And the Shelf He Rode In On (Part III)

In the Bleak Midwinter - Beth Whitney (mp3)
Where Are You Christmas? - Faith Hill (mp3)

Part One -- "The Origin of Laura Jane," wherein I mention our transgendered hero/heroine, Nicole Kidman, late night elf pornography, and Gmail

Part Two - "Bad Dad," wherein I experience the stages of grief, emotionally abuse my daughter, and am reminded why the Christmas season is so despicable

My second daughter continues to write to Laura Jane, our transgendered Elf on the Shelf and the ever-present reminder of a failure of my fatherhood.

She wrote that damn elf five times in November, each time desperately (but as patiently as her little heart would allow) anticipating Laura Jane’s response. My eldest hasn’t mentioned Laura Jane. We’re fairly certain she’s aware that the elf has no clothes, so to speak, and she's hinted as much, but we can’t be sure, and there’s no easy way to ask that question without giving it away.

And this story, split into three lengthy parts, sums up why I tend to despise “special” days, most especially Christmastime. We create these days where things have to be more. They have to be bigger, and better, and greater, and more important. Why? Because people need bigger, and better, and greater, and more important. Because normal isn't good enough.

This is proof that too many people allow their everyday to slip into something bad, something negative and undesirable. They then look to Special Days to rescue them from their monotony and boredom. It's like the abusive spouse who justifies his daily cruelties by being super-sweet on birthdays and anniversaries. I prefer trying, sometimes feebly, to value each day and to not save up my happy karma for Special Days, but rather to celebrate my joys whenever I can find them.

Wednesday, Bob wrote about being sick of winning. But isn’t Christmas, like, the World Heavyweight Champion of Days? Haven't we manufactured Christmas into nothing more than winning? Our entire fucking economy depends on it, fer cryin' out loud. Families depend on it to spend time together, to invest in one another, to think of one another first for a change. Moms (and some dads) need it to get out of the house at midnight on Thanksgiving as some sad proof that they must really really love their families.*

[* -- On the day after Thanksgiving, one of my friends had written on Facebook, “I’m in Target at 3:42 a.m. I can’t believe HOW MUCH I LOVE MY CHILDREN!” If you aren’t bothered by this leap in logic, I pity you. Fortunately for him, some 30 people responded that they, too, were out and about, and that they, too, desperately loved their children enough to invest in Black Friday.]

Christmas has become some maniacal race. It’s become competitive. It's become about winning.

How we got from the story of a family who couldn’t afford a room in an inn and had to sleep in a barn, to elves on shelves made in China but born in the North Pole and who mess up houses and hide and write emails that make children cry is truly beyond my grasp, but almost nothing about this holiday makes me feel one bit more religious.

My goal isn't to sap your joy, dear reader. If you find Christmas in Walmart, bully for you. I'm actually a bit jealous.

For me, however, the only times in this month-long stretch when I feel closer to God, or like a somewhat better version of myself, is at the dinner table with my family and in church singing hymns... and neither of these are seasonal.

And then, finally, at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, we get our service when I finally get the chance to feel undistracted, undiluted joy. Our standing room only church of people raise candlelights above their heads as they sing “Silent Night.”

That service is the very opposite of Black Friday. We pause. We reflect. We listen. And we do it all together in the middle of the night as a way of finally -- one hour before the Most Important Day of the Year -- clarifying for ourselves what the whole damn day is really supposed to inspire in the first place.

Not iPads, not a Lexus in the driveway, and not something from Jared.
Families. Huddled together.
Candlelight.
The acknowledgement of a world in desperate need of hope and meaning.
A communal feeling of love surging through people like a strong gust of wind, carried through them from the notes of a pipe organ or a hammer dulcimer or the sound of a choir.

Christmas finally arrives, deux ex machina, and rescues us from the previous 30 days of misguided obsessions and pepper-spraying our fellow consumers. And nothing, no matter how much bile and bitterness and anger they invoke in me leading up to that evening, can shake the power of the Day itself. It's bigger than we are, and we can't ever completely screw it up.

For that, I am eternally thankful.

And the Shelf He Rode In On (Part II)

You Gotta Get Up - Five Iron Frenzy (mp3)
Please Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas) - John Denver (mp3)

Part One -- "The Origin of Laura Jane," wherein I mention our transgendered hero/heroine, Nicole Kidman, late night elf pornography, and Gmail)

November 29, 2010. My elder daughter -- let's name her Billie Jr. -- writes a letter to Santa and places it under our Christmas tree. In it, she requests a new Elf on the Shelf of her own so that she doesn’t have to share Laura Jane (our gender-transformed female elf who looks like all the other male elves) with her sister.

