A Change of Heart

Grandmere Mimi asks a rational question:

Russ, I don't get it. I really don't. How can so many people demand policies that are not in their own self-interest?

I mean no disrespect when I say it doesn't really matter what the subject was originally, because it's a question that applies almost universally to almost any discourse. And one explanation of it is Wittgenstein's theory of language games: i.e., that we all use what seems like a common language, but we use it in particular ways, and what I interpret your use of language to mean, may not be what you intended to say. Perhaps Robert McCloskey said it best (Wittgenstein's explanation tends to get a bit technical): "“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

That's one way of putting it, and perhaps not, as the poet said, entirely satisfactory. More to the point, I've observed, especially after a brief stint in the pulpit, supposedly in a position of power over people's self-interests, that what I mean by your self-interest, and what you mean by your self-interest, are often two very different things. Which goes a long way to explaining why other people are neither rational nor sensible; at least not when they seem so clearly to be acting against their own self-interests. Especially when I can clearly see what their self-interests are, even if they can't.

Now let me start over again: this is a sound and reasonable position, to wonder why people don't see that their self-interests would dictate an outcome, or an opinion, or even a position on an issue, other than the one they want to take. Why, for example, would one of the few states in the Union with a Spanish word for a name ("Colorado") be associated at all with someone so virulently anti-Mexican and anti-Spanish (Tom Tancredo)? How is it possibly in the self-interest of a non-border state like Colorado to support, in any way, even if briefly, someone so opposed to Mexican and Hispanic immigration (especially since the issue affects Texas more profoundly, and even Gov. Perry is considered "soft" on immigration by some in the GOP because he has to be aware there really isn't much animosity toward Mexicans along the long Texas-Mexico border. Down there, Mexicans are family members, not "others".) But maybe that's a poor example of "self-interest," so perhaps we need to shift examples.

Except as the examples pile up, the bone of contention remains lodged in the throat of rhetoric: why don't you see your situation the way I see your situation? And if the outcome of this analysis is that your situation is unalterably solipsistic, then what hope is there for a rational discourse or a civil society? Whither community?

Well, that's the question of the day, isn't it? Rick Perry enters the race for President (and no, this post ISN'T about Rick Perry, but bear with me) declaring the President may or may not love his country, that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve may soon commit treason, that Obama is unfit to the Commander in Chief and the military troops are disinclined to follow his command (imputing treason to them). Now, on one hand; this is bad; on the other hand, is it really as bad as Joseph McCarthy, accusing everyone from Eisenhower down to the entire State Dept., of being Communists (he finally came a cropper when he included the military in his charges)? Hard to make a distinction, but matters do seem to be as contentious as when Dr. King led marches where people were beaten, attacked with dogs and water cannons, where billboards went up urging the impeachment of Earl Warren and labeling King a Communist (the House Un-American Affairs Committee was still active until 1975), where Mayor Daley unleashed a police riot on protesters in the streets of Chicago, where students died because the National Guard opened fire at an anti-war protest (a situation where it isn't clear why the Guard had live ammunition in the first place).

Wait, what was I trying to prove? That things are worse now than they were then? Or that nothing much has changed? Oh, that's right; we were talking about your self-interest, and why you are so often wrong about it.

Perhaps you see the problem already: first, it's a matter of definition. If I define these as perilously contentious times, with incivility and partisanship dominating the halls of Congress as never before, I first have to ignore history within my lifetime. I have to leave facts out, in order to create a simpler picture of the past, v. the present. The former is always simple, no matter how carefully I try to consider all that was happening; the latter is always complicated, because we are always right in the middle of it, and there is always more happening than we can keep track of. But surely reason can show us a way out....

Surely. Except reason fails, because I can clearly see what your self-interest should be, and you can't seem to see it at all. What is reasonable about that? Why are you so irrational? Why can't we start with the same definition, since it is eminently a reasonable one?

Penn Gillette was on my TeeVee the other night, partly to peddle his newest book (it even creeps into the news shows I watch. I'm surprised he didn't have a guest shot squeezed in by CGI into one of the movies I watched later.) about how he's an atheist because he doesn't know whether God is real or not (let's set aside the tired canard about God's existence. Please?). That was the major thesis of his argument: he doesn't know, so he's an atheist.

Whatever.

I don't know, either, but I'm a religious person. Knowing is overrated, but Penn Gillette (among others) would certainly doubt my understanding of my own self-interest if I insisted (as I do) that I am a religious person who doesn't know any more than he does. He might think I'm being irrational to insist that knowing is overrated; but then we would have to discuss how we define our terms. He might still insist that I'm being irrational, when I would counter that I'm being perfectly rational. And who is right? Well, let's have an argument about it.

Fine. But that presupposes there are agreed upon grounds for the discussion, that a true discourse, a true "meeting of minds," will occur, and from the clash will come enlightenment. Thesis meets antithesis and gives rise to synthesis. Except that only really works in Hegel's theory. When thesis and antithesis both contain aspects of the other, synthesis can occur. But when thesis is chalk, and antithesis is cheese? What synthesis then? And while Hegel might well deny the foundation of my analysis, that is precisely the foundation Kierkegaard insisted on, as the foundation of life as it is lived, rather than existence as it is reasoned about.

There is, in that distinction, a dramatic difference. It's the same distinction I'd draw between myself and Penn Gillette. He insists his "not knowing" is solid ground for atheism, as no alternative is left. I would insist he only describes the "via negativa" of negative theology, a path forged by Martin Luther, among others, and long since recognized by philosophers of religion. But that distinction obscures as much as it reveals, and it is the revelation which is finally important. Kierkegaard's body of work is, among other things, precisely against the Enlightenment baseline that knowledge is all:

Christian faith, for Kierkegaard, is not a matter of learning dogma by rote. It is a matter of the individual repeatedly renewing h/er passionate subjective relationship to an object which can never be known, but only believed in. This belief is offensive to reason, since it only exists in the face of the absurd (the paradox of the eternal, immortal, infinite God being incarnated in time as a finite mortal).

Indeed, for Kierkegaard, knowledge of faith is the true absurdity. As Kierkegaard would argue, we need Jesus, not Socrates.

Which brings me to Walter Brueggemann. In The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann argues against the idea of Israel's culture springing entirely from strands of the cultures that surrounded it.

That is to say, the shaping of Israel took place from inside its own experience and confession of faith and not through external appropriation from somewhere else....we are on sound ground if we take as our beginning point Moses as the paradigmatic prophet who sought to evoke in Israel an alternative consciousness.

This insight has profound impacts, one of which is that:

It is clear that the emergence of Israel by the hand of Moses cannot be extrapolated from an earlier reality. Obviously nothing like the Kenite hypothesis or the monotheism of the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt will help us at all. While there are some hings that the God of Israel is known to be the God of the fathers (cf Exod. 15:2), that evidence is at best obscure. In any case, the overriding experience of Exodus is decisive and not some memory now only hinted at in the tradition. However these antecedents are finally understood, the appearance of a new social reality is unprecedented. Israel in the thirteen century is indeed ex nihilo. And that new reality drives us to the category of revelation.

My New Testament professor was led to a similar insight when he studied the language of the Last Supper in graduate school. Where, he was asked, is the precedent for the words "This is my body" and "This is my blood"? Try as they might, the class could not find them anywhere outside the texts of the New Testament. They were, indeed, a wholly new thing.

It happens.

It also puts me in mind of Wittgenstein's comment:

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).

