Stoned ponderings on recurring themes: one after another after another

I

I would say that I have a good marriage, yet Peggy is a serious disappointment to me in some ways. For example, she’s a procrastinator who often expects me to help her with one project or another at the last minute when she’s under pressure, and I have something else I want to do. I don’t do pressure, and I become testy when someone rushes me, so it’s a bad situation that I blame entirely on her because she’s the one who’s doing the imposing. However, I finally had to give up trying to change her. Not that I don’t bitch and moan from time to time, but I would be an idiot if I expected anything but broken promises to come of it. The sad truth is that EVERYONE is like Peggy. Instead of expecting another person to be all but perfect and to love you forever, put your emphasis on deciding whether you even find them tolerable.

II 

When I was in my teens and twenties, I would ponder all these heavy religious and philosophical questions, but my half-sister, Anne (my elder by eleven years), was the only person I ever knew who wanted to discuss them. I assumed from this that everyone else must already know the answers but for some reason wouldn’t share them with me. I made this assumption because I couldn’t imagine that questions which were so compelling to me could have escaped their notice altogether. When I finally—after many years—concluded that they had, I started to think less of other people and more of myself. I pictured everyone else as being like dogs or cats, nice enough in their way but sadly lacking nonetheless.

III

I was embarrassed to be a Mississippian long before I moved to liberal Eugene, where Mississippi and every white person in it is considered a joke. I would get mad when I heard people trashing Mississippi, not necessarily because I disagreed, but because they couldn’t have named the major towns, or pointed to The Delta on a map, or identified kudzu and fireants. They were simply relaying to me, a lifelong Mississippian, all the bad stuff they had heard. For awhile, I joined them; for awhile, I kept my mouth shut; now, I demand to know their sources because theirs is usually a case of prejudice based upon hearsay. It doesn’t even matter to me that a person is right; if his reasons for his beliefs are unfounded, he’s still a bigot.

 IV

Foolishness that is at least understandable in the young becomes inexcusable with age. I'm very aware that I'm a "senior" now and, except for the physical pain and limitations, I rather like it because at no time in my life have I experienced more of wisdom or contentment.

 V

I just finished Hell in the Pacific by Jim McEnery. It wasn't the best war book I've ever read (that would be With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge), but I'm glad I read it. The following passage will stay with me more than most: “I’ve never lost sleep over the enemy solders I shot or bayoneted or blew to bits with grenades—not even the wounded ones I put out of their misery…. I did it the same way you’d chop off the head of a poisonous snake that was about to bite someone.” I would call that a pretty good example of the dehumanization of war. Of course, the Japanese military went out of its way to earn such hatred (just as we did with our “Shock and Awe” bombing of Baghdad), but still… About three years ago, I heard an old man say with tears in his eyes that he had recently hugged a Japanese woman, her being the first Japanese he had touched but didn’t kill.

VI

Someone wrote that I put unnecessary limits on my openness to experience by labeling myself an atheist. This ignores the fact that I used to be a believer, and that I don’t consider any of the experiences of God that I had back then to have been worthwhile. I went from being scared shitless of God when I was young, to hating him when I was a teenager, to not believing in him when I was in my twenties. That said, I should think that a person who is committed to believing in a particular version of god might be at greater risk than an atheist of limiting his experience of the divine. For example, what if God should come along but not look or act the way a person expects him to look or act; might not such a person fail to recognize God? Because an atheist wouldn’t be so committed, he might be better able to experience God than a lot of theists. After all, few atheists categorically say that God's existence is impossible; they simply say that they can't find a reason to believe in him.

VII

Old times seem to look better with age when the sharp edges have eroded somewhat, and everything has been interpreted and reinterpreted so many times that reality is forgotten.

Photo by Manfred Brückels

Why would a preacher become an atheist?

The usual scenario is that a Biblically naive young person goes away to seminary with an interest in religion and a devotion to God. For the first time, he (usually) studies the Bible from a critical perspective. Doubts are born, but he prays for faith and does his best to push them away. Two decades later, he has been a minister for 18 years, and his doubts have multiplied. At long last he is forced to admit, at least to himself, that he has become that vilest of filth, that most loathsome of vermin, that veritable dung of Satan: an atheist.

Unfortunately, his job requires him to worship a specific triune deity, and the same church that endorses his paycheck owns his house. His parents, his wife, and his children, are probably religious. He has no training in anything but religion, and his every friend is committed to religion. If you were that person, what would you do? I think I would leave, and/or shoot myself, and/or go crazy. I might even build a new and deeply rewarding life based on rationality. Some do.

