I was against gun control until yesterday’s idiocy in which one frustrated man decided to make a name for himself by shooting a lot of folks during a screening of the latest Batman film.
Now I stand with Toronto councilor Adam Vaughan who wants the sale of guns in Toronto made illegal.
I do not for a moment believe that is going to stop anyone who really wants to have a gun from getting one. If Adam feels it will he is wrong.
What it will do, however, is make it a lot more difficult for anyone who decides to follow in the footsteps of the man who perpetrated the lunacy at BATMAN to do so (at least in Toronto). Heck, they could always go to Hamilton or…so I know that banning guns in Toronto is not going to stop them. Change has to start somewhere. It might as well start here.
Northrup Frye (right) is what Einstein meant when he wrote what he wrote about stupidity. Frye was a Canadian academic who wrote a number of books some find hard to read which, of course, is, in their minds, the first sign that a person is intelligent.
Truth be told they are not that hard to read.
Frye started out as a United Church Minister. The United Church of Canada is a Protestant Christian denomination in Canada. It is the largest Protestant church and, after the Roman Catholic Church, the largest Christian church, in Canada. The United Church was founded in 1925 as a merger of four Protestant denominations: the Methodist Church of Canada, the Congregational Union of Ontario and Quebec, two-thirds of the congregations of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and the Association of Local Union Churches.
Until recently THE UNITED CHURCH held that the Pope is the Anti-Christ (most of its members who still believe in God–and most members of THE UNITED CHURCH do not believe in God or Jesus–still hold that view).
So THE UNITED CHURCH by denying that Jesus is Christ is actually more anti-Christ than the poorest Pope the Roman Catholic Church ever had. That is not me saying that. That comes from St. Paul (or Paul if you prefer) who taught that those who deny Jesus is the Christ are anti-Christ.
That is basic Christianity 101.
Well, THE UNITED CHURCH does not believe in St. Paul either.
Most people who call themselves Christians have not got a clue what Jesus taught just as the people who wish for a socialist state have not got a clue what Marx taught (“You can’t have a socialist state for when you have a socialist state the state becomes the capitalist.”–Karl Marx).
My friend Simon Gitano Lüling told me that one of his professors at the Sorbonne said, “Shortly after Karl Marx published his works he received a letter from a group of men who said they wanted to create a movement based on the ideas in his works and that they wanted to call it Marxism to which Marx replied, “Call it anything you want but I am not a Marxist.”
Men are always looking for systems to believe in. Once they seize on one (and it does not matter whether it be Christianity or Fascism or Socialism) they have all they need to start ordering the deaths of those who do not believe as they do.
Anyway, in the midst of all the puffery for Frye comes this from one of Canada’s most astute thinkers:
The scales of fame: The tale of Pete Colgrove and Northrop Frye
Published on Thursday July 19, 2012 in THE STAR:
To mark the centennial of Northrop Frye’s birth a week ago, I want to register — not quite a disagreement with Martin Knelman’s lament here about the lack of acclaim for our great Canadian literary critic. More like a counterpoint.
We live in an era of gradations of fame. You used to be just famous or not. Cary Grant was famous. My granddad wasn’t. I became aware of the rise of degrees when the late Canadian writer Matt Cohen mentioned a writer we knew who’d become “really really really really famous.” You can be minimally famous, nationally vs. globally famous (Jim Cuddy vs. Leonard Cohen) etc. People explain that they’re famous when you’ve never heard of them. It’s a bit like religiosity. McMaster religion prof Louie Greenspan says when he was a Jewish seminarian, he felt pious wrapping t’fillin (ritual objects) around his arm and forehead at morning prayers. Then he noticed a guy beside him applying two sets of t’fillin. There’s always someone who’s more so.
There’s also being famous enough to have your lack of fame bemoaned in Canada’s largest newspaper because you’re not famous enough. We’re talking a complex scale here.
But I had a high-school math teacher named R.G. (Pete) Colgrove who knew Frye and may have been the only person who thought Frye’s fame did him in.
He appears in Frye’s letters and diaries of the 1920s and ’30s, when they both came of age. He’d have been called a cutup then. He was goofy and eccentric. He arrived one day in Moncton, Frye’s hometown, “looking as though he had made himself up for a vaudeville act.” He told Frye he’d ridden a train from Quebec City “in the tool chest” behind the coal car, wearing overalls on top of his suit. In one entry, he teaches “Norrie” to dance.
