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meditationsfromthethirdrail · 4 years

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Credentials and Credibility

I’ve written about polarization and about empathy, rights and responsibilities in the last couple of blog posts. I have a long list of interrelated topics to cover before the November elections and I plan to keep plowing through them. But I’m well aware that my voice is a candle in the wind, to borrow the phrase used by T.H. White in the title of his tale about King Arthur’s dream of a more egalitarian and peaceful society. The number of readers of my blog thus far may barely run into double digits and that may never change. We are all drowning in information (and misinformation) unless we are either so socioeconomically disadvantaged as to be denied access or are actively disengaged from media. People in either category aren’t reading this.

With all the competition for the attention of readers and listeners, if someone wants to be heard above the din, he or she either has to have a forceful personality and a good platform, or actually have something important to say. I may not have either of those. Readers will judge for themselves. But it occurred to me that I ought to at least provide a little background about myself, which may or may not compel you to hear me. So here it is.

My story is not one of hard knocks and resentment - it’s a success story. There are a lot of ways to define success but I feel like I’ve grabbed a nice assortment of brass rings during my almost-seven decades on the planet. I’ve had a long and happy marriage to an incredible woman; I’ve traveled extensively (six continents and all fifty states) and lived for substantial periods in many states; I have three degrees from a major college; I attained a modestly high position in a large, global professional services firm and was financially well rewarded for my efforts; and I have many hobbies and interests that make it easy for me to stay fully occupied in retirement. Most importantly, I’m happy and at peace with myself and others. One could argue that these successes may have caused me to be out of touch with those who’ve enjoyed fewer of them, but I don’t think that’s entirely true, and I’ll try to suggest why.

My parents were the son and daughter of a sharecropper and a truck farmer/itinerant salesman, respectively, in rural Mississippi. They grew up during the Great Depression. They were married and gave life to my older brother when they were still in their teens. My dad dropped out of high school to sign up for the Army and served in the European theater in WWII. After the war he got a G.E.D. and served as a tractor mechanic for a while. Around the time I was born he was hired by a prominent agricultural implement manufacturing company, which led to him being transferred from Mississippi to Maryland to Ohio to Idaho to Oregon and to Iowa in order to earn promotions, and with family in tow. Later he also transferred to Texas, Missouri and Georgia, after I was left behind to attend college in Iowa. In those days it was possible to rise pretty high in the ranks of a business like my dad’s, without a glittery collegiate resume, if you worked hard and were willing to uproot yourself and your family whenever it was called for. So my dad eventually did rise fairly high in the ranks, and in the meantime my mom scrambled her way to a B.A., then taught high school English for a short time.

All’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare once said. My parents came a long way from the dusty fields where they picked cotton for 50 cents a day. My own road to success was much easier than theirs. During most of my childhood our family was financially situated about in the dead center of what was then considered middle class. My parents were not rich, although they accumulated modest wealth later in life, and they were always frugal, so I grew up with very few toys and a mostly empty closet. My parents were not the type to devote much time attending to my personal pursuits, other than to quietly demand that I get good grades in school. So I wouldn’t say I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I understand that’s a relative thing. I certainly wasn't lavished with material things as a child, but I never went hungry or worried about having a roof over my head.

Aside from a base level of financial and emotional support and protection, the best thing my parents gave me was a solid education in a robust public school system. This was a pre Betty Devos era. Fortunately I had just enough innate ambition (or willingness to succumb to my parents’ expectations) and intelligence to perform in the upper tier, academically. I could have done better but I often didn’t “apply myself,” as they say. In retrospect I realize I had ADHD but few people understood or cared about that back then.

My college record was spotty at first, but ultimately pretty good. I had almost no grasp of what I wanted to do with my life. As a result, I had an abnormally extended adolescence, to roughly age 27. Maybe I was a trendsetter; I see a lot more of that happening with young people today. In any case I considered, at various times and among other things, becoming a Baptist minister (I was licensed and briefly attended seminary), an English professor (I have an M.A. in English and instructed freshman writing courses for three years), a novelist and poet (insufficient talent and discipline derailed that plan), and a hotel manager (nah). A happy accident of my wandering and indecision was that I acquired a lot of knowledge that later paid off in surprising ways I’ll come back to later. I was financially very poor the entire time, which gave me considerable perspective on what it means to be concerned about affording basics such as food and transportation.

I vividly remember the catalysts for my decision to enter the social mainstream. One was the fallout from a poker game I got into with some friends. One of my “friends” was a notoriously unethical character who, one late evening when I was especially unlucky and perhaps too full of beer, lured me into some bad bets that resulted in a $700 debt to him. At that time, when I was working several crummy part-time jobs to afford food and my $50 share of the rent on a slum-quality house we shared with two other guys, $700 dollars seemed like a million dollars. I didn't realize and no one told me that on the very next evening the same group of friends gathered for another poker game as I was licking my wounds and trying to form a plan. I was not present to witness the scene in which the guy whom I was newly indebted to suffered an equally humiliating loss - a loss that was forgiven by the victor on the condition that the loser would also forgive my loss. My friends assumed that Bart (not his real name, or is it?) would inform me that I was off the hook. He did not.

