On Wrath

There are seven things which the LORD hates,
Yes, seven which are an abomination to Him:
Haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
And hands that shed innocent blood,
A heart that devises wicked plans,
Feet that run rapidly to evil,
A false witness who utters lies,
And one who spreads strife among brothers.”

~Proverb 6:19 – 6:19, King James Bible

Mr. Vick, you have sparked worldwide controversy, and another addition to the Seven Deadly Sins collection.

The line “hands that shed innocent blood” was the precursor to Wrath being considered a mortal or deadly sin, but was expanded because, I suppose, a person could be an asshole without actually killing someone. But originally, according to Wikipedia, Wrath was described as “inordinate and uncontrolled feelings of hatred and anger…the desire to seek revenge outside of the workings of the justice system and generally wishing to do evil or harm to others. The transgressions borne of vengeance are among the most serious, including murder, assault, and in extreme cases, genocide.”

Let’s be clear here. Vick admitted to setting up, financing, and managing a dogfighting operation. Dogfighting is when two or more dogs are trained, usually through means involving beatings and starvation, to fight to the death. During the fights they literally bite and rip the flesh off each other and die slow and painful deaths, either from organ damage, blood loss, or from having their jugular severed or windpipe crushed. The under-performing dogs are often executed by drowning, hanging, electrocution or gun shot. Vick not only knew what he was financing, but enjoyed watching it, and from all accounts, participated in the execution of the dogs with his own hands.

Hasn’t he ever seen a thriller? Doesn’t he know that people don’t mind watching teenagers get picked off by the dozens, that innocent bystanders can get blown away without a single tear being shed, that even children are fair game…but let threat come to the family pet, and moviegoers will start to whimper in horror?

He released a statement today, which admitted responsibility and refuted earlier claims that he was not guilty of the charges laid.

"First I want to apologize for all the things that I've done and that I've allowed to happen…I was ashamed and totally disappointed in myself, to say the least. And I want to apologize to all the young kids out there for my immature acts. What I did was very immature, so that means I need to grow up. I totally ask for forgiveness and understand as I move forward to a better Michael Vick the person, not the football player. I take full responsibility for my actions. Not for one second will I sit here and blame anyone else for my actions. It was totally irresponsible. I feel like we all make mistakes. I made a mistake in using bad judgment and making bad decisions. And those things just can't happen. Dogfighting is a terrible thing and I did reject it."

Call me crazy, but I don’t see how financing something, watching it, putting money into making it happen more often, and using your own two hands to participate in it is quite the same thing as thinking it’s terrible and rejecting it, and I think it’s kind of rich coming from someone who repeatedly posed in photographs, smiling, with the fighting dogs. But the real problem for me is that he puts what he did down to “immaturity.”

Immaturity makes you date people you know are going to treat you poorly because they look good with no shirt on. Immaturity is mixing anything with Jaegermeister and calling it a shooter. Immaturity is wearing your pants with one pantleg rolled up. Immaturity is not slaughtering dogs. Michael doesn’t need to “grow up,” he needs to do some reading on the psychological profile of violent psychopaths (the three main precursors of which are bedwetting, fire starting, and cruelty to animals.) A man who can sit through a dogfight, enjoy it and want to see more of it, who can hang a dog he bred and raised with his own hands, is a little more than immature. It’s incredibly troubling to me that he would trivialize a crime of repulsive violence to the level of breaking curfew, especially in the same breath as his acknowledgment that he's a role model to children.

I also enjoyed the very subversive tactic of sending a plea to separate “Michael Vick the person” from “Michael Vick the football player.” A nifty trick designed to allow us to hate the person but to try and separate his means of income from his crime. As though a football player who earned millions of dollars by having thousands of fans, many of whom are children, and by being the endorsement face of many products doesn’t have anything to do with refraining from criminal activity. He’s trying to insinuate that while he understands that you’ll hate him for his ‘immaturity,’ his career shouldn’t be impacted. Let’s look at it this way; if Michael Vick was a politician, would we be saying, “Sure, he participated in something like that, but he makes good public policy. He shouldn’t be removed from office.” No, because he’s a football hero. Apparently, our disdain for domestic abuse, rape, animal cruelty and even murder can be lessened by a really impressive record with rushing yards. It’s sad, but it’s life, and I think anyone who expects this man to spend more than a year behind bars is a nice person, but a misinformed one.

