In the February 2008 edition of Natural History Magazine (article not available online), you can learn where tigers still live in the wild.  At the beginning of the 20th century, there were 100,000 tigers living in the wild.  Today, there are only 5000 in the wild.  Tigers now inhabit only 7% of their original territory, which has shrunk by 41% in the past 10 years.  Those relatively few tigers that remain in the wild hunt wild cattle, deer and pigs in isolated pockets of forested land in India, Sumatra, Eastern Russia in southern China.  Tigers are hunted illegally for pelts and for tiger parts that are used in medicines (such as tiger penis soups).

But did you know how many tigers live in United States?  7,000 to 15,000 tigers live

in private roadside zoos, circuses, sanctuaries, farms and backyards in the US.  Owners are often deluded into thinking that they contain the creatures, treating them like house cats, perhaps attracted by the challenge.  Yet even house cats, which have been domesticated for thousands of years will reach out and swat their human companions.  What happens when a six month old sixty-pound beast with claws and slicing incisors takes a swipe?

Are these privately owned tigers allowed to run in large open areas and kept in good health?  Not likely.  Many tigers are kept in cages much too small for them and they are “fed insufficient or inappropriate food, such as canned dog food.”

The Natural History article indicates that tigers are illegal to import, but they reproduce easily in captivity.  Therefore, it is easy to make more tigers, even though many of them are inbred. Although federal law bans the interstate shipment of endangered species for the pet trade, there are many loopholes in the law.  State laws are inconsistent, and some of them don’t even require exotic animals to be registered. 

Tigers are surprisingly cheap too.  “The price tag of a tiger cub-between $300 and $900-is comparable to that of a poodle puppy registered with the American kennel club.”  Tigers are sometimes given away (when the owner realizes the enormous difficulty of keeping a tiger).  The article notes a one newsletter ad posted by a seller in Texas: “Free-two male tigers and a half years old, likes women; one female tiger, six years old, likes men and women; cages with cats.”

Imagine if we had taken a snapshot of the tiger population 100 years ago and we could easily compare it to the tiger population now.  I suppose that is what I am doing with this post.  Imagine the headline:  Tens of thousands of wild tigers no longer exist! Thousands of abused tigers living desperate lonely lives trapped in tiny cages across America!If we saw that headline dramatically comparing the tiger populations of two arrows 100 years apart, would we do something about the situation?  Maybe and maybe not, but it’s much more likely that we would do something if we could more easily see the situation changing.  When change is incremental and therefore not easily noticeable, it is much less likely that we will do anything about a deteriorating situation.  This human difficulty of tracking slow change presents a great danger to human populations.

Incrementalism makes critically important changes invisible, unless we are in unusually patient sort of person who takes the time to carefully track the slow changes of things that don’t seem to need tracking. 

I have a close friend who was in a highly strained marriage. He happened to keep a journal over the years. His wife was an alcoholic.  (more…)

Garrison Keillor is disturbed that so many children are not being properly educated to read proficiently.   He argues that not all damage being done to our children’s education is being done by conservatives.  

Face it, the schools are not run by Republican oligarchs in top hats and spats but by perfectly nice, caring, sharing people, with a smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/mojo/mantra folks like my old confreres. Nice people are failing these kids, but when they are called on it, they get very huffy. When the grand poobah Ph.D.s of education stand up and blow, they speak with great confidence about theories of teaching, and considering the test results, the bums ought to be thrown out.

There is much evidence that teaching phonics really works, especially with kids with learning disabilities, a growing constituency. But because phonics is associated with behaviorism and with conservatives, and because the Current Occupant has spoken on the subject, my fellow liberals are opposed. . . .

No Child Left Behind initiative has plenty of flaws, but the Democrats who are trashing it should take another look at the Reading First program. It is morally disgusting if Democrats throw out Republican programs that are good for children. Life is not a scrimmage. Grown-ups who stick with dogma even though it condemns children to second-class lives should be put on buses and sent to North Dakota to hoe wheat for a year.