Do we know these things? In what sense? In the sense that I know 2+2=4? In the sense that I know the sky is blue? In the sense that I know I love my wife and daughter? Wittgenstein says Christianity is not known, it is something which actually takes place (he was careful enough with his words not to say "is experienced").* But there, I digress again; back to Brueggemann.

For him, it is primarily about newness:

Egypt was without energy precisely because it did not believe anything was promised and about to be given. Egypt, like every other imperial and eternal now, believed everything was already given, contained, and possessed. If there is any point at which most of us are manifestly co-opted, it is in this way. We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns.

Brueggemann, p. 23.

Apply that to the current economic crisis, and those who say we are being punished or that this will "purge" the body civic of contaminants, and those who say we must resurrect the old system with stimuli, are saying the same thing. Everything is already given, contained, and possessed; we just need to move the pieces into new patterns.

At this point I begin to sound like "every man and woman his/her own prophet." I have to avoid that pitfall. What I am arguing for is not the necessity of the prophetic passion, but the view of the prophetic imagination. I am arguing for "new styles of architecture/a change of heart." It's an argument I will only start in this post. I'll have to finish it later.

*Gillette, like the rest of the "modern atheists (Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, Hitchens) are all still making 19th century arguments in a 21st century world. It's kind of like arguing against Impressionism because it isn't as formal as the Academy painters. Maybe the world still prefers the stiff figures of Jacques-Louis David, but the subject of discussion has moved on some time ago.

Still Unclear About the Concept....

Trolling my usual blogs tonight, I come across this. I shouldn't worry about it, but I do. Maybe it's because the story is all wrong.

From the 2007 archives, I bring you the real story of Rick Perry and Gardasil. This, in particular, is the part that still bothers me:

The American Academy of Pediatrics is not advocating mandatory Gardasil vaccination, either. One source of opposition from pediatricians is cost. Buying enough H.P.V. vaccine for 100 girls would require a practice to lay out nearly $40,000 in advance. Many doctors say that the insurance reimbursement for giving the vaccine is not adequate to compensate them for administering it.

Dr. Bocchini of the American Academy of Pediatrics also said too much of the Gardasil focus was being placed on 11- and 12-year-olds, when legislatures should be focusing on trying to obtain funding to vaccinate girls and women in the 13-to-26 age group, many of whom are not covered by the federal vaccine programs aimed at children.

“A number of people are just not going to be able to get this vaccine,” he said.

Perry could issue an executive order that all school children get the vaccine. What he couldn't do was authorize the funds to pay for it. Think back to "The Response" and the much larger crowd in Houston that day, waiting for free school supplies and free vaccinations. And most of those vaccinations don't cost nearly what Gardasil costs. (Need I remind you Texas still leads the nation in the number of uninsured children. Something else Rick Perry doesn't like to talk about.)

Yes, this mandate was overturned by the Texas Legislature, largely on the grounds Perry now tries to hide behind, and for the reasons TBogg (and others) will roundly criticize. Their argument, however, assumes Perry has either banned access to Gardasil, or removed any public funding for it. The first isn't true, the second never existed. So Perry's argument exists in a never-never land that doesn't affect anyone but only tells us what we already know about him. All he really did was try to mandate something the general public didn't support, for reasons that had precious little to do with cancer prevention. You also have to consider that Perry targeted 6th grade girls: because they were most likely to have sex and get cervical cancer? No, because they were most likely to be in school. They made the best captive cohort, in other words. If you are going to suggest to parents of 11 year old girls that their daughters are already having sex, you really need to be prepared for some resistance to that message. Even if you mean well.

The real story here is Perry doing the bidding of his campaign contributors, something he has shown himself to be quite adept at. If you follow the link to my archives, you will see that there are still serious questions (or were as recently as 2 years ago) about the use of Gardasil, questions Rick Perry wasn't interested in at all. (If you follow the TPM link, you'll note there is no mention of the cost of this vaccine, which was another sore issue; efficacy aside, this was essentially an unfunded mandate.) There were (and are) definitely serious questions about mandating Gardasil as a public health measure, as well as questions about educating the public (parents, especially) about the need to use this vaccine on the same basis as vaccines for polio or chicken pox.

These are questions Perry wasn't interested in then, and isn't interested in now. Nor, I'm afraid, is anybody else.

Finally comes the prophet

To start, we have to begin here:

The prophets understood the possibility of change as linked to emotional extremities of life. They understood the strange incongruence [sic] between public convictions and personal yearning. Most of all, they understood the distinctive power of language, the capacity to speak in ways that evoke newness "fresh from the word." It is argued here that a prophetic understanding of reality is based in the notion that all social reality does spring fresh from the word. It is the aim of every totalitarian effort to stop the language of newness, and we are now learning that where such language stops we find our humanness diminished.

Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Fortress Press, 1978, p. 9. The strange incongruity between public convictions and personal yearning. Aye, there's the rub:

"Ladies and gentleman, we desperately need our own miracle of Dunkirk today," he said. "Our nation is surrounded by forces that we don't control, and we have problems that none of our leaders can solve. We've come to end of our rope, and we've come here today to call on our Lord for a miracle, a miracle of Dunkirk to occur in this great nation.

The idea that America is a shining city on a hill set in a world of corruption and evil, especially when we look to Europe, is an idea almost as old as America itself. It is the source of our greatest inspiration; it is also the source of our greatest corruption, as even the "Founding Fathers" understood:

John Adams in his warnings to Thomas Jefferson would seem to have had a premonition of this kind of politics. "Power," he wrote, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party." Adams's understanding of the power of the self's passions and ambitions to corrupt the self's reason is a simple recognition of the facts of life which refute all theories, whether liberal or Marxist, about the possibility of a completely disinterested self. Adams, as every Christian understanding of man has done, nicely anticipated the Marxist theory of an "ideological taint" in reason when men reason about each other's affairs and arrive at conclusions about each other's virtues, interests and motives. The crowning irony of the Marxist theory of ideology is that it foolishly and self-righteously confined the source of this taint to economic interest and to a particular class. It was, therefore, incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency.

The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr. Charles Scribners' Sons, New York, 1952. The incongruity between public convictions and personal yearning. Hmmm....

That incongruity grows wider as we fail to realize we, any one of us, is not us; never all of us.

"We confess that we are still a Judeo-Christian nation," said Hagee, drawing cheers. "We confess that we are still one nation under God. We confess that you are a creator of heaven and earth."

First, the theologian in me wants to know: "a creator"? There was more than one? Is this some new brand of Marcionism? Or just the old, familiar strain of know-nothingism? But are we a Judeo-Christian nation? Are we still one nation, under God? Which God, then? A creator? Or the Creator? And my Christianity, theology, christology, ecclesiology? Or Hagee's?

Inquiring minds want to know.

And in what ways is Hagee interested in what is "fresh from the word"? Or in what ways does he only want to reinforce his blinkered and gnarled and puny view of existence? In this context, Rick Perry offers a prayer that is almost enlightening:

“Father, our heart breaks for America,” he said, leading the crowd in a prayer. “We see discord at home, we see fear in the marketplace, we see anger in the halls of government. As a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that we cry out for your forgiveness. We pray for our nation’s leaders, for parents, for pastors, for generals, for governors, that you would inspire them.”

Yes, but again, inspire them to do what? And if you think this talk of prophecy has little to do with Rick Perry or American politics, think again:

On September 28, 2009, at 1:40 p.m., God’s messengers visited Rick Perry.

