Adventus

Sunday morning very bright....

2012-01-29T11:02:00.002-06:00

Without any scholarly study to back me up, I can still rather comfortably state that the comments at this blog post:

odm,
There’s no evidence that there is God or Gods or whatever, but there’s also no evidence that God is impossible, or in my opinion, unlikely.

I think “God” (and “Gods”) as described by any of the traditional theistic religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism—is extremely implausible. The only kind of God that I consider to be even remotely plausible in light of our knowledge from science and reason is the God of philosophical deism. A kind of distant, uninvolved creator, about which we know nothing.

represent about as serious a discussion of issues in philosophy of religion as I've come across on the web. Which is to say: not even up to the level of freshman dorm room bull sessions at a state college.

Ironically, I heard Alvin Plantinga on NPR this morning. I neither condemn nor congratulate Mr. Plantinga's musings, although I'm not really comfortable with the idea of non-overlapping magisteria (that's another blog post or two). Still, one can scour the 350+ (as of my posting) comments at Crooked Timber and not find one reference to David Hume (who would blast most of the faux empiricism there to bits), Immanuel Kant (ditto), Ludwig Wittgenstein (who would equally eviscerate the faux-positivism stated there), or even Plantinga (who actually makes references, sotto voce, to Godel's incompleteness theorem in his argument).

And yet everyone at Crooked Timber is quite convinced they are wise, knowledgeable, learned, intelligent, insightful, and, oh yes: right. (Not a one of them there has even the most basic understanding of theology, philosophy of religion, or even philosophy. And yet they are as happy in their ignorance of these things as Richard Dawkins.)

These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand.....

The bitter, painful end of 'Christendom'

2012-01-19T15:11:00.000-06:00

I hadn't heard about this:

Lebouvier's case is among a growing wave of de-baptisms in Europe, one of the most visible manifestations of the continent's secular drift. Websites offering informal de-baptism certificates have mushroomed. Other Christians are formally breaking from the church by opting out of state church taxes.

But I must admit it doesn't particularly disturb me. The real problem for some churches in Europe (and I don't know the laws of each country, nor how the churches are, or are not, supported), is in that last sentence: people who opt out of the church entirely, are also opting out of funding the churches with their taxes.

This, of course, prompts all kinds of retorts from atheists and those antagonistic to the Church in whatever form it takes. And, as the article indicates, it may be that the Roman Catholic church especially has brought this on itself; but I don't think so. I think there is a spiritual dimension to this, and the institution of the Church (which exists as much in America as in Europe; the crucial but ultimately minor distinction being the direct tax subsidy) as an institution may well undergo a very necessary restructuring. Or maybe it will be called "creative destruction." Whatever, it isn't necessarily the end, but rather a new beginning:

The bigger worry, experts say, are plummeting rates of new baptisms. Half a century ago, for example, 90 percent of French children were baptized, said Sorbonne University religion professor Philippe Portier. Today, roughly one in three are.

"The church considers de-baptisms a very marginal phenomena and its strategy right now is to resist it," Portier said. "It is much more active when it comes to reversing the drop in (new) baptisms -- there it's put in place a new evangelizing strategy."

The parish at Paris' historic Saint-Germain-des-Pres, for example, is offering a myriad of activities, from ski retreats to support networks for young professionals. At a recent evening youth Mass, the church was overflowing.

The parish priest, the Rev. Benoist de Sinety, is counting on faith, not numbers.

"What is striking today is that those who want to be Christian really want to be Christian," he said. "I rejoice in the fact that people are free to choose."

I would much rather pastor a church of 10 people who really want to be Christian, than pastor a church of 1000 who are only there from habit or convenience or for the entertainment value. And lest you think this is a European "problem," let me resurrect a post I wrote but never published:

The plaster is cracking again:

Of course this rapid growth of megachurches doesn't mean church attendance has increased. On average 50 small churches close their doors every week in America. We've seen 40 years of the Walmart effect -- consolidation rather than expansion. And while the latest infographic reports the average megachurch was founded in 1971, most were not megachurches in 1971. They were average-sized congregations that reached mega-attendance levels in the 80s or 90s under the leadership of a baby-boomer pastor. (I've profiled a number of such churches in the pages of Leadership Journal over the years.)

This is difficult to sum up, but let me try: basically, megachurches are the creations of personality. Jethani is too polite to call them personality cults, but I'm not. I've yet to see a "megachurch" that wasn't built around the charisma and publicity skills of a single individual. And the question not addressed in this article, or in the "infographic" he bases his post on, is the very real question of what happens when the leaders of these churches depart. Jethani mentions only one example, that of Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral. Joel Osteen's church is the best example of a mega church carrying on after its founder dies, but Osteen took over for his father. Ask Oral Roberts how often that works out.

Most of the history of such enterprises is that they fail when the original leader fails. Think of Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammye Faye Baker, Pat Robertson (whose influence began declining when he disavowed his pastoral office in order to run for the Presidency. CBN was once a cable channel. Now Robertson shows up on ABC's "Family" cable channel, for a few hours a night on his once powerful "700 Club.") Oral Roberts suffered a similar collapse when he tried to leave the church in his son's hands; and after Jerry Falwell died his university had some brief influence through it's alumni, but even that is fading now. Anybody heard from Falwell's church or university lately?

True, there are some churches which achieve large congregation status on the basis of being a large congregation. I know of one church which called a pastor specifically to make them grow, and he did. When he retires, the church will probably find a similar candidate to pursue a similar ministry, and they will probably succeed at it. In that model, the pastor is a figurehead for the congregation, not the reason for the congregation. But history shows such churches are few and far between, and besides, they do have a life cycle, like all institutions.

Near me are several former churches; the buildings emptied of the original congregations, some of them filled now with new congregations, mostly Mexican evangelical/charismatic congregations. The segregating of Sunday morning continues unabated. There are also churches which, as I've mentioned before, closed because the neighborhoods around them aged. Old people still go to church if they can, but their children tend not to go to their church. As Jethani points out, the average age of the mega-church is 50; which means, unlike most traditional churches I know, many of the people would actually be younger than me. But what about the 20-30 year olds? Where are they? What are they looking for? Ask Walt Kallestad, the pastor of a church I studied (briefly) in a class in seminary:

Walt led Community Church of Joy in Phoenix, a megachurch that had been an average congregation of 200 before he took over in the 80s and oversaw it's growth. But in 2002 he suffered a massive heart attack requiring six-way bypass surgery. The heart attack, says Walt, was a "wake up call" for the leaders to develop a succession plan to ensure the megachurch continued to thrive after Walt's tenure.

Kallestad began networking around the country looking for a young pastor he could bring onboard and eventually hand the church over to. One conversation stuck with him.

"It's a pretty good opportunity," Walt said. "We have 187 acres just off a major freeway, multipurpose buildings, and a great staff."

The leader looked him in the eyes and said, "Who'd want it? Who in their right minds would want to run that?"

"That's when it dawned on me," Kallestad reflected. "By the time we service the $12-million debt, pay the staff, and maintain the property, we've spent more than a million before we can spend a dime on our mission. At the time, we had plans for a spectacular worship center with a retractable roof. After that conversation, I scrapped it."

I have my own bone to pick with Community Church of Joy, but the story illustrates a truly chilling aspect of megachurches: they are institutions first, and whatever else second. If you are running a church with $12 million in debt to service, 187 acres of land, multipurpose buildings, and "a great staff," what is your first priority? Serving the poor? Saving souls? Or putting paying butts in the pews? To be fair to Kallestad, the article Jetheni links to indicates Kallestad took his megachurch in a radical direction, disdaining the "show" aspects I criticized in my seminary class (and elsewhere) of his ministry in favor of truly doing the hard work of creating disciples. In the process he lost, by his own account, some 4000 church members. This is not the first time a megachurch has decided to take the cost of discipleship more seriously. The New York Times noted Tim Keller's success in 2006. But it also noted that church attendance decline whenever Keller wasn't in the pulpit (a not unusual phenomenon, again to be fair. Even church members who seem to appear in church by habit rather than desire will fade away when the regular pastor is on vacation. But that's in no small part because Protestant churches have by and large learned to attend a church where the pastor pleases them, and not necessarily attend because it is a duty or even a religious obligation.).

On the other hand, Kallestad's concept of "empowering disciples" is illustrated by a grandfather asking Kallestad to come to the hospital to pray for his grandson, and Kallestad convincing the grandfather to do it himself. To infer that lay ministry is radical (I was doing it at the turn of the century, literally. Kallestad writes in 2006, as if he's invented the wheel.) is rather like saying you've found a new concept for December worship called "Advent."

So what is "radical" for a megachurch is not exactly radical for "regular" churches. Lay ministry is a concept working in many a small church where the pastor tries to "empower disciples" by getting them involved in the pastoral care of congregation members. But I have to say I wouldn't send a grandfather to a grandson's hospital bed instead of going myself.

Although, that's just me.

Churches are easy marks for complaint. The pastor is boring, or not interesting, or too loud, or too sleazy, or too.... I've known churches to split congregations over the question of replacing the carpet in the worship space. Churches never do what we want them to do, and when they do, we don't understand why everybody doesn't love the results. But churches can become institutions interested only in being institutions. That was the root of Kierkegaard's critique of the Danish church in the mid-1800's. It could be the root of a critique today by those who want to be "de-baptized" in Europe, or who have just "voted with their feet" in American churches.

Would I reject wholesale the institution of the church, then? No. I need worship, and that means I need others. You cannot worship alone. Moreover, I need liturgical worship, and that means I need a very distinctive institution, both spatially and historically. I need that sense of the "clouds of witness." But the institution, in the words of the old E&R prayer:

Grant that thy Church may be delivered from traditions which have lost their life, from usage which has lost its spirit, from institutions which no longer give life and power to their generation; that the Church may ever shine as a light in the world and be as a city set on a hill.

HEAR OUR PRAYER, O LORD.

But please note that is a prayer for a congregation; and any congregation is, almost by definition, an institution. And maybe it takes events like this for the church, as the Body of Christ and as an institution, to reconsider what baptism is for.

The Church, both laity and clergy, could do worse than to consider that question.

Belated Martin Luther King Day Post

2012-01-16T21:43:00.003-06:00

Nothing to say I haven't said before. Except to underline the point, that Dr. King was in Memphis supporting a sanitation worker's strike for economic justice. Or, as the quoted material in the post says:

Little Dovie realised, as Martin Luther King did, that the struggle and the civil rights movement wasn't just about race, but rather a far bigger issue of understanding power and class distinction.

Remember that every time a GOP Presidential candidate talks about the evils of "class warfare" or "the bitter politics of envy."

Dr. King was not envious.

(*corrected due to the kindness and attentiveness of a reader)

Driving a lovely, simple melody right into the ground....

2012-01-11T23:56:00.000-06:00

To the great bloggy interweb morass of "Oh, whatever...," add this: I went to a wedding this weekend.

I don't bring it up to trumpet who got married, or how, or that I have friends and/or family who still care enough about me to invite me to leave the confines of the casa in something other than blue jeans, but to raise a point made by Kierkegaard:

"What rules the world," Kierkegaard writes, "is... the fear of humanity. Therefore this fear of being an individual and this proneness to hide under one abstraction or another.... Ultimately an abstraction is related to fantasy, and fantasy becomes an enormous power... [T]he human race became afraid of itself, fosters the fantastic, and then trembles before it."

Although my starting point is actually here:

The great discoveries to which Kierkegaard is referring are made possible by the use of technology, and part of his concern is that the use of technology often results in human beings having "destitute" relations to one another.

Consider the modern wedding: it is entirely a creature of technology, and of the reality mediated to us by technology. The modern "wedding party," with its near army of bridesmaids and groomsmen (this wedding had both a maid and matron of honor, and fix other attendants on either side, aside from the obligatory "best man") is modeled on a royal wedding in the early 20th century. Every young girl, American consumer culture tells us, wants to be the "princess" of her wedding fantasy. Contrary to popular belief, this practice does not extend back into the mists of time. My parents were married in my aunt's living room, and this (despite the fact both grew up in Christian churches), was the norm, not the exception. Even in medieval Europe the public ceremony of the wedding was performed on the church steps, and involved the landed gentry exchanging deeds publicly (so everyone would know who owned what now). The religious portion of the ceremony was conducted privately, with the priest and any necessary witnesses.

But I digress. Weddings now are almost entirely mediated by technology. We expect a fabulous white dress that is very expensive (several thousand dollars for the dress alone seems to be the norm, at least according to reality TV shows. No, that doesn't mean it's the "average," but according to the technology bringing it to our living rooms, it's normative). The "event" is meant to be as splendid and memorable as a royal wedding, with all eyes on the bride and the whole world stopping to take note. Or at least as much of the world as the bride and groom can invite and get inside the church. And to this end, large spaces are usually preferred (or imagined). The intimate wedding, the private wedding, even the wedding in a setting other than an ornate church, is all but banished (yes, it still occurs; but no one sells weddings as events in a pasture or on a beach, unless the beach is at a very expensive hotel or resort). We even expect a certain set of words and order of vows, modeled not on our experience, but on the representations of weddings that have turned the Anglican form of the service into a cliche. Again, it is technology that has made us think this must be so.

Also, the wedding must be recorded, for posterity. Hundreds of photographs must be snapped. The entire wedding party must be held hostage immediately after the ceremony, not for tedious paperwork like signing the license, but for the purpose of posing every member of the party with the bride, groom, in groups, with all manner of parents and family members, until the entire affair begins to resemble a photo shoot for a clothing line catalog. And it must be done so technology can mediate our memories and preserve them for us.

In 35 years of marriage, I've looked at our wedding album probably 3 times. I'm glad we have it, but as a pastor and survivor of some wedding wars, what I remember most are the battles with the photographers, both to keep them from snapping photos during the ceremony, and the tedium of waiting for them to finish taking photographs after the ceremony before we can all go to the reception. Technology makes demands on us we all acquiesce to, whether we quite think about why, or not.

This wedding was no different. Technology, in fact, mediated the very sound of the voices. It was a cavernous brick structure, striking and beautiful, but the only soft surfaces were the people in the pews or on the chancel. The amplified voices of the singer and the pastor blasted out of the speakers and bounced and echoed off the hard walls. It was audible, but not entirely discernible, and yet without the technology we all expect now in public places, people would have complained. We sit passively before the onslaught of our technology, convinced that its slavery is to our benefit, its function is only to improve our experience. It's an odd quirk of our modern world, but one Kierkegaard was diagnosing over 150 years ago, long before it had gotten this bad or become this ubiquitous.

The wedding, like all modern and "big" weddings, was an event, a spectacle, something meant to be seen and heard, but the expectations of it were built by television, not by personal experience. We were meant to be an audience to the splendor, because that is what our technology has taught us to expect from special occasions. I once performed a wedding where I persuaded the bride and groom to serve the eucharist and make it a truly religious ceremony, rather than a secular one with the patina of religion applied to is (I've done a few of those in my time, where I was clearly the hired hand meant to say the words, not the pastor joining two souls in the eyes of God). The attendants (guests? invitees? family and friends?) were non-plussed by this. Having no idea how to react to the bride and groom passing out the plates (it was a very Protestant eucharist; even if we had had a kneeling rail available, no one would have gotten up to come to it), most of them sat politely on their hands and looked uncomfortable. The bride and groom enjoyed it, and appreciated how special it made the ceremony for them.

My best approach in weddings was to tell the couple on the night of the rehearsal that no matter what happened the next day, they would be married at the end of it; that it was a celebration, not a performance. This always visibly relaxed people who too clearly thought of the entire matter as something that must be pleasing to someone besides the two of them, or it would mar their happiness forever (or bring down the wrath and displeasure of some family members). When I say our weddings are now mediated through technology, and we think of them as spectacles to be viewed, rather than celebrations to enjoy, this is what I mean. Why is it our receptions are where we have fun, but the marriage ceremony is where we are supposed to be staid, rigid, and almost entirely impersonal? Where did we get the idea we get married in order to be the center of the world's attention, rather than to happily pledge publicly to our friends and family our love and commitment to another?

"Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction 'the public', consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organisation.... The real moment in time and the real situation being simultaneous with real people... that is what helps to sustain the individual. But the existence of a public produces neither a situation nor simultaneity." [Kierkegaard (1962b), pp.60-1]

The problem is the problem of abstraction. We draw out from the world an image of weddings, and put it on screen: first from royal weddings (the official imprimatur from which all social structure flows. Most of manners and courtesy are faint echoes of obligations and orders followed by royalty and those most closely associated with royalty, and it trickles down through the "lower orders" as each tries, in its own way, to mimic those in the strata above). What is drawn out from that association is put on screen: in movies, soap operas, sitcoms; and it reinforces expectations of being the star of our own movie, except this time in real life. And so we abstract ourselves from our own lives, try to "rise above" our "mundane" existence by taking on the imaginary trappings of being the camera's focus of attention (the camera which ever and always focuses our attention). But the characters in movies or on TV are "unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organisation," and what we draw from their example "produces neither a situation nor simultaneity." It produces an abstract idea that we try to live into, a castle in the air where we try to take up residence, if only for a moment. And it is not, ultimately, disastrous and destructive. But it is, finally, a little pointless; and a little sad.

Every wedding I attend or hear about prompts discussions of the expense involved, and stories of fathers offering the bride and groom a home in lieu of an expensive wedding, because it's a better investment. My wedding was a simple affair by contemporary standards, and I was anxious enough about such an important event that I remember little about it, and I'm glad it wasn't more elaborate than it was. Weddings are a cause for celebration, but they've become a cause for self-aggrandizement, which seems to be another kettle of fish altogether. How many people, a few years later, remember all the minor details of their wedding at all, and yet some are conducted by wedding planners and carried off as if they were military strikes. Does it make your marriage stronger, happier, more loving? Even wedding photos are a cheat; they aid memory, but they remind you, too, of what has been lost, what will never come again. Technology can save things for us, but it can also remove things from us. Photos are flat; static; and dead. "The real moment in time and the real situation [is] simultaneous with real people...." Photographs do not capture that moment and hold it; at best, they remind us that moment is gone forever. It isn't that photographs are bad, or even good: but they are technology, and again they mediate our memories, our experiences. And there is a cost in that.

Not a cost that makes photographs evil, but a cost that makes photographs an example. Who is that person? You may well forget, and someday soon the photos will be in the hands of family to whom that person is a stranger (I have such a photo on my desk, right now. What is preserved is an image. Who is the person who made that image, is lost.)

I really didn't intend to make this a screed about marriage and weddings, except as a more concrete example of the concept Kierkegaard is getting at. I have certainly encountered couples and families for whom the fantasy of a wedding had gained tremendous power, and they trembled before it. It's not that weddings are inherently bad, but we have, and within my lifetime, made them into something massive and complicated and daunting. One of the first weddings I remember attending was my cousin's, held in the groom's backyard. I played the piano for them, the family upright wheeled onto the patio. This weekend I attended a rehearsal dinner, not because I was in the wedding party or had anything to do with the wedding, but because I'm a family member (by marriage) who lives in town. Rehearsal dinners have now become the groom's counterpoint to the wedding reception, only with slightly fewer people. It's a mad kind of escalation that is nothing more than a propitiation of an fantasy which has come to scare us to death lest we do it wrong. It is a public event meant, not for friends and family, but some anonymous public and some observing humanity which we fear will be disappointed, or at least some future in which we will look back and shake our heads sadly that we didn't get it "right" when we had the chance, as if it were the ceremony, and not the marriage itself, which was most important. The problem of the abstraction is that it is the ceremony itself which is most important, even though we couldn't say why. Perhaps we fear being individual, and we create the abstraction to hide under. Perhaps its just that we prefer to replace the fact of living with fantasies mediated to us by our technology, the slave which is our true master.

That seems a little large to hang on something as small as a wedding, doesn't it? But a wedding ceremony is the ultimate public ceremony of relationship, and yet it is mediated into a fantasy through technologies both indirect (television, the "media" of print and advertising and movies) and direct (the technologies that make the modern wedding possible, and often the more elaborately the better). Technologies which replace, for us and through us, as much human connection as we can get away with avoiding.

On the other hand, a wedding is one social function that can never be mediated on the internet. And what can be run through this system of disconnected connection is the subject that concerns Messrs. Prosser and Ward. But to follow their argument, we have to shift gears a moment, and give ear to the rhetoric of Aristotle.

And why Aristotle? Because Kiekegaard's argument, as developed by Messrs. Prosser and Ward, starts with Aristotle's ethos, then jumps to the importance of the kairos, before pointing out technology eliminates pathos, and the result of all these affect, fundamentally (although it seems logically it shouldn't) the logos.

It's really kind of interesting, if you follow it out.

Consider, for example, the feelings of helplessness, disconnection, futility, powerlessness, expressed on any political blog, where the complaints about any one politician are often quite personal, but the attitude toward the voting public is quite abstract and conditional. It's often blamed on the media, but maybe the media is a mirror, not a creator:

"Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction 'the public', consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organisation.... The real moment in time and the real situation being simultaneous with real people... that is what helps to sustain the individual. But the existence of a public produces neither a situation nor simultaneity." [Kierkegaard (1962b), pp.60-1]

Why are the people always so stupid, so slow, so ignorant, such sheeple? Perhaps because they don't even exist, except as a concept with no real referent, a symbol with no real object. Rather like a bride and groom, if you think about it, who become mere participants in a ceremony that isn't about them, but about the appearance they make on the stage of their own lives. I've honestly seen more anxiety in weddings about the performance of the task than about the commitment being made, which can make you wonder: what has gathered us here?

... in our age what is an author? An author is often only an x, even when his name is signed, something quite impersonal, which addresses itself abstractly, by the aid of printing, to thousands and thousands, while remaining itself unseen and unknown, living a life as hidden, as anonymous, as it is possible for a life to be, in order, presumably, not to reveal the too obvious and striking contradiction between the prodigious means of communication employed and the fact that the author is only a single individual - perhaps also for fear of the control which in practical life must always be exercised over everyone who wishes to teach others, to see whether his personal existence comports with his communication....

This, of course, is the first desire of authorship: to put your name on thousands of objects. But your existence doesn't comport with the form of communication, and you address yourself only abstractly to an audience equally as abstract as the "author" is. I've seen this, too. Never work in a bookstore if you have illusions of putting your words onto printed pages bound between hard covers. Books are anonymous, the real person behind them not even an abstraction, but a cipher. If you are "known," the crowds flock to hear you; but, of course, they come to hear the author of the work, who may not be you at all. If you are "unknown," your name on the cover is meaningless, your words silent and stifled, and the customers in the store simply look around the anonymous person sitting alone at the table with a stack of books they are not interested in. Such is the power of communication. And how many books move onto the shelves, only to move off again, unnoticed, unseen, unattractive? There is a striking difference between the prodigious means of communication employed and the fact that the author is only a single individual, especially if that author stays a single individual.

Which brings us, finally, to Aristotle. The first order of business for Aristotle's concept of rhetoric is to establish the ethos of the speaker. It's always struck me as the most ironic of the elements, because it is a logical fallacy to attack the messenger in order to critique the message. But Aristotle (the father of logic) is right: the character of the speaker affects the reception of the words. If rhetoric is about effective speech, then the character of the speaker determines whether or not the audience listens. And if the speaker has no character, is simply, by dint of technology ("the prodigious means of communication"), a voice or a set of words, then there is, first and foremost, nothing to listen to. And afterwards, when the speaker is a character, she is a public figure, a person who may not be the one constructed from those words, but who still has to live up (or down) to them, someone preferably anonymous enough not to upset the audience which is a market for all those words, valued by all the persons, from the writer's agent to the bookseller, who make money off of them.

After ethos comes logos, but first for Kierkegaard's purposes there is the issue of pathos, of, almost, sympathy. The speaker must connect with the audience, must, in Bill Clinton's signature phrase, "feel their pain." The audience must, at least, empathize. That moment comes in even the most "perfect" wedding when the bride and groom kiss; it is the first thing that must be sincere, that cannot be staged although it is hotly anticipated; it cannot be false, although it may be uncomfortable and even awkward. It is the sign of common humanity, sometimes the only one allowed (or expected) in the entire ceremony.

Tied to all of this, now, and tied up so tightly I can't bring myself to raise it in a separate post, is my strong feeling that Mitt Romney marked "Paid" to the Tea Party last night in New Hampshire, and that little uprising that was supposed to change the world is as dead as yesterday's headlines. It's tied up with this discussion because I watched "Network" last night and realized that 1976 wasn't all that different from 2012, and while Howard Beale's popular show as the mad prophet of the airwaves presaged the entire Fox News network (watch the movie again and tell me I'm wrong), the kairos of the story could as easily have been today as 35 years ago.

Did you know there was a depression in 1976? According to Beale's famous raging speech, where he comes in out of the rain to tell America to shout "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!", there was. Times were bad, and Beale, according to Faye Dunaway's character, was tapping into the rage Americans felt. Starting to sound familiar? Starting to think we've seen this movie, and it was just a few years ago? Except Beale's rage and rantings lead nowhere beyond improved ratings which finally fall off and give the movie its tragicomic ending. And yes, the comparison has been made before between the on-air rant on CNBC and the start of the "Tea Party," but it supposedly went somewhere; all that rage supposedly changed government in 2010, and OWS was supposed to be the counterpoint in 2012. Except all that's left of the Tea Party now are the US Representatives who will soon be swept from office or made irrelevant, next November. Scott Brown, Senator from Massachusetts, once a Tea Party darling, is running as fast as he can to catch up to Elizabeth Warren, going so far as to endorse President Obama for making his recent, and controversial, recess appointment. Sen. Brown knows which way the wind is blowing, and it's not in the direction of the Tea Party. And while the GOP toyed with the possibility of every radical candidate the party could provide, when it comes to voting for them, the party can't quite seem to gin up enough rage to do that. So the rage Howard Beale tapped into, and the rage the Tea Party tapped into, has run out; the party's over, the ratings are flat, it's time to call in the terrorists for a spectacular on-camera assassination.

What does this have to do with Kierkegaard? Howard Beale and the Tea Party were entirely a construct of television. They lived and died according to the popular perception of them, a perception shaped by abstraction and a complete lack of authenticity. Both were completely composed phenomena based on a perception of "the public" that was itself as false and incomplete as the response supposedly generated by it. Howard Beale's rage was supposed to be clarifying and salvific; in the end, it was simply marketing, and marketing campaigns make nothing happen except to sell people something the already want to buy, and when they no longer want to buy it, the campaign is done. All marketing is based on the same abstraction Kierkegaard criticized: mass appeal to a mass that only exists insofar as it is running from being an individual, a flight which creates destitute relationships (the only person in "Network" who seems even faintly to understand this is Howard's friend, and he is powerless to do anything about it. Everyone else around Howard merrily guides him to his demise, unable as they are to see a human being before them; and, of course, Howard has abandoned his individuality in favor of his madness and his visions, which he mistakes for authenticity, just as he mistakes television for a communications medium.). Television, you see, is not a communications medium. It does not deliver to us a better sense of the world, or even a worse sense of it; a true sense or a false one. It is a megaphone, or a mirror, but it is a neutral object; it is the result of modern society, not the cause of it:

"Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction 'the public', consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organisation.... The real moment in time and the real situation being simultaneous with real people... that is what helps to sustain the individual. But the existence of a public produces neither a situation nor simultaneity."

I repeat that because now it should take on a clearer meaning. "Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give live to concrete realities...." In "Network" the "sense of association" exists only between Howard Beale and his best friend, and then it runs only one way, as Howard has suffered so many losses before the story begins that he's lost his sense of association, too. The medium is not the cause, it is only the medium. We don't expect miracles and fairy tales from weddings because of television, we expect them because we've lost the sense of association, and even attending a real-life event like a wedding doesn't restore it for us. To the extent we've learned to associate real-life with a TV screen we may even be disappointed with real life, which doesn't afford us the monocular view of the TV camera, but places us in a setting where several things are going on at once. We live less in real situations simultaneous with real people, but among a "public" which feels rage and shouts out of windows on command, or which rises up to "throw the bums out!", then settles back to let TV tell us what we just did, or didn't do, and we expect something, somewhere, to save us from ourselves. So if we can just control the media, or a cable channel, or a political party, or a Super Pac, or get people to read the right book, or think the right thoughts, then "the public" will finally see things as we do, and do things as we would, and we can settle back to our comfortable existence, and perhaps they will at last leave us alone in our living rooms and let us have our toasters and our TV's and our steel-belted radials, and we finally won't have to say anything. Or we can get impotently mad as hell, and shout that we aren't gonna take it anymore!

And then just settle back and take it some more.

