Ranting

Baha'i Rants

By John Taylor; 2007 September 21, 14 Izzat, 164 BE

You read all the time about viral Internet videos but I had not seen much "virality" until yesterday when a Globe and Mail columnist pointed to the latest sensation. This is a rant by a young fellow using the handle Chris; he is "flagrantly gay," to use the columnist's choice of words. The Youtube video consists of a five minute defense of a popular singer, called "Leave Britney alone!" His written introduction to the video on Youtube assures viewers that he was not acting in the rant, and that if you look closely enough you will see real tears in those mascara stained eyes. He holds that this singer has met with tragedy in her personal life, and that the media are pouncing on her for that reason. The video is massively popular, for no good reason. So much so that other e-media public figures crowded in to offer their own parodies, including one I liked called "Leave Chris Alone!" The satire consists mostly in using more mascara than Chris, but it works.

I watch Chris's viral phenomenon and think, the guy has a point. The media are essentially gossip obsessed, mocking and cruel, and a lot more people should be upset about that. In the ten years after I cut back on television, by all reports it has gotten worse. Now reporters are as rating-obsessed as advertisers. In my own media watching, a couple of years ago I noticed that my main window to the news media, Macleans Magazine, (my father subscribes) suddenly became more readable. Ever since I was a child it could not have been more boring if they had tried. But suddenly it got much more interesting writing, often so fascinating that I was compelled to read the whole issue, which does not happen often for me. I have featured and discussed the best of Macleans' writing here on this blog. But at the same time its reporters and columnists often went over the deep end into the sticky swamp of gossip.

Sometimes I amuse myself by flipping through the pages of Macleans and picking out articles that should never have been written, and trying to decide upon the reason why. This summer one memorable issue came into my hands that I branded the worst ever; virtually everything in it was either frivolous, effete, a form of backbiting, gossipy, cruel, propagandistic, deceptive, misinformed, biased, or just plain wrong. I flagged a good nine of ten articles as "never should have been written." I spare myself television news, but I imagine their technique of spinning ridiculously brief stories by so fast one after the other that the viewers cannot reflect deflects most criticism. Only the quickest wit would have time to think, "Hey, they should never have filmed that story for this or that reason."

Watching Chris perform his tirade, I could not help but wonder what I could rant about so passionately. At our latest improv meeting, that was one of our exercises, to give a one minute rant about anything, preferably something silly. My choice for my turn at improvisation was off the cuff and now I forget what it was. I later thought that if I really had to rant about something silly, I would choose people who cannot pronounce "ing" properly. They bug me, viscerally, for no good reason.

Rant Against Non-Ingers

Here they are, native English speakers but in childhood they somehow failed to learn how to reproduce the nasal "ng" sound. So, instead of saying "ing" they pretend to be able to say it, they duplicitously say "in" instead. They fool nobody. It is not "in," it is "ing," and why don't they just say it? Nothing they say is ever going to change the English language. It is not going to change because of what their tongues could not do when they were three years old, or whatever. For some reason, cruel and thoughtless as you may think it I am, this handicap really bugs me. Okay, not really bugs me, but sort of bugs me. And worse, we do not even have a name for these people. How can you separate them out and hate them if there is not even a name for them? What kind of a crazy world are we living in when the English language is being mangled and people do not stand up and name the vandals scrawling graffiti across Shakespeare's tongue? Yeah, I know, Richard Smalley would just go up to them and call it a "speech improvement." "I love your speech improvement," he would tell them, and then he would go away thinking that they must feel better about themselves. But for Gosh sakes, it is not an improvement. Sure, it is easier to say "in" instead of "ing," it may even use up less tongue energy and reduce our carbon footprint by a few millimeters, but no, it is wrong. Sometimes doing the right thing takes more energy, so just, just, just stop it! Please, please stop saying in, please... Did you see my tears? I really meant what I just wrote.

