Got in to a brief discussion on Anton LeVay's Church of Satan last night on Facebook, and it got me thinking of Geraldo Rivera's infamous 1988 primetime television extravaganza, "Satan's Underground". One of the best moments, for me, came when Geraldo addressed a question to LeVay's daughter, who was appearing as spokesperson for her father's organization, and she simply got up and walked out, refusing to deal with the kind of crap Geraldo was spewing (a good write-up of how horrible it was can be found in this archived review from the San Jose Mercury News).
The late-1980's were the heyday of what one author called a Satanic Panic (I love this book, by the way; I think it might be hard to find, but make the effort). Whether it was the McMartin Preschool case in California that spiraled out of control, Geraldo's stupid special, or the nonsensical "survivors stories" one heard repeated ad neaseum, the reality is that all sorts of diverse phenomena suddenly became "explainable" as instances of rampant Satanism. Geraldo made things worse by trying to tie Charles Manson to Satanism, in the process getting used by that wily psychopath during an "interview" in which Manson turned the tables on Rivera who was too stupid to realize he was being played, even as Rivera was exploiting the national gag-reflex toward Manson for ratings (I confess I watched the special, and will also confess that I found it by turns hilarious and extremely disturbing, although not as the host would have had me).
Are there disturbed young people out there who might turn to stories of "Satanism" as a means of venting their mental illness? Of course there are. Is there an "official" Church of Satan (with tax-exempt status!) in San Francisco? Of course there is. Is there a secret Satanic underground preying on young women and children that continues to flourish now that the media spotlight is off them?
No.
Like the "CIA/The Mafia/The Communists/The military killed Kennedy" nonsense, the 9/11 truthers, and our current plethora of "birthers" that claim our President was actually born in Kenya, conspiracy theories are impenetrable to reason; very often falsifying data become subsumed as part of the larger conspiracy itself.
I am occasionally asked whether, as a liberal Christian, I "believe" in "Satan". I really have no answer to this question. Do I believe that there is evil in the world? Do I believe that evil is or can be personified in some metaphysical entity, or perhaps entities ("demons") that wreak occasional havoc upon us? Do I believe that our "reality" is merely the plane upon which the larger battle of good and evil, in the "persons" of "God" and "the Devil" occurs?
To the last, my answer is an unequivocal "No". To the second question, I sometimes wonder, but for the most part I have to ask a counter-question: "With all the monstrosities occurring in the world, why would Satan or one of his minions waste time 'possessing' the body of an individual?" In other words, I think much of it is silliness.
To the first, the answer is again unequivocal - Of course I believe there that "evil" exists, to the extent that one can use that word as a descriptor of certain acts, individual and social. Children abused, even tortured, in their own homes. Millions dead at the hands of their own government, either through active or passive means. The list is endless. Yet, I can discuss these instances without any recourse whatsoever to the question of "Satan".
While LeVay's "Church" certainly allows folks to think they're being all hedonistic; while individual instances of disturbed young men and women claiming to act either under the direction of a demon, or through the auspices of "worshiping the devil" certainly exist; for the most part, I feel no need to assign outside, metaphysical, agency to account for evil in the world. We human beings are more than capable of filling that bill.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Reviving A Theme (UPDATE)
Liberal blogs are a-twitter (no pun intended, because I don't subscribe) with a Newsmax column that certainly seems to endorse the idea of a military coup against Pres. Obama (TPM archived the original, which is good, because Newmax has removed it).
This isn't exactly new. From May, 2007, courtesy of the Hoover Institute's resident token*, Thomas Sowell:
While I have been criticizing many anti-democratic tendencies on the American Left of late, there is little doubt that a far more vile and dangerous version lives in the fever swamps of the right.
The only thing that saddens me is time on our 24 hour news channels will be wasted discussing not how awful and anti-American this is, but whether or not the military really is thinking coup.
UPDATE: I didn't read the column in question before I wrote about it, but it is actually even more frightening to read than to read about. There are dangerous people out there. Good God.
_________________________
*By calling Sowell "token", I am referring to the fact that he is African-American and conservative. While he has produced interesting studies of the economic roles of minority populations in various settings - the Chinese in southeast Asia, for example - for the most part he exists where he does solely because of his race. A middling intellect married with a typical academic's desire to publish or perish and conservative political cred add up to a very sorry state of affairs, whereby Sowell is being used and either doesn't know it, or doesn't care because he is on the catbird seat, so to speak.
This isn't exactly new. From May, 2007, courtesy of the Hoover Institute's resident token*, Thomas Sowell:
When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.
While I have been criticizing many anti-democratic tendencies on the American Left of late, there is little doubt that a far more vile and dangerous version lives in the fever swamps of the right.
The only thing that saddens me is time on our 24 hour news channels will be wasted discussing not how awful and anti-American this is, but whether or not the military really is thinking coup.
UPDATE: I didn't read the column in question before I wrote about it, but it is actually even more frightening to read than to read about. There are dangerous people out there. Good God.
_________________________
*By calling Sowell "token", I am referring to the fact that he is African-American and conservative. While he has produced interesting studies of the economic roles of minority populations in various settings - the Chinese in southeast Asia, for example - for the most part he exists where he does solely because of his race. A middling intellect married with a typical academic's desire to publish or perish and conservative political cred add up to a very sorry state of affairs, whereby Sowell is being used and either doesn't know it, or doesn't care because he is on the catbird seat, so to speak.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Against Moral Judgments
I have been given a whole lot of food for thought recently on the question of judging other people. The details aren't really here nor there; suffice it to say that events have given me plenty of opportunity to sit around and say, "Boy, you are one sorry excuse for a human being," or, "You are so wrong, it can't ever be made right." The wreckage of human lives that stares at us as we survey what has been wrought by the actions of others make it so easy to insist that the actions of others are so clearly morally unjustifiable as to make judging them not only easy but necessary.
Except, I caught myself over this past week doing that same thing, only to realize later I was doing so on limited information, and without regard to perspective.
Similarly, if I were honest enough about my own life - all of it, not just the little chunk in which I currently reside - I would have to admit that I haven't exactly always left smiles behind when I rode in to the sunset. Quite the contrary.
Whether in interpersonal relations or on a social/political level, judging actions as morally vicious is usually easy for those who have reached the maturity level of a six-year-old. Far more difficult, it seems to me, is to address the thornier issue of "What do we do now?"
Back in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, you could hear right-wingers carry on about "evil doers", and how liberals feared calling the attacks "evil". My response, then and now, is simple - so what? Calling them evil isn't a policy response; it's an act of rage against the pain one feels. As a society, we had to act, not out of fear and rage, but with deliberation, caution, and a sense of our own interests and limited capacity to alter certain realities in the world. We did none of those things and continue to live with the consequences.
I refuse to sit around and judge the world, precisely because, first, I am as much at fault as those to whom others would point as the culprit. Second, being hardly innocent myself, the issue isn't guilt or innocent, or even responsibility, but how do we go about making things better. How do I change my decision-making so I don't leave a mess behind when I move on in life? How do we as a community make life easier for those for whom it currently is a struggle? While I recognize that diagnosing the problem is a necessary part of finding a solution, it is precisely here - at the level of diagnostics - that I find the morality trap far too easy to fall in to (and, yes, I ended that sentence with a double preposition . . .). We can't just fault "white culture" or "imperialism" or "industrial society" and leave it there, as if we aren't all of us participants in these things, aiding and abetting the many evils that beset our world.
Withdrawal in to purposeful communities outside these realms is only an evasion of responsibility, in my opinion; while they may offer examples of solutions, they are far too often done with the express purpose of defining an "us" over against a compromised "them" who still participate in the evils around us. Thus so self-defined as removed from the problem, such persons can sit on their moral high-horse and pronounce judgment on the rest of us.
In my opinion, such persons are cowards. It is far more difficult, and far more noble, to accept the reality that all of us - and I do mean all - are morally compromised in some way, and we owe it to ourselves and to the world around us to learn from the multiple errors in our lives. We need to live a little more honestly, love a little more openly, give much more freely, and refuse to set ourselves up as some kind of judge over the lives of others.
Moving forward means moving forward with the acceptance of our own limitations, our own errors, and, yes, even our own contribution to the evils in the world around us. Since I'm as much at fault as anyone else, since I've hurt others many times in my life, and while I regret it I cannot go back and change that hurt, one thing I can do is live a little more deliberately. Part of the deliberation includes refusing to judge others precisely because I've been there and done that.
Except, I caught myself over this past week doing that same thing, only to realize later I was doing so on limited information, and without regard to perspective.
Similarly, if I were honest enough about my own life - all of it, not just the little chunk in which I currently reside - I would have to admit that I haven't exactly always left smiles behind when I rode in to the sunset. Quite the contrary.
Whether in interpersonal relations or on a social/political level, judging actions as morally vicious is usually easy for those who have reached the maturity level of a six-year-old. Far more difficult, it seems to me, is to address the thornier issue of "What do we do now?"
Back in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, you could hear right-wingers carry on about "evil doers", and how liberals feared calling the attacks "evil". My response, then and now, is simple - so what? Calling them evil isn't a policy response; it's an act of rage against the pain one feels. As a society, we had to act, not out of fear and rage, but with deliberation, caution, and a sense of our own interests and limited capacity to alter certain realities in the world. We did none of those things and continue to live with the consequences.
I refuse to sit around and judge the world, precisely because, first, I am as much at fault as those to whom others would point as the culprit. Second, being hardly innocent myself, the issue isn't guilt or innocent, or even responsibility, but how do we go about making things better. How do I change my decision-making so I don't leave a mess behind when I move on in life? How do we as a community make life easier for those for whom it currently is a struggle? While I recognize that diagnosing the problem is a necessary part of finding a solution, it is precisely here - at the level of diagnostics - that I find the morality trap far too easy to fall in to (and, yes, I ended that sentence with a double preposition . . .). We can't just fault "white culture" or "imperialism" or "industrial society" and leave it there, as if we aren't all of us participants in these things, aiding and abetting the many evils that beset our world.
Withdrawal in to purposeful communities outside these realms is only an evasion of responsibility, in my opinion; while they may offer examples of solutions, they are far too often done with the express purpose of defining an "us" over against a compromised "them" who still participate in the evils around us. Thus so self-defined as removed from the problem, such persons can sit on their moral high-horse and pronounce judgment on the rest of us.
In my opinion, such persons are cowards. It is far more difficult, and far more noble, to accept the reality that all of us - and I do mean all - are morally compromised in some way, and we owe it to ourselves and to the world around us to learn from the multiple errors in our lives. We need to live a little more honestly, love a little more openly, give much more freely, and refuse to set ourselves up as some kind of judge over the lives of others.
Moving forward means moving forward with the acceptance of our own limitations, our own errors, and, yes, even our own contribution to the evils in the world around us. Since I'm as much at fault as anyone else, since I've hurt others many times in my life, and while I regret it I cannot go back and change that hurt, one thing I can do is live a little more deliberately. Part of the deliberation includes refusing to judge others precisely because I've been there and done that.
No Messianic Complex Here . . .
Ah, the hybris of the young . . .
Obviously, the rest of us who are far busier raising our families, trying to make ends meet, recognize the necessity for moral compromise in a world that really doesn't care one way or another about us - we aren't world savers.
Except, we are. Parents are world savers. We are the most hopeful folk in the world, raising our children to work hard, to believe they can achieve their goals, have a life like ours, or perhaps even better than our own. We work hard to make sure the world around us - in our own little neck of the woods, as it were - is a little better than it might be. We care for our neighbors, ask after them. We help them when they need it. Even in the cul-de-sac in which we live, we are attentive to one another, keep an eye out when houses are empty at vacation time, watch out for one anothers' kids, dog sit on weekends away.
Trying to make the world a better place doesn't have to involve all that the author of this piece says. Sometimes, making the world a better place begins at home. Our world has far too much brokenness for any one person to fix, or even one group to fix. Sometimes, all we need to do is look up and down the street, and see what we can do to make one anothers' lives a little better.
By World Saver, I mean those of us who feel the weight of the world’s brokenness on our shoulders and feel obligated to heal it.
Maybe being bred in a laboratory of hope is a bit of an overstatement. However, for years I have felt obligated to save the world if possible and if not, at least leave the world better than when I was born. Cure cancer, find a vaccine for HIV, equalize the world food disparities, microlend to women in developing nations, there are so many worthy causes.
As I mentioned above, I am not the only person who feels this way.
--snip--
I moved to Los Angeles after college to work in HIV Prevention as part of an Americorps program. I worked with homeless youth, went into schools to teach kids about safe sex and tested over 250 people for HIV. World Saver.
But, from where does this urge to save the world arise? For me, it is a combination of my white privilege/guilt and religious idealism. I was raised upper-middle-class in white suburbia. I received an amazing education at a public high school. I never had need of anything. I got a car and cell phone when I turned 16. When I would try to get a job, my parents always told me that my job was to do well in school and that they would take care of everything else. I had no idea how lucky I was. But, perhaps that’s because most people around me were having a similar experience.
Obviously, the rest of us who are far busier raising our families, trying to make ends meet, recognize the necessity for moral compromise in a world that really doesn't care one way or another about us - we aren't world savers.
Except, we are. Parents are world savers. We are the most hopeful folk in the world, raising our children to work hard, to believe they can achieve their goals, have a life like ours, or perhaps even better than our own. We work hard to make sure the world around us - in our own little neck of the woods, as it were - is a little better than it might be. We care for our neighbors, ask after them. We help them when they need it. Even in the cul-de-sac in which we live, we are attentive to one another, keep an eye out when houses are empty at vacation time, watch out for one anothers' kids, dog sit on weekends away.
