The handwriting on the wall?

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Well, no, not really.

What the linked document will tell you (it's a PDF summary of the law in Texas, and opinions by the Attorney General of Texas regarding that law), is that schools now have to offer a course on the Bible as part of a curriculum, with a focus on the cultural influence/impact of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Which would be extremely interesting if taught from a Jewish perspective, especially; or a Muslim one. Although, as the law recognizes, it would also be controversial. I can't think of a school district in Texas where I wouldn't arouse controversy simply for teaching the Bible as Literature (which I've done, in college courses), instead of as sacred text. The latter, of course, is verboten, and the law and the Texas AG recognize that, so it can't be done. But this is not the indoctrination plan Keith takes it for. Maybe it was meant to be; but I don't think it will work out that way.

I can tell you, as a teacher of high school as well as college level students, that I've encountered students every year with no background in Judaeo-Christian stories; the kind of thing I grew up taking for granted as part of the culture as much as Mother Goose and Looney Tunes. I've taught students who'd never heard of Noah, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, David, Goliath, Jonah, the whale, the Good Samaritan, much less Paul on the road to Damascus or even Balaam's ass. Try teaching English literature before 1960 to students who have no common touchpoint with those stories. It's rather surprising how many references there are to stories once common currency but now as dead as the Dodo because the common lore is now what was on TV when they were children. Students who don't know the Creation stories from Genesis, for whom Sodom and Gomorrah mean nothing (not even opprobrium), for whom "Lot's wife" is an empty phrase. These ideas are shot through English literature down to the near-present, but if you don't know them, you don't hear them. So teaching the Bible as literature is simply teaching it alongside Greek stories of Olympus, or the epic of Gilgamesh. It's hard enough teaching "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" without having to stop and explain what John the Baptist's head is doing on a platter, or who Lazarus is and why he's returning from the dead. But I have to do it every time I teach that poem.

So I'm not shot through with dread at this news, even though I am staunchly in favor of the separation of church and state, even though I know the Texas State Board of Education, which has to approve any curriculum for teaching under this new law that any school may come up with, is full of religious zealots. They are constrained by the U.S Constitution, and they are constrained by Texas law. It may well be more religion slips into some classrooms than should, but if it does, it's there anyway. If any student learns anything that contributes to their knowledge of Western culture, then it won't be an entirely bad thing. Maybe it's not what Texas schools need (and lorry nose, Texas schools need a lot they aren't getting), but it's not the first shot fired in a war for theocracy, either.

Who mourns for language games?

No, I don't get frustrated by claims that Obama wants to establish "death panels" to rid us of costly seniors (whose real concern is that they live for decades after retirement, and fear they are useless and unwanted), or of claims Obama is not an American citizen (where did that one go, anyway? Buried under it's own incredibility, I suppose). As Rick Perlstein points out, crazy has always been with us, at least in American politics. Rather, I get frustrated by the reigning question of religious belief, the one that has been imposed on us since at least the 19th century:

One of the five leaders is Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Of his belief in God he says:

“I think I’d prefer to talk about being confident that God exists, or trusting that God exists.

“It’s not knowing as you know a state of affairs in the world, it’s much more of a sense that you’re in the presence of something greater than you can conceive. I suppose from my teens I have just been aware of that something greater than I can put words to in whose presence I live.”

It's actually a good answer, because faith is nothing more than trust. "Faith" is another term that has been warped into something akin to blind credulity or, as Williams James described it, "Believin' what ain't so" (although, as James tried to point out, that is not the only definition of "faith" at all). The assumption behind the question put to the Archbishop is that existence is a thing that can be known, just as any object can be known. But even David Hume had trouble with that claim. His analysis of the self taking in all the sensory input which, he claimed, is all we know and all we can know, was that there was no self, since he (himself!) couldn't observe one. So all those observations just--"and then a miracle occurs!"--added up to an illusion of a self. Which doesn't go very far to explain how those stimuli add up to perceptions, much less how those perceptions add up to the illusion of selfhood. But since existence itself is not subject to empirical analysis, it's generally not deemed worthy of empirical study, either.

After all, what is the science of being? Indeed, Western philosophy has split on this very issue. Anglo-American philosophers by and large eschew the subjects of interest to "Continental" philosophers, and continue their pursuit of empiricism and pragmatism (empiricism's cousin). Continental philosophy is much more interested in questions of phenomenology, which have to do with the almost undecidable (and sometimes indecipherable) questions of "being." While the question "Does God exist?" assumes a simple definition for the word "exist," Martin Heidegger spent a lifetime trying to define the word and explain just what "being" is.

Kierkegaard tackled this subject head on, pointing out we can never prove the existence of Napoleon, except by establishing an historical record of events connected to someone identified as Napoleon (and S.K. fits into the Continental/phenomenological branch of Western philosophy). As Johannes Climacus puts it:

If one wanted to demonstrate Napoleon's existence from Napoleon's works, would it not be most curious, since his existence certainly explains the works but the works do not demonstrate his existence unless I have already in advance interpreted the word "his" in such a way as to have assumed he exists.

The works of Napoleon, in other words, don't establish Napoleon's existence unless I have already concluded that Napoleon does, indeed, exist. And as for the existence of God? Well, first, you have to posit that God is possible.

