Graphic Firing Table

 I was at loose ends the other night - just finished my last book, didn't have a new one in view, and wasn't interested in the offerings of the tube - and I was pulling over the shelves beside the bed and came across my old 1898 volume of The Day's Work.

It's not the first edition, unfortunately, but the second, and was picked up in a rumpled old used bookstore along the coast, I think, had before and has since then seen a lot of wear. The spine is broken and the pages are hanging on by the threads of the sewn binding. I've cared for it gently, but it's not in great shape.

And...it's an...odd little book.

There's thirteen stories within it and they're all rather slantendicular and many are paranormal, ranging from the truly weird The Brushwood Boy (where our hero, the stock-Kipling stalwart young infantry officer, meets the woman of his dreams literally in the surrealist dreams which they share) to some Anglo-Indian romanticizing (The Bridge Builders, where a similar British hero - bridge engineer rather than subaltern - is subsumed in a conclave of the talking creatures that represent the old Indian gods his creation has disturbed) to straight-up anthropomorphism in the Jungle Book-style.

Some of them I enjoy more than others (I've never actually managed to struggle through .007 or William The Conqueror Part 1 and my tolerance for his full-throated paeans to colonialism like The Tomb of His Ancestors - as clever and touching a tale as it is, and it is clever, and parts of it are touching -is fairly limited; I've read too many Indian authors to elide the "faithful native" claptrap that comes with Kipling in paint-the-map-red mode.

Though not as impatient as George Orwell was; his takedown of the guy is pretty epic (has ever a writer or poet been dismissed as brutally and summarily as this: "He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks."? Daaaaamn...)

The Kipling I loved as a child and the least harrumph-able are his animal tales. The echoes of imperial hubris are faint in the Jungle Books (although I have my eye on Bagheera, that fusty old colonial mug...) and there's a version in The Day's Work - a story about polo.

I know absolutely nothing about the game other than it's a ballgame played on horseback and supposedly the Argentines are now the bosses of it. I know that to play at any sort of high level today you have to be filthy rich, because it's a horse thing and all horse things are rich now that horses are a luxury good and not a working tool.

Not in the 1890s, though (or more likely the 1880s, the period when the guy was working in British India); a British officer rode to work, and keeping an extra hayburner or three wasn't so much of a big deal.

Hence the story; our hero, the gray polo pony of the title, and his equine teammates are carrying the British officers of an Indian engineer outfit (they're called "pioneers", which were the 19th Century version of combat engineers - the guys who built fortifications and bridges and all that. "Sappers" were the tunnel guys, which was a separate specialty...). They're playing a fancy cavalry (meaning: rich) outfit for the Big Casino, and the story is the story of that game.

That's it, that's the bones. The real meat is in the telling, and that's where our guy Kipling gets to cut loose.

"The question was which pony should make way for the other; each rider was perfectly willing to risk a fall in a good cause. The black who had been driven nearly crazy by his blinkers trusted to his weight and his temper; but Benami knew how to apply his weight and how to keep his temper. 

They met, and there was a cloud of dust. The black was lying on his side with all the breath knocked out of his body. The Rabbit was a hundred yards up the ground with the ball, and Benami was sitting down. He had slid nearly ten yards, but he had had his revenge, and sat cracking his nostrils till the black pony rose.

‘That’s what you get for interfering. Do you want any more?’ said Benami, and he plunged into the game. 

Nothing was done because Faiz Ullah would not gallop, though Macnamara beat him whenever he could spare a second. The fall of the black pony had impressed his companions tremendously, and so the Archangels could not profit by Faiz Ullah’s bad behaviour."

A little over 7,000 words paints a vivid little picture of a place and a time and a day and the people - including the four-hooved people - in it. In that short space Kipling gives you a whole cast of characters, from Lutyens and Macnamara and Powell above the saddles to grumpy Benami and slippery Faiz Ullah and Who's Who snorting through his nose in Australian below.

So buried in this largely-forgotten volume from a now-widely dismissed author is this perfect little gem of a tale; brightly and briskly told, sharply drawn, thoroughly engaging and entertaining even to a reader who, over a century later, knows almost nothing about the subject and the setting.

Goddamn it, that's writing.

