Sometimes in April

Yesterday marked the sixteenth anniversary of the outbreak of the Rwanda genocide.  I've never been to Africa and I don't know anyone who survived the bloodbath, but as a student of things most foul in history I never forget certain dates.  As it turns out, April is full of them.  My birthday also falls in this month, yet another reason why my thoughts turn to mortality.  Yes, April makes me wistful and puts me in a certain indescribable mood, equal parts ethereal and sullen, an introspective mindset only the autumnal season can surpass.

I got up early this morning at a hotel in Milwaukee, lodging paid for by the military.  As a reservist soldier, I"m currently flying to California for my annual training exercise.  I'll be in the Bay Area for the next nine days visiting MOTCO or Military Ocean Terminal Concord.  I'm hoping to visit my parents in the L.A. area after a few days. 

I turn 45 on Saturday.  Where has my life gone and wither does it go?  What's it all about Alfie?  And who the hell is Alfie anyway?  So many questions, so little time.  I've looked for answers and thought I had found them earlier in my life, but in the end they were false leads.  One of the most painful things in life, I used to think, was living this life and not knowing why.  But life ain't so bad.  It could be worse.  Getting raped and mutilated by machete-wielding killers trumps an existential vaccum, don't you think?

By the way, there are now a handful of good movies about Rwanda, but the best one is called Sometimes in April (2005).  Check it out some time, and let me know what you think.

Capricious Crusaders, Myopic Moralists, and other Pathetic Primates (4/4)

Finally, in our panoply of pathetic primates we come to a creature that likes to utter shortsighted moral maxims. Remember Jane’s platitude at the dinner table about war not solving anything? I’m not advocating war by any means, but this is a false blanket statement. I’ll let the American Civil War, the sine qua non of abolition in the Old South, suffice as an example, for I do not want to get sidetracked here. These myopic moralists have an inability to look beyond the confines of their narrow ideology and appreciate the fuller, nuanced and complicated world around them; they miss the forest for the trees. Usually they’re just parroting something they’ve picked up from their self-enclosed habitat of like-thinking primates. Once again, I’ll use examples in an area that I have some expertise: war and diplomacy. (I trust you’ll agree that my undefeated record at the board game Stratego, coupled with multiple viewings of Saving Private Ryan, qualify me as an expert.)

You might recall a question that made the rounds just after 911: Why do they hate us? The they in this instance referred to the Muslim world in particular, if not the world beyond our shores in general. The question implies a moral obligation to take stock of our deleterious impact around the world. Because the United States is an aggressor that antagonizes peoples and countries abroad for its personal gain, we should reverse course and strive to show a kinder and gentler face to the world. The question seems legitimate, but it’s insufficient. Is it enough to ask why they hate us? I think not. More pertinent is who hates us and for what reason. Hitler hated us, enough to declare war on the United States in December 1941. Was he justified in hating us, if the criterion is simply hate? Is it at least feasible, I ask you, for a nation’s affection or hatred to be based on its national self-interest rather than some Platonic universal form of pure Truth? Is it not especially the case for dictatorships or stateless organizations to manipulate its people with fear to hate a particular country or part of the world, say, the United States or the West? Is it of significance that Al Qaeda or the Baathist regime in Iraq or Hamas in Palestine hates us? The Serbs despise President Clinton for getting NATO to drop bombs on their death squads in the late 1990s. Should we therefore condemn Clinton and at the same time do some soul searching? Or does this apply to only Republican presidents? Are they unjustified in hating us? Or do they hate us because we put a stop to their murderous oppression of ethnic Albanian Muslims in Kosovo? So, myopic moralists pose a loaded question with a degree of nearsightedness; they can only arrive at an answer that makes sense for their worldview.

