Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged and bad writing

My favorite evangelical Christian blogger, Fred Clark, in his ongoing dissection of the Left Behind series keeps returning to a theme in his criticism of those books: bad theology leads to bad writing.  He contends that while Jerry Jenkins may well be a not very good writer to begin with, the illogical, irrational, and completely incoherent theology that forms the basis for the books makes his writing worse by demanding that he write in multiple impossibilities, contradictions, and generally write characters who behave in a way nothing at all like the way real people behave.

Substitute "philosophy" or "thinking" for "theology" and I think much the same argument can be made about Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged (and probably her other books as well, but as I've only read Atlas Shrugged (and not yet finished it) I'll limit my criticism to that book).

Rand's problem is a problem of willing suspension of disbelief and internal inconsistency.  Some genres of fiction get broad leeway when it comes to willing suspension of disbelief.  Tolkien, for example, set his stories in a world that was not our world, and was not supposed to be our world [1].  We do not object to the existence of Orcs and magic and Elves because we know that Middle Earth is not our Earth.  While the alien nature of the setting does not disrupt our willing suspension of disbelief, internal consistency becomes vastly more important than it would be in other settings.

Some books go so far as to begin in a way that produces the false impression that the setting is our world, and then expose the radical differences between the book universe and ours as a way of adding to the enjoyment of the story.  Sunshine, by Robin McKinley, is a good example of this as the first five or ten pages deal with the mundane aspects of the protagonist's life in ways and with language that would not be out of place in our world.  Then McKinley jerks the reader out of this complacent fog with casual references to events and background information that simply cannot fit our world, producing a sort of intellectual whiplash that many readers of that genre find enjoyable.

Rand, however, sets her book in the near future (presumably some time around 1968 or thereabouts, "near future" rarely mans more than 10 years from the publication date of a book, though she never specifies the year).  While readers will give a great deal of leeway for such books, readers do expect the path from their present to the fictional near future to be apparent and sensible.

A book telling us that it takes place in the near future and portraying America as having undergone a mass conversion to Islam is, if not utterly impossible, at the very least going to have to go to great lengths to justify its background.  I'm not sure even verifiable and widespread Islamic miracles would trigger a mass conversion to Islam in the USA.

Rand proposes a "near future" no less unbelievable than one proposing a near universal conversion of Americans to Islam.  And she does so due entirely to her philosophy and ideology.

Rand said that Atlas Shrugged began with her anger at reading about a strike in the news.  What, she wondered, would happen if the true productive class (of which she counted herself as a member) went on strike?  The result was Rand's magnum opus, a novel that is cited by numerous people as the most important book they have ever read.

We see, from the beginning, two major problems with Rand's work.  Of secondary importance is her unwavering belief in nakedly aristocratic principles, and the utter contempt and disdain for the lower classes that aristocracy implies.  Most important, from a bad writing standpoint, is that Rand started with a completely unbelievable premise, tried to produce a universe in which that premise might make sense, and then told us that this universe was our own.

The wealthy and powerful do not go on strike.  If you were told that Bill Gates, or Bob Iger (CEO of Disney), Daniel Akerson (CEO of GM) had gone on strike you would assume that the person telling you this had mistaken the Onion for a real news source.

Strikes are a singularly ineffective means of producing change in the world, the reason they are the tool most frequently employed by the working classes is not because strikes work, but because the working classes very rarely have access to any other means of producing change.  The wealthy and powerful do not strike because if they are dissatisfied with the world, they have much more effective means of changing the world to suit them.

We need only to look at the real world outcomes of laws and government action that do not please the wealthy and powerful to see this.  Bill Gates, for example, objected to being prosecuted under antitrust legislation in 1998.  Employing an expensive, and extremely effective, law firm and spending tens of millions on lobbying efforts, Gates not only gutted the case against him (technically MS was found guilty of violating the law, but the penalty imposed was non-existent and MS was not prohibited from abusing its position), but antitrust laws were changed to accommodate his desires.

If anyone had suggested that Gates and MS go on strike they would have been roundly mocked.  Because going on strike is ineffective, while lobbying, bribing elected officials, and working through a firewall of high powered lawyers is so vastly more effective.  Microsoft stock rose during the entire affair, their profits increased steadily, and their future actions were completely unfettered by any government action.

