On Holiday(s)

Here I am, three thousand miles away from home -- if my latest address is home, which I sometimes doubt -- in grey weather, cold too, trying to get the time change behind me and start soaking up the holiday spirit. The spouse and I are sitting in the hotel lobby, both working away on our computers. In a little while I'll get myself in gear and head off to do some errands.

So this is "holiday time." The candelabra in the breakfast room all contain 7 "candles" -- is that just to distinguish themselves from Hanukkah lights or because 7 simply comes out as the most symmetrical and elegant number of light elements? In any case, the real candle on the breakfast table, surrounded by evergreen branches and gilded pinecones, is "ecumenical" in that its appeal pre-dates Christianity by quite a space of time.

Yule, like the summer solstice, is above all a festival of light and fire. When I was packing on Monday, I dug out my velvet ritual bag (which I've had for about 15 years now -- red, with a symbol that combines the pentacle and the sign for female (or the planet Venus. Not that I think "men are from Mars, women are from..." -- facile and over-generalizing, always a dangerous combination). There were two considerations: weight of the luggage and what was most appropriate to the season. Yule, a fire festival. So I put in my tiny brass burner, two little cones of Yule incense from one of my favorite providers, and incense matches in frankincense, sandalwood, and bayberry to honor the time (and patchouli just because I like it). Compass and bloodstone pendulum. Tiny travel candle (in a tin). And that's it.

The colors for Yule are just as pre-Christian as the candle/taper/light and the evergreens. Red and green: red for fire, green for growth and manifestation. Fire to keep us warm, sun-fire to invite the sun closer again, green as a sign of our hope and belief that new shoots, new leaves, new crops will once more come in time.

Tomorrow we're going to the "sacred night market" -- the Christmas market, but I just gave you the literal translation of the German word for it, "Weihnachtsmarkt." I look forward to the spiced wine, the traditional holiday edibles like "Lebkuchen" ("the cake of life"), and the many beautiful, and even the tacky, things that will be offered for sale at the myriad outdoor stalls. Northern Europeans are hardy folk, neither the buyers nor the sellers jib at spending long hours in near-freezing temperatures to seek or purvey the perfect holiday gift, treat or decor. More when we return!

Go Gators!

Yes, odd and possibly reprehensible as it may seem, I do love to watch American football. Never got a chance to play it, though I've played quite a few other team sports. But I grew up watching football (and baseball, and basketball) with my Dad, a true fanatic, not just a fan. And somehow life is not complete without occasionally plopping my butt down in front of a TV and screaming my lungs out for the team of my choice (complete with animadversions on bad refereeing and commentary on questionable coaching decisions). Obnoxious of me, I know.

So it filled my heart with glee that the University of Florida defeated Alabama in the Southeastern Conference Championship game in Atlanta yesterday. The majority of football "scholars" thought the Crimson Tide (i.e. Alabama) would roll over the Gators (i.e. Florida), but I always believed the Gators could win. Which does not mean I watched the game live. If I have a superstition, it's that if I watch a team I really care about play in real time, they're likely to lose. I kept well away from temptation by going to my favorite cafe, which doesn't have a TV set. But I admit I checked on the score when I thought the game must be over, and found the Gators were winning. Just as well I didn't watch, though, since as late as the end of the third quarter Alabama was ahead and seemed to be pulling away, so my blood pressure would have been sky-high and the volume of my yelling considerable! I know my faults.

I watched this morning, however, when the game was repeated on the Sunshine Channel, and slurped up every precious minute while continuing to deal with holiday preparations, in this case wrapping and packaging. The last parcels that have to be mailed will be taken to the post office tomorrow and Tuesday. My lists of tasks to be completed remain four sheets of legal paper long, and I object, as I always do, to the hustle and bustle imposed upon us by the felt obligation to sustain commercially dictated Yuletide jollity throughout the month of December. And that's nothing compared to the suffering of the poor salespeople and cashiers in department stores and supermarkets, who are subjected to holiday Muzak starting long before Thanksgiving!

Anyway, this Gator fan is a happy clam. I'm sorry that one team has to lose for another to win. Alabama had a perfect season going into the game, and now has to deal with the bitter taste of not winning the conference title and being denied a shot at the national championship. But there's always next year, and Alabama is deep in talent, they'll be in the thick of the hunt again, as, I think, will the Gators. Now I can relax until the Gators' bowl game, which I assume will be the BCS Championship in Miami on January 8th. And I promise not to bore you with football again until at least then!

Responsibility, Change, and Character

So, it's December 6th and I haven't posted in four days. The holiday preparations continue to rev into ramming speed, and I suspect posts will be fewer and farther between until after the New Year. But I wanted to touch upon a subject I've already mentioned and develop it a bit, in preparation for more concentrated treatment when life becomes a bit less harried (ha, ha).

One of Barack Obama's most attractive, to me, themes during the recent presidential campaign was the concept that the restoration of American liberties and freedoms must go hand in hand with a general re-shouldering of individual and social responsibilities. "We are the change we've been waiting for" is not a new slogan, but remains a true one. Jim Hightower's most recent monthly newsletter (Dec. 2008, Vol. 10, No. 12: if you're a political progressive and don't read the Hightower Lowdown, look into it) takes up this message:

"If last month’s sweeping vote for change is to come to fruition, We the People must be the ones who nurture it. We can’t just crank back in our La-Z-Boys and say, “We did our job – now Barack can do the heavy lifting for us.” We tried this laid-back approach after Clinton won in 1992 – with unpleasant and unprogressive results.
"If you think your job is done, look who’s waiting for Obama in Washington: a swarm of Wall Street bankers, the war machine, 13,000 corporate lobbyists, naysaying Republican Congress critters, right-wing yackety-yackers, weak-kneed Democrats, the conformist media, and other powerful forces of business-as-usual politics. These insiders intend to shape his presidency in their image.
"We have to be the counterforce, pushing insistently, vociferously, and persistently from the outside. Who’s “we”? You and me – determined citizens, working through our personal networks, public-interest organizations, progressive media, the netroots nation, unions, community groups, and other connections to grassroots activism.
"Obama was the candidate of change, but he’ll be the president of change ONLY if we buck him up and back him up. We must stand up and speak out on every move the insiders make; we must propose and push progressive ideas and ideals; and we must certainly expose and vigorously oppose any capitulations he will be pressured to make to the corporate powers.
"If his presidency is to be worthy of the enormous effort that so many put into it, worthy of the deep potential of this political moment in American history, you and I have to be on the alert and in the face of power...
"From the start, I’ve felt that the most significant thing about the Obama phenomenon was not Obama, but the phenomenon – the fact that millions of ordinary Americans (especially young people) were not merely enthusiastic but were engaged, organizing and mobilizing, taking possession of their democracy, and doing the grunt work that is the essence of self-government.
"People really do want change – not as a political buzzword, but as a fundamental matter of national direction and policy. In fact, for some time, folks have been shouting: CHANGE! Get our troops and America’s reputation out of Iraq. Provide good health care for all. Rein in greedheaded CEOs and corporate lobbyists. End “tinkle down” economics. Re-invest in America’s infrastructure. Rebuild middle-class opportunities. Deal with global climate change. End the use of torture. Get serious about green energy. Restore our stolen liberties. Stop polluters. And, generally, reinstate the Common Good as America’s governing ethic.
"As Obama himself often said on the campaign trail, he is not the change. We are. By electing him, we opened the White House door to the possibility of change. Now we must see it through."

This kind of collective effort is part of what I, personally, mean when I talk of social responsibility. Effecting political change by continuing to work, noodge, speak out, demand and protest. Individual responsibility includes doing so in an honest, researched, thought-through and consistent fashion.

Which takes me back to the issue of gay and lesbian civil rights. Like much of the rest of America, I've seen "Proposition 8: The Musical," which I think is a brilliant piece of agit-prop. If by some chance you haven't encountered this three-minute tour de force, check it out on YouTube. Touching back upon the December 2008 Hightower Lowdown, which disappointed me by not addressing the horrific anti-gay legislation that was passed in four states even as Obama was elected, it did trash James Dobson and his Focus on the Family Christian-right organization for publishing an apocalyptic anti-Obama brochure right before the election. Written from the perspective of a shell-shocked "Christian" chronicling the abominations of four years of the Obama administration in the year 2012, one of its many fear-mongering prophecies was that a liberalized Supreme Court would force schools to teach first-graders that homosexuality is good.

Well, that set me to thinking. Of course the Dobson brochure is despicable, and largely ludicrous. But somehow it made something very clear to me. I think homosexuality, in and of itself, isn't good and isn't bad. It just is. Just like heterosexuality, in and of itself, isn't good or bad, it just is. Some of us are 100% homosexual, some of us are 100% heterosexual, and some of us fall somewhere inbetween. I've come to believe that each individual's possible spectrum of sexual preferences is almost as hard-wired as hair and eye color. Which means legislating discrimination against gays and lesbians is about as sensible as legislating discrimination against blond-haired or green-eyed people. Whether someone is gay, or blond, or green-eyed does not determine whether or not that individual is a decent person.

The only factor that may affect the character of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered people is a societal one, the still far too commonly parrotted lie that anyone who isn't easily classifiable as "straight" is somehow "less moral" than "the rest of us." If as you grow up you realize that you are homosexual, or attracted to either gender, or don't fit with the sex characteristics with which you were born, you can't escape being bombarded by the societal expectation that you will be a "lesser" or "bad" person. Since expectations do shape us up to a point, those who aren't vanilla/straight have a harder row to hoe -- they have to fight against a whole set of external and internalized expectations of failure (much like people of color or women in general) on top of all the common vicissitudes and adversities.