That kairos, you see, is supposed to be the situation the speaker addresses, with logos and pathos. Howard Beale is short on logos, but he's long on pathos and ethos. He is first mad because he's so confessional about his woes; he starts his downward spiral by confessing he's going to commit suicide on the air, because he's lost his wife and his job and his reason to live. He starts his "mad as hell" speech by saying he was awakened in the night with a vision about how he was supposed to use TV to propagandize his audience. He lays his ethos before his audience, makes it the basis of his rhetoric, and his pathos is his earnestness. But it is a destitute relationship, an incomplete connection, and he dies a freak, a clownish figure presaging both Fox News and the confessional TV shows which still fill the morning airwaves (go to any waiting room where there's a TV and try to avoid those shows). And what has Fox News or those morning shows made happen? Nothing that wasn't already going to happen, that isn't already a spent force. By the same token Americans poured their hopes and wishes into the vessel of Barack Obama; and by the same token, they were mightily disappointed. We may not want to take it anymore, but what choice do we have? We live by the public; we die by the public. Blessed be the name of the public.

Rhetoric is supposed to be effective speech, but how much effectiveness can it really have in an age of dissociation? Aristotle put ethos first in his list of rhetorical requirements, and Kierkegaard criticized the age (which has not fundamentally changed since he wrote) as one "which reckons as wisdom that which is truly the mystery of unrighteousness, viz. that one need not inquire about the communicator, but only about the communication, the objective only". An age, in other words, in which ethos doesn't matter; or can't, really, because we cannot know the character of the speaker "when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities." In a land of abstractions, of "the public" and "politicians" and "the government" or "the church," what is real? Where does logos attach, except to abstractions, and of what value are those? But it is the abstraction which has become the most valuable. What can we discuss on the internets, what relationships can we maintain, if we cannot discuss abstractions like the state of the Church, or of our politics, or of our public figures?

Put that way, the questions are still to abstract to be anything but absurd, and Kierkegaard's sound point is lost again. His critique is not, ultimately, with "the public" or even "the Press," nor finally, with technology: it is with us. "How should we then live?", was Tolstoy's great question coming out of the changes technology wrought on society in the 19th century. Kierkegaard's equally profound question was: "How should we then be human?" It is a question that takes a great deal of attention to society to answer, but the answer is not ultimately in society, nor in critiques of society, as correcting society will not solve the problem.

No wonder this man looks confused

2012-01-09T08:14:00.006-06:00

Romney:

I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep people healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.

Which would be great if, as an individual, I could have my own insurance; but I can't. I have to have the insurance my employer provides, or that I can afford. And that policy, wherever it comes from, is not "my insurance." It's an adhesion contract: I take it or leave it, and as everyone in America knows, leaving it is not really an option.

An example is the coverage of colonoscopies. Most states have provisions requiring that screening colonoscopies be covered without charge to the insured. But a "screening" colonoscopy can turn into a surgical procedure during the examination. If any polyps or other items are removed during the colonoscopy (which is the best time to do it), the procedure stops being a "screening" procedure within the terms of the law and the insurance contract, and becomes a surgical procedure. You can easily go home to find out you are paying for the procedure you thought was covered at 100%. Can you "fire" the insurance company for that? No, and you can't avoid it by "hiring" another insurance company. The terms will almost certainly be the same whatever insurance you find (and good luck finding insurance for yourself alone).

So I can't "fire" the insurance company that doesn't provide the services I require, but the insurance company can certainly "fire" me, by refusing my claim on virtually whatever grounds they want to come up with. The insurance company doesn't care about the incentive to keep me healthy, like paying for the colonoscopy whether polyps are discovered or not; the only incentive it recognizes is to reward its shareholders.

Which, not coincidentally, is precisely the kind of incentive Mitt Romney seems most clearly to understand.

Addendum: It occurs to me that this situation is precisely why economists don't like "full employment," at least not in the layperson's sense of 100%. At a mythical 100% employment, the employees run the company because they can't be fired: there's no one to replace them. So "full employment" always means a number less than 100%, so that the economy delivers the greatest good to the greatest number. But society requires health insurance for 100% of its citizenry; those who don't have insurance are covered by public hospitals, and publicly funded healthcare. We don't, after all, cruelly countenance letting the uninsured sick die in the streets, if only because of the public health issues (the issues of inhumanity are, I sometimes think, quite another matter. But I am cynical in my old age....). Health insurance is the only way to pay for healthcare, so we have an adhesion contract situation: you have to take it, because you can't leave it; not unless you want your healthcare provided in a publicly supported ER room. So we have the "100% employment" situation: you can't fire your health insurance company, and you can't replace them with one that provides more coverage with less trouble at a lower price. You're stuck, because there's not really enough difference between insurance companies to slip a piece of paper between; or your employer isn't interested in your health insurance claims problems.

Ain't utilitarianism wonderful? Maybe somebody should ask Mr. Romney about the surplus population.....

Playing with fire

2012-01-02T08:50:00.000-06:00

Bouphonia moves me to want to say something about the late Christoper Hitchens, though I am mindful of the admonition never to speak ill of the dead, as they cannot respond. I am also mindful that I can't do better than this:

As you can see, things even out nicely. Granted, Hitchens' political miscalculations have a body count. But how about all those dragons he killed? (Or not actual dragons...but, y'know, the whole idea of dragons qua dragons, per se, in nuce, und so weiter. And not actually killed...but, y'know, personally disputed in some adamantine, ontically oppositional sense of not agreeing with 'em nohow, so there.)

There is also the matter that I don't really want to speak ill of the late Mr. Hitchens: I didn't know him, I marginally know his work, and I was never terribly impressed with his polemical style (so I still haven't tried to know much about his work). My experience has been that polemics and eloquence usually mask a lack of thought, and that Mr. Hitchens work was often, to quote a review, "Thought-provoking but poorly referenced." There's something to be said for provoking thought; but there's also something to be said for being annoying. Socrates provoked thought, too; but he was also, at least in Plato's representation, thoughtful. Again according to Plato, Athens didn't finally think so, though they later recanted (but Socrates refused to play the game with them), so perhaps he was even successful there, too. Who can say? Someone always writes history, and we always move on with the messy and contentious present. But I had heard about Hitchens' famous denunciations of Mother Teresa so I thought, without pretending to do real research into his efforts, I would look into the subject just a bit.

And this, honestly, is as far as I got: his article in Slate about her possible canonization (which is more about the Pope moving swiftly to canonize a saint, more than about the public figure), and a review of his book about her (and frankly, stunts like "Mommie Dearest" and "Missionary Position" don't do anything to endear me to Mr. Hitchens' thinking. Cute and smart-ass are not hallmarks of profound insight; they are the work of schoolboys. It's a reason I've never been enamored of Mr. Hitchens' work.) Alright, I've harumphed; let's get down to business.

Hitchens, notoriously fond of George Orwell, can't resist quoting him in his Slate article. It's supposed to be a clever choice, implicitly comparing the "sainted" (not officially, yet, I don't think) Mother Teresa with the beatific Mahatma Gandhi. But Hitchens doesn't get past the first line of the essay, which is too bad, really; because Orwell is much fairer to Gandhi than Hitchens ever is to Mother Teresa. Of Gandhi, Orwell writes:

In Gandhi's case the questions on feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity--by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power--and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi's acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant.

It's a perfectly fair question, and part of the old "in the world but not of the world" dichotomy so familiar to Western spiritual thinking (but not necessarily Western spirituality). There is, in fact, a problem with Western thinking on matters spiritual: we want our holy men (and women!) truly "holy," which is to say heilege, set apart, limned. We want our holy persons to be truly pure, truly unscathed by worldly matters, but then they are so otherworldly we mock them for their uselessness and ask if they are contemplating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We preach it, as the old judge said to me once, round and square, and are frustrated that we cannot have it both ways at once. Gandhi must be holy, and wholly apart; Gandhi must be influential, or what's the purpose of being holy, except self-satisfaction? Orwell wrestles (more or less) with this question. Hitchens blows past it without even seeing that it is there.

The end result seems to be an either/or: either Mother Teresa was a blessed soul who never erred and followed the will of God at all times (yet spent her life in Calcutta seeking, selfishly or not, another mystical experience of God which, from recent reports, she never again had), or she was a charlatan televangelist, an Oral Roberts in India, lacking only the 900 foot tall Jesus. The truth, most likely, is somewhere in between, and while Mr. Hitchens' work cursed Mother Teresa's candle, he did little more himself than curse the darkness. Is that an entirely fair assessment? No, probably not. It is, itself, poorly referenced. Was Mr. Hitchens a bad man? Heavens, I don't know, neither do I care. "Judge not, lest ye be judged" is a fine idea, but a poor one for bloggers and people who make their living writing polemics. Was Mr, Hitchens really any good at what he did? I never thought so; and nothing has changed my mind since his passing. According to Tim Challies, Mr. Hitchens plays the fundamentalist atheist in his book, coming off like the strident and unthinking proponents of Christianity he so loved to debate. I always thought it interesting he never debated a true theologian, in front of an audience of theologians and seminary students, or even before a group of philosophers of religion. He might have been surprised at how thoughtful and well-educated they were. Then again, he might not have noticed. I never saw anything in his work to indicate he would notice much of anything he didn't already think was worth noticing.

The whole matter reminds me of my favorite quote from the film version of "Angels and Demons":

"My church comforts the sick and the dying. My church feeds the hungry. What does your church do? Oh, that's right, you don't have a church!"

That's a bit of a slap, but not an unfair one, considering the kinds of diatribes Mr. Hitchens seemed to prefer. The sad thing is, he might have provoked a discussion along these lines:

The liberal must “save” the poor from poverty. The conservative must keep the poor from indolence. Both pity the poor as something less desirable. Neither attempts to challenge the basic idea that the poor are ultimately disprivileged.

[...] True Christian charity, therefore, is something more than our common definition of pity. White guilt is pity. Condescension is pity. Even inaction might be pity, for some conservatives. And what pity obscures is the paradoxical realization that the poor are, by certain biblical definition, worthy of higher honor. They own something we do not. And the means by which we might participate in that honor with them is charity.

12.2 Ultimately, Henreckson is arguing that empathy — specific Christian empathy — should replace pity. I agree.

Which makes me think of Dorothy Day:

I am reading (Simone Weil's) essays as a part of my Lenten reading...She says that we "...must experience every day, both in the spirit and the flesh, the pains and humiliations of poverty...and further we must do something which is harder than enduring in poverty, we must renounce all compensations: in our contacts with the people around us we must sincerely practice the humility of a naturalized citizen in the country which has received us."

I keep reminding the young people who come to work with us that they are not naturalized citizens...They are not really poor. We are always foreigners to the poor. So we have to make up for it by "renouncing all compensations..."

Mr. Hitchens would probably just eschew Simone Weil, too, and point out that Ms. Day was never the fundraising evangelist for her cause that Mother Teresa was; he would do it and think he'd scored a point, when he'd be missing the point, once again, altogether. He probably wouldn't take kindly to her claim about being foreigners among the poor, and would probably quote another of Orwell's essays about his experiences with poverty, missing the point again and going still further off the mark. I can't say, really; I can only speculate. But if we try to "renounce all compensations," and we fall short; well, we should be called on it. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God....oh, wait, that's Christianity, isn't it? I suppose it's unfair to bring that into a discussion with an atheist, also.. Oh, dear, it is so hard to know just what to say about, and to, the dead.

Perhaps I should say this:

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

And say I'm quoting T.S. Eliot, and even mention that it's on his marker in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. It at least gives me more of an excuse to discuss Mr. Hitchens' words, since they are left with us and he is gone.

The point is that there is a branch, a mode, a type of Christianity, which thinks its obligation is to set the world aright and do so on terms agreeable to the agent of such change; and there is a branch or mode or type of Christianity that wants to seek change by taking the world as it is, and responding to the particularities of each person and the life they lead. Mr. Hitchens, per Mr. Challies' review, is disdainful of the cotton diapers used by Mother Teresa's order, noting they use Pampers to impress Hillary Clinton. The implication is they should always use Pampers, but surely the disposal problems of Pampers are as important an issue as the poverty of the people Mother Teresa at least recognized as people (quick, how many truly poor people do you know? By name? Personally? And how many more are simply invisible to you, in your neighborhood and town and in the wide, wide world? Now, how many did Mother Teresa know, or Dorothy Day? And are you a better person if you at least try to help such ministries, even if you try to wash your dirty laundry clean with their good moral purposes?). Religion, like politics, is always inseparable from a certain amount of coercion and fraud. But sometimes it is the goal that matters, not just the means. And sometimes it is the means that matter, not just the goal.

It's just not much of an argument, is it, that what someone is doing in the name of charity is not what you would do? Especially if all you do is point out that they aren't doing it right, at least not by your lights. And what have you done to make the world a better place, besides point out the hypocrisy as you see it? How many mouths did that feed, how many of the dying did that comfort, how many of the sick do your actions, directly or indirectly, help in any way? Oh, I'm sorry, is that unfair? Are we discussing abstractions and ideals and angels on pin heads, and not physical hunger and pain and loneliness and an invisibility that few of us will ever know or, if we do, will ever read about or write about or have any of the luxuries of bloggers or opinion writers or the well-off at the top of the global economic ladder? Yeats wanted to finally end where all the ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Hitchens wanted only to sneer at those who thought such a place could exist, and damn the ones who made any attempt to acknowledge its reality, and do anything at all to improve it, or at least make it more bearable.

It's just not much of an argument, to say that Mother Teresa didn't fit your model of what should be done, that she didn't go far enough in one direction, or went too far in the other, or even that she's undeserving of sainthood. Who cares? Who cares?? Walker Percy at least asked the questions about living a life that matters:

What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness?...God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God's goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing...What is missing? Where did it go? I won't have it! I won't have it! Why this sadness here? Don't stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you've found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest! Stop, thief! What is missing? God? Find him!

Mr. Hitchens wouldn't even ask you to leave the table. He'd only ask that you join him in mocking some public figure because he'd found out she was, after all, only another human being. And if all that matters is that you berate one other human being, if that is what makes you feel wise or vindicated, or just makes it possible for you to earn that Thanksgiving table groaning with God's goodness and bounty, then there is something missing. And what's missing is not what Mr. Hitchens thinks is missing:

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions.

It is a mean thing to seem to be an advocate for the poor, when you are in fact merely taking care of yourself. But it is a meaner thing to damn an advocate for the poor, while yourself doing nothing for the poor whatsoever, when all the while only doing something for yourself and your pocketbook. Mr. Hitchens left us still swinging that club; what he didn't do, was leave us seeking for understanding. In his writings, at least, he meant only to bludgeon, and seldom, if ever, to discern. But the world has enough and too much of people willing to bludgeon others, metaphorically if not physically, to assert their positions. What we need a bit more of are people more willing to engage in the hard practice of epiphany; of understanding and discernment. We need someone willing to tangle the holy with coercion and fraud, if that's what it takes. One could make the case that that's the line that Jesus trod: his parables we think so simple and clear are, in reality, as complex and confusing and almost fraudulent today as when they were first uttered. The kingdom of God is like a pearl that a man bought by selling all he had? It is like a woman who spends more than the coin is worth burning oil at night to find it, then wakes the family to have a party and spend more to celebrate finding it? It is like an assassin who practices throwing his blade before he goes out? It is like yeast, which makes the whole measure of flour unclean, rather than heilege?

Discernment is much more interesting than polemics; if it isn't nearly as much fun.

And I suspect had he examined Mother Teresa's work, rather than set out to savage it, he might have done the world a great deal more good.It might almost, dare I say it, have been an epiphany.

Holy Innocents 2011

2011-12-28T13:44:00.005-06:00

When Herod realized he had been duped by the astrologers, he was outraged. He then issued a death warrant for all the male children in Bethlehem and surrounding region two years old and younger. this corresponded to the time [of the star] that he had learned from the astrologers. With this event the prediction made by Jeremiah the prophet came true:
'In Ramah the sound of mourning
and bitter grieving was heard:
Rachel weeping for her children.
She refused to be consoled:
They were no more.' " (Matthew 2: 16-18, SV)

In lieu of a sermon or even a commentary, two stories. If the contemporary first one makes you think somewhat of the much older second one (especially the tradition of godparents to give poor children a chance in life), and then makes you reflect that the more things change, the more they remain the same...

well, it's because that tart observation is true.

And what Matthew meant was not to record an historical event, but to indicate that the world likes this just the way they are, thank you very much. And the world reacts quite harshly when it fears things as they are, are about to be changed. Especially when they are about to be changed radically.

Which applies as well to the story of the Christ child today as it did in Matthew's day. Or, as Robert Southwell put it:

As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow ;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear ;
Who, scorchëd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
Alas, quoth he, but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I !
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns ;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defilëd souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.
With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I callëd unto mind that it was Christmas day.

Fourth Sunday of Advent 2011

2011-12-20T00:46:00.000-06:00

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
7:1 Now when the king was settled in his house, and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies around him,

7:2 the king said to the prophet Nathan, "See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent."

7:3 Nathan said to the king, "Go, do all that you have in mind; for the LORD is with you."

7:4 But that same night the word of the LORD came to Nathan:

7:5 Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the LORD: Are you the one to build me a house to live in?

7:6 I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle.

7:7 Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"

7:8 Now therefore thus you shall say to my servant David: Thus says the LORD of hosts: I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep to be prince over my people Israel;

7:9 and I have been with you wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth.

7:10 And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more, as formerly,

7:11 from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house.

7:16 Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.

Luke 1:46b-55
1:46b "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

1:48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

1:49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

1:50 His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

1:51 He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

1:52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

1:53 he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

1:54 He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,

1:55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

Romans 16:25-27
16:25 Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages

16:26 but is now disclosed, and through the prophetic writings is made known to all the Gentiles, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith --

16:27 to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen.

Luke 1:26-38
1:26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth,

1:27 to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary.

1:28 And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you."

1:29 But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.

1:30 The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.

1:31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.

1:32 He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.

1:33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

1:34 Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?"

1:35 The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.

1:36 And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.

1:37 For nothing will be impossible with God."

1:38 Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

The arrogance of David; the humility of Mary. That is the obvious place to start.

Advent is about preparation. "Prepare ye the way of the Lord," the famous words say. How do we prepare? By making a highway in the desert, a straight road the procession of the Lord can travel down, so all can see it long before it arrives? And to we prepare it so we can praise our perceptiveness, our perspicuity, or insight? Or do we prepare ourselves so we can be a handmaiden to the Lord? That way lies all kinds of trouble, not least of which is: who wants to be a handmaiden?

We don't "do" humility. Mary's song is taken as a hymn of praise and power. Her response to the angel is taken, at best, as sly; at worst, as demeaning. None of these are quite right. Mary is humble because she has no power. She knows her position in the world, and what she can do with it. In Matthew's version, the visitation on an angel in a dream (which marks Matthew as more Jewish than Luke; for Luke, incarnation and ephemeral touch at all points. Matthew prefers the more traditional visitation in sleep.), and the power of decision lies with Joseph. Zechariah has just made a decision, a manly decision by a decision maker: "How can I be sure of this? For I am an old man and my wife is well along in years." (Luke 1:18, SV). It is the question of one used to being responsible, who knows the burden for declaring this vision to the community will rest on him. It's also the wrong question: "Listen to me: you will be struck silent and speechless until the day these things happen, because you did not trust my words, which will come true at the appropriate time." (Luke 1:20, SV). Mary asks only how this can be; not how she can possibly trust it. And of course, here's where the question of faith, of knowing God and the mind of God, comes in: because the angel is a messenger, is an agent of God. The angel is not God, but the angel speaks for God, literally speaks as God. But how can you be sure the angel is true and can be trusted? How can you be sure this is not a delusion?

"Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word."

And by the way, something comes up to underline the importance, the radical nature, the raw challenge, of the Magnificat. It seems that ancient Rome, at the height of its economic inequality, saw the top 1% of Roman society controlling only 20% of the empire's wealth. That, as compared to today in America, where the 1% controls 40% of the nation's wealth. Of course the ptochoi, of whom Jesus was one from birth, would see some strong differences between the Roman Empire and modern America, in favor of America. Do we imagine, though, that the 1% in America today hear Mary's song and tremble? Any more than Rome did when Luke first penned the words?

When will those words come true? How can we know the mind of God, and see those words finally come true? So long, of course, as we are not the ones toppled from our thrones, or sent away empty-handed and hungry. Justice is a terrible price to pay for mercy. And it is mercy Mary is singing about. It is also mercy that she expects from the messenger of God, and so she offers humility. The two are joined, like hand and glove. Mercy is the greatest act of humility, because there is no pride in it. And humility makes mercy possible, because pride will never stand for anything merciful when punishment and the exacting of payment will do.

What do we do with this idea, that we are now, in some ways, less equitable than ancient Rome? Do we look to laws to correct this error, so we can return to fuller employment and richer earnings and go back to storing up our treasures on earth with frantic passion and near-wild abandon? Well, when I put it that way, it seems almost as foolish and panicking in a crowded store and spraying pepper spray on anyone near you. We would never do that, so surely we aren't pursuing the goods of the world quite so manically as...well, as others are. If we just had a bit more, and some to put by, then we could calm down. We could relax. We could rest secure in what we own. If we just had enough, then we could think about taking care of others. We might even be able to afford to be merciful; if only our pride would let us.

"Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." But only if you let it be with me according to my desires. After all, what am I, a servant? A handmaid? A slave?

How can you be sure that what the angel says is true, and can be trusted? "A Miracle on 34th Street" deals brilliantly with this problem. Is "Kris Kringle" truly Santa Claus? Or is he just a kindly but demented old man? We never find out, and the question is never settled. The courtroom scene turns on a simple cheat to avoid taking responsibility for an answer. The final scene, in either version, winks at the thought that the old man was really a right jolly old elf; but again, who can be sure? How, then, would you ever know that you were speaking to God, unless you already believed it was God speaking to you? How would you ever be sure? What proof would you find satisfactory? The proof to the little girl that the old man is indeed the myth incarnate is easily explained away with other reasons; it is not a final proof, except to her. And perhaps, at the end, the rest of us are humbled, a bit; humbled in our pretensions that life is not wonderful, that what seems like magic cannot happen, that love cannot transform us and bring out the angels of our better nature.

And is that God? And how do you know, one way or the other?

"Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word."

There's that blasted humility again! And what do we do with it? Do we accept it, and lower ourselves? Do we ignore it, and wonder how anyone can ever contemplate being merciful (except, of course, to us!)? Do we reject it, and harden our hearts against all entreaties to turn around. to change, to come and hear the angels sing, or at least see the oxen kneel? Which to choose, and how to choose it? If God has already scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; if God has already brought the powerful down from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; if God has already filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty, and already helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; have we simply not seen it? Is it possible this is true, and we keep rejecting the truth of it? Is it possible the truth is not bitter, but sweet; not sorrowful, but joyful; not despairing, but full of hope? Is it possible this truth is so simple, we simply have to humble ourselves to see it?

"Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word."

Let it truly be unto you, according to your faith. Amen.

"For poetry makes nothing happen...."

2011-12-15T22:46:00.001-06:00

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

W.H. Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"

Listening to NPR talking about the famous LBJ "Daisy Ad," I realized the last line LBJ speaks is a familiar one:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

And as a thought experiment, try to imagine any American Presidential candidate making an even remotely similar statement today.

Sometimes poetry does make something happen; whether it meant to do so, or not.

'Tis the season for epistemological adventures....

2011-12-15T13:52:00.001-06:00

Speaking of epistemologies, and for those of you who haven't already discarded Richard Dawkins as a spent force in the "atheist v. believers" wars (a "war" which deserves as much regard as the annual "War on Christmas"), Mad Priest has the link to Dawkins shooting himself in his own epistemological and intellectual foot:

'Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?'

That's Dawkins to Christopher Hitchens, in an interview by Dawkins. Click through Mad Priest's link to the source, it's really worth the effort (short and sweet). What bothers me is less the violence of the attitude (the Rev. Pitcher takes that on nicely) than the arrogance of it. Really, Mr. Dawkins? Do you honestly think you are any threat at all to Christianity? Really?

What a sad little joke of a man. I understand he's actually contributed something to science. Wonder on what scale that contribution to humanity should be weighed?

So many epistemologies, so little time....

2011-12-15T08:55:00.004-06:00

BBC "World Have Your Say" is hosting a discussion on science v. religion as I sit and try to do other things, and now the discussion has veered over to the question of whether or not religion can provide "actual knowledge." "Actual knowledge," of course, is a loaded term. One assumes the questioner putting it to the other participants means it in a rather logical positivist way, where the only knowledge worth having is knowledge as provided by science.

One problem with that, and we have this notion in Western culture: that kind of "knowledge" is what the Greeks, like, say, Plato, would call techne: knowledge of the world which is useful for making clothes, raising crops, building houses and other structures, but it isn't "actual knowledge" in the sense it's being put here. And now religion is being compared to fire, which can be useful or destructive, and can we not say the same of science? After all, mass death and global warming are both products of techne, are they not? Is that a good, or a bad, use of "actual knowledge"? Some would say good, some would say bad, some would say it's a mixed bag. Is religion, then, as this person put it, a human construct? Of course it is! But does that make God a human construct, an artificiality? Not necessarily, unless God is to be equated, let us say mapped, in a one-to-one correspondence, onto religion. I don't know of a world religion where God is equivalent to the faith itself. Certainly the concept of the God of Abraham and of Jesus of Nazareth is of a God far beyond even the imaginings of religion. Simply because we cannot fully know a thing, does not mean it cannot be.

Take the Higgs boson as an example. Earlier in the week, on the same BBC programme (British spelling, v. posh!), this idea of physics (it has yet to be established, except theoretically) was said to explain why things have mass. Anything, you see. And then it was said that without this we would not exist.

Well, of course, that's not quite true. It may be the theory is wrong (I understand Stephen Hawking thinks it is, and he may be proven wrong about that; or not.). It may be the boson has not yet been identified after all, and the theory survives to another day and more investigation. What is certain is that things do have mass. Why? Well, answering that will not cause things to have more or less mass than they do now, but it will explain, to physicists, some very important things: about their theories about the nature of the universe. Which is good for techne.

But I'm damned if I can see what it has to do with the rest of us.

Not meaning to condemn the science behind the discovery, or even to disparage such things as the "Green Revolution" which, according to some, staved off the "population bomb" predicted by Malthus and then by Paul Ehrlich (and which was made possible by science). Techne is good; it would be insane to deny it. But is techne "actual knowledge," and no other contenders need apply?

How does finding the Higgs boson change my life? How does it affect the pollution in my city, the violence of the people around me, the nature of the traffic and the modern world I must contend with, both physically and spiritually? Will it create the political will to combat global warming, or rising poverty in America, or the grotesque inequalities in the economic system? Does it's discovery mean anything to ordinary persons? Does it affect daily life, or how we approach life, or answer in any way the question: "How should we then live?" If it is "actual knowledge," what real good is it? If we aren't careful here, we quickly find ourselves back at Hume's distinction between synthetic statements and analytical statements, and before you know it we're back to logical positivism (which has the sole distinction of being a thoroughly dead end in philosophical circles). Knowing about the Higgs boson may produce a valid synthetic statement about my sense impressions, but what does it tell me about the state of my being? However, since my being is not amenable to sensory impressions (because, per Hume, there is no one behind my eyes making these observations. It is all just a collision of sensory impressions that seems to be an identity), can I actually say I have being?

Not according to Hume. And there we discard him. Because the question of being became the question of the 20th century. And the problem is, while being is not really deniable, neither is it subject to "actual knowledge." After all, do you know you have being as an a priori matter, or as a posteriori matter; and does the distinction matter to you? Hume would say your knowledge of being is illusory, but Wittgenstein, after cataloging as carefully as possible the very nature of "actual knowledge," knew he had not categorized all there is to know: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Which is an address to the issue that, if we cannot speak of it, can it still be?

Take "love" as an example. Libraries could be filled with the books that would be needed to contain all the words expressed on the subject of love, and yet can anyone say to have "actual knowledge" of the subject? Is it contained solely within our words about it? Are our words ever sufficient to express any aspect of this subject, much less all of them? Is your experience of love truly contained within what you can say about it, or even what can be said? We cannot adequately speak of it; but does that mean it cannot still be, tantalizingly apart from our impressions of it? Can love be no more than what I can experience of it, much less the smaller set of what I can express about it, in words, art, music, dance?

Now take "God" as another example. Love is accepted as an experience of Western culture, but "God" is denigrated as a fiction, or at best something inexpressible. And yet, to return to the Austrian philosopher:

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Ethics, Life and Faith," The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, Blackwell Press 1994). Can you penetrate my experience and tell me it is false, when it is not yours? To some degree, yes, of course. If I hallucinate giant bugs on the walls, or imagine myself to be God, the community (i.e., just one other person) can say I am wrong in what I describe. But is Bunyan wrong, or Julian of Norwich, or St. Teresa of Avila? Is my experience of God, real to me beyond description, false because it is not similarly real to you?

Who is the final arbiter of what experiences are real, and which false? Certainly some are falsifiable, but if others are not empirically provable, are they equally false? Then prove that you love someone: your wife, your child, your significant other, a family member. Prove it to me, as you would prove a stone is heavy, or an idea consistent with accepted reasoning. Go ahead. This should prove interesting.