The television series Star Trek occasionally made reference to something called the Prime Directive. The basic idea was that one should not intervene in other civilizations, but only observe—a concept not coincidentally created during the Vietnam War protests. It’s a good idea in general. History attests to the devastation created by bully empires and tyrannies that invaded and imposed their dictates on neighboring kingdoms, communities, or tribes. We should be mindful of foisting our values on another country, well-intentioned or otherwise, without heeding the internal dynamics and cultural rhythm of that particular country. Fair enough. But once you think about the real world, not the world of make-believe, the concept is difficult to maintain in many situations. Heck, it’s not even adhered to by the crew of the Starship Enterprise, let alone in our own galaxy. Can you remember an episode in which randy Captain Kirk is not getting his freak on with an interstellar sex kitten? Me neither. But is this multicultural nonsense and alleged respect for other cultures as moral as pontificators seem to suggest? Weren’t evil, chauvinistic Westerners, in the form of the British Empire, putting a stop to the Indian practice of satee, to wit, the self-immolation of widows upon the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands? Should the Redcoats have left this practice in place?

Permit me to explore this line of inquiry a bit further. Should we cease our condemnation of forced clitoridectomy and female infibulations occurring in places like Eastern Africa? And how about those Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan throwing acid on the faces of women who have the temerity to pursue an education or simply walk outside without a burqa? Between tossing stones at alleged adulterers and sodomizing boys it’s amazing they find time for their Koranic devotions. Come to think of it, why don’t we bring back human sacrifice? How dare the Spaniards for disrupting that venerated Aztec custom of gouging out a victim’s heart! And how dare law enforcement officials put a stop to those Mormon polygamists in Colorado City, Arizona. Those middle-aged men, bless their hearts, should be able to keep their 13-year-old wives. Multiculturalism, it would appear, must be a euphemism for misogyny, considering the fact that it usually supports practices harmful to women’s health. If that’s what the myopic moralists want to do, fine. But I say to them: Don’t include me in your wretched, pseudo-moral crusade. I’m in for the fight.

Please don’t misunderstand. I am aware that Western empires have also done some terrible things; indeed, I have written about such atrocities at length elsewhere. But that’s not the issue here. The Prime Directive, or “respect” for other cultures, can possibly be an immoral act itself. More generally, one should not thoughtlessly subscribe to simple maxims, so full of sound and fury but upon closer scrutiny signifying nothing. Once we homo sapiens developed a spiritual consciousness, it didn’t take long for us to forge our moral sense into ironclad precepts, codes and statutes for the purpose of domination. Why should you expend energy on beating your rivals senseless, biting off their hands, ripping out their windpipe, perhaps eating them too, when you can get them to submit to your will—and have them deliver up their females—with the power of words. The guilt trip was probably the first tool of manipulation known to man.

I’m not advocating moral relativism. My own view is that truth is out there; we just can’t identify it sometimes. And our moral codes serve an important function, whether one believes they were inscribed on Mount Sinai or a byproduct of evolution. Instead, I’m addressing moral selectivity as a function of cooption, social engineering, or self-vindication in our species. “The brain,” explains Robert Wright, “is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either.” Next time you’re at the hypothetical Smith household and are subjected to lofty-sounding platitudes that seem to favor one cause over another, you’ll just have to take it, for its endemic to these capricious crusaders. I’m not asking to you confront them, but I am concerned about your upset stomach, so do bring along a puke bag.

One chimpanzee says to another: “You should eat watermelons with both hands.” The other responds: “Really?” He scratches his head and grimaces. “Why, yes, of course. How silly of me. That makes sense.” The first chimpanzee continues: “Yeah, that’s the way you’re supposed to do it. Just hold it like so, like a bowl, and then go at it in wild abandon.” “Sweet!” exclaims the second primate. “You are so right,” he adds, as melon juice drips from his face. “What was I thinking before?” The first chimp, his brain the size of a clenched fist, rests comfortably with the thought that he has persuaded his hirsute compadre to take up his way of doing things.

