Wise Words From A Lost Soul

I will admit it up front. I have not read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I do know that part of Wallace's construction of his brave new world unites the US, Canada, and Mexico into something he calls One North American Nation that is abbreviated ONAN. Anyone who can make a pun like that, and make it look easy, is to be admired.

In his weekly column "Intellectual Affairs", on Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee describes an encounter with some of Wallace's archive at the University of Texas, and a small book that is nothing more than a series of interviews with Wallace as he conducted that horrid grind many writers must endure, the book tour. It seems that Wallace endured this particular interruption of his life with something approaching full consciousness not only of its absurdity, but the way it was actually a part of all he was writing against. The entire piece is a marvelous addition to a growing body of work that attempts to do justice to the contradictory nature of Wallace's life and early death at his own hands.

Unlike, say, Hemingway, whose entire life and work seemed to move, with the gift of hindsight, toward the moment he took the gun and put it in his mouth, Wallace's lifelong battle with depression, his earlier attempts at suicide do not seem presaged in his work. While one could, I suppose, look to passages of personal reflection such as those Scott highlights as a kind of testimonial Wallace is preparing, a statement of his own sense of his place in the great cultural game of which he is a part and toward which he has mixed feelings, I think that is wrong. Or, if not wrong, perhaps being far too reductive.

I was struck - in fact, thunderstruck - by a quote Scott uses to close out his column. For all his intelligence, his genius, Wallace refuses to reserve for himself or any writer a place of honor in our culture.

What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit – to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop ... and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do. But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.

For myself, I can only add a humanist "Amen". The best writers do not assume they have some kind of plenary indulgence, but offer what they have in full knowledge that it has all been said before; all they are doing is taking the picture apart and putting it together in a way that makes sense to them. When they do their job right, readers say, "Yeah, that makes sense." Treating your audience like a bunch of morons who should be kowtowing at the feet of their wisdom and insight is a sure way to have one's books end up in the remaindered shelf.

I for one rarely assume my readers or commenters are dumber than I*. "[T]rying to have a conversation" is as good a description of what's going on here as anything. Even novelists are just doing that, and Wallace understood that.

Reading these words, and knowing that the person who said them, who lived them is no longer with us makes me very sad for our collective loss.

*There are exceptions, of course. Those who have proved, through repeated experience, they really aren't that bright I will indeed call out as such. For the most part, though, I assume that anyone reading this is at least as smart as I am, if not a great deal more so.

NPR II

Here's at least part of what has the right frothing at the mouth over the released Nuclear Posture Review.

[T]he United States is now prepared to strengthen its long-standing "negative security assurance" by declaring that the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are part to the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.

Seriously. This has people on FOXNews and the rest of the right-wing screechosphere declaring that the US is preparing to surrender Cleveland if we are threatened by Venezuela. Or something. Or that, by declaring a "no first use" against non-nuclear states we are somehow signaling we won't ever use nuclear weapons. Or something. To be honest, trying to figure out what they're saying as the spittle flies from their mouths is really difficult. All the document declares is this - if the US finds itself (as it is now) in a conflict with a non-nuclear adversary, we won't use nuclear weapons.

Nothing wrong with that at all.

The reaction from the right, in all honesty, is neither surprising nor even, by a conventional understanding of the word, "news". Since the darkest days of the Cold War, the right has insisted that liberals are soft on military policy, are quite willing to trade our freedoms and sovereignty for not being attacked by nuclear weapons, and that by pledging "no first use" (in this case, only under certain conditions), we are "signaling" to all sorts of potential foes our willingness to see mushroom clouds over Phoenix.

Since none of this is true, and the comments from right-wing critics wholly unrelated to the facts of the matter, rather than sit around and argue with them, it would be far easier to just take the position I am - either deal with the policy as outlined in the NPR or don't be taken seriously.

NPR I - The Link

Before you say a word, read it.

I will delete any comments that discuss things that are either not contained in the Nuclear Posture Review, or that show that the commenter has not read it. Since it is available for anyone to read, read it.

The Loss Of Coherence

This post at The New Inquiry got me thinking about our current condition as people poised on the brink of the cultural rejection of much of our inherited tradition of religious belief. This is not to say that "religion" is going to disappear; rather, I believe that America, like western Europe, is poised to become yet another culturally secular place, where the vocabulary of faith is as unintelligible to the vast majority as Urdu. We are already at a loss to explain why religion is important in our public life, repeating platitudes and cliches that bear no resemblance to the complex interplay of personal and collective belief and their existential import.

One way of navigating this particular thorny path might well be, as pointed out in the post, not so much reconciling the irreconcilable, but simply setting aside any desire for coherence, yet refusing the grant "irreconcilability" any intellectual or existential traction. One of the problems we moderns have with religious belief is the notion, repeated ad nauseum, that the choices between belief and non-belief offer us stark contrasts. Yet, if one is willing enough to enter in to the life of faith, to surrender oneself to the demands that belief in God place upon us as individuals and collective members of the Church, it becomes clear all too soon, that these are actually false choices. Facing the incoherence of the world around us, we are called as believers to love it in all its horror and sublime beauty precisely because our God has also loved it enough to sacrifice the glory of deity in order that the world may yet become what it was created to be.

