In some ways it is. A rather prominent public figure I used to know was a closeted gay man. I met him through my parents and then one day in university I went to a gay club in Montreal with some friends and there he was. It was a rather out-there joint called Narcissus. I'll spare you the details but suffice to say the entertainment was quite different from what you might expect at most clubs.
And I saw this guy. And he saw me. He nodded at me so as to make it clear that he had recognized me but I got the sense that I was being discouraged from going over to talk to him and his friends. And what would I say in any case? That I was just slumming and that this was not the sort of thing I normally did? That I am not gay? Somehow that seemed pointless.
I asked my friends about it later, the man in question (now deceased) was prominent enough that it was inevitable that some would recognize him from time to time. They said that this sort of thing happened all the time and one of my friends told a rather funny story about having a very casual encounter in a public park and then showing up for a job interview the next day to find he was being interviewed by the very man he had had the encounter with the day before.
An unspoken rule applied that you just didn't let on what you knew about each other. My friend said he and his one-time lover had never acknowledged what had happened between them even though he got the job—perhaps precisely because he got the job. The temptation is to call this sort of relationship a community but it isn't really. It's like a community in some ways and you can see why the outing of public figures in the 1980s and 1990s was such a touchy issue. But it was a secret community and therefore more like an underground movement than a city on a hill.
Many Catholics behave like closeted gay men. Meet someone from church at a party or through work and you chatter away but leave it out where it is that you know one another from any time some one else might hear.
There are, odd as this may seem, important cultural reasons or this. Anglicans sing loud and clear, Catholics try to disappear into the mix. Go to communion at an Anglican or Episcopalian church, and everyone gets up in an orderly fashion, row by row. Go at a Catholic Church and everyone gets up en masse and shuffles to the front.
The last is actually significant and good which makes it unfortunate that some Catholic churches are adopting the more orderly row by row approach. For Catholics are not supposed to regard receiving communion as routine. If we have any doubts about whether we have sinned, we are to refrain. If everyone goes row by row, the individual who does not stands out and everyone wonders why they aren't going.
Our whole understanding of what goes on in church is like that. Watch Catholics go into church and you will see what I mean. We show up at the last second and dart in as if there was some sort of secret. Not unlike the way people walk casually down a sidewalk and then dart into Wicked Wanda dirty book store and tattoo parlour. And some Catholics stand at the door and talk afterward but most of us take advantage of the delta they form to slip back into public like unnoticed. That may seem like a bad thing but I'm not sure it is.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Attendance is voluntary
Waugh's gets in many digs at Anglicans in Decline and Fall. Here is one. Paul Pennyfeather has landed in jail and gets his first visit from the prison chpalain.
Catholics never get this even though the rules are stricter in our case. Miss the service you regularly attend and everyone charitably assumes you went at some other time.
My theory about this is that churches like the Anglican are very much driven by a sense of being a community. A big part of your membership there is an obligation to be a part of that community and there is nothing voluntary about being part of a community. You are either all the way in or all the way out.
We tell our friends that their love for us is voluntary too but just try being a friend on those terms. We like to see our friends regularly and we greet long lost friends with enthusiasm but the semi-dependable friend who is there sometimes and sometimes not, him or her we don't quite like so much.
Are you Church of England? [He is.] Services are voluntary—that is to say, you must either attend all or none.If you are familiar with churches where attendance is voluntary that is the way it works. Attend regularly and you will get odd looks any time you miss a Sunday. Attend not at all and you will be greeted warmly every time you are met in the hopes that you will start coming but no one will ever make you feel guilty about it out of fear of putting you off. But attend sporadically—which, if "voluntary" means anything at all, you should be entitled to do—and you will be treated like Charles Manson out on bail every time you darken the door of your church.
Catholics never get this even though the rules are stricter in our case. Miss the service you regularly attend and everyone charitably assumes you went at some other time.
My theory about this is that churches like the Anglican are very much driven by a sense of being a community. A big part of your membership there is an obligation to be a part of that community and there is nothing voluntary about being part of a community. You are either all the way in or all the way out.