For the first time in my life, I devised a budget in order to determine how I could repay Bart the debt that didn’t actually exist, because that’s the kind of guy I am. I believed, and I still do, that a person is morally and ethically responsible for meeting whatever commitments he or she enters into. So I scrambled for more hours working as a church janitor, a tutor and a library assistant; I ate Kraft macaroni and cheese almost every day (30 cents a box, if I recall); I stayed in my room as if I had contracted the then-undreamt-of coronavirus; and I turned over every penny that didn’t go for rent and minimal food to Bart in three monthly installments until I was finally clear. I was six feet tall but my weight fell to about 140 pounds. On the day I forked over the last $200, Bart skipped town, just as the news finally arrived that I wasn’t supposed to have owed that debt.

That sordid chapter concluded with me taking a job, out of sheer desperation, in a factory where I was paid a below-minimum wage to operate a machine which applied mailing labels to printed advertisements. It was mind-numbing. There were perhaps another 100 workers in that factory doing the same thing I was doing. The output of each worker was measured daily by the factory management. By the end of the first week I was the most productive mailing label attacher in the factory. To keep myself from going insane, I approached my task as if it were a game and challenged myself each shift to beat my previous day’s output, which I always did. During my brief lunch breaks I used to surreptitiously glance around at the other workers and I understood exactly what Thoreau meant when he opined that the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation. I don’t know if he was right about “the mass of men,” but he certainly could have been describing that crew at the factory.

In my second week at the factory I met another newly-hired college guy whose wife and he were trying to save enough money to move to Los Angeles so he could take a shot at professional acting - this was his second job. Chatting with him during lunch breaks, i was inspired by his desire to fulfill a dream and the difficult steps he was taking to do it. I listened to him, I looked around at the hollow-eyed, middle-aged folks who had worked for years operating labeling machines, and I squirmed as I considered what a sap I was for racking up a poker debt and falling victim to a con man. i abruptly abandoned the factory but I felt so discombobulated that I enlisted my good buddy John to drive out to Idaho with me so I could visit my brother and try to get my shit together. By the end of that brief sojourn out west, the best job offer I could manage was from Roto-Rooter . . . to work in the field, as it were. Wake up call!

If you’ve read this far you must be wondering how any of this supports the notion that I’m qualified to write about sociopolitical matters. It doesn’t, except to demonstrate that I have at least a small measure of “street cred.” But the best is yet to come. When I returned to Iowa I found a better job in a hotel. Initially I was a night auditor, which is a position that involves being a desk clerk part of the time and an accountant the rest of the time. Only a small step forward, financially, but it gave me a taste for something I had never previously thought about doing for even one minute. Accounting, I quickly learned, was something I had a natural aptitude for, and in some quirky way I found it interesting. Once again I viewed my duties as a sort of game, but this was a game that lit up my brain much more brightly than did operating a machine to perform an exceptionally repetitive task.

My whole life is a series of lucky breaks at critical junctures. In this instance the break was that I met a co-worker - a guy who shared the hotel night auditor position with me - who had previously worked for a large CPA firm. He had taken the part-time hotel job because he was trying to become a full-time stock trader and that’s what he was doing during the day. From him I learned what it is that CPAs in a big firm actually do. Let me assure you I’m not going to get into that subject, in case you were already feeling the dread. (Thank God for actuaries - the only people who make accountants seem slightly interesting.) Suffice it to say that I figured out how I could minimize the additional schooling I would need to become qualified to be a CPA and I decided to take a stab at it.

I kept the hotel job but started carrying a heavy load of college classes - accounting, math, economics, law, etc. It so happened that I met my future wife, who was just finishing her Interior Design degree at the same college, about the same time I took the first tentative steps down my new career path. That was even more fortuitous - I give her lots of credit for helping me stay the course. The two years in which I went to college in the day, worked at the hotel at night, and struggled to get our new romance off the ground, was “character-building,” to say the least. I can barely remember anything about that period, it was such a blur. To give you an idea of how much of a blur it was, the major highlight I remember was driving with my new spouse to Des Moines to dine at Spaghetti Works. $5 for beer-and-cheese spaghetti, all-you-can-eat salad bar and a glass of swill. Heaven!

When the two hellish years finally ended and I received my B.S. in Accounting, I had already lined up a job in Des Moines as an auditor with one of the Big 8 (at that time) accounting firms. Not long afterward, I passed the CPA exam and my wife landed a spot with a local design firm, and we were on our way.

Ok, at last I’m where I possibly should have started. In the ensuring three decades I continued to work as a CPA, becoming a partner along the way (meaning that I became one of the owners), and developing a specialization working with clients in the financial services industry - investment management companies and banking and finance companies, primarily. This is the good part, folks. My career soon took me from Iowa to New York City, where my background in English earned me the privilege of being a key designer and the principal author of new practice guidance for our international firm, which was just merging with another large international firm. That put me in the spotlight for a time and gave me a leg up for promotion. After the merger we relocated to Los Angeles, where I worked with some of the most prominent investment management companies in the world, and numerous banks, mortgage banks and other financial institutions. Finally we moved to southeast Pennsylvania and I split time engaged with clients there and in California, and with our national financial services practice in New York.