In other words, really seeing the world as a believer, one affirms the essential nihilism that surrounds us all as the way of the world. It becomes the task of the believer to affirm the essential goodness of this sad panoply of madness and joy, sorrow and ecstasy, and to live within it as deeply, as consciously, as possible, without ever allowing it to define our own existence. The lack of coherence that is the source of so much of our contemporary malaise, of which our contemporary loss of understanding of the vocabulary of faith is a presentiment, is a stage that is necessary for the believer. We stand upon the one rock, to quote Jesus, that does not fail, as the floods wash away all the rest around us. It is not up to us to be the rock; it is only our part to declare this rock's existence, and to offer a hand up out of the maelstrom. While not washed away by it, we are as much victims precisely because every body that washes by (to continue the metaphor a bit) cries out to our heart. We cannot, no matter how hard we try, save them all, but should at least rejoice at each instance of this or that individual grasping our hand and being pulled to (relative) safety.

Right now, our society is in the midst of the storm at its fiercest. The churches in their varieties are losing the ability to speak to those around us, to call out so others can understand us, and get a helping hand up. We have allowed a combination of ignorance and sloppy-thinking to become our lingua franca, with the fake notions of left/right, liberal/conservative become our dominant modes of thought and communication. We accept far to readily the (false) modern idea that there is some kind of separation between the "personal" and the "social"; that "religion" is some kind of "personal" area that has no impact upon our social lives. We are stripping ourselves of the ability to be, as we are called to be, the hands and eyes and heart of the God who is declared to be love for this broken world.

The loss of any intellectual or moral or existential coherence, summed up so well by the appeal to nihilism can be affirmed by the Church and believers. What we need, though, is the renewal, or perhaps invention, of a vocabulary that can speak to this reality without allowing it to overwhelm our ability to communicate an alternative from it.

Murder By Helicopter

By now, if you are a reader of this site, you are also aware of the video showing an Apache helicopter in Iraq firing upon what we now know are a couple Reuter's reporters on a rooftop in Iraq, then upon a van that came to attempt assisting them.

I think the title of this post sums up my own view of the events depicted.

The blood on our hands gets thicker and more and more difficult to clean off.

St. Paul, Bishop N. T. Wright, & The Resurrection Of Jesus

So one of the scripture readings at the Easter service yesterday was from 1 Corinthians 15, where St. Paul argues for the reality of the bodily resurrection of Jesus not only from the evidence of testimony (including his own encounter, recorded in idealized detail in the Book of Acts), but from a kind of inexorable logic. It seems that some of the good Christians of Corinth were teaching that there was to be no general resurrection of the dead; St. Paul chastises them on this by asking a simple question: If there is no resurrection of the dead, how can they preach that Jesus was raised from the dead? He goes off on a riff, insisting that either Jesus was raised from the dead, which proves that the dead shall indeed be raised, or the dead do not raise, in which case Jesus was not raised, and all of the kerygma of the early Church is a lie. He even says, at one point, that if the dead are not raised, then Christian who so believe are even more pitiable than others, because their entire worldview, their entire message, is based upon a lie. All they teach, all they preach, all their work in the world, all their hope for the coming Kingdom of God is a fanciful tale.

I realized with that marvelous insight that comes with time and a tired brain, as that particular passage was read, that N. T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God is nothing more than 800 or so pages expanding this particular theme. That is to say, while we can certainly discuss the differences and distinctions among a variety of Scripture scholars and theologians on the question, for Wright in this particular work - for all the chapters on the raising of the dead in the thought of antiquity and related cultures of the Levant; of the emergence of the resurrection of the dead in Second Temple Judaism; of the way the early Christian believers took that idea and molded it to suit their needs - in essence, Wright is insisting on the reality of the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead as necessary to keep the rest of the Christian message from being understood as nonsensical.

On this point he is exactly right. Even more than the death of Jesus - important as that is - it is his rising from the dead never to die again that clinches our understanding of who we are as a people. Our reverence for his teachings, our collective memory we call Scripture and tradition, our liturgy and worship all melt in to air if we deny the reality of the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Yet, my guess is if we were to poll most Christians, across denominations and ideological perspectives, I would think it quite likely most believers today would deny the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead. They would interpret it, in all likelihood, allegorically; in many ways, German Scripture scholar Rudolf Bultmann anticipated this particular way of thinking in his existentialist readings of the New Testament. Going back even further, we can read the Glaubenslehre of Friedrich Schleiermacher as doing much the same thing. Rather than "deny" the resurrection, Schleiermacher and many of his followers in the period of Romantic theology in the 19th century reinterpreted it (see Karl Barth's lectures on 19th century theology, Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl, a work praised by no less a scholar than Martin Marty).

For all that Wright insists on the basic reality, the fact of Jesus resurrection from the dead, he skirts many issues, not the least of them being any way to historically verify (or perhaps falsify) the claim. One reason I think this is so is far too much of the scholarly discussion around this very heated question involves an understanding of the subtle distinctions in German theology of the different ways to speak of "history". Rather than get mired in such detail, he takes the path of St. Paul. He discusses The Martyrdom of Polycarp and other pre-Constantinian writings that testify to the intractability of many Christians' belief in the resurrection of Jesus and what it means for them. He garners from this review of so many people being quite willing to refuse, even under torture, to deny the reality of the resurrection of Jesus, that it was for them something real in a way that defies our contemporary attempts to reinterpret it and therefore deny it.

Yet, the question as we emerge from the celebration of Easter Sunday, is pressed upon this writer: Do I believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and with that belief in my own resurrection from the dead at the end of time?

I can only give a simple answer to this question: Yes.

If you want proof, I have none to offer other than the efficacy of the Christian faith in my own life. Proof is for people who don't want to believe, as far as I'm concerned. Beyond the simple fact that I do so believe, I can only say that I am edified by many of those who at one and the same time skirt the question of the reality of the resurrection, yet affirm the significance of such belief in the life of the Church. Yet, I think such people - Paul Tillich, the aforementioned Bultmann, my former bishop Joe Sprague - are far too willing to succumb to the modernist temptation; they are willing to trade that most precious gift laid at the feet of the Church, the proclamation of new life in the risen Christ, for far more convoluted discussions of "meaning" that divorce that meaning from any actual event (and, ah, that last word is another freighted by far too much meaning).

