Lovely Wife and I aren't very religious. Depending on the state of the world I wax from agnostic to part-time believer. She's much the same but trends toward the believer side. As a result we're not the most regular churchgoers. You might say that we're not churchgoers at all but then people might look at you funny and wonder why you were talking to your monitor so I advise against it.

As far as religion goes we'd like our kids to make up their own minds. That requires a bit of exposure to religion that, as previously noted, we're not the best at providing. To get them that exposure the two older ones go to a religious preschool. This has a couple of side benefits as this particular preschool is both eminently affordable as well as being the best school, hands down, in our area. In addition to the normal preschool stuff learning letters and numbers, playing, learning to get along with other kids and celebrating September 8 birthdays on September 11 (I'm not bitter, why do you ask?) they also attend a mini service once a week and do other little religious things. One of those little things is a "prayer angel". A prayer angel is a little white stuffed bear and a prayer journal that the little guys take home on a rotating weekly basis. The kid gets to pray with the angel and after a week the kid and parent can write down how they pray, what they pray, etc in the journal to share with the class.

We don't pray. I shouldn't say we never pray. We just don't pray in the traditional sense. We pray in the profane sense that is a no-no according to one of the big 10 rules. We don't do it often, generally only at especially painful mishaps or unusually offensive drivers, and never around the kids. This prayer angel was a problem for us. Bear brought it home yesterday and we were at a loss what to do with it. Fortunately for us Bear is a bit better at this than we are.

We had the prayer angel on the desk all night and since that's in our bedroom we forgot about it when we put the kids to bed. Bear woke up and remembered it and hollered until we brought it to him and he slept with it all night. That's not really what it's for but we figured "what the hell, might as well get some use out of it". (That's one of those not-quite-a-traditional-prayer-things I was trying to explain above.)

This morning he greeted Lovely Wife with a hug and instructions. "Mama, write in the book that I prayed for the soldiers. I like soldiers, they are heroes."

Do I have great kids or what?

Posted by: Jim at 02:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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In order to do this, left click over the Z (below) and hold the button down as you drag it over to the J. This will test the click/drag coefficient of your mouse.

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Posted by: Jim at 09:31 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Posted by: Jim at 01:39 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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That's 9/11+1 by the way. That's actually only part of it as the number goes on forever. I'd love to turn that into a fitting allegory but it's quarter to 12:00 and I'm starving, over caffeinated and under nicotteinated so the brain juices aren't flowing too well.

It's the day after 9/11 and I'm feeling much better, thank you very much. A tour around the blogosphere shows that I wasn't the only one who was a bit out of sorts yesterday either. As things return to a more normal atmosphere (mostly my mood) I remembered something else very important that I discovered on 9/11/01. You don't have to be a citizen of the USA in order to be a patriot. My wife is a German citizen (Don't bother calling the INS on us, she's here legally). On 9/11/01 and the following days my Lovely Wife showed a love and passion for the States that I have seen on very few Americans (and I served with Marines for 4 years). She was just like a mother whos child was attacked. She was fierce and outraged and unbelievably frustrated that she couldn't help.

I guess the mother/child allegory is fitting as this is her adopted country. She does not wish to become a citizen - Germany is her homeland and always will be. At one time this bothered me. After all, if you're going to be living in a country for the rest of your life shouldn't you, at a minimum, embrace that country as your own? Well she has embraced it and far more intimately than a great many people who take the tests, pay the money and say the official words. She embraced the United States in her heart and the events of September 2001 allowed me to finally see that.

That's my Lovely Wife. German. American. Patriot.

Posted by: Jim at 11:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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My 9/11 post received a very lovely response from H over at Everyday Stranger that caused me to reread that very same post. Yikes! Don't worry, y'all. I'm not in that bad shape. I wrote and posted angry yesterday so it was a lot more fierce than it probably should have been.

Anyway, my reply to her ended up on the longish side and both include some valuable stuff so I'm putting 'em out here in the open instead of just commenting or mailing back.

Thanks for the kind words and concern, H.

I was writing angry yesterday so that post came off a bit stronger than it should have. But not by too much, unfortunately. I don't want to be a bigot, racist or hatefilled person. I never was before 9/11 and the fact that it is so difficult to fight down these base impulses, and the way it makes me feel when I recognize my own attitudes, makes me hate them even more for what they've stolen from me. It's a nasty and vicious circle that feeds on itself.

But it is getting better. Educating myself has helped enormously. Time helps. Afghanistan and Iraq are helping - seeing that progress can be made in that region and that the psychos really do seem to be a minority. Ironically, France is helping. The way they are totally screwing themselves over their own fundamentalist problems has gone a long way towards showing how much stronger we Americans are as a country and a collective culture.

I don't blame all arabs anymore. Yes, I am initially leary when I run into someone of obvious arabic heritage, but I'm at least ashamed of my emotional reaction and can conciously master it now.

