Political problems

Like basically everyone on the internet at this point, I’ve seen Kony 2012. I was actually exposed to the backlash before I was to the excitement, which might have influenced my perception of it a bit — although I think that if I hadn’t known that there was some sort of interesting controversy surrounding the video, I’d have stopped watching after the first bit. I’m obstinately uncharmed by that sort of internet-age globaloney. I probably wouldn’t even have gotten to the parts that most people find objectionable.

So, what are the objectionable parts, specifically? Firstly, the framing. The video doesn’t even attempt to avoid the stereotyped narrative about a young, idealistic white person seeking self-actualization and adventure by saving helpless dark-skinned people. All the things that Teju Cole objects to — the sentimentality, the white savior complex, the lack of self-awareness — I object to as well. But the rebuttal to this is just too easy: “Well, I’m sorry if this offends your aesthetic or political sensibilities, but we’re helping children here”. You can reply by arguing about how much time and money the Invisible Children organization spends helping children versus how much it spends marketing itself/”raising awareness”, but the response to that is easy too: “Would it be better if nobody had ever heard of the LRA?” It’s certainly good that people are giving a damn about central Africa, in the sense that it’s heartening that Americans’ empathy horizons include people living in a far-flung place that hardly ever gets attention in the media (unless it’s in a Nicholas Kristof column); it’s very depressing that this empathy can only be evoked by use of colonial tropes.

Other objections are related to the actual goals of the video, which seem to involve getting Americans to pressure their government to provide more support to the government of Uganda and its military. The possible effects of sending the Ugandan military into the Democratic Republic of Congo or the Central African Republic, aren’t really discussed — how many people might be displaced, whether they could find Kony at all, and if they did, what this might mean for the children he abducted, or for possible peace talks. Also, the isolationist objection: even if it does work, sending some military people over to Uganda to help them nab Kony, maybe this will influence the American government to send the military to intervene in other countries, which is objectionable if you object to this sort of thing. A podcast I listen to suggested that after Kony 2012, we may have Assad 2013. While the general point — that we ought to be more careful about where we’re throwing our military force around — is obviously valid, an Invisible Syrian Children campaign would not be possible, for very specific reasons that I think illuminate the problems behind the original Kony 2012 campaign.

To start with, the poster. Its theme is very strange — why would Invisible Children want to associate Joseph Kony with this sort of instantly recognizable and currently ubiquitous American election-year symbolism? (Posters setting Kony up as a comic-book bad guy, a reference made over and over during the movie, would have made a lot more sense and offered even more opportunities for eye-catching iconography, I’m sure the graphic designer who created this poster could have done something great with that.) It only makes sense in the context of their two core demographics: evangelical Christians and Idealistic Young People. That is to say, to appeal to two groups that see themselves as beyond political ideologies but who operate in the political world in basically opposite ways, the campaign would have to position itself as not just apolitical but anti-political. So the poster takes political symbols and uses them to dismiss politics.

An organization supporting American intervention against the Assad government couldn’t just dismiss politics with just a couple animal silhouettes and the judicious use of colors. “The situation in Syria is very complex,” any interviewer would say. “What about all the sectarian tensions? Wouldn’t this give the Islamists a chance to take power? Do you support the Syrian rebels taking up arms? What about Israel? Is it really good for the US to get involved in another conflict in the Middle East? As bad as Assad is, do we really want to create more instability?” As stupid as discussions of the Middle East can be, at least the relevant history and politics are taken into consideration — at the very least, at least it’s recognized that Arabs have a culture, politics, history.

The defense: Invisible Children is an activist organization, and they have to tell a story. So maybe that involves a little oversimplification of the politics involved. Nobody wants to watch a documentary about post-colonial central Africa. Activists have always used theater and propaganda to persuade people.

The answer: There was no mention of the conflict between northern Uganda and the central government. There was no mention of the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, or what his government has already done to try and find Kony. The Central African Republic, where Kony apparently is, wasn’t brought up either. It’s not oversimplification, it’s the deliberate erasure of politics. And what is activism without politics? Spectacle.

But as Jason Russell said in one of his less successful videos, the kids want a spectacle. Maybe politics just gets in the way. And because there’s no politics or history in darkest Africa, it’s the perfect setting for their morality play. Which brings us back to the original problem — it’s not really about Uganda, it’s about you, right? Or, rather, about us — about our need for adventure, desire to “change the world” and “make a difference”, about our feelings of discomfort about our privilege, about our guilt regarding the actions of our government in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen and Pakistan. For central Africa to be at peace, the problems of misgovernance by elites, the exploitation of natural resources by warlords and corporations, ethnic and historical grievance, environmental degradation, etc., would have to be addressed, and that would require adopting an ideology, taking political positions that would be criticized and argued with, and all these other things that are messy and disreputable and might besmirch a young idealist.

Election day in Slovakia

It didn’t have to be election day when two boys trying to light a cigarette outside the town of Krásnohorské Podhradie in southeastern Slovakia dropped their match; the grass didn’t have to catch fire so quickly and the sparks didn’t have to carry so far on the wind; the hills around the castle didn’t have to be overgrown with dead grass and bushes; and the castle’s roof didn’t have to be in such flammable disrepair. Or maybe the roof was in good condition, the hills were cleared, the sparks didn’t carry, the boys weren’t smoking, and the fire was started by someone burning cut grass. But it was election day, for sure. That didn’t have to be true, either, but it was, and it seemed appropriate.

What else is for sure is where the fire started, somewhere suspiciously close to the settlement just outside Krásnohorské Podhradie. I’m writing “settlement”, because that’s the translation of the word osada in the dictionary, because of course I don’t know any English words that properly describe the kind of scrubby, muddy clusters of houses that satellite around the borders of eastern Slovak towns like Krásnohorské Podhradie. Sometimes normal wooden houses, sometimes government-provided, sometimes even cement, but always looking impermanent and stapled-together. And always separated from the town (which is usually not in the best condition either, but well-swept, with meticulously tended gardens and houses that are solid in the way that Slovak people from villages also tend to be) by a couple kilometers and a badly-tended road. And always populated by cigáni, by which I mean gypsies, or Roma, or neprispôsobiví spoluobčania, another translation problem — something like “unadaptable” or “maladjusted fellow-citizens”.