On this day, the Lord’s messengers arrived in the form of two Texas pastors, Tom Schlueter of Arlington and Bob Long of San Marcos, who called on Perry in the governor’s office inside the state Capitol. Schlueter and Long both oversee small congregations, but they are more than just pastors. They consider themselves modern-day apostles and prophets, blessed with the same gifts as Old Testament prophets or New Testament apostles.

The pastors told Perry of God’s grand plan for Texas. A chain of powerful prophecies had proclaimed that Texas was “The Prophet State,” anointed by God to lead the United States into revival and Godly government. And the governor would have a special role.

The day before the meeting, Schlueter had received a prophetic message from Chuck Pierce, an influential prophet from Denton, Texas. God had apparently commanded Schlueter—through Pierce—to “pray by lifting the hand of the one I show you that is in the place of civil rule.”

Gov. Perry, it seemed.

Schlueter had prayed before his congregation: “Lord Jesus I bring to you today Gov. Perry. ... I am just bringing you his hand and I pray Lord that he will grasp ahold of it. For if he does you will use him mightily.”

And grasp ahold the governor did. At the end of their meeting, Perry asked the two pastors to pray over him. As the pastors would later recount, the Lord spoke prophetically as Schlueter laid his hands on Perry, their heads bowed before a painting of the Battle of the Alamo. Schlueter “declared over [Perry] that there was a leadership role beyond Texas and that Texas had a role beyond what people understand,” Long later told his congregation.

Let me say, before I go further, that I agree with the Republican strategist on Meet the Press recently, who said Perry represented the politics of W. redux, or maybe just louder and funnier. He presents, said this strategist, the GOP that lost in 2008; and that's an analysis I agree with. Perry may make a splash in the GOP primaries, but I don't think he will get very far, especially if he wins the party's nomination. In fact, Barack Obama, like W. before him, may well turn out to be very fortunate in his opponents for the Presidency.

So this isn't about politics; it is about theology; more specifically, about public theology. So let's ignore the bizarre in the New Apostolic Reformation (which, as Howland Owl said of nuclear physics, ain't so new, and it ain't so clear) and focus on the idea of prophecy it presents. As Brueggemann says: "The following discussion is an attempt to understand what the prophets were up to, if we can be freed from our usual stereotypes of foretellers or social protesters." Or of stuff like this:

Schlueter, Long and other prayer warriors in a little-known but increasingly influential movement at the periphery of American Christianity seem to think so. The movement is called the New Apostolic Reformation. Believers fashion themselves modern-day prophets and apostles. They have taken Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on ecstatic worship and the supernatural, and given it an adrenaline shot.

The movement’s top prophets and apostles believe they have a direct line to God. Through them, they say, He communicates specific instructions and warnings. When mankind fails to heed the prophecies, the results can be catastrophic: earthquakes in Japan, terrorist attacks in New York, and economic collapse. On the other hand, they believe their God-given decrees have ended mad cow disease in Germany and produced rain in drought-stricken Texas.

The prophets in the Hebrew scriptures never foretold earthquakes, terrorist attacks, or economic collapse. That baldly apocalyptic stuff comes from Jesus, and in Luke, at least, it's pretty clearly meant as a joke (mocking the perception of the prophets as forecasters of gloom and doom began early), and a rejection of worrying about the eschaton. Despite what John Hagee might think, America has never had nor claimed a covenant with God such as Israel had (and has, as the children of Abraham). And that very idea of a covenant is the problem with a "direct line" to God.

It seems like a minor theological quibble, and it certainly looks like the sharp dividing line between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism (or, more broadly, all the rest of Christianity), but the line isn't really drawn there between Rome and Protestants: that sharp line is drawn between fundamentalist non-denominational and even anti-denominational, Christians, and the rest of practicing Christianity. It isn't just a theological quibble, and it is a distinction worth paying some attention to.

The covenant, you see, is with a group, not an individual. Even Abraham is promised blessings for his descendants, blessings Abraham cannot possibly live to enjoy. The blessings are for the many, not the one, and the one who receives the word from God is always the one caught between the people and the Creator: it's never a pretty position to be in, in other words. Abraham is forced to renounce all social order on Moriah; Moses wonders why people will listen to him when he follows the directives of a burning bush, and later is so angry with the Israelites he smashes the first copy of the Ten Commandments; and finally, he's the one who, like Abraham, pronounces the blessing he won't live to see fulfilled. Jeremiah weeps and argues with God about what will happen to Israel, and what God is telling him to say to Israel. Hosea and Ezekiel must have appeared as madmen, not revered leaders. Amos never claimed to be more than a dresser of sycamore trees. Being a prophet never put one in a position of power with respect to the community, so the first rule of prophets is: beware those who think their status as "prophets" elevates them to positions of any privilege whatsoever. If you claim the status of "prophet" in the Biblical sense, but you aren't in friction with the world around you, especially with those who should agree with you, then you aren't doing it right.

Prophets are most commonly recognized and admired after the fact. That's the first test. The second is: the prophet is proclaimed by the community, not by the prophet's followers. As Jesus says in Luke: "Did you go into the wilderness to see a reed bending in the wind?" It wasn't the followers and fellow Essenes who made John the Baptist a prophet: it was the people drawn to his message, people as diverse (according to Luke) as Jews and Roman soldiers. I don't present that as an historical fact, but as a sign, a signifier, that a prophet is one whose message is important. And it is the response to the message that makes the prophet. When Moses asks the burning bush what authority he is to give, who he is to say has sent him (knowing the Israelites won't listen to Moses, a Hebrew raised as an Egyptian, just because he says so), it's a question directed at the status of Moses. A very human question, but the wrong question: the status of the prophet is not proven by invoking the formula "The Word of the Lord" (a common trope in liturgical worship, but one that dates back to many of the prophets), it is a status recognized by the people when they hear in the prophet's words "the word of the Lord." When the Synoptic writers introduce John the Baptist, they place him in the pantheon of Hebrew prophets by what he says, and by the people (from Jews to Gentiles) who recognize in his words the words of the Creator. John does not proclaim himself a prophet; his message, and its reception by the people, does that. So there is the second rule: the prophet is known by the community, and made a prophet because the people recognize the truth of his words.

The third rule is that the prophet doesn't try to make his words come true; they are the word of God, they will be as God wills. The prophet doesn't need to take action, doesn't need to direct kings and rulers and bureaucracies: the prophet needs to proclaim the word. What happens after that is up to the people, and in on small sense, to God. The prophet does not acquire glory from the message; if anything, the prophet encounters doubt, rejection, confusion, and anger. What the prophet doesn't get is hands on the levers of power sufficient to make the prophecy "come true." That is where the great weakness of most modern day would be prophets comes in: they seek authority, rather than truth.

Consider the example of Jonah, the one prophet in the Hebrew scriptures who tries really hard to escape his fate as a prophet, not because he cares for Nineveh, but because he is afraid God will relent if Nineveh repents. When Nineveh does repent and God does relent, Jonah is angry: he wanted the fire and brimstone to happen, probably because he wanted to both proclaim the word of God, and be the agent of God's anger and violence. Denied the latter, he pouts. Jonah is the very figure of the prophet who wants God's power along with God's word. The community responds to Jonah's message, they recognize him as a prophet, but for Jonah that isn't enough. And the story of Jonah is as much about Jonah, as it is about Jonah's dire warning. So his story presents a powerful rebuke to would-be prophets who want to proclaim God's judgment and reap a benefit from that proclamation: be careful what you ask for. You might get it.

