Tag Archives: philosophy

September 2, 2015 · 2:23 pm

Matters of Religion

People around this country are busy expressing their religion. They refuse to do their government clerical jobs and deny people marriage licenses. They do it because of their beliefs. They picket military funerals with signs about “God hates fags” (though I don’t see why the creator dislikes English cigarettes so much) because of their beliefs. They refuse to bake wedding cakes because Christian fundamentalism has somehow become about who gets to eat your cooking. They condemn parts of the Middle East and pray for war because there is religious head-chopping going on, and certain countries are not promising to give up their nuclear daydreams sincerely enough. Expressing religious beliefs seems to be mostly about condemning stuff. And, admittedly, some of it is bad stuff… like the head-chopping. But is that what religion is for?

The Paffooney I am using today is called “One Day the Old Mad Gods Will Be Made Whole Again” which is a nutcake picture created during my grad student years in response to the basic undercurrent of fear that underlies most of Christianity. I think I may have written it wrong, though. It used to be about “fear”, and today it has become about “FEAR!”

angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)

People turn to religion primarily because they fear death. Christianity promises an ever-lasting immortal life, either in Heaven (Which I have my doubts you will ever find on a map) or (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses in my family believe) on a Paradise Earth. To never die you are expected to follow a secret formula, or somehow cast a magic spell that will guarantee that even if you are killed, you will never die. If you knock on enough doors to share the “Good News of Christ’s ransom sacrifice” you will be resurrected to everlasting life. If you “Love what is good and hate what is bad”, you will claim a spot in Heaven. But you can’t earn this undeserved kindness. God gave his only son to die on the cross so that everyone else might live. …But not sinners. Not people who do not get the formula right… or do not express the right views… or say the wrong thing. What the… Heck?

It is not a logical construct. Elders among the Jehovah’s Witnesses explain to me that is all about belief. You have to express belief through action. And where belief conflicts with science or logic, you must prefer belief.

So, the man puts his hand down in an old aquarium full of rattlesnakes, and God is supposed to protect him. But if the man gets bitten and dies, well, he must’ve been a sinner or needing to be punished. Hellfire for all eternity… you can’t beat fundamental Christianity on the matter of punishment for sins.

If you have gotten this far through my essay without throwing up your hands and consigning my sinful soul to the darkest pit of hell to burn for eternity, then you have probably concluded that I am just another old philosophical atheist spouting semi-logical nonsense about why there is no God. And you would be dead wrong. There is a God. I talk to him daily. He helped me write this post. I am a Christian existentialist. I believe there is a God, and he can be found in the Bible at First John 4:8. “He that does not love has not come to know God, because God is love.” I don’t believe in everlasting life. I believe I am a part of the whole. I believe in love, because loving my fellow man is part of loving myself. I would willingly lay down my life to save another, out of love, because that other person and I are one. And when they bury me to become worm food and fertilizer, I won’t be feeling the pain and confusion and fear anymore, but I will still be part of the whole. And the whole is God.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, religion

Tagged as colored pencil, humor, Paffoonies, pen and ink, philosophy, religion

August 24, 2015 · 12:39 pm

Lying as a Form of Social Responsibility

Mark Twain had a lot to say about lying. Like in this quote from Following the Equator ; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar; “There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Now, I would have to agree with the Biblical admonition against lying to get the people you dislike thrown into prison or beheaded. I am especially concerned with some of the false witness pooping out of the mouths of some presidential candidates that would like us to believe their anti-science, anti-climate change, and anti-immigration lies would make good laws for our country. If they go with Donald Trump’s idea of taking away birthright citizenship from the children of immigrants, then my three children will lose their citizenship and could be deported from the only country they have lived in. After all, after twenty years of marriage and applications and legal fees and enough frustration to make her give up on the whole idea, my wife is still not an American citizen. She is from the Philippines, and Filipinos are one of the main groups that politicians site as reason for taking automatic citizenship away from foreign-born marriage mates back in the 1980’s. And if we truly believe that climate change is a hoax and disproven by having Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe bring a snowball into the senate chamber, I believe we are all going to fry in Venus-like atmospheric conditions (Venus is 400 degrees Centigrade on the surface due to rampant greenhouse gasses like those emitted by the factories of Senator Inhofe’s primary campaign donors). Some lies have fatal consequences, (and also, apparently, got Senator Inhofe the chairmanship of the Senate Science Committee).

