My letter to "Morning Edition" on the Bible story of Lot and his family

Good morning to the Morning Edition staff!

As a long-time Susan Stamberg listener and fan, I was disappointed in today's radio report on her visit to the National Gallery's exhibit of Joachim Wtewael's work. I undersand that Wtewael painted lurid scenes from the Book of Genesis as well as tales from Roman mythology. But I thought it unfortunate to choose imagery of Lot touching his daughter's breast as a main focus. This goes doubly because of both the painter's point of view and curator's seeming agreement with that viewpoint, unchallenged by Stamberg.

If the story of Lot was the plot of a movie and I described it this way, what would you think? A man looks around at a town, sees lust for his sons in the eyes of all the men of the town (sound like any voices we've heard in the news recently?), so he safeguards his male children and gives his daughters to strangers to abuse sexually. Then he commands the family to leave the city, telling them that God has ordered this. His wife disappears during the journey, and he says she was instantly turned to stone because she didn't obey his command not to look back at her home. Once he has segregated himself with his traumatized adult children, who have just lost their mother, at an outpost, Lot has intercourse with all his daughters. His version is that the young women forced him to become drunk and then they danced around seductively. This is after he's recently given them to strangers for the purpose of sexual assault. He says their goal was enticing him to father children with them.

Again, I do understand that the Bible, both the Christian and Jewish versions, is full of terrible behavior. I'm no censor.  Artists have always needed to paint whatever they wanted to express, and the National Gallery should cntinue to display work on challenging themes.

Where I object is that both Stamberg and Arthur Wheeler Jr.  of the National Gallery see the story of Lot and his family from Lot's point of view. Talk about your unreliable narrator, right? He sees gay predators everywhere, he gives his daughters to strangers in the same manner as a modern cult leader, he claims God killed his wife and turned her into a natural rock formation, he drinks heavily and he blames his traumatized daughters for being seductive to him. All of his daughters, one at a time.

Every listener who ever suffered within crazy family dynamics just heard the perpetrator's assertions validated by the National Gallery's curator. And we all heard Susan Stamberg sounding -- what word should I use? intrigued? - by the image of a father fondling his daughter's body.

All that was needed here to make this art report acceptable was for someone -- anyone - to say that Lot, with his gay paranoia, fear of his daughters marrying and leaving home, and perception of his daughters as debauched creatures, had some issues. But Wheeler Jr. and Stamberg sound more like Lot's defense team.

It's not at all difficult to find Biblical scholars who see things from the daughters' points of view, as in the site I've linked here, but one doesn't have to be a religious scholar to wonder why the re-telling of this already-disturbing tale of insanity was told from the madman's viewpoint.

For alternative (make that sane) interpretations of the story of what happened to Lot's family:

Another viewpoint on Lot's family

I'm really unhappy with both long-time household favorite Susan Stamberg and in "Morning Edition" today.

Marion Seltzer

It's Not My Job To Be Perry Mason

In a courtroom, it's important not to lie. But in real life, what's a lie and what's transmogrification?

Today I was remembering someone who thought I was a fool for having listened with compassion to an acquaintance who'd told me a harrowing story of a bad combat situation. After he'd left, she turned to me and said scornfully, "He wasn't in the Army. He was too crazy for them to take him, even back then." She obviously thought he was pathetic for having told me his tale and she tought I was dumb to have believed him. But his story was not that different from those of people I know for a fact had gone to Vietnam. More importantly, when she said the guy's story "wasn't true," I thought, "It's true for him."

That man had had an enemy, someone he feared would kill him. He had felt drafted into a situation he didn't want, and trapped once he was there. He'd lived through it, but it had left him with a lot to deal with. Who were the enemies? I don't know and I don't think it matters if it was his parents, siblings, classmates, teachers, tough guys in the neighborhood, the other team on a sports field. Why did he change himself into a war hero? Well, for one thing, people like war heroes more than they like scared guys whose mental health issues kept them out of the draft. He didn't want me to think of him as a loser; he wanted to be seen as a survivor.

In a similar vein, someone I used to know believed she was the victim of non-human entities. I think the people who hurt her were in fact, human. I think it was her father and one or more people he knew. But for those extremely bad things to happen, one does wonder if some sort of dark force overtakes a weak human spirit. If not that, then just a descent into the darkness brought on by tormenting experiences before a young soul is developed enough for a coping mechanism. I never disputed my friend's version of her history. She was telling me why she was always so scared and so mistrustful and so bitter. She had good reason to feel as she did. And I think facing the horrifying reality of her childhood was too much for anyone's mind, much less that of a sensitive person.

I've written so much fiction in my life which was transmogrified from real events and real people. Most of the time, the characters are composities, and times/specifics are altered to fit my needs. But I have often truly felt that my fictionalized version of an event gave a truer flavor of what actually happened that a re-telling of the facts would have given. Even as I say "re-telling of the facts" I mean of course, according to my biases, my memory, and the limited information I have.

And I don't feel foolish if someone deceives me. I'd rather be wrong by believing something that isn't true than be wrong by denying someone's story and then finding out it was true later.

Insincerity, That Vulgar Waste of Time

To the Book Seller:

I didn't start this "Dear Book Seller," because you are appreciated by me but not dear to me. I bought something from you and the price was good and you packaged it well enough to survive the shipping journey so thanks for doing a pretty good job.

But this snippet of paper you included with my purchase has me in a state.

It begins "We would like to personally thank you. . ."  You are not thanking me personally. My name's not on this. It's barely even thanking me individually. I got my own separate slip of paper, that's all.

Second, I'd like to suggest you check your stacks for a copy of Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People. The chapter on business letters explains clearly the folly of beginning a letter with "We would like." I don't care what you would like; I don't even know you, and I am really busy.

