L.B.: Worlds collide

Left Behind, pp. 364-365

There's a bit of a lesson in the first meeting of our two heroes, Buck Williams and Rayford Steele. It's a fine portrait of the insecure alpha male in his native habitat. Rayford seems so eager to strike a dominant posture that I was afraid he was about to start peeing on trees or mounting somebody:

"He's with us," Rayford told the woman at the desk. He shook Buck's hand. "So you're the writer for Global Weekly who was on my plane."

As always, the authors intend Rayford's perspective to be trustworthy and reliable, but that's not really possible with a character as self-absorbed and un-self-aware (in the worst sense) as he is. This is off-putting in Left Behind because it's not possible for readers to share the authors' insistence that Rayford's self-importance is deserved and appropriate. But maybe in a sense, by sharing their character's delusion and presenting us with this unreliable reliable narrative perspective, the authors have unintentionally created a new kind of meta-fictional device that goes beyond Nabokov's wildest dreams.

In any case, I love that membership in the Pan-Con Club (fremder!) is something that Rayford flaunts like a hard-earned trophy. "He's with us," he says. Don't worry, my young friend, I have pull. Stick with me and I can get you into traveler's lounges at airports all over the country. I'd bet he's the same way with his membership in the Columbia Record House. ("I know people, my friend. I can get you eight CDs for a penny.")

"What do you want to interview me about?" he asks Buck:

"Your take on the disappearances. I'm doing a cover story on the theories behind what happened, and it would be good to get your perspective as a professional and as someone who was right in the middle of the turmoil when it happened."

What an opportunity! Rayford thought. "Happy to," he said. "You can join us for dinner then?"

"You bet," Buck said. "And this is your daughter?"

While Rayford is desperately establishing his alpha-male status, Buck just plays along. He doesn't undermine the pilot's home-turf advantage by pulling out the Pan-Con Club ID that a frequent flier like him is sure to have. And he strokes Rayford's ego, playing to his sense of status "as a professional" and describing him as being "right in the middle of the turmoil" when, in fact, they were both in the middle of nowhere, somewhere over the Atlantic when The Event occurred. While Rayford continues trying to maintain control -- "join us for dinner?" -- Buck isn't interested in that game. He's playing a game of his own -- "This is your daughter?"

Later, as we revisit this scene from Buck's perspective, he makes this clearer:

He had been tempted to tell Captain Steele that, as of the next day, he would no longer be just a writer but would become executive editor. But he feared that would sound like bragging, not complaining, so he had said nothing.

The context there is that he'd have been perfectly comfortalble bragging to Rayford, but he didn't want to sound like he was bragging in front of Chloe. It's because she's standing there that he circumspectly avoids playing the Who's More Important? game with Rayford.

So the lesson here for alpha-male executive types like Rayford is this: While you're busy posturing to establish your dominance, the other guy is probably trying to figure out how to nail your daughter. So who's really the alpha-male here?*

The larger problem with this scene is that this isn't how strangers would be introducing themselves a week after The Event. They would still be in the throes of that shared trauma and thus wouldn't really be meeting as strangers.

There would be, post-Event, some kind of ritualized exchange that would acknowledge this common ground of loss and bewilderment, some way of asking and answering the "where were you when?" and "who did you lose?" questions. "This is my daughter, Chloe," would be followed, inevitably and involuntarily, by "she's all I have left after her mother and young brother vanished." And Buck would respond by telling Rayford about his missing sister-in-law and the niece and nephew whose absence was still a raw wound that "tugged at his heart almost constantly." Recognizing the imbalance between their respective losses, and feeling again the pangs of survivor's guilt, Buck would awkwardly express his sympathies to the Steeles, reciting the inadequate stock phrases he would have come to rely on after dozens of such conversations during the past week.

None of that happens here, of course. Instead we just get, "Hi, I'm a very important airline captain." And, "Hi, I'm the GIRAT, who's the babe?"

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* I don't know enough about the Tim/Jerry dynamic to speculate on this as subtext, but one has to wonder. They both must be aware, at some level, that their dual protagonists are thinly veiled Mary Sue surrogates. This places Jenkins in the awkward position of having to write scenes in which his stand-in is "courting" the daughter of LaHaye's stand-in. I get this picture of Jenkins sitting uncomfortably in the living room, fidgeting with a corsage in a plastic container as LaHaye asks him pointed questions about his "intentions."

Comments

[Selcaby]

I don't remember the Berlin Wall coming down specifically. I remember there being a lot about the fall of Communism on the news, but I don't remember the actual event. My two clear memories related to it are both from a year later. One is of my dad going over to run the 1990 Berlin Marathon and bringing back pieces of the Wall, complete with graffiti, for me and my sister. The other is of asking the teacher who was organising the trip to Germany (West Germany, but reunification happened just before the trip) whether my visitor's passport would still be valid to go there. Since it was my first trip abroad without parents and I wouldn't need a full passport until I was 16, I had this limited kind of passport that lasted a year and was probably only valid in western Europe.

I remember when Mrs Thatcher resigned. I was off school having just had my tonsils out and heard about it on the radio. I remember thinking that it was the kind of event that everyone ought to remember what they were doing when it happened, and that I was glad to have an event like that since I quite envied people who remembered JFK.

On 9/11 I was at work, it was early afternoon, and the guy in my office who had IRC on all the time started telling the rest of us what people on there were saying. People were speculating about nuclear war, and I got really scared although it doesn't seem very logical now, since even then we didn't think another country had attacked the US. Then my dad phoned to say that my sister's office in central London had been evacuated, since it was near the BT Tower and for all anyone knew there might have been a plane headed for that too.

