98. cranberries

The other night I watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation for the first time. This was to correct a serious cultural deficiency in me—although now that I’ve seen it, I’m not sure that I’m actually better off.

While I realize that this is a lighthearted comedy (the purpose being to entertain), and the intent is ultimately to stress the importance of family and how we should stick it out despite how much we screw things up, offend, infuriate and torment each other (which—don’t get me wrong—is a positive message to send), it left me with the desire to never celebrate another holiday ever again, to never see my own family again, and to never attempt to ever deal with anyone else’s family at family gatherings.

This is probably not exactly the reaction the filmmakers were hoping to engender; and, to be fair, it’s not the reaction that most people will have when they see it.

Part of it is that the whole biologicalness of family gatherings makes me… uncomfortable.

All the parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters, all gathered together under one roof. Now, of course, this is my lizard-brain talking: The part of me that doesn’t get humanity or its social rituals. I mean, I understand the functions and roles, and even the origins, but I don’t “get it” like one of them. The thought of everyone, young and old, gathered around a table, just seems to me overly sentimental, like something out of a Norman Rockwell or even a Thomas Kinkade painting.

My immediate family was removed from our extended families by virtue of the fact that my dad’s family is all in Pennsylvania, and my mom’s family is all on the West coast, so we never really took part in large family gatherings at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and only rarely got to attend family reunions. So family is peculiar to me, and therefore makes me uncomfortable.

And yet there’s another part of me that longs to be included in such gatherings: In being part of a lovable, cute, frustrating, “overcoming it” family. I’ve never had that experience, and the thought of being accepted as “one of them” has a certain appeal.

This appeal has even more urgency to it since, for the time being, I’ve excised myself from my immediate family since they’ve made it clear that they’ll accept their son, but not their gay son and certainly not their gay son’s partner—if and when that ever happens.

I have this elaborate fantasy of finding a guy who happens to come from a big, really welcoming family who will just fall in love with me like I did with him.

His parents will be the parents I never had, and when we meet for the first time they’ll make a big deal about it, and I’ll go over to their place for dinner or something, and his dad will give me a huge hug that’ll crush the breath out of me and his mom will cry because they’re both so happy that their son finally met someone.

And they’ll insist that I come to their home for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and they won’t mind one bit if we stay in his old bedroom (because they’re not old fashioned like that). And I’ll help in the kitchen in preparing the big meal for the family; and they’ll be atheists and agnostics and humanists, and dinner conversation will center around philosophy or science or literature or NPR (because they’ll be articulate, educated, thinking people), and he’ll squeeze my hand under the table because he’s so happy that I’m there; and nobody will mention “God” (except in passing), and nobody would talk about going to church for Christmas Eve service, or want to bring out a cake to sing “Happy birthday” to Jesus (even though Yeshua was probably born closer to Easter if we take the account of his birth seriously). And yes, my family did that, cake and all. And we’ll go on vacations together, and they’ll insist on taking us out to dinner when they’re in town, and maybe go see a show, and vice versa.

And it’ll be the family I never had.

Heavy sigh.

But that is not what I wanted to write about.

What I wanted to write about is Chevy Chase—or rather, Clark Griswold. (Although maybe Chevy Chase.)

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, Clark Griswold is this well-meaning, passionate, caring, loving family man. And through the course of each of the National Lampoon movies, he ambles through situations with the well-intentioned grace and poise of a careening wrecking ball. He starts out Christmas Vacation dragging his wife and two very reluctant and freezing children out to a field in the middle of nowhere to pick out the “perfect Christmas tree.” In the process of he and his wife belting out Christmas carols at the top their lungs, he pisses of the locals with his inane driving, and nearly gets them all killed when he inadvertently ends up underneath a semi hauling tree trunks while playing King of the Road with a couple of red necks. He goes on about how picking out a Christmas tree is an American tradition, as if George Washington took time out from hunkering down with the Colonialists at the Battle of Valley Forge to drag a tree home on Christmas Eve to Martha to put up in their living room.