The men in the 1967 photo are Church of Christ preachers who had come together for a county-wide revival in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Three of the six were from the area, and I knew them well. I was 18 at the time, and had been struggling to keep my faith since I was eleven, yet I still envisioned preachers as residing in that rarefied realm referred to as "Men of God." I was so enamored by the group shown that if someone at the revival had dropped dead, I was certain that the combined prayers of these six men could bring him back.

Buford Stewart is second from right. When his little country church offered him a raise, he turned it down because he wanted to embrace God's ideal of voluntary poverty. I slept with him--platonically--when he took me along on a revival to Kentucky. The man on the far right is Norman Miller who took me to Indiana on another revival. They loved me, but if they were still alive and ran into me today, their version of the "God of love" would command that they turn me over to him for the everlasting agony that, in their view, I would so richly deserve.*


*"And whoever shall not...hear your words, when you depart out of that house...shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment..." Matthew 10:14-15. 

Baptists, Atheists and Christers

The Southern Baptist Church is the second largest Protestant denomination in America, and by far the largest in Mississippi. Like a few other churches, it got its start during the American Civil War (1861-65) when Northern Christians used their Bibles to prove that God thoroughly loathes slavery while Southern Christians used their Bibles (effectively, I thought) to prove that God simply adores slavery, and that, as an added bonus, slavery gives white people a convenient opportunity to preach Jesus to all them poor benighted niggers who would otherwise go to hell, and who don’t have brains enough to be anything but slaves anyway.

My church, the Church of Christ (henceforth Christer), was a distant second in size to the Southern Baptist in Mississippi. The two churches were so much alike that you would be pressed to tell one from the other except that the Baptists had pianos and Sunday School literature. The Christers shunned musical instruments because “Jesus and the apostles didn’t use them,” and they shunned books other than the Bible because “Jesus and the apostles didn’t use them.” You might not consider such differences important, but the way the Christers saw it, “any deviation from the clear and concise Word of God” was intentional and would land you in hell.

Did you have Baptist friends, and did you worry about them going to hell?

Yes, I had Baptist friends, and, no, I didn’t worry about them going to hell because I was taught that they defied God by choice. Such a condemnatory attitude toward other beliefs shouldn’t be taken to imply that Christers spoke with one voice. The far left Christers allowed women to teach Sunday School; the middle-of-the-road churches (which I was in) wouldn’t let them talk at all; and the far right churches were the same way, but they also limited themselves to one “cup” for the weekly communion (that’s how many Jesus used), while the other Christers used stackable trays that contained enough tiny glasses for everyone. I thought these were way cool, and I loved the smell of Mogen David, so I always made myself available to “serve The Lord’s Supper.” I also said prayers, led the singing (badly), and delivered sermons. I think it was assumed that I would go into the ministry, but when I stopped attending church after my teenage efforts to liberalize it failed, nobody came looking for me.

I considered the Baptist Church hypocritical and insufferably plebeian, but my main objections were that, as I was told, Jesus didn’t get himself crucified so his church could be named after John the Baptist; and I added to this my own observation that my Baptist friends didn’t know much about the Bible. Christer preachers said this was because they didn’t read it; they just read Sunday School books that contained “man’s interpretations.” What more proof could anyone want that Baptists deserved eternal hell for “living in open defiance of God’s Holy Word”? Of course, Methodists and Presbyterians were even worse because they sprinkled babies; Catholics were worse yet because they worshipped the pope; and Jews were worse than all of them because they hated Jesus. There were people worse than Jews though—atheists, godless professors, secular humanists, and Communists. You will note that the common thread (the “underlying evil” as the Christers called it) in all these groups was atheism. As they saw it, the only thing worse than an atheist was a Christer who became an atheist because God wouldn’t forgive him even if he changed his mind.

I have found it indescribably strange and hurtful to become the very person whom I was told, week in and week out for eighteen years, is the most foul piece of Satanic excrement in the whole universe, and then to look at the institution that told me this and to think the very same thing about its approach to truth: namely that of basing it upon sketchy stories in an ancient, contradictory, and historically inaccurate book by unknown authors, a book which presents a “fully human yet fully divine” being named Jesus who was likewise fully God yet one-third God. The mischief that has come from accepting such an authority as the starting place for ethics—and even science—is too great for me to wrap my mind around. And yet some Christians say that this authority is really very good—perfect even—and, properly understood, couldn’t possibly inspire the violence, oppression, and other evil acts that other Christians perform everyday. When I hear such statements, I wonder where the line is between religious faith and delusion, the two appearing indistinguishable to me.