That's why it's hard to just toss Kipling into the dustbin of history as just another imperial relic. Yes, he's all the things his detractors, that Orwell, say he is. But, dammit, the man could write when the humor was on him, and he's left us with stories like this. That has to count for something.

As we discussed in the last post here; life is complicated, and sometimes we just have to accept that there is worth to be found in some dark places, and darkness in the shiniest of vistas. Sometimes you have to take in the flaws to accept the value. Or, as the Cat himself says:

"Keep yourselves to yourselves," said the Maltese Cat to his companions. "We don’t want to rub noses with all those goose-rumped halfbreeds of Upper India. When we’ve won this cup they’ll give their shoes to know us."

 

Worth a look.

By purest happenstance the Bride and I watched Saving Mister Banks last night.
To get the film itself upfront let me say that we both enjoyed it and Tom Hanks' and Emma Thompson's work as the two central characters Walt Disney and P.L. Travers despite the reality that both portrayals were, shall we say, less than full realizations of the actual people portrayed.

And that the story itself played more than a little loose with the truth. We weren't watching it as a documentary but as an entertainment and as an entertainment it succeeded.

But I'm not here to review the film. For one thing, I certainly couldn't do better on the subject than Lance Mannion already has, so if you're interested in more about the film, the actors, and the Disney-Travers imbroglio itself let me direct you to his two posts on the subject, here, and here.

For another, what I wanted to talk about is what the film made me think about the peculiar relationship between books and films - specifically children's books and children's films - and the relationship between them both and the adults whose children encounter them.

I've talked about my general approach to cinematic adaptations of beloved books when discussing the ongoing Peter Jackson adaptation of The Hobbit. I'm just not a purist about the whole business of "book versus film". Perhaps it has something to do with having tried to write both "literary" stories, plays, and screenplays. They're very different, and the sorts of things that work well on the printed page often fail disastrously on a stage or a screen. Perhaps its just that there are very few books I'm "passionate" about to the point of being seriously arsed if someone changes bits and pieces of them to make a flick out of them.

Whatever the reason I just don't have much trouble with a screenwriter, or director, or playwright, making changes - even big changes - in a book or story to adapt it for the screen or stage.

But I do look at the results this way.

Making those changes make the resulting play, or film, a different work, and sometimes a very different work.

So the film version of The Hobbit isn't "The Hobbit", a story written by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's a film by Peter Jackson that contains many likenesses and ideas from the Tolkien story, but it's not the same story. It's "based" on the story. It may have a few, or many, critical differences. You can be pleased, or disappointed, by characters or scenes or dialogue or storylines added or dropped (get me going some time on the whole Disappearing-Faramir-Eowyn-Romance business from the Jackson Return of the King segment of his Lord of the Rings cycle) and your love or loathing for the film adaptation may well be affected by that pleasure or disappointment.

But it seems foolish to me for the reader or viewer to be incensed by the changes existing. It's a film, it's not the book. It's going to be different. You can like or loathe the sort of changes, but not that there ARE differences. Difference is as certain to follow a film adaptation of a book as the night the day and railing at them is cursing the darkness - and the candle for not being the sun - instead of appreciating the candle for what it is.

Now.

That said, I can understand an author being arsed enough to forbid giving permission for her or his work to be adapted for the screen, in that there WILL be those changes. The author has only two choices after selling the rights; to be in charge of overseeing those changes (as, for instance, J.K. Rowling is said to have been with the Harry Potter series), or to be so un-wedded to their work as to be unconcerned how it is changed and how it affects their written work.

Because there's a very great danger that the film version, being louder and brighter and more kinetic than the written version, will become the work itself, the commentary will become the canon, and copy will eclipse the original in the minds and hearts of the viewers.


That happened to my own spawn with the film version of Cressida Cowell's How To Train Your Dragon.

They luuuurvvvved the movie. Loved it, loved it, loved it. They watched the much-lesser television series with drooling enchantment and dragged me off to see the second installment of the film at the movie house; fortunately I enjoyed both films well enough to find them tolerable and in places genuinely enjoyable. But something in me prickled at the thought of leaving the porch-monkeys there.