But here’s the thing. Colgrove was in disguise, not just then but as a high-school teacher for decades after World War II. That’s because he was a true truth-seeker. He belonged to an esoteric group that followed the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, a Russian thinker who wanted to arouse people from their “waking sleep.” They learned dance movements meant to release insight and travelled to sources of wisdom in the Orient.
Colgrove slipped me books to read that I hid behind French or history texts in class. Every few years he gave an amazing lecture on the Fourth Dimension in the cafeteria. He’d be giddy for days before, and wore a Salvador Dali time-bending tie. When I lived in New York, he took me to visit Gurdjieff’s successor, Mme. de Hartmann, who had sketches by the Russian abstract painter Kandinsky thumbtacked to her kitchen wall.
He felt truth and enlightenment are easily diverted by distractions like fame or success. So he chose teaching at a suburban high school over a university. He said he could still see the kids’ “real” selves when they arrived, but those were soon concealed by masks and deception. Socialization was desensitization. He wanted nothing to do with normal success. In later years he agreed to head the math department only if everyone understood he had no interest in improving math teaching at the school.
After retirement, he moved to the New Mexico desert, mountain climbed and co-edited a book on the mystically inclined Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris. He probably felt Frye had potential, but got sidetracked by success and celebrity — even if that didn’t include a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame or comparable markers. Poor Norrie, perhaps if he’d been less acclaimed, he’d have really figured some things out.
I first heard Frye’s name from the Israeli Bible teacher Nehama Leibowitz. She thought Frye was wrong about literature but you could learn from him. She was eclectic and also enjoyed Reader’s Digest, especially a feature called The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met. She liked speculating on who she’d write about if she was asked. If I had the chance, and the column still existed, I’d definitely write about her, or Pete Colgrove. It would he hellishly hard to choose. But Frye — even if I’d met him? Not a chance.
Rick Salutin’s column appears Friday.
ricksalutin@ca.inter.net
WhenI was a young man I was an atheist. Not that I had given the question any thought. I called myself an atheist because Forrest J Ackerman who edited FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND was an atheist. I also stopped putting a period after my middle initial “W” because Forry did not use a period after the “J”. I got docked marks for that in English class. That was fine. The minute we start to show character we get docked marks.
Now before you start dissing Forry(whom you may never have heard of you should know that he grew up in Hollywood (Horrorwood), California with two other lads Ray Harryhausen (whom you might know) and Ray Bradbury (whom just about everyone knows). Ackerman had a big impact on a lot of boys beside myself. Stephen King and Steven Spielberg are just two of the many.
So there was no thought involved in my decision.
That changed dramatically in 1970.
At the invitation of a friend I had the hots for in a BIG way I went to Hollywood. I went by bus so that I could see the country. I took with me a small pocket sized copy of THE NEW TESTAMENT which I had found at my uncle, Douglas Hartt’s, place in Ottawa. He had studied to become a priest before deciding to enter the civil service. He was, at that time, Director General of Public Works Canada.
He shared the space he lived in with a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. My first night at his home in Ottawa he and the policeman decided to educate the idiot nephew by showing him a porn film that was part of a stache the police had seized that week.
The idiot nephew had already seen more than his share of porn films.
The onscreen action was being observed by a young man through a keyhole. Just as he orgasmed the idiot nephew turned on the radio. A voice boomed out, “JESUS CHRIST IS COMING!” as the fellow on screen came.
Talk about synchronicity!
“Shut that off!” shouted both the idiot’s uncle and the cop.
By the time I got to Hollywood I had read THE NEW TESTAMENT through cover to cover more times than most religious professionals. I read it just to find out for myself what it says.
Christopher Isherwood said, “One does not have to be a Christian to believe in the sermon from the mount.”
It probably helps not to be a Christian when it comes to that because the majority of the Christians I have met, by their actions show they clearly do not take the sermon from the mount as seriously as did Isherwood who not only was a fine writer but also an out of the closet homosexual during a time when it took more balls to be honest about who one is than it now does.
Isherwood was not alone.
Kurt Vonnegut Interview
By David Barsamian, June 2003 Issue
On February 23, I walked up the steps to Kurt Vonnegut’s Midtown Manhattan brownstone and rang the bell. There was a smile and a mass of gray, curly hair to greet me. Then I heard, “Bite him!” At Vonnegut’s feet was a meek-looking small white dog. The master’s command went unheeded. The dog just looked up at me and seemed terribly bored. Vonnegut lamented that he could not get his dog to obey.
Everything you may have heard about this master storyteller, now eighty, is true. He is irreverent and insouciant. And he is very funny. When I confessed to him that I had not read all his books, he told me, “You can leave now.”
