Burning Violin

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord

I couldn't hear rhythm until I was 20 years old. Dancing utterly mystified me. It wasn't so much that I danced badly (though I did), it's that I had no concept of what dancing was. I could not see any correlation between the movement of dance and the sound of the music. It was just gibberish. I couldn't even tap my foot along to a song. I almost failed wave mechanics my sophomore year because the professor explained everything using musical metaphors, which is actually very helpful, if you have the slightest fucking clue about music. For me it was like explaining colors to Helen Keller using jazz as a reference point. I had assumed I was simply musically retarded and that would be the end of it. I didn't know I was missing anything.

Vodka and spandex changed that one delightful evening.

The girl I was seeing at the time was going through a major swing music phase (this was around the time of that six month swing resurgence led by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, etc.). I went to some swing dance classes with her. After a couple of sessions, the teacher just asked me to sit and observe because I ruined the class for whomever I was partnered with. So said girl decided that she'd get me to understand rhythm. The key was listening to part of the music, not all of the music. Just listen to the drums, ignore the rest, the drums are the beat. And with that almost stupidly simple insight that no one had ever seen fit to mention, rhythm entered my world in the form of the purple spandexed ass. It moved as the drums moved. Thank you purple spandexed ass, you and seven screwdrivers changed my perspective of the world.

But you don't really care for music, do you?

I describe this personal musical retardation as an explanation for my own shortcomings: music reviews might as well be written in Greek for how well their descriptions penetrate my musically addled mind. This is not intended as a criticism of the wonderful music reviews of TK and others, but rather an attempt to feel out where my comprehension falls short. I am accustomed to understanding, and so a blind spot is terrifically frustrating. I feel compelled to poke and prod at it until I figure out why it is a blind spot.

Lyrics drive music for me. A paragraph describing how music sounds is almost meaningless to my mind. I know what the adjectives mean, what a "fast," "angry," "energetic," "aggressive" song should sound like, but I don't feel that translate into any sort of visceral reaction. On the other hand, "It's about being too late to tell your estranged father you love him" ("4 A.M."), "Some people say it's about sex, but I think it's a fuck you to god" ("Hallelujah"), "It's a set of letters back and forth between a singer and a fan slowly going insane," ("Stan"). Those are the sort of descriptions that drag me to hunt down a song, regardless of genre.

It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth

I think the highest form of music, the songs that really stick in my soul, are poetry set to music. I heard Leonard Cohen the first time on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack and was hooked. My introduction to Bob Dylan was the U2 cover of "All Along the Watchtower" on Rattle and Hum. These two have been the twin pillars, the poet laureates, piecing together words that draw other artists like sirens on the rocks. Other bands cover their songs, add layers of harmony and melody, flesh out the bones, but the soul still lives in the words.

Meaning is not always easy to wring from the words, but it is there. Good poetry unravels slowly, over the decades of your life, so what seemed triumphant doggerel at fifteen reveals a sad and melancholy heart when you're thirty.

Half the time these type of songs don't even have choruses, because hammering the same verse home again and again just gets in the way of drawing more words. Repetition can be an effective lyrical tool, but lesser artists tend to use it as a crutch, so that they can stretch the four good lines of a song into decent radio length. That's why Nickelback and Creed can manage to sound good in short bursts of 30 seconds, but tally up the non-repeating parts of their albums and you'd be lucky to gleen a unique three minutes out of any of their albums.

The minor fall, the major lift

Some bands aren't poets so much as storytellers, delivering complete narratives packed into a few lines of verse. Other bands spend entire careers writing album after album filled with variations on the same couple of songs about love. Love is a rather boring subject when decoupled from all the myriad context of the rest of living. Ballads seem a poor substitute for songs about the other ninety percent of life.

Flogging Molly is a particular favorite of mine, along with Social Distortion and Pulp. Their songs are difficult to succinctly summarize but always seem to tell the story of something, whether it's reminiscing over the disaster of your twenties ("Ball and Chain"), or telling your son why he shouldn't look up to you ("Little Soul"), or even just the life and times of the craziest pirate to ever haunt the seas ("Salty Dog").

Maybe it's because I've always been a writer first, but it's those stories that draw me to a band. It's amazing how much story can be distilled down into a few well crafted words. Poke around the internet and you can find micro-fiction boards, contests. Complete stories in fifty words or less. Such compressed stories leave all the non-critical details to the reader, they just sweep broad brushstrokes onto the canvas that the mind renders into something complete. Songs about stories work the same way.

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

"The last person on earth sits in a locked room. A knock rattles the door." They say that is the shortest horror story in the world, because of the invisible monster that must lurk beyond the door. It may be the shortest story, but it is only a horror story by dint of the reader. An old time bible-thumper thinks it's a beautiful story because it's Jesus come knockin'. The optimist thinks the knock is proof that someone else survives. The cynic thinks the same thing. The nihilist thinks that the door will open to reveal nothing but a petrified tumbleweed thunking against the door in the forlorn wind blowing across the blasted plains. It's a matter of perspective. It's why Dickens wrote that it was both the best of times and the worst of times. It's why we can peel back so many layers from so few words in poetry and song.