Late, late nights on Wall Street helping to prepare financial offerings with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. Late, late nights at client offices in L.A., San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York and Philadelphia, managing teams of young accountants to deal with complex accounting problems under tremendous pressure. Board meetings, fee negotiations, staff meltdowns, discoveries of fraud and malfeasance, financial crises in which I was an inside observer. A 60-hour work week felt almost like a vacation compared to many weeks with even longer hours. It was enough to give me PTSD. I don’t want to overstate it - it wasn’t like actual life or death combat PTSD - but I still have nightmares ten years and more after the fact.

That’s a very quick summary of the 30+ years in which I obtained hard-won knowledge about global finance and economics - a period in which I also had a lot of experiences with politics, charitable organizations and other components of society I didn’t have time to get into today. I still spend a lot of time staying informed about subjects ranging from psychology and mythology to current events and hard science. There’s a ton I still don’t know. But as my all-time favorite singer Joni Mitchell famously said, I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now.

#politics #sociopolitical #accounting #credentials

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goingmedieval · 7 years

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Keep the word ‘Judeo’ out of your Racist Mouth, Nigel Farage.

My loves, it is with a heavy heart that I announce Nigel Farrage is once again saying some meaningless garbage.

I know, I know. You are not surprised, but I am afraid I have to respond to this douche canoe’s latest idiocy – in this case the following tweet:

For those not up to speed with this particular flavour of British idiocy – at the moment the Archbishop of York, Nigel ‘Why don’t I have a chin? Let’s blame the EU’ Farage, and now Prime Minister Theresa May are all shocked and offended that Cadbury’s promoted an ‘Egg Hunt’ for the National Trust rather than a specific ‘Easter Egg Hunt’.

I know.

All of this is, of course nonsense, and ordinarily I try to ignore Farage as much as possible, being as my well-being is perched on a knife’s edge in today’s political hell scape. However, Farage just referred to England as having a ‘Judeo-Christian’ culture, and I cannot stand for it.

Leaving aside the issue that Jews don’t, you know, celebrate Easter, because they are Jewish, the idea that we here in the UK somehow celebrate the ‘Judeo’ in Judeo-Christian is offensive, given the hundreds upon hundreds of years of bloody repression of Jews in England.

Backing right the fuck up, it should be obvious that medieval society was not particularly kind to Jews. (If you are out of touch about this, check out Moore’s, The Formation of a Persecuting Society.) Because medieval Europe was largely Christian (except Spain, which was balling), Jews generally had a terrible time. They were restricted from pursing most trades, and as a result largely ended up in the financial sector. Christians, you see, were prevented from lending money at interest because that constituted the sin of usury. Jews did not have the same religious prohibition and made the best of their place in a super stringent society by lending money. This probably led to the stereotypical bigoted idea of Jews as terrible money grubbers that we are all still dealing with.

Jews were so hated that they usually had to be under royal or imperial protection. People resented them because something something the death of Christ (which the Romans were totally off the hook for, obvs), and also because they now owed the Jews money.

English people, like most Europeans, were pretty big dicks to the Jews. First off, and for your information Mr. Farage, there were no Jews in England until after the Norman conquest. (Remember? When the French people took over? Because England is a part of Europe? YOU GIT.) William the Conqueror invited a group of Jews from Rouen to settle in England in 1070, though he wouldn’t let them own land. Because LOL.

By the twelfth century the Jews in London were granted a series of concessions by Henry I that meant they were treated a little bit more like people. They were allowed to buy and sell property, be tried by their peers, and swear on the Torah instead of the Bible. They were also allowed the right of movement around England – and I quote – ‘as if they were the king’s own property’ (Sicut res proproae nostrae). (I know. I know.) So Jews were totally allowed to be people in England. You know, people who were royal property, but stuff got kind of bad after that. King Stephen decided to be a total dick and burn down a Jewish man’s house in Oxford because he wasn’t paying towards the king’s expenses. (Stay classy Stephen!) Then in 1144 there was the death of (soon to be saint) William of Norwich. William had been an apprentice tanner. William showed up dead. The good people of Norwich decided that William had been killed by Jews because sure, why not. Obviously Jews had killed him as a part of a ritual murder that re-enacted a mass because blood libel is definitely a thing. Thomas of Monmouth wrote a crazy-ass hagiography about it and everything. After this, any time there was an unsolved murder of a child, everyone in England blamed it on any Jew that could be found. This included Harold of Gloucester (d. 1168), Robert of Bury (d. 1181), and Little Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1255). All the boys were sainted. People were increasingly giant dicks to Jews.

