Inhuman Swill

Having watched Valkyrie recently, I've been thinking about the intersection of art, commerce and religion. I know, that's probably not the kind of discussion the filmmakers intended to provoke, but here we are. Germany started it.

Every so often a big kerfluffle flares up in the media or the blogosphere about what famous entertainer is or isn't a Scientologist, and why. Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Isaac Hayes, Beck, Chick Corea, Edgar Winter, Chaka Khan, Mark Isham, Greta Van Susteren—we're supposed to avoid giving them money so we don't inadvertently support their reprehensible "church." Leonard Cohen, Paul Haggis, Jerry Seinfeld, Courtney Love, Gloria Gaynor—once were Scientologists, but now they're on the okay list. Neil Gaiman—wait, what's the controversy with him? I'm not supposed to read him because his relatives are Scientologists?

Frankly, keeping score like this is ridiculous.

As much as I dislike Scientology, discriminating against artists because of their private beliefs is a losing game. I hate the fact that there were Crusades, and a Spanish Inquisition, and institutional coverups of child sexual abuse, but that doesn't mean I'm going to deny myself the work of Catholic writers like Graham Greene or Tim Powers, or Catholic filmmakers like Kevin Smith. Will some of the money I pay for their stuff end up in Vatican coffers? Possibly, but I'm not naive enough to think that any of the money I give or receive is pure. We live in a pluralist society. We can't help the fact that our money is going to circulate through parts of the body politic that we don't like. The only judgment we can really make is how we respond to the art, how pure and universal and human it is, how ennobling or demeaning or thrilling or dull, how free from or full of agenda or polemic.

And let's face it, Scientology is no more ridiculous on the face of it than Catholicism or Zoroastrianism or Islam or Greek mythology. The claims of these other religions are just as extraordinary. The only difference is that the origins of the rest are shrouded in antiquity—as if mere age confers some kind of stature or holiness or untouchability. In historical terms, Mormonism is nearly as recent as Scientology, and in cosmological terms makes claims every bit as grand and silly, but how many of you Wheel of Time readers are going to boycott the new volume just because Brandon Sanderson wrote it?

The value of the work is in the work itself. If the work makes your life better or more pleasant, support it. Pay for it. It's that simple. Clint Eastwood's a libertarian who supported McCain? So what. I love his movies. Beck and Chick Corea give money to L. Ron Hubbard's successors? Big deal. I get a lot more pleasure from their records than from most Cruise or Travolta movies—hell, than from most Mel Gibson movies or Orson Scott Card novels these days—so I'm happy to give them my money. I, an atheist, have given money to causes devoted to overturning the Defense of Marriage Act in the United States, but that mere fact hardly makes my fiction superior to or more worthy of support than a Catholic like Gene Wolfe's.

As for Neil Gaiman, I'd be an awful hypocrite to avoid his books just because his father was a big muckity-muck in the Church of Scientology. I myself am a direct descendant of Edward Partridge, the first Mormon bishop. No, I avoid Gaiman's books because I simply don't care for them.

Artists, like most people, are more than just the religions they profess. So get down off your high horse and give the poor Scientologists a chance. The rich ones, too, if they're your thing.

The mighty Dave Slusher has posted the new episode of his fine Reality Break podcast, an interview series focusing on science fiction and other genre literature. In this eighth episode, he talks to yours truly about writing and podcasting The Accidental Terrorist.

This interview was recorded in 2007 but has not been heard until now. Besides my own book, we talk about memoirs in general, writing after 9/11, my experiences growing up Mormon, and how those all have informed my fiction.

Dave is a terrific interviewer, and while I usually wince when listening to myself, I'm very, very happy with the way this session turned out. I hope you'll have a listen. If you enjoy it, thank Dave!

Listen for me today on a radio near you!

I'll be a guest this afternoon on "Doing Time with Ron Kuby" on the Air America radio network. We'll talk about my memoir, The Accidental Terrorist, and about the new podcast in which I'm serializing it. Again.

That's today—Tuesday, April 14th—at 5:00 pm Eastern. I hope you'll tune in.