So, if I read that into a webcam and put it onto Youtube, would it become viral? Not likely. But even if it did, would it do anybody any good? Probably it would do harm. It would single out people with a minor speech defect and make something out of it. So, what kind of rant could conceivably do some good in the world? Having thought a while about that, I wondered, what if somebody ranted about the treatment of Baha'i school kids in Iran? Or the Baha'is and other religionists in Egypt who are made non-persons by not being allowed ID cards? Or how about one of the bodies in the newly bulldozed Baha’i graveyards standing up and giving its zombie viewpoint on a government that does its best to expunge its eternal place of rest? Nothing else we Baha’is are doing seems to be having much effect, why not try Youtube rants? Surely such spite and clear injustices is worth getting mad at and turning into a declamation of righteous indignation.

Of course the problem for a Baha'i would be to rant in such a way that you could say, "Is this what Abdu'l-Baha would say?" Not that Abdu'l-Baha Himself was totally void of rants in His lifetime. He was prone to ranting about the cruel attacks of the Nakazin against the heart of the Cause. But even then, we should remember that He suffered their plotting and machinations for decades in patient silence. Read about the first decade of His ministry and you want to crawl up the back of your chair, so patient and long suffering is He in the face of the attacks of His brother and his coven. Only later, when the issue had been pushed into the public sphere and there were many new, vulnerable Baha'is, and the fire of their lies threatened to burn the entire community, did He write those long, angry warnings. Even the Qu'ran, while it condemns words spoken in anger, makes a clear exception for harsh complaints directed at genuine injustice.

"God loveth not that evil should be noised abroad in public speech, except where injustice hath been done; for God is He who heareth and knoweth all things." (Q4:148, Yusuf Ali)

So, fair to say, ranting about the corruption of the earth and its main effect, climate change, is a valid topic for the most passionate ranting. But then again, can a Baha'i rant? Baha'u'llah actually seems to intensify this directive of the Qu'ran against ranting in the Hidden Words,

"O Emigrants! The tongue I have designed for the mention of Me, defile it not with detraction. If the fire of self overcome you, remember your own faults and not the faults of My creatures, inasmuch as every one of you knoweth his own self better than he knoweth others." (PHW 66)

Ironic, really, that this is addressed to "emigrants," since now the Baha'is most likely to come up with a convincing, detailed rant about Iranian Baha'i schoolchildren or Egyptian citizens made into non-persons would be emigrants from those very lands. It is easy to rant when the victims of injustice are your own flesh and blood. But broadly speaking, though, all Baha'is are emigrants from the Kingdom of God, and as God says here, our minds and language were devised for mentioning Truth, not complaining about falsity.

So, what could a Baha'i possibly rant about? I see only one thing indicated: a rant about ourselves. So, here is my rant against myself.

Why Can't I just Leave Them All Alone?

Why does it enter your head to rant about anything other than your slavery to self? You are a typical slave, underhanded, lazy, servile, constantly complaining about others when the only one in the world whose faults you are a real expert on is you. As soon as you opened your mouth to give this rant you should have realized what hypocrisy it is that you do not know the slightest thing about what you talking about, yet apply that ignorant standard to others! Why not just leave those poor others to their own problems and concentrate on God, His beauty, on Baha'u'llah, and the bounty of His Cause?

How can I portray the folly of it all? I know, how's about this:

You are standing in a dark room, you have a candle in your hand. Just light it! Do not worry about what others are doing with their candles. As soon as light enters the room, everything will change. Just believe it. But no. You know, your fault is the greatest fault of all, the Meta-fault, the Most Great Failing: faultfinding. It is the error of errors because you are the only one who can make your faults into virtues but your only virtue you make into a weapon to cut away at the roots of your own tree. You are in a position to light your own candle, to change your relation to truth directly, yet you dilly dally, you put it off, you gossip, you take your ignorance out on the innocent and the irrelevant. Just leave them all alone, puleese!