Stuff got really bad under Richard the Lionheart. At his coronation a number of high ranking Jewish people showed up to do homage at Westmister, and they got kicked the fuck out of the coronation banquet and then attacked by a crowd outside. A rumor then started spreading that the king had ordered the London Jews to be massacred, and a good old fashioned mob went into the Old Jewry pretty much killing anyone they could get their hands on. The super friendly Judeo-Christian culture that Mr. Farage is celebrating then kicked off a series of violent attacks against various groups of Jews in Lynn, Stamford Fair, Colchester, Thetford, Ospringe, and Bury St Edmunds with dozens of people ending up dead. The Jews of Lincoln only survived an attempted massacre by taking refuge in the castle.

One of the worst incidents was, of course, the Pogrom (or Massacre) of York where on March 16 and 17 1190 a bunch of soldiers preparing to leave on the Third Crusade decided it would be classy and good to try to force the local Jews to convert. The Jews hid in the castle, but couldn’t escape the mob outside. Most of those inside decided to take their own lives, with the fathers of most families killing their wives, children, and themselves, and then setting fire to the keep. All the survivors were killed by the enraged bystanders. A Judeo-Christian culture – ladies and gentlemen!

During Richard the Lionheart’s absence the Jews that no one had managed to kill were generally harassed by William de Longchamp, and when Richard got his ass captured in the holy land, the Jews were told that they had to contribute 5,000 marks towards the king’s ransom. That is more than three times more than the city of London was supposed to contribute. Cute.

Eventually English kings found ways to make money that didn’t involve shaking down the Jews, and at that point the Church was putting more and more pressure on kings not to allow Jews to lend money to Christians. So at this point Edward I was just like, ‘Sod it, let’s just kick all the Jews out of the country.’ On July 18 1290 it was decreed that all Jews should be expelled by All Saints Day that year, with somewhere between 4,000 and 16,000 Jews forced to leave. I mean – what an amazing cultural exchange we had here! Wow!

Jews were eventually allowed back in the country in 1655 when members of the Dutch Jewish community directly approached Oliver Cromwell. Don’t be fooled by this though. Cromwell was, as many important historians have noted, a total Puritan douche nozzle. He thought Jews should be let back in because – in terms of Christian apocalyptic theory – Jews are necessary at the End Times because they first have to be swayed by and worship Antichrist, and then convert to Christianity. Then the world can end. Isn’t that nice? What a great spirit of cultural cooperation! Anyway, Cromwell’s Puritan ass wouldn’t have eaten chocolate egg one on Easter because that would be fun, and as we all know, God hates fun.

My point here is that none of this points to a ‘Judeo-Christian culture’ like Farage wants you to believe in. He’s just using the phrase to exclude Muslims from British society, even though they are here to stay, fam.

Why anyone wants to choose Easter Eggs as the hill to die on is a mystery to me, and the entire ‘controversy’ is a manufactured tempest in a tea cup. My major point is that you shouldn’t trust racists when they tell you about the ‘culture’ of anywhere. They don’t know a damn thing about culture or history.

#jewish history #easter eggs #nigel farage #medieval #antisemitism #english history

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fuelgrannie · 4 years

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Child of God

I have very controversial views of Jesus Christ, at least to Christians. I was raised in the Catholic faith and can thus attest to having played in the Jesus-as-God pool. I do believe Jesus existed and was an extraordinary bright, curious and loving mortal, but I do not believe he was a god nor in a god’s direct bloodline (because gods have no form, no blood, no sperm). But I do believe a higher force, God, exists.

I came to believe Jesus was mortal very early on in my life by a combo of logic and gut. This doesn’t mean I’m right. This just means I never bought into the idea that a couple thousand years ago a virgin gave birth to the lone valid god of all humankind. This belief in me has never wavered.

In my college Byzantine and Christian art history classes, I learned the Bible was edited in the 4th Century by the Council of Nicaea (a bunch of bishops and Roman Emperor Constantine at the latter’s lake house) so to exclude the years of Jesus’ life from age 7 to 32 when Jesus had traveled the world to learn about as many religions and forms of faith he could find and study. Decades of this trek, decades of this personality’s life and record of what he learned, were promptly and permanently erased from the primary tome of the Christian church.

By the fluke that I loved the teacher, I was in this particular art history class to learn potential confirmation of something I had long suspected: a more complete and full story of Jesus Christ, his travels and studies, perchance even his own attesting to his human mortality, may have been purposefully kept from public knowledge by the church itself.

The Council of Nicaea in AD 325 also decreed that the Bible universally refer to Jesus as the actual son of God, eliminating the concept and possibility that Jesus may have preached all humans were children of God, not just him. I’m not the only one to wonder or even suppose Jesus meant being a child of god was a universal concept, not just his sole status, so the Council of Nicaea deliberately set in stone for all forthcoming editions of the Bible that Jesus meant to refer to himself alone when referencing being a child of God; he more solidly and literally became the son of God.