I’ve met some of those “perfectly nice, caring, sharing people” Keillor mentioned who insist on reading methods that simply don’t work for significant numbers of children.  I know that they exist.

This inventory was published by the NYT. You can see what the Bush Administration wants us to think about (and what not to think about) by reference to this graph.  Also, check the President’s plummeting approval ratings at the bottom of the chart.

The Telegraph is reporting on a new book that argues that teenaged girls are being corrupted by distorted images of what it means to be a woman. 

In a society that celebrates people such as Paris Hilton, girls are being brainwashed into believing that promiscuity is synonymous with success, says Carol Platt Liebau.
 
In Prude: How The Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Liebau claims there is “scant recognition or respect” for a woman’s achievement that is not associated with sex appeal.

Liebau says the sexy images of performers such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera catapulted them to fame.

She claims that teenage girls are growing up in a culture in which being called “a slut” is preferable to being labelled “a prude”.

“The overwhelming lessons teenagers are now learning from the world around them is that being sexy is the ultimate accolade, trumping intelligence, character and all other accomplishments at every stage of a woman’s life,” says the author, managing editor of Harvard Law Review.

These sorts of accusations have been made before.  For instance, see here.

The South Carolina results are in.  Barack Obama has obtained 55% of the votes in a three-way race.  In his victory speech, Obama eloquently scolded the Clintons for their divisive politics.   This criticism becomes evident at the five minute mark and crescendos at about the nine minute mark. 

Andrew Sullivan analyzes some of the South Carolina numbers:

Obama won 52 percent of the non-black vote under 30. Among the over-60s, he won a mere 15 percent of the non-black vote. The legacy is racism is clearly dying. Then this: Obama won every demographic among the religiously observant. And the more devout they are - judging by their church attendance - the better he did.

 Interesting stuff.

Note from Erich:  DI has a purchased a license from Cagle Cartoons to publish these cartoons.  We are proud to support the work of these cartoonists.  

I thought I’d mention a bit more about Cagle.   It is an organization owned by cartoonists for the benefit of cartoonists.  Cagle publishes the works of hundreds of cartoonists from around the world.  How do I choose which ones to publish at DI?  Many times, a cartoon will touch on a topic discussed in a recent DI post. Other times, I thought the cartoon made a good political point or simply was enjoyable.  I hope you find these worthwhile too.   

Big Daddy Oilbucks
Mike Lane, Cagle Cartoons

Girl Scout Cookies
Mike Lester, Rome News - Tribune

[Note:  See the post entitled "Don't buy Girl Scout Cookies"]

Internet and Identity
Angel Boligan, El Universal, Mexico City

The Violinist
Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City

Video Games
Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City

Gender Equality
Ares, Caglecartoons.com

Bush and the snake
Olle Johansson, Sweden

As writer Thomas Friedman explains, we only have energy POLITICS.  Shame on us for screwing around with an issue that has massive repercussions for national security. 

In September 2007, Tom Friedman gave a succinct (11 minute) speech to the Rocky Mountain Institute. Friedman is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist with the New York Times.  His speech contained many important take-away messages.  The main message is that the green revolution has finally reached Main Street, even though we are just getting started.

Friedman bemoans the lack of any real policy paradigm.  We don’t yet have the means for connecting lots of capital with lots of technology yet.  He explains that we need a coherent and correct enabling government policy in order to have things take off, yet “there is no discussion by government leaders.”  He bluntly argues that “we don’t have an energy policy.  We have energy politics driven by the richest lobbies.”  The decisions currently being made by the federal government have nothing to do with making strategic and smart decisions.  This massive corruption of the political process was recently exposed in detail by Rolling Stone.

In some state governments, things are starting to change.  For instance, in California utilities are paid by how many kilowatts they say, not for how many they sell.