In order to produce a fictional universe in which Galt and his comrades going on strike [2] Rand is forced to produce a universe which bears virtually no resemblance to our own save for the names of a few places.  If she was content to put her story in a completely fictional universe then we would be limited to criticizing the (many) failures to produce an internally consistent universe.

However, Rand tries to present her impossible setting as not merely possible in our universe, but a warning that unless rapid and immediate action is taken the universe she describes may quickly become reality.  And even the most casual reader is immediately struck by the sheer preposterous nature of this claim, and the truly horrible writing that is produced by the mental gymnastics necessary to pretend that her impossible setting is both realistic and prophetic.

[1] For those Tolkien fans in the audience, yes I know that Middle Earth was supposed to be our Earth in a long distant pre-history so far back that even the shapes of the continents have shifted.  That's not our world of today, and like Howard's Hyperboria (which had the same conceit) it still falls into the category of "not being our world" for the purposes of willing suspension of disbelief.

[2] Not that they actually went on strike, rather they vanished in such a secretive manner that for much of the book no one is even sure that anything is happening.  Strikes are public, and among other things are a forum for the aggrieved to explain why they are striking.  Galt et al did nothing of the sort and in fact went out of their way to avoid explaining their grievances.

Blatant misogyny from the right

One of the interesting things to come out of the recent false conflicts about contraception, and the recent spate of anti-abortion bills being passed in various states, is the increasingly bold and blatant misogyny coming from the American right.

While misogyny has always been a part of right wing politics there is usually an effort to disguise it at least a bit.  Not so with the most recent nonsense.

We're seeing conservatism drop the mask and finally admit that it is not merely abortion they oppose, but rather contraception.  A serious contender for the Republican nomination for president, Rick Santorum, has come out in opposition to Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruling which granted the right to contraception.

Only a few days ago Santorum's biggest contributor, Foster Friess (pronounced "Freeze"), came out against the proposed requirement that health insurance cover contraceptives by literally telling women to keep their legs shut as it was so much less expensive.  Of special note is that he did not tell men not to have sex, but rather directed his remarks to women.

The most blatant recent example of outright misogyny, however, comes as a result of Virginia's new law requiring a transvaginal ultrasound for any woman seeking an abortion. 

For those unfamiliar with the term, a "transvaginal ultrasound" requires that the gynecologist insert a plastic wand into the woman's vagina.  It is, as you might imagine, a rather invasive procedure and not one that doctors consider necessary for many abortions, especially for pharmaceutical abortions (that is, abortion by taking a pill).

People who were not complete and utter misogynists found the new regulation to be revolting.  CNN's Dana Loesch [1] defended the law:

That’s the big thing that progressives are trying to say, that it’s rape and so on and so forth. And in fact, this big battle that I’ve, uh, totally won with Keith Olbermann by the way, like, not only won once but twice and three times… uh, there were individuals saying, [high voice] “Oh what about the Virginia rape? The rapes that, the forced rapes of women who are pregnant?” What!?
Wait a minute, they had no problem having similar to a trans-vaginal procedure when they engaged in the act that resulted in their pregnancy.

Emphasis mine.

It's hard to find a more blatant, more open, declaration of misogyny than that.  It is a distillation of the virgin/whore complex into a single sentence.

The first impulse of many would be to point out that not all women seeking abortion have, in fact, consented to any transvaginal procedures, rape victims for example.  It is, I think, a bad idea to make that argument as it (however unwillingly or unwittingly) buys into the basic misogynist idea that "good girls" are more deserving of respect and consideration than "bad girls".

In the misogynist view consent is understood to be a single universal occurrence.  A woman can choose to remain celibate, or she can consent to sex.  Consent is not determined on a case by case basis, a woman cannot (for example) choose to have sex with her boyfriend and then choose not to be vaginally penetrated with an ultrasound wand if the condom breaks and all she wants is some RU-486.  In the mind of a misogynist that is an absurd contradiction.  The woman chose to be a slut, and sluts exist to be penetrated at any time by any one for any reason.  If the state of Virginia chooses to punish sluts by penetrating them with ultrasound wands that can't be rape, the sluts consented to sex once didn't they?