Neprispôsobiví spoluobčania look like this — like the man on the left billboard, rather, menacing a parking lot in Banská Bystrica above the caption: “So we don’t have to feed those who won’t work”. The political party who put up this billboard, the Slovak National Party (SNS), defended itself against charges of racism by saying that the swarthy, tattooed, gold-chained fellow-citizen on the billboard didn’t have to be a Rom, and wasn’t it racist of their critics to suggest that he must be. This year, they decided to be less coy, and raised billboards saying “How long are we going to pay for the gypsies?” between a picture of a devastated Communist-era housing block and the pacific, squishy Slavic face of Ján Slota, the long-time leader of the party. SNS got less than five percent for the first time in over a decade, which Slota said suited him, since he didn’t want to sit any longer in a so-called Slovak so-called Parliament next to homosexuals, madmen, and other peculiar individuals.

Neprispôsobiví spoluobčania vote for Smer, apparently, the social democratic party beloved of village-dwellers and country people. Maybe because they were paid to, although there wasn’t any evidence of that this year, maybe because the former center-right government lowered welfare benefits, maybe because someone brought around sausages and alcohol. In any case, Smer elected so many people to parliament that they had to all meet in a movie theater, and Robert Fico is going to be prime minister again after two years in opposition. Fico is an odd one, beginning with his tough-little-man appearance, his square head and square haircut. He expressed support for Russia in South Ossetia and didn’t recognize the independence of Kosovo. His first coalition was with HZDS (a horrible party which ran Slovakia during the nineties) and SNS (the aforementioned racist party), which meant four years of embarrassing diplomatic spats with the Hungarian government and silly nationalist laws about kids having to sing the national anthem.

The picture of Fico hoisted in the air by members of his party, holding a Coke, was all over the Czech and Slovak newspapers on Monday. That really had to hurt for their right-thinking right-wing editors, but I’m not nearly as torn up. Basically for the reasons described by Jiří Pehe, who compared Fico to the current Czech government:

At least for the neoliberals who dominate Czech opinion pages, the very worst thing is that Fico is going to tax the richest Slovaks, monopolies, and banks, and how he will try to stimulate the economy through large public works projects… The feeling one gets from all this is that the current Czech government is better for democracy than Fico will be, and that its economic policies will be more successful…

Yes, Fico is a populist, but simultaneously a pragmatist, and less under the spell of ideological instruction than the current right-wing government in our country [the CR]. When he had to rely on his anti-democratic and nationalist coalition partners, his governing style certainly wasn’t very attractive, for which he was rightly criticized at home and abroad. But it was his government that fulfilled the convergence criteria for the adoption of the euro, and kept the useful components of the reforms undertaken by his right-wing predecessor. He didn’t handle the economic crisis in 2009 any worse than the Czech government did… When we compare the political culture of Fico’s government with that of the current Czech coalition, we don’t have much to be proud of either, and in any case, it’s necessary to point out that one-party rule will be a much greater test for Fico than ruling with the nationalists.

…The most interesting thing will be comparing the economic results [of Fico's new government with those of the current Czech coalition]. While the Czech government believes that they can cut their way to prosperity while shredding the country’s social stability, Fico wants to deal with deficits by increasing taxes while simultaneously restarting the economy with pro-growth measures. Right now there’s no indication that following the Czech government’s reforms and their attempts to move the country away from the path of European integration, we’ll get any economic growth with our social pathology, neglected infrastructure, destroyed schooling, and squeezed middle class.

If the result of the elections in Slovakia are any indication that Europe is moving away from austerity as a strategy for dealing with the economic crisis, it can only be a good thing as far as I’m concerned. And I don’t particularly understand what’s so anti-democratic about raising taxes on corporate profits, or what’s so shiny and pro-Western about cutting health care and transport funds. Particularly in a country as Ruritanian as Slovakia can be. Which brings me back to Krásna Hôrka.

Most things inside were saved, the roof will be reconstructed, of course, it’s sad that some things were lost– but the whole thing is sad, really. A beautiful medieval castle with its roof on fire and an illegally constructed slum below its walls, at the end of a muddy road; that’s sad. On election day? Well, it could have happened any day, of course, but the fact that it happened while everyone was voting positively begs for metaphor. It was at the very least an unfortunate coincidence, and it recalls in me the feeling I had while I was working & traveling in that part of Slovakia, that something seriously dysfunctional was going on. I’m not sure what to blame the neglect of the east on, and there are probably a lot of factors: certainly most of the people benefiting from government corruption live in Bratislava, for instance. But it seems to me that the real problem in Slovakia is the problem in Europe as a whole: economic decisions are being decided in the core, with the interests of the core in mind:

In 1989 the PHARE programme of technical ‘assistance’ began, initially aimed at Poland and Hungary, and then at other countries in the region. The countries became recipients of European money aimed at supporting the transition process. How this money was routed and distributed became a crucial question… Consultants would advise foreign private investors to invest into a certain, cheap, plant. The consultancy would then recommend to the EU that money should be invested into the same facility. The investors, whether corporate or private, would profit massively… Programmes to improve infrastructure also relied on these consultancies to identify and design projects. The consultancies, by design, would ensure that certain clients in multinational companies would win the related contracts. The question of what represented the public interest was usually ignored… This ensured that debates about how to conduct a transition economy were rendered obsolete. The administration of these funds corrupted the young democracies of the region. Suddenly, the electorate mattered less, and society mattered less. Politics became a business, to be conducted in the twilight.

