tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-371775932024-03-07T02:43:33.906-06:00What's Left in the ChurchThe title is both question and description. Still trying to figure it out as we go. With some help, I might get something right.Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comBlogger3831125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-40530665343442316182014-03-25T09:02:00.000-05:002014-03-25T09:02:34.432-05:00From Heaven Above - A Review of Praying In God's Theater: Meditations on the Book of Revelation by Joel L. Watts.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As a child of the 1970's, I was exposed to Hal Lindsey's <i>The Late Great Planet Earth.</i> Few books over the past two generations have done as much damage to the Bible as this bit of dispensationalist silliness. Along with other things, it was one of the things that chased me away from the church for a time. The notion that people read Lindsey as authoritative still makes me shake my head.<br />
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In <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Praying-Gods-Theater-Meditations-Revelation/dp/1625641931/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395755909&sr=1-1&keywords=praying+in+god%27s+theater">Praying in God's Theater: Meditations on the Book of Revelation</a></i>, Joel Watts does the singular service of wiping the slate clean not only of Lindsey, but of the all-too-frequent responses couched as Biblical commentary. Instead, Watts asks the one question that should begin any study: Why was this book written? Rather than look to the correct but insufficient answers all too frequently offered - <i>to help the early church through a time of persecution</i> - he reads the text itself for answers. His answer, shocking in its beauty, faithfulness, and novelty to modern readers, is that Revelation is nothing more or less than a view of our life as the faithful as seen from that heavenly Temple/Throne Room pictured in Chapter 4. Rooting his reading firmly within the liturgical and eucharistic practices of the early church, Watts answers his question with the glorious suggestion that we read Revelation as <i>our worship before God as we live it out here and now.</i><br />
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Praying the Scriptures is a venerable tradition, lost in the Protestant Era, in particular since the rise of higher criticism, that Watts uses to great effect. Each chapter of his book offers first a prayer - some solo, some responsive - rooted in the text under scrutiny, with supporting texts from across the Scriptures (especially the Hebrew Prophets) - with a brief explication following. The flow of the chapters follows the practices of the early church, with the <i>Introit</i>, the communal confession, the bringing forth of the Gospel, and so on. The structure demonstrates Watts's contention that the text is rooted in the liturgy of our ancient brothers and sisters.<br />
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There is more to this book that form, however. Watts's reading partners span the centuries and confessions of Christian life, and we are introduced to names that might be unfamiliar to our ears, including Isaac the Syrian and many Eastern saints and Patriarchs. One conversation partner who appears often is St. John of the Cross. Bouncing the Biblical text off the Spanish poet's writings on the mystical journey, Watts brings readers to the realization that there is nothing airy or dreamy about the mystic's journey. Precisely because the text of Revelation concerns itself with the persecution and redemption of the whole church, Watts helps readers understand this drama has many layers, personal and communal and universal. These many layers are best brought to life by considering the recorded journeys of those who lived their struggles in their lives.<br />
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And it is at this point that the centrality of the Eucharistic celebration becomes clear. For the early church, for the faithful on their interior journeys, and for us today, the place where we lay the burden of our suffering and fear and sin before God is the table God has set before us. In the offering of body and blood, of bread and wine, the whole story is made alive for us, to us, and finally in us, and we come before the throne, as St. John the Divine did, in a very real way. In this way, too, Revelation reminds us that the struggles against the powers of this age do end: They end each time God offers us a place at the table set for us and we eat and drink not through our own power or merit, but because of the grace and forgiveness this table not just represents but embodies.<br />
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Watts's book is the kind of Biblical meditation I've long sought. Respecting the text enough to wrestle with the words on the page, it nevertheless offers readers an opportunity to consider that same text as a living, breathing thing. Watts shows how the text is still alive, how the Spirit breathes through the words on the page, filling us today, offering us that New Life that is the promise of the Christian life. The prayers would work well in a liturgical study of Revelation. The text itself would bear much fruit in small-group study, as well, opening readers to the power of worship, to the freedom and grace offered at God's table, and the solace we receive that our struggles - personal, communal, cosmological - are brought up in the life of the Father in the Son through the Spirit.<br />
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I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a joy to read something so fresh and new, yet filled with the Spirit of the communion of saints from ages past.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-47887293105427186582014-02-23T09:55:00.000-06:002014-02-23T09:55:27.764-06:00Nick Kristof Pops A Boil<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It is ironic that I only now got around to reading the fallout from Nick Kristof's op-ed in last week's <i>New York Times</i>. Ironic because his complaint is there are just not enough "public intellectuals" out there, yet I am only now to digging in a bit in part because of all the really good writing I have had to read.<br />
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For all that Kristof is King of Wrongdom - and Corey Robin's <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2014/02/16/look-who-nick-kristofs-saving-now/#more-32094">piece at Crooked Timber</a> does marvelous justice to Kristof - the discussion at the linked piece demonstrates how being wrong can lead to a necessary discussion of real matters of importance. Some of those matters are included by Robin in his article: the near-criminal neglect of excellent writers by the mainstream; the economic pressures on so many young faculty that limit their ability to devote time to engage more (yet so many continue to do so); Kristof's cliched insistence that academia favors bad writing, filled with jargon and arcana, over general accessibility. It is in the comments thread - and here is where I think Crooked Timber stands out against the general rule, to whit, "Do not read comments thread" - that talking about Kristof gives voice to the real issues, issues about which Kristof does not write: the crisis in academia.<br />
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It is not the fever-dreams of the right about Leftist Academics indoctrinating our children. It isn't the equally fevered nightmares of the Left (a much smaller group, to be sure) of the capturing of our institutions of higher learning by corporate power, inhibiting academic freedom in order to pursue a well-funded corporate-state agenda. The real crisis of academia is the collapse of any sense of what, precisely, higher education is supposed to be.<br />
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As a society, we no longer value the most important thing a liberal education brings: a well-rounded citizenry capable of critical thought. Higher education should at the very least give us the tools to be able both to understand and discuss important topics of public interest, as well as provide independent, critical insight on these same debates. While these are ideals, to be sure, their pursuit is important to keeping the American project alive and kicking. Their collapse has brought us to the point where we can't even talk with any clarity about what higher education is.<br />
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As tuition skyrockets away from affordability, along with the expansion of a criminal student loan system that is well on its way to impoverishing an entire generation, as many commenters note at CT 70% of faculty are not tenure track. Adjuncts and instructors hired often to teach three, four, even five courses at a time while saving cash-starved departments from paying full-time tenured faculty, these young men and women scramble to teach, research, and publish with no institutional support at all. That so many do despite the immense barriers in their way demonstrates their dedication to the ideal of scholarship. Far too many in positions of public authority hold higher learning in contempt, seeking all sorts of ways to undermine the university, from threatening the removal of whole divisions, such as the humanities, to the recent push for STEM not as a public good in and for itself but as an economic and financial good for those who pursue it.<br />
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We need to have a discussion about higher education that recognizes the current reality of underpaid, overworked PhDs without any support from an institutional base. We need to talk about what the university <i>should be</i> in America now and the coming decades. We need to ignore stupid things people at <i>The New York Times</i> write, even if they do the public service of lancing a particular boil.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-78871464265162003732014-02-16T10:27:00.000-06:002014-02-16T10:27:06.922-06:00A Lesson Re-Learned<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I don't normally read Ross Douthat's columns in <i>The New York Times</i>. Like David Brooks, he occupies a space of valuable op-ed real estate to wave his freak-flag of pointless, narcissistic spite masked as insightful social commentary. For some reason, though, I clicked a link from Twitter to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/douthat-parental-pity-party.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0">today's offering</a>, and I was rewarded with precisely the kind of awful writing I should have known I would read.<br />
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The column itself is an endorsement of yet another stupid book trying to help young parents understand that becoming a parent is, indeed, a good choice. That such a thing should be deemed worthy of interest outside the halls of self-regarding upper-middle-class whiteness is beside the point for me. Yet, it is precisely because this would be the target audience of such pabulum that Douthat is drawn to it. What he does with it, however, is typical of his output: Rather than talk about parenting as the near-impossible task it actually is, yet rewarding in and for itself, Douthat decides to riff on a theme that is <i>de rigueur </i>for him: How much better Ross Douthat is than others in his same socio-economic cohort. At least, how much better he believes himself to be than the imaginary members of said cohort that Douthat believes make fun of him and his life choices.<br />
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In that sense, this column is an archetype of all Douthat columns. Rather than speak to the many ways our society makes parenting difficult at the best of times*; rather than a curious examination of why young couples might choose not to be parents; rather than wonder why we need yet another book reassuring parents the choice to become parents is a good choice; rather than all this, Douthat makes the entire column about why he, Ross Douthat, is better than those whose life choices are different. Rather than write a column about family or social policy, Douthat writes yet another in a long string of columns about Ross Douthat.<br />
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What's disturbing about this particular offering, however, is Douthat's transparent narcissism. There is no pretense that Douthat is going to speak to issues beyond his own private concerns as reflective of some broader trends. The column is textbook narcissism. His ending flourish - I'm a better person because I'm miserable being a parent! - has the added benefit of him trying to convince himself there is some truth there.<br />
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Deeper than the narcissism, however; deeper than the obvious fear that he has not, in fact, made a choice that brings happiness; deeper than these, however, is a kind of roiling envy mixed with anger. Those in his, Douthat's, cohort who have chosen to eschew parenthood, Douthat imagines laughing at him for his own choice. Leaping off the page is the fear <i>they might be right.</i> As I wrote on Facebook, the words are stitched together in such a way they barely hold back this anger. For this reason alone, this column is not just bad, but horrifying in a disturbing, creepy way. As the world is all about Ross Douthat, those to whom his imagination leaps as sniggering at his becoming a father (as if anyone outside his friends and family care one way or another) are not people who have made different choices. It isn't even, as his words claim, they are somehow less morally upright in their choices. There is, between the words and paragraphs, the sense that Douthat sees them as some kind of threat. That it is obvious Douthat fears they may also be correct in their choices makes this threat even more dire.<br />
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Never mind those against whom Douthat writes are creations of his odd mind. Never mind that the complexities and difficulties of parenting don't seem to be a concern in a column ostensibly about parenting. Never mind that not becoming a parent is a choice as filled with moral uprightness as any other. Never mind all these things. Seething, barely contained by the linguistic conventions of sentences and paragraphs, with punctuation serving as stitches to hold back the tide, is rage that others are living their lives as a judgment upon his choices. It is really quite frightening to read. One wonders how he operates day-to-day, interacting with others without flying in to blind rage at all the imagined slights to his life choices evident in our social life.<br />
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Having read this column, I, for one have at least learned not to read him again. I will, however, wait for the inevitable break. It is bound to come. People with this kind of anger inside them usually do, somehow.<br />
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<i>*In light of the verdict in the Michael Dunn murder trial, such a column would certainly have some resonance. A teenager doing what teenagers do is murdered by a man terrified of a group of black teenagers being teenagers. No matter what we do as parents, we cannot protect them all the time, and that should terrify anyone.</i></div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-57529309247273876222014-02-10T08:38:00.000-06:002014-02-10T08:38:23.167-06:00A Man's Man<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By now you've heard that Michael Sam, defensive lineman for the University of Missouri, came out last night. Almost immediately, the NFL responded to Sam's courageous outing <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/michael-sam-anonymous-nfl-executives-gay-player">with a cowardly display</a> of anonymity and ridiculous gay-bashing tropes.<br />
