Just because

It occurs to me that an awful lot of people alive today never went to a drive-in movie. For their benefit, there were always two movies at the drive in and at the end of the second one they'd play a teaser to get you excited about the idea of going to the snack bar. This is one of them:

The Philadelphia Story (2)

Donald Ogden Stewart
Stewart is one of two people credited with turning Philip Barry's stage play into a screenplay. The other is Waldo Salt. Both men were communists and both were blacklisted.

Stewart famously said that he changed very little of Barry's play because it was near perfect. That's not true. Even a perfect play—and the The Philadelphia Story was most emphatically not perfect—has to be modified quite a bit to make it work on the screen. What is true, however, is that Stewart and Barry saw the world in very much the same way. Both men were radicals. Where Stewart was a political radical, Barry was an artistic radical who desperately wanted to be the American Strindberg.

There is a seeming irony then that the only reason either man is remembered today is a movie that glorifies old money and the manners that go with it. What the movie hates, and hates with a passion that is incandescent, is self-made men and the liberalism of its time. (This will come as a surprise to many younger readers, and especially to anyone who got their understanding of "liberalism" at university, but liberals and communists were each others' most hated enemies for most of their respective histories.)

To go back to my earlier post today, the magazine that inspired Spy was not some gossip and scandal tabloid as you might guess from watching the movie but Fortune, yes the "Fortune 500" Fortune. It didn't sell for 5 cents a copy (a typical price for the era) but for $1 an issue in 1929! And the model for Sidney Kidd is Henry Luce. Barry and Stewart hated Luce and what Luce stood for so much they couldn't do an honest parody but instead engaged in the very cheapest insults.

Here is the odd contradiction  in both men: for all their radical notions they were both shameless social climbers. They hated capitalism, industry, markets and men like Luce who succeeded through catering to the tastes of America's growing middle classes and they worshiped old wealth and status in a way that the term "sycophant" doesn't begin to suggest.

Oddly enough, both Barry and Stewart were well-placed to have done a genuine portrait of Luce because all three went to Yale and both Stewart and Luce were asked to join the very exclusive Skull and Bones society while there. They were all members of a very small and exclusive society of elites. If there were any dirty stories like the one that Macaulay Connor tells CK Dexter-Haven in the movie, they would have known it.

They didn't, however, because there wasn't any such story. There never was a more fang-less satire in the history of film than the attack on Luce here. Luce's real offense, besides being much more successful than Barry and Stewart, was that he was an anti-communist.

So we have one empty promise here. The movie promises an evisceration of a certain kind of journalism and misses its target by miles. It also promises us an inside look at one of the most famous debutantes of its time. Tomorrow I'll discuss how well it delivers on that promise.

The Philadelphia Story (1)

This week's theme, leading up to Valentine's Day, is The Philadelphia Story.

Why leading up to Valentine's Day? Because it is a movie that has a lot to do with love for me and one other person.

It is one of the great movies. And yet, it doesn't make sense. It really doesn't. And it doesn't make sense  on about twelve different levels.

Here is  starter question if you are familiar with the film. In it, there is a fictional scandal and gossip magazine called Spy Magazine. Rhymes with "lie" as Uncle Wilie says. Okay, here is the thing, George Kittredge, the ambitious fiancé of Tracy Samantha Lord is an admirer of the magazine and says he says he reads it to keep up. He then tells Tracy that someday he may run for politics, as if to imply that he may be interested in coverage from Spy when he does.

Think about that. Why would a politician want to be covered in a gossip magazine?

And we also learn that Spy has a Buenos Aires office. Why would a scandal sheet have a Buenos Aires office?

It doesn't make sense. The picture of the magazine doesn't match up with real life. And that is not all. Don't get me wriong, I love this movie, but it is a mass of contradictions.

Here is just one more. When she learns that Spy magazine will cover her wedding, Tracy complains of being undressed and humiliated in public. And yet the movie itself does exactly that. It is closely based on two real-life women who are, in fact, put on display for public entertainment.

Morally, the movie is a mess from start to finish and it has a few dramatic problems too. And yet it is a great movie. How does all this work? That is this week's theme.

Translations

I'm a fan of the New American Bible. It is not my favourite translation (the NRSV is) but I have no fundamental objections to it. I know a lot of people dislike the NAB and many of them are a lot smarter than me and certainly are better informed about Bible translation.

