Prochnau on JFK

 

A column by William Prochnau was recently distributed by Reuters. It is about JFK. According to him, an assessment of JFK occurred the day of his death to the effect that JFK would not be remembered. This lack of remembrance was asserted because his administration did not last long enough and he had accomplished nothing. Others have said he was all starts and proposals. [Doesn't it all start somewhere, somehow?]

Prochnau denies that he was a great president. He wasn't much of a president but he was a hero. He was "modern, handsome and princely" with words and gestures others did not have. He was glamorous, a celebrity, and a media president. [Anything of substance is denied him. He didn't "detail" himself for the tube. Recall that "TV" as an entity was much different then.]

Jackie Kennedy created Camelot, a false view of the president and his meaning for us. She wanted to counter those who sought yet another false, bitter, view of him. Assassination conspiracy theorists created still another view that was less and less about him and more and more about them. [Who says gentle perversity or a raging lie is the last word on JFK? He set a standard as yet unequaled.]

Like TV was as an entity unlike today, Vietnam was an entity unlike how it is known today. Prochnau says JKF started it all for Vietnam. [Others affirm he would have stopped it. There was much, too much, that he wanted to change. Government was not the enemy, as Prochnau notes, and some feared his power to change what he said he would change. So he was murdered. The government not being the enemy worked against him.]

[Once upon a time, if you saw it on TV, that TV of long ago, it had to be true, "I saw it on TV". They used to ask, "Can I say that on TV?" Camelot and conspiracy were on TV. Even then, among those people then alive, neither Camelot nor conspiracy was fully accepted. Each had elements of truth and still do. Then and now if it is in print it must be worried over. The printed word is still accepted by some as what "is". It is reality. Reality then was never a Camelot. Did anyone ask them about it? They knew reality could be sordid, vile, dangerous, and horrid. Those today, idealists that think the contrary, indulge in a fantasy as stupid as the one they condemn. Reality never is a take-all and a cake walk and an endless torture chamber. Not, anyway, for most, then. But they have gone away. They can't tell you there was never a Camelot for them nor conspiracy, if wacko.

The intervening decades contain people born and raised lacking education - in school and life - such that they care little about "the nature of things" be it Camelot, Vietnam, assassination, Hollywood, reality TV, D.C., the Simpsons, housewives of La-La Land, nor any appreciation of style, grace, power, smarts, and the arts. They didn't have homes, family, and adventure. Hard work never accomplished anything for them. It was never about the loss of "innocence", it was about a loss of confidence in the trust of things wholly too large to know well.

Once is was, "Spring came on forever" - to borrow a phrase from the Civil War. We are in the autumn depicted by Keats. Winter is not far off.]

DeGroot, the Telegraph, and the death of JFK

 

Gerard DeGroot, in the Telegraph, comments on a group of books about the assassination of JFK.

DeGroot, given free rein, writes of Jim Garrison that he was "a paranoid fantasist, a publicity hound, and a crooked DA". Of course, not all sources, some reputable, agree with this attack. Though I would think "publicity hound" might have some credence.

If Garrison comes off badly as far as DeGroot is concerned, then Oswald fares perhaps worse, as he is characterized as being "a pathetic loser". But at least he was trying to get at the truth during his less than friendly association with the Dallas Police Department. His remarks and requests made while he was confined by the Dallas Police demonstrate that he thought he had a chance. But then he had no chance against Ruby. He also had no chance with the Warren Commission's portrayal of him.

The Warren Commission need not be considered to be a cover-up. Most, even those friendly to the Oswald-as-assassin notion, think the Commission was incompetent. In a light-year jump, DeGroot gives the assassination over to aliens. Any port in ignorance serves as well when it comes to assassination theory of any stripe. The latest on the Commission, taken to be a serious work, is "A Cruel and Shocking Act", and I am told it, makes much of Oswald's presumed trip to Mexico City. DeGroot dismisses the book because it maintains, according to DeGroot, that the CIA wasn't entirely truthful about what its agents knew of the assassination. So it is "Ho-hum". So I would say it is "everyone knows" the CIA agents are liars.

Wait, there's more, the movie, "JFK" by Oliver Stone, is termed "preposterous". If so, how or why is it preposterous? The death of JFK is accounted for in the movie. No mention is made in the film of JFK's letters and Oval Office recordings. The end of JFK isn't equated with an age of innocence. JFK, per DeGroot ,was cynical and boasted of sexual conquests. DeGroot indirectly asserts he was packaged and sold as a mythical deal worth millions despite his shortcomings. The corrosion of the American spirit cannot be the resultant of truth and lies as DeGroot wants it. It is either truth or lie and has been so for many years. When these become ancient times, JFK will still be known.