I cannot falsify your passions; but neither can you establish them empirically. So, are they actual knowledge? Hume accepted them, but we don't have to; and besides, Hume denied the reality of identity, of the person, of what I call "me". And, as Kierkegaard pointed out, how can I prove that I exist? And yet if I don't, who is there to do the proving?

My soul extols the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has shown consideration for the lowly stature of his slave. As a consequence, from now on every generation will congratulate me; the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name, and his mercy will come to generation after generation of those who fear him. He has shown the strength of his arm, he has put the arrogant to rout, along with their private schemes; he has pulled the mighty down from their thrones, and exalted the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has come to the aid of his servant Israel, remembering his mercy, as he spoke to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever. (Luke 1:46-56, SV)

That is yet another epistemology; an epistemology of the season. As Wittgenstein said of Bunyan, this is "a description of something that actually takes place in human life." I'm happy for those excited about the possible discovery of the Higgs boson. I'm bemused by people who think they know what "actual knowledge" is, as if knowledge were reducible to a small and convenient term. My soul extols the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. He has put the arrogant to rout, he has pulled the mighty down from their thrones, and exalted the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things.

And that is the reason for the season.

Yes, I had a different picture up originally. Then I found this one at the Mad Priest, and I couldn't resist. It is so much better.

The Wages of Sin

2011-12-14T17:24:00.003-06:00

This is more appropriate to 12 days ago, but I find it coming up every Advent now; for me, at least.

And this is what brings it to mind today:

“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, said to investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq. At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”

Those who advocate war are often accused of not wanting to go to war themselves, because of the personal dangers war poses to the warriors. What is seldom considered is the psychic cost imposed on soldiers by war. It isn't like even the most graphic war movies. There isn't a "good" war, or a war where bodies are not dismembered and piled up, and the sight of death becomes a commonplace; and that atmosphere affects people in ways profound and shallow. No, we never consider the cost of violence to those who we order to inflict it. There is always a cost to violence, and those who advocate it, are seldom the ones who suffer directly from it.

As for the rest, it is from earlier years:

In the world, Advent means precious little; frantic for Christmas to come and go, the world is in a hurry. To the liturgical church, though, Christmas doesn't begin until December 24th, and it doesn't end until January 6th, on Epiphany. And before it ends, it will include two days of death: the Massacre of the Innocents, and the first Christian Martyr, St. Stephen. I mention that because Advent is actually akin to Lent, not to "December" on the American calendar. It is a time of preparation for shattering change, not for celebration of consumer excess.

This highlights a distinction I think needs to be made, between Christianity, and Christendom. It's an old distinction, but, like the Massacre of the Innocents and the death of Stephen right after Christmas, little acknowledged or its importance understood.

As I type this, I'm listening to a Christmas mix of my own devising, and Joni Mitchell is singing "River." That's the tone I'm going for, if it helps.

This is from Memory of Fire: Volume III, Century of the Wind, by Eduardo Galeano, tr. Cedric Balfrage, Pantheon, 1988.

"ARCHBISHOP Romero offers her a chair. Marianela prefers to talk standing up. She always comes for others, but this time Marianela comes for herself. Marianela Garda Vilas, attorney for the tortured and disappeared of EI Sal-vador, does not come this time to ask the archbishop's solidarity with one of the victims of D' Aubuisson, Captain Torch, who burns your body with a blowtorch, or of some other military horror specialist. Marianela doesn't come to ask help for anyone else's investigation or denunciation. This time she has something personal to say to him. As mildly as she can, she tells him that the police have kid-napped her, bound, beat, humiliated, stripped her-and that they raped her. She tells it without tears or agitation, with her usual calm, but Archbishop Romero has never before heard in Marianela's voice these vibrations of hatred, echoes of disgust, calls for vengeance. When Marianela finishes, the archbishop, astounded, falls silent too.

"After a long silence, he begins to tell her that the church does not hate or have enemies, that every infamy and every action against God forms part of a divine order, that criminals are also our brothers and must be prayed for, that one must forgive one's persecutors, one must accept pain, one must. . . Suddenly, Archbishop Romero stops.

"He lowers his glance, buries his head in his hands. He shakes his head, denying it all, and says: 'No, I don't want to know.'

" 'I don't want to know,' he says, and his voice cracks.

"Archbishop Romero, who always gives advice and comfort, is weeping like a child without mother or home. Archbishop Romero, who always gives assurances, the tranquilizing assurance of a neutral God who knows all and embraces all-Archbishop Romero doubts.

"Romero weeps and doubts and Marianela strokes his head."

This is the First week of Advent. In Christianity, we are told to watch. We are watching for the apocalypse. We are waiting in faith, faith not so much in certainty as "acting-as-if in great hope." Hope is supposed to be what we desire; Advent reminds us hope is also for what we need, whether we really want it, or not.

An Early Christmas Present

2011-12-13T11:24:00.002-06:00

While doing other, more important things, I simply have to post this for the 6 or so people who won't see it anywhere else:

Jesus Responds to Rick Perry's "Strong" Ad from DC Pierson

O Christmas Tree

2011-12-02T14:12:00.003-06:00

In case you haven't seen it, this is why it's fun to have the Internet.

Just Us!

2011-11-29T17:01:00.000-06:00

When I hear about this:

A 6-year-old Grant County boy has been accused of first-degree sexual assault after playing "doctor" with two 5-year-old friends.

And then consider that we have the highest percentage of our population in prison of any country in the world, I don't think this case is simply a problem of overzealous prosecution or "freaking out" about kids.

First, because it doesn't show up in the linked article, one relevant fact about why the "inappropriate touching" occurred:

"D" is 6-year-old child who previous to the alleged criminal act in issue, had medical issues that necessitated rectal examinations by medical personnel.

"D" is the child being charged with a felony. The girl involved told authorities they were playing "butt doctor," and no penetration occurred.

There is a political aspect to this case (plenty of info on that in the petition and elsewhere); but what interests me is the idea of criminalizing the behavior of others.

The parents of "D" are outraged at a six-year old being treated like a criminal, and well they should be. But who thinks a criminal prosecution of a six-year old is appropriate under any circumstances, and why? Well, apparently, people with the power to prosecute in a country where incarceration has increased 500% over the past 30 years (roughly the same time period that wages have stagnated for 80% of the population while rising for 20% of the population. Coincidence?) We have turned to criminal prosecutions to cure a variety of ills, so it's almost no surprise we would now criminalize "playing doctor" between small children.

Does it seem extreme to link this stupid case to the problem of incarceration? Well, some of this story is of a piece with the national story about prosecutions. Prosecutors love convictions, and not just because they hate criminals. Prosecutors, as this story amply shows, are political animals (not all politicians make sensible decisions in the name of politics). And this prosecutor, like many, obviously doesn't yet want to admit this prosecution is a mistake, or that a 6 year old boy is not an adult.

[L]egal scholars looking at the issue suggest that prosecutors’ concerns about their political future and a culture that values winning over justice also come into play. “They are attached to their convictions,” Garrett says, “and they don’t want to see their work called into question.”

That's from a NYTimes story about convictions being overturned by DNA evidence, and what lengths prosecutors will go to in order to protect their records. Prosecutors are political animals, and in a culture that values not just winning, but criminalizing behavior and punishing people with prison sentences, isn't it just a matter of time until that attitude is applied to children?

This prosecution is vile, rancid, egregious, and indefensible. As the attorneys for the parents point out:

"[The experts say] a 6-year-old child is unable to intellectually and emotionally associate sexual gratification with the act that D has been accused of committing," Cooper said....

And as they note in their lawsuit, a six year old boy is simply incapable of forming the mens rea (guilty intent, basically) necessary to charge him with a felony. That is simply hornbook law: without the mens rea, the act is not criminal. This is the basis for the "insanity defense" in some crimes: if the defendant didn't have the mental capability to form a criminal intent (if, for example, in a delusional state the defendant was killing in self-defense), there is no crime. Of course, for murder suspects who are "not guilty by reason of insanity," there is treatment instead of jail time. But six-year olds are not guilty by reason of the fact they are incapable of forming criminal intent, at least as regards a crime of sexual assault. This is why children are not charged like adults, or treated criminally like adults. It is absurd to charge a child with such an offense. But is it of a piece with the society we've become in the past 30 years? Do we feel so out of control that we are mad to be in control of someone, anyone? Chris Hayes opined over the weekend that if we see a loss of the "American Dream" (the idea that we will be better off than our parents), our politics would go bonkers.

I'm still wondering why he said: "If".

First Sunday of Advent 2011

2011-11-27T21:28:00.002-06:00

Isaiah 64:1-9
64:1 O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence--

64:2 as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil-- to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

64:3 When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.

64:4 From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.

64:5 You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.

64:6 We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

64:7 There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.

64:8 Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.

64:9 Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.

Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19

80:1 Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth

80:2 before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh. Stir up your might, and come to save us!

80:3 Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

80:4 O LORD God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?

80:5 You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.

80:6 You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves.

80:7 Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

80:17 But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself.

80:18 Then we will never turn back from you; give us life, and we will call on your name.

80:19 Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

1 Corinthians 1:3-9
1:3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

1:4 I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus,

1:5 for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind--

1:6 just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you--

1:7 so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

1:8 He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

1:9 God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Mark 13:24-37
13:24 "But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,

13:25 and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

13:26 Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory.

13:27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

13:28 "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.

13:29 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.

13:30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.

13:31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

13:32 "But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

13:33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.

13:34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.

13:35 Therefore, keep awake--for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,

13:36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.

13:37 And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake."

"Advent" means "arrival," and every year the arrival of the new church year begins with the end of all things. Which is also about as close as the church allows itself to get anymore to talk about God's judgment. It's a curious way to begin things, to say the least.

Speaking of curious, take a moment to consider these words of Isaiah:

But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.

We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.

Not the usual "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" description of sin we are used to. This is not a God who pushed the sinners away because they were unclean; they became unclean, says Isaiah, because God pushed them away. It's a curious thing about the descriptions of God in the Hebrew Scriptures: it's almost always a description of a relationship, rather than of a judgmental almost-unmoved Mover who responds only to failure. God's anger, says Isaiah, caused Israel to sin; God's absence caused Israel to do wrong.

Why don't we think of God that way? Where did we get this Christian idea that God only exists to judge us, and we are only saved from judgment because of Jesus? And our only relationship to God is to stand before God in judgment, a judgment which is hidden from us until the end of time?

It's an odd thing; we Christians insist God is "Father," but we then treat God like an absent, quasi-abusive, almost adoptive, father. We ask for things from God. What we don't look for is a relationship with God; except as God is going to make us happier and happier. Which means: what?

Well, consider the psalm, too:

Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth

before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh. Stir up your might, and come to save us!

Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

O LORD God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?

You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.

You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves.

Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself.

Then we will never turn back from you; give us life, and we will call on your name.

Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

This is a plea. But it's not a plea for a new job, or a good bargain on Black Friday, or even better weather or a mended economy. It's a plea for relationship. It's a plea for God to come and join us and restore us and return to us. God's return would mend Israel. God's return would restore Israel. God's relationship with Israel is what matters most to Israel.

We are not Israel. What would God's return mean to us? What would God's advent mean to us?

"Advent" means "Arrival." It's the moment we all dread, when family shows up for Thanksgiving or for Christmas, and they threaten to stay longer than we can bear to put up with them. And then they arrive, and maybe it's not so bad after all; and then maybe it is, and when are they going to leave again? We don't expect family to make us happy. But we don't want them to make us miserable, either. We expect family to be related to us, and we expect to have a relationship with them, even if it's one we don't really want. The absence of family makes us sad; and perhaps even strange. It makes us lonely, and cut off. It makes us feel abandoned, even if we never knew a good family. Advent means arrival. It is the moment we are all waiting for, even if we are not waiting for it.

What would it be like to have a relationship with God, instead of to simply expect things from God? Who would God be then?

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind--just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you--so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

The adventus always seems to speak in apocalyptic tones: fire burning wood and mighty warriors coming to save the people. Always a final proof, a final redemption, an end to suffering and doubt. Paul instead speaks of grace and peace that come from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. "Our Father." Do grace and peace come from our Father? Do they come from God? Or do comfort and benefits and all the good things we value more and more and more in this American life? What would grace and peace be? Where would we sell them in the marketplace? Or are they not commodities, gifts given to us, but the results of a relationship, of knowing God as Father? In every way, says Paul, we are enriched in Christ Jesus: in speech and knowledge; and we are not lacking in any spiritual gift as we wait for the advent, the revealing of Christ as Lord. What do we do with these enrichments, these gifts? Do we even recognize them? Did we realize they were ours, already here, already given, no need for a Black Friday sale or a last-minute shopping frenzy on Christmas Eve? Did we even realize we were called into fellowship, the fellowship of Jesus Christ our Lord?

Do we know what that means?

Advent always begins with apocalypse, but we misunderstand that, too. "Apocalypse" is the Greek word, but it doesn't mean "disastrous end to all things" and "dreadful final judgment from which there is no appeal." It just means "revelation." "Lord, when did we see you?" is the apocalypse of the sheep and the goats, the moment just before the revelation when they realize someone was there and they didn't recognize them. Apocalypse is not when all things end in disaster; apocalypse is when you finally know the truth. But if the truth is that God has always been there, and you haven't been looking....?

Chris Hayes said this morning that if the American expectation that the next generation will do better than the prior generation comes to an end, it will mean a major revolution in our politics. What he meant was, it would create a crisis which would end in a completely unexpected outcome. The headline from Black Friday was that retail sales set a record. The other headlines were the assaults on shoppers by other shoppers, by thieves, and by store security; as well as the story of the man who collapsed to the floor with a heart attack, while other shoppers stepped around or over him, intent on getting the bargains they came for. The fact is, in the past 30 years the expectation that this generation would live better than the last has proven to be false. Statistics make it clear the next generations cannot possible live as well as their parents and grandparents, despite the ubiquity of iPads and cell phones. The decline has begun, we are already living in it, our society and our politics are already reflecting the crisis. This is what that crisis looks like, but if we cannot recognize it, how can we even know that summer is near? How do we know it's summer at all without a calendar and someone to tell us? Do we even read the signs of the times, or do we just expect it all to be explained to us by someone at sometime and in the meantime we are busy with living, or blogging, or watching TV, or keeping up with our families?

This is not a Christian nation, and this is not an argument for a Christian society. Reinhold Niebuhr and Soren Kierkegaard marked "paid" to both those concepts some time ago. The call is not for the nation to return to Christ but rather, like the Desert Fathers, perhaps to consider the wisdom of a tactical retreat, of abandonment as salvation, or at least as fleeing the sinking ship for the few available lifeboats. It is a call to consider radical alternatives.

What life have we if we have not life together? But what life have we if we don't even understand what "living" means? What life have we without relationships, but we do even understand what relationships are? Do we have a relationship with God? Or do we just expect something from God? In a relationship, the absence of someone from it means we are missing something, perhaps something that will keep us whole. If we just expect something, absence just means we haven't gotten anything lately; and surely we deserve another gift! But if we have a relationship with God, if we truly want God around simply because God is God, then we are always waiting for God to show up again. And what would that waiting look like? What would that kind of living look like? And what would happen if we recognized, not that God was going to show up someday and really up end things, but that God was already here? How would that challenge things as we know them? And do we even want it to?

MINE!! MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE!

2011-11-25T15:46:00.005-06:00

The unofficial slogan of Black Friday. Why? Because:

A woman trying to improve her chance to buy cheap electronics at a Walmart in a wealthy suburb spewed pepper spray on a crowd of shoppers and 20 people suffered minor injuries, police said Friday.

The attack took place about 10:20 p.m. Thursday shortly after doors opened for the sale at the Walmart in Porter Ranch in the San Fernando Valley.

The store had brought out a crate of discounted Xbox video game players, and a crowd had formed to wait for the unwrapping, when the woman began spraying people "in order to get an advantage," police Sgt. Jose Valle said.

I live across the freeway from a "wealthty suburb." People from "that side" come over to the grocery store I shop at. I'm not surprised this happened where it did, and I imagine the person with the pepper spray made her getaway in a very expensive car. Whether she could still afford it or not, I can't say; but I'm guessing she lived nearby.

I understand at least one person was shot in the parking lot of another Wal-Mart, presumably a robbery attempt. Robberies I almost understand; at least they seem normal next to a customer taking out the competition with chemical weapons.

In Little Rock, Arkansas, close to the home of Wal-Mart, a riot over $2 waffle irons prompted Gawker to write that incident represented everything "awesome" about America, including the: "horrible economy, aggressive consumerism, mindless violence and a complete lack of concern for one's fellow human beings."

Jeremiah springs to mind in response to a day like this: "Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" Or Isaiah; surely the people are grass. But those are both too big, too sweeping, too grand for this occasion. The prophets were responding to events of life and death, of exile and loss; this is just the death of spirit. This seems more like Jesus chasing the money changers out of the temple; except Wal-Mart is no temple, and neither are the cities of America.

I was prompted to think, today, about what religions teach, and two fundamental teachings came to mind: that if there is a meaning to life, it is to enjoy life, although how it is enjoyed is the teachings of that religion. The other is to care for your neighbor, your fellow man. Neither is on display here, although ostensibly the reason for the purchases and the midnight sales is a religious one.

Well, not really; never has been. But can we at least get Thanksgiving back?

Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-24T09:32:00.002-06:00

"We're all forgiven at Thanksgiving, and everybody's welcome at the feast."--Garrison Keillor

PRAISE AND HARVEST

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, from whom cometh every good and pefect gift, we call to remembrance thy loving-kindness and the tender mercies which have been ever of old, and with grateful hearts we would lift up to thee the voice of our thanksgiving,

For all the gifts which thou hast bestowed upon us; for the life thou hast given us, and the world in which we live,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For the work we are enabled to do, and the truth we are permitted to learn; for whatever of good there has been in our past lives, and for all the hopes and aspirations which lead us on toward better things,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For the order and constancy of nature; for the beauty and bounty of the world; for day and night, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest; for the varied gifts of loveliness and use which every season brings,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For all the comforts and gladness of life; for our homes and all our home-blessings; for our friends and all pure pleasure; for the love, sympathy, and good will of men,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For all the blessings of civilization, wise government and legislation; for education, and all the privileges we enjoy through literature, science, and art; for the help and counsel of those who are wiser and better than ourselves,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For all true knowledge of thee and the world in which we live, and the life of truth and righteousness and divine communion to which thou hast called us; for prophets and apostles, and all earnest seekers after truth; for all lovers and helpers of mankind, and all godly and gifted men and women,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For the gift of thy Son Jesus Christ, and all the helps and hopes which are ours as his disciples; for the presence and inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, for all the ministries of thy truth and grace,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For communion with thee, the Father of our spirits; for the light and peace that are gained through trust and obedience, and the darkness and disquietude which befall us when we disobey thy laws and follow our lower desires and selfish passions,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For the desire and power to help others; for every opportunity of serving our generation according to thy will, and manifesting the grace of Christ to men,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For all the discipline of life; for the tasks and trials by which we are trained to patience, self-knowledge and self-conquest, and brought into closer sympathy with our suffering brethren; for troubles which have lifted us nearer to thee and drawn us into deeper fellowship with Jesus Christ,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For the sacred and tender ties which bind us to the unseen world; for the faith which dispels the shadows of earth, and fills the saddest and the last moments of life with the light of an immortal hope.
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

God of all grace and love, we have praised thee with our lips; grant that we may praise thee also in consecrated and faithful lives. And may the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.
AMEN.

THANKSGIVING

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, from whom cometh every good and perfect gift, we call to remembrance they loving-kindness and they tender mercies which have ever been od old, and with grateful hearts we would lift up to the the voice of our thanksgiving.

For all the gifts which thou has bestowed upon us; for the life that thou hast given us, and the world in which we life,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For the work we are enabled to do, and the truth we are permitted to learn; for whatever of good there has been in our past lives, and for all the hopes and aspirations which lead us on to better things,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For the order and constancy of nature; for the beauty and bounty of the world; for day and night, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest; for the varied gifts of loveliness and use which every season brings,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For all the comforts and gladness of life; for our homes and all our home-blessings; for our friends and all pure pleasure; for the love, sympathy, and good will of men,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For all the blessings of civilization, wise government and legislation; for education, and all the privileges we enjoy through literature, science, and art; for the help and counsel oj those who are wiser and better than ourselves,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For all true knowledge of thee and the world in which we live, and the life of truth and righteousness and divine communion to which thou hast called us; for prophets and apostles, and all earnest seekers after truth; for all lovers and helpers of mankind, and all godly and gifted men and women,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For the gift of thy Son Jesus Christ, and all the helps and hopes which are ours as his disciples; for the presence and inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, for all the ministries of thy truth and grace,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For communion with thee, the Father of our spirits; for the light and peace that are gained through trust and obedience, and the darkness and disquietude which befall us when we disobey thy laws and follow our lower desires and selfish passions,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For the desire and power to help others; for every opportunity of serving our generation according to thy will, and manifesting the face of Christ to men,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For all the discipline of life; for the tasks and trials by which we are ained to patience, self-knowledge and self-conquest, and brought into closer sympathy with our suffering brethren; for troubles which have lifted us nearer to thee and drawn us into deeper fellowship with Jesus Christ,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

For the sacred and tender ties which bind us to the unseen world; for the faith which dispels the shadows of earth, and fills the saddest and the last moments of life with the light of an immortal hope,
WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD.

God all all grace and love, we have praised thee with our lips; grant that we may praise thee with also in consecrated and faithful lives. And may the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.

AMEN.

Are there no workhouses?

2011-11-21T16:38:00.004-06:00

At least Ebenezer Scrooge was a fictional character; and Jonathan Swift was using satire to make a point.

I don't think Newt has an excuse:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich called child labor laws "stupid" Friday in an appearance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

"It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid," said the former House speaker, according to CNN. "Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising."

"You're going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America," he added.

You'll note the burden should fall on poor children, which puts Newt in league with Swift's narrator and Dicken's most famous character. Because what he actually says is that child labor laws should be means tested; the rich need not worry about putting their children to work. They are redeemed by the labor of their ancestors, no matter how many generations back it was. And along the way, Newt twists the word "tragic" into such a pretzel it literally no longer has any meaning. And "extraordinarily radical" apparently means the positions that made 19th century England such a shining example of compassion and enlightenment for centuries thereafter.

Shame still works, but not on our public figures. I'm not sure why that is.

Open your window and shout....

2011-11-21T11:50:00.000-06:00

It occurs to me that the anger and animosity about the police response to the Occupy movement is misplaced; or at least, it should be. If the Dept of Homeland Security and the FBI are "conspiring" with mayors across the country to restore order to their cities, it means Occupy is doing it right. If Occupy members get arrested, it means Occupy is doing it right. If 84 year old women get pepper sprayed, it means they are doing it right.

The question is, does anybody know that?

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants–for example, to remove the stores' humiliating racial signs.On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham's mayoralty election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Police Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run-off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run-off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

The Rev. Dr. King, yet again. It isn't simple, yet it is important. The idea of protests is either to disrupt; or it is to create "a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth." The latter, obviously, is more productive. The former, though, seems to have become the goal of the Occupy movement.

So, the choice is create a situation that opens the door to negotiation, or march, annoy people, and get arrested; alot. Which will just annoy people; alot. Martin Luther King started in December, 1955 with a bus boycott that lasted 382 days. It was 1964 before the Civil Rights Act was passed, 1965 before the Voting Rights Act was passed, and when King died he was leading marches for economic justice. But re-read the "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and you'll see King's focus never really shifted in 13 years of leading the movement. 13 years. And the Occupy movement expects to change things because they are pissed off at a few mayors and a federal government that is willing to help the mayors do what governments do: maintain public order?

I'm starting to lose interest in what the children are doing. David Graeber seems to think an anarchist vision that closely resembles a pure democracy will win the day. More and more I am not so sure. I don't seek a unifying vision so much as I seek a rational purpose. Disruption is not a purpose; it's a temper tantrum.

If there is no more purpose to the Occupy movement than that, then Charles Pierce is right, and this is the way the movement ends. Not with a bang, but with a shout: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"

And we all know how far that movement went.

Xmas Time is here (already?)

2011-11-18T10:47:00.001-06:00

"Look, Charlie, let's face it. We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It's run by a big eastern syndicate, you know."

Kelly Groehler, a BestBuy spokeswoman, noted that CEO Brian Dunn, once a store employee himself, "fully appreciates" the feelings of Melaragni and others, adding that Dunn will miss much of the holiday himself as he helps stores in Minnesota gear up for Black Friday. In a statement on the matter, the company said, "This year, customers have told us -- and our competitors -- that they plan to shop on Thanksgiving Day, and earlier than ever on Black Friday. We therefore made the difficult decision to move our opening Black Friday to midnight. We know this decision changes Thanksgiving plans for some of our employees, and we empathize with those who are affected."

Frankly, I'm surprised we aren't hearing arguments about how opening at midnight on "Black Friday" will create jobs, or how eliminating holidays and weekends will "create jobs."

Seriously.

Apparently the stores could open at noon on Thanksgiving and people would still be lined up from closing time on Wednesday night. This phenomenon seems only to apply to malls and "big box" stores, though. I worked retail for years, and "Black Friday" at the small store I clerked for was always a quiet day. It seems everyone took family to the mall on Friday, to get them out of the house (thus do we entertain ourselves in America). Our regular customers came by on Saturday, or in December. But I've seen the earnest faces of people jamming stores to get "bargains" the moment the stores resumes sales after the Thanksgiving turkey is devoured, people who don't seem to have an extended family they want to get out of the house. I really don't understand it.

Why this isn't all seen as a War on Christmas, or even a War on Thanksgiving*, is beyond me. Best I can figure, we need to put the "Christ" back in Xmas because it's better marketing for everybody. The slogan alone is still good for billboards and bumper stickers, and those things don't grow on trees.

And yes, this year Christmas seemed to obliterate Thanksgiving entirely (the decorations are already up, the carols are already caroming from the speakers in the stores; that's been true for a week now. I even passed a house yesterday already festooned with Christmas lights and yard figurines and fake Xmas trees), and Hallowe'en became the new unofficial gateway to Xmas excess. Thanksgiving vanished in the rush to sleigh bells and fake snow and ceramic "villages." Do we really love Xmas this much? Or are the stores just desperate to balance their books before New Year's?

Since Christmas Day falls on a Sunday this year, I'm every curious to see what the most heavily marketed churches will do about Sunday being a "family holiday." If the past is any guide....

*which apparently has been going on for years. I had no idea.

Then v. Now

2011-11-17T16:12:00.004-06:00

Now:

Cops are dragging kids away by the hair. They're whacking people around and then preventing medical personnel from responding to treat their wounds. The whole world is, indeed, watching. And it's trying to make up its minds.

It's easy for all of us to say that. We didn't get our heads cracked. We didn't get our belongings trashed. We didn't have our free library tossed gleefully into dumpsters. (An action which, to call it philistine, is to insult the cause for which Goliath gave his life.) We don't have the anger rising in us, except by proxy. Nevertheless, it can't end in images of bleeding cops and tossed barricades, and a CNN spokesmodel named Alison Kosik telling all of here at Gate 29 about how the brave brokers of her acquaintence have accepted these inconveniences as "business as usual." CNN is posing the members of the financial-services industry as the last gunners at Fort Zinderneuf. This is not good.

What I know is that John Lewis nearly got killed at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and he never threw a punch back in anger. I empathize with the feelings of the people who have been subject to the ludicrous reaction of hyped-up cops with new military weaponry, and then subject to the contempt and condescension of a greasy little plutocrat like Michael Bloomberg. But this cannot be the way it ends. A few days of ghastly videos — and photos like those below — and out comes a new narrative that in a dozen different ways excuses the bloodletting and then minimizes it, while strangers wait for airplanes, silent applause in their eyes.

Then:

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants--for example, to remove the stores' humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Written to:

"This response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama (Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter, Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop Holan B. Harmon, the Reverend George M. Murray, the Reverend Edward V. Ramage and the Reverend Earl Stallings) was composed under somewhat constricting circumstances. Begun on the margins of the newspaper in which the statement appeared while I was in jail, the letter was continued on scraps of writing paper supplied by a friendly Negro trusty, and concluded on a pad my attorneys were eventually permitted to leave me. Although the text remains in substance unaltered, I have indulged in the author's prerogative of polishing it for publication."

There is a difference between then and now. But until people started seeing scenes of passive marches being rolled down the street by water cannons, being mauled by dogs, being beaten bloody by policemen, they didn't start to sympathize with Dr. King and the Movement. Dr. King understood this. Consider how he begins his famous letter:

MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:

While confined here in the Birmingham City Jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine goodwill and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

Then think again about where he is when he is writing it.

I've used King's letter to teach rhetoric, to teach Aristotle's elements of argument, which are: ethos; logos; pathos; and kairos. Before you can even begin, Aristotle understood, the speaker must have a good ethos, a good ethic. A pedophile may make a perfectly sound argument, but who will give a pedophile the benefit of the doubt to listen? Dr. King understood this, which is why he downplays the fact that he's writing from jail. Today we canonize him; in 1963, he was considered a criminal and an "outside agitator."

