Bobby watched the bugs smash against his windshield one after the other, and each “KUSPLUTCH” they made as they exploded on his windshield was more satisfying than the last. He liked the way they sounded crunchy and liquidy all at the same time. Like his momma eating Frosted Flakes. He waited until he could barely make out the bright headlights on the gravel road, and right before the point where the windshield was totally obscured by bug offal, he would turn on his wipers to create a kaleidoscope of colors. He giggled as the wipers made a bigger and bigger mess.

When he couldn’t see the road in front of him at all, Bobby relented and squirted some cleaner on his windshield. After it was partially cleared of bug guts, Bobby lost patience and abandoned windshield-cleaning, and instead, he decided to reach down into the passenger-side floorboard to get himself another beer. He knew he still had four left in his Igloo lunch cooler, but it was so damn dark he couldn’t really see around the inside of his truck. He made a mental note to have Wade fix the lights on the instrument panel — and maybe the interior light too, depending on how much the criminal charged him for the gauge lights. Bobby stretched down as far to his right as he could, while still holding on to the steering wheel with his left hand. He practically had to lie down in the bench seat to reach the floorboard. As the truck bounced around he made a mental note to get Wade to check his shocks, too.

His fingers fumbled blindly in the floorboard. Work boots. Nope. Gloves. Nuh-uh. CD cases. Move. Empties. Gettin’ warmer. There. Cooler. Open…ah ha…un-opened beer.

Just as Bobby began knocking the ice off the top of the beer can, the steering wheel spun out of the grip of his left hand, he felt his truck lift off the ground, and suddenly, everything became all light and floaty.

…

…

And then crashing chaos. The tumbling truck tossed Bobby around in the cab like a cat in a clothes dryer, and in a point of irony that Bobby would never begin to understand, beer sprayed all over him as the truck entered the “tumble dry” mode of the crash.

And then stillness. The drip-drip sounds of leaking fluid. The squeak-squeak of a still-moving wheel.

Bobby knew the truck was upside down because when he looked up he saw the accelerator pedal. He felt sweaty, but he worried that the stickiness he was wiping off his forehead was something other than sweat and grime. He hoped it was oil. He knew it probably wasn’t. He couldn’t really make out where the side windows or the windshield had been, so Bobby aimed for the largest opening in the twisted, beer soaked metal and began inching his way towards it.

It took Bobby a good ten minutes to squirm and writhe out of his wrecked pickup truck. It had landed, after several balletic spins and flips, upside down and in a muddy ditch. Bobby plopped down in the brown, rancid water with a splash and stared at his mangled truck. He had heard people say that drunks usually walk away from violent car crashes without a scratch on them. He said a little prayer of thanks to Jesus for letting him be drunk. And for being sleepy. He felt sure his drunkenness and sleepiness had kept him relaxed and loose through the crash. The wreck may have shaken him awake, but Bobby could feel his sleepiness returning. His head hurt so damn bad. He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands until he saw white spots. He could actually hear his brain throbbing, and an undulating pressure pushed at the back of his eyes.

Bobby laid back in the muddy water. The water covered his ears and almost went over his eyes. But his nose and mouth were above the surface of the brackish liquid, so he figured it was okay to take a little nap. Just long enough for his head to stop hurting.

Bobby awoke staring directly into the brightest light he had ever seen. It was so blindingly bright, he found he couldn’t even close his eyes to avoid looking at it. He opened his mouth to scream, but he discovered he was unable to make any noise at all. Bobby felt a pressure that was both pushing and pulling his body simultaneously, and he dug his fingers into the mud at the bottom of the puddle to steady himself. Bobby didn’t want to vomit, especially at a moment when his mouth refused to open. Eventually the undulating pressure in his head stopped, his nausea resided as quickly as it had came, and he felt the light pulling him out of his muddy bed. As he floated, he imagined that the mereungie on his gramma’s pies probably didn’t feel as light as he did. Right before he floated passed above the tops of the trees that embowered the wreckage of his truck, he passed out for the second time that night.

Bobby regained consciousness before he regained his sight. He felt frigid, and he realized all his clothes were gone. All the hairs on his body were standing on end, but his hands and arms were rigid at his sides. He tried to bolt upwards, but despite his muscles contracting in the correct manner, his limbs refused to move. He tried to yell for help, but his mouth wouldn’t open. His body remained as still as a statue. But on the inside, in his mind, Bobby was thrashing and screaming in pure terror.

Finally Bobby’s eyes opened. He wished they hadn’t. He tried to close them immediately but they were held open just as they’d been held shut a moment before.