But then, what are the god's works? The works from which I want to demonstrate his existence do not immediately and directly exist, not at all. Or are the wisdom in nature and the goodness or wisdom in Governance right in front of our noses? Do we not encounter the most terrible spiritual trials here, and is it ever possible to be finished with all these trials? But I still do not demonstrate God's existence from such an order of things, and even if I began, I would never finish and also would be obliged continually to live in suspenso lest something so terrible happen that my fragments of demonstration would be ruined. Therefore, from what works do I demonstrate it? From the works regarded ideally--that is, as they do not appear directly and immediately. But then I do not demonstrate it from the works, after all, but only develop the ideality I have presupposed; trusting in that, I even dare to defy all objections, even those that have not yet arisen. By beginning, then, I have presupposed the ideality, have presupposed that I will succeed in accomplishing it, but what else is that but presupposing that the god exists and actually beginning with trust in him.

The question, you see, makes a category error. Does a platypus exist? Well, if you mean by that is a platypus an animal that can be identified, an object that can be classified as "animal" and sub-catetogorized down through the Linnean system, then, yes, it "exists." But if you ask "Do you (your humble host) exist?", you mean something quite different, although you've used the same word in seemingly the same way. Except you haven't, of course. When you ask "Does a platypus exist?", you are asking whether the animal identified as "platypus" is or has been alive in the world. When you ask "Do I exist?," you are asking "Do I have being?" And to ask that is to assume the answer in the question; or at least to assume a definition of "being" that includes a definition of me so that I can have being.

There are really two problems here: one is empirical, one phenomenological. Empirically, an animal identifed as a platypus can be located in the world. Phenomenologically, whether the platypus has being is a matter of definition, for both being and the platypus. As Kierkegaard explains it:

For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who indeed does exist, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated.

The thing in my hand can be identified (labelled, if you prefer) as a stone. That does not prove its existence, it simply gives an object a name. Neither do I prove the existence of a person; I simply identify them by name or by societal placement (a "criminal"). How do I ever demonstrate the being of the platypus, or the criminal? And how do I define "being" so that it doesn't include the stone, but also excludes a corpse? Indeed, how can you be sure I'm not simply a clever Turing test? Or that my name doesn't identify the writer of these posts? One might as validly assert that my social security card, or my diplomas, assert my existence. But all they prove is that pieces of paper with a common name are objects in the world that can be known empirically. When I die (i.e., cease to exist), they will still be objects in the world. But if they exist, how can I not exist? Easily, of course; but clearly those pieces of paper don't establish my existence.

If I am the Invisible Man of the Silverberg story, do I exist? Well, yes, and no; and what a pitiable state that would be. If I proclaim my existence and no one acknowledges it, do I cease to exist, like Apollo on Star Trek? Well, if you posit that to be the god's existence, yes. But if you don't....

The problem is not Rowan Williams' answer to the question, it's the question. The best response, actually, would be to ask the interlocuter: "Do you exist?", and when they said yes, ask them to prove it.

The result would be quite diverting.

Memento Mori

I read this book in seminary, and frankly haven't given much thought to it since. It may be that the current debate of "death panels" is going to return us to an infantile state as a nation of hiding under the covers when the thunder rumbles, although I really don't think the situation is that dire. I seem to recall only a week or so ago the "birthers" were going to undermine Obama's presidency if he didn't do something, and he didn't. I'm still not convinced the "deathers" have any more credibility, and the only response to them seems to be either to punch the tar baby (because no matter what you say, they'll say (a) you're a liar or (b) make up a new lie), or effectively ignore it, publish the truth, and wait for the opposition to collapse under its lies.

Or we can talk about death. Funny that death is a favorite subject of entertainment (the latest "Final Destination" movie is advertised everytime I turn the TV on), but we can't talk about it. Or maybe not so funny; we clearly feel the same way about sex. I remember seeing a nude model advertising suntan lotion on sidewalk kiosks in Paris 33 years ago, and this week topless pictures of Sharon Stone on the cover of Paris Match created quite a buzz. A woman nearly spilling out of her dress is okay; a woman actually spilling out of her dress, ist verboten! We like sex in America, but we like to not like it, except when we do like it. Or something. Thinking about it too hard will make your head hurt. Everyone, especially at those town meetings, where the "sleeping giant" is being awakened, would probably also agree there is too much sex and violence in movies and on TV. Funny thing, though: Hollywood keeps turning to it, and we keep pumping money into Hollywood's coffers.

So if all those people at the town meetings expressed their outrage over the sex and violence, who would they be speaking for?

We can't talk about death, but we must talk about death. Dr. Nuland meant to spark that conversation with his excellent book. Too bad that didn't happen.

AMA President J. James Rohack put it this way: "These are important discussions everyone should have so they are fully informed and can make their wishes known. That's not controversial, it's plain, old-fashioned patient-centered care."

Yup. It's pretty simple. The kind of thing people do every day. Usually when they have to, not when they need to.

It's another boundaries issue, which is one reason it is never discussed easily. Boundaries define us, especially in America. Boundaries between "us" and "the politicians in Washington," for example. Boundaries between class, race, social status; even between the living and the dead. It's no accident graveyards are no longer around churches, or that hospitals are places we only visit on special occasions, or that funeral homes are special buildings we never enter until we have to. Nobody ever put a funeral parlor or a hospital in a shopping mall. Healthcare and the end of life are not matters that we incorporate into our everyday existence anymore.

