Author's Note: From a discussion with Clonnie Yearout, fellow panalist on Voices of the Valley, Roanoke (VA) Times, 7/15/2009

Ah, Clonnie, I think our conversation has been going on for millennia, and there are so many ideas of what truth is that it (truth) has become, I think, subjective. To answer your question, no you are not wrong. Your perspective is different from mine, but both are valid.

I believe truth can be errant, especially philosophical truth. Scientific truth can be examined in a laboratory and found to be true or false, but truth that comes from myriad opinions of the truth are often errant.

Let me explain. The Church proposed from its inception that the sun, stars and planets orbited Earth. For the Church in the 17th century, that was truth. Galileo proved otherwise, but the Church continued to condemn him. Whatever the Church regarded as truth was not to be denied. Galileo's was scientific truth, but the Church wasn't interested in that, so I contend the Church's truth was errant. (I may go to the stake tomorrow!)

Now let me really endanger myself. Many Muslims believe that condemnation of adultry found in the Qur'an is truth from the lips of Allah via Muhammad and that punishment is death. Those Muslims who see that as truth sincerely believe they are doing the work of Allah. We Westerners are appalled; there is no truth in it, we believe. Who's right?

My belief is that truth depends a great deal on cultural interpretation; what is true in one culture is not true in another. Are both right or are both wrong? If I had been raised a Muslim in Iran and believed the Qur'an to be inerrant, I would be the first to cast a stone. Had I been raised a Christian in pre-Civil War deep South, slavery would be truth because the Bible said so. Had I been a Founding Father of our country, probably I would have  held that women did not have the right to vote. It was a truth. As a Founder, slavery would probably be okay, especially if I was a Southerner. So the other variation of truth is when it was held as truth. Wonder what the Founders would say now that we have turned all those "truths" over?

Now to myth: Belden C. Lane, professor of theological studies and American studies at St. Louis University, says that "Theology and myth are stepsisters of truth. The one probes with questions, the other spins out tales on gossamer threads. But both serve a common mystery." Joseph Campbell said that  "Mythology is not a lie. Mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told." The key here, I think, is "what can be known but not told." So a story--allegory, parable, whatever--was created to illustrate what can't be told.

I think I said somewhere, and if I didn't I do so now, that truth is embedded in myth; I did not mean to imply that the myth was the truth. As a matter of fact, people who see myth as historic are missing the truth that is there. I do not believe that Noah and his ark are historic. If I did, I would tell Ricky that indeed, without a doubt, his lineage comes from the two dogs on the Ark. And for me that would take away the truth in the Ark story that says to me that humankind can endure against any odds. I would believe instead that humankind cannot do it without a god in his corner.

I think the Holocaust in our time proved that humankind is resilient under horrible odds, also. Whether a god had anything to do with it is a matter of faith and personal opinion. The Holocaust is a not a myth, but tell that to the president of Iran and other Muslims. But, maybe in 1200 years, if we humans are still here and depending on the predominate culture, the Holocaust may take on the dimensions of myth, but the truth to be learned from the Holocaust will not be lost.

The author Tim O'Brien once wrote: "A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. While most would not interpret myths as literal truth, those who study them tend to see in them a weighty metaphorical, archetypal truth, a truth about the unseen, ineffable dimensions of existence that lie outside the bounds of science and reason." Myths tell us who we are as a people, and when you study myths from many cultures, you find that we human beings are more alike than we are different, no matter the era we live in. We all seek the same things both physically and philosophically.

Science is getting closer to proving some of this, and I again recommend Barbara Bradley Hagerty's remarkable book, Fingerprints of God, the Search for the Science of Spirituality. In that book she reports on studies being conducted now to answer a question that has been asked since the dawn on human life: Is there more to life than the reality we see, hear, touch, taste and hear. Myths have been dealing with that question in stories forever.

Incidentally, I use myth in its classical definition: stories that relate to gods and religion. Allegory and parable I see as different, but they searve the same purpose in attempting to answer that which cannot be explained.

