On Homeschooling: Anti-vaxxers, privilege and Social Orthodoxy

There's a wonderful book called Cheaper by the Dozen that has nothing whatsoever to do with a terrible Steve Martin movie. In this story, all twelve of the Galbraith kids contract measles within hours of each other. The doctor, exasperated, tells the Galbraith parents (Frank and Lillian) that whenever their kids get sick, it upsets the health statistics for the whole state. "If I report a dozen new measles cases in one day, they're liable to declare an emergency and shut down all the schools!"

This happened in the 1920s, when vaccines weren't common. This was roughly the same time the President of the United States was a wheel-chair bound polio victim who went through great lengths to hide it.

This book was part of my homeschooling curriculum.  It's one frequently pushed by homeschooling proponants as a good example of parenting, child obedience and, lately, the principles of Quiverful: Have as many kids as your wife can carry. But it also illuminates one of the massive contributors to the anti-vaxx nonsense we now have to deal with.

 See, long before somebody brought their kid to Disneyland and ruined it for the rest of us, the folks that hijacked Christian based homeschooling gave us all an early warning. It came a couple years ago, here in Texas. That group is on the outer fringe of the Christian Patriarchy movement, and I had hoped and prayed that these idiots were the only ones organized enough to break herd immunity, and that any outbreaks would be limited to the insular Christian Patriarchy communities that congregate in North Texas, Nevada, Arkansas, ect. Bad by me.

Dr. Amy Tuteur, AKA the Skeptical OB, has a fantastic article on anti-vaxx philosophy as an example of privilege in the modern world. The core theme is that there is no greater example of WASP privilege than someone having access to affordable vaccines and refusing to use them. And the fact that the Christian Patriarchy movement is full of anti-vaxxers came as no surprise for me.  I knew about this several years ago, when I first started reading up on people like Bill Gothard, Doug Phillips and the ever-disgusting Pearls. But Dr. Amy's words codified something for me that I've been mousing around for months: in our society, it is a privilege to be undereducated and ignorant.Christian Patriarchy takes full advantage of systematic privilege. If White Anglo-Saxon Protestants did not have the privilege they do, Christian Patriarchy would not be a supportable philosophy. The only reason they can hamstring their wives and daughters, keep their children out of public education and spit on modern medicine is because privilege will catch them long before they fall.

This is how you can have a family of twelve live in a house without electricity and running water for ten years.

This is how the raid on the Yearning for Zion ranch could end with positive proof of systemized, instituionalized sexual abuse of children AND have the children go right back to the system that abused them.

This is how you can make a business advocating that parents beat their children until they die from the resulting trauma.

Because people know, somewhere in their minds, that they have the power to be ignorant and suffer no meaningful consequences.

The Christian Homeschooling community was hijacked back in the late 70s and early 80s. I do not use that word lightly. The demographic involved are usually desperate, slightly gullible people who have concern as a primary motive--concern for their children, their education and their politics. It's a population that is very ripe for someone convincing to come along and take over. It happened with Jim Jones in California. It happened with the Branch Davidians in Waco. It's happened in every religion, in every social group, and in every race and creed known to man. It's gonna happen again, inside of groups we haven't invented yet. Predators will always take advantage of others. It's part of the human condition.

There's a lot of key steps to manipulating an individual into rejecting mainstream society and the materials it offers. One of the major ones is to make that rejection a part of your identity. If a person merely has concerns about, say, Child Protective Services, then one can have those concerns soothed. If, however, you are taught to be frightened of CPS, and are convinced through carefully selected and edited case studies that you have good reason to fear them, then you will likely reject information that places them in a good light simply because fear is addictive. But even then, it's likely that you'll start to change your mind. But if fear of CPS is a part of your identity,  then not only will you be virulently anti-CPS, you will greedily consume information that confirms your bias. It is more important to have this bias be confirmed by an outside source than it is to be correct in your analysis.