It used to be that a loved one died at home, and as kept there until the burial. This was largely a matter of economy, I suspect. Who could afford an undertaker and all those fees? But it was also a matter of respect. Who would join the deceased in the "preparation room" of a funeral home? You probably wouldn't be allowed to, and I know many people who shudder at the idea of an open casket at a funeral service. I even know people who don't want the service at the church they've attended all their life, because of the sad memories it would cause. It's a mistake to generalize about such things, but it says something about our unwillingness to make death a part of life. It was once the norm for someone to "sit up" with the deceased, until the funeral. It was indecent and unkind to leave the loved one alone. Now we can't wait for the undertaker to whisk away the "corpse," and sometimes we aren't sure we want to see it ever again. Gone are the days when family members lovingly washed the body, and dressed it, and truly paid their "last respects."

I don't know what happened. You can trace the modern attitude toward death back to Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich," to some degree. Some of it is simply affluence, the ability to pay someone to provide services, as we pay someone to do our suburban lawns and fix our cars and repair our houses. This is not a harangue against the funeral industry, but more of a question:

What is it that so many people are so scared of? And why? Again, being a pastor, I see this as a spiritual problem, but I don't think I'm wrong to ask: what does it say about us, that we are so collectively so afraid, and so profoundly afraid of death? When and how did we convince our seniors, our elders, our friends and family, that they were so completely useless, that they should be the first to die in order to save society some money?

Are we truly that utilitarian? Are we secretly convinced the pleasures of Omelas depend on our early death? Have we devalued human life this much?

Priests

And all of you
have seen the dance
That God has kept
from me.--Leonard Cohen

The Archbishop of Canterbury roiled the waters in the Anglican Communion recently, an event that would have meant more to me a year or so ago than it does now. If you are curious about how Anglicans are reacting to it, you could do worse than follow the conversation at The Wounded Bird, which is where I take note of it. It's simply a hunt I don't have a dog in now, and a hunt I don't ever want to have a dog in again. And my feelings on this have to do with Pennsylvania and Simone Weil. Let me explain.

Part of the recent travels were spent in the home of a friend from seminary. She's been at the same church since leaving seminary, a feat I am openly and shamelessly envious of. Clearly she has the gifts needed for the pastorate, and she has been blessed with a good congregation. Several years ago, her congregation decided to leave the UCC, a denomination she was ordained in (as am I), and which the church had been a member of since the denomination started in 1957 (it's a very old German church, though whether it started as E or German "R" I don't know). The decision to leave was a carefully considered one, and a painful one, but it wasn't a defiant one. Or at least, not from their point of view.

Here I should explain that my friend and I are great, good friends; but we disagree on almost all points of theology. We went to the same seminary, studied under the same teachers in the same classes, but came to different conclusions about all the issues now dividing churches, issues like Biblical authority and homosexuality (should gays and lesbians be allowed in the pulpit?), etc. We differ strongly on these issues, though we agree on others (like the basic tenets of Biblical interpretation. She's far more "conservative" than I am, but she learned the same exegesis and hermeneutics I did.). We differ, but we simply agree to disagree. It's really no great matter between us; we can discuss our disgreements freely, but I really don't care that she differs from me. She's my friend. She's a good person, a fine pastor, an admirable Christian. What are issues of theology in such a situation?

But it mattered to the UCC in her area. As she tells the story (let's be fair here, I know only one side of the story), she didn't leave the UCC, they left her. Ah, you say, we've heard that before! And especially if you come to this from the context of the troubles in the Anglican Communion and The Episcopal Church, you will think you have. I invite you to think again. My friend told me of events she might have told me about before, at the time they happened; but I'd forgotten them. She reminded me that, before she and her church broke with the UCC, the pastors in her area, her colleagues in the UCC, broke with her. They treated her as a pariah, as "invisible" in the terms of that new Twilight Zone series, "To See the Invisible Man." At meetings of the local UCC, pastors would shun her, would avoid her table, would openly turn away from sitting with her at meals.

You will say this is very human conduct, and it is. It is also very shameful conduct, especially for a religion which bases its primary sacrament on an open table to which all are welcome. The very heart of Paul's eucharisto was a table that welcomed everyone, but especially believers. Was my friend less of a Christian because her theology was not the theology of the denomination? Because she did not agree with the other pastors on one or two points? I will not call those points major or minor, because my interest is in the boundaries question: when do we get to draw them, and against whom, and on what basis? When do we get to decide, as followers of a God who taught us hospitality was important above all things, that someone is undeserving of welcome? How can we live with ourselves when we do such a thing?

As I say, I disagree with my friend on the issue of homosexuals in the pulpit (we have no bishops in the UCC, so that can't be the issue here). But I respect her, love her, and find room in my church for her church, even if they find no room for me. I'm not sure they would reject me, ultimately. I'm not sure they'd reject me if I didn't reject them, but that would be their choice, their decision. That's the paradoxical dark/light heart of Protestantism: the matter of choice. But I would not force that choice on them by demanding adherence to a protocol on how to treat homosexuals. Perhaps they would insist on it; I don't know. But I am ashamed of my colleagues in Pennsylvania who insisted on it against my friend.*

Which brings me to Simone Weil. She was, as Verbis et Operibus says, a paradox:

She came from a secular Jewish home and was never baptized, but she considered herself a Christian — a non-committed Catholic, to be more precise. She was a pacifist, but fought in the Spanish Civil War. She was an intellectual, but was known for her anti-intellectualism. She was a member of the bourgeoisie, but worked on a French assembly line for a year. She loved life, but yearned for her death.

What I know of her I know from the introduction to the book I picked up, Waiting for God. Leslie Fiedler says of her there:

Since her death, Simone Weil has come to seem more and more a special exemplar of sanctity for our time--the Outsider as Saint in an age of alienation, our kind of saint. In eight scant years, this young French woman, whom scarcely anyone had heard of before her sacrificial death in exile at the age of 34, has come to possess the imagination of many in the Western world. Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew, agnostic, devout, we have all turned to her with profound conviction that the meaning of her experience is our meaning, that she really is ours....

