Go to Hell, Pop Culture

The most recent cover given to Gay Talese's cultural chronicle Thy Neighbor's Wife has an image of an unclothed woman sitting on some rocks on a beach. While she is sitting at an angle that covers all the odds and ends that would render the image explicit, it is still clearly suggestive.

It didn't really occur to me that this cover would be a problem, considering that the book was the definitive piece of journalism on the sexual revolution, and the image was clearly a relic of a bygone era, revealing less than you would see at the average neighborhood pool nowadays. So I bought the book at borders and dove in.

My dear wife did not see things the same way I did, so out of consideration for her feelings, I went ahead and took some sharpies and drew a modest skirt and T-shirt on the woman. Enjoying this creative coverup, I went ahead and added some Nike sneakers, a baseball cap, a fish in her hand, and a text bubble that says, "mmmm...sushi."

So in this way, I ended up censoring the cover of a book which is essentially about the battle between censorship and sexual liberty in America. That would place me squarely in the same camp as most of the Christians in the book, with the exception of a liscentious cult leader named John Humphrey Noyes.

In fact, I read the book with a sort of perpetual cringe, waiting to find out what kind of cruelty and repression the Christians would come up with next. As Americans from all sectors of society began openly discussing, portraying, and practicing the kind of sexual (mis)behavior that had, according to the Kinsey Reports, been going on for generations, the Church moved in with its giant political claw to smother the movement.

The tactics employed included intimidation, imprisonment, smear campaigns, and various ill-conceived political maneuvers. It's not too difficult to see why people define Christians by their hunger for power and their ignorance.

Where does anyone get the idea that a Christlike response to "sin" is to crush it with all the political muscle we can muster? I think this response is exactly the opposite of Jesus' teaching, which pierces past appearances and deeds to the heart, and addresses pain, need, and perversion that lies there with love.

Although I've only skimmed it, Rob Bell's recent book Sex God seems to herald a changing voice in the dialog between Christians and pop culture on sex, which used to go something like this:

Pop Culture: Isn't sex awesome?
Christians: Sure, as long as you don't enjoy it.
Pop Culture: But sex is wired into us. It's a biological part of who we are.
Christians: Your wiring is evil. Sex is only for making babies.
Pop Culture: You're irrelevant.
Christians: You're perverted.
Pop Culture: F**k you, Christians.
Christians: Go to Hell, pop culture.

That's a paraphrase, but I think it pretty accurately sums up the tone.

I'm a big believer in the idea that our understanding of, and more specifically our relationship with, Jesus gives us a perspective that can be both illuminating and liberating (although some would argue with my use of that word) if we can be a little less spiteful in how we listen to and speak with those who disagree with or don't understand us.

That goes for sexuality and dozens of other issues on the cultural radar these days. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have convictions and opinions. It means we should always let our speech be seasoned with Grace. We should be quick to listen and slow to speak, and we must understand that nothing short of love really makes a difference, anyway.

Poetic Facts

My official writer's bio reads:

Half-American, half-Australian, Philippine-raised, Chicago-educated, Atlanta-dwelling writer Ian North lives and works with immigrants and refugees. He mentors and equips members of the international community to tell their own stories through writing, visual art, and music. He is also involved in several creative projects, including a blog of off-kilter folk stories and songs at http://ghosttownrevival.wordpress.com.

But if I were to write my story, to really write it as I'm learning to see it, it would be the story of a movement from Scotland to Australia to India to China to Indonesia to the Philippines. It would be short on memoir, long on family history. It would take years of research that I don't know how to do, and it would owe its scope to a book called Unto the Sons by Gay Talese.

Talese is the son of an Italian-American tailor named Joseph Talese, himself the son of an Italian immigrant to the United States. I'd read some of Talese's work in The Gay Talese Reader a few years back, so I was aware of his ability to make nonfiction reports resonate with narrative immediacy, a trademark common to practicioners of the "New Journalism," a writing movement spawned by reporters and nonfiction novelists like Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson.

While other writers in this movement employed a cavalier approach to phrasing, language, and self-characterization, Talese maintained a style that may have cost him the celebrity that visited many of his contemporaries: formal, immaculately structured portrayal of fact.

The reason that I find Unto the Sons so compelling is the subject: Talese turns his journalistic eye on his own family history. He sees himself as part of a massive movement, discussing Italian history, moving seamlessly from Roman Empire to World War I to the formation of the Mafia and its roots in America to his own childhood as an Italian-American during WWII.

So, where I always saw Talese as a brilliant collector of fact and a masterful essayist, I now see the roots of his talent, the development of his eye for minute but significant details, and his comfort with a formal, well-dressed approach to examining the human soul.

What does this have to do with me? It makes me want to know where I come from. I want to understand where my little life, my interests, my movements, my troubles, my talent all come from, and where they all lead.

What of my great uncle who played harmonica with the Sydney Orchestra? Has anyone upstream battled depression like me? Who left the Christian faith, and who stayed? Were the evangelists to China and India ever doubtful of their work or purpose? What drove them forward or slowed them down?

There are dozens of relatable movements in Unto the Sons, especially to someone who comes from a well-traveled line. But the main drive it leaves me with is the desire to be the Gay Talese of my own family line.

The gift given to me by God and/or genetics and/or a few encouraging teachers was to write. So when this gift turns to a profession and I have the time and resources, the North family will have its own book which looks back and finds the poetry in the facts of our heritage, and hands it forward as a legacy for our children to do with as they see fit.