He was chain-smoking Pall Malls throughout the afternoon we spent together in his living room. When I pointed the obvious out to him, he said, “I’m trying to die. But it’s not working.” And then he laughed.
He’s recently been writing a column for In These Times, where he fields questions from readers. His disdain for Bush is palpable. “America was certainly hated all around the world long before the Mickey Mouse coup d’état,” he wrote recently. “And we weren’t hated, as Bush would have it, because of our liberty and justice for all. We are hated because our corporations have been the principal deliverers and imposers of new technologies and economic schemes which have wrecked cultures.”
Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. He was taken away to a POW camp in Dresden. His experiences there led to his celebrated novel Slaughterhouse-Five. It ranks among the great works of anti-war literature. Among his many other books are Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird, and Bluebeard, as well as what he calls an autobiographical collage, Fates Worse Than Death.
The same day I saw Vonnegut, he enthralled an SRO crowd honoring Howard Zinn at the 92nd Street Y. The event celebrated the one-millionth copy sold of A People’s History of the United States. Vonnegut read from the Zinn classic, as did Alice Walker, James Earl Jones, Danny Glover, Alfre Woodard, and Marisa Tomei, among others.
Question: What’s your take on George Bush?
Kurt Vonnegut: We have a President who knows absolutely no history, and he is surrounded by men who pay no attention to history. They imagine that they are great politicians inventing something new. In fact, it’s really quite old stuff: tyranny. But they imagine they’re being creative.
Q: In 1946, Hermann Goering said at Nuremberg, “Of course, the people don’t want war. . . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.” Does it work the same way in the United States?
Vonnegut: Of course it does. Bush wouldn’t know what I’m talking about because he isn’t responsive to history, but now we’ve had our Reichstag Fire. After the First World War, Germany was trying to build a democracy. Then when the Reichstag, the legislature, was burned down in 1933, this was seen as such an emergency that human rights had to be suspended. The attack on the World Trade Towers has allowed Bush and his gang to do anything. What are we to do now? I say when there’s a code red, we should all run around like chickens with our heads cut off. I don’t feel that we are in any great danger.
Q: Today, war is being produced as a made-for-TV event; war is turned into a video game for the army of couch potatoes.
Vonnegut: It’s incumbent on the President to entertain. Clinton did a better job of it—and was forgiven for the scandals, incidentally. Bush is entertaining us with what I call the Republican Super Bowl, which is played by the lower classes using live ammunition.
Q: You live just a few blocks from the United Nations. On February 15, there was a mass demonstration in New York. You took part in it?
Vonnegut: I was simply there, but I didn’t speak.
Q; What do you think of the efficacy of people turning out at protests and marching?
Vonnegut: I’m an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was. We formed sort of a laser beam of protest. Every painter, every writer, every stand-up comedian, every composer, every novelist, every poet aimed in the same direction. Afterwards, the power of this incredible new weapon dissipated. Now it’s like a banana cream pie three feet in diameter dropped from a stepladder four feet high. The right of the people to peacefully assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances is now worth a pitcher of warm spit. That’s because TV will not come and treat it respectfully. Television is really something.
The government satirizes itself. All we can wish is that there will be a large number of Americans who will realize how dumb this all is, and how greedy and how vicious. Such an audience is dwindling all the time because of TV. One good thing about TV is, if you die violently, God forbid, on camera, you will not have died in vain because you will be great entertainment.
Q: In Slaughterhouse-Five, you write about the firebombing of Dresden, and a couple of months later came Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Vonnegut: The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.
Q: At Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the chief U.S. prosecutor, said that to initiate a war of aggression is the supreme international crime.
Vonnegut: People are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are. So let it be known. We’re behaving abominably. It’s like having a relative go absolutely nuts. Somebody has to say, “I think Uncle Charlie’s off his rocker.” We are behaving in a bizarre manner now. George Bush and his gang imagine they are being political geniuses.
You have never seen greatness in a Presidency; I have. It was a rich kid who you would think had every reason to be a horse’s ass—Franklin Roosevelt. He was humane and wise and resourceful. He was called a traitor to his class. With George Bush, that charge would never stick.
Q: When Bush began to play the Iraq card, it was exactly at a moment when there was an enormous amount of attention paid to the scandals on Wall Street—Global Crossing, Enron, Harken, Halliburton. It distracted the public from what was going on in the corporate sector.
Vonnegut: One thing I learned, with permission of the school committee of Indianapolis, was that when a tyrant or a government gets in trouble it wonders what to do. Declare war! Then nothing else matters. It’s like chess; when in doubt, castle.