Capricious Crusaders, Myopic Moralists, and other Pathetic Primates (3/4)

Liberal critics like to allege that social conservatives hold two contradictory views: opposition to abortion of the fetus and support for the death penalty. (Never mind that this allegation makes a logical fallacy in presupposing that a person who holds the one view will always hold the other. For the sake of argument let’s just say that all pro-lifers favor capital punishment and vice-versa. After all, conservatives, at least the vociferous ones you’d see on TV or hear on the radio, generally hold both viewpoints.) Those on the left think they have made their case for hypocrisy by simply juxtaposing the two statements; liberals believe (or at least pretend to believe) that these views are mutually exclusive. What they have done, however, is simply identified a pattern that, to their way of thinking, connect the reasons for opposing abortion and supporting the death penalty. They link these two causes by one seemingly common thread: killing. What they don’t understand is that the pro-lifers object to abortion because they believe it involves the taking of an innocent life, that the fetus or unborn child is snuffed out with no choice in the matter. The death penalty, contrariwise, is about justice for heinous crimes, punishment for those who consciously, volitionally, harm other innocent human beings. What the liberals did here was see a pattern or symmetry—killing or dying—and ascribe this linkage to the conservative’s motivation; but this is only a superficial similarity that does not reflect the latter’s thinking on the issue at all.

Now let us walk across the aisle and consider the second example. For their part, conservatives like to portray their left-of-center interlocutors as duplicitous when it comes to opposing war and supporting the troops. How can you support the one and not the other, they ask. Liberals support soldiers engaged in a war that they fundamentally oppose? This is the height and depth of disingenuousness, n’est-ce pas? Again, our pattern-seeking mentality is a culprit here. Perhaps in this case the operative word of linkage for conservatives is military. War is a military action and the military is involved—who knew? Mainstream liberals (not the radical left, mind you) generally appreciate the professionalism and selfless sacrifice of our men and women in uniform; they respect their courage and duty to country. What they object to are the policies or rationales that led to the war and the destruction of lives and property that such an unjustified war brings. Opposition to a war depends on the particular circumstances at the time. As former South Dakota Senator George McGovern, a former darling of the Left, wrote to President Obama: “Like you, Mr. President, I don't oppose all wars. I risked my life in World War II to protect our country against genuine danger. But it is the vivid memory of my fellow airmen being shot out of the sky on all sides of me in a war that I believe we had to fight.” One can surely differentiate support for troops and criticism of the war, the person from the action. After all, both conservatives and liberals criticize one another for not separating the office of the president from the occupant of the presidency when their guy (and someday, gal) is sitting in the White House.

I mentioned above that Darwin only partly explains moral symmetry. Let’s be honest, its use in our discourse today is less about some kind of atavistic drive to survive in inhospitable terrain than about polemics pure and simple. Evolutionary behaviorists talk about proximate and ultimate causes as a way of distinguishing the evolutionary basis on which we do things from the options we have in dealing with this legacy today. The Dutch primatologist Fans de Waal has made a distinction between a self-promoting genetic evolution and the human psychology that it produces; we can be kind and empathetic (as well as hostile and nasty) in spite of pure selfishness at the gene level. We are not doomed to follow the dictates of our evolutionary past and, like Social Darwinists, justify a harsh “survival of the fittest” social policy. We would be committing the naturalistic fallacy which postulates that whatever is natural is good. So the misunderstanding that arises between opposing political camps in the examples above is more about volitional misunderstanding. Moral symmetry might be in our hardwiring, but that doesn’t mean we’re enslaved to it. What it really amounts to is that we don’t want to take the time to understand the nuances of the opposition’s arguments, but we demand that they understand ours and get upset when they don’t. In his book The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, thinker and journalist Robert Wright explains this phenomenon:

One might think that, being rational creatures, we would eventually grow suspicious of our uncannily long string of rectitude, our unerring knack for being on the right side of any dispute over credit, or money, or manners, or anything else. Nope. Time and again—whether arguing over a place in line, a promotion we never got, or which car hit which—we are shocked at the blindness of people who dare suggest that our outrage isn’t warranted.

The use of superlatives for our own moral convictions and our knack for picking apart a position contrary to our own with selective criteria emerge from the depths of our apish psyche perhaps, but the behavior we exhibit to an adversary, inevitably accompanied with self-deception and self-righteousness, is of our choosing.

