IN MEMORIAM: ZACH ECKHART, ONCE MY STUDENT

Zach Eckhart

  

   Those of us who work in the English Department at Virginia Tech get to see a lot of Tech’s Corps of Cadets. Located in Shanks Hall on the Upper Quad of campus, the English Department is more or less surrounded by Corps dorms. We see the freshman cadets in their first semester walking on the far right of every sidewalk and making only right-angle turns as they walk to their classes. We watch as the cadets, often in shorts and t-shirts in the middle of winter, do sit-ups and pull-ups and leg lifts at the physical-training yard just across the way. We see them doing their marching drills on the half-acre of grass just outside. We hear the Highty-Tighties, the Corps’ regimental band, practicing; sometimes the drums and trumpets distract us, just outside our windows, as we try to teach. We all stand and walk a bit straighter on our good days, influenced, whether we’re aware of it or not, by all those uniformed young men and women with their perfect military posture. Occasionally, we look out our windows and see them with presumably unloaded guns, in full combat outfitting, giving and receiving orders, crawling here and there, aiming at nothing, we hope, practicing for the things that military people must practice for and that we would prefer not to think about. The cadets have always made me proud and worried and a little sad.

     Tomorrow, Friday, April 1, 2011, at 3:00 p.m., Zachary R. Eckhart, who graduated from the Corps in 2007 and from Virginia Tech in 2008, will have his name officially dedicated on the Ut Prosim pylon on the Drillfield at Virginia Tech. Zach was in the navy. He was killed when his training aircraft crashed in Georgia on April 12, 2010. “Ut Prosim,” for you non-Hokies, is Latin for “That I may serve.” It is the motto of Virginia Tech.

     Zach was my student in First-Year Composition in the spring semester of 2004. Like many freshman cadets, who frequently are shouted out of bed for grueling physical training at four in the morning, Zach often showed up for our late-afternoon class exhausted. (I once had another exhausted cadet who, only once, fell asleep noisily in my class. He was so humiliated when I gently woke him that he insisted on standing in the back of the classroom for the rest of the class, in order to punish himself, I think, and so that he would not behave so disrespectfully—as he alone saw it—again. He earned all our respect that day.) Zach never fell asleep in class, always showed up, did all his work on time and according to instructions, and was unfailingly pleasant, polite, and unpretentious. He behaved, in a word, like a freshman cadet. I don’t remember much about his class work or discussion contributions beyond that; he was one of those under-the-radar students. He got a B in the class (I just looked it up)—more than respectable for an Engineering major in First-Year Comp.

     I soon lost track of the rest of my students in Zach’s composition class, but not Zach. Living and working as we both did on the Upper Quad, we would run into each other frequently, on the sidewalk (as an upperclassman, he no longer had to walk on the far right) and in nearby Schulz Dining Hall. I’d say, “Hi, Zach.” He’d say, “Hi, Mr. Weathers.” I’d ask him about his classes, he’d say something, in his quiet manner, and we’d go on our way.  For four years, I watched him grow less skinny, more into a man. I saw other cadets treat him each year with more and more respect. He was often dressed in his Highty-Tighties uniform. I’m embarrassed and disgusted that I can’t remember what instrument he played in the Corps band. I think he was in the brass section.

      I liked Zach. I enjoyed seeing him grow up. That’s all I have left to say about my feelings for him. He was 25 when he died, the ninth Virginia Tech graduate to die during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Zach didn’t die in combat. That makes no difference.

     I won’t be able to go to the Pylon Ceremony for Zach; life calls me to other things at that hour. I hope to be where I can hear the Corps cannon fire in his honor. I won't be able to hear the Corps band play Echo Taps, which is just as well. This blog post is my way of remembering Zach. It’s all I can do. It’s pretty much nothing.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE: What it all amounts to

Dogs are a unit of temperature.

     Consider, if you will, the scruple and the dog. They have something in common, the scruple and the dog: both are units of measurement.

    The word “scruple” is derived from the Latin “scrupulus,” meaning a small, sharp stone. At some point, I suppose, the Romans decided that all those small sharp stones on Italy’s beaches were useful for something other than causing classical calluses, so they apparently began using them to balance their scales, as well. Hence, in the measuring system used by apothecaries, a “scruple” became a unit of weight. It is equal to 20 grains, a grain being the weight (truly) of the average grain taken from the middle of an ear of wheat. Three scruples equal a dram, eight drams equal an ounce, and twelve ounces (apothecary) equal a pound. It is all very beautiful.

     The dog, on the other hand, is a unit of temperature. In the Australian outback, the aborigines keep dogs not only to help them hunt, but also to snuggle up with on chilly nights. A cool night is a one-dog night. A cold night is a two-dog night. A three-dog night is as cold as it gets. (Hence, of course, the cooler than cool name of the great rock band.) The idea of measuring temperature in terms of dogs is also very beautiful. I wish our local tv weather forecasters would adopt it. In more fickle climes and times, they might wish to extrapoloate to other units: October in Blacksburg, for example, is full of two-cat mornings, one-dog nights, and six-gerbil afternoons.

    I first became preoccupied with the subject of measurement way back in high school. (WARNING: DIGRESSION AHEAD.) Mr. William Cates was my English teacher in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. He was a small, stern, brilliant, uncharming man given to calling us coldly by our last names: “And what do you think Piggy’s broken glasses symbolize, Mr. Weathers?” he would ask, terrifyingly, in the middle of a class discussion. And I, of the two-pound spectacles, for whom broken glasses meant slow death while propped helplessly against a tree in a post-nuclear survivalist landscape, would spin out some blather about the loss of perspective in a world without visible philosophical landmarks. With an unsmiling nod that could have meant anything from “You are a brilliant student who will turn the world upside down with your revolutionary ideas” to “Only twenty years to retirement, thank God,” Mr. Cates would then go on to terrify some other adolescent while I sat there astonished by what had come out of my mouth. Mr. Cates was the finest teacher I have ever had.