My particular affliction has led to the appearance of an eclectic taste in music, but that's like saying a blind person has an eclectic taste of color palettes. I don't mind twang in country, volume in metal, or the quiet spaces in acoustic folk, not because I musically appreciate all those things, but because I'm not really listening to the music. It's why techno, jazz and classical music more or less baffle me. A song without lyrics is like a novel without words.

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

In the interests of etymological peace, translation of the title is left as an exercise for the reader in this edition.

"Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after." --

Giles, "Lie to Me"

There is an old saying that it is possible to see all of Rome in a day, some of it in a week, and none of it in a month. Writing about heroes feels that way. You can sum them up in a few words quite easily: "The good guys," but people have spent entire careers composing treatises on the nuances of the hero. We'll try to find a sweet spot a bit shorter than a book, but a bit more introspective than three words. That may be an elaborate cop-out avoiding comprehensiveness, and may or not be a round-about preemptive fuck off to accusations of leaving out important elements. But it's midnight in Indiana, my body thinks it's eight pm, I've been running on fumes since I got up at four am my time, and my shuttle leaves for the airport in four hours. So let's talk about heroes.

Our society is free and loose with the term heroes, using it as a superlative for anyone who does the slightest positive thing. Reporters sniff out heroic human interest stories the way a randy dog hunts down a cheesy crotch. The mailman who stops delivering junk mail? Hero. The angry centenarian who chases armed robbers out of 7/11 with naught but her umbrella and her fury? Total hero. That kid with AIDs who faced down adversity and discrimination to make a real difference? See, I totally made you think the third one was going to be something ludicrous like a monkey who could suck his own balls, and you almost caught yourself before laughing automatically, but not quite, so you were laughing at a kid with AIDs. Asshole.

"The real heroes are the guys who didn't make it back." It's repeated often enough in one form or another, but it hints at our awareness of a deeper understanding of heroism. Heroes are more than just the good guys, more than protagonists, more than common people who manage something extraordinary like rescuing babies from burning buildings or storming nightmarish beaches of steel and smoke. Heroes are the ones who stare into the abyss so that the rest of us don't have to.

Joseph Campbell- - no one seriously thought we'd make it through this without dropping some serious Hero's Journey references did they? -- identified the common metaphor that we use for heroes. We talked about the metaphor of monsters, this is the metaphor of their counter. He identified the symbolic journey that our conception of the hero follows. The hero suffers, succeeds, and ultimately is so changed that he can never truly return home. In saving the village, he destroys his own place in it. At the end of stories, heroes must disappear, they cannot linger. It's true in our real life interpretation of heroes as well. Alexander dies of malaria a thousand miles from Macedonia, Gandhi and Martin Luther King never see the futures for which they fought. When it's not true, we deny it, we ignore the rest of the hero's life. Napoleon dies without a whimper in his final exile, McArthur fades away. We cling to our metaphors even when they don't precisely reflect the reality.

"Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." It's not just a cute turn of phrase. The martyrs are to some degree the lucky heroes, because they don't live long enough to take on the taint of the monsters that they fight. Die young, stay pure. Fight monsters long enough and you become a monster. The metaphor of the monster is wrapped around the metaphor of the hero. One does not exist without the other. But that works both ways. The monster causes the world to create heroes, but the hero causes the world to create monsters.

"All progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself."

-- George Bernard Shaw

Senior year of high school, I took a literature elective on Science Fiction. The centerpiece of the class was the final two weeks of the semester when an elaborate trial took place, students playing jury, attorneys, and characters from the novel. We put Paul Atreides on trial for being harmful to society. Frank Herbert has said that he wrote Dune in part as a cautionary tale against the role of heroes, that they are not an absolute good.

In well written stories, every character thinks that he is the protagonist. That's what real life is: everyone, including Hitler, thinks that he is the protagonist of his own story. They think that they are the good guys. But that's also what makes heroes problematic; they cast things into black and white, into fundamentalism. You can't have heroes without villains, and in the real world where everyone thinks they are the hero of their own piece, that means that the villains are the opposite side of the same coin. Villains are just the other guy's hero.

In shitty stories this isn't the case, the hero is distinct from the villain. Reality (and good stories) just doesn't work that way. This doesn't mean that there aren't good and evil, that everything is just a gray moral relativism where nothing is wrong and nothing is right. It's more to say that heroes and villains are the same fundamental force acting on society, differentiated only by whether we agree with the direction it pushes.

Without heroes, we don't progress. We don't build better things without breaking down the old. Heroes are the societal equivalent of DNA mutation. The right mutation, the right little misinterpretation of a few base pairs can create a wonder. Ninety times out of a hundred it does nothing meaningful, all sound and fury. Nine times out of a hundred it causes some variety of cancer that rips apart the entire body politic unless excised. But that one time out of a hundred it can create something beautiful, something that shatters societal inertia and drives evolution. We can't have one without the other. We can't have a society that produces heroes without the wreckage of failed attempts.

