The Isis-orchestrated attacks in Paris, followed closely by an armed assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado and an "Isis-inspired" terrorist attack in California have once again put the dangerous side of “belief” in the headlines.  The attackers in Paris and California were willing to kill and die for their beliefs. The gunman in Colorado was willing to kill but apparently less willing to die for his. Either way, the motivation behind both attacks is the same. Put simply, it’s: “What I believe demands that I kill those who disagree with me”.
 
          Ironically, “Believe” was also the catchword prominently displayed on the side of the Macy’s building during the Thanksgiving Day parade. In this instance, “Believe” refers to an annual holiday campaign by the Mega Store that answers letters to Santa Claus sent to the store by making Charitable contributions (with the side effect, one assumes, of stimulating holiday shopping). “Believe” in this case is short for “If you believe hard enough, dreams can come true”. So what does Santa Claus have to do with armed gunmen?
 
          More than any of us can afford to be comfortable with, I’m afraid.
 
          Tempting as it is to distance ourselves from ideology-based killers, what keeps them going is what keeps us all going. Biology isn’t enough. In order to get through the day, any day, we need to impose our internal symbolism on the world around us. What we do, from the smallest acts (what we have for lunch) to the biggest (who we kiss goodnight, or don’t) happen within the structure of our meaning system. Our raw perceptions - what we see, hear, feel or taste - can’t hit our brains without setting off millions of resonances in the echo chambers of our stored symbols. Proust’s famous madeleine  (a little taste of cake that triggered one the longest multi-volume novels in literary history) is only the tip of the iceberg. We need to make sense of our lives in order to live them.
 
          When we can’t, when our symbols fail us, when we can no longer find or trust the meaning in what we do, we become depressed and unproductive and can wind up drunk or suicidal (or homicidal) if it doesn’t let up. The only way to snap out of it is to either find some new symbols or a way to reboot the old ones.

         A real-world example would be a person who has spent years raising funds for a charitable organization for low pay but a high sense of personal satisfaction discovering that their organization is completely corrupt and that the public’s contributions are mainly going to enrich a few at the top. Aside from feeling like a fool, the loss of a sense of personal meaning, the thing that defined them as themselves (a “person who helps people”), would be devastating. Finding the energy and will to seek out a more “trustable” charity to work for would be difficult. The alternative might be to reject “Charity, Inc.” altogether and redefine themselves by putting their marketing skills at the service of a better paying Organization with fewer pretentions (Macy’s, for instance).  Either way, the loss of personal identity would be difficult to get over.
 
          The best protection for human beings from this kind of letdown is to find a belief system that can’t fail us, that can’t be disproven. Religion fills this gap for much of humanity, and has for a very long time. God, being invisible, is not subject to the usual rules of proof and is immune to the scientific method. An individual minister may steal church funds but God never does. The sense of “doing God’s will” can bring structure and order to your life  and endow the smallest human act with meaning.
 
          That sense of religious meaning evolved side by side with the development of the tribe as the locus and extension of individual identity and its evolution into the idea of “us” as a nation. And both religion and political systems developed in the context of our ongoing effort to impose our symbols onto raw nature for our survival, protection, comfort and, most of all, our sense of control. We want a house not a cave, goats in the pen not deer in the forest, with walls around the town to define our space and keep out potential threats. And, most of all, we want a sense of why we’re doing what we’re doing to help us cope with the very real troubles that biological life keeps throwing at us: diarrhea, arthritis, hurricanes, heartbreak, failure, debt and death at the end of the journey. There are two ways this can go.

1. You decide that God wants us to “love our neighbors” and answer the unkindness the world throws at us by being kind to each other. This approach can express itself by respecting each other’s property, being generally nice to other people and donating to charities at Christmas time so those less fortunate can join in the Holiday festivities.
   
   
2. You decide that God only wants you to love the neighbors who follow the same set of rules or belong to the same group that you do and draw your sense of meaning from protecting and promoting the “standards” God has set for humanity. This approach can express itself by a refusal to associate (and absolutely a refusal to marry) anyone from outside your group, speaking out and voting against anyone promoting activities you see as sinful and, in the extreme, killing 130 Parisians or shooting up an abortion clinic.
   
   

          On the secular side, Position 1 expresses itself through a belief in the basic goodness of human beings (less easily provable than the existence of God given the available evidence) and a belief that doing good things makes you a better person. The secular side of Position 2 expresses itself through a desire to dominate other people, sometimes in the name of your country, and sometimes just to make a buck. The problem is that, secular or religious, they both come from the same place – the need to find meaning in our lives.
 