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As for Sam's ability, you can find his stats <a href="http://espn.go.com/college-football/player/_/id/481535/michael-sam">here</a>. At 6'2" and 255 lbs., he is a bit small for an NFL's front line, but he's a good size for the defensive backfield, as long as he develops speed and agility. In any event, I don't have the knowledge to speak more than that on how he might fit on a team's defense. Rather, I'm far more interested in the whole nonsense about football being a "man's man" sport, as one anonymous NFL official said.<br />
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As Michael Sam has demonstrated superior skill as a defensive player, being named SEC defensive player of the year for 2013, he can obviously do the job. The argument against drafting him all centers on ridiculous ideas about masculinity. The notion that being gay somehow makes one less "manly" should have been buried long ago. Alas, among too many it continues to hold some weird sway. As I don't really subscribe to the whole thing, I'm not even sure what "man's man" means, in this context. Are these large, muscular, athletic men so fragile in their sense of their own sexual and gender identity that the mere presence of an out gay man threatens them in some ontological way? Do they fear that he would come on to them? If he did so, are they afraid they might say yes? I'm at an utter loss as to what that argument being made means.<br />
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Michael Sam is a man's man by most folks' definition. That he happens to be attracted to other men means absolutely zero. His teammates at Mizzou certainly couldn't care less. The idea that being gay makes one less "masculine" in some indefinable way was never really intelligible. At this point, being trotted out as it is makes its basic silliness all the more apparent.<br />
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Good for Michael Sam for doing what he did. The NFL front-office people are making asses out of themselves, scrambling anonymously to put the kibosh on his dream of playing in the NFL just because he's gay. What I'm hoping is there is enough of a public outcry that at least one team steps up, drafts him, and gives him a chance. He has the ability to play some defensive position in the NFL. He should be given that chance regardless of his sexual orientation. I think all those men's men in the locker room can handle it.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-7610050064045681212014-02-02T11:53:00.000-06:002014-02-02T11:53:25.405-06:00Race, Gender & The Super Bowl Halftime Show<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Time flies, I guess. This past week, I heard the unbelievable news that it's been 10 years since the "wardrobe malfunction" that destroyed Janet Jackson's career.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAS1QLgfHH6w7pMZyAZJfR805Ma_R78n7kX_EIxgdOxoSM9soJ4o4OEDP3Xo7O_r8EnDXiW7xZiy84OZpEksqZaoK4ha2kI_UJRC4YVK_h6XZ1HmGTBYKcRxLFhjQle3gBpJz4/s1600/janet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAS1QLgfHH6w7pMZyAZJfR805Ma_R78n7kX_EIxgdOxoSM9soJ4o4OEDP3Xo7O_r8EnDXiW7xZiy84OZpEksqZaoK4ha2kI_UJRC4YVK_h6XZ1HmGTBYKcRxLFhjQle3gBpJz4/s1600/janet.jpg" /></a></div>
Looking at this photo, I'm still amazed at the national furor, including FCC fines and what amounted to the end of Janet Jackson's musical career, all flow from this moment. A boob pops out and the world went nuts.<br />
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Last year, Beyonce performed at the halftime show, and I was really surprised at the comments I saw on my Facebook newsfeed attacking her dress and appearance as somehow wrong.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSmctPqr1ZXEUxaY5_Khu_XE1y4yCN_lTmnA3X13Qlhx_wDi7Cy7IYnEeDpd5PzMDbD_uQ7A0PmSKLWMP-pXrDK4PEvvDeKHmnEtleqIRJCqg4_njtSwBA4H_qRnWlWBifzih4/s1600/Beyonce.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSmctPqr1ZXEUxaY5_Khu_XE1y4yCN_lTmnA3X13Qlhx_wDi7Cy7IYnEeDpd5PzMDbD_uQ7A0PmSKLWMP-pXrDK4PEvvDeKHmnEtleqIRJCqg4_njtSwBA4H_qRnWlWBifzih4/s1600/Beyonce.jpg" /></a></div>
What, I still wonder, is wrong with the way she's dressed?<br />
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The fact that the incident in 2004 cost Janet Jackson her career, while Justin Timberlake continues on his merry way says so much about who we are. That Beyonce singing and dancing in a costume little different except perhaps in color and material from a ballerina's became a focus of moral outrage says so much about who we are.<br />
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The fact that this year's halftime show will feature Bruno Mars, an ineffectual white man, says so much about who we are as a country.<br />
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As a side note, that so many continue to be outraged at Miley Cyrus's very calculated sexualizing of her own behavior while too few in the mainstream press note the blatant racism in her MTV appearance says so much about who we are.<br />
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I'm so tired of people offended by women's bodies. I'm so tired of people not being offended by the maltreatment of African-Americans. I'm tired of the American madonna/whore complex. I'm tired of the impossible standards African-American women are forced to meet. and the all-too-public slut-shaming when they fail. I'm just sick and tired of our American neruoses around race and gender and sexuality.<br />
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I suppose the fact Beyonce's career hasn't been changed by her appearance last year is a sign of progress. That she has to endure a flood of hateful slut-shaming because she dared wear an outfit that was comfortable for her to move, though, makes me tired.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-8850233960431310912014-02-02T10:26:00.001-06:002014-02-02T10:35:42.513-06:00Just A Moment<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've always felt that parenting is a matter of balance. Too much of anything is bad. Bringing a person from childhood to adulthood without major trauma is difficult enough; trying to do so with the understanding that there's a large element of chance involved is enough to give most people pause before contemplating it. It's important to have discipline. It's also important to know when it's time to let go and believe that all the things you've said and done as a parent have made a difference. Last night was one of those moments.<br />
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I remember the conversations Lisa and I had after Moriah was born. A big life-milestone is dating. We were firm: 16. Right on schedule, last night Moriah headed out the door with a quiet, smart, good looking young man whom she had asked out to what Rockford Christian High School calls their "Lips" dance. Not the greatest name in the world, I know. It's a Sadie Hawkins dance, really. The school doesn't call it that, though, because they do not want school kids left behind because some girls didn't ask them out, or because their girlfriends go to another school. Most of the school treats it that way, and Moriah executed her plan to ask this young man out perfectly.<br />
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As the father of two girls, there are always comments that surround dating: "You should get a gun."; "You doing a background check?"; yadda-yadda. I remember when Miriam was born, a man who was the father of two grown daughters gave me something called "Rules for dating my Daughters". At the time I found it quite funny, with lines such as, "If you pull in our driveway and honk your car horn, you better be dropping something off, because you're not picking anything up." Now, on reflection and with several years parenting my daughters, I find this kind of thing awful. By the time a child has reached dating age, if you don't trust her enough, and trust yourself enough as a parent, to accept that she will make good judgments when it comes to dating, then being a macho bully only demonstrates your utter failure as a parent.<br />
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I've talked to Moriah. I listen to her. Sometimes, I listen to conversations she and her sister, 12, have. I think they don't know I'm paying attention, but I do. Since she was younger, I've been impressed with her common sense. I told her just a few days back about a time when she was 10 or 11 and her sister was 6 or 7. They wanted to play outside on a sunny summer afternoon. There was talk in our neighborhood of a person or persons about acting suspicious about children. My wife and I had already had a talk with the girls about talking to strangers, but I was concerned. I opened my mouth, then said, "OK," and set the boundaries for their play. About 15 minutes later they came back inside. I asked what happened, and Moriah told me that they were following our rules; a stranger was in the yard, so they came inside immediately. I hopped up, went outside, and it was the meter-reader. I went back inside, chuckling, and told the girls how proud I was. At that point I knew I had little to nothing to fear, at least at their end, from a stranger approaching them.<br />
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Which, of course, is part of that nagging fear every parent has. You can prepare your child, teach them, give them rules and boundaries, and someone comes along and acts in ways for which you cannot predict or prepare. All a parent ever can do is so much. The rest, as they say, is life unfolding, with a whole lot of prayer.<br />
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When it comes to the issue of dating, however, a parent has all sorts of resources. As I said above, there's listening. There's talking. Paying attention to the things your child says when he or she doesn't think you're around. Watching how he or she acts in other situations. Paying attention to the social climate in which your child lives and moves. These are all things a parent can do. When the moment comes and your daughter says, "I want to go out with this boy," as a father you have all sorts of choices. For me, it was simple: "What's his name?" If you've been paying attention, you already know the answer to that question, as I did. If you've been paying attention, you've heard the talk about what kind of boy he is. Most of all, if you've been raising your daughter in a way that not only keeps those lines of communication open, but also in a way that allows you to trust her, say, drive a car, get a job, even head out on a cruise with another family, then the whole matter of watching her put her arms around a boy, let him slip that corsage on her wrist, then head out the door to school and the dance isn't a moment of fear. At least the neurotic fears. Last night, I watched all that happen and I was not only happy for Moriah. I was proud of her. The girl has extremely high standards, and here was a young man she felt reached them. A quiet, shy, slightly awkward boy trying to look grown-up in his shirt, slacks, and tie that matched Moriah's dress - I've only ever met two teenage boys who never looked awkward in those situations, and they both went to school with me - I smiled and shook his hand, remembering my own fears as a teenage boy meeting girls' fathers. And the whole time, I was thinking, "There she goes." I could have been gruff. I could have cried. Instead, I smiled, trusting her because of all she's already shown me; trusting him because I knew that was part of trusting her; most of all, for once in my life, trusting myself that I'd raised Moriah well, and the proof of that was all here in this moment, just a moment of time, a moment of life, that showed us all that things will never be the same.<br />
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It wasn't easy, that moment they slipped our our front door. It passed so quickly if I hadn't been paying attention I might have missed it. It was a good moment, though. And I'm still smiling inside because I know that the most important thing, my daughter's happiness, is more important than my own neurotic insecurities.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-30814600906603717132014-01-28T16:36:00.000-06:002014-01-28T16:36:15.230-06:00Thrilling Days Of Yesteryear<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It's a long story how I ended up doing it, but I dragged my old journals out from the place I stashed them when we moved last summer and, for the first time in years, sat down and read them. You can read me tweeting the experience<a href="https://twitter.com/gkrusesafford"> here.</a><br />
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The first thing I did was look at what I was holding. It was a spiral-bound notebook, purchased in January, 1984. I used it to take notes for the class Modern American Fiction. I know this because I have the course, the professor, the meeting time, and the building and room number scrawled on the inside front cover. I also have my name and dorm room there, too. On the outside back cover, I'd written the date, time, and topics for the final exam for the class. These details, unimportant really in the scheme of my whole life, seemed to glow a bit. This artifact from a time before home computers or cell phones or digital synthesizers or anyone outside Arkansas who knew who Bill Clinton was or anyone outside his family and friends who knew who Barack Obama was; before front-wheel drive and automatic transmission became standard (you still had to pay extra for them on cars back then); before Ronald Reagan finished his first term as President - this thing had been.<br />
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In the late summer of 1984, I sat down, drew a line through all that information and printed "Journal, August 17, 1984 -" and left it open-ended until I had filled that particular notebook on April 17, 1986. Which I duly noted. I must have removed the pages on which I'd taken notes. On the top right-hand of the very first page I wrote the date. I started to write:<br />
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I find it increasingly imperative that I keep a record of thoughts, impressions, happenings, etc. so that in case I need reference for future activities, plans, etc. it will be here. Also, to check out historical information in 40 years, this will be important.</blockquote>
I was off by a decade.<br />
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At first blush, what I discovered as I read these was an earnest young man, learning about the world, about himself, and trying to navigate among friendships, relationships, while having few of the requisite skills to do so. I'll admit to being embarrassed by quite a bit in here, if only for its flagrant naivete.<br />
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Of course, there's more. I'm ashamed of one particular instance of just plain ugliness toward another person. If I had the chance, I'd not only apologize in person, but do whatever penance that person felt I deserved. Just a couple short sentences, but so full of sheer disgusting . . . just ugh.<br />
