Whiskey Pete, Bill Gothard, Beards, and Me

 

Not too long ago, notorious DUI hire* “Whiskey Pete” Kegsbreath addressed a bunch of military leaders. While I could spend a few posts on all the incompetence, stupidity, and arrogance displayed in all of this, I wanted to talk instead about a line in the speech that I think I have some insider knowledge about. 

 

*DUI Hire: Drunk, unqualified, and incompetent. This appears to be the primary qualification for working in the Trump Regime, second only to “loyal to Trump rather than the Constitution, rule of law, or any ethical value.” 

 

The line in question is one where Kegsbreath says that he will eliminate beards among soldiers. There has been a lot of speculation about the reasons for this. Is he trying to keep African Americans, Sikhs, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, and so on, from serving? Maybe. 

 

But the specific use of the term “beardo” caught my eye, because I was once part of another organization that took serious issues with beards - and that term was thrown about a bit. 

 

Per the Oxford English Dictionary, the term originated in the 1930s, at a time when facial hair was transitioning from the big (and often unusual) beards of the 19th Century, to an era of moustaches. (From Hitler to Clark Gable…) At the time, it was just slang for “man with a beard.” 

 

The term “weirdo” itself didn’t arrive until the 1950s. Humans being what they are, the two were eventually combined, which is how I heard it as a kid and thereafter. The 1980s were again an era of mustaches, with subgenres such as “law enforcement,” “pastor,” and “gay guy.” Beards were out, and those who wore them, “beardos.”

 

That said, in the 1990s, things shifted again. Your basic white guy grew a circle beard. 

 

The 1990s were when my birth family joined Bill Gothard’s cult. You could look like anything you wanted to come to the seminars, but if you actually applied to join the organization, you had to submit a photograph of the family. And, if someone had facial hair, you had to give a damn good explanation for why. 

 

Because beards were almost entirely forbidden. 

 

Does this seem a bit, well, weird? 

 

It did to me at the time, because beards were coming back in for right wing religious guys - you know, masculinity and all. In addition, lots of the guys in this subculture did Civil War reenactments, and have you seen the beards from that conflict? Seriously. 

 

As it turns out, Bill Gothard, like James Dobson and a bunch of other old white males from that era, associated facial hair with….the 1960s. Hippies. Only hippies had beards and moustaches. Good people shaved their faces. 

 

Gothard, Dobson, and the rest literally made their careers fearmongering about hippies. And specifically, those hippies who protested the Vietnam War. 

 

Facial hair meant you were a hippie which meant you were against the war which meant you were an evil rebel which meant shave your goddamn faces if you want to be taken seriously.

 

I’m pretty sure Kegsbreath is coming from the same place. 

 

Back when we should have won the Vietnam war, but for those dirty beardo hippies, the military required shaving and “high and tight.” Back before those same hippies protested Jim Crow and brought us all this Diversity, Equity and Inclusion woke stuff. 

 

The irony here is that facial hair actually has a strong association with military service. And not just in the 19th Century. 

 

You may have noticed that the Amish and other conservative Mennonite groups have a distinctive facial hair pattern. Specifically, the men wear trim beards, but no moustache? Ever wondered what that is? 

 

My ancestors were Mennonite, although the family became more mainstream Evangelical after emigrating to the US in the 1880s and 90s. At that time, as the family photos show, the beards mostly disappeared, particularly on my mom’s side. (My grandpa had a Colonel Sanders look most of the time I knew him, and one of his brothers had a trim beard.) 

 

The reason for the beard but no moustache is that for centuries in Europe, the big ‘stache was a signifier of military command. Particularly in Germany. 

 

Mennonites are pacifists. They do not serve in the military. Which is why my ancestors on both sides were hounded out of Germany, first to Russia, then to the United States. 

 

The beard without the moustache is a deliberate social protest, a signifier that pacifism extends to the eschewing of the military “look.” 

 

Also a bit bizarre in the case of Kegsbreath is that his pastor-hero Doug Wilson has a big beard, which he uses as a signifier of his great masculinity (as well as a place to store the odors of his two other man-extenders, whiskey and cigars.) 

 

This is why I think Kegsbreath is really doing the “no dirty hippies in the military” thing. 

 

There is an interesting post-script to this in my own life. 

 

I’m a short guy. I used to be pretty skinny (sigh), and when I was a young man, I looked really young. (For a couple decades, I kept getting asked if I was old enough to be a lawyer.) I intentionally kept my first drivers license just for the photo.

 

This came to a head when I was 20. I was already in law school, and played my violin in a band with some middle-aged female friends, who did the church circuit locally. (They were quite good - tight vocals, original songs) 

 

After one gig, a little old lady came up and asked me if I was age 12. 

 

[Insert existential scream]

 

No, I explained, I was 20. 

 

And then I went home and started to grow my beard out. 

