Canine unbelievers

According to today's NYT, Sheik Mahmoud al-Ghassi, a young mullah in Aleppo, Syria, has been giving fiery sermons denouncing "atheist dogs." Surely the same question must have occurred to you: Are there really any atheist dogs?

My first thought was, "Impossible. Every dog worships its master." But then I thought back to a summer in Williamsville in the western mountains of Virginia. My accomplice and I had rented a cabin from the writer Donald McCaig and his wife Anne on their sheep farm.

The cabin had sounded quite attractive (especially the price) in an ad in the NYRB. It turned out to be a collapsing shack among the weeds where the McCaigs' land dipped down toward Bull Pasture Creek. It had electricity, but no air conditioning. The window screens were torn and clusters of big black flies would light on your eyelids and stay there till you brushed them away, while their kinfolk stopped for a taste of saliva on your lips and others explored your ears to distract you from all the reading and writing you'd gone there to accomplish. But the place did have its virtues. It was absolutely quiet, except for the buzzing of the flies and the occasional deer crashing through the trees on the way to the creek. The smells were pleasantly organic, pine and other country plants I wouldn't know how to identify, the rich black soil, the occasional scent of manure. And the firefly displays at night were just spectacular.

It was a short walk up the hill and along the two-lane country road to the general store/ post office -- we could never find anything there that we would want to eat, but for the first few days we enjoyed the illusion that we might. Williamsville must have had a population of, oh, maybe 50 people (that may be an exaggeration -- we never saw more than three at one time), so I guess there wasn't much demand for caponata or gorgonzola or other necessities of urban living. Plenty of lamb chops were available, though; we just had to ask the McCaigs.

Somehow -- traveling all the way to Roanoke for shopping -- we managed to put together a pretty decent non-lamb dinner one night and invited the McCaigs down from the big house to share it with us. Our secret agenda was to get them inside the place to experience the flies and see that maybe the screens should be replaced. Actually, it was a two-point agenda. We also wanted to get to know the McCaigs, and have a chance to talk to somebody besides each other.

They turned out to be pretty interesting. He especially was full of stories. He was at the time working hard on what would become his acclaimed Civil War novel, Jacob's Ladder. He'd found archives of a WPA project of the 1930s, interviews of former slaves, and was quite excited about it. But mostly we talked about sheep and especially the dogs that herd them, most especially the highland border collies that are so smart their owners have to go to a special school to learn how to communicate with them. McCaig's reputation (before the Civil War book came out) was based mainly on his dog books, both fiction and nonfiction, celebrating the wit and complex personalities of these dogs, and he lamented that despite trips to Scotland and Australia to learn more, he hadn't really become expert enough as a dog-partner to get his own two border collies (mother and daughter) to respond to his sometimes confusing commands.

In the next days, when we wanted to take a break from the heavy workloads we'd brought, my partner and I would go walking through the forested hills. The younger collie would come bounding after us, not just to accompany us but, eyeing us closely, to nudge us in one direction or another. After looking us over, she had decided we weren't much smarter than sheep, and she was herding us. This was a little embarrassing, but I suppose from her point of view, and given that we were wandering more or less aimlessly in unfamiliar territory, she was right.

And I remembered McCaig saying that border collies were so smart and so capable of thinking ahead that, unlike almost any other dogs, they would sometimes disobey an explicit command the better to meet what they knew was the master's larger purpose. For example, the master, standing at quite some distance from the action, would think that the dog should make some particular maneuver to get some wayward sheep back where they belonged, but the dog, more experienced and at the scene, would see a better way to it, and would do it that way.

That's when I thought that yes, the mullah in Aleppo may be right. Border collies must be atheists. They are the only dogs to realize that their masters are merely human. Atheism, after all, requires a sense of irony.

Here's something about Donald McCaig.

And here's something about border collies.

She speaks for all of us

"Us" being people who care about humanity and who are trying to puzzle out what we can do against the horrible abuses and deceptions or our elected or, in the case of the US, unelected leaders. I have been listing to Arundhati Roy on WBAI-FM, and felt so moved by her eloquence and clarity (and Amy Goodman's consistently courageous broadcasting) that I even made a small on-line contribution to WBAI's fall fund-raising drive. Maybe you will want to, too. This was the program: Fri., Oct. 24, 9:00-10:30 am: Democracy Now!, with Amy Goodman. Arundhati Roy, acclaimed Indian activist and author of Power Politics, War Talk, and the novel The God of Small Things, gives a speech at Riverside Church in Harlem titled, "Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy, Buy One Get One Free."