At the time we had a software demo, which we would regularly present to prospective clients, where one computer was supposed to be in a city office and another one was supposed to be in the middle of nowhere (or at least, somewhere with a very bad Internet connection). So we gave them both appropriate desktop backgrounds, of Canary Wharf and a Portakabin in a field. After 9/11 I decided the Canary Wharf photo was in bad taste, so I found a picture of the London skyline instead.

[Selcaby]

I forgot to say that if I ever had any other memories of the Berlin Wall coming down, they've now been obliterated by Good Bye Lenin.

The very first newsworthy event I remember knowing about was the Falklands War. Specifically, I remember hearing about Argentina on the radio and thinking it was a nice name and that I would like to call a doll Argentina. I must have been four.

At about the same age I was under the impression that the Conservative Party and the Labour Party involved men in sober suits putting on paper hats and playing Pass the Parcel.

[Karen]

Zorya, absolutely. We old fogeys have to hang together.

Yeah, hapax, that's a good point about 9/11. It was bad, but it wasn't "The Day After" kind of bad. I keep trying to tell younger friends who are worried about Osama or Iran getting a nuke that while it would be unimaginably horribly for one bomb to explode in a major city, we're still not facing the Soviet Bleeding Union, with so much firepower that if it had been used, it would have ended the Cenozoic Era.

[Gabriel]

I remember Regan being shot. I was in the backlot playground at school and the teacher rushed out to tell us the news.

For Challenger, I was in Computer Science class. I had just walked in the door and heard from the teacher who was trying to get a portable radio channel to come in. One of the other students went to the back of the room, got the TV/VCR, and rigged an antenna with some spare wire so we could watch the news.

I don't remember much of anything specific about the Berlin Wall coming down. I just have a vague recollection of about a week of it dominating the evening news.

[burgundy]

I remember the Challenger - that was 1st grade, and in Houston, where NASA stuff is a big deal, plus of course all the schools around there were very excited about Christa MacAuliffe (and I'm sure I misspelled that, but am too sated on leftovers to worry about looking it up.) I remember the Wall coming down, but I had only a vague idea about what it meant. My first Big Event memory is the 1984 election. I was in kindergarten, and was staunchly pro-Mondale. I remember getting into an argument with a pro-Reagan fifth-grader about it.

And I remember Cold War fear. I remember the drill when we had to hide under our desks. I remember the air raid siren located on school grounds that got tested every Friday at noon. I remember the clock that would go backward or forward depending on world events, showing how long we had until nuclear war. I remember when movies using the bomb as a plot device were viscerally scary. Given how much of the fear I picked up, it probably would have been nice if the adults in my life had been a little more explicit in explaining what things like the Berlin Wall actually signified.

9/11 I was home sick from work in my brand-new first apartment that still had hardly any furniture and no TV, and my mother called. By then both towers were down and everyone knew it wasn't an accident, only it was unclear, at least from her report, who had caused it. I think she said something about Hamas. And it was days before I figured out that there was enough time between the planes' impacts and the collapse for people to get out. I thought it had happened more quickly, and so I thought everyone inside had died, and to this day the actual death toll doesn't bother me quite as much as it otherwise might because it's a relief that it wasn't 10 times that.

[Laima]

Jesurgislac, I do remember when John Lennon was shot. I was a freshman in high school, and the news went around like wildfire. I wasn't a huge Beatles fan then, so I probably feel the loss keener now that I'm older (and older than John was when he died - which is weird). :-/

[Dahne]

Damn, I feel young. I can't remember anything about the Berlin Wall falling except some vague recollection of a mention by my grade school teacher.

When the towers fell, I was in 10th grade. It was the first time I'd ever heard that those buildings that you always see in pictures of New York had names.

[Andrew N.P.]

@ 5:28 PM -- I think the "opportunity" is for witnessing. If I had to guess. After all, Tim Stu is a "scientific" "professional", so this is his chance to tell the media, in the form of Jerry Stu, his "scientific" and "professional" opinion that God killed all the children and fundies, to spare them (one assumes) from the execrable oratory of Nicolae Pyrénée. The flaw in his plan, of course, is that Jerry Stu will never file a story about said opinion, but at least it's a plan.

P.S.: here are some moar nicks for the Sundance Kid. Have fun.

[Salamanda]

My recollection of the Berlin Wall thing was pretty vague. For one thing, I was 6...but it may have also had something to do with the big honkin' earthquake we'd just had, which kind of trumped everything in my small little world.

For the record, when the quake happened, I was in the backyard on the swings, and didn't think too much of it. I just figured there was some guy with a jackhammer working on the street out front, because that's what I'd always seen on Looney Tunes. I really didn't know what my mom was on about when she ran out and threw me in under the kitchen table with my brother (who tells me that he had been jumping on the bed at the time).

The closest thing I can figure about my awareness of the Cold War is this: when I was very small, I was watching the news, and I can't even remember what the anchorwoman said, but I immediately hopped off the couch to go find my mom, and told her: "You know what? We probably shouldn't go to Russia because they're our enemies."

As for the Gulf War, I don't remember the start of it, but somewhere in my mom's collection of stuff-we-kids-wrote-for-school is a second-grade political screed on how this war needs to be over already because it's not fair that these news reports keep interrupting Saturday morning cartoons! (I mean, really!)

