Anti-smurfite

Last month HuffPost ran an article about a newly published book by a French author which argues that the original Smurf cartoons were works of racist, anti-Semitic, and socialist propaganda. A few weeks later, an article in The Forward elaborated on this theory without mentioning either the HuffPost article or the French book. According to this theory, Gargamel looks like an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jew, down to his hooked nose, and this suspicion is heightened by the fact that the goal of his nefarious plans is money. As the Forward article puts it, "All that Gargamel lacks is a yarmulke."

This theory isn't new. Back in 2007, JewOrNotJew.com did a half-joking piece on the matter, concluding that "someone out there is really bigoted--the creator of the cartoon or the creator of the theory. Probably a little of both really." I myself never noticed any of this as a kid, apart from wondering why Gargamel's cat, Azrael, had a Hebrew name.

I believe it is within the realm of possibility that the Smurfs' creator Peyo could have been an anti-Semite. But I'm hesitant to endorse this theory, not because it will spoil my childhood, but because it's all speculative. I know nothing about Peyo's life, and he isn't around to defend himself against these charges. (A son of his, however, has dismissed the accusations as "between the grotesque and the not serious.") None of the articles I've seen have provided any new information, just interpretations of what I already know.

Actually, let me qualify that a little. The HuffPost article did mention one fact that I admit was pretty damning with regard to another prejudice. Apparently the very first Smurf cartoon was called "The Black Smurf" and was about a disease that turns smurfs black, where they become dimwitted and say "nyap nyap." US publishers refused to print this cartoon, and later they made the infected smurfs purple. (I remember reading a strip concerning a green smurf that bites other smurfs to turn them green--but my memory could be failing me as to the exact color. I just assumed it was the smurf equivalent of vampires or zombies.) That does sound racist, and quite similar to things on our side of the pond from Disney and Warner Bros. (many of which, such as the black centaurs in Fantasia, have been censored).

As for Gargamel's alleged Jewishness, I have much the same reaction as JewOrNotJew.com: it makes me uncomfortable, but there's no conclusive evidence to prove this theory correct. Gargamel is never identified as a Jew. He doesn't have a Jewish-sounding name or speak any Yiddish. The evidence, such as it is, apparently escaped the notice of American producers of the Saturday morning cartoons (which I watched as a kid through a VCR, an invention of great use to observant Jews in the '80s). It's also possible that the element of anti-Semitic stereotyping was subconscious, rather than part of an agenda, on Peyo's part.

I'm reminded of when The Phantom Menace came out and some critics suggested that some of the alien creatures were thinly disguised racial and ethnic stereotypes. What provoked the most ire were the inaptly (or ineptly) named Gungans, especially Jar Jar, a flop-eared, blubbering creature whom Newsweek's David Ansen described as "a kind of intergalactic Stepin Fetchit." Getting only slightly less attention were the "Asian" Neimodians and the slaveowner Watto, a winged creature with a hooked beak, a strange accent, and more than a dollop of greed. Slate's Bruce Gottleib reacted indignantly to Richard Corliss's suggestion that Watto's accent was "Turkish":

Turkish? Even without the visual clue of the hooked nose, Watto's accent is clearly Yiddish, not Turkish. Or click "No"; listen again; and you tell me: Is Corliss crazy or am I?

Personally I don't think either writer is crazy, but I didn't pick up what Gottlieb was hearing in Watto's voice, even after downloading that sound clip. I'm no expert on Turkish accents, but Watto's accent did not strike me as Yiddish. And I should know, given that my maternal grandfather had one.

Part of the problem is that Lucas made a choice in the prequels to have some of his aliens speak English in made-up accents, rather than totally made-up languages like in the original trilogy. This wasn't a bad idea in the abstract. In an intergalactic society, I imagine there would be diverse accents and not just diverse languages. But I think that whenever people hear an accent they can't immediately identify, their instinct is to compare it to accents they know. JewOrNotJew.com dismisses the theory about Watto before you can say "smurfin' awesome":

If a character is designated as Jewish and is portrayed as loving money, having a big nose, being henpecked by women, whatever, that's a negative Jewish stereotype and the creator should be called to task.

But if a character has a big nose and loves money and the anti-defamation league or whoever says that makes him/her Jewish, well, that's not the creator of the character spreading negative stereotypes. That's the Jews themselves.

But then why did this same site suggest that Gargamel is "probably" the creation of a bigot? He has a big nose and loves money and is no more identified as a Jew than Watto is. Is it because Gargamel is a human on Earth while Watto is an alien in a galaxy far, far away? Or is it because whoever runs this site has a harder time ascribing anti-Semitic motives to George Lucas than to a mid-20th-century Belgian whose life story isn't well-known?

