I Always Think There’s a Band, Kid

This spring I finally fulfilled a long held wish. After decades of waiting, I finally landed the role of Harold Hill in The Music Man.

Once I had the role, though, the rehearsal process turned out to be pretty rough. We had a great director who my wife and I have worked with many times before, but we lacked a musical director. We tried doing it Karaoke-style. The Music Man does not work well Karaoke style. When we got further into the rehearsal process, it became evident that dancing is not my strong suit.

 I’ve always been a bit stiff onstage, and this extended not only to dancing, but to my awkward first attempts to kiss the young lady playing Marian. I was also not great at throwing a punch at Charlie Cowell. After one particularly weird attempt at a punch, my director said, “Well, you’re a lover, not a fighter.” I immediately thought back to my awkward kiss from just a few minutes earlier, and said, “Actually, I’m not so hot at either. I’m beginning to wonder why you cast me…”

I’ve talked to people—including members of our cast—who aren’t super fond of The Music Man. They found it corny. A bit sexist. Old fashioned. Out of date. They had originally planned on being in The King and I, but when the theater lost the rights because a Broadway revival was opening, The Music Man became the backup plan.

I started to wonder—exactly why had I wanted to play Harold Hill all these years? I knew part of it was my somewhat limited ability to sing and my rather unlimited ability to talk. Harold Hill is a patter-part where you talk your way through a lot of the songs. I loved the songs. But reading the play again, I began to see that it had a dark side if you actually thought about the characters. Although it’s played for laughs, throughout most of the show, until the last 15 or 20 minutes, Harold is not just a con man, but a particularly heartless one. In particular, he befriends a little boy with a lisp named Winthrop, brings him out of his shell, and becomes a surrogate father to him, all the while planning to leave town with his ill-gotten gains, leaving Winthrop devastated and disillusioned. And yet audiences like Harold Hill.

 Why had a wanted to play Harold? How was I going to play Harold? Who would he be for me?

The key to Harold Hill became, for me, the scene near the end of the play when he finally fesses up to Winthrop. Harold confesses that he can’t lead a band, that he’s a liar, that he’s a no-good rotten crook. But then he tells Winthrop that “I wanted you in the band so you’d stop moping around feeling sorry for yourself.”

“What band?” Winthrop replies.

“I always think there’s a band, kid.”

That line became the key to the part for me. Harold always believes there’s a band. What does that line mean? It raises the question: Who is the real Harold Hill? Is the real Harold the con man named Greg who is cynical, heartless, and willing to spend weeks cozying up to people he plans to swindle? Or is the real Harold Hill the act Greg puts on? Does he really, somehow, believe there’s a band while he’s pretending he’s going to lead one? I played it as the latter.

Harold really believes there’s a band, even though it’s just make-believe. The way I thought about Harold, he had to pull the cynical shell of Greg back on when it was time to go. But while the con is in full swing, he believes every word he says, and his belief is the thing that makes him a great con man.

I have always had an affinity for stories of make-believe, but especially for stories of supposed lies that somehow come true. I’m not sure why. I guess I often worry that faith is a lie. That a lot of what I tell myself to get through a day is a lie. As a teacher, maybe I’m not really impacting my students as much as I’d like to be. Maybe my creative endeavors aren’t really worth the attention I lavish on them for not much tangible reward. Maybe I’m not as good a father or husband or friend as I’d like to think I am. Maybe the things I spend so much time and attention on aren’t really worth doing.

But the only way out of this conundrum is to act like they are, act like I am. I can’t really prove most of what gives my life meaning, religious or secular. I can prove that my eighth graders achieved high standardized writing scores last year. I can’t prove that those scores will make their lives any better in the long run, or that the scores mean they will be better writers in real life. I can prove that my own children have had high test scores all through their schooling. I can’t prove that the years of reading books to them every night from the time they were 3 and 4 until they finally asked me to stop reading aloud sometime half way through Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince many years later will make them better people as adults.

