Archives

Stolen Lives by Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi

May26

Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi.

Recommended by Laura at Musings: “In 1972, Moroccan defense minister General Mohamed Oufkir staged a failed coup d’etat against King Hassan II. Oufkir was reported to have committed suicide, but was found with five bullet wounds. In retaliation for the coup, his entire family was imprisoned: Oufkir’s wife, Fatima, and his children Malika, Raouf, Soukaina, Maria, Myriam, and Abdellatif. A cousin, Achoura, and a close family friend, Halima, joined them. Malika Oufkir was 17 years old; her brother Abdellatif was only 3.”

This nonfiction account of a family kept in cruel and unusual confinement in the desert of Morocco reminded me of nothing so much as Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. The Oufkir family were so badly treated and so cut off from the world for so very long that they, like the fictional Dr. Manette, were impaired in body, mind and soul when they were finally freed from the prisons of King Hassan II.

Malika Oufkir’s story is that of the spoiled rich girl brought low by injustice and subsequently redeemed through suffering and finally freed to appreciate a new life and love. It’s a classic plot, and the fact that it’s a true story, as trustworthy as memoirs can be these days, makes it all the more compelling. Some parts of the story are difficult to believe: Malika says that as a nineteen year old, educated and well-travelled, she had no idea that her father was a murderer and a tyrant. Perhaps not, but then again, maybe she chose her own blind spots. She also describes scenes of treatment so horrendous during the twenty years of her imprisonment that I would choose to disbelieve her testimony if I could, not wanting to believe that man can be so cruel to his fellowman. Western law embodies the principle that no person’s family should be punished for that person’s crimes. Malika, her mother, and her five brothers and sisters are cruelly punished for the crimes of Malika’s father, a fate that Ms. Oufkir says was not uncommon in Morocco under Hassan II.

An amazing story human resilience and courage. Read it and weep.

When Men Become Gods by Stephen Singular

May25

When Men Become Gods: Mormon Polygamist Warren Jeffs, His Cult of Fear, and The Women Who Fought Back by Stephen Singular.

If ever a book were “overtaken by events” this expose by Stephen Singular was overtaken and made both relevant, as background to the raid last month at the Yearning for Zion Ranch, and irrelevant, as those who were interested learned more about the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints than anyone needed to know and more even than Mr. Singular, after a year of research, knew when he wrote his book. In fact, although the book gives the reader a lot of information on the history of the FLDS, it’s obvious that very little, if any, of Mr. Singular’s information came from actual, current FLDS members. Probably that’s not his fault, since I’m sure they refused to speak to him. Still, he had to get his information from law enforcement officers, social workers, and disgruntled ex-members. None of those groups could be expected to give an unbiased report on the FLDS, and they don’t. Mr. Singular’s picture of life inside the FLDS is unrelentingly negative. Reading about it feels like reading about life under the Taliban in Afghanistan.

However, the difference between Afghanistan and Short Creek is night and day. It truly is possible to leave the FLDS; many men and women and teenagers have done so. Although “prophet” Warren Jeffs probably is a power-hungry cult leader with sadistic tendencies, no one is forced by law to obey him or even listen to his dictates. Mr. Singular writes about girls and women “forced into marriage” and about men who “lost their families” when Mr. Jeffs excommunicated them from the FLDS. However, no adult woman had to marry anyone, and those families chose to disown their excommunicated loved ones. Many of the situations Mr. Singular describes constitute a tragedy, to be sure, but the participants in those tragedies for the most part chose to obey Mr. Jeffs as consenting adults. The crime for which Mr. Jeffs is now in prison, participation in the forced marriage of a fourteen year girl, is an exception to that rule of adult willingness to obey Warren Jeffs, and Mr. Jeffs is rightly serving time for his disregard for the wishes of the (minor) girl involved.

There are lots of allegations of child abuse and spiritual abuse and under-age marriage and polygamy in this book, but Mr. Singular never explains why, if these crimes were being committed, no one was ever charged or prosecuted. He implies that this lack of prosecution is due to a lack of willing witnesses, a common problem in cases of spousal abuse and child abuse. Nevertheless, anyone can write a book and allege all sorts of crimes, but unless some proof is offered that will pass the standards required in a court, the accused are considered innocent in the eyes of the law.

Because Elissa Walls was willing to testify against Warren Jeffs, he is in prison. Because the Texas DFPS had no solid evidence to back up their allegations of physical and sexual abuse at YFZ Ranch, the FLDS children should be returning to their parents very soon. (I hope.) And that’s all as it should be.

