All posts by Lars Walker

Religion

The 50% solution

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I nearly hit a deer tonight, while driving home from work.

It should be noted that my commute is not a rural one. It’s not even outer-ring suburb country, with lots of big, wooded lots. I drive from one inner-ring suburb to another inner-ring suburb, with one or two inner-ring suburbs in between. This deer jumped from behind a wooden fence at the edge of a tiny little park along 42nd Ave. in New Hope. Fortunately, my tiger-like reflexes allowed me to jam on the brakes before I hit it, and the driver behind me’s tiger-like reflexes allowed him to avoid rear-ending me.

I think maybe we need to re-think this whole business about restricting deer hunting to a limited season. I say we’ve got plenty of deer, and people who need cheap protein should be able to shoot ‘em any time they like.

I hasten to add that I don’t think we should be allowed to take our hunting rifles to urban deer, such as the one who touched my life this afternoon. Those stray bullets are made of a toxic substance, you know, and might be bad for the environment.

We might give bowhunters a shot, at them, though.

Speaking of mayhem (and that’s an unusually labored transition, even for me) I have a thought about mysteries and solutions tonight.

I’ve gotten into the habit of watching CBS’s “48 Hours Mystery,” which runs on Saturday nights, often after a re-run of “CSI.” The juxtaposition of the two shows intrigues me, mostly because of the differences between the fictional mysteries and the real ones.

What strikes me about the real mysteries covered on “48 Hours Mystery” is that they generally lack a really satisfactory resolution. In a fictional mystery, you almost always end with a solid solution to the problem. The detective brings out his damning evidence, and the accused can do nothing but hang his head and say, “Yes, I did it and I’m glad. She made my life a living heck” (or something equivalent).

But in real life, to judge from “48 Hours,” that scene almost never happens. The detectives gather evidence that they consider conclusive, and they arrest the suspect, who generally says nothing except to ask to call his lawyer. As the court proceedings go on, every piece of evidence is contested by the defense, and plausible explanations are put forward. The evidence against the accused may be strong, but it’s almost never absolutely, 100% definitive.

So in the end, the jury is left with a judgment call. Has the prosecution proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? In real life, it seems there’s always some room for doubt. Often it comes down in part to a subjective impression—“I just didn’t trust him.” “He gave me the creeps.” And you’re always left with a nagging doubt. “Maybe we condemned an innocent man.” Or, “Maybe we let a guilty man loose to kill again.”

You know what? That’s life. It’s very, very rare that you get to make a choice where you have absolute, 100% proof of the right way to go. (If you did, would it really be a choice?)

I think that goes for matters of faith too. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think truth is relative, or that the Bible isn’t God’s revealed truth.

But those who look for 100% certainty—an argument that will answer all objections and silence all doubts—will hover forever at the crossroads.

Choices—including the choice to believe—ultimately come down to a conviction in one’s soul; “the testimony of the Holy Spirit.” Perhaps that’s another name for what’s theologically called Election.

And even then, don’t expect all doubts to disappear. They won’t.

We see through a glass, darkly.

Writing

Small minds talk about people. Teeny-weeny minds talk about themselves.

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Sent a new column to The American Spectator Online last night. I’d thought the piece a lost effort, an orphan, but it was saved, oddly enough, by a prominent Democrat.

I’d written this timely column in response to a news story with Christian implications which raised a fair stink last month. But by the time I got it into something resembling a publishable form, the editor (and with him the world) had moved on to new and better things.

That’s why I don’t generally do topical columns. I have the greatest respect for those people who can watch a new story developing on CNN, do quick research on the net, and have a polished opinion ready the following morning.

Me, I generally don’t even know what I think for the first couple days. And if I come up with some kind of encephalogram worth transcribing, I’ve got to

A) Compose a first draft.

B) Revise and cut.

C) Revise and cut some more.

D) Put the thing away for a month to get some emotional distance on it.

E) Forget all about it.

F) Discover it while looking for something else on my hard drive.

G) Read it over, appreciating once again how really bush league my prose is.

