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revdorothyl at 07:38pm on 21/03/2006
revdorothyl at 07:38pm on 21/03/2006I just got back from seeing the film “Why We Fight” at my local multiplex (if you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you do so at your earliest opportunity), with my zeal for my dissertation project suddenly renewed.
Without going into all the details of the film -- which starts with President Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961, warning against the establishment of a permanent military-industrial complex and the misplacing of national priorities onto the business of death rather than life, and then weaves a compelling narrative of interviews about the U.S. response to 9/11/01 and how it became tied up with the ongoing war in Iraq -- let me say that I found it chilling and convincing. Though neither the narration nor any of the interviewees ever said so outright, the final words (spoken by a retired Air Force officer whose faith in our national PTB was profoundly shaken by what she observed while working at the Pentagon in 2001-2003) led me to my own conclusions about the “moral of the story.”
What the Air Force officer actually said was something like, “Why do we fight? I guess because nobody’s been willing to stand up and say, ‘I won’t do it.’” But my ear translated those words to say that we, as a nation, fight as a military presence in Iraq for the same reason that we’ve fought in a very large number of countries around the world since the end of WWII. We fight ‘over there’ precisely because we do not fight ‘over here’ -- or at least not hard enough and consistently and effectively enough. We haven’t fought enough as civilians and voters, demanding that those who make the decisions about who we invade and when and why should be publicly and clearly accountable to us for their actions and their deceptive or downright false statements about what’s going on here and abroad.
Okay, impassioned political speech over . . . for now.
On to the relevance (possible relevance, anyway?) for my too-long-delayed work on "Horror, Hope, and Heroes: Practical Religion in BtVS".
Even beyond the very immediate and real personal and public issues raised by the film, I found myself thinking that -- at least in a roundabout way -- it was also reminding me why “we” Buffy scholars write (or why fanfic writers write or fan commentators and bloggers write). We write because the horrors of this world are very, very real, and they invade our homes in the form of terrorist actions and televised disasters and campaigns of misinformation on a very regular basis.
Against those things that go “bump” (or “boom!”) in the night, against the “monsters” that rob us of sleep and the illusions of security, we need somewhere to turn for hope, somewhere to turn for heroes, for someone to show us that third option (in addition to burying our heads under the covers and hoping it all goes away, or taking somebody else’s word for it that all our problems will be gone if we just go kick so-and-so’s butt or take control of more of the world’s resources so we needn’t fear anyone else having power greater than ours) -- a way to face this world as it really is, to live in it, and to realize that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (That last quote is from Ephesians 6:12, which -- even though I’m pretty well convinced it wasn’t actually written by the Apostle Paul -- still makes good sense to me.)
We write for the same reason that teachers teach (at least, the good ones): because people need to learn how to learn, how to question, how to search for the truth and try to discern the good, rather than merely be trained to accept what comes down from “on high” as ‘gospel’ or ‘unquestionable’ truth.
We write for the same reason that good preachers preach and good scholars research and good doctors and care-givers and counselors minister to the wounded and weary and dying: because we ourselves know what it is to be lost or starving or discarded or hurting beyond our ability to heal and to be desperately searching for some glimmer of hope or caring, and we want to share the hope we’ve found.
We write because the world is already too full of silence and denial and improbable cover stories about ‘fatal neck wounds from barbecue fork accidents’. We write, because somebody has to, and we can’t close our eyes and ignore what we see.
This next part may sound like a major detour, but stick with me, if you will: I think it all fits together in the end. (Or, you could skip the next three paragraphs, and only come back and read them later if the points that follow afterwards make sense to you.)
Three weeks ago, I went to another lecture by Sociology professor Rodney Stark (the second of four Templeton research lectures on his “market approach” to the study of religious phenomena), which -- among many, many other intriguing or provocative points -- argued that the pagan Roman Empire (pre-Constantine I) was only tolerant of other faiths as long as those imported religions didn’t try to form communities, as long as they didn’t try to form a voluntary, close-knit congregation around the god or gods they worshiped.
Well before the birth of Christ, much less the introduction of Christianity into the Roman religious marketplace, the Senate or the Emperor (whoever was the PTB of Rome at the time) passed legislation aimed not at the outlawing of religious belief or individual religious practices, but rather at the appointing of priests or priestesses of Isis or Bacchus or the voluntary gathering of worshipers to share concerns and provide mutual aid and support, to keep the Jews in Rome from ‘sticking together’ too much.