To find your local Air America station, or to listen to the live online audio stream, please visit:

AirAmerica.com

I have my breakfast stop to thank for another little gem this morning. The 31-year-old father at the booth next to mine (I know his age because it came up in his conversation) was summarizing news stories from the Sun-Times for his two young daughters, and I was listening in with half an ear over my eggs and coffee as I read Then We Came to the End.

Both my ears perked up when he mentioned Brigham Young University. You may have seen this A.P. story already:

Apostles, not apostates: BYU paper's ungodly typo
Thousands of issues of Brigham Young University's student newspaper were pulled from newsstands because a front-page photo caption misidentified leaders of the Mormon church as apostates instead of apostles....

The caption called the group the "Quorum of the Twelve Apostates." The mistake happened when a copy editor ran a computer spell check and apostate was suggested as the replacement for a misspelling of apostle....  [full article]

I almost sprayed coffee all over my book as the father transmitted the gist of the story. After he had explained the meaning of "apostate," one of the girls asked, "Did someone do it on purpose?"

"No, honey, it was just a mistake."

A delightful mistake. I wish I had a copy of one of those recalled issues. I think I'd like to be a founding member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates.

In 2006 and 2007, over the course of about 30 episodes of my "ShunnCast," I read my unpublished memoir The Accidental Terrorist, the story of how I, as a young naive Mormon missionary, came to be arrested for terrorism and permanently banned from Canada. The response was enthusiastic and overwhelming. Each chapter was downloaded thousands of times, and the memoir continues to be a great draw at my website. If you've listened before, I thank you for your support.

Now I'm serializing the book again, from the beginning. Why? As popular as those episodes were, the sometimes lengthy bracketing chatter about other aspects of my life and work made it impossible for listeners after the fact to sit back with every chapter and listen to the book straight through from start to finish.

This new podcast will change that. Starting April 7th and continuing throughout 2009, I'll post a new chapter from The Accidental Terrorist every Tuesday morning. Most of these will be excerpted from the original "ShunnCast" episodes, but a handful in which I've made significant revisions since the first podcasts will be newly rerecorded.

Most Friday mornings, I'll post a short "Setting the Record Straight" installment, also excerpted from the original episodes, in which I'll talk about what elements of Tuesday's chapter may have been slightly exaggerated in the writing of the book, and which others hew close to reality.

By then end of the year, you'll be able to listen to The Accidental Terrorist straight through, without any editorial interruptions from me. But don't worry—if you like the longer, more chatty episodes, I'm continuing to do that in my occasional "ShunnCast" outings, along with readings of short stories and other materials.

The premier episode of the reconstituted Accidental Terrorist podcast is up and available. I hope you have fun listening, whether or not it's the first time.

I don't know about you, but I am incensed about the LDS Church's over-the-pulpit exhortation of its members to mobilize and help pass California's Proposition 8, banning gay marriage. When I first heard about it, in fact, my first reaction was, "Damn, they need to have their tax-exempt status revoked."

Now you can help urge the IRS to make that happen. Here are all the instructions and supporting documents you need in order to:

File a Complaint Asking the IRS to Revoke the LDS Church's Tax-Exempt Status

If the Church is going to jump into the political arena (yes, okay, they've never not been a player in the political arena) and try to legislate a segment of our population out of their legal rights, then it's only fair that they as a corporation should share this country's tax burden. They pulled this same kind of nonsense 30 years ago to help defeat the Equal Rights Amendment,* and who knows what they'll try next if their actions are left legally unchallenged?

I will never understand the idea that extended marriage rights to same-sex couples somehow threatens the institution of marriage. "Defense of marriage" makes no more sense than, say, "defense of Sunday," the idea that your belief in the sanctity of your Sabbath should mean the I can't buy a beer that day. In a pluralistic society, that's just a ridiculous, backward, and fearful proposition. Observe your Sabbath the way you see fit, and feel free to restrict the definition of a sanctified marriage inside the walls of your own church. But don't try to extend that limited thinking into the public sphere—at least, not without seeing your organization transformed into a de facto political action committee.