You see, my second daughter was always far more obsessed with Laura Jane writing her emails almost every month... and we didn’t know it because we didn’t check Laura Jane’s email account until Thanksgiving Perhaps because Billie Jr. was resigned to never be capable of loving Laura Jane quite as ardently as her sister, she was hoping to start over with a new elf.

And this is where I morph into the bad guy. Here comes my Tragic Flaw.

I crafted an email from Laura Jane that started something like this:

My Dearest Billie Jr.,

I read your note to Santa because I thought it was for me.

Have I done something wrong? I am feeling quite awful about this and wonder how I have failed you. Just this morning you want to know about my life at the North Pole, and then this evening you are asking for a different elf. I am trying not to cry, because I must have done something awful or mean for you to want another elf.

The email went another two paragraphs. Laura Jane was heartbroken. Santa can’t send multiple elves to households. It’s one or none. She might lose her job. The sky is falling, and the Pole with her.

We have struggled with Billie Jr.’s increasing inability to attune to the aches and needs of others, to empathize and to grasp the depth of The Golden Rule. What better way to address that level of selfishness, I thought, than to let the voice of absolute North Pole innocence address it?

Her mother and I had sat her down on numerous occasions to discuss this matter with her, but we had gotten nowhere. Perhaps Laura Jane could accomplish what we could not.

If results can be measured by the level of psychological and emotional distress inflicted, then I earned a gold medal. My daughter looked like death warmed over for two days. She lost the ability to speak in complete sentences, and it was obvious that every time she emerged from a moment of privacy that she’d spent her alone time crying.

Her first email to Laura Jane first thing in the morning was a panicked apology. Her second reply, later that evening, was this:

you have made me cry even more.now i am very sad.I am so so so so sorry!i wrote that note because (my sister) & i argue about who has you and so on,but i am truely sorry.My thoughts have changed so much and thank you for reading the note. it has made me relize christmas even more.

You'll need to trust me on this: Billie Jr.'s apology was more about the fear of losing everything than about an appreciation for what she had. Her concluding sentence was more platitude than truth... although I think she really wanted to believe it.

The 72 hours after Laura Jane’s heartbroken email involved a gradual evolution of personal assessment for me. At first I was proud. Laura Jane’s email had worked. The message had penetrated. The seed would grow into something good.

Then I was defensive. My daughter needed to be taught a lesson, dammit, and some lessons are hard. But sometimes you can’t learn about a stove eye being hot unless you touch it and burn your hand, and human emotions are the same way, and she needed to learn about selfishness.

Then I was panicked. Had I just embodied the persona of one of Santa’s elves and crafted a note intended to stab a psychological knife into my own daughter’s heart? Nooo, of course not... no. Not quite. No no, nothing that awful.....

Then I was horrified. What kind of father does something like this? Isn’t what I did, in some way, even more dangerous and harmful than if I’d pulled out my belt and lashed her a few dozen times, something I would never in a million years do? Isn’t inflicting emotional scars far more cruel and dangerous?

Not to mention the hypocrisy of me -- ME -- having the gall to try and teach someone else about being self-centered or selfish. Who the frick was I to go judging my daughter so much more harshly than I’ve ever been willing to judge myself??

Suddenly I was eyeball-deep into a state of despondency not unlike that which had overtaken my daughter the first day of Laura Jane's “lesson” to her. Except as the puppet-master and supposed adult, my sadness went deeper, and my self-evaluation was unflinchingly brutal. Everytime I heard or thought “Merry Christmas,” I cringed. The season was suddenly a symbol of deception, heartbreak, manipulation... nothing good.

A week later, Laura Jane was dead to me. My wife didn’t handle my resignation very well. I have little doubt that I failed to share in any adequate way my internal nuclear chain reaction with her. I probably mentioned to her once or twice that I was bothered by what had transpired, and the next thing she knew, I was quitting, and it was non-negotiable. That jump from "bothered" to "done" seemed extreme and unfair, I'm sure. (Like many men, I'm not fond of breaking down in the presence of others.)

