Good Faith, Bad Faith

When some random stranger decides not to get vaccinated against COVID for less than rock solid reasons,  any response that strikes your fancy seems appropriate (even those that are provoked out of less than rock solid motivations).  When the person is not random or a stranger, the question of what is appropriate has to be taken more seriously.  I had occasion to ponder the appropriateness of a response recently when I found myself conversing at an outdoor gathering with the daughter of family friends whom I hadn't seen in a while.  A lot had happened to her since our last conversation-- pregnancy, marriage, conversion to a particularly fiery brand of Christianity.  She first entered our lives fresh from a Russian orphanage when she and her brother were adopted as young children by our friends a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Though she was raised in a very East Coast American urban secular way, the way she spoke about her relationship with Jesus was very reminiscent of the memories I have of my most ancient immigrant female relatives from childhood.  I wanted to ascribe her evangelism to genes, but I remind myself that she and her brother were not infants when they were adopted, so her full throttle embrace of Christianity could well be a rediscovery of what could have been for a very small child who finds herself in a Russian orphanage a necessary wellspring of strength.  Facing the challenges of special circumstances, let alone of young adulthood at the end of history, it was certainly that for her now. 

Always a bit of an unfiltered open book (bless her heart), she brought it up.  She had probed me first, to see if by any luck I was a brother in Christ, and when that turned out not to be the case, to be sure I wasn't too in the pocket of Satan.  Satisfied that I was benign at worst, she confessed to being unvaccinated and explained that it was her decision to trust in Jesus above the vaccine.  She admitted that she was equally afraid of taking the vaccine, given her pregnancy and her distrust of the medical establishment based on some bad experiences with it, and of not taking it.  To her mind, both were equally dangerous propositions, likely to give her and her unborn daughter lethal cases of COVID.  Even so she was determined to forgo the vaccine and let Jesus handle it (she pointed to the sky as she said this).  This was causing her agony as she was getting grief for it from the vaccine friendly world of her parents (my world) as well as from the Jesus centric world of her husband for entertaining doubt about the power of Jesus.

My first instinct when a grown up person is talking to me directly is to outwardly respect their viewpoint  regardless of what's going on with me inwardly.  If I have a relationship or history with the person, especially if it's a younger person, I'm inclined to accept their agency in their own life.  But for some reason it occurred to me that since there was an opening for being reasoned with about the vaccine-- which her obstetrician after all was urging her to take-- I could at least voice support for the safeguard of getting it.  As I debated the wisdom of this, I thought to myself, "what if your words make the difference?"

I wanted to remind her (for she had surely heard everything) that millions of people had taken the vaccine by now, and that it has had demonstrable results in preventing the spread and in diminishing the effects of the virus for those who have contracted the Delta variant of it.  I said, why not get the vaccine and put an end to your agony over it?  She countered that as a person with some rheumatoid arthritis she would have to get periodic booster shots.  What's more there would be other variants-- the spiral of vaccination was potentially never ending.   Better to let Jesus inoculate you for good.   But the Delta variant is much more contagious.  Wasn't she afraid of being around so many unvaccinated people?  Everyone she knew was vaccinated, she said, even her husband who was opposed to it on religious grounds but whose workplace required it.  By her being out on a limb with it, her circle had created a bubble of immunity around her.  But what about those outside her circle in her church?  Weren't they potential sources of the disease that her lack of immunity would make her vulnerable to? She preferred to put her faith in Jesus rather than the vaccine.  Having gone down the road I had to say it: Was that not an unfair burden being placed on Jesus? What if in spite of her faith, she got COVID because she didn't get vaccinated.  She could pass it on to others including those she loved.  I could not bring myself to say out loud the implications-- would it mean Jesus failed?  Or would it mean that she had failed to get Jesus's protection?  Was there not some religious obligation to not put Jesus in that position?  But of course the ability to ask the question is a demonstration of one's lack of understanding of faith.  Still, it was clear from her response that she was in agony over the possibility.

In the end,  as it turned out, I had not pushed her over the line on vaccination.  But it was also certainly true that I would not be the last person to proffer an opinion on her choice, and her heart was far from at ease on the question.