DeGroot is quite right about the ready market for JFK assassination books. So long as it may last, the mystery propels along the improbable, the impudent, the wildly improbable, and insults to one's intelligence. But then the lack of acceptance of the obvious record of the assassination - that one being the Zapruder film and the other films or photos of those seconds in Dallas- show multiple shooters were at work. Especially relevant is digital processing of the Zapruder emulsion in order to reveal the tracks of the bullets in the film.

Falling Into the Fire

(Mental illness, hysteria, Jesus, pseudoseizures, drugs, and eunuchs )

 

Christine Montross, in her book, Falling Into the Fire, has some applicable quotes -

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" - from Macbeth

and

"They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me." - Nathaniel Lee

and

"Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves." - from Troilus and Cressida

Not in her book are - "If she sums in analytic art, don't puzzle as by fluxions" - Eradacus Maximus, 17the century.

and

"If she can see herself in the mirror, don't move the mirror" - The Last and Greatest Maximus, 20th century.

 

There is madness among us and we "vote" in a sense to identify those who are mad. A diseased mind, self-inflicted, has yet to be reduced mathematically and can be seen only as a whole, like in a mirror, all at once. The author doesn't want to be seen there in the mirror beside the displayed self, whoever it might be. That would be falling into the fire. They do burn, she doesn't.

Without mirror or fire, Jesus was killed. Justin J. Meggitt, in a book soon to come out, asserts the Romans thought Jesus to be mad. Meggitt thinks he can then explain why the Romans did not hunt down the followers of Jesus. The "diseased" mind, wounded and not healing, was "outvoted" by the Romans. One can suppose their solution was a rational one from their side of things. From a futuristic standpoint, within a characterization of madness, they ended His suffering. The "cured" Him. It is doubtful they knew of any echoes of a Greek approach for algebra, not as art but as science; nor certainly not the infinitesimal calculus. Nothing like contact with the infinite figured into their calculations for His execution. It was simple arithmetic. It was subtraction for them but it lead to a replacement of them, all things Roman ended and, in addition, Christianity flourished.

Much later, and with Christianity no longer flourishing, the author attended an interdisciplinary conference about madness. The conference was decidedly not weighted toward the clinical approach. The literary types got it going that madness can be a good fuel for productive creativity. They saw "fragmented capitalist selves" or "existential radicals" among those mad. They did not ask if literature is real. Nevertheless, what if all those mad had had a "stiff dose" of phenothiazine, as O'C. Drury speculated might have benefited Joan of Arc? For à la Jesus, the Romans, those ancient psychiatrists par excellence, "treated" the wrongly styled "King" without phenothiazine. Nails and wood sufficed.

The author throughout the book relates patients she has encountered in her rather short few years of practice. A stereotype is an appearance by Jesus. In one case she was upset by his gaze. The parents of Jesus arrived from Chicago. They believed he had had a spiritual awakening although his behavior was a concern. He was joyfully happy. It did his soul good. He stunk and was unshaven. He endorsed such an elated mood but with slow speech supporting grandiose thought. He was expansive and poor in judgment. He failed to see a need for help.

The author adds that Oliver Sacks said to not celebrate good times if it is a departure from a person's typical self. George Eliot called it a "dangerous wellness". One can't be high for long, a crash is coming. In one doubtful example formulated by students of Biblical text, was it a crash right onto the Cross?

Some minds are granted time before madness overtakes them. During such time, they know they are going insane; they cannot stop it. They know there is no escape. They are rational until the greatest of existence is extinguished, burned out by the cruel banality of reality. The last embers of life worth living no longer glow, out in a wink. They can try to keep the mind's eye open, but sooner or later, they wink.

The irony of it all is that now, as 2000 years ago, you can be put to death or reduced to little better than death, for what you may be. Whoever you may be is always a mystery to others. There is more than a leading edge of sadness for everyone's last hurrah. Sliding along, is the best or better always before you or is it far away in time or space? If it isn't front and center, are you going to ransom yourself to be held in hock until time and space reverse? We once knew what we had to accept. Now we medically think faith produces agonizing self-debasement. The doctor, the author, ponders when to medicate. Is there a deity involved? Is God's message now being blocked while it was on a clear channel ages ago? She can talk it out with them, talking about it can be good or it can be an example of talking into it, which makes it worse.

