Today’s Politicians (and Voters) Could Learn a Lesson in Religious Tolerance – From Richard Nixon

One of the best things to emerge from the many books I’ve read about Richard Nixon and Watergate is that the political environment we live in today is not without precedent.

I hear a lot of journalists claim that the “current” election is the “nastiest ever” – something that’s said with every presidential election to come down the pike since I can remember.

I hear a lot of people stunned at the polarization of the electorate, electing their guy by the thinnest of margins.

They need to read more about Richard Nixon and, in particular, the elections of 1960 and 1964.

But to get back to the topic of religious tolerance and learning a lesson from Tricky Dicky. Here’s a bit from Jonathan Aitken’s “Nixon: A Life,” discussing the “Catholic Issue” concerning the candidacy of Jack Kennedy:

Coming from a religious minority group himself, Nixon deplored such bigotry. He went out of his way to stamp on all manifestations of the Protestant backlash. [H]e appeared on ‘Meet the Press’ on 11 September, where was questioned about Kennedy’s possible conflict of loyalties between Pope and country. ‘I have no doubt whatever about Senator Kennedy’s loyalty or about his ability to put the Constitution of the United States above any consideration,’ replied Nixon. He said he intended to keep religion completely out of the campaign and that he had ordered his supporters ‘not to discuss religion, not to raise it, not to allow anybody to participate in the campaign who does so.’

Nixon maintained this position even when it became apparent that the religious issue was unexpectedly hurting him rather than Kennedy. In the closing days of the campaign, Republican Catholics were being urged by the Democrats to vote for JFK, while Republican Protestants were being asked to do likewise – in order to prove that they were not prejudiced! Democratic TV commercials also played the religious card blatantly, using the theme that no one had asked Kennedy about his Catholicism when he had fought for his country in the Pacific. Such tactics came close to an attempt to turn the election into a reference between tolerance and intolerance.

I hope that sounds familiar. While I think it’s deplorable of Republicans to trout out offensive t-shirts that say, for example, ‘Let’s get the white back in the White House,’ Democratic winking and nodding at official and unofficial skullduggery when it comes to Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is equally reprehensible, as are the media digs disguised as journalism.

Here are my qualifiers. I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). But in 2008, I voted for Barack Obama. In 2012, I’m on the list of undecideds, trying to figure out which candidate has the least objectionable attitudes. This is on par with my presidential election voting record, where I have switched party loyalty, voting for the right man (or woman, or whatever) for the job, no matter what he looks like, what he thinks, or what “baggage” – and I use the term to describe baggage as seen by the opposition party, not baggage I see myself – he or she may bring into office.

Just as no one on the right has offered a credible argument why I should not vote for Barack Obama because of his skin color, no one on the left has offered a cogent argument why I should not vote for Mitt Romney because of his religion – though they trot out the same “he’ll take his orders from Salt Lake City” bugaboo that many JFK opponents in the 1960s trotted out concerning him taking orders from Rome. You’d think the party on the left would learn such lessons from the past, but as far as I can tell, the only things that exist from the past are rose-tinted memories of Reagan as a great president despite his many shortcomings in the 1980s and Kennedy as a great president despite his many shortcomings in the 1960s. There are no lessons to be learned, except the sophomoric one that says if an underhanded tactic is used by one side – officially sanctioned or not – then despite the moral and ethical obligations of those tactics’ first victims, the same tactics ought to be used in turn.

That’s the lesson I see from Nixon in 1960.

Here’s more from Aitken’s book:

As private polls began to indicate that the traditional Republican Catholic vote was avalanching to Kennedy, Nixon’s staff unanimously advised him to make a speech criticizing his opponent’s use of ‘reverse bigotry.’ Among the most vocal advocates of this recommendation were the Catholic members of the Vice President’s team. One of those was Peter Flanigan, a twenty-seven-year old New York investment banker who had been a contemporary of Bobby Kennedy at the Benedictine school of Portsmouth Abbey, Rhode Island.

