What Would Buster Do?

So, I've been watching "Arrested Development" lately.

This is not a show I want my little sister to watch for at least the next five years.

But it's funny and it makes obscure references, so by enjoying it, I feel like I'm a part of something complex and nerdy with catchphrases.

The show, created about the time of Enron and all those corporate scandals, is about a family experiencing the consequences of criminal activity in the family company.

The youngest son in the family is Buster, a "special," slow innocent with a clear Oedipal complex. Just to give you an idea of the humor in the show, Buster has a relationship with his mother Lucille's social rival, Lucille 2 (played by none other than Liza Minelli, who I adore), gets his hand bitten off by a seal with a yellow bow tie, who had been conditioned to like blood by Buster's older brother, GOB, and joins the army.

Buster is played by Tony Hale. I came across this quote about Tony Hale:

Tony Hale is a devout Christian and is a complete retard when it comes to swearing. The script called for him to swear for about 30 seconds and he just couldn't do it. --Jason Bateman, the star of the series

Buster the character does occasionally go on spastic cussing rants which look like this:

Narrator: [Michael and Buster are putting on biking gear] Michael decides to fill the void left by his son with his brother.
Michael: You know, I'm in pretty good shape. You could be eating my dust out there!
Narrator: And Buster was giving as good as he received.
Buster: Yeah, and you could be
[VERY LONG BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP]
Buster: that's gonna
[VERY LONG BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP]
Buster: !
Michael: [stunned] Well, let's hope it doesn't come to that.

But you never see his mouth during the bleeps.

I think it's interesting... what actors do about things they're morally opposed to doing offstage or offscreen. When you play a part, it's not you. So it's ok to cuss, even if you don't normally? I know people who think so.

My view has generally been--search your heart, seek God and see what He would have you do.

Because it might be different than what you'd expect.

My family drove to see me today and we briefly listened to a Steve Taylor tape that included "I Want to be a Clone."

I'm pretty sick of clones, of doing what's expected because it's what other people do.

You should learn the song, I'd put it among Steve Taylor's top 5. Ever.

Mister Rogers, I Want to Be Like You!

Today at Wednesday meeting, Dr. Del Tackett spoke to us via video lecture and he talked about the Final Sphere on the Twelfth Tour and all of these very science-fiction sounding dimensions. But essentially, he talked about community. What stuck out to me was the emphasis on the parable of the good Samaritan.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of those few things pretty much everybody can admire about Christianity (even though few people seek to emulate the Samaritan's example). The Good Samaritan story says that anyone can and should be a neighbor to anyone else who needs a neighbor.

OUCH. I do not particularly want to be everyone's neighbor. People sometimes offend me. Not a whole lot, but sometimes. Being a neighbor leaves no room for selfishness. True neighborliness says "My egg yolks are your egg yolks." "I will let you have first pick of the stuff I'm selling at my yard sale tomorrow." "I will let you have first pick of the stuff our rich neighbor is selling at his yard sale." "You can wake me up in the middle of the night when you've just gone into labor and I'll watch your older, whiny kids."

And I wish I could be the ultimate neighbor... that I could give and give and give... even if it's the last of my egg yolks.

I wish I could be Mister Rogers, to say to most of the snot-faced rugrats in America:

I've always wanted to have a neighbor just like you
I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you

So, let's make the most of this beautiful day
Since we're together we might as well say
Would you be mine, could you be mine
Won't you be my neighbor
Won't you please, won't you please
Please won't you be my neighbor.--Won't You Be My Neighbor, the Mister Rogers Song

According to TVGuide, once Mister Rogers' car was stolen from the studio parking lot.
It got on the news and people were naturally outraged.
Hours later, the car was found where it had been stolen, with a note that read...

"If we'd known it was yours, we never would have taken it!"

Of course not. You don't steal your neighbor's car. You're not even
supposed to covet it, for Pete's sake.

Neighbors will be back when the day is new, and they'll have more ideas for you...

I wish I could be a neighbor. I'm waiting for JC Penney to have a sale on cardigans.

beauty, money, and other myths

I've been thinking a lot about beauty. Not in the sense that I've been applying more mascara than usual, because let's face it--is that even possible? but in the Edmund Burke/Immanuel Kant sense.

Peter Kreeft says he knows three former atheists who began believing in a divine being due to the music of Bach. "If there is the music of Bach, there must be a God," as Dr. Kreeft summed up the premise. (I think this is one of those statements that either make no sense in the world to you, or make all the sense in the world to you. Many statements end up like that. I can't decide myself what I make of the "If there is the music of Bach" premise. I've always believed in God so I do not know at all what it would take to convince me of the existence of God. I'm not convinced that it would be beauty, but it's been interesting to think of beauty as an attribute of God.) (God is that thing that nothing more beautiful can be conceived.)

I am a big, big Samuel Beckett fan. If I could have convinced my brother to team up with me, we would have gone as Didi and Gogo for Hallowe'en or something. (Heck, if I could have brought the trash heap with me, I could have been Winnie from Happy Days). But I don't at all consider Beckett's work beautiful.

I am trying to read Ulysses. I like Joyce. I liked Finnegan's Wake. (I tried to blog in that style once. It went like this: Paper cuts. Symbolism. -where's the milk, dad? -in the fridge where your mother left it---oygevaltdreidldreidl oatmeal. Shin splints. Shar pei.) But Modernism is not beauty. Deconstructionism is emphatically not beauty.