Protagoras wrote, "Man is the measure of all things."

     Anyway, Mr. Cates had one curious idiosyncrasy: at the end of every semester, on our final exam, he would always ask the exact same question. It went like this: “ ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ Apply this quote to the books we have read this term.” Twice a year for three years I was faced with this command, and twice a year for three years I was faced with the knowledge that I had no idea what it meant. In the middle of my junior year, I actually tracked the quote down, discovering that it was the first line of a work called Truth by a Greek philosopher named Protagoras. Truth didn’t help. I have discovered since that it rarely does.

    After 48 years, I still don’t know what “Man is the measure of all things” means, but if I had to take one of Mr. Cates’ finals today (a hypothesis that still haunts my dreams), my answer would basically consider two possibilities: either a) the quote is a typographical error for “Man is the measurer of all things,” or b) it means that all things should be measured by their effect on people. Which, finally, gets us back to the subject.

    Over-achieving chimpanzees (not to mention crows, termites, and other smart critters) have pretty much exploded the notions of man as the only tool-using creature and man as the only language-using creature. More power to the chimps and termites. Man remains, however, the animal kingdom’s greatest measurer. He has taken time, for example, and sliced and diced it right down to the nanosecond, then reconstituted it into eternity itself, figuring the dates for the birth and death of a whole universe. He has likewise reduced space to the micron on the one hand, then stretched it to the light year on the other. He has invented negative numbers to measure negative things and imaginary numbers to measure (I suppose) imaginary things. (Oh frabjous day when the square root of minus 144 was conceived!) Man even devotes whole buildings to the worship of platinum bars that weigh just so much or are just so long. 

A platinum-iridium bar in Sevres, France, defines what a kilogram is.

    For me, the final measure of man as measurer is googolplex. First came the number googol, which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. It was invented by the American mathematician Edward Kasner, for what purpose I can’t discover. It was named, aptly enough, by Kasner’s nine-year-old nephew. Imagine a distance of googol feet. It would just about span the universe. Then somebody decided that googol wasn’t enough, and he invented googolplex, which is the number one followed by, get this, googol zeroes. I’m told that if you totaled up all the particles in the universe, it wouldn’t come to googolplex. What can the point of such a number be, except to defy the gods? The inventor of googolplex is probably being punished in some Hades right now, doomed to an eternity of counting dust motes.

    When you get right down to it, though, man’s best measures aren’t very good. Googolplexes aside, it seems to me that man, too eager to step off the distance between points, often ends up missing the point itself altogether. In the world of measurement, there are too many scruples, too few dogs. I therefore suggest a new approach, less scientific perhaps, but in human terms more useful, to the whole question of measurement. The essential principle: let man be the measure of all things. That is, let all things be measured by their human-response components—by the dogs we use.

Juliet Binoche, an 8 d/d woman.

     Instead of measuring airplane flights in distance or hours, for example, measure them in, say, the magazines we read aloft: “L.A. to New York is a six-magazine flight.” Instead of measuring adolescents in years or feet, measure them in slammed doors and sighs: “I have a fifty-sigh-a-day, six-slam daughter.” Measure golf, not in strokes, but in expletives. Measure movies, not in stars or R’s, but in spr’s: the number of times you shift in your seat per reel. Measure the opposite sex, not on some mindless one-to-ten scale, but by something concrete, like daydreams: Angelina Jolie is a 3 d/d (daydreams per day) woman; Juliet Binoche in her youth was an 8 d/d woman (and she’s still a 5 d/d woman today). Measure love in perspiration. Measure success in grins.

     And so on. I’d like to patent this concept. Anybody know a good twenty-scruple lawyer?
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The original version of this essay appeared in Memphis magazine in February 1984.

A CALL FOR WORKERS TO WALK OUTSIDE AND REMEMBER ON MARCH 25, 2011

Bodies of women who leaped to their death to escape the Triangle Factory fire.

      One hundred years ago, on March 25, 1911,  at 4:40 p.m., a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Thirty minutes later, 146 people were dead. Most of them were immigrant girls, some as young as 15. Most burned to death or died in the smoke. Others jumped nine stories to their death on the sidewalk below, smashing themselves to pulp in front of horrified spectators. Many died because there was only one wobbly fire escape, which collapsed. A door that would have let many others escape couldn't be opened, locked earlier by the owners to prevent the workers from stealing cloth.

     A year earlier, when the factory's workers had tried to organize a union to improve their working conditions, the owners had brought in police and prostitutes to beat them up. At the time of the fire, most of the girls in New York's garment industry were working 13 hours a day, six days a week, for about 13 cents an hour. In dim, unventilated sweatshops, they worked in dank shadows and rarely saw the light of day. The Triangle Factory was actually brighter than most; it had windows. Girls, aflame, jumped to their death from those windows.

     The fire spurred New York State to pass legislation guaranteeing fire safety in places like the Triangle Factory and improving workplace conditions for all workers in the state. Other states followed New York’s model. It took 146 horrific deaths to make that happen.

      This is presumptuous of me, but, as the 100th anniversary of this fire approaches, I hereby issue a call to action—a very simple action:

      I call on all workers in the United States to step outside on Friday, March 25, 2011, at 4:00 p.m. Rise from your desks, walk away from your machines, step out from behind your counters, open the doors of your malls, and walk out into the fresh air. There let the sun shine warm on your face, or let the spring rain refresh you, or let the March winds brace you. If it snows, rejoice in the snow.

     And while you’re there, outdoors, beyond the walls of your work, remember  the 146 very young women and men who died in the Triangle Factory fire exactly 100 years ago. And remember all the millions of workers before you who fought for your right to walk outside, through unlocked doors, to breathe fresh air on a day of work. Remember the union organizers. Remember the progressive politicians (yes, of both parties). Remember all those who helped pass the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which gave you the right to organize unions and bargain collectively to improve your working conditions and wages. Remember that whether you’ve chosen to exercise the right to unionize or not, you benefit mightily from the fact that that right exists. And remember, too, those who fought for the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which protects you from poisoning and injury on the job. 