If this declaration makes the reader uncomfortable; if it makes my other writings no longer worthy of serious consideration because I am willing to submit myself to this bit of pre-modern thought, then all I can say is, "Oh, well." The resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and what it portends not just for me personally - not really the center of my won faith anyway - but for all of creation, makes of my own belief not something that is negotiable. On the contrary, it roots all the other things I believe - my trust in science as an explanation for all sorts of phenomena in the world; my political and social beliefs; my rage at injustice; my hope for the future in the face of all sorts of evidence that it might not be as bright as one could wish - and I find all these confirmed each and everyday in countless ways. I need not justify to those who would reject belief in the resurrection of Jesus why it is so I believe. I make the declaration, and can explain how it functions as a source of hope and life for myself and millions of other believers. Beyond that, well, if you don't like it, all I can say is, "Been nice talking to you." I will affirm the resurrection anyway. Those who rest easy in their modernist pose have many other qualities that I find distasteful, so I am really not interested in their good opinion at any rate.

So, with millions of believers around the world, I say with all seriousness, "He is risen, indeed!"

Music For Your Monday

This is by way of experiment. I am introducing myself to the band Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I hate to admit it, but I really like them precisely because they sound so much like the kind of stuff we listened to back when I was in college. Nostalgia. Ugh. But, they're really good!

"Zero"


"Heads Will Roll"


"Skeletons"

Improving The Social Safety Net

The next big-ticket legislative item is financial services regulatory "reform", which actually should consist of reinstating regulations that used to exist but no longer do. In any event, I would like to suggest a way of framing this issue that might provide some traction with the public, offering a better chance to pass it.

For the most part, both supporters and opponents see this as an issue primarily of economic regulation, which is to say something unrelated to the general health and welfare of society apart from money-making. Yet, if we should have learned any lesson from the collapse of the financial services sector a couple years back, it is that the theory of atomized, free-standing institutions acting on behalf of their most basic self-interest - profit - do not actually understand the most socially acceptable means of achieving those ends. If pursuing the profits within a financial bubble increases profits, then they will do so. The notion that those who did so acted without understanding that the housing market was overinflated in value is, at this point, incomprehensible. I am not by any means one who understands these issues, yet as early as 2007 it was clear to me that real estate values were hyperinflated. Furthermore, I made occasional statements to the effect that far too much credit was already extended on overinflated mortgages, which were in turn treated as assets rather than liabilities. I called it, at one point, a house of cards, needing only a slight breeze to bring it tumbling down. The breeze came, and down it all came.

As Congress gets ready to consider ways to police the financial services industry, it might be important to talk about the entire project less in terms of old-style industrial or economic regulation. Rather, the lesson from our most recent catastrophe should indicate that setting limits to the actions of financial markets; making determinations of what are and are not proper actions for players in the game to make; separating out consumer banking from investment banking (reinstating Glass-Steagall in some manner, fashion or form) - all of these and other steps that should be taken whether they are planned or will be done is another matter . . .) should be discussed as a further extension of the social safety net. These are not "restrictions" on "economic growth" done in the name of envy, or spite, or as a punitive measure that can be removed as the economy improves. Rather, these measure are being proposed as a way of protecting all of us, not least the financial services sector itself, from the dangers inherent in their own propensity for reckless behavior. Setting aside any question of theory, it should be repeated, again and again, that we are living through the empirical refutation of the idea that an industry free of serious oversight and administrative limits on action will act in ways that serve not only its own bottom line, but its most basic self-interest, survival. We are also living through empirical refutation of the notion that we can treat any sector of society as separate in some way from the rest. The collapse of the financial services sector nearly brought the entire US, and the world, economy, to a halt. Any time someone starts to talk in this fashion, just repeat, politely and firmly, that this theory is no longer tenable based on our collective experience.

We seek to regulate and oversee the financial services sector because we wish to protect the entire country from the ill-effects of bad decision making in an unregulated market. Time and again we have experienced that industries tend toward self-destruction, whether in the short- or near-term, and the results have been social calamity. We are seeking to regulate to protect the entire society from the effects of free markets.

He Is Risen!

The Times Change, But The Whine Continues

In what seems to be an emerging theme, I want to point out that I am growing increasingly frustrated not with the Tea Bag Crowd, or the Birthers, or Sarah Palin, or Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck, or Newt Gingrich. These folks all have their varying roles and, to be honest, they all differ in a variety of ways. The first among them, for all they yell a lot, have attracted the attention of the conservative media, and occasionally are confused about their actual message, are still nothing more or less than citizens going about the business of being active participants in our public life. Are they confused about what it is they want? A great deal less so, I think, than liberals, but this is usually the case with the party out of power. Palin and Gingrich are irrelevant; they are celebrities, not serious public figures, famous for having once been in the spotlight but neither will hold an office of public trust again, and neither is held in high public esteem, outside a small coterie of people who find the things they say agreeable (which is hardly surprising). Limbaugh and Beck are entertainers, pure and simple. They have one job - to attract an audience and keep themselves working, and they know how to do that well. I neither know nor care whether they believe the things they say, nor am I concerned about the effects their views have on public discourse; there have been and always will be demagogues on all sorts of political views. Like Palin and Gingrich, they are irrelevant, the political equivalent of a sideshow freak tent that attracts two kinds of people - the voyeurs who come to gawk, and those who think it is high-minded to come and debunk the whole thing. The first are to be pitied as individuals; the second tend to be busybodies who think it is their business to show the world how clever they are.