We tell our friends that their love for us is voluntary too but just try being a friend on those terms. We like to see our friends regularly and we greet long lost friends with enthusiasm but the semi-dependable friend who is there sometimes and sometimes not, him or her we don't quite like so much.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
A rare political comment
Megan McCardle has some typically insightful things to say about national debt under the headline "How Should the U.S. Break Its Promises?"
She means money promises and she is not advocating that it should but discussing which promises should get broken first if it comes to that. And the key paragraph, the one you should print out and tape to your bathroom mirror soyou have to read it every day is this one:
And a very similar situation obtains in Canada where I live.
Now you may say, who cares about what Congress has a legal right to do as it would be political suicide and therefore it will never happen? Well, it would be political suicide right now but I wouldn't quite say never here.
I have about twenty nephews who are graduating into a brutal job market right now. They are making some damned hard compromises as a result. People qualified for serious research work are going into sales jobs. And they will be paying big taxes all their lives to support social security they have very little chance of benefiting from.
If you are under fifty-five years of age, you may want to think the dynamics through pretty seriously here. Because the demographics here favour people in the first half of the baby boom but they are going to shift brutally against those of us in the second half. And Gen Xers well, they have been complaining all their lives anyway so ....
She means money promises and she is not advocating that it should but discussing which promises should get broken first if it comes to that. And the key paragraph, the one you should print out and tape to your bathroom mirror soyou have to read it every day is this one:
The first thing to point out is that legally, changing social security benefits would not be default, because (as the Supreme Court has already ruled), beneficiaries have no legal, contractual right to their benefits. They enjoy them at the sufferance of Congress, and Congress has the perfect right to change them.Let me repeat that: no one has any legal right to social security. McCardle says the Congress has the right to change benefits paid out and that is right but, just so we all understand, Congress has the right to change them to zero dollars and zero cents starting tomorrow if it wants. If you read the whole thing, you will find she has a lot of fascinating things to say about the lack of financial consequences of Congress doing so.
And a very similar situation obtains in Canada where I live.
Now you may say, who cares about what Congress has a legal right to do as it would be political suicide and therefore it will never happen? Well, it would be political suicide right now but I wouldn't quite say never here.
I have about twenty nephews who are graduating into a brutal job market right now. They are making some damned hard compromises as a result. People qualified for serious research work are going into sales jobs. And they will be paying big taxes all their lives to support social security they have very little chance of benefiting from.
If you are under fifty-five years of age, you may want to think the dynamics through pretty seriously here. Because the demographics here favour people in the first half of the baby boom but they are going to shift brutally against those of us in the second half. And Gen Xers well, they have been complaining all their lives anyway so ....
More on fornication
To go back to that quote from the Waugh's Decline and Fall:
The other two reasons conceal similar exercises in vanity. Mr. Prendergast is a laughable figure but he is, whether he realizes it or not, making a profound criticism here.
'The three reasons given for it in the Prayer-Book have always seemed to me to be inadequate,' agreed Mr. Prendergast. 'I have never had the slightest difficulty about the avoidance of fornication, and the other two advantages strike me nothing short of disastrous.'There is a deep truth hiding in Prendergast's comment about fornication. Reading the novel it quickly becomes obvious that one reason Prendergast might have little trouble avoiding fornication is because opportunities for fornication tend to avoid him. An awful lot of people who feel proud of their sexual continence are in the same boat whether from lack of opportunity, lack of desire or timidity.
The other two reasons conceal similar exercises in vanity. Mr. Prendergast is a laughable figure but he is, whether he realizes it or not, making a profound criticism here.
Three reasons for matrimony
I'm reading Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, and laughing too hard to blog any of it.
Anyway, the subject of marriage comes up and a former clergyman, now schoolteacher, says,
The first is kind of weird because the absence of marriage is no obstacle to the procreation of children, a fact the negative consequences of which we are regularly reminded of. In fact, the two independent clauses in that sentence seem more important than the primary clause. And yet it does seem that as good a thing as raising children well is, the reasons for marriage should start with the man and woman entering into it.