     Spend five minutes outside at 4:00 p.m. on March 25, or 20 minutes, or the whole hour before you head for home.

     And while you’re out of doors on that day, breathing fresh air in the daylight, look around you. Look at each other. Shake a few hands. Pat a few shoulders. Share a few hugs. Congratulate yourselves. You, the people who run the machines and sell the goods and provide the services, are the power that keeps the world running—not the politicians, not the stockholders, not the employers and business owners, though they all have their role to play. It’s you who are the mind and muscle that make it all work.

      There are some today who choose not to remember, or have never learned, what the world was like 100 years ago, before there were laws protecting the rights of workers to organize, guaranteeing their right to bargain collectively,  assuring their safety. Please, on Friday, March 25, at 4:00 p.m., open the doors, walk outside, and spend a few minutes remembering. 

The Triangle Factory workroom after the fire.

_________

“The right to bargain collectively is at the bottom of social justice for the worker, as well as the sensible conduct of business affairs. The denial or observance of this right means the difference between despotism and democracy.”—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (May 8, 1937)

Here are more articles about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911:

The New York Times' original article about the fire: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/triangle-nyt/

From Cornell University’s archives: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/story/introduction.html

From Nation Public Radio’s archives:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/introduction/triangle-intro/

    

MY FATHER WAS A UNION MAN: Why public workers need our support

A. Terry Weathers, my father, was both a union man and a school-board member who negotiated with teachers.

     My father, the most unselfish person I’ve ever known, was a union man. He belonged to the Communication Workers of America. In the Joe McCarthy red-baiting era of the 1950s, my father was accused, in anonymous notes left on his desk where he worked at AT&T, of being a “commie” and a “pinko.” My mother was convinced that AT&T never promoted my father above a middling-level job because he was a union man.

     My father was also a school-board member in my hometown of Farmingdale, on Long Island, in New York. He co-founded the Nassau-Suffolk School Boards Association and later became president of the New York State School Boards Association. He fought for years to increase state aid to schools, so children in poor districts wouldn’t be disadvantaged. He never earned a dime for his school-board work, not one penny for the thousands of hours he gave to it. I still remember him spending long evenings after work with a hand-cranked adding machine on our dining room table, figuring out state school finances. I was one of the few high school students whose dinnertime conversation focused on such things as “weighted average daily attendance.”

     As a school-board member, my father had to negotiate with Farmingdale’s teacher’s union every year or two. Never once did he “cave in” to the teachers because he was a union man or because he wanted to curry favor with them so they would support him in the next school-board election. My father knew that in those negotiations he had to represent the interests, not just of the town’s children, but of its taxpayers, especially those who were retired and on fixed incomes. 

     But my father treated those teachers with respect. He loved teachers and would have been one himself if the Depression hadn’t cost him a four-year college education. My sister was a public-school teacher in Harlem. My brother and I were both teachers at state colleges. So of course my father respected teachers. He wanted the best ones to be rewarded for their work, and he knew that only decent salaries would attract the best ones. Good salaries and benefits meant good teachers, and good teachers meant the best education for our town's kids.

My sister Joyce taught in public schools in Harlem and the South Bronx, one of thousands of hard-working, underpaid, dedicated public-school teachers. When I was three and she was 12, she was my first teacher.

     In the mostly blue-collar town of Farmingdale when I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, the teachers were respected, and each year Farmingdale’s citizens voted to support a school budget that paid teachers adequately and gave them reasonable job security. The taxpayers did this even if it meant slightly higher property taxes (which are the primary source of New York schools’ financing). As a result of the willingness of the good citizens of Farmingdale to give a bit more from their wallets, I got to attend perhaps the greatest public schools in U.S. history.

     All this is by way of saying that today I am sickened by what the governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Colorado are trying to do, abetted by the Republicans in the U.S. Congress. 

THE DAMAGE THE REPUBLICANS HAVE DONE—AND WANT TO DO

      The Republicans, having deregulated business at the behest of Wall Street and of the billionaire Koch brothers and their crowd, ruined our economy and left it bleeding by the side of the road in 2008. Thanks to President Obama’s stimulus package—a transfusion that virtually all economists say has saved the economy—the country is recovering nicely: generating jobs, increasing production, reenergizing people’s 401K plans and pensions. Wall Street managers are again making billions. The corporations are sitting on trillions (literally) in profits. Heck, the rich are even richer now; the thirteen biggest hedge-fund managers last year averaged more than a billion dollars in income, each—enough to hire hundreds of thousands of teachers, if the billionaires' income were taxed as actual income rather than at the 15% capital gains rate the Republicans have given them. (See this column by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich for the details.) 
      But saving the economy required spending government money, leaving us with deficits now.

      Let me repeat: The Republicans ruined the economy. The deficits now faced by states and the federal government are the Republicans’ fault.

      Are the Republicans willing to accept responsibility for what they’ve done? Are they willing to tax their rich Wall Street friends who have benefited from the stimulus that was needed to end the Great Recession? Are they willing to tax the Koch brothers and corporate moguls who are making billions off a revived economy? Of course not. In fact, the opposite. The Republicans want to blame somebody else and make innocent bystanders pay the price for their folly. They want to blame the unions.

Nobel economist Paul Krugman

     Let’s be honest: The Republicans want to use the deficits they forced upon us as an excuse to destroy one of their longtime targets: the unions. As Nobel economist Paul Krugman says, it’s not just public-employee unions they want to destroy, it’s ALL unions.

     If the unions are destroyed, life becomes much easier for the billionaire Kochs and other corporate accumulators, who will no longer have to pay workers a fair wage, who will no longer have to worry about worker-protection legislation, who will be able to fire any employees who look at them the wrong way, without grievance procedures to protect those employees. The Republicans, as Krugman says, want to return us to the Gilded Age, before unions, when workers were treated barely better than slaves. If you don’t believe me, look at the record: name one worker-protection, consumer-protection, environment-protection, or disability-protection law the Republican Party as a group has voted for in the last 30 years.