Finally, and I'm sure you're very glad to read that, Campbell frequently quoted the Hindu truth that "I am the mystery of the Universe. " Tat tvam asi- "thou art that" which is beyond all description. God said to Moses, I Am that I Am, because he, God, was unexplainable in terms humans could understand. That myth was created to show just that: God is not explainable. I think that truth is better coming in a wonderful story than for some theologian to preach on it for hours but never present it as an experience.

So, Clonnie, I have metaphorically stripped myself naked, and I offer my unguarded self to your rebuttal. I enjoy your posts very much; you gotta good mind there.

I offer what I believe to be the most important thing you can learn in college: know-how. Of course major in your passion; unless you are on fire about something, you will never stick with it in my opinion. My friend the potter, who holds a doctorate in political science, comes to mind; she’s fervid about making pots and she knows how to make wonderful ones. Political science was her father’s idea.

Know-how is essential. Let me illustrate: A hotel owner, Nicky, finds his AC broke in August. He calls Dave who comes immediately.

Nicky sees that Dave is dressed in a suit that easily cost $1,000. His shirt and tie are silk and obviously tailor-made. Dave’s shoes are New & Lingwood’s Russian Calf, easily $1,500. Although astonished, Nicky leads Dave to the boiler room and shows him the AC. Dave takes a gold screw driver from his pocket and proceeds to walk around the AC unit, tapping, tightening, and adjusting. After five minutes Dave pronounces it fixed. Nicky flips the switch and it runs perfectly.

Delighted, Nicky tells Dave to send him a bill, which arrives the next day and which shows $1,000. Nicky is flabbergasted. Dave was here five minutes, tapping, Nicky laments. He calls Dave and demands an itemized bill, which comes the next day and shows the following:

$1.00 for tapping, tightening, and adjusting
$999.00 for knowing where to tap, tighten, and adjust

You can know a lot of things, useful, fascinating things, but if you don’t know how to use information, it becomes pleasant thoughts while you sitting in a bread line. Learn to do something. Learn to use your passion in order to deepen it and to improve it, and, most of all, share your passion so it will not cease.

 I do not believe God formed man in his own image. But I do believe that man formed God in his own image. The more I'm around religious folk, no matter what the religion, the more I see that they worship a god that is like them. The god may not look like the human being who worships him, her, or it, but the god thinks like the human being, I'll bet.

Take ultra right conservatives, like Rush Limbaugh, who touts his Christian leanings loud and clear, I am sure if at the Second Coming Jesus is not a right-wing Republican, like Limbaugh and others, they will send Him back and demand God send them the Jesus they have created. I'm not trying for laughs. My point is they are ideologically impaired. Liberals are the same way. An ideologue is an ideologue no matter when one finds him or her. They simply have no room in their minds for anything that differs from their creed.

Indeed, I am always amazed when confirmed ideologues condemn the government for helping people, especially people they determine are not worthy of help. They name those fed at the public trough--welfare or government stimulus--who are able bodied and should be working. Let 'em starve, they say. Make a mortgage you know you can't pay and expect the government to bail you out? You were an idiot, they say, so go homeless. Take your family and freeze to death. Teach you a lesson. I'm sick and tired of supporting these deadbeats who expect handouts, they complain. I work and pay taxes and pay my bills; why should I help them?

Yet these ideologues also rage at government because kids can't pray in school, or politicians can't pray to Jesus at government-sponsored meetings, or the Ten Commandments are banned from government property. They are defenders of God. Defenders of Jesus. Put God and Jesus back into America. After all the Founders were Christian, and this is a Christian nation. I hear that all the time.

I am puzzled. Are they reading the same New Testament that I am? I have search everything ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament, which I think is also called the Gospel, and I cannot for the life of me find one word from Jesus that turns aside anyone from help. Never, I don't recall, does He first ask them if they are worthy of His help. Does He ever ask anyone if they are working or if they can get help from family? Where does He ever judge anyone and not help them? Maybe I'm reading the wrong book.

Point. Jesus says time and again that the way to God is through Him. Do as I do, He admonishes people, and as I see it, that means give without conditions. If He died for the sins of the world, did He run a survey first to make sure everyone was worthy?