Trying to make the world a better place doesn't have to involve all that the author of this piece says. Sometimes, making the world a better place begins at home. Our world has far too much brokenness for any one person to fix, or even one group to fix. Sometimes, all we need to do is look up and down the street, and see what we can do to make one anothers' lives a little better.
Who's A Coward?
This is almost too easy.
Let's clarify here. On the one hand, we have the first African-American President, who began his candidacy with most of the political world telling him he couldn't win. In the midst of his Presidential campaign, the financial system collapsed, and rather than be gimmicky, he kept right on going, remaining calm, confident, and won.
As both candidate and President, he has been on the receiving end of all sorts of baseless nonsense, racist demagoguery, and a near-constant barrage of criticism from both his left and right, even as he carries through on his campaign promises, his favorability numbers remain high, and his opponents, especially to his right, sink below the horizon except as figures on the nightly news.
He's being called a coward by a drug-addicted radio host who refuses to come out of his protective bubble and take serious questions from anyone; whose callers are screened to make sure no one with an opposing point of view gets through; whose record on both truthfulness and follow-through is near zero. Being caught on a return flight from a sex-tourist haven with a bag full of Viagra for which he didn't have a prescription, he rails on his show about "morality".
Those fish who swim in small barrels should not provide reasons for others to take aim.
LIMBAUGH: As has always been the case, ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force, and we have a namby-pamby wimp in the White House leading us in exactly the opposite direction, and he's being made a fool of.
Let's clarify here. On the one hand, we have the first African-American President, who began his candidacy with most of the political world telling him he couldn't win. In the midst of his Presidential campaign, the financial system collapsed, and rather than be gimmicky, he kept right on going, remaining calm, confident, and won.
As both candidate and President, he has been on the receiving end of all sorts of baseless nonsense, racist demagoguery, and a near-constant barrage of criticism from both his left and right, even as he carries through on his campaign promises, his favorability numbers remain high, and his opponents, especially to his right, sink below the horizon except as figures on the nightly news.
He's being called a coward by a drug-addicted radio host who refuses to come out of his protective bubble and take serious questions from anyone; whose callers are screened to make sure no one with an opposing point of view gets through; whose record on both truthfulness and follow-through is near zero. Being caught on a return flight from a sex-tourist haven with a bag full of Viagra for which he didn't have a prescription, he rails on his show about "morality".
Those fish who swim in small barrels should not provide reasons for others to take aim.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Comedy For Your Monday
Feeling heretical, even outrageous, here's some late George Carlin stuff on abortion, the sanctity of life, and other issues. Not safe for work or people who pass out when they hear dirty words.
Robin Williams gets his freak on in London.
Richard Pryor from Live on the Sunset Strip, talking about a run-in with the Mafia. I love this entire film, Pryor is transcendent, and this is just a sample.
Robin Williams gets his freak on in London.
Richard Pryor from Live on the Sunset Strip, talking about a run-in with the Mafia. I love this entire film, Pryor is transcendent, and this is just a sample.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Changinge Perspectives
This whole discussion stems from some controversial remarks regarding the effort at saving the Giant Panda.
I took the point-of-view, offered by evolutionary biology, that species extinction is part of the mix.
That was the sum-total of what I was saying. There is no inherent, connoted moral argument one can make from the standpoint of evolutionary biology that we human beings have a duty to sustain all the endangered species on the planet.
On the other hand . . .
A Christian ethic stemming from an acceptance of creation as part of God's gracious love, and the special role human beings have been given for care of creation, usually discussed under the term "stewardship", would most certainly offer a way to approach discussing human responsibility for all of God's creatures.
Of course, an ethic of stewardship should not ignore evolutionary biology; on the contrary, it should embrace it. Yet, it should do so considering it a guide to intelligent and thoughtful stewardship, rather than willy-nilly placing blame and investing in saving every vanishing species on the planet. I mentioned one in the linked post, the gray wolf. That's a wonderful example of intelligent stewardship; hunted to near extinction for the crime of doing what it does, the gray wolf has returned to near-healthy status, population-wise. The opening up of a wolf hunt in Idaho is poor management. The animal needs more time and to recover.
Another good example is the recent effort to draw attention to the plight of polar bears threatened by the disappearance of summer ice due to global warming. Some others are attention to frog populations as barometers of environmental health; the disappearance of frog populations, both in temporal and tropical areas, indicates there are many problems in the environment that should command our attention.
Of course, it should also be noted that we understand very little about the structure of the interconnected web of life to determine, beforehand through the use of some kind of rule, which species should command our attention, and whose perilous place should receive resources for saving. That shouldn't deter us from making the difficult decisions necessary for parsing out scarce resources of money, emotional energy, and intellectual effort, at making these determinations. In fact, we will never have the kind of understanding necessary to make these decisions as completely as we might like. We can only move forward with the information and understanding we have at any given moment.
I would also say that while I am hardly a fan of much of our social and political approach to western industrial society over the past two centuries, assigning blame here is both cheap and easy. It doesn't do anything to change our social practices that put stresses on the environment. I would also point out that while we have indeed made some strides, for the most part human societies do a poor job of preventive maintenance. Even when we know a problem may loom ahead of us, especially when these problems involve entrenched social interests endowed with a great deal of power, addressing them in a way that mitigates the coming ill-effects usually fails. For example, research during the 1970's showed pretty conclusively that the use of chlorofluorocarbons would result in depletion of the ozone layer, leading to an increase in ultraviolet radiation getting through, and creating a hazard for much of life. From the moment that research was released, the chemical industry went through a years-long, full-throated effort to discredit the research in an effort to stem the tide of possible legislation that would harm their economic interests.
When a hole in the ozone layer was discovered in the late 1980's, the global response was pretty rapid and coherent. It was, indeed, a remarkable example of the UN doing something right, and in the right way. Yet, had they done so a decade earlier, when the information was available that this result was coming, the effects may have been less severe (although, to be honest, we have no way of knowing that for sure). We didn't precisely because part of human society is the dubious, and morally frustrating, practice of politics.
This further complicates the way we address issues of global import. While we have made great strides, again, over the past fifty or sixty years not only in defining and addressing issues of global concern, but of raising the awareness of the global community to the necessity of shared, coordinated action, we still have a long way to go. An ethic of stewardship that is aware of the limitations of human political institutions and practices as they exist (rather than as we may prefer the exist, or as they might exist if only everyone were as intelligent and wise as we) is a necessary part of any such Christian ethic.
This is just a sketch, by the way, to point out to some folks that I am not arguing we human beings have no responsibility to "do something" about issues of environmental import. On the contrary, such a responsibility comes precisely from our being a part of creation, part of the natural world (and here I disagree whole-heartedly from Feodor's expressed idea that human beings are "removed" in some way from the global ecosystem; that just isn't possible). I believe, however, we should do it intelligently, thoughtfully, and with one eye always on the limitations inherent to it.
I took the point-of-view, offered by evolutionary biology, that species extinction is part of the mix.
That was the sum-total of what I was saying. There is no inherent, connoted moral argument one can make from the standpoint of evolutionary biology that we human beings have a duty to sustain all the endangered species on the planet.
On the other hand . . .
A Christian ethic stemming from an acceptance of creation as part of God's gracious love, and the special role human beings have been given for care of creation, usually discussed under the term "stewardship", would most certainly offer a way to approach discussing human responsibility for all of God's creatures.
Of course, an ethic of stewardship should not ignore evolutionary biology; on the contrary, it should embrace it. Yet, it should do so considering it a guide to intelligent and thoughtful stewardship, rather than willy-nilly placing blame and investing in saving every vanishing species on the planet. I mentioned one in the linked post, the gray wolf. That's a wonderful example of intelligent stewardship; hunted to near extinction for the crime of doing what it does, the gray wolf has returned to near-healthy status, population-wise. The opening up of a wolf hunt in Idaho is poor management. The animal needs more time and to recover.
Another good example is the recent effort to draw attention to the plight of polar bears threatened by the disappearance of summer ice due to global warming. Some others are attention to frog populations as barometers of environmental health; the disappearance of frog populations, both in temporal and tropical areas, indicates there are many problems in the environment that should command our attention.
Of course, it should also be noted that we understand very little about the structure of the interconnected web of life to determine, beforehand through the use of some kind of rule, which species should command our attention, and whose perilous place should receive resources for saving. That shouldn't deter us from making the difficult decisions necessary for parsing out scarce resources of money, emotional energy, and intellectual effort, at making these determinations. In fact, we will never have the kind of understanding necessary to make these decisions as completely as we might like. We can only move forward with the information and understanding we have at any given moment.
I would also say that while I am hardly a fan of much of our social and political approach to western industrial society over the past two centuries, assigning blame here is both cheap and easy. It doesn't do anything to change our social practices that put stresses on the environment. I would also point out that while we have indeed made some strides, for the most part human societies do a poor job of preventive maintenance. Even when we know a problem may loom ahead of us, especially when these problems involve entrenched social interests endowed with a great deal of power, addressing them in a way that mitigates the coming ill-effects usually fails. For example, research during the 1970's showed pretty conclusively that the use of chlorofluorocarbons would result in depletion of the ozone layer, leading to an increase in ultraviolet radiation getting through, and creating a hazard for much of life. From the moment that research was released, the chemical industry went through a years-long, full-throated effort to discredit the research in an effort to stem the tide of possible legislation that would harm their economic interests.
When a hole in the ozone layer was discovered in the late 1980's, the global response was pretty rapid and coherent. It was, indeed, a remarkable example of the UN doing something right, and in the right way. Yet, had they done so a decade earlier, when the information was available that this result was coming, the effects may have been less severe (although, to be honest, we have no way of knowing that for sure). We didn't precisely because part of human society is the dubious, and morally frustrating, practice of politics.
This further complicates the way we address issues of global import. While we have made great strides, again, over the past fifty or sixty years not only in defining and addressing issues of global concern, but of raising the awareness of the global community to the necessity of shared, coordinated action, we still have a long way to go. An ethic of stewardship that is aware of the limitations of human political institutions and practices as they exist (rather than as we may prefer the exist, or as they might exist if only everyone were as intelligent and wise as we) is a necessary part of any such Christian ethic.
This is just a sketch, by the way, to point out to some folks that I am not arguing we human beings have no responsibility to "do something" about issues of environmental import. On the contrary, such a responsibility comes precisely from our being a part of creation, part of the natural world (and here I disagree whole-heartedly from Feodor's expressed idea that human beings are "removed" in some way from the global ecosystem; that just isn't possible). I believe, however, we should do it intelligently, thoughtfully, and with one eye always on the limitations inherent to it.
Saturday Rock Show
Still glowing from Tuesday's show at the Vic. Porcupine Tree performed this song, with this video playing on the screen behind them.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Embarrassing, Anger-Producing - I Want To Use A Dirty Word To Describe Sen. Jon Kyl
Since it wouldn't be right to use a bad word in the title of a blog-post, I'll just use is here - Jon Kyl just made the biggest fucking doofus comment of the day. What an asshole.
While Sen. Stabenow's (D-MI) rejoinder is funny, a serious response might include changing the language to include parental leave, offering support for both mothers and fathers.
Does Kyl not realize how stupid we look around the globe thanks to comments like this?
KYL: I don’t need maternity care, and so requiring that to be in my insurance policy is something that I don’t need and will make the policy more expensive.
While Sen. Stabenow's (D-MI) rejoinder is funny, a serious response might include changing the language to include parental leave, offering support for both mothers and fathers.
Does Kyl not realize how stupid we look around the globe thanks to comments like this?
Nasty Things On The Internet Make Me Cry!
Shorter Michael Gerson:
Or something like that. To be honest, I'm not sure what his column meant, other than to whine about the fact that there are bigots out there who express their views.
Because the Nazis gave away radios, the internet should not allow people to say whatever they want.
Or something like that. To be honest, I'm not sure what his column meant, other than to whine about the fact that there are bigots out there who express their views.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Which Species Do We Save
Matt Yglesias discusses pandas. While I wonder whether or not it can be shown that pandas, like any other species has gone down an "evolutionary cul-de-sac", I do wonder sometimes if our worry over the exponentially-expanding extinction rate doesn't confuse our priorities somewhat.
When I took high school biology, my teacher made a cogent point - acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution includes the sobering reminder that extinction is part of the process; a new species may arise to fill a void in the ecosystem. Or, the ecosystem may be changing and whole new areas of opportunity for new species may be opening up even as older ones become redundant or harder to sustain. Even we human beings will go the way of the dodo, giant sloth, and Packard at some point.
There are species such as the gray wolf, hunted to near-extinction due to the fact that they acted like predators (shocking!) and hunted ranchers cattle and sheep, that deserve a shot at saving. On the other hand, there are species like the Giant Panda that receive an enormous amount of attention because they seem cute, but whose evolutionary path has led them to such a narrow place in the ecosystem that extinction may be inevitable, even with human intervention. While they have become the logo for the World Wildlife Fund, and efforts at captive breeding are only beginning to pay off after a generation in zoos in the west, I have to believe that, should we humans allow nature to run its course, they will probably be gone in a century or two. While lamentable on some level, on another it is the way of things.
This, of course, leads us to the whole issue of species extinction in general, and what we human beings should do about it. Trying to determine whether this or that species is "worth" saving, or if the dwindling numbers of that species is due in any correlative way to direct human action, can become a fool's game. Sometimes the lines of correlation (not to say causality) can become so intertwined and twisted that untangling them is more trouble than it's worth.
