Polish Party
gary
Downtown
Thanksgiving 2024
Previous Years
One Project
Left Behind I: True Christians
I’ve always been fascinated with extremes, and for me, there is nothing more extreme in the contemporary American religious landscape than fundamentalist Evangelical Christians. They hold to some beliefs that they themselves would admit are fairly wild were another religion to espouse something similar. Few of their beliefs are more odd than their predictions about how the world will end.
Christians have been eschatological in their theology from the beginning: Jesus in the gospels is always talking about the end of the word, and a substantial percent of Christians see large swaths of the Bible (both Old and New Testament) as prophecies about the “end times.” All this prophetic postulating has led Evangelicals to a belief in the rapture: Jesus will take all true Christians to heaven just before the end time hell-on-Earth led by the Antichrist.
Christians will vanish off the face of the earth in an instant, the idea holds. Cars will suddenly become driverless; airplanes will fall from the sky as their flight crew disappears; and all the children below the ill-defined “age of reason” will disappear.
(The Evangelical god is a merciful god: he won’t send children to hell if they don’t have the mental capacity yet to make an informed choice about whether or not to “give their life to Jesus.” In other words, despite children being born with the curse of Original Sin, they still get a pass — sort of a free forgiveness-with-Jesus card. Why everyone else can’t get that is a mysterious contradiction in the whole theory, but of course, the Evangelical god is a mystery. As is the Catholic god and the mainline Protestant god — all mystery when something strange or contradictory shows up.)
In the nineties, Tim LaHaye, a Baptist minister, and Jerry Jenkins, a dispensationalist Christian, wrote a series called Left Behind that explored the reality on Earth after the rapture had taken place, leaving behind millions and providing the series with its title. Left Behind, the first book in the series, tells the story of the rapture itself. It follows four main characters.
Rayford Steele is a successful airline pilot married to Irene, a gungho evangelical Christiaion whom God takes up in the rapture and thus leaves Raford behind.
Chloe Steele is one of Rayford’s children. A student at Stanford, she is logical and skeptical, thus rejecting God’s call and failing to become a true Christian. As a result, she too is left behind.
Most interesting of all is Bruce Barnes, the associate pastor at New Hope Village Church (the church Rayford’s wife Irene attends). Though he is a minister in a church filled with people who are raptured, Bruce is left behind.
Finally, there’s Cameron Williams, given the ever-annoying nickname Buck because, according to other characters, he’s always bucking the system. He’s an award-winning journalist for Global Weekly, and he is on Rayford Steele’s plane when the rapture occurs. He sets out to discover the cause of all the disappearances, and in the meantime, he converts to Evangelical Christianity.
One of the most interesting questions in the book is the reasoning behind who was taken and who was left behind. There are some obvious groups that would have been left behind: non-Christians are all still around, and this group definitely includes liberals and the college elite. Chloe, a student at Stanford University, calls home after the disappearances:
“Mom? Dad? Are you there? Have you seen what’s going on? Call me as soon as you can. We’ve lost at least ten students and two profs, and all the married students’ kids disappeared. Is Raymie all right? Call me!”
There were about 13,000 undergraduate and graduate students in 1990.If the rapture took ten students, that represents only 0.0769% of the students This fairly clearly shows the Evangelical view of “secular” education. Once even True Christians enter a liberal university like Stanford, they will fall away from the faith. (Of course, most Evangelicals would argue that those who fall away from the faith were never True Christians to begin with. This No True Scotsman fallacy is one of Evangelicalism’s favorite arguments.)
While many people should have expected to be left behind, many people who thought they were Christians remained on Earth, much to their confusion. In this way, the book makes it clear that not all who call themselves Christians will make it in the end. There exists such a thing as “Christians so-called.” Rayford starts to see this quickly. When he lands and is waiting for a phone to call home, he gets to watch a little news:
Rayford was second in line for the phone, but what he saw next on the screen convinced him he would never see his wife again. At a Christian high school soccer game at a missionary headquarters in Indonesia, most of the spectators and all but one of the players disappeared in the middle of play, leaving their shoes and uniforms on the ground. The CNN reporter announced that, in his remorse, the surviving player took his own life.
But it was more than remorse, Rayford knew. Of all people, that player, a student at a Christian school, would have known the truth immediately. The Rapture had taken place. Jesus Christ had returned for his people, and that boy was not one of them.
