The past decade was a time to kill, a time to mourn, a time for war, thus, a time to be silent. But Americans seem to have grown weary of this. Perhaps spurred by Obama’s speech on May 23 in which he echoed James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” or perhaps knowing that some complacency in the American character has allowed the War on Terror to become the longest war in our history, whatever the reason, people are becoming more suspicious of their political leaders and openly expressing concerns about where we have been and where we are headed. I detected this awakening firsthand while doing a tour of Christian churches in Athens, Georgia, over Memorial Day weekend.

At Athens Christian Church, Pastor Eli Harding opened his Sunday sermon with the First Commandment: I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me. After expressing sadness for the loss of life that inevitably happens when people engage in war, he took the opportunity of Memorial Day to caution his congregation against the tendency to romanticize wars and those who fight them: “We must not forget that aggression, enmity and violence, which lie at the heart of all wars, run contrary to our Lord’s Way of meekness, gentleness, and nonviolent love of friends and enemies.” He asked whether any of the young people present were considering joining the military and then asked them to consider the oaths they would have to take if they did.

“Think about it,” he said. “The only person a Christian should promise to obey, one-hundred percent of the time, without question, is not Barack Obama or George Bush, but Jesus Christ.” He urged young people to go on YouTube and listen to the stories of soldiers who “found out the hard way” that they “cannot serve two masters,” listing names of Christians who had become Conscientious Objectors after discovering that what they were told to do in in Iraq and Afghanistan was contrary to dictates of their faith.

Over at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, Fr. Gary White used the holiday as an opportunity to express concern for those veterans who survived their tours of duty but lost their will to live.

“More soldiers have died from suicide than have died fighting in Afghanistan,” he said.

While the media calls the suicide trend “baffling,” Fr. White believes it is no mystery at all: “Human beings are made to love, not to harm. When we live in a way that is contrary to our nature, when we are forced to witness evil and participate in wicked deeds, it leads to sadness, guilt, and a loss of hope.” He said that we need to start doing more for veterans than simply thanking them for their service or prescribing them with anti-depressants. “We need to clear out the spiritual toxins that spread in the polluted atmosphere of war, which is a culture of destruction, enmity and death. We must help them to grieve, to pray, to repent!” He urged Catholic veterans to go to Confession, if they felt the need to, reminding them of God’s unconditional love and limitless mercy.

At Emmanuel Episcopal Church, after expressing sadness for the 6,000 or so American troops that have died in the War on Terror, Rev. John Brown reminded the congregation that the estimated number of deaths in Iraq alone was at least ten times that, probably around 60,000, but likely far greater, somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000. This was the most surprising and controversial sermon of the day.

“Friends, it is civilians that account for the majority of these deaths,” he pointed out. “While we must mourn our losses, we must be careful not to think that the lives of Americans are any more valuable than the lives of people living in other nations.” This elicited a few audible gasps and grunts from the crowd. “We must not be oblivious or casually indifferent to the suffering we have caused!” he said. At that point, about ten families rose to exit the church.

He continued, “How many of you believe that War on Terror is just?” About 75% of the remaining congregation raised their hands. “There are several criteria that must be met, in theory, in order for a Christian to participate in a war. All of you with your hands up: Who can tell me all of the criteria for a Just War according to Christian tradition?” All hands were quickly lowered.

The Reverend proceeded to enlighten his congregation about the Christian Just War theory, explaining the difference between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, and shedding light on particularly problematic areas including “distinction” and “proportionality,” going into great detail with reference to drone warfare.

“It is hard to say with certainty, because our government classifies so much information and operates in such secrecy,” he says, “but it is likely that drones kill between 30 and 50 innocent civilians for every one person deemed a ‘combatant’ or ‘terrorist.’ We must ask if Christians can conscionably participate in this.”

At Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Reverend Stephen P. Uptegrove read John 8:44: “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

The Reverend spoke about the importance of the Christian concern for truth and warned the parishioners not to be deceived: “As the saying goes, the truth is the first casualty of war. Christians must be wise as serpents! There will always be those in political power who wish to manipulate us, because of our strong belief in personal sacrifice, into serving their ends. We must learn to discern fact from propaganda. We must never act out of fear or hatred. When in doubt, we must always return to the words of Christ for failsafe guidance. Doing so remains our only assurance that we will remain objective and critical, and not be misled by those who, out of desire for riches or power, deal in lies.”

The Reverend reminded the congregation that the fruits of the Holy Spirit are: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. He alluded to recent reports about sexual assault and mistreatment of women among military personnel, along with reports of increasing domestic abuse, divorce rates, as well as rampant alcohol and substance abuse.

“You will know them by their fruits,” he said. “A young Christian who is looking for something meaningful to do after graduation may want to consider going overseas as a missionary and spreading the Gospel, instead of trying to spread democracy at the point of a gun, placing himself situations where he will constantly be confronted with the necessity to use intimidation and force against largely defenseless people who, if he weren’t occupying their lands, would never have any inclination, let alone opportunity, to be any kind of threat to him at all.”

But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already: None of this actually happened. There may well be preachers, pastors and priests that go by these names, but I don’t know of them, they don’t work in these churches, nor have I encountered, in the past ten years of going to church on Memorial Day weekend (or any other weekend), religious leaders who say these types of things. The most a Christian can hope for on Memorial Day weekend is a quick prayer “for peace,” followed by a slavish display of obeisance to “the men and women in uniform.” It is for this reason, more than any other, that this country can look forward to exactly what the Obama administration is promising: that the “war” on “terror” will most likely last at least another decade (or two).

The Best of Ellen Finnigan

Last semester, I taught my seventh grade students about narrative structure. They wrote original short stories, which I was reading right around the time of the Newtown shooting. I couldn’t help but see some connections between our class discussions, talk about guns and violence in the media, and their finished work.

“Drama,” I had told them, “comes from conflict, and conflict comes from having two opposing forces: a protagonist and an antagonist.” I had explained to them the four parts of a plot—exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution. (One student would snicker every time I said the word “climax.” Like I said, they are in seventh grade. I started using a different word.)

“Almost every story that has ever been written, since the beginning of time,” I told them, “involves one of four main conflicts: man versus man; man versus society; man versus nature; or man versus self.” We spent six weeks talking about these concepts, during which time they were penning their short stories. “At the peak, the protagonist will either triumph or be defeated. He will get what he wants or he won’t, and the protagonist will be changed, somehow, as a result of his experiences.” As I read their stories, I noticed a trend. The characters in their stories varied, as did the settings, obviously, but the climax was always the same: The protagonist and the antagonist would find themselves in a physical fight. In the boys’ stories, this involved a karate match, a shoot-out, or a war. The protagonist would win by being physically stronger or quicker, mentally craftier, or more skilled with a weapon, and the climactic scene would be a blow-by-blow account of the various stealth “moves” that led to victory: Mr. X shot at Mr. Y from behind a dumpster. As Mr. Y dove behind a car, he shot at a crane hanging above Mr. X’s head. The wire on the crane snapped, releasing a bundle of iron bars, which fell, crushing Mr. X to death. The girls’ stories were less violent and didn’t involve any guns, but they did involve physical altercations nonetheless: The man chased me down the hallway. I ran into the living room and grabbed the ceramic vase. When he came around the corner, I broke it over his head, and he fell to the ground, unconscious. In every instance, the bad guy, at the climax, presented an immediate, physical threat, and the protagonist prevailed through the use of violence. Perhaps I should have explained that having the protagonist vanquish the antagonist through brute force is the quickest way to turn a budding piece of literature into a cartoon. I should have explained that this kind of plot usually only works with visual mediums, such as film or video games, specifically action flicks. But then again, they are in seventh grade. A child’s mind is not capable, I suppose, of conceiving of a more complicated kind of conflict, more insidious manifestations of evil, or a less arbitrary and more dependable means of achieving victory. It is questionable to me whether most of us ever “outgrow” this way of thinking. As the media has brought the issue of violence to the fore in the wake of Sandy Hook, I have been interested in the debates about gun control, as well as the “conspiracy theories” surrounding the event, more so the reaction to those conspiracy theories. (I put quotation marks around the term, because, while there are some outlandish theories floating around, most of the time the time the term “conspiracy theorist” is used to slander people who are merely asking questions that mainstream journalists have been content to ignore, or who simply have a higher bar than “the media said so” or “the government said so” when it comes to accepting something as truth.) I was listening to some kind of “expert” being interviewed by Anderson Cooper and the “expert” had this to say (I paraphrase): “Conspiracy theorists can’t conceive of true evil existing in the world. They can’t allow themselves to believe that a person could slaughter innocent children for no good reason, that a person could really be that evil. Conspiracy theories grow out of an effort to explain evil, because without a sensible explanation, evil has to be grappled with on its own terms.” But it seems to me that just the opposite is true. Most people are actually much more comfortable with the idea of evil when it can be securely pegged to some mustache-twirling villain, the Joker, the Sadist, or the Psychopath: Osama bin Laden, Adam Lanza, Timothy McVeigh, Lee Harvey Oswald. It seems to me that we get evil as a bad guy—an outlier in society, random, inexplicable, and concentrated in a single person (or in an easily identifiable “axis”). What is harder to grapple with is evil that is diffuse, cooperative, common, and systematic. This is the kind of evil that killed Jesus (otherwise the story of the Crucifixion would center on “bad guy” Pontius Pilate), and frankly, this is the kind of evil that “conspiracy theorists” find it difficult to rule out as a possibility. Those who maintain that this kind of evil exists are often shouted down by the crowd. In her famous analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a midlevel bureaucrat in the Nazi regime, Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil” to describe what she observed and concluded when trying to answer the question: How could this have happened? She caused major controversy by suggested that evil of such unimaginable scope and proportions as the Holocaust could ever be in any way “banal.” In his preeminent work on the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and JFK, Catholic writer James Douglass borrows a term from Thomas Merton, “The Unspeakable,” to refer to a kind of evil which is far more common in our world than the psychopath who wants to kill kindergartners, but which we are so very ill-equipped to deal with, so ill-equipped, in fact, that we cannot allow ourselves to think of it, let alone speak of it. As Christian adults, I believe we must ask ourselves, honestly: First, how limited is our conception of evil? Second, what are the means by which we believe it can be conquered? If you believe that evil exists primarily in the form of mustache-twirling villains, then you probably believe that hitting that bad guy over the head with a vase, or injecting him with poison in a government prison, or dropping a bomb on his people, or catching him and hanging him, or taking him out with a drone strike, or shooting him and “throwing him in the ocean” is sufficient, adequate, and practical in overcoming it. In that case, maybe the government will give you a medal or your local parish will applaud you on Veteran’s Day. If you believe that evil is more often diffuse, cooperative, common, and systematic, then you will also believe that evil is more difficult to conquer. In his address at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy said:

“Whatever killed Martin Luther King did not first make its appearance on April 4, 1968. Whatever it is that sent that bullet speeding toward this balcony twenty-five years ago has a past that stretches back to the infancy of time. Soon after the first rays of the first sunrise appear over the horizon of history, there is homicide. In Book One of the Bible, Cain kills Abel. Homicide is the first sin outside of Paradise. In the beginning there is death by the hand of another. Whatever killed Abel, killed Martin Luther King, Jr. Whatever killed Martin Luther King, Jr., killed Jesus Christ. And, whatever killed Jesus Christ, is what killed every person who has ever been shot, stabbed, poisoned, gassed, or burnt to death by a fellow human being. From what demented dimension of the universe, from what polluted place in the soul comes the willingness to destroy another?” It is important, he says, to ask what, not who, killed Martin Luther King, Jr. In his sermon “The Answer to a Perplexing Question” (Why could we not cast him out? —Matthew, 17:19), about man’s persistent efforts to remove evil from the earth, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Man has pursued two paths to eliminate evil and thereby save the world. The first calls upon man to remove evil through his own power and ingenuity in the strange conviction that by thinking, inventing, and governing, he will at last conquer the nagging forces of evil.” I couldn’t help but think of this when reading Barack Obama’s 23 Executive Orders. “The second idea for removing evil from the world,” he says, “stipulates that if man waits submissively upon the Lord, in his own good time, God alone will redeem the world.” I will think of this in the future every time we “pray for peace” in church, and then pass the basket for the collection for the Catholic Military Chaplaincy Office. Pray for peace, but in the meantime, prepare for and engage, indefinitely, in war. In our national narrative about Martin Luther King, Jr., his story is often cast as a “man versus society” conflict, but the truly amazing thing about him was that he, himself, did not see it that way. He understood that there is only one true conflict in our lives, because there is only one true enemy: the Evil One himself. Our efforts to prevail over him make for the central drama of our lives. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood that there is only one way to conquer the Evil One. He proposed a third way of ridding evil from the world. It was the way of Jesus Christ and it can be summed up as follows: nonviolent love of friends and enemies. Evil must be resisted, absolutely, but it must be resisted nonviolently.

It is quite sad, I think, that if I tried to teach this to my students, all of whom are from devout Catholic families, all of whom go to church on Sundays, they would look at me as if I had three heads. I can hear it now: “But if my protagonist doesn’t shoot back, then the antagonist will win!” We are all confused, not just the seventh graders, because our Church does not teach us His Way, at least not actively. I have been going to Catholic Church for thirty-four years, and I have never once heard a homily about nonviolence, or even violence, Just War, or killing in general. I know where the Church stands on abortion, premarital sex, contraception, and a million other things, but on this issue of violence: silence. I would say there is something fishy about that, but you would call me a conspiracy theorist. Martin Luther King, Jr. triumphed through nonviolent resistance to evil, and we should all be changed as a result of his experiences. I urge you, today, to spend some time getting to know this incredible human being and learning more about the Gospel message of nonviolence. I recommend the following to get started: Books Strength to Love Audio Behold the Lamb Video MLK Speech on Nonviolence MLK/Malcom X Debate RFK’s Speech After the Assassination of MLK Peace be with you.

Reprinted from altcatholicah.com with permission of the author.

Ellen Finnigan [send her mail] graduated from the University of Montana with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She currently runs an online writing workshop and teaches Literature and Rhetoric at a Catholic hybrid school in Atlanta. Visit her at scribblesworkshop.com.

The Best of Ellen Finnigan

For years American employers have been complaining about the poor writing skills of college graduates. Teaching assistants in English departments across the country are shocked after their first week teaching Freshman Comp: "We can't be expected to make up for twelve years of lost grammar in one semester!" they cry, while sipping their green tea, and pushing up the sleeves of their oversized cardigans. The SAT grader cringes, knowing these essays are sure to be the downfall of many ambitious young students, relegating them to their "safety schools." Meanwhile a homeschooling mother sits at the kitchen table tearing out her hair, because her eighth grader has just stormed out of the room — again! — all because she was trying to give him "a little bit of help" with his writing.

Let me be forthcoming: I do not have a degree in Education. I have never studied Composition Pedagogy. When I was in graduate school, I did not have a teaching assistantship, despite my impressive collection of cardigans. But I am a writer, myself, and I have been working with families as an online writing coach for over four years. That's right: I have street cred. So I will share a few insights and theories, based on my personal observations and experiences, as to why "the kids these days" can't write. Parents, listen up! I also have tips.

1. Students don't write frequently enough.

Writing is a skill. Like any skill, it requires practice to master.

If your child has been enrolled in a traditional school, he is probably not getting enough practice. One mother told me that her daughter had written only one paper during her entire seventh grade year.

"Heavens to Betsy!" I cried, and fainted.

This is appalling, but not hard to understand: To grade twenty tests might take thirty minutes, twenty papers three to four hours. A teacher can't "bill" anyone for the time she spends grading papers on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, so you can see why she would assign dioramas instead.

Plus, most traditional schools do not offer a class dedicated solely to composition and rhetoric. Hence there are is no writing grade. Hence there is no writing instruction. Teachers are responsible for their "content." What incentive do they have to help your child develop a "soft skill" that, though critical, won't show up on any test? For reasons that are beyond the scope of this article (and certainly not the teachers' fault), they teach to the test! It's all about the test.

Some homeschoolers are guilty of neglect, too, but for different reasons. Many parents dislike writing or consider themselves to be bad writers. "It's just not my thing," they say, "so I tend to avoid it." Or they tell me that writing provokes too many meltdowns: "My kids are fine with me teaching them anything else, but when it comes to writing, they don't want to hear anything I have to say. They get so defensive!"

Tips:

If you wanted your child to learn how to play tennis, you would sign him up for tennis lessons. He would go every week, and an experienced coach would teach him about the game and design drills and exercises that would help him practice the skills he needs to become a better tennis player. If your child were struggling with math, you wouldn't sign him up for a math class. You would hire a tutor. Why not approach writing in the same way? Especially if writing is not your specialty, you should consider outsourcing it! Find a writing coach to help your child.

Not to mention, there is something to be said for an "objective," third party opinion. Even if you consider yourself a decent writer, your own children may not be your best pupils. Because writing is a craft, an art really, it is more subjective and personal than other subjects. Yes, there are rules that must be followed, but writing is also about creative expression and personal taste, and a teenager is likely to appeal to this latter truth when differences of opinion arise. (Does your teenager like it when you pick out his clothes? Yeah, it's kind of the same thing when you try to rearrange his sentences.) I can assure you that most students are perfectly open and receptive to criticism of their writing…as long as it doesn't come from their parents. It's just, like, you know, a kid thing.

