As someone who took years of piano instruction, I can only sit in awe when I listen to Art Tatum. Somehow this blind lover of baseball and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer ran his thick fingers as light and fast over the keyboard as a feather. He never seemed to miss a downbeat, play off-key, or take the music out of whatever mood it was supposed to inhabit. While many seem content to dwell on his technical ability, he combined that with a sense both of rhythm and melody that was unmatched until Charlie Parker emerged in the post-war years.
Here he is doing Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me"
Another standard, Rogers & Hart's "Isn't It Romantic"
One of my favorite songs of all time, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes"
The nice thing about these clips is there is no "video" of him playing, so you can get lost in his playing.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Health Care Reform
There are now five bills that have passed various committees and need to be reconciled in order to pass both Houses of Congress and receive a Presidential signature. Only one does not contain a public option. It seems to me that anyone who says the "public option is dead" can't do the math. The House Democrats, led by the Speaker, are demanding it. Many Senators are inclined to support it, except for the noisy few like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman.
The latest tactic to derail this, revealed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is to demand a long debate. His arguments for a long debate would make sense if this were a new issue, or something that hadn't been discussed in public forums ad nauseum for months. Besides that, the real debate will be behind the scenes in the attempt to reconcile all the undotted "i"'s and uncrossed "t"'s of the five bills currently in circulation, and McConnell and everyone else knows this. With the White House bitch-slapping the insurance industry late last week, any attempt to drag their representatives along will probably be met with hostility.
Since I have to guess, not knowing exactly why the statement was formulated the way it was, the White House statement today that it "prefers" a public option without threatening a veto over it sounds kind of namby-pamby. Yet, when you consider all the veto threats of the Bush White House - threats seldom honored - combined with the desire by the Obama White House to get Congress to move on this issue, a veto threat at this point makes no sense. Passing a bill that is imperfect, even a bill with no public option, is far better than dragging the whole reform train to a halt. Should a bill pass without a public option (again, I doubt it, the math and the numbers are against it), it seems more than likely that after the '10 midterms, when the Democrats have solidified their control over both Houses (still running with my prediction they will kick some ass next year), they can revisit that issue on its own.
Yet, simply by stating a Presidential "preference", it seems to me that puts enormous pressure on wavering Democrats in both Houses to make sure he gets that preference. It makes the Ben Nelsons and the Max Baucus's look like they are being presumptuous, placing their own preferences over and against not just the President's, but the majority of the American people's as well.
I have said it before and I will say it again. I wouldn't want to play chess with Barack Obama. I believe that the obstructionists in Congress have no idea how bad he has consistently made them look.
My prediction - health care with a public option will pass, the President will sign it, and the world will not shift on its axis.
The latest tactic to derail this, revealed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is to demand a long debate. His arguments for a long debate would make sense if this were a new issue, or something that hadn't been discussed in public forums ad nauseum for months. Besides that, the real debate will be behind the scenes in the attempt to reconcile all the undotted "i"'s and uncrossed "t"'s of the five bills currently in circulation, and McConnell and everyone else knows this. With the White House bitch-slapping the insurance industry late last week, any attempt to drag their representatives along will probably be met with hostility.
Since I have to guess, not knowing exactly why the statement was formulated the way it was, the White House statement today that it "prefers" a public option without threatening a veto over it sounds kind of namby-pamby. Yet, when you consider all the veto threats of the Bush White House - threats seldom honored - combined with the desire by the Obama White House to get Congress to move on this issue, a veto threat at this point makes no sense. Passing a bill that is imperfect, even a bill with no public option, is far better than dragging the whole reform train to a halt. Should a bill pass without a public option (again, I doubt it, the math and the numbers are against it), it seems more than likely that after the '10 midterms, when the Democrats have solidified their control over both Houses (still running with my prediction they will kick some ass next year), they can revisit that issue on its own.
Yet, simply by stating a Presidential "preference", it seems to me that puts enormous pressure on wavering Democrats in both Houses to make sure he gets that preference. It makes the Ben Nelsons and the Max Baucus's look like they are being presumptuous, placing their own preferences over and against not just the President's, but the majority of the American people's as well.
I have said it before and I will say it again. I wouldn't want to play chess with Barack Obama. I believe that the obstructionists in Congress have no idea how bad he has consistently made them look.
My prediction - health care with a public option will pass, the President will sign it, and the world will not shift on its axis.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Bible-Burning Christians
I have to admit, I agree:
They're burning all non-KJV Bible translations. And even contemporary Christian CDs, which they label "Satan's music", an idea I could possibly get behind.
Burning books by Billy Graham, though, a favorite son of the Tar Heel State? These folks are hardcore.
I don't even get angry about book burning anymore. Book burning is quaint and laughable. It's like these North Carolina pigfuckers are members of the Society for Douchey Anachronism, carrying out re-enactments of the kind of douchey behavior that used to matter a whole lot in the Dark Ages, but now is just a historical curiosity. Come on down to the Book Burning Faire, and relive a simpler time, when knowledge had physical form!
They're burning all non-KJV Bible translations. And even contemporary Christian CDs, which they label "Satan's music", an idea I could possibly get behind.
Burning books by Billy Graham, though, a favorite son of the Tar Heel State? These folks are hardcore.
A Great Churchman
I just learned that a great leader of the United Methodist Church, a long-time faculty member at Wesley Theological Seminary, my academic adviser while there, and a good man has past away. The Rev. Dr. James Cecil Logan was E. Stanley Jones Professor Emeritus of Evangelism, after having been professor of Systematic Theology for a quarter century. Schooled in Florida, serving in Virginia, taught at Boston University by L. Harold DeWolfe and at Basel by Karl Barth, Dr. Logan was a student favorite not because he was a great teacher - all who had a class with him understood that - or a towering scholar - I only know of one book of his still in print, an edited collection of essays on Methodist history and evangelism - but because he really cared about us.
His first love, though, was the United Methodist Church. He served it faithfully and well, turning down offers of Episcopal office over and over again so he could stay where he was. Not uncritical, he embodied true Christian love for the Church, wanting it to live up to its promise and potential.
When I started at Wesley, in the fall semester of 1990, he was then serving on the general committee that was reviewing the Discipline statements on homosexuality and the Church. He told me once, in a meeting in his office, that he was being forced for health reasons to step down; he also told me he was glad. The committee was bitterly divided between ideologues with far more interest in forwarding an agenda than prayerfully and lovingly studying and considering alternatives. He predicted there would be two reports, mutually exclusive, that would not move the denomination forward. His prediction came true a year and a half later when the committee released its report prior to the 1992 General Conference.
Also prior to the 1992 General Conference, he was offered the opportunity to sign The Memphis Declaration, an attempt by some folks to turn the United Methodist Church in to a confessional denomination. Historically, the UM Church and its predecessors had not unique confession; rather, like John Wesley, we much preferred to concentrate on living a Christian life in faith through grace than figuring out whether or not this clause in this sentence accurately reflects "Truth" about God or anyone else. The confessions we read together in worship are collected in the back of the UM Hymnal, and include the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed (which is really the Constantinopolitan Creed, which reaffirmed the statement from the Council of Nicaea), the Creed of the United Church of Canada, and several others. Dr. Logan understood the two-fold attempt to distort what the Church is, and to move a small group of southeastern conservatives in to a position of authority within the denomination. He also pointed out, off hand, that several of the clauses of the declaration, were rooted in historical heresies, and being a former professor of theology, it would be bad form to sign on to a heretical document.
He was asked to perform our wedding, but had to decline due to back surgery after initially agreeing to do so. Anyone who knew his history of health problem should understand.
It is a sad day for those of us left behind, but I also think we should all celebrate his life, his work for the United Methodist Church, for Wesley Theological Seminary, and for all the students who passed through his classes. I know of no one who would ever speak ill of him, even as we poked fun at his drawling, occasionally stuttering style of lecturing ("Uh, uh, uh . . ."). He was loved quite simply because the grace that saved him, gave him the strength to teach hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students over the decades, and we all were the richer for it.
His first love, though, was the United Methodist Church. He served it faithfully and well, turning down offers of Episcopal office over and over again so he could stay where he was. Not uncritical, he embodied true Christian love for the Church, wanting it to live up to its promise and potential.
When I started at Wesley, in the fall semester of 1990, he was then serving on the general committee that was reviewing the Discipline statements on homosexuality and the Church. He told me once, in a meeting in his office, that he was being forced for health reasons to step down; he also told me he was glad. The committee was bitterly divided between ideologues with far more interest in forwarding an agenda than prayerfully and lovingly studying and considering alternatives. He predicted there would be two reports, mutually exclusive, that would not move the denomination forward. His prediction came true a year and a half later when the committee released its report prior to the 1992 General Conference.
Also prior to the 1992 General Conference, he was offered the opportunity to sign The Memphis Declaration, an attempt by some folks to turn the United Methodist Church in to a confessional denomination. Historically, the UM Church and its predecessors had not unique confession; rather, like John Wesley, we much preferred to concentrate on living a Christian life in faith through grace than figuring out whether or not this clause in this sentence accurately reflects "Truth" about God or anyone else. The confessions we read together in worship are collected in the back of the UM Hymnal, and include the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed (which is really the Constantinopolitan Creed, which reaffirmed the statement from the Council of Nicaea), the Creed of the United Church of Canada, and several others. Dr. Logan understood the two-fold attempt to distort what the Church is, and to move a small group of southeastern conservatives in to a position of authority within the denomination. He also pointed out, off hand, that several of the clauses of the declaration, were rooted in historical heresies, and being a former professor of theology, it would be bad form to sign on to a heretical document.
He was asked to perform our wedding, but had to decline due to back surgery after initially agreeing to do so. Anyone who knew his history of health problem should understand.
It is a sad day for those of us left behind, but I also think we should all celebrate his life, his work for the United Methodist Church, for Wesley Theological Seminary, and for all the students who passed through his classes. I know of no one who would ever speak ill of him, even as we poked fun at his drawling, occasionally stuttering style of lecturing ("Uh, uh, uh . . ."). He was loved quite simply because the grace that saved him, gave him the strength to teach hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students over the decades, and we all were the richer for it.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Saturday Rock Show
When Zebra released their only studio album in 1983, it had the potential to be the beginning of a great career. Their first single, "Whose Behind The Door", had heavy rotation on MTV and FM radio. The album, though full of really good moments, was uneven, and the time was not quite ripe for a kind of heavy prog sound.
Dream Theater's recently released Black Clouds and Silver Linings has a Deluxe edition with a second disc of covers. Here's their pretty faithful version of "Take Your Fingers From My Hair".
Dream Theater's recently released Black Clouds and Silver Linings has a Deluxe edition with a second disc of covers. Here's their pretty faithful version of "Take Your Fingers From My Hair".
Friday, October 16, 2009
It's All About The "R" Word (UPDATE)
Reading this summary of a recent focus group study by Democracy Corps, I was struck by this following:
Now, this study was conducted by, among others, James Carville and Stan Greenberg. Like them or hate them, neither one of these guys is stupid, naive, or blind. Yet, upon what else is the deep-seated loathing for everything President Obama does, or proposes, or whatever accolades he receives overseas based? Since the dominant cry at the heart of all the tea-party crap, all the 9/12 protests, all the right-wing screeching about socialism and Nazism and "Obama worship" is, "We want our country back", it seems to me pretty clear what they are saying is, "We want the white face of our national leaders back." The racial - and with it social and cultural as well as political - change in leadership threatens the foundations of the worldview of many conservatives, even those who, as the study leaders suggest, do not have race as a dominant factor in determining their dislike for the President.
