Working Man - Part II - "The Getty"

Well, I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

 My Uncle Richie had a buddy who owned some gas stations where he worked on Saturdays to make some extra cash. When I turned 14 he got me a job at one of them - a Getty Oil station on Sunrise highway near the Green Acres shopping center. Eventually my brothers and cousins ended up working there as well. I ended up working there for five years. 

One of my first Saturdays working I got off on the wrong foot with one of the shift managers. The full-timers all had uniforms with their names stitched on the shirts. As a part-timer, I didn't rate a uniform, but wore my own clothes. Getting set to leave for the day I saw a uniform shirt in what I thought was the trash. I picked it up, took it home and washed it, and unstitched the name "Red" from the shirt, pretty proud that I had my own uniform shirt.  The following Saturday, after reporting for work I found myself facing down a very angry Red, who was grabbing me by the front of "my" shirt and was demanding to know why I was wearing "his" shirt! I learned that day about the concept of a commercial uniform laundering service. I didn't have to deal with Red for much longer though. He and some of the other full-timers were selling drugs from the station at night and were caught by an undercover Nassau County cop. 

Back in the seventies credit card transactions for minor purchases were rare and debit cards didn't yet exist, so the majority of our customers paid in cash. The guys on the pumps were given a "bank" - a wad of singles and fives, as well as a roll each of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. The manager would take readings off each of the pumps, where a dial logged the number of gallons and dollars sold. At the end of the shift another reading would be taken and the difference between the two readings would determine the amount of money we should have to turn in. In addition to fuel, the station also had a small store where cigarettes and cases of soda were sold. Later a refrigerator was added and gallons of milk and cold drinks were sold. There was no cash register. Might not have even been a calculator at the counter. Purchases of items other than gas were tracked on a sheet of paper and added up at the end of the night. At the end of each shift the manager was responsible for adding everything up and balancing the cash receipts with the various hash marks indicating sales. There was a calculator in the back office - one of those museum pieces where you pulled a lever like on a slot machine to get your total. The back office itself was a converted bathroom. The manager's "chair" was the old toilet!

There was no such thing as a self-service pump. Three or four of us were out in all weather conditions. We were not welcome in the office or the garage, but we did have a little shack that we could find a little shade in the summer and get us out of the wind in the winter. In the winter we did our best to bundle up, but there was a limit to how heavy your gloves could be since we were handling money. The standard solution was to wear two pair of cotton work gloves and warm our hands on the tail pipes of the cars. When sweat and condensation started to make the gloves damp, we'd switch them out with a pair that we had warming up on the furnace in the back of the garage. Just before opening, a guy with a small snowplow would clear the lot, but we had to deal with customers who would brush all the snow off the roofs of their cars. On at least one occasion we shoveled it all into the back seat of one such inconsiderate bastard. Some customers thought that emptying their ashtrays onto the ground was good idea. I don't know how many realized that we were scooping up the butts and depositing them back into their cars, but they eventually stopped!   

"The Getty" featured a colorful collection of characters. When I first started I rode to work with my Uncle Richie (known as "Dick" - when his son, also named Richard came to work, they were known as "Big Dick" and "Little Dick", which my cousin wasn't at all happy with). When he cut back his hours I caught a ride with John S, one of two Armenian brothers who lived around the corner. There were seven Tonys working there. One of whom, Tony Z, didn't have a surname starting with "Z" and wasn't actually named Tony, but was hiding income from his ex-wife. There was Tony Beard, the assistant manager who I remember most for stealing the girlfriend of Tony C. The head mechanic was also named Tony, who we referred to a "Wire Brush Tony". The nickname came about due to his tendency to exaggerate what was wrong with a vehicle in order to jack up the cost, which we called "fucking the customer with a wire brush". Jack, the other mechanic, got his son Jack Junior a job in the garage. Jack Junior was usually high - my most vivid memory of him is seeing him comb his hair with a fork after eating lunch. Another father son team was yet another Tony and his stepson Rob. For the longest time I thought Rob's last name was "Ramsey", but found out later that the other guys were really calling him "Ramesses", a brand of condom - a clever way to call him a "scumbag" without him realizing it. The aforementioned Tony C, along with two fellow Italian Americans Dino and Gino, were habitués of the Long Island disco scene. When not at work they could be seen decked out in polyester suits, wide collared shirts open to the navel and plenty of gold chains, and of course perfectly coiffed hair. One Saturday afternoon Gino taught us all a disco line dance in the midst of the gas pumps. An unsavory aspect of Dino and Gino was the way they viewed women. They were both engaged to "nice" girls who we never saw. They also both had girlfriends on the side, Dee and Betty, who would hang around the station when the boys were working. One night my own girlfriend stopped by to say hello. I was "counselled" by Dino and Gino that I shouldn't "allow" her to come to the station, because it wasn't a place for respectable girls. 