We're seeing the misogyny in the conservative War on Sex more clearly lately, and I find that disturbing.

[1] Already infamous for not merely defending, but cheering for, US soldiers who urinated on Taliban corpses, and declared that she'd like an opportunity to piss on some corpses herself.

Musings on believers in chemtrails, a general sense of helplessness, populist uprisings, and Ron Paul

One of the various, and easily mocked, sorts of conspiracy thinking floating around these days is the idea of "chemtrails".  For those of you who don't have a hobby of following conspiracy nonsense, a brief explanation follows.

For the believers in chemtrails the idea that jet airplanes leave contrails due to their high speed through a humid atmosphere condensing that humidity into clouds is laughably naive. Their belief is that the so-called contrails are in fact clouds of Evil Chemicals that the dark forces controlling things from behind the scenes are spreading over an unsuspecting America. 

What specifically the Evil Chemicals do is something very few chemtrail believers can agree on.  Some will tell you that the Evil Chemicals are mind control drugs, others that they just make people unhealthy.  But they all agree that the Evil Chemicals are bad, and that the forces spreading the Evil Chemicals are bad.

Oddly, and unlike many conspiracy theories which tend to be politically polarized, chemtrails seem to have believers on both the left and the right. Some hucksters make money selling anti-chemtrail equipment, mostly to the newage crystal idiocy leftist variety of believer. 

Lately the more right wing chemtrail believers have been posting videos claiming to show that spraying vinegar around your back yard from a squirt bottle can dissipate chemtrails.  Many of those videos include pleas to vote for Ron Paul on the grounds that he will stop the chemtrails, which in their version of the mythology are being spread by the federal government for various but nefarious purposes.

It's easy to mock the chemtrail believers, as it is easy to mock any of the conspiracy mongers.  And on the one hand I don't have any objection to such mockery.

But on the other hand, I think that they and many others like them represent a political and social need being filled by the wrong thing.

The world has problems.  That's obvious to anyone who looks.  We can argue about whether things are getting better or worse (I'll argue better), we can argue about how best to solve the problems, and we might even disagree on what exactly the problems are, but there is going to be near universal agreement on the idea that the world has problems.

Worse, the problems we face are usually huge, with no clear cause, and no clear way to fix them.  Often the political process seems engineered to prevent fixing, or even discussing the problems.

Which is where the conspiracies come in.  Like the anti-vaccine crowd, the chemtrail crowd has seen problems and seeing that no one seems to seriously discuss the problems they've turned to conspiracy theories.  One of the appealing thing about conspiracy theories is that they boil the complex and often downright opaque problems down to a straightforward and easy to grasp good vs. evil narrative.

The actual causes of autism, to pick on the anti-vaccine crowd for a while, are still something of a mystery.  It is doubtful that any effective treatment to help autistic people will be developed soon. There's some reason to believe that such treatments won't exist until we really understand the human brain and can affect it at a cellular level; which is to say that if it ever happens it won't be for a very long time.  For that matter even classifying and diagnosing autism is not a cut and dried matter.

With that sort of uncertainty it shouldn't be surprising that some people look for easy answers, and for someone or something to blame.  We've got the pathetic fallacy built into our very genes, we see a kid with autism so we instinctively assume that someone was responsible for that.  Most of us recognize that fallacy and are able to accept that sometimes things just happen and no one is responsible.  Others of us can't, or won't, and so they look for someone to blame.

What we see with the anti-vaccine crowd, the chemtrail crowd, and the others is often (though certainly not always) a denial of helplessness and confusion.  Like most of us, the conspiracy believer are powerless to really change much, and they don't even really have a firm grasp on what is wrong.  Unlike most of us they've decided to latch on to any convenient explanation.  That, in turn, allows them to focus their impotent rage at something, even if it's a laughably wrong target, and that having something to focus on feels better than being confused.