2. Students rarely, if ever, get quality feedback on their work.

On the rare occasion that your child is expected to write a paper, a regular schoolteacher will usually grade it, not critique it. Feedback will be critical instead of constructive and it will come in the form of "mark ups": red ink pointing out grammar and spelling errors, a few X's (maybe in purple if the teacher is one of those hippie types concerned with self-esteem). A few cursory remarks like "awkward" or "So?" might appear in the margins. A thoughtful, detailed response about strengths and weaknesses, along with specific suggestions for improvement, are what a student needs to improve, but don't hold your breath. Providing that kind of feedback is time-consuming and labor intensive. Teachers have lives too, you know. Easier to just mark that bad boy up and move on.

Tip:

Hire a writing coach! When it comes to the written word: writing coach is to English teacher as driving instructor is to traffic cop. A traffic cop might pull you over every time you run a red light, and maybe if he does it enough, you'll stop running that red light, but that's a slow way to learn how to drive. And what if you have to parallel park one day, on a hill, while driving a stick, and holding a cup of coffee, and sending a text? (We've all been there!) Of what use will those tickets be then? Hire a cool writing coach and she will not only teach your kids the rules of the road, she'll teach them how to do donuts in the school parking lot. Yeah!

3. Students get way too much feedback on their papers all at once. It buries them, immobilizes them, and suffocates them, like an avalanche.

Okay, that simile was a bit dramatic, but homeschoolers in particular seem to have a problem with this one. They seem to forget that their child's brain can only process so much information. They bombard their children with feedback on every single facet of their papers (content, structure, spelling, diction, grammar, usage, mechanics, style, etc.). This will only dampen the child's enthusiasm for writing. He won't want to do it anymore. Instead of excitedly pouring forth his thoughts and ideas, he will clam up and get "writer's block," because he knows from experience that putting words on a blank page only opens him up to a torrent of criticism. He knows his writing will never be good enough, so why even try? Where to even start?

Tips:

Start with praise. Always. Praise, praise, praise! Tell him what he did well. Tell him the strengths of the paper and his strengths as a writer. Find something to make him feel good about.

Then: There is no reason to point out every weakness that you spot right away: every single spelling mistake, every convoluted sentence, every structural problem, etc. Language is a complex thing. Obviously you will have a million thoughts as to how the paper can be improved, but by shredding their work you will only be trampling their fragile egos and stirring up the gods of war. Show some restraint.

Think of every paper as a triage situation. You have to divide the problems into categories, decide what the priorities are, and tackle them in stages (more about this in number four). Priorities will be different for every student, depending on age, ability, and proclivity. Ask yourself: What is the most important thing for him to learn and master, right now? What little lesson will make the biggest difference for this paper? For example, there is no reason to point out the fact that your child used the word "great" eighteen times if the paper is riddled with run-on sentences. Run-on sentences confuse the reader. While the word "great" is general and boring, it is at least clear. Aim for clarity first. Next year you can worry about diction.

Remember: It's not about making the paper perfect. It's about using the paper as an opportunity to teach the student something about writing.

Another example would be pointing out ineffective transitions when your child is still struggling to write clear, identifiable topic sentences. First, your child has to understand each topic and to be able to articulate that topic in one, summative sentence. Next semester, after he has grasped the idea of topics, you can encourage him to start thinking about the relationships between topics and how best to link them. First thing's first!

Maybe you can see the problems in your child's paper, but you don't know what the priorities should be, or maybe you can identify the problems but you don't know how to fix them. Consider hiring a writing coach. (You knew I was going to say that, didn't you?) You see, writing coach is to regular teacher as rescue worker is to rescue dog. The rescue dog may be able to find the kid stuck under the avalanche, but only the rescue worker can dig him out, administer CPR, and help him revise his persuasive essay. (And that is called a mixed metaphor, folks! Make sure your children don't write those.)

4. Because there is never any expectation to revise, students fail to learn the writing process…and they fail to learn that writing is a process.

Let's say that the teacher who makes $30K a year did spend a Saturday afternoon reading and critiquing twenty student papers out of the goodness of her heart. Is she likely to ask for revisions and spend the next Saturday afternoon reading the second drafts and noting the improvements? Um, interesting as your child's thoughts on Atticus Finch may be, she would rather spend time with her own kids, or get a root canal, than read that paper again. Students get into the habit of writing one draft, turning it in, and never thinking about it again. Where's the lesson in that?

You've probably heard it said that writing is rewriting. Absolutely. Writing is a process. Students learn far more from revising than they do from writing a first draft. But often we teach writing as a two-step process: write, proofread. No, no, no, no, no! The writing process is: brainstorm, outline, write, r…e…v…i…s…e, proofread. Revision should take the longest and be the most intense. That's where the magic happens, people! But every step is important.

A writing coach can walk your child through the writing process with each writing project…or not. For some students, it may be helpful to crank out three or four outlines in a row without ever writing a first draft, just to master those outlining skills. More advanced students who need less handholding may prefer to do their prewriting work independently and present the coach with a draft, which the coach will then critique. As opposed to a writing class with a predetermined curriculum, the good writing coach runs a writing workshop that is flexible and fluid and entirely tailored to the student's needs.

As for that revision process, like I said in number three above, don't communicate all of the problems at once. The process of revision works best in stages, with a lot of back and forth. As a general rule, I find it best to address weaknesses in the following order:

• Content and structure: In the first round of feedback, focus on the big picture. Explain where underdeveloped ideas could be fleshed out. Make sure multiple subtopics are not being crammed into the same paragraph. Make recommendations if subtopics could be presented in a better order. Point out irrelevant or tangential information. All of this applies to outlines as well as first drafts. At this stage, help the student to generate more thoughts and ideas, challenge him to think in more depth about the ideas he already has, and make sure his ideas are organized in a way that will create good flow.
• Sentences: When he comes back with the next draft, focus on clarity at the sentence and paragraph level. Point out things like run-on sentences and sentence fragments. Point out where things are confusing, repetitive, or unclear. Explain why they are confusing. (Stop! Let the student figure out how to fix it. Don't fix it for him.) Remember: You are not yet talking about "mistakes" or making "corrections." You are giving feedback as a reader about where you got lost or tripped up.
• Proofreading: In the final round of revision, I get out my purple pen. (Rather I use purple font. Yes, I'm hippie-ish.) At this point you can deal with those "little" things like misspelled words and grammatical errors. Try to ignore these things until the last possible minute. (I know it's hard.) This should feel like the final "clean up" after the real work has been done, like sweeping up the sawdust after the bookshelf has been built.
• Stylistic concerns: If your child is writing papers that are clear and well organized, and if your child is writing sentences that are grammatically correct, and if your child is doing these things consistently, then you can start working seriously on things like sentence variety, diction, transitional words, rhetorical devices, figurative language, purpose, audience, and tone. Writing should be made clear before it is made pretty. That being said, if your student writes something pretty, do say, "That sentence was lovely. Nice work!"

The key word here is: work. Yes, writing is a lot of work! But in my experience, when you break things down into steps, and give feedback in little bits, students quickly overcome their anxiety about writing and even begin to experience joy in it. And that is the best thing about being a writing coach. (Just had to get that in there one more in time!)

5. Writing is usually assigned for the purpose of demonstrating knowledge, rarely for the purpose of practicing a writing skill or engaging in personal expression.

A literature or history teacher might assign a paper for the purposes of assessing how well the student understands the material covered in the course. In this case, the emphasis will be on the content, and if the content is new, not something the student confidently grasps, then the effort to deal with that content will consume the students' attention. It's kind of like expecting someone to practice juggling while he is walking on a tightrope. Why not let him stand on solid ground and just juggle for a while? This way he can focus on his juggling technique, and forget about remembering everything you taught him about the causes of World War I.

Tips:

Assign some papers strictly for the purpose of practicing writing, and let the student pick his or her own topic. Encourage the student to write about something he loves or understands well, whether video games, dogs, or baking. This takes the pressure off the "content" side, and allows the student to focus on the writing. I have found it especially effective to have the students write "real world" essays or letters for a specific purpose and with a specific audience in mind.

One of my favorite students was a girl named Melinda. Her mother warned me: She had officially entered her teenage years. Her mother had to sit at the computer with her, place her hands on the keyboard, and make her send me an email. I only heard from her maybe twice a week, and her work was haphazard and slapdash. I could tell that she wasn't really trying. So I tried to find something that would get her fired up. Melinda and I emailed casually for a few days, with no work assigned, until I discovered one reason for her malaise: She hated being homeschooled and desperately wanted to go to a "regular" school. A-ha! We had found our topic! I suggested that she write a persuasive essay, with her parents as the audience, convincing them why they should let her enroll in a "regular" school. From that point on, there was not a day that went by that I did not hear from Melinda. The girl became a writing machine.

I spent the next six weeks working with her on this essay: helping her to write a claim, outline an argument, develop her points, and, yes, modify her tone. ("Now, Melinda, think about your audience and how they might react to something that sounds like an accusation.") Because Melinda had been begging her parents to send her to a "regular" school for years, she knew all of their opinions and positions, so we worked those into the paper as well, addressing every one. At some point she decided that the essay was still not good enough. Something was missing. I said it could use more concrete support. It morphed into a research paper! With some guidance and instruction, off she went to research her topic, and I helped her incorporate any research she found. She asked her parents to extend the course for another month, and to my surprise, they did. She ended up writing something akin to a dissertation!

At some point I wrote to her mother: "I'm sorry that I have turned into an agent of subversion in your home."

She wrote back: "I don't care! I have never seen her so excited about writing. She cannot wait to get your emails every day. I have never seen her work so hard at anything."

In the end, Melinda did not succeed at convincing her parents to send her to a "regular" school. But she did convince them to start looking into hybrid schools. Her mother reported that the writing workshop had been good for their whole family: Melinda, noticeably less "whiny" and "sulky," had seemed to mature overnight, and this no doubt had something to do with the fact that she was given the tools to be able to express herself well and engage in a productive and satisfying dialogue with her parents, during which they treated her with the same level of seriousness with which she had undertaken the project.

My work there was done! I have to admit, I felt a little bit like this.

In Conclusion

Writing is not just another useful skill in a technocratic world, like knowing Photoshop. In the end, being a good writer is not about getting into a good college or getting a good job (though that might result). Writing is thinking. Better writing skills make for better thinking skills, and as you help your child to become a better thinker, you help him to become a more critical and independent human being, less easily influenced by others, more reliant on his own judgment, and better able to express himself and engage in valuable dialogue with others. Writing is not just a skill; it is a power, one you don't want your child to live without.

If you choose to be your child's writing coach, I leave you with this parting thought: Do resist the temptation to become your child's editor. You may think that he will learn a lot by watching you make corrections, by noticing the way you move a few things around, by seeing you reword a few things, by showing him the difference between the version he wrote and the version you "fixed," but all you are teaching your child is that writing does not require hard work because at some point, someone else will come along and do the hard work for you.

One of the oft repeated writing maxims is: "Show, Don't Tell." Well, when it comes to teaching writing, it is best to "Tell, Don't Show." There are times when you have no other choice but to show the student what you mean by just getting in there and writing something or changing something, but it is best, whenever possible, to try to explain the problem and let the student do the work of figuring out how to fix it. If explanation isn't getting you anywhere and you need something to "show" what you mean, go find a published work that you can use an example and let your child try to mimic or replicate that. Yes, the hands-off approach requires some restraint, but it will allow the student to feel a greater sense of accomplishment when he sees the final draft, knowing the work was his own.

Ellen Finnigan [send her mail] graduated from the University of Montana with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She currently runs an online writing workshop and teaches Literature and Rhetoric at a Catholic hybrid school in Atlanta. Visit her at scribblesworkshop.com.

The devil always sends errors into the world in pairs — pairs of opposites. ~C.S.Lewis

In the South Park episode "Douche and Turd," South Park Elementary holds an election for a new school mascot, and the students are given a "choice" between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. The episode has been praised for encapsulating the libertarian attitude toward voting. It certainly encapsulates the libertarian attitude toward politicians, but the episode has always bothered me as a libertarian and a Christian. Despite its seemingly subversive message, it supports America's civic religion and promotes the idea of voting for "the lesser of two evils." Christians who take their beliefs seriously should do neither.

Civic Religion

Democracy is a "religion" in every sense of the word: It deals with an unseen, mystical force (the popular will); it has a priestly class that discerns the popular will (politicians and the media); it has martyrs (soldiers), rituals (voting) and dogmas ("every vote counts"); it aims to fulfill the spiritual need of human beings to be a part of something larger than themselves; and it treats non-believers (non-voters) as heretics to be shamed and ostracized.

In South Park, Stanley says he not going to participate in the election: "I think voting is great, but if I have to choose between a douche and a turd, I just don't see the point." His attitude gets him banished from town. Puff Daddy even tries to kill him as part of his "Vote or Die" campaign. When Stanley eventually comes to terms with the imperfections of democracy, he returns to town to do his civic duty, and his candidate loses in a landslide. Nonetheless, Stanley is once again part of the tribe, and he is assured that his participation had meaning:

Sharon: You can’t judge the merits of voting on whether or not your candidate won.

Randy: Your vote still mattered.

South Park lampoons America's civic religion but ultimately endorses it. In that way, "Douche and Turd" is no more "libertarian" than the political satire in The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, or The Simpsons. These shows ridicule the state of politics in America, but they never go so far as to question the system itself. George Carlin was the only entertainer that I know of who dared to commit the heresy of saying that people should stay home on Election Day.

To quote James Bovard: "Voting is a process that consecrates the government's control of the people." If the choice is between a douche and a turd, (moreover if you do not consent to ever-increasing levels of government control, regardless of whether the person wielding that control would be a douche or a turd or Steve Jobs or Mother Teresa), then not voting, or voting for a third-party candidate, is the best way for libertarians to make their voices heard.

Here's my problem with the much lauded South Park episode from a Christian perspective: Note that Stanley's opinion that "voting is pointless" fails to take into account the question of evil, or what man should do in the face of it. The episode portrays elections as absurd (fair enough), but the question of evil never enters the equation, and the potential consequences of the election are understood to be negligible. Hence, Stanley's attitude of blithe indifference can only be considered understandable, rational and appropriate.

When it comes to modern day American politics, though, there are serious stakes involved. Given the destructive potential of America's military might and the clear desire in Washington to make use of it at every turn, and given the State's unique ability to destroy prosperity, trample civil rights, and generally make life a living hell for people, any Christian who believes in the Fall must concern oneself with Presidential elections, if for no other reason than this: Systematic evil is practically guaranteed when power is so concentrated. Even if you don't believe that the "douche" and "turd" are evil human beings, per se, (even if you can listen to Hillary Clinton's giddy laughter here at the mention of "taking out" Iran and not be bothered by what is either her blithe indifference toward the horrors of war or her brazen bloodlust), one would be hard pressed to argue that there is not some kind of evil, pervasive and persistent, lurking in the corridors of power in Washington. How else could one explain wars of aggression based on lies, the mass killing of innocents, the surveillance state, rigged elections, fascist economic policies, propaganda, the destruction of the dollar, the unfettered accumulation of debt, the glorification of violence, the culture of fear, the militarization of the police, the control of the press, the suppression of free speech? If you believe that we, as a country, continue to go in the same horrific direction regardless of whether the Republicans or Democrats are in power, and that supporting either one would be akin to supporting these evil endeavors, what do you do?

The Lesser of Two Evils

Some people insist that, even when both options are reprehensible, a voter still cannot afford to sit out an election. To fail to vote or to "throw away" your vote by voting for someone other than a Democrat or Republican would be taking a defeatist or quietist stance. Man has a responsibility to squelch evil (they might say), to prevent it, combat it, but man must also be practical. So the question becomes: How to combat evil? For this group the answer is a simple: Vote for the lesser of two evils. (This is also known as the "Anyone but _______" argument.)

This position is essentially pragmatic, and I recently came across an essay called "No, Not One" written by George Orwell in 1941 that articulates it perfectly. Mind you, in this essay, Orwell is not writing about voting. He is writing about war. The impetus for the essay was book called No Such Liberty, which had a message of pacifism, an ideology which Orwell opposed and repeatedly denounced. Though he is not writing about elections, I believe Orwell's words here effectively convey the logic behind the "lesser of two evils" argument. Moreover, those who promote this logic with regard to voting are often, to my mind, chauvinists and demagogues. They inflate the evil of the "other guy" and exaggerate his vices, while disregarding or excusing the infractions of "their guy" and playing up his virtues, in order to create the illusion of contrast. So while I'm writing here about voting, and Orwell is writing about war, I think the parallel works: Orwell is talking about evil that presented an immediate threat to the world in 1941, and as for the "lesser of two evils" crowd, they always turn into alarmists as the election draws near, painting a cartoonish picture of the evil inherent in the other party and likening the election to an apocalyptic showdown akin to a war against the forces of evil.

Here's what Orwell had to say:

Underneath this lies the hard fact, so difficult for many people to face, that individual salvation is not possible, that the choice before human beings is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands. It seems to me that the text for our time is not "Woe to him through whom the evil cometh" but the one from which I took the title of this article, "There is not one that is righteous, no, not one." We have all touched pitch, we are all perishing by the sword…There is no such thing as neutrality in this war.