Like Charles Pierce, I hope the Occupy movement doesn't end this way, but I'm afraid it will. The effort to be non-violent in the face of violence is a very deliberate effort. It is a religiously grounded effort, from Gandhi to King. Religion may not be a necessary concomitant of morality, but it can profoundly affect the morality people live by.

People will judge on what they see and what they think they understand. It's unfortunate if the Occupy movement doesn't better understand that.

Armistice Day 2011

2011-11-11T08:28:00.000-06:00

It's funny how conservative you get over time. I've come to prefer "Armistice" to "Veteran's" to label the day, maybe because "Memorial Day" has been taken over as another day to have a spasm of declaring ourselves free because we resemble Rome (with its standing army) more than we resemble Athens (with its citizen soldiers called to battle only when the need arose).

Paths of Glory is the story for today. The story of a French general ordering a suicide charge by his own troops, and then issuing a order to shell his own troops to get them out their trenches and into the fusillade of machine gun fire that would surely cut them down like so many blades of grass.

That's the movie for today. "A voice says, 'Cry!" And I say: "What shall I cry? All flesh is grass...."

Which is the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Call the names. Call the names. Call the names.

The World is Too Much With Us

2011-11-03T08:49:00.001-05:00

I have not been following the controversy over St. Paul's Cathedral in London as I should (Wounded Bird has been doing it admirably), and unfortunately as much of what I know is from BBC World Service (where I can never find links to what I hear, so I can't directly quote it here), but last night as I went to bed BBC was interviewing Simon Jenkins(?), who pointed out the Cathedral was a monument to power, not at all the kind of place Jesus would have wanted built, and it had an obligation to the poor. He mentioned that before the current Christopher Wren structure replaced it, the old St. Paul's had a special pulpit precisely for people to preach from or make speeches from, and that people gathered and argued and riots even broke out there, all in the name of free speech and democracy and airing grievances. So, he meant, there is a long tradition of the Church of England supporting the right of the common man to speak, and it was high time they returned to their senses and to that tradition, and paid attention to the poor rather than the powerful.

That, at least, is what I remember this morning.

Now the Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken:

Dr Rowan Williams said that the Church of England had a “proper interest in the ethics of the financial world” and warned that there had been “little visible change in banking practices” following the recession.

He urged David Cameron and George Osborne to drop their opposition to a European-wide tax on financial transactions, which is expected to be formally proposed by France and Germany at the G20 summit of world leaders starting tomorrow.

“The demands of the protesters have been vague. Many people are frustrated beyond measure at what they see as the disastrous effects of global capitalism; but it isn’t easy to say what we should do differently. It is time we tried to be more specific,” Dr Williams said.

On that last point I would say that perhaps we need, not more specifics within the context of the old discussion (a discussion which hasn't done so well for us in the past 30 years), not, in other words, to simply refine the old structures of inequality and unequal distribution, but to consider new styles of architecture, a change of heart. St. Paul's, as the guest (I'm still not certain of his name) said on BBC last night, is a structure designed to make you feel totally insignificant in the presence of God. At the same time, it's a building built by people with money, as an expression of their power. I doubt the building humbled them as much as it confirmed their exalted status and sense of their own self-worth (after all, to be able to command such a thing into being! It's almost a god-like power....). Maybe we need, Dr. Rowan, to consider the words of Mary when she heard her cousin's greeting; maybe we need to revive the concept of the Jubilee from the Law of Moses; or maybe we just need to dust off the savagely rejected and frequently savaged concepts of the liberation theologians. Maybe, in other words, we need to shift the discussion away from the awesome power of human society and how it is justly distributed, and towards a discussion simply about justice. At least for starters.

Or maybe it's just time to be a little more in the world, but a great deal less of the world:

First, the story. When the camp was originally pitched, over a fortnight ago, concerns were expressed about apparently critical issues of health and safety for staff and visitors to St Paul’s. The cathedral was precipitately closed for the first time since the Second World War. Mistake number one. When the health and safety report arrived after the first weekend, the Dean realised the issues were trivial and easily remedied with co-operative protesters.

Why the knee-jerk reaction? There was no one around the chapter table, other than the estimable Canon Giles Fraser, who would shortly fall on his sword, warning of the liabilities of embarking on particular policies. This would never happen in any other commercial or institutional organisation. So, mistake number two.

Mistake number three was down to naivety rather than indolence: St Paul’s allowed the City of London Corporation to call the shots. It moved into the common consciousness that to talk to the protesters would be to compromise the cathedral’s position. There was an unaired alternative view and it is this: no, it wouldn’t. The evidence for that is clear. Since those early days, the Church’s senior command has spoken regularly and publicly with the protesters, to productive effect.

The Rev. Pitcher lends a great deal of insight to this matter, but that is the internal affairs of the Church of England, and not being of that body, I leave the matter to them without further comment. I'm interested in the larger issue of the church in society, which this story points to. We have no equivalent to St. Paul's Cathedral in Jeffersonian America, nothing remotely approaching the Church of England in our history (the Pilgrims came here as castaways from that Church, if that tells you anything). In America, we get this:

Clergy emphasize they are participants in the aggressively leaderless movement, not people trying to co-opt it. Plus, in a movement that purports to represent the "99 percent" in society, the prominent religious groups are overwhelmingly liberal.

Religion might not fit into the movement seamlessly, but activist Dan Sieradski, who's helped organize Jewish services and events at Occupy Wall Street, said it must fit somewhere.

"We're a country full of religious people," he said. "Faith communities do need to be present and need to be welcomed in order for this to be an all-encompassing movement that embraces all sectors of society."

Part of the problem is the problem of evangelism:

She said some protesters are wary because they don't recognize the authority of institutions, including religious ones, and are generally looking for clergy to be "ministering but not proselytizing." She recalled a conversation with an Occupy Santa Cruz protester while a man in a clerical collar picked up trash.

"(The protester) said, 'That dude's here with us. He's not handing out pamphlets and trying to save me. He's picking up trash,'" Drescher said.

But part of the problem is the problem of "liberal" v. "conservative" churches:

Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an advocacy group for conservative mainline Protestants, said while Occupy Wall Street has succeeded in getting attention, it's limited because it's only attracting religious support from the left.

A call for government redistribution of wealth and reliance on street activism doesn't appeal to the swath of suburban churchgoers with conservative political and religious leanings, he said.

"It doesn't seem they put a lot of thought into expanding their support base beyond those who identify with 1960s-era protest action," he said.

Think Progress points out that this is: "one aspect of the 99 Percent Movement that has yet to be acknowledged by the mainstream media’s narrative: the growing support the protests are receiving from various faith groups and leaders around the country." And when they do point it out, our media can't help but frame it in the "horse race" narrative of politics. I don't think our clergy can't talk like Anglican clergy can; I think it's that they aren't allowed to in the national discourse. I mean, clearly American clergy can speak about the Gospels and justice:

One-sixth of all the words Jesus spoke, and one-third of all the parables, are about the dangers of wealth and possessions. It is something that we hear from the prophets — particularly of the Old Testament, and of course that’s what Jesus was steeped in, those were his scriptures — that any culture, but certainly one that claims to be Godly, is to be judged on how well the most vulnerable are treated.

It’s more than about numbers, and it’s more than about disparity of income. It’s really about our sense of community. And indeed, do the wealthy have a responsibility to the larger community? Are we really going to live in an “every man, woman and child for themselves” world, or are we going to be a community in which the greater good, the common good, is also a value that we hold?

But that's Bishop Gene Robinson at Think Progress, not Gene Robinson being interviewed by NPR. It's funny that people like Bill Maher, who really don't know very much, are allowed to inveigh against the hypocrisy of an American culture that claims to be godly; but American clergy can't get enough attention to point out what a "godly culture" should actually look like. Think Progress provides a host of links to stories about churches and clergy supporting the Occupy movement. Have you heard about it aside from stumbling across it on the Web? At least in England there is a public discussion going on about the responsibilities of the community to its members, to the least as well as the most powerful. At least in England, there are public resignations and public recantations of positions, and public reviews of attitudes, and religious leaders who take a “proper interest in the ethics of the financial world”. Judging by that NPR report, I suspect the "conservative" religious leaders in America would find such in interest an improper interference with "The Market." American religious leaders who do take such an interest are pretty much ignored.

The British are not a terribly religious people, and they aren't especially known for the spirituality of their culture. But it is clear that while they are so much like us in so many ways, good and bad, and while we are linked with them in our devotion to the "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism that the French and the European nations either deride or veer away from, our British cousins still have a thing or two to teach us about valuing people and examining our society and the ends we, as members of it, ought to pursue. I'm trying to imagine a secular entity in America which would be compelled to act because of the decisions of a major church building in America; and I just can't do it.

"Death is the only experience that is not lived through."--Wittgenstein

2011-11-02T11:47:00.002-05:00

It will seem silly to consider this in terms of the life of a cat; but it's the only lesson I have right now.

On Hallowe'en a cat that had been with us for 16 years, finally died. I say "finally" because, looking back, it is obvious the cat was in distress for a year or more. As he aged his personality changed, but it didn't really change until the last year. Before that, he was still a kitten, still as playful and anxious to play as he had ever been. He never grew old gracefully or settled into the role of alpha male among our three unrelated cats. He ruled them, but he remained the amiable kitten and most sociable feline I'd ever seen. Anyone who came to the house was greeted by him, and he insisted on having their attention; but he returned their attention with his affections, not his demands. That much slowly changed in the last 6 months of his life, or what turned out to be the last. He also gradually lost eyesight, from a cause we never determined. In the last weeks, he would walk into things, wander in circles, feel along walls with his whiskers and blunder into blind alleys made by walls and furniture, and seem bewildered.

His blood panels and physical exams showed everything was working normally; but in the last month of his life, he decayed so sharply it was clear something was going badly wrong. The first response was steroids and antibiotics, a course of treatment new to us though we have had cats for over thirty years now. The first two died without major medical intervention, both in old age (almost two decades ago, now). The first died of kidney failure, a sudden collapse that made euthanasia the only humane response. The second, his litter mate, died when he failed to get out of the way as I drove the car into the driveway (I still feel guilty about that). It was just as well, as we were moving and couldn't take them with us, and they were too old to be separated from us. The third died of a stroke, screaming in such sudden distress that euthanasia was again a relief. This spring we euthanized a fourth cat, with a tumor almost the size of his abdomen. The last died on the couch in his sleep on Hallowe'en. He was a black cat; somehow the date was fitting.

One week earlier, we'd taken him to the vet because he was in obvious distress; barely eating, barely drinking, and listless. Antibiotics and steroids were tried, a new course of treatment for us. He responded, and by the sixth day seemed almost back to his old self; not the kitten self he'd always been, but the old cat he'd recently become. On the seventh day, he'd collapsed again. On Hallowe'en, I came home at mid-day to find him in such distress I thought sure the only recourse was the needle.

But it was steroids, again; another try, another brave attempt. His heart and lungs were good, the blood panel had shown no problems. The cause was a mystery, but a mystery that could be solved with treatment. I took him home, and he lay on his side, mewing hoarsely and kicking his front legs. His back legs refused to move. He released is bladder and I cleaned it up, and then he slowly quieted. I decided to try the steroid pill, the high dosage wonder that was going to tell us if it was a brain tumor or brain inflammation he suffered from (a good response to this meant the latter, no response would mean the former). He wouldn't even swallow; he simply closed his eyes. I thought I'd killed him, but he opened his eyes which could barely see (he'd seem myopic to me, in his last days; able to see on that which was very close to him), and he sagged into sleep. He breathed raspingly, and we put him on the couch. Shortly, without even noticing it, he stopped breathing.

I have seen people die, and animals die. They do it the same way, sometimes with consciousness of what seems to be happening (yes, animals too), sometimes without. This death was a shock, because modern medicine had convinced me another injection would stave it off, would have an effect, would be enough this time. It wasn't, but who could know? Who could be sure? He seemed to rally at the vet's office, to show a strength I otherwise thought he had lost. But it was just the distress of being in a strange place; not even the blush on the cheek of the dying, it was the last energy he had.

"What if" haunts these situations. Once, when I still served a church, I was called to the hospital just down the street from the parsonage. I'd heard the ambulance, and with the phone call I knew it was one of "mine". In the emergency room I talked to the wife while her husband, having had a heart attack, was attended nearby. Then the doctor came in and told her there was undoubtedly extensive brain damage due to oxygen deprivation (he'd stopped breathing for a time), that his chances of recovery were slim, so: should they take him upstairs, or disconnect him now?

She turned to me (I can still see her), and asked: "What should I do?"

How to answer such a question? How to know?

In the end, she decided to send him upstairs. He died in the elevator, relieving us all of responsibility. I buried him a few days later, in a small town far from the church, where my memory is the funeral director greeting me with "Oh, you're one of those" when I pulled my robe bag from the trunk of the car.

But responsibility for the living, for not letting them join the silent majority of the dead; or responsibility for sending them along, whether we let them go or force their passage (there is really little difference): that is the issue where we gaze into the future even after the event is past, and wonder: "What if?"

For the cat, there was nothing we could do; but should we have tried? Should we have eschewed another set of pointless injections, an attempt at forcing pills down his throat? Should we have known better, perhaps just left him at home to die in familiar surroundings and such comfort as we could offer, rather than the terror and pain of moving him across town to the vet's office, and back again? He was silent with fear on the way there, mewing with pain and misery on the way back. Was it worth it? Was it wise? Was it the foolish desire for someone to confirm or confute what we thought we knew? Was it a desire for someone to know, someone who pretended to know, but really could only guess, as we could? When he finally died, we had to fight the feeling that he was just sleeping so deeply we couldn't be sure he wasn't breathing. We wanted the vet to confirm our diagnosis one last time. Had it been earlier in the day, we might have; but we had to wait until morning. By early night it was clear the body was growing cold, and finally stiff. There was no mistake then.

There was plenty of time for mistakes before that; but no need to worry about them after that.

This is, finally, what death is. Finality; the point where no more mistakes can be made, where no more uncertainty is faced. Death is the end of the future, of possibilities, of questions. The question of the dead is what to do with the body, but there are no more questions about what happens next for the loved one. There is nothing next for them. Now it is up to you. Now a new story begins, one that is without them.

It's not the same for a pet as it is for a person. For a person, the question can be: did we do enough? For a pet, the question can be: should we have stopped sooner? In the end, it doesn't matter. It is hard, however, to accept that.

Death is a finality, in a world where nothing is final. You will say to me "But you are a Christian, a pastor! How can you believe death is the end?" Because it is. It is as final as it was for the disciples at the tomb. What came next was not the logical extension of death, was not the mere slipping off the mortal coil to reveal the butterfly soul that could fly to heaven. It was something else altogether. I believe in the resurrection; perhaps even for pets. But the resurrection is not the next stage of dying; it is not the room to which death is the doorway. Death is a finality; but only for the one dying. For the rest of us, it is a hole which the world closes over, but which we, one way or another, do not. Even the resurrection will not fill that hole; only, in hope of the resurrection of the dead, unbreak it.

All Saint's Day 2011

2011-11-01T09:25:00.001-05:00

Revelation 7:9-17
7:9 After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.

7:10 They cried out in a loud voice, saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!"

7:11 And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God,

7:12 singing, "Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen."

7:13 Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?"

7:14 I said to him, "Sir, you are the one that knows." Then he said to me, "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

7:15 For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

7:16 They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat;

7:17 for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

Psalm 34:1-10, 22
34:1 I will bless the LORD at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.

34:2 My soul makes its boast in the LORD; let the humble hear and be glad.

34:3 O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together.

34:4 I sought the LORD, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.

34:5 Look to him, and be radiant; so your faces shall never be ashamed.

34:6 This poor soul cried, and was heard by the LORD, and was saved from every trouble.

34:7 The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them.

34:8 O taste and see that the LORD is good; happy are those who take refuge in him.

34:9 O fear the LORD, you his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want.

34:10 The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.

34:22 The LORD redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.

1 John 3:1-3
3:1 See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

3:2 Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

3:3 And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Matthew 5:1-12
5:1 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.

5:2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

5:3 "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

5:4 "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5:5 "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

5:6 "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

5:7 "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

5:8 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

5:9 "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

5:10 "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

5:11 "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

5:12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

In the German E&R church calendar, this would come not the day after Hallowe'en, but the Last Sunday of Pentecost, and they would observe it as Tötenfest.

Almighty and everlasting God, before whom stand the spirits of the living and the dead; Light of lights, Fountain of wisdom and goodness, who livest in all pure and humble and gracious souls.

For all who witnessed a good confession for thy glory and the welfare of the world; for patriarchs, prophets, and apostles; for the wise of every land and nation, and all teachers of mankind,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For the martyrs of our holy faith, the faithful witnesses of Christ of whome the world was not worthy, and for all who have resisted falsehood and wrong unto suffering or death,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For all who have labored and suffered for freedom, good government, just laws, and they sanctity of the home; and for all who have given their lives for their country,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For all who have sought to bless men by their service and life, and to lighten the dark places of the earth,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For those who have been tender and true and brave in all times and places, and for all who have been one with thee in the communion of Christ's spirit and in the strength of his love,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For the dear friends and kindred, ministering in the spiritual world, whose faces we see no more, but whose love is with us for ever,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For the teachers and companions of our childhood and yough, and for the members of our household of faith who worship thee in heaven,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For the grace which was given to all these, and for the trust and hope in which they lived and died,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

And that we may hold them in continual remembrance, that the sanctity of their wisdom and goodness may rest upon our earthly days, and that we may prepare ourselves to follow them in their upward way,

WE BESEECH THEE TO HEAR US, O GOD.

That we may ever think of them as with thee, and be sure that where they are, there we may be also,

WE BESEECH THEE TO HEAR US, O GOD.

That we may have a hope beyond this world for all they children, even for wanderers who must be sought and brought home; that we may be comforted and sustained by the promise of a time when none shall be a stranger and an exile from thy kingdom and household;

WE BESEECH THEE TO HEAR US, O GOD.

In the communion of the Holy Spirit, with the faithful and the saints in heaven, with the redeemed in all ages, with our beloved who dwell in thy presence and peace, we, who still serve and suffer on earth, unite in ascribing:

THANKSGIVING, GLORY, HONOR, AND POWER UNTO THEE, O LORD OUR GOD.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,

AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING, IS NOW, AND EVER SHALL BE, WORLD WITHOUT END. AMEN.

Trick or treat!

2011-10-31T08:04:00.000-05:00

I came across this at Wounded Bird (what better place?):

I've been pondering this whilst following the events outside St Paul's. There has been much criticism of the Occupy movement for not having 'clear goals' (on which see this great cartoon. That is immediately to try and force the rebellion to conform to the dominant discourse, to be co-opted into the patterns that pose no threat to the establishment. Specific claims will, I do not doubt, follow in due course. For now, however, it is enough for there to be the protest, the rebellion - the saying 'No' to manifest injustice, arrogance, ignorance and greed.

I really don't like making the kind of comparison I'm about to make, because it raises the object compared to grandiose heights. But the truth is, for about the first four centuries one of the complaints with the "Chrestians" was that they didn't have "clear goals." It took a several hundred years of hard work by a lot of good people for Christianity to "make sense," and even then, many think it "sold out" with Constantine's conversion. That's too simplistic, too, but then, this isn't a scholarly forum for debating Church history.

The point is, Christianity started as, and was seen as, rebellion. Why do you think all those early Christian martyrs were martyrs? And there were still, and still are, efforts to keep Christianity out of "the patterns that pose no threat to the establishment," even as the Church became the Establishment.

"What keeps you from giving now? Isn't the poor person there? Aren't your own warehouses full? Isn't the reward promised? The command is clear: the hungry person is dying now, the naked person is freezing now, the person in debt is beaten now-and you want to wait until tomorrow? "I'm not doing any harm," you say. "I just want to keep what I own, that's all." You own! You are like someone who sits down in a theater and keeps everyone else away, saying that what is there for everyone's use is your own. . . . If everyone took only what they needed and gave the rest to those in need, there would be no such thing as rich and poor. After all, didn't you come into life naked, and won't you return naked to the earth?

"The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry person; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the person who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the person with no shoes; the money which you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help."

Basil
4th Century

"The large rooms of which you are so proud are in fact your shame. They are big enough to hold crowds--and also big enough to shut out the voices of the poor....There is your sister or brother, naked, crying! And you stand confused over the choice of an attractive floor covering."

Ambrose
4th Century

And yes, Constantine did convert to Christianity in the early 4th century. History reeks with irony. And no, Occupy Wall Street is not a religious movement, although religion is responding rather poorly to it, at least in the case of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The Occupy movement is, by and large, a pro-democracy movement. And that's where the historical comparison becomes very dodgy. Romans had reason to wonder about the Christians; what they advocated was radical because it was so new. But we really shouldn't have to work it all out this time. That we are puzzled about a demand for true democracy, that we are nonplussed by a display, world-wide, of true democracy, says something about us; something about what we should know, but apparently can no longer even recognize. I'm not sure the cartoon is right; I'm not sure it requires the fearful voice of the Powers that Be to distract us from what the Occupy movement is advocating.

We seem to have lost our way ourselves. Maybe, on this eve of All Saint's Day, one of the last Christian holidays we haven't completely commercialized (who connects Hallowe'en with All Hallow's Eve anymore?), that's what we should reflect on.

Adios, Mofo

2011-10-27T11:09:00.003-05:00

I simply cannot resist, especially since the observation by Charles Pierce is so perfect:

Added Rick Perry Bonus: I was watching the Frontline documentary on the appalling case of Cameron Todd Willingham, whom Perry put to death for murder by arson based on trash science not far removed from bleeding people with leeches. Apparently, toward the end, Willingham believed his wife had sold him out and, while in the death chamber, he told her that he fucking hoped she'd rot in hell, or something to that effect. Confronted with the fact that the best scientific evidence exonerated Willingham of the crime, and that he'd rigged an investigation into the case by firing some people and installing his cronies, Perry says to a gaggle of reporters that Willingham was a "bad man" because, at the end, he directed at his wife "an obscenity-laced triad."

A triad.

Inches from actual English.

This is why we make fun of Aggies in Texas. They give us so much material to work with.

"We Make Things Go"

2011-10-23T12:54:00.006-05:00

I am left watching this new debate and wondering "but what is 'violence' and what is 'intelligence'?" Which leads me to first wonder how much the decline in battlefield deaths is due to intelligence that avoids war, and how much is due to intelligence that repairs the wounded, so they aren't the dead. Which are two very different kinds of intelligence, indeed.

I have a vague memory of this discussion occurring earlier, with the Crimean War being a touchstone because it was the last big war prior to modern medicine. The death tolls were high, largely because so many died of their wounds. The death toll in Iraq has been low, comparatively, because so many soldiers don't die of their wounds. Head traumas alone, which would have guaranteed death in earlier wars (and which are only possible because of modern technology which can produce IED's), are now wounds, not fatalities. The number killed in wars has declined as much because of battlefield medical treatment as because we are "less violent." Perhaps. Inquiring minds, at least, would like to know.

As for these numbers:

_ Murder in European countries has steadily fallen from near 100 per 100,000 people in the 14th and 15th centuries to about 1 per 100,000 people now.

_ Murder within families. The U.S. rate of husbands being killed by their wives has dropped from 1.2 per 100,000 in 1976 to just 0.2. For wives killed by their husbands, the rate has slipped from 1.4 to 0.8 over the same time period.

_ Rape in the United States is down 80 percent since 1973. Lynchings, which used to occur at a rate of 150 a year, have disappeared.

_ Discrimination against blacks and gays is down, as is capital punishment, the spanking of children, and child abuse.

I'm not sure all discrimination counts as violence, but perhaps that's too much of a quibble. I do wonder what the murder rate is in America, Russia, Asia, Africa, Australia. Or are we going back to Europe as the pinnacle of humanity and the apex of education? As for murder within American marriages, I'd point out that divorce is now quite common, and it may be not that husbands and wives are better educated or simply smarter (Pinker's thesis), but that they get divorced before they get violent. Murder was probably once seen as the only way out of a bad marriage, in other words. I don't know that, of course; but bald statistic don't tell you anything; it's the interpretation that reaches the conclusion, and what is that interpretation based on? Pinker wants to see it as signs of rising intelligence; if I see it simply as a sign of changing social strictures (divorce is no longer taboo), which of us is right?

Yes, rape is down, and lynchings are down. But the latter were a public spectacle much more than a private crime (they were finally relegated to anonymity), and American society has never had the stomach for public violence that the English once did (one of Pinker's widely related examples is Pepys attending a public execution. To this day the British laugh at physical horrors that most Americans blanch at, and I don't mean that as a slight on the British. But only Englishmen could come up with the Black Knight in Monty Python's "Holy Grail" movie, and there is a greater tolerance in British culture for violence as humor than there is in American culture. We love our violence, but we don't like to laugh at it. We take it too seriously; it's a moral punishment. But that's another topic, for another time.). If rape is down, is it because we are smarter? I don't know; I don't see a connection between intelligence and the desire to rape someone. And while we don't engage in public executions, they are still a thriving business in many states in the Union. The violence of them (hanging, shooting, electrocution) has certainly diminished, but the desire for them has not. And is this because we are more intelligent? Or because we are becoming more moral?

And no, I don't think the two are joined at the hip.

I've made a purely personal observation that of the European countries with violence in their histories, the Scandinavian countries with their Viking heritage seem the most consistently peaceful today. Is this because of education, or because of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? One answer works as well as the other. If this is a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces seem to be identical: either fits. But is it a jigsaw? Is this cut out of a pre-determined mold, and it is simply up to us to assemble it correctly? Of that I'm not so sure.

The question, then, is: how do we measure violence? Battlefield deaths? But we can't measure that without measuring technology, especially medical technology. Maslow's hierarchy could answer just as well, if we decide that what keeps mankind alive is food, clothing, and shelter, and once those are assured there is less reason to go to war and seek new resources. That was the popular argument a few decades back, when the idea began that democracies never go to war against each other, and countries with trade relations have no reason to fight each other (an assumption that ignores history and even literature. Homer's warriors before the walls of Troy battle individually all day long, and find out they are practically family, that their grandfathers were great friends and when this war ends, if they are alive, they will re-establish the old ties.) Perhaps violence is down statistically, but is that because we are less violent, or because the non-warrior class now outnumbers the warrior class, and markets work better than military oppression? Rome survived on its military might first; it had virtually no market economy at all. It's social stability derived from patronage, and whenever that stability was threatened the soldiers turned on the Roman citizens or those they were supposed to protect, and no one thought it cruel and unfair. One reason NATO intervened in Libya was because Gadaffi was "attacking his own people." Are we more intelligent than Rome? Or simply operating under different standards because there are more of us on the planet, and a power like Rome's is now impossible?

If we measure violence by rapes, what about assaults and gun deaths, or violent deaths in general? Are those down, up, the same? Perhaps Pinker addresses this in his book, but even if he does, how do we know why this is, or what it means, or even if it means anything? I don't have an answer, I just have questions. This is a fantastically complex issue, and to rest it on matters like "IQ" (which Stephen Jay Gould, among others, has shown to be a chimera. Identify "intelligence" for me, and then tell me how you measure it the same way you can measure length or weight or height, or even velocity. The notion of comparing "IQ" levels is laughable. You might as well compare the length of unicorn horns over the centuries.) I have also known very intelligent people who were very compassionate; as well as very intelligent people with no compassion or concern for others at all. Intelligence is not inextricably linked to behavior, and can't be assumed to be the weight that tips the scales in favor of the outcome we'd all like to see.

There's also the simple fact that violence is the favored form of entertainment, at least in America. Now, of course, we're back to defining "violence". Is it the antics of the Three Stooges? My mother thought so, when I was young and watching them poke each other in the eye, or strike each other with hammers. Is it the violence of a slasher film or a horror movie? Is it the violence of an "action film," or the highly choreographed fights of the new "Three Musketeers" movie, or the Robert Downey, Jr. versions of Sherlock Holmes? The comic book violence of The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Iron Man? Dalton Trumbo remarked, in his preface to his book Johnny Got his Gun, that during the Vietnam War we read daily "body count" statistics in the newspapers, and instead of thinking of the pile of arms and legs and torsos that number represented, and throwing up at the horror of it, we reached for our coffee cups. Does anyone even pay attention to the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore, or know why we continue it? War we can still always pay for, but people? Surely if we were more intelligent, Johnson's Great Society and RFK's compassion for the poor wouldn't have been erased from public discourse quite so rapidly.

And here, perhaps, I do the argument a disservice; but then, what is the argument? That according to numbers, we don't kill quite as many of our fellow humans as we used to? Well, perhaps not. But we certainly employ a great many people in endeavors directly related to violence, either real or imaginary; and we certainly have many industries devoted to the production of violence, again either real or imaginary. And we continue to do daily violence to the poor, the marginalized, the invisible, the oppressed, the neglected, the forgotten, the dispossessed, the ignored.

