Sacred and mundane

Faye Kellerman's bestselling series of murder mysteries concerns an L.A. police detective named Peter Decker. He stands 6'4" with a muscular build, a shock of red hair and a ginger mustache. He has a tough, no-nonsense personality, and his conversations are laden with profanity.

He is also a practicing Orthodox Jew.

I was first exposed to these books in the early '90s. Several years later I took it upon myself to read the entire series in order, and I have kept up with it ever since. They aren't the type of books I normally read. I like prose that crackles. Kellerman's prose just sits there, except for her dialogue. She has a fine ear for dialogue.

If there is any reason I'm attracted to the series, it's because of its depiction of Orthodox Jews. Kellerman (wife of novelist Jonathan) is not the only writer of modern secular fiction to tackle that subject, but she may be the most accurate, being Orthodox herself. She patterns her style after Walter Mosley, Tony Hillerman, and other writers who incorporate ethnic details into their crime fiction.

I know little about the mystery genre. Most of my experience comes from reading the old private eye stories which center on logical deduction. Modern police procedurals like Kellerman's are handled differently. The solution to the mystery is usually somewhat arbitrary, arrived at through trial and error rather than through sudden revelation. I do not find her plots especially memorable. What interests me is how she blends the material with Jewish themes.

Most movies and novels featuring Orthodox Jews are way off. Even a film like The Frisco Kid--which many Orthodox Jews love--is full of inaccuracies. Other books and films are often downright offensive. Kellerman takes pains to get the details right. Her Orthodox characters feel like people I've known, something I've never said about any other work of fiction I've read, apart from overtly religious works like Chaim Potok's The Chosen.

But her depiction of the Orthodox community is not a whitewash. She touches upon the problems, the scandals, the extremism. The biggest irony of her books, which feature graphic violence and lurid sexual encounters, is that the types of people she writes about may be the least likely to read them.

Her first book, The Ritual Bath (1986), takes place at a yeshiva. A woman is raped on her way out of a mikvah (the "ritual bath" of the title). Peter Decker comes to investigate the crime and begins to fall in love with Rina Lazarus, a young widow whose late husband was a Talmudic scholar there. The trouble is, she doesn't know Decker is Jewish.

Actually, he didn't know either until he turned eighteen. His biological mother was an Orthodox Jew who gave birth to him in her mid-teens. He was sent to an adoption agency and ended up being raised by Southern Baptists. He served in Vietnam, has a Jewish but nonobservant ex-wife, and is in his late thirties when the series begins. His romance with Rina draws him to the Jewish faith.

And no wonder. Rina is drop-dead gorgeous, sharply intelligent, religious but worldly, and a fine housewife. She's something of a Mary Sue, possibly an idealized version of Kellerman herself. She fades into the background later in the series.

The second book, Sacred and Profane, deals with Decker's theological struggles as he explores Judaism. The title is a quote from the havdalah ritual at the end of Shabbos. A more proper translation would be "sacred and mundane," since profane has connotations not found in the original Hebrew word. Kellerman, however, takes the traditional English translation of the phrase rather literally. The book is about snuff films (which appear in fiction a lot but have never been confirmed to exist in the real world), and it poses the question of how a cop who deals with this kind of stuff daily can possibly be religious.

In a moment of anger, Decker tells Rina that the rabbi who heads the yeshiva (a wonderful character) is living in an ivory tower and maintains his faith only because he hasn't seen the horrors that Decker has seen. Rina promptly informs Decker that the rabbi lost his entire family at Auschwitz. Later, Decker talks to the rabbi himself:

"...there are times when I feel God is omnipresent. I feel Him everywhere I go, in everything I do. And there are times I think there's nothing in the skies but an ozone layer. I'm not an agnostic. I'm not waiting for God to come down and prove His existence to me, because sometimes I just know He's out there. I can't explain why I feel so strongly one minute and like a total atheist the next. In short, sometimes I have doubts."

The old man looked at him impassively and extended his hand across the desktop.

"Join the club, Peter." (pp. 253-4)

I've heard members of many faiths report similar feelings. Recently I was reading The Conservative Soul, a book by journalist Andrew Sullivan, an openly gay Catholic. His take on religion reminded me of Decker's:

There have been periods when I have felt the truth of my faith as powerfully as I have felt a warm current in a cool bay, or the stifling heat of a Washington August. And there have been periods when it has seemed utterly empty, drained, arid, and without passion. (p. 50)

One of my favorite books in the series is the fourth, Day of Atonement. Decker and Rina are newly married, and Decker runs into members of his biological family. Meanwhile, they face one of the fiercest villains in the series, a teenage monster from a yeshiva background. Another favorite, later in the series, is Jupiter's Bones, in which Decker is sent to investigate the death of a man who headed a small science-based cult. This gives Kellerman a chance to explore the elusive boundary between cults and mainstream religions.

Generally, I have preferred the earlier books to the later ones. From the start, I would often skim past the sections that didn't have Jewish content. The trouble is, that content figures considerably less in the later books.

Decker is now middle-aged. (I think Kellerman has done a little sleight of hand to keep Decker relatively young while keeping the series in line with current events, but I'm not sure--I haven't done the math.) Recent books have focused on his daughter from his first marriage. She's not especially religious, and she is simply not that interesting a character. But in the book Street Dreams, she gets into a relationship with an Israeli-born Ethiopian Jew. This plot twist gives Kellerman a convenient way to address the frequent charge that the Jewish ban on intermarriage is racist.

In one scene, Decker's daughter serves him breakfast at her apartment. Since he keeps kosher and she doesn't, we would expect her to make certain accommodations, but the book doesn't mention any. This oversight wouldn't bother me in an ordinary book, and certainly non-Jewish readers won't care. But it's a lapse from what Kellerman achieved earlier in the series. I get the feeling she finds the religious elements of the story increasingly distracting.

On a dramatic level, the series lags in certain places. Occasionally, characters act in ways we can't possibly believe. Sometimes Decker, while scrupulously moral in general, displays questionable ethics. In the eighth book, Justice, he gets promoted to lieutenant after he blackmails his boss, an incompetent bigot, into resigning. Moments like this, while troubling, contribute to Decker's complex characterization--probably the second most important reason I like the series.

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.

The Macho Right

Cross-posted at DovBear's blog

In his book The Conservative Soul, bleeding-heart conservative Andrew Sullivan writes, "Even the most passionate of the [Bush] Administration's defenders cannot argue that [waterboarding] is not 'cruel, degrading and inhuman' treatment.... The notion that 'waterboarding' is not torture under the plain meaning of the word as well as its legal meaning is preposterous" (p. 169).

I contrast that with Rudy Giuliani's statement about being unsure whether waterboarding is torture. How do you possibly resolve a disagreement like this? Unless you go to the extreme of testing waterboarding on yourself, as Daniel Levin did, it's basically one person's opinion against another's. Frankly, I doubt the former New York mayor, who built his reputation on dogged machismo, is likely to be swayed by, let's face it, a prissy gay Englishman.