Friedman argues that we need a galvanizing principle in order to make green “the new red white and blue.”  He argues that until we start making smart decisions regarding energy and environment, the United States cannot be healthy, innovative, secure or respected around the world.  The reason we can’t cheat the environment is that “you can’t fool mother nature, because she “always bats last and she always bats 1000.

Is there enough time remaining to make the necessary changes?  Friedman ended his speech by quoting Dana Meadows: “We have enough time, just enough time, starting now.”

I agree entirely with Friedman. See here, for example, where I criticize the way politicians and the media present ethanol as a pancea so that we don’t need to talk about changing our wasteful and destructive ways.  The undeniable dwindling of oil and other natural resources are inconvenient truths for a media that seeks only drummed up conflict and happy news.   It’s the same type of disingenuousness used by politicians who tout coal as a “solution.”  Consider some of the real ways to make a long-term sustainable difference, like solar.  And here are dozens of things we can do right now, here (No Impact Man) and here, courtesy of the Rocky Mountain Institute. 

At least this is my current favorite animal trick.

You know, there are innumerable good dog tricks. There are lots of cat tricks. But there aren’t many fish tricks.

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Via The Quotations Page.

Congratulations to these kids.   They’re absolutely justified.  The military has no right to coerce high school students into taking tests that make it easier to recruit the students. The test the kids resisted, the ASVAB is a covert recruiting tool.  If kids want to go to Iraq, let them go to the recruiter’s office. 

Click here for a slide show of the works of Spencer Tunick.   Incredibly ambitious, delightful, fun, thoughtful.  Certainly something you don’t see every day. 

And how interesting that so many people are so willing to sign up to participate.  What does that say?

A few months ago the English alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited album “In Rainbows” as a free download, leaving it up to the fans to decide what they would pay, if anything at all.

As someone who has had the difficult and expensive experience of distributing physical copies of my documentaries on DVD I can tell you that it was with great anticipation that I viewed this experiment. I was surprised and a little disappointed to find that only 40% of those downloading actually paid for it.

I recall as a young man buying vinyl records for about $5 a piece and watching as the price slowly went up and up, hitting about $12 before giving way to CDs which eventually topped out at around $16 to $18 a pop. These days, with iTunes selling individual songs for $.99 and most albums for about $9.99, I feel like I am getting a bargain. Of course, I still have the expense of having to burn my own CDs to play them in my car, not being hip enough to own an MP3 player.

Still, I find myself wondering what I would pay for some of my favorite music if given the opportunity to decide on my own. The temptation to take it for free would be strong but I am smart enough to know that if enough people do that the ability to place our own value on music would disappear, as it has done with Radiohead. The band has since retracted its “free or whatever” offer, prompting some to accuse the band of chickening out as they saw potential revenue slip through their fingers.

In the band’s defense, Radiohead’s leader Thom Yorke contends that it was always an experiment, not a business model for themselves or anyone else, and that it had run its course. (As of December 31st “In Rainbows” has become available on iTunes and the CD can be purchased through the usual outlets.)

However, a nagging question still remains. Now that music is being freed from the cost of being physically reproduced on disk, how much should we pay for it?

What is music worth to you?

This Slate article is from 2005, but the topic is one that desperately needs to be reported accurately. It’s about ethanol, and the story is that it takes much more energy to make ethanol than one can get from ethanol.

Ethanol won’t significantly reduce our oil imports; adding more ethanol to our gas tanks adds further complexity to our motor-fuel supply chain, which will lead to further price hikes at the pump; and, most important (and most astonishing), it may take more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it actually contains.

If you find these these claims to be disturbing, check out these additional statistics produced by David Pimental, a Cornell University agricultural expert.  Ethanol can only “work” with massive government subsidies.  Ethanol is not quite the panacea it is touted to be by politicians and the corporate media, eh?  Here’s one of the shockers:

If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of about 97 percent of U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States.