The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.
Q: What about the importance of reading books?
Vonnegut: It’s hard to read and write. To expect somebody to read a book is like having someone arrive at a concert hall and be immediately handed a violin and told to go up onstage. It’s an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite. Slaughterhouse-Five is read in high schools, and sometimes the teachers tell the students to write the author. Some of them write that the events are not sequential! It’s hard enough to read a book with Wednesday followed by Monday.
Q:Your father was an architect. But you said you never saw him read a book. Your Uncle Alex, an insurance salesman, was the one who pushed you to read.
Vonnegut: Yes, he did. And his recommendations were absolutely first rate.
Q: Like what?
Vonnegut: The prefaces to George Bernard Shaw’s plays were an enormous influence on me. To hell with the plays. I remember the title to one of his prefaces was “Christianity—Why Not Give It a Try?”
Q: Shaw, who you’ve described as a hero of yours, was also a socialist.
Vonnegut: It’s perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It’s perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments. There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, and I can’t anymore. I cast my first vote for a socialist candidate—Norman Thomas, a Christian minister. I had to cast it by absentee ballot. I used to have three socialist parties to choose from—the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Workers Party, and I forgot what the other one was.
Q: You take pride in being from Indiana, in being a Hoosier.
Vonnegut: For being from the state that gave us Eugene Debs.
Q: Eugene Debs of Terre Haute on the Wabash.
Vonnegut: Where Timothy McVeigh was executed. Eugene Debs said (and this is merely a paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount, which is what so much socialist writing is), “As long as there’s a lower class, I’m in it; as long as there’s a criminal element, I’m of it; as long as there is a soul in prison,” which would include Timothy McVeigh, “I am not free.” What is wrong with that? Of course, Jesus got crucified for saying the same thing.
Q: With two million souls in prison today in the United States, Debs would be very busy.
Vonnegut: Debs would’ve committed suicide, feeling there was nothing he could do about it.
Q: There is another Hoosier you write about who is unknown, Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. Who was he?
Vonnegut: Powers Hapgood was a rich kid. His family owned a successful cannery in Indianapolis. Powers was radicalized. After he graduated from Harvard, he went to work in a coal mine to find out what that was like. He became a labor organizer. He led the pickets against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. I got to know him late in his life when he’d become a local CIO official. There was some sort of dustup on a picket line, enough to bring the cops into play. Hapgood was testifying in court about what was to be done about CIO members who had made trouble. The judge stopped the proceedings at one point and said, “Hapgood, why would a man with your advantages, from a wealthy, respected family, Harvard graduate, lead such a life?” Powers Hapgood replied, “Why, the Sermon on the Mount, sir.” Not bad, huh?
Incidentally, I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the great science fiction writer and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov. John Updike, who is religious, says I talk more about God than any seminarian. Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.
Q: Christianity pervades your spirit.
Vonnegut: Well, of course. It’s good writing. I don’t care whether it’s God or not, but the Sermon on the Mount is a masterpiece, and so is the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The two most radical ideas, inserted in the midst of conventional human thought, are E=MC2—matter and energy are the same kind of stuff—and “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In 1844, Karl Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” He said this at a time when opium and opium derivatives were the only painkillers. And he said it helped a little. He might as well have said, “Religion is the aspirin of the people.” At the time he said this terrible thing, we had human slavery as a perfectly legal enterprise. Now in the eyes of a merciful God, who was more hateful back then? Karl Marx or the United States of America?
Q: You’ve said that you wouldn’t have missed the Great Depression or World War II for anything. Why did you say that?
Vonnegut: Well, I actually saw it all. I didn’t have to read about it. I was there, so for that reason I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I have really been an infantry private. I didn’t read about it; I was it. That’s a matter of pride. I was a police reporter for Chicago City News Bureau, which was the outfit that was the inspiration for the play The Front Page. I covered Chicago as a street reporter. I really did it. And I’ve been a teacher and all that. I’m glad for the opportunity to see so much.
Q: When you go to college audiences and give lectures, you’re talking to twenty-somethings. What kind of response do you get?
Vonnegut: Very warm, very enthusiastic. You think crack cocaine is a high? Try being me facing one of those college audiences. It is marvelous.
David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado. His latest book is “Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics.” His most recent interview for The Progressive was with Gore Vidal in the August 2006 issue.
http://www.progressive.org/mag_intv0603
Now anyone who gives thought–real thought–to forgive us our trespasses as we for give those who trespass against us know that most of what we have had passed off as Christianity over the time since Jesus was hung on a cross ain’t.