Nonetheless, a large part of every identifiable population -- whether it's white straight women, gays, African-Americans, or transgenders -- consists of plain old good people. People who are honest with their friends, loyal to their partners and children, responsible about their duties to themselves, their families, their community, their employers or employees. Whatever the difficulties we face, we are capable of demonstrating good character. The capacity to live as a responsible human being is not affected by our sexual preference or orientation. Unfortunately, the capacity to participate equally in the benefits offered by our society still is.

Yuletide Thoughts

It's December 2nd, and holiday preparations here are already in full swing. I am happy to report that I've made two batches of mulled wine and my gift procurement is just about completed, which leaves a lot of wrapping, mailing and delivery in my future. We have many of what I like to refer to as Goddess-children, some too grown up to be "gifted" but still due a hand-written and heart-felt missive, and others in the under-21 "actually need stuff" category. Since we usually send presents to the siblings of these kids as well, that's a lot to remember and take care of in a timely fashion. What good is a gift if it doesn't make it to its destination in time to be waiting under the tree?

But for me, the central holiday of the "holiday season" is the Winter Solstice, when I tend to do ritual with like-minded friends or as a solitary; then my spouse and I, both with European roots, go on to celebrate on "Holy Night," the German Weihnachten, December 24th. So I thought it might be fun to share some information about the abundant Pagan DNA of the winter holidays!

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the North Pole tilts farthest away from the sun during Earth's annual journey around it on December 21st or 22nd, making that the shortest daytime in Europe and North America. The sun appears to stand still at a low point in the sky. Our Pagan European ancestors mostly believed that the sun traveled around the Earth, and to them it looked as though the sun was moving away from the Earth, and their rituals were about keeping the sun, and thus all of life, from leaving their world forever. They might have been wrong about which planet revolved around which other one, but the image they associated with this time of year, the wheel, is apt: and the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian terms for "wheel," hweol and jul, are the origins of the term "Yule." At Winter Solstice the wheel turns, Earth ends the half of its annual journey that brings shorter days and begins the half that brings longer ones.

In Northern European Yule rituals in pre-Christian times, Solstice dancers danced in a circle in the deosil, or sun-wise, direction, what we call clockwise. They used sword-blades or staves to form a six-pointed star, a sun shape, asking the sun to turn back, come closer. Another common custom, still observed in parts of Scandinavia, the Celtic and Baltic countries and Russia, was to build a huge bonfire, or a chain of bonfires stretching from one hilltop to another - meant to attract the sun by showing it its own likeness. When the days grew noticeably longer, around December 24th or 25th, people relaxed and began to look forward to another spring and summer. Decorating our homes with lights at Yuletide makes perfectly good Pagan sense.

When Christianity arrived in Europe, the Christian authorities found it impossible to suppress the traditional Winter Solstice celebrations across Europe and the Middle East, all about light and new life. The Egyptians honored Isis and her birthing of their Sun God Horus; the Germanic peoples caled the night of Dec. 24 modranikht or Mother Night, the night their Great Goddess gave birth to Her son, one of the many forms of the Green Man or Harvest God who becomes the Goddess's consort in the spring and dies at the time of harvest, to be reborn again each Yule. The Persians, and many converts to their beliefs throughout the Roman Empire, celebrated the birth of Mithras, their God of Light, on Dec. 25th, shouting "Sol Invictus!" (Unconquered Sun!) Romans celebrated the Saturnalia, the twelve-day festival of Saturn and Ops, exchanging gifts, visiting friends and family, dancing, feasting, & temporarily reversing social roles: masters served slaves, for example.

Some of these customs and dates sound familiar, and they should. Astronomers and historians are pretty sure that the historical Jesus was born in the spring of the year 6 of the Christian Era, when the planets we now call Mars, Jupiter and Saturn came close together and likely formed what we now call the Star of Bethlehem. But during the first few hundred years of Christianity, Christians celebrated Jesus's birthday according to their local beliefs: on January 1st, January 6th, March 29th, April 20th or 21st, May 20th, or September 29th. It wasn't until the fourth century of the Christian Era that Pope Julius I ended the discussion by simply declaring that Jesus's birthday was on Dec. 25th. The Catholic Church's objective in declaring December 25th the official birthday was to pre-empt and push aside all the Pagan holidays that clustered around the Winter Solstice.

A Pope could get away with changing Jesus's birthday by decree, but it turned out there was no getting away from the Pagan customs that saturate Yule. One of these was the display of evergreens, symbols of ever-returning life. The Celts performed a Winter Solstice ritual that was a staged combat or dance pitting the Holly King, symbolic Lord of Winter and shorter days, against an Ivy King or Queen. Evergreen ivy often grows on oak trees, ancient symbols of summer. The eventual victory of the Ivy in the combat or dance heralded that longer days and warmer seasons on their way.

For many centuries evergreen trees (pine or fir) were brought into Northern European homes and temples at Yule, lit with candles, topped with a sun symbol, and decorated with ornaments made of straw, nuts and other foods to ask for a good harvest next year. The Yule Tree never went out of fashion with the Germans and Scandinavians, who still call it the Weihnachtsbaum or "Holy Night Tree." It came back to the British Isles in the Victorian Era (mid-1800s) and quickly spread to North America. The preference for a tree is rooted (bad pun) in the common Western cultural concept of a "World Tree" or "Tree of Life." The Christians renamed the Yule or Holy Night Tree, calling it the "Christmas Tree," and the sun at the top became a "Star of Bethlehem."

Wreaths also date from Pagan times and symbolize the constantly repeating wheel of the year, the unbroken circle of life. They are traditionally made of evergreens and often include bay laurel, sacred to the Greco-Roman sun god Apollo. Fruit and nuts decorated the wreaths; in wealthy homes, these were sometimes gilded, to invoke the sun and prosperity.

One Pagan decoration with a long history in Northern Europe and especially the British Isles had to wait eons before the Christian authorities let it reappear in homes and finally even in some churches. Mistletoe, the sacred plant of the Celtic Druids, grew on the equally sacred oak trees. It was held to be particularly holy because it bloomed sun-yellow very late in the year, and stayed covered in abundant berries when fruit was sparse. Druid priests cut it ritually with golden sickles, letting it fall from the trees to be caught by the people, not with their hands but in the folds of their clothing. The Druids then blessed the mistletoe and it was hung over the entrances of people's homes to ward off evil. Anyone who entered a house and passed under the mistletoe was greeted with a kiss of friendship: that's where our "kissing under the mistletoe" comes from.

The Yule Log tradition is linked to the Solstice fires. In Scandinavia and Britain, until quite recent times, the Yule Log was a sturdy tree trunk that had fallen without being cut down, for to cut a tree down would anger the fairies. The log was supposed to be big enough to burn throughout Yule, which in Britain meant for thirteen days. Yes, the good old Pagan 13: there are 13 moons (or menstrual periods) in a year! If you count them up, the so-called "Twelve Days of Christmas" are really twelve Holy Nights dividing 13 days, December 25th to January 6th. You can even make it fourteen days by adding the Germanic Holy Night on December 24th! A small piece of the previous year's Yule Log was always preserved and used to light the current one, a symbol of continuity. One survival of the Yule Log are the log-shaped cakes or Buches de Noel still baked or bought by many households for the holidays.

You may well have heard in old carols or elsewhere about the Boar's Head; there's a British holiday custom of ceremonially serving one at Yule or Christmas. This is an ongoing tribute to Freya, Scandinavian Goddess of love and war, to whom pigs are sacred. It's rooted in the fact that a large part of Britain was invaded and settled by Scandinavians during the first millennium of the Christian era. Christmas pudding, another British custom, known in the U.S. largely because of the novels of Charles Dickens, is another definite solar symbol: decorated with holly, round, made with fruit and nuts, and set afire before it is eaten!

An omnipresent symbol of the winter holidays in our times is Santa Claus. His name is a corruption of Saint Nicholas, who was a long-ago Christian bishop in what is now Turkey. Santa has little to do with Saint Nicholas, but he's more than just a commercial figure trying to get us to spend too much. He continues the gift-giving tradition of the Saturnalia, and his colors, interestingly, are the white, red and black of the Triple Goddess.

The European Santa Claus sometimes still wears a bishop's mitre and vestments and carries a bishop's staff. But he's accompanied by a strange dark figure, whom the Germans call Knecht Ruprecht, the servant Ruprecht. This "servant" actually represents the elves and fairies the old Pagans across Europe thought abounded at Yuletide; he also stands for the Dark or Green Man, the symbol of the Earth's eternal fertility. He's the one who's said to deal out punishments to the children who've been bad in the past year: lumps of coal and switches. But he also hands out gifts for his "master."

This idea of rewards and punishments being handed out at Yuletide is of ancient lineage. Before Christianity arrived in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the Scandinavians believed that Odin, chief God of the Norse pantheon, rode out among humans at Yule for that purpose. Odin rode Sleipnir or "Never Sleeps," a horse with eight legs. Interestingly, our Santa Claus rides in a sleigh drawn by eight reindeer. The number 8 may well refer back to Sleipnir, while the reindeer is a symbol of the Hornèd God, one of the earliest shapes given to male deities in Europe.

So the familiar image of Santa in his sleigh refers to elves, to Odin, and to the Hornèd God! No wonder some US fundamentalist Christians claim that Santa is an anagram of Satan! All kidding aside, there's no devil, but quite a bit of the old Pagan Yuletide spirit in Santa Claus.

