Erin Vincent, Delacort Press, 2007.

Say you’re fourteen years old, and your parents are involved in an accident. Your mother is killed instantly, and your father is severely injured. A month later, your father succumbs to his injuries. You, your older sister, and your toddler brother, now need to strike out on your own. Along the way, you deal with unsympathetic family friends, thieving relatives, insensitive news reporters, nattering classmates, questionable school counselors, predators of many stripes, and, thankfully, a few helpful friends and neighbors.

Vincent writes her true story in the frank, direct voice of her fourteen year old self. She not only describes her navigation of the emotional rapids, but also gives honest voice to the thoughts and feelings that one is not “supposed” to have. She includes enough humor to get the reader through the experience, although she made me cry several times before she was done.

Unlike most books billed as “uplifting,” Vincent’s doesn’t end with a triumphant epiphany, or a blazing message of hope for all humanity. There is a accomplishment, a victory of sorts, but it’s a much shakier, more human: an emerging-from-the-crucible kind of victory. There really is a message of hope for humanity there, but it’s not writ large, nor accompanied by the swelling of the orchestra. The message is much quieter. People experience terrible things. And people can, and do survive them, but it’s not easy and there are no guarantees.

Sarah was kind enough to send me this link: Clowns Kicked KKK Asses, which really made my day. You see, it’s not just the great story of neo-Nazi idiots being mocked and overwhelmed, but it’s a story that has a bit of personal history. You see, I know their leader.

Back in 1986, I was in Marburg, Germany as part of the Pomona College study abroad program. As a college radical, a leftist and activist, I was apprehensive to find that Alex Linder, right-wing columnist for the student paper, would be on the program at the same time.

It was around that time that “diversity” was becoming a hot topic on campus, and “politically correct” was not a phrase in the common parlance, but was still used by activists to chasten one another. Pomona College was, in many ways, the kind of institution for “elite liberals” that the Right loves to attack: in theory, everything was open to academic scrutiny, but go too far off the beaten path, and there would be howling^*. Still, philosophy professors could write articles about our debt to Christian Society and Marxists could write blistering attacks on US crimes in Central America, all in the same student paper.

Now, Alex had always had a talent for putting his literary foot in his mouth. In those latter days of the Reagan years, the voices of the Right were Wally George and his rival/crony Morton Downey Jr, whose combative styles were an inspiration to Alex. He tried to write in-your-face political columns for the student paper, attacking affirmative action, for example, and would offend everyone with his unique style of insulting and blunt language, punctuated with as many abstruse words as he could mix in. He could start with a valid question (e.g., if discrimination is bad, then why is reversing this discrimination not bad?), but would blunder around until it sure looked like he was suggesting that only WASPs were capable of being educated.

So, in Marburg, I had some trepidation about being stuck in a small group with Alex. At first, he and I kept on civil, guarded terms. But as the weeks wore on, we discovered we had a fair amount in common. We both love esoteric words. We both collected quotations. His tended towards Mencken, while mine towards Lu Xun (I’d just had a course in Chinese Literature in translation), but he still surprised me. One of his favorites was Steinbeck: “It was a morning like other mornings and yet perfect among mornings.” He had a sense of humor. He was an entertaining guy to be around.

We both liked arguing philosophical issues. In person, Alex wasn’t the bullying, insulting caricature that his articles would suggest. He was articulate, and thought about things. We both came into the semester regarding the other as an inflexible ideologue, I think, but found that, in discussion, we could respect one another’s points (if not conclusions). In fact, we still rarely agreed, but I became convinced that the more extreme positions he put forth in his student paper articles were less rabid opinions than poorly expressed ideas. Needless to say, I was wrong.

In any case, over the semester, Alex and I became friends. We’d play chess quite a bit, and he’d almost always beat me. Being a semester abroad, and in Germany, we did a lot of drinking, and this was one place I could best Alex. Scrawny kid that I was, I could handle two beers — one more than he. Alex was often at his most amusing when drunk — but, in retrospect, also at his scariest.

In Berlin, that May, after drinking plenty of Hefeweizen mit ein schuß grün, we were staggering back along the KuDam, when Alex lurched into a police officer who was investigating the scene (a motorcycle had crashed into a sidewalk display case). Alex launched into a tirade about how the polizei should show more respect — after all, we won the war, etc. Mumbling excuses for him, I dragged him off before the officers decided to dispense some justice.

That fall, back on campus, I defended Alex and even his writing to many of my friends. They thought I was crazy. I thought he was just trying to stir things up, and perhaps a bit clumsy with his use of language. At least one article had the school administration distancing themselves from his opinions^**. He was the most popular Public Enemy in the student paper — they even dedicated an April Fools issue to lampooning him.