And so much of the time, we are con men and women ourselves. Are we really doing things for other people, or are we doing them so we can feel good about ourselves? But despite my own flaws and my endless need to know I’m doing a good job at this or that or the other thing, while I’m doing these things, I really believe in them. I have to, or I couldn’t do them. I have to believe my creativity, my teaching, my family, matter even if I can’t prove they do.

At the end of the play, Marian the librarian knows Harold is a sham, yet she gives him the piece of evidence that she could have used to condemned him. She is willing to let him go. From a rational point of view, she is being willfully stupid, aiding and abetting a criminal and allowing him to run off with hundreds of dollars of her fellow citizens’ hard earned money. Taken at face value, Marian has become as morally bankrupt as Harold.

And yet…

When Winthrop asks Marion, who is his older sister, if she believes Harold, she says she believes every word he ever said. She tells him that everything he said would happen had happened—and that you could see it in the way every kid and adult in town had behaved all summer.

Harold’s lie had transformed River City from a place full of “Iowa Stubborn” to a town full of creativity and high spirits. They mayor’s wife is dancing. The juvenile delinquent has become a positive role model. The gossipy women are reading more. Most importantly, Winthrop, who had been morose and withdrawn on account of his father’s death and his lisp has become a happy kid again. It may have been a lie, but it came true. And perhaps what Marian realized is that the Harold who transformed the town and her brother was the real Harold in the end.

At the end of the play, of course, Harold is caught because he realizes he is in love with Marian, and lingers to tell her so. He gets his foot “caught in the door.” They are taking a vote on whether to tar and feather him. The ever-suspicious mayor points out that after all these weeks, they have never heard a bit of music or seen the band actually perform. “Where’s the band? Where’s the band?!” he asks.

And then the band enters. The kids have put themselves into their uniforms, gathered together with their instruments, and come to the professor’s rescue.

Each night, as I stood in handcuffs downstage, trying to feel Harold’s despair at having been caught, the sight of the band entering from the opposite side of the auditorium gave me goose bumps. I can’t quite explain why. The deus ex machina effect?

The band played the Minuet in G as an out of tune cacophony, and the citizens of River City loved it anyway, and my handcuffs came off. 

This ending is a little baffling in some respect: it simply concludes with a terrible performance being hailed as brilliant. Will Harold learn to be a real musician? Will he and Marian actually be happy together? Who will pay him to continue leading the band? Will he get away with all his past crimes, despite Charlie Cowell’s evidence against him? The answer, it appears, is yes.

Early in the show, the mayor’s wife, Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn, scratches a bunion on her foot and Harold pretends that this scratch is a movement of ballet-like quality. “What grace!” he declares, lying to flatter her.

The Music Man is a show about lies, but it is mainly a show about grace. Real grace. The grace that allows for a swindle to transform a town, a child, a librarian, and, in the end, the swindler himself. Sometimes the pretense becomes the reality. Sometimes there is love hidden all around, but you have to pretend you have it before you can see it for real.

I can only hope and pretend I’m being as good a teacher, husband, father, or actor as I pretend to be, but with some grace, perhaps I am. Our production had a graceful ending as well. A wonderful piano player who had just finished playing another production of the show came to our rescue and her presence was the final element that made it all gel. I learned to fake dancing just enough to get by, and by the last show a fellow cast member told me he could tell I wasn’t counting under my breath anymore. High praise. And we added on a final coda to the show that apparently doesn’t usually happen—several of the kids in the show actually played a rendition of “Seventy-Six Trombones” right before the curtain call.

I always believe there’s a band, kid.

I think that’s way I wanted to play Harold Hill. And I’m glad I did.

 All photos by Nadia Schult

Secular School Holy

It was all over the news.
The students had pulled the fire alarm, 
Waiting for everyone to exit the building,
And then started shooting.

The very next morning
My school had an unannounced fire drill.
The shrieking, electric alarm blared in our ears.
My students looked at me,
Eyes wide with fear.
Eyes that said, "Do we really have to go out there?"
I was scared too. 
I told them so.
But we went
Out of the class,
Out the double doors,
To the grassy area 
Where we might be sitting ducks.
I told them all to be ready to...duck.

But nothing happened.

When there's a school shooting,
Online postings flood the computer screen with laments:
That shooting happened, 
Those children died,
Because we have chased God out of the schools.