Sullivan attributes the Bush view of torture to "the fundamentalist psyche," which holds that "what matters is his intent, not the empirical analysis" (p. 170). This forms part of Sullivan's larger theory that the world is divided into two types of people, fundamentalists and...well, everyone else, I guess. Into the first category he includes various Evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Zionists, Islamists, Nazis, and Communists. He characterizes fundamentalism as hostile toward reason, and among the unreasonable qualities he lists are, oh, a black-and-white "us vs. them" mentality. Hmmmmmmm.

The chip in his theory is that Giuliani is no fundamentalist, by the plain meaning of the word as well as its legal meaning. I therefore propose an alternative theory that is equally simplistic, but at least it knows it is. The assault on reason here is coming not from the Religious Right, but from the Macho Right.

Contrary to popular belief, members of the Religious Right are quite capable of reasoned thought, at least when it suits their purposes. Reason is absolutely irrelevant to members of the Macho Right, who are driven not by reason, but by testosterone.

Even if you've never heard the term, you surely are familiar with the right-wingers who seem to build their whole outlook on machismo. "We gotta be tough on crime. We gotta bomb the commies/Muslims/insert-your-own-enemy back to the Stone Age. We gotta stop the liberals who want to take guns away from the real men who own them."

It's no wonder all those tough-guy movie stars, at least the ones who aren't into martial arts, vote Republican: Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Eastwood, and Willis.

Schwarzenegger, who has never clearly explained why he's a Republican, is a perfect example. You remember when he characterized his Democratic opponents as "economic girlie men" (never mind that he supports universal health care). Then some gay rights organizations, eager to play Charlie Brown to Lucy's football, complained that his remarks were insulting to homosexuals. Uh-huh.

To qualify for the Macho Right, you don't have to be religious. You don't even have to be conservative in a traditional sense. You certainly don't have to be genuinely tough. As we have seen, right-wingers are more than willing to paint true American heroes like John McCain and John Kerry as spineless sissies.

Some notable examples of Macho Rightists in the media are Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly. You remember Savage. He's the guy who got kicked off of MSNBC because he referred to a caller as a "sodomite" and told him to "get AIDS and die."

Savage, an irreligious Jew, can hardly be accused of Bible-thumping. Macho Rightists aren't fueled by the Bible, which may even provide them with some distractions, such as the admonition to love the sinner. They're the types of people who are given to saying things like, "Get your hands off me, you faggot!!!!"

When Hillary Clinton called Ann Coulter "heartless," referencing her book Godless, Coulter replied, "Oh, lighten up, girl." Apparently realizing the flaw in Hillary's approach, Joe Maguire titled his anti-Coulter book Brainless. That of course has more bite, but it still misses the point. Macho Rightists don't care about brains. They care about cojones.

After all, who else is the emblem of the Macho Right today than President George W. Bush, that tough, macho cowboy who's just like...well, certainly not like the folks from Brokeback Mountain. Those are just sissies who herd cows.

I was once listening to a Macho Right acquaintance of mine rail against bicycle helmets. He wasn't talking about government regulation. He simply hated seeing kids wear them, claiming that today's parents are raising a generation of wimps who can't handle the world.

I had a nasty bicycle spill when I was fifteen. I was wearing no helmet or kneepads. Luckily, I didn't land on my head, but what if I had? I might not be here now to talk about the incident.

The experience gives me a slight advantage when arguing with Macho Rightists. I wouldn't stand a chance against them if all I had were statistics and reasoned arguments. When a Macho Rightist talks, there is absolutely nothing you say, no reasoned argument, that can possibly sway them. On the contrary, the slightest appeal to reason makes you sound like the wuss they know you are. The only way to combat their rhetoric is through more macho rhetoric.

Bill O'Reilly has actually used Macho Right logic to argue against the death penalty. He says that we should give the convicts life in prison so that they can suffer more.

It's hard to say how many Macho Rightists there are, but you know them when you hear them. If you ask any of them whether they belong to the Macho Right, they aren't likely to admit it. The term probably reminds them too much of the Village People.

Democracy without freedom

Dialogue from the 2002 movie Spider-Man:

Peter Parker: Spider-Man wasn't trying to attack the city, he was trying to save it. That's slander.

J. Jonah Jameson: It is not. I resent that. Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel.

I hate when people try to win an argument by appealing to a pedantic distinction with no relevance to the discussion. For example, how many times have you heard someone say, "The U.S. is a republic, not a democracy"?

I've heard that statement a lot from defenders of the Electoral College, as if to suggest that opponents are aiming to turn the U.S. into a direct democracy.

Let's review the distinction. In a pure democracy, people vote for policies; in a republic, for representatives who will enact policies.

What on earth does this distinction have to do with the Electoral College? If anything, having the president chosen directly by the people would bring this country closer to the standard definition of a republic. The president is a representative, not a policy.

People who pull this distinction out of the hat are simply showing off, making it sound as if the other person is ignorant of something we all learned in grade school.

The know-it-alls may be the entire reason we keep this distinction around. It's not a very useful distinction. Apart from specific initiatives, pure democracy is virtually nonexistent. It's almost impossible to implement in a country of any significant size. And it isn't even something that most people hold up as an ideal.

We admire the U.S. system because of the freedoms it gives us, which a pure democracy would have a hard time maintaining. It is in that sense only that we invest the word democracy with its glowing connotations. When President Bush talks about spreading democracy in the Middle East, he certainly doesn't mean the direct kind. When the know-it-alls have their backs turned, everyone uses the word this way. Indeed, the main synonym for republic is "representative democracy," so it's really silly to act like a republic is anything other than a form of democracy--probably, in fact, the best form.

What's even more interesting is that the ancient Athenian government, which gave us the word democracy, would never be considered one in today's world. There, "the people" voted directly for policies, but the majority of the populace was excluded from this privileged group. That's where we got our concept of "pure democracy," even though it was nothing of the kind.

Maybe we ought to abandon the republic/democracy distinction entirely. It makes republics sound somehow defective. And it's unlike the way most people use the word in practice. In common parlance, a democracy is simply a country that grants every citizen some political power. Now there's a useful definition that may help us reclaim the term from the know-it-alls who only confuse the issue.

VR dreams

I've always been intrigued by how we refer to present-day technology using the names of far more advanced devices from science fiction. Real holograms do not look like solid objects, real robots do not have human-like personalities, and real spaceships do not visit faraway planets. Rarely is the human tendency toward hyperbole captured in science fiction itself, one exception being the "star destroyers" in Star Wars.