     Not to mention which, with the unions destroyed, the Democrats lose the only centralized source of campaign contributions big enough to balance the hundreds of millions of dollars the super-rich corporate aristocrats lavish upon Republican candidates.

LIFE FOR WORKERS BEFORE THERE WERE UNIONS

     Let us return for a moment to the days before there were public-employee unions. I’ll use teachers as my example, but I could be talking about policemen, firemen, sanitation workers, or city hall clerks.

     Before there were teachers unions, your chance of getting hired, if you wanted to be a teacher, often depended on which school board member or city councilman or mayoral aide you knew. School teachers were the slaves of patronage: if you supported the right political party, you got hired; if not, not. Once you had a job, you were expected to support the party in power: work in its election offices, fill the crowds for its candidates’ speeches, even tell your students which candidates their parents should vote for; if you didn’t, you were fired. Without a union to protect you, you were at the mercy of your principal, who was at the mercy of the political bosses. If you were a woman and your principal or that mayoral aide made sexual advances to you, you had no union to protect you from his threat to fire you if you didn’t give in. Before there were teachers unions, you had no pension plan; when you retired, you were left with nothing; longtime teachers were often fired just so they could be replaced by cheaper young teachers (my father explained that this was called "the rotating bottom"—a classic corporate ploy to dampen wages).

     While you worked, if you were a teacher in the days before unions, you were paid a pittance, despite your good education. Without any tenure system, you couldn’t teach anything that violated the ideas of the most narrow-minded politician in power: if the politicians in  power insisted that unions were communist, you had to teach that; if the politicians in power insisted that evolution was wrong, you had to teach that; if you were a public-university professor and you published research that didn’t turn the way the politicians liked, you were fired. Before there were teachers unions, if you taught that integration was a legitimate alternative to segregation, and you lived in the wrong part of the country, you were fired. (Union support helped pump blood into the civil rights movement. Teachers unions were the strongest supporters of the Supreme Court decision to overturn separate-but-equal school laws. When Martin Luther King was killed, he was in Memphis to support the sanitation workers who wanted to unionize.) Before there were teachers unions, your students had no protection either: if the politicians decided to save money by firing teachers and increasing the size of classes, they simply did it, education be damned. Before there were teachers unions, if you got sick and couldn’t teach for a month, you were fired and replaced; if your medical bills were big enough, you went bankrupt, and your family went hungry, because you had no health plan. If you got pregnant and couldn’t teach, you lost your job. If you got pregnant and tried to continue teaching, you often got fired anyway, because school boards in some towns thought a pregnant woman was unsightly in the classroom.

Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Memphis in March, 1968 to support the sanitation workers who wanted to form a union. King was killed the next week in Memphis. Unions were among the biggest supporters of the civil rights movement.

     Let me return to my father. As a boy, he worked for a time in the coal fields of Kentucky, serving mine workers their lunch and supper. This was before the mine workers were unionized, so my father saw what a company town was. The miners, before there were unions, were forced to live in company housing, paying rent to the company; forced to shop in company-owned stores, paying with scrip, or “company money,” with which they were paid in place of U.S. dollars; and forced to pay the company doctor if they were sick. The companies, in other words, forced the workers to give all their earnings back to the company. If a worker even talked of higher wages, he was fired. If workers tried to unionize or asked to bargain collectively, they were, not rarely, beaten or killed. If you want to know what the Kentucky coal mines were like before unions, go to this web site . My father saw that world first-hand. It made him a union man forever.

Before there were unions, scrip—"company money"— (shown here as paper, above, and coin, below) was a way to force workers to return all their earnings to their employers. Unable to save real money, they became slaves to their jobs.

     That was the world before there were unions. For workers, it was a dark and ugly and corrupt world. For the greedy rich, it was almost heaven; all they had to contend with was each other. The Republicans want to return us to that world, make no mistake about it.

     So when I see the irresponsible and, to my mind, immoral way those Republican governors are treating public-school teachers and other public workers, I think of my father and the pre-union world he knew and hated. I also see how he handled the teachers union: with respect for them, respect for the collective-bargaining process, respect for the taxpayers he represented, and love for the children whose education was being shaped.

      I remember my father. That’s how I know, when I look at what we’re seeing from the Republicans in Wisconsin and elsewhere, that there is a better way. 

My first-grade class at Main Street School in Farmingdale, NY, 1953. Miss Sokolowski was a fine teacher, like nearly all public-school teachers I have ever known. That's me in the second row, second from left.

 (A column by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post adds some meaningful facts to this discussion.)

    

    

THE EMPTY BOX and THE ACCIDENTAL VOICE: What the words of a nonbeliever can do

I wrote the original version of the following essay in 2002, as a column for the web site of The Memphis Flyer, an alternative weekly newspaper. Back then the web site probably had fewer than 1,000 readers. The response to the essay stunned me. After you read this, you can read what happened after it was first published.

THE EMPTY BOX

It has to be said: Religion is a dangerous thing

           Religion is the root of much evil.

        It has to be said.

        Here is what I believe: There is no god, there is no messiah, there are no prophets plugged in to some divine will. There are no saints or holy men. If there is a heaven or a hell or any other kind of afterlife, we can’t know anything about it while we’re in this life, so it’s useless to speculate and foolish to believe. Faith is an empty box. To believe in Christ's divinity is to believe in a rabbit’s foot. To believe in the Buddha's enlightenment is to believe that pro wrestling is real. To believe in Mohammed's pipeline to a god is to believe that the groundhog can predict spring. To believe that the Ten Commandments came from some deity on a mountaintop is to believe that television psychics can talk to your dead grandmother. Allah, Jehovah and the Trinity are elves and Tinkerbells. They are no more than desperate hope given a name and anthropomorphic shape by the imaginations of frightened human beings.

        It has to be said.