The way economic liberalization and integration with the rest of Europe was conducted put regions like eastern Slovakia at a massive disadvantage. It’s simply too remote to be all that profitable; traveling from Bratislava to Košice, the second-biggest city in Slovakia and the urban center of the east, is an epic journey that I’ve never done in under seven hours, and Košice is the end of the road in every possible sense. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are no jobs in the area, that everyone who can is leaving, and particularly that the conditions the Roma there live in are so awful — but every year, some delegation on ethnic minorities goes to visit some disastrous place in the east to express their horror and promise programs for social inclusion, which are certainly nice, but rather miss the point.

The point is that it’s the entire economic structure of the country that’s “maladjusted”. When Slovakia’s government, and the EU’s, spends as much time addressing that problem as it does wringing its hands about its “unadaptable citizens”, we might actually see some progress in the east. Maybe the elections on Sunday will bring us closer to that time. Or maybe not.

Legionnaire’s disease

Chapters 4 & 5
Most of the parables from chapter 13 of Matthew are repeated in Mark 4. At least, most of the understandable parables: the scattered seeds, the lamp under a bushel, the mustard seed. I still don’t like these parables any more than I did in Matthew: they stink of a marketing presentation. But it’s stated that Jesus uses these parables so that the ordinary people won’t understand, and that he explains everything to the disciples in private. This may be a little sacrilegious, but is it possible that Jesus chose the disciples because they were the only people around who actually needed the parables explained to them? The next passage, a retelling of the calming-the-waters story, confirms my suspicion about the disciples’ intellectual abilities: their ship is sinking in a storm while Jesus sleeps peacefully on the stern. They wake him up, he tells the waters to subside, and they’re totally shocked. “Who then is this, if even the wind and sea obey him?”

Maybe the disciples are playing the role of the idiot skeptic in a horror film, who refuses to believe in ghosts or spirits all the way up until one of them is sucking his soul out of his mouth. Maybe they are serving as stand-ins for the unbelievers in the lives of Christian readers. Regardless of their literary purpose, it’s not believable that they would have left their boats floating at the dock if they didn’t have some idea that Jesus was something more than just a good religious teacher, or that they could watch him healing the sick without being somewhat clued-in.

Just like in Matthew, they land in a cemetery in the country of the Gerasenes. The demoniac is described a little differently here: he lives in the cemetery because he’s been banished from town. His demons have given him the power to break any chains that holds him down, and he runs around the cemetery and the nearby hills, shouting, causing havoc, and cutting himself with stones. Of course, he recognizes Jesus as the “son of the Most High God” and begs him not to cast him out. “What is your name?” asks Jesus. “My name is Legion, for we are many,” says the demon. Hey, I’ve heard of this too! Why the demons would be represented as a Roman military unit, or whether demons usually have names, or why Jesus needs to know the demons’ names, I don’t know. Maybe it’s another metaphor — the demons represent the Roman army and Judea the possessed man. Jesus and the demons negotiate to be cast into the two thousand pigs grazing nearby. Two thousand pigs! I don’t remember Matthew numbering the pigs, so I imagined maybe fifteen or twenty.

The swineherds run back to the town and tell everyone what’s happened, and when the local people see the formerly possessed man sitting calmly on a tombstone, they tell Jesus and the disciples to get lost, apparently frightened by their power. The demoniac asks Jesus if he can travel with him and become one of his disciples, but Jesus refuses, telling him to go find his friends and tell them about how the Lord has had mercy on him.

In the next passage, Jesus performs two more miracles: curing the daughter of a leader of the synagogue, and, on the way, curing a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years. The woman sneaks up behind him and touches the corner of his coat. Jesus senses that “some power has gone out of him” (5:30) and asks his disciples who it was. Sensibly, the disciples tell him that he is in the middle of a giant crowd and how could they know, and besides, isn’t he the one with the superpowers? The woman comes to him and confesses, and Jesus takes pity on her and tells her to go and be healed. When he reaches the synagogue leader’s house, they’re already all in mourning. The daughter is already dead, they say, there’s nothing you can do, sorry to bother you. “She’s not dead, she’s just sleeping,” says Jesus, and goes inside to the dead girl’s bed. “Get up, little girl!” he tells her, although he tells it to her in Aramaic. (Why this quote needs to be here in Aramaic is another mystery. Maybe it sounded particularly divinely powerful to Mark’s Greek-speaking listeners.) And she does! The father and mother are shocked. Jesus tells them not to tell anyone and to give her something to eat.

The second command is probably good advice, but the first? Wasn’t there a crowd of hysterical mourners milling about in front of the house? This is hardly something Jesus can keep secret for long. The secrecy of Jesus’s superpowers is something of a theme in Mark, as is his complete failure to actually keep them secret. This explains Jesus’s weird reaction when the woman sneaks up behind him — he’s irritated that word has gotten out, maybe, but he’s giving mixed signals, because he praises the woman as well as the father of the dead girl for their faith. He doesn’t want anyone to know about his powers, but he wants people to have faith in him. It’s a little odd, but I see it as a sign of Jesus’s essential humanity. He has complicated and contradictory feelings, he’s a real character and a real person, not the divine cipher from the gospel of Matthew.

Chapters 5 & 6 & 7
Jesus goes back home to Nazareth and tries to teach in the synagogue. Just like in Matthew, the Nazarenes are not impressed. “Who does this guy think he is?” they say. “Isn’t he supposed to be a carpenter? And now he’s getting all fancy and trying to tell us about God while his brothers are working in the carpentry shop? What a joke.” I love this so much, not just because it implies stories the people of Nazareth must have been telling about the time Jesus fell into the river and had to be hauled out by some fishermen, or the time Jesus repaired some boards on someone’s house and did a shoddy job, but because Jesus gets angry and can’t perform any miracles. Also, it brings up an interesting and probably theologically troublesome point about Jesus’s healing powers. We learned in the last chapter that he can apparently use them up by performing miracles, since when the woman touched him, Jesus felt a little bit of power leave him. Now we know that they’re dependent on the belief of others.

