Looking back, it’s strange for me to realize that I was almost 17 and had no idea about any of the political or humanitarian aspects of the trip. I was too busy being a teenager, taking my second international tour with a music group, strategizing how to turn a flirty friendship into a real-life boyfriend situation, worrying about hitting that F-sharp in the second-movement solo of Brahms’s First Racket, spending two weeks away from parental supervision—I’m saying I had lots of other things on my mind. Even so, it seems like I should have understood some kind of message from the orchestra administration’s request that we fill any extra space in our luggage with things like aspirin and toilet paper and strings. I’m pretty sure they even told us outright that one of the purposes of going to Cuba was to give our host orchestra things they didn’t have enough of, things that we took for granted—like aspirin and toilet paper and strings for instruments. We changed our money for special Cuban money that exchanged at a 1:1 ratio with U.S. American currency, that we could only use in certain places (where actual Cubans were generally prohibited from shopping or eating). For goodness’ sake, we even went to a beach in Cuba that we were told Cubans weren’t permitted to go to. But little of that seems to have sunk in. I left Cuba pretty much just as entitled and clueless as I was when I arrived.

What did stick with me was an impression of Havana as beautiful and old, tropical, decaying, and generous. We were only there for two and a half days or so, and it was over a decade ago, so some of my memory is spotty or gone, but what remains is vivid. We stayed in a magnificent colonial hotel, genteel and welcoming, with high-walled rooms and a beautiful atrium. It was the most elegant place I had ever been in my life. In the morning we walked through the steaming air down the Paseo de Prado, toward the Gran Teatro, for rehearsal. The buildings all looked at least vaguely crumbling, and the scent of the city’s surrender to permanent humidity hung in the air. It certainly didn’t smell fresh, but it was somehow pleasant. Even more pleasant were the Habaneros we passed in the street. Almost to a person, they were outgoing, friendly, always interested in however much conversation we could manage between English and Cuban Spanish. More than one was willing to interrupt their morning business and follow along with our convoy, curious about who we were, where we were from, what we were there for. (I’d like to think some of the folks we met on our walks to and from the hotel ended up at the concert—it sold out, after all—but I’m not sure what kinds of rules were set about who got to attend.) Who knows how much our interactions with people in Havana were stage-managed by chaperones or functionaries; what I know is that I don’t recall a single rude encounter. I don’t remember anyone ever being less than polite, and in fact I remember lots of people being warm and open and friendly. The audience at our joint concert with the Amadeo Roldán Youth Orchestra was perhaps the most enthusiastic I’ve ever played for.

And hardly anyone I know has had the opportunity I had to meet these large-hearted people, because of el bloqueo. I’m glad to see the embargo softening, and I’m thrilled for the NY Phil. They’re going to meet some wonderful new friends on this tour.

I’ll do a post sometime comparing Goodridge, In re Marriage Cases, Kerrigan, and Varnum v. Brien—the four decisions by state supreme courts mandating marriage equality—but for now I just want to note some of the standout features of the Iowa decision (Varnum). (Chris Geidner covered the substance of the ruling in a clear, nontechnical post worth reading.) The primary salience, of course, is that it is the first unanimous decision by any court of final appeal in the country finding that equal protection requires recognition of the right of same-sex couples to marry. It’s the first time an entire supreme court has found me equal to my sister. From the get-go, that’s a powerful statement for a court to make.

More than that, though, it’s a shockingly comprehensive and generous ruling. The opening insists again and again that the plaintiffs in the suit are no different from other Iowans. “Like most Iowans,” it says, “they are responsible, caring, and productive individuals.” “Like many Iowans, some have children and others hope to have children.” “Like all Iowans, they prize their liberties and live within the borders of this state with the expectation that their rights will be maintained and protected—a belief embraced by our state motto.” “Despite the commonality shared with other Iowans, the twelve plaintiffs are different from most in one way.” (They’re gay.) “Each maintains a hope of getting married one day, an aspiration shared by many throughout Iowa.” “As other Iowans have done in the past when faced with the enforcement of a law that prohibits them from engaging in an activity or achieving a status enjoyed by other Iowans, the twelve plaintiffs turned to the courts to challenge the statute.” They are us, it says repeatedly—the original empathic move from which all the rest flows. I’ve never seen a court decision that so warmly embraces a minority group, and so concretely claims that group as part of the whole of society. As a gay man, I don’t just feel vindicated by the ruling; I feel valued.