Orwell is saying that while war is evil, it is not as evil as the Nazis; therefore it should be employed to conquer them. In terms of logical reasoning, it seems one could just as easily write:

The choice before Americans is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Democrats rule the world; that is evil; or you can overthrow them by voting in the Republicans, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you.

The lesser-of-two-evils crowd admits that both options are evil, but maintain, like Orwell did, that one is less evil than the other. Orwell was a clever chap, and it is my suspicion that the majority of readers would agree with his logic, which could readily be applied to voting; they might say something about the "real world" and the impracticalities or hypocrisies of pacifism and anarchism and personalism and all other forms of "utopian" thinking that promote the conquering of evil with something other than evil, and I can forgive Orwell his pragmatism and compromise with the world because he was certainly an ambiguous and lukewarm Christian, if he was a Christian at all, and while he may have considered himself a member of the Church of England and believed in a certain Judeo-Christian moral code, he did not, it has been suggested by scholars, believe in an afterlife or in the eternity of the soul.

No Other Choice?

The question, to my mind, is: Can a Christian stop here? Can a Christian join the lesser-of-two-evils crowd? Do we believe what Orwell says, that "there is no other choice" before us?

I read something years ago by a writer who was a contemporary of Orwell and no lukewarm Christian: C.S. Lewis. It was a passage in Mere Christianity only a few lines long that got lodged in my head, and I think it has an eerie relevance to this whole issue of voting and the lesser of two evils. In the passage, which follows, Lewis is writing about the idea that that we are all one, as in "one body," yet we are all different parts. He says that people usually have a tendency to go too far in one direction: Either they overemphasize the point of "oneness" and become "totalitarians," or they forget that we are all connected and become "individualists." But that's not the idea that struck me. He was using this example to make a larger, more important point about the way the devil works, and if you've ever read his book The Screwtape Letters, you know that Lewis had incredible insight into the psychological dimension of evil. The larger, more important point he was trying to illustrate is this:

I feel a strong desire to tell you — and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me — which of these two errors is the worse [becoming an individualist or becoming a totalitarian]. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs — pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern that that with either of them.

This passage perfectly explains our habits of mind with regard to American politics and perhaps the sinister nature of a two-party system. Is it merely the "devil getting at us," by presenting two errors that we begin to concern ourselves with, and no matter which way we go, it is still error, and he has won? Think about it: Christians' "extra dislike" of Democrats draws them into the camp of the Republicans (or vice versa). If only Christians could make a psychological break with the "two errors" we are presented with! If only Christians would try harder to think seriously and honestly about good and evil, and keep our eyes on the goal, instead of concerning ourselves with the lesser of two evils.

What should one do to combat evil? For starters, I would say stop endorsing it, supporting it, approving it and condoning it with your vote.

Woe to him through whom the evil cometh.

If you are choosing the lesser evil, it is still evil, and you are registering your consent to that evil. If you refuse to vote, you are at least depriving them of that: your consent. Flannery O'Connor once wrote: "Does one's integrity ever lie in what one is not able to do? I think that usually it does." So stay home. Bake a cake. Say a prayer. Mow your lawn. Smoke a joint. Do anything except vote. After all, the whole point of a Christian life is to try your best to "come out with clean hands," right?

At this point I expect the "lesser of two evils" Christians to object with: "But evil prevails when good people do nothing!" But of course that argument rests on assumptions about what qualifies as "doing something." Contrary to the methods of politics, which seek to affect external change through the use of force, this kind of "doing something" starts from within, in the individual's heart and soul. First off, a refusal to vote is a kind of resistance. To a Christian who believes in temptation and sin and the reality of evil in the world, the act of resisting qualifies as a very important kind of "doing something," even if it appears to be a negative act. But beyond that, a refusal to participate in the civic religion can represent the positive act of giving-up of false idols. If done mindfully, it entails an effort to ground yourself in a deeper truth. It can mean a conscious commitment to a new way of thinking about your choices, and a whole new way of orientating yourself towards the world. It can act as a concrete expression of your trust in a different kind of power. If you are a Christian, you believe that all of this is not insignificant. The work of faith is often quiet, and all change starts from within. Any effort to water the mustard seed counts for something. It has "real world" power, even if we can't foresee or predict what it will eventually result in or lead to.

If you must vote, then don't vote for the evil that you think is better. Vote for that which you believe is good, for that which you believe is best of all. In any case, voting, like everything else in life, should be seen as a spiritual exercise, a psychological test. This November would be a great time to practice what Lewis preaches.

Do not let yourself be fooled. Find a way of going straight through.

Ellen Finnigan [send her mail] graduated from the University of Montana with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She recently published her first book, The Me Years, and currently teaches writing online to homeschooled kids. Visit her at ellenfinnigan.com.

When asked, “What is the most pressing moral issue of our time?” one presidential candidate said: “We now promote preemptive war. We have rejected the just war theory of Christianity.”

This candidate is Ron Paul. He voted against the invasion of Iraq, and he is my choice for president.

In January 2003, two months before American forces invaded Iraq, in an address to the Diplomatic Corps, Pope John Paul II listed “certain requirements which must be met if entire peoples, perhaps even humanity itself, are not to sink into the abyss.” Among them he listed “Yes to life!” “No to death!” and “No to war!” In the political culture at large, war is rarely discussed as a moral issue, but as Catholic American voters, we must consider it one.

I believe that Ron Paul’s ideas on foreign policy, on war and peace in particular, when considered in light of Pope John Paul’s statements, make him the only truly pro-life candidate.

Regarding “Yes to life!” the Pope said, “War itself is an attack on human life, since it brings in its wake suffering and death. The battle for peace is always a battle for life!”

Ron Paul has said, “I get to my God through Christ. Christ, to me, is a man of peace. . . . He is not for war. He doesn’t justify preemptive war. I strongly believe that there is a Christian doctrine of just war. And I believe this nation has drifted from that. No matter what the rationales are, we have drifted from that, and it’s very, very dangerous, and in many ways unchristian. . . . That is what I see from my God and through Christ. I vote for peace.”

Congressman Paul even considers sanctions, such as the ones imposed on Iraq in the 1990s—which resulted, by some estimates, in over 100,000 Iraqi deaths—”an act of war.” He opposed the sanctions on Iraq and calls them immoral. He opposes sanctions on Iran. In his view, “[Sanctions] result in terrible, unnecessary suffering among the civilian population in the target countries and rarely even inconvenience their leaders.”

In addition to challenging diplomats and nation states to say no to war, Pope John Paul called for “respect for law.” The Pope acknowledges that the rule of law forms “the foundation of national and international stability.”

According to the Constitution, our supreme law which every president must swear to “preserve, protect and defend,” only Congress has the power to declare war. The last time Congress declared war was on Dec. 11, 1941. Since then, it has been abdicating this responsibility and transferring the power to the executive branch under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a process which circumvents the Constitution and ultimately the American people. Since then, we have had no clear victories in “war,” only an endless series of convoluted, indefinite entanglements with murky goals, murkier results, and thousands of lives lost.

Congressman Paul is the only presidential candidate who claims to have a problem with the way we now go to war, calling it not only “complex and deceptive” but “a danger to world peace.” He filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its “illegal war in Libya” and “abuse of war powers” in an effort to “force the Obama administration to obey the clear letter of the law.”

Paul is always the champion of the Constitution, which is to say the rule of law, but especially when it comes to war, because “a declaration of war limits the presidential powers, narrows the focus, and implies a precise end point to the conflict.”

Pope John Paul also outlined a “duty of solidarity,” saying that “it is important to spare no effort to ensure that everyone feels responsible for the growth and happiness of all.”

Congressman Paul has said that “history shows that without weapons and war, there is more food and prosperity for the people.” He describes his foreign policy as follows: “I would replace [a policy of mutually assured destruction] with a policy of mutually assured respect. . . . This requires simply tolerance of other cultures and their social and religious values and the giving up of all use of force to occupy or control other countries and their national resource. . . . This would result in the U.S. treating other nations exactly as we expect others to treat us, offering friendship with all who seek it, participating in trade with all who are willing. . . . This is the only practical way to promote peace, harmony and economic well-being to the maximum number of people in the world.”

In his eyes, “If America indeed has something good to offer—the cause of peace, prosperity, and liberty—it must be spread through persuasion and by example, not by intimidation, bribes and war.”

Pope John Paul explained to the Diplomatic Corps: “The peoples of the earth and their leaders must sometimes have the courage to say ‘No’. . . no to death! no to selfishness! and no to war! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity.”

Not only is Congressman Paul known as “Dr. No” on Capitol Hill, he does not mistake bellicosity for courage. On the issue of Iran, Paul said: “I think this wild goal to have another war in the name of defense is the dangerous thing. The danger is really us overreacting. . . . If [Michele Bachmann] thinks we live in a dangerous world, she ought to think back when I was drafted in 1962 with nuclear missiles in Cuba, and Kennedy calls Khrushchev and talks to him and talks him out of this, and we don’t have a nuclear exchange. You’re trying to dramatize this. We have to go to treat Iran like we treated Iraq? And kill a million Iraqis? And some 8,000 Americans have died since we’ve gone to war. You cannot solve these problems with war!“

As Pope John Paul suggested, “International law, honest dialogue, solidarity between States, the noble exercise of diplomacy: these are methods worthy of individuals and nations in resolving their differences.”

Similarly, Congressman Paul has said, “This policy of American domination and exceptionalism has allowed us to become an aggressor nation, supporting preemptive war, covert destabilization, foreign occupations, nation building, torture and assassinations. This policy has generated hatred toward Americans and provides the incentive for almost all of the suicide attacks against us and our allies.”

“We have 12,000 diplomats in our government. I suggest we start using our diplomats and do a little bit of diplomacy once in a while.”

Fittingly, Congressman Paul has named Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks as two of his heroes for their effective leadership through a commitment to the Gospel message of nonviolence. They were social diplomats for change through peace.

Read the rest of the article

Ellen Finnigan [send her mail] graduated from the University of Montana with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She recently published her first book, The Me Years, and currently teaches writing online to homeschooled kids. Visit her at ellenfinnigan.com.

The free market is overrated. In fact, I think it kind of sucks. Forget what all of these people at LRC have been telling you. So the free market is dead or dying? Good! I want it to die. I will watch as it happens and laugh at its pain.

I am an artist jilted and scorned.

In 2006 I quit my job in D.C., sold every possession that wouldn't fit in my car, and drove west to pursue my M.F.A. in Creative Writing. In case you didn't know, "M.F.A." stands for "More F*ckin' Around" — they don't say that for nothing, folks! Pogo sticks. Bacon parties. Dance parties. Halloween parties. Staring contests. Intramural Softball Champions 2008 (holla!) But after graduation, I decided to get serious, to really do this thing: write a book.

So I moved to a small town in the Rockies where snowstorms were already tearing the leaves off the Aspens like they were nothing more than tissue paper. Mid-September and winter had already arrived. For eight months I lived as a cold hermit and wrote, wrote, wrote. Goodbye career trajectory. Goodbye M.F.A. parties. Goodbye social life. I'll miss you, muscle tone.

Flannery O'Connor said, "Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay." I found this to be true. I emerged from a writerly reverie sometime in midwinter to find myself throwing a tennis ball against a wall. The computer screen was blank as it had been when I sat down, nine hours earlier. During a whiskey-fueled bout of procrastination, I wandered into the bathroom and gave myself a haircut. The dentist informed me that my gums were, indeed, receding. By spring I had to start putting "shower" on my to-do list. I was so cabin-fevered and carpal-tunneled that, perhaps prematurely, I began querying literary agents.

They all said the same thing: "The writing is good, but where would this book be shelved at Barnes & Noble?" The book, they said, had a couple of flaws that would prevent it from being bought by a mainstream publisher: 1. It was segmented structurally, very experimental in style. (Yeah, it's called "art," people.) They all wanted a boring straightforward narrative. 2. It had a serious genre problem, meaning it would be hard to classify, thus market, thus sell.

One agent I really liked. He was smart and witty and seemed to really get what I was trying to do. So I pulled off my hiking boots, bought a new dress, and flew out to New York to attend a party at his agency's penthouse office in Manhattan. I strode toward him in my heels, ready to sell him on my book and the brand that is "Ellen." (I guess writers are supposed to have brands now?) He greeted me with, "Hey, you must change your book into a straightforward narrative. You know that, right? As it is, it is not commercially viable." I refrained from stomping my foot, imbibed what was left of my martini, forced an amiable smile and told him I would think about it.

The agency was reputable and, okay, the manuscript was, admittedly, a mess. (Hey, it's called a first draft, people.) The agent said he would help me edit it in return for first dibs once it was complete. Then he got my dream editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (FSG) on the phone and pitched it. The editor was interested! He asked to read it! What can I say? That was all I needed. A straightforward narrative it would be! Commercial viability is the brand that is me! Where do I sign?

One year out of an M.F.A. program, writer lands literary agent and gets the attention of an editor at the most prestigious publishing house in the world.

Guess what? This part of the narrative is known as the "false climax."

Fast forward two years, past two summers spent waiting tables, four subsequent drafts, an epic game of Dodge-the-Census-Worker in 2010 (this should really be its own essay), and I am living on a commune now (anything to buy time to finish the book), and the agent, who has thus far been a tremendous help to me, asks me for another revision, a sixth draft. It was now the requisite straightforward narrative (and admittedly, a better book), but that pesky genre problem persisted.

He said, "Marketing will never go for this. Do you have any idea how hard it is to sell a book these days? Editors are terrified of losing their jobs. Nobody wants to take a risk on something ambiguous."

"Just send the damn thing out!" I said. "I can't eat any more tofu! I have flying squirrels living in my bed! They like to snuggle in my hair at night! Pretty soon, it's going to be my turn to clean out the compost toilet!"

I convinced him to send it to the FSG guy. He finally did. The editor rejected it.

I said, "So what? Just send it out to some more! Everyone at LRC is telling me to buy gold — I can't even afford socks!"

The agent refused. If publishers couldn't get a clear idea of where the book would go at the store, then his conclusion was that there was something wrong with the book.

So off to Barnes & Noble I went to do some research. Once inside, I walked past the puzzles, greeting cards, wall calendars, journals, tote bags, scented candles, stationery, yoga mats, muffins, flavored coffee, stuffed animals, board games, and devices on which to read books. I found the books. Then I walked past the cookbooks, the books written about celebrities, and the books written by celebrities to find those other books. I looked for a shelf labeled Creative Nonfiction or Literary Nonfiction (which is what I write). There was no shelf for that.

I saw many shelves for different kinds of non-literary nonfiction: Business, History, Computers, Self-help. I saw one small, far, dusty shelf labeled Fiction-and-Literature. This question of where my book belonged was truly perplexing. The Me Years is a work of nonfiction, but it borrows heavily from techniques of fiction and reads, mostly, like a novel. One would think (or hope) it could be classified broadly under Literature or Memoir, but there is no Memoir section at Barnes and Noble (memoirs are shelved under Biography for some reason, and that shelf seems largely limited to public figures, historical figures and cancer survivors), nor does the book have a tacit secular worldview. To a lot of folks in the New York publishing world, this is a big red flag: It means that the book cannot possibly be literature.

"Perhaps it would go over there," they thought, "on the Christian shelf?" But if it was going to go over there, then they thought it needed to be more consistently and devoutly religious. As one agency person put it: "You need more church scenes." I didn't feel that the book called for more church scenes and I didn't think that the scenes in my book should be determined by a shelf. After my trip to Barnes & Noble, I still did not have a clear idea of where my book would go at the store, so I concluded that there must be something wrong with the store.

Hence, you can now purchase my book, The Me Years, directly on Amazon.com!

(Oh, by the way, I did walk over to check out Borders, but it had gone bankrupt.)

Publishing directly through Amazon made sense to me for a few reasons, some of which have to do with the state of the industry, some of which have to do with my book, and some of which just make me feel better about never getting invited back to that fancy penthouse for cocktails and a skyline view (sigh):

Genre Schmenre

A genre is a marketing tool, a way of describing a product to consumers. It is essential to business, not literature. Consumers like to know what they can expect from a product. Look at McDonald's. Every cheeseburger you order, no matter where you are in the world, will look, taste, feel, and smell the same: same toppings, same number of pickles, no sesame seeds. McDonald's became successful using a business model that emphasized consistency and repetition. People tend to buy the same products at the grocery store over and over again not necessarily because they are the best, but because consumers feel comforted when they know what they can expect. With this in mind, one can see how important it is to sell books and films that fit the formula.

Genres also have a lot to do with demographics, which is the reason why the second most popular question you are asked when you are trying to sell a book is: Who is the audience for this book? This is why Science Fiction, Paranormal Romance, Travel, and such are all separated from "Fiction and Literature." This is why "Fiction and Literature" takes up, I would say, less than 5% of the floor space at Barnes & Noble. After all, does it make any sense to ask: Who is the audience for The Great Gatsby? (Answer: humanity? How do you market to "humanity"?)

We hear a lot about the mainstream media and think of companies operating in the field of journalism (I use the term loosely). However, the big six media corporations own most of the major publishing companies as well. The tentacles of the establishment extend pretty far. Take the establishment worldview (limited, reductive, regulated, politicized, polarized) combined with corporate incentives, extend the line of thinking about product consistency and repetition into the realm of ideas and the world of letters, fairly assume that readers are not necessarily lovers of literature but are often seeking in books merely one more source of information (I use the term loosely) or entertainment, or one more product brand or cultural signifier ("I own a Lexus, so I am successful"; "I read Miranda July, so I am quirky"), and you have megastores full of "books": glossily bound ideological cheeseburgers.

