The Afterlife & the Movie Casablanca and Other Speculations

By William R. Schweis

If we take our thoughts and memories into the afterlife and find it filled with promised bliss, What do we do with our impatience? Even if we do find long-gone loved ones and old friends waiting with warm greetings, How much reminiscing can one do? One way or another God is going to have to explain His indiscretions or His indecision. I feel quite strongly that we are entitled to an explanation! Unless we enter the afterlife with a slate thats been wiped clean. But if thats the case, how will we know happiness or bliss or anything else for that matter and how are we supposed to make an accounting? I mean judgment seems to be a big part of this afterlife business! Unless, of course, reincarnation is true! Maybe we all come back as a new person or an animal or something. The worse you were in life, the lower form of life you return as. At least until you redeem yourself! But how does an animal or an insect redeem itself? This is getting us nowhere, because I really dont care whether or not an insect can redeem itself or even if its possible for humans! I understand the social context of the concept, but as for God, Im amenable to a variety of philosophical intrusions. Im like Louis in the movie Casablanca when he tells Major Strasser, Personally Ill take whatever comes! Currently the prevailing winds are from Vichy! Some may consider him opportunistic or at least unprincipled. But he did redeem himself at the end of the film by throwing the bottle of Vichy water into the waste can and going with Rick to join a Free-French garrison. His redemption had a lot to do with the fact that he was on our side. The right side! But then, everybody thinks theyre on the right side! If Major Strasser had managed to kill Rick, would Louis claim he was trying to stop Rick from helping Ilsa and Victor Laszlo to escape? It would have been magnificently pragmatic. But we (the audience) would have booed and hissed at his cowardly behavior! After all, there is such a thing as right and wrong, isnt there?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503572256

William R. Schweis

The author was born in Brooklyn in 1940 and worked a variety of occupations: oil storage tank cleaner, shipfitter, bartender, waiter, office manager, data processor, systems analyst, handyman, and building superintendent.

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Copyright © 2015 by William R. Schweis.

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Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved [Biblica].

Rev. date: 05/19/2015

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CONTENTS

The Afterlife And The Movie Casablanca

What Is Truth?

Gut Reactions

Killing Old Myths And Creating New Ones

Isolation

The Cycle Of Arrogance

Everything Is Temporary

Words From Beyond

One Hundred Years Of Despair

The Occasional Necessary Fanatic

Something Just Beyond

Managing Our Greed

March 3, 2009

Exit Life

Quantifying Hate

A Preference For Comfort

Manipulating Atrocities

The Old Indian

Atheism Is Hard Work

The Nomination Of Sonia Sotomayor

Prodded By Loren Eiseley

An Ability

Food For Thought

The Rubble Of Humanity

Self

Leveling The Playing Field

Shouting At Tomorrow

The Burden Of Favoritism

Sources Of Confusion

World Conquest

In Defense Of God

Time Enough

The Charm Of Distance

God Never Gets Bored

Image Is Everything

Infringement

Losing Optimism

Scattered Thoughts With No Place To Go

THE AFTERLIFE AND THE MOVIE CASABLANCA

If we take our thoughts and memories into the afterlife and find it filled with promised bliss, what do we do with our impatience? Even if we do find long gone loved ones and old friends waiting with warm greetings, how much reminiscing can one do? One way or another, God is going to have to explain His indiscretions … or His indecision. I feel quite strongly that we are entitled to an explanation unless we enter the afterlife with a slate that’s been wiped clean. But if that’s the case, how will we know happiness or bliss or anything else for that matter … and how are we supposed to make an accounting? I mean, judgment seems to be a big part of this afterlife business unless, of course, reincarnation is true. Maybe we all come back as a new person or an animal or something; the worse you were in life, the lower form of life you return as, at least until you redeem yourself. But how does an animal or an insect redeem itself? This is getting us nowhere because I really don’t care whether or not an insect can redeem itself or even if it’s possible for humans. I understand the social context of the concept, but as for God, I’m amenable to a variety of philosophical intrusions. I’m like Louis in the movie Casablanca when he tells Major Strasser, Personally I’ll take whatever comes! Currently, the prevailing winds are from Vichy! Some may consider him opportunistic or at least unprincipled. But he did redeem himself at the end of the film by throwing the bottle of Vichy water into the waste can and going with Rick to join a Free French garrison. His redemption had a lot to do with the fact that he was on our side, the right side! But then everybody thinks they’re on the right side. If Major Strasser had managed to kill Rick, would Louis claim he was trying to stop Rick from helping Ilsa and Victor Laszlo to escape? It would have been magnificently pragmatic. But we (the audience) would have booed and hissed at his cowardly behavior. After all, there is such a thing as right and wrong, isn’t there?