That's part of the way I look at it, I admit. I highly doubt Lucas is consciously racist or anti-Semitic. I think it's possible the echo of ethnic stereotypes could find its way into Star Wars, a potpourri of myths, legends, and old movies. There are elements of it in the original trilogy, though mostly too vague to seem offensive: Yoda seems modeled on an Asian master, the ewoks are rather like a stereotypical African or Amazonian tribe, and the Tusken Raiders bear a clear imprint of desert nomads on earth such as Bedouins. I'm sure Lucas would be the first to admit all this. But he has consistently gotten defensive at any suggestion of racial insensitivity on his part. He did so when the 1977 film came out and some critics complained about the all-white cast (except for James Earl Jones as the voice of Vader). He did so when critics of The Phantom Menace complained about Jar Jar and co.

While I'm not ready to let Lucas totally off the hook about Jar Jar, I never noticed the stuff about Watto until others pointed it out. And I ought to have enough Jewdar to pick it up, if it was there. I don't hope to convince anyone who did see it, however. There's a heavy amount of subjectivity in these interpretations, and yet you can't totally dismiss the idea of veiled racism in a children's fantasy, because it's a fact that there's a long tradition of it. All I can do is try to distinguish those who have ill intent from those who stumble into these images by accident.

Design creating the designer

Given the achievements of theoretical physics in the last century, it can come as a shock to realize the amount of unbridled speculation in the field. The way Paul Davies presents the topic in his book The Goldilocks Enigma occasionally gives it the aura of classical mythology. For example, tell me the following account of the early universe doesn't sound like some primordial battle between a good and bad deity:

Whenever matter and antimatter mingle, they quickly annihilate in a burst of gamma rays.... So that presents a puzzle: how did the big bang make 10⁵⁰ tons of matter without also making 10⁵⁰ tons of antimatter?.... however it is done, the story of the origin of matter would go something like this. The heat radiation released after the big bang created copious quantities of both matter and antimatter, all mixed together, but containing a slight excess of matter. As the universe cooled, the antimatter would be totally destroyed by virtue of its being in intimate contact with matter, leaving unscathed the small residue of excess matter--about one part in a billion. (p. 105)

The coincidence of my coming upon this book just a few weeks after I wrote my post about pantheism, which covers similar ground, wasn't lost on me. Both deal with the question of why the dead universe around us seems uniquely suited for life. To rephrase the old conundrum, how come anyone's around to hear the tree make a sound?

Physicists over the past few decades have discovered that many of the physical laws of the universe seem "just right" for the development of life. If the numbers had been slightly lower, or slightly higher, life as we know it could not have come to exist. I will mention just a few examples, because the topic is vast and has been covered thoroughly in numerous books:

1. If the neutron were slightly lighter, the proton would be unstable and atoms probably could not have formed. If it were slightly heavier, nuclear fusion would not be possible and stars could not have formed.

2. If gravity were slightly stronger, all stars would be giants with relatively brief lives. If it were slightly weaker, heavy elements necessary for planet formation would not have been produced.

3. If the nuclear resonance level of carbon were any different, our sun could not have produced high quantities of the element.

One must exercise caution when examining these apparent facts. Perhaps a very different sort of life, or lifelike phenomenon, would have emerged under other conditions. Perhaps we aren't exercising our imaginations enough. But examples like these have piled up, and so far they haven't gone away.

Like me, Davies isn't satisfied with the standard copout, "That's just the way the laws are, and if they weren't that way, we wouldn't be here to discuss it." To illustrate the flaw in this argument, he takes off from an idea in Carl Sagan's novel Contact. The number pi consists of decimal digits going on into infinity. The digits are completely arbitrary except for the fact that the number is derived from nature. Let's say you created a computer program displaying the number in binary, where a light pixel would represent one, and a dark pixel zero. Most likely, the screen would be flooded with meaningless "snow." You wouldn't expect to see a coherent image, such as a circle, much less a smiley face. But what if one did appear after just two minutes? Assuming the program wasn't rigged, the only conclusion most scientists would permit would be that it's just a freakish coincidence.

Davies explores several possible solutions to this dilemma. (I will deal with only a few of them here.) The most popular is the hypothesis of multiple universes. In an infinity of universes, some are bound to produce life. Those that don't will obviously go unnoticed. We're here simply because our universe is one that happened to have the right set of laws needed for our existence.

The multiverse hypothesis isn't purely ad hoc; it seems to follow from certain versions of the Big Bang theory, as well as from certain versions of quantum mechanics. But there are major problems with the hypothesis, as Davies explains. For starters, it is borderline untestable. It also seems to violate Occam's razor, the principle that theories should be as simple as possible. And it leaves unanswered the question of where the universe-generating mechanism came from.

One bizarre twist on this hypothesis bears mentioning. Davies quotes Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom as saying, "There is a significant probability that you are living in [a] computer simulation. I mean this literally: if the simulation hypothesis is true, you exist in a virtual reality simulated in a computer built by some advanced civilisation. Your brain, too, is merely a part of that simulation."

That's just a modern variation on an age-old philosophical idea, but Bostrom makes a case for it based on the multiverse hypothesis. See if you can follow this. If countless universes exist, there are likely to be ones containing civilizations that have reached the point of creating simulated universes. Any civilization with that capacity is likely to exercise it numerous times. Therefore, there are likely to be more fake universes than real ones, and so, by the laws of probability, we are more likely to inhabit one of the fakes.