I've pondered how to respond to those postings--
To nostalgia for a supposedly simpler time
Masquerading as theology.
Very simple theology.
But there is nothing to say.
And too much to say. 
And so I say nothing.

They think that God is found in compulsory, 
Generic prayers said out of habit.
The kids don't even think about what the pledge means.
They think this would be any different?

They think that by chasing out the prayers, 
They chased out God.

So God is either powerless or pouty?

Perhaps God is there,
But not in the places 
People think to look for holiness.

In the beginning was the word...

It is the gospel of the power of words I preach. 
My students are full of words.
They talk and they talk and they talk.
They overflow words.
Spew words all over each other. 

But when I ask them to write about the right words at the right time,
Or about a book that changed their lives,
Or about a deeply held belief,
They give me blanks stares, 
And apparently blank minds. 
The thought had never occurred to them that words 
Might be more than recreational.

Many of them go to church
But claim no words touch them,
No beliefs define them. 
Many of them don't go anywhere 
Where big ideas get discussed, 
Where the power of words
Has any power.

My ministry is to baptize them into the power of words,
Secularly speaking, of course. 
Baptism by immersion.
We dive into stories, 
Essays,
Memoirs,
Novels.
We read, discuss,
Write, share,
And repeat. 
Until they know the power of them,
Until an astonishing detail from writing shared aloud
Can make the whole class gasp.
A kind of Amen.

And it is holy.

For a time I taught my daughter:
Raised Presbyterian, 
Attending Youth on Wednesday night.
And she was friends with a Jewish girl
And a Muslim girl.
One day I saw them, 
Christian, Jewish, Muslim,
Walking in a line, 
Laughing together in the hall outside my classroom door,
Heading for my class.

And I thought, watching them, 
That in a world where suicide bombers 
Can kill people over lunch,
In a world where kids pull fire alarms 
And shoot their classmates,
That the sight before me-- 
Made possible by this secular setting--
Three people bound not by fear or hatred, 
But by laughter...
I thought, watching them,
That this is an absolute Good.
This is holy.
And if God is anywhere,
He is here. 

But his ways are not our ways.

The Kidnapping: A Writing Exercise

It's hard to get young (or even older) fiction writers to really put themselves into the mind and experience of a character. They write things like, "I woke up and realized I'd been kidnapped and was being held captive under a boardwalk in Atlantic City." Try this exercise: Your character wakes up and is blindfolded and tied up. They have to use sound, smell, and touch to slowly figure out where they are. At some point, the blindfold may come off, but they need to write about how the character would actually experience it-- as a dawning realization. The results are usually very interesting. When we share aloud, I have students stop just short of revealing where the character is... the rest of the class needs to guess.

George awakened, his head throbbing. Where was he? He tried to open his eyes, but realized it made no difference-- he was blindfolded. Nonetheless, a pulsing, white light pounded against his closed eyelids, right through the rough cloth. He tried to move, but realized that he was bound as well, his feet tied together and his hands behind his back. The rough, prickly rope dug into his wrists, and though his jeans protected his ankles, the pressure still hurt. He lay on his right side, and his face was pressed against a somewhat bumpy metallic surface.

The metal rumbled, vibrated, as if it was moving. Am I in a truck? he wondered. But he began to detect a pattern to the movement-- not the random disturbance of bumps in a road, but the slow churning motion of something moving slowly around in a circle. He was revolving, and felt certain of it now. The light continued to shine in his face, The metal beneath him was warm, and the light was accompanied by an intense heat from above. He smelled something sharp, now. Some kind of oil. In the far distance, he thought he could hear waves, and maybe the cry of some kind of bird. A seagull?

He realized where he was.

Holy Abstractions: For Christmas Eve

Last Christmas break I read a Charles Dickens' classic. Not a A Christmas Carol, but another book with just as much to say to our modern age: Hard Times. The Common Core crowd and the education deformers may think they are pedaling something new, but their brand of education and thinking about life was alive and well back in Dickens' day. The book begins in  a classroom where these words are being spoken: 'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.' 