With numbers like these, why isn’t conservation constantly promoted on page one of every newspaper?

The death of investigative journalism is not the title of this paper, but it is the context.  Here’s the title:  “The Growing Importance of Nonprofit Journalism,” by Charles Lewis (April, 2007).  The statistics will shock and depress you. That the lack of investigative journalism in the corporate media world is a worldwide phenomenon makes it all the more depressing. What is the long-term consequence?

James Madison warned that, “A people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”7 If that is true, it would seem that we have an extraordinary number of unarmed Americans, less and less knowledgeable about public affairs or news. To what extent can a democracy ostensibly “of the people, by the people and for the people” exist without an informed citizenry?

Luckily, this paper does not end on a pessimistic note:

The often unnoticed irony is that amidst the current, deteriorating state of original, investigative and otherwise independent journalism in America, right now there are new, very energizing forces at play – talented and highly motivated journalists, mindful of the stakes involved; entrepreneurial leaders with vision, a commitment to community and financial wherewithal; new media platforms and technologies revolutionizing the means and cost of production; and every day, more and more signs of what is possible journalistically, particularly with the new social networking connectivity of the Web and related, constantly improving technologies.

Joseph Pulitzer once said, “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

All they need is a public-spirited, trustworthy place to work.

The Center for Public Intergrity has now added them up.  There were 935 lies from high-ranking Bush officials.  All of them designed to convince us to invade Iraq for no good reason.  Here’s a summary:

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

I’m glad that someone finally starting raising probing questions regarding this compelling topic of LOL.

Here’s the announcement by Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut, that the “influential” Mr. Rove will inspire the class of ‘08 with his words at this year’s graduation. 

Is everyone at the school happy with that announcement?   Not at all, as Marty Kaplan explains.  

Today, I find myself wondering how many more bars of soap I will buy before I die.  How many more bars of soap will I buy ever?  What brought this on?

I recently went to Costco.  I needed soap and Costco sells big packs of soap at a good price.  Therefore, I bought a pack of 16-bars of soap. 

It is going to take a lot of time to work through 16 bars of soap.  I live with three other people (two of them are tiny).  To properly do the calculation, I would need to know how long a bar of soap lasts.  One month? Two months?  Whatever the exact answer is, the disarming thing is that it’s going to be many months before my household will need to buy any more soap.  It might be a year or two.  Assuming that each bar of soap lasts one month and that I have about 400 months to live, simple math shows that I’ll only need to buy 25 more packs of soap. Ever.

I don’t often consciously think about the amount of time I have left on the planet, but I’m aware of it.  I suspect that this thought drives me along and encourages me to try to get more out of each day.  Not that this type of motivator is always good or healthy, however.  That kind of “clock is running down” thinking can backfire and lead to a semi-desperate method of trying to get things done.  Writing the previous sentence reminded me of a well-known quote by race car driver Mario Andretti: “If everything’s under control, you’re going too slow.”

At 51-years of age, I have been fortunate to have lived a long interesting life.  I crave more, however, just like many other people in the middle of their lives.  I don’t want to be thinking that I will only travel to San Francisco one or two more times, ever.  I don’t want to consider that I might only need to buy three or four more wallets before I’m dead.  Or that I might’ve already bought my last paper dictionary.  Thinking about these things frustrates me.  Maybe it’s because thinking in this way makes life too much about me.  I’m certainly not the only one on this planet, so I need to be careful to not keep thinking about me.  Not that I dislike myself.  “We” to along quite well.  It’s just that there’s so many other people out there, I don’t want to overlook that I’m only one tiny part of a much larger whole. I’m part of a society that will continue on for a long time long after I’m dead. This is the way Mother Nature (that amoral lass) has set it all up.  Further, I doubt that Earth is the only planet in the universe with sentient beings.  I might be a whole lot less of what is important than I ever dreamed.

