Category Archives: Rants

The 24-Hour News Cycle–a Rant #nonfiction #news #rants

The 24-Hour News Cycle: In My Opinion, This Sucks

                **Disclaimers** For fans of my series on aging (both of you), I’ll be getting back to it as soon as other things stop pissing me off. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy what I’m doing. I’d also like to say that I’m aware that “media” is a plural noun. In the essay below, though, I refer to it as a singular, monolithic entity—not because I believe that’s an accurate description, but because the people I’m writing about seem to—and thus use singular verbs and pronouns in conjunction with the noun itself.

                Today while channel-surfing, my wife Kalene flipped past one of the 24-hour news network—Headline News, I think. And not two seconds passed before we heard the first mention of Warren Jeffs, the polygamist leader whose trial starts soon. As the anchor of the moment promised more on the story after the break, I could hear, somewhere in America, Casey Anthony breathing a sigh of relief. As Jon Stewart once said, all the networks need to change their focus is to stumble across something shiny. Get past the exhaustive coverage of one major scandal and you’ll probably find the next one lined up, ready to worm its way into the national consciousness with the help, even the prodding, of the “news” channels.

                Normally, when anyone from the average lay person to the richest celebrity wants to complain about the problems in their lives, the media becomes their go-to scapegoat. I have little patience for that kind of oversimplification. Hey, famous douchebag who cheated on your spouse in public, the people reporting what you did aren’t “haters” or cogs in a media conspiracy to ruin your life. If you don’t want to see your picture on all the news channels and every tabloid from here to Mars, don’t cheat on your spouse, or at least have the good sense to be discreet.

                During the George W. Bush administration, the President and pretty much every Republican on Earth complained about the so-called “liberal media” every time someone reported that anything might be wrong with the country or its methods. As a liberal, I’m still waiting to discover this mainstream “liberal media.” The Nation is liberal. Mother Jones is liberal. CNN? No. Their neglecting to proselytize from a far-right stance does not make them liberal by default; it just makes them not Fox News. I always wondered how the right could complain, considering the media utterly failed for at least six years to do any investigative reporting on pretty much every questionable, unconstitutional move the administration made. Back to Jon Stewart, he and his staff once said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “How can the news channels ask whether the President did a good job making his case?” when they should have been asking, “Was he ever telling the truth?” Mainstream outlets almost never called the administration on their excesses until Bush was headed for lame duck status and even Republican politicians started abandoning his ship, even as they kept pushing (as they push today) for the perpetuation of his policies.

                Back during the presidential election of 2008, Sarah Palin’s infamous interviews with Katie Couric should have proven to the world, even to John McCain, that Palin was dumb as a stump and willfully ignorant. Instead, McCain helped her blame the media for her inability to answer a basic question like “Which of your running mate’s policies do you agree with?” Mr. Senator and Ms. Ex-Governor, that isn’t “Gotcha Journalism,” whatever that means. It’s an elementary policy question. How can you trust a person with the second-highest office in the land if she doesn’t even know what she claims to represent? The dumbassery was Palin’s fault, not Couric’s or the media’s.

                More recently, when Rachel Maddow delivered an editorial arguing that Fox News could no longer legitimately claim to be a news channel, I had friends who dismissed the argument out of hand before they even heard what she had to say. “It’s just another case of the media’s being out of control,” some of them said, failing to explain how the media could be in a conspiracy against itself. Maddow’s reasoning was that Fox News’ on-air offers to sponsor Tea Party rallies put it in the position of news maker, not news reporter, and that it had abandoned any pretense of its own “fair and balanced” tagline. She had a point. You can bet that if CNN tried to sponsor far-left rallies and report on them in prime time, the right would have a fit. And they’d be, well, right to do so. The news should report, not editorialize or opine or pontificate.

                Leaving the realm of politics, you can’t go ten minutes without hearing some actor or sports star accuse the media of trying to ruin their careers. Does the media too often focus on the sensational, the sordid, and the bloody? Sure it does, and for that we should call it out. But we’ve also got to reserve some of that blame for ourselves. When our comments and our Internet traffic and our TV ratings prove that we’d rather hear about, say, Ben Rothlisberger’s sexual assault cases than Warrick Dunn’s humanitarian work in his hometown, we can’t just blame the media as if it is somehow disconnected from us.