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I remember spending much of that summer reading. A whole lot of history. Post-WWII-era history. That's when I first read <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/America-Our-Time-Nixon-What-Happened/dp/B00BV2OQ38">America In Our Time</a> </i>by Godfrey Hodgson. When I started journaling I was reading <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Missile-Envy-Helen-Caldicott/dp/0553250809">Missle Env</a>y </i>by Helen Caldicott. Just before that, I'd read Jonathan Schell's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Jonathan-Illustrated-Cover-Schell/dp/B005B5AGGM">The Fate Of The Earth</a> </i>so the whole nuclear war thing was heavy on my mind. That's reflected in a lot of what I wrote about the politics of the time. The Republican National Convention, handing another term to Ronald Reagan, was about to start, and while we forget it now, the nuclear freeze movement was popular if not very effective. To say I had my consciousness raised is probably accurate.<br />
<br />
Most of what I feel, reading a couple weeks worth of entries, is compassion tinged with sorrow. The person who wrote those was struggling in so many ways. Writing a journal, for all the pretentiousness of my very first paragraph, was a lifeline with no one to catch it. As I said to someone on Twitter, it's odd to hear my 18 year old self speaking to me and not able to speak back. There's a lot I wish I could tell him. There's a lot I wish I could do. Of course, I can't. Even if I could, as I admitted, my 18 year old self would take one look at me, shake his head, and go about not quite getting life right for quite a long time.<br />
<br />
I did have a thought, before I actually sat and opened and read that journal, of doing some transcribing, thinking it might be fun. The fact is, I just can't do that. It isn't the things about me that would be revealed. I've already been candid about the banality of what I wrote, the bathos of some things, and most of all the immaturity of the person one can read between the lines. I'll also admit that I write about smoking pot and hashish. Yes, I did. What's horrible isn't having done that. What's horrible is the guilt I expressed at having done so. Some innocent fun - and it was, trust me - with friends, and I spend quite a bit of time in holier-than-thou mode afterward.<br />
<br />
No, it isn't what is revealed about me. The simple fact is, as this was never intended to be read by anyone but me, I name names of people and detail relationship matters that, honestly, I don't think are anyone's business. Rather than embarrass anyone else, I'll let my previously brilliant idea die a quiet death from common-senseitis.<br />
<br />
I am curious, though. Anyone out there keep a diary or journal? If so, have you ever gone back after years or decades and read what you wrote? What was your reaction?</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-53568776175786060632014-01-25T09:25:00.000-06:002014-01-25T09:25:22.018-06:00Things I Don't Understand<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
That title holds a multitude of things, of course. From advanced mathematics through the music of John Zorn to arc-welding, there are far more things I will never understand than things I do. For right now, however, I don't get <a href="http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-special-needs-children-of-zhdanov.html">this</a> and related phenomena. Quite apart from the obvious aesthetic Stalinism; quite apart from the bulk of Goldberg's column that goes on to disprove his thesis (as Edroso notes); quite apart from dumping more garbage on the dessicated corpse of "respectable" conservative thought; I really don't understand how it is possible to approach life this way. When I watch a movie, or listen to music, or see paintings, or whatever, I never ask myself, "Is this liberal? Does it advance liberal politics at all?" I do these things to be edified or entertained, or perhaps both.<br />
<br />
Right away, obviously, I would add that of course how I receive and perceive any art form is informed by my politics, among other things. I do not, nor have I ever, used a political hermeneutic as my primary, or even tertiary, criteria. Just to take music as an example, I want to be moved and entertained, usually in equal measure. I enjoy meaningful lyrics, sure; I also love songs about sex and partying, too. Most of the time, what I enjoy is a combination of music and lyric that resonates on an emotional level. I just couldn't care less about the politics either of a song or its writer or performer. To take an example from a rough contemporary, I still enjoy Megadeth's music even though Dave Mustaine has turned in to a bit of a right-wing crank. I couldn't care less about that, any more than I care, while listening to <i>Kind of Blue </i>or <i>Nefertiti, </i>that Miles Davis physically abused his wife.<br />
<br />
Which leads me to the whole "related phenomena" part above. Last week, in a search for something about which to write, conservatives decided to go after Lena Dunham. Now, I don't nor have I ever nor would I ever watch <i>Girls</i>. From what I've read, both critically and otherwise, there seem to be many problems with the show, not least how it is possible aimless 20-somethings somehow manage to live in New York at a time when that has become difficult for all but the wealthy. In any event, the attacks on Ms. Dunham have little to do with the substance of the show; rather, it seems too many on the right hate-watch the show just to be turned off by Ms. Dunham's propensity to disrobe. Of course, they don't question whether such nudity makes any narrative or aesthetic sense. Rather, they personally attack her looks. One gets the feeling reading stuff like this that these men all feel that filmed nudity exists solely to excite them. Lena Dunham not having a model's figure just doesn't seem to do it for these poor men or their simultaneously withered souls or penises.<br />
<br />
Now, here's what I don't understand. If they dislike it so much, if the mere glimpse of Lena Dunham's naked body so disgusts them, why do they watch it? Turn off the goddamn television. Watch something else, <i>Game of Thrones</i>, maybe, where there are enough good looking naked women to keep them alert, happy, and erect for minutes on end. Since they don't criticize <i>Girls</i> for political or social reasons, but rather just want to complain that Lena Dunham doesn't do it for them, the whole exercise is worse than pointless. It's disturbing in a stalkerish kind of way. The folks who write these pieces, and they appear with enough frequency almost to constitute a genre, sound like that guy who appears on social media, harassing women they barely know, carrying on about a lack of attention, carrying on to the woman's friends about alleged vices and faults (I think we've all seen examples of these kinds of breakdowns; they are simultaneously sad and frightening).<br />
<br />
Most of the time, I just wish these folks would find something else to do. Hate-watching a TV show then taking to the internet to express your hatred at the hours of video you've just watched . . . that isn't what people do. You won't ever read a post here carrying on about the hours I spent listening to Yanni. Do you know why that is? First of all, I wouldn't subject myself to the time needed to write such a post. I also know that Yanni has many fans out there who enjoy his music. Just because I dislike it, and can articulate why I dislike it, doesn't make me a better person than Yanni's fans. In fact, doing that would make me look like an asshole. Just like folks who write posts excoriating "liberal" Hollywood, or Lena Dunham's body, or whatever it is. Find a hobby you enjoy and write about that. Go to a movie to have fun. Read a book with the simple goal of enjoying a story and enjoying getting wrapped up with the characters and their lives. The political hermeneutic is just nonsense. The hate-watching is just creepy.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-67394530008879186052014-01-25T08:09:00.000-06:002014-01-25T08:09:02.345-06:00Speaking In Tangled Tongues (Sorry For How Long It Is)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A couple weeks back, a man with whom I grew up posted something about Pres. Obama on his timeline on Facebook, and one of his FB friends posted a one-word comment: "Terrorist". Now, the gentleman who posted the OP had already demonstrated, how can I put this, only a flirting relationship with reality, posting things from Infowars.com, among other places. It wasn't the post that bothered me. It was that one-word comment, and the fact it wasn't challenged, that pushed me over the edge. I went ahead and with a heavy heart blocked further posts from this person.<br />
<br />
A couple days ago, another person posted something about "Benghazi", referencing Hillary Clinton. When I noted that all the claims on the little meme-poster were factually inaccurate, the poster confessed that he understood that. He was opposed to Mrs. Clinton running for President. Then he asked, probably rhetorically, what it mattered. Putting on my smarm suit, I proceeded to say the difference is this simple (and here I quote what I wrote from memory): Would this person prefer I stop being his friend and tell everyone the reason was he molested dogs, or that I told everyone he was just too damn tall (he's 6'4" or 6'5"; not really too tall, but I hope you get the point)? If you wish to oppose Mrs. Clinton's possible candidacy, there is so much on the real public record one could use. Why contribute to the ever-growing flood of absolute nonsense that makes it ever more difficult to have any kind of political discussion without having, yet again, to point out that some folks toss fanciful nonsense around as if it were real.<br />
<br />
I will make a move far too many people (including me, most of the time) make and say this is not limited to the American right. Glenn Greenwald's one-person campaign to erase any and all differences between Presidents Bush and Obama, at least when it comes to issues of foreign relations, is without doubt one of the most irritating and fanciful bits of political theater around. What makes it even more irritating is, just like with folks on the right who want to criticize the President, or Mrs. Clinton, or whoever else, there are very real reasons to take Pres. Obama to task for his policies regarding on-going military actions, the continuation of Bush-era policies on gathering data on American citizens, foreign surveillance and the far-too prevalent classification of material and information. These are serious issues; Greenwald, however, is not a serious critic. He's a crank, standing on a soapbox, calling the President a criminal, that the exertion of American power is a bad thing in and of itself, that surveillance of foreign leaders and diplomats is not just criminal but a moral offense.<br />
<br />
Let's just take this last for a moment. In the documents Edward Snowden stole then dumped without thought or review was evidence that, during the Bush years, the National Security Agency listened to Angela Merkel's cell phone. Ms. Merkel was, befitting the Chancellor of a foreign nation, put out by this revelation. There was some chatter between Chancellor Merkel and Pres. Obama on the matter. The whole time, I was thinking, "Really?" Listening to the phone calls foreign leaders make is exactly what the NSA was created to do! It's the kind of thing any country with the capability not only would do, but does! All the hand-wringing and badgering about foreign surveillance ignores a simple reality - these are the kinds of ugly things countries HAVE to do. Anyone reading this thinking the Chinese, the Russians, the European Union, and the Israelis - to name just a few - aren't doing the same, or at least trying to do the same, to our leaders is certainly welcome to believe that. They shouldn't be let near sharp objects, however.<br />
<br />
Like the right's tsunami of crap, the whole Snowden affair and its adoption by some on the Left has created a climate in which it has become impossible to talk about the real issues precisely because the nonsense has become far too deeply intertwined with reality, separating the two is nearly impossible. I'm hardly a fan of the President continuing the unConstitutional practice of sending American troops in to combat without a formal declaration of war; I'm even less a fan of the use of UAVs in countries with which the US currently has formal diplomatic relations, and those countries have repeatedly demanded we cease such actions (Pakistan and Yemen are two such). I think far too much information in government circles is classified. It would be far better if the default position was public disclosure, rather than to classify than go back and review. These are all discussions we need to have, just as Pres. Obama and Mrs. Clinton need serious, legitimate criticism that doesn't involve, "BENGHAZI!!!" or "DRONES!!!!"<br />
<br />
I know Bob Cesca at The Daily Banter has been doing a whole lot of pushback against Greenwald on the whole Snowden affair, not least debunking pretty much every outlandish claim Greenwald has made, not least that he - Greenwald - is a journalist, precisely because, being a real journalist, Cesca demonstrates how a journalist works by showing just how foolish Greenwald's claims, repeatedly shown false yet repeated no less frequently than the birtherism of the right, continue to be.<br />
<br />
For the most part, though, this tiny <i>cri de coeur</i> of mine won't matter that much. It won't matter not least because there are two potent weapons on the side of the constant nonsense - power and money. At some point reality always wins. It would be preferable if we reached that point with a soft landing, however. As it is I just don't see that happening. The rude awakening coming will be shocking, and that's sad because it isn't necessary. Like Mitt Romney on Election Day last fall actually stunned by his loss despite all the polling the previous couple weeks that showed him falling further and further behind the President, existing within a bubble of falsehood might feel safe. When reality pops that bubble, it can be truly shocking.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-76553684692902091902014-01-07T09:07:00.000-06:002014-01-07T09:07:18.442-06:00We Should Never Feel Discouraged<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This morning, like most mornings, I sat and read some things on the Internet while sipping my coffee. I have really enjoyed reading the blog <a href="http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/">Lawyers, Guns, & Money</a>. Their posts are smart, the comment threads interesting and often very funny, and unlike the other quasi-academic blog <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/">Crooked Timber</a> there is far less pretentiousness afoot.* This morning's read included <a href="http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/for-god%E2%80%99s-sake-somebody-please-give-victor-davis-hanson-his-meds">this</a>, a look at a couple columns from two right-wing writers, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/366648/why-are-liberal-men-unhappy-david-french">David French</a> and <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367231/good-ol-boy-inc-victor-davis-hanson/page/0/1">Victor Davis Hanson</a>. I read the originals and the comments and, as has been my wont over the past few months, I became bone-deep sad. Not for the writers, certainly; their nonsense about unhappy liberal men and . . . whatever point Hanson was aiming for and missed (liberals watch reality shows to make fun of people that Hanson spends a couple paragraphs ridiculing because it makes liberals feel superior to the rubes Hanson spends a couple paragraphs calling rubes; that was all I got from whatever-it-was Hanson wrote; again, doesn't <i>The National Review</i> have editors that could have handed this back to him and said, "Victor, there's a germ of an idea here. Come back to me after a couple more rewrites."?)<br />
