Tuesday, November 22, 2011

The Family as Granfalloon

One of the myriad religious movements in modern times that has received lamentably little attention is Bokononism, introduced by Kurt Vonnegut and closely studied by large numbers of undergraduates during the sixties.  Among other useful ideas embodied in this belief system is the notion of the karass, which is a group of people that may seem unrelated, and who may even be unknown to one another, but whose purpose is to work together toward some worthwhile end. A related entity is the granfalloon which is a group of people who imagine that they have a connection, but they don’t.  For example, Dodgers fans, graduates of University of Kentucky, or residents of Montana, all are granfalloons.  I would argue that families are another.
The idea that a few shared genes should bond people inextricably together, should compel obedience and assure allegiance smacks more of some stone age tribal custom than a biological imperative, or “blood is thicker than water,” which is the costume it wears in modern times.  This is one of the more crippling myths of society, that there is some intrinsic power or value in family.  The truth is that families are no more sacred or cohesive than any other random group of people.  If you chose random groups of, say, 12 people from some cosmic phone book and locked each group in a room together to get acquainted and learn to love one another you would get the same result as with today’s family units.  
There are 4 basic configurations that will appear in either family units or random assemblages of unrelated people.
The Type I family or group, the lucky group, contains members that actually like each other, they sing songs and encourage and support the younger members.  They smile and tolerate one anothers’ snoring, annoying laughs, and weight problems.  They have frequent happy reunions: birthdays, holidays, barbecues. They offer comfort and support in difficult times, and joyful congratulations in happy ones. These people are strongly bonded together, will defend their group and all its members from all comers, and live out their happy lives in close proximity. There are a very small number of Type I families or random groups.  
There is a considerably larger number of Type II groups in which members tolerate each other but without enthusiasm. Most members of these groups get along reasonably well with at least one other member of their group.  They will get together once or twice a year to drink too much, talk to the others they liked, act in a civil manner to those they don’t, and go back to their lives with no great need ever to do this again.  Their allegiances with chosen outsiders are just as strong as those of their group.
Then there is the Type III group, another large but mismatched group in which most or all of the members dislike all the other members of it.  There will probably be at least one member of this group who will reliably stamp out any signs of joy that might unexpectedly emerge, or would keep any hostilities alive and festering, or both. Any member of this group that can, will leave the nest at their earliest convenience, and gratefully stay away.  No birthday celebrations for this group.  No tearful reunion at the funeral of the beloved old auntie, because there won’t be one.  Their allegiances are almost entirely external to the group.
And finally there is the unenviable Type IV group, mercifully scant in number, in which all members hate the very guts of everybody else in the group.  This would be a hodge-podge collection of miserable, depressed, down-trodden victims and the narcissists, bullies, power freaks, or psychopaths that made them.  Mysterious deaths, housefires, and hospitalizations would be epidemic in this group.  They would probably feel no great loyalty to anybody.
Of course, all the refugees from the last three groupings are hoping, at some level to set up a Type I family – who wouldn’t want a sunny gathering of happy adults and well-balanced children? Unfortunately, because of the myth of the importance of family, a potential Type I can be poisoned at the outset by the toxic players of the dysfunction left behind, the nasty hypercritical grandmother, the drunken uncle, the kleptomaniacal cousin.  
But it can be done. There are documented instances of families whose members actually like each other.  Perhaps you have seen one.  There are several ways to get one:
1)  If you are lucky enough to have grown up in such a family, be sure to choose a mate who also comes from such a fortunate environment.
2)  It you are not so fortunate, find a compatible mate and move a long, long way away. Under no circumstances allow yourself to move back.
3)  Tell all your new friends you are an only child, recently orphaned.  Get a post office box and do not tell any of your relatives or acquaintances from back home where you live, as there is always some busybody who feels sorry for grandma and will spill the beans.
4)  Send a notice to your hometown newspaper announcing your tragic death in an airplane crash, shark attack, some military conflict, or a massive explosion. Anything that would discourage anybody from trying to collect your remains. Then marry into a group one family.
5)  Find a way to get into the witness protection program, with or without a companion. You are starting a new life. Don’t blow it.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Personhood in Modern Times