My drinking years—the latter days

When I started college in 1967, my new friends were light drinkers, so I became a light drinker. When I transferred to another school three years later, this situation continued, not because I had grown in virtue but because I wasn’t ready to make my own decisions based upon my own values. I’m not even sure I had values, although I was certainly overwhelmed by feelings that pointed in the direction of values. For example, I felt that the universe had special plans for me, and that they would be realized without any great effort on my part. I also felt that everything I had ever heard about God was a lie, including his existence. You will note that the first feeling necessitated belief in an extremely powerful entity that controlled my destiny, whereas the second feeling denied the existence of that same entity. So have I ever lived, unable to go in one direction but equally unable to go in another.

A month after I finished college, I began to feel tired and feverish, and dropped from 165 pounds to 130. My doctor concluded that the problem was imaginary, and since I believed that doctors were geniuses, I kept going back to him for another try at being taken seriously. When I finally turned yellow, I was thrilled because I figured that this would get his attention, and it did. I probably had hepatitis, and I probably got it from a girl, but liver testing was still primitive, so I can’t say for sure. In any event, I got well while lying around the hospital awaiting a diagnosis. Maybe I needed the rest. My illness had forced me to quit my first teaching job; I had no prospects and no place to live (I was still in the dorm); and I was getting married in three months to Peggy whom I had met two months earlier.

After my illness, I got drunk so infrequently and my hangovers were so horrific that I probably remember every occasion. On one of them, I drove my father for a visit with my sister and her cotton-ginner husband near Tallulah, Louisiana, some hundred miles distant. We three men took a one-night camping trip upon which we mostly drank. When the two of them went back to drinking the next morning, I told my father that I either needed to sober up, or we needed to plan on spending the night at my sister’s. He said we could stay, but when nighttime came, he wanted to go home. I reminded him of his agreement, and he said that, by god, if I wasn’t man enough to drive, he was. When I objected, he set out walking—or at least it looked a little like walking. While my sister and brother-in-law went to fetch him, I prepared as best I could for our drive across the battlefields of the Old South.

My last drunk occurred in the early eighties when Peggy and I stopped off somewhere on our way to an overnighter with Peggy’s teetotaling parents some fifty miles distant. My first trick was to stagger into their house and vomit on their bed—the evening went downhill from there. Doris and Earl no doubt rued the day that their daughter met me, but as my mother used to say about my sister's husband, “Well, at least he doesn’t beat her.”

That night was the end of my heavy drinking, not because I was overcome with shame—which I wasn’t—but because I couldn’t handle the hangovers anymore. I’ve rarely had more than three drinks at a time in the decades since then, and seldom that many. As I write, I have wine, beer, and even some 190 proof (leftover from a marijuana tincture) in the pantry, but I long ago lost most of my interest in the effects of liquor. I don't miss it.

My drinking years—the early days

I started drinking in 1964 when I was fifteen. I didn’t exactly decide to get wasted every weekend; I just didn’t consider the possibility that there might be an alternative. It was either drink or date, and I did my share of each. Every Saturday, I would have supper while watching the The Wild, Wild West, and then drive the three miles into town in my ‘56 Fairlane. When I had rounded up a few friends, we would go to a bootlegger’s, usually the one on Highway 51 a little past Della's Motel. I always bought gin and drank it straight from the bottle. I never had a mixed drink until my sister took me out on the town in New Orleans when I was eighteen. Because of my inexperience with liquor that didn’t taste like liquor, I got a whole lot sicker than I had ever been and felt like a fool in the bargain.

I was in two drinking-related wrecks in the same night. In the first, my friend, Penny ran his car off a dead-end road and into the wet earth of an embankment. This scared everyone aboard except him and me—I had survived so many close calls that I didn’t believe cars could hurt me—so they got out as soon as we got back to town, but I was still with Penny when he slid backwards into the high curb behind Dr. Reel's office. A few weeks later, he flipped that same car and was crushed by it. Mississippi roads back then were narrow, hilly, and curvy; bootleggers would sell liquor to anyone; drunk drinking was commonplace; and you could get your license at fifteen. All this together meant that a lot of teenage boys died in car wrecks.

When a popular kid died—most popular kids came from prominent families with money—their classmates would hit everyone up for the cost of a wreath, but when an unpopular kid died, he didn’t get a wreath. My friends and I weren’t the kind of people who got wreaths. We were the kind of people who wouldn’t have been missed had we died. Even if we passed a year—I flunked three years but made two of them up in summer school—we did it by the skin of our teeth. We also cut school when we could, and we avoided every sport, club, and organization that might have given us a sense of belonging. We did this because we believed that such things existed for the popular kids.

Another night, I hungout with four friends who were camping by the railroad tracks, and when I got ready to leave, I was so drunk that I had turned partway onto the tracks before they stopped me. On yet another occasion, I got drunk early, and drove home to find my mother and sister watching TV. I tried to walk into the house as if I was sober, but I bounced off the patio door like a bird and fell flat on my back. The next day, I found that my car was full of puke and bottles, but I didn’t remember where I had been or who I had hungout with. I did remember the hurt in my mother’s eyes as she helped me to bed.