No, my real concern is not with these elements. Rather, it is the on-going liberal and leftist whine about the "the corporate media". What specifically attracted my attention this early Easter morning before the sunrise was this.

[T]he Republicans and their allies in the press should be disqualified from this process for propagandizing the public and for allowing the violent rhetoric coming out of these Tea partiers, Fox News and Republican members of Congress to continue. Until some more of your cohorts in the media are willing to do the same thing you did here, that's not going to happen. This dangerous nonsense only going to get worse until we get these media monopolies broken up.

We should have hundreds of those like Rachel Maddow, Amy Goodman, Thom Hartmann, Bill Moyers and others out there that everyone that visits this site is well aware of, giving equal weight to liberal voices that there is a market for, but has been suppressed by our corporate media that wants to pretend to play fair while marginalizing those that care more about facts over hype.

First of all, "the Republicans and their allies in the press"? While there is pretty clear evidence from a whole history of columns and books that some writers - I am thinking of David Broder, Bob Woodward, George Will, Bill Safire - do have some kind of bias in favor of Republican politicians. In more recent times, journalists such as Judith Miller and Chris Cilliza have been pretty consistent in favoring sources with ties to the Republican Party, sometimes to the detriment of our nation (Miller, in particular, ran a series of columns pimping an Iraqi dissident in the run-up to the war in the winter of 2002-2003 despite serious misgivings among intelligence and other officials that the information this dissident was providing was mostly BS). For the most part, however, the press's failings are due less to questions of ideological or party bias and more to institutional sclerosis.

More to the main point of this particular post, my own frustration with the highlighted section revolves around two things. First, as detailed by Bob Somerby, for all she is intelligent and effective, Rachel Maddow is just as apt to fill her show with fluff and nonsense as Glenn Beck; far worse, calling out Republicans for being short on facts is a bit of the old pot-and-kettle show because Maddow is guilty of the same crimes against facts in service of ideology.

Second, and a far larger point, I find it interesting that an internet website would wax eloquent concerning the desire for more liberal voices on television news programs even as these programs - like newspaper opinion journalism - are waning in influence. The record not only of honesty and integrity, but also accountability on these programs is staggeringly low. Recent decades have seen the rise of media stars - I for one no longer consider them serious political commentators - the likes of Bill Kristol, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Bill O'Reilly who are full of sound and fury, yet are about equally guilty of both erroneous reporting and horribly bad prophetic ability. Their insistence that they have the ears of the powerful and simultaneously give voice to the voiceless are usually only half right. They may be listened to by those in power; those who follow their advice, however, usually end up on the losing end of political struggles, especially over the past four years.

The simple reality is the entire landscape of public discourse is altered. While it may be that these media stars and others one could name draw large salaries, appear all over print and television, and pride themselves on being players in the fascinating, intoxicating game of politics. For the most part, though, they are remnants of an age that is passing. While the shake-up and breakdown is still-ongoing, I continue to insist that the internet - both left and right - is of far more importance than either print or television journalism and commentary.

I really do not care whether there are more "liberal" voices out there, and I do not believe, really, that the issue is some kind of corporate conspiracy against liberal or left-wing voices. Oh, I am quite sure that no self-respecting senior manager at GE, or Disney, or News Corp. would hire a serious liberal (the except, I think, is ABC's hiring of Paul Krugman as a commentator on their Sunday news chat show; he has the advantage of a Nobel Prize that a lot of other liberals don't share). This can be chalked up, easily enough, to the commonsensical notion that no corporation is going to hire someone whose views would be antithetical to their interests. This is neither evil nor illegal. It is just good, solid, corporate self-interest at work.

This is why the internet serves the valuable function of providing a voice to those who are left out of the conversation. Whether one is liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, Socialist or Libertarian, it is easy enough to gain entry to the larger world of our on-going talk and argument.

Sitting around and whining about the lack of liberal voices on television, and using one as factually compromised as Rachel Maddow as a prime example, does no one a service. Just as at one time it was fine that the right owned AM talk radio, it is fine that more conservative voices seem to have the corner on television news programs. For years now, the dominant voices on the liberal/left spectrum have been right here, on the internet, and I see no reason why, for the foreseeable future, this will not continue.

To quote some guy who made a name for himself in politics recently, We are the ones we've been waiting for.

Saturday Rock Show

Here's something to wake you up. "Universal Mind" by Liquid Tension Experiment.

Falsified Images And The Abuse Of Narrative

A truly fascinating article in The New York Times Magazine about photographer Roman Vishniac and the way photographs he took of pre-WWII Jewish communities in eastern Europe were manipulated by the photographer to present a picture that the originals did not, in fact, capture.

If you were to pick up a copy of “A Vanished World” in a contemporary American Jewish home and turn to the final spread, you would see two photographs. On the left, a man peers anxiously from a window in a metal door; on the right, a boy of no more than 3 or 4 points a small finger across his eyeline. The caption reads: “The father is hiding from the Endecy (members of the National Democratic Party). His son signals him that they are approaching. Warsaw, 1938.” An index at the front of the book, which features additional commentary on the photographs, fills out the frightening tale: “The pogromshchiki” — a lynch mob — “are coming. But the iron door was no protection.”

It is a poignant scene — haunting and full of narrative pathos. But it almost certainly did not happen. The pictures in that spread, it turns out, came from different rolls of film, probably shot in different towns — which means, of course, that its characters were presumably not only unrelated but also most likely did not even know each other.

