Get thee to hell, Prime Minister

Yesterday the Archbishop of Calgary said that the Holy See might want to think about excommunicating Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. Sounds almost quaint, especially coming from a continent built, in large part, on individualising and decentralizing [freeing] the religious experience.

Paul Martin, clearly a man of intelligence and integrity, will not be swayed by this overreach of ecclesiastical power for a myriad reasons.

First, it's never the Pope who does the excommunicating, but whomever the ranking local official is. Also, the thing about religion and its dogma is that its open to interpretation, which is why we currently have so many schisms in protestant churches like the Episcopalians and Anglicans. Similarly, the Catholic Church is not without its dissenters [see: almost every priest in every Jesuit University in America]. Knowing this and knowing the rules of excommunication, the Archbishop of Martin's diocese has remained quiet on the issue [which would be significant], making the Archbishop of Calgary's suggestion seem all the more flailing and flaccid a gesture. It further shows just how divided the Church is on this issue. Even if sympathizers to the 'Homosexual Agenda' within the clergy remain silent, in not acting, their voice is heard.

Thing is, even if he were to be excommunicated, Mr. Martin, a deeply religious man [who, for deeply religious reasons, no longer wants homosexuals given second class status in his country, a lesson to other deeply religious world leaders] would understand the act as a human detente against progressivism, not God's fury. He knows this on account of the following:

Events that made Excommunication Meaningless:
The Gutenberg Press -- For a long time reading wasn't that important because there wasn't much to read, and everything to read was mostly cloistered in some monastery somewhere. Monasteries are where all the churchies hang out. Thus, pretty much the only people who could read were priests, so theirs was the power to shape God's word as they saw fit. Gutenberg essentially gave book-lernin' to the masses, making reading [and eventually, learning to read] a cost-effective pass-time. When people started reading, they realized that none of the bullshit preacherman had been preaching for 1400 years was actually in the bible.
The Protestant Reformation -- Proved there was another game in town. Partial credit goes to the Great Schism for parting with Rome, but, as the Eastern Church and the Western maintained a sharp line of demarcation, Rome's power remained mostly absolute until Erasmus and Gutenberg's great equalizer lay the foundation for Zwigli and Luther. [Still, old habits die hard in Renaissance Europe, Luther was a rabid anti-Semite, making the break with Rome incomplete]
Vatican II -- Rome really shot themselves in the foot this time. By the 1970's most everyone knew how to read, diminishing the preacherman's monopoly as the conduit to God. However, also by the 1970's, almost everyone had forgotten how to read [or speak] Latin, the arbitrarily chosen holy language. So Vatican II rolls around and all these people, empowered by the ability to read and whatnot, complain further about their access to the almighty, and that their sacraments and worship should be in a language lay people can understand. Rome relents and localizes the holy liturgy. Everyone realizes that the dude in the hat isn't saying any kind of mystic or incomprehensible incantations, he's just repeating himself like 50 times and calling it a day.

. . . And so it came to be, in those days, that even the deeply religious understood excommunication was not a spiritual mandate from Almighty God, nay, but the political flailings of ineffectual men who long for the days of Crusades and Inquisitions.

[Archbishop Frederick Henry also served as the Calgary Stampede's Rodeo Princess for 2002]

Read the full thing here.

Nazism and the Warhol of cadaver art

There's quite a tumult in Poland these days. I should say: there's quite a tumult about Poland, and what might be built there, and by whom, and for what dastardly, bone-chilling reasons.

You've probably heard of this man, Gunther von Hagens. He's an anatomist and pathologist, formerly of Heidelberg University, who now makes his living freaking the hell out of people with his [patented] plasticized cadavers, former humans infused with various polymers, then carved up in interesting and artsy ways.

Once a mild-mannered research scientist with no artistic pretensions, He displayed his work at a University open house in the late 70's and has been doing cadaver art ever since. While he says he originally felt uneasy that his work was being considered art, that is, it was resonating emotionally with people, he gradually came to understand it.

plastination opens the hearts of the people to themselves. They recognize themselves, get a new kind of body pride.

The current controversy: he wants to build a factory in Western Poland to churn these suckers out. The facility would employ up to 300 people and would be located in the small town of Sieniawa Zarska, very close to both Prague and Berlin.

This seems to worry people. Certainly the commercialization of death is nothing new, but for some [the devout] it remains a sticky subject. So let's enumerate the concerns:

1. Artistic Medium is dead folks
2. Factory will mass-produce dead folk art
3. Western religions tend to sanctify the dead and their bodies
   
4. Factory will be in Poland, which is virtually 100% Catholic, 60% of whom consider themselves deeply religious
5. Poland is scene of another kind of industrial event involving human bodies, the Holocaust.
   