As befitted an operation so awash in nepotism, the regular night manager was a ne'er-do-well uncle of the owner by the name of Rocky, also known by the pump jockeys as The Raisin. (Rocky had recently moved north from Florida and was well tanned and very wrinkled). Rocky didn't do much. He'd sit in the back office all night doing who-knows-what, paying little attention to what was going on outside. My brother Mike would sometimes shut the station lights off early, making it look like we were closed, leaving only the light outside the back office lit. We'd loaf around and drink beer and Rocky never, ever, noticed. Two girls from the movie theater next door would come hang out on break, whom Rocky would flirt with. We christened them "The Raisinettes". But the most interesting of all was Station Manager Al Kramer.

Al Kramer was a six-three former Marine who liked to yell. He intimidated the Hell out of us younger guys and we did everything we could to avoid his wrath. We just called him "Kramer". One of Kramer's pet peeves were people who parked on the station lot without buying gas, blocking the pumps. When he saw it happen he would emerge from the office, the door banging against the outer wall, almost coming off its hinges, as he bellowed at the poor soul who unknowingly violated Kramer's rules for parking. One early Saturday morning we found a man sleeping in his car on the side of the building. Instead of waking him up and asking him to move we told Kramer that we had asked him to move and that he refused. Kramer stormed out, started kicking the man's car door and screaming at him to get his car off the lot. We had to find our amusement wherever we could. As mean as he could be, Kramer always stuck up for us if a customer complained. I was once accused of shortchanging a customer, a quick reading and a count of my cash on hand cleared me, but the customer wanted to know how Kramer knew I didn't pocket the money. Kramer asked him how he knew he wasn't about to get a boot in the ass. 

Somewhere along the line the elder generation of employees started leaving for "real" jobs, and Kramer started giving some of us younger guys, including me and my brother Mike, responsibility as shift managers in the evenings and on Sundays. One of the first of the new generation of night shift managers was a guy named Gino (different guy than the other Gino, who actually was named Eugene, or Gene). Gino II had a habit of leaving work in the middle of his shift to visit his girlfriend (since "nice" girls don't come to the station!). One evening, while Gino was off romancin', he left me in charge. Kramer must have suspected something was up; he called while Gino was gone and wanted to talk to him. Thinking I could cover his absence I told Kramer that Gino was in the bathroom. Kramer surely knew I was lying and said he would wait. This was decades before the ubiquity of cell phones, so there was no way I could reach Gino. Fortunately, after a very uncomfortable 5 minutes on the phone with Kramer, Gino showed back up. Shortly thereafter Gino was no longer scheduled for manager shifts and I was. 

This was my first management job. I don't mind telling you, I wasn't very good at it. Working there at the time were two brothers, John and Steve VS. Their last name was Socci, but the "VS" was due to the fact that they lived in the town of Valley Stream and we already had a "John S". Steve and I, for some reason, didn't get along. It was probably due in part to my inflated sense of being in charge and Steve's resistance to being told what to do. One afternoon shift change we got into it. At the end of shift everyone had to turn in their cash to whoever was working the counter. This involved tedious counting of change. I don't remember all the details, but I vaguely remember that there was a line of customers buying cigarettes, several workers trying to cash out, and Steve had a line of quarters stacked up 4 high each strung across the counter. Something ticked me off, I can't recall what, and I knocked over all of Steve's carefully counted stacks of coin. Steve vaulted the counter and proceeded to beat the crap out of me until some of the other guys separated us and made me sit in the back room until Steve left to go home. I had a few other run-ins with other workers, in retrospect probably due to my overbearing approach to supervision of people who didn't really need to be supervised. For some reason they still scheduled me as a shift supervisor. 

My brother Mike did a much better job as a shift manager than I did, mainly because he realized that as night manager, all he had to do was count the money at the end of the night and let everybody do whatever they wanted to, as long as people who wanted gas got their gas. One of the things that Mike liked to do was change people's names. They had hired a kid named Mike to work with us. My brother proclaimed that he was the only "Mike" and renamed the guy "Ed", which became his name for as long as he worked there. "Ed" had a girlfriend whose name I forget after 50 years, but she was renamed "Trixie", after Ed Norton's wife on The Honeymooners. A lot of guys had their names changed, but the  most long term change was a guy named Denis. Since there was already a Denis, Mike renamed him "Sid", which became the name his friends called him even after he became a wealthy businessman years later. As far as I know he's still called Sid. 

We had a lot of private jargon among the pump jockeys. "Rubberhead" was a favorite insult to customers we judged to be stupid, as well as "pork nose", which we applied to the usually obese, arrogant, assholes who we felt treated us poorly. One of our competitors, I think it was Exxon, had the slogan TFGB (Thanks For Coming By). We decided GTFO (Get The Fuck Out) was more appropriate to our attitude. Someone made a sign with the letters GTFO on it and tacked on to the outside of our little shack. Occasionally a customer would figure it out! We also had a couple of first generation Italians working at night, who would insult customers in Italian, but do it with a smile on their face so the customer was (usually) unaware of the insult. We all competed at telling people that they were idiots without them realizing that we were telling them they were idiots. It was a skill that would have a lifetime of useful application. 