Beauty is Georges Seurat. (Impressionist with the dots, guys.) I've always really liked Stephen Sondheim's musical Sunday in the Park with George (parodied in tick... tick... BOOM!) which is inspired by the La Grande Jatte painting and is one long love song to beauty and a wrenching exploration of the creative process. (Besides, I loved that the name of fictionalized Seurat's fictionalized lover is Dot. It's funny. Because Seurat invented pointillism.)

"Order.
Design.
Composition.
Tone.
Form.
Symmetry.
Balance.

More red...
And a little more red...
Blue blue blue blue
Blue blue blue blue." --Color and Light

And that, says Georges and Steve, in this musical, makes art. That makes beauty. Not all art is beauty. All beauty is art.

On a drastically different note, over the weekend, I read George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. (An aspidistra is apparently a very suburban-husfrau plant. It is a book about the victory of suburbia, middle-class values and a paycheck over the wounded ego of an anti-The Man poet hero.)

It has one of the most perverted introductory paragraphs I've ever read. More horrible than The Stepford Wives and listening to Tyra Banks' one single (Shake Ya Body, was that what it was called?) on repeat for two solid days or getting a root canal without anesthesia. It gave me chills.

The introductory paragraph was this:

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

I Corinthians xiii (adapted)"

Does this say anything about our society? I think it does, and I will write about it later.

By the way, I just figured out that the edition of The Brothers Karamazov that I just got used is an abridged version that doesn't have The Grand Inquisitor in it. (!) (!) (!). That's like having The Return of the King without the battle of Pellenor Fields. It's what would happen if Darth Vader wasn't Luke's father. It's like The Beatles without John Lennon OR George Harrison. (Although, honestly, Ringo was always my favorite. Because he was on Thomas, The Tank Engine and brought hours of happiness to my baby brother.) It's like a chocolate-covered, custard-filled Krispy Kreme donut with the custard filling sucked out. It's just bad.

The Story of My Life; Or, Why I am Not a Nihilist

No fledgling blog is complete without an initial biography.

So here it is.

My name is Claire. Claire is one of those eighties, yuppie, French names, on a couple of daytime soaps... it's not a bad name, on the whole, even if I am neither yuppie nor French nor on daytime television.

I was born and raised in a land of writers and revolutionaries and preachers and good old boys--the Southeast of the United States of America. Now, despite a whole lot of things I dislike about the state of the Union, I ultimately like the United States because we're a country that consists almost totally of vagrants and outcasts. No wonder so many nations have such a love/hate relationship with the U.S.--we took all these people they were trying to get rid of, and in one sense that's great, right? Now they don't have to deal with their tired or their poor or their huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But then you take the tired and the poor and you turn them into a superpower and give them positions in government. You just have to despise that, particularly if everyone with positions of authority in your government is energetic and rich.

(I like the U.S. for another reason, too... but it probably deserves its own post.)

Back to me. I was homeschooled. This means many things.

One is that I get relatively defensive when someone makes disparaging comments about homeschooling on a grand scale. I realize that homeschooling is not always the most beneficial choice, and it's not always feasible. However, I don't diss the public school system or private schools and say that they are "detrimental to society at large," as a guy I know once told me, speaking of homeschooling.

I make it a point to never attack other school systems, for one thing, because the teachers in those schools tend to take it very, very personally. Similarly, when I sense that my school system is being attacked, I take it very, very personally--my chosen mode of education is insulted, I am insulted as both student and teacher, and my mother is insulted, because she taught me and made the initial decisions. I mean, as palpable hits go, that's incredibly below-the-belt.

The other is that I learned what I wanted to learn and challenged myself. What this means is that I wasn't always challenged. So there are deficits in my education. (Do I care? Honestly, no, not really. Everyone's learning has blind spots, and if I discover that I want or need to learn something to survive, I will learn it, no problem.) It also means that I read a lot of Dostoevsky and other authors and became a fairly well-rounded individual.

Another big, important circumstance in my life is that I was raised in a conservative, nondenominational brand of Christian home.

This clearly had an impact on me, both good and bad. My parents are great, growing up was fine, I went to church and youth group and did it all, etc.

But then I became An Adult and realized that I had to start to define my beliefs and myself on my own spiritual journey, not merely hangin' around watching my dad read Brother Lawrence. The light bulb came on when my dad told me I could be politically more liberal than he and my mom are.

"Really? You're giving me permission not to vote Republican? Can I go to church and still do that?"

This was a big step. I registered as unaffiliated, and I can't vote in the primaries, but other than that, I am very happy. People on both sides lobby hard for my vote, and I have to think hard about issues before I make decisions.

I want to reiterate that I didn't ever neglect the Christian faith. I just had the Christian faith that was always taught to me, with occasional emotional experiences unique to me. And it was good. But now, I have the Christian faith that I fought for, myself, and have thought about a lot.* And it is better. It may be less orthodox than my former familial beliefs. It may be more orthodox. It is better, for me, because it is mine.

*(By the way, Razhumikin Razzmatazz may very well betray my dependency on Dr. Peter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis, Blaise Pascal and G.K. Chesterton, who also thought/think about their faith a lot. It may also betray my dependency on others, like Harold Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Sartre, the majority of France, and my psychology professor who thought/think about their faith a lot and were/are athiests or skeptics.) (In fact, I'm going to step out on a limb and say that this blog WILL betray my dependence on both.)