Those last three are, I believe, the kickers. Von Hagens already has a factory like this in China, where there are no strong cultural feelings about human remains and no connection to the Holocaust. I'd never heard the Orient factory mentioned anywhere before. Now, all of a sudden, the new site is Poland and the press are having a field day.

“How can a German come up with the idea of processing dead bodies for commercial use on Polish soil 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz?” one Polish daily asked.

Firstly, All Germans were not Nazis, and von Hagens is not a grave-robber, each cadaver he uses has consented while still alive. It's more of an ethical quandary for the person being plasticized than for von Hagens, because they are the ones obligated to address the feelings and fears of their loved ones, some of whom are probably religious. He's got factories doing this stuff, that makes him prodigious, not a monster.

Frankly, the biggest problem I have with von Hagens is that he's a bad artist. His compositions are trite and perfunctory. A man playing chess with his brain exposed. A body playing basketball. One hanging its skin on a coat rack. He's terrible, but there's nothing evil about his incompetence. He's certainly not Dr. Mengele. Where that doctor made infamous lampshades of human skin, von Hagens offers handy backpacks of, presumably, nylon. Again, tacky merchandising makes him a capitalist, not a monster.

I'm annoyed at the way the media--especially the American media--has tried to paint him as some kind of mad scientist, playing on people's fear of death and the cultural aversion to playing with remains without explaining his motives. Motives? He's just craaaaazy. Two years ago the BBC ran an article after von Hagens conducted the UK's first public autopsy in 170+ years. Then, they called him "a professor of anatomy" and went on to explain that his fascination with the human body comes from childhood: "it was seeing his first autopsy when he was 17, which he says absolutely fascinated him, that encouraged him to take up medicine."

Then yesterday, ABC, using a Reuters feed, ran this article, calling him a "Controversial German artist . . . known for his displays of preserved human corpses stripped of skin." The report then noted his desire to, "build a factory in Poland to mass-produce his art." A similar story run yesterday in the Telegraph is more measured and, well, journalistic, calling him an "anatomist". It then allows von Hagens to explain what the press chooses to call a factory is intended to be a "cathedral of science". Still weird--maybe more so--but that destroys the implicit argument that this shop and warehouse are simply for the wholesale distribution of desecrated remains to the consumer market.

The biggest part of the tumult, though, involves that 5th point up there. Turns out von Hagens' dad--who handled von Hagens' business affairs in Poland--was a stormtrooper.

Already suspect, von Hagens is now portrayed as a Nazi by association. Von Hagens denies it of course, saying he didn't know about his father's past, but we know the truth. He's gone so far as to fire the father, but that's smoke and mirrors. He's also going to replace him with a native Pole, whom we'll all decry as an Uncle Tom. The subtext of these articles is startling that way.

My friend [L] has an interesting story about her time in Germany. She was befriended by a couple Austrian students in a cafe and eventually [she says inevitably] the talk turned to the holocaust and how the German people try to hide or deny personal, familial involvement, since they can't escape the legacy as a nation. The girl [adjusted to represent L's bad Austrian caricature] said something like:

Eferyvon in Germany says zey housed a family of Jews. Eferyvon ver hiding little Anne Franks in zeyr Attik. Zis is just not pohssible. It is impohssible, no vahn vould have died if all der Germans had Jews in zeyr attiks.

Point being: There were very few innocents in Germany, and you can't throw a rock, be it Baden-Baden or Dresden, without hitting the descendent of a Nazi, them's the facts. There must come a time when we stop looking sidelong at people, condemning them for the sins of their forbears.

We can, however, condemn von Hagens for making crappy art, then shamelessly merchandising it. And condemn the world for buying it and making him rich. And then him again for wearing that fedora like the Indiana Jones of embalming.

Read the full thing here.

Selectivity and inclusivity, now and then

One day, some time ago, in the halls of my high school, a friend [K] walked up to me and asked, Hey, have you heard of the Dead Milkmen? This was a game we played with each other, a way of gauging who was the more culturally adroit. As we lived in a town named after a species of deer [no ready cable access] and attended a high school that required only 3/4 of the credits to graduate as the school you probably went to--and were further hampered by slow internet connections and the fact that, in 1998, the internet didn't really have anything on it anyway--we didn't know much about pop culture. So, to begin, the detentes were usually small and safe. We'd score points for being the first person to hear a band or song on 93ZOOFM and report back. Questions like, Hey have you heard of Weezer [this circa 1994] or Hey did you hear the new Prince song [Circa Purple Rain, no later, I swear] were common.