There are other miracles in these chapters — the feeding of the five thousand, the walking on water — but they’re more or less the same as in Matthew, and don’t need to be retold. Except for one bit: when Jesus walks past the disciples on the river, Mark says that “he means to pass by them” (6:48). Apparently, he didn’t want them to know that he could walk on water; he just wanted to meet them on the other side the next day. After he enters the boat, the storm calmed, Mark notes that the disciples “did not understand about the loaves” and that “their hearts were hardened” (6:52). The miracle of the loaves and fishes had just happened a few verses ago! What is there not to understand?

There’s another miracle that I don’t remember from Matthew. A deaf-mute comes to Jesus to be healed. Jesus takes him to the side, puts his fingers in his ears, spits, and then touches his tongue. The antecedents of those possessive pronouns were totally unclear in all the English translations I looked at, but the Czech version makes it clear that Jesus put his fingers in the deaf man’s ears and touched the deaf man’s tongue, not his own. Either way, it’s gross and weird, and I can kind of see why Matthew didn’t think it was necessary to include this story. Still, it works: the deaf man’s “ears were opened” and his tongue “was released”. Jesus again commands the man to tell no one, but you can hardly tell a man to shut up if he’s just learned to speak.

We also learn what John the Baptist’s problem with Herod was: Herod had married his brother Philip’s wife after his death, which John disapproved of. Herod put him in prison to shut him up, but didn’t have him put to death until Salome’s dance performance.

Immediately!

Chapters 1 & 2 & 3
According to tradition, Mark was one of Peter’s disciples and the Gospel according to Mark is based on Peter’s recollections. So maybe I am getting something like the Gospel of Peter. Unfortunately, this isn’t really supported by any evidence. It’s also incompatible with the other idea about Mark, also traditional and also unsupported, that it is a condensed version of Matthew. The historical view is that Mark was written before the other synoptic gospels, by an unknown author, and that Matthew and Luke combined the story given in Mark with quotes and parables from a different source, enigmatically referred to as Q, and with bits and pieces from their own traditions.

Regardless of its provenance, Mark is much shorter and more action-packed than Matthew. It contains no nativity story at all, suggesting that there was no doctrine of the virgin birth at the time it was written. Mark starts right in the middle of the action, just like our creative writing teachers told us we should do, after a short quotation from Isaiah: “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way,the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’” (1:3). Amusingly, though, this isn’t a quotation from Isaiah at all. Mark has thrown together elements from three different books of the Hebrew Bible to create a composite for his own purposes. It might not be biblically correct, but I like that kind of literary audacity. Pedantic Matthew replaced it with the real quote from Isaiah 40:3 that begins with “the voice of one crying in the wilderness”.

Jesus is baptized by John, goes into the wilderness, is tempted by Satan, and begins his ministry. The events in the first chapter of Mark are almost identical to those in Matthew 3, down to the very words and descriptions of John the Baptist in camel’s hair and eating “locusts and honey”. Significantly, though, John does not enter the Gospel railing about the Pharisees; he merely proclaims the future appearance of one “who is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie” (1:7). Mark is less concerned about the rivalry between John and Jesus, as well — John simply baptizes Jesus without protest.

In Matthew, the baptism seemed to serve as confirmation that Jesus was the Messiah, since we had already seen his miraculous birth announced by angels and attended by magi. In Mark, however, the baptism is our introduction to Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus doesn’t have any time to towel off before he’s driven out into the wilderness by the Spirit. While in Matthew, he’s “led up into the wilderness”, which shows at least some sort of volition on Jesus’s part, Mark has him “immediately driven out”, suggesting that the Holy Spirit was invisibly kicking him in the shins or hitting him with a stick. He stays in the wilderness for forty days and is tempted, but no specifics are given, and certainly no scripture-quoting battle with Satan. Then, he returns to Galilee and begins preaching the kingdom of God and collecting disciples.

Again, the first disciples are Simon (Peter) and Andrew, and then James and John, who leave their boat immediately when Jesus calls them. I’m pretty sure Mark meant that they immediately rowed back to shore, but I prefer thinking of them diving into the water, their father Zebedee, who remains behind in the boat, shouting after them that they’re scaring away all the fish. They go to Capernaum and start preaching, and immediately a man with a demon comes to the synagogue. This demon recognizes Jesus immediately, and starts shouting that he knows Jesus is “the Holy One of God”. Jesus rebukes the demon: “Be quiet, and come out of him immediately!” The man’s body immediately begins to shake and convulse, he cries out, and the demon leaves. Jesus gains immediate authority among the people of the city.

Everything in Mark happens “immediately”. This may just be Jesus’s style, since he likes to roll into town, perform some miracles, and get out before people start noticing him. There’s also a story I remember from one of my rare appearances at Sunday school as a little kid: Some men want to bring their paralyzed friend to be healed. They find Jesus in a house, and they try to carry the paralyzed man in through the door, but there’s such a crowd that they can’t find room for him. So they take some boards off the roof and lower him down. Jesus is impressed by their faith, and tells the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” The Pharisees sneer, but the man, now healed, gathers his sheets up and leaves the house. Matthew had this same story in chapter 9, but Mark did it first, and better.

The ethical implications of this story in Mark are similar to those in Matthew’s retelling, but it’s easier to interpret Mark’s version the way I’d like: Jesus is telling us that the real sins are those we commit against our fellow men, and that among them we should seek forgiveness. Again, the meaning of the passage hangs on the phrase “son of man”, and whether we ought to interpret this man’s paralysis in a metaphoric sense — as a state of social exclusion or something. I suppose just as the totally feasible dismantling of the roof is more impressive than a miracle story I just can’t believe, the story of a traveling holy man brokering truces to local vendettas and rehabilitating untouchables is better than one about some ancient charlatan.

Just like in Matthew, Mark is always trying to get away from the crowds. But in Mark, the crowds aren’t waiting patiently for their bread and fish; they’re surging forwards, pushing Jesus and the disciples, reaching for them. And every time a demon sees Jesus, it begins to shout “Son of God! Son of God!” But they’re the only ones who seem to recognize Jesus’s nature — the people all just want a piece of him. His own family, who clearly has not been clued in, think that he’s gone mad and try to bring him home. Jesus doesn’t have time to be the welcoming, open-armed, long-haired savior in this book; he’s being pursued.

