REPORT FROM FLAG: XXIX
Dana Prom Smith (9/17/05)
Gretchen and I went to the Coconino County Fair over Labor Day Weekend at Fort Tuthill County Park. Rain fell off-and-on during the day. I took shelter under the overhang at the Swine Barn while Gretchen visited the alpaca booth. As I waited for her to talk with the alpaca lady about a poncho, I munched on an ear of roasted corn and watched a small boy stamp in a puddle of water, pleased as punch with himself on his ability to make a big splash, a not-uncommon human failing. Clad in pressed chinos, an ironed shirt, and clean white shoes, he stamped his small feet in the muddy puddle. He looked around at the adults watching, smiling as he looked, knowing he was committing a forbidden act in public and getting away with it. So much for small boys.
A cheery, older woman, much younger than I, clad in dowdy clothing approptiate for a county fair, sat next to me. She repeatedly told the boy to be careful not to splash muddy water on passers-by. She informed me that she was his grandmother and that she didn’t have to worry about him getting his clothes wet and dirty. She reassured me, as though what I thought mattered, that she just wanted him to have a good time at the county fair. “You know,” she said, “you’re only young once.” I nodded an assent, not wanting to be impolite, but also not wanting to engage in a converation with her, focused, as I was, on my prized ear of roasted corn.
A tall, rangy, red-headed, freckled man with tattoos on his arms and numbers tattooed of his neck, clothed in a white undershirt and blue denims with a mass of keys hanging from his belt, also watched the boy. Smoking a cigarette, he held it as do a lot of marginal sorts, “lower orders of society” to use my father’s vertical metaphor, with the cigarette grasped between the index finger and thumb, cradled in the cup of his hand with the lip end pointed outwards and lighted end pointed toward his palm. He tried to hide his cigarette while smoking in plain view. His drags were not leisurely and gentlemanly slow but sharp, aggressive, and decisive with a sucking sound as though he were injecting himself with a narcotic which, of course, he was.
The woman with him was missing several molars and sported an abdominal tattoo with a ring in her navel to which, I suppose, a tether could be attached. She did not have a ring in her nose or her lip. She looked used as though she had been led around the block more times than one could care to count. As with many women in her position in life, she did not appear happy, her face remaining expressionless as though any show of emotion would be a show of weakness. A slight curl to her left nostril gave the impression of impatient disdain which is an emotion usually reserved for those who feel uncomfortably threatened in unfamiliar social circumstances. I thought it sad that her behavioral repertoire with which to cope with life’s vagaries was so slim and that she was so unsure of herself that the corny and trivial threatened her. I am sure, also, that she wanted her companion to know of her displeasure. I suspect that she thought she was on a cheap date or that she was co-habiting with a cheap man or, worse yet, that she was cheap herself. Neither of them would be fare prospects for a date at the fair.
The man said, “Ya know, man, havin’ fun sure don’t cost much when you’re a kid.” Everyone nodded, whereupon the boy’s mother, a purposeful appearing woman, strode upon the scene. Vexed, she grabbed the boy by the arm and shot a sharp glance at the grandmother as Broadway Joe Namath would rifle a football downfield. She hauled the boy off, saying, “How many times do I have to tell you not to play in the water?”
The boy’s father, an oafish sort, had been silently watching the free fun. The family marched off in file, obediently but not smartly, with the mother in the lead. The father stepped in line behind her, as would an adjutant. I heard the mother say to her husband, “You mean you just stood there and didn’t do a thing to stop it.”
The grandmother and grandfather brought up the rear as they trailed off. The grandfather had a hapless air as though he had brought up the rear most of his life. As John Kennedy often said, “There’s always some poor guy at the end of the line who never gets the message.” The sled dog with the only good view is the lead dog.
So much for free fun. The little boy didn’t pay an entrance fee, but he was sure going to pay a hefty exit fee. The ear of roasted corn set me back three bucks. It was a delight, sweet and crisp with a hint of smoke. Gretchen made an appointment to see the alpaca lady after the fair.
The swine were lovely. Some were black. Most were pink. All of them were sound asleep. A young girl sat with her pink pig, gently patting it and grooming it for the judging the next day. She looked forlorn, knowing that her friend the pig, would soon be sold to the highest bidder and suffer a bleak fate.
The bulls in the Cattle Barn were massive, black with red eyes. No one was sitting with them to groom them.
