Goines On: Glad to be home

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Goines had occasionally felt depressed during his first few days back from France. He was sure it wasn’t because he was no longer in France; he was too glad to be home for that. Whatever the reason was, the feeling was deep, for he had even emailed a friend that on his walk the previous morning he had felt as though he might keel over dead before he reached home, and that he was thinking of telling his new primary care physician, when he met her in a couple of weeks, that he hoped he wouldn’t tarnish her record by dying before the end of his first year under her care. Was he depressed because he thought he would die soon?

Orange Terrorist alert justified

I finished reading John Updike's 2006 novel Terrorist this afternoon. After acknowledging five days ago Christopher Hitchens's Orange Alert that Terrorist might be "one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon," I was actually hoping that it would turn out to have been a false alarm. I hoped that John Updike, ill or not, could still have written an excellent and entertaining book. I mentally readied myself to conjecture how Mr. Hitchens could have got it wrong. He was deficient somehow when it came to literary criticism. And why was that? I prepared to adjust my uniformly high opinion of his judgment.

Terrorist (2006: John Updike) [Fatherless eighteen-year-old Ahmad—half Irish, half Egyptian—has been under the influence of imam Shaikh Rashid since he was eleven. Ahmad's Jewish guidance counselor in his inner-city New Jersey high school offers help, but Ahmad agrees to commit violence for his religious beliefs] 05-2012

My high opinion of Christopher Hitchens remains intact.
    Terrorist portrays aging Jewish guidance counselor Jack Levy convincingly, as I hoped I showed by my excerpts. But his young would-be terrorist Ahmad is a clichéd, one-dimensional acolyte, extensively indoctrinated in the Koran and continually reminding himself that he is supposed to abhor sex and hate America and Americans. He shows little sign of being a New Jersey teenager.
    New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani (in "John Updike's Terrorist Imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security," June 6, 2006) seems to absolve Updike for this character by suggesting that "the reader cannot help suspecting that Mr. Updike found the idea of such a person so incomprehensible that he at some point abandoned any earnest attempt to depict his inner life and settled instead for giving us a static, one-dimensional stereotype."
    That's tepid absolution, which I don't think Mr. Updike would have been happy to acknowledge. But it's possible. How does one comprehend a jihadist? Updike may have been determined to write something pertinent to 9/11 despite simply not being well-suited to undertake that particular subject. This can only be spectulation, and unprofitable.

But the plotting. Surely Updike could have done better than concoct a plot with more convenient coincidences than a 43-minute made-for-TV special? Levy, Ahmad's guidance counselor, happens to have an affair with  Ahmad's  mother. Levy's wife's sister happens to work for the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. The secretary happens to suspect that a terrorist plot is hatching in the town where Ahmad and his assistant's sister happen to live. The secretary's assistant happens to speak frequently with her sister, who happens to tell her about this Arab kid her husband the guidance counselor has been trying to persuade to go on to college rather than become a licensed truck driver....
     Isn't it about time for another commercial?

Now back to reading Physics for Future Presidents, which among other things "presents the science behind terrorism...."

Physics for Future Presidents: The Science behind the Headlines (2008: Richard A. Muller) [Physics professor explains basic physics to help government leaders and their constituents make better decisions about issues they face. Presents the science behind terrorism, energy, nuclear weapons and power, space and satellites, and global warming. Debates the future of alternative eco-friendly resources and new technologies.]

    Terror, terror, terror—terrorism everywhere. Not frequently orange anymore, but there in static white noise everyday of our lives.

Reading Updike

Because I'd just finished reading Shibumi (whose Nicholai Hel is the world's #1 professional assassin, targeting terrorists), I next turned to my digital recording of Terrorist, by John Updike (2006).
    With Updike, the subject hardly matters. Who was it who said that Updike never wrote an uninteresting sentence?

The orange of the Gulf sign at the all-night gas station two blocks away is the only emphatic touch of color in the pre-dawn vista. Here and there in the neighborhood a wan, low-voltage night light warms the window of a child's room or a stair landing. In the semi-darkness, under a polished dome of darkness weakened by the climbing rot of city glow, the fore-shortened angles of roof lines, shingles, and sidings recedes to infinity. [at approximately the 55-minute point of a 10-hour, 37-minute reading]

(How could my Yale roommate Jim Carney possibly have been sincere in comparing my own collegiate letter writing to Updike's?)

When he wrote Terrorist, Updike was about Krapp's age, and mine—a few years older. And high school guidance counselor Jack Levy, who witnessed the scene depicted above, was only a year ahead of me in high school:

Prize student at Central High, Class of '59, before it felt so much like a prison and you could still study and take pride in the praise of the teachers.