But to the extent we don't, is that because we are better educated, more intelligent? Or is it because we are more compassionate (and yes, education could increase that, too. Education is not merely the method by which intelligence is increased, although Mr. Pinker seems to think so.)?

I suppose it's all a matter of how narrowly, or broadly, you define "violence." Or maybe it's a question of how we define "intelligence." And also of how much "intelligence" is really worth in human history. I can guess Stephen Pinker's answer on that issue. I can also guess I would think him quite wrong.*

Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

One other point, which may or may not undermine the argument that violence is down because compassion is up (I'm not sure it is, I just think morality is as valid a cause for this perceived effect as intelligence is, and probably a more comprehensive answer. Anyway....): the focus on violence as an indicator of the "angels of our better nature" is an interesting one, since violence is always a personal problem, i.e., a problem of personal security. Violence is always about what is done to me and mine, not about what I can, or should, do for others.

Violence is bad, but it's worse when it's done against me. Nothing motivates a country like being attacked (violence against us); witness America's reaction to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. But who is poverty done against? It's always done against another, and it's easy to blame the victim for the problem. Even when we don't, what motivates a country to care for the helpless, the hungry, the marginalized and dispossessed? Apparently not intelligence, which should at least tell us their interests are our interests, their hunger and poverty will be ours if we are not more equitable. Yet is there a rise in compassion for the poor comparable to the alleged fall in violence? Has anybody thought to ask? And isn't it really a more important issue? Yes, violence is bad; but I would argue poverty is infinitely worse, especially since the measures of violence seem to be death and single acts (like rape). Poverty, unlike death, is actually lived through. But poverty requires an action on my part; violence requires a lack of action on my part.

Small wonder one seems more important than the other, more a reflection of our "better angels" than the other. It's a small thing, but the more I think about it, the more it bothers me. Are we really better off, as a species, because violence is down, because the physical threat against any one of us is arguably lower now than at any time in history? Is that really good news for the poor? Does this debate promise healing for the brokenhearted, preach deliverance for captives, mean recovery of sight for the blind? Because it seems to me that, until it does, it's just rearranging the first-class deck chairs on the Titanic.

The Curse of St. Custard's

2011-10-21T17:37:00.000-05:00

So, according to a new biography, Steve Jobs told President Obama:

"Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform." Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.

I won't comment on the teacher's unions issue, as there aren't any in Texas (right to work state), so I have no experience with them. Suffice to say, on that subject, that not all school districts are created that equally. Hold on to that proposition, it will play into this analysis in a moment.

Matt Yglesias thinks longer school days are fine idea, which only tells me Matt Yglesias knows nothing about school days now. It is true the most practical problem is costs, but the other problem is: who said school is over at 3 p.m.?

My information is anecdotal on this point, but where I live, elementary schools start the day at 7:30, which means teachers are there at least an hour before (some teachers, some staff). Granted, the day ends, for the students, at 2:30. But the teachers don't chase the students out of the parking lot. And if you are going to mandate school keep students in class until 6 p.m., you're asking teachers to work a 12 hour day plus grade papers, prepare for classes, deal with parent/student issues, etc., on a day when they probably will get a one hour break and lunch with the students (which is not a break at all). In other words, you not only need to raise their pay, you need to bring in a swing shift for the afternoon work. That, or work your teachers into burnout in very short order.

Don't even get me started on what pedagogical nonsense this is. By this argument, my community college students should be in class 12 hours a day, too, instead of the 2-4 hours they probably average now. What is the point of keeping students in a classroom for most of their waking hours? They will learn by osmosis, by exposure to books and chalkboards and teachers? Only people who've never taught in a public high school could imagine that more time is better time, or that a a 12 hour day would be as easy for teachers as the 12 hour day a lawyer or doctor might put in (and are we going to pay our teachers as much as we pay lawyers and doctors? I think not, hem hem.*). Teaching is, in no small part, baby-sitting. I don't say this to slight teachers, I say it because it is the truth. Young children through high school students, individually, tend to have far more energy than the average adult (especially the average middle-aged adult, who has experience that is very valuable in the classroom). That energy is multiplied almost geometrically (at least absolutely arithmetically) when you combine 20-30 such persons in one room, and then have school buildings full of them for 12 hours a day. The effort to control them, contain them, educate them, and be responsible for their physical and emotional safety, is a tremendous burden, and Steve Jobs (and Yglesias) want to increase that to half-again what it is now, and extend the teacher's working day after school finally ends, well into the wee hours of the next day?

Is anybody thinking of the children? Or of the teachers, for that matter?

As for the 11 months a year idea, good luck with that. Texas moved the start of school back into early August, a move done by the state Legislature, not any one school principal. The howls of indignation and outrage at disrupted vacation plans, not to mention from vacation providers who saw their season ending far too soon, brought that experiment to an end after one year. There have been discussions about going to a year-round school calendar since I was in elementary school (at least), and we've come no closer to it know than we were then. For better or worse, the 9 month school year is so deeply engrained in American culture you might as well try to get rid of Mom and apple pie first. I'm not opposed to year-round school; in fact, I'd champion it. But I've tried to change culture before, on a very local level, and I have the bruises to show for it. I may think the change is a good idea, but I won't soon try again to even seek to implement such a change.

As for the 12 hour+ work day, I can only say: if you want to drive even more teachers out of teaching, be my guest: implement a 12 hour day, even if you can get the tax revenues to pay for it. But I suspect it will be about as popular with parents as the 11 month school year. The most influential families today, on a local if not a national level, have children in many extra-curricular activities that keep them out of school but also away from home for several hours past 6 p.m. already. Tell those parents all those activities are going to end and their little darlings are going to be in a classroom for 12+ hours a day, and see what happens. Let's just say I won't be in the room when the unfortunate soul announces that plan to the wrong group of parents.

Contrary to what Matt Yglesias says, "The problem a mayor or school chancellor seeking to implement this idea would have is" not "a budget problem." The problem would be long before that, with simply trying to get parents to accept it. You know, we've really got to learn to start taking people into account in these public policy discussions. Steve Jobs may have been able to control the last details of every Apple store on the planet, but his reach ended right about there. Funny how people like Matt Yglesias don't get that, either.

*nigel molesworth, very posh.

Never start your day with the news....

2011-10-21T08:19:00.000-05:00

NPR tells me first thing this morning that the war in Libya was not cheap; or maybe it was:

"First of all, it dramatically lowers the cost to the American people. We spent just over a billion dollars, which is dramatically less than we have in recent military interventions," he said. "And also we see a great deal of legitimacy for our actions when we work internationally with other partners and allies."

It's certainly dramatically less than we're willing to pay for anything else. Anybody hear, say, a Paul Ryan complaining about "borrowed money" being spent on military ventures? Or does that only apply to domestic spending?

LOWE: I come from a very middle-class family and under President Obama, I get $5,500 per year to pay for school, which doesn’t come close to covering all of the funding, but it helps ease the burden. Under your plan, you cut it by 15 percent. I was just curious why you would cut a grant that goes directly to the middle- and lower-class people that need it the most.

RYAN: ‘Cause Pell Grants have become unsustainable. It’s all borrowed money…Look, I worked three jobs to pay off my student loans after college. I didn’t get grants, I got loans, and we need to have a system of viable student loans to be able to do this.

So, "I had to suffer, and so should you," combined with "We can't afford to spend money on people!" Which is certainly the theme being sounded, because the other major problem this country faces is too many hungry people:

SESSIONS: No program in our government has surged out of control more dramatically than food stamps. And nothing is being done about it. [...] Multimillion dollar lottery winners are getting food stamps because the money is considered to be an asset not an income. One of the fast and furious gun buyers –

HOST: But hold on, for ever lottery winner that has food stamps, there’s probably a lot more people who really need them who have them, right?

SESSIONS: Well look, do you think there are four times as many people who need food stamps today as in 2001. That answers itself. [...] We cannot do this. We do not have the money. Congress doesn’t understand that we can’t afford to double the program every three years.

Given the current unemployment situation I'd say yes, there probably are four times as many people who need food stamps today as in 2001. But again, no complaint about the cool billion just spent in Libya to destroy that country in order to remove Gadaffi from power. Of course, blowing stuff up can be profitable: right, Sen. Graham?

One of the problems I have with “leading from behind” is that when a day like this comes, we don’t have the infrastructure in place that we could have. I’m glad it ended the way it did. It took longer than it should have. If we could have kept American air power in the fight it would have been over quicker. Sixty-thousand Libyans have been wounded, 3,000 maimed, 25,000 killed. Let’s get in on the ground. There is a lot of money to be made in the future in Libya. Lot of oil to be produced. Let’s get on the ground and help the Libyan people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles.

So maybe all that money spent in Libya was just an investment for...I dunno, Halliburton?

There is a cost for all of this, as NPR pointed out this morning:

With the nation's student-loan debt climbing toward $1 trillion, it's taking many young people longer than ever to pay off their loans. Two-thirds of college students now graduate with debt, owing an average of $24,000. But some borrow far more and find this debt influencing major life decisions long after graduation.

So "we" cannot do this, but "they" can. And who is "we" and "they", again?

Of economics and morality

2011-10-19T09:15:00.002-05:00

Chris Hayes is surprised that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not revered in his own lifetime:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Which is a little funny (and no slight against Mr. Hayes, we all have the same historic myopia. The world was a simpler place before we were born, and the attitudes we learned were the ones everybody had before it all got complicated....), since earlier in the show Mr. Hayes cited King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." To many Americans, including those journalists in the NBC archives, Dr. King in his lifetime was a criminal and a troublemaker. "I have a dream" was quickly eclipsed by the anti-war sermon at Riverside Church; and almost no one supported King's efforts, after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and decisions like Loving v. Virginia (which removed "miscegenation" from our vocabulary, in 1967), to go after issues of economic justice. King was in Atlanta in his last days supporting a sanitation worker's strike. One of Mr. Hayes' guests, a young black man born long after Dr. King was dead and safely canonized, opined that Dr. King, had he not been killed, would have moved into the position of "elder statesman" before the '70's began; a revered figure, but irrelevant. One does wonder what effect a living Dr. King might have had on the public discussion of economics and economic justice in the '70's and '80's. Clearly what might have been the changed course of that conversation is almost unimaginable, especially to the generation who grew up thinking Dr. King was universally revered in his lifetime, and his most important speech was about a "dream."

This, in fact, actually captures the situation of Dr. King's efforts during his lifetime quite well:

The critics of the civil rights movement in America said much the same thing. Yet pre-eminent oral historian Studs Terkel, for his epic book RACE, interviewed dozens of African Americans for this seminal work, and suggested this ragtag element was one of the underpinning strengths of the civil rights movements. In fact, as one protester said, it really wasn't about 'blackness' or being allowed to sit in the bus or use the same toilets, it was about poverty and about class. " They play off one race against the other. That white kid on the picket line got the same problems as that black kid who don't have a job. He's on strike because his wages aren't what they supposed to be," said Union steel worker, Joseph Robinson.

And says Little Dovie Thurman, heavily involved in the civil rights struggle: "At first I couldn't understand why they hated Dr King so much. Then I began to see he wasn't just working with poor black and white. He was talking at unionizing, and against the war, all kinds of issues. That gave him a force of power that they didn't want him to have. They had to get him. He know that black power, white power, wasn't going to work. As long as he (King) was saying, "Let the black eat at the counter, let them go to the washroom," that was fine. But that didn't get at IT."

Little Dovie realised, as Martin Luther King did, that the struggle and the civil rights movement wasn't just about race, but rather a far bigger issue of understanding power and class distinction.

We forget that, just as we forget that morality and economics have been joined at the hip since economics was first identified as a subject for public discourse. The original impetus of economic theory was not to scientifically examine systems of exchange for insights into their function, as if they were natural forces like weather or tides; the original impetus was moral. Economic theory grew out of moral theory, and the idea that a just society should order its public affairs along lines that create a moral society. Utilitarianism, the philosophical underpinning of all economic theory, was originally intended to create a moral society by establishing a public morality that provided the greatest social utility to the greatest portion of society possible. Of course, if that didn't extend to everyone in society, it was either because no system was perfect ("Sucks to be you") or because the poor and the suffering deserved their fate, a proper consequence of their immorality. "Morality" often applies to thee and not me, especially when it is considered as a public concern. How I conduct my private affairs is less important than how the public is controlled and coordinated, whether the control is "incentives" or the control is imperatives. You can hear this in the advice Andrew Mellon gave Herbert Hoover when Mellon was Secretary of the Treasury: "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people." You can hear it in what Herman Cain said at the most recent GOP debate:

Herman Cain recently criticized the Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying, "Don't blame Wall Street. Don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself."

At Tuesday night's CNN debate, Cain stood by his comments -- to loud cheers from the audience.

"I still stand by my statement," he said.

And the GOP crowd that night went wild with approval; nothing we like more than blaming someone else for their moral failings. After all, economics is really about morality; the worthy are rich, the sinners are poor. It's not really a new attitude, either: "Teacher, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" The Gospels either record or reflexively assume that beggars and whores and the lame and blind are being punished for their sins, or their family's sins, and deserve the impoverished state they live in. One of the greatest scandals of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, one of the proofs that he could not be a holy (unscathed, pure) man, was that he didn't revile the poor and rebuke the lame, and treat them as people who should learn to live a more moral life.

Economics has just come along to give us a more acceptable basis for our hardness of heart. The poor are poor because they have failed in the marketplace, and the failure is their own fault. The market is fair, just, and rewards the pure in heart. These are still the standards which guide our public discourse. The critics of "Occupy Wall Street" almost all do so from a position of moral superiority, a position proven by their elevated financial (and so social) status. Martin Luther King spoke eloquently from a jail cell. Martin Luther King spoke so eloquently from the pulpit of Riverside Church even the Washington Post turned on him. Dr. King spoke eloquently, and the people who refuted him and rejected his message spoke eloquently from positions of power and privilege and economic comfort, sure that they deserved to be there, just as sanitation workers deserved no more pay than would cost those privileged persons as little as possible. The people with moral superiority, the people with the white churches that had the social and economic power (the journalists ask Dr. King how many white people attend his church; they don't ask if white people would be welcome there, which is a different matter altogether), sneered at Dr. King's efforts, and so prompted his famous letter:

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leader era; an too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, unBiblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

There it is. 1963. Birmingham. "Racial and economic injustice." Dr. King didn't pick up the latter after he'd solved the problems of the former. They were never separated; and they still aren't.

In fact, the greatest injustice is thinking that economics has anything to do with morality. It is how we continue to justify the market as a strong green god, sullen, untamed, intractable. And how we continue to justify the "punishment" the "market" metes out on those who "deserve" it. After all, one doesn't come between the god and the object of the god's wrath; not if you don't want some of that wrath on you. But if our god truly was God, and all men and women our brothers and sisters; or if at least we recognized that the market is a human construct and not a "god" at all, and we are all in this together...ah, what then?

Tedious historical footnote:

This is the photograph, made into a billboard, that Dr. King was questioned about in those clips Chris Hayes assembled. I remember it from my childhood:

The scene is the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, established in 1932 by a student of Reinhold Niebuhr's. It was a "communist training school" because it was teaching about race relations and was a center for training civil rights activists. As you can tell from the tenor of the questions of Dr. King, it's pretty clear this is a subversive place: blacks and whites, men and women, are sitting together as equals.

Papers, please

2011-10-17T20:53:00.000-05:00

I understand the concept of reasonable suspicion:

A standard used in criminal procedure, more relaxed than probable cause, that can justify less-intrusive searches. For example, a reasonable suspicion justifies a stop and frisk, but not a full search. A reasonable suspicion exists when a reasonable person under the circumstances, would, based upon specific and articulable facts, suspect that a crime has been committed.

Emphasis added

The problem for me with the 11th Circuit's ruling on Alabama's immigration law is that, under Federal law, entering this country without permission is not a crime. There's also the basis of the "reasonable suspicion." It's never going to fall on me; I look as white as my Anglo-Irish heritage can make me. No, reasonable suspicion in this case is always going to come down to one thing:

"If they see me they will think I'm suspicious and then they will detain me indefinitely," Gomez says.

Why would the police think she was suspicious? "They will see the colour of my skin."

So, will we, as a nation, institutionalize racism in the name of border security? Yes, I'm afraid we will. Why? Well, because of the court's ruling:

The Obama administration asked the court to step in last week, arguing that the law encourages discrimination and subjects state residents to unwarranted scrutiny from local officials.

I'm sure the court thinks the concept of "Reasonable suspicion" is the legal fig leaf that makes this ruling justifiable. But a police officer can always manufacture an excuse to stop someone who "looks illegal," and once that is done, the "reasonable suspicion" that they are in the country illegally can be as simple as skin color.

But that's okay. We have a border to secure.

Papers, please.

The Dismal Science

2011-10-17T08:35:00.000-05:00

In the land of mankind, conceived of as a pyramid, there are few at the top, and many at the bottom,” the congregation sang. “In the land of mankind, those at the top crush those at the bottom. Oh, people of the poor, people subjected to domination, what are you doing just standing there? The world of mankind has to be changed, so arise people, don’t stand still.

I like to remember that Malthus was an economist:

Supply-side' economics, where the focus is on the assumption of limited supply, continues to dominate economic thinking. Fear of scarcity is part of our way of thinking and, because of Scrooge's lost childhood, it is certainly part of Scrooge's psychology. One of the points Dickens is making though is that fear of scarcity and economic withdrawal can lead to the dangers of Ignorance and potential social unrest. A Christmas Carol is like the biblical Parable of the Talents, for nothing of importance will grow if talents are not used wisely. Dickens' work is in part a plea for a new and radical way of economic thinking, suggesting and imagining that at least as far as food supply is concerned it will be, and now is, possible to feed the nation. If not, then at least find a means of fair distribution of what supply does exist.

I start with Malthus because the linked essay, which is really quite good, is a study of Dickens' response to Malthus in A Christmas Carol as well as other works. It is clear to me we are seeing the Scrooging of the world economy in ways large and small. Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? If austerity isn't working, the answer is: more austerity!

Because, after all, we can't go on like this.

" A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does not work upon the compassion of some of her guests."

That's Malthus, but it's hard to see (or hear) what has changed in almost 200 years. The shorter version heard today is: "People are too damned expensive!" While that isn't as blunt as Scrooge's dismissal of the two gentlemen in his counting house, the sentiment is the same. The people today most publicly worried about this are the people with the least visible means of support, and the most time to be visibly fretting. They put me in mind of Sally Brown from Peanuts noting that everyone is worried about overpopulation, but nobody wants to leave.

It's always a problem, in other words, in which the solution should fall on someone else. So it's not that all people are too damned expensive; just the people I don't know well. Overpopulation is a problem, too; a problem for thee, but not for me. After all, now that I'm here, we can pull the ladder up and stop all those people from reproducing.

I mean, what's the point of being the 1% if you can't look down from eight stories up on the 99% who can't reach you?

This is theology of scarcity, again. And it doesn't have to be theological, to be a theology. Malthus was an Anglican curate, but if I labeled his thinking a "theology," it would be to say he had replaced the God of Abraham and Jesus with the false idol of the material world, a god nonetheless. So his is still a "theology," however crabbed and twisted. Do you think still I exaggerate?

Malthus asserted that Nature had a set natural limit on the population of plants and animals -- sparing of room and the nourishment to rear them. Two things did though keep the human population down : vice and misery ( Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death. Among mankind, misery and vice .) These vices and miseries and their agents of war, famine and disease were a necessary evil. In a later edition of his work in 1803 Malthus added moral restraint ( By moral restraint I mean a restraint from marriage, from prudential motives, with a conduct strictly moral... Delaying the gratification of passion from a sense of duty. ) This thought is surely in the mind of Dickens and indeed Scrooge when Scrooge lets go of his sweetheart, Belle. Scrooge once again is very reasoning in his argument. Discussing the world's attitude to poverty he says, "There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!"

Again, Scrooge sounds just like Herman Cain or Mitt Romney or anyone else who has spouted "Class warfare!" lately. I can't slip a piece of epistemological paper between them. And the purpose is always the same: we've got ours, and they want to take it from us, because there isn't any left for them!

Nor, of course, can there be. When resources are scarce, there is never enough to go around. But who says resources are scarce, except the people who have control over so much of them?

And what has this to do with Scrooge?

Scrooge's economics, largely based on those of Thomas Malthus, is isolationist and lacking any social dimension. Its mathematical equation of food production and population growth and its denial of human instincts all betray a rigid economic inhumanity.

Again, if that doesn't seem familiar, it should. Economics doesn't have to be so miserable, of course, but it so often is; or at least, it is so often used that way. We so easily prefer abstractions to people, because abstractions are so much more easily manipulated. And the economic models being pursued and promoted around the world seem determined to isolate the poor (however they are defined) and to exclude all social dimension because, well: people are too damned expensive!

And if this sounds like the same old song, it's because it is. Mary, the mother of Jesus, would have recognized it. She sang a different song:

"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

It would make a fine theme song for the Occupy Wall Street Movement. And what about Elijah and the widow?

After a while the stream dried up, for there had been no rain in the land. Then the word of the Lord came to him: “Go now to Zarephath, a village of Sidon, and stay there; I have commanded a widow there to feed you.’ He went off to Zarephath, and when he reached the entrance to the village, he saw a widow gathering sticks. He called to her, ‘Please bring me a little water in a pitcher to drink.’ As she went to fetch it, he called after her, ‘Bring me, please, a piece of bread as well.’ But she answered, “As the Lord your God lives, I have no food baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a flask. I am just gathering two or three sticks to go and cook it for my son and myself before we die.’ ‘Have no fear,’ Elijah said, ‘go and do as you have said. But first make me a small cake from what you have and bring it out to me, and after that make something for your son and yourself. For this is the word of the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of flour will not give out, nor the flask of oil fail, until the Lord sends rain on the land.’ She went and did as Elijah had said, and there was food for him and for her family for a long time. The jar of flour did not give out, nor did the flask of oil, as the word of the Lord foretold through Elijah. 1 Kings 17:7-16 (REB)

And, of course, the ultimate vision of liberation:

“Come for water, all who are thirsty;
Though you have no money, come, buy grain and eat;
Come, buy wine and milk,
Not for money, not for a price.
Why spend your money for what is not food,
Your earnings on what fails to satisfy?
Listen to me and you will fare well,
You will enjoy the fat of the land.
Come to me and listen to my words,
Hear me and you will have life:
I shall make an everlasting covenant with you
To love you faithfully as I have loved David.
I appointed him a witness to peoples,
And you in turn will summon nations you do not know,
And nations that do not know you will hasten to you,
Because the Lord your God, Israel’s Holy One, has made you glorious.—Isaiah 55:1-5 (REB)

The world's vision of liberation is to gain all you can and then hold on to it as tightly as possible. Only when confronted with the symbol of Scrooge do we wonder about this goal; but even then, we convince ourselves we are not Scrooge, and we identify with Bob Cratchit, who, after all, didn't have it all that badly:

"Bob Cratchit was paid 10 shillings a week, which was a very good wage at the time... Bob, in fact, had good cause to be happy with his situation. He lived in a house not a tenement. His wife didn't have to work... He was able to afford the traditional Christmas dinner of roast goose and plum pudding... So let's be fair to Scrooge. He had his faults, but he wasn't unfair to anyone. The free market wouldn't allow Scrooge to exploit poor Bob... The fact that Bob Cratchit could read and write made him a very valuable clerk and as a result of that he was paid 10 shillings a week."

In modern times he would have had a refrigerator, too!

But the lesson Scrooge learns is the lesson woven through the Bible, and usually ignored in favor of more "spiritual" lessons, one where the focus is on "inner liberty."

More recently, [Pope Benedict] said, “it seems to me we need not theology of liberation, but theology of martyrdom,” and argued that the movement will become a valid theology “only when it refuses to accept power and worldly logic” and instead emphasizes “inner liberty.”

And what is that? Something so precious we cannot define it? Something so valuable we cannot imagine it? Perhaps....

You gather corn -- will you bury England under a heap of grain, or will you, when you have gathered, finally eat? You gather gold -- will you make your house-roofs of it, or pave your streets with it? That is still one way of spending it. But if you keep it, that you may get more, I'll give you more, I'll give you more... I'll give you all the gold you want -- all you can imagine -- if you can tell me what you'll do with it. You shall have thousands of gold pieces; thousands and thousands -- millions -- mountains, of gold: where will you keep them? Do you think the rain and dew would then come down to you, in the streams from such mountains which God has made for you, of moss and whine-stone? But it is not gold you want to gather! What is it? Greenbacks? No; not those neither. What is it then? Not gold, not greenbacks, not ciphers after a capital I? You will have to answer, after all, "No, we want, somehow or other, money's worth."

Money's worth is what we want. And what is that? We don't know, but we have to have it! And there is your economics, in a nutshell! The systematization of the pursuit of the ultimate abstraction: getting our money's worth! And what is that? No one can say, but everyone can agree it is the most important object of living, the summa of human existence!

And they say superstition is dead, and theology a waste of time. Hah!

There are streams in the desert. Not everything is grinding and grasping and chasing after empty terms. There is always hope in what seems to be a hopeless situation. Which brings me back to quoting myself:

The simple truth of the Scriptures, of the Gospels, of the Letters of Paul and Peter and James and all the others, even of the Revelation to John, is that the world you live in is quite literally the world you see. Change your sight, change your reality. There are streams in the desert, and they are part of the prophetic vision; but you have to look to see them. We could call it seeking our place of resurrection. It's a better concept than seeking our self-assured security.

Are we on the road to scarcity? Or do we live in a world of abundance, able to satisfy the needs of all?

You, as Jean-Paul Sartre would remind us, choose.

And to end with quoting a song:

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?

What though my joys and comforts die?
The Lord my Savior liveth;
What though the darkness gather round!
Songs in the night He giveth:
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that refuge clinging;
Since Christ is Lord of Heav’n and earth,
How can I keep from singing?

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear,
and hear their death knells ringing;
When friends rejoice, both far and near,
how can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile
our thoughts to them are winging;
When friends by shame are undefiled,
how can I keep from singing?

I lift mine eyes; the cloud grows thin;
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smoothes
Since first I learned to love it:
The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,
A fountain ever springing:
All things are mine since I am His—
How can I keep from singing?

Guided by a revelation

2011-10-07T14:36:00.000-05:00

Listening to this on the way to work this morning, I thought of this.

Why? Because conveying new ideas to people is like evangelism. Sort of. Kind of. Well, it's similar.

Let me explain.

"Evangel" means, almost literally, "messenger of the good news." If you take out the prefix, you get "angel," a word we recognize as English (although it's actually Greek in origin) and which we associate with mythical winged beings. Not sure where the wings came from in tradition, but the purpose of angels in the New Testament (where the word appears, and so enters English, eventually) was to be "messengers," which is what the Greek word meant. So to be an "evangel" is to be a particular kind of messenger. But there we stumble immediately, because now the question is: "What is the 'good news'?"

TED (as in the conference) has an advantage over the church here. TED is for people who already know what TED speakers are talking about, and who want to hear something in a new or novel way. I try to imagine my mother at a TED conference, for example, and I know it would mean nothing to her. Far from being exciting and invigorating and inspiring, it would be confusing, bewildering, and boring. There is a basic principle of epistemology at work here, one we often overlook.

To learn something new, you have to connect it with something familiar. Too new, you can't learn it at all. There's a reason we start children off with simple addition and then subtraction, rather than with calculus and elementary analysis. Not only are the latter more complex than the former, they are too unfamiliar. Our entire educational system is built on this simple premise: in order to learn what you need to learn in college, you first need to learn what we have to teach you before college. The new must always be attached to the familiar, or learning it is almost impossible.

Which is why it can be so difficult to teach people philosophy. Some of it is quite familiar, some of it is not. The latter is considered "esoteric" by those who don't know enough about it. But it is esoteric largely because it is so unfamiliar. (I am rather like Socrates in that way; I still contend philosophy is simply the study of wisdom, and that wisdom is fundamental to thinking about human existence, and thinking about human existence is something everyone does throughout most of their lives. But I digress....). So if you start with the familiar, and then introduce the new, you have a better chance of explaining your new ideas.

Unfortunately, the most familiar thing about evangelism is the notion of salvation; even if it isn't our notion of salvation at all.

Mention "evangelism" and most people think of the earnest Christians who are concerned with the eternal state of your immortal soul. Already there are so many assumptions being made there the purpose of evangelism is very off-putting, and not just because the evangelizers tend to be rather annoying and single-minded in their purpose. They are single-minded because of their theology, however, not because of the demands of evangelism. It is one thing, in other words, to have good news to tell; it is another thing what "good news" you are talking about.

