Roseannearchy

by Roseanne Barr

  Religion—yep, I’m going there—and allowing people of diverse faiths to practice their beliefs without fear of persecution is another defining quality dating back to the birth of our nation. I grew up with religion on steroids—two religions, in fact. Being a nominal Mormon among Mormons, but also, inescapably, a Jew, really affected me. I was in a hyperspiritual environment, where people would regularly insert phrases like “The Lord” this and “God” that and “The Devil” such and such, in the most mundane, casual conversation. It still comes so naturally to me to think and talk in the manner of my childhood. That was some powerful indoctrination. A lot of my attitudes and actions have either been because of those conflicting influences or in rebellion against them. As I get older, I can see where there’s overlap in what used to seem like two totally different religious cultures. One thing I know: Patriarchy runs deep in both systems.

  I’m loving the show Big Love right now. It’s almost spooky to watch so much of that “Utah thang,” as I affectionately call it, play out on television. Watching it reminds me a lot of what it was like when I lived there—what with the rampant xenophobia and homophobia that led to my little brother’s nose being broken nine times by devout Mormon classmates by the time he was nine years old, either for looking Jewish or being effeminate. The Mormon influence is still out there, big-time.

  Religion needs to be less about believing things and more about beholding things—sharing and healing and bringing people together, not separating them. When I hear people say they have a need to connect with something bigger than themselves, one of the voices in my head says, How can you not be connected with something bigger than yourself? You’re part of everything! I look at my young grandsons, for example, and just the pure physical fact that these little guys are in the world—living, growing, thinking, using language, and finding their way—is profound! They’re setting out on a life that’s as big and deep and wide as they can feel and experience, and that is amazing enough for me. I’m not so sure that they need a great big belief system injected into their mostly pliant minds right now, or ever. I’m breaking with tradition; I just tell them to be kind to one another and polite to other people, and they’ll turn out just fine. Mostly, I just like to have fun with them.

  I look out at what’s left of the natural world, and it is as mystical and beautiful as it was when I ran around in the mountains of Colorado doing my 1970s Wiccan, natural-woman thing. When I remember how complex and awesome is nature’s machinery, the planet’s place in a vast solar system that contains such precision of motion, I still feel a huge sense of awe for it all. Just to be quiet and behold and respect its greatness seems so much more appropriate than to impose a big net of dogma that supposedly makes everything more meaningful.

  Instead of knocking myself out trying to understand or rationalize a bunch of holidays (holy days?) with their symbolism and oh-so-deep, arcane significance, I’m a little less quick to chase that merry-go-round and more apt just to dig the seasons and the real turning points in the year, which are less about myth and interpretation and more about real signposts on our trip around the sun. Why believe a bunch of Bronze Age stuff we can’t prove when we have dependable occurrences to believe in, like the summer solstice—the day with the most light and the least dark? No believing required, nothing to argue about. Or the vernal (spring) and autumnal equinoxes—the balance of day and night—perfect, predictable, and plenty spiritual and scientific for me. I guess we were all pagans way back when—observing, accepting, and respecting the natural world—and that wasn’t such a bad thing.

  In looking at the world in all its scary glory, people often see it as a backdrop on which to pin their religious beliefs, like a giant billboard, and then insist that other people accept those beliefs as fact. For example, the Creationist movement points to the universe, to life itself, as proof that there’s a creator, one that they just happen to know a whole lot about and want to “share” with you. Before you know it, you’re on an ideological conveyor belt. That mental assembly line has you going from “Wow, the vastness of space!” and having a sense of wonder about life on earth straight to talking about the blood of Christ, living in the Last Days, and taking dictionaries out of schools because they contain words that are unacceptable to certain Christians. I’m not bitching about Christians; I’m righteously bitching about fundamentalists of all stripes, anywhere, who insist that there’s just one way to live, and that way is strictly in accordance with their ancient religious texts—as they interpret them, of course.

  Speaking of ancient religious texts and who does the interpreting, can you believe that there’s a movement under way to write a revised Bible that’s more about “free market principles”? There are people who think that there’s way too much “help the poor” and “love thine enemy” talk, along with a whole lot of other stuff that they feel is way too “liberal” and “entitled” to be in a proper, what, capitalist Bible? Yikes!

  This all goes back to my premise: People are getting screwed—from both sides: politics and religion. Let’s face it; religion is politics. Right-wing Christians, who deny the fact that Jesus was basically a Jewish liberal from way back east, have hijacked his teachings to suit their political beliefs. Jesus did an awful lot of talking about caring for the poor and sick, and he warned us about judging one another while not being perfect ourselves. But these facts are conveniently overlooked in service of a new interpretation of the Christian tradition that better suits the conservative agenda. We all know that the extreme religious right is losing a little of its clout, but changing the Bible to be more “conservative” is absurd.