The sheep, goats, and alpaca have wide-set eyes which I learned increased their peripheral vision, the better with which to see impending threats, the periphery being the origin of most threats. The military calls them “flank attacks.” However, some threats either straight on or peripheral, as with our President, are never seen at all.
The scene at the fair set me to thinking about my relationship to Gretchen. She’s fond of describing our relationship in terms of a sailing ship. I’m the ballast. She’s the sails. The question is the identification of the helmsperson. It ain’t a helmsman.
All of which brings me to the point. I wish I had the brain that I have now sixty years ago when I was eighteen. I would’ve saved myself a lot of grief by cutting out the crap as with Ernest Hemingway’s “built-in, indestructable crap detector.” I have always had a spiritual bent, I suspect a gift from my grandfather, Brynjolf, an old Viking who was something of a mystic. Seafaring men are often either rotters or mystics. As an adolescent I talked with him for hours during the summers at our avocado grove in Vista. Also, coming of age during World War II induced me to ask the ultimate questions of life and death because I knew that eventually I would become a soldier and thus thought a lot about courage under fire, death, and life after death.
Also, my father had died when I was thirteen, and that changed my world. We moved from a large house to a smaller one in a less affluent neighborhood. Our memberships in the country club and the athletic club were cancelled. I felt secure but uneasy, having become an outsider where once I had been an insider. Then my grandfather died when I was fifteen.
I had been raised in the Christian faith, and it was in these circumstances that I began to explore it the more. In these explorations I suffered through the nonsense of Fundamentalism for about six years, unaware that I believed, not because of the Bible’s inerrancy, but because it made sense to me and gave me hope. Although I had became gradually alienated from Fundamentalism, I did not know why and felt confused. I suspect now in retrospect that I thought them gauche. I still do. I don’t like their style. It’s corny. I felt shallow about this until I discovered Alfred North Whitehead, the great British-American mathematician and philosopher, whose point was that reality is in the process, not the content. The way a person believes is as important as what one believes.
It was in these explorations that I experienced grace, the grace of God shown in Jesus Christ. I remember the place, time, and moment I felt grace. It changed everything. Since then, I was sixteen, many people have ridiculed me because of this experience, but, of course, they do not know of what they speak.
Fundamentalism is intellectually dishonest. As a boy I attended an afternoon class at church about the evils of drinking. A rather large woman dropped a couple of eggs into a glass of beer. They turned white. She said, “You see children what will happen to your insides if you drink alcohol.” I ran home awaiting my father’s return from his practice that afternoon. When he drove into the driveway, I ran up to him fearing that his insides had turned white. He smiled and said, “Dana, lad, there’ll be only one difficulty with that poor woman. Our intestines’ll not be made of egg white.”
Fundamentalists equate faith with correct doctrine as though they are the custodians of correct doctrine, just as do many Roman Catholics, Mormons, Greek Orthodox, and other authoritarian groups. In my Greek classes in college, I discovered that the word for faith is rooted in a verb. The experience of spirituality is not a noun. It is action, not in doing good deeds, but in giving oneself. The great German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed by the Nazis in a concentration camp, said it best when he said that seeing faith as correct doctrine and morals is “cheap grace.” I have concluded that many Fundamentalists are really mental and moral tyrants masquerading as Christians.
The first big cognitive breakthrough came in college when I discovered William of Occam in a freshman course in philosophy. A 14th century English philospher, he was the author of Occam’s Razor which goes “entities are not to be miultiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, keep it simple. It meant I could jettison a lot of Fundamentalism crap and still believe in Jesus. Then I encountered many high-powered professors who were also believers and weren’t Fundamentalists. My mother’s warning words came to mind, “Don’t believe everything you hear at church.”
Parenthetically, I am always puzzled by a lot of people who say, “As a Roman Catholic, I believe” so and so, “As a Mormon, I believe” so and so, or any other authoritarian group. Even agnostics and atheists begin the same way albeit somewhat churlishly, “Well, as an agnostic, I don’t believe” so and so, as though I should stand up and salute their superior doubts and disbeliefs. Do they not have minds of their own? Do they believe because someone else tells them what to believe? Such non-thinking is absurd. Any argument from authority is a fallacy. I have long since stop trying to have conversations with people who non-think. More and more I value John Locke’s tabula rasa, begin thinking with a clear slate.