 

I have explained elsewhere that the law school I “attended”** was affiliated with Gothard’s cult. I was actually in the inaugural class, which was…interesting.

 

**Attended: that might be a strong word for “went to three conferences and my graduation but was otherwise mostly on my own.”

 

Gothard himself showed up for our graduation, and gave a commencement address that was the most narcissistic blither I had ever heard up to that time.***

 

***Trump is even better than Gothard at making everything about himself and rattling on endlessly in his narcissism. 

 

It was literally all about himself, and how he expected us all to use our degree to help him build his organization. Even my parents, who wouldn’t leave the cult for a few years, commented on how terrible it was. 

 

It wasn’t until many years later that I heard from a friend who worked in the organization at the time (and like me despises Gothard and everything he taught), that my beard was a great irritation to Gothard, and that he complained about it for weeks afterward. 

 

I feel quite proud of that. My one visible source of rebellion against the cult got in the craw of the cult leader. 

 

So anyway, those are my thoughts on Kegsbreath, Gothard, and facial hair. 

 

Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This month, I had a gig one county north of where I live, so that meant a lot of commuting time. As usual, particularly when driving late at night, I prefer an audiobook as they keep me awake. 

 

I do not remember exactly how I ran across this book. Usually I would say NPR, but this one went under the radar a bit. Maybe LitHub? Probably because the author is Canadian, and the book all about a specific subculture of Canadians - although it certainly is more universal than that: the appalling men and their rape culture are everywhere, particularly in MAGA here in the US. 

 

I will admit, I was a bit disappointed in the book. But I am not sure how much of that is on me. There are a few issues that made it less than enjoyable. First, it is very much in a stream-of-consciousness but one that jumps around a lot in time and from character to character in a book with a lot of interconnected characters. This made the first third or so difficult to follow as an audiobook. By the end, I got better at remembering who was who and who was related to who and how. 

 

The second issue for me is that this book is more or less a primal scream, the embodiment of “#metoo” and the rage against the men that treat women as objects to be used, abused, and discarded, and the culture that tells them that this is acceptable - indeed desirable - male behavior. For me, a guy who isn’t particularly fond of conflict (although I’m not exactly avoidant), it was a bit much. 

 

The drama, the rage, the dismal male behavior is unrelenting throughout the book. The only likeable people in the story are the ones very much at the edges, who mostly serve as a backdrop of the few decent people the main characters encounter occasionally. 

 

As for the characters that we actually get in the heads of, all of the men are so fucking horrible that you really wish they would all go away. This is not to say they are unrealistic. Trump would fit right in with their treatment of women, as would no small number of his voters. I know people like this; everyone does. And right now, they are running this fucking country, which is another reason this book was a bit too much. The Rogers are in power. 

 

And yes, Roger the Rapist (and drug pusher and bad influence and truly horrible person) is the worst of the horrible men in this book - and like Trump he gets away with rape and maybe murder because the culture refuses to hold him accountable. 

 

I have the definite impression that the author lived many of the nasty experiences in this book, because she writes them all too vividly. That probably includes the boy cousins who drown a kitten (that alone is a harrowing scene), the neighbor boy who jams his hand down a girl’s pants. And maybe the grandfather’s suicide. One can only hope the gang rape wasn’t a personal experience. 

 

All of this is made even harder to take by the fact that the author reads the audiobook. And don’t get me wrong: she is a really excellent reader, with good voices and pacing. The problem is, she feels the book so strongly that it feels like she is making the primal scream herself as she reads it, tearing her characters new ones over and over and over. 

 

As I said, way too much drama for me. 

 

Although, to be fair, there is no way in hell I was falling asleep at the wheel. 

 

The book is set in the author’s hometown of St. Johns, Newfoundland. This smallish city, about one third the size of my hometown of Bakersfield, in many ways resembles it. It is a melting pot of races, a destination for immigrants, and full of impoverished people who still retain a certain redneck asshole way of existing in the world. Both have the small town problem of most people being only a few degrees separated. 

 

The author is like one of her characters, Olive, in that she is of mixed race - white and indigenous. Although Olive is secondary in importance to the central character of Iris (Olive’s half sister), it is clear enough that the author understands the experience of existing between worlds, not truly fitting in either. 

 

While I could definitely feel sympathy for the female characters (and maybe the one gay male character), they were also frustrating as hell. I really do not understand how and why certain women tear themselves apart just to get a crumb of love from a worthless male. I mean, I know this is a thing. I even see it in my law practice regularly. But still.

 

I think another thing that bothered me a bit about the book is that, while it definitely explores the effects of generational trauma and poverty on its characters, it misses the chance to examine why those men without poverty also are terrible. We get a bit of the rick fucks in this book, but while we see their actions, we don’t really get behind them the way we do with the characters who grew up in poverty. 