Capricious Crusaders, Myopic Moralists, and other Pathetic Primates (2/4)

The Smiths, Jack Jones, and Carla, characters created out of whole cloth for the purposes of discussion (and I assure the reader that no paper napkins were used in this simulation), evinced a posture of moral rectitude based on little more than idiosyncratic criteria. Sometimes people, like Jack, take up a moral position on an issue only when it suits them; it’s the cause de jour, if you will. What I’m addressing here isn’t merely a question of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing another, not practicing what you preach. But I’m also talking about the selectivity of our morality. We can take a passionate stand on one issue and virtually ignore others that, all things considered, seem just as important, just as pressing. For example, one might be an outspoken critic of cruelty towards animals. It’s a passion that comes through in almost every conversation one way or another, and this person might even follow up words with action: volunteering at the local animal shelter or protesting outside of scientific laboratories or writing congress representatives about foreign trade partners who kill dolphins. Does this person get as worked up, if at all, about other disturbing realities like the conscription of child soldiers abroad, sexual slave trafficking, or domestic violence in our country? Carla, for instance, expressed a moral caveat regarding violence but did not seem to acknowledge the dangers of promiscuity. I have no problem with their chosen crusades, but that’s the point: it’s selective, even downright capricious. We can’t do everything. Everyone has their pet project or pet peeve or pet monkey—sorry, scratch the last one. Time is short, our days are numbered, and the world is chalk full of injustices. Add these realities up, and we can’t help but be selective. The problem is when we prioritize moral causes for other people.

I use the term crusader purposefully. The original crusaders of history, the Christian warriors who traveled from Europe to kill Muslims in the Holy Land throughout the Central Middle Ages, were the ultimate capricious crusaders. Having received their plenary indulgence, they killed, tortured, maimed and raped in the name of a religion that teaches meekness and love of neighbor. They didn’t see it this way of course. The more pious among them joined a religious order, mortified their flesh with whips, perhaps gave to the poor, and prayed to the Prince of Peace. Once the mission bell rang, though, they were off to whoring, plundering and dispatching the Jew and Turk. Hip Hip Hoorah! I’m being a bit unfair here, for a handful of these warriors had noble intentions and lived exemplary lives. They believed wholeheartedly in a cause, granted, a cause of dubious worth from our 21st-century vantage point, namely, the protection of sacred sites via shield and sword; yet they opted, or better yet, elected to expend their energy on a religious mission in a strange land at the behest of the pope rather than, say, help reform the church back in their communities.

Let us depart the blood-drenched lands of Palestine and set ours sails for the misty Isle of Hypocritia, where we can observe another strange beast: the moral symmetrist. These supercilious creatures practice the fallacy of moral symmetry—sometimes called the fallacy of moral equivalence—like a religion. For example, they might make a moral equation between Auschwitz and the Allied bombing of Dresden, or between Auschwitz and Hiroshima, or, to update a bit, Saddam Hussein’s mass murders and the American-led invasion of Iraq. That is to say, they believe these events are morally equivalent. The SS administrators and guards, on the one hand, and British and American pilots, on the other, were equally heinous, barbaric and merciless. I’ll let you decide for yourself. I’m willing to hear them out, whatever their assertion might be, provided their claim acknowledges and deals with facts or perspectives that don’t seem to fit their thesis; any solid argument entails potential objections to its claims and corresponding responses. (And if intellectual integrity truly guides the person then perhaps such a person would go so far as to bring up criticisms to the claim that no-one has yet brought forth!) Likewise, you should not let someone make an epistemological leap without the necessary spadework in logic and reason. Don’t be satisfied with glib, off-the-cuff, and unsubstantiated moral equivalencies.