Bobby found himself lying, on what he assumed was a table, in the middle of a stark white room. And Bobby wasn’t even sure the room was white because he couldn’t see walls or a ceiling or any solid shapes at all. It was just a sense of “whiteness” that Bobby felt more than actually saw. He head wouldn’t move to look at his sides, but Bobby moved his eyes and looked to his right has hard as he could. In his peripheral vision, just before the blackness that occurs at the corner of the eye, Bobby could see that he was only one person in a row of people. And these people, who were all naked, were simply floating several feet off the white floor.

At that moment, Bobby truly knew terror.

Bobby heard an excruciatingly loud humming noise in his head, and in start contrast to his rigid and unmoveable limbs, his mind became a whirling tsunami of gibbering, manic horror.

And then, suddenly and without warning, the terror began to slide and melt away as if coaxed by a hypnotist, and his inner-self became as calm and subdued as his limbs were motionless. He felt the pressure return in his head again, but this time he didn’t care. It was gentler this time, and Bobby felt as if the humming presence in his head was flipping through his thoughts and memories like a child playfully fanning the pages of a flip-book. The feeling was distinctly pleasurable. Bobby finally relaxed, and just as he began to drift off, he felt the chilly touch of metal fingers exploring his naked, mud-crusted body. As the last bit of consciousness drifted away, Bobby wondered if he would ever see home again, or if he was, in fact, dying. He said a prayer to ask Jesus for forgiveness for his wicked life just in case.

———————————————–*

Rlyeh sat in his chair, lethargically staring down the long conference table, dreading the upcoming meeting. He tried to form what he could consider to be an acceptable explanation for his team’s failure, but he simply couldn’t. He knew that no one on the Rejoinder expected anything more than a detailed report on his initial findings, but he had begun the preliminary survey with such high hopes. The room felt chilly, even though he knew it wasn’t. He felt like the empty chairs were mocking the ambiguity inherent within his report. He closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing in slow, methodical breaths.

The noise of people filling the room jolted Rlyeh awake. Chairperson Hojannes took her seat at the head of the table, and the people began to settle down and organize notes in preparation for the meeting.

Hojannes cleared her throat and addressed the room, “Okay everyone. We need to get started. Before we delve into your respective reports, the Navs have told me that tomorrow we’ll need to begin prepping the stasis chambers an hour earlier than originally planned. They’re afraid a solar wind maelstrom will affect the Rosen fields, so they want to get an early start. Please inform your teams accordingly.”

“Now, who would like to start us off?”

For a split second, Rlyeh started to volunteer to go first to get the whole thing over with, but just as he began to speak, Investigator Simon cut him off. “I’ll take the lead, Chairperson Hojannes,” Simon said in an authoritative voice. He cleared his voice and stood.

“As you all know, pre-mission hypothesis stipulated that the CO2 level in the atmosphere had risen to such a degree that, over a long period of time, the biosystem of the planet incrementally and gradually became harsher and eventually uninhabitable. The commonly accepted timeline as predicted by modeling for this gradual system failure was in the 2-3 hundred year range. We are now fairly certain that while the biosystem was, in fact, slowly changing after the industrialization paradigm shift, a massive biosystem breakdown occurred sometime around 2170. Up until that point, humankind was still able to survive on the surface, but my team posits that after that 2170, humanity would not have survived anywhere except underground or many meters under what was left of the oceans.”

Investigator Simon typed a string of commands into the workstation in front of him and said, “Let’s take a look at this model my team designed. Hopefully it will help to illustrate the effect of both the gradual and the massive biosystem events.” The lights in the cabin dimmed gently, and floating several inches above the center-point of the table, a shimmering, 3-D image of a blueish planet appeared. Rlyeh sighed inwardly. While immensely competent, and quite friendly to boot, Investigator Simon bored Rlyeh to sleep. Since the lights were already dimmed, and everyone in the room was concentrating on the model in the middle of the table, Rlyeh decided to close his eyes for a moment. Just for a moment.

When Rlyeh opened his eyes, he was shocked to see everyone staring at him. He was confused. Chairperson Johannes looked irritated. “Investigator Rlyeh, I asked if you had any thoughts on that?”

Rlyeh inhaled deeply and rubbed his eyes. “My apologies to everyone, but especially to you Investigator Simon. I certainly did not mean to drift off during your presentation. It’s just that I was up with my team all night trying to construct a hypothesis robust enough to accommodate all of our data. I realize that is not an acceptable excuse for falling asleep.”

“You not only slept through Investigtaor Simon’s presentation, but through Investigator Prin’s presentation as well, Investigator Rlyeh,” said Chairperson Hojannes in a flat voice. “She didn’t realize you were napping, and she asked you why you think the human population, at the beginning of the 21st century, seemed so dead-set on finding a single precipitating cause for the changes they were noticing in their global environment?”

