The Rally for Tone

I had the Stewart/Colbert rally on in the background most of today. There were funny bits, there were entertaining bits, I’m sure everyone there had a good time. It was a pleasant afternoon of entertainment on the mall.

But in the end, I was disappointed. It was also an afternoon of false equivalence, of civility fetishism, of nothing but a cry about the national tone, of a plea for moderation. And you can guess what I think of moderation.

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

Tom Paine

I don’t want moderation, especially when the only people who will listen to Stewart and Colbert are the people on our shared side of the political aisle. I can understand where they’re coming from; people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Andrew Breitbart are poison, Fox News is a propaganda organ without bounds working for the far right-wing, we’ve got evangelical Christians demanding the installation of a theocracy, and on and on and on. But who, exactly, do Stewart and Colbert regard as the equivalent of Beck and Limbaugh on the left? Is it Rachel Maddow? Amy Goodman? Keith Olbermann?

Once again, we have someone bravely standing up and telling the people on their own side to stop being dicks, while being vague on the names and specifics.

So I’m at a loss about what we’re supposed to do in the world according to Jon Stewart. Hey, all you people working for gay and lesbian equality, all you women asking for equal pay, all you workers trying to unionize, all you peaceniks trying to end the war in Afghanistan, all you nurses and doctors and clinic workers trying to maintain reproductive freedom and keep women alive, all you teachers trying to teach science and history without censorship, all you citizens trying to build a rational health care policy, all you scientists and doctors who want our country to progress in medical research, all you damned secularists who want to keep religion out of our schools and government, hey, hey, HEY, you! Tone it down. Quit making such a fuss. You’re too loud. Shush. You’re as crazy as the teabaggers if you think your principles are worth fighting for.

I was left cold by the fuzziness of the event. It could have been great; instead of embracing an apolitical perspective and saying nothing at all about values, it could have been a rally for moderation that emphasized the actual values that moderates hold: we believe in tolerance for people of different ethnicities and religious views and sexual preferences, we believe in building an egalitarian social and economic infrastructure, we believe in privacy and personal freedoms, etc., etc., etc., and they could have held to the theme of the rally by advocating rational argument and unified, organized activism within the system to advance those goals…but they didn’t. There was no purpose given other than a generic insistence that we all get along nicely. And to what end, I ask?

The question wasn’t answered. All we need is the right tone, apparently.

America has no atheists

How sad. There are atheists everywhere else, but here in the United States, Robert Putnam says there are almost no atheists.

It used to be, in the 1950s, that most Americans were kind of in a moderate, not very intense religious middle. And we have moved toward the extremes of being either very religious — this is the sort of evangelical Protestant part of the religious spectrum — or very non-religious. This is the more secular, not really atheist. Almost no Americans say that they’re atheist, but they’re certainly not churched. That’s especially true for younger people.

Oh, dear.

There is this myth of the 1950s that infests America: it was the golden time, when we were prosperous and strong and the teenagers never masturbated, and we weren’t racist at all and everyone just went to church and never squabbled over religion. Somehow we forget the Cold War and air raid drills in the schools, we forget that women were all housewives and being a single woman was a mark of failure, we forget the lynchings and axe-handles in a barrel by the restaurant door, and we forget Father Coughlin ranting against the Jews and the Communists while the John Birch Society raged against the Catholics and the negroes and the Communists.

Americans were not moderate in their religiosity in the 1950s. The difference was that there was a dearth of alternatives in the 1950s — there was the same social pressure to go to church, and it was so powerful that everyone did, and took it for granted. It was also a time when “godless” and “Commie” were all one word, and “atheist” was inseparable in the public mind from anti-American, unpatriotic enemy of the state.

Those were not Happy Days unless you were a white middle-class church-going heterosexual male with aspirations to some day join the Rotarians.

So yes, it’s true that it’s hard to find people who are able to admit to being an atheist today without their voices dropping into a whisper and their eyes scanning right and left for eavesdroppers. There are many people who know that if they go public with the startling confession that they think the god-business is a scam, they will face ostracism and worse — there are many communities in this country where small business owners and teachers must be churched or they will find themselves poor and unemployed. The stigma is real and still strong.

So Putnam is completely wrong. Atheists are definitely a minority, no denying that, but it’s not the case that there are fewer than you think — there are more than you think, sitting quietly, afraid (with good reason) to speak out, and also often silencing themselves because they share that shame with being ungodly.

It’s changing, though. Atheists are growing in number faster than the religious, and while part of it is that people are literally deconverting, a good part of the rapid growth is also due to the fact that the stigma is weakening, people are taking pride in coming out as an atheist, and the closet atheists are simply beginning to come out.

Some people were baffled by the ax handle reference. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and we knew exactly what it meant: it’s a symbol of segregationalist brutality popularized by Lester Maddox, an Atlanta restaurateur who kept barrels of them handy for customers in case someone black walked into the restaurant. He also waved them around in his campaign for Georgia governor.

In case you think this endemic racism owed nothing to religion, read this ad for the Pickrick Restaurant, which gets in a few licks at the “unGodly and unAmerican Civil Rights Act”. Look at this picture of Maddox and his political principles, too — he’s indistinguishable from contemporary teabaggers, except for the fact that he had his sign professionally done and all the words are spelled correctly.

Remembrances of books past

Our university library is having a book sale today, one of those unfortunate but necessary events where they purge old or duplicate items from the collections to make room for new books, and I had to make a quick browse. What did I discover but an old children’s book that startled me with fearful and powerful remembrances — this is a book that I checked out from the Kent Public Library when I was ten years old.

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That’s the Golden Guide to Mammals by Herbert S. Zim and Donald F. Hoffmeister, copyright 1955. It features “218 ANIMALS IN FULL COLOR”, with maps of their distribution and short descriptions of their habitat and life histories. I remember reading that from cover to cover, practically memorizing it, and going on long walks out into the fields and forests around my home, looking for the elusive Boreal Red-Backed Vole or the dens of the Hoary Bat, or using it to try to identify the shredded carcasses of road kill.

Now with hindsight I realize it’s a rather awful little book, simultaneously too thin on information for each species to be really useful, and far too limited in breadth to be helpful in actually appreciating diversity, but I have to appreciate it for being an early provocateur, telling me that there was more to the life around me than people, my dog, and the lettuces and corn growing in the nearby fields. So thank you Drs Zim and Hoffmeister! I had to buy the rather ragged copy on sale at the library today as a nod to my early years.

I also had to buy it as an act of expiation. I sinned in my youth, and it curiously still nags at me. I checked the book out of the library when I was 10, and I didn’t return it. I kept it hidden away in my bedroom for a long, long time, and it was small enough to fit in my pocket when I went out, so I just…kinda…kept it. The library sent out all kinds of late notices and my parents kept nagging me to find the damned overdue book, while I just willfully pretended I didn’t know where it was, and they eventually had to just pay to replace it (so I’m pretty sure the Library Police aren’t still trying to hunt me down). I was so bad.

When I look back on my childhood and recollect the naughty things I did, I have to say that my appropriation of that shallow little book is at the top of my list of criminal acts, and I still do feel a bit guilty about it. But now I have my very own copy, openly and rightfully paid for! It’s not as if I’ll ever actually use it, but it’s sweet how holding it now brings me back to the edges of old ponds, hiking the steep flanks on the west side of the Green River Valley, wandering half-lost through silent forests, and that time I climbed up the side of an abandoned gravel pit to startle a grouse at the top who almost sent me plummeting backwards to my likely death when he puffed up and flew right at me.

Which led me to check out the Golden Guide to Birds, which was another story…