[Robb]

I forgot to say that if I ever had any other memories of the Berlin Wall coming down, they've now been obliterated by Good Bye Lenin.

GREAT film - one of the best films I've ever seen - I laughed, I cried, I felt like vomitting in disgust, I laughed, I smiled - I felt like a more complete human being after it was over.

[damnedyankee]

I don't remember where I was when Reagan was shot, but I do remember where I was when I heard that Wendy O. Williams killed herself.

I still miss Wendy O.

[Technomad]

The thing that bugs me about the whole "sexual continence is GOOD GOOD GOOD" meme is that it makes people totally unable to understand just how unhappy we incels are.

[damnedyankee]

That's Wendy O. Williams, people. ;-)

[Technomad]

And, as for historical events: I was two-and-a-half years old on the very day that JFK was shot; my mother told me that she was teaching me to say "I am two and a half" when the neighbor lady burst in to tell her to turn on her TV. Our family's grieving was remarkably muted; my parents both thought JFK was quite overrated.

[Jake]

Well, I'd been feeling really old lately since i went back to school and am about six years older than most of my classmates, but this thread has been helping with that.

I was six when the Berlin wall fell, but I only know that because I can do arithmetic. I have absolutely no recollection of the event itself, or of any of its context.

I have a vague memory of walking along Bloor St. with my dad while he was trying to explain either the Cold War or the Gulf War to me (I had them mixed up in my head for a long time because, to me, they were both adjective-war, so they're basically the same, right? I was young). My memories from childhood are a lot of vague impressions of visual scenes and feelings, not a lot of detail.

I remember where I was when the Twin Towers fell, though. I was also in calculus class, actually, and the prof was about 20 minutes late and when he arrived he explained that he'd been on the phone trying to reach his son in New York because the towers of the World Trade Center had fallen, and the whole class was like "what?!" and he was like "yup, both towers, down. Okay, now calculus." and he taught the damn class, disaster or no. So it wasn't really real to any of us until the class was over and we went to the Engineering students' lounge where there was a TV on and then I called my roommate, whose best friend lived in New York, to tell him to try and call and then I had a mad dash to a computer to check/send email and make sure my loved ones were okay (they were). Oddly enough, one of my most vivid memories of that day was that Peter Mansbridge (one of CBC's main newscasters) spent the whole day in front of the camera talking, and I was just blown away that anyone had that kind of stamina. My emotional response took about a week to show up, so for the first week all my friends thought I was an insensitive bastard because I didn't think it was a big deal, and then all of a sudden the enormity of it just hit me.

[Tayi]

I was about four and a half when the wall fell, and I don't remember any of it. I remember the Gulf War very dimly, in the form of a newspaper full of photos of tanks and planes and bombed out landscapes spread all over the table in the kitchen, with my father sitting over it and talking very seriously. I don't remember what he said but I remember thinking that it was a Big Deal.

9/11 happened while I was in this weird vacation-like limbo between high school and college caused by applying to college late and not starting until winter quarter. I lived on the West Coast, so I was still asleep, and my little brother burst into my room to wake me up and tell me that an airplane hit the World Trade Center. I brushed him off, thinking it was like a Cessna or something that got into an accident, and went back to sleep. It took me until later that day to finally realize what was going on.

[Strannik]

I was on the other side of the Iron Curtain, so my experience was a bit different. I was too young to remember when the Berlin Wall fell (I was three, so that sort of thing simply didn't register). However, I do remember the day the after the end of the Kremlin Coup. While the Soviet Union wouldn't formally dissolve for a few more months, after the coup, it was pretty much inevitable.

At the time, I couldn't even begin to grasp the significance of the event. I knew that my relatives were practically glued to the TV for days, but I couldn't figure out why. I remember being quite annoyed because nobody would pay attention to me. On that day, my younger siblings were born. I wasn't allowed to enter the hospital for some reason, so my grandmother took me up to the hospital window, where we basically waved at each other for a bit. I remember coming back and thinking that the sky looked very clear and I that liked how the sun was reflecting off the waves of the Neva river.

In retrospect, I remember this day as a turning point. From that day on, things started getting worse. Not that they weren't bad already, but I was too young to remember when things in Soviet Union were actually good. To me, the long lines and the ill-fitting jackets were normal*. Anyway, after that day, everything went to hell - slowly at first, but like a slowball rolling down the hill, it picked up speed and mass, quickly turning from inconvenient to uncomfortable to catastrophic.

As for 9/11, my feelings echo some of the older posters - it was bad, but after seeing your country collapse on you, not to mention the rise of the Russian mafia, the Chechen war, etc, 9/11 just couldn't compare. I do remember feeling a little sad that my classmates, who were sweetly naive when it came to the world outside their borders, got such a bitter taste of cruel reality. I remember praying and hoping that American government wouldn't do anything vindictive and stupid. Suffice to say, the next few years were quite disappointing.

[hapax]

Stannik, you were probably too young, but did your older relatives live in certainty that one day the USA was going to start a nuclear war and End The World? I've always wondered if you all felt the same constant dread that we did on "the other side."

I remember telling the story of Jonah to my Sunday School class (they were young teenagers), substituting "Moscow" for "Ninevah." I wonder if it would have the same impact nowadays if you used "Bagdad" or "Tehran."

[hapax]

I'm so sorry, that should have been "Strannik." (and "Baghdad", for that matter.) I'm dropping letters at an alarming rate.

Perhaps I should have turned down that last beer.