Davies has fun with this idea. If we're in a simulation, who is to say we aren't in a simulation-within-a-simulation? "Logically there is no end to this nested sequence.... The real universe could be lost amid an infinite regress of nested fakes. Or it may not even exist at all. Reality might consist of an infinite sequence of simulations, period" (p. 185).

As the saying goes, that way lies madness. Bostrom's argument has many holes, but the most basic is that the conclusion undermines the premises. If we live in a fake universe, how do we know the physical laws we have discovered--on which the multiverse hypothesis rests--accurately describe the reality outside the simulation?

Davies, in any case, prefers a one-universe model, but he still suspects that the seemingly life-friendly laws cannot be due to chance. He proposes that there must be something leading our universe in the direction of producing conscious, thinking beings like ourselves. What that something is, he leaves open, but he puts forward a series of related theories that he maintains are compatible with modern physics.

While I'm not sure I understood all the details, his basic idea is that conscious life itself, in the far future, somehow influences the early universe to produce life in the first place. The laws create life, and life creates the laws, in a sort of circular time-loop with no ultimate origin. I couldn't help thinking of the following Escher drawing:


Davies contrasts this idea with the classic grandfather paradox, where a time traveler kills an ancestor. He says it is more like a time traveler saving the life of a girl who will one day become the time traveler's mother. Davies insists that this scenario, while strange, does not create a paradox.

Actually, the scenario is called an "ontological paradox." One notable example I discussed on this blog is from the movie Somewhere in Time. A man receives an antique watch from an old lady. He later goes back in time and gives it to a young woman, who will become the old lady who gives it to his younger self--and so on, ad infinitum. The paradox is that the watch was never built by anyone, at any time. It just eternally exists, fully formed. Since Davies is as bothered as I am by the question of why anything exists, I would think he'd stay far away from such scenarios, which only compound the question.

Considering the difficulties with all these theories, why not accept the traditional idea of a creator God? Davies thinks this answer presents at least as many difficulties as the others. For one thing, did God choose to create the universe, or was it a necessary act that flowed from His very nature? Either possibility leads to additional questions. Also notice the problem with describing creation as an event in time--God exists outside of time, at least according to traditional religions.

I think that such questions miss the point. God by definition is where rational inquiry ends. To believers, the purpose of belief is to transcend the rational in order to connect with the unfathomable. The usual response by scientists is that God, then, should remain forever outside of scientific discussions. To some extent, I agree. But when scientists are reduced to positing fake worlds within fake worlds, or self-created entities from an unexplainable time-loop, we are justified in wondering if the end has already been reached.

Lex Luthor was a good person

Every time a public figure says something that causes a stir, he will claim to have been misquoted. The trouble is, in many cases he'll be right.

One of the silliest instances of this has to be the recent flap over Will Smith's "Hitler" remark. For those who haven't been following the story, here is the quote: "Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.' I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good.'" The headline to the article falsely claimed Smith had said that "Hitler was a good person." Just this week, Smith won damages and an apology for this idiotic mistake.

But I get the strange feeling Smith's comment would have passed unnoticed if he had replaced "Hitler" with "Bin Laden." For some reason, people tend to think of Hitler as a psychopath but Bin Laden as a true believer. I'm not sure either assumption is correct.

Everyone knows Bin Laden is an Islamic extremist, but many people are confused about what Hitler believed. I saw a debate between Bill O'Reilly and Richard Dawkins over the existence of God. In the course of the debate, O'Reilly claimed that Hitler was a "confirmed atheist," while Dawkins insisted that Hitler was a Roman Catholic. Both were wrong. Hitler rejected the Catholicism of his childhood (despite public pronouncements to the contrary) but continued to say he was doing the will of God.

In any case, his religious beliefs were almost irrelevant. The Nazis had Protestants, Catholics, and atheists in their ranks. Nazi ideology was a hodgepodge of Christian anti-Semitism, Enlightenment racism, neo-pagan Nordic mythology, Darwinism, and Nietzscheism.

The only two things consistent about Hitler were his desire to rule the world, and his abiding hatred of Jews. Did he really "believe" Jews were that terrible, or did he simply concoct a giant excuse for his murderous tendencies? I wouldn't claim to know the answer.

Comic-book villains, unlike real-life ones, always wear their motives on their sleeves. Lex Luthor knows he's evil and is proud of it. He has no delusional belief system. Indeed, he seems like a clearer thinker than Superman.

You could search the world over before finding someone that transparently evil. Most bad guys in our world espouse an ideology that casts them as the good guys and us as the villains. Whether they believe in it themselves is less important than the fact that they're able to persuade others to believe.

It's scary to admit that people can have such warped perceptions, because it means there's no universal agreement on what's right and wrong. Maybe that's why children like comic books. There's a certain comfort in believing that the world is only threatened by self-aware baddies.