There was news recently from the Great State of Mississippi, that roiling cauldron of progressive thought.  In a surprising setback for the Protectors of Morality, the citizens of that state have voted to reject an amendment to the state’s constitution stating that a fertilized egg is a full-fledged person and entitled to all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto, a notion that the governor voted for, and fully expected the rest of the state to follow his bold example.  The voting procedures will have to be fine tuned before the next such plebiscite is put to the citizens to assure a more satisfactory outcome. Nevertheless this unexpected turn of events has left the startled crusaders temporarily at a loose end, eyes darting speculatively from Louisiana to Texas to Oklahoma.
They probably got this bizarre idea after the Protectors of Private Industry came up with the similarly incomprehensible notion that a company is a person.  And they, in their turn, no doubt got their idea from a frat boy who had made a light-hearted bet of $10 with a colleague in the men’s toilet of the Raquet Club that he could ram this merry fiction through congress before Christmas.  The only winner in all this is the frat boy.
At a time when the news media are bulging with tidbits that our grandparents would dismiss as pure silliness, these two airy little pranks would vanish in the floodwaters of solemn reports of the exploits of starlets and sports figures and other persons of no importance, of significant breakthroughs in sneaker technology or power-driven spoons or coathangers or mailboxes.
But let us pause for a moment and consider the implications of this unbridled bestowal of personhood on entities that any fool knows are not persons.  All of us falling short of the most severe cognitive impairment understand that there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between ourselves and our cells, tissues, and organs, as well as between ourselves and any larger entity we are a part of, such as our species, solar system, or garden club.  This is why we do not send birthday cards to our kidneys or our select boards. They do not have birthdays. They are not persons.  
But now that the silly season seems to be picking up speed, there are people declaring, without so much as a blush, that a blastula deserves the right to vote and bear arms just the same as the rest of us folk, not to mention Pepsico, GlaxoSmithKline, Exxon Mobil, Aubuchon Hardware, Pratt’s General Store, and any other incorporated entity, large or small, regardless of foreign content.  This is bizarre enough on the face of it, but what if this is just the beginning.  What if the next lunatic fringe to wake up to the potential of personhood is, say, the Animal Rights League or Vegetarians of America.
Next time you are bouncing down some woodsy back road in the dark and a possum scampers under the wheels of your car, think of the repercussions.  This could be a full-blown person and you guilty of negligent homicide.  The legal costs, the tearful explanations, the sentence, and there you are doing your stretch in the state pen with all those other felons, the armed robbers, the rapists, the child molesters and drug dealers and desperados who had been found in possession of mouse traps.
But the complications do not stop there. Suppose your newly conceived person fails to implant?  Does this leave you in the soup for child neglect or reckless something or other? And as far as an institutional person goes, what if you change your mind on the way to file your articles of incorporation? Does that constitute abortion?  And in either of these cases, would it be necessary to name the dear departed? Register his/her/its tragic end? Bury the remains in a duly certified location?
And what if chickens suddenly morph into persons and object to being wrongfully detained in battery farms.  Or cattle start demanding their rights to an open range. Or dogs and cats refuse to be neutered until we go first.
Instead of playing out this scenario to its logical and chaotic end, our time might be better spent considering the personhood of beings that most of us could agree are indisputably persons. Beings such as women who, in certain places and families, are mere chattel slaves, with no more rights and privileges than a microwave oven.  Or children who are bought and sold like baskets of fruit. Or beings who are racially distinct from the dominant members of their world, who are therefore seen as merely props or conveniences for the greater glory of their self-styled superiors and are otherwise invisible.
I would argue, in the same vein as removing the beam from our own eye before removing the mote from another, that we would be best served by resolving these confusions regarding our own species before bestowing personhood on mitochondria or hardware stores.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Republicans: A User's Guide

It's all so confusing, so many compulsive, disturbed, yet well-dressed nut jobs, it is difficult to keep track of which candidate has jumped off which deep end, and how their various lunacies compare and contrast. So, as a public service, I have done extensive research on these undermedicated persons and am prepared to share my findings with those interested in learning something about these contenders, each of whom believes that they would be a better choice to lead the nation than President Obama, and one of whom may get a chance to try, a scarier prospect than any space alien scenario yet proposed.

Consider Mitt Romney. He stands out from most of his fellow zealots by not being quite Christian enough. (Try to imagine hearing a knock on your door some quiet afternoon and opening it to find the governor of Massachusetts standing there, perfect teeth flashing in the warm sun, telling you something about your immortal soul) He could be a pretty good candidate, since he didn't disgrace himself too badly as governor, and in fact launched a wildly popular health insurance program there that covered all residents and cut the price of insurance by nearly a half. So why has he spent the greater part of 2011 apologizing for it? He did and said other things that were moderate, nearly liberal, and at least reasonable, but that was back when he was young and foolish. But he has mended his ways and has fully embraced the Republican doctrine of Devil Take the Hindermost.

Jon Huntsman, the Other Mormon, is the only candidate so far who has referred to Mitt Romney as “a perfectly lubricated weather vane.” Apart from his linguistic skills, he closely follows the party line with regards to reducing the national debt by cutting taxes, and mitigating global warming, which he actually accepts as a reality, by doing nothing. He has expressed his appreciation of the overpopulation problem by fathering seven children.