In the most evangelical of Christian circles (and often the most obnoxious, too), evangelism is not just the message of salvation, it is salvation; and more importantly, it is not just the salvation of the unsaved. In the theology of the evangelical (the ones who knock on your door, who are concerned with your salvation), salvation is not just for you, but for them as well. They take the Great Commission of Matthew ("make disciples of all nations") as a directive to convert the world to Christianity, or fail as Christians themselves for not doing so. Their salvation from damnation is tied not only to their acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior (into their hearts, they used to tell me. Did I have Jesus in my heart, I was often asked in high school by very concerned peers, usually the best looking girls in school. No, I replied, he'd just clog a ventricle.), but to their ability to save you, too. For this soteriology (theology of salvation), the believer is not saved until the unbelievers are saved, too. And so you get the endless cycle of evangelism as conversion to a particular theology, a particular credo, a particular set of beliefs. So you get Jehovah's Witnesses who come to my door repeatedly, even after I tell them I'm an ordained Christian minister. Ordained, Christian, and a minister I might well be, but since I'm not of their theological beliefs and principles, I am not yet saved, and their salvation depends on recruiting me.

And that, too often, is the face of evangelism.

It doesn't have to be, of course; but to put a new face on evangelism requires we abandon this model first. "We" being those of us who are Christians, but who don't think our salvation is of primary importance, and that our salvation is tied to yours. Those are not the ties that bind. That is not the love of God we proclaim. This is not the commission we were given. If we have any commission, it starts a bit earlier in Matthew's Gospel, with the sheep and the goats. The question of the salvation of your eternal soul is not so important as the question of your life here and now. It is said that St. Patrick evangelized Ireland not by preaching, but by doing, by helping the daily lives the people led, not by promising a better life in the beyond. And, of course, there are the words attributed to St. Francis:

"Preach the gospel ceaselessly. Use words, if necessary."

The gospel should be strange and new. And it should be apprehended by revelation, not by discovery. This is the epistemological mistake we make. The TED conference is about discoveries, things revealed because someone peeled back the obfuscation and found the true reality beneath, followed a path of reasoning to understanding, a path the rest of us can retrace, can be led down to the same conclusion. And there is nothing wrong about that, but the very idea of the gospel is based on a different understanding of understanding, a different epistemology altogether. The very concept of the gospel comes by revelation, not by discovery. And revelation always comes through action, never through reason. Words are logos. Revelation is not.

So there is no TED conference for evangelism, because the gospel is in the world, but not of the world. It is revealed, not discovered. And it is, as Wittgenstein said, a record of experience, not a doctrine handed on:

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Ethics, Life and Faith," The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, Blackwell Press 1994).

As my seminary professors told us, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is impossible from an historical perspective. It has never happened in human history, there is no precedent for it, aside from the usual claims of resurrection, common at the time of Jesus of Nazareth. (Thus the epistemological problem: something entirely new cannot be entirely known.) But those claims are not accepted as history, so how can this one be? However, the evidence is that something happened to the followers of Jesus, to the disciples and later to Paul, and that others had an experience that caused them to be believers, to start a movement which later became a church which later became a world religion. Something happened, even if empirically we cannot say what; they had some experience, which they identified as an encounter with the risen Christ. They were "simply describing what happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it." And it was never described as a discovery; it was always described as a revelation.

The TED conference is a model for the world. With TED, discussion leads to discovery. But with the claims of Christianity, revelation leads to discussion.

It's hard not to connect all of this, with this:

There is order here, and a kind of vague organizational structure. There is a schedule of activities posted for every day. People get fed from a kitchen in the middle of the park. The marches generally go off on time, and the park is developing its own internal institutions, like the free library that Eric Seligson tends along one wall— battered paperbacks, everyone from Howard Zinn to Robert Ludlum, donated by the protesters or by passers-by. The first batch of books got ruined in the rain when the police forced him to remove the blue tarps because they were "opaque" and you couldn't see what was underneath them. Seligson replaced them with clear plastic bins. "You know, this is sort of an anarchistic bunch — kids — but I really am amazed for the respect they have for the word," he says, "for literature of all different kinds, not just political. There's a real reverence for what has been written that has surprised me, since they eschew whatever came before, all the thought that came before. They entertain everything. You know, all the Isms, as well as the entertainment reading. We have the romance novels, too."
...

People looking for "a coherent message" in the park would do well to talk to Brendan Burke, a tall, tattooed truck driver with a degree from NYU and The New School, who's based at the center of the park, where four or five young people are crouched over laptops, shouting into the wind in their own way.

"People are informed today. People are online," Burke explains. "People in Kansas do yoga, you understand. Country's different, you understand? There's no more mooks in the citizenry. We are working people and we're not getting a fair shake, so we took to the streets. It's an irrational act, an act of passion, but we need to use self-control and respect. Those who want to go down with the ship will go down with the ship. Those who will be there will be sensible people who are out here for a reason. The kids who are out here who just want to party, well, they're beautiful children and we protect them every night. I can't even tell you what's going to happen after today. The cops may sweep this when the landlord says I want them out.
...
"This is not Tahrir Square. This is not Tompkins Square Park. This is not Yuppies against squatters. This is about minds. We need help from people who know. We need help from people in the financial industry who know. They should be here, too. He should want to see a better community. I want to see change in a systematic and legislative way. We're looking for real results. We're looking for protection for people. We're down here trying to play bills. It's serious out there, but it's quiet, because it happens at everyone's kitchen table. It's happening household-by-household. There's a sense out there, which I hope what's going on here will dissipate, that there's something wrong with me. I'm a jerk because I can't pay that bill. There are working men who will march tomorrow. It's all about people, who feel they got duped. There needs to be a systematic legislative change, so that this cannot happen any more."

Do I mean OWS is a Christian movement, or should be? Or that it is depending upon some revelation from a deity for people outside the movement to "get it"? No; but the basic approach of OWS is the same as the basic approach of the early Christian church: you don't get it, until you get it. And there is no simple message here, no single phrase or word or idea that sums it all up.

26 Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” 27 So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian[a] eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, 28 and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. 29 The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”

30 Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.

31 “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

32 This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading:

“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
33 In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.”

34 The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” 35 Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

Acts 8:26-35, NIV

That's Luke's version of early church evangelism. Philip is guided by a revelation from God, and reveals not a singular idea, but "the good news about Jesus." And what was that? Presumably more than "Jesus Saves" or "Do you know Jesus as your Lord and Savior?" ("Lord" and "Savior" being words that would have made more sense in Luke's culture than in ours, and had far less to do with religion and Christianity in particular, than they do today).

It is not too much to say that OWS is demanding a change of perspective, a whole sight, or all the rest is desolation. It is not too much to say that is the claim of Christian evangelism, too. And while evangelism must use the tools of the world, just as OWS is using Verizon to access the internet, evangelism can still be in the world but not of the world. Because, unlike the discoveries discussed at TED, evangelism is about the revelation given in a human life; a revelation that can change and challenge a life. Are we all meant to be evangelists if we are Christians? No. But we are all meant to preach the gospel; and use words, if necessary.

Purity of Heart might get in the way

2011-10-06T15:13:00.000-05:00

Occupy Wall Street occupying my thoughts:

So to all those trying to figure out how to engage, here’s my advice. If you want to “help” #OccupyWallStreet, in New York or any place around the country, think about what you can bring to a public space to make it more lively, interesting, or helpful. On a basic level, just bring yourself. If you are a cook, cook food and bring it. If you are a lawyer, offer free legal help. If you’re an artist, make art. If you’re Joe Stiglitz, go by and host a brief teach-in (as he actually did). If you can publish, make a newspaper. One idea is to bring a laptop with internet access, and open it to the spiffy complaint page of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Put up a sign called “Complain About Your Bank” above the laptop, and show people how to use it. That’s useful. That shows people how to interact with their government and take action to empower themselves against banks. Make the space better, and then enjoy what you’ve made. Or, if you want to fight politically, fight for the right to this public space. Try and make sure predator drones aren’t at either political convention. Advocate for keeping parks open.

The premise of their politics is that #OccupyWallStreet isn’t designed to fit into your TV or newspaper. Nothing human really is, which is why our politics is so utterly deformed. It’s why they don’t want to be “on message” – what kind of human society can truly be reduced to a slogan? I’m not sure I agree with their political premise. But in the carnival they have created, in the liveliness and beauty and art and fun and utter humanity of it all, they make a damn good case.

There was a quote from Steve Jobs on NPR this morning, where he described how the original Mac was designed by poets and artists and historians and a lot of people we don't ordinarily think of as being involved in computer design or even in consumer product design. And I remembered the essay in the Atlantic by James Fallows when the Mac first came out and almost no one knew what it was. Fallows critiqued it because of the mouse and the interface which would soon become ubiquitous as "Windows" (this was in the days when we all had to learn the language of DOS) and the complexity of the programming which he feared was too much of a sledgehammer swatting a fly.

And now all we can say is that Steve Jobs changed the world, because he refused to think like a computer programmer or to have only one message in mind when he designed a new product.

And it occurred to me, that might still be an applicable lesson.

Is "Messy" Messianic? And other useless considerations....

2011-10-04T11:09:00.000-05:00

I was directed here by starting here, so first, my thanks to both Ann and Mimi. But what I'm most interested in is here, something Harvey Cox said 12 years ago. But to simply put the matter in context:

Still, the liturgy of The Market is not proceeding without some opposition from the pews. A considerable battle is shaping up in the United States, for example, over the attempt to merchandise human genes. A few years ago, banding together for the first time in memory, virtually all the religious institutions in the country, from the liberal National Council of Churches to the Catholic bishops to the Christian Coalition, opposed the gene mart, the newest theophany of The Market. But these critics are followers of what are now "old religions," which, like the goddess cults that were thriving when the worship of the vigorous young Apollo began sweeping ancient Greece, may not have the strength to slow the spread of the new devotion.

Opposition to the "liturgy of The Market" is currently being pronounced by the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, which is spreading out to occupy other places as well. But the narrative of the movement is not yet 'crystal clear' enough to fit on a bumper sticker, so the media seems most concerned about how incoherent the movement is. At first I wondered: so what was the single, coherent message of the Hoovervilles? But after reading Cox's argument, I'm thinking: the message is coherent, but like the message of the Church, it isn't being spoken in the language of the world.

Let me explain.

I'm a supporter of the traditional liturgy of the church, the ancient practice, much modified but much the same, handed down from the Roman Catholic observances. Most pastors I know, especially in my denomination, disagree with me. They insist such practices are too arcane and archaic, and must be discarded in favor of newer, more appealing styles of worship. It would seem to be an argument just about styles, then: whether I wear a robe or alb, a tie or a collar, a business suit or an open necked polo shirt, surely what matters is what is said, not how it is said. Right?

Well, maybe.

But if what I say is in the language of the world, is entirely in the "liturgy" of the world, am I not speaking in terms of the world? Reports coming from the Occupy Wall Street movement are that it is radically democratic. At least, "radical" as we have come to understand democracy. But we forget America is not a democracy; it is a democractic republic. We are far more Roman than Greek, and while they Greeks gave us the concept of the "demos," the Romans taught us to organize a republic. We are as much a republic as Rome once was; the main difference is, we are more democratic than Rome ever was. But we still assume we must speak with one voice in all matters; and so pundits bewail "partisanship" and the "lack of civility" that prevents everyone from agreeing that we should be at war in Vietnam, or in favor of waiting for civil rights to be granted to African Americans, or go slower on granting just voting rights to all Americans, or....

You get my point.

The Occupy Wall Street "movement" seems to be less about recreating the democratic republic in miniature, and more about reclaiming the ancient Greek ideal of "democracy." It is not unknown in this country, the idea that democracy means listening to all the voices of all the people. The man standing at the town hall meeting is a citizen entitled to be heard like very other citizen, where the vote is a consensus of those gathered, not the decision of representatives. If Occupy Wall Street doesn't have one message to convey, that is because it is conveying a message by what it is rather than just by what it says. Ironically, in this web-linked and internet besotted age, actions still speak louder than words. And trying to reduce actions to words is as much a distortion as trying to reduce the parables of Jesus to simply moral homilies.

The parables, in fact, are a good example of what I mean. Simple tales told about ordinary events, but tales charged with extraordinary and seemingly contradictory meaning. Jesus' parables take the everyday life of his original audience and fill it with wonder and paradox and even confusion. How can a father honor a son's outrageous request for his half of the estate when his father still lives, and how can that father welcome that same prodigal son home? But how can the brother stand outside and not share in the celebration, and at the same time, how can he go in and accept what the father and his brother have done? Isn't there a simple meaning to this tale, something we can fit in a bumper sticker? There is, by now; but it distorts the tale to render that "simple" meaning. It fits the tale, in fact, into the language of the world, rather than leaving it in the language of the parable.

So to speak in the liturgy of The Market is not to challenge the basic presumption of The Market as God; it is only to seek to reform the presumption so it better serves our preferences and comforts. But there's nothing preferential or comfortable about camping out in a public park for three weeks, demanding attention and advocating for change. The Market expects activities to pay dividends, to reap rewards, to at least incur profits. In The Market, even time is for sale, and the coin of purchase has to have meaning in The Market, or there is no purchase possible, no transaction can occur, no purpose can be identified. If the activity does not have a Market purpose, what purpose is there to it?

Does everything, then, have to have a Market purpose? Does all liturgy, all human action, have to speak in terms of the World to be understandable? And if it does, can it radically challenge the World? Or can it, at best, only seek to reform it, to tweak it, to modify it, however slightly?

"What life have we if we have no life together?" In the NPR story, some of the occupiers of Wall Street noted the irony of protesting corporations while using Verizon to live stream the protest marches and so bypass any coverage or lack of coverage the media might (or might not) provide. But if the message is not about damning the corporation outright, perhaps the message is, in part, about the right use of the corporation. "Liturgy", after all, is the "work of the people." To work is to be in the world (the example of Christ led even the scholarly monks of Medieval Europe to labor as well as study); it is not necessarily to be of the world, however. But to speak in the liturgy of the church is to speak a rich language; one, however, comprehensible to the Church, if not to the world. But what does it mean to speak in the liturgy of The Market?

To speak in the liturgy of the Church is to make the Church and its traditions paramount, if not necessarily supreme. To speak in the liturgy of The Market is to make The Market paramount, if not necessarily supreme. Which, however, should be necessarily supreme: God? Or The Market? Perhaps not even God (there is no reason to make Occupy Wall Street a wholly Christian movement), but what substitute for The Market can be offered? The demos? That would seem to be what Occupy Wall Street wants to offer, and it's a very reasonable substitute to The Market. But The Market speaks in terms of "bottom lines," of DJIA closes and stock prices and valuations that are definable if not final. The Market wants a single, simple, marketable narrative. Democracy, on the other hand, especially direct, unfiltered democracy, is messy.

Long live the messy.

No, not originally from "Godspell"

2011-10-02T08:41:00.002-05:00

When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people,
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they;
let them not pass like weeds away
Their heritage a sunless day
God save the people

Shall crime bring crime forever,
Strength aiding still the strong?
Is it thy will, O Father,
that men shall toil for wrong?
No, say thy mountains; No, say thy skies;
man's clouded sun shall brightly rise,
and songs be heard, instead of sighs,
God save the people!

When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
God save the people; thine they are,
thy children as thy angels fair;
from vice, oppression and despair,
God save the people!

Words: Ebenezer Elliott, 1850

"People are Messy"

2011-10-01T12:09:00.001-05:00

There is a common thread in the analyses of our current fiscal problems, and it is connected by the fact that people cost too much damned money!

It is connected, in other words, by an idea. An abstraction. The worship of concepts over the concern for human beings.

This is as good a starting place as any:

Rep. Dennis Rehberg (R-MT), who’s expected to face Sen. John Tester (D) in the Montana Senate race next year, is worried that some families who receive federally-subsidized lunches may be gaming the system and therefore bilking you out of your hard-earned taxpayer dollars.

It’s about waste, fraud and abuse, he suggests. But Democrats say it’s about something else: A Republican looking to scrimp on a program that benefits the least fortunate of all Americans, poor children, while he fights to protect subsidies for multi-billion dollar oil companies.

Mitch Daniels has been all over the news lately, from The Daily Show to Morning Edition on NPR, promoting his idea that people cost too damned much and we really just cannot afford them:

Daniels, whose book portrays America — and President Obama — in deep trouble, says that he largely agrees with columnist Charles Krauthammer, who says the Social Security system needs to be adjusted, not abolished, and that the changes can come over time.

Changing the system, Daniels says, "would send a clear and positive message that we do not intend to go over a fiscal Niagara."

"The wisest course would be to say to today's retirees, nothing changes for you, but also to ask them to join in seeing that younger generations who are paying for their retirement today have some protection, too."

I pause only to note the "expert" Mr. Daniels agrees with is a newspaper columnist. I might also point out I've been hearing Social Security was going to "go broke" since at least the 1970's. It's a popular canard because, well: people are too damned expensive.

We're never about to go "over a fiscal Niagara" because of defense spending, or because we build too many highways, or because we bail out too many banks, or because we let too many corporations get away with not paying any income tax. It's always because we spend too much on people. Wait for the day a Mitch Daniels goes on the talk shows promoting a book about how we buy too many weapons systems and waste too much money propping up Wall Street.

You'll be waiting a very long time.

Everybody plays the game, even if they don't quite seem to. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles are all for making the tax system "equitable," and want to keep social programs, but only for the "most vulnerable":

The work done by our commission and others has shown that it is possible to reform entitlement programs in a way that preserves and even strengthens the safety net for the most vulnerable while achieving significant savings.

But Dennis Rehberg and Mitch Daniels would define the "most vulnerable" as the taxpayers (who are being cheated by "the poor") and major corporations (who need lower taxes and less regulation so they can "create jobs"). And nowhere in the Simpson/Bowles editorial is there any mention of the outrageous spending in Iraq and Afghanistan which created the budget deficit we have in the first place (Clinton left Bush with a budget surplus; Cheney said "Deficits don't matter".), nor any idea that "entitlements" should perhaps include defense spending in its definition. Defense spending is still for the most vulnerable of all. Apparently.

Two arguments could be made here: one purely emotional, the other painfully rational and based on a pile of evidence. The conclusion is the same, and this is the golden thread running through the discussion of the current situation. Matt Yglesias, for example, noted what I immediately noted about Michael Kinsley's (the poor man's Newt Gingrich) column on Chris Christie's weight:

A further nuance here, though, is that not only did Michael Kinsley’s piece on this draw a spurious connection between Christie’s appearance his personal virtue, it does so in order to make a second bad moral panic. After acknowledging that Christie “makes all the right noises about fiscal discipline,” he says that “perhaps Christie is the one to help us get our national appetites under control. But it would help if he got his own under control first.” This not only misunderstands obesity, it misunderstands fiscal policy. The sentiment here is that small budget deficits are a sign of self-control and personal virtue, and that large deficits are to be deplored as the reverse. There’s just no reason to think that any of that is true. The question to ask about fiscal policy is whether it’s appropriate to try to advance full employment in the short-term and capacity growth in the long-term. You have to ask what’s really going on, what the situation is, and what the impact of the policy choices will be. On Yom Kippur, you fast as an act of self-abnegation as part of a process for atoning for one’s sins. A person with out-of-control appetites will have a difficult time doing it. Fiscal policy is nothing like that.

No, it isn't; but fiscal policy is a terribly abstract notion. Much easier to replace it with an equally abstract notion, but one that seems concrete: people are no damned good! And fat people are victims of their appetites! And so the rest of us, greedy bastards that we are, are victims of our appetites. Or rather, victims of someone else's appetites (always easier to blame someone else for your problems).

Remember when the narrative said that it was the poor who caused the financial markets to collapse because they took out mortgages they couldn't afford? Funny, if they couldn't afford them, how did they get them? I've never been able to take out a large loan I couldn't afford; I always had to have a credit check. If I couldn't afford the debt, it was because of a loss of income, not because I never had the income to repay the loan. How was it the poor were suddenly responsible for the lenders being irresponsible?

They weren't, of course; but the story of the rapacious poor continued. Rick Perry is right: children of illegal immigrants in Texas deserve to pay in-state tuition rates for Texas colleges, colleges supported by state taxes paid by people who live in Texas. Being "illegal" doesn't exempt you from paying taxes, especially in a state with no income tax. A Texas resident pays sales tax on every purchase (except food and medicine) and pays property tax, either as a landowner, or through rent. That money is all you are asked to contribute as a resident in order to get in-state tuition rates at Texas colleges. So how does being "illegal" affect residency status?

It doesn't. But the GOP primary voters who are disgusted with Rick Perry (NPR found some in New Hampshire) think "illegal immigrants" don't deserve anything from Texas because...well...they're "illegal." They aren't people, they're: "Illegal." Perry was right to call people with such opinions heartless, even though that's no way to win votes.

But ideas matter more than people.

In fact, people don't even matter. It's the idea of people that matters.

When Jesus says, in Matthew's gospel, that you saw me naked, or hungry, or sick, or in prison, and you cared for me, even if just to visit me or give me some food, he's contrasting the idea of people with the reality of people. And those who treat people as human beings rather than ideas, are the ones who, literally, served God (and stop and think what it means to "serve God," without serving as God's agent of power. To serve the powerless God, the God who is sick, in prison, or naked, or hungry. We praise "servants of God" who tell us what they think God wants. We pay almost no attention to servants of God who actually serve God by being servants to people.)

I don't want to banter still with still more ideas of how this idea became so important. I just want to point out that if there is truth in the old teaching from the catechism that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God," this is a concrete application of that teaching, rather than merely a metaphysical or abstract one.

Most of us prefer ideas over people. It's just so much easier to deal with the world that way.

Du musst gehen!

2011-09-26T14:59:00.004-05:00

I don't have a problem with this just on constitutional grounds. I have a problem with it on theological grounds:

Operation Restore Our Community or “ROC”…begins next week. The city judge will either let misdemenor [sic] offenders work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine or go to church every Sunday for a year.

If offenders elect church, they’re allowed to pick the place of worship, but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department. If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender’s case will be dismissed.

Set aside the 1st Amendment problem (which ThinkProgress details very nicely), there's the theological, or I should say, ecclesiological problem: what is church for?

In other words, do I want these people in my church because they don't want to go to jail? And the answer is: No, I don't.

Because they are prisoners otherwise? Don't be ridiculous. The criminal charges against them mean nothing to me. No, the problem is: why are the "sentenced" to church for one year? Because worship has magical powers? Because God's presence is only felt on Sunday morning for an hour, and it's the only place we can be sure God is present, and on a regular schedule? Is it because it's the only place God is likely to get their attention, and once God does, that will straighten them out?

If I am taking this lightly rather than theologically, it's because it barely deserves serious consideration. But think about the assumption here: somehow "church" will provide something that is missing (shades of Augustine!) and that will provide the corrective to their behavior that jail manifestly fails to do (and when do we start having that conversation about justice and what prison is for?).

If this wasn't a small town in Alabama, I suppose it would make as much sense to sentence the offenders to be oblates at a monastery. I mean, look what that did for Kathleen Norris!

Okay, enough silliness. Let's consider the thinking, such as it is, behind the proposal. First, that God is only known in a place where God is always known to be. Well, then, consider the counter examples of Abraham (not sure where he was when God first spoke to him); Moses and the Burning Bush; Elijah and the whirlwind; Jacob's ladder; or even Nathan reproaching David. Or any of the prophets speaking to anyone who would listen in Israel. Where is the Biblical evidence that God is in the Temple and only available for revelations during scheduled visiting hours?

And then there's the famous story of Jesus at the Temple, watching the rich man ring in his money while the widow meekly contributes her mite. Things haven't changed much in 2000 years, but we still need Jesus to tell us what's going on; and we still need to listen.

And there's the rub: "He who has ears had better listen!," Jesus liked to say. But if we have ears and don't use them, will a year in church on Sunday mornings make us any wiser? And what is it we are to learn? Are we to see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, and know with our own minds? Or is the truth known to believers the truth that is revealed by God? If God can harden Pharaoh's heart three times (look it up; Exodus. I'll wait.) before the Israelites are finally released from Egypt, then who do we blame for criminals who don't know enough right from wrong not to commit crimes? God, for not opening their hearts? Or the church, for not preaching loudly enough they can't help but get the message?

If the revelation comes from God, then the church can do nothing to forward it to the unbeliever and those to whom it hasn't been revealed. If the revelation doesn't come from God, then our knowledge is only what we discover, and what we know is only known through our senses (and we're all empiricists) or it is more importantly what we recover from our pre-birth memories (and we are all Platonists). Either way, it ain't Christianity; and that's the theological problem.

I suppose the idea is that if we are guilty by association, we will be redeemed by association, too. But I've been around church people, and a year around them might be must enough to convince me not to spend any more time around them than I had to. So there's another frivolous reason to condemn this silly idea.

But the central one remains: what is church for? For rubbing off on people? Or for being a place where, when you go there, they have to take you in? Which is better, but should it ever be a place where you have to go, or else?

Not my church; not the church I'm a member of, or the church I'm (if ever again) the pastor of.

Heat v. Light

2011-09-26T09:09:00.000-05:00

This actually almost makes sense, if you think about this first:

Indeed, to be against the death penalty is to be against all such executions, whether the prisoner is innocent or guilty. Raising doubts about individual guilt, as effective as it may be in individual cases, will not stop the death penalty, but at most multiply procedures instituted to give a greater and falser assurance that the executed must be guilty.

I remember, while in law school, in the late 1970's,it was assumed that the death penalty had been effectively nullified by the Supreme Court because of the concern that discretionary procedures led to discrimination against the poor and racial minorities. The result was an abandonment of discretionary procedures, and a resumption of execution--and, strangely, it was still the poor and racial minorities who disproportionately suffered.

Douthat's argument is generating a great deal more heat than light, but then, it's not a terribly coherent argument. The heart of it seems to be this:

Simply throwing up our hands and eliminating executions entirely ... could prove to be a form of moral evasion -- a way to console ourselves with the knowledge that no innocents are ever executed, even as more pervasive abuses go unchecked....

This point was made well last week by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing for The American Scene. In any penal system, he pointed out, but especially in our own -- which can be brutal, overcrowded, rife with rape and other forms of violence -- a lifelong prison sentence can prove more cruel and unusual than a speedy execution. And a society that supposedly values liberty as much or more than life itself hasn't necessarily become more civilized if it preserves its convicts' lives while consistently violating their rights and dignity.

Which rightly draws derisive questions about why we can't do both, but I think Douthat has inadvertently touched on the question of how we do both, and that's where the context provided by Rick's comment comes in.

At one time we depended on the evil of discretionary procedures to flush out the death penalty; we even declared it dead ("Death, thou shalt die!"). Not so fast, of course; and now the Troy Davis case seems to mean the death penalty shall die again because the system cannot tolerate the death of the innocent.

Well, of course it can. It tolerates the incarceration of the innocent. Just ask the Innocence Project. Now, should it do so? No. But the system is not established to do justice; it is actually established to get convictions. The fact that our prisons are crowded "can be brutal, overcrowded, right with rape and other forms of violence," is a consequence of this efficiency, as much as it is a result of our neglect of prisoners (out of sight, out of mind). Douthat actually makes this point, although most of his harsher critics seem to have overlooked it:

Instead of dismissing this point of view as backward and barbaric, criminal justice reformers should try to harness it, by pointing out that too often our punishments don’t fit the crime — that sentences for many drug crimes are disproportionate to the offenses, for instance, or that rape and sexual assault have become an implicit part of many prison terms. Americans should be urged to support penal reform not in spite of their belief that some murderers deserve execution, in other words, but because of it — because both are attempts to ensure that accused criminals receive their just deserts.

What's to disagree with here? Well, maybe this, the first two sentences of the next paragraph:

Abolishing capital punishment in a kind of despair over its fallibility would send a very different message. It would tell the public that our laws and courts and juries are fundamentally incapable of delivering what most Americans consider genuine justice.

Douthat is jumping off a moral cliff there, and trying to take us with him. He has a point: if we can't reform the system, then the alternative seems to be to declare the system broken and irreparable, but be fair: how far has reform of Washington gotten? And how many people don't think it is broken beyond repair, and the only solution is to start over again with new political parties, or even new, and even more ideological, politics? Douthat has thrown up his hands and declared this state of affairs the norm for public policy and the discussion of public issues. But does it need to be?

Interestingly, Douthat has implicitly put the death penalty at the heart of the criminal justice system. I agree with him on that. And yet we don't have to simply throw up our hands and toss out all claims to the death penalty.

First, this isn't an issue as fundamental to the republic as federalism or states rights. No one complains today of the heavy hand of the Supreme Court in this arena (for better or worse).

Second, the issue is a question of justice, not just of punishment: it's high time we had a public discussion about the distinction between those two.

Third: we cannot rely on any system to do this work for us: the death penalty will not fall of its own weight, it must be actively and openly rejected, and rejected on the grounds of an understanding of justice that doesn't allow a death penalty to be available, not a vague idea that it is just too unfair or personally debilitating in its execution (i.e., either that it is a discretionary procedure that results in unfairness, or that it is pre-meditated murder which takes a toll on the executioners. Society will always be unfair and will always find willing executioners.).

The latter is the discussion even Douthat doesn't want to have, and is the weak reed on which his argument rests: that any such outcome will itself depend again upon the system to do the work for us. In that he is right: so long as we expect someone else to do something good, nothing good will ever happen.

And probably, the situation will even get worse.