Being a bookish sort of daddy I thought that we should go to the well, so I picked up a copy of one of Cowell's "Dragon" books (it was the fourth in the series, How To Cheat A Dragon's Curse, if I recall correctly) and announced that this was the next in the "Bedtime Story" series.

[Let me insert here that the Small One loves to be read to at bedtime. She reads well enough one her own and could read the sort of young adult/middle reader/"chapter books" we choose. It's not the stories, it's the act of reading; the selection of the book, the cuddling together on the grownups' bed, the reminder of where we left off the evening before...and then the performance art of reading the story, with Daddy acting out the voices of the characters and Little Missy asking all sorts of pointless questions that Daddy will invariably answer with the caustic reply "Why don't we read the story and find out?" applied over the rim of his reading glasses. It's a sort of performance art, and Missy loves it well beyond the value of the stories themselves, and I have to admit I enjoy it, too.]

The result?
Disaster.

"Ewww! I hate this book!" "Its sooooo boring!" "I hate that Toothless!" (this was The Boy, who never really got past the fact that in the book his beloved film version giant-black-cat-like dragon was a petulent little serpent about the size of a fox terrier)

We never got past page fifty or so; the kiddos just flat-out refused. For them the film version was the "real" story, the canon; the genuine, original story was for them a sort of poor reworking of what they'd seen on the screen.

Whatever Cressida Cowell got from selling the rights to her story, what she didn't get was the affection of my kids for it but the complete opposite; they now consider her work an inferior version of the film.

After seeing Saving Mister Banks the first thing I did was go to the computer and reserve a copy of Mary Poppins, She Wrote, Valerie Larson's biography of Travers...and the original Mary Poppins.

Because, you see, I've never read the book.

The only "Mary Poppins" I know is Julie Andrews, singing and dancing cheerfully through the primary-colored Disney version of the story. Mannion has read the Travers book and loathes it, but I'm not sure whether my taste will run with his. But now I'm curious to find out what Travers was protecting.

Because she was protecting it, and not from her fantastic fears or her daddy-issues, but from what it has become since 1964; a piece of incunabula, something more spoken of than read, the lost source of what became the great river of Disney-Poppins merchandising. From the coating of sentimentality that the Magic Kingdom lays over everything like sweet venom. From Julie Andrews sunnily playing the character Travers wrote like this:

"What did I say?" said Mary Poppins in that cold, clear voice that was always a Warning.

That isn't - as Hanks' Disney claims in the film - "letting the story finish itself". That's a whole different person in a whole 'nother story. And I suspect that Travers knew, complex soul that she was, that now that she'd sold her soul for 5% of the gross that she was going to have a very, very difficult time living with that.

I suppose it's tacky to blow your own horn, but, well, shit, this here's my horn and I'm gonna blow it.

I've got two pieces up at SlideRulePass. Both of them are about the Portland Timbers and both are pretty hardcore footy.
But I'm rather proud of them, so if you like my writing (and otherwise, why are you here? I won't kid you; the nude photos ain't gonna get posted in case you were still hoping...) and you like the Beautiful Game they are a little more in-depth than my soccer writing here.

In national news, I wanted to be a little more specific about why sane citizens of the United States making under $200,000 per annum have no business voting Republican.

First, there's this. Where anyone with a functioning reptile brain could come up with the idea that turning the federal government's emergency response powers into a goddamn clown show is beyond me but not, apparently, beyond the vast majority of Republicans.

The current GOP candidate seems to think that placing horse lawyers and political hacks in charge of disaster relief isn't even stupid enough; "Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that's even better."


Because I can't imagine that anyone in a position to make a profit from disaster relief would take advantage of that position to gouge, rape, and fuck over desperate people whose lives have been devastated by earthquakes or hurricanes.

Can you?

Then, there's this.

I'm now used to the idea that you can tell when a Republican is lying by just looking to see if his lips are moving. But, really...when the facts so brutally smash your moron-grade fantasies that you can't even come up with a winning lie to try and make the fucking idiots "independent voters" believe you rather than their ears and ears? When you have to try and respond to ugly truths by trying to hide them under the sofa and sitting on the lumpy cushion humming loudly enough to drown out the thumping and screeching from under your ass?

How thoroughly fuckolally fucked are you?

Are we?