Quick primer on Christmas trees: The modern Christmas tree originated in western Germany as a prop in a mediaeval play about Adam and Eve, with the tree representing the Tree of Life. It first began to appear in British homes after the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert in the 1840s. It came to America in the 1850s via a publication known as Godey’s Lady’s Book, in which a picture of the royal family’s living room was reproduced with the royal crowns and whatnot removed in order to make it an American scene. So by the 1870s, Christmas trees were ubiquitous in the States.

Back to Christmas Vacation. It only continues to get worse from there. In his tireless and monomaniacal obsession with having the “perfect Christmas,” complete with two giant Christmas trees, every surface of his house being decked in lights (which, as one visual gag describes, drains the entire surrounding power grid to sustain it—a metaphor?), and a horde of relatives who descend obliviously on the house to add their own unique stamp to the mayhem (including one scene where a red neck cousin empties his RV’s septic tank into a storm drain). In the process, Clark’s kids and his neighbors are relentlessly and unapologetically terrorized in his single-minded quest for the “perfect Christmas,” which, in Clark’s mind, probably looks like something straight out of that Norman Rockwell painting, with the family happily gathered around the table, each joyfully taking part in the great American tradition of Christmas.

What we’re left with to witness is a nightmare that spirals out of control. And at the center of it all is Clark, with his almost child-like faith in the institution of Christmas and what it represents, no matter how much hell he puts everyone else through.

You know what else is like that? The fundamentalist Christian.

I saw in Clark’s enthusiasm for the Christmas tradition the same single-minded devotion to the teachings of scripture and to the God of the Christian faith: The belief that no matter how dark or confusing things get, what really matters is toughing it out, and that the only thing that truly matters is knowing God and knowing Jesus.

I also saw in his megalomania that same devotion in evangelical fundamentalist Christians that leads them to try to impose their beliefs on others, and cause reckless emotional and psychological havoc in those around them. On a personal level, I look at the issue of homosexuality and the untold lives of misery and agony that have been suffered by gays and lesbians over the centuries at the hands of Christians alone, all because a narrow reading of a number of scripture passages leads them to teach that homosexuality is wrong. And then there’s the doctrine of original sin, and how wickedness is basically imputed to every human being ever born all because “Eve ate the apple.” The church teaches that you’re an evil, worthless, corrupt, wicked, rebellious, repulsive and depraved sinner who deserves to suffer an eternity in Hell because God can’t stand the sight of you… all because of what someone else (who probably didn’t even exist in the first place) did however many millennia ago. So you’re constantly asking God for forgiveness for even the smallest of infractions (e.g., losing your temper, telling a “white lie,” watching a show with sex on it), terrified that he’ll send you to Hell anyway or are content with the story that God tortured his son Jesus to death on a cross, basically as a sacrifice to himself.

I kept thinking in watching Christmas Vacation, “It’s a commercialist holiday, for pete sake! All these ‘traditions’—the house decked out in lights, the huge and exorbitant feast, the presents, the bringing the whole family together—are a cultural construct that you’ve been suckered into! And do you really need a pool, or is that just another status symbol that will boost your self-image and your self-worth as a man, and provider as a husband and a father—or rather, in what America tells you that you should be as those things?”

Religion does the same thing. It holds up an image of what a Christian should be: An idealized, romanticized, impossible-to-live-up-to superman (or superwoman). It’s an image that millions of well-meaning and sincere people think they have to squeeze themselves into every day, and they beat themselves up when they ultimately fail to do so. Because after all, the only thing that matters is getting to Heaven to spend eternity with Jesus, at any cost—even if that cost is a lifetime of misery.

So Clark Griswold… you’re doing it wrong.

72. blessing

This morning I was listening to This American Life from 29 July, a show in two acts about thugs and various kinds of thuggery. In the first act, a man in Egypt is subjected to the nightmare of beatings, torture, false imprisonment and then charged with being a thug, all because he wasn’t going along with the military coup before and during the ousting of Hosni Mubarak.