But all good things come to an end. For me it was my adherence to Kramer's "don't park at the pumps" philosophy. A customer, who was not gassing up, blocking the pumps to go in and buy some cigarettes. I asked him to move. He ignored me and attempted to go inside. I stepped in front of him to block his progress - he poked me in the chest and told me to move, whereupon I hit him. And I hit him a couple of more times. Of course I was (rightfully) fired. Not the last time I was fired for an act of violence. A few days later the Nassau County Police came looking for me, since my victim had filed a police report. The shift manager Rocky referred them to my brother, who declined to give them any information. When he got home and told me that the police were looking for me, my father, an NYPD officer, took me to the police station and made me turn myself in. I wasn't charged, probably out of professional courtesy to my father - the closest I have ever come to being arrested.

Shortly after this incident I found another job, this time as a stocker a Pergament Home Center, unloading trucks and stocking shelves. 

Working Man - Part I - Paperboy

Well, I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

Since I am on the six-month countdown to retirement, I thought that a retrospective of my working life might be in order. The image that I included shows a man working on a computer, which describes some of my work life, but I'm finishing up my work life toiling away in my third major industry, and computers didn't come along until I was well into it.

I started out delivering newspapers in my neighborhood. Had a few summer jobs, one in the police department and one for a Wall Street firm in the mailroom. I worked in a full service gas station through high school. Unloaded trucks at a home improvement store and sold plants in the garden center of a department store. Did data entry for a stock broker. Apprenticed as a glass cutter and took care of old folks in a nursing home. Washed dishes and flipped burgers. Worked in the back room of a pizza restaurant cutting up toppings and making pizza dough and drove a truck driving the supplies to different restaurants. Stocked groceries and managed the night crew. Supervised paper carriers. Was an auditor at a big newspaper and was called a "paper pushing, number crunching son of a bitch" by someone I took to court. Back to stocking groceries and worked my way up to store director. Finished up as a senior revenue analyst working for state government. So far!

My first job was as a newspaper carrier for the Long Island Press, an afternoon daily with Long Island, New York circulation. Back in those days, and up through at least the eighties, newspapers were mainly delivered by grade school kids riding their bicycles through their immediate neighborhood. My memory is a little foggy, but it seems like I had around 40-50 customers. There was a little distribution office, not much more than a shack, near the Long Island Railroad station on Francis Lewis Blvd just north of North Conduit Ave. You'd bike up to the "office", which was about 10 blocks from our house on 255th Street, and pick up your papers and head over to your route area to deliver them. A lot of paperboys walked their routes with the official canvas newspaper bag slung over their shoulder; I had a wire rack attached to the front of my bike that held all my papers. It clamped onto the handlebars and was stabilized by two struts attached to the front wheel. It could easily hold 50 rolled-up and rubber-banded newspapers during the week, but since Sunday papers were so gargantuan, it usually took a few trips. I remember one morning, after loading up my Sunday papers, seeing the bike tip over from the weight!

Customers were not billed through the central office, as they are today, but carriers were responsible for collecting, in person, from their customers. The price of seven days of home delivery was 90¢. That broke down as 10¢ per day Monday - Saturday and 30¢ for Sunday. I had a little book where I would keep track of my customers and what service they received (Daily Only, Sunday Only or Daily-Sunday) and marked down when they paid each week. Most customers gave me a dollar, which included a 10¢ tip - with the big spenders forking over $1.25! I had one particularly grumpy customer - Mrs. Diamond - who was very particular about where I left her paper and usually paid me in nickels and dimes - never any tip!

Newspaper carriers then as now, are considered independent contractors. We bought our papers from the Long Island Press distributor and paid him per subscription. The paperboy (or girl) was the only contact that the customer had with the newspaper. Nobody was calling to get you to renew your subscription or take advantage of their special offers. And of course there was no "online" option. I have no memory of what we paid or what our "profit" was, but I must have thought it worth it to do every day (no days off!). We were supposed to pay the distributor every Saturday after we did the bulk of our collecting Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. After my first week I pedaled up to the office to pay my bill. The distributor's assistant was there. In retrospect he was probably around 17-18 years old, but he seemed pretty intimidating to me. When I asked him what I owed, he asked me "What do you have?". When I told him, he said that was what I owed. I reported this conversation to my dad, who took me back to the office to confront the guy. As it turned out, the amount of money that I had on hand did coincidently correspond to what I owed for the week. The distributor explained to Dad and me how the bill was calculated, so in subsequent weeks I would be able to calculate for myself what I owed. 

Eventually the Long Island Press went out of business and I got a paper route in the same general area with the New York Daily News. There were a few differences, the main one being that it was a morning paper, so there was no sleeping in during the summer and I had to get my route done before leaving for school. Our papers were delivered to our driveway (by this time my brother and at least one cousin also had routes) and the distributor came around every week to collect. I was moving in to my last few years of grade school (our Catholic School was grades 1- 8; we didn't have a junior high or middle school) and, not to put too fine a point on it, I was pretty lazy. I didn't like getting up early, I didn't like having to go around and collect money from people. I would put off collecting, and only go around when I didn't have enough money to pay my bill. If the weather was bad I would dump my papers somewhere rather than finish delivering. I had a terrible work ethic. 