“Despite the fact that even the most elementary scientific mind should have realized that a myriad of occurrences affect the biosystem,” added Investigator Prin helpfully.

Rlyeh shuffled his materials anxiously and replied, “Well, again, I want to apologize. I truly didn’t mean to fall asleep, but after everyone hears my presentation I hope that you will all understand my frustration, if not my exhaustion. First, let me say that the phenomenon observed by Investigator Prin and her team is something that my team continues to struggle with explaining as well, but unfortunately, I’m not sure I can offer any theories. Just observations and supposition.”

“First, let me detail our data set. My team and I procured one thousand subjects from a one hundred year time span. Five hundred females and five hundred males. We obtained brain maps of all the subjects, as well as comprehensive verbal and psychionic evaluations.”

Investigator Simon raised his hand. “Initially, the academy was concerned about the verbal evaluations because of the archaic nature of their language. Did that pose a problem?”

Despite the interruption, Rlyeh was pleased the question came up so early into his presentation. “No, Inspector Simon, it did not. Linguistically, their language does not differ significantly from our own. Remember, our language is but a variation of theirs, and since the phonology remains fairly constant between our language and the older languages of the test subjects, we had little to no trouble programming a translator to communicate with them.”

Investigator Simon looked satisfied, so Rlyeh continued: “All subjects came from mid to low economic status, and all subjects possessed mid to low education. Of course, all metrics are based on averages of the time period in which the subject resided.”

“One thing that came as a surprise to myself and my team, and this is something that we have yet to factor into a final analysis of the data, is that 90% of the subjects believed in,” Rlyeh scanned through his notes. “A kind of post-life. Details differ from subject to subject, but essentially they all held this belief.” Rlyeh looked back up at his fellow investigators’ confused faces. “I know. We were confused, too. Both verbal and psychionic evaluations revealed a belief in this premise. Essentially, these subject believed that after they died, some intangible portion of themselves would…go, for a lack of a better term, somewhere else. The location and the details of this other place differed according to the subject’s region of origin, but the belief was essentially ubiquitous.”

“Do you suppose there was an error with the translator?” asked Chairperson Johannes.

Rlyeh shook his head. “No Chairperson. We checked the code and the running program. Several times, in fact. No, eventually we came to the consensus that this was simply symptomatic of an intrinsic flaw in their cognitive processes. The test subjects were able to hold two opposing beliefs simultaneously. All one thousand subjects suffered from this cognitive disability.”

At the opposite end of the table from Rlyeh, Investigator Landry looked up from his notes. “My team has also encountered this phenomenon while constructing a history of our pre-diasporic ancestors. In fact, they had a term for this themselves. ‘Cognitive Dissonance,’ I believe.”

Rlyeh nodded at Investigator Landry. “Indeed? Appropriate title.” Rlyeh quickly scribed the term into his notes for later review. “Thank you, Investigator Landry. Well, our preliminary findings show that this phenomenon influenced the subjects to such a degree that their survival was doubtful even if the planet had remained habitable. Again, through our verbal and psychionic evaluations, we observed the subjects holding two or more opposing ideas simultaneously, and thus, preventing rational thought. 13% of the subjects were aroused by homosexual stimuli, such as probes or pornographic images, yet they proclaimed homosexual behavior abhorrent. 65% stated that it was morally wrong to provide financial support to economically indigent humans, and yet, all of our subjects were economically indigent themselves. 97% denounced what they considered to be fanatical notions of the post-life, and yet all the subjects held fanatical ideas of the post-life themselves. These subjects are, excuse me, were, the most inconsistent and hypocritical beings my team has ever encountered.”

Rlyeh paused to take a drink of water. He nodded toward Investigator Prin and said, “Now, to address your question. I feel quite sure the scientists of that time knew that there were mutually exclusive factors that were mutating the biosystem of their planet, but taking into account the data gleaned from my team, I feel quite sure that it was,” Rlyeh looked at his notes for Investigator Landry’s term, “”cognitive dissonance” that your team observed, as well. According to our evaluations, 765 subjects investigated had heard of the term “global warming,” but only 22% understood the term on even an elementary level, and of those 22%, only 3% believed it was something that humankind could reverse. Accordingly, it’s no wonder this group died off, and again, my team feels sure that on a long enough time-line their erratic and overly violent behavior would have led to extinction anyway.”

Chairperson Hojannes raised a finger to pause Rlyeh. “Is that feeling supported by modeling, or is it based on conjecture?”

“Purely conjecture.”

“Very Well. Continue,” said the Chairperson.