 

Probably I wouldn’t have noticed except for the fact that poverty is blamed in several instances in the book. This isn’t wrong, but it isn’t complete. Kind of like blaming Trump’s popularity on economic issues mostly misses the point that he literally campaigned on racism. 

 

Likewise, not everyone who has experienced poverty or trauma or both turns out like this. Yes, at the population level, there are certain unsurprising results. But the book doesn’t really have the other kinds of responses other than paying the violence forward like the men, or passive victimhood on the part of the women. 

 

Otherwise, however, the author does make it clear that culture raises men to be horrible, limits the options of women, and that “nice” Canada is by no means exempt from this. Patriarchy really has poisoned everything around the world. 

 

I won’t say the book is badly written. Quite the contrary. The writing is effective, and the characters interesting, if highly frustrating. 

 

So, as I noted at the outset, maybe the issue is more about me. The experience of this book was more traumatic than enlightening. That’s the problem of being the man who tries to be decent to the women in his life - and indeed in this world. And that despite a fair share of trauma in my childhood. 

 

In a real way, the paradox of this book is that it will probably be read mostly by the wrong people. Women (who read a lot more literary fiction than men on average) will likely read it, and nod along with the frustration of the author. But the men who read it will probably mostly be people like me, who abhor toxic masculinity and are already doing what we can to push back against the patriarchy. 

 

For us, the experience is a bit traumatic, taking us back to all the childhood bullies we knew, and reminding us all too much that these assholes run the world. The Rogers of the world - and even the Calvins - can’t be bothered to read at all, let alone something written by a woman that implicates them. 

 

But, your mileage may vary, and maybe this book will speak to you. For me, finishing was a bit of a relief, and I think I will need something a bit lighter for my next audiobook. 

 

All's Well That Ends Well (Bakersfield College 2025)

My first date with the incredible woman who is now my wife of 24 years was to a Shakespeare play. But even before that, we had an “unofficial” date where we accompanied one of my siblings to a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Bakersfield College. 

 

BC has had a Shakespeare Festival every fall since 1983, when now-retired professor Randall Messick founded the event. Typically, BC will perform two contrasting Shakespeare plays (and sometimes an additional play by another author) in September and October. 

 

Over the years, my wife and I have seen many of these, both alone and with our kids. She also took some Shakespeare classes while at BC. 

 

Our attendance has been spotty, I confess, in no small part because the festival tends to line up with the opening concerts for the orchestras I play with. That is what happened this year. I had hoped to catch Much Ado About Nothing because Brian and Ellie Sivesind were starring in the lead roles - Brian was in the production for our first date, and both of them are always excellent. Alas, too many rehearsals. 

 

I was, however, able to catch the last performance of All’s Well That Ends Well, one of the less-performed “problem plays.” I last saw this play over a decade ago at Theatricum Botanicum, but not since. 

 

The BC production was a bit different than the typical one. For one thing, there were a lot of cuts. The number of characters was greatly reduced, lines combined, the subplots largely excised, and the dialogue significantly simplified. 

 

Cuts are, of course, universal to modern Shakespeare performances, except possibly Macbeth, which we only have in an already cut version. Otherwise, they would stretch many hours, and contain a lot of repetition. 

 

So, the cuts are always a matter of judgment, at any performance. 

 

In this case, the entire play was performed in the small indoor box theater, without intermission, lasting about an hour and forty-five minutes. Despite the length, the play moved quickly, with great pacing, and the time flew by. 

 

I want to mention some of the artistic decisions. Because of the reduced length, entire sections were performed in pantomime, rather than with extended exposition. Notably, the play opens by showing the childhood love of Helena and Bertram in an extended wordless sequence. The pair perform a blood pact, slicing their palms, and drinking the mixed blood along with an elixir of herbs prepared by Helena. 

 

The production also leans in heavily to the “French” location of the play, using French pop songs from various eras in key moments, including the opening. 

 

I find the play notable for two things. First is the difficulty all of the “problem plays” have with making the transformation of the villain at the end believable. And, on a related note, explaining why the heroine in each case manages to love the unlikable, horrible man she desires. Why on earth does Mariana love Angelo? He’s horrible! At least least Leontes has to spend over a decade in penance before Herminone takes him back. 

 

In All’s Well That Ends Well, Bertram is nearly as horrible as Angelo. Not quite as bad, because being a snob and a rake and a tomcat isn’t at the level of abuse of power, sexual assault, blackmail, and rank hypocrisy. 

 

But still, what does Helena see in Bertram? I guess the best explanation is the childhood romance. Bertram used to be a good guy, but he started hanging out with Paroles and his bunch of cowardly bullies, and started adopting their views of women and social status. 

 

In this case, this was assisted by casting Jesse Magdaleno as Bertram. He’s a guy you really want to like - he’s soft spoken, can cry on demand, and just carries himself like a nice guy on stage. So, it took more conjuring for him to play the snob than to show he came to his senses and realized he was a cad. Props to Magdaleno for making it work. He has grown as an actor over the years I have seen him on stage. 

