Rumor, Innuendo, And The Nature Of Neighbors

“Garbage in, garbage out”, said Blaine’s mother when she saw a story he had written about the neighbors next door. “And I’m not referring to your writing.  I’m talking about the Kitters”, who everyone knew were ne’er-do-well degenerates. “Anything anyone writes about them will have to come out reeking and putrid.  What did we do to deserve neighbors like them?”

Like any family the Fandos had moved to the suburbs looking for more house for the money, a roof over the cars, and decent schools.  They got all that, and although the High Meadows was not exactly high-class and far from the gated communities of Hilton Head, it would do fine. 



As a matter of fact Marge Fando had no clue about the golf clubs, tennis courts, croquet lawns, and multi-million dollar homes of these exclusive enclaves.  In fact she had no idea about any of the wealthy residential areas of Great Falls, McLean, Short Hills, Rancho Mirage. She had grown up ‘normal’ as she was proud of saying, daughter of a mill worker and school teacher, who married at least slightly up to an accountant, and who had managed a small second-hand clothing store in the city.  She had done quite well for herself, worked hard for a living, and brought up two children who had turned out well.



Blaine, the writer, had always been a pill, a “rambunctious trouble-maker”, his grade school teacher had noted on his report card, which meant that he was always in high spirits, snooping in other people’s things, and leaving cryptic notes in them. “Is it true?” was one, that made sense only when paired with “Or false”, left a week later, and finally, “Does it really matter?”

“It shows an existential streak”, said his father; but the teacher wasn’t happy with the remark since one of the students – humorless Janie Simmons - had claimed harassment and under the new rules the alleged infraction had to be addressed.

In any case Blaine wrote stories about the neighbors, most of which he made up, but there was always a lot of truth because he noticed things and scribbled them down in his notebook creating a composite of the target family. “Extra vodka bottles in the trash…discarded Bible…why would anyone throw that away?….cat food tins but no cat…bloodied bandages….phone bills with repeated calls to Minneapolis…”.

Helen Flutie woke to the sound of dishes being washed.  She was surprised because there was always a pile of them in the sink and no one in the family seemed to care….

This bit of information Blaine had gotten by hoisting himself up on the trellis outside the Kitters’ kitchen window.  The sink was not only piled up with dirty dishes, but the counters were gross and disgusting, ants had swarmed around the bits of apple, lumps of mushy cereal, and smears of peanut butter and had formed a supply line into a crack behind the faucet, into the foundation, and out the back wall under his feet.

She noticed the empty, warm folds of the bed where her husband Frank slept.  “It must be him”, she thought. “But at 3am?”. She heard the sound of crockery smashing and a loud, long wail. “Why has He forsaken me?”

This part of the story was based on the discarded Bible and the frequent calls to the Mayo Clinic. Mr. Kitter had terminal cancer, finally confirmed by the extensive tests that had been run, and in a moment of angst and fear, he had thrown away his Bible, convinced that there was no God, for why would he allow suffering?

The pain was worse, deep down in his gut, and Frank Kitter saw the pile of dirty dishes as a symbol of pain and suffering – spiritual detritus in the form of crockery – and he knew that he had to destroy them.  He picked up each piece – a chipped cup, a stained saucer, and a greasy serving platter – smirked, and sent it flying into the far wall, smashing the porcelain owls his wife had neatly arranged as tacky sentinels of the feeding trough.

Ever since Blaine’s mother read her son’s story, she wondered if any of it could be true. Frank Kitter looked fine, even dapper, as he left the house every morning (Marge peered through the curtains so she wouldn’t be seen, and ducked back if he looked her way).  He always wore a clean, starched white shirt, tailored suit, and new Florsheims and gave no sign of the godless anxiety that her son had written about.

Her Kitter family composite was based on rumor and innuendo.  Whereas her son was a little Peeping Tom, she could never bring herself to invade people’s privacy; but she could keep her eyes and ears open. There were whispers at church that Frank Kitter was gay.  It was one thing to dress snappily for work, but those outfits he wore on Saturday afternoon! They were as swishy as anything Liberace ever wore, and if you walked past the driveway after he had left, you could still smell the slightly feminine scent of his cologne. Others dismissed that rumor and said that he indeed have a lover but a female one; and that despite his good and conservative taste in professional attire, he simply was out of touch with casual wear and dressed like a fag simply because he didn’t know any better.

The rumor was that because of her husband’s trysts and continual infidelities, his wife had become an alcoholic, and the regular appointments every Thursday at 5pm could only be AA.  She needed those meetings to keep her on the wagon, and so like clockwork she headed out in her Subaru, turning left towards Farmington where the AA’s Hartford County Chapter met.