Heroes aren't all saints, they have elements of horror bred into their bones, else they couldn't fight monsters in the first place. It is so tempting to insist that this doesn't have to be so, that we could conceive of a hero without the flaws, that flaws are just literary devices not inherent qualities. But the flaws don't just make a hero more interesting, or more human, they are intrinsic to heroism itself. You can't take away Ender's sympathy for those who abused him without destroying the empathy that made him a leader and commander. You can't take away Batman's capacity for brutal violence without eliminating the will to stalk the streets in the first place. The qualities that make them heroes are the exact same qualities that make them monsters.

Morality isn't a zero sum game. The good you do never offsets the evil you do or vice versa. Good and evil don't cancel each other out on a balance sheet so that you can beat Ma'at's feather. It was one of Angel's epiphanies. You don't get a free pass on doing something evil just because you're still ahead in the bigger score, and no amount of good deeds can ever make up for an act of evil. The duality of man and heroes is that that they are both simultaneously good and evil.

The banality of evil derives from this duality. It shouldn't be a wonder that a man exterminates Jews by day and goes home to read his son stories before bed. Only in bad stories is evil ever anything but banal. There is always something human and redeemable about every villain, because there are no villains.

"Answer me this - just one question, that's all. If the Doctor had never visited us, if he'd never chosen this place... on a whim... would anybody here have died?"

-- Joan Redfern

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

"This can only mean that the Republic has fallen." -Lucius Vorenus
"And yet, the sky is still above us and the earth still below. Strange." - Titus Pullo

This is a story of how democracy dies.

Rome is the mother of nations. The legend lurking at the dawn of history. The altar at which our laws and governments still worship. Every courthouse and capital echoes the ruins of that ancient city we still haunt. Legalese is still half Latin a millennium since the last native speakers died. Our senators and theirs would hardly notice the difference between each other, besides the togas and Italian suits.

Rome was a young state in an old world. Just old enough to feel confident and experienced, young enough to think it would last forever. For two thousand years, Egyptian slaves had built desert mountains for god kings. Italy was such a backwater for so long that Alexander overran the world from Greece to India, but didn't bother hopping the Adriatic. Less than three centuries later, Caesar thought he was special. Ozymandias and all that. Empires always believe they're eternal because men never believe they're mortal.

They conquered through ingenuity, through a granite faith that their law was the only law. Anything outside of Roman law was barbarian. Order was their one true god, immortalized in all the identical temples and standardized roads. Rational repetition fueled the legions: men trained to fight as a single machine, gears and clockwork carved from flesh, individuality burned off in the smelter. They tamed ancient Egypt, yoked Spain and France, pillaged Greece for fertile minds. They destroyed Carthage so utterly that atomic weapons could not have improved on the job. Who now remembers the American Indians?

They were the first combination of that most potent meme of state: the imperial republic. They always insist that they rule by force for the good of the people. "For the republic!" Say it enough and you believe your own press. They were the embodiment of that ancient dichotomy of war and peace. Pax Romana. Pax Britannica. Pax Americana. It's lightning in a bottle, catching the fever for empire along with the spasmodic beauty of freedom. An unstable equilibrium cannot last: either the empire exhausts itself or it devours its own children. The British did the former, the Romans the latter, America's decision is pending. Rome is the story of that devouring.

"The Roman people are not crying out for clean elections. They are crying out for jobs. They are crying out for clean water, for food, for stability and peace." -Posca

Rome presents a senate of aristocrats, bickering about rules and propriety while the mob owns the street and legions push out the frontiers. It is a state under constant siege both from within and without. This is not representative democracy, but some ancestral relation. There are is an essential freedom, at least for citizens: you may speak your mind and do as you will. And that is the heart of democracy, self governance rather than state governance.

Caesar conquers his own country while the citizens cheer. The gulf between democracy and populism is the distinction between the people as an actor and the people as a tool. Caesar wields the population as a sword. Here's the real catch though: democracy can never be taken away, it can only be given away. One of the great tragedies of history is how the people are constantly unaware of their own power, even as rulers harness it. De Tocqueville said "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." Caesar buys the Roman people with their own money, just as Octavian later does. And they love him for it.

"So this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause." George Lucas wrote at least one true thing.

The senators can only destroy Caesar by becoming exactly the horror they hate in him: knives in the senate, blood on their hands.

In another story, Brutus would be the hero. Shakespeare saw it: "This was the noblest Roman of them all." What matters more? Freedom or security? Dante placed three men in the innermost sanctum of the ninth circle of hell, three men eternally trapped in the jaws of Satan himself: Judas, Brutus and Cassius. In the wake of the dark ages, the supreme sin was betraying order to chaos.

But without the support of the masses, the senate must trade one enemy for another. They invite Octavian in, give him the legitimacy he lacks.