I look at the "Christian Inspiration" shelf: I just get depressed. The books all resemble each other, in style, in content, in approach, in look and feel, in tone. I believe this is worse for our society than the left/right paradigm in politics! So this was my main reason for publishing directly through Amazon: There was never going to be a place for my book on that shelf, and I believe that if there are only certain ways that we can write about faith, if there are only certain kinds of stories we are allowed to tell that include dimensions or discussions of faith, then there will eventually be only certain ways we can think about faith, thus limiting, ultimately, our understanding of faith.

Amazon has no shelves. There is infinite space. Amazon can rely on the viral potential of the Internet to allow a product work to find its audience. Or not. It doesn't make much difference to them (see "Supply = Demand" below). Hence, no genre problem.

That was the main reason. Here are a few others:

• Creative Control: Amazon is never going to tell me to write more church scenes into my book, nor are they ever going to request an accidental decapitation, a street race, or a steamboat fire. (True story: My friend's publisher asked him to write these events into his novel.) Through direct publishing, I also have control over my own book cover, my own website. No one is going to stuff me in their lame little brand box!
• Price: I get to set my own price. If I want to sell my book for $.99, I can. (I don't.)
• Word Count: Amazon will never give me an arbitrary word limit. If I want to write a longer book, I might eventually make less money on the print version due to per page cost, but that is my decision. Length is determined by the work itself, not market pressure or financial spreadsheets.
• Rights: So this is something I never realized, or really thought about, until I pulled my head out of the ephemeral clouds of creative consciousness (or some might say my ass) and actually thought about this writing venture from a practical, business-y perspective, but when you sell your book to a publisher, you sign over the copyright. In return, they give you about 15%. 15%! When publishing through Amazon, you still own the copyright, and for eBooks, Amazon only takes a 30% cut. The rest is yours. There is some really great information about business-y stuff, money and the economic side of publishing and stuff like that (yawn…ooh, maybe I do need an agent) here, in this dialogue between Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath. Go read it and you, too, will want to kiss "legacy publishing" goodbye.
• Amazon is fast; legacy publishing is slow; I'm completely impatient; the world's about to end: I read a friend's completed manuscript last winter. His book will not be available until March. March! He had an agent and a book contract, and it is still going to take his book over a year to get to market. Imagine how long it would take me if I had to start over: find a new agent, submit to more editors, the inevitable clash with Joe Marketing, revision requests, additional drafts. It could take years, literally! By then, the entire world economy could collapse! The process would be soul-sucking, probably artistically eviscerating, definitely exhausting. I'd rather put that time and energy into writing another book.
• With Amazon, supply = demand: When I launched The Me Years a few weeks ago, I ran a free giveaway on Goodreads.com. I was monitoring how many people signed up to win free copies and comparing it with other giveaways that were ending on the same day. A snapshot:
  • Date with a Vampire: 3,649 people requesting
  • Unleashed (paranormal romance): 2,314 requesting
  • Speed Dating with the Dead: 1,188 requesting
  • Sex Lessons (does it need explanation?): 1,541 requesting
  • Hearts of Darkness (a woman and a man get caught in an elevator, the lights go out): 819
  • Talking with Twentieth Century Women (a psychic "interviews" dead female celebrities, channeling their words from "our home on the other side"): 792
  • The Me Years: 359

So you can see why I'm drinking some Haterade when it comes to the free market. Yes, I'm slightly bitter. In terms of demand, my book was on par with the books of poetry! Hey, don't laugh: I wear this as a badge of honor. (I salute you, poets!) Now, I'm not saying that everything that gets published is crap, or that people only want to read crap. Last time I checked, Cormac McCarthy was still getting book deals. And I'm not saying my book is high art or anything. I'm just sayin' that if this kind of stuff is what the market demands, then that's fine, the market doesn't owe me anything, but I refuse to go churchin' up my book because readers of Hearts of Darkness, who buy most of the books, wouldn't know what to make of it otherwise. As a writer, I can honestly say that I would rather have 1,000 readers of my difficult-to-classify book than 30,000 readers of some horrendous marketing mutation that that was revised into unrecognizability because some suit wanted it to appeal to the widest possible demographic.

Hmph!

I have one friend who is a very talented writer. He couldn't sell his (very good) short stories to a legacy publisher but he could sell a young adult series that he pitched to his agent only as a joke as "Dick Cheney meets Inspector Gadget." So now, that is what he is working on.

Amazon's print-on-demand service (through subsidiary CreateSpace) assures that supply always meets demand by eliminating the guesswork inherent in legacy publishing and thus the risks associated with printing thousands of copies of something that might not sell and could be left to rot away in a warehouse. Amazon brings to market good books that might otherwise be left to rot away on a hard drive because the market for them was considered too small (or nonexistent) or they were considered too risky. By doing so, Amazon encourages writers to write what they want to write, not what the publishers think they can sell to the most people.

Andy Crouch wrote in Culture Making: "It is not enough to condemn culture. Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture or copy culture. Most of the time, we just consume culture. But the only way to change culture is to create culture." Amazon, by opening up quick and easy avenues for writers to circumvent the establishment and get their books to market with little or no upfront cost, helps we, the people, create culture! Legacy publishing, on the other hand, not always, but often, encourages the squandering of talent while degrading culture. After all, do we really need another "Dick Cheney meets Inspector Gadget" in this world? I think not. James Joyce would agree. (Though whether the world needed Finnegans Wake is probably just as debatable, but that is the subject of another essay.)

• Nicer to trees. Amazon's print-on-demand service and pioneering in digital book distribution means less need for paper, warehouses, shipping and such. As a result, it's nicer to trees. My friends back at the commune would be proud.

Is publishing directly through Amazon going to solve all of my problems as a writer toiling away in obscurity? Not likely. It is difficult to match the publicity power of legacy publishing: You are a lot less likely to get reviews from established publications, for instance. A magazine or newspaper owned by News Corporation, for example, is a lot more likely to review books published by HarperCollins, as they both have the same parent company. The New York Times is likely to review only books published by companies that have paid millions in advertising. "Self-published" still has a loser stigma associated with it. And then there is the stubborn problem of the "free market."

Ludwig von Mises:  

“The moralists' and sermonizers' critique of profits misses the point. It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers — the people, the common man — prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books…The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling u2018bad' things than in selling u2018good' things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely.”

The only solution to the free market problem, that I can see, would be to run for President, get elected, and appoint a Czar of Literature or something, to oversee and "regulate" the populace's literary intake. Until I have the power to ensure such progress, however, I will cast my lot with Amazon, the viral potential of the Internet and the democratization of technology, which lowers the cost of access to the marketplace, eliminates cultural gatekeepers, counteracts EstablishmentThink, widens the selection available for consumers/readers and, hopefully, in the long run, will improve and enrich our culture and the quality and depth of intellectual discourse — just like YouTube did! Wait: just like YouTube did!

The astute reader will point out that by praising Amazon as my publisher of choice, I am not shunning the free market so much as embracing and affirming it, as Amazon has provided an improvement in the market for writers and readers by making it more free. I realize this, but what better way to get a bunch of cantankerous contrarians and staunch pro-market libertarians such as yourselves to read an article than by dissing the free market? (Cheap trick, I know.)

One writer friend recently said to me, "Ellen, deciding to self-publish after receiving one rejection from FSG is like deciding not to go to the prom because you weren't elected queen."

But I don't know. I feel more like one of the cool alternative kids who skips prom altogether. The clock has struck twelve at the publishing industry's party, the (slow, cumbersome, expensive, outdated) carriage is about to turn into a pumpkin, and the after party has already started, baby: on Amazon! Out here in a sketchy hotel room on the outskirts of town, it's like the literary Wild West: no institutional supervision, no silly themes or signed wavers, no fussy chaperones to rubberstamp your ticket, no dues that need to be paid, no expensive dresses to be bought, no probity of civil society, pomp, and circumstance, or, for that matter, standards of literary merit. It's just you and me Amazon, a cheap handle of vodka, my quite possibly compromised judgment, and a long, fun night ahead, the unexplored frontier — freeeedom!!!

Will it lead to fame and fortune? Personal ruin? Crippling regret and crushing self-doubt? Nothing at all, really, to speak of? Only time will tell.

Here's another analogy for you: I like to think of the Gas N' Sip scene in Say Anything. Remember that film?

Glamorous Diane Court (traditional publishing) has just broken up with "basic" Lloyd Dobler and super depressed one night and driving around aimlessly in his car, he runs into a bunch of dudes from school hanging out behind the gas station. The dudes see how upset he is about the break-up and start giving him advice about how to get over Diane Court and move on.

After a while Lloyd becomes skeptical. He says, "Hey, I have a question for you. If you guys know so much about women, then why are you here at, like, a Gas ‘n’ Sip on a Saturday night, completely alone, drinking beers, with no women anywhere?"

They're stumped.

Then their leader shouts: "By choice, man!"

Is self-publishing still a default for losers? No way, man.

I'm choosin' it.

Ellen Finnigan [send her mail] graduated from the University of Montana with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She recently published her first book, The Me Years, and currently teaches writing online to homeschooled kids.

I left Georgia in 1996, the year Atlanta hosted the Summer Olympics, the year Bill Clinton was reelected President, the year I graduated from high school. I haven't been back much since, except to visit my parents on the holidays, and that was always what I was doing: visiting my parents. I was never going home for the holidays because Atlanta was never home. We are not Southerners and never were. We are Midwesterners who were transplanted in the nineties, when major corporations were relocating from places like Greenwich, Connecticut to take advantage of cheaper real estate and better tax rates, and so, as far as the likes of our new neighbors at the time were concerned, were as good as Yankees.

Due to the influx of corporate money and Northern blood, our suburban area was the third fastest-growing county in the U.S. when my family moved here in 1992 (I was a freshman). Half my classes were held in trailers, a quick fix to accommodate new students, and I'm sure that at the time the real Georgians would have said, "Atlanta is not the South," but it sure was to me. I found my new surroundings to be downright exotic: the creepy canopies of kudzu; sounds of cicadas at night; girls (Laurie, Lindsey, Stacey, Kellie, Carrie) who wore ribbons in their hair and guys who had started playing football, not soccer, in the second grade. On my first day of high school I noticed that a few of the kids in my first period class had Bibles on their desks. "Is this Geometry?" I asked one of them. "I think I might be in the wrong room." The girl (Chrissie?) said I was in the right place and asked me if I had been saved. When a teacher encouraged me a few weeks later to participate in the Miss Freshman Pageant, I knew: This was the South alright.

This past February, after fifteen years living up North, out West, then back up North again, I moved back to Atlanta after a stint in a commune didn't work out (do they ever?) My parents still live here, my brother and his wife had moved back a few years ago and had a spare bedroom, I needed a soft place to land and so Atlanta it was. I left the cranky Northeasterners with their cracked and bleeding knuckles in the dry dead of winter and arrived in a new land of convertible-driving blondes in blissful, balmy spring. With the dogwoods and magnolias already in bloom, cardinals flittering complacently from branch to branch, with no worries of flurries or hail, no need for snow tires or shoveling, I knew: I had been saved! With each deep breath of that sweet Southern air, each delectable sip of freshly brewed sweet tea, the sun's rays warm upon my skin, memories of my adolescence in Georgia — of buttered grits and collard greens; of Trisha Yearwood and Garth Brooks; of hot summer days spent sweating in long green fields at band camp (that's right, I said band camp) — came floating to the surface of my mind and I became excited about the idea of living in the south again, of experiencing it anew and relishing what I had missed. I started garnishing my glasses with sprigs of mint. I bought a big, floppy hat. I ran out and bought a copy of Gone with the Wind (I had never even seen the movie) which I read on my brother's porch while throwing the tennis ball for his dog, Jackson. My brother said the dog had been named for a song by Johnny Cash but no, in my mind he was now named for Stonewall.

It is probably an obvious point, but it is difficult to see change, whether in people, places, or cultures, as it happens. We don’t notice the grass growing or, as is probably a more apt metaphor in this case, the wearing down of something by erosion. A lapse in time is required for perspective and then one can see, literally, the changes that have taken place. My move back to Atlanta, in particular a certain recent night here, has allowed me to see what I already suspected: that though I can move back to the same city I lived in in 1996 (Atlanta, Georgia is still here), I will never again be able to live in the same country. It is gone.

About twenty miles outside of Atlanta looms a massive granite rock called Stone Mountain. It rises 1,683 feet above sea level, and there is nothing else like it — not a mountain, barely a hill — for miles. No one knows how such a massive rock became exposed but the best guess is 285 million years of erosion. The north face of the rock is home to the largest bas relief in the world: a Confederate Memorial carving depicting Robert E. Lee, "Stonewall" Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, conceived in 1916 and not officially completed until 1972, often likened to Mount Rushmore for its size and splendor. In front of the carving is a long stretch of grass, with a fountain at the base and lined by pines, that leads up to Confederate Hall, which houses a gift shop, a museum, and a movie theater, where a documentary about the War of Northern Aggression / Civil War / War Between the States / whatever you want to call it plays on a loop. In summertime the side of the mountain acts as a projection screen. At night, Georgians and tourists alike picnic on the lawn and watch the Stone Mountain Laser Show Spectacular, a Southern institution (in my mind).

Mention the Stone Mountain Laser Show in certain circles and you're likely to elicit a knowing chuckle or an exaggerated eye roll. It is a spectacle indeed! Take the theatrical merit of a Six Flags performance, the spirit of a high school pep rally, the volume of a Rolling Stones concert, the sentimentality of a pop country song, mix them together with the visuals of an Atari game and you have the Stone Mountain Laser Show. After the sun sets, the lasers project cute, cloyingly wholesome, cartoon-like images on the side of the mountain to classic southern songs, paying homage to all things Georgia. Because the Southern Pride comes out in full force, it was always a high priority on our list of places to take visitors. We would bring them with the attitude: "You gotta get a load of this."

The laser show changes every year, but the classic show I remember from my high school days had a fairly predictable routine. First, it cycled through professional sports teams, the Braves, Falcons, etc., and played some fight songs from the universities. This was usually followed by a tribute to bands and singers from Georgia (James Brown, Allman Brothers, Indigo Girls) followed by The Devil Went Down to Georgia: Johnny and Satan jumped around in the flames for a few minutes while the chicken in the bread pan was pickin' out dough. Then there was a psychedelic interlude (maybe a tribute to the 70's, when lasers were awesome?), crazy designs on the mountain and lasers pulsing wildly overhead. They always played Georgia on My Mind (Ray's version) paired with images of rolling fields, sunsets, and "moonlight through the pines." The culmination of the show would be signaled by the soft snare drum that begins Elvis Presley's Dixie.

Everything would then become very dark and quiet. One laser would slowly and respectfully (if lasers can be respectful) trace the outline of each Confederate general in the carving. It took a while. By the time the images had been traced, Elvis would be singing "Glory, glory, hallelujah," and the figures would come to life, "step out" of the mountain, raise their swords and — charge! At this point the crowd would cheer and our Midwestern visitors would give us a look. We would look back, as if to say, "Yeah! See? Told you." (This part always struck us as strange, because, well, didn't that war happen, like, a really long time ago? And why do they still care? And wasn't that war about slavery? And shouldn't people in the South be, well, ashamed to root for the Confederates, to have any pride in that war, which "they" fought over slavery?) To whoops and whistles, the horses would be running and an outline of the Eastern United States would appear and break apart into North and South. Then Elvis would take it down a notch:"So hush, little baby, don't you cry; You know your daddy's bound to die…" Sounds of guns and cannons. The flute solo was always very somber, with abstract images of war and dead soldiers.

At the next crescendo ("Glory, glory, hallelujah!"), General Lee would break his sword over his knee, and the two jagged pieces of the sword would be shown falling dramatically to the ground. This was the climax of the song. Then you would see the three generals again on their horses, walking back the other way, slowly, past more dead soldiers. The outline of the United States would reappear — "Glory, glory, hallelujah!" — and the two, the North and the South, would reunite. Then each general — "His truth is marching on!" — would be given a moment to "climb" back up in turn and take his place ceremoniously on the mountain (at this point, fireworks, lots of them) as Elvis belted with increasing intensity: "His truuuth is maaarching ONNNNN!" When it was over, the spotlights would reveal the generals still there in their place of defeat but eternal glory.