                Some of us even blame the media for things like eating disorders in young women and our youth’s tendency to shoot their classmates when things go badly in their lives. The media may well be part of those problems, but we can’t oversimplify the situation—ignoring issues such as personal responsibility, parental intervention or lack thereof, genetic predisposition, mental and emotional issues, the ridiculous ubiquity of guns—or we’re basically putting a Band-Aid on a car crash victim.

                This complicated relationship between us and the news media often results in our frustration, our anger, our tendency toward violence. Judging from the comments I’ve seen on Facebook and Twitter in the wake of the Anthony trial, I know a lot of people who would happily string up the accused, with or without hard evidence. That bothers me. And in cases like this, I think that the news media is not completely responsible but more culpable than usual. If the so-called “liberal media” had actually been liberal from 2000-2006, we might have avoided morally-murky issues like torture, warrantless wire-tapping, the invasion of Iraq, the dismissal of climate change, the mortgage crisis, No Child Left Behind, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.  How different might history have been if the media had been afraid to go after a sitting president when Watergate happened?

                And if the media had not crucified O.J. Simpson and Casey Anthony before their trials even started, forgetting about the whole inconvenient-to-their-narrative “innocent until proven guilty” thing, people might not have been so shocked at the acquittals. Once the media narrative reached its tipping point, the national attitude changed from “Did this person commit this crime?” to “This person committed this crime, so how far should his/her punishment go?”

                If you asked me off the record, I’d admit that I, too, believe that Simpson and Anthony were guilty. But believing something and knowing it are two very different things. In the case of the Anthony trial, I think the prosecution’s major mistake was in pushing for the capital charges instead of the lesser ones in the absence of the so-called “smoking gun.” I’d be willing to bet that most of those jurors believed that Casey Anthony killed her daughter. But when a human being’s life is on the line, belief isn’t enough. You have to know; you have to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. As Tim O’Brien says, once a person’s dead, you can’t make them un-dead.

                Of course, no one seemed more shocked and outraged at the verdict than the very talking heads who had long since bypassed due process and had convinced so many of us that Anthony was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Perhaps the loudest voice belonged to Nancy Grace, the Yosemite Sam of 24-hour news. She seemed, and remains, apoplectic that the rassen-frassen Tot-mom is walking free. (Incidentally, whenever she repeats that silly name, I want to paraphrase the Rachel McAdams character in Mean Girls. “Nancy, stop trying to make ‘Tot-mom’ happen! It’s not going to happen!”) I also remember flipping channels one day and hearing Jane Valez Mitchell saying, “Right now we’re just speculating, because that’s all we can do.”

                “No,” I shouted, “you could just shut up until you actually have something to report!”

                And therein lies the major problem with the 24-hour networks. In their zeal to cover every tiny facet of the latest sensational trial, they seem to believe that this wide world lacks enough actual news to fill 24 hours of coverage. American secondary education is utterly failing our children. American higher education drifts further and further toward the corporate model, handcuffing teachers and chaining them to the desires, not the needs, of the students; retention becomes the goal, not a pleasant side-effect of a strong university. The food industry keeps trying to poison us while making as much money as possible. Corporate executives keep stuffing their own coffers while screwing over their workers and the American public. Our penal and justice systems continue to demonstrate our nation’s class and racial inequalities. Poor kids of color go missing or get butchered every day, or they just starve to death or overdose because our society glosses over their problems and supports the system we’ve built that perpetuates those problems. And all over the world, people are killing each other, stealing from each other, invading each other’s countries, dying of horrible diseases and fighting those illnesses without funding or help, struggling to survive third-world conditions and natural disasters while we bitch about slow Internet access, and traffic in each other’s bodies and minds.

                Moreover, people everywhere also do great things. Many of us get out and work in underprivileged areas, give to charities, overcome great obstacles, fight racism and classism and sexism and homophobia, research ways to beat disease and famine and inhumanity. Every single day brings an almost limitless array of stories just waiting to be told. You can never convince me that the networks couldn’t fill up 24 hours with material outside the Scandal of the Month.

                So one major problem is that the networks focus on the wrong things. A second one is that most of the airtime is taken up with talking heads who offer not news but opinions and speculations. I have no problem with shows featuring people like Anderson Cooper and Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, though I find that the latter two are cartoon characters who shouldn’t be taken seriously as thinkers. Those people deliver editorials and speculations and opinions, and they make no bones about doing so. But that’s what they’re supposed to do. On the other hand, when I watch network nightly news or an allegedly news-based show on CNN, I don’t want to hear a panel of experts opining about every little nuance of a scandal. I want facts and pictures and statistics. Great TV journalists like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite editorialized, but they saved their editorials for segments dedicated to those kinds of ideas. They didn’t tuck in their chins and puff out their cheeks like bullfrogs and deliver an emotionally-charged frame to every story on the air (I’m looking at you, Mike Galanos).