She begrudgingly and angrily took over Laura Jane duty and carried that seething frustration with her like a sack of coal, thus adding one more body to the list of Christmas casualties, all borne from my single heartbroken manipulative scheming late-night email.

Now it's the 2011 Holiday Season. Daughter Number Two has continued her pen pal devotion to Laura Jane...

Part Three - "The Night Before," Wherein at last shines a faint glimmer of hope.

And the Shelf He Rode In On (Part I)

We Wish You a Merry Christmas - Shonen Knife (mp3)


A f*#king elf might be the death of me.

Have you seen the Nicole Kidman movie “The Others”? In it, she’s the mother of two special-needs children whose skin is hyper-sensitive to light, and they have become recluses and shut-ins in a mansion/castle in the UK.

(SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT... although if giving away the surprise ending to a decade-old movie is a spoiler, it means you didn’t plan on seeing it...)

The big catch of the movie, and one I failed to properly appreciate the first time around, is that the terrible mean ol’ servants aren’t the enemies in the film. They’re the heroes. The enemy in the film is their mom.

Back to the f*#king elf. Laura Jane arrived by box, purchased from a store by a relative seeking revenge on us for some previous crime, three years ago.

My children had many times over witnessed a box precisely like it in one store after another, constantly begging us for one, a special elf for our house. We’d heard of these damn things, and we were certain it was a terrible idea. But now one was in our house, wrapped up without our knowledge or approval. We had been infiltrated.

My daughters unwrapped the package. They shrieked and screamed. They opened the box. Inside the box was, encased in mixed paper and plastic, an Elf on the Shelf. Much like Stormtroopers, all these elves look exactly alike. Which is to say nothing like any other elves on any other Christmas shows. They look like Justin fucking Bieber.

My daughters opened the box. They removed the Elf from his bondage. They hugged him and tested to see if he had any special features, sounds, or moving parts. They then, right there at that moment, mutually agreed that this Elf was female, and that her name was Laura Jane.

How, you ask? How can children of relative intelligence and sanity open a box “Made in China,” pull out a cloth mass-produced creature, and convince themselves that this thing came from the North Pole? I do not know. I only know it happened, and I didn’t have the courage or the cruelness to crush their enthusiasm like a grape.

From that day to Christmas, we became a predictable stupid American family. Laura Jane hid at night. She messed shit up. She ate cookies and spilled milk and snuck into the computer room and watched porn late at night. She was a cute adorable deviant menace.

She disappeared to the North Pole after Christmas, and we thought that was the end of Laura Jane, the transgendered fabric elf from China. But no, the next Thanksgiving, the girls were literally frothing at the mouth for Laura Jane’s return.

Although I’m not competitive about most things in life, I can’t say that about creativity. In my mind, I am hands-down the single most creative living mind not currently working in Hollywood, the book publishing industry, the comedy circuit, the newspaper-column industry or the big-time blogosphere.

So if regular normal boring parents could make their elves hide and mess shit up and be all playful, then I would by God kick it up a notch.

Therefore I created a Gmail account for Laura Jane, and she started sending nightly emails to the girls. Probably after she was done watching all that elf porn, but how would I know, right? Laura Jane even stole our camera and took a few pictures (clean, safe) and attached them to her emails. Ours was a technologically savvy elf.

The season was fun. Everyone enjoyed playing with the elf. I was super-cool creative, and we were awesome parents. Yada yada.

But something happened on the way to heaven.

(You can read my post foreshadowing all of this, from November 2008, here.) 

Part Two - "Bad Dad," wherein I experience the stages of grief, emotionally abuse my daughter, and am reminded why the Christmas season is so despicable

Part Three - "The Night Before," Wherein at last shines a faint glimmer of hope.

The Rain Dilemma

Bottom of the Rain - Buffalo Tom (mp3)

“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

Here’s my problem with that quote: we don’t mean it.

In Greece, a country that has collectively written a check its body couldn’t cash, people are rioting. They believe their bankruptcy is some secret German plot rather than the consequences of their own fiscally-irresponsible actions. They pissed on themselves for years but were OK with it, because they just kept calling it rain.

In America, The Great Recession might as well be called The Binge Drinking Hangover from Hell, because the entire situation can be summed up the same way: “How was I supposed to know that drinking the entire fifth would make me puke all night and leave me so useless the next day?”