Stark had a lot of very convincing primary source materials with dates of legislation or bouts of crucifixions of ‘inappropriately’ fervent religious leaders, including correspondence showing that even volunteer fire brigades were considered a danger to the state and were consistently denied permission to organize. It wasn’t the supposed drunkenness or immoral behaviors attributed to the bacchanal or the outrage of ordaining women or even the religious beliefs of any of the persecuted or outlawed groups that Rome was trying to stamp out; instead, the historical evidence Stark found seemed to suggest, what official Rome found dangerous and potentially seditious was the forming of voluntary ties, of voluntary connections, of deep commitments to persons unrelated to you by blood or official hierarchies.
I wasn’t quite sure where to go with that information or that set of ideas before this afternoon. But scattered all through the film “Why We Fight” there were comparisons between the U.S.A. in the last 60 years and the ancient Roman Empire. And it suddenly occurred to me that Stark’s earlier remarks might relate more to more than just another way that fandom today (in various incarnations) functions somewhat like a vital religious community, at least for some of us fans.
I’d already been thinking -- as part of my effort to get more of my dissertation actually down on paper -- about the importance of families of choice in fandom generally, and especially in the particular media fandoms that speak to me or in which I’ve been reading fanfic of late (BtVS/AtS, SG-1, The Sentinel, B5, DS9, X:WP, etc.).
Yes, I know there’s been a lot of interesting work written on the construction of families of choice in BtVS, especially (heck, I moderated a panel on that topic at the Slayage conference in 2004).
And yes, I’m also flashing back to Delenn of the Minbari, back on Babylon 5, pointing out that perhaps the essential contribution of human beings to the universe is that we form communities, wherever we go, joining together in common cause with beings who are not of our own kind, not of our own blood.
But in the context of both ancient Rome’s official and often violent resistance to the forming of voluntary communities (something that living, vital religious traditions are prone to do) -- as well as in the context of whatever’s going on with the “present darkness” in our own national character and debate -- I’m wondering if fandom isn’t even more potent and potentially transformative than I’d thought.
You see, my major psychological theorist for my dissertation (Object Relations theorist D. W. Winnicott) is really big on the importance of creativity, of finding ways to use and transform and above all play with the things that we find in this world, rather than just adapt and accommodate ourselves to the games already being played, to the way that things were set up before we ever came along.
Are birth families important and an incredible source of security and love in this world (when mostly functional)? You betcha! Is it great to have a home in that oft-quoted sense of “when you have to go there, they have to take you in”? God, yes! And as we all know, healthy families don’t just assimilate (Borg-style) the children who are born into them, but are in a large part transformed by the people who are part of them and who grow and change within their mutual ties of tolerance and affection.
But there’s also something particularly attention-grabbing about the voluntary community, especially the close-knit family-of-choice, about that which we have to make for ourselves out of the people and materials we meet along the way. I’m wondering if ancient Rome, which was emphasized ‘family values’ (or at least civic values) of a sort, was less worried about citizens who merely accepted the way things were and were obedient and loyal to the families and social class and social obligations they were presented with, figuring that there was little danger of revolution or political-apple-cart-upsetting from people content to ‘go along’ with the status quo and accept what they were given, without going looking for more or deeper commitments in outlandish and ridiculously personal religious practices.
I’m wondering if the families-of-choice that we celebrate in our preferred media fandoms (or that we further re-create and re-blend in a plethora of crossover fics -- to which I’ve become addicted in recent weeks) and which we create in real life and virtual reality in our fannish interactions with one another aren’t the sort of passionate, creative, unpredictable, and unregulated voluntary congregations that have historically caused dictators and despots and entrenched bureaucracies of both church and state to develop spastic colons?
It’s just a thought. But it gives me renewed energy and a sense of purpose for my supposedly ‘trivial’ dissertation into pop culture fandom. And it seems to be bolstered by the questions raised and the boundaries pushed and tested by fanfic writers all across cyberspace. (I’m thinking particularly of the brilliant and challenging BtVS/SG-1 crossover Far Beyond Normal by jAkL, whose concluding chapter was posted just last week on “Twisting the Hellmouth” -- a fic which raised all sorts of questions in my mind about America’s willingness to tolerate a lot of intolerable abuses and betrayals of trust in the wake of 9/11 -- or of the ethical issues about souls and personality raised in AlecStar’s ongoing In The Genes or the intriguing reflections on the underlying cultural and religious thinking that led to the creation of the First Slayer in the same author’s completed series A Watcher’s Son.)
