tory bastard. But I’ll unite his thinking and Debbie Harry’s yet whether he likes it or not, just you watch.
I still recall telling Liza once, as we walked along the street, that if I could fulfill my greatest ambition, it would be to somehow heal the rift in Western civilization wrought by the eighteenth-century schism between traditionalists and innovators/progressives, still echoing today in the battles between right and left — and echoing in the book/articles-writing plan I’d formulate two years later (but more on that in three weeks).
•My friend Reid Mihalko was on Maury Povich’s show on July 26 that year, making the case for Austrian-Americans as the sexiest ethnic group in a “discussion” about that topic among several good-looking people. In a completely faked accent (fully encouraged by the show’s producers), Reid claimed at one point that Austrian men are strong like Austrian coffee “und” thick like Austrian strudel.
•I made the first of three trips, as an adult, to London, this time accompanied by Scott Nybakken, both of us taking advantage of the opportunity to stay with another former Kaplan employee, globe-trotting future “quantum healer” Sangeeta Sahi.
•Let it not be thought that the travel benefits of my friendship with Scott flowed solely in his direction, though: he took me along that October to a Halloween costume party full of DC Comics employees, me garbed as the obscure but pivotal DC villain the Time Trapper — pivotal because he alone lives at the very end of time and has the power to reach back and alter the course of history, including his own multiple and contradictory origin stories, which feed into the same entropic end-point like streams into a single dark river. Editor Mike Carlin did not recognize my costume — and made me more disturbed for the integrity of the timestream than any scheme by the Time Trapper ever could when he answered one of my questions about Superman continuity with a vague and dismissive remark about how if Superman has long hair, the story’s probably in continuity. It was then that I knew that the timestream lacked a firm guiding hand — such as the one I would provide, were my secret ambitions to control the DC Universe ever to reach fruition!
The party also featured the lovely Jill Pope as Jackie O — and on the precious few occasions when I’ve bumped into her since then, I always feel like I just saw her at that party, now nearly thirteen years gone by — but always immediately accessible to the Time Trapper…
•I submitted a piece about the history of the Village Voice (complete with a reference to a real, honest-to-gosh, non-ironic headline from its early, genuinely Greenwich-Village-centric days in the late 50s that read “Cops Break Up Beatnik Bongo Party,” I kid you not) to the fledgling Weekly Standard, but John Podhoretz reluctantly and politely rejected the piece, so it ended up in a waning Spy Magazine of all places, while my fellow New York Press writer Daniel Radosh (a leftist and humor writer) ended up writing the Standard’s retrospective on the Voice — and there’s something very backwards about that, needless to say. (I’ve recently been told Podhoretz still remembers who I am, so he must have a memory like a bartender, for lack of a better metaphor.)
•My co-worker Debbie Stone (now Debbie Colloton) at ABC was an endless source of strange stories from her own life and an inspiration to do more with my own. A gung-ho conservative who converted to Catholicism while we were at ABC (again, I tend to like hybrids and converts of one sort or another), she was a fount of anecdotes about her days at the Dartmouth Review with the likes of Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham, not to mention her time with El Salvadoran military men, her lawyer sister Wendy, and countless alarmed motorists who do not share her somewhat anarchic, New Hampshire-hewn belief that all driving should be done at 100 miles per hour.
•••
I jotted down a note at the very end of 1995 saying “life is great,” despite the small, decrepit former dressing-rooms that Debbie and I, as new Stossel recruits, were then using as offices on a little-used floor at ABC, full of rat poison, construction work, and asbestos removal efforts. At year’s end, Liza was visiting (between semesters) for nearly the last time, and I was still writing for New York Press for a bit longer and doing political monologues for WFUV radio, prior to getting a permanent contract at ABC (at which point I dropped all outside political activities, believe it or not). I awaited the early-1996 airing of the first Stossel special on which I’d worked, as a freelance researcher: The Trouble with Lawyers.

Applied Theology from Kat Von D.

Disturbing as the tabloid show TMZ is, I sometimes see its final minutes before Simpsons reruns, so I know that tattoo-artist reality show star Kat Von D. (her real, though abbreviated — and German — name, apparently) appears to have sent an autographed photo of herself to a hated underling after firing him, autographing it with the message “Burn in Hell, Jew-bag,” with a little cartoon of a burning Star of David and a swastika incorporated into her signature.