Our wealthiest and most ambitious worked behind the scenes to cut corners and fly towards the sun, and our average Joes and Janes maxed out every penny and every piece of plastic we could find until, for one shining moment, our entire society -- our big family of 307 million -- was spending more than it was taking in.

Seriously. Let that fact swirl around in your mind for a minute. Appreciate the gravity of an entire continent, for the first time in our modern history, spending more than it earns. (We only once dipped below 5 percent before the mid-90s.)

By recession time, more than half of the 25-34 demographic in America had ZERO savings. Most of those, it was surmised, had never even grown up thinking a savings account was necessary.

Savings? Fuck that, the lease is almost up on my Scion!
Savings? Fuck that, they’ve just come out with 3D televsions!
Savings? Fuck that, I haven’t yet seen the world!!

You know what we do to people who tell us we’re being pissed on? We vote them out of office. And we replace them with people who tell us it’s raining.

Locally, we have Howard School (of Academics and Technology and Fluffy Unicorns), a school with a rich history that long ago became the preeminent eyesore of inner-city educational horror. Before desegregation, Howard was the shining star that the black community around Chattanooga held up as proof of African-American potential. The school educated and graduated untold numbers of highly- and moderately-successful and men and women of color and beat plenty of odds and sneers to do it.

Yeah, that was, like, 35 years ago.

Or, if you want to stretch the lie and include the era of Reggie White’s years as proof that Howard was not yet a blight, then we’ll just say 30 years. For the past 30 years, Howard has been a shame and a tragedy. It has failed tens of thousands of teenagers, almost all of them black, almost all of them poor. The crime of it being labeled a “persistently failing school” by the state is that this label is about 25 years overdue.

So here’s what’s funny: the people who are angriest about Howard earning such a label are the people the school has failed now for two generations.

“Now is not the time to pull the rug out from under them,” said Walter Williams, a former local judge and one of the school’s alums from its Golden Era.

Um, has he looked at this rug? It’s a shitty rug. They haven’t replaced that rug since he was a student. It's stained, moth-eaten, frayed, and out of fashion. It's never been shampooed or even vacuumed. You can’t help but wonder why anyone would want that damn rug, or why anyone would object to it being pulled out and burned.

But people don’t rally behind slow neglect and decay. We don't hate the dude who lifts a dollar from the cash register every day for 10 years nearly as much as the guy who steals $100. We only rally when someone pulls a fast one. Americans are like frogs in boiling water who get upset about the jump in the electricity bill.

I think we like being lied to. I think we crave being deceived. I think when we pick up that huge turd and sink our teeth into it, we want to be told it’s Hershey’s Special Dark. When we rub our face in shit, we want to be told it’s deep-cleansing mud. When someone pisses on us, we want to be told it’s just rain.

How else to explain our modern world?

Long Confidence

Slippery People (live) - Talking Heads (mp3)

It is—or seems to be—a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of joke, especially his misfortunes, if he have them. And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed round pretty liberally & impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it.  -- Herman Melville

The con is as old as serpents and fruit, as old as stealing a birthright for soup. Since we first crawled from primordial ooze, we’ve longed to run a fast one on another person. Yet something about the word “con” feels quintessentially American. The first reference to “confidence man” is reportedly from an American criminal trial.

The Confidence Man was Herman Melville's final novel. He published it on the very day the novel’s events were set to occur: April Fool’s Day, 1857. The book is described as a satire, a metaphysical rumination, and the precursor to the modern novel. Melville gave up on fiction writing after it flopped.

Who better to acknowledge the cruel joke of life than Melville? Like so many great artists during their lifetimes, he died all but anonymous. Life, as he so beautifully expressed above, cons us all in one way or another.

America especially loves a crafty liar. The Color of Money and The Sting. Sawyer from LOST. Danny Ocean and his mythical 10 pals. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Catch Me If You Can. Matchstick Men. The Music Man. Paper Moon. Most of David Mamet’s CV.

We love crafty lies, and we romanticize something about con artists. We love feeling like we’re in on the grift even as we become aware that the entire nature of artist and audience is like that of the grifter to the victim.

Do we see something in the con that reminds us of life? Are con job movies and TV characters just a metaphorical and blown-up look into our daily lives? Or, do we watch these films as a kind of cautionary tale, a reminder why we should be happy and satisfied to stay in our vanilla and harmless shiny little boxes? Or, do we simply enjoy movies about karma, since the end result for most grifters is to find themselves grifted, the hustler transformed into the mark?