‘I was appalled that we were doing nothing to deter the flight of the Catholic voters so I went to RN with some suggestions for advertisements that might stem the tide,’ recalled Flanigan. ‘He chewed me out. “don’t you play the religious card under any circumstances whatsoever,” he told me. “I absolutely forbid you to do anything which suggests that my campaign has a religious bias to it.”’

After he lost the 1960 election, Aitken says, he said the following to Flanigan:

Pete, here’s one thing we can be satisfied about. This campaign has laid to rest for ever the issue of a candidate’s religion in presidential politics. Bad for me perhaps, but good for America.

America, however, as our continued bigotry against people of color and against people of some minorities where even the tolerant are allowed bigotry, has not learned that lesson.

Why I Don't Buy Strictly Digital Content

If you go into our basement, one of the first things you’ll see is our media wall. One good hunk of a fairly good-sized wall covered with DVDs. In a chest in the corner, our ancient stash of VHS tapes. And in the study, well, I tore out the shelves in a rather large closet and put up bookshelves, which even now spill out into the room, threatening us with an overload of slowly-decaying wood pulp.

We also have a mountain of CDs, and in random drawers and boxes, some old audio cassettes, though those are going to go away as soon as I can get them transferred to my computer.

We have iPods and Kindles, and listen to a lot of digital music and watch a lot of movies on them. I’m also getting into ebooks, and hope to publish one of my own before the year is out.

But we’re not going out of our way to buy solely digital content.

Here’s why.

I keep seeing stories like this, where a consumer makes a digital-only purchase and then, later down the line, is denied use of the item purchased. Because they have no physical or backup copy of the item, they’re out the item and the money they used to buy it.

Until that stops, I’m not investing a lot of money in solely digital content.

I know stories like this are the exception. That most people enjoy their solely digital content, whether backed up at home or residing in the cloud somewhere. But cumbersome as our collections are, I know that day or night, come what may with the provider of said content, what I’ve got in my house is mine, unless they want to come take it from me. Then they’d have to get past the weenie dog, and I think she’s a pretty good deterrent.

Yes, the argument is made that if we suffer a fire, a flood, or have some mishap (such as the aforementioned weenie dog scratching a DVD or CD to the point it’s unplayable) that we lose that content as well. That is true. However, there is a big difference in my mind between an accident or an act of God and a random act of a copyright holder limiting my access to the content I’ve purchased.

Mr. Lonely

I am now the sole technical writer at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex.

When I started here nearly seven years ago, I was one of five writers, with a text processor besides. Since then, through layoffs, attrition and writers moving to other projects within the company, the number has dropped to just me.

Latest blow came Tuesday morning this week, when my co-worker Ed got the call and the pink slip.

It’s unusual, this situation. Ed worked for the company. I’m a subcontractor. The only thing that’s been said about the situation is that “they” decided to “go down to just subcontractor work” for writers on this project. Not quite sure what that means, but here I am, rattling around in an eight-cubicle trailer with only two people in it now. We could celebrate and knock down a few walls and make our cubes much bigger, but technically it’s easier to hide in this maze if all the walls and desks remain as they are.

There are a lot of tech writers on LinkedIn and other sites, now talking about being the lone writer on their projects – wondering who they’ll turn to for professional assistance and such. I’m not too worried about that – there are other writers around I can reach by email and phone, so I’m technically not alone. But being the sole live body at this project is a bit intimidating – especially since we’ve got a pretty impressive document dump coming in the next few weeks, with a lot of those documents as yet not in their final form. Kinda makes my lips numb just thinking about it.

Everything’s going to land on my plate now – there’s no one to send stuff to (or to take stuff for) if we need a pressure relief. And if I get sick, well, I’ve pretty much got to come in to work anyway.

The Ugliness of the Internet, Part II

Who is worse – the investigative journalist who outs an Internet creep, or a band of anonymous vigilantes outing an Internet creep?

Trick question. The answer all depends on whether the investigative journalist or the anonymous vigilantes got their stuff right and outed the right guy and with the right details.