Return to the source

I have a habit of reading the same books over and over instead of moving on to new ones. Last week I wrote a post on Piers Anthony's Killobyte, which I reread recently and enjoyed as much as the first time I read it 13 years ago. In that post, I offhandedly mentioned Jack, the Giant Killer, the first Charles De Lint book I ever read, back in fifth grade. Over the years I've gone on to several other books and stories of his, but this one stayed in my memory as his greatest work. Rereading it now, I'm rethinking that judgment. It isn't as good as I remember.

The book was his contribution to a series of modernized fairy tales by various fantasy writers. The classic tale he chose to update was "Jack the Giant Killer," but he threw in elements of various other stories (including the related and better known "Jack and the Beanstalk") as well as some folkloric material.

De Lint was ideal for this project, since his specialty is incorporating traditional fantasy into a contemporary urban setting. He could easily write mainstream fiction if he wanted. His books always begin in the real world, and he has a reputation for drawing believable female characters. But he also has a lifelong interest in mythology and folklore. His passion for the subject always comes through in his fiction.

The "Jack" of the book's title turns out to be a young woman named Jacky, who lives in modern-day Canada and has no belief in fairies, elves, or sorcerers. Depressed after her boyfriend walks out on her, she is walking down the street drunk one night when she witnesses a bizarre sight. A biker gang chase down and kill a strange little man by shooting lightning at him through a staff. The dwarf's corpse soon disappears, as does a mysterious man who was watching from a nearby house.

Naturally, she thinks she hallucinated the incident, but one item from the scene remains: the dwarf's red cap. When she returns to the spot a few days later, she discovers that donning the cap allows her to see into the land of Faerie, a world of gnomes, giants, and other mythical races. They all live right in the modern world, occupying the same space and traveling on the same roads. They've always been there, and always will be there, but most mortals are unable to see them.

This intriguing premise is part of what I remember loving about the book. I especially enjoyed the names of the creatures, which include the Gruagagh, the hobs, and the bogans, a race of pirate-like ghouls with a penchant for the phrase "Hot damn!"

The book also has an element of female empowerment, as a tiny woman from the contemporary world becomes a fighter and learns to kick Giant butt. (I have a theory that this book, published in 1987, inspired Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.)

Unfortunately, the novel soon gets bogged down in plot details that aren't quite as compelling as the early scenes promise. Jacky is called upon to rescue some enchanted princess (or something) and restore order to the land. There's a lot of names and places to remember, and my eyes soon glazed over.

De Lint wrote in the introduction that what attracted him to the character of Jack, who shows up in at least three classic fairy tales, was his mixture of luck and pluck; he is, according to De Lint, "both foolish and clever."

But it isn't until a while into the novel that we get a sense of this character in Jacky. The book doesn't feel much like a fairy tale. It seems to owe more to Tolkien than to Grimm. There is even an enchanted object that corrupts the one who wields it, just like in Lord of the Rings.

This weekend, I read the 1990 sequel Drink Down the Moon for the first time. In some ways, I enjoyed it more than the first book, even though it departs even farther from its fairy tale origin, with scarcely any giants in the plot. It is more of a typical De Lint novel.

It continues the adventures of Jacky, now a permanent resident of Faerie. She's forced to confront a powerful villain called the droichan, who is considerably smarter and scarier than the rather witless giants and bogans from the first novel.

The book contains much joy and humor, but the scene I will probably remember for the longest is riveting. The droichan captures Jacky and uses magic to torture her. I will end this post with an excerpt from this scene. Do not read further if you aren't interested in getting nightmares.

"When my kind dies," the droichan said, "truly dies, this is where we go."

One by one, Jacky's senses deserted her. Sight went first--from a gauzy veil to nothingness. Her other senses compensated, becoming more acute.

She heard her own raspy breathing, the droichan's light breaths. In the Tower itself, the cries of the bogans and other creatures readying for war....

Then her hearing went.

Now she could smell the sharpness of her own fear, the earthy smell of the droichan. The open window of the Tower brought in the scents of autumn with a bog-reek of sluagh and bogans.

Smell went.

She could taste her fear now--a raw vomit sour in her throat. The salty sweat that beaded her lips.

Taste went.

There was nothing left but touch. The hard wall at her back. The vague kiss of a breeze on her skin. Then her nerve ends began to tingle and go numb. Limb by limb, feeling withdrew until she was devoid of all sensation.

No outside stimuli entered her. She might as well have been immersed in a sensory-deprivation tank. But there was no peace to be found in this. No rest. No solace. She hadn't chosen to withdraw from the world to capture some inner harmony. She'd had her senses stolen from her by a monster and been cast adrift in a bleak void of his making.

There was no way to measure time.

A moment could have passed and it could have been forever. An eternity slipped by in a scurry of seconds. Blank, utter panic came gibbering up from the back of her mind and flooded her brain....

She was here forever.

She might already have been here forever.

Escape was impossible. Without the droichan's help, she couldn't return to the world.

Bigotry chopping

Earlier, I discussed how the term anti-Semitism is abused. I've noticed that many writers avoid the term when referring to religiously motivated events such as the Crusades, where Jews could escape persecution through conversion, at least in theory. The bigotry underlying these events is called anti-Judaism, as opposed to the racial doctrine of anti-Semitism developed in the nineteenth century (when the latter term was actually coined). Many academic scholars make this distinction, which I find problematic.

