America 101: Course for Martians

Leave it to Margaret Atwood to device a course on the essence of America for Martians.

The Martians have come to Atwood to "study America."

As somebody partial to the value of literary texts as the best window on society, Atwood suggests the following course materials:

The Maypole of Merrymount & Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Moby-Dick by Herman Meville

All three novels have to be interpreted allegorically.

Moby-Dick, for instance, becomes an allegorical hologram of ruthless capitalism, American style:

Moby-Dick is about the oil industry,” they said. “And the Ship of American State. The owners of the Pequod are rapacious and stingy religious hypocrites. The ship’s business is to butcher whales and turn them into an industrial energy product. The mates are the middle management. The harpooners, who are from races colonized by America one way or another, are supplying the expert tech labor. Elijah the prophet — from the American artist caste — foretells the Pequod’s doom, which comes about because the chief executive, Ahab, is a megalomaniac who wants to annihilate nature.
Nature is symbolized by a big white whale, which has interfered with Ahab’s personal freedom by biting off his leg and refusing to be slaughtered and boiled. The narrator, Ishmael, represents journalists; his job is to warn America that it’s controlled by psychotics who will destroy it, because they hate the natural world and don’t grasp the fact that without it they will die. That’s enough literature for now. Can we have popcorn?

But the course is more complex than meets the eyes. It is interspersed with Atwood's own take on America. 

"America", she teaches, is a placeholder for human fantasy, being many things to many people. It is also a nation that since its inception through to these times, is riddled with "internal contradictions". 

Atwood also dispenses real-life advice to Martians. The Martians want to do a full tour of the nation and propose visiting, among other sites, the Boot Hill Museum in Kansas.

Atwood dissuades such a plan because the Martians who look like diagrams of the female uterus, replete with fallopian tubes and ovary bunches, might be mistaken for human uteri.

The Martians are surprised by the hostility that the appearance of a group of human uteri might evoke in the breasts of American males, as a quick Google search of the term tells them that the female uteri is the source of creation.

Why would a representation of whence they come arouse anger?

Atwood doesn't know; in certain parts of America, she says, males are peculiarly obsessed with the female uteri. They perceive it as demonic. 

"It's a hangover from the Young Goodman Brown Days," she feels:

If they saw you [Martians] hopping around — worse still, eating popcorn [the Martians have taken an instant liking for these] — they’d go completely berserk, and pronounce you pregnant, and put you in jail.

Atwood suggests that her Martian students visit New York City and Radio City Music Hall instead, because in New York the Martians won't stand out, and if harassed, Martians can cry "specism!"

All in all, a lively course! 

Profaning Faith

Lamenting a loss of vision, poet William Wordsworth famously wrote in Intimations of Immortality:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparell'd in celestial light,

The glory and freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;-

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen, I can see no more.

The poet hasn't gone blind literally, but has lost the gift of the child's eye, the child's natural ability to see the quotidian "apparell'd in celestial light."

The adult, they say, has to live with the burden of a particular kind of blindness which comes from experiencing life. Unlike the child, the adult can't see heaven on earth.

A recent New York Times bestseller in the non-fiction category, Heaven is for Real, celebrates the child's ability, not only to see heaven, but also to report back, with clarity, to his parents, all that he has seen, once he's back on earth.

But the child, Colton Burpo, is no Wordsworthian child; he doesn't see earth bathed in celestial brightness. He sees the heavenly light in heaven.