But not all lies are bad lies. Twain also says; “In all lies there is wheat among the chaff…”
– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

And; “The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend is immortal.”
– “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”

So I have actually started to think that the lies not forbidden by the Bible because of their fatal consequences are actually all good things, and not bad. Yesterday in a post about talking to stupid people, I suggested that you should tell them lies about how you care about them and want the best for them, and you should lie about it so hard that you believe in the lies yourself. After all, story-tellers like me tell nothing but lies. My made-up stories are based on real events and people, and reveal real perceived truths about life, but they are basically nothing but lies. This essay is a lie. I was brought up in Iowa to be truthful and always tell the truth… and that was repeatedly reinforced by religious training from every church I ever attended. And yet, the more I tried to tell the truth, the more I realized that I could never say anything that was not a lie. Think about it, what is there in all the factual things that you know that you can actually prove is true? “I think, therefore I am,” (a quote from Rene Descartes) is the only thing anyone has ever said that I can prove by my own perceptions. Every scientific theory is constantly reviewed for lies and untruth and inaccuracy so that they can be revised for something better that is also not ultimately provably true in every detail. It is entirely possible that everything else truly is a lie, and then the whole universe, science, physics, logic, and everything is basically untrue.

So, what do I do? Anything I say is a lie. Some of the lies are hurtful, even deadly. So I have to be careful about those lies. I should fight against those lies. But the lies that make our existence in life meaningful and full of hope and mystery… I have to let those lies live, and even learn to do them artfully.

“One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.”
– Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain.

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Filed under humor, lying, Paffooney

Tagged as goofiness, humor, logic, logic and lying, lying, paffooney, philosophy, writing fiction

August 23, 2015 · 7:13 pm

How to Reason With Stupid People

Okay, I know… I keep promising that I will never resort to insult humor, and then I go and write mean-spirited stuff about Donald Trump and other Republicans. But I need to point out that as a middle school English teacher for 24 of my 31 teaching years, I had to talk to a lot of stupid. And I am not being mean when I say that. Unformed, immature minds are full of misinformation and wrong-way pig-headedness. Those are both synonyms of “stupid”, aren’t they? And I have the further disadvantage of being a freakishly high level of smart. I have a lot of experience dealing with stupid.

And it often begins with, “Well, I know you are very, very smart, but I have common sense!” That’s how the argument started this morning with my beloved wife. When we are wrestling with financial and health and family problems, we always start with the assumption that I am completely wrong and headed for disaster. An acceptable compromise is when the two of us talk it out for an hour, with me listening and agreeing and her laying on me a thick layer of sometimes-aromatic common-sense solutions. We reach a compromise, by which we mean I accept that she is right and I am wrong. And then we talk about the yes-buts. “Yes, but have you thought about the consequences of that expense when it comes to the APR on your credit cards?” “Yes, but if you talk to your boss that way, would she consider firing you?” “Yes, but if you give that prized possession to our son as a gift of love, will he be resentful if you take it away again as a punishment for a minor error?” Sometimes the common sense people have to be gently reminded that their simple solution might need to be looked at from the back side as well. (Don’t get me wrong. I am not calling my wife “stupid” here. She is not. And I am not looking to make a fatal mistake in my blog.)

It helps when talking and reasoning with stupid people that they know you really love and respect them. When I have to talk politics with my more Republican relatives, well, I have to be very reasonable and polite. Some of them are clinging to toxic candidates that, if they elect them, are going to do the exact opposite of what is good for people in their socio-economic group. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are intentionally playing on the fears and prejudices of people that are thinking with their “lizard brain” instead of their higher-level thinking functions. It helps them to see that you care enough to explain things like “socialism” and “labor unions” and “taxes” in simple terms that help them to grasp that there is a good side to those things as well as a bad.

A large part of the lives of stupid people is the pain and uncertainty that being a part of humanity brings to them. So many of them have no idea of the value of what they do and who they are. They are so caught up in the pain of being themselves that they never realize how much the world around them appreciates and loves them. They don’t understand that being stupid is the common condition of mankind, and just because they are not as smart as God himself, it doesn’t make them bad. Sometimes the only way to talk to stupid people is to stop thinking of them as stupid, and reassure them that you love them and you will do everything you can to help them. If you say it and mean it, they will not be stupid people any more.