                When we ignore facts and journalistic objectivity in favor of inflammatory opinion, basic human rights like “innocent until proven guilty” get lost. And when that happens, when we allow a situation where it can happen, we’re all in trouble.

                24-hour news networks need to block out their timeslots, devoting an hour or two to some major news category—American Politics, American Top Stories, International, Finance, Sports, Multicultural Issues, Human Rights at Home and Abroad, and so forth. They need to commit to those blocks, refusing to cut into the scheduled programming unless some major event occurs. And they need a strict definition of “major event,” the kind of thing that once stopped presses and called for extra editions of print newspapers when diverging from the printing schedule cost time and money. Casey Anthony’s lawyer’s leaving the courthouse for lunch or some psychologist’s long-distance speculation about Warren Jeffs doesn’t count.

                In these time blocks, networks need to commit to showing us the full range of news in the world—not just the sensational or the repugnant, but the uplifting and the noble. Not just the upper-class white victims of crime and tragedy but the persons of color, the poor, the LGBT, the non-Christian. Not just the shouted opinions of personalities, but the objective reportings of journalists.

                When I see a documentary like Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman,” or Robert Kenner’s Food Inc., or Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight or Inside Job, or Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side or Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room or Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s Restrepo, I know that investigative journalism is still possible. When I watch the nightly news on ABC or CBS or NBC, I sometimes find that glimmer of hope that news anchors can still present the story without comment.

                But the 24-hour networks are failing both us and themselves. Just as bad, they are failing their own mandate, which should be a sacred part of the American experience. And when the fourth estate becomes a parody of itself, when Stewart and Colbert become redundant as we point and laugh at the networks, who will remain to deliver the news of journalism’s demise?

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.

Comments Sections and the Death of Civilization–A Rant

Comments Sections and the Death of Civilization

                In my forty-plus years on Earth, I have witnessed many phenomena that someone, somewhere posited as the death-knell of the American Empire, western civilization, even the world—Feminism, Civil Rights, rock and roll, pornography, punk rock couture, secularization, country music, Republicans, goth fashion, communism, hip-hop, Democrats, rich people, poor people, gay marriage and/or adoption, nuclear proliferation, socialism, capitalism, Sarah Palin. My paternal grandparents, I was once told, firmly believed that the Beatles signaled the end of the world, and all those guys wanted to do most of the time was hold your hand or smoke a little pot. My parents stood aghast at posters of KISS, Black Sabbath, Motley Crue, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, ad infinitum. Conservative white people everywhere freaked out (some still do) at gangsta rap, at Public Enemy, at Kanye West and Jay-Z. And those are just a few examples from music. Add in politics, movies, television, religion, and so forth, and we’ve seen many potential Ends of the World.

                Me? I think the death knell of civilization as we conceive of it might just be websites’ comments sections.

                I’ve said this before elsewhere, but I’m serious about it. If you ever want to feel better about your personality, your knowledge, your attitude, and your command of the English language, go read the comments section on a website. If you can make it past the pre-K spelling and punctuation, the scathing vituperation of even the most innocuous text, the name-calling, and the blatant disregard for other human beings, you’ll find that only one in twenty posts has anything approaching an original, critical, debatable, intriguing idea.

                Website comments sections are where manners, good grammar, empathy, and healthy debate go to die.

                I’ve often said that the best thing about the Internet is that it provides an instantaneous, democratic forum in which anyone with the ability to find a connected computer can speak out, use their voices, contribute to the national dialogue. And the worst thing about the Internet is that it provides an instantaneous, democratic forum in which anyone with the ability to find a connected computer can speak out, use their voices, and contribute to the national dialogue. I try my hardest to avoid the comments sections these days (except my own, which have yet to be overtaken by sub-literate trolls with an axe to grind), but sometimes I just can’t help myself. I’ll read an article and wonder what people think about it—the ideas, the implications, the different ways we might understand it, how it might help connect us to each other and to our culture.

                But for every thoughtful, eloquent post, you’ll find fifteen or twenty that say nothing at all. And if you’ve never had the displeasure of slogging through such comments, believe me when I say that these “writers” say nothing at the tops of their lungs, and in language that would make Noam Chomsky weep, if not jump off the nearest bridge.

                Let’s look at a few examples.