And if I’m wrong about all this, please wait a few days to tell me, so maybe I can crank out a few dozen pages while this present zeal is still upon me!
Without going into all the details of the film -- which starts with President Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961, warning against the establishment of a permanent military-industrial complex and the misplacing of national priorities onto the business of death rather than life, and then weaves a compelling narrative of interviews about the U.S. response to 9/11/01 and how it became tied up with the ongoing war in Iraq -- let me say that I found it chilling and convincing. Though neither the narration nor any of the interviewees ever said so outright, the final words (spoken by a retired Air Force officer whose faith in our national PTB was profoundly shaken by what she observed while working at the Pentagon in 2001-2003) led me to my own conclusions about the “moral of the story.”
What the Air Force officer actually said was something like, “Why do we fight? I guess because nobody’s been willing to stand up and say, ‘I won’t do it.’” But my ear translated those words to say that we, as a nation, fight as a military presence in Iraq for the same reason that we’ve fought in a very large number of countries around the world since the end of WWII. We fight ‘over there’ precisely because we do not fight ‘over here’ -- or at least not hard enough and consistently and effectively enough. We haven’t fought enough as civilians and voters, demanding that those who make the decisions about who we invade and when and why should be publicly and clearly accountable to us for their actions and their deceptive or downright false statements about what’s going on here and abroad.
Okay, impassioned political speech over . . . for now.
On to the relevance (possible relevance, anyway?) for my too-long-delayed work on "Horror, Hope, and Heroes: Practical Religion in BtVS".
Even beyond the very immediate and real personal and public issues raised by the film, I found myself thinking that -- at least in a roundabout way -- it was also reminding me why “we” Buffy scholars write (or why fanfic writers write or fan commentators and bloggers write). We write because the horrors of this world are very, very real, and they invade our homes in the form of terrorist actions and televised disasters and campaigns of misinformation on a very regular basis.
Against those things that go “bump” (or “boom!”) in the night, against the “monsters” that rob us of sleep and the illusions of security, we need somewhere to turn for hope, somewhere to turn for heroes, for someone to show us that third option (in addition to burying our heads under the covers and hoping it all goes away, or taking somebody else’s word for it that all our problems will be gone if we just go kick so-and-so’s butt or take control of more of the world’s resources so we needn’t fear anyone else having power greater than ours) -- a way to face this world as it really is, to live in it, and to realize that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (That last quote is from Ephesians 6:12, which -- even though I’m pretty well convinced it wasn’t actually written by the Apostle Paul -- still makes good sense to me.)
We write for the same reason that teachers teach (at least, the good ones): because people need to learn how to learn, how to question, how to search for the truth and try to discern the good, rather than merely be trained to accept what comes down from “on high” as ‘gospel’ or ‘unquestionable’ truth.
We write for the same reason that good preachers preach and good scholars research and good doctors and care-givers and counselors minister to the wounded and weary and dying: because we ourselves know what it is to be lost or starving or discarded or hurting beyond our ability to heal and to be desperately searching for some glimmer of hope or caring, and we want to share the hope we’ve found.
We write because the world is already too full of silence and denial and improbable cover stories about ‘fatal neck wounds from barbecue fork accidents’. We write, because somebody has to, and we can’t close our eyes and ignore what we see.
This next part may sound like a major detour, but stick with me, if you will: I think it all fits together in the end. (Or, you could skip the next three paragraphs, and only come back and read them later if the points that follow afterwards make sense to you.)
Three weeks ago, I went to another lecture by Sociology professor Rodney Stark (the second of four Templeton research lectures on his “market approach” to the study of religious phenomena), which -- among many, many other intriguing or provocative points -- argued that the pagan Roman Empire (pre-Constantine I) was only tolerant of other faiths as long as those imported religions didn’t try to form communities, as long as they didn’t try to form a voluntary, close-knit congregation around the god or gods they worshiped.
Well before the birth of Christ, much less the introduction of Christianity into the Roman religious marketplace, the Senate or the Emperor (whoever was the PTB of Rome at the time) passed legislation aimed not at the outlawing of religious belief or individual religious practices, but rather at the appointing of priests or priestesses of Isis or Bacchus or the voluntary gathering of worshipers to share concerns and provide mutual aid and support, to keep the Jews in Rome from ‘sticking together’ too much.