I'm afraid I find people like Limbaugh misunderstanding what Jesus says. I see a true Christian giving anything to anyone without question. If I am hungry, feed me. If I am thirsty, give me water. If I am naked, give me your cloak. And never is there a qualification before He dies for all human kind, and I do believe there had to be some who, by conservative ideology, were not worthy, such as everyone.

So that's why I believe man made God in his own image. And that is also why I find it extremely hard to believe in any god. I ask myself, what kind of god would I make, and I shudder to think what that might be. How can a believe in a god that humans have made? May as well worship a skyscraper.

Book Review
Allen Barra on the Myth of Ronald Reagan

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Posted on Feb 13, 2009


By Allen Barra

“The aftermath of Reagan’s presidency,” Garry Wills wrote in a famous introduction to his 1987 book “Reagan’s America,” “has proved, over and over, that Reaganism without Reagan is unsustainable.” In the two decades since Wills’ book was published, a significant portion of the press and public seems to have forgotten that. William Kleinknecht is on a mission: In “The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America,” he is out to demonstrate that Reaganism with Reagan never worked.

Kleinknecht, a veteran crime correspondent for the Newark Star-Ledger and the New York Daily News and an American Society of Professional Journalists award winner, is angry. But unlike many writers who have taken scatter shots at the Reagan legacy, Kleinknecht hasn’t lost his temper—in Henry James’ words, he has found it.

 In a fiery and lucid introduction he writes, “This book is born of annoyance: a great bewilderment over the myth that continues to surround the presidency of Ronald Reagan. It gives voice to a vast swath of psychically disenfranchised Americans, millions of them, lumped most thickly in the urban areas on either coast, who never understood Reagan’s appeal.” Kleinknecht’s thesis is nothing less than that Reagan was the “obvious enemy of the common people he claimed to represent, this empty suit who believed in flying saucers and allowed an astrologer to guide his presidential scheduling. ...” The great conundrum “is this: none of [the] unmistakable harbingers of American decline is being laid where it belongs—at the door of Ronald Reagan” [emphasis Kleinknecht’s].

In the tradition of most previous Reagan critics, Kleinknecht doesn’t try to draw a bead on Reagan from an ivory tower. He goes after Reagan from the blue collar on up: “He enacted policies that helped wipe out the high-paying jobs for the working class that were the real backbone of the country. ... His legacy—mergers, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization, globalization—helped weaken the family and eradicate small-town life and sense of community.”

Reaganomics did create fortunes, but mostly for those at the top of the economic ladder; it also brought “a reversal in the slow gains that the working class and the poor had made in the previous two decades.”

During a month when Republicans dug in against Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, Kleinknecht’s words, written last year before the economic crash, ring clear. “Reaganism replaced Enlightenment thinking with the corrupted Romanticism that portrays free-market purism as an article of religious faith that is the real meaning of America. The answer to any of the economic challenges of the twenty-first century is to do nothing. Cut taxes, eviscerate all regulation of private enterprise, and trust the market to guide our fates.” If this sounds like hyperbole, then you weren’t listening to the Republican response to President Obama’s bailout proposal.
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“The Man Who Sold America” has much in common with another recent scathing indictment of the Reagan administration, Will Bunch’s “Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future.” Both books cover much of the same territory: Contrary to the nearly two decades of idolatry from the right, Reagan was no more popular than numerous other modern presidents (as Kleinknecht notes, just 27 percent of eligible voters elected him in 1980, a year which saw a record-low turnout at the polls), the legacy of the famous 1980 tax cut was an era of deregulation that spawned CEO and Wall Street greed, and, most important, the Reagan revolution did not do what it set out to do, namely to reduce the size of government (“Big government,” writes Kleinknecht, “was not stripped away in the Reagan years; it was just redirected to the needs of private enterprise”).

However, Bunch sees Reagan primarily as a pragmatist whose image has been hijacked by a neoconservative cabal while Kleinknecht sees Reagan himself as the betrayer of what once was regarded as genuine conservatism. Reagan’s early backers “were not Burkean conservatives or acolytes of the John Birch Society. They had little interest in social issues. ... Most were not even particularly passionate in their anticommunism. They viewed Reagan quite simply as a potential liberator for the entrepreneurial class.” They were men who simply “wanted deep cuts in their taxes and government regulators out of the way.”