                The Ultimate Fighting Championship has a pay-per-view scheduled during the first week of August. It’s one of those shows that seem cursed; training injuries have caused several fights to be shuffled as opponents come in and drop out. The co-main event was cancelled altogether. But the main event itself attained a new level of intrigue when Phil Davis, and up-and-coming but currently limited fighter, had to drop out of his fight with former light heavyweight champion Rashad Evans. In Davis’ place, the UFC called on Tito Ortiz, another former light heavyweight champion and one of the sports’ pioneers. Ortiz recently won his first fight in five years, a shocking submission victory over young lion Ryan Bader. Ortiz suffered no damage in the fight, so he was healthy enough and suddenly hot enough to plug into a main event, even at short notice.

                Here are some of the comments on the UFC article announcing the replacement. I have copied and pasted these without correcting anything.

                An initial post: “need to bring lidell back for 1 more just to put tito back on the bottom where he belongs!”

                 A reply to that one: “fuck dat nigga chuck [note: Liddell is white.]. where is he at …getting drunk while the hated Tito Ortiz is trying pretty f*****g hard 2 prove everybody that he still has that drive n ppl still doubt him???cmon ppl grow up. look same situation wit rashad, although rashad talked shit 2 rampage n everybody hated him 4 that, …HE BACKED IT UP!!! n dont get me wrong I LUV RAMPAGE . HE IS PURE NATURAL BEAST . IDK BOUT U GUYS BUT I THINK U SHOULD JUDGE PPL BY THEIR PERFORMANCES N SAME GOES 4 CHAEL SONNEN, HE TALKED SHIT BUT HE WHOOPED THE LIVING FUCK OUT OF ANDERSON SILVA!!!! just sayin “

                 Another initial post: “tittoooooo is going to get knocked the fuck out.”

                 A reply: “Tito never been ko idiot!!!..”

                 Another: “Guess you don’t watch UFC. Chuck knocked him out.”

                 Another: “your right he just gets hit and puss’s out or plays possum.”

                 This is discourse? The paradigm seems to go like this: Person A makes a short comment in the most aggressive manner possible. Person B calls that person an idiot (or stupid, uninformed, retarded) for having an opinion different from his/her own. Persons C, D, and E take up the conversation in kind, burying any salient points in badly-spelled text message-speak, all-caps shouting, curse words that add nothing to the debate other than more unnecessary aggression. Even those who seemingly agree with you couch their posts in the language of back-handed compliments or out-and-out dismissal.

                People talk at each other, not to each other. They turn into keyboard warriors, ready to get in someone’s face and denigrate that person’s intelligence, knowledge, personality, and reason to live, none of which they would be likely to do in person, even late at night in a sports bar. As a result, you can feel your own IQ lowering with each comment you read. And your own aggression might rise as you realize how many truly stupid, wasteful people exist in the world.

                Ah, but this sort of thing isn’t limited to websites dedicated to sports where people beat the crap out of each other. Here are some comments on Entertainment Weekly’s recent review of the film Horrible Bosses, which critic Lisa Schwarzbaum (whom I admire) liked enough to give an A-.

                “Funny this movie just dosen’t look that good to me. I’ll wait to rent it.” (Not a stupid comment or an offensively mean one, but doesn’t it miss the opportunity to start an interesting, helpful discussion? Why not tell us WHY the movie doesn’t look that good?)

                “I was planning on seeing this movie anyways but now that Lisa has approved it, I will for sure be checking it out Friday night !” (Good for you—you said something positive! However, I’d still like to know WHY you trust Lisa so much. When has she been right in your opinion, and why? How often do you think she’s wrong? Why follow her recommendation without question? And if you have reasons for following, why not share them? You might enlighten at least one hater out there. Speaking of which…)

                “There’s only one word this trash: Stupidity. And yet, you give it an A-? This is exactly why I don’t listen to critics.” (Why is it trash? Why is it stupid—because you say so? Who are you, and what are your qualifications? How is this one review somehow indicative of every critic’s entire oeuvre?)

                “A- really??? For this crass, hopelessly broad unsubtle, uncleverly potty humor (literally) filled toilet of a film? Makes The Hangover 2 look like Dostoyevsky. That bad, despite the cast.” (This one at least intrigues me, but I’d still like to know what specifically strikes you as crass, or broad, or unsubtle, or unclever (is that a word?). Also, you assume that we didn’t like The Hangover 2 and that we do like Dostoyevsky. You’ve got my attention; now tell me more.)

