Grace

I heard a story once, and I should caution that I don’t know if it’s true. If it were about a dream come true, I would have reason to doubt it, but it is rather about disappointment come true, so I find it believable.

A woman born in a Central American country in the midst of a civil war fled from the violence as a child. Her name, shall we say, was Grace. She was terrified that she would die, but one night she had a dream, in which an angelic figure, or maybe a woman who looked like her dead grandmother, or maybe the Virgin Mary — I don’t remember, and maybe she herself didn’t either, by the time she shared the story — told her, “You will not die, because you are going to achieve a Great Thing in your life, and God will keep you alive.”

Grace was greatly cheered, not only by the knowledge that she was going to live, but that she would live with purpose, with an important destiny. As a child, she never told anyone her dream, but she cherished it in her heart, and thought back on it often. At first, the fact she and her family were able to make it into the United States seemed to confirm her dream, as did her excellent progress learning English, her good grades in highschool and then college.

Yet decades slipped by, and though she married satisfactorily, and bore children she loved, she could not help but notice the dreary ordinariness of her life, the extremely non-special destiny that now seemed her lot, with no great, heaven-blessed achievement in sight. She aged and fattened and grayed, and by the time she pressed fifty, she felt worn out, worn down, disillusioned and despairing.

It was at this point that Grace finally shared her dream with a group of women who met with a psychologist for depression.

The other women suggested to her that perhaps she had overlooked the obvious: perhaps God had kept her alive precisely to live and love, that in His eyes this was a Great Thing, maybe the Greatest thing. And if this were a story of a dream come true, or a Hallmark movie, Grace would have agreed and felt renewed gratitude and love for her family.

I warned you, however, that it was a story of a disappointment come true. The woman pretended to agree with the group, but in her heart, she was not comforted. She didn’t want to be “special” in an ordinary way, treasured, like the sparrow, by God alone, she wanted to be special in the extrodinary way, recognized by thousands, or better still, hundreds of thousands of other human beings. She wanted to be famous, successful and important. That was how she had understood God’s promise to her as a child, that was the dream that had sustained her. And though she recognized now, as an adult, that she had no right to expect to be important, certainly no right to demand it from destiny, still, she rebelled. She acknowledged, privately, the folly of her hubris, but this only deepened her bitterness.

God had lied to her.

When I heard this story, I was angry at the woman for her refusal to be comforted. Because, if she had been comforted by the women’s interpretation of her dream, I felt, the story would have had a happy ending after all. She would have found grace where she least expected it. And yet, I was also aware that I was a hypocrite. Because, although I had never escaped a civil war, or been promised anything by an angel in a dream, nonetheless, as a child I had cherished the exact same hope, and as an adult, I awakened to the same disappointment.

The International Politics of Zombie Invasions

“Zombie stories end in one of two ways — the elimination/subjugation of all zombies, or the eradication of humanity from the face of the Earth. … Indeed, recent literary tropes suggest that vampires can peacefully coexist with ordinary teens in many of the world’s high schools, provided they are sufficiently hunky. Zombies, not so much.”

Realpolitik Approach:

“How would the introduction of flesh-eating ghouls affect world politics? The realist answer is simple if surprising: International relations would be largely unaffected. Although some would see in a zombie invasion a new existential threat to the human condition, realists would be unimpressed by the claim that the zombies’ arrival would lead to any radical change in human behavior. To them, a plague of the undead would merely echo older plagues, from the Black Death of the 14th century to the 1918 influenza pandemic. To paraphrase Thucydides, the realpolitik of zombies is that the strong will do what they can and the weak must suffer devouring by reanimated, ravenous corpses.”

Liberal Approach:

“Provided that the initial spread of zombies did not completely wipe out governments, the liberal expectation would be that an international counterzombie regime could make significant inroads into the problem…..Quasi-permanent humanitarian counterzombie missions, perhaps under United Nations auspices, would likely be necessary in failed states. Liberals would acknowledge that the permanent eradication of flesh-eating ghouls is unlikely. The reduction of the zombie problem to one of many manageable threats, however, is quite likely. Most countries would kill most zombies most of the time.”

Neoconservative Approach:

“Instead, neocons would recommend an aggressive and militarized response to ensure human hegemony. Rather than wait for the ghouls to come to them, they would pursue offensive policy options that take the fight to the undead. A pre-emptive strike against zombies would, surely, be a war against evil itself….They would inevitably lump reanimated corpses with other human threats as part of a bigger World War III against authoritarian despots and zombies — an “Axis of Evil Dead.” This would sabotage any attempt at broad-based coalition warfare, hindering military effectiveness in a Global War on Zombies (GWOZ).”