She speaks of the problems of belief in the vocabulary of the unbeliever, of the doctrines of the Church in the words of the unchurched. The askesis, the "dark night of the soul," through which she passed to certitude, is the modern intellectual's familiar pattern of attraction toward and disillusionment with Marxism, the disciple of contemporary politics.

...To those who consider themselves on the safe side of belief, she teaches the uncomfortable truth that the unbelief of many atheists is closer to a true love of God and a true sense of his nature, than that kind of easy faith which, never having experienced God, hangs a label bearing his name on some childish fantasy or projection of the ego. Like Kierkegaard, she preached the paradox of it being easier for a non-Christian to become a Christian than for a "Christian," to become one....For those to whom religion means comfort and peace of mind, she brings the terrible reminder that Christ promised not peace but the sword, and that his own last words were a cry of absolute despair, the "Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani!" which is the true glory of Christianity.

Obviously at that point I swerve away, since I think hospitality is the true glory of Christianity, because then it isn't about me, but about the other. However, the idea of alienation is a powerful and alluring one, even though it leads, in this post-Romantic era and interregnum between the end of the Romanticism and the start of whatever will finally replace it, rather quickly and easily to navel-gazing. Weil, from Fiedler's introduction, would simply flagellate herself to avoid that, but we needn't be sidetracked by that. It is the sense of being required to be perpetually outside as an insider, that interests me.

Weil, it seems, tried to play a balancing act, which much of this book reflects in the letters she wrote to the Reverend Father Perrin. One of her prime concerns appears to have been whether or not to accept baptism; her reasons for always lingering at the baptismal font, but never stepping through it into the realm of those accepted for the eucharist, are complex and convoluted. For many reasons she felt compelled to remain always at the threshold, and never to cross over or step back.

I have a similar feeling about my call to ministry. I am not devoted to my denomination, although as a pastor I'm expected to be. My friend got in trouble, even with old friends of hers (who were also ordained), because she displayed insufficient devotion to the generally accepted tenets of other UCC ministers. She says today that one reason her church left the UCC is that she and her congregation believe in the authority of scripture; sola scriptura, as Luther famously put it. I think that's a bit of a dodge, and an attempt to assert some higher ground for their congregation against the larger church. I don't think the UCC has abandoned the authority of scripture, but that they understand it differently than my friend and her congregation. That should be fundamental, in a tectonic plates kind of way, but it isn't, for me. I don't interpret scripture in the same way as the larger UCC on many topics. I certainly don't interpret scripture as giving me an excuse, or even a duty, to shun people at meals, or otherwise. "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, diversity; in all things, charity" is apparently a nice thing to say, but really too much trouble to live up to. But if I give authority to scripture, I think I have to live up to it, because I think scripture teaches what those words say. You see the problem with scriptural authority, or any authority: there can be, Robert Browning, but one "Sordello." But "Sordello," and my "Sordello"?

Which does not leave me on the outside, throwing rocks at everyone. I'm an ordained minister, I gave up any pretense to "outside" status when I knelt down and let hands be laid upon me. I gave up any allegiance to "outside/inside" when I first professed Christianity. That's why I put hospitality at the center of my understanding of Christianity: without the radical understanding that we are all strangers who should welcome each other as strangers, even as we are all hosts who are obligated to welcome the stranger, what is the point of professing a faith? If that faith is simply faith in and of the world, then what need is there for God at all? If it isn't, then what confession is it without God? And if a confession of faith in God doesn't radically relocate my life, what need is there for God or confession? In other words, if religious practice cannot lead a group beyond ordinary sociological practices, of what difference is a religious community?

Elaine Pagels makes an interesting point in The Origin of Satan:

Mark does not see himself as separate from Israel, but depicts Jesus' followers as what Isaiah calls God's "remnant" within Israel (Isaiah 10:22-23). Even the images that Mark invokes to characterize the majority--images of Satan, Beelzebub, and the devil--paradoxically express the intimacy of Mark's relationship with the Jewish community as a whole, for...the figure of Satan, as it emerged over the centuries in Jewish tradition, is not a hostile power assailing Israel from without, but the source and representation of conflict within the community.

Aye, there's the rub. It strikes me as an answer, too, to people who challenge the very idea of the God of Abraham because that God fails to save us from ourselves, or reveal the absolute truth to us which none of us can deny. Even in communities where that revelation is claimed, even in communities built on that asserted revelation and a claimed special relationship to the deity, even there, falls the Shadow. We imagine perfection, and then we imagine the perfection is one that suits us best; which means we just need to cast out enough strangers to make everything perfect. If we can just remove them, then we can end the conflict within the community. And if that doesn't work, well, obviously, we just need to remove a few more. Which is the very opposite of hospitality; but we're sure we can make this hospitality thing work, just as soon as we've got the blessed community in order; and then we can determine who we need to be hospitable to.

As Melissa Harris-Lacewell's father reminded her: the struggle continues.

It's an interesting thing that theology does matter in the world. Sadly, it matters for all the wrong reasons. Like anything else given to us by God, theology is supposed to be a tool to guide us, a light on our path, a resource and repository of wisdom for abundant life. Instead, we use it as a club, as denominator, as a chalk spreader for making lines in the grass, marking off what is mine and what is not mine, and who is mine and not mine.