[Scott]

So, the obvious question is: Are they "evil" because they acted according to Libertarian ideology, or did they act according to Libertarian ideology because they were "evil"?

How is an asshole running a church relevant to any political philosophy (other than possibly the asshole's)? Ah, the actions of anyone not taking a govt paycheck are 'libertarian', unless they're good - I doubt you considered Mother Theresa a 'libertarian' simply because she worked for the Catholic Church instead of a govt - only the bad acts count. If you're about to quote Mother Theresa demanding a govt action, keep in mind that the socially conservative pastor I wrote about wants the usual socially conservative govt actions. That doesn't buy you anything; it's a wash.

Oh, and if those two stories are equivalent in your mind, why have you repeated told the one about the evil woman, and never, until now, told the one about the evil man?

Because a fundie woman who accepted a position of authority despite being in the "woman can't be in authority" camp is screwed up in a much more interesting way than your run of the mill authoritarian goon. It was the man's divorce records I spent a day off reading and getting copies of the other day, not the woman's. It was the other man's subpoena in the divorce of the first I got a copy of and emailed to him for the sheer "you can't hide the truth" thrill.

That, and her story is a briefer one than his is, and is complete. His has been an ongoing 4 year series of snide emails from me (imagine the tone of my normal postings around here, except littered with frequent f-bombs) whenever more bad news from his church got out.

RE: Sunday school incident: Gee, that's weird - this wasn't, by chance, 1st Pres of Hollywood (CA)?

No, it wasn't in CA.

Scott, I live in Austin, in Mission Presbytery. My congregation sponsored the seminary education of one of our members who was in a long-term, stable, faithful lesbian relationship. She finished school with high grades and huge support from the school, only to have her candidacy for ordination torpedoed by someone from California who had never met her.

Hmmmm..... Was this 'someone' from CA involved in "ex-lesbian" ministry?

I'm not conversant with the various flavors of Presbyterians. I though PCUSA was the nondescript mainline version. Am I wrong about that?

We've been targeted for fundie takeover.

[KnightHawk]

I was seven when the Berlin Wall came down--at the time, I was more interested in Legos.

But as for 9-11....dude, I was working at an airport when that happened. Now that was a mindfuck. Since all the planes were grounded, I must have spent eight hours pushing a broom. To this day I equate brooms with terrorism.

Love. Peace. Metallica.

[Turcano]

Who wasn't in the middle of the turmoil? This was a crisis that was, literally, everywhere.

Probably in some of those foreign places with swarthy people and funny-sounding languages, and you can't get a venti iced frappachino at all. RTCs don't frequent those sorts of places much.

[J]

Yeah, hapax, that's a good point about 9/11. It was bad, but it wasn't "The Day After" kind of bad.

Right on, Karen. The more temporal distance we put between ourselves and 9/11, the more underwhelming I find it. Okay, so 3,000-some people died. That's a very bad thing, but life is the number one cause of death. Human life has always been precarious. You can either accept that, as the wiser sort of human beings have throughout history (and in fact, I always *thought* that one of the big purposes of any religion was to enable you to regard death with some equanimity (that's YOUR death, not someone else's, ideally))...

OR, you can do as our nation has done for the past half-decade and start wars and torture people and run around screaming, "OH MY GOD! AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHH!!!" ... and do that running-around-in-a-circle- on-the-floor thing.

Tens of thousands will die this year alone--that's civilians, in America--from car wrecks. Millions of children in the world will die of diarrhea for want of 50 cents worth of electrolytes and clean water. In some places in the world, people are currently hunted down and dismembered by warriors on horseback. By contrast with all this, how conceited, how arrogant, how monumentally blinkered is it to insist that we are in "the defining struggle of our generation"? Why, 'cause no one has ever been killed violently before? Grow up, my countrymen. Read a book of history. Realize that yours is not the only and far from the worst pain in the world. Everyone in the world and everyone in history has understood this, why can't we?

"Gilamesh, where are you going?
You will never find the eternal life
That you seek. When the gods created mankind,
they also created death, and they held back
eternal life for themselves alone.
Humans are born, they live, then they die
this is the order that the gods have decreed.
But until the end comes, enjoy your life,
spend it in happiness, not despair.
Savor your food, make each of your days
a delight, bathe and anoint yourself
wear bright clothes
let music and dancing fill your house,
love the child who holds you by the hand,
and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.
That is the best way for a man to live."

[Andrew N.P.]

Scott: I think the assholes were supposed to be libertarians because they were in positions of authority and acting for personal gain instead of caring about those in their charge. Re-read the post.

(Of course, it's hardly valid as a critique of libertarianism. People with power will abuse it. No one disputes that. The nice thing about a libertarian system is precisely that one is not forced to support an "evil" pastor or corporation, as one is forced to support an "evil" government. Or am I to assume that all the progressives here are happy to "donate" to the Bush regime?)

[Inquisitive Raven]

If it happened during my college years (Lennon, the Pope, or Reagan getting shot), I heard about it in the dining hall. That's just the way things seemed to fall out. The Challenger disaster happened during my second year in grad school. I don't remember where I was when I heard about it, but in the apartment that I shared with four other people seems likely.

I was in my apartment listening to the radio when I first heard about the Berlin Wall, but it's not a particularly vivid memory for me.

For the first Gulf War, well, we'd been hearing about the prospect since Iraq invaded Kuwait. I remember that I was in a local Sears in the home electronics department when I noticed what was on TV. My first thought was "It's begun," because by that point, it was bloody obvious that war was inevitable and the only question was when.