We see this same dynamic, though to a lesser extent, with the Tea Party.  Unlike the anti-vaccine people or the chemtrail people, the Tea Party is sufficiently grounded in reality to realize the actual cause of many problems.  They correctly identify one of the core problems as our political process, but "our political process" is a big thing and they still misdirect their ire to many wrong areas (such as Obama's mythic Islam, or his mythic Communism, etc).  Rather than looking for real problems and real solutions the Tea Party, like their more conspiracy minded cousins, seeks easy answers and someone to blame.

I'm harsher on the anti-vaccine crowd than I am with the chemtrail crowd for one simple reason: the anti-vaccine crowd is actually causing harm both to their own children (by putting them at risk of very nasty diseases) and to society at large (by reducing herd immunity).  All the chemtrail people do is buy vinegar or crystals.

I'm also sympathetic to the urge to understand and act that motivates a great many of the conspiracy theorists.  They've horribly misunderstood things, and their actions are pointless at best, and harmful at worst, but the motivation to fix problems and improve the world is laudable.

What worries me is that the helplessness and increasing hopelessness we all have is going to fuel a misguided populist movement that may do horrible things.  Fascism had its origins in the very understandable and luadable desire of many Italians to fix the problems that faced their nation; the result of that was so bad that "Fascist" has become a semi-generic insult.

A people will only tolerate abuse for so long, eventually they will rise up and do something.  And history shows that more often than not the ultimate result of rising up and doing something is terrible.  Revolutions generally produce results as bad as, or even wors than, the original porblem.  And populist revolutions have a particularly bad track record.

I therefore see conspiracy thinking as something of an early warning system for a potental catastrophic failure in democracy.  Conspiracy thinking grows when the feeling of impotent rage at increasingly intolerable situations grows.  The fact that Ron Paul, an unwavering pro-conspiracy voice, is rising in political popularity is, to me, a very disturbing sign.

Samuel dies, plus a side story and Nice Guys! (1 Samuel 25)

The narrative of 1 Samuel often involves detours and sidetracks, one of which I find interesting enough to comment on.


Before that though, Samuel dies.  This is handled in one single verse.  You might suppose that a prophet important enough to have not one, but two, books in the Bible (in fact, the very first example of two or more books) would have his death addressed with a bit more than one measly verse.

Fortunately for Samuel's inclusion in his own eponymous books, he'll be back.  Anyway, he dies and is mourned.

And then David moves to a new place and encounters Nabal, who is quite wealthy and miserly.  Note that the later lessons from Jesus about the evils of wealth and wealthy people are not really new to the New Testament.  There is very little in the Bible that is approving of wealth and the wealthy.  Something that is virtually completely ignored by most modern churches, and inverted by the preachers of the Prosperity Gospel.

At any rate, it is shearing time, and like most people back then Nabal's wealth is largely tied up in livestock.  David and his men guard the shearers and they're virtuous and steal nothing at all.

However we discover that David is a Nice Guy.

Nice Guys are a men who, for a variety of reasons including simple shyness, have the idea that a) sex and romance are transactional, and b) therefore they can get sex/romance by being "nice" to women.  Scare quotes around nice because they aren't really being nice, what they're doing can be more accurately described as attempting to purchase sex and/or romance from a woman by pretending to be her friend.

What makes Nice Guys not so nice is that they have the expectation that by being "nice" they deserve sex, and that there must be something wrong with women who don't just hop into the sack with them after they've been so "nice".

Note that, quite often, the Nice Guy never actually mentions to the woman he's interested in that he'd like a romantic relationship with her, and will often later be quite venomous about being "friendzoned" even though he never, not once, told the woman he wanted to be in a romantic relationship.

Nice Guys often evolve, or perhaps devolve, into Pick Up Artists and become convinced that the secret to getting sex is to be a total asshole.  Like the Pick Up Artists they often become, Nice Guys are convinced that women are basically without agency and that by doing X, Y, and Z they are simply entitled to attention and sex from women.

David exhibits similar behavior here. Nabal didn't ask for David to hang around his shearing team, and apparently Nabal was completely unaware that David had even been around until David sent a messenger to his house telling him so.

6 [...] Peace be both to thee, and peace be to thine house, and peace be unto all that thou hast.