It is not just my own supposition that Jesus never directly said, “I am the son of God and you are not.” He was known to have said that we were all God and that God was in all of us. Only an unresolved douchebag would land on this planet and say essentially, “I am better than you all, I am the son of an almighty power and you need to follow me,” yet that still happens from time to time when someone tries to pull off a second coming and pretends to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. These people are nothing unless, and until, they are believed (and then the trouble starts: “hey, is it me or does this Kool-Aid taste bitter?”), but, as of yet, none have proven to be Jesus, who has made only one earthly appearance so far. Still, what Jesus lectured, the word he tried to spread, was made foggy by the spreaders, the editors of his very lectures: it’s hard for me to trust what’s left. The Council of Nicaea had its own intentions: as previous empires declined in power, the rising popularity of this new Christian religion had become a critical tool for human leaders. Emperor Constantine recognized the power of unifying his people, perhaps with more than a whiff of fear, to keep his own flock in check.

There are very few versions of the Bible to be found that originated before the Council of Nicaea and they are certainly not in English, a language whose long, clumsy unearthing is centuries yet to come. No one talks about the Council of Nicaea anymore, but some people will tell you exactly who they think God is, as if they know. They’ll tell you Jesus Christ is the son of God. They’ll be sure they’re right. They’ll pray for your soul because they’re sure they’re right.

Glory

One night in the mid-1990s, I was up very late with the TV on, and instead of watching infomercials, I stumbled upon televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and thought, “okay, what the hell: let’s just see what this is all about.” Swaggart paraded on his stage, his face wet from tears and sweat. He yelled and sobbed “glory, glory, glory” over and over again. He said nothing else. People in his audience howled, throwing up their arms, crying, dancing, responding as if new words, different words were coming out of the mouth of the minister with the blow-dried hair in critical need of a decent trim.

“Glorrryyy, galloryyy, glORY, oh glorrryyyyy.” He cried looking at the ceiling.

“Say something,” I told my TV set.

“Ahhh, glorrrrryyyyy,” he stomped from one side of the stage to the other. He then held the microphone close to his mouth and stood still. The camera closed in, framing his face which glistened with tears, snot and dripping hair product. He raised his eyes again to the heavens, shaking his head, the mike capturing his raggy breath, the camera tight on his visage.

He inhaled. “Here we go,” I thought. Now he’s going to say something, I reckoned. You could hear the saliva in his mouth, the audience held its breath.

He sucked in air, the microphone steady at his wet chin.

“Glory,” he whispered.

The crowd went even more insane.

I watched for 20 minutes. I wanted to give it a fair shot. The camera panned from sweating Jimmy, exhaling only the syllables “glore” and “ree,” to his hysterical constituents, who in turn shook their heads with an affected joy, smiling those creepy, religious know-it-all smiles that have never rung true to me. Nothing else was ever said other than that one word in as many ways as that word can be uttered. I finally turned the channel to Cher hawking shampoo. At least she talked. At least she was selling something you could actually buy.

Pliz Coiny

My sweet Brazilian neighbor Cecilia recently invited me to join her one weekend at a Baptist church service.

“Awww hell to the no!” I thought as I tried to think of an excuse not to go but the truth always works best: “I don’t feel comfortable.” I said.

“Pliz, Coiny,” she pleaded “please Connie” pinched by her Portuguese. “Oi neffer ask anniting uff you. Pliz.”

I wasn’t thrilled with her logic. It’s true she never asked anything of me but then again she shouldn’t; I hadn’t of her, I don’t operate that way. Neighbors are not automatic friends to me: I’m a New Yorker after all. And now here she was asking me to join her at church, let alone a Baptist church, and she had somehow decided I owed her something because she had never asked me to do anything before.

Given the choice, I would have rather cleaned her toilet with one single Q-Tip than haul myself to an hours-long non-English service (“dey haff interpritters,” she tried to sway me) at an outer-borough Baptist church. Baptists go crazy, don’t they? Crying in the aisles, yakking in tongues, yelling at the perceived devil? Did my neighbor expect that I would stagger out of a Queens storefront church at 6:00pm after having arrived at 11:00am, singing “Paaarrraise Jahesus!” and vowing to “spaaaarrread the WORD” to all non-believers?

I mean, I got stuff to do on a Sunday: I got to launder my unholy panties and stock up on ice cream and tortilla chips. I got DVRed episodes of The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Love & Hip Hop I got to catch up on. Sunday is for me, not Jesus.

“No, Cecilia.” I was firm, I was smiling: there were no hard feelings. I was not going.

“It do you good, Coiny. Pliz. Comm on.” Cecilia likely envisioned me burning in hell, innocent to the fact she’s arrived decades too late and with way too little ice.

“No, Cecilia,” I replied. “It’s not for me.”

HE HAS RISEN!!!!

Ten years ago, I worked at a Christian organization. My first week of work was a shock: I received emails that started with “Greetings in the Precious Blood and Name of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior!!” with signatures that screamed “Blessings in Christ!!!” and “He has RISEN!!!!” It was being shoved down my throat in capitalized words and ever-extending exclamation points. This was not my belief system and I resented seeing it so blatantly and that I felt unable to say anything about it because I suspected I would be perceived as offensive. And I did know no true ill was meant by these words so I learned to tolerate them even though they never became less jarring to me during the four years I worked there.