Many seminal thinkers of 20th century American conservatism—Kleinknecht cites Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver and German-born émigré Friedrich A. Hayek, to whose names I would add G.K.Chesterton—regarded large corporations as “a threat to folkways and small-scale private property. It was, after all, not government but big corporations that did so much to wipe out agrarian culture. The former machinist or farmer now bagging groceries at Wal-Mart is not exactly a conservative icon.”

This is interesting because Kleinknecht’s case against Reagan isn’t based on the former actor’s adherence to traditional conservative values but on his disregard of them. There are two enemies of a real conservative society, thought Chesterton; one of them “is State Socialism and the other is Big Business.” In other words, the enemy is bigness, no matter on which side of the political spectrum it originates. Hayek, quoted by Kleinknecht, wrote something similar in his highly influential book “The Road to Serfdom” (1944):  “... [T]he movement toward totalitarianism comes from two great vested interests: organized capital and organized labor. Probably the greatest menace of all is that the politics of these two most powerful groups point in the same direction.” Such sentiments, Kleinknecht writes, “were swept out of Washington in the 1980s. Relief from government regulation was one of a handful of core beliefs that really mattered to Reagan and his business supporters, and anything that stood in the way of the natural consolidation of the nation’s productive forces was a barrier to be removed.” Or as Reagan’s good friend whom he appointed attorney general, William French Smith, put it, “Bigness doesn’t necessarily mean badness.”

“The Man Who Sold the World” is the most concise and well-thought-out argument against Reagan. Kleinknecht is no poet; he too often writes at the top of his voice. Nonetheless, if he is guilty of occasional pamphleteering, there’s never any doubt as to his meaning, and many of his phrases linger after one has closed the book. “By discrediting government as a legitimate and meaningful presence in the lives of Americans,” he writes in his final chapter, “The Second-Rate Society,” “Reagan repudiated the very concept of national leadership. By exhorting Americans to place self-interest above all, he undermined the spirit of sacrifice and the possibility of a common effort to solve our most pressing national problems.”

Kleinknecht isn’t just writing to be heard by liberal Democrats: His challenge to conservatives is nothing less than to once again be conservative. 

Allen Barra writes for numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

I admit to hating just about anything in PE that required dressing out, as they called it, because that meant I had to undress first. Being naked in front of other boys was a nightmare for me. I won't go into why, but even with the shallowest imagination, one can guess why.

Tumbling I sort of, kind of liked because I was fairly good at it, and since I was born to be an actor, i.e. a showoff, tumbling and being okay at it was a rush because people cheered when I did something they thought was wonderful, like diving over a line of ten boys kneeling on the mat and not landing on them but rolling away safely. However, I did have to dress out, which never ceased to turn me off even when I knew I would perform well.

Other sports--football, baseball, basketball, track, etc.--I ignored. But as I matured I accepted the fact that I was athletically retarded. Exemplifying, my most vivid memory was "going out" for baseball, which for some reason I thought I could play. The coach sent to right field with a number of other boys to field balls, which he sent to us via bat. At the second or third crack of the bat I saw the ball headed my way. I ran up on it, tangling my feet together like the roots of a bonsai tree. My fall was spectacular. I flipped over frontward rolled to my left, winding up flat and staring into the giddy faces of my peers. Their laughter was, to this actor, not unpleasant, but when I glanced at the coach, I saw him bent over cackling like a demented chicken. Thus my baseball career ended.

The next morning I met the coach walking along the hallway. When he saw me he smiled widely, then laughed.

"Fred," he said, patting me on my shoulder, "you're a good actor. I've seen you on the stage here at school and heard you sing those songs from 'Oklahoma!' You were great. Stick to it. Watch baseball on TV."

He turned an sauntered away chuckling, I'm sure, at the fond memory of me whirling around in right field trying to catch a baseball.

I did become an actor, and of baseball I never became a fan.