One example is Jeremy Cohen in his recent book Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen. Cohen links the historical treatment of Jews at the hands of Christians to evolving interpretations of the Christ-killer myth. For much of the first millennium, the Church followed the view of St. Augustine, who held the Jews responsible for Jesus' death but attributed their sin to ignorance rather than complicit guilt. Under this view, Jews were to be tolerated in the hope they would eventually "see the light." By the time of the Crusades, however, harsher interpretations of Scripture had taken hold in the Christian world.

Cohen discusses the influence of the Christ-killer myth on modern anti-Semitism, including the set of beliefs underlying the Holocaust. But he declines to apply the term anti-Semitism to most of the medieval anti-Jewish bigotry. According to Cohen, "one should guard against simply assuming an uninterrupted continuity between medieval anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism in every conceivable mode of religious expression" (pp. 208-9).

I have two basic objections to the term anti-Judaism. First, it's too neutral-sounding. It lacks the negative connotations which anti-Semitism acquired after the Holocaust. Second, the distinction between religious and racial persecution gets pretty muddy when you look at history. Many of the medieval stereotypes of Jews--hook noses, red hair, horns and body odor--had distinctly racial overtones. (How would conversion get rid of any of those things?) By the time of the Inquisition, converting to Christianity was no longer an escape; indeed, the converts were the ones in the most danger.

Pat Buchanan's response to charges of anti-Semitism illustrates the confusion that can result from identifying anti-Semitism purely with a racial ideology. According to The Nizkor Project, Buchanan told a Christian newspaper in 1992, "I am as aware as any other Christian that our Savior was Jewish, His mother was Jewish, the Apostles were Jewish, the first martyrs were Jewish.... So no true Christian, in my judgment, can be an anti-Semite."

That's a good start. But the medieval Church was also perfectly aware that Jesus and all of the early Christians were Jews. That knowledge did not stop them from persecuting the people who continued practicing the faith that Christianity was supposed to have supplanted. If you define an anti-Semite as "one who thinks all Jews who ever lived are bad," then these persecutors were not anti-Semites. But that distinction is of little consequence to the victims.

Calling this persecution anti-Judaism seems inadequate. In today's society, opposition to a religion is not regarded as inherently bigoted. Religions themselves tend to be "anti" other religions to some extent. Where do we draw the line between bigotry and mere disagreement?

Anyone is entitled to critique a religion. But religions are made up of people, not just ideas, and there comes a point when abstract criticisms begin to spill over into stereotypes. Cohen provides an example in a quote from Protestant theologian Karl Barth, normally an outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism:

Who is this Judas, the man who will maintain his freedom in face of Jesus for the sake of something better, the man for whom Jesus is for sale...? Obviously he does not bear this name for nothing. Within the apostolic group...he obviously represents the Jews..., he merely does that which Israel has always done in relation to Yahweh. He merely does that which has always made Yahweh's rejection of His chosen people inevitable.... Israel always tried to buy off Yahweh with thirty pieces of silver. (p. 259)

Nowadays, many Christians have become great friends of the Jewish people. The challenge facing Jews today is how to combat theologically rooted anti-Jewish ideas without attacking Christianity itself. While I don't agree with Buchanan's cavalier dismissal of Christian anti-Semitism--the past needs to be acknowledged before we can move on--the Christian establishment has taken great strides in healing the wounds between the two religions.

The final chapter of Cohen's book examines several movies about the Passion, including Mel Gibson's controversial film. (Gibson has long identified with Traditionalist Catholics who reject Vatican II, though his own views on the matter aren't clear.) These movies use a variety of strategies to avoid the impression that they're attacking all Jews. Sometimes they downplay the Jewishness of Jesus' opponents, or else overplay the Jewishness of Jesus and his disciples. Gibson and his defenders emphasize the theme that "we are all sinners." But a core of hostility toward traditional Judaism lurks in the Gospels, no matter how you spin it.

Film critic Michael Medved is perhaps the most prominent Jew to defend Gibson's film. Around the time of the film's release, he took Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to task for calling the movie anti-Semitic. Medved's reasoning for defending the film--which by his own admission deeply contradicts his beliefs--is interesting:

By what right do Rabbi Boteach and his many outspoken allies in the Jewish community demand that Mel Gibson and his innumerable supporters among Protestant and Catholic clergy should reject their own religious tradition to accept a Jewish version of the death of their savior?.... For reasons that defy rational explanation, Rabbi Boteach insists upon picking an ugly public fight with believing Christians who view their own sacred books in the same way the Rabbi views the Torah - as the inerrant word of God.

In fact, many devout Catholics and Protestants found much fault with Gibson's interpretation of the Passion story. For example, when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) organized a committee to review the screenplay prior to the film's release, the committee concluded:

Certainly films can present Jesus' suffering and death in a powerful way. But they must remain faithful to the church's current understanding. "The Passion of the Christ" does not. Gibson, in fact, rejects those teachings as well as modern biblical scholarship and thus stands outside of official Catholicism today.