One important point may well be that you tend to get fucked when you not only don't have good answers but aren't even asking the right questions. Mike Specter has a good piece in the New Yorker about California's Proposition 37, this election's measure to require labeling of genetically modified foods.

Now my position on GM foods as foods is that anyone who thinks we're not already eating GM foods and wearing apparel made from GM animals and plants is an idiot. The GM was just done by selective breeding rather than gene splicing in a lab, that's all.

Specter's piece points out that the campaigns on both sides of this proposition are characterized by a massive level of nonsense:

"Supporters of the proposition routinely make claims about the risks of eating, making, and cultivating genetically engineered foods for which there is simply no evidence. Big Ag, which doesn’t like regulation, claims that these labels will be useless, and insists that the new regime will set off an avalanche of lawsuits and cost consumers an unacceptable amount of money."

(For which there is also no evidence, I should add).

But there ARE some huge issues surrounding not just GM agriculture but industrial agriculture in general. Monoculturing? Reducing the genetic variation of food animals and plants (and through that their resistance to disease and unviable mutations)? Over-reliance on irrigation and chemical fertilization? The increasing distance (and reliance on cheap fuel for transport) between where foods are grown and where they are consumed?
Either nobody is asking these questions or nobody is listening.

And speaking of not asking the right questions, here's a good article from the journal International Security about the ridiculous effects that the "War on Terror" has had on our actual security and, obviously, liberties. Glenn Greenwald sums this up:

"Unlike the actual, threatening wars of the past, this "war" is pure pretext, a total farce: so out of proportion to the civil liberties assaults employed in its name as to be inconceivable."

I've wondered about this ever since our local G-men helped one of our local idiots delude himself that he was going to be the next Osama. Like the non-debate over GM crops, to me the worst part of this stuff is the utter lack of discussion - discussion, let alone concern - about how damaging this hysteria could be over the long term.

It's one thing to be fooled. But its another thing entirely to fool yourself.

But its better not to be a fool altogether.

But so as not to end with carping, courtesy of my witty and delectable friend Lisa (of Ranger Against War and the Story Project) here's a helpful guide for those of you who are still unsure of how to have sex with one of those poseable wooden mannequins.
It's from some sort of Japanese sex manual from the Sixties, complete with diagrams showing the potential Romeo-san how to woo his Juliet-sama, from the initial stages of hand holding and cute-face-touching to manipulating breasts (although, frankly, this page put me in mind of one of those IKEA cartoon instruction books showing you how to assemble a Billy bookcase).

It makes you wonder how the hell Japanese couples of the time managed to have any sort of normal relationship. I mean, I understand that all societies have their odd little conventions and quirks, but...
Oh.

Yeah.

There's that.

Oh and there's that, too.
Sigh.

Let's just face it; as a species we are very, very, very, very strange.

I have written a fair bit about men, women, and sex, but nothing quite like this:

"Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her."From this year's "Bad Sex Award" winner.

There's more, too.

I've been reading Doris Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" off and on this spring. It's an interesting story in itself - the history of how Abraham Lincoln the politician first finessed his political foes into the Republican nomination and then coopted them into becoming members of his first Cabinet - and the telling is as worthy as the material. Goodwin has a flair for popular history and writes well, using small touches to illuminate a landscape as vanished as the Pliocene to most of us.And that's an important part of any history. Because it can be difficult, especially when the time in consideration is at some remove, to get a sense of the people of the time as...people.

The temptation is to see them either as moderns dressed in period costume, or as some sort of freakish antique, acting and thinking in ways impossible to any "real person" the reader knows.

And in understanding how they acted, and why, how they thought, how they saw the world around them, is crucial. A historian writing for the general public has to be capable, in a handful of sentences or a paragraph or two, present the past life both in itself and in its context so that the modern reader can grasp both the qualities of the person discussed and their standing with the person's times. Was she an especially bold woman, an iconoclast, or was she more typical of her contemporaries? Were his acts, or thoughts, likely to be the product of his surroundings or owe more to the inner daemon of the man?Obviously most histories are written about dramatic times and "great" events - few histories are written about the daily lives of vanished people in humdrum times. So the questions become; how did this or that person fit into the tenor of his or her time? When they acted, did they follow opinion or lead it? Did they act against the grain of their own era, or in conformance with its strictures? Did what they did tell us something useful about people, and events, and societies, that we can use in our own lives?