Accepting Darwin, even in his modified, early-21st century form, means accepting that all species will disappear, at some point. Sometimes, they even die out because another species wins the competition for food, space, and other resources. Human action that creates detrimental effects on other species should not, ipso facto, be considered outside the bounds of Darwin's theory. We do have a certain right (for lack of a better word) to ensure the survival of our own species; if opening more land for cultivation, or creating new spaces for more human beings to live creates hazards for other species, that is part of the process of natural selection, after all.
I realize I am probably ticking off more than a few folks with this, but it's just some food for thought.
When I took high school biology, my teacher made a cogent point - acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution includes the sobering reminder that extinction is part of the process; a new species may arise to fill a void in the ecosystem. Or, the ecosystem may be changing and whole new areas of opportunity for new species may be opening up even as older ones become redundant or harder to sustain. Even we human beings will go the way of the dodo, giant sloth, and Packard at some point.
There are species such as the gray wolf, hunted to near-extinction due to the fact that they acted like predators (shocking!) and hunted ranchers cattle and sheep, that deserve a shot at saving. On the other hand, there are species like the Giant Panda that receive an enormous amount of attention because they seem cute, but whose evolutionary path has led them to such a narrow place in the ecosystem that extinction may be inevitable, even with human intervention. While they have become the logo for the World Wildlife Fund, and efforts at captive breeding are only beginning to pay off after a generation in zoos in the west, I have to believe that, should we humans allow nature to run its course, they will probably be gone in a century or two. While lamentable on some level, on another it is the way of things.
This, of course, leads us to the whole issue of species extinction in general, and what we human beings should do about it. Trying to determine whether this or that species is "worth" saving, or if the dwindling numbers of that species is due in any correlative way to direct human action, can become a fool's game. Sometimes the lines of correlation (not to say causality) can become so intertwined and twisted that untangling them is more trouble than it's worth.
Accepting Darwin, even in his modified, early-21st century form, means accepting that all species will disappear, at some point. Sometimes, they even die out because another species wins the competition for food, space, and other resources. Human action that creates detrimental effects on other species should not, ipso facto, be considered outside the bounds of Darwin's theory. We do have a certain right (for lack of a better word) to ensure the survival of our own species; if opening more land for cultivation, or creating new spaces for more human beings to live creates hazards for other species, that is part of the process of natural selection, after all.
I realize I am probably ticking off more than a few folks with this, but it's just some food for thought.
I Dare Him UPDATE
I have decided I would like to call Neil out on something. He recently wrote the following:
I have written, up to this point, 2,240 blog posts - my, I do go on, don't I! - and I would invite Neil to go through all of them that deal with my thoughts on the Christian faith and point out, either in comments here, or on his own blog, in as much excruciating detail as he usually manages, where I have ever - EVER - said anything remotely outside a pretty traditional understanding of the Christian faith. Shoot, unlike a whole lot of liberal Christians, I accept the reality of the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the Trinitarian reality of God!
So, c'mon Neil. Man up. I do so want to read a detailed smackdown of my views of the Christian faith.
UPDATE: Hardly a surprise, but he's chickening out.
I'm not even sure what to make of this other than a confession of his own intellectual cowardice. At least he isn't hiding it.
I do appreciate your clarity, along with Geoffrey’s, that we have different religions. Mine is Christianity.
I have written, up to this point, 2,240 blog posts - my, I do go on, don't I! - and I would invite Neil to go through all of them that deal with my thoughts on the Christian faith and point out, either in comments here, or on his own blog, in as much excruciating detail as he usually manages, where I have ever - EVER - said anything remotely outside a pretty traditional understanding of the Christian faith. Shoot, unlike a whole lot of liberal Christians, I accept the reality of the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the Trinitarian reality of God!
So, c'mon Neil. Man up. I do so want to read a detailed smackdown of my views of the Christian faith.
UPDATE: Hardly a surprise, but he's chickening out.
Hi Geoffrey,
Thanks, but I’ve read plenty of your writings already. I subscribe to over 100 blogs, and yours and ER’s are not among them for a reason. Unless you have converted I don’t see the need to spend any more time on them. Here’s one summary from when you laid out the differences between our religions quite plainly — http://4simpsons.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/false-teacher-fesses-up/ . As I noted there, I really appreciated the clarity and your honesty in finally abandoning your lie that we could possibly be worshiping the same God.
I'm not even sure what to make of this other than a confession of his own intellectual cowardice. At least he isn't hiding it.
Sportsmanship
I love this story.
Because of a traffic accident, the Yellville-Summit team was down players, including one dead.
Morgan did the noble thing, the only right thing. He refused to take the easy score.
A troubled young man, Morgan is trying to get his life back together. I do hope this story gets him noticed, again, by some big-name schools. He deserves a shot, for no other reason than he understands what "sportsmanship" really means.
Thamail Morgan took the kickoff and headed up the field.
He was at the 20 ... 30 ... 40
He had been avoiding, dodging or just simply running through tacklers on the way. Football always had come easily for Morgan. This game was no different. By the time he hit midfield, only open space was ahead of him. The two-time Arkansas all-state selection was headed for a touchdown.
40 ... 30 ... 20
He glanced at the clock and saw the final seconds ticking away. He realized his team, Cave City, was on the way to a victory over Yellville-Summit, comfortably ahead, 34-16. He also realized two other things: This wasn't an ordinary game. And he wasn't the same Thamail Morgan.
When he reached the 2, he stopped. He took a few steps back and took a knee at the 5-yard line.
Because of a traffic accident, the Yellville-Summit team was down players, including one dead.
Morgan did the noble thing, the only right thing. He refused to take the easy score.
A troubled young man, Morgan is trying to get his life back together. I do hope this story gets him noticed, again, by some big-name schools. He deserves a shot, for no other reason than he understands what "sportsmanship" really means.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
This Is Disturbing
I read this and became sad. Of course, since all we know at the moment is that (a) the guy was a census worker; and (b) he was found with the word "Fed" written on his body, we have no way of knowing what was up. The kind of speculation I have read both at the Freeper site and on Facebook from both ends of the spectrum is meaningless.
The guy was lynched, pure and simple. Maybe by a nutter of the political variety, maybe by a meth-head (as common as fleas on a dog in most rural areas). Either way, right now, it's enough to just say that any murder is filled with sorrow.
The guy was lynched, pure and simple. Maybe by a nutter of the political variety, maybe by a meth-head (as common as fleas on a dog in most rural areas). Either way, right now, it's enough to just say that any murder is filled with sorrow.
"[N]one of these things seemed to have anything to do with Columbine"
David Leitch has a piece at TPMCafe Book Club on Columbine.
To be honest, I was a little put off by his opener, in which he announces he spent "a week" in Littleton, CO back in 2000 "looking for answers". A whole week! I hope his expense account wasn't overburdened.
As far as "looking for meaning", while I recognize the human tendency to seek a "lesson" in an event of the magnitude of the Columbine High School massacre, to want something as large and ugly as that to have something to tell us, I would insist that the recent revelations that pretty much everything we knew about the event is wrong - it was the result of a sociopathic folie a deux, an attempted bombing of the school cafeteria that went awry - should once and for all set aside any thought that events of monstrous evil have something to tell us, as individuals or society. They just are; wanting them to mean more, in the odd belief that the dead would have died in vain without some "good" being dragged from the rubble doesn't change that fact.
Leitch is relentless in his criticism of those who sought either to profit from the horror, or to put their own spin on "what it all means":
While the whores behind the "Cassie Bernall" story deserve no quarter, Marilyn Manson's expressed desire to "listen" at least has the virtue that he was expressing something that far too many weren't saying - that our youth need understanding rather than hectoring.
The ending of the piece is interesting.
Since you know there's no "there", you can, too, stop. This article is the end of your search, I think.
[T]here's a chasm between normal human understanding and what happened there. Confronted with the lack of recognizable human logic, we have provided our own, to make us feel better, to profit, to justify the way we see the world. If we are Christian, the shooting showed the imperative of others sharing our faith. If we were unpopular in high school, it cast a light on the dangerous petri dish of public schooling. If we believe in gun control, it reflected the recklessness of the gun lobby and our country's frightening obsession with firearms.
To be honest, I was a little put off by his opener, in which he announces he spent "a week" in Littleton, CO back in 2000 "looking for answers". A whole week! I hope his expense account wasn't overburdened.
As far as "looking for meaning", while I recognize the human tendency to seek a "lesson" in an event of the magnitude of the Columbine High School massacre, to want something as large and ugly as that to have something to tell us, I would insist that the recent revelations that pretty much everything we knew about the event is wrong - it was the result of a sociopathic folie a deux, an attempted bombing of the school cafeteria that went awry - should once and for all set aside any thought that events of monstrous evil have something to tell us, as individuals or society. They just are; wanting them to mean more, in the odd belief that the dead would have died in vain without some "good" being dragged from the rubble doesn't change that fact.
Leitch is relentless in his criticism of those who sought either to profit from the horror, or to put their own spin on "what it all means":
Columbine brought out the worst in everyone. The famed story of Cassie Bernall, the "She said yes" martyr supposedly killed because she professed her faith in God, was quickly debunked, but that didn't stop publishers--who knew about problems with the story long before publication--from rushing a book by Bernall's mom into production. (It sold over a million copies.) Cultural commentators from Jerry Falwell to Eddie Vedder took advantage of America's hysteria to shoehorn the incident into a promotion of their own agenda. At least twelve different films have been inspired by Columbine, each with its own interpretation--from Gus Van Sant's "They were into violent video games ... and secretly gay!" in Elephant to Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, which allowed Marilyn Manson to bemoan that he would have listened to Eric and Dylan, "and that's what no one did." Everybody had something to say, even though none of them had the slightest idea what they were talking about.
While the whores behind the "Cassie Bernall" story deserve no quarter, Marilyn Manson's expressed desire to "listen" at least has the virtue that he was expressing something that far too many weren't saying - that our youth need understanding rather than hectoring.
The ending of the piece is interesting.
I want answers. I know I won't find them. But I want them, nevertheless. I can't stop looking for them.
Since you know there's no "there", you can, too, stop. This article is the end of your search, I think.
The Show, Part II - Porcupine Tree
Their latest release contains a single, 55-minute piece of music. Earlier works are a 36:00 meandering combination of hard-edged guitar work, lilting acoustic work, and the kind of electronic keyboard sounds one associates with Pink Floyd at their trippiest. They also have songs that blister the ear drums, sounding more like Tool than anything else.
Often compartmentalized with bands like Radiohead and Marillion, Porcupine Tree is really just band-leader Steven Wilson's outlet for his musically fertile imagination. The fans crammed in to the Vic - and it was freakin' hot in there, more air would have been nice - while appreciating Kings X no end, was there for Porcupine Tree. I would have loved to see a two-hour set by Kings X, all on their own, but when PT came out, and blasted the opening of The Incident through the PA (which was either too large, too heavy, or both to be suspended from the ceiling, so was sitting on the stage; the folks on the floor could feel the sound) we erupted in sheer joy.
Live, the band projects a (good) weird vibe. Leader Wilson, who plays barefoot, seemed oddly reserved, almost shy. Keyboardist Richard Barbieri, for all that he creates moods at turns sinister, frightening, and soothing through his rack of keyboards, complete with iMac, looks more like a technician than a musician. Drummer Gavin Harrison's trap set is large, diverse, and he sits behind it, head hanging down listening for the cues for his breaks, his attention all on what comes through his wedges. Bassist Colin Edwin seems to enjoy nothing more than playing. When the music builds up to a release he really likes, you can see the smile on his face, then his eyes close very briefly, and he moves very slightly - I was impressed by Edwin more than any of the musicians because he seemed to appreciate the music more without having any need for histrionics of any kind.
I've been rocked at concerts many times. Musically, however, this was the single best concert I've seen. For all the first part of the show was completely new music (and they debuted another song off the new album last night, asking for audience indulgence because they needed to concentrate really hard), the entire show seemed, to me at least, flawless (except for something going wrong with Wilson's acoustic guitar at some point), the music by turns flowing out then suddenly beating the audience over the head. They ended their encore with "Trains", after announcing they would be back through Chicago on the second leg of their tour, sometime in the winter. If I had to guess, I would say that most of the people there last night will be back.
They performed this song last night, Wilson pointing his guitar at bassist Edwin who smiled and played the opening riff, his head moving ever so slightly to the rhythm. "Strip the Soul" is its name:
Often compartmentalized with bands like Radiohead and Marillion, Porcupine Tree is really just band-leader Steven Wilson's outlet for his musically fertile imagination. The fans crammed in to the Vic - and it was freakin' hot in there, more air would have been nice - while appreciating Kings X no end, was there for Porcupine Tree. I would have loved to see a two-hour set by Kings X, all on their own, but when PT came out, and blasted the opening of The Incident through the PA (which was either too large, too heavy, or both to be suspended from the ceiling, so was sitting on the stage; the folks on the floor could feel the sound) we erupted in sheer joy.
Live, the band projects a (good) weird vibe. Leader Wilson, who plays barefoot, seemed oddly reserved, almost shy. Keyboardist Richard Barbieri, for all that he creates moods at turns sinister, frightening, and soothing through his rack of keyboards, complete with iMac, looks more like a technician than a musician. Drummer Gavin Harrison's trap set is large, diverse, and he sits behind it, head hanging down listening for the cues for his breaks, his attention all on what comes through his wedges. Bassist Colin Edwin seems to enjoy nothing more than playing. When the music builds up to a release he really likes, you can see the smile on his face, then his eyes close very briefly, and he moves very slightly - I was impressed by Edwin more than any of the musicians because he seemed to appreciate the music more without having any need for histrionics of any kind.