One can not call one’s self a Christian and be an anti-Semite, an anti-Moslem or an anti-anything.
One day shortly after I stepped off the bus in Hollywood a fellow I had met on the street invited me to come meet the preacher that had turned him on to God.
I went.
There I saw a man named Tony Alamo stand and deliver a tirade that had nothing to do with anything in the book I had read on the bus on the way to Hollywood.
Suddenly he seemed to look straight at me as he said in a roar, “I SEE YOU HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME TONIGHT. STAND UP AND DECLARE YOURSELF FOR JEEEZEUSSS!”
I stood . How could I not. His finger was pointing straight at me.
I have peripheral vision. As I stood I saw a number of others stand.
I caught his trick.
We were told to go down below into a dark hole and to jump up and down until the LORD spoke to us.
I went.
With all the rest I jumped up and down while at the same time reflecting on what Jesus had actually taught as reported in THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Then I heard a still small voice that said, “Git yer ass out of here.”
I opened the lid on the hole, walked up the steps, saw Mr. Alamo who said, “Did the LORD speak to you?”
Now had he truly been in THE LORD he would not have asked that question.
“Yes,” I answered as I walked out of his church. Along the way I saw page after page of rules for the members of his flock to follow. There were so many of them they made THE OLD TESTAMENT laws look puny.
Clearly his was not the truth that sets us free.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Alamo
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2007/fall/the-ravening-wolf
http://www.alamoministries.com/
http://www.tonyalamonews.com/
Next I dropped in at a Roman Catholic Church. The priest talked about how he had visited an ornate chapel at a university where much wealth was present but not God. As he spoke I looked around at the wealth dripping from every corner of the cathedral in which he was speaking.
Nope. No presence of the truth there, either.
“THE WAY IS STRAIT AND NARROW AND FEW THERE BE THAT FIND IT.”
In Buddhism the way is called “the razor’s edge.”
In the East they say, “The nearer the temple the farther from The Buddha.”
In the West it is put, “The nearer the church/synagogue/temple the farther from God.”
A lot of folk think the word “strait” is spelled “straight.”
There is a huge difference between straight and strait. A strait is far from strait.
A strait is a narrow passageway between two lands masses which is so tight only one ship at a time can pass through and then only with great care and caution. It twists and turns. We have to move very slowly through a strait while on the straight path we often move fast.
Northrup Frye appeals to lazy thinkers.
There is a softness about his flesh as it hangs from his frame that says this is not a man of physical substance. I look at him and feel that if I touched him his flesh would have the texture of foam rubber. My hand would sink into it finding little there. I met a man like that once.
One day, in Hollywood in 1970, I met a man who caused me to have a change of heart for the better (which is the meaning of the word “repent”).
I was crashing in as bordello (which is not an Italian desert).
I was not too hard to look at then (right). The fellow who ran the place wanted to employ me. I gave it a shot but, frankly, put too a high a premium of making love to diminish it by turning it into a trade. I was a complete and utter failure at being a whore.
“Well,” said the fellow, “You have to help pay the rent.”
I saw an ad in a newspaper that promised al kinds of money FAST.
The next morning I walked at least twenty miles on an empty stomach only to arrive at the doors of a mission.
Wanting nothing to do with them I turned to leave.
Then I reflected that it was a long way back. I had am empty stomach. I would not be eating that day. I knew they had to have at least coffee and doughnuts.
Being a pragmatist I went in, filled out their forms on which I wrote that I was Canadian and did not have a working. I knew that without one I could not be hired. That was fine. I wanted nothing to do with them.
I filled myself with doughnuts I washed down with coffee. They were good doughnuts.
“You are Canadian aren’t you?” said the man in charge when I walked into his office,
“Yes,” I replied saying to myself, “that’s a dumb question. I told him that on the form.”
“Do you have a working permit?”
“No,” I replied as rudely as possible while saying to myself, “That’s another dumb question.” I wanted him to throw me out.
“I can’t hire you without one. What are you doing here?”
“I am living in a house. It is time to pay the rent. It is either get a job or peddle my ass,” I said.
“THE LORD says I am supposed to help you. THE LAW OF THE LAND says I can not. What do I do?”
“That is your question,” I said.
“Then I guess I have to hire you,” he replied.
It is a damned good thing that man’s name was not Northrup Frye.
I pity those who had him for their model.
Back to where I started.
I am with Adam Vaughan. It is time we made it illegal to buy guns not only in Toronto but in Canada as well.
And let’s do do it fast.
‘Nuff said.