I watched this happen inside of my family without knowing it. We were Christians, first and always. Then we began homeschooling and, in her effort to get guidance, my mother was taught to identify as a Homeschooler. Homeschooling wasn't just the best choice for our education, it was a part of who our family was. It set us apart, and the negative reaction of her own relatives, and my father's relatives, and our family friends--which quickly disappeared after we began homeschooling--only re-enforced her acceptance of Homeschooling as a part of her identity as a parent. The more shit you get for supporting an idea, the more devoted you are likely to become. And then, of course, she began reading materials that said fear of CPS was a part of being a Homeschooler--that it was an inherent facet of that identity and if you didn't follow it you weren't a real homeschooler. And because being a homeschooler was now an important part of our family Identity, we had to incorporate a fear of CPS into our every-day thinking.

When you factor in that we were also running a foster home full of kids who had been rescued by CPS, and that we had a daily reminder of just how many hoops CPS and the state will jump through to keep families together, you begin to understand the cognitive dissonance I grew up in. On one hand, I was told that we had to fear the state. On the other hand, we were frequently working with Child Protective Services, the court system, the parole system and about nineteen other state-run boards to try to keep our foster kids in touch with their families. We had one child, in fifteen years, emancipate from their parent. And yet we still believed that if Child Protective Services saw me and my brother playing outside at noon, they would take us away from our parents and we'd languish in the foster system forever.

This existed, not because we actually believed this shit, but because we'd been told that to keep our identity as homeschoolers intact, we had to have that fear.

Now, replace "homeschooling" with "good parent", and CPS with vaccinations, and you begin to see the co-relation.

If you are told that to be a good parent, you have to avoid vaccinations like the plague...you wind up with a whole lot of plague. 

It gets even worse when you realize that anti-vaxx rhetoric has become part of the Homeschooling rhetoric. It's not enough to distrust the government anymore; now you have to distrust its medicine. In order to "count" as a homeschooler in certain circles, you have to avoid vaccinating your kids. These are the ATI/Bill Gothard/Doug Phillips/Quiverfull/10,000 kids and Counting people.  If you want to "count" as a real Homeschooler, or whatever, you have to do this, this, this and this other thing. It's a kind of social orthodoxy. If you don't fit all the tennants of their belief system, then you don't get to claim that identity. And because you have already claimed that identity, this means losing everything you now believe defines you.

Debi and Michael Pearl, who really cannot be villified enough, are both advocate anti-vaxxers. None of their children have ever been vaccinated. For anything. They boast about this constantly. They have many devoted followers.

Groups like Christian Patriarchy and Anti-vaxxers are so very strict in who they accept and what behaviors are allowable, that you have to claim and conform to the identity they define. Those who don't get thrown out (or, if they're smart, run the fuck away) very, VERY early on. Want to follow science? Get out. Want to question and analyze all research? Fuck off. Want to allow for the morals and physical safety of others? Selfishness is a part of the identity. Go away.

The result is a band that adheres to a very tight belief system, and who are so tied into it that they will absolutely protect the ideology and the ideologes to the death. Not because they actually believe this shit, but because they incorporated it so deeply into their own psyches, rejecting any part of the idea means rejecting themselves. When an anti-vaxxer or a Christian Patriarchy proponent goes on a spitting rage screed, they're not defending their horrible belief system. They know they can't defend it. What they are defending is themselves. And the knee-jerk defensiveness they display is the same reaction you have when you are physically assaulted--the self must be protected at all costs. It's basic human instinct.

In a very real sense, the anti-vaxx sources and the Christian Patriarchy leaders have built themselves a comfortable protective wall. They can spout whatever they want and know that they will never be challenged. They have a human shield of devoted followers so caught up in the message, they view the Message as if it were their own limbs. The human shield will die for the Idology.

Unfortunately in both anti-vaxx atitudes and Christian Patriarchy, that shield is made of children. And it's the children who will pay the price.

Edit to add: awesomely sarcastic article comparing vaccinations to breaks on a car: http://robertmoorejr.tumblr.com/post/110101466091/im-an-anti-braker

Caress of Twilight--chapter 9

Business first:

GRAY FOX HAS ARRIVED!