Stark had a lot of very convincing primary source materials with dates of legislation or bouts of crucifixions of ‘inappropriately’ fervent religious leaders, including correspondence showing that even volunteer fire brigades were considered a danger to the state and were consistently denied permission to organize. It wasn’t the supposed drunkenness or immoral behaviors attributed to the bacchanal or the outrage of ordaining women or even the religious beliefs of any of the persecuted or outlawed groups that Rome was trying to stamp out; instead, the historical evidence Stark found seemed to suggest, what official Rome found dangerous and potentially seditious was the forming of voluntary ties, of voluntary connections, of deep commitments to persons unrelated to you by blood or official hierarchies.
I wasn’t quite sure where to go with that information or that set of ideas before this afternoon. But scattered all through the film “Why We Fight” there were comparisons between the U.S.A. in the last 60 years and the ancient Roman Empire. And it suddenly occurred to me that Stark’s earlier remarks might relate more to more than just another way that fandom today (in various incarnations) functions somewhat like a vital religious community, at least for some of us fans.
I’d already been thinking -- as part of my effort to get more of my dissertation actually down on paper -- about the importance of families of choice in fandom generally, and especially in the particular media fandoms that speak to me or in which I’ve been reading fanfic of late (BtVS/AtS, SG-1, The Sentinel, B5, DS9, X:WP, etc.).
Yes, I know there’s been a lot of interesting work written on the construction of families of choice in BtVS, especially (heck, I moderated a panel on that topic at the Slayage conference in 2004).
And yes, I’m also flashing back to Delenn of the Minbari, back on Babylon 5, pointing out that perhaps the essential contribution of human beings to the universe is that we form communities, wherever we go, joining together in common cause with beings who are not of our own kind, not of our own blood.
But in the context of both ancient Rome’s official and often violent resistance to the forming of voluntary communities (something that living, vital religious traditions are prone to do) -- as well as in the context of whatever’s going on with the “present darkness” in our own national character and debate -- I’m wondering if fandom isn’t even more potent and potentially transformative than I’d thought.
You see, my major psychological theorist for my dissertation (Object Relations theorist D. W. Winnicott) is really big on the importance of creativity, of finding ways to use and transform and above all play with the things that we find in this world, rather than just adapt and accommodate ourselves to the games already being played, to the way that things were set up before we ever came along.
Are birth families important and an incredible source of security and love in this world (when mostly functional)? You betcha! Is it great to have a home in that oft-quoted sense of “when you have to go there, they have to take you in”? God, yes! And as we all know, healthy families don’t just assimilate (Borg-style) the children who are born into them, but are in a large part transformed by the people who are part of them and who grow and change within their mutual ties of tolerance and affection.
But there’s also something particularly attention-grabbing about the voluntary community, especially the close-knit family-of-choice, about that which we have to make for ourselves out of the people and materials we meet along the way. I’m wondering if ancient Rome, which was emphasized ‘family values’ (or at least civic values) of a sort, was less worried about citizens who merely accepted the way things were and were obedient and loyal to the families and social class and social obligations they were presented with, figuring that there was little danger of revolution or political-apple-cart-upsetting from people content to ‘go along’ with the status quo and accept what they were given, without going looking for more or deeper commitments in outlandish and ridiculously personal religious practices.
I’m wondering if the families-of-choice that we celebrate in our preferred media fandoms (or that we further re-create and re-blend in a plethora of crossover fics -- to which I’ve become addicted in recent weeks) and which we create in real life and virtual reality in our fannish interactions with one another aren’t the sort of passionate, creative, unpredictable, and unregulated voluntary congregations that have historically caused dictators and despots and entrenched bureaucracies of both church and state to develop spastic colons?
It’s just a thought. But it gives me renewed energy and a sense of purpose for my supposedly ‘trivial’ dissertation into pop culture fandom. And it seems to be bolstered by the questions raised and the boundaries pushed and tested by fanfic writers all across cyberspace. (I’m thinking particularly of the brilliant and challenging BtVS/SG-1 crossover Far Beyond Normal by jAkL, whose concluding chapter was posted just last week on “Twisting the Hellmouth” -- a fic which raised all sorts of questions in my mind about America’s willingness to tolerate a lot of intolerable abuses and betrayals of trust in the wake of 9/11 -- or of the ethical issues about souls and personality raised in AlecStar’s ongoing In The Genes or the intriguing reflections on the underlying cultural and religious thinking that led to the creation of the First Slayer in the same author’s completed series A Watcher’s Son.)
And if I’m wrong about all this, please wait a few days to tell me, so maybe I can crank out a few dozen pages while this present zeal is still upon me!