A city can make it worse. There are syndromes named after cities - Florence, Paris, and Jerusalem. For the latter the involved persons have no history of mental illness. Once they leave Jerusalem, they are better. But while there they become agitated, anxious. They have a need to be clean, pure. They put on a toga. They shout verses from the Bible. Then they deliver a sermon "wholly unrealistic" about being moral. It all ends in shame, once they return to reality.

Meantime, the gawkers have a field day. It is not only there in Jerusalem in more modern times but also at other times that the author gives the community of readers-as-gawkers a fair share of material. Accompanying the gawking, the author allows for insider's jargon, wisecracks, and updates on clinical procedures and brain circuitry. Sternal rub, anyone?

Nathaniel Lee, quoted in the above, spent five years in Bethlem Royal Hospital socially known as Bedlam. Tickets were purchased so as to see the "incurables". Perhaps they were in a stupor, having interrupted neural circuits the better to be mute or lack pain. Some of the poor devils were caged. Like horses, some had metal bits in their mouths. Some were underwater for a time or spun wildly.

The author's cabinet of curiosities approach also yields a long list of what one woman of contemporary times intentionally ingests. When stressed, she swallowed. On another shelf of the cabinet can be found those labeled BIID, for body integrity identity disorder. They sense their bodies extend too far. Arms, legs and perhaps a torso should go away - cut away, blasted away, ripped away, or frozen away.

Clocks prominently occupy another shelf to time pseudoseizures. If the not so real seizure trips past five minutes, maybe it is the real thing and status epilepiticus is a bad deal. It doesn't help to call them pychogenic nonepileptic seizures. However named, they are psychological at the source and not neurological in cause. No electrical impulses are firing the brain. The EEG for them shows no seizure.

The author really cranks up with Charcot of the 19th century and his arc-de-cercle or arc-en-ciel, but first she backs up into the 2nd century AD on the subject of hysteria. She faults the treatments because it was said to be a problem confined to females. The majority of cases of psychogenic nonepileptic seizures, for example, occurred in females. For hysteria, massage of the genitals occurred in the 2nd century and much later when the massage was employed until "hysterical paroxysm" for relief of pelvic congestion occurred. But the time spent on doing a massage got to be a bit much so the vibrator was invented. The use of the vibrator was not related to sexual arousal. Even the sight of a speculum supposedly put some females into a lust for an exam. By 1906, the ten-minute vibrator session was substituted for the tiresome hour of effort for treatment of hysteria.

Not only the vibrator but also washes, removal of the stimulated rod or removal of the ovaries were all done. Counter evidence for effectiveness did no good as lobotomies more recently also "trundled on". Charot did get results, he said. Critics, few in number, said he had invented a condition, then and there in Salpêtrière. He fostered a culture of suggestion (à la Freud?) moving subjects from solitary vague unease to continual exposure to real weirdoes. Eventually they succumbed and exhibited symptoms.

Other nonsense had the uterus wandering about the body. But as the author astutely takes note, men don't have uteruses so they did not become hysterical. She says they were tabbed as being "nervous". WWI's shell shock was a warhorse of a different color. But for all their problems they were not castrated though unfairly the women had this and that removed.

Her emphasis is heavy on the gender definition of hysteria. The men got off scot-free. It was men removing the female body parts, damn it. How unjust, eh? Well then, justice was served when Origen castrated himself. Other philosophers, neo-Hellenistic or not, were castrated. After battle, to the victors belong the spoils. Usually the penis was left, but the rest was cut off. Birth control was affected. Eunuchic administrators of harems and bureaucratic activity sold for a pretty penny. Herodotus usually refers to eunuchs in terms of a high value placed on them. Dissent, across the ages, could get you castrated. The Chinese got thousands of boys transformed, voilà! Also, slaves of dark skin pigmentation had both major genital zones whacked for removal. Most died, in terrible agony, but the surviving remainder made for a profitable enterprise. Most of us already know of the castrati obtained so as to hit the high notes in choirs without women. Chemical castration now flourishes as punishment and as medicine. In other words, men did unto men and the women of the above suffered for reasons other than cruelty.