The second is not just silly but actually blasphemous. Marriage is God's purpose, he created them male and female and so forth. God's purpose for human beings is that we leave our parents to cleave to another. To reduce that sacred and noble project to "get married so you don't fornicate" is obscene.
And what is it about marriage that stops you from fornicating?
The Canadian Prayer-Book replaces the first with:
By the way, as someone is sure to bring it up, no, Saint Paul did not say this. He said it is better to marry than to burn. And he said this in a particular context. Paul thought the second coming was coming any day, a factor that would make marriage a secondary consideration, but he told those who felt they could not live without it to go ahead with easy consciences. How that thought gets translated into reason #2 above is a mystery to me.
The third is apparently an addition by Archbishop Cramner. It seems inoffensive as far as it goes. But, how exactly does marriage make this possible in a way that wouldn't be available without marriage?
All in all, a pretty poor showing. No wonder Waugh felt free to mock it.
No, I don't have a better idea ready to go. If I were to undertake the thing, however, I'd start not with the union but the vows and reasons we might make vows before God.
Anyway, the subject of marriage comes up and a former clergyman, now schoolteacher, says,
'The three reasons given for it in the Prayer-Book have always seemed to me to be inadequate,' agreed Mr. Prendergast. 'I have never had the slightest difficulty about the avoidance of fornication, and the other two advantages strike me nothing short of disastrous.'Waugh means to be funny, of course, and it is but he got me wondering what the three reasons are. Thanks to the wonders of Google, the answer is:
Duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.An odd set of reasons wouldn't you say?
First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.
Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.
Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.
The first is kind of weird because the absence of marriage is no obstacle to the procreation of children, a fact the negative consequences of which we are regularly reminded of. In fact, the two independent clauses in that sentence seem more important than the primary clause. And yet it does seem that as good a thing as raising children well is, the reasons for marriage should start with the man and woman entering into it.
The second is not just silly but actually blasphemous. Marriage is God's purpose, he created them male and female and so forth. God's purpose for human beings is that we leave our parents to cleave to another. To reduce that sacred and noble project to "get married so you don't fornicate" is obscene.
And what is it about marriage that stops you from fornicating?
The Canadian Prayer-Book replaces the first with:
Matrimony was ordained for the hallowing of the union betwixt man and woman ...I suppose so but it seems to me that God has already done that. When you are before God's priest waiting to make your vows the important question is not whether marriage will hallow your relationship but whether you are serious, mature and prepared enough to enter into this hallowed state.
By the way, as someone is sure to bring it up, no, Saint Paul did not say this. He said it is better to marry than to burn. And he said this in a particular context. Paul thought the second coming was coming any day, a factor that would make marriage a secondary consideration, but he told those who felt they could not live without it to go ahead with easy consciences. How that thought gets translated into reason #2 above is a mystery to me.
The third is apparently an addition by Archbishop Cramner. It seems inoffensive as far as it goes. But, how exactly does marriage make this possible in a way that wouldn't be available without marriage?
All in all, a pretty poor showing. No wonder Waugh felt free to mock it.
No, I don't have a better idea ready to go. If I were to undertake the thing, however, I'd start not with the union but the vows and reasons we might make vows before God.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Pat Garrett (2)
Discussions of the sort of actions undertaken by Garrett are often put as a matter of means and ends. That has always struck me as about as damning an indictment of this awful age as there could be. Was there ever a more trivial and useless question than, "Does the end justify the means?"
Well, turning the stove on certainly is justified by the end of making tea. Warm toes justify putting on wool socks. I won't go one but I'm sure you get the point. Every day we make decisions where the ends plainly do justify the means. Of course we never think of it in terms of means and ends for the simple reason that that distinction is terminally useless. The fact that I want tea and warm toes is the only justification needed. What was the point of the question about ends and means again?
Some people have tried to salvage the question by being more precise. They say, the real question is, "Does the end justify any means?" To which the answer is plainly "no!" but no one has ever wondered about that. The question is, given a good end, is this means justified?