Where does that leave me? Right alongside everyone else trying to make the ethical decisions of how to live in this world. But contrary to the teachings of Aristotle and Robert Wright, I don't think the world has the answers to those questions. "How should we then live?" Every person, unfortunately, has to answer that question for themselves. To that extent, Sartre was right. Whether we are all existentialists now is a more dubious proposition. The main difference between me and everybody else is that I've made a public commitment to a religious confession, made it in a way that is literally life-altering, as measured by the world, not just by theology. Simone Weil-like, I feel outside even as I am inside; but it would be a mistake to make too much of this. It gives me less comfort than I deserve (I've tried wearing hair-shirts; they aren't my style), but certainly no position of privilege, either. If I look upon the divisions in the Anglican Communion and The Episcopal Church, I do so in sorrow and recognition: all God's children need shoes.

Unfortunately there is something about us that does not love to share, or even to admit how many unimportant differences we have. We need distinctions (somebody has to be the pastor!), but we can't make them without making too much of them. I claim no distinction as either Outsider or Saint, but only that of a teacher about the virtues (if not the practice!) of humility, which makes it easier for the struggle that continues.



*There is an important distinction to be drawn on this point, between the UCC and The Episcopal Church. The polity of the UCC makes it far easier for the denomination to accommodate differing points of view, since the basis of the denomination is the congregation, not the bishopric. This means the larger church cannot speak for the local congregation, and the local congregation can only speak for the larger church when it chooses to ordain a pastor. However, no church can be forced to accept a pastor it thinks should be ordained (which would be foolish anyway, in any polity), so the ties that bind are loose enough, conceptually, anyway, to allow a wide diversity in a larger church that proclaims its purpose to be: "That they may all be one." "One" what, as ever, is the sticking point.

"The Struggle Continues"

What she said:

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That's the signpost up ahead, your next stop....!

So I spent my spare time during the 10 days out of town re-reading Kierkegaard's Works of Love. I happened upon the Strand bookstore in Manhattan, where I picked up Simone Weil's Waiting for God, someone I'd never read before.

I had no internet access at the time, which made it all the more relaxing. Now I think I was being haunted.

Of Jefferson and Wright

I have been traveling, so I find myself returned full of piss and vinegar, as the saying goes; or perhaps it should be I'm relaxed and thoughtful. Either way, this post by digby on Matt Taibbi put me in mind of the second most famous Frank Lloyd Wright building: the Guggenheim in New York.

We wanted to go there simply because I'd never been in it, and the building fascinates me. But the one day we got near it it was near closing time and the tiny museum (well, compared to the Met or MOMA or even the Whitney) was packed, and the line to get tickets alone would have taken 30 minutes to clear. So we just looked around for a moment and left. But I left wondering: what are all these people doing here? There was no "King Tut" level exhibition there. The Guggenheim isn't known for having the collection of the Met or the Whitney, both nearby. It doesn't have the design collection or even some of the more famous pieces of the MOMA. But it was jammed, and I understand it's almost always jammed on the weekends.

It's the building, obviously. That much admired, much maligned circular ramp that defines and some say, defeats the museum. Critics castigate the place, or admire it; 50 years later it's still a controversial structure. But not with the people; the people love it, they are drawn to it, they can't seem to resist it. They want to be inside such a work of art, such a fantastic piece of architecture. Why?

I can only guess, but maybe for the same reason people read Matt Taibbi, and still read Hunter Thompson, and mourned his death in ways nobody thought to mourn Walter Cronkite's. Maybe, just maybe, because there's some authenticity to Wright's buildings (some of them, anyway. I've been in the Price Tower in Bartlesville, OK, and it's just weird!). Taibbi may be opinionated and even a bit challenged in choosing his metaphors (a vampire squid attached to the face of America? Really? Hunter Thompson he isn't.), but like Wright's building, he has a vision, and he sticks to it. And while the critics may tut-tut, the demos, the polis, loves it.

Maybe they know something....

You say you want an evolution, well you know, we all want to change the world....

To the praises of this book, let me add: "Utter crap."

Wright's thesis is plain first from the title: "Evolution" equals, not biological change in species over time, but "progress," "improvement," "advancement." And "progress" comes not from some metaphysical deity, but from "enlightened" human beings. In a nutshell, Jesus and Mohammed were tribalists who fiercely defended their own groups and didn't give a wet snap for charity or egalitarianism or most of the other finer attributes ascribed to Christianity and Islam (one wonders if they were, instead, responsible for all the violence done in the name of the religions they founded, while all the good is the result of anonymous human beings with no touch of divinity in them at all). Let me take one example, which Wright deals with in a single paragraph: the parable of the Good Samaritan.

According to Wright, it isn't authentic at all, because it isn't found in either the Gospel of Mark or Q. True enough; the parable is part of what Biblical scholars call "Special Luke," as it is found on ly in Luke. But most scholars, including the highly skeptical Jesus Seminar, agree it is original to Jesus of Nazareth, because it is such a striking tale of a morality that transcends tribe and social group and all the silly designations we use to decide who we must care for, and who we can ignore. Wright, however, is not fooled by such things, because he has already decided, using Mark's gospel as his Rosetta Stone, that Jesus of Nazareth was actually a rather nasty and narrow-minded tribalist who cared only for the sons and daughters of Abraham, and probably didn't care much for them. So all that "love your neighbor" stuff was added by unknown human beings long after the supposed Son of God was dead. In Luke's case, almost a century after. See? "Evolution" is a moral function, and it works in people but not because of "gods." So the evolution of "God" is actually the "evolution" of people, who get better and living together and getting along with each other because it's a biological imperative, or simply because we learn over time and have insights that are utterly human, and this is all true because the Gospel of Mark is the oldest gospel and therefore the truest, and it reveals, upon careful Wrightian examination, a picture of Jesus of Nazareth that actually makes him quite a wanker.