        Religion is superstition. It is mankind crossing its fingers. Its sole functions are 1) to comfort and console those who cannot bear the suffering and death that are ultimately the lot of every human being, and 2) to offer meaning in a world where meaning can never be established. Religion, in other words, is a fortress of lies built to keep out the terrors of existence and nonexistence. For those in power, it is useful in still another way: Since time immemorial, the powerful have used religion to distract the oppressed, to encourage them to focus on the next world so that they will acquiesce to the injustices of this world. If you would have your slaves remain docile, teach them hymns.

        This is not saying anything new, but it has to be said again.

        On balance, religion has made the world a worse place. It has generated magnificent art and wonderful music and spectacular architecture, and millions of people have, over the centuries, done good and beautiful things in its name, but on balance it has not been good for the world. Those millions of good people would have done just as much good without it. Mother Teresa would have been saintly without the New Testament. Martin Luther King would have been a paragon of eloquent courage without having been baptized. Gandhi would have overturned an empire leaning only on his walking stick. Virtue would exist without Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Hinduism, which, in their vanity and vaporishness, are no different from the Roman’s belief in household gods or the Druid’s belief in tree spirits. A magic act is a magic act, whatever robes we clothe it in. But because of religions like these, the world has experienced centuries and centuries of backwardness and unnecessary suffering. Throats have been slit in their name, hearts exploded, the best minds distracted or destroyed, sweet people tortured, millions of children sent horribly to oblivion.

        It has to be said.

        Today is a good day to say it. Perhaps the worst of religion’s dangerous superstitions is the notion of  the “holy” place. The idea that this patch of earth or that building or that city or nation is somehow sanctified by some god has left us with the bombs and guns and bodies of Kashmir and Belfast, of Baghdad and Jerusalem. “Next year in Jerusalem.” Oh, the lives such words have cost! Why not “Next year in Memphis” or “Next year in Singapore” or “Next year on the banks of the Platte”? What is land but land? What is a building but a building?

       There are wars enough when what is “holy” is not part of the picture. Communism and fascism and capitalism and totalitarianism in all its many guises would have had their wars even with all gods standing on the sidelines. There are land wars and economic wars and grudge wars and wars for no reason that anyone can understand at all. But religious wars are the most tragic, because they are built so deeply on a deluded sense of righteousness. Have nonbelievers started wars? Of course. They have started wars for land or politics or pure villainy. But I don’t know of a single nonbeliever who has killed simply to make others stop believing. (Stalin, you would say? Mao? No, they killed for power.) On the other hand, the world has thousands, millions, who will kill, and have killed, in order to make someone else believe as they believe.

         You won’t read this in The New York Times, but it has to be said: Religion does more harm than good. I wish our politicians in Washington would stop talking to, or about, their god. I wish the Near and Middle East would suddenly be flooded by a sea of atheism. I wish Northern Ireland and the Balkans would overnight experience mass religious amnesia. How much more at peace the world would be.

          A man truly awake does not need religion. He doesn’t need gods. He doesn’t need miracles. He doesn’t need holy lands here below or heavens up above. For him, life in this universe is itself holy, as is every patch of ground and every path he walks. Life itself is enough of a miracle. To believe in a god who made this life is to believe in a miracle even greater than this miracle. Who needs more than one unfathomable miracle? Existence is a fluke, a freak, a wonder, a dream, a bizarre uncanny thing. Our own consciousness of this existence is so incredible a phenomenon that I don’t understand why anyone feels the need to believe in anything else more “spiritual.” It’s all spiritual. It’s all true magic. Why add imagined magic to explain the magic that is right before us?

         Religion is dangerous. It needs to be said, and no one is saying it, except on the nonbelievers’ web sites and in their magazines, where they speak only to each other. Our politicians won’t say it. Our commentators won’t say it. The power of self-censorship in this God-fearing country is too strong, freedom of speech be damned. I can say it here only because this audience is so small, and I have little to risk. (Will fifty of you read this? Will 500? I have no business you can boycott. I have no office you can vote me out of. All I can lose is my job.)

         Nearly all my friends are believers. Nearly all of those I love are believers. Most of them are generous and kind, and their religion gives them hope and comfort and pleasant society. Last night, I went to a Passover seder at the home of Jewish friends. They are wonderful people. It was a lovely evening. My own widowed mother was sustained after my father’s death by the amazing kindness of the women in her church. Yes, I have seen many good works born in synagogues, mosques, and church pews. But the nonbelievers I know are just as kind, just as loving, just as hopeful, and they have given just as much comfort to those in need.

         And I too hope. I hope, for example, that I will see my dead parents and my dead brother and my dead friends in some next life, and that we will all be free from worry and pain forever. But it’s just hope, and it’s awake and open-eyed. It’s not faith, which is sleepy and blind. I don’t depend on my hope, and I wouldn’t base my living actions on it. It’s a hope that does not grow out of dogma, and I would never try to impose my hope on someone else. Pure hope never yet has led to war. The same cannot be said of dogma. If I were to found a religion, I would call it “The Church of the Hopeful Few.” Hope would be its only doctrine, and I think it would be a peaceful church.

         I know it does little good to tell believers that they should stop believing. I don’t really care if they believe, as long as they remain in their closets when they pray, and leave their gods there when they emerge. Their self-delusion saddens me a bit, but it is usually harmless. When it does harm is when it drives them against the self-delusion of those who believe otherwise. Then is the time of enmity and war.

         If our representatives in Washington must believe, then, let them believe. But let them remember that the White House is not a cathedral, and that the capitol building is a place of men, not gods.

--END--

 

So remarkable was the response to the essay above that a month later I was compelled to write the following:

THE ACCIDENTAL VOICE

How I learned that an unpopular opinion can speak for multitudes

 

     I recently declared in this space that I don’t believe in any god, messiah, prophet, or afterlife. I further declared that I believe religion does more harm than good, and that presidents, prime ministers, and judges who promote religious ideas are dangerous to the world at large. Religion, I asserted, maims, tortures, kills and demoralizes. Religion is the root of much evil, I wrote, and it should be kept out of government. 