I almost expect the speaker to talk about reading 80% informational texts. 

Teaching these past few years in an educational system that is increasingly about numbers and data, about labeling students as numbers, about favoring informational texts at the expense of story and narrative, about doubting people but believing in scripted curricula and tests, has made me think a lot about dichotomies: 

data versus people
information versus stories
facts versus truth
doubt versus belief

As for that first dichotomy, I've become aware that some people do view both teachers and students as mere fodder for data. Teachers become "human capital" and students become test scores. We reduce people to numbers, to stimulus and response. Threaten teachers enough and they will finally produce results. 

Out in society, there are many who have discounted free will, and even person-hood at all. We are simply pre-programmed "wet robots," (to borrow a phrase from Dilbert). When I read the book You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Linier a couple of years ago in paperback, something really struck me from his afterward. He conjectured that many people still engaged in religious faith because it afforded them a way to still believe in people. 

I think there's a lot of truth there. There are a lot of people out there who don't believe in people any more. 

When I look at those dichotomies, which I live with every day in my classroom, I have to come down on the side of people, stories, truth, and belief. I need these things to be tempered by numbers and facts, but numbers and facts don't make life worth living or show me what is good. They may give me (sometimes) practical ways to make life better, but they can't give me any assurance that life itself is worth living. 

It is people, story, belief, and truth that make my life worth living. And no story makes the value of these things more clear than the Christmas Story.

The value of being a person, a person, beyond anything that can be measured or explained, is affirmed. God himself became a person. Being a person is transcendent-- or can be. In many ways, the Christmas Story makes God the ultimate humanist. Being human matters. It matters so much that he became one himself. 

The Christmas Story affirms the importance of story. There is the story itself, in its various forms in different gospels, which all seem  to merge into a single narrative for most of us. There are the stories Jesus grew up to tell--human stories. Madeleine L'Engle quotes someone as saying that "Jesus was God who told stories." And then there is the whole story of Jesus' life. It is a story. Not a set of facts. Jesus was not data driven. He was, it would appear, to be driven by love.

And the Christmas Story is about truth. If you go in looking for facts, you may be disappointed. Many things can be proved as facts. But some truths can only be expressed as story. Truths like love. Love can be explained away as a fact: it is an accidentally produced biological stimulus designed to perpetuate the species. Love in its most mysterious, ineffable sense, does not exist. The Christmas Story affirms Love, affirms that to be human is a transcendent experience, affirms meaning. It affirms the Truth that being human matters. 

Read some young adult literature, some fairy tales, some fantasy. The villains never believe in love. The key to Good winning is to believe in it. Stories give us faith in a deeper truth: that love is at the center of everything. Read The Giver. Read A Wrinkle in Time. Read Harry Potter. Read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Heck, even read the faith-denying The Amber Spyglass. What saves the day? Love. Everyone wants to believe in Love. 

I look at the people I most admire, people who have changed the world for the better. They were all acting out of Love: Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, William Wilberforce (who took down the British slave trade). And the teachers at Sandy Hook who gave their lives trying to protect their students. And millions of people who every day do small, unnoticed, unheralded acts of kindness. I refuse to reduce Love to a fact. It is a Truth-- a mysterious, numinous Truth.

If nothing else, I need to believe in Love. But there are so many things I need to believe in to do what I do.

I need to believe in my students. I need them to believe in themselves. There is data (oh, the irony!) to suggest that belief in your own ability to become smarter enables you to become smarter. Not believing means you may not grow intellectually as much as the believer. 

And so I have to come down on the side of people, of stories, of truth, of belief.  Whatever you may think of the facts of the Christmas Story, the Truth of it affirms these holy abstractions:
People
Stories
Truth
Belief

These are the abstractions I try to live out every day in concrete ways, using pencils, pens, paper, computer screens, white boards, and even M&M's. The abstract always becomes incarnate in the specific, whether it is dry erase markers, or dry bales of hay in a manger somewhere. 

Merry Christmas. 

