Sharp Objects

** spoiler alert! ** 

This almost never happens to me, but I accidentally ruined Sharp Objects for myself. I was reading an article on female psychopaths in literature, and although I could see at a glance that Gone Girl, which I've already read, was mentioned, I had no idea that this spoiler was embedded until I had already seen it:

In the world of Flynn’s novels, female psychopaths abound. Women with minds beyond the pale, who defy explanation, who would murder a classmate and line a dollhouse floor with her teeth.

Because of that, learning the central twist of Sharp Objects, I had a much different reading experience than someone would who hadn't seen it, so I need to review it differently, too, I suppose; there was no thrill in the thriller, but the mystery did remain as the killer could plausibly have been Adora or Amma right until the end.

Camille Preacher is a mediocre newspaper journalist (by her own account) for Chicago's fourth-rated newspaper, and when a second little girl goes missing from her tiny hometown of Wind Gap, MO, Camille's editor sends her down there (against her will) to get the inside scoop. Right from the start you know there's something a bit off about Camille: She notes early on that she always takes baths instead of showers because, I can't handle the spray, it gets my skin buzzing, like someone's turned on a switch. It is eventually revealed that Camille is a self-cutter, having recently been institutionalised to recover from years of carving words into her skin. As the book progresses, whenever Camille is under stress (and who wouldn't be under stress investigating child murders and needing to stay with the unwelcoming mother and step-father that she thought she had escaped from?) different words on her body insist on her attention : I felt the word wicked blaze up by my pelvis. This happened so often that it began to feel a bit corny, but the idea of an incredibly beautiful young woman making herself grotesque was just off-kilter enough to keep it interesting.

In Wind Gap, Camille sees her 13 year old sister Amma for the first time in 10 years, initially not recognising her as the leader of a group of nasty young blondes in pushup bras and short shorts -- the type of girls who would giggle and pick over the memorial gifts, the teddy bears and candles, left at the scene where the second young girl's dead and toothless body was dumped (Aha, I said, the pulled teeth…). At home, Amma is Pollyanna in sailor dresses and hair ribbons who plays with her "fancy" -- a dollhouse that is an exact replica of the Victorian mansion their family lives in (Aha, I said, the dollhouse…). Out on the town, Amma is a Lolita-wannabe, sucking on lollypops and teasing boys and men alike. 

Camille is also forced to face her mother, a proper Southern Belle type who, as the book goes along, changes from frigid, to menacing, to deadly. I liked this scene:

My mother lunged then, grabbed me by both arms. Then she reached behind me and, with one fingernail, circled the spot on my back that had no scars.

"The only place you have left," she whispered at me. Her breath was cloying and musky, like air coming from a spring well.

"Yes."

"Someday I'll carve my name there."

Creepy, eh? This scene took Camille's point of view from petulant (why doesn't my mommy love me?) to fearful (what is my mother capable of doing?) and upped the tension just when it felt like the story was lagging. And as it turns out, Adora is indeed capable of murder -- her Munchausen by proxy syndrome killed her middle daughter, Marian, when Camille was 13, and Adora drugs and poisons Camille and Amma in order to care for them, too. It is eventually made clear that Camille's cutting is a self-directed form of this same impulse, but instead of harming others, Camille wounds herself in order to repair herself.

In an essay, Gillian Flynn explained that she was interested in writing a book about the violent side of women:

So I did. I wrote a dark, dark book. A book with a narrator who drinks too much, screws too much, and has a long history of slicing words into herself. With a mother who's the definition of toxic, and a thirteen-year-old half-sister with a finely honed bartering system for drugs, sex, control. In a small, disturbed town, in which two little girls are murdered. It's not a particularly flattering portrait of women, which is fine by me. Isn't it time to acknowledge the ugly side?

And that's pretty much what Sharp Objects accomplishes -- it isn't a nuanced portrait of small town America or an in-depth look at gender roles and expectations, but it is a shockfest, reminding us that girls and women can also perpetuate a cycle of violence through the generations. I did like when Camille told off Richard, the Kansas City homicide detective, in this scene:

"You're sexist. I'm so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting women against sexual discrimination…(S)ometimes drunk women aren't raped; they just make stupid choices -- and to say we deserve special treatment when we're drunk because we're women, to say we need to be looked after, I find offensive."

I believe that's true, but it's the only truly insightful thing I remember Flynn putting in this book. And as for the writing, there are so many metaphors and similes that Sharp Objects had an over-written feel to me, and here are a few random examples, some maybe better than others:

Richard blew a hollow toot with his beer bottle, a mating call to a passing tugboat.

My mother's voice swept high and raw, like a red scarf in a storm.

I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.

A dried-out tree rustled its branches against my window screen as if it wanted to climb in next to me for comfort.

And as for the plot, the central murder mystery and its investigation were interesting enough, ruined of course by my foreknowledge of the solution, but there were several plot points that I just didn't buy: I didn't believe that Camille, even with her messed-up psyche, so needed to be one of the cool girls that she would agree to do drugs with her 13 year old sister, and especially the Rolling Roulette scene; I didn't believe that, the same day as she had sex with Richard with her clothes on (the first time she had done so in 10 years), she would have fully naked sex with a vulnerable 18 year old kid (the first time she had done that in 14 years); I didn't believe that the frightened and bullied girl Jodes could keep the murders a secret; and I didn't believe that when Camille went to tell Richard that she thought her mother was a killer, he told her to go home and act natural because he had already planned to execute a search warrant on her house the next day. 

In the final analysis, this wasn't a great work of literature, but it wasn't unenjoyable, either -- I would rate it slightly above Gone Girl, perhaps 3.5 stars. Darn spoiler.

One more interesting quote:

Thank goodness for Bobby. Three years after the disappointing Ann -- was he an accident or one last shot of brio? -- Bobby was given his dad's name, was doted on, and the little girls suddenly realized how extraneous they were. Especially Ann. No one needs a third girl.

There are quite a few instances in Sharp Objects where Camille wonders if families are happy to have all girls, or young mothers want to have just one more baby to get that boy, or in one case that girl, that will make their families perfect. Even though it's a common enough worldview (maybe especially in a small Southern town?), it feels put on with Camille -- after all, her mother had three daughters and her specific brand of mothering and smothering doesn't seem like it would transfer to a son -- I get the impression that in her own family, there wasn't any disappointment in having a third girl; it's probably exactly what Adora hoped for.

