Dammit Grandma

It's nice to enjoy a quiet, unemployed afternoon with friends and relatives. Spokane is a quiet town, I'm very unemployed, and large herds of relatives and friends live here, so I've been spending many such afternoons.

It's nice especially to hang out with my grandmother and father, who have always been like second parents to me. Grandma's been smoking and drinking her way to Jesus for nigh on 50 years, though there are indications that the drinking didn't really start until the smoking made it prohibitive to do things like survive without the dulling effects of intoxication. After a series of accidents put an end to her driving, the torrent of vodka has slowed to a trickle. In its place she's grown dependent on God.

The consensus among my mother's siblings and their spouses is that it'll be any day now.

It's been any day now for about two years, and Grandma still chain smokes her Kools and yells at the dog. Of course now she does it from the couch, mostly immobile. She no longer spends hours on hands and knees daily, scrubbing the cigarette ash from the rumpus room concrete and kitchen linoleum--ash she had obviously deposited the previous day while scrubbing the day-before-that's ash from the same linoleum and concrete. She now yells at Grandpa until he does it. The house doesn't smell like it used to. It's menthol and a florid, sanguine rot lately, before it was just menthol. The little differences get you.

Grandma's more stooped now and walks with a lock-jointed shuffle. She has stopped coloring her hair that patently yellow shade of blonde. She no longer has her nails fashioned into blood red spear tips, though they still look sharp. She should be on oxygen. The once indomitable matron of this Renz clan, the unflappable keystone, now breaks down like clockwork whenever someone comes or goes from her life. When visitors she's never seen and didn't know before a given afternoon leave, she weeps. She weeps too when I run to my car to get the Febreeze I keep handy for spraying down their Cairn Terrier. He smells like dog and Fettucine Alfredo--and, of course, menthol and that florid, sanguine rot.

She's more allegory now than person, illustrating the fake distinction between self-sacrifice and self-destruction. The more days now that pass, it gets harder to remember the person she was. That person was probably the most singularly selfless human I've ever met. With it came willful and negligent self-deprivation. Very Christ-like, and with the mouth of a sailor. The more in tune she was to your needs, the less she heeded her own. For thirty years she avoided doctors, complaints and the nagging aspirations she'd had before the steamy night at Pattison's Roller Rink which produced my mom. Now I look at her and see a picture of smoldering death.

Deconstructing the psychology of my grandma is difficult because of the stoicism she displayed as I was growing up and because now she can't remember a goddamned thing. It seems like she'd want to talk about things if she could remember what those things were. So I try to remember for her.

She played her cards close to her chest my entire life, but she once told me that she'd have liked to have been a lawyer. She would have been a prosecutor I think. She couldn't have handled the bullshit rigamarole of litigation or the idea of defending the criminal scum of this world. She really loved Perry Mason. And Columbo. She devoured police dramas. I remember how happy she was when Grandpa gave her that police scanner for Christmas. They all reminded her of a time, I think, before my Mom heralded that string of children borne at that string of west coast military hospitals when those dreams of arguing cases before juries of her peers faded to the more modest act of loudly and defiantly voicing her opinions to anyone in earshot. And if they don't like it, they can go to hell.

Maybe I'm reading too much into the police scanner.

It's been, I think, a life filled with personal disappointment and vicarious triumph, with each sacrifice helping to somehow embolden those around her. She, then, drew success and comfort from the successes of her children and grand children.

No help from me there. Educated, debt-ridden and unemployed, sitting across from her, laying supine on the couch, that smelly ass dog in my lap and I'm just wishing that Grandpa would shut the fuck up about John Kerry so maybe I can remember something else.

Read the full thing here.

Political Apologetics

"We are not telling them how to vote. We are telling them how to take Communion in good conscience." -- Rev. Andrew Kemberling

WWJVF? Who Would Jesus Vote For? Democrats, Republicans, Bush, Kerry. I've heard this kind of question asked a lot lately, often jokingly, but more and more often with a kind of liturgical gravitas that is really beginning to worry me.

Despite the specifics of your belief in a/many G[g]od(s), or your lack thereof, calling the local holy man a mortal and not a divine mouthpiece should not be an article of faith. Regardless of the divinity that might have inspired your holy book, it's safe to say that not everyone reading from it is the mouthpiece of your G[g]od(s). Maybe there are a few, maybe most of them are doing G[g]od(s)' good works. But really, who the hell knows? How do you know what you believe and have been taught to think are the actions, intentions and teachings of your G[g]od(s) are actually that?

The question has a Kierkegaardian quality that is ultimately rooted in personal faith. With these latest elections though, the implications of that question are beginning to resonate outwardly and in the very worldly realm of national politics.

Is it right for a preacher, priest, shaman, yogi, Krishna or druid to say "G[g]od(s) wants you to vote thusly?"

It's not an easy question. Certainly that person is entitled to their own opinion and has the authority and right under our constitution to voice it. But should he or she deliver that opinion as one given by G[g]od(s) him[her]self?