This poor soccer player thought he was one of God’s elect, that he’d given his life to Jesus and completed all the requirements to be saved from the hell of end times only to discover at literally the last moment that he’d deceived himself.
Even the hardened skeptical reporter Buck Williams, who “never claimed any devotion to the faith,” remembers during a conversation with his father that his family “had [Buck] in church and Sunday school from the time [he was] a baby.” In exasperation, Buck’s father declares, “You’re as much a Christian as any one of us.”
Even Rayford Steele was something of a nominal Christian:
For years he had tolerated church. They had gone to one that demanded little and offered a lot. They made many friends and had found their doctor, dentist, insurance man, and even country club members in that church. Rayford was revered, proudly introduced as a 747 captain to newcomers and guests, and even served on the church board for several years.
However, it wasn’t true Christianity. Irene learns this when she discovered the Christian radio station and what she called ‘real preaching and teaching.’” Rayford found the sermons at the new church “a little too literal and personal and challenging” and so he stayed away. Therefore, when the events of the novel actually begin, he’s at best a nominal Christian though more likly a lapsed Christian or even an apostate nonbeliever altogether.
Bruce, the associate pastor, is a much trickier case. In telling his story to Rayford, he explains that the “Bible says that if you believe in Christ you have eternal life, so [he] assumed [he] was covered.” Evangelicals like to say that’s all one has to do: believe in Jesus, believe in the efficacy of his sacrifice to cleanse you of your sins. If you do that, you’ll be saved from the consequences of your sin (i.e., hell).
Bruce, however, finds that there’s more to it.
I especially liked the parts about God being forgiving. I was a sinner, and I never changed. I just kept getting forgiveness because I thought God was bound to do that. He had to. Verses that said if we confessed our sins he was faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us. I knew other verses said you had to believe and receive, to trust and to abide, but to me that was sort of theological mumbo jumbo. I wanted the bottom line, the easiest route, the simplest path. I knew other verses said that we are not to continue in sin just because God shows grace.
According to Left Behind, then, believing in Jesus is not enough. One has “to trust and to abide.” But what does that mean? And how do you know if you’ve done that? For Bruce, it’s “sort of theological mumbo jumbo,” which correctly suggests that there’s nowhere in the Bible that lays out what this trusting and abiding might look like. Indeed, there’s nowhere in the Bible that says, “In order to be saved from hell and spend an eternity with God, do this, this, and this.” Indeed, this is why we have so many Christian denominations: it’s just not clear what it takes to get right with the god of this religion.
Bruce goes on to explain,
I told my wife that we tithed to the church, you know, that we gave ten percent of our income. I hardly ever gave any, except when the plate was passed I might drop in a few bills to make it look good. Every week I would confess that to God, promising to do better next time.
So to be a True Christian, guaranteed of salvation, you have to give ten percent of your income to the church? Christians like to say that salvation is a free gift: “You don’t have to do anything.” This sure sounds like doing something, though.
Bruce explains further: “I encouraged people to share their faith, to tell other people how to become Christians. But on my own I never did that.”
Now our list of required acts has expanded to four items:
- Believe in the efficacy of Jesus’s sacrifice.
- Trust and abide.
- Give ten percent of your income to the church.
- Share your faith with others.
Yet that’s not all, because Bruce’s story continues, “I hardly ever read my Bible except when preparing a talk or lesson. I didn’t have the ‘mind of Christ.’ Christian, I knew vaguely, means ‘Christ one’ or ‘one like Christ.”
Now our list is:
- Believe in the efficacy of Jesus’s sacrifice.
- Trust and abide.
- Give ten percent of your income to the church.
- Share your faith with others.
- Read the Bible.
- Have the “mind of Christ.”
Later in the series (in the fourth book, Soul Harvest), when Rayford is explaining everything to a colleague named Mac, he discovers the inadequacy of the traditional explanation of what it takes to be saved.
“So, what’s the plan?”
“It’s simple and straightforward, Mac.” Rayford outlined from memory the basics
about man’s sin separating him from God and God’s desire to welcome him back.“Everybody’s a sinner,” Rayford said. “I wasn’t open to that before. But with everything my wife said coming true, I saw myself for what I was. There were worse people. A lot of people would say I was better than most, but next to God I felt worthless.”