Read earlier this week about Gawker journalist Andrew Chen outing Arlington, Texas resident Michael Brutcsh as Violentacrez, vile poster of lewd and nasty stuff at Reddit.

Then read today about Anonymous outing a fellow they believe coaxed a twelve-year-old girl into sending him photographs of her breasts. Ensuing bullying (and a host of other problems including drug and alcohol abuse, lest the bullies get all the credit) led the girl, now fifteen, to commit suicide earlier this month.

Maybe Anonymous got the right guy – right now there are so many fingers flying you’d think you were at a leper festival – but they outed him at the wrong address, sending a Vancouver, B.C.-area man into hysterics as he saw his address become attached to this ugliness.

They guy they outed is also denying everything, saying he’s gone as far as suggest to authorities another man in New York is responsible for the photographs that started this clusterfark to begin with. (Slate is right to say we shouldn’t feel too sorry for this guy, seeing as he was a regular at Violentacrez’ jailbait forum on Reddit and is in trouble with the law for sexual crimes unrelated to the girl who committed suicide.)

Again, I tread a fine line here. I have a brother in jail right now for looking at naughty pictures, some of them of underage girls. He, too, falls into the “not too sorry for this guy” category, because though I love him a great deal as a brother, I can’t condone what he has done.

Chen had the guts to contact Brutsch, hear him out, and present what he said to those screaming for his head. Anonymous did not allow their outed victim the same privilege. Thus the difference between trained and ethical journalists and trolls hunting trolls.

Basic journalism tells you the burden of proof is on the journalist. Go get ‘em, but make damn sure you know for a fact what you’re doing is correct. But that takes time and patience, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.

Purists

Oh, the Purists.

Arthur C. Clarke mocked them, wild-eyed loons intent that “wilderness” be left on the moon as colonies expanded, that Phobos not be strip-mined as Demois gradually shrank as the ship-builders of Mars cleaned it of its minerals.

In a universe where stars explode and spew their matter across interstellar space, where the departure of miniscule probes from the sun’s heliosphere is news of decades as first one, then another, astronomer alerts a journalist to the “fact” that the passage has indeed occurred; in a universe where comets and asteroids slam into the gas giants and smear their cheerful clouds with soot, can there be room for order and cleanliness?

Perhaps.

But they take it far.

I remember as a youth, reading of the Scotswoman Katie Paterson, who turned Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code and bounced it off the Moon. She played the resulting echo on a player piano, with awkward pauses where the mountains and craters of the moon absorbed Beethoven’s genius and did not reflect it back to Earth.

There were many who called her work sacrilege.

Do we dare not gaze into the heavens to see the Moon, not far away, or the stars, so distant many may be dead as we gaze at them, and fear offending someone who believes the Moon and stars ought to be left alone.

I stared into the heavens with a tiny tabletop telescope, searching in vain for the baobab and volcanoes of the Little Prince and felt, with some reassurance, that the cosmos had not been sullied by my weeks of searching.

There are poisonous clouds of arsenic, boiling seas of hydrogen, nuclear annihilators and light-crushing black holes in space. Surely the wilderness there can cope with the gazing eyes of uncounted entities staring up into the blackness.

They pain me, here on Iapetus.

An amateur astronomer in the high plains of New Mexico, using a massive telescope he erected on his own property, at his own expense, chose over the course of several evenings to examine the surface of Iapetus, knowing I was there, hoping to see me on one of my wanderings. I proved elusive. But he did spot one of my trails – out to the scarecrow on the regio – and he photographed it. He sent it in to an art competition and won in the category of “Man’s Impact on the Solar System.”

Oh, the hate mail flowed.

To him and to me, but mostly to him because when I left earth, I left no forwarding address.

Eventually, he shared a few with me – he had contacts among the captains ferrying freight and passengers in the Saturnian system.