(As a rule, any time we run into someone who tells us that we can clear up moral issues by getting clear about definitions and meanings, we should be on guard. It's not that such a thing is impossible but it is very unlikely that a moral question that has troubled a lot of people is susceptible to such a solution.)
To get back to the ends and means question, when was the last time you remember asking yourself a question like that? It doesn't come up often does it?
Pat Garrett had a question that can look like a means -and-ends question in the abstract but was actually no such thing. He was out to arrest a man who was already convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. The man had escaped from prison and had killed two men, killed two law officers, in his escape and that is another hanging offense. He may not have gone into the situation determined to simply execute Billy the Kid but I'm sure he had determined that the Kid's personal safety was pretty low on the list of priorities. He probably figured he was going to shoot at the slightest provocation and that strikes me as the right choice.
Yes, he may have dramatized his role a bit later but that strikes me as a minor offense at best.
Well, turning the stove on certainly is justified by the end of making tea. Warm toes justify putting on wool socks. I won't go one but I'm sure you get the point. Every day we make decisions where the ends plainly do justify the means. Of course we never think of it in terms of means and ends for the simple reason that that distinction is terminally useless. The fact that I want tea and warm toes is the only justification needed. What was the point of the question about ends and means again?
Some people have tried to salvage the question by being more precise. They say, the real question is, "Does the end justify any means?" To which the answer is plainly "no!" but no one has ever wondered about that. The question is, given a good end, is this means justified?
(As a rule, any time we run into someone who tells us that we can clear up moral issues by getting clear about definitions and meanings, we should be on guard. It's not that such a thing is impossible but it is very unlikely that a moral question that has troubled a lot of people is susceptible to such a solution.)
To get back to the ends and means question, when was the last time you remember asking yourself a question like that? It doesn't come up often does it?
Pat Garrett had a question that can look like a means -and-ends question in the abstract but was actually no such thing. He was out to arrest a man who was already convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. The man had escaped from prison and had killed two men, killed two law officers, in his escape and that is another hanging offense. He may not have gone into the situation determined to simply execute Billy the Kid but I'm sure he had determined that the Kid's personal safety was pretty low on the list of priorities. He probably figured he was going to shoot at the slightest provocation and that strikes me as the right choice.
Yes, he may have dramatized his role a bit later but that strikes me as a minor offense at best.
Pat Garrett
The more I think about True Grit the better it gets. I will have to see it again some day.
I watched a couple of 1960s dusters over the weekend (more on them later) and was shocked at how good the Coen brothers' effort looks compared to them. I also reacquainted myself with some western lore I'd long forgotten.
An aside, I am often disheartened at the thought of how much smarter the teenage me was than I am now. That boy, could snare, clean and cook a rabbit. He could run a canoe through whitewater. He could sail a dinghy across the lake at night in a storm and enjoy it. He could identify a whole bunch of wildflowers, five or sex weasels (I mean six weasels of course but I'm not going to fix this now) and about twenty different kinds of rocks and minerals. He could ski forty miles in a single day. Today, I couldn't do any of those things.
That boy also knew a lot of western lore I have been reminding myself of.
Anyway, one of the things about True Grit that is now painfully obvious to me but that I was unaware of when I saw the movie last week is the very obvious, and intentional, parallel between Rooster Cogburn and Pat Garrett. The parallel was drawn in a courtroom seen at the beginning when young Mattie goes to watch Rooster testify about some men he brought in and how they managed to get shot and killed in the process.
And what we see in a short courtroom scene is a very contracted story that parallels what happened to Pat Garrett's reputation. Rooster tells a wonderful story about how he faced the men and one of them came at him with an axe. The story is colourful and much appreciated by everyone in the courtroom and the theatre.
And then the opposing attorney gets up and exposes this story as dressing up what was little more than an ambush killing. Garrett's reputation as the killer of Billy the Kid went through a similar trajectory though not in such a short period.
The facts are murkier with Pat Garrett. We will never be able to say with certainty that Pat Garrett's version of how Billy the Kid met his death was not true. And yet, something about the story doesn't seem right.