“That’s one thing I don’t have any problem with, Ray. You won’t find me claiming to be anything but a scoundrel.”
“And yet, see? Most people think you’re a nice guy.” “I’m OK, I guess. But I know the real me.” “Pastor Billings pointed out that the Bible says, ‘There is none righteous, no, not one’ and that ‘all we like sheep have gone astray,’ and that ‘all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.’ It didn’t make me feel better to know I wasn’t unique. I was just grateful there was some plan to reconnect me with God. When he explained how a holy God had to punish sin but didn’t want any of the people he created to die, I finally started to see it. Jesus, the Son of God, the only man who ever lived without sin, died for everybody’s sin. All we had to do was believe that, repent of our sins, receive the gift of salvation. We would be forgiven and what Billings referred to as ‘reconciled’ to God.”
“So if I believe that, I’m in?” Mac said.
“You also have to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. That provided the victory over sin and death, and it also proved Jesus was divine.”
“I believe all that, Ray, so is that it? Am I in?”
Rayford’s blood ran cold. What was troubling him? Whatever made him sure Amanda was alive was also making him wonder whether Mac was sincere. This was too easy. Mac had seen the turmoil of almost two years of the Tribulation already. But was that enough to persuade him?
But this contradicts what Bruce later teaches as the requirements for being a True Christian. After he tells his story about how it happened that an associate pastor in an Evangelical church missed out on the rapture, he explains to Rayford what one must do to be saved:
First, we have to see ourselves as God sees us. The Bible says all have sinned, that there is none righteous, no not one. It also says we can’t save ourselves. Lots of people thought they could earn their way to God or to heaven by doing good things, but that’s probably the biggest misconception ever. Ask anyone on the street what they think the Bible or the church says about getting to heaven, and nine of ten would say it has something to do with doing good and living right.
This is the standard explanation in Evangelical circles about how to obtain salvation. But what about that list we culled from earlier portions of Bruce’s story? What role does “living right” play in all this? Bruce explains: “We’re to do that, of course, but not so we can earn our salvation. We’re to do that in response to our salvation.” In other words, once we’re saved, we should start acting like it. We should be reading our Bible, having the mind of Christ, trusting and abiding, and — lest we deprive our pastor of funds to complete his work — giving ten percent to the church.
This still leaves the question of what all these things mean. What exactly is trusting and abiding, and how can we be sure we’re doing it? What precisely does it look like to have the mind of Christ? This formulation leaves Evangelical in constant doubt of their own salvation, and so it serves as an ever-present stressor, constantly pushing the Christian to examine her life and constantly undermining that faith at the same time.This push and pull of grace versus works, salvation verses damnation is perhaps the most unhealthy aspect of Christianity.
Once Bruce is done with his story and explains how to be saved, he leaves it in Rayford’s hands. However, he does “leave [him] with one little reminder of urgency.”
You may have heard this off and on your whole lives, the way I did. Maybe you haven’t. But I need to tell you that you don’t have any guarantees. It’s too late for you to disappear like your loved ones did a few days ago. But people die every day in car accidents, plane crashes—oh, sorry, I’m sure you’re a good pilot—all kinds of tragedies. I’m not going to push you into something you’re not ready for, but just let me encourage you that if God impresses upon you that this is true, don’t put it off. What would be worse than finally finding God and then dying without him because you waited too long?”
This fear aspect of Christianity (and I guess Islam as well) is the one of the most dangerous and harmful ideas in the religion. It haunts believers even after they’ve left the faith: if I was wrong, abandoned the church, and then die, what? The answer to that question lingers: hell.
But it’s not just fear for oneself. When Rayford converts (“accepts Jesus as his Lord and Savior”), he instantly becomes worried about Chloe:
He felt hopeless about Chloe. Every thing he had tried had failed. He knew it had been only days since the disappearance of her mother and brother, and even less time since his own conversion. What more could he say or do? Bruce had encouraged him just to pray, but he was not made that way. He would of course, but he had always been a man of action. Now, every action seemed to push her farther away. He felt that if he said or did anything more, he would be responsible for her deciding against Christ once and for all.
What an utterly hopeless situation! This god Rayford has come to believe in might send Chloe to hell because Rayford can’t get through to her, and worse, the god is so impotent that Rayford might actually push Chloe away from his god and to his god’s hell.Overall, Left Behind presents the horrors and illogic of Evangelical Christianity in a manner that demonstrates Evangelical Christians’ complete lack of self-awareness. These issues would be plain to them if they were fervent believers of another faith looking at Christianity, but being so deeply enmeshed in the belief system, they’re completely oblivious to these issues.