 Pick your poison, kids. Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. READ IT AND ...uh...well, not weep. You're not supposed to cry during this book. But buy it! And read it! Please!

...back to the suck, I guess.

Here is the plot so far: Movie Star Fae Goddess asks Merry (...who is some kind of fertility goddess herself, I forgot that part) to come visit. Merry does. She confronts Movie Star Goddess's guards. Movie Star Goddess arrives in time to get insulted to her face.

This is chapter nine.

My three favorite book obsessions right now are John Dies At the End, Warm Bodies and Hunger Games.
By chapter nine in John Dies Dave and John have saved Las Vegas via shitty garage band rock, beaten a meat monster that wanted to confront a TV psychic and Dave is in the process of trying to buy a bratwerst from a haunted McDonalds. (...look. Just read the book)

By chapter nine in Warm Bodies R has had Julie for quite a while, they have bonded over Frank Sinatra and shitty canned pad thai and R's whole not-eating-Julie thing, they've been discovered by a gigantic spoiler, and he's starting to take her home.

By chapter nine in Hunger games, Peeta and Katniss are in the capitol, have gone through almost all of their training, have done the chariot ride, and are about to go into the inverviews. Peeta has asked to be coached seperately and Katniss is not taking it well.

In ALL of these (KICK ASS AWESOME) books, the plot has been established and advanced. In John Dies and Warm Bodies, the first act is over and we're clearly moving into the second. In Hunger Games, well, we're about two chapters away from Act two AKA the arena, if I remember right.

We do not even have a conflict in this book yet.

But now Maeve Reed is here, and she's going to tell Merry everything and we will move on with the plot now, right? Right?

*sigh*

So we get a long ass description of what Maeve Reed looks like, and what she's wearing, and how she's using magic to look human, and then how she looks like a supermodel, but it's not diet and excercise that does it, it's just how she looks.

NO SHIT, SHERLOCK. SHE'S USING MAGIC TO LOOK THAT WAY. OF COURSE SHE'S GONNA BE HOT.

I have said this before, I'm gonna say it again: NOBODY CARES WHAT YOUR CHARACTER LOOKS LIKE. At least not for four fucking paragraphs worth of material that are about to get blown out of the water anyway.

She says Ethan probably ought to leave if he feels that way.

Ethan says he didn't mean the Seelie court, because they are the "bringers of beauty and wishes."

AKA: The guys that humans believe do good things, as opposed to the ones with all the ugly monsters.

Yeah. Because it's not like the Fairy Queen in Tam Lin was paying a tithe to hell with human people now, is it? Oh wait, she was. And her allignment was never specified.


Another problem here is, LKH is mixing mythology without caring fuck-all for what she's doing. Seelie/Unseelie divisions are a scots thing. Like really awesome lace knitting, great whiskey and golf (...two out of three aren't bad) this belongs to Scotland. And given that you have to go into Norse mythology to find a paralelle (light/dark elves) I'm going to bet this division came from the east. The Sidhe, on the other hand, are Irish. And they're not divided, far as I can tell.

So she's trying to write this big paralelle for oppressed peoples, while ignoring how she's fucking up mythology (do not get me started on how EVERY FUCKING ONE of Merry's boys are a god from old Irish/Scots/Welsh mythology). You know, I got pissed off for Cassandra Clare borrowing everything but God from Christianity, including that bullshit with that church, so I'm going to get pissed off now too. Borrowing fairies and Sidhe and even the Seelie/Unseelie courts? I'd let that slide. But LKH is grabbing very specific gods and goddesses from three different pantheons and shoving them all together so that her main character can have sex with them. It'd be like Jerry B. Jenkins creating a self insert to screw Jesus, Mohammad and Krishna. And LKH, remember, is a card carrying pagan dabbling in both "Wicca" and Astaru. She should have more respect than this. 

Faith is not a shiny object.