“And that is all I have to say about that…” -Forrest Gump

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Filed under empathy, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as empathy, goofiness, humor, Paffoonies, philosophy, stupid people

August 16, 2015 · 2:04 pm

Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Still being under the weather and filled with sinus head-pain, I decided to go back to a subject I love so much that the post will simply write itself. You know I love Norman Rockwell and his art, and I fervently believe that kind of mass media oil-painting does not put him in a lesser category than Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Raphael or any other painter with a ninja turtle namesake. He is a genius, and though he is not a realist in so many ways, his work is more truthful than practically any other kind of painting. If you are taken by surprise and didn’t know I had this passionate obsession, maybe you should go back and look at this post; Norman Rockwell

Now that I got that out of my system, here is another Saturday Evening Post artist that is often confused with Rockwell. His name is Amos Sewell.

Sewell was an amateur tennis player who was talented enough to win tournaments. He was an employee of Wells Fargo who was headed towards anything but an art career until he decided to make a leap of faith in 1930. He started as an illustrator for Street and Smith pulp fiction, and soon caught the notice of the big-time magazine markets for his art. He published art for Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentlemen Magazine, and Women’s Day.

Like Rockwell, he was able to find the funny in everyday scenes, like the dance party to the right. That young man at center stage is trying so hard not to step on the feet of the red-headed girl, that you want to laugh, but can’t because it’s obvious how embarrassed he would be, and the charm of the picture leads you to shun the thought of interrupting. The scene is so real the boy would hear you laughing as you looked at the Post cover.

More expert on this kind of art than I am is the Facebook site that I first got turned on to Sewell by. Children in Art History

They can also be found on WordPress. Children in Art History (WordPress)

There is no doubt that Amos Sewell belongs in the same pantheon of artists as Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, or Paul Detlafsen. They are all artists who achieve in their work exactly what I have always striven for. I want to be able to hold the mirror up to our world the way they did. I want to capture both the fantasy and the reality in the subject of everyday family life. I also want to share this work with you because I cannot stand the idea that such artistic ambrosia could one day be forgotten in archives where no one ever looks at it and feels the message in their heart.

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Filed under art criticism, homely art, humor

Tagged as Amos Sewell, art criticism, artwork, homely art, humor, Norman Rockwell style, philosophy, Saturday Evening Post

July 25, 2015 · 1:56 pm

Life is Surreal

I have told you before that I am a seriously committed surrealist. Not in the sense of “committed to an institution” sort of committed, but seriously committed. All cartoonists are by nature surrealists. Bill Watterson created Calvin and Hobbes around the idea that a toy tiger can come to life in the evil imagination of a child. Jim Davis created Garfield around a seriously self-absorbed and greedy talking cat. Elsie Segar created Popeye about a one-eyed sailor who drank from a magic pool to gain invincibility and maintains it with iron-fortified cans of spinach. To be a surrealist, you must put unlikely things together to make something fantastically super-real… so unreal it seems flawlessly real… er, how do you actually define surrealism without resorting to the dictionary definition about “juxtaposing severely mismatched items created with photo-realism”?

Surrealism is actually more real than realism. If you simply take a photograph of your picture idea, a picture of a birthday cake or a picture of a clown or a picture of your favorite bicycle’s back wheel, you are not showing the reality of life. You are only taking a photograph of a thing. You cannot get more than the physical, objective reality of that thing captured on photographic paper… or in a digital image (I am learning not to be a dinosaur even though I am old). Reality is so much more than that. It is the feeling, the evocation, the nuance, the… stuffy stuff-ness of stuff… and an infinity of other things that make reality seem real.

Take for a moment the whole notion of flying cars. I am trying to create a hero-worship colored-pencil Paffooney about Astroboy riding in a flying car. I am still puzzling out how I am going to make this scene look like the car is flying by juxtaposing something. (By “juxtaposing something”, I, of course, simply mean putting one thing next to another thing… but it is important for artists to use hundred-dollar art words wherever possible to prove that they are serious artists) (I, of course, am actually making fun of my own stuffy stuff-ness in that last parenthetic expression.) (Maybe juxtaposing parenthetic expressions with the phrase “I, of course,” in all three of them is a kind of surrealism?)

