Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 9. You Little Demon

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth, The Book of Ruth; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; Ursa Minor (all reviewed earlier); The Gentleman (not reviewed in my blogs); and You Little Demon (reviewed here).

It is a little known fact that, once every thousand years, a demon (living in Hell) gets a chance to visit the Earth. He has to return unless he can convince a human being to switch places with him. Then the demon gets to live on the good green Earth. The down side is that he becomes mortal. In this story, a demon almost gets to stay on the Earth, even though living in the country with a frumpy old wife, just before he dies of a heart attack.

There is a long literature of mortals visiting Hell, from Dante all the way to the recent bestseller Katabasis by R. F. Kuang. It is refreshing to see the plot go the other way.

Like Rice’s other books, this one gets me to ask questions that I did not know I wanted to ask. And it this story is very short, written with irrepressible humor.

Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions, with Humor, part three.

Now, in the final sections of the novel Glass Cathedral about which I have written previously, Misty and Emilio have to figure out how to tell the world that God appeared in the sky. They decide to build a glass cathedral out in the desert, near the site of The Appearance of God, and invite people to come and find out about what happened. This undertaking is more humorously difficult than either of them had guessed it would be. Misty and Emilio ended up with lots of money and had to figure out what to do with it. They planned a religiously-themed restaurant that served Jesus Pizza with lamb, tomato sauce, and Ezekiel 4:9 crust. They also planned to make their glass cathedral a giant tropical greenhouse. Both Emilio and Misty—now pushed far outside her comfort zone of shyness—went on speaking tours.

Dan went out into the desert to visit Misty. They meet in the desert springtime and see the flowers that grow rapidly in the rain then die a few weeks later. Misty realizes that Dan is in fact doing what Jesus said to do, but what few Christians do: to consider the lilies of the field. Dan realized that just one of the little wildflowers was more beautiful than all the works of man. Job had asked why God put beautiful flowers out in the desert where nobody can see them. Both Dan and Misty realize that this is a very good question.

But mainly they organized a gigantic opening ceremony with hundreds of high school bands and choirs. They supposed they had thought of everything, but with a hundred bands (several hundred tubas) playing the fundamental note of the resonant frequency of the building, the cathedral shakes from its foundations and blows away in a storm like a jellyfish in the surf. In the ensuing chaos, Misty gets trampled and disabled.

Once again, it’s not supposed to happen like this. But Emilio remains ever bubbly in his faith. No more giant cathedrals. He runs a homeless shelter in L.A. along with his nearly unresponsive wife Misty. When all the main characters unite at the end, including Margaret who has married Dan, they all agree that what God wants us to do is just to help make the world a better place.

You all knew this, of course, in principle. But in this delightful novel, you can watch diverse characters discovering this simple truth for themselves.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part five. The Political Cynic.

I grew up hearing about the lofty ideals of democracy, as enshrined in the American Constitution. I grew up thinking that politicians were actually statesmen who really wanted to do the right thing for their fellow citizens, who entrusted them with leadership. As incredible as it may sound, I actually believed this when I was a kid. It was not hard to feel this way. I first became aware of the world during the administration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I remember where I was when the news of his assassination was broadcast. I was a first-grader, who heard it from the sixth-graders in my elementary school. I ran home for lunch and my mom confirmed the news. In upcoming years, I listened to recordings of Kennedy’s speeches, and they were very stirring. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That’s the most famous line. But even better is this one: “Here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own.” His assassination made me revere political leaders even more, since the official story (which nobody really believes anymore) was that the assassination was entirely conceived by a deranged man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

And I still revere Kennedy, even though revelations have come out since his death about some bad things he did, such as cheating on his wife. Even during the Vietnam War, I trusted our politicians to be telling the truth that North Vietnamese communism really was a threat to world peace and that we had to stop it, sort of, advance and retreat, advance and retreat, in which corporations that supplied the military got very rich over a war that seemed to never end and which was supported by an endless supply of federal dollars and conscripted lives.