     I had hoped that my Declaration of Disbelief would be read by the fundamentalists and evangelicals in Memphis and maybe elsewhere. I had hoped to push the preachers, smug as they are, up against a wall of questions and into the rare position of having to defend their beliefs against two-fisted skepticism. I had expected—let’s be honest, I had even hoped for—angry emails from the Bible-thumpers consigning me to hell for denying God.

     But that’s not what happened. The audience I had wanted to reach simply ignored me. I received only one email consigning me to hell and telling me I’d better start praying to Jesus today if I want to save my soul. Either the old-time religionists were cowed by the brilliance of my arguments or they never read what I wrote. I don’t think they were cowed.

     Instead of hate mail, though, I began receiving something else: hundreds upon hundreds of emails praising me for what I had written! I got emails not just from Memphis, but from almost every state in the union, not to mention Canada, Brazil, England and Scotland. Somehow my column had made its way through the Internet to sites with names like “Internet Infidels,” “Atheist Parents,” “The Secular Web” “The Heathen Handbook,” “Freedom from Religion” and “The Freethinkers Forum.” Thousands of nonbelievers were reading my little screed, drinking it in, they said, as if it were the purest spring water, and many of them felt compelled to write to me. Their emails contained the same message over and over: “Thank you for saying what needed to be said.” “You are so brave to write what you wrote.” “You have written what I have always believed and could never say.” “I’m sending your column to everyone I know.” “May I reprint your column for our local atheist group?” “I wish I could speak out as you have.” “When I told my [family/friends/coworkers] that I didn’t believe in God, I was [ostracized/cursed/ fired]. I admire your courage.” “I hope you don’t lose your job for writing what you wrote.” “I hope our support will serve as a small antidote to those heaps of ignorant derision you’ll get from the church-goers."

     This has been an experience both heartening and discouraging. I had failed to reach the knee-jerk believers I wanted to challenge, which was disappointing. But I had somehow succeeded in speaking for thousands of nonbelievers who are desperate for a public voice, which was rewarding. Yet in a way, that very success was also disheartening. Why didn’t those thousands of nonbelievers feel they had a voice of their own? What does it say about America today that, in a supposedly secular nation, there are millions of people who are afraid to say that they don’t believe in any god or in any life after death? What does it say that they can’t speak out lest their families and friends disown them?

     It says, I think, that the tyranny of the majority, as de Toqueville called it, is still a mighty restraint on free speech in this supposedly free society.

     I’ve learned some lessons from all this:

     I’ve learned that sometimes it doesn’t matter if you miss the audience you’re trying to reach. Sometimes all that matters is that you declare what you believe, as honestly and articulately as you can, because you might find another audience that needs to hear what you have to say.

     I’ve learned that when you speak frankly for yourself, you almost inevitably speak for thousands of others who need a voice.

     I’ve learned that even if you can’t change the world--just as I can’t unelect a governor who blurs the distinction between church and state--it is useful to express your opinion, if only to give a sense of community to the like-minded who think they’re alone.

     I’ve learned that if you would find alternative ideas, you would do best to look in alternative media, like the Internet and the weekly newspapers.

     I’ve learned that strangers will worry about you (“I hope you don’t lose your job”) and wish you well just because they like your words.

     I’ve learned that what’s compulsion for one person is courage for another. It took no bravery for me to write what I wrote; I’m driven to write what I believe, come what may. But I understand better now the strength it takes for others to express unpopular opinions when job, family, friendship, or simple social acceptance is on the line.

     And I’ve been reminded once more that such strength is the muscle of democracy.

     So whoever you are, whatever your opinions, I hope that you think hard, stake out your corner, then climb your platform in the bright light of full noon and shout your policies to anyone who stops to listen. So what if you’re greeted with catcalls and rotten fruit? If you believe that France was right and the U.S. was wrong about starting a war in Iraq, say so aloud, though the mass of jingoists call you traitor. If you believe that the rich should be made to share more with the poor, and not vice versa, let everybody know it, though bleeding-heart liberals may be out of fashion this year. And if you have no god, proclaim your godlessness to the world, though you fear the mob will damn you forever to hell.

     Speak out, speak out, speak out. With the world as it is, silence is a sin.

 

AS YOU LIKE IT: A lesson in love from Mrs. Wembley

"Love abhors a zipper," said Mrs. Wembley.

     “Valentine’s Day,” said Mrs. Wembley, stroking Camille with one hand and finishing off the Times crossword, in ink, with the other. “Right. Only holiday to celebrate a bodily organ, refined sugar, thorny plants, primitive weapons, and a pathological state of mind. Love abhors a zipper, Worfle.”

     “Primitive weapons? Zippers?” I asked, trying to get comfortable on her all-convex, sun-yellow plastic sofa, designed with a protractor and crayons by disciples of the Memphis School of design.

      “Bows. Arrows. Cupid. That sort of thing,” she said from the other end of the sofa, clarifying weapons but adding nothing about zippers. Much of what Mrs. Wembley says dwells forever in the realm of the unexplained. She threw her pen and the Times on the coffee table, which was a bigger-than-life, laminated plastic replica of a standing slice of watermelon. A rose (the “thorny plant” referred to above) stuck out at an oblique angle from one of the apertures of a plastic vase on the coffee table. Everything in Mrs. Wembley’s house is hard, geometrical, and avant garde except for Camille, her soft, flatulent, eclectic dog, who has been pretending to die for going on eight years and is spoiled senseless. “I like plastic” is how Mrs. Wembley explains her taste in furnishings. “I like Camille” is how she explains her taste in dogs. I had brought her the rose for Valentine’s Day.

"Love runs in a two-tap sink."

     Mrs. Wembley lives down the street from me, and I often go to her for advice, particularly on matters of the heart (the “bodily organ” referred to above). She has been married twice, but claims to have spent the last fifty years happily single. “Right. I tested the waters. Too hot once. Too cold once. Love runs in a two-tap sink,” she explained, adding delphically, “Love starts at the end, Worfle, and reads backwards till it’s done.”