So Ethan leaves and Maeve is all like "I feel neglected without him" and Julian goes into full on pandering mode, rambling about how he'll never leave her side, yadda yadda yadda, and any chance that Maeve could have been a cool character goes down the fucking drain. It's not badass to watch someone who could probably obliterate you whine and complain that they just don't feel special enough.

And then Merry figures out that Maeve hired all these idiots to protect herself from Merry and Co. Because they are dangerous unseelie court Fae, and the book is basically chasing its own tail again, isn't it.

So now do we find out what the plot is?

Merry listens to Maeve's magic. Maeve watches them. Somehow Doyle indicates that Merry gets to be rude to Maeve. He does this through bizzare eye telepathy. Merry decides that she'll be so very rude, if she were in Faerie territory--because the home of a Goddess for fourty plus years obviously doesn't count--she'd get killed for insulting the other person and...

the chapter ends.

Next chapter will be the tenth chapter without a plot.

HOW do you write ten books, and then have your writing go this bad? It's like LKH died after Obsidian Butterfly and got replaced by a pod person. HOW DO YOU NOT REALIZE YOU'VE WRITTEN TEN CHAPTERS WITH NO PLOT? It's almost as bad as when Jerry B. Jenkins lost World War Three during Trib Force and Nicolae.

Ah, well. There's your chapter for today. And sadly we've got three more chapters of this to go. And trust me, when we find out what Maeve Reed wants? It's not worth it. Not at all.

City of Bones: A rant on religion

You know, sometimes I am AMAZED by what pisses me off. I am still freaking steaming over the stupid I read yesterday, and I keep thinking of things I wish I'd brought up during that rant. So now, kids, you're gonna get it full force. A full on, no holds barred, profanity laden rant on how FUCKING STUPID Cassandra Clare's treatment of religion is. And it's gonna be brutal. How brutal?

Loki made popcorn.

So to refresh your memory, Clary and Jace are raiding a church for weaponry to fight vampires with, because every religion has demons in it, so every religion keeps weapons around. Never mind that of the three religions mentioned in this chapter (Christianity, Judiasm and Shinto) Two of them are founded on the same material, and one grew out of the other one. What about Islam, Clare? Do they keep holy water and throwing stars in mosques, too? What about the pagan revivals going on right now? Do the hard core Gardnerian Wiccans have rose scented holy water? Does it make a difference if the weapons are blessed to the Lord or to the Lady?

And then it comes out that Jace doesn't even believe in this shit, because "If there is a God, he just doesn't care." First off, that's the fucked up creed of anybody with a bad Daddy. Or, to quote the (possibly) late, lamented Tyler Durden:

Our fathers are our models for God. If our fathers abandon us, what does that say about God?

Yeah. He said it better than Jace ever could. Before you start doing heart-felt soul seeking, work out your daddy issues so they don't get in the way. Second, the reason God might not be very nice to you, Jace, might be because you're a self centered cold hearted bigoted murdering sociopath, and kindness won't be your wake up call. Just a suggestion.

But there is a deeper issue here, my friends. Yesterday I wrote that Clare might feel the need to write her novels to be as all-inclusive as possible, avoiding any possible stepping on any possible toes, so that every audience can enjoy her Harry Potter rip-off without shame. But with that one chapter she managed to crush everybody's ten little piggies in one fell swoop, except maybe a special brand of privileaged morons who don't know any better.

Oh yes, blog fans. I thought I could avoid and ignore that oh, so commonly dragged out word, "privelage", most commonly applied to the ass end of "white", because we white  folk get everything easy. And I'm not saying that sarcastically. As a white person and a Christian, I've got a healthy privelage going for me. And if I hadn't added a couple fun wrinkles to my personal theology (long story) I probably wouldn't understand a goddamn thing about how bigoted religion can be.