Mormons at large seem unable to equate their anti-gay activism (and let's be honest, the Church can equivocate all it wants, but in pushing this legislation against gay marriage, it is supporting discrimination against gays) with the anti-Mormon persecution they suffered throughout much of their early history. Mormons only wanted to be able to practice their odd little religion and their uncommon marital practices in peace, but state after state ran them out with torches and guns. (Okay, again it was more complicated than that, and had more than a little to do with the early political goals of the Church and how threatening those sounded to their neighbors, but let's take it as a given for the sake of this discussion that the persecution was entirely unprovoked.) If anyone in the world should be more sympathetic to the goal of earning society's approval for an unconventional brand of marriage, it should be the Mormons. I mean, come on. They are the sorest losers I've ever seen.

John Stewart is much funnier on the topic than I am:


By the way, people claiming to be Mormons attacked and beat several Proposition 8 protesters outside the Los Angeles temple last Friday. Here's news video from KTLA. I think most of the Mormons I know would be appalled by this behavior, but it demonstrates to me the dangerous lack of proportion that can take root in some people's minds when the dominant social force in their lives tells them it's okay to discriminate.

A revocation of the Church's tax-exempt status will likely never come to pass, but at least your IRS complaint can send a small message.

---

* The Boston Phoenix article to which I linked on the subject of the ERA was mainly an assessment of Mitt Romney's chances as a presidential candidate. So you don't have to scan the whole thing, I've reproduced the relevant passages here:

( A crash course in Mormon political power )

Epidode #53 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill combs through the dusty vaults of his cassette collection to unearth a musical gem from his missionary days that might more profitably have remained buried—"The Wenatchee Rap" by No Parking Zone.

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=53

See also shunncast.

This just in. New agent loves new draft of Accidental Terrorist. "I've just read the additions/revisions and I have to admit I am elated.... [Y]ou've completely rounded out the long, strange adventure and added a whole new depth to the tale."

This puppy's on its way to editors again. Thank fucking Elohim.

Epidode #52 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill reads a restored and revised chapter from the brand-new draft of his memoir The Accidental Terrorist.

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=52

See also shunncast.

I have finished the new draft of The Accidental Terrorist and sent it off to my new agent for comments.

Epidode #51 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Donald William Shunn II remembers the original model (1936-2008).

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=51

See also shunncast.

My deepest thanks to everyone who posted or called or sent cards on the occasion of my father's passing. (Well, to everyone but the ones who tried to use the opportunity to reassure me of the reality of the afterlife. Bad time to make your dubious point.) The sympathy and concern were very touching and very much appreciated.

Laura and I returned Saturday from the funeral, which was held in Kaysville, Utah, the town where my parents have lived for 28 years. The funeral was a curiously joyful affair for the family, though punctuated of course by bouts of deep grief. My mother seemed to be doing better than just about anyone else, as if the burden of my father's long illness had at last been lifted. Relatives—and I have a lot—and friends came from far and wide, and many, many folks from the ward where I grew up dropped in for the viewing and/or service as well.

It was hard to walk from one end of the church to the other without being delayed an hour by people wanting to talk. I enjoyed seeing everyone and catching up, but this was also unfortunate in that it prevented me from getting to the men's room before the funeral service began. As a pallbearer, I didn't have a chance to slip away at the end of the service, either. So it was off to the cemetery in a limo for the interment and then back to the church, before sweet relief could be obtained. A short four hours.

My two brothers, Tim and Lee, spoke at the funeral, as did a former bishop who is a close friend of the family. My brothers' remarks were excellent, though I frequently found myself wishing I'd known the person they were talking about better. My brothers are Siblings Five and Six, which means they grew up in a different Family Era from the four oldest, and very different from My Era, the Epoch of the Firstborn.

The former bishop who spoke is someone I knew very well when I was a teenager and a lost young man in my early twenties. He too spoke about a man I didn't know well, but whose generosity of spirit I certainly witnessed from afar. My father had a gift for connecting with troubled and disadvantaged youths, though in my case a different set of expectations probably interfered with that ability. (For my listing as a pallbearer in the printed program, I deliberately chose to be called "Donald William Shunn II," a name I have not used for well over a decade, probably because it gives me a claim on a connection no one else has with him. I sure would have liked to have connected over a beer, though.)

