ALBERT CAMUS: “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
Good or bad, I’m a writer too.
This is DONE post #495, and I have a dozen or so posts in various stages of draft – so Ill hit 500 posts in the next few months.
Wow! 500 since the 1st post entitled appropriately enough:
“THE FIRST DISPATCH” 10/20/2013.
Just over a decade ago.
Most of them run 1,000 up to 5,000 words – a few damn near a book chapter in length – and this aint no blog or daily activities list – the vast majority of my articles here are solidly researched, referenced, ( usually linked to the main sources) informative articles that took a couple dozen edits and additions to complete. Hours of work each.
I consider myself a science journalist, but having PhD. level research training along with a love for science and History of Science, I have a bit more proper background and attitude to report on what we know, what our current knowledge is, the consensus of scientists in a given field, maybe a tad better than the average science reporter (altho there a lot of good ones out there).
And it is my passion to inform – it is why I am a FT college instructor, and public speaker, and author – and I love my fucking job (my poor wife has to hear that almost daily).
Information transfer is what separates us from the animals, and as Camus implies – not ALL of our ideas are good ones. Religious claims being among the worst. Folks like me love to try and inform other folks – especially about the wonders of science that works for all of us (it is just accumulated human knowledge, after all), and the stupid and all too often cruel idiocies of religion.
So, having cranked out just shy of 500 articles on this site, almost daily entries in my journal, and including my 2016 self-published book:
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON in trade paperback, ebook, and audio:
– AND considering the dozens of files full of notes for 2 other books Ive been working on over the years:
I guess I like to write.
I started writing this Dispatches from the New Enlightenment after a year or two of writing editorials for the University Newspaper in Kentucky where I was teaching – finding my “writer’s voice” in the process as they say. I was in CONSERVATIVE Western Ky – the gateway to the American South, just below the Ohio River where it joins the Mississippi at the extreme southern tip of Illinois – which is my home state – known somewhat affectionately to my Kentucky neighbors as:
“Yankeeville”
To so many of the good Southern Baptists, Church of Christ goers, and the most hard-core Catholics it seems one can find – that hang out down there:
the War isn’t over.
I’d never been called a Yankee before I moved there to take my first teaching job but when I told locals who asked where I was from I knew the only city they might know of in Northern Illinois was of course the Windy City, so I’d answer “up near Chicago…”
“Oh, Yankeeville” – uttered definitely disparagingly and with a hint of suspicion.
The Civil War ain’t over and the South never lost. Get used to it.
Western KY is just lovely countryside with rolling hills, and tobacco barns everywhere which would leave a low pall of wispy fog from the smoldering fires lit to dry the huge leaves hanging upside down inside during the mildly chilly Fall – romantic clinging mist almost – as long as one didnt think about the slave labor that used to bring that crop in for decades all over Dixie – or lung cancer.
Some of the views along the Mississippi looking to the west were just striking. And I made a number of lifelong friends down yonder where no-one really goes anywhere – they are always “fixin'” to go somewhere:
“Im fixin’ to go to Walmart, you need anything?”
In another sense altho many of my students were fixin’ to get the hell out of KY, so many of the locals hadnt ever ventured very far beyond the hamlet of their birth and had no plans to it seemed.
One lady working at the Post Office, looking to be in her 40’s and with that “fixin'” kinda drawl had no idea how to get to the next town just 15 miles up the road. She sent someone asking how to get there on the most convoluted route out to the freeway and then to look for that exit and head all the way back into town from the Parkway, when all one had to do was turn right out of the Post Office parking lot and head straight north (an unpleasant direction for many, I suppose), and stay right on that local state highway – no turns – and it would lead you directly into the town square right in front of their post office. I recall she said something like she had been there once.
Directions, and where things were spatially to one another were not stuff many bothered to explore. If one could get to the store and Grandmas and church and school and back home again, well, that was good enough. Road names and compass points were optional, almost too technical that needn’t be bothered with…more of a Yankee kinda thing anyway.
“Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit!” is still my fave expression from my time among the all too hip WESTERN Kentuckians. The true hillbilly types they looked down on were all in EASTERN Kentucky where the real ignorant rednecks lived. The sophisticates among Southerners all resided west of Lexington and I-75. Uh,huh.
The world really does change once you cross the Ohio River.
One of my other fav Southern expressions is the not so subtle passive-aggressive phrase:
“Bless her heart”
When you want to politely describe someone as no more than a dipshit, you do it indirectly invoking your godly concern for their salvation, being a good Christian in the process – a very important aspect of the culture down yonder.
I had a great time getting my teaching start down there, made lifelong friends, saw some incredible countryside, and besides getting my writing career off the ground, became immersed in the US non-believers movement by being deeply involved in 2 very active secular student groups. But I was damn glad to be able to come home to the liberal north and work as a teacher up here, as I wouldnt ever want to subject my kids to the stifling, conservative, uber-religious culture that flourishes below the Ohio. If you think I”m exaggerating, I worked for a State University with a solid biology department with some impressive faculty working in Evolutionary Biology – yet at each end of campus and downtown, we had 3 churches – all teaching Creationism: 2 Baptist and a Church of Christ. They arent real big on gays down there either as it was common knowledge you could get fired from your job at some locations if the owner found out you were homosexual.
As Camus suggests, not ALL human ideas are good ones. So writers (and now bloggers, YouTubers, TikTokers, and the like) – all try to educate, inform, debate, challenge, and persuade others to consider alternatives to their repressive, conservative, stifling, and often downright ugly ideas.
As a member of the French Resistance in WWII, he saw the REAL ugliness of fascist, racist ideals in action. He wrote his novels and philosophical papers on the absurdity of living in an uncaring Universe, indifferent to the suffering of humans – while witnessing one of the worst episodes of oppression and death in human history play out all over mid-20th century Europe.
Along with the ridiculous pseudo-scientific nationalism of the Nazis – their hatred of Jews had one source – as it still does today: the other 2 Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam. Those wholly fictional mythologies brewed in that tiny corner of the Middle East have done a number on us – but THAT is the subject of a whole other essay, fersure.
Good Christians in Western Kentucky didnt like gays or evolution because their 2,000 year old book told them so.
My FAVE slogan and bumper sticker. Unfortunately it is all too true. Religion is the source of most of our self-inflicted woes. It is why I write.
And another way to get your writing out there – the traveling billboard on the back of my car:
A more modern way for the writer to communicate is making Tik-Tok content: something that along with this website and my YouTube channel I am seriously considering to undertake in the near future.
The religiously endorsed and conservatively fueled idiocy under Trump and the Republicans here in the US is a far cry from the conquests and atrocities of Nazi Germany – but it is just as stupid, ignorant, and reliant on religious thinking – and full of misogyny, homophobia, and beyond ridiculous science denial.
Camus wrote in an attempt to keep civilization from destroying itself.
Hear, hear! – and I write also to give religious thought the drubbing it deserves.
end religion now.
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