Virtual reality is an astounding example of the phenomenon. I first started hearing the term in the early 1990s, referring to machines placed over your entire head, sending imagery to the inner walls to make you feel like you're in a different world. I'm surprised this technology never caught on, and I'm disappointed that I've never had a chance to try it. Nowadays, the Internet has produced computer-generated alternate worlds like Second Life, but they're still presented through the flat screen of a monitor. They aren't like the VR that has been invented, let alone the VR in science fiction, where you enter a three-dimensional, fully sensory environment that feels the same as traversing the real world, even though you may be lying on a chair in your basement the whole time.

I was having those thoughts the other day as I reread Piers Anthony's 1993 novel Killobyte. It's the best of the dozen or so novels I've read by Anthony, though that isn't saying much, considering he's written over a hundred more. His books, while wickedly imaginative, have not generally had a lasting impact on me. I recognized in Killobyte many of the elements from his other books, including bizarre sexual scenarios, and the incorporation of medieval fantasy into a futuristic setting. (The sex scenes in his books have generated controversy, since children constitute a large chunk of his audience. In fifth grade, I almost did a book report on an Anthony novel in which an android has an affair with a female unicorn who can shape-shift into human form but still has heat cycles. I chose Charles De Lint's Jack the Giant Killer instead.)

The creativity of this book is accompanied by a page-turning quality that he claims he got from Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. There are also some astonishingly realistic chapters, including a painfully vivid depiction of a girl suffering from diabetes. These qualities are important, because virtual-world stories often get so caught up in world creation that the story just sits there. (That was a problem with the dreadfully dull 2000 movie The Cell.) Not so with Killobyte: the complex VR game conceived in the book is intriguing enough to keep us reading, before the book turns into a slam-bang thriller.

In Killobyte, players are hooked up to a machine that not only simulates a range of sensations, from pain to sex, but also responds to brain signals to move a player's character in the virtual world. The only way to exit the game and return to the real world is by selecting that option from a menu that appears within the virtual world. Otherwise, you're stuck, like someone unable to wake up from a dream. (I doubt I'm giving away too much of the plot, since virtually all stories of this kind have the characters getting trapped inside the virtual world.) The game itself is pretty much traditional RPG, but it involves sophisticated voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and simulated sex so convincing it can work for a paraplegic who has lost that function in the real world.

It's amusing to read the book now, for there's no direct mention of the Internet, and all the players connect to the game's network using telephone modems. That's hardly surprising. Anthony apparently wrote the book in 1991, when the World Wide Web had only just been invented, and when the term "Internet" was still techno-jargon. He did not specify when the book was supposed to take place, and for all intents and purposes it felt very much like the present. He was optimistic that the technology described in the book was not far off: "I suspect we shall have games very like this in the next decade or so" (p. 308).

That this hasn't happened should give us pause. Science fiction hasn't forgotten: the popularity of The Matrix and its sequels proves that it's still in the public mind. And I have heard that inventors are on the brink of creating machines that respond to brain signals. But we aren't close to inventing virtual-world machines that effectively trap a user inside them, like an electronically simulated dream. The question is whether we will create such machines--or, more importantly, why.

The U.S. royal family

Many years ago, I read a thin, richly illustrated book called Motel of the Mysteries, about a future archaeologist who unearths the remains of a hotel room from our time. He thinks it is a burial site of the ancient Usa people. Among the artifacts he discovers there are a Sacred Seal (a "do not disturb" sign), a Portable Shrine (credit card), a Great Altar (television set), and a Sacred Urn (toilet).

I believe that when anthropologists of the future look back at our society, they might conclude we live in a monarchy. Sure, we think we've moved past Great Britain's antiquated system. We laugh at them for still having kings, queens, and princesses, even if the positions are only ceremonial. We don't put up with such nonsense as the divine right of kings, the royal family, right? In America, we like to say, anyone can become president.

Uh-huh. Some facts should sober us up. The majority of U.S. presidents have been related to other U.S. presidents, and a large number have been related to British royalty. (See here for the details.) If you think about it, we're presently nearing the end of the reign of King George II.

If Hilary gets elected this fall and goes on to serve two terms, our nation will have experienced nearly 30 consecutive years in which the president was either a Bush or a Clinton. (And then maybe Jeb, and George P. Bush, and later Chelsea and the Bush twins, can continue the cycle.... Scary, isn't it?)

Everyone knows that the U.S. presidents have mostly been White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. We haven't even had much in the way of European ethnicities. Imagine there being presidents of primarily Polish or Swedish or Belgian extraction. Even that seems off most people's radar.

I'm not saying we haven't had minorities. WASPs are a minority!

What is wrong with us? We're supposed to be this diverse, multicultural nation, and the presidency still operates like an old country club. (No wonder they all play golf!)

Now you're saying, "But wait, this year is different. Look who's been running: a woman, a black, a Latino, an Italian-American, and a Mormon!"

Yeah, sure. I'm reminded of the old quip about Barry Goldwater: "I always knew the first Jew on a U.S. presidential ticket would be an Episcopalian." If Obama gets the Democratic nomination, we can say, "I always knew the first black on a U.S. presidential ticket would be a cousin of Dick Cheney."

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.

The ubiquitous PG-13 rating

Recently, I watched The Golden Compass and later discovered it was rated PG-13. This surprised me, not just because it's a children's movie, but also because it had very little violence in it and no other objectionable content. I had to wrack my brains to figure out how it had gotten so high a rating, and finally I remembered a scene in which a CGI bear rips the jaw off another CGI bear--though it happens so quickly I bet many people won't understand what they just saw. The film is considerably less violent than any of the first three Harry Potter movies, all of which received PG ratings.

Last week, I saw Live Free or Die Hard on DVD, and I had a choice whether to watch the theatrical PG-13 version, or an unrated version with extra content. I opted for the PG-13 version due to my superstitious belief that anything not shown in the theater isn't part of the "real" movie.

Still, just hearing it had a PG-13 was a red flag for me, since the other Die Hard films all have R ratings. Not surprisingly, this is the first Die Hard movie I haven't liked at all. While the film had several other problems, I suspect it's hard to make a good film with the MPAA breathing down your back.

Evidently, they made the film with R level of content, then shaved off just enough material to get a PG-13. These sorts of deals between the studio and the MPAA are basically acts of bargaining rather than the application of consistent standards. The final version is as violent as many R-rated films I have seen, with several moments in which characters get shot and blood spurts from their wounds.

We've reached an absurd situation when The Golden Compass has the same rating as Live Free or Die Hard. Somewhere along the line, after theaters began tightening their standards, studios decided that PG-13 was the most bankable rating, and pretty soon all sorts of movies were being shoved into it, artistic integrity be damned.