Then the court situates the ruling in a line of important civil-rights cases it has decided over the past 170 years: the abolition of slavery in Iowa in 1839, cases in 1868 and 1873 that struck down racial discrimination in schooling and public accommodations, and the 1869 admission of the country’s first woman to legal practice. It makes the point that, although sometimes stumbling, the Iowa Supreme Court has consistently aimed to be in the vanguard on equal protection. This decision arrives well ahead of societal consensus on the matter, but when it comes to equality before the law, that has long been the court’s practice.

The fireworks begin when the court takes on the state’s proffered justifications for discriminating against same-sex couples. In arguments, the state gave five reasons for the law: maintaining traditional marriage, promotion of optimal environment to raise children, promotion of procreation, promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships, and conservation of resources (nonparallelism sic). The court slaps every one down like a game of Whac-a-Mole. On maintaining traditional marriage: “The County has simply failed to explain how the traditional institution of civil marriage would suffer if same-sex civil marriage were allowed.” Whac!

On promotion of optimal environment to raise children: “If the statute was truly about the best interest of children, some benefit to children derived from the ban on same-sex civil marriages would be observable.” Whac!

On promotion of procreation: “While heterosexual marriage does lead to procreation, the argument by the County fails to address the real issue in our required analysis of the objective: whether exclusion of gay and lesbian individuals from the institution of civil marriage will result in more procreation?” Whac!

On promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships: “While the institution of civil marriage likely encourages stability in opposite-sex relationships, we must evaluate whether excluding gay and lesbian people from civil marriage encourages stability in opposite-sex relationships. The County offers no reason that it does, and we can find none.” Whac!

On conservation of resources: “The trait of sexual orientation is a poor proxy for regulating aspiring spouses’ usage of state resources.” Whac!

The court then takes the surprising step of addressing an issue not actually raised by the parties to the case: religious opposition to marriage equality. It makes the point that many religious people understand their faith to forbid the solemnization of marriages between two loving, committed people of the same sex—but that many others understand their faith to require it. In any case, though, that’s none of the court’s business, because the law deals strictly with marriage as a civil contract. And with this decision, “civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete understanding of equal protection of the law.”

In all, it’s a deeply thoughtful, thorough, and fair decision. It could serve as a model for any court facing the same issue. Say, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Dee dee dee dee blessings be upon you…

This has been quite a spring for marriage equality. The progress has been famously characterized as a gathering storm, but the Nashe quote I’m using for my title here puts a different metaphor in my mind: It’s fun to think of the spring as a giant Green Man romping about the country (after hopping over from Sweden) entraining verdancy, and among the tendrils and blossoms that leap up in his wake is the recognition that love and commitment between two men or two women are just as much to be celebrated and honored as when they arise between a man and a woman.

Sweden was the first place this spring to come to that recognition. On April Fool’s Day the Riksdag had a six-hour debate, and then voted nearly 12 to 1 to recognize marriage equality. It’s funny: They have 349 members in that body (not too very many fewer than the House of Representatives here in the U.S., although we’ve got an extra house in the national legislature), and with six hours of debate, they were able to pass marriage-equality legislation in a landslide. I doubt you could get anything through the House in six hours with a margin like that. (And, oh, Stockholm is a beautiful city. I have some wonderful memories of Ping-Pong in a house on a lake there.)

Then, on the 3rd, the Iowa Supreme Court released its opinion in Varnum v. Brien—as far as I’m concerned, the preeminent marriage-equality decision in the country. (It’s so good, I smile now at the sight of Bookman Old Style.) I got carried away writing up some of the ruling’s remarkable rhetoric, so I’m going to post that separately [Here it is.—Ed.], but the upshot is a unanimous, magnanimous recognition that queer folks are people, and not to be treated as anything less than full, equal citizens.

Four days later, the Green King visited the Green Mountain State and the district of his colleague Columbia. It was a short trip to D.C., just long enough for the city council to take its first vote (12–0) on recognizing same-sex marriages validly enacted elsewhere. (The final vote, this time with Marion Barry present and dissenting, was about a month later.) But Vermont—ooh, that was a story.

April 7 was the exciting conclusion of the process in Vermont; in the previous two weeks or so, Vermont’s Senate had passed a marriage-equality bill 26–4 and sent it to the state House of Representatives, which approved it 95–52. In between those two votes, though, Gov. Jim Douglas had announced that he would veto the law once it was passed—which he did. The very next day, both houses voted to override his veto (the House by the slimmest possible margin), and Vermont became the first state in the country to enact marriage-equality legislation.