Besides, Michael claims to have Found Jesus. His “we all make mistakes” and “I give myself up to God” and redemption talk, as ridiculous as it sounds to most of us, is usually a pretty good strategy, because it confuses the mostly atheist left wing and placates the right wing, who never get to hear about God in the media anymore. (If I were the part of the Christian right, I think I’d actually be pretty pissed off that the only people who kept finding Jesus were those who were trying to evade rehab or escape dog fighting charges, but whatever.) He’s not finished, as much as I’d like to think he was.

And I don’t mean to open a very messy can of worms, but he killed dogs. Would we be going apeshit if they were some other animal? Scary Spice’s boyfriend killed a duck with a brick, but he’s still out there enjoying his life. What if it were a fur farm? A slaughterhouse for cows? Pigs? We like dogs, and I think that’s the problem here. He picked on the Miss Congeniality of the animal world. Every meat-eater out there, myself included, is implicit in the often painful existence and death of animals, it’s a matter of fact that we can pretend isn’t the same, because it’s not dogs, and other people do it all the time. But it is the same. It’s a difference of degree, not of principle. So while I believe he's an asshole and probably a mentally sick man, let's have a rational look at the matter, not a witch hunt.

But if Wrath is having 'hands that shed innocent blood,' he’s guilty of Wrath, no matter which way you cut it, and I don’t think Jesus would be all that keen on him. If Vick did a little more homework, he’d find out that committing a deadly sin, in the eyes of the God that he’s currently trying to give himself up to, “destroys the life of grace” and is unforgivable except through confession and perfect contrition, neither of which he’s showing. That Old Testament stuff does not allow for lesser sentencing and plea bargaining; he’s probably better off giving himself over to the Judicial Branch of Georgia than to God. If he’s not careful, he’s going to face an even less pleasant reception once he checks in for eternal damnation; personally, I kind of like to think that he’ll be issued a suit made out of meat and introduced to an unforgiving pack of his former pets.

But Disney taught us that all dogs go to heaven, where, unlike the NFL, Vick probably will not be welcome. And I sure hope the poor puppies are up there right now, being loved and cared for by Helen Keller, and the kid from Lassie.

Rest in peace, you poor things. You were the only ones Vick forgot to apologize to in his speech.


For my friend R, who is a friend to all puppies and kittens, and who would probably be happy to see this guy get his ass kicked. By Johnny Cash.

On Sloth

"The path of awakening is a process. It’s a process of gradually learning to become intimate with our so-called obstacles. So rather than feeling discouraged by laziness, we could look into our laziness, become curious about laziness. We could get to know laziness profoundly. We can unite with laziness, be our laziness, know its smell and taste, feel it fully in our bodies. The spiritual path is a process of relaxing into this very moment of being. "

~Buddhist Meditation on Laziness, from the Shambhala Sun

“Sloth views the towers of Fame with envious eyes,
Desirous still, yet impotent to rise.”

~William Shenstone, Scottish poet

Well, sure, I guess that makes sense. One of the central tenets of Buddhism is that the pursuit of one's desires is a primary source of human suffering. The Scots, on the other hand, have always believed in the 'run in, steal stuff, and run away' as a pretty good strategy for material gain. This is a race that could run through briar patchs wearing skirts with no underwear. You have to give them that they were a pretty tough and industrious people.

So Sloth is generally defined as physical or mental apathy; in Christian times this meant putting off or not doing what God intended you to do. Which is pretty unfair, if you ask me, because according to the Bible stories I remember, God tended to be kind of vague with the instructions. His way of asking Moses to round up the Chosen People and get them to agree to wander the desert for forty years was to set a bush on fire. I probably wouldn't have gotten it. With Abraham He used the rather unclear metaphor of appearing as a smoking brazier and pillars of smoke and fire to let Abraham know to go to the Promised Land. He's God, so I guess He can do whatever He wants, but maybe if you really want someone to do something then you should be a little more clear. I guess He got kind of annoyed after He went to all the trouble of writing the Ten Commandments in stone tablets, and people still kept breaking them relentlessly for the next 2,000 years.