For example, did you ever wonder where we get the Christmas custom of hanging stockings over our fireplaces for Santa to fill with gifts after he climbs down our chimneys? Yep, it's Pagan. It links Santa to the solar Yule-fire which ought to be burning on Yuletide hearths and associates him, like the Hornèd God, with fertility. Filling empty stockings with gifts is a crop fertility charm, like a ripe grain-ear replacing the hollow straw left on the threshing-floor after harvest.

But even though I've gotten reasonably fond of Santa, I resent his complete take-over of Yule in the US. He's popular in Europe, too, but there his work is done by December 6th. Children carefully leaves pair of shoes outside their bedroom doors on the night of December 5th, filled with hay for Saint Nick's horse, and on the morning of the 6th they find the shoes filled with nuts and oranges and little gifts: a ritual very similar to our Christmas stockings. After that, the European Saint Nicholas's work is done. The gift-givers and Yuletide spirits who rule most of the holiday season in Europe were, and are, female.

In Sweden there's Lucia. Early in the morning on Dec. 13th, which the Swedes call "Little Yule," the oldest daughter in each house puts on a white robe and a crown of whortleberry branches and lit candles. She goes from bedroom to bedroom, waking her parents and her sisters and brothers and bringing them coffee and delicious round saffron-flavored cakes known as Lussekatter, or Lucia cats. During the day there are Lucia parades, with Lucia maidens and Star Boys, young men wearing white robes and tall "wizard" hats, the symbols of wisdom, decorated with golden stars or suns. Lucia means "light." Though the day supposedly celebrates a gorily martyred Christian saint, it's easy to read between the lines. Lucia Day is another Solstice ritual, and the Lussekatter, those round sun-colored cakes, point once again to Freya, the bright Goddess, who drove about in a chariot drawn by cats.

In Germany, the big Christmas gifts, as opposed to the small tokens left by Saint Nicholas, come courtesy of a small female angel who rides a tiny deer (another invocation of the reindeer spirit). She's called Christkindl, the Christ Child, but she's definitely not the Baby Jesus. In German homes, the tree is set up and decorated on December 24th in a locked living room, and the children are not allowed to see it until after dark. It's believed that it's the Christkindl who leaves the children's gifts and rings her silver bell, the signal that they may finally come in and see the tree! When they do, a window is open a crack: the Christkindl has just flown away on her magic deer, sometimes leaving a lock of angel-hair in the window-latch as "proof."

The Christkindl has ancient roots. Before Christianity, the one who traveled from one German home to another at Yule was Berchta, the Crone Goddess of weaving and spinning. Berchta took the souls of all children who died young into her care. She made her Yuletide rounds accompanied by a throng of child ghosts and a host of elves and fairies. She expected to find pancakes set out to feed her and her followers, just like Santa expects milk and cookies! Berchta could be harsh, punishing laziness and stinginess with plagues and destruction: but she was also very generous in rewarding hard work and kindness. Long before Saint Nicholas, she left gifts not in everyday shoes but in slipper-shaped cakes that had been baked specially in the hope that she would fill them. Someone very good at spinning and weaving might even find her spindle turned into solid gold. Gold? Spinning? We're back to the sun and its dance around the earth!

In Russia it's Kolyada, an elf-maiden in a sleigh, who brings the Yuletide gifts. And Italy has stuck to the ancient image of the female gift-giver too. Befana, an old woman always shown with a broom & dressed in many of the traditional accouterments of a witch, throws her presents down the chimneys (a recurring theme!) of Italian homes the night before January 6th. The Catholic Church explains her presence by saying that the Three Kings or Wise Men stopped at her door on their way to see the Christ Child but she refused to go with them when they invited her to come along, saying she had to finish sweeping the floor first. Befana's gift-giving is supposedly tied to her trying to catch up to the Wise Men and see the baby Jesus: she gives gifts to all children in the hope that she'll somehow leave one at Jesus's house. But she's closely related to Berchta, and explicitly witch-like, flying through the air on a broomstick to distribute her bounty.

Our New Year's Eve falls right in the middle of the Anglo-Saxon "Twelve" (really Thirteen) Days of Yuletide, now subsumed in Christmas. In much of Europe, pigs on New Year's Eve were and are thought to bring good luck, and no wonder, since they're sacred to many Goddesses: Norse Freya, of course, and Celtic Cerridwen and Greek Demeter, just to name a few. Another customary bringer of good fortune is the chimney sweep. He, or in some cases she, is the most recent incarnation of Yuletide deity: associated with the chimney, that is, the solar fire, and also disguised in the black uniform complete with top hat (another version of the high hat of wisdom) and a layer of soot. Disguises have been part of Yuletide from its ancient beginnings, as in the ritual dance of the Holly and Ivy and the role-playing and role-exchange of the Roman Saturnalia.

In ancient Britain, Wales and Scotland, the mummers or mimers performed and still perform at this time of year, as well as during Carnival, at May Day and at harvest time. They often dance a traditional Morris Dance: "Morris" is a corruption of the word "Moorish," a term medieval England used for all things non-Christian. One figure common at Yuletide is the Hoden or Hobby Horse. The word "Hoden" probably derives from the name Woden or Odin, taking us back to the chief god of the Scandinavians and Germans, and the Hoden or Hobby Horse harks back to the solar, eight-legged, sleepless steed sacred to Odin. "Hoden" is also German for testicles; the hobby horse is a fertility charm. In the depths of winter, the ritual chasing of young women and men by the Hobby Horse to mark them with tar or soot, the black color of earth and fertility, is often part of mumming.

Yuletide mumming isn't confined to British Isles. Disguises made of greenery, rags and fur, and elaborate masks, surface throughout Europe. Mumming and "guising," or disguising, and other evocations of the Green Man/Hornèd God, begin at Yuletide and erupt again at Carnival in February.

The US has its own versions of the mumming tradition. In Philadelphia, New Year's Eve brings the Mummers' Parade, a typically American combination of British and German traditions. A German-heritage Mummer moved to Mobile, Alabama in the early 1800s and started the celebration of Carnival or "Mardi Gras" there. It quickly spread to other southern cities: the most famous Mardi Gras is of course that celebrated in New Orleans, a flamboyant blend of French, African, English, Caribbean and German elements.

Fireworks just after midnight, at the very beginning of New Year's Day, are a common modern substitute for the Yule bonfire in much of central Europe; it's a custom now catching on in the US as well. And in Scandinavia, and the US in Minnesota and other states with lots of inhabitants of Scandinavian descent, burning the Yule or Christmas trees on the "last day of Christmas," January 6th, is their substitute for the old Yule Log or Yule bonfire.

Hope you've had fun discovering the origins of many of our "Christmas" customs! I wish you Good Yule!

Patriarchy and Dualism: Anti-Liberty, Anti-Life

This is an excerpt from a presentation I made a few years ago at a national conference:

Patriarchy literally means “the rule of the fathers,” and its core concept is the idea that all men are born superior to all women. As Shulamith Firestone put it in her classic book, The Dialectic of Sex, this sexual class system, which in its purest form demands the literal enslavement of women and girls [see Nicholas Kristof's editorial in today's (11/30/08) New York Times on the prevalence of throwing acid in women's faces to punish them and keep them down in Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc., if you think female slavery is over], serves as the model for all other systems of oppression, such as racism and homophobia.

The key mode of patriarchy is domination. Scholar Riane Eisler has named patriarchy “dominator culture.” Dominator culture can conceive of power in only one form, as “Power Over” others. Every imaginable relationship, including that between parent and child, and that between lovers or spouses, is defined in terms of dominance and submission. Someone has to be “on top,” and someone else has to be “on the bottom.”

To make it easier to achieve this, dominator culture is saturated with dualism, a mode of thinking we are taught from the cradle. Dualism insists that everything boils down to an either/or choice – that you can never have your cake and eat it too. There are only two acceptable or possible answers to any given question, and these two answers are literally poles apart: polarized. They’re opposites. One answer is labeled entirely right and good, and the other is seen as entirely wrong and bad. Needless to say, dualism makes for gross over-simplifications and generalizations, and twists and distorts everything it touches. With a little bit of imagination, in most instances one can perceive a much broader spectrum of choices, and often more than a single option could be embraced. But that wouldn’t fit with the system of “tops” and “bottoms,” where one thing must always be “better” than another.

Patriarchal religions are used to justify and preach this system, and to legitimize the persecution and often extermination of those who resist it, both inside and outside a given culture. For the first two thousand years or so of patriarchy, these religions featured both Gods and Goddesses, but the “top god” in patriarchal religion was always male. The Goddesses were defined as wives, sisters, mothers, love interests or daughters of the male gods, to make sure that ordinary women didn’t get any ideas about freeing themselves from being defined as the possessions of men. For some patriarchs this didn’t go far enough, so about three thousand years ago they started to preach that there was only one god: male, of course. Eventually, several different religions of this type: male monotheism: developed. My friend the feminist art historian calls it “mono-male-theism.” However you prefer to arrange the syllables, the term proclaims: “Just For Men.”

Patriarchy has been with us in the West – Europe and North America – for only about 5,000 years, give or take half a millennium or so. Human beings have existed for much longer than that: hundreds of thousands of years. Patriarchy entered a Europe where many other cultures already existed, cultures that operated with a very different kind of mind-set. These were what Riane Eisler calls “partnership societies.” Partnership societies were quite cooperative and evolved, with high levels of creative sophistication. Their social structures were generally matrilineal – that is, children traced their descent through their mother back to her mother and so forth. These cultures were comparatively non-violent: they did not “focus on the power to inflict pain and kill, but the power to give life and pleasure.”[i] Their religions centered around a Goddess. The earliest European and Middle Eastern images of the Divine Female are up to 400,000 years old.