A Southern man called our office (the ecumenical agency of a major American Christian church) to complain that the Today Show had featured the Encyclopedia Britannica’s assertion on evolution. He sounded gay to me (a totally unfair assumption on my part but my gaydar is on point, sister, even over the phone) and he wanted me to do “something about” the fact that NBC may actually not believe that Adam and Eve are the ultimate foreparents.

What shocked me even more was my kindness and tolerance of this man; I did not yap into the phone, “are you kidding me and when are you going to do yourself a favor and get out of that closet?” Instead, I told him I sympathized with his frustration, which is the truth: frustration is one of my favorite hobbies. Everything makes me kind of crazy, too and I’ve never been shy with my opinions, but my caller was absolutely beside himself with horror, he almost couldn’t be consoled.

“They need to present both sides!” He squeaked in a lilt. “Doesn’t Al Roker beLIEVE?”

Apparently not. Maybe it’s out of Al’s hands even if he does.

I calmed down the Southern man and said I would follow up, which of course I never did. What could I say to NBC? And why hadn’t this guy contacted them directly himself? Did he know that only guffaws awaited him?

I emailed my gay friends immediately: “Wait ‘til you hear what I just went through!” I was living in a skit from The Kids in the Hall. I was a fish out of water: all the elements felt false and I chose to play along just to stay neutral.

My first year at the Christian office, at their Christmas party, with home baked cookies and apple juice, the few other employees and I stood in a circle with our heads bowed while our boss led a prayer. I felt extremely self-conscious and didn’t mouth any words. I am not one to say anything “in his name;” after all, I hadn’t bowed my head to take two minutes to sing the praises of the New York Stock Exchange during previous parties at previous stints at financial service companies. I felt resentful this Jesus business was something in which I was literally being forced to participate. But I went along. How could I not?

Pussycats in Outer Space

I was five years old when a human boot first hit the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969 so I grew up grudgingly watching the plethora of space travel TV shows from the 1960s and 70s, the airways thick with the concept of this new frontier. The prospect of such a life, tooling around on a space ship with a bunch of people wearing the exact same upside-down-triangle uniform while exploring the dark unknown, was one of my first visions of hell. My autistic brother Christopher loved Star Trek and we watched it every day, I bored out of my mind yet totally anxious at the same time.

Star Trek at least depicted willing participants in space travel. A horrific sub-genre grew from this theme: the unwilling, like in Lost in Space, a dreadful scenario built around the non-Swiss family Robinson, forever banished from planet Earth due to some spaceship mishap and doomed to an existence of trying to get back home while accompanied by a talking robot (clearly a costumed man resembling a large vacuum cleaner) and an obnoxious, fussy British guy. The latter two were almost like a couple, TV’s first inter-metal, intergalactic, gay marriage.

But the absolute worst for me by far was the animated series Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space, a spinoff of the Archie comic books. Josie and the Pussycats were a musical group of beautiful girls, all small-waisted with turned up noses, who wore tight outfits, sang songs and played instruments, including an obligatory token African American girl who played the tambourine. These characters suffered a similar fate to the hapless Robinsons: the band accidently fell into a space vehicle which was then suddenly catapulted into deep space. The group proceeded to then float from planet to planet, back-dropped by paisleyed psychedelic purple swirls, running endlessly from kidnapping aliens who all (magically!) speak English. Josie and the Pussycats never make it back to Earth: every episode depicts another nightmare of being lost and being doomed, running and escaping. It was the ultimate exercise in frustration, almost pointless to watch. Gee, I wonder what will happen this week? Um, let’s see: they don’t make it home. No satisfaction, no variation, no happy ending: no ending at all. The same thing, the same existence of longing, loss: being trapped.

Heaven

Every Sunday morning, my father hauled my four siblings and me five blocks south from our Fifth Avenue apartment to St. Thomas More, the Catholic church in which my parents were married, although my mother scandalously remained a Presbyterian. My mother was thus spared the pilgrimages down to the 89th Street red brick building where my dad assisted in services and sang in a loud voice. I paid no attention to any words spoken and instead spent my time people watching because people all performed when they were at church. I watched my father, too: at times he was called to the front, near the altar, to read from the Bible, he took it very seriously. I remain confused by my father’s blind allegiance to Catholicism; it was a faith that made not one milligram of sense to me at any time in my life. Even as a tiny child, I disagreed with the religion, especially appalled by the lack of romance allowed for its clergy.

“You mean they can’t get married? That’s ridiculous!” I announced at age three.

It all seemed so sad to me: nuns and priests couldn’t even kiss, couldn’t have kids or live together or make dinner together or wear normal clothes to not stick out. They were alone in a lonely life and I wanted to play matchmaker for them: it seemed so easy to just pair them all up, like by size or age maybe. But apparently the clergy had no use for base physical needs; they chose this life, this consequence, but to me they seemed trapped. Church was the last place I ever wanted to be, church was the last life I would ever want to live.