A trick of Latin: male and female noun endings. Bellator/bellatrix: warrior/amazon. Male and female sides of the same coin. Senator/senatrix: senator/whore. Male and female sides of the same coin. Words lie, languages don't.

"Cut off his hands and nail them to the Senate doors." -Mark Antony

Before modern times, it was a given that the body of the state was analogous to the body of the ruler. The ruler was the state. It is the antithesis of our "by the people, for the people" conception of the state. Likewise, the psychology of the ruler became the psychology of the state. Octavian's sexual repression inevitably becomes codified. The grand orgies are outlawed, the state regulates promiscuous behavior. The superego binds sex with shame. I didn't bring Freud into this; Octavian did that himself whilst screwing his sister and making war upon his mother's lover.

Id, ego, superego. It's a cliche, but models become cliches because they fit so well. Pullo and Antony are all id: violence, wine and sex. Vorenus and Brutus are all ego: agonizing compromise between the id and reality. Caesar and Octavian are all superego: moral superiority and calculating control.

Civil wars are always about psychology because if the state is a body, then a war within must be a spiritual one. Ego holds a tenuous balance between id and superego, but by the end of this particular story, every ego-character is dead, every id-character dead or vanquished. Without balance, the system is unsustainable in the long run. You cannot kill part of your own soul without losing it all.

And so Pullo lives, vanishing into the masses with his stolen son. The Republic dies, the Empire is born.

"The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were." - Thoreau

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

"In my experience, there are two types of monster. The first can be redeemed, or more importantly, wants to be redeemed. The second is void of humanity... cannot respond to reason or love." - Giles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Bear with me, and we'll get to blood and monsters.

Metaphors don't work the way we're taught in English classes. Every student rolls his or her eyes when told in no uncertain terms that Ahab's quest symbolizes man's struggle against fate, or that the suckage of Santiago's life is an allegory of the suffering of Christ. Every student but the future English majors that is, but there is little we can do for their sort of degeneracy. If a metaphor must be explained, it is no longer a metaphor. Metaphors are not intellectual beasts, but emotional ones. They either punch you in the gut or they don't.

Monsters are the original metaphor.

If god is the reason that cavemen made up for why the sun rises and sets, then monsters are the shadows flickering beyond the fire. They are the devil. It's the terror of the unknown more than anything, and because we can't see it, it can wear the faces we most fear. We map our fears onto the monsters. That's why the monsters from decades past are so comical to us: the metaphors don't resonate with our fears so it's all just rubber masks and corn syrup blood. Our monsters would probably make them laugh too.

But don't say that fifties horror films about pod people and giant insects are just about communist infiltrators and nuclear experiments. That's like describing an orgasm as a spontaneous muscular spasm coupled to a spike in the brain's serotonin levels. Yeah, you've got the definition down, but you left out the soul. To understand someone else's horror, to understand any metaphors that don't kick your soul in the same place, you have to work backwards from the solution. Don't dismiss their horror as naive. Don't just try to will yourself to be scared of pod people. Don't think of communists, or McCarthy. Just imagine a society in which the concept of pod people is relatable on a visceral level. A society where you don't trust your co-workers, your friends or family. A society in which anyone at any time could be accused of being a monster. A society in which everyone so constantly wears a mask, that you never know anyone's true face. Anyone at any time could be replaced, and you would never know the damned difference because the mask is still smiling back at you. Even the mask you see in the mirror. Now that's fucking horror.

Charlie Stross wrote once in one of his forwards that Cold War thrillers weren't really thrillers: they were horror stories with the layers of metaphor stripped out. They were never really about the spies running around shooting and shagging, they were about the mushroom clouds popping cities like zits.

Horror isn't about what is terrifying in the world; it's about what is terrifying in us.

Now bite into this twist: When Star Wars came out, the best selling Halloween costume wasn't Han or Luke or Leia. It was Vader. We want to be monsters, even as little kids.

I went through a phase (no not that one, I told you I was just curious) in which I was obsessed with monsters. Cartoons, books, movies: I suctioned onto anything that had monsters. I cobbled together armies of six inch tall monsters out of the chemical reeking cardboard of laundry detergent boxes, reams of form feed paper, tape and crayons.

From age five I had haunted the town library, all thousand square feet of it, and for this particular obsession found an enabling set of books that went on the permanent rotation. I was about seven, so "permanent" is a relative term. It was a set of old hardcovers that retold famous horror movies, with full page stills from the films and a few bits of text here and there to fill out the story. Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman ... I knew Boris Karlof, Bela Lugosi and Lon Cheney by sight at age seven without ever having seen them in a film, or even knowing that they were actors. They were just the monsters.

I wanted to be the Wolfman. I sprinted through the bushes at the park across the street from my house, growling and snarling and doing my best imitation of stalking prey. I dug up wet sand in the playground and rubbed it on my arms because I thought it looked like fur the way it stuck to my skin. I'd imitate fangs by biting my upper lip with my lower teeth, because after careful practice in the mirror, I'd determined this was decidedly more fierce than top teeth biting the bottom lip.