This is lost, of course, on those who worship power, as well as those who still think the lesson is: power is okay, so long as it is used correctly. The message of the cross, of the crucifixion, of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, is the power of powerlessness; not that the right application of power just in time will provide salvation. One of the temptations in the desert was for Jesus to step off the pinnacle of the Temple, because the Psalmist said that God won't allow you to come to harm. That is the final temptation, and Jesus rejects it by rejecting the path that requires one to tempt God to act, to exert power. It is a very hard lesson. A very, very hard lesson. But it is the lesson at the still point of the turning world. It is the lesson at the very heart of Christian teaching. Otherwise it is just a nice set of ethics and moral rules, or a bunch of "do's" and "don'ts" from a vengeful cosmic thunderer.

Thinking about this, I don't have a conclusion so much as a final comment, and that not even my own. The words are those of T.S. Eliot, and I add them because they are so apt, and because I stumbled across them at Wounded Bird:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

No more pencils, no more books....

One issue not really addressed in this article about teacher cheating on standardized tests, is the powerlessness of the teachers.

Typically, teachers are the bottom of the pole in any school. As an adjunct, I have virtually no voice at all (not that I really want one). In a public school, even as a full time employee, if you are a teacher you are under the authority of the principal, the parents, the various directors in administration (depending on how the school is organized), the superintendent, and the school board. You want more authority? Get out of the classroom. It's that simple.

So "accountability" is all about blaming the weakest link in the chain for the failure of the chain. It's all about putting the onus of responsibility in the classroom. Seldom is it transferred to the offices where curriculum is decided on, or the school board, where policy is set. The ideas are always sound; it's the failure of the people to live up to the standards of the Big Idea that are always the problem.

You don't think so? Name me a problem with public education in America that hasn't been blamed on how teaching is done, rather than why it is done. "How" often starts out involving theory, but quickly ends up involving people: that is, teachers. "Why" is virtually sacrosanct (unless you want to argue about whether or not a book is to be allowed in a school library). "What" may be a subject of controversy, but it isn't usually the problem it is made out to be. No, the enduring question of education is "how," and that "how" is always based on the presumably democratic ideal that all students are created equal, and it is teachers who disorder and unequalize them. So the problem always comes back to teachers and what they do in the classroom, and the assessment is always of teachers and what they do in the classroom, and any assessment of administration or pedagogical theory or even school board policy is always left in the murky world of vague generalities about too many administrators (even as states like Texas pass new laws in every legislative session mandating more tests and burdens on school districts, all of which require more administrators to comply with) or "wasteful spending" (the current bugbear in Texas is the revelation that superintendents are being laid off to save money in school districts. But superintendents have contracts which must be bought out. Critics who know nothing complain this money should go to the schools. Of course, you want to fire someone under an employment contract, even with cause, and you guarantee a lawsuit with lots of money going to...lawyers.). The problem is never the idea of lesson plans or standardized tests or a pass/fail system that treats human beings like so many widgets. The problem is never the idea of education, it's always the execution of education. And that issue is always centered on the classroom, on the people at the very bottom of the educational system, the people whose entry point into the educational hierarchy is standing in front of a classroom, and whose rise in that hierarchy begins with getting out of the classroom. So the problem always comes back to teachers.

I've taught enough years now to know that some classes (i.e., groups of students) are good, some are bad, and it's simply the luck of the draw and the waves of coincidence or proof of chaos theory that explains how and why that happens. Classes in college, and even classes in high school (seniors, juniors, etc.), have a corporate personality: some are driven to learn, some are as hard to ignite with interest as a pile of wet leaves. No teacher is all things to all students. What the students bring to the classroom is as important as what the teacher brings, as important as what the teacher is told to bring, as important as the textbook the teacher is told to use, the curriculum the teacher is told to follow, the material the teacher is told to cover, even the standardized tests the teacher is told to get the students to pass. It's a fascinating study in inverse relationships: even as teachers lose more and more autonomy in their classrooms, they are more and more held responsible for the results coming out of their classroom.

Rick Perry is a fine example of the problem. He wants to make college teachers "accountable" by making their jobs subject to student evaluations. Because, after all, the problem with a college education in Texas isn't the students, it's the teachers. Somehow I managed to get through college in Texas without blaming my teachers for my shortcomings, but now I should be free to blame them when I'm not interested, amused, entertained, enlightened, or educated. Perry's position kinda makes sense for a guy who could only manage two "A's" in college, and got a "C" in gym. Clearly if he'd been able to evaluate his professors, he'd have gotten better teachers and better grades!

So if the school board fails to set the right policies for the school district, if the administration fails to establish a proper curriculum for the schools, if the department fails to set the right guidelines for their students and picks the wrong textbooks and sets the wrong goals, if the principals fail to oversee their teachers, the only viable response is to blame the teachers for the lousy student evaluations, and find ways to replace those teachers with ones the students find more congenial. Until, of course, the next round of students come along in a year or two, and don't like that new group of teachers.

It's only fair to give credit where credit is due, and blame where it can least be rejected.

O, what a paradise it seems!

Think Progress points out "The Response" was dwarfed by "The Need":

A good seven miles from Gov. Rick Perry's much-anticipated prayer rally, an even larger crowd of Houstonians gathered in preparation for another sacred event: the first day of school.

Some families camped out for hours to gain admittance into Houston's first-ever, citywide back-to-school event at George R. Brown Convention Center, where free backpacks, school supplies, uniforms, haircut vouchers, immunizations and fresh produce were provided.

Others were turned away.

"It was getting beyond capacity," HISD spokesman Jason Spencer said. "If nothing else, it shows the need."

Maribel Martinez and her five children ages 8 to 13 arrived around 7 a.m. to receive backpacks stuffed with supplies including paper, pencils, a pencil sharpener, glue and a compact disc of songs. They also got uniform shirts.

"This is a help, given how the economy is," said Martinez, an East End homemaker whose husband works full-time.

Beatrice Jones, who has two children in the Spring school district, arrived about 10:15 a.m. with her daughter and niece, only to find the doors closed and a police officer announcing the event was over.

"They were supposed to have school supplies, but all we got was sweating and paid parking," Jones said.

School Superintendent Terry Grier posted a Twitter message Saturday morning that security personnel had estimated the crowd at 100,000. At about 10 a.m., officials made the call to close the doors.

Although planners didn't know how many people would attend, they expected to serve at least 25,000 children, officials said.

And yes, Texas did cut $4 billion from school funding for the next two years. But there is one thing the Houston Chronicle noted which Think Progress didn't mention:

Paid for with corporate funding from Shell Oil Co. and Motive Enterprises, dental and health checks were also available, as well as lunch and live entertainment.

I can only imagine Perry would point to that as evidence that the system works. Even if it did cut off thousands, and even if there is now a very high risk that many children in Houston schools will attend without the required vaccinations, or be sent home from school until their parents can find some way to get them.

Oh, and what's the problem with funding Texas schools? Taxes, of course:

“Governor Perry deflected attention away from the major flaws in his governorship, which was that the failings of his tax reform in 2006 created a huge shortfall in Texas’s budget,” said Tom Smith, executive director of Public Citizen’s state office in Austin. Without the distraction of social issues Perry created, “more people would be asking whether that tax relief basically bankrupted the state,” Smith said.

Under pressure from federal courts demanding more equitable school funding, Texas revised how it pays for education through high school in 2006. The state enacted laws to cut local property taxes and expand a levy on business income. While the recession crimped state revenue in 2008 and 2009, companies using loopholes avoided paying as much as forecast.

And by the way: "Enrollment in primary grades through high school is projected to increase by 80,000 students a year through fiscal 2013." The Lege, you see, will be back in session in 2013; but not before.