Most days I think we love con artist characters and con job movies because we find ourselves wondering how much of our own life or situation is an accidental con. How many conversations do we have, private and personal and confessional, where the crux of the subject is “I feel like I’m pulling the wool over their eyes,” or “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this”?

A friend at work was hoodwinked by her boyfriend. They dated almost seven months. He gave her complete access to his Facebook account, complete access to his cell phone, even his email addresses. She met his clearly dysfunctional family. Yet somehow she went seven months before finding out he had been lying about his job and was seeing at least two other women on the side. When he said he was on a business trip to Mexico, he was actually still in town seeing another woman.

In Dallas, a man is recovering from a full face transplant. (Warning: don’t view the link if you’re at all squeamish.) It’s an amazing story of science, but it’s also one more reminder of how much of what we naively consider our “identity” is, in fact, mutable. Your gender, every last bit of your appearance, even every last aspect of your face, can be massively altered in the 21st Century. Meanwhile, in the techno-world, the non-physical things are ever easier to shift and change as well.

A face transplant or a sex change isn’t a con, per se, but it is just one more way the world seems chock full of uncertainty, of shifting sand.

I can’t think of a week that’s gone by since I was in junior high where I didn’t look myself in the mirror at some point and wonder who I was foolin’. My parents thought I was a great kid. My friends thought I was a great friend. My teachers thought I was a great student. My wife. My kids. My pastor. My boss. Anyone whose path I crossed, my darkest thoughts go, probably left with a better impression than I deserved.*

How much wool was (and is) in my possession, that I could pull it over so many eyes, over and over again? How much wool do I have left? Maybe you, dear reader, don’t fret on such things, but I suspect I’m not alone in my paranoia.

In my darkest flashes, I am the Fast Eddie or Sawyer of my own story, fighting to keep the long con from imploding. Each episode comes complete with dramatic, hair-raising moments where someone is on the verge of discovering my deception until I duck into a restroom stall, lift my legs on the seat, and wait anxiously as the footsteps clop and clack on the bathroom tiles.

I sit there, hands against the sides of the stall, not daring to let even a molecule of air escape my lungs, and I hear the click of the gun as it cocks.

Cut to commercial.

All that tension build-up and anticipation just to help Proctor & Gamble sell some detergent. One more con job in our modern world.

* -- The Jonathan Franzen write-up in the NYTimes again gets at this far better than I, but who wants to reference the same guy’s writing twice in a single week??

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Sunshine Lies - Matthew Sweet (mp3)
God's Got It - The Black Crowes (mp3)

A man has a story. The story changes lives. It changes the way entire groups of people deal with situations, with other people, with themselves. It reroutes armies.

But wait.

You begin to realize this story is not entirely true. You begin to realize that the man, the storyteller, knowingly embellished or even fictionalized a portion of this story. And yet, parts of the story remain true, and its telling has unquestionably affected people for good, and its ripple effect of positivity cannot be questioned.

How big must the lies be before they become inexcusable, before the good accomplished is eclipsed by the interwoven acts of deception?

If you think I’m talking about Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea, you’re only partly right. I could also be talking about Joseph Smith, or L. Ron Hubbard, or some could even say I’m talking about Jesus Christ himself.

60 Minutes did its expose, complete with damning info from investigative studpuppy Jon Krakauer. It took a few days of follow-up shock in newspapers and blogs, and then the invevitable backlash to the backlash began. If you read the comments section of the 60 Minutes link, a majority of the 376 (and counting) commenters are incensed that the show dared to investigate such a great hero.

That Mortenson has been the central figure in acts that have positively changed the lives of hundreds of people, possibly thousands, is indisputable. But couldn’t the same be said of Scientology? Or Latter Day Saints? Or Christianity?

Sure, we can all talk about how these religions have caused problems or used deceptive practices or whatever, but it's also indisputable that they have positively changed the lives of thousands if not millions. Does all that positivity that make the Original Sin of foundational lies OK?

As a Christian, obviously, I don’t believe Jesus was a liar. As a non-Mormon and non-Scientologist, I believe Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard very much were. Such is the unavoidable dividing line between believers and skeptics. Faith often requires us to believe true that which is difficult to accept as true.

But with Greg Mortenson... at the very least he tells convenient half-truths, and he (er, his organization) mishandles more money in a month than most of us see in a year, and he gets his ego stroked by reporters, military generals, politicians, and untold thousands of Americans and poor foreigners.