The schizophrenia - and I really am not sure there is another word to describe how completely bizarre some of the stuff coming from the right is - on the conservative political side cannot be explained by ideology, because the President is not an ideologue. It can't be explained by media fawning and adulation, because that just hasn't happened. It can't be explained by any reference to actual events, laws, Executive Orders, or any other action on the part of the President, his Administration, or the Democratic leadership in Congress (a very different animal from the Administration). While it is true the loathing of the right for Bill Clinton entered in to weird territory - the whole drug-smuggling through Mena, killing Vince Foster, on and on - there seems to be a change from hysterically stupid and occasionally scary (Clinton) to frighteningly unhinged and dangerously unsettling (under Obama) among the right.
It seems to me the various political labels tossed at the President - socialist, communist, fascist - all hinge not around ideology, but differentness. He is Different even from African-Americans. His father was Kenyan. He has an African name, rather than an Anglo name. He spent time in his childhood overseas. He grew up in Hawaii. All these things suggest that there is something different - not like us - about President Obama. The constant attempt to strip any legitimacy from him, the actions of his Administration, or even now, it seems, his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, are rooted not in any act, or statement, or even general theme of his Administration. Rather, it is rooted in a deep fear of the perceived threat that comes from the implicit social and cultural change inherent in having a President whose skin color happens to be darker than the norm.
Not all the opposition to President Obama is rooted in race, to be sure. Yet, the kind of thing this focus group report talked about, the kind of thing we see on the right day in and day out makes it pretty clear to this observer that the elephant in the room is race. I wonder how it is possible not to see that.
UPDATE: While hardly indicative of the folks in the study group, I think the kind of thing in this indictment make the point pretty clear. Sick, scary stuff, rooted not just in race, but also in a belief that Obama's Presidency is, fundamentally, illegitimate. The stuff about killing his family in front of him - God, that's just awful.
Adding, it is odd they left out the racial epithets, but left the rest of the foul language in.
Another major theme on the call was that hatred of Obama is not centered around race -- the focus groups were given an open, relaxed environment to discuss what they thought, and this never came up. I asked whether race might be there as an undercurrent, taking shape in other forms such as birtherism, but even here the hosts shied away from it.
Greenberg said that while there were certainly some individuals who used racial epithets, it wasn't a motivating force overall. "I'm not saying people don't have racial attitudes, but in these discussions they didn't slip into a racial discussion," said Greenberg. "They had very explicit discussions about being accused of racism, and the one thing they gave Obama credence for was saying it's not racism."
Now, this study was conducted by, among others, James Carville and Stan Greenberg. Like them or hate them, neither one of these guys is stupid, naive, or blind. Yet, upon what else is the deep-seated loathing for everything President Obama does, or proposes, or whatever accolades he receives overseas based? Since the dominant cry at the heart of all the tea-party crap, all the 9/12 protests, all the right-wing screeching about socialism and Nazism and "Obama worship" is, "We want our country back", it seems to me pretty clear what they are saying is, "We want the white face of our national leaders back." The racial - and with it social and cultural as well as political - change in leadership threatens the foundations of the worldview of many conservatives, even those who, as the study leaders suggest, do not have race as a dominant factor in determining their dislike for the President.
The schizophrenia - and I really am not sure there is another word to describe how completely bizarre some of the stuff coming from the right is - on the conservative political side cannot be explained by ideology, because the President is not an ideologue. It can't be explained by media fawning and adulation, because that just hasn't happened. It can't be explained by any reference to actual events, laws, Executive Orders, or any other action on the part of the President, his Administration, or the Democratic leadership in Congress (a very different animal from the Administration). While it is true the loathing of the right for Bill Clinton entered in to weird territory - the whole drug-smuggling through Mena, killing Vince Foster, on and on - there seems to be a change from hysterically stupid and occasionally scary (Clinton) to frighteningly unhinged and dangerously unsettling (under Obama) among the right.
It seems to me the various political labels tossed at the President - socialist, communist, fascist - all hinge not around ideology, but differentness. He is Different even from African-Americans. His father was Kenyan. He has an African name, rather than an Anglo name. He spent time in his childhood overseas. He grew up in Hawaii. All these things suggest that there is something different - not like us - about President Obama. The constant attempt to strip any legitimacy from him, the actions of his Administration, or even now, it seems, his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, are rooted not in any act, or statement, or even general theme of his Administration. Rather, it is rooted in a deep fear of the perceived threat that comes from the implicit social and cultural change inherent in having a President whose skin color happens to be darker than the norm.
Not all the opposition to President Obama is rooted in race, to be sure. Yet, the kind of thing this focus group report talked about, the kind of thing we see on the right day in and day out makes it pretty clear to this observer that the elephant in the room is race. I wonder how it is possible not to see that.
UPDATE: While hardly indicative of the folks in the study group, I think the kind of thing in this indictment make the point pretty clear. Sick, scary stuff, rooted not just in race, but also in a belief that Obama's Presidency is, fundamentally, illegitimate. The stuff about killing his family in front of him - God, that's just awful.
Adding, it is odd they left out the racial epithets, but left the rest of the foul language in.
The Challenge Of Peace
Under the recommendation of ER, I watched the great Cornel West expound on President Obama's Nobel Prize. Quite simply, his message is simple - now, he has to live up to it.
West's message is both a blessing and a warning to the President. His heartfelt desire that the President's parents and grandparents had lived to see this is genuine. His insistence that the Peace Prize obligates the President to rethink how he envisions himself as the leader of the greatest military empire in the history of the planet is clear.
We can argue back and forth over the appropriateness of the prize - and even the President seems more than little embarrassed by it - yet, should he accept it, it seems to me that West is exactly right. This is the political equivalent of baptism; he is no longer just the President of the United States. He, like those West mentioned (King, Mandela, Bunche) and others (Carter, Sadat/Begin, Medicins Sans Frontiers) unmentioned should remind him that he has joined a great cloud of witnesses. His dual role as President and Nobel Laureate makes him more than just our President, but the latest member of a small, elite group of men and women who have dedicated their lives to making the world better, or perhaps just to doing what they could to making it less full of pain and misery.
Barack Obama has people all over the world looking to him as a beacon of hope. Few human beings can really live up to that challenge, yet the Nobel committee certainly seems to believe he can meet it. It is up to us, the American people, to help him.
West's message is both a blessing and a warning to the President. His heartfelt desire that the President's parents and grandparents had lived to see this is genuine. His insistence that the Peace Prize obligates the President to rethink how he envisions himself as the leader of the greatest military empire in the history of the planet is clear.
We can argue back and forth over the appropriateness of the prize - and even the President seems more than little embarrassed by it - yet, should he accept it, it seems to me that West is exactly right. This is the political equivalent of baptism; he is no longer just the President of the United States. He, like those West mentioned (King, Mandela, Bunche) and others (Carter, Sadat/Begin, Medicins Sans Frontiers) unmentioned should remind him that he has joined a great cloud of witnesses. His dual role as President and Nobel Laureate makes him more than just our President, but the latest member of a small, elite group of men and women who have dedicated their lives to making the world better, or perhaps just to doing what they could to making it less full of pain and misery.
Barack Obama has people all over the world looking to him as a beacon of hope. Few human beings can really live up to that challenge, yet the Nobel committee certainly seems to believe he can meet it. It is up to us, the American people, to help him.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Satire Is Beyond Us
If this is any indication.
We are all drug-addled sex tourists who spout fact-free race- and sex-hatred three hours a day on the radio and get paid far too much for it.
While I think most Americans are far better than we give them credit for, the person who wrote this, and the folks who think it just teh awwwwweeeeeesssssoooooommmmmmmmmeeeee are the ones who drag down our national IQ. You can't make fun of people like this; it's like making fun of the disabled - poor taste.
We are all drug-addled sex tourists who spout fact-free race- and sex-hatred three hours a day on the radio and get paid far too much for it.
While I think most Americans are far better than we give them credit for, the person who wrote this, and the folks who think it just teh awwwwweeeeeesssssoooooommmmmmmmmeeeee are the ones who drag down our national IQ. You can't make fun of people like this; it's like making fun of the disabled - poor taste.
Just Wondering
Is it just me, or are more and more Republican politicians just so lost in the minority that we are only now seeing how kooky they have always been?
I'm not talking about people like John Boehner or Michelle Bachman. Charles Grassley suddenly sees the 10th Amendment to the Constitution as a problem for health care reform. Rep. Sue Myrick has a list, apparently, of "intern spies" - Muslim interns working on Capitol Hill.
Do they expect people who have brain cells to take them seriously?
Is it any wonder that some of us hold them in contempt?
I'm not talking about people like John Boehner or Michelle Bachman. Charles Grassley suddenly sees the 10th Amendment to the Constitution as a problem for health care reform. Rep. Sue Myrick has a list, apparently, of "intern spies" - Muslim interns working on Capitol Hill.
Do they expect people who have brain cells to take them seriously?
Is it any wonder that some of us hold them in contempt?
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Religous Freedom Except For Those Who Actually Live It Out
While conservatives rail against President Obama and his Administration’s threats to our liberties, a direct assault on our constitutional liberties is unfolding in Marathon County, Wisconsin. Dale and Leilani Neumann were sentenced on Tuesday to six months in jail and ten years probation in the death of their daughter, eleven-year-old Kara.
They didn’t beat her. She wasn’t locked away in a room. By all accounts, they were loving, attentive parents. Their crime was refusing on religious grounds medical treatment for Kara. During the sentencing, Dale Neumann said, "I am guilty of trusting my Lord's wisdom completely. ... Guilty of obeying my God.”
Even more dangerous to our freedoms than the conviction were the words of the judge at sentencing, as reported by CBS News. “We are here today because to some, you made Kara a martyr to your faith.” This direct attack upon the Neumann’s religious beliefs by an agent of the state is a disturbing moment. Any person who treasures our freedom of religion should tremble at those words.
It is gut-wrenching to consider the reality of losing a child. It is far worse to have an officer of a court of law inform you that your faith is in error. To insist, as the prosecutors did in this case, that the Neumann’s had a legal obligation to seek medical care for Kara against the tenets of their religious beliefs is an assault upon the Constitutional guarantee of the freedom of religion. The judge’s admonishment from the bench that their religious beliefs were wrong puts all who believe at risk of state intercession in the practice of their belief.
Suppose, in the name of improving our national educational standards, the state removed children from home schools, forcing them against their parents’ religious beliefs to learn about Darwin’s theory of evolution. Or perhaps a judge, acting on the tenets of his faith, would mandate nonsectarian moments of silence against the wishes of an atheist parent.