It's nothing short of a miracle that I didn't end up in a juvenile psychiatric clinic.

Those shadows flickering beyond the fire don't just scare us, they tempt us. We envy their freedom. We envy the ability to walk in the darkness untouched, even if the price is our souls.

It's a hard wiring of the brain: metaphors are empathy. Neuroscience research of the last twenty years has revealed something technical that philosophers and poets have known for millennia: we experience what we see other people experience. Literally. When you see someone hurt, the pain center of your brain fires as if you yourself were in pain. When you see someone smile, you feel pleasure. But you don't feel that way about an ant: they're too alien, their pain is not your own. That connection is the basis of metaphor. We understand the world by mapping it onto what we can viscerally understand. Other people are us. Movies matter because we directly empathize with the characters and events. They lose us when the visceral connection is broken, when the collective metaphor of their fiction no longer sparks that fire in our brain.

But the grotesque twist of modern horror emerges from the fact that there are two sides to every horror movie: the monster and the victims. If it says something about us that we find horror in certain metaphors, it says even more that we find allure in certain horrors.

In fighting evil, you become evil. When you stare into the abyss, it stares back. We use that as a psychological crutch for why we identify with monsters. Dexter only kills killers. Jason, Freddie, and Lil' Mikie Myers kill the sinners, assholes and idiots. Hannibal kills the rude and uncultured. Edward Cullen is the apex of this: the monster that isn't a monster at all, the darkness not just dispelled but filled with teenage love, tofu and something to do with sparkles. The stories in which we identify with the monster always give us an out, an excuse for putting on the mask.

The torture porn genre is much maligned, but it has a fundamental and brutal honesty. It gives you the most terrible of both worlds: the identification with the monster without the tattered ethical excuse.

It's all about empathy in the end. What terrifies us. Who we wish we were like. What we are scared of becoming.

Vampires, cold and calculating, charismatic as kings and dripping with the lust of eternal adolescence. Werewolves, their polar opposite, all animal fury and explosive violence, slaves to the moon.

My first memory is a dream of death. I'm three years old, sitting at the sliding glass door of the house where I grew up. I am alone in the house. Through the glass door I see not our back yard, but an endless plain of smoking hot sand. The ground shifts here and there, churning, and I know that if I open the door and go out, the invisible monsters beneath the sand will pull me under and I will become one of them.

I open the door anyway.

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

When I was a kid, Sunday morning meant going to church. Every week, year after year, until I went to college and lapsed into proper heathenhood. I never really fought going, unless pretending to be asleep the first six times I was told to get dressed really counts as fighting. It meant too much to my mom, and even in the depths of teenage anger boys don't screw around too much with the things that really matter to their moms. Freud said something about it, but he also had a few words about those sixty foot steeples stapled onto every church.

It's a simple equation to solve, really. You add an overly intelligent child to a room with uncomfortable seats and a parent policed prohibition on sleeping and he's going to read a book if it's sitting right in front of him, there's just not much else to do. So I read the Bible. Cover to cover. Over and over. Year after year.

It didn't stick.

The New Testament was fairly boring except for Revelations, but the Old Testament had some deliriously fucked up parts. You ever read Maccabees? Them ancient Israelites were some crazy sum bitches. So I arrived at atheism and agnosticism through a rather Christian route. Those poor Jesuits spent a lot of years teaching the devil to quote scripture.

Spirituality is something distinct from religion: the search for meaning is not the same as the acceptance of god. Joss Whedon is an atheist. So is Russell T. Davies. David Shore isn't, but he's a Jew so he's halfway there. Atheists write some of the most deeply spiritual works because they have thought about it, tortured themselves over it. It's like how the greatest coaches were always the mediocre players, because nothing came naturally to them, they had to obsess over and analyze every detail, fight for every inch. It's that struggle that imparts insight and wisdom. Atheists are amongst the most spiritual because they have not found an answer, their struggle for meaning never ends by definition.

Staggering through the wasteland of television, there are a few shows that have stuck out over the years:

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel"

"If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters ... then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward, and finally just to beat the other guy. Because, if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world." -- Angel, "Epiphanies"

Joss Whedon has said that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is the story of a teenager growing up and that Angel is the story of a twenty-something becoming a man. They are stages, waypoints on the path. They're not just universal stories, they are the story of our society.

We were young once, toddlers, we followed the rules under threat of immediate punishment: follow the priests or they'll cut out your tongue and stone your ass in the temple square. Morality enforced by spanking. Then we grew up a bit, had a renaissance, wrote some philosophy, religion and the state got divorced, we became tweens: follow the rules under threat of eternal damnation, do what the church says, or god will get you when you die. Morality enforced by grounding when dad gets home.

Buffy starts growing up the moment she starts sneaking out at midnight to do what she thinks is right, when she fights the darkness regardless of the consequences with her mom, with Principal Snyder, even with Giles. The point of no return comes on that night when the door to hell almost opens, when her mother tells her that if she walks out the door it'll be for the last time, and Buffy does anyway, heart broken, mind made up.