On 9/11, I got a phone call from a friend about attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC. I got to my TV just in time to see the second plane hit the WTC. Later on we collected at the local blood donation center where I managed to get myself bounced almost instantly on a medical. My friends took longer to get deferred and in the meantime, we watched what was happening on CNN. After a while, I got tired of them replaying the same footage over and over. The thing that struck me about it was how much it looked like a disaster movie. Maybe the scale was just too much for me to grasp; I'm not sure. That was also the only time I've been to the blood donation center when they were trying to bounce people. I do recall that I emailed the one person in/near New York that I had contact information for to try to find out if she was all right, on the theory that email might get through where phones wouldn't (a lesson from the Loma Prieta earthquake). She was, thank the Goddess, fine. I was apparently the person who informed my parents about what was going on.

When the Columbia exploded, I was merchanting at an SCA event in New Hampshire called Market Day at Birka. Somehow it seems that nobody at the event heard about the disaster until after closing. I found out about it during break down.

[Fraser]

J, I think 9/11's impact has something to do with America's curiously blinkered attitude about terrorism: Despite all the bombings that took place in the sixties and seventies (4,000-plus in 1969/70 according to Time), I still saw people in the nineties writing about "What will we do if terrorism comes to America?" (and that's not even counting things like right-to-life terrorism since then).
But regardless, you're spot on about the impact. Which I guess makes both of us terrorist loving sickos who want the Taliban to conquer America.

[Painini]

hapax (and successors), re: existential terror - Being post-Cold War myself, I don't know quite how to explain the overreaction to you. I'll try; can only speak for myself, though.

We had 'emergency preparedness kits' at my grade school, and when stuck in for recess one day a group of us started flipping through. One of the pages included response instructions in case of nuclear attack; we found that hilariously outdated. After all, the Cold War was over, the bogeyman our parents told us about broken into odd-shaped pieces. No, we didn't have that existential terror, that's the entire point. (although, in semi-large 'city', who'd bother with us anyway?)

We weren't taught the finer points of 'The End of History' poli-theory, mind, but we picked up that we lived in the big country, the strong country. We knew horrible things happened, in other countries (and some of the kids at school had been there for, or barely dodged, those horrible things), and that less 'The Day After' traumas happened here - over which everyone still obsessed. (Columbine's body count wasn't so large, either, but damned if those ripples didn't sway us.)

We knew Americans were bad to Americans. But the huge fear my parents told me about - that I could never really get - was not a fear of Americans, now was it? And the rest of the world - who would mess with us?

So the 9-11 thing wasn't 'two buildings fell, thousands died.' It was, 'someone messed with us, and who thinks they're done now? Anyone?' When the war started, of course, more than a few of my peers were expecting to hear a draft called any day.

I mean, it's not so much the event that bothers me now, either. But it was the wake-up call, and the ripples - well, the decision-makers treated it like the Apocalypse, and reacted to it as such. September 11, 2001 wasn't the day everything went to hell; but it was the first dirt falling at a funeral for a friend.

An idea - the country I thought I grew up in.

J - you can do as our nation has done for the past half-decade and start wars and torture people and run around screaming

It's been an ongoing process, J, realising that 'my country' had been doing all of that, all my life. And at some level, since before it was born itself.

[LMM]

it's not as hard to resist as it seems to you every day. Real Men can resist, no problem. In fact, they hardly need to resist; they just casually feel that sex isn't that big a deal, hardly worth bothering really.

Am I the only person for whom this statement is *true*? Mind you, I'm female.

Thlayli, were you on the II boards circa '00?

[Jackie]

@J: I know I overreacted, and I knew I was overreacting as I was writing, but the fact that you wrote that without really meaning Brazil is part of why I feel that way: people don't think much about how things are here. To them, they just are this way. The other part is that it is personal for me. I get IMed by total strangers offering money for dates, naked pics, wanting to hire me for a porn, or asking if I spent my days sambing in a g-string while watching soccer. It's almost funny that a good number of guys say they're interested in a more serious relationship heading to marriage, because "you guys still know how a wife has to treat her husband, and brazilian women are great cookers!"

I was going to say that I didn't believe Buck was a virgin, that the first book said he hadn't been in many serious relationships, but said nothing about sex. I just assumed that he had it without the relationship part. But I started the second book after dinner and wow! Now I can't wait to see what Fred will say about that.

I wasn't all that great about watching news while I was growing up. I was sent to bed somewhere around 8:30, so we used the time before that to play on the street with the other kids or to watch japanese super-heros. The only nights I was allowed to stay awake late were the nights before we had to travel to meet dad. Then mom would pack with the tv on and I'd stay around sneaking peeks on the news. There were videos of violent events all around the world, always preceeded by warnings about them not being suitable for children and sensible people, and I'd feel terrified all night. Saddam was the Strong Man of Iraq, and I thought he had superpowers and that the country had no army, and that their enemies had to destroy only him and the whole country would surrender.
I remember watching about the Wall, but I'm almost sure I didn't see it at the time it happened, only reruns of the coverage some years later, because the brazilian reporter who covered it was our GIRAT and there has been some The Best of Pedro Bial tv programs since then. I remember reading about the Wall on geography books before I read about it on history books, though, and I was impressed that the Wall was build on a November 7th and that it fell on a November 9th, while my birthday was on November 8th. In 2004 I went to Germany for a winter course and a teacher showed us Good Bye Lenin on class. I didn't understand much without subtitles, but I cried all the time.
The first big event I remember was our first democratic elections after the end of the ditactorship, though, in 1989. I remember it because my father campaigned for one candidate and I was harrassed at school for wearing his buttons and symbol. Everybody else liked Collor, the candidate who won (dad used to say the new Constitution lowered the minimum age for voting to 16 so all the teens would vote for Collor because he was cuter). 3 years later, when the impeachment came and the youth went to the streets to protest against him, I felt almost vindicated, but I also felt scared because the older people were scared. They were used to the dictatorship times, and all that ugly business of criticizing The President just couldn't end up well...
9-11 happened during a strike on the public universities, so the campus was almost desert. I was there working on the lab, and we went to the Physics department because they had a tv on their restaurant. On the afternoon, I had a meeting with a group of other students regarding some education project for local schools. One of the guys drove me home and we talked about the towers. All I could talk about was how I kept thinking of Joseph Heller in Closing Time. Then I tried to explain what I was talking about, started talking about Catch 22 and ended up sounding like a madwoman.