But let's step away from religion for a second and talk about race. Why? Well, I'm reading this book right now. It is a disgustingly awful, terrible, and yet wonderfully bad thing called Save the Pearls. The subtitle is, Revealing Eden, and it's supposed to be a trilogy, but if the author publishes the second one she's got bigger balls than a tom-cat. See, in the book, the white people? are the downtrodden and oppressed. The black people? Rule the world. And the white people are called "Pearls" while the black people are called "Coals". Yes, boys and girls. The book is literally titled "Save the white folk." And the point of the book is that we all need to be colorblind. We all need to realize that everyone is the same, and if we can come to a universe of homogeneity and oneness, then everybody will be at peace and harmony.

Basically, we're waiting for Jasmine from Angel to show up.

The problem is, once you dig a little deeper the message is not "We must all be one" but rather "Just shut the fuck up and lose the differences that make me uncomfortable." It's "Don't be different, don't think about differences, and while you're at it, forget about everything bad that ever happened to you, every triumph you gained and defeat you suffered, because I'm tired of thinking about how shitty I was to you. Get over it."
 
It is entirely possible to take something, divorce it from its history (an angel, the Nephilum, consecrated ground) and use it as a sock puppet to parrot your own POV to the universe. It's possible to do that, but it's wrong. Because first, by ignoring the history of the shiny object you've just picked up, you're making yourself look like a moron. Second, it pisses people off.

It's not like I don't like books that refuse to treat my religion with kid gloves. There are books that I love that acknowledge Christianity has issues (Mercedes Lackley's Bedlam's Bard series, for example) There are books that do scary things to theology (To Rein in Hell by Steve Brust) and there are stories that are just beautiful things. Neil Gaiman told a wonderful story involving pagan gods (American Gods. If you have not read it yet I will disown you until you do) and even he took time to acknowledge Christianity's source material. It was one paragraph involving Jesus having to hitchhike through the middle east, I think, but it was an "Okay, this is here, we acknowledge his place in the framework of our universe, let's get back to the story now"  moment that added to the realism of what he was doing. And I remember it because, like everything else in that story, it was profoundly beautiful.

This is not that. This is "Hey, we're in a Christian church borrowing Christian artifacts consecrated to the Christian God, our home base is in a Christian church consecrated to the Christian God, but we won't mention His name or his Son's name even once."

  "And hey, let's make it better. Let's ask for entry into His church in the name of our organization and cause, rather than his own, and let's shit all over the very concept of his existence and benevolence while we're getting the weapons we're going to depend on during the next battle. This is absolutely smart and badass for us to do."

" And hey, in the spirit of Political Correctness, let's add that All Religions Are One before we go off to kill the vampires. That way NOBODY will be offended!"

 And on the name front: For Fuck's sake, Clare, you could at least have used the Tetragrammaton. In fact, given the "vastness" of the occult practices you're drawing on here (and that's kind of sarcastic, here) I'm surprised that you didn't, given that many, many MANY magical systems at least ACKNOWLEDGE the power of the name of God. YHVH, Clare. Look it up. 

"All Religions Are One" is the same kind of bullshit as "Colorblind". No. All religions are not one. All religions may be equally valid--even if you can't believe that due to your religion's rules, you can at least acknowledge the possibility that you might be wrong and respect the other religions as if they ARE equal, because you are a decent human being who respects the rights and beliefs of others, even when yours says they're wrong. Odds are, theirs says you are wrong too. But you do NOT go out there and say that all religions are the same damn thing. You don't say that Jesus is Buddha is Krishna is Odin because one, that makes no fucking sense and two, it denies the fullness of each individual. It denies the mythology, the cultural baggage, the beauty of the liturgy, the stillness of meditation. It denies that there might be a reason why someone would choose Odin over Jesus or Buddha, or Jesus over the other two. Many terrible things have been done in the name of Christ. I'll be the first to admit it. So have many beautiful things. Other religions have also done terrible and beautiful things. One of my favorite stories about Islam is how a Muslem neighborhood stood guard over a Christian church on Christmas day, just so the extremists in the neighborhood wouldn't hurt them. That's not "All religions are one". That's "You're different and I am different, but we are both human beings and we both deserve to stand before our Gods in our own way without fear or shame because that's the right thing to do." In other words:

FYI I have been waiting three months for an excuse to use this macro.