“My team and I are actually amazed that our ancestors were able to make it off the planet at all. Frankly, the subjects in this sample are representative of the leaders of the population of Earth from the 20th century onward. I know our mission here aboard the Rejoinder is the first of many, but I feel confident enough to state that the subjects we examined are one of the primary reasons for the destruction of our species on the planet Earth. Granted, when this system’s star left its G2 stage and became a Red Giant, then human life on the planet would have ceased regardless, but these subjects accelerated the destruction of our species on planet Earth by roughly ten million years. And that is a conservative estimate. When we began this mission, I felt sure my team could formulate a robust theory which would explain these test subjects, but unfortunately, much more research is warranted if we ever want to fully understand this group of pre-diasporic humans.”

Investigator Simon stopped taking notes and asked, “Despite your initial trepidation regarding your report, I find your results simply fascinating, Investigator Rlyeh. Other than the category ‘test subjects,’ have you categorized these humans in any meaningful way?”

“Yes, Investigator Simon. Just a moment.” Rlyeh scanned his notes. “For the sake of simplicity, we actually began using the same name they use for themselves: Republicans.”

When I’m out in public and bored, I like to invent stories about people I see. I usually do this most often at places like Michael’s, which Leigh loves but is like kryptonite, or when I’m at a restaurant by myself. This morning, I came across a photo online, and for some reason I found it captivating. And a story sprung up in my head.

Here’s the original photo (click to enlarge):

After you’ve had a change to view the unaltered photo, have a look at a version that I annotated (click to enlarge):

Angela and Molly grew up on neighboring farms. Despite the fact that their families’ farms were more than a mile away, Angela and Molly saw each other every day. They both came from a large family (Angela-nine siblings; Molly-twelve siblings), and their friendship was a way to escape from the chaos of a large family. Everyday after school, Angela and Molly would walk together down the dusty, gravel road back to their farms, and back to the work that needed to be done. They dreamed of marrying the Danver brothers and having large families of their own.

They graduated from eighth grade and began to work at home, doing chores around the house and helping with farm work as much as their dads would let them. They saw less of one another, but after a summer of work they had worn a path in the corn fields that separated the farms. On days when they weren’t so tired that they couldn’t move, Angela and Molly would cross the fields and meet in a small pear grove. They would talk and gossip and snack on pears until the last remnants of the burnt red sun began to disappear, and then they would walk back home and start the day anew.

Then one summer when the weather had been particularly hot and dry, their respective family’s began to feel the impact of a drought. Crops sat scorched and dry in the fields, the milk cows dried up and gave very little milk, the few beef cattle looked gaunt and starved, and everyone began to worry about a winter food shortage.

Angela and Molly’s pastor began meeting with their parents, and in a few weeks he had convinced them that it might be best to send Angela and Molly away to the city to work for the winter, in an effort to make sure they had enough to eat and to send money back to the farms.

The girls were resistant at first, but they knew it was probably for the best, so at the end of August they packed some clothes, a few books, and ink and paper to write home, and headed north on the train to the city. Molly slept the whole way while Angela watched the countryside fly by her window.

When they arrived at the city they were overwhelmed and amazed by the size and the noise, but that amazement soon turned to acceptance, and acceptance gave way to immersion and apathy. They stayed at the local YWCA, and they both got jobs in a radio assembling factory. Molly had worried at first because the only radio she’d ever seen had been in a picture inside the Sears and Roebuck catalogue, but Angela was convinced they didn’t need to know anything about radios.

And she was right. The girls soon discovered that their job was less complicated than chopping wood or washing a cow’s udders, but far more monotonous and exhausting. At the end of each day they were continually shocked that they could be so tired from standing in one place, moving their arms and hands mere inches, over and over, for twelve hours a day.

At first, Molly’s fingers bled from the rough circuit boards and the pins of the transistors. Then they scabbed. Then the scabs would come off and her fingers would bleed some more. Then one day she realized she wasn’t having any more trouble with her fingers, and she was disgusted to see that on her fingertips she had grown thick, meaty callouses.

Their supervisor, Thomas, seemed to be a nice man. Angela like him because he would occasionally allow them five more minutes on their half-hour lunch break, and he would ignore the fact that sometimes a worker would stay in the bathroom for several minutes before emerging smelling slightly of cigarette smoke. Molly like him because he pronounced her name “MAH-lee” instead of “MOLL-ee” the way everyone else did. The girls dreaded when Thomas’s boss, Frank, who was the nephew of the owner, would come down from the offices above the factory. Frank thought Thomas was too easy on the women workers. To correct this laxity, Frank would pick a girl every visit and berate her and explain to the rest of the workers how the girl was only allowed to work there by the compassion of his uncle. He would curse and point, and as he did so he had to continually push his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. Frank thought the women should be working an extra hour a day, and he was convinced that a thirty minute lunch break only reinforced a woman’s propensity for gossip and hen-like behavior.