This is the second largest state in the union, in terms of population (not just square miles). I still wonder when the rest of the world is going to start paying attention.

Living Poor with Style

Poor people don't pay taxes.

Poor people own appliances, so poverty doesn't really suck.

Poor people caused the collapse of the housing market and nearly brought down the world's financial markets. (That one was so widespread I won't even bother to look for a link for it.)

The poor, being powerless, have more power than you.

The poor will always be with us, so we'll always have somebody to blame.

Walter Brueggemann reminds me that:

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us. Thus I suggest that prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated.

Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Fortress Press, 1978, p. 13.

But he also warns me that:

The task of prophetic ministry is to hold together criticism [for dismantling the dominant consciousness] and energizing [for moving communities of faith with the promise of another time and situation]....Liberals are good at criticism but often have no word of promise to speak; conservatives tend to future well and invite to alternative visions, but a germane criticism by the prophet is often not forthcoming.

Brueggemann, p. 14.

These are words that apply to well and accurately to the debates I frequent on the internet: one side criticizes but offers no real promise; the other side worries ceaselessly about the future, and doesn't even tend to it well, but invites alternative visions only of disaster, with no germane criticism of the present except as it is in the hands of the wrong people. So to simply point out that one side blames the poor while the other side ignores them, is not enough; it's barely even a beginning. But I've lamented before that Robert Kennedy would walk among the poor of Appalachia, and no politician today would be seen with any person who might fit the image of "poverty." Indeed:

What’s poverty? Poverty guidelines have not changed since the 1960s: “A family is counted as poor if its pretax money income is below its poverty threshold,” which is $11,161 for a single adult — think about that! — and $17,286 for a couple with one child.

The poverty rate in 1959 was nearing 40 million. It dipped to about 23 million in 1973, only to rise again in the early 1990s to about 39 million. But the poverty rate in America in 2009 was the highest it’s been in the last 50 years, at about 43.6 million.

And yet the Heritage Foundation insists that poverty is no more, because:

In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation.[4] In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.

Of course, a picture is worth a thousand words, so:



The simple fact is, appliances once expensive and the province of the rich, are now inexpensive and available to almost everyone. Which doesn't even get to the slippery definition of the "typical household defined as poor." I've been in plenty of poor homes with refrigerators and stoves; mostly they come with the apartments. The poor have access to them, but not ownership of them, and that access runs out when the lease runs out, often within three months. In Texas, at least, that's the typical amount of time the poor have before a landlord can act to evict them for non-payment of rent. I am not far from a school in a "wealthy" school district where many of the students attend class for only three months at a time, because the family is constantly moving. The poor also have access to the internet; if they go to a public library. They can get air conditioning there, too, if they can't pay the electric bill in the apartment they can't pay for. Presumably that makes them rich as well.

It's a matter of perception, then. Especially when we don't like the way the prevailing conversation seems to be going, we deride the notion that perception is reality. But strictly speaking, what else can reality be, except what we perceive? And that is where the prophetic ministry enters in and begins its work: with reminders of what was ("the poor will always be with you") and critique of what is, and what should be ("Lord, when did we see you?"). It begins with changing our perceptions in a dialectic that keeps us between criticism and energizing.

Oh, boy; more hard work! Thanks be to God.

Why No One Really Listens to Paul Burka

The Texas political press is moribund. The best voice we ever had as Molly Ivins', and nobody listened to her, despite the fact she wrote two best-selling books about W. But trying to find out what is happening in the Texas Legislature is like trying to read the tea leaves in your cup after the power has gone out. Try as I might during the last session (the Lege meets for 6 months every two years, no more, no less, except for special sessions, which are as rare as hen's teeth, and last only 30 days), I couldn't find out what was going on with school funding or the budget process in general. One day the story was this, the next day it was that, another day there was no story at all, then everything changed again! And political coverage of candidates? Fuggedaboutit!

Into this breach supposedly steps Paul Burka and Texas Monthly. Except Texas Monthly is for the well-heeled in Texas, the people who live in River Oaks in Houston, or Highland Park in Dallas. Seriously rich people, in other words. Paul Burka is their mouthpiece. His most challenging political piece in my memory was a cover of W during the 2004 campaign with a single word splashed across it: "Maybe."

For Burka, that was flirting with liberalism.

So now we get this, about Perry's "The Response" prayer meeting in Houston this weekend:

"Three days before The Response, the Reliant Stadium prayer event Gov. Rick Perry initiated two months ago, the response has been spirited among those objecting to the governor’s participation.

"On Tuesday, more than 50 Houston-area religious and community leaders disseminated a signed statement drafted by the Anti-Defamation League expressing “deep concern” about a prayer rally “not open to all faiths,” while the Houston GLBT Political Caucus and related organizations announced a Friday rally at Tranquility Park to protest the event. The groups that represent gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered individuals accused the American Family Association and other sponsors of the prayer event of hatred toward the GLBT community.

"The ADL statement followed a June letter from the Houston Clergy Council that criticized the governor for excluding non-Christians, partnering with an anti-gay group and blurring boundaries between church and state."

My feelings about public-prayer events haven’t changed, but I’m intrigued by the Anti-Defamation League’s statement, quoted above, that the prayer rally isn’t open to people of all faiths. How are the organizers going to restrict the participants to Christians? Are they going to ask everyone who comes through the turnstiles to prove their Christian bona fides? Of course not.

Those first three paragraphs are from a Houston Chronicle story on the response to "The Response." I do wonder how clueless Burka is to imagine a fundamentalist Christian prayer service is "open to all faiths." I've participated in ecumenical services, and I made a special point during the prayer I offered to exclude even the word "God" so as not to offend the Jews present, and I also omitted any reference to Jesus as the Christ. It only seemed polite, and it had come up as an issue during the planning meeting with the one rabbi who attended. He thanked me later for my consideration.

Did we check credentials at the door? Of course not. Should we have been sensitive to those we invited who were not Christians, and speak of the one God we do worship (as do the Muslims; sadly, at least at that time, no one thought to approach the Imam in the synagogue not far from where I sit now)? Yes, I think so. Will the religious groups Perry has invited, or Perry himself, show any such sensitivity?

Do you really have to ask?

But wait, there's more!

Nor do I think that the rally “blurs the line between church and state.” The line between church and state is very clear. It’s the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The governor of Texas holding a Christian prayer meeting is not an establishment of religion.

Actually, let's just say Burka is completely clueless as to the state of the law on that issue, and leave it at that. It's embarrassing to see him display his ignorance so profoundly within two paragraphs. But it illustrates why no one takes him seriously.

As Molly once said about a Texas legislator, if he gets any dumber we'll have to water him twice a day.

Why do I say that? Well, because the church/state issue is precisely about exclusion. The Court has upheld references to God ("In God We Trust") on the grounds such things are a cultural statement with no real religious significance (which kind of diminishes the importance of the phrase, but no matter), hence no one religion is favored above another. Since at least the passage of the 14th Amendment, the 1st Amendment has been held to apply to the states as well as the federal government, so Burka's "clear" reading of the Constitution is about as muddled as the waters in a flash flood. The Response, a rally initiated by Perry and promoted from his Governor's lectern, is clearly meant to be an exclusively Christian affair. How do I know? Ask Paul Burka:

Attendance is going to fall far short of expectations and the noise generated by Perry’s critics is going to get as much media attention as the prayer rally itself. This is what happens when you think the rest of the country has the same civic and religious values as Texas.

This could have had a much different ending. Perry could have made the event nondenominational. He could have invited people and clergy of all faiths. But he elected to make it exclusionary–and not just exclusionary, but reflective of preachers who have expressed some of the most extreme religious views in Christiandom.

