God 2.0

In search of @realGod

I once had a part time job over the Christmas season working in a convenience store in a strip mall in New Jersey. The convenience store sold greeting cards and small gift items, so it did a modest Christmas business, but, even in December, its bread-and-butter was the unhealthy stuff: candy, pop,¹ cigarettes, lottery tickets, and newspapers.

The owner was quite eccentric and all sorts of oddities had been added to the inventory over the years and there in inventory over the years they mostly remained. In the section at the back of the store marked Gifts, you might discover, behind a half dozen extravagant wrought iron curtain stays, a box of toy guns with a spring mechanism that sent flying saucers with lights blinking spinning toward a target, and next to that might be an assortment of clocks with the numbers made out of rope. And so on.

Few customers ever ventured past the cash register, which was near the front door ensconced in a large rectangular island formed by display cases set end-to-end. The display cases, though illuminated, could barely keep up the pretense they were displaying anything at all. Really, they were what new merchandise was crammed into while waiting for shelf space to open up in Gifts.

Late one afternoon, just before Christmas, a little kid, about six years old, came into the store. He walked up to the counter and said he was looking for a Christmas present for his mother. Okay, well, back there in Gifts you’ll find chaos, and up here in these display cases is where we keep the bedlam.

The little boy opted for the display cases for being on his eye-level. He made his way all the way around the island to the very first one. Then, beginning on the top shelf on the left, he inspected each item there. When he reached the end of the shelf, he dropped down to the second shelf and, again beginning on the left, he inspected each item in its turn. Then down to the third shelf. When he finished that one he moved on to the next display case and repeated the process.

And just so, with great seriousness, he slowly made his way around the island. The owner and I were getting a kick out of watching him—so intently focused on his task. Every single item, carefully considered, judged unsuitable as a gift for his mother, and rejected.

Finally, the boy arrived at the last display case and, surprisingly, still hadn’t found anything. For the last time, he repeated the process. He inspected all the items on the first shelf, then the second, and then the third, and when he reached the end of the third shelf—and I’m not even making this up—there, in the back corner, the very last item on the very last shelf of the very last display case, was his mother’s gift.

I opened the back of the case and retrieved the small blue box he indicated. The lid was open in order to display the contents: a giant piece of costume jewelry—an extremely large, extremely fake diamond ring. I blew the dust off of it and handed it to him. The ring was by far the most hideous and garish thing in the store.

The boy took the ring and held it up and the dreary fluorescence of the shop’s commercial strip mall lighting was transformed inside that magical piece of glass into a splendor of shimmering iridescence. He was awestruck. The ring was by far the most beautiful and wondrous thing in the store.

It was the perfect gift for his mother.

The boy asked how much it was.

I checked the yellowed tag hanging off the side of the box. Eight dollars, I said.

His face fell. Oh, he said dejectedly. I only have five dollars.

Well, I said, looking over at the owner, who nodded approval, we are having a special sale today on this ring. The final price with tax and everything is exactly five dollars.

Really? he raised his head and his eyes lit back up. He said he wanted to buy it, so I rang up the sale and he excitedly dashed out the door with the Christmas present for his mother. You know he couldn’t wait for Christmas.

Some mother in the area would be getting a priceless gift that Christmas. She would know exactly why her son had purchased that ring for her. She would give her son a kiss and a hug and agree that, yes, this had to be the most beautiful ring in the whole world. And way too beautiful ever to be seen in public. She would put it in a drawer and, for the rest of her life, every time her glance fell on that faded blue box, her heart would give a little smile.

That’s what should have happened. Here’s what actually happened.

A few minutes after the kid left, the front door flew open and the kid reentered the store, this time being pulled along by his father, who stormed up to the counter, red-faced with fury. How dare you, he hissed at the owner. How dare you take advantage of a little kid like this to sell him this trash. He slammed the trash down on the counter. Give him his money back right now.

As the owner was returning the money, I looked at the little boy. If you know what it looks like when a human being is crushed, you know what I saw. His head was down and he was hanging back, trying to hide his shame behind his father’s coat. There was utter humiliation. There was confusion. How had he failed so badly picking his mother’s gift when he’d been so careful? And there was shock. How had something so wonderful blown up in his face like that?

Now and then, I think about the episode with that little boy and wonder how his life went after he and his father left the store that day. I wonder whether he eventually had children of his own, and did he teach them, too, that the most important thing about showing someone you love them is making sure you are getting good value for your dollar?

A guy from Nebraska once told me he hadn’t spoken to his son in 15 years. I asked him why not and he told me about some incident involving the purchase or sale of an automobile during which his son hadn’t followed his father’s advice and it had cost the son 150 dollars. Imagine being so enraged by that that you would block your own son out of your life.

If we choose the gods we serve, then whom do these two men, blind to everything except the dollar, serve? Money? Perhaps so, in which case they are idolators. But, I think it is worse than that.

When I taught English in China, the country was just emerging from its hora with Marx and all my students wanted to be da kuan—stupid rich.

Why? I’d ask. Why do you want to be rich?