I recall in a class in Greek one of the students impertinently asked the professor if he had found Jesus. The professor was the son of missionaries to India where they founded a college, had been in the OSS, the percusor to the CIA, as an secret agent in Greece during World War II. He became president of the university (Princeton), and finally the United State ambassador to India. In short, he was and is a considerable human being. Dr. Goheen, a dapper dresser, looked quizically at the student for a moment and then replied, “My young man, I didn’t know he was lost.”
Then I discovered Saint Augustine in a course on Medieval Theology. He cut through the crap of his day and asserted that people are not inherently evil because God created them good. History is not a story of the conflict of good and evil, but the sorry history of human beings who turn God’s goodness into evil purposes. In working with human beings one has to look for the good behind evil. This in no way discounts the magnitude of human evil. As a matter of fact, it makes evil all the more horrible because of what could’ve been. However, it allows for redemption rather than condemnation.
A course in Plato gave me the realization of the difference between appearance and reality. While I didn’t have to adopt Plato’s theories, I did have the pleasure of adopting his notion that what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. It’s called skepticism which is miles away from cynicism, the notion that everything’s rotten.
Recently, one of my club mates from Princeton told me of a book by an emeritus philosophy professor at Princeton, who was long after my time, by the name of Harry Frankfurt. It is short, 96 pages, and entitled On Bullshit. He makes the point that there is not only truth and falsehood, but also bullshit and that most of what we hear and read is bullshit. Politicians, advertisers, true believers of any kind, and authoritarian churches, and so forth and so on speak only bull shit. What a liberation!
Prof. Frankfurt makes the simple point, which I half-way knew all along, that people and institutions not only lie, they also bull shit. Dealing with liars takes more energy than dealing with bull shitters. The latter can be dismissed without effort. The liar at least knows the truth. The bull shitters have no conceptions of either truth or falsehood. They live in a dim world of intellectual muck, a world so dim that they embrace their muck, wallowing in it as an act of faith.
As muck goes, so goes my garden. My composters are flourishing, producing a bounty of vegetables and flowers. Our dinner salads, picked right before dinner, would cost, as Gretchen says, fifteen bucks in West Los Angeles or Newport Beach. The fresh green beans slightly cooked in a little butter, salt, and pepper make a meal.
Well, enough of all this.
Dana
Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2005
Dana Prom Smith (9/17/05)
Gretchen and I went to the Coconino County Fair over Labor Day Weekend at Fort Tuthill County Park. Rain fell off-and-on during the day. I took shelter under the overhang at the Swine Barn while Gretchen visited the alpaca booth. As I waited for her to talk with the alpaca lady about a poncho, I munched on an ear of roasted corn and watched a small boy stamp in a puddle of water, pleased as punch with himself on his ability to make a big splash, a not-uncommon human failing. Clad in pressed chinos, an ironed shirt, and clean white shoes, he stamped his small feet in the muddy puddle. He looked around at the adults watching, smiling as he looked, knowing he was committing a forbidden act in public and getting away with it. So much for small boys.
A cheery, older woman, much younger than I, clad in dowdy clothing approptiate for a county fair, sat next to me. She repeatedly told the boy to be careful not to splash muddy water on passers-by. She informed me that she was his grandmother and that she didn’t have to worry about him getting his clothes wet and dirty. She reassured me, as though what I thought mattered, that she just wanted him to have a good time at the county fair. “You know,” she said, “you’re only young once.” I nodded an assent, not wanting to be impolite, but also not wanting to engage in a converation with her, focused, as I was, on my prized ear of roasted corn.
A tall, rangy, red-headed, freckled man with tattoos on his arms and numbers tattooed of his neck, clothed in a white undershirt and blue denims with a mass of keys hanging from his belt, also watched the boy. Smoking a cigarette, he held it as do a lot of marginal sorts, “lower orders of society” to use my father’s vertical metaphor, with the cigarette grasped between the index finger and thumb, cradled in the cup of his hand with the lip end pointed outwards and lighted end pointed toward his palm. He tried to hide his cigarette while smoking in plain view. His drags were not leisurely and gentlemanly slow but sharp, aggressive, and decisive with a sucking sound as though he were injecting himself with a narcotic which, of course, he was.