Overlapping with my last two years before high school I worked summer jobs in Manhattan. The summer I turned 13 my father lined me up with a summer job at the New York City Police Department. (Dad was a NYPD officer at the time) I was employed as a clerk in the Pistol License Division, which was responsible for issuing and renewing handgun permits for "Special Patrolmen" (SP's), i.e. those who had jobs like security guards which required them to be armed. For the officers in this unit, it was far from a prestige posting. In fact, it was called the "Bow and Arrow Squad", because all the cops in division had their guns confiscated for various reasons and were consigned to desk duty. I spent my days going through files of index cards, looking for SP's whose licenses were expiring and making appointments to get them renewed. When I called SP's I always identified myself as "Tom Joyce, calling from the New York City Police Department". My voice had recently changed and over the phone I sounded like an adult. People calling back would ask for "Officer Joyce", which caused much hilarity among the actual officers. It was far from exciting, but it was my first "real" job. It was minimum wage, which then was $1.65/hour, but I received a "real" paycheck, worked with grownups and commuted to work by bus and subway from our home on the fringe of Queens to One Police Plaza in Manhattan. 

The following summer our neighbor around the corner lined me up a job as a mailroom clerk in a financial services firm, Alliance Capital Management, a subsidiary of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, a major player on Wall Street. Still not exciting, but with delivering mail, making copies and functioning as an overall gopher, I stayed busy. Auggie DiBiasi, the  full-time mail room clerk, made things interesting. Long-haired, with muttonchop sideburns, he was as hippie as you can get while having to wear a tie at work. Throughout the day he had music going in our little mail room - he convinced me to buy Quadrophenia by The Who, which remains one of my favorite albums. 

What was more interesting than the work was the lunch breaks. The office where I worked was just a few blocks from Wall Street, and I could see the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center from our building. On my lunch break I would often wander down to Wall Street where there was always some street theater to be had at The Federal Building. One of the regulars was an elderly street preacher called Crazy Willie. He would park his big Cadillac in front of Federal Hall across from the stock exchange and stand on the hood, preaching incoherently. I found out from my father that the same guy had been preaching at that corner 30 years previously, when Dad worked in Manhattan. This was all pretty interesting to me and was my first real exposure to non-mainstream religious thought, craziness notwithstanding! 

I'm not certain whether this job was in my first summer after my Freshman year of high school or the last summer before I started high school. At any rate, once the summer was over I started my first permanent, full-time job, pumping gas at a Getty Gas Station, which I did for around five years, through high school and into college.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XX - Dispensationalism

Many Christians would take issue with the fact that the Bible contradicts itself, not to mention historical and archeological records. Many others simply ignore the contradictions - or don't know about them because they don't read the Bible. But from the very early days of Christianity theologians have been aware of contradictions and discrepancies and attempted to reconcile them. (I'm mainly dealing with how Christian theologians addressed inconsistencies, I am not very familiar with how Jewish scholars approached issues in the Jewish scriptures).

The question of the nature of Jesus Christ - was he God, or was he a man? - caused a lot of ink to be spilled in the first centuries of Christianity. Even when they thought they had an answer - he's both! The minutia of how he could be both, as well as the ramifications of the various theories, occupied Christian leaders for centuries, when it could be argued that they certainly had better things to do. 

The problem that the Church Fathers identified was that there were sections of the gospels and epistles that very clearly indicated that Jesus was a man, a very holy man, a special man, but a man -  not God. There were also others which just as clearly came down on the side of Jesus being God. These second century scholars had a choice: they could ignore the question and focus what Jesus preached and encourage people to follow his example and live their life as he taught; they could decide that Jesus being a man made more sense and interpret the verses that suggested that he was also God in that light; or place their bets on Christ's divinity and interpret the verses that said otherwise in that light. What they did was decide that Jesus was man and God. They argued interminably about the details, but ended up with the conclusion that he was fully God and fully man. (The nuances of that stance take up fat volumes - check it out some time). They created a theological edifice to explain away a contradiction -  which cannot be found in any actual book of the Bible. 

A very large plot hole in the Bible is the stark difference between how God is portrayed in the Old Testament and the New Testament. (Other than the Apocalypse of John [Revelation] which reverts back to the wrathful, vengeful God imagery). In the 1800's there arose a theological position called "dispensationalism" which attempted to explain the differences. But long before that, Marcion, a second century Christian, came up with his own solution. Marcion took a blunt force approach to Biblical criticism and simply threw out the parts he thought made no sense. Observing that the vengeful God of the Old Testament bore no resemblance to the God of the Gospels he concluded that they weren't the same God. In Marcion's view, the Old Testament God was evil, while the New Testament God of Jesus was the "true" God. He threw out the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John and the non-Pauline epistles and heavily edited what was left. Say what you want, but Marcion took care of those pesky contradictions!