                Of course, EW.com readers have a hard character limit for their comments, so there’s only so much they can do. But can’t we do better than this? Here’s one that goes into more detail, but falls into the UFC commenters’ problems with unnecessary rudeness:

                “I saw “Horrible Bosses” at a sneak preview and enjoyed it a lot, but an A- is goddamn generous to the point of pandering. There was a lot of room for improvement, and a lot a reasons it won’t hold up to the films of Mike Judge. BTW, let’s remember that you gave “Midnight in Paris,” a likely Best Picture nominee, a grade B. Recalling why, your main gripe/reason was that Paris was too pretty, and more glamourized than it actually is. Do you think in a comic fantasy that Paris should be ugly? Duh.”

                See, why do we have to do these kinds of things to each other? I don’t have a problem with the foul language per se; I just don’t think it’s necessary to make the point and thus may turn readers away from your more salient criticisms. The “duh” at the end basically says that the critic is stupid. Why is that necessary? Why not just call attention to a potential flaw in her reasoning? Why do we have to use our keyboards like talons to rip at each other? This writer starts out by saying that he liked the film but spends the rest of the post attacking the critic. By the way—“likely Best Picture nominee” doesn’t necessarily mean it deserves more than a B, given the eclecticism of tastes and the expanded Best Picture field.

                I could have added a “you dumbass” or a “as anybody who knows anything would tell you,” but that would just antagonize people unnecessarily. We can make a point without bashing others over the head with it. We can talk to other people, even on the Internet, as if they are human beings who should be respected, at least until they prove that they don’t deserve it. And disagreeing with us is not a sufficient reason for disrespect.

                If the world ended today and, sometime later, an alien found only comments sections with which to judge the human race, he or she would likely characterize us as a savage, isolated people with little grasp of language, manners, or respect. And then he or she would probably not be surprised when discovering that we regularly blow each other up, join political parties more interested in beating each other about the heads and shoulders than in serving us, shoot each other over parking spaces and baseball games, and marginalize/oppress/kill those who are different from us.

                Language matters. Courtesy matters. Rational thought and meaningful debate matter. The Internet has given us a cheap, easily-accessible forum for using these tools. And we’re squandering it.

                Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

                Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.

Things My Childhood Taught Me #nonfiction #rants

Things My Childhood Taught Me

            DISCLAIMER: This essay probably doesn’t have the kind of purposeful ambiguity that makes for good creative nonfiction writing. It is, in other words, probably a bit too straightforward and preachy. But I feel the need to say it anyway, given recent events. I therefore call it a rant—the first in a series, probably. Thanks for understanding. 

            DISCLAIMER #2: In this writing, I talk about unnamed family members, friends, and acquaintances. The experiences I discuss below are not necessarily indicative of what these people are like in most respects, nor do I claim that they constantly evince the attitudes attributed to them below. I am merely demonstrating how I learned what I learned.

            Recently on Facebook, I found myself in the middle of an argument about abortion. I don’t know how I get into these things. I had linked to a recent article detailing the new Texas law requiring abortion-seeking women to get a sonogram and have a doctor explain its meaning before undergoing any procedure. I see this law, and others like it, as part of the right-wing war on women, the same war that has resulted in other unconscionable laws being proposed and, in some cases, passed. I’m sure there’s another essay or six to be mined from proposals that want to redefine rape for the benefit of men or that, in one case, distinguishes between rape and “forcible rape,” as if any other kind exists. Much of what I’ve seen on this subject seems flat-out insane; even more seems dangerous and regressive.

            The odd part about my posting the article on the Texas law? I did not say one word to defend abortion. I simply asked why, if such a law is going to exist, it doesn’t make a similar requirement of men.  “It takes a man, or at least a man’s sperm, to get pregnant,” I reasoned. Men enjoy the privilege of walking away from a pregnancy if they wish, and their choices to do so—as well as other factors like the mother’s education, her employment situation, the parents’ families’ willingness to help out, and the existence (or lack thereof) of aid programs—affect a woman’s decision to abort or not just as much as her own self-interest or morals. Are there callous women who use abortion over and over as a means of retroactive birth control? Probably, and I admitted as much. But I believe that the majority of women who seek abortions do so for a plethora of reasons, not simply for convenience, and I know for a fact that these women suffer all kinds of consequences for their decisions—emotional, mental, financial, religious, physical, social. My wife Kalene recently read an article in which a doctor stated that 40% of American women have had abortions. I have no idea how accurate that statement is, but in any case, it is dangerous to characterize abortion as an uncommon act perpetrated by a few immoral women who simply don’t want to bother with a baby. Such an attitude encourages us to ignore the very real trauma that leads up to and follows an abortion.  