Then, sometime around 1995, our friends started snowboarding. Soon everyone--even those, like myself and this friend [K], who never actually snowboarded but sure as shit wanted to look like we did--everyone started buying their clothes and shoes and accessories at the not-so-local skate shop. You probably have one in your not-so-local vicinity. There, in this skate shop, were strange pieces of merchandise, unique to the hemisphere of what would later be called 'extreme sports.' These things were called 'tapes'. True to name, they were honest-to-God tapes, video ones, depicting snowboarders, skateboarders, BMXers, anything really ["Just so long as it wasn't corporate," they told us, in the days before they found a way to successfully go corporate].

These tapes, in addition to telling us how to dress and how to act and what to think and how to feel* [*only offering masculine feelings, like the pelvic tingle of hot snowboard chicks and the impotent rage of being pissed on while you sleep], also introduced us to a strange and foreign kind of music. Mostly punk, with a little hiphop, the unifying aspect of these power chords and breakbeats was that they were nothing at all like anything you'd ever hear on the ZOO.

Suddenly what was hip was anything that wasn't conventionally so, anything that hadn't been previously hip. We would be, and would remain, changed at the core. It meant no longer listening to anything on mainstream radio [though the consensus was that Weezer would be grandfathered into this new and contrarian lifestyle]. NOFX, Pennywise, Social Distortion, Bad Religion all rocked our trans-pubescent worlds--rocked them hard--and did so without ever, ever, selling out, something no one really understood the intricacies of [it was connected, somehow, to going corporate], but which all knew was not to be done. Most of us figured selling out was communicable, so we'd never admit to listening to the ZOO, and when someone slipped up [especially if they owned like a Burton coat or something] we'd call them out as heretics of our youth rebellion, slandering them mercilessly. NARC! Poser! Those who screamed the loudest were surely the most Just, the most Faithful. Those not with us were against us.

Rancid, a band, now mostly forgotten, was the hottest shit one summer, until the day the ZOO played Ruby Soho. By the dawn of the next they had been stricken from every place of honor. I hid my CD so as not to be tempted by it. Thankfully, it didn't really catch with the ZOO kids, so after a lengthy quarantine . . . Out Come the Wolves was admitted back into our ideological cannon.

To sound as trite as I possibly can: that thing we worshipped, I think, was youth itself. Youth and rebellion. However, most of our parents were really nice and our teachers permissive and I suppose most of us were fairly logical, so the rebellion part never really manifested outwardly per se, against the structures of power; God, family and school. But we were thinking it. Oh yes. We were just waiting for someone to impose their values on us, tell us what to be or how to act. On the day that happened, we were prepared to do exactly what those board-riding tapes and punk CDs had suggested.

actions could erase all the fear we suffer/
people segregated no one understands each other/
he's a different color but we're the same kid/
I will treat him like my brother he'll treat me like his/
...
the inner city's burnin' yea it's screamin' black and blue/
the power and the passion of a million youth

Yes, that. Our city was a Post Office, a VFW and a place called "The Backwoods Store" but, by God, did we scream, with power, with passion, and usually, with Miller Highlife and Goldschlager Cinnamon Schnapps. Individualism! A hundred mall-shopping rednecks called out, in unison. Power. We were a motley and vigorous cultural experiment, nay a movement, free to anyone with $500 for a snowboard [or at least the matching coat]. God that was great, the life of the elect, completely free of posers and existential irony.

But, but . . . there was a point to this story . . . "Hey, have you heard of the Dead Milkmen?" Remember how I said a friend asked me that? A thousand words ago or so, at the top there.

About then K and I had kind of decided that the rest of our friends had listened to but not really heard the music that bound us. They had spoken and sang the messages of inclusion and unity but had failed to internalize this punk ethics--so we shunned them. Because they were lukewarm, we spit them out of our mouths, but not in any real, demonstrable sense. The power of such movements lie in their great numbers, and, like an inquisition, it only took one whisper--poseur--from one darkened corner to bring down a whole, carefully-crafted persona. So K and I, we kept up appearances, drank and sang and pumped our fists and pretended to snowboard, but secretly we went out on our own, to the very hinterlands of even this, our most fringe of teen groups. And we searched. For music. That spoke. To our souls.

That kind of soul-speak you can't hear on the ZOO, remember, nor even on snowboard tapes.

Then, on that fortuitous morning, K walked up and asked me about these weirdos, these punks, previously unknown even to we few, so in the know. He said he'd found them in a discount tape rack at a convenience store on Highway 2, behind Martina McBride's Greatest Hits. I was dubious but soon turned, though not ever as fully as he did, to the subversive dissonance that is [was] the Dead Milkmen. They had songs; Lord had they songs. Songs about reckless consumerism [Bitchin' Camaro], about spousal abuse [Gonna Beat My Wife], about New Wave kids [You'll Dance to Anything], about finding your Messiah in the signature drink [Manishevitz wine] of a culture that is resistant to the idea of messiahs [I dream of Jesus]. They were just what a good counter-culture movement should be: anti-everything. They were anti-establishment, anti-coherent theses, anti-singable choruses. Their music, far from the elaborate production of even the punkest of punk bands at the time, sounded like it came from a Radio Shack microphone hooked to a tape deck sitting in the middle of a grain elevator. "These guys don't give a fuck about anything," I remember K saying. He was right.