One woman from Paris decried my trail thusly:

Is there nowhere in the universe that man cannot denigrate? Is there no place where one can gaze and not see the devil impact of the species which once threatened to destroy its earthly cradle? No, it is not so. Even on the far distant moons of Saturn, selfish men tread the wilderness and make it theirs, erasing with careless footsteps the artistry of millions of years.

I wrote back:

As a young man, I visited the sewers of Paris. For more than a mile, I walked underneath the streets of your most beautiful city, ogling stuffed rats, staring in amazement at the enormous hollow iron ball sewer workers once used to push the filth of your city out of the sewers and, untreated, into the Seine.

I marveled at their ingenuity. And at the further ingenuity of mankind that saw raw sewage treated to the point it was drinkable – and palatable – as it left the plant. Mankind has learned, through carelessness, disease, science, and faith, to repair the evils it creates.

Pain drives me to walk those miles across the regio to the scarecrow I built there. There is no wind on Iapetus. But there is dust. There is a cleansing. Soon I will die, and, by treaty, no one else may live here after I go. The trails I make, the refuges I have built, the scarecrow which holds my past, will slowly be buried as Iapetus sails on in the sea of chalk dust and soot that Saturn naturally deposits in its wake. I live on a dust ball, slowly, incrementally, infinitesimally growing bigger, mote by mote. Those motes will fill in my footprints. They will bury me. And when, in a million years, my marks may no longer be seen here, no one will remember a hermit once trod the dusty plains.

Paris – barring some cataclysm – and its ancient sewers will still be on Earth, I pray, for it is a beautiful city, ancient and wise, that all should see before they pass and return to the dust from whence they came.

Pardon me my faults, as I stare at the blue waters of the Seine and long to sup from its clear water.

This is, of course, real.

The Ugliness of the Internet

We all know ugly things are done under the umbrella of free speech.

But Michael Brutsch of Arlington, Texas, has done quite a bit on his own to spread such ugliness.

He admits to Gawker writer Adrian Chen – in a profile wherein Chen outed Brutsch as Violentacrez, described as the “biggest Troll” on the web – that he likes “riling people up,” and spent untold hours doing so by posting everything from soft-core pornography to shots of underage girls in bikinis, racism, anti-Semitism and any other trash you could care to name on the “front page of the Internet” – Reddit.

Brutsch is now fearful that his outing could cost him his job (apparently it has), untold social harm on the Internet if his legal, yet nefarious actions were linked to the real person behind the trolling, and other such violations of his rights to privacy as he and Reddit violates the privacy of others by hiding behind the oft-abused Free Speech Amendment.

Chen’s profile is fascinating. I thought – briefly – of sharing it with my BYU-Idaho students, who begin a unit on writing a personality profile this week – but even in Chen’s kid glove treatment of Brutsch’s ugliness there’s a bit too much to share with the tender flowers in my online English classes.

Chen’s brilliant headshot of the free-speech-protecting-scumbaggery comes here:

A troll exploits social dynamics like computer hackers exploit security loopholes, and Violentacrez calmly exploited the Reddit hive mind's powerful outrage machine and free speech values at the same time.

It was this pattern, repeated to various degrees dozens of times, that made Violentacrez an unlikely hero to many of the white male geeks who make up Reddit's hard core. They saw Violentacrez as a champion in the fight against the oppressive schoolmarms: "He upheld a certain amount of freedom for the worst of us to ensure freedom for all of us," wrote one user in a post mourning his departure. Fans followed him wherever he went on the site.

Increasingly, those who are opposed to the ugliness of exploiting women and children, upholding “traditional values” and such are forced to the sidelines and urged – sometimes shouted at – to be silent, in the name of tolerance and free speech and whatever other nice-sounding protections and behaviors the spewers of filth can dredge up from the best places to protect what they call their rights.