Ironing
It always amused me how much stuff the average Polish woman (and it’s always the woman) irons. “Do you all iron even the underwear?” I once quipped.
There is a certain sense behind it, I guess, if you worry about wrinkles in everything. When I first lived there, I didn’t. And I didn’t even have an iron if I wanted to smooth out my clothes. “We always laughed about how obvious it was you were a bachelor” one of my former students once confessed.
Ironing sheets, though? Yep.
Portrait
All-Star Game
The Girl played her last volleyball game as a high schooler today. I thought her quarter-final game a few weeks ago was her final game, but she got an invitation to play in the state all-star game, and of course, she didn’t pass that up! What an honor for our girl.
The game itself was as exciting as one could imagine. L’s team (North) dropped the first two sets, but not terribly. They just couldn’t get everything to click like South could. In the third set, though, they found their moment and took it, winning 28-26. They took the fourth set as well, and suddenly, instead of having their backs to the wall, they’d evened the game at two sets each. But it was not to be. The North team fell apart in the final set, losing 5-15.
But still — what an honor for the Girl. What a way to end a high school volleyball career.
Friday Afternoon Ride
The Problem with Faith
I saw a meme the other day that got me thinking about the nature of faith. A high school friend, who is a pastor and lovely human being in every sense, posted the following thought:
The problem with this is simple: this god never says anything. All we have are people saying that this god has said something. The meme should read:
Man says, “Show me, and I’ll trust you.” Some people say God says, “Trust me, and I’ll show you.”
That puts things in an entirely different situation. The dichotomy is not between a supposedly-fallible self and an supposedly-infallible deity. The division is between trusting your own senses and experiences versus trusting claims someone else makes about a deity. The first quote is asking for evidence; the second is asking for blind faith.
I’ll go with evidence every single time.
Distinctives
Growing up, there were a lot of Bibles in our house. All were corrupt translations in one way or another, my father (on the teaching and authority of our little sect) assured me, and it was necessary to read a given passage in a number of different passages to understand it fully.
One of the Bibles we had was the Scofield Reference Bible. Our sect’s leader, Herbert Armstrong, extolled it for its important commentary. It was, in essence, the King James Version with James Scofield’s commentary and explanation.
The Scofield was a Bible out of step with what corrupt Protestants and whore-of-Babylon Catholics used. We were the only real Christians on the entire planet, see, and everyone else was corrupt in one way or another. The Protestants liked the King James Version, that’s true, and that was a redeeming point in our eyes, but too many used the Revised Standard Version, or even worse, the liberal New International Version. Like other Christians, we referred to these versions by their initials: the KJV was superior, and the RSV was acceptable, but the NIV was an abomination. Above them all, though, was the Scofield Reference Edition, which I doubted any of my Protestant friends at school had ever heard of.
It turns out, several probably had. It was the favored edition of John Nelson Darby, a nineteenth-century Evangelical who came up with the idea of the rapture, the idea that Jesus would whisk his believers away just before all hell breaks loose on Earth at the end of time. These eschatological ideas come from various places in the Bible. Passages from the Old Testament prophets are mixed with passages from the New Testament epistles of Paul and then folded into the Book of Revelation to produce a horrifying image of the end of the world with something like three-fourths of humans dying in the misery. Scofield’s ideas shaped Darby’s ideas, and the idea of the rapture is a key component of Evangelical Protestants to this day. Most of the pastors serving as “spiritual advisors” to Trump during his first term held to this idea, which is somewhat terrifying: people advising the president were expecting the literal destruction of most of humanity, thinking that they might be playing a part in the prophetic nonsense that leads up to all of that.
Our sect had its own end-of-the-world scenario, but I was always taught that our vision of the future was original and, most significantly, correct. So I grew up not knowing about the idea of the rapture and how Evangelicals interpreted the Bible to create a picture of the end of the word. I certainly didn’t realize how damn similar it was to ours. They even used terms that I thought were exclusive to our correct understanding of the Bible, terms like “The Great White Throne Judgement.”