  I’m not letting Jews off the hook, either, when it comes to twisting and politicizing something that should bring peace and unity. For some, unquestioning support of the Israeli government serves as a litmus test for Jewish people. I ain’t buying it! I’m militant in my support of peace and cooking down militarism. There’s defense, and then there’s the insane policy of beating your plowshares into swords and acting threatened and victimized when you’ve got the biggest life-threatening shithammer in the world on your side.

  I’m for taking an Armageddon break. I have to; I have little grandsons whose future I need to consider. In fact, I’m taking a small step back from magical thinking of all kinds: religion, astrology, New Age pseudosciences—and let me tell you, it’s not easy. Like I said, my spiritual “rearing” in Utah—Hillbilly Israel, a hybrid modern-pioneer theme park with cheerful hymns, a few pervs per block, and some polygamist families scattered around to keep us guessing—had a profound impact on me. (As I say in my act, my family really stuck out in Utah: We had only the one mother!) But seriously, folks, I have some crackpot religious, messianic, paranoid tendencies in my blood. Add to that my hippie, Wiccan, radical feminist, multiple personalities, and the Kaballah razzmatazz, and I’m a gushing fountain of symbology from Scientology to Roseannethropology. But I’ve been making a little more room for things that work whether you believe in them or not and using plain old common sense to identify those things that almost everybody can agree are stubbornly true.

  We’re here on earth for a finite amount of time. Life can be good when people are kind to one another and try to work things out when there’s conflict. Except for the fundamental belief in kindness (the Golden Rule), religion gets pretty complicated and calcified and can really create more division between people than we need in a crowded world with real problems that probably won’t be prayed away. I think we need to live and let live, get over ourselves, and do away with the thinking that life is not enough for us as it simply unfolds every day. Why fixate on the stuff we can’t prove, like the existence of prophets or messiahs or angels or devils? I don’t think any of it makes a gorgeous sunset any more gorgeous, or the wine any more delicious, or the kids any cuter. Why can’t we love and cherish what we can see and know? Can’t we just start with the basics—appreciating life and helping to make it better for everybody—without insisting on the existence of s
ome elusive deeper meaning?

  This fresh outlook is part of my brilliant, new program of trying to lead what great spiritual masters and adepts from all disciplines and sects call a less-dumb-ass life. I’d like to provide you, free of charge, with a coping tool, as they call such things in “workshops” and support groups and the like. It’s called Dynamic Laziness. And it’s not easy for a recovering hyper–control freak with ADD and tripolar disorder to practice; you have no idea what an incredible struggle it is for me to leave things alone for a minute. Sometimes, for me, not throwing a tantrum is what running a marathon or swimming the English Channel must be like for others of a less-challenging emotional nature—a descriptive term I like a lot better than “completely crazy,” which I’ve often been called. I’ve also been called a drama queen, an apt description for my behavior throughout much of my life—until I had an epiphany one day in the form of a simple, undramatic realization: Dynamic Laziness is my salvation.

  Sure, panic and rage still felt natural and came in handy whenever I felt the need to generate a much larger reaction than was called for or would be helpful. But those emotions just weren’t providing the warm, “fully engaged with life” kind of self-Tasering experience I’d come to expect from expressing them. Like losing interest in sex, the ambivalent afterglow was almost gone. Sure, there was the revulsion and fatigue and remorse. But instead of that “roll over and have a cigarette” feeling of satisfaction, it was more like I wanted to be put on a respirator and covered gently with a plus-size morphine patch. Getting too mad or freaked out really feels like work now, and uses up more of what’s left of me than I need to be burning up with useless wear and tear. Now that I have embraced Dynamic Laziness, if I desperately feel compelled to make bile and blood and adrenaline gush through my arteries like torrents of churning, pressurized BS spurts from Glenn Beck’s blowhole, I’ll simply go for a walk/blog.

  I’ve gotten in touch with my inner tired old Jewish woman. Like me, she’s in her late fifties, and she really feels it—as they say, “It ain’t the year, it’s the mileage.” Now, whenever smoldering anger or panic rises up inside me, the tired old Jewish woman within says, “For this you’ll risk a heart attack?” In fact, the prospect of most any kind of physical or emotional exertion gets tossed on the cost-benefit scale these days. And usually, I think: Anger, shmanger—I’m getting too mature for that. And by mature, I mean tired and lazy.

  I know I used to drive people around me a little crazy sometimes (which is like saying Stalin used to get grouchy and mess with people—an understatement, to say the least). In addition to tormenting my poor, witless husbands, I put a lot of unnecessary mileage on my ticker. Not good! And I know there were days when my children probably felt that living with the awful realization that I wasn’t dead yet almost wasn’t worth the effort they didn’t put into looking for jobs. At times like that I decided that I needed to focus on trying to like them more often, too.