I do still believe that fundamentalism is a problem that will never go away so long as there are fundamentalists. Fanatics of any stripe, whether islamic terrorists or anti-abortion snipers are dangerous by their nature. Fundamentalism, especially when tied to the arabic culture, breeds fanatics faster than free range bunnies. To actually defeat terrorism we must educate the arabs and bring them into this century. A change in their culture is absolutely required in order to end the worldwide terrorism problem but if that change is suffrage, education and franchisement then is it really such a bad thing?

Posted by: Jim at 08:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Warning: 9/11 post ahead. It isn't a sad post but it is an angry one.

This isn't really going to be about 9/11, per se. Not really about the terrorists, the horror, the many hours spent glued to frightening images being played over and over again. It's not going to be about the dread anticipation as we waited to find out what was happening with that missing plane. Not about the mental inventory of family and friends to determine if anybody we knew was in the towers or the City. It's also not about the frustration of being at work and not being able to get any news or the partial relief when Lovely Wife started sending simulcast emails as she watched everything on CNN. It's not about the tremulous "Did you hear"s as people arrived in the office or the silence when their look told you that yes, they most certainly did already hear. It's not about the many phone calls with Lovely Wife that day as we took turns calming each other down. It's most certainly not about the shattering of my illusions.

No, wait. That's exactly what it's about. The shattering of my illusions. Not the illusion of safety that many people lost that day but the illusion of my own lack of bias. This is about how I became racist for the first time in my life.

I've lived and worked all over the States. As a kid my best friends were Suman and Parul (who were from India) and Mark Mittlemark (who was Jewish). In High School I was in with the Jocks, Brains and Stoners. I was in the Navy for 8 years, serving with every minority you can imagine. I've lived in suburbia, urbia and borderline slums. I've lived in a house of women and roomed with a homosexual man. The personal trait I am most proud of is my lack of racism and bias and I've spent a lifetime minus two years enjoying the benefits of it.

Before September 11, 2001 I was a borderline apologist. Oh I didn't go so far as to voice support for the PLO or anything like that but I was always the one person who would say that we couldn't paint all Palestinians with that brush. Similarly, I was the one who said we needed to respect the culture of the Arab nations. What's normal for one people is not normal for another but that does not give one the right to criticize the other. When talk turned to Islamic terrorists I very quickly spoke up that the vast majority of muslims were just as peaceful as anybody else. When fundamental Islam came up I made sure that everybody knew that most of them were simply firm believers and we shouldn't let some bad apples spoil the bushel.

Boy was I an idiot. And it only took 3000 deaths and one day of emotional hell to educate me. There can be no respect for things that are, by their very nature, abhorrent. If your culture says it's okay to target civilians to achieve your ends then your culture as a whole is wrong. It is not just this person or that person, it is every single participant of that culture. If your culture says that it is okay to mutilate your daughter and cut off her clitoris then your culture is wrong. Every member of that culture is just as guilty as the person who wields the razor. If your culture says it's okay to kill your daughter or sister to protect or avenge your family honor then every member of that culture is a murderer. If you drive an airplane into a skyscraper and your people dance in the streets with joy at the mass murder of your civilian targets then those people need to be dancing at the ends of ropes.

9/11 taught me how to hate an entire people. It opened my eyes to the fact that some cultures are simply wrong at their very cores. It educated me to the fact that some people are evil and dangerous and wrong simply because they are part of something that is evil and dangerous and wrong.

I know now that there is no such thing as a good or peaceful radical fundamentalist. I know without a doubt that anybody from the Middle East really should be viewed with distrust and suspicion until they can prove they are trustworthy. I know that arabs don't want peace and they will never, ever leave us alone. And I know that there is only one realistic way for us to be safe and it does not include autonomous muslim states.

That was then, this is now.

Pretty scary stuff, eh? It scared the hell out of me, that's for sure. I felt that way for a decent portion of 2001 and right into 2002. Gradually I came out of that cloud of hatred and bias. I no longer think that our best bet would be to give Kansas to Israel and then create the Great Glass Plains out of the former Middle East. I'm not quite back to where I was though, and I doubt that I ever will be. I still think that fundamental Islam is wrong by its very nature. I'm still a bit leary of arabic people. I'm still quick to think any act of violence was muslim terrorists until proven otherwise. I still think that any permanent solution to the terrorist problem must involve a wholesale change of arabic culture and the elimination of fundamentalist dogma. I am still more than ready to blame every single supporter of the cultures that breed this evil for the actions of that evil.

That's my legacy of 9/11. I doubt that's what they wanted - to galvanize the people of America against themselves and their kind - but that's what they got. As you sow, so shall ye reap. Reap it, you bastards.

Posted by: Jim at 12:02 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Apologies in advance for the people who will be offended by this post. No insult is intended. I could be totally wrong in my suppositions or simply lacking enough exposure to get the full picture. Then again, I could be completely right. Either way I welcome discussion and comments on the topic and hope that bashing, slamming and/or verbal dismemberment will be kept to a minimum.

I read quite a bit. Generally 2 to 3 books a week or more. Reading has been a part of my life since I was 3 or 4 years old and is my one obsession that will probably never fail. My book reading is mainly fiction - fantasy, sci-fi, or real-world.