When Men Become Gods was published “sooner than planned” according to Mr. Singular’s website “because of recent events.” The book has no index, maybe because of its rushed publication, a serious drawback since I wanted to give a few specifics here but I was unable to find some of the incidents and events I wanted to discuss. It’s also NOT about YFZ Ranch, but rather centers on the FLDS community at Short Creek on the Urah/Arizona border and on the rise and fall of leader and prophet Warren Jeffs. It’s a fascinating read, and it’s obvious that Mr. Singular and Texas law enforcement and CPS officials were getting their information about FLDS beliefs and practices and crimes from many of the same sources.

If you would like more information about the raid on the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado and subsequent events, check out the coverage at The Common Room or at Grits for Breakfast. Either blogger has much more, and more accurate, information posted on this CPS power grab than can be found anywhere in the mainstream media.

Wednesday Discussion

May14

Back in February/March I read Robert Epstein’s The Case Against Adolescence. Epstein and John Holt would have been buddies. Epstein’s basic premise is that adolescence is a fabricated concept and that adolescents, starting at about age thirteen or whenever they demonstrate competency, should be treated as adults with adult privileges and responsibilities. These privileges include the right to own and manage property and money, driving, marriage, and other things we as a society have traditionally restricted teenagers from doing.

Matthew Lee Anderson at Mere Orthodoxy is the one who inspired me to read this book. You may want to read his thoughts and then come back to answer my questions.

Questions:
When does a child or a teenager become an adult?

What characteristics distinguish a child from an adult?

At what age, or using what other criteria, should society give adult responsibilities to and have adult expectations of a person?

If adulthood doesn’t magically happen on your eighteenth birthday, when does it happen?

And to get very specific, and very controversial, what basis does the state of Texas have for deciding that persons under the age of eighteen, and sometimes over the age of eighteen, can be held against their will, not charged with any crime, and made wards of the State of Texas for an undetermined time period? This is exactly what is happening in the case of the FLDS in Eldorado.

Hobgoblins or Habits

May12

Christianity for Modern Pagans, ch. 7: Vanity of Human Reason.

Pascal: ” . . . we require the aid of good habits to overcome bad habitual tendencies in the opposite direction. Therefore, we must act as if we believed, go to church, and so forth, thus habituating the automaton to obey what reason has discovered to be true.”

At least half of parenting and educating children is the development of good habits. As I understand it, Charlotte Mason discusses this aspect of education in her books.

Of course, one can develop a “foolish consistency,” but there is much to be said for doing things out of habit after having developed a conviction that those things indeed ought to be done and don consistently. Some fairly simple habits that I would like to instill in myself and my children:

1. To flush the toilet after each and every use thereof. Does anyone else have this problem? The problem of NOT seeing this done consistently, that is. And of course, Mr. Nobody is always the culprit.

2. Go to church on Sundays. I believe regular worship with a group of Christians is an important Christian discipline.

3. Get up in the morning and get dressed. My children get tired of hearing about how great it is that as homeschoolers they can do school in their pajamas. Unfortunately, they often play into that stereotype by . . . doing school in their pajamas.

4. Brush their teeth without being reminded. We’ve been working on this one for quite a while, and they still need reminders.

5. Tell the truth. I’d like it if they did this habitually without thinking about it.

6. Obey authority. Yes, there are times when a given authority is wrong, but I would rather their first impulse be to obey. Then, they can think about the possibility that the person in authority might have been mistaken or sinful and act accordingly.

7. Look for beauty and joy. This is a habit I need desperately to develop and to model.

8. Speak kindly. Again, if only I could model this one all the time.

9. Put away things when you’re done with them. The clutter, and resultant work, in our house could be cut probably ninety percent if only we would all put things away when we’re done using them.

10. Work first, then play.

11. Read the Bible and pray daily.

Of course, there may be times when the practice of each of these habits will be either impossible or inadvisable. But I would rather the habit be established, and then the mature person can choose to deviate from it for a reason.

Some habits my children are learning inadvertently:

1. Spend the day in your night clothes unless you have to go somewhere.

2. Obey when and if Mom says it a third time and gets THAT tone in her voice.

3. Do your work as soon as you’re reminded to do so.

4. Undress and leave your clothes on the floor.

5. Do as little schoolwork as possible to get by, and when the cat’s away . . . play!

YIkes! How do I replace the second list with a bette set of habits? How do the items on the first list become ingrained habits?