My parents never said a word about my drinking except for the time that I put a dent in the car. My father had a good bit to say about that, but he would have said most of the same things had I not been drinking. His belief was that a real man could do anything drunk that he could sober. Of course, there was that night when he came home drunk (a rare event), missed the driveway, and ended up in a ditch. Staggering though he was, he set up a come-along to winch himself out of that ditch before daybreak.

I concluded at a rather early age that my parents thought I was a bit of a loser. My mother would often say: “Boy, you’ll never amount to anything.” I told myself at the time that she was saying mean things because that’s what I deserved. Now, I understand that she was probably taking her anger toward the father and the two husbands who had abused or abandoned her out on me, the only defenseless representative of my gender.

Psychological pain is like physical pain in that you can’t share it with anyone even when you try. I find it fascinating and terrifying to know that I am utterly and irrevocably shut-off from other people. We can reach, but we can’t touch. Yet, the reaching still matters, at least until we die when nothing matters anymore.

RIP, Nollyposh.

I might as well confess to being a Klansman. After all, I'm from Mississippi, so everyone knows anyway.

A very liberal woman told me at a party last night that I’m the only Mississippian (I live in Oregon, but was a Mississippian for most of my life) she has known who isn’t prejudiced. I interpret such statements as blatant prejudice, so I goaded her by asking how she knew there wasn’t a Klan robe in my closet. I also speculated that modern white Mississippians are less prejudiced against black people than are white Oregonians, although it’s hard to know for sure because Oregonians have been so little tested (1.8% of Oregonians are black versus 37% of Mississippians) whereas Mississippians were long since forced in the direction of racial equality. She retorted that anyone knows if they’re prejudiced because if they’re prejudiced against one group, they’re prejudiced against pretty much every group.

We were teetering on an all out argument when she tried to change the subject. Unwilling to let the matter drop, I told her about the time that, on a dare, I went to a local meeting wearing a dress. To get there, I had to walk several blocks from where I parked, and the hostility I encountered along the way rattled me. By her reasoning all those people who stared hatefully or spoke contemptuously because they thought I was a crossdresser were prejudiced against black people too, casting doubt upon her belief that racism is primarily a Southern problem.

The North was seething with contempt for the racism of the white South during the 1960s, yet—to the delight of Southerners—it was Yankee cities that were ablaze a few years later (many Southerners use Yankee and Northerner synonymously). My house today is in one of the most liberal cities of one of the most liberal states in America. The following is from my 1955 subdivision covenant, and is still binding according to my 1990 contract to buy:

“If any of the property in the tract is ever sold, rented, leased, or given to any person or persons other than a person or persons of the caucasian race (sic), then, in such event, the title for such property shall revert back to the original owners; except that this restriction does not apply to domestic servants…”

During a slightly earlier period, many Oregon towns had sundown laws, the purpose of which was to run any and all black people out of town at sunset. The following is from an interview with James Loewen who wrote Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.

“People I talk with often think I'm doing my research in the South. But very few people in the South ever did this. In Mississippi, I only found six sundown towns. Compare that to Illinois [where 472 municipalities had sundown laws].”

Still earlier (1844), black people were forbidden to live anywhere in the entire state of Oregon, the penalty being not less than 20 and not more than 39 stripes. The penalty was later changed to involuntary servitude for a set period, although slavery as such was always illegal in Oregon due to a desire to protect the labor market from unfair competition.

The existence of Yankee hypocrisy is why a black Oregon friend (herself a transplanted Southerner) told me that Oregon prejudice is more hurtful than Louisiana prejudice because it’s like a glass ceiling in that it’s obviously there, but no one will admit to it. She also said that many white Oregonians are so eager to prove that they’re not prejudiced that they tend to make fools of themselves around black people by saying things like, “I’ve always wanted a black friend,” or, “I really like people of color.”

In this modern era, black people in the South have too much political and economic clout for white people to run over them, and they’re hardly sitting by the phone hoping some white person invites them to dinner. When I attended faculty meetings as a Mississippi elementary school teacher, the black teachers usually sat together and the white teachers usually sat together. If someone crossed to the other side, they weren’t stared at or talked about, and I would even say that black teachers and white teachers treated one another as equals. Yet, the members of both races made the seemingly universal decision to spend their social time with those who were most like themselves.

Does what I’ve written mean that I’m turning into a booster for the South in my old age? Hell no. I hate the South for its heat, poverty, and religiosity. That’s why I left. Yet many is the time that I have been left speechless by Yankee hypocrisy. In fact, I often want to ask: “Is it possible that you’re really as stupid as you sound?”