So, why am I taking on this silly topic right now? Right now I am a working artist in the midst of making art. I am not just a cartoonist… I also write novels… silly young adult novels about voodoo men and snow babies and incompetent alien invasions and fairies successfully invading a middle school in Iowa. I am suffering from six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor… so I could drop dead of a heart attack or stroke any second… I may not finish most of the artwork I am now working on… and I am blogging… I need a lot more silly topics like this to fill 500 words a day for every day of 2015. I am writing this down in a published blog on WordPress because I need to put all my thinking down in a crystallized form to preserve it in case the opportunity to do so suddenly ceases. And all of that muddle of meaning is so surreal it hurts. I could do a better job than this of summing up and pulling it all together in a tighter package, but it is all about the messy business of surrealism, after all… another way of saying… “It’s about life.”

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, surrealism

Tagged as cartoons, humor, Paffoonies, philosophy, surrealism

July 16, 2015 · 3:16 pm

An Anatomy of an Angry Argument (The Stars ‘n’ Bars Controversy)

I get a little tired of friends, family, and especially online acquaintances calling me a liberal and meaning it as a severe antonym of a compliment. They are basically conservative by nature and they are trying to hurt my feelings by calling me liberal. (Or “libtard” or “libturd” or “liberaloon”) They don’t like my fact-based arguments and strike out at me from the deepest depths of their deeply-held-and-so-long-stored-in-the-same-barrel-that-it-fermented set of conservative beliefs. Often they pull potentially intoxicating talking points out of the well of watching Fox News and expect me to drink it… even though I know it has intentionally been laced with poison.

I am not offended by the Confederate flag. It was a part of the Civil War that fascinates me and still stands for the brave regiments of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg who marched into a hail of cannonball-laced death to prove once and for all that an entire way of life can be destroyed on the battlefield. It was a terrible tragedy and those men paid the ultimate price for being on the wrong side of that argument. I believe we should honor them and reconcile ourselves with what remains of them. They are indeed still out there. But we do not have to honor the thing they were fighting for and ended up losing. Slavery is inherently unjust and evil. And the racism that is its aftertaste is just as despicable. It is understandable that in that long gone culture it was normal to view black skin as the sign of an inferior creature. They treated slaves as working farm animals, like oxen or donkeys. It is the way they thought of those… actually people… whom they failed to accept as fellow human beings.

I am not offended by the Confederate flag. But I am upset at the most common uses of it. Klansmen use it as a symbol of their race-hatred. They fly it at their protest marches along with the Nazi swastika. The flag at the South Carolina capitol building went up during the equal rights struggles of the 50’s and 60’s as a defiance of the entire movement. I am not offended by the flag, but I do not like when it is used as a symbol of redneck America believing they’re better than blacks and Hispanics because their skin is white, and that their conservative white values are superior to the values of Jews, liberals, and intellectuals. I don’t like being told that their heart-felt hate trumps my nerd-boy thinking-too-much. I don’t like the way they believe they win the argument by shouting at me in a louder voice than I am capable of shouting back. (Watch Bill O’Reilly on Fox News and see if he doesn’t do exactly that.) I don’t like the way they don’t listen to me in the same way that I try hard to listen to them.

People I care about and even love in Iowa are posting things on Facebook about liberals attacking the Confederate flag, and how terrible it is that liberals are trying to take away “our heritage”. But wait a minute… At the Battle of Shiloh in Missouri, the 5th Iowa Infantry Regiment and the Iowa 13th were embroiled in the Hornets’ Nest, the intense fight all along the “sunken road” that ultimately tipped the horrible battle in favor of the Union. Iowans were shooting at the Confederate flag. Many of them were killed by it. How can that flag possibly be “our heritage“?

I believe the rebel flag is not an appropriate symbol to be used in government buildings or 4th of July parades. It is a symbol of more than one thing… and some of those things are terrible things. I am not advocating making the flag illegal in the U.S. But, consider, the Nazi flag is illegal in Germany. It is the flag of a defeated rebellion against our government, fought for the purpose of defending the institution of slavery. Why are my conservative Iowegian friends supporting such a flag?

