Currently Listening Our Love to Admire By Interpol Wrecking Ball see related

Ron Paul-ism

A Surreptitious Peek into Xanga

I'm still looking for that trampoline that launches dream states into fullblown reality.  As a child I was afraid of trampolines.  I remember dreading being launched clear off the earth, so I cautiously pretended to jump while mooching off the springing momentum of other jumpers.  Now, after the other children have completed their dizzying jumps into adulthood, I must alone generate the force to catapult me to great heights.

Bla, bla, bla.  For any reading this, I miss you and hope to scour up conversations in of the crowded hangouts that populate the web.

Currently Reading The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread By Kate Dicamillo see related

Prolific in Paralysis - Ideas for a Pro-Life Reality TV show

I'm gonna be like Danielle and post my Facebook stuff over here.  I wish everyone could settle on one forum.

Would you watch a reality show about pro-life activists?  Of course you would: you are a pro-life activist.  But would anyone else?

I posed this question to my girlfriend and she answered with a definitive no.  Unless a parallel but opposing set of characters were presented on such a controversial issue, she would feel like she was being railroaded into a brainwashing station and re-route a more open-ended means of entertaining passage.

Does this objection quash my idea?  I really think there'd be an abundance genuine human interest generated by a band of grassroots activists forced to live in close quarters during a country-wide tour or quest.  Spreading my options on the table, I'll look to see if there's any way of avoiding the pitfalls of one-sidedness.

A few years ago, a reality tv show inserted a die-hard pro-abort amidst the Survivors for a single show.  I guess they were going for a sort of Myth Busters style, with explosive social issues substituted for chemical reactions.  Though the results of the former are often more spectacular (in my opinion), people would likely choose the latter.  Why?  Because most normal people are far more interested in the answer to "Could my cell phone really cause an explosion at a gas station?" than to "What would happen if you forced pro-aborts and pro-lifers to work side-by-side?"  The first question engenders a happy and harmless sort of curiosity; the second inspires a quick change of subject and channel.

A potential way to overcome the interest barrier for the life issue is to put the focus back on the individual.  Take "Run's House," the show on MTV about the Run DMC guy.  Watching a middle-aged rapper walk around his house and argue with his family sounds like compelling entertainment, right?  Only if his family is actually interesting, and Run himself is a funny enough guy to keep the audience watching after revealing the old celebrity curiosity, "where they are now."  If you could stock a life-issue drama with enough interesting characters, and I consider the pro-life movement full of them, you're halfway to a marketable TV show.

The next half is the hardest: where's the initial hook?  We might first look for someone with the fame of a guy like Run.  Unfortunately, we have no celebrities in the pro-life or pro-family movements, unless you are naive enough to believe that the mainstream is fascinated by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (R.I.P.).  Outside of Christian fundies like me, the only interest base for such men is the other side.  Consider the film Jesus Camp.  The theaters were probably full of humanists and Christian activists, sandwiching a few teenagers who mistook it for a horror movie set at a Christian summer camp.  The humanists cheered, the Christians churned out prophetic fundraising letters and the teenagers quickly lost interest and started making out.

The pro-life issue has no apparent inherent hooks: no celebrities, little in the way of juicy notoriety.  The whole issue is more like a blade than a hook, skewering those who aren't paying attention and putting the rest to flight.  This cannot be the final judgement, however.  The pro-life issue is too controversial and too fundamental to be exiled from the domain of public interest.  The key is too find the a broad enough riverway that flows back into the mainstream.

Perhaps the broadest stream of interest feeding into television is sex.  The pro-life and pro-family issues are as saturated with sex issues as the public appetite.  Where then lies the connection?  Pro-lifers have often tried using the word "sex" with a little reluctance and some results.  Ears perk up certainly, but the politeness and modesty of the average pro-lifer quickly steers his terminology towards the vague and technical areas of sexual conversation.  "You're worth waiting for!"  "HPV has been correlated with a 25% increase in cervical cancer!"  Quite risque and titillating for the 13-year old homeschooler, but not so much for the public high school student.

If employed artfully sex carries more than enough interest potential to carry an audience past the glaring warning signs of "abortion" and "Christianity" and into the place of raptured interest maintained by shows like American Idol, Myth Busters and Run's House. 

I'll save my plan to do just that for my next post.

Currently Reading The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson see related

Bio-ethically Challenged

Apologies in advance: this post is rather long, and it's only the introduction.  There's a devil of a cliffhanger at the end too.  I'd still like your feedback, however, if you ever have the chance or desire to sift through my convoluted thinking process.  God bless!