I Believe in Ray Bradbury

When favorite authors die, I feel a physical jolt go through my body for a moment when I read the news, much they way I do if I hear of the death of someone I know personally. Because, of course, I do know authors personally-- even if they don't know me. When I heard Madeleine L'Engle had died, I felt the jolt. Yesterday I felt it again. A colleague sent me the link to an article about Ray Bradbury's death on my email at school, and I read it in disbelief. I knew Bradbury was getting up there and had suffered a stroke, but somehow with writers, who exist for me as personalities embodied by words, not by bodies, I can't quite believe they're really gone. And I feel I know them as well as people I see every day, even if they never know me. Writers long dead are people I know. In Bradbury's case, I'd actually had a very brief contact with him, so it made his loss even more palpable.

Some of my 8th graders had read and discussed and written about Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 this year. We were meeting in our Media Center-- no, in honor of Bradbury, I'll call it a library-- to finish the group novels they've been writing, and when I told them he had died, many of them reacted with dismay. I suppose it sounds cruel, but I've never been happier to hear some 8th graders sound a little sad. He had made in impression on them. 

My first impression of Ray Bradbury came, I think, in the 7th grade, where Mrs. Bronson had us read the story "All Summer in a Day." I have always been a sucker for a memorable setting-- probably the influence of the Narnia books-- and this story had one that was memorable in spades: the never-ending rain of Venus, the oppressive earthling classroom of children who'd brought all their viciousness with them across the stars, and the shades-of-gray jungle the students run around in for one magical afternoon. They blazed images onto my brain that stayed for two decades, until I became a 7th grade English teacher  myself and opened my Prentice Hall Literature teacher's edition to find the mental pictures were still there, just as I'd remembered them. And of course, the ironic, cruel, twist ending had stayed with me as well. I think it may have been Bradbury who taught me that it's the twist, the irony, that gives a story its real kick.


I remember watching the TV special of "The Electric Grandmother" and enjoying it, and being vaguely aware of The Martian Chronicles when the miniseries aired. In my Language Arts class, we read a script of one of the stories from Scope Magazine. But what solidified my relationship with Bradbury was my 11th grade Literature of Science Fiction class. (I think of the cool English classes I had as a junior and senior in New York, classes like Masterpieces of the Drama, American Musical Theater, Speech and Public Speaking, and I smile; and then I think about the paltry workbook offerings being dolled out today, and I shudder.) It wasn't necessarily a very well taught class in particular, the but books on the syllabus where a smorgasbord of Science Fiction classics. The book that really drew me in, though, was Fahrenheit 451.


I don't know if I could have verbalized it then, though I was pretty verbal even in high school, but while some of the other books predicted things about the future, Fahrenheit predicted how those things would affect people in the future.  I had already developed a bent toward theology, philosophy, and psychology, and the characterizations and the philosophical discussions in Fahrenheit fascinated me.


There was also the fact that I had already been in love with books for many years, and to have a society that wanted the burn them was both fascinating and repulsive. The poetic, slightly overripe language fascinated me as well, and the fact that the story fired on all cylinders at once: plot, character development, settings, themes, irony-- everything flowed together. It wasn't just a book about philosophical discussions-- it was a book with action, too. But even the action scenes, like Montag killing his boss with a flame-thrower or running for his life on live television, had satiric and thematic undertones.


It became one of my very favorite books.


Over the years of finishing high school, attending college, and beginning a teaching career, I continued to read more Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, collection after collection of short stories. My first year of teaching in 1990, I tried teaching Fahrenheit to a few classes of sophomores, with mixed results. The more I read, the more I came to appreciate one of Bradbury's unique talents: to put us uniquely inside an experience, to give us the inner impression of it, often by being metaphorical. To give us the facts about something you simply describe it; to give us the reality of something, you must immerse us in it, go beyond the facts to the truth.


When I was teaching ninth grade, I got to share the book Dandelion Wine with my students, and Bradbury's deep and enthralling affection with his own youth was one of the things that inspired me to sit down and fictionalize my own youth in my first novel, Making My Escape. It's no Dandelion Wine, but writing it made me realize that my own childhood, with all its flaws, was just as magical in its own way as Bradbury's had been. It isn't what happens to you: it's how you pay attention to it.


