Sit Down, Shut Up, Hang On

For they are a rebellious people, lying children, children unwilling to hear the instruction of the Lord; who say to the seers, “Do not see,” and to the prophets, “Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path, let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel.” -- Isaiah 30:9-11

Here we have another, more pernicious response to the word of God and the truth. At the foot of Mount Sinai, the terrified Israelites in Exodus 20 cried out for a mediator, a prophet who would convey the Word of the Lord to them. They did not reject the truth. You need electricity, but the electrical circuits in your house cannot be hooked directly to the main power line without a disastrous result; you also need a transformer to step the power down so that it is usable and not destructive. Moses and the prophets who followed were transformers, men and women specially equipped to bring the Word down to a people whom God loved but who had little time to devote to Him.

In the times of Isaiah the prophet, however, the attitude was different. Those living in the kingdoms of Judah and Israel were no longer runaway slaves in the wilderness. They were a settled and fairly prosperous people who felt they knew how to run their own lives and make their own way. They had agendas to pursue, pleasures to seek out and enjoy. They were wise in their own sight and righteous by their own standards. They saw the prophets as old-fashioned, out-of-style relics of history who did not understand the ways and days in which they were living.

Isaiah was not a fundamentalist any more than was Job -- though I cannot say the same about Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, or Mushroom for that matter. For myself, the easy answers still come easily, and I can be placated by platitudes too much of the time. Those to whom Isaiah spoke preferred “smooth things” and “illusions” to the sometimes harsh, sometimes paradoxical, always challenging truth brought by God’s prophets. We know to stay away from the Gospel According To Oprah and related spiritual Twinkies, but we also must be wary of trying to make God fit into a Procrustean theology of health and happiness. Sometimes, the best response we can give is to admit in wonder that we have no idea what God is doing.

One reason I do not enjoy debating atheists is that in the course of argument I might slander God. I would not do it intentionally, yet in rushing to defend the Divine, I may fall into an entrenched fundamentalist position. As a fundamentalist, I am not wrong; I am just not fully right. I find myself reading through the arguments of Job’s friends and agreeing with them. The tendency is to say that God does this, and He would never do that; nevertheless, sometimes He must do exactly that, and, since He does, and since we cannot say that He is not Good, we have to say there are limits to His power or resort to verbal contortionists to explain how evil is really good. It is better to tell the truth even if it seems to cast a bad light on the Almighty.

Prophets are never going to be overly popular people. In fact, it is not unwise to assume, if an alleged prophet is universally well-received and highly spoken of, he or she is most likely a false prophet. Jesus concurs . Popular teachers and preachers and speakers of various kinds generally tell people what they want to hear. That is not always the truth – and very rarely the whole truth.

To take a current example, the economic woes of America are the result of years of political prophets telling us we could have something for nothing. “Don’t Tread On Me” is a good American motto, but we must be even more devoted to the standard from Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress that bore the letters TANSTAAFL -- There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. We have bought into the idea that money grows on trees or can be created out of thin air, that wealth means consumption rather than production, and that government spending can solve our problems. We heard the lies, and we believed them, not because they were true, but because they sounded good to us, they tickled our ears and our fancy. When those who told the truth spoke, we ignored them, mocked them, and pushed them off the stage. When they said we would have to pay in the long run, we laughed and replied that in the long run we would all be dead. We were all Epicureans, all Existentialists – if not in belief then in action.

When Isaiah spoke the harsh, unrelenting truth about the sins of God’s people and their need for repentance and returning, they replied, “Shut up!” They despised the words of the prophet; therefore he said:

Because you despise this word and trust in oppression and perverseness and rely on them, therefore this iniquity shall be to you like a breach in a high wall, bulging out, and about to collapse, whose breaking comes suddenly, in an instant; … smashed … ruthlessly …(Isaiah 30:12-14)

This is a message not only to the unbeliever who rejects Christ and prefers to hear words that do not cut and chasten, it is a message as well to the believer who must be pruned and purged in order to be fruitful. We must not just hear the word of God but allow those words to abide in us, just as Jesus said. The abiding truth will do its work of cleansing and purifying, of bringing us rest and restoration.

For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”

Some of Us Grow Up

I have a short week and a lot to do, no FNFFA this week. But Friday night reminds me of Saturday night and Saturday night reminds me of “Saturday Night Live”, which in turn reminds me of National Lampoon, the magazine. I don’t know if it is still published. Somehow, a few decades ago, a copy came into my possession and was stored away in a stack of early ‘70’s vintage Sports Illustrated magazines (I think this was before swimsuits were “sports”) and a single well-preserved copy of Marvel Comics’ “Two-Gun Kid”. The Two-Gun Kid story and art hold up over time. The SI’s are interesting for the history. But looking at the satire magazine, I can’t imagine that I ever paid money for such a disgusting pile of humorless stupidity. My excuse is, if I did buy it, I was probably drunk or high.