     Most of our neighbors claim Mrs. Wembley is dotty, but I don’t think so. It was Mrs. Wembley, after all, who notified me many years ago that the Successful Single had given up hard soap for liquid soap, and toothpaste tubes for push-button toothpaste cans, and who alerted me to the switch back before it happened. On my few dates during my Single Life, her advice was borne out in the bathrooms of Modern Women. It was Mrs. Wembley also who advised me in my Single Years that it is permissible for a man to take his contact lens equipment with him on a date, just in case. “Better to be presumptuous and prepared than polite and stupid,” she said. “Love isn’t blind, Worfle. It’s nearsighted, though.”

     I don’t know how Mrs. Wembley knows about these things, but she does. She is wiry and tan, with short white hair and a clipped accent. She spends a lot of time in her garden. Women like that often know about things.

St. Valentine

     Anyway, I was in Mrs. Wembley’s living room, and we were discussing Valentine’s Day and love (the “pathological condition” referred to above).

     “Right. Birds,” she was saying.

     “Birds?” I asked.

     “February 14—the day the birds mate. That’s what Chaucer thought. Also the day before Lupercalia. L-u-p-e-r-c-a-l-i-a. Roman festival. Wolf destroyer and all that. Boys drew lots to see which girl they’d get. Medieval church said whoa— made the boys draw saints’ names, instead. ‘To expect a woman and draw a saint is ever a disappointment to mortal man!’ wrote the wag. Right. Then a Saint’s Day for Valentine, whoever he was. Beaten to death with clubs and beheaded. Right. Perfect saint for love.”

     I was, as usual, having trouble keeping up, and I was still uncomfortable on the sofa, on which I kept slipping toward the sides. Large Camille, lying between us, whined insincerely and rolled over on her back to be scratched. I accommodated her. She showed her gratitude by silently expressing her flatulence and falling asleep. Mrs. Wembley picked up some knitting. She is rarely still.

     “Listen, Worfle,” she said, “never love if you can like.”

     “Excuse me?” I said.

     Mrs. Wembley shot me an impatient look over the needles. “Love never forgives,” she continued. “Like forgives anything—pimples, tics, ugly laughs, even whiskers in the sink. Same things that drive Love to fury. Love won’t survive the toilet seat, Worfle. Love doesn’t give coupons. And listen, Worfle, Love is permanent-pressed: once wrinkled, always wrinkled.”

     Fat Camille, dreaming now, legs twitching, was chasing a rabbit in a field, imagination her only exercise. Her head was in Mrs. Wembley’s lap. Again, I was having trouble following Mrs. Wembley’s train of thought, and as usual I was convinced the fault was mine. She was looking sideways at me, still knitting. I kept quiet and let her go on.

     “Right,” she continued, looking back at her knitting. “Like’s the better thing. If Quixote had only liked Dulcinea. If Romeo had only liked Juliet. No one is ever like-sick. No one is ever like-lorn. Like’s labor’s never lost. Better to ask, ‘How do I like thee? Let me count the ways.’ Right. Longer list. Like conquers all.” I grinned. Mrs. Wembley never grins. Instead, needles flying, she dipped a ladle deeper into her boiling pot of aphorisms.

"Love is plaid," said Mrs. Wembley.

     “All love is puppy love, Worfle,” she said. “Love never runs out of detergent. Love runs on direct current. Love won’t watch reruns, Worfle, and Love can’t read a watch. Love carries in its pocket a slip of paper with a smeared number on it, and Love listens to Beethoven’s Sixth. Love is not a shopping mall, Worfle. Love is plaid, not pink, no matter what they say. Love doesn’t own a cell phone and can never write its signature the same way twice. Love cannot make correct change to save its life. Love is a many-splintered thing, Worfle, and Love means always having to say you’re sorry.”

     Finally, she stopped and caught her breath, the paroxysm over. I had understood almost none of it. “And I?” she asked suddenly, dropping her hands and looking off into the distance. “I suppose I’ve loved not well but too wisely.” At this she sighed, a rare act for her. Camille, sensing she was being upstaged, awoke, licked the hand that feeds her, coughed softly, and whined. Mrs. Wembley petted her affectionately, and with an absent mind. Camille gazed at her mistress adoringly, upside down. I took a handful of candy hearts from a plastic tray and let myself out.

(The original version of this story originally appeared in the February 1985 issue of Memphis magazine and others.)

I AM NOT A PATRIOT

     I am not a patriot. I was born in the United States and have never lived anywhere else, but I don’t “love” the United States. I don’t hate it, either. It’s just a country—the one I happen to live in. I wish it well, but no more well than any other country. I wish my fellow U.S. citizens well, too, but no more well than I wish the people of China, Uganda, and Ecuador. I don’t care a fig which country wins the most Olympic medals or the final hockey game. I want infant mortality to drop everywhere.

     I actively dislike public shows of patriotism. When they play the national anthem at baseball games, I arrange, if I can, to be under the stands. There I don’t have to stand still or take off my hat or put my hand over my heart or look at the flag. That is, I don’t have to act the hypocrite. If I am stuck in the stands when they play the national anthem, I will stand quietly, but only to avoid offending strangers and provoking a confrontation with people who just came to see a ball game. If other people care that much about the national anthem, I have no wish to debate them about it before the first pitch. Their standing means something to them; mine means nothing to me. I won’t sing the national anthem under any circumstances—not because I can’t or because it’s a silly song, with hilariously out-of-touch lyrics, but because national anthems are symbols of repetitive blind nationalism. Blind nationalism offends me. Asking me to participate in repetitive acts of blind nationalism insults me.