Part of the explanation for moral symmetry has to do with our innate pattern-seeking propensity as a species. Think about our inclination to see faces and strange marshmallow men in the clouds or on the surface of the moon. Perhaps the attraction to moral symmetry, like pattern-seeking, stems from our evolutionary heritage. We can locate a design, a symmetrical pattern, in a seemingly random landscape, structure or object with the same perspicacity an osprey eyeballs an unsuspecting northern pike at a considerable distance. According to evolutionary psychologists, spatial cognition and a pattern-seeking proclivity evolved over millennia during our nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence. To survive, our ancestors gradually became adept at identifying certain cycles in nature, as though the primate brain took some time to adjust to the harsh, bewildering world before it. The process of natural selection was at work here like a Paleolithic version of Where’s Waldo? But instead of looking for a goofy guy with glasses, a cap, and a white-and-red striped shirt in a parade, hominoid beings traced the migratory pattern of wildebeests or discerned the most fertile soil for crop cultivation. Such pattern-identification gave a species one-upmanship in the game of reproduction. I wasn’t around back then, but I suppose the scenario went something like this: Pierre the Cro-Magnon says to Hans the Neanderthal, “Did you ever notice how these fish swim upstream? I figure that…” Hans interrupts. “Whaaa? Hans hungry! Me want fish. Where fish?” Pierre thinks to himself: What an idiot! We’ll easily wipe these Neanderthals out and increase our gene pool. “Hey, Hans, I believe I saw some fish over that cliff yonder.”

Just because our pattern-finding aptitude is innate doesn’t mean it always gives us accurate information. As science writer Michael Shermer point outs in his book How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, we might be searching for patterns in nature that aren’t there or don’t have the meaning we ascribe to them, like the image of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. Likewise, moral symmetry is often baseless and easily leads to communication breakdown. Let me give you two examples from our current political discourse, one from the left and another from the right. I should clarify at the outset that I am neither advocating nor condemning the following viewpoints; my objective, rather, is to explain the pitfalls of moral symmetry.

Capricious Crusaders, Myopic Moralists, and other Pathetic Primates (1/4)

You’re at a dinner party with friends from church. The gracious hosts, a well-to-do couple with professional careers and two young children, live in a handsome two-story house on the better side of town. Somehow the tabletop conversation drifts toward the environment, global warming, and conservation. You’ve already gathered from John Smith and Jane Doe-Smith that while they’re proud of their wealth and success to a certain extent, they also seem to evince guilt or at any rate feel compelled to demonstrate how progressive they are in their thinking in spite of the fact that they live fairly comfortably, send their children to a private Catholic school, and reside in a community that is almost exclusively white. While you’re pretending to enjoy the special Kenyan dessert that Jane had put together from scratch and talked up quite a bit after the Vespers service last week (further corroboration of their progressive and multi-cultural credentials), they mention their volunteer involvement with the Sierra Club during their college days and more recently participation in a rally against industrial waste on the Capitol steps. You are indeed interested in their stories and mentally applaud their selfless commitment, even if the self-congratulatory tone slightly annoys you. You had mentioned earlier something about the importance of maintaining U.S. military strength in an increasingly hostile world, but that didn’t seem to gain any traction in the discussion. You thought you heard Jane mutter something under her breath about war never having solved anything.

John and Jane invite your family and the other guests to gather in the den, sip decaf coffee, and continue some chit-chat. The Smith girls belt out Heart and Soul on the piano just before they go to bed, and you dutifully take it despite the nausea the song and their performance of it create in your stomach. Jack Jones, an acquaintance of yours, holding a crumbling coconut cookie over a napkin, complains about some left-wing bloggers who are likening a Republican candidate to Hitler. He’s disgusted and thinks it’s reprehensible to compare anyone to the world’s greatest mass murderer. You fully concur but at the same time, for the life of you, you just can’t remember Jack expressing this kind of indignation when the same hateful imagery was used against a Democratic politician. John the Co-Host sidles up to you at this point and, being a trial lawyer, talks about some new legal stipulations that the state is about to impose. He’s boring you to death, but you’re a gracious guest, a masterful social chameleon in fact, and feign fascination in his every word. Meanwhile, you look out the window at John and Jane’s pristine, glistening forest-green Jeep Cherokee parked in the driveway. Your thoughts wander. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oxcart. “Wait a minute,” you tell yourself. “That’s an SUV! A gas-guzzling, ozone-layer burning, iceberg-melting, road-kill producing SUV!”