The constitutional protection of religious belief is meaningless if the state can decide that certain acts done in the name of religious belief are criminal. Our liberty to believe and live by those beliefs, whether others accept them as legitimate or not, are threatened when a judge can say, from the bench, that those beliefs are not only wrong, but criminally so
They didn’t beat her. She wasn’t locked away in a room. By all accounts, they were loving, attentive parents. Their crime was refusing on religious grounds medical treatment for Kara. During the sentencing, Dale Neumann said, "I am guilty of trusting my Lord's wisdom completely. ... Guilty of obeying my God.”
Even more dangerous to our freedoms than the conviction were the words of the judge at sentencing, as reported by CBS News. “We are here today because to some, you made Kara a martyr to your faith.” This direct attack upon the Neumann’s religious beliefs by an agent of the state is a disturbing moment. Any person who treasures our freedom of religion should tremble at those words.
It is gut-wrenching to consider the reality of losing a child. It is far worse to have an officer of a court of law inform you that your faith is in error. To insist, as the prosecutors did in this case, that the Neumann’s had a legal obligation to seek medical care for Kara against the tenets of their religious beliefs is an assault upon the Constitutional guarantee of the freedom of religion. The judge’s admonishment from the bench that their religious beliefs were wrong puts all who believe at risk of state intercession in the practice of their belief.
Suppose, in the name of improving our national educational standards, the state removed children from home schools, forcing them against their parents’ religious beliefs to learn about Darwin’s theory of evolution. Or perhaps a judge, acting on the tenets of his faith, would mandate nonsectarian moments of silence against the wishes of an atheist parent.
The constitutional protection of religious belief is meaningless if the state can decide that certain acts done in the name of religious belief are criminal. Our liberty to believe and live by those beliefs, whether others accept them as legitimate or not, are threatened when a judge can say, from the bench, that those beliefs are not only wrong, but criminally so
The Freedom Of Obscurity
In case semi-regular readers have noticed, I haven't been posting over the past week or so. In fact, I've been struggling with a serious decision. Last Monday, I learned of the Washington Post's "Next American Pundit" contest. I initially tossed my scruples aside, wrote a not-quite-400 word piece, and have been sitting on it ever since, allowing my conscience to eat away at me.
I consulted a couple people, both of whom encouraged me. Yet, I knew I was being a big fat hypocrite by doing so. Worse, as the week went on, instance after instance of truly bad writing and analysis was offered up by this same newspaper. I realized I was deliberately holding back writing what I wanted to write because I might be courting this newspaper. Worse, in the off-chance that I actually won, there were even more things to consider beyond censoring myself out of company loyalty. I would be surrendering my freedom to write what I wanted in the way I wanted.
The fact is, pundits are whores. They do not serve the people, but fellate office holders and their staffs, administration officials and various power-brokers, currying favor and ensuring that even obscure officers now and then. I have no desire to sell my services, as meager as they may be, to any one. I refuse to keep silent on the degradation of our public discourse because those degrading it happen to work at the same place I do. If Charles Krauthammer writes something both abysmally stupid and dangerous, I would rather be free to have four people read it here, than thousands read it as my last column in a major newspaper.
Print punditry, television punditry does not serve the interests of democracy. Blogs do. I recently heard of a political science study on blogs; the author said that most bloggers type away in obscurity, with only a few of the big ones getting links and hits. I guess the conclusion was that blogging is relatively unimportant to our national life.
Which begs the question, of course, of how one defines "important". Especially liberal bloggers tend to be scrupulously addicted to factual accuracy, to a certain set of moral principles, and to empowering more and more people to get involved in our public life in part by becoming more and better informed. Even if this blog only has a handful of readers, that's OK, because with obscurity comes the freedom to say what I want to say in my own way, without fear. If I feel like saying David Broder is a senile old fart who passed his prime before Lyndon Johnson left office, I at least can do so without having David Broder threatening my job.
So, I am not entering. I am not going to compromise my freedom, or my understanding that the paper in question is becoming a sad parody of a serious newspaper, publishing junk and nonsense written by people who continue to believe that nothing fundamental has changed in the country; people who believe that John McCain and Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe and Charles Krauthammer and Richard Cohen and David Broder and George Will present views in tune with the American people.
To the editors at the WaPo, may I quote a scribe from the New York Times": Suck. On. This.
And the next post is the piece I was going to enter. I'd like your opinion on it, if you don't mind.
I consulted a couple people, both of whom encouraged me. Yet, I knew I was being a big fat hypocrite by doing so. Worse, as the week went on, instance after instance of truly bad writing and analysis was offered up by this same newspaper. I realized I was deliberately holding back writing what I wanted to write because I might be courting this newspaper. Worse, in the off-chance that I actually won, there were even more things to consider beyond censoring myself out of company loyalty. I would be surrendering my freedom to write what I wanted in the way I wanted.
The fact is, pundits are whores. They do not serve the people, but fellate office holders and their staffs, administration officials and various power-brokers, currying favor and ensuring that even obscure officers now and then. I have no desire to sell my services, as meager as they may be, to any one. I refuse to keep silent on the degradation of our public discourse because those degrading it happen to work at the same place I do. If Charles Krauthammer writes something both abysmally stupid and dangerous, I would rather be free to have four people read it here, than thousands read it as my last column in a major newspaper.
Print punditry, television punditry does not serve the interests of democracy. Blogs do. I recently heard of a political science study on blogs; the author said that most bloggers type away in obscurity, with only a few of the big ones getting links and hits. I guess the conclusion was that blogging is relatively unimportant to our national life.
Which begs the question, of course, of how one defines "important". Especially liberal bloggers tend to be scrupulously addicted to factual accuracy, to a certain set of moral principles, and to empowering more and more people to get involved in our public life in part by becoming more and better informed. Even if this blog only has a handful of readers, that's OK, because with obscurity comes the freedom to say what I want to say in my own way, without fear. If I feel like saying David Broder is a senile old fart who passed his prime before Lyndon Johnson left office, I at least can do so without having David Broder threatening my job.
So, I am not entering. I am not going to compromise my freedom, or my understanding that the paper in question is becoming a sad parody of a serious newspaper, publishing junk and nonsense written by people who continue to believe that nothing fundamental has changed in the country; people who believe that John McCain and Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe and Charles Krauthammer and Richard Cohen and David Broder and George Will present views in tune with the American people.
To the editors at the WaPo, may I quote a scribe from the New York Times": Suck. On. This.
And the next post is the piece I was going to enter. I'd like your opinion on it, if you don't mind.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Music For Your Monday
This post is done out of spite. On my way to my wedding reception on Saturday, I was listening to Chicago Public Radio's program, "Sound Opinions", a talk show on rock music hosted by the critics from the Tribune and Sun-Times. After an interesting show on the use of instruments outside the regular rock idiom - the autoharp, the didgeridoo, the marimba - they did their usual bit of reviewing recent releases. One was the latest by the British band Muse. They panned it, calling the music and lyrics self-important, without that necessity of rock, a sense of humor and that favorite of rock critics, a sense of irony and distance.
As if David Bowie wasn't a pompous blowhard who takes himself too seriously. As if Bono wasn't a pretentious nincompoop at times. As if Bob Dylan didn't take his music, and by extension himself, seriously.
This is the kind of thing I just detest about rock critics.
In honor, then, of this panning by two rock critics, here are three offerings from Muse, the biggest band yet to break in America (they're huge in Europe).
From the aforementioned panned release, The Resistance, this is "Uprising":
From a DVD recorded during a sold-out two-day stint at Wembley Stadium in London, this is "Knights of Cydonia":
If you think the stage set is a bit over the top, consider some of the stuff U2 has done. . .
As if David Bowie wasn't a pompous blowhard who takes himself too seriously. As if Bono wasn't a pretentious nincompoop at times. As if Bob Dylan didn't take his music, and by extension himself, seriously.
This is the kind of thing I just detest about rock critics.
In honor, then, of this panning by two rock critics, here are three offerings from Muse, the biggest band yet to break in America (they're huge in Europe).
From the aforementioned panned release, The Resistance, this is "Uprising":
From a DVD recorded during a sold-out two-day stint at Wembley Stadium in London, this is "Knights of Cydonia":
If you think the stage set is a bit over the top, consider some of the stuff U2 has done. . .
No Fan Of Big Marches
There was a "March For Equality" in Washington yesterday. While such gatherings are a good way for disparate folks from all over to come together, to fell not quite so alone, for the most part, I think they are a huge waste of time.
In 1993, I participated in a huge March for Equality. Nearly a million people, lining up on the Mall, listening to speakers, comedians and comediennes, singers, activists while the line inched so slowly up Pennsylvania Ave, past the White House and toward the Capitol. It was a sunny April day, not too hot, with a nice breeze. As the group with whom I was marching made their way from the Metro stop to the spot where we would get in line, we walked past a homeless man, sleeping on the sidewalk, his few belongings pressed close to him. As my group walked on, talking about the need for equality, about working to make the country better for LGBT folk, some actually stepped over the homeless man without looking at him. Later, as we stood around waiting, that image flashed through my mind as I listened to speaker after speaker insist that the march was about protecting individuals, about promoting a more just society, about encouraging diversity. All the speakers, except one, were white. Most of the marchers, not only from my own admittedly limited vantage point, but also from news reports seen after the fact, seemed to be middle to upper-middle class. All looked well-fed, well-dressed, and the biggest inconvenience seemed to be the wait to get water to keep off the effects of standing in the sun.
The image of that homeless man, curled up asleep, while all a group of earnest, impassioned folk walked by without noticing, haunted me. Even as I walked up Pennsylvania Ave, past the White House, past counter-protesters holding signs telling me I was going to hell, I wondered if that man managed to get out of the way before the crowd overwhelmed him. Did he manage to find a spot, maybe under one of the overpasses in SW Washington, or perhaps further up the Mall in some shrubs, where it would be cool and quiet?
Finally, I left the line, around the Old Post Office. When Lisa got back, she asked me why I left. Was I hot or otherwise uncomfortable, she asked.
No, I said. I was angry. I was angry because of the refusal by some who claim allegiance to something they call Divine Justice, not even to see a human being sleeping on a sidewalk even as they went to protest injustice. Who, I asked, was marching for this man? Did he have a mental illness, or an addiction, that made it difficult for him to hold down a job, or maintain a place of his own? Where was the insistence that this man, too, deserved our concern, our support, perhaps even a march of his own?
While not at all denying the reality that we are in need of legal guarantees of protection for sexual minorities in this country, I find marches like this, or any such demonstration to be nothing more than a necessity for the participants. As soon as anyone shows me evidence that they have any effect on public policy, I might begin to change my mind. As soon as organizers develop a march not just for the homeless and neglected, but by the homeless and neglected, I might begin to reconsider. As soon as one of those participants with me that April day so long ago apologizes to that man for refusing to even see and acknowledge him as a fellow human being, of worth and value and deserving of our consideration, I might change my mind.
Otherwise, not so much.
In 1993, I participated in a huge March for Equality. Nearly a million people, lining up on the Mall, listening to speakers, comedians and comediennes, singers, activists while the line inched so slowly up Pennsylvania Ave, past the White House and toward the Capitol. It was a sunny April day, not too hot, with a nice breeze. As the group with whom I was marching made their way from the Metro stop to the spot where we would get in line, we walked past a homeless man, sleeping on the sidewalk, his few belongings pressed close to him. As my group walked on, talking about the need for equality, about working to make the country better for LGBT folk, some actually stepped over the homeless man without looking at him. Later, as we stood around waiting, that image flashed through my mind as I listened to speaker after speaker insist that the march was about protecting individuals, about promoting a more just society, about encouraging diversity. All the speakers, except one, were white. Most of the marchers, not only from my own admittedly limited vantage point, but also from news reports seen after the fact, seemed to be middle to upper-middle class. All looked well-fed, well-dressed, and the biggest inconvenience seemed to be the wait to get water to keep off the effects of standing in the sun.