[ako]

The Oakwood Mutiny in the Philippines was the morning after I arrived for Peace Corps training. We were supposed to be able to sleep in because of the jet lag, so they'd scheduled nothing until noon. I got woken up by my roommate at eight, I think. She said, "We have to get up. There's been a coup."

It would turn out to be a rather unsuccessful and unimpressive coup attempt (although if you're going to have failed coups, I'm in favor of ones where no one dies). Peace Corps let us each have one phone call, and ten minutes on the internet to reassure our loved ones. My parents hadn't even known it happened until I called and told them.

Proclamation 1017, declaring a nationwide state of emergency, happened at the very end of my Peace Corps service. It was declared the day before I flew up to Manila to do the paperwork ending my service. When I got into Manila, the streets were half-empty; a lot of public transportation and jobs had been shut down, and all the school kids. They had posters up all over the city for the movie V for Vendetta, interspersed with homemade "No to 1017" and "No to Martial Law" signs. It created a rather odd effect. The whole state of emergency was ended before I actually flew out.

I was about a mile away from the Ati-atihan shooting in 2006, because I didn't manage to get myself out of bed for the church service (I'm neither particularly religious, nor a morning person). About a month later, I was in Manila a few days before and the day after the Valentine bombings (when I heard about the bombings, I was lying in a swimming pool at midnight, at the best wedding I've ever attended). But no one outside the Philippines is likely to have heard of any of this.

[Jesurgislac]

cjmr: With Reagan I don't think it was so much a question of 'poor' aim as of overly good doctors. Even ten years earlier, medical technology wise, and they might not have saved him.

My dad is really not the kind of person who seriously wishes death on anyone, not even on a senile evil old man (and in 1981 we didn't know exactly how evil things would get). Nor would he ever, even in joke, wish that a doctor would do less than their best. His joke was precisely that, given an assassin, couldn't they at least be an effective assassin? ("Sir, you're a thorough scoundrel... but I do admire your thoroughness!")

I remember the week leading up to Thatcher's resignation, because the Tuesday before it happened I was sitting with a group of friends in the salad bar at the Royal Festival Hall, and a latecomer was taking off her coat and offering to fetch another bottle and briefing us on the latest news she'd heard on her car radio - and a total stranger turned round and said to us, with happiness in her voice, "Has she resigned?" and we had to break it to her that no, not yet, they were still "discussing". (I am not as nice a person as my dad. I am looking forward to Thatcher's death: we have a party pledge. For Section 28 alone this merits champagne.)

I remember the morning I switched on my radio and heard the announcer say "bombs are falling on Baghdad" and understood that the US-Iraq Gulf War had started.

I remember the morning I woke, switched on the radio, and heard that the 18 years of Conservative regime in the UK were finally over. (Not that Labour hasn't, in many ways, been disappointing - but oh so much better than the Conservative rule that had been part of my life since I was 12.)

I also remember hearing that the Conservatives had won, in 1979, the first General Election whose results I remember paying any real attention to.

[Praline]

My point is there's a difference between pleasure-as-a-good and pleasure-as-the-ultimate-good.

I agree with Ako - I don't think love of personal pleasure is excessive until it makes you willing to hurt other people. I don't do drugs because they’d hurt me in the long term, and also for the same reason I wouldn't buy blood diamonds – too many people get hurt trading them. I don't cheat on my partner because it would hurt him and hurt my own conscience. On the other hand, this world is a beautiful gift and I like to enjoy it as much as possible; the more I'm enjoying it, the easier I find it to be virtuous. I do think there's such a thing as innocent pleasure, and pleasure in good things can drain the temptation to take pleasure in bad things.

[Lee Ratner]

On a slight tangent, but relevant to the whole Buck-tryin-to-nail-Ray's-baby-girl thing - I've been wondering for some time why our little Bucky has reached the age of thirty without ever, apparently, knowing the touch of a woman. I think we're all agreed that a secular-minded, educated, successful, confident, attractive man is highly unlikely to hang on to his lily right into his thirties - so what's the explanation? I've got a few theories, but in the light of today, possibly I may have to revise them.

My own theory is that Buck is like certain types of people who are not good at recognizing social cues and end up getting their experience latter than sooner. This is not a crticize of these people in the real world, I'm more or less one of them.

[Scott]

I am not as nice a person as my dad. I am looking forward to Thatcher's death

Ah, Compassion(tm) at work.