 7 And now I have heard that thou hast shearers: now thy shepherds which were with us, we hurt them not, neither was there ought missing unto them, all the while they were in Carmel.

 8 Ask thy young men, and they will shew thee. Wherefore let the young men find favour in thine eyes: for we come in a good day: give, I pray thee, whatsoever cometh to thine hand unto thy servants, and to thy son David.  (1 Samuel 25:6-8, KJV)

 Having rendered his service, entirely unrequested, David now requests payment.

And Nabal refuses, he sends out messengers of his own telling David that he doesn't know who he is or why he's hanging around, but he didn't ask for his help and he sees no reason to give him anything. To be sure, he is rather curt, rude, and abrupt in his dismissal of David's request/demand.

David's response is, much like a Nice Guy who goes on a spittle filled rant about the evils of women and how they only like jerks and he never gets any despite being so Nice and always being there for the woman, an example of misplaced and odd rage.

21 Now David had said, Surely in vain have I kept all that this fellow hath in the wilderness, so that nothing was missed of all that pertained unto him: and he hath requited me evil for good.

 22 So and more also do God unto the enemies of David, if I leave of all that pertain to him by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall. (1 Samuel 25:21-22, KJV)

I'll sidetrack briefly here and mention that we have another great example of why the KJV is often more entertaining to read than the NIV.  The NIV translates that last bit as "if by morning I leave alive one male of all who belong to him!"  I think "any that pisseth against the wall" has a more evocative ring to it.

The point is that David, snubbed in his demand for payment for a completely unrequested service, is outraged.  So outraged that, in that lovely Biblical style of punishing a group of innocent people for a sin committed by a single person, he swears to kill every man in Nabal's household.  Presumably they'd have then taken the women as sex slaves, that is what typically follows a Biblical slaughter.

But Nabal's wife Abagail gives David a present, David realizes that perhaps swearing to kill all the men in Nabal's household was a mite rash, and they leave.  Then Abagail gives her husband a heart attack (literally) by telling him he came this close to being slaughtered by David, and once Nabal is dead David asks her to marry him.  To the victor go the spoils I suppose.

Star Wars

My son has been watching the Clone Wars lately, and so I've been paying a lot more attention to the Star Wars universe than I generally do.

Like any fan of Star Wars, I'm partially characterized both by a strong dislike of George Lucas and a frequent urge to gripe and complain about the source material.  I've never yet encountered a fandom that is centered more around an intense dislike of the creator and a frequent dislike of the material other than Star Wars fandom. But that's the nature of the beast and like any Star Wars fan I'm here to complain.

But not about the usual litany of things wrong with the Clone Wars.  Yes, the Mary Sue aspects of Ahsoka are annoying, yes the fact that male Jedi wear monk robes and female Jedi mostly wear stripperwear is obnoxious, yes the constant repetition that good is pretty and evil is ugly is maddeningly stupid.  Not to mention the annoyance of the fact that nothing major can be permitted to happen since all the major characters have to be alive and active due to the fact that the Clone Wars is sandwiched between episodes II and III. Been there, done that.

But, in the spirit of David Brin's discussion of the embrace of the idea of Divine Right of Kings in Star Wars, I've noticed something that bugs me a lot more than bad writing and costumes.

I refer to the droids and the clones and the way they illustrate the essential immorality of the theoretically "good" side in the conflict.  More specifically the complete denial of civil rights to those groups.

In the course of the movies and Clone Wars series droids are repeatedly demonstrated to be sapient, to have emotions, to be self aware, to be capable of original and creative thought.  In short they are people, and they are repeatedly shown to be people.  And they are bought, sold, and disposed of casually and without any consideration at all by every character in the universe regardless of whether we're supposed to see those characters as good or evil.

Even Ahsoka, the character more likely than any other in the series to display sentimentality and concern for others is utterly callous towards the droid population.  Sure, she calls R2 by a cute nickname, but when it looks like he (note the pronoun, everyone refers to droids with gendered pronouns, not "it") has been taken POW her response is to get Anikin a new droid and start calling it by a cute nickname.  Her actual concern for R2 is about on par with the concern we'd express for a toaster, not for a being repeatedly demonstrated to have both emotions and sapience.