Did it glorify war? Of course. Did it seem a little bit over the top? Sure. But if you could watch that whole thing listening to Elvis singing that song, sittin' out there eatin' fried chicken with your fellow u2018Mericans under the stars on a warm summer night and — Was that…did I just get a whiff of Atlanta burning? — and not be the least bit moved for the Confederacy, their fight, their home, and their loss, then you must have a heart like Stone Mountain. I mean, heck, even Rhett Butler, selfish opportunist, war profiteer (and implacable voice of reason) that he was, even he ran off and joined the Cause, and at the eleventh hour! "I shall never forgive myself for this idiocy. I am annoyed to find so much quixotism still lingers in me. But our fair Southland needs every man. I'm off to the wars." (And yes, I realize that I'm writing about him as if he was a real person. My God, if only he were. That stupid Scarlett! How could she not…but then again he…oh, Margaret Mitchell how could you…)

We took visitors to the Stone Mountain Laser Show because it seemed so Southern. There, the Rebel spirit was still alive. You could feel it: the pride, the historical sense, the importance of place. We didn't really get it, to be honest, and wondered what it all really meant. At the time Georgia was still embroiled in the never ending controversy over the state flag and whether it should display the Southern Cross. (We thought: Really? Not over it yet?) We had heard that even playing the song "Dixie" at the Laser Show was controversial, because the monument had ties, way back when, to the Ku Klux Klan, and was partially funded by it. We were always wondering if there was something truly sinister (racism) lingering beneath all that heritage and wholesome family fun. We initially took people there as disinterested cultural spectators, but I have to say that after four years, it became one of my favorite things to do in the summer. The world is becoming so homogenized, and Americans in general have such an appalling disinterest and absolute apathy for history, theirs or anyone else's, that I came to like it because it stood for something unique to a particular time and place, and to a particular people, and (setting aside the moral and political facets of that war, "good" guys, bad buys, etc.) the fact that these people found those stories worth preserving was enough for me. (Not to mention we saw plenty of black families attending the show as well. To be honest, this put our minds at ease.) And besides, the Laser Show was never only about the Laser Show. It was also about the two hours that led up to the Laser Show.

My 15-year-old cousin was going to be visiting from Nebraska and I was supposed to think of a few fun things to do with her while she was here. I had just finished reading Gone With the Wind and my enthusiasm for all things Southern had become a fever. That book helped me to understand the South and "that" war in a way that four years of living here never did. (After all, Atlanta's not the South!) My cousin's visit was the perfect excuse to go back to Stone Mountain, and I simply could not wait to immerse myself in some serious Confederate ballyhoo.

When we pulled into the parking lot, I got nervous. The entrance looked different, cleaner, more Disneyland (whereas it used to be more RV park). There was a playground, a sophisticated obstacle course thing that was never there before, and kids were paying for tickets and waiting in line to walk through it.

"Oh, great!" I huffed. "It used to be just some grass and blankets. Now there will probably be a bunch of jumbotrons and an Apple store. Nothing can ever remain simple! You probably can't even bring food in anymore and we'll have to let a policeman rummage through our belongings and…"

But we walked down the path through the pines and there it was: the lawn, people sitting on blankets, no jumbotrons! And only one cop. It was just as I remembered.

The lawn was already crowded and it was only 7:00. What do you do to waste two and a half hours before the sun goes down? Check your phone? Go on Facebook? Read the paper? Let me tell you what you see on the big lawn at Stone Mountain for two and a half hours before the sun goes down. You see kids running. American kids…running! They are throwing Frisbees with their dads, they are racing down the hill, they are playing football or playing tag. They are rolling down the hill. They are hula hooping. They are also: cartwheeling, spinning, blowing bubbles, chasing bubbles, twirling, playing some ninja game that I didn't understand, and dancing (the hustle, the Cuban shuffle, the chicken dance, the electric slide). You also see people talking to each other, like, face to face, and did I mention running? It's completely bizarre! And awesome, way more awesome than lasers. People are enjoying each other's company, maybe walking over to the one (one!) concession stand to get some Dippin' Dots. A woman next to me leaned over and asked if I was involved with Camp Sunshine, because the blanket I'd taken from my parents' house had the Camp Sunshine logo on it. "No," I said. "What's Camp Sunshine?" She said it was a camp for kids with cancer and that her son had gone there. I asked if he was okay and she said yes, thanks to some kind of breakthrough treatment. Then, just when I thought it couldn't get any better, a choo-choo train came a chuggin' down the track at the base of the lawn. The conductor waved and the crowd waved back.

Ah. America! My country tis of thee…

Soon it was dusk and the children were chasing lightning bugs and buying cheap plastic toys that lit up: swords, fans, fake mohawks. I closed my eyes and smelled — What was it? I didn't know — but it's sweet and it's Georgia and it intensifies at night, and suddenly I was sixteen and back at band camp (that's right, that's what I said), sitting under a big tree before lights out and scheming with my two best girlfriends as to how we were going to sneak out at night and meet the boys at a secret spot in the middle of the woods, something we always talked about but never did. (We were good girls, you see. We were on the dance team. We wore ribbons in our hair. And they were bad, bad, bad, drum line bad.)

The laser show started with some fireworks and the sports montage. The crowd cheered for their teams, booed for their rivals. Then they played part of Ray's Georgia on My Mind and switched over midway to Willie's version. "Something new!" I thought, though I must say I prefer Ray's. (See? I told you I'm not a racist.) Then: a big truck on a dirt road and some country singer singing: "We like it loud / we like it honkin' / We're gonna say it proud / we like our country and we like it loud." That one went over well. Everyone knew the words.

Then I heard a soft snare drum.

Wait. Dixie? Already?

"But the show only just started," I thought.

The lasers did not trace the outlines of the generals slowly and respectfully. The generals just jumped off the wall like spry phantoms and started charging.

"Wait!" I thought. "Not yet! This isn't supposed to happen yet!" I felt like standing up and making the sign for time out and marching up to the guy who was running the thing and telling him that there must have been some kind of mistake: This wasn't supposed to happen until the end of the laser show. Then before I knew it General Lee had cracked his sword over his knee, the states had been shoved back together, and Elvis's voice faded out rather abruptly.

I wanted to stand up, stamp my foot and scream: "That's it? No way! It's been fifteen years, and I'm not movin' a muscle till I get some cotton-pickin' ballyhoo!"

But there was plenty of ballyhoo in store for me that night.

Suddenly the lame psychedelic interlude started, and after that came the tribute to the music of Georgia. They did the full Devil Came Down from Georgia routine: Satan and Johnny in the flames and the chicken in the bread pan pickin' out dough. At least they got that right. After Johnny told Satan that he told him once you son of a gun that he's the best that's ever been the overhead lasers shooting up from the base of the mountain disappeared and everything became dark and quiet. Then fireworks started shooting up and exploding over our heads and I thought, "But they already had the Civil War part."

Then an American flag was projected onto the side of the mountain and Mariah Carey started singing "Hero."

"What the hell is this?" I thought. "Mariah Carey's not from Georgia. She's not even from the South. She's from freaking Long Island!" Then they abandoned the laser show pretense altogether and started projecting real photographs onto the mountain, some random ass pictures of Martin Luther King Jr., JFK, Rosa Parks, and Amelia Earhart, followed by token images of "common folk": a farmer, a storekeeper, a miner, a doctor, a black doctor. Then came the fireman and the policeman and the logos for NYPD and NYFD. There was a light flutter of applause. Then (can you guess where this is going?): the Twin Towers, in all their majesty, followed quickly by a helicopter and a fighter pilot.

Then, right as Mariah Carey was screeching at the top of her lungs "When a hero comes along, with the strength to carry on…." a video showed a huge ass American flag unfurling down the side of the mountain, a flag so big it took up every square inch of lit space on the mountain, and it unfurled with flag sound effects and everything, falling right over (gasp!) the generals and their horses. Then the fireworks started going absolutely bonkers. Pow! Pah-pow-pow-pow! The flag faded and there were more images: a soldier saluting…the Vietnam Veterans Memorial…a space shuttle…the Challenger crew…a cemetery….Tomb of the Unknown Soldier…a man and a woman, both in military uniforms and both in wheelchairs, kissing….another cemetery…a man in uniform hugging a child…Arlington Cemetery…the Constitution (ha!).

Then stupid Mariah Carey finally shut up and everything got dark again and I thought, "Thank God. Let's get out of here. This sucks," but as I began to stand up, the words PLEASE RISE were projected onto the mountain in silence. I froze.

The crowd was standing now, and the Star Spangled Banner came in over the loud speakers, the slowest, most drawn out, obnoxiously operatic Star Spangled Banner you ever heard, and there were more fireworks, tons of fireworks, shock and awe levels of fireworks, like Baghdad on the night of the invasion, and then there was a photograph of a massive American flag spread out across a baseball field…a massive American flag on the top of an aircraft carrier….the Iwo Jima Memorial…a bald eagle…a rocket…more fireworks…another bald eagle…the planet Earth….a satellite…the JFK Eternal Flame.

I look around: hats off, hands over hearts. It keeps going…

The Capitol…the country of Japan (Wait, what? As in, "Remember how we annihilated them"?)…Mount Rushmore….the Golden Gate Bridge…a river…the Lincoln Memorial…the Jefferson Memorial…the Statue of Liberty…the Arch…another flag…the Liberty Bell…another flag….a soldier saluting it…the White House (with a flag in front)…two flags!…another bald eagle…Uncle Sam pointing: I WANT YOU…a waterfall…a sailboat… windmills…cacti. At this point I'm thinking of that song from Team America: "Bed Bath and Beyond! Sushi! Books!"

The opera singer howls at the top of her lungs. Another flag. Another bald eagle. Still the fireworks. And it goes on like this forever, and right when I'm about two seconds away from grabbing one of the little kid's plastic light-up swords and stabbing myself in the eyes and poking out my own eardrums to "Make it stop!" it stops and the lights come on.

I sat there disgusted, saddened, and angry, not to mention stupefied by what struck me as about nine thousand layers of irony, but when I looked around at everyone else, they seemed to be in a pretty good mood, almost…satiated, like they enjoyed being subjected to that slobbering, ostentatious, incoherent hodgepodge of orgiastic nationalism and just when I think it can't get any more insane, the song American Pie by Don McClean (um, also from New York), which if I'm not mistaken is a wistful commentary on the decline of American culture in a time that is, politically and geopolitically, violent, turbulent and uncertain, starts playing over the loudspeakers as people pack up their things.

But February made me shiver With every paper I delivered Bad news on the doorstep I couldn't take one more step

And people are singing along like it's a Bon Jovi song as we walk out to the car.

Now the half-time air was sweet perfume While Sergeants played a marching tune We all got up to dance Oh, but we never got the chance u2018Cause the players tried to take the field The marching band refused to yield Do you recall what was revealed The Day the Music Died

I'm sure that if I were a real historian I could offer a lot of insightful observations on this experience, but I'm not. I can only try my best to find words to express all the ways this horrid night appalled me. I know that it had something to do, foremost, with the way national myth can displace (and uproot) local stories. Local stories do not always fit the approved narrative, you see (about "good guys," bad guys, etc.). That huge American flag unfurling over the Confederate generals represented to me, visually, a machine that cannot, does not and will not allow any questions about the past to take precedence over the propaganda of the present. Because you see, if you are allowed to see the past, especially from the vantage point of a local story, you might stop thinking about the present in the way they want you to.

It depressed me to remember how far from our minds war was in 1996, and what a permanent part of our culture war and the warlike mentality has become. Of course back then I was far more interested in winning the affections of a certain snare drum player than paying attention to politics; I know that Clinton, too, was involved in a lot of military shenanigans and adventures overseas, but none of that really permeated our culture the way it has since 9/11. And a lot of people will say that none of this could be helped, that this state of affairs was simply foisted upon us, that we can't go back to the way things were then because we must go forward with the bombing and the shooting and the burning and the maiming because we have to out of self-defense and to those people I ask how many deaths of innocent civilians in foreign countries should we be willing to tolerate in the name of "self-defense," in the name of this "war" on "terror"? I mean seriously, give me a concrete number. How many are acceptable? 30,000? 80,000? 200,000? What is the threshold at which killing again becomes a matter of conscience? At what point do we say, "Enough"?

And then there was the appearance of two legendary Southerners, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, in this kaleidoscopic fantasia of national dreaming. Could we talk for one second about how these two people were followers of Christ and, thus, staunchly committed to the Gospel message of nonviolence? Not only did they not believe in the use of preemptive force, but they didn't believe that force or violence should be used even as a retaliatory measure under any circumstance. They had nothing whatsoever to do with fighter pilots and certainly would not have wanted to be associated with the myriad wars that have been waged under the auspices of "responding to" the 9/11 attacks for the past ten years, which are now correlated directly with National Greatness. Even though they were black people from the South, if you had given them the chance to have their photographs displayed next to the flag and the Lincoln Memorial or the Cross, which one do you think they would have chosen?

And then let's talk briefly for a second about JFK, who slowly turned away from his Cold War beliefs and took up a secret correspondence with Public Enemy #1, Evil Doer Nikita Krushchev at the height of the Cold War. Actually, even though we all know that America is the best and Americans are the good guys, it might be worth it to point out that Kruschchev wrote the first letter to Kennedy, reaching out to him at great risk and expressing his wish to find some common ground with him and to avoid a war that could very well and very quickly escalate into nothing less than total nuclear annihilation for everyone on the planet. (But he's still an Evil Doer because he's not American.) But Kennedy did put his own life at risk too, by flouting the advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff, responding to Kruschchev and secretly building a personal relationship with him. He, too, wished to establish peace and avoid war at all costs, even if that meant that, in the eyes of those who were frothing at the mouth with Cold War madness, he was committing treason. And he did pay the ultimate price, indeed, when the CIA (our own government) KILLED HIM. Bald eagle! Helicopter! Mount Rushmore! Waterfalls!

On the car ride home I was a rantin' and a ravin' about what had happened to my beloved Stone Mountain Park laser show, and I was accused of perhaps taking it all a bit too seriously. It was just lasers and some music after all. It was suggested that perhaps the show wasn't really supposed to mean all that I thought it meant, that perhaps I was reading into things a bit too much.

Was I taking it all too seriously? Am I taking it all too seriously?

Thomas Merton wrote in Peace in the Post-Christian Era: "We strive to soothe our madness by intoning more and more vacuous clichés. And at such times, far from being as innocuous as they are absurd, empty slogans take on dreadful power."

I felt the dreadful power of vacuous clichés and empty slogans that night. I felt it fall over me like a cold shadow, the shadow of a fat, ominous, mysterious, untouchable blimp that eclipsed the sun and hovered overhead. It was so dark and foreboding, precisely because it was so vacuous, so empty, so vague, and thus so untouchable.

How do you fight a shadow? You can't touch it. You can't move it. You can't stop it. It's just there: the blimp of National Greatness and the dark shadow of lies under which we live, and it's been everywhere since 9-11, falling across every state, every county, every city, every church, every house, every mind and heart, and frankly I'm sick to death of being under it, of hearing about it, of being expected to stand and bow and salute and pay my respects to it, and it's so big, the empire, the lie, so powerful in its inconsistent nothingness, that it's obscured everything else, and now it's taken away this too, my Stone Mountain Laser Show. I even have to hear about it here. Can we never get away from it? Will it never end?

Obama says it won't, as long as there are "safe havens" in the world where evil doers might carry out evil plans.

And I suppose my disgust, indignation and offense had something to do, finally, with this idea of unity at all costs, an idea which really has its roots in America in the War of Northern Aggression (there, I chose one), and Justin Raimondo made this point astutely in a recent column about Obama's latest address to the nation, in case you missed it:

Like his predecessor, Obama has often praised this mystic post-9/11″unity,” including twice in this speech, and therein lies the mark of the tyrant, who always welcomes the unthinking submission to authority wartime brings.  

So no, I don't think I am overreacting after watching the power of those vacuous images and slogans, and that final, sinister command, the call for unity and support, and witnessing all of the people around me stand up and take off their hats and put their hands over their hearts to honor…something, though we know not what exactly; we only know that it interrupts thought, blunts feeling, deadens conscience, that it preaches hate, turns man against man, justifies violence and destroys. And that something, whatever it is, has a cold grip on the American psyche. No, I don't think I was overreacting as the fireworks exploded overhead and obscured the stars, the moon and all light with their smoke.

Oh, and as I watched him on that stage My hands were clenched in fists of rage No angel born in hell Could break that Satan's spell And as the flames climbed high into the night To moonlight the sacrificial rite I saw Satan laughing with delight The Day the Music Died

Unity.

Why dwell on things in the past that separated us when we can dwell on things in the present that unite us? Things like fear and arrogance and hate.

Well, what if I don't want to be united with that? What if I don't want to be united with them?

These are questions that have been asked before.

The answer came to me suddenly when the words PLEASE RISE appeared on the mountain. It was a small answer, and an even smaller action, but it was something.

Please rise? No, thanks, Washington. I won't. I've had enough.

While the South rose around me, I was content to stay right there on my blanket, close my eyes and take a deep breath, enjoying the scent of crepe myrtle or dogwood or cape jessamine, whatever it is that sweetens the air in Georgia at night.

Not that I wouldn't rise. I would rise for Dippin' Dots and hula-hoops, for choo choo trains and families playing catch. I would rise to do the Electric Slide or to honor the founder of Camp Sunshine or the person who figured out how to cure that little kid's cancer. But no, not for this, not for your Cause, your wars and your cemeteries, with your end game that is always described with words like u201Cpeaceu201D and u201Cfreedom,u201D but the means to which is always a form of death: physical, moral, and spiritual.

And I'm sure there are people out there who would say, "You wouldn't be free to enjoy those Dippin' Dots if it weren't for the American military! You'd be singin' your country songs in German if it weren't for the American military!" And to those people, too, I say: Enough.

I can never be a Southerner, but I can still be a Rebel.