H) Give it another revision.

I) Put it away again.

J) Remember it once more, when I notice how low my checkbook balance has fallen.

K) Revise it again. Realize it’s hopeless.

L) Send it off anyway, on the assumption that, since I thought it was good in the first place, I must be no judge of quality.

M) Wait for publication, or rejection, whichever comes first.

N) Overeat.

That’s why I prefer to do leisurely, trivial columns on subjects like “Why the End of Analog TV Portends the Demise of Civilization as We Know It.”

In any case, the Democrat (who I’m not going to name here, since I want it to be a surprise when and if the thing gets published) raised the same issue (or an issue close enough to enable me to add it in, like an Almost-Invisible Hair Weave) the other day. I re-wrote the article and sent it off.

Now, time to overeat.

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Nordic news for you

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It happened today. The Devil’s Confetti. The Pillow Fight Aftermath From H*ll.

It snowed.

Not much. Just for a few minutes. But I looked out the window and the white stuff was whirling in a vortex of low pressure in the parking lot. If this were a zombie movie, this would be the scene where the chicken is found nailed to the door, sending the symbolic message, “We know where you live, and your feeble science has no power to save you from our malice.”

Every year that passes, the summer seems shorter.

Fortunately, the winters seem shorter too.

But not as short as the summers.

Thanks to Phil for forwarding the news to me: The Chicago Viking Ship, for which I agitated in this space a while back, has won a preservation grant, thanks in part to your votes. The site is a little vague as to exactly how much money will be forked over, but the ship project is in the top tier.

I don’t often see good news from Denmark, but I’m happy to report that a center-right coalition won the parliamentary elections there Tuesday. “Center-right” doesn’t mean quite the same thing in Denmark as it does in America, but it’s still good news, from my slanted perspective.

I’ve largely written off Europe. I’ve come to terms with the fact that the old Europe, the one we loved from the movies, is gone forever. But perhaps a few things can be saved. Perhaps it won’t become an Islamic continent. Perhaps the Europeans are beginning to notice that the wonderful new world they’ve been promised doesn’t match the reality developing around them. “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” after all, is a Danish story.

What they really need, in my opinion, is a return to Christ. But, as the Lord Himself noted, it’s harder for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom. Prosperity, it seems to me, is Europe’s big problem.

America’s too.

Reviews

The C.M.E.P.

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I enjoyed trashing Steve Thayer’s novel, The Wheat Field, so much last night that I thought I’d kick it a little more tonight.

One thing I started wondering as I re-read my review was, “How come Thayer didn’t finish the job?” There was one obvious conservative stereotype he could have included, but for some reason he left it out. Hard to understand, when he used all the others.

I can imagine him having lunch with his publisher. In between the salad and the entrée, the publisher says, “Look, Steve. We need to talk about the obvious omission in this manuscript.”

“Omission? What did I leave out?”

“The C.M.E.P., of course.”

“C.M.E.P.?”

“Yes. The Child-Molesting Evangelical Pastor. Every other novel set in the Midwest that we’ve published this year has included a C.M.E.P. Our readers expect a C.M.E.P. They’re going to be pretty disappointed if you don’t give them a C.M.E.P.”

“Well, gee. I’m not sure how I could make it germane to the plot…”

“Germane, shmermane. You threw in that subplot about the recluse couple. That didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the story.”

“Well, I felt like I needed to include at least two characters with a drop of recognizable humanity in them.”

“Recognizable humanity? What are you talking about? You’re writing about the Midwest. There’s no recognizable humanity in the Midwest. All those two-parent homes, people going to church. Gives me the willies. You’ve got to put something in there to show how oppressive traditional families are.”

“On top of the C.M.E.P.?”

“Put ‘em together. Make the abusive father a preacher. Our readers’ll eat it up.”

“You want a second irrelevant subplot? Isn’t the plot enough of a mess already?”

“OK. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll let it go for this book, but in the next one you’ve got to give us at least two C.M.E.P.s. Think you can do that?”