I've been rocked at concerts many times. Musically, however, this was the single best concert I've seen. For all the first part of the show was completely new music (and they debuted another song off the new album last night, asking for audience indulgence because they needed to concentrate really hard), the entire show seemed, to me at least, flawless (except for something going wrong with Wilson's acoustic guitar at some point), the music by turns flowing out then suddenly beating the audience over the head. They ended their encore with "Trains", after announcing they would be back through Chicago on the second leg of their tour, sometime in the winter. If I had to guess, I would say that most of the people there last night will be back.
They performed this song last night, Wilson pointing his guitar at bassist Edwin who smiled and played the opening riff, his head moving ever so slightly to the rhythm. "Strip the Soul" is its name:
The Show, Part I - Kings X
"We're Kings X, if you haven't heard, and we're here to kick your ass." Lead singer and bassist Doug Pinnock offered this view of their role as opening act for Porcupine Tree last night. Indeed, they did. A quarter century ago, a friend of mine told me about this awesome band from Texas, that I needed to check them out. I hate to admit that while I knew I should like them, and I wanted to like them, it just isn't the kind of thing I can really dig. Rooted in punk and a late-70's hard rock aesthetic (I know that sounds like an odd combination, but after you check them out, I think you'll see it's accurate), the power trio is the most underappreciated rock band out there. They should be as huge as U2, the Rolling Stones, and R.E.M. Pegged as a "Christian band" because, lyrically, the band flirted with certain spiritual themes, they were consigned to a ghetto. Musicians and hard core fans, however, know there is more to them than this, and love them because they are a band with no frills, just chops accompanied by Pinnock's amazing voice (at one point he hit notes Mariah Carey couldn't have reached!). They ended the show with this old but awesome ode to the only thing that mattered to the folks crammed in to the Vic Theater, "Over My Head":
I felt bad, however, because the only glaring technical issue was with Pinnock's microphone. They had been sound-checking it right up to the moment the band came out, and it still wasn't working right through the first song; by about half-way through the second number whatever bug was there was squashed, and the show was so tight and blistering you could forgive the roadies for not getting it all cleared up.
I felt bad, however, because the only glaring technical issue was with Pinnock's microphone. They had been sound-checking it right up to the moment the band came out, and it still wasn't working right through the first song; by about half-way through the second number whatever bug was there was squashed, and the show was so tight and blistering you could forgive the roadies for not getting it all cleared up.
Monday, September 21, 2009
For Crying Out Loud
Tbogg reports that there are humorless idiots out there who call themselves Christian (I refuse to link to gateway pundit, but the original link is at Tbogg).
Which should be taken seriously.
Of course, these same people get worried about this kind of thing, too:
Which is a way better song than the one Tbogg posted.
Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft took valuable time off from hating on negro people to report this very important thing:It's Come to This... Music Awards Show Audience Holds Hands & Prays to Devil
Jack Black led the MTV Music Awards audience join in a prayer to the devil.
Which should be taken seriously.
Of course, these same people get worried about this kind of thing, too:
Which is a way better song than the one Tbogg posted.
Will The Church Survive?
Part of what prompted last week's little preachy outburst was the announcement by my seminary alma mater of a guest speaker who manages to be "popular" by publishing books pointing out the obvious. Another part of it was the meta-critique of a dear friend of mine that the mainstream church is quite literally dying - aging itself out of existence, really - and the kind of stuff on display at WTS is a shuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic as professor of mine in college used to say.
That the mainline denominations are, and have been for some time, in trouble is beyond dispute. The example of my home church is typical. A quarter-century ago, it was a thriving, lively congregation, with a busy schedule, youth programs, choirs of all sorts, Bible studies, and worship attendance was edging upward.
It doesn't exist anymore.
I usually console myself thinking of the Wesleyan Covenant Prayer, part of which reads, "Let me be put aside for thee." When I received word that the congregation had folded and the property had been sold, I told Lisa, with far more conviction than I felt, that perhaps it was just that a Wesleyan witness in Sayre, PA had run its course, and God might be doing a new thing there.
Actually, I'm still sad.
Yet, I also believe that even if the entire Christian Church, in all its various forms and disguises died out, God would still be God, and the stones might just cry out. In general, while the old mainline churches struggle for a way to define themselves - which is odd - overseas, such as in Africa, the church is thriving. South America is also a lively ground for the Christian Church, in many flavors from liberationist communities to fundamentalist enclaves to the Seventh Day Adventists.
While I think it a bit tiresome for US Mainline denominations to continue to struggle with issues of identity, and to promote the kind of mindlessness that Wesley Seminary is promulgating by featuring this boob at a conference (an institution of higher learning should host serious people with something interesting to say), it is nevertheless true, I think, that even should mainline churches go the way of First UMC, Sayre, PA, the church will continue. It may not be recognizable, to be sure. But it will be, because God isn't finished with us yet.
That the mainline denominations are, and have been for some time, in trouble is beyond dispute. The example of my home church is typical. A quarter-century ago, it was a thriving, lively congregation, with a busy schedule, youth programs, choirs of all sorts, Bible studies, and worship attendance was edging upward.
It doesn't exist anymore.
I usually console myself thinking of the Wesleyan Covenant Prayer, part of which reads, "Let me be put aside for thee." When I received word that the congregation had folded and the property had been sold, I told Lisa, with far more conviction than I felt, that perhaps it was just that a Wesleyan witness in Sayre, PA had run its course, and God might be doing a new thing there.
Actually, I'm still sad.
Yet, I also believe that even if the entire Christian Church, in all its various forms and disguises died out, God would still be God, and the stones might just cry out. In general, while the old mainline churches struggle for a way to define themselves - which is odd - overseas, such as in Africa, the church is thriving. South America is also a lively ground for the Christian Church, in many flavors from liberationist communities to fundamentalist enclaves to the Seventh Day Adventists.
While I think it a bit tiresome for US Mainline denominations to continue to struggle with issues of identity, and to promote the kind of mindlessness that Wesley Seminary is promulgating by featuring this boob at a conference (an institution of higher learning should host serious people with something interesting to say), it is nevertheless true, I think, that even should mainline churches go the way of First UMC, Sayre, PA, the church will continue. It may not be recognizable, to be sure. But it will be, because God isn't finished with us yet.
Music For Your Monday
I owe this one to Kirsten. She went to the Oklahoma City Philharmonic's opening night performance, and along with Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (which, among many other notable things, was used to open Yes concerts for years) included Anton Dvorak's cello concerto in B minor. I hadn't heard it - a person can't hear everything! - but I found it, and it is a marvelous example of romantic orchestral music. All that tension and release, don't you know . . .
So, thanks, Kirsten, for the information. I have discovered yet another wonderful piece of music I now have to spend money to call my own! I thought I'd share it with those not fortunate enough to get to the OKC Philharmonic on Saturday.
For those who like to know who the players are, that's Paul Fournier on cello, performing with the Orchestre National de l'ORTF, Sergiu Celibidache conducting.
So, thanks, Kirsten, for the information. I have discovered yet another wonderful piece of music I now have to spend money to call my own! I thought I'd share it with those not fortunate enough to get to the OKC Philharmonic on Saturday.
For those who like to know who the players are, that's Paul Fournier on cello, performing with the Orchestre National de l'ORTF, Sergiu Celibidache conducting.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Things That Go Bump In The Night
A couple years back I stumbled across a video on YouTube that purported to show all sorts of ghostly activity. I have always been interested in that kind of thing, and was disappointed that the video was a compilation of crap and fake stuff. I felt a bit redeemed, however, because over the course of searching for something really good, I stumbled upon the Syfy show Ghost Hunters, which is a hoot and a half, and offers the occasional moment where you have to go, "Hmm".
For the most part, I think the vast majority of claims of "hauntings" and what not are hooey. Yet, having experienced a thing or two myself, I have a mind that is open to the possibility that there is something to the claims of interaction between our physical environment and energies that can be called, for lack of a better word, spiritual. I would like to know - have you ever had an experience that left you baffled, maybe even a little frightened? No aspersion are to be cast on the character of the person posting; this is a request for reporting information, not an excuse to talk about how silly "ghost stories" are.
For the most part, I think the vast majority of claims of "hauntings" and what not are hooey. Yet, having experienced a thing or two myself, I have a mind that is open to the possibility that there is something to the claims of interaction between our physical environment and energies that can be called, for lack of a better word, spiritual. I would like to know - have you ever had an experience that left you baffled, maybe even a little frightened? No aspersion are to be cast on the character of the person posting; this is a request for reporting information, not an excuse to talk about how silly "ghost stories" are.
Reflecting On Mirrors
I purchased the horror film Mirrors, starring Keifer Sutherland as a down-and-out New York City police detective who discovers some very odd, then horrible, things happening in the mirrors of a burned-out department store where he works a night watchman.
On one level, the movie is so trite and cliche-ridden, it makes the viewer yawn, from the whole "struggling alcoholic ex-cop on the outs with his wife" to the "I'm not crazy I'm really seeing this stuff!" dialogue. On another level, it relies on a recurring theme - mirrors as portals through which evil entities can enter our world. John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness used this particular bit, as did the Keanu Reeves movie Constantine. In Mirrors, a young girl misdiagnosed as schizophrenic is forced by a therapist to sit in a round room of mirrors, described as an "experimental therapy". Of course, the girl is actually possessed, and somehow the demon is trapped in the mirrors.
The hospital is closed after a bizarre and horrific mass murder, and turned in to a department store, which was burned five years prior. A security guard is convicted on the crime, but insists in testimony that "the mirrors did it". The film opens, in fact, with a man running through the Lenox Ave. subway stop, breaking in to a locked room, only to have his mirror image slash its throat; the man dies (of course) as the mirror image watches.
So, on one level the film offers pretty traditional horror-film stuff. There is one scene, however - the murder of Sutherland's long-suffering sister (with whom he rooms as he tries to get his life put back together) by her mirror image - that is probably the most gruesome scene I have ever watched in a main-stream horror movie. What is even more surprising than the scene itself is that it doesn't come across as gratuitous. I was glad, however, I wasn't eating when the scene came on.
There are some obvious scenes designed to make the viewer jump is surprise, and even though one is dragged by the nose to them, they are done so well I jumped even though I knew they were coming.
The most arresting scene in the movie, however, is one in which Sutherland's estranged wife, calling their son out of his room (where he had been sitting cross-legged talking to his mirror; previous scenes had established that whatever possessed the mirrors at the department store had migrated to his bedroom); he gets up and we peer over her shoulder as his reflection stays seated, staring at her. That scene still gives me chills.
I bought the film because (a) I enjoy horror films, even predictable ones; and (b) for all that they are nothing more than "glass and silver" as Sutherland's doomed sister says, mirrors are an intriguing thing to me. Late Victorian/Edwardian occultist Aleister Crowley, it is said, spent decades attempting to make his image disappear from mirrors. In a world and culture in which images of all sorts flicker around us, we are taught to trust images with the use of mirrors. Yet, mirror images are not trustworthy. They are a reversal of reality. Our trust in our reflected image is misplaced. Adding to the issue of trust in images comes the weird (to me, anyway) juxtaposition of a film, which is nothing more than 24-still-fames-per-second flashing before our eyes, about the possibility that images are not trustworthy. Film is the most malleable medium available. Actors portray people they are not, indeed people who have never existed. They have their features changed by makeup and prosthetics. The lighting and sound is artificial; even the setting is usually artificial, said artificiality enhanced these days by computer technology.
The funny thing is that, when I was younger, I wondered about the relationship between mirrors and reality. We stand and look in a mirror, and we see the images of object behind us. We learned, early in life, that these images are accurate representations of the world around us, only backwards. Yet, how is that possible? How is it possible that a mirror shows us what we cannot, on our own, see?
Of course, physics has the answer to this question, and I accept that answer, which makes my own somewhat philosophical wonderment at mirrors and their images silly. Mirrors are, indeed, nothing more than silver and glass; the images are nothing more than light reflections.
The next time you are standing there, shaving, brushing your hair or teeth, making sure your collar is straight and turned out, just remember - nothing is looking back at you.
Maybe.
On one level, the movie is so trite and cliche-ridden, it makes the viewer yawn, from the whole "struggling alcoholic ex-cop on the outs with his wife" to the "I'm not crazy I'm really seeing this stuff!" dialogue. On another level, it relies on a recurring theme - mirrors as portals through which evil entities can enter our world. John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness used this particular bit, as did the Keanu Reeves movie Constantine. In Mirrors, a young girl misdiagnosed as schizophrenic is forced by a therapist to sit in a round room of mirrors, described as an "experimental therapy". Of course, the girl is actually possessed, and somehow the demon is trapped in the mirrors.
The hospital is closed after a bizarre and horrific mass murder, and turned in to a department store, which was burned five years prior. A security guard is convicted on the crime, but insists in testimony that "the mirrors did it". The film opens, in fact, with a man running through the Lenox Ave. subway stop, breaking in to a locked room, only to have his mirror image slash its throat; the man dies (of course) as the mirror image watches.
So, on one level the film offers pretty traditional horror-film stuff. There is one scene, however - the murder of Sutherland's long-suffering sister (with whom he rooms as he tries to get his life put back together) by her mirror image - that is probably the most gruesome scene I have ever watched in a main-stream horror movie. What is even more surprising than the scene itself is that it doesn't come across as gratuitous. I was glad, however, I wasn't eating when the scene came on.