The industrial age came with all the bluster and violence of machinery and ideology. Civilization as a teenager. Stole the keys to the car, got drunk, plowed through some pedestrians. We issued thunderous proclamations that no one preceding us could possibly understand our agony, trashed our room and then scrawled endless bad poetry about our angst and pain. Morality is dead, they say. We need the old ways they say. This is what you get when you kill god, when you don't listen to your parents anymore.

Buffy sleeps with Angel. The world nearly ends. She watches Faith kill a man, helps her cover it up. These are the things that happen when we stop listening to our parents. She stabs Angel through the heart to save the world, blows up Sunnydale High to save her friends. These are the ways we find our own path, our own morality.

We're a civilization trying to figure out what the hell it means to be a man. We've grown up, got those world wars out of our system, but we moved out on our own. There aren't parents anymore to tell us what to do. Insisting that society cannot have a concept of morality without god is like insisting that an adult cannot have a concept of morality without parents. The opposite is true. In reality, it is only as adults, free and unfettered adults, that we truly adopt any sort of meaningful and mature morality. That's the morality that comes from deciding to be the kind of man we want to be. Not because our parents say so, not because god says so, but because that's the kind of man we want to be, that's the face we can look at in the mirror without flinching. Society works the same way. We have labored so long trying to live up to the morality of god, that we finally threw down and had the crazy teenage rebellion clusterfuck of the last two centuries. We're fucking hungover as a species: the car's parked in the yard, we somehow vomited on the couch and shit in the sink, vaguely remember beating the crap out of someone at a bar, and we really can't stand to look in the mirror. That's the challenge of the next century: to build a society we can respect, whether it lives up to the old religions and ideologies or not.

Angel goes to L.A., 200 years old and with a river of blood staining his hands, but still needing to learn to be a man. He watches friends sacrifice themselves. He becomes a father. He tries to help people, he tries to find some measure of redemption to dispel the darkness. But the more he fights for absolution, the more it slips away. The indifference sets in, the cynicism that rises up in self defense against the banality of evil, scoffing at him. "I just can't seem to care." It's that crushing nihilism that sets in when you move to a city alone for the first time, no parents, no friends. It doesn't matter what you do. No one is watching, no one is keeping score. But that's the seed of real morality, that's the epiphany: when nothing you do matters, the only thing that matters is what you do.

"House"

"I find it more comforting to believe that all this isn't simply a test." -- House, "Three Stories"

"You took a chance, you did something great. You were wrong, but it was still great. You should feel great that it was great. You should feel like crap that it was wrong. That's the difference between him and me. He thinks you do your job, and what will be, will be. I think that what I do and what you do matters. He sleeps better at night. He shouldn't." -- House, "DNR"

Man creates god. Man is less than god, man is equal to god, man is superior to god, man kills god.

There is a notion that our concept of god comes from the gaps in our knowledge. We rationalize god as the reason for things that we cannot understand. In ancient times, those gaps were immense, so wide and deep that we didn't even know for sure that they had bottoms, that they even could be understood by mortals. Even Newton ascribed to the hand of god phenomena in the universe that his theories could not explain. But at some point we passed a critical threshold in the comprehension of science, and we realized that while there are still gaps, while the remaining gaps may even exceed by orders of magnitude the safe areas we understand, the gaps are not special. There is a distinction between unknown and unknowable. They are knowable, even if we haven't managed it yet. The conception of god becomes irrelevant once we realize that the universe is knowable. God is no longer needed as a variable to balance the equations.

Gregory House is a scientist. There are no miracles, only things not yet understood. There is always an explanation. Some would say he is the farthest thing from spiritual, a bitter and narcissistic atheist, but he lives by the nuance that took Angel a couple centuries to tease out of the universe: what we do matters. If there is a god, then what we do doesn't matter. Then it's just a game, and as long as we've tried our best, everything will be ok. We will receive absolution. But if it's not just a game, if there are no do overs, then what we do counts.

There's a corollary to this understanding: if our failures are not our fault, then neither are our triumphs. We can't have our cake and eat it too. We don't get to celebrate our success if our failures aren't really our fault. Watch "House," really watch the moment when he figures something out: every discovery is an epiphany, that height of spiritual experience when the universe makes sense. He will pursue a miracle, break it down and figure out why it wasn't a miracle, why the laws of the universe still held true. This isn't cynicism or shallowness, this is faith at its most pure. Faith that the universe can be known, that there is no cheating, no cosmic sleight of hand.

Atheists are often accused of being deadened to the wonder and mystery of the universe, but "House" is the paragon of how atheists are the ones most conscious of the majesty of this universe. A six thousand year old earth at the center of the universe? A playground designed for us by a benevolent and loving personal god? And yet somehow House is the narcissist? Wonder at the mystery and unknowablity of the universe is the impulse of a child. Wonder at how vast and complex the universe knowably is, is the impulse of an adult.