I have a couple of suggestions. First, stop allowing filmmakers to bargain down the ratings they receive. Second, get rid of ratings that make no difference to theaters. As far as theaters are concerned, only three categories really matter: movies that anyone may be admitted to see, movies that people under 17 may be admitted to see with a guardian, and movies that people under 17 may not be admitted to see. The G, PG, and PG-13 all fall in the first category. Their only purpose is informative, but that role has practically been rendered obsolete by sites like Screen It!, which provides parents with detailed information about the content in every film. If the MPAA wants the standards enforced, maybe they should leave the job of guidance and recommendation to other sources, which tend to be far better at it, anyway.

Funny, you don't look Semitic

On Wikipedia, there's a long-running debate over whether the term anti-Semitism should include a hyphen or not. Last I checked, the less common form antisemitism won. It's a contentious issue. In his book Jewish Literacy, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin argues that the hyphenated version "only fosters the impression that there is a wider ethnic entity against which 'anti-Semitism' is leveled" (p. 467).

On occasion, people will use that impression to deflect the charge. The editor of an Egyptian newspaper wrote that "the Israeli and Zionist media have manipulated the concept of Semitic ethnicity so as to apply to Jews alone." (Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov. 2003). The Jewish-born chess champion Bobby Fischer, who maintains that the Holocaust didn't happen, claims not to be an anti-Semite since "the Arabs are also Semites and I'm definitely not anti-Arab." (The New York Times, Sep. 2, 1992, pg. A1). An Arab American defending Jesse Jackson shortly after the "hymietown" incident told a reporter: "In my mind, I don't consider him an anti-Semite. Arabs are Semites, too, you know." (The New York Times, Apr. 28, 1984, pg. 8). Perhaps the most disturbing instance of this reasoning came in a New York Times editorial:

American Jews have reason to be particularly sensitive about demonizing a Semitic people. In unthinking caricature, Arabs are portrayed as demented terrorists or greedy oil sheiks. This is a variation of the hateful depiction of Jews as rapacious bankers or sinister revolutionaries. Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism in both forms. (Sep. 9, 1990, pg. E24)

I have seen websites that take this argument a step further. By combining it with the claim that modern-day Jews are the descendants of converted Khazars, these sites allege that Arabs are really the "true" Semites, the implication being that the term "anti-Semitism" should only be used to describe bigotry against Arabs and not bigotry against Jews! It is as if redefining the term suddenly changes the reality of which group deserves more sympathy.

When I hear arguments of this sort, I have my doubts that the presence or absence of a hyphen is likely to make much of a difference. These aren't innocent errors; they are deliberate attempts to muddle the issue. Most Americans understand perfectly well what the term anti-Semitism means, and serious people do not go around dissecting everyday words to make overly literal interpretations of their constituent parts. If you ask to be shown to a bathroom, and someone brings you to a room with a bathtub but no toilet, you'd rightly think the person was either crazy or a very bad jokester. That probably wouldn't change even if "bath-room" were written with a hyphen.

To play that game with "anti-Semite" is even stranger, since Semite scarcely exists as an independent word in modern English. We talk about Semitic languages, but as an ethnic term, Semite is simply a relic of an old racial category that no one today takes seriously. Even white supremacists don't generally think of Jews and Arabs as one entity. ("I was walking down the street, and there was this dumb Semite standing there....")

Wikipedia also has an article on what it calls "anti-Arabism." I suppose that's a reasonable coinage. But I can almost hear the tone of resentment: "You guys have your term, so we should be allowed our own." Of course, Jews didn't invent the term anti-Semitism. It was invented by anti-Semites themselves, as a term of pride. It is usually credited to the nineteenth-century German racialist Wilhelm Marr, who used the term as a substitute for the more vulgar-sounding Judenhass, or Jew hatred. Appearing at a time when racial theories were in vogue, Semite was a convenient euphemism for "Jew," the only Semitic type with a significant presence in Eastern and Central Europe.

Marr and others actually started organizations with names like the Anti-Semitic People's Party, the French National Anti-Semitic League, and the Universal Anti-Semitic League. With a few exceptions, these bigots were not known to extend their hatred to other Semitic peoples. The most famous anti-Semitic regime in history made a pact with Arab leaders, dubbing them "honorary Aryans" (also a euphemism). It was only after WWII, following the West's official rejection of the concept of racism, that anti-Semite lost its respectability and became the type of word that very few people adopt as a self-description.

To most Americans today, it sounds pretty bizarre that there were ever organizations so devoted to contempt for Jews that they made it part of their name. Until recent times, indeed, anti-Semitism was the only common word in English denoting opposition to a specific minority. English doesn't have a word for hatred of blacks (except for the obscure and problematic Negrophobia). We got through the entire civil rights era with the more general term racism.

In theory, we don't need the term anti-Semitism either. We could get by with a less official phrase, such as "anti-Jewish bigotry," which would actually be clearer and less confusing. But having a term like anti-Semitism around makes the phenomenon stand out and seem distinct from other prejudices. That's what bothers people who think that Jews receive too much attention, for better or worse.

It's not surprising that anti-Zionists on the left become indignant when they get accused of anti-Semitism. Their whole philosophy, after all, depends on opposing racism, and to them anti-Semitism is simply another form of racism that has perhaps received more attention than it deserves. But a lot of animosity toward Jews these days seems aimed at rendering Jews insignificant. The notion that Jews are important enough to merit an entire ideology devoted to hating them, complete with its own term, is something that could only have been dreamed up by a Jewish conspiracy.

How Roy Orbison changed my life

The ability to compose music is, I'm convinced, something you're born with. The tricky part is learning what to do with the compositions. That takes knowledge and practice.

I remember composing songs as a child without even trying. For example, I once had a nightmare about some creature trying to push me down the steps, and it sang, in a tune I distinctly remember, "So you have to fall downstairs." Later, I made up tunes on a Casio synthesizer I still have.

But my songs were lacking in a quality I didn't then understand. Each one was just an isolated sequence of notes, without being organized into anything larger. Aside from the dream, only one of my songs had lyrics, but it consisted of nothing more than one verse and a chorus. I somehow didn't realize that it needed something more to be complete.

The day that all changed was around the time Roy Orbison's posthumous hit "You Got It" was released. I'm still not quite sure what it was about this seemingly ordinary pop song that changed my entire musical outlook.

I first heard the song on VH1. I wanted to hear it again but didn't get a chance for several months. When it finally aired on the radio while I was listening one night in my bedroom, I was extremely excited, and I listened to the song closely.

For the first time in my life, I became conscious of song structure. The song had three distinct sections, which I later learned were called verse, pre-chorus, and chorus. It went through these sections twice, then it had a side part I later learned was called a bridge, then it returned to the pre-chorus. This arrangement wasn't unique or original, but having never paid attention to structure before, I found it clever.

I began to dissect other songs. I discovered that most rock and pop songs fall into one of just a few common structures. "You Got It" has one of the more complex ones, originating perhaps in the 1960s.

I went back to the Casio and created an instrumental piece with three sections, plus a bridge. It was my first composition that felt in any way complete. Over the next year, I composed numerous other songs, most of which I can still play.