Chen again nails it on the head when he describes what occurs on the Internet not as democracy – free speech and such – but rather as feudalism:

When it comes to mods, the political model of Reddit is not so much a vast digital democracy, as it's often framed by fans and users, as online feudalism. Moderators like Violentacrez are given absolute control over their turf in exchange for keeping the kingdom of Reddit strong. Moderators become more or less powerful in direct relation to the number and popularity of the subreddits they moderate, so they try to take over other subreddits to boost their profile in the community. Inevitably, Reddit's administrators develop relationships with the most influential moderators. Like feuding medieval lords vying for the king's favor, moderators form alliances or wage epic flame wars over power struggles.

As long as Brutsch was able to keep things under “control” in his vast feudal state – and control seemed limited to ejecting outright hard-core pornographic images, though he also moderated a slab of filth called jailbait, where he worked hard to ensure that the legal images stored therein were indeed of only underage girls – Reddit turned a blind eye to what went on in their sewers.

That blind eye is getting poked, according to Slate, with law enforcement now buzzing about, looking for the creepiest of the creepy on Reddit.

That is something Reddit should truly consider rejecting unequivocally if they want to continue being the front page of the Internet. Here’s what Joel Johnson writing at BuzzFeed says on the matter:

One of the things about finding your place in the world is realizing that compromise is never fun. But as you grow up, you find out things about yourself and your ideals that don’t always jibe with the way you wish the world operated. And as an adult (if I may wax condescendingly parental), I’ve learned that empathy and graciousness are almost always the brighter path, which is why I hold hope that the people who make up the community at Reddit will recognize that they can choose how they define themselves as a community by choosing what sort of behavior they want to endorse. I hope they’ll take a moment to think about the possible ramifications of being the subject of a “creepshot” for young women who are also still figuring out how they will interface with the world. I like to think Reddit will understand that for the young women exposed there is a lot to lose by being objectified, and that to repeat the marginalizing behavior that caused nerds–often white, male, American nerds, although I mention that only as a baseline matter of perspective–to seek camaraderie and solace on the internet is to become the very self-hating bully we all have run from in our pasts.

I can’t imagine Brutsch – if he has a daughter – would want the creepy uncles of the Internet drooling over photos of her, even if they were purloined not from a private stash or taken surreptitiously by some camera-toting pervert, but from other public Internet sources ranging from Facebook to 4chan. But he sees nothing wrong with ogling other peoples’ daughters, simply because to him – and to the scum he’s supplying – they’re objects, not people.

Brutsch is not contrite, according to Chen. He just didn’t want his name connected with his nastiness. He stands by what he has done, but doesn’t want to, say, lose a job, or be harassed himself. Per the Chen article:

When I called Brutsch that Wednesday afternoon and told him I knew who he was, I was a little taken aback by how calm he remained during our intense but civil hour-long conversation. I had figured that a man whose hobby was saying horrible shit just to screw with people online would rise to some new horrible level when conditions on the ground actually called for it. Instead he pleaded with me in an affectless monotone not to reveal his name.

"My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment," he said. "I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time."

I asked if he regretted anything he had posted, now that he'd be found out. No, he said. "I would stand by exactly what I've done." The problem was, he explained, that if his identity got out, his many enemies would start attaching lies to his name because they simply don't like his views. They would say he was a child pornographer, when all he had done was spearhead the distribution of thousands of legal photos of underage girls. They would say the fact that he created a subreddit dedicated to Hitler meant he was anti-Semitic, when really it was just trolling. (Brutsch says he's got Jewish blood himself: "If you see a picture of me, I'm about as Jewish looking as they get.") They would Google-bomb his name and the word "pedophile" along with his publicly-traded company's name.

Poor baby.

It says something quite brutish about Brutsch's view of life inside and outside the Internet that he's more worried about what "lies" will be spread about him than the ramifications of his own reprehensible behavior. Reflect the blame on society, on my enemies, not on me, who have done everything within legal boundaries, though with the morals of an alley cat.

Again, Chen nails it. If you don’t want to get in trouble for something, DON’T DO IT. And remember, even if its’ legal, that don’t make it right:

The irony of being upset that a noted custodian of "creepshots" is getting some unwanted attention himself is obvious. Jailbait defenders would often argue that if 14-year-olds didn't want their bikini pictures to be posted to Reddit, they should not have taken them and uploaded them to their Facebook accounts in the first place. If Brutsch did not want his employers to know that he had become a minor internet celebrity through spending hours every day posting photos of 14-year-olds in bikinis to thousands of people on the internet, he should have stuck to posting cat videos.