The author wants no part of cruelty. She participates in faith for the effort to cure the mentally ill. The use of "cure" is a strong term as is "treatment" which has a curative connotation that some IRBs will not accept. Anyway, their illnesses generate questions from their states of profound crises. They are people but they are minds too. The doctor, the author, has a mind, as does her partner and her two children. She, early on falsely compares her patients' minds to those of her children. She finds human similarities that are present because both the children and the patients are human. Less training is required for children, honestly, they do have compasses of a sort and a light touch steers them but patients are lost, gone into the fire, burnt to a crisp.

So then, toss pills into the fire. At least her profession sometimes does this. She does robotic, by the checklist, evaluation of those in the fire. She tries empathy, they insult her. It seems she tries to reason with them Try anti-reason, use mindful robots. They need like minds to feel the fire of powerlessness and the lack of response that could make sense to them. Only so much time can be given to them in the author's environment. Guess. Move them out. The system triumphs yet again. Empathy for the burnt evaporates and repugnance tries for the upper hand with many doctors. Go on, deal a deck, give me cigarettes, fatty food, Nazi science, Soviet science, limb removal, enlargement of organs, increased muscle mass, extremely reduced body weight, - in all, subtract from what you were, even if you get an increase, you have taken away what chemical practice, not of itself amoral, but put in the service of what you could have been – helps to light the fire.

In adolescence, once, so long ago, we were taught, yes actually taught, to strive to do good but to accept limitations. It was the striving, don't you get it, that made us not into imposters. Dalma Kalogiera-Sackellares labels a certain condition as being the double imposter. The patient strives to be a real patient, having real trouble and problems and the doctor of psychiatry strives to avoid failure, to be a real doctor. We didn't strive to be real. We didn't need to, we were real, they, the teachers, were also real. There was nothing difficult about it. Eras of enormous falsity have been perpetrated since then.

The author's partner insists on beauty and awe on a daily basis. Bravo! Unknown to us is when we will die, ponders the author. Beauty and awe today, say no more. She gets to the nub in a few pages; the rest of the book becomes of doubtful consequence when she admits to being opaque to the charm of medical science in terms of functional equations, vectors, ion channels, an EKG with a line mathematically representing an assertion of equating itself with a human being. The brain eludes them, mathematically speaking. Where is the mind? Feel the heat.

.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Post Suburbia

The Gray Flannel Suit

My contention has been that the Great American Novel was The Last Hurrah. Perhaps I have erred and it was The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit?

My edition of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was for 2002 with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen (he is perhaps more famous now). For this edition there is also an afterword by the author, Sloan Wilson. The afterword had been the introduction to a 1983 edition of the book.

I read the book to be informed as to why it was, and has been, regarded as important. Usually it is reported to be of value for what concerns the author had for suburbia and conformism and the significance of gray flannel suits. The latter was taken to be symbolic.

The book was a publishing success and became a movie starring Gregory Peck. Having Peck in the movie would have denoted seriousness. I don't know what seriousness the book had then. In any case, it was seized on as a defining element of "the 50s". (From now on I'll let "the 50s" and "the 60s" assume a diluted corporate status as persons.) I didn't find it to be so. The only outstanding characteristic it touches on, endlessly repeated as the 50s by others, is suburbia. To a lesser extent the book has to do with a quest to do something else, something important, something useful, though most of my sources found that they of the 50s had contentment in what they were doing. They had it made. After the Depression and WWII, "it got real good". Even then, some of them made the success of many into something ugly - "conformism", "consumerism" and corporations as evil. Some whined incessantly and perhaps the lopsided dominance of NYC whiners carried the day.

The whiners of the novel are weakly done as Tom and Betsy, husband and wife. Betsy is far removed from actuality. This is not a great fault of a genre, but are their actions to be believed? She doesn't like dullness. She is discontented and wants escape from what was to be a temporary residence and from neighbors who indulge in alcohol nearly ad libitum. Any contentment by residents of the area is regarded as contemptible. She mourns the loss of the short-term pre-WWII puppy love. But believably she suddenly turns the family around what with a self-improvement regimen of less TV, less dogs and burgers, church attendance, and puts the hated house up for sale. She easily accepts Tom's wartime screw in Italy who now needs money for Tom's boy. Betsy also gets active about converting land that comes with the mansion they inherit into a big profit and paves the way with helping to convince locals to pay more taxes to finance a new school that the present kids now need and the future kids, whose parents will have paid for and built on mansion land, will also need. Betsy and Tom have had struggles with lack of money that are soon to be overcome.

