cognitive dissonance

Thought I'd just about given up this site but there is way too much to talk about. Just now I'm learning about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. In an effort to see both sides I checked out a book opposing him and a book that justifies him.

At this point I am reading "Snake Dance," the book by the woman who is trying to justify Jim Jones and the various things he did. I feel for her, I really do: she had a difficult childhood, was always lonely and had problems forming close relationships. So of course when she met the Peoples Temple she felt for the first time in her life as though she belonged. She says Jim Jones loved her. She loved him back so strongly that she's trying to defend & explain him even now. This book was published in 1997. "Six Years with God," which tears down Jim Jones, came out in 1979, one year after the mass suicide in Guyana. The two women who wrote these books are very different, even though they were both females and both on the Planning Commitee. Jeannie Mills (SYWG) tends to be down-to-earth and alternates self-skewering amusement with weary lament. When she was taken in, she says so and explains why and what really was going on. "I found out later that..." And she's horribly honest even about the things she did for the Cause that ranged from "situational ethics" to letting her own child be beaten with 75 strokes for some minor offense and then having to sign a document saying that she'd asked for Jones to punish her daughter that way. No, she didn't think it was right, not even at the time, but this honesty about what she was brainwashed and bullied into doing somehow makes her more credible when she explains the terrible things Jones did to other people as well. Mills posits that Jones was the ultimate hypocrite because for all the long, tedious last sermon about dying with dignity and how life was a vale of sorrow, he didn't drink the kool-aid with his followers. He never meant to die. He had vast amounts of money and property squirreled away, and why do that if he were going to commit suicide? He's dead because someone finally shot him. Here are parts of it if you want to hear his creepy drony voice.

Laurie Efrein (SD) has a style that is more poetic. It'd be great if she were writing something with elves in it (her first paragraph deals with being a child of Neptune), but raises doubts when she's explaining history. She deals more with how various events related to her and her feelings than with telling what was going on globally within the Peoples Temple. It'd still be historically useful (after all, Anne Frank's diary was extremely personal) if she didn't gloss over so many things; if Jim Jones' paranoia had not led her to believe that the Peoples Temple really was taken down by a vast government conspiracy; if she did not explain earnestly that Jones only had relations with so many men/women 1) because they were begging him for it 2) to protect other men/women from having to deal with them 3) because he was a tremendous giver, just like her, and felt he had to give so much of himself to others.

Whoa.

I'm not saying SN isn't at all useful. Quite the opposite. It is psychologically fascinating. If you want to find out the way most members of the Peoples Temple thought about Jim Jones and what was going on in his church, read "Snake Dance." Cognitive dissonance happens before your eyes, on the page, as Efrein allows herself to question or express outrage for a moment but then rationalizes for half a page. She doesn't explain the cognitive dissonance she felt then-- it happens as she's writing "now." You can tell the difference between that and "It sounds unbelievable, but I explained it away at the time by saying..." You might want to read Mills' SYWG first to get a more objective sense of what actually happened. Through Mills' eyes you can see this cognitive dissonance from a few feet away as Jones punishes someone by beating or humiliating them, and they're screaming or crying one minute and thanking him the next, and by the time they get home they're explaining to others why they needed punishment. If I'd read SN first I would have been really confused as Efrein vacillates from one side of her argument to the other. So fascinating. I especially enjoy how, by reading these two books, you can see exactly the same events related from two different viewpoints, so vastly different in fact that unless you're paying attention you wouldn't know Mills and Efrain are referring to the same thing.

The man was a sociopath. Poor vulnerable Efrein has the sort of mind he attracted. She herself claims that "they killed off hope" when "they," the vast conspiracy, killed Jones. She says the government drove him and the people of Jonestown to suicide. She says Jones didn't die by kool-aid because the government shot him. She rants against Jeannie Mills' book for slandering Jones' name. Neither she nor Mills went to Guyana. Mills was heartbroken over the tragedy and relieved that the monster was dead. On the other hand, the greatest example of Efrain's cognitive dissonace is when she was listening to recordings of the mass suicide: "I wanted to die with everyone, I wanted to be there with everyone, I wanted to stand with everyone, and suddenly now I wanted Christa, the terrified little girl, to live."