So in our modern times and in the absence of flaming shrubbery, sloth means not so much disobeying God but not living up to one's full potential. I ask, is that so bad? If we were all living to our full potential all the time, then companies would be all management and no staff. Getting an "A" in school would have no meaning because no one else was getting Bs, Cs or Fs. No one would be dating anyone, because they'd all be waiting for their best possible match. Everyone would be high achieving, neurotic workaholics with inflated titles who couldn't hold together a fulfilling relationship because of impossibly high expectations.

Oh wait, that's my entire generation.

Now, I am not advocating the kind of sloth that results in having to be crane-lifted through a hole in the roof when one dies, wearing a muumuu and a patina of Double Stuff Oreos and KFC grease. No, I advocate a more moderate form of sloth. Achievement is a brilliant thing, in its place. But have we, as a generation, forgotten how to be lazy?

Take vacations. Does anyone go to Hawaii anymore? There is nothing really to do in Hawaii, as far as I know. All you're supposed to do there is drink things out of coconuts, lie on the beach, turn over occasionally, and fan oneself. I'm pretty sure the hotels don't even have gym equipment. But I never hear of anyone going there anymore. All people want to do on vacation these days is rack up yet another achievement. It's still a competition. They're either humping up Mount Kilimanjaro or running away from marauding bulls in Spain or spending the week fighting off a bad bout of dysentery in Vanuatu. I guess climbing 3,000 stairs to ascend to Maccu Pichu is a really great break from the bustle of our modern lifesyle, which probably includes a gym routine involving hours on....the stair climber. I just don't get it. Civil unrest, disease and physical hardship aren't frequently featured on postcards, and for good reason.

It's like we have no idea how to simply be anymore. Even activities which are supposed to be relaxing are no longer sacred. Yoga either has to go faster, like Power Yoga, or the heat has to be cranked up to forty degrees to make it harder. Walking is no longer even considered worthwhile unless you are goose-stepping along like the Third Reich and constantly checking your heart rate. Television is no longer about entertainment. It's about reality TV. Since when do we spend all day in reality only to want to come home and watch more of it on TV? There's no escape.

The large majority of professionals I know spend about two or three hours a day engaged in productive, focused work, another three hours on urgent but unimportant busy work, and another four hours where they do absolutely nothing. I think this is because on some subconscious level, we resent having to be there for ten hours, five or six days a week. The argument goes that our economy has become dependent on these long hours and would crumble if we instituted a shortened workday or three day weekend. But I doubt it.

The average US worker works 1,777 hours a year. That's a lot, considering that the number factors in people who work part-time and is after allowing for annual vacation. Canadians work 1,717 (60 hours, coincidentally enough, is the average number of hours Canadians spend watching hockey in a year.) The countries with the highest working hours are Poland and the Czech Republic, topped only by Korea with 2,300 hours per year. Ever notice that at no time in history have people been trying to get into the Czech Republic? Or Poland? Nope, as far as I remember you always hear stories about people desperately trying to get out. And no wonder.

Who works the least of the developed nations? Sweden and the Netherlands. And these have to be the most smug countries in the world; they're the Reese Witherspoons of the UN. Their citizens only work about 1,300 hours a year, and yet their economies somehow manage. In fact, Sweden is widely touted as having some of the best talent and most innovative business practices in the world. They have a strong export economy, are politically stable, have free childcare and heavily-subsidized higher education. Weird that all those lazy people are able to pull off what the rest of the modern world hasn't been able to at a much higher level of work output.

Is it because they pay such high taxes? Perhaps, I don't know. But we pay high taxes in Canada too, and those Swedes are working way less than us, so the efficiencies must be coming from somewhere.

If you ask me, spiritual apathy is much more likely to flow from this kind of hysterical over-achieving than from a few bouts of reflection and quiet recovery, even if you have to have them while wearing stretchy-waist pants. But in order to give ourselves some downtime, we need to stop rewarding the corporate culture that makes people brag about being on a first-name basis with the janitorial night staff and accruing three months worth of untaken vacation. When someone tells you that they're going to spend their week off base jumping in Acapulco or doing an altitude marathon in the Andes, slap them in to the nearest hammock. They'll thank you one day.

After all, vague signs or no vague signs, even God took a break on the seventh day, and he created the universe. If all you're responsible for creating is quarterly reports...

...give thyself a break.

On Pride

I'm not so sure about those early Christians.