The way to fix the world isn't to erase religion. The way to fix the world isn't to erase race. The way to fix the world is to fix the people, so that it doesn't matter if you are a hindu or a buddhist or a Hutu or a Tutsi, you are a human being and you deserve respect, and that respect had better damn well include respect for the differences between you and me that make you who you are. 

And just because you happen to come from a dominant group does not give you the right to say "we must all become the same to be equal." No. You make me your equal, I make you my equal. So take one sentence in your stupid book to at least acknowledge that my religion exists. Hey, Loki, you got anything you want to say to Cass while we're at it?

Thank you.

Have a good night.

Oh, and TFT is free today and tomorrow. We're at #52 on the fantasy-epic Kindle list. Whoot. Go get a copy.

City of Bones chapter 5

I can see auras. And if it were the fun, mystical kind of aura, I'd be on cloud nine right now. Aura, however, doesn't just mean the neon neatness that happens when you drop acid. It also describes the bizzare visual phenominon your body sends out when a migrane is imminent. I went for a bike ride today and was ten minutes out when my vision began flashing red and blue with electric tingles, and just made it home before a large portion of my vision up and disappeared. The headache that followed, I am sorry to say, was spectacular.

My point? I'd rather still have the migrane and aura than be reviewing this chapter. Is it a Gor revisit? No. Is it Hubbard level logic fail? Not really. Is it Lakes Sex WTF? No. And I'd rather have it be one of those things because this chapter is boring. 

Clary overhears several conversations between Isabelle and Alec. While she's unconsious.

This is something I don't get. Being unfamiliar with Blue Laws? I can give somebody a pass for it. Unless you actually work for a restaurant in a state with Blue Laws (I just spelled that "Blew laws" which would be awesome.) you probably wouldn't know, for example, that it is illegal to sell booze, peroid, before 10am on Sundays (and even then you have to order food). Defining "all ages" as "Allows unsupervised 15 year olds into an alcohol-selling club"...you're an idiot, but I'll still cut you a pass because it wasn't something I thought about until I was threatened with possible arrest for serving a minor alcohol. But I see this trope crop up all the time. Whenever a writer has information they want one character to know about that the other characters would NEVER tell them, they have the character fall asleep and overhear the information while in a dream state.

Let me explain how stupid this is. How many of you have fallen asleep in front of the TV? How many of you remember more than a few minutes of the show after you closed your eyes? This is something that EVERYBODY does. The only way I'd give this stupid a pass is if the main character dreamed this conversation were happening between two dinosaurs. Because that would be awesome.

And Clary isn't just hearing this stuff while sleeping. She's been unconsious for three days. Do you know what unconsious means? It means not consious. And given that it's poison keeping her under, this sounds like a freaking coma.

So what is so important that the main character MUST overhear it while in a three day coma? 

“Yeah. I thought she was a pixie the first time we saw her. She’s not pretty enough to be a pixie, though.”

Seriously. She has to hear what the other characters think about her. Because we would be completely without meaning if we didn't know this, and there will never be circumstances where the other characters could express this otherwise.


Then Clary starts dreaming. And among such dreams as "Jace is an Angel" (GAG) and foreshadowing re: Simon, we get this little gem:

 Isabelle sitting naked with her whip curled around her like a net of gold rings,

One: Why? Why would a straight girl dream this?

Two: A whip...is like a net...of gold rings. You know, I knew in a kind of sub consious way that the descriptions in this book were bad, but this kind of blew my mind, hard. Let me illustrate the fail here. This:

when wrapped around Isabelle, looks like this:

Incidentally, if I ever become queen of the universe, chain mail neckties will become part of the uniform

That's what she's describing. A net of gold rings is fucking chain mail. Isabelle's whip turns into clothing. Freaking wow.