Goodwin's account is no different, and thus she spends some time early on establishing the characters of the central figures; Lincoln himself, obviously, his principal "rivals" (Ed Stanton, Will Seward, Sal Chase, and Ned Bates) and their various parents, wives, sons and daughters, as well as their political cronies and associates.It's a good tale, and it doesn't hurt that pretty much all of the main characters are fairly colorful. Lincoln is an ediface, a man recognized even in his time as a singularity. Stanton, Seward, and Chase are all men with immense egos and strong wills or they wouldn't have gotten where they did.

The one who's sort of the odd man out is Bates.Here he is, a Victorian patriarch and stern paterfamilias there ever was one. You can't picture even his friends calling him "Ed" or "Eddie" or "Ned". He's a "Edward" if ever I saw one.

But that's the interesting thing. He wasn't. Ed Bates was a man passionately in love with his wife, and desperately in need of his family. Goodwin keeps on about this; Bates married Julia Coulter in 1823 and spent the rest of his life falling in love with her. He kept his hand in politics because that what what a man of his class did. But he was miserable when he had to leave his home for D.C., and his letters to Julia are full of longing and his own loneliness and melancholy apart from her.

The Bates' marriage seems to have been more than just a spiritual one; Julia bore sixteen children (sixteen! My mind reels (and my pelvis sches) at the thought...) over the next thirty years. Here she is as a sturdy matron in her forties, but her husband seems to have been just as gaga over her as the day she put on - and took off - her brideclothes.

One of the most difficult parts of human life to transport over the distance of time is emotions and the way we express them. Certainly some elements, the biological ones, are fairly immutable; so a man or woman in Celtic times, or in ancient China, or in modern Peru, must certainly feel physical lust. That desire is a built-in designed to keep little humans coming along, and certainly the Roman man looking at a comely puella, or a Victorian woman glancing at a handsome lad must have felt a touch or more of the same visceral stirrings down in the libidinous regions that you or I would.

But the difference is in the detail. What sort of thing would a Roman find intriguing...as opposed to titillating, or mysterious, salacious, or challenging? We've read about how the mere glimpse of a shapely ankle could send a straitlaced Victorian man into a paroxysm of desire. But could it, really? Does having your inamorata always covered in draperies make the ankle an erogenous zone...unless it would be for you, anyway?

Because, apes that we are, we're a very visual species. We like to look, and where people are concerned, we like to look at the people we're attracted to for the things that attract us. Being not just apes but thinking apes (well, at times and of a sort...) there's more to attraction than JUST what we see. But we still place a great deal of importance in the physical aspects we consider pleasant.

Fortunately for the species, those aspects are pretty flexible. Whether Victorian or post-modern, some of us delight in the familiar, while others are drawn to the "different". Some find certain traits desirable, others the opposite, so while one woman finds a small, neat, blackavised man to her liking another gets a frisson of pleasure looking at his lanky, sun-fair friend.

But...here again, as people's manners and mores have changed through time, so have their standards of beauty. The difficulty of trying to understand someone like Ed Bates or Julia Coulter is trying to get a clue for how they thought about each other. What was "love" to them? How did they say it? Or did they? Certainly the Victorian standards of public behavior, so much more elaborate than ours today, would imply a great disparity in the intimacy a man and woman could show in public as opposed to within the privacy of the marriage-bed. But to what degree? Looking at the man, could Julia have been calling him "Mister Bates" even in their most unguarded moments?

And what of him? Could the dignity of a Victorian gentleman relent to the pure sensual enjoyment of his beloved wife; of an endless moment with his face buried in the scented darkness of her hair, every nerve-ending shirring beneath its satiny heaviness, hearing nothing but the sound of her breathing, touching his brow to the dear curvature of her head, the one he cherished because it held the vital spark, the life and thoughts, the whole essence of the one so dear to him in that fragile orb.

Well, as I read through the section about the Bates' marriage I came across something very like this. Edward was in D.C. when his first daughter Nancy was born. His letter conveys his longing and regret at putting his office before his child. And he asks Julia to tell him all the details of "how she is - what she is - what she is like...whether she has black eyes or gray - a long nose or a pug..."