Of course, God’s opinion of right and wrong might differ from yours or mine. We may only have thought we were on the right side. What do we say when God throws that old adage back in our faces about the road to hell and all that? I’m a strong believer in human destiny. I have never been able to shake the feeling that we (humanity) are going someplace. We could accomplish so much if only we would spend a little more time expounding on our commonality instead of screaming our differences at every opportunity. Most of the arguments seem to be about how to gain entry to one of the better neighborhoods of the aforementioned afterlife. I don’t care what your personal beliefs are; you know how impatient you are. You know that if you are forced to an eternity with no recourse but to endure endless redundancies, you will insist on speaking to whoever is in authority. Denied that, you, along with everyone else, will begin searching for exit doors … anything to escape the unbearable ennui.

That is why I so admire the uncommitted, self-serving pragmatism of Capt. Louis Renault, a true survivor and a vital component to any group seeking to form a civilized society. By his refusal to succumb to a single philosophy, he becomes, of necessity, an observer, a student, and, more importantly, a valued audience for those seeking or attaining power. It is the uncommitted who stabilize and help right the ship of state whenever political leadership stumbles into one of the endless debacles they are wont to immerse themselves. Of course, Captain Renault did secure exit visas for pretty young girls in return for sexual favors, but that only makes him a scoundrel or a bit of a rogue. But if he had been a woman, then he … I mean, she would have been a cheap slut or a dirty gold-digging whore. This perception was created by and perpetuated by men. It is important for men to flaunt their authority. What better way to do it than to subjugate their women, own them, and limit them. Of course, mothers are special. After all, she gave birth to me; she must have been special. So we endow the gender with purity in honor of Mom.

Speaking of women, what about Ilsa? Beautiful, dedicated, but sadly in love with someone other than her husband. That’s a no-no. In her defense, it should be said that when she fell in love with Rick, she had been told and believed her husband was dead. She found out he was alive on the day she was to go away with Rick. It was too late; the old love/chemistry thing was alive and kicking. But being a dedicated, dutiful wife, she returned to her husband, leaving a shattered Rick waiting in the rain at the station. This whole love and chemistry thing is something else God is going to have to explain. Is it just lust? Maybe it’s our impatience. That I can understand. Or at least I can rationalize human impatience being the catalyst of attraction. We want what we want, and we want it now.

Rick, who had been a patriotic, decent, honest man, was transformed by his disappointment into a cynical, hardened saloonkeeper, tolerant and amused by the foibles of his patrons, finding no objection to either criminals or crooks, but not for second-rate ones as he tells the nefarious Ugarte. Rick too redeems himself—several times in fact—first, by arranging for the newlyweds to win the money for their exit visas; second, by hiding Victor Laszlo when he is pursued by the police; and finally with his speech to Ilsa about the problems of three people not amounting to a hill of beans when compared to all the problems in the world.

And what of Victor Laszlo, a hero who suffered torture at the hands of the gestapo, the inspirational leader of the underground? La Marseillaise has never been presented more fervently than when Victor had a band play it at Rick’s Café to drown out the Nazi soldiers singing their songs.

Flash forward to a time when all these characters have passed on. They are in the afterlife. Is Ilsa still in love with Rick? Can she leave Victor? Do they have divorce lawyers in the afterlife? What about Major Strasser? What if he told the gatekeeper he was just following orders and shouldn’t be judged too harshly and was permitted entry? What if even Ugarte was there? Would he be the same scheming weasel? Would Major Strasser still be as arrogant? Life may be hard, but it’s beginning to look like the afterlife may be no picnic either. If our memories don’t accompany us to the afterlife, what is the purpose of experience? Is patriotism a virtue only when exhibited by someone on our side? What of our failures? Are the souls who are too burdened by their disappointments doomed to flit about as poltergeist seeking to disrupt for the sake of disruption? These questions may seem frivolous, but to the characters in the movie, they could be highly relevant. The Bard of Avon tells us that all the world’s a stage. If we take the time to extrapolate to our own lives, we have all known an Ugarte, we have all suffered the arrogance of a Major Strasser, and surely, we have all shared the pangs of the love of Rick and Ilsa. Some of us, probably too many, see themselves as the heroic Victor Laszlo, fighting the evils of some corrupt regime.

