An Alternate History Poem

Jerusalem

The hosts of the Romans have surrounded Jerusalem

but they bide their time while in the holy city’s streets,

rival factions reach for each other’s throats. 

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai watches,

powerless as Jeremiah,

as the bands of zealots bleed each other dry.

Once, by the waters of Babylon, an exiled people sang:

If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its skill. 

If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my tongue cling

to the roof of my mouth.

Now, sheltered within her gates,

they deface her.

The people are already hungry

when the factions set fire

to each other’s food stores.

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai calls

his disciples together.

It is better to go to a house in mourning,

he tells his disciples, than to go to a house where they feast.

So they lay him in a coffin, lift it up on their shoulders,

carry it out past the rebels

who bar the way against escape.

And so it is

that Yohanan leaves the embrace of Zion’s hills

in a box as dark as the womb.

And as he leaves,

he prays for the holy city.

That it never again

see such strife.

That it never again

be used as a pawn

in some self-styled savior’s

game.

That its gaze be turned away forever

from the vanity

and iniquity

and ignorance

of men.

His cry ascends

from the pit of a feigned death

and the last rabbi ever to teach on the temple’s steps

is granted a single

miracle:

God bends the arc of time.

In the heat of the fire,

as the three walls of the temple burn,

the Lord forges a future where the fourth burns also.

Roman generals order the stones of each building

to be scattered, the earth sewn with salt.

No strangers settle there, no flocks lie down

to pasture: the ruins of Jerusalem are home only

to wild beasts: scavengers in a desert.

Pilgrims come only to tremble in fearful awe

at the valley of unmarked graves.

Muhammed’s night ride

is from a heap of ash.

Would-be Crusaders bash

each other’s heads in

at home, because

there is nothing

called Jerusalem

to conquer.

No Jerusalem to inspire.

No Jerusalem to divide.

In a quiet cemetery in Tiberias,

Yohanan ben Zakkai

rests

in peace.

An Unpopular Opinion on What Causes School Shootings

Before I hit an open nerve, let me just say: I'm not writing this to oppose whatever action you feel like the country ought to take right now. I understand you're worked up and I don't want to argue with you.

If you want to try some type of gun control, I will not stand in your way. If you want to tax me a little more so the country can provide more mental health services, you are welcome to a share of my wages. If you want me to make personal efforts to reach out and include people who feel marginalized, I will do so (not out of fear that someone in my circle of influence will snap and become a mass shooter, because that's a weird thing to think about, but because I genuinely like people and feel like everybody does better if I can help smooth over the friction of human interaction a little for someone else).

Look: I'm willing to try it all, even if I don't actually think it will do much to reduce, let alone end, school shootings.

If you will give me a moment to be honest, though, I will admit to you: I think the main cause of American school shootings is the way Americans talk about school shootings. And if I had a magic wand to wave on this issue, I would use it to convince people to change that.

Let me back up and lay out my case before you dismiss my conclusion.

It seems like we can all agree that a school or other mass shooting has three essential elements:

1) Someone who hates the world and wants to die.
2) A gun.
3) The idea that shooting a bunch of people with a gun would be an effective way to show the world how much you hate it.

I've seen a lot of people who talk about elements #1 and #2 above. After I review them quickly, I want to talk about the typically neglected element #3.

Mental Health Options

One school of thought on how to prevent school shootings is centered around changing the shooter. If no one hated the world and wanted to die, the thinking goes, then no one would go shoot a bunch of innocent people and get themselves killed in the process.

So far, so good...but can I get people to stop hating the world and wanting to die? That seems like a question that philosophers, saints, and psychologists have been wrestling with for an awfully long time.

Could we do it by funding more professional psychiatric care? Maybe. A little bit. Counselling does make a significant difference in many people's lives--but it's not like everyone who has ever gotten counselling or other psychiatric attention acts as a good citizen thereafter. Even if we could get everyone who hates the world and wants to die into counselling, we can't come close to guaranteeing that they would listen to the counselor or that the experience would change them.

And how do we figure out who needs intervention? If there were a reliable test to diagnose murderous world-hatred, nations, employers, and school counselors alike would be all over that thing. But there's not. So how reliable can we be at getting at-risk people into counselling? It's tough.

One solution offered by many religious groups is to treat everybody as a risk and get them in for regular counselling. At least weekly in church, though multiple times a day seems like a good way to play things safe. The only problem with that approach is that you have to mobilize basically your whole community of believers to come close to meeting demand, and we're not terribly well trained. God himself has to cover for a lot of the empty spaces, and he seems to have a hard time getting through to people, too.

So there are some big limitations on our ability to adequately tackle mental health. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it's one of those big, endless tasks people are always getting tired of. Do we have other options?

Well: as many commentators have pointed out, people in lots of countries hate the world and want to die. But they don't seem to carry out mass shootings anything like as often as Americans do.

Gun Control Options

Which leads us to element #2. The main focus of debate after a school shooting seems to be on this one. In what is either common sense or totally circular reasoning, we can state with 100% confidence that every mass shooting involves a gun. Otherwise it would be a school stabbing or a campus bombing or an anthrax attack. Etcetera ad naseum.

Would gun control measures stop mass shootings? My Facebook friends are passionately split over this issue.

One thing seems clear. If we could get rid of the supply of guns altogether, we would, at a minimum, replace mass shootings with another form of mass violence. Quite possibly with a less lethal form--though unless you follow news about China, you might be surprised how many people die in mass stabbings.