What free-speech advocates forget (aside from the obvious fact that the free speech amendment discusses only government impingement of free speech, not, say, corporate or communal or individual impingements, which allows, for example, Reddit to ban Gawker and Jezebel links) is that free speech, whether it is being endorsed or strangled, implies a modicum of restraint and self-control.

Adds Johnson:

Reddit should not be a place where the last throes of old internet entitlement have safe harbor; it could be a place where (some of) the once outcast voices of the internet finally understand the dense interleaved social contracts that exist in the world, fairly or unfairly, and choose to err on the side of patience, consideration of each individual as a human being, and the sort of tolerance that was not afforded to all of us evenly when we were younger.

Brutsch is not a victim here. He is a creepy uncle who deserves to be slapped down for this crapola. I don’t envy his future, whether he loses his job or is Googlebombed or whether nothing happens to him at all. He wanted to be an anonymous creepy uncle on the Internet. No more anonymity.

I have a personal dog in this fight. I have a brother who right now is in jail on pornography charges. I have no idea who supplied him with the naughty pictures he was caught with, nor where he sought them out. But it’s creeps like Brutsch who laugh and chuckle at pornography, thinking it does them no harm, who purvey the stuff to others, where harm is inflicted. Brutsch’s wife and soon-to-be-Marine son may be tolerant of his irresponsible behavior and Reddit may have the right to aid and abet his purveyance, but he should know that his ilk led to my brother losing employment, losing a marriage and losing his freedom because he stepped beyond the extremely ill-defined boundaries Reddit and Brutsch chose to acknowledge or enforce and got caught – rightfully – by the short arm of the law.

You, Mr. Brutsch, are a purveyor of filth, and Reddit, your blind-eyed accomplice. Congratulations. By upholding your version of free speech, you succeed in daily ruining lives. You could have both spent your idle hours uplifting people, rather than belittling them, demeaning them, objectifying them and otherwise playing with them – real people, with real lives and real careers and personalities and rights to privacy which you seem to cherish. But instead you continue your loutish behavior while hiding behind that tattered, shit-stained banner that is free speech. My brother, for all of his faults, is a much better human being than you, Mr. Brutsch. Yet he is the one suffering for the choices he made in life. Maybe it’s time for Brutsch and Reddit to suffer a bit as well.

Grow the hell up. Realize that your actions have consequences in real life for real people. Get your little buzz thrills from helping people out, rather than beating people down.

And Reddit’s approach of banning links to Gawker (and sister site Jezebel) because of Chen’s profile – even before it came out – well, that entirely feudalistic of you. Every subject of a Brutsch jailbait photo thanks you.

Churches

“What do the churches look like?” Yershi asked.

I peered at buildings through the carriage windows, trying to sort holy from common. The grey sky merged with soot from a thousand chimneys wet by the constant rain. Through the window came the odors of rotting thatch and horse manure and tanneries and coal dust and carrots and potatoes fresh from the ground.

“I don’t see a church,” I said.

“Every town has a church,” Yershi said.

Wattle and daub and muddy streets gave way to cobbles and buildings of stone.

There, on the other side of a small square, a church.

At least it had a cross on the door – a hard, iron cross bolted heavily to the thick door of oak or yew. There were no windows, only slits of darkness that presumably illuminated the interior. There were turrets in place of towers. Chains in place of the weighted ropes leading to a squat bell chamber – I could not call it a tower – atop the building.

“It’s more fortress than church,” I said.

“Long ago, the people of a village were slaughtered, raped, or burned alive when the marauders came in from the sea. They had no refuge, and the marauders smashed through the windows of their church, betimes throwing the dead or dying bodies of men against the lead and glass until it broke, so they could throw the women and children in more easily to burn them,” Yershi said.