          The same underlying motivator is behind both the best and worst in humanity. It starts the wars and sends medics out to save the wounded at the risk of their own lives. It builds the warm houses and it drops the bombs. It sings our children to sleep and it punishes them when they’re bad. Very few individuals or groups live in either one of these camps exclusively and certainly not all the time. There are elements of both in all of us.
 
          Isis is an extreme. So is Mother Teresa. That they are both extremes of the same human process is something we need to understand and grapple with as we address the issues confronting our increasingly violent world.
 
          To bring it back to where we started, belief is a sword that cuts both ways. We’ve got it, we need it, we can’t do without it.
 
          It’s what we do with it that makes all the difference.
     
          More to come.

The slaughter of nine Afro-Americans in a Charleston church has cracked open the barely held down lid on the tensions that are tearing the United States of America apart. The fact that Dylann Roof acted alone and clearly had mental health issues has not been enough to silence the glaring facts: the mind set behind his act was fueled by the rhetoric of White Supremacy, and when it came time for him to start shooting his symbolic victims, he had a real gun to do it with. Both facts address a single issue for the United States: what kind of country are we? Are we even a country anymore?

It has very quickly become all about the symbols. The people Dylann Roof killed were as symbolic to him as the Confederate Flag on his car bumper. He’d never met them before, he didn’t care who they were. The fact that he is reported to have stated “You rape our women” before killing six women only underscores the separation between fact and imagery that fueled his rage.  The fact that white men through history have raped black women in numbers greater than all the black rapists in the world could ever hope to catch up with was equally indifferent to him. The fact that he did not belong to any organized group promoting White Supremacy, while giving these groups, and the State of South Carolina, room to distance themselves from his actions, made no difference to his embrace of their ideas.  Fortunately, it has not been enough to get them off the hook. Cries to take down the Confederate Flag over the South Carolina State Capital have been as loud as those for increased gun control. We may have better luck with the flag. There’s only one flag. There are millions of guns. And, like it or not, millions of racists. My Canadian wife turned to me from watching the non-stop coverage and asked “What is it with you Americans?”.  I knew what she meant. In spite of how much has changed since Selma, in spite of having black news anchors on television and a black president in the White House, we still seem to have racism in our drinking water.

So what kind of country are we?  A country of gun-toting white people who see minorities - racial, religious or sexual - as threats to be fought against, or are we a diverse country of people who treat each other with respect and compassion regardless of color, creed or orientation. The obvious answer, unfortunately, is yes to both. And, as ever, it’s all about the symbols.

A theme I came back to again and again in “The Holy Bluff” is that good symbolism is responsible for most of the progress, charity, peace and beauty the human race has been capable of while bad symbolism is responsible for most of the harm we do to each other, the world and ourselves.  Turn on your TV. One picture has thousands of people of all colors standing together in solidarity outside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to pay respect to the victims. For the white participants, the symbolic message is clear: “I’m here to show that this killer doesn’t speak for me. All white people are not like him”. The message from the black mourners who welcomed their participation is equally clear: “We believe you”. This is good symbolism, a symbol of that diverse country we were talking about a minute ago. But then the next picture you see is that of the Confederate flag flying over the state capital, with a newsman intoning a  statement that “the leading Republican candidates are treading delicately so as not to risk offending the conservative white voters who venerate the most recognizable emblem of the Confederacy”. That’s a different kind of symbolism.

To the killer, the Confederate Flag was a symbol of White Supremacy, a standard to be carried into battle against the perceived threat of a “black takeover” of America. To a great many people, overwhelmingly white, it’s a symbol of their refusal to trust the United States Government, along with a murky sense of the pre-War South as some kind of elegant White Utopia, usurped by Northerners with no respect for the finer things. There’s a fine line between the two, with racism on both sides of it. What gives the symbol its power, 150 years after Lee’s surrender, is the same power any symbol has – the ability, in a more direct, soul-gripping way than any written statement, law or creed, to enable a person to say “this is who I am”. 

The search for human meaning is all about identity. The flag I carry tells you who I am. More importantly, it tells me. The killer in Charleston found in the rhetoric available to him on White Supremacist websites the means to define himself, to give his life meaning. He was in a sense a microcosm of the thousands of young Southern boys who could never have afforded to own a slave, but cheerfully went off to into battle to protect somebody else’s property rights. The battle itself gave them meaning, much as Dylann Roof’s imagined battle gave him his.