One immediate problem, though, is that most people see the total eradication of firearms as either unattainable or undesirable. Because we generally accept that we won't get rid of guns altogether, most proposals involve trying to limit the supply of a certain type of gun or taking measures to keep a certain type of gun out of the hands of a certain type of person (who, going back to element #1, might be at risk for hating the world and wanting to die). What if we made, for example, a rule that said a person who had certain, measurable risk factors had to wait a certain amount of time before purchasing a certain type of gun? Or ammunition? And maybe had a stiffer penalty if they got caught stealing or borrowing one?

It can get a little Rube Goldbergy at some point to think about how many steps there are between a prospective rule and a potential tragedy.

Gun control measures might make a real difference addressing other problems. Fewer guns and more training have a good chance of reducing the number of children who play with guns and shoot each other. I've seen compelling arguments that wait times could help reduce the suicide rate. But while feasible gun control measures might have a distant trickle-down effect on mass violence, they hardly seem to be the golden ticket to give everyone what they want: which is to live in a world where they don't have to think about violence against the innocent anymore.

Which leads us to element #3 in my list above. Assuming that there will always be people in your society who hate the world and want to die, and assuming that there will be guns lying around in homes and stores and wherever else guns lie these days, a mass shooting still requires the idea that shooting innocents is an effective way to show the world hatred.

Concept Contagion

I suspect that the availability of this idea is a major feature in the American cycle of mass shootings. We have had people who hate the world and want to die for a long time. We have had a lot of guns for a long time. The number of school shootings seem to have increased more recently, though, as the idea has permeated our culture.

School shootings are rare enough that I'm not aware of any research on the role of narrative availability in contributing to them, but we do have a substantial body of research on "suicide contagion." If you haven't heard of this idea, I strongly recommend looking it up. The gist is this: lots of people may be depressed enough to attempt suicide at any given time, but many won't actually get the point of making and carrying out a plan for a suicide attempt on their own. When people hear about another suicide, though--whether it's in their school, their community, or in media coverage of a celebrity suicide--the idea becomes more available and the suicide rate increases.

I did some research on this after a friend of mine committed suicide. A year or so before it happened, she'd worked with a theater company I was helping run. So as I processed the news of her death, I'd considered writing a play about suicide. As I started doing research for the project, I ran across a list of best practices for covering suicide. You can take a look at one now: I'll even give you a link.

You can see that there are ways to talk about suicide that have been demonstrated to increase the risk of contagion. As I processed them at the time, I decided not to write a locally timely play about it at all. The idea was already in the community at that moment, and I didn't want to get my storytelling wrong in a way that increased the suicide contagion risk. A while later, we did a play that did engage with the suicide in a way I would judge, based on guidelines, to be helpful: at a point of deep personal isolation and despair, the protagonist considered killing herself--and then didn't. And went on dealing, day by day, with the pain of life. We gave our attention to a story that could resonate with someone feeling a sense of isolation and despair, but one that highlighted the ongoing battle of life, not one that inadvertently highlighted or even glamorized self-harm.

Again: I don't know for sure if the psychology of copycat suicide and copycat mass violence is the same. But let's assume it is.

Research tells us that the copycat risk increases with the "amount, duration, and prominence of coverage." Guidelines say to avoid coverage that "describes the suicide method, uses dramatic/graphic headlines or images" and "repeated/extensive coverage [that] sensationalizes or glamorizes a death." The website I linked to above specific cautions against "describing recent suicides as an 'epidemic,' 'skyrocketing,' or other strong terms."

How do we hold up in terms of the media we consume, share, and create (keeping in mind that even a social media status is a kind of media)? Put another way: assuming there are people in the country now who already (or will soon) hate the world and want to die and have access to firearms, how much have we increased the chance that they will get the idea to go shoot a bunch of innocent people?

For amount, duration, and prominence of coverage, we fail miserably. We can't seem to keep ourselves from obsessing. We unwittingly imply that if you ever really want the world to notice you and how much you hate it, there is an easy recipe.

As far as describing the method and using dramatic/graphic headlines: we are awful. I can't even count how many infographics I've seen with little pictures of guns to show the number or feature a given model's role in mass shootings. We're not just handing people a script for this: we are giving them careful, detailed illustrations.

What about glamorizing? You could argue that we never glamorize mass shootings in the way that some coverage or fiction glamorizes suicide. And yet: what if the appeal of mass violence is not to be missed, but to be feared? Again, the way we talk about mass shootings tells the at-risk person in no uncertain terms that this is a way to be remembered--and furthermore, as a way to be remembered as someone who had power. During the shooting, power over victims and potential victims. And after the shooting?  Power continuing to play out in national conversation, in nightmares, in haunting parents' relationships with their own children. We fail the dark glamor test every time.

Finally (of the handful of guidelines I picked off the page at a glance--not finally in terms of actually keeping up with research), how are we doing in terms of how we talk about frequency? Have we used careful, neutral ways to discuss data rather than sensational ones? Or did we trip over ourselves trying to show how common this is? My guess is that going out of one's way to increase the total number of school shootings by counting accidental discharges of firearms on college campuses does not qualify as a best practice here.

Look. I know you feel bad when kids get killed. It's awful. It's awful when it happens from cancer, in accidents, and definitely when it comes unexpectedly through violence at school.

But what if our best shot at changing things is to change the way we talk?