These partnership cultures were not in the dark about how babies are conceived: they were aware of both the male and the female role in reproduction. Partnership spirituality usually thought of “the divine in both female and male form,” but “the male deities were not associated with thunderbolts or weapons (like Jehovah or Zeus)” and they were, at most, equal to the Goddesses. In partnership cultures, “masculinity was not synonymous with domination and conquest.”[ii]

Patriarchy is a recent human invention. Despite what its religions preach, it is not natural, it is not inevitable, and it has never been “the only thing that’s out there.” There are alternatives to it, and all human-made systems can be changed. In the relatively brief span of its existence, patriarchy has already gone just about the whole way toward proving itself unviable. This comes easily to dominator culture because it is fundamentally “anti-life,” so anti-life that it has made uncounted life-forms extinct and now threatens even the survival of the human species.

Dominator religions preach the unlimited exploitation of our planet Earth, proclaiming that the world was created for “man” to use, and use up if he so chooses, since some otherworldly Heaven or Paradise is his “real home.” Their expectation is that “mankind” will end by causing global disaster, that human beings are incapable of self-control and common sense. In my local paper in May 2002, one Mike Hosey, a Christian, confidently stated:

“Christianity, in general, believes the world to be a lost and dying place in need of salvation; a place where people need to put their faith in God, and not in themselves.”[iii]

I totally disagree with this view of the world and of humanity, and I believe there is real reason for hope. As Riane Eisler points out, in the West, over the past 300 years and more, a historical continuum has developed that is moving us away from absolute dominator culture.[iv] In the 17th and 18th centuries, the “divinely ordained” rule of kings and emperors over their “subjects” was challenged and largely overthrown. The early feminist movement in the 19th century chipped away at the control of men over women and children, while the abolitionist movement and pacifist movement challenged the entrenched traditions of the enslavement of one race by another, and the use of force by one nation to control another. In the past 100-plus years, civil rights, organized labor, anti-colonial, women’s liberation, indigenous people’s rights, and gay rights movements have arisen to oppose further aspects of domination. A relatively new and very important movement is now taking a stand against domination and violence in intimate relationships: rape, battering, child abuse and incest. Putting an end to intimate violence is central to moving toward a partnership society.

There is no mistaking that this “shift toward partnership has been fiercely resisted every step of the way.”[v] But if you look at the overall trend, we have moved a long distance away from all-out domination and toward partnership in a relatively short time. We are presently in a backlash phase, what Eisler calls a “periodic regression toward the dominator model.”[vi] Yet the irony of globalization is that the world has become so small that people cannot really avoid the knowledge of our mutual world-wide interdependence. We are being forced out of the denial that is typical of dominator culture by phenomena we cannot ignore, such as global warming. The world’s systems of domination are only able to escalate these problems, and as a result it is becoming inescapably obvious that these systems are counter-productive.

[i] Eisler, The Power of Partnership, p. 189
[ii] Eisler, p. 189
[iii] Mike Hosey, in an editorial on the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church, The Gainesville Sun, May 20, 2002.
[iv] Eisler, pp. 94-95.
[v] Eisler, p. 95.
[vi] Eisler, p. 95.

On Marriage, continued

Something just struck me. I wrote in an earlier post about my objections to women taking their husbands' names upon marriage. Well, in one way this connects with my problems with societal homophobia. I believe that people are capable of remembering two or even more family names in connection with a single family unit, but many of them just aren't familiar with the concept and therefore bridle at it, or would rather be mentally lazy and slap the same label on both spouses and their kids. And many, whether consciously or subconsciously, subscribe to the idea that a woman should "be subsumed into" her husband upon marriage, as is the will of patriarchy.

Now, gay and lesbian couples are (blessedly, in my opinion -- they're a breath of fresh air within the New York Times Sunday Styles wedding announcements, see earlier post) very likely to include two or more names in their family unit. So maybe gay and lesbian couples are in somewhat of the same boat with heterosexual couples who retain two names instead of shoehorning both partners in under one name. Many folks claim they "can't handle it" when the truth often is, they don't want to handle it. They're using nomenclature as a means of social compulsion, to make straight women who want to maintain their independence, and gays and lesbians, disappear.

Of course it's not as simple as that. Homophobia is still far more socially acceptable than misogyny. Though misogyny remains too socially acceptable on its own account, if a straight woman, and her male partner, are willing to take on the extra work needful to make the world at large recognize the fact that they each have their own surname even though they're married, they can usually get pretty much everyone to go along with it. Some people may be obnoxious about it, and even attack you personally if they feel threatened enough, but if you don't cede ground, all but a handful will back down. Unfortunately, the same is not true for gays and lesbians seeking the plain old right to marry, much less recognition as a married couple. A straight woman who insists on her own name may get guff, but she won't get beaten up or killed. Gays and lesbians who refuse to pretend to be who they're not may actually get beaten up or killed, or lose their jobs, or be denied housing, or lose custody of their children... and a lot of other unpleasant, wrong and dangerous things. Not to mention that they run a very good chance of being abandoned, rejected and/or abused by their very own family members.

This is a strange time. We've managed to go a little ways toward getting past sexism and racism in our political choices, but at the same time, there's this "renaissance" (I would say recidivist slide) of women ostentatiously "taking their husband's names," and, far worse, a spate of benighted anti-gay legislation which has gone so far as to re-write state constitutions to deny the right of marriage to a specific group (on the basis of sexual orientation or preference), and also to deny the option of domestic partnership to heterosexuals who don't want to legally marry. The effect on my state, Florida, is catastrophic. First there's the despicable homophobia and anti-American tenor of the constitutional amendment passed here. And then there are the disastrous consequences for our senior-citizen-heavy population. Many single seniors live together without marriage because marrying means losing a significant part of their already pathetic Social Security benefits. Now they face not being able to register as domestic partners, which means they have no rights if a partner gets sick, no access to a partner's health benefits, etc. etc. Sickening.

Let me be clear on one point. If a woman desperately wants to change her name upon marriage, it's a free country. But the overwhelming trend of women "taking their husbands' names" is an ongoing expression of a pretty clearly discernible, long-standing patriarchal sentiment, which is that women are here to support and enable men (and children), and not to lead lives of their own or have goals of their own. This system has not redounded to the psychological or economic benefit of homemakers, whose vital work I think should be explicitly part of the Gross Domestic Product. Full-time homemakers of either gender should be awarded Social Security in their own right, not as derivatives of their spouses, and ideally, they should be officially allotted a given share of the annual family income, so they never have to beg, cajole or manipulate in order to get their hands on spending money. And don't get me going on so-called "no-fault" divorce, which seems to assume that someone who hasn't held a paid job for years can somehow jump right back into paid work! What very few people realize is that only about 15% of women who divorce are awarded ANY alimony at all, and as for child support, the frequency with which men skip out on paying it is disgusting.

But I digress. Which I do tend to do. To get back to the resistance of the larger society to both "two-name" heterosexual marriage and, far more aggravatedly, gay/lesbian marriage: of course, what both these options do is to undermine the paradigm of patriarchal marriage. They offer models of marriage that go against gender-role assumptions and assume equal partnerships instead of complementarity. A large percentage of our fellow citizens don't want to see, and don't want their children to see, that there are quite a few different ways to do coupledom, including ones which don't necessarily involve hierarchy, dominance/submission, procreation, or the "disappearing" of one partner into another. They want to force everyone into "one-size-fits-all" (it never does) gender roles and marriage molds, ones they find familiar and comforting, ones that don't require individual thought and don't necessitate the taking of individual responsibility or individual stands.

This is intimately connected to our culture's love of dualism, the idea that there are only two answers to any given question, one labeled "right" and one labeled "wrong." Every situation is reduced to an "either-or" choice, with no option labeled "both-and." More on this next time.

Ethics: Some Food for Thought from Robin Wood

Here's an excerpt from "When, Why...If," by Robin Wood:

"When you were small, you were taught a certain world view by your parents, your peers, and the people around you. Your mind was primed then, and ready to accept those things that would enable you to adapt in this society. You eagerly learned the concepts that your parents taught you, and by the time you were two, your basic view of the world was in place.

"As you grew, you learned to fit the things you heard and saw into that basic view of the world. You learned what behavior was acceptable to the people who ruled your life, and what was not. You learned how much latitude there was in the rules, and when 'no' really meant 'no.'

"And you also learned how to work around the rules to get what you thought you wanted.

"If your upbringing had been perfect, you would have perfectly understood the reasoning behind the rules, and you would easily have developed perfect ethics.

"The trouble is that we are all raised by mortals; by people who have problems of their own, who were raised by other people with problems and so on. And the problems tend to get passed down from generation to generation, right along with all the other attitudes and beliefs that your parents so carefully instilled in you.

"You, however, have decided that at least some of those things are not the things that you want to make up the pieces of your world view. That's great! I think that adults need to create their own world views. We are not the same individuals that our parents are, and we are not living on the same planet they were raised on. The world is changing too quickly. Population has probably more than doubled since they were young; societal values are shifting; technology has flown far beyond the science fiction of my own youth, let alone theirs; incurable diseases have cropped up, and forced a change in attitude about a great many things. Future Shock, they called it twenty years ago. But I look at my own kids now, and they aren't the least bit shocky. I think they are depending on the speed of change, counting on it to give them swell new things they barely dreamed of before. Just last night at dinner my youngest told me that 1993 stuff is way out of fashion now. As I write this, it is January 4, 1994! (Not everything, he admitted, but lots of it.)