And I refuse to be insulted by being called a liberal. Conservative doesn’t mean “good” while liberal means “bad”. Conservative means wanting to preserve the good things about the past and not change them without good reason. Liberal means wanting to change things for the better. I used to be a conservative. I am only comfortable being a liberal now because conservative powers are trying to protect things that have to change because they are hurting us. I love all people in general… and I don’t want to see them hurt by their government or their society. So, if you feel the need to argue in the comments… or if you feel you have to call me a libturd… feel free to do so. But please don’t call me a libturd in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!!!

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Filed under humor, photo paffoonies, politics

Tagged as Confederate flag controversy, humor, Iowans, philosophy, photo Paffooney, politics, symbolism

June 28, 2015 · 2:43 pm

Winning Easy

Now that Captain Action finally liberated my X-Box from the evil Dr. Evil who was holding it for ransom and not letting me play EA Sports Baseball ’04, I have been able to play Baseball ’04 again. (It happened in this blog; Dr. Evil’s Removable Brain) I have been playing this video game now with a passion, as you can plainly see. You are probably aware that the St. Louis Cardinals are my very favorite team in any and all sports. Notice, please that I have just pitched Matt Morris’ 30th victory against no defeats over stinky old steroid-fueled Roger Clemens. It was also his 9th shut out of the season. This is the first 30-game-winning season since Denny McLain in Detroit, in the 1968 season. I only had to replay the entire 2004 season 4 times to get there. Oh, and Albert Pujols has hit 114 home runs and Scott Rolen hit his 70th and 71st in this game. You are certainly smart enough to figure out by now that I have left the difficulty level of this game permanently set at the Rookie level. Hey, I’m old. I like easy wins.

A close-up of the Flower Wagon’s first bloom.

This is true in so many areas of my life. The flower wagon that I posted about on Friday is another evidence of my dedication to the philosophy of the easy win. It was a victory over many things… depression, tragedy, Texas gully-washers that keep on coming, the tragedy of an old toy that no longer gets played with… things where my decrepit old self with six incurable diseases needs desperately to win.

Flowers in our yard in general are a victory of sorts. This is Texas. A couple of summers back we were in a severe drought with like 99 days in a row of high temperatures of 100-plus. Flowers in June in Texas are a bit of a miracle. Good flower pictures recently taken are another miracle. My cell phone camera takes so much better pictures with all its automatic settings than my digital camera which cost twice as much, that it makes me wonder why I ever bothered with it.

A Yellow Rose of Texas in our yard.

Another yellow perennial that came up due to funky wet weather.

Of course, this is pictures the easy way because I am not trying to adjust the color balance (in spite of partial color-blindness), or the brightness compensation, all by my own little self with my modest-to-insignificant photography skills. (I am just skilled enough at photography to recognize a great work of art photographed by someone else, not skilled enough to take one myself.)

I am retired now. I have had a long hard career as a public school teacher, and I am working hard at being a good writer (professional or not) in retirement. I figure I deserve the odd easy win. Using my writing skills to tackle toxic ideas like prejudice and politics recently I was able to score some real points with some of my very conservative friends. I discovered by concentrating on the things they believe which I agree are very good things, I was able to make them consider a more liberal point of view, and not cling to Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts. I can even get them to laugh at things like saying “Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts” because it sounds funny even if you are only reading it silently in your head. It is an example of arguing towards an Easy Win, and I have become an addict.

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Tagged as autobiography, goofiness, humor, philosophy, photo Paffooney, politics, sports

June 20, 2015 · 2:22 pm

Red State Hate

It has taken me some time to put ideas together to tackle this terrible thing. Jon Stewart did a segment at the beginning of his show that was not funny. It was somber, thoughtful, and full of real outrage that cast lightning bolts at the heart of the dragon. And I admire Stewart for what he is… someone who truly cares about things, and fights the good fight using the best weapon he has. Humor. Mark Twain said that against it, nothing could stand. But some things are so terrible that not even a joke can put it right. Why? Because there are places in this human world where ideas are like a festering sore, spreading at an alarming rate, and daily becoming more and more poisonous. Texas is like that. It is a Red State. That means it is a hotbed of conservative ideas and nurtures Republican values… like being distrustful and fearful of them… And who are they? They are not us. They have a different religion. They have a different skin color. They are not opposed to raising taxes on the rich, even if they are rich themselves. They are not capitalists… Or not freedom-loving… They think it can be left up to women to decide what to do with their own bodies. They don’t see abortion as murder. They don’t think teaching evolution in schools is evil. We must fear them… and, yes, even hate them.