The image of that homeless man, curled up asleep, while all a group of earnest, impassioned folk walked by without noticing, haunted me. Even as I walked up Pennsylvania Ave, past the White House, past counter-protesters holding signs telling me I was going to hell, I wondered if that man managed to get out of the way before the crowd overwhelmed him. Did he manage to find a spot, maybe under one of the overpasses in SW Washington, or perhaps further up the Mall in some shrubs, where it would be cool and quiet?
Finally, I left the line, around the Old Post Office. When Lisa got back, she asked me why I left. Was I hot or otherwise uncomfortable, she asked.
No, I said. I was angry. I was angry because of the refusal by some who claim allegiance to something they call Divine Justice, not even to see a human being sleeping on a sidewalk even as they went to protest injustice. Who, I asked, was marching for this man? Did he have a mental illness, or an addiction, that made it difficult for him to hold down a job, or maintain a place of his own? Where was the insistence that this man, too, deserved our concern, our support, perhaps even a march of his own?
While not at all denying the reality that we are in need of legal guarantees of protection for sexual minorities in this country, I find marches like this, or any such demonstration to be nothing more than a necessity for the participants. As soon as anyone shows me evidence that they have any effect on public policy, I might begin to change my mind. As soon as organizers develop a march not just for the homeless and neglected, but by the homeless and neglected, I might begin to reconsider. As soon as one of those participants with me that April day so long ago apologizes to that man for refusing to even see and acknowledge him as a fellow human being, of worth and value and deserving of our consideration, I might change my mind.
Otherwise, not so much.
When An Old Rag Becomes Evidence
I have to admit, when I first saw this story at TPM, I thought it was serious. Considering that it seemed to be coming from Oklahoma (no offense to my various Okie friends online), I feel quite abashed that I took it seriously.
It was only when I clicked a link that I realized it was a bit of turnabout on a new Oklahoma law that really does go in to effect soon regarding abortion.
After due consideration, I think a law stipulating that any act of spermicide be published online is a good and necessary thing. After all, male masturbation can lead one to become gay, along with blindness, insanity, and other hazards. In the name of public health, if nothing else, a public record of male self-abuse is a good thing.
The only thing I see creating serious problems would be the overload on servers as men report in, especially late on Friday and Saturday nights.
A new law set to come into effect on Nov. 1, will require all men in Oklahoma to reveal personal details regarding every sperm that they murder.
"Every year in Oklahoma, a googolplex of sperm die lonely deaths inside socks, in showers and other places," said Oklahoma spokeswoman Sally Kern. "This holocaust of the unborn must end."
It was only when I clicked a link that I realized it was a bit of turnabout on a new Oklahoma law that really does go in to effect soon regarding abortion.
For women in Sally Kern's state of Oklahoma, all your wombs are belong to us as of Nov. 1. A law will go into effect that will require that personal details about every single abortion performed in the state will be documented and placed online.
Here are the first eight questions that women will have to reveal:
1. Date of abortion
2. County in which abortion performed
3. Age of mother
4. Marital status of mother
(married, divorced, separated, widowed, or never married)
5. Race of mother
6. Years of education of mother
(specify highest year completed)
7. State or foreign country of residence of mother
8. Total number of previous pregnancies of the mother
Live Births
Miscarriages
Induced Abortions
After due consideration, I think a law stipulating that any act of spermicide be published online is a good and necessary thing. After all, male masturbation can lead one to become gay, along with blindness, insanity, and other hazards. In the name of public health, if nothing else, a public record of male self-abuse is a good thing.
The only thing I see creating serious problems would be the overload on servers as men report in, especially late on Friday and Saturday nights.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Saying "No" To The Party Of No
This article in The New York Times is, quite simply, the biggest laugh, politically, I've had in a long time.
I will bet anyone - anyone - any amount of money not only will the Republicans not take back either House of Congress. I will further bet that the Republicans will lose seats; up to a half-dozen in the House, as few as two or as many as four in the Senate.
Any takers?
I will bet anyone - anyone - any amount of money not only will the Republicans not take back either House of Congress. I will further bet that the Republicans will lose seats; up to a half-dozen in the House, as few as two or as many as four in the Senate.
Any takers?
Participation And Civility
For some reason, the idea that participation in our public discourse needs to be conducted with something known as "civility" continues to float around, like an untethered balloon. The notion that we should conduct our discussions of questions of national import without rancor and with respect toward those with whom we disagree persists even as our freedom to be uncivil continues unabated. Usually, those who insist that we the people not get too heated when discussing politics comes from those who, until relatively recently, enjoyed a role as gatekeepers of our national discussion. With the advent of the internet, however, the gatekeepers stand around a gate attached to nothing, the wall having been torn down by crowds chanting and cheering.
When a writer like Ann Gerhart at The Washington Post tries to approach the subject, it becomes muddled, false equivalencies suddenly arise, and much of our recent history is ignored. For example, she calls Michelle Malkin "a best-selling and often inflammatory conservative writer with a heavily trafficked Web site." Except, of course, Malkin is much more. She has posted the personal information of opponents on the internet; she has stalked the family of a young teenager who spoke out publicly on an issue; when she published information on a group of college students, they were harassed so much by her readers that one committed suicide. These are facts, and flesh out why someone not in the public eye might be a bit concerned when Malkin's feral gaze turns upon them.
Gerhart mentions the man whose finger was bitten off this past summer. At all the town hall meetings, with all the invective thrown at the President, at Democratic members of Congress, all the guns being worn, we have this one, single incident as an example of liberals behaving badly. Of course, it occurred because the biter was being slapped by the bitey, which also goes unmentioned.
The long and the short of it is quite simple - issues of public import arouse passions. Sometimes, those passions crowd out rational control and our insistence that we be heard, that our point-of-view be considered meritorious ends up in shouting matches. There is nothing wrong with this. Those who desire that we keep accord ourselves with some arbitrary notion of civility forget that questions of war and peace, taxation and healthcare are important to people; sometimes, they mean the difference between life and death. The gatekeepers at their lonely stations may stand like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, shouting "All is well!" to the mob, but it is far more important that all these voices are out there. Even those, like Malkin's, one finds odious. Freedom and democracy are far better practices today because of our freedom to ignore the calls for civility.
When a writer like Ann Gerhart at The Washington Post tries to approach the subject, it becomes muddled, false equivalencies suddenly arise, and much of our recent history is ignored. For example, she calls Michelle Malkin "a best-selling and often inflammatory conservative writer with a heavily trafficked Web site." Except, of course, Malkin is much more. She has posted the personal information of opponents on the internet; she has stalked the family of a young teenager who spoke out publicly on an issue; when she published information on a group of college students, they were harassed so much by her readers that one committed suicide. These are facts, and flesh out why someone not in the public eye might be a bit concerned when Malkin's feral gaze turns upon them.
Gerhart mentions the man whose finger was bitten off this past summer. At all the town hall meetings, with all the invective thrown at the President, at Democratic members of Congress, all the guns being worn, we have this one, single incident as an example of liberals behaving badly. Of course, it occurred because the biter was being slapped by the bitey, which also goes unmentioned.
The long and the short of it is quite simple - issues of public import arouse passions. Sometimes, those passions crowd out rational control and our insistence that we be heard, that our point-of-view be considered meritorious ends up in shouting matches. There is nothing wrong with this. Those who desire that we keep accord ourselves with some arbitrary notion of civility forget that questions of war and peace, taxation and healthcare are important to people; sometimes, they mean the difference between life and death. The gatekeepers at their lonely stations may stand like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, shouting "All is well!" to the mob, but it is far more important that all these voices are out there. Even those, like Malkin's, one finds odious. Freedom and democracy are far better practices today because of our freedom to ignore the calls for civility.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
My Favorite Monument
When I lived in DC, my favorite monument to visit on the Mall wasn't the Lincoln Memorial, even though it is steeped in visual history. I stood where King stood and looked out, wondering what he was thinking and feeling, but that isn't my most memorable time on the Mall. The Washington Monument provides a stunning view of the entire city, but it hardly qualifies.
Just north of Independence Ave, in a small grove of trees, with a beautiful walkway leading to it, is a small Greek-revival, columned building, the District's Memorial to those who served in World War I. Not a national monument at all, out of the way, shaded, forgotten as those events of nearly a century ago have been forgotten in the rush of later horrors. It was a great place to go and sit with a book. Quite a few Saturday afternoons were spent in the quiet shade of that building.
Now, it seems, the memorial is finally getting a facelift. That's a good thing. Like the war whose dead it memorializes, the building deserves more attention than it has received. Like the war itself, we need, as the centennial of its beginning approaches, to remember it, to remind ourselves that the 20th century began with horrors unimaginable up to that time; overshadowed by the ability of humans to be even more vicious than we had previously realized, we have forgotten how shattering that event was to European civilization and sensibilities. We need to refurbish the building and refurbish our understanding of the beginning of the end of an idea of Europe, an idea that, while full of horror and evil, also strove to be better than it was. That it ended up being far more horrible than it could have conceived is, perhaps, a testimony to the inherent limits and inconsistencies in that idea. That doesn't render those ideas any less noble.
Next time you visit the nation's capital, take a walk down Independence Ave, SW, and you will see it, but you have to look closely. No matter the season, the tree-lined walk is a great photo. Go, and sit, and relax, and remember.
Saturday Rock Show
In honor of our Nobel Laureate President, here's John Lennon cutting through the chatter.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Surprising
It seems that there are liberals out there who aren't quite sure what to make of Barack Obama's Nobel laureate status. Apparently, in the word of Matt Yglesias, being given the Prize at this point is "dubious".
Dubious or not, the Prize is awarded for specific efforts - after all, Henry Kissinger has one, too, and he is for all intents and purposes, a war criminal. That doesn't make the prize itself illegitimate. I see no reason in the world why the political dimension - a nod of approval from a certain section of the international community toward the United States and its President - shouldn't be considered an issue of merit and worth.
I should add that Yglesias is also right in that the right-wing howls over the Nobel Committee's decision make supporting the whole thing that much easier.
Dubious or not, the Prize is awarded for specific efforts - after all, Henry Kissinger has one, too, and he is for all intents and purposes, a war criminal. That doesn't make the prize itself illegitimate. I see no reason in the world why the political dimension - a nod of approval from a certain section of the international community toward the United States and its President - shouldn't be considered an issue of merit and worth.
I should add that Yglesias is also right in that the right-wing howls over the Nobel Committee's decision make supporting the whole thing that much easier.
It Couldn't Have Happened To A Nicer Guy (UPDATE)
The Norwegians have style.
He and Teddy Roosevelt share the honor of being the only sitting US Presidents to win the Peace Prize.
Of course, we should brace ourselves for the howls from the right, but for this moment - right now - I am proud to be an American.
