Book review: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

This book is the story of Lenny, the 39-year old son on Russian Jewish immigrants to the US, who falls in love with Eunice, the 24-year old daughter of Korean Christian immigrants, though neither of them are religious. On one level this is the familiar story of cross-cultural tensions: between parents brought up in the traditional cultures of their country of origin and their children who have grown up in the US, and the difficulty for Lenny and Eunice to overcome the cultural baggage of different immigrant backgrounds and ages. (Fresh Air recently had an interview with Shteyngart which is where I heard about the book and was interested enough to read it.)
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But can they get it on MTV?

When I need a good laugh, the folks from the Westboro Baptist Church never let me down. Their message is so absurdly anti-gay, so over the top, that I have long suspected that they are really a performance art troupe trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records by pulling off the longest-running prank in history.

Now they have decided to create a music video to spread their message. Check out the result.

Frankly, I think it needs work and so here’s some advice, Westboro folks. No need to thank me.

First ditch the tune. “We are the world’? Please. Find something that is not so hackneyed and has a decent beat. Also ditch the keyboardist, and get some decent guitarists and drummer.

You also need to rewrite the lyrics to make it more catchy, cut the length in half, and get a better film editor. It would also help to have less mean-looking people as lead singers. Having people who can sing would also be a good idea. And what, your people couldn’t take the trouble to memorize those cheesy words and had to read every one? That shows lack of commitment. And what is the deal with that guy waving a Canadian flag at the end?

The present music video is not going to achieve your goal of making people angry. It will make them fall asleep.

The danger posed by irrational fear

The flames of fear that I wrote about before among some white, English speaking Christians in the US that they are under siege from Hispanics on the one hand and Muslims on the other has been fueled by xenophobic elements and fanned by media outlets like Fox News that have created a climate that people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin have been able to exploit and whip up, each to serve their own personal goals. The coverage they get from so-called ‘reputable’ news outlets serve to merely expand the audience for their craziness. The few times I have seen these three people perform (and I use that word advisedly) I get the sense that they seem to be laughing at the stupidity of their ardent fans, at how easily they can be frightened. For such cynical manipulators, the whole thing seems to be a show that they use for their personal gain. Beck and Palin even had the audacity to hold an event on September 11 in Anchorage and charge for tickets ranging from $75 up to $225.
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Anyone want a used Koran?

Now that the Florida church has decided against its Koran cookout, there is a question that I have not seen asked, and that is what the pastor Terry Jones plans to do with the 200 reprieved Korans now in his possession.

He can’t give them away or put them alongside the Bible in motel rooms because that might seem like proselytizing for Islam. He can’t simply toss them in the trash, which would seem almost as incendiary as burning them. I presume he does not want to hang on to them and risk being struck by a thunderbolt from his god, because these gods get really jealous when they think you are flirting with other religions. His options are really limited.

Anyone know what he is going to do with them?

As The Daily Show points out, this episode illustrates that the religious loonies have taken over the national discourse…

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Islamophobiapalooza
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

… so may the best god win!

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Team Mohammed vs. Team Jesus – Religious Conflict
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Jazzing up the national anthem

I wrote sometime ago about the veneration that Americans had for their flag that bordered on fetishism. This contrasts with the liberties taken with the national anthem. While Americans jump to their feet, remove their hats, place their hands over their hearts, and do all manner of things to show respect, the singers of the anthem are allowed to take all manner of liberties with it.

At any public event, for example, you are never sure if you are going to get a jazz or blues or classic version. The variations that I have not heard so far consist of rock and disco, though maybe even that was done in the 70s. Has anyone ever heard a rap version? Are their some music modes that are considered inherently disrespectful and so are not even attempted for fear of causing outrage?

I can’t imagine that this freedom to interpret the anthem broadly always existed and I wonder when people in the US began allowing the anthem to be varied this way.

By contrast, whenever I hear the national anthem of other countries, they always seem to do it straight.

Update: In the comments Scott reminded me of Jimi Hendrix’s version at Woodstock in 1969. That counts as a rock version and was pretty wild.

Blog comments policy

Here is the final comments policy. I will repost it periodically for the benefit of new arrivals to this blog.

  1. In the comment box that says ‘Name’, you must insert a person’s name only. The name can be a pseudonym but inserting the name of a product or company or service is grounds for deletion. So ‘Ann Jones’ or ‘Joe’ or ‘Genghis Khan’ is allowable, but ‘Acme Roofing Company’ or ‘Diet Coke’ or ‘essay writing services’ or ‘Joe the plumber’ is not.
  2. If a comment seems genuine but violates the above rule, I reserve the right to delete it entirely or simply replace the name with a made-up name of my own choosing.
  3. You can continue to insert a link to a company or product or commercial service site in the URL box and this will make the name in the name box into a hyperlink to that site. This will be the only means by which to advertise or drive traffic to a site or product.
  4. Any link inserted in the body of a comment is also grounds for deletion of the entire comment unless the link is pointing to information relevant to the post.
  5. Even if a comment meets all these criteria, I still reserve the right to delete it if I think its chief purpose is to advertise and not advance the discussion. So comments like ‘Great post!’ and ‘I would like to read more on this topic’ will get the boot.
  6. The comments will continue to be unmoderated, so almost all genuine comments on recent posts should continue to appear almost immediately, just as before. If your comment does not appear immediately or even after a few minutes, it means it has been flagged as potential spam because of the appearance of some words that trigger the filter (words which in isolation can be quite harmless but in combination with other words can cause the filter to sit up and take notice) and it will appear only after I have got around to checking in on the filtered comments board.
  7. If a comment contains language that might offend, I reserve the right to censor specific words using the common practice of replacing selected letters with hyphens.