As a school teacher, I learned early on that if you only look for the bad in other people, then that is what you will be left with, a world in which there are only bad people. I don’t know about you, but I can’t live in a world like that. I learned to look at the world as being full of imperfect people who all have good in them, lots of good. I grew up in Iowa where the people were so white in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s that when the winter snow fell heavy enough, we all had the super power of invisibility. I remember only one black face from my childhood that wasn’t on television. There was a little girl from Chicago who came to stay with a volunteer family so she could get out of the inner city for a while. The adults warned us that she might be prone to stealing things, so don’t do anything to tempt her. And we didn’t. And she didn’t. And damn it, I don’t know whether we did a good job of not tempting her, or that warning was just an empty prejudice. She was just like us. She laughed at things. She loved kittens. She played our games. She was just like us… but she had a better tan.

I started teaching in South Texas. I quickly learned how to deal with Hispanic kids who were mostly poor and mostly Spanish-speaking. I learned that they didn’t laugh at the same things as I did. When they called me Batman for a while, it wasn’t a compliment. I learned to laugh at the things they found funny and learned to joke the way they joked. I played their games. I learned to love pit-bulls and other dogs the way they loved dogs. I was just like them… but they couldn’t hide in the snow as easily as me.

I learned to teach black kids like they complain about on Fox News, the ones they throw to the ground and sit on at pool parties in McKinney, Texas, when I moved to the Dallas area and the town of Carrollton. I quickly learned why some teachers are so stressed out by them. They are louder than the white kids. Their nerves can be more raw and their tempers hotter than the other kids. Not all of them… just about 51 %. But you have to look close enough to see that… they laugh at most of the same things as us. Some of the brightest, widest smiles I have ever seen are on the faces of black kids when you laugh at their jokes. They play the same games as I do. They love puppies just like I do. They sometimes even have more faith in God than I do. Some of my favorite students of all time had very dark faces. I still think of them often… and i will never stop loving them… all of them. And when something happens like it happened in South Carolina… Forgive me, I have to cry again for a bit.

And how do we solve the problem of places where love is so badly needed, but is not present in large doses? How do we overcome this passion some people have to exclude illegal immigrants, and the need some people feel to move their children out of schools where there are too many of the wrong colored faces? I do not know the answer.
But you do not create love by passing laws and building walls. You have to spend time with them. You have to laugh at the same jokes. You have to play the same games. You have to love puppies and kittens. Don’t you?

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Filed under Paffooney, philosophy, red States

Tagged as colored pencil, dealing with tragedy, love, paffooney, philosophy, races, red States, teaching

June 5, 2015 · 1:24 pm

A Matter of Religion

Iowans are simple people and have a simple faith. We believe in the land and we believe in making things grow. Whether we use Christian symbols and Republican moral imperatives, or liberal thought experiments laced with atheistic flavors of actual thinking, we all basically accept that we should believe in the land and make things grow.