There are some obvious scenes designed to make the viewer jump is surprise, and even though one is dragged by the nose to them, they are done so well I jumped even though I knew they were coming.
The most arresting scene in the movie, however, is one in which Sutherland's estranged wife, calling their son out of his room (where he had been sitting cross-legged talking to his mirror; previous scenes had established that whatever possessed the mirrors at the department store had migrated to his bedroom); he gets up and we peer over her shoulder as his reflection stays seated, staring at her. That scene still gives me chills.
I bought the film because (a) I enjoy horror films, even predictable ones; and (b) for all that they are nothing more than "glass and silver" as Sutherland's doomed sister says, mirrors are an intriguing thing to me. Late Victorian/Edwardian occultist Aleister Crowley, it is said, spent decades attempting to make his image disappear from mirrors. In a world and culture in which images of all sorts flicker around us, we are taught to trust images with the use of mirrors. Yet, mirror images are not trustworthy. They are a reversal of reality. Our trust in our reflected image is misplaced. Adding to the issue of trust in images comes the weird (to me, anyway) juxtaposition of a film, which is nothing more than 24-still-fames-per-second flashing before our eyes, about the possibility that images are not trustworthy. Film is the most malleable medium available. Actors portray people they are not, indeed people who have never existed. They have their features changed by makeup and prosthetics. The lighting and sound is artificial; even the setting is usually artificial, said artificiality enhanced these days by computer technology.
The funny thing is that, when I was younger, I wondered about the relationship between mirrors and reality. We stand and look in a mirror, and we see the images of object behind us. We learned, early in life, that these images are accurate representations of the world around us, only backwards. Yet, how is that possible? How is it possible that a mirror shows us what we cannot, on our own, see?
Of course, physics has the answer to this question, and I accept that answer, which makes my own somewhat philosophical wonderment at mirrors and their images silly. Mirrors are, indeed, nothing more than silver and glass; the images are nothing more than light reflections.
The next time you are standing there, shaving, brushing your hair or teeth, making sure your collar is straight and turned out, just remember - nothing is looking back at you.
Maybe.
Intellectual Contortionist
I am no fan of pornography, by any means. It cheapens sex, reduces it not so much to something dirty and horrible, but makes of something profound and complex something far more mechanical and uninteresting. Not to mention the broken lives of the "performers" flickering on the screen, it robs sex of its mystery, its beauty.
Having said that (and I could say much more), I wonder about this guy:
Hazarding a guess, I think he is referring to the fact that, especially for adolescent boys, viewing pornography might lead them (horror of horrors) to touch themselves. If an adolescent boy feels free to touch his own penis in a sexual manner, who's to say he might not be willing to touch another boy's penis the same way? In other words, it's a straight line from wanking in the bathroom to the copy of Penthouse sneaked out of Dad's sock drawer to listening to show tunes.
Since masturbation among males is about as common as breathing, even though most adolescent boys seem to think there is something odd or dirty about it, I think the notion that masturbation leads to gay sex just doesn't pass the smart test. After all, we'd all be gay. We're not.
Part of the problem is that far too many anti-gay folks think it's all about the sex. They just cannot conceive of the possibility that a man can be not just sexually aroused by and attracted to another man, but have an emotional attachment to another man the way the vast majority of us feel about women. I have to laugh whenever I hear about "the gay lifestyle" because what I think of is two men or women sitting around the kitchen, talking about their day, paying bills, cleaning the house, arguing over who took the trash out last, and wondering why their socks keep getting mixed up when they sort laundry. For some reason - well, I think I understand the whole attraction-repulsion thing - anti-gay folks obsess over the physical aspect of same-sex relationships to the exclusion of everything else. Gay couples are just couples, and for the most part sex is an important yet hardly the most important part of their bond.
As far as porn=masturbation=gay, all I can wonder about is the speaker's experience. Does he harbor these kinds of thoughts? I really have to wonder.
Having said that (and I could say much more), I wonder about this guy:
He said, “all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.” You know, that’s a, that’s a good comment. It’s a good point and it’s a good thing to teach young people.
Hazarding a guess, I think he is referring to the fact that, especially for adolescent boys, viewing pornography might lead them (horror of horrors) to touch themselves. If an adolescent boy feels free to touch his own penis in a sexual manner, who's to say he might not be willing to touch another boy's penis the same way? In other words, it's a straight line from wanking in the bathroom to the copy of Penthouse sneaked out of Dad's sock drawer to listening to show tunes.
Since masturbation among males is about as common as breathing, even though most adolescent boys seem to think there is something odd or dirty about it, I think the notion that masturbation leads to gay sex just doesn't pass the smart test. After all, we'd all be gay. We're not.
Part of the problem is that far too many anti-gay folks think it's all about the sex. They just cannot conceive of the possibility that a man can be not just sexually aroused by and attracted to another man, but have an emotional attachment to another man the way the vast majority of us feel about women. I have to laugh whenever I hear about "the gay lifestyle" because what I think of is two men or women sitting around the kitchen, talking about their day, paying bills, cleaning the house, arguing over who took the trash out last, and wondering why their socks keep getting mixed up when they sort laundry. For some reason - well, I think I understand the whole attraction-repulsion thing - anti-gay folks obsess over the physical aspect of same-sex relationships to the exclusion of everything else. Gay couples are just couples, and for the most part sex is an important yet hardly the most important part of their bond.
As far as porn=masturbation=gay, all I can wonder about is the speaker's experience. Does he harbor these kinds of thoughts? I really have to wonder.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Why Neil Annoys Me So Much
My previous post should make clear why the gobbledygook on display at Neil Simpson's blog is, quite literally, meaningless for me.
It is far too easy to take a Bible verse and say, "See? See? It's in the Bible!" Everything is in the Bible - infinite compassion and intrigue and murder; incest and sacrificial love; the demand for stringent ethical norms and the display of horrific amorality. One need not go far to find the affirmation of pretty much anything one wants to find.
The idea that this is the sum total of "belief" is nonsenical. The idea that what Neil thinks of as "logic" and "argument" has any force is ludicrous. It is obvious to anyone with any understanding of the centrality of grace - the Gospel message of God's presence incarnate in Jesus Christ as the embodiment of God's infinite love - that it is absent from Neil's earnest and wrongheaded attempts to set us liberals free from our error. As Alan has said repeatedly, for Neil, God is Santa Claus (and, I would add, a 19th-century school teacher who wants us to memorize various things because that is what "learning" is), and Neil wants to make sure his followers get a bunch of presents on Christmas morning.
It is far too easy to take a Bible verse and say, "See? See? It's in the Bible!" Everything is in the Bible - infinite compassion and intrigue and murder; incest and sacrificial love; the demand for stringent ethical norms and the display of horrific amorality. One need not go far to find the affirmation of pretty much anything one wants to find.
The idea that this is the sum total of "belief" is nonsenical. The idea that what Neil thinks of as "logic" and "argument" has any force is ludicrous. It is obvious to anyone with any understanding of the centrality of grace - the Gospel message of God's presence incarnate in Jesus Christ as the embodiment of God's infinite love - that it is absent from Neil's earnest and wrongheaded attempts to set us liberals free from our error. As Alan has said repeatedly, for Neil, God is Santa Claus (and, I would add, a 19th-century school teacher who wants us to memorize various things because that is what "learning" is), and Neil wants to make sure his followers get a bunch of presents on Christmas morning.
I Get Preachy On Facebook And Expand On It Here
I wrote this yesterday, and posted a link to it on Facebook. A friend of mine was kind enough to write a well-thought-out, meta-critique, not of my position per se, but of the church as an institution and how its many dysfunctions are leading it down a path toward oblivion.
I responded as follows:
I realized after I wrote it that I had been standing on a bit of a soapbox. I also realized, somewhat shamefacedly, that the position I had spelled out was far more mystical than anything else. Rather than try to plumb the depths of various dogmatic statements or creedal formulas, I was offering a view of the Christian life that sees hope and possibility not in a retreat in to our ecclesial enclaves, but in the ecstatic, mundane, and even horrific events around us.
In a recent conversation with Feodor, he wrote:
I think that my view of a life of faith - one that sees God's grace suffusing all of life, explains why I am not a "moralist" in the traditional sense. Rather than make some kind of lengthy argument as to why this or that position is more ethical than another, I begin with the assumption that whether or not we can or do hold some kind of moral standard is beside the point. I assume that God's presence sets aside our petty concerns with "right" and "wrong"; God wants us to realize that the greatest elemental force in the Universe isn't gravity, but love. It's the glue that holds all the craziness together. It can be seen, if we open our eyes, everywhere.
This, obviously, does not erase the need to seek justice, to decry inhumanity, to comfort the afflicted with the promise that God seeks their full humanity. On the contrary, doing all this and more rests precisely on the realization that, as a God of love and life, we are to do these things and more with more urgency than ever. There isn't an argument one can make about this, though. Sitting around and discussing the hypostatic union, or the nature of the immanent versus economic Trinity is as meaningless as sitting around and discussing Platonic forms. Rather than sitting around and making a case as to why this particular belief in God as a God of infinite desire for creation, this understanding drives one to live it.
I responded as follows:
Well, on a general level, I'd say yes. There are pockets of hope. Not to brag too much but PGUMC grows every year, has a vigorous youth program, a very large portion of members are roughly from mid-20's to mid-50's - families all. Lisa and I, at 43 and 41, are about average, age-wise, maybe even a tad to the old side of the mean.
I agree with you that the Church is doing far too little far too late in many instances, and the kind of shallow garbage being peddled at Wesley Seminary at this conference is not a sign of vigorous life. At the same time, the issue itself is, I believe, a vital one - it speaks to the possibility of seeing grace quite literally everywhere, divorcing it from dogmatic formulas and the stale and sterile proclamations of too many dead white men, and gives it a living presence. When we no longer feel the need to create little enclaves of holiness, but see the Holy even in the horrific, not to mention the mundane; when we can teach others this isn't something special or weird, but a possibility of a faith that is open to the whole world - maybe, just maybe we might be taking a step away from the abyss. It isn't everything, and there are far too many ingrained bad habits in the church to believe that they can be shed overnight, or even in a relatively short period of time. Yet, I believe, the radical affirmation of life, of the world, of all of us in all the different ways we live and love and fear and rage and die is the first step toward true holiness of heart.
I realized after I wrote it that I had been standing on a bit of a soapbox. I also realized, somewhat shamefacedly, that the position I had spelled out was far more mystical than anything else. Rather than try to plumb the depths of various dogmatic statements or creedal formulas, I was offering a view of the Christian life that sees hope and possibility not in a retreat in to our ecclesial enclaves, but in the ecstatic, mundane, and even horrific events around us.
In a recent conversation with Feodor, he wrote:
you rarely take the moralist stance when it comes to systemic analysis, contra Lasch.
I had thought that we split because I seek the moralist (categorizing) line in analysis and you like to rub it out.
So when you say you "don't" consider yourself a moralist, that strikes true to me, at least in terms of systemic thinking.
That's why I quipped that it's odd that you would so take to Lasch.
I think that my view of a life of faith - one that sees God's grace suffusing all of life, explains why I am not a "moralist" in the traditional sense. Rather than make some kind of lengthy argument as to why this or that position is more ethical than another, I begin with the assumption that whether or not we can or do hold some kind of moral standard is beside the point. I assume that God's presence sets aside our petty concerns with "right" and "wrong"; God wants us to realize that the greatest elemental force in the Universe isn't gravity, but love. It's the glue that holds all the craziness together. It can be seen, if we open our eyes, everywhere.
This, obviously, does not erase the need to seek justice, to decry inhumanity, to comfort the afflicted with the promise that God seeks their full humanity. On the contrary, doing all this and more rests precisely on the realization that, as a God of love and life, we are to do these things and more with more urgency than ever. There isn't an argument one can make about this, though. Sitting around and discussing the hypostatic union, or the nature of the immanent versus economic Trinity is as meaningless as sitting around and discussing Platonic forms. Rather than sitting around and making a case as to why this particular belief in God as a God of infinite desire for creation, this understanding drives one to live it.
Friday, September 18, 2009
I Blame Wesley Seminary
See, I thought I'd recommend this, which was announced on Facebook yesterday. I was chided for it, and I have to agree, for the most part, with the criticism. I would take the criticism a step further. While I will be honest enough to admit that I have not read the books in question, I will also say (in my own defense) that I have seen most of them (the one on U2 not so much, but it's more recent), and I have pushed them aside as I searched the stacks for something worth reading.
This does not mean the issue is uninteresting or unimportant. On the contrary! It is part of what lies behind this blog! Yet, on the merits, the works offered by the guest speaker sound neither interesting nor of any substantive, intellectual, or theological depth.
Finding a spiritual core in the songs of U2 doesn't take a Ph.D., I know; expounding on them, however, and the opportunities they offer might require a bit more than, "Oh, by! Bono just sang about Jesus!"
For me, I can find hints of the Gospel message in just about anything; after all, God loved the world, you know. This world. The one we live in. This world full of laughter and new babies and genocide and racism and starvation and old couples walking hand-in-hand down the street and young couples snogging in parks and illegal wars and innocent people murdered by governments and first loves and flowers - all of it and more. God loves it as it is. God doesn't love it as it should be. He just loves it. He loves it enough to let everyone know what that love is like. It is a love that is willing to die for all of it rather than let it collapse into nothingness.