“Yeah, I’m sure I can do that.”

“Put Bush in too. Figure out a way to blame it all on Bush.”



(Thayer mutters to himself) “Maybe I can blame Bush for my whole writing career.”

Reviews

The Wheat Field, by Stephen Thayer

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I require a rare, peculiar combination of factors in order to be able write a negative review. The book can’t be just bad. If it’s just bad, I’ll dump it in the re-sell bag or return it to the library. It’s got to be good enough to keep me wanting to read it, with the same sort of fascination that prevents a person from turning his eyes away from a train wreck.

The Wheat Field finds that sweet spot. It was fairly well written (though not as well, I think, as the review blurbs suggested). I opted not to give up on it even when it offended me, not because I was compelled by the narrative, but because I wanted to see whether the author was actually going to take the story where I figured it was going, and actually say what I figured he would say.

Well, it did and he said it.

The narrator and main character is Deputy Pennington (I don’t think we’re ever told his first name), a law officer in Kickapoo Falls, Wisconsin, in the beautiful Dells country, a location the author uses effectively in some action scenes. Pennington, speaking in the present as an old man reminiscing on his law enforcement career back in 1960, tells how he was called one beautiful summer’s day to a farmer’s wheat field, where two naked people, murdered with a shotgun, had been found in a flattened crop circle

I think Thayer means us to like Detective Pennington. I think we’re supposed to like him because he’s so honest (he admits to being a voyeur, and murdering more than one criminal he couldn’t touch through legal means. In his first scene he takes pleasure in threatening the farmer who discovered the bodies because a) he’s short, b) he didn’t serve in the war, and c) he’s a Republican).

Oh yes, Pennington is a Democrat in a Republican county, as well as a Catholic in a Protestant community. I think we’re supposed to like him for that too. Especially when he reminds us how really evil the Republicans are.

There’s nothing so horrendous, you see, that the Republicans won’t do it. While hypocritically talking about morality, the Republicans practice group sex, make pornographic films (even a snuff film), and they’re planning to assassinate presidential candidate John Kennedy. (It’s never entirely clear why they want to kill Kennedy. Maybe it’s that he wants to lower taxes. Or beef up the military. Or get rid of Castro. Or “pay any price, bear any burden” to defend democracy.)

One of the murder victims is identified as Maggie Butler, a woman Pennington grew up with and has been in love with all his life. Her husband, the other victim, was a leader in the local Republican power structure, centered at “The Kickapoo Gunn [sic] Club,” and as Pennington pokes into that den of vipers he faces not only the locked-arm opposition of the party structure, but the suspicion of his own fellow officers. Eventually he is framed for the murder, but gets freed by another policeman (I’m still not sure why), after which he sets off on a trip to Nantucket, Massachusetts, to find the real murderer. At this point the plot rapidly sheds all pretense of plausibility and descends into pure Gothic melodrama.

I saw the big surprise ending a mile away, too.

The writing was good in places, but I thought the dialogue wooden. In one place a young boy, describing a local recluse, calls him “a hideous monster.” Has any American kid used the adjective “hideous” spontaneously since 1919?

Thayer’s earlier books earned glowing reviews from the New York Times (which put him on the bestseller list) and Stephen King, so I think of this book much the same as I think of the recent spate of lame anti-war movies, which anti-war news outlets feel compelled to praise to the skies, just because they push the right lessons. This wasn’t really a very good novel.

No doubt the movie is already in the works.

Reviews

Everglades, by Randy Wayne White

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I’m going to write a piece one of these days about The Static Problem of the Series Hero. The problem is this—the heart of any story is to produce some change in the main character. In its classic form, a story is a drama in which a character employs a series of strategems to overcome a problem, failing time after time until he succeeds at last. The reason he has to go through so many failures and disappointments is because a good story needs to tell how that character learns something and grows. And the solution that involves learning and growing is usually the solution each of us leaves for last.

But series characters make that method difficult or impossible. How many life-changing, existential choices can one character believably make, in one book after another?