America is badly need of unifying symbolism, some central image that tells us who we are. The Stars and Stripes just aren’t enough any more. In the absence of that, Americans in search of meaning will find other symbol. Hopefully it will be something that evokes a diverse and welcoming crowd praying and singing together in memory of slain innocents, not the gun that killed them.

 

 

 

We live in a world of images. You don’t just hear about tornadoes in the Midwest - you see a crying mother standing in front of her crushed house. The image is the story – the story is the image. Once you start reading (or watching as the case may be), there’ll be reports on the weather system that caused this particular group of storms, statistics on the damage, interviews with local authorities - but it’s the image that pulls you in. The story it tells is simple: tornadoes are bad, tornadoes are powerful, tornadoes crush houses, houses like the one you live in. That’s why you care about the weather systems that are tearing up a neighborhood a thousand miles away from your own – because people like you live there. And because weather reporting is considered news, you’d be disappointed to find out later that the woman in front of the crushed house was an actress, and that the house wasn’t even hers but a picture of a crushed house projected on a screen behind her – disappointed but probably not surprised, given the commercial realities of our image-driven world.

So there it was, Time Magazine - on the newsstand – in the supermarket no less - competing for space with the Soaps and Star Couples’ Divorce Rumors - Time Magazine, a news magazine. What caught my eye was the black and white cover picture, dramatic in its minimalism, a picture of what appeared to be the moon vaguely glowing between the trees on a dark, foggy night and the words:  FINDING GOD IN THE DARK in white, bold letters.  A closer look at the cover revealed what looked like dim tracks going off into the darkness, suggesting that perhaps the “moon” was in fact the headlight of an oncoming train – pretty powerful imagery by anybody’s standards. The print under the title announced that that “Acclaimed preacher Barbara Brown Taylor argues that strength, purpose and true faith are found in the shadows”. And that was the news.

The story behind the picture is that Ms.Taylor is a best-selling religious author and charismatic preacher who found that her celebrity was drowning out her message - so she’s pulled back into the quiet places to try to reconnect. She takes walks late at night, finding the dark more comforting and likely to provide inspiration than the glare of the spotlights. Not a bad idea if you think about it, especially given the battering we’ve all been getting from that image driven world we were talking about a minute ago. I tried to keep my cynical side at bay, did my best to keep the fact that Ms. Taylor’s private “retreat from the light” is on  newsstands all over the country and that she has a new book to sell. Her point is a valid one – anyone trying to hold onto their faith (if not their sanity) in a world of mega-churches, non-stop social media and constant bombardment by images of natural and man-made disasters might do well to step back from it all, shut out the noise, and let whatever inner voice guides them squeeze a few words through – a sort of religious twist on the quiet revolution. It’s an interesting idea, and the sort of thing anyone familiar with my work knows I spend a lot of time kicking around - but is it news?

Until I picked up Time Magazine, I wasn’t aware of Ms. Taylor’s work. Some quick research made it clear that she’s one of small but growing number of religious teachers who are wrestling with the idea of  belief that can stand on its own without dogma. She is willing to trust in the Lord despite feelings of real anxiety over aging, death and, perhaps most of all, the Lord’s own silence. I’ve got to give her credit for that, and apparently her work is comforting to a lot of people.

As one of the minority, at least in America, who are living with a simple and obvious if not at all comforting reason for the silence of God, what makes me uncomfortable about Time Magazine’s treating her approach as hard news is that it’s an insult to my position - gratuitous religious propaganda at its worst.  If you go a little deeper though, it is in many ways an insult to Ms. Taylor’s position as well.

While I’m sure she’s grateful for the publicity and clearly participated in putting the whole thing together, the problem is that a lot more people will see the cover than will actually read the article. The article itself skims the surface and is more concerned with Ms. Taylor’s popularity and her pulling back from it than with the deeper issues she’s trying to deal with – though interested parties may at least be inspired to look further.

The problem with the cover is the same as the problem with our actress posing in front of that phony squashed house. It sends a message - simple, direct and way too easy: “Don’t worry, He’s out there.” Or, to put it another way – “You may not be able to find Him where you used to find Him, but a celebrity preacher is here to tell you that He’s still there, just using different imagery to reveal Himself”.  Unless I’m completely projecting my own willingness to live with real doubt onto Ms. Taylor, that’s not what she’s saying. The house she’s standing in front of is really hers and it’s really wrecked. There’s no guaranteed light at the end of the tunnel, shining though the tress, down the track or whatever. Belief without guarantees takes guts, the same kind of guts it takes to commit to unbelief – not the kind of unbelief that enjoys taking pot shots at organized religion (a relatively easy target) but the kind that’s willing to confront the terrifying reality of living in a Godless universe. Ms. Taylor’s willingness to stand in the dark may be the beginning of a badly needed dialogue between believers and unbelievers. Time magazine is feeding the divide and, unless I’m missing the point, missing the point.