 

Playing opposite him was Leslie Art, who I do not think I have seen in a major role before. She was convincing both as the strong, confident healer and as the vulnerable, devastated, unloved girl. 

 Helena (Leslie Art) and Bertram (Jesse Magdaleno)

 

The other thing the play is notable for is that it has multiple strong, feminist roles. Helena may be lower class, but she is no helpless waif. She has badass skills she learned from her late father, who told her she was the equal of any man. She argues her way into an audience with the king of France, then proceeds to convince him to let her attempt a cure. On peril of her life - but also with the promise that she can have her choice of husbands if she succeeds. That’s serious huevos. 

 

And then, thwarted in her quest to win the heart of Bertram, she goes out and schemes how she will manage to fuck him and bear his child. She is audacious in getting what she has earned every bit as much as Magdalene in No Name. 

 

But Helena isn’t the only strong woman in the play. Bertram’s mother, the Countess, is also strong and unconventional. She turns on its head the usual trope of the parent who tries to prevent her son from marrying “beneath” him. No, she is all in on Helena marrying Bertram, and gives her son holy hell for being a cad. 

 

In this performance, Jess Boles-Lohmann played that role to perfection. She owned every scene, not just with speaking, but with the physical acting. I enjoyed every minute she was on stage. 

 The Countess (Jess Boles-Lohmann)

 

Because I missed last year’s festival altogether, many of those in the cast in this one were new faces for me. So many young people. (Shakes cane…) It is fun to see young actors learning the ropes in smaller roles, and they did well. 

 

I will note a few of the more significant parts with actors I have seen before, who also were great. Gary Enns as the aged king made both the illness and the recovery look real. He also brought his usual quiet dignity to the role. John Bollinger was excellent as Paroles, as thoroughly loathsome and simpering as the role demands. Kevin Ganger, who is always good in everything didn’t have a lot of lines as the Duke, but he did bring an epic moustache to the role, which is always fun. 

 

It was a good production, and the cuts and simplification worked well, I thought. I am always impressed at what BC does as a junior college, making Shakespeare fresh and compelling for each new generation. 

 

Alas, I went to closing night, so no more plays until November. And of course, next year. BC’s productions are always a great value, and I love to see the next generation of thespians on stage. 

The Lone Woman by Bernardo Atxaga

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I recently read The Basque History of the World, lent to me by my brother. Because so many Basque authors were mentioned, I decided to try to find one to read. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a book translated from Euskara in our library system. I was able to find this book, which was translated from Spanish, however, and as it has a strong connection to the Basque Separatist Movement and the resistance to Franco, it looked interesting. I think Atxaga wrote the book in both Euskara and Spanish editions, from what I can find only. The English version was translated from the Spanish version.

The Lone Woman is a novella, all about a single day in the life of a particular woman, who we eventually learn is named Irene. We find out that she has just been released after several years of imprisonment for her activities in the resistance movement. We never learn exactly what she did, and given the specifics of the time, whether she participated in terrorist activity or if she was just lumped in with all protesters, as Fascis regimes do. After being released in Barcelona, she takes a bus ride back to Bilbao, and then returns to her home. 

 

Her situation is…..complicated. 

 

Her husband divorced her. Her lover was killed, probably in a hit by the police. Her former associates with the Resistance think she informed on them. (She didn’t, but…she also has left the organization) The police think they can blackmail her into providing information. Her mother is dead and her father has disowned her. 

 

So what she is going back to is both unknown and probably not that promising. 

 

The book contains two dream sequences, which approximately reveal the past, but not exactly. Irene’s very partial accounts of her past are probably unreliable. 

 

There are quotations from popular music and poetry, including English language writers like Emily Dickinson and William Blake. These are listed at the end of the book. 

 

The overall mood is mostly melancholy, not menacing - although the policemen are pretty freaking terrifying. In contrast, an older woman and a pair of nuns turn out to be protective of Irene, which she finds ironic since Franco used the Church to come to power, making resistance anti-Church. And yet the nuns seem to be genuine Christians, intent on doing good in the world and looking after the vulnerable.

 

Much of the book is very interior. It’s all about Irene’s feelings and her attempts to re-normalize herself out in the real world again. 

 

I found it very well written, and compelling. 

 

However, I really didn’t end up writing down many lines. For the most part, the book is its own compact world, and few lines make sense without the entire context. 

 

I loved how the book leaned into the morally grey and blurry line between those outside of respectable society - the incarcerated - and those who enforce the lines - the police. The line between “good” and “bad” isn’t simple, particularly in this case. Is enforcing Franco’s cultural genocide of minority ethnicities and their languages and cultures in Spain being “good”? Is resisting that by destroying government property “bad”? Is it worse to be a prostitute and petty thief, or to assault and threaten and blackmail a woman as part of your official duties? 