One day, while walking home from the factory, Angela happened to find a tattered, and very old-looking, copy of McClure’s Magazine hanging precariously from a trash can by its spine. Angela took it home with them, and when Molly woke up in the middle of the night Angela was still sitting in the corner reading the same article. Something about “The Shame of the Cities,” or “The Shame of our Cities.” Molly wasn’t sure of the title, but she knew Angela had finished the article earlier in the night, mostly because she wouldn’t shut up about it, and she couldn’t imagine why she’d be rereading it.

In the days that followed, Angela began talking in hushed voices and in closed-off groups with some of the scruffier women in the factory. They called each other “sister,” and nodded slyly whenever they passed one another on the factory floor. Angela would try to engage Molly with talk of folks like Lincoln Steffans, Marcus Garvey, and Richard Wright, but Molly grew bored with Angela’s new-found interest in politics, and soon Angela stopped discussing these things with Molly altogether.

Molly began to get worried when Angela began staying out late. She would come back to their room at the YWCA well after midnight, and sometimes she only had time for a couple hours of sleep before they had to go to work. When Molly questioned her, Angela would only say she had a meeting that she had to attended.

At work, Angela began to risk punishment from Frank by taking random breaks throughout the day. She’d simply walk away from the line and go sit down, which would force Frank to come down from his office and scream at her, and then turn and scream at Thomas. On one occasion, she looked at her watch, walked away from the line, and sat down on a bench, but before Frank saw her from his upstairs office, Thomas ran over and began to whisper furiously in her hear. Angela started to argue, but eventually, with a “hrumph” and a bad attitude, Angela went back to work. She finished that day without any more break-protests.

One day during their lunch break, several women that Molly didn’t know approached her and questioned her about whether or not she supported “the movement.” Molly didn’t know what they were talking about, but their tone scared her into saying that yes, she did support it. They told her that if that was true, then she should be at the next meeting with Angela. They left her feeling empty and nervous, and Molly left her cheese sandwich half uneaten on the wooden lunch table. That afternoon a photographer from the newspaper came in and took some pictures of the women on the line. Frank had yelled at the women before the photographer had arrived, and he had told them quite angrily that if he heard about any of the women lying and making up stories to the photographer there’d be trouble. Molly barely noticed the man all afternoon, despite the disruptions he caused. She simply could not take her eyes off of Angela, who kept staring and smiling at the photographer. By the end of the day Molly had heard Angela tell the photographer that he should show up the next Monday if he wanted some really good pictures.

That Friday night, Molly tried to talk to Angela about the women, the photographer, and her odd behavior. Angela was dismissive, and told her that she was too fragile to participate in what needed to happen. She said that after Monday, Molly could help her, but the work before then was too dangerous, and besides, she knew that Molly had no interest in politics. Angela left to go to out, and Molly went to sleep.

When Molly woke up the next morning she was concerned to discover that Angela had not returned. She began to convince herself that perhaps Angela was having a secret, romantic relationship with Thomas, as they were always whispering to one another. In her heart she knew that wasn’t true…but she wished it was.

By Sunday night Molly was so distraught that she’d hardly slept or eaten. She knew something bad had happened. Knew it had something to do with movements, meetings, and the photographer, but she didn’t know what. She stayed up all Sunday night, and when work time rolled around at five in the morning, Molly couldn’t wait to get out of the room.

When Molly got to the factory there were several large, imposing men waiting at the entrance. They stared at her as she passed, scrutinizing her every move. When she got inside to her position on the line, she noticed that there were quite a few women missing. And Frank was wandering around the floor of the factory, looking bemused and malevolently happy. Molly couldn’t help but notice that Thomas was amongst the missing, and along with everything else in her mind, she now had to contend with the possibility that Frank would be supervising them all day long.

Throughout the day, Frank paced the floor of the factory. No one spoke except Frank. Periodically, he would yell at a woman, but never for anything specific, and he sounded like he was enjoying the yelling more than the ever had before. Several times Molly heard Frank joke with the imposing men about the “non-moving movement.” She pretended not to hear.

Molly, and the rest of the women, worked the rest of the day in complete silence. And all morning, and into the afternoon, Molly tried half-heartedly to keep her tears from falling onto the transistors.