It's funny, though, that a considerable amount of ink has been spent romanticizing Billy the Kid. This is odd because, while we might dispute how he got that way, there is no denying that Billy was a bad man. Under the law of the day, he deserved to hang. He'd unquestionably get the death penalty in many jurisdictions today. You can't, although many have tried, make him a sympathetic figure unless you do so by injecting large amounts of fantasy and disregarding certain key facts.
Historically, however, that is where the efforts have been made. Pat Garrett is usually an ambiguous figure at best in the story. If we consider Wyatt Earp's story by contrast, Earp's position was much more ambiguous than Garrett's. Garrett really campaigned on law and order and worked to deliver it. Earp was just fighting on one side of a family feud and using the law to further his and his brothers' interests.
And he clearly believed that this end justified some means that we would regard as dubious. The fascinating thing about True Grit is that it clearly takes the Garrett side of the argument. In a wild situation, you may just have to do some hard to justify things to make a good thing happen.
You might put it this way, in a morally ambiguous world where it is possible to assemble evidence so as to make everyone look equally bad or good, the way to separate the sheep from goats is to look at the end they were aiming at. We're all sinners but the road to sainthood is defined by the ultimate goal.
I watched a couple of 1960s dusters over the weekend (more on them later) and was shocked at how good the Coen brothers' effort looks compared to them. I also reacquainted myself with some western lore I'd long forgotten.
An aside, I am often disheartened at the thought of how much smarter the teenage me was than I am now. That boy, could snare, clean and cook a rabbit. He could run a canoe through whitewater. He could sail a dinghy across the lake at night in a storm and enjoy it. He could identify a whole bunch of wildflowers, five or sex weasels (I mean six weasels of course but I'm not going to fix this now) and about twenty different kinds of rocks and minerals. He could ski forty miles in a single day. Today, I couldn't do any of those things.
That boy also knew a lot of western lore I have been reminding myself of.
Anyway, one of the things about True Grit that is now painfully obvious to me but that I was unaware of when I saw the movie last week is the very obvious, and intentional, parallel between Rooster Cogburn and Pat Garrett. The parallel was drawn in a courtroom seen at the beginning when young Mattie goes to watch Rooster testify about some men he brought in and how they managed to get shot and killed in the process.
And what we see in a short courtroom scene is a very contracted story that parallels what happened to Pat Garrett's reputation. Rooster tells a wonderful story about how he faced the men and one of them came at him with an axe. The story is colourful and much appreciated by everyone in the courtroom and the theatre.
And then the opposing attorney gets up and exposes this story as dressing up what was little more than an ambush killing. Garrett's reputation as the killer of Billy the Kid went through a similar trajectory though not in such a short period.
The facts are murkier with Pat Garrett. We will never be able to say with certainty that Pat Garrett's version of how Billy the Kid met his death was not true. And yet, something about the story doesn't seem right.
It's funny, though, that a considerable amount of ink has been spent romanticizing Billy the Kid. This is odd because, while we might dispute how he got that way, there is no denying that Billy was a bad man. Under the law of the day, he deserved to hang. He'd unquestionably get the death penalty in many jurisdictions today. You can't, although many have tried, make him a sympathetic figure unless you do so by injecting large amounts of fantasy and disregarding certain key facts.
Historically, however, that is where the efforts have been made. Pat Garrett is usually an ambiguous figure at best in the story. If we consider Wyatt Earp's story by contrast, Earp's position was much more ambiguous than Garrett's. Garrett really campaigned on law and order and worked to deliver it. Earp was just fighting on one side of a family feud and using the law to further his and his brothers' interests.
And he clearly believed that this end justified some means that we would regard as dubious. The fascinating thing about True Grit is that it clearly takes the Garrett side of the argument. In a wild situation, you may just have to do some hard to justify things to make a good thing happen.
You might put it this way, in a morally ambiguous world where it is possible to assemble evidence so as to make everyone look equally bad or good, the way to separate the sheep from goats is to look at the end they were aiming at. We're all sinners but the road to sainthood is defined by the ultimate goal.
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