Maybe you can, in your own way, do something. Maybe you can refuse to share sensationalized coverage. Maybe you can rethink the unintended side effects of tone and style in your political speech. It could make a difference: America had a long rash of campus and other bombing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those types of incidents stopped happening with the same frequency once they receded from national conversation. Forms of violence do go in and out of style.

And maybe we can do better than just swapping one form of violence for another. Maybe, even with millennia of conditioning against us, we can try to respond less viscerally to violence. Maybe we can learn to frame it as sad and pathetic rather than terrifying when someone resorts to force to try to lash out at others. It's a long shot, I know, but I think it would make a difference. I think we could teach people to be less violent if we could teach ourselves to be less impressed by violence.

I don't think we're going to have a world where no one hates the world and wants to die. But if we could give more attention to the devastating ways people have poured their pain into their music and poetry and novels and less attention when someone resorts to copycat acts of violence, then maybe (just maybe) people would think less of physical force when they decide to give their demons a voice.

I Was Right Before It Was Cool

In this moment of national discourse, you and I seem to have found some common ground on an issue I see as having paramount moral importance, so I thought it would be a good time to remind you: I was right before it was cool and if you ever try to agree with me on something again I will remind all the world what a poser you are.

Look: I get it. In a moment of reflection, you realized you needed to speak up and contribute to a growing national consensus on a specific issue. But where were you back when I was basically the only one who was smart and compassionate and with it enough to be right and being wrong was all the rage? You had no taste, that's where you were. Maybe it's because of the way you were raised or because you mistakenly think you actually have a point on some other issue or just because you made poor choices about your demographic characteristics. I don't know. The point is: you were wrong and unless you want to go back in time and change all your opinions to have matched mine always, you're hopeless. You just don't get it.

Other people might praise your individual stance on this issue with disclaimers about how they know you're usually not that with it to make sure everyone knows they're way more right than you are, but those people are also posers. I was right before they knew it was cool, because they still don't know what is right or why it's cool. They've just memorized a bunch of talking points. Pathetic.

To be honest, it's better this way. If most people weren't wrong most of the time, the whole being-right movement would just seem so unoriginal and derivative and I'd have to go be wrong about something ironically just to live with myself.

So please, can we just forget this moment where our interests could have aligned to move the nation forward? I'd like you to go back to being a walking caricature of all that is wrong with America while I go back to being extremely satisfied with myself and how cool and right I am.

I hope it never goes mainstream.

A parable (with some profanity)

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" senators who did not know they could still be shocked heard President Trump say yesterday during negotiations on policy for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and several other countries. Today, the president disputed those accounts, suggesting he probably used slightly different abusive language to communicate his contempt.

How do I feel about that language? Icky. But what do I think about that language? I think I see a pattern. 

Remember when Donald Trump called the White House a "real dump"?

Remember that speech he gave that speech at his inauguration talking about how crappy and rundown the United States is and how its neighborhood (among the other countries on planet earth) sucks and everywhere you look people are garbage?

Maybe I'm just bitter because I'm like two Nobel prizes short of enough points to get into the country on Trump's proposed merit-based system. I'm starting to suspect that the man has a low opinion of everyone and everything--except, of course, himself.

Maybe he just figures that there's a certain limit on the amount of quality in the world and he takes it all up?

I don't know how this story ends, but I already know the moral: everything looks like a shithole if you are a giant ass.

Calm down, America!

Is Donald Trump the worst world leader in recent memory?

Not even close.

Our research suggests that the President-Elect is: 

Less temperamental than Rodrigo Duterte!

“Judge me not with the newspaper articles they come up with everyday.
Judge me at the end of my term. If I do bad, shoot me.”

Less sleezy than Silvio Berlusconi!

"When asked if they would like to have sex with me, 30% of women said, 'Yes',
while the other 70% replied, 'What, again?'"

Less egoistic than Kim Jong-un!

“Suddenly, the whole country is engulfed with happiness
and the people endlessly inspired.” 

Less nativist than Robert Mugabe!

"The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans…
The white man is here as a second citizen. The only man you can trust is a dead white man."

Less confrontational than Mahmoud Ahmedinejad! 

"We thank God that our enemies are idiots."

Life's Little Yoga Instruction Book (part five)

"Life's Little Yoga Instruction Book" is a spiritual journey through several contorted bodily positions, plus a voice of wisdom from a land twelve and a half time zones away. 

Part Five: Child's Pose

Now that you are in child's pose, your body is fully rested. But your mind is still crazy. Your mind is still thinking of shopping lists and TV shows and old regrets. That is why you have come to yoga class. You think maybe you came for fitness? Don't be silly. Your body is fine.

All your discontent is coming from your mind. All your discontent is keeping you up at night. All of your discontent is leading to online shopping sprees and 2 a.m. browsing of Facebook. It's 2 a.m.! Your body doesn't want you to browse Facebook. Your body is ready for the world to shut up!

Close you eyes. Imagine your mind: it's a fortress where all the soldiers are on high alert. That's because you told them something important could always happen at any moment. But you were wrong. Important things don't happen any moment. Important things don't happen that often at all.

So tell the archers to ease out of their position and let their bowstrings relax. Tell the spear-men to set down their pointy sticks and throw the city gates open.

Let your exhaustion pour into the fortress. Let your exhaustion conquer you. Let your exhaustion replace the soldiers' torches with Tinkerbell nightlights and the guard dogs with teddy bears. Then lie down, O General of the fortress of hustling chaos, and go to sleep.

