PASSING BELLS: As John Paul II Lies Dying

I am praying for his peaceful death and his joyful entry into Heaven.

And after the rejoicing, I suspect that Mary is going to give him a little lecture on birth control and abortion, and Jesus one on liberation theology.

I have not always agreed with this Pope. But I honor his courage, his intelligence, his joyful spirit, his honesty, and his moral clarity about things like war, capitalism, and totalitarian regimes. The first Polish Pope, the first non-Italian in 500 years, made public apologies for the Church's role in persecuting Jews and Galileo. He changed the Church. He changed the world. Skier, poet, actor, scholar -- Karol Wojtyla was an extraordinary man, and John Paul II was a very great pope. No matter how strongly I disgreed with his views, I never, for one moment, doubted either his personal integrity or his profound compassion.

SCIENCE: The Decline of Western Civilization

My cousin Cindy, who teaches biology in a midwestern college, occasionally sends me reports of her students. Longtime readers may remember the student who stubbornly insisted that fire was a living creature. If they're typical, we should view the future with trepidation.

Yesterday I had at least 6 students (there were only 5 groups!) come and say, "so what do we do now?" after they had picked up their supplies (step 1), even though I had just handed out the written procedure to them.

Step 2 was "Put the strawberries into the ziplock bag."

Halloween or Easter?

Alan Bostick reminds us of what can be done with those leftover marshmallow peeps, assuming the candy is possessed by the devil. But then people have always done unwholesome things with peeps: "It's medical experiments for the lot of you!"


Genuinely . . . Lovecraftian.

Unnatural Writing Quirks

Tod Goldberg, novelist and blogger of Natural Selection, has been reading students' manuscripts. Since the students are trying to gain entry to an advanced novel writing course, they are, one presumes, sending their best work. He really shouldn't be forced to tell them:

If any of your dialogue regularly has the following tags, please consider a lower division course: interjected, retorted, perked, chided, elaborated, huffed, declared, admonished, clarified, ejaculated, defecated, spurted, sputtered, blustered, feigned, forced, exclaimed, condemned, purported, reacted, cautioned, cajoled, stated, lauded, or lambasted. Also, if you find yourself placing adverbs alongside any of those words -- like, "I hate to read poorly written dialogue," Bob blustered angrily -- perhaps pick up any of your favorite novels and check to see how many times anyone says something, you know, furtively.

Of course, I am jaded by too many years wielding a red pencil. The other day, I got a call from an editorial friend. She was whimpering, barely coherent. "The possessive form of it," she moaned.

"Yes, it's spelled without an apostrophe."

"I know. It doesn't have an apostrophe. But-- but-- it certainly doesn't have two apostrophes."

"Your author spelled it with two apostrophes?"

"He spelled it it's'. And this is the guy who sends around the grammar suggestions. Today's was a warning against using cliches."

"At least he followed his own advice. That's the most original misspelling of its that I've run across."

HOLIDAY: In Honor of St. Patrick . . .

I'm going to post about Florence King. Yes, the atheist, Republican lesbian feminist writer.

This is not nearly so insane as it sounds. Her legendary early bodice-ripper, The Barbarian Princess (published in 1977 under the pseudonym Laura Buchanan), featured a hot scene in which the heroine almost deflowered the young, handsome Patricius. Unfortunately, he was kidnapped at a critical moment, starting him on the road to sainthood but leaving the heroine with blue ovaries.

I recently reread her Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, which is right up there with James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times as a classic American comic memoir. It might be even better, for King's book has a profound theme: the search for a feminine identity.

Granny and Aunt Nana define it as fragility, although Granny prefers the pelvic weakness of being "delicate down below," whereas Aunt Nana plumps for insanity. (They collaborate on Cousin Evelyn Cunningham, who ends up hysterically obsessed with losing her uterus as well as her mind.) Herb, Florence King's self-educated Cockney father, explains it all in the terms of Henry Adams: the virgin and the Venus are archetypes of female power, but neither is American. For a while, Florence's love of the French language gives her an easy proof of femininity, but she loses her "-elle, -ette, and -euse" with heartbreaking results. She pursues self-definition in the embrace of men, women, and academia.

The book makes me laugh even on the dozenth rereading. It has deeper feeling than Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, although that's also brilliant. I've bought and given away ten or fifteen copies; it's my standard gift for Yankees moving south and for homesick southerners. (Yes, I am a Yankee, but I also have cousins in deepest Alabama. My cousin Bobby is a classic Good Old Boy, and his daughter is a belle.)

Some Florence King quotations:

"No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street."

"Like charity, schizophrenia begins at home."

"There is no such thing as a fallen woman; when she steps out of her place, she always steps up."

"Silver is the Southern woman’s proudest possession and highest priority as well as the subject of much of her conversation. The night before her daughter’s wedding, a Southern mother will sit on the bed and talk intimately about silver. Every decent woman goes to her husband with twelve "covers," and if the knives have hollow handles he’ll be running with other women before the year is out, you wait and see. No man respects a woman with hollow handles."

"Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty -- as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it."

"Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer... its anti-intellectualism... its puerile hymns... and its faith-healing... are made to order for King Kid America."

"Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental."

"Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs."

The Moral High Ground

My friend Debbie said some time ago: Israel has clearly lost, by the whole Palestinian thing, a huge portion of the moral high ground handed to Jews-in-general by the Nazis.

This statement is, to me, one key to the problems of identity politics, not to mention the psychology of abuse.

In my opinion, nobody gets the moral high ground based on anything but how they’re behaving now. It’s based on what you actually do, not who you think you are and not what was done to you. Neither heroism nor victimhood is an entitlement, much less an excuse.

I hereby declare a moratorium on using victimhood as a deed to the moral high ground.

Victimhood—now or in the past, direct or indirect, whether determined by chance, genetics, race, creed, color, social status, economic status, age, shape, size, gender, sexual preference, accent, disability, personal achievement, birth order, irrational dislike, or anything else—is not a free pass marked "Get out of Guilt Free." It does not grant you permanent immunity from responsibility for your actions, nor can you hand down such immunity to your great-grandchildren or to people who share similar culture or genetics. It does not justify your use of unfair or cruel tactics in self-defense. It does not automatically award you the coveted Halo of Martyrdom—a razor-edged circle that, when thrown like a Frisbee, can decapitate your enemies. (In self-defense.)

This goes in personal relationships as well. I know the psychology of abusers. I know how it feels to say, “They made me do it to them.” I understand violence—physical and emotional and even financial—done in self-defense. And it’s wrong.


I also declare a permanent ban on claiming heroism or good-guy status as an excuse for behavior that would shame a wolverine.

That means the United States cannot decide that since we rode to the rescue of Europe in 1917 and 1941, anything we do now (or did then) is automatically virtuous. The firebombing of Dresden was an atrocity. We did it. It would be wrong no matter who did it, and pretending that our status as world heroes makes it acceptable is contemptible. The same kind of thinking made the Glen Ridge high school football stars think it was fine to rape a mentally retarded girl while their teammates looked on. They were heroes, and heroes are allowed.

We cannot whine that Hitler was worse, or that the Soviets cold-bloodedly murdered 15,000 to 25,000 Polish officers at Katyn Forest and two other sites. Moral responsibility is not a zero-sum game. There is plenty of it to go around.

Self-proclaimed heroism is just as dangerous as being a victim.

Hitler could argue that he was just trying to defend and protect Germany, which had been shamefully treated by the Treaty of Versailles. Stalin could argue that he was trying to build a new society free of the brutal oppression that characterized life under the Romanov czars. Nicholas could argue that he was just doing what he thought was best for his country, that the peasants were like children who needed a firm hand, and that he and his family lived relatively simple lives. The French aristos could argue that they were just having fun. They gave to charity and went to church. Was it their fault that the peasants were filthy and starving, that a few rogue aristos killed the peasants for sport? And Robespierre could argue that he had to build a new France, that the purity of his goals justified Madame Guillotine.

In justifying atrocity, victimhood and heroism tend to work together. Much of current US foreign and domestic policy is based on a revolting mixture of the two. As victims of a dreadful attack, we behave as if we’re justified in violating the basic tenets of the Constitution we are supposed to be defending. And as heroes and good guys, we invaded Iraq—not even questioning the effect of what we’re doing.

From the days of the Revolution, the United States have always defined ourselves as the good guys. We the people started out doing something unprecedented, and, yes, laudable in idea if not in practice. (I revere our Constitution as much as anyone, but the line about slaves being counted as 3/5 of a human being makes me sick.) But instead of using that sense of righteousness as a yardstick to measure our actions, we have all too often used it as a way to justify violence, oppression, and naked greed. And these days, torture.


It all boils down to individual responsibility of a very specific kind. Each person is responsible for the damage they do directly or enable to be done indirectly—both for kicking the cat and for buying clothes made by slave labor.

We have to stop pluming ourselves on who we are, and start looking at what we are doing.

REVIEW: Dinner at Rivoli

Wednesday night four of us celebrated Alan Bostick’s birthday with dinner at Rivoli in Berkeley. According to its web page, “Rivoli strives to be a hands on, moderately priced restaurant with simple and creative food, carefully selected wines and comfortable service in a warm and lively atmosphere.”

They succeed. I left the restaurant feeling the blissful glow that arises from being well fed, well cared for, and well loved.

Dining out when you have serious food allergies can be an exercise in frustration and occasionally a danger to life. Over the years, I’ve seen all the things that can go wrong: waiters indifferent to my concerns, cooks ignorant of their ingredients, the omnipresent possibility of a serious food reaction. Even if I don’t end up in the ER, a reaction spoils the evening for everybody else and spoils the week for me. (It takes that long to recuperate.) Giving the allergy speech is always a time-consuming and generally miserable experience, and I’ve learned to hate it. It’s humiliating to explain these issues, and it’s bloody frustrating not to be able to eat what others can.