And I don’t bring this up as a cheap way to insult her apparent belief in Hell or her dim view of his religious heritage but to point out that there’s something to be said aesthetically for a complete lack of subtlety, as any good tattoo artist or carnival poster artist knows.

Book Selection of the Month: "Atheist Manifesto"

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (First of Four), February 2008: Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto

Religious people have no evidence whatsoever to point to in support of their beliefs (the distinctly supernatural ones, that is, as opposed to some affiliated historical claims that are no different from the ones secular people would make). Often, then, their arguments for maintaining their beliefs come to resemble arguments for the position that “zero is still something.”

That is, they are reduced to barely-sustainable quasi-linguistic chicanery (such as the so-called ontological argument for God) roughly as powerful as the arguments of a small, scrawny, hunchbacked, elderly man with a cane who keeps insisting “I could take Mike Tyson right now in a fair fight” and who then insists that until you actually summon Mike Tyson to fight him, you’ve “done nothing” to show that he’s talking nonsense — even though you’ve pointed out that he has no basis for his claim, lacks muscles, displays no fighting skill, is poorly physically coordinated, etc. — and has a well-known habit of shooting his mouth off without being able to back it up with facts.

So, in religion and in no other area of life, you hear people continually falling back on comments like “Well, you can’t prove it isn’t the case” — or hypocritically claiming religious belief is very important right up until the moment they are challenged about it, at which point: it’s just a private matter and so “What do you care what I believe?” Some of us dislike lies and error on principle, though, and think there’s ample evidence that a general pattern of embracing them is likely unhealthy. So liars and fools deserve to be exposed.

At some point, in other words, the decent, rational person is allowed to get a little frustrated, even a little angry, with the stubborn old man who insists he can take Mike Tyson.

•••

Michel Onfray is undeniably one of those angry, frustrated people. In fact, his book Atheist Manifesto — even better known in Continental Europe than the works of Dawkins and Hitchens are here, apparently — sounds exactly, almost parodically, like what you would expect from a fusion of Nietzsche and “snippy French guy.” Rather than taking the common American approach of treating criticisms of religion as cautious complaints brought to a faltering but beloved grandparent, Onfray is fairly vicious — almost always going for the negative interpretation not only of religion’s factual claims but its (more complex, to my mind) social effects whenever the option arises. If there is a case to be made that religion causes wars rather than ameliorating them, increases hatred rather than increasing love, or leads to the oppression of women rather than sweeping respect for individual dignity, rest assured Onfray will attempt to make that case, and often in a rather off-hand, dismissive, hyperbolic fashion.

Still, even that aggressive attitude is born of his awareness of what he’s up against in the form of cultural and psychological resistance (his greatest strength is his willingness to examine the rather obvious psychological reasons, rarely spoken of, that people might be inclined to believe in religion without it being true). Religious believers routinely insist on a level of gentleness and civility from atheists that they only think they hold themselves to, leading to the atheist knowing in advance that no matter how politely (by any normal standards) his criticisms are stated, he will almost inevitably be asked questions like “Is your life so devoid of meaning that you have to attack everything that’s beautiful?” and “What went wrong in your childhood to make you this way?” and “So you don’t think love exists?” and “Why are you so angry at God?”

This last question was put to Richard Dawkins by a particularly stupid and smug — but no doubt gainfully employed and well-liked (since society does so little to shun these people) — Christian at a speech I saw Dawkins give at the New York Academy of Sciences, and that question was only a slight improvement over “Who are you?” the Vorlon-like question that the man had initially kept repeating, a beatific smile on his face all the while, to the confusion of audience and Dawkins alike. The annoyed audience was quite ready to abandon the question — but Dawkins, with genuine compassion, was eager to get the poor idiot to rephrase his question in a clearer way, so that his point could be understood. Finally, he rephrased it as the question about anger, and it could be answered (correctly) by Dawkins with “One doesn’t get angry at a fictional character.”

•••

Religious people typically have a very, very difficult time understanding that you really don’t believe there’s a God, and thus they have to hunt for ulterior motives in your atheist claims and conduct — and this, like countless other things religious people do, they do not consider rude.