God is in every song ever song, every poem ever read, every painting ever put on canvas. God is in the worst moments of our collective lives, and those rare moments when we discover what "eternity" means when we first look in to the eyes of our newborn child. God is there, period. This isn't anything particularly radical, and it shouldn't be surprising. Sitting around and discussing the notion that there are religious themes in the music of U2 is probably enough to make most anyone yawn; sitting around and contemplating the Gospel in Judas Priest, say, or the abstractions of a Pollock or even Mondrian - that might be far more interesting, and it might even be a game changer (although, not necessarily in the case of Pollock; I mean, this is a guy who painted feelings, for crying out loud, and if God isn't in those paintings, then Jesus died for nothing, as far as I'm concerned).
So, yeah, the choice Wesley made in this instance isn't really all that noteworthy, at least as far as speakers go. The theme, though, is not only interesting, it is important. I just wish there were those who could articulate a far deeper vision of the penetration of the Spirit in our collective popular and high culture. Maybe, "The Gospel According the Black Sabbath"?
This does not mean the issue is uninteresting or unimportant. On the contrary! It is part of what lies behind this blog! Yet, on the merits, the works offered by the guest speaker sound neither interesting nor of any substantive, intellectual, or theological depth.
Finding a spiritual core in the songs of U2 doesn't take a Ph.D., I know; expounding on them, however, and the opportunities they offer might require a bit more than, "Oh, by! Bono just sang about Jesus!"
For me, I can find hints of the Gospel message in just about anything; after all, God loved the world, you know. This world. The one we live in. This world full of laughter and new babies and genocide and racism and starvation and old couples walking hand-in-hand down the street and young couples snogging in parks and illegal wars and innocent people murdered by governments and first loves and flowers - all of it and more. God loves it as it is. God doesn't love it as it should be. He just loves it. He loves it enough to let everyone know what that love is like. It is a love that is willing to die for all of it rather than let it collapse into nothingness.
God is in every song ever song, every poem ever read, every painting ever put on canvas. God is in the worst moments of our collective lives, and those rare moments when we discover what "eternity" means when we first look in to the eyes of our newborn child. God is there, period. This isn't anything particularly radical, and it shouldn't be surprising. Sitting around and discussing the notion that there are religious themes in the music of U2 is probably enough to make most anyone yawn; sitting around and contemplating the Gospel in Judas Priest, say, or the abstractions of a Pollock or even Mondrian - that might be far more interesting, and it might even be a game changer (although, not necessarily in the case of Pollock; I mean, this is a guy who painted feelings, for crying out loud, and if God isn't in those paintings, then Jesus died for nothing, as far as I'm concerned).
So, yeah, the choice Wesley made in this instance isn't really all that noteworthy, at least as far as speakers go. The theme, though, is not only interesting, it is important. I just wish there were those who could articulate a far deeper vision of the penetration of the Spirit in our collective popular and high culture. Maybe, "The Gospel According the Black Sabbath"?
Thursday, September 17, 2009
"Before the GOP finds a new leader, it will need a new vocabulary.": Sam Tannenhaus On The Crisis Of Conservatism
With a hat-tip to Frank on Facebook (no link in order to preserve his sanity), I see Sam Tannanhaus (whose biography of Whittaker Chambers is worthy of a chuckle or two) is saying now what I've been saying for the better part of three years.
While I think the role of "intellectuals" is far more peripheral than Tannenhaus would insist it should be, nevertheless his central point should have been clear to any observer of our national politics since 2005 or so.
Coming down squarely in a modern conservative tradition rooted in Buckley's attempt to wed a certain Catholic sensibility to an political philosophy largely foreign to the American experience, Tannenhaus forgot one of Buckley's other achievements. Far more than almost any other conservative leader in their years in the wilderness, Buckley rooted out anti-Semitism from post-WWII American anti-liberalism.
While the picture of Chambers Tannenhaus draws is more than a little generous - I cannot picture the bloated, alcoholic, former Communist who managed to slander Alger Hiss (and the entire American foreign policy establishment in the process) sitting around and reading French novels - his take on the very sorry state of contemporary conservatism is spot on. It is nice that some, at least, on the right are noticing this fact, even if there is little, at the moment to commend this view to the too-public voices of the American right.
This is the crisis now facing the right and principal reason I wrote this book. The movement has exhausted itself and depleted its resources.
While I think the role of "intellectuals" is far more peripheral than Tannenhaus would insist it should be, nevertheless his central point should have been clear to any observer of our national politics since 2005 or so.
Coming down squarely in a modern conservative tradition rooted in Buckley's attempt to wed a certain Catholic sensibility to an political philosophy largely foreign to the American experience, Tannenhaus forgot one of Buckley's other achievements. Far more than almost any other conservative leader in their years in the wilderness, Buckley rooted out anti-Semitism from post-WWII American anti-liberalism.
While the picture of Chambers Tannenhaus draws is more than a little generous - I cannot picture the bloated, alcoholic, former Communist who managed to slander Alger Hiss (and the entire American foreign policy establishment in the process) sitting around and reading French novels - his take on the very sorry state of contemporary conservatism is spot on. It is nice that some, at least, on the right are noticing this fact, even if there is little, at the moment to commend this view to the too-public voices of the American right.
He Sees White People
For some reason, Texas is discussing new history textbook standards. For some reason even more obscure and unknown, they invited the Rev. Peter Marshall to comment on the standards. If this is the same Rev. Peter Marshall whose published works polluted the shelves of the church library at my wife's last appointment, I can only plea, WHY?!?"
Which does nothing more than prove that Peter Marshall is an ignorant boob.
The gist of the whole meeting was quite simple, really. Peter Marshall doesn't like the fact that people of a dusky hue are included in a recounting of American history. Thurgood Marshall? Pah! Cesar Chavez? A non-entity. I wonder if Marshall, like a writer to either Dear Abby or Ann Landers years ago, objected to a discussion of the Tuskeegee Airmen (when a television movie that dramatized their struggle and various triumphs was aired, a writer to one of the twins said that, as a boy he followed the Second World War on the radio, and he has no memory of any stories about an Africa-American flying unit; he wondered, in fact, if it had been made up in a fit of political correctness).
It's quite simple really. Folks don't like history. It's ugly, morally equivocal, and cumbersome. Even when attempting to construct a narrative about it, it becomes necessary to point out that even the more important persons in our past had certain, how can I put this, less-than-attractive qualities and moments. If our children are going to learn about America, it might be far more nice to paint with broad brush, tell a story full of villains and the occasional hero riding out of the night to save our collective (white) skins, and ignore a significant portion of the population because for much of our history they were, officially, non-entities (one could make a similar case, were one a historian of the west coast, for the invisibility of the American Asian population, something Ronald Takaki has gone a long way to correct).
While the Rev. Marshall certainly has a right to his asinine opinion, what he does not have is the right to (ahem) white-wash the reality of our national history because all those folks whose skin-color doesn't match his did stuff that make him feel less than heroic.
Asked by an African-American board member about his objection to the inclusion of Thurgood Marshall in the textbook standards -- Rev. Marshall called the jurist not "a strong enough example" -- Rev. Marshall responded: "He's known primarily for that one very important Supreme Court decision."
Which does nothing more than prove that Peter Marshall is an ignorant boob.
The gist of the whole meeting was quite simple, really. Peter Marshall doesn't like the fact that people of a dusky hue are included in a recounting of American history. Thurgood Marshall? Pah! Cesar Chavez? A non-entity. I wonder if Marshall, like a writer to either Dear Abby or Ann Landers years ago, objected to a discussion of the Tuskeegee Airmen (when a television movie that dramatized their struggle and various triumphs was aired, a writer to one of the twins said that, as a boy he followed the Second World War on the radio, and he has no memory of any stories about an Africa-American flying unit; he wondered, in fact, if it had been made up in a fit of political correctness).
It's quite simple really. Folks don't like history. It's ugly, morally equivocal, and cumbersome. Even when attempting to construct a narrative about it, it becomes necessary to point out that even the more important persons in our past had certain, how can I put this, less-than-attractive qualities and moments. If our children are going to learn about America, it might be far more nice to paint with broad brush, tell a story full of villains and the occasional hero riding out of the night to save our collective (white) skins, and ignore a significant portion of the population because for much of our history they were, officially, non-entities (one could make a similar case, were one a historian of the west coast, for the invisibility of the American Asian population, something Ronald Takaki has gone a long way to correct).
While the Rev. Marshall certainly has a right to his asinine opinion, what he does not have is the right to (ahem) white-wash the reality of our national history because all those folks whose skin-color doesn't match his did stuff that make him feel less than heroic.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Progress And Its Discontents
In the early summer of 1991, a friend of mine told me of a new book coming out that I might enjoy. I had heard, but not read, The Culture of Narcissism, and the name Christopher Lasch was one I had heard without knowing too much about. Working at the seminary bookstore, I managed to order and get my hands on a copy of The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics and read it straight through. I can say without qualification that it, with a handful of other books, changed my mind about a great many things, and was formative for my own understanding of society, culture, and politics.
Lasch's masterwork is a tour de force, stretching back to Burke and Smith, through mid-19th century social critics in America such as de Tocqueville and Orestes Brownson, the syndicalists, with long excurses on Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, all a long argument that really boils down to a simple thesis - the Enlightenment project of social improvement has degenerated in to a parody of the ancien regime it overthrew, an elitist cadre of self-appointed guardians of public morals and private virtue in the service of keeping itself in power. Rather than either a reactionary diatribe against liberal shallowness or a neo-conservative shifting of alliances, Lasch uses his combination of intellect, moral passion, and masterly writing style in the service of a far more radical critique of American society than most one hears, even from so-called progressives and liberals today.
"Progress", in its debased, Americanized form has come to mean nothing more than turning our democratic ways over to technocrats (a phenomenon already pointed out by French critic Jacques Ellul in his classic The Technological society). With its disdain for politics, its withering view of the fine art of compromise, and its scathing (and occasionally horrid) snobbery toward the lumpen of our society, progressive thought in its dotage is no different, in effect, than the aristocratic buffoonery one saw in the dying days of the French and Ottoman and Russian and Austrian monarchies.
In the service of a call to reconsider small-"d" democratic values rooted in local communities, a sense of historical attachment and continuity, and a sense of place and possibility and hope, Lasch spells out in detail the way alternatives to the growing senescence of the Enlightenment has come to disregard these very values. In the process, of course, it has betrayed the democratic revolution it originally sought to support, intellectually.
I do not agree with everything Lasch has to say, by any means. In his detailed discussion of the Boston busing fight, he marginalizes the role of racism, which lay at the heart of the controversy. While I appreciate his argument that much of the feminist pro-choice movement's rhetoric is both racist and shallow, he does not turn it around and offer a serious argument in favor of legalized choice, which leads me to believe he was not in favor of it. For all that his view of the family has much to commend it, it also is far more idealized than the reality, past or present.
Even with these caveats, I can quite easily say that, along with James Cone's A Black Theology of Liberation, Richard Rubenstein's After Auschwitz and The Age of Triage, and Gary Dorrien's three-volume The Making of American Liberal Theology, Lasch's work continues to inform the way I think, view the world, and is one of the lenses through which I read much social, cultural, and political commentary.
Lasch's masterwork is a tour de force, stretching back to Burke and Smith, through mid-19th century social critics in America such as de Tocqueville and Orestes Brownson, the syndicalists, with long excurses on Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, all a long argument that really boils down to a simple thesis - the Enlightenment project of social improvement has degenerated in to a parody of the ancien regime it overthrew, an elitist cadre of self-appointed guardians of public morals and private virtue in the service of keeping itself in power. Rather than either a reactionary diatribe against liberal shallowness or a neo-conservative shifting of alliances, Lasch uses his combination of intellect, moral passion, and masterly writing style in the service of a far more radical critique of American society than most one hears, even from so-called progressives and liberals today.
"Progress", in its debased, Americanized form has come to mean nothing more than turning our democratic ways over to technocrats (a phenomenon already pointed out by French critic Jacques Ellul in his classic The Technological society). With its disdain for politics, its withering view of the fine art of compromise, and its scathing (and occasionally horrid) snobbery toward the lumpen of our society, progressive thought in its dotage is no different, in effect, than the aristocratic buffoonery one saw in the dying days of the French and Ottoman and Russian and Austrian monarchies.
In the service of a call to reconsider small-"d" democratic values rooted in local communities, a sense of historical attachment and continuity, and a sense of place and possibility and hope, Lasch spells out in detail the way alternatives to the growing senescence of the Enlightenment has come to disregard these very values. In the process, of course, it has betrayed the democratic revolution it originally sought to support, intellectually.
I do not agree with everything Lasch has to say, by any means. In his detailed discussion of the Boston busing fight, he marginalizes the role of racism, which lay at the heart of the controversy. While I appreciate his argument that much of the feminist pro-choice movement's rhetoric is both racist and shallow, he does not turn it around and offer a serious argument in favor of legalized choice, which leads me to believe he was not in favor of it. For all that his view of the family has much to commend it, it also is far more idealized than the reality, past or present.
Even with these caveats, I can quite easily say that, along with James Cone's A Black Theology of Liberation, Richard Rubenstein's After Auschwitz and The Age of Triage, and Gary Dorrien's three-volume The Making of American Liberal Theology, Lasch's work continues to inform the way I think, view the world, and is one of the lenses through which I read much social, cultural, and political commentary.
Politics Of Meaning
I commend this single sentence to your attention:
I have always believed that, while enthusiasm for politics is commendable, there are fewer things more dangerous than enthusiasm in politics.