<br />
I wasn't sad, either, because two men flaunting their neuroses, with little coherence, are getting paid for it. That's why it's called "wingnut welfare", after all. At least they're gainfully employed, and Hanson, for one, certainly doesn't seem to relish the thought of driving trucks over frozen lakes or crab fishing in the Bering Sea (neither do I; I wouldn't spend time and energy belittling them, the work they do, or the combination of local weather and climate conditions, and social and political conditions that make their jobs horrific; I have nothing but respect for these people, while Hanson . . . not so much).<br />
<br />
No, I was and am sad because far too much of our public discourse seems stuck in trivialities. Liberal men are unhappy? OK, I'll accept the survey findings. As not a few commenters at LGM noted, French doesn't make any distinctions based on the racial make-up of respondents. Assuming that "liberals" would include a healthy dose of African-Americans, Jewish voters, Hispanics, and other minorities, it might well be that liberal unhappiness has something to do with systemic, institutionalized racism and less with emasculating harpies masquerading as women? Another point the folks at LGM didn't note is liberals tend not to be bombarded with the near-constant alternative-reality of FOXNews and other right-wing news sources** and we are therefore dealing with a crappy economy, the frustrations of a broken political system for which there is no immediate fix, and, obviously, the right-wing noise factory that never shuts down.<br />
<br />
Last week, 1.3 million Americans lost their unemployment insurance benefits. Congress is intent on gutting the Food Stamp program. Republican Congressman and former Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan wants to take one of the most successful social programs we have, Medicare, and destroy it by turning it in to a voucher program. We have many, many things that need doing, or fixing - which is also doing, I suppose - and far too much intellectual energy is spent talking about emasculating feminists (as if that particular trope weren't a bit dated) and elitist liberal snobs (again, old and busted stereotype). Our soldiers, airmen, and Marines keep dying in Afghanistan toward no end that seems clear, at least to me, and people are still carrying on about Phil Robertson from <i>Duck Dynasty</i>. To employ a cliche I despise, the oxygen is sucked from the room by trivialities.<br />
<br />
Of course, some folks are talking about things not only I believe are important like people having enough money to feed themselves and their families and pay the rent, but things that really are important like people having enough money to feed themselves and their families and pay the rent. Far too few, alas, seem interested in getting busy and changing things so that folks have money to feed themselves and their families and pay the rent. It's much easier to get carried away by something Melissa Harris-Perry said, or the latest serving from that word-salad bar manager, Sarah Palin. Frustrated by the inability of our public discourse to move anything forward, we take aim at easy targets, supporting or decrying something some marginal public figure said in order, at the very least, to assuage our frustration at accomplishing anything else in the public sphere. We can't get Congress to reinstate UI; we can at least make clear how silly the latest FB post from Sarah Palin, highlighted by Media Matters for America for liberals to laugh at, really is and just how silly she is as a public figure.<br />
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This is why I'm a sad discouraged liberal. I know I shouldn't be. I have a full, rich life; a beautiful wife and family I love and who love me back despite everything; a job I enjoy that fulfills me (and frustrates me, as all jobs do). While I type this, I'm watching a woodpecker at our suet feeder, a few juncos on the ground pecking at seed, and evidence the seed corn I put out yesterday for the rabbits and squirrels has been put to good use. These are things to celebrate, especially as the upper Midwest is only slowly shoving that arctic air to the east and I worry about the animals and birds trapped outdoors. I shouldn't be discouraged for all sorts of reasons.<br />
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And I've forgotten, due to lack of use, how therapeutic writing can be. Becoming busy over the past six months, I've forgotten how much better I feel after the exercise of taking my inner frustrations, giving them some kind of shape on a computer screen, and putting them out there for others to share. I have that in common with French and Hanson, at least; the difference, I suppose, is my self-awareness that this is what I'm doing.<br />
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<i>*With the possible exception of contributor Erik Loomis's occasional posts on craft beers. I have decided that, at least in the US, treating beer like we used to treat wine is a class-marker. I'd love to take the time to make clear what this means, but for now, just go with the image of early-20th century white upper class Americans enjoying "The Charleston" while stripping away the context that actually made early jazz such a dangerous music.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
**<i>Two things. First, Fox is on </i>everywhere<i> you go. Doctor's offices, dentist offices, hospital waiting rooms. Hell, I sat for a couple hours in a small airport in northern Florida in September and there were monitors there playing . . . Fox. Last spring, for work I had to swing over to FOXNews online and sat in wonder reading headlines that were as bizarre as anything I'd ever read. The world described by Fox isn't the world in which any people actually live. I'm surprised folks who watch Fox manage to get out of bed without injuring themselves and others. I'm being serious here; the level of disconnect is profound, and not a little disturbing. It's why FOXNews isn't carried on Canadian cable; the Canadian government has this quaint rule that states you can't call yourself a news service in their country and promulgate falsehoods.</i></div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-74515690534915461742013-12-30T14:31:00.001-06:002013-12-30T14:31:22.814-06:00So How Was Your Christmas?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A week ago today, we piled in the car and drove 12 hours to my hometown. Our first family Christmas in my childhood home in 20 years of marriage, in part because my wife isn't serving a church so Christmas Eve is free from obligations. I managed to run in to some old friends and distant family while back there, which is always nice. Plus I saw or spoke to all my siblings; in fact, the only one I didn't see was my brother, and we had a nice phone conversation Monday evening. My older sister and her daughters and my youngest sister and her (grown) children were at our parents on Christmas Day. On Friday, we piled in the car again and drove to my oldest sister's house. That late afternoon we went snowmobiling for the first time. My nephew, old enough to be his cousins's parent (he's 36; my girls are 16 and 12), took them out first, then after I got the hang of it, I took each in turn. Watching their faces while we rode, hearing them scream for joy - it was great. My youngest sister and her son and daughter arrived a bit later and that evening and the next morning we had epic, Safford Family Uno games, invoking our late, lamented Aunt Joan who made Uno . . . well unique. You had to be there; trying to explain to the younger generation was difficult. You were dearly missed, though, Joan. Her daughter, my cousin Claudia, was also missed; we mused on who sang "The Happiest Girl In The Whole USA" (it was Donna Fargo), a song popular one summer my sister and cousin spent much time together.<br />
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As my parents are, in my father's own words, ancient - at 92 and 89 he's not far wrong - it was nice to have one last Christmas at the old homestead, to have so much of the family gathered together, to have little sniping and grousing (there's always some with family), and to return home with warm feelings about the people and events. You never know what things like this are going to bring, so the overall consensus that all involved had a good time, if too short, made this a great Christmas. I'll always cherish being in the living room at my parents' house, in my usual spot, on Christmas morning, as my nephew passed out presents. I think watching two of my sisters dancing to "Cherry Hill Park" by Billy Joe Royal is one my single favorite moments. I found it on my phone after one of them mentioned it. I hadn't heard the song in years and my sister took my phone and the two of them proceeded to have a great time embarrassing their children, and delighting their youngest brother. We're all middle-aged farts now, but it's nice to remember when we were younger.<br />
<br />
So that was my Christmas, 2013. A year of transitions and changes and busyness and new realities ended with a week of family nostalgia that wasn't marred by over-exposure. For that I'm grateful. I'm also grateful for the two Adorno volumes, <i>Essays on Music</i>, and <i>Philosophy of New Music</i>, as well as the essay collection <i>Music in Christian Worship</i>. Oh, I also bought Oliver Sacks's <i>Musicophilia </i>and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0800631463/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=3525342540&ref=pd_sl_7jfdkqwd54_e"><i>Te Deum </i>by Paul Westermeyer.</a> Lots of music reading ahead.<br />
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Hope your Christmas was peaceful and joyous.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-37939408280710585262013-12-21T08:18:00.000-06:002013-12-21T08:18:15.897-06:00Getting Our Hate On<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Of the myriad reasons not fleshed out the other day when I wrote that I would be writing less (and here I am writing three days in a row, because nothing makes more sense than that), one of them is a kind of helplessness in the face of millions of people spewing whatever sits in their brainpans out on the Internet. Whether one peruses the comment threads on news stories or blog posts; the various and sundry left-wing, right-wing, moderate and fringe political sections of the internet; or even Facebook and Twitter; as far as the eye can see every sort of opinion is aired, without any sense that things on the internet are not private, and the whole world can see your words.<br />
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The past three days have brought us, first Phil Robertson of <i>Duck Dynasty </i>saying some pretty horrible things. <a href="http://whatsleftinthechurch.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-robertson-follies.html"> I've said what I want</a> about that. This morning, this <a href="http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/12/every-jonah-goldberg-column-should-end-with-%E2%80%9Cthe-aristocrats">LGM post</a> and this <a href="http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-stupidest-thing-ever-written-until.html">Edroso post</a> "discuss" Jonah Goldberg's latest, in which he gay baits a character in a commercial. The depth of disgust, projection, and seething hatred on display - and the comment section is a festering stew of foulness - is enough to put you off your waffles first thing on a Christmas season morning.<br />
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Yesterday, however, there was a display of worldwide, day long hate that was quite disturbing. If you hadn't heard, Twitter exploded in a ragegasm of epic proportions over an insensitive, bigoted tweet from a young woman named Justine Sacco. You can see the on-going phenomenon <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=justine%20sacco&src=typd">here</a>. She has deleted her account. The Tweet Heard 'Round The World, quite literally, has been captured for all time:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!</span></span> </blockquote>
A PR executive at an internet holding company that owns OKCupid and other popular sites, Sacco was on a long international flight to Cape Town, South Africa and, for reasons that will probably never be completely explained, sent out three tweets. The first concerned being seated next to someone who was deodorant-impaired; the second was a dig at the British; then the last tweet before boarding her 12-hour, wifi-free flight. That her life would never be the same after landing became apparent early yesterday. Her tweet went viral, and her followers exploded from a couple hundred to almost 8,000 by last evening/early morning in Cape Town. She lost her job, discovered hundreds of thousands of people calling her all sorts of horrible things, and even had Buzzfeed digging through her Twitter account to find <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jenvesp/16-tweets-justine-sacco-regrets-hxg7">"The 16 Tweets Justine Sacco Regrets"</a>.<br />
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Far from defending the content of her Tweet, I think it displays a kind of ignorance and low-level bigotry that far too many Americans carry around with them. The difference between all of us and Ms. Sacco is her Tweet got picked up and spread around the Internet, then to major news outlets like <i>The New York Times</i>, her company was forced to act, and she went from a successful business woman to international pariah in the amount of time it takes to fly from one great city to another. I think losing her job was the correct action; a PR executive who tweets the things Ms. Sacco did displays a lack of judgment that is truly astounding; her former employers, IAC, do have to protect their image, after all.<br />
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On the other hand, I cannot endorse the deafening rage that continues to pile upon her. Compared, say, to Phil Robertson, a figure in a television program, or Jonah Goldberg, a political columnist, Ms. Sacco is a private individual of whom no one had heard before yesterday. The hours-long spewing of name-calling, conjectures about how intoxicated she might be, the sexist comments calling her a "bitch" and "cunt" was not only ugly beyond imagining; it was out of all proportion to the offense contained in her Tweet. The pile-on was like Orwell's "Two Minute Hate". I have to admit more than little compassion for Ms. Sacco, not least because her life became something upon which the whole world could create whatever it wanted without any knowledge the furor existed.<br />
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There seems to be some deep well of rage and hate within us. We direct it at all sorts of targets only marginally related to anything of importance. I think this is so not least because our political system is completely unresponsive to the demands for action the people express, regardless of party or ideology. Precisely because ours is a nation of inaction, this seething, roiling cauldron of frustration needs to escape; Ms. Sacco, alas for her, was just in the way. I have no idea how she will manage now; any future in her chosen profession, Public Relations, is certainly out of the question. That thousands of people have called her every sort of foul name certainly can't help. That she has become a stand in for very real and foar more entrenched structural racism is so sad; as at least one person Tweeted last night, "You know what's racist? The education system in Mississippi." We have real, serious structurally racist matters in this country; the insensitivity of one mid-level corporate executive is, in the scheme of things, meaningless.<br />