The woman with him was missing several molars and sported an abdominal tattoo with a ring in her navel to which, I suppose, a tether could be attached. She did not have a ring in her nose or her lip. She looked used as though she had been led around the block more times than one could care to count. As with many women in her position in life, she did not appear happy, her face remaining expressionless as though any show of emotion would be a show of weakness. A slight curl to her left nostril gave the impression of impatient disdain which is an emotion usually reserved for those who feel uncomfortably threatened in unfamiliar social circumstances. I thought it sad that her behavioral repertoire with which to cope with life’s vagaries was so slim and that she was so unsure of herself that the corny and trivial threatened her. I am sure, also, that she wanted her companion to know of her displeasure. I suspect that she thought she was on a cheap date or that she was co-habiting with a cheap man or, worse yet, that she was cheap herself. Neither of them would be fare prospects for a date at the fair.
The man said, “Ya know, man, havin’ fun sure don’t cost much when you’re a kid.” Everyone nodded, whereupon the boy’s mother, a purposeful appearing woman, strode upon the scene. Vexed, she grabbed the boy by the arm and shot a sharp glance at the grandmother as Broadway Joe Namath would rifle a football downfield. She hauled the boy off, saying, “How many times do I have to tell you not to play in the water?”
The boy’s father, an oafish sort, had been silently watching the free fun. The family marched off in file, obediently but not smartly, with the mother in the lead. The father stepped in line behind her, as would an adjutant. I heard the mother say to her husband, “You mean you just stood there and didn’t do a thing to stop it.”
The grandmother and grandfather brought up the rear as they trailed off. The grandfather had a hapless air as though he had brought up the rear most of his life. As John Kennedy often said, “There’s always some poor guy at the end of the line who never gets the message.” The sled dog with the only good view is the lead dog.
So much for free fun. The little boy didn’t pay an entrance fee, but he was sure going to pay a hefty exit fee. The ear of roasted corn set me back three bucks. It was a delight, sweet and crisp with a hint of smoke. Gretchen made an appointment to see the alpaca lady after the fair.
The swine were lovely. Some were black. Most were pink. All of them were sound asleep. A young girl sat with her pink pig, gently patting it and grooming it for the judging the next day. She looked forlorn, knowing that her friend the pig, would soon be sold to the highest bidder and suffer a bleak fate.
The bulls in the Cattle Barn were massive, black with red eyes. No one was sitting with them to groom them.
The sheep, goats, and alpaca have wide-set eyes which I learned increased their peripheral vision, the better with which to see impending threats, the periphery being the origin of most threats. The military calls them “flank attacks.” However, some threats either straight on or peripheral, as with our President, are never seen at all.
The scene at the fair set me to thinking about my relationship to Gretchen. She’s fond of describing our relationship in terms of a sailing ship. I’m the ballast. She’s the sails. The question is the identification of the helmsperson. It ain’t a helmsman.
All of which brings me to the point. I wish I had the brain that I have now sixty years ago when I was eighteen. I would’ve saved myself a lot of grief by cutting out the crap as with Ernest Hemingway’s “built-in, indestructable crap detector.” I have always had a spiritual bent, I suspect a gift from my grandfather, Brynjolf, an old Viking who was something of a mystic. Seafaring men are often either rotters or mystics. As an adolescent I talked with him for hours during the summers at our avocado grove in Vista. Also, coming of age during World War II induced me to ask the ultimate questions of life and death because I knew that eventually I would become a soldier and thus thought a lot about courage under fire, death, and life after death.
Also, my father had died when I was thirteen, and that changed my world. We moved from a large house to a smaller one in a less affluent neighborhood. Our memberships in the country club and the athletic club were cancelled. I felt secure but uneasy, having become an outsider where once I had been an insider. Then my grandfather died when I was fifteen.
I had been raised in the Christian faith, and it was in these circumstances that I began to explore it the more. In these explorations I suffered through the nonsense of Fundamentalism for about six years, unaware that I believed, not because of the Bible’s inerrancy, but because it made sense to me and gave me hope. Although I had became gradually alienated from Fundamentalism, I did not know why and felt confused. I suspect now in retrospect that I thought them gauche. I still do. I don’t like their style. It’s corny. I felt shallow about this until I discovered Alfred North Whitehead, the great British-American mathematician and philosopher, whose point was that reality is in the process, not the content. The way a person believes is as important as what one believes.
It was in these explorations that I experienced grace, the grace of God shown in Jesus Christ. I remember the place, time, and moment I felt grace. It changed everything. Since then, I was sixteen, many people have ridiculed me because of this experience, but, of course, they do not know of what they speak.