After the film was released, the USCCB backed down considerably, but they still felt the movie's depiction of the Jewish leadership was overly harsh. The point is that there are many ways for devout Christians to approach the Passion story, and criticizing the way they portray Jews in a particular account is not the same as asking them to give up their traditions. I agree with Medved that we need to be sensitive to the fact that even ideas which offend us may stem from deeply held religious beliefs, no less sincere than our own. But considering how much damage has resulted from the Christ-killer myth throughout history, these concerns should not just be dismissed under the mantle of ecumenicism.

The Nazis based their anti-Semitism on centuries of hatred by Christian oppressors, even if the Nazi leaders were privately anti-Christian, and even if they brought the anti-Jewish ideas to an extreme the medieval Christians never envisioned. Wherever it comes from and whatever term is used to describe it, anti-Jewishness is basically a single phenomenon. That fact should be recognized before we start making fine distinctions, or else we risk not seeing what's in front of us.

Interpreting dreams

According to popular dream interpretation manuals, if you dream about a cat, that means you are thinking about female sexuality. Parrots in dreams, on the other hand, symbolize gossip, or that "a message is being conveyed to you," or that "someone is being repetitive or even mocking you." I mention all this because I had lots of cat dreams as a child, and plenty of parrot dreams as a teenager. Of course, the fact that I've been around cats since I was four, and acquired a cockatiel when I was older, has nothing to do with it.

Never do these manuals stop to consider that dreams might be based on memories of daytime experiences. They always start from the assumption that all concrete objects are metaphors for suppressed emotions and anxieties, often of a sexual nature. Where they get these explanations I have no idea. It all sounds to me like a rather clichéd attempt to apply literary analysis (with Freudian overtones) to dream narratives.

Still, it's curious that some dreams seem so widespread. For example, lots of people report dreaming about accidentally going outside without clothing. Other common dreams include flying, or falling, or having one's teeth fall out, or facing an exam after having forgotten to come to class the entire semester. If dreams are particular to individuals, why are some of the most absurd ones nearly universal?

My personal theory is that dreams depict events that we expect might happen based on our life experiences. Many dreams consist of little more than distorted memories mixed together. Whenever I dream about an experience I've never had, I get the sense that my dreaming mind believes it could happen. There are things I desire which I never dream about, because I don't expect them to happen. Thus, I'm inclined to reject Freud's theory of dreams as wish fulfillment, even though I know he would argue that my subconscious mind suppresses my true desires.

An important mechanism in dreams is exaggeration. I once dreamt I was visiting a friend who in real life has one cat, but in the dream had five. I've also had dreams in which my own pets spoke English--not just my parrot, but my cats as well. I believe this reflects the way I anthropomorphize animals, thinking of them in such human terms that I practically expect them to talk. Only common sense (which I lack during sleep) makes me know better.

What about nightmares? How do they fit my theory? The answer is that when we're anxious about something, some part of us expects it to happen. That explains the feeling of inevitability in nightmares, nicely captured in The Wizard of Oz when the lion appears as soon as Dorothy begins worrying about "lions and tigers and bears." Those dreams in which we triumph over scary things, as Dorothy ultimately does, reflect our confidence.

As for the dreams where we walk outside without clothes, I suspect that they stem from our anxiety over relying on habit to get through daily routines. Most of the time when we dress ourselves, we aren't thinking about the activity at all. Just as we're occasionally forgetful with other habitual activities, it is semi-plausible (and I believe it has happened) that someone might forget to put on a vital piece of clothing. In the embellished world of a dream, that fear translates into reality.

As it stands, scientists now believe that REM sleep (the period in which most of our dreams occur) serves a memory-related function. It almost appears as if we're not meant to remember any of our dreams. We experience a kind of amnesia upon awakening, in which we quickly forget what we were dreaming about, unless we make a special effort to remember.

There are people who claim never to dream, but scientists assert that everybody dreams. Some people just don't remember. How do scientists know? In the sleep experiments of the 1950s which revolutionized the field, all the subjects, even those who initially denied ever dreaming, ended up reporting dreams at the moment the researchers awoke them from REM sleep.

The study of dreams presents many scientific difficulties. If a person says, "I dreamt I was a dog last night," we have to take his word for it. It's like basing our testimony on an amnesia patient who was the only witness to an event. We know that dreams don't occur in physical reality, but how can we verify that they occur at all? How do we know, as scientists currently believe, that they are hallucinatory experiences that occur in real time during REM sleep?

The 1950s researchers would awake sleepers who had just gone through a REM cycle (detected with an electroencephalogram) and ask them to approximate how long their dream had lasted. The scientists found a positive correlation between the length of the dream reported and the length of the REM cycle observed. They also studied the effects of external stimuli on dreams. In one case, a scientist dripped water down a subject's back thirty seconds before waking him. The subject reported having dreamt about singing at an opera, when molten wax suddenly began dripping from the ceiling.