It was impossible to keep track of the many conflicting stories about the Kitter children.  One was a slut, the other pious and ready to enter the Convent of Jesus and Mary, the third a dope dealer who peddled meth to the Polacks on Broad Street.

To an outsider, the Kitter family displayed none of the behavior that would suggest such dysfunction.  What the natives saw as surreptitious and suspicious (Bobby Kitter was seen on a street corner on Broad Street one winter evening, huddled with another boy) could easily have been explained otherwise.  It was a Saturday afternoon, dark and cold, but the boys could have been going to confession at St. Mary’s the biggest Catholic church in New Brighton with a reputation, thanks to its young priests, of being more forgiving and understanding. 



Jennifer was no slut, only naturally sensual as some young women are. Although not particularly pretty in an Elle way, she had a natural sexual allure that was obvious to men and women alike.  The kitchen may not have looked so distressed all the time, but only after a messy sleepover or teenage party.  The vodka bottles the result of housecleaning, and the regular left turns to Farmington only for bridge dates

“Rumor and innuendo are nothing more than textual exegesis”, wrote a Post-modern, deconstructionist professor at Duke. “A natural human instinct to reorder the world according to personal observation.  There is no such thing as truth in such a world, but only composite realities. The best way to understand the behavior of others is to build the mosaic with as many fragments as possible.”

It is hard to buy this academic double-speak.  People simply like to feel superior, and the easiest way to do so is to make things up.  An abstemious family can snicker at the vodka bottles in the trash.  A reserved and demure family sees sexual profligacy over the hedges and everywhere. Anyone straggling in to Mass just before the Consecration must have just crawled out of an illicit bed. Strange hours are signs of dereliction and social indifference.

One New Brighton neighbor insisted that the Lebanese couple across the street had poisoned their dog; and once that rumor got started, no one on the block could look at either of them without thinking of poor Belinda who one morning coughed up green bile, lay down on her bed and expired. 
Explosive yells and yelps were heard in the summer coming out of the upstairs windows of a house four doors down, and the neighbors were sure that it was because of domestic violence. 

After the family left and the truth came out – the man had suffered from both Tourette’s Syndrome and sleep apnea; and the combination of the two was the cause of the commotion.  The sleep apnea had woken him up with a start and the Tourette’s kicked in.  His loud barking and shouting of violent obscenities was no more than an expression of his disease.  If he and his wife had preferred air conditioning and kept the windows closed, no one would have heard anything and the Smythes would have been considered model citizens and neighbors.



One can only imagine what neighbors think of each other.  Lord knows Blaine Fando would have had plenty to write about although the family across the street was a model of rectitude and proper socialization.

 Of course every family thinks this way, but the curiosity and inventiveness of neighbors is limitless.  Each family on our block has a story, each invented, all subjective creations, all twisted composites based on completely innocent events like bottles in the trash.  An outsider listening to them might well think that a circus freak show had come to town and settled in Fairmount University Park.

Groups, God, And The Need To Belong

The number of atheists in America is growing quickly, and have increased almost 100 percent in less than ten years.  One would think that the decision to reject the existence of God would be a highly personal one reached after years of reflection and investigation much like Tolstoy did throughout his life. After years of looking for answers in science, philosophy, and logic with no satisfaction; and years more studying religion and its conclusions about God, he was still uncertain and even more troubled than when he began. Reason and rationality were now powerful enough tools to deal with the question of divinity; and faith alone was to supine and emotional.

One day after many decades of anxious contemplation, he woke up one morning and realized that tens of millions of human beings alive believed in God; and that tens of billions before him had also.  How could they be wrong, Tolstoy asked himself; and began a life of faith expressed in his personal autobiography A Confession.

The point is, the search for God – or conversely the dismissal of God – is a matter of individual search.  In Tolstoy’s case he understood that he was determinedly rational, almost obstinately so; and he understood that his own spiritual quest would necessarily be limited within the disciplined reasoning of Augustine, Aquinas, and others.  He was not only indifferent to established religion, but hostile to it; and became a political nihilist. In his younger years he was committed to social change which would come about through collective, social action, not prayer or divine intercession.  Later on he became disaffected with politics but not reason, and until his epiphany felt that only through rational exegesis could he possibly come to any spiritual conclusions.

Atheism today is by no means an individual exercise.  There are atheist conferences, clubs, online chat rooms, regular publications, and a variety of associations.  Some groups like the New Atheists, the late Christopher Hitchens being perhaps the most outspoken, claim that not only is belief in religion ignorant and misplaced, it is immoral.  So much war, killing, and barbarity has occurred in the name of religion, that it is not enough to disbelieve.  One must act militantly to destroy religion.