Nineteenth Century dispensationalists eschewed Marcion's approach. Rather than relegating the Old Testament God to second deity status, they arranged history as outlined in the Bible into a number of "dispensations". A dispensation, according to them, was a time period where God dealt with humanity in different ways from the other time periods. There were usually seven of these time periods, although I have seen eight listed as well. Since these dispensations were the opinions and interpretations of the theologians who came up with them, there were difference ways to divide them up. Here are a few ways that people have attempted to assign the breaks in these divisions:

• Innocence/Original Paradise/Garden of Eden - Adam and Eve before eating from the Tree of Knowledge
• Conscience - after "The Fall" - no rules, people followed their own conscience, ended with The Flood
• Human Government - From Noah to Abraham - not sure how this differed from the previous
• Promise - starts with Abraham and indicates God dealing with one specific group of people - ends with Moses
• For some, the previous three are grouped together, sometimes called "patriarchal"
• Law - the giving of the Law to Israel - different interpretations on when it ended
• Christ's Ministry - not all recognized this - some interpretations ended Law at Jesus' resurrection, some at the beginning of his ministry, some at the ascension, other at the end of The Acts of the Apostles. The Christ's Dispensation likewise had differing opinions on it's scope, or even if it is a separate time period
• Grace - this started whenever either the Law or Christ dispensation ended and includes the present day. 
• Tribulation - starts with the rapture and includes all the horrors of the Book of Revelation
• Millennial - ends with Christ's return to defeat The Beast and The Devil and initiates the Thousand Year reign of Christ on Earth
• Some combine the previous two
• Paradise - establishment of God's eternal kingdom on earth 

Despite there being disagreements among Christians on where these divisions should begin and end, the concept is logical. There's no question that God acts differently throughout different time periods as outlined in the Bible. But there are no bright lines delineating changes in God's rules - if there were, there would be no disagreement among the various advocates of dispensationalism. This is the problem with viewing the Bible as an inerrant and divinely inspired, it's impossible to accept that there are errors, discrepancies and contradictions and one has to sometimes tie oneself into knots to make it make sense. 

Transgender Bigotry

Let me start off by saying that during some periods of my life I have been a bigot. I was born in 1958 and the mainstream culture during my formative years was very much bigoted against...well anyone who wasn't part of the dominant demographic. For a long time I was part of a religious group that made homophobia their central emphasis. I wasn't shy about speaking up about it. I'm sure that there are family members who remember my foolish words and still hold it against me. Although there were also family members who held the same prejudices, but weren't as vocal about it. Cultural values and predominant attitudes undoubtedly shape one's attitudes, but we are not bound by groupthink, we all have the ability to change our minds. 

Many people who are prejudiced against another group of people often change their minds when they come in close contact with a member of that group. A homophobic parent who finds out that his beloved child is gay; the popular coworker who you find out is not the gender you thought she was; the guy on your sports team who is a member of a previously reviled racial or religious group. Of course not everyone acts the same. Some people double down on their bigotry - disowning children or refusing to associate with those who have been labeled as "other"; other people decide that their friend or coworker is "one of the 'good' ones", or proclaim that they love their child "despite" that characteristic that they hate. "Love the sinner, hate the sin" comes up in conversation. 

But should it take close association with another person to conclude that they are in fact a person? 

There's a a lot of different varieties of bigotry in the world, but the kind that lately seems the most virulent is against transgender people. And like every other form of bigotry, the bigots attempt to justify their bigotry. The favorite justification, just like excuses for racism, is the Bible, although cherry-picking science seems to have become popular. But the heart of opposition to transgender people's right to be transgender isn't God or science, it's hatred of the "other", with religion and biology a rationale to cover it up. 

I don't think that someone who objects to a trans woman or girl competing in woman's sports is necessarily a transphobe. There's a reason that men and women compete separately in sports - mainly due to the fact that the average woman is not as strong or fast as the average man. An objection to trans women competing against cis women is that someone who transitions after a certain point is essentially competing with a male body, with all the associated advantages. Although no one (or few) object to the advantages that money brings. In most sports the child of financially well-off parents has an almost unmeasurable advantage over someone from a family that struggles to pay the bills. Irreversible gender-altering surgery for minors is another subject that should not be off limits to discuss. The number of these surgeries, however, is statistically small, and mostly takes place with the support of parents and medical professionals, including mental health professionals. While I'm on the fence about these surgeries, I also don't want the government making those decisions.  Anti-transgender politicians claim to want to protect children, but are conspicuously silent when it comes to social programs that benefit children. 

One of the more visible battles involving anti-transgender actions is the crusade by Republican Representative Nancy Mace to ban transgender women from the public bathrooms in The Capitol. She is unambiguously targeting incoming Democratic Representative Sarah McBride, who is a transgender woman. Who does Mace think she's protecting? Other than the fact that Congressional offices have private bathrooms, I was under the impression that women's restroom toilets were all ensconced in enclosed stalls. There shouldn't be any danger of her espying McBride's genitals, or of McBride seeing Mace seated on one of the porcelain thrones. In all likelihood Sarah's presence wouldn't be noticed unless another woman's pre-loaded bigotry was on the scene. I have to wonder whether a trans man, who according to Mace's requirements, would be using the women's restroom, would cause more or less of a stir than McBride, especially if he was fully male presenting, including facial hair!