Someone (not Roy herself) has set up an Arundhati Roy website, with a lovely photo and links to her writings. There's lots more about and by her on the net.

Anybody still there?

We're back! Bear, Lion, Glib and your host, GF (for background on all of us, see Our Editorial Team). We were incomunicados (pardon my Spanish) for a few days, due to some erroneous settings we entered after switching to our new domain host, the Authors Guild. (Fellow authors: if you're eligible to join the AG, they've got a great deal going; I'm saving more $$ on website hosting than I'm paying in annual dues.) But thanks to the friendly support folks at Blogger, we're back on the electron waves. (Gee, this blog is full of advertising, isn't it? Well, they -- in particular a chap named Graham at Blogger, and the web wizards Tenchi and John at the AG -- were a big help and deserve some credit.)

As you've probably figured out by now, Bear, Lion and Glib live mainly in my head, just the way somebody he calls "God" lives mainly in Gen. Boykin's head (see post below). Of course, as soon as Boykin or I can get you thinking about them, they'll start living in your head, too. Or at least drop by for a visit. So I guess it would be all right to speak of these three buddies of mine as my gods (they don't mind). The only difference between them and most people's gods is that I know I made them up -- which doesn't make them any less real.

But it does make me acknowledge an error in my previous post. I spoke too quickly, without consulting my furry deities. It is not true that if left to themselves, "Tlaloc (of the Aztecs) could probably get along quite peacefully with Ganesh (of the Hindus) or Jehova (who comes in various versions) or Estarte or Venus or Inti or Allah." Bear and Lion have both informed me that they get extremely uncomfortable sharing space in my head with Tlaloc, who not only has a nasty temper (he keeps shooting torrents of water at Lion), but -- to Bear's great annoyance -- continuously jabbers in Nahuatl, which none of the four of us understands (though Glib pretends to).

Toward a Deity Liberation Manifesto

"My god is a real god, yours is an idol!" declares Lt. Gen. Willam G. Boykin to the Muslims. May the gods save us from such thinking. This is an idea that has brought mayhem ever since Samson committed genocide against the Philistines. For the sake of all the gods and the people who believe in them, we must establish a Declaration of Deity Rights.

The gods cannot speak for themselves, so it's up to us, the humans who have created and who sustain them, to draft the Declaration.

1 - All deities are created equal. They are created by the imaginations of human beings, to satisfy very deep felt needs, and no human being has a right to question the validity of those needs.

2 - Deities all have the attributes that their human believers assign to them. They may be male, female, or gender-free, they may have an elephant's head or a profusion of arms or a bright nonhuman color, elaborate headdresses, nail-holes in their limbs, or they may be completely noncorporeal and physically undescribable. No matter; no believer in a god with one set of traits should mock the believers in a god (or goddess) with some other set of traits. People believe what they need to believe, and to mock their gods is to mock their needs.

3 - All deities need believers. Without them, they cease to exist. Therefore it is extremely cruel to any god or goddess to deprive him/her of believers.

We should note that these problems hardly exist among the deities themselves. Tlaloc (of the Aztec) could probably get along quite peacefully with Ganesh (of the Hindus) or Jehova (who comes in various versions) or Estarte or Venus or Inti or Allah. We should let them be, all of them, and any future gods that humans choose to invent. They all meet real human needs, and thus must be respected.

Kucinich is the man

Definitely. The only one speaking clearly and forcefully against the madmen leading us toward national suicide. To find out why, if you don't already know, you can start here.

Some quick thoughts: US politics

I've been thinking about these things for days. I don't expect to have time soon to develop them as they deserve, so here are just the starter thoughts.

• The juggernaut of the right is grinding to a halt, its impressive assault on civil rights, democratic voting procedure, and economic equity is finally falling apart. The juggernaut was not a single machine (like the original Juggernaut of India), but a coalition of single-cause anger groups, united only by their belief that it was the liberal establishment that stood in their way. Now that not much of anything stands in their way, they have only each other to blame for the massive failures of their policies. The Iraq disaster, the economic disaster (both entirely unprovoked), the many assaults on personal privacy, the "war on terrorism" that ignores the causes of terrorism and instead inflicts terror ("shock and awe") on another country and asks for $87 billion to cover its errors -- hey, you can't fool all the American voters all of the time.

• Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in California was a defeat for the extreme right (which had expected something entirely different). Of course it was also a defeat for Democratic machine politics, but maybe that was necessary to clear the deck for a real renewal of progressive politics (with or without, probably without, Arnold).