Introduction

So my girlfriend is quite the advocate for animal rights.  This is quite the contrast from my own pro-life fanaticism.  For reasons I hope to explore in this post, "treehuggers" and "fundamentalists" have never been on the same page, despite sharing self-styled titles as cultural prophets and rescue workers.  I'd also like to find some route between the two positions, a stream where the passions of each could meet.  Of course, being the pro-lifer, I'm hoping that the stream leads towards that issue.  I do not currently possess a firm mindset, I can't promise that I will meet these goals satisfactorily.  I'd be a bum if I didn't try, though.

As I cannot speak for all pro-lifers, and certainly not for lifelong animal rights acitivists, I offer only my own experience.  This experience, while limited, has, especially recently, peaked at intensities strong enough to shed some light.

I know I've always rolled my eyes in automatic response to PETA commercials.  I remember one image of a guy poking a turkey accompanied by text asking if the turkey was having a happy thanksgiving.  I was very entertained by one commercial that urged "dog-companions" not to allow their dogs to hang their heads out of the windows, depicting a human baby dangling out the window to drive the point home.

Though distant from the established animal rights groups, I've felt the twinges of sympathy for animals that I'm sure just about everyone who has raised animals or attended zoos can relate too.  I'm irritated by the dull enclosures of the big, ugly farms like Harris Ranch; there's a definite appeal in seeing animals free range, separate from all that filth and those ugly metal bars.  The zoos are just as bad: those big, beautiful cats just pace all day, like inpatients at an asylum.  Such sights temper the delight of watching animals who really seem in their element, like the orangutangs who find seemingly endless entertainment in playing with paper bags.

I've also felt pangs of guilt.  During my brief tenure as a farmboy in Perrydale, Oregon, we had a tribe of eggless old chickens, a few turkeys and a lovely assortment of other animals.  When we moved to the city, we were unable to find any takes for the chickens and my dad had to shoot them.  I was so excited by the prospect of seeing the 9mm in action that I did not realize the sadistic emotions that overtook me.  It was a sad sight, but my reaction was laughter, perhaps a compensation for the grief I felt I should feel.  My dad reprimanded me on the spot.  I felt a low, dirty feeling, like something wicked had snuck into my soul and taken me over. 

The joys and the guilt left me with a sort of tenderness towards animals that surfaces whenever I see them distressed.  When I ran over a skunk last year I prayed with everything in me that it was ok, or that it had died quick and painlessly.  Anger joined with regret; I wished that tires weren't so deadly, and that animals would have sense enough to avoid the road.

Yet in all these cases a sigh, a quiet prayer and the hopeful scent of God's coming kingdom sets me at ease.  Hence I have never had the sort of burning in my bones that would drive me to any sort of activism.  The urgings of organizations like PETA to cease eating meat altogether struck me as so absurd and foreign that I never even entertained their arguments.

Now I've entered into a close relationship with a person who feels the burning in her bones on this issue.  The foreign and the absurd are now reflected in the eyes that hover intimately close and glisten with sincere and powerful emotion.  Needless to say, rolling eyes and condescending laughs do not do her justice.

My currently reading tab is purely because of her.  The book avoids the imperative tense of any verb, but pleads, shames, reasons, preaches, pontificates and scientifically demonstrates the case to consider not eating meat.  As a pro-life activist well-versed in the art of the gently presenting crushing moral commands, I can easily read between the lines.  The book is saying: STOP MURDERING ANIMALS TO SATISFY A $@#!*&% CRAVING!  There's more meat around this bone, but the visceral reaction to this belief shouts over any other considerations.  Anyone who eats meat does not want to hear this message, no matter how delicately it's presented.  We want to hear that we are treating animals great, or at least be offered an easy compromise.

While I'm a bit embarassed at the defensiveness of my response to this book, the experience helps me understand the cold reception given to all varieties of pro-life demonstrations.  No one likes to be called a murderer, nor to tag one of their friends or family members with such a label.  Whether you show a picture of an unborn baby that says "life," or of an aborted baby that says "choice," the word that stands out in even the least-discerning mind is "murder."

Dreading that I might fall into the traps of self-deception and angry denial that ensnare so many people I've argued abortion with, I had to put down the book to gather my thoughts.  I now ask myself if the my defensiveness has justified cause; or if it is (God forbid!) symptomatic of a deep conviction; or if belches forth from a murky swamp of tangled truth and falsehood.  As I feel neither fully right, nor completely wrong, I'll plunge into the swamp.  There I hope to find long-forgotten treasures amidst the rank decay.