Also: in Matthew, the tax collector Jesus picks up is named Matthew. In Mark, he’s called Levi the son of Alphaeus. But then, in the next chapter, when the disciples are named, there’s no Levi, instead there’s James the son of Alphaeus. Also, Jesus gives John the name “Boanerges”, which apparently means “Sons of Thunder”. Awesome.

Best and worst of Matthew

Best Matthew passage:

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ (25:34-40)

Not a particularly original choice, but the idea that the measure of piety is in the treatment of the poor and needy is the best kind of religious morality.

Worst Matthew passage:

And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” And he answered, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” (15:22-27)

It can’t be too much to ask that the son of God not be a nasty xenophobe who requires admirers to grovel and debase themselves.

Most surprising Matthew passage:

The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother. So too the second and third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her.” (22:23-28)

Pure gold. There should be more characters in the Bible like this.

Most confusing Matthew passage:

And when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way. And behold, they cried out, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” Now a herd of many pigs was feeding at some distance from them. And the demons begged him, saying, “If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of pigs.”And he said to them, “Go.” So they came out and went into the pigs, and behold, the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the waters. The herdsmen fled, and going into the city they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region. (8:28-34)

What did he have to do that for?

The end of the beginning

Chapter 28
The Pharisees had foreseen that this Jesus character might cause them trouble even after his death. They decide to seal up the tomb and post a guard at its door for three days so none of his disciples can steal his body away and claim that he’s risen from the dead. “Make sure the whole fraud stops here,” they say.

Of course, the Pharisees’ earthly tricks don’t work against angels of the Lord. The day following the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” (presumably the mother of James and Joseph who was present at the crucifixion) go to visit the tomb. As they arrive, an angel descends from above to roll away the stone from the tomb’s entrance, accompanied by another earthquake — is all this seismic activity common in Judea? The wording in this chapter seems to imply that the appearance of all angels are preceded by earthquakes, so you would think that even the faithless Pharisees would get the idea that something divine is going on when the plaster keeps falling off their temples’ walls. The guards fall to the ground in fear. The angel speaks to the Marys, showing them the empty tomb, explaining that there’s nothing to fear, that Jesus has indeed risen. They should tell the disciples and go immediately back to meet him in Galilee.

Jesus meets the women before they encounter the disciples. This must be significant for some reason, either because Matthew realized he can’t write an entire gospel without any female characters, because it was a common belief that two women were the first to see Jesus after his resurrection, or because they’re symbolic of something — but what, exactly? Neither woman is an important character in this gospel, and neither of them is characterized in any particular way. They’re afraid and excited when they leave the empty tomb, because of course they are, and when they see Jesus they worship him, but of course they do. Since Jesus had told the disciples not to tell anyone about his true nature, are the women just now figuring out that he’s the Messiah?

The disciples meet Jesus in Galilee, and the chapter ends with the rather nice and inspiring quote: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (18-20).

Nice and inspiring for a moment, but then: why doesn’t he go make disciples of all nations? Wouldn’t the gospel be even more compelling coming from a man who had been crucified and risen from the grave? Why does someone with “all authority in heaven and earth” choose to delegate? This may be a Sadducee-style pedantic point, but I think it’s rather more important than who’s married to whom in heaven or whether Jesus didn’t jump off the cross to prove a point and allow himself to get nailed up again. Even more importantly: Jesus is alive again. What does he do now? Shouldn’t he take the chance to heal more people and feed more crowds? At the very least, shouldn’t he tell the disciples what he’s been doing for the past few days?

Matthew has spent half of the last 28 chapters telling parables. Isn’t it more logical — and isn’t it a neat storytelling trick — if we realize that this entire story has been a parable? And not the man-sells-everything-to-buy-one-pearl koan kind of parable, but the weeds-in-the-wheat, fish-in-the-net kind: the Pharisees dismiss true piety as a fraud, they try to destroy it, but in the end, truth prevails and the Pharisees themselves are exposed as frauds and hypocrites.

There’s only one catch. Matthew tries, in this chapter, to explain why some people don’t believe that Jesus has truly risen. The Pharisees pay off the guards, who presumably eventually wake up with vague memories of the earth shaking and heavenly beings, and spread a rumor that the disciples stole Jesus’s body, to keep quiet and not tell the Roman governors. While this serves to drive home the point that the priests know quite well that they’re in the wrong, it also suggests that Matthew wants us to believe that Jesus was literally resurrected. And there’s a very odd couple of verses: “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted” (16-17). Why? What were they doubting? Who doubted? Why even include this sentence?

I don’t know. I know, though, that Peter wasn’t one of the doubters. I’d like to know what he did when he saw Jesus, if he needed things explained to him, if he apologized for denying him, and for doubting that Jesus had known that he was going to deny him. I’m disappointed there’s no Gospel according to Peter.

The crucifixion chapter

Chapter 27
When Jesus is brought to Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, he gives the same answer when asked whether he claims to be the Messiah: “You have said so”. But Pilate hasn’t said anything. I suppose this is a way Matthew can have him refrain from denying the charge while simultaneously allowing him to maintain his modesty and stoicism. Pilate isn’t cruel to him the way the Jewish leadership was (one detail I forgot to mention in the previous chapter, which really shouldn’t have gone unmentioned, it’s action-movie good, is that the goons said “Hey, prophet, how about foretelling who’s going to beat you?” and then beating him); he rather seems to respect Jesus’s stoicism. His wife comes to him and tells him that she’s had a dream about Jesus, and that he’s a righteous man.

Apparently, Pilate is in the habit of letting a prisoner go at Passover, much like how the American president pardons a turkey every Thanksgiving. Matthew suggests here that the Pharisees sentenced Jesus to death because they were envious of him, presumably because they see him as a rival. He brings out Jesus and the famous robber Barabbas in front of a crowd and asks them: “Who shall I pardon? Jesus or Barabbas?” But the priests have already convinced the crowd — somehow. These are the same Jerusalemites that set their coats down for Jesus’s donkey to tread on as he entered the city, and applauded him as he preached at the temple, but now they’re shouting that they want Barabbas released and Jesus crucified. “Is that what you really want?” says Pilate. “Yes! His blood be on us and our children!” shouts the crowd.