I was twelve back then. I would have expected my interest in dissecting songs to fade after a while. But to this day whenever I hear a new song, determining its structure is part of the listening experience. Songs with unconventional structures always intrigue me.

Early rock 'n' roll generally stuck to very simple structures--either verse-chorus with no bridge, or verse-bridge with no chorus. The songs tended to be around two minutes long, and when a song was longer, it was usually because of more verses or a slower tempo, not because of greater complexity. The increase in structural complexity in rock music was gradual, probably peaking around the late 1960s when popular rock bands like the Beatles and the Moody Blues experimented and broke out of the radio format that demanded songs of no longer than three minutes. This was the era of long songs, sometimes a result of arbitrary repetition (as in "Hey Jude"), other times due to unusually intricate structures (as in "Stairway to Heaven").

Still, rock and pop have continued to confine themselves to familiar formulas, with only particular genres such as heavy metal and progressive rock seeking to emulate the complexity of classical music and jazz. On rare occasion, a pop song will attempt a more ambitious structure, as in Madonna's surprisingly multi-layered hit "Like a Prayer."

Structure has a significant effect on the feel of a song, even if most listeners aren't conscious of it. The wrong structure can hurt a song even if the music is good. A case in point is Rush's "Roll the Bones" (the video of which can be seen here). It is the perfect example of a good musical idea ruined by structural overkill.

The chorus is great. But the song takes nearly a minute and a half to reach it, and the verse and pre-chorus that precede it sound like they come from a totally different song. It's as if the songwriter felt he needed to fill something into that time slot, so he grafted on the leftovers from an earlier composition.

But that's only the first problem. The song came out in 1991, when it was common for a pop song to include a "rap" verse, and Rush bowed to this trend. In the video, the rapping is done by a silly-looking animated skeleton, which appears after three minutes of live action. The rapping ends and the song cuts to a solo, where we think it's going to return to the chorus. But no--it goes back to the rapping skeleton for another minute! Finally, it returns to the chorus, and the song ends, clocking in at five-and-a-half minutes, pretty much ensuring its exclusion from mainstream pop radio.

The skeleton's monologue includes lines like "Gonna kick some gluteus max," along with a series of similarly cheesy puns and rhymes. This section seems especially incongruous next to the song's earlier lyrics, which were serious and contemplative. The song lacks cohesion: it's like a bunch of spare parts thrown together. Maybe they were rushing to meet a deadline, no pun intended.

What Rush probably should have done is made the chorus the entire song, and abandoned the verse and pre-chorus sections, not to mention the rapping. One-part songs aren't common in progressive rock, but even Rush has done them, as in their 1977 song "Closer to the Heart." There's nothing wrong with a song having many sections, but they should complement each other rather than sounding like appendages. It's hard to explain why some songs do this correctly, while others don't. But you know it when you hear it.

I can only speculate why an understanding of structure helped me learn to compose properly. Deciding which structure to use for a particular song is not an exact science. I suspect that many musicians just pick one that "feels right," without giving the matter much thought. But for me the music itself always came easily, and all I needed to learn was how to organize it into something coherent. And for that I have Roy Orbison to thank.

From amoebas to elephants

Panati's Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody, a book whose accuracy I have sometimes found wanting, has an interesting take on a familiar fact. According to Panati, sex and death are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Organisms that reproduce asexually do not have finite lifespans like we do. The amoeba simply splits into two amoebas, which in turn exist until themselves splitting. As long as it isn't killed, it multiplies endlessly without ever dying.

But in sexual reproduction, two individuals contribute genetic material that grows into a new organism, then they die. Death is simply the logical corollary to a process that uses a mere fraction of an organism to produce a new creature. In humans, it may happen decades after the sex act itself, but it's inevitable--and linked to the fact that we are sexual beings.

"In one sense," writes Panati, "we possess immortality, but not where we want it. We have it in our generational genes. We'd prefer it in our body, in the form we cherish, in the face that gazes reassuringly back from the mirror" (p. 6).

Despite Panati's argument, there isn't much to envy about amoebas. They don't care about their immortality any more than your sex cells care about theirs. Lacking consciousness, they are unable to care.

For your part, cloning wouldn't satisfy your desire to live forever. You would think of the clone as a new person, just as you think of identical twins as two separate individuals despite their genetic sameness. What you really want is a continuance of your soul, not your body. Even if you don't believe in the soul, you recognize a distinct inner self which perishes at death. Immortality, to you, means the permanent existence of this self.

Previously, I raised the question of whether you'd be willing to die if a clone with all your memories were created in your place. That sort of experiment could be the key to immortality, assuming that merely copying the information in your brain to another vessel would effectively move your consciousness there, like a transfer of data between computers.

There are problems with that assumption, however. In his book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Orson Scott Card discusses a fictional species that communicates by transferring memories. According to Card, "individual identity would be much less important to them than to us. And death would be almost meaningless. As long as you passed memories before you died, then everything you thought and experienced would continue to live on, so that even though you might cease to take part, everyone in the community would clearly remember having done everything you did!" (p. 50)

Card here implies that there is some intangible "you" existing independently of your memories, so that even if those memories are passed to someone else before your bodily death occurs, "you" perish. But if "you" are nothing more than your memories, as some philosophers have argued, then how is a memory transfer from one body to another any different than what happens in life from each moment to the next?

I believe it is different. No matter what the philosophers say, there is something intangible inside us. Consider the attempt to create an android with human emotions. You might program it to have a distinct state called "sadness," where it would display symptoms such as frowning, downcast eyes, and broken concentration. But it's doubtful that any of this would cause the machine to experience sadness, any more than an actor experiences the emotions he performs.

Inner experience, one of the most mysterious features of human life, is not just information in the brain. It is the part of yourself which experiences the information. You can't prove it exists. You're directly aware of your own, but you can only infer that other people are something more than machines programmed to behave as though they have inner experience.

Philosophical materialists typically attempt to ignore or downplay the mystery of inner experience, viewing it as merely another illusion to be swept away by the inevitable march of scientific progress. The problem with that argument is that since all illusions are perceived through a person's inner experience, to call inner experience itself illusory borders on the tautological. Inner experience is the elephant in the room, the one thing in existence that absolutely defeats a materialistic explanation.

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.