            The Texas law, and others like it, oversimplifies a complex situation by dumping all responsibility on the woman instead of sharing her burden (or blessing, or responsibility, or whatever you want to call it) with the man, the potential grandparents, or the state. That was my point—not to praise abortion per se, but to support women. Still, the discussion thread that followed sidetracked us all into a discussion of abortion itself—whether it should be legal and why, whether it can ever be considered a moral decision, whether we can understand why some women choose it, who should get to make that choice, and, finally, whether the Bible has anything to say about the situation.

            Should anyone like to know my actual views on abortion and why I am a staunchly pro-choice Christian, I’ll be glad to write a column about that in the future. But today I am interested in discussing how the abortion debate led me to consider my formative years and what I learned then.

            During the Facebook conversation, my own mother chose to articulate her own view on abortion. From her fundamentalist point of view, abortion is always wrong, no matter the circumstances; the Bible, she says, remains clear on this matter. As proof, she offered multiple scriptures that, in her view, baldly stated how life begins at conception and that abortion therefore constitutes baby-killing. When I read the scriptures, I found that none of them seemed to address the genesis of the soul, or the point at which life begins, or God’s stance on abortion. At best, they were ambiguous; at worst, they seemed completely off-topic and/or out of context. Thus, while I admired her conviction and her courage in standing up for her beliefs, I doubted that her evidence would convince anyone not already on her side. What really troubled me, though, was a statement that she later made: “We were not by any means perfect parents. We made many, many mistakes, but we did our best to instill Christian morals and beliefs in [Brett] as a child. We no longer have any say in what he does or what he believes, but I know he’s a good man, and I stand on the promise that God will bring him back to his Christian teachings.”

            Upon reading this, I felt simultaneously proud of her assessing me a good man and angry about the rest. Here’s how I responded to that particular comment: “I take offense at the idea that I’ve got to come ‘back to my Christian teachings.’ I’ve never left them. I have a strong relationship with my God and, for the first time in my life, spiritual peace. I have achieved that peace by rejecting much of what I learned when I was a kid–not necessarily from my parents or family, but from society at large. But the teachings that I base my life on–faith, and love, and charity, and helping one’s neighbor, and so forth–stem directly from what I believe God wants me to do and what my own conscience tells me is right. I don’t hold all the political beliefs that my parents do–perhaps not any–but I reject the notion that I’m somehow spiritually bankrupt because I believe in a woman’s right to choose what happens with her own body.”

            Though I’ve taken a rather circumlocutious route to get here, these ideas, readers, represent the crux of what I’m after today. I am forty years old as of this writing—older than I can sometimes believe, especially given that I’m just now able to concentrate on my writing as a career, but still young, hopefully not even middle-aged. I am who I am today because of what I learned in the past—the past as recent as yesterday and the past as far back as the beginnings of my memory. Much of what I learned seems positive to me. Other lessons were negative, and many of these were taught me in the context of “good Christian morals” or “political ethics.” Allow me to illustrate, with a series of anecdotes, why I believe that rejecting much of what I learned as a child has molded me into the man I am today, for better or worse.

            I come from an immediate and an extended family that is deeply steeped in Christian tradition. My mother’s family members mostly go to the same Assembly of God church in Crossett, a small town in southeast Arkansas. My paternal grandfather was a Baptist deacon; my father has served in the same capacity. Some of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents on my mother’s side used to tour the area in a gospel band, singing in all kinds of churches. They did so after and beyond their work hours and their family responsibilities. If someone needs a meal, or prayer, or clothes, you won’t find anybody acting as fast or with as much conviction as my family. These are good people in most ways.

            But they have their blind spots. Once, I sat with an aunt at a family gathering. She was praising a local sports team’s accomplishments—games won, tournaments conquered, teamwork represented. Then she said, triumphantly, “And they did it all without any blacks!” She did not explain why that might be considered an extraordinary accomplishment, as if her conclusion was self-evident.

            Another time, at a Christmas gathering and right after a heartfelt prayer for blessing, one of my cousins and I were talking college football. I was extolling the virtues of LSU, my alma mater, and he was arguing in favor of the Arkansas Razorbacks. He has no connection to the Razorbacks that I know of, other than that they play in the state he lives in. He said, “You know, LSU should change their team colors from purple and gold to green and pink.”