The mystery format helps solve (or at least cover over) that problem. Mysteries are generally not stories about transformation through personal change. They’re stories about solving puzzles external to the main character’s personal life. So Sherlock Holmes, for instance, can go on for story after story (long after his author is tired of him), changing little if at all. The faithful reader looks on the detective as a dear old friend. He doesn’t even want him to change. If someone needs to learn something in the story, let it be a secondary character. (Conan Doyle had Dr. Watson fall in love and marry in “The Sign of the Four.” But Watson’s marriage became such a nuisance from a storytelling point of view that Doyle killed her off, in so negligent and confusing a manner that fans argue to this day about how many wives the doctor actually had.)

But there are authors who resist this time-honored mystery formula. One of them (as I’ve said before) is Robert Crais, whose adult adolescent detective Elvis Cole has been growing up before our eyes.

Another is Randy Wayne White, author of the Doc Ford series. As I’ve said before, White manages better than anyone else (anyone I’ve read, at least) to revive the spirit of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee.

But Doc Ford is not McGee. Ford has a darker history, a past career as a top-secret commando and assassin. In the early books, this past served to give the character a textured, somewhat guilty background, and to add credibility to his fighting ability when violence became necessary.

But Everglades appears to have been a pivotal entry in the series (I haven’t read them all). White made the decision in this book to force Ford to change his entire attitude to himself and his past, and to handle his present challenges in a different way.

The story begins when Ford comes home to his stilt house at Dinkin’s Bay Marina, Florida, to find Sally Carmel, a former lover, waiting for him outside. She’s worried and scared. She’s been married to a real estate developer, and he’s disappeared. Supposedly he fell off a boat in the night and was lost at sea, but she suspects it was stage-managed. And she believes someone has been breaking into her house, going through her things. She’s certain someone is following her.

Before his death, her husband had gotten involved with a New Age/Hindu cult leader called Bhagwan Shiva. Shiva’s religion has become extremely successful and profitable, and he’s been investing heavily in Florida real estate, with an eye to partnering with a Seminole tribe to build a casino. Shiva’s religion is extremely “advanced” in its sexual practices, and Sally found that part of it highly traumatic. She separated from her husband, and is now active in a Pentecostal church.

She doesn’t know it, but she’s become a pawn in a very big power game, a game planned by a brilliant man with grandiose plans and no conscience.

The issue of religion looms large in Everglades. As always, Doc’s friend Tomlinson is on hand, often high on pot or booze, spouting New Age “wisdom.” Doc, the narrator, is clear in telling us that he believes in none of it, and yet manages to convey the suggestion that Tomlinson and his psychic friends are actually in touch with legitimate spiritual forces.

This is troubling for the Christian reader.

On the other hand, Sally’s Christianity is treated with respect (although her theology appears a little weak). And a Christian character treated respectfully is something to be thankful for in any popular novel nowadays.

The center of the book, though, is Doc’s personal decision about his life. He starts the story in a bad condition. He’s sleeping badly. He’s drinking too much. He forgets appointments. He’s gotten fat.

His problem, he discovers, is that he’s been fighting his essential nature. Trying to live a quiet life as a marine biologist, working and partying and staying out of trouble, he has been denying his true gifts. If it’s not blasphemous to speak of it in Gene Edward Veith’s terms, he’s been neglecting his Vocation.

But a terrible turn of events shows him that he has a job to do in this world, and that he’ll never be satisfied—and others will suffer—if he neglects it.

The book was published in 2003. Which suggests it was written in 2002.

I wonder if the events of September 11, 2001 didn’t have something to do with Doc Ford’s epiphany.

I found the book very satisfying (with reservations for theological issues and some uncomfortable sexual scenes).

Recommended, as long as you heed the warnings.

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The road to rune

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I don’t think I can avoid it. Lileks noted this morning, on The Buzz, that today is the anniversary of the discovery of the Kensington Runestone in 1898. If anything comes within the parameters of my “beat,” I guess it would be the Runestone.

But I don’t really want to. It’s a subject that can make me no friends.