The best book on dreaming I've read is J. Allan Hobson's 1988 The Dreaming Brain, which includes a remarkable amount of scientific information (much of which went over my head) as well as a theory that ties these observations together with stunning simplicity. The book is one of a kind: most books on dreaming focus either on the subjective aspects (and usually wind up sounding hokey and unscientific) or purely on the scientific observations (which are too limited to tell us much about the subjective state of dreaming). Hobson finds a middle ground where he is able to quantify the characteristics of dreaming and correlate them with the findings of neurobiology and sleep research.

I learned from this book that the portions of our brain governing movement and sight are activated during REM sleep. Hobson proposes that the ultimate source of dream sensation--which seems to be predominantly visual and motor--is physical rather than psychological. It is no wonder that dream sensations feel largely involuntary. As Hobson puts it, "we seldom have the experience of willing the movements that occur in dreams, but instead experience a sense of compelled or involuntary motor activity over which we have little or sometimes no control. This contrast is particularly and strikingly sharp in those dreams in which motor activity becomes a central part of the plot: for example, when one attempts to escape from a pursuer" (p. 171). This also helps explain the sensation of rapid movement we frequently experience during dreams. If we're anxious, we perceive that we're falling; otherwise, we may perceive that we're flying.

Since the sensations are physiological in origin, Freud was wrong: dreams are not messages from our subconscious (or from anywhere else, for that matter). But here's the catch: our thought reflections, which help organize the sensations into a narrative, infuse the dream with meaning. This meaning, according to Hobson, is usually transparent rather than oblique:

The activated brain-mind does its best to attribute meaning to the internally generated signals. It is this synthetic effort that gives our dreams their impressive thematic coherence: dream plots remain remarkably intact despite their orientational disorganization. And it may be that their symbolic, prophetic character arises from the integrative strain of this synthetic effort. The brain-mind may need to call upon its deepest myths to find a narrative frame that can contain the data. Hence, one can continue to interpret dreams metaphorically, and even in terms of the dynamically repressed unconscious, if one so chooses. But such a practice is no longer either necessary or sufficient as an explanation of either the origin or the nature of dreaming. (p. 214)

A recent dream of mine exemplifies this discrepancy. I dreamt that people's faces kept turning into non-digital clocks. Interpreting this dream reveals the different possible ways of answering the question "Why did I have this dream?" It could have been that I had been walking around in the early morning and glanced at a non-digital clock on the wall; the image stayed in my mind so that when I conjured up images of people's faces, my memory of the clock came back to me. Dreams are good at finding analogies. But the dream may also have reflected my feelings over my grandfather's recent death, an event that has made me think lately about how life is finite. In the dream, I expressed this feeling by seeing people as ticking clocks.

Symbolic dreams of this kind are probably a function of the individual dreamer, rather than an expression of universal mythic archetypes. People who have symbolic dreams are probably symbolic thinkers; concrete individuals will tend to dream in concrete terms. Still, human dreams might have a lot to do with why we exhibit more creativity than other species. The biochemist Otto Loewi claimed that the experiment which led him to the postulations of chemical neutrotransmission--and earned him a Nobel Prize--occurred to him in a dream, and Robert Louis Stevenson based his story "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" on a dream.

The important point is that our reactions to dream sensations prove just as important as the sensations themselves in establishing the dream "plot." This is not to suggest that dreams have no meaning. They certainly do, but according to Hobson, the meaning is usually more transparent than both Freudians and mystics would believe. Don't waste your money on a pseudoscientific dream manual; most likely, you are your own best dream manual.

The myth of the fantasy genre

Sometimes viewpoints that are dead wrong can provide a starting point for insightful discussions. I feel that way about Christian opponents of the Harry Potter series. They think it's bad to expose children to stories depicting witchcraft in a positive light. Fans respond that Harry Potter is fantasy, and that these books are a healthy tool for stimulating a child's imagination.

"Fantasy" is a funny name for a genre. The word suggests make-believe. All fiction is make-believe, but fantasy deals specifically with events that not only didn't happen, but couldn't happen. We, the readers, allow our minds to enter a universe that we know could never exist. The books tap into some part of our subconscious where rationality has not penetrated, and for a brief period of time we "believe" in magic. The genre is not about exploring possibilities, as science fiction does, but about losing ourselves in impossibilities. As Orson Scott Card puts it in his 1990 book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, "science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be" (p. 22).

But that raises a problem. If we designate all supernatural stories as fantasy, as is the common practice, we're implying that there's no such thing as the supernatural. I presume that Card, as a Mormon, would resist that implication. Yet he doesn't appear bothered by it: "As rational people, we know that magic doesn't work and superstitions are meaningless" (p. 22). True, but what about the miracles of the Bible? What about God and the afterlife?