And what's so great about having sons anyway in our post-hunting and -farming world? When I was pregnant with Kennedy, I just wanted a healthy baby, and when she was born, she was exactly what I wanted. When I was pregnant with Mallory, part of me did hope for a boy -- not because I think they're better than girls, but because the image of the boy + girl = "Millionaire's Family" was successfully imprinted on me -- and when my beautiful second daughter was born, she was exactly what I wanted. And know why we didn't have a third child? There was no outcome that would have been good for Mallory -- if we had a boy, it would look like we kept having babies until we got what we really wanted. If we had a girl, Mal would have been the Jan Brady of the family and who would do that on purpose? Dave was also happy to have two girls -- he's not a hunter or a farmer or a hockey Dad with NHL dreams (he was actually happy neither of them was interested in playing hockey at all); there's nothing he would want to do with a son that he can't do with his girls -- the trips they make to Fan Expo and comic book stores together attests to that. 

If this blog is meant to be in part a record of the truth of my family, believe this -- neither of our daughters was a disappointment to us, most certainly not because they were daughters -- and that isn't just something we told ourselves after the fact. Both these girls were planned for and wanted and cherished from the moment they first lay on my bare chest and howled into my face.

And another thing that struck me: In the quote above where Camille is calling Richard sexist for practising reverse-sexism, she was internally thinking about her first sexual experience. At 13, Camille had gotten drunk and allowed herself to be passed around four football players at a party. When she referred to the incident as something that happened to "a girl in town", Richard was shocked and said that that certainly is rape. Camille challenged him -- is it because of the age of the girl that makes it rape? Could a grown woman go out drinking and decide to hook up with four men? As the mother of daughters, of course I want them to be safe and protected from harm at all times -- but I also think they need to take responsibility for themselves, too. Case in point:

Within the last year, there has been the tragedy of the suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons, a 15 year old girl who went to a party, got very drunk and had sex with one or more of the guys there. As she was hanging out a window, barfing presumably, one of the guys was photographed with his groin grinding into her bare butt, apparently having sex. When that picture began circulating around school, when the slut-shaming began, the girl claimed she must have been raped, and she ended up hanging herself. The story is so terribly sad and preventable and of course the boys should be charged with something -- taking and circulating a picture like that has since been criminalized in Canada, and that's a good start towards making this not happen again, something has to change culturally with young people today -- but according to Rehtaeh's friend's eyewitness account, it all looked pretty consensual. Was it rape exactly? Was 15 too young to give consent? Should every young guy be programmed to believe that a drunk girl who says yes really means no? I believe there's a campaign to that effect on University campuses, and maybe that is the right solution -- it would protect the young men involved too after all -- but what of Camille's claim that, "I'm so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting women against sexual discrimination"? The character would have us believe that, at 13, she knew exactly what she was doing when she gave herself to the football team. Even her sister Amma, also 13, says, "Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them,"  explaining that letting people behave like monsters gives you the power of making them monsters. 13. Know what I remember about 13? I thought I was grownup -- I was my full height and pretty much had my adult body by then. I wasn't giving myself to the football team -- or to anyone else -- but I really did think then, and actually considered it in hindsight through the years when terrible child killer stories came out in the news, that everything I did was with the full knowledge of consequences. If the Columbine shooters had survived their attack, I think they should have been tried as adults -- they knew what they were doing (mental illness is a separate issue). But back to sexual consent and what this really made me think of:

When I was 17, my good friend Curtis and I were out for a drive and when we stopped to talk, as we often did, he nervously told me that there was a book under my seat that he wanted me to look at. I pulled out a book that was called something like How to Tell People That You're Gay. Now, this was Lethbridge, redneck bible-country, and I would have sworn that I had never met a gay person in my life. It was also the early 80's and we all knew we were supposed to be afraid of the gays and their AIDS. Yet, it took me about a second to process the situation and I said, "Okay, what do you want to talk about?" He was relieved (I was the first person he had told) and we talked, me cautiously asking questions that I had hoped weren't too personal -- did he have a boyfriend, did he ever?

He told me that his first encounter was with a friend of his mother's and it was nurturing and eye-opening and a loving introduction to the real truth of his existence. I was creeped out by the idea that this was a man old enough to be his father -- I wouldn't want for a girlfriend to tell me a similar story about some old guy -- but Curtis assured me that this was a normal introduction to the male gay community. I don't remember now if he had been 14 or 15 during his first encounter, but at the time, and even now in retrospect, I do believe it was consensual. But although his experience was reportedly not coerced, there obviously must be a cutoff age for consent -- Mohammed marrying a 9 year old when he was in his 70s is objectively wrong, but was Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13 year old cousin really so wrong when it was culturally accepted where they were from? On the other hand, where child marriages are culturally accepted around the world today, that doesn't make them right...

Some interesting topics to muse upon...


Edit added the next day:

Honestly, I don't care now nor did I ever care about who is gay or bi or whatever, but the definitions have changed so much since I was a teenager (I never heard of "two-spirited" until recently, and also recently new to me has been seeing people arguing on internet forums about whether there's any such thing as "gender" anyway), and I am happy that our girls are also open-minded, but this conversation last night was a head-scratcher to me.

Mallory mentioned a boy from school and Kennedy said, "Is he gay?"

Mallory replied, "Yeah. Totally gay."

"I thought he told me bi once," said Kennedy.

"No," replied Mal, "totally gay. And now he's with Amanda."

"Wait a minute, Amanda's a girl, right?"

"She's a binary," explained Mal. "Right now her binary is set to male."

"Oh, okay."

So, the totally gay guy is with a girl, whose binary is currently set to male, and that's not, somehow, a heterosexual relationship? Whatever floats your boat...

Cape Breton Road

There he was, lost. The sun he'd kept on his left shoulder had gone, absorbed into a sky cold as milk, and the wind that he'd remembered as east, east on his face, had dodged somehow around, leaping at him in different directions, confusing him in showers of dry leaves. Small clearings of light in deep spruce and fir and stripped hardwoods mocked him as he plunged first towards one, then another…City boy without a city.