If you don’t know anything about the stone (which means you’ve never read my novel Wolf Time, and shame on you), it’s a piece of blackish stone, about a yard high (I’ve seen it in Alexandria, Minnesota, several times, and I also drove out to the discovery site once), carved with runes, an alphabet that began among the Germanic peoples in antiquity, flourished in the Viking Age, and actually survived in remote parts of Scandinavia into the 18th Century (if I remember correctly).

It tells the story of a Gothic (Swedish) and Norwegian expedition to America in the 14th Century, and notes that some of the men went out fishing, and came back to camp to find ten of their company “red with blood and dead.”

The stone was found by a Swedish immigrant farmer named Olof Ohman. He exhibited it at the local bank, and it attracted attention from a few American scholars, who rejected it as a fraud. At that point, it seems that Ohman dropped the subject (as well as the stone), turning it over on its face to serve as a step into his cattle barn. In 1907 he sold it for ten bucks to a Norwegian-American student named Hjalmar Holand, and then things started happening.

Holand became a prominent ethnic historian and a major booster of Scandinavian culture in America. For a man like Holand, the runestone constituted proof positive that Scandinavians were not Johnny-come-latelies in this country, but the original discoverers (it was much the same impulse that made Columbus so important to Italian immigrants around the same time). Holand wrote several books about the stone, and was a tireless advocate for its authenticity for the rest of his life.

Scandinavian runologists have pretty consistently rejected the stone as a hoax, and I don’t believe that opinion has changed with time. The argument about the “idiosyncratic” runes included in the inscription goes on to this day, and it goes on at a level far above my head.

A new wrinkle in the argument involves a geological analysis of the stone published in 2000. The author, Scott F. Wolter, is a highly regarded forensic geologist, who has testified as an expert in a number of legal cases. He believes that the inscribed stone was buried in the ground no less than fifty years, which would mean it had to have been carved well before Ohman’s time, and probably before there was white settlement in the neighborhood. Like every other opinion about the stone, Wolter’s has been challenged.

What do I think about the Kensington Runestone? I’ve learned to be cautious when expressing my opinion. I once told a group I spoke to in Moorhead, Minnesota that I didn’t believe in it, and the chairman, who had been very nice to me, replied with some disappointment that his grandfather had been a friend of Ohman’s.

I think Ohman (probably with the help of a friend; there was a deathbed confession by a neighbor who said he was part of the prank) carved the stone with the help of a history book he owned. I don’t think he intended to perpetrate a hoax. I think he was just interested in seeing how people would react (it has been noted by more than one scholar that Ohman never made any serious effort to make money off the thing). Then when it didn’t draw much attention, he set it aside. I think he was surprised by the notoriety that came from Holand’s books, and was afraid at that point to admit he had carved it, concerned he’d be called a liar and a hoaxter. I think the whole thing got out of hand for him, and he didn’t know what to do.

On the other hand, I’ve never seen a strong refutation of the geological analysis.

So my vote is no, but I reserve the right to change my mind.

Next question.

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The sandwich that swims upstream, and more

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I can’t believe it. My side won in the school tax referendum. It seems like a very long time since I voted on the winning side in anything (although it’s not really that long. On the other hand, this is Minnesota, sometimes known as California Northeast).

Now comes the really ugly part—the part where the educational establishment takes its revenge. We know what they’ll do. They’ll do what all hostage-takers do. They’ll say, “We told you not to call the cops, but you had to go and call the cops. Now we’ll have to cut one of the kid’s ears off. We don’t want to cut his ear off. It breaks our hearts, frankly. But you’ve made the choice. It’s out of our hands. You forced us to do this.”

I’m not feeling terribly well tonight. I think I may have a cold. Or perhaps I’m coming down with the flu. I never get flu shots. I prefer the thrill of danger. And let’s face it, even the worst case consequence isn’t that bad. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not really very well gifted for this living business. I’d probably employ my time better in some other form of activity.