Yes, that's it. I'm not making it up. The passage dismissing the parable of the Good Samaritan as the work of Jesus of Nazareth runs for about three sentences, no more. A parable that has provoked volumes of analysis and been subjected to scrutiny by skeptical Biblical scholars for almost 200 years now, is dealt with by Mr. Wright in about three sentences, maybe four. And he settles the matter once and for all.

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

Noticing "Hirsohima Day"

A few days late, but still:

Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances—thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.)

To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral—as most Americans do—is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

There is a direct line between that event, and its justifications, and "shock and awe" and the continued fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Technology won the "Good War." As Ellsberg points out, "progress" meant, and still mostly means, changes in technology; not in society (although we apply the term loosely to "evolution" now). Technology, however, did not, shortly after the "Good War," defeat the "little brown men in black pajamas," but we have convenient excuses for that, too.

Our faith in technology continues unabated; including the faith that technology, in the guise of computers and the internet, will finally usher in the millenia of peace, prosperity, and democracy. It was supposed to destroy Chinese totalitarianism; it will finally allow progressives to control U.S. politics; and it's supposed to lead to products being "free." Can food without price and wine bought without money be far behind?

Somehow I'm quite sure human culture will continue to lag behind our technology. "O machine! O machine!"

Not that anyone will notice my asking, but...

Is America a country, or an idea?

But as this escalates we should continually be stepping back and thinking retrospectively from the vantage point of the future about where this all seems to be heading.

August, not April, is the cruelest month; in politics, anyway. I have to note, first, that Josh Marshall has no memory of 1968, a year I was later astonished to learn almost meant the death of the republic, according to wise grey heads like Eric Sevareid (no one remembers him anymore, oddly enough; all fame truly is fleeting). There were street riots in those days, actual riots where people were shot, killed, beaten, bloodied; where buildings burned and civic life was actually disrupted. Civil rights marchers were murdered in the '60's (NPR did a retrospective, briefly, on what they called the "Mississippi Burning" case [interestingly they named the case for the movie, which came decades later]). FBI agents were openly threatened (as mentioned in the report). Innocent people were shot to death at Kent State in 1970. And now the republic is threatened because of disruptions at town meetings and threatening phone calls?

Huh. I guess Henry Ford was right, and history really is bunk.

The republic survived the Civil War, as I recall. It survived the Great Depression, a situation actually made worse by the government before FDR started to make it better (and war, always a government enterprise, finally brought it completely to an end; ironically, just as it did for Germany). But we are threatened by a bunch of kooks and excitable people in a few closed rooms around the country? When Phineas Fogg visited America in his whirlwind trip around the globe, he ran into a riot in a frontier town, that turned out to be an election for dog catcher. Jules Verne was only slightly exaggerating the passions brought out in American politics. I read recently that no less a luminary than Ben Franklin despaired for the nascent republic because German immigrants in Pennsylvania were enjoying their liberty so much (and abusing it, in Franklin's eyes) that they were firing pastors whenever the pastor said or did something they didn't like (there's a complex tale behind that of the restrictions on releasing pastors that existed under German law; separation of church and state in America has always meant the courts won't interfere here in ecclesiastical matters which are state matters in Europe).

It's like Tommy Lee Jones tells Will Smith in "Men in Black": the planet is ALWAYS about to end. Deal with it.

So is America a country? Or is it just an idea? Such events don't threaten the social fabric of Germany, or France, or England, where multiple parties exist, some avowedly Marxist or Communist, some neanderthal in their conservatism. America has Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, and any variant shade toward either end of the political spectrum is dangerous and disastrous and means the end of the polis as we know it. I don't like the "tea baggers" and I despise the fear-mongers Rachel Maddow (especially) has exposed this week; but is this really the end of the Republic? Really?

I mean, in historical context, this isn't even a very interesting August....

And furthermore.....

What do I find interesting in the story of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.? This:

His next project on race, he said, will be rooted in his arrest. "I hope to make a documentary about racial profiling for PBS," he said. "[The idea] had never crossed my mind but it has now."

He said the documentary will ask: "How are people treated when they are arrested? How does the criminal justice system work? How many black and brown men and poor white men are the victims of police officers who are carrying racist thoughts?

"I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that criminal justice system is rotten."

A lifetime of study, and it's a personal experience that makes him question the criminal justice system about what we know, and how we know it, and what matters most to us is pretty much what happens to us.

Sad how much we let systems do our thinking and experiencing for us, and how much we depend on personal experience to know anything about the world. Not a critique of Mr. Gates, or his next project; just an observation.

"The Emotional Issue of Race in America"

Offered to note the interesting shift of emphasis in the discussion of President Obama's response to the last question in his press conference. The first video comes immediately after the press conference ended; the other two are from later that same night.

Notice how the understanding of the Gates arrest changes when the discussion involves two white men, and when it includes a black man or woman. Tellingly, Fineman's comment that "race still haunts us" although Obama's presidency "proves otherwise" disappears from the subsequent conversations, even when Fineman is involved in them. Of course, the second time, he's sitting next to Eugene Robinson.

This is how we still talk about race in America.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Long ago and far away....