Scott: I think the assholes were supposed to be libertarians because they were in positions of authority and acting for personal gain instead of caring about those in their charge. Re-read the post.

Sorry, I guess I gave WM too much credit and assumed he/she had some semblance of a point relative to govt or politics. I forgot, care = liberal, not care = everyone else, by definition. Since all assholes are by definition government opponents (regardless of their actual social conservative beliefs, assholes are 'libertarians', even as they support Bush's illegal searches and waterboarding), govt is therefore proven good (despite said illegal searches and waterboarding).

Gotcha.

Or am I to assume that all the progressives here are happy to "donate" to the Bush regime?

Those donations are called taxes. You tell me if that label changes the level of progressive happiness about them.

Back to the topic: something ugly happened to the 'white' (for lack of a better way of phrasing it) evangelical church when Shrub got himself elected. There were always the Falwells and the like, but the rank and file of even Presbyterian churches got on this god-awful 'leadership' kick. Leadership, leadership, leadership. (Note to self, take the Intl Justice Mission off my giving list for participating in that travesty). Obey the leader. Submit to the leader. "If you don't have leadership, you don't have anything" (WM, the pastor who said that to me also had a penis - happy?).

I guess if you can't submit to your leader, who you can see, how can you submit to Geebus, who you can't? If faith is all that keeps you out of Hell, and faith is defined as belief in assertions of fact despite the evidence to the contrary, then you have to be pretty damn submissive to avoid eternal hellfire. Best to just find a Strong Leader (like Rayford) to erase your doubts thru his personal charisma and manly willpower.

[Drak Pope]

The nice thing about a libertarian system is precisely that one is not forced to support an "evil" pastor or corporation, as one is forced to support an "evil" government.

Good point. The most a libertarian system can do is to make it exceedingly likely that poor people are forced to depend on an "evil" religious group or an "evil" corporation for almost all of your needs. That way you can separate yourself from them, as long as you're cool with not being able to pay your medical bills or have electricity or other things like that.

[inge]

harpax: I think that's one of the things that's so infuriating about the whole 9/11 hysteria to old fogies like me. Not that it wasn't a horrible, horrible tragedy, but we remember what truly living in real existential terror feels like.

Wordy McWord of the Clan McWord on that. Although with 9/11, after the first WTF had worn off, I was afraid that the US would be doing something extremely stupid.

Your question to Strannik, did your older relatives live in certainty that one day the USA was going to start a nuclear war and End The World?

I was 20 miles west of the Iron Curtain, and convinced that the world would get destroyed because someone or something messed up. Technical failure, human error, miscommunication, computer glitches, you name it. I didn't expect anyone to be stupid enough to actually start a nuclear war (though I had my doubts about Reagan), but I always was a firm believer in Murphy's law.

[cjmr's husband]

Never forget the greatest hero of the Cold War

[alfgifu]

Sarah Jane: I think that many of us are profoundly shaped by childhood environments and memories -- whether it's the Depression or the post-9/11 world. It makes me wonder what my own [as-yet-hypothetical] children will experience and remember, and how the world of their childhood will shape the people they become.

This is so true - I'm the eldest of four and there's a real difference in our perceptions of the world. I grew up in the optimistic little breather at the end of the 21st century, but my youngest sister didn't really encounter the outside world until 9/11. It shows - I'm inclined to be optimistic about other nations. She is darkly cynical about (and slightly frightened by) America.

I was four when the Berlin Wall came down. I don't remember that, or the start of the first Gulf War, but I do remember asking Mum why she was singing in the kitchen, and being told that the Gulf War had ended. At the time, I imagined they had been fighting over a golf course.

When Thatcher resigned I thought it was a pity our prime minister would no longer be a woman (I wasn't really up to speed with politics, yet!) I also remember the rhyme that went round my school - you drew a stick figure with a puffy hairdo on one hand and held it up: "Here's Maggie Thatcher, throw her up and catch her, squish her, squash her, there's Maggie Thatcher!" Then you held up the other hand, which had a drawing of a mangled stick-figure.

I was on a message board at UK lunchtime on 9/11, then left the computer for a class, then went home early because one of my teachers was away. I first heard that something was happening from a friend on the bus and went straight to the TV when I got home. Later that evening I went back online and saw that the next post after I left at lunchtime ran: 'Oh my god a plane just crashed into the building next to me'. By the time I saw it, the poster had come back and reassured everyone that she was safe, but it still made everything immediate and rather gut-wrenching, even to remember, because it was weirdly closer to home than any terrorist attack in London had ever been - of course, that changed in 2005.

inge: Although with 9/11, after the first WTF had worn off, I was afraid that the US would be doing something extremely stupid.

Snap!

[cjmr's husband]

Interesting democide article -- although I didn't see the Evil Liberal United States Government Employee statistics.

No statistics in the article are denoted as by the U.S., although the "African Slavery" and "Native American" statistics almost certainly are. Most of slavery deaths are almost certainly due to private citizens. There were deliberate Evil Gov't Bureacracy policies involved in the slaughter of the Indians (smallpox blankets anyone?) which would be considered democide, but the actual battle deaths wouldn't.

Both cases, of course, would involve a government that was dealing with people that it didn't consider citizens.

And before Scott brings it up, people killed in FBI, ATF, and police raids on criminal strongholds can be considered democide, but the numbers pale in comparison to just about every other cause of death in this country, even back in the Black Helicopter days of President William Jefferson Stalin.