News From Norway: According to the November issue of Viking Magazine, the publication of the Sons of Norway, McDonald’s of Norway added a new menu item last August. It’s called the McSalmon, and is a fish filet wrap available “in honey and wasabi” (what the heck is “wasabi?”). At the present time it’s only available in God’s Country, but it may go global if it’s a success.



Here’s an idea I came up with today for a bumper sticker. I give it to you at no charge:



“IF YOU’RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU’RE PROBABLY MINDING YOUR OWN BUSINESS. THANKS FOR THAT.”

Reviews

The Forgotten Man, by Robert Crais

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Today I voted. In my little corner of the republic, we were faced with only two decisions, both of them education related. One was the election of school board members. I voted for none of them, since their bios in the local giveaway newspaper made them all look indistinguishable to me. Margaret Sanger crossed with John Dewey.

The big question was whether we wanted to approve a property tax increase for education. According to our lords and masters, our school district will soon be reduced to teaching the kids in one-room schoolhouses with dirt floors and wooden benches.

Come to think of it, that might not be bad. The kids who went to those one-room schools generally learned to read and do their sums. Our present system can’t make the same boast.

Of course my true reason for voting “No” is my selfishness and bigotry. As a bloated member of the plutocracy, my true fear is that the brilliant plans of the National Educational Association will be brought to fruition. If that should happen, all our children will become geniuses and paragons of postmodern virtue. In short order they will end poverty, cure all diseases, stop global warming, abolish war, and prove scientifically that there is no God. This threatens my vested interests and entrenched power, so I’m fighting a vicious, yet futile, rear guard action against the tide of history.

The Forgotten Man is another Robert Crais novel. It really isn’t my intention to review a string of Crais novels all in a row. If I were following my inclinations alone, I’d be reviewing a string of Stephen Hunter novels all in a row, but just at this point in my life I’m cutting back on book buying. So I’m only reading stuff I can check out of the library or find at Half Price Books. My library carries no Hunter, and I’ve bought everything HPB has by him at this point. So I picked up some Crais, and that’s no form of suffering at all. The more Crais I read, the better I like him.

Once again in this book, detective Elvis Cole is forced to deal with the shadows of his dysfunctional childhood. His mother, who was loving but psychotically delusional, always told him that his father (whose name he’s never known) was a human cannonball in a circus. In flashbacks we see how the young Cole ran away from home time after time, searching carnivals for the right daredevil, without any success.

But now, a possible father has come to him (sort of). An unidentified older man, bizarrely tattooed all over his body with religious pictures, has been murdered in an alley. The policewoman who heard his last words says he told her that he was Elvis Cole’s father, come to Los Angeles to find his son.

Cole has been elevated to public hero status by his last case, in which he rescued the kidnapped son of the woman he loves. But in the aftermath she moved away, deciding (and Cole knows she’s right) that being with him is too dangerous a life for a mother who has a child to protect. Since then Cole has been in a funk. He hasn’t even visited his office.

The one thing that could draw him out, though, is the chance to at last learn the identity of his father. He gets permission from the police to assist in the case. But the man is a ghost. He seems to have no name, no past. All Cole learns at first is that the man made several outcalls to prostitutes.

Not to sleep with them. To pray with them. To pray for forgiveness for sins he wouldn’t name.

The story also offers healthy helpings of familiar supporting characters like Joe Pike, Cole’s Psycho Killer Friend™, and Detective Carol Stark, the heroine of Demolition Angel (Crais fixed her up with an FBI agent at the end of that book, but apparently decided he could make better use of her if he had her shamelessly throwing herself at Cole, so he unattached her again).

I’ve been impressed, as I’ve read the Elvis Cole books, by the way in which Crais has deepened and enriched what started out as a fairly shallow, perpetually adolescent character, the kind of detective who wears Hawaiian shirts and decorates his office with Disney collectibles. But maybe I failed to recognize that this was Crais’ intention from the start. The clock on Cole’s wall is a Pinocchio clock, and the figurine on his desk is Jiminy Cricket. And what is Pinocchio but the puppet who needs to learn moral lessons in order to become a real boy?