One statement you hear from anti-transgender bigots is the opinion that transgender people are some new phenomenon. Surprise! Trans men and trans women have always been here. What's changed is that they are tired of hiding in the shadows and hiding from the bigotry. People act like it's a terrible imposition to use a person's preferred pronouns. I worked with a trans man in the early 80's. No one at work had any issue referring to him with male pronouns, including the religious people. Same situation with a trans woman who worked in the bakery at one of the stores where I was a manager. 

What is considered appropriate gender expression in clothes, grooming, interests, or even what toys a child prefers is entirely cultural. There is nothing intrinsically male or female about hair length. Or makeup application. Or clothing choice. Someone who is identifying as transgender is simply making the choice about what cultural expressions they most strongly identify with. Most transgender people made the decision to physically/surgically transition as adults. Most transgender people aren't competing in sports. Most transgender people are minding their own business and living their lives and require no special treatment from society other than being allowed to live their lives as they choose to live them.

It's not special treatment, or special rights, or an "agenda" to want to be treated as a person with the same rights as everyone else.

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XIX - No True Scotsman

In my previous "Agnostic's Look at The Bible", Christians Calling Other Christians Not-Christian, I discussed the phenomena of Christians deciding that other Christians weren't "real" Christians based on doctrinal disagreements. In this week's installment I'll look at how Christians behaving badly are dismissed by other Christians as "Not True Christians".

The classic example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, from whence it derives its name, is this: McBeth claims that a Scotsman will invariably eat haggis regularly. McDuff replies that he's a Scotsman and he never eats haggis. McBeth retorts "Well then, you're not a true Scotsman". The "No True Scotsman" fallacy is a species of circular reasoning where the premise is redefined to exclude any inconvenient deviations and contradictions. This is a pretty common fallacy employed by Christians who by and large adhere to the "love thy neighbor" ethos against coreligionists who don't. When someone points out the horrible behavior of a group of Christians, you can be sure that someone will claim that "they're not really Christians because true Christians wouldn't act like that". 

Of course, Love Thy Neighbor Christians will argue that they're not the ones deciding who are true Christians and who aren't, God has set the standards in The Bible. The trouble with that, as I have pointed out many times in this series, is that the Bible isn't clear or unambiguous in what it has to say. In addition, "Christian" is as much a cultural identifier as a set of religious doctrines and behaviors. Anyone who says they're a Christian is a Christian. One might argue whether a particular Christian is living up to some perceived Biblical standard, but that doesn't make them Not A Christian, any more than abstaining from haggis makes an Edinburgh native whose roots go back many generations Not A True Scotsman.  

This doesn't mean that the Love Thy Neighbor Christians don't have a good reason to be embarrassed by the antics of their bigoted, hateful brethren. Like a family of cops who have that one sibling who just got out of prison, they think they're making them look bad. Guilt by association. But these hypothetical cops don't claim that their ex-con brother isn't their brother. But Christians are trying to boost their godliness average by eliminating their more embarrassing brethren from the statistics. 

This is by no means a Christians-only phenomena. Fundamentalist Muslims who require their women to wear a hijab look down on the Muslims who don't as not true Muslims and the burqa-wearing sects are sure the rest of the Muslim world are just as damned as Christians and Jews, maybe more so. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are pretty judgmental about their Conservative and Reform branches - some don't recognize weddings officiated by non-Orthodox rabbis. Heck, I've even encountered this tendency among pagans! But since Christians are the power wielding majority in this country, this is whom I'm focusing on. 

The truth is, that between Fundamentalist Evangelicals, Conservative Traditional Catholics, Mega Church Pastors and the like, cultural Christians who identify as right wing conservatives and espouse beliefs largely divorced from the Love Thy Neighbor morality are likely the majority of self-identified Christians in the United States. You can't just pretend they're not the face of 21st Century Christianity. 

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVIII - Christians Calling Other Christians Not-Christian

Growing up I didn't think too much about other Christians and what they believed, or whether they were "real" Christians. I was raised in the Catholic Church, which definitely teaches that it's the "One True Church", but it wasn't something that came up in everyday conversation. In my teens I became aware of the Protestant Churches in my neighborhood and attended their services out of curiosity. This disturbed my parents, but I didn't detect anything very different. It wasn't until I got involved in The Way that I was exposed to the idea that some Christians didn't think some other Christians were...Christians.

I'm not talking about one Christian judging another Christian's behavior as unchristian, but a characterization of another Christian denomination as being fundamentally outside what the Bible would define as Christian. I've written much about The Way's cultishness, but their attitudes about how one would define a "true" Christian was right in line with conservative Protestant thinking. The thinking that fueled the engine of the European religious wars of the 1600 and 1700's had definitely not gone away. Catholics viewed Protestants as deluded schismatics and Protestants viewed Catholics as Mary worshipping papists. In the nineties my ex-wife and I were home schooling our children and purchased some textbooks from a Christian book publisher. I clearly remember the description in a history textbook of Catholics as a "false religion". 