 

There are two lines I wrote down not so much because of the story itself, but because of the more universal truths they contain. The two lines are in the same passage, about the way that all these “well meaning” people claimed to know how to set Irene on the “right path,” most of which were mutually contradictory and always unhelpful. 

 

The first is from a popular song by Georges Brassons, “La Mala Reputacion.” 

 

No, people never like

Those who keep their own faith.

 

It is bookended by this:

 

Woe to anyone who renounced the law of the family!

No, people didn’t like you having your own opinions, they would set themselves up as judges, judges who judged and always condemned. Because that was one of the characteristics of puppets, their judgment always, inevitably, turned into condemnations. 

 

Nothing Irene did was approved, nothing failed to be condemned. 

 

I can understand this all too well from my own family experience. Nothing fully met with my parents’ approval. There was always some sort of self-righteous condemnation in the end. It was problematic that I had my own opinions, made my own decisions. 

 

But also that first quote. I chose to keep the faith I was raised in. The one that still believes in loving one’s neighbor, helping the vulnerable, standing up to the powerful, and so on. 

 

To quote from Basque Nationalist leader Jose Antonio Agguire:

 

“I dream with all the nostalgia of a Christian,” he wrote years later in exile after having endured the assaults of Franco and Hitler, “in the evangelical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, a return to primitive Christianity which would have nothing in common with the opportunistic and spectacular affiliations with which we Christians rush to disfigure the most august of doctrines.”

 

That was indeed one of the reasons I was eventually cut out of my parents’ life. I stood up to the anti-christianity, the racism, the misogyny, and chose to keep my own faith. 

 

For Irene, the problem is, her faith cannot be subordinated to any ideology. She has to think for herself. She cannot simply do what any set of leaders demands, whether that is her family, one of the separatist groups, or the cops. 

 

She also has the problem of being a woman in a misogynist society. Pretty much every man she meets after being released tries to prey on her in some way. Her loneliness, her smaller size, her sexuality, her past. It is the women who come together to stand up to the men. 

 

It’s an interesting book, a short read, but one that stays with you. 

 

 

Four Squares by Bobby Finger

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This book is one that NPR recommended and that sounded interesting to me. It happened to be available on audiobook during a time when I am doing a good bit of commuting for music gigs. 

 

Let me say at the outset that it took me a while to get into this book. However, once the stage was set and the characters and situations introduced, I found myself quite wrapped up in the story. It’s just a little bit of a slow starter. 

 

In a way, this is two books in one. There are two narrative threads, separated by about thirty years in time. The chapters alternate between the threads, but this is not confusing at all, both because the year is given at the start of each chapter, and because the plots are significantly different. This way of writing works well in this book, and I am impressed with the author’s care to avoid revealing too many spoilers from the later plot about the earlier one. 

 

The protagonist is Artie, a gay man who moved to New York City after coming out to his unsupportive parents in the 1980s. This is, of course, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, which decimated the gay communities in many large cities around the world. For more of my thoughts on the inhumane response to AIDS, check out my post on Angels in America.

 

The earlier plot is about Artie’s found family, and how he met his eventual partner, Abraham. For LGBTQ people around the world, biological family is often fraught, a place of trauma, not safety and community. Thus, “found family” often becomes the human community for them. 

 

I can very much understand this, as my birth family is mostly not a place of safety and acceptance, and I too have had to make my own “found family” and community. While it is not the same as coming out as LGBTQ, I essentially had a coming out of my own, as a person who was not a Republican, not a Cultural Fundamentalist, and not a member of the White Christian Nationalist cult. And I was rejected for that.  

 

Just as coming out as LGBTQ has implications for family structure, intimate relationships, and power dynamics; so does coming out as having rejected patriarchy. For my parents, my choice to have an egalitarian marriage, where both of us split breadwinning, was as unacceptable as my marrying another man would have been. Although the blame was mostly placed on my wife for our choices. 

 

I am so grateful for the found family that has come into my life. You know who you are, and I want you to know that mean the world to me, and you are an important part of my life, and my wife and kids’ lives as well. 

 

I don’t want to make this post about me, however. I just wanted to note that a lot of this book resonated with me for specific reasons, even though it is about LGBTQ people and communities. 

 

Anyway, Artie finds a friend group by age 30. Artie, Kimberly and Adam form a group with a fourth (whose name eludes me and I cannot find online - his appearance is very brief) for a weekly movie night, until AIDS claims this friend. The trio continues the tradition during the course of the first plot of the book. 

 

Eventually, the trio meets Abe at a gay bar. Abe is…complicated. He is arrogant and prickly, a high-powered lawyer. And he is both bisexual and firmly in the closet. He and Artie begin an on and off relationship, during which Abe is also sleeping with his eventual wife, Vanessa. 

 

Artie is a frustrated writer who works as an ad copy writer to pay the bills, but hates it. When he finally does finish his novel, it fizzles. (One hilarious scene in the book is the worst book signing ever.) 