“Thereafter, many villages and towns built churches that could offer a home to God and a refuge of strength from temporal death – though you should wonder why they feared to die if they loved their God so much,” he added.  Towns with churches of this nature hold their hands closed, hold their hearts deep within their cloaks and are wary of strangers. For good reason.”

“Should we move on, then?” I asked. “Find a town with a church open to the air and sun?”

“No,” Yershi said. “For though the rose windows and transepts are beautiful, these slender churches of living stone carry with them their own dangers. They beguile with their openness and charity, when therein lay ravens ready to pick bones clean.”

“You trust no one in the church?” I said. “I know many good Christians.”

Yershi laughed. “I do not mind Christians,” he said. “There are many who attend these church-fortresses who are friends to Yershi, as are many who attend the churches of open air and sunlight. But the churches tell the true story. I can follow the journey of Jesus to the cross while walking through a church and know that within these same walls, the condemned have walked to unjust deaths just as the faithful have walked with tears in their eyes to partake of the body of Christ. Each stone bears the echo of laughter or tears, hatred or love, sorrow or happiness – and oft a mixture of both, betimes one stronger than the other, like the smell of rain overpowering the smell of manure. The perceptive among the Christians and those they deign entrance to their edifices know of this dichotomy. Some stay within and strive to purge the stone and air of evil, to both great and minor effect. Some succumb to the evil. Some flee it and seek good elsewhere, abandoning their fellow Christians to the evils they recognize.”

“Nature recognized when this Jesus died. The heavens wept and the earth tore asunder,” he added, eyes closed as the horses clopped through the town. “Nature retains this sense of good or evil. Rock absorbs it like a sponge. Trees drink it like rainwater. And when rock is carved and trees are hewn, they go on recording, with invisible rings and invisible lichen and concretions, the good and evil that occur around them. Feel the rock, next time you enter a church, and you will know what kinds of Christians breathe the air around you.”

“Then breathe with them,” he added. “Or endeavor to bring in better air.”

From Hooptedoodle to Kreptdedoodle

In a prologue to his “Sweet Thursday,” John Steinbeck puts the words of an author into the mouth of one of his characters, who launches into a monologue about what he’d do as a writer to entertain his readers.

One of the things he mentions is hooptedoodle, which he defines as a spot in the story – really outside the story – where the author is allowed to play with language, write something pretty and entertain the audience who can skip it if he or she wishes so they can get back to the story at hand.

Here it is:

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from what he says. I like some description, but not too much of that. Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. Spin us up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.

I’m a victim of what Steinbeck and Elmore Leonard call “mainly hooptedoodle,” and as I revise, I try to get rid of as much as I can bear to cut.

Then there are other authors who don’t cut it.

And, frankly, there are other authors who go beyond hooptedoodle into what I call kreptdedoodle – writing bits that are outside the story and easily skipped but so gosh-awful that you have to read it two or three times just to ponder why the author thought it was a great idea to include it.

Here’s an example from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2061 (Clarke, by the way, as his career lengthened, has become an absolute kreptedoodle artiste, which is unfortunate because I really enjoy most of what he writes).

“. . . lucky you missed the annual ball: believe it or not, it was just as grisly as last year’s And once again our resident mastodon, dear Miz Wilkinson, managed to crush her partner’s toes, even on the half-gee dance floor.

“Now this Shaka business. We know you love pulling our legs, but frankly, Jerry and I were horrified! I can see why Maggie M turned him down – yes, of course we’ve read her Olympic Lusts – very enjoyable, but too feminist for us . . .

“What a monster – I can understand why they’ve called a gang of African terrorists after him. Fancy executing his warriors if they got married! And killing all the poor cows in his wretched empire, just because they were female! Worst of all – those horrid spears they invented; shocking manners, jabbing them into people you’ve not been properly introduced to . . .

“And what a ghastly advertisement for us feys! Almost enough to make one want to switch.”