Obviously, they wouldn’t have run this as a cover story if they didn’t think there was a market for it. And there is. People are interested. They’re looking for answers and, far too often, unfortunately, will take them wherever they can find them – even Time Magazine. This isn’t news, it’s religious opinion, and should have been labeled as such. The answers aren’t that easy to come by.

To my slight surprise, Philadelphia was full of ashes yesterday. I knew it was Ash Wednesday of course – the day of the year when practicing Catholics officially confront the soil we came from and to which we must return - the day the church lets its guard down and acknowledges the dark truth it protects its members from for the rest of the year. It takes guts, for the church and even more for the believers who are willing to stand up and be counted – to go out in public with their mortality and their religious convictions smeared on their foreheads for all to see. I was impressed to see so many – men in suits, women in office dress, teenagers in jeans, mothers pushing baby carriages, elders pushing walkers – the whole spectrum of humanity between my various bus and subway stops. Being out of the religious loop I tend to forget at times how many sincere believers there are out there. The half-in, half-out, “officially Catholic so I can call myself something” types don’t do ashes. It’s an easy pass. It always happens on a weekday so you’ve always got someplace else to be besides church. And nobody can tell if you don’t, only if you do.

          I said “of course” in the second sentence because, as a person who spends a considerable portion of my waking hours chasing after human meaning, every day is Ash Wednesday for me – or Ash Monday or Ash Tuesday as the case may be. And I wore the ashes myself for several years so I know when it’s coming. I miss it – the use of ritual to confront our darkest fears. It’s a basic human need and a basic (and successful) human technique for dealing with the undealable - something I’ve had to deny myself as the price of whatever fragile intellectual freedom I’ve been able to muster – not without regret and not without respect. Some rituals are simple “go through the motions and don’t think about it”, but not this one. The pure primitivism of having the priest smear dirt on your face takes religious imagery back to its tribal roots, when ritual involved blood and prayers were taken very, very seriously. Other rituals take place in a protected setting, behind the church doors and in front of your fellow believers - this one you take on the subway.  

          The problem of course is that the next day the ashes come off, death goes back in its box and normal life reasserts itself, with its necessary and unnecessary denials securely back in place.  But for moment, if only for a day, the believers and unbelievers find themselves standing together in the dust we all share – our starting point, our ending point and, like it or not, our best chance of getting though this thing alive. 

Since the release of my book The Holy Bluff, the Search for Meaning in the Post-Religious World, I’ve been asked several times how I can speak of a “‘post religious world” when whole nations are still governed by Islamic law, the Pope is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and the President of the United States still concludes his State of the Union Address with “God Bless the United States of America”. So what am I talking about?

To understand the post-religious world, which I believe we’ve been living in more or less since the turn of the twentieth century, it’s important to understand the religious world we lived in before then. It’s easy at times to forget that for all of human history from the caves on up, the existence of some form of deity was for homo sapiens as much of a reality as the sun, the stones, the water we drank, the food we ate, our fellow creatures and, most importantly, ourselves. In fact, all these lesser realities (including us) were seen in the context of divine creation - which is why we called ourselves “creatures” in the first place.

In the religious world, the fact that different people and groups had different views on God’s nature and intentions were not seen as a challenge to God’s existence. Different tribes had worshipped different Gods from the very beginning. God was by definition mysterious.  If your neighbors disagreed with your version of the almighty, you reacted to them with tolerance or with charges of heresy, depending on your tribe’s inclinations. Disbelief was simply not an option. The American experiment (still ongoing) in separation of church and state is a prime example. The founding fathers did not choose unbelief over belief – they simply decriminalized heresy and identified freedom to believe as a God-given right, which in the religious world is not a contradiction. Fish don’t doubt the water.  So what happened?

There had been major groundswells of change during the 19th century. The Catholic Church executed its last heretic in 1826;  The Origin of Species was published in 1859; Neichze declared God dead in 1882 - and he wasn’t burned at the stake [1]; in 1879 Thomas Edison harnessed the magnetic power of the universe to turn on the lights–  and by 1893 the gods' angry thunderbolts had become something you could make toast with. Our sense of ourselves was changing. By the end of the century, with a long overdue nod to Galileo, heliocentrism (the idea that the earth orbits the sun and not vice-versa) was fully entrenched as humankind’s default position, Genesis notwithstanding. As the century turned, Religion still explained many things for many people – but it no longer explained everything for everybody. The fish were beginning to rethink the water.