Life's Little Yoga Instruction Book (part four)

"Life's Little Yoga Instruction Book" is a spiritual journey through several contorted bodily positions, plus a voice of wisdom from a faraway land of the free and home of the brave. 

Part Four: Cat Pose

You don't need to be angry to arch your back. You don't need to smell the scent of some invader's urine or come home to find some stupid human has bought the wrong cat food again.

No, just let your back lift itself up because that's where it wants to be. And let your head hang down, down, because that's where it wants to be. Don't you wish you could walk into meetings this way? In your mind's eye, you can. Go back to your last meeting in cat pose. Watch yourself shift abruptly into cobra pose--then back out. Into cobra pose again!--and back out.

In cat pose, you are at once above everything and disconnected from everything. Keep your back high, your head low. Breath in or out when you want to. You're a cat. You don't need permission for anything.

Life's Little Yoga Instruction Book (part three)

"Life's Little Yoga Instruction Book" is a spiritual journey through several contorted bodily positions, plus a voice of wisdom from a faraway land where mom is not someone to mess with.

Part Three: Warrior Pose 

Breath in. Extend your arms. Reach forward and backward at the same time. This is what I expect of you, because this is like people expect of you all the time. Reach backward. Reach forward. Get out of my way, I'm driving too fast while I talk on a cell phone and I haven't been watching for my exit. Slow down: no, speed up! Look ashamed when I honk my horn at you! Look ashamed!

Now breathe out. In yoga, we find peace. If you feel at peace, if you feel centered in your own spirit, you are ready to go out into the great bumper car race with other spirits that is life. This world is like an amusement park. It costs too much, it's crowded, you spend most of your time standing in line.

So you have to learn a certain dignity. Breathe in. Soon it will be time to speak from your chest, and say the mantra my mother taught me when I was young and she took me shopping to the market. Let the air rush through you as you repeat after me:

Real price kya hai?!? Discount? Discount? 

Now breathe out. That was great. That brings back memories. When I go home, I'm going to get on the phone to customer service. I'm going to talk to them like mom would, make them wish they'd never been born.

Life's Little Yoga Instruction Book (part two)

"Life's Little Yoga Instruction Book" is a spiritual journey through several contorted bodily positions, plus a voice of wisdom from a faraway land where most of the streets have no names.

Part Two: Downward Dog

Why are you going into this pose? Get up! You are not a dog. You are better than a dog. You been to India? Take a close look at some street dog next time you go. Mangy skin, matted hair, full of fleas. Tell yourself this: I am part of the universe, but not that part. Never that part.

Life's Little Yoga Instruction Book (part one)

"Life's Little Yoga Instruction Book" is a spiritual journey through several contorted bodily positions, plus a voice of wisdom from a faraway land where much of the food actually tastes good.

Part One: Table Pose

In Table Pose, you hold the weight of the earth on your back. It is heavy, but don't let go: you'll spoil dinner. Feel the strength flow up through your arms, and from your knees to your hips. Feel the guests come in and seat themselves around you, but don't think too hard about them. You find yourself embarrassed, maybe, just imagining guests with their knees under your chest, forgetting what their moms said and putting their elbows on your back. Why? Only because your mind is filled with illusion. Guests are part of the universe, just as chairs, plates, cups, spoons, and dust are part of the universe.

Breathe in. Don't cough on the dust.

Worrying about what others will think of their experiences is like worrying what the plate will think of the food that gets dished onto it. The plate is made to hold all kinds of food. The person is made to have experiences, good and bad.

Sometimes people come over like plates full of their own food that's none of your business, but they still spill all over the table. Don't get mad, just get a rag. Breathe in, breathe out. Switch to another pose.

Reply to a former student

A former student recently wrote me asking about the future of blogging and email technologies. My not-so-concise off-the-cuff thoroughly-researched reply is as follows:

Why I Don't Want the Government to Have My Data

Many people on the internet these days are terrified that the Government will go all Big Brother on us and start adding words to the language, stereotyping us based on our phone records, or forcing us to join patriotic Facebook games. And for some reason, the Government's repeated assurances that it only wants information so that it can infiltrate anti-Government brotherhoods has done little to calm these 1984-inspired fears.

But I would like to say today: I am not really afraid of what the Government will do with my data.

I am worried about what someone else will do with my data once some random government employee leaks it out.

Consider the following nightmare scenarios:

1) A secret court authorizes the Government to monitor our credit cards so that they can see who's buying ingredients for explosives. A week later, all your money has been spent on porn ordered to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, dwelling place of one Mr. Julian Assange.

2) The government starts collecting data from grocery store loyalty cards. Communist gorillas track you down to reclaim all your bananas for the primate-ariat.  

3) A recent hire for a government contractor leaks your phone metadata to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and suddenly your mother is armed to the teeth with proof that you really never do call her anymore.

From the Vaults: Vintage 2007 Goldberg

A recent redesign of Facebook made old Notes more prominent--reminding me that I had written some, including a short-lived column called "Just Ask Jimmy" with advice on everything from caring for your pet badger to avoiding spiked lemonade at innocent-looking street-corner stands. I have decided to re-post Volume 3, Issue 12 (in which I respond to a query from one neighbor to the north about another) to preserve the general flavor of my juvenalia. Please note that I can take credit only for the answer, not for the initial query from one of my countless (or so) readers:  

Hey Jimmy,

Just one question. Global warming: truth or conspiracy?