The article relates the revelation to Maya Benton, who has detailed the discovery of the falsification, that her own family also participated in a kind of familial myth-making.

Sometime in 1989, Maya Benton, then a 14-year-old living in Los Angeles, had an epiphany. The daughter of a single mother, a psychoanalyst who as a child lived for years in a displaced-persons camp in Germany, Benton grew up in a household that was a relative rarity in American Jewish life: Yiddish speaking but cosmopolitan, well off and not Orthodox. As she lolled on the couch of her grandparents’ home, Benton started sneaking chocolate rum balls from a sterling silver box — one of two family heirlooms from, she had assumed, Novogrudek, the historic Jewish town in what is now Belarus from which her grandparents hailed before the Holocaust. As Benton stared at the weighty birthright from the alte heym, or Old World, bafflement struck: she knew, from an interview she conducted with her family members for a history class, that they fled the German invasion, hid in nearby forests, were interned at multiple labor camps and trekked through miles of often snow-covered forest in the east. How on earth, Benton thought as she considered the ornate container, did they manage to schlep this through Siberia? The confusion grew when she considered the second heirloom: a full set of Rosenthal china.

As it turned out, the box and the china had not been in the family for generations, nor were they from Novogrudek. As Maya’s grandmother, Tonia Benton, explained that afternoon, they were among the things that she and her husband bought from impoverished Germans after the war; bartering the chocolate and cigarettes they received in the displaced-persons camp, they were able to buy valuable items that could be used as currency to get the family to America. That day, Maya Benton says, she learned a lesson about people’s need for, and uses of, mythical narratives.

One thing jumps out - that old bugaboo, authenticity.

The concentration of poverty and piety in Vishniac’s pictures in “Polish Jews” created a distinct impression of timelessness, an unchanging, “authentic society” captured in amber.

Benton found a treasure trove in Vishniac's archive - negatives and notes that presented a far more accurate detail of the rich diversity of the life of European Jews before the Nazi horrors. Yet, it was precisely these horrors which made Vishniac's work that much more powerful.

According to the Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer, about 30 to 40 percent of the three million Jews in Poland before the Holocaust lived in shtetls. Many other Jews lived in large, cosmopolitan cities like Warsaw and Vilna and Krakow. And yet in the popular imagination, the word shtetl has become nearly synonymous with pre-Holocaust life — a romantic image characterized by homogeneity and quaintness. This sentimentalization — driven in part by secularized, often prosperous Jews troubled by the sense that their hard-earned modernity may have come at the price of tradition and authenticity — began as far back as the 19th century and traveled with Jews from the Pale of Settlement to the shores of America. At the start of the last century, Yiddish newspapers and plays in America treated the shtetl with both love and condescension — too close a memory not to feel homesick for, yet too obviously backward to reclaim.

But this delicate balance was upset by the Holocaust, which twisted ambivalent affection into paralytic grief. After the war, it became difficult to view prewar images as anything but a prelude to destruction — a backshadowing that distilled the complicated, multifaceted reality of prewar Jewish life into a two-dimensional shrine, one that deserved all the mournful appreciation that could be mustered. In January 1945, the rabbi and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel gave a seminal speech at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York about prewar Eastern European Jewish life. It was not a factual exploration of this historical subject but rather a lyrical interpretation of what Heschel claimed was the essence of Eastern European Jewish life: its soul. “Heschel argued that though the Eastern European Jews were destroyed, their spiritual legacy lives on,” explains Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a professor of performance studies at New York University who has done scholarship on Eastern European Jewish culture. “It is indestructible, unassailable — something the Germans could never get their hands on.” In fact, she added, the physical destruction was barely mentioned. At the end of Heschel’s speech, the audience broke into a spontaneous recitation of the Kaddish, or mourner’s prayer.

The question arises, inexorably, almost necessarily: what possible purpose is served by elevating a false myth in the midst of grief? These are questions we face as individuals, to be sure. Yet, this was not the death of one person, but the decimation of an entire population (Poland's Jewish community, the particular focus of Vishniac's most celebrated work, was utterly destroyed by the Nazi machinery of death). With them went their collective memory, their history, both colloquial and collective including all its complications, diversity, and complexity.

Yesterday, I wrote about the rise and fall of the use of spectacle and image in American politics in the age of television's dominance. A particular point, not stressed enough (I fear) was the way so many images used by Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush in particular, presented false impressions. When Reagan spoke at Normandy, in 1984, for example, he managed to convey a sense of his own participation in the great historical event he was commemorating. Certainly he was of the proper age. Yet, Reagan (like another Hollywood conservative, John Wayne), desperately sough to avoid combat during the Second World War. A commissioned officer in the Army Special Services, Reagan performed in Army training films, never leaving Hollywood. Yet, he was able to present to the world the idea that he, too, was a part of what Gen. Eisenhower had called the Crusade in Europe.

Bush's falsification of his own participation in military events was even greater. Photographed striding across the deck of an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, Bush not only recalled his own days as a pilot in the Air National Guard (protecting the skies of Alabama from the North Vietnamese Air Force), but by extension his own military record and that camaraderie that all military personnel feel toward their fellows. He did all this as a prelude to a victory speech at the end of the first phase of the war in Iraq, providing images that, at first, provided images of triumph easily bought. History has a way of turning the tables on people, however, and those same images were used against Bush later.

All of this returns us to that question - Why do we feel the need to create in our memory a sense of the past that, given even a little bit of thought, is false? Why did Vishniac not only present his images as typical, but even go so far as to falsify a pair of images in order to create an impression of menace and danger? Does a reliance on "narrative" as a way of constructing, and reconstructing, our lives, sometimes lead to falsification?