Sure, you have to kind of admire anyone who thought up the idea of feeding people to lions for fun, but I'm not so sure they really understood the concept of moral relativism. How can pride be a deadly sin? Pride is defined by Wikipedia as “a strong sense of self-respect, a refusal to be humiliated as well as joy in the accomplishments of oneself or a person, group, or object that one identifies with.”

Sounds good to me. People spend a lot of money every year on books to teach them how to have pride in themselves, insofar as pride relates to self esteem. I guess what really got the goat of the robe-and-sandal set was more hubris, or excessive arrogance and vaingloriousness (yes, I used it in a sentence, and yes, I am that good.) I can understand that. They probably had the six deadly sins all ready to go, had the foresight to envision Yaletown, and decided to round it up to lucky ole' number seven.

Even Aesop chimed in on the whole issue. As the story goes, two cocks (OK, roosters, but cock is just more fun to say) were fiercely fighting for the mastery of the farmyard.

"One at last put the other to flight. The vanquished Rooster skulked away and hid himself in a quiet corner, while the conqueror, flying up to a high wall, flapped his wings and crowed exultingly with all his might. An Eagle sailing through the air pounced upon him and carried him off in his talons. The vanquished Rooster immediately came out of his corner, and ruled henceforth with undisputed mastery."

The moral? Pride goeth before a fall.

Man, I wish a big eagle would come around and take George Bush off our hands.

I have no idea why this man is possibly still in power. Come on, Lindsay’s in rehab and Britney is bald and Paris has to poo in a glass room, so there is a God. What on earth is God up to letting this asshat run one of the wealthiest nations in the world? And I don’t blame Americans at all, because I’ve never, ever met one that didn’t think he was a complete asshat too. So who the hell voted for him?

I think God did it as some grand plan to remind us that pride might be OK in Chapters but it's not OK when you start trying to unilaterally blow up things you don't like. Here is a man who barely got in office at all. He should have been thanking his lucky stars that he got to be President after the nation he was set to lead categorically and undisputedly let him know that the majority of them really wanted the other guy. He should have lived out his years in office keeping his mouth shut, quietly emulating Clinton and keeping an eye on his daughters but noooooo, he decided to go rampaging around the developed world like a schoolyard bully. And while admittedly, no one got the atomic wedgie worse than Iraq, there’s no discounting the injustices he’s visited upon the American people he has sworn to serve.

Like the whole faith-based welfare initiatives. I get that George W. Bush is a Christian and is, generally, Up With Christ. But last I checked there was something in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution about keeping church and state separate. I guess nobody but me thinks it’s kind of crappy that the President just read that part in the Constitution, shrugged, and went, "oh well."

And the whole War on Terror. I will go on record and say that I whole-heartedly agree that a response needed to be made to the terrorist attacks. And I appreciate that it had the side benefit of freeing the nation of Afghanistan from an oppressive regime that attracted international criticism for human rights violations and which the US tolerated quite happily for five years. But did it need to be a preemptive war that has permanently jeopardized international relations, led to the deaths of over 650,000 civilians, and allowed the suspension of civil liberties on ground not our own?

Oh, George, but for your pride, you could have listened to those older and wiser than yourself. Martin Luther King Jr. would have seen the futility in your efforts immediately.

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.... The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation."

And moreover, perhaps someone who can’t spell nuclear shouldn’t be in charge of the big red button. I’m just saying. But no, he’s like the proverbial pitbull, who once he locks his jaw into something, cannot let go. Too dumb, and too mean.

And, methinks, about to take a fall. His approval ratings are in the 30s, which are comparable to Nixon’s during the Watergate scandal. Only 19% of the people in his country think that he’s headed in the right direction, which is pretty much tantamount to 4 out of 5 people thinking he’s come unglued. Former President Jimmy Carter called Bush’s presidency the worst in history. Uh, this is Jimmy Carter, folks. This guy believes in UFOs but he stops short at thinking Bush should run the country? That should tell us something.

So if pride goeth before a fall, Mr. Bush’s days are numbered. World wide censure? Check. An impeachment? Getting there.

A giant eagle? We can only hope. Guess those early Christians were onto something after all.

On Envy

Avarice, envy, pride,
Three fatal sparks, have set the hearts of all
On Fire. ~Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

I always thought of envy as a pretty powerful motivator as opposed to a venal sin, but then again, I also didn’t think gluttony was all that bad either.