 

Fast forward thirty years, and Adam, Kimberly, and Abe are all dead (I won’t spoil those details.) Artie, now a successful ghost writer, has become mostly a hermit, with his only social life being, oddly enough, Vanessa, and Abe’s daughter Halle, to whom Artie has essentially become a second father figure (along with Vanessa’s second husband.) 

 

When Vanessa and Halle move across the country, Artie is left alone, and knows he needs to find his community again. He starts volunteering at the local LGBTQ senior center, before a bad fall reduces him to one of those the center is for. 

 

But he also meets a variety of colorful characters - we straight folk tend to forget sometimes that LGBTQ people get old too, and often struggle with a lack of acceptance from their cishet peers. And, perhaps, along with community, Artie can find love again. (And get that sequel written.) 

 

The book isn’t terribly long, so, while it does try to get into the backstories for the supporting characters, some are given just a brief sketch. The book, despite what it sounds like, with mortality, generational trauma, bigotry, aging, and loss as themes, is actually not a heavy book at all. It would make a decent beach read, in my opinion. It’s literary, but flows easily and quickly. 

 

One review I ran across noted that many books about the AIDS era tend to be preachy or full of saviorism - in other words, books written about AIDS for straight people. 

 

This book is not that. It is written by a gay man primarily for LGBTQ people to read and enjoy. And it shows, in a very positive way. Even as a boring middle aged white cishet guy, though, I really enjoyed it too. Because it is ultimately about believable, loveably flawed and human people. 

 

Artie, with his introversion, risk aversion, and neurotic tendencies combined with a good heart, is likeable - loveable - as a protagonist. You can’t help rooting for him the way you would a lost soul of a friend or relative. You may facepalm from time to time, but you really want them to have a good life. 

 

The other characters are interesting too, particularly the seniors. I have spent my career working with seniors, and indeed, I did a bit of volunteering as a kid with them as well. This book nails the experience, the joys and the frustrations, that come with age and working with the aged. Finger observes and describes humans so well. 

There are no villains in this book, unless you count the real-life politicians in the Reagan Administration, and they exist only as context for the book. 

 

The humans in the book are plenty flawed, to be sure. They do stupid, hurtful things sometimes. They irritate each other, they make bad decisions - all the usual human drama. But each character has good in them too - even the martinet-like head of the senior center, the genderqueer Ali. 

 

One of the episodes that stood out to me particularly is Artie’s first ghostwriting assignment. In it, he does an “autobiography” of an aging television star, Sterling Bismarck, who was a closeted gay man during his fame, but who is now dying of AIDS, and wants to tell his story rather than let the tabloids do it after his death. 

 

The interview is hilarious yet also poignant. I was particularly struck with the exchange where Sterling grills Artie about why he should be the one to write the book. Sterling picked Artie after reading his book, and wanted a queer writer. Artie, in a moment of vulnerability, explains that he feels compelled to write the book, and his reasoning is fascinating, and really resonates for me. 

 

Artie feels a responsibility to the LGBTQ community to tell their stories. Even - especially perhaps - because the stories make the cishet establishment uncomfortable and even angry. To tell those stories even though some people do not want to hear them, do not want them told, do not want the truth known. 

 

He compares it in his mind to the act of coming out, which faces the same resistance from those it makes uncomfortable. 

 

This too really resonated for me. My parents are furious that I blog about our family. They do not want our family dynamics to be public. They do not want the unpleasant stories told. I was expected to show a loyalty to them (and my sister) and never ever put them in a negative light. Of course, the reciprocal courtesy was not extended, particularly when it came to my wife, who was considered a fair target for open lies and slander. 

 

To an extent, I too feel a responsibility to tell the stories. There are millions of us children who grew up under Religious Authoritarian Parenting and the white nationalist culture wars™, and I write in significant part for them, for all of us. Our stories matter, and need to be told. I cannot just paper over the trauma, or pretend that our nation isn’t self destructing precisely because of the toxic false teachings my parents and people like them swallowed wholesale. 

 

I’m sure I am missing some of the things I wanted to say about this book. I love how it brings New York City to life, particularly the Village of the 1980s. I love the characters, even though they can be frustrating. I love the sense of community. I love that the book is rather introvert focused - I very much understand Artie’s tendency to cocoon rather than get out there and make friends, even though he is good at it when he gets out there. (That’s not at all like me….right?) I love the humor, and the general good nature of the book. Even in terrible circumstances, humans have a desire to connect, to find community, to be friends. It is a reminder that even when the fascists are in charge, good people are still the majority, and we can find each other and build our communities. 

 

I love the way the book approaches aging and the challenges of maintaining community when your friends keep dying - that’s a future for most of us, after all. The book keeps it real, everything feels like it could really happen. It’s realism that is occasionally gritty, but mostly just…real. 