            “What are you talking about?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

            “You know, watermelon?” he said. I still looked puzzled, so he sighed and said, “Niggers! That team is full of niggers!”

            A college football team with African-American players? Perish the thought! I had no idea how to respond to his statement, because I felt so taken aback at the very thought of disliking a team for its racial components. I thought we were living in the 21st century, not the early 19th. I also never learned why he thought Arkansas’s black players were somehow exempt from his attitude. Ah, the “logic” of racism…

            Another time, again not long after a family prayer thanking God for His blessings, an elderly family member opined that her neighborhood was falling into disrepair and squalor. For her evidence, she mentioned the recent increase in noise, attributable to “the blacks who have been moving in.” Personally, I didn’t know that African-Americans brought with them ambient noise.

            These are three of the milder examples I experienced. Countless times when I was growing up, I heard some of these good Christian people use the term “nigger” uncritically, spitting it out of their mouths like rotten meat. Show them an individual black person in need, and they are as quick as anyone to help in any way they can. They are empathetic and compassionate. But remove the individual from the situation and the faceless mass of “niggers” becomes an object of dread, spite, even hatred. I have remained unable to locate the disconnect between this racism and the rest of their values, but it exists.

            I saw more evidence of such a disconnect in school, where student groupings often broke down on racial lines.  Oh, we all played on the same sports teams and went to the same classes; during those times, you might have been fooled into thinking that racism had gone extinct in the south. But after school, or even during lunch, racial groups went their separate ways. I can’t speak to what happened in other groups, but amidst my group of white friends—again, good people in most ways—the term “nigger” was used freely and uncritically. So were terms like “faggot.” I would see these same people in church, praising God and discussing the values of love and charity and human connection. And it bothered me from an early age. I wasn’t always thoughtful or courageous enough to act on my feelings, but I knew in my heart that what I saw and heard often wasn’t right.

            At the church my parents made me go to during my teen years—a place that I hated, a place that made me feel farther from God than I ever have—I once heard a prominent member say that if any niggers ever walked in the church doors, they would walk right back out again, or he would.

            And so, as I grew up, I learned that it’s okay to be Christian and still hate people who looked different than me, especially if they were black. I learned it at school, in church, and at family gatherings. I even learned it when I drove through town, knowing that most black people lived in the section between the western city limits and the highway known as the “truck route.” Racist white people often referred to this section as “nigger town,” as if it were a separate place altogether. I’ve searched the scriptures and my own conscience over the years, and I have never found one single shred of evidence that Christ justifies such hatred and exclusion. Not one. Yet so many Christians obviously harbor hatred in their hearts.

            I mentioned above that many of my professing Christian friends used the word “faggot.” They also used “queer,” “fag,” “chocolate-churner,” “ass-bandit,” and just about every other pejorative name you can think of. These terms served to ostracize people who already did not fit in, regardless of what their actual sexualities might have been—the comic book readers with thick glasses and bad skin, the poor kids who could not afford good clothes and whose parents did not seem to own a washing machine, the gentle boys who were not interested in sports and the thickly-built girls who were. Back then at least, the children of that town seemed hyper-aware of sexuality and perfectly willing to verbally abuse, shun, and even beat up those who exhibited even one highly-stereotypical characteristic that supposedly connoted “gay.” I watched some good kids go through high school miserably, having been saddled with a label that they did not understand. Others who were gay, but closeted mostly out of self-preservation, stayed constantly on guard against themselves, lest they betray a sign of who they really were. They could not seek love, or physical contact, or acceptance because they would have been mercilessly mocked or worse, and by the people you saw in church every Sunday. This happened in late 20th-century America, in a town with more churches than you could count.

            I do not claim to be a Biblical scholar, but I do not remember a single scripture in which Christ speaks out against homosexuality. There are some Biblical passages that seem to, but most of these are taken wildly out of context or refer to historical circumstances that no longer apply. I have read the works of Biblical scholars who feel the same way. In no case do I find that the Bible supports hatred of gay people or violence against them, or anyone else for that matter. Yet those who enact the worst violence against alleged gay people—and others assumed to be gay who are in fact not—often do so in God’s name. I wonder what He thinks of that.

            Once, during my first divorce, I moved in with a friend and his father, who happened to be bisexual. I needed a place to go while I sorted things out, and they took me in without question. Later, when talking with a close family member who was extraordinarily active in his church, he said, “I hope you’re having a good time living with that queer,” pronouncing the word as he might “demon” or “Nazi.”