Yes, those were the days.
    Jack has been lying in bed reflecting on his life:

It was like tuning the violin he used to play in his boyhood. "Another Heifetz, another Isaac Stern." Is that what his parents had hoped for?
    He disappointed them, a segment of misery where his own and the world's coincided. His parents grieved. He had defiantly told them he was quitting lessons; the life in books and on the streets meant more to him. He was eleven, maybe twelve, to take such a stand, and never picked up the violin again, though sometimes, hearing on the car radio a snatch of Beethoven or a Mozart concerto or Dvořák's gypsy music that he had once practiced in a student arrangement, Jack is surprised to feel the fingering trying to live again in his left hand, twitching on the steering wheel like a dying fish. [at approximately the 44-minute point]

    But now,

He lies exposed, as to a sickening blast of radioactivity, to an awareness of his life as a needless blot, a botch, a prolonged blunder imposed upon the otherwise immaculate surface of this ungodly hour.
    In the world's dark forest he had missed the right path. But was there any right path, or was being alive in itself the mistake?
    In the stripped-down history that he used to purvey to students who had trouble believing that the world didn't begin with their births and the proliferation of computer games, even the greatest men came to nothing, to a grave, their visions unfulfilled—Charlemagne, Charles the Fifth, Napoleon, the unspeakable but considerably successful and still, at least in the Arab world, admired Adolf Hitler. History is a machine perpetually grinding mankind to dust.
    Jack Levy's guidance counseling replays in his head as a cacophony of miscommunication. He sees himself as a pathetic elderly figure on a shore, shouting out to a flotilla of the young as they slide into the fatal morass of the world, its dwindling resources, its disappearing freedoms, its merciless advertisements geared to a preposterous popular culture of eternal music and beer and impossibly fit and thin young females. [at approximately the 49-minute point]

    It's the world in which American-born Muslim teenager Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy will be drawn (implausibly? see below) into a terrorist plot against "infidels"....

I'm on Orange Alert, however. Christopher Hitchens sent Terrorist "windmilling across the room in a spasm of boredom and annoyance," he wrote in his review in The Atlantic (June 2006, "John Updike, Part One: No Way") [p. 101 of Arguably]. He judged it "one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon" and judged Updike as "someone who has been keeping up with the 'Inside Radical Islam' features in something like Newsweek. [p. 103]
     Hitchens did allow, though, in his "Farewell to a Much-Misunderstood Man" (Slate, February 2, 2009), that "Perhaps Updike [1932-2009] was too ill by then. And something seemed to have gone wrong with his confidence toward the end. His 2006 novel, Terrorist, was a failure of nerve...."
     [Follow-up]

Some kind of editor

Click to read

My cell phone rang on the commute van about half-way to Chapel Hill this morning. It was loud, which reminded me of the van's policy of limiting cell phone usage so as not to bother other riders, which in turn reminded me how I'd complained of the driver's playing religious stations on the radio when I first started riding (I told her I'd signed up to commute, not to attend Sunday School).
    It was my wife. "The Chapel Hill Herald published a letter of yours this morning."
    "Yes, I know."

I'd looked at p. 2 immediately after collecting the paper from the driveway and was surprised to see my letter printed there, looking longer on the page than it had in the submission box. (In a comment on Monday—"'Daughters of thy uncles and aunts'"—I expressed doubt that the paper would print my potentially explosive missive.)
    Maybe I was even apprehensive that it would print it. I had come to feel unsure about my tactic of appropriating Hurley's logical space for the purpose of extending his criticism of Islam to Christianity. After all, my letter was suggesting that a Christian's belief in heavenly reward for assenting to the literal truth of a myth borrowed from pagan precursors to Christianity was no more credible than a Muslim's belief in heavenly reward for blowing himself up in order to kill a few enemies of Islam.
    But I continued to hope that my concluding "joke" about swimming trunks had lightened the tone, if not enough to defuse the bomb, at least enough to dampen its explosion in this nominally Christian society.

"Daughters of thy uncles and aunts"

The Holy Book

The writer whose letter to the editor provoked me on June 22 has responded to my request that he "possibly tell us a bit more about where he is coming from" when he complained about not making an "al-Qaida-linked" hit list.
    His reply was printed on p. 2 of the July 1 edition of The Chapel Hill Herald, under the title "Letter writer sets record straight":

Reader Morris Dean in a June 24 letter ("Hurley should give rest of the story" [the editor's title, not mine]) wonders whether my June 22 letter mocking Islamic terrorists ("Terrorists' hit list omission lamented") was motivated by some family military history [sic] event.
    No (though we do have various experiences and connections there).
    Instead, I like to think that taunts like mine might aid the national effort to separate the terrorists from the sea of Muslims in which they swim. It shouldn't be too difficult. Mohammed's OK of first-cousin marriages 14 centuries ago has ensured that we're not dealing with real high SAT scores here. I hope Mr. Dean continues to "criticize and occasionally ridicule Islamists" on his blog.