Another misjudgment was the public invitation to all of his fellow governors. The right way to do this was to feel out the other governors first and announce the acceptances later, when you know who is coming. Now, with only one acceptance–Sam Brownback, of Kansas, and he has said he is going on vacation this weekend–the event looks like an utter failure.

Utter failure? Really? Gee, sorta like Perry's entire tenure as Governor, then, huh?

Nobody could have predicted.....

Addendum: If you're interested, here is what Burka didn't say about Perry's prayer rally:

In interviews, the event's planners have conceded that the non-Christians will not be allowed on stage, and that the event—which Perry says is open to everyone—is intended in part to convert people to Christianity.

No, Paul, your religious bona fides won't be checked at the door. But non-Christian, non-evangelical beliefs, won't be welcome, either. And there again, Burka is clueless. Perry contacted the groups detailed in Mother Jones to organize and run this rally. NPR ran quotes from them this morning (hearing a man tell you in his own words that the Statue of Liberty is demonic is quite different from reading about it) in its story on this event. Perry is not just appealing to the Michelle Bachman wing of the GOP, he is being wrapped in this lunatic fringe, even as he tells reporters now that he may only be an usher at the event (aw, shucks).

Whatever effect this has in the GOP primaries, this is the way Perry's career ends.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Books

"Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent or praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-smoker to his pipe."--Somerset Maugham

Are books at an end? Is John Henry truly going to lose the fight to the steam engine? (The analogy is charming, but inapt. Does anyone truly want to return to the days of manual labor, doing jobs a machine can do? Not if you've ever done manual labor, you don't....). I don't know. I don't think so, but what, I have a crystal ball and it isn't cloudy?

There is the Kindle ad running now, where the woman comments on her large bag that carries several books and magazines, and the man responds his Kindle holds thousands of books and magazines. The space around them is magically populated with probably more books than I have on the 7 bookshelves in my house (I've been cutting down over the years, and occasionally regret the loss of some book I know realize I've abandoned in time) to represent the compact wonder in his hands. And I wonder: why would I want to keep all those books in one place, on one reader? And what if I lose the reader?

I also wonder how accessible the books are. I can can my bookshelves without the trouble of flicking correctly on a screen, or remembering which button to push, or waiting for the processor to respond. I can lay the book down spread-eagled where I stopped, put a book mark in it, pile it on my desk, my nightstand, any convenient flat surface. What methods do I have to use to recover the place I left off reading, and the book, in a reader? Undoubtedly some new skill I could learn, if I wanted to. But even my college-age daughter, who grew up on computers, isn't interested in e-readers; so it isn't solely a consequence of my age that I am such a Luddite on the subject. But back to the practical question: do I really want to carry so many books with me? Is that really a benefit?

Maugham's story, "The Book-Bag," which I quoted above, first inspired me to carry a book bag of my own on trips. I grab four or five titles, some aspirational (I hope to read them), some I'm actually reading, some I want for comfort or surprise. I suppose I could carry them all on an e-reader, but why would I want to? If I limt my supply, I'm forced to read what I have. If I have my entire library with me, I'm probably more likely to ignore it all, as I too often do at home.

And there's the other problem: at this point, I own LP's, and the world is going CD. Do I buy CD's to replace all my LP's? I didn't last time. And are all the obscure and small press titles going to be available in e-form? No time soon, I'll warrant. What is available is popular titles and, frankly, I'm not interested in those. I worked in a bookstore for almost a decade, I began to drown in the tide of titles cranked out every year, most of which disappear again (returned to the publisher) without anyone so much as cracking their spines. What would an e-reader do for me, except demand I read what I don't want to read?

Or, in the famous case of 1984, allow the merchant (Amazon) to retrieve the title from my Kindle, because Amazon decided it didn't have the license for that e-version. I don't want my bookseller entering my house and removing books from my shelves. Why should they enter my Kindle and refund my purchase without my permission?

There are other problems coming along, such as whether books are hardware or software. Which, actually, is the problem right now. Do I buy the author's thoughts only, or the paper they are printed on? I like to mark up my books (something Clifton Fadiman taught me to do; see, I remember my important teachers!). How do I mark up a Kindle text? With Word? With Pages? Notepad? A grease pencil on the screen? Sometimes those notes are incredibly valuable to me, especially when I find them years later. They are like messages to my future self from my past one, when I was deeply involved in that subject and recorded ideas I've already forgotten, but thankfully wrote down.

But what is a book? Software, the ideas only? Or hardware? Why, for example, do publishers spend so much money on covers and titles and publicity? In England, the Harry Potter books started selling with two types of cover art: one for children, one for adults. Why? Because it increased sales, and allowed more people to enjoy the books. Probably less of a problem on an e-reader, as your book is always in a plain brown wrapper, so to speak. But what of authors you've never heard of? How do you browse e-books the way you do paper books? Can you read through them as you wish, or is it only as B&N and Amazon allow? Does the cover intrigue you, make you curious, make you decide to pull the book and read it? If not, what do you buy, except what you already know to buy? What will we miss unless marketing of e-books becomes available enough to encourage taking a chance, and how will it catch our eye? J.K. Rowling apparently dreamed of seeing one of her books in the window of an Edinburgh bookstore. Should new writers dream of seeing their books on a webpage at Amazon, and is that the same thing? Will we gather in bookstores bare of books, to stare at each others screens and recommend something that exists only as pixels? Is there no value to the tangible? Are we all going to be the most redoubtable of Protestants in order to remain readers at all?

Of course, marketing problems can be solved, and probably will. But I'm still left with the technical questions, and the questions of physicality. Scrolls and parchment, while charming in Harry Potter's world, were long since left behind for books (which even Harry's school has). It was a far better method for storing, and retrieving, information. E-books have some advantages over books, but do they truly eclipse them the way books replace scrolls?

Of that, I am not so sure at all.....

The Widening Gyre

I think it's time to realize the insanity of the Tea Party is now a feature, not a bug, of our political system.

Athenae insists it's insanity, and the GOP now has a wild animal loose in the house that it cannot contain. But Mitch McConnell is telling anyone who'll listen that this is how the debt ceiling will be raised from now on; John Boehner brags that he got 98% of what he wanted; and TPM says the Tea Party flat out-worked the Democrats and their supporters in the debt ceiling fight.

Tell me again how the GOP is in trouble after this. Tell me again how they are riding a tiger they can't dismount. And given the lopsided votes on raising the debt ceiling, was there ever really any risk it wouldn't be raised? But might there come a time when there is a risk? Can we afford that, in the name of correcting our political system? The Tea Party says it wants to purge the system even if that means destroying the system. Is it best to counter that with our own insistence on armageddon? If both sides are ruled by mad men, who wins?

It may be we are witnessing the collapse of the system put in place in the late 18th century, or it may be we are seeing that the vaunted Founding Fathers weren't all that wise after all, and when they invented a non-parliamentary system, they bequeathed us a legislature that simply isn't up to the demands and challenges of the 21st century. Think about it: until FDR, Washington wasn't a major power center. Sheep ran on the lawn of the White House when Lincoln lived there. Politicians were badly out of touch with their constituents, and while we are appalled by pictures of legislative bodies decaying into brawls in other countries, no one has yet (to my knowledge) matched the caning on Representative delivered on another in Congress in the 19th century. Indeed, the system itself couldn't stand the strain of the peculiar institution, the hidden wound, the flaw of human slavery that was not only there from the beginning, but that had to be designed into the Constitution itself. The union and the Constitution which created it only survived because Lincoln insisted that it should, and he and several states with him were willing to go to war to make that happen. Since FDR, America has fitfully joined the nations of the world and recognized a central national government is essential to both domestic function and to establishing our place among the nations, and now more than ever our economy is bound up in the commerce of the world.