That’s one thing I’ve learned as I study more about other sects and denominations of Christianity. Far from being unique, our beliefs were an amalgamation of just about every sect out there. Bits and pieces from the Mormons? Check. A little something from the Jehovah’s Witnesses? It’s right there. A touch of good old fashioned Evangelicalism? Got it. Our combination of these things was unique, to be sure, but there was nothing new in anything we believed. Contrary to the assurances of our ministers and leaders, we were not special or unique.
I got to thinking about all of this tonight because of a book by Bart Ehrman I’m reading. Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End takes a scholarly look at the Book of Revelation and traces the history of some of the ideas modern Christians root in that book — like the rapture. Suddenly I was reading about the Scofield Reference Bible, something I hadn’t thought about in decades.
Papa’s was in a leather cover with a zipper, and he had covered countless pages with endless annotations. When Papa moved in with us, we got rid of most of his Bibles (his choice — “How many do I really need?”), but I found myself wondering if we still had his Scofield. I walked into his old room, looked at the top row of his bookshelf where I knew the Bibles lived.
And there was a Scofield.
“I don’t think that’s his, though,” I thought, remembering the leather cover. I opened it and saw it was covered in annotations. “But that’s not Papa’s writing,” I realized. Sure enough, on the inside cover: Ruby Williams, Nana’s mother. She wasn’t a member of our sect. In fact, I think she rather disliked it. But she was an Evangelical and so shared a preference for the Scofied.
The annotations themselves are fascinating. On one page, there are all the signs of the interpretative practices we borrowed from Evangelicalism.
“The Bible is a jigsaw puzzle!” Herbert Armstrong, our sect’s founder and leader, taught countless times. One had to piece together bits from here and bits from there to see the true picture. In serious (i.e., scholarly) study of the Bible, there’s a term for this: proof-texting. The idea is simple: if you take bits randomly from the Bible (i.e., get your proof from throughout the text), you can prove anything.
On the above page of text from the Old Testament prophetic Book of Zechariah, we see my grandmother connected it to the Book of Revelation (chapters 17 and 18) as well as Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (chapter 1 verse 4). The vast majority of the text is underlined to indicate its importance.
And along the foot of the page, the reason for everyone’s love (or hatred) of this particular edition: James Scofield’s commentary. He patiently explains that “Symbolically, a ‘measure’ (or ‘cup’)” is something that’s full and “God must judge it.” These are not usual study notes for a Bible. It’s not explaining some ambiguities of the original Hebrew. It’s not discussing the translation difficulties of a given term. It’s telling readers what this particular passage symbolizes. It is interpreting the Bible, putting ideas in readers’ heads that really don’t come from the Biblical text but rather from Scofield’s vision of the whole sweep of Biblical history.
Along the top, we also see it connected to contemporary social commentary: “Big business worships ‘almighty dollar.'” On that single annotated page is the story of the Evangelical approach to the Bible, and while it would have pained me to admit it as a child (who doesn’t want to be special? called out? unique?), it is the story of our interpretative technique as well.
Promotion
Reading Orwell with the Boy
When teachers throughout South Carolina became significantly concerned that the state might ban, among other things, 1984, I’m sure I wasn’t the only teacher who thought, “Now, when was the last time I read that? I should probably reread it.” However, I just reread it a few years ago, and while I love re-reading favorite books, enough time has to pass between reading to make it enjoyable. It occurred to me, though, that, books becoming increasingly worrisome to the powers that be, I might like to read it to the Boy. I knew the Girl had already read it, but the Boy — it’s not a book he would read himself. Truthfully, though, he is a bit young for it. So I decided we’d do the next best thing: read Animal Farm.
We’ve been reading a chapter every few nights, and I’ve used it to teach the Boy a bit about the history underlying that fable. Tonight we read chapter 8.
A few days later, when the terror caused by the executions had died down, some of the animals remembered-or thought they remembered-that the Sixth Commandment decreed “No animal shall kill any other animal.” And though no one cared to mention it in the hearing of the pigs or the dogs, it was felt that the killings which had taken place did not square with this. Clover asked Benjamin to read her the Sixth Commandment, and when Benjamin, as usual, said that he refused to meddle in such matters, she fetched Muriel. Muriel read the Commandment for her. It ran: “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.” Somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals’ memory. But they saw now that the commandment had not been violated; for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball.
