HEIMLICH MANEUVER USEFUL FOR CHOKING PETS

rom an actual newspaper article when we lived in Warsaw Indiana.
Now that I have your attention........................ oh....and.......SEX!!!............... now that I really have your attention:
As I previously mentioned, morning people shouldn't write things at night; when my brain seems to be set on: Tirade/Poo-rade. Once I start attacking the keys physically then I know I had better quit soon. It's a good thing the fish was getting cold. Thank you,wife--smile.
I suppose that what set me off was the book I mentioned, "The Abstinence Teacher". From the reputation and reviews that I read this was supposed to be a very even handed book as regards sexual politics. And religion specifically American Evangelical Christianity.

This reminds me of a man named Greg who was part of our respiratory therapy team who actually came from a Southern Gospel background. He was very excited about the movie, "The Field of Dreams". He had actually seen it I think up to 7 times. It sounded very good and in fact was an excellent movie. However I asked Greg if it was appropriate for children and if it had any swearing in it and he assured me repeatedly that there was nothing like that in the text. So unless I am mistaken we took the children. However not only were there plenty of foul expressions there was even an apologetic given by a child in essence declaring that swearing in front of children was not only acceptable but desirable. It wasn't just, "It's okay Mr. Shoeless I've heard it all before," but something more substantial although I don't remember precisely what her reasoning was.

The point is not to be a Pharisee or go back to the time when we owed it to our children to avoid, as almost all parents do, saturating their minds at an early stage with the more crass insults of our culture and the routine assaults on our dignity that will continue until we die.

The point is that Greg didn't even notice. One could understand Flo not noticing since she grew up with that sort of thing as a kind of second language. Our primary language may be English but that says nothing about the vocabulary of the soul. And which is more important? I am pretty sure that Greg was not desensitized to "Jesus Christ" in its usual context while he was growing up. But he certainly picked it up rather quickly and by the time I met him it was apparently part of the air that he breathed.

Of course this is not to say that, "Field of Dreams" was merely an average or typical ,say "in flight" movie, not at all. It is quite sentimental and that is its major limitation but that is one of my major limitations also; so I am trying to avoid being too critical here in order to make a point. Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy made common use of words that are seldom used in church and some other words they used cannot be used in high culture at all, they are so offensive to our present sensibilities-which is not all bad of course.

But I do forget of course that the level/style of discourse has changed since they were writing. Of course most of us know that John Updike died recently. I do remember reading two of his stories. The first one was probably over 10 years ago and someone showed it to me because it involved the life and death of a recorder group, something I have been involved in on and off for decades. The last one was a recent story possibly his last for the New Yorker which involved a power outage in a suburb which suddenly shifts the protagonist into gear to visit his neighbor and to seduce her. The story about the recorder group was really about the same sort of thing. Low-level but routine adulteries which seems to be the driving force behind everything. Obviously Updike maintained quite a 50's Freudian matrix because he seems to be a chronicler of suburban infidelities but not in any sense of objectivity but in this sense of, "Yes, Virginia, this is all there is." His fiction is far more sophisticated than the book I mentioned above and his characters more complex but the substance, progression, and outcome are pretty much the same at least in these 2 stories. Thanatos and Eros, love and destruction, guns and roses, politics and religion, blah blah blah. We have not yet played out all the dualisms because that's the only way that we think; which is to say, I black-and-white, left and right, spirit and flesh. This we can grasp-so we think-, and very little else.

I must have joined the wrong recorder groups because nothing even remotely close to what Mr. Updike fantasizes has ever happened in the groups in which I have been involved. Musical infighting is of course universal; but Mr. Updike was not concerned with the music as such, obviously. Although I expect he probably enjoyed many real professional recorder groups!

The point is that for most people, including some very unsophisticated people, John Updike and his friends pretty much set the bar in this position, and lesser writers continue and are content to be derivative; but their contentment seems to be with stock or preestablished cartoon-like characters and do not usually take the time with characterization. It sounds all very fair and decent but only to an audience that is, like most juries, heavily preselected. The idea of a fair characterization of an Evangelical Christian to someone who doesn't have the slightest sympathy for such people in the abstract or personally certainly begs the question, uh, fair -----to whom?

"Life isn't fair, Calvin." "I know. But why can't get ever being unfair in my favor?"

No grace, no human nature, no connection, no fair.