But fan I may be of the NAB, I still did a double take when I saw this in today's lectionary:

Share your bread with the hungry,
shelter the oppressed and the homeless;
clothe the naked when you see them,
and do not turn your back on your own.

For comparison, here is how the NRSV handles the same passage:

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see them naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

And here is the NIV:

Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

The word choices here are very telling. Again, I don't know enough to say about the accuracy as translation but I really do wonder about some of the ways the NAB puts things.

The first thing you will note is that the NAB makes the language considerably more linear. The other two translations feature rhetorical questions. They ask what is the kind of fasting desired by God and then pose a number of rhetorical questions. The NAB gives us a direct command.

That is important because the rhetorical question makes it clear that we are talking about an act that is analogous to fasting. If you want to make yourself worthy of God's presence, this is how you do it. The NAB version makes this sort of action into something more like a commandment. You might say it is the difference between, "this is how you do penance" as compared to "do this or you sin".

That is a big difference.

The next question here has to be where did the "oppressed and the homeless" come from here? They are the "homeless poor" in the NRSV and the "poor wanderer" in the NIV. There is no way all three translations here can be correct. Either the NAB is right and the other two wrong or the NAB is wrong and the other two are right. If the latter, and I suspect it is the latter, then we have a pretty blatant to put a political spin on this verse.

One of the reasons that I am pretty certain this is the case is that the ancient world did not see poverty as a thing with politico-economic causes. That era—correctly if you ask me—understood poverty as an example of evil that is always with us and always will be. The expression "economic oppression" would have made no sense to them. By yoking "oppressed" to "homeless" the NAB makes poverty feel more like something with human causes. And that changes the feeling of everything.

Imagine that there is a small landslide and people need caring for and you volunteer. Think of what your attitude would be if you believed the landslide was just one of those things that happens. Now think of your attitude if you believe it was caused by something you contributed to.

It seems to me that Isaiah is telling us that caring for others who suffer is a habit we should develop in our life and that God is asking us to make this sort of habit as part of our sacrifices to him. The word choices in the NAB lean towards a different interpretation wherein it is our responsibility to make the root causes of evil disappear.

Finally, note how what is rendered as either "flesh and blood" or "kin" in the NRSV and NIV becomes "your own" in the NAB. That opens the filed considerably. Again, what is presented as a way of life in Isaiah ends up feeding a political agenda in the NAB version.

T & A part two

I wouldn't want you to think there was anything truly exceptional about A. She is a human being and therefore deserving respect but she is not unusual. You know women (and men) just like her and you know more than one. I start with the warning not to think her exceptional because people who hear about her without knowing her often think she must be exceptional.

When I met her again a while ago, what struck me most about her was how little she's changed. It's hard to explain this because, as others have said, "Most people don't change, so what?"

I guess the thing is that I think she ought to have changed.

What distinguishes A is competitiveness.  When we met she immediately launched into a recital of her life's events during the twenty years since we last met. The whole point of the story was to make it clear to me that she had succeeded. The story didn't come out slowly as it had with T and it didn't come out mournfully and I didn't have to read between the lines as I had with T. There was a need in her to tell me this story that was bursting to get out from the second we met.

The odd thing is that the story she told was entirely of failures. Much of it was about her failed marriage. It was told with a clear need not just to justify herself but also to make it clear that it wasn't her fault it had failed and to make it clear that she was better off now that she was out of it.

There is nothing unusual about this attitude for there are no true undefeated champions. The more competitive you are, the more likely you are to have losses. If you haven't lost yet, don't worry you will. There is an old joke about bikers, there are the ones who have crashed and the ones who will crash.

I think that is one of the things that marks people like A: they are very keen to make it clear that their defeats are not really defeats. But we all have been harmed. When Charles Ryder meets Julia Mottram on the ship he tells her that she has grown softer. She tells him that he has gotten harder. And there you have the two responses displayed. T, whom I wrote about yesterday, has responded to her defeats by getting softer. A, like Charles, has made herself harder.

If, as I had done with T. I had set out to come up with examples of good things she had done in the past and had only been able to come up with a couple, A would have jumped right on that. She would have pointed out that there were only a few. It's not defensiveness but rather what defensiveness will develop into if you push it. Being defensive is, after all, still a form of softeness.

Agone
Thinking about A, I actually wrote a a line about how competitiveness can seem like virtue. Then it struck that that was wrong because competitiveness is virtue. The Greeks, who invented the concept of virtue after all, thought of it in exactly those terms. Virtue was excellence and if you wanted to see virtue you went to see people in agone or competition to see it.