Onfray’s anger is not directed at God — since there is none — but at the institution of religion that he sees as maiming the brains of most of his fellow human beings. As a philosophy professor, he wants to see them think as clearly and as well as possible and not be mired in illusions. He is trying, in short, to help, which a person with nothing but negative emotions (and angry gestures) would not bother to do.

And why should he not see religion as a problem? We can wrestle endlessly with the precise number of oppressive acts vs. charity hospitals caused by religion over the ages (and next week, I’ll review what I admit is a better book — Vox Day’s The Irrational Atheist — that takes a stab at doing just such calculations and finds they don’t look good for Onfray’s or atheism’s case [and tonight, incidentally, I promise my usual Friday Retro-Journal entry]). But Onfray would see the attempt to make such calculations as akin to toting up how many good deeds vs. bad deeds have been performed, say, by people using old-fashioned typesetting equipment when better systems are available.

Yes, much of human action, good and bad, has so far been motivated by or rationalized in terms of religion — Onfray would be the first to say that religious thinking “formats” our brains like computers. He is not interested in tweaking that program slightly or seeing whether it produces entertaining glitches vs. annoying glitches. He wants this formatting out of our heads so we can more readily adapt our thinking to the real universe — and history and personal experience suggest that accurate perceptions of external reality tend to be helpful.

•••

Onfray sees the discarding of faith as a first step toward fully embracing and understanding the (potentially wonderful) world around us — but he recognizes how painful the first faltering steps toward negotiating the real world can be. Atheism is not a plunge into a dark void, but it is the removal of a blindfold in a world of harsh sunlight. And in that sunlit world, as he notes, there would be no need for people whose brains are possessed by religious formatting to do things like imprison a woman for allowing her students to name a teddy bear Mohammed, to take one recent example — and one not irrelevant to Onfray’s experience as a Frenchman, given Islam’s (sometimes violent) inroads into that unfortunate nation.

A commenter on a previous thread on this blog has in the past implied that religious belief is about as harmless as the fancies (recognized as such) of sci-fi fans, and I have a souvenir teddy bear produced by the Star Trek bar in Las Vegas, named J.T. after a certain starship captain — but I’m pleased to say that I don’t see Trekkies trying to imprison me for heresy or claiming that “the real” Kirk disapproves of the bear.

Atheists can do and have done terrible things (as Vox Day reminds us, you’ll learn next week), but there is in the long run the likelihood that atheist actions can be brought before the court of common sense, empirical observation, and real-world costs and benefits. Religion can — and yet may — set the entire world on fire while insisting that the resultant horrors are all outweighed by benefits in a magical afterlife we cannot see, or in the mind of an invisible being who has no discernible impact on the real world (other than as a belief in the minds of its followers). One can say with confidence that we have seen Communism fail, but of religion, the believer can always say, “Trust me, all these deaths — and all these petty oppressive rules — will have been worth it once we get to that magical land beyond death.”

That ineradicable imbalance in costs and benefits — treating all of the invisible realm’s ostensible claims as though they have infinite weight in the scales of justice — is why religion will always make sensible utilitarians (not just more-extreme avowed hedonists like Onfray) a bit nervous.

But even if religion’s effects were entirely benign, that would not mean there is a God. Onfray does not always treat the issues separately (since both are rooted in psychology from his perspective), but I am willing to do so and will endeavor whenever possible to do so as this blog’s “Month Without God” continues.

Seavey-Favored Candidates Scorecard

NOTE: For reasons having nothing to do with the failure of all my favored candidates, I’m exhausted and will have to get to that Atheist Manifesto review early tomorrow morning. We apologize for the inconvenience.

With the Mormon guy suspending his candidacy, allow me one look back. In chronological order and in the (approximate) order of my original preferences — with my standards thus in some sense getting lower with each fizzled or officially-ended candidacy — here is the track record of the candidates I’ve favored so far this campaign season, plus my remaining options (clearly, you’d do well to bet against my picks):

1. Paul

2. Thompson

3. Giuliani

4. hypothetical serious, experienced Libertarian Party candidate

5. Romney (as McCain/Huckabee protest vote)

6. McCain if he does not pick Huckabee as his running mate

7. Don’t vote for president

Five down, two to go. 7 is looking more likely all the time — and would be a first for me since registering about a year prior to the 1988 election (my general-election track record: GOP [win], libertarian write-in [lose], Libertarian [lose], GOP since I mistakenly overlooked the Libertarian Party lever in the voting booth [win!], GOP [win] — and I recognize the Pyrrhic quality of those “wins,” of course, 1994 being slightly more satisfying).