It’s silly. If this fight between the piety of the people and the official religion of the priests is really as powerful as Matthew has been implying throughout the book, the leaders could hardly have convinced the people within a night that Jesus needed to die. Again, this is not supposed to be a crowd of Jesus’s priestly enemies. I suppose that Matthew just needed — whether to escape official censorship, to curry favor with the Gentiles, or to make the point that his enemies within Judaism were very, very guilty — to make it completely clear that the Romans were not responsible for Jesus’s death, and the conceit of pardoning one prisoner was the most convenient way to do this.

I’ve often seen it written (while doing more research, hoping to understand this book a little better) that Matthew is the most antisemitic gospel specifically because it is the most Jewish gospel. Matthew is speaking for a law-observing, Jewish Christian community whose chief conflicts are with other Jews; the villains of the gospel of Matthew, therefore, are mostly Jews. Why Matthew has decided to create such a preposterous scene simply to place the entire crowd in the role of deicides, though, is beyond me. It’s not that Matthew doesn’t understand human motivation and is incapable of creating believable characters: Peter is his best example, but Pontius Pilate and even Judas (who earlier in the chapter gets conscience pangs and returns the thirty pieces of silver) are ensouled to a certain extent. But the most absurd, opaque characters are the most important — the crowd, the Pharisees, and oddly, Jesus himself.

Then the soldiers take him to the governor’s headquarters solely to mess with him — or, rather, to make literal something described in the Psalms. Even if this is just one of Matthew’s slavish Bible-mining expeditions, it’s disturbing as this is exactly the sort of thing that the soldiers of an occupying force sometimes do, humiliating a subjugated people with their own symbols. But since these desecrated symbols of the Davidic messiah soon become the holy ones of Christianity, it becomes even more complicated. Even more intertextuality, and this from people who believed the earth was flat and we were separated from heaven by a firmament.

Simon from Cyrene is pressed into carrying Jesus’s cross to Golgotha. There, they offer Jesus wine mixed with gall. According to various Bible study websites, gall is either bile, snake venom, or just some sort of bitter poison and was offered to those about to be executed to dull their consciousness and hasten their death, and Jesus refused the drink because he didn’t want to die of poisoning, but rather by crucifixion:

Christ refused the gall, knowing the bitter taste meant it was a poison. He did not want to die from poisoning, but by His shed blood so as to become the supreme sacrifice for the sins of all mankind…  Perhaps the person that mixed the gall with the wine was trying to end Christ’s suffering as soon as possible — it doesn’t say for sure. But Christ knew that His blood would have to be shed in order for Him to become the supreme sacrifice for the sins of all mankind. (biblestudy.org)

Why Jesus couldn’t have died by poisoning and still fulfilled the atonement isn’t explained, but that’s a knotty theological problem & above my pay grade. In any case, he tastes it but doesn’t drink, and the soldiers nail him to the cross as the passers-by mock him: if he’s really the Son of God, why doesn’t he just pull himself off the cross? “We’ll believe in you if you come off the cross,” the priests say. This theme always made me a bit uncomfortable during Easter pageants, since I could see myself thinking the same thought, wagging my head along with the Pharisees. Of course, Christian theology says that Jesus had to go through with the crucifixion to become “the supreme sacrifice for the sins of all mankind”, but what would have been most effective is if Jesus had lept off the cross, shown to all that he was the Son of God, and then allowed himself to be nailed back up to complete the atonement. Does Jesus not want the crowds to be saved?

Suddenly, the sky becomes dark. Jesus cries out the famous words: “My God, my God, why have thou forsaken me?” At the moment of Jesus’s death, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies from the unholy world is torn in two. The earth shakes. And the dead saints rise from their graves and walk around Jerusalem. This particular part of the crucifixion story is not one we often hear about at Easter — unfortunately! I love it. Jesus has opened up a liminal world with no veils between the sacred and the profane, where dead are raised, God is in hell, and the Romans recognize the Jewish messiah. “Aw,” says the centurion standing guard over the condemned. “Truly this was the son of God.”

The first station

This is the first station of the cross at the church at Malenisko near Provodov near Zlín. Each station is dedicated to different local men who fell in the First World War and each has a relief depicting the various sufferings of Jesus. If you aren’t Catholic or don’t speak Czech, this is “Jesus sentenced to death”.

The first last supper

Chapter 25
The interesting part of this chapter (the beginning of it contains two famous parables, both of which are theologically/culturally important & neither of which I’m going to address, because honestly I’m sick to death of parables) concerns the Final Judgement: what’s actually going to happen at the apocalypse. The Son of Man will return, sitting on his glorious throne, and will separate all the nations and all the people into two groups — sheep to the right, goats to the left.

Everyone knows that the sheep are the righteous ones and the goats are the unrighteous ones, but seriously, what’s wrong with goats? I understand why it was a snake and not a chipmunk or a mouse in Eden: snakes are alarming creatures, no legs, not even really any body parts that are analogous to those of humans. I understand Jesus’s metaphor of the shepherd and his flock. But goats are herded too, and goats are just as useful as sheep for basically the same things; they’re similarly kosher; they’re cuter, in my opinion; and they’re smarter as well.

In any case, the fact that some people are sheep and some are goats might seem to imply something about their essential nature, but Jesus divides them into these groups based on their actions. The sheep are those who fed the poor, clothed the naked, and performed good deeds; the goats are those who ignored the unfortunate. Matthew is clearly not an evangelical — the sheep are surprised to be saved, and the goats are surprised to be cast into the “eternal fire”. I’m not sure, but this may actually be the first mention of hell so far in the New Testament. What isn’t totally clear is whether it’s set up in Matthew’s cosmology as the counterpart to the Kingdom of God. Jesus does create a dichotomy between eternal punishment and eternal life, but he also says that the Kingdom was created for the sheep from the very beginning of the entire world, and that the fire was created for the devil and his angels. Maybe this is putting too fine a point on it.