I told the Boy about the Stalinist purges, especially the Great Terror of 1937. I told him about Solzhenitsyn and some of the anecdotes he relates in The Gulag Archipelago. The Boy was shocked?
“Why did they do that?”
“To maintain power.”
Napoleon was now never spoken of simply as “Napoleon.” He was always referred to in formal style as “our Leader, Comrade Napoleon,” and this pigs liked to invent for him such titles as Father of All Animals, Terror of Mankind, Protector of the Sheep-fold, Ducklings’ Friend, and the like. In his speeches, Squealer would talk with the tears rolling down his cheeks of Napoleon’s wisdom the goodness of his heart, and the deep love he bore to all animals everywhere, even and especially the unhappy animals who still lived in ignorance and slavery on other farms. It had become usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, “Under the guidance of our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days”; or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, “Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!”
I told the Boy about all the titles bestowed upon Stalin, all the awards, all the honorifics.
“What did Stalin try to do, then?” I asked.
“Make himself into a god.” A bit simplistic, but not too far from the truth.
I explained the illogical thinking behind the claim that atheism is behind the most horrific events of the twentieth century because China and the Soviet Union were officially atheistic states. “They had the exact same dogmatic belief structure as the strictest religion,” I explained.
In the late summer yet another of Snowball’s machinations was laid bare. The wheat crop was full of weeds, and it was discovered that on one of his nocturnal visits Snowball had mixed weed seeds with the seed corn. A gander who had been privy to the plot had confessed his guilt to Squealer and immediately committed suicide by swallowing deadly nightshade berries. The animals now also learned that Snowball had never-as many of them had believed hitherto-received the order of “Animal Hero First Class.” This was merely a legend which had been spread some time after the Battle of the Cowshed by Snowball himself. So far from being decorated, he had been censured for showing cowardice in the battle. Once again some of the animals heard this with a certain bewilderment, but Squealer was soon able to convince them that their memories had been at fault.
I explained to the Boy the idea of saboteurs in Soviet ideology: all the shortcomings of state-run enterprises (i.e., most of what happened in the USSR) were explained away by the idea of enemies of communism undermining the efforts of the Soviet government to create a utopia.
I can’t help but see parallels in all of this with the MAGA cult. Just as the pigs were gaslighting the animals about the changes going on around them, Trump lies opening to his followers, and the true MAGA devotees, blinded by their devotion to Trump, don’t even see the obvious inconsistencies and lies. Just as Napoleon’s and Stalin’s sycophants praised them with honorifics and virtual worship, so too the MAGA commitment to promoting Trump in literally messianic terms. Just as Squealer and the other pigs convince the animals to disbelieve their own memories, Trump’s campaign brazenly called on his supports to cast Harris as a threat to democracy while painting the man who literally led an attempted insurrection as the savior of all.
Our country is about to be in a mess that might not be fully cleaned up by the time the Boy is nearly my age, and he needs to know it has happened before and will happen again.
Sunday
Miś
“I have a film you must see.” We were sitting in a restaurant, waiting for the next bus back to Lipnica, when Janusz told me this. “It’s a perfect film.”
“What’s it about?” I probed.
“Poland. It’s about — you just have to see it,” came the response.
For the next few weeks, whenever we met up, Janusz brought up the film.
“When are you going to come see it?” he would ask. “You have to see it. It’s a perfect film.”
Little did I know: classic and perfect.
The first time I saw the Polish cult comedy Miś (“Teddy Bear”), I knew I’d have to see it again. I’d laughed so hard at some scenes that it was difficult to catch my breath, but I knew I’d only caught part of it. This was partially because of language — my Polish, after all, isn’t perfect — and partially because of the layers of the film.
In the years since I first watched the film, I’ve seen it countless times. Those layers are still revealing themselves with each viewing: little touches like signs in the background and repeating musical themes, things you’ll never get from one viewing. Indeed, I’ve watched it so many times now I can quote whole sections of it, and no matter one’s situation, there’s almost always a quote from Miś that is perfectly applicable.
The first shot is of a helicopter, clearly working as a flying crane. We see the wire, but it takes a moment before we see what is hanging from it.
On the ground, it becomes immediately obvious: it is a fake building with police officers milling around, part of a suprise speed trap.
As the credits roll, other officers put up two-dimensional fake buildings to create a small “village” near the road. The reasoning is simple: Polish traffic law requires drivers to slow in a teren zabudowany.