It is the 1970s and the long-haired Innis Corbett certainly is lost -- born in Cape Breton, but raised in a Boston suburb, Innis was deported back to Canada after a string of luxury car thefts. Forced to move in with a begrudging uncle he doesn't know, in a wooded setting both foreign and remote, the 19 year old Innis is forced to decide what kind of man he will become.

As Cape Breton Road begins, Innis is removing the brush from a clearing in the woods where he has planned to transplant some pot plants that he has taking root in his uncle's attic. Assured that a dozen plants could earn him ten grand, and believing his plan to be without risk, Innis sees the crop as his ticket off the island -- away from the hard-drinking, womanising uncle and the nosy but well-meaning strangers who all know more of his history, what people he belongs to, than Innis himself does -- and once off Cape Breton, Innis would finally have a chance to start over with a clean slate. Although at first impulsive and bitter (and especially resentful about the way that his mother could have allowed him to be deported), as Innis explores the woods and builds his body up through hard work, he develops a respect for nature and himself that bodes well for his future. When Uncle Starr has his latest girlfriend, Claire, move into the home, the sexual tension builds up to the point where Innis doesn't know if he can wait for his cash crop to mature before he's forced to either escape or explode.

By the time the book ends (after Starr has destroyed the nearly mature pot plants, Innis steals an unguarded Cadillac -- which he wrecks as he desperately attempts to warn Starr that he had impulsively added deadly Hemlock to his uncle's water supply before attempting to run away), Innis has lost all of the ground he had gained and reminded me of Holden Caulfield in the way that, on the verge of becoming a man, neither character was able to control his impulses and behaved in a knowingly self-destructive manner. Like a typical anti-hero, I wanted for Innis to succeed at growing and selling the pot so that he could get that second chance, but as a well developed and sympathetic character, I hoped that Innis could see that the ancestral home he never knew might be where he belonged after all; that the slate he worked to clean might be the one worth having.

In Cape Breton Road, D. R. MacDonald writes beautiful and naturalistic scenes of the woods and the water, capturing nuances of light and shadow and mood. So too does he capture the nuances of people and relationships and their ties to the land and each other. Thoughts and memories are brought up organically alongside the current action (none of that clumsy "it reminded him of the time when…") and small vignettes capture the setting in a way that transported me there:

There was no person anywhere, but a little building off behind a cyclone fence, and further along on the other side of a small lake, a solitary trailer, accessible only by a causeway with a locked cyclone gate. A day's workclothes beat like drab flags on a line strung from the trailer to a pole. Shirt, trousers, socks. Something forlorn in all that, fluttering out flat in a cold wind, the guy shut away inside the trailer by himself, his lonely stuff hanging outside, his underwear.

MacDonald is a masterful writer and I am humbled to have not met him before -- honestly, more people should be reading his books than I see evidence of. Cape Breton Road is filled with fascinating people (I especially liked the aged Dan Rory of the second sight) and intriguing events (I especially liked the motley gathering of the clans at the ostensible Gaelic college) -- and everyone and everything fits together just so; masterful in the way that it slowly captured my imagination and touched my heart with such seemingly effortless prose. Like Newfoundland, Cape Breton must be one of those "thin places" that the old folks talk about; for although the setting of this book is far away in time and place, it feels like it's sitting, just there, at the end of my fingertips; timeless; a place I could gladly visit on the page of a book again and again.

It's funny that every book about juvenile delinquents reminds me of my big brother Ken -- my younger brother, Kyler, also got into trouble but we were like the moon to our older brother's Earth; easily lost in his eclipsing presence. Maybe some day I'll tell some stories here about Kye, too, but as a private kind of person, maybe he wouldn't appreciate that too much. Ken, on the other hand, is fascinatingly, perpetually, shameless.

I know I've probably said here before that Ken was a teenaged car thief. He says that when he was 13 or so, he used to sneak out of the house at night and drive our Dad's car into Toronto (about 45 minutes away at the time). Just for the joyride. Imagine the self-centered and thoughtless nerve that takes: I'm the mother of a level-headed 18 year old, and I get a bit nervous when she drives her car, legally, into Toronto in the light of day. But that was Ken -- he always took just exactly whatever he wanted: Any food in the house; my money (that he'd strong-arm out of me); any money he found lying around in our mother's purse. 

I think Ken was about 14 when he decided to go big time. Ken planned to sleep over at his friend Marc Lalonde's house. Marc lived in a foster home out in the country, and while the sleepover might have seemed a bit unusual in retrospect, it was okayed at the time. In the middle of the night, Ken and Marc snuck out and stole a car from a home across the street. In a weird bit of symmetry, this car belonged to the sister of my longtime elementary school "boyfriend", Timmy Burns. Ken and Marc planned to drive this car out to Alberta where they both had family (*see my Uncle Mike after my last book review), and as only impulsive and unthinking adolescents could plan it, they believed that just showing up on their doorsteps would oblige distant relatives to take them in. 

Of course they didn't make it to Alberta -- the police caught up with them in northern Ontario -- but this event precipitated the downward spiral of Ken's delinquency and our parents' anger and despair. His most fascinating story from this trip: High on pot and listening to Black Sabbath, Marc sketched out a pentagram in the dirt at the roadside where they had stopped one night and he invited Ken to enter the pentagram and give himself over to Satan. Can you believe I don't remember whether Ken did or not?

When Ken was 16, our family moved out to Alberta anyway, a transfer my Dad wanted partly to give Ken a fresh start. He was still a pot-smoking, school-skipping delinquent, though, and eventually moved out and I never saw him around. When I was in grade 12, my parents went away for the weekend -- that never happened -- and Kyler and I had a bit of a party. While he and his friends did whatever downstairs, my best friend and her boyfriend were (likely) having drunken sex in my bed while I slept (chastely but romantically) beside my boyfriend in my parents' bed. I don't know how Ken heard that our parents were away, but he and some friends bust into the house and started yelling at Kyler that he had come for his childhood bedroom furniture, and he also needed the keys to Dad's truck to move it. I heard Kye say that I had the keys, and although I dove to lock the door, Ken picked the lock and burst in, and after a brief bit of wrestling, he took the keys, the furniture and the truck. By this time, my parents were so used to his lawlessness, that, after they got home, they didn't even seem to react to the news of what Ken had done, didn't care about the lost furniture if he needed it, and were just glad the truck had been returned safely. As Kyler and I didn't want to prolong any investigation into what we had been up to at the time, I didn't press just how frightening the encounter with my own brother had been.