The book I'm currently reading is Rules of Engagement by Elizabeth Moon. Moon has made the rape and abuse of her heroine a central focus of this book. I've been reading this book and I've been getting more and more uncomfortable with it but I'm continuing because the it is well written and the story, apart from those elements, is pretty good. But those elements are totally and completely unnecessary. I have a tendency to edit a book as I read it, rewriting or replaying it in my head with changes that would have made it simpler or better. With this book I can completely remove the raping and abuse with absolutely no deleterious effect on the story. Nada. None. The story works perfectly well without it. So why is it in there? It adds nothing and is actually making this book less enjoyable than it should be.

This thought got me thinking along another tangent. Many of my favorite female big name SF & Fantasy writers (McCaffery, LeGuin, Roberson, Rawn) have written rapes in their stories. Rape and rape fantasy is a staple of Harlequin style books, which are written for a female audience generally by female authors. Anne Rice, one of the biggest names in fantasy/horror literature, has made a franchise of sexual conquest, rape, abuse and sexual acts with children in her writing.

As I explored this in my head it became more and more apparent that rape content is not generally used by my favorite male authors. I can't think of a Martin, Roberts, Henlein, Brooks or Asprin book that had a rape in them. Weber used rape in one book of the Honor Harrington series but he handled it en post facto. He didn't describe it or dwell on it. He concentrated on how enraged it made his characters.

So what's up here? Why do female writers tend to write about rape, abuse, etceteras more often and more graphically? And why? My basic thought would be just the opposite - wouldn't women writers tend to avoid a subject like rape? I'm at the wild conjecture stage but here are some of my thoughts. Try to overlook the generalizations and see the intended points:

• Women are closer to, and more affected by, rape and abuse. As it is a subject that they think of more often they naturally fit it in their writing more often than males.
• Rape is frightening for women. Men have a different basic fear set. A female writer might tend to use rape as a scare tactic when a male writer will use something that generally frightens males.
• Similar to the above, a female writer might use rape to paint her bad guy as bad where a male writer might tend to use murder or some other nasty deed instead.
• Also similar to the above, a female writer might use rape survival to show how "tough" her heroine is while a male writer would go elsewhere.
• (I'm going to get slapped for this one.) The "Harlequin" mentality indicates a fascination with rape fantasy that ties into the fear of rape itself. The brutish man forces himself on (and in) the heroine but midway through the act she surrenders to his inexorable charms and falls in love. This is reflected in the writing of female authors.
• Because females are the general victims of rape (there just aren't a whole lot of male rape victims outside the penal system) they "own" it. Female writers can write about rape simply because they are female. Male writers are uncomfortable writing about it because they fear being tarred with the rapist brush. This would be similar to how a minority comedian can make jokes about his minority but a white male comedian better not.

Update: One more I thought of in the shower today:

• What's the market slice for fantasy/sci-fi? If it is significantly male, could female writers be putting in rape and abuse of women because they think it tittilates their male readers?

Posted by: Jim at 12:27 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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9/8 is Bacon's birthday. That was yesterday. He's three now and he had a blast at the little party we threw for him. It was just the family - Lovely Wife, me, Bear, Burger, G and G's wife. He hasn't been in school long enough to have made any friends yet and all of his little friends from last year fell out for one reason or another. He still had a lot of fun.

9/11 is not his birthday. If it was, we would celebrate it on that date. 9/9 isn't his birthday either. 9/11 is when his preschool teacher wants to celebrate it. You see, he only goes to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Today (Tuesday, 9/9) is a birthday party for another kid who's birthday is also not today so the closest day available for Bacon would be 9/11.

We told his teacher (Ms. Nancy) that we did not want to have his birthday celebrated on 9/11. We explained that if his birthday was actually on 9/11 that would be totally different but that we have a serious problem with moving a party to that date. We feel it is disrespectful and just...wrong...to have an anniversary party on that day when the actual anniversary isn't actually on that day.

She said that she understood but that if the birthday wasn't celebrated on 9/11 then they would not be able to do it at all this year. The calendar was drawn up before the school year started and there is not another day that could serve. This strikes me as bullshit. These littles have a school year of around 36 weeks. Two classes a week makes over 70 days of school. For the next 8 months there is not a single day that is not scheduled so heavily that there's no time between now and the end of the year for her to lead the kids in a round of "Happy Birthday"? Bullshit, Ms Nancy. Bullshit.

So what do we do? Forbid the in-school celebration? It's just the above-mentioned singing during snack time and an activity or two. No huge loss. He doesn't care about the attention at all - a birthday to him means that he gets money. Since he won't get money there he's not going to care either way. It could actually make him sad when he gets the lead-up and then there's no cash reward. But all of the other students will have their birthday day, will he wonder why they all do but he doesn't?

We don't want to rob him of his due but we also want all of our kids to understand the solemnity and importance of 9/11. Oh, don't worry - I'm not going to push it down their throats. Just as much as they are ready to understand, same as Easter and Memorial Day and the rest of the days of import. But is there a way out of our rock and hard place dilemma?

Posted by: Jim at 09:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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