The church in the Paffooney picture is a real church in my real little Iowa home town. Once it was the Congregational Church in Rowan, the second location. The first Congregational Church building that stood on Main Street burned down before I was ten. But it didn’t remain pure Congregational. Little Rowan was not really big enough to support two different churches. So long about the time when I was wrestling with the fact that I had lust in my heart, and looking at the pretty Congregationalist farm girl two seats ahead of me and the Methodist Minister’s son on the school bus made my soul hurt, the Methodist Church and the Congregational Church were forced to become one church. They used both church buildings on a weekly rotating basis, using the same minister for both. It was the Methodist minister, my best friend’s father who got the job of spiritual leader for the entire community. And there was hell to pay. Congregationalists hated the idea that the minister was no longer speaking Congregationalist approved Biblical ideas. And Methodists resented the fact that they had to have their immortal souls saved in the same church building as those unclean Congregationalists. Heckfire, they didn’t even like taking cold showers as much as Methodists did. They took them, all right, but didn’t really like them enough. So religious wars were fought in our little town for decades. But only in the manner of Iowegian Christians. Silent wars employing laser-focused glares of righteous disapproval. Attacks on the other side committed solely with clucking tongues and expressed only to members of the same congregation in places where the other side will never hear of it. And of course, as children tackling the full range of punitive forces and concepts associated with puberty, we were completely unaware of what was going on behind closed doors. Fury of Biblical proportions was disrupting the digestion of nearly one quarter of the Yoke Ministry of the United Churches of Rowan, Iowa, and causing innumerable bottles of Milk of Magnesia to be consumed in the middle of the night. These two Midwestern flavors of Christianity were just too different to co-exist in the same building. Of course, I couldn’t tell you what the differences actually were. I still can’t. But I learned the tremendously terrible and atheistic notion that all Christians are the same, and they all worship the same God, and they are all equally worthy of love.

The scariest thing of all is this. I went on from the religious wars of Rowan, Iowa in the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s to living in a community in South Texas where the two sides were Hispanic Catholics versus Southern Baptists. I got married to a Jehovah’s Witness, and tried very sincerely for a while to be a Jehovah’s Witness. I taught kids who were Catholic, Baptist, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist. And scariness comes with the realization that I still believe “they are all equally worthy of love.” Atheists too, for that matter. I am sorry that atheists are not crazy enough to actually talk to God. There is comfort on so many levels with the ability to speak to an invisible mythological father. And I speak to Him daily. So what is my real religion? I am not sure. But Valerie Clarke in the church Paffooney agrees with me (because I totally created her and she has no choice); the church parking lot is a great place for skateboards.

Danse Macabre (the cartoon dance of death)

I would like to say going in that there are good reasons why young people can become obsessed with death and suffering and the color black and the dance towards the grave. I danced that jig too when I was younger. At age 22 my experience with sexual assault came back to me in dreams. I thought they were only dream images, but as I continued to think about it and be tormented by it, I began to clearly recall the terrible things he did to me that I had been repressing for twelve years. And I deal with traumatic experience with art for some crazy reason. I took a week in 1981 to get all the horrid feelings out on paper.

You will notice the tombstone lists the date of death as being before my eleventh birthday in 1967. That is when it happened. It was not actually a sexual experience… it was torture. He took my pants off and did things to my private parts to cause me intense pain. And he even said to me that it was my own fault, that somehow I had told him that I wanted this horrible thing to happen. For several years after I intentionally used the furnace in my home to make burn scars on my lower back and the back of my legs. I believe now that I was hurting myself in order to extinguish sexual thoughts and feelings. The worst thing he did to me was make me feel guilty about what happened.

When you go back to the art of the middle ages, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and other European artists both young and old, you see artists grappling with mortality, the fact that all people, including me, will die. At times it can seem to the immature mind that death is the only possible escape from suffering. This artwork comes from a time when I was contemplating exactly that.

If you are looking at this closely, you will see that I signed my name to it backwards. I signed my art as Leah Cim Reyeb, or simply Leah Cim. I put these four panels into my big black portfolio and never showed them to anybody until after my abuser passed away from a heart attack. I don’t believe in Hell and I don’t believe in ghosts, so now, I finally feel safe about sharing this artwork with others. The terrible secret is a secret no longer. He can no longer reach out and hurt me any further.

I apologize for not being funny… even remotely funny… in this post. Funny is probably not the appropriate thing for this post. You may be wondering why I even bother to post it. Isn’t this a private matter, best kept to myself? You tell me. This is a terrible thing that happened to me. I am now honest about it in a way I could never be before. I can explain it without worrying about any retribution by or against him. I can finally forgive him. I can overcome what happened and be the stronger for it. And if you have read this far without being so revolted by it that you stopped reading and stopped following my blog, maybe you need to do the dance with me. Is there something you need to overcome? It can be overcome. So dance with me… and rejoice.

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Filed under forgiveness, Paffooney, philosophy

Tagged as cartoon story, Danse Macabre, death, forgiveness, paffooney, philosophy, secrets, sexual assault

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