Jewish rainbow

When I walk into a room and say to people I meet "I'm Jewish" often I will get the response "But you're Black." I often want to say "no kidding," but the usual response I give is "Yes, my family has been practicing Judaism for at least three generations, now." The point that I aim to make is that it would make it easier to just "BE" as a Jewish person of color if "black" and "Jewish" identity were not so commonly assumed to be mutually exclusive. Historically, Jews have been multiple skin colors and it's unfortunate that the passive internalization of color consciousness that happens so easily in American society, helped us to forget the freedom from identifying around color that is a part of our Jewish history. (p. 27)

The above quote comes from Yavilah McCoy, as recorded in a fascinating book I just read, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz's The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism. Designed to raise awareness about Jews of color, the book presents numerous anecdotes about the experiences of nonwhite Jews, followed by stimulating discussions on the implications of this research. The book is marred for me by its anti-Zionist standpoint, which culminates in a final chapter that has very little to do with the rest of the book. The back cover sports endorsements by Tony Kushner, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Adrienne Rich, all left-wing thinkers squarely in Kantrowitz's ideological camp. I get the sense that Kantrowitz underestimates her audience, thinking that her discussions about racial diversity in the Jewish community either will appeal only to those with her positions or will inevitably move readers toward those positions. Instead, her dogmatic advocacy of ideas that most Jews find offensive will likely turn away many readers who would otherwise find much value in the information she presents.

What types of nonwhite Jews are there? The question is not as easy to answer as one might expect, because it depends on how one defines "white" and "Jewish," both highly contested categories. Most Americans today assume that the prototypical Jew (which usually means Ashkenazic Jew) is white, but that was not always the common perception in this country. The very act of designating Jews as white or nonwhite can be a political statement, because it is taken to suggest something about their status and position in society. (I have known Jews who mark themselves as "other" in forms asking for their race.)

With these precautions in mind, Kantrowitz considers several types of people: (1) African American and Asian American converts to Judaism (2) nonwhite children adopted by Jewish families (3) children of mixed marriages (4) Ethiopian Jews and other black African communities that have practiced Judaism for centuries or more (5) the most ambiguous category, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, some of them quite dark-skinned, others scarcely distinguishable from their Ashkenazic brethren.

One reason this information has value is that Jews, despite a long history of crucial involvement in the civil rights movement, also have a history of racism that persists today in some religious communities. The historical tension between Ashkenazim and Sephardim can take on racial overtones. More pertinently, many Jews have trouble accepting the very concept of a black Jew--it seems an impossibility, a contradiction in terms.

One anecdote really struck home for me, reflecting the type of compartmentalized behavior I've witnessed. McCoy, the woman I quoted before, attended a Hasidic school as a child. On one occasion when she complained to classmates who were denigrating non-Jewish blacks, they assured her they weren't talking about her. The inconsistent thinking required to sustain this kind of attitude demonstrates why Jews of color may help stem the tides of bigotry coming from both Jews and non-Jews.

Kantrowitz wishes to uproot the perception that "black" and "Jewish" are mutually exclusive categories, and to reveal the Jewish people as a racially diverse group. She feels that recognizing this reality will ease the tension between Jews and blacks. Her point is that if the two categories can overlap, people will be less inclined to view the two groups as enemies of each other.

She weakens her argument, however, by trying to downplay the well-documented fact that a disproportionate level of anti-Semitism exists among African Americans. She fails to discuss any of the official studies, such as Harris Polls taken over the last several decades. As Charles Silberman noted in his book A Certain People, black anti-Semitism is not a mirror image of Jewish racism. The latter is far more marginalized in the Jewish community than the former is in the African American community. The problem is not that most blacks agree with Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitic pronouncements, but that leaders like him exhibit far greater influence than any comparably racist figure in the Jewish community.

She also wishes to blur the line between "Jew" and "Arab" by emphasizing the strong Arab element of Jews who are the product of Arabic land, culture, and language as surely as American Jews are Americans. She eagerly embraces the term "Arab Jew" to highlight this dual identity.

She correctly observes that Islamic countries in the Middle Ages generally treated Jews far better than Christian countries from the same era did. The height of this relatively peaceful coexistence occurred in the Golden Age of Spain from the eighth to twelfth centuries. But the picture is more complicated than she would like to believe. This period, when Jews enjoyed more rights and privileges than any time until the modern age, ended not because of the fifteenth-century Christian rulers who instigated the Inquisition, but because of violent Muslim invaders from two centuries earlier.

In addressing this fact, Kantrowitz performs a remarkable sleight of hand. She quotes Victor Perera saying, "[u]ntil the arrival of bloody-minded Almohade Berbers in 1146, bent on implanting Islam in all of Europe, Spain's Jews generally lived at peace with Muslim rulers and their Christian subjects; and they thrived culturally and commercially as never before or since" (p. 81). She immediately comments, "This peace persisted until the Christian conquest of Iberia and the Inquisition," which is not only false, but directly contradicts what she just quoted!

The final chapter of the book is little more than an essay on forging a Jewish identity apart from Zionism. Too bad. There is considerable merit to her thesis that recognizing racial diversity among Jews will help improve relations with other people. She doesn't seem to accept, or even consider, that Jews can support Israel and still be fully committed to peaceful relations with non-Jews. I hope that intelligent readers will be able to overlook the book's flaws, because beneath the rhetoric lies some valuable material about forgotten portions of world Jewry.

Ethnic time

One night when I worried I would show up late for a Talmud class, I joked to a friend, "I wouldn't want them to think I'm Jewish."

That quip was just a variation on a common Jewish theme. If a meeting will take place at "8:00, Jewish time," what this means is that it's scheduled for eight but will likely begin at least fifteen minutes later. Only a Yekke (an affectionately derogatory term for a German Jew) would arrive on the dot.

I assumed that this concept was uniquely Jewish. It seemed to fit my image of the absentminded Jewish thinker, best exemplified in a novelty item I once saw in a catalog, the "relative time watch," featuring a picture of Einstein surrounded by the numbers "1ish, 2ish, 3ish...." (Wait, wasn't Einstein a Yekke?!)

But then one day I was talking to a black friend and learned about a similar concept called C.P. time. "What does C.P. stand for?" I asked stupidly. Uh...colored people. I was a little taken aback. I later saw Dave Barry talk about a Cuban sense of time (because his wife and in-laws are Cuban). According to Barry:

If a WASP wedding is scheduled to start at 2 p.m. Saturday, the wedding march will start at 2 p.m. sharp, and the bride will come down the aisle at 2:03 p.m., no matter what, even if the originally scheduled groom has bailed out and the bride has to use an emergency backup groom taken right off the street.

Whereas in a typical Cuban wedding, the phrase "2 p.m." is translated as "possibly this weekend." (True fact: I once went to a wedding at a Cuban home; I arrived 20 minutes before the scheduled start, and was greeted at the door by the bride, who was still in curlers.) I believe that the Cuban community will not be affected by the Millennium Bug until the year 2004 at the earliest.

I was a little surprised by this column, since Barry usually avoids edgy, politically incorrect humor. It turns out that his wife is actually a Cuban Jew. Put together, that means she won't be experiencing the Millennium Bug until 2008.

You'd think that ethnic stereotypes would have no place in modern discourse, but many people seem more than eager to embrace stereotypes of their own group (or their spouse's). And not just positive stereotypes, like "Jews are smart," but seemingly negative ones, like having a loose sense of time. It gives minorities a warm, intimate feeling that sets them apart from their more fastidious WASP neighbors.