(h/t Talking Points Memo)

Good Friday

The Demise Of The Politics Of Spectacle

In 1960, Richard Nixon was on the losing end of a new phenomenon. In a Presidential candidates debate with Sen. John Kennedy, Nixon managed to hold his own; listeners on radio called the debate a draw. Those who watched television, however, had a different opinion. Because of a combination of bad lighting, Nixon's nervous demeanor, too much makeup, and other factors, those who watched the debate found Kennedy's cool and smooth delivery, free from sweating and appearing either nervous, evasive, or uninformed much more appealing. While perhaps not the single reason Kennedy won that election, the debate made a far larger cultural impact, one not lost on the loser.

In both 1968 and 1972, Pres. Nixon hired public relations firms to run his campaigns. His chief of staff and chief domestic adviser were also from the world of advertising and public relations. Along with breaking in to the National Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate complex to bug their phones, Nixon understood heading in to the '72 campaign that he he might face Sen. Edmund Muskie, who consistently out-polled the President. Besides planting a letter that made Muskie self-destruct (he was reported to have cried, even though he actually didn't; he became the object of snide Washington ridicule and slipped away to nothing in the polls), Nixon also very carefully managed events from the fall of 1971 through the election to ensure he appeared as Presidential as possible. He forced an end to the Vietnam War; he signed a nuclear arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union. His biggest coup was a trip to China, including a meeting with Chairman Mao Tse-dung. Nixon won in a landslide, winning 49 states.

Ronald Reagan surrounded himself with people of a similar bent to Nixon. A close family friend and intimate adviser, Michael Deaver became infamous around Washington for constructing images and messages. His biggest failure was 1985's European trip commemorating the end of World War II. Included in the itinerary was a trip to Bitburg cemetery in Germany that had, among other graves, those of Waffen SS soldiers who had guarded the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. Precisely because, by this time in his Presidency, Reagan was well-known for being very much about flash and appearance while short on substantive understanding of policy, this misstep showed the limits of the politics of spectacle.

The George W. Bush Administration was staffed by people who had either served in lower level positions in previous Administrations, or learned from them. More than the Democrats, who have spent the decades since the 1968 lost election in pretty much constant turmoil, the Republican Party learned a valuable lesson from Nixon's disastrous television debate performance - appearance, show, and most of all spectacle, define political impressions far more than words. This reality was the guiding ethos of "Bush's Brain", Karl Rove. More than any other individual, Rove was the master architect not only of Bush's rise to the Presidency, but managed the President's schedule and appearances.

His high point was to be the President, who had trained as a fighter pilot in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, landing on the deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, followed by a speech. The speech included a shot of the President in front of a banner that read "Mission Accomplished". Pundits and commentators all agreed - it was Bush's finest hour, a significant, Presidential moment.

Except, it occurred at the beginning of another medium, one that would strip the facade from the politics of spectacle given birth in a Presidential debate 43 years before. With the rise of the internet, in particular citizen commentary on political and social events, images that would have arrived filtered through the lenses and words of those taken in by spectacles no longer existed in some pristine world, free of deconstruction. On the contrary, our public discourse, once again turning back to words and ideas and away from images void of substance, stripped this and countless other images of any meaning whatsoever. Indeed, for most liberals on the internet, "Mission Accomplished" became not only a symbol of Bush Administration hubris and folly; it also was a cruel joke, mocking the deaths of thousands of Americans in Iraq after that event.

Part of the reason Barack Obama has been, and most likely will continue to be, successful getting his agenda in place has been his grasp of this fundamental change. As television declines in importance; as the images conveyed by cameras to the American people are now filtered through the words of thousands of ordinary citizens; as these voices clamor not just for more better images, but images that are more reflective of their vision of America; these changes all make the old political habits - reading the national newspapers; watching the network news broadcasts; ensuring a "victory" on the daily news cycle - no longer applicable. Obama not only understands this changed reality; he knows that we are returning to a time when words, not images, dominate our politics, that ideas and substance trump a photo-op and sound bites.

Obama's victory, not just for the Presidency, but his ongoing string of policy victories signal the end of the politics of the imaged spectacle even more than George W. Bush in front of the a banner that lied when it read "Mission Accomplished".

An Example

Yesterday, I wrote that I am weary of the really stupid stuff at Crooks and Liars. Well, today, they managed to provide a marvelous example of said stupid stuff.

As part of this weekend's Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm, Tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors is holding a "Pin the Tail on the Theocrat" contest.

Because, as we all know, with the most liberal President since Richard Nixon, and the most liberal Congress since the late 1970's, having just passed the most significant expansion of the welfare state since the mid-1960's, it is obvious we are on the verge of a theocratic dictatorship.

I guess liberals really can be as stupid as conservatives sometimes.

Boo! God's gonna get ya!

Idiots.

Unconstitutional Constitutional Powers (UPDATE) (UPDATE II)

I had not heard about this particular bit of crazy. Let's face it; calling the Census "unconstitutional" is a bit like calling the sun dark, OK?

Is it any wonder we don't take these people seriously whenever they cry about the way the Obama Administration is destroying the Constitution? I mean, come on, people. At least pretend you've read the whole thing.

UPDATE: The comments on this article are a welter of crazy and stupid in about equal amounts.

UPDATE II:( For the record, I just completed our household Census form, and it was such an unconstitutional overreach of executive authority because it asked how many people are living here, their names, their ages, and their ethnicity. For the record, it didn't ask about the animals that live here, how much money we make, or whether or not I think Barack Obama is the new savior of the galaxy or the anti-Christ.