Then there were a few weeks that felt a little strange. I and some of the bloggers that I read had been so bowled over by the expansion of marriage equality during the first week of April that we temporarily forgot the normal state of affairs, i.e., not gaining new jurisdictions at a rate of more than one a week. Perhaps King Spring was napping. It was a bit of a letdown, waiting for Maine to get the lead out. But it did, and almost exactly two weeks after a marriage-equality bill was introduced (with more than six times the number of cosponsors usually permitted), Gov. John Baldacci signed it within an hour of receiving it—making him the country’s first governor to sign a marriage-equality bill (a distinction, by the way, that my honored Gov. Hoover twice refused). Now if only the voters of Maine can see their way to rejecting the upcoming people’s veto…

Now comes the still-pending excitement. A marriage-equality bill pushed by Gov. David Paterson scored big in New York’s Assembly, but the tradition in the state Senate is apparently for “leaders” not to bring a bill to a vote unless they already know it will pass. Since there was some maneuvering at the start of this legislative term in New York involving promises not to vote on marriage equality in the Senate, there’s some question whether it will even come up before the session ends next month. Let’s hope the necessary political pressure can be brought to bear.

New Hampshire is working on marriage equality right now, too, in a gripping struggle that has required proponents to overcome possibly fatal resistance at every stage of the process: committees, full-chamber votes, and even the governor’s desk. Right now we’re waiting for a conference committee to iron out the terms of a companion bill that Gov. John Lynch has demanded as a condition for his not vetoing the original bill that finally made it through both houses. (Rep. Jim Splaine ‘splains it all in detail at Blue Hampshire, a great resource for following this whole drama, although that post is not recent enough to cover the Senate’s concurrence in the companion bill and the House’s rejection of that same bill.) The roller-coaster ride continues.

And then there’s California. My adopted home takes the national spotlight tomorrow, when we see whether the year’s pleasant king keeps dancing or he trips over the Sierra Nevada and falls into the sea. Cross fingers.

I’m having a great deal of difficulty lately coming to grips with the fact that I live among brutes and torturers. We are in the middle of a public debate right now in the United States about whether torture is effective enough that we can excuse it. Dick Cheney and his squadron of soulless goons are taking to the television studios to argue that we obtained highly valuable information from the people we tortured, and that that makes it OK. They are lying. This is a monstrous debate, designed to distract us from the fact that torture is ineffective and illegal, and that torture is wrong.

But my heart sinks under the feeling that they are succeeding. I see surveys like the Pew Forum’s and am stunned with anguish that three out of four of my compatriots can imagine circumstances in which they’d approve of torture. It troubles me to look at those graphs and see that support for torture—let’s be direct: sadism and bloodlust—increases with religiosity, but that’s beside my main point, which is that I don’t know how to live among people who can’t understand that torture is wrong.

Perhaps these people are not monsters and ghouls; perhaps they’re simply uninformed and unimaginative. Perhaps they don’t know what has been done.

But then, perhaps the torture advocates do know. As digby has come to realize, we are a torture nation: “The United States of America tortures its own children. It tortures prisoners. It tortures average citizens whom any policeman believes is failing to smartly comply with his orders and it tortures suspected terrorists.” I don’t know how to be a part of that society.

Let me approach the problem from a different path.

Ever since I became consciously aware of my own moral agency (when I learned about the Enlightenment in 10th grade, I’m pretty sure), I’ve made it a point to assume the best of people. I feel a duty of empathy, generosity, and openness to my fellow human beings, and the only way I can do right by them is to take a default attitude of care and optimism. This amounts to a general creed that people are fundamentally good. I know there are caveats to this assertion—I’m the one who brought up Dick Cheney before. But I see him and his kind as freaks, inevitable statistical outliers.

I have built my moral framework on this foundation. The ways that I relate to the people I know and the society I inhabit are rooted in my faith that all human beings are basically decent, under whatever fog of fear or ignorance or distrust may obscure that nature. But faced with a regime of torturers and their cheerleaders in my country, I am losing that faith. I am no longer blithely confident, as I was before, that if during a political discussion I bring up my strenuous objection to torture, I will find agreement. For all I know, the person I’m talking to may find the strappado a perfectly cromulent law-enforcement technique. And I don’t know how to recognize that person as a human being.

This uncertainty hasn’t yet infected all my interpersonal dealings, of course; I know, for instance, that my husband and my friends have moral compasses that don’t point “straight down to hell.” Unfortunately, for fear of what I may hear, I have not brought myself to confirm the same about all of my family.