Of course, whether a stereotype is positive or negative depends on perspective. Republican presidential candidate Tommy Thompson got himself in a little trouble a few months ago when he characterized great business acumen as one of the "accomplishments of the Jewish religion." Jews didn't take to that remark very well, but he meant it as a compliment.

Thompson was confusing the religious tradition with the sociological reality. The Jewish religion has much to say about philanthropy and ethics, but very little about financial know-how. The stereotype of the financially astute Jew goes back to the Middle Ages, when Jews became moneylenders after the Church barred them from most other occupations.

Because this stereotype has been the source of so many slanderous beliefs, such as the claim that Jews are greedy, most Jews feel uncomfortable at any reference to a connection between Jewishness and money. But they seem not to mind other stereotypes. The expression "For every two Jews, there are three opinions" was almost certainly invented by a Jew. Then there are all the traits associated with Jewish mothers.

People say that stereotypes usually have basis in truth, but that's a dangerous observation, easy to misunderstand. Lacking a strong inside knowledge of a group's history, one can have a hard time telling truth apart from myth. A good synonym for stereotype is "caricature." Maybe that's why people are more comfortable poking fun at their own group than someone else's: the closer you are to the target, the more you understand how to attack it sensitively.

The cage of language

One of the labels I frequently attach to my posts is "power of words." I believe that words do have power. Our whole life, after all, is shaped by language. Few if any of us remember before we learned to speak, and we probably cannot even conceive of the experience. If language is a vessel for thoughts, it is one that transforms what is inside of it.

One person who truly understood this point was George Orwell, who explained his views most forcefully in "Politics and the English Language." Many people have read this wonderful essay, and many more are at least passingly familiar with Orwell's ideas. But not everyone fully grasps what he was talking about. Ironically, people today who throw around the word Orwellian are usually falling into the very trap Orwell warned against: the use of hackneyed but politically charged terms to mask lazy thinking.

Bemoaning the decline of the English language, the beginning of Orwell's essay almost sounds like it's going to be a tired old trope about the misuse of grammar. But those who read further will discover a far more distinctive argument. Indeed, one of the examples that Orwell cites of bad writing is itself a critique of grammar-related sins, an issue to which Orwell seems indifferent. The writing issues that concern Orwell are wordiness, triteness, and vagueness.

I have observed that people have three levels for understanding Orwell's critique. Level One readers interpret it simply as a call to communicate more effectively. Strunk & White's popular style manual, for example, eagerly seizes upon Orwell's humorous "translation" of Ecclesiastes 9:11 into dry academic prose: "Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

Level Two readers understand that the bad communication cited by Orwell serves a definite purpose, as the people in power try to confuse the masses. This is the most popular conception of Orwell's ideas, the kind that shows up whenever someone rallies against "doublespeak," a term that Orwell did not actually invent.

Level Three readers correctly identify the core of Orwell's message: if we don't exercise control over the language, then the language will exercise control over us. Bad communication is not merely a conscious process designed to keep the masses in line. It is something that we blind ourselves with.

What would Orwell say about the current political climate if he were alive today? Conservatives speculate that he would attack political correctness. There is definitely an element of doublespeak in PC terminology, not just because of oversensitivity but also because of the way it implicitly excludes some views from discussion.

But what many conservatives fail to acknowledge is that overuse of the phrase politically correct has itself become an Orwellian tactic. In the culture at large, the phrase has practically lost its political implications. It is simply a synonym for "polite," but with negative connotations.

I once was reading a blog discussion where a guy referred to the author of some book as an idiot. Another guy said he agreed with the criticism but added that there was no need to launch ad hominem attacks against the author. The first guy came back and retorted, "Oh, don't be so PC." This discussion, I should note, had nothing to do with politics.

What PC means, to most people, is "avoiding saying what you mean for fear of offending someone." People use the expression so that they don't have to take responsibility for their words. It gives people the license to be as offensive as they want and then make it sound as if anyone who disagrees is being namby-pamby. The elder Bush once described political correctness as something that began as "a crusade for civility" and turned into "Orwellian...crusades that demand correct behavior." I would describe the backlash against political correctness as something that began as a crusade against censorship and turned into an all-purpose excuse for poor decorum.

Orwell did not direct his criticisms against any one party or philosophy. He realized that the problem was almost universal: "Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Properly, Orwell's critique should be used for reflection, not just condemnation. We need to consider how we communicate, not just how others do. No one escapes the cage of language; the best we can do is be conscious of how it surrounds us.

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.

Clever translations

When visiting Israel a few years ago, I purchased a Modern Hebrew translation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the fifth in the series, and the source of the latest movie). My Hebrew skills are at a level where I can understand snippets of dialogue, while having much more trouble with the general text. But what interested me was comparing it with the English version. I quickly learned that the translator must exercise some imagination in conveying ideas that can't be understood through literal translation.

The first question that occurred to me was how the translator handled puns. Because puns exploit word pairs that sound alike but have different meanings, they usually are language-specific. Therefore, they cannot be translated directly. Take the following passage from Chapter Seven:

"And don't take too long, Weasley, the delay on that firelegs report held our investigation up for a month."

"If you had read my report you would know that the term is 'firearms,'" said Mr. Weasley coolly.

This exchange depends on the double meaning of arms. Unfortunately, Hebrew has no word that means both weapons and limbs. What the translation does is make Mr. Weasley's report about ekdichay yad (אקדחי יד), or handguns, and the confused wizard calls them ekdichay regel (אקדחי רגל): "footguns." This gets the same point across as in the original--the wizard's ignorance of technology--and creates an equally outlandish image. But it doesn't involve the same level of wordplay.

In other instances, the translation does manage to retain the wordplay of the original book. For example, in the English version Hermione starts a club called Society for the Promotion of Elf Welfare, or S.P.E.W. The Hebrew translation gets lucky on this one, rendering the club's name almost word for word, with the resulting acronym sounding very close to the the Hebrew word for "allergy"!

At least the Hebrew version preserves most of the character names from the original. Many other Harry Potter translations don't. When I posted the "footguns" example on a language list, someone wrote back to me that the Norwegian version changes Dumbledore's name to Humlesnurr. The reason given is that the name Dumbledore comes from a British dialect word for "bumblebee," and humle is Norwegian for "bumblebee," while snurr means "to whirr."

I have no idea how often translators find sensible solutions to these kinds of problems. Puns and wordplay are only the beginning of the challenges. Good translations stand on their own as works in their own right. But they may overstep their boundaries by improving on the original work. One Israeli teenager told Haaretz that he considers the Hebrew version of Order of the Phoenix superior to the English version. That is not necessarily a compliment.