Tom never overcame his activities as a paratrooper in WWII. After the war, he wanted money but was not willing to give up weekends to get it. His status as a former paratrooper does not help with this. It would have been better had he died in the war or stayed in the Army. Korea was not an opportunity. He was committed to reading about that war on a train. There is no accounting for why he returned to civilian life. Tom's flashbacks and ruminations about his WWII jaunts verge on becoming mental illness issues. He never regarded his adventure with Maria as being a mistake. He accepted his wartime activities of killing. It was warfare and killing happens and so, apparently, do Marias. Actually Tom found the war to be incomprehensible and should be forgotten yet he was far from doing so. The memories persisted, remembered and lived again, and he countered by thinking he must be tough, such toughness being part of the 50s ethos.

Aiding him in dealing with his difficulties are his encounters with a local judge as a good guy, a villain who wants the mansion but who quickly folds his tent and is whisked away, and an estate developer who isn't a crook. But then there is the elevator operator in the United Broadcasting building (what a coincidence! oh please say it isn't so) where Tom works, who was a WWII warrior and was with Tom in the war and knows all about Maria, that false impossible life provided for as an asset of participation in WWII. This elevator guy can and does contact Maria in Italy.

There is the buildup developing - Maria is back, become a United Broadcasting gopher, low paid blandness at his current job, his wife's pressing changes of behavior, money worries, his preoccupation with WWII, his Dad, shell-shocked by WWI, had executed a deliberate car crash as a suicide; and Tom’s grandma's estate is threatened by claims of the housekeeper - all could have been momentum for a much different novel. A novel it could have been that connected Tom's mind to the complexity of his existence. Such a course received no support from the author. But all of these concerns are quickly sentence by sentence or by short paragraph by paragraph resolved without detritus, no chads hanging, and no clumsy, awkward truthful residue.

There is acknowledgement within the novel that Tom has four worlds - grandma, WWII, United Broadcasting, and his family. His WWII experiences are the core for him but not of the book. This is a fundamental falsity the author ignored or did not admit to perpetrating.

Along the lines of missed opportunities, only from my perspective, I realize long past the author's creative concerns then dominant, is a slight mention of United Broadcasting showing programs as bad as radio, only in it for the money and not to improve people's minds. Ah, echoes of very long ago and very lost times when some TV programming had to have documentaries and educational content with no glory in rape, murder, torture, and the like; with an FCC chairman declaring that the programming was a vast wasteland. But then the author tossed off this comment about United Broadcasting when his tongue was how far from his cheek? Another lost opportunity here, its effect not-on-Tom added to the list enumerated above. A great novel it might have been.

Does it represent the 50s? Hardly. It touches on suburbia. There are ashtrays in the offices. All the secretaries, but one, are extremely good looking. A tough, tough Betsy pushes the book to conclusion, relieving the author of, shall I say, a writer's duty, to get it going on another, undoubtedly for him, a difficult, complicated, messy plane. The head of United Broadcasting speaks the obvious with exclamation points, example - Glad you could make it!, to a mandatory company meeting. The calm and quiet punched up, business-speak of the time in contrast to becoming calm and quieter via a near lisp of a whisper like the early Jacqueline Bouvier or a recurring character on "Dobie Gillis". They, and anyone else, of the 50s-60s-70s-80s could succumb to greed, not conformism or consumerism. An excess that came too fast, unearned, a fallout of manna.

The novel has specifics about the gray flannel suits of NYC rushing around in frantic paths going nowhere and getting more money. Tom takes off the gray flannel suit when he decides to be honest with Hopkins of United Broadcasting and his wife. He resolves to be an optimist. At least the 50s were more optimistic than later decades. New found early money is imperiled by pessimism.

Such is not a concern of the author as he relates in the afterword that the gray flannel suit goes on - presumably that enduring symbol and the take away for many in the next decade. The author was surprised about where the appreciation of his book was placed. He thought the book had been largely autobiographical. But Norman Cousins and Orville Prescott had a differing view of WWII's aftermath devolving into conformity and suburbia. Somehow others got the idea that Tom was an ad man. The campus and street authorities of the 60s thought Tom was a "square".

The author recognized the suit was of a type, correctly, but incorrectly then the lessons of the book or the lessons put there by some reviewers and others, who must not have read the book, were that WWII problems (Tom’s problem came down to a kid in Italy) were repeated in Korea and Nam. The author characterizes his book as being about youth, not of an era, of a person that was a very angry man. But the youth, ill-thought out though they were, of the 60s ignored Korea and were dominated by the war in Nam too such an extent as to fuel anger, greed, and irrationality to forge an era dominated by Youth. The author readily accepts what the book was not about.