Then she wakes up in Hogwarts.

She saw clear blue sky above her, white puffy clouds and chubby angels with gilded ribbons trailing from their wrists. Am I dead? she wondered. Could heaven actually look like this? She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again: This time she realized that what she was staring at was an arched wooden ceiling, painted with a rococo motif of clouds and cherubs.

Yep. Hogwarts. Also, Clary, honey? I have read this book. No way are you getting a toe through the pearly gates.

Hogwarts is also called "The Institute" (...=school=Hogwarts) and Isabelle is there to make Clary feel like a small and plain little flower. Clary has a stomach ache, so Isabelle gives her a magic potion to drink.

Allow me to lay out what has happened so far, mkay?

Clary either went to an alcohol-free club in a church basement, or snuck in using her mom's ID. She watched three kids her own age murder a fourth boy in cold blood, while the Murder Trio raged about demons and hunters and killing. No one else can see these people. The next day a member of the Murder Trio, Jace, stalks her to a poetry slam and tries to kidnap her, only to let her leave because her mother is in trouble. Mom is attacked by a demon, which Jace knows all about. She passes out and wakes up in a strange place, where another member of the Murder Trio gives her something strange to drink.

Clary Frey is too stupid to live. Sadly, she will.

Then we have Expository Conversation B, where Clary finds out all about Isabelle (Last name, Lightwood, brother Alec, absent parents) and Jace (Dad died when he was young, never met Mom. Hey, Clary never met her Dad! Look! They've got something in common!) Then Isabelle tells Clary she stinks and needs to go take a bath.

Riveting.

Something that bugs me is how old-fashioned everything is in the Institute. Everything here is like 1800s era. There are glass lamps that are either kerosine or gas, and Clary smells candle wax as she wanders around the hall. However, outside, there are cars speeding by. She's still in New York City. The house just isn't on a power grid.

I kind of got the whole "no modern tech" in Harry Potter, in that I understood why the Malfoys and Hogwarts might not have radios and computers (the story takes place in the late nineties, the Malfoys have their collective heads jammed up their racist asses, and Hogwarts has to accomodate students whose parents see muggle tech as the peanuts in the cafeteria of life) but I didn't get why Ron's family or Sirius's manor wasn't wired for sound, given that in the former's case, Daddy has a serious crush on muggle tech and the latter is square in the middle of London. It makes even less sense here, especially when technology is the great equalizer. There is very little a wizard could do that modern tech can't. Magic would have been a HUGE advantage in every other era, but in this one, whenever I imagine myself imagining magic in a real life setting, part of my brain goes "Hey, I just sent an e-mail to somebody in Japan in less than three seconds! Why are you still using an owl?"

So she wanders around this mint Victorian mansion and finds Jace playing a piano, expertly. And we get this:

Watching the quick, sure movements of his hands across the keys, Clary remembered how it had felt to be lifted up by those hands, his arms holding her up and the stars hurtling down around her head like a rain of silver tinsel.

One, they are totally going to be fucking by the end of this book, and two...that bolded part. What the fuck does it have to do with the price of tea in China?

IDK. He greets her with this:

Piano keys jangled as he got to his feet. “Our own Sleeping Beauty. Who finally kissed you awake?”

They go find Dumbledore Hodge. And continue through the Institute, which...oh, for fuck's sake. 

(The Institute looked) like it had been naturally hollowed out of rock by the passage of water and years.

No, it doesn't. It looks like a building because that's what it is. I get what she's saying. People added to the institute over the years until it looked something like the Winchester building. But a building doesn't get to look like a cave unless it has actual stretches of exposed rock. And on the way, they have Expository Conversation C, where Clary finds out no one is in the Institute, that it's where Shadowhunters go when the world gets too hot for her, and they have their own special little country, Idris, which is a small country between Germany and France. Clary responds thusly:

“But there isn’t anything between Germany and France. Except Switzerland.”