"And as you create your own world view, and put together the things you need to take this path, you will discover that some of the stuff you learned as a youngster is still valid for you now, that some things no longer apply to the world you find yourself in, and that some things were invalid from the beginning.

"In order for you to become an ethical being, you need to make these decisions and determinations yourself. No one else can do it for you. If you allow someone else to make your ethical decisions, you are giving away your own personal power, and you are not behaving ethically at all. You are behaving obediently. In my opinion, obedience is for children who do not yet have enough experience under their belts to make cause and effect correlations, and therefore can't be expected to make wise ethical decisions. If you are not a child, you should not be obedient. You are the only person living your life, and therefore, you are the only one qualified to make your life decisions.

"Yes, I know that means that you will have to think a great deal.

"I warned you about that... Get used to it.

"It isn't like you have to start from a vacuum.

"Begin with what you were taught as a kid. Chances are that the rules and standards drummed into you had a lot in common with the basic law of the craft, although the reasons for following them were different. You were probably taught the golden rule: 'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.' Fine as far as it goes. Good for children. But I think we can do better than that. We can 'Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.'

"I told you in the beginning that this was the hard path, not the easy one. And the farther along you go, the more your own ethics will cause you to think, and then do things that you know are right, even if you don't want to do them.

"... It is my sincere desire that you will realize that rules and reflexive reactions have little place in a world that changes every nanosecond; where every situation is unique, and every individual you deal with is unlike any other. In such a world, each case is a special case, and must be met with a special answer. It is my goal to help you discover how to reach those answers; honestly and non-judgementally, with a heart filled with love, understanding, wisdom and joy.

"I want you to be able to steer your way through your life, and find your heart's desire, without harming anyone.

"I hope that you realize that if you do harm someone, you must make restitution. There is no 'forgiveness' on this path. Your 'sins' are not 'wiped clean' with little or no effort on your part. Here, 'sins' are not part of the question. Here we have only responsibility. You are responsible for your own actions, and only for your own actions. And if you break something with your actions, you are required to attempt to mend it with your actions, as well.

"We all make mistakes, try as we might not to. The trick is to realize that we have, forgive ourselves, do our best to correct our mistake, and go on.

"Sometimes, our ethics will cause us to change our entire lives. This takes great courage....

"When you become ethical, when you begin to see the cause of your actions, when you truly take responsibility for everything you do, the easy way ceases to serve. It no longer works to say 'Mea culpa' and be absolved, because deep inside you know perfectly well that is not enough.

"When you look within, and can find the answers there, you are beginning to arrive.

"When you can shine the bright light of honesty on the dusty corners of your soul, and like what you see, you are well on your way.

"When everything you look at, you look at with love and honesty, with a judgement unclouded by any sort of fear or prejudice, and you can decide clearly and wisely what you should do in each situation as it arises, you are there.

"I, personally, am not there yet.

"But I'm working on it!

"The thinking and reasoning become easier all the time.

"My prejudices are fading.

"But in order for your prejudices to fade, you first have to know what they are.... So examine your prejudices... Cast the bright light of honesty on them until they dissipate like fog in the sun.

"Keep working, and thinking, and trying to be better; and I assure you that you will be.

"Let your appetites and habits rule you, have a pat answer for everything, and your ethics will slip away until you have none left.

"Having ethics is like driving a car. Remember when you first learned to drive? You had to think about all of the mechanics of it, all the time. Hands go here, feet go there. Oh no! I'm turning the wheel too far! Ack! That's too far in the other direction! Where is that brake pedal? I know it has to be here somewhere!

"Then, gradually, you learned how to do it, and it became easier. ... By now, you can probably drive without much trouble. You may even have an 'autopilot' that will take you straight to work without any conscious effort on your part at all.

"But if you don't keep at least some of your mind on the road, you will wind up in a pileup.

"In just the same way, using your mind instead of a set of rules is hard at first. Every question is completely different than anything you have had to think through before. Correlating the cause and effect, and thinking through the ripples may seem almost paralyzing at first. Correcting for an error may result in an over-correction that harms someone else. You may need to find the brakes, and use the old rules for a little while to get your breath back. (If so, go ahead. Most of the ones that don't judge other people are not bad, as far as they go. I just think they don't go very far.)

"As you become more familiar with ethical living, you will find that certain questions follow certain patterns, and that you have thought a lot of this out before. Some things will become reflexive. You don't have to consider whether to use magic to cause someone to fall in love with you, for instance. You will just know that is wrong. The mechanics of having your brain with you at all times will be less and less of a problem. Eventually, you will be able to make rapid judgments for most things, and life will go pretty smoothly.

"But don't make the mistake of letting your mind wander completely away, or you will end up in an ethical pileup.

"Just as in driving, you may have only seconds to make the really important ethical decisions. Emergencies of all kinds are like that. And again as in driving, the more experience you have, the more likely you are to make a good decision in time.

"Without the ability to drive, your freedom would be seriously curtailed. Without the ability to make good ethical choices, your freedom may need to be seriously curtailed.

"So become a good ethical driver!

"Go forth joyfully, with honesty and love and laughter and wisdom and all that good stuff. Steer carefully, enjoy your freedom, and write if you get work!"

Terrorism

Terrorism is something I particularly hate, and I'm not in the least apologetic about it. Anyone who feels entitled to cut short anyone's precious life to draw attention to a cause, even to protest some dire injustice, has to me divorced her- or himself from the human race. The only exception might be if one were able to confront someone directly responsible for the injustice. But killing uninvolved civilians, and worse yet killing them because of their nationality and/or religion... unforgivable.

Religion is so often the culprit behind these horrible acts. The kind of religion that spreads the pernicious message that only those who believe exactly like you are fully human, that everyone else is inherently expendable. And to some extent or another, I'm sorry to say, all three of the great mono-male-theisms -- the religions with a unitary or triune male God, i.e. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in order of their emergence -- fit that description.

How can you psych yourself up to such a pitch, such a poisonous mix of bigotry, nihilism and self-righteousness, that you can go out and slaughter a young Jewish couple in front of their now orphaned two-year-old child, who was only saved by the bravery of his nanny? The toddler's pants were soaked in blood. How can you shoot a 13-year-old girl on a tour with her father -- and her father? An ageing couple dining at a restaurant to celebrate their son and daughter-in-law's wedding anniversary? And from what I gleaned from the New York Times this morning, the son in this last case may also have fallen victim to the terrorists, while his wife managed to escape.

Many years ago, by unfortunate coincidence, I ended up on board a hijacked airplane. Then a young teenager, traveling without my parents, I've actually experienced guns pointed at me, and threats to blow up the airplane with all of us passengers on board. I was held in a Middle Eastern nation torn by civil war for a week. At night, the building in which we were last held was bombarded by artillery. When some of us were finally released, we took off from the capital city's airport with a gunfight going on not far away.

I may not be a pacifist -- if anyone tries to turn me into a pawn again, or worse, attempts to take someone I love hostage, I will fight back by every means at my command -- but my Paganism is a life-conserving belief system. Using one's energy to spread terror, throwing away one's own irreplaceable life and those of others in some explosion of hatred, is anathema. It's worse yet if it's religion-fueled hatred. My gut instinct tells me that any religion that dares tell you it's O.K. to persecute or kill people who think differently from you has to be a dangerous load of hooey. No-one is inherently "second-class," and no one is in a position to judge that anyone else is expendable.

Of course, the problem is that the sort of people who carry out horrors like this carnage in Mumbai -- almost without exception young men -- have been taught from infancy to hate the "other" (the "unbeliever," the foreigner, plus women in general) and, at the same time, to hate themselves, to find themselves sinful, imperfect, worthy of death. They're not about to turn around and use their energy to work on creating a better world where they happen to be. They've been indoctrinated with the dread and infinitely destructive idea that the Earth is only a way-station, that they'll be rewarded for throwing themselves and others away with some fabulous paradise beyond death's door.

This mindset has to be replaced with more life-affirming ones before these terrorists and many others of their ilk manage to threaten or destroy everything that matters to us. We need to stand up for our own, life-positive belief systems, to show that one can change one's environment for the better, in small ways and, with enough positive dedication, in a big way. We also need to teach tolerance for the inevitable imperfections in each of us, love for ourselves and others, and personal and mutual responsibility throughout each community.

Responsibility -- that's worthy of a lot more exploration! More anon.

On Marriage

Since marriage is dwelling on my mind since the, to me, incomprehensible passage of Proposition 8 in California -- I still don't get that here in America, a coalition of religious and other bigots managed to write something into a state constitution to take a specific group of people's rights away -- here are some musings. After I say that, if you can amend a constitution to take one group of people's rights away, no-one's rights are safe. Of course, we in the U.S.A. do have a long and not very lovely tradition of founding documents with mythologized reputations that began by limiting rights to a very few (propertied white males), and a constant need on the part of marginalized folks to fight to be included in the category "fully human."

Which leads me to one of my pet peeves: reading the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times on a weekly basis and encountering the widespread phrase "The bride is taking her husband's name." Even women in their 50s and 60s are becoming "Mrs. His Name." Now, I understand this if it's a means of getting rid of a former husband's name, but still! The whole phenomenon is like a retro DEvolution. I've gotten to the point where I cheer whenever the announcement says "The bride is keeping her name" or its equivalent!

It's not a coincidence that there's a convention that all but demands that women who marry (and any children of that marriage) take their husbands' last names. It all harks back to thoroughly patriarchal law, as expressed by a famous 18th-century English jurist (William Blackstone) who said, centuries ago, "In marriage, two become one, and that one is the husband." The idea is that women's only claim to social significance (and still, quite often, to economic survival) is as the "helpmeets" (to use biblical language) of their husbands. Every woman's first duty is to create a nurturing cocoon for "her" man, in other words, to serve as his support system, taking care of pretty much every trivial, repetitive chore so that he can shine, at whatever cost to her own individual career (if she aspires to one) or creative work or simply time and room to breathe and be as herself.