I think “hard work” is at least part of the answer to both questions.

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

May1


The Bookseller of Kabul–Seierstad. Recommended at Bookfest.

The Bookseller of Kabul is a nonfiction account of the lives of a real family in Kabul, Afghanistan. Journalist Asne Seierstad lived with the family for four months as a guest, welcomed by the patriarch of the family, a man she calls “Khan” in her story. Unfortunately, her first impression of Khan as a liberal, forward-thinking Afghan intellectual changed as she came to know his family and his family interactions. In particular, it becomes quite clear, although Ms. Seierstad does not include herself as a player or even an observer in the book, that she was appalled by the treatment of women in Khan’s family and in Afghan society as a whole. She describes how Khan takes a sixteen year old second wife and exiles his first wife to Pakistan to take care of his business affairs there. She also shows the way the other women in the family, especially Khan’s sister Leila, are trapped and limited by the circumstances and assumptions that are taken for granted in Afghan family life, at least in this particular Afghan family.

Khan, whose real name Shah Mohammed Rais was rather obvious to anyone who actually lived in Kabul, read the book after it was published and immediately screamed bloody murder. From a New York Times article December 21, 2003:

Seierstad lived with the family for four months, and then wrote a detailed account of the experience — in which she portrayed the bookseller as a liberal intellectual in public but a tyrant to his family. This summer, Rais received a copy of the book in English. And then the trouble began. Furious at what he viewed as Seierstad’s misrepresentations and betrayal of his hospitality, he vowed to sue her for libel in a Norwegian court. He wants damages and a cut of the profits from ”The Bookseller of Kabul,” which became an international best seller (and the most successful nonfiction book in Norway’s history).

I don’t know what Mr. Rais expected Ms. Seierstad to write. Perhaps she flattered him and lied to him and implied that she approved of his polygamous lifestyle and autocratic family governance. At any rate, according to Wikipedia as of 2005, Rais has “declared he was seeking asylum in either Norway or Sweden, as a political refugee. Things revealed about him in Seierstad’s book had made life for him and his family unsafe in Afghanistan.”

This Salon article calls Ms. Seierstad “The Hypocrite of Kabul” and accuses her of cultural insensitivity. However, the same author Anne Marlow, writes approvingly of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. I guess she hadn’t had a chance to read Mr. Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns in which he directly engages with the tradition and practice of Afghan subjugation and mistreatment of women.

Did Asne Seierstad betray the hospitality offered to her by writing frankly and disparagingly of the family with whom she shared a home for four months? Probably. I wouldn’t have written a book about such a family without at least spending a lot more time and energy disguising the main characters.

Are the women of the Rais family mistreated by my (Western) standards? Absolutely. And I would defend cultural standards that allow women to leave the house without covering their faces and to receive an education and to be more than household slaves, as standards that should prevail in both the East and the West, human standards.

The slave owners in the South didn’t like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book messing with their “way of life” either. On the other hand, she wrote fiction, not a poorly disguised invasion of privacy.

Insightful and illuminating but voyeuristic.

Every Day in Every Way

Apr28

Christianity for Modern Pagans, ch. 6: Vanity of Human Justice.

Ambrose Bierce: A conservative is one enamored of existing evils; a liberal wants to replace them with new ones.

Kreeft: “We don’t want to believe that the evils of our age are only another version of perennial injustice. We want to believe that either they are far worse than those of the past or far lighter. If we believe they are worse, the past becomes our Utopia; if they are lighter, the future does.”

I have been trying to articulate this thought and related ideas for lo these many years. We do not live in the best of times, nor the worst of times. There are things from the past that it would be good to bring back: simplicity, family closeness, extended family networks, a joy in work, a rhythm of work and recreation. But other aspects of the (agrarian) past are abhorrent: lack of medical care, work so hard that it drove many to an early grave, a single dependence on the land and the weather that saw families starve or lose their livelihood in a bad year, harsh discipline of children, lack of educational opportunities.

As for the future, I do not believe that every day, in every way, we are getting better and better, nor do I hold to a post-millennial view of history which says that we Christians, as we conform to the image of Christ, are busily ushering in the reign of Christ on this earth. I’m not a premillennialist either, seeing everything getting worse and worse, descending into chaos and judgement. No, rather I believe that this world will end in God’s time, either with a bang or a whimper, and then Our Lord Jesus Christ will reign over a new heaven and a new earth forever and ever. Amen.