I don’t even need to address this, since it’s so obvious, but one advantage the Matthew apocalypse has over the modern one is catharsis. It’s not justice, exactly — how can eternal punishment be just? — but it provides the universe with a moral narrative. It’s not comforting, either, but it’s satisfying.

Chapter 26
Matthew likes to go back and forth between plot and dialogue, and after multiple chapters of preaching by Jesus, we get a chapter that’s all about plot. After his discourse at the Mount of Olives, Jesus casually remarks “You know, I’m going to be killed soon.” Then the camera cuts to the elders plotting secretly in the palace of the high priest — indeed, they’re plotting to secretly capture and execute Jesus. They don’t want to do it during the Passover feast, though, because they’re afraid his admirers will revolt. Fortunately, a man comes to them and claims that he knows Jesus and he’ll hand him over to them. We’ve seen him before, even if it was only in the background, and even if we only remember his name from the list of disciples given in one of the earlier chapters. The dark-haired, big-nosed one, at least according to all the medieval paintings — Judas Iscariot! “How much money will you give me for him?” he says. Silently, the chief priest pulls out a bag of silver and counts out thirty pieces. Judas nods with narrowed eyes and slinks back to rejoin the man he’s already plotting to betray.

A new scene. The disciples are eating the Passover feast in Jerusalem, relaxing, discussing spiritual matters and fishing techniques. During a lull in the conversation, with his hand in the finger bowl, Jesus says: “Truly, one of you will betray me.” The disciples are shocked. They all begin loudly denying that they would ever do such a thing. “He who has dipped his hand in the bowl with me will betray me,” Jesus tells them.

Judas, on Jesus’s side, has taken the opportunity to wash his greasy fingers as well. He immediately pulls his hand out and hides it among his robes. The disciples have all turned to stare at him. “Calm down, Pete,” whispers Andrew to his brother, who is halfway out of his chair. “Is it I, Lord?” says Judas innocently. Jesus takes a sip of wine and replies, “You have said so.” (Peter is sweating visibly and trying to catch Jesus’s gaze to get a better sense of whether he should follow his first impulse, dive across the table, and grab Judas by the neck.)

Jesus grabs the basket of bread and passes it around the table. “Take, eat, this is my body,” he says. He fills all their glasses with wine, saying, “This is my blood.” The disciples are confused, naturally, exchanging glances, but they eat and drink, and then Jesus leads them out again to the Mount of Olives, silently. He tells them something about how they will all betray him, but he’ll see them soon in Galilee. “No way!” exclaims Peter in a voice that is much too loud. “Not a chance, Lord!”

Jesus shakes his head. “Before the rooster crows, you will betray me three times,” he say.

So Jesus takes them all to the Garden of Gethsemane and goes with Peter, James, and John to pray. Throughout the book, he’s been an otherworldly sage, devoid of emotion except for righteous godly rage, but now he’s so frightened he falls to the ground and begs God (put aside, for a second, the odd theological problems raised by the Son begging the Father). “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” he says, but then remembering the plan he’s been prophecying this whole time, he adds “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” (How can the Son and the Father have different wills, if they’re made of the same essence? Hm.) He looks back, and his three disciples have fallen asleep. He shakes Peter awake and tells him to pray for strength to resist the temptation that he knows will overtake him. Finally, after Jesus gets in some more prayer and the three disciples get in some more sleep, Jesus turns and sees Judas leading a priestly goon squad towards him.

Judas greets him (“Greetings, Rabbi!”) and kisses him on the cheek. Why Judas needed to give the goons a special sign is a total mystery, unless it’s simply for literary effect. I suppose it would have been a different image to have him shout “It’s the one in the middle, guys! Get him!” as the men with swords and clubs rush forth, expecting they’ll have to pursue Jesus and the disciples. “Do what you came to do,” says Jesus, but one of the disciples draws his sword and slices the ear off one of the goons. Matthew doesn’t mention who it was, but of course it was Peter. Jesus tells him that he doesn’t need his help; if he wanted to, he could have called on whole armies of angels. He then rebukes the priests and their henchmen, as well, asking them why they hunted him down in the dark to confront him with weapons instead of just seizing him in the temple. Good point, Jesus — and furthermore, why is it that the priests and Pharisees and scribes had never done anything more threatening to Jesus besides debate him? We’re meant to have the background to assume that people like Jesus were bound to get into political trouble, I suppose. Jesus concludes, “All this has taken place that the scriptures of the prophets may be fulfilled,” the goons seize him, and the disciples flee.

All except my favorite disciple, who follows behind them to the courtyard of the high priest, where Jesus is summarily and immediately put on trial. The priests are intent on convicting him of something, and they’ve brought all kinds of people in to speak against him. Two men are brought to testify that they heard Jesus say that he can tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days.

“Yeah? What do you say to that?” the high priest asks Jesus. Jesus says nothing. “What, do you think you’re the son of God? The Messiah?”

“You have said so,” Peter hears Jesus say. “But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

“Blasphemy!” exclaims the high priest, but he doesn’t tell us which is the blasphemous part. The first part, you would imagine, although it’s a rather noncommittal answer — but if it were the second statement, that would mean that Jesus was put to death simply for stating his belief in messianism, rather than proclaiming himself the Messiah. “What should we do with him? Put him to death?” the high priest asks, and everyone agrees heartily.

In the courtyard, Peter is trying to look invisible, but a servant girl comes by and asks what he’s doing and whether he’s with Jesus. “No, I don’t even know him,” says Peter. A crowd gathers around him, saying that he sounds like someone from Galilee and that he must have come here with Jesus. He denies it again and again, and then the rooster crows and Peter realizes that Jesus had been right — presumably, not just about his triple denial, but about his self-sacrifice, God’s plan, and everything else.