I deeply believe in something outside myself. But I don’t need to gather with other humans to express my respect and thankfulness for that something. I do that on my own, and not only by praying because, really, I am more of a thanker. I thank God constantly all through the day. I live like a queen in comparison to the vast majority of my fellow global peers, especially the female ones, and I never forget it, with every water faucet I turn, with every bite of Thai takeout I enjoy, with every precious second I get to spend by myself in the exact way I want. I don’t need church to remind me of what I have and how lucky I am; believing in and thanking God is me, church is not. Church is about the other people in the church.

I don’t know why religion segregates people; you’d think it would bring us all together but it’s just another thing by which we compete. I can’t begin to understand why we have spent centuries yelling at each other and killing each other because we think our version of God is the right one and that anyone who doesn’t think the exact same way that we do must experience our vengeance. None of us can ever prove we’re right and yet we are violent with fear to be proven wrong.

I look at our planet-mates: animals don’t need religion. They don’t gather at a certain place during regular time periods to ponder something outside of themselves. Their souls and brains are too busy making sure their bodies sustain. Religion has no place in any animal’s process of being alive and neither does God. The existence of God doesn’t affect their own existence or prove to them their presence on this planet: their very birth already did that. Instead of “I think therefore I am,” it’s “I’m alive therefore I am.” And unlike us, they don’t kill for God: they kill to eat. Or to not be killed, to just keep living. Somehow this is too simple for humans.

I also don’t believe God is a Christian.

This concept makes some Christians absolutely crazy. I don’t believe a loving God (a male god) would plop his “son” (male child) on Earth (via untouched, virgin female flesh) and have that son represent only one religion. That’s favoritism, a very human tendency, and I do not believe God operates that way.

The old white guy who lives with his wife in the apartment upstairs from mine, rolls his eyes on occasion when he sees burqa-wearing Muslim women running after their kids on the sidewalk.

“I tell you,” he exhales, “I’ll never get used to it. They need to go back to their country.”

“They’re in their country, Monty,” I yap back. We both know he doesn’t mind finding no kindred in me when he gets into one of his rants. And I tolerate not one ounce of his crap.

“I know, I know. My wife says the same thing. You two are better than me.”

“Aww Mont, we’re not better,” I laugh, “she and I just look at it differently. Think about it: when you go to heaven, if there is such a place, do really you think it’s just Americans, just whites, just Christians who are allowed into heaven? Do you honestly think when you traipse through the Elysian Fields that you will be only surrounded by ‘your kind?’ Honestly?”

(It’s not gonna be like Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space: the folks you meet outside this stratosphere will not always know your native tongue.)

Monty’s eyes slant as he ponders this. “My wife says ‘angels come in all colors.’”

“Well, there you go,” I say.

All colors, all languages. Each child with their rightful place at the messy table, as it should be, amen. No “get out of my country:” instead “come sit next to me, I saved you a seat.”

Earth

The dirt of me has no god, the material of which I am made is leaderless, it is solely of this earth. I have not risen, I am not lost in outer space. I am selfish and arrogant about God: I expect Him to accept me, not the other way around. I taste Him in pork and chive dumplings in Flushing, Queens; I see Him inside the running sweat off a lover’s chest; I decide He loves me when I watch reality TV on the floor drinking lite beer out of the can with a pink bendy straw. I am the basest of humans. God is my ally, I honor Him by merely living, I pay no other respects, I am a rotten subject.

I assume I am loved by God but by no one else. I assume God loves us all. I assume organized religion is a joke and doesn’t really count, that it’s a human construct and no direct creation of God’s. I assume some humans wouldn’t mind killing me for such thinking, or at least feeling that I deserved a good yelling at.

It’s awful: I actually think I have all the answers for me in this area. I must be wrong: it just couldn’t be that easy.

All I have is the truth I know in my heart, it’s all I can go on, here on the grimy path: my church is portable with God existing inside and outside all bricks.

Glory, glory, glory and even some more glory.

#queens #religion #nyc #nycblogger #heaven #search #path #childofgod #fuelgrannie #opinion #newyork #newyorkcity #earth

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usnewsaggregator-blog · 7 years

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The Push to Make French Gender-Neutral

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/the-push-to-make-french-gender-neutral/

The Push to Make French Gender-Neutral

“My homeland is the French language,” author Albert Camus once wrote—and many French people would agree. That’s why any attempt at changing the language is often met with suspicion. So the uproar was almost instantaneous when, this fall, the first-ever school textbook promoting a gender-neutral version of French was released.

It was a victory for a subset of French feminists who had argued that the gendered nature of the language promotes sexist outcomes, and that shifting to a gender-neutral version would improve women’s status in society. Educating the next generation in a gender-inclusive way, they claimed, would yield concrete positive changes, like professional environments that are more welcoming to women.

Many others found this idea outrageous. They complained that implementing it would badly complicate education, and that there’s not enough evidence that changing a language can really change social realities. Clearly in the second camp, the office of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced this week that it’s banning the use of gender-neutral French in all official government documents.