The disorientation and paranoia I’m describing reminds me somewhat of the aftermath of Prop. 8′s passage. For a couple days, I felt like a character in a World War II movie who had parachuted in behind enemy lines and couldn’t tell the resistance from the secret police. I went to the grocery store and couldn’t help wondering whether the mother I saw digging through the tomatoes with her toddler had voted to revoke my right to marry the man I love, or whether the chef at the sushi counter had a Yes on 8 sign hammered into the ground in front of his house, or whether the high-school seniors sneaking wistful glances toward the liquor aisle had told their classmates to vote yes so that I wouldn’t come after their little brothers. As I said, that only lasted a couple days; it helped to have maps showing vote distribution, and to feel the palpable outrage at the proposition’s passage among everyone who is important to me. It also helped to have official support: Lawsuits to overturn Prop. 8 were filed immediately, and city and county governments from all up and down the state joined in. Both houses of the state legislature passed resolutions condemning the proposition. I felt like I was part of a community that recognized a wrong, and that recognition reached upward into positions of power.

And that’s missing, when it comes to torture. I know I am part of an anti-torture community: digby, Marcy Wheeler, Fred Clark (and his wonderful commenters), Christy Hardin Smith, Glenn Greenwald, Scott Horton, Jack Balkin, Marty Lederman, and Brian Tamanaha—these people are not monsters. These people are fundamentally good. These people are decent. But these people only represent about 25 percent of us, and I don’t know how I’m going to get back to trusting the other 75.

And now we can go over the California Supreme Court’s Prop 8 hearing in comfort.

I missed almost all of Shannon Minter’s argument at the beginning. I was all ready to go, had my computer on and my earphones in, called up the California Channel’s site—and learned, like presumably thousands of other eager beavers, that the part of the series of tubes operated by the Cal Channel was clogged with enormous amounts of material. Okay, I thought, that’s quite irritating. Let’s see what they’ve got going on over at Queerty. Ah, excellent! A video feed! …Which is unfortunately just an embedded version of the Cal Channel feed, and equally inaccessible. So I was following along with Japhy’s Twitter updates, frantically clicking “Refresh” every 20 seconds or so, and then my computer turned off. Monitor too. It all just blinked off, and I couldn’t turn it back on. I tried toggling the power switch on my surge protector: nothing. I unplugged the computer and the monitor from the surge protector and stuck them straight into the wall socket: nothing. I called down to the Help Desk and informed the Helper there what was up, and he said he’d be up in a couple minutes to fix it.

Stung that I was missing what’s been described as the most important hearing the California Supreme Court has ever held, I tried another computer, which did at least get me back to the tweets. And then, just as the Helper came around, so did the news that someone else had been running a pair of space heaters (which I can’t very well scold, since it was 60 degrees in my office) and tripped the whole circuit. So the Helper flipped the breaker, I found out from someone else that the L.A. Times site was hosting a usable video feed, and al manner of thyng was wele, and Shannon Minter was just ceding the floor to Raymond Marshall.

I actually don’t remember Mr. Marshall’s argument all that much, nor Michael Maroko’s. I do remember Justice Kennard breaking in every other second to ask a two-hour question “just for the purposes of oral argument.” It didn’t take long for me to get right fed up with her contributions to the morning’s business. I thought Therese Stewart, when her turn finally came, was a knockout. She argued forcefully, intelligently, and with a legal precision that I thought did our side good.

Then came Chris Krueger from the attorney general’s office, about whom I think the less said, the better. Let me merely say that one should strive always to appear prepared when addressing a supreme court.

And yes, Ken Starr spoke. And yes, it was about as you’d expect.

More than the arguments—because we already know what they are, and we already know how they go—I’d like to focus on the justices. There were some very interesting currents aswirl (certainly) up on that bench. Now, I don’t really know from anything, and the veteran court-watchers I’ve read on the matter have said that predicting a case’s final disposition based on oral arguments is a mug’s game, so it’s not like any of this means anything. But it’s what I’m thinking.

The easiest conclusion to come to is that Ken Starr and his bigoted confederates lost big-time on the question of how Prop 8 affects the 18,000 or so same-sex marriages lawfully entered into between the time the Marriage Cases decision took effect and Nov. 5. I’d bet my lunch money that one’s going 7–0 against.

More complicated is the question of how the justices will vote on upholding Prop 8. It was pretty clear to me that Moreno and Werdegar are on the side of the angels here. At different times, they both put arguments in the attorneys’ mouths as to how the court could comport with established precedent and still find that Prop 8 had revised, rather than amended, the state constitution. I mean, Werdegar even straight up said, “There’s nothing that said a revision is limited to an alteration of the basic structure of government, right?” She’s convinced, and Moreno was right there with her.