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The outpouring of rage directed at her, however, is meaningful, if only in a disturbing way, for what it tells us about who we are.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-40125246670600499702013-12-20T06:47:00.000-06:002013-12-20T06:47:27.894-06:00The Robertson Follies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
After writing yesterday that I wasn't going to write that much, and that I couldn't care less about the whole Phil Robertson/Duck Dynasty flapdoodle, here I am writing about it. I'm doing so because this nonsense has exploded far beyond any significance or importance, let alone relationship to anything that actually happened.<br />
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First, Phil Robertson had none of his rights violated. He's an employee of a cable channel. As such, he is under contract to do and not do certain things. When that contract is violated, the channel can act. Robertson isn't going to prison. He isn't being stripped of his citizenship. He hasn't been beaten, harassed, or been intimidated by police. He certainly hasn't lost his livelihood; as the founder of the business at the heart of the program, he will continue to draw a hefty paycheck and live quite well. He has been removed for an unspecified amount of time from a television program.<br />
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He was so removed because he said some pretty hateful things about gay folk, as well as some pretty ignorant things about the state of African-American life under Jim Crow. Of course, in the midst of it all, he insisted it had something to do with his being a Christian, so all sorts of Christians are rushing to his defense, claiming persecution. If Robertson had been fired after saying, "You know, as a Christian, I just don't think it's right that I'm getting paid <i>$X</i> while the folks behind the cameras barely make a living wage," I would probably nod my head in approval, at the very least. What he did say was that people who are gay, because they are gay, are separate from God because of their sexuality. Since, in traditional bland Christian orthodoxy "sin" is neither an act nor an essential part of the human condition, but a description of the broken relationship that exists between all creation and God, whatever else Robertson was saying, he wasn't talking about the Christian faith. So, no, thank you, I won't defend his words as "Christian" because, simply put - they're wrong.<br />
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<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/12/19/3089521/duck-dynasty-controversy-perfect-media-scandal-2013/">This piece</a> by Alyssa Rosenberg at <i>Think Progress</i> captures just how fake the entire "controversy" is. More than the ugliness of Phil Robertson's words, or that he claimed such ugliness as Christian, it is this that irritates me no end. As Rosenberg says, A&E had to know who the Robertsons were and what beliefs they held. That their image is manufactured, from their look to how they interact on the show, all of it is designed to sell a product: a wholesome, down-home American family from the heartland unchanged by wealth and business success. Except, of course, that premise, being manufactured, is no more real than if Phil Robertson were an actor who played a fictional character with a different name and backstory. That hundreds of thousands of Americans have been sucked in to the story, mistaking the image for the reality is a sad state of affairs. It does not, however, give Robertson a pass when he says hateful, hurtful things under the umbrella of "Christian". This is as manufactured as the rest, a bit of theater that is playing out precisely as scripted, including the support of viewers around the country. All of it guarantees more money for A&E, for <i>Duck Dynasty</i>, and for the business the Robertsons own.<br />
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I do not nor will I watch the show. I couldn't care less about the whole kerfuffle, except it, like Megyn Kelly's nonsensical white Santa/Jesus comments, reveals not so much a deep divide in America, as the lingering American Id, that part of our national psyche that lashes out at the Other - by turns gay folk, African-Americans, corporate executives, non-Christians in this particular case - without forethought or care for consequences. If A&E lets Robertson back on the program, well, OK. If for some reason counter to good economic sense they cancel it, well, OK. In either case, the whole unfolding story is not about Phil Robertson or Christianity or censorship or rights. It's about us, Americans, and our inability at times to tell reality from fantasy.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-17503858888880967522013-12-19T05:43:00.000-06:002013-12-19T05:43:01.402-06:00What Really Matters<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Since the beginning of September, I've written 12 posts. I used to write almost twice that in a week. What's been going on?<br />
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First of all, life. Since our move, our lives have become busier and more complicated. You reassess priorities, and stuff that was important suddenly becomes less so. Not that I don't enjoy writing and blogging; quite the opposite. I miss it. I also have other things that need doing, and so I continue to miss it so other things can get done.<br />
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With this priority shuffling comes the chance for reflection. This autumn I also returned to Twitter, although in a more perfunctory way. I rarely "Tweet" anything of my own, retweeting things others have shared, or leaving an appreciative comment. While celebrity tweeting seems to be the big thing, the folks I follow most closely on Twitter comment on issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class, yet somehow manage to get the point across in 140 characters. Some of them are quite amusing. Unlike blogging or other forms of longer-form writing, there is an art to the good tweet, and I would rather share those that have mastered it than demonstrate my own incompetence at this particular form.<br />
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Yet, there is more to it than that. Reflecting on my Twitter reticence and decrease in blogging, I have come to the conclusion that I, personally, am just no longer interested in what I have to say. The explosion of the internet over the past decade, the democratization of communication and commentary thanks to social media, and the ever-higher wall elite commentary builds around itself all lend themselves to the odd phenomenon that, despite having the world quite literally at our eyeballs at the touch of a few buttons, there are fewer things of importance about which to write, and far too many people writing about them. The noise-level in our public discourse is deafening, not least because at least some among my fellow Americans believe that volume equals both competence and a public following. Personally, I prefer the simple declarative mode; if you like it, come on along, but if not, that's OK, too. Far too many think it is necessary to TYPE LIKE THEY ARE SHOUTING IN ORDER TO MAKE SURE NO ONE CAN HEAR ANYTHING ELSE AND ALSO FOOL SOME FOLKS IN TO THINKING THEY HAVE ARE PART OF SOME LARGER SOCIAL OR POLITICAL FORCE. Despite everything, the all-caps brigade continue unabated.<br />
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I've never wanted to be yet another voice shouting in the wilderness. Now, the wilderness is far too crowded, and there are fewer things about which to write. Take the past week, for instance: there's the report from the President's commission on the NSA; there's the surprise release of a new, pro-feminist album from Beyonce; one of the cast of <i>Duck Dynasty</i> was suspended after making some pretty awful anti-gay remarks; for some reason, Megyn Kelly of FOXNews insisted that a fictional character and Galilean Jew who lived 2,000 years ago are both white. There's the nonsense over the healthcare.gov website. Every time Ted Cruz opens his mouth, news outlets race to put it in print and on the internet.<br />
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In the middle of all this, Pres. Obama gives a speech in which he says that rising inequality is the greatest challenge of our time. The top 10% of income-earners in this country manage to rake in 42% of total incomes. This has happened even as homelessness has risen; those depending upon food banks and other private support has exploded; there are 46 million Americans on Food Stamps, most of whom work either part time of full time. For a socialist, Barack Obama is a pretty good oligarchical capitalist. The real danger to our Republic isn't some fake businessman who wears a beard and spouts bigotry to make a buck from conservatives all too willing to fling money at people who say crap like he does. Whether or not Beyonce is a "real" feminist isn't really all that important in the long run (although I'll grant the point that even raising the question masks persistent racism among some white feminists). Beyond revealing her own racial blinkers, Megyn Kelly's nonsense is meaningless because, well . . . Santa doesn't exist and Jesus couldn't have been "white" in any way that makes sense.<br />
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None of this solves the problems of increasingly bad working conditions for too many Americans; corporations supporting their employment practices with public assistance in order to keep wages depressed and increase profits; a concentration of wealth in the United States that hasn't been seen since just before the Great Depression. These are all things that are the result of deliberate policy choices of our government. They are all things that can change, and should be changed in order for our country to remain politically stable as well as socially stable and economically vibrant. They are things that are not going to change because interested parties have far too much invested in the status quo, despite its increasing untenability, to support even modest change.<br />
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People are far more interested in acting the church lady over Miley Cyrus or whining because a guy who pretends to look like a redneck says a redneck thing and then gets pulled from his fake show because he violated the terms of his contract than they are, say, in the fact that over a million Americans are going to lose their unemployment benefits next week. Combined with a feeling that I just am not all that interested in what I have to say; my own preference for the work of others; and a very busy, different life than I've experienced before, my own blogging is going to continue to be sparse, at best. There are things that matter, and concentrating on the those things has made the whole project of public commentary questionable.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-47505001062175081062013-12-07T08:55:00.000-06:002013-12-07T08:55:00.220-06:00Extremes: A Review of The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century By Alex Ross<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The end of T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" has always struck me as the definition of storytelling. When the end comes round, we should be at the beginning, seeing it for the first time. So it is with Ross's narrative history of 20th century classical* music, <i>The Rest is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century</i>. The narrative begins with the 1906 Graz** premier of Richard Strauss's opera <i>Salome</i> and ends with a description of John Adams's opera <i>Nixon to China, </i>which had its premiere in 1987. Despite the years and events between them, there are remarkable similarities. Strauss's opera was based upon the German translation of Wilde's play of the same name. In a departure from operatic tradition, he used the text of the translation as his libretto. The first sound from the orchestra, a clarinet playing a modulating scale, employs a trick that would become a mark of the 20th century: Strauss begins the scale in C# then modulates to G, using the tritone/augmented fourth/flatted fifth. This particular interval is so unsettling, medieval commentators called it <i>diabolos in musica</i>. Mid-century American bebop musicians used it a lot, as do heavy metal musicians. Strauss's use of this particular dissonance was hardly its first use; it was, however, startling to begin this way.<div>
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Adams, a child of the 60's and imbiber both of the chemicals and the music of the era, absorbed everything around his ears and put it in his opera. Like Strauss, he used transcripts from Nixon's trip to China as his libretto. Like Strauss, his music was shocking in its originality. Like Strauss, there is an element of playfulness in the midst of a very serious piece of music.</div>
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What makes these two events distinct, beyond the passage of decades and change of place, is the broader cultural milieu. When Strauss's opera premiered, every significant musical figure in Europe attended. Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg were there. Schoenberg brought along his brother-in-law, Alexander Zemlinsky, among whose pupils were Alben Berg, who would take Schoenberg's music three or steps further down the line. Adams' opera premiered and, other than a small audience and a few notices in the newspapers . . . silence. Ross tells the tale that when Mahler would stroll around the plaza near the Vienna opera, passersby would point and whisper, <i>"Der Mahler".</i> Ross also notes that no one in the late 20th century would do the same for John Adams, despite having similar reasons for doing so.</div>
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In between these two events unfolds the events of the 20th century, both well-known and oft-told, with the composers and their music the thread that moves us from Strauss and Mahler in Graz to Adams in Houston. Ross draws the lines linking the European composers of the first half of the century to the non-European composers of the latter half of the century. His descriptions of the music never fall in to cliche or routine. Unlike Gary Giddins, he does not reach for superlatives for each and every piece of music he wishes to describe. Ross tells us about the music, then invites the reader to decide how best to hear it.</div>
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The last century was one of extremes. Extremes in violence and death; extremes in its fertile hopes at its beginning and bitterness at squandered chances at its end. The music of that century flowed with the times, reflecting it even, perhaps especially, when its creators insisted it was a critical response against those extremes. Those extremes have names and faces and even pieces of music: Schoenberg and Berg and Shostakovich and Copland and Stockhausen and Cage; atonal and 12-tone and serial and <i>music concrete</i>. It's all here, from the pseudo-pastoralism of Copland (a gay Brooklyn-born Jew was writing more what he thought about Middle America than writing Middle America) to the noise of Edgar Varese to the utter silence of John Cage's <i>4'33". </i>Two composers, Jean Sibelius and Benjamin Britten, receive chapters of their own, not so much because of their importance (although they are important, each in his own way, to the music of the 20th century) but for how they highlight so many of the issues surrounding 20th century classical music. There are three chapters on music during what William Shirer called <i>The Nightmare Years: </i>music in Stalin's Soviet Union (including the equivocal career of Dmitri Shostakovich); music in Roosevelt's America; and the <i>Danse Macabre</i> in Hitler's Wagnerian <i>Reich</i>.</div>
