Black and White

One Thing I find somewhat disturbing in modern fiction is the tendency of authors to paint humanity as either black or white. Now, please pause for a moment in your flight to throttle my heretical throat, and think for a moment. In almost every piece of fiction, the author goes to great lengths to show how either the villain actually has a pardonable motive, or the hero has an unpardonable dark side. In Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling paints man as purely white. As evil as Voldemort has become, he is not 'evil', for all his evil is the result of circumstances beyond his control and aimed at an at least pardonable desire, immortality. He is twisted by his childhood and the harshness of the world. It is thus for every single villain in the story, however despicable their acts, however violent their crimes, their motives are pure. The werewolves are angered by their rejection from society (is withdrawal and eventual hostility natural?), Snape's initial involvement in the death eaters is a result of James Potter and Sirius Blacks's treatment of him (and who wouldn't hate the spitting image of their boyhood tormentor?), and Draco joins the Death Eaters at least partly to avenge his father.

The Inheritance Cycle, from the three published books, appears to be buying into this theory hook, line, sinker, fisherman, boots and all. Murtaugh is harsh in the beginning out of fear for his life, not because he's a bad person, and he murders hundreds (semi-?) unwillingly because Galbatorix is forcing him to. The soldiers of the empire are similarly enslaved. Even Durza and Galbatorix are basically good. Durza, stuffed to the eyeballs with raging demons, is enslaved by them because he summoned them to avenge his dead master, and even the demons are raging because the can't bear to be stuck inside mortal flesh! (I personally did not understand how both parties could be guiltless in the transaction, but that might just be my failure as a reader.) Galbatorix was set off on his murderous rampage by the death of his dragon, which it has been hinted drove him mad (No sane man could do all that evil!).

On the other end of the spectrum, authors such as George R.R. Martin, and Vince Flynn portray all men as bad, their evil diluted only in as much as they have good motives. Their villains are vile and their heroes have some dark weakness, which is intended to bring out their 'humanity'. This end of the spectrum was occupied heavily by World War era writers such as T.H. White, George Orwell, and Kurt Vonnegut, whose message was something along the lines of 'Man is doomed, Humanity is coming to get us". As far as they were concerned, we didn't need alien invaders to destroy us, we were doing the job just fine on our own.

The great literary and artistic movement that couldn't stand Aragorn (he was too perfect), Sauron (he was two dimensional), or anyone from ancient stories (they are either good or bad, nowhere in between) has decried such literature because their character were either black or white, with gray left out of the matter. They thus set off to create characters who were more believable with plenty of grey areas, yet in their attempts to paint men as both black and white , they painted mankind one or the other.

Where Tolkien, Lewis, and authors of the past realized that mankind was gray and thus painted their characters as either black or white, Modern artists demand that characters be gray, and thus either condemn man to hell as a demon, or raise him to heaven as an angel.

Man kind is neither black nor white. He is a noble creature created in the image of God who feeds the poor, clothes the naked, and provides for the homeless. People such as Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi exemplified the humble passion that is a characteristic of man, and it is such people that J.K. Rowling and most modern authors think of when they think of man.

Yet man is also a mean, twisted creature who will turn upon his closest friend and kill him for pleasure. Such were the German and Austrian Youth who murdered Jews they had known since childhood for sport. Such were the guards at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec who would make men jump to their depths for fun, hunt prisoners and snipe at them from guard towers. It were these men that T.H. White and Vonnegut thought of when they thought of man.

Yet this is not all, Man is also a conquerer who tames the wild stallion and forces the mighty bull to yield. Man is a creator who builds monuments to dazzle future generations, bridges that span massive caverns, and cities well nigh impregnable to assault. Man is a destroyer who will burn a painting hundreds of years old for a few moments warmth and burn a city because its people offended him.

Man is too complex to be basically good or basically evil, the terrible and wonderful fact is that man is both.

On Writing

Across the page my pencil goes,
Never fast and often slows,
So sundry strands of stories I try to unravel,
As a hundred men
make such a din
I cannot control the rabble.

So many people with different faces,
hurrying from so many places,
I cannot begin to keep them in check,
they will not stand still
for good or for ill,
And turn my tale to a wreck

I vainly attempt to take control
Yet suddenly go down a rabbit hole.
And find to my horror the farther I fall,
that up has gone down,
and spun me around
and sense has gone out of it all.

We Have Met the Enemy....And He is US!

In Pogo veritas est. What is art for if not to illuminate the plank residing within our optic organ. Today Tom Delay was sentenced to three years for money laundering. While it is true that there is much wrong with what the Democrats have been doing in the federal government for the last two years, it is to be expected that they will act the way they have. If we will follow our own moral code, the world will be far better off than if we spend our time screaming bloody murder when democrats in Washington spend like democrats (Drunken sailors, it has been pointed out, stop spending when they run out of money), when people in Hollywood make pornographic films, and when atheists write books that use atheistic logic.

If Republicans cut off pork barrel spending and ended Christmas tree bills just from their own party, that would have more effect on the deficit than any amount of yelling at Democrats. I am not equating Christianity with Republicanism, far from it. I am merely trying to point out that both Christians and Republicans have a tendency to spend too much time pointing fingers when there is plenty of work to be done in their own garden.