I don't think so. The conclusions, however dogmatic, are ultimately groundless and the power they will have in the minds of his/her congregation will be disproportionately large, especially among the highly devout and the under-educated.

Why is this a bad thing?

Religious scholarship is the work of interpretation. Always. You cannot read a millennia-old text written in Europe and/or Asia in some dead language and apply it to contemporary America without interpretation. Even someone who believes their text endorses just exactly and literally what it says has to make sense of it within a given paradigm. A literalist, in other words, decides that, despite G[g]od(s)' lack of intervention for 2000 years, the thrust of civilization and the curious lack of revealed Cherubim and pillars of fire, the rules should and do remain the same.

So interpretation. There's a problem with it. Your holy book isn't specific enough for even a literalist to endorse a position without making evaluative judgments about the text. This is an especially tricky maneuver when dealing with politics. The Bible, for example, has no Thou shalt vote socialist libertariancommandments. There was no Democracy even in Jesus' time. At best the Bible has monarchs, at worst, tyrants. Can a book address questions of human rights if it was originally written for a group of slaves who had no rights, and later amended for the citizenry of a pagan despotism? Not without interpretation.

How does one interpret? On one hand you have Thou shalt not kill. On the other you have An eye for an eye. That then leads you to He who is without sin cast the first stone. Is it more just to oppose stem cell research to show support for the intrinsic value of the human fetus, or to allow the research in the hopes that it might save the lives of millions of G[g]od(s)' creatures?

Then, even if you feel certain that your G[g]od(s) would stand fast to the broad Thou shalt not kill platform, how do you whittle down the particulars and cast G[g]od(s)' vote for a particular candidate? Candidate A is against abortion, but, as governor of his state, presided over more executions than any governor in your country's history. Candidate B is an advocate of abortion, but is opposed to executions. Neither being perfect, which would G[g]od(s) choose? More interpretation.

Interpretation, no matter how rational, scientific or analytical, can never be objective. The criteria you choose to weigh the pros and cons of this candidate or that is totally arbitrary. How can you be sure that G[g]od(s) would choose Candidate A if he/she held fast to more commandments than B? Perhaps some of those commandments are more important than others. If one is more important than others, would it be important enough to endorse the candidate that is firmly pro-the-important-one even if he/she violates the others? How do you know? Did G[g]od(s) provide a sliding scale? The choices made are ultimately yours, not G[g]od(s)',

At best I think it's naive for a man or woman of G[g]od(s) to use that position to campaign for a given candidate. At worst it's a willful and deliberate corruption of the divinity that person participates in for the cheap trappings of worldly power. When you begin to do things like deny believers who vote a particular party line access to their G[g]od(s), you have crossed a dubious and, ahem, sinful line.

Religion is an incredibly powerful force in many people's lives. Those entrusted with that power have a responsibility that transcends partisan politics.

Read the full thing here.

Let slip your undead hordes

It's an opinion my arch-friend Ben gladly spews at anyone within earshot. "Anne Rice sucks." He should know, rarely reading, watching or playing anything that doesn't somehow involve zombies, vampires or demon tentacles.

He rarely gets excited about anything, and that made me want to read some Anne Rice. The desire was short lived. I started to read something and didn't like it, so I stopped. I don't even remember what it was. That was the end of my interest in Anne Rice until today. The NY Times has an article that has reinvigorated my curiosity.

"Your stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander"

That was among the things she wrote in an open letter to her detractors, which she published on September 6th on Amazon.com's Customer Reviews.

Yes. She called the opinions of those fanboy critics slander. Anne Rice, who makes a living at knowing the interrelations of words. Slander, not libel. Slander.

It really struck a nerve, those things they said.

She has every right to be mad, the fans having clearly broken the rules she's lain down. She does the writing, they're buy the books and keep their insignificant mouths shut. When she uses her narrator to chastise people who didn't like her book Memnoch the Devil, those people are supposed to thank her, not respond to her soliloqual tirade. She types, you read. Idiots.

Against the presumptuous assertion that she needs an editor, Anne calls her writing a "virtuoso performance . . . not a collaborative art." Maybe that's the problem Anne. Collaboration allows you an outside perspective when your work is going in dangerous directions--directions like egomaniacal pontificating and unintentional self-parody.

The new book's called Blood Canticle for God's sake. Can you think of a more telling name for a book about vampires from an author who compares herself to "Pavarotti [and] Marilyn Horne?"

In order to write this, of course, she had to use an Amazon account. Surprisingly for someone who hates criticism, this wasn't the first time she'd used Amazon's open forums. She's something of a closet critic herself. Here they are, all her reviews.

And therein I think I've found the problem: she's totally incapable of saying an ill word about anything. She gives everything she's ever read or watched 5 stars. Everything is, in her mind, the greatest thing ever. Not simply her own works, but also Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, scores of Biblical criticism, and, of course, Batman Returns.

I think we can all learn a little something from Anne Rice about inclusion and magnanimity. Or insipid frivolity--one of those.

Read the full thing here.