And it’s not only a matter of sharing a universe with other people who currently exist.  My life is necessarily also about people who are about to be born and those who will be born in 50 more years.

So I need to stop thinking about the existential relevance of big packs of soap from Costco.  Those thoughts are, at bottom, narcissistic.  Thinking that the earth somehow needs my living carcass in order to get by is absurd.  This wacky thought about my alleged indispensability reminds me of another quote, this one by Charles de Gaulle: “The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.”

This thought about my indispensability is as absurd as the many religions that encourage believers to think that the Creator of the universe takes time out from His caretaking regarding the entire universe to fret about them.  Those zany religious people, who might quit their religions if it weren’t for the fact that their religions offer a big something for them. 

We could think a lot about ourselves and our frail mortal bodies. Whether the excuse is soap or the hope of heaven, though, we’ve got to stop thinking this way before life completely passes us by.

More cartoons from around the world.   Note:  DI is proud to support these artists through our subscription through Cagle Cartoons.  All cartoons are reprinted with full permission.

Contaminación fatal col
Arcadio Esquivel, La Prensa, Panama

Metamorphosis
Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City

Two Iraqi Children
Emad Hajjaj, Jordan

If you’ve ever had this thought that intelligent people never believe things they can’t prove, consider that some of the world’s sharpest and most skeptical minds have confessed in writing that they too believe things that they can’t prove.  You can read all about it in the 2005 Annual Question at Edge.org.  The question:  “What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?”

Here are a few “confessions” from some many people whose works I have read and admired.  What follows are quoted excerpts from each of the short essays mentioned:

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY (economist and author): I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance—so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others’ lives.

STEPHEN KOSSLYN  (Psychologist):  Your mind may arise not simply from your own brain, but in part from the brains of other people.  Compare with this article about Andy Clark’s concept of the extended self.

SUSAN BLACKMORE (Psychologist): It is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will. As Samuel Johnson said “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it.”

W. DANIEL HILLIS (Physicist, Computer Scientist): I know that it sounds corny, but I believe that people are getting better. In other words, I believe in moral progress. It is not a steady progress, but there is a long-term trend in the right direction—a two steps forward, one step back kind of progress.

ROBERT R. PROVINE (Psychologist and Neuroscientist): Human Behavior is Unconsciously Controlled. Until proven otherwise, why not assume that consciousness does not play a role in human behavior?

STEWART KAUFFMAN (Biologist, Santa Fe Institute): Is there a fourth law of thermodynamics, or some cousin of it, concerning self constructing non equilibrium systems such as biospheres anywhere in the cosmos?

SCOTT ATRAN (Anthropologist): There is no God that has existence apart from people’s thoughts of God.

JOSEPH LEDOUX (Neuroscientist): I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I, nor anyone else, has been able to prove it.

DANIEL C. DENNETT (Philosopher): I believe, but cannot yet prove, that acquiring a human language (an oral or sign language) is a necessary precondition for consciousness.

RANDOLPH NESSE, M.D. (Psychiatrist & Coauthor, Why We Get Sick): I can’t prove it, but I am pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can’t prove. I am dead serious about this. People who are sometimes consumed by false beliefs do better than those who insist on evidence before they believe and act.

MARGARET WERTHEIM (Science writer and Commentator): We all believe in something and science itself is premised on a whole set of beliefs. Above all, science is founded on the belief that things are comprehensible and that by the ingenuity of our minds and the probing of ever more subtle instruments we will ultimately come to know It All. But is the All inherently knowable? I believe, though I cannot prove it, that there will always be things we do not know—large things, small things, interesting things and important things.

I’m going to be using this set of essays by scientists and skeptics, someday, as a springboard for (what I feel is) an important point about human beliefs and human relationships:  All of us, even the highly articulate skeptics among us, act upon beliefs we cannot prove.