"Doctor Who"

"He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and can see the turn of the universe. And ... he's wonderful." -- Doctor Who, "The Family of Blood"

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest early in the twentieth century whose writings the Catholic Church proscribed, forbidding publication until after his death. His posthumous works were then unceremoniously declared heretical and denounced. Clearly Teilhard was on to something since the Vatican didn't get that worked up about The Da Vinci Code convincing a billion people that Jesus was into orgies.

What Teilhard hypothesized was a reconciliation of Darwinist and Catholic doctrine, introducing a meme he called the Omega Point, a singularity towards which all of evolution was propelled. Atoms begat molecules which begat cells which begat animals which begat man which will someday through further iterations beget the Omega Point. All of evolution has been an interminably long process of life evolving to be so advanced as to become one with god. God is not an entity, he is a destination.

The Doctor is a realization of that meme, a living breathing Omega Point beyond everything we have ever known. If House is the present, the Doctor is the future. He is the embodiment of the removal of the gaps, the laying bare of the knowledge of the universe. Like House, he cannot leave well enough alone, striving to understand the cause and effect, always straining to find the man behind the curtain.

He's not a pacifist, though that might be a fair first guess at his philosophy. He is a warrior, responsible for the death of his race and another. It is his reluctance that makes him a moral figure. An atheist understands that if there is no god, no heaven, no hell, if this really is all that there is, then the greatest crime is murder and the greatest stupidity is war. God won't sort out his own, they won't go on to a better place, they will simply be dust. Life is the most precious thing imaginable in a universe with no god. The greatest joy for the Doctor is when he saves a life, the greatest sadness when he must kill.

The Abyss

We have no idea what this place is that we are born into. It is strange and terrible and unfair. There are those who say that atheism is stubborn and easy, and it is, in the same way that realizing that you're gay in rural Alabama is a choice. Atheism is not an easy path. By acknowledging that there is no greater point, we shoulder the burden of every moment. There is no absolution waiting for us. If we fuck this up, we carry it forever.

There is an abyss underneath us, the yawning chasm of animal chaos. Everything we have, everything we are, is built on top of that abyss. We can build and build but there is no underlying foundation except us. We have bootstrapped order out of chaos.

The most terrifying moment in a person's life is when they first live on their own and realize that there is not anything actually stopping bad things from happening. Oh sure, there are laws and such to discourage people from doing bad things, but nothing actually physically restrains them. But there's a flip side to that, as there always is: it also means you are absolutely and totally free. Nothing can stop you from doing what you want, other than your own will.

I think our humble little species of upstart monkeys is standing on that precipice right now. Our art reflects that, Buffy and Angel and House and the Doctor are us, individually and as a group. Our choice is whether we fall back on the old rules, dig ourselves into those comfortable holes watched over by a concerned parent, or whether we choose to make our own path and grin back at our own reflections in the mirror.

A billion years from now when not even an echo of the memory of man remains, it will not have mattered what we did, except in so far as it matters now.

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

World War Z
Max Brooks

I started this book with the preconception gathered from both its title and that of its companion volume (The Zombie Survival Guide) that it would be a tongue and cheek affair, a textual Shaun of the Dead. It took about ten pages before I realized that World War Z had anything but a tongue and cheek approach. This bad boy is horror: dark, grim and bloody.

The most striking aspect of the novel is its structural approach. It's presented as a collection of oral histories gathered after the titular zombie apocalypse. The histories range in length from one to several pages, never returning to the same point of view. These vignettes (they aren't numbered, per se, but there are probably around a hundred total in the book) are arrayed chronologically from the first stirrings of a zombie plague, through the near collapse of civilization, the rousing and difficult process of starting to push back, all the way to a sort of victory. It's an approach generally found in histories, especially collections of primary documents. I've never seen it used in fiction, but it is incredibly successful in World War Z.

Think of the best Stephen King books, or any horror for that matter. There are probably a half dozen brilliant and gripping scenes from any of the books that sucker punch you and stay with you. World War Z is a novel composed entirely of those sucker punch scenes. Because there are no main characters specifically, the book can continuously change perspective and skip to new characters in different situations. In twenty pages, you might see the breakdown of society from the point of view of a teenage recluse living in a high rise in Japan, to Chinese sailors smuggling their families aboard and stealing a nuclear submarine once they decide the government has lost control, to a soccer mom who fleeing north out of the infested suburbs with her kids into the Dakotas because of rumors that the zombies freeze in the bitter winter.

What makes this approach work is the fundamental realization that in certain horror stories, the human characters are incidental. The true main character is the monster. So instead of feeling like a shallow story skipping from vignette to vignette without gaining traction with any one set of characters, the reader settles on the zombies themselves as the main character. We watch the growth and spread of the zombie plague, explore the aspects and permutations of zombie infection with a variety and breadth that would be impossible or at the very least eye-rollingly ludicrous if focused on one particular set of characters. But it's not just a freak show, it is a systematic and focused telling of a story from start to finish. It just isn't a story in which the human characters are constant fixtures from start to finish.