Her posture is very familiar to me.  You make a decision-- to keep smoking; to quit school or a job; to get back with someone no one thinks is good for you; to associate with bad elements-- for possibly less than stellar reasons -- fear; stubbornness; weak but compelling issues of character or principle or desire for belief; simple willfulness; to be blunt, bad faith and rationalizations-- and the tenuousness of it guarantees that it remains unsettled and that you'll have to explain yourself perpetually to every schmo who wants a crack at knocking sense into you.  The truth is, the decision is made.  It may be an objectively bad decision, but there will be no going back on it, because it has been decided.  If it is wrong and you pay for it and live, it will be a lesson.  But what if, by luck or by some miracle it turns out as you hope and pray it will, to be right? 

What could I do but wish her the best?

That's Just Super

I had an incorrect intuition about the apparent ubiquity of super hero movies these days.  Based on the proliferation of titles and the inescapability of them among the choices in online catalogs and streaming services, I was convinced that their "popularity"  was the inevitable consequence of their being the only kind of movie getting produced.  I was wrong.   While I could not find data for a “superhero genre” on the sites that concern themselves with movie numbers, I learned that while the action and adventure categories of which they are a sub-genre constitute together approximately only 15% of the total number of movies made annually by genre -- number 1 being run-of-the-mill Oscar fodder dramas-- they earn nearly 50% of the box office.  I found it hard to get a handle on how much is spent on movie production budgets by genre but one study has shown that action and adventure have among the lowest returns on investment of any, which could be a reflection of the size of their budgets.  (The category with the greatest return by far: Documentary!)   

What this tells me is that contrary to my intuition, superhero movies are not what the public is being force-fed.  It's what they want.  The hype surrounding them is merely a consequence of the size of their budgets.  

My intuition was of course based on my own tastes about them, which puts super hero movies near the bottom of the list when it comes to choosing entertainment.  It isn't that I consider them childish and shallow.  On the contrary, I lost interest in them when they became dark, deep and novelistic in the netherlands of the 70s.  My consciousness of them was formed in the golden age of the previous decade when the earth looked like a Rand McNally globe from outer space, the sun had squiggly lines surrounding it and henchmen still wore black masks and Kangol caps; a time when supermen were supermen and supervillains were supervillains.  None of this psychological and human superhero melodrama for me.  I like my superheroes like I like my presidents -- vapid and innocuous.   Sure it made no sense that someone who could make time go backward by reversing the rotation of the planet would once an episode find himself helplessly bound by a common thug, but there had to be some dramatic tension.   But I suspect part of the reason for their popularity continues to be the opportunity they afford for vicarious experience of what, in a world in which it's easy to feel helpless, it would be like to experience power over the forces of evil.

In fact, I've been thinking about super heroes and super hero movies because I finally have an answer to the party game inspired by them of naming the secret power you'd want to have if you could choose only one.  It has to be limited to one because what superpower would you not want to have if your choices were unlimited?  Imperviousness to bullets, knives and nooses would be an immediate reducer of anxiety. The strength of a volcano would come in handy in so many situations -- jar opening, subway door prying, getting out of bed.  The ability to fly like lightning, to shrink to the size of an atom or grow to the size of a building, to stretch like rubber, breathe underwater, see through walls... who wouldn't want these?  But the game stipulates only one selection.

The answer came to me one day watching some annoying thing on tv-- the news, corporate PR, one of those dishonest PSAs from an undisclosed PAC, a true crime show... I don't remember which, but it was the sort of thing that raises my temperature and forces a flood of clear and concise invective to form in my mind. It occurred to me that the power I would most like to have is laserlike eloquence.  Not merely a talent for words but a superior ability to use them to penetrate the mind of my foe with incontrovertible truth and defeat the evil that motivates them by persuading them to come to the light.  Under cover of night he enters the chambers of his adversaries and whispers Truth to them in their sleep to make them dream of redemption.  No evil mastermind is too great to be tamed by his words -- not the murderer for jealousy or insurance money,   not the billionaire would-be conqueror of outer space, not the head of the apartheid state nor his enablers, not the Corporate CEO, not the evil funder of think tanks and foundations.  How useful would that be?  I could use it right now for instance.

It might not make for a blockbuster movie.  But I'm looking for power, not for entertainment.  On the other hand, if a Bizarro Superman movie gets produced I'll be first in line for tickets.