Rest assured that I won’t be making a claim that all unproved beliefs are equal.  Nonetheless, the above essays seems to serve as a good starting point for discussing the wideness of the intellectual chasm between (non-fundamentalist) Believers and non-believers. I suspect that once we exclude fundamentalists from the conversation, that chasm is not quite as wide as it is often portrayed to be by skeptics.  More to come, someday . . .

We’re barely teaching science at grade schools in the Bay area.  Here are the findings of an extensive October 2007 study done by UC Berkeley.  You can read an article on this study at the website of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Here are the main findings of the study:

– 80 percent of teachers say they spend less than an hour each week teaching science.

– 16 percent of the elementary teachers say they teach no science at all.

– Ten times as many teachers say they feel unprepared to teach science than feel unprepared to teach math or reading.

– Fewer than half of Bay Area fifth-graders scored at grade level or above on last spring’s California Standards Test in science.

Here’s a well-conceived website. Straight-forward and fun.

You will be given 20 short video clips of people smiling. Are they genuine smiles or fake smiles? After you make your picks (this will take about 5 minutes), this BBC site will reveal the correct answers and give you some genuine pointers for determining whether smiles are genuine or fake.

I got 13 out of 20 correct, though I had little confidence that I was doing any better than I would had I merely flipped a coin.

As some of you may know, bloggers like us are destroying “our economy, our culture, and our values.” At least according to one Andrew Keen, who also says we are “betraying Judeo-Christian ethics,” but we knew that already.

The Knackered Hack has an interesting response to Mr. Keen, recalling a time not so long ago, in a country that no longer exists:

…Keen’s attack on the amateur and self-published is, in my view, a little bit Stalinistic.

I’d like to contrast the world he defends, where what we watch, hear and experience should be mediated by professionals, with one still in the recent memory where to self-publish was a political and democratic act and a gesture of defiance.

Samizdat, (Russian for self-publishing) was the process whereby some of the most important literary and politicial texts of the Soviet era were preserved and circulated. Each recipient of one of these precious, dangerous texts would make additional copies, either handwritten or typed with carbon paper, and pass them on.

Later, when cassette tape players became available, another culture of magnitizdat grew up as a clandestine distribution network for singers like Vladimir Vysotsky, whose material was too edgy for the official state recording company.
Which brings us (again following the lead of the Knackered Hack) to Viktor Tsoy of the Russian band Kino, the most famous rock star you’ve probably never heard of, and certainly the only internationally famous rock star who never gave up his day job (as a boiler operator in an apartment building; you can see him at it here.)

The Knackered Hack writes:

Tsoy and Kino are noteworthy for a number of reasons in the history of 20th century culture, and arguably much more iconic than all those indie bands that we neurotic boy-outsiders modelled ourselves after in our youths — those that were invariably selling out while pretending not to.

(Aside: The part about neurotic boy-outsiders resonates with me, as a former girl outsider. I distinctly remember buying my first Talking Heads album - More Songs About Buildings and Food - at a record store in the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska - about the most uncool place imaginable to buy such a record, now mostly known as the scene of a shooting rampage.
The record store clerk was impressed with my choice, I remember, and flirted with me. This was the first hint I had that a certain taste in music might be a possible key to success with really existing boys, as opposed to the ideal boy of my dreams, who hung out at CBGB’s and generally lived in a realm of mythic coolness beyond my reach.
Aside within aside: My record collection was later confiscated by my parents - the concept of a band named the Sex Pistols was just too much for them. If you want to get a picture of what’s it like to believe that rock and roll can save your mortal soul, while living with parents who believe only Jesus can save souls and that the electric guitar is the Devil’s invention, think Lane and Mrs. Kim on the Gilmour Girls, but without the fixation on health food. )

Back to Viktor Tsoy. Tsoy was born in 1962; his mother was Russian, his father Korean. The years of his musical career, from the time he started writing songs at seventeen, to his tragic death in 1990, coincide with a momentous period in Russian history. In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan; 12 years later the Soviet Union collapsed. (Something to think about, Bush & co.) (more…)

Last night I saw The Da Vinci Code for the first time.  I had read the first chapter of the book some time ago and frankly it so did not capture my imagination that I haven’t picked it up since.  Years before, I’d read Holy Blood Holy Grail, the book upon which most of Brown’s novel seems based, although the ideas in both have been around for a long, long time.