[wintermute]

How is an asshole running a church relevant to any political philosophy (other than possibly the asshole's)? Ah, the actions of anyone not taking a govt paycheck are 'libertarian', unless they're good - I doubt you considered Mother Theresa a 'libertarian' simply because she worked for the Catholic Church instead of a govt - only the bad acts count.

It was probably a little off of me to use "libertarian" to mean simple selfishness, but the basic idea of doing what you want without considering how other feel about it, and then letting it all get sorted out by the free market seems to fit in pretty nicely with Libertarian philosophy.

Mother Theresa was an evil shit who spent decades of her life keeping poor people from receiving medical attention because suffering would bring them closer to god. It somehow doesn't surprise me that you consider that a wonderful thing, but no, I wouldn't label her a Libertarian.

>Oh, and if those two stories are equivalent in your mind, why have you repeated told the one about the evil woman, and never, until now, told the one about the evil man?

Because a fundie woman who accepted a position of authority despite being in the "woman can't be in authority" camp is screwed up in a much more interesting way than your run of the mill authoritarian goon. It was the man's divorce records I spent a day off reading and getting copies of the other day, not the woman's. It was the other man's subpoena in the divorce of the first I got a copy of and emailed to him for the sheer "you can't hide the truth" thrill.

Sooo... you entertain yourself by reading the details of the story you consider less interesting? Not sure that makes sense, but it's a free world.

[Brandi]

Scott: Now show us on the doll where those church officials touched you.

[Jon]

Having read all the posts late, (I was invited out yesterday) I felt compelled to add that my earliest memory of a major event was battles in Korea, and chanting "I Like Ike." Just to let you know that there are some here on Friday's who are a bit older.

Jon

[Ember Keelty]

Am I the only person for whom this statement is *true*? Mind you, I'm female.

No, I'm the same. Mind you, I'm not only female, but also a bit young. I'm not a child, though.

Scott: Now show us on the doll where those church officials touched you.

I have only four words for you:

Rape. Is. NEVER. Funny.

[wintermute]

>Good point. The most a libertarian system can do is to make it exceedingly likely that poor people are forced to depend on an "evil" religious group or an "evil" corporation for almost all of your needs.

And what a socialist or progressive system can do is make it mandatory that everyone is forced to depend on an "evil" government. A big institution is a big institution is a big institution; government isn't excluded from that. It isn't some divine being and thus the one institution immune from human nature.

The difference is that corporations have a moral duty to increase their shareholder value, which they do by not giving away expensive cancer treatments to people with no ability to pay for it; whereas governments have a moral duty to provide essential services such as food, clean water or (in civilised countries) health care.

With an "evil" government providing services, the poor have the ability to opt out if they so choose. When all services are provided by "evil" corporations, they never have the opportunity to opt in in the first place.

I'm sure that Scott's brand of Libertarianism has some magical formula for ensuring that no-one is ever poor though. But unless it involves them all dying of easily-preventable diseases, I can't imagine what it is.

[pepperjackcandy]

About the Berlin Wall, I agree with the people who say that it's a shock thing. Relatedly, I doubt that most U.S. radio and television stations interrupted normal broadcasting to announce it. Not that I'd know for sure, because, counting back and using an international time converter, I'm pretty sure that I was in the middle of teaching reading to third graders at the time. 8-)

Who wasn't in the middle of the turmoil? This was a crisis that was, literally, everywhere.

It's even more absurd in context. We're, what, two, three weeks into the disappearances now, and the GIRAT has at last set to work investigating it. Why? Because his reporter's instinct tells him that the disappearance of a sizable percentage of the earth's population could be an important story? Because his editor said, "GIRAT or no GIRAT, if you don't turn in something on the biggest event in modern history, you're fired"? No, it's because he's finally learned of the existence of someone who was "in the middle of the turmoil," at least in the sense of being in an airport on that day. But if that's his criterion, why not just interview Hattie? For that matter, why interview anyone? Why didn't he just write an account of what he'd witnessed (you know, report on it), since he'd been "in the middle of the turmoil" too?

He had been tempted to tell Captain Steele

Would anyone, with the possible exception of airline personnel, refer to an off-duty pilot as "Captain"?

[damnedyankee]

Stalinism is socialism.

And little bon mots like that are why you find yourself treated like an idiot, Scott. I guess then it's fair for me to say that Chile under Pinochet was textbook libertarianism?

[Andrew N.P.]

Ember: I cite Carlin's proof by contradiction. Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd. Q.E.D.

Wintermute: government has a moral duty to provide food? That's a new one. Looking around my house, I don't see any "Uncle Sam" brand processed foodstuffs. Unless you count Uncle Sam Walton. I CAN HAS GUMMINT CHEEZBURGER? (I assume you meant food stamps, but this is funnier.)

Scott: "relatively little mass murder" is perhaps the best description of the U.S. government EVAR. And I think the opting out wintermute mentioned was on the part of the poor person. Peter can't opt out of being robbed, but Paul can opt out of taking the stolen goods. Which means moar loot for the bureaucrats! It's a win-win!

[Andrew N.P.]

And d-yank, PROTIP: dictators are not libertarians. By definition. Granted, "textbook libertarianism" would probably devolve into Mafia-style anarchy, but that's just because human nature sucks.

[pepperjackcandy]

Personally, Buck always reminded me of "ex"-gays. [snip] he pursues an awkward no-chemistry courtship with a good Christian girl.

The $1,000,000 question: Does Buck actually say that he's a virgin, or does he say he's never had sex with a woman?