"Doubt" is not a thing

2011-09-22T09:42:00.002-05:00

But it should be:

In 2007 the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, the body which has the final say in the state on whether executions should go ahead, made a solemn promise. Troy Davis, the prisoner who is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7pm local time on Wednesday, would never be put to death unless there was "no doubt" about his guilt.

The Guardian article goes on to list 10 reasons why Troy Davis should not have been executed, based on "doubts." As Rachel Maddow noted last night, the convicted murderer of James Lee Byrd was executed in Texas last night, too. But no vigil was held to mark his passing, no last minute stay was requested from the Supreme Court, no articles were written in the Guardian or in other papers protesting his execution, no cable channels covered the act as if it were a funeral (MSNBC was practically draped in black crepe last night).

Should we have been more concerned about the death of Lawrence Russell Brewer? Ross Byrd, James Byrd's son, thought so.

“You can’t fight murder with murder,” Ross Byrd said. “Life in prison would have been fine. I know he can’t hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn’t what we want.”

I'm not trying to equate the two events, except to point out our own public ambivalence about crime and punishment. Somehow it seems easier to defend Troy Davis against execution for a crime so many are now so sure he didn't commit, than it is to protest the execution of a white supremacist like Lawrence Brewer for a crime so hideous we still don't want to think about it (there was forensic evidence that James Byrd was alive through the ordeal almost until he was decapitated by the ordeal). But that's the real problem with protesting executions: not that they are hard to protest, but that the situation itself is so complicated.

In the case of Troy Davis, many were proclaiming his innocence, based largely on reports that witnesses 22 years later had recanted their stories. But who, after 22 years, wouldn't reconsider what they knew then and whether or not they were accurate? One of the grave weaknesses of the criminal justice system is the reliance on eye-witnesses. But once the justice system has relied on those witnesses, under what conditions does it reconsider their testimony? When the witnesses change their minds? When, then do we ever decide a conviction is final, and the case is closed? Never? A system like that is no system at all.

On the other hand, if there is no system for review, no chance to correct errors, there is no justice. So the system has to have a stop; but that stop cannot be arbitrary.

I'm not a criminal lawyer, nor an expert on the laws and procedures surrounding death penalty cases. I don't know why some people are released from prison based on new evidence, and other people are executed in the face of new evidence. But the burden the death penalty puts on the "justice" of the criminal justice system, is shown by the Troy Davis case to be too heavy a burden to bear. We are warping justice out of any semblance of that goal when we murder people in the name of the state and "justice done."

The former warden of the Georgia Diagnostic prison was on MSNBC last night and said, from his experience overseeing executions in that prison, that executions are "pre-meditated murder." Those were his word. Some commentators on MSNBC last night were critical of the US Supreme Court in this case, especially as it wouldn't issue another stay of execution for Mr. Davis in a case he was clearly winning in the court of public opinion. But my ire was, and is, directed mainly at the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, who could have granted clemency in this case, and refused to do so. The Supreme Court acted as I expected them to. The system acted, as best I can tell, as it has to (after 22 years, what witnesses might not change their minds, what jurors might not decide differently? Who in prison doesn't say they are innocent?).

There was an issue of ballistics evidence that even the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said was invalid evidence. I don't know why new evidence in this case never led to a new trial, but new trials based on new evidence are notoriously difficult, and must be, else criminal convictions would never be final. It is a matter of procedure. A judicial system must have procedures, otherwise it is merely an ad hoc arrangement responding to those with the greatest public sympathy at the time, or the loudest megaphone, or the mere whims of those on the various judicial benches. Although "ad hoc" seems to perfectly describe the systems in states like Georgia and Texas where a Board of Pardons and Paroles is expected to act as a dispenser of clemency. Funny, they never seem to think dispensing it is really such a good idea.

But the finality of a death sentence changes everything. And the system still doesn't recognize that it changes the situation enough that the system simply cannot sustain the burden of killing another human being in cold blood.

And that is the problem.

O brave new world

2011-09-20T09:39:00.004-05:00

That has such creatures in it!

This successful exercise in autonomous robotics could presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. Imagine aerial “Terminators,” minus beefcake and time travel.

The Fort Benning tarp “is a rather simple target, but think of it as a surrogate,” said Charles E. Pippin, a scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, which developed the software to run the demonstration. “You can imagine real-time scenarios where you have 10 of these things up in the air and something is happening on the ground and you don’t have time for a human to say, ‘I need you to do these tasks.’ It needs to happen faster than that.”

The demonstration laid the groundwork for scientific advances that would allow drones to search for a human target and then make an identification based on facial-recognition or other software. Once a match was made, a drone could launch a missile to kill the target.

Before James Cameron's "Terminator," there was a Philip K. Dick story about killer robots, which didn't involve time travel or happy endings. Machines had been created to kill people, and the machines were very, very good at it. So much so that in the world of Dick's story, human beings had largely abandoned the planet and moved to the Moon, the better to oversee the slaughter of the enemy on earth. Most of the killing machines, of course, looked like machines. But in the story, the machines (which were already producing the killing machines; if you can manufacture machines that can kill, why not manufacture machines to manufacture the machines that can kill?) start producing machines that look human (terminators!) so they can get past all the defenses humans use to keep the machines from killing them (the killing machines aren't terribly discriminating; a human target is a human target. Much more efficient that way.)

At the end of the story, it turns out the machines have produced several different types of "human" killing machines, and one of them boards a rocket for the Moon before the people on the Moon can be warned of this new development. Like I said, Dick doesn't deal in the happy endings Hollywood prefers. And yes, it's quite a leap from programmed drones to anything resembling the world of the Terminator or Dick's nightmare.

But tell me again why we are even thinking about going there. Is it really because it's more efficient, because "It needs to happen faster than that"?

This is when "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" can be a frightening insight.

Death Works, Inc.

2011-09-18T19:24:00.002-05:00

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that death -- for lack of a better word -- is good.

Death is right.

Death works.

Death clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the [American political] spirit.

Death, in all of its forms -- death [instead of] life, [instead of] money, [instead of] love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of [power].

And death -- you mark my words -- will...save...that...malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

Don't know what made me think of that. Oh, wait, yes, yes I do.

Do you know what it means to miss....?

2011-09-16T10:19:00.002-05:00

So whaddya do when the Web gets boring?

Regarding the Deaths of Others

2011-09-14T16:10:00.003-05:00

I'm going to give up reading the news. It's too depressing.

Thoreau was right, too much of it involves situations in which I am not involved, and in which I have no interest. On the other hand, Derrida was right, and we can't seem to imagine that our deaths are possible. Your death, certainly; but mine? Heaven forbid!

GINGRICH: Historically, we had charity. We had places that say, if you are down on your luck, if you failed to be responsible, we will take care of you, but that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily going to get a private room, that you’re necessarily going to get everything somebody would get who’s been prudent and who has taken care of themselves. [...] Yes, we’re going to make sure they’re taken care of, but they ought to understand that’s charity.

BLITZER: But that money should come from charitable organizations, not from taxpayers? Is that what you’re saying? [...]

GINGRICH: I would prefer to see it come from charitable organizations.

A man who has never had to rely on the kindness of strangers to pay his medical bills is the best representative of the idea that others should do so because, after all, their deaths are perfectly imaginable.

My death is a cruel hoax against the idea of a loving God. Your death, however, may well be a convenience.

And besides, the poor are not dying from poverty, they are dying because of the government. Which means their deaths are not my responsibility:

The golden thread here is responsibility; yours, not mine. I've been responsible and avoided serious illness. You, on the other hand, were imprudent, and got sick. Or you were imprudent and were born poor and never worked your way up to wealth. Which is sort of like saying every little boy who enjoys a sport is imprudent if he doesn't become a professional athlete, although the number of professional athletes is a vanishingly small percentage of the entire population of males (I exclude females for simplicity's sake). Clearly if you were prudent you would be a wealthy white male like Rand Paul or Newt Gingrich, and medical care wouldn't be a concern for you (since prudent white males also avoid getting sick).

Or you were imprudent and lost your job and with it your medical insurance. Sucks to be you, but that's what being imprudent gets you. What am I, your keeper? Who are you, my brother? My sister? What a ridiculous idea! Where do you get a silly idea like that?

Rand Paul is most likely an atheist, but Newt Gingrich wraps himself in religious language whenever it suits his purposes. Religion doesn't, or rather shouldn't, teach us to be selfish and greedy and self-concerned. Christianity, at least, has a definite answer to the question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" And the answer is not: "Yes, but only through a government approved charity." Christianity also understands the nature of the struggle represented here by politicians and crowd reactions.

"When you start a fire, you want it to burn." Dom Crossan attributes those words to Jesus of Nazareth. He bases it on Luke 12:49: "I came to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already ablaze!" Frightening words; disturbing words. And no wonder we seldom hear them preached about, or regard them in some spiritual fashion, akin perhaps to the "tongues of flame" Luke later describes at Pentecost, or to a fire of faith and conversion often associated with mass, and safely historical, events like the Great Awakening. But you don't have to take the words literally to take them out of the safe remove of "Oh, that's just God talking." Think about it a moment: the wisdom of the metaphor is clear. When you start a fire, you do want it to burn. Unless you are an arsonist intent on destruction, that's not a bad thing.

Quite by coincidence, considering how to end this post, I ran across this from Matt Yglesias:

Conservatives write and call Congress at a much higher rate than progressives, and more-or-less ordinary people hear conservative political messages from preachers and business executives all the time.

The conservatives, the people who blame the poor and hate the immigrant and even those who want the uninsured and the criminal to die, are all anxious to start a fire which will burn down what they see is wrong with this country, with this society, with us. Obviously I think that's a bad thing, that their fire is arson, that their goal is destruction. But what about us? What fire could we start? What goals do we have that we want to see effected, what defense of the poor do we offer, what changes would we propose to counter the arguments of Newt Gingrich or Rand Paul? How do we respond to the crowds that cheer for death? Do we cluck our tongues, or do we answer them? Is this the society we want to live in? If not, what are we doing about it? We need a challenge to our complacency. We need to be willing to start our own fire. We need to be willing to let it burn.

Is something missing? Is something needed? Then why don't we find it? Why don't we have it? What are we missing? What do we need? What do we believe? Nothing? Then we should be ashamed of ourselves. What do we believe? Something worth believing? Something worth living for? Something worth starting a fire for? If we don't, what good is it? Discard it, and find a belief worth something. Pray, sleep, eat, meditate, read, confer, worship, sing, shout, whisper, be perfectly still and silent. Whatever it takes, but do it! What is missing? What? Find it! Go out, now, into the world, into the void, into the mystery, into the deepest depths of your soul or the uttermost parts of the world, but find it! Take it with both hands and run laughing back to the caves with the fragment of fire that burns your hands but that you know will light the world! Something is worth it! We are better than this! We know we don't have to suffer this! We know they are wrong, we know we must oppose them, we know they would burn the world down and we would make it burn brightly and light the world up, not leave it a cinder! We know this, we know this, we know this!

It's time we did something about it. "My death, is it possible?" Maybe this is your death, this uselessness, this inactivity, this listlessness. Maybe this is your death, and you should be out seeking your place of resurrection. What are you waiting for! Go! Do it! Find it! Find God! God is out there, among the poor, among the tired and the criminal and the downtrodden and the feeble and the sick and the lame, God is there waiting for you to figure it out and join them and light up the world with them! What else do you have to do with the rest of your life?

What the meaning of "is" is

2011-09-13T09:53:00.001-05:00

Politifact boldly concludes that Jim Hightower told a whopper:

Upshot: Hightower’s statement, suggesting Republican legislators slashed the budgets of fire departments on the front lines of the wildfires, misrepresents the cuts in state grant funding for equipment and training as if they were a direct cut to volunteer fire departments. The state doesn’t fund the operating costs of local departments.

It’s also incorrect to conclude that the cut to the grants’ fund hampered any department’s effort to combat recent wildfires; the reduction just took effect.

Tell that to the volunteer fire departments:

"These grass fires have taken off and we're having a hard time stopping them," said Somerset Fire Department Chief Eddie Dugosh.

Dugosh spends many days repairing one of his trucks. "Within the last week, I've lost five tires at $2,500," said Dugosh.

The department paid that cost out of pocket because the money the department gets from the state isn't enough.

"That (money) just covers our monthly expenses, that does not cover damages," Dugosh said.

State funding for volunteer departments was slashed this year, dropping from about $30 million to $7 million.

But costs are increasing thanks to the worst fire season in state history.

More flames means more repair bills. Dugosh said it becomes a safety issue.

"These trucks break down in the middle of that fire, you're in trouble."

So departments like Somerset look elsewhere for funds, conducting boot drives once a month to raise money.

"It's just, we're doing well with what we have," said Dugosh.

And in Abilene:

Since 2001, the Texas Forest Service has been issuing money from the state to help those departments update old equipment.

After budget cuts their grant money has shrunk from $23 to $7 million.

"The advantage of replacing is their dependability. We have trucks in service that date back to the 60's", said Gary Young, with the Taylor County Rural Fire Committee.

Departments said it's their expensive equipment that helps save land and lives. They count on grant money to keep it up to date.

"We go into meet the initial call with enough equipment and enough man power to meet the initial surge to prevent the fires from getting bigger. Like we saw in Bastrop, it doesn't stop at city limits, it just keeps going," said Young.

And with no relief from fire danger in sight the loss of funding worries many.

"I've been doing this for over 20 years," said Young. "I just don't see where it's going to come from with that being pulled away."

Or, to put it yet another way:

“If we didn’t have the funding cuts, we could make sure the fire departments have the resources they need and rely on Texas resources to fight Texas fires,” Barron said. “When you have to stretch [$7 million] across 1,400 volunteer fire departments, it doesn’t go very far.”

Barron said the cost of the fires, the worst of which has burned more than 1,550 homes in the Austin area, is “well over $120 million,” which the state will have to pay back to the U.S. Forest Service during the next legislative session.

“I don’t know what else it’s going to take to show the lawmakers and the public that the fire service is greatly underfunded,” Barron said.

And actually, current costs are a problem, because of the way fire fighting is funded in Texas:

As of Thursday, the tab for fighting the state's 2011 wildland fires had already reached a staggering $202.84 million — $63.75 million alone for plane and helicopter rentals.

Generally, the Forest Service doesn't have that sort of cash. So it collects the bills and then asks the Legislature for enough money to cover the tab when it meets every two years. This past session, lawmakers appropriated $121 million to cover firefighting costs racked up in earlier years — about five times what the agency itself spends on fire suppression each year.

So the Forest Service is spending money it just received for fires it has already fought. Which means the cuts are affecting fire fighting now.

Politifact called the usual suspects. All I had to do was use Google. Is Hightower wrong? Seems to depend on who you ask, and how you interpret their answers.

I don't think I'd call Jim Hightower a liar quite so quickly if I were Politifact.

Hi! I'm not home right now, but if you want to leave a message....

2011-09-12T16:05:00.000-05:00

Following the 9/11 ceremonies yesterday, and the breathless weeks of analysis that preceded it, with the relentless focus on how "we" have changed in the past decade, I went trolling through my archives looking for some answers. We start, appropriately enough, with Spencer Tracy rendering:

Judgment at Erewhon

Simple murders and atrocities do not constitute the gravamen of the charges in this indictment. Rather, the charge is that of conscious participation in a nationwide, government organized system of cruelty and injustice in violation of every moral and legal principle known to all civilized nations. The Tribunal has carefully studied the record and found therein abundant evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt the charges against these defendants.

Heir Rolfe, in his very skillful defense, has asserted that there are others who must share the ultimate responsibility for what happened here in Germany. There is truth in this. The real complaining party at the bar in this courtroom is civilization. But the Tribunal does say that the men in the dock are responsible for their actions, men who sat in black robes in judgment on other men, men who took part in the enactment of laws and decrees, the purpose of which was the extermination of humans beings, men who in executive positions actively participated in the enforcement of these laws -- illegal even under German law. The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: Any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime -- is guilty.

Heir Rolfe further asserts that the defendant, Janning, was an extraordinary jurist and acted in what he thought was the best interest of this country. There is truth in this also. Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he loathed the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and the death of millions by the Government of which he was a part. Janning's record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial: If he and all of the other defendants had been degraded perverts, if all of the leaders of the Third Reich had been sadistic monsters and maniacs, then these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake, or any other natural catastrophe. But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary -- even able and extraordinary -- men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat at through trial can ever forget them: men sterilized because of political belief; a mockery made of friendship and faith; the murder of children. How easily it can happen.

There are those in our own country too who today speak of the "protection of country" -- of "survival." A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient -- to look the other way.

Well, the answer to that is "survival as what?" A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult!

Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.

Except, of course, when we need to torture single human beings in order, we think, to protect others. The problem is:

Torture does not work

After a few days, the contractor attempted to once again try his untested theory and he started to re-implementing the harsh techniques. He moved this time further along the force continuum, introducing loud noise and then temperature manipulation.

Throughout this time, my fellow FBI agent and I, along with a top CIA interrogator who was working with us, protested, but we were overruled. I should also note that another colleague, an operational psychologist for the CIA, had left the location because he objected to what was being done.

Again, however, the technique wasn't working and Abu Zubaydah wasn't revealing any information, so we were once again brought back in to interrogate him. We found it harder to reengage him this time, because of how the techniques had affected him, but eventually, we succeeded, and he re-engaged again.

Once again the contractor insisted on stepping up the notches of his experiment, and this time he requested the authorization to place Abu Zubaydah in a confinement box, as the next stage in the force continuum. While everything I saw to this point were nowhere near the severity later listed in the memos, the evolution of the contractor's theory, along with what I had seen till then, struck me as "borderline torture."

As the Department of Justice IG report released last year states, I protested to my superiors in the FBI and refused to be a part of what was happening. The Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, a man I deeply respect, agreed passing the message that "we don't do that," and I was pulled out.

As you can see from this timeline, many of the claims made in the memos about the success of the enhanced techniques are inaccurate. For example, it is untrue to claim Abu Zubaydah wasn't cooperating before August 1, 2002. The truth is that we got actionable intelligence from him in the first hour of interrogating him.

Perhaps the contractors could argue he was only following orders. The problem with that, aside from the obvious historical one, is that it also point out that:

The Fish Rots From the Head

Conclusion 1: On February 7,2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. Following the President's determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.

Conclusion 2: Members of the President's Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed. National Security Council Principals reviewed the CIA's interrogation program during that period.

Conclusion 19: The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's December 2,2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were
appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.

And what else did that erosion in standards erode?

For Your Reading Pleasure:

KATHERINE EBAN: Well, you don't make an ethics policy by citing a few positive examples. There has been an army or military line and an APA line that are surprisingly similar, which is that psychologists make interrogations safer and more effective. But what my reporting found is that the interrogations they make safer are the interrogations that had been made more dangerous. In other words, you take some very dangerous methods, like reverse-engineered SERE tactics -- it’s basically like letting a tiger loose in the interrogation booth, and then you get in an animal trainer to make sure that the animal doesn't go crazy, but why did you put the tiger in the booth in the first place? In other words, psychologists were initially used in the SERE program in order to prevent against behavioral drift. So what the military is saying and what the APA is saying is, psychologists can play that role in interrogations, but those are the interrogations in which these reverse-engineered SERE tactics are being used. Now, presumably, if you didn't use those tactics, you wouldn't need psychologists to safeguard them.

So, if the erosion of ethical standards reached professional caregivers, we are left wondering:

Is Our Children Learning?

The report found, among other things, that the techniques being used "are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable," and the "interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices."

"...in meetings with intelligence officials and in a 325-page initial report completed in December, the researchers have pressed a more practical critique: there is little evidence, they say, that harsh methods produce the best intelligence."

Maybe there's little evidence harsh methods produce anything of value; but we did establish that torture was legal; so long as you accept what the definition of "torture" is. And if you don't, well, then, we're left to wonder is there is any:

Morality for Thee

[The questioner is Dan Abrams; JA=John Ashcroft; AG=Alberto Gonzales, both Attorneys General under George W. Bush]

Let me follow this. The U.S. military prosecuted our own troops for using waterboarding in the Philippines, tried the Japanese for war crimes for using it against the Allies and the U.S. troops in WWII. And yet, we’re suggesting that it’s not torture. [Applause]

JA: First of all, the word waterboarding can be defined in a lot of ways.

Let’s talk about the definition that was used in these memos—this is a legal document—of the definition of waterboarding. “Lying on a gurney that is inclined with an angle of 10-15 degrees from horizontal, with the detainee on his back. . . head toward the head end of the gurney, cloth pasted over the detainees’ face, and cold water poured on the cloth approximately 16-18 inches—this is the definition. The question is—

AG: Dan, the opinions have been withdrawn. There are no longer binding position of the department…

I understand that, but that doesn’t mean, as lawyers, we can’t sit and discuss whether this was a correct legal assessment. Because it seems to me, in my opinion, that it is impossible to explain how this particular procedure would not be considered torture. [Applause]

JA: Members of the department went and underwent the procedure.

Once or twice, not 266 times.

JA: Many members of our military in training undergo the procedure—

Once or twice.

JA: Were you there?

No, the memos explain it. It’s once or twice.

JA: OK. I don’t know how many times they underwent it. Let me just put it this way. We relied—I relied—on the best judgments of the lawyers in the department. There are 110,000 employees in the department, the lawyers are expert, and they came up with an opinion that became part of a memo. Later, some lawyers came to me and said "We’re not confident that that memo best expresses the law here." And I said to myself, "Well, I’m the attorney general, and if we have stuff out there that’s not the best expression, we ought to amend it. We ought to get the best information we can." You know we’re in a war, you give it to the president, you give information to the other individuals, but you say, you know, they deserve the best judgment. They reworked the memo, and they came a second time, these professionals did, and according to the definition of torture, they came to the conclusion that the procedure as provided along with the advice to our personnel did not amount to legal torture.

Did they get it wrong?

JA: I don’t think they got it wrong. It’s different now.

It’s different in what sense?

JA: Because the law has been changed. [John Ashcroft called me after the event to correct a mistake he made. He wanted to let me know that, in retrospect and after conducting more research on the matter, he realized that no such change in the law was ever enacted.]

The definition of torture?

JA: Yes! The definition of torture.

So the answer then, it sounds like, is the only reason you still believe the legal assessment was correct was because there’s been a change in the law?

JA: I believe that the work of the department by these professionals came to the right conclusion.

That waterboarding is not torture.

JA: That, as described, and as commented on in their memorandum, that it was not torture.

This whole topic, frankly, left poor Alberto Gonzales struggling:

Alberto Agonistes

"The only person in the administration who knew as much about presidential wartime powers as Addington was a young legal scholar from Berkeley named John Yoo, who was the deputy assistant attorney general in the OLC. A product of Harvard and Yale Law, Yoo was a whiz kid whose conservative bona fides—he’d clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas—were indisputable. Within weeks of the attacks, Gonzales was asking Yoo for memos outlining the limits of the Geneva Conventions. Yoo was generous: Since Al Qaeda and the Taliban militia did not constitute a nation or a state, he concluded, they had no protections."

All the opposition to Yoo's legal opinions? Alberto has an answer for that, too:

" 'Would it have been nice to invite everyone to these meetings? Sure, but it just doesn’t work that way. Were there times others should have been invited? I have to concede it may have been helpful, but we did the best we could under the circumstances.' "

See, it's not his fault. He couldn't help it. You can't blame him. He didn't try, but trying is hard! Besides, does this sound like torture to you?

"In March 2003 Yoo sent out another crucial memo, this time exploring the limits of prisoner interrogation. He concluded that military interrogators were not subject to federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming, or other uses of force during questioning because the end goal was 'to prevent further attacks on the United States.; The memo suggested that acts like dousing prisoners with scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substances; slitting an ear, nose, or lip; or disabling a tongue or limb were not criminal.

And we can make that pesky problem of definitions go away,too!

From the early 1930's until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

Which is okay, because if they had, there would have been lawyers and policy intellectuals to explain that you can ignore the bell, since it doesn't toll for me. However, it is still possible that:

It Tolls For Thee:

In 2004 a group of lawyers and policy intellectuals gathered at Harvard, brought there by its Kennedy School, Law School, and the Department of Homeland Security, to draw up rules for coercive interrogation-"torture lite," as The New York Times Magazine would later call it in a respectful consideration of the subject. All but one of the discussants concluded that a little torture was sometimes necessary, provided it was accompanied by appropriate warrants, rules, and strict oversight. The Bush Administration rejected the Harvard team's regulatory proposals; niceties for the application of torture are superfluous once everyone agrees it needs to be done. But euphemisms-"coercive interrogation," "stress"-are appreciated. They allow George W. Bush to declare, "We don't torture."

But if the bell tolls for thee, then you have to put yourself in the position of being the torturer. And then what happens? Then you hit the trifecta of:

Reason, Emotion, and Torture

Cox presented this proposal to his Harvard classes on Moral Reasoning (his experiences in teaching the class are the basis for this book). The class split almost 50/50 on whether or not torture could be justified, even under the Dershowitz proposal. Many agreed with Martha Nussbaum's sentiment: "I don't think any sensible moral person would deny that there might be some imaginable situation in which torture [of a particular individual] is justified." (Cox, p. 240). Cox raised objections to the "ticking bomb" scenario: victims of torture will tell you anything, torture makes their statements less reliable, not more; it is a "slippery slope" toward allowing torture in less critical cases (much as the Supreme Court has allowed unwarranted searches by police in certain cirumstances); etc. Still, the class sticks, 50/50. So he introduces a few new questions.

How many in the class, he asks, would be willing to insert the sterilized needles under the fingernails?

"Only a small number put up their hands. Then I asked those who favored the policy but would not do it themselves to formulate some moral justification for their action, other than mere squeamishness. A sullen silence followed." (Cox. p. 242)

Cox has already pointed out the utilitarianism behind Dershowitz' argument, a "greatest good for the greatest number" the class as a whole is quite willing to accept, secure in the knowledge that they will be among the greatest number, and that, after all, their hands are clean.

"Then I posed another question. Suppose, I asked, the suspect is not talking to you but you have his two children-- aged four and seven--in the room. Would you threaten to torture them to get the information? After all, if it is mere mathematics, what is the temporary pain of two children compared to the possible deaths of five thousand people? Not a single person in the class was willing to hurt the children." (Cox, p. 242)

Our Army, however, was willing to make the threats Harvard students decided was going too far:

The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of "leveraging" their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.

In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family's door telling him "to come get his wife."

So Dick Cheney insists to this day that our hands are clean, and that torture was effective. Even today Steve Inskeep managed to get through an entire interview with Ali Soufani without mentioning Dick Cheney's redemption tour or his baseless claims, claims undermined by the very book Inskeep was interviewing Soufani about. And in case we really, really, finally still don't get it

Everything old is new again....and again....

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 -- and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

And although nobody was noticing, we went to war on this crap:

According to CIA sources, Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, after two weeks of enhanced interrogation, made statements that were designed to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear. Sources say Al Libbi had been subjected to each of the progressively harsher techniques in turn and finally broke after being water boarded and then left to stand naked in his cold cell overnight where he was doused with cold water at regular intervals.

His statements became part of the basis for the Bush administration claims that Iraq trained al Qaeda members to use biochemical weapons. Sources tell ABC that it was later established that al Libbi had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.

What has changed in 10 years? We still worship power. We think more than ever that security comes out of the end of a gun. We still think our prosperity depends on treading on the poor, only now the poor are among us, not just overseas or at our borders. And we are still better, more decent, more humane, more caring and compassionate and understanding, than our political leaders.

Now if we could just find a way to transfer those better qualities to them.....

Commemorating, not Remembering

2011-09-10T08:40:00.003-05:00

A guest on NPR's "Science Friday" said the words I realized I'd been waiting to hear for weeks now.

The topic was the "Psychology of 9/11," and when asked about the upcoming 10 year anniversary of the event, she responded that we should respectfully commemorate the event and the lives lost that day. "Respectfully commemorate." That was an idea I had yet to associate with this coming Sunday.

To respectfully commemorate the events of that day would not be to wonder what had happened to us in the past 10 years; or to reflect that America was "forever changed" after that day. "Forever changed"? For who? My father, who remembers the Great Depression and Pearl Harbor? For me, who remembers coming home from elementary school to learn that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas? Who remembers 1968, with the Chicago police riot, the death of RFK and MLK? Who remembers Kent State and Vietnam? I heard college age students on BBC World service describing the shock of learning, 10 years ago, that the world was a dangerous place. It was the same shock I felt that day I walked into the house and my mother told me the President was dead. But do we reflect every 10 years on what has changed since that assassination? Since Pearl Harbor? Since the last helicopter lifted off from Saigon? Since innocent college students were gunned down by reckless National Guardsmen?