I cried several times during the service, though not when I was wondering what was wrong with me that I could never connect with the man the way everyone else seemed to have, and certainly not during the part's of the bishop's remarks that seemed directed explicitly at we four scattered siblings (a solid fifty percent of the total) who have broken the celestial family chain by removing ourselves from the Mormon faith. During those interminable parts I gritted my teeth and clenched my sphincters.

I was very glad to have Laura with me, though she was rather discomfited to have seen my father's dead body lying in its casket dressed in Mormon temple robes.

My extended family is vast enough when you count only blood relatives, but to this dense tree must be added the couple who took my father under their wings in his early twenties, after both his parents has died. This was the couple I knew growing up as Grandpa and Grandma Stone, who between them had twelve children of their own—eleven from previous marriages, and one together. At the Relief Society luncheon that followed the interment, I spent an inordinate amount of time greedily lapping up stories about my father from one of the eldest of these, Stephen Stone. Stephen also told me what it was like to grow up in the house of his father, a respected psychologist and minor Mormon celebrity. It was a side of Grandpa Stone I'd never heard before, and the parallels to me and my father were downright eerie. I had to wonder if my father hadn't picked up a good number of his early parenting techniques from Grandpa Stone.

At a Mormon funeral, particularly one filled with people you haven't seen in nearly two decades, religious faux pas are bound to be made. There was the older man (another former bishop!) who mildly scolded me for wearing a beard, and who, when told we lived in Chicago, could only reminisce about the time he looked down from the top of the Sears Tower and thought, "Look at all those people! So many to convert!"

That drew only an appalled stare from me and Laura, but my proudest moment actually came at graveside shortly after my father's interment. The bishop who had spoken at the funeral, a man I really do love and respect a great deal, and who I'm sure many times heard my father agonize about my apostasy, held me by the arm and, after expressing his sympathy for my loss, fixed me with an intense stare and said, "It's true, you know. Deep down you know it, don't you."

"I don't," I said, and as he swept me into a tight embrace (was he afraid to look me in the eye at that moment?), I went on, "Cal, I'm like my father that way. I can't say something that I don't believe, and I don't believe it."

"Think about it for me from time to time," he said.

"I think about it all the time," I said.

He nodded. "We can still be friends, though, right?"

"Of course," I said.

That evening, because my father had come out of one of his final fogs long enough to ask if Mom would still be all right after the $2,000 pizza party (okay, maybe he hadn't emerged all the way from that fog), we had a raucous pizza party at my parents' house. Laura and I are on a diet that doesn't permit pizza, but we had some anyway, and it was good.

Since we were discussing Coupling here recently, I wanted to mention a rather jarring piece of advertising Laura and I saw last night. We DVR reruns of Coupling on BBC America to try to catch episodes we've missed in the past. Laura had never seen the very first episode, so that's what we were watching. As I fast-forwarded through the commercials, though, I realizes we were seeing an ad for The Lamb of God, a free Easter video from the LDS Church. (Sample bits here and here.) Seriously, the Mormons were advertising on one of the most frank, sexually themed sitcoms of all time. I have to wonder if that was deliberate or if it was a case of block ad-buying like the one that put Mitt Romney's campaign ads on Gay.com. What's next? Christian Scientists advertising on House? Scientologists advertising on Mythbusters?

In other amusing news, someone is selling The Lamb of God on eBay. Which is funny because the Mormon Church will send you a copy for free.

In other bittersweet news, How I Met Your Mother seems to have hit its stride again after a bit of a creative slump early in the season. The last few episodes have been sharp and as tightly written as Coupling, and Laura and I could barely breathe for laughing through this week's episode. This, just in time for the writers strike.