There was no mention of Youth by Franzen in the introduction. He thought Tom's suburban world was one of reassurance like Imperial Street in St. Petersburg and Victorian London - both quite a stretch. The features of Tom's world and of those of his associates are, for Franzen, taken up by quiet streets, commuters in fedoras, trains, and martinis by the pitcher, ugly domestic fights, and sexual activities that smell. Except for the fedoras, these features are found before and beyond the 50s. All eras, ages, decades - what have you - have their similar performances. The pretensions of the 60s cant took pains to show that they were removed from 50s conformism, as defined by those of the 60s, or seized upon by whiners, into their own conformism and also into their ever more feverish consumerism. They whined louder as they denied contentment. They became political as a social definition and discarded society as community. Tom was asleep, but with no dreams of career, improvement, or ideals. It was dull, no wartime edge, peace, domesticity, the purpose of the everyday and carrying on regardless never entered his agenda nor of those anti-Toms who didn't identity, like Tom, what was being lost but known in a chain, broken at times, of American life back to the Puritans.

Puritans and others had no Freudian umph! to offer pretended progress for engagement with daily living. From them, jumping into the gray flannel suit, Franzen saw a lack of household harmony when households were going to be in short supply and solitary pursuits of the self, divorce proceedings as often as changing socks, and the end of attempts at participating in truth, patriotism, justice, God, work, and fun -never mind harmony - were gone.

Franzen thought the nuclear family to be a cult, and the politics then was quiet, and, others said, elitism was going to be dissolved by activism. They, of the 60s, "won" in the social sense. And to the victors go the spoils. What was spoiled was what the 60s said was rotten. No effective defenders for the 50s, all were liberals. Money got to be a god-awful solution to all social problems, repudiated as "selling out" but buying equality, opportunity, and integrity.

Franzen wrote that the 50s gave the 60s its idealism and rage. Really, the 60s took the rage. The 60s and its minions wanted no obligation to the 50s and its minions. There was an erroneous homegrown idealism. There and then it came to be. To protect themselves from the worth of the 50s, they got it sealed off using the accusative plaster of hypocrisy, so many stereotypes came out of the pavement, and they became harassed and hassled and hustled.

One hustle was the universal acceptance of disgust, if not hatred, toward suburbia, which is now, our experts say, in decline. At long last, it, as it was, has the decency to expire. I am not one of them, of the 50s and 60s, though I knew both. I carry on alone that concern they gave more lip service to in the 50s, the last time, honesty, harmony, decency, truth, and accuracy were socially attempted. Like them, I am imperfect, all the stones to be the first to cast are too heavy and such is an allusion to the Biblical commonality in community that we lost. We forgo the realization of the obvious lack of enough intelligence we can command to explain. Either don't explain, and live the consequences, or realize God.

The real 50s as perceived by the 60s would be, I presume, Britain, its post WWII experience was much different from ours, the 60s outburst more intensive and concentrated at first. Many books by the Brits have documented the 50s and the explosion thereafter. Truly not our 50s, theirs, not our 60s, theirs (early on). Their religion, decency, honesty, conformism, consumerism, hypocrisy, and so on?

So outside the American 60s contract of criticism of the American 50s, it would be better applied to the Great Britain of the 50s, conceptually of course, and only in that sense. One could do so only for a short time since the Brits didn't wage war in Vietnam.

Christianity in Literary Fiction?

(Cable TV,money,the Great American Novel,boredom, the fire hose and the nukes)

Has Fiction Lost Its Faith? asked Paul Elie last winter in the NY Times. It would be better titled as Has (Literary) Fiction Lost Its (Christian) Faith. Why ask this if it is known that our culture is most definitely post-Christian? As an example of a Christian writer, he names one O'Connor (Flannery) but not the other O'Connor (Edwin) though Mr. O'Connor wrote The Great American Novel, The Last Hurrah, and, more to the point, The Edge of Sadness, winner of the Pulitzer for 1962. Both O’Connor’s were published in the 50's and early 60's.

The implications of the 60's and 70's, confirmed by cable television, ended Christian literary fiction. It ended even so much as the possibility of Christian literary fiction. The bandwidth of our un peu culture has shrunk so that it doesn't accommodate Christian literary fiction. It is plainly a waste of time or, at best, uncomfortable for the atheists in charge. There is little of the belief that could be made known. This belief, if thought, is existent and poses no concern. Should the belief become real - as written, enacted, read - the problems ensure. The prized commitment in some venues to "diversity" can't allow such a reality to become heresy.