Then came Watergate. I had been enthusiastic about Nixon, and I felt betrayed. I felt good about Gerald Ford, who took his place (the only president to not have been elected), because he projected an image of being clean. He said, “The national nightmare is over.” In Japan, which I visited about the time Ford took office, they referred to Gerald Ford as “Mr. Clean,” because Ford did resemble a little bit the white white white janitor on the cleaning supply boxes and bottles.

The presidency of Jimmy Carter was almost boring because of its lack of scandal. To this day, Carter remains about the only clean politician of which most of us can think. Then came Ronald Reagan, who inspired everyone with his words, but then did whatever the hell he wanted to, whether it was legal or not. He sold armaments to Iran, whom he had labeled an enemy of freedom, in order to get money to supply to “Contra” terrorists in Nicaragua so that they could kill civilians. Reagan once said, “I don’t like having to consult a committee of 545 every time I want to do something.” This committee, of course, was Congress, and he was required to obey them by this little tiny document that you may have heard of, the Constitution.

The rest of the story you probably know. I have filled in the 1960s through 1980s for my younger readers. Particularly noteworthy was the administration of George W. Bush, which was so filled with conservative corruption that John W. Dean (a Republican and Watergate whistleblower) wrote a book about it, Conservatives without Conscience. (Donald Trump recently called Dean a rat.)

It is even worse today. Not just the corruption, which we have always had, except for brief shining Camelot moments. But today the powerful conservatives are leading America in a direction of totalitarianism, and even a revival of respect for Nazis. Dean quotes Professor Bob Altemeyer: “If you think [the United States] could never elect an Adolf Hitler to power, note that [Nazi sympathizer] David Duke would have become governor of Louisiana if it had just been up to the white voters in that state.” White supremacist Richard Spencer was taken seriously by Steve Bannon, who was the national security advisor for Donald Trump. Trump said that the white supremacists in Charlottesville and the diverse people who protested against them both deserved equal respect and equal blame, even though the only person killed was a young woman, by a car driven very fast into a crowd by a white supremacist. Trump said that the Congressmen who had not clapped for him at his State of the Union address were committing“treason.”  The link is to the Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper, to show that Trump’s outrageous statement was taken seriously overseas.

In the political arena, then, it appears that the facts support a cynical point of view on the national level. On the state level (I live in Oklahoma), the legislature for a long time refused to allow public school teachers to receive a living wage, and instead of trying to solve the state’s fiscal crisis, they spend their time trying to enact creationist laws. The purpose of the state of Oklahoma, they think, is to make oil companies more profitable, even if it means the poverty and disease of the state residents. Is it any different in your state? Probably not.

I think I have made my point: cynicism is the only realistic summary of the political world. There is probably nothing you can reasonably imagine that can even come close to the reality of that world, only a little bit of whose corruption is visible to outsiders.

Clearly, the momentum of politics right now is toward Trump demanding, and getting, personal adoration. And slightly fewer than half of Americans are eager to give it to Him.

But we can’t stop on such a depressing note. Otherwise you will be exactly like the miserable man I described in an earlier essay. But knowledge is power. As a cynic, you know that politics is thoroughly corrupt. The practical result is that you know it is hopeless, utterly hopeless, to try to solve any of our major problems by working through existing political channels. At least, cynicism can keep you from wasting a lot of time and resources, only to get your heart stomped into a quivering mass of protoplasm on the Rotunda floor. Find something else to do to make the world better. But, as a good cynic, you should not expect any of your efforts to make a difference in the end.

This will leave you lots of time to do things that make the world better and that you enjoy. I mean, WWGCD? What would George Carlin do? Take, for example, the fact that Trump used a ceremony that supposedly honored the Navaho Code Talkers as a chance to insult both liberals and Native Americans by calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and by holding the ceremony right underneath the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the president who broke the law in order to steal Native American land in the 1830s. What can you do in the face of such an insult from the highest office in the land? Humor, of course. A political cartoonist depicted a Native American saying to Trump, “You could learn a thing or two from us. We know how to run casinos that don’t go bankrupt.”