“The different international relations theories also provide a much greater variety of possible outcomes than the Hollywood zombie canon. Traditional zombie narratives in film and fiction are quick to get to the apocalypse. The theoretical approaches presented here, however, suggest that in the real world there would be a vigorous policy response to the menace of the living dead. Realism predicts an eventual live-and-let-live arrangement between the undead and everyone else. Liberals predict an imperfect but nevertheless useful counterzombie regime. Neoconservatives see the defeat of the zombie threat after a long, existential struggle. These scenarios suggest that maybe, just maybe, the zombie canon’s dominant narrative of human extinction is overstated.”

BY DANIEL W. DREZNER | JULY/AUGUST 2010

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/21/night_of_the_living_wonks?page=0,0

Ilya Somin adds:

Libertarian Approach:

“Zombies might be an excellent tool of repression for authoritarian states. Government efforts to combat the zombie menace might well be hampered by public choice problems. Various interest groups would surely exploit the zombie crisis as an opportunity to lobby for special benefits for themselves under the pretext of combatting the zombies. For example, farm subsidies for dead farmers will surely go up, as lobbyists argue that the dead farmers might turn into zombies themselves unless they are paid off. In democracies, anti-zombie policy might also be compromised by widespread voter ignorance of zombies and irrationality about them. I venture to predict that voters are likely to be even more ignorant and irrational about zombies than they are on most other policy issues.”

http://volokh.com/2010/06/22/the-politics-of-zombies/

A commenter also notes, “Most legislators would be safe in case of zombie invasion. Zombies eat brains.”

Indeed.

Hot Kristeva Rap

Postmodern philosophers and novelists share an obsession with words-for-their-own-sake, and indeed, I would say that the philosophers take this to an extreme beyond that achieved by mere novelists. Philosophers, unlike novelists, are not tied down by the necessities of plot and comprehensibility.

I believe the quote at the beginning of this video illustrates my point. Her words are so beautiful I could bathe in them. But what does that mean, exactly?

http://markfullmer.com/film/kristeva-rap-video

Summer Fling

I’ve been too busy for this blog lately, but I may have a bit of time during the summer months for fiction, we’ll see. I always tend to overestimate my available time and underestimate my work load, so no promises.

Fun Word of the Day

No time, alas, for an entry. I’ll just offer a single word. Enjoy it as I have.

…”epistemogenesis”

Ramifications

“Ramifications of third level gematrian permutations of the Letter B in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”

In T.K. Mouser’s methodology, the letter B is represented by 11, typed the PhD student. While this is an improvement over the simplistic Rationalist school’s approach of equating B with 2, it remains a second level permutation, which does not allow the same complexity of third level permutation. In the third level gematria advanced by the New School, however, all attempts at consistency are abandoned and the value assigned to Letter B is determined by random selection of an integer 0-9. The same methodology, of course, is applied to the other Letters, except in Scott’s system, in which Z and X are always 0, but CH is represented as a third level Letter.

After a moment, the student added, “[Note to self: What about TH?]”

Reading the computer screen over the student’s shoulder, the student’s room mate said, “I don’t get it. What does this have to do with Chaucer?”

“The only way to interpret texts such as Chaucer is to use gematria,” explained the student. “The old system was to equate A with 1, B with 2, C with 3, and so on. Then you add up all the numbers in a given word and compare it to other words with the same numeric value elsewhere in the text to find the hidden meanings.”

“The hidden meanings?” asked the room mate. “What about the actual meanings?”

“Only people who read for pleasure worry about that,” said the student. “This is Literary Criticism, not bourgeoisie consumption of literature as entertainment.”

“Oh,” said the room mate.

Indeed, typed the student, the rotating random assignment of a single digit numeric value to a Letter results in unsettling fluidity of interpretation, constantly transgressing the boundaries of conventional Alpha-Numeric dichotomies, contesting and problemetisizing the stereotypes of which Letter constitutes which number, and profoundly challenging the norms of racism and sexism.

“I don’t think most racists and sexists are going to be profoundly challenged by Literary Criticism,” said the room mate.

and heterosexism, added the student.

The student continued typing while the room mate wandered off to drink a soda. When the room mate returned, the student was typing:

…thus, since in this fourth reading of The Canterbury Tales, the word “reeve” had the same numeric value as “nun” but in the fifth reading, the same value as “weeping” this shows that…

“How can it show anything?” asked the room mate. “You just assign numbers randomly to words, and it’s not even the same numbers every time. I can’t believe you can get a PhD writing this nonsense.”

“I can’t believe you’re belittling my career like that.” The student sounded more sullen than wounded.

“Sorry. All I’m saying is, since the original words are just turned into random meaningless numbers, which are just compared to other random and meaningless numbers, and the whole point of the methodology is to prove that all literature is random and meaningless… well, why even bother reading The Canterbury Tales? You might as well just analyze Stephen King.”

A guilty flinch from the student compelled the room mate to lean closer. “Hey! You are just reading Stephen King.”

“Okay, yeeeeesss,” allowed the student. “But it’s still not easy to write this stuff. I have to churn out another fifty pages.”

“I’ll go get you a soda,” said the room mate.