In fact it is Anikin, the character we are supposed to be seeing slip ever closer towards evil, who is the only character who displays any concern whatsoever for any droid.  Of course, George Lucas has some really messed up ideas about good and evil, so the fact that Anakin is concerned for a droid is in Lucas' twisted view of things a sign not of goodness but of his increasing turn towards evil.  Because emotional attachments are evil in Lucas' universe.

Even if we were to agree that somehow biological sapience is inherently superior to mechanical sapience (and I see no reason to do that), we have similar problems with morality and the clones.

To begin with the clone army of the Galactic Republic is, when you get right down to it, an army composed of child soldiers.  Despite appearances caused by handwaved "forced growth" the oldest of them are ten years old at the beginning of episode II, and therefore no more than 12 or 14 during the Clone Wars.

They have no actual legal rights, they're subjected to military training and indoctrination from the moment they're born, and any clone who tries to leave the army is branded as a deserter.  Not only child soldiers, but slave soldiers.

And, like the droids, largely viewed by our theoretically good Jedi as disposable cannon fodder.  They're viewed with a bit more compassion than the droids, but the language used when talking about the clones is telling.  To begin with, they are never referred to as soldiers, only as "clones", as in "send a few clones down to check it out", or "we lost five clones, but rescued Jedi Master Whoever".

Two of the named and highly ranked clones are Rex and Cody, when referred to by rank they're identified as "Clone Commander Cody" and "Clone Commander Rex".  Not Commander, but Clone Commander.  The need to continually emphasize that they're clones, and therefore apparently not real people, is illustrated by the language.

That, of course, is ignoring the fact that the clones are, per the movies, genetically tweaked so that they are guaranteed to be obedient to any order from the proper authority.  We see this illustrated in Episode III when Palpatine orders the clones to kill the Jedi, and this order is followed without any hesitation or reluctance.

 As Brin observed, the Star Wars universe is an inherently aristocratic universe.  It is not merely for show that Lucas puts so many titles of nobility into a setting that ostensibly involves a democratic Republic (Queen Amadala, Princess Leia, His Serene Highness Prince Bail Organa, etc).

We are supposed to ignore the little people, the mere droids, and clones, and slaves [1] who populate the background of Star Wars, and focus entirely on the trials and travails of the important people, the kings and queens and Jedi.

The acceptance of the literal enslavement of droids, and the essential enslavement of the clones is so universal that it is never mentioned.  Neither Lucas nor any other person involved in Star Wars or the Clone Wars ever thought it was even necessary to try and justify it.  No Droid Liberation Movement exists, no one protests in Coruscant demanding civil rights for clones,  in a universe filled with conflict and philosophic naval gazing, and a civil war justified by fears that the Sith lead separatists would end freedom, you'd think that there would be at least some minor disagreement and the disdain and contempt held for clones and droids would be somewhat less universal.  But it isn't.

[1] Note, for example, the way Anakin's mother completely vanishes from the narrative in Episode I.  The crisis has (apparently) been resolved, Master Kenobi  now has the full power of the Jedi Temple behind him, and they leave Anikin's mother held in chattel slavery on Tatooine, there to be bought, sold, raped, tortured, or killed at the whim of her owners, for over a decade.  Even if there are compelling reasons why the Republic and/or the Jedi can't end the practice of slavery on Tatooine, rescuing a single slave would be trivial for such an organization.  They don't because she's s background, not important, and because of that we aren't supposed to think any less of the Jedi or her son Anakin for leaving her in slavery.  Important people we are supposed to care about, background characters we are supposed to be as supremely indifferent to as the characters are to clones or droids.

The dumbest vampires ever (Twilight pp 18-22)

We are introduced to the vampires after only eighteen pages of Bella's pity party, that's actually not all that bad especially wen you consider that the book is almost 500 pages long and it would have been possible (and possibly even useful) for Meyer to stretch things out a lot longer before introducing her vamps.

I haven't covered many pages in this post in large part because there's a lot to unpack in these four pages.