In French, pronouns, nouns, and adjectives reflect the gender of the object to which they refer. So, le policier is a policeman; la policière is a policewoman. The language has no neutral grammatical gender. And there are many nouns (including those referring to professions) that don’t have feminine versions. So, a male minister is le ministre and a female minister is la ministre. What’s more, French students are taught that “the masculine dominates over the feminine,” meaning that if you have a room full of ten women and just one man, you have to describe the whole group in the masculine.

Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them. Most recommend creating feminine versions of all professional nouns and/or using neutral nouns whenever possible. Many also recommend a grammatical tool that consists of adding a “median-period” at the end of masculine nouns, followed by the feminine ending, thus indicating both gendered versions of every noun (like musicien·ne·s, which would read as “male musicians and female musicians”). Some have even recommended creating a gender-neutral pronoun (the equivalent of how “they” is sometimes used in English, or “hen” in Sweden). These and other recommendations have collectively become known as “inclusive writing.”

Many linguists I spoke to stressed that changing a language doesn’t guarantee a change in perception; this leads some of them to say that inclusive writing just isn’t worth the trouble. But at least one major school of linguistic thought concludes that language and perception are intimately related.

Proponents of linguistic determinism argue that your language determines and constrains what you’re capable of thinking. Linguistic determinism is the strong flavor of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—the idea that your language influences how you think. This hypothesis was popular in the 1940s, but it was deemed incorrect by the linguistic community in the 60s and 70s. “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey,” argued linguist Roman Jakobson. It’s not that speaking French makes it impossible for you to conceive of something as gender-neutral, he suggested, but that the language forces you to think often in gendered terms. Whereas in English you can say “I’m having dinner with my friend” without indicating whether the friend is male or female, in French you have to indicate—and therefore think about—the friend’s gender by using either a female or male noun. Today, some still believe in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it enjoyed some popular attention last year after being featured in the movie Arrival.

Some scientific research does seem to suggest that gendered languages like French lead to more sexist perceptions than gender-neutral ones like English. But those studies are limited in that they can’t control for outside factors like culture, which are extremely important in determining sexist attitudes.

“Faced with this ‘inclusive’ aberration, the French language is now in mortal danger.”

In France, this debate traces its roots back to World War I, when men went to war and left women behind to fill traditionally male-dominated positions like chimney sweep or factory worker. The nouns referring to those professions, which previously only had masculine versions, developed feminine ones, to the great horror of French society at the time. But what was tolerable in wartime became unacceptable when men returned from the battlefield, and the question of how to make French gender-neutral was sidelined until the 1970s and ’80s. Efforts at the governmental level to study the possible feminization of French began in 1984 and continued throughout the end of the 20th century, but all proposals were rejected by the institutions that control the codification of the language.

When the French publishing house Hatier released an “inclusive” textbook for children in the third grade this September, it was based on the 2015 recommendations of the High Council for Gender Equality, which had outlined 10 ways to make the French language more gender-neutral. Major conservative publications published op-eds and editorials with headlines such as “Feminism: the delirium of inclusive writing” or “Inclusive writing: the new factory for idiot·e·s.” Many philosophers and scholars came out strongly against what they saw as feminist activism masquerading as linguistic science—and using children as guinea pigs. Emmanuelle de Riberolles, a literature professor in the Picardie region of France, argued that “children should not be dragged into struggles that do not concern them.” Even the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, came out against inclusive writing, explaining that “language is a bedrock of life that we owe to children” and that it “must not be instrumentalized, even for the best of causes.”

The French Academy, the highest council for matters pertaining to the French language, issued a strong statement, saying that the additional grammatical complications of inclusive writing would lead to “a disunited language, disparate in its expression, creating a confusion that borders on illegibility.” What’s more, “faced with this ‘inclusive’ aberration, the French language is now in mortal danger, a fact for which our nation is now accountable to future generations.” The statement also warned that inclusive writing would “destroy” the promises of the Francophonie (the linguistic zone encompassing all countries that use French at the administrative level, or whose first or majority language is French). The Francophonie is arguably one of France’s most successful postcolonial tools of global engagement, with 84 member states and governments that account for 274 million French speakers and represent one-third of the United Nations’ member states.

Proponents of inclusive writing were not convinced by the Academy’s argument. “It’s laughable,” said Elianne Viennot, a historian and professor of literature. “They [the members of the Academy] never cared about the promises of the Francophonie” and “contempt [for Francophone nations] is still very much rooted in their culture.” She pointed to a famous member of the Academy, Maurice Druon, who, in 2006, said he resented the “absurd feminizations” of French, such as those proposed in Quebec at the time under the influence of the “women’s leagues of the United States.”

In fact, “France stands out from other countries by its resistance to feminization,” according to Elizabeth Dawes, a professor of French studies at Laurentian University in Canada who studied inclusive writing. The boldest innovations in inclusive writing are being debated in francophone countries; Canada started tackling the question of feminizing professions as early as 1979, and Switzerland and Belgium followed suit in 1991 and 1994 respectively.