 

I should also mention the narrator, David Pittu, who does a great job with all the voices, making it easy to tell who is speaking. 

 

Regardless of your age, gender, or sexuality, give this book a shot. Humanity and mortality belong to us all, and community is what we all need. 

From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I previously read another book by Caitlin Doughty, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? This book, From Here to Eternity, (not to be confused with the classic of the same title by James Jones) is likewise about death and bodies, but with a different focus. The other book (which I also recommend) is more about answering questions children (and others) have about death an decay, this one is all about exploring alternatives to the ludicrous funeral industry we have here in the Western world. 

 

Thus, the book takes the author from a natural funeral pyre in Colorado to the preserved skulls in Bolivia - and a lot of places in between. 

 

Doughty runs her own funeral home, so she is an insider on all of this. She is also a rebel, advocating strongly for a better approach to death and decay than the expensive, environmentally awful, and death-denialist approach we currently have. 

 

Central to this idea is that by separating us from death and dead bodies, we interrupt the grieving process and create greater fear of death - which is the most natural part of living, if you think about it. 

 

I discuss this more in my review of Doughty’s other book, so you might read that one for more. 

 

As Doughty explores the rituals of other cultures, she notes that there is a long and sordid history of denigrating differences. Throughout the book, she is respectful and thoughtful. And occasionally sarcastic. 

 

I have come to believe that the merits of a death custom are not based on Mathematics (e.g. 36.7 percent a “barbarous act”), but on emotions, a belief in the unique nobility of one’s own culture. That is to say, we consider death rituals savage only when they don’t match our own. 

 

Throughout her journey around the world, she meets up with strange characters. One of those is Dr. Paul Koudounaris, who is described in the book as “an eighteenth-century highwayman reimagined by Tim Burton,” and self-described as “a cross between Prince and Vlad the Impaler.” 

 

In describing the elaborate rituals in an area of Indonesia honoring the dead, she has a great quip. 

 

All of these rituals might seem complicated, but Agus claimed they have actually become far less so. His parents were born into the animistic Aluk religion, but his father converted to Catholicism at age sixteen. Agus gave his theory: “There are 7,777 rituals in Aluk. People left because it got too complicated.” Catholicism hardly seems the place to go for fewer complicated rituals, but there you go.

And likewise on first seeing the mummies:

 

The first mummy I saw wore eighties’ style aviator sunglasses with yellow-tinted frames. 

“Damn,” I thought, “that guy looks like my middle school algebra teacher.”

 

Doughty muses on why Westerners go through all the trouble of embalming, but then freak out about the regularly tended mummies. 

 

The villagers in this region of Toraja are amateur taxidermists of the human body. Given that the Torajans now use similar chemical formulas as North Americans to mummify their dead, I wondered why Westerners are so horrified at the practice. Perhaps it is not the extreme preservation that offends. Rather, it is that a Torajan body doesn’t sequester itself in a sealed casket, walled in a cement fortress underneath the earth, but instead dares to hang around among the living. Which raises the question, why preserve the body so intensely if you’re not planning to keep it around, America?

 

Unsurprisingly, the book talks about the Dias de los Muertos celebration in Mexico. It apparently made its return to prominence in more modern times as a protest against the Americanized celebration of Halloween, and as a protest against injustice. 

 

These groups adopted Dias de los Muertos to mourn for those kept from the public eye, including sex workers, indigenous and gay rights groups, and Mexicans who died trying to cross the border to the U.S. In the last forty years, Dias de los Muertos has come to represent popular culture, tourist culture, and protest culture throughout Mexico. And Mexico is viewed as a world leader in practicing engaged, public grief. 

 

I will mention here my post on reclaiming Halloween from my fundamentalist childhood, and the lovely experience the kids and I had a few years ago at the local Dias de los Muertos celebration. 

 

As part of the discussion of the closure and complete grief that comes with rituals such as Dias de los Muertos, Doughty tells the story of a woman who went through hell to terminate a non-viable pregnancy, whose combined trauma of the event and the loss of a wanted child led her several years later to participate, which helped her find peace.

 

“One particularly vile woman screamed over and over that I was a murderer. I couldn’t take it, so I walked directly up to her and screamed in her face, ‘My baby is already dead! How dare you!’”

 

I was raised in the subculture that believed abortion was always murder. There were several factors that made me change my mind, and come to oppose all forced gestation. One of those moments was meeting a local woman who was the most vocal protester of Planned Parenthood here in my city. I have never before in my life met a more vile, evil, self-righteous, hateful monster of a woman than her. Even though I still (at the time) agreed with her basic political position, I was creeped the hell out. I swear you could smell the sulphur and brimstone. It was then that I realized that the anti-abortion industrial complex drew the worst possible people, the ones who needed vulnerable younger women to take their hate and rageful self-loathing out on. Just disgusting. 