I hope you get the point. Here we have the kreptedoodle come out in a purely Vaudevilleian portrayal of homosexuality. I know it’s couched under the sci-fi cliché of tolerance and acceptance of every little thing in the distant future, winking as us provincials of the past who let divisions, well, divide us, but the way it’s written here, outside of the story, not vital to anything, is pure unadulterated kreptedoodle. I’m glad I can skip it.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of kreptedoodle in 2061, from the golly-bob-howdy revelations that passengers on a spaceship bound for Halley’s Comet can swim in the ship’s water propellant to the inclusion of everyone but white anglo-saxons to the point the only way you can figure out they’re even there in the story is that the author doesn’t have signposts pointing out with flashing bulbs that they aren’t members of some “other” ethnic or national group.

I feel like this reading kreptedoodle of this magnitude.

What Fresh Hell is This?

The uptick I see is the sudden dearth of garage sales upon the suburban landscape. Other than that, I can’t see this working.

Here’s the situation: Supap Kirtsaeng, a Thai studying at Cornell University, had friends and relatives buy a bunch of textbooks in Thailand that he then re-sold in the United States at a profit of about $1.2 million. Nobody stole the books. They were just purchased in another country and sold here. Wiley, the publisher, got wind of the sale and had a conniption fit and is suing Kirtsaeng for copyright infringement. Kirtsaeng countered, saying he had the right to sell the books since they were his – he and his relatives bought them.

Now the case is heading to the Supreme Court, bringing with it the spectre of disallowing the sale of stuff we already paid for if the first sale occurred in another country.

While that doesn’t sound like the end of the world, it is kind of startling to think that, say, you bought a used book from a guy in England and then, after reading it, decided you wanted to sell it yourself. If the SCOTUS agrees with Wiley, such a sale would be banned, or at least you’d have to give the publisher a cut.

This seems wrong.

I already won’t buy digital copies of books and music and movies for this reason, since the original sellers have proved to be a bit grabby and won’t allow me to re-sell what I buy. To think they want to do that with tangible, real, in-your-hand stuff now? Do not want.

All Kirtsaeng did was bring cheaper textbooks to the United States – the books were sold in his native Thailand by Wiley far less expensively than Wiley offered them in the United States. Certainly Wiley was out money for books that could have been sold by them in the US for the higher prices, but there’s certainly nothing stopping individual students from textbook shopping and finding the books for cheap on the open market. But since an individual made a business of doing so, I guess that’s a no-no? Though I can’t figure out why. HE BOUGHT THE DARN BOOKS. They’re his to re-sell, and if Wiley can’t match his price in the United States, well, that’s capitalism, baby.

What Was Not Said at Conference

Every time I come home from the priesthood session of LDS conference, I always joke with my wife that they told us not to beat on our wives and not to look at naughty pictures.

It’s said in jest but with a serious bent – I’ve yet to attend a priesthood session in which these two items are not brought up. This October brought no surprises, as once again we were cautioned against pornography and advised to treat our wives and children as they ought to be treated.

What was not said at conference – by anyone – was this:

Vote for Mitt Romney.

Or even vote for that matter. The upcoming elections were not mentioned once.

To me, that’s significant. In practically every other denomination, if there were one of “their boys” running for a big stakes election – or even a small one – you’d never hear the end of the politics from the pulpit.

Not this past weekend, when the pulpits could have been as bully as all get-out.

Not even a mention of the LDS Church’s policy on political neutrality.

Nothing.

What we got was a lot of this:

May we ever watch over one another, assisting in times of need. Let us not be critical and judgmental, but let us be tolerant, ever emulating the Savior's example of loving kindness. In that vein, may we willingly serve one another. May we pray for the inspiration to know of the needs of those around us, and then may we go forward and provide assistance.

And this:

The Lord admonished, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.' What great happiness this knowledge should bring to us. He lived for us and He died for us. He paid the price for our sins. May we emulate His example. May we show our great gratitude to Him by accepting His sacrifice and living lives that will qualify us to return and one day live with Him.

I like that.