Around the time I switched from teaching high school to teaching middle school, I found the Bradbury non-fiction book Zen and the Art of Writing, and began sharing his essay "The Joy of Writing" with my 8th graders. In it, Bradbury talks about writing what you love and what you hate. The ideas from the essay turned into an activity I still open each school year with, and which I later put into my book, Writing Extraordinary Essays: the Enthusiasm Map and the Frustration Map, where I encourage my students to list their loves and hates. They use the maps all year to find real topics that they actually care about (as opposed to standardized prompts, which no one but state test-makers care about). And Bradbury made me more and more aware of the power of words to create images, and of images to convey ideas, a concept that has become more and more powerful to me as my life has progressed.


In 2006 I had the opportunity to direct a youth production of The Martian Chronicles at our local theater. I decided that my funnies page alter ego, Mr. Fitz, should direct his own production that paralleled the real life one, and began drawing comic strips about the experience. While we were in rehearsal, we were contacted by Bradbury's bibliographer, Don Albright, who wanted copies of our programs and posters, and who offered to send us autographed copies of Bradbury classics to raffle off to benefit the Sands Theater Center.


He really liked my poster for the show, thinking it was a woodcut, when it was merely pen and ink.

When I told him about Mr. Fitz directing the show, he gave me an address and suggested I send copies of the strips to Bradbury himself. I took a deep breath, made copies of all the strips, and sent them off in the mail, including this strip, the final one in the series:

 A short while later, I received an email from Bradbury's daughter (he didn't use computers) with the following message from him:


"I appreciate your sending on copies of your delightful Mr. Fitz. I especially like the one where you did all the characters and the variations of attitudes in The Martian Chronicles. I deeply appreciate this and send my best wishes to you. God Bless, -- Ray Bradbury"


Brief, but what an impact. Not only did I have an message from Ray Bradbury, but he had read my cartoons and at least pretended to enjoy them! Unparalleled and unbelievable, that email was simply one of the best sets of words I have ever read. To this day, knowing that Bradbury has seen my cartoons paying tribute to his work is one of the best things ever to come out of drawing the strip.


Since those first awkward days of teaching, when Fahrenheit 451 didn't go over so well with 10th graders, I've now reached the point where I can successfully teach it to 8th graders. When I teach it each year, one of my rules is that the students come up with the discussion questions and by and large run the discussion. And every year, the students surprise me by noticing something new, coming up with some new insight about the book I think I know inside and out. Having my students find things I've missed, and thus surprise me is one my greatest joys as a teacher. The test I give for Fahrenheit, to take one scene from the book and analyze how it works on every literary level possible, helps me to show the students that literary analysis doesn't have to be the dissection of a dead story, but the lively, goose-bump inducing appreciation of an author's storytelling firing on all cylinders. It was Bradbury's lesson to me as a writer, and now I try to pass it on to them.


And the most important lesson of all, not just about writing, but about life, that Bradbury modeled was to do what you love. Around the time I was directing The Martian Chronicles, I got into some hot water for some of the satire in my comic strip. I thought about quitting the strip, and possibly of quitting teaching. I thought about censoring myself. But then I remembered Fahrenheit 451, and I thought, "What Would Ray Do?"


I kept drawing. Six years later, I'm still at it. 


Bradbury taught me about enthusiasm, about speaking up and speaking out, about the importance of books and stories and how they make us more human. 


And then, the stories themselves. Those stories. Stories you can get immersed in, lost in. Stories that make you see the world a little differently. Ray saw the world a little differently, and he shared that view with all of us. 


I already miss him.

The Invention of Truth

Okay, so I lied. Today's blog is not going to be a direct statement of belief, but an examination of a movie. This past spring we watched The Invention of Lying, a movie that got mixed reviews and not very strong box-office. I'm writing about it because, though I'm not sure what the makers of the film intended, I get the feeling they thought they were creating a masterful satire of religion that makes it look foolish.

Spoiler alert-- I give away a lot of this movie's plot below!