In another bit of symmetry with Innis from Cape Breton Road, when Ken had later pretty much burned all of his bridges in Lethbridge (there's some story I only half overheard about Ken stealing a Snap-On Tools truck; some event that our Dad called in a bunch of favours on to keep Ken out of jail), he moved down to PEI, back to our roots, to live with our grandparents until he could get back on his feet. I believe that, just like Innis, he soon found that being surrounded by people who know your whole history, and that of your parents, isn't a do-over at all: reading this book, I felt Innis' pain as though it was my brother's.

Eventually Ken moved back home with us -- he was maybe 20 by then and looking at going back to school (by which I mean, finishing high school). One of the first things he did was go into Kyler's room when he wasn't home, take a pair of sweatpants from him (which Kye would have bought for himself, as we were both expected to buy our own clothes with our part-time job money) and then Ken cut them off, jaggedly, into a pair of shorts -- making them useless to Kyler. This is still a story Kyler will refer to with great bitterness nearly 30 years later. But it was just the same old Ken -- taking anything he wanted.

The happy news is that Ken did turn himself around -- he is married with kids, a beautiful home, a challenging and rewarding job -- but there was a long time when it looked like it could have gone either way. It is entirely likely that I connected so deeply with Cape Breton Road because I wanted Innis to realise that he wasn't stuck on the self-destructive path; that clean slates and do-overs do exist.

Ken and his kids trying to act like gangsters-- if they only knew, lol

Another reason why I liked this book so much is that, although Cape Breton is an island I've never been to, it is off the coast of and connected by bridge to Nova Scotia -- where our parents now live. The forests that Innis tromps through might well be made up of the same trees and undergrowth as the woods behind my Dad's barn; it's familiar territory. When Innis is swimming or boating in the rocky cove, I know I've been there, too -- that sounds just like the cold and steely water off White Point where we once watched some brave body surfers taking to the water.

Don't be fooled by the apparent sunshine...

Funny, really, how much symmetry I found between this book and my real life, and if someone were to accuse me of over-rating it because of that, I would remain steadfast in my -- highly subjective -- opinions. Some Nova Scotia scenes:

Boating...

Planking...

Dripping wet at Peggy's Cove

Sunset on my parents' cove

And I should really end by saying that my own girls, at 18 and 15 right now, are really great kids -- if they have ever gotten up to any mischief, they've been discreet about it since it never got back to me. And believe me, after the house I grew up in, I know how lucky I am to live in such a peaceful home now.

Edit from August 9/14:

I had reproduced Ken's hitch-hiking adventure here as well as I could remember it after 30+ years, but having heard the stories again, I have reproduced them here more faithfully. I'm not going to correct what I've written above because I think it serves as a look at how memories change over time. I was sure that he slept over at the Lalondes' the night he first ran away. And was sure he took off with Marc, not John.

Cutting for Stone

Foreigners, whose only image of Ethiopia was that of starving people sitting in blinding dust, were disbelieving when they landed in the mist and chill of Addis Ababa at night and saw the boulevards and tram-track lights of Churchill Road.

Terrible jokes:Q: Have you ever tasted Ethiopian food? A: Neither have they. Q: What do you call a 65 pound Ethiopian? A: A cannibal. Q: How do Ethiopians camouflage themselves? A: They stand sideways. Q: What do you call an Ethiopian with a bag of rice? A: Set for life. 

Abraham Verghese was born in Ethiopia to Indian parents and became a doctor, eventually moving to the United States to complete his training, and he loosely uses this narrative for the main character of Cutting for Stone, Marion, and, other than the move to the U.S., for Marion's conjoined twin, Shiva (okay, the twins are half Indian and half colonial-Brit-from-India, and are raised by adoptive Indian parents -- but it's pretty much the same thing.) Like a typical foreigner, I suppose, I too think of Ethiopia as a famine-ravaged wasteland instead of the misty mountain-top metropolis of Addis Ababa, and where Verghese most succeeds in this book is in bringing the actual Ethiopia to life. The setting and history and politics of Ethiopia was an enjoyable education for me, but so far as Cutting for Stone is a work of fiction, I found it lacking in art. As a surgeon and a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Verghese writes like -- a surgeon: He surveyed his subject and slit open its belly, allowing the 7 or 8 meters of bowels to spill out onto the table. After examining its length and taking copious and jargon-filled notes, the slippery tube was crammed back into its host and the various enclosing layers were stitched up, one at a time, neatly using two-handed stitches and carefully rotating the scissors to forty-five degrees to snip each knot, keeping everything nice and tidy. 

Even the title was not nearly as profound as I think it's meant to be. The Hippocratic Oath includes, "I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest: I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art." So, GPs shouldn't attempt surgery (specifically to remove gall or kidney stones) but rather leave these matters to specialists -- yet nearly every doctor in Cutting for Stone becomes a specialist of some sort because they experiment and push the boundaries of their knowledge, whether it's Shiva with his Fistula repairs, Ghosh becoming Missing's surgeon without specialised training and by default, or Thomas pioneering the field of liver transplants (and if the ultimate lesson is that Thomas shouldn't have "cut for stone" because it cost Shiva's life, that's not really fair because, not only did Shiva have a specific and undetected flaw that put him at risk, but the techniques Thomas developed went on to save hundreds or thousands of other lives). And the fact that Thomas and his sons had the surname Stone didn't make it more meaningful -- this felt forced and blunt. By the by, also forced was the notion of a "Missing" hospital -- a clerical error become fact based on the Ethiopian lisping of the intended "Mission" hospital's name -- that led to the very unsubtle "Missing Finger" and "Missing Letters" and "Missing People" and even "Missing is missing"

As for fact-cramming, I have some longish quotes here that hopefully approximate what I mean -- I had a constant awareness of information being listed off to me but I wasn't marking passages at the time and these were the best I could find after the fact:

Bachelli was lost in the memory of boarding his troop ship in Naples in 1934; he was a young officer again in the 230th legion of the national Fascist Militia, off to fight for Il Duce, off to capture Abyssinia, off to expunge the shame of being defeated at the battle of Adowa by Emperor Menelik in 1896. At Adowa, ten thousand Italian soldiers, with as many of their Eritrean askaris, poured down from their colony to invade and take Ethiopia. They were defeated by Emperor Menelik's barefoot Ethiopian fighters armed with spears and Remingtons (sold to them by none other than Rimbaud). No European army had ever been so thoroughly thrashed in Africa. It stuck in the Italian craw, so that even men who weren't born at the time of Adowa, like Bachelli, grew up wanting vengeance.