But we're still operating with an 18th century institution, one designed to limit the ability of anyone to get anything done. And now, after 200+ years of experimenting, someone has finally figured out how to bring the whole structure to a halt.

Grover Norquist pledged, decades ago, to establish a permanent GOP majority, or at least to bend the political will so that there might as well be a permanent GOP majority. Look around; he won. The Tea Party may be tiny, it may be astroturf instead of grassroots, it may simply be an excuse for the GOP to do what donors like the Koch brothers want; but it's working. The vote on the debt ceiling proves there was never any serious threat of default, but the Democrats acted like the crazy people were really crazy enough to go to Armageddon. Richard Nixon called it the "mad man" theory of nuclear deterrence. He knew nuclear war was neither winnable nor even thinkable, but he reasoned that, so long as the USSR didn't know Nixon (or any President) knew that, they wouldn't risk pushing us to the brink, because we might just jump over the edge. The GOP played the same game, and changed forever the way DC does business.

And not in a good way.

So what do we do now? Van Jones wants to organize a group to act as counter-weight to the Tea Party, but if recent history is any indication, that won't work: the Democrats won't embrace it quickly or completely enough (anybody else remember when the Dems "controlled" Congress? It lead to the debacle of the last mid-term elections), a third-party is an impossibility, and even if it works, it will just lead to more grid-lock and more disgust with politics in Washington by the American public. And so more apathy, and so still more Tea Party crazies in office.

I've seen this movie, I know how it comes out. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." The crazies have figured out how to gain control of the system, and they aren't going to give up soon. I don't think we can even vote them out of office. Once changed, the system doesn't snap back to its original form as it rejects the foreign bodies; there are no political anti-bodies to clean up what has happened, no reset button that allows us to purge the last upgrade and start clean from an earlier position.

Welcome to the monkey house.

Addendum: Jim Sleeper turns to Yeats, too (I did it in a moment of weakness) and crafts an argument that disturbs me, if only because it points toward a Madisonian, rather than Jacksonian, view:

Leadership like Lincoln's, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt's, and Harry Truman's is an essential stimulant, but ultimately it's civil-society institutions and mentors -- in the old colleges, in new community colleges and state universities, in immigrant settlement houses, labor unions, inner-city as well as suburban churches, Little Leagues and soccer leagues -- that nurture citizen leaders. Those institutions have to be more than just safety valves for participants' pent-up yearnings and anger. They must be wellsprings, drawing from sources of dignity and faith that states and markets don't supply.

Is any of this still plausible? I've been asking my former students what they think. One, who took my seminar in 2004, became a journalist for a few years, and is now in law school, framed the challenge this way as senior:

"A set of practices, habits, customs and beliefs must be considered basic to the practice of a functioning democracy," he wrote. "The rules of democratic engagement must be inculcated in a republic's citizens.... Unlike the Constitution, though, such subtle understandings and habits cannot be codified. The ethos of a republic is at once its most inscrutable and important attribute."

Hang it all, America, there can be but one ethos! But ethos, and my ethos?

Aye, there's the rub. He's not wrong, you see. But settling on whose ethos is the right one? Well, haven't we had that fight in America for over 200 years? "Ethos" has been used to quell dissent before (see, e.g., King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"), and while I don't like the dissent of the Tea Party crowd, I wonder if this cure isn't worse than the disease.

Anyway, it may not matter, as the GOP seems determined to be its own worst enemy:

In a meeting with editors of the Wall Street Journal, Cantor said Americans must "come to grips with the fact that promises have been made that frankly are not going to be kept for many."

The Republican plan for dealing with the exploding cost of health care is to phase out Medicare and replace it with a system of subsidized private insurance for elderly Americans, starting when people currently 55 and under reach retirement age. "The rest of us have got ample time to try and plan our lives so that we can adjust to reality here when you look at the numbers," Cantor said. "Again the math doesn't lie."

Democrats tend to favor Medicare reforms that enhance efficiency, and curtail ineffective health treatments -- basically for the government, advised by experts, to ration health care rather than to have private insurance companies do it. Eventually, before health care costs overwhelm the budget, one of these two visions will prevail. But the government can buy itself some time if it decides to raise taxes. Cantor says that won't happen as long as Republicans control the House -- even if a powerful new deficit reduction committee reaches a bipartisan agreement that includes some new tax revenue.

"The House is not going to support an increase in taxes," he said.

The solution, of course, will probably be to change the House. Easier than ditching Medicare and Social Security, I can assure you.

And 'round and 'round it goes.....

Once again, here is the steeple.....

Matthew Yglesias:

The basic dynamic of the ongoing feminist revolution is to take a very simple, almost banal claim — women and men are equal in the same sense that “all men are created equal” — and to unpack the series of very radical conclusions that turn out to follow from that.

Interesting that this is starting to trickle out to "progressives" and "liberals," especially those who are not (overtly or actually) "religious."

I was taught more radical notions of equality in seminary, 15+ years ago.

You want "radical"? Try Dom Crossan's idea of the "unbrokered kingdom," where equality is so equal no one stands between you and access to what you need to get through the day. You want radical? Try Crossan's ideas about Paul's true teachings (not the Pseudo-Pauline letters about women keeping their heads covered which everyone quotes and gets wrong because they are stone ignorant about both Paul and biblical studies). According to Crossan, the historical Paul saw no difference between men and women in Christ, and took for one of his fellow travelers (literally) a woman, Thekla (you could look it up!). You want radical? Consider the real meaning of the Lukan anointing (when Jesus actually makes a pun on "love"!, and almost means "sex"!). And I can't even begin to discuss the reinterpratations of scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, going on under a feminist reading (not to mention several other important lenses, feminism merely being one among many. Yglesias implies only one more lens is needed, when modern biblical scholarship and seminary instruction will offer you an entire kaleidoscope of new and interesting ways to view the world.)

Not to disparage Yglesias and Susan Miller Okin, but the church has been doing this stuff for more than a generation now (it wasn't that new when I encountered it). Sure, it's slow to trickle out to the pews (too slow!), but honestly, the most radical ideas I have encountered are still the ones I met in seminary.

Which says something about modern society.....

Welcome to the Monkey House

Alright, I'll play:

Athenae sounds righteously fit to be tied.

David Frum sounds like a Democrat.

And AmericaBlog sounds the alarm:

To put it differently, by operating in such a framework, the Democratic Party is actively destroying liberalism as a valid set of ideas to be considered by the American public.

Let me work backwards from the end: the last time Democrats were liberals, McGovern lost to Nixon. Before that, it was Johnson; and much as I admire LBJ, he wasn't all about the Great Society and the War on Poverty. Vietnam, anyone? Humphrey ran against Nixon in '68, and while Humphrey was considered the "liberal" then, as many have noted since, Nixon would be too liberal for the GOP today.

Ronald Reagan, he of ballooning budget deficits and a near record number of increases to the debt ceiling, would be too liberal for the GOP today. And might I point out David Frum sounds awfully liberal?

Give me a hammer and a church-house door, and I'd post these theses for modern Republicans:

1) Unemployment is a more urgent problem than debt.

...

2) The deficit is a symptom of America's economic problems, not a cause.

....
3) The time to cut is after the economy recovers.