I think we're going to need a lot more. There's a war brewing, and it's not with the terrorists. It's with the shadow. And you don't have to pick up a weapon to fight it. It wouldn't do any good anyhow. You can't fight a shadow with a weapon. Plus, their weapons are bigger. Their weapons are badder. They spend $664 billion a year creating, maintaining and deploying their weapons. Their weapons are their alpha and their omega: the source of their power and their entire reason for existing. So if you have any notions of grabbing your musket, gathering your militia, and running out onto an open field, I feel it incumbent upon me to disabuse you of that notion right quick. They will probably spot you with one of their satellites, send over a drone and obliterate you with a laser (while Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red White and Blue blasts in the background: "We'll light you up like the Fourth of July!")

You can only fight a shadow with light. So take a cue from Rosa Parks and simply refuse to stand up when they tell you to. That's where it has to start, and that's the only way to bring all of this to an end. Do that and you'll be doing your part. True, fight in this way, serve in this way, and they will probably never bury you in a special cemetery or carve your likeness into the side of a mountain. I have a feeling there's not going to be a lot of glory in it, being a Rebel this time around. On the other hand, you will be the victor every single time. You will never know defeat.

Ellen Finnigan [send her mail] graduated from the University of Montana with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 2008, and is still proud of the coup she staged while she was there. As leader of the Missoula for Ron Paul Meet-Up, she helped the group infiltrate the Missoula County Republican Central Committee and win the county for Ron Paul on Super Tuesday (to the chagrin of neoconservatives throughout the state). She is working on a book.

Warning: Spoilers!

When people call a film a psychological thriller, they often seem to be referring to the effect it has on its viewers, in which sense a "psychological thriller" is a film that disorients you, keeps you guessing, allows you no sure footing. Sometimes there is a big reveal at the climax, a key that opens the secret door of meaning (The Sixth Sense). Other times you can find no door but the one through which you exit the theater, stumbling bleary-eyed into the parking lot, disturbed and still confused, scratching your head and asking: "What in the world just happened?"

Then there is a second kind of psychological thriller, one which concerns itself less with the mind of the audience and more with the mind of a character, and the telling of a story in which the drama is mostly psychological, that is to say related to the mind or processes of the mind, mental rather than physical.

The first kind run the risk of being cheap because they can rely too heavily on filmmaking tricks and narrative gimmicks (surrealist images, nonlinear storytelling) that seemingly have no purpose other than to bewilder or bedazzle the audience. The second run the risk of being cheap because they can rely too heavily on trite, psychoanalytical formulas that we have all learned practically by osmosis simply from living in our Freud-saturated, therapy-obsessed culture, reducing the audience to an analyst and the film, or a character in a film, to a client prone on a couch.

The two kinds can overlap of course, and often do, but rare is it to find a psycho-thriller comprising the perfect balance of both and cheap on neither front, one that intelligently and artistically depicts the drama of a mind while taking its audience on a wild ride of spellbinding suspense. This is the beauty of Black Swan. This is movie-going as more than entertainment, filmmaking as storytelling as art.

Most of the reviews I've read have described the film as a psychological thriller/horror film about a professional ballet dancer, Nina, a "good girl" in a highly competitive field who starts cracking up under the pressure when she has to go up against "bad girl" rival, Lily, for a coveted part in Swan Lake, the coveted part being the prima ballerina of course, who, in a new twist, will dance the part of both the white and the black swan. There are doubts as to whether Nina can cut it, because though her dancing is technically masterful, her poise and beauty perfect for the white swan, she supposedly lacks the natural, passionate, seductive quality required to dance the part of the black. The plot points in the film are few, but because of the rich imagistic landscape and a magical, dreamlike, nay, nightmarish touch ("Wait, did that really just happen or was that only in Nina's mind?"), one walks away knowing that the film was "about" something much bigger, much broader. But what?

What one thinks the film is really about depends largely on whom one supposes the antagonist to be. One of the things I liked most about the film, in retrospect, was that it spent the first half playing with the possibilities. Will it be the lascivious director bent on ravishing and corrupting our pristine maiden? Will it be the ageing ballerina (played by Winona Ryder) who has been forced to retire and now wants revenge on her replacement? Will it be her mother, a creepy, doting stage mom, herself a former dancer who only ever danced in the chorus, who seems incapable of seeing that her pride in her daughter's accomplishment might only be working as a thin veil for her regret, resentment, and envy? Or will the antagonist turn out to be the uninhibited "bad girl" (has tattoos, shows up late for rehearsal, smokes!) who, after befriending Nina, will betray her by stealing the part? It isn't long before one realizes that these are clichés, stock characters all of them, a sign that the film is probably working on another level.

During the first half of the film Nina seems barely conscious, getting bounced around like a silver ball in a pinball machine. They say "acting is reacting," and as the film begins, this is taken to an extreme in Nina. She has no agency whatsoever. She gets pampered and manipulated by her mom. She gets kissed and felt up by the director. She gets the lead of Swan Queen, after which she gets taken to a party and shown off on his arm like a prize. There, she gets looked at. Then she gets chewed out by the inebriated retired ballerina. Later she gets harassed by a man on the subway who makes lewd gestures at her (she responds by…continuing to sit there.) She goes to a club with Lily where she gets drugged. She gets laid (though only semiconsciously). The only things she does are: apologize, dance, squirm, apologize, dance, agree, and apologize. Oh, and she also tries to please pretty much everyone: the director (by doing as he requested, attempting to masturbate), her mom (by eating cake), Lily (by taking the drugs), and even the old, drunk ballerina, who after the party threw herself in front of a bus and is now lying completely unconscious in a dark hospital room (on an impulse of guilt, Nina shows up at the hospital and returns some of things she had stolen from her dressing room. Nina apologizes). Nina says that what she wants is to be perfect. All she is is passive.

The chromatic scheme is key: There is a lot of black and white in the film. It is easy to see Nina, referred to often as "sweet girl," our protagonist, our sheltered, earnest perfectionist with the best of intentions, as the white, and everything surrounding her as the threat, as the black. On the surface level we have a plethora of moral dualities, old-fashioned good versus evil in its many ossified forms: purity vs. depravity; chastity vs. lust; goodwill vs. envy; propriety vs. rebellion; conscience vs. inhibition; restraint vs. passion; discipline vs. freedom; innocence vs. experience; etc. Seen in this light, any of the aforementioned characters could be the antagonist, completing the duality which most commonly provides drama, which is the engine of a story: protagonist/good versus antagonist/evil. The third color, however, is pink. There is an awful lot of pink. Nina's bedroom is like a cloud of cotton candy. Only a Care Bear® could live there (and not go insane). It is the pink that, to my mind, offers the key to the door of meaning (a door from which her mother later removes the doorknob in an effort to trap Nina and prevent her from taking the stage on opening night, but I'll get to that in a minute).

The world of pink is the world of ballerinas, is the world of little girls, is the world of the hyper feminine. It is a world from which most girls are ejected when they reach a certain age. I can't tell you how many times I've talked with other women about the love I had for dancing when I was a girl, and in those conversations how many of them have said something like, "Yeah, I was serious about ballet until the seventh grade, when my teacher told my parents I should take up something else. My boobs ruined that dream. I started playing the flute." There are variations. "I gained weight" or "I'm all hips." For me, it was my height. Can you imagine a male dancer trying to lift a woman who is 5’9"? It would be like watching someone try to pick up a tree.

Ballet dancers are muscular, athletic, and incredibly tough, yes, but the qualities we most often associate with them are the more classically feminine qualities of grace, softness, delicacy, lightness, flexibility (which is to say pliability) and formality. They are not vulgar. They are proper. They are not free. They, literally, have bound feet. There are set steps in ballet. They have pretty, sophisticated French names. One memorizes them, and every ballet is made up of a combination of those steps. Ballerinas are obviously also tiny in stature and, when they are not wearing the skin-tight leotards that show off their sinewy musculature, could be mistaken from a distance for little girls. On stage their skin looks like porcelain. Why, ballerinas are sugar and spice and everything nice, what every little girl should be made of!

So is it really that shocking when the retired ballerina lying prostrate in her hospital bed picks up the nail file that Nina returns to her and starts screaming, jabbing it into her cheek repeatedly, stabbing herself in the face? Well, yes. It is a horror film after all. But after the shock of it wore off, I couldn't help chuckling quietly in my seat with some dark delight. Oh, come on now old, drunk ballerina, that is not very ladylike of you! I was reminded of something I once read about Saint Margaret of Hungary: Beautiful, wanted, importuned by suitors, she threatened to mutilate her face with a knife if her father forced her to marry. Ha! How's that for agency?

Womanhood is not pink and fluffy. It is red and wet, sodden with blood. Red is to womanhood as hyper-femininity is to pink, and if I haven't convinced you of that (something of which, admittedly, you probably needed little convincing), then try picturing a pregnant ballerina and you'll get my gist, see how absurd it would be, how diametrically opposed these two worlds, on a symbolic level, really are. So, there it must be: The conflict here is not a simple case of "man versus man" as we so often expect from Hollywood, but (wo)man versus society! Society is the antagonist, represented in microcosm by the world of ballet and symbolically by the infantilizing mother, both of which prize and reward those hyper-feminine qualities, both behavioral and physical, associated with little girls, thereby wreaking havoc on our female protagonist's psyche as she comes of age and to terms with her own body and experiences a sexual awakening. Right?

Not quite.

Here's my problem with that: Then what to make of the director? This handsome devil, the puppet master of the ballet, the very epitome of power in the film (feminism flash: patriarchy! patriarchy!) is not trying to suffocate her "inner black swan" in a world of proper primness and feminine passivity; rather, he is trying to bring it out. He is encouraging those qualities not associated with the hyper feminine: aggression, action, impulse, desire. He tells her to stop apologizing. Now I suppose one could aver that he is doing so only out of personal interest, not because he wants her to be the best Swan Queen she can be but because he's a lecher who seduced (and has now discarded) the prior prima ballerina, and that he wants Nina to stop being so "frigid" as a dancer and by extension as a woman simply because that would make it easier for him to get in her pants, or would make her a better lay, or whatever. But I'm not buying it. There's more there. Because one night when they are rehearsing, he is given the perfect opportunity to, shall we say, fluff her feathers — heck, she almost asks him to (there is the phrase muttered breathlessly: "No, wait. Please.") — but he refuses, walks away. She is left standing there alone, bun intact.

I think it's safe to say that, as many others have noted, the conflict is a clear case of (wo)man versus self. Protagonist and antagonist are one, two sides of the same character. The real drama is related to Nina's mind and the processes of her mind, internal rather than external. Thus the "plot points" of the story, especially with regard to the other characters, matter much less than the internal conflict, the struggle happening within. To a large extent what happens in the external world of the film can be understood as "real" only insofar as it reflects or mirrors the very real drama going on inside; much of it is projection and therefore symbolic. Much of it is also over-the-top and would border on hokey if it hadn't been so artfully executed. Distortion and exaggeration are effective devices. Flannery O'Connor said that the "grotesque" is about "using the concrete in a more drastic way." Few can pull it off. If you can, it's powerful.

So, anyway, the conflict in this story must be an id/ego thing then, right? The black swan is the instinctual, hot-blooded, impulsive id associated with the raw sexual energy and desire, encouraged by the masculine character of the director and represented by Lily, the rival, while the white swan, Nina, is the superego of civilized restraint, the feminine as moral guard trying to keep the id in check. Is the story about these two facets of Nina's personality fighting for control of her self? I'm no psychologist, and I'm not even much of a film buff, but I would venture to say that though we're getting closer, we're not there yet. Bear with me!

It can't all come down to that. It just can't! It's too easy. I say this because of a particular scene that happens near the end of the film. This is after Nina's mother, on opening night, locks herself in the Care Bear® bedroom with Nina and removes the doorknob (for Nina's own good, of course!) Nina beats up her mother, finds the doorknob, and escapes, but not before slamming her mother's fingers in the door a few times (crunch!) just for good measure, leaving her screaming in agony on the floor. She doesn't storm but rather struts out of the apartment, exclaiming: "I'm the Swan Queen! You never even left the chorus!" (It's a violent, sick scene, but kind of funny, too, in a B-movie kind of way.) Nina arrives at the theatre, takes her seat in the dressing room, and starts calmly applying her make-up, insisting to the director as he questions her that she feels fine and is ready to perform. As the momentum builds (it really starts soaring here), Nina begins dancing the part of the white swan. She is very nervous. At the end, she falls. She messes up big time. She is worried and ashamed. Backstage, she sees the director coming toward her, asking what went wrong. Nina points, blames her partner: "He dropped me!" Not the noblest thing to do, but hey, at least she didn't apologize. We see this as progress. There is hope for Nina.

Then, it is time for her transformation. It is time for her to become the black swan! There is a moment, a brilliant moment, an astounding moment, and this is the moment I was talking about, which is disturbing and penetrating, when we begin to understand her fear. She is backstage, right? Walking toward her down a long, dark corridor is a monster, a scary demon-like thing wearing a black, hooded cape, with a hideous black mask instead of a face. There is something phallic about it, a weird snout or something (if I remember correctly…or is this review becoming a wild ride through my mind? Who's to say?) We have seen this monster in the film once before, late one night when Nina was obsessively rehearsing by herself and she walked down a dark corridor of the studio to find the director f*cking (sorry, please pardon my not-so-pretty French, no other word will suffice, oh wait, I'm apologizing, I take that back!) Lily, the bad girl rival. When Nina sees them, the director turns to look at her and he has the face of this monster! And now, here it is again: the monster! the embodiment of "black"! the id! instinct! lust! Dionysian debauchery!, whatever you want to call it, walking straight toward her down a long, dark hallway and what does Nina do? She walks right past it without blinking an eye. He passes on the left, just another dancer in a costume getting ready to perform. What Nina homes in on in this scene is the other women, the chorus girls who are filing past on her right, all in white leotards, all interchangeable, one after another, and what…are they — are they snickering at her? It's hard to tell. Their faces are somewhat obscured, but they seem to be glancing at her, shyly or with contempt or curiosity or — knowing? But we think we hear snickering, something. Why? Because she fell? Because she isn't good enough? Because they're jealous? We don't know. Only Nina knows, because they're not really snickering. It's something in her mind.

What we do know is that there is some kind of pressure exerted by these girls filing past her, more accurately by a nameless, faceless chorus, which Nina senses and finds disturbing or threatening or dark. In this moment, we feel her aloneness. She is the Swan Queen, what she always wanted to be; yet, this also makes her the odd (wo)man out. Does it tempt her, that former state, the familiar womb of white and wash? Does a part of her want to be going that way, the other way, with them? Because how much easier would it be to be in their group? Would anyone in the audience even notice if one of them messed up? This moment, combined with the violent scene of the vanquishing of the mother, suggests that it is something in herself that Nina has to conquer, and that the something has less to do with primal urges or masculine this or feminine that than it does with what is represented by the anonymous, interchangeable girls in the chorus, which she once was and is no longer.

When Nina becomes the black swan, it is a dizzying, dazzling thrill. Everything in the film works, clicks, soars. It is perfect: the acting, the pacing, the music, costumes, cinematography, special effects.* By this time, I was breathless! I've heard it said that the film is about child abuse, sexual awakening, the id, many things, but as the bloody rash on Nina's shoulder blade (which she had so far been trying to conceal) began to ripple and spread, but bloodlessly, like goose bumps (which you can get either from a physical experience, like when you are exposed and cold, or from a mental experience, like when you are afraid or excited or terribly thrilled) transforming her porcelain skin and causing her to sprout little black hairs all over her arms and back and neck (Somebody, please, get this girl a plastic pink razor!), as she fluttered her arms and opened her chest, growing the thick, black plumage (No, wait. Please…don't!), and was lifted up so high that she rose above the chorus encircling her below, their faces looking up now completely unmenacingly, hers exhibiting not only confidence but steely reserve, it seemed clear to me that the film was not just about becoming a woman but about becoming an individual, and the capacity for self-assertion that is required to do so; the psychological trauma (perhaps amplified when you are a woman, expected to be "sweet") that goes along with that; the guilt we inevitably carry if we dare to develop into independent and critical beings, separate from our teachers and parents and friends and colleagues; and finally, the fierceness that is required to break away from the pack, a fierceness which indeed at times can feel like violence.

What a different Nina we see at the end (Bravo, Natalie Portman! Bravo!) from the Nina we saw at the beginning, the Nina who upon discovering that she had been selected for the part of Swan Queen locked herself in a bathroom stall and cried secret tears of joy, hiding as if she was ashamed. When she emerges from that stall, she sees the word "WHORE" written across the mirror in either blood or lipstick, something red. At the time, we think it might have been written by the former prima ballerina or a chorus girl out of jealously, but by the end we understand it was more likely a projection of Nina's self-reprimand and guilt. At the end of her performance, she looks out and sees her mother in the audience, enjoying her performance placidly and with pride. It is not the face of a woman who has just returned from the emergency room, having been assaulted and terrorized by her own sweet girl.

On opening night, Nina does not ask permission from anyone to perform, not the mother, not the director. When she messes up, she refuses to apologize. She is not perfect, but she goes on. She blocks out the snickers, whether real or imagined. And it becomes clear that Lily, her rival, is actually a supportive if not kindred spirit, not a sinister threat at all. However, the performance is still a battle. I enjoyed one last furtive good laugh when Nina spots a sea of blood seeping out from beneath a door in her dressing room (she has killed something, it is in there, it is dead or dying); she grabs a fluffy, pink towel and shoves it in front of the door like she is trying to stop smoke in a burning building. Ha! You're going to need more than that to stop this hemorrhaging, honey!

