Monthly Archives: December 2008

Next generation

One of the high schools in this area requires all seniors to complete a senior project on a topic of their choice. The project includes a written research paper, an oral presentation, and 15 hours of work with a mentor. This year, one senior asked me to be his mentor for his senior project on world religions.

This particular high school senior is fun to work with — he has a flexible and curious intellect, is willing to push himself, and is open to new ideas. Tonight we determined that he takes an essentialist approach to religion while I take a functionalist approach, and then we talked about the phenomenological approach to studying religion. In the course of all this we started on some basic scholarly skills like learning how to underline in books, how to ask critical questions while reading, how to hold a different opinion than the author or one’s mentor, and how to look for the internal structure and unspoken assumptions of a piece of writing.

I realized that what I was really doing was introducing him to the intellectual tradition in which I was originally trained, an Americanized version of critical theory. I also realized that I’m taking on the role of one of my primary intellectual mentors, Lou Outlaw — even down to not worrying about whether the student agrees with me, and instead worrying that they understand and find a new perspective on the world.

All of which got me remembering my own mentor, and reflecting on how I’m passing on this tradition to another generation, in my own way. One result of this reflection was a quick Web search, which led me to this thoughtful video interview with Lou Outlaw. My favorite bit in the video [at about 11:30] is when Lou says: “This is ludicrous. What do you mean you don’t criticize socialism? Criticism is central to the management of social, political, democratic life. You gotta have criticism.”

Which pretty much sums up the intellectual tradition that I’m now trying to pass on to the next generation, even though I’m now doing theology instead of political philosophy.

More on shoes

Update on yesterday’s post:

Today the BBC reports: “An Iraqi official was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the journalist was being interrogated to determine whether anybody paid him to throw his shoes at President Bush.” Given the stated policies of the current U.S. administration, the word “interrogated” could mean what the rest of the world would call torture.

The BBC also reports that the man’s name is Muntadar al-Zaidi, and they give an English translation of what he shouted at Bush: “This is a farewell kiss, you dog… This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq.”

Special take-home quiz: Who is on the moral high ground here, George Bush or Muntadar al-Zaidi, and why? Ten bonus points for citing verses from both the Koran and the New Testament.

Update: Leona’s selling T-shirts (see comments).

Shoes?!?…

At 19:16 GMT (i.e., 2:16 p.m. EST, less than 3 hours ago), the BBC Web site reported that an Iraqi threw shoes at George W. Bush. Shoes? Yes, shoes….

An Iraqi journalist was wrestled to the floor by security guards after he called Mr Bush “a dog” and threw his footwear, just missing the president.

The soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture….

In the middle of the news conference with Mr Maliki, a reporter stood up and shouted “this is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog,” before hurtling his shoes at Mr Bush, narrowly missing him….

Correspondents called it a symbolic incident. Iraqis threw shoes and used them to beat Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad after his overthrow….

Link to story and video.

What a wildly improbable story, and what an interesting example of political theatre. I guess peace rallies on the Mall in Washington are just too Old School, so nowadays the really cool protesters throw shoes.

I shouldn’t be so flippant. That journalist is dead meat, and is probably having the crap beaten out of him even as I write this. Watch the video — security is going easy on him because there are cameras watching, but they are not being nice to him — wait until there aren’t any cameras trained on them.

A random memory

This took place back somewhere around 1984, when I was working as a yardman in a lumber yard.

One of the truck drivers — we’ll call him Skipper — was a young guy, maybe twenty or twenty-two, with sandy hair down to his shoulders and a friendly open face. Like all of us, he always wore a baseball cap, and like most of us younger guys he always wore shorts and a T-shirt in the summer; like me, he wore wire-rimmed aviator glasses of the type that were popular back then.

But he was a little louder and more cheerful than the rest of us, and he had a wicked west-of-Boston accent, and above all he partied much harder than anyone else who worked there. He was late for work more than once because he was hung over, or he slept through the alarm clock, or (so it was said) he was still drunk or stoned when he got up in the morning and couldn’t get it together enough even to drive to work.

Skipper managed to make it work for a couple of years; he wasn’t the best driver we had, but he was good enough. Then he started getting worse. One morning, Bob, the senior driver, came back from a delivery just before lunch. “Where’s Skipper?” he said. “I don’t see his truck.”

One of the other drivers said that Skipper wasn’t back yet.

Bob, a master at sounding disgusted, said, “Jesus, he just had to go up to Carlisle, and he left before I did.”

Pretty soon everyone, even the kid who came in to work after school, was aware that Skipper was screwing up. The other drivers were resentful because Skipper wasn’t pulling his weight. Georgia, the yard foreman, would make a point of checking his watch when he saw Skipper driving into the yard. It became obvious that the shipper and the vice-president were also keeping an eye on him. Skipper didn’t seem to care; he was the same happy-go-lucky, half-stoned, cheerful guy as usual. This went on for a few weeks: tension building around Skipper, while he seemed utterly unaware of it.

One day, late in the afternoon, several of us were standing around in the coffee shack, pretending to wait for customers but really waiting for five o’clock to come around. One of the drivers came out of the shipper’s office. “They caught Skipper.” “What? Whaddya mean, they caught him?” He told us what he had heard, a bare-bones account of what had happened: Skipper was driving one of the box trucks; the vice-president shadowed Skipper in a car, followed him to a jobsite, a place where there was no delivery scheduled; Skipper was selling drugs off the back of his truck.