Satire is perhaps the most difficult kind of humor to get right. I know. I’ve tried and failed miserably every time. I can sometimes sustain a bit of irony for a sentence or two, but in extended pieces it tends to fall apart, just collapse under its own weight. Maybe it is just a personal problem. Looking through that old Lampoon, I tend to think not. The magazine contains nothing that I would call “satire”. There are some things that are gross and/or shocking. There are a few pieces that turn things around backwards in the tradition of Erehwon, but they don’t really work and they aren’t funny. They are just stupid, and stupid is only funny if you actually respect your subject.

For example, contrast a couple of “minority” comedians: the great Bill Cosby and the, uh, well, extremely bitter Margaret Cho. Essentially Cho hates the people she tries to skewer – people like me. Because she has such a low opinion of her target, she cannot make it real, it has no resonance. Cho and her audience are “laughing” at a caricature that is so far from being real I can’t even identify it as human, certainly not as myself.

Consider Cosby on the other hand. Listen to an old Fat Albert story from some of Cosby’s early records. They are still funny – a little more nostalgic than they were perhaps but still funny, even if you’ve heard them a dozen times. Bill Cosby loved his characters. He could see the humor in what they were and what they did, but he respected them. They were caricatures lovingly drawn and the details overblown made them more loveable – not grotesque.

Cosby is an adult who looks back lovingly on childhood and adolescence, seeing the beauty and the humor and helps us understand ourselves. Cho is an aging adolescent who tries to mock adulthood, wisdom and maturity but fails since she does not understand any of it.

All of that brings me to my actual subject: Robert Heinlein. Admittedly I have lost track of how many degrees of separation that is, but here we are. Generally, Heinlein’s work is divided more or less neatly into two segments. His early novels are sometimes known as “juveniles”, written for what we call today the “young adult” market. These works include Tunnel in the Sky, Starship Troopers, Farmer in the Sky, etc. The later works are themed differently -- Stranger in a Strange Land, Glory Road, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Farnham’s Freehold, and the Lazarus Long stuff.

Tunnel in the Sky is a good little SciFi book – the tone matches the theme and the character. Heinlein’s voice is pitched well for the story. The plot is fairly solid and the characters are adequate. You can say the same thing about Starship Troopers which is a little more “mature”, but is still appropriate to Heinlein’s voice. Honestly, I don’t remember the other juveniles that well -- Tunnel in the Sky was always my favorite.

When it comes to the later novels, Heinlein begins to lose me. Farnham’s Freehold is a deeply flawed book. The plot is not just weak, it is atrocious. I was actually ticked off when I put the book down. I had been scammed. The problem was that Heinlein tackled an idea he couldn’t handle. It might even have been a good idea but it was beyond his voice and capacity. He just flailed using his reputation like water wings and went no where. Give him credit, I suppose, for jumping in but it was painful.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has a better plot with better character development. Again, it’s a good idea and at least manages to convey Heinlein’s libertarian beliefs with some passion. It is probably my favorite of the later novels, along with Glory Road, where, once more, Heinlein’s voice was well matched to the material. It was predictable and plodding at times but I didn’t feel cheated at the end.

Having read Stranger in a Strange Land, I could not bring myself to tackle any of Heinlein’s Lazarus Long works, though Stranger is in some ways Heinlein’s best. The title, of course, comes from Moses when he names his first-born son, Gershom, which sounds like the Hebrew for “a stranger there”, saying, “I have become a stranger in a strange land.” (See Exodus 2.) Heinlein brings his protagonist, a human child born on Mars and raised completely apart from humans by the Martians back to earth. Michael Valentine Smith becomes a Christ-like figure, but one whose morality is skewed relative to human tradition. There’s lots of free sex. There’s cannibalism. Heinlein gives us the word grok. It’s a powerful vision and aligned well with the ‘60’s mentality.

Never trust anyone over thirty.

The trouble is Heinlein was still writing a juvenile. In all of his later works that I have read, his voice never changed. Heinlein never grew up. Stranger probably has the most complex characters Heinlein ever created. His insight on an alien mind in a human body is thought-provoking and well-done. But he just could not keep from being a seventeen-year-old boy. Heinlein carried that chip that most adolescents have on their shoulder around all his life. He never made peace with adulthood. He was never able to say, “Yeah, well, maybe the Old Man was right about a few things after all.”

“Write what you know”, so they say. We’ve all been children. Some of us grow up.