• When the president of the United States has to go around to non-news TV stations to make the case that his policies are not a failure, you know his end is near. Like Nixon, when he felt obliged to declare, "I am not a crook!"

• Reporters have mocked John Podesta's new progressive think tank for not coming up with a single unifying "big idea" to counteract the propaganda skills of the rightwing think tanks. Maybe we should suggest some. How about democracy? It's time we tried it again. Let the people vote! In the U.S. and in Iraq. And let's let the votes be counted.

More later when I get more time. Any comments are welcome. Just click on "Contact" over on the left of this page.

Good news!

My short story "Stairways" (one of my South American tales, featuring a very young Ted Auer) has been selected for publication in the Winter 2003 Edition of Small Spiral Notebook, a handsome and well-edited e-journal. I'll let you know when it's up. Meanwhile, check out the current (Autumn 2003) issue of Small Spiral Notebook. It's worth a look.

Phony letters from G.I.s?

I first saw mention of this in a short article in the NY Post. The NYT so far has not deemed this fit to print. It appears to be a new twist in the propaganda war. CBS News article

Re-blog: item of interest from the Poynter Org.

Posted by Juan Carlos Camus 12:17:08 PM

Digital Journalists Meet in Buenos Aires
The Iberoamerican Congress of Digital Journalism, organized by Clarín.com and Fundación Noble, will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, October 29-31. With 10 tracks, this event will include discussions on many digital-media issues, from business models to weblogs as new mass media -- with specialists from many countries including Spain, the U.S., and Argentina, of course. The sessions will be brodcast live by Clarín.com.

U.S. as all-devouring monster

Yesterday was the last day for "The American Effect" show at the Whitney Museum of Art here in Manhattan. As you surely know, the show brought together works about the U.S. by artists from many other countries. Some were whimsical, like the delightful large-scale model of "New Manhattan City, 3021" by Bodys Isek Kingelez of the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- a future Manhattan full of shiny, bright-colored towers of fanciful shapes and many corporate logos. Some were pseudo-anthropological, like Nigerian artist Olu Oguibe's drawings by an imaginary ethnographer documenting racial types in 19th century America, or the hyper-realistic, out-sized figures of Custer's Last Stand by Ousmane Sow of Senegal, now living in France. The twisted, dying, still shooting Custer and the Sioux attacking or falling from a horse or, in the case of Sitting Bull, praying, are all made of wire, mud and cloth by somebody who really understands anatomy. The scene is quite frightening in its violence as the visitor walks among these straining, reaching men, right onto the battlefield and into the line of tomahawk thrust or bullet. Video permits the sequential telling of a story, and the three-channel video about the international battle for custody of little Elián González, made by two Cubans -- Meira Marrero Díaz and José Angel Toriac -- and one U.S. artist -- Patricia Clark -- goes futher, by playing off contrasting and complementary scenes on the three screens. Particularly effective is the "rewinding" -- the tapes actually do run backward briefly, with the scenes of the rescue/seizure of Elián from his Miami relatives, and Fidel Castro and Elián's father, and various other political and cultural figures. Then the story begins again, but much earlier, with the first great attack of the U.S. against the Cuban revolution at the Bay of Pigs, thus giving context to the tensions over the child more than 30 years later (José Martí's children's book gives the video its title).

The fear and hostility toward the U.S. in some of the other works might seem over the top, unless you've been reading the papers lately to see what the U.S. is really doing to countries around the world. For example, Hisushi Tenmyouya (Japan) has a wonderfully complex, comic book-like drawing of "Tattoo Man's Battle" in which Tattoo Man -- Japan -- on a white horse and waving a glowing sword confronts a huge monster, the United States, whose three leering mouths spew flames and whose biceps are other angry monsters and whose claws reach down to grasp Tattoo Man. This is what the U.S. must seem like to many Iraqis and Afghanis these days. The U.S. submarine's apparently careless sinking of a Japanese fishing boat a couple of years back, and the utter lack of remorse for the loss of lives, are commemorated in another of this artist's drawings. And then there are the Mughal-style miniatures by Pakistani artist Muhammad Imran Qureshi. In one, we see the tops of a cluster of trees, about to be bombarded by U.S. aid. Qureshi is quoted saying about this drawing, "no matter whether for good or for bad, everyone today is a target of America."

Over the top? Check out this article by a Chicago Tribune reporter: U.S. data mining riles Latin America.