-Not So Hot in Idaho


Dear Not So,

I’m so glad you asked, but I’m afraid you phrased the question wrong. People as wise and wiser than I am recognize that not everything can be seen as either/or. So before answering your question, I’ll have to break it down into two parts.
 
Question: Is global warming real? Answer: Yes.
 
Question: Is it a conspiracy? Answer: Also yes.
 
You see, global warming is not a conspiracy of alarmists, designed to slow the economy or generate more work for journalists by adding yet another layer to the daily news. It’s a conspiracy of a much more sinister nature. The goal? World domination. The evil mastermind? Canada.
 
That’s right: my shocking recent research shows that our “friendly” neighbor to the north is perhaps not so “friendly” as many United States of Americans might think. A careful analysis of the revisionist history taught in Canadian schools shows a definite aggressiveness embedded in their culture: they count both our Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 as ending in clear Canadian victories, even though every student in the U.S. knows that the only war in which Canada clearly beat us was Vietnam. Obviously, Canada has long resented the way that the United States has upstaged them in world affairs.
 
An alert reader, who also happens to be a free-lance secret agent, recently sent me evidence supporting my long-held belief that Canada has been doing more than passively resenting us over the past 20 years. In a file labeled “Bacon” (the Canadian word for “ham”), my F-L.S.A. friend found documentation of the secret initiative Canada launched at the end of the Cold War to make sure they, and not the U.S., would be the lone superpower by 2050.
 
Out of several proposed plans, one was ultimately chosen: Canadian scientists confirmed that increased greenhouse gas emissions would cause an irreversible but contained process of global warming. Global warming would, obviously, damage or devastate many of the world’s countries, especially those in already-warm areas and those with long coasts and large river systems. At the same time, Canada would see a 143% increase in arable land, a 96% increase in income from tourism, and an end to its long-standing, crippling dependence on banana imports.
 
Canada, of course, was not about to rest content with this subtle shift in the balance of world power. They planned to open their borders to immigrants fleeing China, India, and other river-infested countries: highly educated ones to make them world leaders in science and technology, but also uneducated ones to give them the largest standing army on earth, with which, as the Bacon files attest, they plan to seize Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, and other post-global-warming powerhouses of American agriculture, thus leveraging the crises to put themselves in a position as the world's only superpower.
 
“I can see,” you are probably saying to yourself, “that Canada could use global warming to become the most powerful nation in the world. But does that mean they are causing it? Isn’t Canada one of the leaders in the fight against global warming?”
 
To which I respond: that’s part of what makes this plan so diabolical. Canada intentionally set itself up as a world “leader” against global warming, knowing that this would automatically make the cause seem nerdy, marginal and unattractive. At the same time, they set their most secret, most talented mole to work in the United States, to stymie any effective international co-operation against global warming and to accelerate the process of increased greenhouse-gas emissions. The mole’s birth name was Alexander Winkel Hamilton, Jr.; he was a child prodigy and the son of one of Saskatchewan’s top Mounties. As a very young child, however, he was secretly swapped with the son of an affluent and powerful American family, putting him in an ideal position to amass power and use it for the benefit of his native Canada.
Watch this column for further information on the meteoric rise and manipulation of power by this Canadian mole, known to most as George W. Bush, President of the United States of America.

-J.A.J.

A Limerick for Thomas Acquinas

On Saturday, May 18th, we will be holding a "Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty" Party/Carnival in my yard. Among other amusement for guests and passing strangers, we will have a balloon artist, caricature artist, fortune teller, henna artist, pin-the-tail-on-the-pinata game, and custom limerick booth.

Nicole and I will be in charge of the limerick booth. The idea is simple: people will come up to us and tell us their names, and we will improvise a limerick about them. To get ready for the big day, I've been practicing on historical figures.

Here, for example, is one about the famous 13th century priest and theologian Thomas Acquinas: 

Tom was a scholar indeed:
he could read 'til his eyeballs would bleed.
He knew quite a lot,
though tragically not
the first thing about how to breed.

James Goldberg's eBook: Worth the Paper It's Not Printed On Four the Next Four Days

Now through Monday, you can download a copy of James Goldberg's novel The Five Books of Jesus absolutely free for your Kindle. Or your favorite Kindle-impersonating electronic device. Or your mom's favorite Kindle-impersonating device.

But don't just google it. I'll give you the link if you promise to follow two other links and consider them carefully first.

First: I want you to read my review of this book. Review spoiler alert: I mostly pan it. Novel spoiler warning: if you don't want to know about the crucial plot twist late in this book, you should probably not go to church on Sunday. And try to avoid facebook this weekend. Also the news anytime Pope Francis appears.

Second: I want you to consider the caliber of writer James Goldberg is likely to be based on his past awards. All I can say is: sixth place. Search google images for James Goldbergs and you'll see what a low standard sixth place can set.

OK. Did you follow the links? Do you still think this eBook will be worth the money you're not paying and the paper it's not printed on?

Hm. Well, then I suppose I can't stop you. Here's the link for James Goldberg's novel, free through the end of the day on Monday.

Toward Marriage Clarity

On Wednesday I logged into Facebook and found that many of my friends' faces had been replaced by an image which reminded me of Mark Rothko paintings like this one:

At first I was confused--why the sudden surge of interest in Rothko? As I looked at people's posts, however, it quickly became clear that the changing faces weren't about the iconic artist at all; they were political statements about the Prop 8 and DOMA Supreme Court cases. And what initially appeared to me to be two abstract lines were, in fact, equals signs. People had found a way to simply, symbolically show their support for the cause of Marriage Equality. It wasn't a sudden rash of Rothko at all--it was an elegant, clever mass communication technique.