As for me, I’ll stick with Louis. Personally, I’ll take whatever comes, and when I stand before the gatekeeper and he asks why I deserve entry, I’ll tell him I want to see how the movie turns out. If I get turned away, I’ll try not to be too disappointed, although my impatience and curiosity may impel me to sneak in the back way; otherwise, I might end up as one of those many disruptions people are always complaining about. Either that or who knows? Just be careful next time you swat a fly or stomp a cockroach. It may be me seeking some kind of redemption.

WHAT IS TRUTH?

In the Gospel of John, Pilate asks Jesus, What is truth? And then Pilate leaves the room without waiting for an answer, probably because, living in the Rome of Tiberius and Sejanus, Pilate already had a pretty good idea about the flexibility of the concept of truth. Even before Einstein, he probably realized that truth is a matter of perspective. Lincoln’s famous quote, saying, You can fool some of the people all the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time, and P. T. Barnum’s quote, saying, There’s a sucker born every minute, are two sides of the same coin. Deception and misdirection are tools that we human beings use quite often with varying degrees of success. But there is another word that describes our manipulations of truth: distortion. It’s used to both deceive and misdirect, and it seems (at least to me) to be used, thanks to technology, with ever-increasing frequency.

I was reading an essay written in the early 1950s by the French philosopher/economist Bertrand de Jouvenel. The essay was titled The Treatment of Capitalism by Continental Intellectuals. In a part of the essay, he speaks of how historians did their obvious duty in pointing out the miserable social conditions brought about by the Industrial Revolution, But then he goes on to say that the historians were exceptionally incautious in their interpretation of the facts. First, they seem to have taken for granted that a sharp increase in the extent of social awareness of and indignation about misery is a true index of increased misery; they seem to have given little thought to the possibility that such an increase might also be a function of new facilities of expression.

That was sixty years ago. Technology has given birth to the social media, Myspace, Facebook, and, of course, Twitter. We can express ourselves across the continent at speeds Monsieur Bertrand could not have imagined. Distortion is rampant, and it is not out of malice that we distort; we simply can’t help ourselves. In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume wrote in a footnote, It is wisely ordained by nature that private connections should prevail over universal views and considerations. Our predilections or predispositions, whether formed by culture, religion, ideology, or education, maneuver our interpretive skills. In The Idea of Culture (2000), Terry Eagleton uses Shakespeare’s King Lear to demonstrate another aspect. Our most obvious surplus over sheer bodily existence is language, and the play opens with a gross inflation of the stuff. Goneril and Regan, Lear’s deceitful daughters, strive to outdo each other in lying rhetoric, betraying by an excess of language a love which is all too little. This verbal spendthriftness then forces their sister Cordelia into a perilous paucity of words, while Lear’s own overwhelming vanity can be chastened only by thrusting him out into a pitiless nature.

We are all endowed with vanity to some degree, and that degree, combined with the above-mentioned predilections, can impel our interpretations to totally false readings, especially of the written word. Calvin O. Schrag wrote in Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, Speaking has to do with the multiple forms of verbal communication but also includes the deployment of gestural meaning and articulations through bodily motility. Without the gestures and body language to assist us in interpretation, it’s easy to see how all this communication via the social media often leads to confusion, especially when messages are limited to 140 characters. Abstraction has always been part of our nature. We are driven to put things in a nutshell as it were. Art, science, philosophy, or whatever it is we are trying to communicate, we want to do so in the simplest terms possible. It may just be our innate impatience or, at the risk of delving into metaphysics, perhaps human evolution that compels us toward a form of rapid communication in order to better equip us for our inevitable migration to other worlds. Too sci-fi? Perhaps, but technological advances are tweaking that innate impatience, and it gives me pause to wonder.