The movie is set in a world where nobody lies; everybody tells the truth about what they are feeling and thinking, all the time. There is no fiction, including in movies, which are all lectures, and apparently no religion. Ricky Gervais stars as Mark, a screenplay writer who loses his job, can't get the girl he loves to love him back, and is about to be thrown out of his apartment. This desperate situation pushes him to tell a lie, and once he starts, he can't stop. He makes up fake history for a lecture film, thus creating fiction, and restarts his career. Everyone believes all his lies because the concept of lying is foreign to them.

He eventually tells his dying mother that there is a place where everyone goes when they die where they get a house and be with everyone they love-- on other words, the popular conception of heaven. When word of heaven gets out, Mark is pressured to reveal more, and he eventually writes down ten rules on pizza boxes, and reveals to the world the existence of the "big man in the sky" who decides who gets to go to heaven who doesn't, based on how good each person's level of goodness or badness. This speech eventually leads to the founding of churches, one of which is called "A Quiet Place to Think About the Big Man in the Sky."

On the surface, it might appear that the filmmakers have succeeded in revealing religion as ridiculous. But a deeper reading of the film brings some other insights to the surface. For one, as I've often discovered when people attack religion, the movie parodies a version of religion that is so simplistic that the religion is almost a parody in and of itself. The idea of God as a "big man in the sky" is a child's picture of God. The idea of God punishing and rewarding is certainly in the Bible, is not in the simplistic, legalistic way is is presented here. The satire here is an assault on a seven-year-old's religion. Granted, many adults have the religious sensibilities of seven year-olds, but that's a whole 'nother issue.

What I find more interesting, though, is that while Mark tells the girl he loves that he "did a bad thing" in making up the big man in the sky, the rest of his lies generally have positive consequences. Even more interesting is the fact that world as he knows it, a world of only facts, is not only deadly dull, but is a world of despair. As Mark walks through a nursing home ("A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People") the residents clamour about every day being worse than the last. A man in his apartment building is opening thinking of suicide, and in this world, no one cares. The girl Mark loves, Anna, played by Jennifer Garner, is only interested in a good-looking genetic match (played by Rob Lowe) for a husband. Other considerations are irrelevent-- only genetics matter.

In fact, this world of cold, hard facts is a wretched place to live until Mark begins telling his lies. In a telling scene, Anna sees a boy being teased for his appearance in a park, and, under Mark's influence, tells him there is more to him than meets the eye. And there probably is. She isn't telling the boy a lie-- she's telling him a truth. As always, there is a difference between the truth and the facts.

Although I think the movie is intended as a send up of religion, and although it does parody the lies of advertising well, I think that The Invention of Lying is less a parody of religion than an unintended satire about what it would be like to live in a world where scientific fact is the only truth. In the end, it is looking beyond the obvious facts of surface appearances that matters. It is finding value in people that can't be proved or quantified that makes us truly human and life worth living. The world of The Invention of Lying is a godless dystopia that shows us that when facts are all we have, we aren't left with much.

The world is made better, not necessarily by Mark's lies, but by his seeing beyond, and above, the facts to value being human in a way that the facts alone can't support. The Invention of Lying sets out to make religion look bad, but ultimately shows us how a empty a purely materialist world might be. And that's the truth.

Believing in Beliefs

This blog has been dormant far too long, and since I'm on summer vacation, I decided to reboot it. I've been writing my blot on teaching, The Real Mr. Fitz, much more regularly, because it has a more definite focus. But I think I've finally found my focus here, in this comic strip I published in my newest book. I have a whole lot of beliefs, and since I started this blog with beliefs, I've decided to go with that idea and see where it leads.

I do believe in having beliefs. I think the word believe gets a bad rap, just like the word faith does. But I don't think you can live your life without beliefs. I have a book on my stack of "to read" books (actually it's more like two stacks, and a couple of crates of "to read" books) called Things I Believe But Cannot Prove, written by a bunch of scientists. Having glanced through it, they have plenty to say. Even the most empirical mind around must rest on the belief that the only things worth paying attention to are those that can be proved. You cannot, however, prove that those are the only things worth paying attention to. It is a belief like any other...

And so as I reboot this blog, I'll be considering the things I believe, and why I believe them...