In other words, atheism has become a group practice like any other religion or social cause.  Atheism shares as much with environmentalism than it does with organized religion.

In the case of atheism, however, one can understand the need to form, and participate in groups. In a religious society with a long religious tradition, it is hard to reject God.  A godless world can be a very cold and comfortless indeed.

A rejection of God necessarily implies a belief in meaningless and randomness.  Nothing but natural forces set the world spinning, and individual actions are no more than the repercussions, collisions, and reactions of those that preceded them.  Not only is there no God to pray to in times of trouble and pain; but there is nowhere to turn in a world where everything is relative. It is no wonder, then, that atheists more than any other ‘religious’ group feel the need to gather together.

Environmentalism like atheism has grown significantly in the past decade.  More and more American have become committed to slowing or stopping global warming; reversing air and water pollution, and stopping what they consider the commercial rape of the natural world.  Like atheism, environmentalism is a group activity; but environmentalists do not group together only to increase political influence like any other lobby group.  They do so to be a member of a movement which has higher, even spiritual ends.  Saving the planet is as close to religious evangelism and the saving of souls as anything.  Environmentalists are passionate, even ecstatic about their mission; and belonging to a like-minded group of believers is like participating in a Holy War or a Crusade.

Group behavior is not confined to social causes. We all travel in packs, self-identify and associate almost unwittingly. Adolescents breaking away from parents are no different from atheists who break away from God.  They need comfort and support in a world they find suddenly rudderless. So they dress alike, talk alike, and share the same likes and dislikes.

At a 9th hole lunch restaurant at a popular golf resort in Georgia I noticed that each table of golfers was as uniform as a pack of 10th graders. There were good ‘ol boys from Alabama, all girth and rough bonhomie at one table; Connecticut doctors at another; Low Country patrician women; at a third; and a public course tour group from Minnesota at a long table in the middle of the room.  Golf was incidental. Group affiliation and display was why they were there.

Online petitions circulating on Facebook make it easy to belong to cybernetic groups. By signing petitions against global warming, the One Percent, crony capitalism, income inequality, wealth and privilege, the signer not only supports a cause but tells thousands of ‘friends’ and thousands more of their friends who he is and what he stands for.  Once again, it is less about cause than image, affiliation, and belief.

In The Death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy explores the nature of death and dying; but he also discusses belonging and aloneness. We may group together in life, he says, but we die alone. How can this incongruity be resolved? We are compelled by one and doomed to the other.

Ivan Ilyich saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius — man in the abstract — was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.

Those fortunate enough to understand and appreciate Tolstoy’s incongruity early on can begin to live a more reflective life while there is still time.  “Too soon old, too late schmart”, goes the Yiddish expression, and since aloneness is the essential characteristic of dying, then it is high time to prepare for it.  Most people imagine dying surrounded by family and friends – a kind of social send-off – but in reality their last thoughts are about anything but the predictable ordinariness of life. Facing eternity, one is not likely to think about one’s wife.

Hinduism divides life into four phases – Brahmacharya (student), Grihastha (householder), Vanaprastha (retired) and Sannyasa (renunciation). Man is social, but then becomes solitary, meditative, and spiritual.  Every Hindu understands the nature and purpose of every phase, the first three of which are only preparations for the fourth. Life is illusion (maya) Hindus believe, and the regimentation of one’s mundane life serves the purpose of putting the evanescent nature of being into perspective.  In other words, Hindus have structured a life which is necessarily social around the ultimate purpose of lie which is spiritual.

Most of us are afraid to face death because we have invested so much in social life and its groupings. We have preferred to identify ourselves as a reflection of others rather than as individuals; and therefore are frightened by the thought of facing death and eternal extinction alone.  Ivan Ilyich finally figured it all out, almost too late; but at least he had his epiphany.  Most of us never do.

Atheism, Belief, And Morality

Atheism has become a religion.  Its followers are as passionate about denying the existence of God as Christians, Muslims, and Jews are about affirming it.  Atheism has an anti-theology, a creed, and a moral code. Atheists define themselves by their denial of God and are comforted by belonging to a community of the like-minded. There are atheist conferences, atheist clubs, and online educational and support groups. Atheists are as loyal to doctrine as the most conservative Catholics; as anxious to evangelize as Christians and Muslims; and as committed to preserving the faith as any militant believer.

To an agnostic or one who would check ‘Indifferent’ if such a box existed on the national census form, this religious passion, proselytizing, and doctrinal belief is surprising. Disavowal of God should be a very individual matter, one concluded with a serious consideration of both logical argument and faith.  Tolstoy wrote about his lifelong search for God in A Confession.  For years he was a nihilist who believed that man existed in a meaningless, random universe; but he was unhappy with that conclusion. What if he were wrong? At the end of one’s life there would be no prize for resting on skeptical laurels. One should have either a conviction that the end of life was merely a beginning; or that life was simply extinguished, a secular passage and an exchange of matter.