Towards the middle of the semester in my “Writing Arguments” class, I introduce students to fallacies and flaws that unintentionally, and many times intentionally, creep into arguments. These are fallacies with which most of us are familiar, if not by their name then by their usage, and ones that the media uses frequently and judiciously. Informal fallacies are common, rhetorical tools of politicians and pundits, but they are the fundamental and foundational basis of argument for conspiracy theorists. Read through that wiki list of fallacies and then think about arguments proposed from the likes of Holocaust deniers, 9/11 Truthers, Creationists, NWO believers, etc.

Fallacies are akin to what James Frazer termed “magical thinking.” Magical thinking allows an ignorant mind to make sense of the world in non-scientific terms. Arthur C. Clarke famously stated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Indeed, we encourage this type of thinking in children whether we mean to or not. Every time a child asks “What was that noise in the sky,” and we reply “God bowling” instead of explaining thunder–every time we tell a child “Don’t say that because it might come true,”–every time we encourage a child to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy, we encourage them towards magical thinking as a valid, problem-solving mindset.

Fallacious logic and magical thinking bring out the worst in humanity. Willful ignorance only spawns more willful ignorance, and once the feedback loop begins it’s difficult to end.

Now, I do my best to steer students away from this type of thinking in my classes, but I’m only one person, and I can only do so much. Also, I’m only human, and therefore I’m not immune to fallacies and magical thinking.

But while I do my best to eschew this type of thinking in myself and my students, I have to admit, I’m a little hesitant to do so. I’m terrified that by pushing away fallacies and magical thinking that I’ll also be pushing away imaginative sympathies and my ability to daydream. Some of the most beautiful pieces of art and literature the world has ever known were born out of magical thinking, and I’m not no so sure that silencing that aspect of my brain, or my students’ brains, is necessarily a good thing. Can evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology explain the existence of systems of morals and values as adaptive and selective mechanisms? Absolutely. Sadly, those explanations are scientifically dense and dry, and they are no where near as magical, nor nearly as beautiful, as the story of the Garden of Eden.

Fortunately, people like Isaac Asimov, Mark Twain, Terry Pratchett, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Orwell have shown us that magical thinking doesn’t have to squash rationalism and logic.

The inherent problem is that apparently you actually have to be someone like Isaac Asimov, Mark Twain, Terry Pratchett, Kurt Vonnegut, or George Orwell to keep those two disparate mindsets in check. No small task, that.

Last night (actually, two nights ago, after the edits) while talking to my friend Tank (what up, Spaceman), our conversation swerved into religion, as it is wont to do, and he told me that he intentionally dislikes discussing religion at all, even if the other person brings it up. I told him I intentionally try to press people about their views, especially if they bring up the subject. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not out to attack anyone or anything like that, but it seems to me that an unexamined belief system is really no belief system at all. In John Milton’s Aeropagitica, Milton states (please don’t skip this):

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness. Which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.

Milton claims that a person can’t really know good unless they know and consciously deny evil as well. Milton was a big believer in free speech in a time when free speech wasn’t exactly seen as an inalienable right.

In 2005, the Atheist Agenda at UTSA began the “Smut for Smut” campaign. If a person brought in a Bible, the Atheist Agenda organization would gladly exchange the Bible for a free porno mag. Unsurprisingly, this made national news. The sad part about the whole deal was that I was so dense I didn’t even realize it was happening, on the campus in which I work, no less, until I read about it on Fark . For someone who takes a great deal of pride in cultural awareness, this was quite embarrassing. Here’s the post I wrote when I found out I’d missed the whole damn thing.

Anyhow, the Atheist Agenda has been doing this since 2005, but so far they haven’t received as much attention as that first year. I guess people do get desensitized to porn.

This year I discovered that one of my students was manning (womanning?) the Smut for Smut booth. That’s Chelsea Lura on the right. Hi Chelsea.

So, after three years of thinking about this, here are my random thoughts on Smut for Smut:

1) I’m glad I work at a state school where shit like this can happen. At Baylor, where I got my undergrad degree, these people would have been beaten bloody with King James Bibles.

2) This is an ineffective mode of argumentation. Understand that when I use the word “argument” I don’t meet a debate. I’m using the Aristotelian definition of the term, which stress the possibility of not only reconciliation between the arguing parties, but also of intellectual advancement and ultimately a movement toward finding Truth. One of the most crucial aspects of any argument is a clear understanding of the orator or writer’s audience. Only by identifying the audience can the author determine the best tools to employ during the argument. I suppose it’s all about mission statement, but if the Atheist Agenda wants to meaningfully argue with religious people, and presumably cause them to question their faith, then they need to redefine their argumentative techniques.