Both words have as close a thing as a cognate as just about any words in Polish: “teren” means “terrain” and “zabudowany” derives from “budowac,” which means “build.” So teren zabudowany literally means “terrain built.”
The trap, though, is incomplete without people. Other officers soon appear with variously dressed mannequins in hand. An off-screen ranking officer’s voice instructs, “Put them in a line,” and after a pause, we hear an explanation: “There must be some sign of life.”
The opening scene concludes with a soon-to-be-critical officer announcing over the radio that they are ready and that “moze zaczynac!”
“We can begin!”
What is amazing about the film, made in the very early 1980’s, is how much it mocks the Polish Communist reality and the effects of a state monopoly on everything from goods to ideas. That it made it past the censors is a minor miracle: I’ve really no idea how it could happen other than the notion that perhaps the Polish Communist party was more forgiving than Big Brother to the east. All the same, such blatant mockery?
The story, though, is simple: Ryszard Ochódzki, the director of a sports club, is trying to beat his ex-wife to London, where they have money under a joint account. Each knows the other will drain the account, and so it’s a mad race to see who can get there first. When Ochódzki’s wife, Irena, tears some pages out of his passport making it impossible for him to travel abroad, he devises one of the most complicated and convoluted schemes to get to the bank despite this seemingly insurmountable obstacle.
It’s a miraculous film, and many of the scenes resonate with my own experiences in Poland in the mid-1990’s.
Damage
Four Thursday Vignettes
Practice
Every morning I have hall duty in the arts wing. On one side is the band; on the other, strings. I walk back and forth between the two, listening to a beautiful cacophony of kids learning music.
A young lady is practicing her violin part. I recognize the melody.
“Do you know what that is? Who wrote it? What it’s called?” I ask with a smile. The boy standing with her is one of my favorite students, but I don’t teach him. He’s on a team down the hall, but he’s a sweet young man who smiles a lot and is friendly with everyone, so we’ve chat a little almost every morning. He glances at the sheet music at the same time she does. I beat them to it, though.
“Edvard Grieg. It’s called In the Hall of the Mountain King.” One of those pieces we all recognize from this or that film or advertisement, but few can identify by name. “Bet you didn’t expect an English teacher to know that, did you?” I laugh. They both agree it was unexpected, then go back to practicing.
Texting
We received a text this morning about some visitors to our school: we would be having district personnel touring, and they are not paying attention to us teachers; they’re looking for what students are doing. In other words, no need to talk to them or anything. I got admittedly a bit snarky and replied,
Usually, when someone on the group text makes a comment everyone likes, hearts and thumbs-up start bouncing all over the place. For this — nothing. Several teachers later said they appreciated my text, but no one felt comfortable expressing it in a way that everyone could see it. I think that speaks to the overall feeling that seems to be sitting like a low, heavy fog, and if I were to guess, I’d say it’s not just our school.
The Visit
Of course, the district personnel come to my classroom. The first one comes accompanied by our principal. Did he guide her here? As soon as they leave, another administrator brings another district person to our classroom.
It was a good day to visit, truth be told. The kids are having a Socratic Seminar — one of their favorite activities. After we’d watched a bit of Harvest of Shame yesterday in preparation for our unit on immigration stories, we transitioned to Harvest of Shame Revisited — a 2010 return to the topic of conditions migrant farm workers face. The common question on the viewing guide was the same: “Why do these folks earn so little money?” So this morning, I decided to change plans. We discussed that. In a limited way. In a South Carolina way.
All the kids discussed how we could do this or do that, but the bottom line was that all their ideas cost money. “Who’s going to pay?” I pointed out there are a couple of sources, but one is we, the people. “They get paid so little because we want cheap food.” That’s true enough, and it led to the discussion I was intending about the necessity sometimes to sacrifice for the good of others.
Left out of the discussion — the elephant in the room for some perhaps — was the exorbitant salaries of CEOs. Where does that money come from? It can come from the consumers, but it can (many say should) also come from reduced CEO salaries or increased taxes on those earning at that level.
But this is South Carolina. And that is socialism. Not really, but it’s going to be labeled Socialism (always with the capital letter) in many South Carolina homes. And that’s at least part of the reason I didn’t even bring that up.