Beyond the obvious effect of making a number of almost clean gardens clean, fixing our own lives is part of being above reproach. Our calls for morality fall somewhat flat when people see how Christians behave toward each other. Machiavelli and the Medici could take a few tips from church politics today; I mean whatever happened to 'they shall know you by your love for one another'? Republicans have screamed and yelled about excess spending and immoral democrat practices and yet this past year multiple Republicans and Christians faced charges relating to improper use of money and improper sexual relations, charges that were not unfounded.

If we take care of ourselves, and exercise dominion over the resources that God has given to us, we will do more good for the world than any amount of finger wagging will do. People, strangely enough, are more effected by deeds than by words, yet it is words that most of us employ instead of actions.

Chivalry, Real and imagined.

I recently participated in a small discussion on whether or not chivalry was dead. As my former teacher Blake Moser would say, 'DEFINE!'. What do me mean by 'chivalry'. If we are referring to the code of conduct popularized by the Arthurian Romances written under Eleanor of Aquitaine, in which the knight is essentially the slave of all ladies he happens to come across, I would hesitantly agree that it is dead. I hesitate because I'm not sure if the thing was ever properly alive.

If on the other hand we refer to chivalry as simple good manners such as opening the door for a lady, giving up our seat on a crowded bus, paying when we go on a date, etc., then I think chivalry, while not in perfect health, is a ways from the grave. If I may be allowed to brag a bit, at Texas A&M, I see such acts on a regular basis.

But why would we even ask the question, why would we care about the health of chivalry? I believe that it is certainly ailing, and is under assault by many of the ideas and mindsets of today.

1. First, young men have to a degree, ceased to look at young women as equals who should be protected and valued for who they are. Sexual and emotional desires are the main reasons that young men pursue young women, and such desires leave no room for the selflessness that chivalrous behavior is an indicator of.
2. Second, many women have demanded that they be treated 'just like men'. That is about as reasonable as the Air Force demanding that they be treated like the Marines. Both services have vital missions, but to give the Air Force the kind of funding and equipment that the Corps lives on would seriously impair its ability to perform its mission, they need high tech equipment, millions of research dollars, and high flying planes. The Marines need rifles, bayonets, and some food every once in awhile. Men and women are equals, but they are not interchangeable.

Chivalry is a Christian institution. To Islam, a man opening a door for a woman is unthinkable. To naturalism a man opening a door for a woman is pointless unless the man is trying to get her into bed. Christianity gives both the man and the woman the inherent worth that makes such behavior honorable to both. Neither party is demeaned when chivalry takes place. The man is honored by his performance of it, and the woman is honored, for the man sees her as worth of such service.

Towers

If you decide to become a soldier in the war of ideals that has raged for all time, it is unfortunantly true that you will meet on the vast and varied landscape known as the human mind many people who are brilliant, but have erected towers of ignorance, powerful, imposing, and impervious to facts. In my own limited and short journeys have met several such towers, and no matter how much I hurled facts, figures, and witty quotations at them, they have continued to stand, tall and power, immune to all my arguments.

In a recent confrontation of this nature, I found myself wondering at thickness of the walls and the height of the tower that two gentlemen had erected, from which they poured abuse on an organization they next to nothing about and its failure to have any resemblance to a second organization which they knew nothing about either. Such towers are immensely infuriating to those they withstand, and I found myself devoting far too much time to constructing refutations of their utterances of nonsense. The problem with nonsensical utterances is that there are so many ways to refute them that you can often spend a great deal of time preparing attacks from every possible angle, when you will at most use one.

However, two separate thoughts came to me as I thought how best to bring down a tower impervious to anything I could do. First, assaulting such towers is often a waste of time. Granted, there are times when nonsense is broadcast so far and so loud that it must be contradicted, but it is often better to save our energy and time to discuss truth with those who are genuinely interested in discovering it. Second, and perhaps more importantly, as we survey such towers, we should take a moment to see if our vantage point is a result of our standing on a mountain of fact and reasoning, or if we are able to see so far because we have erected our own citadel of folly.

Eric and Arthen

On the off chance that someone somewhere is wondering what happened to Eric and the story that I was posting upon this blog, I thought I would enlighten that someone.

Eric changed his name to Nikolas and left Narthlan, heading south to attend The University at Cirithul, which I did not know existed until he decided to attend it. When I asked him how he got so much money he replied that his family was in fact a merchants family in Morkal, and while his father was dead, his uncle was taking perfectly good care of him.

Arthen also went on several excursions (he still will not tell me where he went), and informs me that it was not Ethelstein to whom Fingarion gave the weapons, but to King Ulrayne some two hundred years before Ethelstan (Arthen says I spelled it wrong too) ascended the throne of a kingdom several hundred miles south of where Ulrayne ruled.

I have been attempting to correct my errors, but Rovik has been most uncooperative, and Raven refuses to follow any rules whatsoever. Several new characters have found their way into the story, and Arthen has introduced me to several who I knew only from brief meetings some time ago.

On the whole the tale is coming along, but people are so contrary, and characters simply refuse to do as written and will insist on going somewhere else to look after interests I did not know they had. However, Arthen has given me multiple manuscripts for research, and if you want something to read I can reproduce some of them. Most of them are of old, old times but some people might find them interesting.