When I was doing my research into what would become The Holy Bluff, I stumbled upon a fascinating book by the Reverend William Hallock Johnson, The Christian Faith Under Modern Searchlights, in which the Reverend argued for the endurance of and continuing need for adherence to the eternal truths provided by faith despite the mechanistic information provided by Darwin’s discoveries and the seemingly game-changing view of the universe provided by recent advances in cosmology. I was well into the second chapter before a reference to the terrible war raging in Europe prompted me to check the date of publication - which turned out to be 1916.  The Reverend was not simply defending his beliefs against some other theologian’s, but the validity of belief itself. A century before, he would have had no one to argue with.

In the century since, the argument has rumbled on with all the subtlety of a tectonic shift. From the Scopes trial in the 1920’s, where beleaguered evolutionists fought for the right to teach their theories in school, to today’s courtroom battles for (and against) the inclusion of an “intelligent design” curriculum as an alternative to evolution, we’ve seen a major tide change. And like all tides, it has left a lot of people high and dry.

The difference between the religious world view and the (for lack of a better word) secular world view comes down to one simple point: in the religious view, an eternal perfect being created everything for a purpose and we created beings draw our lives’ meaning from serving that purpose. In the secular view, creation is an accident, with no guiding intelligence behind it and nothing eternal except eternal change. Those of us who live in the post religious world are stuck between these two positions and both sides are digging in. It’s not a comfortable place to be, but it’s where we are. The United States is split pretty much down the middle and it’s not working for us.

Religion isn’t over. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. It’s my opinion that we wouldn’t be any better off if it did. The first two attempts to base a modern nation on a purely secular ideology were Communist Russia and Nazi Germany. Few among us, believers or unbelievers, would consider Stalin or Hitler preferable to Jesus. They simply filled a vacuum left by the collapse of something that had been there before.  In the post-religious world, vacuums are a problem, perhaps the problem.

Which is why I wrote the book.



[1] The actual quote is “Though God is dead, we still see his shadow” – as good a picture of the post-religious world as you’ll find.

Depending on how it hits you, this little sound bite comes across as either completely obvious or completely wrong, or at the very least counter-intuitive. Believers feel that it’s short-changing God because he is. Unbelievers feel that it’s short-changing science because you can find six things and count them. The fact is, God and science have a lot more in common than meets the eye. God is the same way six is. This only became obvious to me recently. Let me tell you about it.

Human beings think by analogy*. The pictures we make in our heads are what runs our intellectual operating systems, with strong real-time links to our emotional, information gathering and even our digestive systems (especially when the emotions kick in). Our sense of ourselves is derived by analogy and our means of communicating that sense to others is accomplished for the most part by using the thousands of mini-analogies we call words. It’s easy to forget that we made us up. Nature provided us with breathing, eating, defecating and breeding machines to live in. We thought up the rest, literally. The human brain is as flesh and blood as the rest of us, but it does things the rest of us can’t. It makes things up. Everything from the wheel to the satellite to the love song to the listening device it’s played on had to be imagined before they could be made. E=mc² wasn’t a matter of seeing what was there and writing it down. There was an intuitive leap involved, a work of imagination that, when tested against reality, turned out to be true - with a vengeance. 

Galileo saw some solid dots moving across Jupiter and figured out that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe – quite a jump, also involving the use of a lot of imagination. It took a long time before that game-changing  "big blue marble"  picture taken from the moon verified it, really verified it. What’s easy to forget is that the idea that the earth was the center of the universe required the same use of imagination – and until a guy with a camera touched down on the lunar surface, the observable facts pretty well supported it. The experience of normal life still does. Even though we know better, we still call sundown sundown and we still say (and sing about) moonlight even though the moon is a dead hunk of rock that doesn’t give off any more light than the wall behind my light bulb.