Kennard we have obviously lost. I didn’t see how Maroko’s analogy, of an amendment that changed the title of women justices to “commissioner,” struck her (I had to get up for a quick second), but she was visibly struggling with the notion of overruling the electorate. I really want to be mean to her about this one, because from my point of view it’s so obvious what the proper decision is, but I can’t be upset that she’s taking seriously both the responsibilities and the limitations of her job. To a certain extent, she’s right; if I may stick John Marshall’s words in her mouth—for the purposes of oral argument—“it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” not to decide whether it approves of the law that has been enacted. But here’s the thing: As Stewart firmly reminded the court during rebuttal, the constitution of California establishes a distinction between amendment and revision, and provides different methods for accomplishing those two different processes. That means that it must be the duty of the judiciary, in interpreting the law, to draw the line between the two. That’s what the law is in this case. So I have to applaud Justice Kennard’s chariness of hacking away left and right at the expressed will of the voters with her great scythe of justice-as-she-sees-it, but she’s taking it too far in this case, and letting herself be persuaded (or covered) by some of the arguments she rejected in May. Deference is one thing, but capitulation is another.

Chief Justice George is an enigmatic one for me. The strongest signal I got from him is that it’s too easy to amend the California constitution. Oh, the disgust in his voice when he compared California’s over 500 constitutional amendments since 1879 to the federal constitution’s 27 amendments, in 100 more years. He’s too much a professional to let his dislike for the rules keep him from playing by them, but I wonder whether he might be interested in narrowing the set of situations where those rules apply. He did ask once or twice about the ratchet effect he heard implied in the petitioners’ arguments—the idea that rights could be granted under the equal-protection clause through amendment but could only afterward be removed through revision. I was pleased to hear Maroko (I think) admit that it sounds counterintuitive, but then explain how it actually isn’t. It was just a nice piece of candor and handholding in one place. I don’t know whether the chief was concerned that such an effect would be a bad one, but if so, I hope Maroko’s explanation helped assuage his worries. Also, one of the attorneys (I think a different one, but I don’t remember; it’s been a few days, and there were four squillion attorneys up there) made what sounded like an excellent argument: that the equal-protection clause itself was added through amendment, and certainly couldn’t now be removed simply by amendment. If that’s all true, that’s a nice point. But the upshot is that I don’t know how George stands on the issue. He shares some of Kennard’s concerns, but I suspect he’s more on our side than she is. After all, he wrote the Marriage Cases opinion; he’s got a little more on the line than she has.

As far as I can remember, Justice Baxter said very little during the hearing. He seemed mostly to be harping on the reinstitution of the death penalty in California, which was done through an initiative amendment. I’m of two minds on his focus on that. The first, and honestly most plausible, interpretation is that if it was okay for California’s voters to revoke the right to life of some convicts, after the state supreme court had granted it to them (by invalidating the death penalty), then it must certainly be permissible for California’s voters to revoke the right marriage of same-sex couples after the state supreme court had granted it to them. After all, life is a more fundamental right than marriage. There are some definite problems with this reasoning, most especially the way Prop 8 targets a group that the court recognized in May as a suspect classification, but it may be persuasive to Baxter.

The other interpretation of Baxter’s questions is kind of a goofball thing, but it’s…well, it’s not necessarily in the realm of the possible, but it might be peeking in from the lawn. Depending on who’s hearing the arguments and what the arguments are, in the wake of an overturning of Prop 8, the death penalty in California might fall. That would be a welcome (and most unexpected) unintended consequence of fighting for marriage equality.

I noted Justice Chin most for what appeared to be his serious consideration of a solution suggested by a pair of Pepperdine academics (and hundreds of blog commenters): the separation of civil marriage and religious marriage in California. He asked Maroko and Starr about their opinion of the state “getting out of the marriage business” altogether, and got a surprising agreement from the two attorneys. Both said that the state must provide marriage on equal grounds for all seekers (which doesn’t seem to square with Starr’s primary position on Prop 8, so now I’m confused), but Starr said it would be outside the court’s power to unilaterally convert all marriages to domestic partnerships. But if Chin is actually considering the idea that strongly, that sounds like he sees the current situation as one that requires a remedy, so he may not be out of reach for us. He was one of the bad guys in May, but this is a different question, and one that just may be plucking at him.