You have a gift at making someone feel as though you’re listening to them intently when in reality your mind is far removed from the ostensible conversation. (You perfected this skill a few years ago when during your vasectomy the doctor and his assistants, two female interns with a disturbing penchant for giggling, conversed in their nasally voices; however, you managed to transport your mind elsewhere, to a quaint cottage in the German Alps.) This ability comes in handy at the moment, for as John prattles on you think about what the Smiths said earlier at the dinner table. They’re self-styled environmentalists and yet they drive a non-environmental-friendly SUV? You observe the baby seat in the back and imagine Jane making some lame defense: “Well, we needed something safe for our children. We don’t advise everyone to go out and get one. The dealer ensured us that it’s more environmentally sound than other SUVs. Shouldn’t you conservative-types be happy we’re buying American-made cars? It was a good deal and we just couldn’t pass it up. We’re sort of conducting our own little experiment on the impact of SUVs on global warming. I’m still upset at John for getting that thing! We’re douche bag hypocrites.” The last statement somehow inexplicably cuts through the mist of your ruminating mind.

You make the obligatory conversational nod and requisite eye contact to keep up the pretense of social intercourse before you nonchalantly peer out the window again and this time notice a rolled-up newspaper near the back tire of the aforementioned vehicle. You again think about something that occurred earlier during the party. Your wife had asked for a paper towel to wipe the chocolate smudge off your son’s face. John and Jane explained that they always use cloth napkins to do their part in saving the trees. At the time you were hoping they didn’t extend this paper-saving crusade to arse-wiping materials, what with the wretched African cake working its voodoo magic in your Caucasian bowels. Now, in the ebb and flow of your cranial and rectal outpourings, you wonder how this pseudo-ethical principle squares with the newspaper on the driveway, an unread newspaper at that!

These observations open the floodgates to yet more. What about the desk full of stationary and post-it notes you noticed in the living room? Aren’t they made from trees? And what about Jack’s one-way-street comment regarding Hitlerized politicians? What is this mystery? Who are these odd creatures saying one thing and doing another? The sociologist inside you is coming up with fancy phrases like cognitive dissonance. You’re both intrigued and sickened, like a wayfarer who’s lost his way and is left wondering whether he’s stumbled into Sartre’s hell or Camus’s Paradox of the Absurd. Come to think of it, you seem to say to yourself, isn’t this home, this housing tract, the entire west side of town for that matter, built on prairie land? You recall fields and marshes barely a decade ago where Starbucks, Walgreens, and the Smiths’ domicile now stand.

Having put the sapiens in homo sapiens, you bring to bear your keen intellect and powers of ratiocination. So, John and Jane are self-styled environmentalists and yet they have no compunction about destroying the ecosystem if such destruction serves their personal comfort? Aren’t they part and parcel of the problem, urban sprawl? You imagine John’s defense: “Well, the community is environmentally sound. They planted some trees along the streets and built the park around the pond. Besides, we get our vegetables from a community-supported organic farm.” Tell that to the forlorn frogs who once croaked in deafening decibels, or the coyote who sought his prey unimpeded by coffee-cup-toting elderly couples out for their evening constitutional, or the raccoon whose sanguinary corpse lay supine at the corner of Middletown Street.

You take some of your observations reductio ad absurdum. Why don’t the Smiths adopt children instead of adding yet more mammal offspring to Mother Earth who’s already been shorn of natural resources, raped by the Green House effect, and on the verge of a nuclear breakdown? This overpopulated world, after all, is replete with orphans looking for loving parents. And surely Jane, a gynecologist, knows how much they could save on medical expenses, funds that could go to feeding the ubiquitous poor. You happen to be privy to something else, thanks to your wife’s rumor mill: John and Jane had spent almost $20,000 on fertility drugs to have their second child, Jennifer, whose piano skills and temper tantrums, you humbly and gratuitously submit, are proof that they misspent a healthy chunk of their precious double-income largesse.