Truth be told, the fact that it might raise some parents’ dander is only part of the reason. To cover this well, I’d need to get a couple of articles for the kids to read about CEO wages compared to employee wages, and this was a spontaneous lesson. I’d decided to do it only this morning after reading yesterday’s responses. But I do take that ugly s-word into consideration.
Such is teaching in South Carolina.
Teaching the Boy
I’ve been reticent to force my own teaching methods and ideas on our kids. L turned out to be a good writer without my help, but E has been struggling a bit. Still, offers of help but nothing more.
Today, he asked for help with his essay. I showed him how I have my students plan and organize their writing, and he found the technique simple and useful. He went upstairs and rewrote his entire essay using my method.
“The essay is so much better!” he gushed.
“That and the fact that you spent two hours in the evening working on it are things you can be really proud of,” I replied.
“Thank you.”
I’ve always oved that about the Boy: when you complement him, he quietly and modestly thanks you for the complement. It has always made me smile.
Last Practice of the Season
Tuesday
Tuesday has very little going for it. It doesn’t have the unambiguous “you have to get through it” feeling of Monday. It’s not hump day. It’s not Thursday (a.k.a. almost Friday). And of course, it’s not Friday. But Tuesdays this year are even more intolerable because of our Collaborative Team Meeting. A weekly mandatory meeting, it’s as bad as it sounds. Occasionally, we get something useful from it, but like so many things these days in education, it just has the feeling of being a report mill for the higher-ups (who usually make two, three, four, or more times the average teacher’s salary) so they can justify their job.
It’s often a day for giving a test. I would have said “A day for testing,” but “testing” now has connotations of standardized testing, and the increase in standardized testing is one reason so many of us are trying not to give tests of our own as much as possible. After all, how much can these kids be tested?
“Why not just use all the tests you have to administer for the district as grades?” Today, for example, we went over our benchmark scores. The benchmark, according to the powers that be, is supposed to be an accurate reflection of the degree to which the students have mastered the standards we are to teach in a given quarter. The only problem: they always include questions from other standards which we are to teach in other quarters!
“How is that a benchmark?” I asked one of our leadership team (another useful bit of jargon).
“Well, it’s also predictive,” came the response.
Predictive of what? I don’t need a test to tell me how well the students are going to do on a standard I haven’t even covered yet.
And the questions themselves — so often a jumble of confusion. We went over one question today (they are allowing us to see isolated questions this year, but only when they were projected on a screen without us taking pictures or copying it in any way — profits over the kids!), and I had trouble making sense of how they were even supposed to answer it, let alone which was the correct answer.
“If I am struggling to make sense of the question, what chance do my students have?” I asked.
“Let’s focus on the things in our control,” came the reply.
When you start your day of with that kind of a meeting, it’s a challenge to regain a positive footing when the kids start coming into the classroom. And had it been last year’s kids that came in after such a meeting, I would have stood by the door as the students entered and daydreamed about simply walking to the front office and saying, “Someone better get in my room — there’s no adult there, and I’m not coming back.”
But this year, I have such wonderful kids. Sure, some are disruptive and a little argumentative. Many are immature. Several are chronically lazy. But there’s not a kid about whom I could say, when he’s absent, “Well, thank the heavens for small mercies.” There’s not a kid that I just dread working with because I know she’s going to turn every single thing into a confrontation and make me thing it would be more productive to bang my head against the cinder block wall for the entirety of the period than to work with that kid. And trust me — I’ve taught plenty of kids like that. But this year, not a one.
So it’s easy to reign in the frustrations of a meeting and put on a positive face when such a great group of kids comes in. But it makes all the uselessness of all bureaucratic nonsense all the more acute.
Relief
What would you do if you suddenly realized that, due to some strange malfunction of a file management program, 15 years of online school materials disappeared? Thousands of carefully created questions for tests. Hundreds of online resources. Dozens of interactive lessons. All gone in a poof before you realized it?
What would you do if you then realized that your pet project of nearly 20 years disappeared along with it? Nearly seven thousand posts. Over 40,000 images. Almost three million words. All gone in a poof before you realized it?
Some discussion with a woman tech support with a lovely, lilting Indian accent, a bit of money (how much would have been too much), and some patience (it was supposed to take up to 72 hours), it’s all back. That’s why you’re able to read this because everything was gone — even the Word Press files themselves. Everything. All the URI produced was a 503 error. The relief was immense.