UPDATE: I stand corrected. Woodrow Wilson won for his efforts at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of WWI, and the creation of the League of Nations.
President Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for his work to improve international diplomacy and rid the world of nuclear weapons
He and Teddy Roosevelt share the honor of being the only sitting US Presidents to win the Peace Prize.
Of course, we should brace ourselves for the howls from the right, but for this moment - right now - I am proud to be an American.
UPDATE: I stand corrected. Woodrow Wilson won for his efforts at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of WWI, and the creation of the League of Nations.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Never Forget
Today is Matthew Shepard Day. Or, at least, it should be.
Eleven years ago, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die on the side of the road outside Laramie, WY for the crime of being himself. One of the persons convicted in this horrible murder shows no remorse, and even says that Shepard "needed killing."
It is long past time for a hate-crimes bill to be passed, to draw a line in the legal sand that insists that we, as a society, will not allow those who violently attack others because they are alive and different from others.
Let us not allow Matthew do have died in vain. Let us remember him, the horrible way he died, and insist, "Never again."
Eleven years ago, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die on the side of the road outside Laramie, WY for the crime of being himself. One of the persons convicted in this horrible murder shows no remorse, and even says that Shepard "needed killing."
It is long past time for a hate-crimes bill to be passed, to draw a line in the legal sand that insists that we, as a society, will not allow those who violently attack others because they are alive and different from others.
Let us not allow Matthew do have died in vain. Let us remember him, the horrible way he died, and insist, "Never again."
Random Nonsense
I'm actually looking forward to Todd Palin's companion volume to his wife's memoir, entitled Going Rogaine: The Todd Palin Story
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Marty Peretz Is So Stupid
Oh my God.
Since I'm in the midst of reading Lasch on the issue of narcissism, it is quite frustrating to read this kind of crap. He has no idea what he is talking about here; it's like someone once mentioned the word to him, and he thought, "I should use that!"
George Will, who is even stupider than Marty, has latched on to this notion with all the gusto of a high school sophomore in the literal sense of being a "wise fool".
It's bad enough they are criticizing the President for something that never happened. What's worse, they are doing so in a way that makes the angels cry because it is so dumb.
What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an "optimal margin of illusion," that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?
Since I'm in the midst of reading Lasch on the issue of narcissism, it is quite frustrating to read this kind of crap. He has no idea what he is talking about here; it's like someone once mentioned the word to him, and he thought, "I should use that!"
George Will, who is even stupider than Marty, has latched on to this notion with all the gusto of a high school sophomore in the literal sense of being a "wise fool".
It's bad enough they are criticizing the President for something that never happened. What's worse, they are doing so in a way that makes the angels cry because it is so dumb.
Fantasy And Reality
In conservative fantasy-land, not only is the United States crumbling around us, the cold, dead hand of the state ready to force us all to sing songs to the greatness of Barack Obama while it laughs at health insurance company workers forced to look for work elsewhere; the rest of the world thinks we are a joke, ready to fold up under the pressure because we have a defeatist President who cares little for the use of force in the world, cowed by the tinnest of tin-pot dictators. For example:
In this weird place where we all live and work and breathe, however, things aren't quite so bleak as bad early-70's dystopian movies:
Reality is so stupid.
We Americans, and the world, are truly watching a return to the planet of the apes (chaos and destruction), but as bleak as this reality is, we are still the architects of our future and with that there is hope, and the possibility of redemption.(emphasis added)
In this weird place where we all live and work and breathe, however, things aren't quite so bleak as bad early-70's dystopian movies:
The United States is the most admired country globally thanks largely to the star power of President Barack Obama and his administration, according to a new poll.
Reality is so stupid.
Monday, October 05, 2009
Conservatives Is Smart
Without a doubt, the best thing I clicked on all day was my very first read, which led me to Conservapedia's Conservative Bible Project. Sadly, No! has a nice rundown of their "rules", but the best - a kind of summary of stupid - comes before this particular bit of fun.
First of all, there is an updated Authorized Version, the New King James Version.
Second, to do what Conservadepia is saying - "translating" the Authorized Version in to contemporary idiom - isn't translation, it's a paraphrase. Translation comes when one takes the original manuscripts in Hebrew and Greek and wrestles them in to a form that is readable for contemporary English speakers. There are several paraphrases based on the Authorized Version out there, most notably the Living Bible (which has some serious flaws).
Third, I do so love the fact that these "Biblical scholars" have decided, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the story of the woman caught in adultery, is a redacted addition. Apparently the early church was overrun by liberals who thought that forgiving some slut caught in the act was better than stoning her to death.
I can't wait to read this piece of trash. And they say we liberals don't respect the Bible.
Large reductions in this error can be attained simply by retranslating the KJV into modern English.
First of all, there is an updated Authorized Version, the New King James Version.
Second, to do what Conservadepia is saying - "translating" the Authorized Version in to contemporary idiom - isn't translation, it's a paraphrase. Translation comes when one takes the original manuscripts in Hebrew and Greek and wrestles them in to a form that is readable for contemporary English speakers. There are several paraphrases based on the Authorized Version out there, most notably the Living Bible (which has some serious flaws).
Third, I do so love the fact that these "Biblical scholars" have decided, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the story of the woman caught in adultery, is a redacted addition. Apparently the early church was overrun by liberals who thought that forgiving some slut caught in the act was better than stoning her to death.
I can't wait to read this piece of trash. And they say we liberals don't respect the Bible.
Music For Your Monday
I haven't featured Tom Waits in, like, forever. He is, beyond a doubt, my favorite songwriter, arranger, and singer - and, yes, I said singer. His voice isn't bad, it's just harsh, deliberately created (according to an interview I heard with Terry Gross on NPR) because, as a child, Waits grew up listening to people like Sinatra and Dean Martin. As a boy, he tried to imitate them (adding in the scratchy sounds of some 78s and the general noise from LPs) and it made his voice rough. Of course, smoking a pack or two of unfiltered cigarettes a day also can do things to the vocal chords.
Even more than Dylan, Waits is the singer-songwriter for me. While Bob Dylan does have a sense of humor, the near-deification that has created BOB DYLAN has forced so much of his natural humor and sense of self-deprecation under the protective shell of his natural shyness. To be honest, I don't blame the guy. Waits, on the other hand, continues to do what he has always done - write songs about hobos, drunks, paranoids, and occasionally hopeful songs for children and the children in all of us - and pays very little attention to a press corps that, not understanding him or his music, ignores him. His fans love him and his songs. Sometimes it sounds like someone is banging on an old cast-iron heating register to keep the beat. The guitars, and banjos, and pianos all sound like they are just about to slip out of tune. It's wonderful stuff, and while I know he takes some getting used to, once you have fallen under his spell, it's impossible to deny his brilliance and sheer musical genius.
Even more than Dylan, Waits is the singer-songwriter for me. While Bob Dylan does have a sense of humor, the near-deification that has created BOB DYLAN has forced so much of his natural humor and sense of self-deprecation under the protective shell of his natural shyness. To be honest, I don't blame the guy. Waits, on the other hand, continues to do what he has always done - write songs about hobos, drunks, paranoids, and occasionally hopeful songs for children and the children in all of us - and pays very little attention to a press corps that, not understanding him or his music, ignores him. His fans love him and his songs. Sometimes it sounds like someone is banging on an old cast-iron heating register to keep the beat. The guitars, and banjos, and pianos all sound like they are just about to slip out of tune. It's wonderful stuff, and while I know he takes some getting used to, once you have fallen under his spell, it's impossible to deny his brilliance and sheer musical genius.
Stupid Intellectuals
I was going to write about Steven Hayward's Outlook piece yesterday, but to be perfectly honest, it's crap. The pieces from "conservative intellectuals" he offers up are crap. His juxtaposition of intellectual conservatism and "populism" is crap. His history and grasp of how shallow most conservative "ideas" are betrays his own adherence to them. His refusal to understand the utter failure of conservative governance under eight years of George W. Bush shatter any "integrity" he may have.
Read it to laugh at how stupid it is. Just don't believe there is anything substantive to it. Beyond spanking radio talk show hosts, and wearing on his sleeve the typical conservative desire to have daddy - whether in the form of William F. Buckley or Ronald Reagan - come and make everything better, the piece is so bad it fits in perfectly with the continued downward slurge (in Winston Churchill's apt phrase) of The Washington Post.
Read it to laugh at how stupid it is. Just don't believe there is anything substantive to it. Beyond spanking radio talk show hosts, and wearing on his sleeve the typical conservative desire to have daddy - whether in the form of William F. Buckley or Ronald Reagan - come and make everything better, the piece is so bad it fits in perfectly with the continued downward slurge (in Winston Churchill's apt phrase) of The Washington Post.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
A Via Media
I have finally reached the culminating chapter in Christopher Lasch's The Minimal Self. From pp.226-227:
This dangerous road - skirting the edges of the kind of destructive tendencies Lasch details - is also a necessary one. It's one I try to hew close to as much as possible. Setting aside traditional ideological commitments and a mindless consistency in pursuit of certain social and political and cultural goals that are life affirming means flirting with easy, and dangerous, answers. Thus, while I ignore the brain-dead creationists and global-warming deniers, I am quite vocal in my refusal to follow those who insist that scientific or technical (what Lasch refers to as "instrumental") reason as the only solution to our collective problems. While I do not take seriously much of the offered political opposition to our current situation, I am critical of those with whom I would agree that a certain intellectual consistency should drive an agenda that includes what I perceive as political naivete and the possible abandonment of the current political system because it seems beyond the scope of influence from those on what is traditionally known as "the left".*
Much of what passes for social and cultural commentary by "traditional" left-wing critics usually boils down to an unrealistic assumption that science has forever reduced any and all religious statements to the category of "irrationality"; that technical or instrumental reason renders much of our political discourse moot, if only we would pat attention to it; that adherence to a certain set of social and political views necessitates certain actions and modes of thought that are exclusive, irrefutable, and consistent. I regard none of these propositions as either realistic or even rationally defensible, precisely because they are belied by the reality around us. Most important for me, the end result, no matter how much arguments otherwise are made, they are undemocratic to the core; precisely because they eschew politics as messy and inefficient (the highest goal of instrumental reason is efficiency, a practical application as it were of Ockham's Razor), they much prefer Administrative guidance to a democratic politics that is open to all.
We are all in need of a different way of moving forward. While not completely ready to endorse all of what Lasch has to say, his offer of a way through the stale, dead ideological line-ups we usually deal with is a much-needed first couple steps forward.
The new left's suspicionof large-scale social organization; its rejection of democratic centralism; its distrust of leadership and party discipline; its faith in small troups; its repudiation of power and "power trips', work discipline, and goal-directed activity in general; its repudiation of "linear" thinking - these attitudes, the souce of so much that was fruitful in the new left and of so much that was futile and self-defeating as well, originated in the central contention . . . . that "our politics begin with our feelings."