I mostly hear these accusations of Christians not being real Christians mostly in a political context. Supporters of both major presidential candidates are sure that no Christian could truly support the other candidate. Abortion is a major theme in this flinging of heretical epithets, but even something as ordinary as clapping back at hecklers becomes "evidence" that a candidate hates Christians. In the political realm it's not so much suspect doctrine that gets one viewed as outside the pale, but the assumption that God is without a doubt on one side. 

This is not something new. The New Testament Epistles are full of references to "false teachers" who are accused of leading people astray and even being diabolic influences. Who are these allegedly false teachers? They weren't pagan priests or Jewish rabbis, they were other Christian leaders! Of course, since history is written by the victors, we don't see what the non-Christian Christians of the First Century had to say, but you can bet that they were writing the same things about the eventual authors of the epistles that the epistle writers were saying about them. Even past the era when what we now know as The Bible was written there was a constant battle among different factions of Christians to decide what the truth was. There was a constantly evolving opinion about various topics about which the Bible was unclear. Why? Because the Bible was unclear.

And other than politicians disingenuously promoting themselves as the only Christian alternative, the reason that regular Christians can confidently conclude that what they believe is the truth while other people are deluded fools or shills for Satan is that the Bible is (1) Unclear (2) Internally contradictory and (3) Not a concise doctrinal statement. The Bible is not a manifesto laying out a clear statement of beliefs and clarifying all manner of moral and practical conundrums, it is a loose collection of biographies (which contradict each other) and letters addressing behavioral problems in specific places. 

In order to make sense out of it a Christian is required to cherry pick, ignore the contradictions and parts that they don't like and interpret the ambiguous sections in a way that props up their own morality. Then decide that any other view is not just wrong, but inspired by The Devil. 

Rings of Power

I'm a Tolkien geek. I'm so deep into Middle-Earth minutia that I can tell you the names of the horses of the Rohirrim that Legolas and Aragorn borrowed. I just finished Season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power - there's a lot that I liked and some things that I didn't. 

The following is written mostly for those who have watched the first two seasons, whether or not they were familiar with the source material.

One of things that I recognized early in Season 1 was that the timeline is off. Let me take a moment to give a broad out line of the Tolkien timeline, working somewhat backwards:

• Third Age: this is the time period in which the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and The Hobbit take place. It lasted around 3,000 years. The main events of LOTR take place in the final 2 years of this period; the opening chapter around 17 years previous and The Hobbit around 60 years before that. 
• Second Age: this time period ends just as the Third Age begins. It lasted around 3,400 years. The events of Rings of Power (ROP) take place during this time period. 
• First Age: ends when the Second Age begins - different interpretations on how long it lasted. It's final 500 years consisted of a struggle by the Noldor, one of three main divisions of the Elves, to recover three magic gems stolen by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. It ends when Eärendil, the son of a human father and Elven mother, sails to Valinor, the home of the Valar (pantheon of gods) to ask for their intervention. The Valar fight the "War of Wrath" defeating Morgoth. 

Second Age outline:

• Begins as Middle-Earth recovers from "The War of Wrath" 
• The Valar allow the Noldor, who had rebelled against the Valar to fight against Morgoth, to return to return to Valinor, the Undying Lands. 
• The Valar give the Men who fought against Morgoth the island of Númenor, halfway between Middle-Earth and the Undying lands, which becomes the pinnacle of human civilization
• Other than a few Elven enclaves, the Men of Middle-Earth were effectively abandoned
• Sauron, Morgoth's chief lieutenant, survived the War of Wrath and declined the opportunity to be rehabilitated, building a power base among Orcs and otherwise leaderless Men. 

In Tolkien's books, Galadriel had four brothers, various cousins and uncles, all who were killed in the war against Morgoth. She and Gil-Galad are the only surviving members of the ruling family of the Noldor. They, along with many other Elves choose to remain in Middle-Earth

Gil-Galad, High King of the Elves along with the King of Númenor start to suspect that Sauron survived and was building his power base around 750 of the Second Age (SA 750) . As Annatar, he approaches Celebrimbor around year SA 1200, but the first 16 rings of power are not completed until 300 years have passed. Another 90 years elapse before Celebrimbor forges the 3 Elven rings. In ROP this seems to take place over several months. In ROP Pharazôn’s usurpation of the kingship of Númenor takes place contemporaneously with the creation of the rings, when in the books, Pharazôn, Elendil, Miriel, Isildur etc. all live during the final 3 centuries of the Second Age - 1700 years later! Regarding the Dwarves, the release of the imprisoned Balrog doesn't happen until 1980 of the Third Age (TA 1980) under Durin VI. Obviously you have to modify and compress the timeline in order to tell the story, since important events are separated by centuries, or even millennia. 

Overall though, I liked how the story progressed and portrayed the spirit of the Tolkien canon even though it changed up many of the details. Characters like Arondir and Theo are additions that fill in the gaps, obviously there must have been Elves who weren't kings and queens and Men who weren't great warriors. Adar, however was a major character in the first two seasons who moves the story along in significant ways, despite there being no mention of him in the books. He does present a way to insert an origin story for Orcs into the series in a believable, if not canonical, way. 