After sneering at everyone she encounters for the first half of her day, Bella goes to the cafeteria for lunch.  I'd have expected a whine about the terrible food at the (still unnamed) Forks HS, but beyond a brief mention of Edward shredding a bagel the food is never really discussed.

The purpose of Meyer's cafeteria scene is to introduce her vampires, who apparently have the IQ and thoughtfulness that you would normally associate with mayonnaise rather than with sophisticated and paranoid immortals.

I know, from osmosis, that in Twilight the vampires are expected to keep themselves secret from humanity.  This makes a large degree of sense, most people probably wouldn't react well to knowing that there are literal supermen who want to eat them.  If they were discovered I'd expect, at the very least, a vampire registration act and a mandated system tracking their diet just to make sure no one is getting eaten by non-veggie vamps. There'd probably be a big spike in oak stake sales too and quite a few lynchings. All very good reasons for vampires to want to stay hidden from humanity.

I'm told by a Twilight loving friend that later in the series Edward, in a fit of depression, makes an attempt to reveal himself and call down the wrath of the vampire authorities in order to commit the vampire equivalent of suicide by cop.  So obviously the Twilight vampires are supposed to take their masquerade seriously and the death penalty awaits any vamp stupid enough to betray the secret and expose their existence to humanity.

Which, naturally, is why the Forks vampires all live together in a big house in a manner practically designed to spawn gossip and rumors of orgies and incest and generally attract a lot of attention.

Not to mention the utter stupidity of having all but two of the Forks vampires attending high school.  And always clumping together.  And buying the food in the school cafeteria then sitting around pointedly not eating and drawing attention to themselves during lunch.  Because that's exactly the way paranoid immortals who know they'll face death if they break cover would act.

High school.  Think about just that part for a moment.  The narration mentions that some of the vamps look too old to be attending high school, which brings us back to the whole idiocy of drawing needless attention to themselves, but that barely touches the surface of things.  The whole idea is fractally stupid.

Imagine for a moment that you are an immortal blood sucking monster.  You are about 80 years old.  You've seen wars, technological development at a breakneck pace, horrors unknown to the minds of mortal men, you've wrestled daily with the temptation to simply murder and suck the blood out of everyone you come into contact with.

Why would such a being want to attend high school?  I realize that the target audience for the book is high school age girls, and that putting Bella into high school makes a certain mercenary sort of sense, but the vampires in high school bit simply makes no sense at all.  What 80 year old in his right mind would want to subject himself to the regimented, controlled, petty, silliness of modern high schools?

You can make a good case for vampires wanting to keep up with current events, trends, advances in knowledge, etc.  Especially if you're trying to maintain a masquerade the last thing you'd want is to look extremely out of touch with modern trends.  But college would seem to be a smarter choice.  For decades now college students have been assumed to be adults, they live lives much less regimented and controlled than high school students do.  Further if some of your group look older than teenage that won't make them stand out in college.  Further, since most colleges are in urban areas rather than small towns the gossip potential is automatically lower and the anonymity of crowds helps maintain the masquerade. 

Instead they went to a gossip filled small town high school where they're guaranteed to stand out and attract a lot of attention.

Then, just to make things worse, they stick together in a group thus drawing even more attention, make a big and blatant show of not eating, stare at the walls a lot to give the students and teachers even more reason to take an interest in them, and generally do everything they can short of holding giant signs saying "LOOK AT ME I'M DIFFERENT" to draw attention to themselves.

And, naturally, they're all pretty, pretty, pretty.  I'm going to guess that later, when Bella starts getting some exposition on the particulars of Meyer's vamps, it'll be mentioned that becoming a vamp makes people more attractive.

Apparently the local boss vamp (or at least I'm assuming he's the local boss vamp, he's the "father" of the fake family and Meyer is a Mormon so I think my assumption is likely valid) is a doctor.  Because the best way to avoid the possibility that someone might accidentally discover the vampire secret is to have the boss vamp be in constant, daily, and physical contact with a wide number of people.  That's a great way to hide corpse cold hands (or whatever physical differences Meyer's vamps have)!