So what does all this have to do with God? Everything. The idea of a God, an invisible, powerful, much, much bigger projection of ourselves who’s actually running everything, has been with us since we first started imagining that using a rock for a weapon could protect us from animals with bigger teeth than us. We were right about the rock, so we figured we were right about God (or the Gods, as it started out – we were social beings, so we figured they were too). It made sense. We had no reason to believe that night, day, wind and weather were the result of invisible thermodynamic interactions related to the spinning of the earth, the planet’s distance from the sun, variations in the jet stream and the butterfly effect. Any ancient weathergirl who got up on a rock and tried to say so would have been offered whatever primitive psychiatric care was available, and probably prayed for (or stoned depending on the local religious orientation). It was perfectly plausible to assume that things were happening because something or somebody was making them happen, just like everything else that happened in front of our faces – the trees got wet when it rained, a footprint in the dirt meant that some foot had stepped there, an animal bled when you hit it with that rock, because you hit it with that rock. We had no reason to think things were happening randomly (they aren’t, actually - but it still feels like they do - and we still don’t like it). Which brings us to our next point.

Of more importance than the apparent, intuitively consistent truth of an earth-centric universe with an interested deity running it is the psychological truth behind both ideas. We are the center of the universe - I am, you are, each of us in his or her own way sees everything around us, unavoidably, from the seat in the center. And when we’re gone, it’s gone. Seeing our planet as the center of it all is only an analogy (remember analogies?) for our own comforting sense of being the reason why it’s all here – and the fear that kicks in when we realize that we’re not is what got Galileo locked up. The fear that this gigantic chaotic multi-million planet ship we call the universe, and our own soccer ball-shaped starship in particular has nobody at the helm is pretty unsettling. “God” is nothing more or less than the name we give to our feeling that “I may not be able to see who’s running all this, but somebody is”. God is the picture we put on that feeling, an analogy we can address our complaints to, beg for strength or forgiveness as the occasion demands, and get at least some sense of order and control from - God and the number six.

It’s easy to forget that there’s no such thing as six. We made it up. It’s our projection onto disorganized reality to help us make sense of it – an analogy. The universe can’t count. Only we can - with that analogy-making brain we were talking about. And when we put our analogy “six” to the test, most of the time it holds up pretty well, whether we’re trying to get to a place one block past Fifth Avenue or buying beer in an easy to carry container. Six works. When it doesn’t, it’s usually just because we counted wrong and we get to try again. Testing the divine analogy is harder. God is by definition invisible – she, he, or “the life force running though the universe” isn’t available for observation.  Projecting the analogy of a guiding hand that cares about us onto the workings of nature, blind chance and the actions of our fellow humans is getting harder by the minute. Prayers aren’t getting answered like they used to. Or are they?

Despite the occasional success story (similar to the 65 year old lady from Piscataway who hit the slots jackpot in Atlantic City on her first try), prayers throughout history have not been answered. For every miraculous cure, there were a million praying people who stayed sick. And even the ones who got better died anyway – all of them. But people still pray - because that’s not what prayer is really about. We’re not praying for concrete results. Despite the way its official salesmen try to package it, prayer isn’t an investment. It’s simply a way of making us feel a little less powerless in the face of life’s hurricanes. And in that way, it’s not all that different from watching the contemporary weather person on the eleven o’clock news. We can track this stuff better than we used to, but we can’t control it any more than our cave-dwelling ancestors. The millions of irresistible, non-negotiable forces underlying the unexpected wintry mix that caused that thirty car pileup on route 80 are still frustrating and scaring us, especially if we have to drive on route 80. But we’ll watch the weather tonight anyway, just for the feeling of having a little more control than we do. And you can bet a lot of people stuck in that nine-hour jam-up on route 80 looked up at the snow-filled sky at least once and cried out “Why does this happen to me?” 

We need to ask somebody – and number six isn’t listening. To say that God isn’t either misses the point. Six is the right analogy for getting a grip on how many pieces there are in two sets of three, and God is the right analogy for getting a grip on ourselves when the pure size of it all hits us in the face. The fact that both analogies came from the same place may just be the starting point to get the believers and unbelievers talking to each other – whether they know it or not they’re already speaking the same language. 

* For those interested in going into it more deeply, Douglas Hofstadter, and Emmanuel Sander’s Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking  does a great job of charting out this thought-provoking (or is it analogy-provoking) territory.    

Anyone who goes to see “Inside Llewin Davis” expecting a visit to the glory days of the 60’s Greenwich Village Folk revival will be sadly disappointed. That’s not what it’s about. This movie is about Greenwich Village the way “Hamlet” is about Elsinore Castle.

Just to be clear, I was there. The movie takes place in 1961, as the village Bohemian scene was transitioning from Beatnik to Folk. I rolled into town in ’67, as the scene was twilighting into Folk Rock, Woodstock and what would become the 70’s. The basic elements were the same – non-professional but earnest performers playing songs in shabby little clubs for quiet audiences looking for, for lack of a better word, “meaningful” entertainment. But things had gone national and the Village was about to go back underground. Jack Hardy hadn’t arrived yet, but he was on his way. Van Ronk was around - you’d see him on the street sometimes. But like I said, that’s not what the movie is about. It’s no more about the “historical” Dave Van Ronk than the New Testament is about a Jewish guy from Galilee.