With so many conservatives and libertarians dissatisfied with McCain as the (presumed) Republican nominee, it’s worth asking (as I did at last night’s Debate at Lolita Bar) whether the conservative movement, including well-meaning National Review folks like Richard Lowry, nonetheless bear most of the responsibility for causing the McCain ascendancy to happen.

After all, prominent mainstream conservatives have been driving home the message for five years now that war is the important thing (to the extent that, as my friend Evan says, people have almost come to think “war = GOP” and “antiwar = Dem,” with all the other issues falling by the wayside for definitional purposes). So now we have a presumed GOP nominee who is a hawk and…is not reliably much of anything else that conservatives ostensibly value. I was afraid it would come to this.

I think last night’s debate went well, by the way, with Derb sticking to his paleolibertarian guns (though my concerted effort to get him and others to do karaoke afterwards narrowly failed after getting initial assent, as is often the case when trying to get a bunch of people who’ve been drinking to go to the same place at the same time and stay there).

Seth Colter Walls touched on a point that has long fascinated me: the question of to what extent American policies are made “inevitable” by long-term global trends. Is there any meaningful sense in which any president could “decide” to disengage from our military (or commercial) entanglements around the world, regardless of rhetoric and philosophy? I am reminded of some friend of mine saying he’d heard that long-term planners at the Pentagon see containment of China as the real goal, to be achieved by ensuring we surround it with our allies, in the Middle East and elsewhere — but how meaningful are plans for a half-century out, made by a government that can’t balance next year’s budget? Are such plans the “secret truth” behind government’s more superficial short-term strategies, or are they the most irrelevant of wonkish speculations and unusable contingency plans? Do next week’s primaries have more or less effect than the speed of oil pipeline construction in Turkey over the next two decades? Beats me.

Tardbombs of the Middle East

While collecting my thoughts about Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto, it crossed my mind that, given his undisguised animosity toward religion, he probably wasn’t surprised to hear about the recent al Qaeda bombings that employed mentally retarded or Down Syndrome suicide bombers.

Al Qaeda is built in the first place upon a recruitment drive to attract those stupid or ignorant enough to believe that mass murder will get them into an invisible, unproven Paradise, after all — and will help them defeat a high-tech, materialistic foe.  Countering our “smartbombs” with their “tardbombs” (to coin an ugly term for an ugly tactic) is a natural next step.

Would that more of the world’s civilized people vocally denounced the religious underpinnings of such groups’ philosophies as vocally as we would the blatherings of a drooling idiot man-child running amok in a shopping mall with a machete who thinks that touching people hard with “the shiny thing” is a nice way of helping his invisible friend.

We might then live in a global culture antithetical to the rise of phenomena like tardbombs — and the despicable priest/colonels who dispatch them to disrupt peaceful, secular activities.

P.S. Speaking of the French and mental retardation, here’s Devo on a French TV show performing their song “Mongoloid” back in 1978 — sounding very 80s slightly ahead of schedule and, aside from failure to use the word “booty,” sounding far less p.c. than most mainstream music today.  But then, circa 1980, in times both more innocent and more filthy, we barely blinked when bands did things like sing about falling in love with a stripper (the Tubes) or depict children locked in a cage with a dominatrix (Van Halen in the memorable “Hot for Teacher”).  And would most Americans smile unfazed today if a band made up of children came out with a song about “pahssing the dutchie” (Musical Youth)?  Probably not.  In some ways, we’ve gotten more uptight since then.

French Elite, Atheist Manifesto

Meanwhile, in France, things are different among the political elites.

Whereas here, in the U.S., politicians on both sides of the aisle — and even this year’s most prominent libertarian — now bend over backwards to say nice things about religion and faith, in France, the president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has co-written at least one article of which I am aware with Europe’s best-known promoter of atheism, philosopher Michel Onfray.

Tonight, I hope to post a brief review of Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto, which gets to the heart of the matter during this blog’s “Month Without God.”