He studied logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, epistemology, and science; but found no answers either to the meaning of life or the existence of God.  He studied religion, but found faith too illogical, too idealistic and presumptive.  His rationality and intellect would not permit a serious consideration of such whimsical belief.  At the same time he studied Christian rationalists like Augustine and Aquinas. He was much closer to their disciplined and ordered search for meaning and their exegesis of problems of good and evil; but in the end rejected their final arguments for belief based on faith.

In the end as he describes in A Confession, he backs into faith.  Tired, weary, and frustrated because his years of investigation have come to naught, he suddenly realizes that hundreds of millions of people alive believe in God; and tens of billions before them have believed in him.  They must know something, Tolstoy reasons.  He gives a sigh of relief and believes.

Dostoevsky was a believer but a skeptic.  His Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov challenges the returned Christ and accuses him of selling out the human race. By responding as you did to the Devil in the desert, the Grand Inquisitor says, you offered Man the promise of eternal life but denied him what he wanted – a relief from pain, suffering, hunger, and misery.  Free will was only a ruse, for Man only wants miracles, mystery, and authority.

The Grand Inquisitor confronts Christ with his most telling accusation – not only do you permit suffering, but you permit the suffering of children.  I can understand, the Grand Inquisitor goes on, that you might have set suffering as a test for men to prove their faith and fidelity; but why have you consigned little children who have not yet reached the age of reason to such misery?  The Grand Inquisitor goes on with tales of parental brutality, unconscionable torture, and the horrible mutilation and murder of their own children.  How can you permit this? he asks.

In other words skeptics and agnostics have struggled to answer the classic philosophical conundrums of life and either – as both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy did – to return to religious faith; or to deny the existence of God and be done with it.

Collective atheism, or atheism as a religion, seems illogical and unnecessary unless one looks at it as community, security, and conclusive answers to insoluble problems.  In other words to provide a place where doubts about the existence of God and the meaning of life are put to rest.

Michael Ruse, writing in the New York Times (3.24.15) suggests that atheists not only deny the existence of God, but contend that belief is immoral.

When asked in Ireland a few years ago about the abuse of children by priests, Richard Dawkins — who, along with Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens, is among the best known of the New Atheists — responded that he was more concerned about bringing a child up Catholic in the first place. You don’t say something like that seriously — and Dawkins is always serious — without a deep sense that something is dreadfully morally wrong. The whole system is rotten, this stance shouts, and corrupting to the core.

Religion has been the cause of inhumanity, waste, and suffering these militant New Atheists say.  Belief in God and in the religions such faith inspires and creates is immoral because of the immorality of their actions.

It is hard to disagree that many have been killed in the name of religion – especially today – and that religious zeal has inflicted pain and suffering.  There is no excuse for the slave labor of Irish Catholic orphanages where unmarried girls were consigned to forced labor and then robbed of their children who were given to more worthy and wealthy childless patrons.  There is even less excuse for the recently discovered and widespread sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests in Europe and especially America. It is one thing to disregard the Church’s teaching on abstinence, another to sexually abuse innocent children who have been brought up with a complete faith in the Church and its representatives.

The moral argument, however, is specious. While crusades and jihads have killed many, so did Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin all of whom acted out of secular motives. It is not religion which creates, incites, and foments violence.  It is human nature, human beings, and human society.

The harshest criticism is reserved for both believers and non-believers who come to their conclusions illogically. Tolstoy was turned away from faith because he saw too much of the blind, unthinking version.  Rationalists are dismissive of atheists who similarly look at religion, see its worst expressions and conclude that God cannot possibly exist. Ruse goes on:

This is a pretty remarkable state of affairs that we have here — planets, suns, organisms, humans and so forth. Why is there any of it? Why is there something rather than nothing? This question is not about the Big Bang or if anything went before. It is about the very fact of existence. One doesn’t expect something like this, with its astounding interdependency and innumerable complex parts functioning in service of the whole, to just happen.

The existence of consciousness, or sentience, can be seen in the same way. Brain science has thrown a lot of light on the way we think, but the very fact of thinking is a puzzle. And the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of progress forward. We know a lot about how conscious states are correlated with brain states, but this tells us nothing about how consciousness as we experience it could be a brain state.

Can such a wonderful universe be entirely without point?

In other words, one should respect Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the many moral philosophers who have questioned the existence of God because they have acknowledged that the question of belief is not a simple one.  The complexity of the universe alone requires consideration.