The end result is one of the most horrific and gripping horror novels that I have ever read.

Death by Black Hole

Neil deGrasse Tyson's anthology of science articles only briefly deals with the eponymous scenario, but delves into a myriad of other scientific details in a meandering book that is sometimes brash, sometimes humorous, but always fascinating. At the center of Tyson's writing is the idea central, but often ignored, in all science: we are not special or unique. This simple realization is at once obvious and terrifyingly unbelievable, but is also critical to making the smallest headway in scientific understanding. What exists out there, is fundamentally the same as what exists here. Without that basic understanding, there is no way to understand at all what goes on in the universe outside our insulated sphere.

The universe is vast and old. So vast and so old that we cannot even really understand it on familiar terms, but only at several removals of distance. We can only understand the scale logarithmically, like Russian dolls. The sun is so big that we could fit a million earths inside it, and it is so far away from us that we could fit ten thousand earths between us and it. Space is so vast and distant that the fastest spacecraft we have ever built would still take over 70,000 years to reach the nearest star. That's ten times longer than we've had civilization. The galaxy is so big that it would take 700 million years for us to send that same spacecraft across it. That's ten times longer than the dinosaurs have been extinct. And the galaxy is not just vast, but filled up with a mind-boggling number of stars: at least a couple for every human being who has ever been born in all of history. Top that off with the fact that in the known universe, there are at least as many galaxies as there are stars in our galaxy. In the grand scheme of the universe, our entire planet and history are less proportionately significant than a single cell of your skin.

The other point I took from Tyson is the phenomenon of the God of the Gaps. When we understand something, it is explainable, we only attribute the hand of god to things that we don't understand. Even physicists like Newton took this shortcut, attributing the stability of orbits (something his own work could not reconcile, and which waited another century for LaPlace to figure out) to the periodic intervention by god himself. We see god in the gaps in science's understanding the same way that primitive man explained the rising and setting of the sun with god's hand. The key is that the things science can't explain at the moment should not be scoffed at or defined as limitations in the concept of science itself. This is the central belief in science that has never been disproved: the universe is fundamentally knowable. It obeys laws and rules which we can work out, however shallow our current understanding of those laws may be.

Here's the topper, the great equalizer of science: all those unimaginably distant and huge and alien objects are composed of the same materials as your body. We are billion year old stardust. That doesn't make us special, it makes the universe knowable.

Ancient Shores, Jack McDevitt

A bureaucrat abused Jack McDevitt when he was younger. Each of the books in which his characters interact with bureaucracies are case studies in the small-mindedness of people, which is amplified whenever they are embedded in a bureaucracy. No one is responsible for either failure or success. All that matters is that the waves are smoothed out so that the whole floating wreck keeps meandering along to the horizon.

McDevitt takes a terrific exception to the common cliched comedy of manners so often used to represent bureaucracy. The problem with making something a stock comic resort is that it ends up papering over and excusing the horrors that can be perpetrated in the service of bureaucracy. Sure, it can be funny (if not original), that someone gets shuttled from line to line at the DMV, university, hospital or bureaucracy de jour, finally ending up back at the initial window with the original indifferent and overworked office worker, but it's a story that masks the real dangers of bureaucracy. When no one is responsible, the only motivator for individuals from the top to bottom of an organization is what will cause them the least hassle. More to the point, individuals cannot be rewarded for productivity in such an environment because productivity is not a measurable entity in a vacuum of responsibility. Therefore the inverse quantity of caused hassle is the driving force for promotion, not productivity.

Bureaucracies combine the disdain of responsibility with another great flaw in the human psyche: the scantron subconscious. Our brains work on a multiple choice basis shoehorning everything into the predefined situational options, with no "fill in the blank" option provided. When you see a giant furry thing try to attack you in the middle of the night when you're out for a walk, your brain fits the existent evidence into either: a. a large dog, b. your asshole roommate in a gorilla suit or c. your imagination. Regardless of whether it is a full moon, or the thing runs away at the sight of your silver cross, a sane mind does not write in "d. a werewolf". Writing in one's own options is our best measure of both insanity and genius. A bureaucracy demands that the options be filled in with a rabid single mindedness. If your application to the DMV has some irregularity (like the fact that you don't already have a driver's license, but you can provide your Ugandan passport for proof of identity), it doesn't meet the easy options and the easiest way to keep from rocking the boat is just to casually drop your application overboard and into the shredder.

Now imagine a bureaucracy having to deal with something truly earth-moving, like the discovery of alien technology that will revolutionize everything about energy and manufacturing. That is essentially the question posed by McDevitt in Ancient Shores. A bureaucracy's response will be to shove that thing under the rug so fast that the rug gets rug burn. The horror is never caused by evil but by human mediocrity. The government doesn't try to destroy the most fantastic discovery in human history because of evil conspiracies or arcane power struggles, it does it because dealing with something so extraordinary is just a big hassle. The challenge to leaders is to break that attitude in bureaucracies, force accountability and vision.