It wouldn't be a bad thing to respectfully commemorate those events. Veteran's Day was once Armistice Day, and it was meant to respectfully commemorate the war dead; as was Memorial Day meant to be our Dios de los Muertos, our Samhain. Unfortunately we don't do that very well, so Samhain becomes Hallowe'en, and Memorial Day becomes a three-day weekend for shopping specials. We've never been good at public memorials and commemorations, and we aren't getting any better at it. Today, if we can't wrap it in videos narrated by misty-eyed announcers and news readers and strung together with stirring music, we can't seem to remember at all. Today, if it isn't about us, then what's the point?

I want to remember 9/11, but I can't divorce it from our involvement in Afghanistan before 2001, and our wars there and in Iraq afterward, wars that were directly tied to the horrors of the attacks. Innocent people were killed in America, people who never knew why they were slated to be killed; but innocent people died in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point Baghdad was so choked with bodies we feared a cholera epidemic. We did that, as a response to the events we want to remember on Sunday. Are we going to think about how we changed Iraq and Afghanistan? Or are we only going to think about how events changed us?

There is an important difference between remembering and commemorating. It is the difference between thinking of yourself as an individual, and thinking of yourself as a part of the whole, as not an island at all. To remember is to think of yourself; to commemorate, is to think of the memories of others, to hold in memory the others and who they were. To remember is to think of who we were; to commemorate, is to think of who they were. To respectfully commemorate, is to honor them.

And that's what we should do; we shouldn't honor us, and our pain, and our loss, and our "change." We should respectfully commemorate them. We should honor the dead, because there are so many of them; because they are so deserving. Because the decent thing to do, the honorable thing to do, is to "co-memorate," to reflect on the corporate memory which honors the dead. Anything less is selfish.

Burn, baby, burn!

2011-09-09T23:58:00.005-05:00

Huffington Post:

In Texas, firefighters aren't just battling the wild fires raging around Austin and Houston. The state's first responders have also had to deal with budget cuts affecting everything from fuel purchases to hoses and oxygen tanks.

In some cases, fire officials say, firefighters have had to pay out of pocket for basic necessities like proper protective gear and fuel to get them to the scene. One fire department that battled the blazes in Bastrop County had to pay for a hose, recalled Bastrop City Fire Chief Henry Perry, speaking to The Huffington Post during a break from working the wild fires.

"That fire department has been on this fire every day," he said. "Before this fire, they were having to buy stuff out of their own pocket." Perry said he knows of at least one other department whose firemen had to pay for equipment maintenance and engine fuel.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch....

Residents affected by a devastating Central Texas wildfire are growing impatient with state officials and questioning why Gov. Rick Perry hasn't spent more time there.

Some residents yelled at Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst when he visited the command center in Bastrop County Friday, asking where Perry is and why they haven't had any housing help.

Wildfires have destroyed nearly 1,400 homes about 25 miles from Austin.

Perry, running for the Republican nomination for president, interrupted his campaign and returned to Texas for two days before heading to California for a debate Wednesday. He is now fundraising in California.

Perry's office said "everything that needs to be done to respond to these fires is being done."

Dewhurst said the White House hasn't yet replied to a request for federal aid.

Dewhurst is an elected official, not Perry's right-hand man; but he's a Republican. And what he actually said was:

“Because so many fires are burning across the state, our resources are spread pretty thin. That's why we need the federal government to step up to the plate immediately.”

Except, of course, state resources aren't spread thin because of an act of God.

Earlier this week, HuffPost reported that Gov. Rick Perry, the GOP front-runner for president, had signed off on millions in firefighting cuts as part of the state's most recent budget legislation. The Texas Forest Service's funding has gone from $117.7 million in the 2010-2011 budget years to $83 million in the 2012-2013 budget years.

Severe cuts have also hit assistance grants to volunteer fire departments throughout Texas. The grants decreased from $30 million per year in 2010 and 2011 to $13.5 million per year in 2012 and 2013. These are cuts that firemen are now dealing with.

Penny wise and pound foolish, here we stand:

Gov. Rick Perry, currently the frontrunner among GOP presidential candidates, has been forced to press President Obama for more than $50 million in federal aid. At the same time, he defends the state's decision to slash by 74 percent the funding for the volunteer fire departments who do most of the work, and to cut the Texas Forest Service's budget by 34 percent, down to its 2008 level.

...

But what some have called Texas' “slash and burn” approach to balancing its state budget has left volunteer firefighters, who do about 80 percent of the work, in a lurch. Just last week, the most recent budget cuts meant 90 Texas Forest Service employees were laid off. Some volunteers pay for expenses out of pocket. And the repeated emergency calls are stressing equipment like tankers and pumpers not built for continuous use.

On Thursday, one of the Tomball tankers blew a transmission, leaving [volunteer firefighter David] Hill on the sidelines as the Magnolia fire flared up, cutting across fire lines and highways, and forcing hundreds to rapidly flee their homes. Nearly 100 homes have been lost as a thick haze floated into Houston.

This is why you don't elect Aggies.

Photo is from the NASA Aqua satellite.

The Law Is A Ass

2011-09-09T08:52:00.001-05:00

Thers directs me to this.

I'll save you the trouble. The shorter version is: "Suffer, you bastards, suffer!" "Bastards," of course, being whoever your group isn't. This is not even Rawls' "original position" and First and Second Principles of Justice. This is just sort of a weird "everyone who has more than I do should have less!"

What, I would first ask, is "prosperity" anyway? Isn't it "when I have a little more than I do today?" Isn't the prosperous man the one who anticipates having more tomorrow than he does right now? Is he really prosperous because he has enough? Is enough ever enough, or is it enough because it will be as much, or more, tomorrow? A man who lives off his investments, after all, is constantly anticipating tomorrow at least replacing what he used today, if not providing a little more. Isn't that "prosperity"?

Which is another way of saying "scarcity," only for thee and not for me. These aren't the golden laws of prosperity. They are just variations on the iron law of "Blow you, Jack! I got mine!" Maybe a little more egalitarian than that, but no more conventional and no less radical (i.e., going to the root), for all that. No, you want radical, you gotta go down deep, right down to the base of the problem.

He said to them, "When you pray, you should say:

Father, your name be revered.
Impose your imperial rule.
Provide us with the bread we need day by day.
Forgive our sins, since we too forgive everyone in debt to us.
And please don't subject us to test after test."(Luke 11:2-4, SV)

As for that "imperial rule," it would look something like this:

"Come for water, all who are thirsty;
though you have no money, come, buy grain and eat;
come, buy wine and milk, not for money, not for a price.
Why spend your money for what is not food
your earnings on what fails to satisfy?
Listen to me and you will fare well,
you will enjoy the fat of the land. (Isaiah 55:1-2)

As the Mad Priest said, "It is not our own bodies that raise us from the dead."

Because I am lazy and don't feel like repeating myself, I will simply direct you to more of the same, for your reading pleasure: here; here; here; here....

Blood makes the grass grow!

2011-09-08T14:56:00.001-05:00

"It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case -- not one -- in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.

Antonin Scalia, Kansas v. Marsh

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has said that the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person would be a constitutionally intolerable event.”

The New Yorker

Multiple former Hutchison advisers recalled asking a focus group about the charge that Perry may have presided over the execution of an innocent man – Cameron Todd Willingham – and got this response from a primary voter: "It takes balls to execute an innocent man."

Salon

I'm guessing they'd applaud indentured servitude and restricting the franchise to white male property owners, too.

The big Politico/MSNBC debate Wednesday was not a good night for death penalty opponents. Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who has overseen more executions than any other governor during his three terms in office — stood firmly behind his state’s vision of justice.

And the crowd was with him.

Here’s how it looked in the transcript:

[Moderator BRIAN] WILLIAMS: Governor Perry, a question about Texas. Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. Have you…

(APPLAUSE)

It was probably the largest applause of the night, swelling in the Regan Library’s now-familiar pavilion featuring the Gipper’s Air Force One.

That quote conveniently allows me to bring up another subject: what the hell? The Reagan Library houses the plane Reagan used in office? Why? Because without it, the building would be completely empty? Seriously: what is it doing there in a building supposedly dedicated to Presidential records? Is it a monument to the emptiness of the Reagan era? He traveled? That's the most important thing about him? And a huge hanger of an interior space had to be built to memorialize that?

As for the applause, I can only say to the rest of the world: yes, we are savages. Was there ever any doubt?*

And somehow, some way, the huge bulk of a modern jet hanging over everyone like some sword, or some relic of technology, seemed very appropriate. There's a sign there, somewhere. I'm just not sure yet what it signifies.

*As for Perry's claims about Texas justice, or justice in general, one can only reply: Cameron Todd Willingham. Over and over again.

Totally Irrelevant Minor Media Point

2011-09-08T10:20:00.001-05:00

Just wondering if this will enter the media mainstream, or be lost as the narrative closes over it as skin would a wound, leaving not even a scar.

Last night Rick Perry called President Obama an "abject liar." Rachel Maddow's panel on MSNBC made much of it last night, but I haven't heard that clip repeated this morning on NPR, and I'm not seeing it prominently mentioned in any stories on the debate. Google doesn't turn up any news story containing the words "Perry Obama liar," either. MSNBC noted, in the second hour (0r was it third? Post-debate coverage ran longer than the debate by several hours) that Perry was flat out wrong in claiming El Paso was a dangerous border city, citing FBI and other statistics to back up Obama's statements (the ones Perry said were lies).

I'm being vague because I'm going on memory, not news reports, because there don't seem to be any (and I'm too lazy to search the transcript). MSNBC doesn't have anything about it in their AP report "fact checking" the debate, and even Politifact only has an article from 5 days ago which touches only on the "he said, she said" when Perry first made this claim.

So, first, what are the repercussions of a sitting governor declaring a major city in his state too dangerous for people to live in? Think El Paso wants that kind of publicity, especially when it's not true? Second, and more interestingly, a GOP candidate for President called the sitting President "an abject liar." What, that isn't news?

Is "liar" such a perjorative term that, like "the 'n' word," we have to disappear it from political discourse, and pretend it was never spoken? Can we not even mention "the 'l' word"? Or is it because that's taken?

Interesting what disappears down the memory hole, no?

Those Who Have Ears....

2011-09-08T10:16:00.002-05:00

I like E.J. Dionne, and I don't disagree with his recent column at all. But the advice William Goldman put in Deep Throat's mouth is still the best general admonition in American culture: "Follow the money."

Dionne hearkens back to Abraham Lincoln to find a Republican praising labor: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” I have to point out Lincoln was the last pre-Industrial Revolution President this country ever had.

The Industrial Revolution actually took hold in America during the Civil War, and it was one reason the North defeated the South. When Grant retired from the Presidency, he moved to a farm in St. Louis, MO. He built a fence for his farm from rifle barrels left over after the war. It's quite a long fence, with 2563 rifle barrels. It's the result of factory production. Capital soon swamped labor, because while factories needed workers, machines could outproduce persons, whether they were John Henry, or not. So when Lincoln praises Labor over capital, it's almost an historical anomaly. We all moved away from labor after the war (the South, of course, was built on staying away from labor, and making someone else do it. Small wonder the South is still almost completely anti-union.)

So it would take a brave man to point out that unions “grew up from the struggle of the workers — workers in general but especially the industrial workers — to protect their just rights vis-a-vis the entrepreneurs and the owners of the means of production,” or to insist that “the experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an indispensable element of social life.”

Yes, Pope John Paul II was right; but then, how many shareholders does the Pope have? And yes, "That the language of Lincoln and John Paul is so distant from our experience today is a sign of an enormous cultural shift." But that cultural shift started in my childhood, if not earlier. The South has risen again; and as a soi-Southerner, all I can say is: I'm deeply, deeply sorry.

I was thinking last night about the '70s, and how the economy started to crack and jobs became a widespread problem for the middle class. There was a huge amount of economic displacement in the '70's, and not just because of inflation. One might even say that economic disturbance, which was tied (probably falsely) to government spending such as Vietnam and the Great Society, paved the way for Reagan and the Tea Party today. Labor was still powerful then, but its power was already ebbing, and labor was already widely seen as "advocates of arcane work rules, protectors of inefficient public employees and obstacles to the economic growth our bold entrepreneurs would let loose if only they were free from labor regulations." Anyone remember Reagan "breaking" PATCO? It was the next decade over, but he was practically sainted for that feeble and unnecessarily cruel action.

But in the '70's labor was already unable to protect workers from foreign competition. As gas prices rose (laughably small increases by today's standards, but stunning near 100% jumps at the time), small Japanese cars began to dominate the market as people looked for alternatives to "gas guzzlers." More jobs lost, and even less job security. In the '80's, you may or may not recall, the economy wasn't really so good, except for the yuppies. Reagan oversaw the collapse of the savings and loans, an event that devastated the economy of Texas and other southern states, and was simply prelude for current economic troubles. Clinton eventually steered the economy into better seas, but the 80's were reflected, not in "Morning in America," but in "Executive Blues", G.J. Meyer's record of being laid off as the economy of the 80's soured the early '90's. That experience was repeated again with the bursting of the Internet bubble, and again just a few years ago. So at least four times in my adult life I can count major economic reversals; and all have been blamed, more or less, on labor (well, they never led to a rise in the minimum wage, and even today no one seems interested in reviving the labor intensive portions of FDR's "New Deal.").

Not a one of them, at least, led to the appreciation of labor that the Great Depression finally fostered (briefly, and then it was extinguished).

I do remember regular news reports, on TV network news, about labor. That has vanished so completely I might as well recall when unicorns were prevalent, and fairies lived at the bottom of everyone's garden; or the time before everything came from factories. Now the only news is about finance and "business," the DJIA is reported as if it were the oracle of Delphi, and every news outlet a priest explaining the message of the daily numbers. And one thing Mr. Dionne didn't note: how many workers had to go to work on Labor Day.

The banks were closed. Wall Street was closed. Probably state and municipal contracts for road construction had a day off.

But the stores were open. And somebody had to labor there. What was the holiday of Labor Day supposed to honor, again?

To put this in as much context as I can muster, what I remember of Reagan's era was inflation, which was broken by Paul Volcker's Keynesian application of high interest rates (remember when credit card interest was limited by usury laws, and passbook savings accounts paid 5%? If you do, you remember the era before Volcker broke the back of inflation with high interest rates. States eventually had to scrap their usury laws in order to allow credit cards and banks to keep up with the Fed. Of course, the Fed's interest rate is now down to zero, and credit card interest is in double digits. But at least we don't have inflation, right?), inflation and the Savings and Loan collapse, which took the economy of Texas with it and took bankruptcy from an obscure practice almost no one bothered with, to the centerpiece of law firm incomes across the state and across the South. Unemployment went down under Reagan, but only four years later his Vice-President lost the Presidency because "It's the economy, stupid." Clinton actually left the country with a surplus, but he also left us (coincidentally or not) with the "dot.com bubble," which burst and took a lot of jobs with it. Then another bubble grew under George W. Bush, only to burst with the consequences we are suffering today, where "experts" are finally realizing (as in, just now!) that housing was overpriced and the overheated market had to correct itself (and still is). Is it coincidence that we were told, from the '70's on as manufacturing started to fade here and grow overseas (mostly, it seemed, in Asia), that this was now a "service economy," and yet it now seems the backbone of the economy was still manufacturing? But this time, of housing?

I think not. But we certainly disparaged, and were taught to disparage, labor in all that long process. And we've been through boom and bust cycles so rapidly it would seem that even the most obtuse and ahistorical of Americans would start to see a pattern here.

And yet we don't. And to prove I can, like the poet, connect nothing with nothing, consider the attitude toward the poor today. I've mentioned before the pictures of Bobby Kennedy walking through Appalachia, or talking to obviously poor (certainly not white, middle-class) people in Harlem, and how we'd never see any politician today staging such photo-ops (partly because of RFK's assassination, partly because no one wants that visual today). This, too, is connected with labor. Why else get a college degree, except to avoid jobs involving labor or, worst of all, "Do you want fries with that?" Now we don't feel compassion for the poor, we feel disdain:

To address the jobs crisis, the Obama administration championed more generous food stamps, unemployment benefits, tax cuts, and health insurance subsidies for layoff victims, among other things. The broader safety net prevented a record poverty rate in 2009, yet it gets no respect in Congress, where Republican and even Democratic lawmakers spent 2010 describing the unemployed as a bunch of lazy drug addicts unworthy of the federal deficit spending lavished on them.

The myth that unemployed workers would rather watch TV than look for jobs helped lawmakers take away much of the expanded safety net, and most of the rest will be rolled up soon as federal spending continues to lose popularity in Washington. In particular, it's likely that extended unemployment benefits will be dropped at the beginning of 2012 in an unprecedented abandonment of the long-term jobless during a weak economy.

A disdain not limited to David French and Walter Russell Meade; a disdain that is being incorporated into our laws:

John Stossel (Fox News): “Let’s stop saying everyone should vote.”
Rush Limbaugh: “If people cannot even feed and clothe themselves, should they be allowed to vote?”
Steve Doocy (Fox News): “With 47% of Americans not paying taxes – 47% – should those who don’t pay be allowed to vote?”

These are sentiments from the founding of the nation, when only white male property owners were allowed to vote because, after all, the purpose of government was only to protect property. Need I add that, at that time, people could still be property, that only 40 years after the Constitution was written Charles Dickens would experience the concept of the poor as chattel, as persons to be incarcerated until their debts were discharged? Are there no prisons? Are there no work-houses?

How very far we have not come. Or how very far we have already gone backwards. Rep. John Lewis has called this new spate of voting laws “a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in a democratic process.” Can there be any real doubt he is right? Can there be any real doubt there is a concerted effort to punish and marginalize the poor more than our system of indifference and exploitation already does? And if a brave person, in Mr. Dionne's words, were to speak up: who would listen? Surely someone would.

Is someone enough?

UPDATE: And when you think it can't get worse, sure enough, it gets worse:

Congress should follow in the footsteps of state legislatures and pass a federal voter ID law that requires voters to present photo identification at the polls, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Thursday.

...

Graham even raised the Sept. 11 attacks to justify restrictions on voter access.

"All the highjackers had -- five or six -- had fake drivers licenses, so I think sanctifying the voting process in a way that makes sense, in a way that makes sure we're electing people based on registered voters, is a goal that we should all be concerned about," Graham said.

I'm not sure how fake ID's prove we can rely on voters not to use fake ID's, but I'm sure there's an explanation in there somewhere....

Texas, Our Burning Texas

2011-09-07T16:10:00.005-05:00

These maps at The Atlantic about the Texas wildfires are helpful; I guess. Yes, for example, if the fires were confined to one place, they'd encompass most of the Houston metropolitan area (it may look like Houston and everywhere else on the Atlantic map, but trust me: that's all just "Houston," whether it's technically the city of, or not. You don't feel like you are "out of Houston" until you get past Sealy to the west, or Galveston to the south, or The Woodlands to the north.)

My only point being: Texas IS that big. This map puts that into some perspective. But to put the whole thing in perspective, you can leave Houston (on almost the Gulf coast) on I-10 heading west, and not reach El Paso for another 12 hours or more (depending on how often you stop). And you'll still be in Texas, and only about half-way to the California coast.

3.5 million acres ain't tiny, don't get me wrong. But it really is basically the Houston SMSA. Or at least, the Houston footprint. Which is why we can have the state of Connecticut burning in Texas, and still function.

Not that I don't keep imagining the trees around me being on fire. And not being comforted that they aren't.

Purity of Heart is to Will What I Want

2011-09-07T11:06:00.000-05:00

Anthony McCarthy stirred my thinking with this comment at another blog:

It's so funny how being realistic about things such as the Ivys and scientists gives people here the heebie jeebies. For Pete's sake, they put their pants on the same way all of us do. They're [no] less prone to evil than the Vatican or Wall Street.

Evil has become, for the most part, corporate. Well, that's not quite right; it is our conception of evil that has changed. We attach it almost wholly to institutions (the church; multi-national corporations; the government) or to individuals with great power (Senators; Presidents; Vice-Presidents; CEO's). Seldom do we attach it to individuals as individuals. Would anybody really consider Dick Cheney evil if he hadn't been Vice-President of the United States for 8 years? He'd have been no different as a private citizen running Halliburton (poorly, by all accounts; its stock tripled in value after Cheney returned to public office and Halliburton became the contractor of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan), but would we have considered him evil then, or even noticed him? Individuals we barely consider evil at all, and therein lies an interesting distinction.

Consider what Sherri said earlier, a familiar lament:

What will the church do? What has the 'church' done? The loudest part will continue to do what it's been doing: fight abortion, but ignore the living, and measure their success by numbers and money and power gained.

Can you tell I'm feeling discouraged these days?

And when you consider that the Church does, or doesn't do, it's terribly easy to feel discouraged. But part of the problem is that our default position is the hearts of the people may be pure (well, some of them; I'm pretty sure about me and thee, although maybe not always about thee), but the heart of the institution is selfish and corrupt and bent toward evil ends.

Who, then, is the institution? Is it me and thee? Or is it "them"?

I mean, how many of us don't live our lives by ignoring the living (especially those in our neighborhood, or standing destitute on street corners, or huddled under overpasses) and measure our success by numbers and money and power gained? I make no money from this blog, but I obsessively check the Site Meter statistics, and rejoice when anything I post merits a comment. It's not exactly evil to desire such things, but what about that makes me still innocent and pure, and the Church corrupt and debased? My purity of heart is to will one thing; but what purity of heart can the church ever have, apart from the hearts of its members?

That definition of purity of heart, of course, depends upon what is willed. The corporation may will one thing, to increase a return to the shareholders. But not only does the corporation not have a heart, there is nothing pure in that singular motivation. The church may will to be the body of Christ, but hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but one Sordello? But Sordello, and my Sordello?

Problems abound.

And left there, we are left nowhere at all. Yes the individual heart seeks reconciliation, but does it do it free from the taint of evil? No, of course not. Scientists may pursue noble goals, but they still create nuclear weapons and radioactive waste (even X-ray machines and cat scans have unfortunate by-products we will visit upon generations unborn almost to the end of the earth itself). Nobody meant evil when they found a use for the oil spewing from Spindletop, but look at the results today. And how many of us are evil because we still drive cars or turn on lights powered by fossil fuels, power delivered on poles dipped in petroleum products to prevent rot, or buy foods delivered by diesel trucks, food raised by petroleum derived fertilizers, via roads topped with more petroleum products. There is truly nothing in our modern world that isn't a product of oil and gas development, yet we consider BP and Exxon evil. They are, but not us.

How pure we sometimes are. We didn't cause the oil spill in the Gulf; we just wanted the oil under the Gulf. Our intentions are pure, so we are blameless. BP's intentions were to make money, so it is evil. How convenient it all is.*

And there's the problem: we have conveniently dissociated ourselves from all we depend on (corporations especially; they make daily life in America possible) and keep ourselves apart and clean, unsullied by all those...well, other people. A corporation is not a person (except as a convenient legal fiction, for reasons which actually make sense, Citizens United notwithstanding), but it is run by and for persons. At one extreme, we all know of "apologists" who were only doing their job, despite the results. At the other extreme, we know there are few "mad scientists" bent on absolute knowledge and indifferent to consequences. Yet any mention that scientists can wield inordinate power yields cries of ignorance as to what scientists "really do", or perhaps simply ignore Edward Teller as an outlier.

We are all of us pure; it is "them" you have to look out for. So the trick is to never be "them;" to be in the world, but not of the world.

But how do we do that? We can never forget that the predicaments of modern life are almost all the result of science and the "scientific process." Does this make science evil? No, but simply because individuals insist their hearts are pure and their intentions beneficent, doesn't mean evil isn't still done. The Church faces the same predicament: good as it may intend to be, evil results can still occur. Miserable creatures that we are, who is there to deliver us from this paradox?

Maybe we can deliver ourselves.

Oh, not entirely; but it is our idea of the community and the individual that is at the root of the problem. I punted the issue a bit earlier when I pointed out my purity of heart may will one thing, but the purity of heart of the church can never be established by willing one thing because, no matter how monolithic the Church may seem, its members never will one thing together at one time. That is the problem with institutions: they cannot be single-minded. At least, they cannot be single-minded and pure of heart; when they are single-minded, we seem to assume they are evil and driven only by their relentless malevolence (the other assumption is that they are flailing aimlessly, because they are not single-minded). The institution is one thing, the individual another, and as Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, they have unalterably different ends.

But Niebuhr's brother Richard thought Reinhold had come to the wrong conclusion; and perhaps Richard was right. We cannot assume the perfectability of the institution arising from the perfectability of human nature, and not merely because we cannot presume the perfectability of human nature. We cannot link the hearts of the individuals with the telos of the institution, even if we recognize that the institution is nothing more than the people who establish it. That doesn't mean we can't expect the institution to do good even if it isn't the good we would do. The real problem is: what good would we do?

It's a tougher question than it appears to be. As Brian Morton points out, "Be the change you want to see in the world" sounds good, but it's actually rather weak tea:

Gandhi’s words have been tweaked a little too in recent years. Perhaps you’ve noticed a bumper sticker that purports to quote him: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” When you first come across it, this does sound like something Gandhi would have said. But when you think about it a little, it starts to sound more like ... a bumper sticker. Displayed brightly on the back of a Prius, it suggests that your responsibilities begin and end with your own behavior. It’s apolitical, and a little smug.

Sure enough, it turns out there is no reliable documentary evidence for the quotation. The closest verifiable remark we have from Gandhi is this: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.”

Here, Gandhi is telling us that personal and social transformation go hand in hand, but there is no suggestion in his words that personal transformation is enough. In fact, for Gandhi, the struggle to bring about a better world involved not only stringent self-denial and rigorous adherence to the philosophy of nonviolence; it also involved a steady awareness that one person, alone, can’t change anything, an awareness that unjust authority can be overturned only by great numbers of people working together with discipline and persistence.

Ah, but there's the problem! Discipline and persistence are hard, especially when I have to apply those efforts to working with others! My discipline and persistence break down in the face of their intransigence, of their impurity of heart, of their failure to will the one true thing which I want to will. Can you see why people feel discouraged?

Which isn't to say people aren't jerks, pinheads, and weasels. Some of them are even evil. "Them," of course; never me. My heart is pure. Your heart, on the other hand....well, as Jeremiah said: "The heart is devious, who can fathom it?" Oh, wait, that wasn't Jeremiah speaking; that was God. Even God doesn't know our heart is pure. But God is pretty sure the corporate heart is impure; because, well, just look at what corporations and institutions do! Except that's what God goes on to tell Jeremiah to tell Israel: God tests the heart to find out what is in it. God knows what is in the heart by what is done; and God alone is fit to sit in the seat of judgment. The rest of us? We don't even know what is in our hearts when we act. We consider our actions pure, our hearts to be willing the one thing worth willing. We judge ourselves from the point of view of ourselves, and this makes us sure our intentions are good, and the intentions of others are suspect. Those others are especially suspect if they aren't people but corporations, institutions, large groups. We trust individuals, but only if we know them. Groups earn our suspicion, our distrust, our fear and loathing. We don't trust them because we know we are moral, but societies can be, even have to be, immoral. And so we remain pure; in the world, but not of the world.

Which is another bumper sticker idea, one peculiar to Christianity. We were never told to be superior to the world. We were, are, told to be as innocent as doves, but also as wise as serpents. To be innocent in the world is to be vulnerable; to be wise in the world, is to be worldly. There is no reconciling this into a bumper sticker mentality that lets us be just what we want to be. And the ones sent out into this world are always "you," but the "you" is collective, not individual. Perhaps Southern English would serve us better, and the translation should read "Y'all," the one form of "you" in English I know of that is never singular. We go together, or we don't go at all. And none of us among us has a pure heart; our hearts together do not add up to a pure thing. We are not purer because we separate from the world; we are purer only when we embrace the world. Our purity comes from our selflessness, not our selfishness. After all, we are sent out as sheep among wolves; how much of our own wolvishness do we think we ever set aside?

Evil is not out there, accumulated against us, arising from a separate source or created by a group grown too large to do anything but act in its own self-interest. Evil is inherent in what we do, and how we do it. We may be as innocent as doves, but we are not innocent. We may be as wise as serpents, but we are not wise (and what is the wisdom of the serpent, after all?). We may be sheep among wolves, but are we so sure we are sheep, and they are wolves?

The picture of the maze at Chartres Cathedral is no accident here. The maze is for contemplation and meditation. It must be walked individually. However, it is exists in a wholly corporate setting, and apart from that setting it is nothing. Were the hearts of the builders of Chartres Cathedral pure? Probably not, but we can still appreciate the setting, we can still walk the maze in contemplation of the holy. But can we do that and avoid the community that built and sustained it, the clouds of witness who have conveniently removed themselves and all their prickly humanity from us, and left this legacy behind? The builders of this cathedral did at least this much good. They actually did even more good: they passed on to us the traditions we live with today, both religious and secular, for better and for worse. It is clear none of us can do very much good alone. So the question stands: what good can we do?

*yes, BP was responsible for its irresponsibility; but we are complicit. BP is not a group of aliens taking our natural resources for their own non-human purposes. The oil they pump from beneath the Gulf is impossible to distinguish at the gasoline pump where you fill your car. They were simply extracting what we need, what we have come to rely on. As the environmentalists used to say, there is no free lunch.