So, does the black swan win out in the end? I don't think so. Not necessarily. After Nina performs the role of the black swan (indeed, perfectly!), we see her again in her white swan costume, and this is the costume she is wearing when the film ends. The viewer is kept guessing, the last surprise being that the antagonist is not the bad girl/black swan after all, as one might expect, nor is it the good girl/white swan. Something else has to be killed if our heroine is going to have any hope of becoming an individual, of surviving in this world and living on her own terms. And herein lies the difference between getting and taking: landing the part, performing beautifully, getting the applause, these things aren't enough. All of that the white swan could have done on her own. The role demands that Nina integrate the two, the black and the white, because only the Swan Queen, powered by both, can take the stage. In the process the "sweet girl" must die. Nina must kill her, and that she does.

Is this story a tragedy? Hardly!

More like triumph! I say: "Good riddance."

*This was another thing I loved about the film. The special effects were minimal, and the nightmarish moments they created in extended reality were not simply repressed or twisted memories harkening back to a mysterious plot point that happened before the film began — I am thinking, for example, of Shutter Island — to be revealed and fully explained later on in the film, thus acting as a flashback and a bit of foreshadowing, and serving an expository function all at once. The special effects in Black Swan were used to bolster the thematic content of the film, not to complete the narrative arc. They were about imagery, not memory. Did I mention I really like this film?

Ellen Finnigan [send her mail] graduated from the University of Montana with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 2008, and is still proud of the coup she staged while she was there. As leader of the Missoula for Ron Paul Meet-Up, she helped the group infiltrate the Missoula County Republican Central Committee and win the county for Ron Paul on Super Tuesday (to the chagrin of neoconservatives throughout the state). She is now living in an intentional community founded by lay Catholics with a focus on organic gardening, prayer, and nonviolence, and working on a book.

To Whom It
May Concern:

I am writing
in response to a job posting on www.beapatriot.gov for a new Federal
Reserve Chairman. I would like to submit my rsum for consideration.

Since graduating
with my B.A. in 2000, I have gained valuable work experience in
a variety of fields, such as nonprofit, firefighting, and building
security. Though I have not had much experience with monetary policy,
my skill set would be highly transferable to the work I would be
doing in Washington. Having studied the mission and history of the
Fed extensively, I know that, despite my eclectic background, I
would be a great fit with your organization. Allow me to tell you
a little bit about professional background.

As a junior
in college, I interned at Fly Free, a nonprofit whose mission was
to save the bald eagle from going extinct. My main accomplishment
was coming up with the idea for their "Promise to America"
campaign. The promise was this: "We'll give you a dollar for
every bald eagle you don't shoot." It was about simple incentives:
Give Americans the right incentives, and they'll do what you think
is best. Well, the program became very expensive. The nonprofit
had to borrow money to pay for it. Then no one would lend them money
anymore, so I came up with the idea to put scratch-n-sniff, bald
eagle stickers on Monopoly dollars and send those out instead. A
few people called in to complain, saying their dollars were fake.
I would say: "No they're not." The number of bald eagles
saved is still unknown, but I learned a lot about public relations.

When I graduated
from college, I craved adventure, so I worked as a firefighter in
Colorado. My mission was to protect the wildlife and natural resources
from forest fires and to reduce the threat to human lives and property.
When I was first hired, I conducted a controlled burn at a national
park to decrease the likelihood of a more serious fire. The controlled
burn burned uncontrollably, turning into a more serious fire. I
received a promotion, a 20 percent increase in salary to supervise
the additional workforce, and thousands of dollars in federal aid
to deal with the fire. Plus, it stimulated the economy: More jobs
for firefighters! I guess that's what you call the "law of
unintended consequences."

During this
time, I was also in charge of directing pre-fire suppression activities
in a nearby town, such as removing vegetation adjacent to structures
and thinning out trees to break up potential fuels. Afterwards,
I doused the structures with gasoline and decorated the branches
with red, white and blue paper lanterns. The whole town burned down.

Then I created
a team to liaise with local business owners at a still-standing
strip mall that wasn't doing too well, identifying common goals
and working together to meet community objectives: My team set fire
to the strip mall and received a 10% cut of the insurance checks.
Then we torched a "Ron Paul 2012" billboard just for kicks.
What a summer! Local business owners wanted me to run for mayor,
but I felt I was destined for bigger and better things.

After my stint
as a firefighter, I had a nice nest egg, so I decided to do some
traveling in Europe. I ended up obtaining a job as the Head of Security
at the Louvre. There, my mission was to protect the priceless works
of art from theft and damage. Because I had unchecked and unparalleled
access to the collections, and because it seemed to me that that
most of those pretty pictures would garner a pretty penny, I began
to network internationally with art lovers during the day and became
well versed in art "dealing" at night. I was careful to
replace every work of art that I sold with a dead ringer imitation
so as not to deprive the public of the pleasure of enjoying these
treasures of human civilization.

The French
Ministry of Culture did begin to suspect something was up after
they noticed all of those armored vehicles pulling up to the loading
dock night after night, but when they called me out on it, I reminded
them of the dangers inherent in the politicization of art, and the
need for the world of art to remain independent of all things political,
like questions about force and fraud. The Ministry backed off. When
they decided they wanted to go to war with some Middle Eastern country,
I fronted them the money out of my lucrative earnings and they have
left me alone ever since. In fact, my friends at the Ministry have
recently been egging me to lead the E.U. or the U.N. or some other
pseudo-governing body, but I felt I was destined for even bigger,
even better things.

As for my current
professional objectives, I thought about running for President of
the United States, but I wouldn't like that kind of spotlight. I
wouldn't want to be accountable to the American public. I wouldn't
want to hear their whiny, little voices all the time or have to
explain what I'm doing. I wouldn't want to kowtow to anybody. Then
it occurred to me: The Fed!

I would very
much enjoy the opportunity to speak with you at length about how
I would regulate the United States banking system, maintain stability
of the financial system, stabilize prices, and achieve maximum employment.
(I also have some ideas about a perpetual motion machine that you
might find interesting.) This job appeals to me because, in the
event I encounter challenges that make it difficult for me to achieve
my objectives, or in the event I appear to be accomplishing the
exact opposite of my stated objectives year after year, I can simply
call my critics conspiracy theorists, and will never have to answer
for my inconceivable inanity, seriously questionable tactics, general
moral sketchiness, and absolute incompetence.

A strong country
requires a strong central bank, one full of super smart people who
know how to run, not only the country, but the world. Beyond having
a keen interest in the mission of the Federal Reserve, I simply
want to be one of those people.

Thank you for
your time and consideration. Please find my rsum attached.

Sincerely,
Ellen
Finnigan

Ellen
M. Finnigan
1984
Orwell Street, Springfield, CO 91111
(911)
911-91111 ellenfinnigan@gmail.com

EDUCATION

State College

School
of Arts & Sciences, Class of 2000

Bachelor
of Arts

OBJECTIVE:
To obtain the position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve in order
to utilize my skills and grow professionally

EMPLOYMENT

Fly Free Washington
D.C.

Intern
● Summer 1999

Mission: to
save bald eagle from going extinct

• Put nonprofit
  in serious debt
• Counterfeited
  fraudulent money with scratch-n-sniff stickers
• Number of
  bald eagles saved: unknown

Wildland
Fire Assistance Springfield, CO

Firefighter
● June 2000 — July 2003

Mission:
to suppress wildland fires; protect wildlife and natural resources;
and reduce the threat to human lives and property

• Started
  a fire that decimated wildlife and natural resources and threatened
  human lives and property
• Burnt down
  town of Springfield

The
Louvre Paris, France

Head of
Security ● July 2004 — February 2009

Mission: to
protect museum's art collections from theft and damage

• Stole art
• Sold it
  on black market
• Made a killing
• Ruined world-famous
  art collection forever

References
Available Upon Request

February
5, 2010

Ellen
Finnigan [send her mail]
graduated from the University of Montana with an M.F.A. in Creative
Writing. She currently teaches writing online to Catholic homeschooled
kids and was the organizer of the Missoula for Ron Paul meet-up
group.

Dorothy Day
and her mentor, Peter Maurin, founded the movement, because they
believed that the Catholic Church had developed an unhealthy alignment
with the State, and was spending too much time accumulating property
and wealth, not enough time helping the common man. As a result,
the Catholic Workers developed a fiercely independent, anti-institution
mentality. They believed that charity should be performed as a personal
sacrifice, so they resisted doing anything that would commercialize
or complicate their mission. Paul Elie explains in his book The
Life You Save May Be Your Own: as circulation of their paper
increased, their ideas spread and more houses opened up, they refused
on principle to take out loans, collect interest on real estate,
amass capital, or incorporate. They never sold advertisements in
The Catholic Worker, even after circulation had climbed
to 70,000, and they refused at the behest of government officials
to register as a religious group or a charitable organization. In
fact, Day went out of her way to clarify that the Houses of Hospitality
were not "multiple dwellings, rest homes, convalescent
homes, shelters, asylums or convents."

"This
isn't a business," said Day. "This is a movement."

"We are
not an organization," Maurin said. "We are an organism."

Like most principles,
Day's were adhered to at a cost. By refusing to conform to certain
state "guidelines," by refusing to coalesce into some
kind of official, classifiable entity, the Catholic Workers not
only cut themselves off from opportunities for state funding, but
often found themselves embroiled in squabbles with the government,
which Day liked to refer to as "Holy Mother State."

"More
and more," Day wrote in her autobiography, The
Long Loneliness, "[Catholic institutions] were taking
money from the state, and in taking from the state, they had to
render to the state. They came under the head of Community Chest
and discriminatory charity, centralizing and departmentalizing,
involving themselves with bureaus, building, red tape, legislation,
at the expense of human values."

The point cannot
be ignored: To do something for others through government inevitably
introduces a host of inimical elements — coercion, corruption, bureaucracy,
waste, personal agendas, the corrosive effect of money, the consolidation
of power, i.e. politics — which pervert the spirit in which
the action is being done, skew the intended outcome, and often bring
about unforeseen, long-term consequences. In his book, A
Harsh and Dreadful Love, William Miller writes that the
Catholic Workers were "not opposed to organization, but wanted
radical decentralization and delegation to smaller bodies and groups
what could be done far more humanely and responsibly through mutual
aid as well as charity."

Dorothy Day
and Peter Maurin did not call themselves libertarians (the term
didn't become commonplace until the 70s); on the contrary, they
called themselves socialists. But they believed in a socialism that
was anti-collectivist: They named it economic volunteerism, or Christian
communism. Someone once told Peter Maurin that he spoke like an
anarchist, and he responded, "Sure I'm an anarchist. All thinking
people are anarchists, but I prefer the name personalist."

It is difficult
to define, in terms of a political system, what the Catholic Worker
movement stood for, because their philosophy of personalism, which
lies at the heart of their ideas, is inherently antithetical to
the objectivism, centralization and institutionalism that characterize
the activities of the State. Personalism is the view that the human
person is the basic unit of society, and that all forms of social
organization — family, nation, church, state — are sound only insofar
as they uphold the dignity of every person and prompt every person
into direct encounters with others.

Peter Maurin
wrote: "We must have a sense of responsibility to take care
of our own, and our neighbor, at a personal sacrifice. That is the
first principle. It is not the function of the state to enter into
these realms… Charity is personal. Charity is love."

In his book
Introduction
to Christianity, Pope Benedict explains that being a Christian
means, essentially, undergoing a transformation: from being "for"
oneself to being "for" one another. I have often heard
people say that it is for this reason that libertarianism, with
its emphasis on individual liberty and limited government, is simply
not compatible with Christianity. It seems there are growing numbers
of Americans, many of them Christians, who believe that people are
"for one another" only insofar as they are "for"
certain kinds of government action. Fail to extol the pet projects
of Holy Mother State (whether national healthcare or war) at a critical
juncture, and people will often say: "You call yourself a Christian?
What about sacrifice!" It's a familiar refrain these days.

A couple years
ago, Christian environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote an article for
Harper's called "The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful
Nation Gets Jesus Wrong," in which he discussed the extent
of our country's negligence in "caring for the least of us."
The crux of his argument came down to tax cuts and government programs:
we don't pay enough; our government doesn't do enough. The refrain
popped up again in Michael Moore's film Sicko,
when he diagnosed the problem with our country as: "We are
a country of me instead of we." In his book God Is Not a
Republican or a Democrat, Reverend Jim Wallis advocates a "moral
values audit" of the federal budget, his theory being that
if most Americans consider themselves Christians (which they do),
and if faith is evidenced by external actions, as well as internal
beliefs about God (which, most of us agree, it is), then a look
at our country's spending will illuminate our collective action,
and thus, our spiritual disrepair. A moral audit of the budget,
he claims, proves that we are not sufficiently feeding the poor,
sheltering the homeless, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked,
or doing any of the things that Jesus said would separate the righteous
from the damned.

Should we really
be looking at the federal budget as a spiritual gauge? That Americans,
especially Christian Americans, should identify so radically with
their government is an idea I personally object to; and I do not
believe it is an idea Dorothy Day would have ever propagated.

Day believed
that institutions were destroying society, and that by forfeiting
our personal responsibilities to the government, we not only fail
to love one another in the way God commands us, but we grant the
State power to decide how our duties to one another will be carried
out. From what I gather, it wasn't so much the inefficiency, bureaucracy
or waste she had a problem with: It was the Power, with a capital
"P."

Government
is the only institution in society that can use coercion to achieve
its ends. Day lived through two World Wars, during a time when the
use of unprecedented amounts of force was becoming an acceptable
way to combat evil in the world. She maintained that the true mind
of the Church is peace, grounding her convictions in the Gospels
and the papal encyclicals.

Day's intransigent
pacifism provoked criticism from inside and outside the Church.
As the majority of the country marched in step to the federal government's
war cries (including many Catholics who, being largely an immigrant
population, wanted to be seen as patriotic), the Workers repeatedly
spoke out against the imperialist crusades of "idolatrous nationalism,"
opposing conscription and urging people to be conscientious objectors
from World War II through the war in Vietnam. Often, when Holy Mother
State tried to stir up the passions of her children, Workers resisted
the frenzy, the fever. Workers did not participate in air-raid drills
in New York City, as required by the Civil Defense Act. They would
inform the police of their intent to resist and spend the ten minutes
sitting on park benches. The only point, said Day, was to instill
fear, as it would be impossible in the end to take cover from an
atomic bomb.

Thomas Merton
once wrote that the job of the Christian is "to try to give
an example of sanity, independence and human integrity against all
establishments and all mass movements and all current fashions which
are merely mindless and hysterical." My knowledge of the Catholic
Workers is by no means exhaustive, yet what I do know about Dorothy
Day makes me wonder if today's Christians don't lack her sanity,
independence, and integrity. Are we too eager, whether we're Christians
of the Right or Christians of the Left, to believe that government
(or at least our government, or at least our government when it's
being run by "the right people") is benign? Are we so
desperate for Security or Change that we're willing to open the
floodgates of power, blindly trusting that it will be used for good?

I don't think
Christians need to develop what Reverend Jim Wallis calls "a
new political morality"; Christians need to recover an old
political realism. We live in a fallen world. The poor will always
be with us. Washington is a cesspool of unrestrained greed, hubris,
and corruption. Our political leaders are bought and paid for. These
realities do not give us an excuse to throw up our hands in resignation,
not at all, but it does mean that there will never be a shortage
of people with vested interests who are eager to propose solutions
for things, and I would argue that it is the duty of the Christian
to question those solutions vigorously, approaching anything political
in particular with a healthy dose of skepticism. This is the Christian
virtue of prudence: using practical reasoning to discern our true
good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving
it. As Christians, we are not allowed to separate the means from
the ends.

Coercion
is the essence of every political solution. This is the basic tenet
of libertarianism, along with the belief that coercion should be
minimized in society as much as humanly possible. This seemed to
be something Dorothy Day understood: "Those dreaded words,"
she once wrote, "pacifism and anarchism, when you get down
to it, mean that we try always to love rather than coerce, to be
what we want the other fellow to be, to be the least, to have no
authority over others, to begin with that microcosm man, or rather,
with ourselves." How did Dorothy Day know if the Catholic Workers
were staying true to their philosophy of personalism? If they "could
still cite no satisfying statistics of progress having been made,
of a growth of organizational efficiency, of having established
an economically sound basis for its structure, or of having had
large and victorious confrontations with the forces of evil in the
object world."

The fundamental
Christian value is love, and the political world always has, always
will revolve around money and power. Day repeated the following
statement in many of her speeches: "Love in action is a harsh
and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. Love in dreams is
greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight
of all. Men will even give over their lives if only the ordeal does
not last long but is soon over, with all looking and applauding
as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude,
and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science."

Christians
must approach the glittery promises of politicians with the prudent
political realism Americans increasingly lack. The most important
Christian value is love. We must recognize the difference between
love in action and love in dreams.

January
30, 2009

Ellen
Finnigan [send her mail]
graduated from the University of Montana in May with an M.F.A. in
Creative Writing. She currently teaches writing online to Catholic
homeschooled kids and was the organizer of the Missoula for Ron
Paul meet-up group.