Pascal: “When everything is moving at once, nothing appears to be moving, as on board ship. When everyone is moving toward depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops, he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.”

The Fixed Point is Christ Himself. I can judge my life and ethics by the life and ethics of Jesus. However, I also become something of a “fixed point” as I follow and conform myself to him. In this, I will be seen as a dangerous reactionary by some and a religious fanatic by others, but as closely as I follow Jesus, I will be less and less changeable and more and more a stable point of reference. Again may it be so.

Vanity, Vanity, All Is Vanity

Apr21

Christianity for Modern Pagans, ch. 5: Vanity.

Pascal: “Anyone who wants to know the full extent of man’s vanity has only to consider the causes and effects of love. The cause is a je ne sais quoi. And it’s effects are terrifying. This indefinable something, so trifling that we cannot recognize it, upsets the whole earth, princes, armies, the entire world. Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been different.”

Kreeft: “No psychologist, to this day, has ever explained why Romeo falls in love with Juliet. Yet this is literally a matter of life or death. Let us pray that no one ever will explain it.”

There were other girls in the ballroom when Romeo first saw Juliet. Why her? Why are you married to your husband or wife instead of some other woman or man? Chance? Pheromones? Predestination? Does that online dating service whose name I can’t remember really have x number of “compatibility factors” infallibly figured and matched to find you the perfect mate? I doubt it.

First, there’s an attraction, physical and spiritual/mental. Ideas mesh; bodies feel. Then there must be a commitment, an act of the will. A woman says, “I love this man and forsaking all others, I will cling only to him.” Love is somethng you feel, but to become lasting, it becomes something you do, acting in love whether you feel it or not.

However, Pascal is right. None of the preceding paragraph explains completely why I chose Engineer Husband. Perhaps I chose him because he was attracted to me, but that answer begs the question: why was he attracted to me? And what if he had not been?

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,
For want of the shoe, the horse was lost,
For want of the horse, the rider was lost,
For want of the rider, the battle was lost,
For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a nail!

Read more about the source of this nursery rhyme on vanity and chance (or lack of foresight according to Ben Franklin) here.

Pascal’s point is that mighty events turn on small and seemingly inconsequential choices. Kreeft concludes, “If there is no God, we easily become determinists.” Or anarchic nihilists.

Animal or Angel?

Apr13

Christianity for Modern Pagans, ch. 4: The Paradox of Greatness and Wretchedness.

Shakespeare: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.” Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

Pascal: “Man is neither angel nor beast .. . Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.”
“This is why life is neither a tragedy nor a comedy but a tragicomedy.”

In the commentary portion, Kreeft goes on to list some of the philosophical movements, both before and since the time of Pascal, that have erred on either the side of animalism or angelism.

Animalism: Marxism, Behaviorism, Freudianism, Darwinism, and Deweyan Pragmatism. (I would add Psychology and Psychiatry in general which assume that all of our problems can be traced to physical/chemical causes.)

Angelism: Platonism, Gnosticism, Pantheism, and New Age Spiritualism.

Shakespeare, of course, genius that he was, wrote both tragedies and comedies and a few plays that are ambiguously considered to be tragicomedies. The wheat and the tares grow together in this world, and no one can separate the two until the harvest. The ending is hope or despair, heaven or hell, life everlasting or death everdying, and the ending determines the nature of the play. Even if sad, tragic, horrible things happen, if the culmination is a wedding, The Marriage Feast of the Lamb, then the play was a comedy all along. And even if we laugh and grab for the gusto, if the end is death and despair, the play is a tragedy, no matter how many grave-diggers’ jest we insert along the way.

So should a writer or a playwright show only the depths of evil and the hopelessness and sin of which man is capable and to which he is prone? Is this the work of a Christian novelist or poet, to bring the reader into the deepest darkness so that he might begin to look for a light? For some writers, the rather paradoxical illumination of human wretchedness might be the calling. Others are called to articulate and write hope in a dying world. Some, the greatest of writers and communicators, can do both.

Thanks, Julie: Reading Suggestions for a Thirteen Year Old Boy

Apr11

Julie at Happy Catholic referred her readers over here in answer to a question she received via email:

I’m needing some suggestions for books for my 13-year-old son. He’s gone through Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and now all of Tolkien. He really needs to get out of the fantasy genre and I’m not exactly willing to trust his English teacher on choices. I’ve found some of her suggestions contain language and situations that I don’t approve. I’m sure there must be other parents out there with the same problem.

