Easter thoughts from your friendly neighborhood agnostic.

When I look for examples of of godliness, or godly people, I resort to fictional characters. J.D. Salinger's Seymour is one of these. Salinger kills him in a 1948 short story ("A Perfect Day for a Bananafish"). After a rather caustic portrait of Seymour's wife (and presumably of middle class proto-suburbanites), Salinger--cruelly to my mind--has Seymour shoot himself while his wife naps nearby.

I don't know enough about Salinger, or am not enough of a literary critic, to know whether Salinger regretted offing Seymour, but Salinger couldn't let him go. Seymour would continue to appear in later stories, and in 1959, Salinger wrote a novella called "Seymour: An Introduction," in which Seymour's closest brother, Buddy, writes a preface to a collection of Seymour's haiku. These two passages stand out for me, for Salinger's vivid storytelling and humor, and for how his literary creation inspires me.

So, for this Easter, here's to all those who already have a belief, and to all the rest of us who don't, but muddle along with a faith that we might learn to see God curled up somewhere, that we might get a ride on a Joe Jackson bike, and that we might get better at loving others as well as Seymour loved Les.

. . .there is very evidently one rather terrible hallmark common to all persons who look for God, and apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places--e.g., in radio announcers, in newspapers, in taxicabs with crooked meters, literally everywhere. (My brother, for the record, had a distracting habit, most of his adult life, of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger, clearing all the cigarette ends to the sides--smiling from ear to ear as he did it--as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle, and he never looked disappointed.) The hallmark, then of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other (and I graciously include in the definition of an "advanced religious," odious though the phrase is, all Christians on the great Vivekananada's terms; i.e., 'See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk')--the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile.

[Les] came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishing. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation--in my view, at least--was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been neatly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les--as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle. And aside from its enormous sentimental value to my father personally, this answer, in a great many ways, was true, true, true.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (Boston: LB Books, 1963): 108-109 and 148-149.

NOTE: nearly the same version of what I originally wrote for my Facebook Notes, April 24, 2011.

Oh, those beleaguered straights.

InsideHigherEd.com today reports on efforts in the Texas state legislature to "require any public college with a student center on 'alternative' sexuality to provide equal funding to create new centers to promote 'traditional values.'"

Proponents have framed the measure as an effort to get equal time for heterosexuality on public campuses where, apparently, straight folks barely get the time of day. A political interest group, the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), worked with State Representative Wayne Christian in crafting the legislation, but its goal was to not to carve out equal resources for heterosexual programming and support, but to get universities to defund centers serving GBLT students.

The YCT doesn't think universities should be funding the promotion of any kind of sexuality or values. Sounds egalitarian, doesn't it? But YCT Vice Chairman, Tony McDonald lets us know what this move is really about: "It is clear that our public universities are funding centers which promote a radical political and social agenda in favor of normalizing homosexuality and expanding homosexual rights."

Basically, the YCT and fellow travelers have fallen back on the litany of privilege that we have heard before from whites and males arguing against affirmative action, or straights fighting civil rights protections for GLBT people: the minority group aggressively promotes and agenda while the dominant group simply wants to 'live and let live;' the minority group gets all these extra rights while the dominant group is victimized. It's another round of "reverse discrimination," but this time for those poor straight people, who apparently can't cross campus without "pansexual" weirdos waylaying them, or gays sneakily luring them into deviant lifestyles. It is one of the whines of privilege--your existence on the same field with me is an affront to my tender identity, so stop complaining (you've never had it so good, anyway).

I'm all for carefully reviewing university budgets, and, frankly, I'd like to see more resources dedicated to the classroom rather than student services--but US universities have long had functions besides transmitting and generating knowledge--they are mechanisms of social mobility and socialization, they are laboratories of social change, and since the tremendous expansion of higher education after WW II, they have become this place where parents send their children to practice adulthood--hence all the support services for young adults trying to navigate the world outside their homes, as well as their often tumultuous internal worlds.