Well I don't know what you old fogies were doing on Tuesday night, but if you were watching television you were definitely missing out. All the hip action was on Facebook!

Now let me just start by saying: I held out against the Facebook craze for a long time. I caved with Friendster back in the day and caved with MySpace and told myself I would never cave again. When one doesn't have much of a social life, one has very little need for social "networking." But then I went to grad school with a bunch of narcissistic, socially awkward writers (like myself), where, at parties, the ratio of photographs taken to conversations had was about 503:1. I heard that people were posting photographs on Facebook. I would see people in class and they would tell me I had been "tagged." I didn't know what that meant, so I would start chasing them. They would run away from me, confused, and it was all very awkward. I had to get an account so I would know what the heck people were talking about.

Once I joined, I found the "groups" to be the most amusing part of the site. Groups on Facebook are very, very stupid. For all of you old fogies who don't know (i.e. Mom and Dad, because I know you're going to ask me to explain all of this later anyway), Facebook users can join "groups" that show up on their profile, along with their activities and interests. Like everything else that happens on Facebook, groups are nothing but an extreme exercise in frivolity. Examples of Facebook groups include the following:

• Kids Who Hid in Department Store Clothes Racks While Their Mom was Shopping
• I Believe the Robots are Our Future
• I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar
• The Ultimate Question: Is Soap Self-Cleaning?
• AA is for Quitters
• My Phone Exploded on Impact
• I Use My Hand to Show People What Part of Alaska I'm From
• End the Genocide in Darfur!

Uh, okay maybe that last one is a "serious" group, but you get the point. In fact, even the "serious" groups on Facebook aren't really that serious, as they require absolutely nothing of their members. In this way, Facebook plays to the spirit of the times. We live in an age when the measure of a man lies not so much in what he does as in what he "supports." The emphasis is decidedly not on our actions or choices, but on some inward, intangible, theoretical orientation toward The Good, which is almost always defined only in the most narrow and superficial of ways. If you want to be righteous, if you want to be open-minded, high-minded, and noble, all you have to do is associate yourself with the right groups and causes, which is to say, you don't really have to do anything. The reverse seems to be true as well: What you do or fail to do doesn't actually matter as long as you support the right things. But more on that later. Suffice it to say, I joined a lot of groups when I first started my account, mostly because I found them to be hilarious. LOL! Note to old fogies: LOL stands for "laughing out loud."

I've always loved the scene in Annie Hall when Annie is moving out of Alvy's apartment. Annie picks up a box of buttons and starts to read them aloud: "Impeach Eisenhower… Impeach Nixon…Impeach Lyndon Johnson…Impeach Ronald Reagan. I guess these are all yours," she says, shoving the box into Alvy's hands.

I wanted my Facebook page to be like that, because come on, what modern day President doesn't deserve to be impeached? I joined an Impeach George W. Bush group, but I couldn't find any impeach groups for the candidates, so I started my own, just to be prepared: "Impeach Barack Obama," "Impeach Hillary Clinton" and "Impeach John McCain." At the time, I also joined other groups like "My Friends Are Getting Married, I'm Just Getting Drunk," "Magic Eraser Enthusiasts" (Have you tried them? They're amazing!), "I Went to Catholic School and Was Pissed When the CCD Kids Trashed My Desk," and "Tagalongs Are the Best Girl Scout Cookies…Not Samoas." (Later that day, my friend Anna joined the group "Samoas May Actually Replace Sex One Day," which was clearly an affront and, needless to say, we haven't spoken since.)

Like most people, I forgot about the Facebook groups I joined almost immediately. Fast forward eight months to….drum roll please….THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIME!! (*Yawn*…Aren't they all?)

I spent all day Tuesday checking Facebook. About 80% of my friends donated their status updates to getting out the vote for Obama. Looking down the list, the uniformity was astounding. (Note to old fogies: status updates are…oh, nevermind!) Facebook kept a running tally of how many Facebook users had voted and everyone was telling each other to vote and writing things like "Yes We Can!" It was like one big public service announcement.

The Facebook population could be broken down into two major groups, not Republicans and Democrats, but rather believers and cynics.

The believers would write: I just voted!

The cynics would write: My vote just cancelled out your vote.

The believers would write: I'm looking forward to CHANGE!!!

The cynics would write: I'm looking forward to CHANGE!!!….ing my underwear. It is Tuesday after all.

The believers posted pictures of "I Voted" stickers.

The cynics posted pictures of "I Farted" stickers. There was even a YouTube video going around that showed a bunch of earnest Americans looking into the camera and saying things like, "I just went into the booth, pulled the curtain, and farted."

Sure it was all a little ridiculous, but so is the nature of democracy in America, so I don't really care. It was all pretty amusing.

Well, imagine my surprise when I received a message the next day from a stranger on Facebook: "Your group has news attention!" It linked to a story that said an "Impeach Barack Obama" Facebook group had already attracted over 700 members, less than 24 hours after the election was called. I was suddenly an "activist."

Not three minutes later I received another message, this one from an irate Obama supporter calling me a racist. I totally panicked. I realized that my only description of the group was: "Get on board if you want to be ready to impeach Barack Obama." Admittedly, this did leave things open to interpretation. So I spent a few minutes hastily writing a new description of the group (which I stole from an article by LRC contributor Bill Huff. Thanks, dude!) This was the new description:

Each president recites the following oath, in accordance with Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

This group has been created under the assumption that it takes approximately 7 seconds for a modern day President to violate this oath. So we should be ready.

“In some governments it is held that ‘the king can do no wrong;’ here we know no king but the law, no monarch but the constitution; we hold that every man may do wrong; the higher he is in office, the more reason there is that he be obliged to answer for his conduct; and a great officer, if treacherous, is a great criminal, so that he ought to be made to suffer a great and exemplary punishment.”

~ Elementary Catechism on the Constitution of the United States, Arthur J. Stansbury, 1828

I went back to work, confident that my new description would clear up any confusion about my motivations. Well, either my new description wasn't clear enough or people don't read. I suspect the latter. There is also the possibility that most Americans cannot understand politics except in the most simplistic terms. When was the last time you heard anyone in the two major parties bring up egregious abuses of executive power as an "election issue"?

Here are excerpts from the colorful hate mail I've been receiving ever since: (Warning: Profanity)

you are a racist motherf__ker, you know that? you cunt! this was such a leap into the future, but you republicans can’t seem to see that bitch. U know u are an ignorant Bitch! Uneducated and uninformed hick! Kill yourself. Shame on you, you represent the worst of America. F__king hick! HAHAAAAAAAAA! YOU MAD CAUSE OUT PRESIDENT IS BLACK?! FUCK YA! ITS OUR TURN NOW BITCH! HAHA! FUCK MCCAIN! FUCK YOU! AND BE MAD CAUSE OUR PRESIDENT IS BLACK! HAHA! DUMB BITCH. F__k you. f__king prick. i hate you racist bitches. you racist, ignorant swine. I’m reporting you to the secret service. Hey by the way you forgot to Impeach bush. Ur such a Loser for makin this group like it or not he is ur President and ur opionion really doesnt matter!!!ELMAO.. IGNORANCE. You truly are showing that you are a person who has no morals. Just a quick note to let you know what a traitor you are to the United States of America. racist cunt. asshole. You should do something for the country that has granted you freedom and equality. Shut your mouth and move somewhere else. get hit by a bus. You are disgusting. Kill yourself. End yourself. (And my personal favorite) It’s people like you who are anti America that create a mindset full of hate. (And my other personal favorite) Breeding hatred is all this group is doing by attracting weak minded, ill informed dumbass republicans, christians, and racists.

These people clearly align themselves with the enlightened, tolerant, forward-looking left, and I'm sure they "support" all kinds of warm fuzzy causes on their Facebook pages, but in their prejudice, in their vitriol, in their willingness to make the most general and sweeping judgments about others based on the most superficial of criteria, they expose themselves as no less reactionary, hateful, and irrational than the "dumbass republicans, christians and racists" they despise.

I can't help but think that the bipartisan Establishment has Americans exactly where they want us. People are so polarized by the Left-Right dichotomy, so convinced of the other's Evil, they can't think objectively about anything.

The group's numbers exploded on Thursday when Vanity Fair posted a blog about the group and described me as "The Unlikely Mastermind Behind the Impeach Obama Movement." For better or worse, I have not limited or censored "my" group in any way. Anyone can join, and people can write and post whatever they want. As of this writing, the group has over 6,000 members, 3,000 wall posts, 228 discussion topics, 41 links to articles and videos, and 74 pictures and political cartoons.

I'm not pleased or impressed with 90% of what is happening on there, and I don't really want to be associated with most it, but I've simply not had the time or the inclination to regulate it. I think it's fair to say that if I ever aspired to a career in politics, those dreams would be shot. All anyone would have to do would be to point to a few of the more vile pictures and comments (and there are plenty to choose from), say it was written "under my name," and I would be done for. (Sound familiar?)

Now that it's the weekend, I'm trying to figure out what to do about this. It's quite a pickle. People have been sending me messages telling me I should appoint "officers" for the group. Apparently, officers can help you "clean up" the chat boards and delete things that are being posted by "trolls," but I'm not sure I even want to try. What if I recruit officers to help me regulate the site and something slips past us (which it will, because who has time to monitor all this stuff?) If you're in the business of censorship, then won't anything that is left on the site have the implicit stamp of "approval" on it? In that case, isn't a hands-off policy best?

In moments of disgust at some of the more obscene nonsense, I've considered deleting the group altogether, but I don't think I want to do that, especially now that we're getting press coverage. On some level, groups like these do send a message to the political establishment: There are substantial numbers of Americans who view the entire federal government as illegitimate. Anything that works to de-sanctify and de-legitimatize the state, that encourages people to view all politicians as self-serving frauds, as emperors without clothes, is a good thing.

I've recruited fellow LRC contributor John Delano to be an officer, and I think we're going to try to write a more detailed description of the group by the end of the weekend, but I'm off to meet someone for lunch and I was hoping to get some reading done today and I wanted to cook a nice dinner and maybe go on a hike, so I don't know. The sun is shining. Real life beckons.

The one thing I have had time to do is to respond to some of the messages that have come to me directly. Below is an exchange with "Harry," the only person who emailed me before the new description was posted (before he could have known what the group was really "about"):

Harry: you are a racist motherf__ker, you know that? this was such a leap into the future, but you republicans can’t seem to see that. you’ll be getting more messages from more of my friends, you cunt! sincerely yours, bitch, Harry F. and America

Ellen: Hi Harry, Thanks for the message. For your information I also started an “Impeach Hillary Clinton” group and an “Impeach McCain” group and I am also a part of an “Impeach George W. Bush Group.” I don’t have a problem with black people, just politicians and the federal government in general. Don’t jump to conclusions! Ellen

Harry: sorry, ellen. i just encounter so many racists its hard to distinguish them from the rest of the republican party. no hate whatsoever. henry

Ellen: I’m not a republican either. Just FYI, here is the new description of the group. [insert new description of group]

Harry: sounds cool, good luck

So, maybe there is hope after all?

Ellen Finnigan [send her mail] graduated from the University of Montana in May with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She currently teaches writing online to Catholic homeschooled kids and was the organizer of the Missoula for Ron Paul meet-up group.

DIGG THIS

Dear Ex-boyfriend,

It's happened
again: a perfectly good relationship torn asunder by a difference
of political opinion. Oh why cannot the flower of love bloom on
the border of the ideological divide? I thought love conquered all.
Ex-boyfriend, what happened to us? Oh what aridity, what corruption,
of soul, of culture, of country caused these delicate flowers to
shrivel and die? I say "flowers" because, yes, this has
happened to me more than once. Perhaps my standards are too high.
Instead of picking the petals off a daisy and saying "he loves
me, he loves me not," I pick the petals and say, "he loves
liberty, he loves liberty not" and if he does not love liberty,
I find him hard to love.

Oh ex-boyfriend,
it could have been so beautiful. You were tall. You were well-educated.
You cooked me dinner. You loved your mom, you loved your dog. You
read my crappy writing and told me it was good. You said you were
tired of the bachelor's life. You wanted to get married! You wanted
to start a family! All you wanted was to find someone who would
share the mortgage, not get fat, read your terrible writing and
tell you it was good…was that too much to ask? According to all
those chick-lit books, those ones with the shopping bags and high
heels and sparkly martini glasses on the covers, all of this should
have been enough for us! But alas, it wasn't.

Things were
going swimmingly until that one night — you know the one I'm talking
about — that first time I used the "L" word. I saw you
bristle, and then you became cold and distant. It made you nervous;
I could tell. Perhaps it was too soon. Perhaps I should have waited
until the third or fourth month to tell you I was a libertarian.
I just didn't want to hide anything from you my pet, my lover. You
were everything to me. And I wanted to be everything to you.

Although we
"agreed to disagree" and rarely spoke politics after that,
I could tell it annoyed you when, last summer, I put a Ron Paul
sign in my window, prominently displayed above the town's most popular
coffee shop, where everybody, including your friends, could see
it. When you noticed it, you scoffed and said, "He's not going
to win." Then, you went and put that Obama button on your coat.
For the record, my sweet, I thought you sounded like an idiot when
I asked you why you liked Obama, and you replied, "He just
sounds so…presidential." However, I tried to stay cool. I tried
to look on the bright side: Wasn't it Shakespeare who said there
must be some mystery in love — and there can be no mystery between
intellectual equals?

Looking back,
all the red flags were there. But what can I say? I was a woman
in love. Women in love are so full of excuses. I told myself what
every woman tells herself when she is falling for someone with a
worldview that clashes with her own, in other words, when she must
confront the bleak prospect of incompatibility: "Well…maybe
we'll balance each other out!"

We managed
to stay together, but eventually, I had to start looking for ways
to fulfill my needs outside the relationship. I started sneaking
around. I'm not going to lie. Do you remember when you would call
on those Sunday afternoons or on those occasional weekday evenings
and I always "missed the call." Well, I was with my Ron
Paul meet-up. I'm sorry, baby, but they understood me in a way you
never would. I could actually talk to them about things. I'll never
forget that day you stopped by my apartment unannounced and found
50 people in my living room poring over county legislative maps,
planning a coup of the local precinct committee. I finally had to
come clean. I hope you've forgiven me.

It seemed
that no matter how bad things got, I couldn't let you go. For one,
it's hard to find a man who knows how to dance, and you were the
best two-stepper in town. I finally had to admit to myself that
we were incompatible, but I had a plan B. I believe it was Mencken
who said it is the unique talent of the woman to always believe
she can succeed where others have failed. I thought to myself: "I
can change him!" I thought surely you must be prone to reason.
Like you, pie, I am often too easily seduced by the idea of change.

I gave you
brochures. I sent you links to articles on Lew Rockwell. I made
you read Rothbard. I told you everything about Ron Paul. For a while
there, it seemed like you were coming around! I even convinced you
to read Mere
Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. Then we discovered more things
we had in common, like hating Republicans. Remember all those lazy
afternoons we spent lying on the couch, holding each other and talking
about the different ways we would like to murder and torture the
President? "Poison him with depleted uranium!" "Waterboarding!"
"Make him read a book!" Indeed, it was in those moments
that I saw a gleam of hope.

I'll never
forget the first time you agreed to come to church with me. It was
Easter and you had just purchased a new suit for a wedding you were
going to be in. When I drove by to pick you up, you came strutting
out of your house, a peacock in sunglasses.

Once you were
in the car, I said, "Are you only coming to church with me,
because you want to wear your new suit?"

You said, "Yes.
Do we get a free pancake breakfast?"

"No."

"Donuts
and coffee?"

"No. Get
out."

Oh funny ex-boyfriend,
my little liberal cockatoo.

We still
had our bumps in the road, but overall things were fairly copasetic.
The Ron Paul group had managed to win the county for Ron Paul on
Super Tuesday, and I think after that you thought my obsession would
die down. But it didn't. I think you thought it would just be a
phase. But it wasn't. You soon tired of hearing about Ron Paul.
Then, when he came to town in April, I stood you up to have dinner
with him. I even had the honor of introducing him when he gave a
speech at the University! (Yes, ex-boyfriend, this letter has largely
become an excuse to gloat on the Internet about the time I met Ron
Paul.) You weren't too happy when you came over later that week
and found that the framed picture of you and I had been replaced
with a picture of me and him.

You said, "Why
do you care so much? Don't you get it? He isn't going to win."

Then
I punched you in the face. After that things just sort of fizzled
out I guess.

Ex-boyfriend,
I would just like you to know that I do not blame you for the problems
in our relationship. I blame libertarians, with their ideas about
sound monetary policy, non-interventionism, free markets and peace,
ideas that seem to make some kind of logical sense and are based
on some kind of truth, not on what people want to hear. It isn't
right that ideas, mere ideas, should come between me and those that
I love. It seems ideas, mere ideas, are condemning me to a life
of solitude and lovesick misery. For the record, if I end up alone
at the age of 90 with 37 cats, shuffling around the public spaces
with grocery bags on my feet while ranting and raving about the
government, it will be all the libertarians' fault!

Faithfully
yours,
Ellen

September
24, 2008

Ellen
Finnigan [send her mail]
graduated from the University of Montana in May with an M.F.A. in
Creative Writing. She currently teaches writing online to Catholic
homeschooled kids and was the organizer of the Missoula for Ron
Paul meet-up group.