So if Greed is the desire for material goods and worldly things, Envy is the desire for qualities seen in others that one lacks. Dante called this "the love of one's own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs." So it’s being a two-part asshole; first, you have to want what that person has, and secondly, you have to want them not to have it any more. In Purgatory, Dante noted that the punishment for envy was to have your eyes sewn shut with wire to remind you that you gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. (I actually thought that was an anti-aging procedure, so there you go.)

If this is actually a venal sin, then we’re all screwed. Who doesn’t like to see someone brought low? “Not me!” we claim, defensively. “I’m a positive person. I get immense gratification from seeing others succeed!”

I call bullshit. If that were the case, why do you think photos of celebrities with no makeup are so highly prized? Because deep down inside, in a dark and twisty place (the same place that takes the better umbrella from the umbrella stand and pretends not to see the person rushing for the elevator when you’ve already pushed the button), we love to see someone else brought low. It’s not a noble part of our makeup, but it’s there.

The real indicator that humans really are motivated by envy is to remember that we seldom, if ever, hate another person based on qualities we despise. Which is ironic. No, we hate others based on their attainment of those qualities that we admire. Think about it. Do you ever lose sleep about people who exemplify laziness? Or insecurity? Or negativity?

Nah, we hate people that have the things we really want. Success. Generosity. Patience. Perky boobs.

Jung would have a field day with this one.

On Gluttony

How did gluttony get to be a deadly sin? I figured I'd start with the "lightest" sin and work my way up, but come on. I'm not convinced this even is a sin. It would be understandable for it to be a sin if what you were eating was, say, babies, or if you were a glutton because you were taking food away from hungry people, but how is it a sin all on its own? Wanting more of something is pretty natural.

In fact, it's driven by a survival mechanism. If a wolf brings down a caribou, you never see it nibble a leg and then go all coy and say to the wolf head-deep in the belly next door, "oh no, you bad thing, I just couldn't eat one more bite!" No, they eat until they fall over. And they're the ones that survive the winter.

When people are gluttonous about good things, like exercise or charity or education, that's a good thing, although kind of annoying for the rest of us. So I suppose in order to indict gluttony, you have to indict it only as it relates to naughty things, like recreational drugs or Big Macs. But even then, how sinful is gluttony? Yes, it's not a good idea to turn one's body into Vegas, but is it a sinful one? For the most part, gluttony only punishes the person doing the gluttony, so it's a tool to punish sinners. (Just like religion.) I guess being gluttonous could make one grossly overweight, and thus makes one look bad in stretchy clothing, and I think that we can all agree that looking bad in stretchy clothing is definitely a sin. But the mindset behind gluttony? That's beyond reproach. We love people who really throw themselves passionately into things. So what if you're trying to smoke cupcakes through a crack pipe instead of adopting underprivileged orphans from exotic countries by the dozen? The central dedication is the same.

But, you say, people don't just hurt themselves. Addicts hurt their families and loved ones. People who eat, drink or hotknife their feelings tend to pass those traits on to their children. So, for the purposes of making this a very neat seven-part post, and in the spirit of not trying to refute the word of god, here are some gross facts about gluttony that make me kind of embarassed to be human.

In a medical study, people who had eaten a full meal within an hour were offered either a free medium or giant-size popcorn. Gues which one they invariably picked? And all the participants dug in and ate the popcorn even despite none being hungry, but that's not even the gross part. The people with the giant-sized ones were given stale, two-week old popcorn and they ate it anyway. Apparently, we'll eat something if it's free, even when we're not hungry and even when that thing is garbage.

In another study, one group was offered chocolate cake and another group 'gateau du chocolate.' The group with the gateau du chocolate ate way more than the chocoate cake group, even gateau du chocolate just means chocolate cake in French. (I guess that doesn't really make us gluttonous so much as snobby, and stupid.)

Scientists have found that if you eat with one other person, you'll eat far less than if you are eating with seven people. In fact, people will consume 96% more food in big groups. I have no idea why, except maybe that humans are pretty competitive; maybe we think it's kind of cool to be able to eat a steak covered in...another steak.

All of these facts, in case you were doubting me (and you are right to - I make up facts all the time) are from O Magazine. And I suspect Ms. Winfrey might know a thing or two about eating habits. So I maintain: gluttony is good in theology but not in applied science.

And eating babies is still definitely not OK.