And then he writes an odd little thing. "...and above all..." he implores, "..whether she has a pretty foot." for unless she has a foot as pretty as her mother's she "could never make a fine woman."

And it was this bit of parental and husbandly foolishness that caught me. Because I am a bit of a fool for a woman's hands, and her feet. I've always enjoyed holding hands, feeling the intricate textures of bone and sinew that can hold such character.

A woman's hands (or a man's, for that matter) can speak as or more eloquently than her face, her body, or even her words, of the nature and quality of her. Well-worn or pampered, slender or square, smooth or muscular...it takes a lifetime of living within her hands, of walking the roads her feet take her, to make them, and her, the woman she is. If you cherish the woman, than every line and muscle that makes her her, becomes dear in ways that are hard to express.

Or, hell, maybe people like Ned Bates and I are just queer for feet...

But whatever the reason, that little paragraph helped me see them not as stiff pictures in a book but people, people-people. I could vividly picture this long-dead couple, these vanished people preserved in silver salts and black back in the days of their happiness, perhaps lying lazily abed with her "pretty feet" in his lap as he gently rubs them after a long day. Enjoying the feeling, enjoying the moment, just enjoying each other.Silly, isn't it? And yet, it was that little detail, as one who has often admired my own wife's neat and strong feet as I worked the lotion into her sole and heel-ball and soothed out the aches and stiffnesses of a day's work, that connected these strangers to me, that made me feel like I understood him, and her, just a bit, and through them a bit more of the time and the tides of the world that had borne them up, he and his beloved, on the long swells of a dim-lit sea an ocean of time and a world of lives ago.

And if that's not how a good history works, I can't think of a better.Let me leave you with the words of the Victorian lover himself;

"Oh! How I long to press you to my bosom, if only for a moment. Sometimes, I almost realize the vision - I see you with such vivd and impassioned precision, that the very form developing is in my eye. O, that I could kiss the tear from that cheek whose cheerful brightness is my sunshine."

I hate to say this, but one thing that Facebook often lends itself to is a nattering lack of reflection.

I say this in a tone of rueful acceptance, mind you, not surprise or anguish.

It's a fucking "social network", after all.Generally I like to think that my selection of "friends" helps me avoid the "I'm picking out my toe jam! :-b" sorts of status updates; luckily I'm not bombarded with much of that sort of brain-destroying crap.Mostly the site does what it is supposed to do and provides me a sort of party line to check in with friends and chat about this and that. For all the handwringing about how the Evil Twitter, Facebook, and whatever other electronic media bete noir de jour are destroying civil society by substituting for "real human interaction", when you think about it these things are just replicating the slower means of distant communication humans have used since the beginning of literacy.

What is a "tweet" but a little postcard? What is a Facebook post but a short letter, a digital telegram, a typed-out phone call? "Having wonderful time, caught fish, weather fine. Come soon, Woosie."

I don't see how this happening in realtime, over a fiber cable, somehow makes the process dangerously antisocial. We've always enjoyed our long-distance relationships. Entire books have been published containing the epistolary friendships of pre-electronic times, when living a couple of tens of miles apart meant seeing each other once a year or so. People have always had ways of staying in touch with distant friends and lovers; these electronic means are just an adaptation of a very old gimmick, a quicker version of sending a house slave with a clay tablet to your brother and sister-in-law in Sumer.

But (and you knew there would be a but, didn't you?) to go with the advantages in celerity there is the disadvantage of brevity. If brevity is the soul of wit, it is the mother of inattention. A discussion limited to 420 characters isn't really much of a "discussion", and the one thing I find unlikeable about Facebook - I am not "on" Twitter and have no interest in doing so, since a tweet is even briefer than a Facebook post less informative, and thus more conducive to the ignorant-shouting sort of "communication" than Facebook - is that much conversation is necessarily brief and one-sided. A letter allows time and space for thought, and if two paragraphs are needed instead of one to dissect the issue they are there for the taking. The only limit is the paper and the patience of the writer, and reader.

