TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN

sturgeon
Post to everything

Posts: 109

TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN Aug 6, 2021 15:24:48 GMT

Post by sturgeon on Aug 6, 2021 15:24:48 GMT

Fresh from reviewing CLERICAL CALENDARS, I find another religious mystery on my desk. But this one more explicitly religious (despite its more prosaic setting), and perhaps more sophisticated.

The main character is a menopausal housewife who projects her inadequacies upon a street beggar whom she suspects of being dishonest based purely on the cleanliness of his fingernails. Later, her suspicions are cruelly proved correct, which serves to reinforce her general attitude of mistrust - to the extent that she expects a stranger to pull a gun on her, and she ends up pepper spraying another innocent bystander.

This paranoia comes across at least partly as a product of the pervasive American cultural fear of otherness. The second half of the story reinforces this, when a preacher calls attention to his disability to drive home a point, and she refuses to give him the benefit of the doubt, instead taking offence at her assumption that he is manipulating and even lying to her.

I'm not 100% clear on what this capital's trying to sell. But for me the overriding feeling I'm left with is a damning one. This character is dissatisfied in her home life - utterly insular and boxed in - but rather than taking responsibility for it, she allows her mistrust to consume her and ends up turning to God for an out. Which is a sad ending for her, and a sad condemnation of the parochial suburbanite Americans she represents.

I can imagine other readers getting something completely different out of this story, so I'm going to yes it because I wanna hear what the others have to say.

And now, some notes:

Grammatically, I can understand why Mountain may be capitalised as a reference to the Sermon on the Mount, but Refreshed and Renewed and Fellowship and so on certainly don't need to be capitalised. Also, Monday's, Wednesday’s, and Friday’s should be plural not possessive.

And editorially, the second part starts "Looking back, I’m glad I had the pepper spray. I don’t know what I would’ve done without it." But she grossly misuses the pepper spray and at least briefly feels bad about it, so that reflection doesn't seem to fit.

bulldust
Global Moderator

Posts: 146

TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN Aug 31, 2021 14:49:25 GMT

Post by bulldust on Aug 31, 2021 14:49:25 GMT

Moo.

The Bulldog is a busy, busy bovine. So much to do. So little damned time.

“Tell it on the Mountain” is the next cap waiting on me. It’s almost a “Karen” origin story kind of wrapped up in a prayer.

The main character is a middle-aged woman whose opinion seems to be highly influenced by her husband’s. She gets wrapped up in the concept of charity and who is deserving of it. She becomes obsessed with being played by people claiming the need for help but really not needing it.

Her menopausal hot flashes seem to be timed to her thoughts about undeserving charitable acts. Which seems to fuel her rage with the fraudulent needed.

Overall, this is a tale of mid-aged crisis and faith. It just gets a little lost in the confusion f the main character, which I think is the point of the cap. Although she’s coherent in relating her thoughts, she doesn’t quite know what to think, so she’s effectively an unreliable narrator.

The cap ends in a prayer where she is asking for guidance from God.

The irony here, she’s asking for help. The character that has everything she needs is still asking for help.

Maybe that’s the punchline.

Still, this is a no. I think this cap needs more clarity in what it’s trying to convey.

Last Edit: Aug 31, 2021 14:50:05 GMT by bulldust

rockefeller
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Posts: 278

TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN Sept 2, 2021 16:07:24 GMT

Post by rockefeller on Sept 2, 2021 16:07:24 GMT

Back when my dad was alive, but after he'd mostly lost the power of speech to acute aphasia, a panhandler at the bus station across the street from his condo asked him for spare change. So he gave the guy a twenty. At first the panhandler was concerned my dad wasn't all there, and made it clear he wasn't holding him up or robbing him in any way. He was just asking, and wanted to be sure the gift was totally voluntary. After being assured everything was cool, he gave my dad a hug, then called a cab on his cell phone. My dad related the story to us in his slow, garbled way, only pausing to laugh. He thought it was hilarious. I'm not as pathologically philanthropic as my dad was, though I did once give a twenty to a good looking woman (with early onset meth teeth) down in Myrtle Beach who said her and her husband's car had just died, even though I didn't believe her story, and told her so. She said I could still feel good about helping someone, which I (unlike my wife who was a little pissed) did.

I didn't really believe this Tell it On the Mountain story either, though, initially, I did enjoy it. The hook of wondering why this grungy bum had such pristine fingernails, some nice relationship detail, and overall credibility kept me reading. There seemed to be a "haves vs. have-nots" theme building. But then, for me, it all came crashing down in a lot of menopausal hot-flashes and shrill hand-wringing anger over having been duped out of a dollar. By the time I got to the confrontation with the pepper spray, I was no longer buying it, and beginning to lose interest. I think if the church scene, with the disabled minister's possibly scammy malingering, had followed more toned down musings on panhandling, I'd have liked it better. Maybe the narrator could've come to the same conclusion I came to years ago: everything is a scam; existence itself is a scam.

Should the VC care to correct in future submissions, the only spag things that leapt out at me were the use of apostrophes to pluralize days of the week (e.g., I hate Mondays, not "Monday's") and the hyphenation of "knick-knacks" which, while both knick and knack are words, are meaningless hyphenated, or, at best, do not mean knickknacks.

In case I wasn't clear, this is an appreciative pass.