Of course, the women are stuck in a bind. If they keep their "maiden" names (wince), they're almost certainly hanging on to another patronymic (father-derived moniker). If they opt for their mother's "maiden" name, they're pretty sure to be choosing her father's handle. Some like to make fun of the '70s feminists who renamed themselves "Sarachild" or "Mariedaughter," but nearly the only way to claim a female-derived name in the dominant U.S. culture is to create one. Something not true of every culture, by a long chalk. For example, Iceland's citizens generally add a suffix meaning "daughter" or "son" to the first name of one of their parents. It used to be standard practice to use the father's name, but it's not necessarily that any more!
I like to think that if I'd been a more evolved life-form when I got hitched, more than two decades ago, my partner and I might have considered choosing a mutual last name we both identified with and which had nothing to do with our family trees. Instead, each of us just kept our own last name, which works very well in our immediate circle of friends and didn't cause any major ructions among our family members.

But living in the Southland, it's amazing how much energy a woman has to devote to getting people to call her by her own last name rather than her husband's! It's a none-too-subtle attempt at social policing that reminds me of a visit to the Bahamas we made about ten years ago. On our return journey, a U.S. customs agent claimed he couldn't give us the family allowance for duty-free purchases. Since we had two separate last names, how could we prove we were married? In that particular situation, I ripped my wedding ring off my finger to show him my partner's name inside -- since then, I've carried a copy of our marriage license just in case anyone else decides to try to make us cry "uncle!"

And I do mean "uncle." Because human beings are really more than flexible enough to commit more than one name per social unit to memory. No, the idea is that women, once married, are supposed to be subsumed, to disappear as independent beings, while men are not. It's just like being labeled "Mrs." No-one expects men to be defined by whether or not they're married. It's "Mr." whether single, wed, straight, gay -- because men are seen as individuals under any circumstances. This is why "Ms." is so useful, and why we should fight to maintain its use. It serves the same purpose for women. (Although one could argue it might be interesting to find a universal honorific or title that doesn't immediately point to gender at all...)

Why "Mrs." or "Miss"? Actually, "Miss" is something that gets awkward if used for any female above the age of about 12. Let's compare our situation with that in Germany, where the titles are really interesting. Men are referred to as "Herr," which means "Gentleman" ("Mann" would be "man.") Women used to be called "Fraeulein" for "Miss" and "Frau," which just means "woman," for "Mrs." In the last two generations, the use of "Fraeulein" has all but ceased (except for little girls), and all women (above the age of say 14) are usually called "Frau." But isn't it interesting that men are ranked as "gentlemen," while all women are just the generic "female"? But at least, with current usage, women aren't automatically classified as derivatives of their male partners, if they have such. (Although it does give one pause to consider that well into the 20th century, a German woman would only be called "woman" if she was married, while she'd remain a "little woman" (Fraeulein) into her 90s if she stayed single!)

OK, must quit while I'm behind. I have to be somewhere in twenty minutes. But these surely won't be my last ruminations on this subject!

Thanksgiving

Just a few lines which may be all I manage until after Thanksgiving. We're expecting, as of right now, 24 people (including our two selves). A 21-pound organic turkey just arrived at the front door, and is now reposing in our fridge. Yikes!

Actually, we've been hosting this festivity for 14 years now, so although it's always a bit of a frantic rush, we're used to it. It's a lot of fun to bring together a bunch of diverse folks from teenagers to 80-somethings, and the only thing that would be more fun would be not having to haul the turkey out of the oven every 15 minutes to baste it for four to five hours!

I'm thankful this year, even though I'm also wistful. The vicissitudes of the financial markets have taken a lot out of me, but I'm trying to remember my favorite adage: "Adversity is inevitable; misery is optional." So I do my best to keep my chin up, and count my many blessings. I'm thankful that most of our nearest and dearest are healthy and happy, I'm thankful that we're looking forward to a President Obama (although right now he's looking a bit too "Clinton-lite" to me!) instead of four more years of Bush redux, and I'm thankful that after 24 years and lots of curve balls to deal with, my dearest spouse and I still love, respect, consider, and care about each other. I wish the same to everyone out there!

An Introduction to (Neo-)Paganism

Here's a brief piece I wrote for a panel discussion at a college reunion, almost ten years ago:

Starting in 1991, I came back to the belief system I think I was born with. It's called Goddess spirituality, eco-spirituality, eco-feminism -- the big, catch-all term is Neo-Paganism. None of these names fit completely, and some of the words are given a negative spin by popular culture.

It's partly rooted in ever-growing amounts of archaeological evidence of non-patriarchal pre-Christian cultures in Africa, Asia, and Europe. These societies, which existed for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, were egalitarian, co-operative, highly creative and largely peaceful. They saw the spark of the divine in everything living, and when they personified this divine essence, they called it Goddess -- later, they also called it God.

For me, it's also a personal re-connection to remembered moments in my childhood, experiences of wonder, times when I felt good about myself and the whole world, energized, 100 per cent alive.

But it's not all “going back.” My belief system rejects dualism, the idea that something must be either "this" or "that" -- so it can reach back and look forward at the same time. Neo-Paganism makes no claim to being some "authentic" revival of specific beliefs from 3,500 or more years ago. After all, it's Neo-Paganism, and it's about living in this, present world. It's about remaining aware of both the wider world, and the specific places we each live in: their seasons, climate, and geography, and the needs of that particular community. Because we insist on honoring where we are, what we come from and what we've become a part of, Neo-Pagans come in at least as many flavors as Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream -- but we DO share some basic principles.

First, to Neo-Pagans, the divine is immanent, NOT transcendent. It's not somewhere "above" us humans and the rest of the world, or "out there" -- it IS, and it IS in EVERYTHING, including us. All creation is born of a Great Mother and is part of Her substance, so everything is connected.

Second, Neo-Pagans accept no cast-in-stone hierarchies, and no all-powerful gurus. It's a woman-positive belief system -- for example, since we believe in Goddess, we can't well question women's right to be priestesses -- but it's not a belief system for women only. For men and women, Neo-Paganism gives the opportunity to explore and integrate all aspects of one's personality, to "think outside the box." We're also called to live in the body -- live juicy and messy, without denying the body and the emotions, without seeing the mind and spirit as separate from the body, superior or somehow more "pure." I believe I get one life, one wonderful gift, one chance to experience this beautiful world, through the medium of my body -- and I am grateful to my body, and love it.

At the same time, Neo-Paganism is a very demanding belief system. It's not about unlimited license or moral relativism. The one binding rule, the Wiccan Rede, could be called "How to be Stricter than the Ten Commandments in Eight Words or Less." It says, "IF you harm NONE, do as you will." Think about it. I am to harm nothing -- not myself, or anyone or anything else. So I'm required to "live lightly on the earth", to be constantly aware of the obvious and not so obvious impact of my actions. I have to take responsibility for everything I do, and examine and recognize the amazing power of my intentions and my expectations.

You can see why this is unlikely to become a majority religion! It's a lifelong learning process, without any promise of a future repeat performance. But it suits me, and quite a few others: there are now [1999] at least 200,000 Neo-Pagans in the United States alone.

Courtesy is Contagious

It's great to get one's nose outside the house after a whole morning and half an afternoon spent preparing for another mass Thanksgiving -- up to 25 people! Everyone was supposed to have told us whether they were coming by yesterday morning, but of course, four have managed not to report in yet. The art of the RSVP is all but lost. I had to call pretty much everyone on the guest list to double-check as to whether they were attending and what they were bringing. Even five years ago, not that much was expected of the hosts!

I suppose that leads me to a not so small gripe of mine. One of my favorite bumper stickers says "Courtesy is Contagious," and what seems to be in very short supply in contemporary society is basic consideration for others. Like letting the hosts of a potluck party know if you're going to be there and what you'll bring. Or using your turn signals when you're driving a car to warn the people behind you that you intend to change lanes or make a turn. Something that's particularly neglected in our fair city. Never before have I lived in a place where people were quite as likely to cut across two or more lanes of traffic without the slightest whiff of warning. It's as if drivers are in a trance, convinced they're actually in a world of their own. It's so ubiquitous around here that I had a proprietary bumper sticker made up that says "I Can't Read Minds -- Use Your Turn Signals!"

You know you're really suffering from withdrawal symptoms about responsible citizenhood when you get sentimental about a series of TV commercials. I'm talking about the Liberty Mutual insurance company commercials which show a chain of small actions taken by individuals to look out for their fellow human beings. I feel like investigating Liberty Mutual to see if they can take over some of our insurance, just to reward them for putting these positive examples out there. If we all took the trouble to be more aware of our surroundings, the people around us and our immediate environment, the world could be a much less stressful and stressed place in a very short time.

Taking responsibility. It's a key ingredient of the Pagan creed. Not that I'm always perfect at it either, but I am aware that it's a requirement. It harks back to "Harm none." You have to try to be aware enough to avoid doing any avoidable, active harm. It means you have to live awake, and be cognizant of your impact, and what you can do to make life easier and more pleasant for everyone (without bending yourself into a pretzel or being masochistic, mind you!).

And what you put out there comes back to you, usually in multiples. So it's best to do good!