Disclosure: This story hits very close to home.

Two years ago, a nearby school, a school my daughters will soon attend, put most of its focus on fundraising to help Mortenson’s organization build a school for girls in Afghanistan. They raised over $60,000. Mortenson even came to the school and spoke to them. Now there’s serious doubt the school was ever built, and even if it was, there’s doubt it’s being used as a school and not sitting empty or being used for storage.

When these students saw or were told about the 60 Minutes report, you can only imagine how devastated they were. Mortenson's defenders may be right in part -- we don’t know the extent of Mortenson’s deceptions and incompetencies -- but even the true believer must accept that he has overstated his accomplishments and understated his own profiteering. The most common defense: surely there are worse people out there for journalists to investigate.

Do the schools Mortenson actually built that have real girls in them excuse that he or his organization mishandled this school's $60,000, money raised for a specific purpose that was never met? If Bernie Madoff started a world-changing charitable foundation with the millions he bilked from unwitting investors, does that make him less of a thief?

I find myself fairly ripped apart by these questions. I don’t like having to ask them, and I don’t like the answers my heart and head offer back. Instead I think of The Watchmen, and about Serenity, and many great works of more traditional literature that suggest that large-scale lies and cover-ups in the name of the Greater Good are never, ever OK.

Times like these, I wish reality were as easy as fiction. Is our sin here in making a hero out of a human, or is the sin that the human insisted on believing too much of his own hype? Can we ever get far enough past our own miserable flaws to do truly heroic things for very long, or if we keep flying, are we destined to eventually find ourselves a little too close to the sun?

Kids Rule, Adults Drool?

Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car - U2 (mp3)
Alison Foley - Better Than Ezra (mp3)

Old dude writes a lengthy Weekly Standard column complaining that the world now revolves too much around them damn kids. Parents are too attentive, too nurturing, too overprotective, too omnipresent. Kids are too coddled, micromanaged and supervised. Back in his day, he had to combat rabid dogs for scraps of meat, and his parents would disappear for weeks on end when he was an infant, forcing him to fend for himself. It's not that his parents didn't love him, 'cuz they did. They just had better stuff to do with their time. Like, everything else.

He gives this theory a brilliant name, though: The Kindergarchy.

Unfortunately, as "Back in My Day" curmudgeonly as his writing seems, I can't help but think his central point is dead-on: for all the extra attention, time and cuddles we invest in our children, does it really produce better adults? Less selfish adults? More considerate adults?

Last I checked, employers are saying today's college grads need more praise, more incentives, more rewards just to do the same job their elders did just 'cuz that's what jobs are. That's the price of growing up with parents who convinced them they're the center of the universe: they actually believe it.

You're special.
Hell yes I am!
You can do anything you want to if you want it bad enough.
I'll be the first 5'3" NBA center!
Your place in the world is on top!
Duh! Now get the f*#k out of my way and fix me breakfast!

Reading Epstein's article splits me in two. Part of me feels sorry for the guy for not even knowing what he was missing. Poor kid, his parents weren't particularly nurturing, and they were only mentors in the abstract. But the other part sees my own childhood in his descriptions... (cue personal flashback)

By the time I was in fifth grade, I regularly rode my bike, along with one other friend, five miles, some on traffic-congested roads, to a movie theater. I rode it to school some three miles away. I had a TV in my room by the time I was 10, fully equipped with HBO and Skinemax. My parents didn't go to all my baseball games, nor did they spend tons of time training me in athletics (but then, I wasn't very good... which begins a chicken/egg debate). In middle school, my curfew was hardly enforced, and I would frequently come in at 3 a.m. from a late night role-playing extravaganza at a neighbor's house.... and I'm forced to acknowledge that we grew up with a less heavy parental guiding hand yet somehow emerged mostly OK.

None of these things were examples of stellar parenting, but I never thought of my parents as anything but wonderful, loving parents. Once in a blue moon I somehow felt my parents fell short of their obligations, but for every one of those moments I had 30 where I was grateful my parents were soooo much better, more loving, more caring, than someone else's.

Will reading this change my philosophical approach to parenting? No more than Supernanny, frankly. That show -- arguably the most valuable (and overlooked) public service commercial TV has offered in a long, long time -- should serve as the central reminder that the behavior of a child is the direct reflection of how their mother and father have raised them. For a while there was talk about how little parents influenced their children in comparison to peers and other external factors, but increasingly, common sense and surveys point to parents as the most important influencers (cute little small-town column) on their children's lives.