Which may be the very heart of the matter. We as a culture are increasingly impatient; the notion of simply sitting and reading a letter - or a novel, or a long blog post - is becoming both difficult and challenging. Difficult because many of us are so busy, our days full of cascades of essential ephemera demanding our attention; challenging because our preferred style of prose is often simple and poorly suited to complex thought. While the text we read on paper or off the screen may be prolix the arguments are often crude, the exposition simplistic, and the argumentation circular or absent. So the quick declaratory statements of Facebook make us easier. We needn't marshal our overtasked intellectual reserve; the thinking is done for us.This has become a very roundabout introduction to a topic that emerged on Facebook the past week. Specifically, a friend of mine linked to this article in the New York Times discussing the falling out between the Roman Catholic bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, and a local formerly Catholic hospital.

It seems that the hospital in question performed an abortion on a woman who was in danger of injury or death if her pregnancy had progressed. The bishop, who had apparently warned the hospital that this sort of thing would put them outside Church law, used this surgery to sever the ties between the diocese and the hospital.

My friend was incensed. "Time to move into the 17th century, boys." is the way she put it. Another of her friends replied that the bishop had the right of it; that a "Catholic" hospital had the obligation to abide by church doctrine. Several more of us piled on and we had - especially for Facebook - quite a rousing little discussion. I don't think anyone's opinions were changed, but we at least got to hear a good bit from several sides on the matter.And the more I got to thinking about it, the more I found that I tend to believe in what I first said; that the bishop's job, if he were to be any sort of bishop and not a windsock for popular opinion, was to insist that the mother, as a Catholic or at least as the patient of a Catholic hospital, give her life for the life of her child in the same sense that a bishop would expect his priests to give their lives, if they had to, to ensure the lives, or the spiritual salvation, of those who depend on them.

His understanding of God's Will as expressed by his Holy Father should admit no less, and the tenets of his Church - an authoritarian organization whose fundamental nature is spelled out by the "Dictus Papae" (which includes such statements as "That of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet." and "That this (the Pope's) is the only name in the world.") - demand that those beneath him in the hierarchy submit to his interpretation of that Will.

That's cruelly hard. But religions in general ask us to put God first and ourselves afterwards; that's the nature of a religion, most religions. It's a feature, not a bug. Because of that demand religious faith can accomplish great things. Because of it faith can be the spark for horrible atrocities. The direction depends greatly on the nature of the person who "speaks" for the religion and the nature of those listening. But there is no promise that either the speaking or the reception will be beneficial and kind.

All we can only hope then is that our religions don't demand us to make choices that lead to suffering. But by their nature they can, and often do, and we can't really get one without the other, eh?

My bride, lovely woman that she is, is (if she only knew it) a classic American cafeteria Catholic. She has said that if she agrees with a doctrine, she would hew to it. If not, she would ignore it.

I can't do that or believe that.

To me the entire point of a religion - as opposed to a personal faith - is either accepting the doctrines of the religion or working to change them. But until they change, I don't thing that the adherent has an option to just ignore them.

Since I have yet to encounter a religion whose tenets I can accept without demur or disputation, I have no religion. Since I have yet to encounter a moment where my need to have an all-powerful Sky Daddy overpowers my skepticism of the entire notion, I have no personal faith, either. For good or ill, I am alone within my head when the moment for spiritual succor arrives.

And as ruthless as it is I wish that what happened to the hospital would happen more often. I wish that the Catholic Church, for example, would excommunicate people who use birth control, would stop granting annulments and force divorcees out of the laity. American Catholics haven't been forced to actually do what their church demands them to do for a long time. If they were, well, either the laity might change or the church might. Some people might find themselves alone as I do. Some may find that they can abandon themselves in order to have that Sky Daddy within them.

Either way, at least both sides would be consistent.

Because for me so long as a religion does not force itself into the public square and demand that people not its adherents adhere to its beliefs it should be true to itself. For some religions this is not a pretty or humane thing because by their nature they are not about the pretty and the humane but about the demands of a supernatural belief on a merely human soul.

This often makes them magnificent, grand, and terrible.

And it is perhaps the failure of my own soul that I would take the smallest common moment of human life; the sound of a sigh, the heat of a quarrel, the softness of a kiss, the breathless of lovemaking, the peace of a nap, the placid twilight of age, over all the magnificence and grandeur ever conceived.