Fundamentalism is intellectually dishonest. As a boy I attended an afternoon class at church about the evils of drinking. A rather large woman dropped a couple of eggs into a glass of beer. They turned white. She said, “You see children what will happen to your insides if you drink alcohol.” I ran home awaiting my father’s return from his practice that afternoon. When he drove into the driveway, I ran up to him fearing that his insides had turned white. He smiled and said, “Dana, lad, there’ll be only one difficulty with that poor woman. Our intestines’ll not be made of egg white.”
Fundamentalists equate faith with correct doctrine as though they are the custodians of correct doctrine, just as do many Roman Catholics, Mormons, Greek Orthodox, and other authoritarian groups. In my Greek classes in college, I discovered that the word for faith is rooted in a verb. The experience of spirituality is not a noun. It is action, not in doing good deeds, but in giving oneself. The great German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed by the Nazis in a concentration camp, said it best when he said that seeing faith as correct doctrine and morals is “cheap grace.” I have concluded that many Fundamentalists are really mental and moral tyrants masquerading as Christians.
The first big cognitive breakthrough came in college when I discovered William of Occam in a freshman course in philosophy. A 14th century English philospher, he was the author of Occam’s Razor which goes “entities are not to be miultiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, keep it simple. It meant I could jettison a lot of Fundamentalism crap and still believe in Jesus. Then I encountered many high-powered professors who were also believers and weren’t Fundamentalists. My mother’s warning words came to mind, “Don’t believe everything you hear at church.”
Parenthetically, I am always puzzled by a lot of people who say, “As a Roman Catholic, I believe” so and so, “As a Mormon, I believe” so and so, or any other authoritarian group. Even agnostics and atheists begin the same way albeit somewhat churlishly, “Well, as an agnostic, I don’t believe” so and so, as though I should stand up and salute their superior doubts and disbeliefs. Do they not have minds of their own? Do they believe because someone else tells them what to believe? Such non-thinking is absurd. Any argument from authority is a fallacy. I have long since stop trying to have conversations with people who non-think. More and more I value John Locke’s tabula rasa, begin thinking with a clear slate.
I recall in a class in Greek one of the students impertinently asked the professor if he had found Jesus. The professor was the son of missionaries to India where they founded a college, had been in the OSS, the percusor to the CIA, as an secret agent in Greece during World War II. He became president of the university (Princeton), and finally the United State ambassador to India. In short, he was and is a considerable human being. Dr. Goheen, a dapper dresser, looked quizically at the student for a moment and then replied, “My young man, I didn’t know he was lost.”
Then I discovered Saint Augustine in a course on Medieval Theology. He cut through the crap of his day and asserted that people are not inherently evil because God created them good. History is not a story of the conflict of good and evil, but the sorry history of human beings who turn God’s goodness into evil purposes. In working with human beings one has to look for the good behind evil. This in no way discounts the magnitude of human evil. As a matter of fact, it makes evil all the more horrible because of what could’ve been. However, it allows for redemption rather than condemnation.
A course in Plato gave me the realization of the difference between appearance and reality. While I didn’t have to adopt Plato’s theories, I did have the pleasure of adopting his notion that what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. It’s called skepticism which is miles away from cynicism, the notion that everything’s rotten.
Recently, one of my club mates from Princeton told me of a book by an emeritus philosophy professor at Princeton, who was long after my time, by the name of Harry Frankfurt. It is short, 96 pages, and entitled On Bullshit. He makes the point that there is not only truth and falsehood, but also bullshit and that most of what we hear and read is bullshit. Politicians, advertisers, true believers of any kind, and authoritarian churches, and so forth and so on speak only bull shit. What a liberation!
Prof. Frankfurt makes the simple point, which I half-way knew all along, that people and institutions not only lie, they also bull shit. Dealing with liars takes more energy than dealing with bull shitters. The latter can be dismissed without effort. The liar at least knows the truth. The bull shitters have no conceptions of either truth or falsehood. They live in a dim world of intellectual muck, a world so dim that they embrace their muck, wallowing in it as an act of faith.
As muck goes, so goes my garden. My composters are flourishing, producing a bounty of vegetables and flowers. Our dinner salads, picked right before dinner, would cost, as Gretchen says, fifteen bucks in West Los Angeles or Newport Beach. The fresh green beans slightly cooked in a little butter, salt, and pepper make a meal.
Well, enough of all this.
Dana
Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2005