In the second act, a social worker fights to redeem a young man who enters the criminal justice system who she is determined to save and believes in against all evidence to the contrary. As the story goes, he is eventually connected to a horrific murder, goes to prison, escapes, and kills two more people before he is finally caught and sentence to death row. Through it all, the woman maintains his innocence—until he finally confesses to the murder he was originally accused of, as well as another murder that he was never suspected of, because “he found God . . . and needed to atone for what he’d done.”

Later on, she goes to visit him in the maximum security prison where he will eventually face execution. He began to change, the story went, one day while flipping through the trial documents.

He looked at the photo of his victim, the girl he killed, alive and beautiful. Then he held it side-by-side with her autopsy photo and thought, I did that. He pauses and puts a hand over his face, as if he’s collecting himself enough to continue. But watching Kenneth relive this is like watching a bad play. The words are disconnected from his gestures. He makes a show of weeping, lowering his eyes, shaking his head, and covering his face with his arms. When he looks up again, I don’t see any tears.

The crime for which he went to prison involved robbing two female university students, then later kidnapping them, taking them out into the middle of nowhere and shooting both of them. One girl died; another survived and managed to get to help. “He went back, he said, let them beg for their lives, and shot them, over and over.”

Then the victims of his prison break. A farmer, the one with the truck, was trying to run away when Kenneth gunned him down. And finally, this. After the car chase in Missouri, state troopers made Kenneth walk over and look at the lifeless body of the delivery driver, thinking Kenneth would be remorseful. Instead, Kenneth says all he saw was the man who got in the way of his escape, and he spit on the body.

In one of the earlier episodes of the fourth season of Torchwood: Miracle Day, a child molester and murderer (Bill Pullman in a fantastic change of role for him) is executed by lethal injection, but due to The Blessing (the event by which everyone in the world stops dying) occurring just before his execution is carried out, he survives and is released since he cannot be tried or executed for the same crime twice. In the second episode, he is confronted during a TV interview à la 60 Minutes with the image of the girl he brutally killed. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he says, weeping, tears welling up in his eyes.

“What good is ‘sorry,’ Mr Danes?” the interviewer scoffs. “Is it going to do anything for Mrs Cabina every morning when she wakes up?”

What is it about “finding God” that is supposed to engender sympathy or forgiveness for even the most savage of criminals? As if praying a prayer erases a multitude of wrongs – if not on earth then in heaven. This is one of my primary objections to Christianity: that you could savagely murder a room full of people and then have a pang of conscience, ask for God’s forgiveness, be rightly executed for your crime, and go straight to heaven to be with Jesus for all eternity without a blemish on your soul. Because Jesus paid it all.

Quick primer in atonement theology. There are two main schools of thought here:

• The Christus Victor, or ransom, theory: Humanity is enslaved to Satan on account of the Fall, wherein Adam and Eve imputed Original Sin to all their descendants. The best analogy here is in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Edmund betrays his brother and sisters to the White Witch (the Satan figure in Narnia) and becomes her slave since every traitor is her lawful prey. To save him from death, Aslan (the Christ figure) dies in his place, but because of the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time, “when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table [i.e., the Cross] would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”
• The Penal substitution, or satisfaction, theory: Same premise as Christus victor; but here, God is the Righteous Judge and humanity is the Wretched Criminal. “Sin” is the inexorable debt to be repaid to God for Man’s rebellion against him, and Man is automatically found guilty by God, the only perfect being in existence; and so he is condemned to be separated from God for all eternity in Hell (e.g., life in prison). But Jesus, the perfect sinless Son of God (don’t get me started on trinitarian theology), is sent to serve that sentence and is born the God-man and executed, thus fulfilling the conditions of the sentence. And God declares the debt as having been paid in full.

Richard Dawkins responded to the theology of atonement, how Abraham and Isaac prefigures the Crucifixion, and Original Sin in an interview with Howard Conder this past March. Dawkins said: “The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his Son tortured to death as a scapegoat is, surely from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them?

“If there’s something I can’t stand about Christianity, it’s this obnoxious doctrine of Original Sin, which I think is actually a hideous, and demeaning and a vengeful doctrine. It’s the idea that one can be absolved; that a sin by somebody else has to be paid for by a different person, which is a horrible idea.