     When I was in the tenth grade, my school paper did a poll of students regarding the saying of the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in homeroom, which act we were all required to perform. I still remember my exact words when asked about the morning pledge: “Mandatory patriotism is meaningless.” The quote appeared under my picture in the school paper. I was proud of that, and I still believe what I said. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I said the pledge every morning in homeroom, anyway, cowardly little hypocrite that I was, but it meant nothing to me. In fact, today I would go further in my school-paper quote: “Patriotism itself feeds on ignorance and narrowmindedness,” I would say. “It is dangerous and misbegotten.” There are schoolchildren today who refuse to say the pledge. I admire them. They’re braver than I was. The Pledge of Allegiance is a loyalty oath, plain and simple. Loyalty oaths are the tools of despots and should be rejected at every turn.

     Patriotism is a goose-stepping sort of attitude. It wears a brown shirt, whatever flag it comes wrapped in. 

Patriotism is a goose-step, brown-shirt sort of attitude.

     Occasionally I’m asked to speak to civic groups like the Rotary. Most such groups begin their meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance, a patriotic song (sometimes the insipid “God Bless America,” which, given that I’m an atheist, discomforts me twice over), and a prayer (ditto). I will stand at such meetings because I am a guest. I will not speak the pledge or sing the patriotic song. I will not say, “Amen.”

     Sometimes, hearing me express these attitudes, someone will ask me what country I would like to live in instead of the United States—what country, they want to know, do I think is “better”? Well, I like the Netherlands for its sense of humor and its bicycles. I like England for its pubs and understatement. I like Russia for its love of literature and chess. I like China for its shyness. I like Australia for not being shy. I like New Zealand for its landscape and sheep. I like France for its art and food. I like the weather in southern Spain. I like the politics of Sweden and Denmark. I like the way Finland treats its teachers and its old people. I’m sure I would like many things about countries in Africa and South America, but I’ve never been to either one.

      The question of what country I “like better” than the U.S. misses the point. I would feel no more loyalty toward any other country I lived in, no matter how much I “liked” it. It’s patriotism itself I find inane. There would be no flagpole in front of my house in Amsterdam, either.

     Most of the time my lack of patriotic feeling is irrelevant to the issues of the day. The abortion and stem cell debates, for example, are rarely argued in patriotic terms; not even the most extreme right-winger, so far as I have heard, has ever said, “It’s unpatriotic to have an abortion” or “a true patriot would never work with fetal stem cells.” Often, however, patriotic sentiment is relevant to the public debate. I find myself shaking my head, for example, when politicians talk about “saving American jobs.” I would like everyone, not just U.S. citizens, to have a soul-satisfying job that pays decently. I don’t care if a good job goes to India or Thailand or South Korea, as long as someone gets a good job—the more the better, throughout the world.

     I find it equally inane when people present political positions as either “American” or “un-American.” (Forgive us, Canadians, for using “American” so carelessly.) Restricting gun possession is “un-American”? That argument—to the extent that it is an argument at all—means nothing to me. Is it “un-American” to tax the rich at a higher rate than the middle class? Is the regulation of banks “un-American”? When people make such claims, I imagine they expect me, not to address the issue, but simply to stand up and salute.

     Speaking of saluting, I must, of course, acknowledge the innumerable acts of bravery committed by U.S. soldiers in the name of “patriotism.” Millions have died “for the flag.” Americans are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq today to “protect America.” Many have died fighting terrorists in the name of “homeland security.” (The word "homeland” for me, however, has unfortunate echoes of Nazi Germany.) Thousands of men and women have enlisted to fight wars because “Uncle Sam Needs You.” The courage of Americans on the battlefield has been extraordinary and admirable.

     But did U.S. soldiers in World War II fight the Nazis and the Japanese just for the United States? Are they fighting terrorists to protect just one country—their own? Of course not. It serves a certain motivational purpose to tell soldiers that they are “fighting for their country,” I suppose, but I’d prefer it if they were told that they are fighting to protect people everywhere from tyrants and terrorists.

Should I be patriotic because we have giant sequoias and other countries don't?

     The very word “patriotism” offends me. It is sexist, for one thing, deriving as it does from Greek and Latin roots meaning “father.” “The Fatherland” is a term long used by tyrants to suggest that nations somehow have a right to exert a kind of parental control over their citizens, presumably because they also “protect” their citizens like a parent (even when they suppress more than they protect). With alternative sexism, the term “Motherland” is equally used and abused, meant to suggest, I suppose, that we should love this country which has taken us to its “bosom” and “nurtured” us. I have no idea where the bosom of the U.S. is (though we do have the Grand Tetons—look up the meaning in French), and I can’t imagine being “nurtured” by any country. My country taxes my income, and that’s fine with me if it is the best way to help the poor and the sick, but that hardly counts as nurturing. My country has a military to protect me, but so does nearly every other country in the world. It has lots of good things, the U.S., but very few I can think of that are unique—unless I should be patriotic because we have the world’s only Giant Sequoias and Bristlecone Pines. (Of course, many “patriotic” companies are doing their best to rid us of such things by befouling the air and defiling the land.)

      I think I know what you’re about to say, and my answer is this: No, this country doesn’t “give” me my freedoms; it is simply one of the many good countries that don’t take too many of one's freedoms away.

      Sometimes I’m accused of being a “one-worlder.” But that term usually means someone who wants a single world government. I don’t want that. I rather like the variety of governments the world now has. I certainly don’t like the totalitarian governments, and I hope they change, but I don’t want everyone to be governed in the same way, either. In government, like food, variety is a good thing. There are many ways to cook up a reasonably good government.

      In the end, my loyalty is to people, not abstract concepts like “country.” What is this “country” I’m supposed to be loyal to, anyway? Is it the federal government? Those flag-wrapped patriots the Tea Partiers would certainly say no to that. Is it the land itself—the mountains and the prairies that “patriots” like to sing about? Well, every country has its interesting landscapes, so it can’t be that. Is it the Constitution and the laws of the land? Our Constitution is pretty good as constitutions go, and our laws are about as good as those in other democracies, but I don’t think soldiers have died because of some strong feeling for legal philosophy.

     I wouldn’t even know how to feel patriotic if I wanted to. “God Bless America”? Whose god? What America?

     Salute the flag? I might as well salute the fog.