Hamlet for Breakfast

I'm a softie.  It's about time I realized it.  I tear up just a teensie bit when the hero goes off to certain doom, when the little baby dies and when sons and daughters watch their father go through an emotional breakdown.  When somebody chokes back the tears on TV, my heart engages its switches and demands that I cry for them.  I want to cry for the sweetness of grief, the purest form of love I see in human stories. 

Hence my fondness for Hamlet, that 400-lb. heart-string puller.  Hamlet is a play I wanted to like from the beginning.  It is a work of "The Bard," you know.  Enjoying it, and expressing that joy with overly loud sincerity, might earn me a place among the truly cultured. 

Contrast this with my preconceived notions before reading of Death of a Salesman, a play by one of Marilyn Monroe's hubbies, Arthur Miller.  I immediately penalized Miller 50 interest points for having such a boring name. He also wrote a play called the Crucible retelling the McCarthy led scare-tactics of the 50s as reimagined version of the Salem Witch trials, thus giving all of my liberal teachers a platform to talk about fundamentalist witch hunts for 15 minutes at a time; this costs him 10 more points.  That Death of a Salesman is as humorless and suburban a melodrama as can possibly be conceived tips him over (or is it under?) the negative 100 point scale.

Can you guess which one I liked better?  I have the right combination of lack of time, lack of energy, a dash of vanity and a smattering of humilty to neglect to bash Death of Salesman and just talk about why I liked Hamlet.

First of all, Hamlet has some kick-butt dialogue.  By kick-butt, I mean that the coolness of the phrasing and the imagery is magical, conjuring a sparkling little boot in my mind's eye that dazzles me as it saunters out of view and then kicks my mind's butt on its way into the recesses of my memory.  I can hardly wait to plan to and then completely wimp out on memorizing some of the best soliloquoys (spelling?).  I do have a couple one-liners I can user when I'm feeling ornery towards Kelly, my mom, or any other female with range.  "Oh most pernicious woman!" is on the plain side, but I can always give it weight by citing its source.  "Frailty: thy name is woman" has a bit more sting to it; only useful for obtaining an unspoken but unmistakable "Insensitivity: thy name is Sam."  Finally, when I've just a piercing insight into the feminine mystique (happens often) and the lady blusters to cover up the secrets before I gain full understanding, I whip out "Methinks the lady doth protest too much!"  That really gets them.  If you think I'm bad, just remember that Hamlet drove Ophelia insane.

Perhaps thinking an abundant supply of one-liners wasn't enough to enrich me and win my devotion, Shakespeare thoughtfully delved into a treasure trove of male interest: the warlike instinct.  We men fancy ourselves mighty warriors, but many of us face a prior battle with our squeamish nature.  Strap on the shiny armor and give me a sword and I'll charge out the door, but when my sweat comes out with the sun, and my legs get sore, and I can't open the hopefully refreshing Sprite with my gauntleted hands, that armor's coming off faster than the newlywed's clothes in the hotel room.  And that's even before the rain of arrows whistles around me and the sight of impossibly tall men with warhammers appear through the narrow slits of my visor.  Still, there's always the hope that war will turn out to be more like a video game than the sort of fatal football practice we fear it to be.

Hamlet really wants to slay his murderous, lecherous uncle, but his sensitive upbringing bids him step back and unwind that twisting snarl for a bit.  In his contemplations, he finds that the vengeful lifestyle is not really suited to the wife-kids-house-white-picket-fence ideals all medieval Danish men secretly wanted.  He's like the cop in the action movies before his wife and child get killed by Sean Bean or John Malkovich: he's got lots of aggression but too much to lose.  The presence of tragic-eyed Ophelia and the potential that his mother is not totally evil give him cause to pause, as if Shakespeare might be hiding a floppy little puppy and a happy ending behind the closing curtain.

Deeper into Hamlet's soul rumbles the question of his own fitness to make right what is so wrong with his world.  The failings of those around him is clear, but the evil and weakness that lurk within him cast an inscrutable shroud of doubt over the results of his actions.  His own revenge creates the need for others to take their revenge on him.  Hamlet realizes this and aches.

It is this last quality that makes Hamlet such a moving tragedy.  In many tragedies, the author puts on a really tacky wig and calls himself Fate and proceeds to arrange the zodiac to fall unfavorably on a pair of lovers.  Thus star-crossed, the lovers can only sigh as "Fate" descends upon them with the cleaver.  Here, Fate and his gory saber are bound off stage, and the touching story of human failure proceeds naturally.  Instead of anger and frustration at the meaningless chaos of life, Hamlet's bitter fate is sweetened by his humbler nature's attempts to soften the fall of man.