But it was one I could not take part in. Because I would prefer to see the Supreme Court uphold Proposition 8.

By the logic of my friends' profile pictures, I guess that makes me an advocate of Marriage Inequality. And probably an advocate of inequality, backwardness, and hate more generally.

Framed that way, mine sounds like a pretty terrible position to hold.

I don't want to hate anyone. I can't afford to: hate is a corrosive, self-destructive process that eats away at a person's strength on a physical, chemical level. I may be tempted by anger from time to time, but I hope I know better by now than to let anger canker into hate. There's too much to be done to waste my life that way.

But for me, concern about the definition of marriage is not about hate or discrimination. And so I want to try one more time to explain how I feel about the issue now while feelings are running strong. I don't know who I'm writing to--maybe to friends who feel betrayed by my position but still want to understand where I'm coming from, maybe to people who share my position and are feeling a bit isolated because of it.

Or maybe I'm just writing to leave a record of where I stand. A piece of evidence to incriminate myself by if this week's court cases become the landmark of progress so many people hope for. Because it's important to me to be thorough and honest. If I am going to be judged (and as a writer, I probably will be), let me be judged by my own account of what I believe.

Two Views of Marriage

I don't think the current debate over same-sex marriage is just about same-sex marriage. I think it's a political extension of a roughly fifty-year-old cultural debate over what marriage should mean in the modern world. That debate is complicated and I can't do justice to all its ins and outs, all the positions different groups have taken and reversed. But I think it's fair to say that there have been two broad camps in debates over everything from the sexual revolution to no-fault divorce to the question of whether gender roles should exist in any form to the charged debate over same-sex marriage today. On one side of these debates are traditionalists whose primary concerns are social stability and accountability. On the other side are experimenters whose primary concerns are freedom and acceptance. (Clarification on 3/29/13: this is not to say that traditionalists don't value freedom and acceptance or that experimenters have no concern for stability and accountability. The difference is in emphasis--do you raise questions of freedom/acceptance or accountability/stability first?)

Both camps have influenced society, and so many Americans hold a mixture of beliefs about marriage, drawing some on the experimenters and some on the traditionalists. Many Americans, though, do fall quite clearly into one camp or the other when it comes to choosing between the camps' competing views in five key areas:

Origin: when, how, and why should a marriage begin?
Exclusivity: what expectations about sexual exclusivity are part of marriage?
Family: what is the relationship between marriage and family life?
Gender: what role(s) does gender play in marriage?
Accountability: who is involved in the promise of marriage and when should a marriage end?

To understand any marriage-related debate in America today, I think it's important to first non-judgmentally describe the "emerging marriage" and "traditionalist marriage" visions on these five points. After all, if marriage is (so to speak) an apple to some people and an orange to others, we're bound to talk past each other a bit.

Here's how I see the two models operating:

Emerging Marriage

Origin: As adolescents and young adults, individuals go through a period of sexual exploration and self-discovery. It is considered unwise to commit to a long-term relationship before this process is complete or before a couple feels confident about their compatibility. But when two mature, compatible people fall deeply in love and want a deeper commitment, they may choose to use the word "marriage" to formalize their relationship in the eyes of society.  The word carries a certain legal and social weight which reflects the value of their commitment.

Exclusivity: Though pre-marital sex is acceptable for exploration or to test compatibility, a marriage is expected to be sexually exclusive. Some couples may choose to practice "open marriage," but such non-exclusivity carries a significant stigma even when both spouses freely consent to the arrangement.

Family: A marriage may be a good place to raise children. Single parents can also do a good job, though, and shouldn't be slighted in any way. And married couples shouldn't be expected to have children just because they're married.

Gender: Because gender difference is not essential to love, it is not an important component of marriage. Any two people who love each other can marry and can define for themselves what their roles within the relationship are.

Accountability: The promise of marriage is primarily a promise between two people. When those people agree that their love has changed or when one partner fails the other partner's expectations, it's OK to move on. Divorce isn't necessarily anyone's fault; it just happens sometimes.

Traditionalist Marriage

Origin: Marriage is a fundamental unit of society, and at a certain age young people should look for a person they can form a stable marriage with. Not everyone will get married, and that is too bad--though it's better to stay single than to have an unstable marriage. 

Exclusivity: Sexual exclusivity applies not only during marriage, but also before. Sex is exclusive to the institution of marriage; consensual premarital sex, while not as bad as adultery, is harmful and should be avoided.

Family: Procreation is a central purpose of marriage. When people get married and are unable to have children, it is viewed as a great tragedy. Getting married without wanting children is virtually unthinkable. What spouses do for each other is important, but the most important work married couples do is provide stability for their children and grandchildren.

Gender: Gender difference is an essential component of marriage. This is partly because of the procreative nature of marriage, but also because fathers and mothers have unique strengths and obligations within a family. How gender roles play out may vary from community to community and family to family, but distinct obligations for each gender do strengthen marriage as an institution.

Accountability: The promise of marriage is a promise to God, society, oneself, one's family, and one's partner. Effort should be invested in a marriage even in moments when love is hard to feel or when a spouse does not seem worthy or appreciative of the efforts. Divorce is a tragedy and a final resort, and should be used in cases where the marriage is so bad that one spouse is unable to live with dignity.

So...