I think this lies at the root of progressive and left-wing disappointment with Barack Obama and health-care reform. There was much to welcome in candidate Obama's approach - all that hopey-changey stuff. When he praised Ronald Reagan during the campaign (getting all sorts of flak from liberal bloggers in the process) he was doing nothing more than noting that Reagan showed, by example, what it takes to win a national election, and keep the public's attention. Clinton, too, did the same thing, which in my view is why he managed to win two elections; the American electorate appreciates appeals to the better angels of their nature. Reagan, Clinton, Obama all did this. While the warnings of various dire consequences in following certain policies offered by Reagan's, H. W.'s, and W.'s opponents were certainly warranted, even on target, in the main Mondale, Dukakis, and Kerry lost not because they were right or wrong on the merits, but because they came off (correctly or not) as far too negative. Clinton and Obama married an enthusiasm for policy detail with a rhetorical flourish that showed they knew, as the cliche goes, America's best days are in front of us still.
Young Americans in particular responded to Obama's message with a vengeance; ignoring the humdrum reality that he was not exactly a flaming liberal. Obama is far more interested in the nitty-gritty of governance, knows the price it is sometimes necessary to pay to do something, and that, as a country both geographically large and humanly diverse, compromise even with those we would rather ignore is sometimes necessary. Many treat our elections like those in a parliamentary democracy. In Britain, for example, parties are elected on specific programmatic platforms, and when they reach the majority, are offered the opportunity to enact those policies. Should they fail, the voters turn them out.
Our system is a bit more unwieldy, yet far preferable (to my mind) for all that, precisely because it takes the diversity of the country in to account.
When ideologues of any stripe criticize our politics as unresponsive to popular opinion, I usually hear underneath these complaints the position that politics should be cleansed of its diversity and nastiness. The pursuit of certain social goods through the political process, however, always entails not just compromise, but the understanding that one will never, ever, get all that one wants. The best negotiators manage to get far more than the worst - which is why Clinton managed to mitigate much conservative harm from a right-wing Congress during the last six years of his Presidency - yet we should always remember that even those pieces of legislation we consider landmarks bit of law are the product of negotiation, debate, compromise, and (usually at the time) devastating complaints from partisans who wished the laws did more than they seemed to suggest as passed.
Neither law nor politics will make our country better in the end. We the people, in our homely, everyday existence must do that. Politics is a nasty business, amoral to the core, even when pursuing desirable ends (civil rights for minorities, regulation of dangerous business practices). Those who claim to have voted for a candidate based on matters related to his or her personal character, or because of that candidate has claimed to detest "politics as usual" (as if there were any other kind of politics) are always disappointed. Some of our best politicians are morally compromised individuals; those who have a far more exemplary character are, usually, poor politicians, or at the very least equivocal in their leadership skills. A certain amount of amorality, even ruthlessness, is necessary.
Understanding this is the first step toward appreciating the political skills of a Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. While all these men have their limitations, they also are among the most skilled political operatives to serve as President. Much liberal hand-wringing over all three men lies, in part I believe, in the desire for all three to be far more ethically pure (which usually coincides with a desire for ideological purity) in their approach to politics.
Seeking a certain kind of emotional fulfillment from the political process can be a very dangerous thing.
I have always believed that, while enthusiasm for politics is commendable, there are fewer things more dangerous than enthusiasm in politics.
I think this lies at the root of progressive and left-wing disappointment with Barack Obama and health-care reform. There was much to welcome in candidate Obama's approach - all that hopey-changey stuff. When he praised Ronald Reagan during the campaign (getting all sorts of flak from liberal bloggers in the process) he was doing nothing more than noting that Reagan showed, by example, what it takes to win a national election, and keep the public's attention. Clinton, too, did the same thing, which in my view is why he managed to win two elections; the American electorate appreciates appeals to the better angels of their nature. Reagan, Clinton, Obama all did this. While the warnings of various dire consequences in following certain policies offered by Reagan's, H. W.'s, and W.'s opponents were certainly warranted, even on target, in the main Mondale, Dukakis, and Kerry lost not because they were right or wrong on the merits, but because they came off (correctly or not) as far too negative. Clinton and Obama married an enthusiasm for policy detail with a rhetorical flourish that showed they knew, as the cliche goes, America's best days are in front of us still.
Young Americans in particular responded to Obama's message with a vengeance; ignoring the humdrum reality that he was not exactly a flaming liberal. Obama is far more interested in the nitty-gritty of governance, knows the price it is sometimes necessary to pay to do something, and that, as a country both geographically large and humanly diverse, compromise even with those we would rather ignore is sometimes necessary. Many treat our elections like those in a parliamentary democracy. In Britain, for example, parties are elected on specific programmatic platforms, and when they reach the majority, are offered the opportunity to enact those policies. Should they fail, the voters turn them out.
Our system is a bit more unwieldy, yet far preferable (to my mind) for all that, precisely because it takes the diversity of the country in to account.
When ideologues of any stripe criticize our politics as unresponsive to popular opinion, I usually hear underneath these complaints the position that politics should be cleansed of its diversity and nastiness. The pursuit of certain social goods through the political process, however, always entails not just compromise, but the understanding that one will never, ever, get all that one wants. The best negotiators manage to get far more than the worst - which is why Clinton managed to mitigate much conservative harm from a right-wing Congress during the last six years of his Presidency - yet we should always remember that even those pieces of legislation we consider landmarks bit of law are the product of negotiation, debate, compromise, and (usually at the time) devastating complaints from partisans who wished the laws did more than they seemed to suggest as passed.
Neither law nor politics will make our country better in the end. We the people, in our homely, everyday existence must do that. Politics is a nasty business, amoral to the core, even when pursuing desirable ends (civil rights for minorities, regulation of dangerous business practices). Those who claim to have voted for a candidate based on matters related to his or her personal character, or because of that candidate has claimed to detest "politics as usual" (as if there were any other kind of politics) are always disappointed. Some of our best politicians are morally compromised individuals; those who have a far more exemplary character are, usually, poor politicians, or at the very least equivocal in their leadership skills. A certain amount of amorality, even ruthlessness, is necessary.
Understanding this is the first step toward appreciating the political skills of a Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. While all these men have their limitations, they also are among the most skilled political operatives to serve as President. Much liberal hand-wringing over all three men lies, in part I believe, in the desire for all three to be far more ethically pure (which usually coincides with a desire for ideological purity) in their approach to politics.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Unavoidable Hiatus
I hate computers, for the moment. My home laptop is fizzling fast, and so I am currently shopping for something new. Please no recommendations - I need a PC not a MAC in order for our various computers to talk to one another; I also know what I want, need, like, and can afford - although I know they are meant well.
So, until I have something new sitting in my home office, I am limited in what I can do.
Don't miss me too much.
So, until I have something new sitting in my home office, I am limited in what I can do.
Don't miss me too much.
Monday, September 14, 2009
For Feodor, Offered Without Comment
From The Minimal Self, near the beginning of a chapter entitled "The Minimalist Aesthetic: Art and Literature in an Age of Extremity", pp. 131-132:
Thoughts? Opinions?
Contemporary art is an art of extremity not because it takes extreme situations as its subject - though much of it does that too - but because the experience of extremity threaten to undermine the very possibility of an imaginative interpretation of reality.
The only art that seems appropriate to such an age, to judge from the recent history of artistic experimentation, is an anti-art or minimal art, where minimalism refers not just to a particular style in an endless succession of styles but to a widespread conviction that art can survive only by a drastic restriction of its field of vision: the radical "restriction of perspective" recommended by authorities on the subject as the survival strategy par excellence. Even the kind of embattled self-assertion envision by [Philip] Roth as a typical artistic defense against an "unreal environment" has proved impossible to sustain.
Thoughts? Opinions?
Revising And Extending On The Cold War
I ran across an article on Margaret Thatcher's offer of an alliance with the Soviet Union to prevent the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the reunification of Germany, and wrote the following in a fit of anger and disgust:
The beginnings of the Cold War were not, in fact, bs. While it may have taken a while for American policy-makers to realize the danger posed by the enraged Soviet Union, some of the leaders should have known that Stalin was hardly, as Truman called him during the Potsdam Conference, "Good Old Joe". At Potsdam, Stalin insisted on the execution of pretty much the entirety of the remaining German governmental and military upper echelons, the permanent dismemberment of Germany, with the resulting bits going (for the most part) to newly acquired territory to the east, although the industrial Ruhr Valley would be occupied by the victorious Allied powers sans France (Stalin never quite got over French surrender). They had to settle for the Nuremberg Show Trials, the destruction of the former kingdom of Prussia as a German province, and the multiple industrial spoils of war they carted back to replace their own decimated infrastructure.
Yet, Soviet adventurism did threaten France, Italy, and Austria (my uncle has still not forgiven Eisenhower for allowing the Red Army to take Vienna). By the time of the twin crises that led to the Berlin airlift and the Greek Civil War, it was clear the communist threat to southern and western Europe was far greater than had previously been understood (although the Greek communists were actually cut loose by Stalin, because he perceived that the western powers would fight for a democratic Greece). With the fall of Republican China to Mao's armies in 1948 and the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950, it was even more clear that at least some communists meant business.
Yet, by the time Kennedy took office, had a more deft hand been at the tiller, the US and the Soviet Union might just have managed some fake crises with a bit more finesse. While Kruschev made a show of walking out on Eisenhower because of the capture of a U2 pilot shot down over their territory, and the raising of the Berlin Wall were certainly fodder for American anti-communists to make much hay, cooler heads may have been able to move through the bluster and keep the lines open. The cowboy attitude on display during the Bay of Pigs fiasco - which resulted in the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later - was almost entirely the fault of the Kennedy Administration allowing their weakness to hang out for the Russians to see.
The renewal of the Cold War under Reagan, at least during his first term, was wholly avoidable, the product of rabid anti-communism run amok. It should be noted, though, that it really began toward the end of Carter's Presidency, with the overreaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Carter's willingness to go along with Defense Secretary Harold Brown's recommendations to deploy the MX Missile and build the B-1B bomber, both huge boondoggles.
With the publication of PM Thatcher's unguarded offer and blatant honesty to Gorbachev - that the anti-communism was pretty much for domestic consumption; the goal of stability of the post-war status quo being far more important than freedom for the captive peoples of Central Europe - we may at least be honest enough to admit that much of the fear and bluster, posturing and nonsense from 1981 until the collapse of the Iron Curtain was so much nonsense. Had Thatcher, Reagan, and Bush been as honest with their publics as they were with Gorbachev, history might be a bit different.
I'm still pissed, though, that it took 20 years for this to come to light.
What should be a source of disgust, and even outrage, is the very public discovery of what many of us believed all along - that the entire Cold War was bullshit from start to finish. Far too many human beings, whole countries in fact, were decimated by leaders who pledged adherence to a political ideology and practical policies they not only didn't believe in, but sought to undermine just as the goal of those policies was about to bear fruit.[italics added]
The beginnings of the Cold War were not, in fact, bs. While it may have taken a while for American policy-makers to realize the danger posed by the enraged Soviet Union, some of the leaders should have known that Stalin was hardly, as Truman called him during the Potsdam Conference, "Good Old Joe". At Potsdam, Stalin insisted on the execution of pretty much the entirety of the remaining German governmental and military upper echelons, the permanent dismemberment of Germany, with the resulting bits going (for the most part) to newly acquired territory to the east, although the industrial Ruhr Valley would be occupied by the victorious Allied powers sans France (Stalin never quite got over French surrender). They had to settle for the Nuremberg Show Trials, the destruction of the former kingdom of Prussia as a German province, and the multiple industrial spoils of war they carted back to replace their own decimated infrastructure.
Yet, Soviet adventurism did threaten France, Italy, and Austria (my uncle has still not forgiven Eisenhower for allowing the Red Army to take Vienna). By the time of the twin crises that led to the Berlin airlift and the Greek Civil War, it was clear the communist threat to southern and western Europe was far greater than had previously been understood (although the Greek communists were actually cut loose by Stalin, because he perceived that the western powers would fight for a democratic Greece). With the fall of Republican China to Mao's armies in 1948 and the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950, it was even more clear that at least some communists meant business.
Yet, by the time Kennedy took office, had a more deft hand been at the tiller, the US and the Soviet Union might just have managed some fake crises with a bit more finesse. While Kruschev made a show of walking out on Eisenhower because of the capture of a U2 pilot shot down over their territory, and the raising of the Berlin Wall were certainly fodder for American anti-communists to make much hay, cooler heads may have been able to move through the bluster and keep the lines open. The cowboy attitude on display during the Bay of Pigs fiasco - which resulted in the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later - was almost entirely the fault of the Kennedy Administration allowing their weakness to hang out for the Russians to see.
The renewal of the Cold War under Reagan, at least during his first term, was wholly avoidable, the product of rabid anti-communism run amok. It should be noted, though, that it really began toward the end of Carter's Presidency, with the overreaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Carter's willingness to go along with Defense Secretary Harold Brown's recommendations to deploy the MX Missile and build the B-1B bomber, both huge boondoggles.
With the publication of PM Thatcher's unguarded offer and blatant honesty to Gorbachev - that the anti-communism was pretty much for domestic consumption; the goal of stability of the post-war status quo being far more important than freedom for the captive peoples of Central Europe - we may at least be honest enough to admit that much of the fear and bluster, posturing and nonsense from 1981 until the collapse of the Iron Curtain was so much nonsense. Had Thatcher, Reagan, and Bush been as honest with their publics as they were with Gorbachev, history might be a bit different.
I'm still pissed, though, that it took 20 years for this to come to light.