....
4) The place to cut is health care, not assistance to the unemployed and poor.

....
5) We can collect more revenue without raising tax rates.

....
6) Passion does not substitute for judgment.

....
7) You can't save the system by destroying the system.

Those are Frum's seven points, sans explanations. I've gotta say, I think Obama would only strongly agree with the last two. And Frum is the conservative, Obama the liberal?

How did I find myself in the funhouse, and how do I get out?

Athenae wants to rip Frum for backing the Tea Party, who should from now on be known as the Bull Goose Loonies. That, I think, is unfair. I've more or less followed David Frum since he was a regular, smug, and arch-conservative commenter on NPR. Over the years, as he's seen the GOP shift rightward under his feet, he's actually started to sound more sensible; sort of like a modern-day Barry Goldwater, who seemed nuts in 1964 but now seems almost wise and common-sensical, in the face of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul. I would still disagree with Frum on most things, as my theology and my beliefs put me somewhere to the far left of Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman, but that's no matter. I can make common cause with Frum when he says things like the article Athenae and I both linked. In fact, I'd like to go back and pick up his explanations for his positions, and expand on 'em a bit....

...if only I thought anyone was paying attention.

It's Money That Matters

Yes, Rick Warren actually tweeted that. And begun the pile-on has: here, as well as here; here, and here, just to name four. Most of those are with either analyses of the statement (no, it is neither true nor correct) or with references to Scripture (probably someone somewhere has even reached to the "10 Commandments" to say something about bearing false witness, i.e., telling lies).

I would prefer only to point out that Warren retracted this tweet. Not, apparently, because he saw the light and realized the inhumanity and stupidity of what he said; but rather, because it embarrassed him. Perhaps he didn't like being reminded that people matter more than things and ideas; perhaps he realized he stood as exposed and malevolent as Ebenezer Scrooge declaring the poor should die and decrease the surplus population. I don't know that he realized the life his Lord and Savior led, or who he lived among on this earth, or he'd never had typed that tweet in the first place.

And I'd rather not respond with more scriptures. A), that's been done; B) it smacks of prooftexting; and C), I prefer the words of St. Basil and St. Ambrose, who more directly addresses Warren's particular sin:

"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

17 centuries later, and it's a lesson we still struggle to learn.

UPDATE: Rick Warren has not only removed the tweet, but tweeted again to acknowledge "it did sound mean." Which is a lovely use of the passive voice and a masterful misdirection: Rick Warren didn't say the poor don't pay taxes and would love to see the rich taxed! The tweet did! And it was mean! Not wrong, ignorant, or cruel; not directly contradictory to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth! No. It was just "mean." No, wait; let me be accurate. The tweet wasn't "mean." It "sounded mean."

Silly me, I didn't even know tweets had voices. I thought they were messages created by real people. Tweets are alive! Or at least, they are independent of their creators.

Well...that's okay, then. Mean ol' tweet. Good thing Rick Warren had no responsibility for it. He's not mean! He said so.

"Whole Sight; Or All the Rest is Desolation"

I was teaching rudimentary logic and logical fallacies to a Composition and Rhetoric class this morning. I realized there were several involved in the Norway bombing/shooting story, which I first heard about on BBC World Service the day of the event.

Several Americans with ties to Norway called "World Have Your Say" as the news was first being reported, to lament the crime as Norway's "9/11," and to decide for the Norwegians that they would have to increase their border security and airport security, because clearly this was the action of foreigners, probably Muslims (I don't think that was ever said explicitly, but the subtext was clearly that radicals from outside Norway had done this). There was even speculation reportedly coming out of Norway that this action was by foreign terrorists.

Of course, the man who says he did it is as Nordic as they come, and he did it because he hates Muslims and sees them as a threat to Norway and to Europe. Far from being Norway's "9/11" (the observation is not new with me), this was Norway's "Oklahoma City."

Right-wing pundits in this country were harsher and more belligerent than any of the callers I heard on BBC that day; and now they are clinging to their conclusions like barnacles on a ship. Which isn't much of a surprise, but it is surprising how quickly we jump to conclusions in the absence of any information; how readily we believe in the evilness of the "other," and how banal and homegrown such evil often is. Just after the Oklahoma City bombing, people were blaming foreigners and "Muslims" (a catch-all category for evil people). When it turned out to be Timothy McVeigh, suddenly it wasn't such a dynamic story anymore; and it didn't produce the introspection and examination of our right-wing violence that it should have. As Think Progress points out (in the link), the right wing pundits in this country who first decreed Muslims were responsible for the horrors in Norway, still insist we must remain vigilant against Muslims around the world.

That the suspect here is a blond Norwegian does not support the proposition that we can rest easy with regard to the panoply of threats we face or that homeland security, intelligence and traditional military can be pruned back. To the contrary, the world remains very dangerous because very bad people will do horrendous things. There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.

There are a number of logical fallacies in that paragraph, too, including the conclusion that even if Muslims didn't do it, they might as well have.

Still no recognition that it was the hatred of Muslims that drove Anders Brievik to act, and that he acted thinking an attack on the ruling Labour Party would make him the savior of Norway.

"The operation was not to kill as many people as possible but to give a strong signal that could not be misunderstood that as long as the Labor Party keeps driving its ideological lie and keeps deconstructing Norwegian culture and mass importing Muslims then they must assume responsibility for this treason," according to the English translation of Heger's ruling that was read out after the hearing.

Still not enough self-awareness, in other words, among the right wing pundits in this country that it is precisely their ideology that created a massacre in a peaceful country. And no, I'm really not exaggerating:

While [Frank] Gaffney’s [anti-Islam] views may seem absurd, he is incredibly influential. He regularly appears on Fox News, major conservative conferences, and his writing is referenced in the manifesto by the alleged Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. Moreover, Gaffney was a pivotal figure in organizing the hysterical protests against a planned Muslim American community center in lower Manhattan.

I live in the world of ideas; sometimes, I think, too much so. But I don't live in the world of ideas to the exclusion of my humanity. At least, not as much as some do:

When it emerged that these acts of terror were the work of a native Norwegian who thought he was striking a blow against jihadism and its enablers, it was immediately clear to me that his violence will deal a heavy blow to an urgent cause. [...]

In Norway, to speak negatively about any aspect of the Muslim faith has always been a touchy matter, inviting charges of “Islamophobia” and racism. It will, I fear, be a great deal more difficult to broach these issues now that this murderous madman has become the poster boy for the criticism of Islam.
....
Perhaps Brievik’s inexcusable act of vicious terror should serve not only as a warning that there may be more elements on the extreme Right willing to use violence to further their goals, but also as an opportunity to seriously reevaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere. While there is absolutely no justification for the sort of heinous act perpetrated this weekend in Norway, discontent with multiculturalism’s failure must not be delegitimatized or mistakenly portrayed as an opinion held by only the most extremist elements of the Right.

The Big Idea must prevail, or all else is desolation. As I have said before:

Ideas don't matter. Things don't matter. People matter.

It is not too much to say that the supremacy of the Big Idea above all else is precisely what drove Breivik to act as he did:

Heger said Breivik had accused the ruling Labour Party of betraying Norway with "mass imports of Muslims."

He said his bombing of government buildings in Oslo and massacre at a summer camp for Labour's youth wing was aimed at deterring future recruitment to the party.

"The goal of the attack was to give a strong signal to the people," the judge quoted Breivik as saying.

The people of Norway are not mourning the loss of an Idea, or even of their security. They are mourning the unnecessary, inexcusable, unacceptable, loss of lives. They are mourning people. People are who matter.