Llewyn Davis is, to say the least, a composite character. There’s some Van Ronk in there, but I also spotted, in no particular order:

Dylan, obviously, who slept on Dave’s couch but didn’t knock his wife up;

Henry Miller, who slept on his friend’s floors and did seduce their wives;

Kerouac, who wrote books before anybody wanted to read them and, like Dave, did his stint in the merchant marine;

Jimmy Stewart’s character in “A Wonderful Life”, who also got punched in the mouth for insulting another man’s wife;

Dostoevsky’s philosophical axe-murderer Raskolnikov, who had the advantage of knowing what he was guilty of;

And, maybe most of all -

Camus’ Meursault, the Stranger or, in the alternate translation, the Outsider, who sees what everybody else is doing but can’t seem to buy into it and suffers the consequences.

Whether the Coen brothers purposely picked bits and pieces from these various spice pots to make their L. D. soup, or if it’s just me filling in the blanks, the big picture is hard to miss. This guy is an analogy for the artist in revolt against his (and the human race in general's) reality – simple as that. It’s in the opening scene, loud and clear. The audience is hanging out - the man on stage has a noose around his neck. The choice of “Hang Me” as the opening (and closing) number is no accident. The artist is looking death in the face – “went up on the mountain, there I made my stand” - and when death calls his bluff and sends a dark angel in a business suit to knock him on his ass (while a kid from Minnesota runs off with the paying audience),the pieces lock into place.

With the Village, the road and a short stop in Chicago as the setting, the story is all about the human animal as a stranger in his own world. And Llewin Davis’ world is the only world we get to see. He’s not only in every scene, he is every scene. When he leaves a room, we leave the room. When he’s on the phone, we don’t get to see the person he’s talking to. We get our information, or lack of it, only from him. We even go to the bathroom with this guy. You don’t see many movies like that.

The film doesn’t do subtle. When Llewyn hitches a ride with a Neal Cassady-esque driver who’s been reduced to chauffeuring John Goodman’s “forlorn rags of growing old” cynical, crippled, apparently drug-addicted aging musician (Llewyn’s foreseeable future), the part is played by – guess who? – Neal himself (Garret Hedlund from On the Road). The cat (it’s all about the cat) is named Ulysses and rises from the dead for crissake – but the only Penelope our wanderer has to come home to wants to abort her child because she’s afraid it might be his and Llewyn isn’t dying for anyone’s sins but his own – which, from the evidence presented by everybody who knows him, is the simple fact of his existence and the additional charge that he just won’t buy the program. Llewyn’s songs, with the exception of a few snatches of “Green Rocky Road” sung essentially to piss off John Goodman’s character, are about the tension between life, death and the harm we do each other – “Hang Me” obviously, “The Death of Queen Jane” about a woman who aborts her baby to save its life, and “Fare Thee Well”, otherwise known as “Dink’s Song”, about a woman abandoned by her lover when he gets her pregnant – the “historical” Dink was reportedly dead when John A. Lomax, who collected the song, went back to find her: “One of these days, won’t be long, call my name and I’ll be gone”. Like I said – not subtle. Dink didn’t get any royalties either.

The seeming exception to the above, if you’ve only heard the soundtrack, is “Shoals of Herring”. Not so. In the most poignant scene in the film, Llewyn sings the song to his dementia-ridden father, whose only response is to soil himself as the last chord is struck. As with all the performances in the film, and in defiance of our sound-bite ridden culture, the song is sung in its entirety, with the camera remaining on the father’s blank stare for an almost unbearable amount of time – as ever, we see what Llewyn sees. The point and redeeming grace of the movie, is that he keeps singing anyway.

Under what appears as indifference (Camus again) L. D. is staging a protest for us all. Whether we stand with him or smack him down for telling the truth is beside the point. He’s on the gallows, guitar in hand. The heckling of a “poor girl whose just trying to sing” that earns him his bloody nose is in fact a protest against the club owner’s power to exploit performers in general, female performers especially, and Llewyn’s pissed-off Penelope specifically.