I have some photos of the moon landing. They're as grainy and gray and fuzzy as the pictures you've seen recently, from the TV broadcast. I still remember Walter Cronkite giving the technical details for photographers, to adjust their cameras to get the best picture from the TV screen. A friend with a darkroom and an interest in photography took them and made copies for me, so they're on curling photography paper from a garage dark-room, not professional prints on Kodak paper.

I used to have a map of the moon, too. The near side, and in black and white (I think Calvin's Dad was right, sometimes, and the world was in black and white in the past). It hung on my bedroom wall, and I marked the places of the moon landings on it. I even built some of the Revell kits of the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo rockets and capsules. At one point I had a model of the Lunar Module, if memory serves. I still remember when the acronym for it went from LEM, for Lunar Excursion Module, to LM, for Lunar Module. I still called it "LEM" for a long time.

I remember the night of the moon landing. I remember the den where I watched it, in a friend's house, with my family and theirs. I remember Walter Cronkite talking, I remember the amazing pictures actually coming from the Moon. But my strongest memory is the one no one has talked about, although to me it was even more amazing. In this age of giant TV screens and international communication, where I can pick up a phone and talk to my daughter in Brooklyn as if she was in the next room, and always know I'll get her because I'm calling her cell phone, in this age where everybody knows, or can know, what's going on anywhere in the world at any time, where I can read newspapers from around the world at my desk, this memory is wholly unremarkable. But it shouldn't be, anymore than the moon landing should be unremarkable.

I hear now that we went to the moon to beat the Soviets, and I remember the "space race." But while it felt that way for the 7 original Mercury astronauts, it no longer felt that way by 1969. I don't remember feeling triumph at having defeated the Russian advance into space, which, after all, had disappeared by then. What I remember was the wonder when Walter Cronkite showed us that people around the world were waiting for Neal Armstrong to be the first human being to set a foot on the surface of the Moon.

This was extraordinary, too; and possibly as unprecedented in human history as the moon landing itself. Around the world, despite the hour of the day depending on what point on the planet people were, people were gathered around television screens waiting to see the amazing sight. It was a human effort that day, not a USA effort. It was humankind that set foot on that dusty surface, not just an American. Everyone everywhere, the TV told me, the pictures told me, was watching: watching, and for the moment, the hour, the event, feeling the same emotion. It wasn't a magical Hollywood moment, but it gave a sense of common humanity, of shared experience, of how much more alike we are than different.

It was a technological triumph. But the response was almost....spiritual.

Vanity of vanities

I knew this 30 years ago. No, really.

When you read the emails by Gregory, King, Stephanopoulos and others, you start to understand why most major network interviews with politicians tend to be a lot less hard hitting than they need to be to really hold their subjects accountable. The politicians themselves have the power to make or break the networks, by granting or withholding access. That ends up meaning that, consciously or not, the networks soften their approaches -- both in their pitches, and in their actual interviews -- in exchange for that access.

That's how the world works, and it's hard to know what to do about it.

It must have been in Harper's Magazine, which I was reading devotedly at the time. I was also watching "This Week with David Brinkley" as if I were an acolyte in the Church of News. Then I read this article pointing out that none of the journalists (or George Will) ever asked sharp questions of the "guests" because they would lose all access to the politicians who are the only reason anyone tuned into those shows on Sunday morning. And this, of course, was back when most people were in bed or in church on Sunday morning, and the Sunday morning talk shows were A) a snoozefest that B) nobody paid attention to.

Before McLaughlin, in other words, changed the TV landscape forever, and ushered in the era of Cable News as we know it today (i.e., before CNN was Fox-ified).

There is indeed nothing new under the sun, and even the advent of the Intertubes has not made us wiser. We're just re-inventing the wheel and re-discovering fire at the same pace we were before. Americans really do have the worst inter-generational transfer of knowledge on the planet. It must be something unique to our culture.....

Adding:



Walter Cronkite never did a Sunday morning show with "guests." When he talked to politicians, he was still a journalist. He reported the news of my childhood: the death of Kennedy; the Democratic Convention in'68; the moon landing.

God be with you, Mr. Cronkite; and with your family.

Travel Plans

Planning the summer vacation. Had to get my map out.

Got to get ourselves back to the Garden....

Proof, once again, that I am reading all the wrong stuff:*

A few years ago, when I was visiting the Dominicans in the Czech Republic, I spent the night in a small town called Snojmo near the Austrian border. There was the usual meeting with the Dominican Family. There were lots of young families with their noisy offspring, and we feasted on delicious sausages and drank slivovitz. Then we had an open discussion, and the first question was from a young woman who asked how she could transmit the Church’s moral teaching to her children, who seemed to be just as resistant as children in Western Europe. I did not know how to answer the question and so I passed it to my companion for that trip, a moral theologian called Wojcieh Giertych, professor at the Angelicum University in Rome.

He went to the blackboard and drew a small square in a corner. “In that square are the commandments. Is that what morally is about?” And everyone cried “Of course.” “No,” he said “God is not much interested in commandments.” Then he drew a square which covered all the rest of the board and said, “That is freedom. That is what interests God. Your task is to teach your children to be free. That is the teaching of the Gospels, and of St Thomas Aquinas.” (pp. 29-30)

*I have been entertaining myself re-reading the entire Sherlock Holmes stories. And by "right stuff" I mean both the book and the blog linked to. I, too, was young once, and thoughtful....

Plus ca change....

This Matt Taibbi article is getting attention because it purportedly rips the lid off of Wall Street scandals and goes to the heart of what ails our economy.