Ghosh didn't understand any of this till he came to Africa. He hadn't realised that Menelik's victory had inspired Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa Movement, and that it had awakened Pan-African consciousness in Kenya, the Sudan, and the Congo.

^ That didn't feel to me like the natural or organic thoughts of someone sitting in a bar, and the following is typical of the way we are introduced to new settings:

The Avakians were locking up their bottled-gas store, and beyond their shop the lights of the Piazza, the transitory illusions of Roma, came to an end. Now it was all darkness, and the road ran past the long, gloomy, fortresslike stone wall that held up the hillside. A gash in the moss-covered stones was Saba Dereja -- Seventy Steps -- a pedestrian shortcut to the roundabout at Sidist Kilo, though the steps were so worn down that it was more a ramp than stairs, treacherous when it rained. He drove past the Armenian church, then around the obelisk at Arat Kilo -- another war monument at a roundabout -- past the Gothic spires and domes of the Trinity Cathedral and then the Parliament Building, which took its inspiration from the one on the banks of the Thames. At the Old Palace, because he was not quite ready to go home, he turned down to Casa INCES, a neighborhood of pretty villas.

^ That bit didn't bring Addis Ababa to life for me, but Verghese was more successful when he populated the city with people, and especially the students and revolutionaries and the Emperor Haile Selassie himself. (Although if he had to fudge the dates of the various revolutions and counter-revolutions to fit his storyline, I don't know why he didn't just amend his storyline…) I thought that many of the operations and clinic visits were very interesting, the jargon was necessary and not too hard to understand, but the following (and there were more such passages) was hopelessly arcane:

Braithwaite pointed to a vein coursing over the pylorus. He asked Thomas what it was.

"The pyloric vein of Mayo, sir…" Thomas said, and appeared about to add something. Braithwaite waited, but Thomas was done.

"Yes, that's what it's called, though I think that vein was there long before Mayo spotted it, don't you think? Why do you think he took the trouble to name it?"

"I believe it was a useful landmark to identify the prepyloric from the pyloric area when operating on an infant with pyloric stenosis."

"That's right," Braithwaite said. "They should really call it the prepyloric vein."

"That would be better, sir. Because the right gastric vein is also referred to in some books as the 'pyloric vein'. Which is very confusing."

"Indeed, it is, Stone," Braithwaite said, surprised that this student had picked up on something that even surgeons with a special interest in the stomach might not know. "If we have to give it an eponym, maybe call it the vein of Mayo if we must, or even the vein of Laterjet, which seems to me much the same thing. Just don't call it pyloric."

Some characters were interesting, like Hema and Ghosh, and I would have liked to have known them better; some characters remained flat and undeveloped throughout, like Marion and Shiva and Genet -- which is really curious since they are the main characters; and some were veiled in mystery, like Thomas and Sister Mary Joseph Praise, who, when their full back stories were finally revealed near the end, evoked from me a weak and dejected, "Meh". If I was meant to think that Marion was a complex and tragic figure, the following rape scene killed all empathy I had for him (and most especially because the character and I both know that Genet had been the victim of female genital mutilation as a child; that he was raping her through her scars):

Suddenly I was on top of her, tearing away the sheet, tearing away her towel, clumsy but determined. She was startled, the muscles of her neck taut like cables. I grabbed her head and kissed her.

"Wait", she whispered, "shouldn't you…"

But I was already inside her.

She winced.

…break to explain that this was Marion's first time because he's the good guy…

She wept under me. After a long time, she gently caressed my head, tried to kiss me. She said, "I need to go to the bathroom."

I ignored her. I was aroused again. I began to move inside her once more.

"Please, Marion," she said.

Without removing myself from within her, I rolled onto my back, holding her, flipping her, and setting her on top of me, her breasts hovering over me.

"You need to pee? Go ahead," I said, my breath coming quick. "You've done that before, too."

I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to me hard. I smelled her fever, and the scent of blood and sex and urine. I came again. 

Then I let go. I let her slide off.

When we later learn that Marion contracted Hepatitis from this assault, I could only think, "Good". And as an aside -- the incident referred to here, where as a child Genet had spread-eagled herself over Marion and peed on him as a warning, was, I thought, one of the most memorable events in the book. I was really disappointed, therefore, to read in the Acknowledgements that this was based on a scene in some book the author once read but can't recall. Also, many of his best aphorisms ("A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth" or "Call no man happy until he dies") were taken from other works.

And so, to return to my metaphor, Verghese the surgeon lays bare the guts of his storyline and then crams them back in, checking off each step on the blackboard in his operating room as he goes along (Betrayal that leads to estrangement? Check. Tragedy that leads to reconciliation? Check. Coincidental meetings that lead to confrontation and resolution? Check, check and check) and then, with the help of a few more coincidences and a final catharsis, all loose ends are tied up and the storyline is sent off, healthy and whole. Parts of this book are very good (I really did like the adventurous bits like Thomas and Sister Mary Joseph Praise on their boat voyage or Marion's escape through Eritrea or Hema's encounter with the pilot of her plane), and Verghese assembles them together with a cool and clinical eye, but the overall effect for me lacked heart and depth. I suspect a reader will like Cutting for Stone in direct proportion to the profundity read into this conclusion:

According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphor, fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

I remember last Christmas (2012) that my sister-in-law's mother asked me if I had read Cutting for Stone, and when I admitted that I hadn't, she recommended it highly, based on her book club's enjoyment of it. Barb is a nurse and I wonder if that's why she thought it was so profound -- if it felt like it was somehow telling her story, so I'll forgive the recommendation. (Cutting for Stone also has a very high goodreads rating -- 4.25 as of now -- so it seemed like a safe bet in any case.) 

As I was just talking about Barb and my aunt Judi after my last review, I thought maybe I'd talk just a bit more about Judi and her nursing career here. 