  These insights come to me during meditation, when I sit quietly and let my churning thoughts drain out of me, like old bong water on Willie Nelson’s tour bus or the fat at a Beverly Hills liposuction clinic. It’s not easy to let go of these thoughts; they are always there, pushing me to do and achieve, reminding me that life is short, like Tom Cruise, that these nails aren’t going to chew themselves, that the new tabloids are out today, possibly with women fatter than I am on the cover. It’s so hard to sit still and do nothing while a suffering world calls out for my help to heal it, and then eat crab legs and hear God Herself speak to me through cheese and fulfill what’s left of my grand destiny, and then watch forensics shows until my son comes home from school and gives me that special look, that mix of contempt and condescension that only a mother can recognize and bask in. It’s a rich, full life. And it’s time to enjoy it.

  So beware of the two-headed monster of politics and religion. Listen to your inner compass. We all have an inner compass. Mine’s right there next to my inner pie detector and my dashboard full of panic buttons. Seriously, we have some kind of hardwired internal voice that says, Don’t be a dumb-ass, which I can often hear in there saying things like Have another glass of wine! and I hate women who lose weight for a living and are skinny and rub everybody’s face in it. Heed that clarion call. Don’t be a dumb-ass!

  Moving from prescribed dogma to a truth-based approach to life has been a work in progress for me. That extra layer of religion that was lacquered on me as a kid wasn’t easy to slough off—being a Jew and a Mormon was a full-time job. Navigating between those two monuments to rigid, patriarchal arm-twisting wasn’t exactly like rowing my boat gently down the stream.

  I used to think there was a world of difference between Jewish and Mormon belief systems, but the latter sure has done a lot of borrowing from its predecessor. In Judaism you’re made to think you’re betraying your people if you don’t trudge dutifully along the road of persecution and guilt and suffering that’s always in the rearview mirror and just around the bend for God’s chosen people. Even the happy songs are in a minor key. Mormonism isn’t much different. Both religions revere a prophet who trudged through the desert or the mountains with his people to some kind of promised land—it’s Zion this and Hebron that, and a whole lot of energy goes into begetting. Let’s face it: A lot of the heavy lifting involved in begetting is assigned to the women. The Hebrews were no strangers to polygamy, and there’s an inordinate amount of emphasis on breeding in their faith—same with the Mormons, of course. In their case, it’s extra strange because they believe God just had the one son, but the average old Mormon daddy can crank out as many as his wives can send down the chute.

  Anyway, Judaism and Mormonism against the backdrop of 1950s and ‘60s Republican Utah was my crucible. With those two judgmental, busybody monoliths yelling in my face from down the centuries and up the street, I had to pull my head in like a turtle and strain to hear the inner voices that I figured were casually acquainted with “the real me.” No wonder I needed a Greek chorus of multiple personalities to stand up to the legions of patriarchs, who, whether in sandals or cowboy boots, never tired of letting me know I needed to show plenty of respect for their odd doctrines, and that I definitely needed to know my place as a woman and stay in it. I guess they didn’t know whom they were dealing with. I had three words for them and I shouted them over my shoulder as soon as I had a chance to get on up the road: “So long, suckers!”

  Chapter 1

  Chosen and Humbled

  I knew at a young age that I loved being the center of attention, singing and dancing and making my family laugh and lifting their spirits—that way I could avoid having to talk to them almost completely. They were hairy and smelled like herring, garlic, and onions, and shrieked at one another in loud, shrill tones.

  But they were a great audience, and to me that pretty much made up for the fact that I had to be around them all the time. I never really bonded with them, or with anyone on earth, really, until I had children of my own, who now wish I would just shut up and leave them alone. But I can’t, not now, not after all I have been through.

  Almost everyone in my family was musical and played an instrument and sang and loved to show off, so I was no stranger to it. During my brilliant and audacious performances, my family constantly remarked that they thought I sang like Shirley Temple, only way better and a lot more adorably, and that my dancing made hers look contrived and boring. I humbly accepted their assessments and believed them to be true.

  After all, my own grandmother, Mary Bitnam, had left her town of Aborniki, Lithuania, to move to the United States after being accepted at the Salt Lake City Conservatory of Music, so she knew something about the arts! She played the mandolin and other stringed instruments and sang soprano. She performed at weddings and bar mitzvahs until she married her husband, Ben Davis, whose father was Utah’s only kosher butcher.

  She encouraged me to sing and dance and tell jokes every Friday night, Shabbat, in the windowsill of her living room after everyone
had gorged on her brisket. She also talked about God all the time, and the importance of being honest and obedient to Him, so I figured that she was honest with me about my singing and dancing talents.

  My family would laugh and clap, adoring everything that came out of my mouth and every move I made—every twirl, every note, every word I said. I was the first grandchild, niece, and daughter in my extended family, and therefore I was spoiled rotten until I became dissociative and narcissistic enough to imagine myself to be “special” as well as “chosen.”

  It did not occur to me at a young age that empty flattery is actually quite toxic and would one day be my complete downfall.

  Each Friday night, I persisted in writing, producing, as well as directing my all-time favorite performer (myself) in one show-stopping number after another. During my more than one-hour-long act, I did not consider it a proper performance unless I had laughed, danced, sung, and cried. “Sarah Bernhardt” was what my audience of family members proudly called me.