The last thing they cared to do was offer alternatives to the lives and lifestyles they caricatured and lampooned. The world was a festering sore--a sucking chest-wound--they proclaimed, and the band-aid of activism was useless, the triple antibiotic ointment of change, ineffectual.

No, the only thing to do with such a flesh schism is to pick at it.

Such a glorious thing, this criticism and superiority without personal accountability. I immediately took to it. Rather, I continued what I'd always been doing, empowered by the knowledge that there were other people doing it too. Cool people.

My immutable high school truths:
Everything sucks.
Nothing will change.

That, my 80,000 dollar college education would teach me, is essentially Nihilism [Rancid, in hindsight, wrote a song about it], and it's great. It's the absolute best thing to happen to a kid who's smart enough to have realized there's something screwy about the status quo, but too dumb [and lazy] to find a way to change it. You might catch a nihilistic young punk saying--probably over the churn and yowl of the Sex Pistols tape his mom just got him--"Gaw there aren't any good revolutions any more," without reflecting that revolutions don't just happen, and that the Sex Pistols didn't revolutionize anything except working class Cockney fashion. When there is no moral impetus, you can't feel guilty about sitting on your ass. Right up my alley.

[Sex Pistols also killed rock and roll, but my friend K says he's pretty sure it was already mostly dead anyway.]

In college I grew out of nihilism, kinda, once Nietzsche told me what was wrong with it, and I sought out progressive bands who had also grown out of it. These bands sought to reinvent rock whilst simultaneously reinventing our minds and our social strata. Fugazi was doing such things while I was toddling and I had some catching up to do. Post-punk it was called, and what a great and descriptive name that was. Ian MacKaye was a prophet, preaching the coming of a [highly dubious, pinko] utopia that, if we'd all just try a little harder, would be just about perfect for just about everyone. Wow was that going to be cool. I got excited about that.

But, in the meantime [aka my adolescence and young manhood], NAFTA had happened and Republicans controlled the legislature and later the presidency [after someone decided to run an android against everybody's best friend from college], labor movements were losing clout with the rise of outsourcing. I realized with some desperation that this strange, smelly, small-concert-venue egalitarian political ethics would never see the light of day.

Later, sometime after I first heard the name John Forbes Kerry, I realized that this woeful state of affairs, the wealth gap, the education crisis, unaffordable health care--all the multifarious incongruencies of capitalism--the things post-nihilist me had railed against as new and startling evils, would not have changed even with a different legislature or executive. These things had been going on since well before I came to be here, in this lanky body, in this little town, listening to this angry music. It had been happening, probably, since the discovery of fire or the first irrigation project. A cynic might say humans--or at least their nation-states--were born on stratification. That egality is a heckuva idea for deer and moron college kids, but that civilization just can't function that way. It's fine for the kibbutz but impractical for the industrialized super power. Where does that leave us?

Even after women's suffrage and the civil rights movement and the coming [inevitable!] acceptance of homosexuality, there will still be people who can't feed themselves and can't keep themselves healthy and are denied, fundamentally, all those wonderful things the founding fathers talked about every person having. This is inevitable. There is a finite amount of resources, of capital. Money don't grow on trees.

And we'll have names for these people, these degenerates. They will be bad names, epithets. But no longer Nigger or Faggot or Feminist. They'll be Low-life; White-[black-, red-, yellow-]Trash; Welfare Mother [Father]; Leech; Drain. They'll be Poor People, and we'll hate them because they aren't like us. They'll be brought up poor and they'll stay poor. They'll raise poor children. They'll be sickly and they'll smell and we'll hate them. Because. They aren't like us. And they won't be suitable for employment, like us. Because, you know . . . they aren't like us.

These people--filthy--looking to pull even, to start level, they're communists and pagans. They hate America and God and our magnificent freedom. You want medicine? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps friend. If you can't afford bootstraps, that's just the providence of the free market. This is the Calvinist capitalism. Taxation is theft. The wealthy are elect. Who the hell are you? They're the Narcs, Posers. Trying to act like us, be us. Heathy. Alive. But we'll see through that. We've gotten really good at seeing through that. We know how to deal with them, did that in high school.

That other thing, though, it was such a good idea. Great even. That thing between Nihilism and whatever this angry and impotent new thing I feel is. Egalitarianism. Egality. That was a hell of a thing.

Pity it didn't work out.

Well fought though.

Read the full thing here.