Jerusalem Calling: A Homeless Conscience in a Post-Everything World Joel Schalit Akashic Books 250 pp. $14.95 Amazon

An example of bad prose is immediately in order. To set this up, you may have to imagine a person who's such an individual that he throws himself repeatedly among a group; in Schalit's case, that's being a "progressive". Now, revel in this generalized nonsense: "many a progressive has sought to explain religion as the alienated symptom of working-class disenfrancisement in a tragically futile search for consolation" (Schalit, 77). If saying nothing with clarity is his definition of the progressive movement, my apologies. Let's use this example instead: "For the religious right, radio, television, and the Internet are battlegrounds, what progressives are fond of calling 'spaces of contestation,'" (59). Not only is the sentence clunky; it again aligns the voice of the progressive movement with snobs who favor sounding smart over being smart.

Among Schalit's more irritating qualities is his dalliance with hypocrisy and untruth. While he is touchy about friends using the word "fascism", he is quick to discard Nietzsche, who died in 1900, as Nazi-friendly (102). Since his essays try to critique an evangelist movement that distorts the Bible for personal aims, he should not preach what he condemns, and appropriate Hitler's misinterpretation of Nietzsche for his own.

His unearned know-it-all demeanor continually frustrates, as it leads Schalit to assume far too many of his statements as undisputable truths. Today, affirmative action is not simply a debate between those for it and racists (100), nor are the government's current New Deal-derived social programs unqualifiably better than Catholic charities (76). I disagree with his perception of history and the Holocaust, too. While belittling a friend who wants to stage an electronica show in Austria, he distances Austria so far from the Nazi experience that Thomas Bernhard, if he were alive, would vomit on him. Yes, Schalit, "Austria is not Germany" (118). Along with France, it has had but fleeting moments of penance for its WW2 sins, while Germany wears its cross today in two generations of parents who freak out whenever a kid wants a toy soldier.

As for the direct statements about the Holocaust that crop up now and then, Lawrence Langer's essays and the fiction of Tadeusz Borowski (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen) and Cynthia Ozick ("The Shawl") speak more to me, a non-Jew. While Langer, Borowski, Ozick and the memoirs of Primo Levi make me soberly conclude that savage inhumanity breeds inhumanity (where mistreated mothers would steal from the mouths of their children rather than die themselves), Schalit interprets the victim's experience of the Holocaust as a sign of Jews' resilient spirit: "...like many Jews brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust, I was raised to believe that dodging death was an essential part of my ethnic identity" (80-81). Where it's almost tasteless to choose favorites, I favor the lessons learned from a Borowski or Pasolini, because everyone should know their own humanity could disappear if they're made to eat shit.

On the subject of religion, in which Schalit has two degrees, the comments from the much-heralded editor of Punk Planet are either insulting or vapid, making this book confirm my belief that college degrees are given, not earned. I do not fault him for his frequent use of the word "Christian" as a synonym for "religious conservatives", as that fault lies with his editors. However, Schalit's text makes no use of Hans Kung or any theologian from the Tubingen school, nor does he mention Karl Barth (which is ludicrous, if this means to be a serious treatise on evangelism). As with his old "punk" group Christal Methodists (who "boldly" attacked religion to a crowd of young atheists), Schalit keeps his focus on the simple target of TV evangelists. In order to feign a backbone, he goes to great length attaching complimentary labels ("conservative religious intellectuals", for example) to people he is knocking down, like Francis Schaeffer and Gary North. Now tell me: who the fuck considers Schaeffer and North intellectuals? Is Schalit posing his argument to the retarded?

Where Kung, a Catholic priest, suffers genuine repercussions for attacking the present Pope (who has basically overwritten the Second Vatican Council of the sixties), Schalit only attacks targets that can boost his career among liberal cappucino drinkers. To further this cause, he's a practical advertisement for fancy coffee drinks, and drinks about three in each essay.

Very well, then, are there things I like about this book? I like the way Schalit uses "acknowledged" in one sentence -- "By the time I was twelve, I was an acknowledged expert in twentieth-century military weaponry" (167) -- and the way he cloaks his own self-critiques in compliments ("...the tendency of overeducated theoreticians like myself to miss the forest for the trees" (119)). I also love his use of quotes to cover incidents in his past that he surely did not record. Father Tom, his high school teacher, is privileged to say these words to our "progressive": "You're a great mountain climber, you write beautifully..." (27).

Schalit is good at the propaganda game, too. Since he grows to dislike Father Tom, he sits verbs like "aroused" next to sentences with the priest (27), so that the unseemliness of Father Tom's character can be evoked. Also, I admire Schalit's divine confidence in reading people like an open book ("While Father Tom tried to turn me on to the presence of God in the formulas of high school math, he was demonstrating his own quest for transcendence in the building blocks of modern thought" (52)), as the inclusion of speculative words like "maybe" or "possibly" would have made this book quite long. (The one time "maybe" was used came via this immortal bullshit: "...an evangelical Christian might say, 'My right to worship Jesus Christ is demeaned when other religions have the same right to worship their own gods"(100).)

At Splendid, we pride ourselves in finding the good in anything, but I have no desire to be kind to this book. It has received accolades from people and publications(Doug Henwood, Danny Schechter, the San Francisco Bay Guardian) who are paid to critique, and you can feel free to favor their words over mine. I'm frankly insulted that they think so low of my generation as to consider Schalit a major voice among us. While I did like The Elders of Zion, Schalit's recent music project, I found none of that group's strengths within his prose.

While his writings constantly mention how he did this or that to please his father, or the priest Father Tom, I came to the assumption that Schalit writes exactly the way he was taught. And rather than rebelling against the inane rules of whatever asshole teacher he had, Schalit took them as literally, and as forcefully, as Gary North does his Book of Revelation bible passages. His diligence may have earned him an "A", but it's given the world nothing but another dumb doctoral candidate.

No, scratch that, as Schalit's book has reawakened my own interest in faith; that's a good thing. While I still helplessly embrace Lewis Black's opinions on attending church (to paraphrase: "I got nothing against it, it just bores the fuck out me."), I cannot stand "rebels" and "progressives" like Schalit who see no affinity between true rebellion and Jesus Christ. Even if you take Him as just a character in a book, have the guts to respect a cat whom your most disliked enemies (the Pat Robertsons, etc.) may also cherish. Don't discard Him as some loony "flying saucer" (69) when His message of pacifism and bold truth-telling is supposed to match your own. If you think you shouldn't hate the Beatles just because some ex-Nazi might love them, don't hate Jesus because of Christian conservatives. While I personally believe the best practicing "Christian" of the past fifty years was Gandhi, a Hindu, I am certain that any genuine follower of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount could stamp out the horrors of extreme movements far better than pampered, egotistical quasi-punks like Schalit. Now, if only we followers existed.

-- Theodore Defosse