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This is one of the best books on music I've read in a very long time. It is one of the best histories of the 20th century I've ever read. It illuminates the beauty of some of the strangest, most puzzling, confounding sounds we human have every created, against the backdrop of that bloody carnival of years.</div>
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<i>*I am using "classical" here the way Ross uses the word. Personally, I have preferred the word "orchestral" to describe this particular style of music. "Classical" music is descriptive of a particular era of music-writing; you can love or hate the symphonic composers of the last century, but they didn't write "classical" music. Still, I'm using Ross's terms more for the sake of consistency.</i></div>
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<i>**Rumors of the scandalous nature of the opera forced the relocation of the premiere from Vienna to the provincial city of Graz. I</i><i>n a conversation with Strauss in the 1930's </i><i>Hitler claimed to have attended the premiere. This may or may not be the case, but discovered in the burned-out ruins of Hitler's bunker were plans for rebuilding the opera house in Graz where </i>Salome<i> premiered.</i></div>
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Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-23912757753123669702013-12-07T06:58:00.000-06:002013-12-07T06:58:24.066-06:00A New Internet Tradition Is Born<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/12/on-snark-and-smarm">This post</a> at LGM concerns <a href="http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977">this post</a> at Gawker (I know, I know; Gawker?). <a href="http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/12/on-snark-and-smarm/comment-page-1#comment-801470">One comment</a> includes a link to <a href="http://tigerbeatdown.com/2010/04/09/why-tiger-beatdown-has-jokes-on-it-turns-out-some-motherfucker-had-to-ask-me/">this three-year-old post</a> in which<a href="http://lhote.blogspot.com/"> this guy</a> gets taken outside for a whuppin'.<br />
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I swear if I didn't know who Feodor really was, I would have thought I'd found him.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-15631672752716743572013-11-26T09:20:00.000-06:002013-11-26T09:20:02.227-06:00Hip Gnostics: Visions of Jazz:The First Century by Gary Giddins<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/B8lCn16PHEI?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
This video, in many ways, encapsulates all that people who love jazz love about the music and people who cannot abide it give as evidence for their lack of . . . is abidance a word? Apparently, because it isn't underlined! Anyway, this clip from 1977 features the Oscar Peterson Trio (with the great Billy Cobham on drums and tenor saxophonist Eddy "Lockjaw" Davis) giving space for two very different masters of bebop trumpet playing, Clark Terry (who got his start playing for Count Basie) and Dizzy Gillespie (who spent two years pissing off Cab Calloway before Calloway fired him). The tempo is brutal. The soloists seem - notice I wrote "seem" - not to care all that much about things like melody; when they're trading first eights then fours, while they're listening to one another, they seem not so much call and response as finishing one another's sentences, yet not in ways the casual listener might expect. Then, of course, there's the whole issue of the "Great Man" theory of jazz, a theory that seems more potent in a music one of whose tenets is, "Make It New". You can't make it new if you aren't putting your own unique stamp on it; there are few musics as demanding of individual effort as jazz, precisely because the price of failure is so high.<br />
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No one knows the rules of jazz like Gary Giddins. No critic has written so voluminously about jazz. No critic since Nat Hentoff in the post-bop 1950's has been as big a booster of our national art form, working diligently to put before the public this style he loves, believing despite evidence to the contrary that we as a people will fall in love with it with the same fervor if we would only give ourselves to it the way he has. The long-time jazz critic for <i>The Village Voice</i>, <i>Visions of Jazz:The First Hundred Years, </i>publish by Oxford University Press in 1998, is Giddins <i>magnum opus</i>, the attempt not so much to tell <i>the</i> story of jazz but to give, as the title suggests, his "vision" of jazz, defending his positions with the accumulated knowledge of decades combined with a musical acumen one finds in abundance among jazz critics.<br />
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The story of jazz, like all music, is complicated, rooted in social, political, economic, and our peculiarly American racial matters. Born in clubs in the most dangerous part of America's most multicultural city, New Orleans, most chroniclers, Giddins included, date the music to a single performer, the trumpeter Buddy Bolden. In many ways, Bolden's story - one of legendary prowess on an instrument; of uniqueness of style; of the excesses of a life spent too long in quarters harboring vice - is the story we know not just from the long history of jazz, but popular music in general. It has been repeated <i>ad nauseum</i>, become a cliche so scripted we have our current crop of public figures - Lindsay Lohan being the best example - ready to play their designated roles if only they would allow themselves.<br />
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Giddins is both wise and thoughtful, along with knowledgeable of this particular music's provenance. He doesn't start with Bolden. In fact, he starts with the longest-lived form of popular entertainment, one wiped from our collective consciousness precisely because of its association with our racist national id. I am speaking, of course, of minstrelsy. The very first essay - and this book is little more than the collection of 79 essays - pairs two seemingly unlikely gentlemen: Bert Williams and Al Jolson. Bert Williams was one of the first popular African-American recording artists, putting songs on record while the First World War was breaking out in Europe. He was also one of the last great and popular minstrel performers. What makes this latter so troubling for so many, however, was the fact that Williams was black. He just wasn't black <i>enough</i>, forced in all his public appearances to darken his skin with burned cork, a humiliation he accepted with increasing rage over the years.<br />
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Jolson became famous both as "The Jazz Singer", which he never was, and as part of the last gasp of minstresly, which he never was. The first performer to sing in what had been a silent medium, Jolson did so in black face, becoming at once the focus of much attention and the icon of a half-century of American popular performance. The thing is, Jolson's appropriation both of the skin color and the music of his more talented and original partner in this essay adds yet another layer to the story of jazz - the uneasy, sometimes hostile, always freighted with America's sad history, dance between black and white performers. Like the best musicians in jazz, Giddins doesn't so much come out and pound the theme in to our heads as he does show us, giving to the listener the work of figuring out what's going on based upon the evidence.<br />
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Giddins's book won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, the Bell Atlantic Jazz Award for Book of the Year, and it was a <i>New York Times</i> Notable Book of the Year (1998). One can be forgiven, then, if as a reader you come to it expecting greatness. Like a jazz fan listening to a new piece of music from a favorite performer, a reader who scans the following among the blurbs on the back jacket, would be excused for believing Giddins has written something masterful: "A remarkably nonideological critic, Giddins has long demonstrated a passion for jazz in all its guises. . . . His writing, like the music he loves, is joyously polyphonic, with history, legend, musicology, biography, and performance all rising out of the mix." This was from an uncredited review in <i>The New Yorker</i>. My problem with this description, however, is it gets pretty much everything wrong.<br />
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Giddins is profoundly ideological, if by ideological one means taking sides in the many debates and discussions that surround jazz. On the other hand, if by "ideological", one means "racial" - taking sides in the debate that has been around since the music was first recorded and disseminated to the broad public that jazz is primarily an African-American art form, one few whites can penetrate well - then being "nonideological" is not necessarily a good thing. This is not an inconsequential matter, and discussions, debates, arguments, even the occasional knife-fight that break out over it are rooted precisely in that very first essay described above: white folk stealing and making their own this beautiful, sad, joyous, raucous art form is yet another indignity African-Americans have had to bear. One can acknowledge that there have been white jazz musicians of uncanny beauty and power; one must always, however, note these are like Samuel Johnson's walking dogs and preaching women. It is one thing to "play around" the melody of race, as Giddins does several times although not as beautifully as in the first essay; it is another thing, however, not to state that melody clearly.<br />
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Another thing that made this book a far more difficult read than it might otherwise have been is Giddins style. If one spends one's life as a critic, being limited by editorial insistence to 800-1,000 words, it might demonstrate one's acquiescence to this habit that creating a longer work benefits from writing a series of critical-style essays. Yet, at times Giddins attempt to write either cogently or clearly about his subject matter fails so utterly, one wonders if he will find it again. The best example comes from what seems to me to be a too-long attempt to give Coleman Hawkins's 1940 recording of "Body and Soul" its due. Giddins sets the scene like any master story-teller would, noting that, like so many great moments, it was born of the humdrum of a musician's life, i.e., yet another recording date, and one song among several scheduled for that day's studio time. The following is from p. 127, one of four or five paragraphs in which Giddins attempts to talk about what can only be heard listening to the song, after having acknowledged both the originality of Hawkins's accomplishment and the fact that, despite its popularity (the record sold quite well), it changed little to nothing in jazz.<br />
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If Hawkins's "Body and Soul" isn't the single most acclaimed improvisation in jazz's first hundred years, it is unquestionably a leading contender. Nothing was changed by it. Hawkins's station had long since been established, and Lester Young's time was at hand no matter what. At least one critic professed not to understand the hoopla - Hawkins played like that all the time, he made fifty records as good, didn't he? Not quite. What elevated "Body and Soul" was its purity, its perfection; here, in one spellbinding improvisation, was the apogee of everything Hawkins achieved thus far, an uncompromising example of his gift, a work of art. In his own way, he demonstrated what Lester Young was also in the process of demonstrating: a scheme to penetrate the presumed boundaries of conventional harmony. And he did it with his patented arpeggios, compensating for the absence of identifiable melody with his drive, warmth, and coherence. The public approbation was significant, if puzzling. The record was a sophisticated abstraction of a popular song, yet Hawkins's variations were embrace to the degree that he had to memorize them to satisfy clubgoers, who insisted he play the famous solo, not a fresh improvisation.</blockquote>
Here we have everything that makes this work so difficult to work through, distilled to one paragraph. How can arpeggios be "patented"? In what way is "Body and Soul" "pure" or "perfect", beyond a description of the recording - an abstract meditation on a popular song? If nothing was changed by it, is it well known just because of its beauty, its simplicity, its "perfection"? If nothing was changed by it, why does it stand out so much? None of the questions raised by this particular paragraph receive any answers in Giddins's text. And this is just one of a couple dozen examples where Giddins's prose fails not so much himself as the reader.<br />
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Which leads me to the title of this post: One of the things about jazz, at least in its past half-century or so, is the cliqueishness that seems to surround the music. Its most ardent publicists and fans insist at one and the same time its accessibility and its complexity; its familiarity (if one is "American" enough) and its strangeness. Giddins is no less given to betraying this particular vice (if it is one), in particular demonstrating a willingness to toss out terms from musicology that, it appears, he assumes his readers will understand. This tendency becomes blatant in two esssays, the one on Charlie Parker and the one on Dizzy Gillespie. Giddins includes transcriptions of music from each man, and attempts to use them to demonstrate . . . what, precisely? Musical scores should illuminate, giving the reader a sense of what the performer is playing, even if the casual reader can't read a note of music. One problem, however, is that notating a jazz solo illuminates nothing. One in particular is more confusing the more one looks at it, or listens to the solo so notated while trying to follow along: Parker's solo from "Koko", one of the gauntlets bebop threw down before more traditional jazz in the year or two after the Second World War. The notation lacks both the underlying chords Parker was soloing over as well as an explanation of the rhythmic subtlety that made Parker singular in his approach to the music. Giddins does little to dispel the sense that, to "get" jazz, one needs access both to a vocabulary and a personal style that elevates one above the normal run of music listeners. The picture of a bunch of white hipsters, berets at jaunty angles, sitting in a smoky club snapping their fingers carries throughout the book.<br />