You thought I was done with Christopher Bigelow's post, but I was only taking a little breather. After declaring that it's probably too late for him to change his ways anyway, even if he wanted a new lifestyle, he makes this judgment:

And it sounds like Bill's dad was a real jerk, so he's got more of an excuse than I do to reject his parents' lifestyle....  [full post]

I have a lot of complicated responses to this. First is regret at the realization that I probably haven't done a good enough job in public at pointing out that my father was not only a jerk while I was growing up. He was sometimes kind, loving, and supportive. He was independent and often questioned authority. He was smart, though he tended to downplay that and fall back on received wisdom and kneejerk responses, and he was unfailingly discliplined, hard-working, and generous. He was also argumentative to a fault, controlling, and psychologically abusive, and his temper was severe. He correction could be violent, but physically it was only ever targeted at our scrawny behinds. He tended to spank first and never ask questions later (though he had pretty much stopped corporal punishment entirely by the time my youngest sisters were growing up). Admitting when he was wrong was not a strength. He did, however, teach me many invaluable lessons, the one I've taken most to heart being one he probably didn't intend—how to think for myself and make up my own mind about what I believe.

He's a complicated man, and he set a lot of contradictory examples for me. Most of all, he was a distinctive individual in sea of conformity. It would have been impossible for me not to have rejected his lifestyle in some way; in fact, rejection was exactly what we were taught. We were encouraged to become whatever we wanted to be (though doctor and lawyer were pushed harder than any other profession), so long as we didn't become teachers like he was. (Inevitably, at least one sibling did exactly that.)

We could argue all day about whether or not my rejection of Mormonism was a direct rejection of my father (and I would say that was only a small component of it), but it remains a fact that I lived a more rigorous Mormon lifestyle, by conscious choice, than practically anyone else I knew right up through the age of about 20. I tried to live like I believed the tenets, even while I fought private doubts that extended all the way back to age four or five (well before I could have made sense of the idea of rebelling against my parents). And still, it wasn't until nearly the age of 28 that I finally made the decision that much of my misery derived from clinging to a set of spiritual beliefs that contradicted what I had come to know about the world intellectually.

If that was a rejection of my parents' lifestyle, then it was also a rejection of the lifestyles of practically everyone I knew. I had no lack of good, kind, loving, generous teachers and friends growing up. I sacrificed many of those connections when I left the church, and it hurt. We have our differences today, but I remain on good terms with my parents. They may wish I'd return to the church, my father probably more tenaciously than my mother, but they haven't rejected me, and I haven't rejected them. They could not be more warm or welcoming to my lapsed Catholic and unlapsed Christian wife. We had our hard years after I left the church, but through love, work, and forgiveness we still manage to act like family.

I hope none of this sounds like an attack on Chris, who is one of the more tolerant and open-minded Mormons I know (a statement that could certainly be read as damning with faint praise). I also know this discussion is not explicitly about religion versus atheism, but it leads me directly to thoughts about the assumptions, both explicit and implicit, that religious people tend to bring to their mental portraits of atheists. That discussion, however, will have to wait a few days, until I have time to take on Ben Stein.

Utah writer Christopher Bigelow, in the course of answering the "Four Things" meme, cops to coveting my lifestyle—but then again, not really:

I'm a little envious of his lifestyle of living in big cities like New York and Chicago, not having any kids, letting go of the Mormon rope, doing lots of traveling and drinking, and getting deeply involved in a writing community.... But I suppose I got all that worldliness out of my system as a young adult—well, most of it, anyway—and I'm sure the path I'm on now will lead to more long-term happiness than his....  [full post]

While I suppose I'm flattered in a way, I'm more than a little disturbed by the implication that there's greater long-term happiness to be derived from a traditional and religious nuclear family than from my little family. It's possible that Chris means my lifestyle would not ultimately be satisfying to him, which would be a perfectly fair thing to say, but the way the statement is phrased makes it sound like the objective possibility of satisfaction obtaining from my choices in life is on the slim side.

It probably goes without saying, though I will say it anyway, that I do not covet Chris's lifestyle. I trust he won't be offended when I say that, because I don't intend to offend. I mean only that some of the things he values most are simply not what interest me in life, and I have good reason to suspect that playing patriarch to a Mormon nuclear family would render me dangerously miserable. I'm certain enough that I'm on the path of greatest happiness for Bill Shunn that I feel no compulsion to make major course corrections at this point in my life. Comparing levels of happiness with someone else is pretty much a pointless game.