I don't know if Efrein will ever be at peace with herself. Here is her website if you want to see. Don't bother her or yell at her. She's been bothered enough.

periphery

For some people, Superman is the superhero to end all superheroes. Yet he's never been more than a periphery to me. Perhaps it is because I have a difficulties relating to those with godlike powers and nothing to counter them.

Once you get past the amazement of "it's a bird, it's a plane," Superman is rather boring. Sure, things happen around him, but rarely to him: the audience thrills as he approaches villains who we know will not be able to harm him. The audience is secure and so is Superman. He has it under control before it has even begun. That is a happening, not a story. Stories happen when things get out of hand. Really, there are only three stories about Superman. These are "kryptonite," "reverse-Superman," and "coming to terms with his powers on earth." Every Superman story is a variation on those three.

Ship's Pool

Pleasure cruises, especially in Europe and most especially British ones, used to play a game called “ship’s pool.” This is quite different from the stunt “ship’s mast,” which involves hanging onto the hood of a speeding car while someone else drives.

“Ship’s pool” is a form of gambling in which the passengers bet on how many miles will be traveled that day. First the captain confers with his officers and estimates the number of miles he expects to travel. That night, this number, 10 numbers above, and 10 numbers below it are auctioned off among the passengers. The money from the auction makes up the pool, and whoever holds the winning ticket gets the whole thing, usually minus a small percent for orphans or hospitals or what have you.

Only one person can hold any one ticket. Remember, the captain’s estimate is just that. Anything could happen during the day to affect the outcome. To this end they also auction off “low field” and “high field.” These tickets cover any number below and above the 10 numbers surrounding the captain’s estimate. A “field” ticket seems like a much better value because it covers so many numbers, but is also more risky.

Anyway that is how to play “ship’s pool.” I do not typically do this on the Golden Dirigible, because the traveling conditions are almost as chaotic as they are at the Kafka Airport.

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

Freudian Stupidity

Sigmund Freud: he had little to no proof of anything he said, basically made up a global theory based on a few case studies of an extremely limited population. Yet somehow he tapped into something the people of the time really wanted to hear but didn't want to admit they wanted to hear it. It was essentially pop-psychology. No substance, but a great hook. And now most professional psychologist/psychiatrists wish we could forget about him, but he's firmly entrenched in our field. Even now, when movies want a stock psychologist character, it's a guy with a germanic accent.

Cooking Segment?

Yeah, I know, two in one day, but if I don't do this now I'm going to forget about it because my brain is like a sparkler. Once it burns past something there's no going back. Here is a segment of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Chef Ramsay is on, and for some reason Norm MacDonald is there too. Ramsay takes himself way too seriously, wants to kill them both but has to laugh because he *is* a professional, but he picks on Norm MacDonald and then gets really PO'd when Norm makes fun of him. I've watched this 3 or 4 times and still laugh out loud.

You Don't Love Me Yet - analysis

Ran out of library books on Friday, so re-read Jon Lethem's You Don't Love Me Yet. His new-ish book revolves around a female bassist in a struggling rock-band who works in a living-art piece, a call center for complaints-- complaints about any and everything. One complainer calls every day and they fall in love. Meanwhile, the lead singer works at a zoo. He "rescues" a depressed kangaroo and takes her home to his house. That works out about as well as you'd expect. His reasoning always struck me as a little odd, though: "Back at the zoo, she liked me. She relied on me to cheer her up. But now that she's here, she associates me with the zoo." He can't do anything for her.

I always wondered about that. Today I was finally able to tease the book apart. See, the Complainer and the bass-player fall in love, they finally meet, their worlds collide, but he falls out of love with her pretty quickly. Why? She used to be something apart from the rest of his life. He relied on her to cheer him up. Now he associates her with everything else. He ends up joining the band, which doesn't help. Everything in a band has its place, and this band is even more fragile than most. Their guitarist is their songwriter (and the most "fragile," spacey character in the book) and even if someone else has suggestions for songs, they have to furtively give them to him without letting the others know. The guitarist is not a credit-hog, nor would he get upset if the others knew. The others would get upset, because he is the songwriter. The band is very delicate. So the Complainer joining up not only tips the balance of the relationship with the guitarist, it also irreparably skews the band.

The book jacket calls it a story about the relationship between art and love. I think it's more about the balance of our loves and worlds.