It asked how many people lived here, and all the rest. The commenter at the linked newspaper article who says that he will only answer certain questions apparently hasn't actually looked at the freaking form.

Stupid abounds . . .

Moral Monster

Quite simply put, the only thing worse than the apparent flowering of anointed pederasts in the Roman Catholic Church under the protection of then-Josef Cardinal Ratzinger is the continued defense of the current Pope's protection of these criminals by the Catholic League's Bill Donohue. I'm not even sure how it is possible for this man to appear on television and say the things he does without realizing that all the so-called moral education the Roman Church offers its adherents isn't a bunch of bunk. At the very least, this is a case of having someone defend the institution, and by doing so make it look far worse.

If it were the case, for example, that a Bishop of the United Methodist Church not only knew a particular pastor were a pedophile, but did not remove this person from appointment, but rather moved this person to a different appointment and covered up this person's crimes, you can bet your bottom dollar I would be (a) hanging my head in shame; and (b) be among the many thousands denouncing the denomination for its actions that threatened the safety and security of children this way. Donohue, on the other hand, seems to think that it is a problem with gay priests, rather than pedophiles, and anyway, since it's the Roman Catholic Church, it's OK.

What a horrible, horrible man.

Princpled Bigotry

Back in 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act on the principled notion that much of the bill's intent overreached the bounds of constitutional impropriety. His principled stand - and I, for one, believe it was such - was exploited by bigots and hard-core racists as cover. Here was a position that could hide the fact that they hated black people and did not want equal protection and access for all Americans.

The petty and nonsensical notion that one is, of course, personally opposed to a but believes that the federal government has neither the constitutional warrant nor the resources to address a has, like most right-wing ideas, outlived its usefulness. Yet, here it is again.

The Department’s civil-rights division announced yesterday the terms of its settlement with a New York school district that, in the division’s opinion, was insufficiently aggressive in protecting a young man from “harassment based on sex” by other students. The harassment stemmed from the student’s “fail[ure] to conform to gender stereotypes” — that is, he “exhibited feminine mannerisms, dyed his hair, wore makeup and nail polish, and maintained predominantly female friendships.” The settlement will require the school district to, among other things, “retain an expert consultant in the area of harassment and discrimination based on sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation” and for the consultant “to conduct annual training for faculty and staff, and students as deemed appropriate by the expert” on the same topics. Oh, and the aggrieved student — who now attends school elsewhere — will get $50,000 and the New York Civil Liberties Union will get $25,000 in attorney fees.

Got that? The federal government was addressing the violation of the Civil Rights of a student who experienced harassment because he was effeminate. Here's where the author of this piece goes off the rails.

Now, let me first say that schools should not allow students to bully and beat up other students for any reason, including being gay or perceived as being gay. But it is quite a leap from that to saying that the federal government should police local school districts in this regard, with further leaps out of the real world if illegal harassment is defined to include name-calling in a high school when a male student dyes his hair and wears makeup and nail polish . . .

Whenever a sentence begins, "Now, let me first say . . ." you just know the author is going to qualify his moral disapprobation by insisting there is a greater, principled notion at stake. In this case, the failure of the local school, the greater New York schools, and the State of New York to defend this young man is as nothing compared to the "jihad" the United States Justice Department and the Obama Administration are leading (according to the title of this article).

Sorry, Mr. Clegg, but your article is nothing more or less than the defense of violence against a young man disguised as some kind of defense of constitutional propriety. For this writer, this young man's safety is far more important than any alleged violation of federalism. Indeed, it seems to me, as the court in the article is a federal court, it was the perfect place to rule on the legitimacy of the Justice Department's standing and seemed quite content to consider it as perfectly legal. I will take a court's decision over your opinion any day. Especially since you seem to think there is something far worse about the federal government protecting a young man from physical and emotional abuse by his peers than that harassment itself.

(h/t, Sadly,No!)

I'll Take A Pass On This Kool-Aid, Thanks

Today's Daily Howler does both the unthinkable and provides a marvelous service (for this reader, at any rate) all at the same time. In writing about the error- and hyperventilation-prone way some liberals are writing and talking about the tea-baggers and, specifically, recent incidents on Capitol Hill, Somerby actually dredges up the horrid way Newt Gingrich attempted to exploit the horrific murders committed by Susan Smith in 1994 (she drowned her two children, first insisting they had been kidnapped by "blacks", then confessing she had done it herself so her boyfriend would like her more) for partisan purposes. This is the unthinkable; the service for this reader is just this: he clarified for me the ways in which some liberals and some liberal and left-wing sites get a little out of control - and expose their own ignorance - when talking about some issues, including race and religion.

Crooks & Liars is one site that, for the most part, practices almost daily shark-jumping when it comes to right-wing nuttiness. It is one thing to point out something silly or ridiculous said by someone on the right. It is quite another to make out of these, even accumulated, bits of nonsense a dangerous trend that threatens the general leftward drift of the vast majority of the American people. I tire of it, to be honest, because even as they keep talking about all these nonexistent threats to our ways of life, they also bemoan the lack of substantive discourse on the internet.

Duh, anybody?

On Love

It's like those French have a different word for everything!
Steve Martin

Everyone whose Christian education goes beyond fourth-grade Sunday School classes understands that the word "love" in English translations of the New Testament is the translation of three different words in Greek - eros, philia, and agape. For years we have been subject to ruminations on the distinctions among these three words, usually ending with the insistence that agape, a selfless concern for others, is the true understanding of "love" when used in a Christian context.