I once wrote (about twenty years ago) that if my mother were brought back to life, there would be many words in our common lexicon that she wouldn’t understand; most of the words would be acronyms. I was trying to illustrate how quickly language evolves. Today, while texting, young people are creating new acronyms and combining them with various symbols, and some are even using them verbally. The demands of technology are kicking the evolutionary processes of verbal communication into high gear. Convenience has a powerful influence on human behavior, and if the inclusion of written or verbal forms of symbols increases the speed and accuracy of human communication, it will be quickly adopted. But what about distortion? Will the inclusion of symbols make distortion more difficult? I just indulged in a short burst of laughter, as my mind suddenly visualized the great Victor Borge doing his comical routine about verbal annunciation of punctuation marks. Could we apply such sounds to symbols? In Africa, certain tribes, like the Bushmen, use a series of verbal clicks along with words while communicating. It may seem strange or even humorous to cluck our tongues or emit a kind of raspberry in the middle of a sentence, but if it helps clarify what we are trying to express, why not?

Of course, all this may help speed up communication and even increase the accuracy of our statements, but it still cannot assure truth. Lies and distortions are an integral part of our natures. We exaggerate accomplishments we favor, and we exaggerate the consequences of anything we oppose, and we do both with sincerity, even when we are aware of our bloated boasting or the falsehood of our dire warnings. Another aspect that has a powerful effect on individual communication is passion. Among the multitude of human experiences, there are inevitably some that will stir our passions. The experience—be it religious, ideological, a social cause, a scientific endeavor, or one of the many art forms—affects us in various degrees, and occasionally, that degree, like Lear’s vanity, can be overwhelming. Passion overwhelmed will distort communication to its satisfaction. Thus, the dilemma … the human paradox. We may all ask, like Pilate, What is truth? And like Pilate, we will all leave the room without waiting for an answer. Our passions tell us It’s not here! But we have also endowed ourselves with an idealism that propels us into another room and then another, hoping to find it. The last room we look in probably has no exits, so even if we do find the truth, we’re not telling.

GUT REACTIONS

Today is Monday, July 15, 2013, and as you can see from the title, I’m going to talk about gut reactions. We all have them. They’re probably a cognitive adaptation of the fight or flight instinct. I’m not a neuroscientist or psychiatrist, but it seems to me that gut reactions are usually culturally influenced. Now I should state up front that I’m not a twit … or is it a tweet? Anyway, I’ve never tweeted. I probably will submit someday, as I have always submitted to the seductions that modern technology has tantalized me with. But I’m seventy-three now and growing weary and a little bit annoyed. I expected more, not so much from myself as from people in general. I had presumed that the rapidly expanding multicultural nature of American society would create an amalgam that was more cohesive in their general ideologies, especially aided by modern social media, the Internet, cell phones, tweets, etc., but instead, the divisions or disagreements carry the burden of technological exaggeration, not to mention downright lies and emotional outbursts via tweets that the entire nation must endure every time a political or social issue is brought to the fore. I had no idea that such vitriol could be squeezed into 140 characters. If the tweets announced on news shows regarding the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman are any indication we’re in for some ridiculous ranting every time any type of divisive issue comes into question, many of these so-called divisive issues are fictional creations, designed to distract. They usually work quite well. Let’s face it. We’re easily duped. The reason we are easily duped is centered in the title of this essay. We all have gut reactions.

The powers that be. I guess if you’re a religious person, that phrase would make you think of God, but most of us know that it means whoever is controlling the distribution of information. Some will, of course, immediately think of the government when they hear the phrase, and in most cases, they would be correct. But in our case (America), I think we’re a bit more complex. We always have been. Our gut reactions have always been more diverse than other countries. Thanks to modern technology, we can shout our gut reactions across the continent. If we happen to be a celebrity or a notable person, we can infect any loyal followers with our vitriolic reactions or unexamined opinions, which may, on the acquisition of additional information, change our opinion to one totally opposite our gut reaction. But the unexamined thoughts have spread to loyal followers who have already begun enhancing and seasoning and redistributing the opinion. Let’s face it. It is difficult to admit a mistake under the best of circumstances; how do you explain in 140 characters that you overreacted or acted on bad information? Some will try. Some will also try to brush it off quickly with a line like Oops! My bad. Sorry. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see some actually dig in their heels in support of their