 

Moving on to something more uplifting, the chapter on a North Carolina composting operation (using donated bodies), experimenting on the quickest and surest way to quickly compost a body of any sort, is quite fascinating. Honestly, if I were to have my choice, I think this would be the most environmentally friendly way for my mortal remains to return to the ecosystem. 

 

A particularly hilarious line is about the fencing “to keep out the curious, which include coyotes, bears, and drunk college students.” 

 

Of course, any well-meaning, useful endeavor will find itself attacked by “influencers” looking for clicks by lying about what is going on. No surprise, then, that the operation was attached by an online blogger for being “used by the government to greenwash mass murder.” No points if you guessed this guy was also an anti-vaxxer, a 9/11 truther, and denied that the Sandy Hook shooting was real.

 

This line was also interesting:

 

Katrina looks to this portion of the process, when the water is poured on top of the mound, as a future ritual. She doesn’t want the Urban Death Project facilities to share modern crematories’ allergy to family involvement. She hopes pouring the water on fresh woodchips will give the family the same sense of power as lighting the cremation pyre, pushing the button to start a modern cremation machine, or shoveling dirt onto the coffin. As we poured water onto Frank’s mound, it felt like ritual.

 

Not all of the funerals she visits are old school. She also visits hypermodern mausoleums and funeral homes in Japan and Spain. She describes the look of the one in Spain:

 

By contrast, the Altima funeral home, in Barcelona, is Google-headquarters-meets-Church-of-Scientology. It is minimalist, hypermodern, projecting the potential for cultlike activity. 

 

In this case, bodies are put on display behind clear glass, rather than in coffins. As she quips in the book, but not out loud:

 

“By putting them behind the glass like a zoo exhibit? What trouble are the corpses planning on causing, exactly?" 

 

In the chapter on Japan, she discusses the suicide culture. As an observation, she contrasts the Western view of suicide as a selfish act - a sin - whereas the cultural meaning of suicide in Japanese culture is a selfless act, sparing others the burden. Here again, she snarks a bit:

 

In the Judeo-Christian view - and thus, the dominant Western view - to die by suicide is a sinful, selfish act. This perception has been slow to fade, though the science is clear that suicide has root causes in diagnosable mental disorders and substance abuse. (“Sin” does not qualify for the DSM-5)

 

There is a fun digression in this chapter as well. Because of limited land in cities for cemeteries, there has been a renewed use of vertical space. This was actually proposed back in the 1820s, but rejected at the time. Doughty uses this to note a patent filed in 1983 for a “camera extender.” Alas, the patent expired in 2003….before the Selfie Stick became popular. The inventor could have been rich. 

 

One of the weirdest chapters is about Bolivia, where well-preserved skulls (often with skin and hair) - natita - are prayed to. And sure, it seems weird, but even weirder is the fact that the Catholic church has been engaged in a long-standing war over them. Worshipers, who syncretize the religion with older traditions (like literally every religion ever), want the natita’s blessed. 

 

Doughty makes the connection that seems obvious once you hear it, but that I hadn’t drawn:

 

Bolivia is not the only place where skulls have connected believers to the divine. The irony behind the Church’s disdain for the practice is that European Catholics have used saintly relics and bones as intermediaries for more than a thousand years. The natitas were similar in purpose to other skulls I had met several years earlier, on a trip to Naples, Italy. 

 

Again, the line at the beginning: our rituals are sacred, yours are barbaric and evil. Just something to think about. 

 

Another thing to think about, that Doughty notes: the Catholic Church - and indeed pretty much all conservative religious groups - limit the role of intermediary between worshippers and the divine to males. She notes (and cites scholarly research) that relics and other physical objects used for access to the sacred were popular with women “to seize direct access to the divine from the hands of the male leaders” of religion. 

 

Really, if you think about it, nothing frightens the leaders of organized religion more than the idea that there is no mediator between humans and the divine, and that all of us can access the divine just fine for ourselves, without having to submit to the hierarchy of church authority. It particularly scares them when women can do so without men to tell them what to do. 

 

I’ll end with a great line from the epilogue. 

 

Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it’s a cultural one. Facing death is not for the faint-hearted. It is far too challenging to expect that each citizen will do so on his or her own. Death acceptance is the responsibility of all death professionals - funeral directors, cemetery managers, hospital workers. It is the responsibility of those who have been tasked with creating physical and emotional environments where safe, open interaction with death and dead bodies is possible.

 

I don’t have answers to the cultural problem here. As I noted in my review of her other book, the most religiously devout people fear death the most. Maybe religion attracts those afraid of death? Maybe religion is doing a terrible job of managing grief? Or maybe religion offers an illusion of control? 

 

Whatever the case, our current practices are pretty terrible, and Doughty makes a strong case for positive change. 

I should also mention the delightful illustrations by Landis Blair. Doughty has a knack for pairing great illustrations with her books.

 I believe this is Algebra Teacher Guy...