Why do we want to be rich? What kind of question is that? Everyone knows it is good to be rich. But, I’d press the question and they would start to give answers—the same answers you’d get from American students: to travel, to give my children a better life, to do good in the world.

Then I’d ask how hard they were willing to work to achieve their financial goals? 40 hours per week? Oh, sure, yes, of course. How about 60 hours per week? Yes, but less enthusiastically. 80? Well, that might be a bit much, they’d allow. And for how many years? 40? 60? 80? Are you willing to work so hard for so long in order to be rich that, by the time you are rich enough to travel, you’ll be too old and too exhausted to enjoy it? You’ll give your kids a better life, but without you in it? You’ll do good in a world about which you’ll know nothing except how to squeeze profit out of it?

If I pressed them long enough, eventually it would emerge that the real reason my students wanted to be rich was the same as everybody else’s in the world. They wanted to be rich so that they could look down on others and prevent others from looking down on them. That was it. Status. It wasn’t the money. It was the esteem.

An American poet named Robinson Jeffers (1887-1961) explained the object of our worship like this:

I saw a vision of us move in the dark: all that we did or dreamed of

Regarded each other, the man pursued the woman, the woman clung to the man, warriors and kings

Strained at each other in the darkness, all loved or fought inward, each one of the lost people

Sought the eyes of another that another should praise him; sought never his own but another's; the net of desire

Had every nerve drawn to the center, so that they writhed like a full draught of fishes, all matted

In the one mesh; when they look backward they see only a man standing at the beginning,

Or forward, a man at the end; or if upward, men in the shining bitter sky striding and feasting,

Whom you call Gods . . .

The Tower of Tragedy
by Robinson Jeffers²

When the fathers mentioned above contemplate the divine (and we all do, one way or another), what image do they hold up in their minds? It isn’t the image of a dollar bill. It’s the image of themselves striding and feasting above an admiring world. It’s the image of themselves as God. They aren’t idolators, they are blasphemers.

If I were to ask either of those two fathers whether they raised successful sons, they would reply from the only frame of reference they know: the extent to which their sons are up there in the shining bitter sky striding and feasting. Yes, one might reply. Look, that’s him over there. Look at him stride and feast. He is a great success. Look at how much more crap he possesses than those around him.

No, no, I would laugh, I wasn’t asking whether you had raised a successful crap-gatherer. I was asking whether you had raised a successful son—a successful human. Did you send him out into the world able to recognize true love? Did he know what to look for and why? Did he understand the divine nature of the two-shall-become-one thing? Was he a good husband? A good father? Did his wife know he was on her side, no matter what? That he would never lie to her? Did he know the same thing about her? Was he able to recognize the potential for a true friendship when the opportunity arose? Did he have the wisdom to seize it, and the constancy to maintain it? Did he show courage in mind, body, and spirit, and kindness in his heart? Is he valuable to his family and people first, his community and country second, and humanity third?

Well, I don’t know about all that, says Dad. We haven’t spoken since he switched his major his sophomore year from Money-making to Costume Jewelry Poetica.

Few things expose the degradation and impotence of our religion more than the mass unraveling of the family, the strength and permanence of which it is the primary job of religion to nurture, refine, and elevate.

In Protocol 10, written some 125 years ago, the Learned Elders of Zion state, “Having in this way [through the introduction of subversive ideas] inspired everybody with the thought of his own importance [made them into isolated blasphemers], we will break down the influence of family life among the Gentiles, and its educational importance.” As

Good Citizen

correctly put it recently, we have moved “from domestic strength to individual desires.”

So while we have been left flailing about, isolated and serving as our own deities, the Jews have committed another kind of blasphemy, but one that explains their power: Jews have made Jews their god. They are Jehovah. The Chosen People chose themselves.

In a world of deities no stronger than any one individual, the Jews’ group deity will have its way—a calamity for the world given the nature of Jehovah. There is only one group of humans I am aware of that approaches the Jewish level of group worship—the Chinese. The story of the 21st Century will likely be the story of the struggle between Jehovah and Confucius. Neither can allow the other supremacy. Right now, my money is on Jehovah, as, already, they are corrupting the ruling class of the Chinese while the Chinese are not corrupting the ruling class—the priestly class—of the Jews. But, we shall see.

Is there a way forward for the rest of us? A way to escape the tyranny of Jehovah? Yes, but only if we can find a way to worship a more powerful god than Jehovah. How can we find this god? Perhaps the poet can point the way.

Robinson Jeffers, again:

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—god when he walked on earth.

Jeffers refers frequently to “the wild god of the world” in his poetry, and in another post I can start there, but a god should be creative, universal, eternal, and sublime. A god must be accessible through the human condition—i.e., real—but must not be humans themselves.

Thoughts?

Rainbow Pill

,

Karl

,

Good Citizen

1. Or, “soda,” as they say (incorrectly) in NJ

2. I was introduced to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers through the influential 1978 book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, by French philosopher, Rene Girard. Girard used these lines as the epigraph for his book. I don’t think about Rene Girard much anymore, but I think about Robinson Jeffers, an American who died in 1961, a lot.