 Third, you are blurry in your thinking, at best, and disingenuous at worst. You are not writing to thank me. If you were feeling thankful, you would send me a coupon for ten percent off my next purchase. What you would like is for me to purchase another of your twenty-two thousand books because that's a lot of books for you to warehouse and you want some income. I understand that. See earlier comment on the coupon.

Next, you invite me to praise or complain. Most of us are pretty good with the latter, and need no prompt. The former I would have done on my own, but this snippet of paper has alienated me.

Last, you scold me in advance for complaining about the shipping time. Most of us only notice the slowness of shipping when we don't know if our item is on the way, and I already have the snippet of paper so the item is here. And you just invited me to complain a moment ago. Also, I have been pre-scolded for a complaint I haven't lodged. Okay, now search the stacks for The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick and find the story ":Minority Report." Or read the synopsis of the movie at the IMDb site. Judgment and punishment for "precrime" is a bad idea.

I think the rest of the snippet is more blather about yourself and all the ways I should pay attention to you. I lost interest before I finished your snippet, and I have read the unabridged version of Les Miserables from beginning to end. It's hard for me to lose interest in six or seven lines of text, and yet you have managed to cause that.

I will probably buy something from you again, if you have the item I want at the price I want to pay. But I won't remember it was you, I don't think. If you want me to pay attention to you, either give me something I want, like a coupon, or be charming. If you had sent me a funny cartoon of yourselves yelling "Hey, buy another book or we'll starve!" I would have liked you much more.

Charlie Hustle

During a spring training game between the New York Yankees and the Cincinnati Reds, Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford threw enough bad pitches to send batter Pete Rose to first base. Instead of ambling over to first, Rose ran, and Ford mocked Rose, nicknaming him "Charlie Hustle." As a Wikipedia contributor puts it, "Despite (or perhaps because of) the manner in which Ford intended it, Rose adopted that nickname as a badge of honor."

I have never understood why trying makes a person seem uncool and ridiculous to observers. Everyone's been to a club where the dance music is booming and the lighted squares of the dance floor are changing colors and the walls are pulsing and no one is dancing because no one wants to be the first fool on the floor. I've worked many jobs where, if you wanted to get along with everybody, you had to move slowly and accomplish little. And we all know the ostracism the kid who studies for the test gets for "throwing off the curve."

Conservation of energy comes naturally to humans. Life is constant negotiation and the other guy will take you for ride if you don't watch yourself.  And I understand that pressure from above can be ridiculous. The reason my co-workers dragged butt was that some of the people we worked for would have paid us a dollar an hour and worked us sixty hours a week if they'd been allowed.

But there's covering your behind and then there's the repackaging of putting in little or no effort as being hip and knowing how to work things. It doesn't help that in the digital age, there are four people actually doing something and four billion people tweeting about it.

Well, I think trying is good. In fact, I think trying your absolute best is really good. Be an artisan, not a dabbler. If your job is awful, figure out how you got stuck doing something below your skill level.

And if there's no way around it. . .  I saw a man about seventy years old in a pizza place near a collage campus, who was putting a pizza into a brick oven with a wooden paddle. He wore impeccable swhite pants and a white shirt and a clean blue denim apron. He slid the pizza into the oven and then replaced the paddle on its hook, with a quiet graceful effort. I remember thinking, "How many pizzas has this guy baked over the years?  At the maximum, fifty a day, so three hundred a week (he looked like a six day a week kind of guy), and therefore fifteen thousand or so a year, times fifty years. One and a half million pizzas in his lifetime, and he was doing this particular pizza as if he was taking a test for his pizza certification. He took pride in what he did, and he had no idea that I was watching him. He did it for himself.

It's been true forever that some people think up one idea, or make one basket at the buzzer, or smile during one scene in a movie, and their fortune is made. The likelihood of that happening to the rest of us would fit in a gnat's navel with room left over. The rest of us are going to have to make an effort.

On the Facebook meme about people who say "I seen" instead of "I saw"

I say this about every six months. Whoever told us that Appalachians are the last culture it's okay to mock and ridicule was wrong. I wish people who can't go a day without criticizing someone else's way of life would write science fiction about dumb stupid people on a fictional planet.  At least they'd know something about the people they feel contempt for.

In particular, if non-Standard English really bothers you that much, maybe you should stay inside your house and read "good" books. Most people don't speak Standard English. S.E. is good for journalism and academic papers.

I think the recent meme about the wrongness of saying "I seen" comes from fear that the world is getting dumber and dumber. But I don't think it is. I think the difference is that the "dumb" people don't feel like they have to aspire to be middle class any more.

I've seen "Idiocracy" two or three times, and I love it. I don't want the Tea Party to put anti-science curriculums into school. I graduated from a state university and it was good for me.

 But here's the thing. When I am in a group where people think it's okay to say what they really think about "uneducated" people, they check out the room and decide everyone seems smart so it's safe. They don't realize I grew up in a factory town where everyone brought mountain culture with them. And maybe if they do suspect that, they are sure I am going to throw my own people under the bus in order to approved by people whose parents went to college.

I see what's wrong with the culture on my mother's side of the family. But I also see two things that are right about it, and both of those things I don't see in general culture that much:

1. Appalachian people are highly tolerant. You can be just as crazy as can be, or act that way, and people assume God made you like that for some special purpose only God understands. So they are not quick to find fault.

2. Appalachian people, in my family anyway, don't opine on subjects, people, and places they know nothing about that. It is not shameful to say you aren't familiar with something, and in fact, it's considered good judgement to withhold your thoughts unless you are informed.

So people outside the culture who start in with all kinds of assumptions about people who say "I seen" instead of "I saw" have lost their point with me before they've started. Maybe instead of posting mean-spirited memes, they could Google the "Foxfire" series and learn something.