Judi and Barb were nurses together at an Ottawa hospital and Barb told Laura once that all of the nurses marvelled at how money-hungry my aunt was -- always volunteering for overtime and stat holidays, and especially Christmas which Judi worked every year, despite having three kids at home. When we occasionally went up to visit them, it certainly was impressive how they lived -- first in a big fancy house with a pool and furnished with beautiful antiques (even in the kids' rooms) and later in a log home they had custom-made in the country. Judi was also notoriously cheap --  from serving powdered milk to buying all of my uncle's clothes at Value Village (which was only embarrassing the one time a coworker remarked that Dennis' sweater looked just like the one of his that his wife had recently donated).

As I've stated here before, if something wasn't any of our goddamn business, my brothers and I were unlikely to be told much of anything, so I can only piece the following together from conversations overheard over the years (also note that google isn't coming up with any results for me even though I know this once made the papers):

Apparently one time, as was very customary at the hospital where she worked, when Judi couldn't find a doctor to order the meds that she was certain a patient needed, my aunt just went ahead and administered them. And the patient died. The lovely teenaged girl died and her parents demanded answers and the rolling of heads (and what parent wouldn't?) Even though any nurse in her position, apparently, would have done the same, the College of Nurses had to make an example of Judi and she was stripped of her license, fired, and she may have even lost her pension over it.

However badly she felt about the young girl dying, and of course she must have felt terrible, Judi was also devastated by the loss of income -- this really messed with my aunt and uncle's retirement plans (she would have been in her early 50s at the time). And so she did what she had to do -- Judi hired herself out as a housecleaner. (She has delighted in telling me a couple of times about the one client who couldn't help but remark how weird it was to see Judi pull her mop and bucket out of the trunk of a convertible Mercedes, har har.) She did what she had to do until my uncle retired and they could build a modest (it's really quite beautiful) home back in the small community they both came from; they had adjusted their plans and knew they would have enough.

Meanwhile, my cousin Shelley, their daughter, had a baby, and being on her own, moved out to be close to them. Soon enough, with a different deadbeat guy, she had another baby, a boy with special needs, and still being a single parent, and either with grave medical conditions or a penchant for faking them (as the doctors suggest), Shelley has not worked and has been on social assistance since they were born. (Oh, she did work for a bit at first, but being a Practical Nurse who visited patients' homes and a drug addict,  Shelley  soon stole enough meds to get blackballed from the profession.) Living in social housing, Shelley repeatedly had neighbours call Child Social Services on her for the way she screamed at her kids, and eventually my aunt and uncle bought her her own house. I could only imagine how that impacted their retirement plans.

A few years ago I attended a wedding for another one of my cousins down there and I thought I knew everything I needed to know about these people -- my uncle in particular is a creepy piece of work who always seemed to put himself first and was prone to telling inappropriate jokes and obsessed with asking people how much money they make. It was, therefore, a gentle surprise for me to see Dennis with his grandson, the boy with special needs. Dennis called the boy over to him and sat him on his lap and patiently explained what he was doing as he tied the boy's shoelace. After the boy raced back to the dancefloor, Dennis said to me, "He's going to need a lot of help from us, for his whole life. Thank God we've got the energy and the money to make that happen."

I don't know what the lesson is from all of this -- did Judi and Dennis learn what was really important in the end? Were they subconsciously compelled to make as much money as possible because they would eventually need more than they ever could have imagined -- or was the boy sent by the fates to punish their hubris? Isn't there a strange symmetry between my aunt killing a girl with unauthorised meds and my cousin first stealing and then malingering to obtain unauthorised meds? If it was a work of fiction, would it all come off as too neat and tidy?

And while I'm thinking of Shelley: When I was 13 or 14 (and Shelley 1 year younger than I am), my family went to Ottawa for Christmas, and as an added bonus, my mother's youngest brother Mike was also there. We didn't see him often but we assumed he was incredibly cool since he is only 8 years older than my big brother, Ken, and he had long hippy hair and a biker moustache. As always happened when we visited there, I shared Shelley's bed with her and one night she asked, "Don't you think Mike is really good looking?" I slapped her playfully and said, "Ew gross. He's our uncle." But she insisted, "That doesn't mean you can't tell if he's good looking or not." And I insisted: "No. He's our uncle. I could never think of him that way."

The next day we went somewhere in the car, me and Shelley in the backseat, and my Mom and Mike up front, and when we stopped and my mother got out, Shelley said, "Know what Uncle Mike? Last night Krista said you're sooo good looking and she wants to make out with you."

Mike never even turned around, pretended not to hear, and I was trapped between protesting and knowing that protesting would do me no good, I gabbled something like, "No I...but you...I didn't..."

And as Shelley grinned evilly at me, no doubt her revenge for me not playing along the night before, all I could do was shut up and turn to the window, very careful not to look anywhere near the front seat.

And while I'm remembering that visit: At a different time, Mike showed us all the engagement ring he was going to give his girlfriend, Carlene, when he returned to Calgary. Now, Carlene was a tiny, tiny woman -- she complained to me once that the only clothes that really fit her were from the kids' department and it was impossible to put together a sexy look from the kids' department, haha -- so the ring was incredibly tiny around. I was overwhelmed by the romanticism of it all, like any young girl would be, and I gushed, "It's just so little." Mike blushed and mumbled something about it being all that he could afford, and I marvelled at how romantic that was -- wanting to buy a ring but not being able to afford all the gold required to go around her tiny finger. Of course, I realised my mistake in a flash of memory years later -- Mike must have thought I was calling the diamond little and he was probably really embarrassed by my statement.

Maybe he thought I was a social freak after that visit, but at least I was spared the consciousnesses of that second humiliation, lol.

God is Not Great

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from a period of human prehistory where nobody had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs).