The antecedent diversity of the 60s came in an era that had no one in charge. Students and others were taught to denounce various concepts and groups and then they had no plausible resultant. They got the transcendent, fantasy, utopia, copouts or dropouts. The 60s and 70s continued a tyranny of public opinion unchecked by Christianity and amplified by the public opinion into a worst case scenario.

They played off the concerns for conformism and participation that of the 50s were about types. The 50s were affluent but also labeled as "boring". The affluence was characterized as the longest economic Western growth ever seen including ordinary people having their wages rise faster than ever before or since.

They had the money in their life, need they any meaning in their life? Did the money buy the meaning, if needed? Or is God the best way to give meaning to life? What substitute is there, besides the money? Fiction was written to show the errors in the ways of the believers of God. But hasn't this been done in fact, not fiction, need we more of Clothide de Vaux as the Virgin? We have little morality but we still have fears, adversity, and mental monsters that seize us -especially boredom. Do we need God, after all, if people are replaced by things?

Somewhere along the way, if you got God, you got morals. If you want immortality, get a moral, apply it. If you want complete freedom, you lost God. If you are Golfing Against God, then par is morally neutral and you are putting into sadism. The greens are flattened, Flatland, with no twists into morality. Your caddie is "existence" and you can only get to the next hole without culture, even un peu culture is too much. Subtracting culture does not retain humanity that can offer some clarity otherwise you've got a biological blur.

If your golf game is getting out of hand, blame society. Rousseau wanted to blame society for individual ills. Such, via the therapeutic approach, we have accepted. Christianity need not apply to aid us. The Wild Man of Borneo was our link, not Christ. From the Pacific to Paris and from the Cross to the computer. The elites once had computers, now they are getting to the masses. They have accentuated, if not caused, the outstanding stigmata of modernity –boredom (s).

Can science and technology triumph over boredom? Can they handle not the usual boredom but the profound one of modernity and, thus, of the masses? Is it Christianity that can better combat boredom of today? Christianity has already encountered acedia (apathy in the practice of virtue that afflicted the clergy) in the Middle Ages. In the 4th century AD, monks in the desert near Alexandria battled the mid-day demon (daemon meridianus). Acedia yields to God, or work. At least Pascal thought so. He placed humankind as doomed to boredom without God. Quick, superficial diversions were and are countered by the reality of death.

Once one desires one's existence (á la Romanticism), then boredom can occur and in retaliation one may turn to science, technology, or fashion, TV, or authors. Such science and technology is about what one perceives, one is using science or technology not as the "pursuit of knowledge" and so on, but for personal need, personal function. Such science or technology is not real, nor is fashion and TV watching, nor is reading ("I like to read") not what is read, but to read, it is the reading itself and the watching of TV itself and literally "into" clothes for fashion and having the gadgets are presumed to be enough. Information is substituted for the self.

If we are of the elite or the mass, we get bored. In our un peu culture, we are less safe, more brutal, less rational, more hurried and harassed, less possessing sense and sensibility, with less God (or no God), less responsibility, less honor, less duty. So what's the point? We need to be entertained or boredom sets in, so we are entertained by torture, horror, sexual oddities, extravagance, cruelty, suffering, murder, lack of discipline, less family, no tradition, less cohesion and more chaos, and we can't control our use of money. St. Augustine stole rotten pears and feed them to the pigs. We can now choose between evils though what is evil is no longer relevant. We steal from reality and feed ourselves trash, trash in and trash out. We are pigs. We can no longer avoid the most obvious and antisocial evils, or what were once evil and sinful. Then, too, there is now no sin.

There was no sin in the literary fiction of Huxley's Brave New World. That world offered a solution to boredom which was death. In the meantime, if the life is to be lived, it was to be stable. A world state was put in place that started with the Alphas and ended with the Epsilons. That world government would have been imperiled by parents, family, home, and Christianity. The subjects were compelled by brains and butts to do soul-less what was required. For all else there was soma, Christianity without the side effects. When it came time to die you went like lights out, quick, neat, no fuss, no muss.

Actually, in Brave New World, Christianity wasn't completely gone. It was on the Savage Reservation. It was sullied by pumas, lizards, mescal, flab, sag, blotches, and wrinkles. Off the reservation was stability though it could be squalid and lacking the spectacular. They gave up the truth to be happy. The Savage in Surrey, of the Brave New World, could not be happy as a Christian.