What did I think of the movie?  It was entertaining.  It moved well.  One might say it is almost (almost, not quite) a Thinking Person’s Indiana Jones.  The photography is gorgeous, the settings cool, and I am never disappointed by Ron Howard’s direction.  Tom Hanks character seems a bit too restrained at times, but this is a minor quibble.

I am frankly impressed that they had the nerve to follow the argument all the way through.  The whole notion of Jesus’ sex life drives many people into spasms of irrational anxiety and vehement denunciation.  It is not just that the early church—from the time of Constantine on—exhibited a profound and evolving misogyny, but that the very idea of sexual intercourse itself elicits a kind of systemic, reflexive revulsion I find baffling to say the least.  I mean, if it were only the subjugation of women at issue, then the notion that Jesus might have used them like kleenexes (much as most charismatic cult leaders have done and continue to do) should raise no passions.

No, it is beyond that.  It is a rejection of sex as a valid exercise between men and women.  Jesus and the Apostles become not just the ultimate He-Man Woman Haters Club, but a paradigm for an asceticism echoed down through time as some sort of ideal state for the true christian.

It falls apart, though, in the subsequent perversion of the Ideal in the very subjugation and profound misogyny that Jesus himself seems to have had no time or patience for.  Later generations of church leaders found that in order to reject sex, they had to demonize the very thing that kept pulling them away from that Ideal—the desirability of women.

(I’m speaking here in terms of heterosexuality, but the same applies to all forms of sexual intimacy.  If it was sinful for a man to lust after a woman, at least such lust was discussable, while homosexual lust brooked no dialogue whatsoever, just condemnation.)

The difficulty of this part of the standard operating procedure of christianity appears unique among the other ideals sought—honesty, humility, generosity, forgiveness.  Frankly, none of them are as difficult to achieve and live by as chastity.

The fact that sexual love can be so magnificent, so transcendent, so Other Worldly makes me wonder—has always made me wonder—if this were even an issue for Jesus.  I seriously doubt it was.  I seriously doubt it was part of his ethic.  He seems to have regularly chastised his disciples for being “boys” when it came to letting the women in as equals.  Doubtless there was a lot of competition among the Twelve for Jesus’s attention and approbation, and doubtless—because of the persistence of the aesthetic within Roman, Greek, and Hebrew cultures—there was more than a little resistance to letting women in on anything the boys did, so it would be natural, while the male competition was going on, to resent even more the intrusion of—ugh—females!

Like all oppression, misogyny on the systemic level is a control device.  The church learned early that it could control its followers best by instilling a constant state of anxiety over sin, by making them all feel guilty and requiring expiation through the intervention of priests.  If they could make you feel guilty during your most private and intimate moments, boy they had you.

Did they do this consciously?  Some probably knew very well what they were doing.  Most just followed orders.  They revered hermits and ascetics, set them up as standards—like St. Jerome, who castrated himself rather than be distracted by lust.  After a time, it becomes entrenched, and the cult of chastity becomes self-perpetuating.  It is always a mistake to think that psychological tyranny is a new thing, invented by the Bolsheviks, or that Back Then people weren’t good at it.  Nonsense.  Modern dictators study Caesar for more than mere military advice.

But was it based on Jesus’s teachings?  Likely not.  He was very much about freedom, about getting out from under the shadow of sin, about finding truth, and about people being equal.  The idea that he would somehow have found women lesser beings is not borne out in the texts, either canonical or apocryphal.

