172. leeward

Several weeks ago I discovered that a friend of mine had never seen the 1964 film version of Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady, with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. It was rather shocking because A) I grew up with it and can’t imagine anyone else not having seen it; and B) he’s gay… and, well, musicals seem the particular purview of the gays. Hell, it’s one of the qualities that all but gave me away back in the day. (My friend Emily said, “You got way too excited about Sondheim to be straight.”)

My friend and I were talking about the moment that language goes from being merely parroting to true acquisition, when words go from sounds to meaning, and I brought up this iconic scene:

He had a percipient observation about the show: namely, that it’s a picture of imperialism. Eliza Doolittle is taken from the gutter by the chauvinistic Henry Higgins, dressed in the garb of the upper class, and taught how to speak and behave “properly.” In the same way, Native American children were taken from their homes by Christian missionaries and taught how to speak, behave and dress like proper Christians (i.e., Western Caucasian culture).

The reason we were talking about this scene, and this song in particular, is that it illustrates that “light bulb” moment. My college French teacher told my class that her’s took place one semester while studying abroad. She was reading in a tree one day, she said, and all of a sudden everything just snapped into place. She didn’t have to translate from French into English anymore. The words carries meaning.

Writer David Sedaris describes a similar moment in Me Talk Pretty One Day, from the essay collection of the same name:

It was mid-October when the teacher singled me out, saying, “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” And it struck me that, for the first time since arriving in France, I could understand every word that someone was saying.

Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive. The teacher continued her diatribe and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult. . .

The world opened up, and it was with great joy that I responded, “I know the thing that you speak exact now. Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus.”

These moments came to mind because several weeks ago I finally stopped believing in God. That’s not to say that I haven’t been an atheist these past two years. I still see no evidence or reason now to continue believing in God. The difference is that, a couple of weeks ago, I finally stopped missing God. It’s like that moment when you finally get over someone you’ve held a torch for, and one day, for whatever reason, those feelings stop. The memory of the love and the feeling is still there, but the gravitational pull doesn’t yank you out of your own orbit every time it wheels around.

Walking to work one morning a couple of weeks ago, the part of me that missed having a God to believe in went away. I’m not sure why it happened just then, but it was as if a balloon had popped, or a string were, and I wasn’t tethered to those feelings anymore. I didn’t feel the need to get angry or mean when someone talked about God or faith. I still get upset when hearing about someone being hurt by Christians, but then I get upset when anyone is hurt by anybody, for any reason.

I’m still passionate about the separation of church and state, about promoting secular and humanist values in society and throughout the world, and encouraging people to think for themselves instead of letting their thinking be done for them by those who want to fetter everyone in the world to a 2,000-year-old book. But I’m not doing it out of some revenge fixation, like a jilted lover railing against an ex.

None of us had a choice about being born in the proverbial Christian missionary school and taught the clean, holy Christian ways of the White Man. Neither did any of us have a choice about being attracted to members of the same sex. Eliza Doolittle chose to become the pupil of Henry Higgins, and accept his narrative of being a “proper lady.” But in the process she maintained her sense of self, and at the end of George Bernard Shaw’s original play, Pygmalion, she does indeed go off to marry Freddy and become a teacher of phonetics. Her final words to Higgins in the play show her to be a truly emancipated woman, unlike the chauvinistic ending of Lerner and Lowe’s musical: “Buy them yourself.”

I didn’t have a choice about being raised a Christian and saddled with all the negativity. But I’ll be damned if my parents’ choices are going to steer the course of the rest of my life.

You dear friend who talk so well: you can go to Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire.

130. pococurante

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them:
that’s the essence of inhumanity. After all, my dear, if you watch people carefully,
you’ll be surprised to find how like hate is to love.

— George Bernard Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple (1901), Act II

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pococurante, noun: Caring little; indifferent; nonchalant. Adjective: A careless or indifferent person.

Denzel Washington loves his Jesus. He goes to church every Sunday. Allegedly he reads his bible every single day. But you know who he apparently doesn’t love? Atheists.