You also ponder in your heart of heart another guest’s comments. Carla, the corpulent lady whom you met last Sunday and who needed to sit at the end of the dinner table for spatial considerations, talked about the deleterious effect of TV and videogame violence on children and society in general. But she also mentioned a movie that she and her teenage daughter watched the other evening, a movie that you know is rated R because of graphic sexual content. So she worries about being desensitized to violence but has no qualms about desensitizing her daughter to meaningless sex on demand? Interesting. You start to get sick in your stomach again. This time it’s not because of the two aforementioned demons from piano hell, nor the image that you can’t get out of your mind of Carla, powdered sugar on her chin and lips, scarfing down a lemon-filled donut as a first-time visitor immediately after the church service. (You also recall trying to reconcile her girth with your elementary school education which claimed that there are only seven continents.) Instead, this moralizing and the creation of makeshift precepts for living repulse you. You give the keys to your wife, for your somber insights into the foibles of the human condition make you too cloudy headed to drive safely.

Thus concludes our second-person hypothetical scenario. This happens to you all the time, right? Okay, maybe not some of the particulars; alright, perhaps not any of the particulars, but I wanted to set the stage for the present analysis of human behavior. Part of what I’m saying is plain to the naked eye: we humans are walking contradictions and chronic hypocrites, selective in our moral causes, short-sided, deceptive and self-deceptive—and that’s on a good day! Yet we seem to forget this fact, or at least succumb to moralists who are in fact just mammals like us, primates inter pares, yes, you heard me right. People come up with their own categorical imperatives and pseudo-precepts all the time; and they don’t just harbor them in their heart of heart but inevitably feel compelled to imply, insinuate or state openly their view of what’s right or worthwhile. Once you fully appreciate this human phenomenon, you’ll feel liberated and see subjective moralizing for what it is…well, subjective.

Travelogue: Walking in Memphis

Well, we walked down a stretch of Elvis Presley Boulevard at any rate.  The last day of our trip centered on our visit to Graceland.  We stayed the night before at a hotel in Jackson, Mississippi.  I can't say much about the state, as we merely passed through it; but the scenery was beautiful, seemingly a vast landscape of green the whole way through it.  Memphis was to be our last stop before the 11-hour drive home through Tennessee, Arkansas, Illinois, and....nice try!  As readers know, Der Viator never reveals his place of residence; if I had a nickel for every female stalker trying to track me down!  But I digress.

Visitors to Graceland are immediately struck by the “smallness” of the place. How do I know that? That’s the impression my wife and I had. Also, some obnoxious lady on the tour bus was remarking on the house as we approached. I wanted to bop her on the head (not out of malice, mind you, but as a service to humanity). You know those people who are ostensibly talking to their friend but really speaking loud enough because they want everyone to hear their brilliant opinion? I hate that, but I digress again. Although Elvis’s home doesn’t quite match the opulence of today’s rich, Graceland is quite a spread, what with horses, a carport, a racquet ball court, a meditation fountain, a shooting range, an office, and more.

Throughout the trip we had been listening to a CD of songs having to do with the places we’d visit or at least pass through, two of which deal with Graceland: Mark Cohn’s Walking in Memphis and Paul Simon’s Graceland. Both of these tunes are not my normal genre of music, but they’re great songs nonetheless, and I find the lyrics of the latter particularly clever and even profound. But I didn’t see the ghost of Elvis getting it on with “a pretty little thing” in the Jungle Room, nor did I receive any spiritual solace.

I'm not a huge Elvis fan, but I did enjoy the tour.  Years ago I read some fairly disgusting things about Elvis, his sexual exploits.  And I haven't been able to think of him in a positive light ever since.  However, we all have a bit of saint and sinner in us, and some more than others.  During the tour, however, Elvis impressed me in a couple aspects.  You get the sense that he never forgot his roots.  Indeed, he kept his residence in Memphis, and gave to charitable causes and to individuals in need.  The way he resolved to lift his parents out of poverty when he became famous was particularly touching.

Postscript: Elvis gave to the city of Memphis and, as my wife pointed out, he's still giving.  Graceland is pretty much a money trap that employs a fair number of local yokels.  If you make a visit, be prepared to slap down more cash than is really worth it, unless you believe in the second coming of the King, in which case you'll want to pay homage whatever the cost.