The crafting of the rings themselves was presented backwards from how they were forged in the books. Tolkien wrote that sixteen rings of power were made with Annatar/Sauron's help first, then later the three were created by Celebrimbor alone, that eventually went to the Elves. Sauron, after forging the One master ring, attacks Eregion and takes the sixteen and distributes them to Dwarves and Men. (No Adar, and the destruction of Eregion is after the One Ring is made) 

What made the rings magical was presented differently. Tolkien is vague when it comes to how magic works in Middle-Earth. It's fuzzily presented as something like an extra "something" in the creative process that Elves bring to the table. ("Angelic" spirits like Sauron and Gandalf too). The mechanics of how the rings influence or enslave people, and how the One Ring controls them, is never fully explored in Tolkien's works. The Seven and the Nine are not described as different in themselves, but have different effects based on who is wearing them. The Dwarves' rings effect them differently than Men's rings because Men and Dwarves are different, not because the rings are. Mithril in the books has no magical qualities and is simply the perfect metal.

ROP presents mithril as having a miraculous power to "preserve". It magically prevents the "fading" of the Elves so that they don't have to leave Middle-Earth for the Undying Lands of the Valar. This is why in ROP mithril is a critical ingredient in the rings. The Three, the Seven, and the Nine are all shown as being intrinsically different in their composition in order to explain the different effects, with the Nine Rings for Men even containing some of Sauron's blood. Initially I thought making mithril magical was pretty dumb, but to make the story coherent to television viewers, especially those unfamiliar with the source material,  there needed to be some kind of explanation to why they worked, and why they were different from each other. In the books the Three do have a power of preservation, and we see that in how Lothlorien and Rivendell are like the lands that time forgot, but it's not due to the inclusion of mithril, but an unspecified magical component. 

I thought that the portrayal of Sauron as a gaslighting, manipulating, deceiver, who nonetheless appeared as the charming Annatar, was brilliant. He seduced Celebrimbor, the people of Eregion, and eventually even the Orcs. But he seamlessly employed betrayal and cruelty when he thought it justified his goals. Celebrimbor's guards killing each other with just his thought showed his power was more than just talk. It's not evident in LOTR, but in one of Tolkien's letters he describes Sauron's motivations as a desire for order that was corrupted into a belief that he alone could bring that order and that the ends justified the means. 

The Númenor arc was disappointing. There is no rationale given for the political intrigue other than...political intrigue. There is little reference to what Númenor was, how and why it was established, or the reason for the antipathy towards Elves: generations of building jealousy of Elves' immortality and the fear of death. The Kings of Númenor (Westernesse) are all descended from Elros, Elrond's twin brother. (After their father Eärendil successfully sought the help of the Valar at the end of the First Age, the half-Elven were given a choice to live as Men or as Elves. Elros chose mortality as a king of Men, Elrond chose to live as an Elf.) The power struggle in Westernesse might as well be any succession crisis in late Middle Ages Europe the way it's scripted. And let's not forget that ridiculous trial by sea monster that supposedly vindicated Miriel and Elendil, but was apparently forgotten by the next episode. The added characters - Elendil's daughter and Pharazôn’s slimy son add nothing to the story.

And as happy as I was to see Tom Bombadil, did we really need to wait so long to find out that the Stranger was Gandalf? We followed him for two whole seasons and he didn't do anything. I guess all of Season 3 we'll be treated to hints on who the so-called Dark Wizard is. Not Radagast, that's for sure. He came right out and said that he was one of the five Istari, i.e. Wizards, so he could be Saruman, or he could be one of the Blue Wizards that we know very little of. Speaking of the Stranger, who we now know is Gandalf, the Harfoot (and now Stoor) episodes I could have done without, but they are trying to cram in as many origin stories as they can. 

I do enjoy the regular throwaway lines that Tolkien fans will get, but that those unfamiliar with the source materials will miss: the chants of Baruk Khazâd in Khazâd-Dum; the Dark Wizard mentioning Manwë; Elendil (finally) mentioning that he has a son named Anarion; references to Fëanor and the Silmarils; mentions of Tuor and Beren; Disa's mention of the Dimrill Dale and Zirakzigal (and Disa's name is similar to Dis, sister to Thorin and the only named female Dwarf in all of Tolkien's writings); the Doors of Durin crafted by Narvi & Celebrimbor; Pharazôn lamenting not being able to see Eressëa in the distance; the Palantir; Miriel giving Elendil Narsil, the sword that ultimately is used to cut the One Ring from Sauron's hand and is reforged as Aragorn's sword Anduril; the Stoors reference to a mythical home as Sūzat (the word that is translated "The Shire" in the appendices); Adar's mention of Melian...and some I may have missed...geek paradise!

I liked Season 2 much more than Season 1, and the ending was at the same time catastrophic and hopeful. The Elves, while defeated in battle, find refuge in what is surely the future site of Rivendell; the Stoors, accompanied by the two Harfoots are one step closer to founding The Shire (although that timeline will have to be off as well, since The Shire was founded in 1401 of the Third Age...and we still need to meet the Fallohides!