Wars of religion loom, can we respond adequately, let alone win, if we are utterly secular? As pagans, our battle banners may be illegible. If corruption and stupidity are outed, we have a fighting chance, otherwise we will succumb. We lost Vietnam. Iraq and Afghanistan are inconclusive. Our drones and other machinery are expected to carry the day. Boredom will overtake us and we will take more drugs, not just pills, to assuage ourselves into destruction. We will be conquered. Segments of the bored are attained or a critical mass of the bored is attained. In a flash the nukes or "biologics" or something else gets activated.

Even without the wars of religion, we are losing the ability to control nuclear weapons. We gulp from a fire hose spewing the start of nuclear destruction somewhere within the flow. The start will end us all. We try to consume the start before it is too late. We are drowning in vulgarity, sadism, brutality, taboos ended, impulse completed, gratification done instantly, ecstasy, unbridled freedom, and the remnants of Christ and God. Each era we drink less and the fire hose’s flow gets faster. Greater grow the odds that we will fail. No aliens are out there in such a state that then they can rescue us. Millions of possibilities are there but they have had enough home abundance to gain time to reach out to us but they never did. But before their reach could go far, their physics, like ours - it is ours, enabled them to destroy themselves. It will be okay here too, if we all die together. Only some die now and again, how unfair. And , truly, not all of us drink at the fire hose, they don't care- atheists, the moral neutralists, the perverse. The stakes grow enormously, who will take the bet? What fool would bet against this house? A Christian believer. Others will attempt escape to other planets.

Then again, there may be no fire hose to worry about if boredom on top of boredom on top of boredom becomes extreme and they (some of us) devise a simulation of nuclear world war. Then, why not see if it works? How many people want it? How many are enough? On the day they put Him on the Cross, there was no way they could imagine such madness. It is Pascal's wager and it is lose-lose. Haven't the odds been against us for a long time? Get a clock, when it chimes, they launch. As compensation, imagine how more and more gets invested with meaning. The importance of anything at all accelerates as they close in on the chime. The End. Everyone gone, all at once. None of this malingering. Thousands of warheads are available. Earth will become unrecognizable.

Human reason has limits but it can take you up to belief, we can have at least some idea (Aquinas) of matters regarding belief. The plausibility of faith can be supported by reason. At the end of reason is belief. Hobbes did not care for the ancient prudence but he felt it prudent to not take an unnecessary risk and cast aside omnipotence. Non-believers are fools to not be on the supportive side of God. Hobbes also thought there is not much we can know about God beyond the word "God" - certainly not the abundance of knowledge some profess to have. For instance in regard to our souls, for most of us our soul disintegrates on death since it has no place to go. After all, there then need not be a "place". It is as if we had never lived. For some, the soul may persist; the place and time are not known. There would be no knowing in any event. We will never again know. Life is temporary for some. For others there is no more. A nothing of any kind becomes impossible. Belief is not the truth of propositions. It is not caused by facts. Literary fiction has an ending. The believer currently has not ended. A truth need not be factual if contained in faith.

Flannery O'Connor, a practitioner of literary fiction, drew, early on, mostly birds, some chickens. She tried to become a cartoonist. Her guardian angel had feathers. She had decided at 12 to not get any older. Milledgeville, Georgia was a bird sanctuary. She brought peacocks to Andalusia. And she caught "rabbits”. They were the starts for a story. Now, no Christian rabbits can be found. She was a 13th century Catholic. She got a sense of practicality in writing, no forcing here into guesses (a fiction within a fiction) nor was she defeated by Church doctrine. Her Christianity was more than symbols. Kazin thought she used more synonyms than metaphor. She believed in original sin and, other than that, all else is lessened. There is a lack of stasis. You get to choose ways that may slow the lessening. God has a say in it. As she lessened, she didn't have an easy life.

For many of us, life has gotten too easy. We strive to come of age without boredom but the traps are very numerous. We should be learning about it. Boredom 101. Stay youthful, get bored. Ripeness is all - Shakespeare. What is Great is beyond us, little dissipations in art, sex, drugs, alcohol, travel, literary fiction, and so on are what we do. Stavrogin, for example, never liked nor accepted his dissipations. Wanting it the easy way, Christianity is too strict, so flop into "religion “or recline into "spiritualism". For the latter two, try to work up an enthusiasm for literary fiction. Good luck, you'll need it. May you have a wide road and all that sort of thing.