And now Justice Corrigan. I’ll tell you what, this is my only experience of her, but I think I kinda like her. She was witty, she was crisp, she demolished Krueger with a perfectly innocent-seeming “The question is withdrawn”—I really enjoyed her participation. I also think we may have her on this decision. She was insistent on clarifying with three or four of the petitioners’ attorneys that they were asking for a narrow rule: that an amendment that purports A) to revoke a right the court has recognized as fundamental B) from a specifically identified group the court has recognized as a suspect classification is properly a revision. That’s a very narrow rule indeed, and it has a focus and concern for equity to it that I think she may find powerfully attractive. Like I said earlier, I don’t know from anything, but I really think she’s considering siding with Moreno and Werdegar. She also seemed deeply disturbed to hear Starr argue that rights are defined by the people, and that a majority of voters could therefore validly amend the constitution to take away rights of free speech. When she pressed him on what the limits of this broad amendment power might be, he told her the people could vote in any new form of government they wanted (including, presumably, a form that is not democracy ["Hey, how did y'all become a dictatorship over there?" "Oh, we voted for it. I'm starting to think maybe the 47% who voted no but have been subjected to it anyway might have had the right idea..."]), and no branch of the actual government would have any authority to review that decision.

So I have a few predictions. Write them down so that you may ball up the paper you’ve written them down on and throw it at me when I turn up wrong.

1. Nobody votes to make Prop 8 retroactive with respect to marriages entered into while the law was that same-sex marriage was legal.
2. Moreno and Werdegar will find that this is a question of first impression for the court, and that they therefore have the power to decide a new set of criteria that may define a revision in addition to the ones already set out in California case law. They’ll say Prop 8 is a revision, and was improperly enacted.
3. Corrigan will join Moreno and Werdegar, and will be the one responsible for formulating the new set of criteria: a revision can also be a constitutional change that seeks to strip a suspect classification of a fundamental right.
4. Kennard will say it’s fine for the majority to take away whatever rights they want, as long as they do it as a majority.
5. Whatever the decision is, Chin will write a dissent arguing that the state should abandon marriages altogether, and issue only domestic partnerships.

Unfortunately, I’ve got no prediction on George. Looks to me like it comes down to him. We’ll know within…[counting on fingers]…86 days.

When I was about eight, my mother was hospitalized a couple times for kidney trouble. My dad would take me and my sister (who was about six) to visit Mom in the hospital. She had tubes coming out of her that I didn’t understand, and the doctors had given her a scratchy blue robe and slippers to wear. I know there was at least one surgery involved, and I suspect there must have been a second. I remember one day in the waiting room with my aunt, watching her work on her cross-stitching while I pawed through her plastic box of embroidery floss, rearranging the skeins according to some instinctual color scheme.

I remember another day when Dad, my sister and I were the only ones in the waiting room, so we were able to spread out. I took my calligraphy kit across the room to where a chair gleamed in a shaft of sunlight. I sat down on the floor and used the seat of the bright-lit chair as a table, where I read through the pamphlet in my calligraphy kit and learned the difference between italic and Gothic writing styles. I liked the Gothic-style alphabet better; it was more mysterious, full of extra strokes that made towers, chess pieces, and inscrutable knots out of the letters I’d been so friendly with for years.

I also learned fractions during that period. They were coming up in school anyway, and I was nervous about learning them, so I asked Dad to teach me. He explained what they represented and how to understand them, and then showed me how to add and subtract them. (He saved multiplying for my mom to explain from her hospital bed.)

The strongest memory I have of that time, though, is of a library book Mom read to my sister and me when we would visit her in the evenings: Dean Koontz’s Oddkins. I’m pretty sure my sister and I picked it because of the beautiful illustrations. The cover calls it “a fable for all ages,” but that’s really not true—I just found it again at the library, and rereading it, I have to say it has some wicked flaws that would never get by an astute adult reader.

II: …A Terrible Book Was Written…

The book opens with a kindly old magic toy-maker, who makes stuffed animals that magically live (called Oddkins) and magically find themselves delivered to children who desperately need special friends. As the children escape their awful circumstances, the life fades out of the toys. The kindly old magic toy-maker is very ill, and before he’s able to get his whole household in order, he drops dead. It’s up to a small group of Oddkins to trek across town and find the kindly new magic toy-maker. Unfortunately for them, the death of the kindly old magic toy-maker has released from their decades-long coma a group of evil toys made by his predecessor and crated up in the secret subcellar (against the day they might return to their tasks of pinching and burning and stabbing children, it seems, although that’s never very clear; probably a mercy, come to think of it). A lingering aura of goodness from the kindly old magic toy-maker prevents the evil toys from conquering the workshop, so they strike out after the Oddkins to kill them before they reach the kindly new magic toy-maker. If their candidate for evil magic toy-maker (a man just released from prison) gets to the workshop first, he’ll get to take over, and it will again be an evil magic toy shop as it apparently was up until the Nazis were defeated. (I wish I were kidding.) Then there’s a climactic battle in a department store after hours, the evil toys are destroyed, the candidate for evil magic toy-maker goes back to prison on rather general grounds (“We’ve had some unsolved crimes around here. You’ll do!”), and the kindly new magic toy-maker assumes her responsibilities and explains to the Oddkins what happens to them when their useful lives are over.