Music For Your Monday
Yesterday, as is my habit, I posted a sacred music video to Facebook. Rather than a piece of classical, baroque, or contemporary orchestral sacred music, I posted a song by the Soul Stirrers, a gospel group that, for a time, featured future soul pioneer Sam Cooke on lead vocals. What I didn't know, as I searched for a song, was that the Soul Stirrers continued on after Cooke left to cross over to pop music. Since I have not done enough on gospel music, and would like to try and correct that, here are some offerings from them, from older to more recent.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Extremities
The trouble is . . . that words fail in the face of evil on such a scale [the Nazi attack on European Jewish existence]. As many survivors have argued, silence is the only fitting tribute to the three and a half millions who died in concentration camps and death camps, to the two million exterminated nuy mobile killing unites on the eastern front, and the the half million more who died in the ghettos of eastern Europe of hunger, disease, terror, and Nazi reprisals. Words fail, but it is nevertheless necessary to speak. Who can remain silent, having witnessed such events? But a language of extremity, the only language appropriate to extreme situations, soon loses its force through repetition and inflation. It facilitates what it seeks to prevent, the normalization of atrocity.
Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self
p. 101
The second and third chapters of Lasch's follow up to The Culture of Narcissism examine the way so much of our public discourse and cultural understandings in the late-20th century began to rely more and more on "survival" as a theme. Whether it was popular manuals on business success, or serious works on feminism, race relations, and even history, more and more commentators began to proclaim the goal of life should be survival.
This is the bulk of chapter 2; chapter 3 examines, as a way of highlighting and clarifying this issue, the way the Nazi extermination program (and Lasch is wise enough to include Stalin's various exercises in mass death as well) has been mined far too frequently as a guide to understanding our own, contemporary social, political, and cultural situation. With the appearance of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, the plethora of right-wing commentators and politicians insisting that Barack Obama is leading the US toward a kind of Nazi-like authoritarian state, I think it more than relevant to consider whether or not this mainstreaming of extremist understandings has not only reached a kind of logical conclusion, but also if this might not also be an opportunity to place the Nazi and Stalinst horrors back in their proper, historical, perspective.
Lasch is never explicit, but he certainly attempts to make clear the historical ambiguity of attempting to understand unique historical events - the Holocaust, the various Stalinst crimes - while also seeking to draw from them lessons for the rest of humanity. This is always the tension in historical understanding. History is the record of unique events, never repeatable (therefore non-scientific) yet nevertheless events capable of understanding, and therefore, should we delve deep enough, meaning. Yet, as he also points out in the epigraph above, faced with the inhuman ferocity of mass death, words fail even as the dead cry out for words as their final plea for some kind of justice. Lasch seems to straddle a fine line between insisting on the qualitative uniqueness of 20th century experiences of mass death, and our own attempt at understanding robbing them of their character as a break with the past.
Since the late-1960's, at least in the United States, we have lived far too long with the rhetoric of extremism. The radicals of the time far too often compared our country then to a fascist state. That the early-70's saw an attempt at extra-legal Executive power on a scale previously not seen only seemed to intensify the idea in the minds of many leftists that there is an inherent authoritarianism to conservative rule that, if unchecked, could lead us down a dangerous path.
This line of thought intensified, three decades later, during the Bush Administration. It was given impetus by the right-wing acceptance of massive intrusions on constitutional liberties in the name of national security, apologias for torture and indefinite detention without trial, or even accusation of wrong-doing, and domestic espionage on a scale unheard of even during the Nixon Administration. While these illegal acts are certainly troubling, just as troubling was the regular cries one heard of "Fascist!" and "Nazi!" on the left (that I, too, did some of this is a source of remorse; one should be far more careful with this kind of thing).
When Jonah Goldberg published Liberal Fascism, it was greeted with a mixture of humor and scorn for its lazy lack-of-research, its poor reasoning, and perhaps its biggest flaw - the idea that a political ideology based on extending human freedom, both individual and social, and extending the benefits of society to as many heretofore excluded persons and groups as possible could somehow be equated with the irrational desire to make war on one's neighbors, all the while exterminating vast numbers of one's own population. This isn't just bad logic or scholarship; it is deeply offensive to anyone who understands the historical realities bound up with those horribly-coupled words in the title.
Thanks to the popularizing of Goldberg's work, however, we now have far too many on the right equating Pres. Obama's Presidency and many of his policy initiatives compared to fascism and Nazism. Placards at protests paint a Hitler-mustache on Pres. Obama. The attempt to extend health care to underserved groups is seen as an attempt to steal our Constitutional freedoms and rights. It has reached such a ridiculous pitch that, as often noted, many of those protesting health care reform are recipients of a kind of socialized health insurance in the form of Medicare, and this is too often passed over in silence.
While all this Nazi-talk does indeed rob the words of any substantive meaning, an attempt to address it head-on might present an opportunity to place the historical referents back in their proper place; it might also be an opportunity to ratchet back the reliance on "extreme" rhetoric and place it back where it belongs - out of the public discussion of routine, and mostly beneficial, policy discussions. I realize this kind of thing - Holocaust comparisons, the cry of "Fascist!" - will always be around, sad to say. There is no reason to take it seriously, or include such nonsense as part of any serious discussion.
Not-Quite-Random Thoughts
When I started blogging back in 2006, I was amazed at the vibrancy and activism on the left. I was not aware of how much work had been done to counter the takeover of the web by a shallow libertarianism and scary extremism (both are still there, of course, but hardly a huge presence). As summer turned to fall, as it became clear (to me, at any rate) that the Republican Party was headed for a disastrous mid-term election result, I got the sense that liberals and progressives knew there was blood in the water. Networks for fund-raising, hooking up volunteers with campaigns, get-out-the-vote drives, and all the other necessary work for winning elections seemed to be all favoring the Democrats. The liberal blogs and websites were putting out information that was hitting hard at a variety of politicians; the best known, I think, was the whole "Macaca" business that ended George Allen's Senate career in Virginia. The Act Blue network, or whatever it was called then (Blue America, maybe?) was giving money to a variety of candidates around the country.
The '06 elections were landmark not only because of the huge turn-around in Congress, or the huge turnout for a mid-term election. They were landmark because of the fantastic network of people around the country, connecting, coordinating, doing the grunt work of knocking on doors, making phone calls, pooling resources in GOTV efforts, publicizing information in order to achieve the outcome they wanted. It really was democracy in action.
Barack Obama, a seasoned community activist who had spent his adult life in and around Chicago politics, built on his own understanding of how to coordinate a campaign as well as the internet infrastructure in place from the '06 elections, and built huge momentum through the primaries, and then left this structure in place for the general election. While, in my own mind, the results of the election were only in doubt for about five days in September of last year (Sarah Palin was receiving far too much press attention that seemed to ignore all sorts of questions that needed to be asked and answered), Barack Obama never let up, and the numbers kept growing and growing - and he won not only overwhelmingly, but with the drive continuing to rise.
For some reason, I think many of those same activists believed that electing a Democratic Congress, and then a Democratic President, would be all that was needed in order to get an agenda favorable to liberals and progressives through Congress. Far too many people sat back and waited for Pres. Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid, Majority Leader Hoyer, and other senior Democrats not only set the agenda, but make the case for that agenda. When it became clear, relatively quickly, that it wasn't going to happen this way, far too many on the left - bloggers, commenters, ordinary citizens - started to whine about how "the system is broken", "it's all the media's fault", "Obama's no better than Bush" (this last is a horrible, and fallacious, thought) - rather than continuing to work for the change they want. While there is still quite a bit of that spirit around - the Act Blue network is still fund-raising for candidates; some major liberal bloggers continue to get information out, including contact information for members of Congress on issues on import - there is too much hand-wringing, too much complaint that Obama isn't progressive enough (I thought we knew that going in to the election), that senior Democrats are in thrall to various corporate interests who pay large sums of money to keep them in office.
Apparently, while able to organize a couple major election cycles around negative ideas - get rid of the Republicans in Congress (first) and the White House (second) - it seems to be more difficult to organize citizen action on positive ideas. Poll after poll continues to show the popularity of the public option in health care reform, yet without any organization, without some serious threats backed up by both numbers and money, these poll numbers are meaningless. Poll after poll continues to show the popularity of holding senior members of the Bush White Hous, including former VP Dick Cheney, accountable for any alleged crimes they may have committed while in office, yet without an organized effort for a systematic investigation that would include the possibility of legal sanctions if criminal activity is discovered and proved in a court of law, those polls mean nothing.
I guess the point of this little rant is quite simple. While there is certainly enough evidence to blame the media for their role in liberal frustrations, and the way money is influencing votes of members of Congress, or that Pres. Obama isn't as liberal as me, let alone Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, we need to accept some responsibility for failing to continue the pressure. While I wrote not long ago that I'm not in favor, for a variety of reasons, at wholesale primary contests against sitting members of Congress if this or that piece of legislation doesn't pass, I would certainly think that a campaign of targeted primaries, if well-funded and with enough organization to provide a serious threat to an incumbent, would certainly be a wonderful idea. We need to do more organizing on health care reform, more phone calls, more letters, more face-to-face visits with members of Congress and their staffs. We need to keep the pressure up, let them know that our pet issues are not just our pet issues, but America's issues; policies to make our country better.
If health care reform, or cap-and-trade, or a legal inquiry in to the Bush Administration, or a repeal of DOMA fail, we the citizens who elected this Congress and President, will be as much at fault as the larger institutions of our civil society that are fighting against them. Democratic citizenship is not just about winning elections, but getting things done. All of us share that responsibility, and all of us share the blame when it fails.
The '06 elections were landmark not only because of the huge turn-around in Congress, or the huge turnout for a mid-term election. They were landmark because of the fantastic network of people around the country, connecting, coordinating, doing the grunt work of knocking on doors, making phone calls, pooling resources in GOTV efforts, publicizing information in order to achieve the outcome they wanted. It really was democracy in action.
Barack Obama, a seasoned community activist who had spent his adult life in and around Chicago politics, built on his own understanding of how to coordinate a campaign as well as the internet infrastructure in place from the '06 elections, and built huge momentum through the primaries, and then left this structure in place for the general election. While, in my own mind, the results of the election were only in doubt for about five days in September of last year (Sarah Palin was receiving far too much press attention that seemed to ignore all sorts of questions that needed to be asked and answered), Barack Obama never let up, and the numbers kept growing and growing - and he won not only overwhelmingly, but with the drive continuing to rise.
For some reason, I think many of those same activists believed that electing a Democratic Congress, and then a Democratic President, would be all that was needed in order to get an agenda favorable to liberals and progressives through Congress. Far too many people sat back and waited for Pres. Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid, Majority Leader Hoyer, and other senior Democrats not only set the agenda, but make the case for that agenda. When it became clear, relatively quickly, that it wasn't going to happen this way, far too many on the left - bloggers, commenters, ordinary citizens - started to whine about how "the system is broken", "it's all the media's fault", "Obama's no better than Bush" (this last is a horrible, and fallacious, thought) - rather than continuing to work for the change they want. While there is still quite a bit of that spirit around - the Act Blue network is still fund-raising for candidates; some major liberal bloggers continue to get information out, including contact information for members of Congress on issues on import - there is too much hand-wringing, too much complaint that Obama isn't progressive enough (I thought we knew that going in to the election), that senior Democrats are in thrall to various corporate interests who pay large sums of money to keep them in office.
Apparently, while able to organize a couple major election cycles around negative ideas - get rid of the Republicans in Congress (first) and the White House (second) - it seems to be more difficult to organize citizen action on positive ideas. Poll after poll continues to show the popularity of the public option in health care reform, yet without any organization, without some serious threats backed up by both numbers and money, these poll numbers are meaningless. Poll after poll continues to show the popularity of holding senior members of the Bush White Hous, including former VP Dick Cheney, accountable for any alleged crimes they may have committed while in office, yet without an organized effort for a systematic investigation that would include the possibility of legal sanctions if criminal activity is discovered and proved in a court of law, those polls mean nothing.
I guess the point of this little rant is quite simple. While there is certainly enough evidence to blame the media for their role in liberal frustrations, and the way money is influencing votes of members of Congress, or that Pres. Obama isn't as liberal as me, let alone Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, we need to accept some responsibility for failing to continue the pressure. While I wrote not long ago that I'm not in favor, for a variety of reasons, at wholesale primary contests against sitting members of Congress if this or that piece of legislation doesn't pass, I would certainly think that a campaign of targeted primaries, if well-funded and with enough organization to provide a serious threat to an incumbent, would certainly be a wonderful idea. We need to do more organizing on health care reform, more phone calls, more letters, more face-to-face visits with members of Congress and their staffs. We need to keep the pressure up, let them know that our pet issues are not just our pet issues, but America's issues; policies to make our country better.
If health care reform, or cap-and-trade, or a legal inquiry in to the Bush Administration, or a repeal of DOMA fail, we the citizens who elected this Congress and President, will be as much at fault as the larger institutions of our civil society that are fighting against them. Democratic citizenship is not just about winning elections, but getting things done. All of us share that responsibility, and all of us share the blame when it fails.
An Odd Thought
When 60,000 to 70,000 people show up with signs comparing Obama to Hitler, and the whole array of anti-Obama weirdness, it is something to consider and ponder.
When hundreds of thousands march through the streets of cities all over the country to protest the United States starting an illegal war, the reasons for which are fabricated, and for which our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines continue to pay too high a price they are all a bunch of anti-American leftist hippie wannabes whom both the media and our politicians can ignore with impunity.
Our system is truly odd.
When hundreds of thousands march through the streets of cities all over the country to protest the United States starting an illegal war, the reasons for which are fabricated, and for which our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines continue to pay too high a price they are all a bunch of anti-American leftist hippie wannabes whom both the media and our politicians can ignore with impunity.
Our system is truly odd.
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