A good waitstaff and a knowledgeable chef can make all the difference. Rivoli has both. We all ate different things, and it was all perfectly cooked, elegantly presented, and reasonably priced. And none of it sent me to the hospital.

I started with portabella fritters with a dipping sauce of subtle lemon aioli. The crisp slices of mushroom were fanned out on a bed of arugula and topped with caper vinaigrette—an astonishing riff on the old fried mushroom standby. Every bite was a rainbow of flavors and textures: crunchy, earthy, bright, creamy.

For a main course, I chose grilled scallops. Because of my allergies, I can almost never order seafood in restaurants, and I was eager to taste these, but half afraid something would go wrong: too much heat turns scallops into 50-caliber rubber bullets suitable for subduing crazed rioters, and an extra day or so between sea and plate can give them an unpleasant doctor’s office flavor of iodine and disappointment.

The first taste brought tears to my eyes. These beauties were of a melting tenderness and velvety fresh flavor. They were bedded on a mound of soothingly creamy mashed potatoes and surrounded by grilled Brussels sprouts, the apotheosis of that maligned and maltreated vegetable. The roasted tomatoes were small, sweet, perfectly flavorful.

For dessert I ordered Meyer lemon curd tart, tart and fresh, sparked with blood oranges and a touch of bergamot in the sauce. Not too sweet, not too tart—balanced on the point of maximum flavor.

Not only did I have a meal that was transcendently delicious, I had superb service to go with it. Alan's partner Debbie had made inquiries beforehand to make sure there would be something I could eat, but we also checked with the waiter. He was a model of everything a good waiter should be: friendly, unobtrusive, aware, skilled, and concerned. He made substitutions with no problem, and never interrupted the conversation. He even picked up that it was Alan’s birthday and added a small candle to his dessert. Nothing flashy or humiliating—just a little notice taken.

The ambiance matched the quality of the food and service. Although every table was at capacity, the room felt welcoming and peaceful, not noisy or claustrophobic. The acoustic engineering may have had something to do with the miraculous quiet, and the quality of the food certainly did—people were too busy savoring the food and the blissful serenity it engendered to get noisy. I didn’t even hear a cell phone ring all evening. Nor were we tormented with Muzak.

Part of the reason for the serene atmosphere, though, was surely the vast glass wall at the rear of the restaurant, which showcased a beautiful shade garden: ferns, cyclamen, bleeding hearts, a grand magnolia tree coming into bloom. Lit like a stage, the garden drew the eye away from the proximity of one’s neighbors and toward the open space. I’ve noticed the same effect in traffic jams on certain freeways: being stuck on 85, 280, or 680 never feels as edgy, frustrating, and claustrophobic as being stuck on the ugly, billboard-dotted freeways such as the 101 or 880.

We were seated at the back corner of the restaurant, next to the wall. Under a stone bench were a couple of bowls of dry cat food and two cats enjoying their dinner. The waiter explained that we were likely to see some wildlife, too: raccoons and even skunks. As the evening went on, half a dozen raccoon families showed up for dinner. Their manners were hilarious, too: one or two would appear, then the kids would climb right over the parents to get at the food.

Inside Rivoli, the behavior of the diners was more controlled but no less eager. The food was a revelation. My reactions to each new dish contributed at least as much as the raccoons did to the entertainment of my companions.

Finally we staggered forth, utterly sated. My one unfulfilled wish is that Alan could have a birthday three or four times a year. Or as often as the menus change.

Rivoli: 1539 Solano Ave. Berkeley, CA
(510) 526-2542

Christmas Poem
G.K.Chesterton

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost---how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wife's tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

Serendipitous Quotation of the Day

"I tell myself there is only one true thing in our world, to satisfy one's heart, to feel and go to the bottom of all one's feelings, to desire and go to the bottom of all one's desires; finally to live one's own life, one's sincere life, outside of all lies and all conventions." --Wallace Stevens

GRIEF: National Children's Memorial Day

The holidays are hard for bereaved families. Especially if you're grieving for someone who died too young, the holidays can be close to unbearable. One way to handle it is to make a place for the grief. Every year I take part in this, and every year it offers some comfort.

The Worldwide Candle Lighting®

In loving memory of all children who are no longer with us, The Compassionate Friends extends an invitation for you, your family, and friends to join tens of thousands of persons around the globe for the eighth annual Worldwide Candle Lighting.

On Sunday, December 12, 2004, hundreds of community candle lighting ceremonies will be held in parks, churches, and other public places by TCF chapters, allied organizations, and other compassionate groups. Thousands more will be held informally in homes. The Compassionate Friends Worldwide Candle Lighting is held every year on the second Sunday in December at 7 p.m. local time for one hour in each time zone around the globe—a 24-hour remembrance of all children who have died.

A “Remembrance Book” will be available from The Compassionate Friends Website home page, Sunday, December 12, 2004 for all who wish to leave a message in memory of the children gone too soon. Please make plans to post a message that day.

We do this . . . that their light may always shine!

Whether you're grieving a baby who never had a chance to live, a child who didn't get to grow up, or an adult whose life ended in their prime, grieving parents (siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends) can participate.