And here we hit one of those things about the Greeks that is both unlike us but also very much more like us than we might like to admit. For the Greeks admired Achilles. You may think you do too but Achilles was a thug and a creep of the first order. If you don't believe me, go read about the real Achilles.

Between us and the Greeks lie the middle ages and the middle ages admired Hector, the man Achilles killed, as greater than Achilles. Hector did everything he was supposed to. He was loyal to family and  his city. His death at Achilles hand was a foregone conclusion and it is obvious from the outset of the Iliad that Achilles is faster and stronger than Hector and, what is more, the gods, or fortune, are firmly on his side. And Hector is dutiful onto death even in the face of this.

The obvious reason for the admiration of the middle ages is the parallel with Christ who was dutiful unto death, even death on a cross. We can see a kind of virtue that leads to defeat; a kind of virtue that wins by losing. The Greeks could not. For them sacrifice was pointless and humility was not a virtue but a vice. The closest they could come was the tragedies of Sophocles and the death of Hector where there is a sort of horror in defeat of a great person but the Greeks could never say that Hector was greater than the man who killed him.

But we shouldn't be so quick to think we are better. An Achilles like figure occurs in a  lot of our dramas. Think of JR on Dallas or Victor on The Young and the Restless. These guys keep winning and while we don't exactly side with them, we tend to diminish the people who keep getting defeated. Joe Frazier is a better man that Muhammad Ali but it is Ali who got praised because he won.

The best revenge
And that is the odd thing about A. It's very hard not to compete with her. I've learned the hard way not to try and explain her to other women because they get so wrapped up in competing with her spectre that they don't really listen. Even women who don't know A get competitive when they hear about her.

And the thing is you can't not compete. I know that from the very outset of our encounter, she was  looking for the victory to take home. She was looking for the take home point that would give her a sense of triumph. I knew this from the second I saw her and have known for twenty years that we would inevitably meet one day and that this would happen.

With a competitive person you can tell yourself that  you won't compete back but that is nonsense. You will. As Lenin said, You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you. The competitive person will push and they will make you fight back. The Greeks had this much right, you can't just let that happen and pretend it doesn't affect you. It does.

A would sneer at Natasha Vargas-Cooper. She'd say, life is a series of tests so get used to it. Don't  run a round bemoaning the fact that some things are tests because they are and you will only fail by complaining. And she is right: life is a series of tests. I've known for twenty years that I would run into A again and that it would be a test.

So what to do? I'm repeating myself here but there is an old piece of advice that says the best revenge is living well. The point is to not let ourselves get dragged down to the level of the person who hurt us. I think the right way to respond to competitive people is a slight variation on that. The key is to compete for the right things. A competitive person will always try to get you to compete with them on their terms. They want you to compete on the same ground they are striving to be good at. That might be a good thing or it might not.

Yesterday I wrote about T and her admission that she had not been very giving. A could be very giving but only provided she felt she was competing. At the very beginning of our relationship, when she saw herself as competing with other women before her, she was very giving. Oddly enough, at the very end, when it was important to regain a sense of her own status, she was also very giving. In the middle when she was secure and comfortable knowing I was committed to her, she was a selfish jerk most of the time.

Again, there is nothing exceptional in that. A lot of women and men are like that all the time and just about all of us are like that sometimes. But if we are going to compete, and we should compete, we should compete for the things that really matter. Store up treasure in heaven. Life isn't like professional boxing, there is room for more than one champion and you can be one of them.

Getting men into church

Note: The second part of the T&A post from this morning will not appear until tomorrow.

I was doing some singing this morning and thought, as I have often done before, something fascinating about music. There is what I call the tyranny of the treble clef. If you look at a treble clef you'll notice it creates a standard of normality. The bottom line of the clef is an E and the top line is an F nine steps above. If you want to go beyond that, you need to use ledger lines. So the Treble clef tells that a normal range runs from C (the first ledger line below the staff) to A (the first ledger line above).

For those of you who don't read music, a much simpler way of putting things is that the treble clef tells you that normal range for men is tenor.

And it isn't. Overwhelmingly, the normal range for men's voices is baritone meaning that hymns that fit comfortably on the treble clef will usually be slightly out of our range. These hymns either don't let us use our rich bass tones on the one end or they will force us to strain on the other.