Confession

We all have skeletons in our closet, right? I’ve done many crazy things in my life, and I’m not without my fair share of idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes. Moreover, I’m not a Catholic, so I really don’t know why I’m confessing my “sin” to you. But one experience I had in my life—four years ago, to be exact—has bothered me and I haven’t been able to shake it. I once killed a drifter with a Swiss Army knife. There it is. I said it. In all honesty, I don’t really feel guilty about the actual business of killing him; after all, I no longer believe in hell. That's not what this mea culpa is about.  I simply have retrospective misgivings about my involuntary response to the slaying, though at the time I didn’t think much of it.

By the way, I’m not unaware of the irony here: a systems analyst at a software company dispatching a drifter. I know what you're thinking.  I'm sure you've conjured in your mind the image of a bedraggled, hirsute lowlife with a menacing scowl. This guy didn’t look the part, though—not entirely. He was a hobo, some guy ostensibly down on his luck; and he was an old fart who probably couldn't hurt a flea. There's no doubt that he walked across from the truck stop only about a half mile down the road from Wal-Mart, and for this reason he qualifies as drifter.  He asked me for a handout when I was walking to my car in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Can you believe it?  I'm not averse to charity when the cause is worthy, but I'll be damned (so to speak, because I don't believe in such things anymore) if some toothless dreg of society is going to work me for some cash.  For all I know he lives in a nice house somewhere and has chosen to make his living in this affluent town by sponging off of others and trying to manipulate their conscience.  He picked the wrong day to conduct his evil tricks.

Another irony in this pig's untimely demise at my hands is the precise weapon of choice.  You're thinking I knifed him, right?  You would be wrong.  I insisted on ripping out his throat with the nail file–neither the blade nor the screwdriver.  Heck, I would have used the toothpick, and I even tried it, but it wouldn't do the job.  I like to think outside the box, I suppose.  You give me a task, and I'll find an unorthodox way to accomplish it.  You might not think that about me, an ordinary-looking analyst, but, as my colleague Shelby would say, "that's just how I roll."  I like that.  No, I'm not your typical office guy.  Looks can be deceiving, and I have an ethereal dimension that you and the morons I work with could never understand.  They can satisfy their pedestrian desires with an Audi or even just a latte at Starbucks.  I would also add for the record that I have my own office with a window and not a cubicle.

What bothers me, however, is the erection I got while tearing out his larynx.  I'm comfortable talking about this now because I've spent weeks with a therapist going over this issue.  Dr. Knutson, the idiot, doesn't know the source of my erections, but I am getting some helpful medication out of the deal.  When I killed the old man, something inside of me happened that I can't fully explain.  It felt good, indeed sensual, though I couldn't bring it home, if you know what I mean.  For this reason I started seeing a psychiatrist, but of course I couldn't reveal everything.  To Dr. Knutson's credit, I can now be honest about erectile dysfunction, not that I tell everyone I meet on the street.  But if these words are my attempt at a "confession," well then, by all means, I'll bring everything out of the closet and put it on display before you prying eyes.  I used to fear hell itself for such indiscretions.  But when I was a kid my mother threatened to whack off my member for sexual thoughts of any kind.  How she knew what I was thinking, I still don't know to this day.

You'd think the first time I killed a guy would have been a harrowing experience, no?  I assure you I snuffed out this asshole with as much equanimity as if I were squashing an earwig.  I didn't know I had it in me, but I found it liberating.  If anything, I had felt awkward about the next person I killed, and that's only because I felt something for her.  Joyce Landry was a little whore, to be honest, but she used to babysit our kids back in the day. I surprisingly felt some nostalgia for her as the blood squired from her neck and sternum.  Unlike the bum in the parking lot, Joyce was a crime of passion, you might say.  But they won't link me to the "crime," because it's been over fifteen years since she we've known her, and she had moved to another town.  I never forget her, though, and I still think about her now, nothing but a bag of bones.  Life is funny.

Sometimes in my darkest imaginings I consider my place in the world, and it's likely not the same view that I suspect you hold of me.  Do not judge me from your Bema Seat on high. You know nothing about the real meaning of life, and less about people like me.  God loves me, I feel at peace, and the world is my playground.  That's all I need.  There's your confession.  Now leave me be, as I'm about to head out for Wal-Mart and get a new Swiss Army knife.