We also get more of Meyer's odd writing.  As Edward and his vampire posse are sitting around a lunch table pointedly not eating:

"His mouth was moving very quickly, his perfect lips barely opening.  The other three still looked away, and yet I felt he was speaking quietly to them."

Yes Bella, usually when people move their lips it indicates that they're talking.

Take particular note of that "and yet", it implies that Bella/Meyer expect the reader to have drawn a different conclusion, that the notion of Edward actually talking to the people sitting near him is strange and unusual.  Perhaps Meyer imagines that people routinely sit around moving their mouths very quickly but not talking?  If so her complete lack of understanding of normal human behavior might explain a lot about the rest of the book.....

The ancient Isaralite soap opera contineues! (1 Samuel 19-24)

In the last episode of As the Bible Turns, David (secretly the true king), exchanged 200 foreskins taken from Philistines for the hand of Saul's daughter Michal.

The situation seemed to be calming, Saul's desire to see David killed was fading, David was set to become king after Saul's death or abdication via not only the secret anointing with oil ceremony of Samuel but also by marriage. 

God, disappointed that no one seemed to be killing anyone else fixes the problem by using a Jedi mind trick on Saul to make him try to kill David.  Again.  For those of you counting at home this is not the first time God has added excitement and death to a story otherwise not blood drenched by mind controlling some poor schmuck.

Saul is hard to figure in the next few chapters.  He waffles between rebelling against God to prophesying, he switches from loving David to wanting to kill him.  I'm guessing it reflects more the confused narrative and the long oral tradition the story had before it was first written than any real attempt to bring depth to the character of Saul.

At any rate, David and Saul's son Johnathan devise a needlessly complex plan to figure out if Saul really wants to kill David or not.  Turns out that God's mind mojo has made Saul want to kill David, so he flees.

1 Samuel 20 is has a couple of delightful early Iron Age insults.  Johnathan is called "Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman do not I know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own confusion, and unto the confusion of thy mother's nakedness? ", which has a nice ring to it.  Note also that, as is common in patriarchy, there aren't very many ways to insult a man that don't involve either calling him a woman, or insulting him by proxy and directing the insult to a woman.  Though I do wonder how you confuse someone's nakedness....

 In Chapter 22, Saul not only breaks God's Law but (much worse) violates the rules from the Evil Overlord's handbook. While fleeing David took assistance from some priests who thought he was still in Saul's good graces.  Upon discovering this, Saul kills the priest, and his whole family.  Not really the best move for an aspiring Evil Overlord.

We also discover a nifty King James era euphemism.  During a brief passage to illustrate how great and wonderful David is, we have an incredibly contrived situation. Saul and his men pursue David who hides in a cave.  Saul, thinking that he's lost David's trail, decides that he really needs to defecate, and that the cave David has hidden in looks like a great spot.  But the King James version can't outright say Saul needed to defecate, and thus says that Saul "went in to cover his feet".  Presumably that meant he didn't hike up his robe to defecate but rather let it fall down and cover his feet.  Which seems pretty unhygienic to me.

Saul doesn't notice David, goes about his business, and David considers killing him but decides against it.  He does, however, sneak up and cut off a corner of Saul's robe.  And then has a horrible moral crisis because he thinks of himself as an awful person for cutting off the corner of Saul's robe.

The point of this particular tale is one of the central themes of the Bible thus far: OBEY!

David has been plainly abused by Saul, but since he's the Good Guy he is obedient and respectful towards his rightful master.  Saul, as David explains to his men, is his king appointed by God and therefore it is deeply wrong for him or his men to strike Saul, and it was even wrong of David to simply cut off a corner of his robe in secret.  Obedience over all other considerations!

The message to people working for abusive employers, servants toiling for abusive masters, etc is that God demands they obey and faithfully serve the person abusing them.  Obey.  Over and over the message of the Bible is depressingly simple and plain: Obey!  The social order is established by God, those on top are there because God personally put them there, obey them or suffer.

David sent the corner of the robe to Saul as a sign of good faith (and an implicit threat), and Saul declares that David is righteous and he won't kill him after all.

Naturally that won't work for God, so in the next episode we will see God, yet again, employ his mind mojo to make Saul try (and fail) to kill David.