Herman Cain, now, there's an entrepreneur of a different stripe. Former CEO of some midwestern pizza joints, and a talk show host in Atlanta, this proud American effectively torpedoed any health care reform during the Clinton administration. He further demonstrated his statesmanlike demeanor by trying to link the democrats to David Duke, because both opposed the Iraq invasion. Both of these projects are doubly impressive considering that Mr Cain seems incapable of making a simple declarative statement about anything. Rush Limbaugh has publicly announced that the recent sexual harassment fuss is all an invention of the democrats to make Mr. Cain look bad. Not clear that he needs help with this. Apparently he opposes abortion, but who knows?

Hard to know where to start with Michele Bachmann. Perhaps her greatest liability is that, unlike some of her colleagues, she makes clear statements with a clear meaning such as, “Gay marriage is probably the biggest issue that will impact our … nation in the last, at least, thirty years.” Not traffic deaths, not endless wars, not medical crises, or illegal immigration, or global warming, or gun control, or financial malfeasance, or drugs or drought or flood. On the up side she has a sure cure for unemployment. She must have very clever advisors. Her solution is to eliminate the minimum wage so that all those poor hard-pressed billionaires can afford to hire at, say $5 an hour, $2 an hour, 50¢, whatever works.

Newt Gingrich lacks the flash and theater of the revival tent preacher that so many of the others use to such good effect, but that is not to suggest that he is a reasonable grown-up. He is merely the archetypal politician with all the sleaze and chicanery, the mistresses and god-knows-what under the table, but in the end he is just as keen as any of the others to snoop, eavesdrop, invade, torture, protect the obscenely rich and execute the luckless, innocent poor, to strip women and gays of as many rights as possible, because, after all, he is a good Christian too. More than most, since he started off a baptist and has since embraced the Catholic Church, perhaps out of a feeling of kinship for all those priests, you know the ones.

Ron Paul may be the closest the Republicans have to a Thoughtful Candidate. Unfortunately, if there is anything the republicans can't stand it's a Thoughtful Candidate, so we probably won't see much more of him, in spite of his having assured the world at large that he is a born-again Christian with a deep and abiding faith. Not good enough for a heretic who opposed the Iraq war, is lukewarm on gay rights, and does not applaud the assassination of foreign persons in foreign countries whom we do not like.

The Uber-Zealot, Rick Santorum is a Catholic lawyer and former Senator from Pennsylvania, breeding ground of so many colorful political creatures, who believes that Christianity is grievously threatened by muslims, jews, hindus, communists, Iranians, democrats, homosexuals, evolutionists, illegal immigrants, and the National Weather Service. But he loves puppies and wants to save them.

Then there's That Other Texas Governor, Rick Perry, friend of the Tea Party, whatever they may be, and proponent of the secession of the Great State of Texas, and who could object to that? He strongly opposes abortion, of course, but equally strongly supports the death penalty, apparently oblivious of any conflict between these two positions. His approach to dealing with the poor is to suggest that they move to California. He did not extrapolate this policy to cover his proposed dealings with America's poor should he become president. It is not clear that Canada would want them. He would no doubt pray on it and send them wherever The Voices told him to send them. His greatest asset is his willingness to repay significant campaign contributors with useful government positions.

Chris Christie says he's not interested in running, but he is the clear first choice of billionaires everywhere for his brilliant theory, shared with Jon Huntsman, that we can reduce the deficit by cutting taxes, but unlike Huntsman, he is a nice safe Catholic. Since billionaires almost always get what they want, and are in a position to provide Mr. Christie with inducements of all types, we may yet see him heaving his ample bulk up on the nation's podiums. And who's to say a magician isn't just what the nation needs?

And finally there is the ever-perky Ms. Palin, another who has denied any interest in shooting for the moon. She has not yet clearly explained why she was tearing around the country in a bus, but then she hasn't clearly explained anything else either; however she is not campaigning, nope. Her followers still think she's a dream come true and they drag their knuckles up to her bus and vocalize excitedly to show this. For those who think it matters which flavor of religious extremity their candidate subscribes to, well, Ms. Palin is whatever you want her to be. It would be a mistake to eliminate her from the Republican possibles list.

So to recap, come the actual campaign, Obama against some Republican, the potential opponents boil down to the past or current governor of Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, Utah, or Alaska. Or you can choose from Catholic, Baptist, Evangelical, Mormon, or Sarah Palin. They all believe in the sanctity of the conventional marriage, the military budget, and the obscenely rich. They loudly believe in freedom of religion, provided it is their own, and want the government out of our lives except for the parts that give us other people's money.

This post did not receive funding or encouragement from Re-elect Obama or any other Democratic PAC.