I would think that the Atheist Agenda would need to have as logical an argument as possible with religious people, simply because logic is where religiosity falls apart. Again, I’m not attacking religion, it’s just that faith, by it’s very definition, is a belief in something in spite of all logic and reason. Contrastingly, religion is all about passion and emotion, so it would be best to avoid overly passionate and emotive techniques when arguing with the religious because doing so puts them in familiar territory; it’s a place where they can rally and counter-argue with their own passionate rhetoric. Then the argument has devolved into a shouting match.

All Smut for Smut does is take something that religious people passionately feel is morally wrong–porn–and juxtapose it against something that they passionately feel is morally right–the Bible. This places the two arguing figures in antagonistic roles, and even more unproductively, it forces people who might have otherwise been persuaded into hearing the Atheist Agenda’s side into choosing the side of passion with which they feel more familiar. Odds are good that will be the side of the religious. As a consequence, the Smut for Smut campaign will only further divide believers and non-believers, and it will strengthen the ideological foundation of the religious because it will serve as confirmation that their assumptions of Atheists are correct.

However, if the Atheist Agenda wishes to simply rally their base and cause some commotion, then Mission Accomplished.

3. When walking to and from my office, I need to pay better attention to the booths outside the HSS building.

One of the other things my friend Tank said during our conversation was that he categorizes people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins similarly to folks like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. They don’t add anything meaningful to public discourse, and in fact, they do their level best to create an environment of antagonism and division.

I don’t like antagonism and division.

I don’t like exclusion and insularity.

But I do appreciate the porn. So kudos to you, Atheist Agenda.

Currently, I’m teaching four classes–two of comp I and two of comp II. At UTSA, comp I is “informative writing” and comp II is “argument.” In the comp I classes my students work on using research as a means to inform their readers. There are several things the students need to keep in my when writing their papers in comp I: summarizing and paraphrasing correctly, using MLA parenthetical citations appropriately, learning to structure an essay competently, etc.

One of the most foreign concepts to the students is the notion of audience. The majority of the students don’t truly realize that at its most basic element, writing is simply a form of communicating with other people. Too often, the students turn in their papers without ever considering the fact that someone might actually read what they wrote. They only think of writing as a means to fulfill an assignment, but I find that if I can break through that intellectual wall and help the students recognize an audience, their writing generally improves exponentially.

Last week the students had to turn in a process analysis paper (fancy term for “how-to” paper). As an author, one of the biggest challenges of this paper is deciding when technical terms need to be defined for the readers. I tell my students to err on the cautious side, and if they have any doubts whether or not a term needs to be defined, they should probably go right ahead and define it.

One of my students turned in a paper where he mentioned the second law of thermodynamics in passing and where he stated, and I’m paraphrasing, that everyone knows that the majority of the electricity we use in our home comes from burned coal.

I kinda know the definition of the second law of thermodynamics, something about entropy increasing in closed systems, but I had no idea about coal and electricity. Just for a moment, I wondered if I was too big of a moron to be reading his paper.

So to make myself feel better I told him that a normal audience would probably need those terms defined.

It remains to be seen if I’m a moron.

In literary criticism there are many schools of thought on how to interpret and analyze texts. New Criticism, a school of literary thinking that began in the early 1900’s, emphasis a “close reading” of literary texts. New Critical scholars will stress the importance of the text itself, and eschew all external elements, especially the biography of the author, that might interfere with close readings. One of the major contributions of New Criticism to literary scholarship as a whole is the notion of the “intentional fallacy.”

Intentionally fallacy refers to the practice of critics futilely determining to discover the “intentions” of the author through the text. This, New Critics say, is a fallacious endeavor. We can never know for sure what an author had in mind for his or her text, and texts are not necessarily an expression of the author’s mind. As Terry Eagleton writes in his book Literary Theory, to attempt to offer statements regarding the author or the authors emotional state via the author’s text “reduces all literature to a covert form of autobiography: we are not reading literary works as literary works, simply as second-hand ways of getting to know somebody” (41).

Unfortunately for us, not many journalists or political pundits know about intentional fallacy. If they did, we wouldn’t see so many jackasses proposing that the writing instructors at Virginia Tech should have known that Cho Seung-Hui was a nutty-nutbag from reading his ultra-violent plays “Richard McBeef” and “Mr. Brownstone.” Sure, those plays might have been good indicators, but as intentional fallacy teaches us, the writings of an author cannot be used to determine the author’s intended meaning for his or her writings, or to determine the psyche of the author.

Apparently the creative writing instructor at Cary-Grove High School in Cary, Illinois had never heard of intentional fallacy, either. If the instructor had, perhaps Allen Lee, an 18 year-old straight-A student, wouldn’t have been arrested for writing a “disturbing” paper for a creative writing assignment. In the assignment, the students were told to express themselves emotionally, and despite the fact that Lee’s essay didn’t threaten anyone, the police in Cary, Illinois, arrested Lee and charged him with a misdemeanor, which could carry a $1,500 fine.