“It would be persuasive if the judge said, you’re forgiven. That would be great. That would the kind of thing one could empathize with. But that’s not what he said. He said, ‘Okay, we’re going to hang somebody else for your crime’.

“I think it’s a horrible idea that – given that the judge is all-powerful; given that the judge has the power to forgive if he wants to – the only way he can do it is to sacrifice his son. I mean, what an incredibly unpleasant way to do it, given that you have the power to forgive, that you are all-powerful!”

So what’s so wrong with a murderer (or anyone else for that matter—liar, adulterer, thief, homosexual, or whatever else you call a “sin”) being forgiven and getting off scot-free? Or with Jesus paying your sin-debt for you? It’s precisely that—you get off scot-free. And let’s say that the people you killed weren’t Christians. Let’s say you tortured them—horribly—before you then murdered them, had that pang of conscience later after you realized what you did, prayed “the prayer” and were “saved.” The problem is that you sent however many into an eternity in hell (because they weren’t “saved”) while you yourself skip out of jail into a blissful eternity in heaven and Jesus pays the $200.

What kind of a theology is this? To borrow from Julia Sweeney Letting Go of God, it would be as though Hitler had a “come to Jesus” moment right before he died. According to atonement theology, if he was truly sincere, no one would sit him down and say, “You fucked up, buddy! Now you’re going to spend an eternity in hell!” Quite the opposite. His sin of having murdered millions of people (among other things) would be expunged, paid for on the Cross by Jesus.

Supposing an inmate who suffocated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz ran into the man responsible for their death in heaven? Or Susie Cabina running into Oswald Danes who raped and murdered her as a 12-year-old? Or Cecil Boren or Dominique Hurd meeting Kenneth Williams (the kid from the This American Life story earlier)? Or conversely, any of them going to hell and learning that their murderer had been pardoned by God?

Now, it may be fair to say that I just don’t like this arrangement because I don’t think it’s just. God sees all sins as equal, and if a sinner truly repents, who are we to begrudge God for granting pardon since we are just as guilty as the murderer? Does that make me the Unmerciful Servant whose debt the king forgave? Or a grumbling vineyard worker who resented the owner for paying those who showed up at the last shift the same as those who had worked all day? Possibly—to both.

However, as to the question of whether a murderer who “found God” should be worthy of our forgiveness, I say the only person who can truly forgive the wrong is the victim him or herself.

In Tony Kushner’s play Perestroika, Ethel Rosenberg returns to haunt Roy Cohn, who effectively killed her by pulling strings with the presiding judge to get a death sentence. As Roy lies dying of AIDS, Ethel stands at his bedside.

I decided to come here so I could see could I forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly I have born my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needle-sharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June Nineteen. It burns acid green.

I came to forgive but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ’cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you couldn’t ever defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: Better he had never lived at all.

In the scene that follows, Roy feigns reverting to a childlike state, calling for his mother, begging her to sing to him. At first, Ethel is bitter, angry, and refuses, but finally relents when he persists. She sings him an old Yiddish song, “Shteit a bocher.” Then, once she thinks he’s dead and turns to go, he suddenly sits up and exclaims, “I can’t believe you fell for that ma stuff, I just wanted to see if I could finally, finally make Ethel Rosenberg sing! I WIN!” After which he actually dies.

Towards the end of the play, Ethel returns in a final gesture of forgiveness to help Louis say Kaddish over Roy. They end with the blessing, “Oseh sholom bimromov, hu ya-aseh sholom olenu v’al col Yisroel v’imru omain. You sonofabitch.” The Hebrew translates to, “He who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace upon us and upon all Israel; and say, ‘Amen’.”

So in the end, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, a God who pardons the unpardonable and allows his son to be tortured to death for our sins is utterly offensive. On the other hand, what are the limits of forgiveness in light of eternity? What is the extent of forgiveness? And what is the extent of retribution?

Many friends of mine say that the criminal justice system should be restorative instead of merely punitive—that the purpose should be to eventually restore an individual to right standing in society (provided that there is no danger posed to society). But to what extent can a debt be considered “paid”? Does such a person deserve to walk free, or receive our collective forgiveness?