This may seem like a trivial point to some, and all by itself it would be, but it tells you a whole lot about how alien church culture is for men. And it has only become more so in recent years.

T & A part one

That title is not a perverse attempt to pull in Google hits. The letters are merely two that I choose to stand for two ex-girlfriends I coincidentally ran into both during the last little while and interesting lessons came out of both meetings. (Okay, me being me, I’m not entirely innocent here.) I'm going to write about T this morning and A this afternoon.

T and I met on the street and had coffee. We talked about her. Or, to be more precise, she talked about herself and I listened sympathetically.

And we did so with good reason. She has not had an easy life. She has children to care for and one of those children in particular needs a lot of care and she married a man whose strength is not caring and giving. That was what she talked about and I was happy to let her talk about it.

At the risk of seeming vain, I think I did my part of listening sympathetically and, as we say in the trade, “validating her feelings” rather well. This last simply means showing that you do understand that life is tough for her rather than, as we normally do, following up her story with one of your own or giving advice about what we think she ought to do or challenging her about the facts of her story. (That, I suppose, is what diaries, blogs and novels are for.)

Anyway, she was feeling much better after the hour we spent together and she surprised me by suddenly apologizing for something. She said, “When I think of you I feel guilty because you did everything for me in our relationship and I did nothing for you.”

Readers, being smarter than I am, will immediately see that there is a close connection between that apology and the first part of our conversation. I didn’t see the connection until later.

At the time I reacted instinctively. I told her she has more important things to worry about. I told her she had done lots of things for me and gave a couple of examples, but only a couple because, well I'll get to that. I told her she fell in love with me and that was an extraordinary gift. And I told her that it is a gift when women let you do nice things for them and that one of the things that set her far above some other women is that she was willing to let me do nice things for her and was willing to let herself respond to those nice things. All of which was true and all of which was entirely beside the point.

It was entirely beside the point because—as considerable reflection has hammered home—she was absolutely right. She didn’t give a lot. I couldn't think of many examples of her giving to me because there weren't many examples. I didn’t give an extraordinary amount myself—no more than what is due when someone loves you and lets you love them—but she gave a lot less than I did. The thing is, she wasn’t a very giving person.

I suspect she still isn’t. She is a very moral woman and the root of her caring for her children is certainly her morality. It was that morality that attracted me to her in the first place. It was a highly unusual thing for me at the time, most of the women I was involved with in those much younger years were chosen for qualities other than morality. (It was a surprise to find out that this very moral woman was, in fact, much better at the things that I had originally sought in other women who weren't so moral but that is a story I'll keep to myself.)

Her morality did not extend to being giving. She is driven by a strong sense of right and wrong. She always has been and always will be. It is only because she is now in a situation where regular giving is required by her moral beliefs that she has a keen appreciation of it in me.

Giving emotionally and physically is a habit. You don’t sit there and think, “Well, this is a situation that requires giving so I’ll do it.” You never have the time to think that through. Giving is a lot like swearing or not swearing. You get to be that way either because you train yourself to do it or, far more likely, because your mother did. Whatever the reason, it gets to be a habit and habits are the sort of thing morality sneers at. T was driven to acquire the habit of taking care of her child at great cost to herself and that is admirable but it would be better (and she would have been much happier) if she had developed the habit of giving much earlier in life.

(A big problem with being driven by morality is that you are always acting out of a sense of obligation or to avoid censure. And this is true even if the obligation is only to your own sense of who you are or if the censure you fear is your own. The truly giving person just does what is their habit and that is why the moral person will sneer a bit. Habits don't require much "moral" effort and, therefore, don't seem like much of an achievement. They are, however, a far greater achievement than any morality.)

Part of the reason T didn't develop the habit of giving earlier is because in our culture we credit women with giving automatically. We just take it as a given that women are giving and, not unrelated, we take it as a given that men aren't. To be honest, I’ve never seen much evidence of it. I’ve known women who were giving of course but the phenomenon of women in general being especially giving is nonsense.

Being giving is one of those qualities that women automatically get credit for and for what I suspect are largely competitive reasons, they often live up to it on the surface. It’s a lot like neatness that way. Because women are supposed to be neat, neatness is expected of women and women usually are publicly neat. But really getting to know a woman is often a matter of really getting to know a secret slob. Women are also often very giving on the surface because it is expected of them but a really giving woman is a very rare commodity indeed.