Everyone needs to clam down about writing students. There are some totally demented and disturbing texts out there in library-land that were written by well-adjusted and sweet authors. Not every author that writes disturbing material is destined to shoot up a school. As a teacher, I would have found Cho’s practice of signing his name as a question mark, his refusal to speak, and his instances of stalking female students far more disturbing than his writing.

As the traffic for Hyperliterature grows I find myself increasingly worried about the content that I post. I want to make sure I continue to entertain but not offend, and I’m constantly worried that too many personal posts will look unprofessional and way too diary-like.

I have noticed that everyone likes a good YouTube clip. Silly-ass clips from YouTube seem to cut through nearly every demographic out there, and so I find myself writing posts that not only benefit from video clips, but many of my posts almost necessitate them. Like, for instance, if I was going to mention the number of assholes I encounter on a daily basis I would probably embed this:

Since I’m a writing instructor I got to thinking about what my penchant for intermingling text and video means about writing in general, and more specifically what it means for information transmittance in the future. A lot of news sites have comments sections where readers can go and discuss the articles, and nine times out of ten people bitch if the article doesn’t contain images or videos. Go into a comment section on any news site and count the number of times you see “Post worthless without pics,” or “Post worthless without vids.”

The cynic in me wants to chalk those comments up to stupid or lazy readers, but truthfully, I gravitate towards stories with video and images, too. And I know I’m not stupid, so maybe there’s another answer. In the book “Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching,” Kristie Fleckenstein argues that “[b]ecause imagery is an inescapable part of our psychological, social, and textual lives, it needs to be an integral part of our epistemologies and of our literacy teaching…[w]hat is necessary for our meanings and our classrooms is a double dialectic, a double vision of literacy as image and word, as imageword” (4).

Perhaps the images in texts and videos aren’t diluting our literacy, but are simply ways to further facilitate information transmittance and absorption. Fleckenstein would say that text is a kind of image as well, and a reader simultaneously pulls meaning from the word and from the image the word connotes. I suppose a thoughtful author would attempt to keep that in mind when composing. With the proliferation of news media broadcasting and publishing over the internet I imagine we’ll see a lot more articles which try to reach a balance between text and video.

No matter what any blog writer or teacher tells you, at some level we’re all driven by the desire to be respected and admired. My hope is that I can use my knowledge of text and image, and my talent to intermingle words and graphics, to endear my readers and students to me, so that when I look at them, or read their comments, I feel just like Mr. Keating:

Of course, now’s the time when the cynic in me pops up, and reminds me that most readers don’t really give a damn about any of that. They just wanna see some curse words and a few funny pics. The cynic also points out that my students probably give less of a damn than the blog readers, and while I’m up at the front of the class jumping around like a monkey most of them have already escaped to their Happy Place.
Oh well. I’ll still keep up that balancing act of entertaining/informing. And don’t worry; I’ll make sure that for every word like “epistemology” I use I’ll toss in a few “motherfuckers.” You know, just to balance things out.

Each day I check my statcounter and I’m continually shocked at the slow but steady increase of readers. It makes this whole blogging endeavor that much more satisfying when I see how many return visitors hit this page each day to read my nonsense, but underneath that satisfaction I also feel a bit apprehensive. With the steady influx of readers comes a greater responsibility on my part to entertain and inform, and sometimes, just sometimes, I just don’t feel up to the role.

Tonight I spent several hours working out how to install Zelda on my cell phone (I finally got it to work), and consequently I didn’t write up the post I had originally intended. When I finally sat down at the big computer where I normally write I felt drained, and instead of writing I just watched silly YouTube videos…and now I’m feeling guilty about my laziness.

Earlier this evening a friend and I discussed the beginnings of Hyperliterature, and that conversation got me wondering why I feel obligated to post every single night. Lots of bloggers only post several times a week. My palms get itchy if I go a day without posting any new material.

I like knowing that I touch people (clean up those thoughts you pervs), and with the blog I’m provided with instant gratification by way of comments and the statcoutner. I don’t have that crutch with my other writing. Also, with the blog format I’m not required to really organize my thoughts in any extended or intuitive manner. At most I’m writing five or six paragraphs, and that’s a walk in the park compared to working on a novel.

But in the back of my mind I know that many times I use this blog as the means to avoid having to work on that novel, because I realize that a day will come when its completion will force me to seek publication.

And don’t tell anyone, but I’m more than a little scared of that not too distant day.