              And so I learned—in school, with my family, and in and around church—that you can be Christian and hate gay people.

            Familial relations appear to be a problematic area, too. Once, while I was attending my first wife’s church, one of her brothers had been scheduled to sing during service; I’m sure anyone who has gone to church is familiar with the “solo.” This church was fairly large, so it had a good sound system that piped the music and vocals from the pulpit to speakers at the back of the hall, into the vestibule, even into the nursery. Someone controlled the sound from a mixing board located in back of the church; on the day of my ex-brother-in-law’s solo, his own uncle was running the board. But as the song commenced, the sound faded in and out, usually during the most emotive portions. I looked back at the uncle, and he did not seem alarmed or even aware that anything was wrong.

            After the service, I asked my ex about it. She said, “Yeah, he was mad that his son hadn’t gotten to sing, so he was messing up the sound on purpose.”

            And so I learned that it’s okay to be Christian and to screw over your own family because of petty jealousy and spite.

            In this same town lives a man who drives an old lawnmower everywhere he goes. Something is wrong with his head, and I don’t mean that metaphorically; his skull is actually crooked, tilting far out of true. This man is poor; he doesn’t drive a lawnmower because of the gas mileage. He is dirty; I have never seen him wear anything but the same pair of grimy, grease-and-dirt-stained overalls. He usually goes barefoot. He works, if I am not mistaken, odd jobs. He is, in other words, a good example of the financially downtrodden, the physically afflicted, the outcast. He is the kind of man that I believe Christ would be drawn to.

            But in that town, people make fun of him because his head is crooked, or because he drives that mower down the shoulder of our roads, or because he isn’t clean. I have heard such comments made in a church parking lot as the man puttered by on his mower. And so I learned that you can be Christian and reject those in need, that you can be pious and make fun of others’ misfortune.

            Did I learn anything positive while I was growing up? Of course I did. I learned positive lessons from my parents, my schools, my friends. But many of the lessons I learned were also negative; in other words, I learned what kind of man I did not want to be through the examples I saw around me. I did not do so immediately; I don’t claim to be better than any of the people I’ve discussed. When I was much younger, I too used words like “nigger” and “faggot.” I too made fun of the poor and negatively judged women who found themselves in adverse circumstances. I too shunned people who weren’t like me; I even participated in some of those verbal and physical rejections of difference that I discussed above.

            But I did so, I can now honestly say, to my everlasting shame. Even back then, when I heard such words and saw or even participated in such actions, a voice deep inside me cried out, “This isn’t right! You’re a liar and a hypocrite! You don’t really feel this way!” And as I grew up, I discovered that the voice was right. I was professing to be a good person, a good Christian, while my actual life exemplified beliefs that contradicted progressive politics, Christian teaching, and my own conscience. If I do any time in hell, I believe it will be because of what I did and failed to do in those early days, not because I believe in a woman’s right to choose or because I can understand why some women feel abortion to be their only choice.

            What I have done differently from so many of my peers and relatives—and I only say “differently” because you have to judge for yourself whether my beliefs are any better or worse than theirs—is that I have tried to reject those negative lessons. Rather than refusing to think about the contradictions in my stated values and my actual life, I have tried to bring the two into a kind of harmony. Rather than dismissing my own early complicity in hatred, I have tried to own it and make up for it. I don’t do so out of guilt alone; I don’t believe in civil rights for everyone, for instance, only because I feel bad that I once ignored any societal problems that didn’t directly affect me. I do so because I truly believe that it’s right—that it is what my own conscience, and my God, would have me do. I have tried to make myself a better person so that I can make the world better, and I have tried to pass those values onto my children as a counterbalance to the negative lessons that I know they, too, are learning deep in the American south.

            Does this make me (or people who think like I do) some kind of role model or paragon of virtue? No. But for the first time in my life, it does allow me to look at myself in the mirror and like what I see, to sleep at night knowing that if I didn’t contribute anything especially transcendent to the world today, then at least I didn’t make things worse. I have tried to take the positive lessons of my youth and apply them. And I have tried to take the negative lessons and build something positive from them. I try to serve as an ally for those in need, those I might have once mindlessly rejected. I don’t try to speak for them, because they can speak for themselves, but I try to do my part, and I am honored when they allow me to be a part of their missions. I strive to live by the principles of love, faith, hope, charity, and acceptance, and on those occasions when I still fail, I wake up the next day, ready to try again. I am at peace with myself and with God.

            And in this imperfect world, perhaps that has to be enough.

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Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.