More Thoughts on Faustian Questions

To go along with what I just posted about the afterlife, here are a few more thoughts generated by my viewing of "The Damnation of Faust" this afternoon at the movie theatre. An aside: nothing is more civilized than going to an opera broadcast with friends, a bar of decadent dark chocolate, some prosciutto sandwiches and a thermos of home-made mulled wine, all enjoyed in the obscurity of one's movie seat without disturbing anyone around you. But nothing is more annoying than people who talk nonstop during such a broadcast, displaying the bad habits they've developed in front of their TV sets at home. We put the kibosh on that when it popped up in our immediate vicinity, but continued to be disturbed by folks farther away yammering on and on. Augh!

One of the great themes of the Faustian drama is, of course, Faust's restless boredom with all that ordinary life has to offer, his demand for omniscience, omnipotence, eternal youth. There are many stories that reiterate this theme, from the fairytale of "The Fisherman and his Wife," one of the rare instances in which it is a woman who wants to be God, to John Adams' new opera "Dr. Atomic," already mentioned in a previous post, in which the "man who would be God" is Robert Oppenheimer.

Hand in hand with the impossible demand for unlimited power and personal immortality goes the (usually male) impossible demand for the perfect, pure partner. As soon as the love object has been sexually enjoyed and thus polluted, or displays any normal human failings, it (usually she) is summarily jettisoned. In the same essay I quoted in my previous post, I explored this dynamic as acted out by the 9/11 hijackers:

"[The] Islamic notion of paradise, somewhat less ethereal than the Christian one and geared to satisfy the imaginations of hyper-patriarchal males, is a magnet for the terroristically inclined. In a September article in the online Asia Times, Arif Jamal, an expert on jihad or Islamic holy war, points out the incentives the Koran offers to men willing to be mujihadeen (holy warriors):
"'The mujahideen [are] assured of entering Paradise before the first drop of their blood [falls] to earth... The martyrs are promised 72 houris [each] in Paradise. These houris [perpetual virgins, black-eyed and nubile] are more beautiful than all the beauties of the world combined. I have studied more than 600 wills of mujahideen... There is hardly any will that escapes this concept. All the mujahideen have mentioned the houris as an important incentive for waging jihad. The Paradise with houris is the prime objective of these mujahideen... they refuse to get married because they want to get married in Paradise.'

"In his final instructions to them, apparent September 11 hijacker-in-chief Mohammed Atta reassured his fellow fanatics, 'You should feel complete tranquillity, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.' When Palestinians commit a suicide bombing in Israel, their deaths are announced in Palestinian newspapers as weddings: 'The Wedding of the Martyr Ali Khadr Al-Yassini to the Black-Eyed in Eternal Paradise.' (NY Times Sunday Magazine 10/28/01, "What Makes a Suicide Bomber?" p. 51.)

"But these young men aren't committing murder-suicide simply to get sex. Certainly not sex as we know it. The 72 houris are part of a whole package promised to each [male] martyr, which includes guaranteed ever-lasting heaven, no pain, no death, no judgement day. The most important thing about the houris is that they are perpetual virgins. Flesh-and-blood women can never aspire to such purity: they are considered innately evil and seductive, permanently sullied by their menstrual bleeding and even more defiled and devalued once they have been sexually "used." By contrast, a man can have as much contact as he wants with a houri without being contaminated by the filth of mortal femaleness.

"It all hangs together: an obsession with impossible purity, hatred and fear of real women, of the dirt and imperfection of real life, even of one's own physicality, one's own body. Mohammed Atta's last will and testament stipulates that no woman be allowed to mourn him, attend his funeral or even go near his grave. He disdained his own body so much that he stipulated that the man who was to wash his genitals after his death wear gloves, so his impure sexual parts would theoretically remain untouched.

"But let's not kid ourselves that this thought complex is the exclusive property of Islamic fundamentalists. Consider orthodox Judaism, which demands that women cleanse themselves of their menstrual pollution each month, and be banned from synagogue for twice as long after the birth of a female child as after the birth of a male. Any man who touches a menstruating woman has to ritually purify himself and still remains unclean until sunset that day; if he has sex with a menstruating woman, he is unclean for a week.

"As for Christianity, early "church father" Tertullian (ca. AD 200) makes it clear: '[W]oman [is] the obstacle to purity, the temptress, the enemy...her body is the gate of hell.' The all-male Catholic church hierarchy couldn't stand the thought that Mary, mother of Jesus, might be a normal, fleshly woman. So the New Testament mentions of Jesus's younger siblings are explained away, to make sure no-one dares think she actually had sex with her husband Joseph, and by the mid-19th century, she was declared a perpetual virgin. Just like the houris.

"It's a given in male-monotheist religions: the immaculate super-woman, a figment of the imagination, is set up as an impossible standard that "standard-issue" women can never meet. This fills women with despair and self-hatred, while men may cultivate exaggerated expectations, sure to be disappointed.

"I could write a Ph.D. dissertation about how male-monotheist cultures associate women with the body, the emotions, what is "lower," and "nature," while men are associated with the soul, the intellect, what is "higher," and "culture." (If you want to read a really good feminist book on this subject, try Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, or Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity.)

"Of course, all the dualistic nonsense about the desirability of a mind-body split and greater female fleshliness automatically conferring superiority on males is unadulterated baloney. Emotions and states of mind don't have a gender, and various quantities of all of them are parcelled out to every human being. As for the supposed ideals of pure mind and pure spirit, our marvelous brains are organs of the body, and if the rest of the body doesn't function, the brain is kaputt! Without the senses, we would be incapable of experiencing or learning anything. No emotion: no joy. About as appealing as the stereotypical heaven I heard about as a child.
I wonder why so many men, and not a few women, presume to despise the miracle of our one life on this earth, and spend the precious days allotted to them bewailing having been born at all, focused monomaniacally on the supposed flaws of embodied living. Mohammed Atta is certainly not alone in his self-hatred, misogyny and contempt for all the world. Variants of that attitude are thickly strewn throughout all male-monotheist belief systems. Atta's will warned people (by which term he meant men) not to be "distracted" by life, to fear God and not allow themselves to be "fooled" by the things life on earth offers. I am completely baffled by someone who thinks the emotion we should feel toward the force behind our creation is fear.

"Of course, this whole line is easier to swallow if you are someone with few perceived options in life, or are unhappy or dissatisfied with your position in the hierarchy you believe the world should embody. Which also links up to why I feel haunted by the afterlife, for the belief in an individual, personal, eternal ever-after, in either "heaven" or "hell," has been used for thousands of years by ruling classes of whatever ilk as a rationale for oppression and exploitation of the vast majority of people. If "the meek" -- read the poor, the disadvantaged, the put-upon -- really believe it will be "their turn" in some vague, glorious post-apocalyptic by-and-by, they are far more likely to resign themselves to the inferior, unpleasant place they occupy during what they think is just their present round on the planet. Karl Marx was wrong about a number of things, but he was right when he said that religion -- or at least the spectre of the afterlife -- is the opium of the people.

"Opium, carrot, and stick as well. A lot of folks believe we can't "be good" unless the carrot of "heaven" and the stick of "hell" are constantly dangled before our eyes. Now I don't think that we're all pre-programmed for saccharine-sweetness, but the vast majority of us can learn to view ourselves as okay individuals, treat others with basic courtesy and take responsibility for our own actions. As one clever T-shirt saying has it, "No child is born a bigot": instead, we absorb the plupart of our problematic thought patterns from our environment. I'll tell you what believing I have only one go-around does for me. It has helped me go from being a type A with a vengeance to an A minus who takes time to appreciate the world around me every day and is moving toward acting out of understanding and joy rather than anger and despair. For some reason, a lot of folks think that if we allow ourselves to accept that we have just one life, we'll drown ourselves in heedless hedonism. Instead, that acceptance motivates me to try to be my best self, to want to make right what I've done wrong, make amends for my mistakes, and do all this with some consistency and promptitude. I still drop the ball quite regularly, but because I can draw strength and pleasure from my connection to everything around me, I stay pretty much on course. "

Needless to say, these will not be my last words on this subject! Stay tuned!

More on the Afterlife

Just got out of the live HD transmission of the Metropolitan Opera's production of Hector Berlioz's "Damnation of Faust." It was staged by the well-known director Robert Lepage, his first work for the Met, and beautifully sung, especially by the baritone singing Mephistopheles, John Relyea.

Lepage filled this episodic opera with fabulous visual tricks illustrating the hallucinatory imagery in the score, imagery which certainly seems to suggest that Berlioz was a drug fiend, as has been rumored. Snakelike, writhing trees, demons dropping from the skies to cavort with will of the wisps, a grid-like scaffolding enabling two planes of projection.

But after all this fertile creativity, the final scene, in which Faust is dragged down to Hell and his betrayed lover, Marguerite, literally ascends a ladder toward Heaven, is pure stereotype. I had to smile to think that only days ago I wrote in this blog about the hierarchy of Heaven. Here you had the barechested damned, all male and visible only from the waist up at the very bottom of the stage, suddenly replaced in a twinkling by a chorus consisting entirely of women and children and dressed all in white drapery, so many angels. And right at their center Marguerite, also decked out in a white robe, climbing the celestial ladder.