III: …Containing Some Terrible Religious Ideas…

I’ll get to that explanation, because it’s part of what’s badly wrong with this book: the theology. It’s seriously confused, y’all. The kindly old magic toy-maker has drummed into the Oddkins’ heads a bunch of teachings that are supposed to pass for normal Christianity. The Oddkins have a strong idea of Heaven as a place of reward, for example, and in fact, when a runaway dog threatens their expeditionary party, the toy dog in the story admonishes him that he might not be good enough for Heaven:

“Ashamed? I should think so. If you have any hope of redeeming yourself and one day bringing credit to your loving mother, I’d advise you to put your tail between your legs right now, slink home, lick the hand of your master, and do what you’re told from now on. In time there might even be a place in the pastures of Heaven for you, though right now I think you’re destined to spend eternity running on sore and bleeding feet through a much hotter place than Heaven.”

Nevermind the incongruity of rewarding a domesticated dog with an eternity of life in a pasture—she’s telling him he’ll go to Hell and be given wounds that will never heal because he’s run away from home and snapped at a little troop of living stuffed animals. His only other option is abject self-mortification and total obedience. Clearly this is a children’s story.

There’s a weird, lopsided focus on Hell and the Devil in this book, too. The head evil toy (a marionette with a sword-cane and no strings) and the candidate for evil magic toy-maker are guided by catoptric visitations and telepathic instructions from the Devil himself; when the head evil toy fails, a tide of sewer rats comes to carry him to the Devil’s side, where he will sit forever with strings and without the power of independent movement, as a sign of the eternal punishments in store for failed Satanic minions.

Mentions of God, though, are scarce. One comes when the Oddkins pass through a zoo on their way through the center of town. The stuffed elephant sees a real elephant, then there’s some “inspirational” chatter among the Oddkins about why people need magic like living stuffed animals when they have the inherent magic of God’s creation around them every day. Or something. I might have been napping.

The weirdest bit of theology in the book is the kindly new magic toy-maker’s explanation of what happens to an Oddkin when it dies: It’s reborn as a flesh-and-blood animal of the same kind. (The oldest Oddkin, who is a stuffed version of some indistinct, extinct beast, gets to choose his reincarnated body from among all the species on earth. So that’s some consolation for the loss of species diversity, at least: free choice in reincarnation.) When the live body dies, the Oddkin’s spirit is taken to Heaven, where it will stay by the side of God—because God loves toys. I swear that’s in the book.

It’s so strange: The main goal of the book is evidently to be a religious fable, which is fine. But the instructional elements grow fuzzier when the chosen plot requires some theological invention. As general character-building inspiration—the way children’s entertainment often strives to inculcate relatively uncontroversial values, such as kindness, curiosity, reading, etc.—it’s not all that bad, but the religious trappings are deeply odd, because there’s no branch of Christianity I know of that has room in its beliefs for living stuffed animals.

IV: …Compounded by Terrible Construction.

I think I’ve pinpointed the source of the troubling theology, and what’s interesting is that it seems to be a result of some questionable artistic choices—that is, Koontz’s (primarily structural) missteps lead him into a world where he can’t stick to any recognizable version of Christianity, but he doesn’t appear to recognize that fact. On the face of it, it should be a great allegory: The maker creates beings out of everyday stuff and animates them to lead lives of goodness and service to others, and they face difficulties in their pursuit of spiritual fulfillment. I can imagine something at least somewhat interesting being made out of that setup.

But a “properly” Christian story can’t have two Creators, so the toy-maker has to be a mere human (with powers that are never explained, probably because they can’t be). Suddenly the allegorical element is drained from the story, and it tries instead to be straightforwardlier didactic about living in proper reverence of God. It turns into a kind of religious realist story that is direly at odds with the fabulism inherent in a tale about walking, talking stuffed animals.

And there’s the problem. The cover calls Oddkins a fable, which explains the living toys, who can easily stand in for human beings in a non-literal story. But when that story also contains actual human beings, the toys can’t be metaphors anymore. What’s an author to do with them, then? Well, a clear-sighted author would choose to write either a religious fable about stuffed animals or a more literal book in which human characters explain to other characters how they should relate to God. But when an author can’t (or doesn’t) decide between the two, the result is a book that invents whole subfields of theology dealing with the relationship between God and animated toys, and tries to pass that off as standard doctrine, and then nobody wins. Especially not the reader.