Where do I stand in all this? And what does my view have to do with how society defines marriage?

First question first:  where do I stand?

I realize that every position on this earth comes with certain costs and benefits. And I prefer the costs and benefits of traditionalist marriage on each of the five questions.

Origin: I understand the expectation of marriage becomes a burden for many, but I appreciated being raised with marriage as a challenge to live up to. I was raised with the idea that I had to work a great deal to be the sort of person who can sustain a stable marriage, and I am a better person for having tried to refine myself rather than find myself.

Exclusivity: I know that it's difficult to live in a culture as sexualized as ours with a belief that sex should be exclusive to marriage. But the struggle of staying abstinent before marriage is worth the payoff in trust. My teens and early twenties could have been far more wrenching and volatile if sex-related chemicals had been part of my less stable dating relationships. And it seems much easier for intimacy to nurture strong bonds of trust within my marriage without the obstacles of past disappointments or alternatives to distract me.

Family: I grew up in several strong extended families with deep senses of connection and community, and they've meant the world to me. I'm not entirely convinced it's possible to build big family networks like that when family is an afterthought in relationships and parenthood is an improvised accessory to marriage rather than the central purpose.
At one point during my testicular cancer treatment, some misread data made it seem doubtful that I would be able to father biological children. So I've dealt a little with the weight of disappointed expectations biologically-family-centered norms can create. But I've also experienced firsthand how even the best adoptions don't erase children's hunger for connection with their biological parents. I love my oldest daughter more than I can describe and she loves having me as her adopted father--but she does still wonder about the biological father she hasn't seen since her third birthday. The miracle of adoption is still built on the tragedy of failed or interrupted parent-child relationships. And so I think it's best to think of adoption as an important supplement to biological parenting rather than a replacement ideal.

Gender: Some see gender roles as inherently oppressive, but I've seen how they can offer a sense of place and permission instead of only negative pressure. My wife is a smart, talented woman who could be in a PhD program right now. But our faith's teachings on gender give her permission to focus mostly on children while teaching only one class as an adjunct instead. It's a career sacrifice she can make both because she's allowed and encouraged to value her work in the home and because my obligation as the primary provider relieves her of the full obligation for the family's finances.
While an absence of gender roles can lead to greater flexibility, it can be quite limiting when negotiations over flexibility fail. There's no shortage of families today where one parent (often the father) doesn't carry a fair share of the weight in either the financial or domestic spheres. At their best, gender roles can give the community a language to call such individuals to action and to help them take a more active role in family.

Accountability: This may be the issue I feel most strongly about. As more people have come to view marriage as an interpersonal contract, divorce rates have risen significantly. There's an argument to be made that that's a good thing--one writer I know called a fifty-year marriage a "terrible failure of the imagination" because of the limits it implies on two people's exercise of their freedom. But to me, most divorces are just sad. Too many couples are unable to make it through difficult periods in their relationships because one (or both) lacks a motivation and obligation beyond the love and satisfaction hard times make difficult to feel. And families and societies lose a lot of stability when so many marriages fall apart. As a society, I think we need to find ways to increase individuals' sense of accountability and commitment in marriage and countless other contexts if we are going to effectively face the social, environmental, and economic ills of our time.

Now to the second question: what does all this have to do with how society defines marriage?

My sense is that most of the main groups and individuals that promoted California's Proposition 8 did so not out of specific concern about homosexuality, but out of a broader concern that a handful of state Supreme Court Justices were beginning to enshrine an emerging view of marriage into the law at the expense of a traditionalist view. The definition of marriage Prop 8 proponents wanted to protect was not simply heterosexual marriage: they wanted to give traditionalist marriage a fighting chance in the ongoing cultural battle over the institution.

And as traditionalists, they couldn't accept the State Supreme Court's discovery of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. On issues of family and gender, the court's position that marriage was between any two partners clearly came from an emerging marriage view where procreation and gender difference are not core components of marriage norms. On issues of origin and accountability, the court's findings also leaned (albeit more subtly) toward emerging marriage by prioritizing the desires of individuals over the established norms of the institution.

It's important to note that Proposition 8 didn't challenge any of California's domestic partnership rights, which were both available to same-sex couples and equivalent under state law to the rights of marriage. It focused on the word marriage specifically to maintain a potential rhetorical distinction between emergent marriage "partnerships" and traditionalist "marriages."

In other words, Proposition 8 was an attempt to keep separate names for apples and oranges. It wasn't perfect: in the interest of simplicity, it failed to articulate the full social difference between the two views of marriage and drew attention to the bright line of gender difference at the expense of the complicated and multifaceted marriage values proponents wished to defend. But imperfect though it may have been, I have a hard time seeing it as evil: what is so wrong about wanting some sort of distinction in the language to represent a larger net of diverging assumptions?

Well--one important worry about preserving some sort of name difference is that we'd be falling into the old Plessy vs. Ferguson "separate but equal" trap. Having even a difference in a name between unions or partnerships and marriage might inevitably result in gross injustice to the minority group.

But while I respect that concern, I see a vital difference between separate physical facilities and separate words. I don't think we need to feel threatened by meaningful distinctions in our vocabulary. In universities, we divide degrees into Bachelor's of Arts and Bachelor's of Science Degrees. Those names strike me as representing important differences in a net of underlying assumptions. Has the division of degrees into BS and BA created gross inequality? I don't think so. People certainly make distinctions between (and sometimes sweeping assumptions about) each type of degree, but because enough people believe in each underlying set of assumptions, the degrees are able to coexist relatively peacefully. I would go as far as to argue that scientific disciplines and artistic disciplines coexist far more peacefully because of the naming differentiation which helps keep one side from dictating how the other should operate. While there's not a single bright line between arts and sciences, theater classes really are better off without having their norms set directly by science syllabi, and biology classes are better off without being accountable to the educational assumptions of the arts.