I don't argue with the above quote -- I'm not an overly religious person -- but there was something in Christopher Hitchens' tone in God is Not Great that got my back up (maybe it was the frequent use of puerile insults like "babyish" to describe the faithful) and, instead of always listening carefully to this audiobook, I kept distractedly framing counterarguments and I may as well begin with one: It would be very easy for me to write a book called Love is not Great : How Marriage Poisons Everything. I could have chapters on Bluebeard-type serial wife killers and on Warren Jeffs marrying off young girls to lecherous old goats. I could write at length about abused spouses who feel trapped in their marriages. Dowries and polygamy and Henry VIII -- it would be fairly easy to paint marriage as a social custom whose time has passed, a left-over of pre-Enlightenment thinking. And while, yes, there are extreme and terrible things that can be done within and in the name of "marriage", I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater -- religion and marriage are found in all cultures, they are among what the Anthropologist Donald Brown calls Human Universals, and I believe that they are both social goods, stabilising forces, and if they're seen by some to be as vestigial and useless as my floppy pink appendix, to me they still satisfy whatever they are meant to in my lizard brain. I believe that the fact that both religion and marriage are in decline in our western society can be seen in the various ways that our society itself appears to be in decline.

Hitchens spends a lot of time pointing out the contradictions within and outright fallacies of the various religious texts, and this was nothing new to me -- with respect to Saint Gabriel and the Holy Spirit, these books were written by mere mortal men after all. He also spends a lot of time describing extreme practises that the average person would be revolted by (female genital mutilation and the Hassidic practise of having the Rabbi remove a circumcised foreskin with his mouth) and instances of systemic rot (the Catholic cover-up of child rape and North Korea's "necrocracy"). He points out that various models of religious good works, like Gandhi or Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King Jr, were not actually such good people after all. And again, none of this was news to me -- these are all the actions of people and people are capable of doing terrible things; especially people with power; and in many cases, religion is power. 

But I don't think that Hitchens makes his case that all religion is bad. To use his own example: A Sudanese cabdriver went to great lengths to return a large sum of money to the author and was offended when he was offered a reward -- he explained that his Muslim faith prevented him from profiting from doing the right thing. And while Hitchens was amazed by this, I think that the vast majority of religious people -- those who humbly follow the Ten Commandments/the Golden Rule/the Five Pillars/whatever basic precepts have stood the test of time -- are well-meaning non-fanatics. Again, the problem with organised religion is the ways in which the people in power corrupt the message.

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

After making that statement, asserting that the New Atheism is in no way a religion itself, Hitchens calls on Charles Darwin a dozen times, using his theory of Natural Selection and the resulting theory of Evolution as absolute proof that there could not have been a creator God (in a manner that sounded to me like Darwin's was the only true gospel) . I wonder, then, what Hitch would have made of his fellow atheist Thomas Nagel's recent book Mind & Cosmos that argues that the theory of Evolution can't explain human consciousness and should therefore be considered invalid or at least incomplete. Just this week, a group of scientists and intellectuals proposed that Evolution be one among many outdated beliefs that should be retired. Similar arguments could be made against the theories of Freud and Einstein, both of whom Hitchens also treats as canonical to his worldview. 

With the undeniably wicked deeds done in the name of organised religions, I certainly wouldn't try to make a case for their infallibility, but the onus here was on Hitchens to prove his thesis -- that God is not great and that religion poisons everything -- and I think he fell short. As I said, I'm not religious, but when I attend Midnight Mass and the choir is filling the vaulted ceiling with the soaring minor chords that I can feel in my bones, when the incense is burning and the candles are flickering, as I'm surrounded by hundreds of other people who have come together in a communal act of worship and praise -- the feeling of awe and belonging that I experience is unmatched by any secular experience that I know. Religion has endured because religion is necessary to the human psyche -- the rot is in the all too human actions of self-interested religious leaders.

Two things that I found very interesting: Hitchens' apparently original conclusion that ancient sanctions against eating pork was a guard against cannibalism (I've heard of the "long pork" many times) and his reference to the Gospel of Judas. (I might be a closet Gnostic.)

Christopher Hitchens was a noted intellectual and a fearsome debater -- I would no doubt have been a stammering jellyfish in his presence -- but on a topic like this that he was so passionate about, I expected more.

And in a final aside for my own remembrance, at one point Hitchens sneers: It could be argued that (Moses) preferred to speak of himself in the third person, though this habit is now well associated with megalomania. And although Hitchens died before Joseph Anton was published, I wonder what he would have made of his great friend Salman Rushdie's use of the megalomaniac third person in his own memoir.

And some personal stories about religion:

My mother resents her Catholic upbringing on the one hand and put us into Catholic schools when we were kids on the other. Having never even been to a church since Baptism, the first time there was a mass at St. Mark's,  Ken and I were embarrassed to be the only two kids who didn't seem to know the required actions and responses -- and when Communion began and everyone was lining up, I shot a desperate look at my big brother and he motioned for me to join the line. That was how we became practising Catholics even if we might have been acting like goggle-eyed  bumpkins. Being young enough, Kyler was the only one of us to have an actual First Communion ceremony -- and I don't remember even then my mother wondering what became of me and Ken; she probably just figured that it was "taken care of" at school.

At St. Mark's, naturally, my friends were all Catholics and I eventually became a member of that community -- especially since my friends all lived out of town and it was convenient for sleepovers if I met up with them at a Saturday mass or was dropped off at the one on Sunday.  How strange that my mother didn't resent me joining in the religion that must have disappointed her so much. And I don't even know the details of her self-exile except for some unflattering stories about the nuns who taught her and the one time she spat out that she would happily rejoin the church if they started to ordain women priests -- and this is my first example of how religion poisons everything.

My mother often comes up with these radical feminist statements, even though she really doesn't have any feminist background, but I will concede that I'll never know what it was like to live before the radical changes of the 70s. (I'll digress for a story: When my parents had three babies in under four years, all failures of birth control, my father said, "You have to do something about this. If you keep having kids we'll end up in the poorhouse."  Being a dutiful housewife, my mother went to her doctor to ask about a tubal ligation. He told her she would need to appear before a panel of doctors, and when she did, these wise and judicious men told her that she was too young to have the operation. When my father heard this, he went to a doctor himself and had a vasectomy within weeks. Reproductive control is not the least of what the radical feminists achieved; something we take for granted today.) But when my mother made her statement about ordaining women priests, I made some smart-alec statement about how she should just join the Anglicans or Uniteds if she wanted to see change, and while she was at it, she could ask that dwindling congregation how they like their lesbian bishop and if they agreed that they should just stop talking about God altogether (like some church in Toronto recently did -- wish I could find the article -- because they wanted to focus their resources on social justice instead of spiritual matters). My point wasn't about gay-bashing or a sneering contempt for people who focus on justice, but so many churches, in reaction to the changing times, have changed their purpose for being -- so many churches don't seem to be churches anymore -- and if the Catholic Church wants to make a claim to be the one, true church that represents the will of God, then it needs to remain consistent. I don't have a problem with only men being ordained priests, women are capable of serving in their own ways, but I will risk sounding hypocritical by saying that I do agree that priests should be able to marry -- not only to curb sexual repression but because I believe a pastor's partner can be a great help. Anyway, this is all I know about my mother's resentment, that and:

At the end of my grandfather's long and saintly life, he was profoundly disturbed and shaken by the early reports of the child rape that had happened at the hands of parish priests and he wanted to talk to his own priest about it. I won't project any motivations on the man, but he refused to talk with my Pop about it, and this rebuff just added to my grandfather's sorrow.