Such a politics can take many forms: radical feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, nihilism, a cult of revolutionary violence. "Cultural revolution" is an ambiguous slogan. In China, it was invoked on behalf of systematic attacks on intelligence and learning, a revolution against culture. In the West, a critique of "instrumental reason" has sometimes degenerated into a Dionysian celebration of irrationality. The revolt against technological domination points toward new forms of community but also toward nihilism and "addled subjectivity," as Lewis Mumford has called it. But in spite of the anti-intellectualism, the infantile insurgency, and the taste for destruction so often associated with cultural politics, it addresses issues ignored by the dominant political tradition: the limits of reason; the unconscious origins of the desire for domination; the embodiment of this desire in industrial technology, ostensibly the highest product of the rational intelligence.
This dangerous road - skirting the edges of the kind of destructive tendencies Lasch details - is also a necessary one. It's one I try to hew close to as much as possible. Setting aside traditional ideological commitments and a mindless consistency in pursuit of certain social and political and cultural goals that are life affirming means flirting with easy, and dangerous, answers. Thus, while I ignore the brain-dead creationists and global-warming deniers, I am quite vocal in my refusal to follow those who insist that scientific or technical (what Lasch refers to as "instrumental") reason as the only solution to our collective problems. While I do not take seriously much of the offered political opposition to our current situation, I am critical of those with whom I would agree that a certain intellectual consistency should drive an agenda that includes what I perceive as political naivete and the possible abandonment of the current political system because it seems beyond the scope of influence from those on what is traditionally known as "the left".*
Much of what passes for social and cultural commentary by "traditional" left-wing critics usually boils down to an unrealistic assumption that science has forever reduced any and all religious statements to the category of "irrationality"; that technical or instrumental reason renders much of our political discourse moot, if only we would pat attention to it; that adherence to a certain set of social and political views necessitates certain actions and modes of thought that are exclusive, irrefutable, and consistent. I regard none of these propositions as either realistic or even rationally defensible, precisely because they are belied by the reality around us. Most important for me, the end result, no matter how much arguments otherwise are made, they are undemocratic to the core; precisely because they eschew politics as messy and inefficient (the highest goal of instrumental reason is efficiency, a practical application as it were of Ockham's Razor), they much prefer Administrative guidance to a democratic politics that is open to all.
We are all in need of a different way of moving forward. While not completely ready to endorse all of what Lasch has to say, his offer of a way through the stale, dead ideological line-ups we usually deal with is a much-needed first couple steps forward.
Saturday Rock Show
U2's lead singer Bono once said that the band's guitarist The Edge was spare with his playing because he believed that one had only a limited number of notes allocated to one in life, and Edge wanted to live as long as possible.
Applying that philosophy to this young band, Scale the Summit, it seems they believe they are going to die young. Or, one can say they are so enthusiastic to show the world they can play, they haven't taught themselves the discipline of songwriting yet. While technical virtuosity is certainly an admirable quality, when it is tempered by service to the goal of crafting a coherent melody and harmony, it becomes something even more powerful. I just hope that the Sturm und Drang underway in the recording industry allows them the possibility to learn that discipline, because they do have potential. This is "Sargasso Sea".
The lead guitarist plays an eight-string, the rhythm guitarist plays a seven-inch, the bass player a six-string, so they are impressive just in their choice of instruments.
Applying that philosophy to this young band, Scale the Summit, it seems they believe they are going to die young. Or, one can say they are so enthusiastic to show the world they can play, they haven't taught themselves the discipline of songwriting yet. While technical virtuosity is certainly an admirable quality, when it is tempered by service to the goal of crafting a coherent melody and harmony, it becomes something even more powerful. I just hope that the Sturm und Drang underway in the recording industry allows them the possibility to learn that discipline, because they do have potential. This is "Sargasso Sea".
The lead guitarist plays an eight-string, the rhythm guitarist plays a seven-inch, the bass player a six-string, so they are impressive just in their choice of instruments.
This Is What Drives Me Crazy
The other day, in a comment I wrote the following:
In the post to which this comment was added, I called David Broder one of the best political reporters of our time. At one time, that might have been true. Yet, the very opening of today's column is forcing me to wish I had never written those words.
A reporter is supposed to be paying attention. A reporter is supposed to be able to string together various incidents creating an intelligible whole. While it might be the case that individual statements, especially on health care reform, suggest a refusal to take a firm stand, this hardly means that the President faces "persistent question[s] about his core beliefs and political priorities". Through the course of his column, Broder never once names who is asking these questions, let alone specifically what those "persistent questions" might be.
Rather, the narrative he weaves is one straight out of the Republican playbook, and has little to do with "questions" about his beliefs or political ideology.
Camouflage? What does that even mean?!?
The whole column is nonsense. While I am quite willing to accept that Glenn Beck is both stupid and ignorant enough to believe much of what he says about the President, I refuse to give Broder the same benefit of the doubt. Any observer of the President - and he was the junior Senator from my state for four years and I paid attention to what he said and did - would know that, at heart, the President is indeed a pragmatist. He has no "ideology" per se, other than getting stuff done for people. There is no other conclusion one can reach from a careful examination of his record, whether in the Illinois state legislature, or the United States Senate, or the White House.
Since I refuse to believe for one moment that Broder believes any of his assertions, one has to wonder, then, why he wrote the column. Bad reporting, combined with a familiar, and partisan, take on the President's approach to governance that is at variance with the facts at hand leads me to a couple conclusions, neither of which excludes the other. Either Broder is really stupid and believes this (despite my refusal to grant him that stupidity) or he is playing a partisan role here.
Of course, this seems to be part of a larger trend at the Post, noted by Glenn Greenwald and Matt Yglesias:
While this addresses, specifically, the multiple ways the Post seems to misinform readers on global warming - from (again) bad reporting to the factually inaccurate pieces offered by George Will - the same could be said across the board, including the recent controversy over the decision by the Swiss to deport rapist movie director Roman Polanski. Sometimes at odds with itself, very often at odds with basic factual material, the Post seems to be on a steep dive toward oblivion.
Add today's column by David Broder to the weight dragging the paper down.
Part of the problem also stems from really bad reporting, too. There are incidents all over the place of just plain, flat-out lousy reporting.
In the post to which this comment was added, I called David Broder one of the best political reporters of our time. At one time, that might have been true. Yet, the very opening of today's column is forcing me to wish I had never written those words.
Barack Obama has reached the moment of truth for answering the persistent question about his core beliefs and political priorities. The coming votes in the House and Senate on his signature health-care reform effort will tell us more about the president than anything so far in his White House tenure.
A reporter is supposed to be paying attention. A reporter is supposed to be able to string together various incidents creating an intelligible whole. While it might be the case that individual statements, especially on health care reform, suggest a refusal to take a firm stand, this hardly means that the President faces "persistent question[s] about his core beliefs and political priorities". Through the course of his column, Broder never once names who is asking these questions, let alone specifically what those "persistent questions" might be.
Rather, the narrative he weaves is one straight out of the Republican playbook, and has little to do with "questions" about his beliefs or political ideology.
All during last year's campaign, Obama skillfully skirted the question of whether he was a moderate, consensus-seeking pragmatist, as his words suggested, or a faithful adherent to the liberal agenda, as his voting record demonstrated.
In stylistic terms, he cultivated the pragmatic image. On issues, he was alternately one or the other -- lining up with the liberals on Iraq and civil liberties, for example, but joining the hard-liners on Afghanistan and the budget.
In the campaign, he took the moderate side of the health-care debate -- disagreeing with Hillary Clinton on the necessity for an individual mandate to buy health insurance and suggesting that he would be satisfied with incremental progress toward covering all the uninsured.
But now, a number of factors have combined to strip him of the camouflage that he once enjoyed when it comes to health-care policy.(emphasis added)
Camouflage? What does that even mean?!?
The whole column is nonsense. While I am quite willing to accept that Glenn Beck is both stupid and ignorant enough to believe much of what he says about the President, I refuse to give Broder the same benefit of the doubt. Any observer of the President - and he was the junior Senator from my state for four years and I paid attention to what he said and did - would know that, at heart, the President is indeed a pragmatist. He has no "ideology" per se, other than getting stuff done for people. There is no other conclusion one can reach from a careful examination of his record, whether in the Illinois state legislature, or the United States Senate, or the White House.
Since I refuse to believe for one moment that Broder believes any of his assertions, one has to wonder, then, why he wrote the column. Bad reporting, combined with a familiar, and partisan, take on the President's approach to governance that is at variance with the facts at hand leads me to a couple conclusions, neither of which excludes the other. Either Broder is really stupid and believes this (despite my refusal to grant him that stupidity) or he is playing a partisan role here.
Of course, this seems to be part of a larger trend at the Post, noted by Glenn Greenwald and Matt Yglesias:
[O]ne is once again left with the profound crisis facing the employees of the Washington Post. Simply put, they all work for an institution that seems utterly indifferent to whether the people who write for the paper are informing the readers or deliberately trying to mislead them. That hurts their credibility, each and every one of them. It also means that whenever any of them do good work, they raise the prestige and credibility of an organization that dedicates a substantial quality of valuable real estate to deliberate efforts to mislead the public about the single most important issue of our time. It’s a very serious problem.
While this addresses, specifically, the multiple ways the Post seems to misinform readers on global warming - from (again) bad reporting to the factually inaccurate pieces offered by George Will - the same could be said across the board, including the recent controversy over the decision by the Swiss to deport rapist movie director Roman Polanski. Sometimes at odds with itself, very often at odds with basic factual material, the Post seems to be on a steep dive toward oblivion.
Add today's column by David Broder to the weight dragging the paper down.
Friday, October 02, 2009
We Are Better Than We Give Ourselves Credit For
I wrote the other day about the debunking of the Kitty Genovese story. For far too long, the image of three dozen people actively preferring the death of a young woman pleading for help rather than involve themselves and risk all sorts of things from minor inconveniences up to and including death has ruled much of our collective thoughts on what our collective life - the German social thinker Max Weber called it anomie - has done to us. I would be the last person to say that the debunking of the story proves the opposite of the story; rather, while there seems to be specific, credible evidence of one person who heard/saw something there is also evidence this person refused to act because of a certain mitigating circumstance. Being drunk, while hardly a morally exculpatory excuse, at least presents an understandable explanation.
On the larger point, much of our popular culture is flooded with images of large numbers of Americans acting, in the words of various characters from popular fiction and television and movies, "easily frightened, easily led, panicky, even dangerous". One that comes to my mind (because my wife has watched it recently) is an older episode of the TV series ER when a possible smallpox outbreak leads to a lockdown, which, in turn, leads to a riot, including violent attacks on the staff. The riot only stops when those trapped inside realize that the police will fire on them if they attempt to break out.
Lockdowns happen in all sorts of places all the time, sometimes for an hour or two, sometimes longer. I have yet to read of a riot (outside a prison lockdown, of course) in a lockdown situation. Considering that our recent history includes such things as powdered anthrax attacks, this should surprise many.
The other side of the coin - the anti-Genovese point of view, if you wish - is offered in the television series Lost. Considering what the characters go through - I'm still in season one, but that really big thing that shakes the trees and snatches the pilot out of the cockpit . . . I mean, these people set up a golf course for pete's sake. And it's entirely believable!
Why? Precisely because Hurley's reason for doing so - they need to be about more than mere survival, coasting from crisis to crisis, they need the distraction of something mindless in order to feel alive, not just like survivors - make so much sense (Hurley is the combination Greek chorus/moral check of the show, and I really love the fact he's worth close to $200 million back in the real world). Lost provides an alternative to the "Genovese syndrome" view that prevails on that episode of ER, and for that very reason, I think it is far more accurate.