The Abomination of Desolation

Prologue
When I was about seven or eight, I learned the fact that in a few billion years, the sun would burn out all its hydrogen and begin fusing helium and expanding out to many times its current size. I had already been told that some day I would die, which didn’t worry me very much — I reasoned that since I wasn’t bothered during the infinity of time before I was born, I wouldn’t be bothered during the infinity of time after I died. But the idea that the earth would be consumed by a dying sun I found very, very disturbing. My father, who is a rational man, told me that it didn’t matter, since he and I and everyone we knew would be long dead by that time, even deader than the ancient Greeks and Romans are dead; that five billion years ago, there was probably no life on Earth at all, and that who knows what could happen in the next five billion years. Maybe we could move to a new planet. I wasn’t satisfied.

Outer space was one of my intense childhood interests, and another one was amateur archaeology, or rather, digging holes. I’m not sure why I liked digging holes so much, because I was decidedly not the kind of kid who enjoyed getting muddy and splashing in puddles. Part of it must have been the understimulation I wrote about in this post, but the other part of it was that I convinced myself that either I would discover some important artifact, or that I could bury my own artifact for future generations to discover. Once, I dug up a large but unremarkable sedimentary rock and, convinced that it was a thunderegg or that there was some sort of fossil inside, spent an afternoon banging at it with the back end of a hammer. Another time, I put some things into an empty pop bottle and buried it in the front yard as a time capsule. I couldn’t wait too long — I dug it up the next summer and was very disappointed at the dumb things my one-year-younger self had thought were important. (I think that among the things I buried was a note that had gotten soggy and unreadable, and also a necklace with little, brightly colored plastic pacifier charms, which I had bought from a gumball machine at Fred Meyer’s. This was a massive fad among girls at my grade school, I can only imagine it was some sort of nationally-orchestrated marketing thing, and that it was over by the time I dug up the pop bottle again.) I knew our house had been built in the eighties, and before that the subdivision had all been part of an orchard, and before that, something else, and before everyone, presumably, the kind of cold jungle that reclaims every untended square inch of earth in that part of Oregon, that creeps up through cracks in the street and pries them open with moss. I wouldn’t ever know anything about the mammoths or dinosaurs or cavemen whose bones were lying beneath my house, but they were down there somewhere in the dirt.

Here’s the point: I learned that the sun would turn against us, blow itself out and burn up or vaporize all the bones and buried cities and treasure and fossils and coproliths, and then there would be no evidence that any of us had ever been here, and maybe nobody to even look for us, and I freaked out. I had never thought of my own life in such a context. And that’s how, when I was in grade school, I became a modern person.

Chapter 24
Jesus is predicting the destruction of Jerusalem, and he’s being unusually direct. The disciples are trying to take a tour of the temple, and Jesus points at the bricks and says “Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down” (2). The temple, at this time, would have been spectacular, recently reconstructed out of imported marble by Herod the Great — the same Herod who, in this narrative at least, tried to kill Jesus at his birth. Jesus had cleansed the temple of moneylenders and pigeon sellers the day before, but soon something even worse was coming to the temple: the Abomination of Desolation.

This chapter is full of terrific phrases, particularly in the KJV (“wars and rumors of wars”, “of that day and hour knoweth no man”, “the one shall be taken, and the other left”), but this one, maybe the most important, strikes an ugly dissonant note. “Abomination of Desolation”? Awful. Nothing which is truly abominable can be expressed by words with Latinate endings. Some other versions have “abomination which maketh desolate” or “abomination which causes desolation”, which is even worse, although it’s more accurate, supposedly. Someone might speak about a desolate landscape or a feeling of desolation, but what “causes desolation”? Another translation is “desolating sacrilege”, which is a little better, but much too Latin for my tastes again.

Anyhow, the real question should be what the Abomination of Desolation is. When I first saw the phrase, I thought of it being some sort of monster of unkosherness, maybe a cross between a pig and a shrimp, but giant, running through the temple, overturning jugs of milk over barbecuing meat, tearing apart holy scripture with its hooves, etc. In fact, that’s more or less what the original Abomination of Desolation was. It seems to refer to certain acts during the reign of the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanies, who persecuted followers of Jewish law and established worship of Zeus in the Jerusalem temple. The book of Daniel, which is the origin of this phrase, was written at this time to support the traditional Jews who were resisting Antiochus. (Or, if you’re of a certain different theological bent, it’s to do with the United Nations.)

Antiochus reigned from 175 to 164 BCE; Matthew is writing in the early second century. Between the first era and the second was another, even greater desolation in Jerusalem: the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. Second-century Matthew is putting the language of the first century BCE into the mouth of first-century CE Jesus to describe an event that would happen a few decades later. The references become even denser when you remember that the Book of Daniel was presented as having been written by a prophet of the seventh century BCE about the struggles of the Jews with another empire — Babylon. This rather makes you think that all the talk about the postmodern age of intertextuality and meta-information and so forth is just a new name for an old phenomenon. Or maybe it makes you wish for a simpler interpretation.

Maybe LaHaye’s interpretation is absurdly simplistic, maybe it completely ignores the meaning of Matthew to Matthew himself and his intended audience, but it has the advantage of at least being modern. (Well, more modern, at least. It was written in the 1990s, and uses videocassettes and phone booths as plot devices, so even it feels a bit like an artifact of the very recent past, not unlike my pacifier necklace.) Jesus talks about the gospel being “proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations”, and of course we think of all nations as the Cambodians and the Icelanders and the Maori and the Iroquois, and we can’t conceive of such a provincial apocalypse as one involving some obscure king centuries and centuries ago, not when it’s the wisdom of the Christ himself being given to his disciples.

The point of the prologue is that I have to imagine that the people of the first century simply had a different conception of apocalypse, one coming from their different cosmology. One that involved the smashing of cities and the destruction of temples, not the vaporization of planets. The sun darkening to signify the coming of disaster, not the sun exhausting its supply of hydrogen. It’s difficult — especially when we keep digging up coins and bricks with physical signs of these people — to imagine that although the dirt they walked on might be more-or-less the same, the way they imagined their place in the universe and how it might end was completely, utterly different.