On a personal level, I worry about living in a society that implicitly defines emerging marriage as true marriage and traditionalist marriage as a backward, hateful counterfeit. Which is what will probably happen if a historic Supreme Court ruling takes the word "marriage" out of the realm of rational debate and enshrines emerging marriage as a constitutional right. And which may happen anyway as people rally around concepts like "Marriage Equality" and slogans like "Hate is a choice; love isn't." As values of freedom and acceptance become the only acceptable criteria for evaluating relationships, people who speak for traditionalist values--whether by discouraging single-parent adoption (and artificial insemination by single women) or by connecting the value of marriage with premarital abstinence--will be increasingly pushed out of mainstream marriage conversations. We will have an additional burden in communicating our values to our children when they are treated not only as divergent, but also as actively hateful and backward in school curricula.

Isn't there a way to recognize same-sex couples without making pariahs of the 40% or so of Americans who are still quite attached to a more traditionalist view of marriage?

I will be far more comfortable if future schools teach my children and grandchildren that our country has two different but coexisting views of marriage than if they teach that prejudice was the only reason people used to think (and their family and community still think) of marriage as requiring a husband and a wife. I want marriage clarity.

But I don't think a two-word system would only benefit traditionalists. In the worldwide conversation over same-sex relationships, a clear linguistic division between traditionalist views of marriage and an emergent-Western view of marriage would be a far easier path to legal recognition than simply asserting that gender doesn't matter in marriage.

Take India as an example. For the majority of Indians, religion is still the dominant guiding influence in marriage and family life and most religions in the region have wedding ceremonies with very clear gender roles and divisions--in the case of Sikhism, not only for husband and wife but also for a wide range of maternal and paternal relatives. Simply asserting that marriage is between two people without regard to gender makes no sense in most Indian contexts. There would almost certainly be widespread, intense resistance to any attempt by a high court or foreign lobby to impose a gender-neutral definition of marriage on India or many other countries.

That said, most Indians are familiar enough with American media to know that many American relationships are built on radically different assumptions than Indian marriages. A proposal to create a separate category for the Western-style relationships of many urban youth, including same-sex relationships, would likely lead to spirited debate but would at least have some chance of success without tearing the society apart.

A "marriage equality" argument for recognizing same-sex relationships wins significant support in Western Europe, the United States, and other areas where emerging marriage assumptions have filtered deep into the culture. But on a worldwide scale, "marriage equality" is probably a dead end as long as the assumptions of emerging marriage are positioned as a replacement for, rather than an alternative to, traditionalist marriage.

Where would I like to go from here? And where do I think we actually will go?

My ideal solution would be to use a term like "union" as an umbrella for both traditionalist marriages and emerging marriages, to keep "marriage" associated with a more traditionalist view and to come up with a word with more everyday appeal than "domestic partnership" or "civil union" for emerging marriages. After all, who wants to kneel down and ask for a lifetime commitment by saying "will you civil me?" The utter lack of romance in the unwieldy, clinical names California lawyers came up with may have been a significant factor in convincing Prop 8 opponents to hold out for the word "marriage."

That said, the weight of the word "marriage" doesn't come from its syllables. Marriage feels more committed to individuals and society largely because of the sacrifices generations of traditionalists have made for the institution's sake. We pour meaning into words slowly through the collective pattern of our actions, and it strikes me as a significant mistake for people who hold an emerging view of partnership and marriage to seek the old weight of the word at they same time as they strip it of its old assumptions.

I would like to see both forms of union recognized by the law, but in a way that allowed new-paradigm couples to build up a new word with the connotations that gradually collect around their way of approaching partnerships.

But--things are highly unlikely to unfold according to my ideal. So here's what I think will happen:

Probably not right now, but probably before too long, the position of the United States Government and the majority of Americans will be that considering gender difference an essential component of marriage is discriminatory and wrong. Freedom and acceptance will become the core values of our society in regards to marriage.

But a significant minority of Americans, perhaps a third or so, will remain attached to traditionalist views of marriage because our family values are shaped less by government and media than by an alternate conversation, such as the teachings of our faiths or the traditions of our ethnic subgroup. Having lost any claim to the word marriage in public discussions will be a difficult burden for us, and so we will eventually coin a new term or adopt a new symbol of our own to describe the different assumptions we bring to marriage. Maybe traditionalists will take a foreign loan word, maybe we will adopt a certain type of ring, maybe we'll shift to a compound concept like "covenant marriage" to differentiate, but sooner or later we will create a language that gives our position its own place and purpose again.

And then slowly, perhaps over generations, we may achieve some degree of Marriage Clarity. People will have an easier time seeing the differences between the two main views of marriage in our society, and they will have an easier time choosing for themselves whether they prefer a model primarily focused on freedom and acceptance or a model primarily focused on stability and accountability.

And maybe, just maybe, our grandchildren will be able to get along reasonably well in their differences. Maybe they'll stop framing their debates as equality vs. hate or natural vs. deviant and have both the understanding and underlying appreciation of difference we can see today between thoughtful people over the differences in assumption between science and art.