Of course, what Chris mentions (lightly) coveting about my lifestyle are really just the trappings. He doesn't mention the two things that are most important to me, which are surely two of the things he cares about most: devotion to a loving spouse, and the writing itself. On that score I doubt we're so different.

So please go ahead and be happy with your life, Chris, and I'll be happy with mine.

An amusing article in this morning's Times recounts how the various presidential campaigns are being blindsided by the unexpected sites where their web-buy advertising is showing up:

Visitors to Gay.com can sign up to find the perfect dating partner, advice on sex and how-to articles on same-sex marriage and parenting.

Over the course of at least two days in August, they may well also have seen banner advertisements about the Republican presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, according to an analysis of campaign Web advertising provided by the Nielsen Online, AdRelevance, monitoring service....

A regular site for advertisers like Jeep and Toyota, Gay.com was not exactly what Mr. Romney’s campaign had in mind when it set out this summer to blanket the Web with messages about the candidate....  [full article]

I found this particularly amusing, not only because I enjoy seeing the Romney campaign embarrassed by association with positions the candidate has since abandoned, but also because John McCain ads have been showing up on my site for the past couple of weeks. Hey, I don't really mind, and McCain probably doesn't care, but those ads are a strange sight below my name.

Honestly, now I wish Romney ads would show up on my site. I like the thought of taking a little of his money.

Epidode #49 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill, in an outtake from THE ACCIDENTAL TERRORIST, recounts the fate of the modest vinyl collection he'd amassed before leaving on his mission. Also, freethought is vigorously defended, in the context of gay weddings and dying fathers.

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=49

See also shunncast.

Epidode #48 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill attempts to convince you to order his brand-new six-pack chapbook—only five bucks!—and a definition for the term "chapbook" itself is sought.

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=48

See also shunncast.

I'm not sure what Parables Publishing is up to, putting the entire text of their "classic" LDSF anthologies online. I guess they're trying to drum up some publicity for their long-overdue fourth volume of science fiction for Mormons. Good luck to them.

Why do I care? Well, the first story I ever published, "Cut Without Hands," appeared in LDSF-2 back in 1985. I was sixteen when I made the sale (payment in copies), and I was beside myself with joy. Unfortunately, editor Benjamin Urrutia lost my address and couldn't send me my author's copies. I assumed the project had died on the vine—until the spring of 1987, when I was a missionary in Washington and received a letter from Mr. Urrutia. He had read about my brush with the law in the paper and was writing to ask if I was the same D. William Shunn who had given him a story for his anthology.

Much as I wish my little piece of Mormon apologia would quietly vanish, copies of LDSF-2 still show up in used bookstores every once in a while, so I can't be too upset that my story is now up on the Web for all the world to see—in total copyright violation. I'm not inclined to press the matter, though Philip José Farmer and the estate of Avram Davidson (both authors had Mormon-related stories reprinted in LDSF-2) might feel differently. So go read this odd historical curiosity before someone more litigious than I gets wind of it and the whole thing vanishes. (You'll have to scroll way down, or search on "cut without hands," since the Parables folks seems to have only rudimentary HTML skillz.)

Another story you might want to read while it's still available is "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" by hyperpopular LDS author Jack Weyland, which immediately precedes mine in the table of contents. This story is significant to me only because I hated it so much, even as a young Mormon missionary. Its central conceit was so smug and insular and made for such bad science fiction that for two decades I carried around a desire to write a story that proceeded from the same premise but took it in an entirely different direction.

The result, finally, is my novelette "Not of This Fold," which is one of two new stories that will appear in my chapbook An Alternate History of the 21st Century, coming damn soon now from Spilt Milk Press. Pre-order your copy now for a measly five bucks!

---

P.S.  The title "Cut Without Hands" comes from the Old Testament, the passage where Daniel interprets King Nebuchadnezzar's dream about a stone cut from the mountain without hands that smashes a great statue and grows to fill the earth.

P.P.S.  It has always amused and delighted me that Jack Weyland's name is misspelled on the cover of the book.

An occasional nightmare of mine, in Simpsovision:

( But it would be great publicity )