Alex graduated a year ahead of me. We wrote sporadically, but fell out of touch sometime in the year after my graduation. Last I had heard, he went to intern at American Spectator, where he felt ill used by the proto-neo-cons. Years later, I saw his name associated with the Vanguard News Network and their slogan “Just right. No Jews.” I contemplated writing him, but decided that there was really no purpose to it. I did make a point of admitting to some friends of how wrong I’d been.

So. How could I avoid a smile upon reading this news?

^* Eventually, I’ll post some stories here of my own run-ins with authority and the ruthless defense of the image of diversity.
^** Then again, before I was able to graduate, I was chastised for similar sins.

P. H. Ditchfield, 1894, read as an e-book from manybooks.com

This litany of imprisoned, tortured, condemned, burnt, exiled, hounded, bankrupted, beaten, abused, reviled, and otherwise rejected authors is a fitting followup to god is not Great. While Ditchfield gave brief histories of authors doomed for their writings in a range of fields (which he groups as Theology; Fanatics and Free Thinkers; Astrology, Alchemy, and Magic; Science and Philosophy; History, Politics and Statesmanship; and Satire), the majority in all of these categories were condemned for ostensible violations of theological dogma. Some of these theological associations are pretty tenuous — for example, Ditchfield references “a recondite treatise on Trigonometry” that was condemned “because they imagined it contained heretical opinions concerning the doctrine of the Trinity.”

Ditchfield repeatedly waxes poetic on the plight of the writer, who nobly labors to share intellectual riches with a world that responds with scorn and violence. I can’t find much information about Ditchfield himself, other than that he was a prolific English writer and the Rector of Barkham Antiquary. His biases come through when he writes of critics, who hound poor authors to death. With regard to religion, he tries to maintain neutrality, but can’t help but chide some authors for their theological errors.

Even if the “fatal” of the title is not necessarily our modern usage of “leading to death,” reading this gives me renewed appreciation for where and when and how I live. I don’t have to think twice if I choose to blaspheme, criticize my government, or even write about trigonometry.

So, it’s Saturday night, 10pm on a three-day Holiday Weekend. And another important server decides to have a fatal disk error.

How do they f*ing know?

It’s uncanny.

This is just another in a long series of similar failures. The power supply failed in my security-system a few years ago — hours before we were going to leave for a vacation. The previous time the security system crashed (due to unfortunate automatic software update) was — yup — the afternoon Elizabeth and I were leaving for a weekend cruise. And Elizabeth’s Mac had its hard drive fail the day I left for Bulgaria.

Of course, we all know why this is. There have been half a dozen other failures that happened during more mundane times, which evoked the standard rage/repair response. But that was par for the course, and soon forgotten.

So here I am. Saturday night … fixing machines. I should have been a ditch digger or something.

Christopher Hitchens, Twelve Books, 2007

Reading this book is kind of like coming into your first freshman seminar class where you are harangued by an extremely well-read and well-educated but overbearing, bullying, and quite possibly drunk professor. It’s intimidating, impressive, and, dare I say? amusing.

From the title on, Hitchens flaunts his disdain for religion. He offers up example after example of the philosophical contradictions of various religions, skewers beliefs by pointing out logical flaws, and condemns faith by describing crimes of organized religion. Hitchens spends most of his time on “the big three” of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but he is ecumenical in the contempt he heaps on other religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism in the little time he devotes to them. He comes up swinging, winding up with a call for a new Era of Enlightenment, one without religion.

I can’t help but feel ambivalence. Yes, religious fanatics the world over are trying to create their own respective theocracies and suppress everything but their own threads of belief. I can oppose this without reservation. Yes, many of these same fanatics are ignorant, and don’t know much about their own religions. Attacking some of these people (like the kind who say “if English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me”) is shooting fish in a barrel, and doesn’t do anyone any good. The deeply faithful admire the believers for their faith, ignore their flaws, and take umbrage at the attack, while the nonbelievers already think of them as asinine idiots.

However, in what I feel is the weakest part of the book, Hitchens defends atheism from responsibility in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Nazi Germany by casting the personality cults as religions, and, in the case of Germany, by showing how religious groups lent early and vital support to the fascists. It comes off as awfully glib. Furthermore, it seems to me that the evidence supports the idea that religion is not the problem, but that the sins of religion are symptom of a deeper pathology. The universality of the crimes suggests that the accumulation and abuse of power is hard-wired in (at least a portion of) humanity. Religion is a useful tool to incite believers into evil behavior, but tribalism, nationalism, racism, or countless other means of division have done just as well.

As a devout and pious member of the Church of Sacred Doubt, I found some of the attacks on religion appropriate, I found some of them gratuitous, and I found many of them engaging. While the book could be dismissed as an atheist preaching to the choir, it is definitely thought-provoking, and, if nothing else, entertaining.