V: The End

“All right, then; I’d like a green 4-gig Nano, please.”

Eric goggled at me. He’s a gadget guy, so he thought buying the smaller one because it was prettier was the height of insanity. The way I figure it, when he gets his own iPod, he can get whatever color he wants.

And thus I joined the constellation of folks walking around in their own little universes, signaling our fellowship in isolation (and ripeness for mugging, so I hear) by the bright white umbilicals running from our pockets to our ears. But entering the debate about how iPods have contributed to the disintegration of modern society is not my aim here. Instead, I want to talk about my playlists. When I first got iPatch, Sara told me about Smart Playlists and their great flexibility. What she didn’t mention is that they would become the single best way for me interact with my iPod. Here’s how it works:

I knew how I wanted to organize the music on my iPod: I wanted it to play music I love. Since iPatch has not (yet) achieved sentience, I had to tell it what that music was, which meant I had to rate my music. Cue my first Smart Playlist, “Sweeps Week.” (Because it’s all about ratings, you see.) I gave it the following two rules: “Genre is not Podcast” and “Rating is [null].” Then I limited it to the size of my iPod’s memory, with tracks selected randomly, and set it to live updating. When I went out to the bus stop, I would start the music shuffling, rating each track as I listened to it. I used a modified version of my Netflix ratings standard: 5 means I love it, 4 means I like it very much, 3 means I like it, 2 means I don’t like it (and will therefore delete it from my machine), and 1 means there’s been some kind of technical problem, and I need to rerecord the track.

I listened to “Sweeps Week” for a while, dutifully rating every track I owned, until it started to get a little tedious. I had to click through and decide on a rating for every track, and once I had identified a track I really loved, I knew it was going to be pulled off my iPod the next time I synced (sunc?). So I jumped the gun a little on my next playlist, which I named “Greatest Hits.” The rules on that one are “Rating is greater than [3 stars],” “Play count is less than 5,” and “Genre is not Holiday” (Dolly Parton’s Christmas carols kept popping up in August, and while I love her to death, I’m just not up for “Jingle Bells” when it’s 85 degrees out), and again I set it to live updating and random track selection. I added the rule about play count because I had more four- and five-star tracks than could fit on iPatch at one time, so I needed some kind of rotation mechanism. Once enough of the music gets to five plays, I’ll change the rule to ten. I listen to this one on shuffle also.

After not too long I realized that sticking with “Greatest Hits” meant I had a whole underclass of music I liked well enough to keep but wasn’t ever hearing—everything I’d given three stars. I made a third playlist called “Tier 2.” That one’s got “Rating is [3 stars],” “Play count is less than 3,” and “Genre is not Holiday.” (Again, random track selection and live updating; those two settings are standard for me.) “Greatest Hits” is set to take up about two-thirds of the space on my iPod, with “Tier 2” and a podcasts playlist (q.v. infra) filling up the rest of the space. My vague grasp of probabilities told me that music from a playlist that takes up one-sixth of iPatch’s memory would cycle through (rack up play counts) more slowly than music from a playlist that takes up two-thirds of the memory, so I lowered the play count requirement to keep “Tier 2” fresh, too.

My last two playlists are both about podcasts. I’ve got 20-some podcast subscriptions, and my first podcast playlist, “Podcasts,” is just for listening to them. The rules are simple: “Genre is Podcast” and “Play count is 0.” I see it as the podcast version of “Sweeps Week,” because as I listen to a podcast, if I like it enough, I keep it; if I don’t like it enough, I delete it. What I haven’t got around to yet is using my second podcast playlist, “Podcast All-Stars,” which is for podcasts I’ve kept and would like to listen to again sometime (“Genre is Podcast” and “Play count is greater than 0”). That’s basically the podcast version of “Greatest Hits.” Eventually, once I’ve worked down the total of unheard podcasts, I’ll start listening to some of them a second time.

A quick note about shuffling and random selection: With “Greatest Hits” choosing tracks randomly from the available pool, and shuffle choosing a random track order from that playlist, I get basically a radio station playing only music I love. It’s pretty fantastic. The best juxtaposition I can think of off the top of my head was when I went from Sarah McLachlan’s “Fear” to “Let Go,” by Frou Frou. It was great—similar sound worlds, related subject matter, and an honest-to-God emotional arc from the beginning of one song to the end of the other. That‘s why I let random-number generators pick for me.