Think of the situation in France:

•Market-friendly, relatively pro-U.S. president who was notoriously drunk at a G8 meeting

•His new wife and former mistress formerly an avowed polyamorist (and model, seen above, as well as a good singer) — who has been called “libertarian” by the UK Guardian

•His co-writer a militant — and I mean militant — atheist who wants to see religion ended completely

In short: France is practically run by Ayn Rand characters now.

Super-Debaters Wednesday, Part 4: From Romney to Paul and...Beyond

One last Ron Paul note: the February issue of Reason, which had Ron Paul on the cover, also had an article about another somewhat Ron Paul-like U.S. congressman, though he’s more religious-conservative than libertarian. Still willing to vote against any government activity not outlined in the Constitution, though, which is cool.

All the same, let’s not make him the next focus for a mini-movement.

In the end, it appears Republicans are, for now, going not with a religious conservative or a fiscal conservative but with a hawk — and with an aggressive, unpredictable, perhaps slightly deranged guy instead of a bland doubletalker. Let history decide if that’s the right choice — and whether they should have run on the same ticket.

My webmaster — who will also be, as usual, our moderator tonight (8pm) at Lolita Bar — Michel Evanchik notes at least one man whose vote switched from Romney to Ron Paul, though: an amusingly enraged radio host who makes it civilly all the way through an interview with Romney and then goes berserk over what an arrogant jerk Romney is the moment he’s off the phone and announces his switch in loyalties right there on the spot. Almost revives my fighting spirit to listen to it.

Super-Debaters Wednesday, Part 3: Wesley Snipes and God

The celebrity who sounds the most like a Ron Paulista in the past couple weeks, by the way, happens to be a black man, despite Paul’s past racial insensitivity: Wesley Snipes, who apparently believes (or at least was taken in by) some Biblically-influenced arguments for the illegality of taxation, leading to his IRS troubles.

I’m pleased to see him acquitted. I’m less pleased that he beat Halle Berry, she says. (And she marks the fourth Catwoman I’ve mentioned on the blog this month — can Michelle Pfeiffer be far behind? And who would win a fight between Catwoman and Blade, if it’s not inappropriate to ask that? Blade, apparently.) Initiating force disqualifies Snipes as a libertarian, so he probably shouldn’t be praised in the next Ron Paul newsletter.

(And don’t forget to join us at Lolita Bar at 8pm to discuss it all.)

Super-Debaters Wednesday, Part 2: Fisc Con, Soc Lib

In between writing increasingly-frequent blog posts, I am of course supposed to be writing a book, and as we sort out the Super Duper Tuesday results and ask what they mean for the direction of both parties, it’s worth noting a phrase that sums up the real message of that book and that perhaps doesn’t get uttered often enough in mainstream political discourse: “fiscally conservative, socially liberal.”

Neither party’s most gung-ho primary voters are made happy by that phrase, but I hope a plurality of the general public still would be if they heard it once in a while.

I should confess, though, that the FCSL (for short) gambit is somewhat contrary to the usual “fusionist” gambit of conservatives, which is more nearly just “fiscally conservative, socially conservative,” and which is more popular with Republicans but wasn’t getting the intended results (or wasn’t really being pursued) in recent years, the soc con part tending to mask the abandonment of the fisc con part.

So for all fusionism’s virtues, should it — like the even worse “fiscally liberal, socially conservative” formula that Buchanan, Bush, and Huckabee all to some degree represent — be retired next time around in favor of a fresher FCSL approach (preferably with a better representative than Giuliani)?

And who would have thought a similar debate needed to occur within libertarianism, but Ron Paul’s racist-newsletter controversy was a reminder that even among libertarians, who don’t want to use the state for cultural ends, cultural attitudes can end up mattering. Was he (or rather the echo of his former staffer, Lew Rockwell) the last gasp of neo-Confederate thinking in the libertarian movement or will there be some sort of schism among libertarians?

Despite my sympathy for Republicans and initial support of Paul, my real strategy, as those paying close attention may have noticed, is usually to try cutting through all these formulations by just stressing: “fiscal conservatism, fiscal conservatism, fiscal conservatism, fiscal conservatism, fiscal conservatism.” Can’t we just fight about the rest later?

(And don’t forget to join us at Lolita Bar at 8pm to discuss it all.)