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Yet, these frustrations hide many virtues, not the least of which is Giddins's utter lack of sentimentality. Scanning the late decades of his story, Giddins finds much to recommend to the reader. While dismissing fusion as an attempt at broad popularity this particular style failed to achieve, he nevertheless grants to some musicians who included electric instruments in their ensembles pride of place as he places before the unknowing reader performers as diverse as Henry Threadgill, Gary Bartz, Dave Murray, and the great Cecil Taylor, whose virtues require attentiveness to appreciate. While far too many writers and fans yearn for the "Great Men" who have passed and whose like we won't see again, Giddins is insistent that jazz still lives, thriving in a variety of musicians who continue the music's individualistic ethic while navigating the waters between a stale traditionalism and the outer reaches of the avant garde that left too many listeners wondering if such things as harmony or rhythm would remain.<br />
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Despite its faults, I would recommend Giddins's book, with some provisos. Listen to jazz first. Familiarize yourself with the standards, the men and women who shaped the music in the past, their idiosyncrasies and personal touches that make it easy to tell the difference among so many performers using the same instruments. To get used to Giddins's style, get a hold of <i>Weatherbird</i>, a collection of Giddins's review essays from the late 1980's, 1990's, and early 2000's (also published by Oxford University Press). Finally, open yourself to the possibilities that exist within and through the music - the possibility not just of freedom and joy, pain and tears; but the possibility that you, dear reader, might become one among the initiates, a hip gnostic who understands that, in the words of British drummer Bill Bruford, "America is jazz and jazz is America."</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-83201421275819123622013-11-24T08:48:00.004-06:002013-11-24T08:48:54.090-06:00I Went To Healthcare.Gov And All I Got Was Health Insurance<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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If you can't beat 'em, you might as well join 'em? Anyway - I know they won't, but the nuts can shut up now.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-49548458659625108092013-11-19T08:38:00.003-06:002013-11-19T08:38:58.231-06:00The Never-Ending Story<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A FB acquaintance of mine, recently installed as pastor of a UCC congregation in Oklahoma, posted the following as his status for this morning:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 17px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let the never-ending exegesis of Psalm 52 continue!</span></span></blockquote>
It got me thinking about the whole matter of reading Scripture, figuring out what it means, discovering new layers and depths in familiar passages, learning new things about the original context that might just shade our understanding in a slightly - or perhaps more than slightly! - different way than previously.<br />
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More than anything else, this is why I find the project of reading the Bible each day so wonderful. Not only do I find passages I hadn't encountered before, at least specifically; I also encounter old passages, reading them in the light of changed life-circumstances, or a changed understanding of the background or setting or perhaps even authorial intention, should one delve in to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mimetic-Criticism-Gospel-Mark-Introduction/dp/1620322897">academic studies and monographs</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.390625px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What if the story of Jesus was meant not just to be told but retold, molded, and shaped into something new, something present by the Evangelist to face each new crisis? The Evangelists were not recording a historical report, but writing to effect a change in their community. Mark was faced with the imminent destruction of his tiny community--a community leaderless without Paul and Peter and who witnessed the destruction of the Temple; now, another messianic figure was claiming the worship rightly due to Jesus. The author of the Gospel of Mark takes his stylus in hand and begins to rewrite the story of Jesus--to unwrite the present, rewrite the past, to change the future.</span></span></blockquote>
There is not just joy in such discoveries. There is the deepening of faith, the assurance of that peace that passes understanding when we come to understand how little we understood even when we confidently insisted we did understand.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.390625px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></blockquote>
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Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-39058873766631322212013-11-16T08:22:00.001-06:002013-11-16T08:22:54.320-06:00Come Out Swinging<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I know, I know. Been away for a while. My life suddenly became incredibly busy, and blogging disappeared from the priorities of my life. Things have settled down a little bit, though, and I thought I'd post something about our current nonsense. If nothing else, this gives me a chance to vent.<br />
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The whole point of the PPACA was not "healthcare reform". Rather, it was "insurance regulation", a related but different creature. The main problem with our healthcare delivery system has been the high bar for access due to high cost. Insurance ceased to be something people had from employment, a benefit employers gave to workers, and by extension their families, as an inducement to work for them. Even companies that offer "health insurance coverage" do not offer it as a benefit they cover; they offer it as a private market, putting up plans from which employees can choose, but for which employees, rather than the employer, have to pay. Insurers cover fewer and fewer things. They refuse payment for treatments. They drop individuals either because of some suddenly-discovered pre-existing condition or because there was a cap on payments that had been reached. Plans change in midyear, sometimes with little notice from those who are on the plans, leaving them stuck. Add to that the 48 million Americans who simply had no insurance and the crisis becomes acute.<br />
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The PPACA addressed these issues in a pretty straightforward manner. They eliminated annual or lifetime caps on insurance payments. They eliminated the restrictions on coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions. And it created a marketplace for insurers to compete for individuals and corporate business for their products. It also provided the opportunity for individuals to receive assistance in paying for coverage with subsidies they could receive to help cover the cost of purchasing health insurance on the individual market. Finally, they offered states the opportunity to raise the Medicaid eligibility income level, bringing millions more in to that pool.<br />
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Most states have not created their own healthcare exchanges. Most states have not raised the Medicaid eligibility income level. These two things, combined with simple ignorance about what the PPACA actually does has brought us to the point where everyone is screeching and hollering about a lying President and a failed law. The "lie" was that people could keep their insurance if they wanted to; the truth is, they could keep it if the insurance company brought it up to meet the minimum standards of the law. The insurance companies refused to do that, then turned around and canceled millions of policies that were, by and large, little more than catastrophic plans with high deductibles, low caps, and tiny to non-existent co-pays. The attraction of these plans was their low premiums. The premiums were low because they didn't cover very much, or pay very much for the things they actually covered.<br />
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The President didn't lie. The insurance companies simply refused to make the plans satisfy the requirements of the law. For some reason, rather than being angry at the insurance companies for screwing them, the people receiving cancellation notices are angry at the President for telling them something that was true enough - they could keep their plans if they liked them - because he underestimated both how bad these plans really were and the recalcitrance of the insurers in updating the plans in question. You want to be angry about your cancellation notice? Be angry at the insurance companies.<br />
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Everything that's been in the news concerning the PPACA over the past few weeks has been frustrating as hell to read for one simple reason: most of the reporting, and almost all the mainstream commentary, has been abysmal. No one seems to understand what insurance is or how it works. No one seems to have looked at the law, or if they did they failed to understand how it works. For example, I saw a young woman complaining that her insurance plan covers OB/GYN services even though she is not planning to have any more children. Why should she have to pay for that coverage? For the same reason she has to pay for prostate exams, colonoscopies even though she's under forty, hospitalization even though she will probably not spend a night in the hospital, and hundreds of other things. Insurance is about pooling risk. When she was pregnant and had her babies, her insurance company paid its share of those costs not through the money she paid in, but in part through money paid in by thousands of others on the same plan, most of whom would not be taking advantage of the OB/GYN services. The larger the risk pool, the lower the cost for individuals <i>and the companies</i>. PPACA works by increasing the insurance risk pool, creating incentives through public subsidies for people to purchase plans they might not be able to afford on their own, thus reducing costs both for them and for the insurance companies.<br />
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It's really that simple.<br />
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As for the foofraw over the website, all I can say is if you really think this is some horrible thing demonstrating either the incompetence of the Administration or the inefficiency of government in general, all I can say is: Really? You can't pick up a phone and call a toll-free number? You can't sit down and figure out if you're eligible for a subsidy that will cover some or even most of the cost of a plan that offers far more comprehensive coverage than the plan you currently have? If you think the numbers of people signed up or signing up are too low, consider the deadline for signing up is the end of March (extended beyond the normal December 15 cut-off date because this was the beginning of the law's operation). People have time. Husbands and wives are doing the math, comparing plans and rates, thinking about that nagging back ache or persistent cough or pain that might signal something that needs more than a quick fix. The numbers might be lower than if the website were functioning properly, but hardly demonstrating some catastrophic failure in the law.<br />
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I'm no fan of the law. Personally, I would have preferred a system like they have in most of the rest of the world, where healthcare is just something the state takes care of because it's something people need. You can go to your doctor for a check-up, or the emergency room in a crisis, and not worry about finding your insurance card. That being said, the law is what we have and it's functioning precisely the way it was designed to function. Considering all the complaints, I have to smile thinking of all the complaints people had about insurance companies screwing them over, refusing to cover treatments, changing plans with little notice, dropping coverage all together, or jacking up rates and reducing coverage and co-pays without any recourse at all.<br />
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Being as the word "church" is in this blog's title, I got to thinking of the children of Israel, stuck on the shores of the Red Sea, the Pharaoh's army pressing down on them, bitching about Moses leading them to freedom when they were so much better off in slavery. To all those folks who want the law repealed, I say: Fine. Let's repeal the law. Let's kick millions of people off insurance plans, thus functionally denying them access to medical care because they have a chronic condition. Let's put back those annual or lifetime caps on payouts so people in need of long-term care suddenly find themselves facing personal financial ruin because the insurance company refuses to pay any more yet on-going treatment is needed. And let's not forget the 48 million Americans who won't have insurance coverage, yet whose treatment we pay for in higher fees and costs from medical providers. Let's go back to the way it was before 2010, when we all bitched and moaned because the system was clearly working only to line the pockets of the insurance companies, instead of providing access to healthcare of individuals and families. Let's repeal PPACA and then hear the howls because the insurance companies, no longer required to do all sorts of things, stop doing them.<br />
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In other words - grow up, America, and deal with it.<br />
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Lordy, but I feel better!</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-58381673906049972132013-10-15T11:05:00.000-05:002013-10-15T11:05:52.424-05:00A Thing That Bugs Me<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
With all that's going on the world, you'd think my occasional post would consist of commentary on something of importance. And it does. Just not what most would think is important.<br />
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I know the answer to the question, but I'm going to ask it anyway: Why the hell do people on the internet not only scorn music they don't like, but impugn the character of people who like music they don't?<br />
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Any YouTube user knows how it can happen. <a href="http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/10/ted-cruz-a-greater-embarassment-to-alberta-than-nickelback">This post</a> at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has over 240 comments because it devolves in to a long pissing contest over "Who's The Worst Band EVAH!!!!" and I threw up in my mouth a little. It's assumed that bands like The Eagles, Journey, and Styx will get mentioned (my favorite review of any rock album was of Styx <i>Paradise Theater</i>, in which the reviewer said it was a parking lot of whale vomit). Other, newer bands - Limp Bizkit, Radiohead, Coldplay - get honorable mention. Pearl Jam came up a few times. Finally, of course, straight from the headline, is Alberta's own Nickelback, a favorite punching bag.<br />
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It would be far better if people just let other folks listen to whatever they wanted and shut the hell up. Seriously. It doesn't matter to me one bit that other people not only like different music than I do but might not like what I listen to. Who? Cares?<br />
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You think the Eagles performed a few songs that are pretty good? OK. You would invent a time machine to prevent the parents of members of Roxy Music meeting so none of them would be born? A bit extreme, but OK. Don't listen to them.<br />