Uh, come again? Mr. Hurley seems to be saying that the Jihadists have descended through so many first cousins that they're less intelligent than Muslims who descended through fewer.
    First, though, it does seem that Muhammad did "OK" marriage to first cousins:

Allah says: “O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee the wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers; and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the captives of war whom Allah has assigned to thee; and daughters of thy paternal uncles and aunts, and daughters of thy maternal uncles and aunts, who migrated with thee; …”
    Allah has made marriage with first cousins lawful. There is no dispute about this in Islamic Law. Anyone who wishes to dispute with this is placing his own religion in serious danger. [http://en.islamtoday.net/node/1265]

    But getting back to what Mr. Hurley might be saying, does his apparent contention that terrorist Muslims will be less intelligent than other Muslims mean, for example, that if a Muslim's ancestors married enough first cousins, he'd be prone to believe things like, "If you blow up some infidels by detonating yourself, you'll go straight to Paradise"?
    And if his ancestors didn't marry quite so many, he might only believe things like, "If your daughter gets raped, you'd better have her stoned to death to preserve your family honor"?

But people marry their first cousins in other cultures, too. Doesn't Mr. Hurley's sort of eugenicist's approach imply that if a Christian's ancestors married enough first cousins, he'd be prone to believe things like, "Simply believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and you'll have eternal life"?
    And if his ancestors didn't marry quite so many, he might only believe things like, "The Bible is the literally revealed word of God"?

But what does that have to do with Mr. Hurley's taunting the terrorists in order to "aid the national effort to separate the terrorists from the sea of Muslims in which they swim"?
    Does he think that they're so much less intelligent than other Muslim swimmers that taunts will cause them to stop swimming and walk out of the sea so they can be arrested?
    Maybe someone will ask him.
_______________
July 6. I decided to ask him myself. My letter was published this morning.

Faith-based support groups

In my Monday's post on "The miracle," I wrote that I think:

there's less of a possibility of Tom [Sheepandgoat]'s becoming an atheist than of my again becoming a theist. He has his Jehovah's Witness support group, people he sees (I think he indicated) three days a week down at Kingdom Hall, whereas I can't be said to have such a support group—unless a few authors I read can be counted as such.

And Tom supportively commented:

Many atheists find support groups within the blogging community. You could do that...I hope you don’t go that way, and I don’t foresee that you will. So far, you are a blogger who happens to be atheist rather than an atheist blogger. Even as I try to be a blogger who is one of Jehovah’s Witnesses rather than a JW blogger.

Right on, my friend!

No, as I commented back to Tom:

I don't feel the need for such a support group. I have the necessary life support of my wife, my dog, and my many friends (including yourself in your non-religious-affiliated moments).

In thinking about the concept of a support group, I realized that one of the practical uses of a church (or a temple or a mosque or a synagogue or a Kingdom Hall or, for Wiccans, I guess a wattle hut?) is to serve as a support group for its members. Perhaps that's the main reason for many of them. A place to go to have their faith and their faithful practice reinforced and perhaps reinvigorated.

But what about those "atheist...support groups within the blogging community"? What are they doing? They don't have any faith to enforce or invigorate. Maybe they're getting together to celebrate communally what I too celebrate (individually) of our constitutional freedom from religion? Or maybe they're political groups banding together to fight further encroachments on that freedom? After all, we only have it "while we still have it." And if we can take Harris and Hitchens and Dawkins at their words that religion is lethal and needs to be overcome, then I suppose some atheist groups might be plotting ways to achieve that....

And the religious houses of course serve other purposes than that of a support group. Some congregations have political agendas too. Support Bush! Don't pull the plug on Terry Schiavo! Down with gays and lesbians! Keep your women covered! Death to infidels! Some support charitable causes. Money for the starving people of Africa! Money for good Jack Abramoff's projects! Money for Jihad!

And of course they proselytize, which I guess is what the "plotting atheists" referred to above might be doing—in reverse!

By the way, by "life support" I was not referring to extraordinary measures' being taken should I become vegetative. No, my living will states that I'm strictly DNR. (And that might as well stand for Do Not Resurrect.)