The story of a toddler's brief sojourn in heaven is summarized very well by Maud Newton:

At 3 years 10 months, Colton Burpo was a sunny child, a preacher’s son certain of his faith and his eternal fate. Then his appendix burst, and as doctors failed to figure out what was wrong with him, he lay in a hospital bed until his father, Todd, saw “the shadow of death” cross his face. “I recognized it instantly,” Todd, a pastor, recalls. With Colton’s face “covered in death,” Todd and his wife, Sonja, took the boy to another hospital, where he was wheeled into surgery. “He’s not in good shape,” the surgeon said. As Colton screamed for his father, Todd fled, locked himself in a room and railed at God.
Less than two hours later, Colton was awake, still shouting for his father. “Daddy, you know I almost died,” he said. But only over the months following his recovery did his parents hear his whole story: that while in surgery, he went to heaven and met Jesus, who assigned him homework; he also encountered angels, a rainbow-hued horse, John the Baptist, God the father, the Holy Spirit, a sister his mother miscarried (unknown to Colton) before he was born and his great-grandfather, Pop, as a young man. Everyone in heaven had wings; Colton’s were smaller than most. He learned that the righteous, including his father, would fight in a coming last battle.

So convinced is Colton that he was really in heaven during the time the doctors performed a surgical procedure, that he saw the doctor as a mere tool of Jesus' will:

"Dad, Jesus used Dr. O'Holleran to help fix me [...] Colton told his father as he asked him to pay the hospital bill which had amounted to a whopping 23k. 

It's easy to understand why in this day and age readers would take to this story. The average reader, despairing about the astronomical cost of basic health care, would have her anxiety assuaged by the thought of a Jesus that would come to her (financial) aid if she had faith enough.

With hyper-inflationary trends and the cycle of recession, stories of faith-based solutions to real social problems are attractive sellers.

Didn't Karl Marx once famously predict a relationship of inverse proportionality between poverty and religion? Else, how to account for the enormous popularity with the rapture stories, collectively titled Left Behind?

But Marx also spoke about change and the irresistible encroachment of modernity into our lives--the wheel of history will roll, he said, rendering into vapor all that was once "solid", and into lumps of profanity all that was once "sacred".

Books like Heaven and propagation of the virtue of absolute faith by politicians like Rick Santorum, is a fulfillment, not negation, of Marx's prophecy.

The wheel of history is rolling. What was revered as sacred even thirty years ago is now a commodity that is to be sold for money, media-attention and in the case of faith-based politics, votes.

Heaven's success has emboldened the Burpo family to expand into a multi-medium, million dollar empire, replete with bestselling picture books and a movie version in the making on the foundations of something quintessentially sacrosanct like faith. 

It's strange that the profaning of the sacred in this sense is not remarked upon, but innumerable bones are picked about the other, more obvious kind of profanation, reflected in yet another bestseller of our times, Fifty shades of Grey.

Junot Diaz

I liked how author Junot Diaz explains his artistic choices.

He writes his short fiction, Ms. Lora in the second person, instead of his customary first person.

Why write in the second person?

Second person, I’ve always noticed, has the distinction of being both intimate and repellent at the same time. A quick way of drawing the reader close but also hard to sustain for any length of time. Only so much a person likes being addressed as “you” by a complete stranger. I knew I’d lose people with the approach, but I was going to lose people anyway. That’s the nature of fiction: despite all our lofty claims of universality, no piece of art is for everyone—which is why we have so much art, so that everyone has a chance of finding something that moves them. I figured some people somewhere might connect with the tale even in second person.

Excellent response! 

Another super illumination: "Ms. Lora" is about the love affair between a minor--a 16 year old boy--and an older woman (Ms. Lora). Isn't Diaz apprehensive of being judged as "normalizing" a relationship that would be deemed "illegal" in our society (I found myself judging Ms. Lora as I read the story)?

Likely, yes, feels Diaz. But he's not seeking to redeem the Ms. Lora's of the world, just as he isn't seeking one-dimensional judgment. He aims for eliciting both reactions in the minds of the readers:

Sure, it would be swell if someone got to know Miss Lora before they judged her, or if their judgment was overturned by reading the story, but it’s also cool if a reader judges and knows the character simultaneously and neither of these experiences alters or counteracts the other. In a culture like ours, obsessed with its dichotomies, giving folks the opportunity to work out their simultaneity muscle is a worthy goal.