The music was sublime, but the visuals at the climax were all too expected. And as I gazed at this antiseptic scene of Marguerite's supposed redemption, I remembered my own words from an essay I wrote right after 9/11:

"Now, paradise or heaven has never appealed to me. From my childhood, I remember our Lutheran minister awkwardly trying to conjure up the delights of this place (Lutherans are better at duty and order than at poetic description). I also digested the more fluid prose of Catholic priests while staying with friends. However, and however well, it was described, paradise sounded dreadfully boring. Floating around playing harps and singing praises to God "up there," a never-ending so-called "life" without any of the delights of embodiment: nothing to tempt me. Plus, I've never been fond of hierarchy, and every mainstream religion with an afterlife concept features one that's cast in stone, with God (by whatever name) at the top, saints, cherubim and seraphim of whichever description near the top and, of course, the vast majority of folks (and just about all women) permanently at the bottom, and supposed to be grateful to be there. Thanks, but no thanks."

You can tell that my opinion about the afterlife has been pretty constant for some time. Pagans in general don't believe in "heaven" or "hell": in my own case, unlike many of my fellow Pagans, I don't subscribe to reincarnation either, or to the comforting concept of a "Summerland," where souls wait contentedly to return to this world. As I put it in the same earlier essay,

"My thoughts run like this: when I die, my energy will get "recycled" into other forms of life. Maybe my ashes will fertilize some plants! But my common sense doesn't accept the idea that any entity recognizable as uniquely "me" will endure, or return. And I don't feel in any way disappointed or cheated by that. I must admit that to me, it seems greedy to demand more than one lifespan, as if living in itself were not a treasure beyond price for those of us lucky enough to be living in relatively comfortable circumstances in relatively enlightened parts. Instead, we could be making the most of every moment we are given, dealing with our limitations, celebrating our possibilities, and fighting to improve everything we can. As the late great Margaret Mead put it, 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does.'

"So my concept of an "afterlife" is that life on earth will go on after I'm dead. I don't have children of my own, and it doesn't trouble me to think that my particular genetic code stops here. I have a lot of children and young people to care about, including large numbers I don't know personally. I see the well-being of all the creatures of our Earth, present and future, as the legacy, the re-cycling, as it were, of my energy and that of uncounted thousands upon thousands of others, human and non-human. Our mission, if we choose to accept it -- and it's a glorious one -- is to spend our time enjoying each other's company, making the most of the talents we have and doing our level best to each safeguard our little corner of the Earth from the uncontrolled depredations of the human race and keep that human race from making itself extinct. It does no one any good if we lose our time grumbling, moaning and trembling, or fixating on being "raptured" away to a rigidly ranked hereafter.

"I suggest we stop betting our present lives on a non-existent future one. Let's not hate ourselves any longer, let's not deny ourselves the beauty and happiness of mortal existence for fear of post-mortem punishment for being human. And let's not accept the unacceptable over and over, here and now, on the assumption that some pre-programmed variety of bliss lies beyond death's door. It's a bad bargain: for us, for the planet, for all the living beings that will be birthed in the time to come."

About Harm

Just a little food for thought. Here's a little excerpt from the book "When, Why...If," by Robin Wood, which I mentioned in my previous post. It's drawn from the chapter titled "Harm," and explains some things about the paramount rule of Wicca, the Wiccan Rede: "An it harm none, do as ye will."

"Eight words the Wiccan rede fulfill,
An it harm none, do as ye will." (Traditional)

"An it harm none. [As you probably know, "an" in this archaic usage means "as long as."]

"As long as you harm no one, you are free to follow your own will.

"But what does that mean, "Harm no one?"

"The dictionary defines "harm" as "hurt; injure; damage, physical or moral."

"I define "harm" as interfering with another's free will; lessening someone's freedom of choice; causing unnecessary injury; damaging someone, physically, mentally or spiritually; or wantonly destroying something.

"And don't forget, when you are trying to figure out if an action you are contemplating will cause harm, that you are exactly as important as any one else. In other words, don't harm yourself, either!

"So what sorts of actions cause harm, by my definition?

"Forcing someone to take a certain path, whether by mayhem, manipulation, or magic.

"Think about it, dear friend.

"Any time that you count your will more important than the will of another, you are harming them.

"Whenever you decide that what you want is what you will get, no matter what, you are harming someone.

"Whenever you go off half-cocked, and hit someone with your fists, your car, or your words without thought, without love, without regard for what it may do to them, you are harming someone.

"Whenever you thoughtlessly go your own way and never notice those around you, there is a good chance that you will harm someone before the sun sets.

"And whenever you harm someone, three times the harm will return to you; whether you meant to harm them or not, whether you knew you harmed them or not, whether you believe in all of this stuff or not.

"Sometimes it's easy to tell that you are going to harm someone.

"Sometimes you have to think long and hard to figure it out.

"That's why you must have your mind with you at all times.

"You have to think at all times.

"And you have to review all the facts honestly, with love."

The Problem With Transcendence

Last night a friend of mine and I went to see the Metropolitan Opera's HD transmission of the new opera by John Adams, "Doctor Atomic." The opera centers on the director of the atomic bomb project, Robert Oppenheimer, during the last days leading up to the first test of the atomic bomb in July, 1945 in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

It's a compelling work, even though music that modern doesn't really sit all that well with me. I admit it, I'm a Philistine. The Philistines were actually a remarkably sophisticated and cultured people for their time, but I like to believe that if they'd heard most of what's termed 20th and 21st century "classical" music, they would have been as put off as I am.

The staging is phenomenal and to say that the work makes you think is an understatement. I'm particularly taken with the libretto, that is, the words Adams and lyricist Peter Sellars thought to set to music. Sourced from poets like John Donne and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as the writings of the actual protagonists and the Bhagavad Gita, the text contains many an argument, and to me one of the most compelling ones is the one raging between acceptance of limitation, of the finitude of individual life, and the illusion of transcendence, of something close to entitlement to individual immortality.

One of the desires that seduces Oppenheimer is his yen to play God, to unleash previously unknown powers, to be Vishnu the Destroyer. When he isn't yearning to play God, he's invoking God -- what my fellow opera-goer, with her great gift for words, would call the mono-male-theist God -- in a way I believe to be core to the best-known monotheistic religions: seeking to put the responsibility for his actions onto his deity, claiming or hoping to be compelled by his God to do what part of him wants to do, but what his earthy common sense warns him is fraught with bad consequences, in this case for all of life on earth.

It's something I've always had trouble understanding, this demand for transcendence, for individual "eternal life," which seems to be more common among men than women, though plenty of women long for it too. To me, part of the bargain of being born on this Earth is the knowledge that it isn't a permanent gift, that at some point you die and make way for other life forms. Although I'm not crazy about getting old and dying -- who is? -- I accept it. To me "eternal life" should be on-going life on this earth, a fair shot at a worth-while existence for the many creatures on this planet, including (but not necessarily always foregrounding) humans.

The most disturbing thing about the insistence on individual eternal life is that it's all but inextricably linked to stasis, to permanence, to unchangeability. In the stereotypical Christian heaven -- and I grew up Christian, so I was exposed to it early -- people are given angelic bodies but compelled to use them in an antiseptic, asexual place where there is an unshakeable, detailed hierarchy which, like the bulk of the Bible, privileges elite men.

Some years ago I traveled to China and saw some famous Buddhist cliff carvings representing their idea of heaven. To my wry amusement, it was much the same as the Christian one -- neatly arranged in many tiers, superiors above inferiors, and pretty much all the women at the bottom, symbolically carrying the rest on their backs. Not surprising, but still saddening.

What's so scary about your body changing: ripening, unfolding, and eventually decaying? Not much if you accept the idea that you're not entitled to perfection or personal immortality. But what terror and rage it seems to evoke in those who cling to the notion that they "should" be perfect and everlasting.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more to say on this subject in other posts. But I did say I'd talk about morality in this one. Unfortunately, "Dr. Atomic" got me off track, and now I have to go back to work. So I'll leave the names of two books on Pagan ethics I find, not perfect (grin), but helpful. One is Robin Wood's classic "When, Why...If: An Ethics Workbook," published by Livingtree in December of 1996. The other, which recently came to my attention, is Marian Singer's "A Witch's 10 Commandments: Magickal Guidelines for Everyday Life," published in 2006 by Provenance Press.

More soon!

Obama Drama?

Will he or won't he? Will she or won't she? All sorts of speculation about whether or not Barack Obama will choose Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. When my cleaning team was here yesterday -- yeah, we've budgeted a cleaning service every two weeks ever since we got hitched, we both hate housework -- one of the ladies complained that it seemed Obama was surrounding himself with people who were more of the same old same old. I can't argue with her too much. I know all the rationales -- the Clinton people are the last Democrats who were in the White House so they know the ropes and Obama has to hit the ground running, so he needs them, or at least some of them -- but the general idea makes me as uneasy as it does Ruth the cleaning pro.

And I can't say I'm thrilled about the idea of Hillary Clinton, less because of her -- though her vote for the Iraq War still sticks in my craw -- than because of the skeletons I fear may continue to fall out of her husband's closet. More his business associates than any "bimbo eruptions," as they called them in the '90s.

My hope is that the Obama team will leave it as it is, not add much more ballast from the Clinton years. The last thing this country needs at this precarious point in its history is to lose hope, get cynical, and turn away from our soon-to-be president, believing he's just more of the same. And I send a wish to all the deities that may be that not too many Republicans are added to the Obama Administration either. We didn't vote for them, and we don't want their discredited ideas distorting both the image and the substance of this new beginning.

I'm sending e-mails to every lawmaker I think might actually get at least a tally of voter sentiment on various issues. But I'm too old to be super-hopeful that, to name the most immediate case in point, Joe Lieberman (Senator from Connecticut, for those of you who aren't political junkies) will actually lose his Senate committee chairmanship for his consistent, obnoxious and mendacious trashing of Obama during the election. He should. And when he's let off without any punishment, the Democrats will once again look like wusses, and amoral ones at that. Not good.

More on morality in my next post.