So what are we to do? We have great influence over our children, but we can also abuse it by overusing it. Damned if we do, damned if we don't, to some extent, which makes the intentionality of choosing our battles all the more crucial. Worst case, it seems picking fewer battles will rarely hurt the kids as long as we stay in the fight.

The Great Disconnect In The Sky

THE FIRST-EVER BOTG JESUS WEEK
(sponsored by Yeungling)

Post #3: The Great Disconnect In The Sky

The Reivers--"He Will Settle It" (mp3)
Warren Zevon--"The Indifference of Heaven" (mp3)

One day a week or so ago, my wife and I were driving downtown to a restaurant when I said, kind of out of the blue, "Do you think that everyone is just practicing various levels of self-deception about God?"

It was a slow day on the radio, I guess.

She agreed with me. We kept driving, both trying to figure out in our own minds what I'd just said. Don't worry; this is not going to be an argument in favor of atheism or agnosticism or nihilism or the Yellow Deli. It's just a public wondering about how we interpret a higher power.

Here's what I think: there is a great disconnect about what happens up there in the sky or at least in that place where it's most convenient to look when we want to ponder things greater than ourselves. It all depends on whether you are inside of a situation looking out or outside of it looking in. F. Scott Fitzgerald first talked about "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function," and it is this schism that we daily struggle with. Because, let's face it, our two basic views of God, or at least mine, do not reconcile, even in the slightest way.

FIRST VIEW: If you have a loved one in grave circumstances, say, in the hospital, then you are likely to see, or at least to wish for, God's presence and oversight in every yawn, every blink, every shift of a muscle. You talk to God, at least in your head. More likely, you beg and plead for anything, even the slightest improvement. You believe that God can and may or even will act. Even something as obvious and predictable as a rally after a powerful dose of antibiotics is ignored in favor of the power of prayer.

SECOND VIEW: If, however, you are not emotionally engaged, then on some level, you know that this is a silly, even dangerous, kind of understanding of God. You start with why a single swing, a lucky punch, puts a young man in a life-threatening situation. From there, you reject the oft-heard notion that this is somehow part of a divine plan that we mortals are not blessed to understand. Then you intuit that the God you think you know would never do any such thing, would not allow the random to rule more powerfully than his will. Furthermore, you know that He would not tease or dabble in a family's pain and upheaval. And then you conclude that God is not involved or even that whatever higher power there is doesn't have that role or ability.

I have certainly been on both sides of this one. When Robin was near death after a misdiagnosed appendectomy, you can bet I was talking in my head and praying, and even the note from Moms in Touch, a group I might have made fun of, was one of the most comforting messages I received. At the same time, I agree with Robin when she talks about her social work years with child sexual abuse cases and how no god could ever have a glorious plan that involved the kinds of things that were done to those children.

Musically, I suffer from the same dichotomy. Ever since John Lambert first introduced me to the Reivers' song "He Will Settle It," it has remained for me one of the most spiritual pieces of music I've ever heard. And, I've continued to make the assumption that the "He" in the title was a reference to God or Jesus, but there's no concrete evidence, just three verses of various kinds of despair and struggle and getting by, then the resolution of the refrain: "But I know, [H]e will settle it."

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Zevon's "Indifference of Heaven" seems equally appropriate to our condition most of the time:

Gentle rain
Falls on me
All life folds back
Into the sea
We contemplate eternity
Beneath the vast indifference of heaven

When things go badly, as they always do eventually (though in the song, Zevon ramps up the pathos even more to create some grim humor), it's hard not to think that whatever force is there that guides us is benign at best. At best.

And so, yes, I conclude, that we typically add our conceptions of God to our many other daily self-deceptions and that this is what we need to do, have to do, want to do, suffer from, take comfort in, and otherwise juggle with all of the other balls we have in the air. Which conception is the more deceiving? I haven't made that choice yet. I expect I'll try to keep both up there at the same time.

The Reiver's "He Will Settle It" comes from a mix cd known only in our family as "John's Greatest Mix." Perhaps he can tell you which CD it originally came from, but it is now out-of-print. Warren Zevon's "The Indifference of Heaven" comes from his perfectly-legitimate-to-download-from-archive.org concert of 1/12/96.