My son is an advanced reader, but not an enthusiastic one. I did have him read Night by Elie Wiesel and he was quite moved by it. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Julie got lots of good comments on her post, lots of good suggestions. And I said there that I thought the mom was right to question some of the choices that the schoolteacher might send home. A lot of young adult fiction is heavily concentrated around the themes of teen romance, sex, and youthful rebellion, perhaps because the writers or the publishers think those are the only subjects teens are interested in reading about. I’m not saying that authors shouldn’t deal with those and other sensitive themes in their young adult novels, but you know your child better than anyone. And you should know what he or she is ready to read in terms of “adult” content and what your family can tolerate or approve of in terms of worldview.

I also suggested that the mom in the email consider some nonfiction, a few good books about a subject her son is already interested in, anything from cars to sports to electronics to music. The nonfiction would “balance out” all the fantasy, and guys actually tend to like nonfiction. Lady teachers and moms, on the other hand, tend to think it doesn’t count as real reading if it’s nonfiction or if it’s a magazine. So, here are a few nonfiction and fiction suggestions for a thirteen year old boy. Links are to reviews here at Semicolon.

Fiction:
The Declaration by Gemma Malley. Dystopian sci-fi.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. Mystery/adventure.

Isle of Swords by Thomas Wayne Batson. Pirate adventure.

Cracker: The Best Dog in Vietnam by Cynthia Kadohata. If he likes dog stories that include war also . . .

Code Talker by Joseph Bruchac. Navajo code talkers (radio operators) during WW II.

Code Orange by Caroline Cooney. Excellent adventure about a boy who almost inadvertently starts a smallpox epidemic in NYC.

Heat by Mike Lupica. Baseball fiction.

Leepike Ridge by N.D. Wilson. Action adventure in the tradition of Tom Sawyer.

Nonfiction: This list is a little tricky because as I indicated, it all depends on what the boy’s interests are. But here are a few possibilities.

An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 by Jim Murphy.

Long Way Gone by Ismael Beah. A boy soldier in Sierra Leone. It’s violent and disturbing, but if he read and appreciated Night . . .

The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay. For the mechanically minded.

More suggestions from my readers for a 14 year old male friend of mine.

Any more ideas?

I’m Back

Mar25

For those of you who missed me and for those who didn’t, I am, nevertheless, back to blogging. I took a blog break over Lent, although I left a few post-dated posts, and now I’m back with lots of “stuff” from my reading and thinking and writing over the five or six weeks of Lent.

One of my Lenten projects was Peter Kreeft’s commentary on Pascal’s Pensees, called Christianity for Modern Pagans. In the book, Kreeft takes Pascal’s thoughts and organizes them by subject in an order that makes some sense. Then Kreeft comments on each of the sets of pensees and relates them to a modern mindset. According to Kreeft, Pascal, although he lived in the seventeenth century, speaks quite cogently to the twentieth and twenty-first century man’s dilemma. A lot of what I collected in my commonplace book were quotations from the book, both Pascal’s words and Kreeft’s exegesis.

Chapter 1: Order

Pascal: “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.”

Kreeft: “The root of most atheism is not argument but attitude, not intellection but feeling, not love of truth but the fear of truth.”
“Most apologetics tries to feed spinach to a reluctant baby who stubbornly closes his mouth. . . . What you have to do is make the baby hungry.”
“Why not cultivate neutrality instead? Because neutrality is impossible once you are addressed with a claim as total, as intimate, as life-changing and as sin-threatening as Christianity. Christianity is not a hypothesis; it is a proposal of marriage.”

Sherry: And moderns/post-moderns are afraid of marriage commitment just as they are afraid of Christian commitment. The job is to make people see that there is no neutral ground in regard to Christianity just as there is no neutral ground in regard to eating or marriage. Either you eat or you starve. Either you’re married or you’re not. (“Living together” is an attempt at compromise in this area, but it’s a very poor compromise.) You can’t decide to be neutral about food or marriage. The Bible says that the wages of sin is death. Agnosticism says, like Satan in the garden, “You will not surely die.” And people fear that Satan may be right and try to hedge their bets. But there is no middle ground. Jesus said, “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40) and also “He who is not with me is against me.” (Matthew 12:30) We all must choose, and even those who think they are not choosing are making a choice, whether they will or no.

I’ve got lots of book reviews, a couple of memes, more Pascal and Kreeft, and even some essays and Biblical commentary. So as they say, stay tuned.