I am going to go out on a limb today and offer a different take. Before getting to that conclusion, however, I want to take a couple steps backwards and talk about language. The starting point here, in case you're interested, is Richard Rorty's essay, "Texts and Lumps", which is included in his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Collected Papers, Vol. 1 published by Cambridge University Press in 1991. In that essay, Rorty compares the way critics view a text and scientists view a lump of material they are analyzing. Rather than consider their methods as being wholly distinct and incompatible, Rorty notes that, in reality, scientists and textual critics go about their tasks in remarkably similar ways. They have something in front of them they are attempting to understand. They have tools they use for the job; for critics they are rhetoric and grammar, deconstruction and historical criticism. For the scientists they are the spectrometer and SEM, litmus paper and dissection, what have you depending upon what type of lump might sit in front of them. For Rorty, the issue is not that the humanities and the sciences have different methods, or that their subject matter is so distinct as to make their methods incompatible. Rather, we have been led to believe that science deals in something called reality which is objectively verifiable (or falsifiable, depending upon which philosophy of science to which one adheres) while the humanities deal with matters that are purely subjective, interpretation being at the service of whatever whim the critic happens to have. These distinctions, once one considers how these very different tasks are actually done, disappear like summer fog once one considers that most basic tool - language.

For Rorty, language is nothing more than the sounds we make or the marks we make on paper (and, of course, a computer screen). After Darwin, to consider language as anything more than a purely contingent tool humans use to help them survive their environment is to get all airy, "theo-ontological" to use a favorite term of derision of his. I am going to depart from Rorty at this juncture; unlike Rorty, I would like to emphasize that languages are not only tools of individuals and groups. Precisely because they are such, they have histories; the meanings of words exist within complex histories of communication, each new use adding an incremental bit of meaning and understanding (as well as obfuscation and lack of clarity). For that reason, it is important, if we are going to consider "love" from a Christian perspective, that we are clear that it is not some thing that exists, but is, rather a way some human beings insist we are to live once we are grasped by that reality we call God.

Those folks who lived in the eastern Mediterranean in the first century CE would not have understood us should we suddenly find ourselves there and insisted that the words eros, agape, and philia were actually referring to an emotive and existential state we English-speakers call "love". Precisely because koine Greek - a kind of pidgin-Greek that was the lingua franca after Alexander's conquests of most of the Mediterranean basin three centuries before - has these three different words means nothing more or less than they served the useful purpose of describing three very different human phenomena. "Eros" referred not just to sexual love, but to that complex relating that human beings feel and act out toward one another; "intimacy" might be a far better way of understanding it than reducing it to its sexual component. "Philia", very often considered similar to "friendship", runs far deeper than our rather shallow understanding that word. Those who were joined in bonds of "philia" were very often just as close as those for whom the term "eros" might apply. "Agape", an altruistic, self-abnegating posture toward the world, in which one considers those around oneself of greater worth than oneself, worthy of sacrifice appears more often in the New Testament than any other term translated as love. Yet, it is the most difficult with which to come to terms.

Having made the distinctions among these three words a little more clear, we need to ask the following question: Are we best served, either out of a sense of tradition or common usage, by continuing to translate these very different words in to the English word "love"? Would it not, perhaps, be better to find different English cognates and set aside "love" altogether?

Part of the problem here is that the word "love" is one of the most equivocal words in the English language. I can say that I love my dog, my daughters, my wife, my parents and siblings, my job, and my favorite music and there would be no loss of understanding when others heard me so use that one word in this way. Yet, how strange is it that this one word serves such a multiplicity of purposes? It seems to me that, rather than the specificity of the ancient Greek differences expressed by the use of different words, English-users actually have a grasp of the range and depth of human emotion and the subtleties of the ways human beings relate to their environment that is represented by using the single word "love".

That being said, as we move from the koine-Greek of the New Testament with its different words to the lively world of English, I believe that rather than stop our considerations of "love" as a Christian virtue with the understanding of the distinctions among the various Greek words in question, we should take the next, quite clear, choice and insist that the equivocal nature of the English word "love" is a far better word to capture the fullness of love as the Bible intended. That is to say, when we consider, for example, that most famous passage on Christian love, the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians, rather than insist that St. Paul is speaking here of only one way Christians should relate to one another (as evidenced by a close textual reading of the chapter in question), we should take the next step and talk about how love, in all its varieties and permutations, its differences and similarities in the objects toward which we use the word "love" are encompassed by Christian love as expressed by St. Paul.

Rather than denigrate the erotic - not so much the sexual per se but that intimacy between human beings that might best be expressed by the phrase "romantic love" - we should celebrate it as a necessary part of Christian love precisely because it captures part of that reality we celebrate, for example, in marriage: that two human beings may form bonds of intimacy that are stronger than the mere whims of emotion. Rather than insist that Christian love, in its most pure form, sets aside considerations of oneself as understood by the use of the term "agape", we should insist that the fullness of Christian love includes not only self-sacrifice, but that consideration of others expressed by "romantic love", the deep bonds of mutuality expressed in the deepest of friendships, and even that intimacy that finds expression in private between those for whom love is expressed physically.

We human beings were created as beings who love. When the first epistle of St. John says that "God is love", we should understand that predicate in its fullness. Medieval interpreters of the Song of Songs grasped then when they understood it as an allegory for the love God has for the Church. In its earthiness and celebration of human sensuality, we have the definitive statement of the power of human intimacy and its holiness in the eyes of God.

Rather than settle for a truncated, attenuated understanding of "love", we should take it in all its fullness as the English language permits and shout a very loud "Amen!" when we speak of Christian love. We are created to love in all its varieties by a good God and should not settle for anything less.