The fantasy genre avoids this dilemma because it rarely deals with religion. Magic may be rooted in pagan belief, but most fantasies do not feature pagan deities. Two important pioneers of the genre--J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis--were devout Christians. (J.K. Rowling is, too, but let that pass.) I once saw someone make the following clueless remark about Harry Potter: "Why do the kids celebrate Christmas if they practice witchcraft?" But that's just the point. The magic in Harry Potter isn't a religion; it is an alternative series of natural laws. It has about as much to do with ancient occult practice as Westerns have to do with the real Old West. And it has about as much to do with Satan worship as armadillos have to do with Swiss cheese.

The fantasy genre, in any case, centers on things that almost everyone agrees are imaginary, like elves and dragons. Religiously rooted supernatural fiction, like The Exorcist, usually ends up in the horror section of a bookstore. People may call it fantasy, but that's not the publishing category. Fantasy, despite its religious origins, is essentially a very secular genre. Individual works like C.S. Lewis's Narnia series may express religious ideas, but mostly through metaphor.

Does a book even need magic to be considered fantasy? The Princess Bride has no obvious magical elements, unless you consider a volcanic swamp populated by ferocious capybaras to be magical. As for Miracle Max, he's an herbalist, not a sorcerer, and he doesn't show up until quite late in the story. Yet everybody thinks of The Princess Bride as a fantasy, largely because it has all the trappings of one.

The matter gets even fuzzier with books that deal with the afterlife, like Richard Matheson's What Dreams May Come, which I discussed in a previous post. Wikipedia classifies such novels as "bangsian fantasy," after an author named John Kendrick Bangs. But the thing is, Matheson actually believed in what he wrote. He based his depiction of afterlife on extensive research into near-death experiences and the visions of mystics. To him, and to many readers, his book is surely not "fantasy."

Card hints that the genre designation does have something to do with what people actually believe about the world. For example, are The Iliad and The Odyssey fantasies? No, says Card, because they were written at a time when most people believed in such stuff. What about the Bible or Paradise Lost? Card prudently remarks that even today many people "would be outraged to hear of either being classified as fantasy" (p. 18).

Even science fiction isn't immune to this dilemma. I have heard George Lucas described as a "modern mythmaker." But myths are what a culture actually believes in. People do not go to Star Wars to see a world they believe is real. Rather, Lucas takes the myths of the past and spins them into entertainment which modern audiences accept on a purely symbolic level. In a sense, that's what all fantasy writers do. If we could see what future societies will think of our own, we might be surprised at what they consider our myths and our fantasies.

Modern mythology

Urban legends are so much a part of our culture, they force us to ask ourselves how we acquire knowledge about the world. So many people get attached to these legendary stories that I hesitate to discuss the topic, for fear of coming off as a party-pooper. Yet in recent years, debunking urban legends has become popular, with several TV series and websites devoted to the sport. By now, most people who have heard the old alligators-in-the-sewer tale probably know it to be false. I suppose this is all a good sign, but the cynic in me suggests that the general public is no less gullible now than it was twenty years ago. Most people still believe anything they see on television (the continuing influence of political ads makes this all too clear), even if that information includes skepticism.

It's not just the dumb or uneducated who have fallen prey to these tales. Cokie Roberts, a respectable journalist who should have known better, uncritically repeated the Internet rumor that the phrase rule of thumb derives from an old English law condoning spousal abuse. If the very people responsible for telling us what's happening in the world can't keep the truth straight, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Some of these tales come from outright hoaxes, as in the picnic etymology that proposes a shockingly racist origin to an everyday word. But urban legends aren't always the result of intentional deception. The old game of telephone may be at work, where a basically true story gets embellished beyond recognition. That's evidently how the alligators-in-the-sewers business started. In other cases, one writer's offhand speculation is mistaken for fact. That's how people came to believe, for example, that "Ring Around the Rosie" was about the Black Death. And sometimes a joke gets misinterpreted as a true story, as when the parody newspaper The Onion published an article entitled "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism Among Children." While most readers understood the parody, some critics of J.K. Rowling's fantasy series--the very people whom the article was lampooning--cited the article as fact.

Fear and paranoia are prime mechanisms in the spread of urban legends. Indeed, many horror movies are based on old urban legends, the Urban Legends series being only one example. And today's legends often sound like horror stories of their own: the AIDS needles that pop out of trash cans, the man who wakes up in the bathtub and finds that his kidney has been stolen, the black gangs with sinister murder rituals. Many of the legends prey on racial fear in much the same way that the blood libel myth of the Middle Ages exploited anti-Semitic prejudice.

Are urban legends really anything new? A great deal of what passes for common historical knowledge is in fact folkloric. Take the stories about Columbus being the first to prove the earth round, or George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, or the Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock. Even the revised accounts often lack historical basis, and there is scarcely a major event in American history that doesn't have a legendary version existing alongside a more accurate account.

When we look back at all the myths and legends from the Ancient Greeks and other cultures of antiquity, we tend to assume that the people back then must somehow have been stupider than us to have believed such things. In reality, very little has changed. We've got mythologies right here in the present day, and they show no signs of waning in our age of Internet literacy. Discerning the valid information from among the junk is a far more elusive skill than most people realize. There simply isn't enough time in our short lifespans to look at everything with a critical eye. At some point, we have to trust our instincts.