Meanwhile, I married Dave, in the Catholic church and by the same priest who had married Dave's parents so many years ago, and that same Father Williams baptised Kennedy (but retired before Mal was born), so I have felt a continuity and sense of community in the church (even if Dave only barely and grudgingly goes along with it). I put the girls through Catholic schools, which was not the fish-out-of-water experience it had been at first for me, and I don't think they've been damaged by the experience (no matter what Christopher Hitchens says about early exposure to religion equalling child abuse). And I took the girls to mass regularly when they were little (Father Dunne did a beautiful job of providing comfort and perspective on the Sunday after 9/11), and I even took my turns leading the Children's Liturgy -- an experience I loved but abandoned due to the interference of the new priest we received at the parish (a story I've told here before). So, I don't have any personal grudge, but as for my brother Ken:

Ken met and fell in love with the daughter of our aunt's good friend. As she was still in university and he was newly moved back to Ontario, Ken and Laura lived together in my parents' basement before moving out to an apartment of their own. When they decided to get married, they met with the priest at Laura's childhood parish -- the same church where our aunt Judi and her mother Barb sang in the choir and pampered the priest with home-cooked treats and small gifts, "Father does love his angels" -- and the priest refused to marry them because they had been "living in sin". Only after much pleading from Judi and Barb did he consent to having a willing priest from a neighbouring parish come do the deed. This bothered Laura so much that she severed whatever connections she still had to the Catholic church and told Ken that if he wanted any future children to be raised Catholic, that was up to him and him alone.

When they did have kids, it for some reason never seemed to be the right time to have them Baptised, and so poor Conor and Ella were sent unprepared to Catholic school just like we had been, and why wouldn't Ken have known better? Anyway, Conor's First Communion was approaching and the school was asking all grade twos for Baptismal Certificates and so Ken finally contacted the church -- and was told that since his kids were now 7 and 5, and no longer innocent infants, they would be required to take a short course and confess their sins before receiving any sacraments. Ken was incensed by this, believing that his children were indeed still "innocents", made some rant about "no wonder church attendance is dwindling" and refused to sign his kids up for the course. And yet, he continues to send them to Catholic school, where they are obliged to go to another classroom when sacrament preparation courses are happening, and yet also obliged to attend school masses. I'm sure Ken would use this as an example of religion poisoning everything -- there might be a case to be made about needless bureaucracy -- but although I will continue to state that I'm not a particularly religious person, religion is only relevant to the extent that it is rigid. There must be rules or what's the point?

Can anyone seriously make the case that society is better off with the anything goes view of marriage -- the smirking young men who show up on Judge Judy, proudly claiming that the four kids they have with their three different Babymamas are being taken care of just fine, are an unhappy view of family life to me.  I do believe that with one life to live, none of us should be stuck in a miserable marriage, but I do wish that more children were born within marriage and that more parents decide to commit to making a happy and stable family life for the kids they brought into the world.

As for abortion, since Hitchens brought it up as an example of churches over-reaching, here's what I think:  Although the practise is ugly to me, as the mother of daughters, I agree with Bill Clinton when he said that abortion should be available, safe and rare. Rare is the critical word for me there -- while I would never want my girls to desperately seek some back alley butcher, it's disgusting to me that so many women consider abortion to be just another form of birth control. I've read that in Quebec something like 60% of pregnancies end in abortion because, here in Canada, birth control costs money and abortions are free. That's horrifying to me -- and as an aside, I have come to the realisation that perhaps here in Canada, birth control should be free and abortions cost money, but I'm sure anti-poverty advocates would shout me down; likely lead by the United Church.

And this is all to make my larger point: Any actions of the Catholic Church that have hurt the people I know (and this is the only religion I can claim to speak from inside of) were the actions of people; those who enjoyed wielding their power and those who didn't act in a WWJD manner. People can criticise that the church is out of touch on birth control and traditional marriage and divorce, but I believe it must stick to its conservative foundations, at least aspirationally (and am simultaneously grateful that Pope Francis appears to be a man of acceptance and loving outreach). If Hitchens criticised Mother Teresa's anti-condom views, well, you know what? Abstinence is the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS and other STDs. I, much to Dave's bewilderment, supported traditional marriage myself. Not because I fear gay people -- here in Canada their unions were already recognised by the government and they enjoyed all the rights of straight people, as they should -- but I did object to the changing of the definition of marriage itself. I think as an institution, marriage has been decaying for so many years but is as important as it has ever been -- anyone who points to the divorce rate as proof that marriage is a failed institution (a common argument for expanding its definition) seem to have missed the point: This is all the more reason to try and reclaim its sanctity.

Here's an analogous point: Recently in The New York Times, the columnist David Brooks argued that, while he himself smoked pot as a teenager, he didn't think that its legalisation was such a great idea:

Many people these days shy away from talk about the moral status of drug use because that would imply that one sort of life you might choose is better than another sort of life. 

But, of course, these are the core questions: Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture? What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage? I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

In the same vein, I believe that in healthy societies religion wants to subtly tip the scales in favour of temperate, prudent, and self-governing behaviour -- and I fully acknowledge that my positions may seem as self-contradictory as the formerly pot smoking David Brooks arguing against its legalisation.

As a community and a fellowship of like-minded people who gather to submit to a higher power and join in thanksgiving, religion can be a beautiful thing. And, again, I say this in the full knowledge that these concepts have been twisted and exploited by the power hungry and self-interested throughout all of history.