Think back for just a moment or two to the image we saw on television on September 11, 2001. We saw people running through the streets, some toward, far more away from, the danger. We saw people - many, many people, not just the official "heroes" such as the firefighters and EMTs and police officers, but ordinary citizens - helping one another. There were no riots in the streets, there or in any other city that day. There were no angry mobs descending on Islamic centers of worship. There was no "mob" at all.
Or perhaps, to make sure my point isn't too parochial, consider the images from the South Asian tsunami a few years back. For all the devastation, and for all the reports of looting and economic exploitation, there were also images of people going about the understandable routine of trying to get their lives started again. They went back to the ruined villages and picked through the rubble for evidence of their personal effects; they hugged one another both in sorrow over loss and in relief at having made it through.
Remember the stories of Katrina survivors shooting at the helicopters trying to save people? Remember the white suburbanites who armed themselves at stories and rumors of gangs of African-Americans looting in the suburbs? Of course, none of these stories were true (well, the armed white folk was true); they were believed not because they were credible in a factual sense, but because, despite all evidence to the contrary, for the most part, we human beings are far less panicky, far less prone to go off on wild screaming-meemie fits, far less likely to pose a danger to others and ourselves in times of crisis, and far less likely to ignore the cries of those in need than we give ourselves credit for.
That there are counter-examples is no doubt true. That hardly disproves my thesis that we are better than believe of ourselves. I never said we were perfect, and there are plenty of examples of groups of human beings doing truly horrible things - lynchings, you know, were a community activity - to make that point, too. I only said that we need to cut ourselves some slack.
On the larger point, much of our popular culture is flooded with images of large numbers of Americans acting, in the words of various characters from popular fiction and television and movies, "easily frightened, easily led, panicky, even dangerous". One that comes to my mind (because my wife has watched it recently) is an older episode of the TV series ER when a possible smallpox outbreak leads to a lockdown, which, in turn, leads to a riot, including violent attacks on the staff. The riot only stops when those trapped inside realize that the police will fire on them if they attempt to break out.
Lockdowns happen in all sorts of places all the time, sometimes for an hour or two, sometimes longer. I have yet to read of a riot (outside a prison lockdown, of course) in a lockdown situation. Considering that our recent history includes such things as powdered anthrax attacks, this should surprise many.
The other side of the coin - the anti-Genovese point of view, if you wish - is offered in the television series Lost. Considering what the characters go through - I'm still in season one, but that really big thing that shakes the trees and snatches the pilot out of the cockpit . . . I mean, these people set up a golf course for pete's sake. And it's entirely believable!
Why? Precisely because Hurley's reason for doing so - they need to be about more than mere survival, coasting from crisis to crisis, they need the distraction of something mindless in order to feel alive, not just like survivors - make so much sense (Hurley is the combination Greek chorus/moral check of the show, and I really love the fact he's worth close to $200 million back in the real world). Lost provides an alternative to the "Genovese syndrome" view that prevails on that episode of ER, and for that very reason, I think it is far more accurate.
Think back for just a moment or two to the image we saw on television on September 11, 2001. We saw people running through the streets, some toward, far more away from, the danger. We saw people - many, many people, not just the official "heroes" such as the firefighters and EMTs and police officers, but ordinary citizens - helping one another. There were no riots in the streets, there or in any other city that day. There were no angry mobs descending on Islamic centers of worship. There was no "mob" at all.
Or perhaps, to make sure my point isn't too parochial, consider the images from the South Asian tsunami a few years back. For all the devastation, and for all the reports of looting and economic exploitation, there were also images of people going about the understandable routine of trying to get their lives started again. They went back to the ruined villages and picked through the rubble for evidence of their personal effects; they hugged one another both in sorrow over loss and in relief at having made it through.
Remember the stories of Katrina survivors shooting at the helicopters trying to save people? Remember the white suburbanites who armed themselves at stories and rumors of gangs of African-Americans looting in the suburbs? Of course, none of these stories were true (well, the armed white folk was true); they were believed not because they were credible in a factual sense, but because, despite all evidence to the contrary, for the most part, we human beings are far less panicky, far less prone to go off on wild screaming-meemie fits, far less likely to pose a danger to others and ourselves in times of crisis, and far less likely to ignore the cries of those in need than we give ourselves credit for.
That there are counter-examples is no doubt true. That hardly disproves my thesis that we are better than believe of ourselves. I never said we were perfect, and there are plenty of examples of groups of human beings doing truly horrible things - lynchings, you know, were a community activity - to make that point, too. I only said that we need to cut ourselves some slack.
Specifics
For a couple years, I've used the generic term "the press" or "journalists" as a lazy way of defining one of my chief complaints with our current public discourse. ER has chastised me on many occasions, and rightly so, I might add. The problem isn't "the press", or "journalists" as practitioners of a particular profession. Rather, it is the eruption in the past decade and a half of a professional pundit class that, for want of a better way of describing things, would dearly love to have it both ways. On the one hand, they wish to be taken seriously as commentators on whatever issue has our national attention; on the other hand, they want to be treated as just journalists who have a particular set of practical and ethical standards unavailable to those outside the profession, when criticized by outsiders.
Part of the problem with this should be obvious. Even the best political reporters and commentators - and I would include David Broder, Thomas Friedman, Eugene Robinson, and the late Robert Novak as among the very best - are (or were) just that. Political reporters. They are not experts on policy; they aren't really knowledgeable about social science data on the relationship between various interest groups and the powers that be. What makes especially this group so frustrating to read is the belief they all seem to share that an understanding of certain realities of power in our nation's capital translates in to an understanding of broader social and political forces.
Perhaps the most egregious offender on this level - the pundit who pretends he is a public intellectual a la Walter Lippmann or Reinhold Niebuhr or Arthur Schlesinger - is George Will (although David Brooks certainly seems to be making a run at the title). Will's problem is not that he is ignorant, like Jonah Goldberg is ignorant, or the ultimate insider who considers questions of policy irrelevant, the way Robert Novak would. Rather, Will's problem is quite simply that he believes he is smarter than he actually is.
Like Will, and Brooks, and other lesser lights who seem to be multiplying like athlete's foot fungus in a high school locker room, the professionalization of political and social commentary is probably the worst thing to happen to this country in many a year. What makes this professionalization so bad is the unstated belief that anyone who is not a professional in this regard - we bloggers, say - simply "doesn't understand". Our further complaints about the phony high-mindedness of many pundits usually results in the accusation that we are all secretly harboring a desire to become like they are.
The truth, which for some reason seems beyond their ken, is that we have no such desire. Rather, opening up political commentary to the masses has created a far more lively, politically productive, and ideologically shifting public discourse than at any time in my own living memory. Even the best pundits are offering no more than their own view, based on knowledge of events, and persons, perhaps a private conversation or two as a way of setting the stage or "background" as it were. I can only speak for myself when I say that the democratization of political and social commentary, as evidenced on the internets, is a great thing; rather than attempting to dismiss or even silence we bloggers, to snidely wave a hand and insist we can't possibly understand what we are talking about is belied quite simply by the record of the past four or so years. Professional pundits, for all their access, for all their understanding of the inside-baseball kind of stuff they find all important, have been incredibly, almost comically wrong. If you want to stretch your mind back a bit further, just remember the split between elite and public opinion at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
While I believe there is certainly a role for professionals to discuss politics, political and social issues, and various cultural trends that effect them, the way they have overrun our discourse, marginalized the opinions of large numbers, even the majority, of the American people is staggering in its arrogance and small-mindedness. That there are many bloggers who seem to be able to see and understand and explain what is going on, why, and make pretty accurate predictions based on these more distant observations should be a huge clue as to why it is the punditry is held in such disdain.
We Americans aren't ignorant, or stupid, or sheeplike, needing the words from the various oracles to guide us in our political opinions. We are feisty, occasionally insane, quite often funny, at our best irreverent, at our worst obsequious and blind to our own hypocrisy. These qualities exist across the political spectrum (although spectra would be a far better way to describe it) and there is abundant evidence that the current liveliness of our public dialogue on issues such as cap-and-trade, health care reform, and financial services regulation would be far more stilted, truncated, and less well-informed than it currently is if not for the very hard work of bloggers and citizen-journalists who are doing the grunt-work of getting the word out, starting arguments, making their case.
In the future, I will be sure to specify that it isn't the press or journalists that drive me crazy. Rather, it is the elitism, an elitism often combined with a staggering ignorance barely disguised as insouciance toward policy detail, of the professional pundit class that make me crazy.
May a thousand blogs bloom!
Part of the problem with this should be obvious. Even the best political reporters and commentators - and I would include David Broder, Thomas Friedman, Eugene Robinson, and the late Robert Novak as among the very best - are (or were) just that. Political reporters. They are not experts on policy; they aren't really knowledgeable about social science data on the relationship between various interest groups and the powers that be. What makes especially this group so frustrating to read is the belief they all seem to share that an understanding of certain realities of power in our nation's capital translates in to an understanding of broader social and political forces.
Perhaps the most egregious offender on this level - the pundit who pretends he is a public intellectual a la Walter Lippmann or Reinhold Niebuhr or Arthur Schlesinger - is George Will (although David Brooks certainly seems to be making a run at the title). Will's problem is not that he is ignorant, like Jonah Goldberg is ignorant, or the ultimate insider who considers questions of policy irrelevant, the way Robert Novak would. Rather, Will's problem is quite simply that he believes he is smarter than he actually is.
Like Will, and Brooks, and other lesser lights who seem to be multiplying like athlete's foot fungus in a high school locker room, the professionalization of political and social commentary is probably the worst thing to happen to this country in many a year. What makes this professionalization so bad is the unstated belief that anyone who is not a professional in this regard - we bloggers, say - simply "doesn't understand". Our further complaints about the phony high-mindedness of many pundits usually results in the accusation that we are all secretly harboring a desire to become like they are.
The truth, which for some reason seems beyond their ken, is that we have no such desire. Rather, opening up political commentary to the masses has created a far more lively, politically productive, and ideologically shifting public discourse than at any time in my own living memory. Even the best pundits are offering no more than their own view, based on knowledge of events, and persons, perhaps a private conversation or two as a way of setting the stage or "background" as it were. I can only speak for myself when I say that the democratization of political and social commentary, as evidenced on the internets, is a great thing; rather than attempting to dismiss or even silence we bloggers, to snidely wave a hand and insist we can't possibly understand what we are talking about is belied quite simply by the record of the past four or so years. Professional pundits, for all their access, for all their understanding of the inside-baseball kind of stuff they find all important, have been incredibly, almost comically wrong. If you want to stretch your mind back a bit further, just remember the split between elite and public opinion at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
While I believe there is certainly a role for professionals to discuss politics, political and social issues, and various cultural trends that effect them, the way they have overrun our discourse, marginalized the opinions of large numbers, even the majority, of the American people is staggering in its arrogance and small-mindedness. That there are many bloggers who seem to be able to see and understand and explain what is going on, why, and make pretty accurate predictions based on these more distant observations should be a huge clue as to why it is the punditry is held in such disdain.