The idea that he was married is hardly the Big Deal the church makes of it.  All it would mean is that he lived life fully as a human being, eating, sleeping, working, talking…loving, in all the ways humans have of loving.  To claim, as the church does, that he was made human in order to live as us so that when he died he could die as one of us is undermined if you take away one of the most basic and powerful and intimate of human experiences.  All the rest of that list is barely more than survival.

I’ll leave the examination of why the decision was taken to subjugate women in the church to others.  It’s a lengthy topic.  Suffice it to say that they did and we’re paying the price of ridding ourselves of that condition, and have been for some time.

What interested me in the ideas behind The Da Vinci Code and it source material is the notion that the revelation of such a fact would overturn the church.  People are gullible, but stubborn.  It would do no such thing.  People would fight and cling to their faith and reject the new fact, just as they reject anything else, true or otherwise, that threatens them where they pin their hopes.  I see atheists all the time hoping for the day religion disappears (hoping, of which most faiths draw sustenance, hence an ironic condition for one who wishes faith to disappear) and thinking that this or that piece of science might dispel as if by magic the blindness of those who see the world otherwise.  Never happens.  Never will.

At best, people adapt and modify the new facts to fit with the old framework, and over time the whole thing gradually morphs into something new, even while appearing to be the same old schtick.

Therefore, I see the idea of the Priory of Scion not as a secret organization designed to guard a Great Secret until the time is right to reveal it, but as another church that has a different kind of icon at its center—a human one, but nevertheless just as potent a symbol as any other.  The bitterness of Ian McKellen’s character that when the first millennium rolled around and the Priory failed to reveal the heir misses the point.  They didn’t reveal the heir (fictionally, mind you) because it would have gotten them all killed, including the heir.  But more importantly, they would have lost their icon.  Their center.  They changed, became like the thing they sought to replace, and simply continued on, worshiping in their own idiosyncratic way.

I quite enjoyed the whole scene with The Last Supper.  Absurd in many ways, though.  While I liked the notion that the person on Jesus’s right is, in fact, Mary, it is a problematic conjecture.  The original was painted on a wall in a mess hall—the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan.  It did not fare well.  Even in 1556, one commentator described it as ‘a muddle of blots.’  It has been restored more often than any other painting by Da Vinci.  The church itself was hit by a bomb in 1943 and rubble covered the painting.  The current version is the nth restoration and no doubt a lot of it is guesswork.  It is not the only Last Supper with a beardless youth at Jesus’s side, but many have pointedly identified this person as John, his brother (another point of contention among those who find the idea that his mother had sex with Joseph offensive).  If Da Vinci had been so bold as to paint a woman, I think there would have been public controversy at the time.  But who can say?  It’s as concrete as any other aspect of this particular issue.

I think we are best left to the long and slow process of just growing up when it comes to this issue.  The supernatural elements of the church have less and less hold on more and more people.  The essential points of Jesus’s teachings do not require his deification or the intercession of divinity—except, perhaps, the divinity we ourselves possess simply as conscious beings capable of greatness.  Capable of wholeness.  Capable, finally, of love.

That is the conclusion of this article by Lakshmi Chaudhry, published by In These Times:

But where “lad lit” authors disguise the dumbing-down of adult masculinity with witty prose, advertising executives are less subtle. Commercials for cell phones, fast food, beer and deodorants offer up an infantilized version of masculinity that has become ubiquitous since the rise of “lad” culture in the ’90s. These grown men act like boys—and are richly rewarded for it.

In his upcoming book, Guyland, Sociologist Michael Kimmel argues that it is not good business for men to grow up:

To be grown up is to be settled, comfortable, stable, responsible, and secure,” Kimmel says. “Those are bad conditions for advertising, which depends on our sense of insecurity, anxiety, and incompleteness.” . . . A stoic John Wayne has been replaced by the “metrosexual,” a man who is all about self-indulgence and defined almost entirely by his wallet. At the beauty salon, designer boutique or exclusive health club, a metrosexual spends, therefore he is.