I googled this. I found a map:

...That is not what I'd call "Between". That's more "Stapled onto the join". And this one I won't let fly. Cassandra Clare is from the UK. This is like ME saying Navada is between California and Arizona. FRANCE AND GERMANY ARE TOUCHING. NOTHING IS BETWEEN THEM.

Fuck. I'm not even halfway through this chapter yet. And I am skipping SO MANY THINGS to try to make this breif as possible.

Then he takes her to the library, where the books are all bound with leather and velvet.

Leather. And Velvet.

Seriously. Velvet is a book binding material here. I've owned several velvet-bound novelty books and let me tell you, they do NOT age well. It's something you put on Baby's First Journal. it's not something you use to record the Deep Secret of the Universe.

And then Alec appears and is revealed to be a total ass, Clary calls her uncle and finds out that he is a total ass, Hodge shows he'll be the Gandalf for this book, and I'm speeding through this chapter suddenly because I'm having a HUGE bout of religious rage and I have to vent about it.

A frequently occuring motif here is angels. Angels and demons, angels and demons, and...okay, I have to address this. I was going to wait until it got worse, but it's getting fucking annoying and I need to get it over with. Every book of magic draws on some kind of mythology. I'm trying to draw on modified Celtic/British with a seasoning of Greek, which is what C.S. Lewis and Rowling drew on. Tolkien did European mythos.

Cassandra Clare is drawing on Christian mythology for this novel.

My faith, in other words.

The problem with writing in any mythology is you tend to treat it like a buffet. You take what you like and you leave the rest. Thus, it is a lot safer to draw upon a more or less "dead" faith than it is to draw on one that's still alive. First, because you piss fewer people off. Second, because the odds of running into somebody who actually understands the theology you're working with are relatively small.

Cassandra Clare? Has managed to pull full research fail on the biggest religion in the world. 

See, the Shadowhunters, that hunt demons, are the Nephilium. She gets exactly one part right: The Nephilum were the offspring of humans and Angels. Yes, boys and girls. The Bible does say that humans and angels got it on and had a whole bunch of kids. And then Clare basically says "But the bible got it wrong, and Shadowhunters were really created by people drinking angel blood out of the Mortal Cup."

No.

Nephilum were the product of angels getting it on with human women. Something that God disliked so much that he freaking drowned the human race. The Nephilum are one of the reasons for the biblical flood. Noah's ark is a thing due to the Nephilum. And they were considered very, very evil in the Bible. One of the fun theological debates you could have is if Goliath, as in David and Goliath, was a Nephilum or just a very big man.

It is possible to take Christian theology and fuse it to magical elements. C.S. Lewis did it beautifully, a couple of other Christian writers did it, and Neil Gaiman fucking nailed it. But there's one thing all those writers have in common: They respected the source material. Even if they didn't believe in it, they took the time to research the things they're drawing on and present them in a manner that stands up to casual theological scrutiany. (See Good Omens) 

Cassandra Clare grabbed all the shiny objects and left the rest of it sitting in the box. The biggest sign that this is so? There are a lot of angels, and a lot of demons, but nobody ever brings up God. And I don't mean goes "this is the One True God of Cosmos, fall on your knees in respect and love" I mean nobody mentions the posibility of deity. In a book about angels and demons. Written by an author who did enough research to find something as awesome as the Nephilum.

There's a factual connection between Christianity and the other elements Clare employs, but there isn't a spiritual one. At no point does Clare take time to connect the dots between the pixies, the Shadowhunters, and the Christian theology. And I know this isn't a bullshit thing. American Gods has a deep spiritual/emotional connection between the gods of every pagan religion ever and America itself. It's a story about a battle between Odin and the spirit of talk shows. And it WORKS.

City of Bones does not work. It's all fluff and bubblegum, and its drawing upon sources that are deep and pretty damn dark at times.

To sum up the rest of the chapter, we find out that Valentine has all the same goals as Voldemort, and that Clary is going back to her house to get clothes and see if maybe her Mom came back. Hodge writes a letter. The rest of us go to sleep.

End of chapter.