RiYue being a Sword

Candles of various heights and shapes decked the mantel. Incense smoke drifted up from the holder I’d made from sea-glass. There were a couple of peaches next to the candles. I took one, pressed my nose against it, and inhaled. I’d already eaten food offered to idols/spirits/ancestors; To make a long story short, Grandma (owner of Grandma Thai Restaurant down the block) gave me a piece of fruit from her little shrine after she made me soup the way she’d make it in Thailand and to her surprise I happily slurped it up with chopsticks and without my mouth catching on fire. So it wasn’t like that particular Biblical sin was anything new and anyway I’d put the peaches there in the first place. It was my mantel, and the spirit inside the sword perched there was my friend… or used to be. I didn’t worship him. The stuff was there to let him know I remembered him. That made the whole thing more snackish then mystic or profane. Besides, the only other munchies in the house was ice cream and I don’t need to eat that. Why do I even have it in the house?

“RiYue, better speak up if you want your ancestral peach,” I said aloud. No response from the sword. I stuck my tongue out at it. No response except from my own reflection in the shiny black sheathe. The reflection was distorted, dominated by a mass of red curls streaked with black, and a flash of pink tongue. I shrugged as if the whole thing didn’t matter all that much and lay across the couch with a book and the peach. Nothing happened except the usual: Borges’s Labyrinth stories are just as mind-blowing the second and third time around. At length I closed my eyes to imagine myself as an intrepid Librarian exploring his infinite library; a spiral of hexagons divided by a mirror reflecting infinity back on itself. If there are an infinite number of books, why then, the answer to any question must be there. Yet the chances of finding it must be zero. When I jerked awake it first seemed that I’d imagined the Library a little too well. The shelves around me were heavy wooden things, built to stand in the same place for generations-- not the comparatively flimsy things an apartment-dweller must be content with. There were big golden statues scattered about; thin Buddhas, dragons with curving snouts, figures with many arms. Slow, languorous sitar music drifted in from another room. The shelves reached up to the rafters of the ceiling, and all their available space was taken up by books. These too were old, bound with leather or the beaded skin of other animals. Less than a tenth of the gold-leaf titles were in English. The letters gleamed in the soft light of a globe hanging somewhere high above. I was reaching for one of the books when a noise from the next room startled me. Was there a Librarian here who could direct me?

I peeked through a doorway between two massive bookshelves and found that I was not in a library after all. The next room had no books at all on the shelves. They were stocked instead with many jars and shiny things which under other circumstances would have had my undivided attention. Someone stood in the middle of the room with his back to me-- all I could see was a many-folded robe far too rich for a Librarian, massive shoulders supporting a strangely-shaped head. Even from the back I could see a peculiarly long, fan-like moustache. The figure was standing in front of a big, tarnished mirror in frame so busy with carvings that I could not tell what the whole thing was meant to be. The glass did not reflect the room: I was stunned to see my own living room there. There was the couch, there was Labyrinths fallen to the carpet and myself half-fallen after it. Am I the only person who has succeeded at looking into the mirror and seeing what I look like asleep? And if I was asleep, what was I doing here?

Unexplained ice cream I can deal with. This, however, required some answers.
I was about to step out from behind the door and clear my throat when the figure in the middle of the room turned to pluck a jar made of carved jade off of the shelves. It happened quickly but there could be no denying what he was. What I’d mistaken for a moustache was a fan of whiskers. The hand on the jade jar was huge (the jar was the size of a quart of milk), and covered with short, fine fur. The nails were long, pointed, and lacquered in red and black. Those shoulders were massive because they supported the shaggy, striped head of a tiger.

A rakshasa, I thought. A malevolent spirit, or demon if you want to put a fine Americanized point on it. Languidly the spirit removed the cap from the bottle and threw the contents onto the surface of the mirror. The thick greenish liquid spread until it had coated the glass, and the air grew thick the way it does before a thunderstorm. Rakshasa are shape-shifting demons. The older ones can look like practically anything, although they seem pretty comfortable as tiger-men. They are typically Indian in origin but they hang around the Himalayas too. They are all diabolically intelligent, but not usually not this rich or powerful. There would be a highly unusual rakshasa looking into my living room, not that I could even handle a regular one myself. I shuddered. Shape-shifting demons never had honorable intentions where sleepy women were concerned.

The rakshasa held up its curled fingers and twisted them as if pulling something. Its nails and rings glittered. I braced myself (small good that would do) but quickly realized that the tiger-spirit was paying no attention to me at all. Its focus was just above the couch-- the katana on the mantle.