I post, therefore I am

You're walking down the street, and a scrawny young man approaches you. He has acne and wears braces. He can't be more than seventeen. He says to you, "I'm George, a 52-year-old surgeon." A moment later, he says, "And I'm Clara, a 26-year-old law student."

As absurd as this scenario sounds, many people are acting this way for real, not because they are psychotic, but because the Internet enables them to get away with this sort of behavior. In most online discussion areas, users can adopt whatever name they want and say just about anything without facing the consequences that would result from similar behavior in the real world. Many use this anonymity to their advantage, making up facts about themselves to intimidate others and empower themselves. They also may pretend to be more than one person by posting under more than one name. In extreme circumstances people can be traced to their real identities, but this rarely happens except when law enforcement is tracking criminals. There are other, limited ways of counteracting the problem, none of them foolproof.

It is therefore important to be cautious before accepting claims that people online make about themselves. I'm not saying that you should go around calling people liars, but you should be cognizant about the way people in Internet discussions can use their anonymity to manipulate the situation.

I have had several apparent encounters with such individuals. I say "apparent" because I never was able to prove my suspicions. The earliest was in 1997, on the Excite message boards, which happened to be my first experience with message boards. A fellow started a board entitled "HOMESCHOOLERS ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO TEACH!!!!!!"

He took every opportunity to insult anyone who challenged his views. His main argument was based on personal experience: he wrote that he knew several homeschooled children who were "all lacking in social behavior, adjusting to their surroundings and general knowledge." I asked him to clarify what exactly he had seen, pointing out that his observations may have been too limited to draw general conclusions. He replied that he had encountered numerous homeschooled kids in his jobs as an interviewer and a college instructor, and they were "all blown away by others who had attended formal education."

A fairly well-known homeschooling advocate named Karl Bunday, who has made a side career interviewing homeschooling families, joined the board and asked for permission to interview some of those kids. The person replied, "you expect me to just cough up names of my students so that some nutcase can come to their house to evaluate them?!? That is hardly confidential or professional." The question, then, was why he would base his arguments on information that others could not verify. For all we knew, he could have made it all up. Even if he hadn't, his judgment of those kids may have been less than fair. That was a distinct possibility considering how quick he was to insult complete strangers.

When I raised these points, he said that questioning his claims was unreasonable since the purpose of these boards was to "share experiences." He then attempted to put his experiences on the same level as the documented evidence of homeschooling success I had presented: "I guess I could compile my studies and call it research refuting homeschooling as being effective."

People observing the debate told me I handled myself well, but I felt I was being suckered too easily by this person's antics. He was clearly exploiting his anonymity to win the argument, by relying on "data" that could never be investigated. I acted flustered at times, and he seized on that weakness. (The good news is that I successfully changed the mind of someone else on the board, a person who actually listened to my arguments instead of just trying to fight me.)

Years later, I got a new opportunity to deal with this sort of situation. In 2005, after taking a course in which my final paper examined the movie Fight Club, I went to the Internet Movie Database's message board for that film, eager to share my insights. I soon found myself in a heated argument with two posters. If I take what they said at face value, they consisted of a middle-aged psychology professor and a young female fan. Personally, I suspect both of them were in fact one person. How do I know? I don't. I found clues, to be sure, like the fact that they frequently posted just minutes apart from each other, and that their writing styles (particularly spelling errors) were similar. But I mostly based my suspicions on my familiarity with this sort of situation.

The argument started when the "professor" posted an analysis of the protagonist's mental condition. He ridiculed all the laymen (which he spelled "laimen") who had addressed the issue. Having researched this topic, I found many errors in his post, and I pointed out that the filmmakers were themselves laymen. I hinted not too subtly that I doubted he was a real professor.

He and the "girl" erupted into insults. Here is a sample (pardon the strong language, but this is what they said): "Stop being a little bitch crying because you don't like that someone here has experience and truly knows what they're talking about." "If you ever have something to say, do yourself a favor and just shut up." "YOU were the only retard unable to comprehend me, you think it's my fault. That's your mom's fault." "Being the arrogant asshole you are, I'm sure you're not done yet, so go ahead and prove me right again by posting another whiney bitch post."

Does any of this sound like the words of a typical professor? I asked him for proof of his credentials. He replied that they had been "proven to TRUSTED people on this board, aka NOT YOU." Of course I respected his privacy; however, as long as he was flaunting his credentials, it was ridiculous that he should expect everyone to believe him without verification. Any anonymous user can claim to be a professor. It doesn't prove anything.

For a working professor, he sure seemed to spend a lot of time on the board. He had established a club called the "Space Monkeys" (modeled after the film), and board members who wanted to join he would initiate into it. He started a new thread inviting his Space Monkeys to attack me. There, they each provided me with brilliant kernels of wit, such as the following (I'm not making this up): "Kylopod is stupid and his logic is stupid and the reason he is stupid is because the opposite of smart is Kylopod." Afterwards, the "professor" praised the intelligence of these comments.

I had a chance to get angry and join in the abuse. But I decided to restrain myself from such an emotional reaction. That's one of the advantages of message boards as opposed to real-life encounters. You get some time to think before posting a reply. Here is a passage from one of my posts:

I want to thank you.

Now, I'm sure you're thinking I mean that only in a sarcastic way, and maybe you're right. But I'm actually trying to be quite honest now. I really am thankful for the insight you've provided me with your latest posts, though I realize my gratitude is of a kind that you're not likely to appreciate.

You see, I've always been fascinated by multiple-identity trolls such as yourself. What makes you tick? I've had my theories, but it's largely impossible to confirm any of them. Trolls are elusive almost by definition. All I can deduce about you is that you're pretending to be a professor, and that you are assuming at least two identities on this forum. Other than that, I know very little about you. I assume you are young, but I don't know how young--you could be anywhere from teens to twenties. Perhaps you actually are older; I really can't say for sure.

But your two latest posts have helped me understand the troll mindset better than I ever have before.

Despite his/her/their attempts to portray me as an "attacker," I adopted a cool, detached tone when replying to their rants. I acted completely unruffled by their insults. I gave the impression that I was coldly analyzing them and reacting to their attacks only with quiet amusement. As one observer put it to me in an email, "you calmly and coolly handed them their asses time and again, and you did it without swearing at them. I am humbled by your patience."

I could have simply walked away as soon as they started attacking me. That would probably have been the most sensible approach. But I've always had the weakness that I enjoy deflating bullies. In this case, I was being passive-aggressive, a quality I don't normally display in the real world. I'm usually very direct with people. But because this was a message board, I had the opportunity to try a different strategy, and I was pleased by the results.

I may have improved in my ability to handle this sort of situation, but I'm still perplexed by what it all means. I have made actual friends online. But the lack of accountability remains a problem with Internet communication. I know I'm for real, but I often cannot be sure that someone else is. There's something positively solipsistic about this situation, where the reality of everyone else's life can only be accepted on trust.