We Americans aren't ignorant, or stupid, or sheeplike, needing the words from the various oracles to guide us in our political opinions. We are feisty, occasionally insane, quite often funny, at our best irreverent, at our worst obsequious and blind to our own hypocrisy. These qualities exist across the political spectrum (although spectra would be a far better way to describe it) and there is abundant evidence that the current liveliness of our public dialogue on issues such as cap-and-trade, health care reform, and financial services regulation would be far more stilted, truncated, and less well-informed than it currently is if not for the very hard work of bloggers and citizen-journalists who are doing the grunt-work of getting the word out, starting arguments, making their case.
In the future, I will be sure to specify that it isn't the press or journalists that drive me crazy. Rather, it is the elitism, an elitism often combined with a staggering ignorance barely disguised as insouciance toward policy detail, of the professional pundit class that make me crazy.
May a thousand blogs bloom!
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Another Myth Shattered - And It's A Good Thing
I grew hearing about this story.
Ramming around, reading something completely unrelated, I discovered the transcript of this episode of NPR's On the Media.
I grew up with this story still floating around. Television programs used it as a template. Public intellectuals and even science fiction writers (the wiki article notes Harlan Ellison's long, and false, rhapsody, on the alleged incident) used it to create the myth of urban anomie and callousness that still exists. Like the Central Park jogger case of 1990, another incident that didn't occur the way everyone thought it did, or the Columbine HS massacre, it took on a life of its own.
The part of the NPR dialogue that got me slapping my head and shouting, "D'oh!", was the whole issue of the trial of the person who committed this murder. It seems the number "38", which is still bandied about, was one either the author of the original article, or editor Abe Rosenthal found while exploring his rectum (i.e., he pulled it out of his ass). Yet, of such nonsense not just urban myths and legends, but entire social philosophies are born.
In order to discover what actually happened, consulting the trial transcript might have helped, always with the caveat that they are also a limited source of information, too.
The idea that ours is a heartless, callous society that would rather allow an innocent young woman be murdered than trouble ourselves with "involvement" is an ugly story that needs to disappear. While there are, of course, instances where people sit by or walk away rather than help those in need, there are enough others to more than make up for the scared few - hardly 38! - who would rather "not get involved".
Genovese had driven home from her job working as a bar manager, late in the night of March 13, 1964. Arriving home at about 3:15 a.m. and parking about 100 feet (30 m) from her apartment's door, which was around the rear of the building, she was approached by Winston Moseley, a business machine operator.[2] Moseley ran after her and quickly overtook her, stabbing her twice in the back. Genovese screamed, "Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!" It was heard by several neighbors, but on a cold night with the windows closed, only a few of them recognized the sound as a cry for help. When one of the neighbors shouted at the attacker, "Let that girl alone!", Moseley ran away and Genovese slowly made her way toward the rear entrance of her apartment building. She was seriously injured, but now out of view of those few who may have had reason to believe she was in need of help.
Records of the earliest calls to police are unclear and were certainly not given a high priority by the police. One witness said his father called police after the initial attack and reported that a woman was "beat up, but got up and was staggering around."[6]
Other witnesses observed Moseley enter his car and drive away, only to return ten minutes later. In his car, he changed his hat to a wide-rimmed one to shadow his face. He systematically searched the parking lot, train station, and small apartment complex, ultimately finding Genovese, who was lying, barely conscious, in a hallway at the back of the building, where a locked doorway had prevented her from entering the building. [7] Out of view of the street and of those who may have heard or seen any sign of the original attack, he proceeded to further attack her, stabbing her several more times. Knife wounds in her hands suggested that she attempted to defend herself from him. While she lay dying, he raped her. He stole about $49 from her and left her dying in the hallway. The attacks spanned approximately half an hour.
A few minutes after the final attack a witness, Karl Ross, called the police. Police arrived within minutes of Ross' call. Genovese was taken away by ambulance, at 4:15 am, and died en route to the hospital. Later investigation by police and prosecutors revealed that approximately a dozen (but almost certainly not the 38 cited in the Times article) individuals nearby had heard or observed portions of the attack, though none could have seen or been aware of the entire incident.[8] Only one witness, Joseph Fink, was aware she was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide was in progress; some thought that what they saw or heard was a lovers' quarrel or a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar outside when Moseley first approached Genovese.
Ramming around, reading something completely unrelated, I discovered the transcript of this episode of NPR's On the Media.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Where do you think the number 38 came from?
JOSEPH DE MAY: No one knows. All I can tell you is that there’s a man named Charles Skoller, and he was the assistant prosecutor. He helped prosecute Winston Moseley. And he said he doesn't know where the 38 witness number came from. He said that the District Attorney’s Office found only maybe five or six people who saw anything that they could use, and of the people he identified, there are only really two that I know of who actually saw any part of the physical attack.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And the only person who could be said to have ignored the plight of this young woman was that man at the top of the stairs.
JOSEPH DE MAY: Well, let me tack on that word “ignored.” The rap against the witnesses is not that they sat there and watched what was going on. It was that they heard a scream and did not act upon it. Now, why didn't they act upon it? The common belief is that they didn't want to get involved, and, of course, that quote comes from the one guy at the top of the stairs who said that. But if you look at the Rosenthal book, the people who were interviewed later on said they didn't know why.
I think a number of them were uncertain about what was going on. Others truly thought that other people would call. Others thought that whatever the crisis was, the fact that the attacker had left and Kitty had left the scene under her own power meant there wasn't a problem any more.
And I have to tell you that I do not by any means accept that no one called the police. One of the people who contacted me is a retired New York City police officer who said that he was an eight-year-old boy whose bedroom was on the second floor of that apartment building on the night of the murder. And he said his father did call the police because he was there in the living room when he did. I've heard second- or third-hand about two other people who also said that they called the police.
I grew up with this story still floating around. Television programs used it as a template. Public intellectuals and even science fiction writers (the wiki article notes Harlan Ellison's long, and false, rhapsody, on the alleged incident) used it to create the myth of urban anomie and callousness that still exists. Like the Central Park jogger case of 1990, another incident that didn't occur the way everyone thought it did, or the Columbine HS massacre, it took on a life of its own.
The part of the NPR dialogue that got me slapping my head and shouting, "D'oh!", was the whole issue of the trial of the person who committed this murder. It seems the number "38", which is still bandied about, was one either the author of the original article, or editor Abe Rosenthal found while exploring his rectum (i.e., he pulled it out of his ass). Yet, of such nonsense not just urban myths and legends, but entire social philosophies are born.
In order to discover what actually happened, consulting the trial transcript might have helped, always with the caveat that they are also a limited source of information, too.
The idea that ours is a heartless, callous society that would rather allow an innocent young woman be murdered than trouble ourselves with "involvement" is an ugly story that needs to disappear. While there are, of course, instances where people sit by or walk away rather than help those in need, there are enough others to more than make up for the scared few - hardly 38! - who would rather "not get involved".
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Christians And Other Faith Traditions
With a very generous hat-tip to Rick Perlstein, who put the link on his Facebook account and plugged my blog in the process (it still kind of blows my mind), I would invite you to read this, from USAToday. In particular, this just jumped out at me.
First, I just love the whole, "pray that Muslims would come to know Jesus" because it is so ignorant. Driscoll should read the Holy Q'uran - Jesus is in there, faithfully portrayed as messiah and prophet. Muslims revere him as they do Abraham and other prophets. As for dishonoring Jesus by celebrating a religious festival with those of other faiths . . .
Sorry, but a short rant here. Quite simply - nothing, nothing I say, nothing I do, dishonors Jesus, if it is done in love and a spirit of fellowship. How does Driscoll feel about Christians who hold Seder? I have attended High Holy Day services. I even attended one Friday night during Purim, which recounts the events recorded in the Book of Esther. I have attended a Seder. Does this dishonor Jesus, considering that Jesus himself did these things? How utterly ignorant is this guy?
On the other hand . . .
Christians should enter these with the understanding that they are done in a totally different spirit, with unstated beliefs and assumptions about their spiritual efficacy, and in line with a completely different set of beliefs. The article appears to show that those who are so participating are doing exactly that.
What's truly sad is the whole "other God" crap. We three Abrahamic faiths - Jews, Christians, and Muslims - differ so little that, to those far outside our bitter quarrels, the fussing and screaming probably seems much ado about little. Which is not to suggest there are no differences. Rather, it is to suggest that what holds us together should count far more than our differences. There is a beauty to much of the teaching of Islam, an endorsement of mutual humanity, a sense of discipline to the God of love and mercy and justice that is emphasized, in many ways, far more than in Christianity, which claims many of the same Divine attributes, but too often gets caught up in abstruse doctrinal nonsense, rather than celebrating the God of grace and love.
I think it would be far better if more Christians did this, in concert with our Muslim brothers and sisters. Shared sacrifice like this would be a wonderful way to show that we know that Muslims already have Jesus, and that Jesus is big enough for us all to share without having any exclusive rights.
Christians should have friendships with people of other faith, but engaging in other traditions' worship practices is problematic, said Mark Driscoll, lead preaching pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Driscoll said that in this case, Christians and Muslims fast for different purposes and do not worship the same God.
Christians observing a Ramadan fast is "insane at best ... Sad, tragic, horrific, misguided, dangerous, wrong," Driscoll said. "If Christians want to pray during Ramadan, they should pray not with Muslims but for Muslims — that Muslims would come to know Jesus. To pray with Muslims absolutely dishonors Jesus."
First, I just love the whole, "pray that Muslims would come to know Jesus" because it is so ignorant. Driscoll should read the Holy Q'uran - Jesus is in there, faithfully portrayed as messiah and prophet. Muslims revere him as they do Abraham and other prophets. As for dishonoring Jesus by celebrating a religious festival with those of other faiths . . .
Sorry, but a short rant here. Quite simply - nothing, nothing I say, nothing I do, dishonors Jesus, if it is done in love and a spirit of fellowship. How does Driscoll feel about Christians who hold Seder? I have attended High Holy Day services. I even attended one Friday night during Purim, which recounts the events recorded in the Book of Esther. I have attended a Seder. Does this dishonor Jesus, considering that Jesus himself did these things? How utterly ignorant is this guy?
On the other hand . . .
Christians should enter these with the understanding that they are done in a totally different spirit, with unstated beliefs and assumptions about their spiritual efficacy, and in line with a completely different set of beliefs. The article appears to show that those who are so participating are doing exactly that.
What's truly sad is the whole "other God" crap. We three Abrahamic faiths - Jews, Christians, and Muslims - differ so little that, to those far outside our bitter quarrels, the fussing and screaming probably seems much ado about little. Which is not to suggest there are no differences. Rather, it is to suggest that what holds us together should count far more than our differences. There is a beauty to much of the teaching of Islam, an endorsement of mutual humanity, a sense of discipline to the God of love and mercy and justice that is emphasized, in many ways, far more than in Christianity, which claims many of the same Divine attributes, but too often gets caught up in abstruse doctrinal nonsense, rather than celebrating the God of grace and love.
I think it would be far better if more Christians did this, in concert with our Muslim brothers and sisters. Shared sacrifice like this would be a wonderful way to show that we know that Muslims already have Jesus, and that Jesus is big enough for us all to share without having any exclusive rights.
Satan!
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.
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.
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.
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