There’s a lot going on in this film. It’s not for the multiplexes and it’s certainly not a nostalgia piece. Whether it’s successful as a work of art, whether it will “last” is not for me to say. I don't care.  I got my money’s worth – some serious meat to chew on that I’m still busy swallowing. In that way, it’s similar to what really happened in the Village and why the rest of the country got interested. When I moved into a storage area sized room on 27 West 11th street (right across the street from the “bomb factory” that blew up two years after I went off to New Jersey to get married), I was looking for the world of the “In the Wind” album liner notes. Lucky for me, it was still there when I got there.

I found it in this film in ways I didn’t expect.

In the media coverage surrounding the recent passing of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, perhaps the most reverberating theme has been that of his role as a hero. This word gets thrown around a lot and deserves some attention. Individuals who earn this title do things that go beyond themselves. Whether it’s a onetime action or a lifelong series of activities, the common factor for all heroes is that their actions do good things for other people. It can be as simple and direct as a fireman risking his life to save a child from a burning building or, as in Mr. Mandela’s case, the transformation of an entire society. The other common factor is that the hero isn’t doing it for “selfish” motives. The fireman isn’t looking for a promotion and Mr. Mandela wasn’t acting out of political ambition – in fact, he turned down a second term. The hero is seen as acting in response to a “higher” principal, which is where it gets tricky.

The standard of what makes a higher principal higher is harder to pin down than it appears. The word that gets thrown around a lot is “selfless”. In the recent “CNN Heroes” broadcast, the word came up constantly. Whether they were building homes for wounded U.S. veterans, providing medical care to impoverished African communities or organizing their fellow citizens to clean up trash-clogged waterways, the thing this diverse group of good people was portrayed as having in common was their “selflessness”. I believe that if we look a little closer, we’ll see that this idea is selling the heroes short, and is missing the real point.

A truly “selfless” person would be hard to be around. A person with no sense of themselves or their own value would be very unlikely to inspire other people to serve the greater good, which is what heroism is really all about. Heroes are heroes because they make us all want to do better. They raise our image of what human beings are capable of. In our “better selves”, we want to have the courage of the fireman who is willing to risk it all to save a fellow human being. That kind of person has a strong sense of identity, very strong – he or she considers human life worth saving. To think the hero would take his or her own life out of the equation is ridiculous. The truth is that the hero values his or her own life more than most of us do, much more. That’s where their courage comes from. The courageous person is the one who doesn’t kid themselves about the hard fact that all human beings, including themselves, are mortal. They know what they’re risking. The courageous person is the one who knows damn well you can’t beat death – that it always wins in the end - but the hero says not today - death isn’t getting that little girl on the third floor- it’s going to have to take me first. It takes a person with a pretty high opinion of themselves to stand up to death and spit in its eye. The truly selfless person is the one who started the fire to collect the insurance money.

If Nelson Mandela had known the day the prison door slammed shut behind him that he’d live to become President of the whole country, the sacrifice of his liberty would have been pointless. The day he went in, he had to assume he wasn’t coming out. A selfless person would never have been able to sweat out 27 years – or 27 seconds. The selfless person has nothing to sacrifice, nothing to lose. The hero has everything to lose and knows it - everything but themselves. Mandela went to jail because he was unwilling to live in a world that didn’t measure up to him. He was a free man long before the key turned the other way and the doors opened. He never stopped being free. He was never locked up.

Heroes are people who don’t wait for the world to catch up with their idea of how they’d like the world to be. If their image of the world includes the notion that fragile, mortal human beings need to look out for each other, the fact that many of their fellow human beings or, to get specific, their own oppressive governments don’t agree doesn’t stop them. The fact that their actions are for the most part symbolic and can only “fix” some small part of the bigger problem doesn’t stop them. The fact that a wall of flame or a uniformed man with a gun tells them to cut it out and behave like everybody else doesn’t stop them. The fact that they may die trying and not achieve their goal doesn’t stop them.

In “The Holy Bluff”, I talk a lot about good symbolism vs. bad symbolism. A man willing to put his life on the line for human liberty is good symbolism. A government that holds onto its power by legitimatizing the oppression of most of its own citizens for the advantage of a few is bad symbolism. Good symbolism is contagious. Bad symbolism stops at the border. Good symbolism is holy, in the fullest sense of the term, which is “wholeness” - the whole picture, the whole story, the whole truth. Good symbolism tells the truth. Bad symbolism is lying.

Heroes are simply people who see the truth and act accordingly. This may seem like a rare commodity, especially if you've been watching the rest of CNN’s programming - but it really isn’t. The fact that the “heroes”’ actions reverberate with so many of us suggests that we’ve all got secret heroes hiding inside of us.  It’s time we started listening to them. Now more than ever, we need all the heroes we can get.