That’s all we ever heard about it. Nobody had to say that they fired Skipper, we all knew that. But was he just selling marijuana, or was it something more serious? Were the cops called? Was he arrested? I never found out, and no one ever talked about it. Skipper never came back, and I never saw him again.

Another take on Harvey Milk

Blogger Tallturtle was living in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco when Harvey Milk was assassinated thirty years ago, and he’s written a short memoir of his impressions of the incident, from his perspective as an ordinary San Franciscan of that day.

Tallturtle has a couple of observations that I hadn’t heard before:– First, that Dan White, the guy who murdered Milk and George Moscone, was fairly clueless when it came to politics, and possibly even too honest in a peculiar sense of the word:

This next part is merely my speculation. White was a political amateur. He didn’t understand how politics was played in San Francisco. He didn’t realize that as a conservative Supervisor, he was valuable to the commercial and financial elites of the city. He didn’t know there were many perfectly legal ways that rich people could reward their friends. Heck, he may not have known that these people considered him his friend….

And second, that San Franscisco of that day was not a coherent city, but rather a collection of many smaller communities that didn’t really communicate with one another. This last point leads to the moral of the story for Tallturtle — but rather than spoil the moral for you here, you should just go and read the post yourself.

[untitled]

Low gray clouds come and
go. The wind shifts from east to
southwest then to west.

The turn of seasons
seems to be stalled. It’s fall, then
it’s winter, then fall.

Midafternoon, just
before sunset, the clouds broke,
and turned orange pink,

a solstice sunset
in shirtsleeve weather with a
winter’s cold west wind.

Memory

Tucked in a large zippered portfolio that was given to me by a pretty and wealthy girl when I was in college — but that’s a different memory, let’s not get diverted by other memories quite yet….

In that large zippered portfolio, I have a poster that a friend gave me in high school. “BANANA MAN” says the poster in large, cheerful letters. Above that is a cartoon portrait of a caped superhero, arms crossed, big goofy grin over his big goofy chin, a bulbous nose, stern eyes gazing out from behind a bright yellow mask loosely tied behind his head, all under a mop of unruly black hair. The poster is a lithograph drawn and printed by the guy who gave it to me, and there’s his signature in the bottom right corner: Karl E. Friberg.

Karl was a year ahead of me in high school, about the only student from art class I hung out with outside of class. Karl was always drawing Banana Man cartoons, some of which ran in the high school newspaper, and I admired and copied his drawing style to the best of my ability. We had a free period together at some point, and I remember watching him bring out the “Banana Box,” a slim box filled with an unruly collection of drawing implements: pencils, pens, erasers, a ruler, felt-tip markers. As soon as I saw it I started assembling my own portable box of drawing implements.

“I’m going to make a lithograph of Banana Man,” Karl announced one day. He was taking an industrial arts class in printing. “I’m making Banana Man T-shirts.” Wow! What could be better than a Banana Man T-shirt! A few days later, Karl appeared with an armful of T-shirts, shouted, “Laundry!” and tossed me a Banana Man T-shirt. God knows what happened to that T-shirt, but he also gave me the Banana Man poster which is still in my portfolio….

Banana Man by Karl E. Friberg

Karl graduated from high school a few months later, and I completely lost touch with him. Did he go on to a career in commercial art as he dreamed of doing? Does he still draw Banana Man? After he graduated, I inherited his place as the cartoonist in the high school newspaper, and I drew a humorous melodrama called “Rabbit Man,” the main character of which was a shorter, dumpier, stupider version of Banana Man. I never was as good a cartoonist as Karl had been.

It’s worth mentioning that Karl Friberg’s Banana Man predates the British cartoon character Bananaman by four or five years.

Shoulda had a notebook with me

Over the past week, I’ve had more than the usual number of pastoral visits and conversations. I spent half an hour sitting with a dead woman, waiting for her family to arrive. I sat beside the hospital bed of someone who is in the midst of serious health crisis. I talked with someone who is under stress and having problems with his/her spouse. I listened to someone tell me about the illness of a grandchild’s parent. And quite a few more besides.

My older sister is a non-fiction writer, and professor of writing at Indiana University East. Recently she told the students in one of her writing classes that they should always keep a notebook on hand, “a little book you jot things down in when they occur to you… because everything must be turned into writing. Everything.” I used to keep such a notebook, but I don’t any longer. The change came when I started working as a minister. The spoken word demands a different kind of thought process than does the written word — it is less precise, it requires more repetition, it is more formulaic, it is inherently improvisational (even if you speak from a text as I do), and it is rooted in memory not in written notes. Because of this, most preachers are not particularly good writers of prose, although some preachers wind up being pretty good poets.

Oh, and something else happened to me this week. I was driving somewhere with a member of our church, and a small silver sports car pulled right out in front of me without even looking and I jammed on the brakes hit the horn swerved missed the idiot by about two feet and shouted through the windshield at the other driver (who didn’t even look until the last minute!), What the $%&#, buddy!?! Yep, I dropped a big loud f-bomb right where a church member could hear it (fortunately he’s the son of a preacher and so has no illusions about the ministry). If ever there was an incident worth recording in the notebook I do not carry, that was it.