While this book is more worthy of our attention, as it discusses the "invisible poor" in America at the height of the "boom" in the American economy. I'm listening to the author talk about places in America labelled "food deserts" because there is no food available within 100 miles, except from gas stations selling "junk food." Imagine such a term being a part of the vocabulary of people who care for the poor in this country, and try to help them. Imagine such a word applying to this "land of plenty."

As the author points out, we used to expect to be wealthier than we already are, and lived and spent into that expectation. Thus did the economy grow, but thus, too, were bubbles created. There are strong indications this continuous growth not only cannot continue, but has come to an end.

But the expectation hasn't; yet. And the problem is not the perennial one of market manipulators; it is that the poor will always be with us. The question is: will we always ignore them?

Happy Forth of Jooly!

*Be kind to your web-footed friends.
For a duck may be somebody's mother!
Be kind to your friends in the swamp!
Where the weather is very, very damp!
Now, you may think that this is the end...

WELL IT IS!


*Tune: Stars and Stripes Forever, 3rd movement, if you're wondering. I have a soft spot in my heart for Mitch Miller, what can I say?

Huh. Well....

Is it me, of have conservative politicians suddenly decided it really is all about them, and this decision is leading to self-destruction?

The similarities between Sarah Palin's resignation announcement and Mark Sanford's statement are eerie. And it isn't lost on me that both of them assure us they are taking these actions in the name of, if not on behalf of, God. Or at least because they are so certain this is what God wants. I want to discuss, a bit later, Locke's "Letter Concerning Toleration," and this is an almost perfect chance to do that.

But the weirdness has to sink in, or slink away, or something. This is just really, really, odd. Not exactly unexpected, if you understand that excessive self-regard usually leads to self-destructive acts (destruction of reputation, if nothing else); but as to what it all means...well, that requires some reflection on Locke and Kierkegaard and the bewilderment of current events.

Friday document dump, indeed.

*picture courtesy of watertiger

Humility is hard

I understand that: humility is hard. And it looks nothing like this:

So in the aftermath of this failure I want to not only apologize, but to commit to growing personally and spiritually. Immediately after all this unfolded last week I had thought I would resign - as I believe in the military model of leadership and when trust of any form is broken one lays down the sword. A long list of close friends have suggested otherwise - that for God to really work in my life I shouldn’t be getting off so lightly. While it would be personally easier to exit stage left, their point has been that my larger sin was the sin of pride. They contended that in many instances I may well have held the right position on limited government, spending or taxes - but that if my spirit wasn't right in the presentation of those ideas to people in the General Assembly, or elsewhere, I could elicit the response that I had at many times indeed gotten from other state leaders.

Their belief was that if I walked in with a real spirit of humility then this last legislative term could well be our most productive one - and that outside this term, I would ultimately be a better person and of more service in whatever doors God opened next in life if I stuck around to learn lessons rather than running and hiding down at the farm.

Because the whole point of humility is that it's NOT about you. The whole point of humility, just like the whole point of identifying pride as a sin, is to remove yourself from the center of the world, and recognize the importance of others. But in Mark Sanford's case, the humble thing to do is to treat the Governor's office like a hair shirt, and his continued political career as penance.

Thomas More this guy ain't. Worse than that, he doesn't even understand why he's not approaching sainthood with such a public display of sacrifice. A sacrifice that isn't a sacrifice at all, of course, because what he's offering on the public altar is his wife, his children, his marriage, any possible sense of shame or culpability, everything except his ego, his libido, or his pride.

I suppose this is what comes from having a spiritual adviser who makes his living as a court reporter and whose spiritual advice seems to consist of telling you God wants you to do whatever it is you're doing. Funny thing is, Jesus spoke directly to the question of adultery once, in very clear language:

As you know, we once were told, 'You are not to commit adultery.' But I tell you: Those who leer at a woman and desire her have already committed adultery with her in their hearts." (Matthew 5:27-28, SV)

I suppose you could read that as: "So go ahead and get her in bed!," but I don't think that's what Jesus meant.

What he meant, of course, is that it isn't all about you, and that your actions begin in your thoughts. That's a very constrictive view of responsibility, but then humility restricts what we can do, too. And Governor Sanford is having none of it:

They have also made the point that a good part of life is about scripts - that the idea of redemption isn't something that Marshall, Landon, Bolton and Blake should just read about, it's something they should see. Accordingly, they suggested that there was a very different life script that would be lived and learned by our boys, and thousands like them, if this story simply ended with scandal and then the end of office - versus a fall from grace and then renewal and rebuilding and growth in its aftermath.

Yeah, this is all about teaching his kids. Sure it is.

What's really astounding here is to listen to this man preach on the sin of pride while displaying such conviction as to his own self-importance. He wasn't handed his head by the SC Legislature and Supreme Court (the former overrode 10 of his vetoes, the latter forced him to take the stimulus money he said he wouldn't take) because he was wrong; he was rebuffed because he wasn't in the right spirit to carry God's message to a government that desperately needed King David to save it from the grip of evil, a grip he knows because Cubby Culbertson told him it wasn't Mark's fault he had to go to Argentina or New York or outside South Carolina to sleep with his mistress. So now he has to bring his hard-earned humility to South Carolina, as a purified vessel of God's will. It takes a humble man to realize how important he is, and how important it is to God that he stay and do what God wants, because it just happens to be what Mark Sanford wants! And that's the lesson he wants to pass on to his children: God wants what Mark Sanford wants.

And that's what real humility is all about. Recognizing that you and God are totally sympatico.

That's how they say it in Argentina, right?