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If you don't like something, there's an easy enough solution: Don't listen to it. Go listen to what you like. Don't waste precious hours tearing apart the personalities and morals of others whose tastes differ. You might miss out on something you like, spending all that time on the Internet telling the world how awful Nirvana really was.<br />
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I know that Internet trolls are the same whether it's politics or social issues or music. "Pay attention to MMMMEEEEE!!" lies at the heart of it, along with a good dose of, "How cool am I? Oh, and I know the difference between the Phrygian and Ionian modes therefore EXPERT!" The Internet is a great boon to people with serious status anxiety issues, but really people: get a therapist.<br />
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Again, hardly the worst thing going on in the world, but all the same - if you find yourself wanting to engage in an epic struggle over whether Grand Funk Railroad was the worst band ever, take a deep breath and realize it just doesn't matter.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-16768425120498097282013-10-03T18:22:00.000-05:002013-10-03T18:22:42.505-05:00No End Game<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
So we're in Day 3 of shutdown mode and I wonder about a few things.<br />
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I wonder if any of the Republicans in the House, and Cruz and Lee and Paul in the Senate, had an end-game in mind. That is, allowing members a couple days of spittle-flecked rage at one another, do they have a plan to get from where we are to a functioning federal government again? From the looks of things, I kind of doubt it. In fact, from the looks of things, they aren't bright enough to have had a game, let alone an end-game. There is no way any of this ends well for the Republican Party. If you play a high-stakes game like this without some inkling of what the conclusion will be, then you're screwed. That no one seemed to believe a plan for an end-game was necessary tells me just how ridiculous these folks are. They had to know the country didn't really want this, and would blame them, and would continue to blame them more as time goes on. Believing their own rhetoric about the unpopularity of the ACA, that it doesn't work, blah-blah-blah, they refused to consider reality in their plans.<br />
<br />The result is the clusterfuck before us.<br />
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I wonder why people keep talking about John Boehner as if he is either (a) cowering before an alleged rump of his own party; or (b) secretly wishing for a light that illumines his way out of the tunnel in which he finds himself. It seems pretty clear to me that the Speaker of the House, like the rest of the far right nincompoops in the House of Representatives, actually believes that the ACA isn't working; that the heroic stand he and the members of his Party are taking will be seen for what it is and praised by the American people soon enough as they clamor for release from affordable health care. In other words, there is no actual evidence that John Boehner is secretly sensible and attuned to reality. Rather, he is as delusional as the allegedly small group who is leading him and his party in the House over the cliff (even if the country doesn't follow, which isn't necessarily the case).<br />
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In the real world, John Boehner is the one person who can end this by doing the one thing he refuses to do. That he refuses to do it is evidence enough that he isn't so much cowed by some small group, but a member of them.<br />
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Finally, I wonder about the repeated reports that there is only a small group of Republicans insisting on a die-hard position regarding tying a Continuing Resolution to repeal of the Affordable Care Act. If this is true, why didn't a majority of Republicans vote with Democrats on Monday against that kind of bill, forcing the Speaker to bring a clean CR to the floor of the House? For years I've been hearing about "moderate" Republicans, reading anonymous quotes in the press complaining about the right-wing of the party. Where the rubber meets the road - in roll-call votes on the floor of the House of Representatives - I see zero evidence there's some huge war going on in the Republican Party. The fact that over the past couple days former IRA fellatist Peter King (R-New York) is held up as a "moderate" tells me that, in fact, there are no moderates left. There is no small group of fire-breathers holding the rest of the Party hostage. This is what the Republicans want to do. This is what the Republicans said they would do.<br />
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Did the Republicans believe the President would cave before allowing a shut-down of the federal government? It's certainly possible they believed that. That they didn't plan for the contingency with which we're now faced shows, as I said above, we are in the hands of morons. They cannot save face. They cannot escape responsibility. Regardless of what they and their allies think or believe - this is disastrous for the country; this is disastrous for millions of Americans who are and will continue to suffer very real harm because of this; and this is disastrous for their Party, much worse than the 1995 shutdown.<br />
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So we coast or float or drift with no end in sight because there was never an end planned.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-46081841576643219982013-09-16T12:38:00.000-05:002013-09-16T12:38:08.689-05:00Autumnal Equipoise<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
While the calendar may have the next season beginning later in the week, yesterday and today up here on the prairie are giving us a taste of things to come. It's been cool, even crisp. Yesterday was damp, but today is sunny, the sky the kind of blue you see in early fall and mid-spring. One of the hummingbird moths that frequent our flowering hostas got in our garage yesterday. By late afternoon, it had moved from the ceiling to the back door. I gently removed it from the door and set it on one of the plants outside. It sat for a few minutes, then took off, feeding at our hostas again.<br />
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There is something marvelous about autumn. Last week we had a blast of hot, humid air, reminding us that summer wasn't quite over. Now, though, it feels like things are settling in as they should this time of year. The languor of summer is passing, the busyness of fall has begun and now, at last, the weather is making such busyness feel a bit less like a burden. Daylight hours shorten, the year's twilight reminding us the cool sleep of winter is coming soon.<br />
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As I write this post about the peacefulness of the onrushing seasonal change, the situation at the Washington Navy Yard is still unfolding. Ten people shot, with reports of 2 to 4 people dead. How many have died in Syria's intramural slaughter while the world dithers over one type of weapon, leaving tens of thousands of other deaths of seeming less importance, beneath the world's need to act? How many children have died of curable diseases because nation-states and multinational pharmaceutical companies refuse to provide cheap preventive medications to poor populations around the world? How many people have died from gun violence over the past 24 hours right here in the United States?<br />
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The reality of death and violence makes me uncomfortable with my own sense of peace and ease in this time of seasonal change. I cannot ignore the immense privilege that grants me space and time to reflect on this bubble of peacefulness around me. I cannot ignore the reality of pain and suffering around me because it harshes my mellow. An full and honest accounting of autumnal equipoise would include the reality that I cannot rest within this space of quiet rest, but move out in to this world so beloved of God, a world so broken by sin and death there is no safe place for far too many, no peace and quiet for billions of God's children.<br />
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I understand Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration, that desire to build a tent and stay forever in the presence that is so full of beauty and peace. That, however, is not our lot. The world is not yet that Mount. It's our job to drag it there, kicking and screaming if need be. Such is the real equipoise of autumn: The hope and promise that what is reality for me can be for others. It isn't about me giving up anything. It's about others, indeed the whole world, having the opportunity to experience this same space and time.<br />
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That is our calling. That's what we're to be about. The Gospel message is meaningless if we aren't living out God's abundance with the world.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-15601664972059456952013-09-15T08:42:00.002-05:002013-09-15T08:42:37.494-05:00Getting It Done Right<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
With the United States and Russia agreeing on a protocol for Syria to follow for surrendering its chemical weapons arsenal; with the Syrian ambassador to the UN formally agreeing to adhere to the chemical weapons treaty, including allowing UN inspectors to weapon sites; with diplomacy moving forward even in the midst of a brutal civil war; all this, and the question on too many lips is: Was Obama duped, first by his Secretary of State then by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in to accepting a diplomatic solution that appears to weaken the United States?<br />
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It is both unanswerable (at least at this point) and irrelevant whether Kerry's remarks on Monday about a possible diplomatic solution were a "gaffe" that got out of control or part of a much larger strategy that included a threat to use force as a cudgel to beat Syria to the bargaining table. Whether it was or not, the Obama Administration took it and ran with it in ways both smart and timely. The President's much anticipated speech on Tuesday night included a plea for Congress to postpone a vote on the authorization to use military force to let the diplomats get their work done. This comes just a few days after it was thought he was going to lay out a case for military action alone.<br />
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One feature this week was the <i>New York Times</i> op-ed appearing under Vladimir Putin's name that many on the right - and not a few on the left - thought was wonderful for any number of reasons. As someone who has read a few things about international relations in my time, I found the contents neither surprising nor interesting. They were, in fact, the kinds of things a foreign leader would say to the people of another country: trying to flatter the people at the expense of their leader in order to create mistrust and disagreement. The fact remains that Putin said nothing that the Obama Administration wasn't already in the midst of doing. The tongue bath Putin received from American conservatives was odd, unless one considers that he is (a) pretty hard-core in his reactionary positions; (b) playing by a rule book American conservatives understand (brute force plus ruthlessness plus a disdain for social and political and diplomatic niceties; and (c) the kind of leader too many on the right wish America had, i.e., one who is white, authoritarian, and unafraid to keep things simple and direct even if that means trampling the lives of others. American conservatives have loved dictators since the 1920's, when they heaped praise upon Mussolini. Since then, fascists from Franco through the Greek military junta of the 1970's, Pinochet in Chile - well, really, pretty much any Central or South American dictator in the 60's and 70's was the subject of much American praise, official and otherwise - and the Shah of Iran have all been held up by American conservatives as "statesmen". Shoot, Lyndon Johnson said that Ngo Dihn Diem of South Vietnam was the Winston Churchill of southeast Asia!<br />
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There are many things that remain the be done. There are many steps that need to be taken, and with Syria in the midst of a bloody civil war, those steps are made far more difficult. There are many questions that I think are important to ask, including whether chemical weapons are different in kind from conventional weapons, which renders the hundreds dead because of them in Syria of some kind of different importance than the nearly 100,00 who have already been killed while the United States sat on its hands. This last, in particular is an important question, and deserves some discussion. All the same, at the moment international law sees such weapons just that way; the President reminded the American people, and the rest of the world, of that; the diplomats in Washington and New York and Geneva are doing the grunt work while the world watches, a far better way to verify than a UN inspection regime. All this because of the deft way President Obama has spoken and acted over the past couple weeks.<br />
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As far as I'm concerned, this justifies his Nobel Peace Prize. Even with his initial martial bluster, or perhaps because of it, an international outlier long criticized for its refusal to conform to international law on chemical weapons has, in the midst of an ongoing, bloody, and still-inconclusive civil war, agreed to abide by the terms of the chemical weapons convention. These are good things.<br />
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Good job, President Obama. No. Most excellent, Mr. President. Thank you for reminding us that diplomacy can and does work.</div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37177593.post-28628323532999951022013-09-15T08:15:00.001-05:002013-09-15T08:15:20.789-05:00Honest Interest In A Response<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Over at LGM, there's <a href="http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/09/innovations-in-rape-apologia">a post</a> highlighting something written by right-wing blogger Robert Stacy McCain (who defended the lynching of Emmett Till, so we know what kind of . . . "person" . . . he is).<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Date rape is an apparently common campus crime that usually involves two drunk young people, one of whom has an erect penis, and the other of whom is unable to avert what the erect penis typically does.</span></span></span></blockquote>
Now my question is simple: Is this describing rape? Is it describing bad communication between a man and a woman (she calls it rape; he says he was aroused and couldn't help himself?)? Is McCain's claim that erect penises take over the mind and body of men a valid defense?<br />
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I ask these questions for reasons of clarification. I really would like to know whether the two gentlemen who seem to believe there are such things as "sluts" that are identifiable by their dress and/or behavior would take the next step and insist there is more than a grain of truth in this notion that date rape is just two drunk people caught up in the moment, only one of whom seems to have regrets. </div>
Geoffrey Kruse-Saffordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11242660591954094499noreply@blogger.com