The current sad state of the American psyche

America is a big and diverse country so any generalization that treats its people as a single entity with one set of qualities is going to be wrong. But having said that, I do want to make some fairly broad statements about one particular group, that of white, middle class, middle-aged and elderly Americans. Understanding the state of mind of this particular group is important because although it represents only one segment of opinion and class interests, it is vocal, votes disproportionately, and the shallow and sensationalistic media focuses on it and is sympathetic to its interests. Furthermore, as Kevin Drum notes, how responsive politicians are to your concerns is directly related to how much your income is. The sad truth is that the fundamental premise of democracy of ‘one person, one vote’ has effectively become ‘one dollar, one vote’.

My comments about the psyche of this group are based on those events that have received considerable attention in the news recently and the results of recent primary elections running up to the mid-term congressional elections.

The one thing that strikes me is that this group seems to be in the grip of irrational fear and despair, almost to the point of paranoia. One symptom of this is that they look back on the past as a wonderful time, a golden age of peace and prosperity and wholesome living, and the current times as fraught with a vague and inchoate sense of danger. They tend to take real but small current incidents, inflate their significance beyond all reason and evidence to gigantic proportions, and then quake in fear of the monster that they themselves have conjured up.

These people seem to think that the country is under existential threat from enemies internal and external. Externally, they think that al Qaeda or some Islamic equivalent is plotting to launch another attack on targets in the US. This is actually very likely to be true (after all, those groups explicitly keep saying they want to attack the US and its interests) but why does it cause such fear? Even the US government says that there exist less than a hundred such militants in Afghanistan, with the rest (still a small number) in the remoter areas of Pakistan. While such a small but determined group can create some death and destruction, even the remote possibility of one on the scale of another 9/11, it would still be a tiny pin prick for a country like America and not by any means an existential threat. Does anyone really think that Osama bin Laden’s forces will defeat the US military and that he will become the ruler of the US? Any mature country and mature people should be able to shrug off the threats of groups like al Qaeda as merely irritants and go about their normal business unconcerned. And yet these people are acting like elephants terrified by mice.

Related to this is the fear that Muslims are infiltrating the country, Christianity is under threat in the US and Islam taking over, and that Sharia law will soon be imposed on everyone. It is true that the number of Muslims is growing more rapidly than the general population because Muslims, like ultra-orthodox Jews and Catholics and Mormons, tend to favor large families, but they are still a tiny minority. The proposition that Christianity will be replaced with Islam in the US is laughable on its face but that has not stopped people from taking it seriously. The fuss over the Islamic community center in New York and the attacks on Muslims and mosques in various parts of the country are symptoms of this irrational fear.

Another fear is that the country is going to be overrun by Mexicans and other people from south of the border and this has resulted in increased anti-Hispanic sentiment, rooted in concerns about illegal immigration. Again, the symptom of the irrationality lies in these people taking the 14th Amendment guarantees that almost all babies born in the US are automatically US citizens and elevating this into fear of a colossal scheme for Mexicans to come to the US purely to deliver their babies here as part of a long term plan to overwhelm the US demographically. A variant of this crazy fear is that Muslims are also coming here to deliver babies so that, in a couple of decades, they can create home-grown terrorist cells.

These trends are disturbing to say the least. When enough people develop paranoid fears, they do stupid things.

Next: How these fears are inflamed.

The fog of religious language

When one discusses the science-religion conflict with sophisticated religious apologists, one has to be alert to two things in order to avoid finding yourself in a fog where unsure of what you are talking about.

One fog generator is that sophisticated apologists tend to shift without warning between metaphor and the concrete, something that I have written about before. In order to stay on firm ground, it is good to keep clear what the discussion is about.

The first thing is to ask believers whether the god they believe in exists as a separate material entity, just like a photon or electron. If the answer is yes, then the question of god’s existence becomes an empirical question, like the existence of a photon or electron, and they are obliged to provide evidence for why we should believe in its existence. If the answer is no, and their god is some kind of metaphor, then we can stop the discussion right there. The usefulness of metaphors is not something that the methods of science are designed to investigate.

What usually happens though is that they refuse to be pinned down. They assert that god is not material and exists outside of space and time but then proceed to ascribe properties and actions to god that can only be true if god is a material entity existing within our space and time. You should press them as to how they can possibly know that their conception of god exists at all, let alone its properties, if it ‘exists outside of space and time’, since the speaker obviously lives within our space and time.

What one should be alert for is the sleight of hand that speaks of god as a metaphor in order to avoid having to provide evidence when it is requested and then, when the discussion has moved on, to make assertions (‘God wants us to do this’ and ‘God is like this’) that treats god as if it has a material existence.

As an example of the kind of woolly thinking that permeates religion-speak, consider this disappointing interview that Jon Stewart of The Daily Show had with religious apologist Marilynne Robinson. The problem with the interview was not that Stewart made some trivial errors like confusing dark matter with anti-matter. It is that the whole conversation was highly vacuous, reducing Stewart to making absurd statements that science is like faith.

While watching the interview, I felt there was something familiar about Robinson’s name and then I remembered. She had written a review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion for Harpers magazine back in November 2006. She did not like the book but that is fair enough. Reviewers are not obliged to give positive reviews. What was bad about the review was that it gave the reader little idea of what the main argument of Dawkins’ book was, because of the fog of religion-speak that she generates.

POST SCRIPT: Richard Dawkins on clarity

He makes a good point in that what religious people object to about the new atheists is that we are shunning complicated theological/philosophical circumlocutions about god and stating clearly why there is no reason to believe in him/her/it. Clarity is the enemy of religious apologetics.