“The overwhelming majority of sociopaths aren’t violent. They just have a desire to win. They just don’t have a conscience — they don’t have it. The majority of them are atheists as well. So that was the book that was sort of my Bible if you will… in preparation for this part.”

The part in question is his role in the recently released film Safehouse, where he plays an ex-CIA agent turned international criminal. Denzel was talking in an interview (from which the above quote was taken) about his preparation for his part in the film. Now, to be perfectly honest, I think that this is a non-story. Here’s another interview where he talks about the movie:

Washington talks more about waterboarding than he does about atheism. Atheism is mentioned in passing, more as his own personal takeaway from Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door: The ruthless versus the rest of us.

Now, before we get carried away with media portrayals of sociopathy, it’s important to actually define what a sociopath is. Both sociopathy and psychopathy are classed under Antisocial Personality Disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, fourth edition (DSM-IV), and are characterized as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.” Both sociopathy and psychopathy are characterized by (among other things) a noticeable lack of remorse, regard for the safety or well-being of others, deception (“as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure”), impulsiveness, and “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.”

This is not just a lack of guilt—it’s a complete inability to relate to other human beings. What’s probably most frightening about sociopaths is that they often look “normal,” and that’s part of the mask. The character of Dexter in Jeff Lindsay’s novels exemplifies this sociopathic trait: They don’t understand how other people operate. They’re often very intelligent and are able to study and emulate human behavior in the way that an actor takes on a role, but they don’t internalize.

Okay—back to Denzel.

Shortly after these interviews, the reference to atheists blew up in atheist circles. “Did Actor Denzel Washington Really Call Atheists ‘Sociopaths?’” goes one recent headline from this morning, which signals to me that this is yet another example of people needing some excuse to get bent out of shape. You see this a lot in the gay community too, although (to be fair) atheists don’t have a reason to hear anti-atheist slurs, whereas homophobia really is woven into the societal fabric to an extent. And atheists aren’t routinely harassed, bullied, tortured and beaten to death (or worse) for being atheists. Or being suspected of atheism.

But to be fair to atheists (and myself), we’re tired of having to defend our morality against those who say that you can’t be good without god. I’m not going to waste a keystroke on the various ways that nasty little question is thrown around, but I can make the jump that by even mentioning atheism in the same sentence as sociopathy that Denzel Washington is saying that atheists are sociopaths. But he didn’t. He’s an actor who was quoting from a book. If anything, we should be going after Martha Stout for writing that about atheists! And that would be a waste of time and energy.

So yes, Denzel is a very religious man. He has never made that a secret.

But you know who we’re not talking about in terms of sociopathy? Religious conservatives.

Now, I don’t think that Michele Bachmann, Tony Perkins, Rick Santorum, Tracy Morgan and any politician or celebrity who has made anti-gay remarks are necessarily sociopaths. Nor do I think that opposing gay rights or gay marriage should raise suspicion of a person being antisocial (although for some it should make us wonder about what other issues they’re potentially hiding). They hide behind their “traditional beliefs” and their religious arguments, and on the surface it appears that they genuinely don’t understand why people are so outraged at what they’re saying and doing.

However, many of these people (Tracy Morgan excluded) are just too intelligent to be that simple. If they were your average, church-going rube fundamentalists I might be willing to cede that, but these are educated individuals who have managed to get elected to fairly high political offices (although that in itself is not necessarily proof of intelligence—a certain former President comes to mind). You can’t get to that level without some cunning, or at least knowing how to surround yourself with the right people.

And regarding homosexuality, I think that if you were to pin every anti-gay politician to the wall or (the ghost of Christopher Hitchens forbid) waterboard them long enough, I think they’d all admit that it’s a MacGuffin that keeps conservative voters coming to the polls and voting keeping them in power. Most of them probably don’t personally care much what two guys or girls do in their bedroom.

However, what I do see in the eyes and speeches of Bachmann, Perry, Santorum and Kevin Bryant is indifference, be it genuine or willful. And when your political agenda trumps achieving equality for GLBT Americans, there’s something dangerously wrong with your moral compass.

So who’s the most sociopathical sociopath of them all?